Greg Baxter - A Preparation for Death

We got out and I had trouble unlocking my door because Clare was behind me with a hand down my jeans. We stepped inside and I put her on the staircase and unzipped my jeans and lifted her dress and pulled her underwear off and fucked her. She came immediately as I entered her. She was so wet it was like fucking in mud. It was coming down my legs, pooling on the staircase. I told her I was going to come inside her; she nodded. Come inside me, she said. I came. I could feel the head of my dick pressed into her cervix, and I fed every drop of myself to her. We lay on the stairs for a little while. The only thing that kept us from falling asleep was the desire to drink some more wine. I zipped up. I had her walk ahead of me and kept my hands on her ass, up her dress, and even pulled her down again to kiss her, but she said I’d better not start what I couldn’t finish. We poured some wine and turned on some music, and sat outside in the half-warm night. Neither of us ever remembers our conversations: we ask each other questions we have answered several times. She sat on my lap after a while and I pulled down the shoulder of her dress. She was wearing a black silk slip. Are you wearing a slip? I asked. She nodded, as though it were nothing. I began to kiss her again with purpose. Does it turn you on? she asked. I supposed that it did, but I couldn’t explain it. I felt her breasts and stomach through the silk as I kissed her. Then she told me to fuck her. Something original. I brought her inside and bent her over the dining-room table, flat, breasts and face flat down, arms out, hands holding the other side of the table, tiptoes gripping the floor, and I pulled the back of her slip up.

I woke, on Sunday, to find her commingled in my white sheets, naked and asleep on her side. The grey blinds in my bedroom are opaque, but around the edges there are apertures where the light cuts through obliquely and violently. Generally, on weekends, I cover my head in pillows, but somehow Clare had them all under her. She also had almost the whole bed to herself. I put my hand on her waist, and she backed into me. I moved her hair away from her neck.

There was no future in it. But the future and I have nothing in common.

Dublin is sunbathing. June began yesterday. I have run out of housemates — I am sending Helen texts because it fills the house with her wet black hair — and the clutter is gathering without any reason to tidy it. I do not create disorder; I make room so that it may pass.

I wrote my first short story at the age of eleven. It was ten pages, longhand, about a group of teenagers on a journey to a cabin in the woods, who are murdered, one by one, gruesomely, by a Satanic cult. I set it on Friday the 13th, and, after some consideration, decided it must also be Halloween. My uncle Troy, a preacher and welder, who went around people’s yards rebuking Satan in the name of Jesus Christ and whose wife had visions of Satan at her bedside, typed the story out for me. He owned a machine that was half typewriter, half word processor. He typed all the characters of a sentence, which appeared on a tiny screen, then pressed a button and the globe of the typewheel began to batter ink onto paper. Rendered this way, my story, disappointingly, covered only a single page. Uncle Troy, a short but large man with side-parted black hair, handed it to me as though the event were of such little significance that it did not even deserve reflection. I asked, feeling rather humiliated, if the story was at all scary. Boy, he said — and he squeezed his face together very seriously — I have seen the future, and nothing scares me but the will of God. I did not believe him, and told him so. He said, Let me show you. He opened the bible on the desk — there were bibles all over the house — walked me to the kitchen table, and introduced me to the Book of Revelation.

I come to this imperfect memory — I have no idea how much of it is true; I only broadly know that I am not lying — from two directions: I remember the day for my first short story, and for my first encounter with the Apocalypse. That may sound a little precious. I only mean to say that no matter which path I take back to that anecdote, my recollection of one always leads me to the other.

My mother and I had only just moved to Conroe, following her divorce from my father. In San Antonio, as a Catholic and altar boy, I had drearily studied the Bible and held long and torpid discussions on Jesus with Sunday School teachers. I was intuitively disconnected from Christ. I once told a teacher that even Jesus made mistakes; she corrected me. When we moved to Conroe, I found that people were intensely more religious, or more outwardly religious, but Satan had supplanted Jesus as the central character, and the Apocalypse was more celebrated than the crucifixion. People spoke of Jesus effusively and kindly, but if you let them go on long enough they turned the conversation to Satan. And of all the figures in the drama, Satan was, to me, the most captivating: intuitively he was my man.

It is important to say this: Satan is not an idea in east Texas, nor a myth, nor a figure you must face beyond death, nor a reason not to sin, nor even a metaphor for the capability of wrong and cruelty that exists in the hearts of all men. He is a man who stands in the woods behind your house, or walks your streets, or comes to your bed. Sometimes he wears jeans and cowboy boots, and sometimes he has wings and hooves. I heard of young women who were raped by Satan in the middle of the night — and I met two of them — because they were impure of thought. While Satan, in many cases, was surely a father or stepfather (a stepfather raped one of the girls I knew), in others the experience was purely imaginative or hallucinatory — something from the fever of religion and guilt and loneliness and inadequacy. But there was also something purely wonderful in the thought of it. The stories, which were often passed down by scaremongering adults, turned all of us — at various ages — to impure thoughts. Girls secretly adored him, and formulated rape fantasies. Boys, who were jealous, passed on rumours with pornographic, exaggerative zeal. I still find it pleasurable to visualize Satan with young women. I know it is reprehensible to find sexual gratification in rape, but in my fantasies Satan is always handsome, and the women always want him.

Now and again, my cousins and I filled whole evenings, whole nights, with talk of the Apocalypse. We sat outside in darkness, or in dark rooms, quoting lines from the Book of Revelation, lying about the seven signs beginning. Some said they had seen a red moon, others that a trumpet had howled in the clouds; I told them all that a machine in Switzerland that made credit cards was called the Beast. I am not ashamed to say that I joined rebuking excursions around our houses. Satan had to flee if you rebuked him, but only if your faith was pure. Since ours was not, these excursions were about seeing him. But I think I was alone in the belief, which I dared not share, that if I met Satan, he and I would get along.

I was as fascinated then as I am now with thoughts of annihilation. Beyond the Book of Revelation, I was also obsessed with the certainty of nuclear war. I used to climb on top of the roof of whatever house or trailer home we were living in, and with a pair of old binoculars — my father’s — I watched the sky for incoming Soviet ICBMs. I examined vapour trails. My friend Grayson often joined me, and we would say things to each other such as, That is not the vapour trail of an airplane. We would call each other and say we’d spotted mushroom clouds. For many years my mother and I lived in a house whose previous owner had installed a bomb shelter — a large steel tank buried thirty feet deep and connected by a staircase to the living room. But I knew that when war did start, the best place to be was near the blast, so that you were immediately incinerated.