Kissing Carrion

by Gemma Files

  Then you arch, unable to control you own response, as she takes you to the hilt: A cold scrape of uneven bottom teeth along the underside, a liquid plunge. Back and forth, lips pulling like mist. Nothing to hold onto. And you’re so hard now, your cock feels like it’s gone numb.

  Things are coming to a head, obviously; but it’s too soon. You rear up, pull her up as well, arms hooked under hers. (She comes easily, light and frail, a sex-doll stuffed with milkweed down.) Kiss her breasts as they go by, sucking hard, but provoking no visible response, not even the barest stippling of arousal along the inside of her cleavage. Nothing blooms in this garden—stone roses only, petals turned forever inward.

  Then you lie back, ready to return the favor.

  For a beat, she gazes down at you from this weird Picasso angle, cut off at the knees, the wishbone triangle of legs and pelvis bound together by that pale pubic knot. Seashell furls, secretively overlapped: Put your ear down there, mister, and see what you can hear. Sunken bells? A blood-beat tide, raw and roaring?

  Time to find out.

  Gently, you pry her apart with both hands—spread her wide. She doesn’t stop you.

  (But what would she stop you doing?)

  If her body has limits, she’s posted no signs to indicate them. So you stare up into her mystery, put out a hesitant tongue. Taste it. She’s waxy and redolent with some indefinite, interior scent: Liquorice, filtered through a watercress base. Narcotized. Her juices sting, slightly.

  Again, no visible response. No blush of mere physical pleasure to dampen that detached glow of hers. So you bite deeper, determined to prove you can make her come. All things being equal rights-oriented, they give prizes for that, don’t they? The Orgasm Cup. Best Multiple In A Given Session. It’s a matter of pride now, because this is beginning to remind you of Lisa—her way of absenting herself, without a spoken word or visible sign: Sure, I’ll play along, but this is your business, buddy, not mine. Just hurry up, finish up, shit or get off the pot.

  Fuck you, baby.

  Oh no, fuck you.

  “That’s enough,” she says. Sliding back. And screws herself down onto you with a swiftness that seems to surprise you both equally. You hiss, in unison. Because she’s tight, hurtfully so. And dry, not slick—all friction, with a vague, talcum-powder stickiness. She churns her hips, frantically, digging around inside herself, trying to find the right button. At which point, part of you rebels.

  (I mean, whose fantasy is this, anyways?)

  So you heave yourself over, taking her with you, forcing yourself securely back in the saddle—sheet-wrapped, one of her knees jammed up against your ribcage. Deeper than you’d thought possible. She hums approval; you can feel it through your sternum, an interior caress. The sheets erase a different view of her face with every thrust. Grasping for her elusive wrists, you wind up just getting still more ells of fabric, looping yourself ever further inward: Bed of lies, bed of nails, bed of quicksand.

  “Call me,” she says, with barely a catch, between the bellows-rush of your own panting. “Like you used to. Call me—”

  “Honey—”

  “Slut.”

  A feather-touch at either palm, steering them inward. Another ripple of speech, intimate and infected, rising up your arms like an arthritic seizure.

  “Now hold me like you used to, baby.”

  As she makes a choker of your hands, centering your thumbs on her larynx.

  “Hold me. Hard. Hold me. Tight.”

  (That black-lettered yellow streak of plastic banner drooping, snapped, by one side of the front door. That front hall carpeted with dead insects. The distinct lack of footprints, other than your own, in the dust beneath you as you mounted the rickety stairs.)

  And what’s that term? Off of Oprah’s newest rival, one afternoon when you cut class to surprise Lisa with a quickie. And she wasn’t there, of course; it’s not like she could read your mind, after all. Any more.

  So you flip on the tube, and it’s a panel of parents, crying, talking about walking in on their sons in various states of undress, belts and cords looped around their necks. Slumped. Slack. Porno mags nearby. Most do it alone, and die. Some do it like any other contact sport, using a spotter, somebody who loves them enough to let go once they black out. The high as your throat closes off, the luxuriant gasp of climax, as you come like your life depends on it.

