=9=

On Sundays, which are simulated, Neena sits in the eastern chapel, the one with all the disused satellite dishes, and kneels, head bowed, as a parable is read, ostensibly for her edification, that seems to have something to do with the cellular re-absorption rates during the mitosis of self-cannibalizing cancer cells. Along the walls large computer screens have uploaded photo retouches of celebrity deaths designed by Gnostic internet priests and Neena finds herself confronted now with the live disemboweling of the minor late 20th century actress Alicia Silverstone by medical anatomists, which is anachronistically set sometime in the 17th century.

Neena, aroused from a daydream about a parachute drop she may or may not have experienced, does not hear correctly such partial phrases as “to die again and again and again” and “a paradigm of the beauty of ritualistic human sacrifice” and “the voluntary abrogation of the human ego at the moment of nonconsensual climax,” and other things besides, misunderstanding the true nature of the Mass as l she drifts off sideways into a dream that has something unspecified to do with false doors.

She misses entirely the grand finale and the distribution of the Eucharist which she cannot participate in anyway, even though she has been “confessed” during her interrogation. As best she can make out the reason she cannot take Communion has something to do with the fact of her special role as a “lovely and exclusively grain-fed animal without blemish.” But this is rather dismissively and off-handedly explained to her in simplified terms, as if she were a mere child too young to understand. She is advised to simply accept what she’s told as a “Holy Mystery.”

The mass is ended. Go in peace.

=10=

Of all her deaths, it is the one that we recount now that Neena knows the best, knows almost by heart, and for which she feels something almost like nostalgia, it being one of the first deaths that she can remember having suffered. It begins in a place vaguely reminiscent of a place she’s found herself in before (or is it later?); well, it really doesn’t matter. She finds herself in the cavernous ground floor of an old building, a warehouse, perhaps, the kind that has apartments or offices on the floors above, stacked like layers of meat on a thick sandwich.

She passes through a machine-shop, picking her way carefully around a maze of table-top tools of a kind that mean nothing to her: saws, drill-presses, incomprehensible stitching machines, others that mean even less, or even nothing, machines whose purpose she can’t even guess at, machine after machine, an evolutionary progression of machines whose existence fades away into a grey non-existence at the end of each dusty row that she passes.

These machines are here, most likely, for only one real purpose: to invoke a sense of anticipatory dread, which they do, standing in half-shadow as they are, a menagerie of machines, mute, grim as engines of execution, but ready to come alive upon command, at the flip of an unseen red switch, humming, grinding, nailing with malevolent intent, a taut band of serrated metal singing a high-speed falsetto, or a loop of thin copper wire heated to the white luminosity of a line of pure poetry.

It is a workhouse devoted to the tortures of the flesh, Neena thinks, or it might as well be, and Neena passes through it as if she were a figure in her own imagination (which she is), fully aware of what horrors could (and will) take place here, what outrages have (and still may) occur in another scene, some frames further along if she should return to this warehouse of damned souls for some at present incomprehensible reason, at three a.m. when a gray shift of somnolent men drift in, the hollow-eyed dim army of the marginal, whose hands are hooks, whose oily guts are chain, and whose work is done and undone off the books.

Is it three a.m. already?

For not having tarried in this ominous location, having progressed even as we’ve been speaking to one of the upper stories, the main floor is already throbbing below her, waking like a black and scaly dragon somewhere in the past beneath her feet. She is now in a hallway without doors or any doors that she can see, even though, ostensibly, it is a functional hallway lined with rooms and not a dream hallway (even if this is a dream), nor is it a hallway symbolic in any way. There is no chance of her looking for any particular room, or having a particular destination, or having really any business in this place at all, and so, perhaps, for this reason, no rooms appear to exist, at least to her, as she walks, or rather drifts, listless as a windless smoke, towards the end of this hall, which, incidentally, she cannot see (nor can we), since she (nor we) will never arrive at the end of this hall. So, you might just say it goes on, this hall, like she (and we) do, like the universe does, on and on and on…to infinity.

Let us not neglect to say how Neena is dressed for this crucial rendezvous--that is, in a modest but fashionable skirt of dark wool, which is thin enough to assume that the season is mid-to-late fall, tight-fitting, cut just above the knee, most likely ultramarine blue, (definitely not black), with the possibility of a subdued pattern, squares, triangles, stars, but this pattern is easily overlooked; perhaps it will be of interest to the detective assigned to her case, maybe he will look for it; let’s leave him to it then; he’s welcome to such arcane observations. It’s his job, after all, to help solve a crime. Whereas for us…we have other, erm, considerations. Let’s get back to them.

Her blouse is white, a blend of natural and synthetic micro fibers, and of a general silkiness without being silk, yet in no way to be mistaken for an attempt to imitate silk. This fabric is better than silk. (Why for heavens sake the italics, Pinker? Are you trying to make a particular point here? If so, I wish to heavens you’d just come right out and make it and spare us your typographic melodramatics.) After some deliberation, it is decided that she is wearing black seamed stockings, very sheer, ultra sheer (again with the italics?), and a lace black garter belt with panties of a matching black lace. The blouse, with its abbreviated collar, is opened at the throat to reveal an expanse of u-shaped white flesh, and only the faintest hint of cleavage, a flash of a black bra strap, part of a lacy black cup filled with the fluffy cream of her tit.

