Scar Flowers (22 page)

How did he justify watching this? It fascinated, like a snake striking, like glass breaking. The thought of taking the victim in his arms to protect her jostled with the urge to taste her helplessness himself: dangling from her chained wrists, she twisted under Leah’s touch with gasps that rose into o
ne long moan. Her lips parted as if for a kiss. If he subtracted the sight and sound of the wand, he might think he was witness to an assignation, not consensual shock torture.

Leah released the girl from the chain. As Faith bent forward, palms braced against her knees, Leah leaned over her with something small and white, with which she traced a pattern on the girl’s skin. Then she touched the sparking wheel to Faith’s wrist, and a blue flame kindled there, writhing orange and yellow at the edges as it crawled up the girl’s arm, a line of fire that ate its way across her shoulders.

“Stop!” Simon tried the gate, but it was locked.

Leah
switched the wand off and extinguished the flames with her hand, then lit the candelabra. The walls were painted with the sound of the girl’s breathing, struggling to slow itself, but Faith’s skin bore no burns.

“Is something wrong?” Leah set the wand down.

“Let her go.”

Leah
removed Faith’s blindfold. The girl looked at him curiously a moment, then whispered something to Leah as she crossed her arms over her chest.

“Faith wants to know if she displeased you.” Leah pulled off her gloves.

“No, it’s just . . . It’s not right.”

Faith reached for Leah’s hand and murmured in her ear. Leah’s features softened, and she smiled as she took the girl’s face between her hands and kissed her forehead.

“No,” she said to the girl, “you pleased me very much. You can go see Drew.”

Faith turned and left through a small door cut into the mural behind the throne, with a last-minute glance at Simon over her shoulder. Leah approached, each step ringing, until she paused just on the other side of the gate.

“Why are you really here?” she asked.

Simon released the gate handle but said nothing.

“It’s all right for me to hypnotize you, to cut you, and for you to film children slicing themselves with razors, but you can’t let me share this with Faith. Is that it?”

“Maybe it doesn’t make sense to you—”

“It makes every bit of sense.” Leah pulled off her hood and dropped it on the floor. “Rape and abuse happen every day, but if a woman embraces the submissiveness
that society claims it’s not already trying to force on her, then it’s wrong.”

“So it’s a political argument.”

“A simpler explanation is that you enjoyed it, and that disturbed you.” Leah smoothed her hair, which had flared with static. “Maybe you think you would never be able to do such a thing to her. But it starts when you admit you’d like to be able to make her move like that, breathe like that, without causing her pain, of course. But we always cause pain when we affect someone that much.”

“Always?”

“Think about it.”

The tips of her eyelashes were reddish-blond.
There was a pinpoint indentation in both her lobes where they had been pierced, healed over now.

“Who are you now? The watcher or the watched?” she asked. “Maybe you want to take her place.”

Take her place and be used? Be sent away wondering if he had displeased her? Simon caught Leah’s wrist. She started to twist away but stopped.

“What? Maybe you’d rather I took Faith’s place?” Her words came out with such force that he almost let her go. A furrow formed between her eyebrows
, an inner struggle that flashed across her features only to be submerged again. Her breathing slowed.

Simon reached through the bars with his free hand, to touch her cheek, her lips. A bit of the gloss on them smeared under his touch. He had thought he would want to reach into her mouth as she had done to him at the party, but something, maybe her
lack of resistance, stopped him. If only the gate weren’t there. It framed thoughts of his hands on either side of her head as he pulled her toward him, and how soft her hair, her mouth, would be. The image lasted only a second, a shimmer of mingled violence and longing.

He still held her hand.
Faint blue veins ran beneath the skin.

“You don’t want anything but what you can’t have, do you?” she said.

“Why’d you single me out? Why’d you want a job on
Babylon
?”

“
I saw
St. Sebastian
, and then
Poppies Are Red
. About the cutters.” She paused. “You took something painful and hidden and gave it a voice, one that your subjects couldn’t even give it. You could’ve used that to drive your point home, but you didn’t. Not many people show that much restraint. That absence of judging.”

