The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

by Mariana Enriquez

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, they found out he has a tumor between his heart and lungs, and they can’t operate on it, so he’s going to die.”

  One week later I was suggesting to my friend that we visit Mara. I wanted to meet her dying brother, because I suspected that, well, that I could fall in love with him. But when I met him…the boy seemed sick enough, but I didn’t find him attractive. It was a confusing time for me, and I reached a conclusion that soothed my conscience: I didn’t like real sick people, and as such, I was not depraved. Those thoughts didn’t save me from my obsession. For an entire year I spent my allowance on expensive medical books, while my friends all spent theirs on drugs. Nothing brought me as much happiness as those books. All those euphemisms for death. All those beautiful medical terms that didn’t mean anything, all that hard jargon—that was pornography. By then I was pretty clear on what turned me on and what didn’t, and so I was increasingly bored by Victorian novels, where there was always some sick person but you never really knew what they were dying of. I was a little fed up with all the tuberculosis, once I’d gotten over my savage crush on Ippolit, the teenager with tuberculosis in The Idiot, which lasted over a year. I wanted pornography: sick people like Helen, Tadzio, or Ippolit were eroticism, suggestion. And they were always secondary characters. Ippolit was ideal: beautiful (Dostoyevsky made sure to have Prince Myshkin describe his “lovely face,” a line that always made me tremble), adolescent, definitively dying and stubborn and vulnerable and wicked. But he talked a lot and fainted little: I was tired of reading descriptions of paleness and sweating and coughing. I wanted details, I wanted explicit sex.

  The medical books were ideal, and they also helped me specify my fetishes. I skipped right over neurological illnesses: I didn’t like convulsions or mental retardation or paralysis, and the nervous system definitely bored me. I could care less, oddly, about oncology: cancer seemed dirty, socially overvalued, a little vulgar (“the poor woman has a tumor,” the old ladies would say), and there were too many movies about heroic cancer patients (I liked heroic patients, but not the ones who were role models). And how graceless was nephrology: clearly people died if their kidneys stopped working, but I didn’t care, because just the word “kidney” struck me as awful. Not to mention gastrointestinal illnesses, so filthy.

  It was clear what I liked, where I fell on the map, and once I’d clarified the specialty, I dedicated myself to it alone: I liked pulmonary illnesses (certainly reminiscent of Helen, Ippolit, and all the other tubercular patients), and cardiac patients. These latter had their tawdry side, but only if they were elderly (or over fifty, when frightful things like cholesterol started to intervene). If they were young…what elegance. Because, in general, you couldn’t tell. If they were beautiful, it was a kind of secretly ruined beauty. All the other illnesses tended to have a timeline, but this one was different. A person could die at any moment. Once, I bought a CD in a medical bookstore (where all the employees thought I was a student—I’d been sure to slip that in, as a precaution) that was called Cardiac Sounds. Nothing had ever brought me so much joy. I guess that what normal men and women feel when they hear their preferred gender moaning in pleasure, I felt when I heard those ruined hearts beat. Such variety! So many different rhythms, all meaning something different, all of them beautiful! Other illnesses couldn’t be heard. Plus, many of them could be smelled, which I found unpleasant. If I took my MP3 player out on a bike ride, I’d have to stop because I was too turned on. So I listened to it at night, at home, and during that time I got worried because I wasn’t interested in real sex. The audio tracks of heartbeats took the place of everything. I could masturbate with my headphones on for hours, dripping wet between my legs, my arm cramping up from so much rubbing and my clitoris inflamed to the size of a giant grape.

  After a while, I decided to get rid of the recorded heartbeats. They were going to drive me crazy. From then on, one of the first things I did with a man was lay my head on his chest, to see if there was any arrhythmia, or a murmur, an irregular beat, a third heart sound, or an atrial flutter, or anything else. I always wondered when I would find someone who was an unbeatable combination of elements. I remember that longing now, and I smile bitterly.

