PALM SUNDAY, WHEN THE GRASS MOON WOULD RISE FULL, was nearing. Two days later, Mars, the bringer of war, would enter into conjunction with Mercury, the messenger, in retrograde, with folly of all communication, all sense, moving backwards. We were under the force of the warrior.
I believed in none of the astrological bullshit presented by any of this. But I was enamored of the mythic poetry inherent in the idea of the sky of these nights belonging to the bringer of war. I slept well under that sky. I was beginning to notice, however, that the grand rebirths of my mornings were more fleeting, and less grand, the longer I went without communion with the flesh and blood of those life-giving goddesses whose dew rose not only with the coming grass moon but with every moon.
Lorna was all right, she told me when I called her, and she sounded all right. We met for breakfast on a morning when the chill at last seemed gone from the air. It was good to see her. Looking at her, I could not help but think of her long slender limbs stretched bare and on that Saint Andrew’s cross, the lashes striking her through the transparency of the vinyl raincoat as the panties in her mouth gagged the screams of her pleasure and pain. Her juices dripping to the floor.
I asked her if she had gone to the meeting on Sullivan Street that morning. I purposefully took off my shades and laid them on the table.
“Christ, I haven’t been to a meeting since that night I was with you.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
The waitress came and we ordered. In declining coffee, I managed to get in my line about never drinking coffee when denied the freedom to enjoy a smoke with it. Useless words, but if I had a credo by which I lived, this was it, and I was going to affirm it whenever the opportunity arose.
“I don’t know if it’s good or bad. How about you? Have you been hitting the rooms lately?”
I shook my head in the negative. I said that I just hadn’t felt like it lately. I wasn’t going to say what part of me believed: that I had got all I was ever going to get out of A.A. when I got her. I told her that I had no desire to drink, however. I told her about the baclofen that I had been taking now for several days.
“A pill that cures addiction?” She followed her words with a little laugh of disbelief.
I told her about Dr. Ameisen’s discovery, about the ways it had been suppressed.
“Rimbaud said morality is a disease of the brain,” I said. “I think he was right on the money. Of course, a lot of people disagree. But I don’t think anybody disagrees that alcoholism is a disease of the brain. I think that’s a given. Baclofen alters the brain chemistry so that the underlying causes of addiction are eradicated. I forget the science, all the scientific words. But it’s all there in black and white, for anyone who can understand it. The thing is, it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that it works. The science just explains how and why. Some guy who won the Nobel Prize for medicine came right out and said it. He said, ‘Dr. Ameisen has discovered the cure for addiction.’ The thing is, there’s no money in it for the pharmaceutical companies because its patent has expired. But companies like Novartis are trying to play with the molecules so they can come up with something like it that they can patent.”
“So you’re cured?”
Again she followed her words with a little laugh—no, not really a laugh this time, but a wry, mischievous smile—of disbelief.
“I have no fucking idea,” I said. “I just started taking the shit.” I put a forkful of eggs in my mouth, chewed, swallowed, took a drink of water. “We’ll see.”
She took out one of those handheld-device gizmos, asked me the name of Ameisen’s book and how to spell his name, then put the gizmo back in her bag.
“How about you?” I asked. “Have you felt like drinking lately.”
“No,” she said. Now there was a different sort of smile on her face, an almost plain and happy smile.
“And how do you feel otherwise?”
I hesitated following my question with another, the question that seemed naturally to follow it. And she hesitated in her acknowledgment of understanding what I meant, even without that unsaid second question being asked. So I went ahead and asked it:
“How about the spooks?”
She looked into my eyes. Who knows what they looked like. Who knows what she saw. But she looked into them quite easily.
“They’re still there,” she said. “But”—she knocked on wood—“they seem to be receding into the shadows.”
She fell silent for a few moments, and I took care not to break that silence.
“That night.”
Then she fell silent again, and again I let the silence be. It was a silence so heavy that what little noise there was in the restaurant on this quiet morning seemed to fall into silence as well.
“I don’t know how to say this,” she said. “I don’t know how to say this without it sounding melodramatic. Without it sounding stupid.”
I took a sip of water. I looked at her lowered eyes with my own, waiting for those eyes to rise, to meet whatever it was to see, or whatever it was that she might see, in mine.
