Documentary slag, the serial debris of his compulsive remigrations, litters his trail to the coldwater flat, crumbs for the wayward orphan. Letters, old bills, a lock of her red hair, trinkets, photos – a thousand eyes on him, all his own. His tears disturb not one pool, but an infinite regression of pools within pools. What drives him to come back here?
– Come back here! Come back here!
Film tins lie in the frozen streets like manhole covers. Shredded scraps of notepaper fall like snow, and camera lenses twinkle in the deep white heaps, reflecting the lights of signs and shop windows, the passing traffic. The wind bowls through the gaps and chasms of the city, orchestrating the percussive mutterings of engines, the clangour of horns and auto crashes, the reverberant desperation of immaterialized sorrow. Da capo. Da capo. Passing his own shadow, trammelling his own footsteps. Over and over again.
– Again! Again! Again!
I must be mad, he thinks.
– Yes, mad! You are mad, Lucky! Mad about your Cleo! Hurry, my love! I am hot! hot! hot!
Mannequins model her underwear, her rings and bangles, her ancient gown, flash their dead green eyes and hard white bottoms at him. Notebooks block the slush of gutters, their ink running hopelessly, and spools of tape tumble out of metal wastebaskets like wild red hair.
– Was I the first, Lucky? Really the first?
He is drawn up the dimly-lit stairwell like a clock hand to its hour. The wooden stairs creak with anxiety, his hand sweats on the worn rail. He watches his reluctant ascent, blowing a flute at it to drive away the stink of piss and ink. The flute quickens him. Eager now, he climbs hand over hand. Cleo squats on the bidet spraying ice-cold water up her womb. He lies on the flowered carpet, listening to the splash of water, staring at the ceiling, piping himself up the dingy stairwell with its chipped and battered walls, once green, past its urgent graffiti: HURRY, LUCKY! MY CUNT’S ON FIRE! The carpet smells, not so much of daffodils, as of sheep, too long dead.
– I heard you out there in the corridor. You were peeking through the keyhole I opened the door.
– I watched you through the branches. I’d never seen anything like you. I fell.
A child still, with big green eyes and long lashes, springy red ringlets all over her head, slipping barefoot through the fresh grass to the water’s edge. Dappled with sunlight and leaf shadow. Her white gown, fine as gossamer, twines about her slender thighs and narrow hips, clings to her breasts, small and firm as new apples. She kneels on a flat rock and dips her finger in the pool. The gown folds into a soft crease down her buttocks, flows forward between her thighs as though caught on a sudden breeze. His once-quiet heart pounds in his ears. Something is happening!
He opens the door. He hesitates at the threshold, as though anticipating . . . what? He is disappointed. It is the same. Or perhaps he is relieved. Anyway the same: a hanging bulb, a bed, stove and cupboard, a chest, a chair. The mattress on the bed is laid with a frayed quilt. The window-shade is torn and the spring is gone: it hangs at the same odd angle. The flowered wallpaper is soot smeared and peeling. It has always been peeling. She smiles at him from the mirror over the washbasin, her white teeth sparkling.
– It’s our anniversary, Lucky!
Her long slender thighs are distorted, creased by the lip of the bidet. In this part of the city, they have bidets. The ridges of her spine, curved slightly forward, cast a ripple of dark dimples down her back, crossed by the downy shadows of her shoulder blades. Her bottom is hunched forward, like a cat’s when it shits, and beneath the smooth white cheeks, steam is rising. She watches the man, stretched out on the old wool rug, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, where nothing is happening, nothing in her mind at all, one of his hands clutching his rigid organ, the other an empty wine bottle.
– You’re just torturing yourself, she says, and lowers her steaming cunt over his face.
– That’s right, it sizzled when you touched the water, he says, I remember now!
– That’s not true, Lucky, she laughs, and unpins her wide-brimmed bonnet, shaking out her curls. You’re making it all up! Her ruffled white blouse is creased starchly over her prim breasts, and her full skirts rustle as they brush the old oak bed. The door clicks shut behind them.
– Your nipples were petalled like pink daisies.
– Help me unbutton, Lucky! Please! Hurry!
– In your navel you kept a –
He switches off the tape recorder. Street sounds leak into the room. He sits on the bidet, smoking a pipe, spraying his balls with cold water, gazing thoughtfully at the old bed with its stained and sagging mattress. She writhes there, her nymphae puffy, inflamed, the clitoris quivering, her head thrashing from side to side.
