Imperfections (13 page)

The applause became confused and stuttered to silence.

Anastasia died.

The wooden wheel looked like a bloody Spirograph drawing gone wrong.
 

Razor brushed hair back from her inverted face. Sobbing, he kissed her bloody lips.

Right there was the connection between entertainment and real life. Right then it became real to everyone, the inseparable nature of reality and the fantasy that had enthralled us. The fantasy truly took place, it happened in reality, and that only just became apparent. With the thickness of less than a hair, there was really nothing separating the two.

Razor, desperately clutching at his lovely assistant, his wife, looked frantically for some small part of her that was still alive. His hands and her face were covered in blood and tears.

Razor's real name was Chad Strauss.

His lovely assistant, his wife, was named Eileen Fletcher. She didn't take his name when they had married. They didn't love each other any less because of it.

Screams and commotion rippled through the crowd. I fought to stay on my feet in the press of shifting bodies. If I'd fallen, I would have been trampled. Somehow, Leonard and I found each other and we were swept along with the crowd. There was an explosion of light and we were back on the midway.

The fire popped and flared, sending fireflies spiralling high into the night. I blinked at it. Somewhere from the direction of the lake, there was a splash and a squeal.

I looked at Paige, her face smooth and pretty in the flickering light. She leaned over and kissed me. I kissed her back with eyes wide open, staring dumbly at her closed eyelids. She put her hand on my chest and pushed with just enough force to tilt me and the log I sat on to topple. Our lips broke contact for a moment when we hit the ground, Paige's body on mine. Our landing hurt and winded me. I let out a small grunt which was punctuated by Paige's tongue entering my mouth.

We fumbled there, in the dirt, lit only by the flickering firelight. Rough caresses followed, awkward hands exploring each other's bodies through clothes, lips never parting for fear of neither of us knowing what to say. I ran my fingers through her hair. She tousled mine with her hand on the back of my head.

Paige pulled me up to a sitting position and lifted my T-shirt over my head. I was dazed momentarily, head covered in a sleeve of fabric, until it popped out the other side. My skin was alive, naked in the night air, warmed on one side by the fire, cooled on the other by the night.

Paige latched onto my mouth again. She tasted like fire-roasted marshmallows and her lips were sticky with sugar.

She ran a hand, floated it really, one molecule above my skin, from my chest to my belly button so that I could feel the sensuous absence of her touch gliding across the fine hairs covering my skin. Even so, I didn't clue in that she had done this before.

“What's that?” she asked through a mouthful of tongues, her hand rested on the patch of hair left of my belly button.

I heard Mother's voice ask the question, which wasn't right. It was the last voice I needed to hear at that moment. I pulled Paige closer and sealed our lips together to silence Mother, which I wasn't sure was so right either. I needed a distraction so I clumsily pulled her sweater up over her head, as she had done to my T-shirt.

“Ow. Stop,” she said, reaching to pull her sweater back down.

I recoiled, fearful I had done something horribly wrong.

“My earring is caught,” she said, her voice muffled by a veil of alpaca.

I stole a look at the smooth skin of her belly which almost ended the whole session for me. I closed my eyes and tried to think of something else, something infinitely unsexy. A multiplication table, some mathematical impossibility, anything to distract me from the horrible pleasure I knew I was about to endure. I tried to remember all the lyrics to R.E.M.'s “Losing My Religion.” I ran through scenes of
Terminator 2
in my head until a pyjama-wearing Sarah Connor's bare feet squeaked sexily on the floors of Pescadero Mental Institution.
 

Eileen Fletcher spinning on the wheel flashed into my mind.

“There,” Paige said.

Paige pulled her sweater off. Her hair was a static-cling Medusa wig. She smiled triumphantly.

I smiled expectantly.

The fire crackled happily.

Paige smacked me in the side of the head.

It was much harder than a caress should be, I thought, though I wasn't sure, being new to this and all.

“What the hell?” I sputtered, a little aroused by the foreign sensations all over my body but confused by the pleasure/pain combination.

“Shit,” Paige straddled me, her warm thighs bracketing my waist. She smacked me in the head again, then grabbed it in both hands, twisting to one side. She started pushing my cheek into the dirt and pine needles. She was surprisingly strong as she grasped firmer and pushed harder when I started to struggle, using both hands to washboard my face back and forth across the ground. “Your hair's on fire.”

“There,” she said, “lemme see.” She twisted my face to the opposite side. “Yep, all out.”

I ran light fingers over the area, trying to assess the damage. I could smell the burnt hair but I couldn't feel a bald spot. A few patches of my cheek and chin felt gritty where dirt had collected in newly acquired scratches.

Paige sat atop me watching. As soon as our eyes met, she leaned forward and smushed her lips to mine again.

“Let's roll,” I gasped, “away from the fire.”

She heaved and we steamrollered away from the fire, a distance of one roll. Paige wound up on top of me again, her skin on mine. I wanted complete contact. I reached around her with both hands and fiddled with her bra, having only a vague idea of how the clasp contraption worked. I tried to get a peek at the clasp without breaking our lip-lock but, unsurprisingly in hindsight, the geometry didn't work. Desperation and inexperience made it a good idea at the time though.

Paige let out, what seemed to me, a patient sigh. She sat up, reached behind her and effortlessly released the garment and its prisoners.

There they were… boobies. That's what they were called. Breasts were the things that would cost Dow Corning $7.3 million after a lawsuit resolved with the finding that silicone implants caused immune system illness. But boobies, those were just wonderful.

I reached up with both hands and squeezed them as if they would honk, go
beep-beep
, or make an
Ah-woogah
sound like some old Model-T horn. Paige took me by the wrists and guided me through the foundations of erotic caressing.

