The Interloper (17 page)
Of course, Raven killed CJ. He lied blatantly to Lily while pledging himself to openness and truth-telling. How I wanted to confront him directly! But now was the time for Lily to get suckered by Raven, to let him seduce her, until he thought he had her in his clutches, and then to tear her away from him.
Seduction works both ways. Even when the so-called seducer is at his most calculating he is being drawn inexorably into a trap built for two. The more she gave herself over to him, the deeper he would step into the trap, which, as I had planned, would snap down as Lily—as deep into it as her counterpart—disappeared into a poof of particles, a magician’s cloud of smoke.
In this scenario, I stand to the side, the magician, manipulating the mirrors that make the illusion possible.
There was a minor victory at the end of his letter, no question about that. He had signed it “love.” Whether he meant it as a gesture of goodwill, an impulsive expression of feeling, or a calculated move to harvest from his correspondent some masturbation fodder, he had, by writing that four-letter word, exposed himself. Even if he considered it a cool and opportunistic stratagem, there lay behind that word the desire for a response, the expectation of a response, the notion that he was not writing into the void or even to an irregular correspondent but to someone he could expect something from. He’d gotten hooked, a bit, whether he knew it or not.
For that, Lily would throw him a bone.
I went to work modifying a new photograph, a woman, tan and youngish but not firm, standing poolside at what appeared to be a desert hotel, wearing a yellow bikini. I’d found her by searching an image bank for the word “poolside” and scrolling through 376 personal photographs. My initial search, “bikini,” had yielded a surfeit of soft porn and assorted images of pin-ups, hot-rods, underwear advertisements, anime, a very fat woman, and a mushroom cloud over the Pacific. The woman’s face, to be covered by Eileen’s from a hiking snapshot, made me think of the schoolteacher’s brand of strict cheerfulness. I visualized that impression shining through a sort of digital palimpsest, to suffuse Eileen’s image with a dash of Lilyness.
The creation of this latest Lily led me again through all the photos I’d scanned of Eileen. With each new image came
a flood of memories, some of them of moments I knew I had not witnessed. Part of me could see them as if they were a movie playing in my head, while another part cried out across the chasm to remind me that I had not been present at these events. Other memories were real, and those rose like zombies from a graveyard, staggering across my consciousness, each demanding a piece of my brain.
Eileen used to call me late at night and tell me about the situations she’d find herself in. Ditching a stolen car in the LA river, stripping in the VIP room at a club, leaving an OD at the entrance to the ER, and so on. I wouldn’t hear from her for months, and then she’d call three nights in a row. She needed to talk it out, she’d say. She needed an audience. I was always there for her. When she died I half-expected the phone to ring at 3:00 a.m.: “Dude, you’ll never believe where my soul ended up …”
The word
ghost
should be like the word
pants
—it should never be singular. No one leaves behind one ghost. Everyone who dies leaves behind at least as many ghosts as people they knew. I had been sidetracked in my Lily-making by two dozen of Eileen’s ghosts, and when they were finished with me, I turned my thoughts to the ghosts that had been haunting me more recently, those radiating from Calvin Stocking Junior. I had wanted to know how this young bastion of certainty, this brat, this loved one, this window-breaker, had fared in the last moments of his life; if Raven was to be trusted on the details not pertaining to his guilt, I now knew. He vomited, cried, told every joke he knew, cried again, and turned toward the darkness when ordered to. Then, according to testimony provided by two independent forensics experts, Raven shot him in the back of the head.
Dear Henry,
I appreciate your honesty. Thank you. And I’m sorry if I seemed to be preoccupied about not knowing you. It’s not easy waiting for your letters. I had a few drinks tonight in preparation for this one. I must say I debated whether or not to share my fantasy with you just yet, but then I thought about what I asked you and how open and honest you were in writing about it, and I decided I should respond honestly to whatever you ask of me. It’s just you and me, after all. I hope you won’t be offended that it took three cranberry and vodkas to get me to write this, but it’s personal.
