Night of the Avenging Blowfish

by John Welter

  “Is He coming over too?”

  “You shouldn’t joke about the Lord.”

  “You just did.”

  “Well, Doyle, I’m drunk.”

  “I know. Are you okay?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” she said, folding her legs beneath her to sit cross-legged. “I talked to a priest today. A gay priest. Father Ruuden. I asked him about getting a divorce. He said, ‘Well, you can’t, my dear. The Church won’t allow that.’ And I thought of saying ‘And how long has the Church allowed gay priests to dispense Church doctrine?’ But I didn’t say that. Although the truth is, a gay priest told me I can’t get divorced, because it’s a sin, even though being gay is a sin, too. So, are you hungry?”

  “Not right now. I need to finish hearing your story.”

  “I have some chicken. It’s burned.”

  “And what else happened?” I said, touching my hand on her shoulder to reassure her, and also just because of my need to touch her.

  “I have some potato salad and fresh strawberries,” she said cheerfully. “Do you like strawberries? I do.”

  “Yes, but you said something about an annulment.”

  She nodded her head yes. “I’ve decided to annul myself.”

  “Yourself?”

  “Well, no. I mean my marriage. You see, as Father Ruuden explained, divorce is a sin, because you’d be putting asunder what God hath joined together. But what the Church does, as a loophole, is annul you. They pretend you never really were married. Does that make sense? To say, ‘Well, you’re married, and the only way to dissolve marriage is to pretend you aren’t married’? That’s what Father Ruuden said. I’ve been thinking about it all day. Although, …” Natelle stood up to look at the chicken on the grill. She said, “It’s all burned on one side. I think it’s raw on the other. In the Bible they always have burnt offerings. I’m not sure that includes barbecue.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, watching Natelle sway just slightly as she stood. I wanted to hold her and feel her breathing against me.

  “Soooo,” Natelle said, and sat down again. “The Church has the authority to pretend my marriage isn’t a marriage. If I just up and got a divorce, they’d say it’s a sin because I’m married. But if I ask for an annulment, then they’ll pretend I’m not married. I guess that’s an important theological doctrine.”

  “What is?”

  “Pretending,” she said, and smiled at me wearily. “It’s awful. I think I’m having a schism. Do you know what a schism is?”

  “Yes. It’s when you have a different reality than what the Church wants you to have.”

  She nodded her head and said, “You know what I’ve decided?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve decided to have my own annulment,” she said, and very delicately took a sip of wine, as if she needed just the tiniest amount to keep her as drunk as she was.

  “You mean do it yourself?” I asked.

  “Yes. Technically, some priest or cardinal or bishop or somebody, who knows nothing about me, is supposed to examine my request for an annulment. So a group of strangers gets to decide if I’m really married or not.” She looked over at me and said, “I was there. I’m the one who lived through all this. Don’t I get to decide if I’m married or not?”

  “It’s fine with me,” I said.

  “All right,” she said, sitting up straight and breathing in some air and exhaling. “How do you do an annulment?”

  “I’ve never done one.”

  “Do you think I should change my clothes?”

  “I think you can do an annulment in shorts.”

  “All right,” she said, taking in a deep breath and exhaling again. “And then what?”

  “This is a new ceremony. I think you get to make it up.”

  She began biting her thumbnail and said, “We had music during my wedding. Should we have music at an annulment?”

  “Well,” I said, rubbing my hand on her back, “they also had someone to give you away at the wedding. Do you think we need someone to give you back?”

  Natelle’s head tilted wearily toward me as she started laughing quietly. “That’s right,” she said. “You give the bride away. Now it’s time to give her back. But who are we giving me back to?”

  “We’re giving you back to you,” I said, wishing I’d never come up with that idea, because now she closed her eyes and sat very still and did nothing except be quiet and let tears trickle from her eyes. I kneeled beside her and put my arms around her and felt her lightly trembling as she cried without sound. I wanted the hurt to come into me, to invade me, like I could transfer it all to me, because I was used to sadness and swam in it. But it stayed in her, and all she could do was cry and tremble in my arms, like something was thrashing inside of her. As tightly as I held her, I wasn’t protecting her from anything.

