Nocturnal Emissions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Huh?” I said, staring at the indicated photo, of a handsomely smiling older “African-American” gentleman, as she put it. I confess I was still pretty baffled. Whatever the case, it appeared that the transmissions from the dimension in question, which obviously more people were now receiving on their televisions, had excited not only Hee. Were other factors or anomalies or advances in technology making these signals accessible, or had the afteref-fects of my little mishap extended beyond the limits of the house I lived in?

  Our waiter came then, to take our orders. He was himself a distinguished-looking, somewhat elderly “African-American” gentleman, with snowy hair and a mustache, a little stooped but tall and wearing a neat white apron. In a gentle, honeyed drawl he said, “Well, well, young people…pleasure to see you tonight. This your first time comin’ to our fine establishment?”

  “Hi,” I said. “Uh, yes, it is.” I swept a hand over the open menu. I had never to my knowledge experienced some of its fare before, such as collards, okra, snap beans, and the cruel-sounding smothered chicken. “Any recom-mendations? I’m not really sure what to order.”

  “Well, young sir,” the waiter chuckled softly, “sometimes ya jest gotta listen for the golden cabaret in yo head.”

  I gazed up at his warmly smiling face for a few moments, and then said,

  “Okay.” I supposed that advice was as good as Detective/Psychiatrist Jabronski’s, “You gotta build a fi-ah,” anyway. I looked back down at the menu.

  “Drinks while you folks ponder?” he asked.

  We gave our drink orders and he shuffled off for the kitchen. I watched another waiter take the orders of a couple seated across the room. He was a huge, muscular black man with a bald head, who despite his deep rumbling voice spoke haltingly, shyly and simply, like a child. A white dove was perched politely on one shoulder.

  While I waited for our own waiter to return I looked back at Hee, both mesmerized and a little unsettled today by her beauty. For our date she had fitted contact lenses onto her eyes—of an unnatural green color—maybe going for an extra touch of exoticism, though I didn’t think they really jelled with her Oriental looks. In fact, the green lenses made her look as though the Ephemeral Eye were peering out of her through them, and I told her as much as a kind of joke—hoping it wouldn’t offend her, given her confession that the Ephemeral Eye had had some unspecified effects on her.

  “Yeah, that’s why I bought them,” she admitted easily. “But I never showed you this.” She turned around in her seat, bent forward and thrust her bottom toward me, pulling down the edge of her tight, white hot-pants. There, on the taut brown skin of her lower back (and I was teased with the indented beginning of a dark dividing split) was a tattoo I hadn’t got a glimpse of before, despite her habitually revealing clothing (unless it was newly acquired). It was a perfect representation of the Ephemeral Eye, in weirdly luminous-looking lime green ink. Pivoting on her bottom to face me again, she confirmed, “It glows in the dark.”

  “I’d like to see that sometime.” I was proud of myself for having the courage, the daring, to put that out there.

  “Sure,” she chirped, giving her winning bright smile. It was a bit lopsided, higher on the right, and her teeth were very white but a little crookedly uneven. Imperfection always enhances beauty, so I found her crooked teeth endearing. By now I found everything about her endearing, and I had a compulsion to record her unique beauty somehow, in a story or a drawing, in a photo or a video, because it needed to be captured, to be possessed. Possessed by me, of course. The flitting, erratic butterfly pinned in a case to be admired at will, safely and securely and only by me. The more this craving took hold of me, the more I felt an insecurity bordering on panic. My covetousness was such that I could almost have consumed her. Literally, eaten her body, and savored every tender cell. But even then, I thought, without being sated.

  This hunger transcended lust. It was an existential kind of lust, I thought.

  The unhappiness of desire.

  We ate our meal, and throughout I hoped to win a specific date for her tattoo’s phosphorescent properties to be demonstrated, but I couldn’t quite steer her that way as she wove wildly from one enthusiastic topic to another.

  We finished with bread pudding (me) and sweet potato pie (Hee) for dessert, after which I sipped my chicory coffee and joked to Hee, “Well, that sure was some good eatin’, huh, little filly?”

