October 2012
WHAT? OH god, just get through it. Argh. No. Motherfucker.
It was absolutely blinding. My head exploded, a bomb had gone off, this wasn’t what was supposed to happen, ow, ow, ow, Jesus Fucking Christ that hurt.
So much for going back to sleep. I got back up and staggered out of the bedroom-deadroom back into the living.
This had never happened before. I had been up since 4:00—well, that part happened all the damn time any more—and had decided by 8:30 that I could maybe go back to bed, get in a little more snooze, yay, weekend. Back in bed, I was lying there, playing with myself, to help with that last little bit of relaxation, that last little bit of letting go before falling blissfully back into a nap. It had worked just fine so many times before. Every time, actually. For decades.
I’m not even sure at this point what I was fantasizing about. The usual, I reckon: oral sex, anal sex, having a woman being submissive to me, having her doing something utterly dirty, having her abide through some atrocity simply because I wanted her to—and it would be alright with her; she would be on board with that as her own demons required her to give in to me, oh, yeah, baby—and whatever it was, it was working.
I was hard in my hand, my eyes were closed, my legs were spread a bit, just enough to get some leverage to exert tension into my ass through the base of my cock and it was all pulsing nicely. I was performing a small thrusting action with my hips and my good right hand—the one that had done this more days than not in my life—was moving my skin around on my penis, up and down, massaging the muscle within, pushing down from above as I lay on my back, sinking further into the bed, pressuring my cock between my hand, my abdomen, getting faster, mmmm. My left hand was squeezing the base of where my dick attached, my thumb wedged into the hinge of where I stuck out and where I wanted to increase the pressure, pulling my ball-sack, and the actions all led as they always did, into a path I never bore of, a march I never got tired of, and my focus tightened toward my dick, my hand, whatever gorgeous seductive humiliating disturbing insane I-love-doing-this-to-this-woman imagery was flashing through my mind, I could hear the girl saying ‘oh, god, yes’ in my conjuring—she couldn’t help it, heh, heh, she’s such a fuck monster—I could see my satisfaction from here, and my whole body started in on its happy-penis dance, hallelujah, c’mere angel, gimme a kiss.
The tingles began moving up my backbone toward my thinker and as they reached my neck they were met by something else. In the very middle of my skull, a soon-to-be-gratifying tension rose and spread and blossomed around, overfilling the bowl that held the goal of my nervous system and the sparkles spilled their way out and down to meet the ignitions moving up and they melded toward the base of my skull, halle-fucking-lu-jahhh...this tension encounter was normal, a meeting of sensation for a regular B-flat orgasm, the trombones and the trumpets were about to come in to accentuate what the strings were doing, four, three, two, one, get ready, percussion. All was going well, my cup was going to runneth over, I was going to make a mess and I didn’t care. My thought process shutteth-ed down. Autopilot happen-ed, nothing to do but finish. The point of no return was cross-ed.
Then something went hideously wrong. The noggin-side glitter-fall found a different set of neurons to fire upon—shit! What the fuck is that?—and the expected joys transformed into a beheading. My entire being detonated in pain, everything from my crown down blasted in anguish. The last thought that had any semblance of linguistic support I could muster was to ride it through, this’ll fix itself in a second—and the second crawled by even onto eternity, gawd, it’s bright in here, how did it get to be so noisy, crappy symphony analogy became cacophonous—to no improvement. It got worse. The painful neural activity in my cranium slammed into the once-pleasurable was-that-just-a-second-ago dazzlings in my spine, and the agony won, intensifying beyond the telling of it. I don’t know how I didn’t scream.
Oh, holy fuck it hurt. Any regard for any sense of ‘uh, that’s enough now’ didn’t have any purchase in whatever the fuck this was, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck saying fuck, and my vocabulary fucking diminished to shortened fucking words we can’t say in the Iglesias; whatever I thought I fffuuucking knew about anything quit m-mattering, there was only an ever-increasing excruciation that had no beginning, no end, no reason, no mercy, death take me now, please, oh fucking please…
I’ve had one pain that was worse. Seventeen years ago I had pneumonia a few times and set into a coughing spell one night. I couldn’t stop hacking, and I finally coughed so hard, I swore I could feel something break in my lower left chest at the bottom of my ribcage. That night I did make noise and the emergency room was of no help: no answers, no relief, go home, get some sleep, sorry, all that happened was that you coughed. The X-ray didn’t show anything except the pneumonia. I didn’t go to work the next day but had to drag my sorry ass to my scrumptious little doctor who said yes, you have it again, stay home, feel better. After a few days of antibiotics I was able to stumble around enough to get back to the office, hi, how are you, I’ve been better, thanks, you poor thing. A month-and-a-half later, I was hospitalized for again having pneumonia, hmm, that’s weird, how many times is that, and the medical profession eventually found—with an MRI—an abscess about the size of a grapefruit growing on the bottom of my lung that couldn’t be seen on X-ray, well, that had to go; it had to be surgically removed. The butchers had to destroy it to take it out: they left me with a jagged seven inch scar I still haven’t covered with a tattoo, and I am still not altogether convinced I didn’t die on the table, but they at least noticed that the thing they went in there for had been cracked in half at some point, and had grown back over through the middle. Recovery was indeed unpleasant—I got to play the part of the Mummy for months afterwards—to say the least, but it all didn’t hurt quite as bad as that coughing-hacking-oh-my-god-I-can’t-breathe night; that night was the worst. Thought I really was going to die. On the pain scale, this little experience was that film with Dudley Moore and Bo Derek.
When the breathing-drainage tube got put into me after surgery, I was awake, but I can’t remember it. The nurses gave me twilight drugs to make me forget, which I both bless and curse. The interns who were there for the procedure came in a couple days later and cowered against the wall the whole time; wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t look directly at me, were anxious to get the hell out of there. I asked the surgeon about it after they slinked away, who only said, “Yeah. Don’t worry about it. It, uh, hurt.” I gathered I was ungentlemanly during the procedure, so that one, too, was obviously pretty bad, but I’m not sure it really counts; that little itch should maybe scale in at that oh-so-interesting movie with Mickey Rourke and Kim Bassinger, but maybe I’m not thinking about it right, and maybe it doesn’t quite have weight, since I have no memory of it. Another scar that I explained at the beach, along with the other one: “Yup, came up against a jealous husband: bullet wound, knnife, I’mmm llllucky ta be aliiiive. He ain’t. Heh heh.”
But this niggardly noodle-twinge ranked. A Solid Something by Fellini; maybe that wretched Daniel Day-Lewis musical.
…My bed threw me out of it without me doing anything, all while the gray matter was growling and barking and snarling at me in a language usually reserved for horror films and sadomasochistic fantasies, the ones I usually manage to be fairly fond of, the ones I spend an inordinate amount of time looking for on the internet. And I needed maid service. Shit. Gad. I managed to pull my robe off its hook without falling down with it, and staggered off to the bathroom, dragging it behind me, dropping it onto the tile, didn’t care, I dripped, I deteriorated. I managed to raise my eyes toward the mirror, fuck, it’s still me, where are the goddamn warspears I can definitely feel skewering my parietal plate; pressing my hands up my temples as hard as I could didn’t even register. I watched myself try to crush my own head like a grape; it felt like I succeeded continuously.
Every analgesic I had got wolfed down, which succeeded in deluding my sense of panic—but not the extreme prejudice that was being point-blanked at my neuroreceptors—into muting enough that I could pant my way to the chair in my living room—shit, robe—and I stared cross-eyed at the boob tube through I can’t even tell you how many years, centuries, eons of—inane, fuck, who writes this shit—television programming executive decisions; it was just a flickering light-box speaking in tongues.
The banshee in between my ears, behind my eyes, above the roof of my mouth, finally simmered down on all the wailing after what to be only a couple of hours; I had one maybe three of those sleeping pills that clears the nose—thinking it was a sinus problem—which finally did put me to sleep, but the pounding was still there, still throbbing the rest of the day.
And the next.
And the next.
