by Nick Tosches
“What did it feel like?”
“Saying ‘I love you’?”
“No. The self-rape. You raping me and me raping you at the same time?”
“It was all in my head.”
“But what did it feel like? What did what was in your head feel like?”
“It was almost too much. It was like being in a storm that was so bad I had to close my eyes. It was like I could feel the force of the winds and all these windblown things hitting me and flying past me, but I couldn’t see what they were.”
“When you say you closed your eyes to it, do you think that could mean you closed your mind to it?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that I wanted to feel it a lot more than I wanted to see it. I didn’t care what it was, I just wanted to feel it.”
“And it felt good? You weren’t afraid of what you couldn’t see?”
“It felt more than good. It felt fucking great.”
She seemed lost in that remembered feeling that was hers alone. She slowly stood, returned the beat-up paperback to her bag. She took a cigarette from my pack, lit it with my lighter, and sat back down. I had not seen her smoke before.
“What was really weird was that the whole thing, whatever it was, didn’t even have a name. I never heard of any kind of sex, any kind of anything, that didn’t have a name. That sort of shook me up a little. Like I had gone beyond what was known. Like I had gone beyond what was even imagined. I mean, they had words for guys who fucked dead bodies. Words for guys who got off disemboweling live children. I read a whole paper once on how Proust liked to jerk off while he stuck hatpins through rats. But there was nothing for this. Not a name, not a word. Bernini made a statue of Saint Teresa swooning while Jesus fucked her brain. They called it ecstasy. They called it—what’s that other word they called it?”
I shrugged and grimaced indifferently with ignorance.
“Oh, come on, you know. You of all people. That word they only use when they’re talking about her.”
“I really don’t know.”
“Transverberation. Yeah, ecstasy, transverberation. And they put it in the Vatican. Nobody was going to make a statue of me raping myself, a statue of me raping you while you raped me. But it was ecstasy. And it was transverberation, whatever the hell that means. But it was way more.
“They say that if a fly flies too high it gets sucked off into space. I felt like one of those flies. Fancy words, dirty words, the whole taxonomy of sex and sin: it’s all down there somewhere, and here I am, up here in dark space without any gravity to get my little fly-ass back to where it came from.”
“Does that scare you?”
“A little. But this is all just—I don’t know. If it does scare me a little, it’s all just part of that other thing.”
“What other thing?”
“That thing without a name. That thing, whatever it is, that feels so fucking great.”
She then fell still. Though she was not looking at me, or at anything, I could see on her face the most serenely beguiling smile that I had ever seen, certainly on her, maybe on anyone. It made Mona Lisa look like she was taking a pleasant shit and nothing more.
“Do you want to rape me?” I asked her.
“I don’t think I can.” Only then did the smile on her face ease and become imperceptible. “I don’t think it would work that way. I think I can only rape you by being raped by you.”
Without thought, without hesitation, with nothing but a sudden white heat in my mind and body, I grabbed her by the neck, jammed my hand down her panties, and rammed my fist up her cunt. She screamed and clawed at me, and I tore down her T-shirt and sank my teeth into her breast without any foreplay of lip or tongue. She struck me as the blood, full and strong, entered my mouth. I smacked her in angry response. She pulled violently at my arm to remove my fist from her, and I drove it in deeper, deeper again, as I sucked the blood relentlessly from her. She punched my back. I wrenched my fist from her cunt, and with both hands pried open her clenched jaw and let loose a good amount of her own blood from my mouth into hers. I blocked her breath with my hand until she swallowed and gagged. As she made to strike me again I grasped her wrist and forced her to smear herself with the blood that still flowed from her breast. I shoved her aside. I was panting like a beast, and so was she. Our bodies loosened, our breath subsided. We looked as if we had overcome a wild boar and feasted on it raw with our bare hands. Glancing at each other, our bellies moved with mild, soundless laughter.
“I love you,” she said.
How I had yearned to hear those words from her, and how happy it now made me to hear them. I felt blessed. I felt as if I could close my eyes and sleep in bliss in her embrace.
