In a world of imprecision one can never go entirely wrong. The boy licks his fingers and musses his hair to careful chaos. He frowns, taking the girl’s offered compact as she laughs brightly. She swirls circles on the gelid surface of the sauce in the chipped yellow bowl, her blacknailed fingers trailing the golden tatter of an onion ring. His forelock trembles like a divining rod, her fishnet thighs a hoarse out-of-sight sigh as she crosses her legs, no longer laughing. A red rose blooms where her mouth should be. Someone at the bar has just lit a clove cigarette, its invasive bursts of smell now mingling with those of lysoled floors, expensive perfume, and stir fried peppers. Eros is driven into temporary hiding. The boy’s eyes appear to seize reflected light and darken it to tiny opaque stones from which no gleam escapes. Her eyes are more receptive, appearing to achieve however, the opposite effect. If he is worth watching for superficial pleasures, she is the half which invites inventory, the prolonged measurement where brain hums and heart dilates.
The city lies within a parenthesis. Eyelash, floating in a tear, sliding down an unblemished cheek. The intros are beginning. Judgments concerning need, hunger, desire … all of these are postponed as the process of gliding from point B to point C takes unspoken precedence. Unspoken, so that the fiction of dress-up, of style over content, might hook the polished flesh for the length of one more night. By dawn everyone involved will be convinced they had no choice.
The latest trend is metallic plastic, irrelevant zippers, the sensory shock of silk in unexpected places, body sweat pooling, beading to erect perfection. To any wet blanket with a documentary memory it is a fashion fourth-timing it around in a single century. In this world of painstaking detail the background is always empty. A deep emptiness into which one might imagine walking through to ‘forever’. And it is also uneasy, as though a milkwhite canvas were invisibly divided in three, and one can sense this, the flutter at the crossover but one can’t say quite where it is. It’s her curse to think the things he can only put into words.
Paradise is a mausoleum; the current crop of gods, when looked at sideways, hovering on the verge of disappearance, a roll call of solitary Benzedrine cripples. Thin river, fat land, soundtrack of a drum machine and a harpsichord recorded backwards. And no one wants out, even knowing that they’ll end up in a dark room that’s blue as bruises, consoling separate angels of confusion who’ve had, inevitably and often at no one’s urging but their own, far too much to drink. And fifty drops of love can’t compare with fifty drops of blood.
The girl (more properly, young woman) has known this partial and imprecise truth for as long as a year, though perhaps a little less. The boy (less properly a young man) will arrive at its burning lessons soon enough, shying through almost too late. It is an unalterable law of the underground, the scene, the only world that matters. It is as much a part of the night as animal ecstasy and the bad decisions made before and after.
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She tested his claim that he could find her in the dark.
–Right, she’d said, and he’d slid his index finger between her lips, depressing her tongue and lifting the moist cud of chewing gum off its primped, tickled tip.
–Right, she’d smiled.
The glowworm would guide him, lamping awkward and prosthetic and underwater to the hint of her. Some blasphemy was aphrodisiac and some wasn’t. Her instincts let her down at times but it cost too much to dismiss him, to label him fickle. His opinions were trite and true. She was afraid of love and therefore dangerous. Cure me, she begged, playful and only half-joking, aware that her shirt was as diaphanous as the rising sun was punctual behind her.
When it’s done she lets her head sink back into the pillows. The air is fluid with birds. The early morning sun is blue against the closed shutters. The bedroom is unseasonably cool. What happened will, she knows, be played back many times.
For now she runs the first and purest version: memory’s rough cut. It runs to reel’s end, then backwards, then forwards again, with only the quickest of jumps, the circuit from where he kisses her against white tile to the sinking back through blue coolness onto pillow but not yet beginning the degradation that comes with each revision.
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-Which one of us, do you think, has the more interesting past?
Amphitronia asked the question through a spinning drift of soap bubbles. Her words were not directed so much at the two men sharing the tub with her, as at her own smoky silhouette, cast by candlelight onto the frosted glass of the bathroom’s sliding door. The younger of the two men bubbled a palmful of warm pink water over his head, yellow metallic hair spiking with the afterdrip.
-Why you, of course, dear Amphitronia.
It was not necessary that he believe it, it was however important to let her see that he’d been listening and that she oughtn’t therefore speak aloud expecting impunity.
The black lacquer of her cigarette holder, the cherried red of her long fingernails, the white of the unechoing biscuit-paste porcelain. The other man, the silent man, could form no cohesive snapshot without imagining each color and curve floating separate, pristine and spider-clear against a background of some impressive neutrality. Sinister pastel, perish the thought. His language left much to be desired, as hers left nothing to the imagination. The cohesive picture unfroze and ran.
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Although it hasn’t rained all day, the spill of neon on the sidewalk and streets has a humid, messy look, bloodsmear of green or blue. Even love’s most furious disease drops its temperature, is cool and beautiful. All this might change. It is eight-thirty at night. The clockface of the moon leans in for a closer look. Gradually the fangs develop.
Under the awning, outside the entrance to the club, he paused, looked to his right, down towards the tooting darkness of Avenida Rayuela. Across the road was a convenience store, clerked by refugees from some Indian Ocean tyranny, armed to the teeth and importers of a complicated strain of polite racism all their own. It is at this very store where, from time to time, he has picked up the needy runaway with nothing left to barter. He makes his generous offer and names his awful price and has yet to be refused.
Three, no, four blocks east to west, and then a left for one block more. But stop for a minute or two before turning left. Hang still, here at the heel of the ‘L’. Watch the foot traffic, in and across and out of the wet neon spill. Watch, especially, the women. Their purses are all so small. One or two glamorous with Persian flash, but mostly black and shiny. A tourist pack hurries past, shrill with frightened laughter, the girls’ ungainly bolsas kangarooed at their bellies, straps slung awkwardly around their necks. No self-respecting pickpocket would presume the frontal attack necessary to rob these boisterous ninnies, breasts absurdly prominent where the cinch halves their jiggling, a jiggling one will get cursed or slugged for staring at. They’re gone, a bad memory that won’t hush decently up. Further down the block someone shouts ‘Put a cock in it!’ Almost cheerfully. The parade of tiny purses resumes. He’s rummaged through his share, knows the rough denominator. (Panties, toothbrush, triplex condoms, Swiss Army knife, and the omnipresent unlabeled cassette: every girl carries her own suicide mix: ninety minutes that would reveal more than any last will and testament, more than the scrapings of the most insectine autopsy blade.)
