The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 10

by Maxim Jakubowski

  But the others are there. Auras of faces, mouths open, all of them, a hideous Munch canvas of tortured souls in each tiny square. I can see them even in miniature like this, though at first it was only in large blowups that I recognized the pixel-masses for what they were. Some of them I’ve come to recognize. Like old friends, they’re there whenever I take such a picture. There: a jaundiced smudge that coalesces into an ignoble desperate for a tipple. Her new palomino pony will be here soon (but not soon enough for me), oh so surprised, faint at first behind the others, but staining deeper with time. The distorted shapes and splotches gel into discernible features. If I overlay an old shot of a lover’s face (irrelevant mugs cropped out but saved, as I hoard everything she touches), I make a perfect match. Of course they’ve followed her here, too. They are always with her. Like me.

  You might call me a stalker – obsessed, dangerous – except that it’s my job to follow her. She is my life’s blood, my income, my career.

  Not psychotic. Symbiotic. She needs me as well. My lens raises her to mythic heights of beauty. She is my creation.

  There are many of my kind, a dime a dozen making their bread and butter exposing the cellulite and transgressions of gods who should be perfect. The business of our pack is to smear the unbesmirched. To mar what is sacred.

  But there is only one Kiara, posed on her holy pedestal. My eidolon. Only one of my kind can destroy her, burn her image, and turn her to ash in the public mind’s eye. But she knows I never will. To smash my idol would be to destroy myself.

  On my bedroom wall back home I had assembled her graven image. Craven, distorted collage: breast, hipbone, elbow, knuckle, snapshots in skewed angles captured through windows and doors. I staple gunned pieces of her to the plaster. It took me years to acquire the surreal whole, every inch of her, nude, life-size. Four walls: front, back, both her sides. I see her through a fly’s eyes, compound images multiplied densely and divided into myriad squares – right side up, of course. I studied it as I fell asleep and awoke. Not my bedroom, but my laboratory, my own psyche pinned to the plaster.

  In the hazy state of half-sleep, I started to see things.

  Another face. Not hers.

  Then: another.

  My own jealousy, I thought, of the men who’d been inside her, while I’m perennially outside, always her surface: skin, curl of hair, lay of a dress. To touch her nostril or earlobe would be enough, but they’ve been inside the chalice of her. Don’t say the vulgar word you’re thinking, the clinical word. This she does not have. What she has is holy.

  If I stood back and looked, as at a museum painting, they weren’t there. Only as I looked away, or fell asleep, did I see them. Like the Rorschach images burned into the eyelids when you close your eyes after staring into the sun. Like the green flash as the sun sets on the horizon that you’re never sure you’ve actually seen. Glaring magenta screams behind my Kiara.

  I began to test new methods. Infrared lenses. Sun filters at dusk. Noontime ASA film at midnight. A flash at noon. Millisecond or 32-minute exposures. Pinpoint cameras and coated lenses. Dodging and push processing. Half-developing negatives. Reciprocity effects and reticulation. I’ve never tried completely exposing the film like this, leaving not a trace of her latent image. But the trapped lovers remain, unwilling ghosts nattering at her back. More clear than I’ve ever seen them.

  Maybe it’s this place and not the process. The graveyard sulked behind her.

  Long ago, I gave her a photo of herself. A gift left outside her dressing room, shared with other nameless backup singers, a black and white she could use to promote herself, still plain Kara Grealy. I included a caption: Kara’s Chiaroscuro. Love, Click. I heard her asking someone for a dictionary. I gave her the negative, too, one of the few no-nos in my line of work. I’d like that negative back, because I know what I’d see behind her: nothing. Just my Kiara. No stains.

  Then she disappeared. Poof. I hit the bottle. She reemerged a year later as simply Kiara. So you see, I named her, too. Exotic creature, her own fabulous tapestry woven from the frayed threads of her mixed and murky lineage. Her name needed no further appellation. Like Jesus. Mary. Lucifer.

