The Worm in Every Heart (13 page)

Diehl, who came to your mutual wedding day prepared to make the best of a bad bargain, only to find himself terribly deceived about how much either of you could really take of each other's personal foibles—dumb things like a basic lack of actual affection, or a growing inability to mask one's true sexual preference. Who only wanted respectability, and political power, and the money to buy both. Bank accounts, to draw upon in your family's name; children, to give his own name to. And he did try, you had to give him that. He kept his mouth shut, his affairs discreet, his smiles wide. He never even hit you—except, of course, for that one time.

Which turned out to be more than enough.

While, in your mind—day after day, year in, year out—you cheated on him with every woman you saw. Even the ones you knew he was probably cheating on you with.

Nothing in Aunt Maris' house works well, or for long. It's hard to find the light switches; the fixtures are empty, or the lightbulbs die with a little blue flicker and a contractive rustle of fused glass.

Unfamiliar with the house and woozy on pain pills, you blunder into a downstairs bathroom—so long unused that the bath is full of dust—just as the stove's archaic timer begins to chime.

You turn, knocking your knee hard against the toilet bowl. A bruise will bloom, likely purple-blue, the orchid shape of the red mark.

Later, sipping the chai, you find yourself sitting in what must have been Aunt Maris' library, tentatively admiring the damage. A scratchy disk of old Bessie Smith tunes is still cued up beneath the encrusted cover of her record player's turntable—“Blue Spirit Blues,” with its jazzy death-march refrain.

Leaning back in a velvet-covered chair, you open your robe to your waist and transfer your attention from knee to nipples, which have once again become raw enough to need soothing. The hospital gave you some salve, expressly for that purpose—it looks something like toothpaste, smells like crushed-up Ivory soap (faux camellia with a faint tang of plastic) and stings like unholy hell.

You anoint the raw tips, carefully, but the stuff clusters and clings, still too thick to absorb without rubbing harder. And you sure don't want to do that.

So you reach for the nearest book instead, hoping to distract yourself while the salve's touch dims from its present slow burn to a mild tingle. But its spine is cracked—it opens on a bias, loosing a carefully-hidden cache of pornographic snapshots which scatter on the floor. Small, brown-tinted, like that one photo of Aunt Maris. From the same period, perhaps? No, even older.

Some have notations in Arabic, red ink on sepia. Written on the back of one, in Maris' familiar looping script, the words:
Sufiya, 1949.

You turn this particular one over, and the image revealed makes you burn even harder, nipples elongating inappropriately under their caps of medicinal cream. A spark set to your hidden bud, like a match to a short, short fuse.

So much better to show than to tell,
foreign lady—a voice whispers in your head, strangely faint, strangely near, not at all strangely unfamiliar—always.
Do you not think?

And easier, too.

The woman—Sufiya, one assumes—tilts herself towards the camera, spreading her bald, engorged labia wide with tattooed hands, long-nailed fingers: An upraised flesh pomegranate, flecked and packed with blurred, shiny stuff that could be juice, could be scar tissue, could be an oddly enticing mixture of both. Smiling wide, with both pairs of purple-rimmed lips. The topmost point of her deep-set navel is pierced with a small, silver ring and threaded by the fine-linked chain that circles her gorgeously lax waist, half-hidden in its soft folds. More of that wet, indefinite sheen extends down her inner thighs, so tensed and gleaming you can almost smell them.

The back of someone's head rears towards her, seen from above. Its hair is a dark, braided, mirror-fringed mass that matches her own mane, almost exactly—as though she were offering herself to her own reflection. The nape of the neck shows through, similarly tattooed with something vaguely oval, vaguely dotted. A supernumerary eye, staring back at the camera's own.

That blur between it and her—an exhaled plume of smoke?

The extended tip of a hungry tongue?

Who was taking these? you wonder. Maris? Then, annoyed with your own denseness: Well, who else?

You flip the photo back over again, and reach for another, free hand slipping under the closed portion of your robe. Excavating. Scooping upward, collecting lubrication, digging for the point of most resistance.

