The Madhouse

by TJ Benson

‘I am leaving today,’ he said in the dark. ‘My flight is in three hours.’

  She turned to him, too close, and stared at him for a while. He couldn’t read her face in the dark; all he could see were her eyes and they weren’t even their true colour. He was about to step back when she brushed a thumb over his lower lip.

  ‘Can I try something?’

  ‘Okay,’ he said without knowing what. She took his lower lip in her mouth and sucked gently, then let go. His body burnt in response. She did it again and he staggered back, stepped and fell down.

  ‘Oh my God, I am sorry. Are you okay? Are you hurt?’ She reached for his arm, her hair falling over her face into his eyes. ‘Can you stand?’

  ‘Is it okay if I sit on the ground for a while?’ he asked, wanting to be as far from her and her vanilla as possible.

  She laughed, then leant towards him and covered his face with her curtain of hair. Her kissing was dangerous, he realised, when she climbed onto his lap and pressed his head to hers. His hands travelled her back as if her body was familiar. As he felt his groin solidify beneath her, he quickly broke away from the kiss and looked at her face, inches from his.

  ‘My flight is in three hours or less.’ Staring into her eyes was like falling into a dark room where he had to search for her gaze, the only source of light, and make his supplication. ‘The traffic—’

  ‘Stay a few more days.’

  ‘Amsterdam is beautiful, you are beautiful, but I can’t afford this place. My budget is up. I have checked out of my hotel. My money is—’

  ‘Let me pay for your hotel.’

  His eyes widened.

  ‘Besides,’ she said, standing up, ‘You haven’t chosen lingerie for your mom yet – or is it for your father?’

  He laughed and stood up, followed her out of the darkroom to the bedroom with its full daylight heavy on the eyes.

  He would move in with her after three days of indecision. His visa was for a month, Grachtenfestival was only a week, so for once in his adult life he thought, Why not? Why waste the visa?

  She kept on photographing him, every move, every laugh, every tightening of the jaw. ‘You are only snapping my mouth,’ he complained. ‘What’s the use of photographing only my mouth?’

  ‘You probably have the hottest mouth I have ever seen,’ she said, looking him in the eye.

  His hand flew to cover his mouth. ‘Stop it,’ he said, looking away, but she pulled his hand away and stood on tiptoe to kiss him again. His hands hung in the air for a while, then fell inevitably on her body. She pushed him gently to the table and unbuttoned his shirt. When her tongue grazed his nipple he went dizzy.

  ‘Wha— what’s your name?’

  ‘What, what?’ she said from under his chin.

  ‘I just realised – I don’t even know your name. And we have … we have been—’

  ‘I will tell you after we fuck.’

  ‘What?’ He pushed her away and did up his buttons.

  ‘Nothing.’ She shook her hair and stepped back. ‘I am so sorry.’

  ‘Let’s go to your exhibition,’ he said, moving away from the table. I’d like to see your work.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, looking away before he could see her face. ‘I’ll have to speak on the last day so we can go then.’

  A wall came between them but he agreed to sleep over, tired after being up all night. When he woke up later that morning she was gone, but she had left a note asking him to order anything he needed and leave the key for her at the reception if he went out. He never went out. He was tempted to search her things for her name but another part of him made him enjoy the thrill of waiting. He distracted himself with her books on photography, swallowing up the images from colour to sepia. He was still in bed, on his third book, when she came back.

  ‘How was your day?’

  ‘They are setting up for tomorrow. Should be a large turn-out. I see you have occupied yourself.’ She threw her bag on the ground and he made a mental note to pick it up with a smile.

  ‘I missed you,’ he said, crawling on his knees across the bed to her. He wrapped his arms round her waist, buried his face in her blouse to drown in her vanilla. She was stiff at first, then she relaxed in his arms. He said, ‘I am so sorry for what has been happening.’

  She pulled herself out of his arms and untied her hair. ‘I want to have sex with you and I know you want to have sex with me. But for some reason you keep holding yourself back. Is it a religious thing?’

