by Salar Abdoh
He’s right. Without makeup I look like your everyday Mother Mary. Makeup would have left traces behind. Lipstick on the bedsheets, eyeliner flaking off on the pillow. Wouldn’t do. I pour a second shot. “I said get in the bedroom.”
He follows me, whiskey in hand. He takes his T-shirt off. Then shoes and socks. The shoes are dusty. He hasn’t gotten around to cleaning them. Another dead giveaway he’s not from Tehran. Now it’s time to take off his pants. He plays with his belt and hesitates. You’d think it was his very first time.
“Hurry up!”
Once he pulls his pants down I finally understand his hesitation. He’s got a massive hard-on under those shorts. He jumps under the covers thinking I didn’t see it. Why is it men believe it’s not cool to show their card so early? I suppose they just don’t want you to know how eager they are when they’ve been playing it so cool.
“You don’t want to take your shorts off?”
He’s like a little bitch of a coquette. Slowly he pulls off the shorts and lays them on the pillow next to him. Without the shorts, his hard-on is like a tent under the covers. He reaches for it and tries taming it. No good. The thing sticks right back up. I hand him the rest of the bottle of whiskey and suck on my own bottle of gin. Then I sit on the ottoman across from the bed and cross my legs for him. He eye-fucks me big time and I let him.
“How long you been on the job?” I ask.
“For a while,” he says, and guzzles the bottle like he’s never drank whiskey before.
“You make good money?”
“Good enough.”
Why shouldn’t it be good enough? Back in his hometown the most he could hope for was probably a laborer’s job or waiting tables, or—if he was lucky—a gig as a chauffeur. And on weekends he’d find some cheap cunt to service him and his friends. Now he’s here. All he has to do is keep down a Viagra pill and some Tramadol and stand on a street corner. He should be thanking his lucky stars.
“Come sit on it,” he says with a heavy look. The whiskey he’s been downing like a champ is already getting to him.
“I’ll come. Let me drink a little more.”
“You’ve drank plenty, love. Come sit on it, won’t you?”
I turn into a little girl for him. “Close your eyes. I don’t like being watched when I’m coming.”
“Baby, just sit on the General and I promise I’ll keep my eyes shut.”
I take several of Naser’s neckties out of the drawer and go sit next to him on the bed. “Now close your eyes. Promise you won’t cheat.”
He stuffs his face in my cleavage.
I hand him one of the ties. “First your eyes.”
He sighs. “Your skin is like cream, love.” Reluctantly, he takes the tie from me and draws a tight knot to cover his eyes. Then he inches a hand between my thighs.
“You won’t mind if I tie up your hands and legs too?”
He stops. The hand withdraws. He pushes the tie from one eye and gives me a frown. “You’ve been watching too many movies.”
“Not really. I just want you to be all mine tonight. No one else’s.”
I want to laugh at my own words. They are so ridiculous. But Yadollah doesn’t care. He pushes the tie back over the eye and slides down on the bed some more.
“Do what you will to me, love. Just fuck me soon. You want me your prisoner, I’m your man. You want me in chains, you got me. Just do me soon, I’m dying.”
He has the hard-on of a true champion. I knew he was a novice at this. I take the rest of Naser’s ties and bind the kid’s hands and feet to the corners of the bed. Then I fetch the syringe and the massive dose of ketamine I’ve prepared for him.
“Love, what are you doing? Sit on it already, I’m begging you.”
“Wait a bit. I want you good and horny.”
“Horny? I’m dying here.”
I pull the cover off of him. His dick stands at attention. Whoever circumcised this boy did a fine job of it. That’s a luscious prick he has. I take another tie and slide it up and down his dick, massaging it. He’s in seventh heaven, biting his lips and squirming with pleasure. I want him in his best moment; I want to freeze his absolutely finest expression when I do to him what I have to do. I keep the syringe in one hand and take the tie off his eyes. He looks like some Jesus close to bliss. He sucks in the air between his teeth and is about to call me “love” again when I push him over to his side, hold him down, and stick the needle right into his ass cheek. He wiggles and shakes to free himself but it’s already too late. All I need is a few minutes. He doesn’t yell or scream, but tries hard at first to reach the knots tied to his hands and feet. The strangeness of what has happened has muted him. It’s as if instinctively he knows that to have a fighting chance he needs to preserve his energy. But it’s no use. It’s like watching a man slowly go underwater. For a minute he gives it everything he has, at one point shaking the bed so violently that I fear it might come apart. But the animal tranquilizer is working its inevitable magic. The muscles gradually give up on him. And the terror in his eyes becomes complete.