It would be better if she were not wearing an overcoat, even though the season and (particularly) the hour (the former, as noted, suggested by the material of her skirt; the latter by the empty warehouse) would suggest she ought to be, realistically speaking, though we are hardly speaking realistically here. If realism is insisted upon, perhaps we can say that the coat could have been mislaid somewhere, at an earlier appointment, or neglected in the heat of the moment, rushing from the hotel room of a married lover or to the hotel room of a married lover, either of which is not the case; it’s just an excuse, an explanation, for her having no coat, if realism is insisted upon.

And even if it were so, that she were rushing to and from the hotel room of a married lover, why rush here? Her shoes are black, consistent with the rest of her outfit, dark blue or black, of a shiny leather, and raising her heels to the level of two or three inches, toes tantalizingly concealed. The overall impression is of a typical office girl, an administrative assistant or cost analyst, perhaps, modest, quiet, super-competent, with an inhibited, but active, yes overly active, sexual imagination. She may be, as already falsely postulated, a woman having a clandestine affair, possibly with her married supervisor, or, even less likely, she is a straight woman working nights as a call-girl catering to the kinkiest of clientele.

In any event, the unseen figure comes up swiftly behind her, detaching itself from the hanging shadows, and although, expecting as much, (certainly no less), Neena is still taken by surprise, maybe it’s more like she’s surprised to be surprised, having expected something of the sort. To express this “surprise,” she makes a little gulped cry, as the far greater, the absolutely overwhelming masculine strength of her unseen assailant takes possession of her, causes her to struggle uselessly. She understands immediately the uselessness of struggle but Neena struggles all the same, as it is no doubt required that she do. (Who writes this stuff, anyway?) (Why, you do Pinker. Don’t be coy.).

Well, she has experienced this attack so many times already that she reacts almost instinctively, all the better to secure her doom, lifting her chin as she ineffectively and with inadvertent sensuality wriggles, her strength rapidly draining away. Her head, grabbed by the hair, is violently yanked back by her attacker, the scent of tweed and octopi in the air, and it is by her very complicity, combined with the aforementioned overwhelming strength of the invisible killer, that causes her neck to be very nearly broken.

She doesn’t feel the blade that slices across her pale defenseless throat, at least not until much later, if the term “much later” can be appropriately used to describe a consciousness that will continue to flicker for a little less than two or three minutes more. She is on her elbows and knees now, crawling forward futilely, through dust and sawdust, blood spraying in a wide fan over the old boards of the bare floor beneath her, her hands covered in blood, her arms, too, the front of her formerly white blouse also plastered wet with red. She crawls forward into the blood streak she is simultaneously dragging along behind her, inches no more than the six feet of hallway she has yet to traverse before she collapses into her eternal rest, her dark skirt matted even darker, and now darker yet, her stockings, garter, panties, etc., too, all of the latter, by the way, now exposed to one degree or another.

One of her pumps, as it always seems about to do, has come off her foot, which also slick with blood.

Neena is choking, coughing, her pretty head dangling like a snapped gerbera daisy. She instinctively tries to clear an airway, as she pauses, hopelessly, in her crawling, to draw a breath so that she might continue crawling forward nowhere another foot or so. She is dizzy and close to unconsciousness, amazed and sickened by all this blood, which she can taste and smell, which wets her cheeks, her lips, her eyelids, and her hair, clinging to her face like a scarlet mask. She is blinking, eyes stinging, trying to see through a mist of blood, which continues to spray out of her, sizzling across the floor, flung onto the walls, splashing about wetly in such incredible gouts that it seems impossible that it could all be coming from just one body, her body. She is bleeding in such a spectacularly tragic and showy manner, a veritable special-effects fountain of hemorrhage, that even the fantasy of squelching the flow, either by holding the gaping throat wound closed with her now slippery hands, or by means of the ministrations of a miraculous last-minute appearance of trained emergency medical personnel, is entirely too unrealistic to entertain, even in passing.

She is lying prone on the floor at this point, her forehead in a widening black puddle, the warmth flowing from her severed artery and spreading under her breasts, her belly, her thighs, soaking even the scant black panties. The point at which she crosses the boundary between faux struggle and surrender, at which she loses the capacity to crawl on hands and knees to no purpose whatsoever escapes her entirely, but she has not given up her struggle yet, such as it remains, far from it, even though she is as close to death as she will ever be without being dead, by which we mean that if she were any closer to death, she would be dead, which she will be, and now she is.

