Butterfly Skin

by Sergey Kuznetsov

  The article caught Ksenia’s eyes that morning when, after washing the blood off her slashed thighs – not for the last time, alas – she decided to go out into the city, walk as far as the nearest street stall and buy something to eat. Too bad, she hardly had any money left at all – she hadn’t wanted to take any from Mom, she’d been sure she was going to get her pay, but now it was screw you, Ksenichka, no pay for you. It turned out that during the week when she hadn’t left the building, a kiosk selling books and tabloid newspapers had appeared where the vegetable stall used to be. Ksenia bought Megalopolis-Express because one of her mother’s guests had said it was the only newspaper that was possible to read. And anyway, the titles of the others didn’t mean anything to her. When she reached a shop, Ksenia bought a bagful of food, went back home and sat down to read, dropping sour cream on the newspaper from her tomato salad. The photos of semi-naked girls were definitely only improved by these white and pink blotches.

  The article was included in the “Confessions” section, right smack between the replies to readers’ questions (“Dear editor, please tell me if it is possible to get pregnant from oral sex…”) and stories about a sect of Satanists who were despoiling graves outside Peter. Ksenia’s attention was caught by the sentence in a frame at the centre of the page: “I cut myself with a knife, confesses M-E correspondent Maya Lvova.” Ksenia vaguely remembered that Maya Lvova specialized in intimate stores about her sex life – two years earlier Ksenia and Vika and Marina had had lively discussions about Maya’s reminiscences of how she was deflowered – obviously in anticipation of their own defloration. This time Maya Lvova wrote in her typical ornately explicit style about how a year earlier she had suffered severe depression as a result of the death of her mother and other events of a personal nature. “I hadn’t gone out for a month,” wrote the correspondent, “I blamed myself for everything that had happened. So great was my despair that I attempted to end my life, inflicting clumsy cuts on myself with a kitchen knife.” However, a faithful friend was on hand to take the failed suicide off to her dacha, where Maya made the acquaintance of a handsome and masterful man not much older than herself. The entire tone of Maya’s article made it clear that this man was a rather well-known individual and so she could not give his name, preferring – entirely in keeping with the style of the newspaper – the euphemism “my demon.” “On our first night,” she continued, “I simply could not become aroused. Yes, I desired him insanely, but it was as if my body had died! And then my demon turned me over onto my stomach and slapped me several times on my buttocks, which were quivering in anticipation.” Later, when she re-read this article. Ksenia always giggled at this point, imagining Maya Lvova’s fat thighs quaking like jellied meat on a wobbly table. However, in the summer of 1995 Ksenia was in no mood for merriment, and she read all the way through to the happy end in a single breath (“…can be bought in certain sex shops in Moscow, but my demon prefers to import them from abroad.”) Carefully lowering an unfinished tomato onto her plate. Ksenia dialed Marina’s number, trying to contain the thrill of arousal or, as Maya Lvova would have said – the quiver of anticipation.

  That was how Ksenia met Nikita, her first dominant lover – and he taught Ksenia most of what she still likes in bed now. Despite all the men Ksenia has had since then, Nikita is still her first, in a class of his own. Their affair only lasted six months: then Nikita went away to America, where he is now quite well known in the BDSM community of San Francisco. Ksenia had to find others who were capable of satisfying the appetite for submission and physical pain that had suddenly awoken within her. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth the effort.

  “For me, ordinary sex is like beer for someone who likes vodka,” she explained to Marina. “It relaxes you, it’s a pleasant drink at negotiations or with lunch. It’s convenient, as a matter of fact. And it’s the same with sex: after a good vanilla lover I feel really relaxed. If I like the man, I enjoy having him near me – you know, I like the male body in general – but all that’s not what I’m talking about at all. When they beat me, put me on my knees, hurt me or humiliate me, the world goes away. The space around me seems to curl up, even before I come – and in cases like that I can come for a very long time – well anyway, almost immediately I’m in a different place. Maybe I’m liberated from my body, I don’t know. In the specialist literature it’s called subspace, meaning ‘submission space’ as far as can tell from the descriptions. I guess for me the difference between vanilla sex and play sex is the same as it is for you between kissing and the normal sexual act. You like to kiss, but you’re hardly willing to give up the pleasure you get from screwing.”

  “I read somewhere,” replied Marina, “that highly successful businesswomen have leanings like that. They have to keep everything under control at work, but they let themselves go in bed.”

  “Probably,” said Ksenia, who still wasn’t a successful businesswoman then, and shrugged her skinny shoulders. “Maybe. But I think there’s more to it than that.”

