by Lucy Taylor
Nicholas shook him so hard his head bounced back and forth like a dashboard dog’s. “Why, Sonny?”
“ ’Cause I got unfinished business with the bitch,” he whispered slowly. “She stole from me, the fucking cunt. I’m gonna kill her, ’cause she stole my fucking name.”
“Fucking crazy smack-shooting, son-of-a-bitch,” muttered Nicholas as he left the hotel.
The rain had started again, warm and stinging, driven in spurts by the wind. Nicholas walked with his head down, avoiding the puddles, trying to think.
The Biretta was back in jacket, unfired. His brain was brimming with booze and the Volvo must’ve been stolen, because he could swear there was some other vehicle in the space where he’d parked it.
At first he thought of going back to his hotel and trying to sleep, then saying screw it, driving back home to Detroit, explaining the whole nasty business to Beth and facing the consequences. At least, he knew that she was healthy. Her system couldn’t take the Pill so, for years now, they’d been using condoms for birth control.
He couldn’t face her, though. Not yet.
Not while Sonny Valdez, for all his demented ravings, had given him a shred of hope.
So he called Beth and made his excuses. Then, for the next week, he stayed in Toronto, taking in the live sex shows, the backroom peepshows, investigating the upscale callgirl services, the street hustlers and whores. He didn’t have sex, paid or otherwise: which was remarkable for Nicholas, since these streets were his old stomping grounds. They reeked of all his old addictions – bought sex and booze and the oblivion brought on by a trio of hot whores, a few grams of coke, and enough Jack to numb out everything but reptile brain lust. Names, he thought, remembering Sonny’s babbling, who even wanted a name then? Who needed to know?
“Myriam, her name’s Myriam,” he said to the stringy-haired hustler who sidled up to him outside the strip bar where he’d just spent the last hour trying to get information out of girls so stoned or high or just braindead that they made talking to Sonny seem intellectually stimulating.
To Nicholas’s surprise, the boy’s sallow face lit up; the somber blankness of his eyes gleamed with animation and a hint of fear.
“Myriam?”
“You know where to find her?”
“No, but if you make it worth my while, I know somebody who might. My lover. She saved his life.”
No marquee advertised her. No promoter delivered his pitch or handed out fliers outside a dark doorway. There was only a stairway leading down to a basement underneath a boarded-up adult bookstore. When Nicholas took out his wallet, the smokey-skinned East Indian manning the door shook his head. “No more audience tonight. Full up.”
Sonny had told him this might happen, so he took a chance. “I’m a friend of Sonny Valdez. He knows Myriam.”
The man shrugged. “Don’t know no Valdez.”
“Fuck it, man, I’m sick. I know what it is that she does. Sonny told me all about her.”
The man nodded knowingly. “Maybe you come in anyway,” he said, unblocking the door.
The stage was small and furnished only with a mattress covered in yellow satin sheets and a leather swing of the type sold in sex boutiques. Crimson curtains were gathered back on either side. White carpeting and stark white walls, against which the curtains stood out like stigmata.
The audience sat on a semi-circle of tiers facing the stage. Saffron-tinted track lighting rendered their faces bleak, surreal, and jaundiced-looking. Some of the patrons, almost all men, had removed their shoes and sat cross-legged, like yogis, but any resemblance to an ashram ended there. The room reeked of sex. Half a dozen nude and semi-nude women slunk on their hands and knees along the tiers, offering their mouths to the seated men, a few of whom unzipped in the detached, dispassionate way of bored despots exercising droits de seigneurs.
Nicholas aimed himself at a seat at the end of the tier farthest away from the stage. He tottered a bit getting up there and plopped down with an unintended grunt, like an old man losing a grip on his walker. Fuck, not only had he let Sonny Valdez send him on this wild goose chase, but he was shit-faced as well. He thought about getting the hell out of there, finding his way back to the hotel, assuming he still could, and decorating those snazzy gold bathroom fixtures and cushy white towels with part of Sonny’s frontal lobe, then he looked down and saw the brunette with her round tawny rump in the air and decided maybe that would be hasty.
