My Amputations (Fiction collective ;)

by Clarence Major

  He was made deeply lonely by the arrival of carnival time in Nice. Too many full moons, too much promise of Spring. Place Messena with its giant cartoon figures of Saint Nick and his nicky helpers, Popeye, Snoopy, Clark Gable, Roy Rogers, were a bit much. The New Moon had him by the balls. Ash Wednesday got his goat. He had the howling Quadragesima blues. Lent let him down. The First Quarter moon drove him mad till the Second Lent. He walked a lot nights now—just for the lights, the carnival spirit . . . Hard to imagine himself not followed—or that he wasn't in pursuit . . .

  She had a clear triangular face. “Do you speak French?” “Un peu.” She was an exchange student at the University of Nice. About twenty-one. Knew his name. Was that grounds for celebration or the cue to split. This was in his little cafe on rue du Marché. Barbara Ann Reynolds. Would he come up to the Fac and give a reading? Professeur Jean-Claude Bouffault, one of her professors, she felt sure, would support the idea. Then it was suddenly set for the last week of February. Posters in Old Nice announced the forthcoming event. A week after he'd met Barb, this: at three in the morning the phone rang: It was she. She was weeping Little Orphan Annie-tears. The girl was hysterical. Mason told her to calm. She got louder. Screaming: “Come and get me!—” she shouted into the phone. “He's after me! H-he raped me! I'm, mmmm, l-locked in—” (she screamed again). And Mason yelled: “Where are you?” only to get this response: “He's trying to break the door in—” (and another scream, and—) “Oh please, come and get me!” “What's the address? “I don't know—I, uh . . . ” Was this a set-up? For real? A tactic of the Observation Squad? He'd heard about such tactics. If for real, why'd she selected him? Surely she must have friends at the university. He couldn't even call and send the police. Mason pushed the light switch. Light the color of Billy the Kid-gunsmoke filled the room. A crackpot maybe? The feeling and sound of his own heartbeat was that of a scalawag viciously kicking repeatedly—with coldjaw, unbroken pride—a blood-slick fence on a candescent day. But what to do now? Clumsily he stepped into his stiff jeans. The phone rang. Barbara Ann again. “I got away.” Gasping. A high ring in the nightwood of her voice. Echo of a sleeper awaking. It dislocated him. Something fishy? Was she another spy after him? She explained that she'd been picked up by the police while running along, God who could remember the boulevard. Maybe Dubouchage. He saw a full moon swinging loosely above her flight. The cops stopping her. Every shadow was too long . . . When Mason entered the harsh light of the station he knew he was getting in too deeply. He took her away. She was in bad shape: red-eyed. Swollen face: out of focus. Her whole presence warped. The story went this way: she'd been in a bar in rue Droite, the Arab section. Everything was okay for a while with the two American guys and their French friend. Then Jackie went off with the Frenchman leaving her. Well, she and Jackie weren't all that close anyway. But there she was stuck with these two boys she didn't even like. She'd thought the French guy pretty nice. She was drunk. The year the place the season all fell like a landslide down her consciousness. “I made the mistake of trusting that sonofabitch and he raped me.” (The other had gone off alone on foot.) She went into convulsive heavings as she talked. Mason drove with no sense of direction. He felt helpless, hurt by her pain. She'd gone willingly to the American's apartment. She did not expect to be raped. She wept. She'd fought him violently. He overpowered her, pinned her down, entered her like a Boy Scout knife. She knew dimly then that no living organism ever wanted to be penetrated. Mason thought about this and its potential.

  Lately some woman was turning up in his bed in the night. A chain smoker, he smelled her breath. Could the other hotel guests hear her screams, smell her? Despite himself his fingers seemed always to find the warmth and wetness between her thighs. A hog in armor, he climbed the mountains of her, and tasted the snowflakes falling from her peaks. He fizzled fast though. His heart wasn't in it. Resisting the glow of her red light, he endured her kicking—her yelps. Was she making a movie or something? She huffed and clawed. She squirmed and gagged. Bit his neck. Her toenails dug into his cheeks. “Oh, I'm coming—” His sense of flunkum was complete in minutes. Yet he plowed on: an after-midnight farmer watching buzzards circle against the hazy moon. A cagey “impostor,” he hid out in the valley of her chomper. She bit him. “Ouch!” “Sorry.” Then she whipped out a can of chicken soup . . .

