15
You see, this is why I hate Facebook.
Actually, there are a lot of reasons why I hate Facebook, prime among them being the fact that, despite hating Facebook, hating the very idea of it—its saccharine amity, its overweening groupiness, its inane, interminable blah, blah, blah—I’ve joined the nodding herd and posted a profile on it anyway, just like every-fucking-body else.
Yes, I’ve spent the time—way, way too much time—on my profile, deciding—no, it’s worse than that—painstakingly culling what’s cool and not cool to say about myself, what sounds right but is marginally true as well, or fibable if pressed.
I’ve taken the five hundred warped webcam snapshots of myself, been duly horrified by the results—am I really that rubber-faced? slab-nosed? droop-eyed? edemic?—and tried all the ameliorating effects—sepia, pencil sketch, black and white—but to no avail.
I’ve selected, from the measly offered list, what’s safe or advantageous for the world to know about me, which amounts to very little—name, hometown, relationship status (“Other”?). And in the end, I’ve clicked that oh-so-apposite submit button and posted my self’s thumbnail to the ether, like the love letter or the last orders hastily dispatched, going elsewhere, nowhere, and everywhere all at the same time.
Ridiculous.
But I submit.
To the religion of social networking.
And then what happens?
Well, exactly what you’d expect to happen. You get repeated, rapid-fire friend requests from all the fuckups, lamebrains, asswipes, and outcasts that you never kept in touch with all these years for a reason, and you find out they’ve become exactly what you’d expect them to have become: married, kidded accountants, salesmen, software designers, and schoolteachers, all posting this year’s crop of family photos from the mid-March getaway on the Mexican Riviera or the Oktoberfest booze-up/corn maze with the kids.
And then, of course, there’s the thimbleful of people you actually want to find who, apparently, don’t want you to find them, and for all the same reasons stated above. You’re their good-riddance classmate, cabinmate, teammate, regretted hand job, rim job, spit swap of whichever sad and shady stage of life and venue where the floor was tacky underfoot and the goings-on were best (and, thus, ruthlessly) repressed.
Friend request ignored.
Sure, you make a few connections on Facebook. Emphasis: few.
But you spend the rest of the time marveling at why it is that Jimmy or Joanie or whichever other generic and superfluous Your Name Here that you, in a moment of weakness, accepted as your friend thinks you give a rat’s ass that they are, at this very moment, having a glass of conscientious Pellegrino in the tub and reading Eat, Pray, Love for the fourth time aloud to imminent progeny number three—it’s a girl!—in utero.
I mean, fuck.
And yet, as I found out today when I logged on to my account, if it could—and, yes, I’m here to tell you that indeed it can—it gets worse. Because not only is Facebook home to the mind-numbingly logorrheic stay-at-home mom and the quietly desperate actuary languishing in his six-by-six-foot cubicle. It’s also home to that holed-up cyber-psycho who has a special message just for you.
Or for me, as it happens.
And no, thank you, the rank ironies are not lost on me here. It couldn’t have happened to a ruder pest. The peeker is being poked. The spier has been spied. I get it.
Nicky boy has a friend request from a stalker who is calling himself Iris Gray.
Iris Gray.
Can you beat that?
No photo, natch. Instead, per Facebook’s template, just the blank outline of a male. Silhouette. White on blue. A male.
Okay, whatever.
But it’s the message attached that’s the real eye-burner.
It says simply: “What about those pink notes?”
A strong opening move, wouldn’t you say?
King’s pawn to D4, or something.
Not that I play.
But this player definitely has my attention.
And then some.
I’d even go so far as to say I’m scared. Truly. I mean, it was one thing to keep finding these notes, convinced, as I had pretty well become, that it was all my own work—and the excessive drinking that was making me forget. But now it’s official. Someone else knows. Someone else is in possession.
Of the paperwork, or its implications, at least. And maybe more.
It’s Gruber, of course.
Who else could it be?
Unless it’s one of Gruber’s boys, but I can’t see that. What’s the possible motivation or means? Mental means, I mean.
Eric’s in a crate half his life, and when he’s not, having been rendered semiretarded by this treatment, either he’s at special school still trying to grasp the rock-bottom rudiments of the three R’s or he’s in front of the tube playing ultraviolent futuristic war games on Xbox.
Jeff and I are pals and see each other often. No grudge there, or I’d know about it.
