Nocturnes and Other Nocturnes Read online

  Eyes still shut, the Serpent takes several deep breaths, announcing the end of his narrative. The mute servant once again raises the pungent bowl to the Serpent’s face. The Serpent gently breathes in the aroma and, after a subtle wave ripples through him, he opens his eyes and stares calmly at you.

  Neither of you speaks for several minutes. The Serpent’s tale has left you filled with revulsion for your host.

  You watch as the Serpent, with the help of his servant, disentangles himself from his perch. He approaches you, but stays out of reach.

  You are disgusted to notice that you yearn to touch him. The Serpent stands upright, supported only by his tail. In silence, he stares at you. Your disgust turns upon itself, upon you. You are no longer disgusted by your desire, but rather by your reaction to it and by your lack of compassion.

  Slowly, the Subtle Serpent sheds his old skin. You avert your gaze, turn toward the fireplace.

  Is it the fire that colours your cheeks?

  Someone to Watch

  VIOLENCE

  The three friends are beating a man to death. Frank Loban is one of the three young men doing the beating. For what it’s worth, the other two are Steve Karn and Miller Archack. We never find out the name of the man being killed.

  The man is not quite six feet tall. His longish ash-blond hair is thinning. There’s not much fat on him, but he gives an impression of health, not hunger. He is clean-shaven and elegantly dressed, although not expensively.

  When they first spotted the man, the trio thought he looked weak, an easy victim. In silent agreement, the three friends – aroused by the prospect of violence – walked up to the man. They held out their knives and pushed him into an alley.

  Give us your watch. Give us your wallet. We’ll cut you up.

  I have no watch. I have no wallet. Do what you will.

  And then they felt his unexpected strength. The air was charged with its intensity. They were too cowardly to back down once their threats had been issued. They were scared, not only of this unsettling victim but also of the violence that now seemed inevitable. They were all three experiencing the same emotions, each of them thinking of himself as the only one, the only coward.

  If pressed the young men couldn’t have identified the unpleasant writhing of emotions within them. They would have savagely denied the existence of any such feelings.

  The man refused to empty his pockets. He held out his wrists. See, I have no watch. I have nothing to give but myself.

  Each passing moment made the trio increasingly nervous. Each assailant’s fear was increased by the anxiety of having his cowardice found out by the other two.

  Stop fucking with us. We want your money.

  The three frightened assailants were struggling not to piss themselves. Miller broke the tension by suddenly kicking the man in the crotch. They all dropped their knives and started pummelling the man with their fists. He fell to the ground, amid the discarded pizza boxes, broken beer bottles, dog turds, and torn garbage bags.

  Bastard. Bastard. Don’t fuck with us bastard. You bastard. Fuck. Bastard.

  The three friends kick the fallen man, stomp on him.

  At no point does the man offer any resistance.

  Eventually, the violence peters out. The three assailants are breathing hard, exhausted by their physical outburst.

  The man is still alive, barely. His clothes are torn and his flesh ripped. He is bruised and bleeding. His breathing is jagged and wheezy. He breaks the morbid silence by saying: “I could have hit you and killed you.”

  Steve grabs the man’s head by the hair, yells, “You fuck!” and smashes the man’s head against the ground. More blood gushes from his skull, and he dies.

  FEAR

  Frank whispers: “Holy shit, Steve, you killed him. He’s dead. He’s dead. Look at him. He’s—”

  Frank realizes that he has soiled himself. Wet shit sticks uncomfortably to his buttocks, the fresh piss on his jeans stings the skin of his thighs.

  How did it come to this? The man seemed like such an easy mark, a quick way to get a few bucks, a few thrills. It was supposed to have been fun.

  He looks around. Steve is trying to wipe the gore from his clothes, oblivious to anyone. Miller is jittery, jumping up and down, his head snapping back and forth in every direction.

  Frank cannot remember ever having felt fear this intensely. Tonight, terror has seeped into him, leaving a cold wet trail on his bones.

  FASCINATION

  Steve clutches Frank’s shoulder with a bloody hand. “We have to get away from here before someone sees us.”

  Miller is shouting, “Steve’s right! Frank! Let’s go!”

  Steve and Miller run off. Perhaps they assume that Frank is running with them; or perhaps they notice that he isn’t, but their fear of getting caught is stronger than any bond they might share with their fellow assailant.

  Try as he might, Frank can’t move. The corpse holds his stare and his unwilling fascination. He is disgusted by what has happened. He had never imagined that his violent escapades would distress him in any way. He wants to leave and forget tonight, forget Steve and Miller, forget himself. He surprises himself by thinking that this is not who he wants to be: someone who could be in any way responsible for this act, the stealing of someone’s life. Something is keeping him here. He finds himself observing every detail of the lifeless body: the angle of the limbs, the state of the clothes, the number of wounds, the expression of the smashed-in, blood-smeared face—

  Unexpectedly, the corpse jerks and in one jump it is standing face-to- face with Frank, its wounds healing rapidly. The resurrected man grins mischievously.

