I remember one night with F. as he drove down the highway to Ottawa where he was to make his Maiden Speech in Parliament the next day. There was no moon. The headlights flowed over the white posts like a perfect liquid eraser, and behind us we abandoned a blank blueprint of vanished roads and fields. He had pushed it up to eighty. The St. Christopher’s medal pinned to the felt above the windshield was involved in a tiny orbit lately initiated by a sharp curve.
– Take it easy, F.
– It’s my night! My night!
– Yes it is, F. You finally made it: you’re a Member of Parliament.
– I’m in the world of men.
– F., put it back. Enough is enough.
– Never put it back when it gets like this.
– My God! I’ve never seen you so big! What’s going on in your mind? What are you thinking of? Please teach me how to do it. Can I hold it?
– No! This is between me and God.
– Let’s stop the car. F., I love you, I love your power. Teach me everything.
– Shut up. There is a tube of sun cream in the glove compartment. Open the glove compartment by depressing the button with your thumb. Dig into the tangle of maps and gloves and string and extract the tube. Screw off the cap and squeeze a couple of inches of cream into my palm.
– Like this, F.?
– Yeah.
– Don’t shut your eyes, F. Do you want me to drive?
Oh, what a greasy tower he there massaged! I might as well have addressed myself to the missing landscape we flung in our wake, farm houses and oil signs bouncing like sparks off our fenders as we cut open the painted white line at ninety, fast as an acetylene saw. His right hand beneath the steering wheel, urging, urging, he seemed to be pulling himself into the far black harbor like a reflexive stevedore. What beautiful hair poked out of his underwear. His cufflink gleamed in the maplight, which I had switched on the better to witness the delicious operation. As his cupped hand bobbed faster the needle tickled ninety-eight. How I was torn between the fear for my safety and the hunger to jam my head between his knees and the dashboard! Whish! went an orchard. A Main Street flared up in our headlights – we left it in cinders. I longed for the little wrinkles of his tightening scrotum to trap the tatters of my lips. F.’s eyes closed suddenly as if they had been squirted with lemon. His fist closed hard around the pale slippery shaft and he commenced to throttle himself madly. I feared for the organ, feared and coveted it, so hard it gleamed, streamlined as a Brancusi, the swelled head red and hot as a radioactive fireman’s helmet. I wanted an anteater’s tongue to whip off the wet pearl which F. himself now noticed and with a happy violent motion incorporated into the general lubrication. I could bear my loneliness no longer. I ripped the buttons of my old-fashioned European trousers in my frenzy to touch myself as a lover. What a handful of blood I was. Zoom! A parking lot blazed and expired. The warmth spread through leather gloves which I had not time to remove. Kamikaze insects splashed against the glass. My life was in my hands, all the messages I longed to deliver to the Zodiac gathered to begin their journey and I moaned with the intolerable pressure of pleasure. F. was screaming gibberish, his spit flying in all directions.
– Face me, face me, face me, suck bright, suck bright, F. wailed (if I remember the sounds correctly).
Thus we existed in some eye for a second: two men in a hurtling steel shell aimed at Ottawa, blinded by a mechanical mounting ecstasy, the old Indian land sunk in soot behind us, two swelling pricks pointing at eternity, two naked capsules filled with lonely tear gas to stop the riot in our brains, two fierce cocks separate as the gargoyles on different corners of a tower, two sacrificial lollipops (orange in the map light) offered to the ruptured highway.
– Ay ay ay ay ay! cried F. from the very top of his ladder.
– Slof tlif, sounded the geysers of his semen as they hit the dashboard (surely the sound of upstream salmon smashing their skulls on underwater cliffs).
As for me, I knew that one more stroke would deliver me – I hovered on the edge of my orgasm like a parachutist in the whistling doorway – I was suddenly forlorn – I was suddenly without desire – I was suddenly more awake (for this fraction of a second) than ever before in my whole life –
– The wall!
The wall occupied the whole windshield, first as a blur, then focused precisely as if an expert had adjusted the microscope – every pimple of the concrete three-dimensional – bright! precise! – fast film of the moon’s hide – then the windshield blurred again as the wall rushed into the glass of the headlights – I saw F.’s cufflink skimming the edge of the steering wheel like a surfboard –
– Darling! Ehhhffff….
– Rrrrriiiiippppp, went the wall.
We passed through the wall because the wall was made of a scrim of painted silk. The car bumped over an empty field, the torn fabric clinging to the chrome Mercedes hood emblem. The undamaged headlights illumined a boarded-up hot-dog stand as F. applied the brake. On the wood counter I noticed an empty bottle with a perforated cap. I stared blankly at it.
– Did you come? asked F.
My prick hung out of my fly like a stray thread.
– Too bad, said F.
I started to shiver.
I placed my clenched fists on the top of the dashboard and laid my forehead on them, weeping in spasms.
– We went to a lot of trouble rigging the thing up, renting the parking lot and all.
I jerked my face toward him.
– We? What do you mean “we”?
– Edith and I.
– Edith was in on it?
– How about that second just before you were about to shoot? Did you sense the emptiness? Did you get the freedom?
– Edith knows about our filthy activities?
– You should have kept on with it, my friend. You weren’t driving. There was nothing you could do. The wall was on top of you. You missed a great come.
– Edith knows we’re fairies?
I threw my hands at his neck with a murderous intention. F. smiled. How thin and puny my wrists looked in the dim orange light. F. removed my fingers like a necklace.
– Easy. Easy. Dry your eyes.
– F., why do you torture me?
– O my friend, you are so lonely. Each day you get lonelier. What will happen when we are gone?
– None of your fucking business! How dare you presume to teach me anything? You’re a fake. You’re a menace! You’re a disgrace to Canada! You’ve ruined my life!
– All these things may be true.
– You filthy bastard! How dare you admit they’re true?
He leaned forward to switch on the ignition and looked at my lap.
– Button up. It’s a long cold drive to Parliament.