– I thought you knew everything, he says softly. I loved you more than life.
The gown in a filmy puddle at her feet; the branch between his legs; she gazing curiously at her breasts, cupping them in her slender hands, squeezing the pink buds.
– Lucky . . . ?
– The first? I don’t know, there might have been others. But if there were, I wasn’t counting them. I started with you, Cleo. Number one.
Her tummy is flat and soft, with a deep navel like a secret eye. On the hard nub of her childish mound: a small cluster of tiny red ringlets in the shape of a little goblet. She steps cautiously into the pool, shuddering, clutching her breasts, then stands there spraddle-legged, staring at her reflected orifices. Gently, tentatively, she strokes herself.
– You were masturbating. I heard your heavy breathing through the keyhole. I rose from the bidet and crossed to the chair, where you couldn’t see me.
– I masturbated all the time then. I was happy, Cleo. I wasn’t afraid of anything. Then I fell and put on my weight forever.
He opens the door. Again the same. The frayed quilt, the crooked shade, the battered tin wastebasket with the pink swans. Long ago, he bought the room. He has tried to keep it just as it was. As best he can. As best he can remember. The old oak bed, the hat tree, the empty wine bottle, the basin and bidet with their coldwater taps, everything in its place. Even the same coarse white towels, now yellowed with age, the oil-cloth on the chest. He has tried, but it is not the same. There is now a yellow film box in the wastebasket; he doesn’t remember how it got there. New holes in the rug, stains in the mattress, rust in the basin. A torn photograph under the bed. And there were more mirrors then, some of the mirrors are gone.
– No, they’re just the same. Only we looked in them more often then. You were just a boy. You didn’t have a moustache then.
She dips her finger in the pool, licks it, sticks it up his rectum. His balls drop into his scrotum. She blows on his groin and black hairs sprout, spreading like vines. Like a bird with a worm, she draws forth his reluctant penis, then slides the foreskin back and sucks the heart-shaped crown. His hips buck.
– How did I – ah – get into this room? he cries.
– I don’t know, that was a long time ago, she says. I was still a virgin.
She stands at the washbasin, gazing at him through the mirror. Her eyes are in shadows, but their whites seem all the more striking. She unties the pussycat bow of her ruffled blouse. Her movements are hesitant, hurried, blurred, flashing in and out of deep shadows, but the flowered wallpaper is very clear. She stares wide-eyed into the mirror, her hands groping for the buttons on the back of her blouse. He approaches, wearing boxer shorts, baggy in the seat, and an undershirt with narrow shoulder straps. He undoes the buttons, tugs the blouse free of the skirt, and lifts it over her shoulders – but it gets stuck there: they have forgotten to remove the wide-brimmed bonnet.
– Wait, Lucky! Wait!
– I . . . I can’t!
They watch themselves fuck, sandwiched in mirrors. Their hips heave frantically in an infinite series, their thighs slap, she bites his shoulder, complaining, counting, rips hairs from his ass, from his innumerable asses, he explodes in her, his seed bursting forth in a chorus of imitative spasms, and he sinks away, all by himself, on her breasts. He is unable even to contemplate this collapse in the mirrors, but closes his eyes and allows himself to slip down into some deep consoling cave. In his fading mind’s eye, the bucking of all those hips gradually gets out of sync, begins to undulate slowly like waves lapping a shore. She slides out from under him, and he hears her scratching on the notepad she keeps by the bed.
– Forty-seven minutes, 836 thrusts, she announces flatly. You were doing better than that five years ago. You don’t love me anymore, Lucky!
– I just realized, Cleo. There’s one too many ashtrays in this room.
It almost worked once with the towels. When he least expected it. Nothing special about the moment, they weren’t even fucking, he was just washing his face at the basin, like a thousand times before. He reached for the towel, and suddenly he had it: the scene, whole, just as it was then, her body stunted by refraction, her legs as though sprouting from her breasts, buttocks just under her shoulder blades – she ducks under, and her bottom bobs to the surface for one fantastic second, gleaming bright and pure in the sunlight. And then, with a foamy kick: gone. It’s only the towel in his hand, soapy water in the basin, his own image, wet and perplexed, in the mirror.
