“Yeah, right. I make one move and you zap me!”
“No,” she answered, shaking her head. “You’re here by choice, not chance. If you ask, I’ll remove the collar and you may leave. But you’ll never be able to come back for a private consultation.
“Oh, Sunny, don’t be resentful … your problem is that you feel so vulnerable now. Only you can’t admit to yourself that that’s exactly what you wanted. The idea that you were no less vulnerable two hours ago doesn’t occur to you. When you come to understand the kind of collar you were wearing then, you’ll be started on the true unbinding.”
I stared at the rodents, the cat, the girl, the wires, the clock. “What will happen if there’s a volcano but no eruption?”
She pursed her lips and replied, “When the clock hand reaches the black marker, you’re free to go. If you haven’t delivered your payload, but have maintained your angle of attack, the cat will survive. Sophia will suffer though. And all the lab specimens will be exposed to the charge you would’ve gotten. Life is a matter of balance, sacrifice and shared distress.”
“What are the time increments on the clock?” I asked, sweat breaking out on my forehead and back, making me stick to the chair.
“Time is a curved Riemannian four-dimensional space,” she answered. “Concentrate on the things that are familiar to you: what’s between your legs, the mixed fear and enjoyment of pain, and the sound of your own voice.”
She held the remote control out in front of her. My cell phone started ringing in my jacket on the floor. She laughed. “Would you like to answer that?”
“No,” I scowled.
“Then answer me,” she said softly and undid her bra with her other hand. She whipped me across the cheek with it, which stirred more of her scent through the air. “Are you going to read to me? Or is this farewell to the surprises and the possibilities?”
“I’ll … read.”
Genevieve leaned in close to me, her breasts brushing my skin. If I’d have been fast enough, I could’ve broken her lovely neck. Instead she prodded me with the antenna of the remote control. Raising it and circling each of my nipples. The metal felt cold against my flushed skin.
“Very good, Sunny,” she whispered in my ear—more a fragrance I could hear than a voice. “I’ll give you one concession. The first time you falter, one of the specimens here will take your punishment for you. Like this.”
She pressed one of the buttons on the remote. A lone hooded rat hopped and hit the roof of its cage, falling back down in a puff of smoke, its fur singed, legs raised.
I swallowed down a glob of phlegm. My throat was so tight my tongue felt like glue. She eased behind me and hit the button to open Sophia’s cage.
“Grovel!” Genevieve commanded, and the girl did exactly that, shimmying across the floor to the older woman’s feet like an animal—what kind I wouldn’t want to say. Then Sophia began attaching patches to her body, each one linked to a length of wire. Two went on her nipples. One between her legs. Others on her arms and abdomen. And a final one, Genevieve inserted between the cheeks, which even from where I sat smelled like musk and womanly perspiration. Then a face harness and choke collar was secured, and Sophia submissively slipped to the floor between my legs. Genevieve moved behind me and passed around my shoulder a book—a red hardbound textbook entitled Mammalian Sexual Behavior. She’d employed an unused fluoro pink studded condom as a bookmark, opening to a chapter titled “Sexual Exhaustion and Recovery in the Male Rat.” I felt my vocal chords atrophy.
“Read to me, Sunny,” she said. “Let your mind exist only for the words before your eyes. Give them your total devotion and your body will be free to behave like a body. This is your first chance to make love to me. Perplexed and even terrified as you are … release yourself.”
The clock began to throb more than tick. I heard the sound of water begin to enter the aquarium, the whine of the cat, the awful creaking of the wheel in the sewer rat’s cage. And I felt the warm, wet breath of Sophia … what I’d dreamed of so often in my loneliness in the last months. I sensed her appetite to please me in every cell of my body. I took one glance at the cat in the trickling tank and knew that if I looked again I’d regret it. I began to read …
“Twelve male rats were left with receptive females and allowed to copulate and ejaculate. Sexually active males were selected on the basis of their mating performance in three or four prim … preliminary tests with receptive females.”
