Full Frontal Fiction (3 page)

Terrarium

BY SUSAN NEVILLE

IT WAS ALWAYS DAYTIME when she saw him, but there was never light, and there were never other people. He came to her room, and the room was dark with drawn drapes, and after he left, it smelled of sex.

He said this thing would never hurt a soul. He would never tell a single human being. She would never tell a single human being. It was a completely enclosed system. If anyone saw him enter her room, even once, they would deny everything and end it. She loved him, and she knew it had to be that way for now. He was married. He had children. He was a responsible man.

He left dried semen peeling from her skin, flaking off like sunburn, or was it in fact her skin that was peeling off in layers, leaving her unprotected? Or paint from the walls, which were shrinking to fit her? She was convinced the room was shrinking to fit her.

Pretend with me. His sack crawled like the skin of a squid. It was always moving, no matter what his face was doing. She couldn't begin to imagine being him, that particular kind of bondage. He had beautiful eyes and dark hair with flecks of silver. There was the same silver honeycombed in the window glass.

Her room was in a converted factory where once men had manufactured parts for cars. There was still a red Stutz in a room by a former loading dock that was now a restaurant. There was no door wide enough to drive it through. It had been put together in that room as a novelty, like a ship inside a bottle, and it had remained there.

All her clothes were drenched with the smell of him. Nothing would wash it out. Not a thing in the world would wash it out. It was a musty smell, like decaying leaves. If only she were sure he loved her. If only she were sure he wouldn't leave her here alone. Outside the window there were people walking through the sunlight and the dust. How did they get outside? The room was shrinking to fit her. It was a completely enclosed system. When he left the room, she felt the oxygen and moisture seep out around the windows. It drew the walls and ceiling toward her. It was a completely enclosed system. She couldn't breathe. She loved him. She was madly in love with him. Pretend with me, he said.

Outside, there was a city filled with limestone monuments and statues. It was a city like a giant cake, all elegiac, funereal, a place made of stone the color of sugar.

She opened the drapes. A bus went by, with its deep blue windows.

A glass bank tower, glazed with reflected sunset, orange as a Popsicle, shone on his face. An airplane drew its slow descending line near the horizon. Do you see it? he asked. Yes, she said, I see it. You don't need another thing, he said, and she said, No, not another thing. She touched the silver watch on his arm, the warm skin, the dark curling hair, the places where his blood pressed against his skin.

There was a sheen to the monuments, all glassy polished stone, and when she moved her head just right, the light snapped like rows and rows of flashing cameras, aimed straight for her heart.

Talk to me, she said. Straight ahead of her, there was a row of silos. The sunset faded and the silos towered in the blue-white light.

There, he said, and he took her to the base of them. It made her dizzy. She put her hand on the concrete, and it was cool, as though the silos had spent the entire day in refrigeration. A breeze caught a pile of grain dust and it whirled around her face like fog.

The silos were connected to a flour mill. There were trucks lined up outside the silos and the mill. PASS THE BREAD was written on the side of some of them. EAT CAKE was written on some others. She didn't see a single human being, just these trucks and silos and the mill. It was a daylight factory, like the one she lived in, and she could hear the pounding of machines through the long windows, but no sign of people, like one of those neutron bombs had hit, those bombs that burn the flesh and leave the cathedrals.

You know, she said, I read in the paper that viruses replicate by building tiny machines. I swear it's true. They punch a hexagonal hole into a molecule and build something like a nut-and-bolt assembly to turn the DNA into the cell. I read it.

She looked at him. This universe has to be so much stranger, she said, than we can imagine it.

I mean think of it, she said. Little microscopic things inside your cells building simple machines. A few thousand years from now they'll have strip malls and gas stations and ten-cents-off sales, all underneath the skin.

She'd been waiting since she saw him last to tell him this. Otherwise, what was it for? Every bit of information seemed strange and miraculous to her but didn't reach its full potential to amaze her, didn't seem strange enough, or, rather, mysterious or perhaps even real enough, until she passed it on to him and she knew he took it in. This was how she knew she loved him. She was absolutely blind and dumb when he wasn't there to hear her speak.

And maybe we're the viruses inside something else inside something else inside something else, like Russian nesting dolls, and God walks around with us inside and doesn't notice.

Rather than the other way around, he said, and he unbuttoned her blouse to the breastbone and ran a finger down a blue vein to her left nipple. She watched the nipple rise, felt the ping of blood in the tip. It's like they think, she said, these microscopic things, they think. Not thought, he said, but will. The universe runs on sex and will, he said. One feeds the other. I'm older than you. You'll live to see that this is true.

