A little ink more or less

11.

She died with his cock inside her, hard and deep like a wasp’s sting, something he kept thinking about for days afterwards. He clung to it like a pair of panties, wadding it up and breathing it in until he used it up and it became just part of the wallpaper. He’d been fucking her from behind, her thighs as slightly parted as kissing lips. A hand in her hair, crimping the cotton candy-like frizz of her dyejob red mop into sweaty ropes. An arm around her throat like a choke hold, squeezing her every time he thrust, every time she moaned. His forearm had been wet and whitened with the places she’d bitten it, drooled on it, things lawyers wouldn’t like but things she’d done in passion, not protest.

What she liked — what he liked even more — was the feeling of helplessness when he grabbed her like this, the feeling of anonymous danger wherein they were both just skin and bodies, just motion and touch. No faces. No voice. No caress, only impact.

What the autopsy said was that her body started producing too much carbonic acid, in order to balance out the carbon dioxide she wasn’t exhaling fast enough, a problem they call respiratory acidosis, which you don’t hear much except in morgues and the Discovery Channel: the same thing happens to drowning victims, but they beat it to the punch and die of other things. She wasn’t drowning, she was suffocating. Respiratory acidosis wasn’t the same thing as metabolic acidosis, which was what they called it when the oxygen didn’t make it in time to metabolize the pyruvate broken down from glucose, which left to its own devices turned into lactic acid instead.

Simultaneous processes of acidosis are a common subsidiary cause of death in suffocation cases: they lower the pH of the blood from the normal range of 7.35 to 7.45 — “slightly alkaline,” ten times moreso than milk. It can’t fall very far. At 6.9, approaching the acidity of urine, blood is called “incompatible with life,” a phrase that sounds like it should be scrawled in white lowercase typescript across a Hot Topic T-shirt and accessorized with a wide belt and leather low-riders. Think of ripping out that chunk of the pH scale, of looking only at the possible extremes a body could reach: at the top, at 8 or so, the veins are full of Pepto-Bismol, smooth and chalky and rich in milk of magnesia, blood that would coat your throat like a triple-thick shake if you drank it.

In the downbelow, down at 6.9, with that pyruvate churning into lactic acid like wormy little fissures and carbonic acid sizzling up in swamp bubbles, her veins were lemon juice. She was burning vinegar while her legs started to thrash, not because she was coming but because fight-or-flight had just hijacked her brain’s control center, and everything else had been kicked off the board.

When she started to flail and panic, his first impulse was to hold her down, to fight her back: he didn’t think of it that way, it was a reflex, a physical reflex as sure as kicking at hammers. His arm clenched harder around her throat, and later a doctor would tell him that’s when it was all over. Her heart started to fire off premature ventricular contractions, little panic flutters because it didn’t have enough oxygen. It had probably been putting them out off and on over the last hour she was alive and in his hotel bed, every time his arm clenched down around her throat for a little too long, or she bit down her breath like she was forcing her orgasm out harder: but now it was sending them out in droves, like little soldiers.

His arm bore down on her carotid arteries and on the carotid sinus bodies, baroreceptors which vasodilated her brain: i.e., said the doctor, e.g., ergo, don’tcha know, the bitch passed out. Only but he didn’t know it yet. He only knew it was still warm around his cock, and that she’d been groaning her loudest just seconds ago, wanting to be fucked the way he’d fucked her dozens of times before, the way they both loved it.

Vasodilation sends a signal to the heart to turn down the rheostat of the heart, to make it slower and softer, in order to conserve oxygen: nine times out of ten, that only makes the situation worse, but the body’s instincts are not subject to legislative correction nor editorial suggestion. Rachael flatlined, going into asystolic cardiac arrest at the same time a premature ventricular contraction fired off during the electrical repolarization phase, which would have kicked off ventricular fibrillatory cardiac arrest if she weren’t already dead.

This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends.

#

Mia my dear,

In yr last missive you say, “you are a rose, Michael, an absolute rose” — or the most recent missive I have received, at least, as I should not be surprised if you have written more since. In any event: it is untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose.