  * * *

  —

  I can specify the exact moment I lost control. After years of sterile searching, I found a website where other heartbeat fetishists shared their hearts. They did it live, in chats, but they also had an extensive archive of sounds that you could download, deliciously classified into normal and abnormal beats, hearts during exercise, heart murmurs, ectopic heartbeats….I never participated in the chats. I only copied those sounds and lay down to listen to them. An accelerated, regular rhythm; suddenly an early beat, another one delayed (premature atrial or ventricular contractions). And I thought my earlier masturbations had been brutal! I’d had no idea, I knew nothing about the limits of lust. My middle finger between my inner right labia and clitoris, rubbing until I hit bone, until my bone hurt, sometimes until I bled, and the orgasms came one after another, implacable, tremendous, for hours. The sheets damp, perspiration dripping down between my breasts, my skin always prickling, and the feeling of my swollen, glorious clitoris, and the contractions of my vagina and uterus. Supraventricular tachycardia, the beautiful sound of aortic stenosis, the irregular beats provoked by hyperventilation or the Valsalva maneuver, things only the brave would attempt. Sometimes a hidden heart, beating barely audibly and frenzied behind the ribs, a sound achieved by holding the breath; and when finally the oxygen returned, that heart shook itself as if it lived inside a can of tomatoes, disconcerted, sometimes too slow, as if it were about to stop.

  I didn’t answer the phone. I was late everywhere I went. I only stopped when the pain of my irritated, sometimes wounded vulva took my pleasure away. In the dark with my headphones and the hearts, that was my life, and I’d never have sex with people again. What for?

  Until I isolated one of the hearts. Its beat never, ever failed. I could distinguish it perfectly even without checking its author, who went by the name HCM1. The recordings were always very clear, and the beats always different, and dangerous: in atrial fibrillation, in long tachycardias, in a ventricular gallop. It was a man. I could hear him breathing sometimes, and there were vestiges of his voice. I found one sound file where he moaned because—said the text that accompanied the file—he’d felt pain in his chest during the session, and that was when I decided to enter the chat to meet him.

  He was evasive for a while. Too long, it seemed to me, but I guess it was objectively a short time. A month after our first contact, he agreed to visit me. Strange: we lived in the same city. Statistically unlikely, if not impossible, because we had met in an international fetish community. We decided not to ascribe any importance to the coincidence, not to fall into ideas about messages from fate or theories like that. We just dove into pleasure. He liked to have his heart listened to. He was very sick, and so he tended to get rejected in chats and online communities. People thought he was too extreme, that he went too far, that he ruined the idea of play and pleasure. Soon we both abandoned the online life, and we locked ourselves in my room with a sound recorder, a stethoscope, medicines and substances that helped change his cardiac rhythm. We both knew how it could end, and we didn’t care.

  * * *

  —

  His hair was as dark as that of the man I’d met as a child, and his smile was the same. But he had three scars, not just one. They’d opened his sternum from top to bottom: a casual observer would have seen a single scar, but I could tell them apart. The first one transparent, thin, almost totally hidden by the second, of an opaline pink that shone like it was coated in polish; the last one, broader, brutal, was darker than his skin. The scar that crossed his back (he’d described that painful process in detail) was enormous, clumsy. The small, discreet scars on his stomach seemed to be distributed randomly. The skin on the ins
ide of his arm was marked like a drug addict’s. There was another short scar, a dark sinking on the right side of his neck. So many marks. And his labored breathing, and his fleshy lips that sometimes took on a color as blue as his eyes.

  I could hear his illness. It was in those sudden inhalations when he ran out of breath as he spoke, in the nocturnal coughing attacks that left him pale and trembling. He always let me rest my head on his chest, to listen. A normal beat is two sounds, open and close. But his beats had four sounds, a gallop, a desperate effort, different and unnatural. It got worse with a cup of coffee. It was scary with a little cocaine. He fainted often, and I went on listening through the stethoscope, terrified and excited, until his heartbeat recovered a kind of normalcy and he woke up. I could spend hours on his chest and then, thrilled, I kissed and embraced him almost violently, and his laughter and abandon worried me, because at times—ever more often as our intimacy grew—I was certain that if I listened one second longer, I was going to wound him even more. Hitting him, clawing him with my nails, scarring him more, was a way of being even closer, of making him more mine. I had to contain that desire, that wish to sate myself, to open him up, play with his organs like hidden trophies. It got to the point that I imposed little punishments on myself: not eating all day, going seventy-two hours without sleeping, walking until my legs cramped up….Little rituals, the same way a girl wishes death on her mother because she won’t buy her something, and then feels remorse and makes little sacrifices: “I won’t say any more bad words, God, I promise, but don’t let my mom die.” And the bad word slips out and then comes the running in at night to be sure the mother is still breathing in bed while she sleeps.

