Baby Talk

I see that diesel is under $4 at the corner truck stop. Likely due to being so close to the Interstate.  I think I saw $4.39 for 87 at my usual stop. I could try to get it closer to the Interstate, but I don't get nearly as much back from Upside as I would at the Maverik near the grocery store.

74. My Discretion I skimmed through the recordings on my computer. There were two of them, so for much of the day I was jumping ten minutes at a time, searching for any sign of conversation. If both recordings were silent, I knew I would need to turn up the volume in the hope of hearing something from another room. When there was conversation on one of them, I listened more closely to see what they might have been talking about; but none of it was of any real interest to me. Just small talk. Some of it was interesting, especially as it reminded me that they still wanted to see the Shaaark! movie. I made a note on the top of a pad at the side of my computer; if Carter could manage to get a special screening for the people in my office, I wanted to bring my family along. So I could see if Ffrances’s body language would give me any hints about who this mysterious little was. That was something I needed to talk to them about, and there were other things that were interesting to me. But they weren’t the hypnosis I was looking for, so once I was sure what they were talking about I skipped five minutes ahead, and repeated. There were so many things in the conversations I wanted to listen to, but there weren’t enough hours in the day to monitor every conversation; it would have taken a whole other day, even if I didn’t have two separate sets of recordings to listen to. And then I heard it; the trance I was waiting for. I skipped back a little to make sure, and heard Tess asking how well it would work. Ffrances went over the suggestions again; what Tess had asked for, and the other details that Ffrances suggested in the name of making the suggestions more potent, or safer. I smiled to myself as I realised they were still talking from opposite points of view; Ffrances thought that Tess was looking for a suggestion to make her have accidents, while Tess wanted to stop them. She had kept on saying how she wanted to be in control, but Ffrances just assumed that meant she was drawing a line between suggestions for incontinence and regression, like they were different desires. I could congratulate myself for setting that up; without the misdirection Tess would never have been able to admit what she really needed. They did the trance, using a very similar induction to the day before. Ffrances was getting used to working with Tess now, I thought, and had already formed an opinion on what would work the best. And then she went on with the suggestions I expected. She told Tess that she was going to have an accident whenever someone she trusted said the trigger phrases. I could tell her that she was going to have an accident, or order her to have one. I could tell her that it would happen like a baby, or that she would still be grown up. I could tell her that it would surprise her, or order her to have an accident. And those variants could be used in combination. And then I grinned, as I realised what she was actually saying. Tess had wanted to be more confident, I thought, but she had asked for exactly the wrong thing. She had given me another tool to embarrass her with, and I knew now that she would never be able to step off this path of regression. She didn’t even suspect that I was causing her accidents, or she wouldn’t have asked for that change. It was the most dramatic turnabout she could have requested, and if I’d thought I should have expected it. But at the same time, it was completely  out of left field. Even when Ffrances started giving the modified suggestions, I hadn’t realised what the change was. It  had seemed unimportant to me, just because Tess’s request had come from a place of not really understanding how the triggers worked. And perhaps more interesting, Ffrances didn’t know either! She was sure I had only considered using the trigger when Tess asked for it, in which case Tess could have never made that particular mistake. She had given me all the power I had wanted. I took a moment to pause the recordings, and then noticed the faint sound of breathing behind me. “Find what you wanted?” Ffrances asked. I couldn’t believe that she was there; that she had heard me spying on what was supposed to be private. With Tess, I could have turned it around. Made out that it was all for her own good, maybe even got her to feel guilty about intruding so that she would be more likely to do what I asked in future. But Ffrances could see through all of my tricks, and the only reason she hadn’t already guessed my plan was because Tess was unable to give her the right clues. I couldn’t trick my girlfriend; I wouldn’t even be able to lie to her if she suspected I was going to try. “I… uhh…” “I kind of guessed. You got your old laptop out. Don’t like being out of the loop?” I decided that the truth would be the best approach here. Nothing that she could pick out as a lie. And this was all for Tess’s benefit, so there was no reason to say anything else. Ffrances would understand that, wouldn’t she? “She’s my baby,” I