Author Archives: dsholloway
Bottega Veneta
And so he met her knowing full well the conditions of their rendezvous, knowing full well that she had some sort of marital slash lover situation that, in spite slash because of said situation, necessitated her posting advertisements on the internet for discreet and caring “gentlemen” in the city proper. He answered one. They volleyed emails back and forth for several days, and then the day to finally meet arrived.
He knew she would be attractive, or at least attractive, for a white woman in Tokyo. Most look malnourished and angry. This one was pretty; he found when he found her at their Rendezvous Point—in front of the Bottega Veneta store at O station (she was one of those kinds of girls) at Y o’clock. She had on too much concealer to conceal whatever it was she was trying to conceal (her face, probably). She was thin—as in Japanese woman thin, not malnourished white woman in Japan thin (there is a difference). Her hair was dark. She wore high heels and a beige dress. No stockings. She was English. She smiled when she greeted him. He was pleased.
After preliminary formalities and how-dos they marched off to such and such place for coffee. They went Dutch. He was above the notion that a man must, under every circumstance, make certain to pay for a woman’s 300 yen coffee so that she is obliged to reward him with sexual intercourse at the end of the day. He was a “gentleman” besides.
They chatted about living in Japan, their younger days, the riots in London, fashion, how Japanese people still read books, and about white women in Japan. She seemed to be having a good time, and he was having a good time; he was a “gentleman” indeed.
They chatted until their coffees were gone and until the Japanese people who had been trying to pick out words from their conversations (such words may have been: football, shopping, orange, sex, coffee, delicious, Japan, Tokyo, shit, time, hot, Fukushima, four, yes, no, thank you, joke, Will Smith) were all gone as well. (Words perhaps not understood by eavesdropping Japanese: obsequious, schizophrenic, happenstance, vexing, the XX [which she had just discovered; he, on the other hand, was, like, totally over the XX and considered the band a band one likes simply for the pleasure of saying that he or she likes it], moribund, polyvalent, corpus, Waka Flaka)
She suggested a walk. He figured either A) she was having a great time or B) she really didn’t want to go back home.
So they walked. Or rather, they strolled—it was, in fact, the slowest he had ever strolled before. They strolled back to O station to board another train and head out of the city and toward K-ward—some place where she would not worry about being seen cavorting with a man who was not her Significant Other, no doubt. He was having a good time, but he grew afraid.
They got off at M station. He had never been there, and there were no other white people. She could probably relax here. She seemed to know a lot of white people, but he didn’t seem to know anybody, which was probably why she chose him over whomever else she may have otherwise chosen.
They chatted freely about whatever frivolous and unimportant subjects came to mind. They did not discuss the nature of their rendezvous. They meandered until night (it had been day). She suggested wine. He figured either A) she was having a great time or B) she really didn’t want to go back home. They sat in some hipster joint that played old RnB songs from the United States of America, RnB he could relate to. They sat at the booth at the window and ordered a bottle of wine. Wine brought about slightly more serious conversations—family, money. She even brought up her Significant Other in passing, telling him that he [the Significant Other] made her move to Morocco for three years, five years ago. I see, he [our hero] replied and then quickly changed the subject. He touched her leg; it was soft, inviting, and fearsome. She was fearsome. He grew afraid of her (she would not have been fearsome otherwise) and of the sorts of feelings he, a hopeless romantic, would develop for her by the end of the evening.
The hipster joint was closing. She suggested another walk. He figured either A) she was having a great time or B) she really didn’t want to go back home. They strolled about the empty streets and quiet shops until they reached M station. She said I need to go. She was drunk and stumbly. She grabbed his hand as a teenage girl might but quickly released it, also as a teenage girl might. She spoke of meeting on Sunday. He grew afraid more. But he naturally said, of course, let’s get together on Sunday or something similarly overly eager.
They boarded the train back to O station. They sat next to each other, bodies pressed together even though it was not crowded. At O Station they made ready to go their separate ways, or whatever. She thrust a hand toward him—wanting a shake or something. He grabbed her by the elbow of her outstretched arm and pulled her in for a mildly romantic embrace. She did the kiss-on-the-cheek thing with the embellished and onomatopoeic kissing noise girls make when they want to drain the moment of any significance a kiss might otherwise suggest.
He boarded his train, by which time she had already flooded his trendy smartphone with thank-you messages. It was fun, and let’s get together on Sundays.
He liked her, the girl with the Significant Other. The girl who wanted to get together only because he [the Significant Other] was not around enough for her. I would treat you right, he [our hero] told her in his mind, the her in his mind that was still pressed up against him, eyes glazed over in drunken glee or shame.
A man threw up in his train car. That did not bother him [our hero]. He [our hero] had descended into love. How unfortunate for him. She messaged him. Come out for the New Zealand-Japan rugby match tomorrow, she said. But if you do, say we met through your mutual friend, Jim Jones. Wanting to show her that he was not, in fact, in love after one stroll through the city, he declined. But I’d love to get together on Sunday if your offer still stands he replied. Silence. The next morning, a reply. She was now sober. Sunday might work. I’ll let you know tomorrow.
And that was the last he heard from her. He was still in love. But now he was dying, or so he thought, indeed rotting one minute at a time. Just an email, please, he pleaded to nobody in particular. Pathetic. Perhaps she had patched things up with her Significant Other; perhaps it was another “gentleman’s” turn for a stroll around M station and a bottle of wine at the window booth at whatever the hell that place was called.
With a creased smile and eyes, he [our hero] was telling all of this to empathetic ears at Starbucks—an apparent English lesson or something. If it turned out that the pudgy Japanese student with the nice watch, but not as nice as his, was actually her Significant Other, then this mildly embellished piece of work would have had a better ending.
A Head in My Garden
And thus it happened that I lost my head:
I had been gardening, bent at the waist and forcefully churning a trowel in the large, rectangular flowerbed that parallels my porch, working to liberate the soil from a hardened layer of filth and death built up over the long winter months and the extreme hot and cold that indicates the arrival of spring.
My flowers had begun to decay last autumn, and I recall fondly sitting at the edge of the flowerbed watching their necks bend—more and more each day—toward the earth as though a heavy crown drew them prostrate. Petals that had been a vivid yellow or orange but a month earlier were by October or November dull and leaden. The insects that used to pick over these flowers had long gone where insects go during the cold months, and as I would sit watching my dead plants, I could almost hear the buzzing not of honey bees but of flies that gather around dead bodies.
By November and on into December, January, and February, my flowers had been reclaimed completely by the earth, and my flowerbed sat vacant and silent until weeds began to clamber to the surface in large numbers, strangling life where life might ordinarily reemerge.
Thus yesterday I took to ridding my flowerbed of weeds and the fossilized remains of the previous year’s growth. With my trowel, I had managed to work the soil into a rich brown, taking in the characteristic smell of dirt. Incidentally, in turning over the soil I unearthed a small cylindrical object that would turn out to be the head of a small child’s doll—though this was not immediately obvious to me.
About the size of a small orange and the color of soot with splotches of yellow and white, and brown, I initially thought this head a rock that had for some purpose ended up in my flowerbed. I snatched it up with my fist in angry haste and was intent on flinging it someplace far away until it began to speak to me from the hollow of my clenched hand.
“Excuse me……………………….Excuse me. Sir? Sir!” It was a woman’s voice.
I opened my palm. There were no discernible features to suggest that what I was holding should have been capable of speech.
“Sir, would you be so kind as to turn me over?”
Doing as requested, I transferred the woman from one hand to the other so that what had been facing down in the one hand was now facing up in the other.
There were two eyes—a vibrant, enchanting green—blinking at me in silence. There was also a mouth that appeared to have been painted on. The rest of the face was badly weathered. There was no nose; neither were there ears. If I speak, I wondered, will she be able to hear me? She had no hair.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You have no hair,” I replied.
“I used to. It was long and brownish-blonde. It was naturally wavy, but I would straighten it for special occasions.”
This made a great deal of sense to me, so I pursued the topic no further.
“What is your name,” I asked.
“K.”
“What an odd name. How do I spell it?”
“Just the letter K, please.”
K smelled like the earth, so I offered to draw her a bath.
“Just a bowl with warm water, if you have it,” she said in response. “I don’t need anything as elaborate as a bath. I am just a head, after all.”
I was saddened by what she said. Although I had just met K, there was a part of me that wanted to draw her a bath, gently wash the grime away, and revive her to her former self. I would have bathed her with the utmost care and, after drying her off, would have applied the finest lotions and oils I own with an equal caution. And if she had invited me to join her in the bath, I would have gladly stripped myself bare and cleansed my own body—filthy from tending my garden—as I cleansed her gentle face. The bath water—a translucent blue when first drawn—would certainly have become a murky brown, but neither of us would have been bothered. Indeed, we would have imagined we were religious relics that remained pure even amongst the dirtiest of conditions. But K was modest.
Cupping K in my hands and drawing them close to my torso—the way one might hold an injured sparrow— I retreated inside to the kitchen and set her down on the counter. From my cupboard I withdrew a large soup mug in the shape of a snowman’s head. I was fond of this mug—which my mother had given me for Christmas one year—and drank from it often. The possibility that K might take offense to this mug did not occur to me. Luckily, she remained silent.
I filled the snowman’s head halfway with warm water and—hoping to make a good impression—retrieved a hand towel and a bar of soap from the pantry and excused myself.
“Please,” I offered, “take your time. I’ll be in the sitting room.”
She said nothing, but perhaps her eyes sparkled in unstated gratitude.
From just beyond the kitchen, I heard a gentle PLOP—what I took to be K plunging into her bath. And although I couldn’t be certain (nor do I know today), I thought I detected a faint song emanating from her lips as she bathed herself.
She called for me several minutes later, and what I found as I returned to the kitchen was indeed a rejuvenated beauty. Gone were the odd splotches of various colors. Gone, too, was the smell of earth. K was a glimmering pearl; her eyes twinkled in the dim kitchen air, white and pinkish hues danced atop her healthy skin, and her head—which is to say, K herself—was of a sublime roundness that no other creature on Earth could possibly imitate. It was as though K had spun herself a cocoon out in my flower box and simply had to let the fine protective silk dissolve in the bath. Anybody else would have died out in the elements or would have at least grown flabby and unsightly.
As I entered the kitchen, K met my gaze but for a moment before casting her eyes down.
“Thank you,” she said.
Her reticence startled me. Was K embarrassed to be in my presence? Was what I took to be modesty—was what I took to be feminine restraint—in actuality a manifestation of K’s abhorrence toward me? Suddenly I was overcome with shame; I wanted to cower in the shadows or hide myself away in the basement or attic—for how could an unsightly creature such as myself survive in the midst of such a boundless radiance? The warmth of her glow would burn holes in my oily, flakey skin; I would flounder to the bottom of her eyes, my feet encased in concrete; my feeble frame would be crushed as she rolled across me on her way to a more suitable mate. I felt as though I were mere lines of graphite on paper; I was but a base, worthless stick drawing of a man slated for erasure.
“Sir,” she inquired, breaking a probable lengthy silence. “Is anything the matter?”
“Nothing at all,” I replied much too hastily. “I was simply admiring your beauty.”
I immediately regretted my remark, finding it in poor taste. I was simply admiring your beauty—what respectable man would say such a thing? Perhaps I should have told her the truth, that I was petrified—even, somehow, hopeful—that her radiance would destroy me.
How contrary I had become since K’s arrival. Until rather recently I had been prideful of my body. I would stand gazing at it in the full-length mirror in my bedroom as though it were an expensive piece of art I finally had the capital to acquire but hadn’t yet placed in my home or office. It was beautifully taut, the product of intense exercise—it was steel, it was indestructible. As a young man I had been unable to attract even the most hideous members of the opposite sex, encased as I was in a permanent state of boyhood, hampered by a body that was sickly and asexual. Yet as a man—with a body of substantial worth—I encountered numerous women who found my body enchanting. When I couldn’t sleep, I would count them and rate them in terms of attractiveness and sexual abilities.
But in recent months my virile body had begun to grow sterile and limp. I am at pains to explain why. It is as though my body had anticipated K and started to decompose in preparation for her arrival—similar to the ways dogs can smell approaching storms.
