Chapter 7

"I've been waiting such a long time... for Saturday!"

I woke up, famished. Debbie and Mary weren't in my room.

I had a thought to "reach out" to them to find out where they were. At which point, I stopped.

A weird thought came to me. What were the ethics of having this mind power? Didn't Mary and Debbie deserve some privacy?

Funny... that had not occurred to me before.

I found myself brooding over and over about it, unable to come to a decision. However, I made a little promise to myself: I would limit my "visits" to Mary's and Debbie's minds until I sought their opinions on the matter, and until I felt comfortable with doing so. Aimee might have an opinion on this as well.

Mary had brought my clothes from my apartment (which had not been used yet!) the day before, and I found some clean clothes and underwear and decided to take a shower.

I spent about a half hour luxuriating in Mary's shower, letting the hot water caress my back and the steam clear out my head. My mind kept on thinking back to watching Mary and Debbie getting it on before, and I found myself getting semi-erect.

Mary's shampoo had an apple scent to it, one of the kinds that you find in beauty shops--a bit feminine, but nice. It wasn't the scent I preferred, but I knew that my hair needed a good scrubbing. Unfortunately, it ended up making my hair feel like a used Brillo pad. Apparently, Mary and I had different hair types.

I stepped out of the shower, and realized that I had left my clothes in Mary's bedroom. I toweled off quickly and wrapped the towel around my waist. I opened the door, and was surprised to see Aimee in the living room.

"Oh, hi, Aimee!" I said.

Aimee blushed a little when she saw how informally I was dressed, but recovered quickly. "Mary and Debbie are out right now... but I guess you already know that."

"Um... actually, I didn't know," I said.

Aimee gave me a queer look and then shrugged. "Oh. I'm sorry... I just assumed..."

"Aimee, I had been thinking about some things, and would like to hear your opinion."

"Anytime, Jim," she said quietly.

I smiled at her, "Let me get dressed, first. Did you have breakfast?"

"Yes, Jim, and we left you some bagels. You seemed to like them the other day."

My smile grew broader, and I walked into Mary's bedroom.

My clothes were on her chair, where I had left them, and I quickly got myself changed. I walked back into the living room in my socks.

While I had dressed, Aimee had brought out a bread plate with a toasted and buttered bagel on it. She placed it on an end table next to the sofa, with a cup of coffee. There was a tiny pitcher with cream in it, as well as some sugar. Apparently, Aimee didn't know I drank my coffee black.

"Wow. You are pretty efficient, Aimee," I said, with real respect.

"Not a problem, Jim," she said.

Aimee sat down on the love seat, and watched me sip my coffee. She was looking at me, expectantly.

I put the cup down, and said, "Aimee, you seem to have some insight into what's going on within me, and I really need somebody's opinion. Can you help me?"

Aimee smiled and said, "Of course."

"Earlier this morning, I was wondering where Mary and Debbie were. It occurred to me that I could just... um... scan for them. Like you mentioned to me yesterday."

Aimee simply nodded for me to continue.

I took a breath. "The question is, is it right for me to do that? I mean, shouldn't the girls have some measure of privacy? Just think... their thoughts cannot be hidden from me. This cannot be right."

Aimee said, "You are asking me about the morality of doing so?"

I nodded. "Yes. The ethics, as it were." Discharged or not, I still considered myself an officer and a gentleman.

Aimee said, "I am not sure. It is obvious that people consider their private thoughts private, and being able to see them is an invasion of their privacy."

I had a sinking feeling, but waited for Aimee to continue.

"Yet, I'm not familiar with the... how would you say it... the mechanics of what you do. Do you simply know what Mary and Debbie are thinking, or do you have to do something to connect with them?"

It was a curious question, but I answered. "I don't know if I can really explain it, but it's like I can reach out... and know exactly where they are."

Aimee nodded and said, "When you make this connection, do you see their thoughts?"

I thought for a moment. "No. I can sort of 'hear' their thoughts when I am interested in knowing something. We can even communicate. Debbie and I did it when I was in her head once after I spoke to you through her. She was able to transmit a thought to me. It's easier with Mary, though."

"It's like a conversation in their heads, then," Aimee said, more as a statement rather than a question.

I agreed that this was how it seemed to work.

Aimee nodded again. "My advice is to not scan their thoughts uninvited, then. Let Mary and Debbie have that level of privacy. When you are 'hearing' their thoughts, are you able to are you able to 'hear' every thought or do you somehow manage to just get to the thought that you want to get to?"

This took me longer to answer. "I think... no... somehow, I manage to get exactly the information that I want. I don't recall ever getting any stray thought that I hadn't been looking for."

