White Tiger on Snow Mountain

by David Gordon

  She wrote me a prescription for herbs and then had a talk with her assistant, Amy, a stout, middle-aged lady with thick forearms, thick glasses, and a part in her short hair. She led me into another room with massage tables sectored off by sheets hanging from shower rods. Amy spoke almost no English, but using signs and brief exhortations (“All off!”), she had me strip to my underwear and lie on my back. The table was edged into a corner, and I had to turn on a slight angle to fit. “You too tall”—she laughed—although for a Caucasian man I’m average. “Too tall!” She lightly slapped my feet. I giggled. Then she spread a little towel over me and patted my head.

  “You so weak,” she clucked. “I have to help you stronger.”

  Her first step was to stick needles in my face. One in the forehead, one in each cheek, and one into the cup of each ear. It didn’t hurt exactly. There was a small prick as she worked, quickly and expertly, first poking lightly to find the spot, then flicking the head of the needle with a finger to drive it in. The hardest part was just lying there and thinking: She’s sticking needles in my face. I shut my eyes and did what I vaguely remembered as yoga breathing, which seemed to help, though of course I knew that yoga wasn’t Chinese. She put more needles in my hands, right in the meat between the thumb and fore-finger, in my forearms, my shins, and especially my feet, a fistful sprouting among my toes. You couldn’t really predict what would hurt. The left hand stung more than the face, but the right hand I didn’t even notice. Then, when she stuck my thigh, I felt a wild surge of pain, but not where the needle had entered. I felt it on the bottom of my foot, in the curve of the sole. Lightning shot up my leg, like someone had jerked an invisible wire running through my body. I twitched uncontrollably and hissed like a severed snake. Amy laughed good-naturedly and patted my head again.

  “Sensitive,” she chanted in a teasing lilt.

  “What is that point for?” I asked through gritted teeth.

  She smiled. “That kidaney.”

  I was now pinned to the table like a butterfly, with a dozen needles standing in my skin, but we weren’t done yet, not by a long shot. Amy got out some alligator clips attached to electrical wires and started clamping them to the needles. I felt like a prisoner about to be tortured. I was desperate to confess, but to what? She turned a knob and began ticking up the current.

  “Too strong?” she asked. “Is too much?”

  How much electricity in the face is too much, really? I’d never pondered the question. It came in pulses, a bristling tingle like heat rash breaking out. When it hit blister stage, I said, “Too strong!” With another chuckle—“you so sensitive”—she dialed it back to bearable, then aimed a heat lamp at me, tucked in my towel, and left me there, little needles jumping in my skin, flesh flexing of its own accord. If I opened an eye, I could see a silver pin trembling in my cheek. “Relax,” she ordered, and drew the curtain.

  Weirdly enough, I did relax. One of those spikes must have fired off some endorphins because I drifted right to sleep. It was a sleep that spread over me like a light blanket, very dark but very thin, stirred by the pulse of the needles and by the staticky Chinese news radio playing in the next room. The current came in waves, building and then receding. It was immensely pleasurable in that way a nap can sometimes be, when the constant little wakings, instead of disturbing, return us to the joy of sinking back to sleep. For a few minutes I forgot where I was. Then one of my face needles popped out.

  It must have been in too lightly because it just jumped loose with its wire attached. I could see it from the corner of my eye, hopping around my chin. But I was afraid to move or even lift a hand since my other needles were still buzzing away.

  “Hello?” I called softly. “Help?”

  All I could see was the curtain, stirring with the heat vent above. I could hear the other patients in their tents, moaning and snoring. Beyond that, the radio and a burble of voices in the waiting room. I searched my mind for its tiny bits of Mandarin.

  “Ni hao ma!” I called. And louder, “Ni hao ma!”

  Although it’s used as a greeting, like “bonjour” or “shalom,” the phrase actually means “how are you,” and I was well aware of the absurdity of a white guy lying there and yelling, in a panicked voice: “How are you! How! Are! You!”

  I heard some giggles from my neighbors, who added their own calls in rapid Chinese, and a minute later Amy came in.

