Repeatedly.
No charges were ever filed. I hadn’t really known her then, had only admired her from afar, and it wasn’t my place to speak out. But I remembered seeing the bruises, and hearing about the asshole ex-boyfriend following her around, making threatening phone calls and an ugly nuisance of himself.
And I remember, even then, wanting to tear his stupid throat out.
She’d been with him for almost two years: a very gradual descent into hell. She never talked about it much; I had to piece most of my knowledge together from the rumor mill and an outsider’s perspective. But the bitch of it was, I think she really did love him. And that’s what scarred her so badly: she cared, and she trusted him. She’d truly given him a piece of her heart. His betrayal was tantamount to a traumatic amputation; even after the shock she could still feel a twinge of the missing piece. The phantom pain, where it used to be.
And tonight she’d gone back, once again.
To find it.
I really didn’t want to hear the gory details; I could fill them in well enough by rote. She was scared; of him, of herself. She had good reason to be. It was a twisted sort of ourobouros, the snake forever consuming its own tail, forever vomiting itself right back up; victim and victimizes locked in an endlessly spiraling deathdance.
And for the very first time I saw her, flung head-first off the pedestal and down into the slime. I saw her the way they must.
Flawed. Vulnerable.
Pathetic.
And for one bone-chilling moment, I thought that maybe Martin had a point…
No. The word was vehement, the voice very much my own. No no no No! The vision ran completely counter to everything that I held dear, everything that I’d ever believed about the nature of love and the dignity of the human spirit. It made me crazy to think that such a thought had even entered my head …
… but still I could see it, in psychotic Technicolor clarity: LeeAnn, cringing before my swinging fist; the moment of glorious frisson, as flesh met surrendering flesh…
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH ME? I silently screamed. My eyes snapped shut. The vision vanished. I whirled in my seat, away from LeeAnn and toward the bar, not wanting my face to betray the merest hint of what had just gone on inside my mind.
Then the bartender turned toward me. And nodded. And smiled.
And the pain in my bladder went nova.
It was remarkably like getting kicked in the balls: the same explosion of breath-stealing, strength-sapping anguish. It doubled me up in my seat, brought my face within inches of the tabletop between LeeAnn and I. At that distance, with the dim light etching them in massive shadow, I couldn’t help but see the four words crudely carved across its surface:
TO BE A MAN.
“What is it?” her voice said in quivering tones. Her tears were subsiding; she was regrouping in the rubble. I dragged my gaze up to hers with difficulty, still drowning in the pain.
“It’s nothin’, kiddo. Honest.” I was trying to brush it aside, to hide it. It wasn’t working. My voice was even more wobbly and wasted than hers.
“Don’t bullshit me, Dave. You’re in pain. Is it an
ulcer?”
“I don’t think so. I never had one before.” But I had to briefly consider the possibility, because, Jepus, did it hurt!
“You look horrible.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“No, I’m seri…”
“LEEANN!” I thudded my fist against the table in pain and frustration and rage. “We didn’t come here to talk about my goddam pain! We came here to talk about yours! Now will you stop trying to change the fucking subject for a minute!”
She was stunned. In this, she was not alone. I could no more believe what I’d said than I could what I followed it up with.
“Baby, I’m not the one who got smacked around tonight! I’m not the one who went to Martin’s and asked him to do it, either! I didn’t even ask to come here! I only came because you begged me to, and I only did that because…”
I stopped, then. It was like slamming down the brakes at 120 mph. The only sound in my head was the screeeeeee of rubber brain on asphalt bone. I blinked at the dust and smoke behind my eyes.
“Because why?” Her voice was soft as a whisper, warm as a beating heart. Her good eye was green and deep and inscrutable. It unnerved me, that eye, even more than its battered mate or the question that accompanied it. It scrutinized me with zoom-lens attention to every blackhead and ingrown hair on my soul.
Because I love you, my mind silently told her. Because I’m a goddam chump, that’s why.
