“You’re so good,” he said. “Why are you so good?”
When I reached his stomach, I hesitated. The hole had shrunk, but it was still there, about the diameter of two fists. What would happen if I touched it?
Just then, as if in answer to my question, he lightly took hold of my wrist. I looked up at him. Holding my gaze, he pulled my hand slowly into the hole. I did not resist.
My hand went all the way through, almost up to the elbow. I even saw it come out the other side. I could do a little wave at myself with my fingers. But then my skin started to tingle, the way it had in the mailbox earlier: the air inside the hole was different air. This was an active absence, a force that wanted to know me just as I wanted to know it. No, not just to know me: to take something from me. It corroded and gnawed at reality. The longer I touched it, the further from reality I would move.
So this was what he had inside him. What he’d been battling.
I closed my eyes. It felt important to not remove my hand myself. I would wait for him to do it. I would greet this thing inside of him for as long as it wanted to be greeted. I would extend my hand into the void and give it a firm handshake. I would not be the first to pull away.
He stayed over again that night. Again we spent hours in my room, touching; again I felt melty and open, as if my body had no borders. When my palm touched the warm skin of his arm, when my fingers grazed his inner thigh, when any part of his flesh resisted me and pressed back, I felt keenly aware of its contingency; I might touch him in the same place five seconds later and find nothing there.
In fact, though, he managed to stay together. His hands were there to move over and inside me, his weight was there to hold me down, his penis was there to ask its straight and unmistakable question, and because I felt so open and permeable, the answer was an obvious yes. Still we were careful. We had the slowest, deepest sex, as if everything depended on how carefully we moved, because it did.
During, he made me look into his eyes, despite my impulse to laugh or look away.
“I know how you feel,” he said, “because I used to be that way too.”
“Looking into someone’s eyes like that, it just feels kind of…well, cheesy.”
“Think of it as a practical thing,” he said. “For me. Looking at you helps me hold together.”
“Okay,” I said. It had become almost painful to hold his gaze. His eyes were so bright.
“Stay with me,” he said. But something was happening in my chest, a gathering pressure that I didn’t recognize as a thick knot of tears until it had begun traveling up my throat, full of force and velocity, headed straight for my eyes. By that point I was so off guard that it was impossible to stop it, and soon I was shuddering and he was cupping my wet cheeks and saying, “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?”
I didn’t have a name for the thing that was shaking me as though I might shatter, as though I had already shattered; it was too late, I would never get my old self back. I would never be able to recall its current expansiveness back into its former finitude. I might be condemned to this openness forever.
In my dream that night I lay on a butcher-papered doctor’s table in a small examination room. The doctor stood over me, smiling. But he was not dressed like a doctor—more like a fancy old-timey businessman. Impeccably tailored gray suit, light salmon-colored tie, fine silver-rimmed spectacles, black bowler hat, all with a subtle sheen of extreme expensiveness. He had a round white face, smooth features, a well-trimmed goatee.
He smiled. “Have you ever been to Norway?” he asked.
“No, I haven’t.”
“Magnificent fjords. The very best. I can recommend a book on the subject: call number 942.13. Watch what I can do with my spine.” Then he turned around, and I saw that those finely tailored clothes covered only the front half of his body, as if he was a life-sized paper doll. The reverse side of him was entirely naked, and a zipper ran vertically down the length of his spine, stopping just above his wide flat butt.
He reached behind himself and pulled it down, opening up a hole. As soon as the zipper reached the base of the spine, two hands emerged from the hole, followed by arms and then a head. Slowly a woman came out, freeing herself from the man’s body, which collapsed around her like the empty costume it obviously was.
The woman now stood naked in the middle of the pile of shed skin. She looked physically identical to me—exactly as I imagined myself when fantasizing—except that her ears were extra-large, a man’s ears, sticking out awkwardly from the sides of her head.
“I didn’t mean to be coy,” she said. “But I always travel in disguise.”
Then she reached up to the sides of her head and, with one vigorous yank, ripped her ears off. Blood started gushing out of the holes, but her facial expression didn’t change at all. She held the bloody ears out to me as an offering. “I believe these belong to Dr. Moon,” she said. “If you’d be so kind as to pass them along.”
“Who’s Dr. Moon?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. I sat up on the table, the butcher paper crinkling and rustling beneath me. I held out my hands and she placed the two bloody ears into them, open side up. They were lightly glazed with fine golden hairs. They glowed faintly in my hands.
“But these look like Thomas’s,” I said.
She gave a thin smile. “My blood runs outside of me now,” she said softly. “Where it belongs.”
I looked down at the pool of blood forming on the floor. It was spreading outward. When it reached the base of the table, it began to climb, flowing against gravity, inching up the leg. It was coming for me. I gasped.
The other me giggled softly. “It’s gonna help you, silly,” she said. “You need a blood transfusion. You’re dying. That’s why you’re here.”
The blood was traveling along the edge of the table now, about an inch from my thigh. “Let it embrace you,” she whispered. “It’s thicker than water. It’s life.”
