(Spoilers for Under the Influence)

I am very familiar with that cliche about rape. You know the one. It's a standing joke in the movies now. The victim has to keep bathing but she (or he in the case of Ace Ventura) can't get clean. No matter how long and hard she scrubs, how hot the water, or how strong and clean-scented the soap.

It's true. I am one big, old cliche.

Of late I have wanted only to be clean and whole again and yet I dread the things that once comforted me, like lighting candles, listening to soft music and having a long hot bath or shower and wrapping myself in a warm robe smelling of fabric softener. The association is with solace and pampering, but I feel now that I merit none of these things, that my life has violated in such a profound a way that no simple thing I took pleasure in before will ever matter again. I find myself wanting to savour something and then I remember that I can't. To enjoy implies freedom. And I am not free in any sense of the word.

Yesterday it rained, a cold, late winter downpour. I went out on my balcony and stood in it with my head tilted up to the sky, until my hair hung in ropes and my clothes were soaked. My bones ached and my teeth clattered together but I felt nothing drain away, no release. The desolation was still as fierce as it had been before. I think it's because the contamination is in my head and my blood and not at the surface where it can be simply washed away by soap and water.

It can't be cleansed away like the smells and the sticky leavings of a sexual encounter because it has nothing to do with sex. It was about control and the fact that I don't have any. I never wanted to admit to myself that Section controlled me. They have proved it to me now. I am nothing, just a tool to be used.

I was not raped by Karl. I did sleep with him, had intercourse with him. I remember none of it. And yet I remember all of it. The pleasure that I took and gave was with a man whom I loved at one time with all my heart and soul. Karl was not even present. He was just a body in the room, in the bed. You can say, if you like, that I was just a body in that room, in that bed. My spirit, my soul was with someone else. Or believed it was. Wanted to be.

When I awoke beside Karl, seeing his thin, sallow face and his smooth, be ringed murderer's hands, where there should have been the dear face and the gentle, calloused hands of my love, I could only cry hot tears of shame. I got out of the bed and looked in the mirror. I knew the person who stared back at me. It was my mother. I had become her, a sad and wasted copy. I touched my face and it was cold and lifeless, like a rubber mask.

Karl is dead. He has been punished for his crimes. I can only hope that he and Simon rot in hell. He was nothing to me. His death should have been a kind of closure. It was not. His death just opened the floodgates, created a deluge of sorrow. My rape was ultimately at the hands of Section and I fear that even if it was not Michael's idea, it was perhaps with Michael's knowledge and consent. He knows me. He knows what will break me. I know in my heart that he did not try to stop them. He did not tell me that I was being duped.

Could he have done that to me? Drugged and deluded me, bombarded me with hypnotic images so I would do something that I could not consent to doing if I'd been in full use of my senses? Did he assist them so that I would be a better and more submissive operative and not mess up this mission? Did he knowingly use the love I have for him to make a fool of me at section's behest? That is what terrifies and disgusts me. That is what gives me nightmares and keeps me from concentrating. My rapists are free and I must see them every day and pretend nothing has happened. I must pretend that I am one of them. That is why I feel this way. Raw and dirty. Dirtier than I have ever felt on the streets. At least there I had a choice.

I wish that I could go to him and ask Michael why. Find out if it is indeed that truth that he helped them use me. I'm sure that he will just give that blank cold stare and tell me that it was my job, my duty, to sleep with Karl. He will say that I have been unwilling to do things like this before or have failed miserably and so they cannot trust me. He will say that it is my fault that Section had to resort to trickery.

A small part of me knows that this is true. I am not a willing and eager operative. I have not made many Girl Scout points. I was trying to make myself learn, to make myself acceptable to them something always held me back. I proved that last month when we gas lighted Operation's wife. Madeline was angry with me for not sleeping with the husband. I was trying to be competent. I did things that repulsed me, like going to her door and telling her about the phony affair. Michael knew doing that went against all I believe in. The mission seemed to bother him too. He said as much. I thought he was finally in tune with me. I wanted him to be.

Has it all been a lie? Have these feeling I had for Michael been manufactured by Section? This love I had for him? Our blossoming friendship? Has my mind been manipulated at every turn? The sensual dreams I have had of him, the nights I have stayed awake longing for his touch, his kiss. Were the feelings somehow programmed?

I look back on these pages at the adoring words I have written. Did I imagine everything wonderful that I have felt in regard to him? Every smile? Every overture of friendship. Have they all been lies to exploit me?

