Cabiling / The Somatic Defilement /

 THE SOMATIC DEFILEMENT

(Part One: First published in Insanity By Increments, Stories as “Frailty”)

(Second Edition)

I woke up at daybreak, the sheets partly covering my nakedness. Undulations moved across the cotton surface like waves on water, the shadows contrasting with the swells. The only sound in the room was the ticking of the alarm clock on my side table. I watched shadows move across the ceiling—intermittent traffic outside the window: a car speeding to its destination; passersby on the sidewalk, hurrying.

Mildly disoriented, I stood up and surveyed the room. I found a note on the other side of the bed and crumpled it without reading. I checked my safe in the closet and found it locked. Satisfied, I made my way to the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror.

I studied the face in the glass—brown hair, heavy brow, square jaw, and, in between those features, a vague emptiness. The mirror was supposed to tell me who I was at that moment, but all I could see was the shadow of my former self, the insidious destruction of the man I used to be. The mirror couldn’t circumvent reality. I saw the blemishes, the sunken eyes, the black patches beneath them, likely to worsen with time. I wanted to see someone else in the mirror but, at that moment, all I could see was the face of death.

The woman I had slept with had left hours before—I couldn’t be sure when. The lingering scent of her perfume was all that was left of her. It pervaded the bedroom, not quite masking the smell of her skin, a hint of mine obvious too.

I turned the shower on, noticing the air was stuffy. I showered, scrubbed her memory from my mind. I combed my hair, and it cooperated meekly. The sex had been a diversion, a compulsion of the body, a desire for union that yielded no further need for any course of action.

I folded up my sleeves and buttoned up my shirt. My trousers fell gently over my shoes at the precise length. I flashed the mirror a parting smile, and the dying man smiled back at me joylessly.

Outside my apartment building, the concrete sidewalk was littered with salt, freezing rain having been forecasted for the week. A thick mist still hovered over the distant horizon. The street lamp outside my building emitted a pale haze that combated feebly with the daylight. A girl on a bicycle hurtled past me. Behind the veil of mist that settled over the city, the waiting sky was a great, dirty patch of white. The street was empty.

* * *

I had breakfast in a place called The Urban Jungle off Main Street. It was a bar frequented by bored thirty and forty-somethings at night and was usually packed on Fridays, meaning you couldn’t even get on the waiting list if you’d come late.

Located in downtown Richmond, Virginia, my one-bedroom apartment was in close proximity to the biggest trauma center in the state, to many government office buildings, to condominiums and fancy eateries where the yuppies met up for lunch break. Downtown Richmond had its share of homeless persons. Many people commuted downtown via the metro, regardless of income, because parking was scarce and expensive.

The banquet area of The Urban Jungle was relatively small. There was more room along the bar and the café area, which extended to outdoor seating, where some of the patrons liked to meet for business and sip their lattes in the sun during the day and as an outdoor pub at night. There was a stage where performers could play music in the evenings.

The lone flower in its vase on my table was a day old by my estimate. The velvet draperies that hung from the windows facing the street made the place look like a funeral home. The wait staff wore pressed, clean shirts and tapered trousers, taking orders like soldiers on patrol. It was quiet despite the soft music drifting from the overhead speakers, making subtle conversation possible.

Deeper in the lounge, where the sunlight couldn’t reach, the walls glowed faintly. Lamps hidden in small alcoves sent licks of light up the walls toward the ceiling.

I recognized an older man sitting across the room. He was a local doctor, a psychiatrist who treated a female acquaintance with whom I’d slept with. The only time I had spent with her was the aforementioned night I’d slept with her. She knew better than expect a return call. She had taken the encounter at face value, I presumed, perceiving that little could be expected from something so brief, so trivial. I wasn’t ‘boyfriend’ material.

That same woman strolled past my table. She looked dressed for a date: I could tell how she’d taken stock of her assets long ago: her smooth thighs showing through the seam in her skirt, her salon styled blonde hair flowing elegantly on her shoulders, her toned arms showing through a sleeveless dress. The Eagles song tells it plainly when it mentions how girls like her learn how to open doors with just a smile.

She greeted the old man warmly. It looked to be more than a casual exchange of pleasantries over breakfast. My senses heightened. I watched his hand graze her arm, the calloused finger incisive as a razor, almost leaving a mark, short of a cut, on her smooth, tan skin.

What did I know about her? Beyond one night of sex and very ineffectual chatter, I knew nothing. This doctor’s desire for her was evident. What did she see in him rather?

Her back to me, I watched him take her in, his eyes drowning in her youth. I wondered if he cared for her. I doubted it. What was love but corporeal excitement? What purpose did she serve but be a vessel to achieve those ends?

Suddenly, one of the waitresses came up to me. I smiled at her. I hadn’t seen her before. “You’re new here,” I told her, starting conversation.

Staring at an unfamiliar street, I remembered a line from a poem I had written in my youth:

“Love: shapeless, formless, many-faced,

You come to many a heart on earth and above.

The chaos blossoms in my chest and I am one with the stars.”

I may have been a romantic back then. When love comes at no one’s expense, you dispense of it as much as you can. You spend freely and get pure pleasure in return. But, all the while, a debt is mounting somewhere, waiting to come crashing down on someone. Your only hope of survival is to pay that debt and wash your hands of it. I am immune to love. In fact, I do not believe in it.

After a chat with the waitress, I took her back to my apartment during a break in her shift. It almost seemed too easy. She wasn’t a hooker, and she wasn’t expecting anything. I wasn’t famous, nor was I rich. I happened to look the part—the guy who got things easy: women, free drinks, favors for photography jobs that were promised to lousy studio photographers.

Just then, she emerged from the bathroom, wearing nothing more than a satin robe that extended to her knees. Her wet skin shimmered. She drew the curtains, leaving only the light in the bathroom and what light was to be had from the drawn curtains. She took off the robe and crawled up towards me in bed, wearing nothing more than a mischievous smile.

* * *

Chivalry is no virtue of mine. I’ve long stopped pretending that it is. That my preference for the simplicity of my less-than-chivalrous ways has brought me a lifestyle that suits me aptly testifies to the wisdom of my approach.

I do, however, acknowledge its purpose, place, and importance. Sincerity be damned. I don’t have to believe in chivalry to subscribe to it when it’s advantageous to me. I am not a man of principle. I am a scalawag. An insincere gesture of gallantry has suited my end purpose at times. I’ve done worse things to help myself out.

The common thread among women who choose to sleep with me is that they abide by the same ideology—we speak the same functional language—we don’t expect much different; emotional investment where none of it is promised.

It was a cloudy half-past ten in the morning when I decided to go to the gym. The gym was nearly empty.

I was drenched in sweat, hitting the punching bag contentedly. Boxing was therapeutic, recreational, and rehabilitative. I came by as often as I could, but not often enough. I desired women less after subsequent visits. It was a physical regimen that placated the demons of this strange disease of duress, a disease that holds you captive: my so-called weakness, my frailty of the flesh.

I headed to the locker room to change after my time boxing. I was meeting somebody at a bistro not far from the gym to discuss a job taking pictures. The pictures were part of his private memoir. The details were sketchy. He had some ideas, but he was still wondering whether I was the right guy for the job. By trade, I am a photographer. The money is bad, but it beats most of the jobs people resign themselves to.

I pulled my collar taut on both ends and exited the gym onto Main Street. The breeze from the factory district downtown carried a hint of smog. Meanwhile, the fetor of fish was swept in on the crosswinds from the east district’s fresh market, and the smell of wet earth permeated the city.

As I walked down the street, I noticed a man and woman arguing by the steps of an apartment building, yelling profanities at one another. The man grabbed the woman by the wrist as she attempted to walk away from him, but she returned the favor by hitting him squarely in the face. She followed it up by hitting him repeatedly. He tried to shield himself, squinting, cussing, telling her to stop. People walking up and down the street didn’t seem to care, and neither did I, until …

"Robbie," she said. "Finally, you arrive. I was just about done with this dirtbag!"

She looked back at the confused man, then took me by the arm, leading me away in a hurry. We got in her car, and he followed, continuing to yell as the vehicle pulled away. I glanced from him to the woman beside me, trying to make sense of my predicament. Despite the mad rush, she was noticeably beautiful. I began to examine my captor closely, drawing conclusions about her life. She had sharp eyes, and her cheekbones ended in sharp angles. She was in her early to mid-thirties. She took immense care of her complexion. She wore very little makeup; in this sense, she was a minimalist, and it suited her features. She had raven black hair, but she looked like she might have worn other colors in the past. She liked high-heeled shoes, and she liked them regardless of the occasion. She had no children, and she had no true desire for any. Along the drive, she pulled the ring off of her ring finger and threw it bitterly out of the window, and smiled at me.

“Cheating bastard,” she retorted. I hadn’t guessed at that precisely.