  * * *

  —

  But I think I ended up hating him. Maybe I hated him from the start. Just like I hated the man who had made me abnormal, who’d made me sick, with his tired penis in front of the TV, and that beautiful scar. The man who’d ruined me. I hated my lover. Otherwise some of our games were inexplicable. I made him breathe quickly into a plastic bag until I saw his forehead grow damp and his arms start to tremble. His heart pounded in the stethoscope and he would beg, “Enough,” but I asked for more, and he never said no. I had to take him to the hospital once, and while they regulated his tachycardia with cardioversion—an electrical discharge in the chest, like in resuscitations—I locked myself in a nearby bathroom and fell onto the toilet when I reached orgasm, howling. I bought him poppers, cocaine, tranquilizers, alcohol. Each substance caused a different effect and he went along with all of it, he never complained, he hardly spoke. He even paid my rent with his savings when they threatened to kick me out of the apartment; I never paid again. I no longer had a phone, I only worried about the electricity for the sound recorder, so I could go back and listen to my experiments when he was too exhausted, nearly unconscious.

  He didn’t even protest when I told him I was bored. That I wanted to see it. Rest my hand on his heart stripped of ribs, of cages, have it in my hand beating until it stopped, feel the desperate valves open and shut in the fresh air. He only said that he was tired too.

  And that we were going to need a saw.

  Meat

  So some of him lived but the most of him died.

  RUDYARD KIPLING, “THE VAMPIRE”

  All the TV shows, newspapers, magazines, and radio programs wanted to talk to the girls: Julieta, the younger, and Mariela, the older. The television vans stayed parked outside the psychiatric clinic where they were hospitalized for over a week, but the reporters got nothing. When the girls were released, the cameramen took off after them, some getting tangled in the cables, a few falling onto the concrete. But the girls weren’t running away. They looked into the cameras with smiles that were later described as “terrifying” and “cryptic,” and they got into the car that Mariela’s father drove away. The girls’ parents wouldn’t talk either: the cameras could only record their nervous pacing through the hospital hallways, their fearful eyes, and Julieta’s mother sobbing when she came out of her house with a bag full of clothes.

  The silence provoked an extreme hysteria. The front pages of the newspapers talked about the most shocking case of teenage fanaticism not only in Argentina, but in the whole world. The story was picked up by international media outlets. Psychiatrists and psychologists were called in as experts; the case monopolized the news, the gossip shows, the afternoon tabloid and talk shows, and the radio talked of nothing else. Julieta and Mariela, sixteen and seventeen years old, two girls from Mataderos who were fans of Santiago Espina, the rock star who in less than a year had left the suburbs behind to fill theaters and stadiums in downtown Buenos Aires; Santiago, whom the music press loved and hated in equal measure: he was a genius, he was pretentious, he was an unclassifiable artist, he was a commercial artifact for hypnotizing alienated girls, he was the future of Argentine music, he was a capricious idiot. El Espina—as he was known by both his worshippers and his detractors—had stupefied the critics with his second album, Meat, eleven songs that split opinions even further: on one side they called it a masterpiece; on the other, a self-indulgent anachronism. Sales skyrocketed, and the record label started to dream about an international release. Santiago Espina was strange, yes, he was unpredictable and almost never gave interviews, but how could he refuse promotional tours through Mexico, Chile, Spain? They just had to convince him to finally make a video once and for all, so the world could get a glimpse of his eyes and the way his pants hugged the sharp bones of his hips.