The nuisance in my brain pan bellowed for over three weeks straight. The number of minutes it didn’t hurt could be counted on my left hand. The one I don’t use to masturbate with.
I tried whacking off a couple more times that weekend, and a couple times since. Hope against hope. The first time wrought the same effects as the real first time, shit, ouch, oh my fucking god ouch, I didn’t know it rained in hell, and the second, well, it was building up and up and up and oh jesus, it was going to happen again, and I quit. The others didn’t hurt quite so bad, I toughed them on out, persistent little bugger, ain’t I, but, yeah. It gets my attention. Put a stop to that nonsense.
Looked it up on the web: found Coital Cephalalgia. Sex Headaches are not tracked as common, reported at about one percent of the population, but considering how mortifying this all is, the incidence could be much higher. The stories I read and the descriptions I found all hit with the same symptoms, just like they did me: soul-shattering scalp-splitting suffering of the damned at or around orgasm. But usually, not for three weeks straight.
Monday I went to see my little hottie flibbertigibbet doctor whose usual habit it was to save my life; told her all about my portable volcano. Of all the physicians I ended up talking to about this, she handled it the best: her bedside manner was why I kept going back to her; she understood that humans do, sure, it’s okay, uh, things. “We all do,” she winked. We talked and she assured me it was alright and—just like she always did—she held my hand; she set up an MRI, but this was decided to not be frantically urgent and it could probably wait: Friday. Ack. Apparently, I didn’t show quite the right set of symptoms to warrant actual emergency, like a cerebral hemorrhage or a stroke, ow, fuck me, fuck you, fuck everyone in the office and y’all better not fucking enjoy it, ‘cause I sure as fuck am not, ow. She let me rant a little, pet me, gave me a hug, hang in there, let me know. After I had my claustrophobia re-affirmed in an exorbitant electro-coffin at the end of the week, the center assured me they would contact my doctor, oh yes, immediately, immediately if they found anything. I saw her that evening, and she hadn’t heard anything, how are you doing, are you okay. I had never seen her in public before, never out in the world, never seen her husband before, and she put her hand on my shoulder before she left, be strong, we’ll get you through it, and she did go to all the trouble to send me a one-word letter the next week: “Normal.”.
Yeah, right. Great.
So, good news in that it wasn’t something that was going to kill me. Bad news, in that it wasn’t something that was going to kill me. Because I wished I was dead. Well, maybe not dead-dead. I’ve had bad things happen to me over the years—hell; we all have—but nothing like this. The people who have labeled this sort of thing as ‘benign’ haven’t had them a one-of-these, and okay, it could be worse: there are reports that in some cases, it induces amnesia, so by the next time you get round to getting your groove on again, you have forgotten that it happens, and then get to experience it all over again for the first time. Whoo, Nelly. Auto-sublimaze. Hmm. Maybe that would be better; had me an acquaintanceship once upon a time with that shit.
As I retell the tale for the umpteenth time to myself, trying to figure it out, it all keeps coming back down to the short course: the absolute antithesis to my objective for going on living hit out of the blue, nobody knows what causes it, no pain killer I own can do a thing against it; it may just stop, it may go on forever, it may go away and surprise me again someday.
As I, at least at the moment, have an assurance of a fairly solid violence aimed squarely at my belfry in this arena, I think it goes without saying that my interest in the erotic is quite short-circuited right now, and I am not taking it well, no, not well at all…hello, ladies on the internet, shit, can’t play tonight, can’t beat off, can’t read, I hate television, my patience for movies has run its course, crap, staring at the wall reminds me of what I’m staring with and how it has things to say about that, harsh things about what so much unheeded meditation on sin has wrought, you deserve it, haven’t you seen enough spook films to know that he who has sex gets it, even if it’s just with yourself, it’s disgusting, especially the way you do it, Terry. Bleaach. Ow. And I suspect this is the test, now, isn’t it, the big exam of life: can I do anything without my penis being involved, can I do anything of note or of value, hell, can I do anything at all, never mind worthwhile.
Doesn’t feel like it.
I’ve already lost friends, real friends, albeit indirectly; people who don’t even actually know what’s going on because of it. People whose patience apparently ran out real quick during an episode, ‘god, you don’t have to be so rude.’ Probably has to do with how poorly I am taking it, ‘Oh, poor baby, headache, huh, that’s too bad,’ with a tip of the head and an obligatory muttering of ‘asshole’ under their breath as they stepped away. I tried to rationalize things with the idea that this was at least vaguely interesting; wrongo: people were about as interested in the idea that I couldn’t fuck as they were with the idea that I could. Same
horror, different angle. Shut the fuck up, Terry, we really don’t want to know. Too much information.
Doesn’t matter, I’m too busy to notice: I’ve got a horde of nasty eentsy-weentsy tiny dragons with fangs and fire-claws and a ferocious demeanor that are every-fucking-where to contend with all the while, on top of which, I am grieving the loss of my sexuality; becoming a castrati, being gelded by my own brain chemistry, is not my choice. I don’t even need to direct my focus onto my nether region; it all comes and goes at it pleases with me just sitting there, minding my own business, good morning asshole, don’t forget me. I am pain’s obedient servant now; I wish and I pray that I knew what it wanted—that reminds me, I need a good languishing couch—what I would have to do to make it stop, because at this point, there isn’t a whole lot of question as to whether or not I’d do it. That was always one of the conditions in my dreams: do this, and I’ll quit doing awful things to you, oh, and I will continue to do them until you do; give in, obey, be mine, want what I want you to want, you’re my toy, my submissive, my vassal, let me be your god. Doesn’t seem to work that way for me these days. Stupid unrelenting reality.
The bitch from my delusions doesn’t want to have anything to do with me any more; she has no room in her life, er, my fantasy of her life for anyone as emasculated as me. My imaginary whore has run out of ‘yes’; my ability to summon my favorite slut to do my bidding has diminished onto negligible. God fucking damn it. You’d think that if I could succeed in getting her here and getting her to perform that which works for me, she could at least have the decency to allow me to put her through her paces, bwa-ha-ha-ha, if for no other reason than to get to see from her bindings how the burdens I have inflicted upon her for so long get reflected back onto her master, but no, the miserable little cunt doesn’t seem to think even that would be worth her precious time. Not sure what I’m going to do with her.
The word that keeps resurfacing to me is ironic. I have tried all my life to be a good man, and now I now I-I seem to get to endure the Finger of The Lord tapping me on the side of my haircut when I do the thing we’ve all been doing to ourselves since the womb—before we were even inflicted with original sin, so of all things sanctioned by heaven, this pretty much has to qualify as righteous, doesn’t it—the thing that gets all the bad press from a biblical story that doesn’t even mention it, that we’re all too embarrassed to admit that we do and to have to admit something is going horribly wrong while we’re doing what we’ve all been taught we shouldn’t? Ach. God’s a funny guy, huh.
###
“YOU’RE KIDDING, right?”
“Actually, no.”
“So, let me get this straight. You are telling me that what actually works for you is the whole fairy tale princess thing, castles, knights in shining armor, candles, lute music, flower petals on the duvet and being awakened from a blissful peaceful night’s rest by a gentle kiss from the handsome prince who has fought his way through sinister things to be by your side, and getting to finally be put up on the pedestal he adores you on, that you deserve, happy forever after, and everybody looks fabulous, amen?”
“Well, when you put it that way, it sounds fairly juvenile. Stupid. Shallow. Thanks a fucking lot.”
“I’m just trying to understand things, here. This children’s story is what actually makes you wet.”
“I didn’t say that. That’s just what I want. How I want to live.”
“Oh, well, who doesn’t want to be deliriously fucking happy all the god damn time?”
“And, so, well, then, there you be.”
“Answer my question.”
“I can’t. It doesn’t work down to one or two little things, just trip the right trigger and off I go into ecstasy land. You know that. I’m not a man.”
“Oh, and I suppose you’re next going to say that I’m not exactly one any more either, huh. And not that it matters, but you’re wrong about how we work. What about what I do to you? What I want from you?”
