Nocturnal Emissions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Jealous—oh. Her unreasoning jealousy extended to the elderly landlord:

  “I know she wants you to stick your face in that old cobwebby cellar of hers.

  Is that what you do instead of paying the rent?” She was even jealous of her own mother. I spoke to her mother on occasion, when I ran into her outside, and after I would hear, “I know that fat whore comes to see you when I’m out with my friends. You want that other hole, I know, and she’s the closest you can come to what you thought I was going to be.”

  She became physical with me. When I cooked for her, she ate with chop-sticks, and more than once when we argued at the table she suddenly jabbed them in my face, shoved their tips against my upper lip, squashing it against my teeth and snarling at me through her own gritted teeth. Once she punched me, splitting both my upper and lower lips, when I said she was acting crazy.

  “I’m not crazy!” she shouted, wild eyed. “Don’t you ever call me that! You’re crazy! You are!”

  Despite her protests, I truly felt she could have benefitted from some other medication we made at Nepenthe, such as the anger management drug Dammitol.

  She’d accuse me of spitting in her food or otherwise tainting it when she was out of the room (such thoughts occur to people who would do these things themselves, but I tried not to think of that when I ate my own food around her). She told me I was old, fat, ugly, poor, that no one would ever love me.

  Playing on my own insecurities, trying to break down my self esteem the better to manipulate me—or simply hurt me.

  Oh, to be alone in my little flat again. Sweet solitude, how could I ever have cursed it?

  But…then I’d see that long dark hair again, spilled like ink upon her shoulders. I was always compulsively stroking it, and I would cup her small sleek head in both my hands as I tasted her tongue, sucked on her plump lower lip, and she would kiss me back with her eyes staring open (preferably, without her contacts). She would burst into my flat unannounced and giggling, jump into my arms so that I’d have to catch her and not topple. She’d look up at me, in my embrace, shake her head wonderingly and say, “I love you so much, Fetch, you know that?” (That’s my name: Fetch.) “You put some kind of magic spell on me, didn’t you?”

  But…those words would soon again morph into, “You never believe that I love you!”

  But, and but again.

  In her calm moments, she aroused my tenderness, and my pity. If she couldn’t control her emotions, I must at least try to control mine; I would remind myself (frequently) that it couldn’t be easy, all this churning weather inside her little envelope of skin. We would lie in bed and she’d stare up at the tiny room’s ridiculously high ceiling where gas had once pooled and congeal, and speak in this bewildered sort of manner that would make me pull her closer.

  Sometimes, in these thoughtful interludes, she would bemoan the effects the Ephemeral Eye had allegedly had on her, such as somehow urging her to become a teen prostitute in her own country (though she wouldn’t attribute her unstable moods to the Eye, or even acknowledge them). Hee said it was exposure to the Ephemeral Eye that had caused her body to take on aspects of the other sex. But what was the other sex? Maddeningly—purposely?—she was never clear as to whether she was a girl who had changed partly to a boy, or a boy who had changed partly to a girl.

  Plainly, though, she also was attracted to the Ephemeral Eye, attracted enough to have had it tattooed on her body (though was it significant that it was in a spot where she couldn’t easily see it herself?), and she even spoke sometimes of a desire to run away and join the cult called the Eternal Eye.

  Her more prevalent ambition, however, was to become a singer or an actress. As she explained it to me one evening as we lay entwined, “Even with my friends and my mom and all, I’m just so lonely. I don’t feel real, you know?

  I’m just like a sad little ghost. That’s why I want to be a singer, or an actress. I feel like I need lots of people to know I’m real so I can know I’m real.”

  I replied, “I just need one person to make me feel real.” But I’d said it so quickly and easily that even I didn’t know if I meant Hee was that one person, or if I was talking about myself being that one person.

  “But what should I do?” she implored me. “Should I just leave my mom and you and everything and go follow my dream? I don’t know anybody out there. What if I fail and there’s no one there to catch me? And what if they find out about my condition? Not everybody is gonna understand that. A lot of people would shun me, even. Should I try it? Should I go?”

