Be in the Real

by Denise Mathew

  This too she had predicted, she smiled because the fix was easy. If she did the touching then everything would work out just fine. At least that worked most of the time.

  “I’ll touch, you receive.”

  Norm scratched his stubble free chin. Even more warmth worked into Kaila, knowing that Norm had shaved for their meeting.

  He shrugged.

  “Okay, you’re the boss,” he said.

  He folded his arms, waiting for instructions.

  “Take all your clothes off so I can see your body and your man parts,” she said.

  Norm shot her a sideways grin.

  “Now they’re called my man parts not my…”

  He chuckled and shook his head. “Never mind.”

  He kicked off his shoes. His socks were stained and his big toe poked through the right one. He tugged his t-shirt over his head revealing his bare torso. Though Kaila had known that he was skinny, she hadn’t known how very emaciated he was until he was half-naked. The absence of flesh on his upper body, the small bumps of his biceps that were the size of Ping-Pong balls, or how his stomach was concave, didn’t faze her. Norm was showing her his body and all she could do was be grateful for his gesture.

  He unbuttoned his jeans and zipped down the fly, pushing them down his thighs. His legs reminded Kaila of the chicken drumsticks that they served at dinner, except Norm’s legs were covered in dark hair from the top of his thighs right down to his ankles. It seemed odd that he would have so much hair on a body that was so boyishly small.

  “I’m going to get to see you too right?” Norm said after he had kicked his pants to the side. He stood in a pair of navy briefs that pulled tight against the lump that was his penis.

  “Okay,” Kaila said.

  Without fanfare she pulled her t-shirt over her head and tossed it to the side. She stood there for a moment, allowing Norm to study her body. His arms moved instinctively until his hands were inches from her plain beige Wonder bra that was stretched from wear, and slightly smaller than she needed. When she had been given the bra a few years back she had been a C-cup. She had gained a few pounds since then and now her breasts were somewhere in the middle of C and D. She could have asked for a new bra, but she hadn’t bothered. In Kaila’s opinion it wasn’t necessary to replace the garment unless a strap or a clasp broke.

  She reached behind her and undid the clasp; sliding the bra down the length of her arms until it too dropped to the floor between them. Kaila noticed with amusement that Norm’s penis had taken on more shape in his underpants. She smiled, knowing that she had played a large part in activating his body. Her sweatpants came off next.

  “Nice, even better than I pictured,” Norm said, bobbing his head up and down.

  “You pictured my bare breasts?” Kaila said.

  She had predicted much of their encounter, but had never imagined that Norm had wondered what lay beneath her clothes.

  “More times than I can count, they’ve played the starring role in more than a few of my…” He paused as if gauging what to say next.

  “Yes, I’ve pictured them,” he said in a husky voice, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

  Kaila felt a blush work up her cheeks, past her hairline, then down the base of her skull. Since nothing much ever embarrassed her, she found her reaction as odd as the idea that Norm had been thinking about having sex with her, even before she had started imagining it. It also made her wonder who had been first to come up with the idea, and if her mind had affected his like ESP, planting a thought into his brain, or if it had been vice versa. Questions filled her mind and as was the case with her more times than not, she became lost in the thickness of her subconscious.

  “Hey, Kaila, are you still with me?”

  Norm’s voice brought her back to the present.

  “Yes, I’m here,” she answered, still a little disjointed after her trip away.

  As odd as it felt, for a few moments she had allowed Trillian to take up residence in her body, which itself was crazy since she didn’t have her computer and Trillian usually abided the rules, and only came out when she had it.

  “We should probably move this along, it’s not like we can be in here forever, eventually someone will come looking for us, meds are in less than an hour.

  “I am Trillian,” Kaila said without provocation. Norm stared at her oddly.

  “But you can’t be Trillian, you don’t have your computer?”

  It felt strange that Norm would know this about her. Nobody usually knew this much about her, or so she thought. She wondered if Trillian was playing tricks on her.

  Kaila shook her head and felt Trillian fade back into her mind.

  “I know, but somehow I am,” she said.

  “Take off your underpants,” Kaila said, shifting the subject away from something that didn’t have an easy answer. She knew that if she spent too much time thinking about how Trillian had shown up she would once again lose her place; she wasn’t sure how rapidly she would find her way back.

  Norm obeyed her immediately, pulling his briefs down to his knees before he let them dropped to the floor. He kicked the balled up fabric to the side and for the first time since Kaila had met him, Norm looked vulnerable, like a newborn puppy that was searching for its mother’s protection. As soon as she was comfortable with Norm’s muted demeanor she shifted her gaze to his penis.

  She had never seen a penis in real before then. She hadn’t expected him to have the same size appendage as the men she had watched having sex on online porno, but she had expected more. Certainly not the Vienna sausage size member that lay partially erect, below a triangular patch of thick curly pubic hair that trailed a dark line to his navel.

  Norm shifted his stance, clearly discomfited by her appraising stare.

  “It’s not all the way hard yet, it’s cold in this place you know…”

  She shrugged in response.

