Stabs at Happiness (7 page)

They go into his room, shut the door and put some music on. The dog shuts up at last.

When they sit together on his futon Justin wants to show her some of his art books. Nikki is actually pretty interested. He has some exhibition catalogs from good shows, like the retrospective featuring the drawings of Eva Hesse.

She died young, of a brain tumor, back in 1970. She was very pretty, which doesn't hurt the cult of personality. A lot of her work – wild hanging sculptures, like Jackson Pollock translated into three dimensions — was made of latex which has changed color and rapidly decayed just from exposure to air. It's temporary, meant to be so, complicating the usual commodification in which art is purchased by wealthy collectors as a luxury vanity project or just pure investment and no more.

Justin seems more relaxed now that they're bonding over art or something. Their bodies touch, and bump, and she feels his warm body against her.

“You mentioned those pills,” he says. “If you didn't bring any, I have some pot.”

“I have a couple. We should probably just split one. See the fleur-de-lys? That marks the quality control of this chemist I knew in school.”

Justin nods, and lays back on the futon, taking off his sweater. They look at each other in sort of professional clubkid manner, as if they've been out dancing to the one-thousandth remix of Blue Monday… slowly now Nikki begins kissing and caressing him, and he is as passive as advertised, eyes closed as they kiss.

They have to smile at each other when it turns out that they're both wearing bright-colored American Apparel boy-style briefs. His are turquoise-blue; Nikki's are bright red.

Is she physically stronger than him? Maybe. No, probably not. They sort of wrestle at times. He becomes more aggressive. He likes to bite.

She feels the 2c-b – the Ecstasy derivative – as it exaggerates the natural sensations somewhat. She's tripping when she applies a generous glob of lube to Justin's sphincter, pushing it into his rectum, where it melts. Nikki asked him earlier if he wanted to be tied up and he never replied. On the internet he said that he did. She asks him again now and he ambiguously shrugs in a way she decides means no.

The strap-on's dildo is black. It seems like a supple instrument once it's buried in his rectum and she's moving around. She feels like a badass, and Justin is a badass too. This experience will serve as masturbation fuel for all kinds of fantasies he can access of being raped in jail, or where he's an innocent little schoolgirl picked up in a van, or some L.A. teen named Brad in a Dennis Cooper novel. You have to be a badass to let yourself be fucked like this, squirming, his shame redeemed in the abandon of the Flesh, the Flesh, the Flesh.

He moans, “Ohhh, ohhh… oh fuck.”

Nikki feels like she's fucking a beautiful boy who exists in space and time while also, in some blurry way, another boy who looks almost exactly like this one but who's semi-invisible and exists in slow motion… kind of superimposed. Justin has all kinds of poetic expressions set and reset and float above his face.

Obviously, a dildo has no nerve endings or anything, but it's not like Nikki has to imagine something else is going on. Fucking is an intensely physical act no matter what. It involves all the same sweat and grabbing and stuff so yeah, it's physical. Penetration is obviously physical by nature. She doesn't pretend she's a boy or anything. This kind of fucking illuminates other things about the act.

Also she in general has very little trouble achieving orgasm, so yeah she can cum when fucking like this, general crotch pressure and mere participation in the spectacle is totally enough. She loses herself at some point with a little cry in some kind of interior wave.

So there you go.

There is brown shit stuck to the head of the black dildo when it finally slides out of the deeply-plumbed hole. It stinks but Nikki sort of appreciates the smell. It's so organic.

“I feel empty now,” Justin says, face slack, missing having his ass full.

“Slut,” she says, hot smile when she looks into his eyes. He smiles back but not as hard, he's a little removed, private, unable to process the new data yet. He can't think hard in this condition.

Later on they're lying together cooling down, and Justin seems so wiped. He notices that she notices and says, “I took a 5milligram diazepam from my mom's to serve as a muscle relaxer when we first came up here.”

Nikki's sort of pissed off by this. She understands, but… Jesus. Justin's eyes are huge.

“Don't go. Just lie here with me. Hold me, okay?”