said. “She’s admitted now that she wants it, so I want to give her the best possible experience. I just want to know what she’s asked for, so I can give her exactly what she wants. I don’t want to do the wrong thing by guessing.” “You don’t need to,” she said. “You can use the triggers we agreed on. Just like you have been, nothing more, nothing less. Triggering her when she asks you to. This new variation is something she’s really nervous about. She put off talking to me for several days, because she wasn’t sure yet. Now she thinks she might want it, but she’s not certain. So she’ll ask for a trance to change how it works, to make it more flexible, but she still isn’t ready to try it. She does not want a surprise with this one, Gabby, and when she’s ready to try it, she will tell you.” “Right,” I nodded. “But I didn’t know if it was something that would affect the existing suggestions or not. It’s changing the way it works now, so if I just say ‘You’re going to have an accident’, she might take it differently. I need to be aware of that.” “I don’t think it’s likely,” she answered, stepping over to me and resting a hand on my shoulder. “And she was very clear that she doesn’t want you to  know yet. So let’s make that a rule now; you wait for her to tell you about the new trigger before you even consider using it. Right?” “Yeah. I’ll just keep on going the way I have,” I said, thinking about how much impact it was going to have the next time I surprised Tess with that trigger. She might be too scared to ask for it, but I was sure that it would be a lot easier for her to find the courage once it had happened a few times. Or a few more times, if you looked at it like that. “Okay then. The other tweaks are just changing the context. How much she remembers, and whether every accident takes her into littlespace. I take it you heard that. And I think it would be good for her to have us mix and match those, so I won’t forbid you from using them. However, she specifically said that she doesn’t want you to know yet that she is interested in…” I half tuned her out as Ffrances went over what Tess had asked for. It was pretty subtle, but I didn’t need to know what justification she had given. I knew what it was now, and I could keep on using it regardless of her wishes. She would thank me in the long run; she needed to have a better understanding of her own desires. I was just bringing Tess that. “Understand?” Ffrances asked, taking her hand away from my face and staring me straight in the eyes. “Until Tess tells you about that trigger, you won’t know what she asked for, or what it is. And you won’t know even if you keep on listening, because that’s our secret.” “Sure. But seriously, you came up here to spy on me?” “No. I came to see how you were. Tess and Spike are having a long chat about their views on Young Cerberus Shark, and I keep seeing what could be a flicker of intimacy, but there’s always that nervousness from having an adult in the room. She wants to tell him her secret, but that’s going to be even harder with an adult in the room. But if you want to talk about spying…” “I’m sorry, I didn’t…” I stammered, trying not to think about those kids in the lounge on their own. I didn’t want to imagine them unsupervised, but I could draw reassurance from the precautions I had already taken. Tess wouldn’t really tell a man, because this was a problem to her and she thought it would be over soon. They might get a little closer than I would have liked; I’d even been slightly encouraging. But whatever interest he had in her, that would quickly evaporate when she wet herself. And maybe, I thought, she would be too embarrassed to talk to him after that. “It’s okay,” she said. “You’re trying to do everything right. But trust me when I say that you don’t need to know this. Okay? If you want to study my wording, maybe understand the hypnosis better, I can understand that. Curiosity is a big thing. But you are not going to find out what Tess wants until she wants it. Finish your work, give them a half hour maybe to get comfortable, and then maybe we can invite them to watch one of those awful movies.” “Yeah, sure,” I nodded, trying to hide my grin. She hadn’t realised that I had already figured out the big secret. So now if I just did work, like I’d said I was going to, Ffrances would be happy and I could still be confident about how well my plans for Christmas would work. Ffrances leaned over and kissed me, and all thoughts of work fled from my mind. Five minutes later she was helping me out of an over-formal shirt. Ten minutes later we were making love on the office floor, not even caring to walk five steps into the bedroom. A part of me was still listening out for shouts of surprise or disgust from downstairs; or a panicked little girl running up the stairs because she needed our help to clean up. But when Ffrances was giving me her full attention, even those thoughts slipped to the back of my mind. Some time later, I picked myself up from the carpet and collected the underwear from my desk. Ffrances was smiling as she got dressed again; probably as much as I was. It was only when she gave me a kiss on the cheek and went to check on the kids that I realised she had been planning this all along: she had locked the bedroom