The Third Performance:
The artist was wearing a simple white robe. Her feet were bare. She looked like a New Testament martyr.
A sexy New Testament martyr. The robe did little to hide her curves.
She was confined in a cage. Not only confined by the cage, her arms were held loosely over her head by rough iron shackles that were chained to the wall.
She wasn’t going anywhere until someone released her.
Ominously, a multi-tailed scourge was hanging on the wall next to her.
A small didactic plate attached to the bars read, “The artist awaits her fate. Should she be flogged, fucked, or freed? That is your decision.”
This time, six television screens were hanging on the walls in the front room. Unlike the previous performances, the guests could see both the artist and the television screens at the same time.
Each screen showed a different picture.
When Howard and Marcie entered, he led her to the artist first. She looked beautiful. He would have liked to reach out and touch her but the cage was too big; the woman chained to the back wall was too far away for anyone to reach her. That wouldn’t have mattered because no man would dare do that with his wife standing beside him.
Howard thought that she looked frightened. “How are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m afraid.” Her voice was quivering. He couldn’t tell if it was an act or not. He looked at the whip. It looked like serious business. If she was risking being flogged with it, she had good reason to be afraid. “Please tell them to let me go. An artist needs freedom.”
“Who should I tell?” he asked.
“You’ll have a chance to choose to free me later. In about an hour.”
“Okay.”
“Thanks.” Then she added, “Please don’t change your mind.” She sounded like she was pleading with him.
“Why would I change my mind?”
“Just remember that it’s only art.”
“A flogging is only art?”
“No. My fate, whether it’s to be flogged, fucked, or freed, will be real. Everything else is art.”
Marcie had nothing to say to the artist.
Howard didn’t know if his wife was aware that he had touched the artist when she was naked. She hadn’t said anything to him about it during the last two months.
And he wasn’t about to ask.
They drifted away to look at the television screens.
Marcie gasped. Howard was shocked.
Howard’s face was on one of the screens. Like all the other screens, the picture was split. His wide-eyed face was on one side; a picture of the artist’s breasts was on the other. The naked breasts were taken from the video that had been shown in the television room during the first performance. The juxtaposition made him look like he was leering at the naked breasts.
He probably had been.
He looked at the other screens hanging on the walls. One showed a woman in a red dress with an expression of hatred next to a video of the artist’s pubic triangle.
Another screen showed a man with his eyes closed in ecstasy as a hand caressed a plump naked buttock.
Another screen showed a woman with her face contorted in anger as she confronted the artist. There was sound emanating from each screen. Howard knew that if he were close to that screen, he’d hear the woman berating the artist for being a cheap exhibitionist.
He kept watching until he saw Marcie’s face. She looked transfixed – a voyeur peeping at the other half of the screen where the artist was telling about the last time that she had given a man a blowjob. He had been her professor and, afterward, he had given her a glowing letter of recommendation to Stanford.
He kept watching. In another context, these video portraits would not have looked so unflattering but when they were juxtaposed with the images of the artist on display, visually, physically, and psychologically, the faces looked lascivious, envious, angry, and hateful. Or worse.
He realized why the artist had begged him not to change his mind about freeing her. Seeing his own face again, this time next to his hand caressing the artist’s naked belly, he wanted to maker her to pay for his embarrassment. Her pleas were forgotten. He had already changed his mind about freeing her.
Like every guest in the room, she had tricked him, set him up to be humiliated in these videos.
She deserved some punishment. But did he really want to see her flogged? Or fucked by some other man?
He didn’t know what that was all about. Flogging was obvious – the whip was right there – but what about fucking? Was she going to let herself get fucked by every man in the room? That didn’t seem likely. There must be fifty men here.
He glanced over at the woman in the cage. She was pleading piteously for mercy from the handful of guests who were watching her instead of the screens.
The faces of the people who were looking at her now were expressing more hatred than any image on the screens. She could see that. She was in for it and she knew it.
He felt a twinge of sympathy. Maybe he would ask for her freedom like he had promised after all.
Then his face appeared on a screen for the third time. This time he looked to be in a state of rapture. His hand was caressing a naked breast. And it wasn’t Marcie’s.
He glanced at his wife. Her face was white as she stared at the same screen.
How long was it going to take for him to repair his marriage? How much recrimination would he suffer?
Artistic freedom be damned. There was no way in hell that he was going to free her until after he had taken some kind of revenge.
For an hour, the level of sound in the room was rising in pitch and volume with every new image on the screens. The purpose of the cage wasn’t to keep the artist inside; it was to keep the mob outside. If they could get to her, they might have wanted to tear her asunder.
She was the Christian in the Coliseum and the guests were the lions, ready to devour her.
The television screens went black. The lights in the room dimmed. The roar of the crowd abated as spotlights illuminated their host, present at last. Jeff was standing on a low dais opposite the caged artist.