"Where to?" I asked her. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, and yet I was swept up in the moment.

“My place is out of the question … which leaves us with no alternative but …”

"There are about as many hotels in this city as there are …"

“Dumpster dives? Or 7-Elevens? I’m a cheap first date.”

“A motel, maybe?”

“Think real cheap.”

She began undoing my trousers, and I was a little uneasy all of a sudden. She sensed this. She asked what was wrong, laughing a little, as if there wasn’t anything remiss about the circumstances.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just remembered I had to be somewhere.” I took a short glance at my watch. I had twenty minutes until the appointment. “Or, that is, have to be.”

“Relax,” she said, smiling. “You might still make it.”

* * *

I recall a conversation I had with a counselor during my freshman year of college. I was a weird kid. I had a thing for obscure music and strange art. I didn’t care for school. I was blacklisted.

I didn’t care much for extracurricular activities, either. I took up photography but didn’t care much for the school paper. I took up guitar but didn’t play for the school band. I never joined an athletic team even though I was a natural athlete, and I could run for miles without gasping for air.

Parties mattered. Parties had lots of alcohol and lots of unsuspecting women.

My early photography reflected my youthful preoccupations: a flair for the dramatic, a keen eye for the unusual. I didn’t start out photographing nudes or, worse—pastoral scenes like the kind that wind up in cheap hotel rooms. My first portfolio was a collection of photographs taken of a disgruntled man’s family crypt, and yes, it had a theme. Since the man who helped me was interested in my ideas, he exposed his ancestral remains to me as a favor, finding the photos pleasantly demeaning to his estranged family. The project netted me some ungainly notoriety in some circles. They served to put the art world on notice: the lighting, the scope, the architectural basis of the main objects of the photos, the mathematical precision of detail, and the controversial ways the pictures were staged.

Those arrangements: skulls peeking out of vaults, arms orchestrated to fall out of the open coffins, else crossed against one another against the earthly remains of a ribcage, made for a collage of photos that exhibited the ephemeral nature of the flesh, the loneliness that accompanies the individual upon death, the inevitable end of everything we once held sacred.

The conversation with my counselor might have irked him. I hadn’t aimed to divulge as much as I had.

The counselor assigned to me was a man in his mid-fifties or so, nearing retirement age and already significantly bald. One eye had a cataract problem, which led him to look at you with his head slightly tilted when he was listening to you. His skin was pale and blemished in spots, and his fingers were short and stout, like a man who’d been overweight all his life. He wore a pale blue sports jacket, the kind only old men wore. I also noted a few strands of cat hair clinging to the coat’s surface. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, and I wasn’t at all surprised at that.

“Some of the other students speak of you,” he said.

“Highly?”

“No.”

“Too bad. Can’t get them all.”

"Apparently, you try your darnedest."

“What do you mean, sir?”

“The girls talk. You’re popular.”

“Does that bode well for me?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“But surely …”

“Tell me, sir. Won’t you?”

“Why so curious?”

“Just that you mention it, that’s all.”

“Ahhh …”

Here’s where it gets interesting …

“The girls say you’re a hit-and-run artist. Do you know what I mean?”

“Not sure.”

“It means you love ‘em and leave ‘em.”

“Ahhh …” I said. It was my turn to say it.

“Not merely that.”

“What is it, sir?”

“You like to hit your target every single time.”

“I believe that’s personal. High school was so last year. Besides, you can’t threaten me this way. Even if someone accused me of doing something, I’m entitled to the courtesy of being presumed innocent until proven guilty. Besides, you’re not supposed to disclose that kind of stuff.”

"Yeah, well, everyone around here talks about it like it’s common knowledge. Not like someone gave me sworn testimony. I know it’s not a crime. But they say you’ve been at it since way back when. They’re well aware of your reputation."

"Didn’t make them any smarter," I said to him coyly. He was not pleased.

He seemed eager to issue me his parting shot. “Look, I’ll give you some advice. You’re a good photographer. Don’t screw it up.”

I smiled. I sat back. I waited. It was about to end.

“Life is far too important to see it simply pass you by and not give a damn about things. If this behavior of yours is indicative of bigger problems, there are resources available to you.

The bottom line is: it’s self-destructive. Can’t you see how people react to you out of revulsion or distrust? You have to face it. You are not a slave to your desire. You turn to it for fear of being less than you aspire to become."

* * *

The bistro was packed for lunch. Luckily, the man I was meeting had reserved a table for us. It was furthest from the traffic at the main entrance. The entrance to the bistro was located by the lobby of the Marriott Hotel and got plenty of foot traffic, but our table was set back, away from the commotion.

The married woman who was with me earlier had already left for her mother’s, where she would presumably stay until she decided what to do about that husband of hers. I had asked her about getting a room at the Marriott, for convenience’s sake, but she had refused, saying it was far too late to check-in, far too expensive, and far too plush for a one-time sort of thing. I told her I felt degraded. She smiled and told me that she felt the same way.

We did it in a public restroom in an empty movie theatre near Main Street. The smell of dank, old saturated urine was repulsive and only worsened as I took deeper breaths, my heart beating faster. She tried not to let it bother her, either, even though I saw her nose twitch a few times. The tiles were yellowish and were lined with mold and mildew. A spattering of feces missed its mark along the outer rim of the toilet in our stall. Encounters like it used to be routine. Now they just seemed desperate.

In the bistro, I was worried I had carried some of the unpleasant scents in with me. I would sniff at myself self-consciously when no one was looking. I was worried that I might have become immune to the stench after some time. I had the notion of asking a waitress to give me the rundown so I could know for sure, but I was afraid of coming across as crude.

I examined my surroundings as I awaited my would-be employer. American pop culture mosaics hung on the walls of the bistro, lending a 1950s look that made the bistro appear really throwback to anyone who remembered what that era was like. The wooden chairs and tables were spare but glossy with varnish. The tablecloths were old but clean, by my judgment. The glasses were spotless. The busboy accompanied my glass of refreshing ice water with a smile and a nod. The bistro’s cod dish was highly recommended, but the appetizers on the menu seemed more enticing than the lunch specials. The bar was unusually busy for lunchtime, and the orders kept coming. There was still no sign of my potential employer.

It was twenty minutes past the set appointment time, and I had begun to think that my business meeting was a no-show. I gathered my notebook and pen from the table, already planning my apology to the waiter when a man fitting my meeting’s description walked in the door. I felt a warm wave of relief as I settled back into my seat.

The man spoke first, addressing the headwaiter. I noticed a woman standing next to him, scanning the room. She eventually caught my eye as I watched them. I smiled, but she did not reciprocate. They looked like a couple. The woman had straight, bleached blonde hair that looked steam pressed. She wore a long faux-fur coat and a shimmering black dress inside of it. I gathered more details as they drew closer. My would-be employer wore a gray sport coat and matching pants, a shiny purple shirt that extended the lapels of his coat, and a pendant on a gold choker necklace exposed through his open collar. The pendant looked like a small locket. His hair was thick and combed back, reaching the shoulders—the type of hairstyle convicts wore. As he approached my table, he slid his sunglasses off and smiled.

“I’m a big fan of your work!” The man named Sherman Dwyer exclaimed, holding out a hand, which I promptly shook.

“Please, sit down,” he said. He did all the talking. The woman stared at me blankly, then lit a cigarette and looked out the window, almost impatiently, indifferently, as if she couldn’t care less about being there.

“About this job …” I said.

“Let’s get right to the point. I like that,” he answered back. “It’s a job I think you’ll like, looking at your background.”

“This isn’t a wedding, is it?”

“No, no. None of that.”

“Great. You know, of course, I’m not into conventional work,” I told him.

“Of course.”

There was a brief pause as we both sized each other up. I broke the silence. “What kind of pictures will I be taking?”

“They won’t be difficult subjects. Once you get through to them.”

I scrutinized him impatiently. The cut to the chase moment seemed to have suddenly lost its luster. “What do you mean by that?”

"I want pictures of five women who lived in Tucson, Arizona, a few months ago. Beautiful, popular women. They were in a local beauty pageant about two years ago, but you’ll need to look them up all around Tucson. Don’t know their exact whereabouts now."

“You want portraits? This doesn’t sound like my kind of job. What’s in it for me? What did you mean by lived in Arizona if they’re still around the Tucson area?”

A hideous smile grew from one corner of his mouth and ended at the other. The realization dawned on me then. I remembered the news of a serial killer in Tucson whose victims involved five former beauty pageant contestants. Fixated, all I could do was stare at Dwyer’s smile and wait for what he’d say next.

“Yup. You’re right. It’s your kind of job, all right.”