I point this out not to be contrary, as I know you would accuse me of being, but because it bothers me when you lavish me with false praise, and in particular praise which is not simply hyperbolic but false through-and-through: it is no more flattering to me to be called a rose than a daisy, nor a sparrow, nor a piece of the moon. Do you see? You would feel ill-praised if I complimented you on your green eyes, and would remind me they are blue: you would feel nonplussed, and perhaps perturbed, if I told you you had lovely wings. Metaphor is no greatly different thing. If a thing is demonstrably unlike me, I will not enjoy being compared to it.

When it persists, in fact, as it does in your language, it becomes a nuisance. I find myself musing that your feelings are not for me, but exist independent of me, and I have only become their focus: as the web of a spider has an existence beyond a fly, and irrelevant to it until it becomes ensnared.

Sometimes I wonder where it is you have spun your web, and what you ensnare there.

I do love you, darling, do not take these chidings amiss. You know I am concerned only for the sincerity of your soul and the tending of your character.

We will speak more now of flowers, then, true flowers. You would like Ecklesburg, Alabama, the nearest town to the base where I am stationed. I don’t know how much longer we’ll be here: the war, some men who would know tell me, is at a wane now that the United States have entered it. The Kaiser shall not last long. Do you know that word has gotten out — I know not from where, and have dismissed it as rumor — that the family’s wealth comes from the Kaiser? In ordinary times I would not deny that Wilhelm is a distant cousin, but I think we can hardly be blamed for — nor even associated with — his aggression towards Serbia. It is more than a century now that the Van Der Lindens came to the New World, no matter what titles we may retain.

But I was speaking of Ecklesburg. The flowers of Ecklesburg are blue and gigantic, peering out of the fields which go untended in the perimeter of the village. They’re all blue, you understand, but not because they are all of the same breed — or do I say genus, there, species, phylum? my books are not with me, save my Boswell and the copy of Simon Called Peter you sent me, you trolloping scrumpet — but simply because some aspect of the land, perhaps its people or perhaps its soil, favors the color.

Did you not once tell me you wished for a blue rose, if I should have your favor and affection? I have looked and found not, even in this warm clime. There is the blueflag, which unfolds like an orchid with its legs cocked about its cunt and wings proudly unfurling above a stamen — or is it pistil, I wonder — of the tenderest purple. There are harebells and pickerelweed, which the honeybees adore. There is gentian, which has dark blue flowers shaped like artichokes and which is harvested for its root, which flavors the bitters for cocktails. There are fields and fields of chicory, daisy-like, pale feathery petals surrounding a nipple-like bud at the center, reminding me ever of the asters which grew in the meadow of my childhood. There are forget-me-nots with five petals, and speedwell — which like logic and wine and sex is its own plural — with four, and the most brilliantly-colored of all, visible from fields away as blue starbursts amid green surroundings, is the plainly named blue-eyed grass.

The eyes of Ecklesburg are blue and gigantic, but they are not roses, my love.

Yr,

Michael.

#

O Sol Mia,

There is a madness that overtakes me at a time, a madness I think must be unique to men, as demonstrated by the whorele of history and literature: the madness of judgment made under the influence of arousal. Do not so many of our institutions and taboos, our laws and virtues, come back to this? Is it not why men rule, to counterbalance our vulnerability to the woman and return equilibrium to the world and to sex?

Ruin and ruin. I met her at a dance, not the sort of modern thing of which I have so disapproved, but a barn dance, which is a quaint thing they have done in these parts (don’t I sound so native, dear?) since Alabama was an English colony. It is a called dance, that is to say, one governed by a caller, usually an older gentleman who is long married or widowed, and many of the dances are traditional English dances, thus involving nothing untoward. The sort of dance one might easily do with one’s grandmother without drawing ridicule, you see, and sometimes the girls even dance together when the boys cannot master the steps. “Strip the Willow” is a popular dance, and “Cat Whiskers,” which I know you would like.

But I tarry from the point.

I met her at one such dance, which officers are permitted to attend. Her name is Samantha Montgomery, and she is as lovely as a tree in the rain. She is but twelve years old, and as shy a flower as the blueflags which grow in her yard: it was her grandfather, the widower Judge Montgomery, who called the dance the night we met, and her grandfather who raised her while her father Captain Montgomery was abroad at war.

