There Is No Wheel

by James Maxey

  Still, the feeling of control was wearing off. Her sense of hyperreality was melting into surreality. Was she a girl or a table? Was there a difference in the grand scheme of things? She felt as if some deep philosophical truth lay just beyond her grasp.

  Then the door opened and Dirk sauntered into the room, followed by a group of men and women with cameras. Devi held very still. Bennie hadn’t mentioned reporters, had he?

  There was a cacophony of voices.

  “Dirk, what about . . . ?”

  “—blames you for the suicide—”

  “Senator Walton says that your practice of Satanism is—”

  Dirk cut the reporter off. “Practice? Why would I need to practice?”

  Everyone in the room laughed, except for Devi, who concentrated on not looking at Dirk. Not moving, not making a sound, was real work. Like a mystic rite, an initiation, it required all her strength and will. She reached deep inside to touch her inner table.

  But Dirk kept moving closer.

  “Actually,” Dirk said in response to a follow up question, “the whole Satanism thing is wearing thin. The cattle-like mass of humanity can’t imagine the world as anything more than a playing field for two forces, the dark and the light. It takes a mind of infinite compass to grasp the more subtle nature of reality.”

  Dirk began to disrobe, as the cameras clicked away.

  “Who among you can hear the joy and love in the drip of blood falling from a cut wrist onto linoleum? How many of you have listened to the death and darkness tangled up in the laughter of a child?”

  Dirk held out his snail as his pants fell to his ankles. From the corner of her eye, Devi could see his enormous erection. Dirk had said in interviews that his performances aroused him. Even now, Dirk was performing. Then she realized that Dirk’s second face had its eyes focused on her. She stared at the mattress, taking a slow, deep breath. Dark spots stained the sheet where her sweat rained.

  “This snail,” Dirk said, turning it slowly in the dim light, “reveals all the secrets of the universe, if you have but eyes to see.”

  “What species of snail is that?” someone asked.

  “My God, what a dreary life you must lead,” Dirk said. “Does anyone have an interesting question?”

  “What is the secret of the universe?” someone asked, and several people chuckled.

  “Am I the only intelligent being in this room?” answered Dirk.

  He turned from them and walked to Devi. He placed the snail on the back of her neck. It was warm and wet, like a kiss. As Dirk poured himself a wine, the kiss began to crawl. The reporters continued to babble, but Devi paid no mind. She was trapped inside her body now, focused on the tiny patch of skin that held the snail. The raspy, slick weight undulated slowly around the curve of her neck, toward her throat.

  “Noise and pain and sex and magic,” Dirk said, distantly. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me, I intend to partake in all four.”

  Dirk climbed onto the bed behind her. The glasses on her back swayed and tinkled. Sweat stormed from her body, darkening the sheet. The cameras kept snapping even as Benny pushed the reporters to the door.

  Dirk’s hands clasped her hips. Molten steel could not be as hot as those hands. She felt herself melting from the inside, could feel her vital moisture flowing in response.

  His cock gently touched her ass and she shuddered, violently clanking the glasses on the tray. She froze, fearing she had offended him. But his hands continued to burn into her hips, and his penis traveled slowly downward, teasing across her slick asshole, continuing down toward the fountain of her moisture. His penis lingered there, barely touching her swollen lips.

  The snail reached the dip where her throat joined her chest and hung there like a pendant. As she breathed, she felt its weight. This was magic. This was sex. And she couldn’t wait for the noise, and the pain.

  Benny pushed the last reporter out and closed the door behind him.

  She was alone with Dirk Sinister.

  She waited in grand longing for his cock to push into her, to open her, to fulfill her.

  Instead, Dirk rose with a grunt, grabbed the bottle of wine from her back, and loped across the room. He slumped onto the sofa and began to drain the bottle.

  Devi trembled, suddenly cold. Had she done something wrong? Had she broken a rule?

  “Christ,” Dirk said. “Look at you.”

  She turned her head slightly to look at him, remembered rule three, and turned back.

  Dirk chuckled joylessly.

  “You would do anything, wouldn’t you?” Dirk said. “If Benny had produced a razor and told you to shave your head, you wouldn’t have hesitated.”

  Devi didn’t know if she should answer. She wanted to assure him that this was indeed the case, that nothing he could ask was off limits. But, remembering rule one, she allowed herself only to nod, ever so slightly. The snail began to creep across her clavicle.

  “And what if I were to want something more? What if I asked you to bleed for me? Suppose I smashed this bottle and had a go at your pretty little face?”

  Pretty! He thought her face was pretty! But what if he did cut her? She felt her eyes moisten. She didn’t know if she was ready for that. She didn’t know if she could refuse him.

  “Go on,” he said. “Screw the first rule. Answer me.”

  “Anything,” she said, her voice cracking. “I’m yours.”

  As she said this she felt something empty grow inside her. It was as if her soul had fled her body, and was even now being inhaled by Dirk. His face bore a little half-smile, as if he enjoyed the taste.