“Would you like anything to eat?” I broke the silence that settled over us.
“No. I’m fine, thank you. I would like to rest, however. I am very tired.”
“Of course.”
I gingerly scooped K up into my hands and, holding her close to my body, began to make my way to my bedroom. Her bath had made her warm to the touch and I frowned in spite of myself, knowing that I would soon have to put her down.
She said nothing as we crossed the foyer and made our way upstairs to my bedroom. Her breath was slight as it brushed against my hand.
There were two pillows on my nicely made bed. I set K down in the center of the fluffier of the two and stepped back. She blinked at me quietly as though waiting for me to say something of import. The full-length mirror, attached to the door of my bedroom closet, was much larger than I had remembered.
“Will you cut off my head?” I asked.
She said nothing.
“I would like you to cut off my head,” I implored.
“Why do you want me to do that?” she rejoined.
“So that we can be together.”
“But we are together right now.”
“You have misunderstood. We are in proximity to one another, it is true, but we are not together.”
“How is it that we will be together if I cut off your head?”
“Once I am headless, I will place you on top of my neck and we will be as one.”
“I forbid it.”
“Please.”
She closed her eyes and refused to open them. Were we a married couple, we might have called this a marital argument.
“Do you find me so unsatisfactory?” I whimpered.
From behind her clamped eyelids, K offered: “It is not that. I simply do not want to cut your head off. I would have no stomach for such a thing.”
“It will not be such a messy endeavor,” I countered. “I have a very sharp knife.”
“We have just met,” K rolled her eyes open and stared at me. She seemed confident.
“I do not care. I would like to join your head to my neck.” I stared back. I was suddenly equally confident and hoped she would acquiesce to my request before my confidence ran dry.
“Cut it off yourself, then,” K said.
“I could shoot myself in the head if I owned a gun. But I cannot cut it off. It is implausible.” I felt as though I were imparting wisdom to a small child. “Besides, I do not want to die. Shooting myself in the head would kill me. I simply want to live with you as my head and me as your body. Do you not need a body?”
“I do not. Nor do you need a head. You have one of your own.”
She was missing the point. I sought to explain. “Of course I have a head. But I would prefer it if you became my head and if I became your body. We would be joined as one, and it would be beautiful.”
“Cutting off your head is not beautiful.”
“You are beautiful.”
“Please do not resort to flattery. It is unbecoming.”
“Cut off my head.”
Either to appease me or to punish me, K spoke:
“Bring me your knife, then.”
Silently, I turned from K and toward the bedroom door, which led to the hallway, which led to the staircase, which led to the first-floor sitting area, which was adjacent to the kitchen, where my sharp knife was locked away. As I made my leave from K’s side, I caught my gaze in the full-length mirror. I looked gaunt and lifeless, as though my body had already portended its end. Although I quickly fled in disgust from my own gaze, I felt the gaze of the me in the mirror linger on the real me as I stepped toward the bedroom door. The me in the mirror seemed to follow me with its eyes, the way photographs of people in magazines do, and I became terrified. Making my way toward the kitchen, I–that is, the real me–began to decay rapidly. With each step, my bones splintered, and from the subsequent cracks in my skeleton a fine dust escaped. I felt the hair on my head slough off in large, tangled clumps. My skin melted like candle wax and slid off my desiccated skeleton, leaving large discolored holes in the dirty carpet under my feet where it landed messily. Resigning myself to a painful, lonely, and unorthodox death in a corridor of my home, I was surprised to find myself in my kitchen, standing whole and unharmed. Death has not yet accosted me, I concluded, I have simply seen the future. The knife I sought happened to have been a gift from a friend who died of an illness, the name of which I do not remember, in a hospital bed in an unimportant town, tended to by unimportant people.
Convinced his internal organs were conspiring against him, this friend–whose name is not important–went to the hospital to have them all removed and executed for lèse majesté. The doctor on duty ignored this now-dead friend’s request and had him committed to a psychiatric evaluation, where it was found that while he was not insane, he was, in fact, dying–and he had been for some time. He gave me the knife in question, he said before dying, so that I could avenge his death–reason being that he understood his illness as the underhanded scheming of his internal organs rather than the ill fortune of organic sickness.
I was to bide my time until he had been autopsied and all of his organs extracted, at which point I was to raid the hospital—wielding my sharp knife all the while—and demand access to his dismembered body, whence I was to stick my knife vengefully into his stomach, his spleen, his liver, his duodenum, his pancreas, his kidneys, and for good measure his testicles, which were not necessarily internal organs but deserved a good butchering nonetheless. At the time I obligatorily swore allegiance to my now-dead friend’s cause, knowing full well that I would use his gift not to avenge his death but rather to, one day, unite my body with that of a lover I would find outside in the dirt.
From a locked cabinet, I extracted the knife, thought momentarily of cutting off my tongue, and then mechanically made an about-face and marched back toward K.I returned to my bedroom to find K as I left her, sitting in the middle of the fluffier of my two pillows. Her eyes were closed as though she were deep in thought or asleep. The floor creaked as I crossed through the doorway, rousing K from her meditative state. She met my eyes with her own. She did not smile. Without speaking, I took a kneeling position at the edge of my bed and offered my knife gently with both hands, placing it at the base of K’s pillow–which seemed more of a throne at the moment. She was beautiful, and I would have hardly complained if she simply reached out to slash my throat and watch me die. This, of course, was not the plan. But just as I had betrayed my now-dead friend, ignoring his plea for vengeance, perhaps K would betray me. K eyed the knife in silence, drawing her gaze slowly from the base of the handle to the tip of the blade and back again. She lifted her gaze once again toward me and spoke softly: “Please, close your eyes.” Her eyes were alive with fire.
Shutting my eyes, I gave my body to K. She will not betray me, I told myself. We are to be as one.
I had nary a moment to anticipate the beloved union to follow before the knife was swung and my head lopped off. It bounced and rolled here then there, finally settling at the far corner under my bed. My body then waited—headless—for K to situate herself atop its neck.
Though my head was no longer attached to my body, my brain continued to function for a minor period of time. From where I—or rather, my head—was, I could see my beheaded body waiting patiently for K to fulfill her promise as the blood spilling from my body’s neck quickly formed a deep ruby-red pool at my body’s knees.
To my horror, I saw K leap from my bed and move toward the door, avoiding my body as though it were diseased. She was surprisingly agile.
“K,” I called from my place under my bed. “This was not what we decided.”
At the doorway she briefly turned.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, a moment of intimate communion—one head to another. “I do not want to live as your head.”
I began to cry. My body, undoubtedly weak from losing its head, collapsed to the floor as K turned away.
“K!” I called, to which there was no reply.
I tried again in vain: “K!”
She was gone.
I have to go after her, I decided and willed my body—now a lifeless mass hunched over itself and quickly surrendering to exsanguination—to will what life it had left.
Its shoulders seized and twitched and thrashed about under my command. Its arms flailed and flopped as I ordered it to reach out to me, its head and master. If only I can reassemble myself, I thought, I’ll be able to catch K. She is to be my head.
At my order, my body hurled itself into the side of my bed, sending its right arm and outstretched fingers toward me.
Just a little further, please.
My body’s fingers were like worms as they writhed along the carpet searching for extra length.
Just a little further.
My body lurched toward me one last time, its fingers probing in blind desperation.
What is Already in Us More Than Ourselves
Why didn’t I suggest Battleship? K’s father frowned.
K’s father was becoming increasingly annoyed with his adolescent son’s word choices. First it was “duvet,” then “loofah.” Until recently, K’s father enjoyed their weekly Scrabble games, even though–perhaps even because–K’s vocabulary far surpassed his own. But the words that had begun to enter the young boy’s Scrabble lexicon were unsettling. K’s father thought back to K’s winning word last week: “exfoliate.” K’s father frowned again.
How does he even know these words? K’s father knew them, but K’s father knew them for the reasons you probably know the lyrics to some horrible pop song you hate–they’re floating out there in the world, and you’re bound to run into them one way or another, and over and over again. But this was different: K’s use of these words in Scrabble suggested, to K’s father, a level of familiarity and comfort that probably had nothing to do with the reach of popular media. K may have even wanted his father to know that he knew them. But that was probably a stretch, K’s father reasoned to himself.
K’s father watched his son’s eyes absorb the Scrabble board. K’s father imagined letters swirling in K’s head; he further imagined letters bumping into other letters to create effeminate words. K’s father watched his son’s eyes move from the board to his remaining letters and back again. K’s father detected a smirk: K had his next word. After K’s father offered a word hardly worth mentioning, K played it: “chanteuse.” K’s father didn’t know what that word meant; he did know, however, that it was French; he also knew that he didn’t want to know what that word meant.
K’s father had always found it hard to relate to his son. When K was much younger, K’s father tried taking him hiking and canoeing, and camping. K refused to do those things, preferring instead to read at the kitchen table. Recently, K’s father suggested an afternoon at the shooting range. But K had no interest. Sometimes at dinner, K’s father would bring up iconic male figures like John Wayne and Robert Duval, saying stuff like, “These are real men” and “Next time, just ask yourself: WWRDD, What would Robert Duval do?” K’s father expected his son to respond with an eye roll or scoff; K’s son was far too intellectual for that sort of behavior.
Indeed, the term intellectual suggested someone well-read and someone who plays French words during a game of Scrabble. It was also a term that had gained currency in recent years as a euphemism for a man unlike John Wayne and Robert Duval, for a man who probably slept under a duvet and who scrubbed his body with a loofah. K’s father was not an intellectual. He had a college degree–in mineralogy–but preferred to think of himself as “just an old cowboy.” Which was why he had a hard time relating to K. Scrabble, which K’s father brought on a whim one day, seemed to be the only way K’s father could bond with his son.
K’s father stared at his remaining letters, feeling betrayed by the father-son time he so desperately wanted. K’s father scanned the Scrabble board. Words like “bronzer,” which K had played early in the game, suddenly seemed to take on alternate meanings: a noun, now, rather than a potential adjective. If he were more of an “intellectual,” K’s father could have countered his son’s suspicious vocabulary with his own manly version: bolts, beard, fortress, chainsaw, dirt. While those words hardly count for anything in Scrabble, at least compared to “chanteuse” or “exfoliate,” they would have at least meant something to K’s father–a last stand of sorts. But K’s father’s intelligence aside, it was too late for that. K’s father was going to lose.
The only letters he had to play were: W, W, R, D, D.
With Her One Hand
My gaze fell to her left hand, still on the table. I wondered what stories her hands would tell. I wondered how many men had experienced her touch. I wondered why her hands, though always au courant, were peppered with scars, dents, and imperfections. What story would they tell? Maybe I couldn’t write because my hands were done telling their stories. Maybe I needed new hands.
She moved toward the door and readied to slip into her high heels.
“Wait,” I implored. “I love you.” I immediately regretted my words; I didn’t know why I said them. Desperation was taking hold.
“I know,” she sighed. “What’s it like?”
“Love?”
“No. Loving me.”
“Unrequited love has its difficult moments. But in general, it’s grand.”
“Is it unrequited?”
She slipped out of her shoes and glided back to the table, where I, now flustered, still sat. Perhaps successful in my mission, I let a smile drift to my lips. She stood at my side and put a hand on my shoulder. She rarely touched me, even platonically. Her touch was awkward, unpracticed, and unsure of itself.
“Vulnerability looks good on you,” she said, not taking her hand away. I moved to take her hand in mine, unsuccessfully. Before I could reach it, she took it away, nearly recoiled. This was her way and didn’t entirely surprise me, though I felt let down in spite of myself.
“K, we don’t have that kind of relationship. We never have.”
She wasn’t wrong. Our intimate moments were anomalous carnal events. Perhaps she did love me. Who was I to question her? Whatever doubts I had about her affection for me were the residues of my own insecurities and faults and had nothing, probably, to do with her. I cursed myself for needing validation, some kind of totem and symbol that said what she couldn’t or wouldn’t express.
She sat back down, and sighed. “What?”
She could read the worry in my eyes. I shrugged and didn’t answer. Silence took over. The two of us were comfortable in quiet the way couples (if that’s what we were) rarely are. Years spent exchanging fiction conditioned us to each other’s thoughts. We were different writers but were of the same mind – of that, I was sure.
