She lies behind me, nearly bare as we spoon on that still 23rd of July, hand on hip, breath on neck, leg on leg. I shift half-asleep and foggy to my back, stirring awake only as her hand digs under the elastic band. She breathes out and I in, and her lips fold around my lower lip, testing and tasting, suggesting, lingering.
Pausing.
Her grip closes, tightens, spasms and subsides, relieving rubbing and finally resting.
"Not tonight," she whispers, spreading her fingers across my chest, fluttering them like butterfly wings.
For each a code, a formalization: red, white and blue -- emergency, order, and transportation -- fire and ambulance, police, the local bus system.
Long after work as the cloud-obscured sun faded the blonde and the brunette -- the former imbued with an accent more Cambridge than Canberra but all imported Australian, and the latter a petite soprano, her wavy muddy reddish mane tamed by an orange-green silk band twisted in emulation of a blossom's secretive enclosures -- stepped into the bus, displayed their monthly passes and passed to the back, taking blue-upholstered molded seats a few rows in front of him.
"Nathan is so nice," diphthongized the brunette as they shifted from a discussion of dance, performance, and the body, all subjects of a three-day conference, workshop, and roundtable, to the economics and calculus of life. "I've been spending a lot of time with him, maybe two or three evenings a week."
Reassuring nods and affirmations came from her colleague. "Did you know that Mark lives right around the corner? I was walking to Nathan's from the biochem department the other night with Mark, and when we got to Jefferson he said, 'I live down the block here.'" Several blocks went by; streetlights flickered on. Insects swarmed around them. "Last night Kayla and I left the happy hour and I was going to Nathan's so just asked if she wanted to watch the movie with us. I hope that was okay."
The bus passed from downtown streets to suburban, connecting corporate and commercial with densely packed residential developments teeming with autumn trees shedding torrents of leaves at the slightest suggestion of breeze. Two days after a sharp freeze new buds and leaves burst from the ground as if it were spring, pink and yellow flowers doomed but oblivious, reacting instinctively to the temporary warmth and stimulation.
"I think he's more into me than I am into him," she continued. "I just don't feel it, you know, the butterflies in your stomach. He told me that he really likes me. He's nice and all, but I told him at the beginning that I can't do anything serious right now. I mean, I'm just out of a long relationship."
"You laid your cards on the table, Jean."
"I know. I don't think it will last, but he is nice. And when we go out he insists on paying. So I guess I have an ulterior motive for staying." All is fair in love and war, she thought, and she adhered meticulously to her code of conduct. They pulled a cord, the bus stopped, and they left.
One stop later he folded the newspaper and got off.
"They say it is not about sex. It's violence, power, dysfunction playing itself out."
At two in the morning, around bar-time Saturday, a lone unidentified twenty-one year old female student, succumbing to an altruistic nature, a moth to a flame, entered an alley behind Ian's Pizza when asked for a light. One man grabbed her wrist, causing her to cry out, while another came from behind and forced her to her knees, and got into her jeans. Approximately five minutes later, having long since ceased struggling as the result of numerous blows to the head, she swam in and out of consciousness, vaguely aware of of dishwasher A.H., who had come out back for a smoke, but unable to scream she observed in ironic horror as A.H., willfully ignorant and choosing to believe this to be a consensual encounter, accepted an invitation to join in by conducting digital penetration and capturing a handful of poses with his cell phone's camera.
In daylight hundreds of degrees of longitude away but nearly simultaneously a never-prosecuted squad of soldiers operating in an anti-terrorism / peace-keeping / nation-building project entered the residence of a suspected insurgent, kept an adult male, an adult female, and two juveniles (one male, one female) huddled against a crumbling wall through threat of violence, while from a neighboring room barely muffled screams wailed as if doppler-shifted. Neither the bodies of the elder daughter nor those of her family were recovered.
Back in the United States Eric Steiner of Dundee, Oregon, crept into his daughter's room as his wife slept. 54 year old Greg Rudolf of Glen Canyon, Utah, visited his third wife; a self-proclaimed messiah abducted E.S. and returned her swollen-bellied nearly a year later; a five year old pageant queen was found mutilated in the family basement; a repeat offender, a family member a first daterapevictimperpetrator ... object[ified]verb.
Times, places, and faces blurred.
