Crook & Flail

by Maira Isabel Pita

  “Lucia, will you marry me? Don’t worry, I’ll sign a prenup—we just won’t tell Julian that.”

  She stares at him, wide-eyed as a sarcophagus containing a mummy on whom the Opening of the Mouth ceremony has not yet been performed.

  “Okay, forget it.” Now he looks over at the pyramids. “I’ll ask you again some other time, more romantically.”

  “No…I mean, no, I won’t forget it. I love you, Mark, let’s do it… And I won’t make you sign a prenuptial agreement.”

  “You’d be stupid not to,” he says mildly, his eyes still on the pyramids. “You’re way too trusting for your own good, Lucia. I know you can trust me,” he meets her eyes, “but how can you be so sure?”

  “My intuition?”

  “Right!” He pushes his chair back. “We’ll talk about this later.”

  * * * * *

  Alone in the spacious bathroom, Lucia undresses and pins her hair up as she fills the tub then she sits back to relax in the almost painfully hot water, her body invisible beneath white clouds of bubbles.

  What is troubling her isn’t whether Mark truly loves her, or if it is her money he is attracted to. She is willing to live in this gray zone for the time being. What disturbs her is her stubborn belief in Richard’s good intentions, the fact that no matter what, her faith in his love for her refuses to die.

  Mark pokes his head into the bathroom. “Enjoying yourself?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “I’m going out for a while. The Sound and Light Show starts at seven. I’ll meet you down there. Save me a seat.”

  “Where are…?”

  He closes the door.

  She trusted Richard with her life. She still trusts him with her life and now she longs to trust Mark in the same way even though she knows that will never be possible because she does not feel about him the way she felt, and still feels, about Richard and she knows she never will. Yet love, trust and respect all form a single orbit around her heart, inseparable in her sensual system.

  * * * * *

  Just behind the Mina House Hotel, folding chairs have been lined up in neat rows facing the Sphinx, which stares straight over them with benign indifference.

  After the Sound and Light Show at Karnak, Lucia isn’t expecting much. She is, however, looking forward to seeing Mark again. She doesn’t let herself speculate on his whereabouts.

  Seating herself next to the aisle in the back row, she sets her purse on the chair to her right. The makeshift auditorium is filling up rapidly but there is no sign of Mark yet.

  Every minute or so she glances over her shoulder, hoping to catch sight of him emerging from the hotel, but everyone around her remains a stranger.

  An expectant hush falls over the crowd as the lights dim but the chair beside hers is still empty. She tries not to become anxious, reassuring herself with the thought that he could easily have been delayed by Cairo’s infamous traffic.

  Pompously majestic music fills the night and a dramatically reverent voice rises into the universe as colored lights are beamed up over the pyramids. The cheap technology does not succeed in capturing the immensity of the monuments, much less their mystery. When the lights wash over the Sphinx, his smile takes on a sinister quality, as if he knows something she doesn’t, or won’t dare to face…

  Ten minutes into the show Lucia picks up her purse, gets up and walks slowly back into the hotel, searching the shadows outside it for Mark.

  She nurtures the hope that he is up in their room changing but she finds the suite as empty as she left it.

  She retraces her steps, hoping he is outside looking for her now.

  Walking behind the last row of seats, studying the undulating silhouette of the spectators’ heads, she ends up at the bottom of a dark road that ascends alongside the Sphinx toward the Great Pyramid.

  A small, hot light sparks suddenly in the night to her right.

  She turns toward it and watches a distant sun being born as a tall silhouette takes a long drag from a cigarette.

  She allows herself to become half hypnotized by the glowing red sphere’s rhythmic death and rebirth as a ghostly hand lowers and raises it. Then it careens into space, the silhouette steps toward her and the darkness takes form as a hard arm slipping around her waist and a hand cradling the back of her head. When a mouth opens over hers like a black hole she is too stunned to resist being sucked into a passionate kiss.