  I had to be careful here. I couldn’t separate what I wanted from what was best for her, and what I wanted was pretty confused, at that. Right now I didn’t want to lose this sensation of her small brown body naked against mine, her neck in the crook of my arm. But I also lamented ever having invited this once intoxicating newness, longed to return to my dull old life and be free of her.

  So the only answer I managed to come up with just then, the only advice, was,

  “Well, honey…sometimes ya jest gotta build a fi-ah.”

  But this seemed to resonate with her, being in her own language I guess, because she nodded and was quiet after that…and soon enough asleep. With her lips parted a little there was a miserable innocence to her.

  And I lay there watching her, the theme song to Detective/PsychiatristJabronski caught in my head, a group of soul sisters singing, “Build a fire and let it burn, build a fire they’ll never learn, build a fiii-re!”

  #13: Little Ghost Lost

  My ladyboyfriend (as Hee jokingly referred to herself) would sit astride me, stroking herself while churning atop me, and staring oddly down at me would whisper through gritted teeth, “What do you want? Tell me what you want.”

  This happened on several occasions, always in this position (something about it aroused her to this mysterious emotion), and I never knew what to say. She would persist, ask me again, but the only answer I ever had, one time, was to say, “This. I want this.” Even then, she asked me again.

  The hitting continued. It escalated. She kicked me in the testicles one afternoon and after a suspended moment of shock I dropped to the kitchen floor and had to lie there, curled around myself, for over an hour. Still bitter, unapologetic, Hee nevertheless went upstairs to her mother’s apartment and brought back some kind of burning hot ointment with a foreign language on the label to rub on my genitals (cure, or further torture?).

  Then, one night, I made a grave mistake. When Hee struck me across the face (and I can’t even recall the reason any more), my hand lashed out without thought and I struck her back. Slapped her resoundingly. Again, as when she’d kicked me, there was a moment that encased us like amber, staring at each other, her hair wild in her face. And then, the amber shattered and she was all over me like a spitting cat. She raked my face and chest, ripped my shirt to shreds to get at my skin, punched me repeatedly in the side of the head, the top of the head, thrust her fingers like a knife blade—in a frighteningly purposeful martial arts move—into the center of my throat. Kicked me, pulled my hair. All in a matter of seconds, before I caught hold of her own long hair in my fists—that hair I loved to stroke—and using it, flung her down to the carpet. I fell atop her, pinned her frenzied limbs beneath me, and she started screaming for the police. She bit me deeply on the shoulder and breast, leaving bruised impressions of her jaws there for several weeks. But I managed to clamp my hand over her mouth and pin her head down to stop the biting, the screaming.

  “Please, please,” I beseeched her, sobbing now, lying across her much smaller body as I had done so many times under more pleasant circumstances, “don’t do this, Hee, I’m sorry—please! The landlady will hear us…she’ll kick us both out! Your mom will hear us…she’ll know what we’re doing! The police will take both of us… look at me…not only me, Hee!” When all else failed, I wept, “I love you, Hee, I love you!”

  Gradually the muffled screaming died down behind my palm, though her eyes remai
ned crazed through the strands of hair pasted across her face by tears, and I took the chance of removing my hand and sitting back from her.

  She launched to her feet, lunged past me to grab up her pocketbook (punching me on the top of my head as she passed), whirled around and spat, “You fucking asshole, I’ll go to the police about you, you abusive fuck! I’m gonna have my mom take me over there right now and tell them how you raped me!”

  She stomped back toward me, I tucked my head into my shoulders as she showered another flurry of blows on the back of my neck and skull, and when I looked back up again she was at the door. One last hateful glance over her shoulder, and she shrieked, “You never loved me! And I don’t love you any more—you fucking asshole!” Then with a slam of the door, she was gone.