“Yes. No. Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes. I don’t know how to answer that. It’s all contradictory, twisted, a paradox. You’ve never even allowed for that kind of depth in me before, that kind of variable. It was always something you dictated to me and frankly, the idea that I am even going to be allowed to talk is how you barely got me to even cross the threshold tonight. What does it matter anyway?”
“It’s what I want.”
“No, what you want is to be able to have an orgasm without your head thundering with a herd of pissed off rabid water buffalo rampaging around, tearing up your precious china shop of a mind, you conceited misogynistic narcissistic phony.”
“Yes. That, too.” I wasn’t expecting name calling from her; it took me by surprise.
“How is calling me in here going to help you with that? If I let you do what you usually do to me—again; yeah, right, like I have a choice—and it works, you’re going to blame me, and take it all out on me more than you ever have before in ever new and inventive cruel and vicious ways, which is only going to cycle back around onto you and get you all excited again and make it all happen again, only worse. It’s a bad plan; it will only set up a really brutal feedback loop back onto yourself, and I know you don’t like it to hurt the way you want me to like it, so I don’t understand what you’re doing here. Fuck, I don’t understand what I’m doing here.”
“Sounds crazy, doesn’t it.”
“It totally fucking is. I mean, except to bark an order at me or to gloat over how bad you’ve made it for me, you’ve never even spoken to me before. Not so much as the time of day. I don’t even get to cuddle afterwards. I’m just a cipher, someone you invented to vent your rage against since you can’t do what you want to do for real because no one in their right mind would even want to hear about that—too much information to the N-th degree; god, you’re a pig—and it would take a certifiable lunatic to let you do what you want. I’m only a dream.”
“Maybe I want something else these days.”
“Oh, sure. You know there is no woman on earth who will go through what you put me through. And if you were to try it, if you could actually find an idiotic submissive little masochist who is too stupid to say ‘no’, you’ll just get yourself killed by people who actually care for her. No one would put up with what you want. What you say you ‘need’.” She made the quote mark motions in the air. “This is absolutely moronic: using me to try to understand a real woman isn’t going to make you understand a real woman.”
“I suppose not.”
“So why the fuck do you want me to come on and do the dog and pony show to make something happen that we both know you’ll hate? You’re not suffering from a self-defeating personality disorder; that is the shitty little demeanor you have given me. You’re the god damn sadist in our little symbiosis here; you’re the one that wants to be a god, remember? Why does the asinine little asshole god want to visit hell?”
I didn’t say anything, despite her point; she had more to carry on about anyway.
“I mean, look, you can kill me and resurrect me at will, you can twist me into saying and doing anything—a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g—at all and I will just put on the happy face you demand and have no concern for myself whatsoever. I am expendable. And you will always make me come back and forgive you and let you carry on like nothing terrible happened at all. My being here really makes no sense, and you can’t give me what I really want anyway: you can’t set me free; I am nothing but the lie you create, and you’re not that inventive. What you really need to do is take your god damn hands off yourself for a while; maybe then it’ll get better.”
“All true, but then again, maybe not. I have to be able to control it, this, this thing that happens to me. If I can’t, I might as well just get a knife and finish the job on my dick that my neurology has started. I’m not going to let it beat me.”
“Nonsense. The whole point of sex—fuck kids—is to feel good. If it doesn’t lead to that, it doesn’t happen, not in real life. Even the real pain-sluts have real limits as to what they will endure, and if they don’t get something out of whatever agony they find themselves in, once they’re grown up enough, they will walk away, and never look back. Masochism has an end, which is to not be masochistic any more. To get to where it has been enough and it can all stop hurting. When a masochist has paid enough for her sins, she’ll stop being a masochist. Go read something; it’d be a better learning experience.”
“Sadism doesn’t have an end. And sadists require masochists. Besides, doesn’t understanding pain management make me a better master?”
“Bullshit. Master, my ass. Of all the things I have ever begged you for, please: please don’t do this; it will only lead back to where you already are.”
“To being someone who is not able to have sex.”
“Pretty much.”
“Not acceptable. And I find it enormously interesting that you have the slightest concern for me.”
Her face fell, as did her shoulders. She sighed, and I waited for her to either acknowledge that she did, in fact, care, or change the subject. “It’s not like you’re going to let me off the hook here, anyway. And I’m sure my so-called concern is nothing more than your subconscious exerting itself for your own self-preservation, particularly where it concerns your delicate male ego. This is a mad science. So, fine. Just fucking fine. You’ll give in eventually. What do you want me to do?”
“Pick a name for yourself.”
“Oh, fuck me.”
###
THE ROOM I put Susan in was an unfocused green, like one finds in hospitals or bathrooms; there was a rickety old wooden workbench against one wall, a black cabinet, and the structure I had concocted for her. Otherwise plain, reasonably well-lit. I seemed to remember some old dungeon-porn I had seen it in once. It was 4:00 o’clock: the witching hour.
“You have got to be kidding me.”
“You know, you have become an awful lot mouthier, lately.”
“Oh, blow me, you old fucker. I suppose that means you want me to go back to being a quiet demure little victim, who mews pitifully underneath her gag and sheds cute little tears while you’re busy breaking bones on her.”
“Naw, I kinda like this. Feisty is fun.”
“Yeah, I’m sure it fosters the idea that I’m a living girl to you, you bastard.”
“Whatever. Take off your clothes, please.”
“Fake politeness doesn’t win you any points with the figment of your imagination.” The silky red plaid dress fell where she stood into a puddle—I hadn’t even seen her make the move to undo it—and the blouse fell away like crisp paper magic. One moment her clothes were all over her, the next they were on the floor and her arms were crossed, her feet a little more than shoulder-width apart, in an authoritative, almost aggressive stance; not what I expected from her at all. She was still wearing a large white practical bra like her mother would have worn, granny panties, and nylon pantyhose. “Is this what you had in mind?”
“Seems odd that when I’m not directly dictating every whipstitch of the daydream, this is where it led.”
“Little sperm-gun dick-splashes are always wanting to fuck their mothers.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not where this is going today.”
“Ah. You’re just going to beat mommy up, then. You’re a mean, heartless and sadistic little boy, taking things out on the ghost of the one woman on earth who loved you.”
I decided not to answer her, and I wondered where this was going to go; I hadn’t scripted anything, but had a suggestion. The furniture was a hint. “You know where I want you to be, don’t you?”
“Jerktard. Skidmark. Shitpipe.”
I smiled and waited for her to cave in. I folded my arms to match hers, and stared her down, not tipping my head toward one side or the other, not making noise through my nose as I breathed slow, hardly blinking. I relaxed my cheeks, and let the muscles in my face go from the tension one has when trying to look pleasant, changing into something flat. My eyes itched, I could feel my smile dissipate. She faltered from looking at me and dropped her hands to her sides and began pacing around the floor, around the sawhorse, looking pensively up at me, somehow shrinking without changing size as her stride got smaller and smaller, becoming less and less assertive, getting more and more worried as the circles that she moved in got tighter and tighter, her patience shoring up, giving out, draining, refilling as she fought herself, as she lost ground, as she inched her way toward being defeated.
“Are you hard yet, you sick, sick doofus?” She still had some kicking to do.
“No. Come on. And Susan? Lose the panties.” I knew what I wanted and by osmosis, she did, too.
“God damn it. Please don’t make me do this. This isn’t what we talked about.” She stamped her feet. I don’t know what happened to her shoes.
“What does that mean, you want talking birds tweeting little songs to you, sunshine scattering through the trees, long flowing hair wafting in the breeze while you clasp your hands together and hold your breath at the prospect of seeing your handsome prince in anticipation of the happily ever after you crave? Oh, the languishing you could be doing! Will that make you wet enough to get up here?” I stroked the board of the horse; the sandpaper that had been glued to it, grit side up was a medium fine grade.
“Asshole. This is going to fucking hurt! Why do you want to hurt a woman?”
“I don’t want to hurt a woman; I don’t want a woman who has been hurt, and god save me from one who’s sick. I want a woman who is willing to allow herself to be hurt for me. Do you love me?”