  ALL IN A NIGHT’S WORK

  The resurrected man leans forward, his nose almost rubbing Frank’s. He stares deeply into Frank’s eyes. With both hands, he violently grabs the hair on the back of Frank’s head, nearly ripping it from its scalp. His grin relaxes into a smile, and his mouth closes on Frank’s. His smooth tongue caresses Frank’s teeth, gums, tongue, palate, the inside of his cheeks. He bites down hard on Frank’s lower lip, stopping short of tearing the flesh, and releases him with a final, loud smack on the lips.

  Frank snaps out of his trance, stares at his erstwhile victim, and calmly mumbles: “Thank you.” He doesn’t know exactly why those words find their way to his mouth, but, also, he can’t deny the depth of his gratitude. Panic suddenly overwhelms him, and he runs away, as fast as he can.

  The man whose name we never learn laughs heartily, satisfied.

  The Four Elements: Water (Scars)

  He closes his eyes. He takes a deep breath. A melancholy smile spreads across his face.

  I love to look at him: his square jaw, his dimpled chin, his thick eyebrows, his mane of golden hair.

  He’s smelling the sea. They say smell is the sense most strongly linked to memory. A lifetime ago, the sea was his.

  I touch his face. My lips brush his lips, and then his ear. “Watch me. And wait for me.”

  Basking in his gaze, I take off my shirt, slip out of my shorts and underwear.

  I walk toward the waves and plunge into the ocean.

  When I emerge, my fists are carrying seaweed.

  Rejoining him, I hand over the seaweed, and then I lie on the sand. On my back, my legs spread.

  He decorates my body with the strips of seaweed.

  He removes his clothes. His cock is huge and dripping. For me.

  I moan.

  He rubs the seaweed into my wet skin: my face, my neck, my arms, my breasts, my stomach, my legs, my toes. He runs his face against my naked body. I hear him breathe me in, smelling the ocean on me.

  I’m so eager for him.

  One last strip of seaweed he brushes against my cunt.

  He buries his face between my legs, pushes open my labia with his tongue. He takes a deep breath of my smells mingled with the sea’s, and then releases his hot breath over my clit.

  I gasp.

  He moves up to kiss me. As h
is salty tongue finds mine, his cock spears me.

  He nuzzles my neck, sniffing furiously. His thrusts are strong, savage. I come, pulling at his hair.

  After his orgasm, I tenderly kiss the scars on his neck, the remnants of his gills.

  The Triumph of the Autosomes

  None of this is happening yet.

  You will be born in a dome. The dome will be attached to other domes by means of circular tubes. These tubes will be narrow, their width able to accommodate a large person, but no more. Distances between domes will vary. The domes will vary in size.

  Perhaps these domes will cover the surface of a devastated Earth; perhaps they will constitute the only area habitable by humans on the moon or some distant planet; perhaps they will form an orbiting space colony; perhaps none of these hypotheses will turn out to be correct.

  The dome in which you will be born will be a medium-size one. Several adults will be in attendance. There will be a woman, the mother. She will scream. Her feet and wrists will be tied and secured to the metal clasps protruding from the smooth cold ground.

  The light will be harsh and bright. There will be men around the screaming mother with the spread-open thighs.

  One of the men will stand guard, holding a long metallic rod with a firm black handle. The exposed end of the rod will sizzle menacingly with hot energy.

  The mother will be naked. The men will also be naked, except for long black gloves covering their forearms, and short, thick black boots. The men will not utter a word to the mother. Occasionally they will whisper among themselves, sometimes pointing to some part of the woman’s body, sometimes not. Their flesh will not come into contact with hers.

  The woman will scream.

  Your head will emerge from the mother’s vagina. Your hairless scalp will contrast with the thick bush of the mother’s groin.

  One of the men will cradle your head with one of his black-gloved hands. The rest of your body will follow.

  Your whole body will be outside the mother’s. Having pulled you from between her legs, one of the men will poke at the vertical slit between your legs, smaller but otherwise identical to the hairless slit between all of the men’s legs. This slit will allow the urethra to evacuate the body’s liquid waste. An umbilical cord will connect the baby to the mother. One of the men will cut the cord with a sharp tool.

  You will scream and cry. The mother will scream and cry.

  A second head will peek out from between the woman’s thighs. Soft hair will cover that scalp. Black-gloved hands will cradle the head, ease the body’s exit.

  Between the legs of the second baby, there will be genitals: a penis.

  The man holding the second baby will lay her down on the cold ground between the shackled feet of her screaming mother.

  The baby will scream and cry. The mother will scream and cry.

  One of them will be holding you. You will scream and cry.

  The men will be silent as they leave the dome, wriggling and crawling though one of the connecting tubes.

  The man with the rod will stay behind.

  One by one, three women – two with female genitals and one with male genitals – will step down from another tube after the departure of the men who are escorting you, carrying you. The women will have waited silently, crouched in the tube. With their bare hands, they will touch the screaming and crying baby and mother. A woman with male genitals will pick up the crying newborn, comforting her.

