Lies & Ugliness

by Brian Hodge

  “Go ahead,” whispered Hiram. “Do it for me.”

  Hiram or not, there had never been any choice but that he would. Their marriage had hardly been conventional, and if this marked its end, then let the end come in ceremony. Let it mean something, even if it killed him. Let it feed a greater hunger.

  With loosened clothing, Kraaft took his place among the semicircle to wait. With his eyes he drank her in, as she in her exaltation drank pleasures for an id of millions.

  Cities, he reflected, had in their dawn been places of great sexuality. A Roman, an Athenian, a Ninevite, a Babylonian, could scarcely turn around without confronting another fertility icon, or an unabashed depiction of genitalia and what they were for. Temple prostitutes made love as the proxies of deities lacking flesh rather than appetites. He felt cheated, then, that the puritans to follow had seen to the burying of all this, driving it under wraps and shadow, until all that was left, really, was the teasing gloss of image.

  Billboards. They had billboards.

  This close, from so few feet away, it was difficult to miss Shawn’s bruises, purple mottlings against livid skin.

  He’d never been one to invest faith in the pipe dreams of anarchists; thugs and opportunists would swarm to fill any void. But cities, he allowed, were always of two minds. Above ground, the servants of the empire strained beneath their yokes of state, of faith, of ambition no greater than vain acquisition. While far below their watch, anarchy gnawed at the seams of the straitjacket to spill its redeeming violence, here a trickle, there a torrent.

  And down here, among the lowest, surely some epiphany had been achieved, orgasm as magic on an epic scale. Or was this but a pipe dream of his own, dreamed in one more galley of slaves?

  Kraaft watched as she took another, and another after that, tiring of waiting for his turn. Had he no rights here at all? He seized her present lover by the hair, yanking him up and off her, and slung him into the wall. Others rose to their feet and there was a brief scuffle, until Kraaft grabbed one of the lanterns and used it to brain the nearest and threaten the rest into surrender. They backed into deeper shadow, cowed and beaten with arms raised to protect their skulls, but unable to bring themselves to leave.

  On the mattresses, Kraaft knelt between her outstretched legs and for the first time in half a year laid his hands upon her belly. He looked her over now that no more illusions could come between, to see what demand had wrung from her. Her shoulders, bruised; her ribs, scraped; her fathomless green eyes threaded with blood.

  “Do you even recognize me?” he whispered.

  Somewhere within was the Shawn he’d known, and she seemed to rise as if from the bottom of a lake. And when she smiled, her teeth appeared to have lengthened, until he realized that, no, her gums were just receding.

  “How could I forget?” she said. “No matter how hard I tried.”

  His hands trembled as they roamed across her, and she warmed beneath his touch. When one fingertip dipped into the tiny crevice of her navel, she cooed, and he knew that no one had cared enough to realize she’d liked that, too — not one out of six thousand. He stroked the tender skin behind her knees, and everyone there could feel what it did for her. He massaged her temples. He kissed her eyelids.

  From now on he would be all that she needed, and they would feed the beast together, until their flesh rotted and their bones were rattled apart by the passage of trains above.

  Not even death would part them now. The revolution within him had gone too far for that.

  After all the years of pose and pretense, he was himself, and no one else.

  He could prove it.

  He had witnesses.

  The 121st Day of Sodom

  It was thin and delicate enough to be female, but because there were no breasts I had to assume otherwise. It stood before us without moving because it hadn’t been told to do anything else, and while it had arms and legs and stood on two feet, the leather hood over its submissively bowed head made something of it a rung or two below human. This was obviously the intention.

  “See how compliant it is,” Drake told us. “It’ll stand like that for hours if I don’t give it something to do.”

  That leather hood: black, naturally, and tight as burnt skin. It could see from inside, but the visible eyes were hard flat buttons that held everything back. The nose was no more than the hint of a bump, the mouth a three-inch gash of open zipper through which we caught an occasional glimpse of lip or flicker of tongue.

