Enemy Blood

At my insistence, Aaron choked me during sex the other night. I nearly passed out, but I had a spectacular orgasm. My load shot into the air like a Saturn V rocket. The next day he informed me in a text that he wouldn’t do that again, that it was perverse, depraved, disgusting, dangerous, unnatural. Maybe, I replied, but I loved it and can’t wait to do it again. To my surprise and delight, he showed up that night and choked me again, this time with the added gusto of guilt and recently acknowledged self-hatred. He performed as if he were actually trying to kill me—and I thought I’d die from ecstasy.

To convince him to let me choke him, I described the sensation as best I could, in case the shudder of my body and the trajectory of my ejaculation wasn’t demonstration enough of the wild pleasure choking provided. Incomparable sensations, I explained, nothing you’ve ever experienced before, the impossibly gradual build-up, the moment you think you might die—mind-blowing, load-blowing—and then the desperate gasp when your neck is released. Aaron was appalled. Said he could never in a million years submit to that. It was hard enough, he said, to be the choker. He only did it for my benefit, because it gave me pleasure. That pleased me, but I wanted to please him. And, despite his protestations, I could tell he was dying to try it, so to speak.

Before he even got home, a one-word text appeared on my phone: Repugnant. As if Charlotte had suddenly gone sour on Wilbur. I knew it was just his puritanical white blood cells marshalling a defense. I also knew, or suspected, that those same defenders would retreat into their trenches once the threat subsided. They were never proactive, only reactive. I would back off a bit, fake them out, then attack them from the flank.

A couple of days later he texted that he was on his way over. Didn’t ask, just announced. I cancelled my plans immediately, poured myself a stiff drink and plotted my next move. I wouldn’t even suggest choking to him or suggest sex of any kind. I’d pretend I’d found Jesus or some nonsense—keep the army’s guard down. Perversely, this strategy made me even more excited.

I want to try it, he declared, dropping the leather messenger bag he was never without onto the middle of the floor. I was shocked and delighted. Outstanding, I said, like the father of a little leaguer whose bat had made its first contact with the ball. Drink first? I offered, forgetting for a moment my strategy and risking activating Aaron’s puritanical antibodies. No, he said with an urgency which suggested that he too was trying to get ahead of the puritan in him. Let’s do it…before I change my mind. Good, I thought, the soldiers are asleep. Lady Macbeth hath drugged their possets, providing us with the perfect opportunity.

We retired to my bedroom. Aaron stripped naked and lay back on my bed. I was wildly excited and fearing I might climax too quickly, remained clothed. Close your eyes, I told him. It’s more intense that way. He made several blinking attempts, but they wouldn’t stay shut. I didn’t press him. Eyes open was fine with me. I began to stroke his already erect cock with my right hand. He flinched at first and then relaxed into it. This was nothing new; we’d stroked each other’s cocks many times. Choking was the forbidden fruit he’d yet to taste. I began to establish a rhythm. I could tell from the tension in his neck and shoulders and the look in his eye that the puritan cavalry was stirring in its sleep. We’d have to proceed cautiously. I looked away, hoping, like a peek-a-boo child that if I couldn’t see them then they couldn’t see me. With one hand I popped open the bottle of Astroglide and squirted some on his cock. He began to squirm. Do it, he said, do it now. Not yet, I teased. Not ‘til you’re close. I am close, he insisted. Relax, breathe, it gets better. I stroked on with averted eyes, until I could feel his pulse quicken, his muscles tighten, just as it had for me. I slowly reached for Aaron’s throat with my free hand. The moment it touched his throat, his hands reflexively grabbed my wrist. The Lady’s drug had abruptly worn off and the guards were suddenly awake. We’d have to act fast if we were going to get Aaron off. Let go, I commanded. He didn’t at first, so I increased the rhythm on his erection, jacking up the pleasure down there. He finally released my wrist and his hands hung in the air like a captured suspect or a dog on its back. I gently returned my hand to his throat and curled my fingers around it as far as they would go. Even the mild pressure I exerted flushed Aaron’s face red. Now I knew what I looked like when he choked me. Narcissus-like, I was entranced. I tightened my grip while continuing to stroke his cock with subtle, tantalizing variations in rhythm and pace as his face began to bulge. He’d been scared all day, but now fear shone in his eyes as reflections of me, double demonic gleams of impending victory. I was waging a war with Aaron’s puritan army and I was determined to win. But the enemy was not quite vanquished; he grabbed my arm again with desperation. Terror flooded his eyes, obscuring every image but mine—and I could see myself, my strength, my virility, my power with crystal clarity. I pressed on with steely determination. Come, you spirits, I heard myself say aloud, resisting Aaron’s grip, the regiment’s grip on Aaron, choking him with all my might. Aaron’s eyes rolled back into his head, his voice throttling into grotesque gasps. Is this how I sounded? I was almost carried away by my own ecstasy when a shot of hot viscous liquid exploded onto my jaw, announcing my victory. I instantly released my left hand from his throat and slowed my stroke with my right as Aaron exhaled what sounded like a death breath, followed by another and then another and another while semen continued to flow from his cock onto my hand. Aaron’s orgasmic convulsions gradually subsided. He closed his eyes, and I could tell from the twitches in his face that behind those lids the battle raged on. Even though I knew he hadn’t won the war today, at least he’d won the battle. I knew he’d won this round because the spoils of the day coated my hand and dripped from my face like enemy blood.

