Edward Lee: Selected Stories Read online

  Smith’s hands tremored. He drained half his beer in one hit. Perhaps here was some of the very truth he felt bereft of. This was more than a girl—this was his past coming back to him, a reclamation. But what had his past been? Innocence? Smith frowned. Not innocence as much as intimidation and failure. He couldn’t see between the lines. Was this his past coming back? Or his weakness?

  The waitress ignored him and sauntered away when he pulled out his wallet. “These are on the house,” Lisa told him. “In case you haven’t guessed, I work here.”

  Smith had already figured as much. “What, waitressing?”

  “Something like that.”

  Probably a hostess or manager or something. Smith didn’t push it. For the next twenty minutes they talked, chatted to no account about innocuous things. She didn’t seem the least impressed that he was making a living as a writer.

  It caught him off guard, however, when she observed, “But you’re not happy with your writing. You’re not fulfilled.”

  She knows how to hit the nail on the head, Smith thought. Could he be read this easily? Or had his despair merely steepened to the point that it now showed? God knew he’d seen it happen to other writers. “I have this absurd and completely egotistical compulsion about…I don’t know. About the truth of things.”

  “We all have our compulsions,” she remarked. She was looking right at him, smiling bright. “Nietzsche said there is no truth, right? And Sartre said it’s only in yourself. But I think they were both wrong. Truth is all over the place. You just have to know what door to look behind, or what face.”

  Smith was bewildered; he could’ve laughed. I’m sitting in a strip joint with a girl I haven’t seen in ten years, talking about epistemology and abstract existential dynamics. Happens every day. He wanted to comment. He wanted to make some sophisticated, highly intellectual observation, but it all felt suddenly sucked out of his head. He could not assess a collision of opposites so diverse. The charm, the silver penis, dangled at her throat like a finger waving. He could think of no reply. When he looked back at her, he realized the only obvious truth: She was beautiful.

  Then, oddly, she continued, “But even truth has a price.”

  Change the subject! his thoughts commanded. Say something, you ass! Anything! “We used to come here every now and then in college. You know, have a few beers, take a look at the…speculative dancers.”

  “Boys will be boys,” she returned. “Don’t be timid in admitting that you’ve been here. Christ, I work here.”

  “When did they start this live sex stuff?”

  “About a year ago. Washington’s always been one step behind New York and L.A. It’s a free country, right? Besides, every night is packed.”

  Smith barely heard her. Her face seemed as puzzling as the night, an inexplicable perfection. A decade ago he’d dreamed of it, but what now? Where was the truth of it now?

  “You’re beautiful,” he said.

  “Everyone is. If you look close enough.”

  He was shivering. He couldn’t believe what he’d just said. Sitting with her, talking to her and merely seeing her was like trying to decode a cipher. Her smile never wavered. She squeezed his hand. “I would’ve gone out with you, you know, in school.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  The smile turned sad. “But you never asked.”

  The whole thing was too depressing. Smith knew he should leave, get out, go somewhere else for his sorry plight. But then the aura popped. The Anvil’s din rose to a wild roar. Some huge young man had stepped onto the stage, grinning and taking bows as the audience whooped. The guy looked like a body builder, all shining skin and corded, flexing muscles. He probably weighed 220 without an ounce of fat. He was completely naked but for a studded black-leather collar and wrist bands. That and the mustache and shoulder-length hair gave him the appearance of a barbarian. But Smith could only gawk at what everyone else in the place was surely gawking at. The guy’s penis, though limp, was huge. It dangled between his legs like a flap of steak.

  “Excess is the name of the game at The Anvil,” Lisa commented. “How’s that for a donkey-rig?”

  Smith gulped. He’d never felt right talking to girls about sexual details, much less penises of extraordinary size, but even he had to half-chuckle. “It looks like something that should hang in a smokehouse. I hope his partner has a good health plan.”

  “His name’s Do-Horse. A real scream. We didn’t hesitate to hire him once he showed us his qualifications.”

  Smith had always believed that morality was relative. He was not a Christian, yet he knew travesty when he saw it. He stared at Do-Horse. The dense, pumped-up muscles and brash grin made him not a man but a caricature, a personification of moral desertion.