)(
He doesn’t always consider himself free of the spell. He carries with him a list of words covering a range of sensations, none of which registered within him to any substantial depth. Freezing each word listed, catching it in occasional tenuous alliance to an image or sequence of images: this had become the reason behind living. It was a way of passing the time, anything else consigned to before or after (with the moment that ‘after’ slides into ‘before’ no longer worth noting). He doesn’t always consider himself free of the spell. Much of the time, yes, and he squinted as though it was merely the downtown leg of the Rio Madrugada on fire, lighting some stranger’s cigarette and neither of them speaking, but squinting to reproduce, through the clouds of smoke and the glare off some drunk’s loud lame jacket, the sensation of a cold camera cocked to his right eye, the lens runny with rain, and the effect produced was one of relief, of sliding in deep through the words he’d asked her to use when describing herself, and the camera felt cold against his forehead and she touched her lips to his ear and unconcerned as to who was nearby, listening in or not, watching or not, asked him yes in a normal speaking voice and he slid deep, free of the spell and in, believing and happy to be believing that it was pre-oiled and tightening for him and him alone. Time shrank from six midnights to one, and yesterday and tomorrow were ticklike, tiny as second thoughts that stung too late to hurt anyone. Was, is, will be. The volume of the music always seemed to drop, or recede, when he came. He liked the pressure in his head, liked that she pretended her talent was nothing special. Oh, a sweet nothing. They’d forgotten each other’s names and that was worth a shared laugh and tomorrow was why not and turned into yes. She used to never linger but now left fewer and fewer drinks unfinished. Someone was waiting for her. Someone was always waiting for her. Or just leaving ahead so as to meet up later. Sometimes it was him though he doubted his memories and much preferred her lies, her excuses, her fear of giving up her spell for his. At times it was as though everyone beneath the waterstained ceiling woke up to the same starlight juju: one night the grown-ups just never come home. In the lamplight at the end of the bar she saw an unfamiliar face. An unfamiliar body blocked her glide to the cigarette dispenser.
–Have you seen the nude wrestle? he asked.
For a moment she thought he was speaking to someone behind her. She didn’t however, turn around, for this was a common occurrence: people appeared to look through her, address her as though she were their troubled conscience, some vengeful curl of shadows to be mollified with backroom chat, the offer of a pint or suck. He smiled and asked again.
–Have you seen the new Russell?
She imagined him groping around in the dark calling out. She was not his mother. She’s not anyone’s mother. He went on talking and she nodded, her pelvis soft, her throat gargling sapphires and snowflake. She told herself it wasn’t deliberate. That she let them go for five or six paragraphs of history and detail, threaded with opinions, sometimes clever, sometimes rote, studded with quotes and references which went unacknowledged (she asterisked the ones she knew, let the others starve like orphans). And then some phrase, some minor mistake and her pedantry bit with mousy venom and she watched the beads jewelling his eyes flicker black and white as he unraveled backwards, feeling a fool, a windy phony with his flies undone. It didn’t mean anything though, and she told him so and wanted him to agree that who Orson screwed and who Bacon warped could never bring them as close as they were the instant before she started to laugh. She told herself it wasn’t deliberate and was fiercely loyal to those who knelt and confessed. Sometimes she was so lonely that any man could have had her.
)(
By all means let this be the one. Why not? Let her address settle to a permanent elsewhere. When no one was looking she felt the most exposed, like a small child afraid to sneeze without permission. The competition looked cheap, and pallid, and so she felt among friends. To agree to an all-the-way overnight would nip any attempted coup, the infiltration of his true interest (in her mind, her soul) stalled at the checkpoint, held for further questioning. She could always gamble for time with one of the games where silence was a central rule. Her fingers tasted as though they’d been dipped in mint, his bulge, caressed with the heel of her hand, the roulette wheel tensing with each unspun second. Call it a sacrament even as it turned to slop. A kiss of nibbled jasmine, touch of tongues in a jolt of nicotine. Labeling a woman’s technique under ‘bestseller’ lifted it above the menu of familiar afflictions, although the use she made of his scarf had momentarily unnerved him.
And that trick with the keychain? Gasping, close to foaming, he would have tilted gladly at a thousand such windmills, not too proud (in his mind, in his silent mind) to beg for a repeat. They can either talk it to death or say nothing. It’s a choice they make each time they find themselves together, alone just as surely as in a crowd.
And it was this sort of loose talk that led to quarrels and challenges which lapsed, more often than not, to peevish silences waiting to be stroked and mollified. Deep unspeakable alliances also, and he or she found themselves riding in towards an intimacy which left them lightheaded as vertigo. No one else, for a moment, mattered, and the accounting of them, down to a cold stone zero, came as a shock. The peripherals were easy enough to discount, they deserved the lack of interest which clung to their aprons and hairnets as they wordlessly served out omelets to the vampires. But he, she, in that instant were able to see themselves as dead, and thus the living were reduced to a slender hum blipping a pale nothing room. Not my type, literally.
That they would lie for it, begging for it even, when had that stopped telling her all she needed to know? There were few things which set her dreaming so much as the moment bracketed in a man’s glance away and slow glance back as he realized she was reading his mind. It was the same every single time. Sometimes an almost-arch into an almost-shrug, with the corresponding rising whine that would have introed with baby this or baby that if she hadn’t shushed it back down. He’d said this was all so sudden, so fast and she’d wondered what exactly it was that men did when they wandered backwards into that unroostered zone, free of the scissoring possibilities. To brush up on their more sensitive clichés, she supposed.
