Apple and Knife

by Intan Paramaditha

  He sat in my wicker chair, drinking a glass of water. He opened a button of his shirt and loosened his tie – a tie that was totally wrong.

  Look at the man’s neck. Do you like vanilla ice-cream? Taste its iciness with your tongue and it will melt in your mouth.

  He spoke my name. It was a murmur, but I caught what he said afterwards: ‘We always knew what would happen between us.’

  I was shaking. My fears had come true. But I was professional; I knew to reject him, to throw him out if necessary.

  Yet I felt him getting closer and closer. Cologne and cigarette smoke wafted from his neatly trimmed hair. I felt as if –

  Sucked in?

  Atop the ice-cream sits a shiny, round cherry. The fruit tempts, challenges danger. Will I fall? But I want it so much. I imbibe life.

  His neck is so beautiful. And I am so thirsty for blood.

  —

  8:00 am. The phone rings.

  ‘Hello, Saras?’ A woman’s voice on the other end. ‘Irwan’s not answering his phone. He has a meeting with a client at eleven – could you remind him as soon as you see him?’

  Beauty and the Seventh Dwarf

  I never knew her real name.

  She was imperious from our first meeting, when she told me, ‘This is difficult work.’ She spoke from a shiny black chair, her back to me. I had the feeling the chair was hiding a truly powerful figure who wanted to keep her identity secret. A mafia boss, I decided, one who wouldn’t let me see anything but the smoke trails rising from her cigarette.

  In her office was a glass cabinet. It contained opaque clues about her. Chemistry books, children’s stories, some VHS videotapes. I suspected she wasn’t a businesswoman and was puzzled as to why she couldn’t just hire almost anyone at random for the job; nothing in the key selection criteria stood out. Male. Minimum height 175 cm. Of sound mind. Not fat. What specifications there were emphasised appearance. Public relations, maybe? But why was she willing to pay so much? My situation meant I had little time for suspicions.

  I was there because I was desperate. Predictions of a prolonged impact after the recent financial crisis had been rife, but I’d never imagined I would fall victim. At the beginning of the year, the promise of a pay hike drew me to a smaller company, owned by the son of el número uno in this country. Two months ago, though, murmurs about downsizing had started, and then I was sent packing.

  After that came a series of unexpected setbacks. No company would take me on. My wife sold off her handbags one by one, which of course fuelled gossip about my hard luck. The crisis soon became an ugly test to discover who was in the outermost circle and would get bounced, and who – thanks to a wise selection of friends – remained on the inside. Like magic, most of those I’d assumed would spread a safety net for me disappeared. I became a leper.

  My beautiful wife didn’t complain, but I knew she missed joining friends for dinners at restaurants or renting villas at weekends. When I heard that the ex-wife of a wealthy businessman was looking for someone to help out on a project, I sent a letter of application and my resume. The role itself was fuzzy, but it offered double my previous salary.

  ‘Six men have tried this work and they all failed,’ the woman warned from behind the black chair.

  She was yet to arrive at the point so I broached it politely. ‘What kind of business do you run, madam?’

  She sighed, softly at first, yet soon the sigh turned into laughter. Not the laughter of a colleague making you feel comfortable but the degrading laughter of a tyrant.

  ‘Oh, this work is important. Your services are sorely needed.’

  For a while she said nothing more. Then, in language stripped of formality, she stated what she wanted. It made my face flush. I felt silly. She remained motionless and stopped exhaling her smoke.

  The woman wanted to pay me to have sex with her.

  My confidence collapsed. Not because I’d never been involved in a transaction like this – the whims of youth had taken me to several call girls. Yet there is a big difference between paying and being paid. And this strange woman, who wouldn’t even look me in the face, wanted to make me her whore.

  I felt like I was being trampled underfoot. If only I’d hightailed it out of there. But the threat of a future as a pariah made me anxious. I was an economic castaway and my losses could only keep coming – friends, car, house. Maybe even my beautiful wife.

  I took a deep breath. ‘I’ll try my best.’

