Удушье (Choke)

by Чак Паланик

  "No," she's hissing.

  Inside Room 234, the group leader's saying, "We're going to work on the fourth step tonight."

  "Not in there," Nice's saying until we're standing in the open doorway being looked at by the crowd of people sitting around a big, low table stained with paint and lumpy with dried paste. The chairs are little plastic scoops so low everybody's knees jut up in front of them. These people just stare at us. These men and women. Urban legends. These sexaholics.

  The group leader says, "Is there anybody here still working on their fourth step?"

  Nico slides against me and whispers into my ear, she whis­pers, "If you go in there, in with all those losers," Nico says, "I'm never getting with you again."

  See also: Leeza.

  See also: Tanya.

  And I come around the table to drop myself into a plastic chair.

  With everybody watching, I say, "Hello. I'm Victor."

  Looking into Nico's eyes, I say, "My name is Victor Mancini, and I'm a sexaholic."

  And I say how I've been stuck on my fourth step for what seems like forever.

  The feeling is less like an ending than just another starting point.

  And still leaning in the doorway, not just eye juice but tears, rolling black mascara tears, burst out of Nico's eyes, and she smears them away with her hand. Nico says, she shouts, "Well, I'm not!" And out of the sleeve of her coat, her bra drops on the floor.

  Nodding at her, I say, "And this is Nico."

  And Nico says, "You people can all get fucked." She snatches up her bra and she's gone.

  It's then everybody says, Hello Victor.

  And the group leader says, "Okay."

  He says, "As I was saying, the best place to find insight is to remember where you lost your virginity...."

  Chapter 40

  Somewhere north-northeast above Los Angeles, I was getting sore, so I asked Tracy if she'd let up for a minute. This is another life­time ago.

  With a big hank of white spit looped between my knob and her lower lip, her whole face hot and flushed from choking, still holding my sore dog in her fist, Tracy settles back on her heels and says how in the Kama Sutra, it tells you to make your lips really red by wiping them with sweat from the testicles of a white stallion.

  "For real," she says.

  Now there's a weird taste in my mouth, and I look hard at her lips, her lips and my dog the same big purple color. I say, "You don't do that stuff, do you?"

  The doorknob rattles and we both look, fast, to make sure it's locked.

  This is that first time, what every addiction is about getting back to. That first time that no subsequent time is ever as good as.

  Nothing's worse than when a little kid opens the door. What's next worst is when some man throws open the door and doesn't understand. Even if you're still alone, when a kid opens the door you have to, fast, cross your legs. Pretend it's all an accident. An adult guy might slam the door, might yell, "Lock it next time, ya moron," but he's still the only one blushing.

  After that, what's worse, Tracy says, is being a woman the Kama Sutra would call an elephant woman. Especially if you're with what they call a hare man.

  This animal thing refers to genital size.

  Then she says, "I didn't mean that to sound the way it did."

  The wrong person opens the door, and you're in their night­mares all week.

  Your best defense is unless somebody is on the make, no mat­ter who opens the door and sees you sitting there, they always as­sume it's their mistake. Their fault.

  I always did. I used to walk in on women or men riding the toilet on airplanes on trains or Greyhound buses or in those little single-seat either/or unisex restaurant bathrooms, I'd open the door to see some stranger sitting there, some blonde all blue eyes and teeth with a ring through her navel and wearing high heels, with her g-string stretched down between her knees and the rest of her clothes and bra folded on the little counter next to the sink. Every time this happened I'd always wonder, why the hell don't people bother to lock the door?

  As if this ever happens by accident.

  Nothing on the circuit happens by accident.

  It could be, on the train somewhere between home and work, you'll open a bathroom door to find some brunette, with her hair pinned up and only her long earrings trembling down alongside her smooth white neck, and she's just sitting inside with the bottom half of her clothes on the floor. Her blouse open with nothing inside but her hands cupped under each breast, her fin­gernails, her lips, her nipples all the same cross between brown and red. Her legs as smooth white as her neck, smooth as a car you could drive two hundred miles an hour, and her hair the same brunette all over, and she licks her lips.