So it was that her house was empty when I enticed her to lead me to it. So it was that I undressed her by moonlight, that none would see signs of occupation in her bedroom, should they drive by on the dusty road and we by chance not hear them, so enraptured by our attentions to one another.

Would it credit her, or me, or the town of Ecklesburg if I said she struggled and protested? Would you prefer to hear it that way? I can tell it that way, but it wouldn’t be true, and there are days I think honesty is better than comfort, but perhaps that is only the madness on its heel. In truth, she was eager to lose her virginity, and almost meticulously concerned with doing so in the arms of an out-of-towner: I would not gossip among her menfolk, she knew, and as she planned to marry locally, if she performed poorly with me she would not harm her chances.

She struck me as remarkably practical in these matters, which I found admirable.

But don’t think she was an old hand, a jaded woman: she was still a girl of twelve, and nervous as you might imagine. What pains I took to comfort her and assuage her were only taken so that she might not scream, I confess, nor expel me from her home and thighs. We had one another for the better part of an hour: her nervousness subsided quickly, and I taught her several clever tricks she could use to ensnare her local boys when the time for such things came.

I had her in the ordinary way, as well as with her hands clutching the edge of the bed as she lay on her stomach, and with the two of us on our sides and my arms wrapped around her, my hands holding her buttocks. I had her mouth, and she had mine.

I have not seen her since, nor do either of us intend a rendez-vous. We engaged one another’s attentions for a time, and afterwards, letting my sweat dry in the dark, I was somewhat upset with myself for not waiting to find some other woman, some experienced woman who might know more of what she was doing. Having a virgin, it is the sort of thing which is enticing only in intellectual ways: there are few physical novelties to be taken from it. I was irritated with her, as well, for once I was sated she seemed plainer than she had: her body so boyish as to be nearly nonsexual, her face badly wanting of cosmetics, her hair not yet trained to attract a man’s eye.

But I comfort myself now in ink, and with the knowledge that this perhaps renders irrelevant and childish your prattling about some man with whom you flirted a fortnight ago.

Do you not agree, my love, my only?

Michael.

#

Mia,

My dear you must calm down.

I hope that this letter finds you in saner, more tranquil spirits than those which possessed you when you last wrote me: if so, you may discard it now, and we will have a laugh about it when I finally return home. If not, I must caution you: do not let your emotions ride you so roughly. Do not make yourself a steed to those creatures which plague your thoughts.

I understand, I think, that you take some sort of pleasure from — intensity? from passion, the sort of passion of which they write about in those books you have loved and will love again when calmness comes back to you. I understand that you are what would be called — if you were a man — a thrillseeker, and that because of your sex you must seek your thrills from womanly things, from love and drama and depression and the like. I too enjoy a good tragedy, when it is on stage, or a melodramatic farce on the screen. But I do not then seek to live such lives.

You must find this steel in yourself. You must accept that you may “look but don’t touch,” if you see, when it comes to these sorts of things. It is like a lust in you, I think, and it is not becoming when you succumb to it.

Now, I will tell you what you want to hear, but do not think that I do not realize this is a game we play. You summon up these dark thoughts in yourself, these rapid crimson moods, both for your enjoyment of them and for the way they empower you to manipulate others — and by others I mean largely me, for you may have noticed that few others will put up with you.

My dear I remind you that many days I am all you have. And that perhaps I am entitled to certain respects as a result.

What you want to hear is that I love you, not mildly but with strength — from strength — and that I love only you. I love you beyond words and thought. I love you so greatly I do not even need to think of it: it does not consume me, but rather I consume it, as a fish consumes water, as birds consume air. It buoys me. I do not entertain myself nightly with thoughts of you, nor comfort myself with such in the morning: I live the love of you, my Mia. I am the love of you. No other could take your place: it would not be possible, because without loving you, I would be nothing but the body — and the body is naught but meat that twitches.

Never doubt my love for you. If you do not hear me speak of it often, it is only as I say: that birds speak little of the air, and fish sing quietly about the sea.