* * *

I was restless that night in my apartment. I couldn’t sleep, despite the fact that I was exhausted. I had spent the rest of the day tracking down job leads and finally found a project that seemed worthwhile and interesting. I realized that I might have been looking for an excuse to turn down Sherman Dwyer’s offer. I made it a point to be thorough, so I carefully considered Plan B in case Mr. Dwyer’s proposed job hit a snag. Plan B involved taking photos of lab specimens for a clinical research project. It would be conducted at the site of a big laboratory. I thought the exposure would be an excellent addition to my portfolio, taking pictures of body parts pickled in formaldehyde, for example. The money was also decent for work of that sort, and there were opportunities to travel should I be assigned to go.

Nevertheless, my anxiety worsened as the night dragged on, and I grew even more restless. I felt vexed, unable to forget Dwyer’s proposal. I was ridiculous to even consider it. It was the sort of job that spelled trouble. He was promising a hefty sum in advance and a hefty parting gift when all was said and done (say 30K in advance to the tune of $250,000.00 in total). I’d have to get my hands dirty, bring a lot of equipment, and pack my gear, so I don’t get suspected of illegal activity. Fortunately, construction jobs made use of the same equipment—not just for graverobbing. I planned to go solo, dig up each site, and hoist each corpse from the casket via rope and pulley rather than lift the extremely heavy coffins out of the ground. One cemetery was in the middle of Oro Valley, and I would have time and privacy to unearth the grave—no one actually came patroling in that desert wasteland cemetery for next to no reason.

I had already begun to envision how I would dress the corpses up in each unique setting, beautifying their surroundings to add the sharpest degree of contrast—death and decay amidst serenity and calm. They’d reportedly died violent deaths, adding to the project’s appeal.

I decided to call a friend who worked the graveyard shift in a local telecommunications company monitoring equipment, knowing that he wouldn’t be busy. Charlie was his name. He was a scruffy techie-type whom I met in college who was into some of the same weird shit. He worked nights and slept during the day, even on days he wasn’t working because he said it was natural to him; there was a lot more going on at night.

Once, in college, he and I had checked out a shop in Brooklyn that sold New Age products. Inside, he picked up a crystal and started rubbing it around his arms and neck, stating that the item was a healing crystal. It had medicinal qualities, he had said.

It occurred to me that I might’ve believed in the esoteric to a greater extent if it hadn’t been introduced to me by a guy like Charlie.

“Hey, Charlie, it’s me.”

“What the hell? What are you doing up?”

“Can’t sleep. What are you up to?”

“Nothin’. Ain’t you got another one of your bimbos with you?”

“Yeah. She’s asleep.”

“What’s wrong? You too tired?” Laughter echoed through the phone line.

“As a matter of fact, I am, so shut up.”

More laughter. And more. I can hear crunching sounds. Charlie liked to snack on Cap ’n Crunch on his shift.

The woman lying in the other half of my bed was named Susanna, or something like that. It didn’t matter. She lay on her side, her buttcheeks gleaming in the moonlight, presented to me so innocuously, as though I would never desire her. I didn’t at that moment. The sheets tangled and twisted about her extremities like a painting from antiquity.

“I had a long day.”

“Who didn’t?”

“Hey listen … I got offered this job, man. The money’s good … for a change. And …”

“And what … you take it!” he said.

Crunching sounds accompanied his barely intelligible words through the line.

“Well, the thing is, you remember the portfolio piece I did in high school that made me, um, notorious?”

“You mean famous? The Transmogrification of Life piece you did. Fucking awesome, man. How can I forget? It launched your career, didn’t it?”

“Well, I’ve been offered to do a project to shoot a portfolio of five women in the Tucson, Arizona area and …”

“Five women, wait. What the hell does this have to do with your work, man? I thought …”

“They’re dead, Charlie. I have to dig them up. That’s what.”

* * *

Nobody can say I don’t do my research. I tracked my subjects down quickly. Four of the women or, more precisely, the bodies of the women were laid to rest in a cemetery at Oracle Road in the heart of Tucson. The last body was in a small cemetery outside Oro Valley. I was to procure a temporary workspace during my stay in Tucson. I prepared a map detailing the locations of each grave and plotted a sequential pattern to allow the least amount of time spent at each site before making my exit. I planned which tools to bring with me, which photographic equipment would be best suited for the dry, hot, and cold conditions that characterized the bipolar days and nights in Tucson, making catastrophic screwups less likely.

All my travel and extraneous expenses would be paid for by my employer, Sherman Dwyer. The bonus compensation was lucrative enough. I asked few questions, granting him the privacy I thought his generous compensation afforded, but he offered an explanation as to his motivation for the perverse act, anyway.

"Beauty pageant bitches, that’s what I call ’em. I knew some when I was young, just a kid in Tucson. The same pageant, even. They were mean as hell to me," he said. "When I heard about these killings, you know, I’m not gonna lie, I got it. I mean, I know why the guy did it in a way. Ever since then, I wanted to know what they looked like in the end…" he said with a wicked smile.

I simply nodded in agreement, not knowing what it was that I was agreeing to. His explanation felt flat to me, like a joke with no humor. But, like I said, I didn’t ask many questions. I realized that whatever was not being said to me couldn’t be pretty, so I kept my mouth shut.

"But I know your work, and I know you’ll do them justice," he said, laughing after he said the words.

“What do I do if I get caught? Are you posting bail? Are you providing me fake credentials and travel documents?” came my short take of urgent questions.

“You’ll have everything you need to get the job done," he told me, smiling, showing me the gold tooth and shaking his shoulders while he chuckled like he was lying.

Lying awake the night before my departure, I could still hear his laughter echo in my ears, resounding like a broken record of listless, dissonant music.

* * *

Charlie was right when he said that I could use the money or, more accurately, that it would be plain stupid to refuse as much as was being offered. So I took it, and I was off to Tucson, ready for the desert sun and little else. After all, rent is becoming more than a commodity, rather a luxury. I’ve done enough time sleeping on people’s couches and backyards.

On the plane ride, I contemplated the task before me. I would have to dig up five graves and stash the remains in a house I had secured for rent for a couple of weeks while I fixed the photographs for Mr. Dwyer. I couldn’t get his laugh out of my head. He was probably psychotic in some way. He had a tooth missing as if he had lost it in a barroom brawl and kept the open space as a battle scar, though he could’ve gotten a replacement if he’d wanted. I had no doubt he could afford it. His payment to me was proof. To me, that black hole in his smile only fortified my suspicion that there was something deeply, inherently wrong with this man.

* * *

"How’d you get into this line of work?" he had asked me. "No, no," he had said. "Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of yours. Just wondering. You’re a smart kid—a genius with the camera. Coulda done just about anything else with that talent, by my estimate. Coulda made about five times as much. Tell me. How come?"

"Cuz I didn’t want to be stuck in some nine-to-five concrete hellhole all my life," I told him. "I work on what I want to when I want to."

He smiled just then, a tooth missing and all, thick sludgy hair combed back, and said to me, "I’ll tell you a secret; I feel the same way you do, man."

* * *

Tucson, Arizona appeared from my airplane window looking hot and hazy in the summer. The city had a sparsely cluttered cluster of buildings amid a landscape of dry, faded orange sand and hard rock structures. Palm trees lined the near-empty streets while Giant Saguaro cacti stood guard over vast desolate plains outside the city.

I proceeded to my accommodations the moment I gathered my luggage at the airport. I drove my rental at a leisurely pace across downtown toward the suburbs and then finally to the small cluster of homes located close to city limits where I would conduct the operation. The house I’d rented for two weeks had fading green paint that was peeling in a lot of places. A wooden fence guarded the perimeter of the vacant property, and the property next to it was derelict, as well. I chose it for that exact reason. For that reason, I should say, it suited the purpose.

The garden plots were littered with desiccated stems, and the sand inched its way into every crevice of the house’s exterior. The property owner had been concerned that a feral cat or dog might have called the place home. "It might stink in there," he warned me.

It was a bungalow. The roof of the house converged towards the left wing, where the kitchen was located. The windows were old and appeared to slide open. No drapes or blinds were hanging by the windows, so you could see through to the inside if you moved close enough. To my surprise, I was relieved to note that the windows allowed ample light in. Was I really afraid of it being dark in the house, I wondered. Nothing in there could be worse than what I was about to bring into it.

* * *

Under the cloak of night, I made my way to the local cemetery via a rental van. I brought a pick and a shovel, two essential grave-robbing tools. I wore a black long-sleeved shirt with a Chinese-style collar and black gabardine trousers. My pale skin stood in stark contrast to the rich dye of the seldom-used articles of clothing. It was hardly an ensemble that seemed worthy of the occasion, but the nights were cold here. I even smudged a bit of black face paint around my eyes.