  She was suddenly fluent in the language of the Mexican grandmother she now claimed – a woman she’d never met, a country she’d never visited, until summoned to her deathbed, or so goes her most famous ballad. I dried myself out, bought a Spanish translation dictionary, hired a tutor, worked diligently, but words don’t roll easy on my tongue. Some I can manage. Photo: foto. Film: membrana. Naked: en carne. Same as meat: carne, my line of business. Sin tu, without you, a sin. But I stumble over words. Speech is not my method of communicating. I lip read better than I talk. I smell a false trail more easily than I can recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

  Like the mólé of her adopted country, she took a hundred separate ingredients and used her secret, inherited recipe, boiling them down into one dish – her new identity. I backed it all up. I documented her made-up truths, turned her lies into reality. The fame that had eluded her until then exploded like a supernova.

  Year by year, she’s grown darker – though her skin is still smooth and unlined – easily explained by sun worship, though modern actresses have given up this pagan ritual in our cancer-riddled times. But I know that she draws her curtains to el sol and casts her devotion to the moon. Her skin can only be the pigment of her grandmother calling from the distant past.

  I want to be part of the fabric. Not apart.

  Not what I am, a bedbug on the linen, despised irritant.

  Not what I am, always witness, never in the frame.

  Not what I am, one of the mongrel pack who chase her, like the hundreds of stray dogs that crowd the pitted streets of Moth Bay. All descended from just a few lost pets long ago, the hotel proprietress, a transplanted gringo, told me. Like the townspeople themselves, all descended from just two ancestors: a Huichol priestess and the first Catholic priest to land on this shore, a man of the cloth who disrobed to lie with her. I see hints of Kiara when I look at the villagers. They won’t talk to me, even when I stutter out an hola at the mercado. Secretive, as tight knit as the jungle trees. They say it was the women who saved the town from slaughter when the conquerors invaded. The white men simply disappeared, one by one.

  The Moth Bay dogs ceaselessly hump each other, copulating though they’re nothing but sacks of ribs and mange, as if they had no choice but to mate, a last ditch effort at immortality. A spastic, robotic rutting lacking in joy – like me and my hand and my photo collage. The proprietress warned me the townsfolk will set out poisoned meat tonight, as they do every year at this time, a ritual cleansing before the pilgrimage and influx of tourists. Tomorrow, before dawn, a noose of dead dogs will be tossed into the ocean. Tied tail to neck, in a distended necklace of bloated corpses, surreal killick that anchors this town to a medieval notion of purging its incestuous plague. The lariat of carrion will rock gently beneath the surface, so easy to tangle an ankle and be sucked down to doom. The water will turn filthy with jellyfish, feeding on the swollen bait. But no matter what the town does to eradicate the dogs, the proprietress says, they return and multiply, a virus. They reincarnate themselves, refusing to be exterminated.

  Like them, we paparazzi exist on the margins, fighting each other over scraps of humanity. We’re punched and kicked, flipped off, wished dead. The masses spit on us but buy the snaps we take, starving for more. We hound the perimeters, hated, but without us, the fiction falls apart.

  The spool of film crackles in my hand. I stumble from the closet and bump into Malele, the maid’s toddler. She follows me everywhere. Malele’s dress is dirty, her upper lip encrusted with dried snot. Her mother trails me through the house, sweeping after me, making me uneasy. She leaves cleanliness in her wake, silent except for the flap flap of her rubber slippers and the swish swish of her broom.

  Malele and I have been teaching each other the names of colors. We point to the deadly oleander: pink. To the sleeping gr
ass that snaps its leaves shut when touched: verde. To the prickly guanabana fruit that looks like an angry blowfish: green. To the bumblebee drowned in the pool: negro. To the poisonous angel’s trumpet flower: amarillo. We argue over the ocean’s color: Azul, she says. No, not blue, gray. To my hair: blanco. It turned white overnight, when I saw the faces – not from horror, but with terror that we would grow further apart as I aged while Kiara remained unchanged. A gecko click, click, clicks at us: brown. Malele stomps upon it with her bare foot. It scampers away, leaving its tail, and she runs after it. I pick up the gecko tail and carry it outside, flinging it on to the sand, where the rich insect life will make short work of it. The gecko will grow another tail, a nifty trick of rebirth.