“This all started because you were interested in my work?”

“You intrigued me. The challenge intrigued me: what would you do if I approached you?” She removed the elastic band that held back her hair, which fell loose down her back. “I also thought you might understand, might not be afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“Of me. Of where you could go with this. Leave your camera and I’ll let you in.”

Simon shook his head. He recalled images of the naked slaves, their soft bodies crouched in submission. The room pulsed with whispers, voices he did not want to hear, ghosts of faces he did not want looking at him. His legs took him out of the room. He passed through the door to the stairs on his way out and left it open behind him.

Wednesday, September
13, 3:00 p.m.

All week Simon worked with the editor on
Babylon
. Editing used to be the point at which exhaustion from shooting faded, and his excitement for the story returned, but this was just a task. Pieces to be arranged.

He could pull an all-nighter, rethink the order of the scenes, maybe piece together some new transitions. But there was nothing wrong with the film that he could find. He just didn’t care.

Saturday he moved out of his hotel and rented a brick cottage in Leah’s neighborhood. Sunday he regretted it. Did he have so little in his life that he could let it all fall to pieces while he pursued—what? An idea for a
Poppies Are Red
follow-up? A woman? But this wasn’t a relationship. He only knew Leah’s address and number through a detective agency. He had to accost her in parks or schedule an appointment to even talk to her. The one time he had stayed on the line when he called her, he hung up after her recorded voice instructed him to leave a message.

This should be something he could will himself out of, just as he had outgrown the asthma, rashes, and fevers of his childhood. Whenever the wheezing paralysis tried to grip his chest now, he would take a handful of the nearest possible culprit and inhale, whether it was grass or dust or meadow weeds. Breathe it in and hold it, burn it up with rage, so as not to fall back into the cringing reflex of fear. It didn’t make his symptoms vanish, but he hadn’t had a bad attack in years.

Wednesday again. Leah’s words, a riff on the old Mae West line—
I’m usually home Wednesday afternoons
. . .
For you, everything is gratis.
Well, he wasn’t going back. After a few restless hours of work, he got in his car and drove north.

He stopped at a mall
and took a seat in the back row of a multiplex for a showing of an action film with a complicated plot. The characters were still wet with screenwriter’s ink, patched together from focus group feedback—stick figures with glued-on heads cut from magazine ads, comic books. Three other people sat in the audience, a retiree with a bag of groceries on the seat next to her and a pair of kids skipping school.

Afterward, i
n the parking lot, he sat behind the wheel of the car and searched for a good radio station. The whole day had been an elaborate trick to try to fool himself: He still had time to get to Leah’s by five o’clock, if he started now.

When he got to her front gate, there was no answer. A few drops of rain fell, then thickened into a curtain as he waited under the blank eye of the security camera. Water collected and dripped down the back of his neck. He rang the buzzer again.
What are you doing here?
But he stood there until the front gate and then the front door clicked open, went upstairs past the fountain of burbling tongues, past the empty-eyed masks, to the upstairs waiting room. On the wooden table sat a plain black mask with a note:
Use this if you want to remain anonymous; you won’t be alone for long.

Behind the iron gate, a hand pulled the velvet curtain aside. Simon raised the mask, looked through its eyeholes at the new
-comer. Faith. As before, she was naked except for a collar, noncha-lant, as if the air clothed her. Today her face was uncovered. A lovely, inscrutable face, but he was not surprised; half-masks concealed only the details of identity, not the larger characteristics of beauty or ugliness.

Faith crossed her hands at her waist and raised her arms elbows
-first, as if taking off a shirt. With a dip of her head toward him, she indicated that he should do the same and undress.

“No,” he said. “What for?”

She let the curtain fall, so that he had to ask quickly: “Is Leah here?”

Gradually, the curtain stopped swaying. Faith had gone. He tried the gate: locked.