  ‘I can explain. I was brought up as a Christian but it’s not that, because I started questioning God after my brother became suicidal at age five and—’

  ‘It’s really fine. You don’t have to explain.’

  ‘I have to, because until you my brother has been my life and my family and I never thought anyone would like me and for the first time in my life I haven’t thought about him in days.’

  ‘Marry me,’ she said.

  He burst out laughing.

  ‘Because I have never met a man who flies across the world to save his parents’ marriage with lingerie.’

  ‘I … I have problems.’

  ‘You are not into women? You are not into sex at all? No problem; there are some Indian herbs I could get so we could be celibate together,’ she smiled at him.

  ‘No, not that.’

  ‘Then what’s the problem?’ She climbed onto his lap and held his brooding face in her palms. ‘Talk to me. What is it?’

  ‘My family!’ He pounded his fists on the bed and grimaced but she didn’t flinch. ‘My irresponsible father, my mentally ill mother and my André,’ he choked into her chest. ‘My broken, stupid, selfish André.’

  ‘I want to meet all of them,’ she said softly, rubbing the back of his head.

  ‘They are not my family. That is why I am here in Amsterdam. I lied to you that I wanted to buy my mother lingerie and lied to myself that I was here to find André. I lied to myself that I wanted to find him but I knew I wouldn’t – he has never been predictable or punctual in his life. That band that came up to apologise at the opening of the Grathtenfestival? It was he they were apologising for. He has never been reliable. No, I didn’t come for him, I came to run away. I came to run from them!’

  ‘Then fine. We’ll never meet them.’ She kissed his forehead.

  ‘I am not man enough. I am not man enough for the kind of woman you are, or any woman. I have failed at being responsible. I am not ready to start making decisions—’

  ‘You don’t have to. We’ll make them together. Marry me.’ She dipped her head to kiss him. ‘Marry me,’ she whispered to his lips and kissed him again and he felt his walls crashing. He gasped, ‘I am a virgin,’ but she swallowed the words and brought his head to her chest.

  The real reason he had kept himself from women all these years flashed before him, the unforgivable thing his mother had done, forcing him as a child to suck her breasts, and he felt himself go cold.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked but he said nothing and kissed her because this was not his mother; this was a French, maybe Spanish woman who took pictures of his mouth and wanted to marry him without telling him her name. The disciplined part of him lashed out, but it was too late: she had pulled her dress over her head and was licking his nipples again and began a dance that his body was aching to join.

  Sometime after they were spent, she asked, ‘Have you ever fucked someone who didn’t understand your tongue?’

  ‘You know you are my first—’

  ‘Right. It’s something. No common language between the two of you. It takes the meaning of “complete stranger” to a new level. It is like saying, “Stand up, let me close the curtains, let’s dance in the dark.” There can be accidents. But the thrill. You have to rely on basic human instinct to communicate. Then maybe hand gestures. Those are older than words. Touch. It is the oldest medium of communication you know.’

  ‘You talk just like my father.’

  ‘You miss him.’

&
nbsp; He shuddered.

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘No, nothing at all. I am fine. I just wish the English didn’t rule the world.’

  ‘They certainly don’t rule my country.’

  ‘But which language are you speaking?’

  She rolled her eyes and spanked his ass, laughing. ‘Hör auf zu reden und fick mich.’

  He laughed too. ‘See! See, I wish I understood that. I wish we didn’t need English as this bridge. I wish there was no need for verbal language. Then I could have spoken this basic instinct you speak of so fluently.’

  ‘Ah, you spoke so well,’ she said.

  He laughed and turned to kiss her and there was no residue of fear left in him, this twenty-nine-year-old bald man. He felt indestructible. The wonders of a kiss. With this new-found power he laughed into her mouth and lifted his head from her, leaving her molten beneath him.