  “The needle came out,” I told her. She laughed and put it back, giving it a little twist that stung.

  “You talk Chinese!” she said.

  “Just a little.” I recalled the couple of other words I’d learned. “Bing-lang!” This was the weird betel nut stuff old Asian guys chewed and spit in purple wads on the ground. I’d tried it once, as a tobacco substitute. She laughed, delighted.

  “Xia xia,” I said, trying to pronounce the lovely word right, swallowing the soft shhh, as she adjusted my current: “Thank you.”

  I started going twice a week. Amy gave me acupuncture front and back and usually a great massage. Dr. Chang attached little seeds to my inner ears, like discreet piercings I was supposed to press when I wanted to smoke. I also went to the herb store and showed them what she wrote. Perhaps it said, “Let’s screw with this fool’s head,” because what they gave me looked like a sack of garden trimmings: sticks, fungus, berries, and dried brown leaves that I had to boil into a foul tea. But sure enough, when I showed the note to the old guy behind the counter, he took the cigarette from his lip and said the magic word, “Kidneys.” Smiling wide, he pronounced the bag of scraps he sold me as “Good for man.” He made a virile fist around his burning cigarette and waved it in my face. “Very good for man!”

  Phase Two in my stop-smoking program was running. For years, I’d been urged to take up some exercise, but the thought of a gym triggered traumatic wet-towel-snapping locker-room flashbacks and visions of myself crushed in some mythological torture machine: The Tantalus Maximus. The Sisyphus 5000. The Abdominator. I was too poor and angry for yoga in Manhattan. Running seemed, if not easy, at least simple: If you could walk at all quickly, I figured, you could run. Also it was free. When I’d tried before, however, I had been smoking. Not while I actually ran, perhaps, but I smoked on the way there and back, and ran only in short bursts, as if chasing a bus, passing everyone, then stopping to wheeze and choke a block later. The real joggers eyed me curiously as I tore by, then fell behind, gasping. All of which led me, when I finally quit, to make an amazing discovery: Smoking is actually really fucking bad for your lungs. Or at least for mine, because in a few weeks I had doubled the distance I could run.

  I ran two miles, then four, then six, up and down the waterfront. I didn’t go very fast, and at my rate it would be ten years before I could attempt a marathon, but I had caught the habit and I kept going, even as the winter days grew cold and dark. My outfit was a bit odd compared to the high-tech warriors I saw darting along the paths: thrift store polyester pants, a hooded sweatshirt, black socks. When it snowed, I layered on thermals, a hat, and gloves. When my ancient long underwear sagged, I had the brilliant idea to safety pin them to the tops. I even got sciatica from running too much. Amy cured it with one vicious stab in the hip, and I was back, across Houston Street to the West Side Highway and out to the river alone. Just like I wanted.

  My other new obsession was Internet sex (Intersext? ISX?), specifically the ads on Craigslist. I was freelancing then and spent all of my working and most of my nonworking hours immobilized before a screen in my basement apartment, making it rather hard to tell the difference really. And how far that once noble term has fallen: a free lance! Once it was a knight, unbound, ready to fight for fortune or honor, to ride out and meet victory or death. Now a freelance(r) was a pale, impudent non-smoker hunched in his bathrobe, grinding out captions for an organic Brooklyn roof farm’s veggie pics, ad copy for a revolutionary line of wrinkle-free chinos that came in a tube, and rhapsodic bloggings about a new hotel for dogs.

  But if no
t smoking was great for breathing, running, and living in general, it turned out to be terribly unhealthy for writing. It was just as I’d suspected: Writing was antithetical to life as a whole, and my smoking cure had apparently relieved me of both compulsions at once. So I waited, staring into the blankness, and added work to the list of things I was busy not doing.

  Then, when a rumor in the building made me fear, erroneously, that I’d have to move, I searched for places on Craigslist. The housing scare passed, but I found myself checking the personals. The ones that seemed sincere, actual people seeking actual happiness, were far too depressing, and at first I mostly enjoyed the silly misworded ones. “I’m the girl next store,” a lady declared. A wise woman insisted on “condemns,” while another’s “testy pussy” had to be licked “just now.” Then there was the plaintive cry: “So moisten, can’t wait!”

