Wounds, page 16
part #2 of Voice of Blood Series
“It is pretty.”
“I was kidding. I wasn’t actually trying to be pretty.”
“You can’t help it. And you look smashing in that Galliano.”
“It’s a size eight,” she said, “according to the tag. I ripped it open in the back so I could fit into it. I kinda like it with the jacket. What’s a Galliano?”
“He’s a designer,” Daniel explained. “He’s really good.”
“I kind of like it, but it’s basically just something fucked up to wear. It doesn’t keep me warm or anything. Do you have anything I can change into at your place?”
“I might have something that fits you,” said Daniel. “If nothing else, I bet you can fit into my clothes.”
“Something like that,” replied Sybil.
“Will you help me with my luggage?”
They went into the flat together, garment bags slung over shoulders. After setting down his bags on the patent-leather sofa, Daniel went straight into the bathroom, stopped the tub, and turned on the bathtub’s hot faucet. Sybil went to the kitchen and poured herself some Scotch, returning to the bathroom to find Daniel naked and lowering himself by inches into the hot running water. She sat on the floor next to the tub and waited until he had settled in, and said, “So my project . . .”
He poured handfuls of water onto his hair. “Yes, tell me about this world-changing top-secret project.”
“Don’t be patronizing. First of all, tell me what’s wrong with art today.”
He laughed and waved a puff of steam at her. “What’s wrong with art? Haven’t millions of volumes been written about that already?”
“I want you to tell me about what you think is wrong with art.”
He sat a while and thought about that for a second, dunking his nipples below the water line, rising out to let them cool and stiffen in the air. “What I think is wrong with art is . . . that it doesn’t have enough power to really change society . . . that it’s not immediate enough . . . that not enough people are really paying attention to the . . . transformative properties of artistic expression?”
“Exactly,” said Sybil. “Not enough people are being directly touched by art. Not enough people these days are really faced with the immediate nature of art being created. How many people hear ‘art’ and immediately picture the ‘Mona Lisa’? They think about art that’s dead. Not enough people are touched by living art.” She settled back onto her heels with a bright smile on her face.
“And you propose to change this how?”
“And why do you think that reality-based TV is so popular now? People enjoy watching the spectacle of public, but recorded and played-back and edited, embarrassment and horror and aggression. They set up some poor sucker, or a group of them, and let chaos take its course. They’re sick of the predictability of a script. They like to watch a person who’s just found out they just fucked their own mother, and they wonder what it’s possible to feel in that situation. They wonder what it’s like to be under the surgeon’s knife. They wonder what it’s like to be on TV while the cops are cuffing you and beating your face into the hood of a car. They imagine that because they’re watching it thousands of miles away on TV, that they’re safe. What I propose . . . is to erase that distinction between the passive audience . . . and the exposed nerve. I want to shove that feeling of terror and the unexpected into their faces. I want to see real fear and revulsion in the faces of people—not audiences, not taxpayers, not the folks at home plugged into their Nielsen ratings dehumanizing machines. I want to make art a real living spectacle.”
“It’s been done,” sighed Daniel. “Over and over again. I did it.”
“To what purpose? Why did you do it? And aren’t those reasons still valid—right now, more valid than they’ve ever been?” She leaned toward him, her face shrouded in steam. “We’re—I learned this from you, even though I feel like I already knew this—we’re sitting on top of a huge compost pile of repressed feelings, repressed reflexes of the subconscious. These people around us don’t feel and they don’t care, and it’s not often that they feel fear for their lives or their sanity—real fear. Uncut adrenaline. Fear of the unknown.”
Daniel stared at her. “And . . . what do you mean in concrete terms? Where do I come in, besides regurgitating Dadaist rhetoric?”