“You took something out of me,” she said. Then, as her eyes rose, more words followed quickly: “I mean that in a good way.” Then the words slowed again, to a normal if slightly halting pace. “You took something out of me that needed to be taken out. It was like some bad thing inside me, some kind of growth, some kind of disease that needed to be removed. I don’t know if you got all of it. I don’t think you did. But you got some of it. You got a lot of it. I could feel it. I can still feel it. Something was taken away and something was given back. Something bad was cut out, or let out, and something good was let in. I really don’t know how to describe it. I really don’t.”
She began to eat again. A good sign, I figured. I finished what was on the plate. She drank some coffee.
“Don’t dwell on it,” I said. “Don’t try too hard to figure it out. The way you describe it, it makes sense to me. I don’t know exactly what you feel. That’s something nobody can ever do, get inside somebody else and feel exactly what they feel. But you sound like you feel a lot better than you did. You seem like you feel a lot better than you did. It’s probably better not to even question it.”
She nodded slowly in agreement. I couldn’t tell if it was truly a nod of agreement or merely the simulacrum of one. I smiled at her. She smiled back, and there was no doubt that at least this was real.
“So,” she said, “when you went to the doctor to get those little magic pills, that Booze-o-Fix or whatever it is, did he say anything about your eyes?”
“He mumbled something and moved on to my prostate.” I did not want her to fear my eyes. That is why I had removed my shades. But I did not want to lead her back to the eyes of her father, either. For her to see my eyes as beautiful without even a thought of her father—and this was what I really wanted—was to want far too much.
“Do you want to get together tonight?” she asked.
How could she think I would not? How could she think I would not have asked her before we rose from this breakfast table? How could she not know that she was irresistible to me? Why would she even ask?
I got a cappuccino to go, lit up in the street, walked her to work, kissed her good-bye, squeezed her hand, and told her I’d see her later. Before entering the building, she turned and smiled to me. It made me feel good.
I passed a new store, on Hudson Street, a sort of day care resort for yuppie mutts called Biscuits & Bath. It offered grooming, transportation, natural foods, puppy kindergarten, classes in basic manners, exercise programs, and socialization services. This neighborhood really was fucking going to hell. It was getting embarrassing just to live around here.
I stopped by the joint on Reade Street, finishing my coffee and tossing the cup into the trash on my way. It was good, the coffee. It was really good. But there was no denying that the Eucharistic euphoria wasn’t there. It was good to know that it would be there again tomorrow. My night with Lorna would see to that.
I still couldn’t get used to the television sets in these joints. News, baseball, commercials for dick-stiffeners and hair-sprouters. Half a dozen customers and three satellite television sets going. Some of the guys in these joints would rather stare at a soap opera than drink alone and face themselves and their drinks and the screaming emptiness and desperation inside them. It was as if they had forgotten how to talk, even if it was to talk only the nonsense of their shambled brains. Only when there was enough booze in them did they give voice to the empty, desperate screaming inside them. And still the television sets droned on.
From the bar I went to the knife store. I did not know why, but I wanted to pursue the possibility of having made for me a dagger with a leopard-bone handle. If it had been suggested to me an hour ago that I might be entertaining such a pursuit, I would have responded with a blank, nonplussed stare.
It was a short dagger that I wanted, I explained. A hishu, a tosa, a hishu-gatana. But I would also take a longer dagger, a tanto, or an old-style traditional hunting knife, a yamagatana.
Whatever the type, I wanted a knife that was at least about eight inches and not much more than about a foot in length. I suggested that the dagger should have a modest tsuba, or hand guard, of hard metal, maybe good silver or good, strong-alloy twenty-karat or twenty-two-karat gold.
To craft a knife with a leopard-bone handle, a true master craftsman, or two master craftsmen, one for the blade, the other for the handle, would have to be found.
A leopard-bone dagger, carved from treated fresh leopard bone or from petrified leopard bone, must be made by a true craftsman working with his own hands, not by a mere big-business designer who oversaw a modern assembly-line company.
The question was: could there be found a true traditional master? A true, old-fashioned knife-making artist?
Sugai-san knew real Japanese blade-forgers well. One of them was Keijoro Doi, an eighty-four-year-old master of masters. Sugai would be going to Japan at the end of the month. The more precise an idea I could convey of the knife I envisioned, and the amount of money I was willing to pay, the more likely it was that the very special knife I wanted could be made for me.
