Dark Matter

by Sheree R. Thomas

  Issy ignored him. She kept talking to the ganger. “Cool, cool Cleve. No ‘What’s up?’; no ‘What the fuck is this crap on the floor?’; no heat, no passion.”

  “What was the point? I did the only thing that will sweet you every time.”

  “Encased us both in fake skin and let it do the fucking for us.”

  The ganger jittered in uncertain circles between the two of them.

  “Issy, what you want from me?”

  The ganger’s head swelled obscenely toward Cleve.

  “Some heat. Some feeling. Like I show you. Like I feel. Like I feel for you.” The ganger’s lower lip stretched, stretched, a filament of it reaching for Issy’s own mouth. The black cavity of its maw was a tunnel, longing to swallow her up. She shuddered and rolled back farther. Her back came up against the bathtub.

  Softly: “What do you feel for me, Issy?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I do. We do. It’s good. But what do you feel for me, Issy?”

  “Don’t ridicule me. You know.”

  “I don’t know shit, Issy! You talk, talk, talk! And it’s all about what racist slur you heard yesterday, and who tried to cheat you at the store, and how high the phone bill is. You talk around stuff, not about it!”

  “Shut up!”

  The ganger flailed like a hook-caught fish between them.

  Quietly, Cleve said, “The only time we seem to reach each other now is through our skins. So I bought something to make our skins feel more, and it’s still not enough.”

  An involuntary sound came from Issy’s mouth, a hooked, wordless query.

  “Cleve, is that why…” She looked at him, at the intense brown eyes in the expressive brown face. When had he started to look so sad all the time? She reached a hand out to him. The ganger grabbed it. Issy saw fireworks behind her eyes. She screamed. She felt Cleve’s hand on her waist, felt the hand clutch painfully as he tried to shove her away to safety with his other hand. Blindly she reached out, tried to bat the ganger away. Her hand met Cleve’s in the middle of the fog that was the ganger. All the pleasure centers in her body exploded.

  A popping sound. A strong, seminal smell of bleach. The ganger was gone. Issy and Cleve sagged to the floor.

  “Rass,” she sighed. Her calves were knots the size of potatoes. And she’d be sitting tenderly for a while.

  “I feel like I’ve been dragged five miles behind a runaway horse,” Cleve told her. “You all right?”

  “Yeah, where’d that thing go, the ganger?”

  “Shit, Issy, I’m so sorry. Should have drained the suits like you said.”

  “Chuh. Don’t dig nothing. I could have done it, too.”

  “I think we neutralized it. Touched each other, touched it: we canceled it out. I think.”

  “Touched each other. That simple.” Issy gave a little rueful laugh. “Cleve, I… you’re my honey, you know? You sweet me for days. I won’t forget any more to tell you,” she said, “and keep telling you.”

  His smile brimmed over with joy. He replied, “You, you’re my live wire. You keep us both juiced up, make my heart sing in my chest.” He hesitated, spoke bashfully, “And my dick leap in my pants when I see you.”

  A warmth flooded Issy at his sweet, hot talk. She felt her eyelashes dampen. She smiled. “See, the dirty words not so hard to say. And the anger not so hard to show.”

  Tailor-sat on the floor, beautiful Buddha-body, he frowned at her. “I ’fraid to use harsh words, Issy, you know that. Look at the size of me, the blackness of me. You know what it is to see people cringe for fear when you shout?”

  She was dropping down with fatigue. She leaned and softly touched his face. “I don’t know what that is like. But I know you. I know you would never hurt me. You must say what on your mind, Cleve. To me, at least.” She closed her eyes, dragged herself exhaustedly into his embrace.

  He said, “You know, I dream of the way you full up my arms.”

  “You’re sticky,” she murmured. “Like candy.” And fell asleep, touching him.

  Song “Weakness for Sweetness” quoted with permission of singer Natalie Burke and composer Leston Paul, ©1996.

