by Krissy Kneen
‘It’s just work,’ said Susanna. ‘Nothing too exciting.’
‘I get excited if there’s junk mail in my box, you know what I mean?’
Susanna took the letters from the girl’s hand, among them a catalogue from a local dress store with no address at all. ‘Here,’ she said and handed the catalogue to the girl. ‘Have some of my junk mail. I have too much already.’
Green-hair laughed, then shrugged as the lift doors opened at her floor. ‘Catch you round the lifts sometime.’
‘Yeah, thanks.’
The girls stepped out, the lift doors juddered closed and Susanna relaxed into the joy of sudden silence.
The envelopes were laid out across the floor. It was a reconstruction of the building, a core sample, the letters representing the names of people inside, the virtual units laid out one above the other. Susanna wandered through her building, stopping to check on Amy Evans in 2B, Jeff B. Gibbon in 7F, Tim Bachellor, Greg Davies. Not a single Aaron among them.
There were, of course, missing pieces of the puzzle. Apartments that were not represented. Not a single piece of mail for floor thirteen. There were also men who might have been another incarnation of her Aaron Fitzgerald. Alan Francis was a likely candidate, as was Andrew F. Lane. Susanna perched up on her kitchen stool and looked down at the paper representation of the building arranged before her. She could see her own flat, a bill, a cheque, a catalogue.
He would be waiting for her to log on. Somewhere in the building he would be waiting for her.
I missed you.
Did you?
It is unlike my Susie-su to be so late.
Big day, she told him, and then I had to go through so much mail.
A paper trail. I long for the days of a paperless society. Almost upon us. I rarely get any mail at all.
She squirmed. It would be so simple just to ask him— but when you do get mail, where does it go to? What is your address? Your unit number? But all of these questions would break the veil of anonymity they had woven between them, Magritte’s blind lovers, the exquisite braille of the internet.
Perhaps I should write to you.
Start a letter now, here. Begin it, Dear Mr Fitzgerald.
And then how do I send it?
Simplicity itself. You just press the enter key.
And what if I wanted to send you a lock of my hair, a tribute to the romantics?
Oh? Then you would press it between the pages of a webcam. But that would be a shame because, Suse or Susanna or Susie-su, you are my blonde Venus, my dusky Moor, my Eurasian delight with skin as fine as calf leather slippers. Even a lock of your hair would pin you down like a butterfly, diminish you, corral you. You were right, my divine smorgasbord of S. I remember how I used to beg you to lift the edge of your scarf just an inch. I wanted to defile just a little fraction of your breast, peer into your dusky hollows, touch my tongue to my computer screen where the wide-spread glistening vision of your sex would be revealed to me in exquisite detail. All this I longed for, and you resisted my advances sagely. You are the wise prophet of my fantasies and because you have hidden yourself from me you will be so for eternity, never to be diminished by the truth.
So, Aaron, do you feel you have been diminished in my eyes? I have seen your chest, your cock, your balls. I have seen the fountain of your emissions and the pleasure that you conjure from your body with your own pretty hand.
How sad for you, dear S. I have allowed myself to become a thing of two dimensions, flat and trapped forever. You will never truly believe that I am dark and muscular, bending you roughly over the rocks on some secluded beach, thrusting the dark thick meat of my engorged penis into the delicate flower of your body. I have destroyed the chance that you might see me as some nervous boy, my tiny cock so shy that only your teacherly lips will draw the tentative semen from my loins. You will never believe me when I tell you that my fingers are soft and so finely formed that when you place them, trembling, at the entry to your cunt and slide your hips forward onto my virgin touch, my whole hand will slip inside with barely any resistance.
The truffly feast of your chest—average chest—and the juicy meat of your cock—everyman penis—and your hand, the careful rhythm of your hand—which could be any hand but so expertly manoeuvred, she had noticed—these things delight me, and despite the fantasies that we have indulged in, despite all of these well-played games, when I am finally alone in my single bed it is your hand that comes back to me, your real and corporeal penis that enters me where my own fingers are preparing the way.