)(
A shaman would have been no cleverer than she in divining the particular needles at work in his terrible silences. A peace like ivory, where a tonguetip touching a blood-rich dot was the sensual equivalent of a dozen mouths in furious aquatic swarm. His eyes bore down on details like a jeweler’s. A compilation of doves, clustered roelike in an overlap of wings. He eased himself over her and into her, her drowsy tumbling welcome following him into the swallowing surrender. The intervening time, often a very long time, without movement but exploration, their minds like spiders agitating down the heartbeat webs of each other’s bodies, intertwined fingertips touching and retouching those places where they joined as if it were a sadness, a joy, not to be believed, even as tongues and eyelashes tapped out exquisite endurance.
Coming down was the thing to be avoided. A jarring dissolve into the world, which, if its green and black walls and gates and trestles were allowed to reform to solidity and stillness out of the lingering liquid shudder of their bodies’ glazed struggle, would prove a holding pen no whisper, no cry could penetrate. It was no longer a pattern of planned fixing, of binges scheduled with preparatory care for the afterward, all of that and the time for that had been passed somewhere back along the irretraceable path. The sustaining of constant pleasure, constant near-death, the omnipresence of perpetual damage was now no longer dream, or goal, but rather permanent need. Whisper and try to cry out, sleep amid noise, survive and fall. The other world wouldn’t go away, perhaps would never go away, and arm’s length, two blocks away, as far as the outskirts, a year off, any and all of these distances were still too frighteningly near. Their minds had crossed over, yes, but their bodies, in unguarded, untampered, unmedicated sleep, struggled in brief spasms of yearning to crawl or lurch back among the green and black, where blood under fingernails was real and even dull, drained of the magic which shone from each telltale crescent when glanced at in that sleepless world of artificial light.
)(
Happy cries, bordering on the insensible, coming from a bedroom closet. The party primped at the edge, the overplunge dependent only on a provocation or dare, on someone, male or female, dropping their pants and offering their souls in sacrifice. A smell of burning hair, one of the bus station girls laughing and in tears, having leaned her cigarette too near the shimmering gas burner. Her latest best friend made huge his mascaraed eyes, imitated the sudden whoosh, doing it again for anyone who asked. A blond woman in a tiny blue dress, who no one seemed to know, stepped out of the closet, tugging down her hem and whispering ‘oops’. The happy cries went on without her. The coffee table had been swept clear for action, the bathroom was being plundered of towels and lotions.
–Oh god, a man in a suit moaned, crumpled on a crowded loveseat.
–oh god, I can’t sit up.
He flapped his hands ineffectually and sank deeper into cushions and camera equipment. A recording angel sat crosslegged, perched on the narrow mantelpiece, and invisible to all but her. Its eyes were compassionate, inhuman, and fierce, and its presence, though not perhaps intended to arouse, did just that. It scribbled with a burning charcoal stick, sweeping oppressive characters over the pages of a great big golden book.
–Read aloud, she looked up and said, as someone vaguely known to her hugged her from behind. Its eyes were prismatic, its voice that of a self-satisfied child.
–In the pantheon of dark and wicked urges no idol, from the very high to the very low, will be passed by without tribute being paid.
She nodded and swam out of the rear-entry embrace she seemed to have invited, though no known signals sent. Lust is a savory, love is a sweet. By now two women had shivered from their cocktail dresses and were facing each other, astraddle the burnt umber of the coffee table. Lips, eyelids, nipples, all touched by second-hand artistry to swollen dabs, seeping and almost heavy with blood. They shyed their arms towards each other and humped bare bottomed till their knees bumped, lost in their own light and the silence of a watching crowd.
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Shadows. As many precious legs as a spider. At a central table in the café in broad daylight, Amphitronia unclasps the small suede notebook and taps down the entries of orgies scheduled for the coming month. The notebook is a deep purple that matches her fingernails, her lips, both polish and stick called something like ‘Vampira’ or ‘Countess Bathory’ and very difficult to find, she says.
He counts the hopping sparrows between his shadow and her shoes, sidewalk curled and bumped with the beginnings of a colorful fake Venetian mosaic. He fights down his desire for a drink, for something stronger than a teabag of Lagg’s humo con limon. The waitress, he couldn’t help but notice, had a lazy, illegible tattoo, ribboning from her elbow up to her arm to a baroque whirlpool in her armpit then out again and down towards her rib cage, disappearing from view where her light top began, stretched to house her fat young breasts. Against her deep tan the design had the brailed look of a fine pale scar, a tipping out like the leak of recent love. He resumed his middle distance vacancy, wary of trespassing upside-down. Wormwood was said to be sticky. A punishing regret and the metaphors conjuring up the ‘never know’. How snug was her holster? Falling asleep, too tired to puzzle it out. Was there jam in the cupboard or was the cupboard jammed? A note arrives, although the sender could whisper and be safely heard. Amphitronia has invited him to join her at her diplomatic table.
She’s going away for a lost weekend with her husband. Oh really, he never knew she was married. Well, he doesn’t’, you know, doesn’t quite approve, doesn’t approve at all, in fact. How could he, jealous as an only child? In my (her) absence would you (he) be so kind? Wolf or slave, this sudden first name favoring turns up the heat with slim fingers, palm cool upon his burning knuckles. The door’s unlocked, if not yet honeymoon-wide.
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Sound bleeds from room to room. He wonders what is in that pretty, that maddening head. The gathering moments after the dead bolt’s shot, here on the lip of the orgy. Can she read his mind? Does the truth manage to wriggle through her overlapping nets of defense, her fallback of ‘no English’? That he desires her with something akin to tantrumed agony? That he would bleed (lightly, dramatically) to be the first one at the breach? Or is it the last? The one in whose arms she passes out, drenched in the best, the foulest of her previous occupants? But he finds himself instead and each time somewhere at the midpoint of the queue. The spontaneity of others has become his sworn enemy. He loses his place and takes his kisses and his erection elsewhere through the darkness in its many comforting rooms. He couldn’t bear it, he thinks to himself, that squeezing off of volley after volley into the sump of The One Who Came Before, only to be churned mongrel-like by He Who Comes After. Adding his dregs to her greedy chamber seemed the worst sort of self abuse, and the high comedy of his enforced chastity (with her, if not with others) slurred like mercury on a tilting saucer. Their eyes lock for an instant and he’s grateful for the roar from the speakers, drowning out whatever is being said to her. Drowning out her words as well, as she looks away from him and sinks out of sight, hidden from view by a trio of her half-naked admirers. His own skin is lightly flushed, faint film of cool sweat off the body of a woman moaning when his fingers absentmindedly moisten her delicately rocking clutch. Who is she? he wonders, as their tongues touch, slide clumsy in aggressive circles. Patricia, perhaps? Or is it Dominique? Or some other, more perfectly unknown stranger? If he rolls her over on her stomach or hoists her to an awkward handstand might a childhood scar or crescented sequence of freckles jolt his memory, find him a name to convincingly hiss and sigh?
