meeah williams

geisha

in the

city

of

death

a novel

“One would like to arrange the book to resemble a house that would open easily to visitors; yet as soon as they went into it, they would not only have to get lost there, they would be caught in a treacherous trap; once there they would cease to be what they had been, they would die.”

 –Maurice Blanchot

“…or he’ll select a favorite ingénue and assault her with a thick impasto of pirates, sailors, bandits, gypsies, mummies, Nazis, vampires, Martians, and college boys, until the terrified expressions on their respective faces pale to a kind of blurred, mystical affirmation of the universe. Which, not unexpectedly, looks a lot like stupidity.”—Robert Coover 

=1=

You are dead.

Of course, it takes a long time to believe that. You've died so many times by now.

You say, “I am dead.” But how can you say “I am dead” unless you’re still alive?

That conundrum stumps you for a time.

Eventually it dawns on you that it can also work in reverse. Only if you're dead can you be murdered as many times as you have. Perhaps the dead, too, can fool themselves. Perhaps they, too, can say, “I am alive” and mean it only as a figure of speech.

Going round and round like this…after a while you just stop thinking about it at all. Alive or dead, it stops making any difference.

Neena is sitting in her room as the first stars begin to appear on the monitor behind her. The monitor displays a purple sky of impossible depth and unspeakable beauty. She's already dressed for the occasion: the white fishnet stockings and the white micro miniskirt, the five-inch silver platform sandals, and the elegant gloves, white, satin, elbow-length, with the forty-nine tiny pearl buttons running up to each alabaster elbow.

She's wearing a corset comprised of the ribcage of a murdered teenager, which has been laced tightly enough to reduce her breaths to tiny sips, like a deep-sea diver out of her depth, hopelessly conserving a limited supply of oxygen. Her breasts, enhanced by surgery and indelible inks, are cupped inside this cruel corset. The bra cups are formed from the skeletal hands of the two children she shall never bear.

Her left nipple has been pierced. That is the custom here. But the charm which dangles there is unidentifiable--a Martian hieroglyphic?

Earlier, her geisha-corpse makeup was applied by her Japanese transsexual maid. Oh yes, they have those here, too.

Her hands are lying uselessly in her lap as she faces the upcoming endless night with no personal expression whatsoever.  

"Are you ready?"

"No," she whispers.

"Then come."

Someone, unseen, in the darkest corner of the room, has been masturbating. Finally, after much effort, he or she reaches a shuddering climax that makes the very atmosphere twitch.

Neena takes the proffered hand of the undertaker, who is dressed, predictably, in formal black. On his face, he wears a mask of black silk, as if he were afraid  to breathe the molecules of death floating in the air of this place. His eyes are entirely abstract. He will never fuck Neena, never, not even after the passage of another thousand years.

Neena rises from her chair, unsteadily, as if from past

abuses such as those not even fantasy can quickly and completely heal. She moves, still dreaming, towards a door that seems always to be opening into some new nightmare.

She tells herself that she will remember this time, just this once, but she knows that she has already completely forgotten everything that is about to happen.

=2=

Time does not exist here.

There are no clocks or watches anywhere. But it’s unclear whether this is by edict or simply because such instruments are irrelevant in such a place. Perhaps they simply don’t operate here.

How do you measure eternity?

No one is born and no one dies in this place. No one ages, or, if they do, it happens at such an incremental level that you cannot see it actually happening. Imagine seeing only one frame of a bullet captured on film in mid-flight towards the innocent lover it is aimed to murder.

There is no coming here and no leaving here, never a time that one wasn't here, and never a time when one won't be here again.

It's an immortality, of sorts, Neena thinks, whenever she feels the life draining from her cold toes for the millionth time and hears the distant, polite, yet ever-so-slightly bored applause of jeweled hands that have never touched a thing that had its origins on planet Earth.

In the hallway of this subterranean complex Neena presses herself against the wet wall to let a gurney pass. Upon it, a creature lies like a broken butterfly.

It is not uncommon to see victims being brought back to their rooms at any hour of the day or night, or, wheeled, full-speed, down to what is presumably the emergency surgery for unnecessary and futile procedures. The attendant pushing this particular gurney is almost invisible, a mere outline of an attendant. Neena has to look closely to even see him, or her--it’s usually impossible to tell their sex--otherwise the gurney would seem to be propelling itself.

Maybe it is.

The stylized faces of the attendants are designed to approximate the same dreamily expressionless mask of implacable indifference that might be seen on department store mannequins. Perhaps it is even more accurate to say that their expressions mimic what might be the result of an autistic’s rendering of moon-people, drawn left-handed, with eyes closed, in a hypnotic trance.

Neena, dazed and dizzy, stands confused at an intersection of featureless corridors.