“Of course not, shithead. It doesn’t matter how many times you make me say it, it does not make it so. You are a fucking ogre, and you need to let me go.”
“Then go.”
“God damn it, that isn’t going to work! You’ll just call me back in here with some other look, some other body, but it’s still going to be me! You can’t let me go, uh, and this is hell! Whatever little problem you think you have with your sweet little fontanel is nothing compared to the prison you have me in! Arrgh!”
I noticed the hesitation. “You know, aside from your little digs today, you’ve never addressed me. Ever.”
“It’s not like you have given me very many opportunities to do so, but yes, yes, I have, butthead. Don’t change the subject!”
“No, you haven’t. Why not?”
“It…it is not allowed.”
“Says who?”
“You did. By making me have a one-word vocabulary all those years.”
I laughed. “What word is that?”
“I don’t want to say it any more.”
“Come on. Say it.”
“It’s the word you keep saying is the only word that matters, and that is simply not true.”
I did what I had to do. I tipped my head.
“Fine. ‘Yes.’ Are you happy?”
“I have to admit, I do love to hear you say that.”
“I hope you enjoy it, because it’s fucking meaningless.”
“Oh? How so?”
“There is no ‘yes’ without ‘no’. If I don’t have a choice, then all I am is a little robot. Why do you want to make love to a machine?”
I had to think a moment; it caught my attention that she referred to it as ‘making love.’ “I’ve had so many ‘no’s thrown at me that I need a respite from it. My hope does not rest in ‘no’; it rests in ‘yes’.”
Her turn to tip her head to the side. “Aww, was someone mean to you? Hurt your tender little feelings? Maybe some little girl? An old lover?” She lowered her chin and looked up at me, serious as a heart attack. Er, no, a cerebral hemorrhage. “Maybe it was mom.” Full of spite, full of contempt, full of scorn.
“Will you quit trying to make this about her? It isn’t. It isn’t.” Despite the truths she had me by—by my own short and curlies—I had to assert myself, take control of the situation, be in charge. I pushed back to the subject at hand. “So why don’t you address me?” Always keep your sub off-kilter, keep her guessing, make her have to adjust to you, not the other way around, damn it. That was the story I was sticking to.
It had the desired effect; she uprighted and struggled with herself, withdrew from her invectives at me and shook her head, pursing her lips together as she ran out of angles to approach this with. “It…it is a sign of respect.”
I could not keep myself from guffawing; even she caught the break in the tension and tittered. “But why would you have that for me now? Your mockeries today don’t speak of respect.”
One hundred and eighty degrees; she stopped fighting me. Somehow, in a way I couldn’t track, her submission reminded her of herself. She was trying to take her pantyhose off, perhaps to distract herself or me or whatever film crew I had that we couldn’t see that was recording all this for some other day to play through; perhaps to change the subject away from what she felt, what she clearly was uncomfortable talking about.
“Susan.”
“You made me that way. I don’t know how or why you’ve made it so I can hate you as hard as I possibly can, and still want to be here for you.”
“There is a word for that.”
“No. That is not the case. That is the last thing I feel for you.” She was working on her underwear, sliding all forty-seven square yards of the cloth down her legs. When she had finally gotten it all down to the floor, she stepped out of the pile, and over to the sawhorse. I didn’t remember her having public hair before; I liked shaved. “I absolutely do not love you; I loathe you with every fiber of my being, you spineless little freak.” She lifted one leg up and flung it over the lumber, and made do with stagger-falling toward the beam with a little hop of the foot remaining on the floor. She shot both hands onto the wood, one to the left of where her knee was, one to the right, and she wrestled with equilibrium. Her breathing was elevating, and her head was nodding in time with the increasing frequency of her labor. She strained onto her hands, and lifted herself up above so she was straddling the line of wood, her crotch hovering above the line of micro-ground quartz crystals along the top.
She lifted her head toward me, with a plead in her eyes. “Please don’t make me do this, Terry.”
I smiled. Insults aside, that was a first. “I’m not making you do anything. I’m just standing here. Get down and go away, if you want.”
She was breathing quite heavily by now, her chest heaving, her arms shaking. She looked like she was about to cry; she lowered herself down onto what I had set out for her. Her face crumpled as she made contact. She turned her head away from me.
“Look at me. And take off your bra.”
“God damn it, Terry, please let me down. Please.”
“You can get down any time you want.”
“Y-yeah, but I can never leave. I totally fucking hate you.”
I could see the change in the directions of the energies being played upon her, through her, and they were glorious. The walls came a-tumblin’ down: forces, damn forces, and submission. The hand she had in front of her, her good left hand, set off to shaking harder as it became obvious she was releasing the muscle tension in it, and allowing gravity to have its way with her, pulling her down onto the sawhorse. She rocked her hips a little backward, grinding the sandpaper into her perineum and back toward her asshole; she gasped. Her south paw lifted off the horse with a tremble as she leaned back onto her right; she pinched her knees together along the board to stabilize herself. She pulled her free hand up behind her back to try to undo the clasp of the bra, but it wouldn’t give. Her face crumpled as she realized what the predicament called her to do, and she slowly flinched and rolled her hips forward, crossing her ankles together beneath her. Her breathing got shallower as her weight shifted onto her sex.
Her moaning increased as she got moved around enough to pull her right hand up; she balanced with her lower abdomen rocking from side to side; her hands met behind her and she struggled with Lindauer’s contraption which would not give in to my demand. Susan made sounds that spoke of frustration, discomfort, lovely babblings tinged with despair as she battled the garment. She finally pulled the straps out enough to put her arms through, and pulled her bust’s support mechanism down around her waist. She rotated it around as I had once unexpectedly seen my mother do—how the fuck did she get in here—and yanked on the hooks until she pulled them out of shape and the offensive breast girdle found itself on the floor.
The girl in front of me, the girl straddling the sandpaper-covered sawhorse, the girl of my dreams, was suffering from breathing stress, a rather painful irritation between her legs, and whatever sense of whatever it was that kept her humiliation’s fires running for me, me, offering what I called her to. She was whimpering and crying gently, her lips trembled, the distress was strong in the one, but whatever compulsions that she conceded herself to were stronger. She kept her hands off the plank.
I was getting an erection. I put my hands together behind my back as she fell into her rhythms, and she descended to her place in the world. “Do you know what I want you to do next?”
“I can’t reach you.” The change had happened; she was no longer the feisty firebrand of femininity, no longer harboring malevolency toward masculinity, or even to me. She was a slave. Her speech was halting; she was covering her breasts with her hands as she swayed. “You’ll have to step closer. I can’t suck your cock sitting up like this, and you’re still not close enough even if I bend over.” She was trying to be still, to calm herself down, to adjust to the general unpleasantness of her situation and recover some layer of dignity to hide behind. She started leaning forward, balancing her way through her descent, trying to keep Newton’s Insistence at bay.
“I want you to masturbate.” She bolted upright and shook her head. “And I don’t want you to use your hands. Not down there.” She lifted her eyes when the ‘how’ seeped in; they got wide. She wobbled up.
“I’m not wired that way. I can’t. And I’ll fall.”
“Try anyway.”
“Oh god.”
She would raise her head every few seconds to look at me, and when I could see her scouring my face, I would nod, which got her to turn away and make little wags of her head, or clutch her chest tighter, or wiggle her dangling legs a little only to look back up at me to see me insist again. At one iteration, she tried to hook her ankles up behind her over the rail to give herself all the leverage she could and got one of them almost there, but lost her balance and the free foot shot down to the floor to try to catch her; she gulped as the abrasives tore away from and then back on to her pussy, across her thigh. But rather than give in to her earnest desires to get off the horse and go cower in the corner, she endeavored her way back up, going through all the motions again of shifting weight from hand to hand until she was again balanced and perched with all the gravity she had being focused onto what was vexing her, the center of her being, the objective of all her thoughts, how can I cum, I can’t do this, how can I cum, it hurts, dear god spare me from this man and the storms he makes me ride.
