Butterfly Skin (29 page)

“And then what?”

“Well, one thing led to another, and he turned out to be a genuine sex addict. You know, absolutely great. He could go on about it for hours, like those novels in the pink covers. My powerful hands embrace your trembling body… well, and so on. I laughed at first, then I started getting turned on. Once I answered him something like ‘my weak hands grab your trembling prick’ – and then the floodgates opened. Go figure, it’s their night, he’s sitting there on his campus, everyone’s asleep, and he’s writing to me about how he undresses me tenderly, licks me passionately and screws me savagely. But go figure, there I am sitting in the studio like a fool, trying to work, with my hands literally shaking. I can’t jack off at my desk, in front of everyone. I had to say, I tell you what darling, slow down. Why don’t you get back in touch when it’s our morning? And then, go figure, I set the alarm clock for eight, and go straight to the computer. And there he is already, all set for action. I use one hand on the keyboard and the other to work myself off – Gleb, don’t you listen to this, by the way, you’re still too young – well, after ten minutes, that was it! I don’t know what he was doing all the time, probably the same thing. Well, I send him a tender kiss, hop in the shower, have breakfast, this and that – and by twelve I’m at work, fresh and relaxed after the morning.”

“And where did it all lead?”

“Nowhere really, you know. He came to Moscow for the winter vacations. I met him in some café the very first evening, we talked, had a coffee, and I see – there’s no way, he doesn’t do a thing for me. Well, I’m not a little girl anymore, I have to finish what I’ve started: we caught a taxi, went to my place, got undressed, lay down and screwed. You know, all pretty average. A definite C plus. To be quite honest, I was expecting more. I could have been ‘Like a Virgin’ with him. He knew where to stroke, where to kiss, well you know. Well anyway, in the morning I wake up as usual when the alarm clock goes off – and go straight to the computer. And, of course, as you realize, there’s nothing in the computer, because my virtual lover has devirtualized himself and he’s sleeping just two yards away from me. What I really wanted to do was shake him awake and send him out to the nearest internet café. So, in short, that was how it all ended: while he was in Moscow I got out of the habit of getting up early. Now we meet occasionally on the internet and send each other greetings on public holidays.

Pull up the sweater, pull down the cup of the bra, take out the breast, jab the pencil into the nipple that is already hard, then again, and again. How does he know, how can he feel what I need? A wave of warmth runs right through my body. Once again, just a little harder.

You think it’s easy – being a man like me?

You watched too many fashionable nineties movies, I guess

Natural Born Killers
and
Curdled

And heaps of other B- and even Z-movies

For eight dollars they tell you

That being a serial killer is cool

Famous killers of the nineteen fifties

Charlie Starkweather and Caril Fugate

Were the models

For Mickey and Malory in
Natural Born Killers

Charlie said when he was caught that he had no regrets

That he still hated everybody

This is easy to believe:

He made love

To fourteen-year-old Caril on the sofa

Where he raped her mother an hour earlier

With the father’s body lying in room

And when they were done

He went upstairs and put the barrel of his gun

To two-year-old Betty Jane’s throat and –

No, he didn’t fire – he waited

Until the little girl choked to death

He was real scum,

Theories of childhood trauma

Work perfectly in his case

But even after he said: “I still hate everybody,”

He still added: “and myself too”

Although, as you can guess

Introspection was never his strong point

Living is very hard when you hate yourself

And I had a happy childhood

I was a good little boy

From a decent Moscow family

I was afraid to watch the news, because

They talked about things too frightening for me

When I heard about the stadium in Santiago de Chile

Where they tortured and killed thousands of people in 1973

I was shattered for two weeks

I looked into people’s faces passing by,

Trying to understand how they could carry on living

If they knew about this thing too

I still don’t understand, to be quite honest.

Dostoyevsky said the harmony of the world

Is not worth a single tear shed by a tormented child

But a world in which there is no harmony

Is not worth anything at all

And this is the world I have lived in all my life

I have never believed in God,

Perhaps because I sensed

That Christ was not alone in dying for our sins

But every drop of blood, every groan of hunger

Every raped woman’s scream

(once every fifteen minutes, remember that?),

Well, that all of this concerns each one of us

Chikatilo’s wife also said

Her husband fainted at the sight of blood

How well I understand him.

I was a good little boy, you hear?

I was kind, and I still am kind

I love people, my pity for them brings a lump to my throat

And when I squeeze a newly cut-out heart in my hand

My own heart contracts too, in tenderness and pain

A lump in my throat

How can a man like this live, when I know

The blood has eaten into my hands like coal into a miner’s hands

How can I live when my memory

Is like a torture chamber

In which every object –

Even the most innocent –

Can only inflict pain?

Once I woke up in the night

In my Moscow apartment

And suddenly realized none of them had existed

Not that teenager, the one with plump lips

That were torn to shreds when she screamed

Not that one whose eyes were burned out by the magnifying glass,

Eyes so blue they looked like shards of broken sky

Not that one with the breasts so large

That I cut them off in thin slices for several days

Nor all the many others I recall so well

I realized none of them had existed

A wet and bloody dream

A masturbation fantasy, to make me come quicker

A murderous one-man play

I lay in bed, weeping tears of happiness

Repeating like an incantation:

“I haven’t killed anyone”

Still weeping, I went to the kitchen

Objects lay on the table, no longer reminders of torture and torment,

The fork on which I never wound the entrails from the slashed abdomen

Of a living seventeen-year-old girl

Who screamed so loud, I was afraid

The insulation of the basement would not save us

The knife with which I never carved words of tenderness and love