Psychostasis

by Ezra Blake

  Her pink innards appear on the monitor as Frost feeds the thin tube down her throat. “Watch for lesions,” he says. Without glancing in their direction, he snaps the fingers of his free hand. “That means you, Elliot. Pay attention.”

  Elliot wrinkles his nose. Their first endoscopy was negative—he knows because he was there. The bleeding is coming from her lower gastrointestinal tract, and he doesn’t need to pay that much attention.

  “We’re passing the lower esophageal sphincter. Elliot, what type of muscle are we looking at here?”

  “Smooth muscle.”

  “How does the sphincter maintain tonic contraction?”

  “Myogenic and neurogenic mechanisms.”

  “And the mechanism of relaxation is…?”

  Elliot frowns.

  “Vagally mediated inhibition!” Amy squeaks.

  “Elliot, what neurotransmitter regulates vagally mediated inhibition?”

  Amy rolls her eyes. He is so fucking sick of being singled out.

  “It’s a simple question,” Frost says.

  It is, and he knows the answer. He just can’t retrieve it right now.

  “Serotonin?” He guesses.

  “This isn’t intro to psychology. Not every neurotransmitter is serotonin,” Frost sighs, still deftly maneuvering the camera. “Try again.”

  “I don’t know,” Elliot mumbles.

  “What was that? This could be on your exam.”

  “I don’t fucking know, okay? Will you get off my ass?”

  The room falls silent. Mrs. Kauffman moves her head a fraction of an inch to squint at him, and the camera’s view pivots. She starts coughing.

  Frost yanks the endoscope out of her throat and passes it to Amy. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Kauffman,” he gushes, and when he turns to Elliot, there is not a note of remorse in the hard lines of his face. “Alvarez, hallway.”

  Elliot doesn’t have to be told twice. He closes the door a little too hard and slides down the wall, head in his hands. He’s going to have a heart attack in probably five minutes, but at least he’s already at the hospital.

  When his group files out of the room, they all glare at him like he’s the asshole. Frost shoos them away and gestures for Elliot to follow. They ride the elevator up to his office. He trains his eyes on the graffiti scratched under the emergency stop button: Tom + Clara 2014. If a hospital elevator is their idea of romance, he feels a little sorry for them.

  Frost locks his office door. He leans on the desk and smooths one broad palm down the front of his shirt, slow, like he’s following his breath from his trachea to his diaphragm. He looks fresh-faced and healthy. Elliot wants to punch his fucking teeth out.

  “Elliot,” he says, “have I done something to offend you?”

  “You’re joking, right?” He scoffs. “You’ve been gunning for me since day one. Everybody hates me because of you.”

  When he speaks, his voice is laser-level even. “If your peers dislike you, perhaps you should examine yourself before assigning blame.”

  “I never asked to be teacher’s pet.”

  “My pet?” His lips twitch.

  “I misspoke. Meant to say ‘punching bag.’”

  “I’m sorry you feel criticized,” he says, “but please remember that real men must learn to accept constructive criticism. If you can’t foster that skill—”

  Lightning rage flashes through Elliot’s body. “Real men?” He sneers and takes a step forward. “A real man doesn’t need to stroke his ego by demeaning people who are required to respect him.”

  Frost’s eyebrows draw together. Every time Elliot catches that mock-sympathy, from anyone, he wants to smash their face through a wall.

  “What’s happened to you, Elliot? You didn’t show up yesterday, you haven’t submitted this week’s reflective journals, and frankly, you look like shit. If you’d like to speak to campus mental health services—”

  “You know exactly what happened. You involved me in your organ trading scheme.” He steps forward until their toes are nearly touching, but Frost doesn’t flinch. Elliot can sense his every shallow breath. “But I should thank you. Really. All you’ve done is given me an opportunity to surpass you. Best in class, making literally thousands of dollars an hour, and I’m a minority? I’m going to be fucking renowned.”

  “I’d be careful who you speak to about that. You’re setting a terrible example for your community.”

  Elliot laughs. “You’re one to talk, picking on me of all people? Can’t stomach the idea that some brown kid with a pussy could be better than you?”

