by Alison Tyler
As the breeze cuts across the driveway, I explore each piece I have laid reverently on the cloths upon concrete. My fascination gives way to bewilderment, that machinery should be so superior to cruel, sad flesh—flesh, that is the eyes and the ears of the soul and the conscience of the universe; flesh, that is the knowledge and the love and the understanding of the cosmos; flesh, that withers and decays and becomes nothing; flesh, that vanishes not unlike the timing on an Alfa Romeo—but the Alfa is superior in the cult of modern love, for machinery has interchangeable parts.
My article in the Journal of Surgery brings a torrent of international scorn and international praise. I am invited to give the keynote address at a small but prestigious surgery conference this spring, in a city just a short flight away. In my acceptance letter I ask them to add the cost of the ticket to my honorarium.
Some weekends, after I’ve explored Angel’s delights, exposed her delicious insides, socketed her parts together, tightened her screws, polished her chrome, I need to bring her inside the three-car garage for a little while. There I touch her again, with love and tenderness and more than a little ardor, and behind the garage doors our transgressions meet each other in the caress of petrochemical fantasies. If I could bring her to the bedroom with me, I would tangle her up in my satin sheets, would spread her out across the expanse of the king-sized waterbed and penetrate her, hearing her moan and rumble and squeal as I ride her. But I must content myself with touching her in the garage, for not even Sharper Image makes a bed big enough for my lover. I remove my clothes and feel her smooth metal against me. I weep as she holds me, and for a time our parts are interchangeable.
Nights like that, I take her through the city streets, through the lights and the drifting clouds of crack smoke, through the scattered bombed-out buildings, the crowds of derelicts and the haunted faces of the damned. There’s a street I like where six theaters come together on a couple of corners, where you can take your pick of the lovely flesh under the slanted light. I drive my white Angel, and the sight of her with the top down draws them over to run their hands over her curves and coo about how beautiful she is and oh, is she Italian?
Angel loves all this attention. The girls shake and jiggle and promise me all sorts of lovely things. I flash a few twenties and their feeding frenzy turns the waters of the district to a red-light froth.
After I’ve chosen one, I usually drive up into the hills, where I can park on a secluded ridge, leaving the top down. There I can look out over the city and the bay and feel the breeze cutting across my body while the guest leans down in the car and does her work. I like to think of these as threesomes, my understanding being that Angel, in her infinite understanding, holds me so dear that she will share me with other lovers. So that when I come, she is happy.
Some nights, I take two lovers up there. They think it’s a little strange, maybe, but cash is cash and I’m always careful not to troll in the rich neighborhoods, where the girls will be less impressed with Angel. I ask one girl to undress and stretch on Angel’s hood while the second ministers to me. There’s something deliciously intimate for Angel about the beauty of a half-naked young prostitute writhing and moaning, stretched out on her hood, while I ejaculate copiously into the mouth of another.
Other days I take her for long drives over the hills; I know places where she can show me her stuff for hours. I know she wants to come, wants to hit 100, 120, 130 on the open road, her supposedly street-legal engine roaring with a terrible authority. At that speed, the ride is still smooth, but every tiny bump in the road is like a spasmodic jerk of her pleasure. I rock up and down, feeling the rumble of her engine against my ass. My cock is hard in my pants, and as my body bounces up and down in her soft seats, Angel reaches her second wind, picking up speed and screaming faster and faster. Then I let myself go, filling my pants with a seed that, if there were any justice in this universe, could mix with Angel’s transmission fluid and produce a child half of skin, half of machinery, all of beauty; a child of steel and/or flesh, and more than a little love.
Sometimes I end up in Barstow or Santa Barbara and have to get a hotel. I’m not as young as I used to be.
I cruise the streets, hungry for flesh. I want three tonight, three girls who will make love to Angel and me with a fervor unmatched. But I want something new, something different; I take a left and head down to a slightly different section of the red-light district. Here the flesh is further decayed: sorrier—or cheaper, more vulnerable. This excites me somehow. I pull up alongside a trio of hookers.
