by Lee, Edward
He sipped and thought. He had taken a taxi here, because he’d wanted to walk in the past for a while. But the memories here were all dust and broken glass now. And so he’d called for a special ride. The kind that offered a sexual pot of gold at the end of the itinerary. But first you needed to take a ride. That was part of the fun, right?
He shrugged, and spoke an address on the south side. She looked in the rearview mirror at him, as if to offer him a second chance, but said nothing. After a moment, she put the car in gear and drove. He enjoyed his bourbon in silence as the streetlights blurred by.
“You are restless tonight,” she said. He didn’t question her perception, or how she had it. She was right. He nodded.
“What are you looking for?”
“Things I can never have,” he said. His voice cracked slightly.
“You?” she said. Her voice betrayed incredulity. “You can buy whatever you want. Go wherever you like. You have the means, or you would not be in my car.”
Aaron closed his eyes. “There is only so much money can buy. At a certain point, you die anyway.”
The car pulled off the main road and down a dark street. They were in an industrial district; the lights of a refinery pierced the night to the west, while the east was lined with a railyard. The car slid along the tracks for a minute, and then came to a rest in a lot after crunching gravel.
She said nothing, but opened his door and stood at attention waiting for him to exit. Aaron levered his weight across the seat and used the top of the door to pull himself up. It had gotten harder to sit, stand, lay down over the years. It crept up on you. One minute, you were cracking a whip. The next, you were cracking.
“Would you like me to come in with you, or wait outside?”
“Come in,” he said.
She nodded, and walked with him to the door. A sadly listing neon sign proclaimed “Adult World” above the door. The words “Beer and Boobs” flickered on and off beneath. There was scratched but legible white paint on the door itself that warned: Nobody under 21 will be admitted. Ever.
“This doesn’t seem to be the sort of place someone like you would come to,” she said. Her voice almost whistled against the low thud of a bass beat inside.
“You wear a suit, but that doesn’t mean you become the suit,” Aaron said.
They found the stinking breath of old beer and a horseshoe-shaped bar inside. And a small black raised stage, with pink neon lights along the side. A gold pole was decorated by a bleached blond with sagging breasts and a tattoo on her ass that while stretched and jiggling clearly said “Bite Me.”
Three greying white men sat on one side of the bar while a Mexican couple flanked the other. The couple were as thin as the old men were fat. The young man wasn’t shy about feeling up his woman in front of the rest of the bar. It didn’t matter to her; she was looking at the stage, watching the gone-to-seed dancer writhe suggestively to the crooning howl of Axl Rose and “November Rain.”
Aaron pulled out a stool at the hump of the bar, between the two “crowds.” The chauffeur stood next to him, at attention.
“Sit,” he commanded, dragging out the stool next to his.
He ordered them both a Budweiser, which appeared to be the only beer the sleazy dump offered, and then leaned back against the rounded edge of the bar to watch the dance of the fading flower on stage.
“This is not your kind of place,” the chauffeur said. Her arm slipped around his shoulders, and she fingered the white collar around his neck. “I don’t think what you’re looking for is here.”
Aaron shook his head. “Not anymore,” he agreed. “But it was once. Everything’s different now.”
“Not everything,” she said. “You’re still the same.”
He laughed. Bitterly. He knew better.
“Why did we come here,” she asked softly. “What memory drew you?”
Aaron took a sip of his beer, and grimaced. He set it back down on the bar. “Once, there was a back room,” he said. “Most people here in the strip club area had no idea. But it was a place where you could have whoever you wanted. Do whatever you wanted. In the morning, they hosed the place down, and took whoever wasn’t moving down to the canal.”
“Girls died here?” she said.
Aaron shrugged. “Girls, boys…it didn’t matter. It was all sushi.”
She looked at him with a sidelong glance. She said nothing.
“Have you ever been to Tokyo?” he asked.
She shook her head. No.
“Pity,” he said. “I always ask for an Asian chauffeur, because sometimes…”
“I am sorry to disappoint,” she said.
He shook his head. This time, he didn’t grimace as much when he drank his beer. “In Tokyo, once, I went to an adult sushi club. Not far from the Tsukiji fish market. It was all very genteel and mannerly at first. We sat around the table they directed us to. Eight strangers, three men on either side, a couple at her feet. She was naked, but covered in slices of tuna, mackerel, salmon, crab and abalone and…she was a rainbow of fish. Each of us ate the appetizer that covered her breasts and her belly and her thighs…but then it was time for the main course. And the waiter brought us the fileting knives. And a number.”
“A number?” she said. “Did you have to eat in order?”
He shook his head. “Everyone got to have one slice from the main course…our young sushi girl. But only one could have a slice from the rarest part.”
“And the numbers were a lottery?”
“Yes,” he said. “The girl on the table would call a number from 1 to 8, and that was the person who was allowed to carve from between her legs.”
“She chose her murderer.”
Aaron shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “She didn’t die. She bled, yes. But she was paid well. And she went home, eventually, a piece of her, now a piece of us.”