She was crawling toward him, naked except for the gold armbands on one wrist and biceps and darker bands, tattooed ones, around her neck and ankles. Gazing up at him, she ran her tongue around full lips that, in the weird light at least, looked purple-black.
“You want to fuck?”
The phrase, in its similarity to Elise’s opening remark of so many months ago, jolted him. He ran a hand along the sweet, smooth curve of her buttocks and bent down to cup the furry mound between her legs.
“God, you are fucking beautiful,” he said.
She cocked her head, shiny black hair swishing against her breasts. “You want my ass, my tits, my cunt?”
“God, yes, I want,” he murmured, “but how about a drink first? Or, better yet, a joint?”
“No drinks,” she said, “just fuck. No drugs, just fuck. You understand?”
“Right, I got it,” said Nicholas, more perplexed than ever. So Sonny Valdez had sent him to a place where neither drugs nor alcohol were part of the picture. The very bizarreness of such a scenario made him uneasy.
Someone further along the row was requesting the girl’s services. She crawled past Nicholas, long hair sweeping the carpet, ass uptilted, the pierced lips of her vulva hanging meatily between her legs.
As Nicholas looked after her longingly, he was aware of a hush and a collective intaking of breath on the part of the men around him. He turned toward the stage, where a voluptuous, big-hipped blonde with enormous, low-swaying breasts had emerged from behind the curtains. She wore red leather, high-heeled boots that laced up the back of her thighs to below the knees. A black leather thong that made a pretense of covering her crotch disappeared into the crack of her ass. She looked yielding and smotheringly soft, like loamy earth from which a man might not emerge without a struggle. To Nicholas, who preferred his women firm and muscular, she would have merited no more than a glance, but the audience appeared entranced, almost mesmerized. As one, they murmured, “Myriam.”
She undulated her lush body along the edge of the stage in rapt silence – no catcalls, no whistles, nobody rising to thrust a bill under the thong. Silence – tense, awestruck, respectful – reigned.
She selected an overweight man from the third tier. Haltingly, as though the sex-steamy air must hurt his lungs, he lumbered onto the stage. Began to remove his clothes with trembling fingers.
Nicholas watched, at once fascinated and repulsed. The guy was no sex-show stud, that was obvious. With agonizing self-consciousness, he undressed, then stood naked, hands flopping nervously over a pendulous abdomen. To Nicholas, he looked pathetic and ridiculous. The woman ran her hands along his chest, arms, crotch. He didn’t move: nor did his dick, which peaked softly, shyly from beneath the mound of belly. The only rigid thing about him was his spine, the vertebrae of which seemed to have been fused by pure panic.
Without further preliminaries, Myriam lay down on the mattress, legs spread, back arched. The fat man knelt ponderously over her, his body language and facial expression suggesting he was placing his dick onto a guillotine. Even at this distance, Nicholas could see his hands were trembling, his dick so soft it might have been squeezed out of a toothpaste tube.
Nicholas squirmed, finding the guy’s public humiliation almost too painful to watch.
Myriam played with the man’s penis for a few minutes, using her hands and mouth: but, if anything, the exercise seemed less about an attempt at copulation than a graphic demonstration of his utter inability to get an erection.
Finally, the two reversed positions, with Myri
am guiding her partner down onto the mattress while she squatted above him. Slowly, with almost balletic grace, she removed the thong and lowered herself so that her parted lips touched the crown of his penis where it rested slack against his enormous belly. The oiled muscles of her thighs and abdomen flexed powerfully. Six, twelve times in eye-blink fast succession. Then, again. The fat man gave a little cry. Slowly, like a snake being charmed, his dick began to rise. From what Nicholas could see, it looked like the muscles of Myriam’s pussy were tugging at it, lifting it erect, then sucking it inside her.
The fat man started to buck and moan. Soaked with sweat, he puffed and grunted. Tears rolled down his cheeks as his cock disappeared inside. She settled herself on his hips, shut her eyes, and rested motionless. The man beneath her began to shake and sob. Finally, Myriam eased herself up and released his cock. It popped back against his belly, majestically erect.