Why, she wonders, is he so anxious to know what goes on behind her eyes, between her damp temples. Half the time and more she doesn’t quite know herself. She thinks her uncertainty into words and moody phrases and that helps, or seems to. She thinks she remembers seeing someone drop a something into the disco darkness below their knees. Lost in their own light. She thinks it is time to surrender. She thinks it is high time. She thinks she wants to have a chance to start all over again. She thinks the chance is all around her. She thinks she is the world’s best at avoiding others’ eyes, at letting even promising conversations gutter down to death. She thinks she heard them say ‘hyaloid calabrian sunset’. She thinks he knew she was watching him. Watching him consider his maneuvers in the mirror, thinking perhaps that he looked insufficiently perturbed, insufficiently anguished. She thinks he knows that the bus station girls don’t notice the things he does that leave them with soaked panties. She thinks he intends, one day, sooner than later, to keep her busy. She thinks he intends to keep her for himself. She thinks another soulful searching glance from the safety of his corner of the room and she’ll bolt for heaven or the exit sign. She plays back a scene that may or may not have happened. An erotic interlude featuring someone distinctly not him. A foghorn, a small animal swimming, at first coming nearer, than not. Lights, a stitch of blurry dots, unconnected on the water, rippling out and out and changing to reedcaught moonlight. A foghorn and a distant answering voice. His fingers on her hips, his lips sweep and sip at the sweet crevice. Sound bleeds from room to room and the tide rises till there’s nothing left to hold onto and fingers slip on every surface, whether metal, or wood, or skin.
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What was the language, what had been the occasion of her witnessing, invited third party, a negotiated seduction between light and anti-light? One (the seducer) whose every sentence ran for transcripted pages without error or pause, and the idée fixe of possession like a heartbeat without pause or skip or increase. The other (the seducee) incapable of pulling together the most elementary coherence, reduced instead to a patternless spluttering, something sub-shitfaced-helot. A hush from one and the barest vibration of fear from the other. How might she have intervened, especially when she wanted very much and very precisely and unapologetically to see what would happen, and to witness it happening frame by frame. The scenario was strange but no one would have dreamed of claiming a stranger’s immunity if things went nightmarish. When they lifted the young woman onto the table the light seemed to sponge her with panic, but she was being blotted out quicker than the animal words could form. From a witness’s vantage she now looked away, heard the tireless surf out and beyond and away and down, saw an open door and went through it.
Orgy as tag-team, orgy as fugue. She walks with tinseled steps along the moonlit balcony. Her hands are gloved and white and confident, the fingers of the left cringing the edge of a copper coin along the marble railing. In the courtyard below, a breeze balloons the walls of the blue tent, winedulled eyes see only blurred flame and floating shadow, taking no notice of the ghosts leapfrogging the manicured lawn, their shadows simulating sodomy against the smoky garden wall. Lost souls needn’t look far for company. She slaps at the offending hand and walks through a window of moths. It is possible, she says to herself, it is possible for things to end well. One fat moment of happiness and then deep sleep.
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Like birds reacting to rain everyone who came to watch the downtown implosion had either been up all night or was still asleep, though moving to and fro, stamping like horses restive in a threatened stable. The streets looked odd in the morning light, anemic under an eggshell sky. A painter’s eye might have identified a dozen or so gradations of gray, mostly on the moist, dark end of the scale. The light leaked forwards into sepia and one smelled coffee on the fringe of diesel. The full range of color drained in from the edge’s of one’s field of vision and bird-twitter came in blasts, trains sounding their swing round the city’s ring like trumpets testing the range of an empty room. One could believe that noise was invented some time during the early days of the Tigre administration. A taxicab screams past, flirting with a pretty girl dancing stoned down the yellow stripe. The jerk of her spine shudders with electricity and her bloodless beauty is so pure that the fillings in one’s teeth ache but it isn’t cold and it isn’t heat. The crowd is loose along the sidewalk, the north corner kitty at the intersection to the doomed building, its eleven stories of brick and gaping, paneless windows holding it upright and passive. Small figures in yellow and orange sealsuits walk unhurriedly from charge-box to charge-box. Someone says that the condemned pile looks like it could use a blindfold and a final cigarette and the tender irony sets the tone of the crowd. The guy who programs the drum machines for Las Munecas Mecanicas is laughing and laughing hard with a foreman in a suit and tie and hardhat. The last eyelets of dawnlight fade on earrings and horn-rimmed glasses. He sees her then, making her way through the crowd, moving away to the emptier end of the sidewalk. She’s examining an open matchbox, her jacket is several sizes too large, a lovebite or bruise spires her throat. He sees it happening, wonders if she yelled. She looks up. He opens his mouth. She puts a finger to her lips and passes around him, forearm brushing his elbow.
Chin to chest and breast to ribcage, crammed face to face in a narrow elevator, shooting the blue void like an ascending coffin. The bulb above their heads gave off a metallic tinkle, the smooth-looking door proved not so smooth, beaded, almost pebbly under their fingertips. When he maneuvered her so that her forehead was resting against the wall, she breathed in leather and recycled air, felt the hump of the trembling cables vibrating through her body. His hands went around and up, fingernails a toneless whisper gingering the tops of her stockings away from skin. He rested his thumb against damp stubble, stretched his index to cover her, teasing out the moist length, slipping, knuckle by knuckle, a blind man’s familiarity with a precise keyhole. The image both amused and displeased her but it was neither the sweet nor the sour which frowned her blinking eyes, gulped her mouth to an untidy grimace as though the oxygen was thinning down the shaft. She backed up against his greed, the rough material of her skirt an accelerating rustle of tingle and wool across his belt buckle. Gasping her depleted air, chin resting on the archaic shoulderpad of her no-nonsense jacket, he unlocked her stroke by generous stroke.