“Friends, guests, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation in these artistic performances.” He was miked; his voice was amplified and routed through the speakers by the television screens. “I appreciate–”
A voice interrupted him. “I’m going to sue you. You had no right to invade our privacy and secretly videotape us. And then showing those tapes in public like this? We’re going to bankrupt you.”
The crowd roared its agreement with the man’s sentiment.
Jeff raised his hands and waited for silence. When he could speak again, he said, “I understand what you’re saying, but you are wrong on several counts.”
The crowd roared again and again he had to wait for the noise to subside.
“First, this is not a private venue. Everything that you see on these screens was something that happened in public. In fact, you, the people who are looking at the screens right now are the very people who saw exactly the same things live and in person in these same rooms at the two previous parties.”
The crowd fell silent.
“Second, each and every one of you agreed to participate in this.”
The crowd roared again.
Jeff waited to for the uproar to abate, then said “It’s right there on the badges that you’re wearing about your necks. Every invitation says in plain English that these are interactive artistic performances and that the performances would be recorded in audio and video media. Furthermore, your badges say that you agree to the recording by attending and by wearing those badges.”
A woman yelled out, “That meant the artist would be recorded, not the audience.”
The crowd added a chorus of agreement.
“The badges clearly say that it’s an interactive performance. Interactive means that your interactions with the artist are part of the performance.
”
“Legal mumbo jumbo,” some man shouted.
“My lawyers certainly agree with the legal part. You can be sure that I had them look at the language on those badges with big magnifying glasses to make sure that it would stand up in court.”
“But you hid the cameras,” someone else cried out.
“No. They’re right there in the frames of the television screens,” Jeff said. “They make cameras small these days, but not invisible.”
Howard looked around at the screens. It took him a moment to realize that the extensions that he had taken for extra control knobs were little lenses. They were sitting in plain sight, but they didn’t look like cameras. At least not the kind of cameras that he would have expected.
He wondered for a moment how the artist managed to co-ordinate the images on the screens. She would have had to recognize a hundred faces on the videos. Then the obvious answer occurred to him. The badges contained radio frequency ID chips that were recognized whenever they were near a television screen and the image was indexed in a computer somewhere.
The crowd muttered their angry disbelief.
Jeff had to wait for the crowd to subside before he could speak again. “Let me assure you of one thing. These recordings will not be made public, will not be broadcast or shown to anyone that you know or are likely to meet, and will not be used for any commercial purpose. You will not be embarrassed outside this room.”
“What’s going to happen to the recordings?” a woman asked.
“First, they will be shown in their entirety to the artist’s thesis committee. She will be granted a master’s degree in fine arts if her performances have sufficient artistic merit. After her committee has had a chance to judge the artistic merit of the piece, they will be re-edited to remove your faces. Catherine assures me that she can keep a documentary record of her performance without including any recognizable images of any of you. It won’t have the full impact of the actual performance, but will serve to demonstrate the concept for people who are not here now.
“Second, I will not keep any copies of the full performance. She has convinced me that the art is the actual live performance, not in the video of it. I will be satisfied with a copy of the documentary record that she is going to create. Like I said, your faces will not be part of the documentary record.
“Third, if any of you want to have a copy of the videos that have your own faces in them, she has agreed to give them to you. Of course, they will be edited so that only your own face is in your video and there are no other audience members’ faces visible. Personally, I don’t recommend it. As you can see, the videos are not flattering and the only way that you can be certain that they will not be seen if they do not exist in the first place.”
“I’m still going to sue you,” the first man shouted again.
“Ask your lawyer to get in touch with my lawyers. They’ve already prepared an outline of our legal position. After your lawyers have read it, I seriously doubt that they will advise you to proceed with the suit. Especially if it means that we have to show every bit of these videos in open court as part of our defense.
“In any event, let us save the bickering until another day and get on with condemning our artist, Catherine, to her fate. I’m sure that she’s anxious to know what is going to happen to her.”
There was a moan from the woman in the cage at the other side of the room.
Howard realized the obvious. Jeff could be blasé about the videos because his face would never appear on them. He had not attended the first two parties.
“Before I explain the procedure, please allow me to make a brief defense on her behalf,” Jeff said. “You all know that it feels painful to be exposed in public. Please do not forget that Catherine has exposed herself far more extensively and profoundly than you. I’ve come to know her over these past few months. She may be a performer but she’s not an exhibitionist. If you listened to what she told you about herself in her last performance, you heard her tell you how shy and uncertain she feels about her body. She has never been nude in public before and got no joy from having to expose her every physical fault to your view. And when she told you every shameful detail about herself and her family, she was telling you the honest truth. No one has ever told her therapist as much about herself in the sanctity of his office as she revealed to you here in public. She knew that she would be embarrassing many of you but she also knew that she would be subjecting herself to a hundred times more public humiliation.