I knew that leopard bone was difficult to obtain here in the United States, but that it also was not too costly. Not long ago, a friend in Texas, where the remains of protected and endangered species can be sold legally to Texas residents by licensed dealers, bought me a leopard skull. As federal and local laws prohibited its interstate transportation, it was more difficult to get it to me in New York, where dealing in poodle skulls is probably a capital crime, than it was to purchase. And the price had been under four hundred bucks for a fine skull with all its teeth. It sat now atop my cherry television cabinet. I also knew that endangered-species bones, as I had seen firsthand, were far more easily and openly available in Asia, where I’d had many chances to buy leopard pelts but no way of getting them back home. So the cost of the bone would be the least of the expenses.
The problem was that I had no idea how durable or workable leopard bone was, or how it aged, treated or untreated. Could it, for instance, be gold-riveted in two identical simple, striking pieces to both sides of the tang? Could it be ornately carved, even carved out, katabori-like, for a hollow center, to be affixed to and expose glimpses of hard, dark-brown ebony or black onyx beneath it? And I had no idea what petrified leopard bone looked like, or if it was an available or desirable material. Without this information, it was hard to arrive at the more precise details of the leopard-bone handle I envisioned.
Would it be possible to obtain this information, so that I could then know the limits of my envisioning, the extent of possibility, and thus the extent of craftsmanship available to me, so that I might then be able to explain in more precise detail what I wanted, and how much I would be willing to pay for it? There would also be the saya, or wooden sheath. Leopards spend much of their time in the boughs of trees. I wondered if they had a favorite type of tree. If so, it was wood from that type of tree that I wanted. If not, any one of many dark and beautifully grained woods lay open to me. Or perhaps, going against tradition, a sheath of fine-tooled strong dark leather.
One way or the other, considering the blade-forging alone, I knew it would be an expensive proposition. The one thing I had going for me, I told myself, was that this knife would present a new and most enticing challenge to any true master. An elder master of masters might see in it the masterpiece that could prove to be the end note of his long years of workmanship.
I figured I would be willing to go the price of a bottle of great Cheval Blanc. Yes, the price of a bottle of great Cheval Blanc. Maybe even as far as a 1947. Why not? I would drink the bottle, and it would be gone. The knife would be forever.
I caught myself. Sober, on baclofen, and still calculating according to the wine standard.
Old habits die hard. And—an uncomfortable thought—all too often they die only when we do.
Standing on the pavement outside the store, I lit a smoke and wondered for a moment whence this yearning for a dagger with a leopard-bone handle had pounced. I had always loved leopards, which held for me a mysterious power that spoke to me in ways that went far beyond their surpassing deadly beauty. The leopard skull I possessed was a totem, a symbol of that power. I had wanted such a skull for a long time, and I drew much from its presence. But never before did I think of a killing knife whose grasp-hold might offer that same elusive power.
Heading north on Church Street, I stopped at We Are Nuts about Nuts, stepped through the storefront door, and inhaled deeply for the scent of a current or very recent fresh roasting. The scent was thick in the air. The roaster had been shut, and I asked which nuts had come from it. I was led to the big covered plexiglass bin of cashews, placed my hand to it, and felt that it was hot to the touch. Before the cashews, almonds had been roasted. I placed my hand to the bin of almonds and felt that it was somewhat warm. I asked for a quarter pound of each, took the two small brown paper bags, one hot and the other a bit warm, to the counter, laid down three dollars and seventy-five cents, and left. The aroma from the little bags was delicious.
When I got home, I put the little bags of nuts on the end table beside the couch, took a Valium, poured a glass of cold milk, and returned to the couch. As I did so, I paused to look at the two sheets of paper on the desk, the one with words I remembered writing and the one with words I didn’t remember writing.
I was a leopard awaiting glance in bowering shade.
I read the words slowly, silently, then simply stared at them awhile. My eyes moved farther down the sheet of paper and once more paused. Again I read slowly, silently, then simply stared.
Remembered now: what the lady and the leopard, the daemon-seeker and miller did know before me.