  At times he thought she might be Barbara Ann slipping into his room. He knew she wasn't when one night just before orgasm she said, “Ah, I like foreskin. Bless your mother for not having it taken off. Circumcision is a primitive, barbarian practice: it's symbolic castration with the same intent as clitorectomy. The foreskin which is cut away contains a massive supply of nerve-endings. The elimination of these reduce sexual pleasure—” (which sexual pleasure?) “by eighty percent . . . ” and of course listening to this finale finished the old assertative one. Besides, how could Mason be sure . . . ? Maybe such talk had secret coded intentions.

  Mason climbed the darkness, his feet locating steps and at an unlighted door—the only one—he knocked twice. Odd place to hold forth: upstairs over a triperie on rue de Boucherie near rue du Marché. The door opened and Doctor Wongo with bandy legs and protruding teeth seemed to fill it. His thick lips were purple. No extended hand? Lights poured down from irregular ceiling beams. Doctor Wongo made a display of examining the time. His watch sparkled on his wrist. His voice was full of sandblasted rock. “You're two minutes early. Please wait.” Wongo closed the door and Mason felt the suction and the uprush of a draft from below. He kicked the railing. A minute and a half later Doctor Wongo came for him. Inside, Mason's eyes burned. The wall to his left contained two windows and between them were wall-hooks and straps for arms and feet. In the right corner: a large metal tub filled with what appeared to be steaming hot water. Doctor Wongo was grinning at Mason's bewilderment. “I'm approved by the World Health Organization, you know . . . Your problem?” Somehow the question was too clinical with a commercial edge: a red herring. There was detachment here. And mystery. A huge wooden cross graced yet another wall. Blood stains? Yes, but very dry, very old. “Sit down, my son,” said the African, “here, on the floor with me; tell me all about it.” Following Doctor Wongo's lead, Mason sat on one of the large cushions in the middle of the room. Then Mason said, “I see myself trapped in an air-conditioned hotel room somewhere . . . I want to—to . . . Somebody is trying to get a message to me but I'm in a remote part of the world. I'm guilty, like Kafka. The message might have something to do with my release: no separation of body and spirit possible. But I'm not sure . . . My children condemn me. Or did I simply dream that? Or they worship me too much . . . Somehow I'm part of a plot: a scheme: I'm supposed to free a girl held captive. Exactly where, I don't know. I can hear her speak, ‘My parents must not know . . . ’ Army guns are stacked in my closet. I have no idea how they got there. I keep expecting to be arrested and, uh, I've done nothing. I tell you I've done no wrong!” As Mason spoke Doctor Wongo played with the handcuffs suspended from his belt. Then the doctor spoke: “I can nail you to that—” (indicating the cross) “or there—you can experience The Saint Sebastian Redemptive Method.” He gestured toward the straps. “There's another method: you get into a tomb and I close you in: it's called The Martyr Saving Plan. That tub is our little swim: it's The Guilt Absorption Baptism. Downstairs in the cave we have the furnace for severe cases.” Doctor Wongo grinned. “It's very hot . . . I'd suggest you take the Saint Sebastian route. Why? Because the arrows are tiny and the sting not so great. The scars vanish quickly. Nail marks from the MSP wouldn't.” Mason was suspicious. He knew Doctor Wongo could see his mood. The doctor held up a firm hand. He blew his whistle. “Please. Undress.” Mason hesitated, started to speak but Wongo beat him. “You've used up all your rope. The System has very highly developed ways of getting the Right Angle on an Instrument. If you want release from it and yourself you must obey. This is the right place. There's no army guns in my closet: only peace and love. Undress.” Stripped, Mason
stood before the seated guru. Wongo's face changed as he peered sternly at the emblem branded on Mason's chest. “You poor boy you.” Doctor Wongo wagged his head in mock despair. “Take the Saint Sebastian. I firmly recommend it.” To rebel along traditional lines? Rubbish! Mason shook his head no. He'd go for the tub. Water. Warmth. Womb stuff. Pleasure? “It's very hot, son. But if that's what you want . . . ”

