Finishing touches, p.22
Finishing Touches, page 22
I should have felt good, getting all this out, but as soon as I stopped talking, a clamorous apprehension seized me. It was like a premonition or a vision, in which my mind showed me Lina saying: Yes, I’m your fantasy, but the point you’re missing, Tom, is that I am also my own ultimate fantasy, I am power, and so power is also your ultimate fantasy, and the reason you cannot resist me is because I am the irresistible force of nature, and our love will fly to the maximum because there is no wrong way, there is no other way at all. We are the only way.
This vision or flash of insight disturbed me profoundly, and the aftershock continued in spite of the fact that Lina actually said nothing. She was looking out into the night, holding my hand like a life line. Then she turned to me, and I saw that her eyes were full of tears.
SIXTEEN
Think of it as a hobby. A man needs a hobby. Tonight my pleasure is to watch. I am in a closet that has been turned into a small theater. It’s cramped and stuffy, but the play tonight is real life. Drama, comedy, and tragedy all rolled into one – you can’t beat that. The window is made of one-way glass; on the other side, in the guest playroom, it looks like a mirror. London is my peep-show . . . and tonight I’m going to watch a man try to fuck a chicken.
I don’t know where she picks them up, but it doesn’t matter. It isn’t difficult, either. The city is full of people out on the streets looking for something. Do they know what? Will they recognize it when they get it? Will it be as good as they had hoped? But wait. The lights come up to a soft glow and the stage is lit. The door opens. Enter dramatis personae, a man and a woman. The play begins.
He likes the room. He’s knocked out by it, and says so. They throw their coats aside. She goes to a liquor cabinet to get some drinks. He is still checking the place out. Nice decor, he says. Kinky, but he likes it. His eyes widen as he notices the implements on the wall – the whip, the handcuffs, the ropes and chains, the hoods and assorted masks. His eyebrows dance when he comes to the standing rack and the leather horse. There’s an old school desk too. It’s a romance.
He asks her if she collects antiques. No, she says, she uses these things. Just for fun and games, you understand. He does, of course. He hasn’t encountered this scene before, but he likes it. He’s game.
She’s worth it, isn’t she? What a looker, what a face, what a body. Some dress too – all those diagonal slits crisscrossing her thighs and cleavage, a web of them in back. Every way she turns and moves exposes a new fantasy of glimpsed flesh. He is so busy watching her he has trouble getting his glass to his lips without bumping his chin. He’s not much good at small talk, either, but we can excuse that. This is an action play.
Who is our hero? Late thirties, early forties maybe. First signs of gray in his hair. A businessman, at a guess. Probably not a very energetic or successful one, or maybe it’s just a dull business. Any ambition left in that face is strictly residual. His life may change, though. He still can’t believe his luck.
She gets up to put on some music. He tags along and takes advantage of the opportunity to come up close behind her and peer over her shoulder like they do in the movies. He kisses her ear (another ear washer!). She smiles back at him, leans against him for a brief moment, then glides away. The music comes on, and now he joins her on the couch. Enough of watching her; let’s get down to it. But he is smooth. He won’t rush it like some callow youth. Her smile is encouraging. He strokes her hair, fingers it gently, and he tells her sweet things. There seems to be something continental about this manner, and it occurs to me that he might be a Euro-businessman.
She wants to change into something else. Fine. And she tells him to get out of those clothes. Mmm, kiss, kiss.
She goes behind an Oriental screen, and he crosses the room to strip by the bed. There is both more and less of him with his clothes off: more flesh, running to slack and flab, less presence. He keeps his underpants on, and now he looks like a protodumpling.
She comes out from behind the screen and – hey, what is this? Wow! That’s what it is. She’s all done up in silver suede: high boots, tight microshorts, and, above, only a ribbon around her throat. Her long dark hair tumbles down to her waist. His Europoise is slipping badly. This is the call of the wild, and he is ready to answer it.
