The Cannibal's Prayer
Page 7
* * *
I keep her in the hotel room for days, for weeks. I fuck her when I please. I use her how I please. She exists to please me. Fame is a whore to be twisted for the pleasure of the strong. Those lips which wrapped around the cocks of all the wealthy of Hollywood kiss me now. She cannot escape the truth of her body; she is bound to it. She speaks to me. I cannot bear to hear her voice, pleading and weak and sickening. I cut out her tongue and feed it to her. She fights me, but she is glad enough to eat. I do not feed her often. Her body became bloated in the years of her growing irrelevance, sleek flesh grown soft, the belly and the hips and the thighs swollen. She is slimmer now, under my care. I can count every beautiful bone beneath the skin with the tips of my fingers.
They have stopped looking for her now, for the most part. She checked into the hotel under a false name - As if I would not know her! As if the world could suffer her silence! - and, it seems plain now, she told no one of her plan to return. They assume her overdosed in an alley somewhere and they eventually stop speaking of her. The movies go on without her. They bring in younger women who resemble her as she was to serve for new idols. I am not so fickle. The other disciples, those Judases, flock to her replacements. I am tempted, but I will not do it. She is mine alone. I let her watch TV sometimes. I think that this is the hardest part for her, to see that they do not speak of her any longer. That they have forgotten her. It is the addiction of fame, she craves the attention of faceless half-wits beyond all things. Now she has my attention, and that ought to be enough. I punish her for treating me so. The spiked barbs of the whip make ribbons of her back.
I begin to regret cutting out her tongue. I find recordings of her films, her television appearances on cheap daytime talk shows and late night press tours. I edit out several phrases and put them on a tape for her. She speaks to me by playing them. Each one is a memory for me. I find them far more soothing than the cackle of her broken voice had been. She sometimes grows frustrated and attempts to speak naturally: Her mouth opens and there comes a rattle from her throat. The stump of her tongue flutters in her mouth. I beat her when she does this until at last she ceases to attempt it. She is learning. There is nothing which she can say that I have not given her. She has no need of a voice. She is only sex.