  Lisa let out a long, uneasy sigh. “You always were a gentleman. Aren’t you going to ask me what I do here? Aren’t you even wondering?”

  “I’m wondering,” Smith admitted, spewing smoke.

  “Pay attention and you’ll see.”

  With Smith’s low groan came images of beauty defiled, like dropping fresh-picked flowers into pits of excrement, like pissing into spring water. The applause grew deafening as Lisa wended toward the stage. She stepped up and shed the plastic overcoat; her sudden nudity glowed in the stage light. She turned and bowed, raised her arms, giving the crowd its visual appetizer. She was a caricature herself—of desire unbridled, a living object of men’s lust. Her body was long, willowy, very slender, but with large, high breasts and sharp contours. Her hips turned to highlight her pubis, which was hairless and smooth, a protuberant cleft. Do-Horse strode the stage a last time, flexing softball-sized biceps and tensing the rippled musculature of his back. Then he sat spread-legged in the chair. Lisa knelt at once and took hold of his cock. It drooped like a fat, lazy snake.

  Smith felt paralyzed, hands flat on the table, eyelids glued open. This was awful, a passion play from the abyss. Do-Horse had come erect instantly. The glans, large as a baby apple, seemed to pop into Lisa’s mouth. She blew him in long, suffocating strokes, while applause surged like machine gun fire.

  The thing must’ve been a foot long, and Smith actually jolted when every inch of it slid quickly down her throat. “Deep throat, my ass!” someone shouted. “This is deep stomach!” Smith thought he saw hunger in her bulged eyes. Her cheeks looked stuffed, her stretched-open jaw made her face long and narrow. My God, Smith thought. My God, my God.

  Do-Horse lifted her up, pulled her mouth off. Her ass spread against the leather strap when he placed her in the harness. Long slim legs hung loose; she looked levitated as she grasped the suspending cord. Do-Horse knelt to plow her sex with his tongue, which, like the rest of him, seemed inordinately large. The hot lights beat down; sweat shone on her flesh like lacquer. All the while, Lisa squirmed in the harness, her feet pedaling the course of this oral prelude. When Do-Horse stood up, the shadow of his erection played over her belly, a ghost-serpent ranging white valleys. Lisa reached up and caressed the equally large testicles, then began to stroke the shaft. In time, she guided the dome to her sex. The dome disappeared. Do-Horse grinned, paused, then shoved it all into her at once.

  A hush swept over the crowd. Lisa shuddered at the first thrusts, then slipped into the rhythm, more and more intent. That’s all Smith could see in her now, an intricacy of intentness, matrixes crossing—flesh and spirit. The clarity of details revolted him, the shine of sweat on skin, the motion of muscles, the moaning and the wet sounds in sudden pin-drop silence. It hurt just to watch. The girth of the penis stretched Lisa’s sex to a tight, bright-pink rim. With each thrust, Smith feared it might break.

  Do-Horse was an iceman, his grin false, his arousal automatic and cold as slate. His ministrations progressed with no more passion than a derrick wheel pounding dirt. Yet Lisa reacted the opposite. Again it was her intentness, like light focused to diamond-points. Her nipples stood up stiff and pink. Her shiny breasts quivered with the blows. She moaned and whipped her head around and
locked her ankles behind the broad, tapered back.

  Perhaps intentness was contagious. The once cacophonous crowd had transposed to a room full of frozen, staring faces and unblinking eyes. Every attention held fast, in compounded silence, to the lighted stage. Smith felt himself shivering. Was this truth, this one-act play of copulation as spectator sport? These were human bodies submitted for mutual use, the act of love corrupted to parody. Or perhaps it was Smith’s misconceptions. Besides, every night is packed, Lisa had told him. Maybe Smith’s ideals had kept unadmitted attractions buried to his consciousness. If not, then why hadn’t he left? It was the same sensation he’d felt upon entering, a melting pot of revulsion and excitement. Everything was opposites here, negative poles being forced to touch.