  “Do anything you want to me,” she groaned.

  “I already have,” he said. “Put your clothes on. Go.”

  It took several long seconds for the meaning of these words to register.

  “But—”

  “I’m done. You’re no longer needed. I’ve already got the bottle.” He sloshed the wine back and forth.

  “You’re not going to fuck me?”

  “Haven’t I?”

  She jerked upright, sending the tray and glasses crashing across the floor.

  “What?” she hissed.

  He rolled his eyes.

  The snail crawled over her left breast above her heart, which had stopped beating. Her mind flashed into rage.

  “You prick!” she screamed. “You aren’t man enough to fuck me! You aren’t—”

  She stopped abruptly as he brought up his hand from behind the couch cushion, holding a pistol.

  “Fun’s over,” he said, cocking it.

  She cringed, not so much from the gun as from the terrible blackness of his eyes. His eyes held the darkness of the valley of the shadow of death, and she stood in that shadow, in the terrible cold, aware that the breath she was drawing could be her last.

  “Oh Jesus don’t kill me,” she whimpered.

  “Get out of my sight. Ten seconds. Nine.”

  “I don’t know where my clothes are.”

  He grabbed his tuxedo jacket from the back of the couch and tossed it to her feet.

  “Six.”

  She grabbed the jacket and raced toward the door. She paused before opening it, struggling to pull the jacket on. Her arms couldn’t find the sleeves.

  “Two.”

  She pushed the door open, stumbling naked into gray drizzle.

  She pushed the door shut as the gun went off.

  She shrieked.

  She stopped.

  She wasn’t hit.

  But with her eyes closed it didn’t matter. With her eyes closed it was exactly as if she’d died. She fell to her knees, cold and weak. Her life had ended and she had the opportunity to judge it, to weigh it, to see its true value, which was nothing. Nothing at all. Her life had been like the lyrics of a Horsemen song—utterly meaningless.

  Only, this wasn’t the end. Her knees stung where she’d hit the pavement. The rain chilled her bare skin. The snail still clung to her, heavy a
nd ticklish as it crept across her ribs. She started to giggle. She opened her eyes, wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand, and gasped for breath. She felt drunk, better than drunk. She felt fucking alive.

  Benny came up to her, carrying her clothes and purse. He looked tired and old in the dreary light.

  “I called you a cab,” he said, handing the bundle of belongings to her.

  “Oh my God,” she said, still giggling. “Oh. My. God!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Benny.

  Later, as she waited in the rain for the cab, wearing only Dirk’s jacket, she vacated hyperreality, slipped out of surreality, shook off her introspection, and settled into here and now. Here and now, her body vibrated with unspent energy. Here and now, she felt horny. And so, on the wet city street corner, she slipped her hand into the folds of Dirk’s long silken jacket and dipped her rain-moist finger between her slippery, swollen lips. She could smell him so strongly, could feel his heat in the fabric, and his kiss was still with her, now tracing a long slick line across her belly toward her shaven mound. Dirk Sinister had tried to kill her, but she was still alive, and she was forever bonded to him because of this. As the snail reached her hand and climbed onto her wrist, she knew she was about to come.

  At that moment, the cab pulled to the curb. The bubble of sexual energy within her popped prematurely as the cabby beeped his horn.

  She climbed in and gave her address. The thin, scar-faced cabby had an eye-patch and a hook for a hand. He wore a black and white pinstriped uniform, like some old movie convict. He snarled an acknowledgement to her directions and ground the gears, lurching the cab forward.

  She leaned against the window. In the shifting light she examined the snail, now perched upon her finger like a wedding ring. The curves and swirls of the shell encompassed all that had happened to her, all that would ever happen to her. The great spiral of life stood revealed. She dipped her hand inside the coat and touched herself once more.

  With her other hand she found her phone and called Martha.

  “What happened?” Martha said. “Was it great? Did you get to talk to Dirk?”

  “Yeah,” she said, drawing her breath in as she spread her legs wider and slipped further down into the seat. She rubbed her palm over her hairless mound, luxuriating in her own smoothness. “I got to talk to Dirk.”

  “Oh God. Oh God! Tell me everything.”

  “Well, for one thing, I found out the words to ‘Snail Love.’”

  The cabby’s one good eye watched in the mirror. Devi tugged the sensitive folds of her labia, spreading them, letting the air touch every part of her. The snail crept from her fingers onto her moist slit. Devi bit her lip.

  “Dirk told you? Oh God, Dirk told you the words to one of his songs? I would have died!”

  “Perhaps the snail is Ahab,” Devi said, “towed into the void astride the whale.”

  Martha was silent.

  “Also,” said Devi, arching her back as the snail crept gently along, climbing toward her swollen clit, “I got invited into his trailer where we almost had sex.” She felt a small spasm of pleasure ripple up her spine.

  “Right,” said Martha.

  “And then he, like, pulled a gun on me.” She began to gently roll the pearl of her clitoris between her soaked fingers as the snail drew ever closer.