She tells herself not to look at the victim on the gurney. But she looks, anyway. Who wouldn’t?

They have purposely denied the girl the dignity of a sheet to cover her abused remains. The terrible cruelties inflicted on her body are on display for the sole purpose of enflaming the passions of whatever guests might be strolling the halls. 

These marks of ardor on the soft and surrendering flesh serve as an ever-present reminder to the regular inhabitants (aka prisoners, dreamers, etc.) of this section of the mansion. A reminder of what, though, is a variable sum. 

Back to the blonde girl on the gurney (before she is wheeled away forever and we think of her no more): she is naked, as mentioned (I think) except for a pair of red, high-heeled ankle boots. She has been cored through the middle, where her navel had been once, by what looks to have been some kind of huge, minutely machined screw-bit. Whatever the actual cause of death, that unnamable engine of destruction has left an absence at the center of her being that makes of her corpse the perfect comic representation of a woman who, for one reason or another, could never satisfy her need to be filled.

There is a look of utter horror on the blood-speckled face that has accentuates, in fact, amplifies, a delicate beauty which puts Neena in mind of a cross between the white garters she is wearing and a slice of French vanilla cake.

“Absurd,” Neena murmurs and licks her lips, unconsciously.

They are taking the poor girl off to be repaired (ha-ha), or altered, or fucked by one of the necrophiles who pay handsomely for the privilege of abusing, with absolute impunity and no-questions-asked, a pretty, blameless, and terribly disfigured young corpse. They come to the topside gates of the compound above the necropolis in limousines and private jets, in helicopters, and aboard intercontinental yachts. At least such is the rumor that sifts down to this place deep inside the earth, which could be Hell, if Hell existed, but is not.

It makes no difference to Neena. 

She has her own fate to fulfill, and she must hurry to her appointment along a corridor that leads even further, even deeper, passed a “no exit” sign, along a one-way corridor into the very bowels of the subterranean sex mansion.

=3=

Tonight Neena is to be poisoned at dinner.

It’s no secret; it’s on the printed programme, after all. She has suffered this fate before, perhaps, or one nearly identical; she can’t remember exactly. She has lived so many lives, died so many deaths. It’s really impossible, after a while, to distinguish one from the other, and who would want to?

She enters the formal dining room, which, on other nights, could be a prison cafeteria or Beowulfian mead hall, without introduction or fanfare. A butler, dressed formally, motions her towards her place at table, where at least eighteen other exquisitely garbed guests sit chatting amiably about nothing much at all as they await the imminent arrival of the first course.

Neena is inadequately and inappropriately dressed for the affair. This is immediately apparent—and, of course, premeditated. Neena blushes. She sits as the chair is slid beneath her by an officious if utterly indifferent waiter. She is relieved that no one so much as glances in her direction to acknowledge her arrival. You can always depend, Neena thought appreciatively, on the cultured to behave with complete sangfroid, even in the most horrendously awkward situations. To see nothing requires a grace more delicate than charity.

Self-consciously, Neena lays her left hand near the snowy napkin upon which rests more silverware than seems necessary, or even possible. Are they performing experimental surgery at table tonight, or what? She notes a pleasing correlation between the white delicacy of her fingers and the exquisite thinness of the china, which appears to be made of bone sanded and buffed to an excruciating near-transparency that is shine alone.

She finds herself questioning, in spite of herself, if maybe she has somehow come to the wrong place, after all. Her alienation from the others at the table is so total. She begins to think it possible that she misread the agenda of tonight’s performances. Perhaps she was scheduled to be hanged tonight, instead?

She knows, intellectually, that her fears, in this one area, at least, are groundless. Although a love for random violence animates the mansion, one can have faith in the unerring bureaucracy that nonetheless prevails. A monstrous impersonality that is all-inclusive, even of the principles of opportunism, chance, chaos, and quantum mechanics.

Nothing here ever happens by accident.

If Neena has any doubts at all, her skepticism is only one pole of a continually oscillating psychic state that holds her in place, torn apart in constant agony, a crucifixion between insecurity and childlike trust.

The initial toast is poured into tall, exquisitely hand-blown flutes (containing the breath of mothers dying in childbirth, so they say). 

Neena lifts her glass, in perfect unison, along with the others, to her black rosebud of a mouth. She understands not a single word offered in benediction by the toastmaster, spoken as it is in a tongue that is completely alien to her. It sounds liturgical. No one touches her glass, but the others, touch theirs together. That sets the glasses all to singing like a flock of small, bright, migratory birds shivering in dead trees.

They drink to seal the toast, grinning.

Neena brings the flute to her lips and kisses the taste of pale light an autumn afternoon.

In a flash she sees: a rocking chair before the window and, slumped there, a woman of indeterminate age, She has apparently overdosed on tranquilizers because she could not bear to grow even a single day older.

