Saline Solution (24 page)

'It starts with circumcision or baptism or enrolment in some league. From practically the first breath the child is marked with some tattoo to enlist him in the rolls of some imbecile group claiming its separateness from the rest of humanity and the rest of existence. In schools the cry is 'Line up, be quiet' and throughout the vast structure of society the fossil myths fight such duels as to blind all but a very precious few. And the war will never end.

'Lies and lies and lies so dense and interwoven into the very texture of our language that hardly anyone even knows he lies anymore. The masses of people wander in a haze of unperception and a welter of confused emotion, while the intelligentsia become semantic pimps selling the mother tongue as a whore for the rich to use. And all the palliatives fail, all the politics or reform, and the therapies and ideologies and drugs. For there is
no way
out of the hell which increases daily and will soon engulf us entirely. Do you understand that?
No way.

'Do you think it's sane to attempt to raise a child in such a world?'

I got up and walked to the window. 'Look at the city. It's dying before our eyes, suffocating in its own filth.' I yelled into the street: 'Hooray for filthy air and poisoned water. Hooray for atomic reactors and mountains of garbage.' I spun back to see Lucinda biting her lip.

'Dante G. is only a symbol,' I said to her. 'The real abortion is us. The universe is flushing us out of its system.'

XXI

'Clean all the way down,' he said.

The doctor looked down the entire length of my lower intestinal tract via a hollow two-foot rubber tube which he had inserted, slowly and tentatively, into my arsehole. 'I was about to say "Clean as a whistle",' he said, 'but it seemed indelicate.'

As in most medical situations, we both attempted to pretend that something extremely intimate and sensual wasn't happening. He was exquisitely gentle, with a tender reverence for the body that enriched his consummate expertise. He was like a top mechanic with a really fine engine. As he slid the dildo out I had to exert my will to keep from moaning with pleasure.

'It's a safe bet to assume that the amoebic dysentery has been cleared up,' he said, now sitting across the desk from me. We were dressed; I had put my clothes on and he had rolled his sleeves down. 'We'll do another stool examination in three months and that should wrap it up.'

He stood up and shook my hand. He smiled. My mind teetered. This same man's announcement of the disease some four months earlier had triggered my bout with fidelity and started the trip which was ending with calm despair and kinaesthetic gloom. The end is the same as the beginning, the snake swallows its tail.

I walked back to the apartment through Central Park, relishing the pockets of relatively clean air among the clumps of trees. The rest of Manhattan Island had been stomped flat and covered with cement. It occurred to me that the Indians had lived for almost twenty thousand years on the North American continent and had not left a single mark to mar the beauty of nature. And within a mere three hundred years, the viscious and monumentally insensitive European arrived and turned the entire land into a junk yard, the rivers and lakes into cesspools.

Lucinda was in the bedroom, packing for her stay in the hospital. A man crouched behind the television set.

'He's from Cable TV,' she said.

'It used to be the Fuller Brush man,' I said.

'They were giving a demonstration in the lobby. It only cost six dollars a month.'

'I thought television was supposed to be free,' I said.

'You don't have to get the service,' said the man from behind a tangle of wires. 'Only if you want good reception.'

'It's the logic of madness,' I said to Lucinda. 'Capitalism run amok.'

'At least abortion is legal,' she said.

'It should work fine now,' said the man as he stepped onto the stage of the bedroom floor. He turned the set on. The picture was perfect. He gathered his tools and left, leaving Lucinda and me to watch the end of a very early Bogart film about a ring of Nazis who were trying to lay mines in New York harbour. Peter Lorre played a weird fascist.

We settled in for the evening. We lay on the floor, propped against the mattress, and peered into the tube. Now and then our hands would touch, and we shared a most fleeting pressure, the ghost of an affection that had been mangled by the megamachine and now whimpered behind walls of artificially constructed indifference. My chest was sore from all the aching I had been refusing to allow myself to feel.

She heated up a dish of rice and eggplant left over from two days earlier, as we dipped into the steaming food we both understood that this would probably be our last meal together. We continued to pretend that this was just another evening, though; for, in effect, that's all it was. The emotions were ripcords inside me, and I staggered from moments of crushing loss to giggling euphoria, all within seconds.

We had two bowls of Haagen-Dazs ice cream, and enjoyed them shamelessly, the luxurious seduction of that wet cold flavour temporarily dispelling all other moods and purposes. And then we watched a cast of international stars romp through John Huston's camp on
Casino Royal.

After all the passion and rationalisation, that is the way the affair ended, with two people stupidly watching television, their faces turned towards the screen like flowers towards the sun, their eyes liquid with guilt; afraid to let one another know their pain, their fear; unable to comfort one another in the face of the great tragedy - the murder of the child.

We walked woodenly through our lines for the rest of the evening, as though we were rehearsing, doing blocking, not actually living the real scene. And then we lay down to sleep.

