by Brian Hodge
Summernight sweat, they lathered each other well in this very bed. Their wetness flowed like earlier wine, and if by the end of the carnal netherhours he felt his joints stiffening, he thought it only as side-effect of her insatiability. Which he would not have classified as nymphomania, precisely. Such insatiability had to go deeper than the libido, a chute emptying into a bottomless chasm of need. She wore him out, and despite the landscape of an unfamiliar bed, he slept deeply and well.
Like a petrified log.
Awakening the next morning to a deep and overall soreness he had never quite known. Movement equated with pain, like muscles wrenched during autumn’s first pick-up game of football with friends a few years ago, before families were begun in earnest by so many of them. Stefan asked to sleep in, you don’t mind, do you? And she did not. He blithely loved her in that moment, her bright understanding, her trust.
Awakening later that afternoon to realize the pain was gone, while even the possibility of movement had been taken with it. His fear was great, an awesome weight to bear, the same fear the fox or mink must feel with the first slam of trap jaws on its paw. And then, compounding the misery, he knew the shame of embarrassment.
He was lewdly, permanently, erect.
Awakening with a hard-on had always been a matter of goofy pride, everything in working order and ready for action. It had become the most ironic of curses.
He glanced down along his length, could tell a difference in skin color, healthy fleshtones gone dusty white. His internalized horror at this was exceeded only by Connie’s nonchalance when she came home to find him this way, not as if she had been expecting it, but worse: as if it were the answer to some incoherent prayer. He knew the moment she walked in that she would never summon help. With moist and loving eyes, she sat and stroked his new body for a time, and if he were outside himself, he might have marveled at the fact that no matter how firmly she pressed, poked, or prodded, his skin would not dimple.
Connie designated this room as his, converted the second floor guest room for her own use. He would be harder to move than a dresser emptied of its drawers — oh, here was morale. And she began to care for him like a nurse, of sorts. He can no longer move his jaws to eat, though she is able to force a stout straw through his lips, and he can suck up water and thin broths. Apparently his internal metabolism has slowed, for this meager diet seems sufficient. His resultant messes she cleans without complaint. Defecation is a thing of the past. The occasional spout of urine is all.
Nurse and keeper she may be, but she is also mistress, and he lacks even the physiological cop-out of impotence to deny Connie her satisfactions. Strong in the beginning, now hate is no longer in his remaining psychological framework. For further irony has not escaped him: She has her own design firm — this he remembers — and owns her own home. Isn’t this the dream of every guy teetering on career burnout, to kiss it goodbye and become a kept man?
Stefan still contemplates the why of it all. Vengeful wrath of some newly stirred deity? It’s crossed his mind, though this seems extreme. He’s been no saint, but no plundering cocksman, either. In terms of callous usage and abandonment, he has known far more deserving of punishment. Which is no excuse, Stefan supposes, but in this day and age, it seems as if the women he has known have been equally handicapped at making some genuine connection. All of them, male and female, fumbling in emotional darkness like blind, mad children.
Which, in retrospect, made his own heartfelt numbness seem quite normal. Apathy has just never seemed very important.
He’s had time to think himself through quite well.
And if he were to be run past a physician and a psychiatrist, what would be their diagnosis?
Patient exhibits symptoms of new, as-yet-unclassified social disease afflicting, in order: heart, soul, and finally body. Emotional rigidity and isolation seem to stimulate sudden massive production of osteoblasts and fibrous matrix. Accumulation of calcareous deposits continues until intramembranous ossification is complete.
And the prognosis? More of the same, perhaps, no cure and no preventative. He finds himself almost insane with curiosity: Is this scenario being repeated in other homes, other bedrooms? The lonely and the battle-scarred, awakening to find their night’s lover gone stiff beside them. The callous, rising to morning pain and finding surrender more attractive than fighting joints in protest. This city of men and women, one by one and two by two, sculpting unwilling new bodies of bone.
