$25/Hour

“Jeanine. Jeanine. Jeanine!”

Swimming up through the depths of sleep to wakefulness, Jeanine opened her eyes to a bombardment of bright light. She blinked several times, then squinted against the harsh glare. Beyond a small area of illumination, she could see nothing but encompassing darkness.

To ease the burden on her eyes, she tried to tried to rub them. But she couldn’t move her arms.

“Jeanine.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jeanine said groggily. “I hear you. I’m awake. Mostly.”

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Where is here?” Jeanine asked. “And why can’t I move?”

She found that she couldn’t move her legs, either. Maybe it was some kind of sleep paralysis. Maybe she wasn’t really awake. Hoping things would return to normal on their own, she tried to focus on the person who was talking to her.

Marisa, her best friend, sat just a few feet away at the edge of the lit space. The chair she sat in was thickly padded, and it cradled her body. It perched high above the floor on a metal column, much like what was found in a barber shop. Marisa’s bare feet dangled beneath the chair. She sat stiffly in it, not moving her arms or legs at all.

Through the remaining haziness fogging her brain, Jeanine found it odd that Marisa, who was otherwise fully clothed, had no shoes or socks on. Wiggling her own toes, she realized that she also had nothing on her feet. Looking down at herself, she saw that she sat in a chair twin to the one Marisa was in. But there was one major difference:

Jeanine’s chair had four thick straps attached to it, two on the armrests and two on the front of the seat. One pair encircled each of her wrists, and the other did the same to each of her legs just below the knee.

“What the hell?” Jeanine said.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Marisa said again, this time more emphatically.

“What’s stopping you? I’m the one who can’t move.”

“I can’t move either!”

“Why not?” Jeanine asked.

“What do you mean, why not? Because I’m strapped into this stupid chair, same as you!”

“No, you’re not.”

“Look, Jeanine. Our situation isn’t one that’s going to benefit from jokes. Let’s just find a way to get out of here.”

“I’m not joking. You’re not being restrained. Just hop down from there and then help me get loose.”

The two friends glared at each other. Jeanine couldn’t understand what Marisa’s problem was, and Marisa felt the exact same way. Jeanine shook her head, in an effort to clear her mind and abate her growing anger. Maybe a different approach would work with Marisa.

“Do you know where we are?” she asked.

“No,” Marisa said. “But I feel like I should.”

“Yeah,” Jeanine said, mulling it over herself. “I know what you mean. Do you remember how we got here?”

“Yes...no...maybe?”

“Same with me. I feel like I remember, but I can’t pin it down.”

“Wait a second. Wasn’t there something you and I were doing together?”

“Hm, yeah. We had both signed up for something.”

“Right! It was...something we were getting paid for,” Marisa said.

“An experiment. A psychology experiment,” Jeanine said.

“Yeah, yeah. A psychology experiment that dealt with…”

“Hypnosis…”

“And suggestibility…”

“So, is all this some crazy part of the experiment?” Jeanine asked.

“No, it can’t be,” Marisa said. “Can it? Is it?”

“Well, you do think you’re strapped to a chair that you’re really not strapped to. That does sound like you’re acting on a hypnotic suggestion.”

Marisa started to retort, but stopped herself. She tried furiously to move her arms and legs, but she couldn’t.

“So you’re telling me that I can’t move because someone hypnotized me and told me that I’m bound to this chair?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“And what about you?”

“Do you see straps on my arms and legs?”

“Yes.”

“Then I don’t think I was hypnotized and made to believe that they’re there. I think they’re really there.”

“Ah, but you can’t remember what happened to us, just like I can’t,” Marisa said.

“True. So maybe we were both hypnotized, but we were given different suggestions about these chairs.”

“Maybe.”

“This is weird.”

“And creepy.”

“To say the least.”

“What do we do?”

“I don’t know,” Jeanine said. “Call for help? See if we can break free? Wait here until someone comes for us or something happens?”

“I called for help before you woke up. No one answered.”

“Ugh.”

Suddenly, a tremor shook Jeanine in her chair.

“Did you feel that?” she asked Marisa.

“No,” Marisa said. “But I saw you shake.”

A low hum sounded from above Jeanine. Both girls looked up. After a few seconds, an object emerged from the darkness about a foot above Jeanine’s head. It slowly descended downward on a metallic rod.