The lady and the leopard. The daemon-seeker and the miller. Why had I spelled it—“daemon”—in this archaic way? There was no doubt that this was my scrawl, but were they my words? The idea of spirit writing, in which I did not believe, insinuated itself once again in my mind. And the “miller”—could this be Blake’s “Miller of Eternity”? And who was “the lady”? Or what was “the lady”? And what, or whom, did this particular leopard represent?
And that phrase: “Awaiting glance in bowering shade.” What of that? Yes, leopards were given to lounging in quiet stealth on the boughs of trees. I had heard that this was what made the leopard so exceedingly dangerous. You could pass unawares beneath a leopard looking down on you from a great tree limb above you. But if by chance, distracted by a bird in the sky, or the sun receding or emerging from behind a cloud, or the first pale star of dusk, or anything that set the eyes to wandering upward, your glance met with the eyes of the leopard, in that instant the leopard would leap upon you and you would be dead. Your eye contact, though inadvertent and brief, would not be suffered by the leopard even in its most lulled and sated quietude. This was why, by comparison, lions were such easy game. They lay hidden in path-side gullies, and hunting guides tossed stones lazily into those gullies until one of them hit a lion, which would instinctively rise and run, an easy target for the shot. Leopards, however, did not run, and if in coming upon one, your glance met the glance of the leopard, you were no longer the hunter but the prey, and you would be dead before you had the slightest chance to raise your gun. Your first trembling of fear would be your last.
I looked up “bowering” in the Oxford English Dictionary. Bowering, embowering. Participial adjective of “bower,” to enclose or shelter in leafy covert, or in seclusion overarched with the branches of trees.
I was a leopard awaiting glance in bowering shade.
I didn’t want my milk to get warm. Sometimes I wondered why I even took the Valium. I felt nothing from them. I once had told this to Dr. Yanoff, seeking something stronger to relax me. He said that the Valium did have an effect on me; it was just not a drastic one that I was conscious of. But still I wondered about this. There had been times when I had taken as much as eighty milligrams over the course of a day and a night, while drinking wine, and still nothing. I had come to more or less believe that it was the ritual, not the drug, that relaxed me: the Valium and the cold milk taken together in respite. I no longer took one of those ten-milligram pills without being able to sit awhile in peace with my cold milk afterward.
Ritual. To replace habit with ritual was good. Everything a Eucharist. But still I hoped this baclofen I was taking would prove more than ritual.
Awaiting glance. I had been like that for years. The dread of eye contact. The dread of physical contact, of any physical intimacy. Somehow, as the years had passed, these had become anathema to me. But now it was over.
Then I thought of my eyes as they were now. I thought of the way Lorna looked into my eyes. I took a drink of milk. I lit a smoke. I thought of Lorna on the cross.
I called for the results of my blood tests. “I don’t know how you did it,” the croaker said over the telephone, “but your A1Hc is down to seven-point-six. It was ten-point-three last time.”
A reading of seven-point-six on this glycohemoglobin test that measured the average level of sugar in the blood over the course of the previous three months was, I knew, only one-point-six percent over the upper end of the non-diabetic range. Even my diabetes was being cured, I thought, and not by any fucking hypocrite, Avandia-prescribing endocrinologist either. How did I do it? I felt like saying. By turning into a fucking god, that’s how.
“Your vitamin D is low. I want you to take a thousand units a day.”
“You’ve had me taking a thousand units a day for the past year,” I said. “Take two thousand,” he said.
I told him I would. And, like a fool, I probably would.
“And there’s some occult blood in your stool.”
“The test can’t show that.”
“Is it red or black?”
“The test doesn’t show that, either.”
“It’s probably my hemorrhoids. I’ve been bleeding out of my ass for the last forty years.”
“I’d like you to come back in June for a colonoscopy so we can see what’s what.”
“Another one? I just had one last November.”
“You haven’t had a colonoscopy in two years,” he said.
“It was last November. Remember, the prep didn’t work, and I had to have it done twice.”
“Right, we did it twice. But that was two years ago.”
I wasn’t going to argue with this guy. I wasn’t going to tell him that I trusted my memory, not his. In any case, June was a way off, so I figured he didn’t think it was anything serious. If he did, he would have wanted me to come in right away.
“And I don’t know what this is,” he said, “but your blood seems different.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your blood test. All your blood. It doesn’t really seem to be your blood type. It doesn’t really seem to be any stable blood type.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your blood type is A. But now it seems you’ve got some B glycoproteins mixed in with the A.”