  Auto-erotic. I mean, erotic. Asphyxiation.

  You stare down at her, with eyes abruptly narrow enough to be clear, and see—for the first time—how she waxes and wanes with the ebb of your urges. Her face, seen full-on, is a flicker; something meant to be intuited, meant to be glimpsed from the corner of an eye rather than studied closely. A white darkness in every line of her slumberous haze of toxic dreams. She arches against your grip like a domesticated animal, flexed and lithe, trained into desperation for human contact of any kind: Love, love me do. Kiss me, kick me.

  Kill me.

  You see her, suddenly, like a blow to the face, as wholly as one can see any ghost. And she, just as abruptly—

  —sees you too.

  Both speaking at once:

  “You’re not—”

  “—not. You.”

  Cloudy blue, Arctic depths, glaring upward. Crystallizing. As the shared delusion of her physicality, punctured by this double recognition, begins—slowly, steadily—to come apart under pressure.

  (The moment of truth from that old Japanese movie you saw with Lisa one birthday, not too long back at all. The girl with the long black hair, the morning after; the willing skeleton bride.)

  Oh, I’m going, I’m going.

  As she melts, becomes ether. Seeps inside you like a novocaine kiss, penetrating you to pool around the fluttering muscle between your lungs and squeeze it—tight. Hard. Hard, in absolute sorry fact, as your own dinosaur member, which—instead of wilting—just swells along with the flow, the sub-zero uprush, painfully full as a clogged artery, reaching for consummation. Blackout orgasm. Closed-heart surgery. Cooling it to a light sheen, to a frosty glow. Until it gives one last, convulsive clench, and cracks wide open.

  Dark river, suck me down.

  Now, if you ever read the paper for more than the Sports section, maybe you might understand why you’re about to die. You might have seen the pictures of a woman’s body, found naked and bloated in her apartment after a game that went too far. You might have heard the descriptions of her lover, garnered from friends and family. You might have remembered certain things Lisa used to tell you, before you stopped listening—those pseudo-Wiccan fatuities about how violent separation from the body sends what’s left roaming aimlessly in pursuit of its most recent passion, of anyone who knows its name. How it confuses emotions: Pain for pleasure, rage for tenderness. How it forgets everything, except for the last person who touched it as though it was still a human being. You might, however briefly, even have time to pity the man she thought you were, for the horror he’s going to feel once she finally finds him, and moves back in with him—moves into him, completely, never to vacate his heart again.

  But you don’t, so you don’t. And so you die like she did, not knowing how or why things have gotten so far out of hand—in that most terrible of states, having expected only bliss.

  * * *

  Love, love. The worm in every heart. That little speck that keeps on burning after everything else is gone, right down to the bone, and the dust of bones.

  Because you were right, after all—the world is full of thieves, baby. And so many of them have somehow gotten hold of your name, your walk, the same tactile net of warmth that used to hover between your hands, binding me to you.

  But they all have the same face under their masks, once they’re off: Slack, and white, and hollow.

  I only want to be yours again: Only that. And with such a righteous goal to drive me, I think I can be forgiven for maki
ng a few errors in judgement.

  They say the moment just before you die is the loneliest moment in the world. Well, I’m pretty lonely now. I’m full. I’m empty. I’m nothing but what I want, nothing but my own need. And when that’s all gone, there won’t be a part of me left to hurt.

  So find me, baby, before I forget why I wanted you to, in the first place. Find me, and hold me.

  Hold me—hard. Hold me . . . tight.

  Blood Makes Noise

  DEPTH DRUNKENNESS BRINGS strange thoughts—stranger than usual, at least. Right at the moment, it’s like I’m seeing my deaf paternal grandmother’s hands hover in this darkening air, signing the scenes of my life away syllable by syllable: Old, new, in and out of order.

