Lies & Ugliness Read online

  His voice echoed hollow along a tarnished brass pipe, running through the ceiling from far above and down into my pen, like a speaking tube on an old ship that linked the captain at his helm with engineers belowdecks. Drake could’ve afforded something more modern, an intercom, but I believe he enjoyed the sense of human proximity that would’ve been lost to electronics.

  “Entry one-thirty-five: ‘A girl is bound hand and foot, facing a wall. Between her and the wall is placed a blade of sharp steel adjusted to the height of her stomach. Then she is beaten. Whenever she leans forward to avoid the lash, she is cut.’”

  “Amen,” I said, and now imagined being the girl.

  “We tried this a little earlier,” he told me. “Aimee’s quite resilient, isn’t she? Not that you ever tested her limits. Then, she never tested yours, so your relationship really was a complete waste of vows, wasn’t it? You may speak.”

  Whatever I said, my mouth wasn’t close enough to the pipe for him to hear me.

  “Back to work, then. No … no rest for the wicked.” He sounded so weary I felt mildly concerned for him. “Did you know her bleeding coagulates quicker than anyone else’s I’ve ever known?”

  Drake sighed. From somewhere near him came the faint sound of a high, feminine whimper. Or maybe it was laughter. With Aimee, it had sometimes been hard to tell the difference.

  “Really,” he said, before rattling the brass plate back over the mouthpiece, “between the two of you, you’re exhausting me.”

  Well now, whose fault was that, I wondered, if he wasn’t up to the job? I wondered, too, who wielded the real control here. For while Drake was the one who inflicted the pain and degradation, we were the ones inciting him to it in the first place, effortlessly, making him dance to that subtle and needy tune of our own.

  He seemed so much less worthy when I thought of it that way.

  Two evenings later another heavy fluid meal found its way down the tube and into my mouth. As the flow was about to stop, I felt a new texture I’d not been fed before, some smooth solid bit catching on my tongue. I chewed at it for a moment and found it too tough, so I leaned over to spit it onto the concrete.

  It took me a minute to realize what it was, but this was only a problem of context. Most people aren’t accustomed to seeing someone’s baby toe anywhere else but still on the foot.

  A valuable reminder — still and all, we are but the sum of our parts, and sometimes, not even that.

  I began to laugh, loudly, laugh until Drake at last came down and opened the door of my pen, as we both knew he would eventually have to do. He glared at me with haggard, dark-rimmed eyes.

  “It’s not de Sade, but listen to the story anyway,” I told him. “We’ll start at the end, too, then work our way back over the years. ‘One Sunday afternoon, a fifteen-year-old boy is home alone with his father when the man goes into cardiac arrest. He sends his son to the medicine cabinet after his nitroglycerine tablets. But when the boy gets the tin, all he can think of is being a lot smaller, and the first time his father forced a new crayon an inch up into the boy’s urethra for wetting the bed. And the things this led to over the next few years. So the fifteen-year-old boy holds those pills just out of reach and watches his father crawl halfway across the family room before the old man finally gives out.’”

  I nodded down toward that pitiful toe, rotting on the floor like a pale little nut.

  “Is that the best you can do?” I demanded then, with all the impudence of a runaway slave come back to seize control of the Big House.

  Drake said nothing, the sum of his own parts, and turned away to come up with some better method to start prying apart the rest of mine.

  Empathy

  It was the exception rather than the rule whenever she looked up from the tabletop, actually met him eye to eye. Hands busy at her half-empty mug, thin fingers picking at the rim and handle as though she could peel glazing from the ceramic. When Strauss asked her to stop she seemed surprised, not even aware of what her hands were up to. All that nervous energy dissipating, wasted.

  Amazing she’d mustered up enough courage to have answered the ad at all. Strauss pictured her in a cramped, dismal apartment with a view of dumpsters and walls as sheer as tombstones. She agonizes for hours, first over the newsprint, then her phone — should she or shouldn’t she? There would be a cat that never wants much to do with her, which she’d periodically scoop into her arms for immoral support, feeding on its nonchalance the way drunks feed on the hoots of broth-brained friends.

