The Towers of Babylon

by Michelle Kaeser

  “Mm,” she says.

  She does like it. She likes when their positions become acrobatic, testing her flexibility and finding it intact. He has a tendency to showboat with these preliminary positions, but she doesn’t mind obliging, so long as she eventually finds her way on top for the finish. That’s when she becomes demanding and decisive because that’s when she can best get off.

  It’s maybe ten minutes before she finds herself in charge and on top. She closes her eyes and focuses on the exquisite pressure building inside her. When she’s this close to an orgasm, it’s almost possible to forget about Yannick altogether, in a way she never quite manages with Elliott. Sex with her husband is too cluttered with emotion—or it used to be, when he still bothered to fuck her. She could never empty out her head with him. And it’s empty-headedness that she likes best. The pure physicality of body against body. The freedom of abandoning the mental, succumbing to the physical: it’s fundamentally athletic.

  When the pressure reaches an absolute maximum, she pushes off him to allow the flood of her orgasm to expel from her cunt, carrying along with it all thoughts in her head. She’s only faintly aware of things in the following minutes, of the mess she made on the towel beneath them, which they put there for this very purpose, and of him re-entering her, and pumping fast, and saying, “Oh god, here it is, here it is!”

  And then there it goes. But not before he pulls out, as she’s instructed him to do, because, although she’s on the pill, she’s adamant that coming inside of her is a strictly marital privilege, reserved only for Elliott, as though she might some day be able to point to this oh-so-faint line she’s drawn in the sand and save herself from the severest of judgments.

  Yannick aims for the towel, but misses and hits the sheets instead, which someone else will strip and clean, which she always feels bad about.

  She lies on her stomach. He rests a hand on her ass cheek.

  “That was really fucking hot,” he says.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  They relax like this on the bed for a minute or two before the alarm on his phone goes off. He always sets an alarm, which usually only sounds once they’re done, but sometimes happens to go off right in the middle of things, just as they’re really delving into it, and the hanging threat of that alarm gives their meetings the peculiar feel of a therapy session, like at any time, no matter what might be transpiring at that moment, what is being exposed, they’re liable to be interrupted by the gentle, but conclusive ding-ding, time’s up.

  Obedient to the alarm, Yannick pops out of the bed and into the shower, grabbing soap from his bag along the way. He brings his own soap to the hotel, a familiar scent from home, so that Karen won’t sniff out the affair. It’s a smart idea, he’s smart about things, but Louise foregoes this precaution. No point. Elliott doesn’t pay enough attention to her.

  While Yannick showers, Louise lies still, reflecting on the lingering effects of her orgasm. Her limbs feel drained, but heavy. No part of her moves or shifts or even twitches, because no part of her, not a shoulder, an arm, or a finger, registers anything less than perfect comfort. Her breathing is slow. She’s tired, almost exhausted. Her orgasms used to be different. Clitoral. More invigorating, but limited to the higher registers. Melody orgasms, she thinks of them. But these vaginal orgasms, these are bass orgasms, these make her feel like her body is tuned to some primal vibration, like she’s in chorus with the low hum of chanting monks.

  It’s a development she’s pleased with on the whole. Though she read once that the vaginal orgasm is a sign of maturity, which means of aging, which means of death. Her body is changing, like it’s getting ready for something. For illness? For collapse? Her left leg twitches. Then her arm. And just like that, a noticeable and familiar discomfort fans out across her body. Sickness and early death have always preoccupied her, but the preoccupation has been worse lately, transformed into an obsessive dread. It’s her upcoming birthday, that’s what’s doing it. Her thirty-third. That beacon of terror draws nearer and nearer, looking ever more horrifying the closer it gets. In a little over a week she’ll be thirty-three, a bad age to be, the absolute worst age for her to be, because thirty-three was the age at which Mother Mai died. And Louise, a dead ringer for her dead mother, has always in some shadowy part of her soul believed—known—that she will not make it past that benchmark either.