  I sat in my recliner chair for several hours, waiting for the police to come for me. Or at least, for the mother to storm in. Was Hee still giving her report?

  But when four hours had passed I realized with relief that she hadn’t gone to the police. Upstairs, then? Out with her friends?

  I locked my door then. Not against the police, but for fear of that mad creature bursting in upon me unannounced, as she used to do when she flung herself laughing into my arms.

  Days passed in which I lived in fear of her as I never had before, because I didn’t see her. The longer she didn’t show up, the greater my tension built in expectance of when she would. And then, a week to the day after the incident, I was returning from the market with my groceries (out of a touch of melancholy nostalgia, I had bought a type of cookies I knew Hee liked) and I met my landlady in the driveway as she was getting out of her car (yes, even at her advanced age she still gets around well). I cringed inside, expecting to be berated or threatened about the noisy altercation, but when we began to chat comfortably I realized she hadn’t heard us through the mountainous old house’s thick walls. So I decided to find out if she had seen Hee lately, herself.

  I broached this by saying I hadn’t seen the mother’s car in the driveway for a couple of days (which was true) and wondered if they’d gone visiting someone.

  “Oh no, Mr. Vardoger,” she said (because that was my name, Fetch Vardoger), “she left.” Referring to the mother, not the daughter. “Two days ago. Packed up what she had, and a friend rented a truck to help her move.

  You must have been out, or sleeping.”

  “Oh my God…I guess so,” I muttered, looking up at the high attic windows, gazing back down at me black and unreadable. “Where did they move?”

  “She said out west. I don’t know where.”

  Out west? So maybe the mother was helping the daughter pursue her dreams, after all. Still, I couldn’t be sure the mother and daughter had gone off together, could I? What if the daughter had run away, and in despair the mother had decided to relocate, too? Or had the daughter gone out west first, and the mother had resigned herself to join her?

  But in the days to follow, my imagination became more fevered about the matter. I entertained the notion, one evening, that maybe Hee had never been real at all. That I had only imagined her—or else, that I had built a fantasy around the attic tenant’s daughter after spying on her from afar. I tried to recall if I had ever actually heard the mother or landlady mention Hee. I remembered that smug pundit on the talk show, and thought maybe I had superimposed my own lusts and dreams onto the girl, or invented her entirely out of those lonely longings (and might that explain why my creation, a projection of my own id, had turned out to be part male?). But later this golem of mine had corrupted and become a blight on my mind that I had ultimately had to reject (though I guess that would mean I had somehow bitten myself on the chest).

  In somewhat more rational moments, I wondered instead if my tormented Hee had committed suicide after our terrible fight. One night I sat out on the landlady’s big screened porch with her, rocking beside her. It was one of those nights when the blue fog flows down the street from the ghost factory, according to certain conditions or alien seasons—that almost solid current of blue ectoplasm like electric cold blue lava. Floating on this current one could at times see mysterious corpses that have swollen to twice the size they should be, like black balloons with blistered skin showing pink and metallic silver inside, bobbing past on the surface of the fog—until it begins to soften and dissolve and run off into the grates along the curb of the street. The old woman would rock out there on the nights when the flood creeps silently down the hill, as if still waiting for her long dead husband’s body to be borne along again. And I watched and waited, too—to see if another body would be buoyed along. This one formerly beautiful, with skin like gold and certain intriguing anomalies. If I saw her, would I drag her out of the current’s cold fire with my hands, heedlessly—hold her and rock her deformed remains as I wept? Or would I just watch her sail on past, to be collected by those sanitation trucks that collect such corpses come morning…and simply wish her sad little spirit well, wherever it had gone?

