Smoke and Mirrors

She groaned. He paused. “Is—is that okay?”

“Yes.”

He rocked back and forth, pushing deeper. She grunted, rhythmically, as he did so. After a couple of minutes she said “Enough.”

He pulled out. She rolled onto her back and pulled the soiled condom off his penis, dropped it onto the carpet.

“You can come now,” she told him.

“I’m not ready. And we could go for hours yet.”

“I don’t care. Come on my stomach.” She smiled at him. “Make yourself come. Now.”

He shook his head, but his hand was already fumbling at his penis, jerking it forward and back until he spurted in a glistening trail all over her stomach and br**sts.

She reached a hand down and rubbed the milky se**n lazily across her skin.

“I think you should go now,” she said.

“But you didn’t come. Don’t you want me to make you come?”

“I got what I wanted.”

He shook his head, confusedly. His penis was flaccid and shrunken. “I should have known,” he said, puzzled. “I don’t. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”

“Get dressed,” she told him. “Go away.”

He pulled on his clothes, efficiently, beginning with his socks. Then he leaned over, to kiss her.

She moved her head away from his lips. “No,” she said.

“Can I see you again?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

He was shaking. “What about the money?” he asked.

“I paid you already,” she said. “I paid you when you came in. Don’t you remember?”

He nodded, nervously, as if he could not remember but dared not admit it. Then he patted his pockets until he found the envelope with the cash in it, and he nodded once more. “I feel so empty,” he said, plaintively.

She scarcely noticed when he left.

She lay on the bed with a hand on her stomach, his spermatic fluid drying cold on her skin, and she tasted him in her mind.

She tasted each woman he had slept with. She tasted what he did with her friend, smiling inside at Natalie’s tiny perversities. She tasted the day he lost his first job. She tasted the morning he had awakened, still drunk, in his car, in the middle of a cornfield, and, terrified, had sworn off the bottle for ever. She knew his real name. She remembered the name that had once been tattoed on his arm and knew why it could be there no longer. She tasted the color of his eyes from the inside, and shivered at the nightmare he had in which he was forced to carry spiny fish in his mouth, and from which he woke, choking, night after night. She savored his hungers in food and fiction, and discovered a dark sky when he was a small boy and he had stared up at the stars and wondered at their vastness and immensity, that even he had forgotten.

Even in the pettiest, most unpromising material, she had discovered, you could find real treasures. And he had a little of the talent himself, although he had never understood it, or used it for anything more than sex. She wondered, as she swam in his memories and dreams, if he would miss them, if he would ever notice that they were gone. And then, shuddering, ecstatic, she came, in bright flashes, which warmed her and took her out of herself and into the nowhere-at-all perfection of the little death.

There was a crash from the alley below. Someone had stumbled into a garbage can.

She sat up and wiped the stickiness from her skin. And then, without showering, she began to dress herself once more, deliberately, beginning with her white cotton panties and ending with her elaborate silver earrings.

BABYCAKES

A few years back all the animals went away.

We woke up one morning, and they just weren’t there anymore. They didn’t even leave us a note, or say good-bye. We never figured out quite where they’d gone.

We missed them.

Some of us thought that the world had ended, but it hadn’t. There just weren’t any more animals. No cats or rabbits, no dogs or whales, no fish in the seas, no birds in the skies.

We were all alone.

We didn’t know what to do.

We wandered around lost, for a time, and then someone pointed out that just because we didn’t have animals anymore, that was no reason to change our lives. No reason to change our diets or to cease testing products that might cause us harm.

After all, there were still babies.

Babies can’t talk. They can hardly move. A baby is not a rational, thinking creature.

We made babies.

And we used them.

Some of them we ate. Baby flesh is tender and succulent.

We flayed their skin and decorated ourselves in it. Baby leather is soft and comfortable.

Some of them we tested.

We taped open their eyes, dripped detergents and shampoos in, a drop at a time.

We scarred them and scalded them. We burnt them. We clamped them and planted electrodes into their brains. We grafted, and we froze, and we irradiated.

The babies breathed our smoke, and the babies’ veins flowed with our medicines and drugs, until they stopped breathing or until their blood ceased to flow.

It was hard, of course, but it was necessary.

No one could deny that.

With the animals gone, what else could we do?

Some people complained, of course. But then, they always do.

And everything went back to normal.

Only . . .

Yesterday, all the babies were gone.

We don’t know where they went. We didn’t even see them go.

We don’t know what we’re going to do without them.

But we’ll think of something. Humans are smart. It’s what makes us superior to the animals and the babies.

We’ll figure something out.

MURDER MYSTERIES

The Fourth Angel says:

Of this order I am made one,

From Mankind to guard this place

That through their Guilt they have foregone

For they have forfeited His Grace;

Therefore all this must they shun

Or else my Sword they shall embrace

And myself will be their Foe To flame them in the Face.

— CHESTER MYSTERY CYCLE,

THE CREATION AND ADAM AND EVE, 1461

This is true.

Ten years ago, give or take a year, I found myself on an enforced stopover in Los Angeles, a long way from home. It was December, and the California weather was warm and pleasant. England, however, was in the grip of fogs and snowstorms, and no planes were landing there. Each day I’d phone the airport, and each day I’d be told to wait another day.

This had gone on for almost a week.

I was barely out of my teens. Looking around today at the parts of my life left over from those days, I feel uncomfortable, as if I’ve received a gift, unasked, from another person: a house, a wife, children, a vocation. Nothing to do with me, I could say, innocently. If it’s true that every seven years each cell in your body dies and is replaced, then I have truly inherited my life from a dead man; and the misdeeds of those times have been forgiven, and are buried with his bones.