A sharp brightness flared in one of the cages when I swallowed the word “preliminary.” There was an acrid smell, but I read on.
“Males were housed individually and were maintained in the experimental room in which the light-dark cycle was controlled by an electric clock. Drinking water and Purina chow were available ad libitum.”
I hesitated on the Latin words, just long enough to hear the clock again. Like another animal in the room. I felt Sophia wince and a sympathetic tremor of electricity ran through me. I was still soft and withdrawn. Slippery and gratified, but afraid. The collar around my neck seemed to tighten. I could feel the carotid pressure and the slow ache seeping through Sophia without a word spoken. The words were for me. The current hummed. The wheel of the sewer rat squeaked. The cat’s paws were growing used to the rising water. My voice droned on …
“The apparatus included special observation cages and a recording device. The rear half of the top was surmounted by a cylindrical release can in which a receptive female was placed.”
I heard the cat shaking the water from its fur. Sophia growled with a surge of electric anguish. I read on, trying to do to the dead scientific words what she was trying to do to me.
“Three observation cages were fastened to a rack in such a position that they could be watched simultaneously by an observer …”
Something happened then. All of the details of the room began to dissolve. The collars and the electrical current. The creatures and the cages. It was as if a door had opened to a secret world that had always been there, close by, only I’d never known about it.
“At the observer’s side were three counterweights controlling the trap floors …”
I felt the rush of blood and the cat’s tank stopped filling with water. Each word I encountered from that point seemed engraved. The sentences began to radiate before my eyes and I read them like holy inscriptions revealed in a vision. I couldn’t hear the water, the clock or the electrical flashes anymore—only Sophia’s encouraging breathing. I was on the verge of exploding—not like that hooded rat—when another buzzer sounded. Deafening. Final.
“Congratulations, Sunny,” Genevieve said—and the reality of the room, if reality it was, came flooding back. The clock hand was stopped in the depth of the black area.
“Your curiosity hasn’t killed the cat. In fact, an exotic pussy is free to live another day. Unfortunately, you weren’t quite able to let yourself go. Your tumescence is proof of your capability, but your partner in this experiment was longing for your fulfillment.”
The spell broken, the cages and animals returned. “So … what happens …?”
“You’ll be released, as soon as the consequences have been made clear to you.”
There was a crackling of current. The bare bulb overhead dimmed for a second. Instantly the cages full of the surviving rats lit up—the creatures leaping and jerking. Those that didn’t burst open outright simply collapsed in tufts of smoke. My whole body was rigid in the chair, too startled to move. Where my mind was I couldn’t say.
“Now, Sunny. You’re going to see Sophia dance. She knelt down and pleasured you. Now she’s going to wriggle on the floor like a maggot. Have you ever seen someone have a grand mal seizure? Oh, of course you have. Your sister for instance.”
“P-please …” I stammered, rage and disgust racing through me like a current.
“Very good!” Genevieve praised. “That’s a word you haven’t used nearly enough in life. But it won’t do now. Didn’t your sister’s death resul
t from a seizure? She fell and broke her neck didn’t she? While you and your friends looked on.”
“You don’t—understand!” I cried. “You weren’t there!”
“You were feeling naked and ashamed, and yet perversely excited, as you are now—knowing you could do something to help her but not knowing what. It was not a sexual failure you faced then—or now. It was a failure of love. Of care. Prepare Sophia.”
My head spun. How had she known anything about my sister Serena—and what had happened that afternoon? She couldn’t have known.
“Give me the juice,” I yelled. “That’s what you want. Fry me!”
My cell phone rang again from my coat pocket on the floor. The contrast to the scene in the room was ludicrous. I let it ring through to the voicemail. Then I stood up and wrenched off the foil ring. I was going to peel off the neck collar too and then beat some sense and decency—
But to my horror, even more than my exasperation, Genevieve bent down to the grilled cage that held the dump rat. She opened the door and summoned the vermin into her hands, nestling the filthy thing to nurse at her bosom like a much loved pet.
