by Brian Hodge
And she watched, a privileged witness.
They could do the most astonishing things.
Adam explained later, after the two of them had returned to his apartment. She was very quiet, cataloguing everything she’d experienced but finding that even in her vast erotic repertoire there was no place for this.
She drew herself together on the sofa, hands around a mug of coffee. Feeling loose inside, liquid, where muscles had stretched.
“How did it start?” she asked.
“How does anything start?” Adam said, then laughed softly to himself. “Transcendence. That’s what anyone wants out of life, isn’t it? Some way of getting past it. Or getting more out of it.” He paused, changed gears. “Ever hear of the Gnostics?”
She seesawed her hand.
“They were several splinter groups from the early Church, a couple thousand years ago. Didn’t last long, by comparison. The party line condemned them as heretics. Progressive in their day, in a lot of ways. But then they had this self-loathing kick they were on. Since the material world fell short of the spirit, it was bad, themselves included. So, automatically, anything that created them had to be bad too, so their lives were spent showing contempt for it all, until they could return to the spirit. Each branch had its ways. The ascetics denied themselves everything. The libertines, they pleasured themselves and fucked each other left and right. Overindulgence as the way to paradise … people after my own heart.” Adam winked. “And yours too, ma chérie?”
Elle smiled weakly; felt rubbery inside and out. “I don’t think my goals were that lofty.”
“Oh mine neither, hell no,” he said, laughing. “Anyway. Even among the Gnostics there was a lunatic fringe. Most all of them had the idea that the body was a prison that kept the spirit shackled, but this fringe, they did something about it. Had a habit of cutting parts of themselves away to reduce the size of the prison.”
She began to piece it together then, amputation in an erotic context: The less body one has to dilute pleasure, the greater must be its concentration in the flesh that remains.
“And so the two of those approaches got combined, over time?”
“I don’t know. Probably.” Adam looked dumbfounded. “Who knows how anything really happens? It’s not like we trace ourselves back for centuries, nothing like that. It’s just something that someone stumbled onto awhile back, and found out … works.”
Languidly, Elle slipped from the sofa, wandered to a window, stared into the night. A sickly glow of sodium lights cast pools amid the blackened hulks of brick and steel, withered hives of isolation. How she hated it out there, its cold hard rot.
“Everything revives,” she said, “if you give it enough time.”
Their procedures were strictly of a back room variety, the amputations performed by a surgeon no longer allowed by law to practice his craft. Who still liked to keep his hands active. It was an ideal arrangement, and the discarded parts were safely burned in an industrial incinerator.
Elle had him begin with her foot.
She found that phantom pains were scarcely a problem when you had done away with something voluntarily. She grew new skin, and beneath it, it seemed, new nerves. It was an awakening, and while the world slept beneath snow, she was healed enough to give this new sexual organ its first workout. Found she could come without a single touch between her legs.
At the bookstore sympathy flowed freely, especially from Jude, and they all remarked what a wonderful attitude Ellen had in spite of her accident. She was deliberately vague on particulars, felt touched by Jude’s concern that it might now be more difficult for her to find a man, one who would overlook her handicap.
“If you have one tiny flaw,” Jude said, “they can turn around and be such cold-hearted bastards,” and then she smiled nervously and checked herself in a compact mirror. Ellen assumed it was time for another nip or tuck.
And Elle, with her mind already made up to proceed, wondered how she would ever be able to explain away the rest of her leg.
She was up and around again by spring, the itch of healing and new growth mostly behind her. Spending most of her free hours at the former church, crutching her way about as she explored both edifice and companions. They were an insular group, came to be with each other even when they left their clothes on. Of course — who else could they talk to? They’d cut themselves apart in more ways than one.
She often lay with Adam in the dying light of afternoon, both of them washed in colors the sun picked up as it streamed through stained glass. Overhead, the Virgin Mary held a little lamb; its fleece was dark with soot.
