Forty
The photographer arranged the lights.
Harsh white lights.
Hard to see anything but the glare. Not the face. Not the person. Just the bright white lights. And the voice coming from behind the camera.
“You look more forlorn in this kind of light. No filters to soften or flatter. But I don’t have any need to show you off or make you look good. That isn’t the purpose of these photographs. Fear is. The kind that wakes you up at fourforty in the morning, when it is still dark, and prevents you from doing anything but lying in bed, tossing and turning, trying to find a cool spot on the pillow, but knowing even if you do, it won’t matter. The worry and anxiety is too deep to let you fall asleep again.”
Bruce Levin blinked. It was sinking in. He wasn’t dead yet. But he didn’t feel right. He tried to get his eyes to open wider, to make some sense of where he was, but he couldn’t. Someone was touching his chest. His thighs. The fingers felt like ice streaking across his skin. God he was cold. It occurred to him that he must be naked. He couldn’t understand that, either.
“Don’t worry,” the photographer said to him. Or at least he assumed it was the photographer because he could see a camera looking down at him.
Bruce couldn’t answer. There was something in his mouth.
His mouth?
His mouth was full of-what? It was tasteless and had wicked every drop of saliva from the inside of his cheeks and his tongue.
“Nothing will hurt. As long as you don’t try to fight me. I don’t like fighting.” A laugh.
What was so funny? he thought. What kind of lunatic had brought him here and tied him up? More important, why? If he knew why, maybe he could figure out how to get free. But he couldn’t think-not think straight, anyway. He wasn’t sure if it was morning or night or how long he’d been here or even where he’d been before he was here. What had happened? Had there been an accident? Had he been hurt? Were there bandages in his mouth?
Bruce tried to concentrate on that. He was someone who could always figure things out. Complicated things. But now it was as if part of his memory had been cut out. That had to be the drugs. But what drugs? He’d taken his share of drugs when he was in college, but nothing made him feel this sick.
It took a huge effort but he managed to open his eyes. And this time he could see just a little bit more. It would have been better if he hadn’t, since what he saw were hospital gurneys with shapes on them. Silent shapes. Naked. Pale. Freezing. How could he know that? He couldn’t. But the air around him was so icy, he was so cold, those shapes had to be equally frigid.
The light glaring off the steel edges of the scissors blinded him. Christ, that hurt! But he fought against the pain. At least it was distinct. At least it wasn’t hazy the way everything else was. The scissors were coming toward him, toward his face…closer…and closer…and he thought, I should prepare myself for this, but how?
The fear now was so deep that it was inside of his chest and forcing his heart to race. Christ, he could hear the beating, and then the scissors moved toward his forehead.
Involuntarily, even though he made a big effort not to, he closed his eyes.
That’s when Bruce heard the sound. It made no sense given the rest of what was going on around him. Blades. Cutting. But cutting what? A swish and hiss and after that the sandpaper sound of hair being shorn. His hair.
Why would anyone want his hair?
He was dreaming about someone he’d had sex with once. Someone whose body he knew as well as his own, but only the body. It was better to fuck strangers and not know what they were upset about or what their bosses had said to them that morning, and not have to worry about when they would start to expect more: more words, more actions, more commitments.
He liked his partners to tell him what they wanted him to do with their bodies. It put them in charge. And he liked that because he didn’t have to use his imagination on how to please them. They told him. And by doing so, they took away the one aspect of sex that was the most dangerous as far as he was concerned.
Women fell in love with you, not because of who you really were, but because of the fantasy you fit. They kept silent and selfish about what they wanted, so you made it up as you went along, and God forbid if you guessed right, you bypassed go and became some fucking sort of hero. And then the only place you could go was down.
But this way, they made the rules. The women made you move right or left or up or down or lick or suck or bite or come or wait, and there was never the next morning when they’d look at you with their sloppy lovesick eyes and tell you that they had been waiting for you for a long time.
Because this way, you were no more to them than a dildo come to life.
He was hard.
Christ, in this place?
Tied to this steel bed?
Freezing his nuts off and scared out of his mind, he had enough blood running through his veins for some drug-induced dream to give him a hard-on?
No.
It was the gloved hand that was stroking him. Shit. The photographer’s hand sliding up and down the shaft of his penis, slower and faster and slower, and his body was responding as if none of this horror existed at all.
He knew that there wasn’t much connection between his cock and his brain. Hadn’t that been proved to him hundreds of times? But this was even more insane. This time it wasn’t just that his brain wasn’t engaged, it was that his brain should have been fighting this obscene seduction. His brain should be preventing the erection. And it couldn’t.
The tongue flicked out and licked him. Like a very aggressive cat. One long lick. A short one. A long one.
How could he let this happen? The inertia was hard to fight. Despite wanting to stop what was happening, the feeling in his groin was pleasure. It was the feeling in his stomach that he couldn’t stand. The anxiety that wasn’t abating even with the expert combination blow job and hand job he was getting.
Abruptly, it stopped.
Right in the middle of the massage. It ended with a laugh. Low and deep and crude. No words needed to be spoken in order for him to translate that laugh. It mocked him and his penis. It reduced him to the most basic animal, denounced his brain and his talent.
“That’s all you get.”
He shivered.
So that was it. Cut my hair, suck my dick, photograph me, and after that, when you are good and ready, you’ll kill me. He felt nausea rise in his throat and hoped he would throw up and choke on it. At least then he could cheat this monster out of the pleasure of killing him-because surely that was the ultimate high here. Sex games, mutilation and finally murder.
The nausea rose again, came up higher, and after that receded, leaving an acid burn down the back of his throat.
Please, he begged some God he didn’t know. Wasted thoughts. Whoever the fuck God was, he wasn’t in here listening.
Please, make it quick. Make it quick. And painless.
That was when he heard the popping noise-the last noise, he thought, he would ever hear again.
Forty-One
My visit to Nicky and Daphne that Thursday started off badly.
The two of them were sitting on opposite sides of the room, not looking at each other and not looking at me.
Sometimes you really can smell emotions. I’ve always thought that the body emits scent to warn other members of a group-the way that wild animals do.
In that pretty sunroom, filled with the benign still lifes of fruit and flowers Daphne had painted before she’d discovered her talent for the male nude, I smelled fear, anger and lust.
It was an effort to get them to tell me what had happened before I got there.
“Why don’t you want to talk about it?” I asked Daphne first.