  She hadn’t finished. ‘You haven’t asked for details. I love stories. I love acting them out even more.’

  I came to wish I’d taken that statement as another warning.

  Unable to guess what she was insinuating, I asked if she had any particular story in mind. ‘The Beauty of Ancol Bridge,’ she said, naming a well-known ghost tale. Reading the confusion in my face, she explained herself calmly. ‘I want you to rape me.’

  I felt myself go limp. She repeated her request; I wasn’t up to hearing it twice. I had swallowed my pride in agreeing to whore myself out. Now she wanted to call me a rapist.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It will only be make believe.’

  She outlined the scenario. She would give me the uniform of a Civil Defence guard and have me hide in a wardrobe in her room. Dressed as the Beauty of Ancol Bridge, she would come into the room after prayers, still veiled. As she was removing her veil, I was supposed to leap from the wardrobe, grab her, and begin by tearing off her blouse.

  I figured that the woman was out of her mind. But I was desperate. I asked her to increase the pay a tad reluctantly, out of pride. But when I considered that someone like her had no shame, I quickly overcame my hesitance.

  She agreed, laughing. She even told me she would pay half my salary up front. She seemed pleased to have filled the position with such a promising candidate.

  Without turning around, she waved a contract at me. I swallowed. On it was printed the stipulation that I was responsible for completing my work ‘professionally and efficiently’, while following a ‘flexible’ schedule for three months. Listed beneath were my name and hers. Her name seemed familiar but I couldn’t immediately pin it down. I picked up the pen, my palms sweating.

  As soon as I scrawled my signature, she twisted the black chair around and looked straight at me.

  The woman’s face was like a rough chunk of meat. It was difficult to say where her nose ended and her cheeks began. Her left eye was swollen and red, like an inflamed ulcer. If it wasn’t for her straight hair I wouldn’t have been sure she was human. She was a tumour come to life, covered in pustules and obscene.

  I prayed that God would rescue me from this horrible joke but it was too late. I had already shoved the thick wad of rupiah into my bag and now fled the office, jumped into my car and drove away, feeling frantic. A car behind me honked and pulled past, its occupant cursing. That’s when I realised what had escaped me earlier. The name on the contract, Siti Ariah, was the name of the Beauty of Ancol Bridge. I’d signed a contract with a devil woman.

  —

  That damned contract landed me in the darkness of a sturdy teak wardrobe with carvings on both doors. I was sweating beneath the guard uniform she’d instructed me to wear. I held my breath when I heard footsteps enter the room. My heart had never pounded as hard as it did on that first day of work. I didn’t feel like a rapist – I was more like a submissive bull, fearful of being led into the slaughterhouse.

  She and I were close, separated by nothing but the timber of the antique wardrobe. It was time. One, two, three. I burst through the door. She was dressed in batik and a white Javanese blouse embroidered with small flowers. She was removing her veil. My throat constricted when I caught sight of her wasted face.

  She instructed me to say her name. Ariah. Her eyes narrowed. She faced me, impatient, as I stood fixed in place before her. I knew I had to act fast. My hands trembled as I took her shoulders and started shaking them. She slapped me hard.

  ‘Say you want to rape m
e, you son of a bitch.’

  The slap jolted me, drove me to throw her onto the bed. Ariah writhed and kicked at my thighs. Breathing hard, I pinned her hands and ripped off her blouse.

  When I laid eyes on her body I gasped. It wasn’t mutilated at all. I’d never beheld such curves. What kind of joke was this? The scene was bizarre, disorienting, like an unfinished painting. I felt ill.

  If nothing else, the sight of her body made my own react: I became the son of a bitch she wanted. Unwilling to let her prey escape, she ordered me to look her in the eyes. I ravaged her, not once turning away from that horrid face of hers, sobbing all the while.

  She took no pity on me and urged me to rougher heights. She spewed curses that reddened my ears. Every time she opened her mouth, every time she gasped and moaned, I felt like I was being stabbed. Over and over again. Those eyes – those asymmetrical eyes that refused to close – were the worst. They widened, making me feel like I was fucking a putrid fish cast up on dry land. Cold, scaly, twitching.