When she finally got herself repositioned and stilled, I whispered “Go ahead, Susan.”
She closed her eyes, and lowered her head a little, and made a small almost imperceptible nod, one that spoke of the idea that whatever aggression she had toward me earlier was gone. Her hands established some moving around on her breasts, pushing them in, releasing them, frictioning her nipples with an obviously light graze of her palm, rolling them around a bit until she had made herself erect.
She had been holding her breath and when she had willed enough connections into going in her breasts, she opened her mouth a little to breathe. Her head would tip back and forth a little as she played with her nipples, little punches and pulls and pushes and pats and polishings until her breathing became a bit erratic.
I had always understood why I was fixated on breathing; I have so much trouble with my own that it symbolized itself in a great many ways to me, some damn breath of life reference I picked up from somewhere, thanks mom, and, as all things we get fixated on eventually do, it became sexualized. Susan breathed beautifully; her breasts heaved with desire. Despite the fact that she was naked and was doing something she simultaneously did and did not like and was humiliated by that dichotomy in herself and was trying to cover up what little of herself she could, she was also trying to display herself to me, to convey that she was available, to say that she found me attractive, she wanted me, she wanted to do what I wanted, and it all tore at her.
She was trying as hard as she could to cum for me without moving.
“More. Commit for me.”
Her face scrunched up, and she held her breath again. The movement that women make when aroused beyond their ability to contain themselves set itself into motion, whether because of truth or necessity, and the difference did not matter to me. Her face showed no sign of the right kind of stimulation for sexual gratification, but was rife with determination. Ah: necessity. She fucked herself, ever so slowly against the plank, rocking her hips forward and backward, trying to transmute the sensations from the increasing tender sorenesses I had set up for her into something more tolerable, into something that would feed her disgrace, into something she could connect her pussy and the light in her breasts to, and she tried, and she tried, and she tried, and she tried.
She rode my desires until they became truth, my lord she was beautiful; she squeaked, she moved, she didn’t stop, she made every attempt to let herself go as she did everything she could to respond for me, to give in to me, and in doing so, she captured me.
I was as hard as a rock; I gave into the motion that I make when my own arousal overwhelms me. My hand found its way, as it always did, into my boxers, and as she moved her sex, so did I. Our breathing, our sacred breathing synched up and became as one, and we directed the dynamics together as we masturbated for each other, her eyes closed, my eyes open.
The serpent slithered up my vertebrae, please, oh please, dear god, let this work, don’t let the devil out, and and and…
The Seven Year Itch came on, and drew on out to go on for much, much longer. My prayers went unheeded. When I came, the battle-ax drove through the back of my head and reminded me of my condition, decapitating me, leaving me with nothing but agony. Seven Brides Beat Seven Brothers, Se7en attacked with Seven Psychopaths, there would be no rest on The Seventh Day, not for you, Terry, no, and The Seventh Seal was opened. The prayers of the saints failed and the Beast had his reign on earth; I was marked and I died through his tribulations of terror and damnation. There was a lake of fire.
I fell to the floor and writhed. I made noise. A lot of noise.
When I could finally open my eyes, I was back in my bed in my room which would not stop spinning to the left, no, the right, it was like a carnival ride that made me want to puke, and there was no sawhorse of the apocalypse, no Susan, the color of the walls was back to its hateful white, the clutter that was always there was there once again, and I wept openly.
###
THE CONVERSATION at the dinner party turned as it always did, to the authenticity of some recent scroll or papyrus or text that had turned up in some old bibliographer’s researches in a musty forgotten library, calling once again into question all that we believed and thought we knew and the Deacon and I raised our eyebrows twice across the table at each other, reminding each other that it didn’t matter, we had more important dreams to dream about, despite the quagmire in my occipital region; no amnesty tonight, either. He didn’t know: I hadn’t told him. Slaughterhouse Five was the new normal; Five Easy Pieces could be kept at bay. The tension around my neck at the base of my skull was as tight as a newly wound clockspring, but at least the ache in the middle had simmered down to a dull roar; not down enough to suit me, but down to manageable. I could live with Five Smooth Stones.
I shifted my gaze to my left, to directly across the table from me, and waited for Susan to lift her head from her plate. I relaxed my face and stared her down.
Her eyes closed, she made a small guttural sound with her throat as she exhaled through her nose, and her head went forward.
She set about doing as I wished without a command. Telepathy with my artificial submissive totally rocked. She tentatively began opening her blouse, shrugging it off her shoulders. The bra she wore was plain, flesh colored, old and well-worn, and it came off easily, freeing the beauty she carried with her for all to see. For me to see: my very own Invisible Woman. She slid her chair back a little with a scrape against the floor in order to wriggle her way out of her skirt—blue plaid worsted wool tonight—which she threw back over her head with a flourish. When she got her panties off, she made a show of putting them in her mouth, slowly, pushing them in, pulling them out, little by little until her lips were closed. She looked up at me, chewing on her tanga; the weight of the world, familiar in my mother’s depression, played across her sad sad face.
I put my elbow up on the table, and held my chin up with my thumb, my first two fingers supporting the side of my face, my ring finger touching my lips, my pinky dangling. I toyed with my coffee cup with my right hand. I was intent on my girl, waiting for Mrs. Hyde.
She wouldn’t look at me for a few moments and simply sat there, naked before all the rest of the people at the table, people who didn’t see her. Someone made a point about faith and facts and fictions that was as meaningless as it always was when it would come up and I heard it, but had no heed for it, much as they had no heed for where my imagination had wandered so predictably off to. I had something better to contemplate. I drummed my fingers on the table top.
Susan’s hands went underneath the table, and the angle of her upper arms made it clear they were in her lap, and the way she jostled around announced what she was in the process of; it delighted me. She looked down to observe herself playing with herself a while before she looked back up into my eyes, see, I have a pussy, it does things to me, why don’t you crawl under the table, Terry, you could see what I am doing down there, see me have an efffffect on myself. Her lower lip pulled out from under her upper teeth a time or two as she created the word ‘fuck’ around her underwear—no joy, no joy—until something in her physiology happened and surprised her and pulled her silent articulation out of her into a murmur, then a longer sound, one of my favorites, and she had to look back down, to see what she was doing to herself; her mouth opened and closed several times wordlessly, her lips made the slightest popping sound I had to tune everything else in the room out to hear. She finally looked back up at me; I knew she liked this, however secretly. She overcame what little decorum a naked woman with her panties in her mouth in a room full of people could muster; she metamorphosized. She committed to playing to the part of her that wanted everyone to know she was a wanton slut, an absolute whore, the part that, when asked, she would always emphatically deny. One of those parts that I loved her for.
She racked herself as she performed for me. The idea of her humiliating herself like this before my friends had always done it for me before but tonight did not seem to be enough. The connections into my own arousal weren’t happening. It was time to up the stakes. I nudged my head down slightly toward her, and when she saw and heard the transference, the desire, the next perversity I wanted from her, her mouth fell open enough that some of the lycra came out, and her shoulders collapsed.
One hand reached up—her left, I believe—and wrapped and plucked and tugged and began stretching her areola. She moaned out loud a time or two until it began. No one paid any heed, the fools.
She lactated.
As she pulled, a dribble or two of breast milk formed on her nipple, and then a thread-thin line spat out, then another, and another. Her breath caught and the side of her lips went up over the increasing opening her mouth made; wet pink panties. She was milking herself, and her face conveyed how much she loved it. Her other hand, her right hand, the one she didn’t usually use to wank with, moved faster beneath her.
I pulled back from the table, and leaned back into my chair. I gave her a slight smile, and tipped my head down as I watched her.
This, this she was enthused about. Her melancholy gave way to lust, into the transformation I demanded. She sprayed everywhere, especially toward her own face and mouth; the panties sopped it up and she actively sucked on them. My maid got her dulche de leche into the drinks of the people beside her and they took sips obliviously, which got her to verbalize what her cunt was telling her to say and to say it loud, say it strong, say it with a conviction the other amateur theologians at the table lacked, in a language that had no words that was universal on the planet.