All the while I worked through the hardest times table in my head, the twelve times table, anything to distract my mind. I thought about the images I had seen on television: burning Kuwait, soldiers in gas masks, rockets blasting off. Nothing helped against the presence of Paige's naked skin.
 

Of course, I had seen parts of a dirty movie and a few porno magazines before. Sex there was so glossy, juicy, large and long. It was also very tidy. There were no smells, no extraneous juices until they were called for. Vocalizations were all scripted or dubbed in after the deed. There were no farty noises, no weird grunts or air expulsions. Talking dirty seemed erotic when someone else was saying it or writing it.
 

I found the reality of it was different.

Sex education classes, with their vaguely erotic technical drawings, taught me where everything was: the sexy parts and the not-sexy ones. Mind you, I had mixed feelings about the words used to label the parts, attached by a thin black line leading from the name to the part. The words seemed wrong, seemed funny where they should have been sexy. They weren't the words anyone would use later, in real life. “Labia majora” read the fletching of the black line that pierced the part. Mons pubis, clitoral hood, perineum, Bartholin's gland.

The guys are no more blessed with technical terms than the gals. Scrotum, corpora cavernosa, tunica albuginea, testicles, or funnier yet, testes. The words were speleological gear and the weird rock formations you found on spelunking adventures.

So, put all this together and there was a heavy session of coitus. When Paige and I had coitus, my penis penetrated past her labia majora and minora, less than gracefully entering her vaginal canal until her mons pubis rested on my mons pubis.

Then she jiggled a bit, her hands on my shoulders and her arms straight, locked at the elbows. Her shadow vibrated. Then I was done. There was nothing I could do; no amount of distraction with obscure trivia or mind games could prolong it.

Paige kept jiggling and I was left with a rather uncomfortable feeling of being done but wanting to be polite to someone who had given so generously of her body. From what I knew, this was much stinkier, more uncomfortable and notably shorter than most couplings.

A rustle came from the edge of the circle of flickering firelight. Mary and Leonard had returned, stumbling into the light and stopping cold when they spotted us. Paige looked over her shoulder with a gasp and was dressed before I even had time to stand up.

“Nice,” Mary said, eyebrows raised at me.

I spun around looking for my shirt and pants without much luck.

Leonard smirked, the lines on his face exaggerated by the firelight. He circled the fire, pulled my pants from a shadow on the ground and handed them to me. He gestured at Paige, who was wearing my R.E.M.
Out of Time
T-shirt, with her arms crossed protectively across her chest.

“You can never say anything about this,” Paige warned, not looking at anyone of us.

“Oh, Paige,” Mary said. “Trust us, our lips are sealed.”

“Yeah, Paige,” I said, taking a step to comfort her.

“Put your pants on,” she said, matching my step with one in the opposite direction.

I did. Then I put on Paige's sweater. It hung, loose and itchy against my skin.

Little else was said that night. We put out the fire and stirred the ashes. Leonard and I peed on the spot once the girls started back to camp. Billowing clouds of stinky, steaming soot rose up. We followed Mary and Paige who walked slowly, picking their way through the dark woods. The pale moon lit the forest in greys and blacks. It robbed the dimensions from sight, making it like a walk through a painting of a forest at night. I could hear the girls talking quietly up ahead. Leonard followed me in silence.

I wanted to talk to Paige. I wanted to talk about the experience we shared. At the time, it was the deepest connection I had ever felt with anyone. But we couldn't talk with Mary there. I wanted to know what they were talking about. Was it about me? Then I didn't really want to know. My loneliness deepened with a giggle from the girls and the quiet noises of Leonard moving through the bush behind me.

The sound of a breeze in the trees drew my attention upward. I slowed my pace and looked at the sky. The trees were grey stripes, all converging on a hole in the canopy, a beautiful black space where I could see stars. The lights shining from up there were old. Whatever happened to them was already long over, thousands of years past. I wondered if any one point of light had a planet spinning around it where a little alien guy was walking through an alien forest after just having had coital relations. I doubted it and from that doubt came an overwhelming sense of wonder coupled with deep isolation. Reality was here. Fantasy was out there, in some alien sex light from ten thousand years ago.

I shivered.

We broke through the forest and onto the camp's compound. A few naked bulbs cast deep shadows on the dorm cabins. A gravel cul-de-sac looped around the buildings and back out through the dark spaces of trees to the highway a short distance away. A logging truck roared by, its headlights and yellow running lights flickering through the trees. For a moment, it drowned out the distant buzzing of the power line that ran to the camp from the lines along the road. It drowned out the quiet gurgling of water that passed through a corrugated aluminum culvert that redirected a stream under the highway.

We whispered good nights.

Leonard and I watched the girls go, their bodies side by side slipping from white to black through light and shadow. Their feet reported a muted crackle as they walked along the gravel lane. They rounded the girl's dorm and were gone.

“Want to go for a walk?” Leonard asked in a hushed tone.

I nodded. I was glad he asked. I needed to be around someone. The place was too quiet and, that night, the universe was too big. I felt too small. I wouldn't have been able to sleep anyway.

We wandered up the short road that led to the highway. A single lamppost, crowned by a yellow spotlight, marked the turnoff to the camp.
 

Across the highway was the large black spot of a recent cutblock. The space left behind where trees once stood was large, flat and empty. It smelled of earth and was a feeling that settled into both of us. The spotlight did not stretch far from the tarmac where we stood. There was a slight creosote smell from the lamp pole. We stood in the safety circle of light, looking in opposite bearings along the highway. The unknown tarmac stretched out in either direction. For all we knew, in the dark beyond our vision, the road may have just looped above, rising overhead and leaving us looking at each other in opposite directions.