Her unseeing eyes are open, staring at a bit of dust crumbling inwards into the heel section of a boot-print a few inches from her noiselessly murmuring lips, lips bright with blood, her fingers still curled for purchase on the plank-wood floor of the hallway, although she doesn’t move forward another millimeter. The stocking toes of her right foot, the one missing the high-heel pump, are similarly curled, but slightly more dramatically, highlighted, somehow, as she futilely tries to push her body forward, her last bit of will concentrated in the curled toes of that foot, which is now lifted by a gloved and anonymous hand, almost gently, by the ankle, and laid down again, on its finely-arched instep, as if the owner of this gloved hand were patiently correcting a mistake, or relieving Neena of some outdated obligation, the toes curled uselessly up, the soft, defenseless sole of her small foot fully exposed to the ceiling, the hallway empty, except for her, and nothing but the silence of a door that has been left purposely ajar.

=11=

Forget what we’ve said up to now. Perhaps this is where the story should begin: in the prototypical darkened room, located in a boarding house, or in what was once a swank hotel from the end of the last century fallen into disrepair. It is the kind of room full of abandoned furniture from other places; beds that no one sleeps in anymore, lamps that no one lights. There is a painting on the wall, but it is too dark to see it, and even if it could be seen, it would draw no eye, painted, as it probably is, by a machine; it is a scene reproduced so many times it represents nothing in particular, a framed visual cliché executed entirely in thick shades of umber brown and sickly ochre.

In short: it is the kind of room in which someone may once have met a professional escort for unconventional sexual relations, or spent several days bingeing on alcohol or drugs, or hiding away from creditors, professional debt collectors, loan sharks, and the like, prosecutors of one sort or another, with or without the backing of the law. It is the kind of room to which a person retreats to "assess the situation," or simply to sit, staring at the wall or floor, until the “situation cools,” but seldom, if ever, does he go anywhere near the window. 

Here such a person will take a time-out before returning to the world and facing whatever judgment awaits, or, as is sometimes the case, they may not return at all, making this room the scene of a Last Judgment, the site where the surrender is signed, and the sentence executed without further appeal.

What is paramount to note, above all, is the temporary and provisional nature of this sort of room, which can be anywhere, really, or just as easily nowhere, for temporality is the key here, wherever “here” happens to be, as no one can stay in such a room for long, put a name-plate on the door, have their mail delivered.  Consequently, this room, like all such rooms, hardly go unnoticed by the police, who visit, or even, on occasion, inhabit them, on a fairly regular basis in pursuit or perpetuation of criminal activity.

Neena arrives by way of the stairs—the elevator, or lift as it might be more accurately called in this case—no longer in service (merely fallen into disrepair or deliberately sabotaged?). The stairwell she climbs is littered with beer cans and newspapers and other urban detritus familiar to us from the usual depictions of this scene from innumerable movies and television dramas. Inevitably, one of the landings is inhabited by a hollow figure, huddled in a filthy overcoat of indeterminate color, a ripe and festering mound, alive with lice, from which no head rises to watch her silent passage.

Neena is in formal couture, wearing an elegant black cocktail dress, which leaves her shoulders glimmeringly naked; it is the kind of dress held up by her "natural endowments," although Neena is not particularly well-endowed, naturally, being but modestly developed, perhaps a 33 or 34B, if even that, and varying with her time of month. There is nothing unusual in any of this, nor do we mean to imply there is. The dress is not made out of velvet, but it might be mistaken to be velvet, from a distance, and even close up, even to the touch. One imagines it must be some sort of special Vietnamese sweatshop blend.

In spite of her barely modest endowment, the décolletage of the dress nevertheless reveals the provocative cleavage formed by two plump breasts of flawless white flesh, pushed up by the hidden under-wiring of a specially constructed bodice built into the dress, which seems intended to suggest, and not merely vaguely, a selfless offering of first fruits, proffered with her own hands. 

It isn't the case, or perhaps it is, but Neena could be coming from an opening night concert at Lincoln Center, Mahler, maybe, or Dvorak on the program, neither of whom she likes, or would like, if she weren’t, in fact, mistaking them both for Liszt. She imagines she’d prefer Shostakovich, who she’s never heard, but whose story she has read about, and with whose struggles with love and Stalinism she feels some natural sympathy, or imagines she does.

If she has gone to that night’s performance at all it would be for the benefit of an absent companion. She would be wearing a pair of impossibly delicate high-heeled sandals, silver, with the thinnest sole possible and no ankle strap, thus easily lost in a scuffle, a Cinderella-situation waiting to happen. They would be the kind of almost-disposable shoes one wears once and never again, leaving one to wonder, but what one wonders in this context is too complex, or, rather too idiosyncratic, to untangle at the moment. Suffice it to say, she must not be planning on  walking very much or much longer, at all.

There is a small handbag over her left shoulder, no, her right shoulder, discouraging the use of her right hand, now that we have determined she is right-handed. It is a small handbag, approximately the size of a 4x6 inch postcard [seriously, Pinker, isn’t that too small? What would she be able to fit inside it, besides a postcard?), black, of course, no, silver again—make that of silver spangles, like a snakeskin, ie. a dragonskin(!). The bag is suspended from her shoulder by a silver link chain of intricate delicacy and Cabbalistic design.