It’s too bad. I wanted his eyes to look like he wanted to eat me. He is quite still now. Except his tower of power is still standing as erect as before. Maybe a few more seconds and that thing too will go limp.
I take the packet of cigarettes and his kitschy lighter and sit facing him drinking my gin right out of the bottle. My frozen man. My own marble Jesus.
“Forgive me, this is not personal.”
I suspect he can hear everything. His gaze is still on me, fear and longing locked in those eyes in some eternal clash of desire and horror.
“Look, none of this is your fault. Maybe you’re wondering why you’re frozen like that. I could give you a lecture about it, but I’m long past my nursing school days and can’t remember half the whys and hows. I just know what works. In any case, I owe you an explanation, don’t I? It’s only fair, right? Well, it’s like this: What you are experiencing is part of a family reckoning. It’s about a husband-and-wife fight. And you just happened to get trapped in the middle of it. I apologize.”
I feel the coolness of the bottle of gin between my legs travel the length of my skin. His thingamajig is still standing at attention. I had no idea that even with the drug it could stay up like that. Maybe he downed a whole bunch of Viagra pills beforehand. Now my boy has an eternal hard-on. A marble Jesus with a hard-on that won’t quit.
“Don’t you just love what I’ve made of you?”
No answer, of course.
“I don’t know when I cooked up this plan. It’s not like you wake up one day and decide to do it. These things take time. They need to percolate through your head a little bit. Then one night . . . I don’t know, I couldn’t fall asleep, and then it all came to me. Just like one of those murder mysteries. I worked out the whole plan in my head.”
I press hard on the gin bottle between my wet legs.
“I have to give it to you, you’ve got one of the best rods I’ve ever seen. You could have been a fabulous gigolo once you stopped being a dumb peasant. You wouldn’t have had to work the street anymore. All you’d need is one of these horny rich bitches to discover you. She’d give your number to all her friends and you’d be home free. Your phone would ring off the hook. You’d be the king. But boy do I want to watch Naser’s face when he sees your dick. You know his own dick is more like spaghetti. When he sticks it in I feel like there’s a little lizard paying a visit. It tickles, feels slippery, half dead. But I still have to make all the sounds, you know. He loves my sounds, otherwise he can’t even stay hard. As for me, I’m happy to do it once a week. Once a week you open your legs, make a little aah-ooh noise, and the slippery little lizard goes his merry way.
I take another big swig of the gin. I’m feeling it.
“I like the fact you shaved off your pubes. Easier to keep things clean that way. But you have to tell your friends this isn’t quite the fashion nowadays; the fashion is to let it grow. Like that faggot b
oyfriend of mine. I don’t know why I’m thinking of him tonight. Maybe it’s because of the shape of your dick. Reminds me of his a little bit. Except his was smaller. That faggot! I met him at the university before I became Naser’s wife. Those were the days!”
I drink some more.
“What say you we go a round together? I mean, why waste that lovely specimen of manhood that refuses to go down for the count?”
I take out a condom and pull it over his hard-as-rock prick. I’m so wet that as soon as I sit on him the thing pumps right up to my navel. I ride him hard, still with Naser’s boots on, and before I know it I’ve come three or four times. Four times. Let’s be precise here. My body feels almost numb and I’m getting sleepy. But tonight’s not a night for sleeping; there’s a whole lot of work ahead.
I get off of him, grab a garbage bag, and throw away the condom and the syringe. Then I clean his skyscraper and all around the area. Naser won’t be here until much later, but I have to finish the job as quickly as possible.
