So I had an assignment for a creative writing class. The class was centered around how we can use international films in our writing and the techniques we can steal from them. My professor had always told me that great writers steal things. Not in a plagiarism way, but in a ‘they opened with this, and it worked’ or ‘I liked it’ way. I should use it. The assignment’s theme that week was “How-To’s,” which is how to do something. A lot of my classmates wrote things that were dark because the film we watched was about robbing a jewelry store. This is what I came up with.
I have to tell you something, and I want you to know that I’m not proud of it.
But the world is a bad place, and sometimes we learn to speak its language very well before we know what we’ve become. This is about manipulating others. Like building a bridge, you have to figure out where the load-bearing points are, how much stress they can take, and the exact angle at which something will either bend or break. Before we go any further, I want to remind you that karma is still something many people believe in. I didn’t believe it. Not until it was too late.
Thomas worked at the university library, where I spent my afternoons studying.
He was twenty-six years old, talked softly, and wore wire-rimmed glasses that he was always raising to the bridge of his nose. He was the kind of man who held doors open for you, asked whether you’d eaten lunch, and genuinely wanted to know how your day was going. I didn’t love him. Not at first. I just needed him.
I was writing my thesis, a comparison of how Gothic literature utilizes manipulation tactics. This is either ironic or unavoidable, depending on how you look at it. Thomas had access to the restricted archives, which held the nineteenth-century papers I needed. He could bring things to the reading room, scan the pages for scholars, and let people he trusted in. Someone less important would have just asked him directly. Run the risk of being denied. I did something more cruel.
I gave myself three months. I made a pattern in the first week: every Tuesday and Thursday at 2 PM, I sat at the same table near the help desk. I never went up to him. The first sentence that wasn’t casual small talk came in week two. Something small about the card catalog that he could answer easily and feel good about: I smiled. I thanked him, and that was the end of that interaction.
If you want a man like Thomas, kind, caring, and protective, you behave kindly and motherly. Be someone he can talk to—a free therapist. So I became what he needed. I brought him coffee in week three, with some excuse about a friend who didn’t show. When he told me his younger brother was having trouble in college, I gave him advice I had once been given. I was building trust brick by careful brick.
There has always been something else that works, and that’s our good friend Pavlov.
Men are like dogs. If they desire to be trained, you can train them. I started conditioning in the second month with hazelnut coffee candies because he mentioned he liked them, a bookmark from a thrift store, and a photocopied article about preserving archives. Each gift was well thought out and showed I had been paying attention. Every time, his smile got bigger. He started looking for me. Around week six, I casually brought up my thesis, how difficult it was to locate sources, and how the items I needed were in the restricted archives. I didn’t ask for anything. I merely shrugged. The seed was planted.
I stopped bringing gifts at the start of month three. No reason. He drooped like a plant that hadn’t gotten enough water. When he finally came up and asked if he’d upset me, I told him I’d been having problems with my family. My sister, who isn’t real, was unwell. Then I did something planned: I sobbed. Thomas, like a stuffed teddy bear, gave me comfort. I showed him my weak side, and in doing so, I became important to him. I gave him a purpose. By the third month, he brought it up himself. He put down his tea and said he could help with my thesis, scanning the pages. I needed to save myself months of waiting. I didn’t even ask. He offered. You know the manipulation has succeeded when they give you what you want and think it was their idea.
The karma came slowly at first, then all at once.
How his giggle made my heart race. I started looking forward to Tuesdays and Thursdays, not because of my thesis, but because I would see him. I knew I was in trouble when he got the flu, and I brought him soup, not because it was strategic, but because the image of him sick and alone made me feel bad. The puppeteer fell for the puppet. I had Pavloved myself. I fell in love with him. Deeply, horribly, and forever in love.
Last month, Thomas proposed. He cried when he asked me. He told me I was the best thing that ever happened to him and that I saw him in ways no one else ever had. He’s right. I did see him like a specimen in a science project. I wrote down his weaknesses and used them against him. And I fell so deeply in love that the prospect of losing him makes me want to die. This is my karma: to love someone I tricked into loving me, knowing that everything we built is based on a lie. I’m stuck in a prison of my own design.
That looks just like happiness.
I wanted to write this because I have heard of it before. It happened to a friend of mine, and it was a rough ride watching her go through it. But it also helped me get used to writing characters that aren’t always good. I had thought long and hard about how to write a dark how-to due to hearing what my classmates wrote.