They walked through a laboratory filled with glass tubes and faded Formica tables. There were different colored liquids in the tubes, and the tables were covered with white dust. Beyond the lab, the box of an elevator without a door, these belts and weights that you could see.

She was afraid of closed-in places and heights, and she leaned into the warmth of his body. It was strange being out in the daylight with him. He seemed more vague to her, like something bleached by the sun. She wondered if she looked the same to him. She felt like one of those couples you'd see in beat-up cars, his hand jammed inside her blouse or underneath the waistband of her jeans, and the look on her face too old, a kind of mask, both hard and scared because she could not concentrate or focus on a single thing outside of him.

He said he had worked at this mill one summer when he was a boy. You're still a boy, she said. No I'm not, he said, I'm not a boy.

One of his jobs was to walk on the crust that hardened on the grain and spoiled the suction when it was time to drain the silos. He broke the crust, with a rope around his waist, and then grabbed on to the ladder as the grain began to flow and threatened to pull him under. Grain is tricky, he said, both liquid and solid. Tons of red wheat could stand solid as a mountain and then give way and flow in waves.

In five seconds, he said, you can drown in it. Be so far under that twenty men couldn't pull you out.

She remembers walking in the woods one spring, kicking aside old leaves and looking for crocuses and the red spindly starts of peonies. She had reached down and picked up some rotting leaves, she had crushed the webbing and run her fingers along the spine. She was eighteen and all of a sudden that day the ground had started to feel like a thin crust on top of endless water. Like the ground was fragile, like it would give way at any step and she'd just fall and fall and fall and never stop falling.

Once that occurred to her the feeling had never entirely gone away. She'd just gotten used to it, like learning to walk on a ship. She had sea legs. Once in a while the boat would pitch her forward and she could feel herself starting to drown. She thought she understood what it would be like to drown in the silo. She wanted him forever always. Whatever it is that wants to pitch her forward was always out there, around the edge of her vision, circling.

Hold me, she said, and she leaned into him, his breathing in her ear. Just the thought of being up that high terrified her. Whenever she was up that high she was absolutely certain she would jump. Do you love me? she asked him. He would never say the words, and she knew it was a dangerous thing to ask him, but she asked it anyway. Do you love me? She led his hand up underneath her skirt. Do you love me? Am I important to you? Will you live in a house with me, and read our children stories, and go to church all dressed in a suit and tie on Easter? Could we build a family like a boat for the times when the ground turns to water? Could you do that with me as you could never do it with her?

She was too young for his wife to matter to her, but his children were all too real. She was waiting for them to grow up and then he would be with her all the time, and they would eat in restaurants, holding hands.

He waited a beat or two too long before he answered her. I love you, he said then, but it was wooden, the way he said it. She changed the subject, asked him if he was afraid someone he knew might see them. He told her the mill was, like every place, so automated it was almost empty. Just a man or woman here or there to tend to emergencies and start up the machines. You could go in the largest mill or power plant, he said, and see room after room of abandoned desks. And anyway, though they knew him here, it was a different life. It couldn't touch his present one.

Completely self-contained, she said, and she tried to laugh.

There was motion everywhere she looked, but he was right, no human beings. There were buckets that rose up and down on belts, and man-lifts only one foot wide. You could jump on one, he said, and rise up ten floors like you'd ingested yeast. She tried to put her arm around his waist but felt him move away. When the lift went by from the bottom floor, he stepped onto a step about a foot wide, and he rose into the air. Now she'd done it. She would never again as long as she knew him mention the word
love.
He rose clear to the top of the building. She could see the bottom of his heels six floors above her.

He was nothing more to the person who made that lift than one of the buckets of grain, a container of pulsing blood. Why should he be any more than that to her. She could turn and leave this building but instead she called to him. Don't leave me here, she said. Please please come back down to me. She waited for him to return, like the receipt in a pneumatic tube.

When he came back down, she tried to laugh again, and still it didn't work. She was feverish, she was dizzy, not the least bit well. You scared the hell out of me, she said to him. No matter what you say, you know you're such a goddamn boy.

There were beams in the floor of the mill like a log cabin, bags of barley flour everywhere, soot on the wall from a fire, ink stains on the floor. She followed him then past metal pipes, past giant bags of flour, past boxes marked SWINE STARTER and NIACIN, past gray flour dust and a curving wall that echoed the curve of the railroad track outside of it.

Once he'd brought her silver metal balls you were supposed to roll around the palm of your hand. He'd put them deep inside of her, there were bells inside those balls, and he'd taken his hand and made her come and listened to the muffled sound of the bells. She remembered it now because every inch of the floor was covered with grain that rolled like ball bearings underneath her feet.

