Wired Man and Other Freaks of Nature

by Sashi Kaufman

  When Ilona was dancing, her hands were over her head and then down at her sides like she was digging for something and the whole time her torso was undulating, slithering like a snake charmer’s snake appearing from a wicker basket. He stood there watching her and barely moving. Her eyes were closed or barely open; it was hard to tell. He was letting the blood cool from his face and trying to decide whether or not to pull the hearing aids out and put them back on, the act of which would have to be performed in whatever passed for a bathroom in a place like this. But the longer he stood there, the more he realized he could hear. Not in a miraculous throw-down-your-crutches-and-walk kind of way. But he could hear the music; if anything, it was a little less painful this way, and he could hear the people around him shouting at each other whatever was shouted on a dance floor.

  The last time he’d been without his hearing aids was a family party after his batteries had gone dead. He’d spent the entire time in the car faking a stomachache. It was the last time he’d allowed himself to be caught unaware and unprepared without backup batteries. But this was different. Everyone’s hearing in this place was leveled. No one stood out. He wondered for a second if this was what Ilona had been trying to explain to him with all her rants about freaks and the falsehoods of supposed normalcy. Maybe there was no normal—maybe normal was a really loud room and everyone, EVERYONE, was trying to hear and understand each other.

  Ilona was dancing with her back to him in a skinny white tank top with a black bra showing through. Around the waist of her black jeans, or maybe they were leggings, was a neon yellow belt with silver studs. She began to back up against him, shaking her hips and her head and then reaching back to wrap her arms around him. So he was dancing with her. Actually trying to dance for the first time that night, maybe ever, and he couldn’t believe how freaking good it felt. Everything—her body against him, her hands on his neck where usually he never wanted anyone to touch him. Her back rubbed against his chest and her ass was bumping into his hips until he grabbed the sides of her hips and pulled her against him, grinding into her. The crowd pressed them together, and he could almost say it was the crowd making it happen except that he could feel how much he wanted her, how much more he wanted than just this clothed rubbing on the dance floor. He let his hands drift up and under the bottom of her shirt where he could feel the muscles of her abdomen rippling and crunching with the music, and he still wanted more.

  As if Ilona could sense he was about to rip her clothes off, she spun around suddenly and grabbed his hand and pulled him through the crowd into a smaller room where the people were packed even more tightly together—something he hadn’t thought was even possible. They squeezed through to the far side of the room where there was a small bar. At the end of the bar was another heavy black door with a sign that said “Don’t fucking dance here” in red magic marker. Someone had crossed out the word “dance.” There was a tiny bit of space to stand there.

  “What?” he mouthed at Ilona. She gave him a critical look and then pushed him back against the door. She wrapped her wrists around the back of his neck and then leaned toward him, her lips parted. Right before he could taste her, when he could feel her breath hot against his mouth, she leaned back and looked at him as if to say, “You want this, right?” He answered her with his mouth, slamming it into hers, but she pushed back—her lips and tongue were warm and tasted faintly of beer—mashing into his mouth, her hands pulling at his neck and the back of his hair. And God did he want to be somewhere with her and nakedly squeeze and chew every part of her. For once he didn’t try and censor his thoughts or imagine himself on a nice date with her. Did Ilona even go on such things? He doubted it. He just knew that he wanted her and he didn’t care where they were or who was watching.

  There was a tap on his shoulder. It was the bartender, a beefy dude with slicked-back hair. He was grimacing and pointing to the dance floor. Ben shrugged his shoulders. He couldn’t hear him, but maybe the guy wasn’t even talking. The beats were so loud he could feel his toes vibrating inside his shoes. Ilona dragged him back into the crush, and they kept on dancing, flinging their arms around each other, waving them in the air, catching occasional glimpses of the equally ecstatic people around them. Ecstasy. That’s what the club should be called. He’d never tried it, but Tyler had. His only experience with the word was in Hamlet. He remembered his English teacher, Mr. DePeter, talking about how in Shakespeare’s time, the word meant “pure madness.” The song changed to an Icona Pop hit from a few summers ago, and the dancing seemed to intensify, if such a thing was possible. Two women with heavy nose rings piercing that piece of flesh between your nostrils were tonguing each other’s faces. Not kissing, licking one another.