  A week later, on the closing day of her exhibition, he woke up around four when a cold draught from the open window hit his skin. He left the bed and went to the mirror to inspect his naked body for the first time in a decade, to see if sex had changed it somehow. When he turned to look at her sleeping on the bed, he thought she was perfect, bedsheet drawn up to her chest, arms above her head in a frozen dance, face still, hair silver. Like the heroines who appeared on the Harlequin romance books he had loathed as a teenager. He picked up her camera and brought it to his face. In the viewfinder he was startled to see her eyes open.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I want to make an image of you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Isn’t that what you people do with the cameras? Capture important moments?’

  He kissed her at daybreak until her hands circled his neck and she opened her eyes and she kissed him back.

  She disappeared into the bathroom in a flash of golden hair and he sighed. What was he doing? What was this? What would his father or his André or Sweet Mother think about this?

  The answer hit him heavily on the bed: Nothing. They would think nothing. They never thought about him. This was why the father kept taking his trips to nowhere – blind trips they called them – and his mother kept travelling to the past in the manuscripts she wrote and his brother kept wandering round the world at the whims of his wild luck and utter madness.

  It was Max who spent his time thinking and wondering about them. He was the one who didn’t have a life.

  She popped out of the bathroom, wet.

  ‘That was fast.’

  ‘I am in a hurry. Meeting with the sponsors, my agent flying in from Peru and I still haven’t prepared my speech yet—’

  He was in front of her and silenced her with a kiss. She smiled and pushed him back onto the bed.

  After she left he ordered breakfast and tasted every flavour, really enjoyed the faint fragrance of the air – everything was heightened. He was surprised when her phone rang and it was the driver there to collect him. He hadn’t even dressed! What was he going to wear? He finally made himself open the wardrobe of clothes she had bought for him. Today was her day, after all. He settled for a navy-blue satin shirt with tiny motifs of embossed red feathers and tucked it in a pair of beltless navy-blue trousers. Then he put on the Zanotti sandals she had got him. He looked at himself in the dressing mirror. André would have been so proud. He pushed caution to the back of his mind and loosened a few shirt buttons. She would love to see him like this.

  Outside the apartment building, where the taxi was waiting, someone ran into him, begging for red oil. The driver rushed to his aid and when Max pushed him back he saw it was André, fighting to keep his eyes open. Max crossed his arms, looked to the dark sky cloudy with the promise of rain, and sighed with the exhaustion his heart had accumulated for almost three decades. He apologised to the cab driver, saying he wouldn’t be going. It was clear to him then that he wouldn’t be spending the rest of his life with anyone else. He could never escape his family.

  He carried André, who was now unconscious, hailed a taxi and asked to be taken to the nearest hospital.

  While they rushed André on the gurney to the emergency ward, he composed a message that would best explain everything, his gratitude and regret. That was when he realised he did not have her phone number.

  The next morning, while André was under observation, he went back to the apartment and slipped a note under her door, but she didn’t call. Two days to the expiration of his visa and seven hours to his flight back to Nigeria, alone (André had insisted on not returning and not telling him why), he went to the apartment and knocked. Having kept the key, he mustered the courage to turn it in the lock when no one answered. As the door opened he lost his breath.

  Everything from his week of happiness with her had been stripped, down to the curtains. Windows he never knew existed opened up in her darkroom and defiled it with daylight. The ropes on which his face had hung were no more. On the kitchenette sink was a fat envelope of dollar bills and a small photo she had taken of him. A black-and-white of him smiling, looking away. On the back a note read, Payment for the modelling. Thank you. Please leave the key.

  He staggered out of the apartment clutching the envelope to his chest as if it was killing him and keeping him alive.

  Sitting now with his father and brother in the small kitchen, he tries to think of the erasure of loss. It was as if that week with her never happened. Who would have believed it? Every time he tried to remember what her face was like it was like trying to recall a dream. She had taken the image he took of her and her small camera. He still didn’t know where she came from. She never told him her name.

