The Stud Book (13 page)

He didn’t want to stop.

There was a time when he’d been walking with Hannah, and it was night. They’d gone off campus to see a band—some kind of thrash metal theatrics, all fake blood and pus. It was a band with guys named things like Flattus Maximus and Beefcake the Mighty. Jesus. Those days, he’d followed Hannah everywhere. The show had been in a warehouse district. They had to walk a ways that seemed farther after the show than on the way in, down empty side streets.

Hannah had worn these white high heels.

He ran a hand over his cock. He hated himself for pulling his pud in a public toilet. It wasn’t right, but also—big deal! His inner Puritan could buzz off. There was nobody else there. He was alone in the bathroom. He was alone almost everywhere he went, really. Why stop? He gave another tug. He paid his mortgage, he had a strong credit history. If he applied for a new loan, he’d be the easiest credit file in town. He spit on his hand, cupped it, and rubbed his damp palm over the head of his cock.

His wife was great. He loved his wife.

There wasn’t enough time in a lifetime to show Sarah all the love he had for her. There wasn’t enough safety, enough security, in an uncertain future to keep her as safe as he wanted to. Everything he did was for Sarah, and he respected her! Respect was crucial. She was gorgeous, smart, and patient. She was his twin, his body; when he looked at her, he somehow saw not some other person, but a part of himself. They were on the same page, all the time—he could trust her.

Now she marked the dates they had sex on the calendar, which was okay, until friends came over, and then it seemed a little weird. She highlighted her fertile days in yellow. She’d started using a computer program to keep track. She walked into his mind, his fantasy, and he had to push her away. This wasn’t about Sarah.

Coming back from the show, twenty years earlier, Hannah’s shoes had cut into her feet. She complained. She was drunk. She leaned on his shoulder. He was stumbling, too drunk to drive, but not so wasted to think he could drive.

He pushed her up against a loading dock. No, wait, she pulled him closer. It was her move first. When they made out, their mouths were sweet with beer and mashed together, and they fell or folded themselves down onto the cement stairs.

Her legs were so long in those white shoes she was taller than he was. He’d climbed on top of her and hitched up her skirt. No—that’s not it. She’d pushed her way on top of him. She’d been the one jerking on his fly. His black jeans. His effort to be some downtown kinda cool. His head was against a cement piling, something to keep trucks from running into that part of the loading dock. It cut into his neck. He said, “Somebody might see—” his voice broke, and Hannah laughed.

She pulled open her button-down shirt and showed him her bra, then her tits underneath. Her bra opened in front that easily, with one twist of her fingers like she was turning a key in a lock. He didn’t want to do it. He was scared. She said, “Come on, there’s nobody here. It’s dark.”

It was downtown. Public. He said, “Let’s get back.” To the dorms, he meant, that warm, safe place.

She grabbed him through his jeans and gave a squeeze that made him yip.

But that was years ago. He’d been drunk. Maybe he had it wrong. Memory is as faulty as anything. Could be he’d climbed on her. Maybe he’d undone his pants and lifted her skirt. It was his memory now. He could tell the story the way he wanted to remember it, full of the weight and curve of her boobs and the taste of her skin. Could be she was the one who said “No,” who said “Wait,” and maybe she didn’t mean it. He ran his damp hand faster over his tight rod, and then again, and he didn’t want to stop but he knew he should but why should he? He remembered how soft she’d been, and how sure of herself, and when he saw her now, in the paper, it was like she was there for him, like she hadn’t left him so long ago, like she hadn’t given the It’s-not-you-it’s-me speech, and he remembered instead an earlier evening when they first met, the way she whispered, “Come
to my room,” and he closed his eyes and heard it again in his head and he couldn’t help it he shot his wad and pressed his cock down, felt the kiss of water, sent spew to lace its way through the toilet bowl and he hated himself even as he groaned, as he breathed, as he crunched the newspaper in one hand.