– It was pink then, your anus, like a little tiny raspberry, with just the lightest fleck of downy red hair ringing it round. And your cunt, too. Pink, Cleo. Just a blush. Like the crease in a peach.
– What colour is it now? she asks, coming down.
– Wait! I’m not trying to hang on to anything, Cleo, I just want to get through to – mmmf!
Wow, it is hot, her cunt, it burns his lips and makes his tongue leap and throb. At first, he can’t see a thing, but then she leans forward to lick at his groin, and past the goosebumps on her cold wet ass, he sees himself, projected onto the ceiling, climbing the stairs, peeking through the keyhole. Why does he keep coming back? It’s impossible, he knows that. He could have recorded it then, got it all down somehow, but you always think of such things too late. And once it’s gone, there’s no remaking it, the door closes and disappears into the wall forever, it’s useless. Yes, he’s a fool, jacking off in the corridors of some lost episode. He leans forward, weeping sorrily for all the beauty that escapes him, and finds the door there after all: it opens and he tumbles into the room.
– My hero!
Balls of lint and dust on the carpet. Cracks in the baseboard, the cupboard, the chest. The chair legs are nicked and scuffed, worse at the feet. There is gum stuck under the seat, a microphone concealed in the bed springs. Cleo’s pale ankles are planted in a little mound of her own underwear.
– We did fuck once in the country, didn’t we, Cleo?
– Where did you come from, Lucky?
She steps out of her puddle of panties and straddles his head, her bangles ringing. Did she wear bangles that time? Does it matter? Paint is splattered on the underside of the washbasin and a strip of wallpaper is missing.
– Do you remember what we did seven years ago tonight?
– No.
– Oh, Lucky, you’re hopeless! How old are you?
– I don’t know.
– What is today? Don’t you even know that? Who are you anyway? What’s the matter with you?
Above him, her cunt yawns: a bottomless pit. He should know, he’s explored it. The great maw. Everybody in town trying to fill it up nowadays, the fools. Can’t be done. She’s driving the whole city nuts. He can’t see her face, can only hear it.
– Speak to me, Lucky! Any answers, I don’t care how true they are, just talk to me!
On her ass, there’s a projection of him pulling her bloomers down, caressing her tight cunt and white bottom, but he can only see the lower edge of it, foreshortened, like a body refracted in a pool of water. He backs it up and starts it over.
– Bend over, Cleo.
He unbuttons her skirt, unlaces her corset. She watches him as though in fright through the mirror. His hands fondle her young breasts, two firm little bubbles with tiny dark tips. He kisses her neck under the dark ringlets, her throat, her armpits. She seems about to swoon. He pulls her bloomers down, stroking the little cluster of ringlets on her pubis, caressing her bright white bottom. He nips her cheeks in his teeth, brushes them with his moustache, licks her anus, then runs his tongue up her crack and spine. She drops limply into his arms, her eyes rolled back.
– It’s our anniversary, she murmurs. I’ve brought the wine.
– There was a tree, wasn’t there? A rock?
– Why are you staring at the chair?
– A pool, a meadow? Wasn’t there, Cleo?
– And wild flowers?
– Yes! That’s it!
– Wild flowers!
–Good!
– A river!
– No . . .
– Yes, a river, flowing hard and fast, with churning rapids, and all the reeds along the bank, all the reeds were penises!
– No, Cleo . . .
– Long golden penises with big violet heads like giant acorns! Wherever I moved, the reeds tried to follow, leaning toward me! As I danced around them, they swayed, to and fro, to and fro, stirring a frantic hot breeze! Whush! Whush!
– Uh, Cleo . . .
– I leaped back and forth across them! They thrashed about wildly, pulling at their roots! The wind rose! The reeds grew bigger and bigger! Oh, Lucky! There was thunder and a thick perfume, convulsions, the skies were aflame! Oh my god! Still they grew! Their heads burst, raining nectar on me! I was screaming. I threw myself on hundreds of them at once – !
He watches her roll about on the carpet, fucking the wine bottle.
– Damn you, Cleo. It wasn’t like that at all.
She faints.