  “You’re dangerously conceited,” Frost growls.

  “Yeah? Guess where I learned that.”

  “If I hadn’t taken a personal interest, a student like you might have fallen through the—”

  “Like me, huh? Because I’m poor? Because I’m a fucking queer?”

  “Because you’re—”

  “I’ll tell you what I am.” He braces his hands on the desk, boxing him in, and finally Frost leans away. “I’m younger than you, I’m smarter than you, and it’s driving you fucking insane.”

  The room flips. Elliot’s shoulders smack against the desk, scattering a stack of important memos that Doctor Frost hasn’t read and isn’t planning to. He twists, but Frost’s wide palms pin his biceps.

  “Insolent,” he mutters, tugging Elliot’s pants down his hips. “Is this what you want?”

  “That’s all you, Doctor. I just wanna pass your rotation.”

  Frost’s only response is a guttural growl. He braces an arm across Elliot’s chest and shoves two thick fingers inside him. For a moment, Elliot can do nothing but wildly hump his hand. His head falls forward, hits flesh. He’s in biting distance.

  “No,” Frost says. Too late. Elliot sinks his teeth into his shoulder, saturating his white shirt with saliva. Frost stumbles backward, gets tangled in his own slacks, and falls onto the couch. Elliot kicks his shoes off. He steps out of his clothes. This is what it’s all been building to. It was nothing but a playground game—punch your crush, pull their pigtails. Well, Elliot punches back.

  He straddles Frost’s hips and drags his wet cunt up and down the bulge in his briefs, leaving the fabric tight and translucent. He rips them off. There’s his professor’s dick, perfectly average, a bit crooked. “Huh,” Elliot says. “I thought it’d be more—”

  Frost’s hips surge upward. The first thrust misses, dragging between his swollen labia. The second hits home. The stretch burns like hell, and when he bottoms out against Elliot’s cervix, a warm ache spreads through his pelvis and lower back. He clenches involuntarily, groaning, “Ah, ahh, ahh—” and this is nothing like Lucas. He thought he fucked Lucas, but it’s clear, in hindsight, that it was only a transaction. This is sex, frenzied and wrathful, thick and damp and throbbing with hot blood. He digs his nails into Frost’s thighs and twists until the flesh turns pink.

  Bad move. Frost flips him in an instant. His back adheres to the vinyl couch; he squirms and rolls his hips but can’t get any more of Frost’s shaft inside him. A shriek builds in his chest. Frost catches it. “Quiet,” he hisses, one hand locked over Elliot’s mouth. Then, an inch at a time, he drives himself back inside.

  Frost fucks like he has nowhere to be. His scheduled procedures can wait, his students can take a break, and all his critical cases can fucking die. Elliot grips his forearms and humps the air, but no matter how he squirms or whines or bites Frost’s palm, he doesn’t go any faster. If he could just touch himself—but no, Frost grabs his wrists and pins them to the couch with one hand. The other slips down, through his thin pubic hair, toward the nub of angry red flesh between his legs. It isn’t a cock. It’s a fucking liability, because when Frost brushes the underside of his glans with one gentle finger, Elliot can’t help but thrust mindlessly against him and beg, “Please, more, more.”

  He slows his thrusts even further. Elliot watches with desperate horror as Frost’s cock slips in and out from between his
labia, machinelike in his cruel endurance. For five or ten minutes, he keeps Elliot on the unbearable brink of ecstasy, stroking the rigid shaft of his clit with one finger, catching every broken gasp in the crook of his shoulder.

  Then he falls overboard, and Frost is ready. In one smooth motion, he withdraws and spreads Elliot’s thighs apart with his knees.

  “No,” Elliot gasps. “Wait, wait—”

  Frost keeps him pinned as the first waves of contractions ripple through his empty, swollen cunt. He humps the air, but Frost compensates, shifting wider, and Elliot comes. His pelvic floor muscles cramp in a desperate bid to touch something, anything, and the orgasm drips through him and out of him, hollow and unsatisfying.

  He lets go. Elliot shoves half his hand inside himself, but it’s too late. It’s over. Frost gives his cock a few strokes and comes silently, streaking his bare thigh white.