“I don’t know,” I said eventually.
“You know I have to go.”
“I know. I just…” My words fell into a mumble, and my gaze fell to her hands, which were fidgeting on the table impatiently. “I want those,” I said, suddenly emboldened, gesturing with my chin.
“Seriously? Why?.” She rose from the table.
“Wait.” I stood to challenge her. “Just for the night.”
“Why?”
“You said to write by hand.”
“I meant with your own hands.”
I shrugged: “My hands have said what they need to say.”
She raised her hands to her eyes, spun her wrists this way then that. She tilted her head to one side the way she always does when she pretends like she is thinking about something significant. Then she looked at me. “You can have one.”
“The right one.” My response was immediate.
“Okay.” She removed the gold bracelet from her wrist and transferred it to her left wrist. “You’re sure?”
“I am.”
She said nothing and instead coiled the fingers of her left hand around her right wrist. With a gentle tug, her hand came off. The girl set her hand down gently on the table.
“Thank you,” I said, barely audible even to myself. I reached for the hand, and picked it up with care as though it were an injured bird.
The hand was frigid, nearly artificial. I could tell that it didn’t like being held by me.
“Here,” said the girl. “I’ll fix that.” She took her hand from me and pressed its fingers to her lips. She placed it back on the table. “Now it’ll cooperate. Be good to it, K.”
Without a word, she placed her left (and only) hand on my cheek and kissed me. She kept her eyes open. This was something she did whenever we embraced. Then she pivoted, slipped into her shoes, and left.
“I’ll be back for it in the morning,” she said coldly on her way out the door. She didn’t look back.
Her hand and I were alone. Again with care, I picked it up, and studied it with affection. She had failed to take her rings off of the fingers. The rings caught the light of my chandelier and offered a sparkle in reply. I wondered of their significance.
The nails were carefully polished and finely manicured. Against my own short, thick nails, hers possessed a strange beauty, as if they belonged to no human creature. With such fingertips, a woman perhaps transcended mere humanity. With such fingertips, she could command the world.
I pressed the hand to my body and felt the girl herself press against me. How I longed for her in that moment, longed for those fleeting encounters when our bodies fully disclosed themselves toe ach other. I stroked the hand the way you would pet a cat in your arms, and it subtly writhed in response. The girl rarely wore perfume, but a hint of eu de cologne drifted to my nose. I recognized the scent; I had given it to her for her birthday one year. She loved birthdays.
There was much I wanted to do with the hand. I wanted to talk to it, to reveal to it my insecurities, passions, and vices. I wanted it to tell me things about the girl she denied to me: her own insecurities, faults (if she indeed had any), weaknesses, and proclivities. I wanted the hand to tell me that the girl did in fact love me, that, as I asserted to myself, she only did cocaine with me because it was her excuse to be in my presence; it was I, and not the powder, that was her drug of choice. I wanted the hand to tell me who she was when nobody was looking, who she was behind the feminine artifice she seemed to always hide behind. Would I still love her if I saw behind that artifice? I was confident: I would love her all the more.
But I knew of the task at hand. Tucking the hand under my arm, I retreated to my study to fetch my favorite pen. As much as I wanted to share my secrets with the hand, as much as I wanted the hand to disclose the girl’s secrets in turn, there was also writing to be done. That was the whole point, was it not?
I picked up my pen and scrounged up some paper. The hand and I returned to my kitchen table and sat. I removed the pen cap and pressed the pen into the hand’s palm. The fingers came to life and wrapped themselves around the pen. My heart began to pound.
Pioneer to the fall
It was the middle of the night in autumn. In one room of a house located on the Street of X in the city of Y, a pale young prostitute sat behind an old table, his chin in his hands, tediously chewing on the seeds of a watermelon that lay on a tray before him. A lamp on the table emitted a faint light. The light seemed less to brighten up the room than add to its gloom. In one corner of the room, the wallpaper had started to peel off. An old chair had been set as if abandoned on the opposite side of the table.
Despite the barrenness of the room, the young man would, from time to time, stop chewing on the seeds and lift his cool gaze to stare at the wall facing the table. Hanging unpretentiously from a bent nail on the wall was a small brass crucifix. The worn contours of the artless figure of the suffering Christ. Each time the man, let us call him K, looked at this carving, the tinge of loneliness behind his long eyelashes faded away for a brief moment. However, as soon as K shifted his gaze, he would invariably heave a sigh and once again begin chewing on the seeds in the tray.
K welcomed clients into his room night after night in order to pay off large sums of debt owed to creditors around town. Unlike his fellow ladies of pleasure, K could not lie to or swindle his clients; nor was he willful. Rather, each night with a pleasant smile he dallied with the various individuals who called on him in this cheerless room.
Certainly K’s nature was inborn, but if there was another reason to be found in his actions, it would be in the fact from his childhood he adhered to the Catholic faith he had inherited from his late mother, as evidenced by the austere crucifix hung on his wall.
This past spring, a willowy tourist from an Eastern European country had come to the horse races and ended up spending a capricious night in K’s room.
“Are you a Christian,” this tourist asked through thickly accented English.
“I am.”
“And you’re still pursuing this profession?”
“I am.”
“Don’t you think that by doing such despicable work you won’t be able to go to heaven?”
“No.” K cast a quick glance at the crucifix. Then he continued: “It’s because the Lord knows what’s in my heart.”
The tourist smiled, then reached into a briefcase and extracted a glass flamingo. “I bought this as a present for my child, but I’m going to give it to you in memory of tonight.” The tourist set the pink figure on the table, adding color to the edge of a grey existence.
Since the night he entertained his first customer, K had taken comfort in this assurance that Christ knew what was in his heart.
Sadly enough, this pious prostitute had been suffering from a violent strain of syphilis. Other harlots in the house heard of K’s affliction and offered various potions and pills. But K’s affliction grew no better. “Since you got this from a client,” a fellow whore said in passing, “you need to pass it along as quickly as you can. That’s the only way you’ll get better.”
K was pleasant enough to this whore, but in his heart he said a prayer, vowing to remain chaste on every occasion and asking to be delivered from every temptation. Having set himself to this resolution, K stubbornly refused every client.
“I have a terrifying disease. If you get too close to me you’ll catch it,” he admonished every potential visitor, even regular clients. As a result, little by little clients stopped visiting him and his household budget grew simultaneously tighter with each passing day.
Again this evening K sat munching absently on seeds and staring at the flamingo on his table that glowered in the dim light of the lamp. At that very moment, his door was flung open and a tall figure stumbled in. Due to the darkness of the room, K could not make out this figure’s features. The way the figure tottered, eventually leaning against the door, gave K the impression that he or she was drunk.
“Is there something you want,” K asked into the shadows.
The visitor silently raised a hand and held out two indistinct fingers. K was used to such impropriety. But the visitor did not strike K as improper.
Indeed, the visitor was familiar, gave K a sense of warmth, as though they had met before.
K crossed his arms across his body and shook his head. The visitor held up a third finger, then a fourth, and finally a fifth. K had never received such a sum of money from a visitor before. Nevertheless, K remained absolute, shaking his head at every turn.
This haggling with gestures and body movements continued for a long while. Toward the end, the visitor tenaciously increased the offer to ten. This was an enormous sum for a prostitute.
K was growing weary and stamped his foot repeatedly. As he did so, it chanced that the crucifix slipped loose and fell with a slight clang to the stone floor at his feet.
He quickly reached down to retrieve the precious object. When he snatched up the crucifix, K was overcome with the same sense of warmth that assailed him when the visitor first burst into his room.
When K looked up, he was startled to find the figure looming directly above him. K did not have a chance to move before he was ensnared in the visitor’s clutches.
* * * * *
Several hours later, the faint chirping of crickets added a forlorn autumnal tone to the breathing of the couple on the bed. But K’s dreams drifted upward like smoke from the dusty curtains of his bed and into the starry nighttime sky.
In his dream, K was in Jesus’ house, sharing a plate of Chinese food with the mysterious figure. Despite the luminosity of heaven, this figure remained indistinct. This is because in his dream, K was going blind from syphilis.
K awoke from his dream of heaven with a start. “If I’ve infected him with my illness.” K’s feelings were clouded with that thought, and K rushed to waken the stranger.
But to his surprise, other than his own self covered by the blanket, there was no sign of the visitor. Perhaps a dream wondered K. Still, the bed’s disarray suggested to K that it had not been a dream.
K stumbled out of bed and knelt on the cold stone floor to offer up an earnest prayer, just as had the beautiful Mary Magdalene who spoke of the risen Lord.
* * * * *
One night in the spring the following year, the willowy European sat across from K. “You’ve still got that crucifix,” the European laughed.
K then launched into the strange story of the mysterious visitor, the mysterious night and, most mysterious of all, the disappearance of his illness.
As K spoke, the European’s mind was occupied by the following thoughts:
I know that individual. I can’t place the name, but I am certain we are acquaintances. I hear this individual has gone mad, perhaps from syphilis.
Should I enlighten dear K? Or should I say nothing and leave him forever to dreams that are no better than old Russian legends?
When K finished his story, the European smiled and spoke: “How unusual! But you have never been sick since then?”
“No, not once,” K answered without any hesitation, his face glowing as he crunched on the melon seeds in his mouth.
All of the Faces, All of the Promises
He knows already what will happen.
He knows because it has happened before, many times before. He knows because it always happens. Each time he and a woman decide to kill themselves, he lives on, in mockery and defiance of his own will to die, in mockery and defiance of the promise he has made to join her – whoever she is – in death.
Yet he will do it. He will, with her, his new one, dutifully by his side, consult his suicide manual. He will enjoy her conversation and admire her eyes as they scan the words, the morbid and profane and, to her, impenetrable words, that will, in the end, lead her and her alone to her end. He will translate for her, for she is impressed with his Japanese language skill, and fortunately for him, his suicide manual has yet to be translated into English. He once considered translating it, but translations don’t count toward tenure – so it would have been a waste of his time. He enjoys being the intermediary, besides, the conduit between the ideographs on the page and the woman who is keen on learning their meanings, hidden secrets.
He pours her a brandy and offers her the manual. She accepts both, though she does not immediately put the glass to her lips. Instead, she sets her glass on his iron kitchen table and caresses the book’s dust jacket. Silver with a drawing of a man in a coffin directly in its center, it is an alluring object. She is hesitant to open the manual, he observes, but she will not change her mind about their postmortem pact. He is confident.
Love suicide was her idea, after all.
He never suggests it, that is his first rule. He has several rules, but that is his most important rule, the one he will never break.
“K, I love you,” she said one night against the glow of candlelight, snatching up his hand in her own and pressing his fingertips to her lips. “And I cannot imagine a life without you.” He took her words for so much dramatics at first, but she did not relent. She spoke at length of her affections for him and of refusing anything less than his undying love. Those were her words – “undying love.” He knew she would suggest that the only true undying love is a love cultivated in and by death. It’s a trite thing to say, utterly ridiculous, but charming and romantic as well. Naive. He knows that that is not true, at least not for him, for he knows only the disgrace and shame of living with a love that dies with the woman that he loves.
And he does love – passionately and recklessly. He does not hope for disgrace and shame. He hopes for death and sweet escape. But he knows now that he is cursed to love women who yearn to die with him, and who do die, as intended – a math problem left half solved, a loaf of bread only partially eaten.
So she will die, this beauty seated next to him, this creature who will be alone in death as he will be alone in life, until a new woman comes along. And a new one always does.
She is nervous, he can tell, and her languid fingers continue to trace the book’s edges. There is no small talk to be made now. No pointless conversations about unimportant things. She tastes the brandy and inhales, opens the book. Flipping through the pages, she examines the odd diagrams of stick figures swallowing pills, tying nooses, and slitting wrists. He has long puzzled over the affinity the Japanese hold for graphs, charts, and drawing. He cannot explain it, but he may not have to, for she finds the crude visuals beneficial, a kind of suicide shorthand.
“What does this say,” she asks, stopping randomly at Chapter Six.
“Gas Poisoning,” he replies gently. She takes a moment to compose herself, so he elaborates. “Carbon monoxide. Things like that.”