  The women will release the mother. They will drag her and her child out of the dome, through the tunnel by which they came.

  Not long after, the remaining man will receive a message. The message will say: The women are back in the enclosure. The message will be communicated through a small implant surgically inserted in all men’s brains during their adulthood ritual at age ten. The man will then leave the dome through the same tube used by the other men.

  The newborns, you and your sibling, will be dizygotic twins. Nine months prior to the birth, a woman will insert her hard wet penis through the gates of another woman’s swollen labia, the one who will become the mother. The woman with the male genitals will ejaculate in the other woman’s vagina, and hundreds of millions of spermatozoa will explode into her uterus. Each of these spermatozoa will be composed of twenty-three chromosomes, of which at least twenty-two will be nonsex chromosomes, autosomes. The identity of the twenty-third chromosome will be split more or less evenly between three possibilities: a Y chromosome, an X chromosome, or a twenty-third autosome. All three types of spermatozoa will have the capacity to fertilize an ovum.

  Approximately one day before the impregnation, two of the woman’s follicles will develop to maturity, each releasing its egg into her fallopian tubes. These ova will each contain twenty-three chromosomes: one X chromosome and twenty-two autosomes. A distinct spermatozoon will fertilize each one of these eggs. You and your sibling will be the living evidence of the dual impregnation’s success.

  The various combinations of chromosomes will have three possible results. The successful impregnation of an ovum by a spermatozoon carrying the X chromosome will create a zygote that will mature into a woman with female genitals. The successful impregnation of an ovum by a spermatozoon carrying the Y chromosome will create a zygote that will mature into a woman with male genitals. The successful impregnation of an ovum by a spermatozoon composed of twenty-three autosomes, twenty-three nonsex chromosomes, will create a zygote that will mature into a man: a human with no genitalia.

  The men attending the birth of the twins will judge that you will have matured from a zygote composed of twenty-two pairs of autosomes and one X-autosome pair. Your sibling’s penis will be evidence of her gender, of the absence of a second autosome in the twenty-third chromosomal pair.

  Men will have no genitals. They will not breed. The women will breed. That will be the purpose of women’s existence: to breed more men, and to breed more women who will breed more men.

  Men will have no body hair, no hair whatsoever. Women will have hair all over their bodies: on their legs and arms, on the top of their heads, and thick bushes in their armpits and groins. Some of them will have hair on their faces, on their chests, and on their backs.

  Men will be able to move freely between domes. They will perform a variety of tasks. These tasks would seem meaningless to the women, if the women were ever allowed to witness them being performed. The women will be kept in a large dome – the enclosure – away from any tools or equipment. The women will breed. They will not be required, expected, or permitted to perform any other task.

  The first ten years of men’s lives will constitute their childhood.

  Like all men children, as an infant you will be entirely covered by a gelatinous membrane. The membrane will feed you. The membrane will extract your bodily waste and recycle it into the dome’s ecosystem. Viscous coils will protrude from the membrane and lodge themselves in your body, through the anus, through the ears, through the nostrils, through the mouth. The membrane will keep you in a perpetual dream state, stimulating your body through the necessary stages of physical development. The membrane will feed you dreams that will condition you to accept the mores of the dome society, and it will feed you dreams that will be indistinguishable from the reality of dome life.

  You will turn ten years old. The membrane will retract its coils from your body. The membrane will grow brittle, and you will be released from its embrace. Immediately, you will be surrounded by several men. They will lead you to another dome. This dome will be filled with cold, shiny metallic machines and instruments. There will be a table in the middle of the dome. The men will tell you to lie on it. You will do as they say. They will strap you to the table. They will not administer anesthetic. A laser will cut through the skin on your head and into your skull. You will feel pain. You would scream, but your mouth will be covered with black adhesive tape. One of the men will insert a syringe needle into the tiny hole. He will press down and squeeze the contents of the syringe into y
our skull. The men will dance around the table, laughing and hooting and pointing at you.

  The fluid from the syringe will contain nanomachines that, once in your skull, will build an implant that will embed itself in your brain. The implant will allow the dome computer to relay messages to you. It will allow you to communicate with the dome computer and ask it to relay messages to any other man with whom you wish to communicate.

  You will be assigned surveillance duties. You will watch monitors. You will watch for accidents, conspiracies, rebellions, breakdowns, and damage. You will not witness any of these.

  You will become twelve years old. Increasingly, you will watch the screens that monitor the women’s enclosure. You will often watch male women thrust their penises into the orifices of other women. During your sleep, you will dream of the women. You will imagine rubbing your body against their alien body parts: their penises, their breasts, their hairy chests, and their hairy crotches. Immediately after waking from these dreams you will feel great pleasure, but it will only be a fleeting sensation. As the details of the dreams unfold themselves to your waking mind, you will be seized by self- loathing; you will throw up.