Edge Play X (8 page)

The man didn’t answer her question.
She knew the answer anyway—the photos would probably someday be used to
blackmail
Compton
, threaten him with embarrassment.

X put camera into her purse.

Simeon said, “He is hoping to give you
ten thousand this next time, but he wants you to count it in front of him.
Hopefully, he’ll give it to you in $100’s so it won’t take you too long.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He wants you to count it naked.”

X snuffed out her cigarette in the ashtray,
releasing miniscule specks of ash that lifted into the air above.

“He can go fuck himself for the extra
five grand.”

“Tell him yourself,” he said, “you’re
his
Domina
.”

And it had surprised X that he had
said
Domina
and not
Domme
or Dominatrix, making her even
more sure
that the
CIA
had listened in on their session, that the
dungeon must be bugged, but the term was becoming common enough. X thought that
it was likely that the agent who had been killed had planted a bug in the
dungeon one of the times she was there. Probably that was why Simeon wanted the
office bugged now—the dungeon had already been taken care of.

X sat in front of her canvas, picked
up her brush again and started to paint, trying her best to ignore Simeon, but
he pulled up a chair next to her and watched as she dabbed thick color onto her
work.

Simeon asked her, “Did you see the
paper?
Compton
shaved off his mustache.”

“That made the papers?”

“When you’re a billionaire who has had
it for fifteen years, it does. Did you tell him to?”

“No,” X said, “no.”

“Did you say anything about it?”

“I told him it disgusted me, that it
looked like a caterpillar on his lip.”

“I see. I need to know something,”
Simeon said. “Were you intimate with
Compton
?”

“Did I fuck him, you mean?” X didn’t
want to let on that she was aware that he probably already knew the truth.

He shook his head yes.

“No, I didn’t fuck him. Not that he
didn’t want to. What does it matter, anyway?”

X picked up a different, wider brush
and loaded it with another color.

Simeon paused. “As I mentioned before,
it may be necessary for you to be intimate with the subject.”

“And Agent Simeon, I told you before
that
Dommes
don’t always have sex with their subs.
There are reasons for that. You give away some of your power when you fuck someone.”

Simeon grabbed her hand with the brush
still in it.

“We don’t want him to lose interest,
do we?” Simeon asked, his words as scouring as blowing sand.

“Maybe you don’t,” X said.

“I’m telling you this for your own
good, X, you don’t want that to happen.”

X tried to resume with her painting
but Simeon pulled the brush out of her hand and threw it onto the old plank
floor. It skidded across the surface, leaving traces of color on the floor, a
beautiful streak in its own right, ochre and vermillion. Simeon reached out and
gripped her face, forcing her to look at him.

“What is it?” he asked. “You need more
money? Because we can take care of that. He isn’t revolting. A girl like you
shouldn’t have too much trouble with it.”

X slapped him, a strike to which Simeon
did not recoil. Instead, he pressed his fingertips deeper into the flesh of her
cheeks, contorting her face.

“Look at me,” he said, and she obeyed.
“Don’t ever slap me again, do you understand? I’m not your bitch to slap
around.”

“There are men in the world who should
have been slapped more in their lives and you are one of them.”

He pressed his fingers deeper into her
jaw.

“I asked you if you understood.”

 
X let out a whispered, “Yes.”

Simeon stood up. X rubbed her jaw, wondering
if he had left more bruises. She guessed that he had left at least a couple
faint ones.

“Tell me something, Agent Simeon. Do
you really believe that
Compton
is a murderer, that he killed your agent?”

Simeon, hearing her question, began to
grow concerned that perhaps X would be scared off if he said yes. He paused and
considered. He knew the truth.

“He might have paid someone to do it.
He might not have done it at all. Our agents are involved in a wide arena of
work that puts them in danger on many different fronts. I would say it is more
unlikely than likely. But he is a complex man. Don’t make assumptions based on
what you see on the surface. Don’t underestimate him.”

There was the sound of the gallery
door opening below them, the noise of Anne coming back from lunch and getting
ready for the afternoon foot traffic.

“Look, I’m not going to fuck him,
Agent Simeon. I can’t.”

“Fine. But if you aren’t going to fuck
him, at least torture him with desire. Keep him interested. The carrot in front
of the stick.”

The
pussy in front of the dick
, X
thought and laughed to herself as the words entered her mind. Anne was starting
to come up the steps, and when she saw Simeon, she gave him a warm smile and
hello.

Anne came over to examine her latest
painting and then went to the recent ones that were leaning against the wall.

She said, “You’ve been a busy girl.
Look at these! Exquisite! Something has gotten into you,” she said, glancing
over at Simeon, thinking that this was X’s new lover. “You’ve been working like
mad.”

“Yes,” X returned, “something.”

“I’ve got to get going,” Simeon said.
“Call me when you get back from
L.A.
”

And with that, he was gone.

Anne came over and chided X excitedly.
“Who is that handsome fellow?”

“Nobody,” X said, giving her a fake
smile. “Nobody important.”

And then, in the tyranny of the night,
X considered the possibilities of what would happen to her when Compton
eventually did lose interest, an occurrence X felt was as certain as the wind
or sun or rain.

6.

