Little Cat (20 page)

Gio stuck his tongue in my ear. ‘Mira, Mira, you’re the next.’

I thought he was in love with me. We were in love.
He’s in love, he’s in love and I’m in love too!

But it was only for a second, both of us like that.

Love is so strange it can hardly bear more. It’s a nightmare vine, a plant with a face, wood with the veins ripping through, squirting come. Love is one second inside these dark folds.

‘Fuck me, please fuck me.’ I want your come!

‘Mira, you’ve got a hungry little pussy.’

I wanted to be like Adi when she was dancing.

‘Mira, little pussy, little cub, little whore.’

I wanted to be the next whore that he saved. I would give up my money. I would give up my life and shove it in the ground.

We were struggling and humping. My fingers stretched out. Gio turned me around by the chin. He pushed his tongue in and out of my mouth. I was a sponge. I’d take anything from him. I thought I was going to come in a second, just from us kissing, just from the wind, just from my hips banging into the car. Clenching my cunt, I squeezed and let go. The rushing, the fucking, my ass got all split. My legs were all locked. The sides of the road extended forever. Then his cock was inside me. His cock pushed so hard. His cock went up through my ass like a rock. There was nothing between us. This was how I loved. Hot on his stone, oiling it down, I was holding it inside me, squeezing it inside me. My ass loved his cock. I wasn’t letting him go, he was fucking me harder so I could take more. His cock pushed in behind me all the way to my clit and my clit flowered open, a bulb from inside. I choked, I came, I heard it in my throat, his tongue through my lips, and I came and I came! His pulsing fat dick pushed the come into me.

God, wait, don’t stop!

Gio’s cock left me.

I collapsed inside the car. I was wet on the seat. I was going to cry. I wanted to cry. I wanted more! I wanted him back. I’d wanted him from the first time I saw him: eyes like a hunter’s, eyebrows all in one line. I wanted to go back to right where we just were, where my ass was so strong that I was showing it off. As strong as him, I was as strong as him and I wanted to do it again and again, get stronger than him, zap him and kill him just like a leech sucking blood from the bone. I hid my eye in my shoulder to stop myself from crying. A hard pain shot through my body and lodged itself inside me.

Gio got back into the car carrying a small beanbag pillow from the trunk. He wedged the thing between my face and the window. He said, ‘Sleep for a bit now. Go back to sleep.’

I didn’t want to be asleep again. The feeling of fucking was too strong inside me, but when I closed my eyes for a second, the lids stuck together. The next thing I heard was Gio saying my name.

He stood outside the car. I was holding my stomach. I thought I was bleeding. I shoved both my hands down there: thick, fuck, I got it.

‘Rise and shine,’ Gio said.

We were at the bottom of a driveway that curled up a small hill. Gio’s palm was in front of my face. He was holding the handkerchief that he’d pushed to his face in the car. It was filled with little cream-coloured pills. It almost looked like they were homemade. White dust was coming off them.

‘Take one.’

‘What is it?’

‘Take it.’

‘I got my period.’

‘For that.’

‘Is it good?’

Gio nodded. I didn’t move.

He took one of the pills and wedged his fingers between my lips. I opened my mouth and it fell on my tongue. It tasted mouldy and came apart fast. I just wanted to run and get to a bathroom, but Gio was staring between my legs. Blotches of brown and bright red dyed the creases of the white dress. My gut felt like it was being scalped.

‘I’ve got to go clean up,’ I said. My period always started really strong, blood all over my legs for a day.

‘There’s the creek out back. Do it there. Wash the dress too.’

I was bleeding and he wouldn’t let me into his house? Gio leaned down inside the car. Above his lip were clear drops of sweat. I thought for a second he was going to kiss me, but instead he gripped me by the arm and lifted me out of the car.

My toes were clenched. I knew I was leaking. I held the beanbag pillow at my crotch.

‘Come on,’ Gio said. He was irritated again.

The ground was made of sharp white stones. Just a little way down from the driveway was a still brown pond in the middle of a creek. It looked like a place where people washed pots, threw stones.

