One guest, a man, middle-aged and mundane. He was wearing a suit and tie. I looked at his shoes. Ma was always telling me to look at a man’s shoes. That men know how to wear a suit and they know how to trim their beards, but the shoes, everyone forgets about the shoes and that’s how you can tell who the man really is, Ma liked to tell me.
The man introduced himself with a soft Italian accent, and his teeth looked pressure washed, and his shoes were polished and tied with a double knot. You can’t trust a man with tidy shoes, is what Ma was always saying. Who has so much time to spend on their feet?
“Are your teeth real?” I said.
“What?”
“Your teeth.”
“Of course they’re real.” He gnashed them together, and the sound was a cheap plastic wind-up toy.
“I mean, I know they’re real, but are they yours?”
“They’re in my mouth, aren’t they?”
I took him back to my room, and he agreed to pay two grand to choke me. He was good at it, well practiced, he knew to squeeze the sides of the throat rather than crushing the windpipe.
“Can you tell me you’re dying,” he said, his voice still so soft, buttery.
“That I’m dying?”
“Tell me I’m killing you.”
“You’re killing me?”
“Make me believe it.”
“Ouch, sir, you’re murdering me.”
“That’s really not good,” he said. “Make me believe it.”
“Make me believe it,” I said.
The man squeezed my throat so hard that a gurgling noise came out.
He left a five-hundred-dollar tip and I thought, damn, if only Ma were here to see this.
* * *
As I washed myself off, soaped between my legs, I noticed a smear of blood on my fingers. I noticed it, then I washed it away. It’s so easy to keep a secret from yourself.