“You bastard,” she said, “you didn’t wait for me.” But there was no anger in it, and it made Adam smile, made him laugh.
He touched her face with his sole remaining hand, an act she would relish for however long it might last. Not forever. Elle curled in closer, pressed her mouth over the smooth pink stub that jutted from his left shoulder, flushing in pleasure as he gasped.
“Has anybody ever gone all the way?” she wondered. “Cut off everything?”
Adam nodded. “There’ve been a few.”
She groaned, murmuring wordlessly with fantasies of narrowing herself to a focused bundle of overloaded nerves, a single vast erogenous zone. “I wonder what it’s like.”
“I don’t know. But I get the idea that … that it’s like being a god.” Adam stirred, flexed; seemed to ripple with each caress of hand and mouth, breeze and dust mote. “By that time, you know, it’s up to everybody else to care for you. Take care of your needs. You’re mostly a receptacle by then.”
“What did the others say about it? And where are they now?”
“They quit talking,” he said. “And pretty soon … they quit eating. But they still smiled.”
They knew something, she thought. Or felt something the rest of us aren’t even close to yet…
Yet.
She forced his hand down to her hip, the exposed stump hot, tingling. Raw and alive with promise. “I’ll be better at it than you will. When I get that far. I’ll feel more than you.”
Said this with a tremor and a smile.
Could she cut herself down an inch at a time, feel gradations of pleasure with each successive chopping? If she lopped off a finger herself, would it be a new form of masturbation? Such paths to explore, down this avenue of the blade.
“We’ll just have to see about that,” he said, “won’t we?”
And Elle wondered if she could convince him to hang onto that one last arm at least until she went in for her other leg, so that Adam might be the one to hold the scalpel for that first ceremonial incision.
That would be divine.
It would almost be something like love.
Childhood At The Lost And Found
His favorite thing to watch is MTV and he likes it best when they show the metal and the rap videos, because he sits in front of the tube and wonders what it would be like to step into their world. Those guys have the power and the women and the attention, all they need, and he thinks he’d like to try living with all those quotas topped out. Someday, maybe someday. Dad once bought him a guitar. It stands inside the closet, probably dusty by now.
Not that he doesn’t want to learn to play. It’s a white Fender Stratocaster, “Just like Jimi Hendrix used to play,” the salesman supposedly said, and that was enough to convince Dad of its merits at the pawnshop. But one of the strings was gone and another one broke before Dad got it home, and now he doesn’t quite know how to restring the thing or tune it if he did, and even so, no one said anything about lessons and he’s not about to mention it to Mom and Dad because they’ll just say something like, “Don’t be ungrateful. Isn’t the guitar enough for you?”
He hears them talking upstairs in the kitchen, and they’re using that tone of voice again, and he knows his number is about to be called. He leans forward and turns down the volume on MTV because once they appear at the top of the stairs, that’ll be the first request an
yway, so might as well beat them to the punch.
Sure enough, seconds later there’s Dad at the top of the stairs, he can hear the footsteps and then the pause, like his old man is gauging decibels and finding them within the acceptable range and is vaguely disappointed about it. And then he’s calling down, “Alex, come up here a minute.”
So Alex leaves his traditional perch and saunters upstairs, forsaking Marilyn Manson on the tube for the real live dynamics of home. The kitchen is bright with tile and gleaming with chrome, and he doesn’t feel comfortable in here because he’s never very hungry these days, and anyway, he clashes with the decor since he’s wearing a ripped black T-shirt and black jeans with the knees wearing through and his hair is kind of spiky and once they said he looks like he came to vandalize the place instead.
Dad is pointing toward one corner, wearing that face again, and he’s saying, “You do remember that the trash is your responsibility, don’t you?”
Alex nods meekly, mutely, looking at the can, and it’s not really that full, is it, but you’d think the thing was overflowing with used plutonium.