  “Now you, that’s when things will get cooking,” he said, motioning to her white cotton underwear, the ones Pauline loved to call Grannie panties. Pauline liked satin and lace thongs and infinitesimal pieces of fabric that did little to cover any part of her sex. Kaila understood the differences in their undergarments, but preferred the extra material that covered all parts of her buttocks and pubic area, to something that pulled and tugged in all the wrong places. She slipped the underpants down the length of her slender hips until she too had stripped naked.

  Somehow she had imagined the moment so different from how it was right then. Kaila hadn’t known that she had placed herself into the stream of sex and moaning that she had witnessed on her computer screen. Either way, she hadn’t until that very second understood that she actually had had predictions for how everything would unfold.

  “I like a girl who doesn’t trim away all the stuff that says she’s a woman, all that baby smooth shit makes you feel like you’re doing it with a kid,” Norm said.

  Kaila detected that he was attempting to sound relaxed and calm but the waver in his voice said he was none of that.

  Kaila glanced down at her nakedness, letting her eyes graze over the fine strawberry blond hair that formed a v between her legs. She had never really paid much attention to her body, washing it, dressing it, feeding it and using it to take her where she wanted to go. Now she saw it as something other than a vessel, now it was something more, though what exactly that meant she wasn’t sure.

  She felt Trillian drift forward again, attempting to take over her consciousness, like a familiar song that played in your head that made you feel like you understood everything around you. Trillian wanted to know how it all felt to be with a man, the sensations, the smells, and everything that went with it. Trillian wanted to snatch the experience away from Kaila.

  “I am Trillian,” Kaila said in a high-pitched voice that seemed amplified by the confines of the room.

  “Shit Kaila, lower your voice someone will hear,” Norm said, advancing on her. Kaila drew in a deep breath and took a f
ew steps closer to Norm until she could feel his breath, hot against her skin. And she wanted to touch his bare flesh, feel the coarse hair that covered his lower stomach. She placed her hand lightly on his half-shrunken penis, stroking it gently as if she were petting a dog. Though she knew that the women in the porn shows did things much differently, she didn’t try to replicate their moves, and was happy instead to experiment.

  Kaila felt Norm’s member respond to her fingers and his breathing sped up a little. It excited her that despite not knowing anything about sex she was in fact effecting a change in the workings of his body. Suddenly Norm clasped her breast in his hand and squeezed. Her whole body stiffened. The spiders that weren’t supposed to appear when she was going to have sex skittered up the soft skin of her breast.

  Kaila slapped Norm’s hand away with more control than she felt capable of.

  “Hey, I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it. I want to touch you Kaila, I want to make you feel good too.”

  Norm’s voice came to her as though through a distant tunnel, tinny and meaningless. She tried to grab hold of the sound of it, allow it to pull her out of the dark swirl of fury that enveloped her whenever she was touched. She didn’t want to hit him, though her whole body was poised for just that.

  “It’s okay Kaila, I’ll keep my hands to myself, c’mon touch me again, please.” Kaila heard the need in Norm’s voice. The sound of it was enough to tug her out of the darkness that had slipped in all around her. Then Norm was there again, standing in front of her, naked and uncertain, a look of regret painted on his face. Kaila didn’t want to have the spiders invade this special moment, didn’t want their legs to race over her flesh and make her want to flee from her own body. She willed them away, back to the hidden spaces, black areas, where they could lie in wait; ever ready to appear at the slightest provocation.

  Kaila pressed her hand to the hollow of Norm’s stomach. She noticed how very large her hand looked against his skinny frame. Norm relaxed against her touch, pushing slightly against her in the closest act to physically touching her that he could manage. Oddly it did nothing to agitate the spiders and Kaila responded to his move, kneading his flesh with the palm of her hand, feeling his bones, muscles and all the parts that made him human. Kaila slid her hand up to the hollow between his breastbones, and there she felt it for the first time in her life, another beings heartbeat. She instinctively placed her ear against his chest, pressed her cheek to his warm flesh that spoke of life and what it was to be alive.

  “Your body is beautiful,” she whispered.

  Kaila was in awe that she had said the words, because before then there had been no beauty in Norm’s body. Brightly colored flowers, meadows, and crystal clear streams, vast oceans, the rain forest in emerald green, all the pictures that she had studied and committed to memory were beautiful, not this scrawny man. There couldn’t be beauty in this man who had hair in odd places, and who was by all accounts not attractive, yet there was. And she didn’t find Norm’s beauty in the places she had imagined, instead of his exterior there was so much to appreciate inside him, in the humanness that made his heart beat exactly as it was needed, speeding and slowing without his volition.

  She felt Norm’s heart quicken against her face, the ticking of his tapping heart on her skin, like the beat of a hummingbirds wings. Kaila knew the workings of the human body, had studied every function, the digestive, nervous, circulatory, respiratory and every other system of the body. She knew the organs and the tasks they performed, but not until she had felt the beat of Norm’s heart did she really know what a miracle the body was. More than that was a new revelation, one that she had always known but had failed to acknowledge, that all humans were the same. Every person on the earth had a heart that beat blood through all the veins and arteries in a body, they had brains that had thoughts and though all brains were different they were identical in their function, a right and left lobe, a parietal lobe, a cerebellum and…

  “We are all one,” she murmured against Norm’s chest.

