The dolls in the corridor watch you walk to the bathroom. The one sitting at the dining table, it watches the professor for you while you’re gone.

In the mirror while washing your hands you see flashes of yourself forcing a finger down your throat to throw up. Flashes of heading straight out the door, excusing yourself, because there’s an emergency. Your friend is in the hospital and you have to go and you don’t need a lift there, but thanks for the offer.

You don’t do either of those things because it must, it must be nerves, the way you feel so light in the mind, so heavy in the body. You watched him pour the tea, took the cup nearest him when he set the tray on the dining table.

And anyway there were never stories about him, not the way there were about countless others — it’s why you felt safe enough to accept his invitation in the first place. You don’t generally get fired from Gotham University for licentious behaviour, no matter the outcry from the student body. His story of having left due to undeclared external partners, and of feeling restricted by the ethical guidelines set out by the university — much more likely. The rumours Professor Strange’s students would tell were more… Frankenstein and exquisite corpse.

And you don’t mind that. You didn’t mind enough not to go to all his office hours, come top of his class. But the stories linger as you pass back through the corridor to the dining/kitchen space. The manikins, previously housed in his campus office, now give his penthouse the air of a coffin.

You slip past the kitchen countertops and back to your seat at the table, your back to the floor-to-ceiling window.

“Now, I think we were discussing why you want to pursue research.”

“I don’t know what I’m meant to do. I don’t know if I’d do or try at anything if I didn’t get praised for it.” You stumble, try to pull the words out from your mind’s eye and connect them in real-time. There’s a scribbled list of things to tell him, to ask him, that you left in the notebook in your bag. But thinking is getting harder, your heart accelerating.

The professor gesturing as he speaks, he says, “Praise should not be the reason you play the game. I certainly wouldn’t have made the progress, the contributions I have, if I cared about getting a well done at the end. My dismissal was not something I had anticipated when I took up my current project… but it was not necessarily a significant setback. Consider it a warning that your passions may lie outside the bounds of the institution, and you may have to make the same decision I did a month ago. But I suspect you know that already, or you wouldn’t have accepted my offer.”

“Yes. You’re the reason I want to do research.”

“But you don’t know what kind of research, do you?”

His words hit you so hard you tremble, have to hold yourself steady, gripping the underside of the table till your knuckles pale.

“You would like to know what kind, but you expect me to tell you.” He sips his tea, his other hand poised, each fingertip pressed into the table as though to claim it as his domain. “Without the experience yourself, you have chosen to defer to someone else’s experience. But I’m not sure if I can provide you with the answers you’re seeking. To find a specialism is to find a purpose. If you have not searched, as I searched, for a purpose, there is little I can do for you.”

The sun beats off the back of your neck and burns in the reflection of your glasses. A rare day to have this much sun in Gotham.

“Are you alright? You seem… distracted. Is it the sunlight?”

Your lips pursing, you nod. He stands, sweeps behind you. He closes the window blinds halfway so the sun filters through in stripes.

Your tongue still lost, it only just finds the way to a “Thank you.”

He places a hand on one shoulder; you look up and behind you — but his eyes don’t connect with yours. He’s looking at your other shoulder.

On the side you’re not looking is a sharp intrusion, boring into your neck. The fluid presses steady through the needle. He squeezes your shoulder as your muscles slump, your thoughts disintegrate.

“You’re very welcome.”

Your eyes are too heavy to see but you feel the weight on the bridge of your nose lifting as fingers slip your glasses off, and your head lolls back in the chair.

“Now… let me tell you who you’re going to be.”

You dream of teetering on the edge of a tall building but cannot reach your hands out, cannot catch yourself before you fall, and then you wake up in a box.

You try to move your arms but they’re glued at your sides. Your legs are bunched up against the lid of the box and stiff enough to have been tied together. You sit in your own involuntary slickness.

You glance down: yes, there are no ties that would restrain you. The source of the wetness becomes evident as well: a wand buzzes low between your legs, cradled in place by your underwear. Despite the physical arousal you don’t shiver. Your breath doesn’t hitch. The sensations sent by your nerves are sparse and select. Maybe it’s overstimulation that stops you from feeling the toy, because you can feel your bare skin peeling off the wood as you breathe deep; you can feel the tension in your crammed-together muscles.

You cannot piece together the prospect of opening the box, or banging the doors, or calling for help.

Your ears are crushed in foam cups. Beside you, a tape recorder.