Now as to a remedy. I do hope that you are feeling better, more rested and calm, when these words reach you, but if you do not, will you take my advice? It has often steered you properly in the past, and I think you will agree that I am more versed in many matters, more schooled and sharper-eyed. Let me guide you, dear love, and bring you back through the tempest to the shores.

Your therapy should consist of two parts, it seems clear, the first a “letting,” a venting if you will, like the leeches used long ago, or the therapeutic tension release employed by the Swedish girl who used to come round the house. I wish for you to take my straight razor, the one I left behind for fear of losing it, with the ivory handle engraved with my initials. I wish for you to make two cuts just above your throat, at the corner of your jaw: some few inches below your earlobe, as I recollect. This, I think, will vent the black humors from you — and serve as a penitence as well, a reminder of your ill-doing. A preventative, you see.

But there are still those energies riding you, which you have taken upon yourself, and I should find it unpleasant if you still carried them when I returned home. So you must expend these.

There is a boy living at 43 Maple, is there not? You know the one I mean. I remember him as young, but he is not so young as that. You should draw him into the house without anyone else knowing, and conceive to seduce him. Do not, under any circumstance, permit him access to your womanly parts: but you may entice him to rut with your anus if you like, as he would with a man. When he has spent himself, and is all a-daze, is when you may toy with him.

But you may not kill him, love. There would be discoveries. You are not clever enough to conceal such transgressions, and I have told you before I do not approve of a woman who murders, no matter her proclivities or excuses, no matter what amends she makes. You may damage him, but play a careful game: you must hurt him enough that you spend yourself, as surely as an orgasming cock: but you also must make the damage slight enough that he will tell no one. You must humiliate him, so that he will never wish to tell anyone of the injury — nor of its source, should they discover it.

I suggest an internal rectal injury of some sort, perhaps turning the tables after your loveplay with him, or else a scarring injury upon his penis. Whatever you do, do not use my straight razor for this purpose: I should not like to have the whelp’s blood upon it, for I have never liked the way he looks at you and should not want him touching me as I shave.

I trust you will mend your state per my instructions, should it remain necessary.

All my love,

yr

Michael.

#

Castle sat on the floor of the middle basement’s central room, with a gin rickey he’d promised to try from the electrician’s recipe and a handful of letters. Sparky had not only redone the wiring, but installed more overhead lights while he was at it, diffused ones that lit the place more like sunshine would have — and seeing the downbelow in the light like that … well, it just wasn’t nearly as creepy.

In fact, it was kind of great.

It might be the gin talking, of course — this was his fourth, Bombay Sapphire splashed with lime and soda and mint syrup — but right now, the downbelow seemed the perfect antidote to what Katrine had said about cabin fever. It was the closest thing he had to a change of scenery: and it gave him something to do, because the place was badly in need of being cleaned out. In places, like corners where it had folded up like snowdrifts, the dust was so bad it kicked up in clouds as he walked through it.

But he wanted to give everything a thorough once-over before calling a cleaning service. Who knew what they might throw out, or move to where he’d never find it — like these letters, from Michael Van Der Linden to his wife or lover.

He’d started out on the furthest-down floor, which was shortened, nothing more than storerooms piled up with boxes: decaying cardboard boxes, hatboxes, steamer trunks, wooden crates, the works. He’d found the letters there, after sifting through a couple boxes of shoes and old clothes: a treasure-chest-looking box full of papers both loose and stuck into envelopes (some marked, some not), as well as a few other trinkets.

He’d brought them up to the middle floor, where there was more room, to start skimming through them. At last, Michael spoke — Michael, whom in a way he’d heard so much about through Mia’s writing.

The first letter had a dried blue flower pressed between its pages, and the imprint of one of the petals still showed faintly on the second page. The second letter had a black and white photograph of a young girl — Samantha Montgomery, Castle assumed, looking stunningly young and pink and blonde in the kind of dress you put on children, not young women. She looked like Alice in Wonderland, or Dorothy in Oz, or one of those girls. And Michael had fucked her to make Mia feel bad.