“What is that?” Jeanine asked.

“I don’t know. A light fixture? A hair dryer?”

“My hair is definitely not wet!”

“But it does look like it’s going to fit over your head.”

“This is not what a hypnosis experiment is supposed to be!” Jeanine yelled. “This isn’t worth $25 an hour! Stop it! Stop it and let me go!”

“Let us both go!”

Their shouts garnered no response. A moment later, the object slid into place over Jeanine’s head like some kind of perverse helmet. It covered her face down to her upper lip. Then a light went on inside it, rendering its sheer material almost transparent. Marisa could see her friend nervously looking around from within it.

“Stop it! Stop it! Help! Help!” Jeanine cried.

Marisa watched in morbid fascination.

The light within the helmet began to pulse, dimming and brightening in a rhythmic pattern. Jeanine winced and shook her head back and forth, as if trying to avoid being touched. At the same time, she fought against the straps with tensed muscles. But the restraints and helmet held tight, and her efforts to escape proved entirely futile.

“Jeanine? Jeanine?”

“My head, my head,” Jeanine moaned.

“Are you okay? What it’s doing to you? What’s happening?” Marisa asked her friend, then out to the darkness, “What are you doing to her? Are you hurting her? Am I next?”

Only silence answered her. Helplessly, she continued watching Jeanine.

After about a minute, Jeanine’s moaning ceased, and her struggles lessened. Over another 30 seconds or so, she stopped moving altogether, with the exception of an occasional twitch of a hand or foot. She let out an extended sigh, as if experiencing a great deal of relief. Then, a sleepy smile spread over her face, and her eyes fluttered closed.

“Jeanine?” Marisa said. “Are you...asleep? I think you are. This is so bizarre. I don’t understand what’s going on. Unless...is this how they hypnotize us? With some weird machine? Why don’t they let us know what they’re doing? Jeez! I’m really, really done with this experiment!”

For the next several minutes, the helmet remained over Jeanine’s head, and the light within it pulsed. In the silence, Marisa could hear a quiet murmur--little more than a buzz--coming from inside it.

Then, suddenly, the helmet light went out. The murmuring stopped. Jeanine shook once as she had before the helmet had descended, and then it lifted up off her head and disappeared back into the darkness.

Jeanine swayed slightly in her seat. With a snap, the straps that bound her released and retracted back into their housings.

“Oh my gosh!” Marisa said. “You’re free! Jeanine, wake up! You’re free!”

In response to her friend’s voice, Jeanine opened her eyes.

“Huh?” she said. “What? What were you saying, Marisa? Oh yeah, you were asking what we should do. Well, I don’t know. Call for help? See if we can break free? Wait here until someone comes for us or something happens?”

“No, no. We already talked about that. But now we don’t have to wait. You’re free. You’re not restrained. You can get out of here and find help.”

“What are you talking about? I’m not free. I can’t move.”

As she watched her friend push uselessly against restraints that weren’t there, Marisa’s eyes widened in horrified understanding. She, too, pushed against the straps that she could feel holding herself down, but which she was now certain didn’t exist.

Then she looked straight up. She couldn’t see anything in the darkness above her. But she had little doubt that an odd helmet-thing resided there, that sometime recently it had lowered on its rod to cover her head, that it had executed its insidious machinations upon her, and that it had then erased all memory of the experience from her mind.

“No,” she said softly. “Oh, no. Experiment. Hypnosis. Suggestibility. More like...brainwashing.”

“What?”

“They’ve brainwashed us, Jeanine. They can make us believe and feel anything they want. They have machines that do it. I don’t understand how. But they do.”

“Brainwashed us? Really? Come on.”

But even as she spoke, Jeanine saw Marisa unable to leave the chair and fighting against non-existent bindings. And she knew that neither of them could remember how they got there, or who they had been dealing with. It made sense. It all made terribly undeniable sense.

“They really did brainwash us,” Jeanine said. “Oh, man.”

“Yeah,” Marisa said.

“So, what do we do?”

“We do whatever they tell us to do. We know whatever they want us to know. And we forget whatever they want us to forget. Until they let us go. If they ever do.”

“Oh, man.”

“And for now,” Marisa said. “We wait….”