We talked awhile, wanderingly, softly, sleepily.
“So what do we call that? Me raping you and you raping me?”
“Do we need to call it anything?”
“No, I guess not, not really.”
“Because we can.”
She perked up, shot me a look, and said, “You mean this is something known after all? You mean everything I’ve been feeling and trying to explain, it’s not something unknown? You mean it’s not new? I’m not a freak? It has a name?”
“Not exactly. But we can give it one.”
The perkiness ebbed. She looked quizzical and confused, then simply, deflatedly confused.
“You know,” I said. “It’s funny. Greek and Latin are such vast, nuanced languages. Especially when it comes to sex. I mean, there were words in Greek like phoinicizein, which meant to lick a woman’s cunt while it was bleeding. One single word to say what it would take a sentence to say in English.”
It occurred to me that I should have used a different example. Her own cunt might be sore and bleeding from the violence of my fist. All I could do was hurry on to another example that might throw a cloak on the one I had thoughtlessly given.
“We took the word fellatio from Latin. And, sure enough, fellatio meant sucking cock. But we never bothered with the Latin word irrumatio, which represented a fine distinction. With fellatio the mouth was active. It performed on the cock. With irrumatio, the mouth was passive. It got fucked like a cunt.
“But what’s funny is that with all this sexual eloquence and precision, neither Greek nor Latin had a single word that referred specifically to rape.”
I was too lazy, too tired, to go into the library to fetch my copy of The Latin Sexual Vocabulary or Forberg’s Manual of Classical Erotology, or to lug out the big, heavy Oxford Latin Dictionary or the big, heavy Liddell-Scott Greek-English Lexicon. But I knew I was right.
“The Latin word rapere or raptare—they were both more or less the same—had a dozen or more different meanings, having to do with seizing, abducting, stealing, this, that, the other thing. But only one of those meanings came close to what we commonly mean by the word rape. It’s a fucking mystery. Maybe you should write a paper on it for school.
“Anyway, rapere and raptare are all we got. That’s where we get our word rape from. And also—and here’s another pisser—also the word rapture.” I paused, recalling all the feelings that she had tried so hard to explain and simultaneously seeing a beam of light issue from what I had just said. “Rape and rapture. Linguistic twins. Maybe twins in ways that go far deeper than that.”
I felt that I should have stopped there, but my weary mind maundered on, and my mouth along with it. I heard myself saying things about the shifting, sharing of roles of violator and victim, about “symbiotic ferocity,” about “bilateral rape” and “equipollent rape.” I had no idea from which yawning crevice of my drowsy brain that one came from. I had no memory of ever having used the word equipollent, and I wasn’t even sure if it meant what I thought it did. I was sleepily aware once again of her search for a word, a phrase, a name that might bring her some sense of solace by lending definition to the screaming formless banshees of her inexpressible feelings. I muttered the words “raptus aequus”—equal rape. How stupid they sounded. I though
t of what they called “the spintrian postures,” traced to the endless pursuits of pleasure of Tiberius, and defined most wonderfully by Thomas Blount, in a manner that could but barely escape memorization, in his dictionary of 1656 as “pertaining to those that seek out, or invent new and monstrous actions of lust.” Forberg’s manual enumerated the postures to be ninety. But, as shown by Melissa and countless others through the ages, this list of erotic variations was far from complete. One that had always stuck in my head was paedico paedicator, “a pederast pedicated.” As this posture was described as spintriae tres, involving three participants, there could be no doubt that the butt-fucker was simultaneously being butt-fucked while butt-fucking. There seemed to me a certain music to both the sound and meaning of this one.
“Raptor raptatur,” I said, first whispering it to myself, then saying it aloud. The rapist raped. Spintriae duo. Perfect. I repeated the phrase again: “Raptor raptatur.” Then, even though this phrase had never appeared in Latin, I said, as if it were a definition to be found in the commonest Latin dictionary: “A rapist raped while raping.”