The mist covered me, feeling cold and damp, thick and penetrating. My clothes were wet. Shovel in hand, I dug into hard, dry, sandy earth. Soon enough, the hard ground was replaced by soft soil the deeper I went, and it all came easy to the spade. Muscles tensed, and I nearly convulsed on occasion due to the strain and fatigue, made worse by the cold. When the coffins were exposed, I used the pick to shatter the ornate coffin lids, and, one by one, my subjects were exposed. They were beauties once, forlorn forever. Corruption and decay had stripped them of their prized possessions. The vim and vitality had left them, and they were putrid and solemn. I had to shield my eyes from the dust and niter that rose into the night. I extricated each corpse from its coffin, like a newlywed on a moribund honeymoon.

After four of the bodies had been disinterred, I started on the last. I could feel the soft earth turn to mud in my hands, mud on my face as foul earth mixed with my sweat. Foot by foot, inch by square inch, the grave was unearthed. I took the pick and began to destroy the coffin lid. The heavy mahogany splintered beneath the sheer force and weight of the blade. Soon, there was my prize: a woman by the name of Esmeralda—the beauty pageant winner that year. She lay there inside that coffin, asleep and waiting in a bed of soiled white satin, her mouth gaping open, worms still squirming within the small orifice.

Suddenly, she thrust her arms open and pulled me down into her. I felt the disinterred earth retreat back into the grave. I squirmed and fought hard to free myself from her, but it was too late.

Then, abruptly, I woke up.

I got up from the sheets, detecting the scent of ripe sweat as I rose, and made my way quickly to the bedroom at the end of the hallway. There was a musty smell since I hadn’t cleaned the place up. The wood planks creaked under my shifting weight. The doorknob almost gave way when I twisted it open.

Inside, four skeletal remains lay on the ground wrapped in black plastic wrapping, their skulls exposed and grinning. The smell was putrid, but I was used to it. The pungent stench pervaded the house, mixing with other odors in other rooms. Here, though, it was immersive. It felt like I had taken humus and rotting entrails and rubbed my face with them.

Apart from the rest was Esmeralda, safe in a warm, cossetting velvet blanket, hands on top of her breasts like a queen of ancient Egypt without the bandages.

* * *

The coffee maker made its annoying whistling sound. The blender whirred, and the anchorman’s voice coming from the television set was dulled by all the noise. The scent of death was everywhere. Its wetness soaked my clothes, the tablecloth I had laid out the night before, the curtains.

I preferred to keep it cold, owing to the smell. It would have only been made worse by the warmth of the radiator. Whatever was left in the spaces between those bones would rot faster than you could imagine.

I cracked the eggs and tried to build an appetite. I couldn’t risk being seen around town. I had chosen the house because of its remote location and the promise of a pre-existing odor that might make my subjects less noticeable. The owner had forewarned me and, sure enough, I found a dead mink and two large dead rodents inside.

A long day lay ahead of me, so I had to work fast. Take the photographs, dump the corpses and move on. Out of Tucson. Out of Mr. Dwyer’s twisted ’sociopsychotic’ universe.

I cooked silently, planned methodically. The news droned on in the background, no doubt mentioning a bizarre grave robbing the night before, but I ignored it. I lost all track of time until there was a sudden rapping at the door.

* * *

I peeked out of one of the front windows to see who it was.

It was a woman, dressed in a white blouse and skirt with a matching white hat and matching white shoes. What the hell? I thought to myself.

It was the visage of an angel, down in the valley of darkness.

I knew if I opened the front door, the smell would pour forth, so I ran to the back door and circled around to investigate and drive her away quietly, without arousing suspicion. "Hello," I said. "What seems to be the problem?"

The woman jumped at the sound of my voice. “Oh,” was all she said until I recognized who she was.

She was Sherman Dwyer’s wife. She took a moment to gather herself. “You startled me,” she said, which was no mystery to me. “Why didn’t you open the front door?”

“Aren’t you aware of the type of business arrangement I have with your husband, Mrs. Dwyer?”

“Oh, please. Call me Sherry,” she said, walking up to me, extending a hand.

I politely obliged with a light handshake. “What’s going on? What are you doing here?”

“Well, my husband doesn’t know I’m here. I was kind of …” she trailed off.

“Kind of?”

“Kind of curious to know what they looked like.”

* * *

Sherry sat in her chair sipping the coffee I’d made for her, waiting for me to get done cooking my scrambled eggs, not once minding the sharp smell of exhumed corpses or the general state of decay the house was in. I found it almost peculiar that she was so relaxed. How could she tolerate it?

“Are you sure you can stand the smell?” I asked her in disbelief.

“Oh, it’s awful,” she said. “But it’s okay. I’ve come so far.”

“The waste can’s right there,” I told her, eyeing the trash bin to her left. She seemed hardly interested to know.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

“How can you stand it?” she asked.

I shrugged. “It stinks, you know. But I’ve smelled worse. Fresher ones.”

“You’ve done this more than once.”

“More than twice.”

“Too infrequent to be a hobby, too often to be a healthy occupation,” she said. I had to turn around and smile at that one.

“Why do you ask?” I asked her.

“Because I’m not the one who’s eating, you know?”

I laughed. She was showing a sense of humor that hadn’t been there when we met in the restaurant. She seemed so normal, sipping coffee, laughing. She didn’t look like someone waiting for a glimpse of rotting corpses. Why does she want to see a bunch of dead bodies? I wondered. Why is she here at all?

* * *

“What exactly did you want to see?”

“What did you have?”

“Don’t play games with me. The photos aren’t done yet. I just got here. Remember?”

“I know.”

I didn’t know just how twisted she and Sherman Dwyer were, but I intended to fulfill my end of the bargain and get out as neatly and cleanly as possible. I didn’t need her curiosity jeopardizing me.

“Listen, if something goes down, I’m taking you two with me. Hell, I could walk out right now and leave you with these fucking corpses to deal with, okay? How does that sit with you? So, how about this? We’ll do this as Sherman and I agreed, or I’m out of here, all right?"

She smiled contentedly and agreed. Her pupils sparkled at me, hectic, obsidian, like black holes set in pools of white. Her lips looked like moist cotton candy after you’d had a taste of it. “I know,” she said. “But Sherman didn’t agree to give you this.”

She undid the buttons of her blouse, and her breasts popped out.

* * *

Frailty is mankind’s incurable weakness. All of life is fragile to its core. Death is the culmination of life’s incessant illusion of progress. Desire breathes ferocious wind powering the wings of death. In my life, love has meant nothing but a misconception, a great stepping stone to unhappiness. After all, all that I feel in my heart is emptiness, semen pulsating in my veins instead of my cock, and my life is predicated on feeding that flesh the way a cockroach feeds on filth.

My own frailty works twofold: first, I suffer from a starvation for life, a libido with an insatiable appetite. It is a mundane fascination that seeks comprehension only through the great consequence of gratification, made meaningless by repetition, and is, therefore, treated as useless and essential simultaneously.

Secondly, I suffer from a fascination for the beauty of death. It is the unhealthy eye for the beauty of mortality and decay that plagues my view of all ephemeral life. It is this fixation with death that manifests in my work—that art which so cleverly mimics life can most aptly celebrate death when death inevitably takes away all appreciation for art drives me to celebrate death and not vice versa.

I called Charlie, hoping he was home from working the graveyard shift. Things were happening too fast, and I was beginning to worry I’d gotten too far ahead of myself.

The phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Charlie, it’s me. I’m in Tucson.”

“Hey, man. You’re in the fuckin’ news. Woo-hoo! Bravo. Where the chicks at?”

“I got more problems than that.”

“They catchin’ up to you?”

“No. The cops don’t know it’s me. It’s Dwyer. Or, rather, Dwyer’s wife. She’s here, in Tucson, at my place, in my bed.”

“What the …?”

Loud cuss words followed. He hollered into my ear. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Charlie asked.

“She got to my head,” I told him.

“Yeah, it looks like. Why didn’t you use your other one? The one that’s supposed to think?”

“Everything’s under control. She’s getting dressed. She just wants to be around for the photoshoot."

“How twisted are these people you’re into?”

“Don’t know,” I told him, shrugging my shoulders.

“We’ll see what happens.”

Suddenly, Sherry walked out, dressed in my clothes and coming towards me, smiling salaciously. It appeared as though she wanted more. I could hardly believe it.

She undid my trousers as I listened to Charlie murmur about work. She began to perform fellatio, even as I stood there, phone in hand, a little busy at the moment. Hell, do I care. Fuck it! On with the show, I thought.

“Uh, Charlie, I’ll have to call you back.”

With the press of a button, Charlie fell silent.