Simon tied his mask on. He called Faith, and the curtain moved a fraction, just enough for the dark-eyed girl to peer out. She looked him up and down and shook her head, as if to underscore that he hadn’t followed her directions, and left again.

There must be a way that would allow him in with his dignity intact. He checked the confessional. The curtain behind the grill was three-quarters drawn, revealing only a slice of empty office on the other side.

The gate would not open until he agreed to play the game. The only way out deposited him in the yard. Maybe there was another entrance, on the lake side of the house? But she would not let him in that way, and what would he say to her if she did?
Hello, I just stopped by to . . .
to what? To learn how to be a slave?

Can’t think of that. Can’t leave without knowing. Leave your clothes here, it doesn’t matter.

He removed the camera from his belt and pulled the tape from his ribs. As he undressed, his skin prickled like an unlit fuse. There was a hole in the pit of his stomach that felt like it had been filled with cold, dark earth. Suffocating, damp, queasy.

More suffocating was the thought that nothing would happen. If he did go in,
what would she reveal, and what would he find in himself? After the encounter in her hotel room, he had had so many ideas, so much energy, that he had felt
Babylon
come back within his grasp. He needed that again.

Faith returned and opened the gate.
No hint of the ripe and helpless victim today. As she led him in, he stared at the back of her shaved head, her small ears so exposed against her skull. The bruises and scratches from the last time had faded, but the scars on her shoulder blades stood out like pearls. Maybe it should have felt more odd to be led naked through an unfamiliar house by a naked guide, but there was an entire year in New York that he only half-remembered, filled with parties in strangers’ houses that lasted whole weekends and laid waste to everything from the guests’ marriages to the absent owners’ antique collections. Faith took him through the main room to another iron gate at the far end. Inside was a large bathroom with tiled walls and floor, windowless. She tested the water in the sunken tub with one slender foot, then motioned him in.

Simon glanced at the security camera that crouched at the corner at the ceiling. Well, he had his mask on, and at least it was not a hidden camera.

Faith joined him in the tub. The chest-deep water lapped and echoed as she wet a cloth and washed him as if he were a dog or a small child. She hummed a little once or twice until she caught herself and fell quiet, her eyes lowered under butterscotch eyebrows as light and feathery as a child’s.

“Faith.” He reached for her hand but she pushed it away. “I want to talk to you.”

She shook her head and moved behind him to wash his shoulders, her breasts pressed against his back as she reached around to do his arms. She was slippery as a seal and smelled of lavender soap. The blood-warm water tugged at them with tiny currents of her movements as rills of water ran off her hands and wrists. She washed his hands—as if he did not know how—his chest, under his arms. In the quiet, he slipped into a dream of drowning, of mermaids who teased and laughed and eluded him. Faith was thorough enough to leave him aroused but seemed intent solely on the task at hand, which was to make him ready or perhaps merely to render him acceptable. He was too lulled by warmth and water to care which. As the tub drained, Faith rinsed herself in the shower, then padded back to spray him down as well.

He began to relax as she rubbed him with a towel—until she buckled his wrists into leather cuffs and motioned him to follow.

Water shone on her skin as she led him back to the gallery. Their bare feet sopped and squeaked on the waxed wooden floor. For all its echoing size, the room was warm. Some of the velvet drapes had been removed from the equipment, such as a hanging iron cage shaped like a dragon. Nearby, a metal spider the size of a bed lay on its back, a cat’s cradle of white rope suspended among its upraised legs. There was the mural from last time, in muted green, brown, and gold, depicting both agonized and bemused denizens of some sort of post-Edenic garden being pleasured and tortured by various demons. Mirrors in rococo frames reflected each other.