  Everything happened fast. My brain went into overdrive. I thought: just finish it off and you’re free. At the end of our little role play, my face was close to hers. She smiled, cruel and content, as I caught the odour of an animal that has just died. An unbearable, bitter taste spread in my mouth. Without a chance to flee, I vomited my guts up onto the floor.

  Ariah got to her feet and slipped on her robe. I was still gasping for breath when she stood over me and folded her arms. She looked as if she were faking sympathy towards a slave. She laughed hysterically, then said, ‘Not too shabby. Now go and clean up your puke. And come back tomorrow.’

  —

  And so it went. I kept visiting Ariah’s house, lurking in her wardrobe, then attacking and ‘raping’ her. For the whole first week, I had no appetite. The inflamed tumour of her face loomed on my dinner plate in lumps, mocking me. I threw up again and again. And wept. One night, as my wife applied the face cream that nourished her beauty, she asked what was so draining about my new job.

  ‘I just need to get used to it,’ I lied.

  At night, I tried to make love to my beautiful wife to forget what I had been through during the day. But there was always a point when her perfect features dissolved into the revolting face of Ariah. The fragrance of my wife’s body – a soft, clean lavender – evaporated, only to be replaced by the stench of animals at market, of stagnant water churning with blood.

  After the first time, I thought I would quit by the end of the week. Instead, I was surprised to find within myself an astonishing tenacity. By the second week, I’d learned self-deception: yes, her face was a horror, but my misery would come to an end once I collected all my money and found another job. I inured myself to disgust, habituated myself to rape, as though I’d always longed for such ugliness.

  In the third week, I started to note major changes within myself. I started to believe in the mantra that she commanded me to memorise: Ariah, Ariah, I want to pulverise you. Not only could I perform my role as the rapist of a hideous woman without nausea, but now I could stare into her eyes, searching them for an explosive depravity.

  To be sure, this change instilled terror in me. Not only of her but of myself. I didn’t dare confirm it, but over time my performance ceased to be a question of adaptation. Something else was involved – an uncanny impulse beyond my control.

  Secretly, I began to enjoy my work.

  I know it’s hard to fathom. God knows I was worried about my sanity. But the woman made love as if possessed and this wore off on me. I decided Ariah had violated our contract: often, I felt like I was the one being raped.

  But I allowed it. Even longed for it.

  How wretched was that human tumour. Every recess of my brain pulsed with pleasure whenever she clawed and hit and slapped me. A thrilling jolt surged through me when she roughed me up. I held her down because I knew she would kick me. The more I internalised my role as the rapist, the more viciously she treated me. I slapped her because I wanted her to box my ears, harder, over and over. I said I wanted to rape her to encourage that savage voice of hers to lacerate me with dirty, guttural whispers.

  My pact with the devil dragged me into a universe I’d never known. She awoke in me desires I didn’t recognise. A desire to be degraded. The woman infected me with her disease. Questions that I dared not ask gnawed at me. How did she become such a terrifying creature? Why, how, could she repulse me so and yet draw me in at the same time?

  —

  I don’t know if it was because she was satisfied with my work or because she realised we shared an illness, but Ariah started to treat me like a human being. I say that because up until then she had behaved as if I was a dog. She made me satisfy her five times a day. The next morning, while I was still slumbering next to my wife, she would order me to come over again, right away.

  She questioned me about my family once, her face expressionless. She seemed to have developed an interest in her obedient servant.

  Cautiously, I started asking about her work, hoping to discover answers from the source of the sickness I needed to treat. She revealed details in dribs and drabs. Often, she cut off the conversation, commanding me to get back to satisfying her lust. Always in control, she prevented me from digging into the contents of her head, contents that I imagined were uglier than her mutilated face. I received her life story in fragments with no leads to follow. Maybe she lied about her past and maybe that wasn’t important since our transactions would soon be over anyway. But the scraps themselves kept calling me to piece together a story.