She plays with his hair as he falls asleep. Some music she's not crazy about is playing in his bedroom but so what? She doesn't feel like moving yet.

Nikki lies there holding him for maybe an hour. He's breathing regularly. She feels lazy but finally rises and gets dressed. She goes to find the bathroom and Justin's mother is home, walking around in sheer black panties and bra, supersexy, smoking a cigarette, mascara smudged like she's been crying.

Wow, she's really drunk.

She says, “My name is Susan Chen.” Yeah, she's sexy as hell. She gazes without comment at the strap-on dildo and its harness which Nikki is holding – she had taken it to the bathroom with her to wash the impacted shit off the dildo head before putting it in her bag.

When she gets it that Nikki wants to leave she says she'll call a car service for her. This is good because sometimes it's hard to get a cab in some parts of Brooklyn this time of night.

Attention drawn first by the smell of his cologne, Nikki discovers a shirtless black man lying on the couch who looks like he's brooding, staring without speaking at the beigey wall. He gives off some hint of a bad adrenalin vibe, drama suspended maybe soon to re-ensue.

She gets dressed and takes the elevator downstairs, and then waits outside there in East Williamsburg for the car service to show up. There's nobody around on the street… though some cabs pass by, end of shift, not even glancing at her.

Spooky atmosphere. She wills herself to be brave.

It takes a while to get home. Maybe she's pretty stoned, ‘cause she finds herself lying sideways in the ganja-smelling backseat gazing out at weirdly-lit scenery all the way, loud sub-woofer slow motion reggae making some impression on her.

She takes off her jacket up in her apartment and after considering taking a shower she lies down in her clothes, can't sleep, gets up later and dons a navy-blue hoodie. She goes back out after washing her face and brushing her teeth, realizing today she does not have to go to work.

In an automat two blocks away she finds
Meld43
, an older guy who has a blog, they're friends she supposes, he has MS and doesn't make an issue of it, if he broods on this or finds tragedy or meaning in suffering she can't tell. His laptop is on while he drinks coffee, she joins him there after fetching a Mexican hot chocolate, turning off the music in her earbuds just as the riff for
Surf Goths
begins.

Meld43 says, “This just says
Yes does not mean
.”

Nikki waits, then says, “That's it?”

“Yeah.” He looks her over. He's not so bad looking for a dude in a wheelchair with an incurable degenerative disease. He takes his rimless glasses off.

“Have you been to the doctor lately, where they have these illustrated faces on the wall — someone in pain from One through Ten?”

She shakes her head.

“Ten looks pretty bad,” he says. “Nine is definitely uncomfortable, but Eight when pressed acts all stoic and says ‘It could be worse.' Want a Vicodin?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

He's taking three or four different kinds of pills, sorting them with shaky hands. The disease makes him subject to unpredictable symptoms including something called ‘electrical pain.'

It's cool of him to share narcotics.

He asks, “Have you been up all night?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What've you been doing, NineOh? High on research chemicals again?”

“Effects're wearing off.”

Nikki says nothing for a long time, then: “I fucked a cute emo boy.”

“Really.”

“Yeah.”

“How was it?”

“Oh…well, it's always awesome having sex with someone who's beautiful, but…afterwards he was really clingy. He didn't want me to leave. He kept saying ‘I just want to hold you!' It went on and on. God. How many times am I going to have to play out this scene with a boy who supposedly wants emotionless sex, wants to be ‘used', but then actually he ends up really wanting something incredibly traditional and boring, basically a girl to fuck and then hold all night long?”

Nikki realizes, within a few moments, that she's lying, confusing Justin Chen with someone a few weeks ago.

“Shit! That was some whole other dude. That was more like Shawn.”

The look Meld43 gives her seems understanding or something, amused, left hand quivering while he waits for the medication to hit.

Outside, in that world visible through the big window, the violet-gray light is becoming pervasively paler, more transparent, while all kinds of people are going to work, walking beneath barbaric splendor of superhigh buildings which extend into great holes in the sky.

Nikki watches. She knows this kingdom, maybe.

Or nobody does or ever will.