  “And what’s your name again?” Strauss asked.

  “Jane … Jane Norwood?” Inflection peaking at the end, as if she were no more certain of her name than exchange rates for the yen.

  “Pick a new one. A first name, anyway.” When he saw that he’d thrown her, added, “It’s not legally binding. It’s just a tool.” He sighed, getting nowhere pronto by the look of her. “Think of it this way: You’ve got some picture of yourself in mind, how you wish you could really be. Correct?”

  She nodded, compliant as a sheep.

  “Then find her a name, because she’s not going to answer to Jane, I guarantee you. There must be some other name that fits her. That captures her essence. Yes? No? Yes — good. So what is it?”

  As she had to ponder this, Strauss showed mercy and didn’t stare, letting his gaze wander the coffeehouse instead. The arrayed subphyla of trend-clutchers were good for at least a minute’s diversion. They slurped specialty brews with the smug propriety of those who’d invented them. Some chased promising careers like the hoop-jumping little doggies they were. Others cultivated a sedentary disdain for ambition and punched metal through their faces, of which Strauss approved insofar as the risk of infection was possible. In his opinion there was not enough acquired deformity in the world.

  “Zoe,” she announced, the most declarative thing she’d said yet. “That’s her name. Zoe.”

  Strauss tasted the name on his lips, rolling it in place and letting it melt upon his tongue. Such a tiny name to feel so barbaric yet so elegant. It would do just peachy.

  “Then the first steps on this path to Zoe lead back up to the counter,” he said. “We’ll need butter.”

  She blinked. “Butter?”

  “They sell muffins, they must have butter.”

  Up she went, and nobody watched. She wasn’t the sort who drew looks of anything. Admiration, envy, lust, disgust … they all passed her by in a tepid slipstream of indifference. She was a nonentity. The world would glance at her and see in the sum of her attributes a perfect zero, then forget it had ever laid eyes on her.

  Strauss, however, saw the same potential that sculptors saw in lumps of wet clay.

  Her face? Oval and undistinguished. Her hair? A limp and lifeless brown. Her chest and waist were hidden inside the sail of an engulfing sweater. Her legs appeared toned, but she wore black tights and this was a colossal error, unforgiving emphasis on a dumpy ass that had no business beneath snug packaging.

  Jane came back with two butter pats, and Strauss peeled the wax paper from one.

  “Zoe,” he said. “Solid choice. There’s a lot of power in the naming of something. ‘In the beginning was the word...’? That kind of power.”

  “Oh. Um. I’m afraid I was never very religious.” She smiled a wobbly apology.

  “Now that’s a shame. Sincerely. Much more meaningful being an ex-believer than a never-was.”

  Strauss laid his dagger on the table and pushed it across. It was a stubby thing; its ebony scabbard fit comfortably beneath his arm. When Jane saw it her smile flickered and snuffed.

  “If those tights you’re wearing have a seam in the crotch, they should be easy for you to cut straight. Panties too.”

  “Here?” she whispered. “Right now?”

  “Split down the middle.”

  She balked, wide-eyed and terrified. If there was anything he had to accomplish today, it was to get her past this misperception that she had anything to say about who
did what, and where. He had no interest in her modesty at all, only what lay beneath it.

  Jane took the dagger in a trembling hand. Beneath the table he felt her legs shift, knees splaying, and when she looked at him with her eyes on the brink of tears or epiphany, he nodded. Once. Go ahead, first cut’s always the hardest. She looked down, hands between her legs, then he heard a rip, the rending of the veil.

  While she worked at it, he set the anal plug on the table and used an index finger to lube it with butter. Jane’s face flushed scarlet when she saw it, and for a moment Strauss thought she was ready to bolt. Two phobias squaring off across her vanilla face, a mundane war, and guess what: Fear of a dull future whipped shame’s bashful ass.

  He had her scoot lower in the chair, her shaky knees veering around his own. Strauss leaned forward and pushed an arm beneath the table, working by feel. The back of his hand gliding along her thigh, more slowly than needed, but oh such fun watching Jane gnaw her lower lip.