Yes, the purse is indeed small, obviously, even pointedly, too small, but it is big enough to hold the most essential personal items: a tube of lipstick (scarlet, of course), a folded twenty-dollar bill, an unidentified key, and compact mirror. It also contains a foil package (empty) for a black, ultra-sensitive, ribbed condom, and a prescription bottle an expired prescription bottle holding 150 Xanax tablets, each one milligram. The name on the smudged label is illegible, but whatever it might read, it clearly does not read “Neena.”

In the end, she will not need any of the aforementioned items in her purse, except, it’s still remotely possible, for the lipstick, which she may or may not use to freshen her mouth during the proceedings still to come.

Let’s just wait and see.

=12=

There is a kind of lobby downstairs, or what's left of a lobby, and a woman behind a desk. She’s a Puerto Rican; no, a Mexican, an illegal, a short dark woman, hirsute, slightly hunchbacked, with large arms, and heavy, canine features. She speaks a highly-personalized mix of English and Spanish, this all-but-incomprehensible polyglot orchestrated unhelpfully with emphatic gestures. She squeezes a stubby cigarette between dirty fingers with broken, chewed-up nails painted forest green and decorated with golden dots representing the constellation of Orion, the Hunter.

This woman always seems to be talking to someone else, someone off-stage, as it were, presumably in a backroom behind the desk, and she is doing so now, as Neena asks for the number and key to the room that has been reserved for her as planned. Somewhere above her in this dilapidated establishment, the man who reserved her room is waiting in this room, sitting in the dark, also as planned.

Upon hearing (intuiting, perhaps? Anticipating? We do not actually hear Neena’s voice) Neena’s inquiry, the woman behind the desk doesn't turn completely around, doesn’t look at Neena directly, but keeps her eyes deflected, her gaze oblique, straying off to the side, as if she had been and were still looking at something else that has caught her eye instead. In fact, there is nothing to see in the direction in which she pretends to be looking, a wall, a few nail holes, a bit of damaged wood from something that used to hang there, maybe a shelf, or some kind of box in which to put a phone, although such a box for such a purpose has been our of fashion for half-a-century or more.

There is a general sense about the matron’s demeanor that suggests an attitude of purposeful inattention, as if, from long experience, she understands that it is better if she genuinely misses a lot of what is happening right under her very nose in the event that she is later questioned by the authorities, whatever their authority, which has happened often enough before, and will undoubtedly happen often enough again.

She is dressed, exactly as one might imagine, in an oversized man's shirt, perhaps her husband’s, flannel and unbuttoned down the front, under which she wears a t-shirt, depicting a cute fluffy kitten suspended by its little claws from a wire accompanied by the slogan “Hang in there!” She is not wearing a bra, her breasts are disproportionately enormous, but this is only a side observation (“only a side observation,” eh, Pinker, you horndog, you…), and her lower half is clad in a pair of cheap department store stretch pants. Their color: burnt orange.

It might be wondered why we felt the need to describe in such detail this seemingly inconsequential character, whose sole function in the present narrative is to slide a key across a plank of wood; to that, we have no satisfactory answer. Indeed, there is no reason to describe this woman any further, at least not at present, except to say that her black hair (pulled severely back from her bulbous forehead), which, in spite of her relatively advanced middle-age, has only a few long oily threads of silver wired through it, is thinning along the hairline in a slightly inverted u-shape. 

Yet, in spite of this incipient balding, her lack of hygiene, culture, general intelligence, and more besides that goes unmentioned, she is still not altogether an unattractive woman (for godsakes, Pinker, how on earth can this possibly be?! Are you even paying attention to what you’re writing?) In fact, this woman radiates the overall impression to those attracted to her type, a feeling which is best summed up in these words: "if not for certain unfortunate circumstances and some extremely poor life choices this might have been one fine piece of hoochie-coochie…" (Un-freaking-believable.)

One is aware, or, perhaps, naturally led to the idea, by this woman’s general manner, the “vibe” she gives off—an attitude of sublimated aggression, a mocking-lax-appraising-predatory something or other encoded into her very mannerisms and gestures, and that informs her overall attitude towards Neena, in whatever way it is these subtle impressions are communicated, as they doubtlessly are—that this woman, let's call her Juanita (please consult a Spanish name dictionary, Pinker. This just won’t do), would consent, if not eagerly, then matter-of-factly, to a sadomasochistic lesbian encounter with Neena, either alone or as part of a threesome, if invited (and paid handsomely to do so) by whoever it is that has already paid for the room, in this case a man, older, handsome, and obviously well-to-do, (although she could not describe him any better, later, to the authorities, having kept her eyes pointedly averted from him, as is her custom, as was noted), who arrived earlier, went up the stairs, and is now apparently awaiting Neena, all as previously planned, or so that is how it is meant to appear to one not paying close enough attention.

