The Ruined House

by Ruby Namdar

  Andrew glanced at his watch. A mere seven minutes had passed since beginning his cardio. Twenty-three more minutes on this humiliating machine! He gritted his teeth and pedaled slowly, a feeble ox turning a grindstone that was simply too heavy. These commercials! What were they trying so hard to sell? Wonder diets for instant weight loss, wonder solutions for credit debt, wonder drugs for bigger and better erections: a brave new world of wonder. Two more minutes gone by. How many commercials could they squeeze in between one segment and the next? It must be a popular show if they could sell so much advertising time. A thick, feverish perspiration ran irritatingly down his face. Reaching for the towel around his neck, he knocked it clumsily to the floor beneath the pedal rods. Instinctively, he bent to pick it up, letting go of one handle. At once his feet slipped from the pedals as though they were stepping on ice, and he lost his balance. With all his strength he clutched at the other handle, which rattled rapidly as though trying to shake free of him, too, and managed to avoid a painful, embarrassing fall. His muscles felt stiff and tight again. He wiped his brow with the sleeve of his exercise shirt, looking with vague, sorrowful guilt at the little white towel lying at his feet like a dead dove. There was nothing to do but let it lie there and go on pedaling. If he stopped even for a second, he knew it would be the end. He would beat a hasty retreat to the locker room and never come back.

  The program resumed with the caption: “A Month Later.” There they were, on their way to a glitzy club in the Los Angeles hills, pulling up in Daddy’s black Mercedes. Their friends crowded around them excitedly. Jason’s kinky hair was a straightened, peroxide yellow—or was it Aaron’s? Both were blond, their eyes an ersatz, ghastly ultramarine. They couldn’t be told apart. Which was which? One wore a stylish light blazer, the other . . . but God only knew what his sleeveless tunic was supposed to be. Still, as much as one hated to admit it, who could deny that the golden lines of their elegantly reconstructed cheekbones were a big improvement? What’s true was true. They were not nearly as ugly as they had been.

  There was Michelle! Short, pretty, and blond, too, she slunk into view in a tiny evening dress. The twins approached her reverently, a path cleared for them by their friends, who formed a ritual circle around them. Michelle, in the middle of it, looked bewildered and even alarmed. She clearly had not been expecting this. Live television at its best! Now the twins stood facing her with broad grins, their hearts pounding beneath the fashionable outfits that the program’s costume designers had dressed them in. “Well, what do you think?” Cut. The camera pans out and in again on an interview with Michelle outside the club. Although the light isn’t good enough to make her expression out clearly, her eyes do look moist. She seems in shock. “They look a lot better but they’re still not Brad Pitt,” she says. Cut! Another short break for a commercial.

  Andrew took his eyes off the screen. No, they weren’t Brad Pitt. Not quite. Still, the results weren’t unpleasant. Nineteen minutes gone. Only eleven left to go. Just keep it up a little longer! But no, he’d had it. Enough for today. Maybe tomorrow. He dismounted clumsily, his spine jolted by the sudden stop, bent, picked up the no-longer-warm towel lying on the floor, wrapped it around his neck, and headed for the stairs to the locker room. His glance lingered on the familiar surroundings as if he might not see them again for a long time, perhaps forever.

  11

  June 26, 2001

  The 5th of Tammuz, 5761

  What time is it? They have taken my watch with my other personal belongings, leaving me in a short green smock that barely reaches my thighs. Terribly weak, I sit hunched on a bed trying to follow the doctor’s explanations, which go wearyingly on and on. I don’t understand exactly what the problem is. Something has gone seriously wrong in my genital area, there is irreversible damage that calls for immediate surgery. I will be operated on alongside someone else, the faceless man lying catatonically in the next bed, wrapped in blankets and sheets as though in shrouds. How can it have come to this? I try collecting my thoughts and concentrating on the doctor’s words. If only I could stay focused on the soft, blinking eyes behind the thick glasses, I might grasp what has happened.

  The doctor continues his patient explanation, his soft, monotonous voice barely audible above the buzzing in my ears. It has to do with my seminal vesicles. Something very bad has happened to them. They have fallen into my anus. A dim, malignant feeling of guilt sweeps over me. What neglect! How, I ask, nodding a bit too eagerly to show that I am following the doctor’s remarks and want to cooperate, have I let myself deteriorate so? What luck that I am being offered a last chance to extricate myself, if only at a steep price, from the predicament I have gotten myself into!