The third letter, the one that most disturbed him, had a spot of copper by the signature, a brownish spot that had to be a bloody fingerprint. It seemed out of place even though the letter talked about torturing a boy in order to “expend energies” — but not to kill him, because murder wasn’t for women.

All three letters had an instructional tone to them, and Castle felt he knew some of the Michael-between-the-lines already. He was the Schoolmaster Guy, a type of rich boy Castle’d identified as a teenager: the guy who somehow made the leap from “rich kids can afford good schools” to “intelligence is proportional to wealth,” and would assume a looking-down-the-noise, splayed-hand posture when explaining matters of the world or learning to his fellow students. They were the kind of guys who only saw education as an accumulation of things to explain to other people, in order to correct the error of their ways. Guys like that loved memorizing explanations for the finer points of anal-retentive grammar, and would be the first to point out that the Battle of Bunker Hill hadn’t been fought at Bunker Hill, or that only a novice could confuse Manet with Monet.

They were never quite nerds because they weren’t interested in math or science — only the humanities, especially grammar and what they saw as a normative sort of etiquette, as though behavior were the kind of thing that indicated how many secrets you’d been let in on. Guys like Michael were why secret societies had code-phrases and handshakes: because those things tied etiquette and deliberate behavior to membership and belonging.

Castle’s mother had always loved guys like Michael, and as much as he hated to admit it, his father had probably been one. He hadn’t known him at an old enough age to be able to judge something like that. Jonathan certainly wasn’t — which, in the way Castle understood families to work, made it all the more likely Jacob had been.

Even Michael’s casual cruelty wasn’t unusual. Aspects of it — not the offhand mention of murder, which might be facetious or playing along with some tic of Mia’s — were powerfully familiar, bringing Castle immediately back to his late teens and early twenties, when he’d treasured primarily two things about women: the conquest and the jealousy he could instill in them. The older he got, the less sure he was that was a male thing so much as it was an early-twenties thing — but he’d never been close enough to any women to really be sure what went on in their heads. And he suspected Michael, with his very delineated conception of gender, would disagree.

He put the rickey down and ran a thumb over the photograph of Samantha, looking for what Michael had seen in her. Just a vessel for revenge? A convenience? Maybe she’d approached him first, indicated her availability, and he’d only accepted, because he was tired of the feel of his hand and wanted to put his cock somewhere that would clean itself up afterwards instead of having to do it himself.

There was a knowing tilt to her lip, a quirk of her mouth, even in this formal photograph — the war Michael mentioned had to be World War I, and Castle didn’t remember history perfectly but figured that had to mean the letter was dated from somewhere between, what, 1915 and 1925? In that range, anyway.

“Did you fuck her mouth, Mikey?” Castle asked, looking down at the photo. “Is that what did it for you? You didn’t like her tits any, and it doesn’t sound like she had any to speak of. So was it her mouth? Or did you just like feeling those little thighs against you? I know she was tight, but I’ve fucked virgins, and it’s really not that great. You had to know that.”

He let the back of his hand rub against the crotch of his jeans as he inspected the photo, undressing the girl with his eyes. She had a spray of freckles on her nose and cheeks, light enough that these days Olan Mills or what the fuck ever would airbrush them out, but they didn’t and couldn’t do that back then. The freckles probably continued when you took the dress off, along her collarbone and a light sprinkling around her nipples, those small soft nubs that weren’t really breasts yet.

But her legs would be perfectly white, as smooth as polished bone and as soft as a kitten. Did her pussy have any hair yet? A little? None at all? Castle had never fucked a twelve year old, had never wanted to, but this one had clearly wanted something. It was a different time then. People got married at fourteen. Twelve was like twenty. Twelve could be horny.

Twelve could be wet.

He thought about that, the idea of a twelve year old begging for sex, of not wanting to fuck her but letting her beg, letting her crawl between his legs and rub her face against his cock through his jeans, and of unzipping himself and letting her lap her little pink kitten-like tongue all over his soft cock, having to think about someone else — having to think of Mia, strange and beautiful Mia with her pale skin and cruel mouth — in order to get hard, and then letting her suck him off without ever saying yes. He thought about coming in her mouth like an afterthought, and of the pleasure of losing interest in her.