  Yannick bounds out of the bathroom, moving with hyper-efficiency. He yanks on his boxers and suit pants and breezes into his button-down shirt. “Gotta go,” he says, almost apologetically, as though she has ever once complained about his abrupt departures. “It’s this vinegar deal. We’re trying to sell off this vinegar company. It’s been one headache after another.”

  “I thought you were selling a windows company. A windows manufacturer.”

  That’s what he told her last time they met. She’s sure she remembers windows.

  “No, we’re buying the windows company. Or looking to. We’re working out a leveraged buyout with them. Separate headache.”

  “Hm.”

  “But we’re selling the vinegar company. And that’s the real fucking nightmare. Because their guys are being assholes.”

  “Hm.”

  “Incompetent assholes.”

  Yannick leans over her and kisses her, hard, on the mouth, tugging on her lips, and then he’s gone. After her own shower, she stands naked in front of the bathroom mirror, studying herself, the breasts especially. Does everything look okay? As it always has? For now, maybe. But things deteriorate quickly. Healthy one month, sick the next, dead the month after that. That’s how it went with Mother Mai, so why wouldn’t it be the same for her? Why wouldn’t the time bomb in Mai’s breast tissue have passed into Louise’s genetic makeup? That bomb must be locked inside her cells right now, ticking, ticking, ticking, just waiting for the trigger—the biological age, the particular palindromic signal—that will set off the internal explosion.

  2

  THE ROOF OF St. Michael’s Cathedral is newly hand-painted, twilight blue with 18,000 gold-leafed stars. A solicitous middle-aged woman explained about the stars (along with a thousand other details of the recent restoration) to Louise after her second appearance at the noon-hour Mass. “You can buy the stars,” the woman explained upon catching Louise staring up at the ceiling, open-mouthed and dead-eyed. “Well … claim them. By making a donation.” Then, with a finger waving into the vacuum above them: “Mm … that one there. No, no, wait … that one. That one’s mine. So you can’t have that one.”

  Attending these masses is another thing Louise does in secret. Because isn’t it foolish, even passé, to be a true believer? Her submission, however minimal, to the Church comes with a brick-load of embarrassment. But the Catholic cathedral, located a few blocks from her office, kept popping up on her lunch hour meanders until one day, earlier in the summer, she meandered right in through the open doors, desperate for any kind of salvation from the horror of another ordinary workday.

  Today’s priest is young and fit, with excellent posture, and he is exuberant in his reading of the scripture, all of which makes it easier for Louise to pay attention. But it does nothing to bring clarity to the content.

  “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field,” reads the priest with a friendly voice that bounces around the sparsely populated pews.

  None of the readings ever make sense to Louise, but the parables are among the worst offenders. She has not comprehensively understood a single one of them, not even with the guidance of the priests. The parables come and go too quickly. Before she can even start to grapple with one, Jesus has already zipped on to a fresh metaphor that is similarly impossible to understand. It’s shoddy communication. Louise would be fired if she ever wrote copy like this.

  “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold al
l that he had and bought it.”

  But she tries very hard to understand the readings, because there must be something to all of this. Thousands of years of theological scholarship must have turned up a few nuggets of metaphysical wisdom. And with her death just about imminent now, she has started to worry about the Big Questions, about the moral reckoning that might soon take place. Because if there is a grand accounting at the bitter end, some metric used to measure the worth of one’s life, she’s pretty sure that, as things stand, she’ll come up short. Way short. And it’s getting late to make up that ground.

  But despite a rapt attention to the readings and ensuing sermon, Louise once again understands almost nothing. Soon she tilts her head back to study the stars on the ceiling, which remind her of the glow-in-the-dark stars in her childhood bedroom. When the mass eventually moves into quiet prayer, sitting in these pews is almost like being in a planetarium. In fact, had the city’s planetarium not closed years ago, she might well have wound up there instead, finding comfort in her own complete cosmic insignificance rather than in the murky promises of the Church.