“What about you?” I cried. “Won’t you die?”
She didn’t answer. Her smile faded, or turned into a different kind of smile, no longer playful. She smiled through an infinite sadness, like a faded saint in a medieval painting. “You’re such a stupid little hermit crab,” she said. “In such a stupid, stupid, stupid little shell.”
“I thought I was a sea urchin,” I said.
Before she could answer, the blood reached me. Just before it touched me, it congealed into the form of a hand. Then the hand reached up and grabbed my thigh, and I screamed.
“What?” said Thomas. “What is it?”
I was still screaming, still half in the dream. Slowly his face came into focus. I felt the weight of his body straddling mine, the pressure of his hands against the sides of my face. “Shh,” he said. “It’s all right.”
I closed my mouth, looked up at him. “You’re missing your ears,” I observed.
He raised his hands to the sides of his head, where his ears should have been, and set his mouth in a stoic line. “Don’t worry,” he said. “They’ll come back.” He rolled off me and sat up.
“In my dream,” I said, “I was supposed to give your ears back to you. My doppelgänger had them.” I sat up next to him, reached over, and touched the sides of his head. I could feel that faint tingle, that corrosive effervescence of absence. Then I touched my own ears, solid and warm. I imagined cutting them off and plugging them into his head. But they would just be rejected, like mismatched organs. I was made of different stuff from him.
I’d never felt so trapped inside my own separateness. I returned my hands to the absence of his ears, playing my fingers across their invisible rims as if across rosary beads, patiently awaiting the slow tingle of their re-becoming.
* * *
Then: three weeks of nocturnal geothermal explorations and hazy half-awake days. Every morning, when I left for work, I left him naked in my bed; when I got home, he was already there, waiting (I had given him a key). Every night we stayed up as long as pos
sible, testing our respective limits: his structural integrity, my capacity for withstanding high temperatures. For a while, we pulled through like champions: there’s nothing to boost your sexual adrenaline like a rapidly draining hourglass hovering above the bed.
Then, though, we began to lose the race against time, or against death, or whatever other force was pulling him apart. His molecules barely held together; he’d seem fine and then, just like that, they’d come apart like loose shoelaces. His body would untie from itself, and a hole would open up. I’d try to place my palm on his taut, resistant stomach, and instead nothing would resist me; I’d feel air, then the cool sheet beneath him. Sometimes it was his arm or chest that vanished. Once his head: I was kissing him and then I just pitched forward, my tongue curling and wagging through empty space. When these unravelings happened, he said, he still felt me, in a secondhand way, like watching a movie of someone being touched.
His molecules would always eventually come back together, but when they did, they’d move faster than normal, and his body grew hotter than ever. Several times I burned myself. After one night with him I had to soak my hands in a bowl of ice water. Once I woke up with an actual scar, a fuzzy stripe across my inner arm. We learned to sleep with a flannel sheet between us, for safety.
His penis would become especially hot, a baton of dense flame. If we used lots of lube, I could stand it. In fact the pleasure depended upon the pain, the way certain thick sunsets depend upon smog. He moved so slowly inside me, to minimize friction that might generate more heat. I loved it. People talk about feeling their insides melt, but only I knew what that actually felt like. I was the only woman who had ever melted in this particular way. When I thought of a regular lukewarm penis now, it seemed so boring, like an old wet sock.
We might as well have been the first man and the first woman: risking everything, learning the limits of the body, figuring everything out from scratch.
* * *
Of course it was impossible to tell anyone about any of this. What language would I have used? I myself knew very little of Thomas’s past, only what it had shaped him into: someone incandescent and voluble, with depths carved out by suffering and a reckless commitment to pleasure.
As it happened, I managed to avoid seeing any of my friends in person for nearly a month. This was shockingly easy. In New York City, it is possible to disappear with very little effort. Even though hundreds of people see you every day, most of them don’t know you, wouldn’t miss you. The people who do know you are busy and exhausted and assume you are too. Plus, at least half of my friends were professional flakes, and even in the best of times I had a habit of sometimes ignoring them and going into private Rachel worlds for weeks at a time—so my actual life turned out to be the perfect alibi. Like a camouflaged lizard, I hid in plain sight.
As for my family, I took their calls as I always had, answered their questions as cryptically as usual. It was pointless to tell my parents about a boyfriend unless they were likely to meet him at Christmas; I hadn’t mentioned a man to them in years. (They sometimes asked me how my old boyfriend Mark was doing, even though they knew I hadn’t seen him since college; this was as close as they ever came, in their Wasp-polite way, to accusing me of lesbianism or premature spinsterhood.) As for my much older sister, she was a narcissist and thus easy to lie to.
If I had not been so caught up in the daydream, it might have alarmed me, how easy it was to shed or distort these connections upon which my life as a social being depended. But I didn’t have time to think, any more than an athlete has time to think while running a triathlon. I was attempting the impossible: sustaining a fragile daydream through the power of my fucking, through sheer force of will.