* * *

We started the photoshoot first thing that afternoon. I dressed up the corpses in evening gowns and set up the rooms. The house was spacious enough. For some photos, I propped up the skeletons on antique chairs. For others, they had glasses of wine in hand, the glasses wired to the ceiling so they wouldn’t fall on the floor. For some pictures, the corpses wore hats. For some, they were positioned to pose seductively on beds of velvet and crimson, which aimed to prove irresistible to starved necrophiliacs. Esmeralda was the crown jewel; she was the trump card. She lay in a garish bed, surrounded by white drapery, dressed in a white evening gown made of fine silk, her arm extending down the side of the bed, hovering over a spilled vial of liquid. The scene aimed to imply that it was poison. I thought it was an original concept.

Through it all, Sherry hovered over my work like a vulture, occasionally giving me oral sex or fondling my ear or something of that nature, touching me inappropriately just when I was about to shoot a picture so I’d have to yell at her to cut it out. She’d smile and back off and let me do my thing, but then she’d start at it again just as easily. I finally figured out how to get her to knock it off. I decided to let her join in.

I took pictures of her. She sat on a chair naked. She wore her high-heeled shoes, and she threw her bleached blonde hair back at an angle, just as she did whenever she was about to come. Next, I had her split her legs open to show herself. Then, I had her pour some brandy in between her large breasts so it would run down into her navel, down into the heart of her, where it was warmer.

The poor ladies, they were meant for so much more than this—so much more than the violent deaths they’d suffered or the defilement they’d endured at my hands these past two days. They were meant to be remembered for their beauty. The beauty that got them so mercilessly slaughtered. I’d pay them that honor with my photographs. It was the least I could do to atone for what I did to them.

Who was I kidding?

I planned to keep a copy of the photos as part of my personal collection, which I would call Wine, Women, and Sin. Yet my nameless subjects were as dispensable to me as one roll of film could have been; all it took was finding more women who’d suffered somehow.

Sherry went back to her husband, and I remained to finish the job, which meant dumping the corpses without getting caught. I did, in a ditch that I dug up in the middle of nowhere off Oro Valley where the ground was hard. It took more than a day to get it deep enough. Content, I ditched whatever evidence could link me to the crime and cleaned the house up.

When I was finished, I got a haircut, shaved, wore something fancy, and took the first flight out of Tucson under a fake name. I looked forward to my compensation, my regular work, the normalcy of my routine, and the comfort of my home. I was eager to forget about Tucson even though everything had worked out splendidly. I’d decided it was the last time I’d do a job of that nature.

Sherry had told me before she’d left that her husband, Sherman, was a necrophiliac who’d inherited a good sum of money. His private memoir was his personal porn registry. She reiterated what he’d told me: that he’d had a rough time with some beauty pageant girls when he was in high school. He’d been a tormented youth, and a couple of knockout beauty queens had made fun of him, spurned him, or, worse, failed to notice him at all. "It’s a shame," Sherry had said. "Sherman’s really not that bad … except in bed."

* * *

Days removed from Tucson, I was in my apartment with this woman named Erika, whom I had just picked up at a club. We were having drinks. We were making small talk, lounging on the sofa. She had one hand on my shoulder and another undoing my pants. Then, the unthinkable happened. The doorbell rang. “What gives? Charlie, this better not be you,” I said aloud.

I opened the door, ready to preach a sermon to whoever it was. But I stopped short. My mouth fell open in surprise.

It was Sherry. In a robe. In high heels. Wearing a smile, cupping her fake boobs. “Hello,” she said. “It’s me.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked her.

“Can I come in?” she said, walking past me without waiting for an answer.

“No,” I told her. “I have company.”

Sherry looked at Erika. Erika looked at Sherry. Sherry told Erika to get out. “He and I are about ready to fuck,” she told her.

* * *

Sherry and I were having the sex of a lifetime. She fought to get on top, and I would regain control, then we’d roll around the bed looking for more room, nearly falling on the floor. She scratched me with her long pointed fingernails and bit me at the neck. I squeezed her hard, penetrating her, bruising her flesh, desecrating her. I rendered her as helpless as a marionette, limp and tangled beneath my own strength.

I paused on top of her at one point, and I saw her smile, her eyes lighting up like lanterns, all her wrongdoings laid bare before me. Suddenly I was certain of the compensation she was offering me: my own useless pleasure in exchange for something I’d given up long before meeting her or Sherman Dwyer or the lifeless beauty queens–something I had been chasing in the form of each woman, each subject for a photograph, every last dime that offered me empty, momentary happiness.

Her laughter resonated in my head.

I saw a shadow on the ceiling, shaped like a man. A spider-like figure seemed to weave its web around it like it was devouring it somehow.

I fell back on the bed, not moving, wondering what it was that I had been missing or what it was that had left me behind.

Part Two:

(Five years later)

Art has no soul. Art is a rendition. Art is the result of creative vision, but without vision, no art is possible.

The bible is folklore, nothing more than mankind’s attempt at explaining phenomena in terms that are relative to the human condition. God didn’t create us in his image and likeness. Instead, we created a God we could relate to.

Applied to this argument, the metaphysics of man as a creation of a god is an art. It is a deceptive art partaken with the art of deception because the very concept of God is a result of man’s flawed attempt at an explanation.

I used to believe in that without a doubt. After I met a woman named Sherry Dwyer, I wasn’t too sure.

Sherry might have been anything but human, anything other than what might have shown fellow man sincere compassion, anything other than what might have fathomed the existence of a god.

No matter the case, I struggle against the notion of a god, a soul, heaven…

But not a hell. Not one below, but here on earth.

* * *

Once an artist, always an artist, it doesn’t wash out. It flows in your veins. I quit photography, but I was still an artist—same day, different medium.

A wealthy necrophiliac named Sherman Dwyer commissioned me to do a project—a series of photos involving five women from Tucson, Arizona, murdered by a serial killer. These five victims served as the subjects of Mr. Dwyer’s photo memoir. I had to unearth the corpses, dress them up, photograph them, then dump their bodies where no one would find them.

The job didn’t come without its share of risks, but the authorities could not close in on me, as I was always one step ahead of them. No one suspected that a photographer would take an interest in the corpses. With my careful planning executed to a T, I successfully arranged the photos and fled from Tucson, collecting a large sum of money for my services.

After a few more months doing bit jobs that suited my eccentric tastes, I quit photography to search for another means of creative expression. The difficulty involved with my last undertaking in Tucson helped spur the search for a new medium. I considered painting, music, and performance arts, finding each of them equally intoxicating as the other. I dabbled briefly in each before moving on to the next one.

First, I took an art class, secretly hoping to paint some nudes, but was surprised to learn that we would be painting a bowl of fruit one day. Wow! I thought. How boring!

So, like always, I decided to give it my own spin.

I was supposed to capture the essence of the subject, but what else were grapes, pears, and bananas? What essence did they have?

So, I splashed paints on the canvas, used my hands to blotch and blend colors together wiped my hands on my apron, then stood from across the room to view my work while shaking my head, never feeling satisfied.

I repeated the process until my frenetic pace worsened. The canvas came alive after a fit of spontaneity.

I ended up painting a bowl of rotting fruit, capturing the discoloration with dark hues and dark monochromatic shades. These fruits sat in a mixture of their redolent juices. Supple flesh looked bruised, bitten, feasted upon by white worms.

“Capture ‘di essenz ov zi bowl ov froot,’” the art teacher had said. He had an accent. He was French. Like his name was supposed to be Guillaume, or Jacques, or something like that.

Mission accomplished.

I let out a sigh of relief when I was finished. Our art teacher had given us only an hour. “Now,” he said. “It is time for our guest critic to judge.”

Without further ado, an overweight man with a mustache came in and began inspecting our work. His mustache was curled at the ends, like a pirate’s mustache, or like a musketeer. He wore a beret. He looked even more French than the art teacher did.

In contrast, he wore a yellow ensemble that looked like a traditional Chinese robe. His eyes narrowed at the sight of the class. We must have looked stupid.

“Yuck,” he said, looking at one painting—a realistic rendition of the bowl of fruit.

He said the same thing about another painting—another realistic rendition of the bowl of fruit.

He made his way around the room, furrowing his brow and squinting his eyes. He shrugged. He sighed. He said things like, "Ugh." "Hack." "Waste of time." He slaughtered the roomful of weekend art class students, fine arts majors, street artists, mall gallery artists, etc.

Then, he beamed at the sight of my painting, exclaiming, “Caravaggio! Look at this one.”

Next, I ventured into music. The sense of satisfaction or therapeutic catharsis that I experienced with my growing proficiency at playing instruments proved deeply stimulating. Learning the intricacies involved with playing guitar, producing melodies that tickled the eardrums, simple yet executed well after months of steady practice, was in a myriad of ways more soothing to the senses than taking a photograph of something pickled in a jar, which I was actually paid to do once.

Drums and percussion produced the same sensations. Improving my playing drastically raised my level of confidence. After steadily improving through the fundamental stages of playing each instrument, my skills were further enhanced after increasing levels of difficulty.