J.R. is so steeped in anabolic steroids and militia camps I doubt he’s even on the grid. At the breakfast table not long ago, he announced that the U.S. Armed Forces were too PC for him to bother with—“too concerned about civilian casualties to get the job done in the sandbox.”
I’m sure by now he’s been so indoctrinated by the weekend warrior set that he thinks computers are Orwell’s telescreens, part of the vast government panopticon watching us. If he knew about the cameras, he wouldn’t be in the least surprised, and he sure as shit wouldn’t write to me on Facebook. He’d kick in the back door, throw a hood over my head, and spirit me upstate to one of his deer hunters’ goon forts where I’d wake up in a circle of inbred Dave types feasting on muskrat and questioning my loyalty to the secessionist U.S. of A.
Mrs. B. is the only other person who knows about that bird, or knows that it’s alive and well, and she would never use its name as a pseudonym. Just thinking of Iris made her cry. Besides, she’d never use a pseudonym, much less designate herself as male. She’d never use the Internet. She doesn’t even have a computer.
But then again, neither does Gruber.
Does he?
Not in his study anyway.
Yeah, but between them, his boys must have more hardware than they can keep track of. Judging by the look of the basement, that house must be a graveyard of motherboards. Besides, there are always Internet cafés and Internet courses for idiots free at the public library.
It’s Gruber.
That Nazoid.
He’s found the cameras.
Either that or Dave and Dorris have hired him as their bodyguard for Miriam.
That’s possible.
Absurd, but possible.
Gruber would know Dave as the perpetrator of Eggnacht, if nothing else, and given Gruber’s flaunted heritage and general comportment toward anyone whom he even suspects of being sub-Caucasian, I’d be surprised if he didn’t send St. George’s oaf a commendation on behalf of the Aryan Brotherhood when he saw Jack Gordon with egg on his face splashed across all the local papers for weeks.
Either way, alone or in Dave and Miriam’s employ, it’s Gruber.
Gotta be.
Gruber, who thinks he’s being all stealth calling himself Iris Gray because he doesn’t know that I know that he still has that bird jailed in his study piping the sonnets of Robert Frost in a perfect imitation of Robin Bloom.
Or does he know it?
No. That’s paranoid.
Even if he did find the camera in his pencil sharpener, how in hell would he trace it to me? And wouldn’t he be just as likely to do what J.R. would do in the same circumstance? Walk across our adjoining patch of grass and put me in a wheelchair?
I dunno. Maybe he’s learned a thing or two about restraint in the hopes of spending his retirement as a free man.
How likely is that, though, really?
A lifetime of brute force without even so much as a Filofax, and suddenly he’s the cunning hint dropper of the photon dot? The friend finder of Facebook? And more unlikely still, the stealth pink planter of black valentines?
Nick, man, your nerves have gotten the better of you. Take a breath. Have a piece of Nicorette and use your head. Chew on this for five and get a grip.
Right. Okay.
Question: So who’s left?
Answer: Jeff.
Question: No, come on?
Answer: Yeeees. Think it through.
Have I been too quick to dismiss my singles partner?
Really? Jeff? Clean Jeff?
He is the only one in that house who’s brainy and tame enough to do it. There is that. But why? I can’t figure it.
He’d probably be thankful for the cameras—fodder for his day in court if he ever got one. Besides, I’ve never filmed him doing anything in the least incriminating, or even embarrassing. The guy’s a machine of schoolwork, workouts, and sleep. He’s like a prisoner of conscience in his own home. Model inmate.
But what do I know?
What did I know about Monica?
True.
Maybe that’s why he’s so withdrawn and impersonal, never much for talking over beers after a game. I always thought it was life in H-block that had rendered him near mute, but maybe it’s me. Maybe all this time he’s been playing not tennis but chess.
Oh, Christ. Who cares? I don’t have the energy to speculate anymore. At this point it hardly matters. The game is on and I’m ready.
Do your worst, Iris Gray, my man, whoever you are.
Let’s see what you got.
Friendship, is it, you’re requesting?
Or a duel?
Fine.
Click.
I accept.
Meanwhile, today I finally had the stomach to go downstairs and check out what might be going on at Dorris’s place. I haven’t dared to look since Dorris as Mother Brown gave me tonsillitis of the scrotal sack on my own front stoop. What’s more, I haven’t cared to look since Dave pulled his whole Law & Order: Special Victims Unit routine a few days later.