That is why I sit here now in what used to be my favourite spot trying to write in this damned book. I stare at the pages, pristine and white, and nothing comes. It used to be that couldn't wait to take up the pen and begin to scratch at the paper, to fill that blank space with my words and thoughts. I would drink tea and curl up in my big white chair with Oreos and music on the stereo. I had only to close my eyes and think of him, to hear the words of a song or recall a dream and I wanted to write.

The words would overflow, not always expressing my feelings exactly as I wanted, because I'm a beginner, not a real writer like Hemingway or Hardy. I can't always turn a phrase or make the words sound pretty to the ears, but I was as satisfied as Tolstoy must have been when he finished War and Peace at seeing my rather round and backhanded scrawl fill a full several pages of paper, misspelled words and all.

It just felt good, the act of saying what I feel in a way that was concrete and lasting, and yet still remaining private. The words were my own. Romantic and silly. Wistful and wanting. The only things I can truly call mine in this strange domain where I have nothing but what is deep inside of me. I liked to think that maybe when I was dead this journal will live on somewhere in the hands of someone who had known me, even in the ones of an interested stranger. Someone who would read my words and cry as I had cried and maybe like me in spite of what I had done. It was always something of mine that Section could never touch.

Now I fear that they have taken even that small, almost insignificant pleasure from me. There is no joy in the act of writing. If the words seem laboured it is because they are. I am wrenching them from place very deep inside myself and they are fighting me. They do not want to surface. Yet I will try to say them.

Michael --

God, it even hurts to write your name, to see the blue curves that it forms on the page. I used to think your name so beautiful there in the white parchment. I used to think that you were beautiful.

The morning that I was told about the mission I had a dream. Maybe it was a premonition of things to come. I can't even be sure now if my dreams are mine any more. I was in a white dress, a lovely gown of silk and lace. My hair was free and rippling down my back, falling like silk on my shoulders, like in a Rossetti painting.

I knew that Michael was there. I had only to think his name and there he was. It was like I was looking at him through a microscope. I could see every eyelash, every pore, the glints of red in his hair. It was as if we shared the same skin.

For once he was not dressed in his usual black. I think he wore faded jeans and a cream silk shirt, untucked at the waist. His feet were bare. He looked splendid, free from care, happy. His eyes were very light, almost a jade colour. They were smiling at me in a way they rarely do in life.

He gave me an armful of red roses. I buried my face in their perfume, laughing with joy until I looked down to see that the razor sharp thorns had cut into my wrists and palms. I dropped the roses at my feet. The front of my dress was spattered with scarlet patches of blood that widened across my hips as I stood there staring. Staring in revulsion and trying to scream. When I awoke my throat was raw, my lips dry.

I was thinking about the dream as I watched Operations speak at the briefing. Michael didn't sit beside me even though there was an empty seat. It was almost as if he wanted to be away from me, distancing himself . I was unaccountably sad about it.

I can't say that I've ever gone into a mission eagerly. At the briefing on Karl and his brother Simon, I felt this little shiver of dread run up my spine. I looked at his picture during Operation's apprisal of the mission and a name came to mind: Mr. Karl Creepers. That had been the name one of my mother's boyfriends gave to the bogie man. " Be a good girl, Nikita, or Karl Creepers will get you." I still think he is waiting under the bed. I never stick my feet too far lest he grab my ankles.

Karl was as low as they come. I had seen and heard the revolting things that he was party to and yet the moment I saw his image on the CD I was studying, something about him moved me, made my breath quicken in my chest. I tried to fight it. My head was aching and I tried to tell myself that it was exhaustion. I was sure that I dreamed of Karl that night, strange erotic dreams that I could only partially remember, dreams similar to those that I sometimes have about Michael, but darker, disturbingly real. I woke in a sweat with the covers tossed to the floor my nightgown up around my thighs. I could remember little of the details and yet the realisation that I had been aroused by them humiliated and depressed me.

The days with Karl were confusing We were thrown together in that hellish little garret. It smelled of cabbage from down the hall and blood from the slaughterhouse down the street. The trains ran day and night, making the room shake. I felt tainted. I kept excusing myself to take showers. He must have thought me crazy, compulsive,

I remember little about my emotions at first other than feeling almost maternal. He had been shot in the leg and was in pain. His eyes were panicked, a deep liquid brown like that of an injured dog, quite unlike Michael's gray, impassive ones and maybe that was what coloured my reasoning. He needed me in a way that Michael never had. Something about his pain touched a chord in me. He required me to tend the wound to see to his medication, which I knew was suppressing his memories and nothing more.