  Before Norm could respond Kaila wrapped her long arms around his torso, drawing him into an embrace. Norm remained stiff; fearful that if he responded to her touch that he might set her off.

  “We are all one,” Kaila repeated.

  She gazed down at Norm, made small by her tall frame. All she could think was how she wanted to hold him forever because in that very moment the spiders were nowhere to be found. In fact they were so conspicuously absent that she was terrified to even send a thought toward them at all, in the event that she disturbed them in the hovels that they nested in.

  “What the hell is going on here?”

  Norm startled and pulled out of her grasp. Kaila reached for him again; unable to accept the disconnection of their bodies, she wanted to hold him endlessly, never let him go. Somehow their embrace had awakened something in her, something that she hadn’t known had been asleep. She cupped his head in her hands, threading her fingers through the tangle of his hair, pushing him to her bare chest until she felt the almost non-existent stubble of his beard prickle against her breasts.

  “We are one, we are one, we are one,” she murmured, her face buried in his hair.

  “Break it up you two.”

  The voice that she knew well was like an irritating fly buzzing around her head. She wanted the voice and the interloper gone because she couldn’t draw herself away from the moment; she wondered if what she was feeling was love.

  Norm struggled to be free of her. The harder he tried to disengage his body from hers, the more desperately she clung to him. Kaila refused to let him go because she didn’t know if she would ever feel this again, so complete, as if a secret to a part of the universe had been dropped into her heart.

  “Kaila, let go.”

  Norm’s voice was laced with panic now and Kaila couldn’t understand why. Didn’t he feel the magic in that space of time where everything slipped out of existence except for the two of them, the two of them…

  “Kaila, that’s enough…”

  More flies buzzing, and mosquitoes too, she shook her head, unwilling to let it go, as if it was the last breath of clean air in a room filled with smoke.

  “No,” she said, holding, pulling, squeezing…

  “Kaila, fuck…I can’t breathe…please…”

  Then the spiders came, racing across her body. Norm disappeared, tugged away by the tarantulas, black widows, poisonous, and household spiders too, a million of them in all shapes and sizes, legs and ichor filled bodies covering her. And every body that she plucked away from her skin was replaced with another, because they had taken over everything, they had stolen Norm away and they would never bring him back. And when she thought she would drown or go mad from it all she felt one sting her arm, felt its venom pulse through her veins, and then she was falling into a dark place, somewhere safe, where the spiders couldn’t follow, where only Trillian and she existed.

  CHAPTER 6

  Kaila woke up in the White Room. She knew that three days had passed when she glanced down at the date on her watch, the only piece of color in the depressingly bland room. Outside the White Room she would have read the clues, but it was for these moments alone that she wore a watch; time couldn’t be measured by happenings in the confines of this place.

  The date sadly confirmed that time had passed that she had no recollection of. It wasn’t her first time there, a space reserved for those who lost all sense of reality, who the facility deemed a threat to their own wellbeing, but it was the first time she had lost three full days. Before then she had lost a few hours here and there, the very most eighteen of them, but three full days was unimaginable.

  Kaila swept her gaze across the room. She realized on closer inspection that this room that appeared the same as the ones she had inhabited before, was marginally different. The bed for one wasn’t a bare mattress on the floor, but a real cot with a metal-frame and a substantial mattress. She also had blankets and even sheets, a pillow too. The double-sided
mirror was the same, yet its location was not. Instead of the right side of the room it was on the left side. The door that opened into the room was in the wrong position as well. All clues said that she was in a brand new area. A surge of panic raced through her, but she worked to push it back down. She was more than ready to be out of this White Room and knew that letting her anxiety get the better of her would not hasten her exit.

  Another brand new addition to the list, that was growing ever so long, was the intravenous tube trailing from her left hand. It was taped in place with a flesh-colored Band-Aid. A long plastic tube that linked to a half-full bag of clear liquid, dangled on a metal pole. Without hesitation Kaila ripped at the tube, pulling it out with a rapid snapping motion. She allowed herself the luxury of a few seconds to study the foreign body that had been inside her. Kaila pushed at the tip of the cannula of the intravenous device, marveling at the fact that only a few heartbeats before, the small piece of plastic had been a part of her body, feeding her fluids and whatever was contained in the bladder shaped bag. Drops of the fluid dribbled from the intravenous tubing in a steady trickle that had been perfectly calibrated to deliver exactly the right amount of fluids that she had needed.

  Though it was the first intravenous device that she had ever held in her hand for real, she had studied the workings of such devices excessively, using search engines that gave her all the answers she needed. Despite knowing all the trappings of the invention, she couldn’t help but be thrilled at actually being privy to the experience of handling such an item. Knowing that the cannula had been positioned in an open vein in her forehand, she also knew what would happen if that very same cannula was tugged out of the vein. Thick crimson blood stained the Band-Aid then began seeping from the pucker that had been left behind by the tube. Kaila watched as the blood trailed down the freckled skin of her hand, running snake like down her middle finger until a huge drop collected and landed with a soft drip onto the rubberized floor.