“Rap-tor rap-ta-tur,” she said, pronouncing the words with a mock gravitas, in a cleverly understated burlesque of full and solemn imperial cadence. “I am she who rapes while being raped. I am she who rapes herself.”
She looked to me, grinning crookedly. There was caked blood in her ponytail. The dried blood on her face was inescapable of notice all along, but I had not until now seen the dark glistenings that matted her schoolgirl hair. The rape of the lock.
“What about that part?” she said. “She who rapes herself. What about that?”
I immediately coined the word autoraptus, then just as immediately cast the coin into the gutter. The prefix auto- was Greek; raptus was Latin. It was an abomination to make a word by forcing a marriage of Greek and Latin roots.
What was the Greek equivalent of raptare? I couldn’t remember. All I could remember, or seemed to remember, was that it was ungainly, unwieldy, and started with an alpha. Fuck it. Even if it worked, it would involve getting up off the couch. I was even having trouble remembering the Latin reflexive pronouns. I really was falling asleep. Ah, sui. Yeah. Sui, sui, sui. Self. Sui juris, one’s own master. All right, then, so what was the genitive singular of raptor? Same thing. Sui raptoris. One’s own rapist. Sui-raptus. Self-rape.
“Oh, that,” I said, as if recalling something from a child’s primer. “She who rapes herself. One’s own rapist is sui raptoris. As for the deed itself, self-rape, that’s sui-raptus.”
Somehow all of this seemed to make her feel better. And so I said:
“You’re a goddess, baby. The goddess whose name is dea raptor raptatur. The goddess who rapes while being raped.
“Somewhere incense burns, solitary figures search the constellations, and the priestly and the low utter sighs of prayer without knowing why.”
She wiped some dried blood from her lips with the back of her hand. She looked at the back of her hand. She looked at me. There were still stains of darkening burgundy on her mouth, and it was hard to tell if she was smiling or smirking.
“You just made all that up, didn’t you?” she said.
“What part of it?”
“All of it.”
“No.”
“The part about the goddess.”
“Every goddess is made up. Every god is made up. That doesn’t detract from them. Look at Isis.”
I had mentioned Isis not long before. But when I now said her name—or, rather, the name that Herodotus had somehow Greeked from what he had heard in Egypt in the Late Dynastic Period—I felt an uncanny consciousness of that mysterious and unsettling scrap of paper, in my scrawling hand but unrecognized by me, that I had kept secreted in a drawer since inexplicably finding it on my desk one morning not long ago. It had been for the most part out of mind as well as out of sight until this very moment. I experienced a quick wave of anxious unease.
“Jst.” The strange sound burst from her, a sudden glottal hiss, giving me a start and warding off whatever aftermath might have followed that wave that passed through me.
“Or however the fuck they said it. Look at her. The Greeks and Romans turned her into Artemis and Diana, Aphrodite and Venus. The Christians turned her into the Virgin Mary. All of them made up, just like her. But she’s still there. Her beauty, her power, her magic—everything, undiminished. People die, but what they make up, what they wish to exist over them, what they make up to embody everything that they can never be, everything that can never be, period—that doesn’t die. It’s eternal.”
“So you made me up. I didn’t think they were making up any new gods these days.”
“Are you kidding? Every breath, every breeze bears a god or a goddess waiting to be born, a theophany there for the taking. You know those lines on the refrigerator? In that same poem he summons the four hundred gods of drunkenness—‘The four hundred gods / of drink alone / sat with him / as he died / in pieces’—which never existed until that very moment when he made them up.”
Those lines had always scared me, and I had always wondered if they had scared Olson as he conceived and wrote them down.
“Not one god for him,” I said. “No, four hundred of them in one fell swoop. There was a maker up of gods who thought big, all right.
“That statue of that saint getting transreverberated by that made-up Jesus. That other statue there of that made-up Virgin Mary holding the corpse of that made-up transreverberator. That painting The Birth of Venus. That stuff’s pretty to look at, but it’s just a bunch of stone and paint, a bunch of made-up stuff about made-up gods and made-up goddesses.