I couldn’t decide which conclusion was truer. I couldn’t even sustain the internal debate. If I didn’t get up and drag my ass down the stairs, I would let loose in my pants, and that was all there was to it. It was a matter of Piss or Die now, and there was no holding back.
“Excuse me a moment,” I managed to mutter, rising up at half-mast and away from my seat.
But suddenly, LeeAnn didn’t want to drop it. She grabbed my wrist just as I cleared the table. “David, please…” she said. It took everything I had to force the gentleness into my voice.
“I gotta pee, baby. Please. I’m gonna blow up if you don’t let me go.”
She actually smiled, then. In retrospect, were it not for the pain and embarrassment, that might have been the finest moment of my life. “I really do want to know,” she said, soft as before. And her hand stayed right where it was.
I laid my free hand over it. The fingers meshed.
“Hold that thought,” I whispered. Not entirely romantic; speech had gotten very difficult. Then I turned and beat a hasty retreat.
She watched me go. I could feel her eyes.
I knew what they were saying.
I will never forget.
■
Mark Twain once said that if God exists at all, he must surely be a malign thug. I wish it were true. It would be easier to blame God, or Fate, or the drugs, or the bar, or even LeeAnn.
But I know where the blame lays.
Right where it belongs.
I waddled away from the table with a smile on my face. The pain was still there … it kept me half-doubled over… but those last few moments had rendered it nearly insignificant. I was aglow with proximity to my heart’s desire. I was aglow with impending triumph.
And that, of course, was when the Mighty Asshole chose to speak.
“Hey! Lookit the fuckin’ creamputf!” he bellowed. “Guess you gotta go WEE-WEE, huh?”
There was a pause that crackled in my ears like static, dispersed by a ripple of harsh, raucous laughter. I turned to face a dozen mirthlessly grinning eyes: the Asshole and his punching bag, the troll and the hairball and Heckle and Jeckle. All of them watching. Most of them laughing.
The Mighty Asshole, most of all.
Something clicked inside me. The words I don’t need this took control of my brain. Under ordinary circumstances, I might have been scared. Not now.
I stared him down for a long defiant second.
Then I smiled. And curtsied. And blew him a kiss.
“Eat shit,” I said.
Crude, but effective. I felt better almost instantly. The shock on his face was a joy to behold. I turned and scuttled down the stairs before he could rally; my mind raced in mad tandem with my feet.
Never mind them, I told myself. You’ve got to get your butt back there, tell her that you love her, give her the kiss that you’ve been dreaming about. The time has come. She WANTS you, man!
Then the stairway ended, and my thoughts screeched to a halt.
I had reached my destination.
And the source.
■
The door itself was ill-hewn and splintery, lusterless and finger-smeared where the finish hadn’t worn away entirely. The word GENTLEMEN was spelled out in eight-inch metal caps that glimmered flatly in the glare of the overhead bulb. I yanked on the handle; it was surprisingly heavy, beyond its mass. I pulled harder, and it relu
ctantly gave way.
I’d forgotten about the hinges, the terrible screeching sound they made. Like a thing in pain. The small hairs on the nape of my neck stood up like frightened sentries as the sound sawed through my eardrums and raked along my spine.
I stepped inside. The door creaked shut.
And the presence of the room assailed me.
There was the resonant boom that sent echoes bouncing off the filthy tiles. There was the overpoweringly ammoniacal sewage-stench, jolting up my nostrils like smelling salts. There was the dim insectoid buzz of the overhead fluorescents, spackling the interior with blotches of pulsing, spasming shadow.
And there was the size…
Mad, twirling Christ, it was huge. I stood in stunned amazement of what lay ahead. Now, the claustrophobic crapper of any midtown Manhattan working-class watering hole is just about big enough for the average-sized man to squeeze in and out of with an absolute maximum of discomfort. By comparison, this place was a fucking castle.
Twin rows of nonfunctional, moldy sinks: ten, in all. They lined a long tiled corridor on the way to the main room, from which I could make out a solitary stall.
