Damned (9 page)

And no, the children of wealthy families, consigned to Swiss boarding
schools, are nothing if not wily. It was common knowledge among my peers and
myself that a crafty student some years before had stolen a key to the
residence hall, a master key, and secreted said key beneath a specific rock
near the hall's main door. In the event a wanton little Miss Slutty Slutpants
sneaked away for a clandestine tryst or to smoke a cigarette and found herself
locked out, rather than face reprimand she had merely to use this key held in
common for such sinful emergencies and later return it to the usual hiding
place. As convenient as this shared key was, under the rock only a few steps
away, with my bare hands frozen to the door handles I had no means to reach it.

My mom would tell you, "This is one of those
Hamlet
moments." Meaning: You need to make a
significant effort to determine whether you're to be or not to be.

If I scream and yell until a night watchman arrives, I'll be mortified,
humiliated, but alive. And if I freeze to death I'll save my dignity, but be...
well, dead. Probably I'll be a figure of pathos and mystery for future
generations of girls at this school. My legacy will be a stringent new set of
rules about accounting for every girl. My legacy will be a ghost story which
girls my age will tell to scare each other after lights-out. Maybe I'll linger
as a naked spirit they glimpse in mirrors, outside windows, at the far end of
moonlit corridors. Those future privileged urchins will summon my ghost by
repeating: "Maddy Spencer... Maddy Spencer... ," three times while
gazing into a mirror.

Again, that's a form of power, albeit a fairly impotent form of power.

And, yes, I know the word
disassociation.

As much as I fancy that spooky gothic immortality, I start screaming
for a guard. Shouting, "Help!" Shouting,
"Au sec-ours!"
Shouting,
"Bitte, helfen sie mir!"
The falling rush
of snow hushes every sound, dampening the acoustics of the entire midnight
world, blocking any echo that might carry my voice very far into the dark.

By this time my hands were the hands of a stranger. I could see my
bare, blue feet, but they belonged to someone else. As blue as Goran's veins.
In a glass pane of the door, I could see my own face reflected, my image framed
by the frost of my breath condensing and freezing on the small window. Yes, we
all appear somewhat absurd and mysterious to each other, but that girl I saw
was no one to me.

Her pain was not my pain. Here was Catherine Earnshaw's dead face
haunting the wintry windows of Wuthering Heights, blah, blah, blah....

That waifish me, reflected in moonlight or streetlight, I watched her
pulling her fingers away from the steel handles, her skin peeling away still
clinging to the metal, leaving the whorls and palm prints like patterns of
frost. Abandoning the wrinkled road map of her lifeline, her love line and
heart line, I watched this strange girl, her face grim and resolute, walk on
frozen stick legs to retrieve the key and save my life. This girl I didn't know,
she pulled open the heavy door, her hands sticking once more, tearing away yet
another thin layer of this stranger's fragile skin. Her hands, so frozen they
didn't bleed. The metal key froze between her fingers so resolutely she was
forced to carry it to bed.

Only in bed, smothered between blankets, drifting to sleep, did her
skin thaw and the girl's hands began to bleed quietly into her clean, starched
white sheets.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Please do NOT get
 
the idea that I'm some Miss Trollopy Van
Trollop. It's true that I've read the Kama Sutra, hut why anyone would bother
to attempt such revolting gymnastics remains largely a mystery to me. In regard
to sex, mine is a kind of complete intellectual understanding with no real aesthetic
appreciation whatsoever. Forgive my uneducated distaste. While I know what
organ stimulates what, the bizarre, sordid business of phallus and orifice
interaction, the exchange of chromosomes required for procreation of the
species, I have yet to grasp the appeal. Meaning: yuck.