  She made no secret of her own leanings, but several sad experiences had taught her that men get frightened when they find themselves in bed with a girl for the first time and, in addition to a condom, they are offered a selection of two whips, handcuffs, lashes, a leather paddle, a riding crop and nipple clamps linked together by a frivolous little silver chain. Some instances were positively tragi-comic. Once at a party at a club Ksenia met a superbly built young guy with blond hair, a genuine blue-eyed Slavic folk-epic hero. And his name was something ending in “slav,” just as it ought to be, maybe Svyatoslav or Miroslav. He was a friend of a distant acquaintances of Ksenia, and after countless tequilas with lime and salt, they caught a taxi and went tearing off to Ksenia’s place, because it turned out that Stanislav, aka Rostislav, lived with his mom and dad. Everything would have been fine, but along the way the youthful hero bit Ksenia on the neck, hugged her so hard that her bones cracked and, in addition, jabbed his cigarette into her knee, as if by chance. If not for the tequila, she might have realized that Vyacheslav, aka Mstislav, simply didn’t have very good control of his arms and legs, but Ksenia, who hadn’t had a BDSM lover for two months, became so aroused that they were barely even inside the apartment before she started eagerly demonstrating her new acquisitions.

  “What’s that?” asked Slava, gaping at Ksenia with his astonished blue eyes.

  “This is a riding crop,” said Ksenia, “and this is a lash. They’re used for beating women, as you know.”

  The folk-hero lover reacted unexpectedly: his eyes glazed over and he slumped to his knees from his full heroic height, disgorging onto the linoleum three limes and one squid salad – that is, all his solid refreshments for the evening. Ksenia spent the rest of the night feeding the epic hero tea and listening to confused apologies. When it was nearly morning her maternal instincts got the better of her, she stroked Slava’s hair, led him into the bedroom, undressed him and five minutes later, trying hard not to hit a false note, she moaned that he was a wonderful lover. Since neither of them had slept all night and Ksenia didn’t even have the strength to moan properly, she wasn’t really hoping to deceive him, but even so, she felt she had done enough to heal the wound inflicted on his sensitive male soul. Then she said it was time for her to go to work, and led her failed lover to the subway by the most tangled route possible so that when he finally sobered up, he would never be able to find the way back to her apartment. Naturally, she gave him a false phone number, with one digit changed, as she always did in such cases. When she phoned Marina that evening, she summed up: “Maybe it was the worst sex in my life, but it’s one of the funniest stories.”

  So now, bearing in mind her bitter experience, Ksenia is in no hurry to involve Alexei in her semi-taboo games. Certainly, she does leave a leather paddle or a cat-o’-nine-tails lying around in conspicuous places, but Alexei’s indifferent glance skims over them and he probably takes them for part of the interior design. They get together every two weeks, Alexei ap
ologizes to Ksenia because he can’t manage it more often, but she doesn’t tell him she wouldn’t agree to more often anyway. Combining a light affair like this with work has proved to be rather convenient: as a manager she would actually say that Alexei has started working better. Though maybe the reason for that is the success of their project: the man is thirty years old, after all, and so far he has nothing much to be proud of.

  After throwing the papers in the basket and rearranging the folders, Ksenia sits down on her chair again. In the bottom corner of the monitor the ICQ icon is blinking – someone once wittily dubbed it “a flower on the grave of the working day.” Ksenia clicks on the yellow rectangle and a message appears: “Hi!”

  “Hi,” Ksenia answers and dives into the user’s details.

  No first name or surname, just the nick “alien,” written in English – highly original – and the only information given is the sex – male. In the “About” section there’s a flashy text in English that looks like the introduction for some character in a computer game: “I’m a monster in your chest. I’m a really nasty one. And in a few hours, I’m gonna burst my way through your ribcage and you’re gonna die. Any questions?”

  “Do we know each other?” asks Ksenia.

  “No,” the other person replies, “but that can be fixed, can’t it?”

  Ksenia sighs. From time to time bored men come knocking at her ICQ door, wanting either to flirt or just chat. As a rule it only takes a few lines of conversation before she consigns them to the eternal oblivion of “ignore.”

  “I’m not sure I want to fix it,” she replies hostilely.

  Ksenia wonders if this one will start writing flirtatious nonsense like: “Ah, why are you so grumpy, darling?”

  “All right,” says the man, “let’s not introduce ourselves. Let’s just talk.”

  “What about?”

  “What should people who don’t know each other and are never going to see each other talk about? Their most intimate secrets, of course. So tell me, Ksenia, what is your most cherished secret desire?”

  Ksenia looks at the Samsung liquid crystal display monitor, at the tube of metal mesh with two pens and three pencils standing in it, at the neat piles of folders and papers. Career, money, success? You could hardly call those desires secret, and in any case, they’re not even desires – they’re the inevitable future or, rather, a premonition of the future. For a second Ksenia’s thin hands hover motionless above the ergonomic keyboard.

  “I’m an ordinary girl,” she types. “I want to find a man who will understand me and make me happy.”

  27

  I OFTEN THINK ABOUT WHY THIS HAPPENED TO ME. There are many theories explaining why people lure solitary girls into their basements, torture them for days and then kill them.

  Of course, there are simply the creeps who the girls won’t put out for, or who are afraid they won’t put out, vicious little boys ready to break a beautiful toy just because it doesn’t belong to them. I don’t think that’s really my case.

  And they like to talk about homosexuals, victims of repressed sexuality who hate women or are afraid of them. These men obviously had problems with their mother and father, as well as with society in general, Article 121 of the Soviet Criminal Code, jokes about fags, a spacious closet with a tenth of the male population inside it. I don’t think that’s me either.