Aimee smiled. "This is all new to me, obviously, but it seems that you are reading their thoughts with their cooperation. You'd have to run some tests with Mary and Debbie to find out for sure, but I feel that if there was something that they didn't want you to know, you'd probably not be able to reach that thought."

I nodded, and Aimee startled me by continuing.

"Of course, if there was something that they didn't want you to know, you'd probably notice something different and know that they were trying to hide something."

I pondered this for a bit. Aimee was saying that I was connecting to some part of Mary and Debbie, and somehow I was requesting a particular thought, and they were somehow giving me that thought. It's a bit better than coming upon a large office and rummaging through the desk, looking for something.

"So," I said, "you are saying that they are cooperating with me. It's not like I'm doing it against their will."

Aimee frowned. "Maybe, Jim, but remember, you are able to impose your will on them. So, even if they wanted to hide something, you might be able to overpower their impulse to hide it."

"It's like Mary allowing you to stay here in her apartment. She does this of her own free will, but you, being bigger and stronger than she is, could also force her to make her share the apartment. The first is freely given, the other isn't."

Aimee was making sense, I thought to myself. "So, although I could compel her, to do so would probably be crossing the line between good and bad."

"Yes. At least, that is what I think," she answered.

I nodded and thought quietly to myself, munching on my bagel. Aimee was a great person for me to have around.

"Of course," Aimee continued, "you'd never be able to overpower Mary."

"Why not?"

Aimee shrugged. "I see something that tells me that nobody will ever dominate her."

"I dominate her! She calls me Master!"

"Those are two different forms of domination," Aimee said. "Mary gives you domination over her will, but she will never allow any person, male or female, to dominate her physically."

While I was eating, my mind was running through thoughts at a furious pace.

I had what some people would consider a very desirable power: the power to control the minds and wills of two breathtakingly lovely females.

How did I get such a power? Certainly, not everybody that comes out of a coma can control minds. What was different in my case?

I remember being told of my injuries after I had come out of my coma. They were what you would expect for somebody stupid enough to get hit by a jeep in the dead of night: bone fractures, massive internal bleeding, even a concussion.

A concussion... that would be something that happened to my head. Could this have caused my mysterious power? It could very well be so.

Cool reasoning told me that I was probably heading up a blind alley. After all, a concussion would more or less damage my brain; the odds of it activating some unknown power were astronomical.

I knew, from the amount of time that I spent in Mary's head, that what had kept her visiting me all those years was guilt, plain and simple. She had hit me, and then, confronted with the fact that I was in the hospital because of her lapse in judgment, she vowed to visit me until my condition improved. Of course, guilt wasn't the reason she continued to visit after I woke up, but Mary and I never really discussed that really; I preferred to think it was that she grew to like me in the many years since our paths had violently crossed.

Mary had always believed that I would come out of my coma. I don't know where she got her conviction, because everybody else at the hospital was simply amazed when I returned to the land of the living, breathing, and talking. Somehow, Mary knew that I would come back.

I had never examined Mary's motives too much before, and after my conversation with Aimee, I was hesitant to reach out and examine them now without her express permission.

Of course, then there was Debbie. How did I hook up with her? Debbie was a rich woman who had no cares in the world, who had absolutely no idea that I even existed... nor did I know about her. Yet somehow, the two of us connected.

What was the nature of my relationship with Debbie?

Debbie took immediately to Mary, and vice versa. It was if they seemed to think that it was because they had me in common. Aimee, who seemed to be Debbie's best friend, also took to me, although at first, she had been naturally suspicious of me, especially when she discovered the power I held over Debbie.

So what the fuck was this power? Aimee's description of "people that sleep and don't wake up" was more or less hoodoo to me: a good story, but not really helping. In fact, trying to fit my experience in being in a coma into Aimee's myths really seemed that I was stretching the analogy to the breaking point. Even Aimee said that she wasn't really describing my coma, but my ability to invade the dreams of others.

The fact remained that I had Mary and Debbie both declaring to me that they were my slaves. I also had Aimee' profess a desire to also be my slave. The strange part about that was that neither Mary nor Debbie seemed to have any submissive streak in them. Aimee might be a different story; her soft spoken ways sort of implied that to me, but it also could just as well have been when she told me that she wanted me to enslave her that my opinion of her as a bit submissive may have been formed.

The mind is a funny thing.

Somehow, that thought made me smile. It was definitely a funny thing, and this is all about my mind, isn't it?

I sighed. This really wasn't funny. I told myself that I could be having a bad effect on the lives of three lovely females. I really needed to know what I was doing if I was going to behave in an ethical manner as befits an officer and a gentleman.

