“You don’t look so bad yourself.”
“She wants to talk to you.”
“What for?”
“She wants to confirm all those predictions. You know, about the outcome of the trial.”
“Well, I’m sure she’s getting good advice. Tell her lawyer to lose the hat.”
“Be serious, Efren. She wants you.”
“Why?”
“Because she trusts your opinion.”
“I like the way you put it.”
“I’ve never seen her so . . . human. It makes me so sad.”
Efren laughs. “Sorry,” he says.
“You’ve never forgiven her, have you?”
“Forgiven her for what, Christina?”
“For being you.”
“She never made me what I am. I made me what I am.”
“Come to her apartment, Efren. This afternoon. After the hearing. You know where it is. Fifth Avenue.”
“Busy.”
“Busy with what?”
“My science. My experiments.”
“What can be more important right now—”
“See, Christina, there you go again. My experiments are important. They’re the fucking most important thing I’ve ever done in my life. And nobody fucking gives a damn.”
“Taping interviews? Talking to God knows what—Efren, this is the real world. You’re in the real world now.”
“All my life I wanted to know. You know that?”
“Know what?”
“What it is that goes on in that little thing inside people. The heart, for Christ’s sake. The aorta. I want to know what goes on in that little machine. I want to do something useful. You know what that means, Christina?”
“My heart bleeds. Can you see that?”
“Jesus. You’re beginning to sound just like her.”
“What else do you want to know? It fucking bleeds. Just like she’s bleeding now. We’re all being tried here. Not just her. All of us. Do you understand?” She edges closer to him and looks in his eye. “Do you really think you’re different from us all?”
“I can’t do anything anymore. I just can’t.”
Christina holds his hands and then lets go. “I have to go in now. She needs all of us. Will you please please please be there?” She runs up the stairs, her heels clicking like ice.
He turns around and walks to the subway. Then, on second thought, he decides to walk home. He walks up Broadway, the bleak monotony of it, the hobos and the suits, the serpentine visa lines along the Federal Office Building, past the fortress of the police barracks on Lafayette, then turns left on Canal past the disheveled stacks of vegetables, the Vietnamese noodle houses, the Chinese bonsai shops, the unbearably human need to eat and fuck and defecate and prettify.
Finally, with some relief, he reaches the lesser frenzy of Lispenard. Back in his apartment he discovers that the boy has gone. He walks about, inspecting the objects he left behind. They’re all there. The only thing missing is the sweater he gave the boy. He can’t, for the life of him, remember what the boy looks like. Some day he’ll pass him on the street and he won’t recognize him. He picks up his recorder and switches it on, and sits thinking for a long time before switching it off. Then he slumps on the sofa. The remnants of last night’s meal—the glass lined with a thin film of milk, the half-torn packet of biscuits—lie on the table. He stares at the spoon that’s lying there. It’s smeared with muddy chocolate that has dried and caked into streaks. He picks it up with the intention of dumping it in the kitchen sink. Then he changes his mind and puts it back on the table. He stares at it for a long time. It’s beautiful, in a strange sort of way. Just the way it is.
SUBMISSION
Karl Taro Greenfeld
The boys on the wall catcalled as she passed. Tanned faces with flecks of peeling skin, crooked teeth, hooked noses, blood-rimmed eyes like old fish in a monger’s stall, these were the features of horny, stoned, bored teenaged boys. And they stank, these boys did, of the ocean and brine and seaweed and their own sweat. They reminded Sandi of what was repellent about sex. The fluids. The smells. The saltiness. No wonder women demanded to be paid.
She didn’t glance at them. Two years their senior, she had never really known the boys on the wall. Her own little brother, Mickey, was a good student, a potential engineer, consistently scoring in the high 90s at Chai Wan Secondary School #2. He never hung around with the surfers on the wall. They smoked cigarettes and hashish from crushed soda cans and executed little flip tricks on skateboards, the clicking sound of the urethane rolling over cracks in the pavement audible all the way up the hill, even in the tiny dining room of her family’s housing estate flat.