His tongue probing your ear canals.

His voice tells you that you are motionless. You are empty. His voice tells you that you are his to mold. His to pose.

You will always be ready for him. You will return when you are called. You will be whatever he wants you to be.

“With each inhale you accept my words, allow them into your body, allow them into your mind. With each exhale you lose resistance.”

He tells you that hearing his voice takes you deeper into the caverns of your own mind, renders action impossible. His voice will be there to join you in your head, to scrub out the unwanted thoughts.

He tells you that all of your thoughts are unwanted.

When you hear his voice your head will empty itself. When you catch his gaze your body will become his. You will feel pleasure only when he allows it, and if he speaks to you, you will only respond to direct commands.

The lids of the box — the doors of the closet — leave a slight gap between them. A stripe of electric warmth leaks into your prison, falls on your stripped corpse. As his words strip your head bare your own exploratory glances become a transgression, an error in your programming to be eradicated. Your eyes now refuse to stray from the vertical strip of light.

For when the doors part, when you are flooded in light, you must be ready for him.

His voice fogs over your consciousness, you dream of falling into nothing, and then you wake up in a box.

The tape guts your mind again and again. Your clit is buzzed numb; his voice drips into your ears; the closet doors await being parted.

His voice has told you many times now to await nothing, to expect nothing, because objects await and expect nothing.

And then the doors open.

After removing the toy and slipping off your panties and headphones — your only remaining items of clothing — he picks you up, carries you past the manikins to his lounge area overlooking the city. He places you there, unfurls you from your bunched position till you stand tall. Your feet sink into the rug in front of the couch. The lights of the Gotham skyline watch your naked body, but you’re too high up to be seen, the lights too dim to differentiate you from any of the other furniture.

The edge of his balcony is the same drop-point from your open-eyed dreams.

The professor picks up a glass of whisky from the coffee table, sips at it, before he picks up what’s next to it.

Measuring tape.

“I thought we could spend some time getting to know one another.” He smiles, his mouth divorced from his eyes.

Stepping up to you, he wraps the tape around your neck, draws it tight. You might be gagging or gasping for air about now, were your mind able to catch up to what’s being done to you.

“Sorry,” he says, patting your shoulder, and as he does you feel the flash of an ache in your neck, the needle protruding heavy from its access point, and you’re back at the dinner table with the professor and the manikin —

And then his voice drags you back.

“I’d like to buy you some new clothes for your next visit.”

He coils the tape roughly down your body — your shoulders, your chest, your waist and hips — kneeling to scribble the measurements in an open notepad on the coffee table between each step. He speaks slowly and clearly, as he would to a full lecture hall.

“Initially I had planned to do as I had promised. But then I remembered that I am no longer being paid to cultivate the minds of young researchers. I am simply being paid to make progress, at all costs.”

A hand lingers on your inner thigh as he tightens the tape around it. When he lifts his hand, your natural lubrication follows him, and he wipes it on your neck. Staring through your skull, he takes your jaw in his hand.

“I have been employed to free humanity from one curse of the human condition, but that isn’t the only curse I’m interested in curing. Some, for example, are blinded by the illusion of free will. And I do not see the need to humour your ‘free will’ if you step into my house and tell me you’re going to waste it.

“Before we met, I looked over your work from my class again. It speaks to one thing: that your talent is caged by your principles. In the university this would make you a fine scholar. But you asked for the help of someone disgraced by that university. The help you need from me is not the help you would swallow easily, if at all… and it’s no longer my job to sweeten the pill.”

He picks up his glass and steps toward you. With a squeeze to your cheeks your mouth opens. He feeds you half the whisky and says, “There are other ways for me to shape your mind, give you the purpose you crave.”

The whisky stokes a fire in your throat, but you swallow.

“It’s just that none of them involve your mind, specifically.”

His voice chases away all the needles of doubt and resistance and memory. He coaxes your legs a step further apart, leaving enough room for his free hand to slide between. With no mind for your comfort the heel of his hand presses on your mound, his grip hard so to maintain purchase on your dripping cunt.

In any other circumstance you’d be writhing in his hand, knees buckling, but you stare at the lights outside; you do not move. You can process that his fingers are dragging up and down your clit but there is nothing there for him to tease. It’s on the same level as, say, brushing arms with him as you pass him in a crowded hallway.

Still playing with your clit he looks up at your blank face, your undilated pupils, and the corners of his mouth upturn, a glint of pride in his eyes.

