“No tricks. I want to do it fast but slow, my own speed. Hold it if you want.”
I take my hand away. He does it the same way with me for minutes. My entire head hurts. I feel like choking but open my mouth wider so I won’t. I can’t get used to it or block it out. I even try to think he’s someone I like doing it with, but nothing in my imagination works. I hate it, hate him. I want to bite him, kill him. I should do something. Biting him, he’d kill me or come close. Biting him off, I don’t think I could do all the way through or even near to it and I have to do something I know for sure will incapacitate him completely and for minutes and that I know I also can do. Because I now think there’s as much chance of him killing me as not. Before I thought there was more of a chance he’d just rape me and go. Now I think he’ll rape me and then wait around taunting me and rape me again and maybe even a third time and then he’ll hate me so much for having been raped by him or for whatever I am or have become to him or for any such reason that he’ll kill me or knife me badly. Just to stop me from identifying him he could kill me. So I have to do something to him. All this while he’s pushing my head back and forth on him and using his finger.
Then he stops both, takes a big breath, pulls on my earlobe almost tenderly and bends over and starts kissing me. Sticks his tongue in. He’s very wet around the mouth. His spit pours through, dribbles down his chin onto mine. He nips my lips with his teeth. Nips them harder and my tongue and I shriek and jerk my head away because he bit through my lip and I can taste my blood.
“I get overexcited,” he says.
“Don’t bite. You want to kiss, I’ll kiss.”
We start kissing. He puts his arms around me and I put mine around him and rub my hands up and down his back like he’s doing to me. I want to get him involved with the kissing while I think of something to end all this. It takes a lot of concentration to kiss as if I mean it while same time trying to think hard about something to save my life. The knife. At the end of the bed on the floor. Not that I could get to it as he’s much stronger than I and with one blow if I lunged for it he could knock me off the bed.
I could scream. He’ll kill me. Fight back. Overpower me. Jab him in the eyes. I might not hit them right and then he could tie my hands up or something and I couldn’t do anything more. His balls. I know they can hurt. I know how delicate they are for sure. Some of my men friends. Several times over the years I just touched their testicles a little more than a little and each one of them said it hurt. Don’t even pat them one of them once said. One man’s I just squeezed affectionately I thought and it gave him one of the worst jolts of anyone I ever saw. His stomach pain and being doubled up lasted half a minute or more and if a ball had hit it as happened a few times in his life, he said, he’d have dropped right to the floor. How in the service, he or another man said, one soldier was being strangled by another on top of him and when the top one wouldn’t stop or get off, the bottom one smashed his testicles between his hand and the man on top was knocked unconscious by the blow and had to be hospitalized and almost died.
He stops kissing me. “Now spread your legs.”
“Let me do it once more to you down there with my mouth.”
“Don’t tell me you’re suddenly beginning to like it.”
“As long as you’re going to do it with me, I might as well enjoy it—I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“It’s the truth.”
“The truth. Just lick it a little. I’ll see how much you like it. You can be sure I’ll get into it more if you do. Try anything funny though, you’re finished.”
“Lie back comfortably.”
“I’m fine where I am.”
He’s sitting up. I bend over his penis and hold it with both hands and start to lick it. Then with one hand I stroke his testicles and then squeeze them real hard and he jumps and he’s screaming but stops and starts coughing and choking and falls back on his back and bounces up and down on his shoulders and then I release them a little and shout “Don’t move, stop bouncing, don’t touch me, stay there or I’ll squeeze them so hard they’ll break and you’ll die right here on the bed or else never move again—I know, I’ve worked in hospitals, so don’t even try and get up, you hear? Say yes, say yes.”
“Yes, yes.”
I maneuver my knees to the floor while he’s crying and saying “No, no, oh stop, please, oh,” and I say “I’m going to let you go. But I’m first going to crawl you to the door while I squeeze your balls. I won’t scream for anyone. I’ll talk softly as I am now. You’ll have to put up with the pain. I just want you out of here. You carry your pants while I crawl you to the door and put them on in the hall. What you do once you get out there is your business but I’ll give you five minutes to get dressed and out of the building and then I call the police. That’s a promise. But make one bad move, don’t fool with me—try and hit me or get away, anything, whatever you try and do before you get to that outside hall and by the time your arm swings around or anything, I’ll smash your balls in with my hands, okay?”
“Yes.”
All this time I’m squeezing them just enough to keep plenty of pain coming in and he is in great pain. He’s practically screaming. He probably would be screaming if he let himself make loud sounds. I say “Now turn around on the bed on your stomach and get off the bed backwards and slowly till you’re on your knees in front of me and don’t let me lose my grip on your balls. I’ll be right behind holding on to them and you’re to crawl very slowly to the door. I will kill your balls if you try anything but what I want you to, understand?”
“Yes.”
He turns over on the bed and gets on his knees on the floor in the direction of the front door. I stand bent over behind him and keep squeezing them just so there’s enough pressure to keep him in great pain. “Now move,” I say, “crawl,” and he starts crawling to the door while dragging his pants, all the time making noises how he hurts, “can’t take it, go any more, the pain, oh, stop, please,” hair and face full of sweat, tears coming out too. I don’t say anything and it takes about five minutes to get to the front door.