KARL TARO GREENFELD was born in Kobe, Japan, in 1964 of a Japanese mother and American Jewish father. Currently the editor of Time magazine’s Asian edition, he is the author of two books of creative nonfiction, Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan’s Next Generation (1995) and Standard Deviations: Growing Up and Coming Down in the New Asia (2002). A former staff writer for Time and correspondent for the Nation, Greenfeld has spent much of his career reporting and writing about the Far East for GQ, Outside, Men’s Journal, Condé Nast Traveler, Vogue, the New York Times Magazine, and other magazines. His nonfiction has been widely anthologized, most recently in The Best American Non-Required Reading, 2002. This is his first published work of fiction.
They ogled Sandi. With her feline eyes and condescending smirk, she frustrated and angered and aroused them. She had grown up in the same housing estate, swung and jungle-gymed in the same crummy rubber-matted play area and spent her springs and summers on the same dirty Shek-O beaches. They’d stood atop a Dumpster to spy on her peeing in the public bathrooms, seen her bush almost as soon as she had one. And now, suddenly, it’s as if she didn’t know them. For the boys, pulling their baggy Billabong T-shirts tight over bony chests and crouching with knees bent in the coiled human spring that is a skater about to ollie, she was the local bitch. So whenever she strolled by, her black Prada shaped like a doctor’s bag but the size of a small suitcase under her arm, they reminded her that she was one of them.
“You slut.”
No, she wasn’t a slut. Because sluts gave it away. What the boys could never imagine was what was in the bag. The skin-tight vinyl cat suit, the crotchless panties, the dildos, the vibrators, the whip, the cato’-nine-tails, the plugs she would stick up a British investment banker’s ass. All washed, cleaned, ready for lubrication and insertion. Could the boys on the wall handle that?
She boarded a mini-bus that wound up through the headlands and then down into Chai-wan, passed Northpoint, Quarry Bay and then along the harbor and into Central. As the driver, a middle-aged man with a face that seemed frozen in hang-jawed astonishment at how badly his life had turned out, swerved between taxis and trucks hauling bamboo pipes, Sandi ran through her calculations again. She had the same head for figures as her brother, only Sandi had never been able to stay interested in the abstractions of numbers without dollar signs attached to them. Now that the money was accumulating quickly, she was fascinated by the easy arithmetic of adding each day’s take to the stash in her Standard and Chartered account. She’d quickly figured out she could charge more than the other girls: attractive Chinese dominatrixes were rare. They were actually more in demand than the wrinkled gweilos who hung around the shop. It was a matter of learning the technique, the knots and buckles and pulleys and straps. At first it was like taking a course in rock climbing. Master the equipment. Safety was paramount. You had to strap him in, make sure the customer was secure, test the straps and buckles before you winched him up. But she was learning. Steadily, slowly, from watching videos, reading magazines, visiting Web sites, doing doubles with some of the older girls. And her customers, they told her what worked and what didn’t. This was a business, like any other, and she had to expect a certain amount of R&D, of sunk costs, there was that vinyl bodysuit, the dildos, it wasn’t like you could go to a bank and take out a loan. But f
rom here on it was all profit. And somewhere, at the end of all this, was Australia, Sydney, a paradise of S&M and dom-sub role-play. Where she could fist fifteen customers a day, pretty Aussie boys charged up on poppers with muscular chests and long, bulbous cocks and neatly trimmed pubes. She’d rent her own little flat in Paddington and finally get out of stinky, humid Hong Kong and away from her parents’ tiny apartment, and frustrated, desperate Mickey hunched over his graph paper and tapping away on his Casio calculator and finally, once and for all, say good riddance to that bad rubbish who sat along the wall.
She worked in an office, she had lied to her parents, for an old gweilo woman who was often out of town and worked unconventional hours. Late evenings, Saturday afternoons, her mobile would buzz when Sandi was sitting down to dinner with her mother and father, chopsticks hunched over bowls of rice and steamed garupa and dau-mieu. A customer, one of her Pommie bankers, American computer geeks, French restaurateurs. They needed spanking, violation, discipline. They wanted to be strapped in, winched up, harnessed, saddled, ridden. Sandi would explain to her parents that her boss needed her and she would grab her Prada bag and head down the hill, past the beach and the boys on the wall, to the mini-bus stop or taxi stand and into town.