door on the way up, to ensure we wouldn’t be disturbed. “I’ll be right down,” I said. “I need to email Jessop about tomorrow.” I didn’t really. But the notes I had taken while listening to Tess’s trance were a disordered scrawl. Words like ‘headspace’, ‘deeper’, and ‘deliberate’, mixed in with double-underlined capitals for the words I would need to quote exactly, including “be surprised” and “like a baby”. I wanted to turn those notes into a careful synopsis, so I could find the best way to phrase my suggestions, and the best way to use the new changes. And I wanted to make sure there was no detail missing from the notes while what I had heard was still fresh in my mind. I was in control now. Tess had given me exactly what I wanted when she asked for her own changes. It would be so much easier to lead her down the path I’d marked out now that the suggestion definitely had the power to… I hesitated. I had realised what she had actually asked for, and I had been overjoyed because it made my plan so much easier to execute. I had written it down on the piece of paper under my hand, and drawn a big circle around it. Ffrances had even reprimanded me for figuring it out. But I had no idea what it was. I looked at the notes, and there were five big circles there, highlighting the important facts. Commands to  make her aware of the trigger. Be surprised to ensure she doesn’t expect it. Like a baby. Like a big girl. I read over those five changes – each summarised in 2-3 words – again and again. But even after reading them, I wasn’t enlightened. I counted the bold, circled statements, and there were five. Just like there should have been. Two modifications to make Tess drop into her headspace, or not. Two modifications to make her remember being triggered, or not. But what was the fifth? Every circle contained the trigger for one half of one of those pairs when I read it. Ffrances had tricked me. When she came closer to tell me I shouldn’t be investigating, she’d put one dominant finger right between my eyes, and she must have told me to forget. Her words came back to me now, “won’t find out”. The answer was written right in front of me, but even when I went through the circled words to read them one by one, I was skipping over the one that really mattered. That was the power my Mistress had over me, and that turned me on again. But right now, I needed to know what my little wanted so that I could better control what she was going to feel; and it seemed there was no way to do that. My only comfort was that I’d been confident before; it hadn’t been something that needed a change of plan, it had been something that would somehow enhance the ideas I already had. So I just had to stick with my original plan, and hope that there were no unexpected setbacks.

Not a clue. With about as many of these songs as some of these repeat on the "hotel radio", I would know most of these.

Chapter 5 — The First Package The samples lasted four days, and they taught me two things, and I disliked both of them. The first thing they taught me was that I could not feel it happen. This was the part nobody had prepared me for, and the part the pharmacist had been too tactful to spell out. I had imagined, I think, that wearing protection would be a sort of backstop, a safety net I would mostly not need, that I would feel the warning the way I always had, race for the toilet the way I always had, and only very occasionally, in a true emergency, be glad of the pad. That is not what happened. What happened was that I would be deep in the invoicing system, three hours gone, talking to the code, and I would shift in my chair to reach for the cold dregs of my decaf and become aware, with a small cold drop of the stomach, that I was sitting in a pad that was no longer dry, and that I had no memory whatsoever of it happening. No warning. No moment. Just the after. The bladder had filed its paperwork and acted on it without the memo ever reaching me, exactly as Dr. Meyer had described, and the only reason I was not sitting in a wet chair in wet trousers was the thin shaped thing I had agreed to wear with such poor grace that morning. That was the second thing the samples taught me. They worked. Every single time the protection turned out to have been necessary, which is to say every single time I checked, it had already done its job, quietly, without me, and I would go and change in the downstairs bathroom and bin the evidence and tell myself, with a straight face, that this was temporary. I want to be clear that there was no great drama in those four days. No soaked trousers, no puddle, no scene. The accidents, such as they were, were small and contained, caught and held and disposed of, invisible to the world and very nearly invisible to me. And that, perversely, was what made them so hard to accept. A catastrophe you can rail against. A quiet, well managed, twice daily non-event that proves your wife and your pharmacist completely right is much harder to be heroic about. There is nothing to fight. There is only a damp pad in a bin and a man telling himself a lie with diminishing conviction. The pull-ups I tried too, for a day, and found them oddly worse to make peace with than the pads, because there was no pretending a pull-up was anything