I told myself that I was not touched in the head feeling sympathy for this man. He was helpless and I am capable of compassion for a fellow human. Michael, when I asked him for the pain killers, looked at me like I was mad. I don't remember his exact words. " I don't care if he's in pain and neither should you," was the gist of it. His agitation was obvious as he stormed past me in the hall at Section.

His behaviour seems odd to me now as I write this. I recall that he was in a black mood. He was furious, if not with me, than with someone else. He was teetering on the edge. Not that I have ever really known him to blow up, but he was very close. His hand trembled slightly as he handed me the pills. His eyes glittered with something I couldn't quite comprehend and he seemed anxious to get away from me. I was in such a strange state, rather out of reality. I thought he was being deliberately cruel. I resented him. And yet as I think of it now, maybe Michael was angry because my compassion for Karl seemed misdirected. Maybe, unlike Madeline, he didn't want me to care about Karl.

Am I indulging in wishful thinking again? Had he not known? Doesn't Michael have a hand in on everything that goes on at Section? The discs that exploited my mind were in his possession. He must have put the mood altering drugs on them. Walter tried to tell me just this morning that he believed that Michael had not been in on it. I would not hear of it. I am convinced that Michael is in on everything that happens at Section. Walter just smiled and said that it didn't seem right that Michael would lie to me at this point in our relationship, that the only things that he has kept from me have been for my own good or to keep me safe. Walter is as much a hopeless romantic as I am. He wants to believe that Michael is intrinsically a good man, my protector.

Walter and his fairy tales.

Walter says he's just glad that I am safe and that the mission is over. There are two less SOBs in the world now. I should try to be content with that.

I suppose as the weeks go by the images of what happened will subside and leave me at peace. If not peace, then some sort of acceptance that I cannot change what has happened. I think slapping Michael in Madeline's office is going to haunt me for a long time. I hit him hard, so hard that my hand vibrated up to the elbow, and yet he said nothing. He didn't flinch. He stood there and took it. Like he deserved it. That's why I can't help but believe that he was guilty of deceiving me. That is arguable, too, I'm sure. I felt no satisfaction at the time even though I threw back some stuff over my shoulder at them about having free will. The words rung hollow in my ears and I felt a like a small child after a tantrum.

There was something in Michael's eyes, the moment after I slapped his face, a split-second's expression of such intense sorrow and self-loathing, that I believe now that I must have imagined it. It knocked the wind out of my sails. I thought of the drunken and homeless men I had seen on the streets, the hopelessness, the failure marked on their faces, the drawn inward slump of their shoulders. They have a barren look in their eyes, as if they have lost all dignity. Michael is straight and tall and handsome and yet his eyes can be as bleak as the ones of those men.

Just as quickly the revelation was gone and his eyes returned to their normal appearance, a mirror into which I can see only the lifeless refection of my own pain. Nothing of his. I can never be sure if I did see something. I do know that this one act of violence was the end of that fragile bond we were forming. I tell myself that it is the end for me. I tell myself that I cannot love someone I don't trust.

I still shudder when I think of how close I came to dying that day in Simon's gruesome, gothic house. I have wanted to die in the past. The very recent past. And yet when Simon and then Karl raised his gun to my head I knew that I didn't want to die. When Michael shot Karl, the relief passed through every cell of my body like a white capped wave. I remember staring into the stormy gray of Michael's eyes and loving him again, for that lightning quick moment in time. And then the spell was broken and I remembered what Section had done to me. It was me who broke eye contact with Michael. I thought that maybe he was going to say something. He walked past me. He did not turn when I involuntarily whispered his name.

I tell myself that I can forget about you, Michael. Yet, fool that I am, I am still thinking about you. I see you in everything when I am alone. In the pictures on the wall, in my head. I wonder sometimes if they are still drugging me, playing games with my mind even now as I write this. I saw your face in a silk sculpture on the wall last night. It seemed so real. I tore it and the pictures from the wall and broke them so I wouldn't have to see you any more. I cut the palm of my hand on the wood and did not feel the pain until I noticed the blood, bright red on the white carpet. My palm hurts now, throbs as I write. It echoes the pain deep inside me, a long and jagged scar that will never heal. It just crusts a little and bleeds again.

I went to sleep early last night, overcome by exhaustion. I was in a twilight sleep, that strange state between waking and dreaming that happens when the body is depleted and the mind still haunted. I thought I heard a noise and sat up. I saw you very clearly there in the doorway. You were smiling at me in that gentle way that sets my heart to flame. You held out a white rose to me.

You said, " Don't lose faith in me, Kita. I love you. Only you. . ."

I wanted to believe in you, Michael, as I did once. But it is too late. I know now that you are one of them, the enemy.

In Section one does not love the enemy. Even I have learned that much.

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