“Ooooooooh, look at Doctor Love,” says one, leaning down and showing me her breasts. “Take me for a ride, sugar, I love independent suspension!”
“A car like this makes my pussy wet,” says the second in a lustful growl, climbing onto Angel’s hood and making eyes at me through the windshield. “I’m dripping on your Armor-All.”
“You like Alfa Romeo?” whispers the third, a blonde, bending low and whispering hot breath into my ear, her tongue drawing inviting circles as she takes my hand and put it down her shirt to feel the hard swell of her breast . “How about Hoover?”
I pause for a moment. How did the first one know I’m a doctor? Ah, of course. The cover story of the Medical News and Review. She recognized me from my picture. It’s satisfying to know that Angel and I will be with a prostitute who keeps up on the medical literature.
I cram all three of the hookers into Angel’s single passenger seat and we head into the hills as they tell me all the things they’re going to do to me. The conversation degenerates as I bring Angel up the hill, and by the time we park they’re trading makeup tips with occasional muttered promises of “We’ll do you right” and “Gonna give you some lovin’.” Leticia is the name of the talkative one. “Nurse Leticia, Angel and Sweet Simone got a new patient, Doc, he gonna get the best care around. Get that pad out, Doctor, write yourself a script for satis-FAC-shun!!!” She snaps her finger and put her lips close to mine. “Three hefty doses!!”
It’s a warm night. It takes some extra cash, but I get the two of them onto Angel’s hood and tell them to caress her. Rub their hardened nipples against her smoothness. The third, the dark-haired girl, gets to do the work because her name is Angel. There’s something achingly beautiful about that.
“So long and stiff,” she says, rolling a rubber down my shaft, rubbing my cock over her face. Angel takes my cock into her mouth, and while Angel sucks me, Leticia and Simone squirm on the hood of the car playing with each other’s tits. I think they’ve misunderstood—they think I want to see a girl-girl show, like the kind I could see any night at the Sixth Street Theater.
“The car,” I rasp. “Touch the car!”
“What?” says Leticia, cocking her head.
“Touch the car! Stroke it!”
The two of them must stare at me for a minute, then look down at Angel, then back at me, then at Angel. Uncomprehending.
“You’re kinky,” says Leticia. “I appreciate that in a medical professional.”
Both she and Simone begin to touch Angel halfheartedly, but when they see my response their enthusiasm increases. Soon they’re humping violently against Angel, fucking her with their legs spread. Leticia yanks down her top and pulls up one of the windshield wipers, sliding it between her ample tits. She pushes them together and moans “Ooooooh baby” as she slides the wiper in and out of the tight channel of flesh.
“Oh God, yes,” I groan, reaching for the washer button.
I hit the button and washer fluid shoots all over Leticia’s tits. Leticia goes along with it, lets out a little moan, rubs the fluid all over her tits until it soaks her shirt. She holds on to the wiper as it flops back and forth, in and out between her tits. I hear a sharp crack and Leticia gets this look over her face like she’s really fucked up. I almost come right then, seeing the limp windshield wiper flapping around over and between her breasts. “Whoops—” Leticia starts to say, but I shriek “Don’t worry about it! Don’t stop! Don’t stop! Goddamn it, don�
�t stop!” and so she goes back to riding the broken wiper while I lean on the washer button and fluid sprays across her belly and breasts and face, making her makeup run. It’s not easy, but I manage to hold back, letting out wild moans of pleasure and pistoning my hips. Simone has just been watching with this look of bewilderment on her face, but now she gets the idea. She sort of shrugs and then plants herself on the other washer, sliding her ass up to the front of Angel’s hood and hiking her spandex skirt up as far as it will go. She spreads her legs around the wiper and rides it, moaning, rides it until it cracks, and the washer cables squirt all over her exposed crotch.
I catch a beautiful vision of black lace panties—and as the washer fluid soaks them they become slightly transparent. My eyes go wide. It seems like my brain was playing tricks on me there for a second.