I actually yanked out the wires on the monitors, Katzes’ numbers 1, 2, and 3, and they stayed yanked until this evening when close scrutiny of the Grubers yielded nothing more than the usual lobotomized Ellie lambent before the light-emitting diode in the living room, Gruber himself in his study lovingly fellating the snub nose of his Walther PPK, and Iris, inspired as ever, interjecting spots of Hopkins, I think it was, at intervals.
My heart in hiding stirred for a bird.
There was no sign of the boys.
I had to change the channel.
On KatzBO, the only news I got of the hostage Miriam was through Dave and Dorris’s conversations about her, which of course took place postcoitus with the two of them flopped like a couple of leopard seals after a meal, seeping sebum and electrolytes onto the black sateen sheets. Word was, Miriam was conducting a strike of sorts in her room, door locked, lights out, and Justin Bieber on repeat crooning at his bluest and mooniest.
Bless her, she maintained my innocence of all but sympathy and kindness, or so said Dave, who had been assigned the wearisome task of prying the truth out of her, or whichever distortion of the truth would best suit Dave and Dorris’s need for a scoundrel to blame their damage on.
She held firm, Miriam did, even in the face of bribes to do otherwise, or so claimed the exasperated Dave, pounding the teak headboard with his fist.
“She won’t give,” he shouted. “She won’t fucking give.”
“Shhh, baby,” cooed Dorris. “Shhh.”
Baby?
There is no hell where Dave is anyone’s baby.
“Listen,” Baby said, hefting his wet bulk onto an elbow, “can’t we just take her to a doctor?”
“Are you crazy?” Dorris wailed.
“No. No, listen. I mean, can’t we just take her in and say, ‘Hey, Doc, can you take a look and tell us if anyone’s been messing with her?’”
“If anyone’s been messing with her? I can’t believe what I’m hearing. What do you want him to do, a pap smear? She’s ten, Dave.”
“No, I know, but I mean, can’t the guy just get out his headlamp and find out if her Heimlich is still intact?”
“Hymen, you idiot. It’s hymen. Even I know that. And no, he can’t. No geriatric pediatrician is going to go spelunking around in my daughter, especially not without Jonathan finding out about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s in the field, genius. Pediatrics. They all know each other. Trust me, he’d find out.”
“Well, can’t we go out of state and find some hole-in-the-wall, low-budgie guy who’d give us what we want?”
“Low-budgie? This isn’t a snuff film, you complete shithead. This is my daughter. My God. What am I doing? What am I doing?”
She leapt out of bed, enraged.
“Get out,” she screamed, pointing savagely at the door. “Get out of my house.”
“What, baby? What?” said Baby.
She tore the covers off the bed.
“Get the fuck out. NOW!”
Dave slid to a sitting position, legs akimbo, all flaps and folds and mounds of flesh.
“All right, all right. Don’t lose your shit. I’m going.” He groaned, throwing his feet to the floor.
“Damn right you’re going.” Dorris sneered.
After that, the usual screeching and cursing that Dorris had done with Jonathan went on for a while between the two of them as Dave dressed. Dorris did all the screeching, while Dave merely grunted a series of nasty, half-inaudible asides as he searched for his clothes and other accumulated belongings under and around the furniture. He threw everything into a couple of pillowcases and walked out without a parting shot or even a glance in Dorris’s direction, as if he’d just had the sudden urge to do some spring cleaning and had forgotten that Dorris was even there.
Dorris collapsed in a heap on the floor in the pile of covers she’d ripped from the bed, wailing herself senseless until, exhausted, she fell into a juddering trance and finally a leaden sleep. At some point later in the evening, I checked the monitor again and saw that Miriam had joined her, spooned in on the near side.
As expected, the reply from Iris Gray was prompt. Friend request acceptance accepted. Then an invitation to chat on the IM. The lower right-hand corner of the screen popped up.
“Hello.”
I obliged.
“Hello.”
“Thank you for accepting my request. I know the subject is touchy, but I needed to get your attention.”
“So you have it. Now what?”
There was a long pause on the other end, so I opened a file in Word to keep a transcript. Here’s how it went.
Iris: “Now we get acquainted.”
“I’m not in the mood to dance,” I replied.
“So don’t dance.”
Long pause. I could think of nothing to say to this. Then Iris again.
“Talk to me.”
“I am.”
Pause again. Then me again.
“I don’t like being manipulated.”
“I’m not manipulating you. There was no other way.”
“Why no other way?”
“Because you had to see for yourself.”
“What did I have to see?”
“The notes. The evidence. The handwriting.”
