Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  That is how life is for those of us who can be caught by the sudden, astonishing dearness of a strange woman’s back.

  If you want to know, I was in love with femininity. That was why I hazarded myself with supernatural bedmates. In my quest for the most womanly woman of all, I sought out her who was not half derived from man, which is to say her who had never had a father.

  5

  Regarding the fox-women I do admit that in each case I felt bad for doing it, but then I thought: It was her, me or abstinence; and neither of us had wanted the last! She would have murdered me if she could.

  6

  I remember the first, who tried her feeble best to be good to me, but dared not cease even momentarily from being good to herself as she saw it, which meant protecting herself from what she was doing to me by draining my semen; once I began to show signs of anemia she cut herself off from my neediness. Unfortunately, it is impossible to divorce a fox and live; these beings do not accept abandonment, perhaps because once they have attached themselves to a given host, severance would cause them great suffering. At any rate, she had a lovely voice and long brown hair—but what is the use of remembering her? When she died, I remember how the white waterfall of urine gushing between her dark thighs turned into a snowy tail.

  Departing the room forever, I emerged into the Chinese beauty parlor whose beautiful hairdresser, in a polka-dotted miniskirt, was rapping the shoulderblades of a happy man.— I think you have very good time? she demanded, continuing her business as rapidly as a chicken-and-rice vendeuse can slice with her cleaver.

  And I remember the latest, who kept striding and kicking, prancing and flashing various shades of leg and breast while her lies alone smiled in the friendly darkness. She possessed the small unwinking eyes of a splay-legged turtle. Unlike the first, she not only preyed on men, but camouflaged herself as a prostitute. Light puckered up on the floor. My semen trickled down her black bikini, as slimy as a worm. Pretending to be happy and desirous, she dragged me into the back room.

  At her funeral an old Chinese lady raised an incense stick above her head, clasped her hands at mouth level, silently praying before the shrine, her eyes tightly shut, her lips clenched; I suppose she must have been the procuress.

  Below, in the creamy brown river, floating shacks on logs like old houseboats gone to decay reminded me of other lives that she and I could have lived; and I remember a hill of flower trees, coconut trees, papaya trees; a railing whose tiles were hot to the touch; and a street on which headscarfed women slowly strolled. The ones who were fox-spirits in that town frequented either the Tong Chong Chinese Club or the Lai Zhu Unisex Hair Salon.

  7

  And regarding the elf-ladies, I truly have no regrets at all. Thanks to them, I have already lived a thousand years.

  8

  Once an elf-lady married me, and then left me largely alone while she went out to enchant other flies into her spiderweb. I spent most of that century chopping wood for her. Grey hairs grew from my chin as slowly as the stained glass windows of ancient cathedrals ooze from rectangles into trapezoids. Brown creeks unhurriedly undercut the leaning trees of my solitude and occasionally some long narrow weasel-like animal clattered from stone to stone, chasing a fish. When she returned at last, with a hypnotized knight clinging to the tail of her white horse, she set the knight to breaking stones, dismounted and with a laughing kiss set me free. It had all been a game. I felt joyous and strong as I wandered back into the world, and found a fairy hoard of gold upon the way.

  9

  Ultimately, the play of light through banana leaves leads one to heaven, which I now inhabited with my naked Wenuke, who seated herself on a river rock, laving her drawn-up thighs, her desire to devour me as sweetly naked as a baby’s toes wiggling in its mother’s lap.

  Whenever I left, even for a moment, I was attacked by her sadness at my back. Moreover, each time I tried to get up from beneath her, I felt weaker and she clung to me with greater determination. I had no illusions.

  Once upon a time, a certain carnivorous woman sought to do to me as she had done to my nine hundred predecessors. Just as a smiling Thai mother dabbles her child’s face with sacred water while he grimaces, so this fiendish lover of mine began to baptize me with a silver poison drawn from between her legs; fortunately, I confounded her with my bezoar stone, and she perished in a single shriek. How and when would Wenuke make her attempt to murder me?

  We sat alone together in her rotting house, and in the rocking chair which would have caved in beneath a child’s weight she knitted me a green pullover, the threads blossoming one by one as her needle drew them up toward the light, her face calmly poised over the growing garment that resembled a swatch of turf; sometimes she smiled, and sometimes peeped at me as if she might be plotting something; but what if it was only that she loved me? I had hollowed out the handle of my keychain and filled it with a military herbicide. Do you consider me a scheming betrayer? But I never killed any lady except in self-defense.

  I was in love with every one of them, for they eschewed the tiresome unpredictability of human women, who might start an argument at any moment, or decide to leave me. At least the supernaturals always knew what they wanted.

  10

  The carnivorous woman I mentioned had murdered my best friend five hundred years before; and when I encountered her in that alien city I suddenly heard the ghost of my friend laughing his happy sniggering laugh, watching me from overhead in the night, knowing my misdeeds, and a pet phrase of his came into my head; he said it and laughed, said it and laughed, but in the laugh there was only bitterness; he was saying his pet name for the woman who had now become my lover. Well, who was he angry at? She had destroyed him, not I. Her kiss was as lovely as the sea’s salty spittle squirting up against the walls of my heart.