However, I was still not a virtuoso. I practiced with diligence, steadily improving, garnering praise from my instructors. I branched out into many music genres, playing a little flamenco on guitar, jazz fusion on drums, and classical pieces on the piano. The diversity of disciplines improved my overall abilities, such as beginning to hear the notes that comprised each piece, playing intricate compositions by notation, even though I didn’t start out being classically trained.

After playing in a recital before a large crowd of music aficionados at a local event, I found that I had effectively replaced boxing as my means to cope with physical stress. I hardly visited the gym, staying in shape by using a jump rope and watching my diet.

It had also been years since I had sex. I was once a heathen. What led to such a change? Perhaps I was tired of sex. Maybe something caused my libido to diminish. During those years, the desire came incessantly, not for intimacy but for temporary gratification. It was mundane idolatry, reserved for the few who could command a steady supply to sate an insatiable appetite. Therefore, did I cease the irony of my ways by losing all interest in sex to pursue something more significant than the act itself?

Was it affection or emotional intimacy I craved? I didn’t think that I had changed enough. I concluded that I had simply lost the will to fuck everything that moved. I initially felt liberated by my newfound celibacy. However, a life’s worth of deception left behind by a lack of intimacy didn’t fool me, much less fooled others who actually had been.

Still, I often wondered what went wrong as far as my lack of sex life was concerned.

* * *

I was at a strip club downtown, taking in the drum machine and seductive sax while the strippers did the poles. Men applauded, offering swaths of dollar bills.

The club was located at a warehouse close to the riverfront properties in downtown Richmond where some expensive lofts and condos stood. I had a glass of scotch and was seated near a pole, alone, gracing the company of a mauve-haired beauty naked in front of me. She gyrated her hips and cupped her breasts at me. I would smile at her from time to time, but my enthusiasm was blunted by my memories of Sherry Dwyer and the night we had spent together, followed by memories of the following morning when she wound up missing.

Glass after glass, my scotch went down my throat, warming my stomach, making my head feel lighter and lighter with each sip.

I looked around me, and the scotch must have gotten me really tipsy. I started seeing skeletal figures—five of them, to be exact—five skeletons caked with dry earth and dark ash dancing to the tune of industrial music, spasmodically gyrating hips and making jerking movements with their elbows and wrists to the heavy beats.

At the very center, at the pole at the very front, with crowds wildly cheering around her, was Esmeralda—beauty pageant winner from many years ago and the prize of my Tucson, Arizona graverobbing adventure. She was dancing like Nefertiti devoid of vital organs and flesh, and men of all types were serenading her with swooning and promises of money and a life of pleasures.

I shook my head. I knew that I was imagining things. I went to the restroom and splashed water on my face. When I returned and got seated in my chair, the five dead beauty queens were gone, so I took five dollars from my pocket and tried to stick it in the mauve-haired stripper’s ass. The stripper turned around before I could shove the swathe of bills in. I was quite surprised to see the stripper’s reaction, which was etched on her face: her flesh, skin, eyeballs, lashes, and eyebrows were as they should have been. She wasn’t some skeletal figure dancing at the pole—or a fleshy butt, lean torso, and big breasts with a skull and a wig for a head and hair-do on top of it. She looked taken aback.

I snapped back to my senses.

“Don’t you want it?” I tried to ask her nicely.

“Yes,” she replied, “But not there.”

“Tell me where.”

“How about here?”

She pointed at her pussy, then used her pointer finger to part the labia so I could have a peek inside. She smiled like she was being naughty.

I half-expected to see something like an orb—a ben-wa ball—something ancient Chinese women used to strengthen the vagina muscles. Instead, I stared at it into the infinity of red, pulpy stalactites made of flesh. I wondered why it didn’t excite me.

“No,” I told her, irritated this time. Her face became fuzzy as I imagined her being Sherry Dwyer right in front of me.

“I wanna put it in your ass!”

She looked at the bartender, and the bartender nodded. After he did, she did the same.

She turned around. That was when I saw the tattoo on her butt cheek. It looked familiar—like the picture I took of Sherry Dwyer in Tucson, while Sherry was in a pose, letting wine stream down her navel.

The stripper squirmed when I shoved the cash into her ass again. I shoved it in much harder than I would have the first time.

* * *

“Hey! Wait up!”

The stripper at the club turned around to face me. I was following her outside the club. The show was over, but I had to speak to her.

“Look. I don’t want trouble,” she said, sprinting for the door of her vehicle. I ran after her and covered her mouth to muffle her scream.

“I just want to talk.”

“Fuck you, you weirdo!” she muttered through my sticky fingers.

“Where did you have that tattoo done?”

“What the fuck?”

“The tattoo on your ass. Where did you have that done?”

She kicked my boot and it happened to be steel-toed. She kicked at my shins instead, like a wild horse. It hurt. But, I didn’t let go.

“Get the fuck off me!”

“Just answer my question, and you’re free to go.”

“Sherry’s, in Shockoe Bottom.”

“Sherry?”

“Sherry Dwyer’s Tattoo Parlor!”

* * *

Could it be? Sherry Dwyer, in the same zip code? In the same city? Years ago, Sherry and I were having the sex of a lifetime. Then, she disappeared. Who was she? What did she really want that night?

What did she do to me? Why couldn’t I forget her? After one lousy night of great sex?

Sherry Dwyer was the wife of the aforementioned Sherman Dwyer. Sherman was a sicko and Sherry wasn’t far down that road either. After the night we spent together in my apartment, she disappeared the next morning, and days later, her husband, Sherman, filed a missing person’s report.

The cops would then ask many people, including me. Search teams found no trace of Sherry close to her home. The cops had no reason to suspect me since no one (like Charlie) disclosed that Sherry and I had an affair in Tucson, so they did a background check, and that was it.

Sherman Dwyer didn’t confess any details of the job I did for him to investigators either. He knew something was up, but he wasn’t too curious to actually find his wife. He was a necrophiliac, after all, and it occurred to me that he didn’t exactly want the police to find her alive.

Back in my apartment, I searched Sherry Dwyer’s tattoo parlor online and didn’t get results. There were three Sherry Dwyers. The other two had residential addresses listed. I couldn’t explain why I had a hunch that a Sherry Dwyer address at a rough commercial district downtown was none other than the Sherry Dwyer I knew.

I wanted one thing: to take back something she’d taken from me years ago.

* * *

The next day, I drove downtown to Sherry Dwyer’s Tattoo Parlor. I didn’t know what to expect, what to do if I’d see Sherry there. I lit a cigarette and took a puff, then walked in.

I was surprised to find a kid inside, tattooing some biker-looking guy.

“You must be Sherry,” I said to her.

“Who else would I be?” she said flippantly.

The girl was Asian, had long black hair, fair skin, narrow eyes, and thick makeup on her face. The biker guy didn’t seem to mind one bit that I was staring at her working. Fuck, I must have thought. Years ago, I would have tried to screw her.

“Sherry Dwyer?”

She gave me a look like I had just said something stupid. I wasn’t convinced. I didn’t know why I was doing it, but I tried on a little bad cop routine.

“I know you’re not Sherry,” I said to her.

“Who else would I be?” she said again, sounding a little more peeved.

I smiled. I didn’t think an Asian girl would be named Sherry Dwyer or that she would have used the name as an alias, so I puffed more smoke at her, eyeing her down, then inspected the tattoo parlor a little more closely.

“What do you want?” she said.

I picked up a newspaper on a desk full of papers with the front page containing my last job for Sherman Dwyer as the headline: Five Bodies Stolen From Tucson Graveyard.

“I want the real Sherry Dwyer.”

“I am the real Sherry Dwyer. Get a tattoo or get the fuck out!”

I wasn’t the least bit scared. I glanced past her at a hallway leading to some closed doors and thought that maybe, the real Sherry Dwyer was somewhere in there, lurking.

“I’ll come back,” I told her.

“And Sherry had better be here when I do.”

* * *

I wasn’t coming back. I knew better than that. I staked out Sherry’s Tattoo Parlor and followed the Asian girl drive to a nearby club full of metal fans.

A band was playing that night. There were plenty of hoodies and leather coats, long hair, and cups of beer. I waited for the line to shorten and the Asian girl to go inside. I watched her hang with some dudes wearing all black, faces painted white, eyelids smudged black.

I did a nifty bit of blending in, wearing a t-shirt my friend, Charlie, lent me. On the front, it said, ’Marduk. Fuck me, Jesus.’

I went through the crowd in search of the girl. When I found her, she was on her way to the ladies’ room.

I parted the crowd, followed her in, and found all sorts of people doing drugs, burning crystal meth in lab paraphernalia, and foils.

That was when I found the Asian girl getting a hit of smack while Sherry stroked her breasts, fondling her leather-clad ass.