  There is no afterglow. He doesn’t stop for breath. He buttons his slacks and says, “Get out. You’ve wasted enough of my time.”

  “Fuck you.” Elliot’s sweaty thighs slide against the vinyl as he rights himself. “Fuck you, fuck you, this isn’t over. I’ll file a report, they’ll—”

  “Fire me? Arrest me? I can afford the best lawyer in the city.” Frost sneers. “Who will look after your mother when you’re in prison for organ trafficking?”

  Elliot grits his teeth. He scoops Frost’s jizz off his thigh and wipes it on the couch, tugs his pants on, slings his bag over his shoulder. Frost watches.

  “Fuck you,” he repeats. “I’m going home.” His voice cracks and his face flushes; he misaligns his buttons and has to start over. He slams the door behind him.

  But he can’t go home.

  His mom can’t find out he skipped. Her baseless anxiety is nearing critical mass, and if she keeps worrying, she’ll try to regain control. She’ll bring up past mistakes; she’ll call someone about phalloplasty—anything to smash Elliot back into the mold she carved for him.

  He can’t go home and he has nowhere else to be, so he sits on the closed toilet and plays solitaire on his phone for forty-five minutes, brooding. Fuck Frost. Fuck his shelf exams. If he passes, then what? Then he spends another year stretched as thin as basal cell carcinoma smeared across a petri dish. Another year waiting for his life to start. Another year in the same building as Frost, and what’s the fucking point? Everything is meaningless, suffering is inevitable, God is dead. And even if he weren’t, he’s too busy to give a shit.

  Chapter 19

  The last thing Ash desperately wanted, aside from redemption, was probably a double cheeseburger. An older man lured him off the street with the promise of food; he went through the drive through with Ash in the car, ordered one for himself, and ate it in front of him.

  Every morning feels like that. God used to allow him a moment of tranquility when he first opened his eyes, before he remembered who and what and where he was, but he lost that privilege somewhere between the first hit of heroin and his cock in Jake’s ass. Now the cramps wake him. The longing wakes him, cold and magnetic in the bottom of his shriveled stomach, and it’s just like watching burger grease saturate that sadist’s goatee as he leered and moaned and sucked his fat fingers.

  Ash almost asked him, too. He might have followed through without pity or kissing. He also might have kept a knife collection in his trunk, so Ash got out of the car.

  “Jake?” His voice is lost in the drool-soaked pillows. “Hey, Jake?”

  He palms his crotch. It’s the only part of him that doesn’t hurt today. He’s joined the ranks of all those choir boys whose voices will always sound like helium, but he can’t muster a spark of gratitude. Jake has been a constant fixture at his bedside. Why the sudden neglect?

  He drags his aching body out of bed. He creeps into the master bedroom, hovers one finger over the mirror keypad and prays, Please, Lord. I never ask for anything.

  “What are you doing?”

  He falls back on his butt and spins around. There’s Jake, flushed and wiry under his wife-beater, his hair a waterfall of grease.

  “I need my meds,” Ash says. “You weren’t—”

  “Yeah, I was cleaning shit off the patio so we can put the dog out there. You’re supposed to wait for me.”

  It’s true. They have a procedure. Ash shuffles to the bedroom and prostrates himself on the filthy sheets. Jake needs to look at it—that’s the procedure—but he’ll never feel comfortable showing his crotch to another guy, penis or no penis.

  “Does it still hurt?”

  “A lot.” He parts his legs the barest fraction of an inch. “Trust me.”

  Jake leans in to examine the pink lip of the wound, raised and shining in the lamplight—it’s mid-day, but the sun hurts Ash’s eyes, so they keep the curtains drawn. “It’s healed,” he says.

  “Nuh-uh. It’s less than a week.”

  “I know, but it’s healed. See for yourself.”

  Since the operation, Ash has done nothing but see and feel and smell his healing body. He knows what’s happening down there. The throbbing pain has dulled and spread everywhere, especially into his creaky joints and the little mountains of gumline between his teeth. “Maybe it looks fine, but it ain’t,” he says. “Probably the inside is still healing.”