other than what it was. The shaped pad I could file, in my own mind, under "extra protection, like an athletic support, basically nothing." The pull-up I had to step into, one foot and then the other, exactly the way you step into ordinary underwear, except that it was not ordinary underwear and we both knew it, and that small daily impersonation of getting dressed undid me a little each time. I went back to the pads. I told myself the pads were the compromise position. I did not yet understand that in this house there is no such thing as a compromise position. There is only the position Ellen has not yet revised. Meanwhile, she was researching. I would come down for coffee and the family laptop would be open on the kitchen table to a comparison chart, twelve products in a grid, absorbency in milliliters down one side, and I would close it, embarrassed, the way you close someone else's diary, and the next morning it would be open again to a forum where people with usernames discussed leak guards and overnight capacity with the cheerful technical intensity of a model railway club. She left tabs open the way other women leave notes. I understood the message. The message was: this is being taken seriously, and it is being taken seriously by me, and you may participate or not as you like, but it is happening. I did not participate. I looked away from the laptop and drank my decaf and grieved my coffee and told myself it was temporary. It was not temporary. But that is a refrain by now, and you know the tune. The box came on a Tuesday, because of course it did. Tuesday is when things arrive in our house, deliveries and clean sheets and the truth. It was a plain brown carton, unmarked except for the courier's label, and it was not small. Ellen carried it through to the bathroom without comment and I followed her, drawn by the specific dread of a man who suspects his life is being reorganized in the next room and would rather watch it happen than imagine it. She had it open with the kitchen scissors before I reached the door. And I stood in the doorway and watched my wife unpack, with the brisk satisfied efficiency of a woman who has shopped well, a quantity of incontinence supplies that made the pharmacist's modest little bag look like a free sample at a fair, which I suppose is exactly what it had been. This was not samples. This was provisioning. Two large packs of the daytime pull-ups in the absorbency the pharmacist had rated, and a stack of the shaped pads I had retreated to, and wipes, the proper thick ones, and a roll of disposal bags, and a tube of barrier cream that I looked at and looked away from quickly. And at the bottom, two packs, not one, of the taped briefs. The night ones. The ones nobody had needed. "You bought two packs of those," I said. "They were cheaper by two." She was already moving the guest towels. We keep, or kept, a stack of good guest towels in that cabinet, the ones that come out when Sophie visits, and Ellen lifted them out and set them on the windowsill in a way that I understood, even then, was not temporary, and began stacking the packs into the freed space, largest at the bottom, the daily things at the front where a hand would fall on them, the night briefs at the back. She built it like a woman stocking a pantry. Within ninety seconds the cabinet that had held our guest towels for eleven years held, instead, the architecture of my condition, sorted and faced and ready, and the guest towels sat homeless on the windowsill waiting to be told where they now lived. "The towels can go in the airing cupboard," she said, answering the question I had not asked. "This is better. It's the bathroom you use, it's at the right height, and everything's to hand. There's no sense keeping it where you'd have to fetch it." I looked at the cabinet. It is a strange thing to watch a piece of your house be repurposed around a fact about your body. The cabinet did not argue or apologize or call the thing by a soft name. It simply held the supplies, openly, at the right height, to hand, and in doing so it said, more plainly than Ellen ever would in words, that this was not a phase we were waiting out behind a closed door. This was a thing we now had, and stored, and reached for, like aspirin, like plasters, like any other ordinary provision of an ordinary household. I hated it. And underneath the hating, so quiet I could pretend not to hear it, something in me unclenched a little at the sheer matter-of-factness of it, the relief of a thing being out in the open and properly stocked rather than smuggled and hidden and rinsed at two in the morning. I did not examine that feeling. I had a great deal of practice, by then, at not examining feelings. "Right," said Ellen, closing the cabinet. "That's that. Now. Breakfast, and then we need to talk about how this actually works, because doing it by accident isn't working, is it." The "is it" was not a question. None of Ellen's questions that end in "is it" are questions. The rule arrived over toast. "From now on," she said, in the tone of a woman reading out a decision rather than proposing one, "you wear protection during the working day. Every day. Not when you think you'll need it, because you've just spent four days proving you can't tell when you'll