  His fingers found the makeshift split-crotch and teased the cloth apart — the elastic tights, the soft cotton of her sensible undies. The revealed tuft of downy hair begged a more lingering touch, and by now her nail-bitten hands were clutching the edge of the table like an owl clutches its branch. South, then, along the moistened secret lips until his knuckles met the fleshy cheeks of her bottom. He found the puckered bud between and let the rubber plug track its way home, pushing it in gradually as Jane gulped down a whimper, until her sphincter naturally caught the indented ring around the base end, to hold it in place.

  Strauss sat back to watch her unwind. He hadn’t expected this episode to go unnoticed and wasn’t disappointed — a stare here, a nudge or squelched outrage there. Nobody actually doing anything about it, but by god they could paper the area with flyers.

  The harshest disdain came from a skanky-haired brat dressed in poverty chic and a knit hat that might’ve looked authentic with an actual Jamaican beneath it. He glared, an armchair Lancelot brimming with superiority. Drank his coffee black. Strauss decided to get back to him in a minute.

  “I don’t think I can ever show my face in here again,” Jane whispered.

  “Gee, there’s a loss,” he said. “But look on the bright side. Your face may not be yours much longer.”

  He sent her home then, to wait, and she moved funny, clearly unaccustomed to butt plugs. The walk would do her good. Meanwhile, her would-be champion had already abandoned the cause, sipping at his steaming mug and pretending to understand a volume of Anne Sexton. Strauss could tell he was deep by the way he tugged at his goatish wisp of beard.

  A few slow deep breaths and Strauss was almost in his head, matching him posture for posture and move for move. It only took a few moments until the sync was perfect and he didn’t have to think about it, or respond consciously, because he’d bypassed all that. Strauss mimicked him at a preconscious level, until muscle control, for at least one perfect moment, could exist as a two-way exchange.

  Strauss waited until the sensitive and intellectual goat-lad hoisted his mug again, then yanked his own arm back and tipped his hand. Goat-lad did likewise. The steaming mugful of brew deluged his lap, sudden inspiration for a yodeling lunge away from the table. Laughter pealed. How long, though, before the inevitable lawsuit?

  Strauss stuck around for the rest of the show — anticlimactic to be sure, but he was a completist.

  Do you believe in magick?, he’d asked in the ad that Jane had responded to, and it was always a hoot to remind himself why there were much wiser answers than no.

  Sailor Billy was an antique hardliner on the tattoo scene, predating the modern primitive craze by decades, a throwback from an era when inked skin was anathema to all but the genuine weirdoes, mutants, and outcasts. Strauss always got the feeling that Billy missed those days.

  Cash on the barrelhead was the surest means of getting your way, and when you wanted the atypical, Sailor Billy didn’t bargain. He was a shaven-headed old cuss in his seventies, possessed of steadiness of hand and sureness of eye that age had failed to erode. While skilled with the electric needle, he was also a repository of techniques older by millennia. If you wanted a lost art, it was definitely a seller’s market.

  “Why put her through it?” Sailor Billy nodded his wrinkled dome toward the next room, where Jane was staring at the flash art on the studio walls, the cheap shit for impulse buyers. “Fuck me for a beggar if she’s got the constitution to last this out.”

  Strauss wasn’t biting. “You were in the navy. You must’ve heard somewhere that still waters run deep.”

  “Your money,” grinned Sailor Billy. “If you can’t drag her back in for tomorrow night’s session, no refunds.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, Billy. Don’t insult me by implying I would.”

  It wasn’t that the subjugatum was inherently more difficult to apply than any large design. It was, rather, purity of method that made the difference. Electric needles were too easy. Manual means would knit deeper than mere flesh, converting pain into ordeal and process into ritual.

  Theater of the mind, all of it. The thing about magick was you could be an atheist and still never betray your refusal of cosmology. Strauss didn’t believe in angels and devils and pacts with either any more than he believed in giant egg-toting bunnies or the misty-eyed messiah who’d muscled in on the rabbit’s turf.