Flutter

Why do tyrants stir our sex blood? Is it their power, their global reach, the ease with which they can crush us like sand fleas beneath their silver toes? Or is just that Evil is a potent aphrodisiac? In my secret shameful lust heart, I’ve always longed for physical intimacy with lushly bearded and immaculately hijabed MBS, the brutally repressive, treacherous, and murderous Mohammed Bin Salman Al Saud, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

But now that some perverse fluke of tyrannical yet usually reliable Physics has shrunk MBS and me to the size of caterpillars and wedged us together inside this dank single-wide cocoon like two tubes of toothpaste squeezed into one, both of us emanating pheromones of terror about our shared predicament, I have lost my lust for him. While he, to my astonishment, trembles with raging desire. I try to wriggle and squirm free, but he enfolds me in his hairy arms, nestles his bristly bearded face into the warm hollow of my neck, gutturally declares his passion for me and somehow manages to insert the shrunken scepter of his corrupt authority into my defenseless shuddering body. I have no recourse but to receive the unwanted penetration with forbearance; MBS is a powerful Haboob while I by comparison am a mere grain of Arabian sand. The humiliation I feel as I surrender to the fruition of my former fantasy charges the connection with erotic electricity. I am in his thrall.

 Regrettably, we have no tiny cigarettes with which to savor our post-coital satisfaction.

What will become of MBS and me when this dual diabolical metamorphosis is complete and we emerge from our gooey confines? We are a pair of deviant dice, it seems, rolled into an impossible sum. Whose genetic make-up will dominate the mutant lepidoptera, his sinister helices or my benign chromosomes? Will we transform into a glorious new species of butterfly, dazzling the world with beauty and benevolence, or will the fresh flutter of our glistening wings reverberate terror around the globe?

It is too much to contemplate. I relax my body into the arms of already softly snoring MBS, close my eyes, and wait.

Person Manqué

The mirror’s hot breath fogs my face.  Hot water dissolves it in my hand and the drain sucks it down with a slurpy gurgle. Fortunately, it sticks in the p-trap. For the plumber’s visit I conceal my facelessness with a black mantilla and candlelight. I toss in an alluring scent and Barry White tunes. Seduction is in the air, but I need a face to face the world—and the plumber insists on adequate light to perform his job.   

After he leaves, I brew oolong in a Japanese teapot, burn sage and resume my transcendental meditation practice. Soon I am hypnotized by the fakequarium’s blue glow. Intuiting Inuit animism, I am transported—

Somewhere near, but not within sight of the coast of Labrador, in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, floating on ice calved from a rapidly disintegrating Greenland glacier, accompanied only by a walrus and an aerial escort of curious Black-Legged Kittiwakes, I withstand harsh temperatures, brutal winds, hunger and sleep deprivation for seven nights and seven days. Using a single tusk, the walrus scores the ice each day so that we might know how long the journey lasts.

Times are tough for everybody, so we scrounge for ways to appreciate our paltry lives. This is one of the stories I tell myself on the iceberg anyway. The God of our fathers infiltrates my thoughts at every turn. I struggle to resist the antiquated mythological constructs, but the din of the collective unconscious overpowers me. I seek counsel from my walrus companion. He—or she—its sex has not been a matter of concern to me—maintains the same noncommittal visage it has worn from the start. Is it a real walrus, I ask myself, or a spirit disguised as one? Or both? Or perhaps just a figment of my frozen, salt-soaked imagination. I caress its thick hide and the rough cold reassures me. If touch is to be trusted, my companion is material.