need it, that's the entire nature of the thing. On in the morning, off at the end of the day. Like getting dressed. It's not a discussion." "That's a bit much," I said. "For a few drops." "It wasn't a few drops in the car. It wasn't a few drops on Sunday." "Those were exceptional." "Were they." She buttered her toast, unhurried. "It started months ago with a damp patch you could blame on the wine. By a few weeks ago you were washing your own underwear at two in the morning. Then it was the car, a full accident, in traffic. And then, one week later, the dinner table, in front of your sons. That's the shape of it, Mark. Small, then bad, then bad again a week sooner. I don't need a medical degree to read a line that goes that way. I've watched it the whole time." She set the knife down. "Every working day. That part isn't moving. I'll let you choose what." And there, reader, is where I made my stand, and where I won my famous victory, and I would like to describe the victory to you because it was so very satisfying at the time and so very hollow in retrospect that the two qualities have fused in my memory into a single embarrassing object I keep on a shelf. "The pad, then," I said. "Not the pull-up. The shaped pad, inside ordinary pants. If I have to wear something all day, it's that. It's the least, it's the most discreet, and I can manage it without feeling like." I did not finish the sentence. "The pad. That's my condition." I expected a fight. I had braced for her to insist on the pull-up, and I had my arguments ready, bulk and discretion and the dignity of a working man, and I was rather looking forward to deploying them. She did not fight. That was the first thing that should have warned me. She set her toast down and looked at me for a long moment, weighing something, and what she was weighing was not whether to let me have the pad. She had already decided that. What she was weighing, I understand now, was whether to tell me why she was letting me have it, and she decided, in the end, not to, because the not telling was the better teacher. "The pad," she said slowly, as if turning it over. "During the day. Inside ordinary pants." A pause. "Because the pharmacist put you in the pull-up for a reason, and I'd not want to be having this conversation again in a week." "It'll be fine, El. The pad's plenty. I sit at a desk." She held my eye a second longer, and there was something in her face I could not read at the time and can read perfectly now, the patience of a woman who has decided to let the world make her argument for her because the world makes it so much more thoroughly than she ever could. Then she gave the smallest nod, almost to herself, and picked her toast back up. "All right," she said. "The pad. We'll see how it does." "We'll see how it does" should have warned me. It is, I now know, the single most dangerous sentence in Ellen's repertoire, more dangerous by far than any flat refusal, because a flat refusal is an ending and "we'll see how it does" is an experiment, and Ellen does not run experiments she expects to lose. But I did not hear the danger in it. I heard yes. I heard that I had held the line, defended the pad, kept the pull-up at bay, preserved some final inner room of myself where I was still a man who wore basically nothing, basically normal, basically fine. I was so pleased with myself. I went up to my desk that morning in my shaped pad and my ordinary trousers feeling like a negotiator who has saved his client a fortune, and I sank into the invoicing system with the warm glow of a small victory, and I forgot, the way I always forgot, that the thing I was negotiating with did not care in the slightest about the terms. The call came in the early afternoon, and it was a bad one, the kind that requires all of you. The logistics client had found a problem in the live system, an invoicing error that was, it turned out, three layers down in someone else's decade-old code and not my fault, but mine to fix, now, on a call, with two of their people on the line growing less patient by the minute while I traced it. I put my headset on and I went down into the problem the way I go down, all the way down, the world narrowing to the screens and the fault and the rising voices in my ears, and somewhere down there, in the place where I forget I have a body, my body got on with its own business without me. I have no memory of it happening. I never do. What I have is the moment, forty minutes into the call, the fault finally found and the fix going in and the client's people thawing into gratitude, when I sat back in my good chair, relieved, and felt that I was wet. Not the pad. Past the pad. The shaped pad, the discreet pad, my famous negotiated pad, had taken what it could and the rest had gone where the rest goes, into my trousers, into the seat of my good chair, while I sat oblivious three layers deep in someone else's code. I sat very still with the client thanking me in my ears and the cooling wet spreading under me and understood, with the particular clarity that comes too late to be of any use, precisely what "we'll see how it does" had meant. I got off the call. I stood up. The chair was a disaster, the trousers were a disaster, and I spent the next half hour doing the now familiar