  THE BECOMING

  Akua Lezli Hope

  (2000)

  “Go all the way back this time

  Sometime it feel good to go back

  And start it all over again

  Here it is, three o’clock in the morning,

  Can’t even close my eyes,

  Can’t even find my baby,

  Can’t be satisfied.”

  She took the cube from the holoplayer, trying to hold the flickering holo image of the blues man in her mind. He was dark as some museum’s rare mahogany. What hour was it anyway? She pulled her tellya from her skinsuit’s top pocket and pressed “time.” It whispered back in the husky voice of that ancient singer, “hundred.”

  She loved the way his voice hunkered down over “hundred,” guttural vowels and rich-throated. The top holoartists weren’t like this. They were sinewave castrati, whose falsettos sounded like plugged-nose keening. She listened to more singers now, after her Great Becoming. She had a voice once, but it was always the horns, the muscular vibratos, the burnished mineral ululations, the flesh-beckoning brum-bra-tata-tas, and soul-awakening yayeeyaah, yeas, those wails, transcendent, that set her very liver to quiver. The horn. WHEN THE DAY HAS TURNED TO EVENING, SOME WHO WALK THE CITY’S CANYONS. Precious, precious metal saxophones were her first joy, metal like the City’s Muse.

  One long seasonless day in the past, she met the City’s Muse. Oh, the tellya’s “thoughts for good days” said never think about the past, but she had to remember. She had to think about when she had decided on her becoming, when she would have to leave Nuyorc if she did not become something.

  All that lay between recognition with guaranteed income and the mind-blocked boredom of the Cottage Industries was Decision. The Great Becoming. Many avoided the decision. Others never had to make it. Then, too, there were those who were never offered the choice. My family at least had the choice. She patted the thermafur loungebed and felt its responsive underpurr as it rolled along her thigh—an inaccessible and undreamt-of luxury had she chosen telecommuting, the Cottage Industries, the slaveboxes. I thought there was honor in the choosing, I was honored by the offer. Jason never had to choose. It’s been ten years since my Great Becoming.

  Her one friend, her one lover, Jason of the full firm mouth, Jason of the thick thighs and languorous laughter, Jason, how his nipples would thicken under her tongue, how he could wrap around her.

  It was an unnegotiable day and Cenpark was greening. She’d been listening to one of her minidiscs, the reproduction on them far surpassed the new encryption capsules. Besides, she was younger then, needed to have something in her hands, needed to be hearing and holding. He was similarly attired: zipsuit, thermapeds, sling bag, and headlamp. Must be my age, she thought. One couldn’t tell anymore. City hick that she was, she felt unschooled in the subtlety of rank and dress. Nuyorc core was socially more egalitarian than the Manhattanae. Here in Cenpark, up- and downtown stores and eateries catered much more to tourist traffic than anywhere else in Boswash, than any other of the domed Mahattanae.

  “Heyo, visitor.”

  “Journo, babe. Que happenin this here?”

  “Umm nada much, jus listening, breezin.”

  “Rap, babe. It’s better than tellya.”

  She loved this core, her home. Her mom and dad were official artisans and city bards. They spent a lot of time in the street, plying their creations or entertaining touristas. They spent their downtime teaching her and Bud, her brother.

  They were most special, they were artisans and street players. They had talent and choice. She spent her young years studying violin, cello, bassoon, flute, and finally the horn. The enormous breath changer. She craved it in her hands, its mouth in her mouth, part of her passed through it, it transformed her, finger and key, breath and lip, the reed vibrating tones
that colored the mind.

  A good life and she got to choose. She told him all this. She opened her eyes realizing his hand was on her left breast, massaging it as she spoke. She grabbed his wrist, only half angry, held his hand.

  “Your nomen, brother?”

  “Jason, sistah, from Clevelands.” He was ten years her senior. Neither artisan clothes nor the look of touristas, and where were the scabs or calluses that swell on finger pads, where were the contacts, the eyeshades? No, he was a technoman and from the Midwest, an oddity like a Cenpark tree, a dark-skinned technoman, like her and unlike her.

