Honey is Sweeter than Blood

by Jeffrey Thomas

Damask agreed to meet me for lunch. Also, she e-mailed me another example of her amusing animated greetings, this one an early 30th birthday card for me. It was a photo of that same aborted, disembodied fetus head, but oddly taken from another angle and shown much larger, a cartoon party hat added, and its jaw worked like a Monty Python animation as it sang, “Happy Birthday To You!” in a watery voice like that drowning baby cry which accompanied the Xmas message. She always was talented, I recalled.

  Staring at that hairless, tenderized head made me perversely use my powers of extrapolation to age it into Damask herself, as best I could recall her from those college days. The raw little scalp grew thick, crazy wild black hair that she wore like a thundercloud, and the wrinkled red flesh turned smooth and pale as a puddle of candle wax. Big, too-big doll eyes lined and accented in too much kohl. A mouth too small and pouty like that of an insolent child. She was very petite, Damask, and almost could have passed for a child, really.

  And yes, my friend knew me well. I’d always been attracted to her, but too loyal to act on it. I had been dismayed, but at the same time excited, when one time the three of us had gone to a gallery where she had a few paintings on display, and she gave my ass a quick squeeze without even meeting my eyes.

  She was there at the Cuban restaurant before me, waved me to the table, stood to give me a hug, still so small even in platform shoes that I smelled the nest of curls at the top of her head. Her wild tendriled mane of yore, snarled Medusa snakes, was gathered back more or less into a huge puffy ponytail like dirty clothes kicked under a bed. Its color wasn’t black as I remembered it, more of a dark auburn. She hadn’t aged much; her face was still child-like, though I saw some subtle lines in her forehead and her throat looked like a more mature woman’s. A beguiling mix, that blend of girl and woman. I had pictured her all in black, like in the old days, but she wore a gray T-shirt (cut short to show a tease of midriff as was the style with young girls, though at thirty she could still get away with it) and olive drab combat pants too large for her, rolled up at the cuffs. We sat and both ordered coconut-encrusted haddock and Havana martinis.

  We got to talking about our main connection, that being Dwayne. I told Damask about his fear of Tamsin finding out that he received the occasional email message from her. Damask snorted. “That boring little wife of his has him so pussy whipped, it’s not funny. She seems to think I was this evil Eve, this Pandora that came along and corrupted her pure little future hubby. I didn’t put any kinks in him…I just helped him give them some air. But thank God his own personal Princess Dye-job saved his soul again. Can you believe they named their son Corey? Corey…oh my God. Duh-wayne has gotten so old…”

  “That’s what I was telling him.”

  Damask lowered her head so she could look up at me with those huge black eyes from under her thick black brows. “How about you?” she asked in a voice just as dark. “Are you old these days, Timmy?”

  “Me? I’m the poster boy for Peter Pan Syndrome.”

  Damask sat back and gave a deep belly laugh that was surprising coming from her. “Well that’s a relief.”

  We each ordered a second martini and also downed a few free shot-sized samples of several new cocktails on the menu. We had gotten to the subject of her artwork.

  “Where’d you get those gross fetus photos, anyway? Online somewhere?”

  Damask chuckled and sipped her drink. “Maybe I fished them out of an abortion clinic’s dumpster, then plopped ‘em onto my scanner.”

  “Eww.”

  “I should take you to my studio. Some of my art is kinda hard to describe. But then, I’m not sure you’d understand it, Tim.”

  “What? C’mon, give me some credit, Damask. I know you.”

  “Really?” She sipped again, and nonchalantly said, “Okay, then. And as long as we’re going there we might as well fuck, huh? My studio is also my apartment, actually.”

  I nodded deeply and slowly for a few moments before answering with a fearful smile, afraid she might only be joking or that I might be missing out on some new definition of fuck, “Okay.”

  “Are you going to finish that?” Damask poised her fork over my last chunk of haddock, its flesh as white as her own. When I gestured for her to go for it, she pierced the cooling flesh and popped it into her mouth. Smiling and chewing and talking at once, she said, “I’m eating for two.”