“I know you’re a beginner, but you did well. You shouldn’t put so much gel on that lovely hair of yours, though. I say let it grow. I’m a sucker for men with long hair. That faggot boyfriend I told you about, he had really long hair. He’d always wrap and hide it under a hat at the university so they wouldn’t give him a hard time about it. But when we went to parties together, boy, everyone and their mother wanted to fuck him. Truth is, this whole business started with that piece-of-shit boyfriend. One day he comes to me and says so and so would like to take you out for a date. I look at my faggot boyfriend like the faggot he is and you know what he says? He says, The guy’s head of surgery on campus. He’s just an old fart. He’ll take you for a nice steak uptown and at most maybe you guys will rub legs under the table. What’s the harm in that? Can you imagine? I wasn’t even the guy’s student, but apparently he’d seen me through the glass when we were watching him perform an autopsy and he’d gone and asked the faggot about me. I’ve always wondered what that shit got out of the whole deal.”
I take a last shot of my gin and throw that in the garbage bag too and light a cigarette.
“So that’s how it all began, with a black Porsche waiting for me one afternoon by the girls’ dorms. Naser was always a Porsche man. And seven, eight years ago it wasn’t like today; you didn’t see a Porsche every day in this town. I smelled the cool scent of expensive cologne when I got in his car. His fingernails were perfectly manicured and he wore a tasteful purple scarf. That night in the restaurant he didn’t mince words—he asked if I’d marry him; he needed a trophy bitch and a couple of kids. And I said yes. I’m thinking if that faggot boyfriend of mine had had any idea, he would have never pimped me to the doctor. And there you have it. That’s the whole story. By the way, let’s see what your real name is, kid. Let’s take a look at your wallet.”
His pants are on the floor. A worn black wallet in the back pocket. Inside it some torn-up money and those folded telephone numbers he just collected on Pasdaran. I put the pieces of paper with the numbers on them in my mouth and swallow them. It’s an act of exaggeration and I don’t mind doing it. His cheap cell phone shows three missed calls. I check the text messages too. Nothing incriminating me. And finally his national ID card: Hamid Abasqorbani, 22 years old.
“Boy, you’re still just a little chick. But it’s good this way. By the time you were thirty you could have had yourself a nice little nest egg for a wife and kids. You’d just have to be careful not to fuck it up and spend too much as you went along. Otherwise you’d have woken up one day and you’d be forty without a pot to piss in.”
His balls look odd, one side up and the other down. I imagine his eyes are pleading with me. And so what if they are? I bring my lips close to his ear and whisper, “Naser has serious OCD, you know. He thinks his house has to be sterilized like a surgery room. He attacks the place with every kind of cleaning agent you can imagine. He puts his gloves on and goes to work. And when the kids shower, he stands there like a prison guard making sure they scrub themselves to death. Now, you might look at this stinking place and think I’m just feeding you a bunch of crazy lies. But I’m not. The doctor will come home ready to make the house spotless. But today he’ll have a lot more work to do than usual.”
I feel for his heartbeat. There’s still a trace of something there. I don’t want to start until I’m sure he is finished. So I light another cigarette and start blowing smoke rings in his face.
“You like how I make these rings? I learned that at the college dorm. Imagine a girl like me coming from the backwoods is suddenly thrown in this city and has to learn everything from the beginning, and all the while those fucking girls from Tehran with their nose jobs and painted hair are making your life hell. Yes, that’s how it was at the start. But then you learn to wax that facial hair and do something about your eyebrows and throw away the damn chador at last. You feel like you’ve been tossed in the middle of some Disneyland and have to negotiate everything for the very first time. Slowly you come around. You fix your hair, tattoo your eyebrows, get the nose job, and learn to down arrack like the best of them. It’s a lot easier, of course, if you manage to find the right boyfriend. A guy can show you the ropes a lot faster. Me? I had pocketed half the boys in our college by my second year here. I loved strutting around campus after my latest catch while those Tehran bitches gave me the evil eye for stealing their boyfriends. A girl from the village fucking with them like that. They deserved what they had coming to them. I know that you, of all people, can appreciate what I’m talking about.”
His hard-on is no more. I get up and feel for his heartbeat a second time.
“Why doesn’t your damn heart stop beating? I wanted to make it easy on you, but it’s getting late. Hurry up already.”
I fetch the gin bottle out of the garbage bag again and take a shot. One last cigarette too. My watch says two fifteen a.m.