I could not entirely avoid Jimmy. But Jimmy had problems of his own: the night after my second sleepover with Thomas, Kit’s husband, Byron, had finally returned from rehab; as it turned out, he and Kit had not come to a crystal clear understanding about the nature of their relationship, specifically the fact that it was over. This had become apparent when Byron had opened the door in the middle of the night and yelled “Where the fuck were you? I had to take a cab from fucking Newark!” and then “Who the fuck is that?” and then “Oh no, you motherfucker, not again.”
A fight had ensued, a fight whose contours might at first have seemed predictable but soon became less like a fight than like a Charlie Kaufman film: just when you thought you understood the genre you were in, it swerved and gained a sudden self-awareness and undermined itself and became something else entirely. I’ll spare you all the twists and turns and just say that by the time the sun rose, several expensive objects had been threateningly brandished, including a broken bottle of Bordeaux and the blunt end of a Buddha statue; each of the three had, at one point or another, sobbed from the sheer force of sudden self-revelation; and finally, they had all had sex together, sex that was enhanced by Byron’s long-standing porn addiction and the pressure cooker of his seventy celibate days. By the time they went out for brunch at 2 p.m. the next day, they were a throuple.
Jimmy had never been a member of a throuple before; learning the rules and nursing his partners’ fragile egos and attending several therapy sessions a week absorbed all of his attention. Thus, conveniently little was required of me as a friend besides responding to his frequent texts and infrequent phone calls and supplying the appropriate exclamations of astonishment or excitement or sympathy. He did ask about me, but it was easier than usual to give an evasive half answer and steer him back to himself.
So the rest of my life continued—technically. September had arrived; school had started. The library was quiet during the day again. But nothing in daily life was a match for the heat and terror of the daydream, which had finally found a place to thrive: in the shimmering negative space opened up within Thomas’s body, between his body and mine. It did not surprise me that the daydream had required, or occasioned, a tear in the fabric of reality. I had never underestimated its strength.
But I was also learning that there was, in fact, another force strong enough to compete with the daydream: fear. Every time a hole opened up in his body, I felt the daydream waver and jump like firelight. On the other side of the daydream lay not what had been there before—my boring, ordinary life—but its shadow, a yawning blackness, a territory I had never even come close to encountering. If and when he did disappear, in some final way, how would I continue? How could I carry this dark, unshareable knowledge? Could a person even remain a person, after such intimacy with death?
I’m not an idiot. I knew how crazy it was, what I was doing. And yet, and yet—even with only the barest, most partial knowledge of his life (I still didn’t even know his last name), I felt confident in applying the word “love” to what was happening between us. I’d been a goner since he’d pulled my arm through his stomach there in the middle of the carpet, since I’d felt his death lick my hand with its prickly tongue, since I’d become the keeper of his secret.
This love required a certain kind of mystery, the way a fire required oxygen. Deprive it of that oxygen and it would die—perhaps not completely, but it would die down into something ember-like, something barely there, something whose warmth offered the memory of flame rather than flame itself. So, as unbelievable as this may seem, I hadn’t asked him to explain anything.
On the one hand, I wanted to know everything about him; I wanted no part of his life to remain foreign or inaccessible. Even the air that touched him had become precious to me. On the other hand, I knew my myths, and they all said you could kill something by seeing it too clearly. Cupid and Psyche shared a perfect love, but only in the dark. Plagued by doubt, she raised a lamp to his face; he disappeared.
Each hole that opened up in Thomas’s body was one more hole we might fall through and never come back up again. But as long as he had enough of a body for me to hold—as long as he had warm skin to press against mine—the risk seemed worth it. I could only hope that whatever force was dissolving him from the inside
out wouldn’t eventually dissolve me too.
Sometimes I thought about Thomas as a person who’d been alive, in a normal way, before. I imagined him belonging to other people: parents, co-workers, friends, lovers. He was not just the solitary golden man who’d inhabited my bed for weeks—he was a glittering shard of a larger story, cut loose and drifting, surrounded by an ache of negative space.
And me? After being less than nothing to him—a stranger—a month before, I’d become his entire new reality; I’d become reality itself. “You’re so dense, you’re so real,” he’d said on our first night together. “Fucking you would be like fucking the world.”
Perhaps this is, on some level, what every woman longs for: the chance to become the world for another person, to prove that she is a world. I felt this urge ripening inside of me as we lay curled together on the bed. It seemed like a worthy use of my life. I mean, what else had I been planning to do with it?
At the same time: where did it end? What if the world I lived in, the world for which I’d come to stand in, was already in some way lost to me?
* * *
One night, the entire lower half of Thomas’s body disappeared while he was inside me. I could still feel him, like a minty tingle spreading through my loins, but with no weight or pressure.
We took a break and waited for his missing flesh to reappear, but even after it did, the sex felt different. He was spooked. He fucked me aggressively, as if he’d forgotten about me—as if I wasn’t even there, as if the purpose of the fucking was to prove he had a penis, to prove that his penis was stronger than death. He fell asleep instantly afterward, his head conking back on the pillow like a thousand-pound weight, and began to snore.
The Regrets Page 9