  “Whore,” he says mildly. “I thought you loved me. The only part of Osiris’ body Isis couldn’t find was his penis, Lucia, yet she remained faithful to him.”

  “Oh God.” She can hardly breathe from the length and depth of the kiss he just gave her, not to mention from shock. “This can’t be happening!”

  “It’s all right, just take a deep breath,” he urges gently, letting go of her.

  Still trying to catch her breath, she watches him light another cigarette like a beautiful devil breathing the spark of life into a slender white body he will enjoy for a while and then casually discard.

  “Julian told me you were wasting away with grief for me,” he goes on casually. “All that time I was laid up in the hospital I wondered, pictured, how you’d react when I rose from the dead, and you didn’t disappoint me, my love. You really believed I had the power.”

  “Oh my God!” She can’t think of anything else to say.

  “No, I’m not, but I appreciate your faith in me.” He gently thrusts the end of the cigarette between her lips. “Here, it’ll help you relax.”

  She takes a long, soothing drag of smoke and, closing her eyes, exhales two long years of misery.

  “I’m sorry, Lucia, but it was much better this way, believe me. The doctors weren’t sure I’d ever be able to walk again. It was touch and go for a while and I didn’t want to put you through that.” He caresses her hair and makes her take another drag. “I couldn’t have lived as a cripple—you know that.”

  “You were too proud to tell me,” she gasps. “You didn’t want me to see you that way!”

  “I was dead to you anyway, Lucia. I couldn’t fuck you.” He slips the cigarette between her lips again to quell her retort. “Yet by the time it was obvious I’d recover it was too late. I couldn’t just come home one day. So all that time I lay in bed, or agonized in rehab, I looked forward to preparing you for my resurrection with the ultimate fantasy—watching you give yourself, body and soul, to my all-powerful disembodied force.” He tosses the burning stub away. “I knew you’d enjoy it as much as I did, my love. Don’t pretend you didn’t. You know you never have to pretend with me.”

  She breathes, “It was you that night! You came to me that night!”

  “And God did you feel good! It had been so long, Lucia…”

  Before he can kiss her again, she turns and runs.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Sound and Light show has just ended and Lucia finds her headlong flight blocked by all the bodies milling leisurely back into the hotel.

  Caught in the current flowing through the dining room into the lobby, she desperately attempts to digest what just happened in the shadow of the pyramid and simply cannot. Yet the truth is that she had deliberately followed the secretive path of the Sphinx’s smile into the darkness and even as she searched for Mark, she had remained open to the haunting possibility of Richard’s presence, still refusing to believe he was gone forever. Now she must somehow grasp the fact that he had never been dead at all.

  “There you are.” Mark is standing before the dresser, slipping a black belt around black Dockers beneath a mock turtleneck the dark gray of storm clouds. “Sorry I missed the show.” He picks up his comb and runs the fine teeth through his thick hair. “Did you enjoy it?”

  “No!” She closes the door behind her and leans against it like Pandora pressing down on the lid of her box even as another part of her makes sure it doesn’t lock. “Where were you, Mark?”

  “That, princess, is a surprise.” He tosses the comb down and approaches her. “
You look beautiful. That’s an awesome dress.”

  “Elizabeth was right about you, wasn’t she, Mark? Richard coached you from the beginning, telling you everything you had to say and do!”

  He stops a few feet away from her “What the hell are you talking about, Lucia?”

  “Stop pretending, please.” She flings her purse on the bed. “I know Richard’s alive.” Her stomach aches from the abortion of one reality and the birth of its demonic twin.

  “You saw him again?”

  The door opens again.

  “And felt him.”

  Richard steps into the room. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’d like my wife back now.”

  Mark reads the impossible truth in her eyes before slowly turning to face the deep voice.

  “I appreciate your taking care of her for me.” Richard pulls out his wallet. “A thousand dollars a night seems reasonable. After all, she’s hard work.” He tosses some bills onto the small table beside him. “There, that should cover it.”

