The Convulsion Factory (4 page)

Drenched in sweat, she fell back into someone’s arms, felt her lover withdraw, receding into a blackness that was total, her sole world. They waited until she got her breath, then a hand was on her chin, urging her lips to part. She obliged, eager to surmount exhaustion, prove herself worthy. Whoever these people were, she wanted to be one of them, take what they offered, give what she had. Her lips parted, and her tongue serpentined out to explore what her eyes were denied. She touched warmth.

It was at her mouth
.

She smelled herself on the gigantic phallus, tasted herself a moment later. Opened wide, wider, could scarcely accommodate a few inches without her jaw cracking.
What WAS it?
, and she raised one hand, wrapped her fingers around it, felt firm flesh, muscle…

And it slowly withdrew, teasingly, before she could identify what seemed so familiar, so alien, so tantalizing. Around her, far and near, came soft murmurs of approval, appreciation, acceptance.

Adam’s hands were at the back of her head, gently undoing the knot, and when the blindfold was drawn away she blinked into the light, forgot to breathe. Whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t this.

She found herself in the center of the old sanctuary, beneath soaring ceilings and the watchful eyes of suffering figures in the stained glass windows, some pocked with vandals’ holes. Pews and pulpit were gone, in their place a cushioned playground for these thirty-plus members who had welcomed her, even though she wasn’t at all like them.

Elle looked straight into the eyes of the young woman sitting in the V of her outstretched legs. So this was her lover? There was a thin, wanton quality to her as she reclined on her haunches, meeting Elle’s gaze with a hunger almost masculine. It was a role she played well. Elle followed the contours of her body, from the small breasts to the slim hips, to the tapering length of her left leg. There was no foot, just the smooth bony head formed by her ankle.

At the moment, quite wet.

And she had no right leg at all.

Elle whirled, met Adam’s smile. His pride. And let herself be taken into his arms. At least he had them.

Not so, many of those around her. They were all missing bits and pieces, some more than others. Feet, lower legs, or the entire limb. A few, like Adam, had neither. Others had sacrificed arms along the way. A couple, she saw, were but heads and a single arm attached to naked trunks. They were smooth and they were sculpted, every one of them, and if they looked upon her with anything, it was with longing. Not to be like her again … but to make her one of them.

“You do it to yourselves, don’t you?” she whispered to Adam. “These weren’t accidents.”

He grinned, got Freudian on her. “There are no accidents.”

“I don’t understand,” but then, in looking around at them, an entire roomful of broken statuary, she couldn’t say she didn’t like it. Whatever their reasons, this was commitment, so far beyond the Inner Circle that she could never go back there.

“You will,” Adam told her, then scooted off to new partners, as did the others. Recombinant pairs, trios, groups.

And she watched, a privileged witness.

They could do the most astonishing things.

*

Adam explained later, after the two of them had returned to his apartment. She was very quiet, cataloguing everything she’d experienced but finding that even in her vast erotic repertoire there was no place for this.

She drew herself together on the sofa, hands around a mug of coffee. Feeling loose inside, liquid, where muscles had stretched.

“How did it start?” she asked.

“How does anything start?” Adam said, then laughed softly to himself. “Transcendence. That’s what anyone wants out of life, isn’t it? Some way of getting past it. Or getting more out of it.” He paused, changed gears. “Ever hear of the Gnostics?”

She seesawed her hand.

“They were several splinter groups from the early Church, a couple thousand years ago. Didn’t last long, by comparison. The party line condemned them as heretics. Progressive in their day, in a lot of ways. But then they had this self-loathing kick they were on. Since the material world fell short of the spirit, it was bad, themselves included. So, automatically, anything that created them had to be bad too, so their lives were spent showing contempt for it all, until they could return to the spirit. Each branch had its ways. The ascetics denied themselves everything. The libertines, they pleasured themselves and fucked each other left and right. Overindulgence as the way to paradise … people after my own heart.” Adam winked. “And yours too,
ma chérie
?”

Elle smiled weakly; felt rubbery inside and out. “I don’t think my goals were that lofty.”

“Oh mine neither, hell no,” he said, laughing. “Anyway. Even among the Gnostics there was a lunatic fringe. Most all of them had the idea that the body was a prison that kept the spirit shackled, but this fringe, they did something about it. Had a habit of cutting parts of themselves away to reduce the size of the prison.”

She began to piece it together then, amputation in an erotic context: The less body one has to dilute pleasure, the greater must be its concentration in the flesh that remains.

“And so the two of those approaches got combined, over time?”

“I don’t know. Probably.” Adam looked dumbfounded. “Who knows how anything really happens? It’s not like we trace ourselves back for centuries, nothing like that. It’s just something that someone stumbled onto awhile back, and found out … works.”

Languidly, Elle slipped from the sofa, wandered to a window, stared into the night. A sickly glow of sodium lights cast pools amid the blackened hulks of brick and steel, withered hives of isolation. How she hated it out there, its cold hard rot.

“Everything revives,” she said, “if you give it enough time.”

*

Their procedures were strictly of a back room variety, the amputations performed by a surgeon no longer allowed by law to practice his craft. Who still liked to keep his hands active. It was an ideal arrangement, and the discarded parts were safely burned in an industrial incinerator.

Elle had him begin with her foot.

She found that phantom pains were scarcely a problem when you had done away with something voluntarily. She grew new skin, and beneath it, it seemed, new nerves. It was an awakening, and while the world slept beneath snow, she was healed enough to give this new sexual organ its first workout. Found she could come without a single touch between her legs.