  Jason, the great listener, the wish-toucher, became her friend, her first and only lover. She fashioned from him the love of her life. Not to say he was that love, but she connected the nerve endings of the flesh of her need and her creation to the spine of what he was. Her want and its partial (but oh so much closer than before) fulfillment became one.

  And how, after the last shout, the last sunburst, after the heart pulse left her head and the lips and tongues unswelled and all the tides receded and the colors were no longer of the neon jungle—he would unwrap himself from her, push her from her nesting curl around his body, and turn his back. And she would be hurt, wanting to be held till, wanting the small eddies and salt of her joys, his passions, to be still shared… he was so tender and insistent in their beginnings. But his dark blank back would not reveal any after feelings. Why does he hide? she would think and he would instruct her to “Hold me, baby, please hold me, baby. Hold me tight, rock me, baby.” Always she would press against his hard back, one arm curled between, one arm and one leg over him, and she would rock him past sleep. She was wrong, in part, he was not hiding so much as he was selfish—why should he hold her after he had spent so much energy awakening her to his will—this was just a continuation of her fulfilling his will.

  He was a studied, relentless lover. It was ever something he did to, not with her. Like everything else she could observe him do, he did it well, but for himself only. “I never do anything naked,” he said to her. She looked at him questioningly, with a half smile. So that was not your skin my legs knew? she thought.

  “I always wear my socks,” answering her half smile, her unspoken question. And she was plunged in doubt. Skinsocks? Like all her other small confidences, he had taken another one from her. He had never been naked with her—perhaps he had, but his denial was as hurting as any actuality.

  He wished he could accept love as she did with a large, child-eyed innocence and joy. Her joy angered him, engaged him. He was repulsed and attracted by her unqualified embraces, city hick, sweet fodder gal. To plunge in her, to play her like she played.

  She was hurt. She wondered why, why must there always be pain? This pain just seized her deep. So profound that it ate the tears that might break it up and wash it away; it ate the scream and cries that would shatter it. It grabbed her muscles so that her tremblings were stilled, locking her into an erect posture denying her relief.

  I am too strong, she thought. Yet she felt the pain throb deep inside. It moved up her vulva, stabbing toward her womb. Her womb, full of hope, ached from its desire and betrayal. This, then, she sensed, was her loss of virginity. For it happened not with that first entrance, the first being rarely the best, and memorable only because of its novelty. But this pain was the deflowering, the busted cherry, her loss of innocence.

  Of course she would share her choosing with Jason, one rare and incredible nighttime before her eighteenth birthday in his apartment overlooking Cenpark. It began wrong, she’d broken her own rule—smoked one of his huge Nigerian imports. It was a vintage crop that year, Bud had told her—a Nigerian nineteen, a true and sweetly somber joint, liquid, calm, false clarity and streetlights burnished in their late sunset hue.

  The huge empty room that was Jason’s box should have told her something, this was no slave hovel, no artisan’s crammed warren, a whole jumpspace of a room, with a tub and water, no portosan.

  She reeled with her own great giddiness. “I am choosing. I will be a musician, an artisan! My long-awaited moment shouts me, rumbles me, tumbles me!

  “Jason, what a pairbond we have. You’ll be my second song after I declare my choice.”

  “What will be your first?”

  “My first will be the choosing.”

  “You really think choosing’s good? What if you did not have to choose? The world holds more than those with options.”

  “La. Yah. There are them without.”

  “No, babe. More like, there are those who never have to, at least not like you do, doll. Not either work nor work, neither serve nor serve. No City’s Muse. No slavebox.”

  “You work, Jason.”

  “Yo, plenty downtime and new ones like you. I made your City’s Muse.”

  “Nah. My folks met the Muse their time and their parents.”

  “They met another Muse. This Muse knows more… knew you from birth.… How I sighted you.”

  “Sighted me?”

  “Read you, doll, watched you, waited for you, wanted you, before your choosing, whatever it would be.”

  “You, a technoman, can sight things? You must have some strange access code.”