  Ilona caught him staring and laughed. “Come on,” she mouthed and pulled him out of the crowd to an open spot on a long leather bench. She pushed him down and went for more drinks.

  “How do you keep doing that?” he shouted when she came back.

  “I used to come here a lot last summer.” She flopped down on the bench next to him and stuck her legs across his lap.

  “Is this going to be weird?” he blurted out.

  “It’s all weird, dude.” She gestured around the room. “Weird and crazy and great. Aren’t you paying attention?”

  There was a scream from somewhere. And then yelling and yipping, which Ben couldn’t identify as positive or negative. They pushed back through the crowd, which was also gravitating in that direction to find the source of the noise.

  It was coming from the main room where Tyler was dancing shirtless on the bar.

  People were clapping and stomping their feet so loudly that they didn’t seem to realize they’d lost the beat entirely. The crowd was mostly guys, and Tyler was strutting his stuff on the bar like he’d been doing it his whole life. His hair was slicked back and on the sides with sweat. He caught sight of Ben and Ilona and started waving his hands wildly. The crowd seemed to think this was part of the act and began cheering louder. Ben threw back his head and laughed. This was the old Tyler—the confident goal scorer with his adoring fans. Except in this case it was a group of gay men twirling their shirts over their heads and gyrating to electronic dance music.

  Tyler looked over at Ben and Ilona again. He turned around facing away from the crowd, put his hands up in the air, glanced once behind him, and fell backwards into his adoring crowd. They caught him and surfed him back close enough so Ben could hear him gleefully yell, “I DON’T THINK I’M GAY!”

  “Not yet, honey,” said the skinny guy with a buzz cut who was holding up one of Tyler’s shoulders. They paraded him around the room and finally set him down in a corner.

  “This was a great idea!” he said when Ilona and Ben found him.

  “Where’s your shirt?” Ben asked.

  Tyler scanned the crowd. “I think that guy has it.” He pointed at the Asian guy with a black T-shirt wrapped around his head like a towel.

  “YOU’RE AMAZING!” A man grabbed Tyler by the shoulder as he passed by.

  Tyler smiled blithely, like a real celebrity might. “Have you guys been dancing?” he asked.

  Ben nodded. He noticed Tyler’s pupils were tiny. “Did you take something?”

  “I don’t know,” Tyler said. “Maybe. Yeah, it feels like maybe I did take something. Everyone was just so nice to me. It’s really nice in here, isn’t it?” He started rubbing the sides of his arms and smiling. “I think we should dance more. Do you think we should dance more?” His words were rapid-fire.

  Ben shrugged. He was starting to think maybe they should just get out of there before something even crazier happened. But Ilona grabbed their hands and pulled them both back into the fray. Tyler was wild. Not entirely with the beat of the song, but wild and free. So Ben stared up at the millions of tiny dots on the black foam ceiling, and without looking around at anyone he kept that image of Tyler in his head and he tried to dance like Tyler was dancing. He tried to feel that free.

  It worked.
There was nothing but his limbs, which seemed to be shaking and rotating on their own planes but somehow still moving with the music. The base was pumping so loudly it felt like the hair on his arms was vibrating in time and that his organs were thumping along as well. He didn’t need to open his eyes to feel that Ilona and Tyler were near him. He just knew they were and that knowledge, along with the blasting music and the ecstatic feeling that began in the soles of his feet and seemed to exit through the top of his skull, was lifting something off him, something heavy he’d been carrying for a long time. He felt the urge to scream and then he did. A primal yell escaped his mouth, and for just a second he opened his eyes but no one had heard him, either because the music was just that loud or because they were lost in their own private communications with the gods of loud music and psychedelic drugs. So he shut his eyes again and danced.