It is no accident that I segue from a scene in which my group is
confronted by a towering nude giantess to a flashback in which I, myself, am
undressed and exploring both my interior and exterior environs without the usual
protective layers of clothing or shame. In the enormous, exposed figure of
Psezpolnica, no doubt I feel an affinity, perhaps an admiration for any female
who can present herself with such apparent lack of self-consciousness,
seemingly in complete disregard for how she might be judged and exploited by
her audience. Having masqueraded one Halloween as Simone de Beauvoir, I guess
I'll always be a bit de Beauvoir.

The satire of Jonathan Swift remains a staple of English-speaking
primary education—including my own—but it's usually limited to the first volume
of
Gulliver's Travels; or,
in very daring and progressive classrooms, strictly as an illustrative example
of irony, students might also read Swift's classic essay
"A
Modest Proposal." Few teachers would
risk introducing the second volume of Lemuel Gulliver's memoirs, his
misadventures in the island nation of Brobdingnag, where looming giants capture
and make of him a household pet. No, it's far safer to present children, those
powerless, diminutive children, with a narrative in which a giant is taken
prisoner and manipulated under the control of tiny beings whose sole reason for
not murdering him is their fear that his gargantuan corpse might decompose and
threaten the overall public health.

It remains unknown to the majority of children that in the kingdom of
Brobdingnag, in the second volume, Swift's picaresque travelogue does get a tad
bit tawdry and dicey.

These are the salacious tidbits one learns when bothering to do the
supplemental reading for extra credit. Especially while spending Christmas
vacation naked, alone in an otherwise empty residence hall. In the second
volume of Swift's masterpiece, once the giant residents of Brobdingnag capture
Gulliver, he's presented at their royal court and is made a kind of mascot,
forced to live in the queen's apartments, in very intimate proximity among the
very gigantic ladies-in-waiting. It's these ladies who pleasure themselves by
removing their clothing and lying together, sharing a bed while our hero is
compelled to journey the peaks and valleys of their way-naked bodies. Writing
in the guise of his narrator, Swift describes these women—the most-lovely
female aristocrats of their society, who would appear so charming and appealing
from a distance—as in fact constituting a swampy, reeking Gehenna in actual
up-close physical contact. Our minuscule hero stumbles about their spongy, damp
flesh, encountering monstrous pubic thickets of hairs, inflamed blemishes, vast
cavernous scars, pits, knee-deep wrinkles, stretches of dead flaking skin, and
shallow puddles of fetid perspiration.

And yes, it's duly noted that such a landscape depicted by Swift bears
a marked resemblance to the actual terrain of Hell. This spreading landscape of
noblewomen recline in their afternoon languor, expecting, really demanding that
this teeny shrunken man bring them to pleasure. All the while, he stumbles and
reels in disbelief and utter disgust of them. Overwhelmed with sickness and
horror, exhausted, our enslaved Gulliver is forced to labor until the giant
women are satisfied. In all of English literature, few passages can match this
one of Swift's for its descriptive bluntness and unwelcome, masculine crudity.

My mother would tell you that men—boys, men, males in general—are too
stupid, too easily found out, and too lazy to ever succeed as truly gifted
liars.

Yes, I might be dead and rather imperious and steadfastly opinionated,
but I know the blunt stink of misogyny when I smell it. And that it's very
likely Jonathan Swift found himself the victim of childhood sexual abuse, and
was now venting his rage in the passive-aggressive avenue of fantasy fiction.

In his own unhelpful way, my father would tell you, "A women eats
to feed her pussy" Meaning: Anything we do to excess is in compensation for
not getting a minimum amount of sexual gratification.

My mother would say that men overimbibe alcohol because their penises
are thirsty.

Really, being the offspring of former-hippie, former-Rasta,
former-punk, former-anarchist parents means that I'm bombarded by no end of
earthy truisms.

And no, I've never enjoyed an orgasm of my own, but I have read
The Bridges of Madison County
and
The Color Purple,
and if I learned nothing else from Alice
Walker I learned that if you can help a woman discover the curative power of
manipulating her own clitoris she'll serve as your loyal devotee and best
friend forever.