)(
Fucking her had become his religion. She stood (the image was in his waking mind, and he was willing it consciously into his dreams) like a slender blackened elm in a snowwhite field. Every atom pulsed towards the two times a week, in which he was inside her. As the field the elm, he was all around her, every pore was his to fill.
He begged her forgiveness in advance and she gave it, as if already knowing where his desire was leading him, where their one body was being taken. She told him what they would begin to find, in one, in two hours’ time. He felt the twilight in her temples, headache soothed with alcohol. His fingertips roamed her and she absorbed his touch with little sounds, deeper, lower than her usual moans, as scattered as a child’s excited, frightened cries. He lifted her head from the pillow, opened her mouth with wet fingers. She opened her eyes and stuck her tongue out for him to suck. A milky animal, sweet as fruit. Their mouths filled with each other’s spittle, their overspill slipped from the corners of their mouths, chins and cheeks cool with the slimed exchange.
She penetrates him first and he offers himself, surrendering in a sequence of controlled shudderings. It’s his turn to speckle the sheets with blood. His shirt front already bears the spots of an earlier discharge: black bead at the heart of a red sun, aureole hazed at the edges with buttery gold.
)(
Sometimes on a recent stranger’s bed, either before or after, she discovered within herself a feeling of resolution. A tinge of happy delirium as though ringside, with neither sin (broken-nosed, past middle age, but muscular, planed with speed and cunning) nor innocence (first time out and hinting at a hell-raiser’s endurance) showing any sign of picking up the thrown-down, splay-fingered glove, yellowing astral at the dead center of the canvas. Sheltered in a small god’s rainproof hideaway, listening, and tweaked to prick, she often heard the unexpected. In shadows, bruise- or bird-dark, under the blows of freezing air, the singing (meager and fine) of stars setting sail, in a drunken capsize down to the bottom of the blue world. But if the phone rang she was not to answer it, her enemies being everywhere and closing in. For one in permanent mental flight hers was a sedentary sort of paranoia, much given to third person plural. She knew this, needed no one to point it out to her, she already knew it. Pursued to the bottom of the world and nursing a pus-fat grudge as geology plunged up around her. The bottom of the world had she said, the bottom of the blue world, but she was anticipating and this might be the undermining loyalty her last lover had been so afraid of. She had noticed for a long time before it broke the daylit surface and housed an actual thought. That the colors of Ulysses were those of the Virgin: pure white and pale blue. And those of his former comrade, the pathetic Agamemnon? Gold and crimson. Burning, near to green in their ferocity and in the silence imposed by hindsight, raping her eyes. Troytown is burning. Against that she could shore up some mild sweet feelings. At least … It could be worse … At least no one she knew had ever stooped to the pilfering of gold from dead mouths. Along with some few things, of that posthumous robbery they remained pure. Once, and why not stare at it ruthlessly now, once she saw a crowblack murder of them coming down the hall and wishing with all her insolvent party girl’s heart not to be seen by them, nor touched, nor complicated at in major or minor mode, stepped aside to where she might pulse, undetectable by their poppy-dipped antennae, on the leeward side of an upstart linen closet. Not one of them was innocent of the fantasy wherein, somnambulant, the landlady winds up with her chirpy sparrowlike throat cut, from kidd to drake. But she alone possessed the red-tabbed cassette of how it might sound, the post-razor gurgle of an Old World drain. The armoire shivered, would have groaned at her some unclean stayaway, if, alas and woe, its oaken voice were not warning off the latest unicorn, galloping faithful-eyed towards some distant troublesome virgin, lap bowled hot with mayhem and a bull’s eye. She heard the shop’s bell tinkle as the door closed behind them and she was free to drift. On a bottom shelf down one of the back aisles of the pharmacy she found a child’s coloring book. Simple designs, the world imagined as an infinity of local curves, this one a duck and a beachball with clouds and the flattened placid oval of a pond on the following pages. Taped to the cover was a box of crayons and she lifted the lid to see, eight colors in all, including white, blue, yellow, red, and green. She fingered the price tag, wanting to know how much it would set her back but having no real intention of buying. Her outstretched fingers appeared to tremble in a sudden shift of light as above her a track of fluorescent bulbs buzzed and faded. A slim pool of shadows showed the way out. Ulysses settles between the spread thighs of his kidnapper. A waltz, a butchery, grapes blown cold and silver in the wind. A treacherous tepid bath: dignified enough for a tragicomic king; a dram too domestic for the arsonist of Troy. Her bed was comfort, island, foxhole. A blue-bordered calendar of naked acrobats pleased her, not least because it seemed so out of place in that sad den. Such lachrymose stars had their joyous place somewhere and sometime, a where and when she hoped was as proud and as frivolous as possible. They were too young (and they’d nod, insisting it themselves) too young to die. An October acrobat wraps his arms around November’s waist and grins back down to earth. On nights like these she doesn’t mind waiting. In fact, part of her is glad he isn’t here just yet, hopes he gets held up, drawn into something furious enough to eat another hour or so. She hears a car door and does nothing, her head barely stirring on the pillow. If she were at the Pirate’s place would she self-consciously do as he had shown her? For he permitted only three responses to noises originating beyond his door: a shrug at the irrelevant thump or blur; a startled movement followed by a slow relaxing of the shoulders; a bundle of stretch and grasp, hooking to hand the nearest available firearm or bludgeon. She hears a voice turning in a circle of trees, another car door, a space in between the two where someone strains to look through her window. She does nothing, her head doesn’t stir from the pillow.