  These slippery reminiscences, repetitive and elusive—squid-ink images written on oil, squirming from close examination. A memory flip-book, curling at the corners: Nanny Book’s crepe-paper skin, laced with pale blue veins; the vestigial webs between her arthritic fingers, spread to catch the light.

  My unit bracing to take their turn—pulses shallow, impatient with dismay, most of them more terrified to gauge the true limits of their shameful, mounting fear than consider the circumstances prompting it—as Captain Kiley lies propped up against his bunk, making rabbit-shadows on the holding cell wall.

  The sky over Pittsburgh when I was five years old, dirty as a bed of nails.

  A map I saw once of the twin moons of Mars.

  Hit, flash: Popped bulb, clicked lens—image, then absence. Whispers in my skull, like the roar inside an empty shell: Blood echoes. Music to—in—my ears.

  And just what the hell is that word for the fear of fear, anyway?

  Fear: Phobos. Fear of: Phobia.

  Phobophobia?

  . . . must be it.

  I press my eyes closed, momentarily forgetting to remember just how deep we must already be. HPNS regulations at least breached, for certain—sure, if not exceeded—more than deep enough to check my hands for tremors, and count off the rest of those prospective High Pressure Nervous Syndrome symptoms our mission literature listed:

  Increased excitability, motor reflex decay; aphasia. Mental glitches.

  . . . under the deep black sea, who loves to die with me . . .

  —glitches. Psychosis. Cyanosis.

  And eventually . . .

  I slam my head back, skull on wall, hard enough to ring myself true—short, sharp shock, broken left incisor into lip, tweak of clarifying pain. Instant coherence. Kiley’s rules, channeling themselves: Keep alert. Tell it through. No opinion without research. No solution without . . .

  . . . with—out . . .

  “Book,” the Doctor whispers, beside me. I shift a bit towards him, deliberately trying to find the floor’s sharpest angle, to bend my hip in such a way as to make the pain flare just so, girdling my pelvis. Making myself uncomfortable.

  “Doctor,” I answer.

  “Book, Regis. American. No . . . registered rank.”

  “Specialist.”

  He coughs. “I . . . didn’t know that.”

  “No reason you would.”

  The Doctor gives a snuffling gasp, a liquid retch. Something catches in his throat, rattles there briefly—then flicks out again, splattering the floor between us with wet, red bile. I glance back at the wall I just used for a memory aid, which could frankly use a few shadow animals right about now. And as though he’s read my mind—

  —which may, I suspect, no longer be quite as hard to do as it once was—

  “Black . . . Ops . . . operative. ‘Wet . . . boy.’ Yes? C . . . I . . . A—puppet.”

  I smile, thinly. “Whatever.”

  But at least you know my first name.

  “You . . . are a—coward, Book,” the Doctor tells me. Then lets all his breath out in one big rush, ragged with the effort, like he expects me to pause, to take note—to congratulate him on his sudden insight, his startling perspicacity.

  As though this were really some big revelation.

  * * *

  Okay: Step back. Start over. To call the situation bleak would be an understatement. Down to our last few hours of oxygen, high on our own fumes and drifting blind: Trapped inside a lost, crewless, experimental submarine—make and model strictly classified, even if it mattered—trolling rudderless, black and silent, along a smoking ridge of volcanic fissures at the bottom of the Subeja Trench. Engines blown, no fuel reserves, interior lights dimmed down to a thread or two of emergency luminance along the hallways. With nobody left to tell the whole tale but me and the Doctor, enemies in an undeclared Lukewarm War, huddled across from each other behind the blackout blinds, the two-way mirrored walls, of what we used to call the Waiting Room.

  Me sitting quiet, chin on knees, cradled by a weak but quenchless glow that emanates from somewhere deep inside me—quivering, almost imperceptibly, against the back corner of my former prison. Watching him, on the floor, slumped in on himself—curled, fetal. Broken. Moving just enough, every once in a while, to give up the occasional cough—weak and wet, greased with pinkish phlegm; visible fallout from a buried haematoma, a crushed rib, a punctured lung.