When he opened his eyes, he’d gone blind—all those warnings he heard as a kid, and now here it was, he was blind! The bathroom was uniformly black. He couldn’t see the stall door in front of him. He couldn’t see his own massive shoes.

No. That wasn’t it. He’d been in one place for too long. The motion sensor.

He waved the folded newspaper over his head, a gesture that fell between a command and an SOS. The lights stayed off. The toilet, that overeager red-eyed bastard, saw the wave of the paper in the dark and flushed again beneath him. He waved the paper once more. No luck. He fumbled and reached a hand out into the complete darkness, until he jammed his fingers against the stall door. He found the lock—he could reach it from where he sat—unlatched it, and pushed the door open. But the door didn’t trigger the motion sensor. either. Who’d designed this space? He sat in the dark for minutes, or maybe seconds. Either way, too long. What if the whole building had gone out? Or the whole city? Maybe it was a power shortage, or a terrorist attack, and he was on the toilet with his pants down.

It was a darkness so thick, so entirely absent of light, that Ben started to see shapes in it. He saw something yellow flickering always just to the side of his vision. He lost sense of the space, thought the walls were closer than they were, then farther away, and when he reached, he never had it right. The pitch-black room started to seem full of motion, full of space without the confines of visible walls. He could practically see molecules floating in the air. He knocked his coffee over, heard the clatter, and felt the cup hit his bare leg. Lukewarm liquid seeped into his sock. And there was that little hiss overhead again, as the air freshener gave a wheeze and crowded the dark with its scent of oranges.

That air freshener acted as a timer, triggering Ben’s guilt: Nobody should stay in the john long enough to hear a timed air freshener twice.

One shoe was soggy with coffee. He had to risk everything,
to get out. He stood up and shuffled forward in the dark. He shuffled and he waved the paper. He swung the stall door open, hoping the radius of that motion would be enough to turn the lights on. The door swung open, then closed, then open again, in the dark. He stood and waved the folded-up newspaper just past the border of that stall doorway. He shuffled a tentative step forward in the pitch black, then another, and still nothing happened. His pants were around his ankles. Clearly this was going to take more commitment. He bent to grab his trousers and pull them up, and when he did, smack—fuck!—there it was, the crack of his face against porcelain, the sink. That sink was closer than he thought. Who moved the goddamn sink?

The automated faucet turned on, triggered by the swing of Ben’s head as he fell to his knees. That sink mocked him—the whole bathroom could go on with or without Ben. He was nothing. The door opened. Finally the lights came on. Some big moose stood in the doorway. Blood ran rich from Ben’s nose, and he moved his nose with his hand. It clicked sideways, bone against bone, and he was instantly sick and light-headed. There was a taste of metal in the back of his throat and his eyes swelled shut even as he tried to see straight, tried to sort out two sinks or one sink, two or one, every line doubled and blurry. He blinked and squinted, and felt his head swim.

The guy who’d tripped the light just held the door open for fuck’s sake. He didn’t back out or come in, like he was waiting for a prom date that would never show. Ben clutched the folded newspaper in one hand, and there she was, the love of his life, smiling—two of her. No, one. Then two again, the lines wobbling—about to fly off in a private plane. She’d been voted into office! People loved her! He loved her. Ben loved her. He’d voted for her, too. He filled in the little red circle with such sweet, sweet care. His cock was out, limp and exposed. Humiliation, pain, love, and Hannah—it was all familiar. Before he passed out, before he fell against the tile floor and before the paramedics came, for a moment he felt so young again that it was almost all right. The taste of blood in his mouth was salty as sex. It was like he was in college, and in love, half-drunk, out on the town, heading back to the dorms with Hannah.

A
rena was trapped in the Temple Everlasting of Life on Earth. She could see the world out the storefront window but was too shy to duck around the skinny guy who’d lured her in. “Are you happy with the shape of your life?” he asked. Arena nodded. She’d be happier if she could get out of there, politely.

