A Door in the Mirror

by PW Cooper

  He'd given up hope for such things long ago.

  All he had left was her, and now he'd lost her. He didn't think he could ever love a woman. It was all so false. What was man anyway? Just the instrument of sex. Just a self-replicating machine.

  He orders a drink, not knowing or caring what it is, and shoves dollars at the bartender until the man stops holding his hand out. He drinks fast, letting it burn in his throat, and he watches the doorway.

  He has let all preconceptions fall away, all notions of beauty or desirability. He has embraced the central truth: that all women are equally desirable by virtue of their being. There is nothing to distinguish them anymore. He'll take anything that crawls if it will just slither his way.

  There is nothing in the bar for him, only rejection and disgust. He staggers out, coming up the throat of the airport and vomited out the great glass mouth into untamed darkness. He shivers, tugging his coat close about him. The silent air is broken with the groans of the machines rising from tarmac to weightless space. His cock is throbbing with painful need, like a nail driven deep, hammered by every thought and motion.

  He watches the cars drive slowly by, sees his reflection distorted in their reflective windows. He feels dizzy and weak, alcohol is buzzing in his head. He staggers against a post and leans there, lifeless and thoughtless.

  Then he sees her.

  She is standing under the light, waiting. Her clothing is cheap, luridly tight, all zippers and clasps. She meets his gaze and blinks slowly, not turning away. Her eyes are liquid and guileless. He can see it right away: she does not want him, but she will take him. He goes to her.

  She speaks to him in her foreign language, the words a meaningless babble to him. He shakes his head. “No, no, English.”

  She cocks her head. “English?” Her voice is thickly accented.

  He nods, points to his chest. “Yes, English.”

  She opens her synthetic fur coat to show off her body. “You want?” she asks, gesturing at herself.

  He breathes a desperate sigh of relief. “I do,” he says, “God, yes... Yes, I want.”

  She points toward the airport building and speaks again, chattering in her own language. It seems that they have exhausted her command of English. He nods, and follows her as she goes. She leads him through the building, deep into the bowels of the place. Her high-heeled shoes clack on the floor, counting down towards some certain misery.

  She opens a heavy metal door and they pass together into darkness.

  He hears the knocking of her shoes come to a stop, hears her turn and approach him. He feels her body press against his own. She takes his hand and puts it on her breast. He squeezes the plastic-bound flesh, his whole body quivering with desire. He knows that this is the thing for which he has been made. This is his purpose, his whole being. This is who he is and all he ever could be. His mouth falls violently against hers, open and devouring.

  She pushes him back hard against the wall. A light-switch clicks and they are bathed in sick green-yellow light. He sees her now, so horribly close, and wishes to be again submerged in darkness. Her eyes are hollow and red, with no soul in them. There are sores on her lips and cheek. Her nostrils are ruined and viscus, the blood vessels broken under pasty white powder. Her teeth and hair are the same ocher shade, have the same filthy sheen. Her tongue plays at an empty brown hole in her mouth. She holds out her hand.

  “How much?”

  She hisses, slapping her palm, giving no betrayal of understanding.

  He digs into his pocket and shoves money at her. Her fingers close around the crumpled bills. He thinks that she has the hands of a small child, weak and thin, dirt beneath the nails – hers are the hands of a man's daughter, lacy with scars and burns.

  She sinks to her knees and undoes his belt buckle. She pulls his pants and boxers down around his knees. He can feel how dirty he is – sweaty and rank between the legs after eighteen hours of travel – and he feels a flash of terrible shame. Her breath is hot on him. She touches his penis, pulling it like a milkmaid who'd done the morning chores too many to count. She cups his testicles, as though weighting them in her hand. It happens without thought or consideration, only impulse.

  She takes him in her mouth. Her lips are dry and cracked, her mouth sticky. His penis is dark with hair and gleams like a sick thing, a leech, a hanging parasite. Her saliva is thick and runs slowly. He can feel the ragged edges of her teeth catching the numbed sags of skin.

  He shuts his eyes. He knocks his head back against the wall, wishing he could die.

  Need burns in his stomach, the sickness, the want. He looks, his eyes focusing and fading to the confines of the room. They're in a small outhouse. The porcelain figure slumped akimbo in the corner of the room, drooling filth. His nostrils clench at the reek; his skin crawls.

  He takes her, half push, half drag, drapes her languid form over the toilet and scrabbles at her clothing, pulling it away. She lies there, eyes rolling lazily, gnawing the end of one fingernail. He rips away the last of it and there is all she is before him. He plunges headlong into her, hurtling like a savage through the endless jungle.

  The awful sounds of it fill the room, the slapping of flesh against flesh, the wet muddy squelch of two bodies, her low bovine grunting, his own snarled excess and in his ear the faint electric whine of the light bulb singing.