  Hee looked at me with a frozen smile for a beat or two, before her face crumpled like a tissue and she began shaking with sobs. “Ohh…poor little Widget…I can’t believe it!”

  I avoided the eyes of other customers, embarrassed, as I reached across the table to hold her hand. She allowed me to do this, so perhaps it hadn’t been such a terrible faux pas, after all. Or so it appeared at the moment.

  This was the first blatant indication I had of the radical mood swings Hee suffered, but which she appeared not to consider a serious problem; at least, a problem she was willing to admit to. Her stormier moods were always someone else’s fault. Usually her mother’s, but starting tonight, mine.

  “Why did you have to say that, you stupid asshole?” she wept, yanking her hand away again.

  “Sorry, shh, sorry,” I whispered, leaning forward in an attempt to catch her hand again, but she wouldn’t let me touch her.

  “How was everything?” asked that honeyed drawl again. I looked up and there, as if he had suddenly manifested by my elbow, was our waiter.

  “Great, great!” I said too cheerily. “I’m so glad I tried this place.”

  “Well, young sir,” the old man said wisely, giving me a wink, “sometimes ya jest gotta jest gotta.”

  #11: The Wages of Skin

  From having begun our TV ritual with sitting cross-legged on the floor, then graduating to the recliner, the following afternoon Hee—thankfully, recovered from her bout of anger—took things to their natural progression, by suggesting that we lie on my bed together to watch TV. This we did, and thereafter our ritual changed dramatically…as I had prayed with an increasingly desperate fervor that it would.

  We started out lying side-by-side in our clothes, and Hee drew a blanket over us and snuggled against me, shivering and claiming to be cold. My left arm was behind her neck as a pillow. I began some channel surfing, until such time as I expected Hee to claim the remote, but she seemed content to cling to me and dreamily watch whatever I briefly alighted on, before, like a restless bee, I drifted on to the next bright flower. I settled at last on a program that looked like it would bore Hee for sure (bore her to sleep, which wasn’t what I wanted), but I was hoping it might further stimulate matters instead, as it was a talk program in which two people were discussing relationships between men and women—“the male and female dynamic,” as one of them said.

  Both host and guest (the guest was apparently an author) were men, and when I tuned in the guest was saying, “Let’s break it down to the obvious, Ted.

  For the most part, acquiring children is women’s goal, and sex is incidental—whereas acquiring sex is men’s goal, and children are incidental.”

  “But in the end everyone gets what they want, right?” the host joked lamely.

  “Really? Are we really all that content? Women—and I don’t mean the fictitious women you see in TV and movies—are not truly sexual beings. Men are sexual beings. Men superimpose their sexuality onto women, dress women in their dreams and longing the way women obligingly but unenthusiastically don sexy lingerie. But women are only as sexual as they need to be to acquire the aforementioned children, or to impress or outdo each other, or to boost their self esteem…their self worth, and their worth to their men. I suppose in a way they’re to be pitied. With men, sex is a wholly pure hunger—as innocent, really, as a shark’s bloodlust.”

  “But people aren’t just mindless sharks,” the host countered. “We should be more complex than that, shouldn’t we? Doesn’t what you’re saying suggest that in this regard men are too simple, but women
demonstrate the more complicated thoughts and concerns of beings who are advanced enough to question their condition?”

  “Question it to what end? To bring about neurosis, while too often so self-absorbed and lacking in empathy that they leave their counterparts feeling desolate and unfulfilled—when all that’s being asked of them is something as simple as nursing a baby, and as vital?”

  Vital. Yes, it was, and it was something I hadn’t known in too long. It was my own fault, I suppose. I was not such a simple man, like what this author was describing, a shark only needing to feed; I suffered the neurotic self doubts that he was attributing only to women. I had fared badly with women in recent years—in all my years, really—and I wasn’t going to exonerate every one of them, but neither was I going to blame their race for all my unhappiness. Though the guest had his points, I didn’t believe things with men and women were as clear cut, as black and white, as he was suggesting.

  He could be forgiven, though. His words were dripping with his own hurt.