  “I’m giving me back to me?” she asked almost inaudibly. “Isn’t there a better prize than that?”

  I wanted to say Me, but I was always the kind of prize women eventually discarded, and there was no proof that Natelle wanted me for anything more than the desperate kindness of holding her then. And so I cried with her, and helped her do that.

  “All right,” she said suddenly, as if waking from her sadness, or just fighting it, and she raised her head up and said, “I’m a big girl. I’m a brave girl. Let’s finish my annulment. Get the damn thing over with.”

  “Okay,” I said, since I had to say something, although I had no idea what she was going to do.

  “Let’s see,” she said. “I’ve never been to an annulment, so this is going to be pretty primitive.”

  “That’ll fit in with the burned chicken,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay, so … give me your right hand,” she said, smiling a little bit.

  I gave her my right hand and she held it up and pressed the palm of her left hand against mine. She did the same with my left hand so that we sat side by side with our knees touching and the palms of our hands pressed together.

  I said, “Are you sure this is an annulment? It seems like patty cake.”

  “No. This is an annulment,” she said. “You have to do it, you have to touch the hands of someone you love and trust, and press them tightly together,” she said, and she pushed and pushed against my hands, and I pushed back on hers. What we were doing was touching each other almost as hard as we could, like she had to fight physically against her sadness by trying to push herself into me.

  “Is this how they do it in Rome?” I said.

  “This is how we do it at my house,” she said, grinning intently at me as she used an instant burst of strength to push me backward so hard that I and my chair fell over. Natelle fell with me, cradling her arms around my head so it didn’t hurt very much when we both landed on the wooden deck and the chair fell away from me. She lay on top of me, an accident, a harmless accident, and also the first time either of us had ever been on top of the other. The full weight of her was stretched out across me, and I thought maybe it wasn’t an accident, as she pressed her lips against my neck and, very lightly, only one time, pushed her groin against mine and made no effort to get up.

  “Is this part of the annulment?” I said.

  “I think that part’s over,” she said, bringing her lips up onto mine, and we were kissing. Her breasts were pressed against my chest and she pushed against me again between my legs, no mistake, no accident. Without warning or preparation, we had each other. I worried. I reluctantly thought of my better judgment, and said to her when she lifted her head up to look at my eyes, “Is this what you want to do?” which was a depressingly responsible thing to say.

  “Well, I’m not doing this by accident,” she said.

  “But you’ve been drinking.”

  “But part of me’s still sober,” she said.

  “Which part?”

  “This part,” she said, and kissed me again on the lips.

  “Are you trying to take advantage of me?” I sai
d.

  “I think it’s working,” she said, then pushed herself off of me and didn’t say anything, as if now she realized she didn’t want to do this. She stood up and looked down at me on my back and said, “I want you to go in my room and wait for me.”

  I was stunned by the idea that she wanted to have sex with me. I looked up at her and said, “What’re you going to do? Knock me over again?”

  “I might,” she said, pulling me up by my hands. We walked into the kitchen together and she said, “Go wait for me. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  It amazed me how familiar we’d become with each other when so much of us was still unfamiliar, like love was a squall and you didn’t know it was coming and suddenly it was all over you. I wasn’t going to turn her down. I went into her bedroom and sat on her bed and quickly started undressing, tossing my shoes and socks and shirt and pants on the floor.

  “Are you ready?” Natelle called out from the kitchen.

  And we’d never even had a date. I never understood anything. All of this was impossible, and unmistakably real.

  I said, “I’m not sure what I’m ready for, but yes.”

  Natelle came through the doorway with only her panties on, pale green panties with tiny red flowers on them. Her breasts swayed as she walked up to the bed and crawled on her hands and knees over me and beside me. It felt like electricity from her skin shot through me, and I was feverish and bewildered and gentle.