A slow, fluid, stop-motion fantasy strings itself together in front of you, images flickering through your fingers, figures snapping unexpectedly from position to position. Sufiya bending back, legs widening like a pulled wishbone, as the other person laps over her bare, split mound and up past the ring and chain, suckling at either breast, then forcing apart her lips, smearing her with her own juices from nose to chin.

Another woman? Yes, almost definitely. A long curve of spine uncoils as it spreads itself out over her, ending in a wide pair of hips, two soft and resilient cheeks, a subtle shade or two paler than Sufiya's own—ripe and reflective, lush with internal movement.

A somber image, hammered silver, cast in some ancient, concave mirror. It dips and writhes, wraithlike, up through a series of sheer and smoky veils that peel back like petals, trailing along its flanks and sides, cradling Sufiya's rapt body on a foamy, barely transparent wave. A tide that ebbs and flows in sudden rushes, hiding more than they reveal.

And always from the back. The face always hidden.

Sufiya is obviously moaning now, eyes rolled back, mouth squared over bluish teeth; her partner rummages through her spread stickiness with both hands, their exact location evocatively uncertain.

Obsessively, you map the various possibilities on yourself: Suck your middle finger, sliding it first past your streaming cleft and then lower still, broaching the anus's brown flower; wedge your slickened index to its haft inside your vagina, as you use your thumb's broad pad to flutter your clit's hood back and forth, a makeshift tongue grinding against its moist, jeweled hardness.

Your gaze turns upward, inward—pleasure growing slow and spreading, in small, circular waves—shock and aftershock knit tremor-close, nerves alight and aimless—your desire snarled in on itself like some half-burnt summer firework, a curled, self-immolating frenzy, haloing your groin with heat.

Dropping the last photos, you find your free hand drawn inexorably back to your aching, slippery, fiery nipples—to pull them ever harder, ever longer, first the left, then the right—finally teasing a thin spurt of milk from one, with a sudden, painfully satisfactory jolt.

Uh. Oh, Jesus.

Your lids flutter. The ceiling shakes and reels.

Sweet Lord Jesus.

A sickly-sweet stink of soap rises, rushing back over your spasming body in a volcanic cloud. The discarded photos fade to white, becoming empty screens, rear-projected. Spilling a pale, unfocused light that melts their contents whole.

Sweet . . .

And a fresh load of watery blood explodes down your legs as you ride your hand to climax, soaking the chair beneath you. Your toes curling, cramping. Gasping. Breathless.

Sweet . . .

Too busy making that thin, endless, whooping shriek you faintly hear in the background to mind just how ridiculous you must look, even if there were anybody else here to see.

Or care, for that matter.

. . . sweet . . . Maris.

You come until you black out, then sleep until you wake, newly drained and doubly emptied—sometime after midnight, if the clock on that nearby desk still reads right. And when you do wake, though you can't remember lighting the traditional post-coital cigarette, you find you have more than a bit of trouble trying to read the time at all.

Because the room is full of smoke.

* * *

Afterward, Maris reorders her clothing, tucking her braid away. Sufiya slips the rest of her jewelry back on, piece by jangling piece. She cleans her face with a dampened cloth, fastidiously wiping away all traces of their visitor, as Maris raises the recorked bottle, watching the darkness concentrated beneath its warped blue glass skin roil—like mercury—from the diffused heat of her hand.

Djinni are evil angels,
Sufiya tells her, moving the cloth slowly over her cleavage.
Unclean spirits, infinitely powerful, infinitely malign. Like ghools, but with no flesh—no way to feel the carnal impulse, except through the body of a human being. All-powerful as desert storms, they nevertheless envy the fragile strength of one's simple human desires.

She pauses.

And it is in this way—that they may be trapped.

Maris, recalled to herself, sets the bottle down again and checks her camera for possible damage, tightening its lens cap against the wind-borne wave of sand that has already begun to blow in under Sufiya's drawn curtains. Idly, she asks:
Will these pictures come out, does one think? Or is your pet demon too shy to risk its soul in a foreigner's machine?

Sufiya glances back at her, eyes narrowing.
One would not call it shy
, she says, finally.

Oh, no,
Maris replies, hidden once more behind her tourist's mask of propriety.
Not after such a show as that.

