Saline Solution (23 page)

A trickle of sperm jerked up through the opening and onto my fingers. I looked at it. Just such a load lodged in Lucinda's cunt one night and now a human being was festering in her womb. And soon the salt solution would enter her bloodstream, triggering her uterus into a series of convulsions which would dislodge the troublesome foetus, who was scheduled to ski out on a torrent of blood and tissue.

He will have died with his symbols on.

I was disgusted at myself for thinking contemptuous things about the death of the child, for viewing the entire affair with a sneering witticism. And yet, how could I feel or do other than what I felt and did? Again, it seemed that some value system had insinuated itself into my character, and it was against this that I measured myself.

I got up and went into the kitchen to wipe my hands. I ate a piece of cantaloupe. The cold scrumptious fruit blessed my body as it went down. I felt so much out of contact with the basic realities of life, with the sun, with the air, with the water, with the earth. I was a cell in the body of humankind, and the humankind was dying.

I realised that I had absolutely no idea of how I was supposed to be or how I should behave.

There was nothing else to do, so I went to sleep. Lucinda stirred and woke as I got into bed. She pressed her warm body to me. And I groaned and cursed inwardly as I reached for her.

XIX

Dear Anita,

Last night will remain in my memory as the most perfect evening of its kind that I have ever spent. Many of my sexual gambits are falling away from me these days, and I tick them off as they pass: the last homosexual encounter, the last masturbation, the last literary flirtation. Perhaps, one of these days I shall write THE LAST FUCK in sweat between the breasts of my final woman. Our exchange reminded me that foreplay is by no means inferior to actual penetrating intercourse. And the tension between two narcissists is always exhilarating.

You are a sad human being. The mechanical routine of your life, the compact of helpless emotion between you and your dog, and the growing grimness of old age, are inevitably devestating. but so long as you can convince yourself that awareness saves, you should be able to brazen it through, and die quipping. In all this I see you as a mirror to my own condition, especially in the way your inability to maintain an intimate relationship mimics my own and serves as a model for

growing numbers of the species.

I was surprised that we didn't fuck, and found myself smiling as I woke this morning. The contrast this provides to my usual Savonarolian gloom indicated that I must have had a good time last night. But I think that now it will never happen, for having had a chance to think about it, I realise that fucking you would be unbearably tedious.

Picture it. Your Capricornian thrusts challenging my Scorpionic energy. The female in me twittering to the male in you, the stew enlivened by the fact that the woman in me is a lesbian while the man in you is gay. Our minds in a game of speed checkers, leaping over one another to capture and remove. And of course a romp through the dualities, through yielding and firm, through strangeness and familiarity, through sensuality and distance, through fantasy and actuality, through ecstasy and terror, into the eye of orgasm.

May I yawn?

There
is
nothing new under the sun.

How would it have been at first? A long time just kissing, discovering what joyous dances our perfect mouths may make. My full and pouting lips leaning fleshily into your edgily curved wide quivering lips. And then to yearn and strain, to empty and explode, to rise and fall. Until the heat of that energy began to glow in our chests and we crushed our breasts against our breasts and hung in that rare space where for a moment one might believe that love was happening.

And then the rest of it. Fingers, nails, nipples, arseholes, cock, cunt, toes, armpits, bellies, buttocks, kneecaps, and elbows. Rolling around and jockeying for position. Feeling the subtle crescendo of wills meshing. Then to get it in, get it in, now it's in, all the way in, your legs come up and I sink glowingly into you.

Change gears.

You moan and purr. I bite your shoulders. You scrape the skin off my back. For a short while we taste the melting of the shields which guard us. Our auras merge. Genital to genital, mouth to mouth, arms holding loosely tight, we lock to our embrace and rock gently. Small eddies of sheet sensation thrill us together.

'Yes,' you say.

⁴
Yes,' I say.

At which point both of us remember that it will be quite different in the morning and our absolutist conspiracy is another dodge to ward off the horror. In chagrin I pull back and you fall back, and I kneel perpendicular to your torso, turning you over, turning you to the side, passionately technical, taking refuge in control, to blot out that one anguished moment of perception which always sees how solitary and transitory are the transports of the body.

And then, junkies of the soul, we would have to do it again, and again, to reaffirm the deadly vision. And sophisticates that we are, we would eventually bring out the paraphernalia, the props to help us sustain our pain. And then others, as provender for us to feed on. Until the boredom reached such a shattering frequency that we would split violently apart.

And I would say, 'Anita? Oh, yes, we had an
affaire,
but that's all ended now.'

Perhaps the key lies in ceasing to confuse self-destruction with pleasure.

A few weeks before I saw you, I lay in Bosley's arms, he also a Capricorn, but a man, and tall, and black. He caressed me with the most wistful of ironic inflections as I sat on his floor trying to be gay. It was easy to give myself to him, for we could be honest about our despair. Shall I tell you about that fucking? Can you understand how I understand? I have watched women in the throes of orgasm and there is nothing you can experience in

the way that I haven't known. The bittersweet of penetration, the relaxation and acceptance, the movement, the joining, the excitement I can never feel when I lie astride a my cock priming a woman's ventures into rapture. And at the finish, feeling as though I had a good massage, and expert and pleasant kneading of my flesh.

And there it is. Evolution's joke. The creation of the sexes. Giving with desire what is taken away by death.

After leaving you I returned to the apartment I share with Lucinda, and fucked her abruptiy. For the first time in five months, she wanted to say no. But we both sensed that it was for the last time, so we consented for old time's sake. And we wound up the engine once more, pumping our despair into the night.

Sex is a dead end.