Aimee interrupted my reverie quietly to tell me that she had some errands to do. I know that she felt that I was working out the situation in my head and needed to sort things out for myself, and felt that giving me some time alone might help. Somehow, Aimee and I had an unspoken bond with each other; not as strong or as direct as I had with Mary and Debbie, but something was definitely there. That was something else that I'd have to think about.

After Aimee left, I continued to work out that "bond" that Aimee and I shared. Aimee said she had a bit of an emotional insight to other people. She tapped into my emotional state, and decided I needed to be alone. Maybe that was a one-way bond between us. Yet, somehow, I think I was able to tap... just a little... into Aimee's emotions as well.

I had since moved into the living room, and laid down on the couch. I had closed my eyes, trying to sort out all these strange things. I found myself feeling really restful... relaxed...

I fell asleep.

It was amazing. In my sleep, I could bring myself back to the whiteness that identified my first conscious thoughts after the accident. The state of total confusion had returned to me.

Then there was the whiteness as I opened my mind's "eyes" and saw what I later realized was myself in the hospital.

It was amazing that all these memories were so easily accessible for me. When I was a kid, I had no memories of any dreams that I had, and now here I was in my thirties, and was able to remember my thoughts from when I was in a coma!

When I had awakened at the hospital, I was "debriefed" by the doctors, who were wondering what my experiences of twelve years of coma were like. I knew that talking about my trysts inside Mary's head would have me shipped to the psychiatric ward, and a section eight wasn't something that I had really desired. Instead, I professed that I had very few memories, and hazy ones at that. I didn't see anything wrong about describing the milky whiteness that I had experienced at first, but remained very vague on anything else specific.

I remember with some amusement questions about a long tunnel. I had remembered hearing about other people in near death experiences. I had remembered many things about what I dreamt during my coma, but a tunnel didn't seem to be one of them.

I remembered quite a lot about what I dreamt during my coma. I was not so sure about my life before the coma, though. While I did remember some things, I realized that there were definite holes in my memories. There were some thoughts that I could approach, but not get a handle on; thoughts that skidded away as I got near them.

All of a sudden, unbidden, I saw a face of a man. I really couldn't "see" the man. I could sense a strangely disquieting smile on his face, but as I tried to focus more on the features of his face, I saw that I would lose the detail on that smile. Yet if I tried to focus on his smile, the rest of his face would get blurry.

It was an exercise in futility, but I persisted. "I will conquer this," I told myself in my officer's voice. However, that smile seemed that it was laughing at my inability to get any detail on the person behind it.

I heard noises, and they were distracting me from trying to focus on this strange face... and it seemed like hours passed before I realized that the noises I was hearing was, in fact, my own voice.

I was screaming!

"Open your eyes, you asshole!" I told myself in my dream.

I finally tore my mind away from that elusive face, and my eyes opened. I squinted at the sunlight beating down on me from the living room window, and saw Mary and Debbie around me, shaking me, trying to make me wake up.

Mary was the first to see my eyes open, and she had this really concerned look about her.

"It's alright, Jim," she said to me, soothingly.

I turned to see Debbie also looking at me, her face a mask of fear.

"You... you're back," I said.

"We heard..." Mary began, and then paused. "I mean, the two of us... we felt..."

Debbie nodded, completing Mary's thought. "Mary felt your torment, Jim. It scared us. We came back as soon as we could. You were screaming..."

I was out of breath. My throat was a bit sore from screaming; I must have been loud, and I must have been screaming a while. I could imagine the trouble that Mary could get with her landlord over this, not thinking that Mary's landlord was in the room with me right now.

"I... I'm sorry," I said, trying to catch my breath. "Didn't mean... Didn't want trouble... didn't want to scare you..."

"Shh," said Mary. "Calm down. We're both here. Where's Aimee?"

Aimee? I thought to myself. "Went... out..."

"Mary's right," said Debbie. "Calm down. Breathe in and out slowly. You're hyperventilating."

My mind digested all this information, and I realized that breathing in and out so fast wasn't helping me. I consciously slowed my breathing, and felt some measure of control coming back to me.

It took about five minutes, but I finally felt a bit more normal.

"You heard me?" I asked, glaring at Mary.

"I... felt you," said Mary.

Debbie simply nodded in agreement.

This bit of information took me by surprise. Did the girls actually manage to connect with me without me initiating the contact? There were obviously something interesting about this, but this wasn't the time to pursue such avenues of thought.

"Thank you. Both of you," I said. "I was having sort of a nightmare."

Mary simply nodded. I wondered right then how much of a connection that the two girls made. Did they share that nightmarish face that had haunted me? I looked from one to the other, and couldn't tell. I'd talk with Mary about it later, perhaps.