The end of this journey, I believe, will be the beginning of another end. Of what? Self? Ego? Attachment? Desire? Suffering? Existence? These are questions for which the answers remain a question. Seek and ye shall find, the Bible speaks to me from deep within its grave. Alarmingly, its voice seems to recognize no barriers. How far must I journey to escape its pertinacious grip?

The birds do not appear to move, as if they are suspended in the sky, held there by invisible wires, like bird-shaped kites.

Back there, somewhere near the pole, we clustered, I recall, a herd of us, around the breathing holes, waiting to club seals as they surfaced for air. It was invigorating work, more therapy than survival, I felt. Gathered in a group, expressing with blunt instruments what could not be expressed to our parents when we were children. Psychological resolution achieved through physical and emotional catharsis and sacrificial seals. The Old Testament God would approve; the Inuit didn’t think twice. Nature dictated action while my psyche inferred metaphor. The result was holistic healing despite the contradictions and confusions of belief. In the end we had a barbecue.

Fleeing the drudgery of life’s routines: home, work, grocery shopping, traffic, dinners, social engagements, dentist appointments, doctor visits, weddings, funerals, birthdays, trysts, movies, plays, symphonies, laundry, the dishes and television; the internet with all its empty promises… Finally, none of it adds up to anything resembling a purpose or a point. Of course, I knew intellectually that there was no point or purpose, that I’d never make it to the Mountaintop, never receive a sealed confidential envelope containing detailed instructions and explanations for and about the purpose of my life. I would be condemned—or free, depending on my disposition—to wing it any way I chose. And I could change direction at will, providing conditions were favorable and funding adequate. Still, I longed for the ultimate, craved knowledge of the end, long before the last page of the book or the final reel of the film. I wanted to know and knew I couldn’t know and didn’t know what to do with that knowledge. So, I bailed out and headed for the pole. Now you know.

“A sheathed hunting knife and a book of D. H. Lawrence poems with “I Wish I Knew a Woman” bookmarked, appeared with him the day we were to bring to class objects which typified us. There were fourteen other students in that class, but his objects are the only ones I remember. Three nights later I prepared for him my specialty, Bouef Bourguignon, and after we ate, we drank red wine, smoked marijuana and made love on the floor listening to Lou Rawls, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell albums. A soft breeze wafted into the apartment through windows open to the warm August night. It was a night I cherished for years and then later came to regret.”

The preceding is an excerpt from S.’s memoir, I Wish I Were Not a Woman, about a woman in her mid-thirties living in a mid-sized mid-western city in the mid-seventies attending an arts college with students much younger than herself. She goes on to say: “It was there I met the young man with whom I fell in love, bonded, befriended, used, was used by, discarded, and was discarded by; we were an erotic, neurotic, symbiotic, toxic psychological stew of a couple, in whom the seeds of our self-destruction were evident within the first minutes of our first meeting. Both of us instantly recognized the destructive potential in the other and neither of us could wait to unleash it.”

I am embarrassed, but I urinate lying on my back, sending a small fountain of thick yellow fluid arcing in the direction of the walrus. He—or she—remains impervious.

On what would be our last visit, instead of the memoir, S. read passages from her book of poems entitled “Unborn to Lose: How’s that for a Tattoo?” It was a title I recognized as my own creation for a book I’d imagined writing some years before, when S. and I shared a basement apartment on the lower east side of Manhattan. It was there that it was revealed to me through a large cockroach falling onto my forehead as I masturbated naked in bed in the dark that I’d had many, perhaps seven or eight false starts as a human; that I’d actually been repeatedly aborted before some unfortunate woman waited too long to make up her mind and by the time she did it was by law too late to call me off.

Curiously, the cockroach’s narration was conveyed to me in the first-person present tense: “I have been aborted seven or eight times. Every time someone inadvertently conceives me—usually in a drunken stupor or a moment of self or people-pleasing weakness—they soon decide to deny me tenure. Consequently, I’ve lived seven or eight mini pre-lives inside seven or eight different wombs. Well, I can’t be entirely sure, but I strongly suspect I was in one womb twice. Once I was even part of a set of multiple fetuses, and damned if I wasn’t the one chosen for reduction. Some fetuses might find this kind of itinerant gestation fun and fascinating, like say foreign travel or concurrent lovers, but I find it disturbing and confusing. Sure, I’m still me, whether I’m hanging inside Marilyn Monroe or your child’s third-grade schoolteacher, and my inherent me-ness will shine like the midday sun as soon as I’m given the opportunity to pop out of whichever woman eventually commits to carrying me to term. Still, there are the unavoidable influences either endowed to or inflicted upon me, depending on your values. I take great pains to try to keep straight where I am and who is carrying me during each pregnancy. Ay Dios! That one time in Pinar del Rio was a carnival ride from hell, although I admit to having enjoyed the rich, complex flavors of the perfectly aged local tobacco. Anyway, I take copious notes about my “mother’s” habits, routines, friends, family, associates, socio-economic circumstances, tastes in food and drink, fashion, music, literature, religious beliefs, psychological and physical condition, alcohol, tobacco and drug use, and most interestingly, her post-conception sexual proclivities. The latter being of particular interest due to the unique perspective of my vantage point, as you might imagine. Regarding that, I am reminded again of Pinar del Rio.