Leah sat in an ornate throne before the mural. She seemed taller until he realized that the chair had been scaled to suit her small frame. As absurd as the situation was, seeing her lightened his mood. It had only been a week, but he found himself trying to memorize her features. Maybe then he would not have to turn his head every time a woman with reddish hair passed by on the street, to see if it was her. Her nose was aristocratically long, her forehead wide and her chin narrow. Her eyes were set far apart and her chiseled lips held a hint of amusement. It was a face from antiquity, not as soothing in its balance as the current standard of childlike beauty. Most of her hair lay coiled elaborately on her head, and the rest trailed down her back. She wore black leather from throat to ankles, with only a thin, horizontal slice of skin visible just below her collarbone. The white dog from the park lay at her feet, its head split in a yawn, tongue curling and pointed ears flattened against its skull.
A mutt, half wolf by the look of it. More silence as afternoon light bleared in through the wall of glass bricks so that the view outside was as watery as the rain. Drops pattered on the skylight, their shadows sliding down her face like tears.

“You left in a hurry last time. I didn’t think you’d be back.” With her index finger Leah traced the scrollwork on one arm of her chair. “Did you come to confess?”

Confess. Question. Desire. Demand.

“I came to see you,” he said.

“Like this? What, to talk?” Her gaze traveled over him, lingered below his waist. “If I do nothing else with you, I will get you to admit who you are. What you are. I thought when I met you that you were one who wanted to know.”

His blood moved through him like a tide, responding to something celestial or magnetic. He did not answer. Anything he said would be a lie.

Leah handed something to Faith and the girl brought it to him: a collar of black leather, well oiled and adjustable, with a lead and an open padlock dangling from it.

A
collar. He thought of reservations, epidemics, forced marches. As homework in junior high he had asked his mother to help him fill in her side of his family tree, and she penciled notes for whole branches:
starved, shot, huffed gas, beaten to death while “resisting arrest” in his home
.

A fucking collar.
Did she even know what this meant?

“My house isn’t open to curiosity seekers, only partici
-pants. That’s the condition under which you may be here. Otherwise, go.”

He should get angry, leave. This woman did not know what it meant for him to wear a leash like a white man’s dog. Or she knew and did not care. Such luxurious thoughtlessness, such beautiful arrogance. He picked up the circlet of leather and steel. Leah’s eyes flickered, or maybe it was a trick of the light that made him think she inclined her head toward him. To let him know she was watching but withheld all expectation. She knew to do that much, to let him determine his own truth without judging him by hers.

Could he do the same?

The martyrdom scene in
St. Sebastian
had been like this, knowing he had to go past the safe places. He had ordered someone from the prop department to tie his hands for the arrow sequence, and the man hadn’t done it right. Brian finally came down from his seat at the camera and trussed his wrists with knots just loose enough to bear as long as he breathed deeply and didn’t panic. He told Simon that if he felt numb to say something right away and he would cut him loose. “Don’t mess around with this, or you could get nerve damage.”

So
this
is what the DP does in his spare time
, Simon had thought, but once the crew stepped away and the cameras rolled, everything dissolved and he was alone. Bound to a tree two thous-and years ago in the middle of a mob—and the camera captured everything. Not that he had been aware of the camera, though until then it had been his Divine Eye that he played to. No, at that moment he had stood under an empty and godless sky, his blood beating against his skin. Dangerously mortal, yet defying it.

How convenient to forget what the aftermath was like.
He had exposed too much in that film, and the pokings and proddings and musings of the curious reached him through every jeering or fawning review, every religious pundit’s diatribe, every smirking appraisal from a stranger. He stopped reading magazines or watching TV, did not work for a year. The only refuge was anesthesia in all its forms. Work, seclusion, booze, women.

Until that night in Leah’s hotel room.

Leather and metal. That’s all a collar was, aside from the politics. He was free to leave, but he would learn nothing that way.

He fastened it on and clicked the padlock shut.

Leah removed the velvet drape from an object beside her throne: a wooden frame seven feet tall and five feet wide, secured to the floor with bolts. There were eyehole screws set along the inside, hung with lengths of chain or spring-loaded clasps, the kind used to hook leashes to dog collars. Not just a frame: a rack for binding captives’ hands and feet. Leah stood next to him, so close that he could smell leather. Her air of detached amusement had vanished.