He wonders. It’s a theory, at least.
But if Stefan is anything, he is adaptable. He has adjusted to this new life, new flesh. A part of him now feels entirely divorced from that carnal Stefan of the past, he of curly dark hair and thrice-weekly health club workouts. He now knows the harsh ascetic rapture of the penniless holy man, the vow of silence and the wisdom that comes from motionless meditation. There is much to understand once the barrier of self is broken.
It’s not so bad, really.
Except those infrequent nights when he hears Connie readying to go out, smells the perfume, the hair mist, the very scent and essence of her need. Stefan, lying awake for hours, recognizing the key in the latch when she returns, and he swears even the lock sounds different when she’s not alone.
For hours, he listens. For hours, he prays.
These nights he hates most of all. Because he knows she’ll be coming to him in the morning.
To finish the task of satisfaction.
Connie fears, above all, the same solitude he so desperately craves.
iv. contagion
She has always hated autumn. Autumn brings sad change and a cyclical melancholy. Rains and chills, the false beauty of trees that will soon enough show their true colors, stark dead etchings against gray skies. Connie has always taken for granted that she will die in the fall.
Never has she considered it might be her time to nurture within the bud of new life.
Of sorts.
The cessation of her period four months ago did not seem undo cause for alarm. This has happened before, unintentional metabolic tampering through extremes of diet and exercise and stress, and the menstrual flow is dammed. That she never missed a single morning pill was more weight to her belief that this was simply another one of those episodes.
But tests, run and rerun, don’t lie. Nor does the blatant concern on the face of her gynecologist. But what, she’s not entitled to a mistake now and then? She’s human.
Unlike the thing in her womb.
He’s told her that it’s rare, but it does happen. It’s a documented alternative to successful pregnancy; one of the many biological missteps that can occur early on, through no fault of her own; one that did not happen to spontaneously abort. Just one of those things.
If he only knew.
Her gynecologist, of course, has never seen the father.
“Embryos can ossify, Connie. But it’s nothing you could have foreseen, nothing you could’ve prevented.”
Sure. Tell me some more fairy tales.
Connie drives home on autopilot, hands and feet independent of thought. Having left the doctor’s office before he can get her to agree to another appointment, chip this calcified lump of child off her uterine wall. No, she’s told him, she’ll have to think about this, the doctor dogging her footsteps, insisting it will not, repeat, will not take care of itself —
She would’ve liked nothing better in that moment than to have whirled upon him, let him know just what a shitty deal their six-year patient/doctor association has been from her point of view. Connie’s own thousand points of spite: you think you know me, think you know how i feel? i can hang my feet in those stirrups and open wide and you can poke and probe and name every part in English and in Latin, but you have no idea what it’s like inside my heart and my soul, no idea how hard it can be for some people to fall in love, so don’t you try to heal what you don’t even understand.
Of course she did not say this aloud. Public spectacle is public embarrassment. And later demands p
ublic apology.
Connie arrives home with the past twenty minutes of transit in blackout, forgotten or never registered. Her quiet street of century-old oaks and two-story homes, dignified, shutters and curtains aplenty behind which to hide their iniquities and secret shames. She keys off the ignition and sits behind the wheel in her driveway. Hands gently resting across her stomach.
Look into the rear view mirror and what does she see? The dark mascara runoff, so-blue eyes filled to overflowing with too many fears, too many questions, and a lower lip left ragged by nervous teeth. Hello young mother.
Hasn’t she known all along that something has been growing inside her? Something white and chalky and hard, this child of her own isolation, its skull a smooth dome of rock. She knows it never had a chance — it was never right and proper to begin with, and as such, what about its gestation period? How long will it take to come to term? And when its moment of delivery arrives, will it be like trying to squeeze a boulder from her body, and tear her in half with a rush of blood and chalky limewater flood?
There are no self-help books for this, are there?