“So…you wanted to ruin her for all other men?”
“I wanted her to be part of me,” he answered. “A connection like that is so rare.”
“Did she call your number?”
Aaron didn’t answer immediately.
“Did you eat her…sushi?”
“Not the special cut,” he said. “But she called my number next.”
“Next?” she said. “What did she call you for?
“To breed her,” he said. His voice was quiet…nearly silent.
“You had sex with her, there on the table?”
He nodded.
“In front of a group of seven other people, one of whom was probably chewing her labia in his mouth at just that moment?”
He nodded.
“And you liked it moist and bloody, didn’t you?” she asked.
Aaron blinked. And then frowned. And then nodded.
“It was the most amazing feeling I have ever had in my life.”
“They don’t make sushi like that in America, huh?”
He shook his head. “They didn’t then.”
“You brought it here, though, didn’t you?”
He nodded. “That was just one of the things that happened at this club,” he said. “You needed a special invite to get into the back room.”
“Maybe it’s still there, you just aren’t invited?”
Aaron shrugged. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
He stood, and threw a $10 bill on the bar. “Come with me.” He led her out a side door, and they walked to the back of the building, closer to the train tracks. His breathing grew loud as they walked. The ground there was overgrown with grass and four-foot tall weeds. Bricks littered the weeds, and nearby, the remains of the walls those bricks had once belonged to were in evidence.
“After the fire, it was all over.”
She looked at him in askance. “Fire?
He pointed at the broken slabs of concrete that once had been part of a foundation, and chunks of blackened brick that had fallen from mostly, but not fully, leveled walls. “Some people knew we were doing something diff
erent out here,” he said. “And as always, they tried to stop it. There is always someone who feels you’ve gone too far.”
He sighed as he looked at the ruins of what had once been the back room of the strip club.
“Why are you out tonight,” she asked him.
Aaron stared at the weed-covered bricks, and shrugged. “Why not?” he said. “Some nights I can almost taste it, just from closing my eyes. It haunts my dreams. My entire being yearns to taste it one more time, before I let go. But it’s all over. Gone. Washed away. There are no more sushi girls.”
“How do you know?” she asked. One of her palms massaged his back. “I may be your sushi girl.”
Aaron laughed. “You only get to be a sushi girl once.”
“Maybe I saved it for you. Your whore and yet your virgin.”
He turned and pushed past her, walking back towards the car. “What’s wrong with you,” he mumbled.
She managed to slip around him, and was there to open the door when he reached the car, huffing with lost breath. It was harder to move now than it once had been. Harder to do most things. Some days Aaron wondered if cancer was eating him up from inside. Colon. Stomach. Pancreatic. Liver? Things hurt. But he didn’t see a doctor. He would die when his time came. He had no drive, no desire to try to extend it. When the best was behind you, what was the point, really?
When they were both back in the car, she said, “You stopped coming here. And the other places. A long time ago.”
Aaron nodded.
“Why?”
“I got married,” he said. “I thought I’d found that connection. I thought I’d found the one who could really go there with me. I thought I’d found her.”
“But she was someone else?”
He shrugged. “She was someone. But not the someone I thought. Sometimes I thought she was someone who only wanted my checkbook. But I know that wasn’t fair.”
“What happened to her?”
“Breast cancer,” he said. “Fitting somehow.”
“And so…you are alone again?”
He nodded.
“And looking for that connection…that special spark.”
He nodded again.
“That sushi.”
He laughed out loud. “I think the world of sushi has gone away.”
“Nothing ever really goes away,” she said. “It just waits behind closed doors.”
“Whatever you say,” he answered. “I just wish the reality could answer. Once I knew of a club that was so decadent…some nights they hung people on crosses at the entrance. Try finding a place that un-PC today.”
“That is brave in any era,” she said. “It must have been a very hidden place.”
He nodded. “Only certain people knew about it. Some people who came brought others as…coin. A payment in flesh to get inside.”
“I know of such a place,” she said quietly. “I can take you there when you are ready.”
“I’d be interested in seeing it,” he said. “Though I can’t imagine it is anything like the place I once knew. They called it NightWhere and it was only open one night per month. You could only get in if you were invited and you could never find it if you weren’t. It was never in the same place as it was the month before. I went there for many years.”
“Where there are humans, there are places like that,” she said.
He shook his head. “Not like this. Sure, there are bathhouses and sex clubs and brothels in every culture in every time. But this…the things that happened there. There were perversions that I had never even thought to imagine. Sex that was the end rather than the beginning. People came and did not leave.”
“If I take you to the place I know, you may not leave,” she said.
He shrugged. “If it was anything like NightWhere, I would never want to leave again. I have no energy to search for that feeling anymore.”
“Don’t you still want to kill the girls and make them cry?”
He snorted. “It was never about killing,” he said.
She shook her head. “No, not killing,” she agreed. “Connection. A soul kiss of Thanatos. The fleeting fulfillment when two are one. Always a bitter pleasure, for you can never hold on to the passing.”
