Justine pressed her face into the floor, rubbing her cheek against the porous smelly wood, trying to scrape through her drunkenness. Darkness moved around her; she could barely feel the welts rising on her back. Her knees hurt, she thought. He beat her as she squirmed on the floor, caught in the steel trap that had closed on her when she was five years old. The upper strata of her thoughts and feelings had ruptured, and the creature long trapped beneath was out and gnawing her with its teeth.

She felt him drop down on his knees to fuck her and she turned away from him, rolling on her back. “I don’t want your cock,” she said. “I want you to make yourself soft and piss on my cunt.”

She lay panting on the floor as he stood at the counter pouring beer down his throat. Silence imploded in her ears. She turned her head to stare at her shoe lying on its side.

That night at dinner he had told her stories of his travels in Southeast Asia.

He had walked through the Patagandrian rain forest with kind, dark guides who showed him where to find edible plants and roots to drink from, and who told him stories based on their dreams. The paths in the forest were so hard that his shoes were destroyed in a week, they were so rugged that he could not walk on them without falling again and again. If you cut your foot in the forest, he said, you could get an infection and die in days. His guides had feet that were tougher than shoes and they taught him how to walk in the forest, they taught him how to read direction on the bark of trees and the hairs of moss.

He traveled weeks without seeing the sky, when the sun was an article of faith through the emerald roof of the forest. He saw pale-hued flowers that bloomed at night, giant spiders bejewelled with bright hoary pustules, salamanders with tiny palpitant throats, sudden storms of butterflies and plant roots that tore through the earth with erotic violence. He saw a man covered with animal tattoos carrying an old-fashioned washing machine through the jungle on his back. He saw villages where people danced to Prince and Beach Boys tapes, and predicted the future with the entrails of pigs. He hunted boar with parties of men and half-wild dogs. He murdered animals for the pleasure of watching them die. He was mistaken for an evil spirit and almost butchered by a frightened woman with a machete. He talked her out of it, and gave her his Swatch watch, assuring her it would protect her from any cruel spirit.

After two years he returned to Manhattan and was totally disoriented. He felt as if the cab bearing him home from the airport was taking him into hell. It was early December and, trapped in the stultification of the holiday traffic uptown, he viewed legions of shoppers marching the streets at what seemed an insane and martial speed, their expressions of frozen emotion covered with willful oblivion. Mechanical elves and dummy children in the windows of Bloomingdale’s beat their cymbals and screamed with joy around the tree. Human beggars extended their hands into the neurotic throng, like thirst-parched men sticking their cupped hands out into the rain which, thoughtless and unfeeling though it is, will provide them with enough drops to survive.

She listened, impressed by his bravery and ingenuity and uneasy with the combination of condescension and fondness with which he described the forest people. She saw him again as she had seen him on their first meeting, a mobile little sphinx with shifting surfaces encouraging her to admire its mystery and then contemptuously shedding that mystery like an old skin, laughing at her as she puzzled over the empty skin. It occurred to her that perhaps he felt so comfortable in Southeast Asia because it wasn’t possible to pull this act there; people wouldn’t understand it. He was probably forced by language and cultural barriers to interact on a fundamental human level; this being an experience he’d never had before in his life, it was probably a great novelty as well as a great relief.

He leaned naked against the counter drinking beer so he’d have some piss when the moment came. His body had a tense, frenetic, rigid quality, it was completely stripped of its animal nature. And out of his face, emerging as if his cells had subtly changed shape, came the stiff visage of something old, mechanical, and unfeeling. She felt that this thing was part of him, and that if it had taken a different turn in its development, it could’ve been a natural element of his self, but that it had instead gotten stuck in a crawl space somewhere, neglected and denied contact until it had grown into this creature that appeared to come over him like a transfiguration.

“Play with yourself,” he said. “Stick your fingers in your cunt.”

She did what he said; she was wet, swollen, tender, and numb. She masturbated expertly and felt nothing. She was aware of her humiliation, but it was so far away and had so little to do with her that she couldn’t feel that either. Still, she clung to it fiercely, as if it were her only chance to feel.

He pissed on her genitals, occasionally traveling up her body. It felt warm, almost caressing, and for a second she had an unbearable sensation of closeness with him. Then she worried about the mess on the floor, which had smelled bad enough to begin with.

“Tell me you love me,” he said.

“I love you.”

He pissed in her face.

After dinner they had gone to a bar with red vinyl booths and drank martinis as they sat close together, stroking each other’s thighs. She had told him about her experience in the garage with Rick Houlihan.

“That sounds a little gruesome,” he said.

“Well, yeah.” She stared confused at the play of light and shadow on a painfully perfect martini glass. “What do you mean?”

“I mean was it really that bad?”

“Yeah, it was. He was your average jerk I guess.” She picked her olive out of her glass and chewed it, savoring its bitterness.

He stared at her until she felt self-conscious as she hunted for bits of unchewed olive with her tongue. “Most of the men I’ve ever been with are like that. They’re really awful.”

His face went into a strange combination; his mouth was as playfully cruel as a child torturing an animal while his eyes were gentle and inviting. “You are so hard and closed,” he said. “Don’t you know anything about tenderness and caring? Between men and women?”

She stared, incredulous to think that he was on speaking terms with tenderness and caring. “Are you trying to tell me that you do?”

“Yeah, I do.” His eyes beckoned her into an Easter egg world where males and females held hands and gazed into each other’s eyes while music played in the background. She regarded it suspiciously. “I’ve had relationships that were close and loving. From what you’ve told me, you haven’t. Why is that?”

His falsely tender eyes mocked her and hurt her; still part of her trembled forward, starving to experience the place of love and closeness he had displayed, even if it was a deliberate illusion created to highlight her privation.

He smiled, and the cruelty of his mouth shadowed his eyes and made their tenderness piercing. “I’m going to teach you about love and closeness,” he said.

They fucked touching as little as possible; he raised straight up on his arms, she with her legs wide apart and her arms flung open to grip the sheets in an anti-embrace. She closed her eyes and turned her head away from him, hurtling alone through her imagination, the furniture of her internal self smashing on impact.

“I’d like to see you on your hands and knees,” he whispered, “surrounded by guys who’d piss on your cunt and jerk off in your face. I’d like to blindfold you in the Hellfire Club and tie you up with your legs spread so anybody could fuck you or beat you.”

She imagined the warm piss of strangers between her legs and come running down her face. Split apart and boundary-less, she was sucked into the eye of the storm. She reached between her legs for some tiny memory of pleasure. She floated for a second of peace before she came as if she were being cut to pieces, her cunt and her heart utterly apart.

He continued to flail above her, his eyes closed, oblivious, alone in his private cyclone.