So, I waited in my car and staked the club out, waiting for Sherry and the girl. I did not want to surprise them. After some guests left the club, I spotted Sherry and the girl waiting for the valet. A black Ferrari Testarosa stopped at the curb, and the valet got out and handed Sherry the keys. Sherry and the girl drove away. I tried to follow closely, but I got caught in hot pursuit.

After losing them on one turn, I felt like giving up. I stopped my car at an apartment building downtown and realized with excitement that the Ferrari was just up ahead, parked by the curb of an establishment.

I was about to confront Sherry, having walked up to the driver’s side. After I found the car empty, I looked into the neon-lit window of a nearby shop and found Sherry and the Asian girl trying on some lingerie.

They were trying the lingerie on in clear view from the street. Never finding Sherry or anything about her shocking, I watched as Sherry stroked the girl’s breasts yet again. Then, the Asian girl led her to the back of the shop, presumably to start having sex. I felt frantic.

I entered the shop and watched the porn shop owner while he was fucking another girl from behind, behind the counter. He slid his heavily-veined cock into her small ass, and she winced hard but moaned in mixed pleasure and pain. He looked up and caught me licking my lips.

“Sorry, can I help you?" he said, stopping. He yanked his jeans up, and the girl hurried to get dressed.

The girl looked at me and left towards the back of the shop. I ignored the shop owner and followed the girl.

“Hey, you can’t go in there!” the porn shop owner said.

“Fuck you!” I told him. “I want the girl.”

“You can’t!” he yelled, then looked outside to see if anyone had heard him.

“Why not?” I asked him.

He hesitated before speaking.

“Because she’s expensive,” he said.

“Is she really?” I said sarcastically.

“No, she isn’t, Brainiac. And she’s eighteen, alright?”

“Fuck you!”

“Hey, get out of my store!"

I shoved him aside and went in, following the girl to a room at the end of a hallway. The door was open.

Sherry was inside.

“Why, darling? How have you been?” Sherry said to me, smiling.

“Ah, Sherry Dwyer. I knew I’d find you.”

Sherry was naked from the waist down, getting fellatio from the Asian girl. Waist up, Sherry was hardly dressed anyway, typically wearing a white midriff crop top cupping her fake boobs. She sat there looking bored like she wasn’t enjoying the fellatio.

“Oh, don’t worry about her, dearie,” Sherry said with a swig from a flask. “You wanna take over?”

“Bitch!”

“Sorry, not your thing, is it?”

“You’re coming with me,” I told her.

“Whoa!”

The porn shop owner came in, huffing and puffing and sweating. “I tried to stop him, Ms. Dwyer,” he said.

“Ms. Dwyer?” I asked Sherry.

“It’s fine,” Sherry told the shop owner.

“How long has it been since you’ve had a taste?” she asked me.

* * *

“What the fuck?”

“What’s wrong?”

“You’re not excited?”

Sherry was staring at my limp penis, ready to perform fellatio.

“I guess not.”

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Whip me.”

“You’re a masochist now?”

“You took something from me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t play games with me, bitch!”

“Well, I guess I’ve got to scratch your itch.”

She took out her whip, dragging me up from my seat, and turned me around to face the wall.

The motel room smelled terrible from the inside. From the outside, the KFC next door sent the aroma of deep-fried chicken throughout the parking lot.

A Married With Children rerun was playing on TV. You could hear the couple next door to us banging up against the wall across our bed.

Sherry, meanwhile, was in her element. She’d met Sherman on a date run to a rock concert, doing it outside beside a dumpster in an alley right after the show was over.

I knew that starting off with regular sex wouldn’t do the trick. I wasn’t even erect. I had to find some kinky way of getting started. I thought about whipping—Sherry was about as good as any woman at whipping a man to get him in the mood.

She whipped me several times.

“Is that it?”

“No,” I said.

I didn’t know what was wrong. She tried doing a striptease, and that didn’t work either. Nothing turned me on, not since the last time she fucked me.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“My life back.”

* * *

So, fast forward some months, and my search for Sherry Dwyer brought more of the same—no answers whatsoever. I watched her with listless eyes. My muscles felt languid, no more feverish than a body fished out of the Arctic. Anxious, naked, eager to finish what I’d started, I proceeded to give her fellatio, rousing neither of us. Searching into her vermillion eyes brought me the same eerie sense of nothingness, a sense that an uncharted vessel would forever remain hollow. It felt like a vacuum where souls sucked up from her orifice lay imprisoned and screaming.

Sherry was now a tattooist. Strange but true. I had always speculated whether sex was her only god-given talent, but her tattoos looked genuinely well-wrought. Like the one on the stripper’s ass, for example. Sherry had mastered the art of the somatic defilement.

Did Sherry somehow lose that Sherry Dwyer magic? She had a gift with men who couldn’t feel a connection with women: men who looked at breasts and saw bliss; men who would prefer fellatio to heaven; men who would give up all of life’s worldly possessions like sex was Buddhahood. Men like me.

I left my apartment feeling hopeless, directionless. Like a hitchhiker, a traveler without a destination, I wandered to the point of purposelessness. After all, I thought her touch would titillate me once more, rousing my body to orgasm to reignite my soul.

I drank from morning till noon, rising at 3 PM to find the bottles empty. I would go out shortly to replenish my supply. I went to a liquor store nearby.

I bought two bottles of Hennessey and two bottles of Bacardi. I emptied the two paper bags full of liquor at home and proceeded to open one of each kind. Then, half and half, I poured each of the bottles to create a near-toxic amalgam.

I drank glass after glass, despairing to no end. In the silence, my dreams would not come, my eyes betraying me to sweet somnolence. My muscles grew limp, and my heart slowed down to seeming ataraxy. I lay down on my couch close to death.

The next thing I knew, I opened my eyes to a flood of fluorescent lights. Confused, I looked around me as I was being transported via stretcher in a hallway, surrounded by men and women wearing blue scrubs, pointing the way and pushing the stretcher through the many corridors of a nearby hospital.

The ride stopped at a point where a large spotlight shone on me. I immediately passed out.

* * *

I was in the hospital for a month, then got out. Lost and lonely, I walked the city streets in search of a remedy. I had been diagnosed with depression and tried all anti-depressants to obtain the same results—miserable failure.

I was tested for jaundice. Negative on that. I was tested for a rare deer tick bite that affects the nervous system. Negative on that too. The doctors tested me for cancer. No matter. No luck finding any sign of a terminal disease either.

I was tested for various other ailments, clearing me of chronic disease and a lifetime’s worth of pain. One man, a shaman, said the reason for my ennui was actually simple.

“Your ennui is not of pathological origin. Instead, your disease is a physical manifestation of internal conflict.”

“What does that mean?” I asked him.

“Your illness is psychosomatic.”

I could hardly believe my ears.

He had looked into my eyes while saying the words.

* * *

I read the name on the prescription paper.

I read the directions to the woman’s place. Can’t be right, I thought. There are no houses along the county’s fringes where he told me to seek the person out—just woodland.

It turns out the place used to be quarried for quartz crystals.

I found her where the Asian doctor said I would. Close to the shaft where she sought shelter, under a tree some distance from the debris. Granite rock formations shaped the hillsides of the mine shafts.

I approached her carefully so as not to shock her. Once I was real close, she rustled awake. She looked startled. She grabbed one of her crutches, presumably to defend herself.

“You’re the fortune teller, aren’t you?”

“No. I am not. Begone!”

“I have come a long way.”

“What makes you think you’ve found the one you search for?"

“It’s you. I’m certain.”

I stared at her with false hope gleaming from my eyes. The old woman wore stained, worn-down clothes. Her hands showed prominent knuckles, and the skin on her arms and legs was wrinkled and blemished. She had lived a hard life, I assumed.

“I was told that you could help me.”

“With what? Can’t you recognize a poor, old woman when you see one?”

“I was told you helped people. Helped them get better.”

“I’m not a doctor.”

“No. I apologize. I didn’t mean that.”

“And I’m not a fortune teller,” she snapped angrily.

“I know. I’m sorry. Can you help me?”

“Help you with what?”

“Look into my eyes,” I asked her.

She refrained from doing so.

Frustration mounted. I stared at her long and hard, refusing to blink so she would see, but she refused to look.

“Look at them!” I nearly screamed.

At once, taken aback, she stared straight into my eyes and saw nothing—precisely nothing.

“My boy,” she said sadly, a change in her tone apparent.

I was silent.

“Why have you come for me?”

“I think you know.”

“Search for it yourself.”

“My soul…” I began.

“It’s been taken from me.”

* * *

I couldn’t imagine staying in a shaft for years the way the old woman had. She built a fire by rubbing two twigs, and we sat across from each other with the fire in between. The dark tunnel was dank, and the smell of bat droppings was strong. Often, bats would fly in and out of the tunnel while the old woman and I sat there conversing. She asked me whether I would eat some of the stew she’d made, but the food didn’t look appetizing. Worse, she told me what it really was.