  And then the lights flickered and went out. There was a buzzing, and within seconds the room went purple and everything white shone brightly with black lights. The crowd screamed their approval at the change. All around him, everyone was transformed into glowing Cheshire cat mouths, their eyes dark pupils with the whites like matching glowing crescent moons. “LAST CALL!” Ilona mouthed at them over the din. She pointed to the lights, which apparently were meant to be the indicator. But Ben didn’t want anything else to drink. Whatever he was drunk on, high on, whatever he was, was right here on the dance floor. He shook his head and kept dancing, patting his jeans pocket only once to make sure his hearing aids were still there.

  When the overhead lights burst back on, the effect was immediate; the energy fled the dance floor like air from a sputtering party balloon that scoots around the room before settling flaccidly on the floor. Everyone began a slow gravitation toward the door in varying states of inebriation. Ben hung back and pulled his hearing aids from his jeans pocket, placing them behind his ears. His head and his body were still buzzing from the noise and energy of the club, so the difference that he could now officially hear again didn’t seem that extreme.

  It was quiet in the car on the ride home. Ilona hummed to herself, and Tyler flicked manically through group chats on his phone. Ben pressed his cheek to the car window and tried to take in the cold, immense presence of the stars.

  Chapter 28

  Ilona’s house was dark when they finally pulled into the rutted driveway a little before two. Ben started to follow Tyler toward the leather sectional, but Ilona caught him by the arm instead. “You don’t mind if I borrow him for the evening, do you?”

  “Do what you gotta do,” Tyler said, walking toward the kitchen. Ilona’s hand was warm on Ben’s arm, and he followed her up the dark stairs toward her bedroom. She didn’t bother with the lights. He tried to ignore the feline hiss and subsequent thump of four feet hitting the ground when they flopped down onto Ilona’s bed. There was a momentary nervous twitch in his stomach. What did she expect him to do exactly? With Ilona he was never sure what the limits were.

  He worried for about two more seconds and then she started nuzzling his neck again. Was it her lips or her tongue? He wasn’t sure, but something was flicking at his earlobe and the sensation was something he could feel everywhere. Then she was scraping his thighs, up and down on either side of his dick, which was threatening to burst the seams of his pants. God, he wanted out of those pants. And then Ilona, as though she could read his mind, twisted the button on the front and helped him wiggle out of his jeans. As he did so, his hand brushed her thigh. It was smooth and taut and she was not wearing pants either.

  “Are you wearing boxers?”

  “You want me to take them off?” she asked.

  “No!” he said. “I mean . . .”

  But Ilona was already laughing at him. She rolled onto her back, and he could see the outline of her with the yellow light from the streetlamp coming in between the two massive pine trees outside her window. He pulled her back toward him, and she rolled so she was on top of him, staring down, her lips now level with his chin. “You really are a head case, you know that, right?”

  “I thought you didn’t like head cases?”

  “Mmm,” she said and leaned over so she was nuzzling in his ear again and whispered, “You’re my kind of head case.”

  He didn’t know how it happened. One minute they were kissing and her hands were rubbing up and down his body. His hands were under her shirt, mapping the contours of her shoulder blades and venturing around to cup her small breasts. He had one hand on her thigh, stroking where he imagined the tattoo was, when her breathing changed in his ear. There was a small sound, like a dolphin clicking, and then another that was identical and he realized suddenly that her hand, hooked on the waistband of his boxer shorts, wasn’t moving any longer. And that her mouth planted on his earlobe, was actually just that—planted there. She was snoring.

  He would have laughed out loud. He thought for a second of waking her up just to give her some shit about it. But then he just opened his mouth in a silent laugh for the benefit of the shark-shaped water stain on her ceiling.

  Ilona wasn’t very heavy, and her breath against his neck was soft and sweet. After a few more minutes she started drooling on his neck, which was neither soft nor sweet, and he pushed her gently to one side. She grumbled something and then pulled part of the comforter up over her legs. He was half in and half out of the blanket, and he shifted around, trying to decide if he was really going to sleep there or not. He settled back into the pillow, trying to ignore the apparent lack of a pillowcase. The pillow was an old one, and his head sank deep until he could feel the mattress against the back of his skull, the two sides of the pillow puffing up around him like horse blinders. He was replaying the events of the night—all of it: the dancing, taking off his hearing aids, seeing Tyler paraded around the dance floor like a roast pig at a luau, and the strange salty-sweet feeling of Ilona’s mouth against his. He touched his lips, which were still burning a little from vigorous use. All these thoughts and images cycled round and round in his brain until he entered a trancelike state that was something close to sleep.