  Lisa seemed close to convulsions when Do-Horse took her out of the harness. He lay her on the floor and straddled her, sat right down on her belly. The wet penis pointed up, pulsing. Lisa looked at it as though it were more than a cock, as if it were an icon of vast complexity, the graven image of the cult of flesh. She grabbed it with both hands, stroked back and forth first slowly, then with vigor. Do-Horse’s grin looked like a knife-cut in clay. His buttocks constricted as his climax broke. The long spurts of his semen jumped out in flying lines which formed chaotic glyphs in the air, arcane messages or even epitaphs. They landed on Lisa’s breasts and face as she milked out the last. The finishing touch surprised no one; Do-Horse leaned over and licked it all off.

  In the aftermath, a great empty space filled Smith’s gut. The crowd was roaring again, standing in demented ovation. Amid the rain of applause, Lisa and Do-Horse rose, their naked bodies gleaming under the lights. They stepped to the stage edge, exchanged grins, and bowed to the audience.

  The act was over. Smoking, drinking, oblivious, Smith felt consigned to stare back into his own thoughts. Other acts followed, variations of the same crossed matrixes of flesh and bipolarity. More bodies for use. More sex as spectacle. The Anvil thundered after each performance, while Smith’s despair sunk to the lowest strata. Sometime later, a shadow listed behind him. He was stupefied and drunk. Only the trace scents of clean hair and soap caused him to look up. Purity in the Hall of Filth, he thought. Everything is opposites.

  “Oh, Jesus,” came the sad voice. “You look so innocent sitting there.” Lisa was dressed again in the shiny new wave coat. The tiny silver penis dangled on the choker. “Shocked?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “People change. Changing is an unchanging fact. I’m not ashamed of what I do.”

  “I don’t expect you to be.”

  Her words rose like an incantation, very far away. “I hope you find what you’re looking for. But in the meantime…” She slipped him a piece of paper.

  “Here’s my address.”

  Smith thought about her for days. He drank his meals and chain smoked, trying to refit the pieces of his psyche. He saw her in nagging images, he saw her in his dreams: the montage of flesh and throbbing lights, how her skin shined in sweat, how her eyes rolled back in her head as she was penetrated.

  His manuscripts were waste to him now, all dissolution. He burned them in the fireplace and watched the flames. What did he expect to see? Revelation? Truth? All he saw was her, and the only thing even close to his concept of truth gazed back at him night after night from the blank page in his typewriter.

  Knowing that he must not go to her only made him want to more. He felt buried alive in a grave of abstractions. Somehow, she was the key, she was the answer to the question, and Smith knew this without even knowing what the question was.

  It was a cold night, and very quiet. He saw things in rhythms and weave works of textures. Colors hummed, unreal yet painfully intense. Streetlights burned like pots of phosphorus in a darkness of steeped dimensions and hidden heights. Before he knew it, numb from the wind, he was trudging up the steps of the stark row house, was knocking emptily on the door.

  “I knew you’d come,” she said.

  The sound of her voice made Smith want to wilt, or even cry. Inside was warm as a womb; she brought him in and closed out the cold. A long, dark hall led to a room laved in twilight. There was only a bed and bare walls. Behind them, a narrow window framed the moon.

  Neither of them spoke; words seemed a pointless objectivity. Smith’s heart thudded when she wriggled out of her jeans. The blouse slid off her shoulders like dark liquid. Moonlight etched her contours in tinsel, pools of shadow, luminous swirls of flesh.

  She stripped him systematically, appraising him in circles. When she knelt, he felt tremendous embarrassment, but what man wouldn’t, knowing what she was used to? “It’s not big, it’s not like Do-Horse,” he muttered, a dreary excuse.

  “It’s beautiful,” she whispered.

  The touch of her lips on his penis made him feel speared by current. He came in her mouth almost spontaneously, which made him feel even less adequate. He was mad to have come here, idiotic to think he could pass for the man she needed him to be. He shivered as he limpened; his knees almost gave. “Jesus, I’m…” But she was smiling, already leading him to the bed.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “We have lots of time, don’t we?”

  Time, Smith thought. Somewhere, a clock was ticking. Who even knew what time was?