A solitary stall…
Its door hung lopsidedly askew, as though wrenched violently off its hinges. An enormous pool of black, fetid water extended around it in a widening berth, apparently stemming from the blockage of gray, spongy effluvium that floated in the bowl like the lost continent of Atlantis. By craning my neck I could make out a pair of urinals just around the comer, clinging for dear life to the wall beyond.
One stall. Two urinals. Ten sinks.
Under any other circumstances it would’ve been weird enough to ponder. At the moment, my priorities were far more basic. I groaned, surveying the terrain. There was no way around it.
Only through it.
So I started in, holding my breath, gingerly skirting one of the main tributaries. Each of the sinks had its own mirror bolted to the wall above it. Nine of them had been smashed into glittering shards, held in place by inertia and thin metal frames. The buzzing light refracted off of them, making the streamlets of the pool appear to ripple with a malignant life of their own. The last mirror, the one nearest an adult novelty dispenser proffering big-ribbed condoms in tropical colors, was intact. My reflection fought its way back through the grit and haze; it looked pasty and haggard, forlorn.
“No wonder she’s crazy about you,” I muttered. “You gorgeous thing.”
Something burbled, distinctly, from inside the stall.
“Huh?” I sputtered, startled, and turned to see a fresh ripple of foul water expanding outward in ever-increasing concentric rings. My thoughts turned to my quality footwear and nervously gauged the odds of making it over and back unscathed. It didn’t look good.
The stall belched in agreement, sending out another wave.
I peeked around the comer, into the main body of the room, it was infinitely worse: the water actually deepened, and though it could only reasonably be a few inches, it looked bottomless. Some of the floor tiles were warped enough to form a series of little dry islands.
It was my only hope. Taking a last, desperate glance at my reflection, lips curled in disdain, I began to hippy-hop from dry spot to dry spot like a little kid crossing a creek. The beer made me clumsy, the drugs hypersensitized me, and the fumes burned like lye in my eyes and nose. But I made it, awkwardly straddling the sole oasis beneath the far urinal.
The stench was incredible. I momentarily regretted leaving my jacket upstairs, where a half-pack of Merits were serving no useful purpose. The joint was there, too, as were all my matches. There was nothing I could do to abate the smell.
Those were the facts I had to face as I, at last, unzipped my fly.
And not a moment too soon; no sooner had I freed my screaming pecker than the pee blasted out and splished against the procelain like a runaway firehose. I sighed, a deep and vastly relieved “Ahhhh…” and leaned forward to brace myself against the wall, feeling slightly dizzy and a vague surge of pride at having made it.
I looked at the wall, while the bladder pain receded. There was a profusion of graffiti there; the same sort of jerkoff witticisms that probably graced the Pissoirs at the Dawn of Time. Crudely optimistic penises pounding into yawning pudenda. Tits like udders, hanging from faceless, howling female forms. Phone numbers advertising good times at someone else’s expense. Initials. Dates. Dreams of seamy grandeur.
And the same four words.
TO BE A MAN.
In the stall, something big went squish and then sputtered. I could hear the tinkling of falling droplets, delicate as the tines of the tiniest music box as they sprinkled the surface of the pool.
My spine froze. My pissing and breathing cut off instinctively. I leaned back as far as I could and listened.
Nothing.
“This is stupid,” I informed myself by way of the room at large. My paranoia burgeoned. “There’s nobody in there.”
Still nothing. Ripples, expanding quietly outward. I exhaled. My pissing resumed with great difficulty.
And the door to the men’s room flew suddenly open.
I jerked, nearly spraying myself. From inside, the echoing screech of the hinges resounded like a billion bat-shrieks in a cave. The door screeeeed and slammed shut like thunder. The walls boomed with the sound of amplified footsteps.
Every alarm in my nervous system went off. It was like pissing on the third rail of a subway track, a thousand volts of terror sizzling through me in the space of a second. The footsteps got closer, and I found myself wanting to get out of there very badly. Relax, I hissed silently, as internal organs tightened to pee faster. You’re stoned. This is stupid. Nothing’s going to happen. Nothing’s—
“Well, well, well,” he said, sneering. “Lookit what we got here.”