This invitation, by the way, if it had been proffered, would have surely been extended in the usual roundabout way, with a discrete indirection, all very English, mind you, and involving an elegantly executed exchange of money at some point, a few cash bills, in the larger denominations, but nothing too out of the ordinary, fifties probably, a sum large enough to make at least an effort towards a pretense of respect; in short, the idea would be to avoid any implication that either woman is a prostitute.

For this sum, Juanita (I can’t abide it, Pinker) would follow Neena up to the room after the appropriate amount of time had elapsed, all previously agreed upon, during which time the man would supposedly have finished preparing Neena for whatever role in the proceedings the matron was to play.

The plan was this: entering the room with her pass-key, the matron would, without a word, proceed to lay into a bound and supine Neena with a crop or whip provided for the purpose, thrust handle-first and spooling out from Neena’s anus. She might then fuck Neena with a large strap-on dildo, lying near to hand in its harness, after which she would force Neena to perform an extended session of cunninlungus. All of this would take place while the unknown man sits quietly in a corner, legs elegantly crossed, hands folded in his lap, as if he were watching a dress-rehearsal. But a dress-rehearsal for what, that is the question.

Anyway to Jaunita’s vague disappointment, the invitation is not extended this time. For whatever reason, her services in this regard are not required. Too bad, she thinks, she wouldn’t have minded giving it to that stuck-up looking gringa, gratis, that’s Spanish for free, shithead….(yikes, where did all this come from? So hostile! Perhaps we should have her go up to the room, after all! It might have been interesting…) this is what she’s thinking, this dark, dwarfish matron, who merely looks askance at Neena as she informs her of the location of the room in which the faceless partner of her liaison, for want of a better description, awaits her to do god-only-knows-what (God and us, eh Pink? Pretty select company, I’d say heh-heh).

Neena doesn’t catch the mumbled number, the matron having muttered it quickly, distractedly, sotte voce, in her deliberately strange polyglot patois, forcing Neena to ask her to repeat it three or four times, which the woman does, purposely thickening her diction, exaggerating her already exaggerated and faux accent that much more with each repetition, feigning at the same time impatience and incredulity that Neena still fails to understand. In addition, the matron doesn’t repeat herself immediately, but makes Neena wait a little longer each time, delaying her answer with an uncomfortably long interval, interrupting herself, as she pretends to be carrying on a simultaneous conversation with the unseen companion in the next room (her husband?), who, from the sound of it, is watching a television game show, which sounds familiar to Neena, even in the Spanish language in which it is being broadcast (cf. in this regard the once inexplicably popular game show hosts, Wink Martindale, Chuck Woolery, Jack Barry, etc).

And, as if that were not enough (oh Lord, Pinker, isn’t it though?), the matron purposely gives Neena the wrong room number, the number of a room three doors down the hall and one floor above the one which she actually seeks (or thinks she’s seeking), if, for no other reason, than to spitefully imagine Neena knocking on one wrong door after another and having to explain herself, red-faced and with the usual inadequate apologies and lame excuses for her unwelcome interruption—“this overdressed puta looking down her gringa nose at me,” etc. (Jeez, Pinker, this is one angry wetback you’ve got there!)—to the swarthy, malevolent characters who invariably answer, rough trade every inch of them, hostile and suspicious, openly appraising Neena as a potential victim who has fallen so propitiously into their lap, so to speak. The sparrow God didn’t see…

Ha!

=13=

What is Neena thinking, one wonders, as she stands inside door of the aforementioned room, having closed behind her the door which, unlocked upon her entrance, remains unlocked behind her. It was the fourth door on which she’d knocked, and the last before Neena, confused and frustrated, would have considered turning and walking back downstairs to the lobby to ask at least one more time for the correct room number. Such an interval would certainly have provided Neena with the life-saving opportunity to rethink her reasons for being here in the first place.

She might have hired a taxi to take her straight home, or, more probably, being the romantic type, she might have directed the driver to take her to a late-night coffee shop instead. There she might have sat alone at a window table until dawn, staring out at the sparse traffic, a forgotten cup of cold black coffee set in front of her. Forgotten, too, the zero calorie artificial sweetener packets that her nervous fingers tore into pink confetti. She would shudder every so often at the realization of how utterly surreal even the most ordinary life can become with just a single impulsive choice. How mere chance can literally mean the difference between life and death at any given, otherwise totally insignificant, moment. (Ah philosophy!)

But this is a possibility, like so many others, that is not lived out, for at the fourth door, as we said, the last she intended to try, and even then tried only tentatively, half-heartedly, just for the sake of going through the motions, largely to eliminate any later possibility of the ironical reproach, “if only you’d knocked at that one last door you would have found it,” in other words, fully expecting failure, but doing so if only to confirm defeat, her small fist barely breaking the silence, she knocked.

Her knock was answered, not by a man looking guilty and afraid, or guilty and angry, or guilty and deranged, or any combination of such looks as she’d seen on the faces of the occupants of the previous rooms who’d answered her knock and finding her standing there expectantly instead of who(what)ever it was they feared and/or hoped to find--well, I’ve actually lost the train of thought I was following here.            