She stepped off the mini-bus near the Central Market, walking up the block to Lane Crawford and then the escalator up to Cavanaugh Street. The businessmen in their shirtsleeves, carrying their leather briefcases, the old ladies wheeling their collections of scavenged aluminum or cardboard, the teenage girls talking on mobiles, the shirtless construction workers taking a break from laying fiber-optic cable; the vista was numbingly familiar. Sandi felt she could slip into her fellow Hong Konger’s minds at will, read their thoughts as easily as a Chiron scrolling news: the businessmen were scheming about money, the old ladies counting up their take in redeemables, the girls steadily compromising their standards so that in a year or two the prospect of marrying one of those businessmen wouldn’t seem as depressing as it really was and the construction workers, well, they were thinking of fucking Sandi.
That’s what bored her, actually, the same-sameness of it all. In Sydney, she had found, she really didn’t know what those hook-nosed gweilos were thinking; oh, about sex, surely, because Sandi had concluded that was really all anyone thought about. You could throw in money, but wasn’t that just sex in a different form, a fungible that was valued because of its ready convertibility to sex? But Down Under, who knew? Every withered, freckled, craggy, pallorous face was empty as a new bank account. That’s what she fancied, after the stifling closeness of Hong Kong housing estate living. Her family’s apartment was three bedrooms in name only, the rooms seemed small as airline seats, the smells and sounds of each family member permeated the whole place, so that Father’s belches and Mother’s sighing and Mickey’s clicking away on his keyboard and scratching at his columns and rows of figures became the soundtrack of her life. They didn’t need to speak anymore. It was as if they heard enough of each other when they were separated that when they came together, there was nothing to say. She always paid Mother the four thousand Hong Kong dollars they had agreed as her share of the communal housing and board bills before Mother even had a chance to ask for it.
As she walked into the shop, two of the old gweilo dominatrixes—they must have been in their mid-thirties—were sitting on the carpeted bench under the edible underwear and a selection of billy clubs. They were little better than prostitutes, Sandi reckoned, reduced to trolling the shop for middle-aged Chinese men who longed to revisit their colonial servitude. At first, when she got into the business, Sandi had listened to the old doms, eager to siphon their wisdom and advice, and intimidated by their ease and comfort with the vast array of equipment the shop provided in the dungeons let by the hour. She said hello in English and told the shop boy in Cantonese she’d like her usual chamber and to send in the sub when he checked in, an anxious, medium-height American with hair the color of sesame seeds. He’d be wearing an inexpensive-looking blazer and trousers. And he’d pay for the room.
At first, she’d made the mistake of having sex with the subs. They would beg her for it. Their reward, they would call it. And they would demand it petulantly. After being on the rack or in a pulley or strapped to a chair or suspended from a winch or locked in a cage for an hour or two, they would insist that they had been good boys and they should get their reward. As if Sandi was a doggy biscuit. They’d pout and sulk and say that for three thousand Hong Kong dollars they deserved it. And she’d relent, unzipping the crotch of her cat suit and squatting over them where they were tied down, or strapped up, and letting them lap at her hairy bush while she jerked them off. The old gweilo ladies smiled at each other when she asked about the rewards, and shrugged, telling her it was a matter of preference, clients, business. When she worked in tandem, she was surprised when the old dom, Madame Xonia, slid a condom over the balding Chinaman’s cock and lowered herself onto him, riding him until he came and simpered, yes mistress, yes mistress. So she resigned herself to having to proffer her little biscuit to the subs.
Still it wasn’t sex. This was masquerade, a kind of theater, or at least a spectacle. She was paid as much for her expertise as for her body. Those whores out in Mongkok, they were paid for allowing trespass, violation of their reproductive facilities, nothing more. There was a dignity in this, Sandi would insist, in knowing how to fasten the straps and tie the knots, to lay a fine silk rope between the subs’ testicles and fasten it with a slip knot over the cock. That was a skill. One that paid well. And the more she learned, the more tribute she could demand. With her looks—whenever the new sub called, having been referred by the shop, they’d ask if she was pretty, “Very,” she would say, her voice assured and confident, “very”—she had raised her rates: four thousand Hong Kong for the hour. And there was no longer any reward. At least not on the first few visits.