  WHEN LOUISE EMERGES from the cathedral to face the brutal sensory assault of the city centre, she has to force her feet back toward the office tower. But with each step it becomes more apparent that she simply can’t go back to work today. The thought of returning to the office dweebs and the passive-aggressive emails and the meetings and meetings and meetings, it all prompts an acute queasiness.

  This career in marketing—billboard space in particular—is wreaking havoc on her system. She spends her days working up ways to advertise advertising space, doing her part in the mass effort to push increasingly susceptible populations into buying shit they don’t need. It’s a career of coercion and Louise excels at it. But it’s making her nauseous.

  “Hey Nicky, it’s Lou,” she says into her phone, speaking in her flat workplace affect. “Listen, I’m not feeling well. I just threw up in an alley.” Only a mild exaggeration.

  “Oh god. Well … are you all right?”

  “I might have caught a bug.” This is the most effective lie, because Pregnant Nicky is terrified of contagion.

  “Okay, Lou. You just go home, all right? Don’t come back in today.”

  “Are you sure, Nicky? I might be able to tough it out.”

  “No no. No, absolutely not. I’ll cover for you. But if you can, Lou, at least try to finish the ABPP report? Rob doesn’t want to let the grass grow long on this one.”

  “Mm, I mean, I’ll try. But he’s asking for fairly in-depth analysis. And honestly … is this even our department’s responsibility?” Louise says, even though she finished the Audio Billboard Pilot Project report days ago.

  “I’m with you, Lou. He’s not being completely reasonable. But he’s getting a lot of pressure from higher up. And that’s cascading down. Just see what you can do, okay?”

  “Sure, I’ll try to crank something out.”

  3

  ALTHOUGH IT’S ELLIOTT’S turn to cook dinner, Louise is seasoning the chicken breasts and minding the rice pot, because Elliott is “working” tonight.

  “I’m not saying I won’t do it,” he told her when he got home from the framing shop he manages. “I’m just saying I’ll do it later. We’ll eat late. Spanish-style, my senorita. You’ll love it.”

  “But I’m hungry now. I put in a long day.”

  “Eat a banana,” he said and shrugged, then brushed his lips across her cheek—not enough effort for an actual pucker—and vanished into the study to edit his latest batch of wedding photographs, a one-time weekend hobby that has metastasized into something more like a career. He was supposed to be a photojournalist, that’s who he was when she met him. He documented what was going on the world: the corruptions and injustices and arbitrary sufferings. He was passionate about that work. He told her once he didn’t think he could change the world—that was a naïve expectation—but that at the very least he could bear witness to the grief of the abject. That’s what he said: “the grief of the abject.” But weddings, it turns out, pay more.

  She smothers the chicken breasts with turmeric powder, because turmeric is a superfood. Remarkable antioxidant properties. This turmeric, though, is ancient—the tin dented, the label flaking off. There’s no scent left at all. Her father’s turmeric. Everything in this old kitchen belonged to her father—and to Mother Mai—every dish, utensil, spice jar, and oven mitt occupying the same spot it did thirty years ago, the entire set-up neatly ossified in place.

  With the chicken in the oven and nothing else to do, nobody to talk to, a flurry of hypochondriacal thoughts zip through Louise’s head. She pings into and out of the living room, dining room, foyer, kitchen. Her left eye keeps twitching, the bottom lid. And she’s light-headed again, the world teetering around her.

  But she skips her anti-anxiety pills tonight. She only got them after her fourth panic attack landed her in a doctor’s office—easier to accept prescriptions than put up a fight. But she doesn’t like the Xanax. And she doesn’t like the clonazepam. Brutal side effects, especially on the libido. The pills obliterated her interest in the one activity she still wholeheartedly enjoys. Besides, there’s no defect in her brain. This chronic anxiety is induced by moral failing, not mental illness. She should be anxious—because there’s not a single thing she can point to in her little life that will commend her to a Great Beyond.

