The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors (22 page)

Celebration

ABRAHAM RODRIGUEZ JR.

Celebrate good times

Come on

—Kool and the Gang

A
N OFfiCE CROWD,
partying it up somewhere near the West End. Bodies packed on the dance floor, bopping up and down. Drinks spilling, bottles clinking. Loosened ties and rolled-up sleeves on saggy white shirts. The office girls were whoop-whooping themselves beyond silliness. The mindless giggle attack when Benny from accounting started doing the robot, and Jenny countered with a frantic funky chicken. It was a small, garish hall, mirrored walls, gold columns that ringed a glimmery scuffed dance floor.

The DJ was in a booth opposite the dance floor, bopping to his rig. He played the usual assortment of disco hits, eighties synth pop, and some hip-hop of dubious quality, stuff one could find on any office party CD, the kind that includes such anthems to office bonding as Sister Sledge's “We Are Family.” After that came the inevitable Kool & the Gang song, “Celebration.” Loud and pounding, whoops and screams, it flowed out along that sullen, marble hallway outside the hall. It hit M in the face like a sharp uppercut to the jaw. (He was calling himself M now, because of what Myron said.) It half blinded him, made his stomach burn. It set off the colors, strange flashes of red, of yellow, of black. The red especially—he headed back toward the bank of elevators frantic fast, pulling the hood over his head. The pounding, the sick feel, was it the music, pounding a burning hole through his brain? Was it his fists punching at the elevator buttons senselessly, flashing red, blink blink, no elevator in sight, the song would not stop. He turned swift. Stairs!? There must be stairs, some way off this ride, fast.

He hurried down the marble hall, which looked like a relic from some fifties movie. The elevator bank led nowhere, there was a barred window, there was a locked door. He went back the only way he could, and that meant going past the racket, the madhouse, the pulsating sick sound. There was a cluster of people over by the entrance to that man-made hell, that inferno of bodies and spandex skin, but he was sure no one had looked at him, and why would they? They weren't even turned toward him, in their glittery dresses and pressed pants and shiny shoes. Someone was smoking a cigarette, a cigarette, he would just
KILL
for a cigarette, the red flash, the yellow, the black, he pressed his temples, he went straight right past, and people like that, dressed like that, in the throes of double martinis, would not waste a glance at some sneakered low-class going by in his hoodie. Maybe he had a delivery! Maybe someone ordered a pizza. Candygram? M rounded the corner. A dead end, another barred window, and a door, a door, there was a fucking door and it had to be the stairs because it was getting very hard to see

and he went through the door fast and it wasn't the stairs, no stairs, it was a fucking men's room and he slammed the door hard and hard again, it killed the music when he slammed it felt good to slam it slam it again just some sound beating in his head
FLASH
the bright fluorescents
FLASH
the mirrors over the pair of basins
FLASH
the tiled wall, all of it blasting brightness at him. The door, the door, he slam slam
SLAMMED
it again and again and it was almost blotting out the noise and maybe if he could keep that up he could beat the noise because Myron said the best way to blot out the noise is with another noise, adding cryptically that this was the solution and paradoxically (he used that word), also sometimes the problem

and that made M laugh in midslam, it was possible he was doing it he was going to beat this because they weren't going to get him. And that's when the guy came out of one of the stalls, looking mad as hell and somehow puffed up with all the authority his three-piece suits gave him.

“Hey! What the hell are you doing?”

It was a color thing, and a sound thing. Both at once: Now it was two marbles clacking together, clacking together hard, over and over again. It was wood breaking all sharp and crack, it was chicken bones splitting. It was the guy's skull splitting, cracking against the wall over and over. Whimpering cries. Mad bursts of air, gurgled gasps. A body crumples down crash against the toilet and sets it off to flush. Fresh water bursting spin with that muffled, crash thump.

At the last breath … the song changed.