The two women look at each other. Now it is Sufiya's turn to lift—and offer—the bottle. She makes the movement silently, smoothly, as though it were part of some tiny ritual—pregnant with hermetic meaning, and just the faintest whiff of high style. Of simple showmanship.

Did what you see impress you?
She asks.
This is nothing. Once confined to the bottle, the djinni bows entirely to its keeper's will. It wants flesh, and it takes it however it may, even briefly. It will be one's double, one's partner,
one's fallow mirror image in all erotic matters, its actions limited only by the range of one's imagination.

Maris nods.
Assuming such things have limits,
she replies.

Sufiya dips her head in mocking imitation, the faultless picture of “subservience.” Her earrings swing together with a musical rustle, metal on metal. Bright as hovering insects.

One cannot doubt you want this, foreign lady,
she suggests, slyly.
Now that you have witnessed the—attractions—of its inhabitant for yourself.

The darkness, coiling. Licking the bottle's sides.

Maris represses a shiver. Says, coldly:
Would one really sell such a treasure?

Sufiya, shrugging.
If another cares to buy.

And the price?

That part of the bargain . . . is not my affair.

True night outside, now. A fingernail paring of moon has already risen over the vanished horizon, slim and sharp.

The djinni catch us as well,
of course, says Sufiya, slowly, perhaps more to herself than Maris.
They catch us—by allowing themselves to be caught.

Maris laughs, briefly. Remarks, mainly to herself:
Like every other woman.

But her eyes are drawn inexorably to the glass, to the darkness under it. She sees her own face stare back at her from inside the bottle—bluely elongated, tongue tip to upper lip, reflective. Almost seductive. Her own black eyes, no longer empty, but filled with an endless wealth of shadow.

Her stomach gripes; it seems to her, abruptly, that she has been hungry a long, long time—far longer, in fact, than she has ever been aware of.

Maris lays her nail against the bottle's cork, softly, and thinks of a lover who will never fail or leave her. A lover who knows her, and loves her, like herself. A perfect reflection, whose constant hunger exactly matches her own—always growing, deepening, evolving. Never satisfied. Never slaked.

She thinks: How much would I pay, to be finally full? For once?

No price could possibly be too high.

* * *

Upstairs in your aunt Maris' house is . . . .

Stuff. Nothing much. Nothing to get excited about.

. . . belonging to a dead woman. With your name.

Still, it's not like there's anything you can do about it.

So here you sit, ensconced in her private bath—a huge porcelain monstrosity on squat, grey gargoyle's feet, filled rim-high with water so hot it seems practically sterile—as you drink her Drambuie and use her handmade soap, each cake individually wrapped in wax paper, with whole chamomile flowers buried in its fragrant white flesh.

You pop another pain pill and chase it with more liqueur, feeling it take hold all at once, its normal force already alcohol-bolstered.

Pulling the plug with your toe, you dip your head underwater, riding a luxuriant swell of fatigue—knowing you shouldn't, and doing it anyway.

Aunt Maris' house seems to have that effect on you, generally. But you're already beginning not to mind, so much.

Especially now that the remains of your latest small miscarriage (hardly worthy of the name, given the sheer traumatic impact of your earlier adventures in haemorrhaging; more of an after-carriage, if anything) have been carefully washed away, and are rapidly disappearing—in a fine, red swirl—down the bathtub drain.

You close your eyes, feeling the pill begin to take hold. You think of Diehl. Of the last time you saw him—the time before the actual last time, in the car. At the hospital, you were always kept carefully separated; the doctors agreed it would be bad for you to have to see him, and he—surprisingly enough—agreed with the doctors. Poor, persecuted Diehl, coming home unexpectedly early from some badly scheduled appointment, only to walk in on you with your skirt hiked up and one hand down your pants, surrounded by a selection from his “secret” stash of emergency pornography.

Gaping at the sight of his supposedly orgasmically challenged wife, head thrown back and face contorted, in the throes of full-fledged, autoerotic ecstasy. His look an amazing mixture of prurient interest and utter betrayal, as though he'd just caught the Virgin Mary scribbling her name and number on some bathroom wall, only to realize his pen was out of ink.