  “Two?”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  * * *

  Lowell, Massachusetts is a college town with an artistic bent, site of a yearly Jack Kerouac festival. It was where Dwayne and Damask and I had attended school together, at Lowell University. The town has a large Asian population, and every person I glimpsed in Damask’s apartment building was Asian. In a dingy hallway smelling of exotic foods and resonating with muffled exotic music, as if one might step into Hong Kong behind any one of those ranked doors, Damask even greeted a passing woman in the woman’s own language, which might have been Vietnamese, before unlocking one door and letting us into her flat.

  “I’ll give you the grand tour,” she said, locking and chaining and bolting the door behind us. “My roommate is on a work assignment in Boston this week. Her name’s Phetsamone. She’s Laotian. Everyone calls her Simone.”

  “Speaking of names,” I said, “there’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you. Damask. Is that your given name?”

  Diminutive Damask smiled up at me subtly. Her dark overstated eyes, like some anime cartoon come alive, could be unnerving. She said, “I had it legally changed. The name I was born with is Florine Laliberte. But I was adopted, so I became Florine Sewell. My adoptive parents called me Flo and the kids in school called me Flo Sewage, so when I was fifteen my parents allowed me to change my first name to Damask.” She gave a little shrug. “Of course, when Duh-wayne would get mad at me he’d call me Dumbass. Simone calls me Don’task.”

  “Wow…I didn’t know you were adopted.”

  “Yeah.” She turned away to begin leading me on the tour. “I was an unwanted pregnancy.”

  Our tour skipped ahead to the bathroom, for starts, because I had to relieve my bladder. On the white wall above the sink there was a spatter of rusty stains. I pointed to this and laughed, “What is this, blood?”

  “Oh…no. I did that dying my hair.”

  “Ahhh…I thought it looked redder than I remembered it.”

  “Well, I’m getting white prematurely,” she muttered despondently, beginning to step out to let me do my stuff. “It sucks getting old.”

  The tour resumed. I learned Simone had artistic interests, as well, and the walls of even the hallway and kitchen were a gallery of framed prints and photos. Of the latter, Joel-Peter Witkin was much in evidence (his History of the White World: Venus Preferred to Christ, with its nude central figure and an apparent actual fetus crucified in the background; Abundance, with its model who was little more than a head and torso as a result of her mother trying to abort her; The Invention of Milk, with a fetus in a miniature pillory in front of a woman’s groin; Woman (Birth), a photo of an art student with her hands bound and an image of a skull above her pubic hair). Paintings by surrealist Zdzislaw Beksinski. H. R. Giger’s grayish Landscape XVIII and the red, meatier looking Landscape XIV. Both portrayed rows of grotesque babies with closed eyes and gasping mouths, covered in a plague of blisters or tumors. Damask said, “I know Giger might seem a little too uncool, a little too mass market, but really, who is cooler than Giger?”

  “He’s still alive, right?”

  “He’d better be. One of my goals in life is to fuck him.”

  I chuckled uncomfortably. “So…um, who got you pregnant?” I joked. “Beksinski?”

  That subtle smile again. “Someone you needn’t be concerned about. He’s not a part of my life.”

  “How far along are you? You don’t look it.”

  “Not far; six weeks. Come on.” She reached for my hand. “My studio is next. It’s in my bedroom.”

  One might have
thought that it would be the bed to which my attention would immediately fly. Maybe it did for a microsecond at best. I was too immediately struck by the vivid sights and subtle scents, equally unsettling, in her bedroom/art studio.

  For one thing, the walls and ceiling had been painted in glossy, wet-looking, blended shades of pink and red, marbled with white and yellow. Twisty lengths of surgical tubing had been stapled to the walls and ceiling like telephone wires and painted red or blue like veins.

  Flanking the door were two framed pictures, poor in quality and apparently simply printed off the web, of an Asian man sitting down to a meal of dead fetus, cut or broken into various pieces. In the second he was delicately nibbling on the chicken wing of a shriveled arm. Damask, smiling, pushed close to me and explained, “That’s Zhu Yu, a Chinese performance artist. This performance was called ‘Man-eater’, and it was part of a two-part series called ‘Infatuation on Injuries’. The other part was called ‘Canned Human Brains’. It’s a six month old fetus stolen from a med school. He puked while he was eating it.”