The footsteps came up behind me and paused. I didn’t want to turn around and look.
I had to.
The Mighty Asshole stood at the edge of the swamp: arms crossed, legs spraddled, a hideous grin on his face. He said, “Looks like we got us a live one.”
Something burbled and glooped in the toilet stall.
What the fuck did he mean by that? I wondered. The images it conjured were not very pretty. The smile that flicked across my face was meant to look cool and unruffled. It failed. I flashed it anyway, trying to hide my desperation. He grinned back at me, flat-eyed and mean as a mouthful of snakes.
The Mighty Asshole sploshed, indifferent, through the pool of rancid liquid. He came up beside me, unzipped his fly, and finagled himself into trajectory with the urinal to my left. I took a deep, nasty breath and exhaled it at once, not looking at him. His pissing chorused with mine.
A moment passed.
“You’re a faggot, you know it?” he said casually. “You’re a little fucking faggot.”
I looked at him then, peering straight into his idiot face.
“Yeah you,” he continued. “A little fucking faggot.”
“‘Zat so?” I said. “Geez. This is sure news to me.” My bladder was draining, like air from a flat; and with it, the pain and the fear.
“A faggot,” he repeated, as loud as before, but his sense of utter mastery had dwindled a bit. Our eyes were locked, and I could see the sudden twitching of dimwitted uncertainty there.
“‘Zat a fact,” I said, marking time ‘til I was done. I didn’t want to fight him, that much was for sure. My knife was upstairs, with the Merits and the joint. He wasn’t all that much bigger than me, but he was blitzed and stupid; even if I jawed him, he probably wouldn’t know it, and we’d end up rolling around here in the slime of the ages.
“Thass a fact, alright.” He slurred it, and it took a long time to get out. Good sign. My pissing was almost done; by the time he formulated another thought, I’d be gone.
“I know a woman who’d be interested to hear that,” I said. “Yessiree. She’d find that pretty goddam funny.”
He laughed. I joined him.
>
He stopped. I didn’t.
He hit me.
It was a short, straight-armed punch, with a lot of muscle behind it. It caught me square in the side of the head, sending hot black sparks pinging through my skull. I lurched to the side, off my little island, and straight into the sludge. Cold putrescence flooded up through a hole in my shoe.
“Shit!” I yelled. “Shit! Shit!” I splashed around to face him, waiting for my vision to clear. I could feel my ear starting to cauliflower, feel the hot trickle of blood seeping down. I thought about booting him right in the nuts, grinding his face into that same black water. I was furious. ” You stupid motherfu—” I began.
And then stopped.
Suddenly.
Completely.
Stopped.
In the pool. In the slime.
It started with the sole of the right foot: a numbing sensation that I at first mistook for the cold. In the thin web of flesh between the first and second shafts of the metatarsus, seeping up through the sodden expanse of my gym sock, the horror took root and spread. Up along the flexor tendons, through their fibrous sheaths. Soaking into the flexor brevis digitorum. An impulse, shooting out at the speed of thought, socked into the motor nucleus at the fifth nerve of the brain.
I couldn’t move.
The numbness spread.
In the grume. Where He waits. Forever and ever.
Up through fibula and tibia, dousing bone and soaking marrow. Up through muscle and sinew, tendrils snaking up arteries and conduits, putting frost in my ganglion, ice in my veins. Up through the femur and into the hip, the pelvis. Numbing my cock, my balls. Spreading down the other leg.
Ancient. Eternally crawling.
Blitzkrieg in my bladder. In my spleen. Worming a finger up through my intestines. Oozing through the superficial fascia of the abdominal wall and then outward. Seeping through the pores. Bleeding through my sweatshirt.
Eternally struggling toward form.
And taking it.
For His own.
My eyes riveted on the eyes of the man before me: moist and pulsing, the color of slugs. A spasm ran through us both, synchronized and uncontrollable. Then I was pivoted and slammed face-first into the filthy tiles above the urinal. I couldn’t feel it.
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