  I would actually like to be gay, for some reason they find it easier to talk about pain and love in the same sentence. I once read a story in which two boys in love are standing with their eyes closed on the shore of the ocean and they suddenly hear the screams of a dolphin that has been cast up on the shore, and the local lads are amusing themselves by jabbing it with pitchforks. And it is clear to the reader that those screams have an absolutely direct connection to their love. If I could write a story like that, I wouldn’t need to kill.

  And then there are the schizophrenics, God’s own fools, to whom He speaks, or the Devil does – some Sam, Beelzebub or Belial. In Russia I guess they could hear the voices of Stalin or Hitler. After all, even Chikatilo wrote that he felt he was a partisan. Anyway, they hear voices that order them to kill – and that’s definitely not about me.

  I haven’t heard any voice, neither God nor the Devil have spoken to me, nobody has given me any messages. I am here completely alone. I think that if someone did speak, God or the Devil, no matter who, I wouldn’t feel so lonely and I wouldn’t need to kill.

  I’ve read Stanislav Grof, the Czech psychologist, who cleared off to California at the right time and experimented with LSD and special breathing techniques. He believes there are four perinatal matrices that determine a person’s life via the process of birth. And the third matrix, the journey through the birth canal, is what engenders serial killers and sadists. I was so intrigued that I even asked my mother how it all happened, and whether that stage was the most difficult for me. I can’t be sure that she really does remember but, as far as she can recall, it was just an ordinary birth, nothing that surprised the doctors. So this isn’t my story either.

  I have conscientiously read the American books, taking great care to buy them abroad and not attract the attention of the postal service or some department at Amazon.com that analyzes orders. They all say the same thing: repressed sexuality, child abuse, parental cruelty. To be quite honest, I’d only be happy if I knew my father raped me at the age of five in a drunken fit or my mother used to make me watch as she was screwed by the clients from whom she earned the money for a bottle of vodka or a shot of heroin. It would be a real stroke of luck if my brother had been eaten during the famine years, as Chikatilo’s brother was.

  I even invented a past like this for myself, false memories masking goodness only knows what. Yes, as a boy I certainly had a rich imagination. I had many fantasies – but in reality I had a happy childhood. I would prefer it to be the other way round – that would mean I’ve simply been unlucky. Shit happens, as the Americans say. I’ve been unlucky, but the world’s just fine, I can leave the damned newspapers and their readers in peace, let them live as they like.

  If I knew this was just my problem, I’d go to an analyst and I wouldn’t need to kill.

  If I went to an analyst, I would ask him just one question: why do I always kill girls? Why no men or boys? If I killed boys I could say, like John Wayne Gacy, that they are all me. I would quote Denis Nilsen, who said: “I always killed myself, but it was always someone else that died.”

  But I don’t kill men, I don’t touch people who are like me. I kill women and girls who are still very young. Why them? Yes, of course, I sleep with them, they arouse me. But what I want to receive – understanding, sympathy and forgiveness – I would receive from men too.

  I don’t think my sexuality is all that seriously repressed. And in general, it seemed to me that sex really had nothing to do with the whole business. So one day I decided to hold an experiment.

  I thought: I wonder, can I kill a woman

  But feel no arousal as I do it

  Not masturbate beside her body

  Not make her take me in her mouth

  Or give herself to me in various positions

  Mostly uncomfortable and humiliating?

  I thought I would choose a woman at random

  One for whom I feel nothing

  Kill her quickly and walk away from the scene

  Of course then, when they find the body

  It will not be as impressive as the installations

  That I set up in the forests outside Moscow

  To please the mushroom pickers and young mothers with their buggies

  And couples seeking solitude

  This killing won’t make people think about the cruelty of life

  But maybe they will understand something about the suddenness of death

  And that’s a pretty good result as well

  I chose the office building where I used to work

  I knew the side entrance, no ID needed there

  A
nd no security cameras inside, that was important

  I walked up to the third floor, called the elevator

  Not sure what I was counting on, but I was lucky

  I’ve read that serial killers often are

  Even Chikatilo was arrested twice and then released

  But right now that is not the point.

  The doors opened. There was a woman in the elevator

  Aged about forty-five, not very beautiful

  And wearing a cheap trouser suit

  I guess she thought was business style

  A bookkeeper or something of the kind

  Her hair cut in a fussy style

  And light in color, almost red.

  Obviously dyed, with natural red hair the skin

  Is never like her skin

  Believe me. I should know

  She aroused no feelings in me

  Believe me, there were no vibrations

  My penis lay curled up and sleeping soundly

  The doors closed and I stepped behind her

  And put one hand in my pocket,

  To take the knife and cut her throat

  It would only take two seconds

  And I would get out on the next floor

  Send the elevator with the body on up to the top

  And then walk down the stairs to the side door

  But as I took a tight grip on the handle

  My penis suddenly turned hard inside my jeans

  Hard as the Vendôme column or the Alexandria pillar

  As if all the blood in the world had flowed into it at that moment

  I let go of the knife. The experiment was over

  And as she stepped out of the elevator

  I saw a gray strand running through her hair