  Lifting André out of the tub for towelling the night before he would leave for America to take his life, Max had told himself comforting things like ‘First thing tomorrow, I’ll send him packing.’ But even then he knew that was a lie; that in any world, any universe, whether during the years of their childhood or years later in Amsterdam, André’s life would always belong to him. He dressed André in his pyjamas and force-fed him yam porridge and put him to bed. He bade his brother goodnight but he couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t silence his curiosity, wondering what it was like to be worried about, to have so much control over people – what it was like to be like his André.

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know – your dreaming, your mind. What is it like?’

  ‘Noise sometimes. Like a radio changing stations. People are talking all the time even when it is night here.’ He turned to Max on the bed. ‘The world is really round.’

  Max laughed. ‘Of course it is round. Secondary school geography.’

  ‘I am serious. I know.’ André’s eyes flashed with hurt from all the ways Max had failed him and his voice grew harsh. He looked away. André didn’t back down this time. ‘Not just from geography. I have experienced it.’

  ‘Okay, so let me see,’ Max said. ‘Let me in.’

  ‘Let you in where?’

  ‘Into your head.’

  Now it was André’s turn to laugh but he stopped when he saw the serious look on his big brother’s face. ‘How?’

  ‘How did you do it when we were small?’

  ‘O, o, so you are admitting I am not mad abi; you are admitting you actually entered my dreams and you saw those things?’

  ‘I never denied it, André,’ Max sighed wearily. ‘I can’t be embarrassed by you; you know this.’

  Long pause.

  André’s voice became faraway, distant, child-like. ‘Hold me.’

  Max took his palm and squeezed. ‘Close your eyes. Let’s go to Amsterdam.’

  The night party doesn’t start until the earliest hours of the morning in Amsterdam, when the day is still young. They are young right now. The DJ is driving them crazy right now. They are going to party like the world is about to end right now. Now is all they have. And nobody is going to stop them.

  In Nigeria bodies obey instructions yelled out of loudspeakers to the electron
ic beat of drums: Whine your waist! Shake your baka! Put it on me! It’s TGIF – how dare you bring headphones or a novel or the wife to TGIF? The people here mean business; they know what they want and won’t stop dancing till they get it. So grab any waist, shake it like there’s no tomorrow, and grind until Mama calls.

  The cold winds from the ocean can do nothing to those partying on the beaches of Florida. By now they have lost themselves and become heroes and heroines or just people they’ve never met before. Foreign substances guide the music into their blood, due north to their brains, so that they become gods and goddesses of the Atlantic Ocean crashing in reverence before their dancing feet.

  In the heat of Nairobi alcohol takes control. The party grows beyond the confines of the pubs and bars so that everyone dances in the nakedness of night. Rain might fall but who cares? If you are still sober by now, go back home. You were not made for the party. You were not made for the night.

  A trance rages across Europe like wildfire. The young do not belong to themselves any more. They belong to Stromae or whoever the DJ thinks is better. In the malleability of hypnosis Stromae teaches them the catechism of revolution to a beat. All eyes closed in the sanctity of prayer as their arms flail above their heads to the recaps of corruption, ills of racism and inevitable uprising lubricated with electronic dance music. ‘Progressive house,’ they call it.

  Brazilians are partying in Spain. No one can understand this mystery. The men have come because Spanish women are lighter and reflect more neon colours in the night. They are here because Spanish is passed from the tongue without strings attached. They are drawn here by the similarity of tongues and the women cannot resist.

  By this time folks in New Orleans have inadvertently slipped back to the African spiritual dance of their ancestors shipped here centuries ago, even though it’s rap music playing. Dazed with sleep and alcohol and power and rage older than their bodies, they clap hands as they find in hip-pop the age-old rhythm, dancing in circles, vessels to the eternal dance of pain, triumph and longing.

  You cannot come to the party alone in Rio – are you crazy? Get your shorts, rip open your shirt; it’s hot anyway. And remember to shake! Or be shaken. You don’t have to be a man or woman tonight. Unleash your inner child. You don’t need to understand the Portuguese. Just let the beat guide you. Or the beer. Or the hands. Don’t just stand there, shake!