She slid several times on the grain and dodged pipes and the lifts that continued circling up and down on thick strong belts.

Finally they walked into a large, window-lined room. The room was filled with enormous golden oak boxes, like armoires, arranged in two straight lines and suspended from the ceiling and up from the floor on black rubber stems.

Look, he said, and she did.

She thought something was wrong with her eyes because every one of those wardrobes was shimmying, twisting around on the rubber stems with a motion like belly dancers. These are the sifters, he said, they separate the wheat and chaff. They shook and shook and a part of the concrete block wall and all the paned windows shook.

Inside the wardrobes the grain fell through metal nets with a thread count as dense and fine as percale sheets. The bran swirled like sparks when he opened the machine and pointed a penlight.

The dark shaking windows, the whole room vibrating. She could feel the power in the engines all the way through her body.

No one else was in there with them. He put his hand on a wooden sifter and held out his other hand to her, and she took it. Why couldn't she stay mad at him? Jesus, she said, oh dear Jesus God, please talk to me. She could already feel the vibrations in the soles of her feet, the shaking windows, through his hand, through his body, to her hand like an electric current. He leaned into the vibrations and pulled her to him, and she lifted her skirt and moved up close to him and pressed her clit against his thigh. She looked over his shoulder, out through the window, to the city. The lights were coming on like the flecks of bran. The wheat, the chaff, the constant sifting and falling, the rising sparks. Underneath the sparks there was all that rolling darkness. The wind through the windows, her skirt, his voice, the wind. His hands, the wind, his voice, the grain from a hundred farms. What was he saying? There's nothing else outside of this, he was whispering, not one single thing outside of this.

Two Cans and a String

BY JACK MURNIGHAN

WHILE SHE FUCKS ME she makes me talk on the phone with various members of my family. Multiple conversations with my mother, my brother, my aging grandmother. And then the exes, the coworkers, the credit card agencies, the pizza deliverers. I ordered the electricity for our new apartment with a shoelace tied around my balls and the back of her teeth dragging up and down my cockhead. On my hands and knees on the parquet making dinner reservations with my pants around my calves and her thumb up my ass. On my back and immobilized cupping the receiver tight in my hand telling Mom the highlights of my week at work trying to keep her from hearing the steaming urine splash off my chest and stomach. When the phone starts to shake in my hand and I feel the exigent tightening behind my balls, I breathe deeply through my nose, holding back through each anxious throb, only to release all at once beneath the cover of a throat-clearing cough. “I'm sorry, Grandma, I must of swallowed funny. Excuse me.”

My name is Lucien. I am a line cook. I spend my evenings bent over a commercial grill tending to a massacre of meats. My days I spend with Alice; her evenings—her evenings she spends. I am thirty-eight years old; I don't know how old Alice is. She says twenty-two or twenty-three or twenty-five depending on the situation, but it's clear that she's older, perhaps much older. Quite some time ago I gave her the keys, and she normally doesn't arrive until I've already made the coffee and stirred the eggs in the bowl and am sitting distractedly at the table waiting for the sound of hard heels in the stair-well, the sound of her smoker's wheeze as she tops the final stair, the turning of the lock as she gasps her last breaths to try to conceal that she's unfit, sleepless and entirely overplayed.

She comes to me because I never ask. Never ask if she will come again, never ask where she's been, never ask what she's doing or how she can do the things she does. When she first saw me, she saw what she hoped to see in my hands. Broad, pale and hairless as a child's. She thought I'd be thick and pliant, a sizeable block of workable clay to shape with the insistence of her needs. And this is what I've been for her: a neutral page on which to write her dramas, to play out her fantasies of security. She didn't know, she still doesn't know, that the hair on my fingers and the sides of my hands is perpetually burned off by flame-ups from the grill. She knows that I cook, but doesn't know anything about it. What would I tell her? That you test a steak with a two-fingered push like a doctor percussing a patient's chest? That you turn a chicken breast when the liquid starts to puddle in its center? That when I come home at night and manage to fall asleep, I dream not of golden meadows or armed assailants, but panic my way through forgotten entrees and dropped dishes?