  For the second time that day she is silent as a mummy waiting for a priest to perform the magic ceremony that will enable her to think, speak and move again. The problem is there are two men with power over her in the room and only one possible heaven.

  “Lucia, tell this boy to leave, please.”

  She stares at the man she mourned without consolation for almost two years. Memory had smoothed out the fine lines around his eyes and mouth, which looks thinner and harder than she remembered it, probably from the intense pain he must have suffered after his accident, she realizes. “Mark, you weren’t part of this?”

  “No, he wasn’t,” Richard answers. “He just happened to walk onto the stage and deliciously complicate the plot.”

  “I’m sorry, Mark,” she glances at him, “but when I realized Julian had only been doing everything Richard told him to, I thought that was how you seemed to know me so well, because you were part of it.”

  Dark with emotion, Mark’s eyes are tarnished silver in the lamplight. “Is that what it felt like?”

  Richard kicks the door closed behind him before she can answer. “My wife seems to have grown fond of you, Mark.” He slips a pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket. He is wearing a black jacket over a black turtleneck, black jeans and black boots. “What can we do about that, I wonder?”

  More than anything on earth, she had longed to see him again, yet she can hardly bear the sight of him, as though she has been starving and is presented now with a feast from which she can only take painful, tentative bites at first in order not to get sick.

  “You never smoked before!” She accuses him of everything through this one manageable fact.

  “I promise I’ll try to quit after tonight, my love.” A smile smoothes away the new lines on his face and fully resurrects the man she loves more than life itself.

  She falls into the chair behind her as if hit by a laser.

  “Excuse me, but what’s going on here?” Mark’s scorn is desperate. “Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”

  Following her example, Richard seats himself beside the table onto which he threw the money and calmly smokes his cigarette as he once again describes his brush with death. In his pitch-black clothes, with his black hair and goatee and smoke flowing out of his nose and mouth, he is as handsome as one of Lucifer’s followers.

  Mark asks, very quietly, “You mean to tell me you played God with her feelings?”

  Richard crushes his cigarette in a white alabaster ashtray. “It was better than making her suffer along with me.”

  “You actually believe it was better to let her think you were dead all this time?”

  “Yes, to let her remember me as I was,” he smiles again briefly, “strong and virile.”

  “What you did was unbelievably sick! Pretending to be dead was bad enough but then to play your own ghost and fuck with her head like that.”

  “Lucia always enjoys it when I fuck with her. Don’t you, my love?”

  Mark says to her, “I’m going.”

  She gasps. “What?”

  He quickly throws some things into his bag, hangs his camera around his neck and picks up his laptop, all in less than a minute.

  Richard remains seated, his knees together and his hands lightly gripping the arms of the chair like a modern statue done in the pharaohnic style. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Mark.”

  Mark heads for the door.

  She manages to get up out of the chair but her body inexplicably refuses to follow him. “Mark?”

  His hand on the doorknob, he looks over his shoulder at her and holds her eyes. “Sa-eeda, princess.” He walks out, slamming the door behind him.

  The hissing foreign syllables the sound of her heart deflating, she falls back into the chair.

  Richard speaks so softly she barely hears him, “I’m sorry, Lucia. I know my being alive is a shock to you but I’ve been trying to prepare you.”

  She stares at the coffin lid of the door behind which her new life just vanished.

  “You’re a beautiful woman, Lucia, but you must realize it was your money he was after. That’s why he gave you up so easily, because he thinks it’s all mine again.”

  “Then why didn’t he take what you offered him?” she asks listlessly.

  “Probably because it was an insulting amount compared to what he had his heart set on.” He rises. “And maybe he’s proud. Maybe he didn’t want to admit, even to himself, why he was so utterly taken with you.”

  She closes her eyes. “Stop it.” Her head falls back, stretching and exposing her neck as if for execution. “Just stop it!”