  #14: The Continuum

  (Author’s note: the following account is out of the ordinary for me, as it details events which I did not personally witness, having been pieced together from fragmentary reports, rumors, and my own extrapolation. But I feel it is an accurate portrayal of events nonetheless, and if you will bear with me the reason why I have recorded it will become apparent later.) When the event occurred, the background behind the entertainer was a brightly-lit, tiled tunnel like one might find leading into a subway station, its ceiling arched, its walls and ceiling and even the floor painted glossy pink. All of it dripping wet, streams of moisture running down the wall tiles to join puddles on the floor. The androgynous mime-like dancers in their skintight white costumes came crawling out of a sewer grate in the set’s floor, then writhed and contorted sensuously behind the singer.

  As always, he appeared in his white greasepaint, with the red dots on his cheeks and red lipstick, his eyes ringed in black kohl. His hair (a wig or maybe not?) all curly crimson red and bushing out from beneath his black top hat, drooping to one side like a crushed stovepipe, ringed with its lime green satin ribbon. The familiar long, black velvet coat, and under that his black body suit blending into black platform shoes. As always, smiling glassy-eyed into the camera, singing, “Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl…oh Silicooone…Silicone Swirl” over and over as he did his little soft-shoe dance, twirling around and opening his coat at the lyric, “You make me feel like a girl,” to reveal two swirling designs that spun around and around over his breasts like twin hypnotic vortexes. “Silicone Swiiiiiirl…Silicone Swirl,” he sang, dancing backward away from the camera then forward, closer, again.

  Sashaying lightly, nimbly from side-to-side across the screen. And when he again sang, “Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl,” this time he twirled the index finger of both hands in front of his body suit where those hypnotic designs spun around. And he continued singing, “Oh Silicooone…Silicone Swirl…Silicone Swiiiiiirl…Silicone Swirl…Silicone Swirl you make me feel I’m a girl…oh Silicooone… Silicone Swirl…”

  There was a control room, somewhere perhaps subterranean, with technicians in military uniforms hunched over work stations crammed with gauges, knobs and switches, keyboards, and of course countless monitors all showing the same thing: the singing entertainer. And in the center of the room, in a swiveling chair, the team commander—who abruptly flew out of his seat, stabbing a finger at the room’s oversized central monitor, and bellowed,

  “Deviation! Deviation! Shut it down! Shut the fucking thing down!”

  When the three commandos burst onto the set, they had to squint against the dry, dead dust blown on an icy wind across a vast plain of barren desolation, stretching off to the horizon, with a dull sun waning low in the gloomy sky. The commandos were disoriented by these surroundings for a beat or two, but then they all opened fire with their SCARs (Special Forces Combat Assault Rifle). The dancing showman never even looked over at them, or stopped smiling—even as dozens of
bullets tore into and through him, throwing his body to the ground. He lay there tattered, vivid red blood leaking from the wounds, forming a growing puddle under him. In death he grinned at the roiling sky just as he had grinned into the camera. For good measure, the squad leader stepped closer to him warily (as if the singer might suddenly reach out and seize his ankle) and fired a last burst of 7.62x51mm ammo directly into the entertainer’s face. His top hat, which he had retained to this point, rolled off with the aid of the wind.

  They all watched this on the monitors in the control room. The team commander, hands on hips, legs spread in a wide stance, was wagging his head and saying, “Fuck me. Fuck me.”

  The automatic doors to the control center parted and a man in a high tech motorized wheelchair barreled into the room. The man in the wheelchair, in his sixties and entirely bald, wearing wire-rimmed dark glasses, was demanding questions of the commander even before he had cleared the threshold.

  “What was the deviation, Chief?”

  “The thing said, ‘You make me feel I’m a girl’ instead of, ‘You make me feel like a girl,’ Doctor.”

  “Good God,” the man in the wheelchair said, bringing it to a stop just short of colliding with the commander. “And did you end the broadcast before your men terminated the Continuity Agent?”

  “Yeah, Doc, of course. As far as anyone out there would know, the channel just cut out…the viewers didn’t see anything.”

  “Thank God.” The man in the wheelchair squeezed the commander’s forearm. “We’re lucky you caught him in time, Chief, before things degraded more seriously.”