“You perform with me,” she said. “Or you provide backup. Or you sketch the scene like a court reporter and we then analyze it later to provide more material for our performances. What I propose is a series of lightning strikes on comfortable normal American consciousnesses. We go out there, in the street, and make a spectacle. Then we get the fuck out of there and nobody’s the wiser. The way we make this work is to perform only stunts that will cause such humiliation or terror or confusion or lunacy to the mark, or to the spectators, that they would never want to speak of such things to anyone. It’s really easy. People have so many societal hang-ups about what to do in really weird situations, and those hang-ups are very, very easy to exploit.”
There was silence for several moments, which Daniel shattered by laughing again. “You are so high,” he said.
Her response was an eye roll and a sigh. “Think about it,” she said. “Think about it outside of your limited framework of being famous and making bucketloads of money. Think about what the creation of true art forms means to you—think about the transcendence.” She stood up and yanked the blue dress over her head, then pulled off the thermal long johns under it and climbed nimbly into the tub with him. Her breasts were noticeably fuller, heavier, and what had been a suggestion of extra flesh at her middle had become now definite. Less dancing, more eating. He touched her skin without meaning to, imagining sinking his teeth into it, to see if she tasted as creamy as she looked. She slid across him and dunked her head under the water, coming up with furious bubbling and a gasp and raking her hands through her wet thin hair. “I’ll do it with or without you. But we can do so much more damage if there’s two of us. And you’re like the master of disguise—you can totally pass for a woman if you really try. You’d have to tape your wee-wee down a little better—I could totally see it. And plus, y’know, in the confusion, it shouldn’t be too hard to find somebody to bite . . . ?” She slid forward to him again and puckered her wet lips against his chin.
He put his arms around her and kissed her mouth and pressed his body against hers. She was no longer stiff in his arms, but rather supple and warm, her skin stippled lightly with indentations from the thermals. His fingers played against the welt bitten into her skin at the waist from the elastic, and she slid her fingers over his spine and into the cleft of his buttocks.
Daniel spoke against the skin at the sounding board of her skull, just below the ear. “You know . . . last time I was in this bathtub, I killed Ricky,” he murmured. “And then I fucked him. I fucked him as I was killing him.”
“Did you fuck him in the ass, you queer?” she murmured affectionately.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “And I tore him open. And I drank all his blood. And he died happy because he loved me.”
“You didn’t love him,” she added sleepily.
“No, I didn’t love him.”
The pain of the world seemed so far away, holding the beautiful girl in his arms and kissing her lips, listening to the tight squeaking sound of her legs on the sides of the tub, the splashes she made riding his thighs. He wondered that he wasn’t consumed with the urge to kill her as well, just get her over with, suck her impermeable blood and ditch her body in the park; but he only wanted to hold her, draw out this luscious, drowsy tension for the rest of time. “Write me a proposal—a scenario—and I’ll help you,” he said to her between kisses, smoothing her hair off her ears. It would probably only be one time. The obnoxious public spectacles of Dada theater were long, long dead, and for good reason—after a while, shocking people became so boring.
But not really.
Scene Sixteen: Daddy Spank
It never ceased to amaze him, after decades of making love to women, how incredibly soft and smooth, at once delicate and resilient, was the flesh of the inner folds of the labia. It was only mucous membranes, after all; but those words never seemed right to describe the ecstatic journey along those silken coral slopes, how infinite a few square inches of bare pink flesh could seem. Orchids and sunlight and melted butter . . . he could never run out of ways to describe it, and none of them was ever quite accurate. This was transcendence, this was the private art of ecstasy that she sought. . . . Sybil was still new to having her pussy eaten, still trying to work out what she should do when half of the blood in her body had concentrated between her legs, and Daniel held her open with the fingers of one hand, while the other arm flung across her belly kept her body still. She lay diagonally across his bed, almost relaxed but for a rigid tremor that swept across her body over and over again.
