“Yet, he’s the fool who called me,” he said. “What of you, sweet?”
Her arm shook from extending the envelope, so she folded her hands at her waist. “I’ve never gone into the forest.”
“Pity, pity.” He laughed again and now she imagined a hyena with an overdeveloped skull regarding her from the darkness, a stag crowned by tiers of crooked and decaying antlers. There was a terrible sickness in that laughter. “What of you? Tell me what
you
need.”
“Nothing.”
“Best wish for something,” he said. “I could lie with you until you shrieked fair to drive the pheasants from their nests. Then I could split you open on the altar and have you to the fullest.”
“Oh.” The stars began to flash and she allowed her jelly legs to fold. She bowed her head, aware of the obscenity of this pseudo genuflection. “Not that.”
“Then speak your desire.”
Her mouth opened and she blurted, “You fucking well know, don’t you?” Tears dripped from the end of her nose. She dared to raise her gaze, lips curled to bare her teeth in an expression of abject self-loathing. “Give me that. It’s what I deserve, isn’t it.”
“I think you are both richly deserving.”
“What…what must I do?”
“Why, pet, it’s done. All these years I’ve been waiting to hold up my end of the bargain.”
He emerged from the curtain of darkness and it stretched to limn him, to halo him in a writhing, black nimbus. She looked upon him and gave forth an involuntary moan of terror. For a moment, it was who she expected, the huntsman, florid and smug in triumph. The moonlight brightened and his face waxed ordinary—the face of a lover, the man who reads the meter, a blank-eyed passenger sharing a bus seat; a face mundane in its capacity for cruelty or avarice. Then he smiled and fulfilled every dreadful image conceived in a thousand plates in a thousand hallowed tomes, and woodblock illustrations and overwrought cinema. Corrupt heat pulsed from his flesh; his breath stunned her with its foul humidity. Yet, the impulse to clutch his lank beard, to twine her tongue in his, consumed her will. Her thighs trembled and she moistened. She wept as she pressed her lips against his muscular thigh and inhaled the reek of sulfur, bestial sweat, and rank, overripe sex.
His fingers tangled in her hair, long nails like hooks pricking at her scalp. He whispered, “Ask and ye shall receive.”
15.
The sulfurous moon had almost dissolved into the horizon.
Katherine returned to the suite and stood for a while as a shadow among shadows, watching Sonny. He groaned in his sleep and called a name she couldn’t recognize for his slurring. She erased a section of the ridiculous chalk pentagram with her bare foot, then went to him and murmured in his ear and coaxed him to bed. They fell across it and she undressed him. She sweated. The fierceness of her need was an agony, a pressure of such magnitude it eclipsed reason, caused the room to spin around her. The painting of the stag hunt caught her glance for a moment, its detail obscured and grainy, but—the mastiffs sat on their haunches and the stag towered on its hind legs, and the entire dark company gazed down upon the couple on the bed.
She caressed him, licked his ear and kissed his neck until he stirred and woke. It didn’t take much more. Her heat was contagious and he made a sound in his chest and rolled atop her. She closed her eyes and arched, hooked her calves over his hips, pinned him to her with all her strength.
Motes and sparks behind her eyelids stuttered with her pulse. Pleasure shot through her brain and unfolded a kaleidoscope. She saw the white nanny goat bound at the foot of the statue. It bleated, then the knife and a fan of blood, her husband, his face one of legion, exultant and savage.
He drove into her without love, merciless; and in her skull, rockets.
Sonny, what did you wish?
She knew, oh, yes, but the question lingered, bored into her just as he did, and she trembled violently.
What did you wish?
The nanny goat rolled its head on the altar and its eyes flared red to a surge of panpipes, an offstage Gregorian liturgy, thunderous laughter.
She came, and, simultaneously, he rocked with a powerful spasm and bellowed. Her eyes snapped open. His face was a white mask, flesh stretched so tight his mouth pulled sharply upward at the corners. He vibrated as if he’d grabbed a high-voltage wire. Something cracked, a tendon, a bone, and he shoved away from her, flew from the bed and crashed to the floor. She managed to right herself. Her belly felt overfull. It was the strangest sensation, this ballooning inside, the sudden rush of nausea.