What’s important is that the man who answers the door this time doesn’t instantly convince her that she’s knocked on the wrong door yet again. That’s not to say that he gives her the conviction that she’s knocked on the correct door either (of course not)—no, no, no! Instead his demeanor is mild, almost casual, and he speaks to her with a voice that she half-expects without quite knowing that she half-expected it, the dreamer’s dream-voice, the lover’s secret melody that corresponds to something deep inside us that we have always longed to hear.

It is a command, which, like all commands, to one degree or another, is imbued with a seductive intimacy. This intimacy carries an authority quite apart from any of the usual apparent sources of authority—physical, psychological, political or economic; i.e. it is not brute force that backs true authority, lends it power. No, what truly ensnares and ensures that a command will be obeyed without hesitation or question, even when the command is unspoken, especially when it is unspoken, is intimacy (Not sure I follow this Pinker, but it sure sounds right.)

This is all another way of saying what should be plainly obvious by now. That it's not necessary to tell Neena what to do; she does it as if of her own free will, and so it is. She crosses the room, slips the handbag from her shoulder, and lays it upon the unattractive still-made bed. She rests the fingers of her left hand lightly on the pilled green spread, brushing the backs of her manicured nails across the worn chenille, and then bends her right leg and, with her right hand, removes one of her white sandals by its high heel (for it now appears to us that she’s wearing sandals and that the sandal is, in fact, white--a “bridal sandal”). She repeats this operation, removing the left sandal with her left hand, but this time with nothing to lean on, and only one bare foot on the floor, she totters, but only slightly, a whisper of a totter, to use a figure, a presentiment of the fall to come. (cf. Elias Canetti’s discussion about why we find it humorous to see someone trip and fall: in short, it reminds our animal brain of the fall of prey about to become meat--a fall which our “civilized” brain re-interprets for us “safely” as comedy).

Meanwhile, the man sits by the window, in a straight-backed wooden chair, his legs crossed at the knee, almost…

Well, let’s just go ahead and say it, demurely--but in that vaguely, yet distinctly European manner of being demure that has nothing feminine about it, that denotes a cultured savagery and suave butchery.

He smokes an elegant, hand-rolled cigarette while looking out the filth-splashed window into a Sophoclean courtyard of cracked asphalt, weeds, and shattered glass of which he can see at present only an irregular dark triangle, and this surrounded by a section of fallen cyclone fence, and a senseless concrete wall every inch of which has been tattooed with an indecipherable graffiti.

The room is totally dark, even darker than it is outside, if that can be imagined (of course it can!), and so there is a kind of ambient light coming in from the window—coming from nowhere apparently!—the abandoned buildings across the street, the broken lamps along the sidewalk, the all-night delicatessen and launderette that must exist, but don’t, the stars and moon one cannot even see through the torpid cloud of atmospheric pollutants that squats, so to speak, above the unconscious city like a malevolent gnome taking an oily black dump, blocking any easily conceivable source of illumination.

Yet in spite of this third or fourth-hand light, wherever however it comes (perhaps, it’s only mental light? The light of anxiety and fear? Imagination’s light? Dream light? What light is it that permit us to see in dreams, anyway? There must be a kind of dream light, no? I’m just thinking out loud here, Pinkster…), which somehow creeps into this room, making it at least theoretically possible to see, if see only poorly and with distortion, the man's face nonetheless remains hauntingly obscured, and this obscuration is abetted by several diverse factors, including the angle at which the man’s face is turned towards the window, the way the hand with the cigarette goes to and from his mouth, the smoke therewith exhaled, and, last but surely not least, the fact that Neena, as usual, keeps her own gaze averted, down and slightly to the left, a gesture that she has read or heard somewhere or other (correctly, too, I might add!) imparts a pleasingly suggestive air of coy and coquettish seduction to a woman’s general appearance--a subconscious sexual “come-hither.”

Of what she therefore sees and/or thinks she sees, Neena would affirm this much at least: the man is dressed in wool or tweed, some arty fabric such as that, a suit, of a personally tailored cut. He almost certainly isn’t wearing a tie, rather a casual shirt under his expensive yet sporty jacket (think hounds-and-hunting in the English countryside), that would be more like it. Upon second thought, perhaps not a shirt at all, but a sweater, a turtleneck, no, not a true turtleneck, but the kind commonly referred to as a "mock turtleneck." On the other hand, perhaps he is wearing the exact opposite of a turtleneck sweater, a long-sleeved, v-necked, mixed-blend t-shirt in an appropriately somber hue.

All of this exhaustive and exhausting detail is superfluous, an attempt to avoid or, at least delay, dealing with the most obvious and disturbing feature of the room: the noose that Neena notices hanging above the bed.