  And then I saved myself from her and she died in that long scream.

  11

  Wenuke was certainly as tender as sautéed snowpea shoots in a careful Chinese restaurant.

  She sucked the semen out of me with her mouth, and kept sucking, until finally, when she raised her face and looked at me, I saw it trickling from the corner of her mouth, and there were threads of blood in it. I felt so dizzy that I could hardly think. If I didn’t get away right now, I would die. I stood up, clung to the bedpost for a moment and staggered naked down those rotten stairs, expecting her to pursue me with her whipping tendrils, but she lay as if uprooted; and presently, just before I fled the house, I heard from upstairs the beginning of a keening like the sobbing of a child left alone at night with a cruel mother, a sobbing that continues hour after hour while the child tries to do what the mother demands, always failing to please her.

  There was a blanket in my car. I threw it over me and drove away. Then I telephoned Rileene, who sounded strangely surprised and resentful to hear from me. She referred me to a discreet doctor who was very knowledgeable about such cases. He prescribed a diet of beef broth and blood pudding. Within two weeks I felt as right as rain.

  Rileene telephoned me to say that her sister missed me very much. What could I do? I drove back to the house. Wenuke was waiting and watching for me up on the widow’s walk.

  12

  That first dusk we scarcely touched one another, and the darkness came by staccato stages, each as irrevocable as another spurt of India from an inkwell. It became pleasantly cool, and my elbows and shoulders tingled with mosquito bites no matter how much citronella I put on.

  Her gaze was like some strange green rainforest pool.

  I already knew who I was and what I wanted. I had become nearly as supernatural as she.

  When the moon rose, she wrapped her long green fingers around my wrist and led me back into our bedroom.

  For a surprise she had dug up some foxed old mirror and propped it up against the wall so that we could watch ourselves make love; and I was interested to see how thin and pale I had become.
She looked as perfect as ever, of course. With a single tendril she began to stimulate my prostate; and I looked at myself. My panting reminded me of the way a lungfish’s inhalations puff out small sacs next to its anterior fins.

  Gazing at me with desperate love, she brought her face close to mine and extended her tongue until it blossomed in my mouth, wrapping round and round my tongue a dozen times and piercing it with suckers until I was happily drinking my own blood.

  Just as in Paris they open the long green coffins bolted to the wall of the quai, and the books and prints within get resurrected, so my capacity for affection—I nearly wrote infection—got once more disinterred from within my breastbone by Mrs. Wenuke Lei McLeod. I almost believed that she had no heart to hurt me.

  13

  But deep underwater in dreams, a nurse shark’s belly rising overhead like the moon, I woke to find myself struggling somewhere within her crotch, which was a deep weedy hole with black water shining across it like morning light on the blue sea. Blood was trickling from my nose and my nipples. I pulled out of her and tried to sit up, but could not.

  On the other side of the bed, she knelt and motionlessly watched me, half smiling, silently weeping jasmine-fragrant tears.

  14

  I knew even then that she was as rare as a banana-colored eel, which every now and then, on long voyages, I have been lucky to observe languidly flicking its tiny front fins.

  I threw myself wildly into her cool green body, and in her magic mirror I saw myself purple-faced and bulging-eyed, with the stuporous gape of a puffer fish, and just then one of her fingers sprouted deep in my anus, at which point I experienced agonizing pleasure and everything went black. When I knew who I was again, I found her sitting on my lap with all her myriad arms wrapped around me; and in the mirror I saw the white cilia of mushroom-gilled anemones wriggling like maggots.

  When I finally left her for good, she wrapped herself around the bedpost like a black-and-green spider whose legs swell at the joints into leaf-shapes, clinging to a silk-wrapped victim, hanging in the wind.

  15

  After my escape from Wenuke, I wanted somebody more substantial, so I travelled to Greece, a country renowned for vampirism. After a few peasant funerals I found the right situation and was there alone, having bribed the mourners, when the girl’s cadaver rose up off the table, stark naked and ready. There may well be nothing on earth (or under it) as delectable as a fresh young corpse with a waxy yellow complexion, sunken eyes, conspicuous ribs and the sweet odor of decay. I was intoxicated by that odor! I fell in love with her.

  I think I’m probably not as good a person as you make me out to be, the corpse whispered.

  She left for a moment to recompose herself. Returning to the unmade bed, I sought her traces and found upon the pillow a long black hair. When I touched it, my heart raced and my penis stiffened.

  I belong to you, I said. I’ll love you forever. I’ll be yours forever—well, at least for the rest of my life, which is the best I can do.

  Oh, I hope not, she whispered in dismay.

  I prized her. But whenever she thought that I was not watching, she commenced to make metallic grimaces and jaw-workings similar to those of a coal grouper fish; and I wondered whether she longed to gnaw me up or whether she were simply tormented at not being permitted to rot away in peace. Her kisses had begun to stink.

  When I asked her how to make her happy, she replied that she had always wanted to visit other places. I took her to Paris. In memory of Wenuke I proposed to her in the Jardin de Plantes, where just behind our bench a sandyhaired young cop stood clasping his white-gloved hands just over his buttocks.