“And why did I have to see it?”
“Because you wouldn’t have believed me.”
“You don’t know that. And now I don’t know what to believe.”
“Maybe not, but trust me, this was the kindest way.”
“What do you mean, the kindest way?”
“The kindest way to tell you. To show you.”
“Yeah, well, trust me, it’s not kind.”
“None of this will be easy. You’ve been through a lot. I know that.”
“Then why not leave me alone?”
“Because you want to know.”
“Know what?”
“What I have to tell you.”
“Then just tell me. I told you I didn’t want to dance.”
“I will tell you. But slowly. There’s a lot to know, and it will take time.”
“I’d rather just have it out and over with.”
“It will be, eventually. But not all at once.”
“Who are you to decide what I should know when?”
“I’m trying to help you.”
“Or fuck with me. How do I know you know anything worth knowing?”
“It’s not a question of worth.”
“So you don’t want money?”
“God, no! Whatever gave you that idea?”
“Money to destroy the evidence. Seems pretty straightforward to me.”
“The evidence belongs to me. I will never destroy it.”
“Then what’s the fucking point?”
“I told you. You needed to know. You deserve to know.”
“Or maybe there’s nothing to know, and you’re just having fun at my expense.”
“Calm down.”
“Fuck you. You plant crazy notes trying to frame me for something horrible, and you expect me to be calm.”
“No one’s framing anyone. Relax.”
“I say again. Fuck you.”
“I think you may be confused.”
“Uh. Negative, asshole. Not confused. Just really, really pissed off.”
“Don’t be. Look, Nick. The notes can’t harm you. But you have to go slowly.”
“How about I rip out your liver slowly?”
“In the end, if that’s what you want, then be my guest. Maybe I deserve it. But just hear me out.”
“Then fucking talk.”
“I am. I will. But you’re going to have to trust me.”
“I will never trust you.”
“That wasn’t a request.”
And that’s where Iris blipped out. I sent three or four more stabs, but no answer. Just the slow blinking of the cursor. Black on white.
About an hour later I got a message in my inbox. It said: “I’ll be in touch. Trust me.”
Goddamned manipulative son of a bitch.
I have no choice.
Since he’d started seeing Dorris, Dave hadn’t been at his place much, but now, after the Heimlich maneuver and its aftermath, he was back to his old ways. Homebody nothin’ doin’, holed up in his home theater smoking dope and watching movies so bad they’d gone straight to video unrated, and so loud and grossly special-effected they made the house beams shake.
I knew him in this mode. Had been there, asphyxiated by my own brown breath, sealed tight in his subbasement, and buffeted borderline retarded by the sound track of Demoniad III: The Pains of Hell booming at me through five channels. That entertainment center was like something out of A Clockwork Orange, and Dave in it was like something out of Kafka, or a cheeky commercial for pest control: a giant roach smoking a roach.
I knew what he was doing even if I couldn’t always see it—the cameras were still upstairs in the Sanizephyr and the antiquated DVD, which Dave now used exclusively for nightcap porn. But I knew what Dave was doing because I knew Dave. He wasn’t complicated. He was lying back and letting Mama Kitty lick his wounds for him, because tongue therapy with Mommy was all bonking Dorris had ever been about. Mama Kitty was the first whore. There would never be another. He’d lie in her smothering embrace for a while longer, and then he’d be back out in the scene, looking for her next epigone.
I was making bets on how long it was going to take for my doorbell to start ringing again. Either that or I’d see him at the Swan with his nose in a pint of pale ale and his dick in a sling, blubbering to himself like an old hobo about the great injustices of the world and the cold treachery of womankind.
Most of us drink to make the rest of the world palatable to us, but Dave drank to make himself palatable to others. He figured, rightly as it turned out, that his cerebrum was only sophisticated enough to chew gum or walk down the street, not the idiomatic two at once. Thus, if he was drunk—language center compromised, motor function deranged—all his remaining brainpower would be given over to trivia—standing, leaning, bringing glass to lips—and he’d be constitutionally incapable of insulting anyone or, in fact, of doing anything more injurious (to himself or others) than braying at passersby in the parking lot. And that, only if he wasn’t simultaneously taking a piss.
That was the mistake he’d made with Dorris. He’d let slip a clearheaded lacuna between bouts of effortful dishevelment and—whomp!—out had flopped Little Lord Schnastypants with his parasitic twin Ignoramus attached, and the honeymoon was over. The workings of Dave’s mind were revealed, and the horror of recognition dumped in Dorris’s lap like a placenta.
