The End of Alice

by A M Homes

  He fixes a makeshift curtain over the door.

  I am on the bed.

  “There, like that,” he says, although I haven’t moved.

  Upon my arrest, I immediately began to prepare myself for events such as these. In the holding cell, I forced myself to think of the interior, of penetration, of what it feels like to pierce the cavity, to plunge, to plow, to be held at the center of things. Awaiting legal counsel, awaiting the announcement of the arrival of my fate, I continued to prepare myself, again and again, never sure what would happen, when it would happen, but convinced that it would happen, that it was an inevitable element, a piece of my punishment. Fucked. My fingers toyed with the rough edge of my asshole; there was none of the slippery warmth, the buried angle, of a girl’s hole—only a puckered drop of dung hung unceremoniously fixed behind my balls. I tried to push the finger through because it seemed one should practice, one should be prepared. I met with full resistance, but continued. The body rejected and simultaneously wrapped itself around the first inch of my finger; the nail scratched and I withdrew the digit and brought it to my mouth. The taste was hearty, rich, surprising because it was so unlike the flavor of my jailers’ food. One would have half-expected the strange bleached-white absence of flavor, texture, essence. I sucked the finger to soften the nail, then bit it down to the pink, wet it good, and reinserted it, this time getting to the knuckle.

  I thought of my girls and their unsuspecting parts. Surprised, temporarily taken aback, horrified by my inspection, but always beneath the gentility of my touch, the firmness of my hand, my tongue, my member, they surrendered. Slowly, they allowed themselves to be laid out, spread. They responded with detachment, separated from themselves. It took months of careful cultivation to get them to engage in the repartee—to have them voluntarily hook their legs around my back, to have them not pull away as I slide my hand up and under their little dresses, curling my fingers into their underpants. There was one who was reaching for me within two weeks. She would lower my zipper as we sped along the interstates, putting her mouth over me—little snake charmer. I soon left her by the side of the road with the sick and frightening feeling of having created a monster, worried for the life of the unsuspecting trucker who would likely pick up the hitchhiking and precocious nymph. Cunnus Diaboli.

  I am on the bed, my knees bent into a desk, a book against my thighs. Clayton takes the book and thoughtfully closes it so that the dust jacket marks my place. He puts a hand on each of my knees and leans forward as though he is about to perform a circus trick, a balancing act, flying on my knees like the airplane rides we all give each other as children. But as I am at that age where the distinct and hard pressing of interest, impatience, and passion comes across more as pain than excitement, I pull away. He leans and tries to kiss me. I turn my head. The kiss lands on the side of my cheek near my ear. He tries again. It is against the rules (our rules) that Clayton kiss me, he knows that, but because he is in such a rare and good mood, I don’t say anything—a good mood is such a fragile thing. Already by turning away, I’m sure I’ve challenged it, but I couldn’t not turn, it would have been too out of the ordinary, it would give away my own sad state of mind.

  Clayton is kissing my face and neck, at first tenderly and then harder and wetter; all of it causes me to draw back, to pull up inside myself. If it were a single kiss, I think I might be able to enjoy it, but these, too furious and frequent, are filled with a strange and hurried panic. He is kissing and kissing me, lapping at me and now kicking my knees out from under so that he is firmly on top of me. I feel his length, his weight. I feel his care in trying not to crush me and take it to be a gesture toward my years— my soon-to-be infirmity. I raise my hips off the bed as he unzips my trousers and pulls them down. He does the same with my underwear, everything to the ankles, and then reaches back and takes my shoes off. They drop to the floor, two heavy clunks; the echo I’m sure is an announcement up and down the hall that I’m being had again. Clayton pulls his T-shirt off, the muscles ripple. His left nipple is pierced and through it he wears his leaf from the Ivy Club, his Princeton dining affiliation. He stands, takes his pants down, and lays them out carefully on the floor. This is a man who can’t be read, can’t be understood, a man who if he were so inclined could kill me in a split second—a feature that undoubtedly adds an unarticulated element of excitement. He is three-quarters hard. Even though I thought I wouldn’t—could never—I do enjoy looking at him. It is like seeing one’s self, like seeing one’s self with a certain sense of remove. He takes a tube of (bartered) jelly from his pocket and spreads my legs; his hands on the insides of my thighs, prying, pulling until my legs unlock—this is something still difficult to do voluntarily, without help, encouragement. He squirts jelly onto his fingers, rubs it for a moment to warm it, then slides one or two digits into my ass, greasing the path; sometimes his other hand is on my belly when he does this, sometimes he is pulling on my cock, but today he jiggles my balls and laughs. I see him getting harder. This is not exactly punishment; it is not torture. It is an experience I deserve (need). I am the woman. I lie here and he fits himself into me. In order to survive I must relax. I feel him inside. I feel him against my entrails and am, as always, most impressed. I think of the ones I have been in— the flash of terror as the nine-by-two-inch wonder wand is about to be crammed into the half-inch hole. I breathe.