)(
And then one night he lets her tie him up. Sometimes a shape, sometimes a white candle, nothing moves, She stretches out her hand and he fills it. What happens now and what will be happening when it’s the turn of then sparkles with the tight synthetic choreography of forethought. A skeleton missing random ribs and joints. The interstices intended for improvisation’s takeover, the allowance of some moments to drone as much as to wrack sharp or slide flat. Their original diagram was baroque, baroque in the sense that four swift lines, connected, might imply a diamond, an oval emptiness imply an opal. Begun in a rush and a birdlike rise and fall of rapid whispers, back and forth across the drafting table, a whispering which slowed and then drained into eventual silence, their pencils fencing the sheet of drawing paper, their heads almost touching above the parade of stick figures mapping out what they planned to do together. They rested, pulled back and the eye took in exactly how ornate their lasciviousness had grown. The 48” x 72” page of their scrawlings had a harrowed, penalized look. Shame rose with a thrill and their silence was undeniably half wonder. The paper was bumped at moist intervals and the design appeared to complete itself, a key that the eye noted though it was nowhere marked, a key that clued them to the spaces and minutes which would be foxed and stained and burbled with orgasm. Moments of tremor and freefall, monumentalized to ‘near’ or ‘postponed’ or ‘delayed’ or ‘achieved’ or ‘surpassed’ or ‘carnival’ or ‘murder’, each choked spurt or spasmodic swallow, each ejaculation or discharge honoring the wide variety hinted at in their scribbling. Again, geometric shorthand indicates the aesthetic hierarchy of the seconds (split, spread, teased out) devoted to plosive, unruffled pleasure. Circles, triangles, diamonds, and lozenges predominate, floating above the stick-heads like cartoon bubblethink, for on this they agreed: the quality of the thing was unclassifiable outside of the orgasmic head, and a less sketchy attempt at order could show nothing more compelling than the usual rictus and mess. There was only the last box to be checked, then the pencils put aside, the earlier purchases unwrapped and made ready, the phone taken off the hook, bodies scrubbed and emptied, minds cleared for a strange sort of combat. They needed a moment to themselves, himself or herself, some combination broken. In separate rooms they found themselves having to breathe deeply, to steady themselves with a private joke coughed out in a funny voice. In the hallway outside the bedroom, with the wintry sun glazing up the wall and glass and floor, they felt filled to the brim with joy. There was no need to nod or speak. And that night she ties him up.
Sometimes a shape, sometimes lean, lithe, sometimes bunched, the quiver of muscles contained in a dark shape, the slackness vanishing and almost audible. The moonlight is laid on the bed in even and unmoving bands, a shine (no), a glow (still no), that shows there’s space between his lifted knees, the dark shape there, in between them. He knows the light is artificial but needs it to be moonlight, or starlight, lest he balk, lest the cold translate into the germ of fear. She is positioned so that he will not see but only feel, her back ramrod, her abdomen so close that a mere flick or slow thrust will open him to her. The air between them is warm, and still as water when the wind drops and for just a moment reflections freeze. The heat from their bodies stirs the air, they listen to each other breathing, modifying their patterns to the same rhythm and it’s hard to concentrate, hard to keep from speeding up. Sometimes a white candle reveals itself, plumed with a white flame that staggers as though off balance, drawing the darkness this way and that, curtains cut too short to ever close without the benefit of a burglar’s breath. Voices ring out, but on a street that’s in a memory, only in his head, and this takes hold for a moment, the sense that any real voice would be hushed to a nothing whisper. She says blue eyes can’t save him in the darkness. He imagines, as she wants him to, that she’s found him in this condition, that she’s one of many, perhaps the first of many who will come. To get something, something for themselves, something taken from him, whether he thinks he’s giving it or not. The buckles at his wrists and their very specific tightness were reached in a candlelit sequence of murmurs. When the candle was blown out he knew that offering it would be redundant, would pass down the claustrophobic corridor the wrong way. It would be plucked, in or out of season, in the next hour or next two hours or next three hours, it would most definitely be plucked.
Nothing moves. Then suddenly, everything does, staying as it was but twenty, thirty degrees over and sideways to a lesser darkness, profiling him, as he imagines, hiding half of him in full darkness, pulling half of her into view. Between them they almost make a whole, an almost completeness, although a monstrous and biphallic one. The bed trembles like glass under high wind. The wordless noise coming out of her and through him and back again settles at various points, anchoring and pausing and dredging as it spreads beneath them. He opens his hands as he had practiced doing all day beforehand, miming helplessness then. She butts her skull against his trapped, spread fingers, once, twice, waiting for him to remember. He sinks his nails in, twists her hair, fists it like a strong dog’s leash, and she, in turn, hurts him.
The counterpoint rises, they take the painful steps together, first her, then him.
Never has the nonexistent future made its non-existence so clear. Each gasp denies tomorrow, each cry denies the possibility of a summons calling anything by another name. The air between them is elastic, thickening to near flesh, as though moving backwards from rot to ripe, another body they must surround or swallow, entering through any orifice it offers, pushing and biting and kissing through it to get at one another. Together they saw, for an instant, not what death might be but what it was. Sounds crowded in from the frames of the windows and doors, a storm far out on the sea, a music made dizzy with speed, as the risk of error or accident or crime escalated with each thrust and catch. Upended throne of bones, crown of freestyle coral, the slow pinion and bounce of their thought-out, dreamed-in, ritualized fucking fused their curves and straight lines into a half-moon buoyed on the bed’s shimmering black banner. They rocked in the arms of vertigo and the quiet took her someplace else, submerging him until he disappeared. Raw and unbearably sweet, they locked in on the simplicity of slip and receipt, fatigue in a buzzed monotone of spend-your-day and blaze-over-rain and coppice and ululate and lathe and yawn. They dropped off, came to, dropped off again, finding each other on the way down and urging one another by turns back up as though riding a current till their heads broke the surface of the air. Glass shattered but they ducked into each other’s gasping till the distraction passed. She slept inside him and woke and not so much time had passed and they were pleased and on schedule, continuing in a new position, his elbows higher than when they began, her belly relaxing into the rhythm her plunging set. Her forehead came to rest against his chin, her headbone grinding till his teeth chattered. They were a third of the way through the page. She withdrew for a while, drank a glass of something laced with a pill, fed him wine from a paper cup after kissing his eyelids and cheeks. She circled his tongue with hers, drawing him into her mouth. It came to them where they were, her fingers and lips emphasized his openness, the wrist bindings doublechecked as she began a different exploration of him. His back was wet, as were her knees and shins, the sheets grown sloppy with spill. Music roared down the street. He took it all in. The heels of her hands on the heels of his hands, his knuckles bruised where they’d slammed, repeatedly, against the wooden railing of the headboard. They arrived shouting at the mid-point of the page. The die-down took a long time reaching silence, their hearts thumping like something desperate, creatures trapped between burning walls, the oxygen grown miserly.