  Yet how steep the price was only dawns on me as the anesthesia dripping into my arm takes effect. The realization hits me like a bomb: my prostate, testicles, and penis are about to be removed. A cold, paralyzing horror creeps through me, causing my body, which is growing heavier and more numb, to writhe in a final paroxysm like a fish in a net. The needles dislodge, tearing the skin of my biceps into bloody shreds. Sturdy arms seize me from behind and hold me in their practiced grip. Although its use of force is degrading, this display of authority calms my panic. Yet a moment later, the thick needle jab between my vertebrae almost makes me pass out from pain. The anesthesia is working on my muscles, which suddenly feel weak and watery. The terrible pain is now gone, though. In its place is a sense of relief, almost joy. I have done all I can to resist. Now I can give in and go to sleep, diving into the warm depths of helplessness.

  The hours pass. Perhaps days. Who can say? I open my eyes with great difficulty, forcing their sticky lids apart. They are bleary and sting as though from acid. I try lifting my hand to them, but it refuses to obey me and remains cold and lifeless on the sheet. I shut my eyes to let them rest. When I open them, they are met by a hideous sight: the elongated blue head of a young man was staring at me from a pillow next to mine. Certain it has been decapitated and diabolically placed near me, I shudder and shut my eyes again to drive the vision away. I take a peek. It is gone. The head, more pitiable than heartening, is now attached to the long neck of a youthful, astoundingly beautiful body. Its tormented look has a breathtaking, almost angelic beauty. The eyes flutter, the half-opened lips mouthing voiceless words that wake me from my anesthetized state. I know clearly now who the handsome young man is. It is Brad Pitt. Brad reaches out an arm to gather me to his maimed body. I strive to meet its embrace halfway, yielding to the desperate hug. We are both in such pain. Everything hurts. We are so wounded.

  The days pass as though in a clear, uninterrupted dream. Now we are ambulant, bandaged hermetically, taking gingerly walks in long, white hospital gowns, supporting each other. We are inseparable, me and Brad Pitt. It is as if we share one body. I have to pee. My urine is making my wounds hurt. Where is the bathroom? We have to find the bathroom. A nurse, stern and uncaring, stops us on our way. No! You can’t! You can’t urinate like that anymore! You have no penis! You’ll have to learn to pee sitting down. From now on you’ll have to pee like a woman.

  12

  Andrew woke up suddenly from his nightmare. He was in his bedroom. Although part of him rejoiced in this sudden relief, another part wanted to return to the warm, total embrace of the blue man, whose anguished beauty went on shining even though it had been only a dream. Ann Lee lay on the other side of the bed, half-naked. She had thrown off the blanket. The light from the street, mistakable for moonlight, bathed her in a soft, romantic glow that flamed in him tremblingly, tenderly. He reached out a hand to her, his fingers aiming for the place where her bare thigh met the bottom of the man’s shirt she wore as a pajama, then thought better of it. The movement was mechanical, volitionless. The struck match of desire went out quickly, leaving a trail of acrid smell. Lately, this had happened too often. What little sexual excitement he still felt vanished as fast as it was aroused. Though this worried him, he had no explanation for it; not knowing what to make of it or do a
bout it, he preferred not to think of it. The last times they had tried having sex had not gone well, to put it mildly. The electricity between them was gone, its place taken by a cold make-believe that led to more anxiety than pleasure. Although you couldn’t really point to any specific moment or thing that had spelled the end of their passion—but that was a lie! He knew very well that it had begun with that terrible night of the bloodied sheet; they no longer felt it. For the first time in his life, Andrew brooded about his ability to make love. It had become a major concern. Ann Lee was patient, perhaps more than she should have been. She seemed to have lost her sarcastic sense of humor and become unnaturally serious while prone to increasing fits of anger. Andrew had never been able to imagine life without sexual desire, especially for a young, attractive woman like Ann Lee. It was basic to his masculine identity. And yet the very idea of it now seemed improbable, almost unimaginable. He could hardly believe he ever had felt it. All his refined, richly nuanced, epicurean male sexuality now struck him as an illusion, an empty bubble that had burst against a gray, diminished, Eros-less reality. Memories of past lovers came and went: naked bodies, assorted positions, ribs rising from a woman’s waistline; the elongated curve of a white thigh; the fine fuzz running down a spine: it all seemed distant, unreal. It had the cheap vulgarity of a bad novel or dumb movie, a triteness like the Vaseline smeared over the lenses of cameras in old X-rated films to give their nude figures a mysterious, dreamlike halo. The whole tiresome exertion of lovemaking, of arousing the minimal desire and curiosity needed to maintain an erection, had come to seem not only tedious but immature and even infantile.