  “Can it breathe with the zipper shut?” Aimee asked.

  Of course Drake would know, but he gave a practiced shrug of ignorance. “Maybe we’d better find out, don’t you think?”

  He told the slave to step up to the edge of the table, and it did. Told it to bend forward at the waist and lay the side of its head on the tabletop, and it did this too. One, two teeth at a time, Drake ratcheted the zipper halfway shut, then paused to study the hood and the nameless, faceless entity inside.

  “You don’t need air tonight, do you,” he murmured.

  “I need only to—”

  Drake went suddenly livid, pale face flushing from contoured jawline to the widow’s peak of midnight-dyed hair, receded just enough to lend him a touch of faux aristocracy in his haughtier moments, and these were frequent. He slapped a chastising hand down upon the hood. Aimee and I watched taut muscles flinch and squirm across the slave’s naked back, like watching the trembling of a puppy newly learning the brute power of its master’s wrath.

  “Who told you you could speak?” Drake shouted, then waited to see if it would take this bait and slip up again. When it didn’t, Drake nodded, satisfied. “So you’re not afraid of suffocation? You may speak now.”

  “No, master,” it said, genderless and muffled. “I fear only disappointing you again.”

  “Don’t you all,” he said, then with a casual flick of his hand shut the zipper the rest of the way. “And stand up straight, for god’s sake, somebody may want to set a drink down.”

  We watched it then, standing before our table like a waiter who had forgotten why he’d come. No one else in the club paid any attention, immersed in their own tableaux and their rigidly proscribed rites of seduction, surrender, and will.

  Its stomach began to convulse first, with quickening attempts at stealing breath. The suggestion of a mouth, open and straining, formed behind the opaque skin, a circle of leather dimpling in ever so slightly. The head would sag, then snap upright, as if fighting sleep. Finally the slave collapsed to its knees, falling forward and banging its head on the edge of the table.

  Drake relented, opening the zipper, and the leather sphincter stretched as the slave drew reedy gulps of air. He pulled it toward his lap, cradling the head with peculiar tenderness as it knelt and seemed blissfully content to be stroked like a pet.

  “Looks like they might have a little trouble when it’s shut,” Drake said, finally answering Aimee. “Any more questions?”

  She would have a thousand, I knew, and if Drake answered each one she would have a thousand more. The trouble was knowing where to begin.

  Drake smiled at the confused interplay of repulsion and longing on our faces. He stroked the head with fingers long and slender, patient as a spider, gazing fondly at the two buttons that were the only other facial features apart from that zippered mouth.

  “Oh, they’re a responsibility, all right,” he said. “But how can you resist them when they look up at you with those eyes?”

  Drake had owned the club for three years, so he told us, but it had become what it now was by accident only within the last nine months. He gave us the original name, something so clever and vapid that I forgot it immediately. Business was good from the very beginning, but Fetish Night — instituted to invigorate the ordinarily dead Monday scene — proved so insatiably popular that it soon cannibalized the other six as well. There’s no way of knowing how significant a deviation from the norm exists out there until someone gives them all a place to go. This Dr
ake did, and thus was born Club Kinque.

  He gave us a swift tour before the doors opened that night at 9:00PM, showing the layout of this building he’d found in a part of the city where blight was high and property values low. The first floor was unused except for storage and access, the clientele entering through a closed-off bay to pay their cover and find their way up a stairwell where urban primitives had slashed paint on the walls to glow beneath the bruised nostalgic violet of black lights. The second floor was cavernous, with dance space and lights and screens and a booth for a DJ who was always busy except for the nights when a live band had been booked, often notorious acts that few other venues, if any, would dare handle, such as the Genitorturers and Crash Worship. The third floor was barred to all under twenty-one, with tables and booths and a warren of mood-lit nooks more intimate still, where practitioners would gather for piercings and brandings and whippings and so on. Like the Christian heaven, it was insulated from the chaos below, except for the more intense bass thuds, and while speakers continually played ambient industrial music from Sweden’s Cold Meat Industry label, and other sources obscure enough to suit Drake’s aesthetic, the volume was never so loud that you couldn’t hear the crack of a lash across bare buttocks tightened in sweet dread.