“I’m proud of you, Sunny,” she said, stroking the mottled fur. “You’ve proven yourself in more ways than one—my affection for you grows. You’ve left some of your mammalian performance anxiety behind and can now advance. Get dressed and take your prize home.”
I wanted to hit something—like her. But that line threw me. “You mean …?”
She cackled. “I meant the cat.”
My face went red and I started wrestling my clothes on. Sophia waited on her knees at Genevieve’s command. When I had my underwear and pants on, I yanked the shock collar from my neck as I should’ve done right at the start, and flung it on the chair that still bore my sweat marks. Then I stuffed my arms in my shirt and snatched the rest up in my hands.
“Save the cat, Sunny,” Genevieve said. “Notice that I didn’t say take the cat?”
My eyes considered the electrocuted lab rats and I crossed to the tank to release the sopping Persian. “I never want to see you again,” I said.
“Really?” she laughed and pressed a button on the remote control. The shock collar leapt out of the chair and hit the clock. “Some collars are more easily removed than others. I’ll expect you at 4 PM on the dot on Friday. That’s the time your mother used to expect you home from school. Be prompt. And bring me another present—but nothing like a box of chocolates. It must be something personal, from your past. As befits our budding intimacy.”
I lurched out the door with the wet cat and my shoes. I was almost to the stone stairs when I heard Sophia yowl like a banshee. Just as my cell phone rang again.
DIDN’T WANT ANYONE TO SEE ME RUNNING—AND I couldn’t anyway with the cat. But I sure as hell wanted to. The air was muggy and the cherry and plum trees along Rockview gave off a heady scent as the sun hemorrhaged over the derricks across the harbor. I hadn’t been in Genevieve’s parlor as long as I thought—not by the clock in my car anyway (for some reason I’d left my watch in the apartment, which was so not like me). How I drove home, I’m not sure. It was all I could do to get my socks and shoes on in the street after stuffing the cat in the car. The soaked thing quivered in the back seat, happy to be safe from the tank. The last call had been from Padgett, keeping me in the loop. ¡Dios!
Genevieve was right about me and animals. We’d had a bulldog when I was growing up named Winston. It tried to dig its way under the back fence and somehow tangled an intestine and died not long after Dad went off the construction scaffolding and smashed his head in. El Miedo laughed about it. I never wanted another pet after that.
“You’ll have to be the man in the family now,” my mother said after the service. The insurance company behaved surprisingly honorably and paid out the full policy on Accidental Death. And not too long after that Rod started sniffing around. A year later they were married and he was on top of her every night (except when there was a Rotary meeting).
I thought of Sophia’s howl.
The whole scene came back to me. Dreamlike, druglike, but so real. Too real. A nightmare executed like theater. Anything I’d hoped to learn about the Stoakes and Whitney investigations had been struck out of my mind in a bolt of electricity. I felt so jangly I could barely drive, and I’d never been so grateful to see the big sign for The Rumpus Room that marked the edge of my neighborhood. Ladies Baked Bean and Jell-O Wrestling—$$ Prizes.
The cat didn’t want to get out of the car and scratched my hand when I tried to grab it. Mrs. Ramona, the older widow from across the hall, saw me struggling and remarked that it was nice I’d gotten a pet. I didn’t want to prattle with her in the condition I was in. And I always felt guilty when I saw her now. I knew she was sort of sweet on me. When I’d first moved in, she invited me over for some of the best red tamales I’d ever had. The next visit she talked me into teaching her how to play Texas Hold ‘Em, and it was kind of fun at first. She said she wanted to pick it up so she could meet people. Pretty soon it wasn’t hard to work out what kind of people she meant. She liked repeating the words Flop, Turn and River after me, but when the Tia Maria came out and the attention shifted from how she was playing her hand to what she was trying to play with in her other hand, I had to fold. She was one of those sad, soft cow-faced older women who’d have been pure bitch in heat when she was younger. And very maybe still was. Very maybe. But I couldn’t deal. I hadn’t been back and I never left a note in her mailbox. I knew she was pissed at me. Or just hurt, which was worse. Now I felt bad every time I ran into her, but I couldn’t worry about that just then.
