The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [80]
32
After television I cast around for a sexual partner and these were usually available at the coffee station.
I had a favorite, although I don’t care to admit it. In my mind I called her Marta. Sometimes, when I thought about her during working hours, I spelled her name phonetically, in Chinese, using the Soothill Syllabary. Some of the dummy texts I wrote in the Phags-pa script were addressed to Marta or documented some pleasing feature of hers.
Marta was wiry, severe. Beneath her skin was the faintest grid work of blue-colored veins that fell short of forming a picture of something I could never quite name.
In bed Marta and I were each impassive and facially bland in the extreme, as if we were competing with each other in the washing of windows. It took effort to control one’s face so totally while fucking, to disable one’s gestures and reactions, and it was not long before I was put in mind of the dead, just dead people, people who had died but who somehow had managed to start fucking each other, not because they still lived, but because this is what the dead did. This is what it was like with Marta. She had died, and then I had died, and then the two of us, in our dead world, had found a way to join parts, a grim and dutiful task, a collaboration of the dead on becoming slightly more dead with each other, this to be achieved only by deadly fucking until we turned blue and gasped with exhaustion, careful not ever to look at each other’s dead faces.
Marta and I collaborated on rapid-fire release, a sprinting frenzy of goal-oriented sex. We chose not to kiss, but sometimes we held hands. Not for tenderness, I don’t think, but for balance. That’s why we sometimes needed to connect our nonsexual parts.
Sometimes it wasn’t Marta whose shoulder I tapped at the coffee station, and I had to make do. I’d walk off with whoever it was and then see Marta not noticing or not caring as she did the same. I could always rely on her to project no response about an encounter. Sometimes it was Emily, or Andrea, or Linda I tapped, and off I went with them, and once it was Tim. I didn’t care. It wasn’t making love, it was making do. And I made do as a matter of course, often toward the end of the week, after a fit of the faceless television in the lounge. It didn’t matter. In private quarters we dropped our robes and transacted with legal precision, as if we were performing light surgery on each other’s genitals, the most delicate cuts, masturbating against the sweaty obstacle of another person, hoping to raise the difficulty of self-release.
We may as well have withdrawn my emission by syringe. The glow of orgasm was so vague, I experienced it as a theoretical warmth in the adjacent wall, as something atmospheric nearby that I could appreciate, but that I myself barely noticed. When I reached climax with Marta, I felt the material vacate my body, which counted for something, but the accompanying gush had departed, relocating off-site. It might as well have been happening to someone else. Perhaps it was.
But as detached as the Marta sessions were, I did prefer them to the solo work. Alone I raised no boner, even when I wanted release before sleep, when a cold, leaky emission was what I craved in order to break my seal with the day and let me think that something different was waiting for me tomorrow. I thought too much of home, and home was not a thought that carried with it the slightest erotic possibility. In fact, it only served to repel it. Home provided a sound defeat of the erotic, a complete and final stifling of it. In bed, alone, I may have approached myself with seductive touch, but it seemed only to trigger a rush of vivid imagery, imagery I myself had lived through, which may as well be called memory, the vilest stuff. The result was that I fell asleep holding my cold penis, missing my wife and daughter.
33
At Forsythe there was little news of the outside world, because the outside world had slowed to a freeze. Most of what happened elsewhere happened silently, underground, far enough out