She comes in drunk and often with smudged lipstick, wearing clothes you never see during the light of day. She hurries in and kisses me on the cheek and flops into bed and lets me bring her coffee with her cigarette. Soon thereafter I bring her the omelet but she eats only a bite and then if she's tired she goes right to sleep but if she's drunk enough she pulls me toward the bed with her ashtray mouth and puts my hand under her skirt and rubs my knuckles against her and moans in a way that I can't quite trust. And then she pulls me closer and slides my cock out of my undershorts without really looking at it and rolls over onto her knees. And suddenly I'm inside of her, and I don't have anything on and I don't know if she's protected or if she's been careful but she's moaning so heavily and pitching against me so hard that my fears kind of get lost in the spectacle of her rising ass and something just kind of takes me over and I can't even stay in my mind long enough to figure out if she's really enjoying it. And then I lean my head back and put a hand over my eyes and from my chest to my knees I feel opaline and electric and then my ass tightens to a pinch and I quiver and twitch and just give out inside her like the time-slowed lilt of an airborne leaf. When I open my eyes I can see that she's been panting and clawing and it seems that maybe she too has been delivered. She knows I'm looking and turns her neck and flashes me a smile of playful commiseration that I don't let myself question. Then she wipes herself with her hand and jumps up to go to the bathroom in a dash, leaving me with a peck on the cheek as I get up to do the dishes, awash in the fullness of it all.

God it had been a long night, such a long night already and it was only like two or something. I had been fighting with my ex, had totally fucking had it with him, had to get away or I was finally going to tell him what was going on. I mean, why are they all such creeps, why do I never meet a guy who doesn't turn into a creep the minute I leave his bed? On my way out, he keeps repeating, “Alice, Alice, Alice,” and I'm screaming and carrying on and I manage to tear my tights on the edge of his bed frame but I keep going anyway, taking my bag off the kitchen table and telling the fat fuck to go to hell.

So I'm lucky to get a cab and I just tell the driver Midtown, and as we're racing up Flatbush I'm looking at the lights thinking, How the fuck did I let my life get this fucked up? Oh God, what am I doing? What am I doing? What am I fucking doing? And each time I think it, it's like the words start to tremble and get more insistent, and I'm about ready to start crying right there in the cab and I take another swig of brandy and then I think, Oh fuck, I'm not supposed to fucking drink or this medication is never gonna work, and then I'm ready to cry about that too, 'cause I'm itchy and it hurts to pee and it's been two months already and I can't even quit drinking long enough for the medicine to have any effect.

The cabbie starts to take us onto the Manhattan Bridge and I see the downtown skyline off to the side and the Brooklyn Bridge and the East River and Lady Liberty and I'm thinking, What am I doing in all this shit? How did I let it happen this way? Why can't I just close my eyes and make it all be over?

She feels she must test my silence. She tries to draw out my sighs, longs to shake me, to tear me from my moorings, to draw me into her. But then she never notices how my hand lingers when she turns away, doesn't know the savagery of my morning coffee spent wondering if I'll hear the footsteps on the stairs, doesn't know how my stomach drops—from relief or fear?—when I hear the turning of the key in the lock. She would have me lose myself, to consign myself to her without reflection, and sometimes I think she only asks it of me because I would find it the most unnatural thing in the world to do.

I had had lovers before Alice. Quiet and timid girls who I held in my arms without words or understanding. Our sex would unfold at the snail's pace of my own initiative. They would hesitate to touch my cock, and then only touch it furtively, like a hot cup of coffee or someone else's diary. I would love them with my body in a rhapsody of my own unconnectedness. I would see our bodies in a haze, gazing abstractly like I was watching a ritual I didn't fully comprehend. Their pleasure seemed aleatory to me, a function not of my acumen but of their having decided, long in advance, that I was the one. I would listen as their breathing accelerated; I'd hold steady as they lifted their hips from the bed and bit their thumbs forcefully; I'd press my forehead to their shoulders and shadow their movements as they'd buck and spasm and relent. And then I would say, I would always say, as they opened their leadened eyes, “You are beautiful. You are so beautiful.”

So I got the cabbie to drop me off at Roddy's and there was this guy sitting at the bar alone, and even though he had B&T written all over him, he was so big and looked so uncomfortable in his ten-dollar tie, it was like he had to be too fucking dumb to start any bullshit. He had one of his oversized mitts wrapped around a whiskey sour with the cherry and the straw still in it and I don't think he realized it's a woman's drink, and then I realized that he probably had no idea what to drink in a bar, and suddenly it all became clear to me that this guy probably works in Hoboken and lives with his bedridden mother and was supposed to meet some coworkers here or something but they blew him off or he got it wrong and he was trying to make the most of a broken evening, his first one out in months, and that I could make this guy very happy and maybe what I needed was someone to make me feel normal, to make me feel clean, like it was me that lived in some ticky-tack house in the suburbs and worked a 9 to 5 and had a kid and a car payment and plans for the future.