H
E'S TOO ROUGH.
She has other complaints as well. She doesn't like his friends. He doesn't make enough money. There is a bruise of many colors on the soft skin of her arm.

The red of the Coca-Cola signs is the same all over the world.

This face is completely different, yet its expression is the same. The change has come too quickly to see. It isn't physical.

Men with shovels are digging in the soil, making room for a length of clean gray pipe. The men are clad in dull-hued clothing. Coal gray. Khaki. Gunmetal blue. They have on scuffed day-glo orange hard hats.

The clouds are gleaming white on top, where the sunlight strikes; the lower halves are shaded white merging into gray, difficult to distinguish from the neighboring blue of the sky. We do not see where clouds end and sky begins. The boundaries between blue and gray have disappeared.

Mark comes out of his office, deep within the brokerage. He wears a lemon-yellow shirt, a blue knit tie, gray slacks, brown oxfords and dark blue socks. He sees a young woman talking to Carol, the receptionist, evidently applying for a job. The young woman is blonde, with the kind of vaguely Slavic features Mark has previously imagined as sexually ideal. He lingers to get a better look. She has on black tights. Mark imagines the flesh of her thighs. She'd never understand him. It would never work.

The belief in luck is in substance a habit of more ancient date than the surviving predatory culture. To the archaic man all the obtrusive and obviously consequential objects and facts in his environment have a quasi-personal individuality. They are conceived to be possessed of volition, or rather of propensities, which enter into the complex of cause and effect and move events in an inscrutable manner.

The car is ivory-colored, with shining chrome. Wire wheels. Wine-red leather seats. Note the distinctive hood ornament. The car's left-turn signal comes on/goes off/comes on as the vehicle slows to a stop.

A song goes through her mind. She can't get to the end of it. How does that little part go? She hears singing, along with an amplified beat which threads its way, distant pulse from a faraway star. It fades out and picks up again, with only a semi-momentary glitch once more at the start.

The children are digging, building riverbeds, setting up their little plastic figures. Thoroughly engrossed, they want everything to be perfect before the violent end of the world.

Empty buildings. Concrete. Suspended black wires. Telephone poles. Gravel and weeds.

Anna Mae Richmond, 83, has been evicted from a house 157 years old, so that a new on-ramp to the freeway may be built. Anna Mae turns on her call-light but no one comes. They're not interested in walking down the hall. They're talking about the break-up of someone's romance.

In all relations with the other, one's behavior is at first exploratory, almost random… later contacts modifying and redefining variables until some kind of an interim crystallization can occur.

A cobalt-blue elevator, not part of the structure, but a temporary external addition for the benefit of the workers, slides up the side of the building-in-construction. A man in a hard hat is looking at something. Hammering noises, then the giant echoing buzz of a machine. Layers of sound. Harmonics. Cars, trucks, buses passing by. Honk of a horn. The wind is blowing. The big noise stops. It starts again. Half-audible voices, words lost in the wind.

James takes Mary into a room and asks her to sit down on a wooden chair. Mary suspects she is going to be criticized for her recent lack of enthusiasm. “Do you realize,” he says, “that through your attitude you have allowed Satan to come into this house?”

The modern airport is beautiful and well-planned. Listen to the music in the long shining corridors. Look at the runway. Look at the brand-new pieces of luggage. The tower, with its arrows and lights. The runway. Here comes another jumbo jet.

Sarah chooses the can of tomato sauce because of an attractive illustration on the label. She pushes the silver shopping cart onward up the aisle, past an old woman who is staring, seemingly abstracted, at the vast selection of canned soups. A man with a curly black beard walks past, humming to himself. Sarah's mind goes blank. Should she buy some cheese?

She doesn't like his friends. He doesn't make enough money.

A rat is placed in a box with two compartments, one of which has
White
walls and a grid floor, the other
Black
walls and a wooden floor. The rat explores both parts and shows little preference between them. Then it is placed in the
White
compartment and given a strong electric shock through the grid floor. Most rats soon escape the shock by running into the
Black
compartment. This sequence of shock in
White
and escape to
Black
is repeated. Then the rat is placed in the
White
compartment without shock. It runs into the
Black
.