  The Lord detests lying lips, Hail Mary, full of grace…

  “I’ll get some ibuprofen to tide you over. We’re running low.”

  “We got plenty left.”

  Cords twang in Jake’s neck. “I don’t have a job now. We need to conserve resources.”

  “Right, I forgot.” Ash snaps his legs shut and yanks the sheet over them. “You don’t share the good stuff, just the stuff that makes people crazy.”

  “C’mon, Ash. I need to, like, stabilize. The rent on this place is ridiculous and I don’t have any more savings.” He ducks into the bathroom for a bottle of over-the-counter pills and adds them to the growing pharmacy on the bedside table. They won’t do crap. They might as well be tic-tacs.

  “So ask your parents.”

  “I can’t.” He sighs. “Just wait until evening, okay? If we only do it once a day, we can make it last the week. I’ll have a job or something by then.”

  Ash sits up. His hips groan. “I don’t wanna wait around for you to get a job.”

  “Me neither, but—”

  “I wanna go to school.”

  Jake’s eyebrows dip. “Huh?”

  “School. I wanna be a pastor.”

  “You wanna be…” His teeth grind with the effort of switching gears. “That’s cool. No, yeah, it seems like you’re really passionate about it, and maybe you could teach me about religion and shit. It just needs to wait until—”

  “There’s a few schools that might take me, but not here.”

  “Philly’s a shithole anyway,” Jake says. “And pastors make a decent living. If we were both full time we could still afford someplace nice.”

  “Alone,” Ash says.

  He watches it happen in sluggish sepia: all the blood drains from Jake’s body and soaks into the mattress, drips down the bedskirt, pools on the floor.

  “Pastors commit themselves to God forever. Like marriage.”

  “Yeah, but I mean—” an awkward, forced chuckle “—I’m cool with a roommate. As long as God cleans up after himself.”

  “No.” Ash says, and his voice is Old Testament scorched earth, plague, famine. “I don’t want you to come. You tempt people. Woe to the one by whom temptation comes.”

  Jake rolls out of bed. He snatches a crumpled necktie from the dresser and scowls as he winds it around his fist. “You’re probably right,” he says. “C’mere.”

  He grabs Ash’s arm and squeezes until the shockwaves make him nauseous. He forces his weight onto Ash’s barren hips and lashes his wrist to the bed. “Wait!” Ash screeches.

  Jake deftly binds his other wrist. “This way, there’s no temptation.”

  “You can’t just—”

  “Don’t
worry, hey.” His earnest thumb brushes down Ash’s cheekbone. “I’ll stay with you.”

  Elliot scrolls through his call log in search of a number he should have deleted. He waits while it rings, steadies his voice. Your call is being screened. Please state your name and your reason for calling.

  “Elliot Alvarez,” he says. “I want more work, and I want to do it alone.”

  He cooks beans and rice and lies in bed with his mother, watching Jeopardy reruns. She cycles through their three conversations: the news, the past, school. “I know you’re going to ace those exams,” she says, and Elliot says thanks, I hope so.

  And then he thinks about it. Why not tell her the truth?

  “Actually, Mom, I’m kind of nervous about this rotation.”

  “April 21st, 2015. You threw up the morning before exams because you were positive you ‘d fail, and when you got the results back, you had the highest grade in your class.”

  “This is different. My supervisor hates me. He always gives me the hardest questions and basically crucifies me if I get them wrong.”

  His mother wraps an arm around his shoulders and leans in close. “Hm,” she says, a playful lilt in her voice. “Now, why on earth would he give you the hard ones?”

  “It’s not ‘cause I’m smart.”

  “Did he say that?”

  Elliot can’t help but smile. “It’s not, mom. He thinks I’m—” His phone chimes, instantly draining his mind of its current contents. “Just a second,” he says. “Might be school.”

  He pivots away and checks the text. It says: I am closing our American branch. Your family is safe. Our HR team will not visit you, upon my request. Destroy your phone. Do not contact Vic.

  Elliot set his cell face-down on the bedside table.

  “Who was that?”

  “Just spam,” he says, and pulls the covers up to his chin. “Guess somebody put me on a life insurance list. Must think I’m rich.”