‘Go,’ Gio said as we walked toward the water. ‘Go on, get in there.’

‘Will you come in with me?’ I asked.

Gio’s eyes roamed up and down my legs. He stared, revolted, at the stains on the dress where I held the pillow, where the dress was a clump.

He poked my ass. ‘Clean yourself.’

I walked in tiny steps. I held the beanbag between my legs. I was thinking maybe we could stay here awhile. I’d even hang out with his kids. I didn’t want to be in this freezing, this cold! I wanted to lie between sheets with Gio beside me.

‘Go on! Get in there!’

I was right at the edge where water was lapping. I moved bit by bit down into the pool that had turned black and blue as I got closer. My thighs, then my stomach, then my breasts disappeared. Long weeds were floating on the surface of the water. I scrubbed the dress between my fists and let it flare out as big as a blossom.

So this is my body.
Hoc est enim corpus meum.

Red smoke rose from between my thighs and settled like scum on the surface of the pond. I felt like laughing for a second – so this is my blood!

When I looked up, I saw that Gio had walked to the edge of the water. His hands were lifted as high as his heart. Trees waved around his head in a circle. He was watching me, patting the air in downward strokes. I imagined his hands were touching my shoulders, pushing me down to where everything was ice. Go under, it was like he was saying,
dunk yourself clean
. Breathing fast through my nose, skin turning to scales, I disappeared underneath the freezing cold plane. Gio’s hands pushed me down. Oh fish. Oh god. I thought God was in the ice water with me. Adi, are you down here too?

‘Mirrrrrra!’

I shot up for breath. Gio’s body, chest bare, was coming in toward me. I was dizzy from gasping, dizzy from swallowing, I was walking sideways in short jerky steps. Who was this man who was walking in toward me?

‘Fuck, what did you give me? I feel dizzy. I’m stoned … ’

Gio looked different in the water. His hair was tighter to his skull and his skull seemed thinner than his neck. The bones above his cheeks protruded, temples beating.

‘I had sex the first time with an illusion,’ he said.

Gio looked like Jesus fucking Christ.

I glided toward him. My body felt suddenly good, all sucked in the dress. He had come in for me! I was not an illusion.

‘I stared at a girl in a porn magazine. There was no hair on her vagina.’

‘Was it Adi?’ I asked.

‘You need to repent for your thoughts,’ Gio answered. He put his hand on my forehead. He was going to push me backward and I tried to resist.

Gio had this disdain for me. Adi and Coco and Lani had suffered. They’d been fucked and fucked and fucked in small rooms. I reached through the water for Gio’s tail. He had unzipped his pants and I found his dick, all waxy and limp. My grip kept slipping off its head. I liked it when a cock was soft and I was the one who made it hard. Gio braced himself on my shoulder as I pulled on his cock underneath the pond. His cock was getting a bit harder in my grip. I rubbed faster and faster, looking up at the sky. Then I saw the house up behind him. It was a white painted house with a spire. That house was a church? No, the house was a nunnery! A man with the nuns! I started laughing hysterically. I couldn’t help myself.

‘You live up there with the nuns?’

Gio took my hand off his dick, lifted it out of the water and spread it flatly on his chest. His heart felt like some kind of frog: cold, deliberate, rasping. He lifted my arms and started twirling me around.

‘Lift up your arms, Mira. High, higher. Don’t forget your legs, lift them too! Lift your legs, stand on your head! In happiness, too, there are heavy animals!’

I was dancing and splashing. This creek was a swamp! The sky started turning purply red. I saw rain in the clouds before rain came down, vibrating holes from the tiniest grids. I knew rain would squirt through those clouds and pour out, dissolve like glass splinters into our skin.

‘Let’s get out of the water!’ I splashed Gio’s chest. ‘Let’s go and lie down in the stone room and fuck!’

But Gio didn’t budge. I stopped my wet dance.

‘All Jews must go to Israel,’ he said.

My feet sank into the clay of the creek. I felt a big clot of my blood release.