  Spring was a gentle wrestler holding the body of Nice in an agonizing embrace. Then he made her kiss the canvas. The sky cleared. Mason's first lecture for IHICE would take place the last week of April, two weeks away, at The American College in Paris. What was this intense windstorm blowing inside? . . . Alpes-Maritimes Agency d'Immobilieres'd located a furnished three room apartment for him up on the old Roman Road, Route de Bellet. He could move in the first of May . . . He'd bought a lemon: a Simca, new and blue and difficult. Parking was a hassle . . . The morning he started driving toward Paris he felt he was in a struggle buggy about to fall apart. Looseness always bothered him. By the time he reached Aix he was cursing himself for not having gotten the Renault. Then just north of the view of Mont Sainte Victoire, as he felt the geometry of Cezanne's landscape, in a BMW speeding South, on the other side, he was sure he saw—would you believe?—Edith Levine: in the passenger seat. The guy driving looked Italian or French. Small world? Mason toyed with the idea of exiting and following her—just to see but the next exit was twenty minutes later and by then, well, forget it. He stopped at Arles. The outlying areas, farmland, hadn't changed since that strange, tormented painter cut off his ear here, in, was it 1888. The city itself was strictly tourist: complete with sidewalk cafes, the type with metal chairs and tables. The drawbridge no longer existed but they'd built a replica. The house he briefly shared with that sailor of the South Sea Islands was bombed during Hitler's efforts to construct his own Roman Empire. Roman ruins in the old center. The postman and his wife were not in sight. The lamplighted cafe . . . ? The glare of the lighted billiards table. Mason spent the night here—not wanting to push too hard through the late afternoon and early night: and risk not finding a room. He checked into a hotel called Hotel Malchance. He didn't pay any attention. He was tired. Huge succulent plants lined the stairway up to the second floor where he had a room at the end of the hall. After a shower he lay on the bed. Edith . . . in France? Edith: twenty-one-year-old Jewish Princess from Brooklyn. Calling her a princess was like somebody calling him a nigger. At least Princess was capitalized. Graduated with a bachelor's in sociology from City. She'd irregular, crooked ways even back in sixty-seven: lifting money from his wallet, selling dope to pay back university loans. He always suspected she sold a little ass once in awhile. Gave away a lot, too. In that car today she was dressed to kill: decked with tons of jewels. A new, upswept hairdo. Back in the old days she was a rags-and-feather hippie. Edith had blown flower petal in cops' faces while dancing around them with other hippies in a mad frenzy of corolla and incantations. She had inbred dignity but she was a fink. Even stole from her analyst. But that wasn't so bad ’cause he stole from her too: a huge waste of her father's money. A chronic liar, she used to fake orgasm—but was unable to let herself go: to go meant a loss of control—the fucking abyss, in all its irrecoverable large-capacity garbage bag full of anal-tight nothingness. Not coming was a defense: a fortress against the brain-shit of the world. She held back except once when she asked him to spank her. She lay across his lap and he whacked her like her dad used to do: she produced, out of her twat, one drop of perfume—smelled like Evening in Paris or Sunrise in Lower Manhattan. He now closed his eyes. Lying prone. Release. He could see her big cayenne-pink hindquarters now, the curl of light pubic hair there at the crack. When his palm struck the flesh there was bounce-back shudders from the hip flash. These were not hard. Not hard enough for her taste. He? He didn't especially dislike it but it was boring: did nothing for his erection. He never did it again and they grew farther apart sexually: she had her own life, he had his. And they had only some vague thing together. Once at a dance party Edith almost got fucked against her will. She only wanted to flirt but the yellow nigger she was belly rubbing with twirled her away off the dance floor, danced her into a dark room from which she shot distressed and yelping five minutes later. Mason was pissed at her stupidity and that night they fought. But she was a smart cookie: she knew the problems of America and could talk them in scientific terms. Her command of higher math awed Mason. She knew changing birth rates by religion; crime rates by ethnic groups; death rates, income rates, you name it. Medians, scales, variables. She used, in their daily life, the jargon: and after a while Mason felt like he had cabin fever . . . There was the time her father came over. They'd been together a year. Mason was nervous before his arrival: rare is the white man who accepts the black mate of his daughter. Edith's father, kicked out of the family, now ran a fruit vending business up in the Bronx on Pinkney Avenue for his cousin. The old guy got a lot of colored customers from the Boston Road area (“I know colored real well—they buy from me . . . ”) buying his rotten citric “wares”—so said Edith. Maybe Edith was a cold fish and had no integrity but she did write to Mason once while he was in the joint. That was more than he could say for, well, a lot of so-called compassionate friends. When he got out he and Edith had dinner together at Ratner's on First—where the waiters (very old Jewish guys) gave them dirty looks. They knew. Her pie had a huge green dead fly stuck in its whipped cream. Well, you could say old guys had bad eyesight, but . . . Such events gave Mason jungle fever. There were times when they were left too long waiting for service in places where the waiters weren't busy. She once said, “New York Jews have some nerve hating Black people: a defenseless group . . . after the Jewish experience . . . ” As a child she'd been to Israel with her parents. Her Brooklyn high school teacher “made” her “lecture” on it: the one thing she wanted to say she never said. She went around for weeks telling her friends she was an altruist—not a Jew. Edith was Edith. There was no figleaf covering her crotch: even if she couldn't come. Judaism sort of embarrassed her. And she had no intention of becoming a Christian. She liked Mason because, she said, he was gentle and immoral, beyond sin, beyond crime; existential. Plus he liked women. When he fell asleep that night in Arles he found himself not in Van Gogh's house but in Cezanne's: upstairs in the place on the hillside in Aix-en-Provence. Cezanne, in a stained suit—complete with vest—was sitting on a stool, before a canvas. He held his pallet with thumb and fingers of the left hand. His sharp eyes darted from the long, bored body of his son, slouched in a chair, to the half finished painting of him, on the easel. Mason left Cezanne to work. Down the hall and stairway, out into the garden. Skylight was rare here: the trees were thick and close together: it was like having a deliberate roof. He walked peacefully under the shelter.