  Ariah had apparently been driven to live her life as if it were fiction. She would pass over the denouement – when evil was rooted out in an adventure story, or when the main character found happiness. ‘The end of a tale is a compromise,’ she said once. ‘The middle is a fatty piece of meat, full of gristle, not always easy to chew.’

  It seemed that tales first became a driving force in Ariah’s life when she was a teenager. Her father had brought an old animated movie about Snow White and her seven dwarf admirers, childmen. It wasn’t the sweet princess who had enthralled her but the Evil Queen who loved only herself. Consumed by jealousy over her stepdaughter, the Evil Queen entered a secret chamber and concocted a deadly potion. Another herb helped her change into a wrinkled old granny. Then she persuaded innocent Snow White to accept the poisoned apple.

  Young Ariah had become immersed in this tale in a way that was difficult for me to fathom. In her eyes, the Queen was no mere cruel and jealous woman but a scientist who worked in a spectacular laboratory. Ariah had decided that her own intellect was as sharp as that of the Evil Queen and so had travelled abroad to study. She majored in chemistry and then worked in a research institute at a university until she married.

  I pieced together her story based on information that emerged at random, so the tale was incomplete, unsatisfactory. It didn’t explain the enigma of her hideousness. Waiting while she bathed one night, I hunted around for further clues. Her room contained a mirror and a dresser. There were no rows of cosmetics. Of course she didn’t need beauty products, nothing could redeem her looks. Even the mirror’s presence was odd. Why would someone with such a grotesque face want to gaze at herself?

  I pulled out a dresser drawer and discovered a stack of documents and a framed picture. I was stunned to see a photo of a beautiful woman around thirty years old with straight black hair. Hair like Ariah’s. Could it have been her? If she was so beautiful once, then what had destroyed her face? I began to speculate. Maybe skin cancer had slowly ravaged her until the doctor’s verdict had come: she had only a few years to live. She was determined to spend the rest of her life living out her adolescent obsession with freakish tales. She had nothing to lose, not even her place in the world, because she would soon be dead.

  When I heard her opening the bathroom door, I quickly shut the drawer. I caught a passing scent of soap, but her rotten smell never disappeared altogether. I returned to the wardrobe, ready to repeat
my ritual.

  —

  My parents always advised me to make safe choices. Prudent calculations pushed me towards a business degree, towards work in an established company, towards selecting an ideal prospective spouse. But now, a month after I signed our contract, Ariah’s bedroom had clouded my judgement, had jumbled my perception of security and threat. Her room was a luxury prison. Every time I arrived she took the key from the door and made off with my watch, hiding both as soon as I got into the wardrobe. A long black curtain, thick and motionless, shrouded the room’s window. There was no light apart from a harsh blue neon lamp. No wall clock either, so gauging the passage of time was difficult. I didn’t know whether she was protecting her secret or hiding her monstrousness from the outside world.

  And oh how strange the sights that lay within that room. I, rapist-slave, and Ariah, employer-demon, staring at the ceiling, lighting up a smoke and engaging in pillow talk. We were like two of the damned, ensconced in our cave, shunning the world.

  ‘Did you know,’ she said, ‘that out there, mothers are protesting about the price of milk?’

  Of course I hoped the situation would end soon. Change terrified me. I just wanted to get through all of this and for everything to go back to normal.

  She stroked my hair with absurd motherly caresses. Lying beside her, I got used to the sight of her dry lips, pursed half the time, exhaling cigarette smoke. Bathed in the blue glow, her mangled features made me feel as though I was looking at a mermaid who had been dashed against the rocks by the waves. Yet I was shipwrecked, and she was not rescuing me.

  At the same time, finding myself so close to a devil summoned a measure of courage. I asked what happened to her face. She thought for a while, then answered, ‘It’s because I like to experiment.’

  She cackled, fixing her gaze on my knitted eyebrows. ‘Experiment’ apparently was a key word if I wanted to piece together the fragments of her story. A word that I came to regret ever hearing.