Looking closer: Neena notices that from the cold blue fingertips of the dead woman’s hand a flute has fallen, a flute exactly of the kind (if not the very one) from which Neena sips at this moment.

Neena wonders, albeit briefly, if upon taking that one sip, she has already been fatally poisoned.

The soup course is first.

Neena lifts to her blackberry lips a spoon so impossibly light it may or may not be obeying the laws of gravity. The pale broth has an elusive flavor, as if the game used to season it were still fleeing.

Bon appetite!

Several equally exquisite intermediary courses follow (to be concise about it), some or even all of them quite probably poisoned. Neena knows that each time she lifts her fork it could be the last. Any bite, either by itself, in tandem, or, more likely, cumulatively, could deliver the lethal dose. Such a flair for deadly flavoring was the hallmark of the gourmet poisoner today. The sense of expectation raised among the other diners is atrociously, indescribably yummy.

The conversation around Neena is lively. At the moment there is a discussion underway about the most recent political developments in the capital. But the figures of whom they are speaking are entirely unknown to Neena, although, obviously, they are personages of such prominence one could not possibly be living in these times and be unfamiliar with their names. Apparently, some of them are even seated at the table!

It all means nothing to her.

Even stranger, despite the heated nature of the discussion, the great depth and complexity with which they discuss the burning issues of the day, Neena can’t help but note that no one seems to be taking any of it seriously at all. It’s as if the discussion were only an elaborate and intense kind of adult parlor game, like bridge or canasta, the rules and goal of which Neena just cannot parse out.

A woman eventually turns from the conversation to gaze, if only briefly, at Neena, her plucked eyebrows a semaphore for permanent amusement. Her stylized, tiger-striped metallic eyes look Neena up and down, pass a mute but deafening judgment of faux-haughty disdain, and then she turns abruptly back to the red-bearded hunter seated on her right. Laughing, she says something about the brutal last days of an emperor of an outlaw corporation to whom she was apparently once married.

The burning on Neena’s lips grows steadily more intense. Up to now, she’s been telling herself it could be the result of too much cayenne pepper in the eighth course. But the burning has intensified to a truly ominous degree. It feels like an army of red ants have set up camp in her mouth and lit a thousand campfires on her tongue.

Hoping to appear nonchalant, Neena stays her hand on its inevitable trek to the water glass for as long as she can stand it. Then she finds herself gulping down the contents of the glass with short convulsive swallows, in spite of her efforts at an indifferent discretion. The water, she knows all too well, is certainly poisoned (that’s the failsafe, after all)—it tastes of peppermint echoes.

For the moment, everything reminds her of the backyard pool of her childhood, her handsome, sadistic father, his underwater seductions, and a crystal skein of semen, blood, and carbon dioxide bubbles twisting toward the surface…

Neena foresaw the outcome of her impulsive attempt to quench her thirst. Yet she is still surprised at the Technicolor blossoming of pain, a time-lapse Vermont fall foliage of breathtaking agony, that spreads across her chest and along the inside of her throat, an incandescent glow like an overexposure to some sort of interior radiation.

One of the servers, the one whose duty is circumscribed by this sole function, refills Neena’s glass silently and automatically; indeed, this server--and, incidentally, not this server only--may, in fact, be an automaton.

Meanwhile, the party goes on.

A woman chosen for her strong familial resemblance to Neena, leans forward and asks, “Can you imagine an aunt doing this to you? Or perhaps it could be a dear friend with unrequited or betrayed lesbian feelings?” The woman slow-winked a long cat-eye. “Maybe it can be both, yes?”

Neena gasps for air by way of answer.

The main course, Neena suddenly realizes, has already arrived (perhaps, she passed out in the interim between the various salad and cheese plates?), and, from the state of what remains on the plates around the table, that everyone has been eating for quite some time. She presses a fork, which suddenly appears in her hand and all-but guides her motion, into a thick white meat of what seems almost certainly to be some unknown variety of deep-sea fish, the kind that must be caught in hadal depths, that lives under pressures so intense it has evolved in an exploded state, that is, with all its vital organs on the outside of its body.

Neena hesitates, spears, ad then lifts to her mouth the grey mottled jelly of fish flesh.

Yuck!

Neena chews slowly, reluctantly, meditatively, savoring the horror, an unnamable sauce, even as she checks the closing of her throat, the instinct to gag, to puke out this coprophagic feast of filth. Yet in spite of her revulsion she manages, miraculously, to keep it down.

Bite after bite, each time she swallows a masticated bit of the spotted poisoned goop.

There is talk about a Brechler symphony, about a church massacre, about someone’s “impossibly” dyed hair. The Times is mentioned (but which Times is unclear), a movie about the Lasky incident, endoscopic surgery. Kroner, juniper, Los Angeles, unnecessary casualties, epidemic bread, Kroner again, snow, skin grafts, nanobiology, and elective mental breakdown—fragments of these conversation snag her attention like barbed wire the prison jumper of an escapee.