  It might be safe over here to quietly assume his “rightful” identity again. Do a few readings for the bread, which he needed already. Signard, head of the International Humanities Institute for Cultural Exchange's Speakers' Bureau had already expressed interest in response to his, Mason's letter from Nice. Hence this trip . . . Not likely to bump into hellcat Brad? or agents from MRF? . . . But surely that woman was Edith!

  Paris, Paris! IHICE kept a low-profile: entrance in a court-way (not visible from street) of an old apartment building across the street from the famed cemetery called Père Lachaise. After Signard, a quirky little man, gave Mason an advanced check and his itinerary (he'd read at the University of Paris to a class of grad students studying contemporary American fiction) the booking agent walked out onto Avenue Gambetta with Mason and expressed his delight in the beautiful weather. He also told Mason that the university people would wine and dine him either before or after the event. Mason watched him talk. Signard twitched as he reached for Mason's hand. At that moment another man approached. Signard showed signs of recognition, if not delight. The guy looked familiar to Mason. Very! The fact got his fear churning again. Signard made a nervous leap, yanking the two�
�Mason and the new-arriver—together; meanwhile, forcing their hands together and introducing them at the same time. Mister Familiar's name was Alm Harr Fawond. Arab? But . . . the American accent? Anyway, the moment lasted less than the time it takes a fly to tune his legs. Then Mason was on his way, with not a second thought.