The spreading, repetition, infection -- through but not about sex -- led to dysfunction, more and new victims, abuser to abused; and, like the birthrate, had a critical ratio of abusees to abusers, not always metaphorical children to parents, to ensure continuation. The genes could not be blamed if pregnancy rarely resulted, if many of those that did were terminated, and if the same-on-same offenses had no possibility of biological reproduction. But the sex continued, a Gestalt divorced of and from its source.
"It's inherited. They say, if your parents didn't have sex, odds are, you won't either."
Dear ****,
This impulse to be alone was mild when we were all children. But in time [...]
We had but one way, even in closeness and distance: one instinct, one reflection.
And I still thought, life would never cease to give. Am I not at my greatest within myself? Won't my self comfort me as in my childhood?
Suddenly I was as if cast out, and this loneliness, standing like hills upon my breast, expands without measure -- my feelings scream for wings, an end.
No is the saddest experience you'll ever know.
This is the end.
[...]
It's like sex she says. No, not like sex -- like great sex.
She means chocolate.
It could satisfy, was messy, sticky, often oral, resulting in a chemical-hormonal response, and, sadly enough, often enjoyed alone. The darker, the better.
Yet so often cheap, pre-packaged in tiny, tidy doses, always the same, available when necessary. Consumed, digested, excreted.
I study her sex.
The one-on-one of the video becomes a laboratory, antiseptic, cool, and distant, the volume nearly muted, the colors washed out, the passion mechanized and viewed and reviewed time and time again. This is where ... One-on-one, the mechanical device humming along, buzzing. Birds and the bees. A Bible-thumping hag, wrinkled, baggy, but sturdy and wrapped in a faded winter coat stood before the crowd, imploring them never to marry a masturbator; we laughed together. She performs alone.
Obsession, possession, recession ... sess -- an idea of setting. Placing. Concession? Clearly an obsession; not letting go; she won't let me go, and so I strive to understand.
Pause and zoom. Study her sex. The folds and wrinkles; the colors from peach to pink to flushing blood red; the texture lush, pimpled, smoothed, satin; roars, purrs, the products of air in and out of a living body and the contracting and relaxing of muscles -- live and not Memorex, memory, or meme.
The technology, digit-al and anal-og, reminded me of her.
Study her ... . Not mine. Hers. Walk a mile in ...
I would destroy the files. Digital.
Two can be as bad as one.
Steps are a collection of individuals, stairs the collective. Mountains, and the mountain range.
The manifold, emergent, many-in-one.
In the wake of her leaving I first became a dick, a private dick, and the sign over the clouded glass of my office door said as much, and business was good -- until she walked into my life.
Dames.
Can't live with 'em, can't ... well, you know how it is.
As is always the case, it went down badly, the other man, the fight, broken and bloodied nose, the double-cross [it's in her nature!] ... ah, the case. So in the end the credits roll, I live to narrate my tale, and I'm no closer to understanding her than before.
Not quite so invisible, this man. I read about the one who darkened his skin and passed, just to see how the other side lived. I watched the movie -- you know, the one -- where our singer puts on the black-face so he can play jazz. He got off lighter than the midwestern woman living as a man, murdered when the wrong people discovered the contents of her pants, and just recently another passed as a man to see how men live. Tootsie wouldn't be quite the same. So often it is the other way around; I think of Viola -- a young woman of aristocratic birth, washed up on the shore of Illyria -- but that was just play.
The science was weird.
For then, and perhaps even for now. July 23 was a Sunday that year, and this it is a Thursday, and in the years since while our love withered, she grew. I have withered, but today I am new.
Me, me! they scream; successful if continued, if passed on. I have lived a life with this self, all the time seeking to obliterate it though losing myself, finding myself, finding my self.
She was that flutter of wings that caused a hurricane across decades of my life.
Grubs have become the food source of now. Grubs, beetle larva, to beetles what caterpillars are to butterflies, and the effect here was more than metaphorical, for the transformation of Lepidoptera from larva to adult involves the chrysalis -- the philosophical third term -- and my cocoon, spun by years of research and technology, the bridging of analog and digital, will, by way of the refinement of those once called retroviruses, bring me as close to her as possible, through merging, becoming. A sample here, a piece of hair there; the foundation becomes scaffolding and finally frame. Cocoon.
Metamorphosis.
When I awake that morning, it will not be as a dung beetle. Call me selfish, if you will, but I will call myself Jean.