Simone can’t match Leticia’s enthusiasm, though; Leticia has it down pat. She smears the washer fluid all over her body, whimpering things like “Oh babycakes, wash me,” and “Whoa, sugarplum, make it the SPIN cycle.” She runs out of things to say after a while, though, and just starts moaning, prompting Simone to let out a halfhearted “Wipe me down!” It’s not the second-rate dialogue, though, that’s getting me off, it’s the sight of Angel—my Angel—working the two whores, shooting warm fluid on them and flapping between their tits.
I’m groaning and rocking up and down, pumping my hips back and forth while Angel rides me like a vixen. I start to whimper. I throw my head back and almost scream, the hottest orgasm of my life exploding through my cock and into Angel’s mouth. I shudder and thrash back and forth, and Angel holds on for dear life, her lips clamped around the head of my cock as she milks me. Finally, my spasms subside and my head slumps forward.
I am greeted by the sight of Simone and Leticia, half-naked, covered in washer-fluid lather, their clothes and hair soaked, regarding me as if I were the most extreme kind of maniac.
The washers emit a rhythmic clicking sound, spent.
Angel looks up at me from my lap with pretty much the same expression on her face.
“You get the prize, Doc. Weirdest trick I ever turned.”
“Me, too,” says Angel, wiping her mouth as she slips the condom off and tosses it away. “You don’t even have any competition.”
“Yeah, same here,” says Simone, nodding her head vigorously as she tucks her tits back into her soaked lace top. “I think there ought to be some sort of award for this kind of stuff.”
“Congratulations,” says Leticia matter-of-factly. “You got first fucking place. I hope you got cash to pay for these fuckin’ clothes you ruined.”
After a long session of cleanup with chamois cloths from the trunk, I drive the girls back to the district slowly, savoring the sharp, soapy smell of washer fluid, tasting the ripeness of my union with Angel. I drop them off where I got them, and they shuffle away, my cash tucked into their boots.
Except Leticia. I put my hand out and stop her.
“What is it, sugar? You want my phone number? Hey, you know where to find Lady Leticia.” She indicates the streets with a wave of her hand.
“No,” I say. “It’s not that. I just wondered…”
She leans forward. “How I keep my girlish figure? Where I get my creamy skin? How an old broad like me can exude such a raw, primal sensuality?”
“No, it’s not that,” I say. “I just wondered…”
“Spit it out, Doc, time costs money.”
“How did you knew I was a doctor?
She smiles. “See you in the clinic on Tuesday morning, Doc. Maybe you could tell your nurse to sport me a free shot this time? Make another trip out here Tuesday night, see if it makes a difference.” She winks at me.
I put Angel in gear. Leticia shrugs, tugs at her bra straps, and vanishes into the dark and the drifts of smoke, calling “Love for sale, oh baby love for sale—ooooh, a Caddy, I love Caddies….” I hit the gas and everything goes away.
I have surgery to perform the next morning. I lie awake tangled in the satin sheets, the waterbed rocking me to sleep. I distract myself by dreaming of the new windshield wipers I’ll get for Angel—the best money can buy. Gold-plated, perhaps?
The distractions subside and I look up at the mirrored ceiling, eyes wide, gently rocking on the warm plastic waves.
Of course, Angel was the only one who actually touched me. Maybe she was different. Maybe she was just along for the ride.
It seems impossible. I’ve been in the field for long enough…I should have recognized the signs.
After years of holy service as the high priest of gender reassignment, taking people apart and putting them together again…I should have understood. Why didn’t I? After years of my work, learning the lessons of Angel and of my patients—I should already know the answer to any questions posed in prayer. But things are not like I thought they were. Machine and mind, steel and/or flesh, an Alfa Romeo and a third-rate streetwalker…they’re not as different as I thought they were. In the scattered wreckage of the millennium, we find gods and goddesses among whatever is left. We all inhabit different parts of heaven. We fit pieces of our lives, sometimes broken pieces, together to form what passes as a whole—and it is only through change, through assemblage, that a functioning whole can be created.