  The last time I had confessed was at the funeral of my calm and faithful wife. The priest, who appeared to be quite certain of his knowledge, had assured me that in the afterlife I would be placed in a cell, bricked in up to my waist, so that I could see only the top half of my pure and faithful wife, who thanks to celestial virtue would be able to see all of me; she would pity me without missing or needing me. That had made me sad, but I soon consoled myself. Being a good Catholic, I now decided that I had better go to confession again. When I whispered into the little window that I intended to marry a ghoul or vampire, the father assured me that I would be doing no harm since such creatures lack souls. If anything, he said, I would bestow the blessings of God on her through the sacrament of marriage. That night I said a few Hail Marys just in case.

  I’m afraid I’ll disappoint you, the corpse whispered. I kissed her forehead, which was as waxy as a banana leaf.

  The priest sold us holy water, and we both drank it. On our wedding night I stripped my bride, flung her down on the bed and buried my head between her breasts, ravished by the overripe smell of her cleavage. One of her nipples came off in my mouth, and I swallowed it desperately.— I think I have a loose tooth, she giggled in a little-girl voice.— Suddenly I was stung with longing for Wenuke’s breasts, which had been like many immature bananas growing upward in their hard green cluster. But what could I do about that now? Here was my lawfully wedded vampire; I drove my stake between her legs.

  Where must Wenuke be now? I had sent her to a grey clear sea, calmer than its mosquitoes and raindrops.

  By the next morning, my wife’s flesh had further discolored into a semblance of the soft yellows and greens of fluorescent corals. I possessed her in a fury, trying to persuade myself that the creaking of the bed might be her sighs.

  Once upon a time, in the jungle on the way to Wenuke’s house, there had been lemon-colored flowers that smelled like armpits. Wenuke’s armpits had smelled like flowers. And now my wife, whom I had thought to be a vampire but who was only a harmless corpse, opened her black mouth to apologize for leaving me, then began choking and retching as ants streamed out of her. What sort of universe is this, that suffering continues even beyond death? Love and pity both demanded that I give her the only gift I could, oblivion. I went to the desk, found a letter opener, and with it sliced off her rotting head. Her yellow arms continued to reach for me, and her breasts wept ichorous tears.

  Rushing out of there, I found myself on the Quai des Grands-Augustins, gazing into a bookstore window whose gold-stamped red and black leather merchandise gaped open to drypoints and aquatints. I remember a volume of Villon depicting an old man facing a noose, another Oeuvres of Villon open to a longhaired, gloomy medieval fellow gazing out of a dark casement, his hands on his knees; I also recall some NRF volumes of Malraux, whose spines bore luscious blue and orange inlays that reminded me of fungoid domes. Should I take up reading instead of love? But these printed adventures promised me no better happiness.

  I walked for hours. Then like a grave there awaited me the empty bed, the rumpled bed, my loneliness a physical illness.

  16

  After that, my lovers got worse and worse. One night I found myself trying to pick up a sweetheart at Casa de las Mujeres, which was a closet in a hotel in a hot border town; but there was nothing inside except a yellow old skeleton with long black braids that the moths had been at.

  Then there was a bronze woman who turned out to be malevolent; although I certainly have the fondest recollections of her cunt, which was dark, ornate and incense-fumed like the mouth of some Chinese temple encrusted with stone lions from which red balloons dangle like breasts. Slowly, slowly she lowered her head, grinning perpetually. Whenever she undid her chessboard skirt, it clanged on the floor. She liked to grip my upper lip between her rusty little serrated teeth. I suspected that it would end badly, so I started secreting a blowtorch in my pocket. One night, pale-mottled and -bellied but otherwise nearly stone-colored, she lay pretending to be sleeping, her snout upward as we lay together on our boulder. I knew that when the moment arrived, she would deny me any warning; so I felt almost sick with anxiety. Now my memories of Wenuke came back to me like the sky seen through insect-gnawings in a broadleafed jungle plant. Of course I had then been
trapped in the analogous situation of waiting for her to strangle me with her green tendrils; but my distrust of Wenuke no longer felt real to me, being the habits which no longer served, and whose comforting instinctual run suddenly faltered into astonished sorrow. As for my bronze woman, however, when she opened her golden-green eyes and snapped her teeth at me, did she mean to sever my throat or was it merely in her mind to nuzzle me affectionately? I would not harm her on mere suspicion; after all, this was supposed to be a love match. And her cunt was so interesting; it was perfectly smooth and cold; she always oiled it for me.

  She could not speak; she only roared. In the end I decided that she was harmless. But I never slept easily beside her. When I left her, tears hissed and squeaked down her mottled cheeks.

  17

  Back in the time when I used to pass my evenings in Wenuke’s house it sometimes took quite awhile for the sky to actually get black. When it was still a pale blue color, Wenuke would show me the first star, which was big and round and bright, and then the next two stars winked on quite suddenly, and often a firefly traversed a tree-silhouette, sometimes grey and blurry, and perhaps a bat came almost to my nose.