I have many fantasies, and I like to change them often, but there are a few I return to again and again. I used to picture a man without a face, but now I let myself peek with my mind’s eye and there is a face—yours. I am not
one for wide-open places in my fantasies. In regular life I love nothing more than looking at the ocean spread all the way across the horizon … but let me get on with it. I’m afraid, I think, to write it down …
I am getting ready for school. It is early morning, and though I’ve showered and done my hair, I’m still wearing my robe. I hear the doorbell. I tighten my robe and look through the peephole. It is you, but you are wearing an electrician’s uniform. The shirt is tight and barely restrains your muscular forearms. I watch you through the peephole as you ring the bell again. I take a deep breath and reach for the knob. I know that as soon as you are inside you will be in control. I open the door, half-expecting you to ravage me right there, but you ask me where the problem is. I say the outlet in the bedroom is not working. We go to my bedroom and you test the outlet. It’s dead. But you soon figure out that it is connected to a switch on the wall. You begin to explain it to me then realize—this is my favorite, watching it dawn on you—that I know all about the switch. I called for another reason.
You put down your tools and approach me. We stand face to face for a long while. I reach out and touch the front of your shorts. There is a substantial bulge and it feels hot to my hand. I unzip your fly and pull out your thing through the front of your pants. I play with it until it feels like it is about to burst through your skin. Your fly pushes on your balls and your thing is super-hard. You look at me now. You are thinking of
what you want to do to me. You reach for the belt of my robe and I think you are going to loosen it, but you pull it tighter. You take my shoulders and turn me around to face the wall. You do this gently but with total authority.
You press me against the wall, not violently, but with a good amount of pressure, so that my cheek is against the plaster. You pull my belt tight again. You reach under the back of my robe to touch me. I have never been so wet. You pull the robe up and enter me from behind. You push and push me against the wall, and we move sideways until we are in the corner of the room. You’re pushing me into the corner now. I am full of you and I am being pushed by you and by two walls. You groan and I like it. My knees collapse and you come down to the floor with me. You fill me and push me into the corner at the bottom of the two walls. My head is where the walls meet the floor and you are pushing from above and behind and the walls and the floor are pushing back and this is where I usually have an orgasm.
I can’t believe I told you all that but I’m going to drop it in the mail right now before I reread it or tear it up. I have never written that stuff down for anyone, Henry, including myself, so you’re the first one to have me like this. Please write back to me very soon as I will be worried all week about how this letter will be received.
Love back,
Lily
PS In your last letter you mentioned that you had to spend the night in a park, and that the police woke you up and ran you out of town. This is the most unlikely of coincidences, Henry, but I too have spent the night in a park only to be awakened by the police. I was a teenager, and I had run away from my aunt and uncle’s house for the night. I stole a sleeping bag from a sporting goods store and rode the bus until the end of the line. I slept outside, in the cold, and I was happy because the outside was matching up with the way I felt inside. I can’t help but think our shared experience is a sign.
Lily’s letter, apparently written in haste and sent off immediately, was actually composed over several nights, as I tried to fine-tune the raw but still Lily-like language and, more importantly, the subtext of Raven’s growing power and domination over Lily. Yes, Raven, dominate her! She is yours, make her precious and constant in your mind, take her for granted, visualize her, sexualize her, fetishize her, entwine your heart with your image of hers! Nibble at the cheese while you can—the spring will come to break your neck.
I knew Raven well enough to know that further masturbation over pictures of Lily, or better yet, over the mental vision of Lily, could only cause her to loom larger in his mind and heart, could only sink the hooks deeper into him, and make the tearing away that much more painful. And I knew that the more vulnerable I made her, the more powerful I made him, the better chance he would really enjoy it.
In constructing Lily’s fantasy, I made sure to blend elements of women’s fantasies gleaned from old girlfriends (the faceless man, the emphasis on context and story) with the more male-centered imagery of domination and bondage, not to mention a physiological focus and general pressure-building. Still I felt as though I had only scratched the surface.
Rereading it, I thought it a little cursory somehow, probably because it had taken me so long to compose—I expected it to take as long to read as it had taken to write. The composition period was strenuous, given the type of research I pursued—an issue of an octavo-size narrative-form porn magazine—and the necessity of relieving my own pressures along the way. I couldn’t help but picture aspects of the situation Lily had written about, and I couldn’t help but become aroused by them.