He wished that he knew how she felt, that she could know how he felt. Under normal circumstances, the pleasure of the experience was shared; humans couldn’t help transmitting their thoughts and sensations to him while he touched them, and he could easily use the same connection to give it back to them. But there was almost none of that with Sybil. All he had to go on was the moisture of her vagina going from sticky to slick, and the trembling of her arms and legs. He could almost feel her, and he lapped at her desperately, craving more of her soul, wishing she would bleed so that he could get inside her mind. There was so much glory in her unknowable flesh, her fingertips repetitively massaging his scalp, and the freckles on the tops of her thighs.
“I want something inside of me,” she groaned after an eternity of near silence.
Daniel propped himself up on one elbow and smiled at her. “Too bad,” he said. “I’m going to leave you wanting it.” He didn’t feel like adding, Just like you leave me.
“You fucker,” she replied with only slight hostility. She sighed, arched her back, rolled onto her side facing him, and rubbed the long scars on her arms.
“I’ll make it up to you,” he promised, recalling suddenly one of the invitations he’d gotten while he was away. He picked up the telephone beside the bed, fed a number into its keypad, and rested the receiver against his white cheek. “It’s midnight; want to come out and play with me?”
She smiled back. “What does that entail?”
“I know this really interesting club . . .” He bent over and ran his tongue along the scars. She quivered and giggled—a most unlikely sound, one she obviously didn’t make very often, an odd, rusty burbling with sparkles. “. . . Where we can be naughty. Very . . . naughty.” He circled his tongue in the crook of her elbow. On the telephone, a voice spoke, and Daniel said his address and hung up.
Her lips quirked in a comma of skepticism. “Like how naughty?”
“I’ll show you. Don’t be a ‘fraidy cat.”
“Whatever,” she retorted, sliding off the bed. “Sure, show me the way to be . . . naughty, or whatever.” A more usual laugh from her, a kind of hissing snigger. “I can’t imagine what you think naughty is.”
“Do you want to look at some of my clothes? I think that almost any of them will fit you except maybe the Very Tightest Leather Pants, and I’m going to wear those myself.”
She laughed and followed him into his closet. After a few minutes of pawing through hangers of material and stitching, she turned to look at him standing in the doorway to the bathroom, rubbing cornstarch powder on his legs. “This is all dresses,” she said, whining, rhetorical. “Why do you have so many dresses, Daniel?”
“Because I look fucking fabulous in them,” he grunted, lying on the floor and pulling the Very Tightest Leather Pants over his feet. He had to get into them in a series of wiggles and shimmies—a laborious process, but worth it. “Because I’m a crossdressing faggot fairy queen. Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering.” She grabbed a pair of dull gunmetal leathers off its hanger and compared their length to the outside of her leg. She stepped into them and zipped up the sides while Daniel wriggled and grunted on the floor. “Can I wear anything from here?”
“Anything you want,” he said. Only a few more inches. Usually the pants were too much bother, but he wanted to go out of his way tonight. With effort he forced the blood out of his erection so that his penis would fit into the pants—it took some tucking to accomplish.
Sybil chose a fishnet top that squished against her ample breasts and scored her nipples like screwheads.
Daniel stood up and tugged gently on the crotch of the pants. Nice thing about the VTLPs—his balls always sorted themselves out somehow. Sybil stared at him. “Well, OK,” she said admiringly.
“Like them?” Daniel turned around and rubbed a powdery palm across his slick behind. “As long as I don’t try to move too much, they’re not too bad.”
“Your legs are so long.”
“Yes, they are,” Daniel said.
“It looks good on you,” she told him.
He came over and kissed her quick and sweet on the mouth, then put on a more substantial shirt himself. “There’s a car coming to pick us up,” he said, hastily applying black-red lipstick and checking himself in the mirror. “This is not a night for driving if I can do anything about it.”
In Midtown, on the sixty-fourth and ultimate floor of a business high-rise, a wealthy married couple ran a ridiculously exclusive monthly fetish club called Daddy Spank. Daniel had first been invited because the couple had been passionate fans of his drag cabaret act, singing Lotte Lenya, and Daniel had accepted because he approved of the design and typography of their invitation. Unfortunately, the very best thing about Daddy Spank was the design of their invitations, but Daniel returned to it occasionally with a kind of masochistic glee. He loved hating it.