With this sub—the quiet American with dirty blond hair who insisted that his cock be tied up—she was settling into the routine. She let him in, led him through the dungeon and into the rest room. While he was showering, she checked herself in the mirror. She’d already changed, fastening the collar around her neck, slipping on the cat suit over the crotchless panties, pulling on the black stiletto boots. She removed a dildo, a small vibrator shaped like a giant diet pill and several Durexes from her bag, setting the sex toys and contraceptives atop the black, upholstered rack.
The sub would tell her about his sexual conquests—all lies, Sandi assumed, although she didn’t care. He worked at a magazine, as a writer, he said, covering business, politics, Southeast Asia—again, not that she cared. He asked her if she read any magazines. The Nutcracker, she answered, Leatherworks, BDSM Monthly. Newspapers? he’d asked. Mingpao, Apple Daily. She gave a few names, but she really never read newspapers. They bored her. And they made her hands dirty with ink. He was frequently out of town. He once called her from Bangkok, as if they were friends, and told her he had to see her. She told him to call back when he was in Hong Kong. What did he think? That she would talk dirty to him while she was riding a mini-bus?
She told him his safe word: yellow. She would tie up his penis so that it was strapped to his stomach, pointing up at his navel. And she would whip it lightly with a riding crop. He moaned. He begged her not to stop. He told her he’d been a bad, bad boy, that while he was working at the magazine he would think of her and masturbate behind his desk, sometimes with the door open. Who knew who saw him? Sandi agreed that yes, that was bad and—thwack!—he had better not even think of stopping it.
“Because this is my cock, right?” Sandi said, poking at the fleshy little member with the riding crop—his penis reminded her of an elongated tube of pig’s colon that you might find in an assorted noodle soup, mixed in with the pig’s blood and rhubarb. “I own this cock. And if I tell you to touch yourself, you touch yourself.”
“Yes mistress,” he moaned. “Oh yes mistress.”
Later, while she was browsi
ng a rack of codpieces and chastity belts, she chatted with Xonia. Xonia was a part owner of the shop, though she would still frequently take a session or two or partner with another of the girls if the client wanted a threesome. Slightly built with medium-sized breasts and wavy, shoulder-length dyed-blond hair, Xonia was trying on a see-through camisole and turning before the mirror, commenting that she had to start working out again.
“I’m going all wobbly,” she said as she bobbed up and down on the balls of her feet.
She’d been in Hong Kong more than a decade. Had seen advocates and chief secretaries and managing directors and magistrates pass through her dungeons. “Oh, you’d be surprised, you’d be surprised.”
While Sandi fiddled with the lock on a male chastity belt, she listened as Xonia told her about her life in England, before she came to Hong Kong, about working for a pop star who was famous in the eighties, a now-forgotten, dreadlocked pretty boy with a few videos on heavy rotation on MTV—but this was before your time, Sandi, before Honkers even had MTV or Channel V. And how he was much smaller than he looked in the videos and how they would have these wild parties. He used to rent a villa in Ibiza or Mykonos, and they’d take drugs. Xonia never took drugs herself. They used to tease her for it. She’d drink tea and eat her chocolates while the rest of them were taking Es. This was before it became a big club drug, when you took it and stayed home and, well, just partied. By partying she meant having sex with multiple partners. One of the band or the pop star himself would come up to her and just tap her shoulder and off they’d go into one of the bedrooms and they’d screw, or they’d just cuddle. They didn’t call them orgies then, nobody ever used those words. They were just parties.
“But I wasn’t so wobbly then,” Xonia said, examining her bum in the mirror.
Sandi tried to imagine Xonia as a younger woman, a Xonia in her prime. She may have been pretty once, in that fleeting gweilo way where a woman can be pretty for like fifteen minutes when she’s nineteen and never catch a second glance again. How lucky she was to be Chinese, Sandi assured herself, her looks would last. And anyway, she had another thirteen years at least before she would be Xonia’s age. But now Xonia was like an old scholar, someone to be venerated for her age and wisdom, but the lessons to be taken away were not necessarily those that came from Xonia’s words, instead it was her life that Sandi took to be a cautionary tale. Stay in this business for too long, and you become an old whore, smelling of powder, stuffed into lingerie, hoping for customers.
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