  A hammock stretches itself between two coconut trees. Erosion of the beach has exposed the skirted black roots of the trees, shameful like a widow’s slip showing. A bulbous, black termite nest hangs in one, a malignant tumor. The termites’ tunneled tracks scar the tree from the inside out, an old man’s raised and scabbed veins, but the termites shy from light and won’t cross the whitewashed trunks. I shed my many-pocketed vest and lie in the hammock. She’ll know I’m no longer watching, the third eye closed. A skinny horse nearby strips a banana tree of its leaves, its grinding molars audible even over the constant, hammering waves. The harsh sun blotches the back of my eyelids. Inside the coconut trunk, the termites’ busy drone lulls me into siesta.

  Kiara approaches me on the beach, scarab skirts crackling around her. A mantilla, flowing from a tortoise shell comb, falls over her shoulders. She peels back her webbed veil, peels back the skin of her lovely face, revealing a travesty of decay. My Canon has captured the slivered hints of her deterioration just before her annual donning of full vestments. Her nose, earlobe, the corner of her lips: rotting like a leper.

  She climbs into the hammock and tucks the gecko tail behind her ear, a flower that grows reptilian limbs. The ocean froths behind her, beating its fists against the pebbles and shells, which chatter and clatter with each grasping wave. Her long nails tap, a beetling click click click. Castanets of my soul. Scrape scratch tease the inside of my skin, palms and shins inflamed with her inside me. She crouches over me, her back to me, astride me, so graceful the hammock doesn’t rock. I pry the comb from her scalp and run the mantis-limb prongs through her hair. She tips her head back, her black hair brushing my chest, scampering ants tickling. Her wet hair drips. Dark water stains my nipples, leaves tracks down my belly, pools in my navel. Her hair oozes, pungent unguent, an urgent seeping. Smell of damp mulch, a gold-bearing alluvial soil. Black secretion, amnion seething, leaching weeping coils in my fist, dripping ink tattooing my hide. Black dye. No, Malele points, shrieking. Roja. Sangre drips down my cheek. I poke out my tongue to lick, to taste the brine of her, but feel a tickling instead.

  I thrash awake, nearly tossing myself from the hammock, and pluck a dying termite from my lips. Termites live only one day, long enough to mate and destroy. It’s nearly sunset, and my fingers cramp around the cold black lens that I’m never without. A moth click click clicks against a porch light, hurling itself against the impostor moon.

  Seaweed pops and sizzles, cooked by the sun and now cooling. While I’ve slept, I’ve lost my shade. My pasty skin is now red – outlined by the white shape of the camera on my chest – my body too used to scuttling in the night, covered by vests and baggy pants, layered with pockets and pouches – to hide things in, to hide myself behind, to secrete. I’m sure the hammock ropes indent my back like a chessboard.

  I am a game board. Play me.

  Kiara moves down the beach, real now, still in her nun’s garb. Beside her, the flaxen pony frolics in white briefs (aptly named in his case). He ignores her, running to retrieve a child’s ball and dancing in the waves. With them, an old woman. They creep toward the graveyard. The green strobe flashes as the sun sets.

  I will not follow. I’m tired.

  When I was young, I chased butterflies. Caught them in nets, spread and pinned them, displayed them in boxes. Good practice for what I do now – study, capture, still the moving subject, frame. Only to find they were all just moths, every last one of them common pests. Their identity mattered, though their outward beauty hadn’t changed. Like a candid of a has-been or of a beautiful nobody – worthless. Now here I am, burned out in the cloying heat of Moth Bay. Poetic justice. Full circle. God has a sense of humor.

  A rusted pickup jounces along the hard-crusted beach. Its tires pass over a dead gull fanned out in the sand, pressing feathers and bones beneath tread marks, leaving a trace of shocked shape. The creaking, squeaking truck crawls past, crunching the seaweed. Camarones! Camarones! An old man in the pickup bed squawks through a loud speaker that amplifies and strangles his words. Translucent and veined shrimp dangle from strings stretched across a high bed frame. They dance with the lurching truck, synchronized like sickly chorus girls lifting their skirts, spindly legs tapping together. Their exoskeletons brush each other, click click click. Dust and flies chase their ghostly, fetal bodies, but each heaving bounce keeps them from settling, skittish. The old man gives me the once over, leering recognition in his eyes. A look that all of the townspeople seem to give me.

  Tough day for business. Besides the stench, no one can swim because of the dark tide, an influx of toxic seaweed. Like the riptides, no signs announce the danger, no newspaper articles, no lifeguards. But there is Kiara, a dark silhouette, unmistakable to me, cleaving the dark water, a kelpie drawing the unaware to their own doom. Lemmings, the early tourists will dive in if they see another swimmer, assuming their safety.