There were occasional genuine fetishists there—one of the regulars was a shoe designer who had never sexually touched a human being but who brought his favorite shoes with him in a special fur-lined bag and caressed their surfaces all night and wouldn’t let anyone else touch them, and the electricity fiends always got their AC/DC kicks there—but mostly instead of Freudian fetishes, the club’s attendees were strictly there to put on their own personal dress-up dramas in multi-thousand-dollar rubber hot pants and skin coddled by spas and milk. A low crawl of sex-o-rific bass thrummed from the sound system, only a bare fraction more interesting than the featureless, chirpy pop music at the Supernova Gentleman’s Club.
He loved the place in all its trying-too-hardness—didn’t they know that a dank basement with a set of restraints hanging by a chain in the ceiling would do just as well? The windows were draped with thousands of yards of red gossamer, which trailed onto the black-plastic-wrapped floor, dented here and there with marks from stiletto heels. Clouds of frankincense smoke thickened the air, mingling with the scent of sweating human bodies and the fluids produced by their arousal. The whole room smelled horny, like a church, home to wild visions of bleeding martyrs. And yet there was such a sense of control, such decorum, such a sense of restraining the very pleasure they were there to exult. A girl in a white dress, desperately gulping red wine poured into her mouth by her unsmiling corseted mistress, was as close to a feeling of bacchanal as it got. He wondered that there was not more acting out, no temper tantrums—he wanted to someday see a slave rise up and strike his master across the face, screaming, “I’ve been the bitch long enough, motherfucker!” But it had not happened yet.
Daniel had imagined that Sybil would be interested in seeing it. She held her drink close to her fishnetted body and leaned against the floating bar in the center of the room, glancing around herself casually, touching the plastic rim of the cup to her lips without drinking. “This is kinda boring,” she said, her eyes settling on a huge buxom woman forcing a happily cowering man on a leash to lick the spiked vinyl heel of her boot. “This is just a disco where nobody’s dancing.”
“You think so?” Daniel asked, sipping his own drink. Tonight there was only wine; the owners of Daddy Spank disapproved of alcohol and drugs, and only provided (and tolerated) them grudgingly. “I just kinda like the atmosphere. It’s fascinating what expressions people here have on their faces.”
“I always wanted to go to one of these when I was a kid,” Sybil said. “But this isn’t what I pictured.”
“A kid.”
“You know, like fourteen.”
“And what did you picture?”
“I dunno,” she admitted. “Something more Hieronymous Bosch-y. I thought there’d be more sex.”
“No, it’s all foreplay.” Daniel laughed. “Actually, if you play your cards right, and exercise a lot of patience, there’ll be actual sex eventually. Fucking’s not what this place is all about, but some folks just can’t help themselves—although sometimes I wonder why they bother getting all dressed up, if that’s all they want.”
“That’s obviously not all they want,” Sybil pointed out.
The shoe fetishist smiled in her general direction, stroking a pair of feather-covered pumps.
Daniel nuzzled the edge of Sybil’s neck under her ear, and she leaned into him for a second in acknowledgment, but only for a second. “Like that guy over there licking the boot,” she said. She stuck out her own tongue and curled it into a tube, as if to demonstrate. “Do you think he’s wanted to do that all his life, or is he putting on a show for somebody?”
“Does it matter?”
“I dunno,” she said again. “It’s all so . . . abstracted here. Like this is all just a reenactment that they can store up and use to jack off with later.”
“Well, yeah,” Daniel agreed, “isn’t that what any erotic experience is supposed to be? They’re putting on a show, sure. For you, or me, or anybody else who’s watching. Most of all, for themselves.”
“That seems kinda sad to me. All these people come together to this place and show off how twisted they are and then they go home and they’re alone and all they can do is live off of what they remember.”