“Can’t you show a little more responsibility, Alex, you’re fifteen years old, for crissake,” Dad continues, so he nods some more and tunes Dad out because it’s the same speech he’s heard a trillion times before. Must be the first one they teach you in Dad School. The only thing about it that changes is his age, and it always seems to take about a century for that number to click up one higher.
Dad goes through it all note by note, and Alex figures he could probably recite it along with him, like the parishioners with the priest in Mass when they tried Catholicism a couple years ago. Mom backs him up, silently nodding, the oft-present cocktail glass in one hand and her Valium prescription in the other, and she wears her bleary eyes like a pair of false ones from a novelty shop.
Dad finishes and Alex promises to keep a more vigilant watch on the can in the future. Dad, his patriarchal duty exercised, smartly turns on one heel and exits the kitchen, probably back to his very own corner in the rec room. Alex cinches the trash bag and notices that Mom lingers behind.
“Are you feeling all right?” she asks, and she hardly slurs her words at all anymore, because now she’s a professional at this. “You look kind of pale.”
“I’m okay,” he says, and hauls the bag out of the can. He knows what’s coming next, and then it’s there, Mom’s clammy hand squelched across his forehead to see if he’s running a fever or coming down with chills. She shrugs. She can’t feel much, he’s figured that out by now.
“You’re always too pale,” she says, and nods to herself as if the act of nodding transforms it into gospel truth. “Maybe you should go to the doctor after school tomorrow.”
He tells her maybe he will, so she’s happy, and he totes the bag through the garage and drops it by the cans already awaiting pickup. Dusk has fallen, and Alex decides to hang outside in the yard for a while. He fishes into his sock for a joint and smokes it behind a tree in suburban peace and quiet. He watches a BMW that looks like Dad’s cruise past, and when it gets to the end of the block he pretends to press a button and vaporizes car and driver. Foom.
No doctors, he knows he told a lie. The only way he’ll go to a doctor these days is if he’s carried there unconscious and has no say in the matter. Doctors ask boring questions and make you take off your shirt and he doesn’t want that, and he’s not sick anyway.
Mom’s always finding some reason to suggest a trip to the doctor, and he always says he’ll go but never does, and she never questions why no office visits in Alex’s name show up on the bills. He doesn’t think she remembers most of the time. Sometimes he tells her he went and needs money to get a prescription at some pharmacy where they don’t have a charge account and she shells out the cash and he spends it on more important things. It’s a good arrangement.
He finishes the J and waits for most of the smoke smell to clear from his clothes and heads back inside. He watches MTV some more and vacates when they announce they’re going to play a pair of Michael Jackson videos, so he hunts for and finds the Very Important Paper he needs. He takes it upstairs to the rec room.
He was right, this is where Dad went. In his corner in the back, hunched over his flat worktop while working with plastic pieces and Testor’s glue and tiny bottles of paint. The fruits of Dad’s labors hang suspended by fine wires from the ceiling, models of Fokker tri-planes and Sopwith Camels from the time of the Red Baron, and B-17 Flying Fortresses and Stukas from World War II, all the way up to modern F-16 Falcon and Harrier jets. The ceiling back here is nearly full, and the models just keep coming. Now Dad is working on a kit proudly acquired last week, a scaled down version of a Stealth Bomber.
Dad is employed as a comptroller for some big corporation with a lot of interlocking squares in the logo, but Alex knows his secret. Dad really wants to be Tom Cruise. They have a DVD player hooked up to the TV but still only one disc, a copy of Top Gun. Dad has watched it at least twice a month for years, and Alex knows that whenever Dad watches he pretends he’s Tom Cruise shooting down MiGs and nailing Kelly McGillis.
“Dad?” he says, and waits and watches his old man pour himself into the model and close off all else. The model looks silly, like a chunkier version of Batman’s boomerang. “Dad?”
“Mmmmm?” comes an eventual reply.