She flips to the next chapter. “And this?”
He leans closer to her, allowing his brow to brush against a strand of her dangling hair.
“Electrocution. That’s probably self-explanatory.” He allows himself to smirk.
“I admit, I thought you were joking when you told me you had a suicide manual.”
“I know.” He places his hand on hers. “There’s a table of contents at the front,” he continues, allowing her to make the same mistake all of the other women have made. “That’s the back,” he reprimands laughingly, once she realizes her error. “Japanese books open the other way.”
She blushes: “Sorry.”
She observes the morbid list and he translates mechanically and too literally, his bad habit.
“Chapter 1: Overdosing.
Chapter 2: Hanging.
Chapter 3: Self-Destruction.
Chapter 4: Slashing the Wrist.
Chapter 5: Car Collision.” He pauses now, and looks into her eyes. “You know what Chapters 6 and 7 cover,” he says as though he is back in the classroom testing his irritating college students. Then he continues:
“Chapter 8: Drowning.
Chapter 9: Self-immolation.
Chapter 10: Freezing.
Chapter 11: Miscellaneous.”
“‘Miscellaneous,’” she questions, mischievously.
He shrugs: “The Japanese,” is all he says in response. A self-evident response.
“‘Self-Destruction,’” she says with the same inflection.
He shrugs again. “That’s what it says.”
He wonders which method she will choose, for he always lets them choose. Overdosing has been the most popular method by far, followed inexplicably by freezing. Only one woman chose to die in an automobile accident. K gripped her hand as they went through the windshield of her white BMW. She died instantly while he spent a week in the hospital. Only one woman chose to hang, too. She was wispy, fragile, and her poor neck snapped instantly. K dangled helplessly until his noose came unraveled, sending him crashing to the floor. He dragged her body into a field after that, because he would never allow himself to be incarcerated for a crime of passion, if one could call it a crime at all.
He observes her observing the table of contents. He tries not to anticipate her choice, for he does not want to be disappointed. He has already decided that she is different from the others, perhaps special but perhaps not; should she choose to overdose she will be very much like the others, regardless. He has a number of pills ready; indeed he has everything ready, so that he is ready, no matter which choice she makes. This is why she has come over tonight, so they can make their plans. He will not ask her to die tonight, but he is ready if she wants to.
She takes her brandy thoughtfully, with class. She wets her lips, sets the glass back down. She rubs her tongue along her lower lip, which arouses him. He follows her tongue to her mouth, imagining himself slipping inside her mouth, sliding gently down the back of her throat like cocaine, residing within her for all time. That would be the best kind of death – erotic, consuming.
Overrun with passion, he grips the nape of her neck and kisses her. She kisses him back, running her hand upwards through his hair as she does so. Death makes everything passionate, he learned long ago. This is what she is learning now.
She pulls away. His face is still close. “Drowning,” she whispers, shoveling her words into his mouth with another kiss. It is his turn to kiss her back, and he obliges. She is indeed different, for none before have chosen to drown. Drowning seems awful, tedious, horrendous. It is a terrible way to die, perhaps bested only by self-immolation. Drowning is not subtle, but neither is her kiss. Drowning is deliberate, purposeful, bold – so is she. It is the best way for her to die. He does not wonder if he will actually die this time, for he has given up wondering. It is now a given that he will have to dispose of her drowned, bloated body.
“As you wish,” he whispers, kissing her again. His eyes are open, clouded with sadness.
‘“Tonight,” she huffs with passion.
“As you wish,” he huffs with equal passion. He kisses her extra hard now, extra deep, because after tonight there will be no more kissing her.
He places his other hand around the other side of her neck. He stands, craning and stretching her neck, making their kiss more dramatic. Her hands grip his belt. She yanks his body close, folding her arms around his torso and then running her fingers up his shirt.
She digs her nails in, pulls downward; he arches his back in response and lets out a noise, an animalistic noise that says that right now he wants her and is thinking only of the present. He pulls her by her throat to her feet. They kiss again. He kisses her jawline now, first to the left, then around to the right. He squeezes her tightly and she exhales roughly – the erotic song and dance fulfilling itself. They are both practiced in the ritual. It bores him, and he opens his eyes, noticing that hers are closed. She is enmeshed in the moment; he is not, having become tired of the whole charade, over time. But he cannot resist. He is a lover, besides.
The first time a woman suggested love suicide he was caught off guard. Ever the shy boy, he never thought a woman would want to make him her final lover and confidante. It was only by happenstance that he had acquired his suicide manual and, nearly in jest, suggested she come over to, in his words, “consider their options.” He offered her the book, the manual, he happened to order only a few days prior because of his research interests in Japanese youth culture. The suicide manual was the product of generational anxieties, at a time when young people were killing themselves with reckless abandon. Whoever wrote it no doubt grew tired of trains being delayed by “human accidents,” as they were politely called in the press. She, his first, chose to die by pharmaceuticals, and he, yet inexperienced, figured it was just ill fortune that caused him to wake the next morning to find her cold, cold body resting silently. Now he thinks differently.
He wads her black hair up in his fist, pulls hard, sends her chin to the sky. He kisses her neck again, pulls again on her hair. He spins her around now, her backside settling into his crotch, his hands settling into her pants. They make love, profess love, touch each other’s skin, trace each other’s veins, feel each other’s life. These moments, these intimate moments he has grown to despise.
He misses her, his first, his first loss, his first vacancy, his first disgrace.
He has loved many other women since, but she, this phantom bride, remains wedded to his heart, has hooks in his heart that he cannot dislodge no matter how many women’s bodies he devours. He misses her so much, and torments himself by dwelling on what happened and what could have been. She was modest in the bedroom, even timid. He stroked her face with a tenderness he has not been able to replicate, and she, with muddy brown eyes, gazed at him with an intensity that has infected his being. Her body was hard and tan, tattooed with incomplete tattoos. She was proud of her body but did not like being looked at by men, had probably been looked at too much by men. Her body, her entire physical presence, was a paean to vanity and ego – sculpted and manicured to perfection. He admires the vain and the egotistical, for his own overwhelming sense of self has only ever been overshadowed once, by hers. When he found her head, he fretted and thrashed, worried over what would become of her beautiful body. He imagined it in a morgue somewhere, pale and blue, rotting, being enjoyed by nobody. He found solace in the fact that beyond beauty can only lie destruction: the imperfect strive for perfection; the perfect preserve their perfection in death. Since her death, he has come to appreciate her perfection and is even taunted by it, and each woman who prostrates herself under him, beside him, reaffirms loss and want, is another echo into a hollow cavity. He is not naive enough to think that his enduring commitment to love suicide is anything more or anything less than what it is. To pursue her in the afterlife would go against the logic of love suicide – he would not do that: that is his second rule. He appreciates each woman, loves her, then commits to die with her and only her. She deserves that much, at least.
“K,” she whispers afterward, nestled into his side, “I’m ready.” He runs his fingers through her hair, silently. She is bold, this one – this “victim,” to call a spade a spade. He kisses her gently on the forehead. He does not want victims. As a young adult he wanted to be the victim, prey for a beautiful woman. In graduate school, he became interested in the femme fatale archetype, the beautiful but ultimately lethal woman of myth and lore. Although he had met plenty of women who in one way or another made his life miserable, he wanted a kind of physical – rather than emotional – destruction, and he wanted to enjoy it; like the men in his books. He thought often of Wanda, the victimizer in Venus in Furs, who demands of her poor
whipping boy: “Be then my slave, and know what it means to be delivered into the hands of a woman.” K found instead, in his more suitable mates, a kind of symbiotic slavery, a mutual attraction to the limit. He found, in these mates, an eagerness to cross the threshold, hand in hand, into oblivion – a thirst for eternal and mutual servitude.
He is ill-prepared. He does not know how to achieve tonight’s goals, for he simple doesn’t have the resources to drown two people. Suffocation, drugs, poison, hanging – these would have been relatively easy tasks to carry out. But drowning? One person could successfully drown in his bathtub, but not two. The whole point is to die simultaneously, in unity. Otherwise it is yet another sad, lonely death. The whole point is to die in comfort, familiarity, and love. He does not, after sex, want to drag her into the forest and push her into a lake and then jump in after. Her lithe body, tangled in his bedding, is too precious.
“Soon my love,” he offers into the air, kissing her again. “Give me just a moment more.”
“Are you reconsidering?” Her voice is soft, but words sharp. He is caught off guard – no one before has ever spoken to him like that. She rubs her fingernails up and down his torso.
“Of course not my love. Just a few more moments with you in life before we are together in death.” The words strike him as genuine, if slightly trite and rehearsed.
“Have you ever done this before?” She continues to scrape her fingernails along his skin. “I mean,” – she catches the oddity of her question, – “of course you haven’t. Because you’re here with me. I mean, have you ever promised to die with a woman?”
His impulse is to lie, to preserve the fantasy-fallacy. How will she react should he confess his burden, his curse? Will she abandon him? Will she even believe him? Ever a man of morals, he inhales and waits before speaking. “I have.”
She does not react, which is good for him or bad for him.
He continues, slowly, deliberately: “I have done this many times. With many women, women I have loved deeply, as I love you deeply. I have scars, which I have kept hidden from you. Some are deep and some are shallow, but they are a record of my flirtations with death and futile attempts to join the women I have loved. They always go – go wherever the dead go. I, obviously, always stay behind. I hope that, with the right woman, my time will come.”
“May I see this record? I’d love to read it.”
“No.” He is curt.
“Am I the right woman?” She has asked the right question.
“That is why we are here.” He is evasive, and he has lied, for she is not the right woman. The right woman came and went already. The right woman is long dead, an afterthought he cannot escape. His inability to die is simply a reminder of the ease with which she left him behind, traitorously.
“You flatter me,” she says smoothly, almost with calculation.
“Yes my love.” He kisses her on the head.
They lie in silence, his bedroom is tomblike, a precursor, perhaps, of what is to come. He does not believe what he has told her, about dying when the woman is the right woman, but he likes the idea. He strokes her hair and she strokes his skin. He presses his body against hers and she shifts gently in response. Then stillness.
“How would you die,” she asks. “You wanted to know how I would die. But how would you die?”
No one has ever asked him that question. The woman always decides the method – that is his third rule. He is honored by her compassion, if that’s what it is. Perhaps it is just curiosity, but he doesn’t think so. He knows exactly how he would die, given the choice. But she means how would he die with her. Selfishly, he has not considered how he would die with a woman. The logic of his third rule allows him to never have to consider it.
His desire to be consumed by a woman precludes her own participation in joining him in death. So he tries not to think about it. Nevertheless, he begins cautiously:
“I want us to —,”
She cuts him off, raises her head, looks at him. “That’s not what I mean. If you could die, regardless of circumstance, how would you die?”
He wastes no time in telling her of his hidden fantasy, in rich detail. He tells her of the joys of complete subjection, for to him it is to be completely subjected. To nourish a woman’s body with his own, to become part of her, and to vanish into solitude inside her. He would not go out of his way to die with a woman, to be chained to her for eternity. He would accompany her, of course, but he has no desire for the inverse.
She listens intently, nods in deep understanding at the appropriate moments. She lengthens herself, kisses him on the lips, stares at him. She kisses him again, puts her hand on his crotch. “Close your eyes,” she says in a faux whisper.
He obliges, expecting something sexual. She is erotic and sensual in a way the other women haven’t been. He feels a subtle twinge in his heart, the bashfulness of his first coming back to him. He longs for her. But only momentarily. His thoughts are disrupted by a grotesque noise, a noise so unsettling he doesn’t dare open his eyes. There is a dripping sound, a slithering sound, a breaking sound. He doesn’t feel her against him anymore. His skin bristles against its solitude. Again a noise, a terrible noise. She is the orchestrator, the conductor of this obscene symphony. He does not move, feels something wet hit his skin, like fat raindrops. He flinches, grimaces, eyes closed hard.
He recognizes the moment that she swallows him. He becomes warm all over, like settling into a bath. He is enveloped completely, and as she swallows him, he is jostled violently, turned upside down, pressed upon by the insides of her throat. He feels her pathos as he is delivered to her deep, dark insides. Complete darkness comes and he is at peace.
“K?”