He was not calling himself M anymore. He was O now. Myron said it was good to use letters, just letters. It throws the waves off. Counts to change what you call yourself, even while just telling a story on the inside, because these people, they have machines. They're inside your brain and every time you talk to yourself in there, they pick up on it. They zero in and send you things. That's why calling yourself something different in your head throws them off. The machine, it can't find you so fast. Of course, O hadn't asked Myron why he was always a Myron, or what he called himself inside his head. It didn't occur to him to ask ball-breaking questions like that, because Myron had all the answers. O liked that, he needed that. Myron came along at the perfect moment, seemed to lift the gray fog with just a few words. Everything he said had double meanings spinning on a wild axis, and though O hadn't told him about the red yellow black attack, or about the things Joanna was doing to him, Myron said a few words and right from the beginning started to connect all the dots.

It started and ended with Joanna, his white-girl dream. Myron made him realize. You come across people in life and you interact with them and all of a sudden it feels like they were planted there on purpose, a setup to put you on a certain path. He had that feeling those first moments with Joanna, feeling himself slowly falling, morphing into someone else. He was a stranger obeying commands, another person growing inside him doing things and he didn't know why, these voices … they all belonged to Joanna, coaxing, teasing, laughing with pleasure when he gurgled in pain. It wasn't until Myron that he started to really think about what she was doing to him. Myron, another “chance” meeting, or was that all on purpose, again a setup?

Joanna was a nice white girl from a small town in Texas. She moved to New York, studied marketing at NYU. She had blonde-reddish hair and green eyes. O met her at a tiki bar on the West Side the night he was supposed to meet his friend Nero there, who never actually showed up. He met Joanna there while he stood at the bar, having a red cocktail. She was magically drawn to his cocktail and almost swiped it and he told her the bargirl had made it especially for him and there was only one per night and she picked the people especially and Joanna didn't believe him and so he called the bargirl over and tried to get a red cocktail for her but the bargirl said no dice, only one per night, so he got her a mojito instead and the mojito made her talk about how much she loves Mexico and how she had been there and how she loves the music and he said he's not Mexican he's Puerto Rican and she freaked out and said she
LOVES
Puerto Rico and how she was in San Juan last summer and how much she loves the music and the people and he admitted that she had probably been to the island more times than he ever had, and she said ohhhh that doesn't matter because Puerto Ricans from New York are sexier which created a fast, warm pulse between them. And her eyes stared at his lips as if she would touch them.

“I'm Joanna,” she said, pronouncing it
Jo-awna.
They spent hours snuggled in the small lounge by the dance floor. The smell of her wrapped itself around him like a drug, the closer together they came on those pink cushions. Those first kisses. How she bit on his lips, teasingly, at first—then, the sudden, sharp sting of her teeth.

“Yah,” he said, involuntarily.

“I have to warn you,” she said. “I'm a nymphomaniac.”

He laughed, but she was looking him seriously in the eyes.

“I don't know a single guy that doesn't dream of hearing that,” he said.

“But it's true. I send men running into the night, screaming. They never come back.” She gave him another biting kiss.

“Uhhhhhhhh,” he said, involuntarily. Vaguely tasting blood.

“I can be very demanding,” she said.

She drove a black Ford Escort that slinked along streets like a shiny cockroach. Her apartment was a modest three-room on Ninety-second Street. (He only ever really saw the bedroom.) The going there was a red blur through yellow flashes of passing street lamps, the black-hole night that turned into morning as first light blued the windows.

He was naked. She was wearing black stockings. It started with kisses and snuggle words. Then she began biting him. These weren't tickly nibbles but deep bites that set off manic tremors of pain. She would suck on his neck and dig her teeth in and grind them. She sucked his cock with such a voracious desperation that he was soon swirling in mad delirium, up, down, all direction lost. She sat on his face and smothered him with her pussy until he was faded to black, the lingering yellow-red when he came to and realized he was alone on the bed. That his hands were spread out and tied to the bedposts. And then it was