  It wasn’t until later that I learned how important that quiet really was, but by then … well, you can guess the rest, I’m sure.

  We’d seen enough our first night there, Aimee and I, to work us into a fever by the time we got home very late. We’d had just enough to drink to fuel desire without sapping performance, neither of us giving much thought to the morning’s obligations. I commuted to Chez Noir Monthly via fax and modem, and since we’d moved back to the city, Aimee was doing radio promo again, spending more time out of the office than in.

  Undressed and tall, she was radiant in her heat and need, and knelt upon the bed, hinged at the waist with her rump high in the air, dark hair slung across the pillow as she awaited the fall of the belt. It was looped double in my fist, and I on my knees above her, trying to muster the nerve to swing. I swatted her with a soft wet smack of leather on skin, and tried once again when my arm faltered, the same as when I tried to talk dirty and the words would clench in my throat because I found it such an unnatural act — not wrong, just outside my nature.

  “Harder,” Aimee whispered, desperate and heated.

  I managed another swing but no more, and she turned on me in disappointment until I forced the belt into her hand and lay flat out, asking her to use it across the plain of my stomach. She cringed as she brought the belt down. It barely tingled. At least I could share in her frustration, wanting the hot cherry glow of flogged skin but being denied.

  In Drake’s world, there were two kinds of people: those who topped and those who bottomed. With standard-issue consummation, Aimee and I could meet each other halfway easily enough, and had been happily doing so for four years. But when the theater of the boudoir turned to dominance and submission, we’d both been cast in the same role. Two Juliets, as it were, and no Romeo.

  We tossed the belt to the floor, and when Aimee threw a long, tapered leg over me to straddle my hips and ride me hard, I know we both were better for it, if still plagued by how conventional it felt. We could at least laugh about it, about our limitations.

  Four years. They say the itch doesn’t come until the seventh, but with the pace of life on an exponential increase, I suppose it’s inevitable that we look beyond the horizons of our marriages sooner than our parents did, and in places they never dreamed existed.

  “I wonder,” she said, “if it feels claustrophobic inside one of those hoods.”

  Even our very first night at Club Kinque, Aimee was hardly a stranger to Drake, and when we returned the next night he seemed to have expected it all along, if nowhere near as triumphantly gloating as I might’ve expected. Then again, I’d always imagined him as the type who’d spent too much time cultivating his jaded nonchalance to gloat over anything. It took effort, maintaining that much lassitude, and I suppose I did envy his control.

  Aimee had dated him years ago, breaking it off because he was too unapologetically self-absorbed and always would be, something she tried not to be judgmental about, just regarded it as a matter of fact. Drake congratulated her on her perception and offered to pay for the cobalt laser treatment to erase the padlock-and-thorns tattoo he’d had put near her pubis. He was no sore loser because, Aimee guessed, he saw himself as naturally dominant over 99% of everything else that particular day.

  Or maybe he just had the advantage of incredible foresight. You’ll be back someday, former boyfriends are prone to believing, but in this case it was the truth.

  She never used him as a weapon against me, but I always knew he was there, an indelible piece of Aimee’s past, what dead comic Sam Kinison once called “the darkest chapter in her sexual diary.” An unabashed erotic explorer, Drake supposedly had fucked his way through the Kama Sutra by his nineteenth birthday. From there he’d graduated to various rites of sex magick as described by Aleister Crowley, made pilgrimages to legendary Eastern brothels, and when fleshly sensation became saturated, finally, turned to the epic panorama of deviant psychology mapped out in the surviving works of Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade. Contemptibly familiar acts can become fresh again when put into a new context.