  “What do you want to do with me?” I asked.

  She leaned into me and pushed me down on my back and rolled onto me, kneeling over me as if she’d pinned me, and simply stared into my eyes, both of us staring and never blinking, as if it wasn’t possible to see enough and we wanted to see harder; as if what we were really doing was entering each other through our eyes. She leaned her face down and put both of her lips lightly on my top lip and then my bottom lip, kissing me almost reverently, which was how I felt about her weight on me, every touch and nearness of her, gently astounded that she wanted me, feeling the vague sensation that she could pass right through my flesh into me, or at least I wanted her to.

  “I want to melt into you,” I said, not even sure what it meant.

  “I think you might,” she said, turning sideways and around on me, still on her hands and knees, moving her head down to kiss me high on the inside of my thigh, slowly kissing me, her own soft thighs and her wet, flowery panties raised just inches above my face as she put her hand between her legs and used two fingers to pull aside the narrow, soaked swatch of her panties while I breathed in her strong fragrance, staring with wonder at the glistening, wet folds of her vagina, which she slowly moved so close that I couldn’t see, but then found with my tongue inside her, where I found something she must have gotten from the kitchen: a small, sliced piece of a strawberry. Natelle moaned when I discovered the strawberry and worked to get it with my tongue. She giggled briefly and said, “Do you like strawberries?”

  “More than I realized,” I said. “Served this way, I’d even eat broccoli.”

  She almost shrieked with laughter and pounded the mattress with her hand.

  “Well, I’m not going to put broccoli there. It’s not as erotic as a strawberry.”

  “And a lot harder to conceal.”

  “Does it taste good?” she wondered in a playful voice.

  “You, or the strawberry?”

  “Both.”

  “I like the strawberry fine. The flavor I prefer is you.”

  “Good. There’s more of me,” she said, pushing her fragrant, moist flesh back onto my mouth and gently sliding her tongue along my penis, up to the tip, covering it with her lips. This was more complicated than bliss, this complexity of love and hungry tongues, where you couldn’t distinguish the giving from the taking, both seeming the same. And in this way we consumed each other, and made of each other more.

  26

  Doltmeer was holding a bag of dead flies when I walked into his office for our two o’clock meeting. I knew it was a bag of dead flies because he reached into the bag and pulled out something too small to see and gently stuffed it into the mouth of one of his pitcher plants near the window. I glanced around the room to see if Edgar Allan Poe was with us. We were alone. For a moment, when I should have been concentrating only on seeming properly serious for Doltmeer, I couldn’t help remembering having had sex with Natelle for the first time, which should have been a completely wondrous thing except that Natelle had been drunk. There was no way of knowing if she really wanted me, as it had seemed, or if she’d be sober now and regretting her intimacy with me. While to me it was the best thing possible, to her it might have been an aberration, and she’d have to drive me from her life. I wanted to go to the White House, then, and talk to her about it, to find out if I was deeper in her life or about to be pushed guiltily to the farthest edge of it.

  But I couldn’t just leave Doltmeer’s office right when I got there, and I was reluctant to say anything that would make Doltmeer immediately get to the point of why he’d asked me there, since he would either describe to me some new trouble I was in because of the Spam deal, or he’d announce to me some repugnant new assignment. I decided to make small talk.

  “As a special treat, do you ever give the plants horseflies?” I said.

  Doltmeer glanced thoughtfully at me as he stuffed another fly into a plant and said, “No, but it’s an interesting idea. It’s hard enough, as you might imagine, just to find a steady supply of ordinary flies.”

  “I know. I was at the mall last weekend and didn’t see a single store that sold flies.”

  “I get mine from a biology professor at Georgetown,” Doltmeer said. He put the bag of flies on his desk.

  “How much is a pound of dead flies?”

  “Free,” Doltmeer said, while looking at some papers on his desk.