  You slam the door and say, "Sorry."

  And from somewhere deep inside, she says, "Don't be."

  And she still doesn't lock the door. The little sign still saying:

  Vacant.

  How this happens is I used to fly round-trip from the East Coast to Los Angeles when I was still in the medical program at USC. During breaks in the school year. Six times I opened the door on the same yoga redhead naked from the waist down with her skinny legs pulled up cross-legged on the toilet seat, filing her nails with the scratch pad of a matchbook, as if she's trying to catch herself on fire, wearing just a silky blouse knotted over her breasts, and six times she looks down at her freckled pink self with the road crew orange rug around it, then her eyes the same gray as tin metal look up at me, slow, and every time says, "If you don't mind," she says, "I'm in here."

  Six times, I slam the door in her face.

  All I can think to say is, "Don't you speak English?"

  Six times.

  This all takes less than a minute. There isn't time to think.

  But it happens more and more often.

  Some other trip, maybe cruising altitude between Los Angeles and Seattle, you'll open the door on some surfer blond with both tanned hands wrapped around the big purple dog between his legs, and Mr. Kewl shakes the stringy hair off his eyes, points his dog, squeezed shiny wet inside a glossy rubber, he points this straight at you and says, "Hey, man, make the time...."

  It gets to be, every time you go to the bathroom, the little sign says vacant, but it's always somebody.

  Another woman, two knuckles deep and disappearing into herself.

  A different man, his four inches dancing between his thumb and forefinger, primed and ready to cough up the little white sol­diers.

  You begin to wonder, just what do they mean by vacant.

  Even in an empty bathroom, you find the smell of spermicidal foam. The paper towels are always used up. You'll see the print of a bare foot on the bathroom mirror, six feet up, near the top of the mirror, the little arched print of a woman's foot, the five round spots left by her toes, and you'd wonder, what hap­pened here?

  Like with coded public announcements, "The Blue Danube Waltz" or Nurse Flamingo, you wonder, what's going on?

  You wonder, what aren't they telling us?

  You'll see a smear of lipstick on the wall, down almost to the floor, and you can only imagine what was going on. There's the dried white stripes from the last pull-out moment when some­body's dog tossed his white soldiers against the plastic wall.

  Some flights the walls will still be wet to the touch, the mirror fogged. The carpet sticky. The sink drain is sucked full, choked with every color of little curled hair. On the bathroom counter, next to the sink, is the perfect round outline in jelly, contracep­tive jelly and mucus, of where somebody set her diaphragm. Some flights, there's two or three different sizes of perfect round outlines.

  These are the domestic leg of longer flights, transpacific or flights over the pole. Ten-to-sixteen-hour flights. Direct flights, Los Angeles to Paris. Or from anywhere to Sydney.

  My Los Angeles trip number seven, the yoga redhead whips her skirt off the floor and hurries out after me. Still zipping her­self up in the back, she trails me all the way to
my seat and sits next to me, saying, "If your goal is to hurt my feelings, you could give lessons."

  She's got this shining soap opera kind of hairdo, only now her blouse is buttoned with a big floppy bow in the front and every­thing, pinned down with a big jewelry brooch.

  You say it again, "Sorry."

  This is westbound, somewhere north-northwest above At­lanta.

  "Listen," she says, "I work just too hard to take this kind of shit. You hear me?"

  You say, "I'm sorry."

  "I'm on the road three weeks out of every month," she says. "I'm paying for a house I never see . . . soccer camp for my kids ... just the cost of my dad's nursing home is incredible. Don't I deserve something? I'm not bad-looking. The least you can do is not shut the door in my face."

  This is really what she says.

  She ducks down to put her face between me and the maga­zine I'm pretending to read. "Don't make like you don't know," she says. "It's not like sex is anything secret."

  And I say, "Sex?"

  And she puts a hand over her mouth and sits back.