Sonny thrashed against the floorboards and continued to ejaculate. In the near darkness, she became confused by what she saw—the short, quick spurts that arced across his body were neither ropes nor strands, but thick and segmented. She’d seen a dead bird in the garbage and what had feasted upon it in oozing carpets, and her mental equilibrium wobbled mightily. He squealed as his rigid muscles softened and sloughed. He rapidly diminished and became physically incomprehensible, emptied of substance. What remained of him continued to flow in seeping tributaries toward the bed, and her. It happened very fast; a time lapse photo of an animal decomposing in the forest.
Sticky things squirmed upon her thighs and loins, and when she registered the flatworm torsos and embryonic faces, she screamed, was still screaming long after people finally battered through the door and everything was over.
They couldn’t find a trace of Sonny anywhere.
16.
The pregnancy wasn’t complicated. The hospital staff (they called it a “home”) gave her a single occupancy room with a lovely view of the grounds. A squirrel lived in the chestnut tree near the window, and the nurses let her feed him breadcrumbs over the sill. Nurse Jennifer gave her medicine in the morning. Nurse Margaret tucked her in at night. Dr. Green visited daily and gave her peppermint candies, which she’d loved since childhood.
She slept a lot. She ate Jell-O cups whenever she liked, and watched
The 700 Club
on the television hanging in the corner. Occasionally, after dark, it’d be something nasty with bare tits and gouts of gore, children with withered faces who glared hatefully, and priests walking with their heads on backwards, but she didn’t panic, the screen always went blank then returned to regularly scheduled programming when a nurse came in to check on her. Sometimes she watched the Reverend Jerry Falwell or Benny Hinn. She followed their sermons from a new King James Bible her father brought after an incident he’d jokingly referred to as an “exorcism” when she first came to the home. Admittedly, she’d had issues in the beginning, some outbursts. There hadn’t been an incident in months and she’d practically blacked out entire sections of the Old Testament by underlining. She knew what to expect. She was ready. Things had gone so smoothly, so dreamily, it had scarcely felt like being pregnant at all.
It happened in the middle of the night and she didn’t feel anything after the epidural except sweet, bright oblivion. They removed the baby before she revived. Nurse Jennifer told her she’d given birth to a healthy boy and they’d bring him around soon. Several days later they wheeled her into the sunshine and parked her on the patio by the fountain. She loved this spot. The grounds were decorated with manicured hedges and plum trees, and obscured by the trees, a high stone wall topped with wrought iron spikes.
Dr. Green, Nurse Jennifer, and one of the big male attendants brought the baby wrapped in a yellow blanket. The doctor and the nurse seemed reserved, disquieted despite their friendly greetings, and they exchanged looks. She’d heard them whispering about progeria while they thought she was asleep. They probably weren’t sure what to tell her, were doubtless loath to upset her at this delicate juncture.
Dr. Green cleared his throat. “So, have you decided what you’re going to call him?” He watched carefully as the attendant put the boy in her arms.
“Baby
has
a name,” she said, staring with wonder and terror at her child’s face.
You’ll be talking in a few months. Oh, sweet Lord, won’t that be interesting?
His smooth, olive skin was pitted by a faint scatter of acne scars. His eyes were alive with a dreadful knowingness. He already resembled his driver license photo.
Strappado
Kenshi Suzuki and Swayne Harris had a chance reunion at a bathhouse in an Indian tourist town. It had been five or six years since their previous Malta liaison, a cocktail party at the British consulate that segued into a branding iron-hot-affair. They’d spent a long weekend of day cruises to the cyclopean ruins on Gozo, nightclubbing at the elite hotels and casinos, and booze-drenched marathon sex before the dissolution of their respective junkets swept them back to New York and London in a storm of tears and bitter farewells. For Kenshi, the emotional hangover lasted through desolate summer and into a melancholy autumn. And even now, when elegant, thunderously handsome Swayne materialized from the crowd on the balcony like the Ghost of Christmas Past—!