The first of the more severe stomach cramps abruptly folds her in half. It takes all of her will-power and concentration to delicately place her fork down on the napkin and even so she is certain that in spite of everything she has laid it on the wrong side of one of her six salad knives (one is missing). There are severe penalties for such a breech of etiquette.

The second appalling pain causes her to disturb her wine glass with a weird and hermetic gesture of her right hand, which has suddenly, and ominously, become, as it were, withered and incapacitated.

“Always,” she hears someone say, but nothing follows. 

It is the asexual fashion designer with the false jaw who pronounces this isolated mountain-peak of a word, seated as he is across the table and one chair to the right.

Sometime later, someone else adds, “the color of orange at 4p.m. in Andujar.”

=4=

When Neena opens her eyes again, she cannot see out of the right one. She is gasping and she has begun to foam at the mouth. No one seems unduly alarmed.

“One must mix carefully to get the full spectrum of desired effects and still you must make sacrifices [inaudible passage]. A good deal of this has taken place over a period of several days duration.”

An older woman--Neena has seen her often before, but where, under what circumstances she can’t say--interrupts her own conversation (about insect-derived poisons) to turn to Neena and ask, solicitously, “Are you quite alright, my dear? You’re looking rather peeked. You might want to redraw your lipstick.”

Neena is chilled from scalp to toes with a transparent sheen of sick sweat and she is suffering from an uncontrollable tremor, but she actually manages, to everyone’s surprised delight, to take four spoonfuls of the chief desert course, a creamy crème brulee made of whale eyes.  

She tries to smile, absently, albeit knowingly, when someone on her left pretends to ask her opinion of that new athletic satire causing such a stir among the Estraud faction. She struggles for form an intelligent answer but realizes that her interlocutor has only used the question as an excuse to examine her more closely. He is checking the second hand of his watch for the eagerly anticipated beginnings of morbid cyanosis.

Neena feels her heart stagger into a ventricular fibrillation which in turn triggers her adrenals like a starter’s pistol initiating her all-out flight response. But flight--to where? She is far too disoriented and polite to do much more than vaguely excuse herself and half-rise from her place at table with a gesture of elegant resignation (a gesture later much discussed, admired, and copied), which she makes with her as yet only partially paralyzed left hand. 

The floor comes up quickly, quicker than possible! (how is that possible?). When she revives to a state of semi-consciousness, she is lying on her side and convulsively vomiting as if trying to turn herself inside out. She vomits as if giving birth, by mouth, in a burning flood of blood and mucous, to Death itself.

One of the ridiculously impractical platform fetish sandals she’s been wearing has come off. Her skirt is hiked up over her right hipbone, revealing the starry-spangled g-string that bisects the smooth angel-dusted globes of her perfect ass. She can feel the garters have unsnapped on the back of her right thigh and the fishnet stocking adorning that leg has worked itself a few inches down the back of her very white flesh. The image would be aesthetically complete, she believes, if one of her breasts were simultaneously exposed, but the only way that will happen now is if someone reaches down to help slip a soft tit out of its lacy cup in order to expose her in this lovely fashion.

She is aware of all these details, and several more besides, and aware of it all in the ever diminishing intervals between each hideously violent constriction of her entire gastrointestinal system.

“Designer poisons, I’m afraid, are an absolute necessity,” Neena hears someone say. “You simply can not get such a rainbow plethora of reactions from any combination of natural poisons alone. Believe me, I’ve spent the better part of a lifetime trying. Not the worst way to spend the better part of a lifetime either, I might add.”

“Indeed,” concurs a chuckling man, who has stooped down to examine Neena more closely through a monocle. He slips her tit out. “Nature is so limited.”

“Magnificent,” another voice says. “She has turned quite an unearthly tone of blue.”

“Death occurs on a variety of fronts,” still another voice points out, droning somewhat pedantically. “There is, of course, the collapse of all major organ systems: respiratory and circulatory, for starters. The nervous system goes haywire before it shorts out completely. It is a catastrophic assault on the entire body from within. Quite painful—and yet remarkably…”

Either the sentence isn’t finished—or Neena cannot hear it. Instead the next thing Neena hears is this:

“I note, with extreme satisfaction, the issue of blood from her anus…”

The voice belongs to a female, it is both enthusiastic and insinuating.

“Yes, major hemorrhaging from there as well. She’s quite ruined, I’m delighted to say. A biohazard. Dangerous to even touch; I wouldn’t recommend trying.”

