Teaser

The walk from the car to the front door at home was out of a movie, only without my footsteps amplified by foley artists. Everything was crisp, fluid, and very distant. I paused before testing the lock. “Everything, everything,” I muttered and pushed the door open. “Beth!” I called. “Is this one of those days when your mood is unpredictable and entirely false? “

“I love it when you lie about who you are, baby,” she answered from the kitchen. “Now shut up and get in here.” The TV was playing a video of a man carving at a block of mud covered with ketchup with a table knife. “He’s going for broke. A whole pound of peat.”

“Christ, I would have said, ‘That’s Not Food’ last week when they asked him to lick out the insides of those petri dishes of streptococcus.”

“Everybody likes cash and prizes,” Beth mused, raising a champagne flute to her lips.

“What’s the occasion?”

“It’s gin. I just wanted to try out the glasses. They’re for Shelia’s wedding. Would you like one before finding out this leaves us?”

“I’d love one angel.”

Beth filled another flute from the bottle in the freezer. “One of these days, Bobby,” she said, handing it to me and turning away and planting one knee on the barstool by the counter, her butt thrust out and her spine curved in an S-shape as she sipped her gin.

“You wouldn’t have to do that if you ever fucking smiled.”

“Is my little princess feeling insecure?”

“I miss your disaffected youth shtick.”

“Really?”

I shrugged. “No cliché too banal. You wear it well.”

“Some guys have all the luck.”

I downed my gin in a gulp and heard Guang’s voice thunder in my ears.

“Don’t tell me it hit you that hard.”

“No, it something else. A ghost. She’s speaking in Soji, likely thinks it’s funny.”

“What is Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?”

“Suck my cock. I’m going to bed.”

“Wander into my bedroom later if you’d like. There’s something in there I’d like you to stick your dick in.”

To annoy her, I reached my thumbnail out to trail along the wall if the hallway lit by two wall sconces that grew brighter, the whole of it, but less vibrant. I thought nothing of it as the world glowed with pastel colors that bled into each other to a blinding white light that popped, disappearing and taking it with me.

“Bobby”

I turned my sad gaze from the aquarium that held Blinky and Drama Queen and stared across a small mahogany dining table at a very pretty Korean woman with the best hair I’d ever seen. “How have they been?”

“Bobby, I will kill those hamsters if you keep pretending they’re my children. You know I have to know. How much does this frighten you?”

I shrugged, moving to the bare mattress on the floor. “It’s what I’ve always wanted, helplessness and safety, being an object of desire enthralled by the woman who desires me. An object in the sense that you’ve let me fall adrift to bob upstream in the frothing torrent of love and pain and need that flows from your heart, and that you watch my course with large, intent eyes. It’s seemed both dark fantasy and fear yet at the moments I know it’s so, there’s bliss and understanding that the world could not be right without it. I’m wondering if that’s true or only what I want.”

She was already upon me, hands holding my face, her tongue deep in my mouth. “It’s fucking true,” she hissed. Glaring down at me with wild eyes and nodding, she pulled my head to her breast and filled me with pain as I began to nurse, everything a too-fast oblivion of need. I could feel her pain, draw it from her. It coursed and prickled through my veins, not shared but shamelessly offered and, with it, her. Enlightenment describes nothing, not one thing in this world. To call anything enlightenment is to profane the word. Anything but this. I felt no shackles of a conjoined spirit, but we understood each other and, with that, clarity — numb to the pain of understanding. “This is right.” The cold breeze of her pleasure. “Peace is so fleeting.” She smiled, lolling her head. “You can have me, Bobby. I’ll course through your blood until you scream for escape from what we’ve become, though your only happiness will be found in accepting it, in submitting.” Guang leaned in close and with more sing-song to her voice than usual, said softly, “This is forever.” Warmth and the most beautiful exhaustion overtook me. Life turned into a movie I wasn’t paying attention to because I was too distracted by the darkness. Guang was touching me, teasing me until I became so used to it that it that it was always there. There was something else long ago, but this was reality now. I saw her face in the dark, felt her hair trace over me. Her hands, her lips. Then, and this was very clear, she was astride me, rocking very slowly, her face flat and expressionless. And her eyes. Cold, cold eyes that revealed a thought, a truth that wracked me with pain and loss. Her eyes made a statement: I own you. Mouth agape with fear, I watched those eyes until I felt heat bloom inside her and her face broke into a happy smile. She slept on my shoulder after speaking for a long time about what love meant. The words were so pretty though I didn’t understand them. I woke up shaking like a leaf in the black and alone with tears welling in my eyes and her words in my mind. “There will be tomorrow.” Then there was nothing. I grabbed the pillows in my arm and babbled apologizes. “I didn’t know. I’m so sorry. Please? I need you so bad. I need you, I need you bad.”

