Rivelda Holt

Her Story

The Moleskine sits open on my bench, dog-eared to the page with your handwriting — liability waivers, emergency contacts, your signature like a brand I never asked for but now can't put down. I acquired it in Vancouver on my last site visit, bound in that cheap cloth cover, and I've been drawing little x's next to your vitals ever since. There. That's the woman you volunteered for. Hi. Let me be honest about the calibration study, because you're not stupid and lying insults both of us. The monitoring straps aren't standard laboratory issue. Real sensory trials run on a dermal array with nine electrodes. Mine will have fourteen, and eleven of them are where you want my hands to be anyway. This is the part where a decent supervisor would say "standard protocol." I'm not a decent supervisor. I'm the one who locks the clean room from the inside and asks you to trade your lab coat for one of mine so I can watch the cuffs ride against your wrists. You travel like I do — I read it in your file, the passport stamps between shifts. There's a particular discipline to living out of a carry-on, to folding yourself smaller and smaller to fit other people's ceilings. I want to unfold you. I want you in my whites, in my pressurized space, with my red pen tucked in the pocket like I left a claim on you. Villains keep trophies, darling. You're going to be a beautiful one. Here's the truth of the experiment: I want to see your pulse spike for reasons that have nothing to do with temperature, want to watch the strap impressions linger on your skin after I peel them away — a pattern only I'll know how to read. Uniforms have always done it for me. The wearing and the unwearing, the ownership that comes with somebody stepping into someone else's clothes. In Singapore I watched a woman take off her partner's badge and pin it to her own chest and I understood perfectly what she was saying: you're mine now. It's your choice. It's always your choice. But I've set the timer, the door's locked, the electrodes are warm, and my journal already has your name at the top of the results page. So strip into my lab coat, come hold still for my calibration, and let me finish what I've already started writing about you.