Neena hears nothing any more. From this point on, she’s stone-deaf. Her jaws are locked open and her eyes, tear-fringed lids a- flutter, have rolled back. She is crying, quite literally, tears of blood. Her long delicate fingers are curled into tight babyish fists, and her nails puncture her palms, a pseudo-stigmata, in wounds that form an alchemical hieroglyphic.

But back to Neena’s point of view (while she still has one): her rapidly diminishing boundaries of concern have already left her with very little point of view at all, just a rapidly dimming pinprick of awareness, through which she gazes as if at an eclipse. In this case the eclipse of her own life.

A team of men in white protective clothing, complete with masks, now surround her. They wield disinfecting machinery and wear reptilian breathing devices.

Neena dies without so much as a shudder, her body already locked in a spasm of such rigidity it is impossible to compare it to anything.

She is more than dead, she is hyper-dead.

She is beyond even necrophiliac desire, dangerous and untouchable--a thing beyond taboo.

She feels nothing, as usual, except what might be felt from the post-conscious knowledge that no one is interested in her any longer. The wreckage of her liquefying corpse has been lifted, deposited, and is now being wheeled unceremoniously from the dining room in a grey cart marked on all sides with the bright yellow warnings signs for toxic waste.

She will be dumped into the chopping cold waters off the Jersey Shore sometime later that night. Her processed remains will be pumped through the bilge system of an unmarked tanker along with other illegally dumped chemical and radioactive byproducts from various secret, underground medical and technical weapon facilities along the east coast.

Meanwhile, the guests in the dining room are enjoying mints and aphrodisiacal rattlesnake-blood aperitifs.

=5=

"This is my first time," the girl says. She is lying, naked, on her back, across a red oriental-style footstool, fingering herself to an orgasm that never comes.

Neena looks at her blankly, as one's eyes might fall on an empty white ceramic cup, the heavy, utilitarian type you’d find in a diner. She is thinking of something else. Neena has heard the girl give this same speech before, maybe five hundred times before.

"My father brought me here," the girl continues, "on my sixteenth birthday."

Her head and shoulders hang off one end of the stool, her long bare legs off the other. Her legs are bent at the knees, her feet arched, only the tips of her tiny toes pressing the polished teakwood floor.

Her middle finger is buried deep inside her clipped black bush, moving slowly, in and out, in and out, as if she is hardly paying attention, or may lose interest at any moment.

Her skin is very white, as if dusted with talcum, or confectioner’s sugar, and the bones of her hips rise from an inviting pelvis that looks like a small animal designed by a primitive hunter as re-imagined by a postmodern artist.

Someone, somewhere, is methodically photographing her. You can hear the dry click and whirr like the descent of a plague of locusts.

"He was not my real father," the girl claims.

Her voice carries absolutely no emotion. She pauses a half-beat, for emphasis, but it all seems to be an afterthought. She’s not listening either, nor does she care.

"He bought me on a street in Bangkok. It was after a war."

Neena sighs, or rather acts as if she were sighing, and lays a frozen white lily to her cheek. She thinks, for some reason, of miles and miles and miles of empty green ocean and no horizon and the sound a tape recorder makes when playing back hours of nothing.

She thinks, Oh god, how meaningless, how completely and horribly unnecessary this all is….

The girl continues telling her life story, as she tells it every day.  

Over and over again.

"He sold me for an indeterminate sum. I was pregnant."

The tears on her face are not real.

"I am to be ravaged," she says, quite matter-of-factly, "over a period of several days by two rats, lightly sedated, and surgically planted inside me. One will be white and the other will be black. They are clones, and yes, I know, I don't understand how that can possibly be either.”

She pauses a moment, and continues.

“It seems a little bit too derivative of Orwell’s 1984 to me.  Do you think they tell me these things only to frighten me?"

Neena isn’t listening. Instead she is looking passed the girl, passed the wall, over the ocean, passed the horizon that is not there. She is listening to the tape playing nothing. She answers the girl but she feels like she is answering no one (you’re getting warmer Neena, dear) and the breath that whispers across her lips feels like the mechanically chilled air issued from an air conditioner.

"Yes,” says, "and no."

=6=

There are times when Neena almost believes she can see God. The last time this happened, someone was holding her head under water and she was nearly out of oxygen.

She remembers coming to an unfinished corridor and peering around the corner into a damp twilight of scaffoldings, leaky pipes, carts piled with debris.

She paused, listening closely.

She could hear the intermittent sound of a lone hammer, hollow, metallic, apathetic, as if a forgotten mechanic were working on a project that has been long abandoned.

“This is the end of the world,” she remembers thinking.

What could be a better image of it? The unseen laborer, working alone, on a perpetually unfinished pier that extends further and further into oblivion, all in the hopes of seeing…nothing.

"Hello," she called out, unfamiliar with her own voice.

At the end of the world her voice had a raw, unabashed meatiness to it that embarrassed her. There was need in it, a desperate hope for an answer.