“You and me, we have a little bit more time left. But not much. I’m worried about my children, see? The older one is already six years old and he’s sharp. He said, Maman, why do I need to drink cough syrup tonight? I’m not sick. As for my parents, they’re out cold. Ever since they moved to Tehran they have to take sleeping pills. They can’t get used to the sound of traffic. Poor things! Alongside my brother, they all came as part of the package. Naser had already done his homework on me. He knew my brother hadn’t gotten into college and my parents were just simple people living far from Tehran. He made an offer I couldn’t refuse: he’d buy a nice big place for my parents right here in Tehran and he’d take care of my brother too. But you know, after sitting in that Porsche I’d have married him without the package. I’d have married him even if it was Godzilla behind the wheel. He said all he wanted in return was to be left alone on weekends. The weekend nights belonged to him and his friends. Poker night, he said. Poker night my ass. I started to get the picture after a while. Poker is just the excuse. Every weekend, whoever loses the most has to take care of business and pay for the delivery. What’s the delivery? you ask. Mostly young boys, pretty as peaches. That’s their taste. It sickened me. I brought in somebody to install a microphone. But it didn’t work. Some of these guys won’t go anywhere without their jammers. When I asked the electrician about it, he said, What can I tell you? The ladies buy microphones from us and their men buy jammers. But then I had him run a hidden camera that wasn’t wireless. Did you know you can only jam wireless? The guy ran wires for me right through the ceiling lights and . . . well, I got some of the most disgusting videos you’ll ever see in your life. I’ve hidden them right here. Naser will never find them. But the police, once they start turning this place upside down, that’s a whole other story. Kiss poker night bye-bye.”
I glance at my watch.
“Apologies to my marble Jesus, but I have to start now. Can’t delay it any longer.”
Naser keeps a bagful of surgical tools in the bedroom. Gloves. Knife. And we’re off. “I’m truly sorry, young man. Who knows, ha
d we met under different circumstances, some spark might have even come to life between us. Though I doubt it. What is it Christians say? Jesus was crucified for our sins? Well, here you are, aren’t you?”
Blood gushes out from the first cut and immediately I feel faint. I take the gin and leave him for a minute. The living room stinks of leftover pizza and half-eaten bowls of yogurt and reeking cheese slices and rotted fruit. I think about all the times Naser would collect this garbage with a long set of pliers. The absurdity of seeing this obsessive-compulsive pedophile wearing surgical gloves and daintily picking up one piece of garbage after another with pliers and putting them in an industrial-size plastic bag. Then taking the bag out the back door, as if he’s too ashamed of himself to carry it out the front. But tomorrow—I mean today—how’s he going to clean this particular mess?
I force myself to chew on a piece of chocolate. I can’t afford to act the part of a spoiled little bitch. I studied nursing for three years, for God’s sake. All that blood and gore we had to see every day. So: back to Jesus. A pool of blood has collected around his torso and the sheet is soaked in red. I make for a deeper cut this time. Then I stick my hands through and open him up. The bowel spills out a bit. By now Jesus has lost color. I stick my hand in deeper to get a better grip, but I can’t tell where the intestines begin and end. So I just start pulling and walk what I have in my hand across the living room before I cut it all up good. The stench of it. The half-digested lettuce and tomato swimming in a sea of near shit. My boy must have had a sandwich for lunch.
The third cut is a neat cross in the chest area. More blood. The end of the knife hits a rib and gets stuck there. It’s handwork from here. I have to dig deep. Be methodical. Just like we were taught in school. Except half these things, I don’t know which is which anymore. Liver, spleen, kidneys, gallbladder, out you come. I almost apologize to my Jesus again but then feel silly about it. It’s all about quick work from now on. The heart fits nicely in front of the antique candelabra Naser claims his dear grandmama gave him. Dr. Naser Zarafshan of ancient royal blood. So he says. If he’s so royal, why would he want to marry a girl from a working-class family? Past eight years I didn’t see a single one of his relatives. He says they’re all in the US, but I couldn’t give two shits if they are on the moon or if they’re royal or not. That’s right, cut those veins. Spill everything across the house. I make sure the liver graces the face of that Marilyn Monroe. I mean, what kind of fool would have a Marilyn Monroe face woven for him on a carpet?
