The Four Fingers of Death (76 page)

Proto-hominid! There had to be a better way to say it. But no one had come up with that better way. For the moment, women were ripping off their golf dresses and were trying to get their husbands to ravish them in the parking lots of emptied shopping malls, and they were shouting out gibberish (part of Spinrad’s argument related to
speaking in tongues
), which was hard to ignore, if you were coming back from the ice cream shop, with your double scoop and jimmies, and your best friend’s mother was wearing a shark mask and red high-heeled pumps and fucking the pool boy, who had a hairy back, just like a chimpanzee.

She and Jean-Paul got into it, because you couldn’t not get into it, because these trends came in waves, and when the world was falling down around you, you did what you could do to stick your head in the sand, the desert sand, to feel as little as possible. This the proto-hominids must have done, when they were going extinct. Like the Neanderthal had to watch the first Cro-Magnons in Central Europe, knowing how much smarter those new guys were, the brand-new Cro-Magnons. She and Jean-Paul got into it, because all the kids got into it, because the kids got into what their parents got into, even if they ridiculed their parents a little bit. And what she noticed, when she was a prodigious reader of Spinrad and the commentators on Spinrad, was that certain ideas did make her a little bit, well, there was no other way to put it, certain things kind of made her
wet
, when she thought about them with Jean-Paul, like there was one thing that really kind of made her
wet
, and not just a little bit. This one thing was a faucet being turned open, which was not what she had experienced, for example, when she had first slept with that lacrosse-playing hunk of wood Damien Lorenzo, which had been like trying to stick a fence pole into a block of concrete—anyway, what really made her
wet
, at first, was the idea of gagging Jean-Paul, like actually gagging him, pretty tightly, so that he couldn’t say anything. She had a horror of stuff like this at first, but then she kind of liked it. She had a kind of a high-pitched screech she got into, and she imagined this was the cry of some kind of rhesus monkey, while she was gagging him, and then when she was done gagging him, she liked to blindfold him. Now, what kind of
proto-hominid
male, you might ask, would be willing to be gagged and blindfolded? She wasn’t totally sure why Jean-Paul Koo was so willing to go along with this stuff, but she thought it probably had something to do with the Dead Mother, who was always around him everywhere, or so he said. She was in his back pocket. The Dead Mother. She was in his glove compartment. Only
proto-hominid sex
, he said, allowed him to put aside all these feelings of filial duty or whatever. He needed to really go back down through the evolutionary chain of sexuality.

Getting him out of all of his rags, so that he had on only the satin jockstrap thing, out on the desert floor, with the big clouds massing in the west, there was something about it that was enough for her, or temporarily enough,
proto-hominid
enough, never mind
hominid
, which was level two, and when she got him like that there was always some other thing she wanted to do, some other degradation that she wanted to visit upon him. It was in fact never enough, and in this case she wanted to tie him up, and she had some of those things, what were those things called, those cords that you used to attach to things,
bungee cords?
She could bungee-cord his wrists, and then instead of laying him down gently, she would just pummel him until he was on his back on the desert floor, and he was still laughing, which was always a good sign, and she took off everything except her bra, because the one thing that Vienna Roberts couldn’t stand was anything to do with her nipples. Maybe for this reason, if she left Jean-Paul’s wrists unbound, he was always ripping at her bra, trying to get at her nipples, biting at them and generally causing a lot of trouble. She hated that maternal thing, didn’t like feeling that anyone was using her in some maternal way, because she wanted all the maternal parts of her
shut off;
she would have been glad, as a teenager, to have her cervix and her uterus and all that stuff taken out of her body, because you know,
proto-hominids had no idea that sexuality caused babies;
that wasn’t something they put together at all. They didn’t make decisions about sexuality based on anything to do with procreation. They just wrestled around and bit one another and penetrated one another and had orgasms, and in the process, they got covered with sweat, blood, and come, and then some time later, in a completely different place and environment, ordained by the plentiful gods, the females swelled up and went through that agonizing labor business.