A familiar voice. It’s his first: his first death, his first love. She is as he remembers: wan, intense, distressed. Her brow is furrowed, as it was back then. She doesn’t want to be here, that he can tell. He grabs her forearms, looks her in the eye, intensely in the eye. She used to wear bangs, but now her hair is different. It sweeps down at a pretty angle, leaving her forehead exposed in a cute way. He stares, stunned.
“I preferred you with bangs,” he says finally, attempting to break the silence that is closing in around them.
She brushes her hair with her left hand, removing herself from his grip.
“I’ve missed you,” he continues, reaching for her arms but she pulls away.
“Fuck you,” she hisses.
This is not how their conversation is supposed to go. She is supposed to speak of her terrible loneliness without him. She is supposed to pledge her love that could finally be called undying – for both of them are now dead. They can now be together. Is this not what she wants anymore? It is what he wants. Can she not see that?
“Why did you bring me here,” she demands, misunderstanding the situation.
He sighs. “I did not bring you here. You’ve been here all along waiting for me, don’t you see? I’m sorry I’ve been apart from you for so long. But you must understand, I am cursed. I was unaware of my curse back then, when we tried to be together in death, but I am all too familiar with it now. My curse was to die alone. And alone I have finally died. But inexplicably here I have found you. Are you not happy to see me? Did you not miss me?”
This is his fear, that she – the one he really loves – will say No. That he does not figure into her post life in the least regard. She will say No and he will wonder why. Is it because she feels betrayed? Slighted? Used? Manipulated? Perhaps she has moved on? If she feels these things, it’s because she doesn’t understand his enduring love for her. A truly undying, burdensome love from which he cannot be absolved, in which he can finally indulge.
He apologizes to her. “If only you knew what this has been like for me.”
“Have there been others?”
This question makes him nervous. But he proceeds: “There have. Many others. But I’ve always loved you and have always wanted to spend eternity with you.”
She reacts poorly, jealously, like a teenage girl. He is put off. She has other questions, prying questions, uncomfortable questions: how many women, how many died, how many did he love – questions like that. He answers them all, kind of, without incriminating himself fully.
“Go to hell, K,” she bellows finally and retreats into the recesses of the other woman’s insides. He reaches out for her but she is gone. He calls for her, desperation on the edge of his words. He calls again. She is gone. He does not follow because he enjoys the pain of being walked away from.
He is alone again, agitated and restless. He screams, filling the woman’s insides with his frustration. He screams again, stamping his feet like a child.
When he rouses himself from this twisted and incomprehensible revelry, he is pressing the woman’s head to the porcelain floor of his bathtub. At some point she stopped struggling, but he was too wound up in his own ego to notice. He was too wound up in his own ego to notice a lot: love, compassion, understanding; terror, violence, deception.
He presses down harder on her head, making small undulations in the water in which she has drowned.
He crawls into the bath, wraps her water-logged head in his arms, presses it to his chest.
“All of this for you,” he whispers, addressing nobody at all.
Just Ignore the Smoke and Smile
For the rest of his life, K would allow himself to be haunted by the events of that night, by the minutia that had led up to the moment he put the bottle too close to the edge of the table. Dissatisfaction creased his face whenever he thought back to that ugly red stain left by that pretty red liquid; and while this had some to do with the ghastly embarrassment of the whole thing, K was primarily and rightly haunted by the disappearance of his wife.
For her part, she had been resistant – for over a decade– to opening that particular bottle in the first place, claiming that its opening required a special occasion and nothing less. K had tried to counter her argument by insisting that the opening of a bottle of wine is its own occasion. But she had been a stubborn woman who would not be swayed by K’s relatively decent assertion. In fact, their whole romantic courtship had revolved around the ebb and flow of this call and response. That bottle, ever unopened, had been how they made sense of their world. And after a few years’ time, the very idea of opening it was something neither party had dared consider with much seriousness; the discussion had become a signifier emptied, and nothing more. Just something they would talk about over candlelight or at sports events between the action.
Though K’s family loved to recount among themselves the hardships and trials of his relationship with his wife, the events surrounding the spilled bottle of wine were never discussed. They were not discussed even in covert groups of two – mother and father, or sister and brother. And this was unusual, because family matters, great and small, were everything. Even the cruelest and most random moments were routinely discussed, but not that bottle of wine.
Nobody in the family rushed to blame K for what happened; everybody knew that he was a gentle, timid soul. Still, some distant cousins just knew he was guilty of some crime. Others were more sympathetic. It could have happened to anybody, they said.
But it happened to K. For his part, he blamed his dear wife. He often thought to himself, She just had to have that fucking special occasion. If she just let me open the wine like I wanted to, none of this would have happened.
But no. A special occasion had been required. And by that, she didn’t mean their eleventh anniversary or her birthday or his promotion. She didn’t mean any of that mundane specialness. She meant a once-in-a-lifetime occasion. Such was the grandeur of their prized bottle of wine.
Neither party could place exactly where or why or how the bottle of wine had come into their possession. Over the years, the woman who had given them the bottle began to fade from collective memory. Eastern European with big white teeth and heavy eyelids, she had been the proprietress of a bar they would frequent. And, on their fifth anniversary, she presented it to them after much fanfare. It had no label. And this, the eastern European woman had said, guaranteed the authenticity of its contents, which, she had said also, haled from some eastern European country. It was less wine than elixir, the ingredients for which had been smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Poland. Or so the East European woman had said. But she was given to hyperbole often.
So the couple decided to wait for an occasion, and at some point the process of waiting suplanted the idea of opening the bottle of wine. K and his wife would revisit the topic sometimes and reminisce fondly over the yarns told by the Eastern European woman or the quirky literary types who patronized her bar.
Indeed, bottled up with their wine were memories great and small. K’s wife, before her disappearance, was afraid that uncorking the wine would uncork the memories, which would slowly drain from their lives like water after a bath. She hadn’t realized – or at least didn’t want to admit – that memories fade anyway, like artwork on a wall that gets too much direct sunlight.
Bottled up with the Eastern European were other citizens, events, and occasions. The bottle of wine itself was a repository, a bank, an archieve – at least for K’s wife. To keep their memories safe, then, she had foreclosed the opening of the bottle. She said to K once, not in jest, “Do something great, something out of this world, and I’ll let you open it.” K obeyed because he was never able to disobey a beautiful woman, especially not one he was married to.
So K gave her her special occasion, tenfold. He cured cancer and HIV. He solved intense and blood conflicts in the Middle East. He convinced prominent Republicans that black lives matter. He fixed poverty and socioeconomic inequality. He occupied Wall Street, successfully. He thawed the Arab Winter. He cloned a sheep and then a baby boy.
K’s wife was proud of her husband. She commended him and lavished him with verbal accolades and whorish sexual favors. Then she agreed to open the wine. “One last thing,” she said in bed, raising a manicured nail to her lips, “make me dinner?”
K made something impressive – laboring in the stainless steel kitchen for hours. He didn’t need to do that. But upon reflection, he shouldn’t have needed to open the wine either.
The town would say that it was his masculine pride, warped and unseemly, that did in his wife. The town would say that he had been enraged, that the police missed something in their investigation, that he should get the death penalty because certainly he killed her. But if the town had been there, they would have seen that all K was guilty of was trying to please his wife. And, of course, of being clumsy.
How was he to know that his wife had been right? I mean, what were the odds that that bottle of wine would, in fact, contain every last thing that mattered to the both of them? When it toppled from the table, both K and his wife cried out – but only because they foresaw the ruination of a newly purchased rug from Restoration Hardware. “Shit,” they exclaimed in tandem, helplessness in their eyes.
“Sorry,” K said with a sigh. Then he added, “So much that.” His wife shook her head affably. “It’s fine. I didn’t like that rug anyway.” Then she laughed. Then she said, referring to the shape taken by the spilled wine: “Look, it looks like a face.”
It did look like a face. To K, it looked like the face of the woman he had had an affair with several years ago. To his wife, it looked like the face of the man she was still in love with.
Wine continued to flow from the bottle. Too much, in fact. It was unnatural. “I’ll get a rag,” K spat. He sprang to his feet and dashed to the kitchen. Returning to the dining room, he found a deluge of red wine that, he would insist to anyone and everyone who asked, swallowed his wife.
He tried to save her. He charged into the vast sea of wine like a lifeguard. He thrashed around, ran his hands frantically through the wine. He called out. But she was gone. He found, though, in that flood, all that he had sought to keep bottled up. Shards of the world’s imperfections. Shards of his own imperfections. Shards of those of his wife. Glimpses of tragedy, betrayal, clandestine rendezvous, hookers, drugs – it all swirled around him.
K would decide later on, much later on, that what claimed his wife was not the wine itself, but rather the burden of the past, sharp and threatening. K had been able to swim to safety somehow, probably because he was the primary perpetrator of all that had threatened their union.
He would also decide that the spilling of the wine, the spilling of his sins, had granted him a perverse form of absolution. He would buy a bottle of wine to celebrate his rebirth. He would uncork it. Then he would recoil in terror when he his wife climbed out of it.
Coalescence
The black cocktail dress I bought her for her birthday hung in a lonely way. A spackling of dust coated its neckline and bulges from its wire hanger were beginning to protrude at the shoulders. The garment was exquisite, classy, tasteful. Yet there it hung, neglected from day one simply because it had the misfortune of being the wrong exquisite, classy, tasteful cocktail dress. Indeed, in my haste to procure for my wife her most desired item, I overlooked the ostensibly most important criteria: the designer.
“This isn’t Givenchy,” she whimpered when I presented her her dress. Then she glared at the label before lamenting: “It’s Chanel.” To me the issue was negligible, even laughable – hardly an issue at all. But to her, on this special occasion, my opinion on the matter mattered not. Because I did not understand her fixation with the black Givenchy cocktail dress, I felt it best to remain silent and allow her to fret. This is what I did.
“I’m sorry,” she eventually said in a calm manner. “It just has to be Givenchy.” Then she handed me the dress and descended the stairs to the living room. I thought briefly of returning the dress to the boutique from which I bought it. But pride got the better of me. So I cleared space in the bedroom closet and hung the dress among countless other black cocktail dresses. Perhaps next year, thought I, pulling the closet door shut.
Next year never came. We divorced four months after the Chanel incident. And while I would have liked to think that the dress had nothing to do with our inability to reconcile, when she moved out, she left the black Chanel behind. She left also a note that read only this: “One day you’ll understand. And then you’ll understand women.” I threw the note in the garbage but left the dress hanging on her side of the half-empty closet.
I was lonely, like the dress. And I began talking to it, explaining to it my sorrows, fears, failed ambitions. I asked it why she left. I asked it what was so great about a Givenchy dress anyway.
The dress never answered of course, but when the bedroom window was open it did sway a little in the breeze. The dress and I grew old together, grew vintage together. I refused to meet women because I still did not understand the import of my failure. Therefore, I presumed that I did not understand women.
Then one day, without the slightest warning, I fell in love. Lithe and graceful, yet intimidating and assertive she exuded an aura of dark sophistication that I found irresistible. I thought of the dress, its classic silhouette immune to the fits and starts of fashion. I imagined her wearing it. Then I imagined her stepping out of it.
On our fifth date I asked her to marry me. She agreed, and my long period of loneliness came to an end. I didn’t dare mention the dress, afraid I was of being rejected because of it. But she was a reasonable sort, and this put my heart at ease. We started blowing coke, drinking heavily, and abusing amphetamines. The two of us found a twisted equilibrium in this cornucopia of self-destruction. We would get ourselves high on drugs and delve into our fears and anxieties. It was thus only a matter of time before the topic of the dress. When I broached the issue, she listened with much compassion. Then she spoke: “I would love to wear the Chanel, K.” I smiled, and she continued: “Women love the Givenchy because of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Every girl simply dreams of being Holly Golightly. They get very upset when that dream doesn’t come true.” As she spoke, I thought back to my ex-wife’s mild obsession with Audrey Hepburn and it all seemed to make sense. How stupid I had been.
That night, my fiancé put the dress on. For my part, I wore my best suit, and we stayed awake all night long, blowing more coke in the kitchen and exchanging stories. Then we danced slowly and romantically. The dress, once a hallmark of my failures as a man was now transformed into an expression of masculine success.
