by Чак Паланик
And Gwen says, "Not on the bed."
So I toss the knife on the dresser, and I raise my hand to slap. From behind her, this is really awkward.
And she says, "But not in the face."
So I move my hand a little lower.
And she says, "And do not hit my breasts unless you want to give me lumps."
See also: Cystic mastitis.
She says, "How about if you just slap my ass."
And I say, how about if she just shuts up and lets me rape her my way.
And Gwen says, "If that's how you feel, you can just take your little penis and run along home now."
Since she's just out of the shower, her bush is soft and full, not matted down the way it is when you first take off a woman's underwear. My free hand creeps around to between her legs, and she feels fake, rubbery and plastic. Too smooth. A little greasy.
I say, "What's with your vagina?"
Gwen looks down at herself and says, "What?" She says, "Oh, that. It's a Femidom, a female condom. The edges stick out like that. I don't want you giving me any diseases."
Is it just me, I say, but I thought rape was supposed to be more spontaneous, you know, a crime of passion.
"That shows you don't know shit about how to rape anybody," she says. "A good rapist will plan his crime meticulously. He ritualizes every little detail. This should be almost like a religious ceremony."
What happens here, Gwen says, is sacred.
In the bookstore coffee shop, she'd passed me the photocopied sheet and said, "Can you agree to all these terms?"
The sheet said, Do not ask where I work.
Do not ask if you're hurting me.
Do not smoke in my house.
Do not expect to stay the night.
The sheet says, The safe word is POODLE.
I ask what she means by a safe word.
"If the scene gets too heavy or if it isn't working for one of us," she says, "you just say 'poodle' and the action stops."
I ask if I get to shoot my wad.
"If it's all that important to you," she says.
Then I say, okay, where do I sign?
These pathetic sexaholic chicks. They're so damn dick-hungry.
Without her clothes, she looks a little bony. Her skin feels hot and damp as if you could squeeze out warm soapy water. Her legs are so thin they don't touch until her ass. Her little flat breasts seem to cling to her rib cage. Still holding her arm behind her back, watching ourselves in the mirrored closet door, she has the long neck and sloped shoulders of a wine bottle.
"Stop, please," she says. "You're hurting me. Please, I'll give you money."
I ask, how much?
"Stop, please," she says. "Or I'll scream."
So I drop her arm and step away. "Don't scream," I say. "Just do not scream."
Gwen sighs and then hauls off and punches me in the chest. "You moron!" she says. "I didn't say 'poodle.'"
It's the sexual equivalent of Simon Sez.
She twists back into my grip. Then she walks us over to the towel and says, "Wait." She goes to the dresser and comes back with a pink plastic vibrator.
"Hey," I say, "you're not using that on me."
Gwen shudders and says, "Of course not. This is mine."
And I say, "So what about me?"
And she says, "Sorry, next time bring your own vibrator."
"No," I say, "what about my penis?'
And she says, "What about your penis?"
And I ask, "How does it fit into all this?"
Settling herself on the towel, Gwen shakes her head and says, "Why do I do this? Why do I always pick the guy who just wants to be nice and conventional? The next thing you'll want to do is marry me." She says, "Just one time, I'd like to have an abusive relationship. Just once!"
She says, "You can masturbate while you rape me. But only on the towel and only if you don't slop any on me."
She spreads the towel out around her ass and pats a little area of terry cloth next to her. "When it's time," she says, "you can put your orgasm right here."
Her hand goes pat, pat, pat.
Uh, okay, I say, now what?
Gwen sighs and sticks the vibrator in my face. "Use me!" she says. "Degrade me, you stupid idiot! Demean me, you jerk-off! Debase me!"
It's not really clear where the switch is, so she has to show me how to turn it on. Then it's buzzing so hard I drop it. Then it's jumping around on the floor, and I have to catch the damn thing.