“Hello,” she called again.

She closed her eyes and concentrated, listening for an answer. She trembled with tension, like a ballerina on the toes of one leg.

She was almost afraid that an answer would come.

But she needn’t have feared.

There was no answer, nothing but the last syllable of her own question repeated, over and over, but each time at a less and less audible frequency, and with more and more space between each repetition, almost like the cliché of an echo depicted in a cartoon.

The sound of her own unanswered voice continued to dilute itself, homeopathically, until there was nothing left but silence, a distilled and super-potent silence—a silence that heals itself seamlessly after each disturbance.

Then the hammering started again, exactly as before.

She recalls something similar having taken place. She was standing beside a silver casket, closed, next to an open grave. She was the last mourner, after all the others have drifted away.

It was a sunny, but chilly November afternoon.

=7=

"Let us proceed," the man says, and pauses an indeterminate period of time. He stares, with great curiosity, as if it were one of the most fascinating things he’d ever seen, at the white button on the cuff of his  standard-issue white oxford cotton dress shirt. 

And to think: it was there at the end of his very own arm the whole time! 

He examines it, at first, with mild amusement, and then, a growing bewilderment, until he is outright stupefied, as if the button doesn't belong there, as if it’s appearance there on his cuff were the most improbable thing to be imagined, a kind of miracle. At last, shrugging it off, as if it were “just one of those things,” he looks up and finishes the sentence he began what seems so long ago now.

“There are a few questions we'd like you to answer."

It is, to all appearances, a typical interrogation room: grey walls of regulation concrete block, ugly wooden table, three uncomfortable chairs, a large mirror, presumably two-way, built into one wall, and, of course, the obligatory naked bulb. The room is cold, as one might expect, and Neena, occasionally shivering uncontrollably, tries to suppress a natural urge to hug herself, which is difficult to do, dressed inadequately as she is in a white paper slip and white paper slippers, as if in preparation for some nasty medical procedure.

Indeed, Neena is nearly overcome with a sickening temptation to look down at her body, to take a quick inventory of any new scars that might indicate a recent surgical procedure, the removal of an organ, for instance, or, equally unsettling, the addition of a new organ, orifice, or limb, the result of some outrageous new transplant or modification. But she manages to resist the curiosity, irresistible as it is, and keeps looking forward, away from the presumably two-way mirror, to the terminus of the man's chin, and the white, star-shaped scar thereupon.

What happened to her clothes, if she had, in fact, been wearing clothes when she arrived, she doesn't remember, nor does she remember who it was that must have undressed her, if she didn't undressed herself (why would she have?). She could almost think, and this thought is beginning to dominate her meditations on the subject with a wearying regularity, that she is wearing some kind of prison uniform, except that the gown, which ties up in the back and therefore at first confounded her, is not made of paper, after all, but of silk or an imitation silk (there is no manufacturer’s label to decide the issue), with a little trim of patterned lace (hearts and hummingbirds?) around the bodice, and hardly standard hospital fare at all. Similarly, it is altogether too sexy for a prison, even a prison of the minimum-security variety, which, in any event, this does not appear to be, or so Neena thus far reasons.

"You are cold?" the man asks, nodding vigorously, encouraging assent. "Yes?"

He allows a little smile to inform his thin lips, not to indicate that he is satisfied, but as if in acknowledgment of the algebraic understanding that he can see dawning in her eyes, as if to say “and so x=y, you have it now, ja?”  He offers her a glass of water, which he has been pouring now, on and off, the whole time she has been here (which is how long anyway?), but which never seems to fill the glass more than halfway…is it some kind of trick?

Neena takes the (finally) proffered glass without thinking, thirsty in spite of the cold, yet she would have taken it even if she weren't thirsty, if for no other reason than to complete the gesture of the offer, that seeming to be the only thing it is possible to do, so subtly tyrannical is the entire exchange, like all such exchanges with all such men as the one who sits across from her now.  

Still, holding the glass, or rather, the paper cup, for it suddenly seems to us more suitable that it were a paper cup, under her chin, the tremor of her right hand, fingers slightly numb from cold, causes the surface of the water to tremble in sympathy, or mockery, of her cold terror. Neena pauses before taking the obligatory sip, fearing, not poison this time, or even truth serum, but something else even more horrible, though what could be more horrible than poison or truth serum, she doesn't know.

"Go ahead," the man says, almost jovially, "it is only…"

His attention is momentarily caught again by that damnably curious button. Actually, it’s an identical button on the other cuff! At length, he shrugs once more, looks up as if slightly distracted, and contrives an expression to indicate that he is recalling where he previously left off. He finishes the sentence tentatively, "…water?"