The hush of the room erupted into cheers. Some of the masturbating men rushed to the stage and surrounded Myriam, anointed her with their semen. One came on her face, another spurted onto her breasts; thickly clotted strings of it were in her hair and glistening on her thighs.
Amazed, but also disappointed, Nicholas turned to the scrawny, blemished-faced man next to him. “So that’s all she does, she cures impotence?” he said.
The man glared at him. “That’s what you think the guy’s problem was, a limp dick? He had stomach cancer. That’s what she was pulling out of him, the cancer.”
Afterward, Nicholas waited until Myriam emerged from a bathroom off the hall. Nothing glamorous now – she wore a baggy white shirt over black tights. Blonde hair clipped back from her round face. Her only make-up a smudge of mascara and a dab of fuschia lipstick.
Nicholas blocked her way. “A man named Sonny Valdez claims you cured him of cancer.”
“Oh, does he?” Her cool green gaze washed over him. The scent of her, gardenia with undertones of musk, filled his head.
“I have AIDS,” Nicholas said. “Can you help me?”
“If you want it badly enough.”
“How much money?”
“How much is your life worth to you?”
“Two cents on a good day. Cut the crap, lady, how much do you want?”
“Nothing,” said Myriam. “If I heal you, then you make a gift to me. Whatever you think is fair.”
“That’s a funny way of doing business.”
“This isn’t a business.”
“And I won’t do it in front of an audience. It has to be in private. Just you and me.”
She smiled. “A lot of people feel that way. But the sexual energy of others is important for the ceremony. It makes the healing faster. If you’re shy about –”
“I’m not shy,” said Nicholas. “But I’m not performing for a bunch of perverts, either. I already know what that feels like.”
“You know so much, then maybe you don’t need me.” With surprising strength, she put a hand on his chest and shoved past him.
Contrite and frightened, he went after her. “No, wait. I’m sorry. Please. I need your help.”
She glared at him a moment, then her features softened and she drew a long, slow breath. “Tomorrow night, then. Not here, though. Never in the same place twice. I hope you have a good memory. I never write anything down.”
“It’s good enough,” said Nicholas, and she told him an address.
“Take your clothes off and lie down with me,” said Myriam. They were in a third floor efficiency of a squalid hotel off Dundas Street that catered to transients, addicts, and hookers, who rented the rooms by the hour. It occupied a tiny nook between a take-away Chinese joint and moss-encrusted St Benedict’s Cathedral on the corner and, although Nicholas had cruised this area a hundred times, he didn’t remember ever noticing the place before.
Now, awkwardly, as though he were stripping for some unpleasant physical exam, Nicholas undressed and crawled into bed next to Myriam. He laid a hand on her breast, but she only continued staring at the ceiling, her expression meditative, pensive.
“Now what?” he said angrily.
“Do you believe in God, Nicholas?”
“No.”
“Do you believe that I’m God?”
“Of course not.”
“That you’re God?”
“What is this? Is this about getting it on or are we having a fucking prayer meeting?”
She turned onto her side, breasts lolling in great vanilla mounds. “You’re here because you believe – even a little bit – that I might have the power to cure you. That isn’t rational, Nicholas. And clearly you’re a rational man, who doesn’t believe in God, who doesn’t expect miracles. So maybe you’re just here for one last good fuck.” She traced a fingernail around his nipple, teasing it erect. “So what are you waiting for, Nicholas? Don’t you want to fuck me?”
“Damn right,” he said, affecting his old bravado from the past, but unconvincingly so. As her fingers played with the curls of his chest hair, fear did a counterpoint jig on his spine.
“I told you what’s wrong with me,” he said. “You don’t want to use protection?”
Merriment danced in her green eyes, in the creases at the corners of her smile. “I already have protection, Nicholas.”
She pulled his face to hers, kissed him long and wetly. Tongue rimming the roof of his mouth, the tender edge of his gums. Licked his eyelids and throat, filled his ear with the heat of her breath. Her meaty body felt heavy and powerful. Her smell enveloped him, old odors and fragrances, scents of passion and longing and loss. He wanted to fuck her and he wanted to weep, and the juxtaposition of those two conflicting sensations brought up his anger, a sense of brute self-preservation.