Fantasies. The pause following the word betrayed his disappointment. Oh wonderful Susie-su, my love, my treat. For you they are fantasies but for me they are the very essence of the thing itself.
Susanna squatted by the door.
She had always had a particularly intense relationship with the hour between two and three in the morning. This was the time when she woke from restless dreams, her legs clamped around her pillow, the damp muskiness of her juices staining the red pillowcase even darker, the last pulse of her pleasure rippling through her body. When she was a child she had believed that nocturnal visitors climbed through her window at this witching hour. Perhaps it was the men watching Artemisia’s Susanna from their position above her bed, but in dreams it was always a succubus or an incubus—she didn’t care which, but a visitor of some sort anyway. The evidence would be spelled out in the dampness of her budding breasts, the ragged red welts on the insides of her thighs, marks of a dream lover scrambling for purchase at the lip of the virgin well.
As an adult Susanna began to see that the incubus was nothing but her own hand, working hard against her skin as she slept. The power of her lust, once piqued, seemed unfathomable, and she would fall between sheets still slippery, dewy from her last encounter, only to be ravaged by the astonishing force of her own imagination.
She checked her watch. 2:05. Perhaps he would slip up next time they met; reveal some small detail of his life, his sleeplessness, the shape of the moon at precisely this time of night. She could see very little from where she crouched by the door. The arm of a couch, leather, dark leather; black or perhaps midnight blue. The only light spilled, pale and tinged with blue, from a television outside her line of sight.
She could hear it, of course. This was what had alerted her to the act in progress in the flat next door. The man’s actorly groaning, the breathy high-pitched climb towards ecstasy of the girl. The sounds of simulated pleasure. And, underlying them, a background soundtrack of the wet, succulent machinations of the act itself. Her neighbour, naked on the couch.
She confirmed this with a small shift of her body. The spread of his chest suddenly slipping into the sliver of her view. A chest that could be his chest, her Aaron’s chest. An everyman’s chest and a penis as average as a size seven shoe. She watched as he stroked himself. On the internet the men were much closer to the camera. Their performances were for her gaze. This was a less expert demonstration. Her neighbour stroked his penis, stopped, leaned forward, pressed a button on the remote control. The sound of the woman’s orgasm was suddenly repeated, the very apex of the crescendo rehearsed again and again, like a pianist mastering a new scale.
Susanna watched. The engorged cock lost just a little ground as its owner fast-forwarded or rewound the sequence of events on the obscured screen. When he leaned back into the couch and took himself in hand once more the sounds of sex had changed: guttural groaning from the woman, a quick leap of the penis in Susanna’s truncated view. She heard the male voice coaxing just a little more, that’s right, almost there, relax, oh god, look at that, sweet fucking Christ look at that beautiful…ah there, ah there. Oh man if you could only see what you look like now spread out like this, oh fuck oh fucking hell, so tight, your sweet little hole is so fucking tight.
He shuddered, he twitched back onto the lounge and the sound of his skin was a rude rasp against the sweat-wet leather. He came.
If she’d had her own remote control she wo
uld have used it to rewind and play, rewind and play until she was sated, gorging on that one acute moment of pleasure. She was dressed in a cotton shift, white like the nightclothes of the little girl who used wake to the succubus groan. The child grown tall had long abandoned the use of frilly knickers, and now the juices dripped freely, drawing a slippery accusing line towards the place of her unrest.
She glanced around, scanned the darkened corridor, tiny down-lights dripping a treacle glow onto the brown furred paper of the walls. The doors were all shut tight. 2:25. Her knees ached from squatting, her back cracked when she leaned back against the door. The man was dabbing at himself with a tissue, pulling on boxer shorts, standing, shutting off the low guttural groans.