“Got a minute to sign a paper for me?”
“Mmmmm.” Alex doesn’t know what this means, so he waits, and finally Dad joins two pieces together and says, “What is it?”
“It’s a permission release for my driver’s training class this final quarter.”
Dad still hasn’t looked up. Alex could be on fire and roast all the way down to charcoal before Dad would notice, and he finds this funny, the thought of a charred lump standing there between his father and the pool table begging for an autograph.
“Just put it on the edge of the table, I’ll sign it a little later.”
“But I need it tomorrow, and it’ll only take a second.”
“I never sign anything without reading it twice,” says Dad, words to live by, he’s using that particular tone of voice. “You’ll have it by tomorrow. Now … please?”
Alex bows out. He’s had his eyes crossed the whole time to see if the old man would notice, and it’s a bet he would’ve won. Tom Cruise would have noticed. Have to be alert to be a fighter pilot.
He checks on Mom and finds her zonked in the living room and so he lifts the half-smoked cigarette from her fingers so she won’t set the couch on fire. As she sleeps, gravity plays mischief with her face, but that’s for somebody else to lift.
When he returns to MTV, Michael Jackson is history, so he watches some more and calls a couple friends to see what’s new in their lives since school was out, and pretty soon he’s tired and it’s time to go to bed.
He digs into his sock drawer in the very back and pulls out a small plastic box full of shiny metal. He takes off his shirt and leans back on his bed. A moment later he selects a safety pin from the box and opens it and skewers it through a pinched fold of skin over a left-side rib. He licks the trickles of blood from his fingers and latches the pin closed again and watches MTV to wait until it quits bleeding. Just like after the ninety-odd pins he’s already put there.
Sometimes they get infected and he’ll wash the area down with alcohol or hydrogen peroxide. It burns, but he doesn’t mind, likes it sometimes even, because it means he can still feel something, and it scares him to think of what it might mean if the pain were to stop.
Just like the blood. His scar tissue has gotten gnarly thick in places, and sometimes he’ll sink in a new pin and it won’t bleed, and this never fails to freak him out. No blood, like he’s dead inside. Somehow this signifies failure. Or maybe he’s like an atrocity-hardened veteran who can’t cry, because no matter what he sees it’s just not awful enough anymore. The body won’t turn loose of the liquids.
He admires the craftsmanship, though, and like
s the way they look down his body in their orderly regimented rows, no haphazard placement. Some have been there so long it looks like the skin is growing around them, trying to swallow them and make them its own. He supposes this is what he wants. The only problem is, he has to watch where he rips his T-shirts, so Mom and Dad don’t see, because it’s his secret.
He should have thought of this a long time ago.
He knows that every single pin has its own special meaning.
One per night … for every day since midwinter that they have never told him anything remotely like they love him.
Mom eats lunch professionally, he decided this when he was ten. Long elaborate luncheons with other ladies like herself, where they plan benevolent crusades and their slogan is probably something like We Will Stamp Out Social Inequity In Your Lunchtime. He has no idea what they actually accomplish, and wonders if maybe what they do is plan to raise money to give their husbands rides in fighter jets to keep them happy in hopes they don’t stray off looking for the Kelly McGillises of the world as a consolation.
But whatever inequities they fight, he hopes they don’t eradicate them any time soon, because then what will they do? He can easily imagine some new group springing up to attend luncheons on their behalf and decide what’s to become of these poor displaced crusaders.
Mom has beat him home from school by all of five minutes, and doesn’t question if he went to the doctor or not. She’s happy and fired up, and he suspects that the main reason she attends the luncheons is so she can examine her own life on a comparative basis and feel reassured that it is superior to most everyone else’s who is there.
“Another divorce in the works in that group,” she tells him with no small amount of glee, then tells him who. It’s no one he can recall her mentioning before.
“Oh, that’s terrible,” Alex says but doesn’t mean it, because it sounds like par for the course.