And so I bought her more and more cocktail dresses. At least twice a week I returned home with a new one tucked under my arm. We would blow coke and dance romantically; this was our ritual. Our closet bulged; I moved my garments to the little guest bedroom closet to make room for my fiancé’s expanding wardrobe. One day when she was out, I counted the number of dresses: 132. When she got home I made a bold promise: “Your next dress will be the Givenchy.”
I didn’t get the chance. Three days later she died in a car accident and I was left with a room full
of size zero black cocktail dresses. After the funeral I shut myself up in the closet and took in the
sea of black. “What am I to do with all of these,” thought I. These dresses had once clung to my
fiancé’s body, which had endowed them with the warm breath of life and made them move.
Now, however, what hung before me were mere scruffy shadows, cut off from the roots of life
and steadily withering away, devoid of any meaning whatsoever.
Ten days later I placed an ad online for a female housekeeper. Against political correctness, I listed the physical specifications of the housekeeper I required: five-feet-five, size zero. One woman responded to my ad. When I interviewed her the following day, I explained: “I’ve recently lost my fiancé, and I have a huge amount of her clothing. Most of what she left is new or almost new. I would like you to wear her things as a kind of uniform while you work here. I know this must sound strange to you but, believe me, I have no ulterior motive. It’s just to give me time to get used to the idea that my fiancé is gone.”
“I think I understand,” she said. “And I think I can do what you are asking me to do. But, first, I wonder if you can show me the clothes I will have to wear.”
“Of course,” I said, and took the woman upstairs and showed her the closet. She had never seen so many dresses gathered together in a single place except in a department store. Each dress was obviously luxurious and of high quality. The taste, too, was flawless. The sight was almost blinding. The woman could hardly catch her breath. Her heart started pounding. She began crying.
The woman fled my bedroom and rushed down the stairs. “I’m sorry, K” she shrieked, “I can’t. It’s just too much to bear.” Then she left, and I found myself alone with my dead fiancé’s dresses.
I returned to the bedroom and opened the closet door. I stared at the dresses – countless flawless garments arranged just so, standing at attention as though readying for battle. Their rich blackness danced in space like dark pollen rising from evil flowers, lodging in my eyes and ears and nostrils. The frills and buttons and lace and epaulets and belts sucked greedily at the room’s air, thinning it out until I could hardly breathe. Liberal numbers of mothballs gave off a smell that might as well have been the sound of a million tiny winged insects. I hated these dresses now, it suddenly occurred to me. Slumping against the wall, I folded my arms and closed my eyes. Loneliness seeped into me once again, like a lukewarm broth.
In the end, I had a used-clothing dealer take away everything that my fiancé had left behind. The dealer gave me less than a twentieth of what I had paid for the clothes, but that hardly mattered. I would have let them go for nothing, so long as they were going to a place where I would never see them again.
Once in a while, I would go to the empty room and stay there for an hour or two, doing nothing in particular, just letting my mind go blank. I would sit on the floor and stare at the bare walls, at the shadows of my dead fiancé’s shadows. But, as the months went by, I lost the ability to recall the things that had been in the room – they became shadows in the truest sense.
Sometimes I could barely recall my fiancé’s face. What I did recall, though, was the woman, a total stranger, shedding tears in the room at the sight of the dresses that she had left behind.
I clung to her memory, whoever she was, as a life line to my fiancé’s memory.
A year went by in this way, and I gradually lost interest in the woman and what she represented. I let her slip through the cracks in my mind and with trepidation embraced the emptiness that remained.
Finding myself truly alone, I uncharacteristically set out for the cinema: a midnight showing of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
The Magic Pencil
“No, that’s not right. Try again.” The artist grew angry with my unsteady hand and untrained eye. He yanked my paper from me and balled it up in his fist. “I don’t believe you,” he spat, before tossing my work on the floor where it coalesced with my previous work. Also less than satisfactory.
Then he continued: “That is not how you draw a woman.” The artist then labored over his own craft, explaining to me just how, exactly, one draws a woman. Then, at the end of the lesson, he took from his utility tray his most prized pencil and handed it to me. “Here,” said he, “this will help you.”
Thinking nothing of his words, I snatched his pencil and jammed it into my pocket.
Returning to my modest apartment – soggy with roof leaks and cooking vapors – I then tossed my book bag onto the drab carpet that carpeted my modest apartment.
The small room, nine-feet-square, appeared to be larger than it was because it contained nothing but a single desk and a single chair set against the wall. Everything else had been sold for scrap to support my fledgling career in art.
Dinnertime drew near.
The fact is, I hadn’t eaten anything all day. With a pale face, a wrinkled brow, an Adam’s apple that rose and fell, a hunched back, a sunken abdomen, and trembling knees, I thrust both hands into my pocket and yawned three times in succession.
My fingers found a pencil in my pocket.
“Hey, what’s this? A pencil. I don’t remember it being there.”
Playing with the eraser between my fingers, I produced another yawn.
My thoughts drifted to the gumbling in my stomach.
Without realizing it, I began scribbling on the wall with the pencil. First, an apple. One that looked big enough to be a meal in itself. I drew a paring knife beside it so that I could eat it right away. Next, I drew bread. Jam-filled bread the size of a baseball glove. Butter-filled rolls; a loaf as large as a person’s head. Beside the bread, then, a stick of butter as large as a brick.
“Damn it!” I ground my teeth and buried my face in my hands. “I’ve got to eat!”
Gradually, my consciousness sank into darkness. Beyond the windowpane was a bread and pastry jungle, a mountain of canned goods, a sea of milk, a beach of sugar, a beef and cheese orchard— I scampered about until, fatigued, I fell asleep.
A heavy thud on the floor and the sound of mashing crockery woke me. The sun had already set. Pitch black. Bewildered, I glanced toward the noise and gasped. The pictures I had penciled on the wall had vanished.
“How could it…?”
Suddenly every vein in my body was wide awake and pounding. I stealthily crept closer.
“No, no, it can’t be. But look, it’s real. The bread is smooth to the touch. Be bold, taste it. K, don’t you believe it’s real even now? Yes, it’s real. I believe it. But frightening. To believe it is frightening. And yet, it’s real. It’s edible!”
The apple tasted like an apple. The bread tasted like bread. The butter tasted like butter (not margarine). The sugar tasted like sugar. Ah, they all tasted like the real thing. The knife gleamed, reflecting my face.
By the time I came to my senses, I had somehow finished eating and heaved a sigh
of relief. But when I recalled why I sighed like this, I immediately became confused again. I took the pencil in my fingers and stared at it intently. No matter how much I scrutinized it, I just couldn’t understand what I didn’t understand. I decided to make sure by trying it once more. If I succeeded a second time, then I would have to concede that it had actually happened. I thought I would try to draw something different, but in my haste just drew another familiar-looking apple. As soon as I finished drawing, it fell easily from the wall. So this is real after all.
Joy suddenly turned my body rigid. The tips of my nerves broke through my skin and stretched out toward the universe, rustling like fallen leaves. Then, abruptly, the tension eased, and sitting down on the floor, I burst out laughing like a panting goldfish.
I tried to sleep, but I was unable. So I toiled throughout the night with my newfound tool. I drew a windowpane that looked out onto an expansive scene. It all materialized before me as if by magic. The world is at my fingertips, thought I, and I drew and drew, turning my modest apartment into a world unto itself.
Yet I was overwhelmed. There was so much to create, and all from the beginning. I had to fill this desolate land with mountains, water, clouds, tress, plants, birds, beasts, fish. I had to draw the world all over again. Discouraged, I collapsed onto the bed. One after another, tears fell unceasingly.
But what was I forgetting? My mind drifted to my art class and to the crotchety teacher. I thought about the woman he drew – perfectly proportioned, perfectly pliant. I cried out: “This is what I forgot. It’s time to begin everything from Adam and Eve. That’s it—Eve! I’ll draw Eve!”
Half an hour later Eve was standing before me. Startled, she look around her.
“Who are you?” Her voice was cold.
“I am Adam,” said I. “You are Eve.”
“Bullshit,” she retorted with authority. “I’m a crude drawing.”
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
“No, you are Eve,” I explained. “I have created you. Look.” I proceeded to draw us a pair of wedding rings which materialized from the wall. I reached for her hand, yet she recoiled. I continued: “I created you just as I created these rings we are to wear.”
She held my gaze: “Do you wish to marry me?
“Of course.”
“Do you love me, Adam?”
“I do, Eve.”
She extended her hand. “Then come with me.” She gestured to the wall.
I hesitated: “But what of the world I have created for you?” I guestured to the rich foliage that populated my once-meager apartment. I guestured, too, to the sublime radiant sunshine that I also drew specifically for my Eve. “This is all for you,” I pleaded.
She shook her head. ”I do not want….all of this.” She gestured to my pencil. “Please,” said she.
I did as instructed and handed over to her my pencil.
I watched as she snapped the pencil in two and tossed it on the ground.
Tequila and Ashes
As is well known, K was a stubborn old buzzard. After he died – which happened not so long ago, really – he was cremated and his ashes submerged in his favorite bottle of tequila and then consumed by citizens of the small New York town where he resided until his death. Or so is said.
Some days ago I stopped into the bar where the famed bottle is said to reside. When I asked the dark haired bartendress about the bottle, she furrowed her brow and narrowed her heavy European eyes. “K!” She spat. “I hated him. There’s no way I would ruin a perfectly good bottle of tequila for that monster. Maybe the bottle of which you speak is at a different bar. Try across the street.” She jammed her finger against the window, leaving a smudge.
I did as she suggested. At this adjacent bar I found the bottle of tequila. To my surprise it was full. The bartender, observing my confusion, interjected, “There is also this bottle. It contains the ashes of one of K’s servants, I think.” He then sauntered off, apparently satisfied with himself.
I examined the small bottle, which was a much lesser tequila. I swished around the liquid and watched the ashes agitate and then settle. So this is the final resting place of K’s famed servant, I thought to myself. The fact that this bottle was smaller and inferior in quality demonstrated to me that K’s servant wished to remain humble toward him even in death. After observing the bottle, I returned home and dusted off my copy of The Life and Times of K, which his servant published posthumously, or so my investigation has concluded. The text has no identifiable author, though I am sure it was penned by K’s servant who, herself, had no name.
To quote from the text:
K had no family. Although there were whispers of relatives stirring and scavenging someplace in the developing world, K never spoke of others in the affectionate manner often reserved for family members. His ascent to wealth and fame was unrivaled in the small town he came to call home and, owing to his modest upbringing, he was never ashamed to showcase his success.
Supposing the source of this information is true, K’s servant certainly idolized him. The book contains one photograph of K, taken before he died. In the photo, despite the terrible events surrounding his loss of sight, he merely looks like a man who has closed his eyes. He appears graceful, philosophic even, kind. As you probably know, K hated having his picture taken and so this may be the only picture of him left in public circulation. It occurs to me that the date stamped in the corner of the photo – January 14, 2018 – was near the date that K’s nameless servant herself became blind. Her last image of K must have been something like this picture. Did she remember him as a benevolent philosopher? Or did she create an image in her mind to counter those vicious rumors regarding his comportment and treatment of those in his stead?
The Life of K goes on to state: Although not much is known about K, it is common knowledge that he lost his eyesight early in life, after which he devoted himself to capitalistic pursuits and the acquisition of material possessions. The book does not mention his eyesight again, and so we are left to speculate on the cause. I have heard, however, that he was blinded by the sun during an eclipse. This doubtful. But I know of no other explanation.
In any case, it need only be noted here that K lost his sight at the prime of his youth. And it was because of this unfortunate incident that he invested himself in the enterprises that eventually made him rich, egotistical, and beyond reproach. Or so is written in his biography. We know, however, that nobody is beyond reproach. K’s favorite servant may be exaggerating here.
K’s servant also writes that it was shortly after his blinding that she came to work for him. Yet as long as she lived, this nameless soul considered herself fortunate not to have seen the light of his eyes. Had K seen her, she may have been thought somehow imperfect – lumpy and pale and reproachful. But thanks to his blindness her features could only have seemed ideal. She could only ever and always be a phantom.