Connie steps from the car with a deep breath, and at last prepares to live life according to her deepest instincts.
v. anastomosis
Standing in the doorway of Stefan’s room, she now sees him with new perception. Connie sags against the doorjamb, suddenly tired, exhaustion having found a home in her muscles, her bones, her soul. The climb up the stairs was an expedition.
She slips her suede jacket from her shoulders, lets it fall to the floor.
“I quit bleeding four months ago,” she tells him.
Stefan, of course, does not answer. Cannot even turn his head to acknowledge her in the doorway. Flatbacking, eyes toward the ceiling, without so much as the motion of perceptible breath.
“But that’s okay. I’ve bled enough.”
Silence. Closed up for late autumn, the house is as quiet as a mausoleum. An occasional creak, the settling of the house’s wood and iron bones. The occasional rattle of wind at windows. She has always felt safe here. There’s so much she makes sure remains outside.
Although, any more, she has to wonder if she belongs out there too. No longer to taint this house, its ageless serenity.
And, loudly, eternally, Connie screams.
At neither herself nor Stefan, yet at the same time both, at her home, at the world. She screams in potent raw distillation of feeling, without words. There are no words for this, the dawning revelation that betrayal has been in the works for a long, long time, and she has never chosen to believe it. Until now. “There’s someone for everyone,” her mother used to tell her, and she believed. And it’s true, but the truth is too spiteful to accept.
Someone for everyone — there he is. They deserve each other.
She blames Stefan for everything and nothing, knowing that half the fault falls squarely on her own head. Had she never let him get so close, he could never have infected her soul with whatever virulence had taken root in his own. Had she not continued to drape her own tender skin across his hard shell, he would never have violated the sanctity of her womb. It had never been made to grow anything like this.
Her scream is forever, it permeates walls and floor and ceiling, and after it drains her of breath, Connie steps into the room. With small, quavering grunts, she spins Stefan’s rigid form a quarter-turn on the bed, so that his legs hang over the floor. Then she maneuvers him up, onto his feet, and while his eyes are the only part of him that can move, can respond, she will pay them no heed. With her hands steadying his shoulders, he is balanced upright.
She moves him toward the door, into the hallway, rocking his weight to one foot, then the other, back and forth. Like walking a heavy piece of furniture into place.
Until she stands him before the flight of stairs.
Stefan is making a soft, high whine inside himself, and she can hear the crisp whistle of breath through brittle airways. Her hand firm on one shoulder as she bites her lip and moves around to gaze, at last, into his impassive face.
Only his eyes are vast and feverish, glazed with the terrible knowledge of expectation and damnation. Down his cheeks trickle white tears. Miracle of miracles, a statue that weeps.
“No,” she thinks she hears Stefan say, with ghastly effort.
“I can’t be afraid to be alone,” Connie says. “Be free.”
Then, lightly, she shoves him. His own weight and imbalance do the rest. He falls, striking down upon the staircase with a thunderous crash.
And Stefan shatters.
Connie stands with tears of her own, watching it happen, fragments large and small flying apart to rattle down the wooden stairs. They litter the staircase from middle to bottom, pieces of Stefan … bone china, and inner tissues like red sponge. Not nearly as much blood as she would have thought.
Call the king’s horses, call the king’s men. A fairy tale ending for her at last.
Too many dreams unfulfilled, too many expectations that were evidently too great, realized only too late. Love and family and security, so sorry, these belong to others, not for you, never for you. Maybe next life, ha ha. As she gazes down upon the fractured spill that was Stefan, she understands: This is the sum total of her life. Wouldn’t her mother be proud now, if she could see?
Footfalls soft upon the stairs, Connie makes her way down to sort among the debris. Stefan’s head is at the bottom, halfway across the dining room floor, and it is whole, but not much else is this recognizable. She finds what may be a piece of his arm, split lengthwise like a greenstick fracture, radius or ulna tipped by a point to reckon with. Long sharp shard.