Wait! Wait! pleaded the woman in the gravelly croon of a jazz club star. Too big! You are too big, you’ll tear me apart. And then the voice of her partner, warning, You think I’m too big? You better get ready and relax because I’m going to show you there’s room in there for two. A little shriek from the girl, the neighbour pausing with the remote control in his hand. His interest suddenly piqued, disturbing the flaccid little hang of the penis nestled inside his shorts.
This is my brother, Bob. Bob, this is Scarlett. Do you like what you see of her?
Another voice, a baritone. I love what I can see of little Scarlett. Look how much I like you, little Scarlett. Do you want to see how much? Close up? Here right up close to your face? Better use lots of spit, little Scarlett, get it nice and wet deep down there in your throat and if it’s lubed up just right, then brother Bob won’t hurt you very much at all.
The sounds of feigned pleasure, the sounds of simulated pain. The neighbour turned the television off and all the play-acting was replaced by silence. Susanna watched him adjust his vaguely interested penis in his boxers and scratch his chest distractedly, then her spyglass theatre was plunged into darkness. She stood quietly, tiptoed back towards her own front door.
She closed it behind her and leaned against it. Touched her breasts, feeling the steady thud of her heart. Then, when she was certain that the rhythm of it was no more aroused than usual, she let her hand slide onto her breast, massaging the nipple, feeling the comforting weight of flesh slip into her hand. She liked the feel of her breast in cotton. She liked the way the nightdress slid up with the barest caress, exposing the bright sheen of moisture on her thighs, the humid damp of the tangle of hair. She didn’t shave herself as the women on the internet shaved. There was no one to care that the view was obscured; no one to see how thick and forested her crotch was, to smell the gamy scent of it, like a wild creature gone to earth.
She let her fingers slip into herself, this torso, this new torso a real man’s body, this real man sleeping in a real bed a matter of metres from her own. She fingered herself and touched her breast and her mind was aflame with a real man pulling his cock in her very real apartment building, with the invented pleasure echoing out like a soundtrack to his ministrations.
She came too quickly, an unsatisfying end to such a vivid first experience. It could have been Aaron working himself to orgasm in the brash light of a television screen, it might have been her Mr Fitzgerald. But the spasms of pleasure were sharp and dissipated quickly. If that man had been her lover—surely her orgasm would have shattered her world. She felt sure that her body would have responded more fully to a brush with the familiar.
She wiped her hand on the cotton of her nightdress and pushed away from the hard wood of her door. It was coming up to 3 am. She drank water, splashed some onto her flushed face, and slipped quietly between the crimson sheets. There was a sound, some low drone. Perhaps it was her neighbour tripping into a deep sleep, the succubus climbing up onto his bed, you think I’m too big? You’d better get ready and relax because I’m going to show you there’s room in there for two.
Susanna wondered if his sleep was restless, if he sensed her sleeping through the thin dividing wall. How easy it would be to drill a hole between their rooms, the kind of glory hole they might make in one of their scenarios: a place for the occasional protrusion of his penis, anonymously grand and angled perfectly for her own separate pleasure. If this was Aaron in the apartment next door she might suggest it, but it was not Aaron. This was some other stranger, snoring quietly in the room next door.
Most of the residents of the building were sleeping. She knew so many of them by now. She had read of Angela Loon’s debts and the possibility that a company might repossess her car. She pressed her hand against Angela’s door, sleepless at 2 am, wishing for some end to her worries. She had seen the letters to Henry Cleckheaton from his eight-year-old son, the photographs of fish dragged, boy-sized, from rough seas. Looking forward to my birthday breakfast when I get back. Mummy says I shouldn’t ask what you have got me but I think it is a fishing rod of my own but one that works on the beach because mummy doesn’t have a boat like Uncle John.
The cute row of kisses at the bottom of the page did not dissuade her from crouching low to peer through the keyhole while Henry Cleckheaton walked from his kitchenette and back to the table—trailing the glorious scent of buttered toast. Susanna clutched her stomach with a wave of hunger; she was hungry also to see more of Henry. Another potential Aaron and, after days of wandering through sleeping halls, finally she’d found an Aaron awake when all the other Aarons were asleep.