K suffered from terrible class anxiety and felt himself above those of lesser means. As his worth climbed, he brought on more and more servants in order to degrade and ridicule them. His sense of inferiority was no double exacerbated by the loss of his sight. He kept his mansion forever wrapped in the dim twinkle of twilight, just bright enough for the servants to avoid bumping into each other as they traversed the cold, masculine corridors of his space.
One wonders why K took a liking to this particular servant above the others. Perhaps he felt her adoration. Perhaps she was simply an easy target who absorbed every insult like a loyal dog. Spoiled by his success in the markets and embittered by his blindness, he never gave her a moment’s rest.
“Why is he so hard on you,” the others would ask her. But to her credit, she never wavered. Perhaps she took his extreme waywardness as a warped form of flattery.
Not long after she arrived in his estate, she began playing the market, enamored as she was by anything K did. In the dark, she would pour over facts and figures almost by touch alone. K is ever in the dark, she would tell herself, inspired. She was no good at the markets and lost what money she earned from K. The other servants began to whisper. One day, K surprised her by giving her insight into the most reliable stocks to follow. Under his tutelage, she did well and earned herself a small fortune. She remained loyal to K, however, and stayed on as his servant even though she hardly needed to.
But once, she ignored his advice, risked everything, and lost. K was especially severe to her then. “You fool,” he shouted, and struck her across the face. K had never hit any of his servants before; if the book is to be believed, he had never hit anyone from any station before. The rumors, though, always the rumors…they paint a picture of a sadistic figure whose violent hand was but a pretext for perverse sexual games.
Unfortunately, this first time of violence led swiftly to others, and soon enough K would strike his loyal servant with regularity. She would walk to her room crying, earning looks of concern from the other servants who encouraged her to seek other employment. But if K was stubborn, so was this servant and she was always by his side in spite of – or perhaps because of – the verbal and physical assaults. She eventually controlled her tears, which enlivened K. This strange admixture of devotion and violence drew K and his servant closer and their relationship became less of master – servant and more of husband – wife. According to The Life of K, K decided from the time he was a boy that he would never marry. If that were true, then this particular servant softened his heart in an unanticipated way. Always one to eat alone, he began to dine with her. The blind do not dine with others; so this was a large gesture that gave way to others.
The poor girl, she thought all of this fanfare gave her reprieve from her duties. K would ring for her and she would arrive late, if she bothered to arrive at all. “You bitch,” K admonished! “Don’t forget, you belong to me!” Then, according to the text, he hit her badly. I suppose that K’s awareness of his wealth and greed had something to do with the malicious, if not sadistic treatment he administered. That is, because he was known for his cruelty he was forced to become cruel all the more. Gradually, becoming more and more vain, he ended up losing all control.
Given K’s reputation and the foul ways he treated everyone in his estate, it is reasonable to assume that his attacker was one of his servants. One possible perpetrator could be the Korean man he kept in his home as his gardener. After K trampled freshly planted lilies, numerous individuals overheard the Korean make a threat against K’s life. Another incident, one which I personally witnessed, happened with a handsome Puerto Rican. Still, because K had so many enemies it is hard to say who it was who snuck into K’s bedroom one fated night and threw acid on his face.
This is all the book says about the incident: K’s screams filled every floor and every room, and he shooed away all of his attendants except the one he prized most. She tended to him tenderly throughout the rest of the night. The others overheard through the door: “Don’t look at me! I’m hideous”! The servant responded: “My eyes are shut, K. I see nothing. Like you.
The event caused K to retreat further into his mind. He fired all of his servants except this most special one who tended to him with eyes always clamped shut.
“You mustn’t open your eyes,” K implored time and again. “You can never let my appearance now diminish how you used to see me.”
“Fear not,” she responded time and again. Then, one day, the servant moved from K’s side and into the kitchen where she cut her eyes out.
“Where did you go,” K inquired.
She answered: “I am blind now. I will forever see your radiance in this darkness of mine. I shall never see your face again for as long as I live.”
“I am touched, K” said sheepishly. He put a hand on hers and blind lovers embraced.
A local writer of fiction is the only person with intimate knowledge of how these blind lovers spent their remaining days. K stopped accumulating wealth and the two of them rarely ventured beyond the estate walls. Nevertheless, I am told, the couple lived happily until K’s death. The woman supposedly said that even if the gods offered her her sight back she would refuse. But who really knows what to believe?
As I Descend from Grace
The second story of the hospital, the one with the special elevator, the one-way mirrors, and the guards, in spite of the tinsel and lights and Santa Clause cutouts taped to the walls, still looked like the second story of the hospital.
It still smelled like the second story of the hospital: like decay, as though there was a trashcan somewhere that needed to be emptied. It still felt like the second story of the hospital, slightly claustrophobic and completely purgatorial.
K wasn’t much in the Christmas spirit, was still, in fact, wearing the fancy pinstriped suit he had been arrested in a day and a half ago. His contacts irritated his eyes. He needed to throw them out, but then he wouldn’t be able to see – as if he didn’t feel debilitated enough already.
He rubbed the tiny, useless remnants of cocaine that were still in his pocket and smiled bitterly, pissed off that the cops confiscated the fancy belt that held up the fancy bottoms of his fancy suit. Ever since being deposited here he had to shuffle around in his socks like a crazy person, pinky fingers hooked in his belt loops. The hems of K’s expensive pants were matted down and creased. He was not in the mood for a party.
Yet it was the season for parties: Thanksgiving parties bled into Christmas parties like this one, which would then bleed into New Years parties, after which the year would take its usual shape like it always does.
Even in a place like this, populated with schizophrenics, drug addicts, and sad prom queens, a place with no clocks on the wall, a place where time comes to a stop: even here the holidays raged on; even here, you just knew it was Christmas.
“Excuse me,” came a lazy voice, distracting K from his revelry. K turned 180 degrees to find a man with crooked, sheepish eyes holding a large red piece of paper that looked like the letter T. In fact, it was the letter T. Had K been less self-absorbed, he would have noticed that the other patients were working diligently to cut from construction paper the letters for Christmas.
The man with the crooked eyes still had his blunt children’s scissors in his left hand. “This is for you,” he said in his lazy voice, handing over the paper letter. K was going to scold the man,, or at the very least wave him away with a flippant flick of his wrist. But K suddenly pictured the man murdering him with his children’s scissors. K suddenly pictured his blood splattering all over the Santa Clause cutouts. So he bashfully took the letter T and held it awkwardly like you hold an axe you don’t really want to swing.
The man with the crooked eyes bowed strangely and moved onto the next person, presenting the letter H like a Japanese man presenting his business card.
K observed the room, and the multiple other patients holding their respective letters. At some point, K reasoned, he was going to be assembled into a lineup of letters and made to perform the word Christmas. If he refused, he might be given a demerit and made to stay in this hell hole for who knows how long.
With a sigh K let himself slump onto an ugly beige love seat.
“What are you in for,” said the letter C, a blonde girl who had obviously been crying. Her voice had a slight rasp to it and probably sounded rather cute over the phone.
“Coke,” he said with a shrug. He was going to explain that he wasn’t really a coke guy, per se, just a guy who enjoyed elusive moments of false confidence, and it was either coke or Ritalin. But Ritalin isn’t really a lifestyle drug.
K didn’t say that. Instead he said this: “Just God’s way of telling me I have too much money, I guess.” His joke – lifted from a comedy special he saw on TV once – didn’t go over very well. She was obviously from a different income bracket, too poor to comprehend the punchline. Silence began to settle in.
“You,” he asked quickly, waving away the encroaching quiet. It was the letter C’s turn to shrug: “I swallowed a bunch of pills.” She shifted her body, which was perched stiffly on the seat next to his. “I wasn’t actually going to do anything bad,” she continued, letting her letter fall to the ground. “If I wanted to kill myself, I would have fucking killed myself, you know?”
K didn’t know what to say, so he fetched her paper letter from the floor and handed it back with a smile she did not return. K felt himself looking at her wistfully, a bad habit of his, so turned away before he put his foot in his mouth. Under ordinary circumstances K would not have been attracted to the letter C; he would have found her unnecessarily morose and her bangs unnecessarily sharp. But K didn’t have a lot of options on the second floor of the hospital. He turned back toward her, ready to say something stupid, but at some point she had started to cry uncontrollably. K watched with some interest as she ripped her letter to pieces and let the shards of paper fall through her fingers.
K knew what was about to happen. He moved away silently just as a horde of orderlies descended on the poor girl and carted her off through the ominous door that could only be unlocked by an administrator sitting behind Plexiglas. K fixated on her sandpapery voice until her curses and screams were too far away to be discerned.
Shit, now what do I do, K thought to himself, once again wrapped in boredom. Ever since being deposited in the mental ward, K felt as though he were rapidly losing his mind, a sad irony indeed. There was a dirty sign on the wall showcasing the hospital’s commitment to “mental hygiene.” This was also an irony, for K hadn’t been able to brush his teeth in nearly two days now.
He was unable to recall what, exactly, led to him being committed – he had been that strung out when the cops arrested him. All K knew was that he could not leave until some psychiatrist gave the okay. And this okay had yet to be given by anyone.
When he first arrived, his blood was drawn by a person of indeterminate gender. “You’ve tested positive for cocaine,” they disclosed to him some hours later.
“Well, yeah,” K retorted, a microaggression that probably explained why he was still milling around all these hours later.
In his left periphery, K could see the Christmas letters standing in an ill formed line. But now, given the girl’s outburst, there could only be Histmas. A couple of orderlies were helping to keep the letters from rearranging themselves. They seemed really into forming the word mash for some reason.
“We need you over here,” one of the orderlies hissed at K. So K slinked over and took his place between the S and the M, large men who were obviously lifers. They both wore ugly slippers and hospital-issued gowns that barely covered lumpy pale bodies that had not seen the sun in some time.
“Where’s the C?” one of the letters shouted in consternation. Wordlessly K pointed to the heap of paper where the girl had been sitting.
The Christmas letters began to agitate and shift like a waking dragon. There was moaning, followed by shouting, followed by violence. The Christmas letters began to hit each other and thrash each other. The R pushed the I to the ground and got in two good kicks before being tackled by the A. Letters went airborne as bodies crashed into each other.
There was a siren now, a repetitive awful droning on, which only exacerbated the confusion and hysteria. K slithered away from the mess, which was now a spectacle beheld by the entire floor. Those otherwise too crazy to play Christmas raced over to lend a fist or to cause trouble. Some tore the Santas from the walls, others hit the orderlies. One wrapped some tinsel around his neck and pulled.
K found his way into the admin office. It took him little time to locate the button that unlocked the door to the stairwell.
K didn’t know where he was going, but he held tightly to his paper letter as though it would guide him to some manifestation of safety. He was on the first floor now, but he could still hear the cacophony above. He was nervous, certain that he was going to get caught and made to stay in the psyche ward for weeks, if not months or years. Maybe he would be carted off to an actual prison. He quickened his pace, heading to nowhere in particular. If only he had shoes he would look normal; but those had been confiscated too.
K ducked into an open room to try and orient himself.
“I know you,” came the familiar voice of the letter C.
K turned to find her strapped to a hospital bed. “It happens,” she said without embarrassment. Sensing K’s discomfort, she continued: “They’re all upstairs. The doctors and stuff. What’s going on up there?”
“The other letters are upset because you ripped up your C. They can’t have Christmas now. I mean C is the most important letter.”
Her eyes settled on the paper letter in K’s hand. “Well, if you’re down here with me,” she said smiling, “they must be down to Hismas.”
K moved to the bed. “Here,” he said, laying his letter across her lap. “I need to go. Here’s something to remember me by.
She smiled: “Thanks T.”
“My name is K,” he corrected. Then K spun around and padded out of the room, fingers in his belt loops.
“A Christmas miracle,” he heard the girl shout behind him as his eyes found an illuminated exit sign.
Agent Provocateur
She wrapped both hands around my wrist and lifted my attention away from the tiny zipper on her equally tiny hotshorts. “Just so we’re clear, I don’t plan on having sex tonight.” Her words startled me. That sentence, so economical and precise, sounded like something from a pamphlet on sexual assault prevention. It sounded like a warning, an admonition, a heading off at the pass. In that moment I pictured her collecting brochures on sex and rape from the university clinic. “Sex happens on your terms,” one of her brochures probably exclaimed in bold capital letters. “Not on anyone else’s.”