  One month after Meat sold out, the city—papered end to end with Espina’s face—received the news that he had disappeared, mere days before he was going to present his hit album at Obras Stadium. Tickets were sold out. His fans—almost all of them girls, which only increased his detractors’ contempt—sobbed in spontaneous gatherings in the street, organized marches, and recited Meat lyrics in an ecstatic litany, kneeling before posters of Espina Scotch-taped to monuments and trees in all the plazas of Buenos Aires, as if praying to a moribund god.

  As the desperation was spreading to teenagers in the country’s interior, the discovery of Espina’s body provoked an unheard-of terror among disoriented parents. Santiago’s body had been found in a hotel room near the Once Station, his whole body flayed: he had used a razor and a knife to carefully skin his arms, legs, stomach. On his left arm, he’d sliced to the bone. In his chest you could see his sternum. And finally, possibly semi-unconscious, he’d slit his jugular with a bold, precise cut. He had not mutilated his face. One of the policemen charged with forcing the lock on the door of the room said that it had reminded him of a walk-in freezer: it was the middle of winter, and Santiago had left the air conditioner on. There were several conspiracy theories about a possible murder, but they were ruled out when it was leaked that the room had been locked with a key from the inside, and the suicide note was published, almost illegible because of the nervous handwriting and the bloodstains. It said: “Meat is food. Meat is death. You all know what the future holds.” Ravings of a dying man, said the experts, and the fans were silent and cried locked in their rooms, where the teddy bears and pink-covered diaries mixed with always overloaded backpacks and photos of Espina, more beautiful than ever now that death shone in his eyes.

  * * *

  —

  The nation expected an epidemic of teenage suicides that never came. The girls went back to school and to the clubs, and only one case of serious depression was recorded, in Mendoza. Still, the fans all listened to Meat as their idol’s last will and testament, trying to decipher the album’s lyrics in online forums and on long phone conversations. The press said goodbye to Santiago Espina with features and elegies, and for a time talked about nothing but suicide, drugs, and rock and roll. The funeral in Chacarita was less well attended and much sadder than expected, and the mourning subsided once the people close to the star finished their procession through TV programs. Santiago Espina was relegated to �
��important anniversaries,” ready to be unearthed a year after his death, or on his birthday.

  No one could have suspected that something was being hatched between two girls in Mataderos over a wrinkled photo of the suicide note, Meat on the stereo, start to finish, over and over.

  * * *

  —

  Mariela had been one of the very first “Espinosas” (as the press called Santiago’s fans, the girls with their eyes lined in mortuary black, cheap feather boas around their necks, and leopard-print pants). She had followed him for a year, night after night, wherever Espina played. She knew the suburban trains and buses well, and she’d spent freezing dawns trembling on train platforms, the song list in her pocket, caressing the paper with her eyes closed. Espina knew her and sometimes—very rarely, because he almost never spoke to his audience, not even to announce songs or say good night—he’d give her some small offering: his guitar pick or a plastic cup with a little beer in it. In the bathroom of a club in Burzaco, she met Julieta, who was the most famous Espinosa because she had tattooed the idol’s name on her neck; from far away, the letters looked like a scar, as if her head had been sewn onto her neck. Julieta had managed to take a photo with Espina: they both looked very serious, they weren’t touching, and the flash had turned their eyes red. Julieta and Mariela lived just ten blocks apart, and Espina’s suicide united them so much that they started to resemble each other physically, like couples who live together for decades or solitary people who start to look like their pets.

  That mimetic resemblance had surprised the cemetery caretaker who’d found them in the early morning as they were trying to jump the wall. “It was still dark,” he said, “but I never thought they were thieves. I could tell from far away they were young girls, and when I got closer I saw they were also twins.” Julieta and Mariela didn’t put up a fight when the caretaker caught them. They seemed dazed, and they let him lead them to the office; the man thought they were on drugs, and he figured they’d spent the night in the cemetery keeping vigil at Espina’s grave. The caretaker and his coworkers had found girls there before, hiding in the passageways of niches or behind trees around closing time, but none of them had ever managed to stay with their idol until dawn. The caretaker thought Julieta and Mariela had been lucky, but as he was scolding them and asking for their parents’ phone numbers, he noticed that the girls were covered in dirt, blood, and a film of muck that stank and was smeared all over their hands and clothes and faces. Then he called the police.