She gets the whip and shows it to him. Smooth animal skin. Doesn’t it feel . . . good? So thick at one end, so . . . delicate at the other. What’s the matter, any problem? You can’t win the prize, she tells him, if you don’t play the game. He reaches for a peekaboo nipple, but she moves away. Oh, yes, he’ll play, for man excels all the animals even in his ability to be trained.
Down, get down. He does. No, not just on your knees. All the way down. Crawl to me, she says, and he crawls. He reaches her boot. Kiss it. Good. Now crawl up this leg. That’s it. Now around behind. Very good. He’s trying so hard to please I hope he doesn’t falter. What a wonderful thing is man! Now kiss the back of the thigh. Now up. It’s tight, but, come on, get your tongue in there all the way. Yes, there.
Now she turns around, puts her boot on his chest, and pushes him over on his back. She stands over him and dangles the whip in his face. Lick the end of it. Suck it in. You can do that, can’t you? Sure he can. She’s taunting him, but he loves it. This is new to him, this is fun.
Now she tells him to get up and sit at the school desk. It isn’t easy, but he fits. He’s wedged into it. She stands close to him, one breast inches away. She holds his hair to keep his head still. Isn’t it a fine breast? Yes, he agrees. No, it’s more than that; it’s the most perfect breast you’ve ever seen, she tells him. Yes, he says hungrily, it sure is. Now she tells him to put his tongue out as far as he can without touching the nipple. Very good. Now hold it there as long as you can. He tries hard, but finally he gives up and lunges for it, ignoring the pain in his scalp. She lets him have a taste, but then she pushes his head away and steps back from him.
He extricates himself from the school desk. Can we go to bed now? his face asks silently. Please, teacher. The game was just fine, I liked it, it worked. I’m ready, oh, so ready. Can we go to bed now? Please, teacher, let me fuck you blind.
Stop, she commands. Hold your hand out, palm down. That’s right. One more trick. He’s a naughty boy, isn’t he? Admit it. A little piggy with naughty thoughts in his piggy head. Tell the truth. Yes, yes, he confesses. He has dirty thoughts about her. She should rap his knuckles. Make your piggy noises. Oink oink, he says shamefully. Oink oink oink oink oink.
The whip flies out to him before he realizes it has happened. He feels a warm, pleasant sensation in the soft fleshy area between his thumb and forefinger. Yes, it’s turning a dull red. He is shocked, but thrilled. She’d laid the whip end on him like a hot kiss. It didn’t even hurt. He didn’t know the whip could feel so – good. He has been chastised. The teacher smiles. He will be rewarded. Oink oink. She unbuttons her shorts and slides them down her legs.
But the truth is, the game is already out of hand. The next time the whip comes, it rips a fingernail away. Before he can react to this, the whip cracks again, taking out an eye. He crashes to his knees, hands covering his bloodied face. He is wailing, paralyzed in unthinking agony. Only she can deliver him from this, and she comes to him at once. She grabs his hair and yanks his head back from his hands. She has a shiny smile of a knife in her other hand, and with a swift stroke she draws the blade deeply through his throat.
The rest of him is science, but I can’t think about that now. It’s time for me to intervene. London is my peep-show and I am in it. Only I can deliver her from this. She is on her knees in his hot spill of blood, and she is crying for me.
“Tom!” she screams. “Tom! Where are you?”
I’m with her in an instant. I have her in my arms; I’m kissing her, hugging her, comforting her, but it’s as if she doesn’t know it yet.
“Tom! Where are you? Tom!”
She is crying in terror, like a child lost in the dark, a creature in unfocused pain. My body takes charge of hers. We lock and roll on the floor. I am taking her, working her, fucking her clear.
“Tom, get in me, get in me, fillmefillmefillme, oh, please get in me, get inside me!”
The way home.