  She says, "Oh, gosh, I'm so sorry. I just thought..." and reaches up to push the little red stewardess button.

  A flight attendant comes past, and the redhead orders two double bourbons.

  I say, "I hope you're planning to drink them both."

  And she says, "Actually, they're both for you."

  This would be my first time. That first time that no subse­quent time is ever as good as.

  "Don't let's fight," she says and gives me her cool white hand. "I'm Tracy."

  A better place this could've happened is a Lockheed TriStar 500 with its strip mall of five large bathrooms isolated in the rear of the tourist-class cabin. Spacious. Soundproof. Behind every­body's back where they can't see who comes and goes.

  Compared to that, you have to wonder what kind of animal designed the Boeing 747-400, where it seems every bathroom opens onto a seat. For any real discretion, you have to trek back to the toilets in the back of the rear tourist cabin. Forget the sin­gle lower-level sidewall bathroom in business class unless you want everybody to know what you've got going.

  It's simple.

  If you're a guy, how it works is you sit in the bathroom with your Uncle Charlie whipped out, you know, the big red panda, and you work him up to parade attention, you know, the full up­right position, and then you just wait in your little plastic room and hope for the best.

  Think of it as fishing.

  If you're Catholic, it's the same feeling as sitting in a confes­sional. The waiting, the release, the redemption.

  Think of it as catch-and-release fishing. What people call "sport fishing."

  The other way how it works is you just open doors until you find something you like. It's the same as the old game show where whatever door you choose, that's the prize you take home. It's the same as the lady and the tiger.

  Behind some doors, it's somebody expensive back from first class for some slumming, a little cabin-class rough trade. Less chance she'll meet anybody she knows. Behind other doors, you'll get some aged beef with his brown tie thrown back over one shoulder, his hairy knees spread against the wall on each side, pet­ting his leathery dead snake and then he says, "Sorry bud, noth­ing personal."

  Those times, you'll be too grossed even to say, "As if."

  Or, "In your dreams, buddy."

  Still, the reward rate is just great enough to keep you pushing your luck.

  The tiny space, the toilet, two hundred strangers just a few inches away, it's so exciting. The lack of room to maneuver, it helps if you're double-jointed. Use your imagination. Some cre­ativity and a few simple stretching exercises and you can be knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door. You'll be amazed how fast the time flies.

  Half the thrill is the challenge. The danger and risk.

  So, it's not the Great American West or the race to the South Pole or being the first man to walk on the moon.

  It's a different kind of space exploration.

  You're mapping a different kind of wilderness. Your own vast interior landscape.

  It's the last frontier to conquer, other people, strangers, the jungle of their arms and legs, hair and skin, the smells and moans that is everybody you haven't done. The great unknowns. The last forest to devastate. Here's everything you've only imagined.

  You're Chris Columbus sailing over the horizon.

  You're the first caveman to risk eating an oyster. Maybe this particular oyster isn't new, but it's new to you.

  Suspended in the nowhere, in the halfway fourteen hours between Heathrow and Jo-burg, you can have ten true-life adven­tures. Twelve if the movie's bad. More if the flight's full, less if there's turbulence. More if you don't mind a guy's mouth doing the job, less if you return to your seat during meal service.

  What's not so great about that first time is, when I'm drunk and first getting bounced on by the redhead, by Tracy, what hap­pens is we hit an air pocket. Me gripping the toilet seat, I drop with the plane, but Tracy's blasted off, champagne popping off me with the rubber still inside, hitting the plastic ceiling with her hair. My trigger goes the same instant, and my gob's suspended in the air, weightless hanging white soldiers in the midway between her still against the ceiling and me still on the can. Then slam, we come back together, her and the rubber, me and my gob, planted back down on me, reassembled pop-beads-style, all one-hundred-plus pounds of her.

  After those kind of good times, it's a wonder I'm not wearing a truss.

  And Tracy laughs and says, "I love it when that happens!"

