A collaboration with Margaret B Simon

Published 'Seductive Torture' 1999

Enid's face is a collage of autumn valleys with winter skeined

hair. She turns ice blue eyes to me, asking me again if I mind if she

smokes.

            I drink to that, laugh. It matters not, I tell her—what should it

matter—I'm deaf. I can only read her body, her lips. Long, long ago I forget

how long it was that I could read into her eyes and we would plot and plan

and endeavor together  things that mortals only contemplate as schemes.

            Enid nods, lights her flame and tosses that mane of curled grey-red hair

behind her neck. I note that it is bound with rubies, her rich coil. Tresses

once laced with the blush of goldenrod, autumn evenings when we would hold

hands and chant our songs together to the bowing trees, under October moons.

            I shuffle my napkin, plans to jot ideas confuse me. Something else is here,

that which I cannot identify. Something that is terrible and familiar. The

band plays on, loud—oppressive, beating and hooting I can read it. Enid

enjoys this, mouths to me a message of contempt. She puts her cigaret on the

ashtray and cups her buxoms, leers at me with an expression so familiar that

I crush the napkin, stand to leave.

            She cups, yes, she cups her buxoms in the manner she earlier tantalised to

press mine into similar cones.  Yet the smoke from her cigaret dispels, for

a nonce, my yearnings.  You see, for me, such charcoal ghosts prefigure

death—when blood itself does tend toward steaming away with a mind of its

own.  Blood's degree of hate for the body that sucks it is, I feel, greater

than the body's love of blood.

            Then, of course, Enid's nugget-ensaddled wisps do redraw my passion

ineluctably and I know even my own well nurtured wig's unable to match her

head's undulant chokings.

            Abruptly, the man who brought us together and made us meet amid a

namelessness that only Enid broke, says he wants to watch us. Of course,

we'd already planned to meet and deafness made me hear more than simple

silence.

            "But of course, Mr. B., " Enid smiles, parting those most alizerin lips so

easy for me to read.  She licks fingertips to tongue, and touches his hand

to confirm the ceremonies ahead. He looks to me, narrow-eyed, barely

concealing a speck of spittle drooling down the left side of his mouth with

handkerchief. I took this in, of course. He knew so little, did Mr. B.

            Enid and I arise as one, taking cloaks from backs of chairs. Enid pauses to

take one last drag of her cigaret, then flips it neatly into the vase of

plastic lilies—a gesture which causes Mr. B. to frown, yet he composes himself

quickly, takes her arm and nods to me to follow.

            I check to be sure that our pouch is secured beneath my sequined belt, then

off to trail with them beyond the curtained exit.  Mr. B. nods to a hefty

guard, and we pass without further incident. We come to a narrow staircase,

descend three floors. I can feel Enid's heat enervating from her hair, her

billowing satin cloak, already messaged with heavy musk and flavored with

the aftermath of her recent smoke.

            We reach a basement area. Storage rooms loom around us.

 Cement and casings, machinery, the necessities for keeping electricity and water shimmer faintly

in the shadows. If a rat should scuttle past our feet, I would not be

surprised. However, as in the way of this tonite, Enid and I have no

impediments. We have a mutual dislike of vermin, you see. I tend to eat them

live, while Enid prefers to—well, it's a distraction that would have altered

the evening. So best it doesn't occur.

            Mr. B. guides us to a doorway. As he fumbles out his keys, he presses

Enid's hand and nods to me, yellow teeth flashing in the glare of a bare

lightbulb.

We enter. Before my vision is an empty warehouse. In its center is a bed,

with cameras and other electrical equipment, wires willy nilly tangled

about. In the corner of the room's a large boiler-type apparatus that

shudders and clacks while its dials whirr—sounds I infer.

            Enid knows him not as Mr. B.  Her lips earlier cloyed words towards my

brain's fingers—for Enid, he is Lord Booby.  A strange insulting name, that,

I'd thought originally and, what was more, he had—albeit in mysterious

vein—written Mr. B. on my napkin. And she, too, called him Mr. B. to his

face, having read the movement of his pen writing Mr. B. as I interpreted

similar meanings with deaf cunning. But these were thoughts I'd already

managed to relegate to my mind. We were here to perform, not to question. 

Yet the cold seeps beyond blood to the very bottom bone—despite the boiler

thing's proximity.

            Seeing me shiver, Mr. B. strides overtly to the corner, opens the

contraptions lid—whereby he stirs it with his arm, wincing only once.  I

spot the tousled tops of vermin bobbing upon the brew's meniscus and I wince

for different reasons. Upon replacing the lid, with a forceful clunk, Mr. B.

groans. Smoke belches from a valve towards  the back, filling the warehouse

with wall-hugging shapes.

            I laugh. Bats?  Black flickerbats? Vulture-moths? Lungfish? Or wild dreams?

            Yet they soon disperse as the thingummyjig whines into even keel, more

smooth to the eyes than noise. Enid's already ensconcing herself upon the

bed; I was always taught that in polite company one removed one's

over-things before climbing upon a bed. And, in all our years together, this

in the premier occasion she hasn't done so and, furthermore, she drapes

herself in wires with no concern for neat circuiting.  I almost believe

she's not the Enid with whom I've just dined. She's someone whom Lord Booby

calls Cigwitch, where mouth-to-mouth is neither resuscitation nor its

opposite.  Indeed, he's in the process of close-to lip reading even

now...tongue to tongue, the only way to talk.

            He rears his head, remembers me and motions me to replace him on the bed

with the one I used to know as Enid.  I manoeuvre as if to disrobe, but he

shakes his head vigorously. I glance at Cigwitch—for, surely, that's what I

must call her—and cringe at the entwinings of which I must make myself part.

            She helps me with the wires, for indeed each seem to have a second link

which she attaches to me at various points around my neck and wrists. Her

lips form words, salamander-esque tongue flickering down my neck. Out of the

corner of my eye, I see Mr. B. watching us intently until she is done. He

steps back to the boiler, teeth flashing yellow underneath the dim bulb. I

catch his intent, and rise to protest but Cigwitch has me in her arms, her

breath still heavy with English Ovals chokes my nostrils. Mr. B. reaches for

the boiler switch; I close my eyes as her hand unzips our pouch. What relief

I feel at this final moment, for the façade we play down to the final moment

is again complete.

            Slipping her hand beneath my pants, she bends toward my neck. "Enid!"  I

cry out, as her jaws descend upon my throat and simultaneously I know that

Mr. B. has thrown the switch, for there is blackness and an indescribable

stench... which still hangs heavy in this dismal room when I awake, refreshed.

            Lord Booby, as I must now call him for real, turns his head from me, as if

shame sits uneasily upon the face.  During my sleep, he must have undressed.

His chest, which I've just barely glimpsed, bulges—and, instinctively, I

know he's about to rip off such swelling buxoms by pushing their overskinned

blubber towards his own yellow gnawing teeth.  Even if Enid is a mix of

Dine, I'm surely not going to submit to believing that those vermin earlier

I saw boiling were the appendages of Enid's predecessors here.

            Suddenly he speaks, his mouth still hidden by the face-turning.  His words

explain everything. To someone deaf, however, even an explanation is simply

one more wrench towards nullity. How can I countenance—let alone

comprehend—him planning to smoke me in the way that Undeads bleed their

victims? But then I know. Lord Booby takes from a cupboard what I can only

assume to be sanitary filter tips, an action which has no ambiguity ... even

though, I guess in better, healthier times he would doubtless prefer his

joints wireless and unplugged.  Yet that's not me speaking is it? Surely,

I'm simply lip-reading the person I've become.