by Chamber Four
He sold amethysts and other gems from a cart in the middle of the food court. I stopped at Auntie Anne’s for a pretzel and he tapped me on the shoulder with his wand, smiling wide in the mandatory wizard costume. His thick fingers grazed my hipbone as he slipped a gem in my pocket. He was kind and I let him drive me home in his old taxicab. The peeled leather seats were charming and I told him so, lingering in the passenger seat while he idled outside of my apartment.
2.Locate a high-intensity vein by measuring surface temperature. They are often found in heavily wooded areas because the excess heat creates a thriving environment for plant life. However, amateurs often mistake veins for hot springs or volcanic activity.
He snuck me into a free show and I watched his face turn colors in the glow of the movie screen. He told me I looked like a goddess. We had sex in the woods behind the movie theatre until our bodies were imprinted in the flattened grass.
3.Once you have located a vein, monitor the area for surveillance cameras or other electronic appliances that may disrupt the integrity of the electric field when you try to access the portal. Secure a shovel of medium weight, a number of steel beams depending on the size of the hole, and anything that can carry electric current.
We lay there afterward and he told me what he had found. He cradled my head in the crook of his arm and I didn’t tell him about the twig that was pressing into my lower back above the cusp of my jeans. He pushed a dripping curl off of his forehead.
4.Survey topographic maps, land surveys and local geological data to familiarize yourself with the natural obstacles. Start digging.
I started wearing his t-shirts to bed so he could see my nipples through the thin cotton but he fell asleep on the couch amid his maps and frenetic scribblings. He asked me for money, his voice desperate and deep, and I forgot about returning to community college in the fall. He would rub my neck and ask me to stand watch and I would lean against a tree, watching the fuzzy computer screens for bodies other than his.
5.At regular intervals, test the strength of the vein with your car battery or other electronic device. The current should arc, disabling all cell phones, television sets, handheld radio devices, etc. The high-intensity veins flow beneath the earth’s surface at varying depths, and so some holes may tap into the vein at a depth of six feet, while others may prove impossible without sufficient machinery.
I scavenged flea markets and garage sales for old magnets and steel wool. I started knitting it together into a sort of chainmail with extra wire, industrial knitting needles and a screwdriver. He spoke of bodies embedded in walls, warped consciousness, the Philadelphia Experiment, a martyr’s transcendent ecstasy.
6.Reinforce the hole’s walls with the steel beams. Some holes may become tunnels and so proper reinforcement is needed to support the integrity of the roof. For the portal to become active, it needs to be eased into wakefulness. Employ as many conduits of electricity as possible to divert the energy of the vein into your chosen portal space. Many travelers do this by embedding magnetic devices, discarded electronics, batteries and bits of scrap metal into the walls of a concentrated region of their hole or tunnel. Begin constructing the coverings to transform your mortal body into a part of the mosaic itself. Medieval armor and chain mail, constructed with overlaps and interlinking metal pieces to ensure full coverage of the warrior’s skin, provide a very sound model for this construction, although past travelers have tested other methods, from weaving electrical wiring to welding car parts (the success of these methods remains unknown).
He slipped his steel sweater over his clothes, dousing himself in water to find the leaks and openings where it seeped through to his skin. I rubbed Neosporin into the bloodied epaulets the steel wool etched into his shoulders as he stood in front of the mirror, locking his eyes on my moving hands.
7.Do not be discouraged. Portal access is quite difficult, especially in areas with a high concentration of housing developments and power lines. Rainfall has an unexplained cleansing effect on power sources and often provides the best opportunity for transcendence. As studied travelers must know, a past period cannot be specified; the convergence of time and space differs at each vein. The essence of travel itself is embodied submission to the unknown and the inevitable.
He was fidgety and distracted with the summer storms. I came home after work and folded my jacket carefully on the back of the couch; the iron coat hanger had vanished. I placed my keys on a clean kitchen table, the scattered papers gone and dirty coffee cups on the drying rack. Even my desk chair was gone. I wandered from room to room, drinking in his absence.