  She seals her way back to her promontory. She thinks I’ll pace her on the beach, like the iguana paralleling her on the sand, its flailing gait leaving thrashed tracks. But I sit tight.

  She climbs out of the water up on to the rocks at her crown of land. Even at dusk I see that she’s lost her nun’s habit and is naked, her lithe body haloed in the crepuscular light. She emits her own corona. She disappears behind the apertured wall.

  I heave myself out of my webbed cradle and turn the other way and walk South towards the City of the Dead. I leave my camera in the rope net.

  I’m used to working at night, but the darkness here is complete; no refracting neon brightens the sky like a hippie god. La luna, gorged on light, hoists its full belly over the top of the towering Strangler Figs and washes the jungle in a pale glow. The arms of the enveloping Stranglers shroud the slivered ghosts of the host trees.

  I touch the smooth bark of a host sapling no higher than myself but with much better posture. A gust rattles its bleached leaves, sending a shudder down its shimmering, golden trunk. Quite a lovely tree, really. Just behind it, a Strangler Fig reaches with murderous arms to hug its trembling limbs. Long roots have just begun to unfurl themselves from the canopy to coil around its outflung branches, grafting themselves around the slender trunk and knotting themselves together in a callused embrace.

  I break off a branch of the palomino sapling with a vicious snap. Dark sap flows from the wound. I taste it, bitter, and feel a mercury shock in my veins, a paprika tingle on my lips, a rancid-meat nausea in my belly. The over-arching canopy stirs, setting off a dry whispering of leaves. A bird caterwauls.

  .“The sap dries up too soon,” she says from behind me. I’m not surprised that she’s there; I smelled her, her earlier scent of rotting mulch now gone beneath her usual complex myrrh. Her familiar velvet voice violins down my spine, with no trace of her earlier clawed tones. “They’re not strong enough to survive.” She points to an anemic stalk nearby that’s caught in the maws of a giant Strangler Fig. Wooden bangles click, click, click on her smooth arm. Gone are her vestments. Dark nipples tinge her white halter top, as does the triangle of dark hair beneath her tiny, white shorts. She looks younger than the day I first saw her.

  The thick Strangler hide wraps itself around the pallid host tree and soon will completely shroud the pus-colored torso and all of its blanched leaves, joi
ning itself down the middle in a long scar. “This one can’t take the heat. A transplant too used to the cold.”

  “Maybe he just needs a vodka martini.” I emphasize the he. She smiles at me, not startled that I’m flitting near the truth. She wants me to know. She must. She wanted me to follow this time.

  She places her hand reverently on the Strangler. “Graçias, abuela,” she murmurs. She strokes a knobby protuberance on the sallow trunk in the Strangler’s grasp. The tree crackles, leaking out a meager black sap that she catches in a clay bowl. She licks her finger, and the clock of her face ticks backwards.

  I would stand here forever, voluntarily, to feed her needs, to be inside her like that. No, I would kneel.

  “I can give you what they can’t,” I say, too close to begging. I have what they lack: patience, endurance, persistence, desire. A knack for camouflage and standing still. And no other need but her.

  “A daughter,” she says. “But it requires a strong will. As the years pass, it takes more and more to sustain me. These have no stamina. To have a child, it would take an exceptionally hardy—”

  I interrupt her, afraid she’ll say specimen, not man. “There’s truth in the power of a man who chooses his fate willingly for the one he loves.” I don’t use the word sacrifice, for I have nothing to lose.

  “Yes.”

  She’s known all along it would be me.

  We are moral equals. Or should I say immoral equals. Stopping at nothing to freeze time. We belong together.

  She points to a tombstone wedged into the rooted knees of the largest Strangler Fig. There’s no sign of its original host tree, long since sealed completely within its massive trunk. “My great-grandmother,” she says. “Bisabuela.” She’s looking at the tree, not at the grave.

  She steps toward me. She takes another lick of the black sap from her bowl, and then she kisses me, tasting of acrid electricity. My knees almost buckle, but I hold myself up as she backs me toward the bisabuela tree. She slides her shorts down and presses against me, reaching for my fly.