  Finally, perhaps inevitably, I answered. I estimated of course that at least 60 percent of the ads were spam, drawing traffic to commercial sites. Another 35 percent or so I figured were hookers, pranksters, or men. Of the remaining “real women,” I assumed most were housebound invalids who had been scarred in terrible acid attacks, since, as far as I knew, pretty much any woman who wanted casual sex with a stranger could find it walking around the block. This left one in a hundred, maybe, who was normal enough, attractive enough, biologically alive and female enough, but harboring some dark secret (she was married, she was kinky, she was a nun lusting for rabbis) and so venturing online to engage in a bit of fantasy, with no intention of actually meeting up.

  That was fine with me. I had no intention of meeting up either. I never intended to meet anyone ever again, unless she sat beside me in my doctor’s waiting room, or to chat “off-line” with another human, except across the counter of a deli.

  So I targeted this perverse minority. In fact I took it up as a (blocked) writing challenge: I knew each girl would get hundreds of responses from desperate dudes drooling over their keyboards. Could I, purely through the magic of language, rise to the top of the pile? To make it really sporting, I answered only the dirtiest, nastiest, and most twisted of the posts, the masochists and the submissives, the self-named whores and sluts, the daddy’s girls, the slaves, the bitches in heat, the toys. Henceforth, it would be among my fellows, the fallen, wounded, and lame, that I would find my only friends.

  HELLO DADDY . . .

  I just read your response and it turned me on so much!! I do have a pic, but I am on campus right now and cant send it . . . But i wanted to let you know that you got me thinking such filthy filthy thoughts. There was a few things that TOTALLY peeked my interest . . i have interested in a while to do pee control . . when you make me hold it till you say so . . or me holding your dick when you pee . . I have 3 little girl outfits that i think you may like . . and i hope i get to wear them for you! I deo have to tell you . . i am not that experienced . . but I love to rollplay and pleasure my daddy . . i tend to be naughty a lot . . nothing a punishment cant handle . . hope to here back form you . . Lyla

  Hi Baby,

  It’s Daddy. I’m glad you liked what I wrote. And I’m very happy to know that it turned you on. Did you get all wet reading my letter? Don’t worry about being experienced. After all, that’s what Daddy’s for . . . to teach his lttile darling to obey and please him. I will certainly train you to hold your pee till I say so and to have you show me how you learn to go like a good girl. Yes, sweetheart, you will get to hold Daddy’s cock while he pees, but that is a reward for when you are good: If you’re naughty you will be punished: Daddy knows what to do with naughty girls too.

  Hey Daddy . . . I want to play with you soon . . . i read your first 2 emails . . and they were soo hot . . lol . . . Your little girl had a confession to tell you . . i am not sure if you are going to be pleased or upset . . I have recently found out that I like playing with girls too. . . . i am not sure if you are into playing with 2 little girls . . maybe having 2 daughters . . but it could be fun . . once in a while . . she is into older men too and we played together one night and it was great since then me and her play a lot . . i jsut wanted to let you know . . . we are both 20 . . but we look like we are 15 . . lol . . . I just turned myself up totally . . lol . . .

  If you have a special best friend, of course you can bring her to play with Daddy. There’s lots of fun we can have. Although she has to be a good girl too, or she’ll get spanked and punished also.

  Well we both are sometimes bad . . we would both need to be punished from time to time . . . sometimes we argue over our toys and clothes . . . we usually share nicely . . but sometimes we get snotty . . we are little girls . . lol . . we love to experiment on eachother . . but for our daddy we would do anything he told us . . . I forgot to tell you i did mention to her this situation and she got excited . . i told her about pee control and holding your cock when you pee and she said she has doen some dirty stuff like that before . . i never have . . she said her last daddy liked to pee on her . . do you like to do that? i am not sure if i would . . but you can do it to her . . . i mean if you really wanted i guess i would have no choice . . bc i know what you say goes . . love Lyla

  I complained to Dr. Chang about my back, so she added a new item to the menu: cupping. Amy had me lie on my belly with my head to the side. I could see a fellow patient’s white-socked feet, tiny as cat paws, poking from her curtain, and a cheap calendar hanging on the wall, printed in English and Chinese. It was January. There was an ink drawing of a tiny village, thatched huts cuddled in chimney smoke at the bottom of a hill. Brushy trees climbed the heights, and a ram posed at the peak, his horns curling like shells. A line of check-mark birds flew off the edge. “Morning in Cold Village,” the caption read. I meditated on this image for a month.