There Dorris, having lapsed carelessly into sobriety herself, beheld all at once the full and terrible form of the hydra-headed shegetz in her bed and, what’s more, the clear and present danger he posed to her ten-year-old female child, whom, she then realized, he regarded as little more than a junior hole.
She’d known, of course, about Jack Gordon et al’s treatment at Dave’s hands all those years ago, and the insidious ramifications thereof—never forget!—but she’d convinced herself that the skinhead had grown out his hair, had hung his Bova boots in the garage, had expunged the offending hieroglyph from the epidermis of his left deltoid, what have you. He’d changed. She herself had changed him by the very fact of their congress.
Besides, as she told herself in the mirror when the weak-signaled distress calls of her conscience could sometimes be heard above the brainstorm of alcohol and drugs, assuaging her lust with one of the unbrissed was really no worse than succumbing to the occasional BLT.
Is it any wonder then that the dawning of sense came down so hard and heavy on them both? Or so quickly? It saw its chance and it took it. Two sots sober at the same time and so much—shall we say cultural?—volatility between them. It was like a critical imbalance of nature rectifying itself with a bang. The ill-fated strike of lightning undone the second time around.
“Phew!” said God and all the angels when it was done. “That was a close fucking call.”
And it was, too.
Better to have Dave back at the Swan or in his basement debilitating himself—in either case, for the public good.
Alternatively, his keeping would be back on me.
A reluctant brother.
But, ach, I tell myself.
Don’t fight it.
This is all part of the punishment.
But Miriam. I felt responsible for her. And something else, too. Drawn, I suppose. Curious in a way that made me squirm and still suspect that there was some truth to what Dorris and Dave had accused me of, even if Miriam herself had denied it. Maybe it wasn’t the truth of having violated or coveted her, or even of having attempted however ineptly to seduce her that drunken night while Dave and Dorris were safely out of eye and earshot in the kitchen.
But there has been more contact since then.
I confess.
Although I do not know how to feel about it.
My clearest time of day—I’ve said—is late afternoon when I am writing this and prodding myself to life with all the iridescent gels and syrups of the convenience store and the galloping black bile of the barista.
As cruel coincidence would have it—this is also just about the time of day when those straggling dribs and drabs of public schoolers are taking their ill-advised and too entitled shortcuts home across the backyards of iffy neighbors like me. School must be out by now for summer, or very close, and remedial courses begun. Most kids are playing video games all day at this time, or watching movies, or heading off to camp.
But not Miriam.
She bows beneath the burden of her book bag, eyes on her feet. She knows the way so well. She cuts down the property line between Gruber and me, having crossed the main road behind my house and crept into the subdivision the back way through a door of loose planks in my fencing.
I’ve gotten so I can time this, three forty-five or thereabouts, sitting at the table in the kitchen, sipping, eyes over the brim, scanning for the sneakered foot, skinny leg, half-girl to slide through the slit of pine picket and out, full body, into view.
She lingers under the apple tree sampling the new-sprung fruit. Finding it sour, she stomps the rottens on the ground instead, if there are any so early in the year. She likes the way they splat and flatten into cakes that she can pick up and fling.
She finds a clear spot and sits. She has a family of dolls in her bag, which she removes and assembles in the grass, tilting them on their stiff legs to make them speak: whole listing, jerking conversations, back and forth, right hand to left hand and left to right, her face giving wild expression to their dance.
She looks up at the house occasionally, but sees nothing. Or I think she sees nothing, because her expression does not change. The mouth is a weak bow of longing and the eyes are like caves in her face. She stares, she scans the sun-blazed windows of the house for movement, as if they, too, are unfathomable eyes, and then, downcast, she goes back to what she is doing.
The dolls tussle and shout, throwing stiff-limbed punches and kicks, hurling insults in Miriam’s voice. Then, abruptly, they stop, and Miriam sits breathing, holding the figures apart. Slowly, slowly they come together, and there is the relief of an embrace, the rigid heads unmeeting, the cartwheeled arms and legs turning on the dry axis of the chests grinding like the foci of five-pointed stars.
And then there are tears coming down her face, washes of them in sheets. Her cheeks and chin glisten. Her lungs sputter and protest like flustered wings in the cage of her chest, and a rain of sputum comes down in front of her.
It must tell you everything about me that I do not go to her then. That I do not open the door and go out and take her in my arms and cradle her to calm. Not as many times as I have seen it. I have not gone.