  Blood whispering in my inner ear, static between stations: Radio Tinnitus, the voice of the virus. Of that indefinite thing to whom I owe my freedom, my breath and life itself, but whose true nature remains as much a mystery to me now as when they finally threw me into this same room, head-first, to sweat and scream out my appointment with its presence behind a triple-mag-locked door.

  The barely-there voice of my master, my soon-to-be savior.

  It cajoles, flatters. It says: My love. It says: You know I will honour my promises. It says: Time means nothing. And in the same non-breath, self-contradictory, it says: Soon.

  Soon, soon.

  And I sit here, still, not answering. My whole body nothing but a thin skin suit, stretched tight over an endless scream.

  * * *

  When three of the Doctor’s largest “orderlies” finally dragged me down to the Waiting Room, they had to break two fingers just to get me through the door. I lurched, tripped, came down face-down and felt my bottom lip split open on impact against the floor, left eyetooth cracking right in half like a piece of candy-corn.

  Mouth full, head tolling, I spat, swallowed, screamed back at them—and him, for all I couldn’t see him through the two-way’s glare—every invective phrase I could form in their wonderfully poetic native language: “May goats rut on your grave! May nuns use your bones for dildos! May God fill your heart with shit and drown your grandchildren in blood!”

  And then, reverting under the stress of the moment to pure all-American: “Fuck you! Motherfuckers! Fuck, fuck, FUCK ALL Y’ALL!”

  Unlike the rest of my former unit, you see, I knew exactly what to expect—because I’d already been there behind the mirror myself, helping the Doctor record what happened to each and every one.

  I felt like I’d broken the rest of my fingers on that fucking door, before the pain calmed me far enough down to get me thinking straight again.

  So: Slowly, I turned. Made myself look back.

  And there it was, in the Waiting Room’s far corner—almost close enough to touch.

  The thing.

  They found it at the bottom of the sea somewhere, in relatively shallow water. Took it out real deep to test it, just in case—a fairly good idea, in my personal opinion. Given what I’ve seen it do.

  White coil of unknown—metal? Bone?

  Silence. Compressed dust.

  Whatever, Doctor.

  A funneled, calcified glass shell, an empty tube-worm knot, utterly alien. Shedding icy light the way we shed blood, and looking somehow slick while doing it. Somehow . . . unclean.

  But that might just have been the fear talking.

  Blink-flash fast, I conjured a mental image of the Doct
or comfortably ensconced behind that mirror, taking his notes, making his calculations, running his useless experiments; the same fucking data, over and over:

  You go in. And it sits there. And you sit with it.

  And then—the glow begins to change. To grow.

  And then—

  —you die.

  Five times out of five. Granted, I’m a traitor, not a scientist—but to me, those odds do suggest a certain pattern.

  I felt myself freeze, then, settling instinctively into much the same position I hold now, except with my back up against the door instead of the corner. Freeze and listen, straining for a hidden warning, some cold whisper beating up through the rush and gasp of my own hot blood—a hum beneath the hum.

  Beneath the human.

  The flutter of my pulse, quick and light with morbid anticipation. The—

  (Phobo)

  —inescapable fear—

  (phobia)

  —of my own fear.

  . . . and why do I keep forgetting that fucking word?

  Oh yeah, right; brain melting. Memory—drowning.

  Terror-struck, I held my breath, tried to slow it down. Closed my eyes and prayed to simply disappear, before the sheer, dull, palpable horror of it all ate me alive.

  But I didn’t piss my actual pants until the first time I heard that noise in my blood begin to talk.

  * * *

  Two weeks, ten days and five other men ago . . . five men I knew well—my trusting comrades, my trusted co-operatives . . . five men plus dear, dead Captain Kiley, that old Cold War-horse, who once let slip (in strictest confidence) how he considered me his second son . . .

  The call came straight from the top, wherever that is: A need-to-know mission with an unstated goal, just a set of coordinates and a schedule on a sheet of flammable fax-paper.