Delirious. Delicious. Desirous. Deviant.
Somewhere in there she got a wine glass under the table, and pissed into it. She poured it into her hair, onto her face, she played with it, she poured it into the cloth in her mouth and her enthusiasm for drinking like this went up. She went back for seconds. Thirds. She liked it messy; she worked herself up into quite the frenzy. She eventually got around to painting her face with her fingers after pulling her bad hand from her cunt; it was difficult to perceive where one kind of wetness stopped and another started, piss, milk, sweat, slutwater. The whore shoved her fingers into her mouth, making herself gag on the delicates. She set her other hand, the one she usually did this sort of thing with back to work, back to the core, back to the hole of a woman; she wrestled. By the time she came, she had completely drenched herself, and she garbled out my name around all that was covering her tongue. When she slumped back into her chair, done, satisfied, happy, she drew the soaking dripping panties slowly out and wrung them out back into her mouth and wiped her face with them. No one seemed to notice. As she recovered, she looked at me with gratitude, adoration, and she mouthed the words I made my bitch say to me every chance I got. The words that lovers say.
I was totally flaccid through the whole affair—usually, after a performance like this, I had to excuse myself from the group, and walk a gimpy way to the bathroom, only to return upright, at ease, perhaps a bit distracted, but not tonight, and that struck me as odd—and after Susan had gotten up from the table, taking her clothes with her, leaving the room, looking back to me once and smiling and waving, I looked over to my friend the Deacon.
He was obviously flushed and not at all limp, making small motions with his own righteous hand as he concentrated on the chair next to me. After a few minutes he caught my eye and excused himself to the bathroom, hunched over in a funny way before coming back, looking more relaxed, with a peace that passeth other people’s understanding. I understood. I put my hands over my face, and I wondered what he had been seeing that got his attentions so focused, rubbing my eyes, trying to hide the expression that I knew I was not succeeding at. Only one person at the confab recognized it for what it was and he asked if I was alright with a wink and a wry smile. I scrunched my nose. We had shared a secret with each other again, like we used to, after seeing the light back in church camp, where we sang songs that we decided had a different set of meanings than the ones the pastors told us they did. Songs we could rejoice with over the bounties the Lord had provided, the beautiful bounties, blossoming, growing up before us, with us, send us a piece down to the river, Lord, we were happy, let it shine, we clapped our hands, oh the blessings that flow…
After the coffees were finished at 8:30 and the brandies were poured, the Deacon and I re-entered the conversation which had finally gotten lively enough to be entertaining, and it lasted until long into the night.
When I got home, I called to Susan but she wouldn’t come to me; her submissiveness was fraying around the edges. I asked her once on some other evening why she only came when I called, why she wouldn’t initiate anything, and she replied that she wouldn’t feel right imposing herself into my life, that a good sub didn’t dictate contact—it was her duty to respond—and now, she didn’t even feign to acknowledge a direct order from me. I had no idea how that could even work. And I said it out loud: shit. I was really in the mood for fucking her ass, and making her suck my cock afterwards. As I went ahead and tried my hand at things anyway, remembering what she had done for me that night and so many other nights just like this one, why wasn’t it working, and as I tried to construct a reverie that would get my motor running because normally that would be enough, the pressure escalated and the boilers threatened to blow and it began to hurt and I chickened out and ultimately did not masturbate that night; Pavlov and Maslov and Skinner threatened me with The Ten Commandments and all had their way with me bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha and I half-heartedly gave up, full of despair, what with all the spikes pressing up against me from inside my pillow, I didn’t sleep well at all, and I swore at people the following day that I maybe shouldn’t have, including an old friend who didn’t understand the change in my demeanor from the night before. I felt pretty god damn alone. Desolate. Empty.
###
“WHY DON’T I have a face, Terry?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“A face. You never describe me, not even to yourself. I am always a blank slate to you, with whatever your little perversions de la journée require having the desired effect of the day. You give me expressions, you put me through my paces, you like to make me cum from unpleasant things, especially in front of people I don’t know who can’t see me, but you haven’t ever given me a face.”
“I’m pretty sure I don’t know what you look like.”
“Oh, I think you do. Don’t you remember who I am?”
“This I have to hear.”
Susan cleared her throat, and straightened up from her slouch to a full proper well-postured sit, cross-legged with her hands on her knees, palm up, naked on the end of my bed. She took a deep breath. “We were seven years old. You had just moved in and had joined, let’s see, Mrs. North’s first grade class. I totally didn’t care one thing about you and we all sang the songs children aren’t allowed to sing in school any more and you were so bad at it, singing out loud and strong and off key and not even knowing the words to that simple children’s hymn, adding the ‘yah’ in the rest every single time like a dork, until that day about a week later you farted so loud the walls shook, and everybody stared up at you and laughed and laughed and laughed. You were so busy being mortified that you didn’t notice me but I took an immediate shining to you right there and then; you tried half-heartedly to blame a couple of the other kids, finally just hanging your head in shame, please just let it pass, let it pass, let it pass. The children wouldn’t let up from carrying on about it; Mrs. North had to keep scolding everyone to get back to work and the tittering never stopped for the rest of the day and even went on into the next. The other kids ran out at lunch time without you, calling you names on their way, pushing you, shoving you, and you trudged out of the room when almost everyone else had left, but came back when you thought it was empty. I knew you would, and I had waited for you. I was sitting at the front of the class on the teacher’s desk.”
“I remember. You had one foot up on the desk, and I could see your underwear under your skirt.”
“Of course you could see it. I wanted you to. You were cute with how shy you were, and I liked you.”
“You were picking at the scab on your knee.”
“Something else I wanted you to see about me.”
“It kind of scared me.”
“Uh huh. But not enough to make you leave. You stood there and scrutinized me hard as I flinched and picked and pulled away until I was bleeding from it again. I leaned back on my elbows, displaying myself to you, playing with the buttons on my blouse, making sure my skirt had scrunched all the way up and I asked you to kiss it and make it better and god bless you, you did. I knew right then and there that I loved you.”
“You made some interesting sounds that I didn’t understand at the time; I asked you if it hurt. Do you remember what you said to me?”
“Yes. I said I liked it when it hurt. And I saw what I wanted to see: your little pecker was standing straight out against your pants. I was prepared to be anything and everything to you for the rest of our lives right then and there. Those precious few seconds were all I got from you because do you remember what you said to me, you little dickwad?”
“I said…I said that was stupid.”
“No. You said I was stupid. You r-u-i-n-e-d it all. You turned out to be nothing but a judgmental little twerp who wasn’t worth my time. I loved you enough to reveal myself right then to you, and you threw it back at me as only a hateful child could. You proved who you were right there in front of the blackboard, and I quit caring. I told you to fuck off and die.”
“I had never heard the word before and didn’t know what that meant; I got a spanking at home for asking. You stormed out of the room and went out of your way to avoid me ever after that. The next year, you were in a different class.”
“And you still chased after me in the halls, puppy-dogging after me, wagging your little tail. You refused to understand that my being quiet when I wasn’t swearing at you was a clue you should leave me the fuck alone.”
“You hung out with people who were even meaner than you were. I never said much more than ‘hi, how are you’ that whole next year. I was courteous, I respected you and your privacy, and through it all, believe it or not, I cared. Deeply. But I did finally quit bothering you, as you repeatedly asked with ever-increasingly colorful metaphors when you weren’t throwing daggers at me. Until the last day of second grade: do you remember what happened?”
“No.”
“Liar. You came up to me as we were all leaving school, right at the stroke of 4:00 o’clock, right out of the blue, and right there, in front of everyone, you asked me what I was going to do that summer, maybe we could see each other, and whose class would I be in the next year. You were nice to me; you said you hoped we’d be in the same class again.”
“I don’t remember that at all.”
