Michael Martone - Four for a Quarter - Fictions

INVISIBLE GIRL

Where he touches me, I vanish. The back of his hand stroking my face erases my cheek. Involuntary, the skin initially, then the deeper flesh. The skin first, gone when it feels his fingertips. I feel the surface disappear but still feel feeling there. His touch sinks in. The subdermal layers go. The nested cells he polishes clear, his soft palm hovering. By the time I have stripped off the blue bodysuit, stepping out of the spandex which retains, for a second, the shape of my body as it falls, the body it reveals has already become translucent, the meat turning milky, the bone wiped clear in streaks like a smear of butter melts the white from a paper plate. I become clarified grease beneath him. Entwined, we are tangled up in the skein of my airy sinew, the ropey braids of my circulatory system, its cartoon of primary reds and blues. My blood thins in the extremities but knots at the nodes of erectile tissue, clotting a nipple visible again beneath the sheen he has left from licking what looked, a moment before, like air, now, me, there, concentrated into rubbery ruby light again. It disappears into his mouth. I am down to the broken dashes of the central nervous system, suggesting, still outlining, the outer neural net of my skin, feeding me the synaptic code of dots and dits from the dissipating periphery. His hands, as they caress nothing, reveal me to myself, leave the afterimage of his movement burned upon the transparent wall of my retina, the lightning streak of his skin shaping the borders of my own body. I close my eyes and watch as my eyelids dissolve. My vision passes through skin first, turning then to scrim. And I see, now, through another unoccluded lens. I see through my lids, through myself, see his cock, clearly, moving inside of the vast and now empty empty space which must be me and must be not me.

THE HUMAN TORCH

I sit at the bar, usually, drinking ouzo neat, a Jordan almond dissolving at the bottom of the shot glass. I have set the liquor on fire swizzling it with my finger. I like to watch the floor show and the show on the floor. The tunnel crowd weirded-out by the drag queens doing stripteases or singing old torch songs “One for my baby and one more for the road,“ sending up Lady Day or Barbra, that kind of thing. I dump some water into my aperitif, extinguishing the blue flame and turning the drink chalky like a precipitate in a test tube. My current favorite is a Liza interpreter who vamps this obscure number — is it by Mercer? — that plays with the line “You've let yourself go.“ She sings to her lug of a lover how he has grown fat and dull, how their liaison has suffered the consequences. There follows a litany of complaint. What a schlub, she sings. “You've let yourself go.“ But it turns in the end. It always turns. “Come on over here,“ she whispers, “come on over and let yourself go.“ I tear up, naturally, but it isn't saline staining my cheek. It's a dab of molten lava percolating there in the corner of my eye, my own brand of running mascara. I have to watch myself. Spontaneously, my eyelashes can ignite, throwing sparks up into the tinder of my eyebrows, which can smolder for hours without my knowing. Once, I set the sprinklers off in the Russian Bath House on 10th. I've stopped looking for a boy who can top me. It's too dangerous. The leather bars. Too hot. I was cooking inside the horsehide Eisenhower jacket, cooking the jacket, the seared meat smell an additional turn-on, I suppose. These powers we have acquired seem to fall into that dark space between the involuntary responses wired into us and those we can modulate. Not like the heartbeat on the one hand or walking home on the other, but like blinking and winking, say, or like desire itself. There is only so much one can do to help oneself. Oh sure I can bellow “Flame On“ all I want followed by the stunning transformation from solid buff flesh to superheated gaseous vapor. The controlled burn. Here precision scalding. There the delicate sweating of copper pipes. But in the weaker moments, when I am weak in the knees, a stranger's hand on my hand will steam off skin. I can't watch myself all the time. A human touch sets off the human torch. I am a captive within my sublime hide.

MR. FANTASTIC

To make the edge of the famous samurai swords of antiquity, the smiths beat the iron flat into foil then folded the metal over and hammered it flat again. And then another fold and peening, and still another and then another. Thousands of times. Fold and flatten, fold and flatten. Until, in this primitive way, through brute force and patience, the metal's crystalline structure became saturated with itself. Atoms packed inside the spaces between atoms, at last, both the surface and simultaneously its underside now no more than a molecule deep, the edge of the matrix serrated only by the minute undulation of subatomic matter, a sine wave, spanning a mere handful of angstroms, of the outermost electrons. Sharp, you bet. It is what I find myself doing to my own skin in private moments. I stretch and fold and knead it back together. A wrinkle in the loose hide on my forearm, a flap of fat at my chin. It is the very definition of definition, and I spend hours honing my musculature, ironing in the pleats on my belly, increasing the cant of my cheekbones with the finest shade of a sharpened pencil line. I know what people are thinking. The elasticity of your normal everyday run-of-the-mill uncosmicly irradiated penis is, itself, a goddamn miracle to most. The ways it inflates, its skin thinning to the gauziest of tissue webbed by diaphanous capillary sponge grown thick with the stiffened rebar of packed and interlocking corpuscles. Sure, I've tried it all. Swallowed myself whole, took myself in myself from behind. For awhile she liked to watch it snake toward her across the floor, liked the way it coiled up a leg then threaded the cleft of her rear, whipping around her waist then back up her back, curling over her shoulder and back down between her breasts down her stomach, parting her down down there and then her labia and into her from above, how its tensile strength lifted her in this hardened harness, held her weightless as it expanded within her and all around her. We haven't done that in awhile, and everything, believe me, grows familiar. Recently our lovemaking has tended toward the less baroque. A simple vertical embrace, my member remembering its scale from before the accident. Sue, her legs wrapped around my waist, is saddled on my hips, riding this altogether unfantastic appendage and me supporting her, strapping my silly, pliant arms around her, then around me and then around her again. Stretching, another lap and lapping another lap, another band around us both, belting us to us. My arms still encircling, encasing us from head to toe, this cocoon spinning while we kiss, my elasticity nearing its end, effaced to the point of transparency, my thinning skin becoming, at last, the clear outer covering, at last, of this new creature we create.

THE THING

I don't really need the briefs down below since my thing ain't there no more. It's more for show to let the folks know I was once a guy. A scrap of cloth for the modesty of the citizens craning their necks to take a gander at me. They can't get past the orangey crust of skin. It's something all right. Little do they know I am all hanging out there for anybody to see. My Johnson, or what I take to be my Johnson (Johnsons really — I don't know since there is no other thing like me, as far as I can tell, to let me try out these doohickeys of wadded callous and thingamabobs of oozing mucus) is plopped there in front of their collective noses. Just more eruptions and rashes on the sliding plates of my scaly surface. The Doc explained it to me, showed me the Tinkertoy models of your typical twisted normal gene, and then how mine's been tripled, another worm squirming around that ladder of goofy golf balls. It's simple for everybody but me. Male and female. Male and female down to everybody's bones but me. No bones for me. No in and out. No on and off. A whole other dimension to nookie. What I have become needs a couple other things to reproduce, I guess, not just one other. Sex, as near as I can figure, is like nothing you can dream of since those dirty pictures your brain's pumping out are made up of, you got it, those same twin strands caught wrapped up in each other. Well, I am another other. And I am on the lookout for other others like me. Meantime, when I'm alone (but this could be in the middle of Times-freaking-Square, a public spectacle where the public can't begin to see the me that's me) I make myself have this nameless thing, feel this Thing thing I have no words, no more, for.