“What’s that all about?”
“It’s like you’re an A becoming an AB.”
“Does that happen a lot?”
“Well, it did somewhere along the line. First there was O. Then about twenty thousand years ago some people evolved into type A’s. Then about ten thousand years later, other people evolved into B’s. Then some A’s and some B’s mixed and eventually their glycoproteins merged and produced the last of the four blood types, AB.”
“So it’s a natural sort of thing?”
“It was natural over the course of twenty thousand years of procreation. Not spontaneously, not in a few months.”
“So it has to be a mistake by the lab.”
“We’ll see.”
“What’s the difference between A and AB?”
“AB’s a lot less common. Type O’s called the universal donor. No matter what blood type, anybody can accept O.”
“What do you mean, ‘accept’?”
“A transfusion, say.”
“And what’s that have to do with type AB?”
“Well, AB is the universal acceptor. It accepts any and all of the four blood types.”
“So that’s not a bad thing?”
“I’ve just never seen anything like it before, an A developing AB characteristics. Never seen it, never read of it, never heard of it.”
I knew it. All blood was mine. It was part of my rebirth. Twenty thousand years of spinning life cycles in the time it took to smoke a cigarette. Out of the cradle endlessly rocking. Every beat of my heart and pulse brought procreation, new life to a new me. Only lesser beings were born but once. Re-procreation. Was that a word? It was now. Talk about virgin birth. Talk about parthenogenesis. Talk about agamogenesis. Talk about fucking ham and eggs. I wanted Lorna on that cross right now, that Virgin Mary juice of hers drizzling to the floor. I wanted that fucking whip in my hand right fucking now.
There was a lot that the croaker had never seen, never read about, never heard about. A lot that the croaker did not know and never would. I told him I’d see him in a few months. Maybe I would, and then again maybe I wouldn’t. I was pro-choice. My body, my bankroll. We’d see what Paeon advised. Otherwise happy fucking Passover and a mise meshune.
Inspiration came while I stroked my cock, ate almonds and cashews, and thought of Lorna spread-eagled on her cross.
I went to the hardware store on Chambers Street, then over to Weinstein & Holtzman on Park Row. I walked north, zigzagging in a wider and wider range, until, at a surplus joint on Sixth Avenue in the teens, I found what I wanted.
Heavy, rough three-quarter-inch raw-strand Manila rope. I bought seven yards and had it cut into five equal lengths of a little over four feet each. Enough of that cop shit, those cuffs and those leg irons, I thought. Tonight we were doing it the old-fashioned way.
I shelled and skinned a bunch of fava beans, the first of the season I had seen. This was always a time-consuming chore, a real pain in the ass, but it was worth it. I chopped up some pecorino Romano, put the pieces in a bowl with the fresh beans, poured in some olive oil, and ground in some black pepper. I cut into chunks what remained of the cheese, wrapped them in slices of tasso pork, and tossed them onto a paper plate. I sliced a red pear and put that on the plate as well. I took it all to the couch and feasted slowly. There might be a lot of hours, I figured, between now and that Shun Lee delivery that would come only after the crucifixion and the flogging and the wonders that followed.
It was still light out when I arrived at her place, but the dark soon set in, and that dim red glow from behind the black curtain became more pronounced. She made some coffee. She told me about her day, I told her about mine. She went off to her bedroom for a few minutes, then emerged before me in her see-through raincoat. In the room where the red light cast its hue, she began to fix the iron to her left ankle.
She had seen the bulky plastic bag I had brought with me, eyeing it curiously but saying nothing. Now she watched as I withdrew the first length of rope from it. I hunkered down, wrapped it round the ankle she had been about to shackle, pulled tightly, knotted it, and with the two long end lengths, bound her leg with not much slack to the lower left lag of the cross. Removing a second length from the bag, I wrapped it round her other ankle, pulled tightly, knotted it, and with the two long end lengths, bound her leg with not much slack to the lower right lag of the cross. Then, with another length, and another, her wrists. I turned her head to the side and kissed her. Slipping my tongue from her mouth, I saw that it remained open. Her eyes were softly shut. I took a segment of the last length of rope between my hands and brought it taut to her open mouth, then wound the rope round her head so that a second thick mouthful of it further widened and filled that sweet open mouth. I tied the rope tightly at the nape of her neck. I stood back, looked at her, and stroked my cock. Her skin was already beginning to redden near where the harsh pricking bristles of the rope dug into her. This reddening was noticeable even in the diffuse red of this room. I stuck my hand under the raincoat and brought it to her cunt, to see if the rough piercing rope made her wet. I felt her moisture, wondered what of it came from anticipation and what of it came from the rope.