“Do you need a chicken salad sandwich?” Beth’s voice chirped. She tossed one, wrapped by the deli, on my stomach. “I love the parking here.”

“Rural Oklahoma has parking.”

“Theirs is gravel. Now eat.” Beth picked up the scotch and sat silently at the other end of the sofa. “Bobby, do you have a pornography problem?”

“Did I ever tell you how I lost my virginity? I snuck out on the baby sitter and came home drunk. She was freaking out, said she’d almost called the cops. I was thirteen and she was sixteen. I lay on the floor at the foot of the sofa where she sat and began to talk about how ugly she was. I don’t remember what I said exactly. ‘You’re so ugly. It’s like your face, like it isn’t even a human face. There are shapes of skin and bone that stand out but like on a doll in a movie that comes alive in your sleep. Your forehead. It stands out so much above your eyes. And your cheeks are so high and puffy and your nose. It’s part of someone else’s face.’ After just a minute or two of it, she pulled my pants off and made me a man.”

Beth smirked. “My father raped me at age seven and the reason I fuck like a drunken, coked up forty-year-old losing her virginity is that it’s one department I know I don’t disappoint in.” She jerked her head. “Get your ass in bed. You need to be reminded what it means to belong to me.”

“I’m not your slut.” I hissed when she didn’t respond.

“Yes, and you don’t get into that gay shit but you’re a bit of a size queen.”

“My body betrays me.” She stared until I rose and retreated down the hall.

I crept down the stairs when I woke in the dark feeling as children must if they wake in the dark on Christmas, knowing I awaited at the bottom, a young me, not yet twenty. I managed to slide beside myself on the mottled cream sofa and my heart swelled when I curled my hand on my younger self’s thigh and he calmly turned his head and smiled so broadly, so brightly. His eyes shewn and I saw stars. Then he started talking and none of it made any sense but he didn’t seem to know and backed from beneath my hand and retreated into the kitchen. Seducing myself would be its own reward, it would seem.

“Can you stay till morning?” I called. “I don’t want to play phone games any sooner than at all. Will you promise? No matter what?” The last words snapped my lips shut, a pelican having caught a fish, as I thought at the time. Only a fish, I thought at the time, my eyes bulging and asphyxiating because I had forgotten to breathe.

 Fleeting, pleasant fragments of the eternal daydream that is my curse, that ran years, into which I’d brought myself flited through my mind, my ornery mind. No solutions appealed to me. “Bobby?” I called.” I haven’t done anything to you so you have to trust me not to hurt you. Come in here. I have something you can wear so you can shower. But first, love, let me thank you for reaching through the anger and resentment for something we cannot be sure is there.” I stood before myself, gazing up into my eyes. “We should go upstairs. It always starts like this.” My laugh was soft and hysterical, saying words neither of us heard. “I’m lying. I don’t think it ever starts like this.”

 “Are you okay?” my nineteen-year-old face, more pretty than handsome, asked.

 “Are you? Why do you want it hard? I mean, why do I know I want it hard but why do need to suffer. Bobby, no. Bobby. Eyes, Bobby. Eyes, Bobby. If I’m too forward, I’m too cheap, if I’m too obvious, I’m a fool. You don’t get permission, Bobby, now take me.” Remembering it was just a dream, I grabbed myself dove my tongue into my throat, my moan exploding into a forceful, pleading kiss, my tongue penetrating my mouth to the throat again throat then fluttering and flicking tenderly as it withdrew. “What is it, plaything?” I asked the face cupped by my hands.

I felt so much pity for the virgin boy who swayed as though about to vomit. He blinked. “Kissing a fucking pile of burning helium snow with an oven-warmed maraschino cherry inside.”

