Mark de Silva - Square Wave

It was difficult for him to see the drawing as his. He’d been listening carefully, raptly, to her story. He was paid to listen, after all, and he wasn’t going to lose this gig. But it was more than that. Her story, her way of telling it… he liked the way she spoke. That’s how Renna would have put it. Everything was balanced just so. Whatever exactly he asked, she would look inward the way you could only look outward, at someone else’s situation. It’s how he was too. You saw more that way, even if after a while, you looked around for something to blind you. A pill, a drink. Still, before that happened, you could see the art in things that were ugly and vile. Like tragic verse. That’s what she’d been making him see now.

But as hard as he’d been listening, by the looks of it he’d also been drawing, and quite carefully too. It seemed incredible to him, but there it was: the contours of the bear’s head natural and subtle, the expression of the beast equanimous, if beasts were capable of such. The eyes, though, had not been finished. But then, being unsure of his intentions, he couldn’t say if this wasn’t the full picture. Whatever it was, the eyes were mere circles in the pale green of the paper, not the black of the pen. Perhaps that’s where the equanimity resided.

Stagg turned back to Jen. She had paused, noticing his involvement with the pad. Probably she thought something important was written there, about her case. Perhaps a relation to the other cases, or some interpretation of her words. A key. Even he expected better of himself: something about his essays, if he had to drift. Not a bear.

He flipped the sheet. “And then, the attack itself?”

“I answered his questions, told him I’d been doing this for a while, on and off, that I didn’t know how long I would keep doing it. It depended on what alternatives came up. He said he knew young women who worked as clerks, waitresses, baristas, that sort of thing, and aren’t those alternatives. I told him I had done some of those jobs, that they humiliated me in certain ways that felt worse than giving head.

“He gripped the steering wheel tightly and stared out the windshield. He said, ‘Then why don’t you do that, right now?’ I was a little surprised, given his tone up to now. But that’s why I went on the ride, right? So I leaned over his lap and undid his belt. He gently put his hand on my shoulder. I pulled his cock out and started stroking it. I was about to put it in my mouth when I felt a terrible pain in my back. He’d hit me with a blackjack.

“I knew it was him then, and my fears — some of them — grew. I knew there was going to be pain. I knew there’d be the hospital. But some of my fears shrank. I knew I’d be left alive like the others.

“Anyway, that’s how he pulped me that night, with the blackjack. I thought it was like an especially bad beating by a loan shark, except you’d never borrowed money from him in your life. I think he kicked me a few times too. I can’t remember everything after it started. I gave way at that first shot, collapsed in his lap, with my face resting on his cock. He pulled me from the car, from the driver’s side, and lashed me with the sap, all over. I remember seeing the tool, the woven leather, the springy handle.

“And the sting of each hit. It would ripple out until it met the stings of all the other hits, until eventually, these circles of pain, they overlapped, turned into one thing. And then it stopped. He left. I started to feel less. It was very cold, and I remember feeling grateful for that. Then, later, I was dragged along the ground again, but more gently, by a different man.” She looked at Stagg as she said this. “And I remember being unloaded from the ambulance at the hospital.”

“He said nothing to you, during or after.”

“I don’t think he had anything left to say.”

Stagg started to summarize these details in his notes, the bullet points Penerin would want, how all this might compare to Ravan’s cases. But the image of Jen collapsing on the man’s cock, at the strike to her back, divided his mind, and half of it turned toward the double-axe handle.

His freshman-year roommate once told him about someone he grew up with, Chris, who was, at the time, a Sigma Chi brother at Cornell. He’d met a thick black girl one January night — Lena, a student at Ithaca College, he thought — in a pickup bar in town. She wore a bob cut, with shiny, waterproof hair, the sort that had been relaxed in an attempt to mimic the hair of other races. But in this respect it failed. It looked only like distressed African hair. She wore black skintight leggings, and a black blouse meant to be flowing that was instead packed tight with flesh. Her belly appeared to begin at her sternum and it rolled in waves down her front as she moved.

Chris showed up at the bar already loose from the four pints he’d had at the frat house, around the pool table. It was Sunday night and the bar was less than half full. He sat down, asking for a double Maker’s, one cube. Lena was three stools down talking with another black woman, this one of more common proportions. There was a moderately attractive white girl next to Lena, then an empty stool, then Chris. The girl reminded him just slightly of an ex, her small breasts pressed against a fitting wool sweater. He caught the ex’s eyes — they might as well have been — and nerves seemed to stir in her. A sense of possibility came over her face; he let it be for a minute, in small talk. He made it grow when he asked if she’d like to move down a stool. She did.

The bartender came to see if she could use a drink Chris would pay for. But as she ordered, he slipped around her, bourbon in hand, to the stool she’d vacated. He thanked her for moving and watched vague hopes seep from her face. Seamlessly he chatted up Lena. A few vodka spritzers, some talk about the formative influence of Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City on his life, and then outside, pushing past six-foot snowbanks on the narrow road. To an Ithaca dorm? No, turns out she’s not a student anywhere, just a townie. The fraternity was no place for her. So they made their way to her apartment at the base of the hill.

He watched Lena jiggle up the stairs from behind. The place was clean, it surprised him to see. But the materials were poor: linoleum, plywood, dollar-store spackling, wood-patterned plastic for the table, chairs in aluminum with vinyl cushions, and a couch upholstered in cloth only slightly smoother than burlap.

He thought of his ex as he pulled the clothes from her. The mess of rolling flesh made him smile. He pulled out his cock and pushed it between those heavy lips. Too much tooth. Can’t even suck a dick right. He reverse-fishhooked her with his thumbs, felt the grooves of her molars worn away by ten thousand Slim Jims. With his hands gripping her face, he wrenched open the jaws and pushed himself into the space he’d made. She gagged and tried to close it, but his thumbs were there. He carried on in her mouth this way until she began to froth. He rolled the woman over, told her to fold out the burlap couch. She said some words that didn’t interest him. He was more concerned with the two condom coins he’d pulled from his pocket, for double bagging. The diseases he imagined she had then were many, and the thought of each brought more blood to his groin. He finished his preparations and worked her over from behind. She rocked and rolled and the couch threatened to collapse, but he was determined to finish before the fall.

He did. But as he came, he gave her two sharp shots to the kidney, gripped his hands high above his head around the handle of an imaginary axe, and launched himself into the air with a roar. He brought his fists down on the stem of her neck, his full weight behind them. The metal struts of the couch seemed to crumple as her arms splayed out and she came down in stages under him.