Seven Little Stories About Sex
by Eric Freeze
from Boston Review
The boy’s first French kiss was with a teddy bear. Her name was Melissa. She had blue fur, like shag carpet, two dimples for eyes, and a plastic one-piece nose and mouth. His brother told him, this is how it’s done. You put your tongue in their mouth and move it around. You need to know how to do it right when you get a girl. So the boy held Melissa’s head with both hands and licked the plastic slot that was Melissa’s mouth. His tongue dipped down like a hummingbird darting into the throat of a flower, slurping up nectar.
* * * *
Every month, the boy had an interview with his father. His father wrote down their conversation and made a list of goals to accomplish. The father wrote, “Have homework done every day by five. Get above 90% on the next math test.” And always, “Read the Bible.”
Once, the boy’s father talked about being in graduate school. He opened one of his mile-thick textbooks filled with diagrams and equations. His father had a pad of paper on his knees and he drew what looked like a sports play, with arrows and circles and squiggly lines. The boy moved his chair so he was looking at the shapes from the same angle. His father wrote “meiosis” in block letters, then “woman” next to a large round circle and “man” next to one of the squiggly lines. Then “sperm” and “egg.” He wrote these down in no apparent order and then he described the flagellating sperm swimming up a woman’s fallopian tubes to penetrate the egg. The boy’s father used many words that the boy didn’t know: mitochondria, flagellum, TK inhibitors, implantation, zygote. The father drew more pictures: the egg halved, then quartered, then grew into a bunch like grapes or a cluster of frog eggs. The boy understood that this was how every human being started, the proliferation of two cells dividing. But the father forgot to explain the sex part, how the sperm and the egg got to be in the same place at the same time and so for years the boy thought the sperm flew out of the man and through the air to where it entered the woman and multiplied like cancer.
* * * *
Once the boy was on a playground. The playground had see-saws and monkey bars and a metal dome of welded triangles. The boy rode a donkey on a giant spring next to a plastic turtle. He was waiting for his mother to meet him halfway from school, like she usually did, sauntering up in overalls and sandals, her hair in a bun. Three teenage boys with black or grey t-shirts came up to him. They had chains on their pockets and their pants hung so low that their crotches were almost down to their knees. Their hair was long and un-parted.
“Do you want to see a lizard?” one of them asked.
The boy said yes. He liked lizards. He knew that their ancestors were dinosaurs and lizards reminded him of these great ancestors, their regal heads and their bones in the Tyrell museum that he had been to with his class. Yes, he wanted to see a lizard. They were rare in Alberta; in fact, he couldn’t remember ever seeing one out in the wild—only in interpretive centers or zoos.
The middle teenager, the one with a silver loop splitting his bottom lip, pointed to a plastic turtle, said, “I saw a lizard go under that turtle.”
The boy got off the donkey and climbed down to look. There was about a half-foot space between the gravel and the turtle, so the boy pushed some of the gravel out of the way with his hand.
The teenager said, “That’s right, go all the way under and
you’ll see it.”
The boy did as he was told and went in under the turtle. He could sit up now. The turtle’s plastic shell diffused the light, making everything a pale green. “I don’t see it,” the boy said.
The teenagers were laughing. “Keep looking.”
The boy said, “I can’t see it anywhere!”
The teenagers threw rocks at the shell and the rocks made a sound like knuckles rapping a table. One said, “It’s out here now. Come quick!”
The boy climbed out and the sun seemed brighter than before and he looked at the feet of the boys to see if there was a lizard winding its way through the gravel, camouflaged like a chameleon or a green anole, blending into the smoky rocks. But there was no lizard, only one of the boys with his pants even lower, and a penis hanging out of his boxers, limp and hairy.
“There’s your lizard,” the teenager shouted before pulling his pants back up, a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t trick, and they were off just as the boy saw his mother running toward them, angry-looking, her sandals thwacking her heels, and the boy thought, that was not a lizard, that was definitely not a lizard.