  “He just didn’t know the meaning of the word love,” Aimee told me. “The closest he could get was adoration.”

  When they met again, by chance, it was through her job. Some luncheon gathering of the city’s music business types, promoters and radio personnel like Aimee, and venue owners. Undoubtedly Drake relished his status as a wicked and unsettling pariah, Club Kinque going strong for the better part of a year and beholden to no one and nothing but human appetites for its success.

  Their reunion was warm and cordial, leading to the inevitable what-are-you-doing-now inquiries. Drake gave her a business card with only an address and, along one edge, a riding crop. We later joked about it, imagining polo players and blue-blooded equestrian snobs showing up to get the shock of their lives.

  “Bring … whoever,” he said, although he knew damn well she was married, and to whom. “You might even like it.”

  When Aimee brought it up after a week during which I could tell something was eating away at her, I felt more intrigue than threat. This surprised us both. How understanding, how open-minded, some might say on learning that not only was I willing to suffer an evening there for Aimee’s sake, but that I actually felt drawn to go. How secure in his relationship he must be.

  I’d have to laugh in their faces, for this would obviously be coming from people who didn’t even know me.

  So we came. We saw.

  He conquered.

  We were VIPs, on the shortlist of those whose cover charges were waived, but night after night he kept us on the periphery of it all, like U.N. observers, or anthropologists who, while prized guests, were still expected to remain ceremonial exiles.

  On the one hand, I suppose it truly was for our edification, so that we’d learn the protocol of the S/M world. On the other, it was pure calculated manipulation, feeding our heightened senses a nightly diet of sights and sounds but denying us any chance to participate until such time as Drake would decide we could.

  To challenge him in this was unthinkable.

  One frustrating night, as we sat sidelined, a female dom approached us. Asymmetrical ebony hair stuck to her sweaty throat, and alabaster skin showed through innumerable slits in her black latex outfit, making her as sleek as a carnivorous zebra. She regarded us with painted Egyptian eyes.

  “May I borrow him awhile?” she asked Aimee. Submissives could be loaned and traded, as long as permission was granted, although she’d apparently mistaken Aimee for my keeper. “I promise to return him in almost like-new condition.”

  Something in me longed to go with her, submit to her pointed fingernails and whatever else she had in mind. Never would I know he
r name — never would I deserve to know her name, for she was clearly a more highly evolved creature than I. Her will overruling my own, there would be something monumentally secure in giving in, knowing I was free of all responsibility but to endure, or perform on command. She might pull apart slitted latex, then the muscled globes of her ass, and my only purpose would then be to lick. Or it might only be the sole of her shoe. It would not be adultery — we’d discussed this. It would be taking our places in the natural order, among those who knew how to treat our inferiorities much better than we could treat them in each other.

  But upon being asked for permission to borrow me, Aimee didn’t know how to respond. If anything, this stark latex mistress had every right to commandeer us both.

  Assuming Drake would’ve allowed it.

  “You’re grazing the wrong field. This one’s still being seeded,” he told her. I’d not even known he was nearby. He levered the handle of a whip beneath her chin and pushed up, then pinched her one displayed pink nipple, rolling it like a hardened pebble. She tensed against him, obviously unaccustomed to being put in this position, yet aware his word was law. “Now run along and find something not quite so tender, why don’t you.”

  When released, she did not look back.

  “Sorry about that,” Drake said, joining us. “It’s only been recently that I’ve broken Cleo of the habit of hitting first and asking questions later. Where would we be without the rules? This isn’t a place for anarchists, you know.”

  “It seems plenty rife with capitalists,” I said, and did wonder how wealthy this place had made him. If money had subsumed his every motive.

  Drake smiled, in his way. His was no natural smile — a mild upturning of the corners of his mouth that never touched his eyes, as if he feared the crinkles would set, and mar him. He would be near forty, seven or eight years older than I, but his face was so scrupulously unlined that he didn’t look anywhere near it, except for the subtle receding of his hair.