  I too, especially lately, was a stupid walking erection, its veins packed hard with backed up blood, bumping into every wall around me with the hypersen-sitive glans that were my poor engorged brain.

  In the middle of the interview Hee had hooked one of her legs over mine, and thinking that perhaps the TV discussion had inspired this action, I turned to her and asked, “What do you think about this guy’s theories?”

  Hee pushed out her succulent, full lower lip in a pout and complained, “I thought this show was supposed to be sexy!” And with that, she took the remote from me at last and thumbed a familiar number on its keypad.

  No burst of static first this time. Straight to the singer with his unblinking eyes and unwavering smile, in his white greasepaint and with a lime green band around his skewed black top hat, singing his song: “Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl…oh Silicooone…Silicone Swirl” ceaselessly as he went through his unchanging dance.

  Hee scurried out from under the blanket then, stood up on my bed with her back to me and started dancing and singing along with the TV, bobbing up and down with the mattress’s undulations. I lay looking up at her now instead of at the entertainer, and I was almost too surprised to be excited, at first, when I saw Hee peel her top up over her head and cast it away to the floor. Barely missing a beat, she skinned off the tiny miniskirt she’d worn today, and threw that to the carpet as well, never taking her eyes from the screen. She continued to dance, long legs swaying and hips swishing, wearing only cotton panties and a bra, both white with tiny blue polka dots. The tattoo of the Ephemeral Eye in the small of her back was plainly visible. Hee now reached around behind her, unclasped her bra, and tossed it aside. She had timed this move just right, because at that point she turned to me at last, grinning, and twirled her index fingers in front of her tiny exposed breasts with their pointed little nipples like chocolate kisses, and sang, “You make me feel like a girl…Silicone Swiiiiiirl… Silicone Swirl!”

  I propped myself up on my elbows, smiling, shy but giddy, and my gaze slid down her body, from her cute adolescent breasts down her long, beautifully proportioned torso with its too smooth, too perfect golden-brown skin…skin of such a honey luster that it almost glowed. The flat plain of her belly, a belly many women would have murdered their husbands for, and down…down…

  Inside her blue-dotted cotton panties there was a bulge. Hee had the start of an erection.

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized, her smile faltering a bit as she watched for my reaction, though her body still gyrated to the music. “I figured this was better than trying to talk about it.”

  “Oh,” I said. She had her hand on the selling now, as if to half hide it, but the contact was only making what hid in her panties more swollen.

  Continuing to dance, but doubt growing in her eyes and her smile almost drained away, she asked. “Are you disappointed?” But even as she did so, she flipped the lever inside her undies, so that it cleared the elastic band and jutted up against that expanse of flat belly.

  Of course I was partly disappointed. This wasn’t the pot of gold I had expected at the end of the rainbow. But I was so overwhelmed by this point with her overall beauty, her overall feminine beauty, that this one feature how-ever significant had a lot weighing against it. It was almost as if she had revealed a large wine birthmark on her belly, or burn tissue on one leg. It could be overlooked, dealt with.

  And anyway, why should I be afraid of that peeking periscope? I had one, too, which received quite amorous attentions from me in my lonely hours.

  This one was just like another of mine, separate from me, a remote extension of my own body. She was just too lovely for my desire to falter much. And in fact, whilst my mind had been diverted, my own member had arisen just as profoundly, tenting up the blanket. Maybe, to be honest with myself—and it was only me here with Hee, only me to answer to—this was more than I had hoped for. Something transcendent.

  I reached out for her, and she stepped closer to me across the mattress. She freed her maleness a little more, pulling her scrotum out over the lip of the panties, and I slid my arms around her—cupped her soft bottom in my hands and guided her to me.

  She spread the fingers of both hands through my hair and sighed, obviously from relief at my acceptance as much as from pleasure. And meanwhile, behind us, watching us, the showman kept on singing, kept on dancing.

  Around Hee’s body, a few times, I happened to glance to see what the accompanying mimes were doing in the background, and to see what the background itself looked like. I knew, now, intuitively—perhaps from repeated exposure—that this was no film loop. Even though the song and dance steps themselves never varied, every second was in real time. Yes, I even had the sense that this was a live broadcast…

  Because we made love several times, over the course of several hours (unmindful of Hee’s mother in the attic apartment), and the singer accompanied us the whole time.