I smiled softly. “I get that a lot.” The air hung still, laden with lead crystal moonlight as I descended upon everything I didn’t know on the sofa, in the dark, a roaring fire at my back shrouding me in shadow. I watched uncertain eyes become frightened, my childish notions forgotten, search plaintively for love and alarmed by my fervent nod. I wanted it, to be that too. Our eyes glazed over. I saw wide wonderment, eyes thirsting for knowledge and lips moving soundlessly, searching or repeating words at a whisper. The banked coals of vanity that burned within my eye sockets poured meaning into the trance you’d separated from the moment with. I smiled at your fear.

“Baby.” The hiss enveloped me and the lead crystal air that hung began to distort the cold moonlight with its heat, refracting spectrums of blue across the wall as the fire burned black flame and blooming red roses across the wall, across the sofa, across your face. I fell to my moving lips, this boy I mauled, and passion and need passed between us. Abated, I ventured, “I own you.”

“I know,” this young virgin’s kiss answered. “I love it.”

“There is only me. Tell me you need more.” I caught my hands first and pinned them to the sofa. “I’m sorry, but truly I can’t truly let you leave here with this. There is nothing to fear in something that has already happened. Be dutiful.”

“You should not have been made to suffer so.”

The words sent my torso thrashing. “Baby!!!” I screamed.

The cold air that hung heavy with lead crystal moonlight shattered. I was sitting on the sofa, staring up at Guang’s face. “You sneaky fuck,” she slurred, laughing. She kissed my forehead and then my mouth. She stroked my face with the backs of her fingers. “Now you know. I needed to be your first so I could be everything to you. Go. Go back to your insane, pedestrian whore.”

“Wait.” She stood and removed a three-diamond stud from her ear. “Lie on your tummy and relax.” I turned away from her when I saw her begin to heat the diamonds with a cigarette lighter. “Do you want this?”

“I’m really scared,” I confessed.

“Think hard, Bobby. Could it be exactly what you want, could it have happened long ago, and are you just afraid to accept you have no control, that you can only control how you react to it, whether to struggle to prove to yourself it’s real because that excites you or to be happy that it’s real because it’s what you so much wanted.”

“It’s what I wanted.” My chest heaved. “I don’t want to lie to myself anymore.”

“Good boy,” she chirped girlishly.

I screamed when the burning hot head of the earring hit my ass and opened my eyes to my own pillow and a great deal of pain. Beth was in bed beside me. “How’s tricks, Butch?” she called into her phone, on speaker.

 “How long was I out?” I interjected.

 “Two days. I was going to call an ambulance tonight.”

 “Bobby’s okay? Did you hit him while he was out?” asked the phone.

 “I wouldn’t dream of it.” She giggled. “But you know I lie to you, don’t you?”

 “Paul flunked the board.”

 “How’d he take it?”

 “‘It’s all fun and games till some dickhead fondles you with the rape kit,’ was all he said.” 

“He heard that on Beat Bobby Flay.”

The phone laughed hysterically.

“Bobby!” Beth snapped as I made my way to the bathroom. “When did you do that to yourself?”

“I didn’t. Sec. I’d like a washcloth.”

“Bobby, see the problem is that we’re married and someone else branded you.”

“Who? When?”

Beth began picking up anything she could seize and throwing it at me, making guttural noises of outrage and grief. And then the doorbell rang and rang as a fist pounded on it. I dressed waited in the bedroom for the moment to pass. My head spun when Guang’s voice called, “Join us, Dove. I might need a second. Fetch your gun. Why you people arm yourselves . . . well, I suppose that isn’t my business.”

I carried the AR-15 that my survivalist, crack smoking brother had milled in aluminum from a three dimensional printer design. Utterly untraceable. Guang held out her hand and I placed the gun in it.

“Do you remember what you told Beth?” she asked. “Do you remember that you wanted a whirlwind romance, the be married and madly in love? Do you remember that love like yours should never fade, that murder-suicide is the only acceptable end to love like that?” Guang leveled the gun at me. “I won’t share you, Bobby.” Beth’s glance said I knew this would happen one day.

“I can’t be yours,” I stammered.

“Silly, you always will be.” Guang fired and I fell. I watched, bleeding out on the carpet, perplexed at her hysterics. What had she thought would happen? She held the gun to the side of her head and blew her brains all over the floor.

“I’m going to be shampooing that carpet for days, prick.” Beth leveled the gun at my head. “Tell me to look into my heart.”