He carries her past the bare bulb, hanging near the stove, and lays her on the bed. He smiles, scratching his armpits. He spreads her legs, doubling her knees back with a fluttering flash of light and shadow. Hmmm. There is a cork in her cunt. He ponders this, poking about at the pale little cunt; then he brightens. He reaches into the fly of his boxer shorts, and as though pulling a blade from a jacknife, opens out a corkscrew. He stabs it into the cork and she starts up suddenly as though in pain.
– Oh, Lucky, you don’t love me anymore. You’re just using me!
– Hold still, damn it!
He lies on his back, head propped by quilt and cushions. She straddles his prick, facing away, leaning on his knees, her feet in his armpits. On one cheek of her ass, he is taking her maidenhead with his corkscrew penis, revolving round and round, impatiently manipulating her cumbrous limbs, kicking her in the face with his stockinged feet: on the other, he is watching through the keyhole while they fuck on the bidet, surrounded by mirrors and cameras.
– Now, if I can just bring these two projections together somehow, on top of each other, right over the asshole . . .
– My god, what is it you want, Lucky? Do you want this room to just disappear, is that it?
– Don’t say that, Cleo! Goddamn it, that scares the hell out of me!
His heart is racing. She sits on a rough-hewn rock at the water’s edge. Her hair sparkles in the sunlight, her naked body gleams. What is she staring at? Her smooth plump bottom is warped by the rock’s craggy surface into a kind of wry grimace. In the upper right hand corner, at the edge of a forest, there is what looks like an opening into a cave.
– Good lord, Cleo! Has this . . . has this been hanging here all the time?
– No, I bought it for you, Lucky. It was pretty. I thought you’d like it. I thought it’d cheer you up.
He rips the frame down off the wall and, throwing open the window, chucks it out into the night. Snow blows in and whitens the hair on his belly, frosts his cock, chills his heart. Cleo runs to the window, leans out into the storm. Far below, there is a crash and a scream – she laughs excitedly, one hand pressed between her thighs. Now! Swiftly, almost without thinking, he rears back and gives a tremendous kick to that splendid red-haired ass.
– Goodbye, Cleo!
But it is like kicking a rock. She spins round, grinning wildly, her red ringlets glittering with ice crystals, her green eyes shining.
– Lucky!
– Cleo!
– Suck me, Lucky! Now!
– My goddamn foot hurts, Cleo!
– You won’t need it, she laughs, and leaps on him, wrapping her limbs around him, tumbling him to the carpet. It’s our anniversary!
They pitch and roll, her bangles jangling, around the flat – under the bed, past chest and stove, scrunch! over their photo album, slam! up against the coldwater bidet. They kick the chair halfway across the room, cameras and recorders come crashing down on them, they scratch and gouge, mingling hot blood with their sweat.
– That’s it, Lucky! she gasps. Oh yeah!
Photos crumple and stick to their bodies, they wallow in a tangle of celluloid and nylon, the tin wastebasket goes clattering about, bowling over wine bottles. Projections run riot, mirrors tip and weave, there’s a blur of images like film jumping out of its sprockets.
– I love you, Cleo! Gawdamighty, I hate myself, but I can’t help it!
– You’ll get grass stains on your ass, baby! she laughs.
She grabs him by the ears, stuffs his whole head up her cunt – oh criminy! it’s all liquid there between her thighs, a warm pot of honey! There’s nothing like it, doesn’t matter if she’s the most famous piece in the city, when you’re in here she makes you think you’re the only one! He shoves in, but his shoulders jam on her pelvic floor. The soft folds of her vaginal walls slide by his face, as she rotates ninety degrees. He kicks forward: past the fleshy pillow and into the elbows. Pinioned: he starts to panic. But one fierce hand wraps his cock, the other digs deep into his anus for a grip. An impassioned tug: he slides in to the wrists. Another push, and he’s free! Only his feet stick out. He plunges about in there, lapping it up, slaking his ancient thirst, his weary ass wrapped in a hot buttery embrace, while below, to keep him moving, she scratches the soles of his feet.
Finally, as though drugged, he fades away, succumbs to an oily peace, his dreams reduced to simple patterns of light and colour, cycled on a short endless loop.
Or . . .
Or are those dreams, after all? Is it Cleo’s cunt?
Or is this rather some kind of theatre, after all, he the bulb of a magic lantern. . . ? A man walking through an endless-loop winter in somebody else’s nightmare?
My god! Can’t breathe!
Help! Let me out!
Where am I?
Photograph courtesy of quattrostagioni