  Elliott. She used to think he would serve as her something Good. For hours and hours she’d listen to him recount the horrific shit he’d seen abroad. He’d rail on and on about, say, the depths of poverty in Bangladesh, where he’d spent a lot of time before they met; he’d rant about the exploitation of that country’s factory workers. And Louise thought he was a rare man doing something of actual use and importance—really wrestling with the horrors of this chaotic world. She thought loving him, supporting him would be enough to redeem her in some way. But there’s no rub-off redemption from a wedding photographer.

  Calm down, calm calm calm. Sweat is pouring from her body. She steps outside to catch her breath, but the night is humid. No oxygen anywhere. She reminds herself that the dread seeping outward from the centre of her chest is familiar. Normal, almost. It always happens around sundown, once the day has ended and the new one threatens to begin. It’s the dread of the inevitable return to work. It’ll pass. Once she’s smoked her evening joint. If she can just light it. Come on, come on, steady. Her hands are so jittery it takes three tries before the joint catches.

  In the depths of the dark yard, beyond the low fence: a shadow, moving. What? What is it? An apparition? Mother Mai used to see things and hear things—being-type things—in the weeks before she died. She kept telling Louise to “look, look right there! Do you see them, do you hear them?” Neither Louise nor her father had any idea what Mai was talking about when she implored them to look and listen. The cancer had spread to her head by the end and they took irregularities in her behaviour to be the delusions of a damaged brain.

  But something is definitely lurking in the yard. The shape eludes focus, but it is there. Looming. Stalking. Louise is locked rigid on the top step.

  Her phone erupts. In fits and jerks on the deck.

  “Fuck! Jesus!”

  Her hand grasps at her heart thrashing against her ribs. She inhales, wheezing.

  “My boobs, Lou!” wails Joly’s high, thin voice over the phone.

  “What?”

  “My boobs. Are huge. They’ve never been this big before. Not even that year I was fat. And last night … I felt the baby moving.”

  “You’re eight weeks. You can’t feel a baby at eight weeks.”

  “I swear I could. I felt her foot.”

  “It probably doesn’t even have a proper foot yet.”

  Emboldened by an ally on the phone, Louise ventures toward the back of the yard, from where she can now hear a low rustle. Quiet in her approach, light on her toes, she spots the source: a deer, just a deer. She gets within a few met
res of the animal before it jerks its head and disappears between the trunks of the maple trees, and Louise is left alone at the very back of the yard.

  “Then her head!” screams Joly. “I felt something, Lou. What if I left it too long? It’s not right to abort her when I can already feel her moving!”

  “But you can’t. That’s impossible.” Louise puts out the joint, half-finished, on the fence post. There’s silence on the other end of the line. “Listen to me, Joly. That’s gas. Or shit. It’s definitely not the tiny collection of cells in your uterus that will be gone in a few days.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Eight weeks. It’s science.”

  “I read that it hurts. It’s gonna be terrible, isn’t it? I’m not good with pain.”

  “It’ll be fine,” Louise lies. “You won’t even remember it.”

  She lingers by the fence, gazing into the dark pitch of the forest. She tries to internalize the shadowy quiet of nature, maybe find some peace in it, a calming influence, but nothing works.

  LOUISE HAS PROMISED herself never to follow Elliott into his office, seeking him out like a puppy wanting a pat on the head, but it’s a promise she has broken a thousand times. Tonight is no exception.

  Taking a few steps into the office, she glances over his shoulder at the photograph on the monitor, a happy couple mid-kiss at the altar. Directly above them, in the stained glass windows, hangs Jesus, mid-crucifixion. Elliott has set the shot so that the sacrificed saviour’s feet sit right above the couple’s kissing heads, while the two thieves, bony-kneed, edge the frame. She hopes Elliott has done this on purpose, an ironic statement on wedded bliss.

  “Interesting shot,” she says.

  “Needs tweaking,” he says.

  “I like Jesus’s face. Real fun and festive. Good wedding stuff.”

  Elliott turns his pale boyish face toward her. Six years older, but not aging nearly as noticeably as she is. No misery has yet inscribed itself on his face. Only a few well-placed wrinkles around the eyes and forehead that chisel a hint of gravity into his youthful features. He’s still beautiful. “It needs work.”