That said, I stand before the Serbian demon, the towering nude tornado
woman known as Psezpolnica.

First, I shuck off my remaining penny loafer and place it at a safe
distance from the giant. I pull off my school cardigan, fold it, and settle it
neatly on top of the shoe. Unbuttoning the cuffs of my blouse, I roll the
sleeves back to each elbow, all the while gazing up the length of the giant's
hairy legs, looking skyward to see her shins, the knees, the muscled naked
thighs, craning my neck to see the Brobdingnagian mons pubis beyond.

A shrill whistle splits the air, a whistle as loud as a fire siren. On
the ground, resting near my stocking feet, Archer's severed head looks up at
me, the lips still pursed. "Hey, little girl," the severed head says,
"whatever you're planning, don't do it...."

Reaching down, I grab Archer by the long hairs of his blue Mohawk.
Carrying the head as I would a purse, I step up onto the arch of the giant's
foot.

Dangling from my hand, Archer says, "Getting eaten hurts like
hell." He says, "You don't have to do this..."

Transferring the blue hair to my teeth, I bite down, gripping the
Mohawk as a pirate would a knife as said pirate climbs the rigging of a ship.
In that manner, I climb the copious leg hairs of the giant demon Psezpolnica,
scaling the fleshy ridge of her shin. Like Gulliver, I navigate the wrinkled
skin of the demon's knees, then continue grasping the coarse body hair, pulling
myself ever higher along the giant's thighs. Glancing at the distant ground, I
see Babette and Patterson and Leonard, all of them with their heads tipped
back, watching my ascension with their mouths gaping open. Looking around, from
this height I can see the distant mother-of-pearl shimmer of the sperm ocean,
the steam rising off Hot Saliva Lake, the perennial dark cloud of bats that
hover above Blood River.

Swinging from his blue hair, gripped between my clenched teeth,
Archer's head says, "You're crazy, little girl, you know that?"

Still climbing, I skirt my way around the wrinkled folds of the labia
majora, hauling myself, like Jonathan Swift's worse nightmare, through pungent
thickets of curling, dense pubic hair.

Above me hangs the foreboding cornice of two enormous breasts. Between
them I can discern a chin, above that a rolling pair of chewing lips, and one
blue-jeaned leg of Archer's, still shod with a motorcycle boot, dangling out a
corner of the giant's mouth.

Even though my knowledge is largely theoretical, based on years of
witnessing naked family friends on French beaches, I do know my way around the
adult female genitalia. Clinging to the abundance of lush hair, I locate the
clitoral hood and deftly manipulate the sheltering skin, thrusting my arm
within to find the retracted organ of such fabled womanly pleasure. On this
scale, merely brailled blindly within the warm enclosure of the clitoral hood,
it feels to be roughly the size and shape of a Virginia ham.

The severed head of Archer watches my actions. Licking his lips, Archer
says, "Little girl, you are
sick.
..."
Smiling, he says, "The bitch monster ate me so, hey, the least I could do
is return the favor."

Retrieving my forearm from the warm depths of the fleshy hood, I take
the hank of blue hair from my mouth. Holding the head so that I gaze directly
into Archer's green eyes, I say, "Take a deep breath, and make yourself
useful," and I stuff the grinning, salivating head deep into the hooded
depths.

For a beat, not much occurs. Above me the vast mouth continues to
masticate the cud of Archer's body, his blue jeans and boots. From below, the
trio of Babette, Patterson, and Leonard stare, slack-jawed. Something stirs,
moaning and slurping like a ravenous beast, moving within the skin of the
clitoral hood. Then gradually, the giant's lips cease to chew. The giant's
breathing deepens and slows. A warm pink glow suffuses the acres and acres of
skin, a great landscape of blush covering the giant's face, chest, and thighs.
A shudder, tremulous as an earthquake, shakes the towering body, and I'm
compelled to grip the pubic hairs more tightly lest I plummet to the fingernail
fields far below.