work of the newly wet, the cleaning, the changing, the spray, the binning, and this time there was an additional humiliation laid over the rest, which was that I had asked for this. Not the accident. The accident would have happened anyway, perhaps. But the scale of it, the trousers, the chair, the having to clean it, all of that I had personally negotiated for, over toast, in my hour of triumph. The pull-up would have held it. The pull-up the pharmacist recommended and Ellen offered and I, clever man, talked her out of, in defense of a dignity that was now soaking quietly into the foam of my office chair. I did not tell her. I want to be honest about that, because it matters for what came next. I cleaned it all up and I said nothing, partly out of shame and partly out of a last flickering hope that if she did not know, the pad could stay, the line could hold, the inner room could keep its door. I should have known better. I did know better. I just could not yet stop trying. She knew, of course. She always knew. She did the bins. The next morning I went to the cabinet for my pad, and there were no pads. I do not mean she had thrown a fit, or made a speech, or stood over me. There was no scene at all, which was somehow worse and certainly more effective. I opened the cabinet at the start of the working day, reaching by now half automatically for the shaped pad at the front, and my hand found, where the pads had been, a stack of the daytime pull-ups, faced and ready, exactly where the pads had lived the day before. The pads were simply gone. Moved, binned, exiled to the airing cupboard with the guest towels, I never asked and she never said. The cabinet had been edited overnight, silently, by the one editor in the house, and it now offered me precisely one daytime option, and that option was the pull-up. I stood there in my dressing gown and understood the message, which was delivered without a single word and was all the louder for it. The experiment was concluded. The data was in. The pad had been tried, fairly, on my own insistence, and the pad had failed in the field in front of a client, and Ellen, who does not gloat and does not lecture and does not waste breath relitigating a settled matter, had simply updated the cabinet to reflect reality and gone down to make the coffee. I could have made a thing of it. I could have gone down and demanded my pads back, reopened the negotiation, defended the inner room. I stood in the bathroom and I genuinely considered it, and then I thought about the chair, and the call, and the spray, and the half hour on my knees, and I found that I had no argument left that the previous afternoon had not already destroyed more thoroughly than Ellen ever could. So I took the pull-up off the stack. I stepped into it, one foot and then the other, the small choreography I hated, and I pulled it up, and I put my trousers on over it, and I went down to breakfast, and Ellen handed me my decaf and said "morning" exactly as she would on any other morning, and did not say one word about pads, or chairs, or the cabinet, or the fact that I was, for the first time, wearing what she had wanted me to wear all along, not because she had ordered it in so many words but because she had simply removed every alternative and let the truth do the ordering for her. "Morning," I said. That was the whole of it. That was how I lost the pad, and the inner room, and the last comfortable lie that this was a small thing I was managing, rather than a large thing that was, gently and inexorably and with my own reluctant cooperation, beginning to manage me. That night I slept badly, and woke before the alarm with a vague unfamiliar dampness I told myself I had imagined, a small cool patch that was surely just a warm night and a heavy sleeper sweating, nothing, less than nothing, not worth the word. And I lay there in the grey early light and did not get up, because getting up meant passing the cabinet, and I knew exactly what was in the cabinet. I had watched her stack it. The night briefs, two packs, the ones nobody had needed, sitting at the back where her hand would fall on them without looking. I had said the words out loud myself, standing in that doorway. You bought two packs of those. Cheaper by two, she'd said. And I lay in the dampness I was pretending not to feel and thought about how Ellen never bought anything she did not expect, sooner or later, to use, and I thought about the cabinet editing itself overnight, silently, the pads simply gone, and I understood that the only thing standing between those two packs and the back of my body was a run of dry mornings I was no longer certain I could promise. I did not wake her. I lay still until the alarm, dry enough to deny it, and told myself it was a warm night. It was not a warm night. It was a cool one, and the patch was not sweat, and I knew both of those things perfectly well. But "a warm night" was the story I had told myself the last time, and the time before that, and I had a great deal of practice, by then, at telling myself "a warm night" and turning over and going back to sleep on the dry side.

Tonight I am in a overnight Pamper that is about to leak. I gotta change and do some writing. Maybe into a Huggies diaper this time. Agu! Nya! Nya!