* * * *
Grade seven, the boy took the bus to middle school. The boy’s family moved to the United States and the boy had started to learn to play the violin. The school put him in EEO: Extended Educational Opportunities. The boy still spoke Canadian; he said serviette for napkin, chesterfield for couch. Initially the boy was shy for saying these words, was embarrassed when kids would introduce him to other kids, like he was some Canadian ambassador. Two girls took it upon themselves to make him a badass. The boy had never been a badass before. One of the girls took the same bus to school. She sat one row in front of him and turned around in her seat and laid her head on her hands and asked him what it was like to live in Canada.
The boy said, “It’s colder.”
The girl said, “How cold?”
The boy said, “Colder than here.” Then they stopped talking.
“We are going to make you into such a badass,” the girl said.
The boy didn’t know why, but talking to the girl was hard for him. And exciting. He had bought the jeans that the girl told him about, the ones that she said made his ass look great. He felt that this was important: a good ass to be a badass. He was glad for the jeans, too, because they were loose and when he sat down, the crotch bunched up in the front so that there was plenty of room if he got an erection. He got erections all the time now, whenever the two girls would grab him by the hands and take him to their lockers or when they hugged him between classes and he could feel their incipient breasts against his chest. And the morning. The morning on the bus was the worst. He was tired and groggy and just the vibration of the bus would set it off. That’s why, when he talked to the girl, he couldn’t say much. He was wondering if she could see his erection in the folds of his loose pants, the pants that she told him to buy, the good-ass pants.
But now they were at the school and the kids were getting off the bus, shuffling past one another, wires trailing from ears into pockets, backpacks swinging, and the girl was waiting for the boy and the boy said, “I’ll be there in a second,” because he was at full mast now and the lack of vibration wasn’t doing squat. So he picked up his violin case from where it lay at his feet. It was hard and black and plastic, shaped a little, he thought, like a penis. He held the case in front of him so that it angled up, a giant erection hiding his little one. The girl was ahead of him now and the case bumped against his good-ass jeans until he could feel the swelling starting to work its way out, and then they were moving through the glass double doors and the girl was waving to her friend and she took the boy by the hand and twirled and twirled him so that the other girl could see how good he looked in his new jeans.
* * * *
Yanking your Yoda. The new Star Wars had just come out and the boy made a fist and unclenched and held his limp penis in his hand. Poor Yoda, about to be strangled. To be a Jedi, strangle him you must.
The boy made up the phrase at a friend’s house. They found a colloquial dictionary that the boys took turns reading. Masturbation wasn’t something the boy felt comfortable discussing openly; for all he knew, he was the only one of his friends who yanked his Yoda day after day. But reading the various euphemisms was somehow OK: bopping the bishop, choking the chicken, beating the meat, spanking the monkey, feeding the geese, yanking the chain, stroking the salami. The boys were prudish, came from prudish families, which made the words hilarious. Passing the book around was like what the boy imagined sharing a joint or a bottle of Tequila might be like, each new euphemism adding to their mutual intoxication.
But now the boy stood in front of his mirror and he felt a sickly guilt for the words: pounding the midget, spanking the plank, burping the worm, milking the lizard, doing the five-knuckle shuffle, cleaning the pipes, flogging the dolphin, punching the clown, siphoning the python, jerking the gherkin. The boy hoped the words would bring back that feeling of clutching his stomach, his breaths short and shallow, water in the corner of his eyes. Only Yoda made him smile now. There was something about the shape of his Jedi head, the peaked dome of it, the foreskin-like wrinkles on his face and his wispy curls like pubic hair that made the boy laugh so hard his abdomen was sore. The boy’s priest had told him, warned him about his sin, the sin of Onan, self-abuse, masturbation. There were consequences. Think of every sperm as the potential for life, he said. Millions of lives wasted on the ground, spilled. Would he want those lives on his hands? Those unborn souls chasing him through eternity? It would drive him mad in the afterlife, would be like being boiled alive in his own sperm. Boiled alive.