He rolled her over, got on top and thrust her open. So she didn’t need protection from his disease? Fine: maybe she needed it from him. He rammed his way inside her. Their skin squeaked together. He could hear the thumping of their bellies, the slurp and sputter of moist flesh.
But the instant that he entered her, he felt her grasp him almost to the point of pain, her inner muscles pulling him inside. Tugging his penis, but also something else – his essence, his energy, his very Nicholas-ness – for which his dick seemed to be becoming the conduit. The sensation that he was in the process of ejaculating not just his infection, but his very soul, galvanized all his energy into his thrusts. He fucked her desperately, with the savagery of a man trying to dig his way out of prison, and she was the passage to freedom, to hope. Carving her out with his cock, widening her up until her cunt seemed to expand to suck in the whole world. She was wet and dark and hot, and somehow he was not only fucking her, but seeing her from inside as well – she was a black galaxy pulsing with what seemed at first to be stars, but what he realized were sperm, countless millions of seething, glittering sperm aswarm in her hothouse interior.
The energy built toward an orgasm. Not yet, his ego protested. For some perverse reason, he wanted to impress this woman, this harlot, this hooker, this bitch, he wanted to fuck her like she’d never been fucked. The excitement intensified, not just in his cock, but at the base of his spine. White energy that burned and blazed, stoking the fire that kept his cock hard as he fucked her and fucked her and fucked . . .
Then suddenly, there was no one fucking her at all or getting fucked. Nicholas – the fiction of Nicholas – was drowning in Myriam’s depths. What remained was pure silence, a crystalline nothingness marred only by the swelling of his own primitive terror.
The white radiance of sexual energy blazed like a fiery tree from the base of his spine. It consumed him, reduced him to ashes.
There was a swishing noise, like fabric rustling, and the sensation of light entering the room with a rush, but he didn’t dare open his eyes.
For a moment, it seemed every question was answered, every terror assuaged, every evil forgiven. There was no separation. Ecstasy thrilled through his body, his soul. His soul – for he knew now that he had one, that it was his soul that was
real, nothing else, not the Nicholas shell he’d accepted as his true self all these years.
He cried out as he came, opened his eyes, and then recoiled from the shock of what he saw – rows of naked men and women observing him in all his fear and vulnerability. He was no longer fucking Myriam on a bed in that miserable hotel room, but back in the basement room where he’d first seen her, performing on stage before an audience of aroused and worshipful voyeurs.
Slowly the watchers filed up onto the stage and began the ritual Nicholas had seen the night before, only tonight it no longer disgusted him – their semen streamed into his mouth, his hair, mingled with the come on his own cock, and he didn’t object, didn’t feel soiled or outraged or betrayed, but threw his head back, opened his mouth, and drank their spillage along with Myriam.
“God,” he breathed, “what happened?”
And she smiled up at him exultantly, and said, “Yes. Exactly. God happened.”
The day after the experience with Myriam, Nicholas went to two different clinics and had his blood drawn. A week-long wait for the results at the first one, five days at the other. He could have gone back to Detroit, but the idea never even occurred to him. As long as she was here, he would be, too.
Am I in love with her? Nicholas thought. Am I in thrall to her?
Not to Myriam herself, he decided, but to the experience she’d given him. For the first few hours after their love-making, the wondrous sensation had lingered. His reality shifted. He felt whole, he felt one with all of Creation. Entranced by the feeling, the knowing, that he was not defined by his skin or his mind or his name, Nicholas, but that God Himself was playing peekaboo, peering out from behind his eyes looking at God peering back from the eyes of everyone else. Love suffused him. He no longer hated Sonny Valdez, no longer regretted his past or longed for some fantasy future. For the first time in his life, he felt happy and whole.
Then, gradually, the ecstasy faded and Nicholas became just Nicholas again – separate and lonely and flawed, but longing now to return to that place he had briefly visited.
He returned to the boarded-up storefront and banged his fist on the locked basement door. No one answered, and a passing policeman finally stopped by and shooed him away, thinking him tipsy, but harmless. He went back the next night and slept on the stones by the door, but no one came. Nor the night after that or the next one.