  “It’s all right, Lucia, at least you can be sure I love you.”

  Her mind is suddenly as blank as the moon about to be swallowed by a black cloud as he approaches her. All she knows is that she will lose sight of everything once he takes her in his arms. Once again caught in the inescapable force of his will, body and soul she will reflect only his desires with her own.

  She feels him move behind her chair.

  “Lucia…” One of his hands lightly grips her throat and slowly caresses it up to her chin. “It’s me, Lucia, I’m here.” Two of his fingertips gently part her lips.

  As if the gesture throws a mysterious switch inside her, all her thoughts go out like lights and with her eyes still closed she turns in the chair, throwing both her legs over one arm and leaning back against the other so her head hangs back off the edge. She is dreaming—she must be. All she can do is keep her eyes closed and pray that nothing wakes her. Her hunger for him is so intense and so deep she is barely aware of the chair beneath her as she feels herself falling into the darkness of her own soul, waiting for him to give her what she needs, what she can’t live without. She moans when his hands catch her, gently cupping her face for a moment before he lets the tip of her tongue savor what she missed so much—the uniquely delicious taste of his head, so promisingly full of the cool, inexplicably rich flavor of his whole cock. She thinks she hears him whisper her name again far above her but the wave of joy and longing that hits her is deafening as it rushes through her blood. Fortunately he understands and quickly fills her gaping mouth with his erection. Her teeth, her tongue and the muscles in her throat all make way for him happily, welcoming him home. He doesn’t say anything, just makes a soft sound deep in his throat. His fingertips rest lightly on her cheeks so he can feel himself sliding in and out of her, slowly and carefully at first but a little faster and harder as her jaw relaxes around him.

  The terrible emptiness of the last few months vanishes as he fucks her mouth just as he used to, only it is so much better than she remembered, so much more overwhelming and dramatically difficult for her to endure, which makes her pleasure border on the mystical. The physical release is all his and, sensing it approach, feeling him pulsing between her lips as his warm, suffocating groin buries her features, fulfills her like a divine sacrifice. She is taking nothing for herself—it is all for him as the borders of her fle
sh seem to dissolve and she experiences his pleasure as her own. The only parts of her body he is touching are her cheeks, her lips, her tongue and her throat yet her cunt is so wet that when he suddenly reaches down to lift her dress and presses two fingers firmly against her clitoris, it feels like electricity surging through water. An orgasm’s pure charge arches her back and spreads through her whole body, burning through her veins and out into her nipples, which feel like hard little flames against her cool dress. She wants desperately to find some release for the beautiful agony in a scream. She can’t, not with her mouth full of cock, but her throat opens up with the desire, letting him thrust even deeper, and the feel of his cum pouring into her goes some way toward soothing her. Her eyelashes flutter against his groin and her nostrils flare so she can breathe as she presses her lips firmly around the base of his pulsing erection, sucking all of him into her.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Wearing a short violet dress and white high-heeled sandals, Lucia is standing dead center in the lobby of the Etap Hotel, surrounded by over half a dozen black suitcases of varying sizes.

  Richard is at the front desk, settling the bill and ordering a car.

  How could Mark have let her go so easily?

  The question feels like a knife stabbing her in the chest over and over again and she can’t stop turning it over and over in her mind and torturing herself with it.

  Something soft and warm brushes past her ankles.

  She looks down.

  A slender black cat is weaving itself around her luggage and possessively scenting each piece.

  “Oh, baby,” she cries softly, “you’re nothing but a skeleton!” She crouches down to pet it. “We’ll have to find you something to eat, now, won’t we?”

  “You must be she!” The smiling face of an Egyptian boy perches on the horizon of her garment bag like the hieroglyph for “eternity” written as a circle on top of a line. “Lucia Taylor, aywa?”

  “Aywa.” She smiles back at him.

  He thrusts a small brown fist toward her and opens it to reveal the slip of paper folded inside it.