The boy thought back to the first time he had jerked his gherkin. He was young, eleven or twelve maybe, his penis not fully grown. It was at night, on the waterbed that he shared with his kid brother. He had trouble sleeping, would diddle with himself out of comfort, to help the sleep come on. He remembered the feeling the first time, a great whoosh of energy from his groin permeating his body. Nothing came out at first, no dead sperm, no souls chasing him through eternity. But gradually they came, every night, day after day, his seminal volume growing as he developed. Soon he was spurting, had to bring a towel to bed to clean up as inconspicuously as possible, the millions of sperm rising to the top, following each other up and out, like lemmings diving off a cliff. Now he was in high school, was jerking off a couple of times a day, each couple spurts adding to the vat of sperm waiting for him in the afterlife. He tried to fix this image in his mind: a huge cauldron, like the ones used in Disney cartoons, a witch’s brew where flames licked the sides and him roasting in there like a boiled cabbage. His penis wasn’t limp anymore but slightly engorged. He thought of the heat, searing heat, and his face melting like wax. His penis grew harder. The vat of semen was on fire, the flames engulfing, charring his face, and he smelled burning flesh. He was hard as a steel rod now and slowly, in spite of himself, his hand started to pump, yanking Yoda from his grave as the vat and all its contents went white hot and he felt himself, just for an instant, lifted away.
* * * *
At college, late at night, the boy and his girl made lazy figure-eights down landscaped medians on the way to the cathedral at the center of town. They were barely eighteen, under-aged drinkers nursing their buzz with rum and Cokes. The cathedral was near the top of a hill and the boy led her around behind. He had a Navajo blanket and she wore a spaghetti-strapped top and a pair of khaki shorts that barely covered her buttocks. Behind the cathedral was a park with grass and a spectacular view and it was three o’clock in the morning and they had been talking about how they could spend all night together and all of the next day and the next and not tire of each other’s company and wasn’t that unique and great? So much more freedom than either of them had had growing up. The boy put the blanket down like he was laying a bedspread and he propped himself up on one elbow with the girl still standing and he was thinking how good she looked with the lights of the cathedral
behind her and her soft cream legs and the spot on her back right above her buttocks which was the only place she had allowed him to touch freely since they had been dating these two months.
The girl lay down beside him, facing him, and she said, “What are you thinking?” Always the same question whenever they were close.
He wanted to say thinking of putting his hand between her legs because his friend Travis said that’s how to get a girl hot but instead he said just how great it would be to be with you forever and the girl said that she’d been thinking the same thing. And then she looked down at the cathedral, its white lights shining up to its spires and arches, and he realized she was thinking the M-word and he was thinking sex and he wondered if talking about the M-word could get him sex if he was careful. He liked this girl, he really did, but he had a condom in his back pocket and Travis had been razzing him for a week that it had taken him so long to score.
“Here,” the boy said. “You look cold.”
He pulled the edge of the Navajo blanket over her and then he rolled her toward him so that she was lying comfortably in his arms and he pulled the other end of the blanket around him so they were like two larvae inside a cocoon. She put his arm around her and placed it on her stomach.
“I feel so safe with you,” she said.
His hand felt like it was on fire. He had a vague idea of what was below her navel, that there was hair and a hole and labia and moisture and so he rubbed her belly and put his index finger in her navel and wiggled it around some. Then, as if it were a power button turning her on, she rotated toward him and placed her hand on his cheek and opened her mouth to him. He moved his lips and let his tongue do some of the work and he tried to move his head around and brush his fingers lightly against her face like he’d seen actors do in movies. He put his hand on her shoulder blades and massaged where it met her side, just under her armpit and he slowly slid his hand over with each combination of kisses. But as soon as he felt the padded cup of her bra, she took his hand and put it on her thigh and then she rolled on top of him.
