Butterfly Skin (35 page)

He could hardly have seen anything. Most likely he had got hungry, woken up and started crying. I got up. My right hand and the lower part of my stomach were covered in semen. I darted into the bathroom, swearing and holding down my prick that still hadn’t wilted. For a second I remembered how Larisa had sworn and darted into the bathroom on that night when we made our son. Denis is eleven years old now. He calls Larisa’s new husband Daddy, and I think that’s a good thing. Larisa tells me our son recently won some kind of prize in the academic competitions at school, and I don’t know if I can feel proud of this: after all, I’m not raising the child and my entire contribution to him amounted to a few cubic millimeters of semen released into his mother when I saw a blow from a machete sever a woman’s heavy breasts.

That night I realized that we had to separate. As I held the bottle that my son was sucking on, I was acutely aware that right now I was doing something monstrous, perhaps more monstrous than everything else that I was going to do. A man who has just ejaculated, picturing to himself a woman with her eyes gouged out and her breasts covered with stab wounds from a corkscrew, has no right to feed a child. He has no right to hold a bottle of breast milk in his hand, even if it is artificial breast milk, as artificial as Larisa’s blue fur and her greenish eyes.

I was a very good father. I loved my son very much. I didn’t want to hand on to him the hell in which I had lived all my life. That hell was hidden so deep that I forgot about it myself, and only occasionally an image in a movie, a phrase spoken by someone, a dream out of nowhere plunged me back into it. Perhaps I got it from my father – I’d have liked to ask him about that, but it was kind of awkward. What answer would he have given me? Yes, son, I have also lived in hell all my life? I’m sorry you ended up with a piece of it? I didn’t want my son to have even a part of the hell that I lived in. I thought it would be better if he never saw a man who knew that his appearance on Earth had resulted, not from the melding of two loving bodies, but from a machete blow that severed his mother’s breasts.

“I wonder,” Larisa suddenly says, “if we’d gone to a counselor, would that have saved our marriage?”

I shrug. It would have been awkward for me to ask about this, especially since Larisa still doesn’t know why I divorced her. Luckily for me, a month later she had a casual office affair, and she repentantly confessed her first infidelity to me. I pretended to be shattered and that evening I left home and went to Mike’s place, and two days later I rented an apartment. I’m ashamed to admit it today, but for an entire year, while our divorce was going on, I took pleasure in the fact that Larisa felt she was guilty. I remember that one day she came to my place slightly drunk and tried to persuade me to come back. I played the offended husband, kept repeating “no, no,” and then she went down on her knees and crawled toward me, whining. While she was unbuttoning my fly, it occurred to me that I liked this kind of behavior, and if she acted like that all the time, I wouldn’t mind carrying on seeing her. Since then, many girls have stood on their knees in front of me, crying, but the first time is always special. The blow job didn’t turn out all that well, though. Maybe because she was still crying, or maybe because she didn’t take her spectacles off.

That Larisa, tearful and drunk, is even harder to see today than the twenty-year-old girl whose heavy breasts I used to fondle on the top floor of all the apartment blocks in the neighborhood. I feel ashamed of that last blow job – but what else could I do? Larisa always acted up when I bought the latest volume of de Sade, who had just started to be translated extensively, and she walked out of the room almost as if she was making a point when Mike and I watched
Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS
or some other movie of the same kind. As if I’d said to her: dear Larisa, the only things that arouse me are blood and violence, blood and violence. The marriage counselor would have been very surprised too.

“I don’t know,” I say, “it was so long ago. We were mere children, we didn’t know what we wanted. I dreamed of being a rock star and you dreamed of being a scientist. So it’s hard to imagine now…”

“But do you regret now that you got divorced?” she asks, and I realize that the old resentment is still alive. I don’t think she has ever stood on her knees, crying, in front of anybody else.

“Of course I regret it,” I reply, “the way things turned out with you was stupid, and I loved Denis very much. And you?”

This time she shrugs.

“No. Everything’s just fine with me. Denis calls Oleg Daddy. I guess it’s actually good that things turned out the way they did…”

At that moment, just for a second, I imagine that she already knew all about me back then – about masturbating in the shower, about de Sade, about my fantasies, about the machete slicing off the breasts on the TV screen, she knew, but regarded it as endearing eccentricity, nothing serious. Maybe all my friends know and they simply don’t take any notice? People have all kinds of fantasies.

“Everything’s absolutely fine with me,” Larisa repeats, “but how about you – are you happy with your life? We meet every month, but we don’t ask about the most important things.”

It would be awkward for me to ask about the most important things, and for a second I freeze. Not because I’m trying to weigh up if everything’s okay with me, but because at that moment I see you. You’re standing on tip-toe so that the sharp point of the stake is jammed into your crotch and your arms, raised above your head, are chained to rings set into the ceiling.

That’s how I left you this morning and I think your legs must be tired by now. You’re starting to sink lower, little by little, the stake is entering deeper, the blood is flowing onto the floor. You have beautiful, slim thighs, with no cuts on them – yet. I’ll come back late, untie you and wash your wounds, I’ll caress your left breast and remember Larisa in her artificial blue fur jacket. I’ll feed you the best dinner I can cook, pour the wine, and then tell you a story about a little boy and a little girl who grew up in a country far away. They were afraid of sex, they felt ashamed in front of each other, it took them three years to lose their virginity. Since then they’ve grown up, I’ll say, matured a great deal, come to understand many things, but they will never be able to talk to each other about this.
This
is the most important thing. I’ll ask you to give me a blow job, in memory of the days when Larisa still used to wear spectacles. And afterward I’ll brew coffee, which I know how to do, and pour it – straight from the pot – onto your face.

“But how about you – are you happy with life?” Larisa asked. I remembered you and replied:

“I’m happy.”

* * *

I used to dream of being a rock and roll star. Of screaming out the injustice of the world and my own suffering. Of standing on a stage, covered in blood, like Iggy Pop or Nick Rock’n’Roll. I guess my dream came true.

I became a serial killer.

TRY A PENCIL WITH A SHARP POINT. TRY MASTURBATING
for exactly twenty seconds once every fifteen minutes. Time yourself and report on your performance. Try putting the clamps on your nipples before the daily briefing and sitting like that for an hour. Don’t faint. If you do, tell him about it when you come round. Try typing with just your left hand for a whole day. Try buying the very heaviest earrings you can find. Go to a workshop and ask them to make some even heavier. Try to feel the pain in your ear lobes every moment.

Try simply talking to him.