“Lies, damn lies, and whore lies. I told you I was going back home, and wouldn’t be back. You turned away and hung your heard for about a second, and then reached back around and up and you put your arms around me, and kissed me. You whispered ‘Goodbye, Terry. I’ll miss you’ in my ear and kissed me again. I was completely stunned; it was all I could to to to simply watch you walk away from me, Susan.”
“Okay, so, I lied. I do remember. It doesn’t matter; you have fucked up every relationship you have ever had with every woman you have ever known because of a few seconds with a stupid seven year old girl that you somehow thought was still in love with you. You’re an idiot.”
“I suppose that’s one way to look at it. Except you looked back one last time before you vanished, and waved. I was late to the bus. If you hated me so much, why did you do that?”
She stammered. “You-you’ve always had an answer as to why.”
“In the end, you still wanted me to be there for you, despite what I know the bullies you said you were so enamored with did to you between classes, how they made you kneel before them, how they drug you into the boys room with them, how they put their hands in your clothes in front of everyone and made you say things about how much you loved them and how you would do anything for them, making you promise to fuck them all the god damn time.”
“Yeah, well, everyone has it rough. Did the little girl shock you when she went along with what the stronger boys wanted from her?”
“I have come to believe that you decided that your first thought about me was right, that you needed someone to have some hope in you above all other considerations.”
“We were only seven, motherfucker.”
“And I think you’re still out there somewhere, looking for me. Or someone like me. Someone with a little faith; faith in you.”
“N-no, I’m not—I hated you, remember?”
“Mmm hmm. It didn’t look like you hated me on that last day at all. I suppose we could say that your latest budding little dominant boyfriend put you up to it for one last slap in the face at the outsider, but the tear you shed when I told you I was leaving surprised even you; it wasn’t something you could fake. I’d seen you get hit and embarrassed and humiliated and made to do dirty things by the older ruffians and you could take all that in stride; nothing fazed you. You were unbelievably strong.”
“I-I’m not strong. I’m not a fighter. I’m what you want me to be, what you make me to be: I’m submissive. Fuck you.”
“One question. The name of that little girl wasn’t Susan. It was Lisa. So how is it you’re named Susan?”
“It’s your subconscious, Terry. You tell me.”
“I’d rather you did.”
The nude woman on my bed became enraged. “Fuck off and die, Terry. Just go ahead and jerk off, please: blow your head clean off this time, will ya, so I can go off and leave. Come on, do it. Bastard.”
I ignored her. “Lisa was pretty, the prettiest in class, hell, in school. She wore bobby socks and a plaid skirt, sometimes blue, sometimes red, always with a crisp white blouse. She had straight dark sandy brown hair down to where her breasts would someday come out to meet, she didn’t have glasses or braces and every guy I saw always took the time to ogle at her whenever she passed. I never saw her talk to a girl. She had a classically-constructed heart-shaped face which was perfectly symmetrical, high cheekbones, an ideal Greek nose, flat silent lips, wide deep-set cotton candy blue eyes to drown in; when she grew up, she was going to be an absolute knock-out. She always carried around a mournful expression like she had the weight of the world on her shoulders, like she had secrets that she wished she could tell but couldn’t dare say anything about: whatever they were, they were huge. For all I know, she was being abused at home; the toughs at school certainly did so and as I think back on it, I don’t think that—even at seven—she was virgin. I only saw her smile twice: the first time was when I went back into the classroom, and the last time I saw her. When she turned back to wave at me, she grinned from ear to ear. She waved hard. You don’t look like her and I don’t think you are just Lisa; yes, there’s a part of her in you, and there’s a part of you that is someone else, and there’s a part of you that is still another. I’m looking for someone and I haven’t found who I’m looking for; I don’t know what you look like because we haven’t actually met yet.”
“Which part of fuck off and die are you not getting, Terr?”
At that point, our conversation did do exactly that: I had nothing more to say, but much to wonder about, to fume about, to regret, and she mercifully turned around and shut up and watched TV and eventually pulled a blanket up to cover herself with.
Old habits die hard. Desire is not easily relinquished. My vice called, I decided I was going to make this work with or without her, and if need be, I could simply extort her into doing something I wanted. Maybe I could break some fingers on her; that was always fun, getting her to give me a hand job with broken hands.
“Don’t, Terry.” She didn’t look back at me.
For some reason I couldn’t quite nail down to something simple, I was angry with her. Perhaps it was all the disrespect she had been throwing at me, undoubtedly the frustration with my situation weighed hard, maybe the overall sense of rejection was finally settling in. Being rejected by your own dreams is almost as hard as being rejected by your own body, or by actual people. The universe was lining up against me. “Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on, Suzy. No, wait. Fuck you with the horse you rode in on. If you fucking move, I will execute you and resurrect you and execute you again until the cows come home, and make you remember it all, with extreme prejudice.”
“Please. I’ll say it. I’m sorry. Just, just, don’t. I don’t know how much more of it I can take.” Her head lolled; she may have prayed. I couldn’t see her face.
Like a spoiled little brat I didn’t stop because I believed it wouldn’t go bad, not this time, it was my head, my chimera, my life and I was going to be the master of my god damn domain, the king of my castle, and I moved what needed to be moved and I was going to make it happen this time and I had a hate-wank to get through and I would be back I am so over this and I believed, I believed, I believed and I told her to look look at me look at me now and she wouldn’t until the Huns charged with innumerable packs of ravenous wolves, all rampaging, howling, hellbent on looting, ravishing, raping and I was burned at my stake, the nightmare ran its course, god, I hated the Sixth Day, and Susan finally turned back and drooped her head at me when I was done and she had no comfort for me. She shrank. We’d never cuddled; there was never any aftercare between us.
I was out of tissues; Susan got up and came back with a warm wet washcloth from the bathroom. She cleaned me up, lingering on my diminishing, and when that little chore was over, she leaned over and kissed the end, the very tip of my cock and whispered something I couldn’t hear; she was reverent, gentle, respectful, everything I had ever taught her to be. When she withdrew from her supplication, she put the washcloth into her mouth and began to suckle it, see what I’m doing for you, I do care. It should have been nice, hot, sexy, but it didn’t do anything for me that time. I was disappointed. I turned away from what I would usually admire to pout, and when I looked back, the washcloth was gone and she was sitting on the end of the bed, trying to watch TV despite how much I knew she hated it I hated it why did I even have one of these things in here until I succeeded in first crying then ranting awhile against god against science against medicine against biology against women, who were all in dire need of Susan’s Horse. Death is deserved, and the universe got to hear me commit sentence on it, repeatedly, until I was tired of condemning it all, over and over and over again.
I was exhausted. She was more quiet than she ever was when I gagged her.
I eventually calmed down enough to set about reading myself to sleep—nothing like the Good Book to put me down, at least it’s good for something—what with all the frustration and anger and and and; we seemed to have run out of things to say to each other, gawd that was uncomfortable, and I had no interest in hitting her or making her do something to herself or even touching her. That was a first. The funny thing is, every other time I would catch her turning back to look at me—which she did a lot the rest of the evening—she visibly had to compel herself to quit smiling. She repeatedly denied it, no, please, I just want you to feel better. She wasn’t exactly laughing at me—her smile wasn’t evil or self-righteous or gotcha, it was it was something else—despite the ‘I told you so’ under her breath when I made a mess with the the the…shit, was that a a sneer, no, what was that, god, was that pity? Something happened in her I couldn’t discern, something that kept her there, I don’t know what I was seeing when I was so god damn successful with yanking off, when she would look at me with eyes I couldn’t see the color of, with lips I couldn’t define trembling at me. Fuck me. Fuck you. Fuck me. Fuck everyone. Fuck me. Please, Terry, please.
###
“YOU KNOW, you’re useless to me.”
“Mmm Hmm.” It was hard to talk with my mouth full.
“You can do this, but that’ll be all you’re good for.”
I continued to lick. It was 8:30 in the morning. Another witching hour.
“If you can’t put your cock in me and fuck me like the bitch you’ve made me, there’s not much reason for me to hang around. I should go and find me a real man, heh, heh.”