Once, on a time-out in the bathroom, I pictured myself in the electrician’s uniform, pounding away at Lily, then Eileen, then Patty, as she moved from a one-dimensional wall, to a two-dimensional corner, to the three-dimensional meeting place of two walls and the floor. I had not planned to step into Raven’s shoes like that.
I went into the office to submit some of the documents I’d been working on. Despite all the Lily-Raven correspondence, I was actually ahead of schedule. I have always been a natural at writing, so I was able to rush chapters without compromising quality. Neil missed having me around the office. He needed the security of seeing me actually work on the project alongside him. A normal human impulse, but one that led him to impugn the quality and timeliness of my work.
“You’ve missed deadline on the last two chapters, Owen. I know it’s been a rough time, but I need you to speed it up. When you’re late, the graphics-and-layout deadline doesn’t change. I’m the one who gets crunched.”
“I’ll tell Peter to give you more time.”
“No matter what, I’m going to have to pull all-nighters to get these chapters done.”
“I’ll get on it. I’m sure Peter will be sympathetic.”
“He wasn’t happy with the last chapter. I told you the text was a mess.”
“It’s all there, Neil. Don’t sweat it.”
“You can’t just stick in your aphorisms and think they’re going to slip by the editors.”
“Live a little.”
“I need the last two chapters.”
“What’s your favorite joke?”
“Do you have the last two chapters?”
“Have you got a favorite joke?”
“You’re not going to start slipping jokes into the manual?”
“Why did the cow roll down the hill?”
“You’re going to get us both fired if you keep this up.”
“And someday you’re going to die.”
“Jesus, Owen.”
“What’s going to happen then? Isn’t that worth thinking about?”
“I’ll leave that up to God, thank you.”
“When you die, the world dies with you. Nothing to learn, no reward or punishment, not even the sensation of drifting through blackness. Think about that for a minute.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not what happens as far as I’m concerned, plus I’m short on time right now. Have you got the chapters or not?”
“I emailed them to you when I heard you get up from your desk.”
“You think that’s funny?”
“Have you ever been heartbroken?”
“Thanks, Owen, I’ll be in my cubicle.”
I stared at my computer for a while. There was more work to be done.
It could wait.
Dear Henry,
I know I just sent you a letter, but I couldn’t resist writing again. I hope that when you are gripped by the impulse you will do the same. I wanted to share something with you. In our classroom we have a large terrarium, with an iguana inside. The kids named him Eduardo. He is a sweet iguana and he’s wonderful to have around. The other day, after all of the kids had gone home, when the school was quiet, I was grading some quizzes and I heard him scratching around his terrarium. I walked over to watch him eat and drink and I noticed something when the angle of the light changed. The glass of the terrarium was marked up with the children’s handprints and nose-prints. All I could sense was that those children would all be gone someday, returned to the earth, and I began to cry. Not for their eventual departures, but for those smudges left on the glass. I don’t think those smudges would have been as beautiful if those children were going to live forever. My sense of what is beautiful and what is sad and what is to be protected is nowhere reflected in the world around me. Only in those moments when I find myself
alone with, say, an iguana and a terrarium, do I feel like I have any sense of my true feelings.
I had to tell someone about it, someone who would understand, and I don’t have anyone but you. Write back soon!!!
Your Lily
Patty was concerned about me. I could see that. She suggested I take a day off and join her father at a baseball game. He was leaving work early, she said, and the seats were supposed to be excellent. I was not overjoyed at the prospect of an entire afternoon alone with the imposing if affable Calvin Stocking Senior, and the prospect of doing so at a sporting event was like a multiplier to my anxiety. On the other hand, there is a certain pleasure to be gained when accompanying someone as a guest to an event they hold sacred, and while venturing downtown, finding a good parking spot, and navigating the stadium sounded to me like a series of horrible headaches, they were for Calvin Senior suffused with anticipation. It didn’t hurt that he had season tickets, a powerful air-conditioned sedan, and preferential parking.