But I digress. In short, I create a comprehensive profile—a dossier if you will, of each carrier. I realize I accidentally used the word “mother” earlier, and if I ever see the face and suckle the breast of any of these women, then I’ll consider calling her mother, but until that blessed event occurs, I’m sticking to more clinical terms.

Where was I? Oh, yes, the profiles. I figure if I can keep them all straight, who laid what on me when and where, then I’ll have a fighting chance the moment I experience my first rush of air to the lungs. Trust me, I know now from seven or eight rounds, from hard won experience, that a baby, this baby-to-be, needs a fighting chance against pre-natal influences. Lest we forget, whoever the carrier might be, she’s got a load of baggage besides me to contend with, and they’ll do anything to lighten that load, including dumping it onto me. Okay, I know what you’re thinking: this is a bitter seven- or eight-time unborn loser—Unborn to Lose? There’s a tattoo for you!—whose perspective on the subject is suspect, if not entirely inadmissible. Most certainly objectionable. However, I urge you not to pre-judge me based on my pre-natal experiences, for to do so would be to condemn me to eternal pre-life. How, you ask? Your opinions, either explicitly expressed, or covertly conveyed through subtle innuendo and tantalizing implication, can unduly influence my carrier’s decision about delivering me. I know a woman has the right to choose, and wholeheartedly support that indisputable right. Still, it would be a relief for me to someday see the light of day. Who would deny me that…again? Or maybe I place too much value on birth. Maybe it’s enough to have simply been conceived. Perhaps life outside the womb isn’t all it’s cracked up to be—maybe it’s all hype. If so, then I am seven or eight times blessed. I have no way of proving or disproving this hypothesis, though, until I’ve tested the alternative.”

It was at this point in the transference that I believe I ejaculated directly onto my forehead, drowning the poor cockroach in a thick glob of hot sticky semen. This made me wonder if I wasn’t perhaps self-conceived.

True, I had been experimenting with threshold doses of LSD and was known to experience chemically altered perceptions at inopportune times, but at that moment I’d not used the drug for more than a month. It’s possible, of course, that the cockroach, and perhaps even the masturbation, were flashbacks to a previous trip. Or a previous lifetime—perhaps I’d been a cockroach or was simultaneously a cockroach and a man. I had, in fact, having recently been introduced by S. to the work of Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists, started investigating past-life regression to see if previous incarnations could shed light on my current condition. I was also unemployed at the time and subsisted on heavily processed lunchmeats.

S., a poet as well as memoirist, reads a few poems to me. Her verses are insightful in a middle-aged middle-brow fashion, and her diction and versification leave something to be desired. Still, I enjoy her visit. She wears dark sunglasses the entire time, and she’s given up smoking.

Aurora Borealis appears to me in my sleep, beckoning me to look deep within its colorful lights, to scry into its murky green and sometimes red glow and search for images of my former selves, those that could have been but never were, and the one that made it and then dissipated. There I see with preternatural clairvoyance the seven or eight other lives I was denied—glimpses of the roads not taken. When I am awake the eerie light is unbearable, its luminescence a spectacular condemnation of my human frailty. I know the lights are not gods, or mythological virgins, but their magnificence and scale dwarf my puny concerns, so that I come to feel like climbing aboard my walrus friend and riding him or her to the dark depths of the cold unforgiving sea.

Tim Hanson writes in Southern California. His work has appeared in great weather for MEDIA anthologies, Coffin Bell Journal, Cease, Cows, Into the Void, Funicular Magazine, On the Run Fiction and God's Cruel Joke. His audio drama podcasts can be found at: https://aptfprods.podbean.com/ Contact him via DOGE--they have the 411 on everyone.