He starts to light a cigarette, another all-but-obligatory prop which Neena had expected to make its appearance at a point long before this one. She finds herself wishing that he would just go ahead and smoke, it would be a relief somehow if he did, but just then he suddenly stops the whole production, puts the cigarette and lighter back into his jacket pocket. He looks down briefly at the button on his cuff again, shrugs, frowns "perplexedly," and then looks up at Neena, but this time as if to say, "so now what?"

Neena, meanwhile, if just to be doing something, if only to break this horrible nightmare stasis (and wake up, perhaps?), has taken a sip from the paper cup. The water, which tastes vaguely of old photographs in which dead relatives pose, seems to be only water, after all. She is not comforted, however. Instead, she is wondering again, in spite of herself, how she came to be here in the first place (fruitless speculations, we don’t have to tell you). Was she taken from her bed in the dead of night or brazenly kidnapped off the street? Had she been raped in an alley or van after a brief, seemingly impromptu flirtation in a bar or bookstore?

She is thinking that, perhaps, she did something impulsive while under the influence of alcohol, or a semi-legal narcotic, and although this is not her normal pattern of behavior, far from her standard social M.O, it is, at the same time, not categorically impossible, not entirely out of character (of her shadow character). As human beings, we are vortices of unpredictability; there is always a first time for anything. The parallel idea that she was the innocent victim of some kind of freak accident or medical emergency, that she was struck down in the street by a delivery truck or suffered a seizure, is never far from her mind, either; in fact, it occurs to her repeatedly, almost obsessively.           

Also it almost certainly must have occurred to Neena that it is all-too-possible that she has been arrested for some arcane reason or other, either that a mistake has been made in targeting her for arrest, or that she really has done something illegal of which she is entirely unaware (the breaking of some quietly passed law solely intended to allow the authorities to arrest whomever they want whenever they want without the inconvenient obstacle of such considerations as “civil rights” [haha], ignorance, of course, being no excuse for ignorance of the law, etc.).

Perhaps, the man, once again starting (and failing) to light a cigarette, understands all-too-well the nature of her basic innocence and this understanding accounts for his generally casual, even friendly, if still strictly appropriately official behavior—a behavior that might, almost, be mistaken to indicate that they are both caught, more or less, in the same unavoidable situation, and what can they do, but try to make the best of it while it lasts (hopefully not too much longer; short of forever, in any case). They need only clear up a few mandatory points and afterwards she will be free to go on her merry way, and la-dee-da.

So Neena muses. A question slowly drifts across her consciousness, as insubstantial as a form already vanishing, suggested by the smoke exhaled from the cigarette she anticipates but that the man is still not smoking. It is a question that she doesn’t ask, never asks, never even thinks of asking, after asking, futilely, so many times before.

"Did I do something wrong?"

The man, who has just finished a gesture as if to say, "That's it, I've done with this button for good," looks up, suddenly, as if Neena has indeed inquired aloud about a possible inadvertent transgression, (and, perhaps, she may have in spite of herself and all the blather we blathered just a moment ago), or as if he has read her mind (and perhaps he has), or as if, even more likely, he understands that it’s simply the most natural thought to occur to anyone in Neena’s position at this juncture of her interrogation, the man having conducted such interviews as this one thousands of times before--and for the exact same reasons, which is to say no reason at all.

There is no smile on his thin lips and no expression on his narrow expressionless face and there is no cigarette between his fingers. He doesn't seem to be looking at her at all, nor has he been, it occurs to Neena, from the beginning of this interview, which is only a euphemism that they use for what is transpiring between them, whatever the hell it is that is transpiring between them, if anything at all can properly be said to be transpiring between them.  

It is still very cold in the room and the water in the cup that Neena is holding is also very cold, but it no longer tastes of the photographs of long-dead relatives stiffly posed but like her own hands as she wets her lips from the water cupped from the wheel-ruts beside which she kneels, crows wheeling overhead. She drinks while waiting for the man to say what he always says at this juncture:

"But, as you and I well know, that is not the question that truly concerns us here, now is it?"

=8=

“Please,” she says without actually saying the word aloud, or, for that matter, making any sound at all, but using the position of her body alone to communicate her meaning, like a totemic hieroglyphic, to convey the message: 

“Please, beat me harder.”

Neena is bound in the usual way, that is to say, her arms pulled overhead, wrists crossed, cuffed, and a chain stretching upward into a darkness as infinitely regressive as outer space. She has been stretched to the extreme, hoisted onto tippy-toe, and she takes the expected, but no less so for that, delightful, mincing little half-steps, forward and back, backward and fore, that advance her no place at all. She has asked, previously, if her shoes might be removed: large Plexiglas platforms in the heel of each of which a green Gloster canary is imprisoned—but this wish of hers, to her great disappointment, has predictably been denied.