Gwen brings her knees up and they drop off to each side the way a book drops open, and I kneel on the edge of the towel and work the buzzing tip just inside the soft plastic edges of her. I work my dog with my other hand. Her calves are shaved and taper to curved feet with blue polish on the nails. She's laid back with her eyes closed and her legs spread. Holding her hands together and stretched above her head so her breasts pull up into perfect little handfuls, she says, "No, Dennis, no. I don't want this, Dennis. Don't. No. You can't have me."
And I say, "My name is Victor."
And she says to shut up and let her concentrate.
And I try to give us both a good time, but this is the sex equivalent of rubbing your stomach and patting your head. Either I'm focused on her or I'm focusing on myself. Either way, it's the same as a bad three-way. One of us is always getting left out. Plus the vibrator is slippery and hard to hang on to. It's heating up and smells acrid and smoky as if something's burning inside.
Gwen opens one eye just a sliver, squinting down at my flogging the dog, and says, "Me first!"
I'm wrestling my dog. I'm snaking Gwen. I'm snaking Gwen. This feels less like I'm a rapist than I'm a plumber. The edges of the Femidom keep slipping inside, and I have to stop and pick them out with two fingers.
Gwen says, "Dennis, no, Dennis, stop, Dennis," her voice coming up from deep in her throat. She pulls her own hair and gasps. The Femidom slips inside again, and I just let it go. The vibrator tamps it deeper and deeper. She says to play with her nipples with my other hand.
I say, I need my other hand. My dice draw up tight and ready to trigger, and I say, "Oh yeah. Yes. Oh, yeah."
And Gwen says, "Don't you dare," and she licks two fingers. She pins her eyes on mine and works her wet fingers between her legs, racing me.
And all I have to do is picture Paige Marshall, my secret weapon, and the race is over.
The second before you trigger, that feeling when your asshole starts to clench, that's when I turn toward the little spot on the towel Gwen said. Feeling stupid and paper-trained, my white soldiers start to toss, and maybe by accident they misjudge the trajectory and toss across her pink bedspread. Her whole big soft puffy pink landscape. Arc after arc sprays out, in hot cramping gobs of all sizes, all over the spread and the pillow shams, and the pink silk bed skirt.
What would Jesus NOT do?
Spunk graffiti.
"Vandalism" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.
Gwen's collapsed on the towel panting with her eyes closed, the vibrator humming inside her. Her eyes rolled back in her head, she's gushing between her fingers and whispering, "I beat you . . ."
She whispers, "You son of a bitch, I beat you . . ."
I'm tucking myself back in my pants and grabbing my coat. White soldier gobs are hanging all over the bed, the drapes, the wallpaper, and Gwen's still lying there, breathing hard, the vibrator angled halfway out of her. A second later, it slips free and flops around on the floor like a fleshy wet fish. It's then Gwen opens her eyes. She starts to push herself up on her elbows before she sees the damage.
I'm halfway out the window when I say, "Oh, by the way . . ." I say, "Poodle," and behind me I hear her first scream for real.
Chapter 28
In the summer of 1642 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a teenage boy was accused of buggering a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey. This is real history on the books. In accordance with the Biblical law
s of Leviticus, after the boy confessed he was forced to watch each animal being slaughtered. Then he was killed and his body heaped with the dead animals and buried in an unmarked pit.
This was before there were sexaholic talk therapy meetings.
This teenager, writing his fourth step must've been a whole barnyard tell-all.
I ask, "Any questions?"
The fourth-graders just look at me. A girl in the second row says, "What's buggering?"
I say, ask your teacher.
Every half hour, I'm supposed to teach another herd of fourth-graders some shit nobody wants to learn, like how to start a fire. How to carve an apple-head doll. How to make ink out of black walnuts. As if this is going to get any of them into a good college.
Besides deforming the poor chickens, these fourth-graders, they all walk in here carrying some germ. It's no mystery why Denny's always wiping his nose and coughing. Head lice, pin-worms, chlamydia, ringworm—for serious, these field trip kids are the pint-sized horsemen of the apocalypse.
