Borderlands Read online

  I would have continued normal animal sex with her though, watching the sweat splash as she flopped around the bed, but she wouldn’t and that made me mad, which sent me to Sella who received anger like an offering, which after a while it was. Because after the first flush I got when I realized I was actually whipping her, after the first time I’d rested so she wouldn’t mar the occasion by bleeding, I ceased to see her body at all. Rather I ceased to see her as a body. The blackness of her dress blended with the dark of the room and the white of her skin with the lightness of bed and bathroom beyond until I imagined myself alone in the room and her ass a blank page upon which I was writing a save-me note to the world. The more I whipped, the more articulate I became, the tip of my belt landing just where I aimed and eliciting a different note in the continuous keening wail that came from Sella but which seemed to come out of my own screaming frustration at being locked onto two legs in a world that is mostly air. When I became aware of Sella’s noises I stopped writing and became a musician. Every cry of rage or pleasure or fear or want I’d ever felt in my life I was able to bring to her lips through the instrument of my belt, and as it got more accurate and more intense there was no remaining difference between Sella, the room, and myself. I was creating a world through the mediums of pain and violence and I didn’t stop until she became me and I was feeling the burn in my head more strongly than she on her skin and we were two poles of an electrical field so strong that if anyone else had touched the belt at that moment it would have killed them.

  It was in that moment that I threw the belt aside, leapt onto the bed, and shoved into her like a coked-up angel sent by the Almighty to cuckold Lucifer, and the only way to cuckold Lucifer is to give his wife more of what she wants than he does. So I used myself as a weapon. I banged against the backs of her thighs so hard that her head drummed against the bedboard with the doomlike thud of the slave-master’s hammer on a galley ship. I bit her and slapped her and bent her into positions that made her nothing but an orifice with a body attached. And I used every orifice she had, finishing with the one Lucifer likes the most; the one that makes the cunt seem like a debutante at her coming out party, the one on the side of town where the lights never shine, the gateway to the gardens of perversion where the black roses of hubris grow out of wells of dark satin. And as I did it I could read her spine from the inside and it said, “Yours is the thing that writes the limits of my life. Yours is the alchemy that changes my pain to bone and my bone to come.” And I did it harder and her wail swallowed itself into a muted roaring grunt so I could feel it sitting on the end of my spear, and as I came I could see the limits of my life expand like the speed and reach of the universe. I could squeeze air and feel it run between my fingers. I could bite minutes and feel the seconds run down my chin. Afterward I couldn’t remember coming. I was lost.

  I don’t remember exactly how many times I saw Sella after that, only that they were never enough and the times between felt like a fluorescent dream from which I wanted to awake. Each time I entered a shady motel room with Sella felt like balm to a bum wound and each time I came out I felt like I’d been singed all over and needed the balm worse than before.

  Whatever I did she wanted more. I tied her hair to the top of the bed, wrapped a rope around her feet, and pulled her taut using the bathroom doorknob as a pulley. She spread her arms and called it flying through hell, and asked for more. I had her suck me until her neck was stiff and her jaws were sore and when I needed time to keep from coming I made her use that time to suck everything else in the room: table legs, doorknobs, bathtub fixtures, her own toes. She called it tasting exotic fruit and asked for more. I used appliances on her: an electric shoe shine machine, a slow-turning power drill with a sponge bottle washer attached, a wire attached to a tape-player’s LED flashers so that small shocks were delivered in time to the music. She called it lips of fire and came until she cried, and asked for more.

  And me? My days were like slow-flowing mud and my time with Marian like a sensory deprivation tank without the hallucinations. I began taking time off from work to meet Sella. I bought leather outfits from Frederick’s, whips and harnesses from feed stores, new appliances from hardware stores, liquor by the case, and drugs by the kilo because they all enhanced the erotic imagination and Sella wanted more. And as she got it, Marian got less and noticed. She also noticed our dwindling bank account and my decreasing weight. I was getting quite thin and liking it because I was able to fit into the zipper front leather bikini underwear which never seems to come in husky sizes. She wondered about the porno films I rented for posture concepts and the two-pack-a-day cigarette habit I’d picked up because they enhanced the drugs and were handy for inflicting controlled burns. She nagged about them all and said she’d think I was having an affair but I didn’t have the look of love. She didn’t know much about the look of lust so she chalked my behavior up to a mid-life crisis. Unintentional irony is, after all, the hallmark of the uninformed.

  And it was an ironic statement because I was about to face the crisis that sealed both our fates and many of yours. It began when I met Sella at the motel we’d been using because it was fairly soundproof and had a bed that was anchored to the floor. She was dressed in the outfit she’d worn the first night I whipped her leather skirt short enough to show the fasteners on her garter belt, black silk blouse sheer enough to show her nipple erections. The outfit summoned up a wave of nostalgia in me and I decided to whip her again just like our first time but this time she called it old and said it wasn’t enough. She sat up, slithered off the bed, sat at my feet, and said in a pouty little groan, “Ooh, I feel like such a bad girl tonight. This just isn’t enough to hurt it out of me. I need something special, something very special.”