And yet, even as disturbing as this sudden apparition of the empty noose is, and it is, her attention is inexplicably drawn further and, irrationally, to the enigma of the black umbrella, which stands against the papered wall beside the man’s chair. This umbrella makes an appearance even though it isn't raining, hasn't rained in weeks, and there is absolutely no chance—according to the latest and most reliable forecasts—of any rain tonight or tomorrow, or any day of any week in the foreseeable future. The drought being a subject impossible for even the most self-absorbed (and can there possibly be anyone more self-absorbed than Neena?) of the city’s inhabitant’s, even it’s dead ones, to ignore, suffering as they are by virtue of the severest water shortage in the history of the city, so bad a water shortage rumors of imminent martial law are rampant.

Still, why this detail of the umbrella strikes her so powerfully, or, for that matter, engages her attention at all, under the circumstances, (ie. the hideous room, the waiting man, the rendezvous, the noose), why she should be obsessed or distracted by the incongruity of a simple black umbrella when there is so much else in this scene so much more incongruous, so much more nightmarish, foremost of which, most obviously, is the noose, is, it might be argued, the very essence of “nightmare,” as well as one of those quirks of human consciousness that can't quite be explained. Although it is likely to be explained (or explained away?) all the same as a psychological defense-mechanism against the unthinkable, the threat of massive bodily harm, the imminence of death, all of which, in almost every respect, the current situation certainly seems to be.

=14=

How she steps up on the chair, a second straight-backed chair, identical to the chair upon which the man by the window is still sitting, a second chair borrowed, perhaps, from another room (agreed: unthinkable that there should be two such chairs in one room; but why is it unthinkable?), how she looks deliberately away from the fatal constellation of man-window-umbrella, and away from the door through which she will again pass alive, how she lifts the noose, surprisingly heavy in her graceful, manicured, pale and delicate hands, how she slips her head through the absolute zero of burly hemp, her hair worn in a formal up-do especially for the occasion, exposing a long, slender neck and the intricately marvelous pink pastry of her ears, from which dangle, by the way, elaborate rhinestone earrings rendered in noose designs (!); how the stray scratchy "pubic hairs" of the rough rope abrade and tickle the soft flesh at her throat and at the back of her neck, how she places her bare feet demurely together, ankle to bare ankle in preparation and how the man, in the meantime, having already risen from his chair and crossed the room, is now tying those feet together with a thin, shiny black cord like a shoelace, yes, in fact, it is a shoelace, a simple black shoelace from a man’s dress shoe, his own, let’s say, pulled free from the eyelets of his left shoe, and how, only earlier that day, Neena had her toes freshly pedicured and polished by a pretty Korean girl on Third Avenue to whom she purposely confided that she was having her nails especially done for her suicide that evening, and how the girl nodded and smiled quizzically, as Neena knew she would, having only just enough English to be uncertain whether or not she had heard Neena correctly—of all of this, let us say nothing. Let it also go without saying that the man must have prepared the room for this hanging in advance of this evening, equipping it with a hook bolted to a ceiling beam strong enough to hold the weight of Neena's body (115.5 pounds), this room modification certainly requiring the knowledge, if not the cooperation, paid or unpaid, of the building manager, the complicity, at the very least, of whoever would have been on duty at the time (Juanita’s theoretical husband, perhaps?) such modifications to the premises were made, for this person would also have been responsible for explaining, as "routine maintenance," the hammering and whatnot attendant upon the installation of this hook to anyone who might have complained.

As it is, the front desk has recorded no complaints from the guests who, for various reasons of their own, wish to keep a low-to-no profile. The matron sits peaceably at her post on a duct-taped vinyl stool, smoking a fresh cigarette, her attention divided three ways: listening to the television in the next room, wondering if the man on the third floor had “done it” yet, and planning her look of surprise when someone eventually comes upon yet another corpse in room 318.

[Pinker:  Please follow-up on the possible numerological significance of the room number in this passage—and, while you’re at it, all the other numerical values given in this account. I don’t hold truck with numerology or any of that pseudo mystic hoo-ha as you well know but others (including you) do and I concede such nonsense very often provides the only clues we have to go on, the only ones left behind by these criminal kooks (especially in fiction and have therefore come to be expected)—indeed, in some cases, the idiosyncratic patterns left behind by this obsessive voodoo-making are as good as it ever gets to an out-and-out explanation of these sorts of crimes, fanciful as these explanations are thereby destined to be. Damn, this idiotic business! Anyway, get on it ASAP, if you haven’t already. Start with divisors of three. Baby steps, at first. For crissakes, I don’t have to tell you what needs to be done. I sure as hell hope not! As the sneakers say, Just-Do-It.]

=15=

Dead, as always, Neena lies on her back, crossed arms over chest, feet splayed out at heels, toes curled under. She is in a drawer, or a kind of drawer, something made of stainless steel, and set on smooth, silent casters, which has just been slid out by a man in a white lab coat, a photo ID clipped to his left breast pocket. Looking closer, one might notice that the little square photo looks nothing like the man whose pocket it adorns, but like someone fifteen years older, thicker hair, square of jaw, forced to smile.