Connie holds it in both hands, and it’s rough in some places, smooth in others. Moist. Moving to stand before a hallway mirror, she watches herself cradle it close. Mother … stone child … shattered father? What poignant destiny that they should all end up in the same body.
She strips, tossing clothes to the floor, until she beholds herself naked in the mirror. Her bony frame, small ribs in bas-relief, can anorexia be far away? Her hair seems the biggest part of her.
Connie takes the stake of Stefan’s arm and, like a young Shakespearian lover wronged by family and fate, presses its point to the skin just beneath her breastbone. Angles it upward. Wraps both hands around the thicker base…
And shoves as hard as she can.
There is pain, the rending of skin, and she feels the last of Stefan slide in, an inch, no more, and then it stops. Feeling deep within a terrible scrape, the meeting of irresistible force with immovable object.
Hands falling in defeat to her side. Bone shard slipping free to fall and shatter on the hardwood floor. The spill of tears that descends to anoint her breasts, her new wound, bleeding both red and white.
Dear God, it’s worse than she thought.
But there is no piercing the calcified heart.
Extinctions In Paradise
They kill children here. Let me make that clear from the beginning.
In spite of that, I have for two years found this city an agreeable place to live. Still not a lot of friends, but those I have are genuine, and diverse. Their company cheers me on those days when I still miss my family so much the pain claws at me like a wounded jaguar.
It was Pedro Javier that I met first, or that’s the way I remember it, a little man with silvery hair above a brown old face wrinkled in the kindliest of ways. His shoulders are rounded with a perpetual stoop from all the years he’s spent hunkering down behind a camera so antiquated that no one’s interested in stealing it. Every day, for more than forty years, he’s come down to set up his camera in the Plaza del Oro, and take pictures of tourists and students, lovers and anybody else who’ll spare him a few minutes, against a backdrop of a fountain cascading with water that looks purer than it really is. Pedro hasn’t missed a day in four decades … except for some week many years ago, a week I’ve never been able to get him to talk about. I suspect it happened when the army was in charge,
when the generales often rounded up anyone they thought might not fit their agenda. I suspect this. But I never press him on it. He’s a happy man, and God knows I realize how easily bad memories can tear your day to tatters.
“Roberto,” he greeted me one afternoon, same as he always did. I think he believed that adding the o might make me feel more like a native down here. It didn’t, but I never told him. I handed him a coffee I’d bought from a vendor across the Plaza. He always appreciates that. “Thank you, thank you.”
“What says the sun today?” I asked. As a photographer, he is deeply into the philosophy of light and shadow and the shadings between the two, their subtle nuances and how they speak of the world.
“El sol, today he is saddened by the change of seasons, and how he gets not so much time in the sky. He is weary, but he still fights. See the golden glow of the shadows today? Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Pedro was right, but this was something I’d not have noticed until someone with his eye pointed it out to me. The Plaza, full of those strolling along, taking time out to enjoy the day, seemed suffused with a warmly glowing luster, and whatever teardrops the day called its own pooled only in the thickest shadows.
I wasn’t the only norteamericano in the Plaza, but few would mistake me for a tourist. I’d long ago lost that scrubbed, pressed sheen, had effortlessly cultivated the rumpled, lived-in look of one who has forsaken a prior lifetime, to live the rest of it in a land that made the smallest daily acts seem new again.
We talked for a while, then when he’d finished his coffee, Pedro flicked a spindly finger at me. “Okay, over by the fountain with you. Today we will make a new picture. That time has come again.”
“Already?” But I was walking to where he wanted me.
“One each month, you know my plans for you, hee hee.” Pedro sank into his stance behind the camera, making adjustments on the boxy contraption, compensating for changes in the light that only he could see. “Someday you will thank me, you will be able to look at them in sequence and see how well you have aged. Or … how much you have healed. Now smile, lazy gringo.”