  I asked her what and she told me I had to be in charge, that it wouldn’t do any good for her to think of it. She asked me to go home and think of something really special and then come back, without phoning in advance, walk in the room and just do it, whatever it was, just do it. She said she’d wait there until I came back, even if it was days or even weeks. That’s how bad she needed me to do it.

  On my way home I realized suddenly that God chose to be love instead of pain because it’s so much easier. All you have to do to love is just do it, just open your arms and passively let it flow. Pain requires imagination, constant innovation. And that is of course the reason why humans are only a cheap imitation of God, and Satan a very good imitation of humans. We’re all in his image and have a taste for it. But the only kingdom we can be masters of is the kingdom of pain, which requires constant thought, which induces fatigue and depression, which causes us to be tired and pitiable creatures which makes us even easier to love. You can’t win.

  That’s the state of mind I was in when I got home to Marian that night and she started on me about money. The bank statement had come and she couldn’t help but notice the dent my last cocaine buy had put in our funds. She wanted to know what all that money was for. And, by the way, why had the latest Frederick’s fall catalog come in that day’s mall? She even hinted that I might be a transvestite. I considered it for a minute but decided that wasn’t what Sella had meant by something special. Sella! What the hell did she want? How far into cruelty could I go without rounding the bend into love? Then I realized that was it, the most dangerous thing to Sella of all, a thing so cruel that it stopped just short of love. I knew what she must want.

  Marian was in my face, literally, leaning in, waving the bank statement under my nose. I stared blankly at her face and thought of all the times we’d seen each other through. Hard economic times when we were both still in school. Hard emotional times when members of our families had died. I knew I loved her with an intensity just short of hate. Ah hell, what are we to do about this capacity for cheap imitation? And I was an imitator, a sincere flatterer, a man in desperate need of something special, something to keep him from the land of the ordinary. My blood now flowed too fast for me to go back to being God’s navel or the
devil’s fantasy. I needed something special to stay king in the kingdom of Sella. I needed something on the cusp of love and hate.

  Marian was in my face, shouting for my attention, and I gave it to her. I reached out, hoping she would understand, and put my hands around her neck, just as an experiment at first, to see if I was on the right track. Then I started to squeeze. The more I squeezed the more I realized it was what Sella wanted. They say hanged men die with a hard-on and I knew strangulation would give Sella the biggest orgasm of her life and that once she had it there would be no repeating it so she wouldn’t want to live anyway. And without Sella I could never go back to Marian no matter how much I loved her. I had the power over all of us at that moment and I took it, rather I thought I took it. Now I can see it took me. An imitation’s not the real thing after all, is it? But once I was squeezing I kept on, feeling myself emigrate permanently into the realm of imitation power as I did it. I was still a religious man but then so was Lucifer. Let me tell all you consumer units who only read the parts of the Bible quoted in the elevator version of Bob Dylan songs that Lucifer was an angel who became the devil when he decided to be equal to God. He became a real imitation rather than a fake original.

  After killing Marian I raced to the motel, knowing that Sella would appreciate it all, that she’d been waiting there for me to kill her. I could hardly wait to hear her groan with pleasure when I told her. I was on fire with the thought of finally uniting her and Marian in my hands, of squeezing my two great loves into one.

  But she wasn’t there. All I found was a garter belt lying like a black corsage on top of a pair of black bikini underwear. A white note lay in jarring contrast on top of the small pile of nylon. I read the hooked scrawl: “As you can see I’m not here, and I’m still not wearing any panties. As you know, witch rhymes with bitch. Now you know I’m one. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether I’m the other. I know we’ll meet again when you become really special. Until then I’m always yours in pain. Sella.”

  So good-bye, kind world. This is my last note to you, and my only warning. Like all religious men I know that there is only one sin God will not forgive and that is the sin of rejecting forgiveness. And sadly, I reject it because I have discovered that Sella was the bitch but I am the witch. In using her as a window to the caverns of pain where the fires of small power burn I cast a spell on myself. Now I sit in those vaginal halls on a throne of God’s excrement beside a river of blood where I baptize myself daily in dreams of Sella’s neck gripped in my hands as I squeeze in masturbatory pleasure. As she dies maybe the spell will be broken and I can accept the forgiveness that lies just across the now impassable membrane where love meets power.

  The problem is though, that to find her I must remember her and I can only remember her through action. So, just as Marian did, the ones of you I select will in your final moments become Sella. I will love you as I loved her and some of you will in those moments find that you love me. Yes, it’s true, you will. Because you are consumer units and each purchase is nothing but a small and thrilling act of submission, a voyeur’s ticket to the kingdom of pain.

  So as you stare at your televisions each night, know that I am the dark moon that orbits full behind the piano key grins and the toylike wrecks of the expendable cars. I’m the darkness in the center of the mother’s whispered douche advice to daughter. I’m here, behind the tube, outside the window, and around any impulse you might have to leave fake reality for real imitation.

  I wait for you.

  I want you.

  I need you.

  I love you.

  And, to paraphrase that most romantic of songs: You always love the one you hurt.