  After that, just normal turbulence bounces her hair in my face, her nipples against my mouth. Bounces the pearls around her neck. The gold chain around my neck. Juggles my dice in their sack, pulled up tight over the empty bowl.

  Here and there, you pick up little tips to improve your per­formance. Those old French Super Caravelles for example, with their triangular windows and real curtains, they have no first-class toilet, only two in the back of tourist, so you'd best not try any­thing fancy. Your basic Indian tantric position works okay. Both of you standing face to face, the woman lifts one leg along the side of your thigh. You go at it the same as in "splitting the reed" or the classic flanquette. Write your own Kama Sutra. Make stuff up.

  Go ahead. You know you want to.

  This is assuming the two of you are anywhere close to the same height. Otherwise, I can't be blamed for what happens.

  And don't expect to get spoon-fed here. I'm assuming some basic knowledge on your part.

  Even if you're stuck on a Boeing 757—200, even in the tiny forward toilet, you can still manage a modified Chinese position where you're sitting on the toilet and the woman settles onto you facing away.

  Somewhere north-northeast above Little Rock, Tracy tells me, "Pompoir would make this a snap. It's when Albanian women just milk you with their constrictor vaginae muscles."

  They jerk you off with just their insides?

  Tracy says, "Yeah."

  Albanian women?

  "Yeah."

  I say, "Do they have an airline?"

  Something else you learn is when a flight attendant comes knocking, you can wrap things up fast with the Florentine Method, where the woman grips the man around the base and pulls his skin back, tight, to make it more sensitive. This speeds up the process considerably.

  To slow things down, press hard on the underside at the base of the man. Even if this doesn't stop the event, the whole mess will back up into his bladder and save you both a lot of cleanup. Experts call this "Saxonus."

  The redhead and me, in the big rear bathroom of a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 Series 30CF, she shows me the negresse po­sition, where she gets her knees up on either side of the sink and I press my open hands on the back of her pale shoulders.

  Her breath fogging the mirror, her face red from being crouched down, Tracy says, "It's in the Kama Sutra that if a man massages himself with juice from pomegranate, pumpkin, and cucumbe
r seeds, he'll swell up and stay huge for six months."

  This advice has a kind of Cinderella deadline to it.

  She sees the look on my face in the mirror and says, "Cripes, don't take everything so personally."

  Somewhere due north above Dallas, I'm trying to work up more spit while she tells me the way to make a woman never leave you is to cover her head with nettle thorns and monkey dung.

  And I'm, like, no kidding?

  And if you bathe your wife in buffalo milk and cow bile, any man who uses her will become impotent.

  I say, I wouldn't be surprised.

  If a woman soaks a camel bone in marigold juice and puts the liquid on her eyelashes, any man she looks at will become be­witched. In a pinch, you can use peacock, falcon, or vulture bones.

  "Look it up," she says. "It's all in the big book."

  Somewhere south-southeast above Albuquerque, my face coated thick as egg white from licking her, my cheeks rug-burned from her hair, Tracy says how ram's testicles boiled in sugared milk will restore your virility.

  Then she says, "I didn't mean that the way it sounded."

  And I thought I was doing pretty good. Considering two double bourbons, and I've been on my feet for three hours at this point.

  Somewhere south-southwest above Las Vegas, both of us our tired legs flu-shaky, she shows me what the Kama Sutra calls "browsing." Then "sucking the mango." Then "devouring."

  Struggling together in our tight little wipe-clean plastic room, suspended in a time and place where anything goes, this isn't bondage, but it's close.

  Gone are the golden old Lockheed Super Constellations where each port and starboard bathroom was a two-room suite: a dressing room with a separate toilet room behind a door.

  The sweat running down the smooth muscles of her. The two of us bucking together, two perfect machines doing a job we're designed for. Some minutes we're touching with just the sliding part of me and the little edges of her getting raw and pulled out, my shoulders leaning back squared against the plastic wall, the rest of me bucking forward from the waist down. From standing on the floor, Tracy gets one foot up on the edge of the sink and leans on her raised knee.