Instead of useful Pilgrim crap, I tell them how their playground game ring-around-a-rosy is based on the bubonic plague of 1665. The Black Death gave people hard, swollen, black spots they called "plague roses," or buboes, surrounded by a pale ring. Hence "bubonic." Infected people were locked inside their houses to die. In six months, a hundred thousand people were buried in the huge mass graves.
The "pocket full of posies" was what people of London carried so they wouldn't smell the corpses.
To build a fire, all you do is pile up some sticks and dry grass. You strike a spark with a flint. You work the bellows. Don't think for a second this fire-starting routine makes their little eyes sparkle. Nobody's impressed by a spark. Kids crouch in the front row, huddling over their little video games. Kids yawn right in your face. All of them giggle and pinch, rolling their eyes at me in my breeches and dirty shirt.
Instead, I tell them how in 1672, the Black Plague hit Naples, Italy, killing some four hundred thousand people.
In 1711, in the Holy Roman Empire, the Black Plague killed five hundred thousand people. In 1781, millions died worldwide from the flu. In 1792, another plague killed eight hundred thousand people in Egypt. In 1793, mosquitoes spread yellow fever to Philadelphia, where it killed thousands.
One kid in the back whispers, "This is worse than the spinning wheel."
Other kids open their box lunches and look inside their sandwiches.
Outside the window, Denny's bent over in the stocks. This time just out of habit. The town council has announced he'll be banished right after lunch. The stocks are just where he feels most safe from himself. Nothing's locked or even closed, but he's bent over with his hands and neck where they've been for months.
On their way here from the weaver's, one kid was poking a stick in Denny's nose and then trying to poke the stick in his mouth. Other kids rub his shaved head for luck.
Starting the fire only kills about fifteen minutes, so after that I'm supposed to show each herd of kids the big cooking pots and twig brooms and bed warmers and shit.
Children always look bigger in a room with a six-foot ceiling. A kid in the back says, "They gave us fucking egg salad again."
Here in the eighteenth century, I'm sitting beside the hearth of the big open fireplace equipped with the regular torture chamber relics, the big iron pothooks, the pokers, andirons, branding irons. My big fire blazing. This is a perfect moment to take the iron pincers out of the coals and pretend to study their pitted white-hot points. All the kids step back.
And I ask them, hey kids, can anybody here tell me how people in the eighteenth century used to abuse naked little boys to death.
This always gets their attention.
No hands go up.
Still studying the pincers, I say, "Anybody?"
Still no hands.
"For real," I say and start working the hot pincers open and shut. "Your teacher must've told you about how they used to kill little boys back then."
Their teacher's outside, waiting. How it worked was, a couple hours ago, while her class was carding wool, this teacher and me wasted some sperm in the smokehouse, and for sure she thought it would turn into something romantic, but hey. Me being face deep in her wonderful rubbery butt, it's amazing what a woman will read into it if you by accident say, I love you.
Ten times out of ten, a guy means I love this.
You wear a foofy linen shirt, a cravat, and some breeches, and the whole world wants to sit on your face. The two of you sharing ends of your fat hot slider, you could be on the cover of some paperback bodice-ripper. I tell her, "Oh, baby, cleave thy flesh unto mine. Oh yeah, cleave for me, baby."
Eighteenth-century dirty talk.
Their teacher, her name's Amanda or Allison or Amy. Some name with a vowel in it.
Just keep asking yourself: "What would Jesus not do?"
Now in front of her class, with my hands good and black, I stick the pincers back into the fire, then wiggle two of my black fingers at the kids, international sign language for come closer.
The kids in the back push the ones in the front. The ones in the front look around, and one kid calls out, "Miss Lacey?"
A shadow in the window means Miss Lacey's watching, but the minute I look at her she ducks out of sight.