I had one brief glimpse of the truth of our condition, and then a vast blackness closed over me, as though I were being encased in a huge concrete vault, the thickness of which was the entire breadth of the physical universe. I was ultimately trapped in the toils of existence and in panic my mind raced to the utermost limits of what I could know. All the accumulation of history unrolled before my consciousness, and I perceived that my consciousness was nothing but that accumulation, a dustball of arbitrary structures. As I tripped into sleep I could hear laughter coming from the spaces beyond my prison.

The night was a pool of frightful dreams into which I peered as though through water. Lucinda swam in and out of the field, and I was never sure whether I was seeing the actual woman lying next to me or the crystallisation of a dream. At one moment we held on to each other with all the fullness and freshness of people who have nothing to hold back from one another, as it had once been. And again I sat up, soaked in sweat, and gasped at the speed of time.

Events were out of my grasp. They always had been, but now I didn't even have the illusion of control.

The content of the dreams shifted and refused to stay in focus. But over all was the impression of being beaten with an iron rod, with slow methodical strokes, a punishment that would never stop, no matter whether I slept or woke, day or night. Inside me, always, the club would continue to crush my bones, bruise my flesh.

At six o' clock I got up and walked around. Somewhere behind the dull glow which suffused the sulphurous air outside the window, the sun was shining. I looked over at Lucinda. Her face was wrinkled in pain. I lay back down and fell asleep.

And then Lucinda was shaking me awake.

'You won't be able to visit me today,' she said. 'What?'

'I'll be in isolation.'

I shook my head.

'Don't you know how they're going to do it?' Her eyes were wide and seeing. 'They're going to put in a room with three other women and stick a needle into my arm and let the salt water drip into my bloodstream for ten or twelve hours until the baby suffocates and dies and I begin to abort. And then they'll catch him in a metal pail.'

Hysteria cut though her voice like the whine of a buzzsaw. I was paralysed. I watched her look at me, waiting. And then she backed out of the room. It took an eternity. I screamed inside my head. But I couldn't break the spell. I fell back unconscious.

I woke up at ten. There was a note on the kitchen table.

I had written you a long nasty letter - jealous and bitter - but why end that way -

I am sorry about the baby - deeply and forever sorry and sad - I've felt it move and loved it cause it was ours -

I will miss you - five months is a long time - some of it was very good -

I'll be at my mother's apartment for a few days -call if you want -

Thanks for staying around yesterday - it helped

I read it five times, looking at the handwriting, the colour of the ink, the texture of the paper. I tried to feel something. It seemed to me that I should be feeling something.

I scratched around the refrigerator for breakfast, and a rising tide of separateness flooded my soul. For a brief time another human being had crushed through the texture of my alienation and I had felt her as real as myself. Now I was alone again. I was afraid to look at the seconds as they passed.

We began as nomads, we end as monads. We join the ants and roaches and bees in great unthinking patterns of culture. Or shall we destroy it all? And to whom will it matter?

The hunt is done. We have caught ourselves. Like photographs taken with a flash bulb unawares.

I carefully washed all the dishes and slowly packed what few things I had. I dressed and went into the bathroom. My face in the mirror surprised me, for I looked so normal.

Except for the eyes. Which stared back without question, without wonder, without quarter.

I pissed into the urinal, thinking about what I would do next. It was impossible to stay, and there was no place to go. I flushed the tank with a deliberate twist of the wrist, and watched the yellow water swirl into the base of the bowl on its way to the pipes, into the bowels of the building, under the city street, into the river, and to the wounded and vengeful ocean beyond.

NEXUS BACKLIST

Where a month is marked on the right, this book will not be published until that month in 1994. All books are priced £4.99 unless another price is given.

CONTEMPORARY EROTICA

CONTOURS OF DARKNESS THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE THE DOMINO TATTOO THE DOMINO ENIGMA THE DOMINO QUEEN ELAINE

EMMA S SECRET WORLD EMMA ENSLAVED FALLEN ANGELS THE FANTASIES OF JOSEPHINE SCOTT THE GENTLE DEGENERATES HEART OF DESIRE HELEN - A MODERN

ODALISQUE HIS MISTRESS'S VOICE THE HOUSE OF MALDONA THE INSTITUTE SISTERHOOD OF THE

INSTITUTE JENNIFER S INSTRUCTION MELINDA AND THE MASTER MELINDA AND ESMERALDA MELINDA AND THE

COUNTESS MIND BLOWER

EROTIC SCIENCE FICTION

ADVENTURES IN THE Delaney Silver

PLEASUREZONE

RETURN TO THE Delaney Silver

PLEASUREZONE

FANTASYWORLD Larry Stern

WANTON Andrea Arven

ANCIENT & FANTASY SETTINGS

EDWARDIAN, VICTORIAN & OLDER EROTICA

ANNIE

ANNIE AND THE SOCIETY BEATRICE

CHOOSING LOVERS FOR

JUSTINE GARDENS OF DESIRE THE LASCIVIOUS MONK LURE OF THE MANOR MAN WITH A MAID 1 MAN WITH A MAID 2 MAN WITH A MAID 3 MEMOIRS OF A CORNISH