  Meanwhile Amy placed a small clear bowl on my right lower back. Attaching what looked like a giant turkey baster or small bicycle pump, she began to suck the air out, until I felt it bite my skin like a leech. It sealed and stuck when she let go. It didn’t hurt precisely; it was more like being molested by some futuristic parasite. She put another one on the left, repeating the process until my entire back was covered with these globes, like giant blisters bubbling from my skin. When removed, they left big circular welts, super-hickeys from an octopus. In the men’s room mirror, I looked like I had some terrible disease that made you break out in polka dots. I covered up when some guy in a suit walked in and gasped.

  What could I say? I’d been horribly beaten by a mugger with great design sense? It was impossible to explain, even to myself. But as I bent to tie my sneakers later, I noticed my back pain, my neck pain, my shoulder pain: all gone.

  That day, while I was running, New Jersey disappeared. The river froze white into fog and rose like a ghost from its grave, becoming first a curtain, then a mountain that covered the far shore. As if I were witnessing the geological past, or peering into the drowned future, the river now went on forever, blending into the horizon, with only the clock atop a mall’s tower still awake. Farther uptown, the black stubs of a fallen dock appeared, rows of broken teeth in the river’s mouth, a folded white gull asleep on each, like an envelope or a handful of snow. I ran along the edge, against the wind, with a scarf over my mouth to warm my breath, and snowdrops stung my face like sparks.

  IM with sweetsally

  hi Master

  Hey slut where are you?

  in my apt

  Are you wet for me? Did yr pussy start to drip?

  its always wet for you

  thats right. Your horny little pussy should melt as soon as you see me online . . . you should drool at the thought of my cock like a starving bitch in heat

  i neeeed ur cock i am drooling for it

  you’d love to crawl and beg for it . . . worship it . . .

  yes Master

  you’d come crawling as soon as I come over . . . with your leash in your mouth

  yes Master

  I want you nake on all fours with your collar on . . . what is your bod
y like?

  Althletic, curvy

  what size are your tits?

  34DD sometimes 34D depends on the bra

  Real or fake?

  real i work out a lot i lost like 40 lbs a couple years ago and now im a workout junkie

  good . . . Shave? Wax?

  wax

  good . . . I’m strict when I inspect you . . . if I find a stray hair . . . legs, armpits, pussy . . . you get whipped

  yes Master

  if you asshole isnt pink and clean when I stick my finger up it you get slapped

  yes Master

  maybe I should weigh you too.

  oh god that makes me so wet and if we go out to get coffee or anything and i try to order a cookie or put cream in my coffee u stop me right there and humiliate me in front of everyone by slappin gme accross the face and saying you think you can have a cookie?!?! i dont want a fat fuck for a slave and then i have to apologize and thank you for stoppin gme

  Then I’ll eat a big brownie and drink a cappucino while you watch, haha . . .

  mmm god im soaking wet tell me more about how u would humiliate me please and make sure i dont get fat and the names you would call me like slapping me if i ordered a cookie and making me apologize and thank you and show everyone that i cant get fat

  ok . . .

  I’d take you shopping and pick out the tightest sluttiest little clothes and make you try them on and come out of the dressing room and parade around . . . and if they dont fit I’d call you a fat pig in front of the other customers and laugh at you with the cute salesgirls and talk about how hot they looked and how you should lose weight and maybe bring one home to fuck in front of you and eat cake and hot fudge and let you lick us clean after

  oh god i am soaking wet

  oh my god that is so hot

  the more u make me feel like i am the MOST worthless girl in the universe