  “Did you pick up a program?”

  “Um,” said Devi. She sighed as a wave of warmth washed across her skin. “It slipped my mind.”

  “You are such a fucking moron,” Martha said.

  “There were pictures,” Devi said, breathing heavily, the eyestalks of the snail now at her fingertips.

  “You sound wasted,” Martha said. “You home yet?”

  “Almost. Almost there.” She closed her eyes and pulled her hand away, luxuriating in the unthinkable act about to occur.

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow then. You sound like you could use some sleep.”

  “I may never sleep again . . . .” Her voice trailed off. Her body trembled. She could feel how wet the seat beneath her had grown. The snail crept over her engorged clit, engulfing it with its raspy foot.

  “So you’re serious?” asked Martha.

  “Yes!” she cried, her legs clasping tightly around the shell.

  “Those are really the words?”

  “Oh God yes!” she screamed as her eyes rolled back in their sockets.

  “Christ, they aren’t that great.”

  Devi fell limp. She plunged her hand under her coat and peeled the snail away from her too-tender flesh. She brought it to her lips, and kissed its smooth shell, slick and wet. The snail’s long eyestalks swayed gently. In the mirror, she could see the cabby’s open mouth. She adjusted the phone, which had slipped from its perch on her shoulder.

  “You’re right about the lyrics,” she said with a sigh. “Kind of a let down, huh?”

  “I guess. I dunno,” said Martha. “What’s a hab?”

  “I didn’t ask,” said Devi, rubbing the shell across her cheek. “It wouldn’t matter.”

  “Wouldn’t matter?”

  “I decided tonight that meaningless things are beautiful.” The snail’s eyestalks fluttered across her eyelashes and she giggled.

  “The thought seems to please you,” said Martha.

  “Everything’s meaningless,” said Devi placing the snail in the center of her brow like a third eye. With it she could see so clearly, from the stars to the cities to the sea, a vast, pretty, pointless world, that no one had crafted for her safety or pleasure. She blew the cabby a pouty kiss. Her hand moved once more to her crotch.

  The cabbie wiped the sweat from his eye with his hook as his hand fell to his lap. Devi could hear his fly being unzipped, his breath quickening. They drove into the night, with no one’s hand on the wheel.

  Author’s Notes and Acknowledgments

  CIRCA 1994, I decided to write some short stories. I’d written three novels, but had barely dabbled in the shorter forms of story telling. Two of the novels I’d written were fairly lousy, but I’d finished a third, a fantasy called Bitterwood, that I thought was worth sending to publishers. One bit of advice I was reading about how to submit manuscripts said to mention any previous publications, like short stories. I decided I’d knock out a few quick short stories and build a writing resume. I’d written novels after all. They had as many words as ten or twenty short stories. How hard could they be? And, amazingly, my strategy worked! Except, the copyright date on the first edition of Bitterwood is dated 2007.

  So, what happened in the thirteen year gap? I wrote some short stories. Almost a hundred. One thing I learned during the years I devoted to that form is that word for word, short stories are much more time consuming than novels. Chapters are relatively easy to write. If you’re on chapter nine of a novel, when you sit down to write you already know the characters pretty well. You may have a new character or setting or plot point to introduce, but these are all woven in amid familiar elements. While a chapter should open and close with some sort of hook, it doesn’t require a real beginning or conclusion. Chapters are all middle; they’ve come from someplace, they’re going someplace, and the events within them are mostly a straight line.

  Short stories, on the other hand, must be a fully closed circle. You must introduce every character, setting, and plot element, then, almost as soon as you’ve placed them on the stage, you must immediately aim for the exits. They’re carefully designed clockwork devices; no gear or lever can be removed without the whole thing failing to work. They must be polished to mirror smoothness, so that each part reflects all the other parts. With the final line, the story must fold in on itself, and form its own tiny universe.

  It took a while to get good at this. As I said, I’ve written a hundred short stories; I feel like I got these ten about right.

  But I couldn’t have gotten these right without a lot of help. Over the years, I’ve been a member of several different local writing critique groups. I also attended the Odyssey
Fantasy Writer’s Workshop and Orson Scott Card’s Writer’s Boot Camp. I’ve been part of online writer’s forums, most notably the Codex Writer’s Group, whose various short story contests provided the birth place of roughly half these tales. I’ve gotten feedback and advice from hundreds of fellow writers, too many to name. But I will name the editors who helped me bring these stories to their final forms. Nick Mamatas, Keith Olexa, Ed Schubert, Sheila Williams, W.H. Horner and Lou Anders. Also, the final, final draft of this collection was edited by Rick Fisher, a man who happened to read some of the first stories I inflicted on the world thirteen years ago. Without these individuals, these stories might never have found their way into print; my gratitude is deep and boundless.

  Hmm. Boundless seems a bit over the top. So how’s this: My gratitude is such that, should I ever hang out with any of these people in a bar, I’ll gladly buy them a drink and split an order of hot wings. It’s the least I can do.