I mailed the letter and felt lighter. Now I had only to deal with the sense of universal despair which permeated my every pore. Walking back from the mailbox I saw an old man on a bench near Central Park. He was doubled over, his arms across his stomach. He looked as though he had been in pain a long time and didn't care any more. The grey drizzle had soaked his matted clothes and little drops of wet had formed in the rim of his dirty hat. On his feet he wore felt slippers, incongruous, probably picked up from the garbage cans in front of the highrise across the way. The air was rotten with exhaust, the passing cars and cabs and buses and trucks exuding the stuff by the millions of gallons. The sky was gunpowder black.

I looked at the faces on the street. I saw masks which told the stories of a million timid tragedies. The hard tight mouths, the quick glittering eyes, the furrowing foreheads, the deadness of expression. Sickness everywhere. Cripples all over.

I passed a bank with its automatons standing glassily behind the cages, and in the window saw a photograph of somewhere in New Mexico, blue sky and clouds, multicoloured mesas. The text stated that the bank would be more than happy to make such a vacation possible for everybody. I thought of the hundreds of thousands who were held in subhuman thrall to the grey dull routines in countless banks across the nation. The giant ritual of money worship for the benifit of the masters of the land.

I flashed the entire horror of the world condition in terms of the implacable greed of the men who owned these banks, who ran the machines of war, who spawned the empires of commerce. The brute fact of human stupidity staggered me. And the situation steadily grew worse.

I realised that the only decent act one could commit in relation to that bank was to totally level it with a massive charge of dynamite.

'Be careful,' I said to myself.

The laws against thought were very close to being enacted. And if I even, started thinking about blowing things up they would come and get me. They would put me away. They would kill me.

I walked on. I saw the globe in a single vision, and everywhere grey clouds hung over the land and from them poured down in steady unvarying sheets a cataclysmic rain of pure hatred.

I raised my face and yelled in unholy joy.

Only two of three people even bothered to look up. The rest were dealing with the end of the world in their own way in their own heads, and really couldn't be bothered with someone else's grief.

XX

'Well, are you going to give me the money?'

Lucinda sat propped against the pillows at the foot of the bed and asked for three hundred and fifty dollars, half the price of the abortion. Anger flared through me and I struck out.

'You've got ten years of alimony coming, twenty thousand in the bank, and millionaire parents. And you're asking
me
for money? That would wipe out half of every cent I have in the world.'

'You could at least take responsibility for your half of the pregnancy. Don't stick me with the whole thing.'

'God,' I thought, 'I wish this would end.'

I shouted at her: 'I've taken all the responsibility I can. The money is a separate issue. Can't you see that?'

'I don't feel like being understanding,' she said.

'Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. I don't want to hear about money. I don't want to hear about problems. I don't want to hear anything.' I grabbed my jacket.

'Where are you going?' She came forward on the bed; she looked worried.

I started for the door.

'Wait,' she said. I stopped. 'I don't want to be alone today.'

I felt like a prick. I went back into the room and sat down at the edge of the bed.

'Can't we just have a day together, just that?' she said. I leaned over and she moved into my arms. The attitude was classic. Corn became the final style. 'I have to go to the doctor's this afternoon,' I said. 'But I can stay until then, and we can have the night together.'

The day went slowly. We ate, read, stared at the ceiling. From time to time I looked out of the window and noted the passage of the hours in terms of the glowing darkness of the day. There was no sun, merely the black and white blanket of pollution that hung a half mile up. I felt myself grow calm, as though the decision to remain together in the space of the apartment obviated the coming split. We entered an almost opiate continuum in which some of our spontaneous liking for one another began to re-form. It became possible for the 'us' to emerge from the 'she' and 'I'. And with that the desire to let the baby be born burst out again, and the hope fell from the centre of Lucinda's eyes whenever she let her control go. Several times the words almost came to my lips, 'Let's leave it all now. Let's find the last place on earth where the poison hasn't reached. Let's try to take care of one another and make a space for our child to grow in.'

Yet each appearance of that thought was met with a ring of destruction, an impulse to find a gun and go out into the streets and begin to kill, to blow holes in the heads of this horrid animal which was rabid with violence and greed. And so I stay suspended in the ultimate posture of impotence: talk.

'Death to the species,' I shouted out loud.

'Oh dear,' said Lucinda, smiling. For she was familiar with, and enjoyed, these tirades. They were something we could share.

'Up with murder and destruction. Don't pay any attention to appearances. They'll smile and they'll seem civil, but they are all conforming fiends, proliferating, bringing more of their kind into the world, making the wars larger, the systems more oppressive, the religions more idiotic.'

'Keep that up and you can run for office,' she said.

'Cruelty is the only way to survive on this godforsaken planet. We've been left on our own and we can't sustain the energy to stay awake. So we kill, and each time we plunge the knife into someone else, it gives us food, it eases our pain. Do you see that? We are imperfectly made. We must do violence to survive.'

'Stop,' she said, 'you are frightening me.'

The vibrations of the room shattered again. 'I'm glad we're killing the baby,' I said, 'it's better off dead.'

I sat down next to Lucinda and spoke gently into her gaze. 'You see what's out there. Institutionalised brutality, from cradle to grave. We've traded the terror of the jungle for the horror of the city. A nation of wage slaves and psychic derelicts stumbling in each day to the choking centres of power to build the latter-day pyramids, to expand the empires of the overlords. They are so demoralised that they have forgotten that such a thing as freedom ever was. I mean real freedom, not that shit the politicians talk about. They beg for crumbs and are happy when the smallest piece of booty falls into their hands.