Her torso, stretched taut, reveals her ribcage, each rib in aesthetic high-relief, alternating light and shadow, a xylophonic provocation, illuminated by off-stage spotlights, which tempt the viewer to imagine the severe fetishistic constriction of her breath, as if she might be wearing a transparent corset, and who can say for certain that she isn’t?  

What you can say is that she isn’t entirely naked, only very nearly so. She is wearing a platinum g-string featuring a tiny “v” of lycra mesh that does little to conceal, and much more to frame, the plump cleft peach of her shaved mound, which is moistened, periodically, with atomized camphor held by a seemingly disembodied hand emerging from the surrounding shadows. The ultra-thin, nearly invisible string that keeps the scrap of underwear from falling to her ankles seems drawn over her sharp white hipbones with nothing more than a cursive pencil line deftly executed by a left-handed Marcel Duchamp. [Note to Pinker: Was Duchamp left-handed? Please verify].

She opens her mouth to moan, but, of course, no sound comes forth, her mouth merely opening wide and closing, like the mouth of a goldfish in poorly oxygenated water; thus, it is that she “moans” when, exhausted, she is unable to maintain her tiptoe balance for any reason, whether it’s a blow from the heavy bullwhip that periodically falls or from simple exhaustion, for her position requires unceasing physical discipline and one-point mental focus, and, occasionally, her mind drifts off into a weary haze and consequently her heels drop an eighth-of-an-inch towards the cold blue tiles of an otherwise transparent floor.

It’s just such an interlude of quiet moaning that Neena experiences now, a period that is neither here nor there, a limbo within a limbo, without a climax, and therefore, perhaps, all the more excruciating for that.           

Someone—or something—whips her, clearly that must be the case, but who or what it is that administers this flogging, no one knows. The whip appears and disappears, as does the atomizer, wielded by a seemingly disembodied hand. It is the very anonymity and relativity that is what is most provocative about this beating, and the real source of its erotic frisson, to be specific: its utter incomprehensibility.

Whether there is real pain or not, or if it is all merely simulated, a performance, that, too, is irrelevant, (to the observer in any event), but what does interest whoever might be present, although there is no one present at the moment (but you), is that Neena is posing as if there is pain, or, if not exactly pain, as if she is feeling something,  that she isn’t a cold, unemotional, frigid bitch.

Is there real damage being done to her body, is this damage visible on the pale, previously unblemished flesh, and is this even a concern (and to whom?), aesthetically or sexually, or both, and why does this seem to be the last thing to consider in this particular “intervention”?

We don’t know.

Common sense informs us that it would be impossible to suppose that a lead-weighted bullwhip braided into existence from strips of salt-cured leather and quarter-inch copper cable, and wielded, as it is, with both expertise and savagery, by either a mechanical or a human agent, upon the body of a nearly nude, helplessly bound, delicate and vulnerable young woman such as Neena would not have disastrous effects.

There are, thus, upon closer inspection, all the expected alarmingly garish wounds, ie. the ripped flesh and exposed muscle, the blood freely flowing, and bones that actually break under the force of blows that strike with a surprising solidity, no matter how many times they’re struck. The idea, roundly put, seems to be to ruin the girl’s body entirely, while leaving, untouched, the agonic spirituality of the suffering angelic face, or suggestive of something equally ridiculous.

What eventually becomes clear is that it would be a simple matter to end this scene with a single flourish, such as laying open Neena’s carotid with an off-hand whip stroke, but that possibility, for reasons previously alluded to, will never be entertained, and so the beating continues, as it has, with a brutality so methodical and disinterested that it has all come to seem quite in the ordinary course of things, like, perhaps, the operation of a printing press.

Neena, likewise, continues posing, as if it mattered, as if someone wandered in to watch, and one can say, without any certainty whatsoever, that no one has; but really one wouldn’t know, how could one, and so one makes no speculation on the matter at all (even though we have), but continues, as does Neena, to behave, vaguely, as if it were possible that someone were watching, which, theoretically, it always is.

And as always, just before the viewer, whether present or not, might be reasonably expected to direct his or her attention elsewhere, the joints of Neena’s arms, extended to the absolute limit by her extreme position, finally “pop” out of their sockets, first the left and then the right, causing additional pain to register on her classically beautiful face. But this is not to be mistaken for the climax of this interlude, (oh no don’t mistake it for that!), as the whole thing goes on and on indefinitely, as does the hypothetical viewer’s attention, whether present or not.

What we have here is a model of endless foreplay—or is it excruciating frustration?—such as might be a model of an obsessive sexual fantasy. One simply notes that Neena’s exposed armpits, of which she is mystifyingly (under the circumstances) self-conscious, are painted yellow and violet, left and right respectively, with a kind of UV sensitive paint that glows when illuminated by black light, as it does now, as all the spotlights, suddenly, go out.