  The tedium of the act is unbearable, and so frighteningly present in his mind. He grapples to her, fingers digging into bruised flesh, clutching skin-clad hip and hairless thigh. They are joined now, a machine in operation. This is the endless tangle, the moribund dance of the universe.

  She speaks, calling words to him which he does not know. He does not let this deter him, he carries on his plying. Her hands reach back, grab at him, pushing, the fingers brushing off his skin. Her voice rises, shrieking with scorn and abatement, but he will not be swayed now, not so close. “No!” she says, “No, no no!” She wriggles away, her waxen flesh squirming from his grip as she tumbles to the floor. He falls, shin cracking hard against the toilet and he is sent down clutching it and groaning, his pants tangled about the knees. “No, no!” She is on her feet, animal-like, skittering away. He grabs at her and for one instant his hand is closed about her fleshless wrist.

  Something flashes in the gloom, a bright spark drawn from beneath her vinyl garb. He feels a hot hard burn in his gut and looks down to see a knife handle protruded from his lower belly. He falls away, blinking, dismayed, and the girl is gone out the door, her being scattered to the wind.

  His new protuberance turns sour, and the blood flows. He feels himself fall backwards, but experiences no sensation of landing, no crashing down, no thudding collapse, only the endless fall – the void spin.

  He tugs the blade out and is brought down again. He feels a cry of pain tearing at his throat, screaming out. He touches the wound, a gynecologic slit below his belly, and his laughs.

  He laughs, choking on pain in the foul outbuilding, blood slipping free while all the world rumbles about him its great mechanical song.

  * * *

  The sun is going down on the eleventh summer of his youth. The car roars as his brother revs the engine. The older boys laugh their clear high laughter. An emptied beer can clatters across the road, bouncing once twice three times, and rolls into the gutter.

  The boys beat the side of the car with long gangling limbs, hooting and cawing. Their pockmark faces milk-pale in the moonlight, their dental appliances glinting as though weaponized. His brother feathers the gas, sending noxious fumes up from the spinning tires. Their father told them once that a car was like a woman, you had to treat it right and keep it well in hand or it would turn on you. Something releases and they're gone, nothing but a blister on the road and into the gathering night.

  They drive. The quiet town sleeps around them. It is like a tomb, every family inside dead through. Only they are alive, and only their speed keeps them breathing. So they race through the silence, engine grinding an
d wheels squealing.

  They know that there is a certain girl in a certain house, so they stop there, car idling and desperate to go while three lanky boys hop out to call up at her window. She comes clambering through the opening with laughter spilling from her lips and she collapses over the door of the car onto the laps of the boys. They cackle and paw at her. She slaps them away and pinches them and grabs what is between their legs.

  He sits still, neither touching nor being touched though he wants both more keenly than any want he'd ever felt. The energy is changed now, she is theirs but they are subservient to her. She is object and idol, she is pure being beyond humanity. He cannot see that they are of the same species, he and she. Between them is a gulf which he can neither define nor cross. Hers is the unknowable. They don't want to know. What use in knowing? What matter who she really is? The fact of her is all that matters to the boys.

  They leave the town, driving blind into darkness, slugging back beers and pinching her tits and telling dirty jokes. She climbs into the front seat and a boy reaches up her skirt as she goes. She sits in the lap of a boy and smokes a long cigarette with her jaw defiantly jutting. The smoke whorls behind them and the ash falls away. Her lips are painted blood red and leave smeared marks like cuts on the cheeks of the boys she kisses.

  The car stops on the shore of the wooded lake. It seems to come to a halt of its own accord, and there is nothing to do now but get out. Only he cannot bring himself to leave; he watches the others climb over the doors and into the forest. They stand silhouetted against the shifting water. His brother pulls the girl close around the waist and kisses her mouth. She laughs, breathing smoke in his face.

  Somebody says that they should go skinny dipping. The girl laughs and says you first. The boys strip in the silence of their nervous laughter. His brother walks back to the car and turns on the radio and the lights. The pounding music is masculine and metallic, a tribal beat expectant. The headlights spill out, burning at the damp trees and far shore. The illumination seems to be swallowed by the forest, it cannot penetrate far, only grope and grasp.

  The naked boys all watch as the girl slowly removes her clothing. She wears rings on her fingers and her hair seems alive as fire in the car lights as she begins to sway and move to the music, cigarette still burning. The boys circle in slowly around her, dancing their idiot waltz among the trees, moving slowly on towards the distant shore.

  He sits in the car and watches them dance against the darkness until the song ends. In its absence their only music is the groaning of the machine and the lapping of water, though they dance to it just as well. He feels something opening inside him, a space he is sure will never be filled. He feels set apart from the others, and it occurs to him as a heavy and terrible sadness. They are the older children of the world.

  He leans against the leather seat and watches their naked bodies twisting silently in electric light.

  * * *

  Fragment

  He is alone in the mirror.

  Groping towards something, his fingertips to the silver.

  The heat rises, the door opens, he pushes through to the other side and what lies beyond.