  I feel Clayton’s weight and understand both the comfort and fear of suffocation. I feel my cavity fill with his fluid and know that for hours it will slowly run out of me; it will mix with shit and leak out a milky brown, soft suede. I will feel him in me longer than he will feel me around him. He will zip up and walk off and I will still lie here split in half. I will have to roll over and take matters in hand. I am the pussy and I take it to heart. I know what it means to be the wife and am so glad to have this horrible moment, this degradation, under my skin.

  I check myself in the mirror. I am old, so old. My youth, my beauty, has been lost to this place, that is what they’ve stripped me of—my finest years. As a young man there was a notable fineness to my features: clear eyes, a thick head of hair, even my chest tresses evoked a certain mystery— there was a mystical spin, a magical weave, to the pattern of that thatch. It swirled like a hypnotist’s spiral, round and round. And look at me now. The skin that every summer broke out in freckles is awash in liver spots. The mat on my chest has gone silver, spare, wiry like steel wool. It is the wiring of death, my own wiring breaking through the skin. My body is softening, spilling out over the edges. Everything attractive has disappeared. The fine cap of hair that crowned my pate has receded into thin gray strands— I grow them long and carefully sweep them back. When my teeth go into a jar, that will be all, the end. I’ll file the damn dentures sharp and bite my own jugular.

  On turning fifty in this criminal hothouse, as the institution’s gift the cook baked a dozen of my beloved cuppy cakes—the finished product was leaden like Civil War ammunition, coated with a heavy brown frosting that had less flavor, less firmness, than shit.

  “Thanks,” I said to the cook. “Thanks very much.”

  “Happy birthday,” he said.

  “And many more,” the sergeant added.

  SIX

  He called! My mother answered the phone!

  Obviously she hasn’t received my latest missive yet, the postcard that explains the proper time and place for exclamation marks!

  His voice cracked! Tennis date, tomorrow! Can’t wait!

  Tennis. They meet at the courts. He arrives early and stands by the fence, swinging his racket, the Wilson wonder wand, back and forth through the grass as though it were not the accoutrement of activity, the measure of athletic prowess, not a sporty bit of equipment but that most modern whip, the freshest fetishistic toy for playing out the empire’s old relation between homeowner and his lawn, a weed whacker.

  She arrives, says not hello, but are you ready?

  Hello is a word that comes with a blush, a flus
h of shyness. It is not absolutely necessary, and so it is dropped. She is dying—half-dying—not having known until now that he would be so willing, so easy.

  They step onto the courts. Quickly, she goes to the far side. Her T-shirt catches the breeze, fills with air, billows like a sail—catches my eye, catches my breath, my full attention. With only the slightest effort, she could fly.

  For his part, the boy wears the vestments of virgin, white tennis shorts and a proper white T-shirt. The shorts are too snug, the shirt too large—his father’s. His effort displays his desire to please, the seriousness with which he has taken the job, his vulnerability.

  She smiles.

  With the exception of two women in tennis togs at the far end, the courts are empty. The women are volleying, taking great care to avoid the baby carriage parked midcourt by the sidelines under the shade of a maple tree.