Behind him a wall was covered with photos of the cosmos torn from magazines: black holes and the Milky Way. One read
URANUS IN INFRARED
. Those words made her queasy in ways she couldn’t articulate even to herself.

The guy was maybe twenty, in a necktie and a white shirt, dressed as though for some kind of office job. Was this place his job? It wasn’t an office. It smelled like mildew and was cluttered with half-unpacked boxes. He said, “Let me tell you about morphic resonance.” His fingers were long, and they tickled the air as though he was flipping through an invisible Rolodex.

She held a smudged address on a slip of paper—her mom’s store, LifeCycles. She’d gotten off the bus, walked down NE Williams, and met this man on the street, where he stood on an oil-stained square of sidewalk. He’d invited her in with the words “Hey, beauty, when’s the last time you found a genuine bargain?”

She and her mom bought her back-to-school clothes in dustier retail corners, and called them legit. She wouldn’t have gone inside except she believed his place was some kind of store. She thought the word “temple” on the front was ironic. She thought the word “bargain” was sincere.

Was there somebody else, in back in the dark? Somebody very quiet?

He said, “If you control your energy, you control the future. It’s a resource.”

She tried looking into the guy’s brown eyes, past the fringe of inky lashes, to read if he was a rapist, a psycho, sincere, or just lonely. How would she know? She couldn’t even look at him for long. The eye contact thing unnerved her. She ran the slip of paper through her fingers.

The temple was narrow and dark, lit by the glow of altars. White pedestals marked the floor like in an art gallery, basically, only a crowded gallery and with the lights turned off. It was like a gallery that couldn’t pay its bills. He said, “What you do now will impact the lives of your children and grandchildren, the future of humankind.”

Was that a threat?

He said, “We’ve seen it with littering, clear-cutting, and then reforestation. But it’s bigger than that. If you’ve got ten minutes I’ll show you tricks to expedite human enlightenment.”

Her eyes had started to adjust to the dark. There
was
somebody in the back—a face. A man. It was Albert Einstein, in plaster, on a pedestal. He looked out from a dim halo of orange light, his usual cloud of hair a solid thing now. These were altars to science.

When Einstein looked at her, Arena had no trouble looking back. Maybe the temple was like going to OMSI, Portland’s science museum. That’d be
edifying
, as they told the kids on every school field trip.

She let the temple sales-guy guide her through his showroom. His words held the bite of mints, his skin breathed soap.

He said, “Take the Egyptians.”

“Okay,” she said, as though he were actually offering them to her.

He led her to a mural on a northern wall. There was a honey-colored image of pyramids and an anorexic dog-headed god, like
something copied from a middle school textbook, painted right onto the cinder block. He said, “The Egyptians were in touch with the divine.”

Letters stenciled on the lumpy concrete wall read
WHAT REMAINS AFTER CORPOREAL DEATH?

He shepherded her to a second display, where another sign, stenciled on the same wall, read
GREEK PHILOSOPHERS ASKED DO WE HAVE AN EVOLVING INTERGENERATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS?!?!

There was a life-size picture painted on a square of freestanding glass of a man, presumably a Greek, with a broken nose and a laurel wreath.

The man at her side, also maybe a Greek, said, “All cultures dabble in understanding the great mystery. African holy men and Indian gurus.” She took another look at him. He was pretty hot, actually, in his underweight kind of way. If he wasn’t a rapist, she was free to check him out.

On the wall it said
HOW REALISTIC IS METEMPSYCHOSIS
?

He asked, “Do you ever shed your clothes?”

“No.” That was unnerving. She took a step back, then stumbled against a box on the floor in the dim light.

He caught her hand to keep her from falling. He said, “Of course you do. Everyone does.”

She tugged her hand away from him. He let go easily. She read that as evidence he was okay, proof he wasn’t a predator—proof of what she wanted to believe.