The army medic you’re sitting next to at the empty bar looks just like Tom Hardy from the side. That chiseled-face Anglo bearded crazy, tense churning underneath, jawline sharp enough to cut, full lips in perpetual pout. A coin toss where heads is boyish and tails is brutish. I get that a lot, he says, his grin crooked. You like his crooked grin. Fuck symmetry. Fuck all those beautiful, symmetrical people.
He’s refreshingly forward, blunt. Clearly educated, in a way that seems more self-directed than institutional. You respect that. He knows how to engage you, which is rare. He knows a little bit about art, and he asks you to choose a piece for his new apartment. Based on his stated affinity for Hieronymus Bosch, fire and brimstone, medieval themes, and men looking heroic on horses, you recommend a print of an Albrecht Dürer woodcut, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He looks it up on his phone. Delighted, he orders it right there, in front of you.
Both of you moved to this city to be with the person you were in love with, but then your relationships crumbled. Since then, you’ve been suspended in the amber of the world of your ex-lovers — a haunted, binary city where every bar, every restaurant, every square of sidewalk is either Somewhere You Went With Them or Somewhere You Never Went With Them. And now you’ve fallen into each other’s orbits, snagged by the mutually recognized gravity of wilted-heart outsiders who are tourists who are prisoners who are exiles.
Sitting there, three whiskeys in, he begins to tell you, in detail, the things he wants to do to your body. Things he wants to make you do.
You lean forward into his words. Into his want.
As he describes what he wants to do to you, your initial reaction is fear — not of him, but of the acts themselves, their implications. But fear is the threshold of curiosity, and you immediately begin to analyze your own aversion.
Where does this recoil reflex come from?
Why does it exist?
Does it really mean something else?
Can it be eliminated?
Will eliminating it change something about me?
What kind of girl will that make me?
Well, what “kind of girl” am I now?
Asking yourself questions leads to other questions, and it takes you down a meandering path that winds and winds and twists and splits off over and over, and when you finally look up and pay attention to your surroundings again, night is creeping and you are very, very far away from where you thought you would be. It’s snapping out of a daydream with tongs in hand as your smoke detector shrills. It’s realizing you passed your exit thirty-five miles ago and now you’re two counties away.
You’re powerfully attracted to the fact that the things that turn him on are unconventional. The bizarre, elaborate nature of the fantasy he’s spinning out for you is sinking its hooks into the dark folds of your brain. Rituals and ingredients: fruit and egg timers and medicine and toys and specific articles of clothing. Imagining the choreography of objects makes you dizzy. They whizz and dance around your head like hearts/stars over a smitten/smashed cartoon character. Except in this scenario, you’re not a cartoon character. Nor are you a girl. You’re just another object (though a central one) that other objects move in and around and through. It’s almost planetary.
You suddenly ache to be the sun.
(Besides, not enough is said in favor of self-objectification. Or consensual objectification.)
He’s clear that he needs your full consent. He warns you that what he’ll do is intense, that you might cry, that it’s very common to cry, but that he’ll be careful, respect your limits, and be tender with you afterwards. Somehow, you find it easy to believe him.
You tell him what you want from him. Because this is an exchange of sorts. These are negotiations. The kind of negotiations adults who know what they want make, right? That’s what you tell yourself. Oh yeah, he says to your request, truly pleased, that’s no problem. I’d be happy to.
Maybe I can get out of my head, you think, and live inside my body for a while. If it’s intense enough, maybe I can leave my body too. Maybe it will hurt. Maybe I’ll cry, like he said, and it will knock loose this jagged thing that’s been stuck in my chest and flush it away. Like a branch down a river. Maybe I’ll feel some sense of relief afterwards. Maybe this will help me get over him.
You walk out the door in front of him into the humid, chirping night. Into the maybe.
You don’t cry.