  Andrew pulled the blanket toward him and turned carefully on his side so as not to jostle the mattress, his face to the wall and his back to Ann Lee. All he wanted was to lie like this, by himself, semi-fetally curled beneath the blanket while surrendering to the wisps of thoughts and bright, golden visions that increasingly occupied him by day and by night. They bore him to far times and places, bound him to them with magical cords as if he had unfinished business there that he needed to complete. But tonight they did not appear. The doors of the shrine remained shut, excluding him from the enchanted light that filled the interior, gilding its implements and its smooth, cool marble walls. His half-waking fragments of dreams and memories were replaced by a strange, regressive stirring more like the vague desire of prepuberty than a normal, mature sexuality, the autoeroticism of the masturbating child who has no object in mind and is too young to ejaculate. He was having more and more of these cloudy, infantile episodes that evoked a lost sexual prehistory. Paradoxically, they occurred most frequently on nights when Ann Lee shared his bed, frustrated by his lack of interest in her and forced to make do with a fatherly hug and a good night peck on the cheek. Andrew would lie by her side, waiting for her regular, childlike breathing to tell him she had fallen asleep. As soon as she had, all the demons of his imagination emerged from their hiding places to torment him with images and snatches of scenes having nothing to do with his adult self or its sexual proclivities: huge, white, flabby, sexless behinds; heavy, pale bellies spilling over thick hips, their flesh crisscrossed by bluish veins; thick, hushed voices whispering baby words he did not understand, though they aroused in him a strange yearning. Sometimes a covert violence took control of this phantasmal night world, trapping him in its crude, sterile, embarrassing lust. A hand holds the elastic band of a pair of baggy underpants, stretches it, and suddenly lets go. The band snaps back, thwacking loudly against a bare bottom that quivers with a cry of protest . . . Andrew sat up with a start. An invisible hand has taken hold of his penis and milked—with a few sudden, rapid strokes—all the sperm stored in his warm, sleepy testicles.

  Panicked, he looked for the hidden hand. There was no one there. No one had touched him. Ann Lee was still sleeping at the other end of the bed, her position practically unchanged. The last of the quick, deliciously painful contractions throbbed in his loins. He peeked beneath the sheet and saw nothing. Taking a deep breath, he stuck a hesitant hand in his pajama bottoms and pulled it back quickly, his fingers covered with a layer of warm, sticky goo. Incredulously, he stared at the viscous sperm shining dimly in the light from the street. This had never actually happened to him before, though of course he had heard about it as a boy. It was a subject for locker-room talk, the “wet dreams” related by the boys who had them in voices no less sticky and wet. The gluey fluid had seeped through his underpants and was staining his pajamas. Andrew threw off the blanket with his left hand, holding his right hand, on which the drying semen burned like a cold fire, in the air. Trying to keep it from touching anything, he extended it before him like a soldier while slipping out of bed and tiptoeing to the bathroom. Still using his left hand, he shut and locked the door and turned on the hot water. The faucet gurgled testily. Surprised to be woken in the middle of the night, it took a second or two to start filling the sink. Andrew scrubbed his sticky fingers, unable to recall when he last had encountered the batter-like texture of human semen. He dried his hands, which were stinging from the hot water, and turned his attention to the real disaster, the smelly, sticky mess in his pajama bottoms. He peeled these off cautiously, trying to avoid unnecessary contact, rolled them into a tight ball, and stuck them deep in the laundry hamper, hoping the pile of dirty clothes on top of them would keep their odor from permeating the bathroom. Next, he inspected his body. His sex and groin were almost completely covered with the sickening substance that whitened as it congealed, making his short, curly pubic hairs stiff and prickly.