  It was pointless to keep making small talk about dead flies, so I said, “Is everyone still mad at me?”

  “I was never mad,” Doltmeer said in a quiet and oddly friendly voice, as if for a while, not long, he’d try to speak to me as a friend, a human. “Personally, I didn’t vote for the president and I think he’s a son of a bitch. So I don’t care what he eats. And I kind of enjoyed it when you and Abbas humiliated him. But professionally, I can’t tolerate that. And neither can you. In the Service, we’re like courtesans with guns. Do you know what a courtesan is?”

  “No, but it’s an interesting word.”

  “A courtesan is a prostitute for the upper class.”

  “We’re whores?”

  “Somewhat. We aren’t required to have sex, but we are bought off, even more than a prostitute, who can have sex, wipe herself clean, and go home. We can’t go home. We practically live with the people we’re assigned to, and in some cases, we actually do. So we’re expected not only to escort them everywhere and protect them from harm, we’re also expected to protect their dignity, even if we don’t think they deserve dignity, and sometimes they don’t. So that’s why I say we’re like courtesans with guns.”

  “Does this mean you’re going to ask me to live with someone?” I asked with mild anguish.

  “Good Lord, no. I don’t think you’re civilized enough for that. On my staff, you’re one of the fringers. You operate successfully on the fringe of order, decency, and sanity. And don’t think it’s an insult. It’s not. The world needs fringers, just like history’s always needed explorers, inventors, thinkers and madmen.”

  Madmen? I wasn’t going to tell him about my 60-second nervous breakdown. It might make me seem too authentic.

  “So I’m a fringer,” I said in a wondering tone.

  “We gave you an award for breaking an ambassador’s nose, didn’t we? That’s certainly a characteristic of a fringer.”

  “Well, that was an accident. I didn’t practice breaking his nose.”

  “And you didn’t need to. It was done expertly without practice.”

  “Thank you. Do I get a raise?”

  “Not s
oon, no. But you do get a new assignment, which, coincidentally, is part of the continuing fallout of that dumbass Spam incident that you’ll live to regret, if you’re capable of an emotion as refined as regret. The White House has received threatening mail from a heretofore unknown animal rights group calling itself Animad. As far as we can tell, Animad just comes from the a-n-i in animal, plus mad. Not particularly poetic or clever, but they, whoever they are, apparently have an office near RFK Stadium, according to their letter, which was received by the White House today. Here’s a copy,” Doltmeer said, opening a folder and handing me a photocopy of the letter.

  Dear Mr. President:

  It was with great shame and indignation that we saw you on TV and read about you in the papers, traveling across the nation and eating mound after mound of innocent, profaned and desecrated animal flesh in an atrocious attempt to show the public that you, too, are just an ordinary, fun-loving pig murderer.

  I looked up at Doltmeer and said, “I don’t think the president actually kills pigs. I think he just eats them.”

  “Just read the letter,” Doltmeer said. The rest of the letter said:

  You have an opportunity, as the most powerful and visible leader in the nation, to set a moral example of enlightened vegetarianism for this nation and the world instead of debasing and debauching us all by eating every vile and repugnant form of massacred meat cooked up by the ignorant masses, to whom you pander for votes. On top of that, the latest media estimates are that the federal government—the White House—is now placidly storing in a government warehouse approximately 38 tons of Spam, that canned atrocity, mailed to the White House so far in a continuing tragedy and indictment of Western Civilization.

  “Western Civilization,” I said. “Does that mean Roy Rogers and John Wayne?”

  Doltmeer grinned slightly, one of the few times I ever seemed capable of amusing him. The final part of the letter said:

  Action is called for and will be forthcoming. The endless and unconscionable slaughter of animals ultimately must stop. You, as President, have it in your power to help end the immorality of wanton predation, the cruel insanity of transforming sentient creatures into lunch-box sandwiches. We urge you to consider this, and advise you that to dismiss us can result in dramatic consequences from the devoted members of Animad.