X’s brother
Daniel stood at his kitchen counter and sliced an onion. He had already diced
two others and had deposited the pieces into a stainless steel bowl next to
him. Each slice he made seemed to make his eyes burn a little more, and as he
tried to rub away the tears with his forearm, he barely noticed the tattoos
that covered his skin. It was hard to see through a watery blur. And that’s
what those years of heroin had been, a watery blur.

Cut. Cut.
Cut.

The tattoos
were from a different time, they had been inked onto a different man. There
were times, random and fleeting, when he wished he didn’t have them, wished
that he had the unmarked skin of a man who hadn’t done prison time, a man who
hadn’t done as many drugs as he had. The skin of a straight-laced man.

Slice.
Slice.

When he was
a child, Daniel’s mother had told him and his sister that it was a sin to have
a tattoo. The body was a temple, God’s temple, she had said. It was a sin to
desecrate the temple, to cover it with graffiti.

Dice.

But hell, nowadays
almost everyone had a tat. Everyone was desecrating their temple. Now even the
hipsters and intellectuals and Wall Street
douchebags
had been inked-up. Shit, even his little sister had a tat. He had seen it one
day when she had crouched down to pick something off the floor, had spotted it
there on her lower back, and he had thought that he understood what it
signified.

Cut. Cut.
Cut.

Still,
there were times when he wished he could go back to the unmarked man he had
been, return to the pure body he once had back before he had dumped all the
junk into it. If his mother was right and the body really was a temple, he had
treated his like a garbage can. It was a miracle that he hadn’t been buried
like a bag of trash in the landfill.

But one
thing that Daniel understood is that a person can never go back. A person can
only go forward. There was another thing that his mother used to say—a pickle
can’t turn back into a cucumber.

Slice.
Slice.

At least
all the images on his arms could forever remind him of where he had been.
Remind him that a person has to live in the moment. Remind him that a pickle
can’t turn back into a cucumber.

The agony
of kicking heroin was his first real lesson in living in the moment. It had
been a lesson in pain, a lesson he couldn’t escape from. It was as if all the
pleasure he had gotten in his drug use had rebounded into his own personal
torture. It had been like birthing a demon. But the experience had taught him
how to live in the moment. The pain had taught him that he was alive.

After that,
he had learned to concentrate on the small things, on the little tasks that
before he had not been mindful of. When he had finally kicked, he had forced
himself to find Zen in the smallest actions. The Zen of chopping onions.

Dice.

He finished
slicing his onion and put its pieces into the bowl. He washed his hands and
turned around to face his sister who had come down for the holiday. She was
sitting at the kitchen table and talking to his girlfriend, Sabrina. His sister
was laughing and smiling but Daniel noted that in other moments she looked like
there was something on her mind. She was carrying some sort of burden.

Daniel
walked over to where Sabrina sat and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

“The
kitchen is all yours, baby. Work your magic.” And then, to his sister, “Let’s
go outside for a minute so I can have a smoke.”

X followed
him out and together they stood on the little concrete patio while Daniel lit
up. He was surprised when X asked him to bum one.

“Are you
sure?” he asked.

“Yes. I’ve
fallen off the wagon.”

Daniel
handed her one and then took a long drag from his cigarette. He was a fast
smoker and was half-way down the cig after just a few inhalations.

“I could
quit heroin but I can’t quit these God-damn things,” he said, “but Sabrina puts
up with it as long as I smoke outside.”

The pair
watched her through the window as she mixed together the stuffing at the
counter.

“She
doesn’t smoke, or drink?” X asked.

“She’s
clean living. No cigarettes, no caffeine, no alcohol, no drugs. She’s been
sober for eight years.”

X said,
“Does she do anything?”

“Well, she
fucks.” He threw his head back and laughed and X couldn’t help but chuckle at
his crassness.

The street
was quieter than usual because of the holiday, but cars still zipped by,
interrupting their conversation.

“It’s an OK
neighborhood,” X said.

“You don’t
have to say that. We don’t even go out after dark.” Daniel looked through the
window again at Sabrina. “We want to get out of
L.A.
, maybe go up toward
northern
California
, but I have to wait
until my parole is finished.”

X nodded in
agreement, telling him that it would be a good idea to get out of the area,
start somewhere fresh.

They both
finished their cigarettes and put the butts into a coffee can that was halfway
filled with sand.

“And how
much longer is your parole?”

Daniel
looked over at the houses across the street. He knew it was a crappy
neighborhood but reminded himself that even a shit-hole rental in a gang-ridden
city beat the pants off of prison.

“About three
more months. Eighty-seven more days, to be exact.”

X could
sense the shame in his voice. She didn’t even need to ask if he was still
sober, she could see that he was clean. When he was a junkie, he rarely smiled.
He had even walked differently back then, like he had been carrying a heavy
weight on his back everywhere he went. His eyes had carried storm clouds and
flecks of crematory ash.

“And after
that there is no more checking-in, then there’s no more drug testing? And you
can move?”

“No, then I
guess I’m really a free man. If a man is really ever free…But enough about me.
Tell me what you have been up to. You been seeing anyone?”

“Not
really,” she said, not especially wanting to talk about it.

Sabrina
came out onto the stoop.

“I’ve got
to head down to the store and get another loaf of bread for the stuffing,” she
said before kissing Daniel goodbye and starting up her car.

It made X
happy that her brother was with Sabrina. Finally, he was living clean and was
relatively happy. Deep down X thought that was all a person could really hope
for, relative happiness.