Kenshi wore a black suit; sleek and polished as a seal or a banker. He swept his single lock of gelled black hair to the left, like a gothic teardrop. His skin was sallow and dewlapped at his neck, and soft at his belly and beneath his Italian leather belt. He’d been a swimmer once, earnestly meant to return to his collegiate form, but hadn’t yet braced for the exhaustion of such an endeavor. He preferred to float in hotel pools whilst dreaming of his supple youth, once so exotic in the suburbs of white-bread Connecticut. Everyone but his grandparents (who never fully acclimated to their transplantation to the West) called him Ken. A naturalized U.S. citizen, he spoke meager Japanese, knew next to zero about the history or the culture and had visited Tokyo a grand total of three times. In short, he privately acknowledged his unworthiness to lay claim to his blood heritage and thus lived a life of minor, yet persistent regret.
Swayne wore a cream-colored suit of a cut most popular with the royalty of South American plantations.
It’s in style anywhere I go
, he explained later as they undressed one another in Kenshi’s suite at the Golden Scale. Swayne’s complexion was dark, like fired clay. His slightly sinister brows and waxed imperial lent him the appearance of a Christian devil.
In the seam between the electric shock of their reunion and resultant delirium fugue of violent coupling, Kenshi had an instant to doubt the old magic before the question was utterly obliterated. And if he’d forgotten Swayne’s sly, wry demeanor, his faith was restored when the dark man rolled to face the ceiling, dragged on their shared cigarette, and said, “Of all the bathhouses in all the cities of the world….”
Kenshi cheerfully declared him a bastard and snatched back the cigarette. The room was strewn with their clothes. A vase of lilies lay capsized and water funneled from severed stems over the edge of the table. He caught droplets in his free hand and rubbed them and the semen into the slick flesh of his chest and belly. He breathed heavily.
“How’d you swing this place all to yourself?” Swayne said. “Big promotion?
“A couple of my colleagues got pulled off the project and didn’t make the trip. You?”
“Business, with unexpected pleasure, thank you. The museum sent me to look at a collection—estate sale. Paintings and whatnot. I fly back on Friday, unless I find something extraordinary, which is doubtful. Mostly rubbish, I’m afraid.” Swayne rose and stretched. Rich, gold-red light dappled the curtains, banded and bronzed him with tiger stripes.
The suite’s western exposure gave them a last look at the sun as it faded to black. Below their lofty vantage, slums and crooked dirt streets and the labyrinthine wharfs in the shallow, blood-warm harbor were mercifully obscured by thickening tropical darkness. Farther along the main avenue and atop the ancient terraced hillsides was a huge, baroque seventeenth-century monastery, much photographed for feature films, and farther still, the scattered manors and villas of the lime nabobs, their walled estates demarcated by kliegs and floodlights. Tourism pumped the lifeblood of the settlement. They came for the monastery, of course, and only a few kilometers off was a wildlife preserve. Tour buses ran daily and guides entertained foreigners with local folklore and promises of tigers, a number of which roamed the high grass plains. Kenshi had gone on his first day, hated the ripe, florid smell of the jungle, the heat, and the sullen men with rifles who patrolled the electrified perimeter fence in halftracks. The locals wore knives in their belts, even the urbane guide with the Oxford accent, and it left Kenshi feeling shriveled and helpless, at the mercy of the hatefully smiling multitudes.
Here, in the dusty, grimy heart of town, some eighty kilometers down the coast from grand old Mumbai, when the oil lamps and electric lamps fizzed alight, link by link in a vast, convoluted chain, it was only bright enough to help the muggers and cutthroats see what they were doing.
“City of romance,” Swayne said with eminent sarcasm. He opened the door to the terrace and stood naked at the rail. There were a few tourists on their verandas and at their windows. Laughter and pop music and the stench of the sea carried on the lethargic breeze as it snaked through the room. The hotel occupied the exact center of a semicircle of relatively modernized blocks—the chamber of commerce’s concession to appeasing Westerners’ paranoia of marauding gangs and vicious muggers. Still, three streets over was the Third World, as Kenshi’s colleagues referred to it whilst they swilled whiskey and goggled at turbans and sarongs and at the Buddhists in their orange robes. It was enough to make him ashamed of his continent, to pine for his father’s homeland, until he realized the Japanese were scarcely any more civilized as guests.
“The only hotel with air conditioning and you go out there. You’ll be arrested if you don’t put something on!” Kenshi finally dragged himself upright and collected his pants. “Let’s go to the discothèque.”