Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

And so Abrams stands there on the concrete sea, in the sweltering heat, and looks down at his narrow cup, the red spoon stabbed into the blank territory of pleasure. Abrams feels the anxiety of the first bite spreading over his body like a very tiny horse race across his epidermis, Abrams tracing its progress from the environs of his anus up into the space below his belly button and then across the plain of his chest. He can feel his intestines spasm. He looks down into the cup and uses the spoon with its garish red to swirl the already melting contents. Shockingly, something Abrams has not foreseen: the color-coating of the Nerds, enveloped by the ice cream, has begun to bleed into the pure bed of ecru. Each individual Nerd leaves an arcing trail of hue, dissipating in intensity and, worst of all, revealing at its core a heart of whiteness, which all collectively sit on the field of ice cream like teeth thrown across an unwashed linen sheet.

Abrams supposes that this feeling, this loosening from between his shoulders through his core and reaching finally his sphincter, is what makes men, particularly soldiers, defecate in the process of their deaths. It is a kind of peacefulness, it is true. There’s nothing particularly special or original about the pleasure of abandon, Abrams knows. Perhaps there lies within the sensation of knowing, of (literally) striding forth into the moment of his fate, some sort of masochistic desire, a sense in which Abrams’ appreciation of the maze of light and the calm fall of shadow was in fact beckoning the violence of the thing in the dirt which he cannot see. A death wish. Perhaps this is what — underneath all the paroxysms of memory — he’s really wanted. Why else can he not stop his foot, really?

Just as he cannot stop now the memory of Lara Fugelsang, the tall, severe-faced, blonde lesbian in the philosophy seminar he’d taken back in graduate school.

Abrams had assumed Lara was a lesbian mostly because she had a girlfriend, and a face that featured prominent, martial cheekbones. She was writing her thesis on some inherently boring, ultraspecific example of gender politics in government language usage, and her comments in seminar were always throbbing with disgust and carefully curated anger. Abrams hated her. He hated her comments. He hated gender politics in general, and especially her diluted third-wave, recherché feminism which was really, he’d always suspected, just a collection of exceedingly normal personal anxieties. He had no idea what Lara was really like, or where she’d come from. He only really knew that she’d gone to Brown.

Abrams spent a lot of time staring at Lara in that seminar. And it was this that he hated the most about her: that the sight of her made Abrams wonder if, really, deep down, he hated women. He worried about this a lot. He did not feel that he hated women. He supported feminism, when it was not being annoyingly espoused in seminars, and generally shared the reasoning of many girls and women he’d known who hated men. He was, by all accounts, a conscientious, generous, and democratic lover. But there was the blowjob thing, which was undeniable.

What he would eventually begin to do, every single time the seminar met, was to look at the female members of the class and imagine, especially when they began to talk, forcing his penis into each of their mouths. He needed no extended barstool monologue from Lara (though he’d heard her give a very good one on the subject) to understand the inherent misogynistic issues involved in the act of oral sex itself, let alone what it might mean about Abrams that he sat there and imagined what he did about the women in the seminar, not all of whom he hated. He didn’t hate all of them, but the exercise was especially exciting, he squirmingly admitted to himself, when it was someone he did hate, when it was Lara herself. He was consistently taken aback, somewhat horrified in the midst of his helpless reverie, by the violence implied in this carnality. He often even felt victimized by it himself. He did not want to be the kind of man who sat there and imagined — with asinine pleasure — this act. And yet he was that kind of man, apparently. Which made him think he secretly — unbeknownst even to himself — bore some vast reservoir of hatred for women. Which made him hate Lara — Lara in the specific, he defended to himself, who happened to be a woman — even more.

But then the computer lab. The first deposits of their theses were due the next day, and Abrams and Lara were the only ones left at their workstations at 2:47 in the morning. Abrams had been reviewing leaked U.S. Government memos for his own thesis ( False Narrative Constructions in Intelligence Reporting, 1976–2001 ), which would eventually get him the enlistment appointment with the Defense Intelligence Agency, and which in turn would lead to his job at the Combat Review Repository in Tucson (which itself would eventually lead to his attachment to this unit, in Iraq, in the dusty alley where the device of his fate awaited him). He didn’t know what Lara was working on.

What he did know was that they were both printing off large amounts of material, and had been taking awkward turns getting up from their seats and going to the boxy printer to retrieve their documents. As the hour grew later and later, however, their papers became mixed, and they kept getting in each other’s way during simultaneous fetchings. Abrams was pretty sure Lara had twice now taken a stack of documents that belonged to her and purposefully included in her grab the documents he’d printed off, then thrown them away on the other side of the lab. He retaliated by doing the same to a packet of hers at the back of his own pile. The next three times they got up, Lara became more physical, elbowing him out of the way. On the fourth time, when she went to elbow him, Abrams shouldered into her, which she responded to by hip-checking him sideways with surprising strength, sending him caroming painfully into the corner of the table the printer stood on and then to the ground. Abrams got up quickly, the blood in his face pounding, and pushed her.

By some tangoing struggle, Abrams ended up standing against her from behind, and pressed up against each other like that, they each suddenly and simultaneously became aware of his erection.

Abrams was so tired and supremely confused by the erection, and the situation that gave rise to it, that he took a small step backward, his face falling, feeling both ashen and humiliated.

“Listen, I—” he started to choke out. He was going to apologize. Lara did not turn around.

What Lara did was bend slowly forward, bracing herself against the table, which motion reclosed the space between her ass (its shape Abrams had noticed watching her go to and from the printer, covered thinly by her light dress and tights) and the taut front of Abrams’ slacks. She looked back over her shoulder at him, her eyes flashing, almost angry, but sincere.

“Oh, just do it already,” she said, and without really thinking Abrams undid his pants and let them drop and pushed up the soft material of her dress and pulled down her tights — she wore nothing underneath — and commenced intercourse with her, just like that.

Even as he was doing it he was aware of the queasiness of it, the problematic nature of what was happening. There were so many things at once: Abrams had never had sex in public before; he was terrified that he was enacting some surely misogynistic male protofantasy about “turning” a lesbian by phallic force; he was also concerned that he was raping her, and he stopped cold at the thought, looking at his hands lightly grasping Lara’s narrow hips, trying to scan an objective description of the situation for any signs of resistance (was she being sarcastic? were her verbalizations now ones of pleasure or horror? was he in any way manhandling her?) but she only moved back against him more forcefully. And overlaid on everything was the childish surprise: he’d thought Lara hated him; he’d thought he hated Lara. With a shudder, and a sound from Lara, he ejaculated, and was done. They were still for a few long seconds, his heart beating wildly.