At the bookstore sympathy flowed freely, especially from Jude, and they all remarked what a wonderful attitude Ellen had in spite of her accident. She was deliberately vague on particulars, felt touched by Jude’s concern that it might now be more difficult for her to find a man, one who would overlook her handicap.

“If you have one tiny flaw,” Jude said, “they can turn around and be such cold-hearted bastards,” and then she smiled nervously and checked herself in a compact mirror. Ellen assumed it was time for another nip or tuck.

And Elle, with her mind already made up to proceed, wondered how she would ever be able to explain away the rest of her leg.

*

She was up and around again by spring, the itch of healing and new growth mostly behind her. Spending most of her free hours at the former church, crutching her way about as she explored both edifice and companions. They were an insular group, came to be with each other even when they left their clothes on. Of course — who else could they talk to? They’d cut themselves apart in more ways than one.

She often lay with Adam in the dying light of afternoon, both of them washed in colors the sun picked up as it streamed through stained glass. Overhead, the Virgin Mary held a little lamb; its fleece was dark with soot.

“You bastard,” she said, “you didn’t wait for me.” But there was no anger in it, and it made Adam smile, made him laugh.

He touched her face with his sole remaining hand, an act she would relish for however long it might last. Not forever. Elle curled in closer, pressed her mouth over the smooth pink stub that jutted from his left shoulder, flushing in pleasure as he gasped.

“Has anybody ever gone all the way?” she wondered. “Cut off everything?”

Adam nodded. “There’ve been a few.”

She groaned, murmuring wordlessly with fantasies of narrowing herself to a focused bundle of overloaded nerves, a single vast erogenous zone. “I wonder what it’s like.”

“I don’t know. But I get the idea that … that it’s like being a god.” Adam stirred, flexed; seemed to ripple with each caress of hand and mouth, breeze and dust mote. “By that time, you know, it’s up to everybody else to care for you. Take care of your needs. You’re mostly a receptacle by then.”

“What did the others say about it? And where are they now?”

“They quit talking,” he said. “And pretty soon … they quit eating. But they still smiled.”

They knew something
, she thought.
Or felt something the rest of us aren’t even close to yet…

Yet
.

She forced his hand down to her hip, the exposed stump hot, tingling. Raw and alive with promise. “I’ll be better at it than you will. When I get that far. I’ll feel more than you.”

Said this with a tremor and a smile.

Could she cut herself down an inch at a time, feel gradations of pleasure with each successive chopping? If she lopped off a finger herself, would it be a new form of masturbation? Such paths to explore, down this avenue of the blade.

“We’ll just have to see about that,” he said, “won’t we?”

And Elle wondered if she could convince him to hang onto that one last arm at least until she went in for her other leg, so that Adam might be the one to hold the scalpel for that first ceremonial incision.

That would be divine.

It would almost be something like love.

His favorite thing to watch is MTV and he likes it best when they show the metal and the rap videos, because he sits in front of the tube and wonders what it would be like to step into their world. Those guys have the power and the women and the attention, all they need, and he thinks he’d like to try living with all those quotas topped out. Someday, maybe someday. Dad once bought him a guitar. It stands inside the closet, probably dusty by now.

Not that he doesn’t want to learn to play. It’s a white Fender Stratocaster, “Just like Jimi Hendrix used to play,” the salesman supposedly said, and that was enough to convince Dad of its merits at the pawnshop. But one of the strings was gone and another one broke before Dad got it home, and now he doesn’t quite know how to restring the thing or tune it if he did, and even so, no one said anything about lessons and he’s not about to mention it to Mom and Dad because they’ll just say something like, “Don’t be ungrateful. Isn’t the guitar enough for you?”

He hears them talking upstairs in the kitchen, and they’re using
that tone of voice
again, and he knows his number is about to be called. He leans forward and turns down the volume on MTV because once they appear at the top of the stairs, that’ll be the first request anyway, so might as well beat them to the punch.

Sure enough, seconds later there’s Dad at the top of the stairs, he can hear the footsteps and then the pause, like his old man is gauging decibels and finding them within the acceptable range and is vaguely disappointed about it. And then he’s calling down, “Alex, come up here a minute.”

So Alex leaves his traditional perch and saunters upstairs, forsaking Marilyn Manson on the tube for the real live dynamics of home. The kitchen is bright with tile and gleaming with chrome, and he doesn’t feel comfortable in here because he’s never very hungry these days, and anyway, he clashes with the decor since he’s wearing a ripped black T-shirt and black jeans with the knees wearing through and his hair is kind of spiky and once they said he looks like he came to vandalize the place instead.

Dad is pointing toward one corner, wearing
that face
again, and he’s saying, “You do remember that the trash is your responsibility, don’t you?”

Alex nods meekly, mutely, looking at the can, and it’s not really that full, is it, but you’d think the thing was overflowing with used plutonium.

“Can’t you show a little more responsibility, Alex, you’re fifteen years old, for crissake,” Dad continues, so he nods some more and tunes Dad out because it’s the same speech he’s heard a trillion times before. Must be the first one they teach you in Dad School. The only thing about it that changes is his age, and it always seems to take about a century for that number to click up one higher.

Dad goes through it all note by note, and Alex figures he could probably recite it along with him, like the parishioners with the priest in Mass when they tried Catholicism a couple years ago. Mom backs him up, silently nodding, the oft-present cocktail glass in one hand and her Valium prescription in the other, and she wears her bleary eyes like a pair of false ones from a novelty shop.

Dad finishes and Alex promises to keep a more vigilant watch on the can in the future. Dad, his patriarchal duty exercised, smartly turns on one heel and exits the kitchen, probably back to his very own corner in the rec room. Alex cinches the trash bag and notices that Mom lingers behind.