He opened his laptop, a good start. She saw his face illuminated, his fleshy pout, the pale, almost white shock of hair, the startlingly blue eyes. Her breath made the paint of the door bead with condensation. It seemed he would stare into the computer forever without making a movement or a sound. She wanted him to take off his pyjama pants; this at least, just a quick look at his penis, the presence or absence of a foreskin, might eliminate him.
Just when she imagined that he would sit forever like this, frozen in a pose of concentration, Susanna heard a thin voice, cracked with sleep.
‘Henry?’
A man’s voice, a high-pitched bluebird of a voice, sweet and musical. She had imagined from Henry’s correspondence that he lived alone.
‘Henry? Come to bed. You are always on your computer. It is bad for your eyes.’
Henry turned to the place beyond the scope of Susanna’s keyhole. He smiled, a smile that lit up his pretty face and made her heart and her loins ache a little. Such a gorgeous smile, angelic. He was, perhaps, in his forties and therefore just outside her target group. Most of the men over forty she had encountered on the internet were circumcised. Most had the odd grey hair around their nipples or peppered through their pubic hair.
‘You are not playing that godawful game again, are you?’
‘Perhaps, my pet.’ The angel glowed with a screen-blessed halo.
‘But I am disappointed. You should be looking at porn like a normal red-blooded male. Not running around some deserted pretend island like a child.’
‘This game is not for children, Dimitri.’
‘I know another game that is not suitable for children.’
‘Is it hard?’
Henry was. She could see the outline of his cock tenting his pyjama pants as he stood and gently closed the screen.
‘I’ll teach you. There aren’t very many rules.’
‘Oh. I am fond of rules, though. Without rules we have nothing to push against.’
‘I have something for you to push against. And so do you, I can see it from here.’
She wanted the invisible stranger to wander out into the diningroom. She wanted the coupling to occur in the tiny fragment of the room available to her prying gaze. She wanted so much to see this combination of male flesh, something she had not yet seen on the internet, the kind of game she and Aaron might play with some unsuspecting torso. But the intensity of her desire would not make it so.
She was treated only to some creaks which must have come from the loose or overstretched joints of Henry’s bed. There were a few grunts and at one point a little giggle, muffled by bedclothes or perhaps a pillow. And after this, l
ittle easy settling sounds.
Susanna stood and walked slowly past the other doors of other apartments. No one awake now but herself. Henry was still an option for her. Despite his Dimitri it was clear from the letters of his son that he had once been with women too. You are always on your computer. It is bad for your eyes. Perhaps this was all the hint she needed. A man of average build with a computer habit and a fluid sexuality, easily aroused.
Back in her apartment she pinned his letters to her cork board of possibility. It was thinly populated: her direct neighbour, who still remained anonymous because the lock on his mailbox was still firmly in place, and Henry Cleckheaton. The definitely-nots were laid out on the diningroom table. Women, older men, the very fat and the very thin. She sat at her kitchen bench and ate buttered toast and opened her laptop, but of course he was never online at this time in the morning.
Hi there, typed a big swollen torso with a tiny sausage of a penis.
Hi, she typed back.
Female? Male?
Female.
Age?
Old enough.
Turn your webcam on, let me see your pussy.
No. But I assure you I have one, and if you touch yourself for me I promise I will be touching myself too.
James Bacon was reading Lolita. It was not much to go on, but as she stood beside him in the lift her senses clicked over to high alert. She noticed the caramel smell of his aftershave, his smooth jaw, his over-long eyelashes and the little grin that kept flicking up to kiss his perfectly formed lips. She had read the book a dozen times and wondered which part of the narrative was resonating, which literary touch was making this young man smile. James Bacon lived on the floor above hers. The room directly above, in fact. Sometimes, not often, she heard his footsteps. Once she heard something fall and shatter on her ceiling.