He drove an Escort. So do we. There must be a million of them on the road. Ours changes color regularly. I’ve gotten good at it. Call it a hobby. A man needs a hobby. We put him in the trunk of his car, next to the spare tire. I drive until I find a good parking space. It’s a big city, and there are plenty of places to park, in spite of what people say. Then I walk along and get into the Escort Lina is driving. Someone may have seen me? But that wasn’t my hair color, my beard or my mustache. I have a much thinner build too. The key is, get them in and out fast, before they’re reported missing. They’re found soon enough.
These things do happen. We give it a good run, but we don’t push any pattern too far too long. We’re not in a game with the police. Headlines might help foster the desired state of public mind, but they can become a net negative. We take care.
For instance:
Lina and I are in Hyde Park. It’s a beautiful day, hot and sunny. There aren’t many such days in London’s short summer, and you have to take advantage of them. People are sprawled everywhere, sunning themselves. Lina and I are like any other loving couple out to enjoy the day. We find a good spot and stretch out on the grass. We say things to each other and maybe smootch a little. We are far enough away from anyone else to have a bit of privacy.
After a while, we notice someone. A man alone in a deck chair. He is about eighty yards away. He already has a tan and is burnishing it now. He has a floppy white sun hat pulled down over his eyes. A newspaper under his seat.
We’re on the high ground and we have our own newspaper. It’s folded like a small tent, sheltering the gun. Lina has a clear view and can pick her spot through the telescopic sight. The gun resembles a .45 automatic and fits neatly in her purse. But it’s something else. It’s powered by a battery in the grip. It is smokeless and virtually silent. It makes less noise than snapping your fingers. Click.
The man gives a small start. Does he have time to think he’s been stung by a bee? His hand moves instinctively toward the pinprick in his side but never reaches it. The flechette carries saxitoxin, which I’ve learned to extract from shellfish. Call it a hobby. Once in the bloodstream, saxitoxin is instantly fatal. The man never gets to say ouch, and he will stay in the deck chair until someone gets around to wondering about him.
The flechettes are even easier to use at night. Whether in crowded streets, like Piccadilly or Charing Cross Road, or in darker places. Lina and I may be walking arm in arm, or one of us may be out alone. People are always falling down dead in this city. More than ever, lately.
I have come to understand and accept that I am no less a sociopath than Lina is – if that is the right word for us. But then, I think all people are sociopathic, or most of them, if only by omission and indifference. And what has happened to me – it’s as if there were another part of me that had been waiting all those years for this. Call it conspiracy, serial murder, revolutionary justice, madness, ego anarchy. We’re secret anarchists. Call it history. It is all of these and more. And less: because the point is not to take it too seriously. It just happens, like the rain.
Lina and I have taken in one of the world’s homeless children. She is thirteen, slim, barely five feet tall. She comes from Chiangmai, or somewhere in that northern Thailand territory. It cost all of £100 to rescue her from hunger, whoredom, heroin, and early death. And it wasn’t hard to get her into this country. Money is the great enabler.
She had another name, but we call her Asia. She doesn’t speak a word of English, which is fine. She has long black hair, a face that is pretty in the best, truest sense of the word, and bud breasts that are just beginning to round her.
Our house is a palace to her, and she hardly ever wants to go out. Asia is with us all the time. She doesn’t like clothes, and we don’t make her wear them. She moves through the house like a cat. She takes possession of a chair, rather than just sitting on it. She uses her whole body in everything she does. Asia’s language is physical contact, and she rubs against us, sits on our laps and at our feet. Sometimes she even purrs and lick-kisses us. Asia is endlessly affectionate. Lina and I have only to glance at her to raise a sweet, girlish smile. We’re definitely better for having taken this child into our lives. Asia sleeps with us, light and playful as a kitten, a silky miracle of warmth and life.
We found Asia, and she found us, at the right time. Summer had passed, and autumn, two seasons of blood ritual. The manipulation of a city and its people. We pushed our inventiveness, and we took death as far as we could. We hung up some numbers, we had an effect. But in the end, it was only an effect. Even terror turns to numbness after a certain point.