Gloom settled over Gio’s face. I wanted to pull us in toward the shore, but I couldn’t feel my feet. Everything was numb. I had no desire to go to Israel. I wanted to get lost in Japan.

Suddenly Gio got down on his knees. His chin bobbed just over the surface of the water. He closed his eyes. His bottom lip was turning blue.

‘What does it mean, Mira, when a rabbi says that Truth is all over the world?’

I looked down at Gio’s square-shaped Jesus-like skull. ‘I’ve never heard a rabbi say anything like that.’

Gio opened his eyes and looked up at me. ‘It means that Truth is driven out of one place after another, and must wander on and on and on.’

‘Maybe the rabbi meant the Jews are driven out of one place after another and that’s their search for the truth, right?’

‘Yes. We wander. You wander too.’

Light filtered through my stoned daze. I understood now. We wander through the wilderness. Being with Gio is wilderness. The titty club is wilderness. Maybe my room is the wildest place I’ll ever be.

The sequence in this freezing creek in front of Jewish Jesus on his knees was all of a sudden clear to me: I met a man named John, then I met a man named Michael, then I met a girl named Adi and I followed her to him. To Gio, Jesus. I did what Adi did, she left and I left with him. Now I remembered, I knew how I was who I was. A wandering Jew! Struck dumb. On her knees. Truth is driven out of one place after another and wanders on and on and on …

Gio held my legs together under the water. ‘I’ve called all the other girls,’ he whispered. ‘But they don’t respond. It was you who knew who I was even though I tried to confuse you. You saw what I wanted from you and your want responded. You are a Jew who can save needy souls.’

‘Amen!’ I said.

That felt so funny I wanted to say it again but Jews don’t shout amen, they wail to Adonai.

‘Amen! Amen!’ I screamed, bleeding in the water near his chest.

‘Yes, Mira, you hear the requests of unworthy men’ – Gio was stroking my thighs up and down, up and down – ‘and you pray to God for the whole world and them that their wandering through the desert should not be without fruit. You are the one who can do this, Mira. I know you are the one, the only one.’

I put my hand on Gio’s head. I was above him and it felt right, yes, Jesus Christ.

‘Gio,’ I whispered. ‘Will you, will you marry me?’

‘Fuck no, Mira.’

Gio let go of my legs. His face went blank. He stood up and walked out of the water. I heard him say no again.

I took off the pearly white dress. I pushed it down to the bottom of the creek. I got naked. Amen. I squirted fresh blood. Amen. I stomped the white dress into the pond’s slimy ground.

All of a sudden I felt ready for something. Fuck becoming a stupid wife! I was ready for every kind of game in the world! I felt a restlessness spread through my body, itching and rushing, fluorescent waves. I remembered how Ezrah and his friends had huddled around me when I was young, when I was down like a blob on my stomach and back. The magazine was spread so we could do it how they did. Those guys made the rules until someone’s finger pushed in me. Until I felt how big I was there and how small the finger was, how nervous it was.

I wanted Gio to see me bloody and naked. But he was walking, up toward his house.

Alone, alone, I was at the edge of the water. It felt strangely lukewarm. The foaming edge of it squelched between my toes. I started going forward. My foot didn’t sink. I was skimming it forward: my foot did not sink! The arches of my feet were like the sails of a boat and underneath my soles was warm air. It was like my legs swelled into balloons. Steady in my pelvis was a helicopter pulse. I was a body made up of water. All of my blood was softer than water. I could walk on this, fly on this, skim or dissolve. I walked forward on the water. I was walking on water like Jesus fucking Christ. This was real, not a dream, everyone could do this. Lift up and move with the pulse in your ass, spray from your heart. Everyone should feel this!

‘Daddy! Daddy!’

I spun and I fell. Shit! Two little bodies were running down the hill, heading straight for Gio’s legs. I plunged through the water, hid myself under. Gio scooped his girl in the middle of her dash, and threw her high up into the air. Shrieking, she was as thin as Adi. The boy raised his arms, he wanted up, too, but Gio wouldn’t stop twirling his girl.