  I leaned in close, wrinkling my nose as if the underlying unpleasant smell in the room came from these images. “Its face looks like a doll. The way it’s smiling.”

  “Ahh…well, see…some people claim it was a doll’s head, stuck on the body of a cooked duck. But that arm looks too real, to me. I sure hope it was real, and not a fake, or I’d have no respect for the fucker.”

  As I further took in the womb with a view, I saw that the framed baby-eater was the least of its grotesqueries. I drew closer to this display or that work in progress slowly, timid but fascinated, my heart in my throat or maybe that was bile and the oddly foul air collecting in my lungs like the vile water in those of a long-drowned man.

  “Jesus, Damask,” I breathed, as the parts of several fetuses lazily spun from a mobile like an astronomical model of the planets, an astronomical model of God sundered by the Big Bang. They were shinily lacquered so as to preserve them, but still had an atmosphere of stink emanating from them. It may come as no surprise that these were the very parts she had used in her animated Xmas card. The head from the birthday greeting. I would have thought she found those images on some web site. Never that she would have actually possessed them in the third dimension. It was perversely like a mobile one might hang over a baby’s crib.

  “No, not Jesus. If I used the second coming of Christ for my art, I think people would really disapprove.”

  I faced her. “So that joke about you stealing them from a clinic dumpster…”

  “I can’t reveal my sources just yet.” Smiling again, like a cat or a sphinx, and maybe La Gioconda had had some very dark secret that had compelled a half terrified, half intrigued da Vinci to capture it.

  Encased in a greenish block of Lucite like a chunk of amber—a science class display, sitting on a window sill so the sun could glow through it—was a fetus like a shrimp skinned of its translucent shell. I picked up the heavy block and Damask said, “I got that while we were still in school. It’s an embryo at six weeks, like the one in me. About an inch long; that’s why I’m not showing. It already has a face and the spine is closed, but its hands are more like flippers, still.” She pointed all of this out to me like a teacher smug with their knowledge.

  Inside an open-faced wooden box hanging on one wall was a very large horseshoe crab, belly facing outward, with another disembodied fetus head affixed to the animal’s underside, just below its cluster of legs, as if it had been revealed by dissection to be growing inside…or be partly digested there. Pinned below the crab, to either side of its tail, which ultimately extended through a hole in the bottom of the box, were the desiccated remains of two pigeons, facing each other like heralding angels.

  “Is this the only theme you’re interested in?” I asked, taking in her Midwives of the Invertebrate, as she’d dubbed it.

  “I’m a woman. This is what society expects of us, right? To be preoccupied with childbirth? So I’m preoccupied with childbirth, like a good little breeder.”

  Realizing I still had it in my hand, I started to set down the Lucite block, then hesitated when I realized it had originally been resting upon an old photograph lying on the window sill. The photo, with its faded colors, showed a woman holding a baby in her arms. I knew the woman had to be either Damask’s birth mother, or her adoptive mother, but the baby was a zero, cut out of the photo with an exacto knife. Damask urged me to go ahead and rest the block on top of the picture. She explained, “I call that piece I Am a Paperweight.”

  I drifted to a work bench along one wall where there lay a skull of an infant, its plates not fused yet and no teeth in the upper jaw, looking like the remains of some space alien. I was reminded of my cousin’s baby as a newborn; in a certain light I had seen the top of its head subtly pulsing in that soft spot. She had spray painted the tiny skull a glossy red and it was drying on a newspaper. She demonstrated how a thin candle would emerge through that hole in the top of the skull when this candle holder was finished.

  “Do you sell these things?”

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  “Where do you find your clients?”

  “On the web. Through street talk, word of mouth. I have my connections.”

  “It’s like your own little museum in here,” I said. “You could charge people money to come in and look around.”

  “I do, in fact,” she told me. “And aren’t you the lucky one, to have the free tour?”