Aaron’s eyes widened. Nobody had ever vocalized the ghosts of his past so perfectly. Not that he’d spoken to hardly anyone about the violent pleasures of his past.
“You’re too young to know such things,” he whispered.
She lifted her cap and bent her head low, so that he could see the roots at the top. There were traces of grey there. “I am older than you think,” she said. “And I have desires of my own.”
She replaced her cap and settled into the driver’s seat once more. “Where would you like to go next?”
««—»»
“You loved her,” the chauffeur said. She stood behind him in the night. The moon slipped in and out of clouds above, lending an eerie light to the gravestones below.
“I gave it all up for her,” he said.
“You loved her,” the chauffeur said once more.
He nodded. “I did. But still, we never completely connected. She never understood me. Not really.”
“Nobody ever really does,” she said. “We are all separate in the end.”
“I put myself in a box for her,” he said. “Tied it up, and hid it on the top shelf of a closet. Always there…but always hidden.”
“Is that when you stopped going to your club? Your NightWhere?”
He nodded. “She humored me, and went a few times. She enjoyed the attention, but never understood that the bar and dance floor at the front were just window dressing for the real reason people were there. She tried bondage play there a few times, but she never had an interest in going through the inner door to The Red. When she said she didn’t want to go anymore, I stopped. And soon the invitations stopped coming.”
“Is that when you began to go to the secret room at Adult World?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No. That was before. That was actually where I met her. That was why I thought we were truly one mind. But her need was different than mine. She needed to be seen, to be desired. Nothing more. I didn’t understand that at first.”
“And when you did?”
“I tried to go back, but it was too late.”
“Why?” she asked. Her hands massaged his shoulders from behind.
“You just saw,” he said. “The places I knew are gone. Rubble. There is nothing left of the past.”
“Time moves forward, not back,” she said. “Say goodbye and drive with me.”
The grave stone in front of him looked much the same as those in the rows all around them. But Aaron read his dead wife’s name on it; spoke it out loud. He let the Born and Died dates linger on his tongue as he remembered the times when he had been inside her, and the times when he had paraded her for others to envy. And the times when he had sat right next to her on the couch, arm around her shoulder, and still felt as if he were alone in the room.
He touched the smooth edge of the granite, and nodded. Then he turned towards the small Japanese woman in her “fuck me while I drive” chauffeur outfit. “Take me to the place you know,” he said. “I am ready.”
She turned and walked ahead of him to the car, opening the door for him once more.
««—»»
They drove in silence, and Aaron poured himself another bourbon. The streetlamps and traffic lights turned to blurry trails as his eyes filled with tears. Once he’d given away a part of himself hoping to be filled in turn. But all that had happened was that his emptiness grew larger, deeper…until he was nothing but a gulf. A vacant man in a false skin. He had pretended to be something he wasn’t for so long, he no longer knew what he was. He wasn’t the man he’d pretended to be, but he wasn’t the man he once had been either.
The car left the main road behind and slid through an alley. He didn’t recognize the neighborhood, but the rent was definitely declining by the block. Apartm
ents were flanked with pawn shops. Windows were boarded, but people moved on the sidewalks outside. The buildings were not deserted, only desolated. They pulled down another alleyway, and then the car rolled to a stop. His door opened, and when he stepped out, he saw there were entryways to a couple of bars, as well as an old neon arrow that pointed from the second floor down at a doorway. The sign above the red glow proclaimed “Peep Shows 25 Cents.”
She motioned for him to head that way. “What you are seeking is there.”
Aaron shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s degenerate, sure, but not exactly the kind of place…”
“Did they keep your secret room on a bright, busy street?” she asked.
He couldn’t argue that point, so he stepped forward, and she opened the blacked glass of the door for him.
The place smelled like mildew and ammonia. It was small, dingy, close. Something sexual occupied every space the eye could roam, from vibrators to dildos to Spanish Fly pills to crotchless panties. There were only three rows of shelving units crammed into the narrow room between the four walls, all of them overflowing with porn DVDs and each section labeled with the particular kink catered to: MILF, Lesbian, Bondage, Gay…
An old oriental man behind the counter leaned forward as they stepped inside. The chauffeur approached him, and extended her hand. The cashier took it in his own, and appeared to study it for a moment. “I’d like a coin,” she said.
He said nothing, but reached below the counter, and then placed something in her hand.
She turned to Aaron, her dark eyes strangely bright.
“This way,” she said, moving down the aisle towards the back of the shop, where a sign read “Adult Arcade.” She led the way down dirty tile steps into a lower level. At the bottom, a line of wooden booths had been constructed out of plywood, and painted black. Thin doors opened into the booths, and next to each was a small glass display window that featured the DVD covers of the movies that presumably played in each booth. The hall smelled of old urine, and Aaron shook his head when she approached one of the booths.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
She stood impassively at the entryway to a booth and waited for him. The DVD covers next to the door showed a line of naked men, all holding their cocks out with their hands. A big-butted brunette was kneeling at the center of the line, both of her hands as well as her mouth occupied.