We needed a rest. We had atomized ourselves, and we needed time to fall back together. Then we went and bought Asia, as if we knew she was looking for us, and we brought her back to London. It took only a few days, but Asia proved to be a new dimension in our lives. She enhanced us in ways we might not fully have understood but which we definitely felt. It isn’t humanly possible to sustain love at a constant fever pitch. Sometimes, not often, Lina or I would drift off into our own moods and thoughts and could not snap out of them. Then, responding intuitively, Asia would bridge us back to each other.
Asia stepped into our house, our life, and she became a part of it at once. She fitted in as if she had always belonged. I liked to think of her as the materialization of the love between Lina and me. Our child? Yes, perhaps, but something more than that. We shared the same bed as equals. Lina and I were two people, two bodies, but one life, one love. With Asia we were now three, but still one. Not a triangle, but a trinity.
I wonder whether it would have worked as well as it did if Asia spoke English. Would language, as it so often does, create strains and tensions? Maybe, but it didn’t happen, even though Asia inevitably picked up some English words from us. She used them only occasionally, and at a practical level. Otherwise, she avoided speech, as if she understood that we communicated best in a more natural way – with smiles, frowns, laughter, gestures, and touch.
We stayed in through most of the winter and spring. The three of us hibernating together, pleasing one another sleepily. Rest and recreation, in roughly equal measures. It was a kind of recovery too, for during those months we were also building up our strength for whatever lay ahead.
My father suffered a stroke that winter. With typical parental consideration, they didn’t tell me until he was back home. They didn’t want me to disrupt my work and fly home unnecessarily – there was no immediate threat to his life, although you never can tell in matters of the heart. It was a disabling stroke, however, and it ended any chance that they might travel to London to visit me. In a series of telephone calls, I told them, almost as often as I told myself, that I would soon get home to see them.
But at the same time, I wondered if I would ever see Ohio again. It was so far away, the land of the past. Sometimes it seemed like an alternative universe, beyond reach altogether. I didn’t really want to go back to it, but I did think of it now and then, as a mental puzzle to be toyed with idly. The past. When you are twenty, what do you remember of being ten? How little I now recalled of being twenty, which was recent, part of my adult life – and yet light-years away. The past is impossible. Personally, I think psychiatry is overrated. It’s all about the past. It’s a form of intellectual magic, and, like all magic, it works only if you’re willing to accept what you think you see.
Take Nordhagen and his chamber of horrors, for instance. That was even more recent, a black hole that had sucked me in – but already it was receding into history, sealed off in the past. The episode was becoming no more than a strange curiosity, a miniature seen through a telescope backward. I did all that? How strange!
And what of last year? The summer and autumn of London terror. All those dead. It wasn’t a mistake. I don’t even think it was a wrong turn. It was just something we had to go through. A Nordhagenesque Möbius strip, maybe. We were right to escape it when we did, just as we were about to find Asia.
We’d been hoping to create, then build on, some kind of momentum, and that was our false goal. Now, as England warmed into a new summer, I could see that trying to orchestrate death and terror was beside the point. They are part of the force of nature, which will flow and flow ever on. Instead of trying to steer it ourselves, we would have to learn to let it go its own way. Death and terror will follow, like leaves falling out of trees. We had been trying to gild the lily.
“You’ve got to think of people as raw materials,” Lina tells me. She says: “They are the ore of life, but all ends are irrelevant, so what you make of them doesn’t count as much as the process itself. Only the process matters, since it is the course of nature, and we can help it only in small ways. We are the cutting edge, that’s all. But it’s enough. It’s everything. We are the bacteria on the floor of the boundless jungle.”
I agree. The possibilities are infinite. The way ahead is the only way. We’re young, we’re ready. The winter was good, but now we’re downright itchy. It’s stepping-out time.