I say “Now get up in a slight crouching position but with your rear end facing me.” He does. I keep a tight grip on his balls with one hand and with the other unlock the door. “Now down,” I say, “on your knees, rear end up,” and I get on my knees too.
“Now I’m going to open the door by turning the doorknob and when the door’s open enough for you to fit through, you start crawling through. When you’re far enough out of the door I’ll let go of you and slam the door, so bring in your foot or you’ll lose that foot that’s sticking out too.”
“Neighbors.”
“What about them?”
“See me. They. I’m caught.”
“I’ll look out first to see they’re not there. I shouldn’t be so kind to you.”
“Have to. Or else. Else I try get you. Or away. But please, quick, hurry, no talk, to release me.”
“Okay. Get in a crouch again. Rear up.” He does and I stand, hold on to his balls with one hand and open the door. “Come closer to me.” He moves towards me backwards. I can look down the hallway now. “Someone’s coming up the stairs,” and I duck back in and shut the door.
“Christ,” he says. “Someone would. Let go. I won’t run.”
“No. You’re a sonofabitch and I hate your guts and wish I could squeeze these to sawdust now but I can’t because if I did you wouldn’t keep your part of the bargain you’re doing now, right?”
“Shh. They hear. I won’t touch you. Too in pain. I’m. Can’t even stand. Please. Let go. Killing me.”
“Shut up. Step a step backwards.” He does. I open the door, look down the hall. “Don’t stop. Just crawl out slowly.”
He starts crawling into the hallway. When his foot’s just past the threshold I slam the door, lock and latch it and scream “Help, police, rapist, in the hallway, someone call the police, for the fifth floor, everybody
call,” when I really had thought I’d give him a few minutes to get away. I can’t call as I want to be right here to snap the lock back if he somehow gets it unlocked or the latch back in or just to keep my shoulder against the door and myself screaming if he tries to get back in.
He doesn’t. I look through the peephole and see him struggling to get his pants on. He’s on the floor, having trouble getting the first trouser leg over the shoe. He’s still crying, face in great pain. He stands with the pants, falls to the floor. He beats the floor with his fist, but lightly, as he doesn’t seem to have the strength for anything more. I want to open the door and with the lamp near me smash him over the head. But he might suddenly revive by then. So I keep screaming and looking at him and his eyes are almost closed as he tries to get the same trouser leg over the shoe. Then he stands, holds his testicles and sort of drags himself with the pants in his hand to the stairs and down them.
Three days later I get a phone call. I’d seen the police here and went to the station and wasn’t able to pick his picture out of the thousands they showed me. The man on the phone says “Remember me?”
“The police have a tap on all my phones.”
“Bullshit. Think they can afford it every time some woman meets a new man? But you remember me.”
“All right. Talk at your own risk. Longer the better I was told.”
“You almost killed me with that hold.”
“I wanted to, so feel lucky I let you go.”
“You let me go because you had to. I wish I’d killed you when I had the chance from the start. I’m all better now. Took a couple of days to recover. You want to try it again?”
“Oh sure.”
“I know your name.”
“Get lost.”
“Of course you don’t and I wouldn’t trust you if you said you did. You’d call the police and they’d be there in a minute. And that nutcracker grip of yours. Where’d you learn it? I want to know if it was in the newspapers before I met you and so how widespread it’s known.”
“Why the call?”
“You were a bastard for shouting like that when I was in the hall. You broke your promise.”
“I didn’t think. It was all my emotion unleashing or something. But you have to expect that when you treat someone as you did me.”
“What did I do to you, Magna? Come on, just what did I do that’s so bad to you?”
“You’re so stupid. Anyway, you got away.”
“You didn’t see any photos of me at the police, did you?”
“No I didn’t.”
“There aren’t any. But I have killed women. Nicer women than you too and I’m going to kill you. That’s why I called. In the next week I’m going to get you on the street, force you into your apartment or a car or just be in your apartment or on the stairs again waiting for you. If you go to your friends I’ll get you there and kill them too. First I’m going to rape you though till you hurt as much as you made me hurt. No more baby oil. I’m going to make you suffer real hard. And no chance of your hands stopping me because they’ll be tied from the start.”
“Finished?”
“No, I got much more to say.”
“Well I don’t.” I hang up.
He calls right back. “I meant everything I said.”