  STILLBORN

  Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  When you edit an anthology such as this one, a kind of wide-open, no rules, no theme kind of thing, you don’t really know what type of fiction you want. (You always know, however, what you don’t want.) But every once in a while, as you work your way through the stacks of submissions, a story simply grabs you by the frontal lobes and demands that you buy it. When I read the following piece by Nina Kiriki (isn’t that a great middle name?) Hoffman, I knew immediately she’d written a Borderlands story—whatever that entity might actually be.

  Nina ‘s work has appeared in all the major magazines and anthologies over the past few years, receiving the critical acclaim she richly deserves. She lives in what is one of the all-time great college towns—Eugene, Oregon.

  Hugh found it in the shallow grave his mother had dug behind the house. He kept it wrapped in cotton above a heat register in the attic, where the dry warmth would preserve it without rotting it. Once it had mummified, he locked his bedroom door and took it out to look at, nights after his mother had gone to bed. When he shook it, its brain rattled inside its tiny skull like a pea in a gourd. “Little brother,” he would whisper, staring into its sunken leathery face. “Little brother.”

  Whenever she yelled at him, he remembered he owned something that had known her intimately, something she had cast out. He could stare at her with that knowledge behind his eyes, and nothing she said got inside him anymore. She yelled and yelled and he only smiled. When she slapped him, he thought of reaching up inside her where Little Brother used to live. His hand would never have to touch her; his thoughts touched her enough. With that knowledge behind his eyes, he stared at her some more, until her face went dull red and she turned away, her words gone. Sometimes she touched herself, low down, as if she knew his thought-hand had touched her there.

  The night in October when Little Brother first spoke to him was windy and cold. The window in Hugh’s room was a square of black. Occasional rain spattered it. The gooseneck lamp by the bed cast an image of the room against the night.

  “Elder brother,” whispered Little Brother, though his tiny lips never moved.

  Hugh laid Little Brother on the bed and took two steps away before turning to look again. In the center of his cotton batting, Little Brother was small, dry, and yellow brown, with tiny skeletal fingers clasped into little bony knots, fleshless fists like curled-up dead spiders.

  “What?” said Hugh, after a moment. Little Brother had not moved, hadn’t shifted position since the mummification. “Elder brother.”

  The wind whipped tree branches against the side of the house. Below, Hugh heard his mother scream something. Maybe it was the weather she was mad at, or maybe it was the television.

  “Elder brother.”

  “What?” said Hugh, after a moment.

  “Kiss me.”

  Hugh went down on his knees and inched closer to the bed. He stared at Little Brother’s face, the lids stitching the sunken eyes shut, the nose a tiny bump in the yellowed flesh, the mouth a narrow slash that had never smiled.

  The voice sizzled through his mind, its words a whip. “Kiss me,” it whispered, stinging.

  Hugh closed the cotton batting over Little Brother, pulled it tight, and tied a belt around it. He put Little Brother back in his hiding place, behind the shoeboxes on the shelf in the closet. That night his dreams were full of Little Brother, and he woke to find Little Brother lying on his chest, free of cotton. He threw Little Brother off, against a wall. He heard cracking noises, like dry sticks being broken for kindling. He jumped up and ran from the room. After half an hour in the bathroom, waiting for his shivers to stop, Hugh went back to his bedroom. He couldn’t let Mother come in and find Little Brother.

  Little Brother’s skull was half smashed in, and one arm hung loose, dangling by its leathery skin. Without touching Little Brother, Hugh wrapped him in a T-shirt. “I love you,” he whispered. He took Little Brother downstairs and outside.

  It was early morning. Down the street beyond the houses there was a dirt road that led to a horse pasture. Hugh walked through the dawn, hearing the birds calling as if this was the first day of the world, his hands closed around the T-shirt that wrapped Little Brother. “I love you,” he whispered again. He slid between the bars of the horse
pasture gate, slogged through the churned-up mud there, and headed for the stand of trees. Dew-laden grass pressed against his pants. The horses were on the far side of the pasture. They watched, but they didn’t come near.

  The trees were thick oaks, their knobbly finger branches wound among each other, wet black bark spotted with pale green lichens. Hugh pushed through the underbrush until he was in the middle of the stand. The trees were so close together the horses couldn’t get in here. He put Little Brother up in the crotch of an oak tree, and slipped away again, the dew soaking through his sneakers and the calves of his jeans, burrs catching in his cuffs.

  At home, she yelled at him for getting wet in the morning, for leaving the house without telling her, for rising too early; and he discovered his shield was gone, out in the pasture with Little Brother. The things she said cut through him.

  That night he snuck out to the pasture and brought Little Brother back.

  “Kiss me,” whispered Little Brother, three nights later. Hugh, fortified with having survived another onslaught of words that afternoon, kissed the side of Little Brother’s face that wasn’t smashed.

  “Eat me,” whispered Little Brother.

  Hugh left him in the closet for three months. Little Brother said the same thing in late January when Hugh took him out and opened his cradling cotton to look at him.

  Hugh needed Little Brother’s strength. His mother had found a new man, a man with a hand that hurt and a face that snarled and a tongue full of words that stuck under the skin and pricked like fish hooks.