  How much goddamn sperm did he have in him? He had never imagined one ejaculation could contain so much. Although he would have given anything for a hot shower, the thought of waking Ann Lee was out of the question. The combination of shame, animosity, and self-pity that this made Andrew feel brought him to the verge of tears. He was trapped in his own bathroom, forced to act like a thief in his own home! Grabbing a washcloth from its bar by the sink, he wet it with hot water and set about cleaning himself of the disgrace as best he could. In the end, still feeling soiled and polluted, he made another little ball of the towel and thrust it into the hamper by the first. Angie! She was sure to find it, still damp, when she came in the morning and identify the smell at once! He would have to do something. Would there be time to retrieve it all and wash it with hot water and soap before she arrived? Fatigued to the point of apathy, he leaned above the sink and stared in despair at his puffy, unshaven face in the mirror. Dark bags hung under his eyes. His gray hair stuck out ridiculously like a rodent’s filthy fur. The sight disgusted and shamed him. He shut his eyes and breathed deeply, struggling to recover his senses. White, sand-smoothened, wind-honed wooden oars. Whalebones, cleansed by the sun and the years. A breeze from the sea would blow away all impurity. The light would bleach it. The sand would scrub it clean of its apartness and return it to the bosom of Unity. All matter would be pure again, restored to what it once was. . . .

  Andrew came to with a start, startled by the sight of himself in the mirror and the realization that he had fallen asleep standing up: undressed from the waist down, his two hands gripping the sink, his forehead almost touching the cold mirror. He was far too exhausted to sneak back into the bedroom, open the dresser, and take fresh pair of pajama bottoms from a drawer. What would he tell Ann Lee in the morning? It was too much to deal with now. He would think of something. Perhaps he would wake before her and manage to dress before she asked embarrassing questions. He hobbled back to bed, groping his way with half-shut eyes, and lay down, taking care to keep the blanket away from his still moist and sticky genitals. He mustn’t contaminate the bedclothes with even a leftover drop of sperm! He let his eyes close and breathed in and out to stay calm. A deep weariness overcame him. He yielded to the sensation of it, maintaining his breathing while letting sleep steal over him. . . .

  13

  The telephone rang sharply, close to his ear, tearing Andrew from his sleep and hurling him into a panicky wakefuln
ess. Who could be calling at this hour? Something terrible must have happened! He grabbed the receiver and held it to his ear. Linda’s voice screamed hysterically into it, her words so mixed with sobs that they were hard to make out. “Alison’s gone! She’s disappeared! Someone’s kidnapped my baby!”

  Andrew leaped out of bed and dressed hurriedly without turning on the light, groping for his clothes that lay on a chair like a dark corpse. One leg in his pants, he hopped out of the bedroom while trying to work in his other. His damp, itchy genitals rubbed against the rough fabric. There hadn’t been time to put on underpants, every second counted. Sticking his feet into a pair of shoes, he grabbed his wallet and keys and ran outside, uncombed and unwashed. The long hallway, lit by a weak neon light, was like a labyrinth, every one of its gray doors alike. Low-wattage bulbs flickered over the emergency exits. Empty elevator shafts yawned with toothless mouths. Andrew kept pressing the button of the snail-like elevator to make it come faster, then dashed across the lobby and leaped into the dark street.

  The taxi sped down Broadway and turned left at 96th, heading for the FDR. Its faceless driver weaved past flashing traffic lights and orange road-repair cones. As in a bad dream, the apocalyptically illuminated streets were totally empty. The taxi raced on. Andrew squirmed in the backseat, running his hand through his hair in a vain attempt to make it look presentable. The driver drove in silence, taking the streets to Brooklyn at an unbelievable speed. Was he shocked by Andrew’s strange appearance? Could he smell the faint whiff of dried semen coming from his pants? What was he thinking, what was going on in his mind? Most likely, nothing. New York cabdrivers had seen everything. Nothing could surprise them anymore. They were on the FDR now, tearing by the exit at 42nd Street, at 34th, at 23rd. The tail end of the Williamsburg Bridge loomed in the corner of the front windshield, causing Andrew’s terrified heart to beat faster. The rapid ticking of the meter kept time with it as they neared their destination. Down Flatbush Avenue. Then right, into Park Slope.