I motion to the kids, closer. The old rhyme about Georgie Porgie, I tell them, is really about England's King George the Fourth, who could just never get enough.
"Enough what?" a kid says.
And I say, "Ask your teacher."
Miss Lacey continues to lurk.
I say, "You like the fire I got here?" and nod at the flames. "Well, people need to clean the chimney all the time, only the chimneys are really small inside and they run all over the place, so people used to force little boys to climb up in them and scrape the insides."
And since this was such a tight place, I tell them, the boys would get stuck if they wore any clothes.
"So just like Santa Claus ..." I say, "they climbed up the chimney..." I say, and lift a hot poker from the fire, "naked."
I spit on the red end of the poker and the spit sizzles, loud, in the quiet room.
"And you know how they died?" I say. "Anybody?"
No hands go up.
I say, "You know what a scrotum is?"
Nobody says yes or even nods, so I tell them, "Ask Miss Lacey."
Our special morning in the smokehouse, Miss Lacey was bobbing on my dog with a good mouthful of spit. Then we were sucking tongues, sweating hard and trading drool, and she pulled back for a good look at me. In the dim smoky light, those big fake plastic hams were hanging all around us. She's just swamped and riding my hand, hard, and breathing between each word. She wipes her mouth and asks me if I have any protection.
"It's cool," I tell her. "It's 1734, remember? Fifty percent of all children died at birth."
She puffs a limp strand of hair off her face and says, "That's not what I mean."
I lick her right up the middle of her chest, up her throat, and then stretch my mouth around her ear. Still jacking her with my swamped fingers, I say, "So, you have any evil afflictions I should know about?"
She's pulling me apart behind and wets a finger in her mouth, and says, "I believe in protecting myself."
And I go, "That's cool."
I say, "I could get canned for this," and roll a rubber down my dog.
She worms her wet finger up my pucker and slaps my ass with her other hand and says, "How do you think I feel?"
To keep from triggering, I'm thinking of dead rats and rotten cabbage and pit toilets, and I say, "What I mean is, latex won't be invented for another century."
With the poker, I point at the fourth-graders, and I say, "These little boys used to come out of the chimneys covered with the black soot. And the soot used to grind into their hands and knees and elbows and nobody had soap so they stayed black all the time."
This was their whole lives back then. Every day, somebo
dy forced them up a chimney and they spent all day crawling along in the darkness with the soot getting in their mouths and noses and they never went to school and they didn't have television or video games or mango-papaya juice boxes, and they didn't have music or remote-controlled anything or shoes and every day was the same.
"These little boys," I say and wave the poker across the crowd of kids, "these were little boys just like you. They were exactly like you."
My eyes go from each kid to each kid, touching all their eyes for a moment.
"And one day, each little boy would wake up with a sore place on his private parts. And these sore places didn't heal. And then they metastasized and followed the seminal vesicles up into the abdomen of each little boy, and by then," I say, "it was too late."
Here's the flotsam and jetsam of my med school education.
And I tell how sometimes they tried to save the little boy by cutting off his scrotum, but this was before hospitals and drugs. In the eighteenth century, they still called these kind of tumors "soot warts."
"And those soot warts," I tell the kids, "were the first form of cancer ever invented."
Then I ask, does anybody know why they call it cancer?
No hands.
I say, "Don't make me call on somebody."
Back in the smokehouse, Miss Lacey was running her fingers through the clumps of her damp hair, and said, "So?" As if it's just an innocent question, she says, "You have a life outside of here?"
And wiping my armpits dry with my powdered wig, I say, "Let's not pretend, okay?"
She's bunching up her pantyhose the way women do so they can snake their legs inside, and says, "This kind of anonymous sex is a symptom of a sex addict."
I'd rather think of myself as a playboy, James Bond type of guy.
And Miss Lacey says, "Well, maybe James Bond was a sex addict."
Here, I'm supposed to tell her the truth. I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.
In a way, being an addict is very proactive.