that song. The one she started it all with, the one she started

blaring from the living room, getting louder, boomier still. She came back, sliding her body over him. And his cock is a stiff stick and moves as if no longer under his control. Her pussy is a sudden, flaming breath. He was sinking, twitching his way back to the surface, just that song, just that song,

and then she started scratching him. Not just soft strokes with the tips of her nails, but grinding in her fingers deep into his sides, his chest, his ass. The tendrils of pain burned all through him. Her deep laugh shook her body and resonated in his cock. She paused for a moment, there on top of him, just looking down on him and the crisscross designs of the fresh scratches she had made on his chest and stomach. She leaned a little to the side and picked up the thin, green knitting needle. Her eyes were different, a different face from any he had seen before. Some feeling like that. He strained against the bonds.

“Joanna,” he said.

“Are you going to beg? I would like you to beg.”

“Yeah, no kidding. Joanna, what's the knitting needle for?”

She smiled, but her eyes looked different. (Again that feeling.) Oh shit.

He strained.

“I already told you,” she said, picking up a small remote. “I like to scratch.” She pressed a button on the remote vigorously. The music got louder and louder. That same song, that same fucking song.

“Sorry about the music,” she said. “It's just the walls are pretty thin here. I don't want the neighbors to hear the screaming.”

“Joanna, Joanna, please … ”

A slow smile. It pleased her to hear him say her name.

“I would like you to beg,” she said. “Are you going to beg for me?” And she teased the tip of the knitting needle with her finger.

The first time (deep breath). He didn't mean to, he didn't mean to. Be taken so far. The woman scared him, she was possessed with some mad, demon spirit. She could see things in him. She had a certain smile for when it hurt the most and he cringed he squirmed he twitched—he had to keep the slamming sound going, see? He had to drown out that other sound, nothing would stop it until that slow, last breath, clean water cascading down rocks in a Japanese garden, the nagging question why, why, and that was like asking why does she hurt you? and why does she like to see blood? The two flowed together, it was all one sea. He shouldn't see her, he should stop. He said that after the first time, he said it again and again for three months of fuck dates that came and went in her bedroom and that one time in the hotel on Fifty-seventh Street because “if I'm going to kill you, I'm not going to do it at home,” and she even wore a wig and joked about how the guy in reception won't recognize her when she leaves as a brunette. (She didn't get to kill him that time.) Or that Friday night, and how she kept him there until Sunday, a nonstop fuck attack that left him paralyzed and senseless, tied to the bed for a large part of the day while she went shopping with friends. When she came back, that song came on, that fucking song … felt drugged and falling and he hadn't eaten and his chest was sticky with blood from where she was carving her name. Appeared at the door in nothing but her black shiny tights, just leaning against the jamb, looking at him, looking at him lying there … no more, no more please, no more weekends ever again …

“You're still here,” she said softly, warm breath against him shiver. “Don't you know, the more you come back, the more I'll hurt you?”

Was she laughing, was she crying? Was that him making that sound? She was twisting the needle … she was twisting him deeper … no, he said, he said it again, he wouldn't go back to her. And every time, he found himself calling her again and again and again, as if under some hypnotic spell he couldn't break. They didn't date and they didn't hold hands or cuddle in the park, they just met and fucked or whatever you call what she was doing to him, carving her name meticulously across his chest (the sound of plastic irritated him anywhere he heard it, she said she didn't want to get blood on her sheets) and it made him feel somehow sick and not like a person so he started appearing at her jobs. She had two of them. She always seemed pleasantly surprised to see him mostly, but if he came upstairs to see her like at that place on the West End she would be too busy to see him for long and would tell him she'd call him. And maybe she would, maybe not. And the next day he would show up at her other job, that small copy shop on Prince Street. “Good baby,” she said, finishing the last
a
on
JOANNA
carved deep across his chest, a jagged bloodied wound that stung him with daily pain no matter how he moved. Then she just stopped calling him. And he wouldn't go to the West End anymore, he was still trying to figure out how she worked that, how she made that yellow red black happen, how the day after she called him.