Nocturnal Emissions (32 page)

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.”

Jealous—oh. Her unreasoning jealousy extended to the elderly landlord:

“I know she wants you to stick your face in that old cobwebby cellar of hers.

Is that what you do instead of paying the rent?” She was even jealous of her own mother. I spoke to her mother on occasion, when I ran into her outside, and after I would hear, “I know that fat whore comes to see you when I’m out with my friends. You want that other hole, I know, and she’s the closest you can come to what you thought I was going to be.”

She became physical with me. When I cooked for her, she ate with chop-sticks, and more than once when we argued at the table she suddenly jabbed them in my face, shoved their tips against my upper lip, squashing it against my teeth and snarling at me through her own gritted teeth. Once she punched me, splitting both my upper and lower lips, when I said she was acting crazy.

“I’m not crazy!” she shouted, wild eyed. “Don’t you ever call me that!
You’re
crazy!
You
are!”

Despite her protests, I truly felt she could have benefitted from some other medication we made at Nepenthe, such as the anger management drug Dammitol.

She’d accuse me of spitting in her food or otherwise tainting it when she was out of the room (such thoughts occur to people who would do these things themselves, but I tried not to think of that when I ate my own food around her). She told me I was old, fat, ugly, poor, that no one would ever love me.

Playing on my own insecurities, trying to break down my self esteem the better to manipulate me—or simply hurt me.

Oh, to be alone in my little flat again. Sweet solitude, how could I ever have cursed it?

But…then I’d see that long dark hair again, spilled like ink upon her shoulders. I was always compulsively stroking it, and I would cup her small sleek head in both my hands as I tasted her tongue, sucked on her plump lower lip, and she would kiss me back with her eyes staring open (preferably, without her contacts). She would burst into my flat unannounced and giggling, jump into my arms so that I’d have to catch her and not topple. She’d look up at me, in my embrace, shake her head wonderingly and say, “I love you so much, Fetch, you know that?” (That’s my name: Fetch.) “You put some kind of magic spell on me, didn’t you?”

But…those words would soon again morph into, “You never believe that I love you!”

But, and but again.

In her calm moments, she aroused my tenderness, and my pity. If she couldn’t control her emotions, I must at least try to control mine; I would remind myself (frequently) that it couldn’t be easy, all this churning weather inside her little envelope of skin. We would lie in bed and she’d stare up at the tiny room’s ridiculously high ceiling where gas had once pooled and congeal, and speak in this bewildered sort of manner that would make me pull her closer.