  She gradually caressed out his fears, kissed away his inadequacies. The warm bed felt like clouds. Mere seconds revived his erection; her hands on his skin, like catalytic prods, gave him life. Suddenly he felt powerful; he felt ready. What could constitute so rapid a resurgence of vitality? Their mouths bathed every inch of the others’ flesh, tongues wringing pleasure out of nerves. She tasted lovely and sharp. Her fluids sheened his mouth and ran down his neck. Her jerking orgasms made him feel brighter than the sun.

  Eventually his cock found her sex. They coupled in every conceivable configuration, and in some, perhaps, not conceivable. Passion or lust—it didn’t matter because it was real either way, shreds of truth seeping into his mind through her body heat, her sweat and her musk and her kisses. That same intent—his own quest, perhaps—incited him. Was he giving to her, or was she taking? The question seemed meaningless; truth was not a question, and truth was all it was he’d ever been looking for. Truth, he thought. But what had she said? He came in her repeatedly, ignoring exhaustion. The channel of her sex seemed to gulp each release of his semen, seemed to rejoice over it as a gift, as though he were indeed giving something of himself.

  But what had she said, earlier at the club?

  They made love and they fucked—all night. The moon watched them over their backs. Their sweat drenched the bed, along with her own fluids, and his that ran out of her. When there was nothing left, absolutely nothing, Smith rolled over, gasping air. Traced in moonlight and sated, she leaned up, very gently stroking his chest and shriveled penis, cupping the spent testicles. Truth, he thought yet again. Then he remembered what she’d said: But even truth has a price…Smith gazed at her now.

  Then he screamed.

  The hand playing over his penis was now no more than gray-white skin stretched taut over bone. Her eyes looked sightless, huge, like crystals. Her features blurred and prolapsed. A stench rose. Her face drew out to a long, thin shape, her cheeks sucking in, her nose receding to a pair of skeletal holes. Smith was in bed with a corpse.

  “Truths change,” grated the dead voice.

  Smith could not speak, could not break the paresis.

  The corpse smiled. “I’m your truth. The new truth.”

  Smith convulsed, in waves. Even truth has a price.

  “Pay me,” it said.

  I work at The Anvil now, with Lisa and Do-Horse and all the rest. We are the oligarchs of a new order, not remnants of eons past but seeds of a new truth. We are the prize and the penalty, what is wanted and what can never be had. Others rise, wither, and die unnoticed, but we go on forever, changing only faces with changing times. We slake our lust on the passion—and the truth—of the world.

&nb
sp; Stop in and see us sometime.

  MAKE A WISH

  “Look,” Jessy said. “A falling star.”

  Why did her gaze upward seem so hopeful? In Seattle, the stars always looked farther away than they had in Baltimore; Spad said it was because they were closer to the North Pole. At first, she could barely make it out: a tiny fleck of light that streaked across the midnight sky over Elliot Bay. “Can you see it?” she asked.

  Spad managed a smile. “Make a wish. But you have to make it quick, before the star burns out.”

  But Jessy didn’t believe in wishes. Why should she?

  The twenty-dollar bags of “boy” were long gone. Skag was cheaper here—lumps of sticky black tar from Mexico. They sold it in “quarters” for quarter grams, and it was only ten bucks a bang. It was also much more potent. Even with the resistance she’d built up, in Seattle she could get by on six a day, even four. Everything she’d heard in the Baltimore County lockup had turned out to be true…at least with regard to heroin. On the West Coast, it was better, stronger, cheaper, and easier to cop. The needle exchanges were legit: no questions asked. Supply never turned dry. But then there were the things they hadn’t mentioned. You abscessed with each and every shot. The stuff stayed black when you strained it; it was like injecting dirt into yourself, and you had to muscle half your hits because your blood coagulated faster. Your whole body scabbed up after a while, and it was ten times harder to turn tricks in this town. Jessy’d always figured you had to take the good with the bad anywhere in life, but here the bad snuck up on you and then put you down like a brick fell off the top floor of the Seafirst Building and landed on your head. Every day when she woke up to cop, she wished she was dead. Being dead seemed so much easier. Out here junkies and crackheads jumped off the Aurora bridge two a week. No one had survived yet.