Naked as a primate, she located a furry eye mask of her own. If the desert was about death, then she wanted the possibility of death, she wanted the reintroduced wolves hovering just out of range of the rutting proto-hominid teenagers, and she wanted the coyotes and the mountain lions all getting ready to devour them, hopefully waiting right behind that stand of greasewood until the moment when they were about to come together, she and Jean-Paul, and then the mountain lions could jump out and sink in their teeth. Before she put the blindfold on, she tried to get the harness on, and the floppy Pulverizer rigged up flush against Jean-Paul’s ass. There was lots in Allan Spinrad’s book about anal penetration. Nothing was more important in indicating the limits of civilized
masculine power
, in this day and age, than the anal penetration of the male, and in Vienna Roberts’s opinion (because eventually she had gotten even that block of wood known as Damien Lorenzo to agree to allow her to put things up his ass), no male really felt
anything
, not even a little, unless he had something up him, and this was because he hadn’t given up enough yet, enough self-respect; proto-hominid sex was nothing if it wasn’t about casting off any last remaining bit of self-respect—but the problem was that notwithstanding Spinrad’s advice, she kind of found the whole anal thing
gross
, you know, she just didn’t like getting anything that was
in there
on herself, and you just couldn’t trust guys, not guys like Jean-Paul who are hooked up to their computer like ninety hours a week, guys who’d already had three or four screen detoxes to their credit, you couldn’t really expect them to
bathe
, and in fact, people just didn’t bathe all that much in the desert anymore, because there wasn’t really enough water. What little water was left was saved for hospitals and mining operations. And so it wasn’t like Jean-Paul wasn’t going to, well, you know, it was like there could be all kinds of stuff down there, who knew, things growing, encrustments. She tried to get the Pulverizer in there a little bit, and there was a kind of hiccuping laugh from him, and then she pulled down the eye mask and then rolled onto him, in the dark, and there was the breeze, and the babbling creek of the distant interstate, and there were the clouds massing, and she knew they were massing, and then she and Jean-Paul were rubbing against each other, and nowhere in the proto-hominid manual did it say what you were supposed to
feel
really, because
feeling things
, that was so old-fashioned, you know? And guys never wanted to feel things anyhow, emotions, and she kept privately to herself that one last little bit of feeling, the kind she wasn’t supposed to have, and that last little bit of feeling was for having the part of him inside of her, and even if she did kind of think that it was disgusting, that part of men was disgusting, the mandrel was disgusting, she just hadn’t gotten past it, and even if she did think that, that they were disgusting, there was a way in which she still wanted to have him inside of her, not that she needed completing, forget it, nothing about completing, she was complete as she was, she didn’t want to be completed, she wanted to take things away from other people, and she wanted to squander what she took away, but something in her quieted when he was inside her, and maybe something quieted when the Pulverizer was inside of him, if it
was
really in there.