I took the blacksnake whip, encoiled it, held the coil between my hands. With fast hard movements, compressing the coil with a jerk of my hands and quickly jerking it wide again, I was able to produce a series of muted crackling sounds. From the swooning-ripe cries that barely escaped her rope-filled mouth, I knew that these sounds excited her. My first cast of the whip was tentative—I could not straightaway recapture the movements to which my previous wielding of this whip had led me—but it struck her, lightly, across her back with a soft smack of leather on vinyl, to which she seemed to react as if being teased by a touch of foreplay that, instead of pleasantly arousing her, brought her to the pitch of torment of overwhelming, unrelieved passion. Slowly it came back to me, the physics of it all, and, with increasing strength and accuracy, I gave it to her, harder and then harder, until her rainy juices trickled to the floor and her long, lithe limbs strained and shook, and her hair flung to and fro with the wild movements of her head.
I could see the faint markings on one of her buttocks and the back of one of her thighs where I had opened her skin on my prior night in this room. How wonderful it would be, how wonderful for both of us, I thought, if I could reopen those very same lash lines. I exposed her bare flesh as I previously had done, raising the little raincoat and bunching it above her hips. I aimed carefully, but the tip of the whip struck wide of those marks, slashing instead her other upper thigh. I fixed my eyes on the slash, which was like a thin crescent of color on her pale, pure flesh; and in an instant I saw the blood begin to flow.
Approaching her with my cock hard in my hand and my heart beating hard in my chest, I found myself wondering for the merest moment what type of blood it was that ran down the back of her thigh. Damn, the shit these croakers put in your head. Kneeling, I placed my tongue to the back of her knee, that bend so lovely and so soft where the blood was about to reach. I felt it meet my tongue, and I slowly raised my head, licking the ever-increasing flow of her blood, feeling the quivering of her hamstring muscles, until, as I clutched her other leg, my tongue came to the seeping crescent high on her thigh. With my mouth wide, I sucked and I drank and I closed my eyes and reveled until I could feel the blood descending in a thin stream to my chin. I braced myself, rose, and lay hard against the slight incline of her back. I thought of deflowering her like this, as she remained bound and defenseless on the cross beneath my weight. It could be beautiful. It could also destroy her. Beauty and destruction were often one in nature. The vast towering ocean waves of onrushing cataclysm, the wild rising flames of conflagration, the earth-shaking cracking open of the earth. The eye of the leopard. I stuck the fingers of one hand into her cunt, and with my other hand I greased my cock with her running blood. I brought the swollen blood-greased head of my cock to her ass, and I shoved myself into her, feeling the sudden severe spasm of her body and pulling back on the abrasive rope at the nape of her neck as I did so.
Just months before, my cock would have been too limp to slam and fill that cranny. But I was young again. More than that, I was an ithyphallic god, a force of flesh and of deeds, a bringer of fates. It felt great. I exploded inside her almost instantly.
We showered together. There was surprisingly little blood, but we lathered and rinsed each other slowly and luxuriously. I saw that there were tiny spots of blood on her lips, mostly at the corners of her lips, where the rough bristlings of the rope bit into her. She said little, and in an untelling voice. But then she hugged me closely as the warm water fell upon us. The lingering human weakness within me had brought me unease and doubt about what I had done to her. The tender clinging closeness of her hug showed me that my lingering human weakness must be left behind. A god can do no wrong, no matter what he does. I had not done anything to her. I had done something for her.
We shampooed each other. The back of her neck, beneath where her hair fell, looked sore and raw, and there were a few tiny spots of red there as well. We dried each other with the same plush towel. I wished I had pajamas to get into. It was not warm enough for just my skivvies, and I did not want to dress again, though I did. I had not slept at the home of another for more than fifteen years, but I would have slept there on that night. The blessed serene drowsiness was coming upon me. When she emerged in her robe, with vitamin E on her lips, I took her mobile telephone from the couch, placed it in her hand, and had her order enough Chinese food for a small family of wolves.