  “Don’t be a primitive.”

  “I’m not, maybe city slowed but not devo.”

  “O baby one, this is the first smoke you’ve agreed to share. Laced with my chemist’s best, to celebrate your choosing.”

  “Jason, umm.”

  He had removed her boot and sock, licked her arch, and sucked her big toe.

  “So, what will it be?”

  “The horn, Jason, the horn, I love horns, the tenor saxophone.”

  His fingers swirled around her navel. She felt in a swoon, unable to move. She felt his fingernails dig into her back. But the pain was distant.

  “Jason, that hurts.”

  “It won’t sting, babe, this is good-bye, the sweetest, the best.”

  She felt wildly out of sync. He was manic, awhirl, a plunging, racing, giddy madness. The flashes of discomfort were washed in an orange passion. There were colors that she realized were not drug-induced but were holograms.

  She felt a deep fear. He was not waiting for her this time, but driving her. It was a sensory overload, he moved about her, through her in bolts and jolts. Screaming horns wailed, spinning through the air and crashing around her.

  She could not see. She felt her insides rush out, a thin slice, warmth at her side. Jason sat beside her caressing a blade.

  Every time she was back in Nuyorc, she would remember. How in choosing the horn, she would become one. Ah, they had left her lovely breasts, but between them, the flesh buttons, and below, a swell from her flat abdomen. They were clever about the windpipe, the trachea; she could eat but no longer speak, not without playing herself. And she was a great player, roaming the invisible world that runs the world, avoiding the other freak flesh instruments; avoiding those who wanted to touch. Blowing for those who never have to choose, who never have to Become, but Are.

  THE GOOPHERED GRAPEVINE

  Charles W. Chesnutt

  (1887)

  Some years ago my wife was in poor health, and our family doctor, in whose skill and honesty I had implicit confidence, advised a change of climate. I shared, from an unprofessional standpoint, his opinion that the raw winds, the chill rains, and the violent changes of temperature that characterized the winters in the region of the Great Lakes tended to aggravate my wife’s difficulty, and would undoubtedly shorten her life if she remained exposed to them. The doctor’s advice was that we seek, not a temporary place of sojourn, but a permanent residence, in a warmer and more equable climate. I was engaged at the time in grape-culture in northern Ohio, and, as I liked the business and had given it much study, I decided to look for some other locality suitable for carrying it on. I thought of sunny France, of sleepy Spain, of Southern California, but there were objections to them all. It occurred to me that I might find what I wanted in some one of our own S
outhern States. It was a sufficient time after the war for conditions in the South to have become somewhat settled; and I was enough of a pioneer to start a new industry, if I could not find a place where grape-culture had been tried. I wrote to a cousin who had gone into the turpentine business in central North Carolina. He assured me, in response to my inquiries, that no better place could be found in the South than the State and neighborhood where he lived; the climate was perfect for health, land, in conjunction with the soil, ideal for grape-culture; labor was cheap, and land could be bought for a mere song. He gave us a cordial invitation to come and visit him while we looked into the matter. We accepted the invitation, and after several days of leisurely travel, the last hundred miles of which were up a river on a sidewheel steamer, we reached our destination, a quaint old town, which I shall call Patesville, because, for one reason, that is not its name. There was a red brick market-house in the public square, with a tall tower, which held a four-faced clock that struck the hours, and from which there pealed out a curfew at nine o’clock. There were two or three hotels, a court-house, a jail, stores, offices, and all the appurtenances of a county seat and a commercial emporium; for while Patesville numbered only four or five thousand inhabitants, of all shades of complexion, it was one of the principal towns in North Carolina, and had a considerable trade in cotton and naval stores. This business activity was not immediately apparent to my unaccustomed eyes. Indeed, when I first saw the town, there brooded over it a calm that seemed almost sabbatic in its restfulness, though I learned later on that underneath its somnolent exterior the deeper currents of life—love and hatred, joy and despair, ambition and avarice, faith and friendship—flowed not less steadily than in livelier latitudes.