The holy belief that flesh and therefore life is mutable is whispered like a prayer or a mantra on the stainless-steel and starched white altar, the white linoleum prayer mat, with me as the priest, reciting the liturgy with my scalpel and my hands. So as the unwilling holy man of such a movement, it only makes sense that I should sample its communion wine. Offering my devotion unto the god of medical transfiguration.
And all God’s children have interchangeable parts.
BLADES
ALISON TYLER
KNIVES AREN’T EASY. They’re more difficult, say, than palming an apple, the rounded red fruit cupped under your hand in an arc as you slide between the automatic glass doors of the neighborhood grocery. Far more complicated than lifting a lipstick. Those short, cylindrical tubes always fit so easily beneath the edge of a cuff before disappearing up the sleeve in a reverse magic trick. Trust me, knives take skill. And more than that, they take will. You have to want to steal that shiny, mirrored blade, to conceal it carefully, so that you don’t cut yourself to bits in the process.
The cutting, of course, comes later.
That said, I’m the type of girl who gets an intense rush from any type of thievery. From absconding successfully with a single piece of fruit that I know I’ll never eat to taking lipsticks and glosses and tints that simply gather dust on my bathroom shelf. The art of stealing is enough. It transforms me. A heart-pounding energy fills my brain when I realize that, fuck yes, I’m going to do it once again. I’m going to walk out of this store with something that I haven’t paid for. Fear freezes into a pleasing numbness as I grip an item tightly and make my way to the nearest exit.
But knives are the best, because blades turn me on.
I’ve been at the game for a number of years. I know what I’m doing. You’d never guess my sexual hobby from looking at me. I’ve mastered the nonchalant expression that I wear as I cruise the cutlery section of a gourmet cooking store. I’m no cat burglar. You won’t find me robbing a place after hours, scuttling through deserted racks of silverware accompanied only by my shadow and the red light on the video camera overhead. What’s the fun in that? I like the challenge of working when there are people present. Security guards. Overly attentive shopgirls. And other customers. Especially other customers. Those housewives who trundle along after a new paring knife, one with a handle that won’t break off this time, thank you very much. The atrocious newlyweds exchanging a set of butter knives for a fancy blade that will cut through the slimy seaweed skin of homemade sushi.
“We’re making it ourselves,” they gush in saccharine-sweet voices, eyes on each other rather than the prices of the expensive weapons displayed before them.
But my eyes are focused on the razo
r-sharp edges that can do such damage in the hands of those less experienced, and even more damage in the hands of those who know what they’re doing. I like the high-end knives, often imported from Europe, with black handles made of heavy-duty rubber. Usually, these blades are trapped behind glass. You have to ask for permission to touch.
“That one,” I nod to the helpful pink-cheeked salesgirl. “The small one.”
I get wet as soon as the slick rubber meets the flesh of my palm. My thumb works up the edge slowly, to dance lightly over the ridge of the blade. It’s a tango between steel and flesh, and flesh, I know, will always lose. In my head, I can already visualize the heartbreakingly lovely hue of that first drop of blood. Cherry red, the little pinprick of liquid will dot and then swell, blooming—
“Oh, gosh, Miss,” the honey-blonde salesgirl murmurs. “You’ve cut yourself.”
And I have, which is shocking, to me as much as to her. I’ve never done something like this before. Never let myself slip up so badly in public. She is rightly concerned, taking me firmly by the wrist, hurrying the two of us to a back room, where I see a half-filled coffeemaker, a box of donuts that grow staler as I watch. My dark brown eyes are clear and sharp. Everything is in perfect focus. That line of blood as it trickles now, pooling—
“Raise up your arm,” she says, lifting my hand to show me what she wants me to do as she rummages a cabinet in search of bandages. The knife, I discover, is still in my other hand, and I slide it secretly into my pocket without thinking. Blade first. Down my thigh. If I sit, I’ll stab myself.
“Here we go.” Her voice is calm, and I recognize in it the exact same tone that the nurse at my pediatrician’s office always used before bringing out the shot. “It’ll sting,” she warns, “but only for a moment.”