Neena pretends to notice none of this, of course, how could she, being dead, her eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling, so fixated on nothing that whoever it is standing over her could prick the cornea of her eyeball with the pin on the back of the aforementioned photo ID and she wouldn’t see it coming. As it happens, the man does just that, plunges the pin-tip dead center in the pooled dark pupil, the jelly sticking when he pulls the pin back out, clinging, for a suspenseful moment to the pinpoint, a glistening thread of blindness, before it snaps back into the ruined orb.

There is laughter, or perhaps just giggling, some obscenities, and an overdone feigning of disgust, the latter issuing from two young women, who, intoxicated and playfully bumping into each other, have seen, and hope yet to see, much worse.

The insensibility and immodesty of the naked woman in the drawer, whose toe tag, entirely superfluous, has been deliberately—and distastefully—mismarked (though the body is easily recognizable as that belonging to our long-suffering heroine, who, by now, is familiar at least to us, as “Neena”), is apparently the source of great amusement, ribaldry, and general, if somewhat leisurely, fascination to whoever they are (attendants, nurses, first-year residents, custodial staff, college pranksters) on the morgue’s late-shift. Here at three or four a.m., under fluorescent lights, in windowless rooms, after untold ounces of coffee and equally liberal doses of appetite suppressants, pilfered amphetamines, and other illicit chemicals have been greedily consumed, these necrophiliac orgies, secret desecrations, and depraved hijinks hardly seem unthinkable; in fact, it’s hard to imagine any but the most determined sort of Pollyanna who wouldn’t concede their possibility, even likelihood, anyone who still has so stubborn a belief in the goodness of human nature as to categorically deny that such dark shenanigans probably don’t “happen all the time in morgues when no one is looking.”

Whatever the cause of death (or deaths), Neena is lying flat on her back tonight, (as opposed to how some jokers sometimes like to pose her in the drawer—rump up, for instance, to accommodate the taper in her bumhole), which, because she was dispatched from behind this time, is probably for the best, at least aesthetically speaking (and for those with weaker stomachs), as it hides the majority of the damage done to the back of her body. There is, however, ample evidence (i.e. gore) of whatever it is that killed her on the sides and front of her body, an exit wound or several, on her chest and/or belly, certainly “someplace vital,” as they never tire of saying. But, significantly, this wound and/or wounds will always exclude the head, face, and, often, even the throat, at least to the degree that said parts are transformed into what any chronicler might describe as “a sunflower of raw meat.” 

Even so, someone, most likely one of the techs (janitor, grad student, etc) has, upon instructions from the surgical amphitheatre (the amphitheatre? Who the hell’s up there at this hour?!), laid an open napkin, which, incidentally, came with his midnight double McWhammy Pounder, over whatever wound there is, which is meant, one might suppose, to suggest less a reaction to any form of squeamishness than a kind of mocking sensibility, a tongue-in-cheek nod to modesty, perhaps, as if the wound had taken the place of the sexual organs as the most intimate part of Neena’s body. Intimate, indeed, inasmuch as this wound is closer to the core of her being, which is now non-being, the inverse of the cunt by which she was brought and might have brought life into the world: all wounds being in this regard “exit” wounds.

Discount not, we advise, the specific instructions Neena herself left regarding the disposal of her remains following her murder. These must be taken into consideration and while not always acceded to, or even necessarily respected, they should be consulted, considered, when they exist, at least cursorily, just in case; for sometimes it’s been found that the victim herself will come up with some pretty good ideas no one had ever thought of before. Just when you think you’ve heard it all…

Unable to determine in any general way what exactly is taking place here, let us, for the sake of accuracy if nothing else, limit ourselves to what seems to be indisputably true. 

Specifically. This much we can determine with relative certainty: two men in white lab coats, yes, they have regulation white lab coats (and why wouldn’t they? Such coats are easy enough to obtain without any special authorization at any uniform shop), have masturbated themselves to full erections, which they’ve produced from the unbuttoned fronts of their “navy-style” button-fly trousers. They are spattering, or very soon to spatter, let’s say that they are on the brink of spattering, with cum, the dead girl’s expressionless face, making certain to also adorn her cold breasts with droplets, her belly, and, if their seminal capacity proves up to the task, her shaved slit, which—it might have been foreseen—seems in particular to have agitated these highly-agitated fellows.

A third man, considerably older, who could be a kind of director of something, as he has that incompetent, if supremely confident, authoritarian air of the vague administrator, as well as a fine head of the often requisite wooly white hair, is being vigorously fellated by one of the previously giggling women, who, incidentally, is also wearing a lab coat but nothing else save red high-heels, (all of them, to make a long story shorter, are wearing lab coats). The other giggling woman (formerly giggling, no longer giggling now) is instead of giggling or fellating, having finished both for the time being, is engaged in re-drawing her lips in a compact, and asking, incessantly, without managing to receive an answer, if anyone feels like driving to the ocean to look for sand dollars. One suspects that this must be a way of speaking in code, if it isn’t simply intoxicated babbling, but what it might possibly be a code for, if it is a code and not simply intoxicated babbling, well, that’s still anybody’s guess.