  To catch his attention, she holds a bright green ball up in the air.

  He crouches, readies—the crotch of his shorts bunches up. She loves playing tennis. He hits, she hits, they hit. She plays him well, but rarely allows herself to win. She compliments him, but not too much, not too often. She does not make him work excessively hard nor does she make the game too easy. There is time for that. The ultimate move, the great reach out and touch someone, must come from him. He must initiate otherwise he will be too shy, he will feel put upon. She will wait until it is his idea, until it is something he wants, knows he must have. Until then, they will just play.

  The ball escapes and flies into the far court, into the ladies’ game. He indicates that he will retrieve it. She looks at the two women, looks at her boy looking at them. They are in short white dresses with frilly white panties, like diaper covers, over their underwear. When the boy comes toward them, one of the women bends to pick up his ball. Bent, the full fluff of her upper, inner thigh is flashed in his face along with the sparsely haired turkey skin that surrounds the extended pubic region. That the hole is hidden, swathed, only makes things worse—that it, too, isn’t flashed in his face heightens the suspense, hints that something more special is buried there, makes everything seem better than it is, than it ever could be. The baby begins to cry and the woman leaves him for the carriage. The boy returns with a rise in his shorts. From across the court, she sees the distension, the bulge, bloom. The fat bitch has given him a hard-on. Will mysteries never cease?

  I am Casper here, the friendly, fondling ghost. I walk out onto the court, stand behind her, and take her arm as she pulls it back to swing. I touch her. There is the high hum, the holy harmonia, as if to touch, to tickle, were the highest, most sophisticated of all tantric exercises.

  Even though she is well past age, even though not quite so fine as something brand spanking new, I am stirred by the feel of her flesh. Is it because I have been deprived, have gone without for so long? Is it possible that as my age advances, the acceptable limit of their years also rises? The idea that if I live to be eighty, I will find forty-year-olds attractive, will think them babes, is a thought that should I ever think it, I hope will be seconded by the impulse toward suicide. That I might find charm and sustenance in fully flowered—past ripe, nearly sour— endowments, that a grown woman’s warm welcome of my intrusions, protrusions, my wicked weapon, might someday appeal, is far, far beyond what I am willing to allow my imagination to conjure. They say women peak sexually much later than men—I have witnessed though not sampled such; a willingness to experiment, wife-swapping, doing it with the dog, with the bisexual daughter of the couple next door, etc., and frankly it scares me half to death.

  Her. It is urgent that I take her in my hold and encourage her to step into the ball, pivot, rotate fully, to arch her back when serving. I need to stand pressed against her, spread her legs, then ask her to check her balance, her position. I want to slightly humiliate her in her game, to rub myself against her, and through this loving, gentle guidance separate her from him, that she should play with only me. I want to lick her lips, to spit in her eyes, and spray her with what is mine.

  Can’t wait!

  And when their hour is past, when their hearts are pounding and sebaceous glands pouring sweat, she makes the gesture of checking her watch, an unspoken but undeniable signal that their time is up. He comes to the net. “Great,” she says, blotting her nose. She has a propensity to sweat, to produce water bubbles like blisters that cover her shnoz—good pores, effective but not too large. “Yeah, great,” he says, echoing her sound, imitating her blotting with a wider gesture, wiping his whole face with the shoulder of his father’s shirt. She reaches into her pocket, pulls out a ten, and he starts to hesitate, to actually back away, to pretend that he’s not going to take her money. But she holds steady; the bill remains, extended, curled in the air between them. He takes the money. “We’re pretty well matched,” he says.

  She nods. “Again tomorrow?”

  “Sure, why not,” he says, waving the ten through the air before he pockets it and walks off.

  I am here, taking it up the ass, and she is out there, roaming the hills, the valleys, of Scarsdale, Larchmont, Mamaroneck, in a post-acquisition high, a moment of tranquillity, of pseudo-satiation. And in that flash of release, she has relaxed her vigilance. Upon returning home, balancing her electrolytes with Lay’s potato chips and Orange Crush, she allows herself to be cajoled into Mummy’s car and led to the shopping mall. She is there now, trying on tennis togs, having her racket restrung, shopping for the supplies her fantasy demands.