When I sat down next to him, he looked up at me with bovine, disbelieving eyes. He was the opposite of what I normally find attractive, but I was thinking, Fuck, all I ever pick are assholes, maybe it's time to try something new. So I turned on my bar stool so he couldn't see the tear in my tights and I asked him for a light and he fumbled in his pockets but it was obvious he didn't have one so I told him to buy me a drink instead and I ordered a whiskey sour and he laughed, saying, “That's what I'm drinking,” like I didn't already know, like I didn't totally fucking have his number, the dumb piece of Jersey shit. I've never gotten over how easy it is, how much they're willing to believe. At first I thought it was a kind of magic, that I could be anything I wanted; then I started to see that the only reason they had stars in their eyes was that they were not really looking, that they didn't see anything at all, that they were looking up my skirt and down my shirt and saying yes, yes, but they weren't seeing shit of me. And the sensitive ones would pretend to listen; and the smart ones would finish my sentences; and the rich ones would tell me they'd get me something nice, but I was never anything more than what they wanted me to be, their fantasy of the tramp they'd save or the angel they'd fuck up the ass.

The day I gave Alice the keys I thought back to an evening I'd spent with some people I met through a dishwasher at work. They were passing around a joint and one of the women wanted to play this game. You were supposed to say, if you were shipwrecked on a deserted island and could bring one animal with you, what it would be. My first thought was a dog that would protect and love me and whose love I'd never question, that would follow me and be loyal to my death. But then another idea insinuated itself, truer than the first: I thought of a falcon, that I would fear, but respect. That would return to me, but I wouldn't control it. That would sit blinded on my arm until I'd set it free, to go and kill, and come back only if it so wanted. And each time as I placed the hood back over its head I would wonder why it ever did.

He was so odd, so sad and nervous. I had to keep talking to keep the conversation going. I'd ask him questions and he'd answer in three words then sit silent again and stir his drink. I asked him his name but I didn't really understand what he said—it sounded like “Lucid” or something—and then he didn't even ask for mine back. And part of me is thinking, This guy is a total fucking loser, but then another part of me thinks, Maybe he just doesn't know how to win, and that's when I decided that I'd fuck him in his own car that night and see how long it took him to tell me that he loved me.

Happy, happy—I was going to make him so happy. So I walked him out to his car and got in alongside him and he started to ask where we were going and I just raised a finger to my lips, “Shhh,” then ran it down his, then down his chest, and then when I reached into his pleated navy pants he came all over my hand. I felt the laughter rising up in me, and the shame on his face made the cruelty rise up too, but I forced it under and leaned over and kissed him on the mouth and said, “Oh baby, I'm ready to burst now too,” and then I ran his come through his hair and laughed and said he looked like James Dean and pushed him back on his seat and told him to close his eyes and I put my hand back between his legs and took him in my hand like it was a broken wing and worked beneath his balls until he started to groan and move with my touch and I told him to keep his eyes closed while I pulled my skirt up above my garters and climbed over him onto my knees with my ankles pressed to the edge of the seat and I held myself open with one hand and guided him in with the other and he started saying, “I can't, I can't, I can't,” but I pushed my tongue into his mouth and pulled down hard on top of him and was grinding back and forth until, a minute later, he was ready to lose himself again. And then I stopped on a dime and pulled off him and said, “Uh uh,” waving my finger back and forth like a schoolmistress.

And he tried to speak and I said, “Tell me your number,” and he said, “Hold on, let me find a pen,” and I said, “No, just tell me; I'll remember,” and he said, “I work late,” and I said, “I know,” and he said, “226 2809,” and before he could get his pants zipped back up I was out his door and across the parking lot, getting into another cab.

On the first night we fucked; on the second night we were in the car again, and again when I was about to come she lifted herself off me and looked away. But this time she didn't leave, she just turned in the seat so she was on her knees looking out the passenger window and pushed her ass firm against my face. She was wet and sticky and told me not to press so hard and while I was fumbling around trying to figure out what to do with my tongue she just rubbed against me and tucked one hand between her legs. I don't know if anything is scarier than a woman taking her pleasure when you're just sitting there not knowing where to put your hands. So I just ran my tongue up and down her sweaty cheeks trying to stay out of the way until she finally came and looked back at me and gave me a deep heavy kiss. You're the best, she said. And I looked at her and had no fucking clue what I had done.

All my life I've wanted something. The tiara that would make me a princess, the pony I'd ride into my dreams. Later the horse had a rider, and he'd lift me out of the cosmic mess I had made and take me to his castle in the dunes. But then the real men would come with their glittering watches and I'd look the poor fucks in the face and think, Is this what I get? Is this all there is? But Lucien seemed so neutral, so average and grounded that maybe I could get lost in him like in a big field of grain. Just close my eyes and take five steps and never find my way out again.