They might have elected to quit altogether at this point, but brief, near sleeplike hallucination and the sponge of various alcohols (sipped, bathed in, soft cascade of almost-nausea, saliva and oil on each other’s skins) restored them to their purpose, a further deviance to enact, two or three limits remaining for desire to pick apart and pass beyond. They were both determined to see the something they hoped for, an intensity of surprise, followed by revelation, a narcotic shine like fever in each other’s eyes. Near the beginning of the final phase he passed out, more swoon than overdose. Honoring their design she soldiered on alone, unstrapping one wrist to roll him gently over and continue. She tangled his obliviousness into her effort, hoping he’d recover consciousness but not just yet. She couldn’t tell how she felt, how she would feel, whether preferring to be alone, rocking in and out of his detachment, or joined by him, senses wide awake, tickling as thorns, when the light would begin its leak along the edges of the blacked out windows. Dawn was still some hours away. She’d forgotten what her voice sounded like when it was not animal. Kneeling above him, supporting herself with her fingertips to the wall, and staring down to find his body looking more and more naked. She closed her wet eyes and imagined his back and buttocks, covered and blue with hieroglyphs, hot captions pricked and scraped by a third party’s needles. He sighed a dutiful phrase and then a complete sentence into the muffling pillow. She heard only a moaned command. Entwined with him her head felt drained of blood, they bore into each other in a series of repetitive movements that renewed and grew in violence, like an entire city hurtling down the side of a mountain, fires springing up here and there, collapsing walls stoking their rate of descent, but mostly intact and beyond control.
They had discussed these possibilities, had welcomed what they imagined, wanting not to forget what they now took part in. That too was part of it. To record accurately, in order to describe afterwards. He had his count as she had hers and they came again together on an even number. She coaxed him into an arch, gathering the sheets from beneath him, depositing him back onto the dry mattress.
There was half a plastic bottle of lubricant left and a warm damp towel she used first on him and then on herself. The chilled wine sang in the glass and there was a faint taste of blood filming her tongue. She offered him her forearm and he fed, his lips slipping lightly in the red flow. He lifted his eyes to her as if about to speak. Her eyes filled with ashes. Floating, there was nothing. All around them and inside them. Someone coughing quietly on the roof or rain perhaps. He pulled his hair from his face with his free hand and she touched him to see if he was still there. He touched her throat with his free hand, touched her shoulder, her hip, the stiff unvulcanized elastomer of her phallus, and smoothed his hair from his face, his eyes filling with ashes. Before the last hour ended and the next one began. She emptied him, pooling him into her palm. They toasted their faith in one another, in their nearly being one. There was nothing left to suffer.
The light rose and fell over the bed they made love on. She released his other hand, rubbing his wrist gently, then briskly. They followed the instruction of their stick figures to the last. He slid further beneath her. Crouched above, she held her panting like a hidden cat. She allowed him to drink what was left of himself, first one mouth, then the other.
)(
A flagrant sweetness poured like neon starflue through the club, an occulting pulse which moltened to slender columns through which the vampires moved, singly or in pairs, an unhurried pavane bordering on a limpid tango. Thought was unimpeded and Beauty turned his singular face upon the unhealed and the purified alike. A face devoid of wisdom, eyes like jewels reflecting back sorrow or amusement or faint horror or that agreeable tolerance which was different from surrender only in that Beauty waited to be kissed before asking what came next. Potential buyers, potential sellers, all in perpetual fear of abstraction, those inessential diversions which wounded the more sensitive perverts and deepened the mass grave of the world weary. She would have to cross the room to get to him if she meant to go into darkness whistling. In under the shadow of Mars, pockets outturned, a smudged red star stamped on her hand should she change her mind and want to be let back in. She let herself gently go out on to the swirling floor. It was the fifth time the deejay had played this crowd’s new favorite. Whatever song it was it hurt as deep as sex. A bull-like bellow tinged with acid strings.
Afterwards she found her way with a light heart, tripping with the barest of ease along the alley lined with crates waiting for morning’s crowbar. Pausing at the first crosslight, she put a cigarette to her lips and stoked a match just in time to watch an insect collide with nothing and knock its guts out against her hand. Orangish jelly, overwriting the club’s red star. The sort of nasty something infants would lick off, not knowing better.
She had fed on something not so sweet but with a disorderly vengeful satisfaction the more addictive for being bitter. Her hair smelled of smoke, her saliva tasted of ashes.
)(
She sleeps like a magnet, snug in its bed of filings. The flannel shirt she sleeps in, red checks raced with masculine black, oversize and thus sufficient. To cover her delicate ass, fog the shape of her breasts in its hand-me-down billow. She turns the collar up so only the top tip of her ears peek pink in the shaded room’s warm light.
He’s been warned that she might ramble, muttering treasonous clues amid the nonsense. His task: to disregard. He promises, mock-solemn, not to take notes. The pentecostal flame shudders like a lifted prick, stamina exhausting in a breeze of tempting voices. He stills his breathing, listens in. A gooey, heavier French than he would have predicted off the lips of a sleeping woman, full of ‘plonge’ and ‘esclavage’ and ‘bouledogue’. He considers the possibility of contractual prayer. To wish for constancy in jealousy. If only anger and resentment could be tended to a festering plum. But she owes him nothing and he knows this and cannot bring himself to pout for an explanation, however jellyfish or fantastic. By the seventh leap off the bridge its wishful thinking to regard the plummet as a lapse in judgment. It is the judgment. He may, if he so chooses, despise those who organize the masquerades, who brush the nettles from the cobbles and light the path between the hedges, beside the drowning lake. But how to begrudge her her attendance at the orgy? Particularly when his own name is scratched in some twenty lines lower and he has no intention of taking a raincheck? A possessive lover (or would-be lover) is, by simple definition, doubly mad. His sentimental dilemma isn’t softened by the peacefulness of her sleep. There are knives in the drawer, a baseball bat behind the bathroom door, and even silk pillows have been known to suffocate.