My whole body seemed wired still. I bear-hugged the cat and lumbered through my door. Inside, I made sure all the windows were shut and let the animal get its bearings. I had to work to get mine too. I thought at first I was in the wrong apartment, but the PICO collar on the table and the empty box of chocolate proved otherwise.
Other than the police scanner and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, there was all the ambience of a roach motel. Trash had stacked up, and dishes too, even though I hardly ever cooked. Mostly eggs and stir-fries. Clothes were piled on the floor. The medicine cabinet mirror yawned, with dried shaving cream and crusted hairs glued to the sink like sprayed ants. Polly had kept our house so neat, except for one little patch of tile near the shower. I always marveled at the sight of her footprints in the talcum powder there. The cat seemed as appalled as I was. There couldn’t have been any place more different than Eyrie Street.
My new chum was a female all right, quite beautiful now that her fur was starting to dry. I tried to think what I should call her, then my eyes fell on the collar again. It occurred to me that it was about the right size for her. Punched into the last hole, it fit. She didn’t want to be stroked though. Probably hungry—and just as washed out as I was. I splashed some water in my eyes and didn’t recognize myself. My skin was soft and clean. My razorburn had cooled.
The Koreans had no pet supplies whatsoever and were unfriendly even for them. I hustled down to the 7-11, where the Indian man behind the counter scowled at me. They had cat stuff anyway. I bought one can of jellied pilchards and another one of something called “Seafood Platter,” along with a sack of litter and some dry food. The counter guy wouldn’t let me have an empty box though. Asshole.
On the way back I noticed that the weather was changing fast. The sun had streaked out in a mass of gunmetal cloud and the Duke of Earl was sidling back to his burrow. I called him the Duke, and he seemed to like that, but his real name was Landon Moore. He gave me a smile and a holler when he spotted me. He looked like what Scatman Carothers would’ve looked like if he’d spent a couple of years living in a lice-ridden sleeping bag—and I think he might have been a candidate for a diagnosis of Grave’s Disease, because his eyes were beginning to bulge. He was always cheerful though, like some mad monk. He’d been a promising singer somewhere back in time, and was always happy to show you a faded
newsclipping of him in his 20’s posed with John Davidson and Leslie Uggams. Whether through drugs, bad luck, some mental disorder—or all of the above—he’d found his way into a long-term engagement in the bushes of Peralta Park. Two years back he’d come forward to identify a prime suspect in a rape and murder case I’d worked, and I’d been trying to look out for him ever since. Urged him out of the park to a sheltered doorway and abandoned shop front around the corner from my apartment when I moved. It was safer there, and when I couldn’t keep an eye on him, I had the beat boys make sure he was left alone. For some reason, with really busted up people like him—wounded souls who remade the world so they could survive in it—I felt at home enough to help them as best I could.
Besides, he remained proud and self-sufficient in spite of his circumstances. He wouldn’t take any outright assistance, just spare change for singing. Billed himself as the “Human Jukebox” and loved it when you challenged him with requests for songs. I was still feeling pretty damn frazzled but I hit him up for “It’s Not for Me to Say.” His face lit up, and he carried it off as good as Johnny Mathis. Damn fine pipes for a dude who slept on concrete. A twist of the dial and he might’ve been a big star. But life ain’t fair. I read somewhere the strongest erections come during sleep. I laid a tenner on him and hurried home.
I reached the front of the whitewashed and mold speckled cinderblocks of my apartment building when the first dime-sized drops started striking the pavement. Then I remembered I hadn’t gotten myself anything to eat. I’d have to call out for a delivery. My whole body felt like a rejected organ—my mind still fidgeting and popping with images of the cages and the sparks. And I kept imagining I still had that blasted collar on.
Private Midnight Page 8