  Suddenly, though he was unsure of how much time had passed, his eyes flicked open, alert in a way they hadn’t been before. The sky was still dark and the streetlights still blazed orange through the huge six-paned glass windows. He went downstairs to find Tyler.

  He was awake, the large flat screen showing one of the Die Hard movies, and eating from a family-sized bag of Cheetos. Ben stood behind the couch as though he needed to be asked to sit down.

  “They had Cheetos here? In the kitchen?”

  “Uh-uh,” Tyler said, pausing to lick his cheese-dust fingers clean. “I walked to the Sev.”

  “Can’t sleep?”

  “Nah, not like usual. I think it’s whatever I took. I’m really hopped up.” He smiled as one of the bad guys took a two-by-four in the face from Bruce Willis. “He’s kicking ass now,” he added and pointed with his chin at the open space on the couch.

  Ben stepped over the back of the couch and slid down on the soft leather. Tyler passed him the bag of Cheetos without looking over. As soon as he smelled the fake cheese, his stomach let out a huge rumble.

  Tyler snickered. “Work up an appetite?”

  “Not really.”

  “Hmm?” Tyler raised his eyebrows in disbelief.

  “We didn’t really do much,”

  “Ilona’s cool,” Tyler said.

  “Yeah, she’s good. I mean, she’s a good friend. What if we fuck that up?” His mind started to race, jumping ahead to a future without Ilona. He liked who he was when he was with her.

  Tyler shrugged. “What if you make it even better?” His eyes never left the TV as he spoke.

  Ben considered this as he pulled out a particularly long and skinny Cheeto with a strange protrusion on the top. It reminded him of Judy for some reason, but he didn’t say anything to Tyler. He didn’t really know if Tyler would get it, and right now he wanted them to be on the same page.

  Tyler waved
his hand over, beckoning for the bag of Cheetos. On the screen a gunfight was erupting and people were falling backwards and getting shot in that weird late-nineties style where it looked like they just passed out with holes in their chests. “You know her pretty well, though, right?”

  It took Ben a second to realize he was talking about Ilona and not Judy. “I guess so, yeah.”

  “And she knows you.” This wasn’t a question. Tyler shook the bag around as though the really good Cheetos were going to surface from the mix of crumbs and dust. “No one knows me like that,” he said without looking up from the bag. It seemed like maybe Ben should argue with him, but he wasn’t sure what to say. “Except you.” He popped a handful of cheese crumbs into his mouth and wiped his hand on his jeans. “I don’t think anyone else ever will.”

  There was silence. How should he respond? It was a compliment but also a sad self-deprecating statement. “You don’t know that,” he said uneasily.

  But Tyler just kept munching on the crumbs. To anyone else, he would have looked unconcerned and easy sitting there on the couch. But there was one line across his forehead that Ben had never noticed before and a twinge of distracted worry in his eyes, even as they seemed focused on the movie.

  “Hey!” Tyler said suddenly. “Let’s order pizza.”

  “From where? It’s four in the morning.”

  “Shit.”

  Ben bounced up from his seat and opened Ilona’s freezer and there, hidden behind a bag of ice, stacked up on each other like Holy Bibles, was a neat pile of frozen pizzas. “Oh my God,” he said softly. His mouth began to water before he could tear open the cardboard box.

  “This summer’s going to be epic,” Tyler called out from the couch.

  Ben nodded even though Tyler couldn’t see him. He was trying to figure out which buttons on the perfectly clean oven to press to turn it on. It would be an epic summer. Their last summer before college or whatever came in September. Ben gazed over at Tyler as the oven began to click and hum to life. How many times had they been up like this after a night of partying? How many more times like this would there be? Would he ever be like Julie Snow—done with high school, ready to move on? If he really looked closely, he could see that maybe the tide, slack for so long, had finally turned and begun to ebb.