“At least you’re real. You’re right here, sitting right next to me. And what I said about making up that goddess. It’s not true. You are a goddess. You embody what others can’t be, what others can barely imagine. That beauty, that power, that magic. It’s in you, and it’s forever. All I made up was the name of the goddess. And I pieced that together from words made up by the same people who made up gods and goddesses. Every goddess has to have a name. Of course, you could always just stick with Melissa.”
“I don’t feel like a goddess,” she said. But it was obvious that she was feeling pretty damned good.
“If you did, you’d be unbearable,” I said. “And you’d end up in your arrogance like Jesus in his. Look at that fairy tale. Tormented for forty days and forty nights. All just to end up getting nailed to a cross in his diaper.”
“The temptation of Christ.”
“Yeah. As opposed to the temptation of Louie the Lug.”
“I never got that. I mean, what was he supposed to have been tempted by?”
“By exactly what he wanted. Dominion over all earthly kingdoms. That was the main one, with the offer coming from Satan, the one guy who could probably actually deliver. There was a whole mess of other temptations, too, but they don’t go into most of them.” My eyes were closing again. I lit a cigarette. “I can tell you one thing. This salami sandwich wasn’t one of them.”
“Do I still have a lot of blood on my face?”
“It depends on what you mean by a lot.”
Yes, I thought, as I drew smoke and let my eyes close for a moment: fuck normalcy and fuck the normal. It was death and they were dead. Dante looked down upon them as being unworthy even of entering hell, calling them i vigliacchi, the lukewarm, the cowardly.
I kissed the dried blood on her lips. I said the words I had so yearned to hear from her, and had heard: “I love you.”
Her eyes were angelic. She rose silently to take a shower and prepare for bed. I sat alone, luxuriating in what I felt, which was all the more wonderful enwrapped in the comfortable warmth of deep and quiet drowsiness. The sound of the shower cascading behind the closed door of another room was soft and sylvan.
I went to her bag to get that beat-up paperback, so that I might read again the lines she had read me. I was surprised to find that, in context, the “tender thigh” and the “red blood�
�� the character wished to drink “full measure” were those of a deer. Sweet self-raped Melissa had extracted them from the rest of the verse in a way that gave a very different impression and conjured a very different picture. As isolated by her, the tender thigh and red blood were those of a maiden; even, by the implication of her chosen and well-voiced reading, those of Melissa herself.
The discovery of this little deceit was an unexpected pleasure, like coming across a thoughtful gift that had been hidden away in anticipation of being given on a special occasion.
When I returned the book to her bag, I noticed a folded piece of paper on which the book had lain. I could see that it was a slim brochure of some kind. I took it out and opened it.
Printed on it were the words WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DAY MAKES. I was about to re-fold it and put it back where it was when I saw that it was a publication of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
The sound of the shower, which was no longer soft and sylvan, abruptly stopped. I sat on the couch in the dark and had another cigarette. Then I sat a little longer in the dark and had another cigarette.
By the time I went to bed, she was asleep. I did not wake her to mention the little brochure about what a difference a day makes. Nor did I sleep in bliss.
THE SUN THE NEXT MORNING WAS BRIGHT IN A CLEAR BLUE sky, but the cold could be felt through the walls and closed windows, and it was not hunger but a desire to generate and linger by heat from the stove that moved me to make a breakfast of sunny-side-up duck eggs, good fat greasy duck sausage, and toast, made of the last of that pumpernickel that was going stale the night before, smeared thick with dark apple butter.
Melissa swigged coffee and ate like a wolf. It was good to see. But I was still thinking about that little folded pamphlet from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention that I wished I had not come across in her bag.
How to broach it? “What a difference a day makes,” I might say, apropos of absolutely nothing. It was ridiculous. Here I was, sopping duck yolk with already sodden toast and shoving it into my mouth, mulling over asinine gambits instead of just asking her straight out.