  That she is so clever, manipulative, as to have both him and me engaged is something that were I younger, I would feel the need to take to heart. Taking matters in hand, I would remind her that though I am caged, I remain viable—a man. I would dilly myself, shoot onto the page, leave it to dry, then fold the crusty wad into even sections and slip it into an envelope, mailing it to her for reconstitution. In the comfort and privacy of her room, she would collect in her mouth a fine blue loogie, a big ball of spit, and drop it down onto my page and, then with either the tip of a pencil or her pinky finger, would swirl the two together. And then as if applying a plaster, a medical paste, she would collect the material on her finger or perhaps raise the page itself, pull down her panties, and rub it against herself. Like that, we would be together. And I, in my cell, connected to my fluid as though it were my faith, would shudder and ripple as she worked the paper back and forth until our wetnesses mixed and the thin blue lines that rule were all worn off, until the paper itself was just a sliver, thin as a pathologist’s cross section. Finished, she would drop this page onto the floor by the bed, and later in the afternoon she’d slide it—r-still not quite dry—back into the envelope, tape the seal, and with a red pen mark it Return to Sender.

  “Been opened,” the postman would say, squeezing the damp, the lumpy. “Can’t return to sender if it’s been opened.”

  “Didn’t open it,” she’d say. “Came that way.”

  And because she is sweet, and because she is young, and because she looks like his sister the Carmelite nun, he’d accept her letter and drop it in the great box bound for upstate.

  SEVEN

  Prison. Bells. Commotion in the corridor. I wake from my dream, rise from the fugue, and pull to the surface.

  “He bit me. Broke the skin. Sick fuck took a chunk out of my arm.” A guard is crying.

  The Special Tactics team has Appfelbaum, the abortionist with the habit of snacking on the fetuses he scraped, cornered, pushed back into his cell.

  “Broke the skin. Sick fuck. Does he have rabies? Tetanus? Something worse? Do I have to get tested? Do I have to get shots? I hate this place, fucking zoo.”

  Appfelbaum’s door slams closed; the click of the lock falling into place echoes down the hall.

  “I ain’t gonna lie,” Frazier says. “No point pretending. Just is the way it is. No surprise.”

  How does the watched pot boil? How to let it steam, simmer, froth, without them knowing? If it spills out and over, they will put it down
fast and furiously. I know. I have been shackled to this Cot and left to twist and turn for days and nights, the shackles so biting my flesh that I required stitches. I have been left alone and awry in a dark bed, a wretched wet stink. I have been swaddled, stuffed into a straitjacket pulled so tight that my ribs broke and my breath slipped away from me in a thin, high whistle. Trapped and tied and left for days, involuntarily paralyzed. I’m too old for that now—not too old for them to do it, they have no limit, but too old to have it done. I haven’t the stamina. In my blood, in my muscle and veins, there still lurks the impulse, the urge, the coursing poison of rage. But in my effort to contain it, to spare myself the humiliation of an explosion—imagine how much more forceful an explosion is in a confined space, how much more hazardous—I turn this poison on myself. I maim myself in order to stay the line, in order to go unnoticed. I pain myself so deeply, so thoroughly, that when I am through, I have no ability, no interest, in paining others— or so one might think. But if you are smart, you must know that as I hurt myself—and I feel I am hurting myself for you—as I assume the burden and beat you to the punch, I loathe you all the more. It is too much to keep inside. If I were able to relieve myself, to simply piss it out, it would hiss and foam a thick black and inky line. The body is not the proper capsule for such poison. And my contempt for what I am made to do to myself mounts, so, when you are not looking, and be sure that at some point you will blink, your mind will wander, I’ll slip this blade that I carry stealthily, silently into your heart.

  My poison is my vigilance.

  The bells ring. Order is restored. Everything is as it was.