I glanced back at Mary, and noticed a bit of gold dangling from her neck. I focused my eyes on it, and it was a necklace, once that I hadn't seen before.

Debbie caught where I was looking and said, "I bought her that today, Jim."

"May I?" I asked Mary, reaching up to inspect the charm on the necklace.

"Of course," Mary smiled.

The bauble was a circle of gold, with a white star in the middle, framed by the circle. The star was tiny little gems or rhinestones.

"Lovely," I said.

Mary smiled, and said, "It's a gift from Debbie. She said it's me."

I glanced at Debbie, who was beaming at my appreciation of her gift to Mary.

"It was in the stars..." Mary and I said together.

Mary and I looked at each other in surprise, totally amazed that we said the exact same thing at the exact same time!

The three of us laughed, and then Mary leaned down and kissed me.

Mary and Debbie sure knew how to calm a person down, that was for sure. I looked at Debbie, and she bent down and kissed me as well.

I had been voraciously hungry when I woke up, and it was almost two in the afternoon, and all that I had eaten was a single bagel. Now, don't get me wrong. I would gladly turn down a king's feast for a delicious buttered bagel, but my stomach wasn't as much of a romantic as I seemed to be.

"Did you girls have lunch yet?" I asked.

Mary and Debbie looked at one another, and finally Mary said, sheepishly, "We were... um... at Cicero's... a pizza place near Neiman Marcus. Anyway, the two of us both felt your... um... torment... and we left before either of us had anything to eat."

Debbie gave a wan grin, "We sort of left the pizza behind."

"So... you two are hungry?" I asked, hopefully, trying to steer the subject into a better direction.

"Yes," my two lovelies said together.

"How far is Cicero's?" I asked.

Mary was about to answer, when Debbie interrupted. "There's a better place closer to here. Nellie's."

"Ooh, Nellie's," Mary cooed.

"That good, huh?" I said, smiling.

"It's a place that was opened from somebody from Chicago. They have Chicago style pizza there," Debbie added.

It took all my willpower to keep a straight face after hearing that. My friend from the service, Brooklyn, might have a word or two about where a good pizza came from, and thankfully discretion won out.

I said, with a straight face, "Sounds great!"

We all headed out.

Nellie's was a cozy little restaurant which had subdued lighting, and dark wooden booths. Inside the restaurant was a light smell of garlic, a much more subtle aroma than I had encountered in the various pizza places I had frequented with my friend Brooklyn. There were ferns everywhere, the decor was brass fixtures on dark oak, and the conversation in the restaurant was faint and non-intrusive.

I fell immediately in love with the restaurant, making it second only to Peter's, another local place that I was starting to enjoy.

"Chicago style" pizza is a sort of pizza with a thick cake-like crust served in a dark round pan. I made an effort not to show too much interest in the pizza. I had started getting pretty embarrassed by my "Rip Van Winkle" reactions to things that everybody seemed to take for granted.

Nellie's also had beer, although the girls chose to drink wine coolers. This aroused my curiosity, since before my accident, those kinds of drinks were usually ordered by ladies of lesser repute. I simply ordered a Coke, not being much of a drinker. I noticed that the waitress didn't seem to give any particular reaction to their order, and, much to my surprise, when she came back with our drinks, the coolers were actually in colorful bottles that looked almost like Michelob bottles.

As I said, I was ravenous, and between the three of us, we finished two pizzas. Actually, to be fair to my lovely companions, I accounted for three quarters of the pizza consumed. I found that the pan pizza, once you got used to it, actually tasted good. The waitress kept refilling my glass of coke (I must have drank a half gallon or so!) and found between the refreshments and the pizza, I was most happily fed.

We all declined dessert, and I even passed on coffee.

After we left Nellie's, Mary suggested a walk in "our" park, where we had eaten fried chicken a few days before, and Debbie and I both thought it was a splendid idea. The sun was warm, and I had found that I had a fondness for the smells of grass and fresh air, probably because of all the antiseptic air I had been breathing for the last decade or so.

The three of us just wandered around the parks, following sidewalks. We didn't say much, although I could see that look of concern was still in the eyes of both of my sweethearts. I shuddered a little to think of how they must have reacted to my incomprehensible screaming.

I excused myself a number of times to empty my bladder of the quantities of coke that I had consumed, using the public restrooms in the park.

Dress styles had changed, I noticed, looking at people in the park. When I had last been around, most civilians tended to dress down. Jeans and a T-shirt... sometimes even army fatigues. Now, shorts were making a comeback. Pale colors seemed to be the rage, although there were some older people that dressed in expensive looking black motifs.