In my blissful, becalmed state, I tasted and delighted in what I ate as others could not. To prolong and deepen my pleasure, I used chopsticks instead of a fork. We spoke comfortably, with slow ease, as we ate likewise and randomly from the various containers we shared. She said that she felt like hearing music that was very tranquil and very lovely, more so than anything she could think of. Arvo Pärt’s Alina came to my mind, and I told myself that I must have her hear it when she spent the night at my place, and I knew that she would come, soon, to spend the night. There was no cross, but it was so very close to where she worked; and I wanted so very much to have her there, in my living room and in my bed.
She spoke a little about what was going on at her job these days, the stupidity of drawing up a detailed budget for a project that did not and never would have the money to remotely bring any meaning to it.
“Sounds like the government,” I said.
“Sort of like working for the government, too,” she said. “Especially these days. Imagine doing bookkeeping for dreams and lies. They don’t teach that at business school.” She chewed awhile, made a very satisfied little sound. “Though these days they probably should.”
“Why didn’t you become a model? You know you’ve got the looks for it.”
“Too short a career span. Plus, regardless of looks, it’s a long shot. There are a lot of models out there walking around broke and desperate for work who look just as good or better than the ones pulling down big money.” She paused, and then spoke again as if sharing a secret. “Besides, to tell you the truth, I wanted to be an actress. I wanted to be a movie star. I went for an audition once, and I never went for another. I think what I really wanted was to escape from my life into a dreamland. It didn’t work. It couldn’t ever have worked. I didn’t have it in me. Business school I had in me. Barely. And that just got me deeper into what I wanted to escape from.”
I had heard her speak honestly before. Very honestly. But not with such nonchalance.
“It’s like that obsession with the scars. It’s like wanting an unblemished outside to hide the damage that’s inside. Like hiding it might make it go away, like the one might cancel out the other. That’s the thing about escaping into a fake world, the thing about keeping the poison in a pretty little cloisonné box. All the same thing.” She looked at me. “If that makes any sense.”
“It makes a lot of sense, what you’re saying. It makes even more sense that you’re seeing it,” I said. “You have to know the prison before you can break out of it.”
“That all I want to do. I mean, not know the prison. That hurts. What I mean is break out of it. Blow it up behind me. Be free.”
“You will, baby. The way you’re talking, the way you’re doing. You will.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said. “Sometimes I think I like to suffer.”
“Well,” I said, as lightly as I could, “there aren’t too many girls I know who have their own crosses.”
“Oh, that,” she said, dismissing my words as if they had been said out of innocence or ignorance or both. “That’s not what I’m talking about. That’s not suffering to me. That’s pleasure. It gets me off. We’re all fucking perverts, if not in our own eyes, then in the eyes of the person next to us. So I’m a fucking pervert. What’s that old Grateful Dead song? ‘I’m a thief and I dig it.’ Yeah, well, I’m a pervert and I dig it. We don’t burn witches anymore. We burn perverts.”
“I think that was the Band, ‘I’m a thief and I dig it.’ I forget what song.”
“Remember that guy a few years ago? That guy who covered British royalty for CNN? That guy with the breathless gay, gay royal grin? He got busted one night at four in the morning in Central Park with a noose around his neck tied to his balls, a dildo in his trunk, and a bag of meth in his pocket? Remember him? I can’t remember his name. Richard something, I think. But remember that?”
I did remember something like that a few years back. The guy she was talking about was back, covering royal gossip again for that stupid so-called news network. I had seen that oh-so-happy face of his the other day on one of the televisions behind the bar on Reade Street.
“Yeah,” I said. “I remember that.”
“He’s my hero,” she said.
“Why not?” I shrugged and smiled. “If you’re going to have a hero, why not him? Better him than a bunch of asshole cops. Yeah, better him than the cops who busted him.”
My words, which were sincere, seemed to make her happy, and she dug with glee into a container of lobster. It was good to see her like this.
“I still want to see you whip yourself,” I said. “With that crop, like you told me about. I still want to see that.”
“I’m feeling pretty mellow and blissed-out right now,” she said. “Maybe next time.”