  He believed mightily, however, in the depths of the human psyche — fathomless, uncharted, raging with turbulence and storms whose power needed only to be harnessed and directed toward a goal. That deep plunge was crucial, since the conscious brains of most people were murky saucepans of confusion and tail-chasing defeat.

  Any rite was valid as long as its drama dished up the raw material needed to start hammering order from chaos. And he found a poetic quality in utilizing tools with sharp points.

  Strauss steered Jane in, coaxed her into peeling away her clothes, and got a look at the body, finally. Her skin itself was, well, divine. Pale? Indeed. But all pales are not created equal. There are fishbellies and there are pearls, and Jane’s skin was akin to the latter, a smooth, luscious hybrid of silk and cream. Sailor Billy paused in the preparation of his tools to give a lingering stare of awe and a groan of highest appreciation.

  Candles were lit, incense too, while Jane lay facedown and nervous on the padded leather bench. Sailor Billy traced the subjugatum’s intricacies over the rich ivory canvas of her back, from the tops of her shoulders to the twin dimples flanking the base of her spine. In his rendering of line and curve and angle there was both precision and flair. He took pains to adhere to the strictures of design while incorporating them into Jane’s own topography of musculature and bone: of rib and deltoid, of scapula, vertebra, and trapezius.

  Strauss could never settle on what it looked like. One moment a map, the next a maze, the next a lock. And so on. And so on.

  When it was complete, he handed over the bottle of blue-black ink he’d never allowed Sailor Billy to keep. Turn it so it caught the light just right, and sometimes Strauss swore he could see faces swirling in it.

  “Someday you’re gonna tell me where you got this,” Billy said. By now it was part of the game.

  Strauss’ eyebrow would arch just so. “You don’t want to know.”

  That was how they always knew it was time to begin.

  Process and ordeal, three nights running:

  The only sounds for hours were those of wood on wood, and the soft cries Jane made, like the coo of a murdered dove, whenever the tenderest new skin was pricked. Sailor Billy used the old way, one sharp-toothed mahogany tool angled like a toothbrush against the skin, with a tapping stick to drive its inked points into the dermal layers below.

  As the subjugatum took deeper form one slow line at a time, Strauss fell mesmerized by its progress. Trance inducement was no accident, but a crucible to alchemize everything he willed for her, everything she willed for herself. His will was the stronger, natch — practice, training — but her energi
es were readily gobbled up as well. All change began in the mind, where he held firm to that visualized ideal of face and body, pumped into her as sure as seed. To keep the charge going took a concoction of pleasure and pain, Strauss straddling Jane’s ample haunches after removing the plug and sliding himself up that snug hot channel.

  He moved no more than necessary to maintain the erection, a tortoise-slow rocking back and forth to the steady brittle tap of hardwood, a silver chain swaying around his neck as its precious locket thumped over his heart. Jane’s hips rolling beneath him but her back immobile beneath that needled bite, and Sailor Billy working a rhythm of his own, breaking new skin, holding it taut and dabbing at the trickles of blood. Red, white, blue-black; the smells of ink and musk, of jasmine smoke and the earthier aroma of animalistic union.

  Together they played her and Sailor Billy noshed his words. Jane was a sponge, soaking up pain and ink, night after night. By the second, shyness over baring her body was shed. By the third, even the pain had been converted into something else, a commodity she seemed proud to call her own. No more whimpers, only a deeper grunt of tolerance; of challenge confronted, even.

  Strauss could hardly have been more proud. His creation. It was enough to bring a tear to a jaundiced eye.

  And when he looked into hers, before leaving the shop on the night the subjugatum was finished, he thought he saw it: that first hint of Zoe, rising from the depths of desire and time.

  He, of course, would have another name for her.

  “My cousin got road-rash once,” she told him. “All down the side of one leg. He dumped his motorcycle over and slid about a hundred feet.”

  “Sounds painful.” Strauss yawned. “A shame he’d never heard of leather.”

  “At least he was wearing a helmet. It was the law.”

  “Let’s hear it for helmet laws, then. Government’s way of thwarting nature’s way of improving the breed. And your cousin has what to do with this again?”