  I faced her again. Behind her I saw a small refrigerator like one might have in a dorm. I had noticed the stink in the room was stronger near it. Sitting on top of the fridge was a glass jar filled with formaldehyde, inside of which like some old-time carnival “pickled punk” was a medical school fetus, maybe even a full term baby, with nails driven all through its head and limbs and torso like that Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies might have looked when delivered in a chainsaw C-section.

  “Your voice is trembly,” Damask purred. “Do you disapprove of my work? Or are you just wondering when we get to the fucking part?”

  “I don’t…I don’t think I disapprove. It’s just…you know, not what one sees in the average art gallery.”

  “I should hope not. Art is so castrated. People are so terrified of their own bodies, and everything that comes out of it. Sweat, mucus, pus, blood, earwax, snot, puke, piss, shit, placenta, and this.” She swept her arm. “I guess we hate ourselves, huh? Is that a good thing? What’s more healthy…being in contempt of ourselves, or embracing it like I do?”

  “I like your art,” I stammered.

  “Do you really?” She drew closer to me again, slowly, as if stalking me through the half-obscuring tall grass of my half-sickened lust. “Or do you just like me?”

  “You’re one and the same.”

  “Yes,” she hissed, eyes glassy as if she had lacquered them as well, to preserve her artistic vision before it could decompose. “Yes, Tim. I am my art. Exactly. I think you do understand…”

  At last, I focused on the bed at the nucleus of the room, and its sheets were red satin as if it were a giant afterbirth and soon we were two conjoined twins lying whitely against it. The mobile twirled hypnotically above us, a scarlet constellation.

  “Harder,” she grunted, her body folded double beneath me, her legs bent back so that her knees almost pressed against her delicate breasts, her feet resting on my shoulders as if in stirrups. She was grimacing, her fingers knotted in my hair. “Slam it into me. Hammer it into me…”

  Propped over her, I trembled with strain but was driven on by the lurid sloshing/slapping/smacking sound of our pelvises impacting. The smell of our sweat and her musky juices blended with the effluvium of death. “I’m afraid I might hurt your baby,” I gasped.

  “I want you to,” she panted. “I want your cock to hit her in the head. I want you to fuck her, too. Fuck her in the womb…”

  * * *

  At work, Dwayne e-mailed me the latest photos of Tamsin and Corey. The littl
e boy was straw-haired like his mother, both with cheery sun-squinted smiles. I noticed Dwayne’s hair was thinning, and he had a bit of a paunch, so I teased him about that in my reply, and added: I met up with Damask, and had lunch with her. She showed me her art. But before I sent the message, I erased that last sentence. As if I were afraid to let it be known even to a friend that I had seen what could only be illegal.

  Dwayne replied: If you even think about screwing her, man, double bag your unit. The last thing you need is some disease. You do know she’s a prostitute, don’t you?

  I sat staring at my screen, rain thumping the ground outside the window behind me, trickling down the long narrow pane in living rivulets like immense spermatozoa. Was Dwayne jealous? Afraid Damask and I would do what we had already done? Or could he be telling the truth?

  What do you mean, a prostitute? Says who?

  Dwayne: I heard it from Greg; can’t remember where he heard it. But she’s as much as told me herself. She glosses it up, says it’s all part of some performance art, but you can call it anything you want. Fucking for money is prostitution. Watch out for her, man. She wanted to drink my blood while we were screwing. Seriously, she wouldn’t let up about it. I let her cut me once with a scalpel, and it was freaky.

  You can’t tell me you didn’t enjoy it, too, though, I electronically retorted.

  He didn’t reply to that one.

  * * *

  I wanted to see Damask again. That night, of the very same day I had exchanged emails with Dwayne. I wanted to ask her, in as delicate a way as possible, about what Dwayne had accused her of. If it angered her, I could put the blame on him. “See what Dwayne is saying about you?” But more than that…I just wanted to climb onto that red-sheeted placenta of a bed again, in that room with its womb walls and its smell of sex and death.

  But on the phone, she sounded very dour, terse, which made me timid. I think she was stoned, too. She grumbled, “Simone isn’t back from Boston…she was supposed to come back this morning. I can’t reach her on her cell.”

  “I’m sure she’s all right,” I offered meekly.