)(
Which Station of the Cross is his current favorite and which one is giving him unexpected pause? He looked back up towards the dim altar. A funnel of slanted light fell on the table’s crimson corner. Walking back along the aisle he’d walked up a half an hour earlier, he found himself glancing sideways and down. The shadows underneath the hindmost pew were a dark blue, the carpeting frayed and probably in need of a good vacuuming. Had she really consented on one of those unyielding benches? He knew what he was looking for but not the shape it might take. Surely not something so foul as. Or a lost earring, dislodged during the embrace itself and what, surely, were the chances of that? In the approaching darkness he listened for nothing, playing over the momentary image of her receiving the penetrating thrusts. Eyes opened? Widening? The pressure to break the silence must have been immense.
)(
The flare from frightened wings turned on this unseen thing, meticulous in darkness but uncolored by detail or form. The outside inhabited a large room resembling night. Fractions of night resembling sleeping perils on ‘downtime’. Close to the wall the corridor sang. Appearing to narrow but not, upon inspection, doing so.
A descent of darkness flared sudden at the closed door. Close to the door a trace, the flutter of vanished wings and the residential shamelessness of the hidden, guessed-at, room. He imagined opening the door without opening it. What would he see? What would he want to see? He recognized the pale sickle of a childhood scar on the heel of her left foot. She lay across her companion, what was left of her purple dress draping them like a vivid wound. He looked for a sign of life, a sign of distress. One was not long in coming. Persephone the cavalier, mistress of perfect pacing. Her companion lifted her against the uneven light pooling the damp ceiling. The bed turned, or appeared to, the bulb’s failing light washing the walls with waves of shadow. Blue starlight slipped along the pillow, or was it a memory of having wanted that once which permits him to see it now? Checkmate, deathmate, armpits of fever, vulva of cool clay. Her quality of being there, of impenetrable eyes nervously expressive. Her veins singing lightly outside her skin. And him, warming her as she sheathes him with the frozen flesh of nowhere. All this he remembers. He closed the door as he might close his eyes. Savoring darkness and that remembered image pricked out by a bright fringe of curling flame. Something ran hot. Something beat hard. Self-pity was a momentary indulgence, like cool water, like a cherry not yet ripe which he took from her mouth, from those same lips. He closed his eyes, savored the void.
He wanted to be alone with the image, he wanted not to have to respond to the same insistent question.
–Have you been reading anything of interest lately?
He could hardly say yes, he could hardly say no, best to pretend he didn’t hear, to button his vest, hand the temporary secretary her key back (with a smile, always with a smile), kiss her severe forehead and grab his jacket while the elevator bell was still echoing.
Night then, and how long had he been walking? And why this particular street? The sort of neighborhood always described as one you wouldn’t want to be caught alone in and yet precisely the sort you would only ever visit alone. There was a taste in his mouth of oysters, of gunmetal, of something else.
Her kisses had given him back that which she had taken from him, coercion a game they were equally masters of. The sidewalks had a snowy look, made more so by the weakness of the streetlights. He never bothered with trying to hide his interest when he passed an open window. He always looked in, it was a very simple thing. And often they looked back. Sullen fascist, in handsome profile, leaning back from the window, but letting him hear the latch fall as he passed. The easy weight of terror thrilled him with baroque intimation: what must it be like to be a woman in the dark city? A block away a car accelerated before the driver lost nerve. The car buried itself in the concrete barrier and exploded into white flames that rose twenty slow feet into the jade, mist-splotched night air. She wouldn’t be back. Not tonight, not ever. What had he been reading before their drone, their questions, their kindnesses had chased him away.
“The imaginary hides consciousness’s own operations and attitudes from it: in its representation, consciousness sees something other than itself, whereas there is nothing in this other except what consciousness has put there.”
Nicely put, if one liked that sort of thing, but it wasn’t, and he hesitated to be sure he was being just and fair and adequately detached, it wasn’t much help, no, not really.
)(
And what consciousness puts there, as she merges a chosen with an unwished-for image, is her awareness of passing through the dark dazzle of Snakeland. Her eyes adjusted from one darkness to another, her legs floating her with an assassin’s cautious drift along the center of a conduit of the city, one running parallel to dozens, hundreds of others just like it. Alleys symmetried at either end by circular iron stairwells rising straight up, which swung slowly, almost imperceptibly in the never-generous breeze. The stairwells all led up to somewhere, a sequence of somewheres, some of which she had seen, some of which she dreamed of seeing, and some she hoped to never be so lonely as to see. Like the collective broken heart of a queue of unemployed angels, the city sighed, invited her to register its pretty suffering. Its not-so-pretty troubles boiling to a skyscraping tea-kettle whistle, King Kong spires lost in the broad beast fog of echoes, echoing her steps around the iron stairs. What happened in the shadows above and around her was a graphic release. She had always found the briefest negotiations almost unbearably romantic, and found it hard to contain her quota of the forbidden words, the euphemisms for slavery or love. She watched, how the flame died down where his steps had tamed her desire to follow. Only this, then nothing. Aphrodisiac of counterfeit gold. Then nothing. It occurred to her and vanished in the same moment. She was almost home, almost in the sheltering arms of whichever man was there to answer the door. He would ask her specific questions to which she would return casual specificities, while they both gazed deeply into each other’s eyes, marveling, marveling at the sincerity detonating underneath the lies. Hardness was a banished adjective here, in this world where they walked together quietly down a damply carpeted hallway to a room where they might repeat upon each other’s bodies the separate images which had come to obsess them.