Instead I sit in fascination, the live picture framed in the window, so perfectly real, this interior life outside, for me, and voluntary. A prayer, a sacrifice, a ritual. It is the doing and the loneliness that count, and would make no sense if someone answered.
She leaves me offerings, or arts. A fallen starling, so softly dead, rung round with wreaths of berries and branches and sprigs of greens and dandelion. A trail of pebble cairns leads to a small trench, furrowed by dirty fingers, and in it there are figures she has fashioned out of sticks and bundled grass. They are gathered over plates and cups made of wrappers, bottle caps, and broken glass.
As I watch her there on the ground, crouched small, assiduous, answering the urge, so female, to make her plastic figurines enact relationships and eat and drink from tea sets made of trash, I wonder what it is to be a girl, vulnerable for life, who will never grow into a form that can protect her from the prying eyes and minds of men like me. She is what she will always be in this world, an animator by craft, a greenhorn yearning in a dry world to wring emotion from dead things.
And I am what I have always been, a vacuum of personality sucking its only substance through the holes in its skull. What I have seen, what I have heard, I am. The pastiche of stolen words and pictures that belong to other people and places has become the hodgepodge of me. Things observed, overheard, remembered wrong. Things that I do not even understand are there in me, sewn in, waving in the wind of an inspection, saying: This guy has absolutely no idea who he is. He’s made it all up, and I’m the proof of it.
You cannot expect such a person to go saving people, fantasies of same notwithstanding, even when the drowning man in question is a little girl crying her pipes out in his backyard and leaving handicrafted signals of distress in every bush and cranny. He simply cannot help. He cannot act, because that is information going in the wrong direction—out—when he is only ever taking in, absorbing, copying—and that, poorly.
It’s no good.
I’m not going to do anything.
And yet I watch. I wait for her and I watch, and I think she knows I’m watching. Yes, she knows. Of course she knows. We are communicating, if only in the deferred language of objects.
I put a crow’s feather upright in the ground at the head of her starling, and a canopy of bright leaves over her tea party. I put the print of my hand in a clearing of soil at the base of the apple tree, and beside it she puts the print of her own.
Back at Facebook, I’ve been waiting on Iris. Waiting for his information, if he has any.
Over and over, I’ve kept thinking about what he said.
“You needed to know. You deserve to know.”
Deserve?
“Deserve” was not a word I would have expected from an extortionist, or even a whistle-blower for that matter, unless it was followed by the words “to die” or “to be gang-raped in prison like the rest of your chicken-hawking kind.”
I mean, it’s weird. This guy thinks he’s got me on child rape, right? So why is he taking care of me, or seeming to? Why take the “kindest way”? And if I’m the author of these notes, then what could he tell me that I don’t already know? He doesn’t know I’m blocked on the memory. Yet he said, “I think you may be confused.” Confused how? Confused as in, you, wretched pedophile, caught in the grip of your monstrous perversion, aren’t thinking straight. You don’t know that little girls are not for the taking. You can’t see the right way. So now I, equalizer/vigilante therapist, am here to set you straight. Was that it? Or was he using “confused” euphemistically, like some hit man in a gangster movie as the prelude to a really ugly move? As in, let me help you get clear here, pal. The ground rules are these. Snap.
And yet he said I could torture him in the end if that’s what I wanted. So how does that make any sense?
There’s nothing to do but wait.
And trust.
I can see the appeal of letting myself fall into someone else’s hands, advisedly or not. It doesn’t matter. The slipping feeling, the ease of it is intoxicating in a new way. To be led blindly and not to resist. To exercise no choice but this one. To follow. And after that, all the following is done without thinking. It simply proceeds, like water flowing through channels, finding the weak points and carving new ones very slowly, unnoticeably, without pain, until there is a gash of its passage through rock.
I recognize in this the appeal of my sexual past as expressed in my body through sport. There is, of course, the surge of victory, of domination, which we are all supposed to be in it for. The win. But there is something incredibly erotic in a loss, especially a loss that is delivered on the other end, as in tennis, with balletic ease. The volleyer praised for his touch and his soft hands places the ball in the corners, an elegant slice, a curt punch, and the running man on the baseline, all feet, scampering, desperate, outpaced by a sliding, taunting, floating untouchable shot.
Put that way, I accept. Fully now, without caveat, I accept.
I will be led and—laughing now at this next bit—pummeled softly.
How dime-store is that?