“Good. Your conditioning is working as intended.”

Repositioning his hand, he pushes a finger inside you. You reconnect to your own arousal like the closing of a circuit, your skin, your nerves, galvanised.

Unmoving but burning from the inside, you feel your labia part for a second finger, a third finger. You drip around them as they slide in and out, and each time you feel the hollowness only after they fill you.

“I would like you to remember how it feels to be empty,” he says, closing in on you, pushing his hand deeper into you. Your open mouth pools with saliva, goosebumps striking your flesh. The glass in his other hand presses against your chest. “Of course, in the purpose I have granted you, you will always be empty. Objects are nothing but surface until they are used, until they are filled by something real, something alive.”

He drags you by the cunt to the sofa and your legs stumble. Your limbs don’t know how to walk anymore. You must retain your pose, must not maneuver without guidance.

His fingers slide out of you as he turns to place the glass on the table. A hand on each shoulder guides you down to the seat of the couch. As he stands above you you stare straight ahead, the sides of your vision full of information that glosses off you. You see and don’t see the bulge beneath his pants, and though you do not consciously process it, it’s enough for your wetness to open you up against the friction of the couch.

He unzips himself with one hand, tilts your chin up to look at him with the other. The goosebumps still there from his fingers, your insides shudder at their nakedness while your surface remains plastic. Your inhalations sipping the alcohol on his breath, they’re slight enough that your movements are corpse-like and incremental, shallow enough that your head is perpetually light.

“The object has its curses, but they are easily remedied. It cannot find its own stimulation, its own pleasure. It must await its purpose. When you leave today, half-formed, half-actualised, you will not be able to find your own pleasure.”

He pushes you sideways so you’re draped against the arm of the couch, your head drooping over the arm, eyes on the ceiling lights that appear to you like stars in your unfocused vision. He spreads your legs wider to make room for himself, his cock pressing against your cunt. Behind the tinted lenses his eyes devour you from your scalp to the soles of your feet.

“Not until you return to me.”

It requires almost no force for him to enter you, but it burns with the ease of it; you’re unused to his (or anyone’s) girth. The hollowness leaves you as he splits open your mind, your hole, your muscles straining to accommodate him. The deeper he goes the more the tension drifts out of you, replaced with a haze of contentment. He seizes your waist to reposition you, to grind into you harsher, with a friction that makes your eyes cloud over with tears you are unable to blink away. The angle of his cock, the violence of his thrusts would ordinarily wrench cries of pain from your throat, perhaps a plea to stop.

Were you anything but a thing.

Your eyes don’t move by your accord. They roll involuntarily, lids fluttering with the force of his penetration. The silhouette above you wrenches your torso towards him as his rhythm grows faster, your bodies both sweat-shined. The hole you are needs more. The hole you are needs deeper.

Then he grabs you by the back of your neck with a grip hard enough to choke, pulls you into the crook between his chin and his chest. His thrusts decelerate and gain force. His breaths are gusts over your hair as his hips lock up and he comes inside you with a low grunt, splattering your insides.

Your muscles tensing, you can feel the beginnings of contractions just as he pulls out, just as the stimulation drops to nothing. Your breaths cannot help but waver. Tears roll down your cheeks as you slump on the couch, dripping onto the fabric.

He carries you to the bathroom, cleans you up (though he can’t undo for the time being your own raw openness, or the soreness of your lower half), feeds you a pill and some water, suggesting as he does that he’ll eradicate the need for such measures upon your return. He takes the clothes you arrived in, folded atop a stack of towels, and dresses you.

Still mindless, you have nothing to gain from the improvement in vision as he slips on your glasses.

“I took the liberty of writing some answers to the questions you had in your notebook,” he says, pushing you out into the corridor, past the manikins. He rifles through your bag, hanging on one of the coat hooks by the exit, and hands you the book in question. “They will jog your memory as to what actually occurred here: that I offered you advice, perhaps an overwhelming amount, and invited you back to give you more. You will be given more — be permanently put to use — if you return.”

He steps behind you once again.

“Now. Wake.”

He taps your shoulder. Your first blink brings an ache to your eyes, your muscles. You glance at the notebook in your hand and down at your fully dressed body before you turn to face him.

“Get home safely,” he says, smiling at you as he opens the door to the elevator. “Apologies; it’s rather late… I hope you’ll forgive me keeping you.”