“It’s bat soup,” she said with a laugh. “You get used to it after a while.”

She sat there and ate, telling me how it was like to live in quarries well beyond civilization’s fringes.

“So, it is true that I’ve lived in these tunnels for years. Things I’ve seen and heard. Men and women who have auras that are toxic to love. They are everywhere. But here.”

I listened respectfully.

“The woman you search. This Sherry Dwyer. You say you’ve tried to reclaim your soul from her?”

“I remember that night. It’s still clear to me. How do I take it back from her?”

“You’ll have to do the exact same thing that you did that night.”

“I don’t seem aroused by her anymore.”

“Try this.”

The old woman handed me a small item in a bag. I dipped my hand in the bag and took something out.

“This. Viagra?”

“It works.”

“I can’t believe this!”

“One more thing, of course.”

“Yes? Surely there must be.”

“You’ll have to shape-shift to rouse her and open the portal that hides the souls, she’s taken.”

“How would I do that?”

“I’ll cast a spell to make you appear different to her physically.”

“And where does she hide souls?”

“Through the vessel in which she entraps them.”

“Where’s that?”

“Her vagina!”

Just then, a colony of bats stormed out of the shaft.

* * *

“So, what is she?” I asked the old woman.

“A rare psychic leech,” she said to my astonishment.

“Never heard of that.”

“She sucks out your chi, your life force, and along with that…”

“My semen?” I said, interrupting.

“Your soul, you dummy!” she said, smirking.

We were staking out Sherry’s Tattoo Parlor. The old woman sat in the front passenger seat of my car, smelling like the sewer.

“Go in and do it.”

“This is crazy,” I said, opening the door and getting out.

“Once she sees your disguise, you will look irresistible to her. And oh, chew some of this.”

It looked like dried-up’ shrooms. I was sure she was pulling a fast one, but I was desperate.

I looked both ways if the coast was clear. I felt nervous like it was Mission Impossible...

...or just plain nuts!

“And then what? What do I do when she sees me?”

“Go down on her and suck in the chi, she stole from you.”

“I didn’t know that there was a dark side to Taoism.”

“Just do it,” the old woman said.

I entered the Tattoo Parlor, and the Asian girl was working on a biker dude. She smiled at me. I was shocked. She didn’t seem to recognize me one bit.

“Be with you in a sec,” she said, smiling lasciviously for once.

The biker guy looked pissed. I wondered whether he planned on hitting her up after she did the tattoo.

Sherry came in through velvet curtains wearing typical Sherry apparel. She went over to the biker dude and got down on her knees in front of him. Soon, she was giving him the oral sex of a lifetime.

“Oh," she said, glancing over in my direction. "I didn’t know we had company."

Like the Asian girl, she didn’t seem to recognize me either. I assumed the old woman was doing her little trick on Sherry and Sherry’s assistant. Then, in an instant, I saw the biker guy’s eyes roll, and a shadow loomed over him on the ceiling. Sherry sucked in the shadow like it was vape. I was a little intimidated.

Everything felt like déjà vu. Sherry cupping her fake boobs. Sherry unhinging her jaws to fellate the biker dude’s enormous dick like she was an anaconda eating a water buffalo. Her eyes were lit like she hadn’t just sucked the life out of a human being through the tiny slit in his phallus.

“Hey,” she said to me. “Come over to the back. You’re my kind of customer. You’re special.”

I followed her to the back, but not without looking for the old woman in my parked car some distance away. I thought that the car was empty, but I didn’t turn back.

* * *

So, another night with Sherry Dwyer, and it was another spectacular fuck after another. I had forgotten the game plan, obviously, feeling like my old self again. I felt like Hugh Hefner on steroids, fucking Sherry like I’d fantasized doing to all kinds of women.

Sherry said we’d do it all that night—wet sex, ass-to-mouth, you name it! And fucking idiot I was, I went along for the ride like a puppy just rescued from a kill-shelter.

The moment I thought it must have been a bad dream, I closed my eyes and enjoyed Sherry’s wet tongue on the hairs of my scrotum sac. Then, shape-shift, I screamed after looking in the mirror, seeing who I was fucking like a maniac…

…the old woman from the mining shaft.

She must have been Sherry Dwyer in disguise the whole time.

But something must have happened because I started having an orgasm, shaking, like I was convulsing during an epileptic seizure. I felt vitality seep back into my limbs, my bones feel solid, not brittle, my joints feel fifteen years younger.

When my eyes stopped oscillating from the convulsions, I looked down and saw Sherry Dwyer on the bed, smiling at me—not the old woman at the shaft—Sherry Dwyer, covered in sweat, hardly tired, hardly impressed.

“Now, get off me,” she suddenly said, setting me aside and pushing me off. Then, she headed to the bathroom completely naked. Her butt gleamed in the light of the lamp—smooth and golden—like a 24-karat gold ring with a single diamond desperately hanging on—what turned out to be a drop of semen on her buttcheek.

“Get out! You got what you came for!” she yelled from behind the door.

She was right. I felt different; I had my soul back. I was sure of it.

* * *

I went back to the mining shaft and saw no sign of the old woman. I returned to the shaman’s shop, and the door was chained and padlocked; the windows were boarded up like no one had occupied the place in years. I went back to Sherry Dwyer’s Tattoo Parlor, and the place was shut down, too. In just two days since I’d taken enough Prozac to save me from jumping off a roof, everyone effectively disappeared. Particularly, Sherry—like she was prone to. Oh, well. The sex of a lifetime. That cost me big the first time I tried that out.

I decided that I needed a career change now that chasing after missing people like Sherry Dwyer was no longer a priority. I decided to pursue careers in music and art. I did recitals and did exhibits. I bought an apartment. Charlie was so jealous that he decided to hang out with his other scruffy techie-type friends instead. I still wasn’t predisposed to lending Charlie money now that I was successful, and with his bad advice and suspect maturity, he had become expendable anyway.

Like when he called me after he got word about my voice and piano recital in the National in Richmond (a famous theater). He made a bizarre request.

“Hey man, so since you’re big now, can you loan me some money for a start-up I’m doing with some of my techie buddies. Hey, listen, we’re going to make a million bucks off of this. We offer repair services to lower-income folks in the Richmond Tri-Cities area so we can get a headstart and corner a small market so we can eventually expand. I’m heading the operation. You’ll be a partner. What do you say?"

“Computer repair doesn’t make money,” I told Charlie. “Especially when Geeks-On-Call already has a large share of the market, buddy, ok? Kiss off!”

“Hey, wait! I thought you were my friend, man! How can you bail on me like this now that you’re famous? You know what? Piss off, dude! I thought I knew you.”

The line went dead. It was the last I heard of Charlie.

The best thing that happened to me was when I met this girl, and I fell in love with her. She was a classical singer named Autumn. Together, we did voice and piano recitals. Bach, Haydn, Grieg. We dated for eight months before getting married.

Autumn was fair-haired but not bleached blonde like Sherry Dwyer was. She was beautiful, not silicone-busty. She wasn’t someone you’d catch red-handed partying with A-listers in Wet’N’Wild in Australia. She didn’t wear stiletto heels like they were beach sandals.

She wasn’t close to being the nymphomaniac Sherry Dwyer was either. She constantly rehearsed, singing notes to perfection and going through the scales in crescendo or decrescendo in an equally-impressive fashion.

She didn’t have tattoos, nor did she wear leather underthings. She didn’t attend metal or rock concerts just to get laid with long-haired druggies and rough-types. That was all Sherry Dwyer. And meeting Autumn made me wonder just what I had seen in a woman like Sherry.

So, there were no comparisons between her and Dwyer. Or most of my one-time women, for that matter. Being a pianist, my heart smoldered after listening to the sound of Autumn’s voice, after watching the lush, sweeping radiance of her hair glimmer against the stage lights, or after looking deeply into her eyes and seeing them smile with affection. She was different from the beginning, and she was the first woman of her kind to take notice of me...because I, too, had changed. I wasn’t the sex fiend without a name—the man all my women called using fake first names and aliases. When I met Autumn, my name wasn’t relevant because she didn’t need to know a man destined to be a stranger; she referred to me by my real name. What that is doesn’t matter either. She loves me; that’s what matters.

I never told her about Sherry Dwyer, Sherman Dwyer, the dead beauty queens, the Asian girl at Sherry’s Tattoo Parlor, Charlie, or the old woman in the mining shaft (if she was real in the first place). Autumn and I had our honeymoon in a mountain resort in the Appalachians, and we were blissful. I haven’t been the same since. I had my soul back. Maybe, I always did and always had. I just didn’t have the right woman and the right perspective.

THE END

Next Chapter: Eighth Story: Morbid Destitution of Covenant