Which didn’t mean that proto-hominid sex wasn’t more like Mexican wrestling than it was like
love
, at least the proto-hominid sex of Jean-Paul and Vienna. Someone was on top and then they were not on top, and someone was elbowing the other one in the head, and then someone was trying to pin someone else down, and they were breathing hard not because they were turned on exactly, although there was some of that, but more because they were exhausted from all the wrestling. There was a reason why rounds in wrestling were only so long, couple of minutes, and it went on like this, wrestling and spitting and grunting, and occasionally Jean-Paul would shout something in Korean, because when he was really enjoying himself, he enjoyed himself in the language of his birth. From Vienna’s point of view, which was no kind of point of
view
just then, since she was blindfolded, it was all about sensation—she didn’t fall into that thing where she was concerned about whether she was emaciated enough, because even though Jean-Paul denied it, she was certain that Jean-Paul only liked women who were emaciated—and she didn’t care if she was making a strange face or if one of them had
unsightly body hair;
she just felt certain things. Her body was being wrung out, like on one of those nonelectric dryers that people were using again. You cranked the clothes between two pieces of lathed mahogany, and then the garment was automatically lofted onto a line in the yard to bake in the desert heat. Sex was like that, like laundry, and all kinds of important psychosexual juices were being moved through the proto-hominid latitudes of her—her back brain, her uvula, her perineum, her labia, her small intestines. The juices were like the runoff from an industrial accident, a flaming, pressurized sluice of erotic by-products that could run from a factory down into a wash somewhere, erotic by-products that could flood the Rio Blanco city center, washing away encampments of homeless people, maybe even her parents, who were busy trying to organize the homeless citizens, and along with her parents, also the unstuffed armchairs that the homeless people used for reclining in the park off Stone, shopping carts, tarps, old-model cellular telephones and satellite phones that the homeless people used to communicate with one another, various OxyPlus intravenous drip bags and nasal inhalers, piles of clothes from the charitable thrift stores, all of this was being washed away in the erotic runoff from her. Oh, and it was also true that proto-hominid sex put a big premium on female ejaculate and encouraged women to work hard to learn the skill, because
everybody spurts
was a rallying cry of the proto-hominid movement, and maybe therefore Vienna, who really didn’t understand what this signified exactly, and who had been unable to get the high school sexual education counselor to tell her (he had a twenty-point memo he handed out detailing the things
he wasn’t allowed to say
), he couldn’t be relied on to tell her anything about female ejaculate, and the part in Spinrad’s book that had the
everybody spurts
subhead, it was hard to understand, even though she felt like she understood everything else, so basically she just imagined a lot of fluid, fluid everywhere, gigantic streams of fluid gushing forth from her, especially during the blissful penetration and the even more blissful
clitoral devourment
, which was another Spinrad recommendation, although, you know, the proto-hominids probably didn’t engage in oral sex, this was a much disputed subject, but that willingness to devour the partner, the part of sexual congress that could move straight into cannibalism, like where you really would eat a bloody shank from each other, you know, maybe with some kind of condiment, the
clitoral devourment
would do pretty well as a symbol of the kind of proto-hominid willingness to devour the partner, and she was really getting into that
clitoral devourment
, even though she wasn’t, you know, entirely sure if Jean-Paul really knew exactly where the clitoris was, and most of the time, well, he had these ideas about how he was going to work hard to get her off, but once he stuck the mandrel of love into her, there was a real danger that he would gush in about ninety seconds and it would be on her leg or something, and that was the end of that, but anyhow, for the moment he was fulfilling his obligation to pursue
clitoral devourment
, and she was imagining the kinds of waterfalls and tidal waves and tsunamis that were consistent with the idea that
everybody spurts
, and she found that against her better judgment, she did lapse into English language for a brief moment, and with a somewhat, well,
uncomatose
fervency, “This feels so fucking good!”

Then a strange thing happened. Vienna Roberts knew, and she was fond of telling her friends, that there was a goal with this new sex thing, like there was a goal with everything American, there was a payoff, there was a
bottom line
, and the bottom line of proto-hominid sex was
complete negation of cerebral activity
. As with, she guessed, religions, like Buddhism or whatever, the goal with proto-hominid sex was to strike a fabulous blow against the reasoning part of the brain. Most people thought this whole idea was totally fake. Even her parents joked about it. Probably Spinrad was taking some kind of mood stabilizer when he wrote that part, and with his bald head, his little potbelly, and his stumpy legs (she’d seen him on the infomercial), he was cardiologically unsound, and probably he had some transient seizure while leaking a little eyedropper full of seminal fluid, and that was what he referred to as
complete negation of cerebral activity
. Both she and Jean-Paul had subjected this claim to exhaustive testing involving OxyPlus, cannabis, inhaled cleaning agents, mild strangulation, and they had found that they had headaches and got sore throats, but they still managed to worry about what would happen if their parents found their naked bodies in the desert. With all of their rigid scientific testing, they had never once achieved
complete negation of cerebral activity
.