Women my age treated sex like you treat a stray dog: if it hangs around long enough you’ll let it in and keep it with the others. To these women, sex wasn’t this event, this decision, this dance. It was more of an occurrence, a thing that happened. My immediate reaction to her bourgeoning feminist identity was a mixture of confusion and hostility: “Why the fuck not?” I wanted to ask in response to her declaration. I smiled instead and kissed her boringly on the mouth.
I knew very little about the pale twenty-one-year-old girl who, even as she so powerfully disavowed even the thought of sex, was busy slithering out of her tank top and wrinkling my Restoration Hardware duvet cover in the process. Until a week ago – when she emailed me to ask if I wanted “to get a drink sometime” – I considered her to be nothing more than another fidgety coed who took too many pictures of herself in the bathroom mirror. And now here she was, stripped down to nothing but her little white shorts and an expensive padded bra that simply accentuated the hollowness of her barely-legal chest. She came from a wealthy family and her bra – red and frilly and simply out of place on her as yet childish body – reflected a socioeconomic height I would never be able to reach. I recognized its signature fabric immediately: Agent Provacateur. I dated a rich British girl for a while who wore the same brand. We dated for about six months until she tried to kill me. We used to fight about her expensive lingerie: Wear something nice tonight, I would demand; What’s the point – you don’t keep my clothes on long enough to notice, she would counter.
The spry girl on my bed was not, I was confident, going to try to kill me. But I was slightly unnerved by her presence. She was a threat to my career, to what modicum of middle-class stability I had managed to scrape together since graduate school. She was a threat to my sense of self-worth. Is this what I had been reduced to? Really? Nevertheless, her vitality was invigorating, her innocence charming. I saw none of the anger, hurt, spite, and mistrust that mars the faces of women I meet in bars or on dating websites. She had no idea what was waiting for her. And I liked that. She was just beginning to understand the sexual power that women like her command and that they desire. I liked that too, even as I tried to ignore this growing sense of powerlessness within; thank God she’s leaving her shorts on I said to myself, while unhooking her expensive bra with a single gesture from a shamefully practiced hand.
Yet she, too, seemed practiced. With each item of clothing she tore from my body I felt increasingly exposed and vulnerable, like prey, like a chicken being trussed up in a butcher’s storeroom. She, the skilled predator, had exploited fears and insecurities in my masculine edifice. Otherwise I would have just turned down her invitation like any other adult would. Otherwise I would not have invited her over several days later, cooked for her, made a move on her that she had been patiently waiting for me to make.
“This isn’t a date,” I said in a professorial manner the first time we went out, when I picked her up outside her dorm. She smelled way too good, her legs were way too shiny, and her skirt way too short. She nodded in understanding. “You get why, right?” I continued. She nodded again. “Nothing can happen. It just wouldn’t be right,” I said, attempting to convince myself of my words of prudence. Her ghostly white skin, held gently by my car’s red leather interior, was the carnal canvas of my dreams. Her aura, young and dangerous, coiled itself around my neck before diving down my throat and reaching into my lungs.
My anxiety that night was unwarranted, probably a figment of some twisted fantasy I harbored. Every heterosexual man hopes to be destroyed by a beautiful woman, of course, and surely my time would come. This girl just wasn’t the type to end lives, at least not yet. Of that I was sure. She tended to show up in class cloaked in oversized gray hoodies and swallowed up by baggy gray sweatpants, giving her the appearance of a retired cartoon mouse nobody liked anymore. And that was precisely how I saw her – as some creature that scurried in and out of my 1 pm class two days out of the week. I saw nearly all of my girl students in this light. When friends or even girlfriends would ask if I ever got hit on, I would always laugh: “Girls who study literature don’t have vaginas.” This explanation seemed to make a lot of sense to those who asked, and they never broached the subject again. This was pure hyperbole, naturally; literary girls have literary vaginas, and they typically use them to develop intellectual crushes on figures like Jack Kerouac, Sylvia Plath, or Salman Rushdie. I took her far from campus that first night, someplace beyond the mundane shadow of academic life, someplace I wouldn’t run into any of my colleagues or, worse, any of her 1 pm classmates.
What would they say, my colleges; her classmates? They would, in their little huddles behind closed doors or sprawled out catlike on dorm room furniture, gossip and speculate. What was he thinking? In the minds of naysayers, there would have been little question of my questionable character. Exactly what sort of questionability would have left everyone for a loss. Just who is he, they would wonder to themselves, to each other, deciding that they didn’t know me and that I obviously didn’t know myself.
Twice, since the early 1990s, two male professors had been busted and subsequently dismissed for sexual misconduct. But these were old scandals, the parties concerned long retired or simply uninteresting – fat, dumpy sorts who invited no gossipy fantasy whatsoever. My student and I were different. She, almost coquettish in her asexuality, and me, obviously able to get action whenever I wanted, were the types you wanted to slander. Every now and then a case turned up, almost always a fat male professor professing his affection for an uninterested female student. As student advocacy groups and HR departments were quick to point out, these cases were always lopsided and easily parsed into instances of harassment or manipulation. Extreme actions usually never needed to be taken. But university administrators were always eager to make an example of out of anyone who would dare violate what amounted to the first commandment of university professordom.
But those who might mock or criticize my intent did not understand. Surely they had never experienced the life-giving qualities of skin so refreshing and effervescent. Otherwise they would keep their mouths shut. It wasn’t necessarily that this girl was a virgin per se (maybe she was maybe she wasn’t), so much as that she represented something ever unattainable, something ever past tense. Her body had yet to traumatized by childbirth or years of endless drinking and empty conquests. She had yet to live dangerously and recklessly and regretfully. Pressed against me, her bony, protuberant body offered me reprieve from my own sense of decay and deceit. She didn’t know what to do with her mouth or her tongue or her hands – but it didn’t matter. Her body’s youth leveraged my decay against me, slathered me in sadness and missed opportunities.
I jammed my fingers in her mouth, then I yanked her hair. I took her by the throat. I stirred with a strange desire to mark her body, to deface this virginal tribute, to make up for something lost, something missing within me.
“Is this okay,” I offered, my fist full of her blonde hair.
She nodded only, before pulling hard on my arm and sending her chin into the air. She let out a small sound, adorable and cartoonish. “Do that again,” she whispered, eyes closed. The cartoon quality of her voice was gone now, replaced by that of an individual groping for a sense of the topography of some undiscovered country.
She wrapped her hand around my fist and squeezed tightly. “Harder,” she demanded. I did as she ordered and took a worrisome pleasure from the way she twisted her child-like face into a snarl of sexual perversity. She dug her shoulder blades into my duvet cover. “Harder,” she huffed.
The British girl was the first one who ever asked me to knock her around. Yet inexperienced, I cowered and dithered in response. “Why,” I asked, rather like an idiot. She shrugged. “I like it, I guess. I was with this guy who was rough and it just, I don’t know, did it for me.” I didn’t respond well to any of that, especially not her opaque yet blatant reference to someone else. What kind of guy just does something like that to a woman’s body, I wondered. At the same time, I admired this stranger, this conquistador. His bravado was still written on the body of the woman I was with; it was in her skin. He owned her, whoever he was, in a way I would never be able to replicate. I was angry at her words and my own cowardice. So I tore her lacy thong from her hips and stuffed it in her mouth. This was the wrong thing to do. “What the fuck, K?” she yelled, pushing me off of her and spitting her thong out on my bed like a cat expelling a hairball. “That was expensive. It’s Agent Provocateur.” It wasn’t long after that that she stopped wearing things like that.
After the British girl was the forensic psychiatrist who entertained fantasies of rape and domestic violence. By then I was better at donning the mask of the aggressor. I always felt a little strange afterward, guilty and misogynistic. But those feelings eventually passed.
Other women came and went, executives, yoga teachers, cashiers, each with their own indulgent narrative in which I was merely a supporting character. I always did as I was asked, figuring that the day would come when I wouldn’t be able to take the mask off so easily, when I would be the man who grabs a girl by her neck without asking, with the haughty presumption of consent. I would be the man to whom all other men would be compared and measured.
Was I supposed to do that now, to the girl presently stifling her screams? Was I supposed to rob her of the very thing that made her different from the Brit, the psychiatrist, and all the others? At first, it was frustratingly boring to me that she didn’t want to have sex. But it made sense now, at least from my perspective. I didn’t want to be responsible for who she would be tomorrow, for the ruination to come. I didn’t want to be responsible for who I would be tomorrow. I didn’t want to take that experiential process – so baffling and confusing and arousing – away from her. I was the wrong person to do this with her.
I let go of her throat. “What the fuck,” she snarled. “Grab my bra and wrap it around my neck.” The moment I would forever return to in my memory was the moment I did as she asked. I snatched her Agent Provocateur from the floor and strung it around her neck and pulled. Its fine fabric was smooth between my fingers. I pulled again and she cried out.
“Take my shorts off,” she moaned, as my heart sank in sorrow for the both of us.
Green-eyed Monster
I used to tease her–“Your skin is so soft,” I’d say, “I want to peel it off you and wrap myself in it.” She would smile in reply, but her eyes were now cautious and alert as though I might actually do that.
When she invited me under her skin, I figured she was joking–all things considered. But she grabbed at the tattoo on her wrist and pulled up, revealing a small cavern.
I stuck a finger in. Then two. Then my left hand.
“Well,” she said blankly.
“Sorry,” I replied and climbed into the opening in her wrist. It was claustrophobic, and everything was tinted red.
I met a guy named “K” there. He was nice enough. “How long have you been here,” I asked this “K.” A long time, he said. He spoke of her fondly and of her wrist tattoo. I grew suspicious–because I was with her when she got that tattoo.
I attacked him in masculine rage. Then I felt myself being pulled from her skin.
“Look,” she said with disappointment. “I think we should see other people. Jealousy is so unattractive.”
Tenuous
She was convinced she was made of glass. Refusing to wear clothes or shoes, she laid only on the bed, wrapped herself only in the softest bedding.
“Stay away, K,” she would shrill. “I’m fragile.”
Atrocious
She yanked at her roots, both fists tangled with brownish/blonde hair. She had been doing it for weeks, eyes locked on herself in the bathroom mirror–tugging and pulling with all her might, until her eyes swelled with tears and her face twisted into a grimace.
It’s not going to grow any faster, I said in the most sympathetic way I could.
You just don’t get it, she spat, glaring at me in the mirror. For guys it’s different.
Everything changed the evening she came home with her new hair cut, the recommendation of an inept stylist whose theories of hair design have no place in reality. She hated me now, not because I did anything wrong. But rather because I was part of the world in which she, now seven inches shorter, had to live.
Just go away please. She pulled on her hair again. Her eyes were still hateful and I wondered, jokingly maybe, if she wanted me dead: one less person to scrutinize her exposed neck and comment on her earrings.
“You were wrong, K.” I woke to find myself floundering in a sea of her hair. She continued to say ominous things, but, because of the mass of hair, I couldn’t locate the source.
I felt myself being dragged under. It was either the undertow or something else.
The Abyss of Freedom
Something possessed him to enroll in a woodworking class at the community college. Which was fine.
Ever since she introduced him to the male members of her family – all tall, rich, and unfaithful to their wives and girlfriends – he sought to “up his man game.” She rolled her eyes whenever he said this and was secretly sad that he felt the need to be different. Nevertheless, every Wednesday for the past eight weeks he came home late. Which was fine. He was making her a clock.
When he climbed in bed – after showering, naturally – he dutifully whispered in her ear his progress. “It’s done,” he said softly. “It’s on the table.”
She jumped up, not bothering to put a stitch of clothing on (this did not bother him), and dashed to the dining room. It was an awful thing – uneven and splintery.
“K,” she said like a homeroom teacher, “it’s not even telling the right time.”
“I know,” he replied proudly. “It’s set to when we first kissed.”
She looked at him incredulously.
He explained. “Your eyes were closed and I looked at my watch. I wanted to remember.”
She began to cry, and he glanced down at his watch.