“Please show her some mercy. She deserves it more than you think.”
The crowd was muttering. Howard could hear unmollified anger in their tone. He looked at the woman in the cage. She heard the same anger and was already hanging her head in defeat.
Jeff spoke again. “Catherine faces one of three possible fates. You will go into the back room and vote by dropping your badge into one of three slots. If you think that the artist must suffer for her art, you will slip your badge into the slot marked with the image of the whip. If you think that the artist is no more than a whore, pandering to your base instincts, you will slip your badge into the slot marked with the image of the phallus. If you think that she deserves artistic freedom, you will slip your badge into the slot marked with the key.
“If the majority of the votes are cast for flogging, then one of you who voted for it will be chosen to administer it. We will draw a badge at random. If the owner of the badge declines to flog her then we will draw another badge, and keep drawing them until we have a volunteer. If all of you decline, then I will administer the flogging myself.
“She will receive, on her bare back, ten strokes of the cat o’ nine tails that you see hanging beside her. I can assure you that each lash will cause severe pain. She has assured me that the whip is soft enough that it will not break her skin or cause permanent scarring so there is no need to hold back when you flog her, even if you are a strong man. You can inflict terrible suffering on her without concern.”
The crowd was silent. Everyone could hear the woman in the cage whimper at these last words.
“If the majority of the votes are cast for fucking, then the same procedure will be used to select a man to have sex with her. Only men are eligible for this duty; she is not bisexual. We will continue to draw men’s badges until one man agrees to have sex with her. If no one agrees, and I certainly understand if the married men in the room prefer to remain faithful to their wives, then Marty has agreed to do it with her. He is single and willing. The sex will take place in private in the guest bedroom. There will be no need to force Catherine; she has agreed to cooperate fully with whichever man wins her favors. She will only agree to normal sex and the condom that will be provided must be used.” He smiled and added, “Even by you, Marty, if you’re the lucky winner by default.
“Finally, if the preference of the majority is for her to go free, then she will be released immediately and escorted directly home.
“Dear guests, you may vote in the back room at your convenience. There’s no need to rush to a decision, we will not close the voting or tally the votes for another hour.
“If anyone wishes to discuss his or her decision with Catherine before voting, she is eager to plead her case.”
Howard looked at Marcie. She looked resolute.
“Want to talk to her?” he asked.
“No need,” she replied grimly. “There’s nothing that she can say that I want to hear.”
Marcie began chatting to a woman beside her. The tone of their low conversation was grim.
Howard joined the crowd to listen to what the artist had to say for herself.
“Would you rather be flogged or fucked?” a man asked.
“I’d rather be freed,” she replied. She glanced at the flogger hanging next to her.
“What makes you think that you deserve to be freed without being punished for what you did to us?”
She looked at the woman who spoke. “I promised Jeff that I would give his guests a significant l
ife experience. I tried to design experiences that you have never had before and will never have anywhere else. I wasn’t trying to give you bad experiences, just honest ones. If you found the experience bad, then you have to ask yourself if it was you or me who made it bad. You always had more freedom in these rooms than I did.”
“You designed this, didn’t you?” another woman said, practically snarling. “You could have done anything but you chose to distract us in the back room while you encouraged our husbands to feel you up in here. You’re going to pay for that.”
“I encouraged nothing. I forced no one to do anything. I gave you free choices. You chose to listen to my confessions while your husbands chose to feel a bit of skin. You could have chosen to take your husbands home and talk to them while they caressed you. How many of you have let your husbands look at you and caress you like that, even once, in the last two months? Even after you saw what they wanted. Now you blame me because not one of you did as much for your own husbands as I did?”
Howard walked away. The artist was doomed if she thought that these women would take responsibility for their own choices. They were going to make her suffer for their failings. It was an old story, often told.
But maybe that was the artist’s final lesson for her audience.
For the first time, he noticed a guest walking by without a badge. Then, a couple minutes later, another and then another. People were giving up their badges, sliding them into slots in the back room to vote on the artist’s fate.
Is that what people always do? Relinquish their individual identities when they make a group decision?
He didn’t see Marcie in the front room so he walked to the back room. When he passed the buffet, he noticed that it was barely touched. The party guests had something more interesting than food to hold their attention tonight.
“Vote for sex,” a man said as he entered the room. “One lucky sap will get to do her but only if enough of us vote for it.”
The man had a point. During the past four months, Howard had been fantasizing about the artist’s body more than he cared to admit. Seeing her nude image on the television screens at the first party had been fine but that was nothing compared to actually feeling her skin under his fingers two months ago. If every man at the party voted for fucking and the women were split between flogging and freedom, then he’d have a two percent chance of being the lucky guy tonight. In less than an hour he could be in bed with a beautiful, willing, twenty-seven year old blonde.
Punish Me, Please Me Page 27