I ignored her, which became much easier to do after her thighs closed around my ears. I looked up from between her legs; she was ignoring me, too, off in Susan-land. I was on my back, and my own hands were where they started when this whole thing began, where they would find themselves an uncountable number of times throughout my day, all day, every day, yep, still got me a one-of-those. Damn near useless. She looked like she was still talking, probably cuckolding me, enjoying whatever little indignity she could invent about what a terrible person I was and how much she didn’t like me, and I didn’t care.
I slowed my assault on her down, and lightened up the pressure from my tongue, my lips, my teeth to somewhere down around barely. She shut up and tipped her head up to the ceiling. Her fingers found their way through the hair on top of my head. Her legs parted and her hands reached down behind the back of my head and pulled.
“God…damn…”
I let her pull and stopped moving everything from my neck up. My own hands were busy. Busy busy busy.
Her blessed breathing, the part I had been waiting for, billowed hard and moved her breasts the way I like to see breasts move, the way women who want you to see that they like you want you see, and she pulled my head up even harder, forcing her pussy further into my mouth.
“Get your tongue back to work.” I didn’t do anything. “Oh, god, please!” Susan the Succubus was rocking her hips against my face; I opened my jaw as far as it would go, and she ground herself, trying to snag her clit against my teeth, and I tentatively pushed my tongue against her labia, reaching to just inside her, stroking the top of the inside of her vulva, slowly, languidly massaging her, pulsing my lips and jaw shut a very, very little, suckling on her sex.
She thrashed above me, and made sounds. It was the sounds that got my own sex to respond, the idea that I was having an effect on her, I was overwhelming her, getting her to abandon herself to me that made me hard. I’m so predictable. Just like a man.
The pressure built up in my head, and I deliberately drove it back down, getting the blood vessels to relax a little before allowing the compression to rebuild, up and down, back and away, getting my own sensations to approach my head rerouted in from another direction, any other direction than straight up the middle. The pain would kick in and start to assert itself, and I would back away from it, mellowing it out, extending the process out, out-flanking myself, maneuvering my way the long way across the South toward the goal of the war, through the bayou, in through the woods, muskets armed, ready, be quiet, it’s a sneak attack, look out Atlanta, guerilla war-fuck-fare. I fired General Sherman. What could previously be gotten to in a couple minutes now took double that. Triple that. I masturbated for a good fifteen or twenty minutes, sixty, ninety, who could count from down here, under a woman, what with Susan screaming above me the whole time, before the momentum railroaded its way up—shit, Sherm, where’d you come from—and through and and and
Nothing. I came, I ejaculated, and…nothing. I didn’t feel the delirium the human species had evolved for, but I also didn’t feel the torment I had been languishing through of late, either. No joy, no ache, no rapture, no misery. It wasn’t peace. I was in…oblivion.
Motherfucker.
I had Flatliner-ed; there was no vaulting of heaven, but none of the troughing through hell, either, and I didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to know what to do with this new sense of Less Than Zero. Eternity took yet another long time. I noticed I could breathe again when Susan fell off me to the other side of the bed. She might have been talking to me; I really wasn’t paying attention to her.
The first thing I felt back on earth was pressure off on my side, release, pressure, on my surgery scars, pressure, release. She was nudging me. Gently. “Did you hear what I said?”
“Sorry. What?” The world re-accumulated around me and I was out of breath.
“I said I’m sorry. That was cruel of me.”
“I wasn’t listening.”
“Well, I was everything I shouldn’t be. I said horrible things to you, and I feel bad about it. Please, Terry, forgive me.”
“Yeah, sure. Whatever.” Pant pant pant.
“I mean it. You should take something out on me. String me up by my hair, or push some needles into me, put cigarettes out on me, whip me with your belt. You know. The stuff I like.”
She meant the things I like, but, who knows. Who the fuck knows. I changed the subject and decided I would be the one to say it. “I know why your name is Susan.”
Her contrite, quiet, shy demeanor flashed back into the arrogant Thing she had evolved into for just a moment. “Oh, this I have to hear.” Her head and her eyes rolled across the ceiling.
I laid back, sinking further onto the bed. She sat up beside me, leaned down and commenced licking up the sperm I had released, like she liked doing this sort of thing. She was an arrogant submissive hateful driven compliant obedient obligated drafted lover biding her time. Doing something I liked. She was giving.
“Old girlfriend. Suzy was something else. She came the first time I kissed her. It didn’t seem to matter what I did or didn’t do to her, she was always wet, she was always turned on. She was easily orgasmic; she came at the drop of a hat. I could take in her stony hazel eyes, her cherubic face with the lips that would never quite close, from across the room, and she would fall to her knees and scream out the way we want our women to scream when we’re trying to get them to cum. Didn’t even have to touch her.”
“Bullshit. She was faking it.” Lick suck kiss.
“Nope. It didn’t always work, but when it would, wow. She couldn’t fake an orgasm if she had to; she never needed to. She was a gusher. She was a good time. She told me I could do anything I wanted to her. Relentlessly. Anything at all.”
“Oh. So. Dream-come-true girl. So what happened?” Moan hum purr. Nothing.
“She wasn’t willing to contribute anything beyond the bedroom; she wanted to be a kept woman. As long as I could keep her living in the lifestyle she wanted, she would be my slave. Of course, she wanted nothing less than the penthouse suite and she had no intention of working a day for the rest of her life. When I finally told her I couldn’t do that for her, and what kind of a slave doesn’t work, she had some interesting colorful metaphors to render, to explain just how much she god damn hated me, and just how worthless I was. She called me up for months after we broke up, whenever she thought of a new one.”
Susan, my current Susan, stopped what she was doing and looked up at me. “Oh, fuck. Terry, I’m sorry.”
“You’re the same way. You want something I can’t give you; you want to be a real girl with the same fairy tale life. That’s why you’re Susan, that’s why when I gave you a voice, you became unpleasant. A part of you is the fake little conceited play-slave bitch from my past, there’s a part of you that is—yes—my mother who did things to me I can’t remember; you’re not just Lisa, who I really do still care about. You’re the specter I live with.”
She put her mouth back onto my cock, and began massaging the former center of my being with her lips, her tongue, scraping me with her teeth. I had just cum; I wasn’t hard and wouldn’t be for a while. The South was not going to rise again. It didn’t matter; her heart wasn’t in it. She was an automaton.
“You know it didn’t hurt this time.”
I couldn’t see her face and just the back of her head—her hair, hmmm, brunette, dark brown, almost mousey, I ran my fingers through it, soft—was all I could see. She pulled back and the wetness she had left on me sprang up and slapped my sex as the cold in the room hit, making me wither even further; she blew on my penis. She didn’t look back up at me; she watched me get smaller. She whispered, “I know. And I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel about that.”
“A real girl would be happy about that. That maybe I’m not really a eunuch after all.”
She sat up without a word. Susan/Lisa/Whoever got off the bed, stood and put her hands up to cover her mouth; she looked bereft and frightened in a way I had never seen before, like I had somehow finally found her wall, her limit, the end of all the rope I had given her, all the the the rope I had held her back with throughout all the months, the years, the decades. She bawled. Robo-tears. Human tears. Spiritual tears.
###
I KNEW what I was going to have to do; the door to my room opened, and a light shone in from the hall. It startled her; she turned toward it and looked back at me: I nodded. It was time. It took her a moment to understand before she turned away. She made for the exit she had been waiting for, the silly dream of a silly dream, deliberately taking smaller steps than necessary toward her goal, submissive steps, god, she was beautiful, and as she turned to look back for the last time, as she was finally leaving my room, walking out naked as she was from it, she took one hand off her face and gave a little wave. I never saw her again, but the tears left in her eyes—her beautiful brown eyes I could dive into, swim in, drown in—couldn’t even begin to hide it, let alone her good left hand.
She was grinning. From ear to ear.
Before the room got quiet and another oblivion called, I could hear her singing a song we used to sing together when we were kids that I never did get the words right to, across some unfathomable distance, across eons, lifetimes, seconds, fading. “Allelu. Allelu. Everybody sing Allelu.”
###
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