“That’s what you said last time.”
“You’ve got to remember before we start getting it on, before you take the whip.”
“But then I’d come and wouldn’t feel like whipping you.”
“You’d like to see it that much?”
“Yeah, I would.”
Still chewing her lobster, she stood and went into the dim-glowing red of the other room. She came out with the crop. She removed her robe and placed it on a chair. She faced the wall opposite me, and, supporting herself against it with her left arm and outstretched hand, she reached round the shoulder of that supporting arm with the crop that was held by her right hand, caressing the area beneath her shoulder blade with the little leather loop at the tip of the crop. These caresses were slow and seductive.
As quietly as I intently unzippered my pants and drew out my cock, she must have heard it, for she then immediately stopped the caressing movements and struck herself hard with a strong fast flex of her wrist. There was a startling snapping sound, and I then knew why that little leather loop at the rat-tail end of the whip was called a popper. She did it again. Then again. I watched her back flush as she thrashed. She turned her head as far as she could over her right shoulder to watch the self-lashing, the cracking of the whip on her own back.
“You’re naked,” I said. My cock was in my hand, which I began to move faster. “What about the scars?”
“Fuck the scars,” she said. It was a sort of low, loud whisper that emerged from heavy, quickening breath.
I saw the scar on her thigh where I had opened her. I looked at all of her. I watched and heard the raising and striking of the crop, faster and faster, harder and harder, as her breathing likewise grew faster and faster, harder and harder. I went into the other room, got the biggest of the whips. I approached her from the right, out of range of the cropping. My cock was still hard, and I took it in my hand again as I worked the thick leather handle of the big whip into her cunt. There was a gasp, a final violent snap of the crop, and she loosened and seemed as if about to fall just as the whip handle fell from her unclenched cunt and my semen struck the salved scar on her thigh. Moving my hand back and forth, I spread the semen with the softening head of my cock over the scar and the surrounding area of her thigh, feeling the smooth oiled flesh, the smooth and warmer bare flesh. There was a single drop of blood beading on her back. I sucked it into my mouth. An even smaller droplet followed. I placed two semen-smeared fingers to it, then placed the fingers to her lips, which opened to take the fingers into it and suck them clean.
I washed and dried my hands, rubbed lotion on her back. She wanted to kiss me. My semen, her blood, her saliva. Fuck it, why not? She moved her tongue on mine, slowly withdrew it, and our lips met gently. As she put on her robe, I kissed the slight rise of her sweet small breast.
She looked to me like a tall, thin sylvan deity. A hamadryad, a wood nymph, a beautiful maiden and indwelling spirit of the trees. I thought of the frail tawny oak leaf that had appeared to me with the last breath of winter, the first breath of spring, the oak leaf I had imagined drifting over the sea waves of time, thousands of years, from ancient grove to the here and now of my windowsill. Balanos. Yes, maybe Balanos, hamadryad of the oak. Daughter, one of eight, of Hamadryas, the holy mother whose name was given to the hamadryas baboon of Asia Minor. The spirits of the wood nymphs were said by many to inhabit individual trees, and when a tree died or was killed, so was the nymph-spirit that lived in it. I thought of the mystical exquisiteness of the petrified blue handle of the big knife.
Dead monkeys. Dead oaks. Dead virgin nymphs.
But now was a time for life, a time for life ever new. I helped her on with her robe. We returned to the Chinese food, as if to a movable feast that awaited us at every pause for rest on an enchanted journey. My lassitude was wondrous. Every bite of food, though no longer hot, was sublime with orchestrally nuanced satisfaction, and the presence and soft sleepy voice of Lorna beside me enwrapped that sublimity in pure and peaceful happiness.
I was falling asleep. She invited me to spend the night. But I needed to fall full into this alluring sleep in my own bed, in the smoky air of the endless breath, my own breath, where for so long I had lived as if dead and where I now lived as if entering true life for the first time. Words passed through my mind as I held her and kissed her good-bye: “We are the breakers of our own hearts.” But I was too tired to say them, and they probably needed not to be said, for I felt that she was very near to knowing this herself. Words did come from my mouth, but they were only three and whispered: “I love you.”
I whispered those words again as sleep overtook me in my bed, but I did not know to whom or to what I whispered them.