  Hee was my teacher that evening. I didn’t know how much of her knowledge she had gained working the streets in her home country (and by the way, she assured me her doctor had pronounced her free of diseases), but I wasn’t going to judge her. I too could make myself believe the Ephemeral Eye had induced her to follow that route. And speaking of the Eye, at one point we lay side-by-side on the mattress again, but unclothed this time, Hee’s arms thrown up behind her head to cool her shaved underarms. I leaned across her to kiss one of her underarms and inhale its subtle musk, and she turned to me and said, “You didn’t know I was a TV, huh?”

  “A TV?” I was confused, thinking only of her love of television.

  She smiled, had maybe misled me that way on purpose. “Not a TV like that—” she gestured toward the gamboling singer “– A transvestite.”

  “No, I didn’t. I never would have suspected anything.”

  “I wasn’t like this before, you know—part girl and part boy. It happened after I saw the Ephemeral Eye.”

  “What?” I said. Could that really be?

  “I was young, see, and my body wasn’t finished…you know, all my hor-mones and stuff.”

  “Ah…wow,” was all I could say just then. I hadn’t stopped marveling through these past hours; only marveled more, and the more I fed the hungrier I grew. Half-propped up beside her, I ran my hand over her ribs and belly, hearing the hissing little rasp of my rough palm over her polished skin.

  Whatever had brought about this condition, she was to me a distillation of the feminine. More feminine than so many women I’d known, even some I’d slept with. Was it an illusion? What truly made one female, or male? I was like Hee, in ways, wasn’t I? Not this thing, but not that thing. Not so young, but not so old. Not so handsome, not so ugly. Not so rich, not so poor. Not so sane, not so insane. We are all of us sad little halved things, cracked down the middle.

  Ah, but her crack I worshipped. She soon went to elbows and knees and looked over her shoulder at me, smiling with invitation, her uncanny green eyes easy
to forgive. Kneeling in supplication behind this goddess, I anointed myself for an act no natural born female had permitted me. Ah, that glossy sphere, bisected with its shadowed cleft, and dangling at the bottom of the cleft, a leathery dark brown pouch like a shaman’s medicine bag. That smooth orb presented before me was a world unto itself, a heavenly body. A new world for me to explore, perhaps dwell in. Ah, the new! How seldom does the new touch us in a way that excites, stimulates, awakens us. I was not afraid of any of this.

  No, not until later.

  But for now we were conjoined, and I held her waist, my thumbs overlap-ping the Ephemeral Eye as if to squeeze it blind…but it only stared up at me, unreadable.

  #12: Transformations

  But the moon, despite its luminous beauty, has its dark phases, too.

  There was no predicting Hee’s emotional highs and lows, and so I began to walk with trepidation through the minefield of her personality. Increasing trepidation, as she became more comfortable with me and thus revealed the true extent of her temper.

  She was spending much time with me now. Too much time, I would feel—sometimes desperate for her to go home to her own apartment upstairs. But then, she’d sneak down in the middle of the night, to spend an hour in bed with me, and she would have me hooked anew.

  Did I love her? Maybe. When I wasn’t afraid of her, or—in the end—hating her at times. I was willing to love her, despite her revelation. Or because of her revelation. But she seemed determined to thwart my love, even as she demanded it.

  I had never met a woman so jealous, so insecure. No matter how many times I reassured her otherwise, she would accuse me, “I know you’d prefer a real girl, huh? You didn’t know I was someone like me.”

  Her face would change at such times, in what seemed a literal physical transformation. I could understand how in times past, people were thought to become possessed. Her brows would clamp down lower, forming creases between them, and her sweet smiling mouth turn hard and dour. When she came into my apartment wearing that mask, I knew before she even began to speak—to complain, to accuse—that she had become possessed again. I told her on one occasion that she was two people in one body. Misunderstanding me, she flicked her crotch and said, “I know that.”