“Then I’ll tell you what I mean and what I swear you made me be. If you ever come here or any place I am or whatever next time you say you’ll try anything with me, I’ll bite or slice but cut both your balls and your penis off—now take your choice, and you’re right, I don’t need any fucking police tap, but take your choice but that’s what’s going to happen to you, now do you hear me good?” There’s silence at the other end and then he hangs up.
pp. 221-224
Page 221.1 don’t know if I can write it. It’s taken me almost two years to get to this page. I don’t have anything more to say. The novel’s run flat. I don’t want to go on with it. But after 221 pages? 220 I mean. And it’s not true I don’t want to go on with it. I do. I’m sure I can too, but I’m just bogged down. I have him where he’s on a bridge. He has to make a decision about something. This has been the main point of the novel up till now. To have him go through the novel till the moment where he makes a decision that will change his life and also change the direction of the novel. I didn’t know where he was going to make the decision. After the first hundred pages or so, it could have been almost anywhere in his journey through the city the novel takes place in. I didn’t block out the novel from the beginning, just as I haven’t with any of the novels I’ve written. But he should make the decision now. On page 221. There’s no place else for him to go. It’s late at night, he’s alone on that bridge. Looking at the river about fifteen feet below. He knows he has to make the decision. He’s been talking about it on and off through the entire novel. He left his apartment at dawn on page one to make the decision. A decision he knows will change his life. He hasn’t revealed yet what the decision’s about. Really hasn’t revealed anything about the decision: just that he has to make one. What the decision’s about is supposed to be revealed when he makes the decision. The reader’s supposed to follow him around the city right up till the time when he makes the decision. I think I said that. Then he’s supposed to make the decision. If he doesn’t make it now there’s nothing else he can do. He’s done everything else in the novel but make that decision. At least everything else that would apply to his personality and life and actions and whatever other things apply, before he makes that decision. But what’s the decision he has to make? He has to know what he has to decide on if he’s to make the decision, and he has to make it. So make it. I’m telling him to make the decision. Say something out loud or in your head or even write it down if you want that will change your life and also change the direction of this novel. If those devices don’t work, say it some other way. By a gesture or just one word or any way you think to say it, as long as it’s clear to the reader that what you’re doing is making that decision, but make it. If you don’t, this novel’s finished. It was all supposed to come to this. It has come to this. Right now there’s no place else for you to go, nothing else for you to do but make that decision. So make it. I’m telling you to. Ordering you, damnit, I am ordering you to. The decision. Now.
Nothing comes. I wait. Nothing. No decision and nothing about the decision. I return to page 221 an hour later. Nothing comes. He doesn’t move or say anything. He stays on the bridge. In the same spot, without a thought, gesture or word. Without doing anything, and everything around him stays the same too. I try to make something come to him or happen to him, so the novel could continue till the time he does make the decision, but nothing happens or comes. I return to page 221 a few hours later and do everything I can to make the decision come, to make anything happen around him or anything come, but nothing does. Then the next hour and then the next day. Each day after that, and many times a day some days, for two more weeks. Nothing. go to a bridge with the 220 pages, the same bridge I left him on, in the same city I’ve lived in for years and walked him through these last twenty to twenty-one months and throw the whole thing into the river. Most of the pages just sink. A couple of dozen or so float for a while downstream and sink. A few pages keep floating downstream till I can’t see them. Four of the pages I threw float in the air till they land on the shore. One rolls into the river and sinks but the other three remain. No real problem. Nobody would know, if he found those pages, where they came from and probably not what they mean. Wouldn’t really matter to me if anyone did. Wouldn’t matter at all, in fact, not at all, and I mean that. I go home and sit down to start another novel, but with a new character for me. I’ll make him older, of a different nationality, and with a wife. I’ll put him in the country, since I’ve never written anything but about city life. I’ll call him Bill or Phil or Ed, three names I’ve never used before, “p. 1” I write on the top left-hand corner of the page. Maybe that’s as far as I’ll get. I don’t know, but I do care. “Bill walked into
his house.” So, there’s more. I sit for hours and try to think of something to follow that sentence, but nothing comes that makes any sense. I get up and tell myself to come back to it later today.
Training to Magna
It’s been a long tough week of work and other things and for the train ride to New York I just want to be alone and rest. I walk the half mile from my apartment to the Baltimore station, buy my ticket and in the waiting room see every seat but one is filled. If I sit in it I’m almost sure someone on either side will start talking to me—it usually happens—so maybe I should just stand. But the train from Washington’s been delayed by twenty minutes, the stationmaster says over the p.a. system, so I take the seat, put my overnight bag between my feet, my briefcase on my lap, close my eyes and think Just rest.
“When they say twenty minutes, do they mean thirty or even forty minutes?” the woman on my right side says.
“Talking to me, ma’am?”
“Yes, sorry, did I wake you? This is my first train trip, other than for that little subway under the Capitol in Washington, so I don’t know if that announcement was only some delaying tactic for not telling us the train’s going to be an hour late, possibly two.”
“When they say twenty it usually means twenty and sometimes it means fifteen.”
“You’ve ridden the trains from here a lot?”
“Every Thursday around this time,” I say, “or really about three out of four weeks.”
“You work in Baltimore and both travel that much?”
“I travel for personal reasons—to see a friend in New York—but teach here.”
“Community College?” the man on the other side of me says. “That’s where my wife went nights.”
“University of Maryland Baltimore County my school’s called.”
“Baltimore?” he says. “Oh yeah, I know the one. Way out in the sticks.”
“Sort of, that’s right.”
“What do you think?” she says to him. “Our train from Washington will be an hour late, or only twenty minutes as the announcer and this man says?”
Friends Page 5