Rafael Yglesias - Fearless

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she said as they rode on the sea together to the elevator.

“Yeah, it’s amazing,” Max thought or answered, he wasn’t sure which, and he also didn’t know what he was referring to: the surfing, the crash, the acid, or checking into a hotel with Alison.

Maybe I’m her husband, he thought, and giggled. Maybe I’m the father of her four children, of the dimwit and the cripple. I have tenure but insufficient power and money. My wife is fat.

“Stop it,” she whispered and giggled.

He was kissing her neck. He had found the familiar beauty mark that appeared at the start of the slope toward her shoulder. He tasted the dot with his tongue, a drop of chocolate that had no sweetness.

They were in the room without Max knowing how. He searched for her face and found an eye, a nose, and at last her lips. He kissed her dry lips and snuggled deeper to find another pair that were moist and kinder; he wedged himself in and nestled. A sound thundered from a canyon and vibrated him.

Sky appeared in his vision. A gray sky, but bright anyway. He glided warily, a hawk searching for his home.

She laughed in the clouds. Her head was a painting, and yet it breathed, expanding out from the canvas. “Max! Let’s get into the bed…I’m too old to stand up,” she joked, her smooth skin wrinkling with laughter.

“I’m sorry,” he tried to say, but he droned like an old turntable; the record moved too slowly under the stylus.

“I love it. Don’t be sorry.” She moved away, a boat separating from the dock and he hung on, desperate, afraid he would fall in the water. She kept laughing. He fell on the bed. It was cool like water, but of course it bounced.

I’m tripping, he thought.

“I have stretch marks,” he said in his own ear.

“I do?” he asked himself.

More laughter. The sun set when she drew the curtains. Dark passed over the room as if a giant’s hand were blessing them. If God existed He could pass His palm over the earth and blacken it like that.

“Don’t you believe in God?” she asked.

Max opened his eyes. The ceiling was low, pressing down. A smoke alarm’s red light warned him: You are tripping and you have your eyes closed and you don’t know the fucking difference.

“Where are you?”

Her answer came from behind. He turned and saw her, mountainous beneath an unreal yellow bedspread. The color was unlike anything in nature. Her young face was scared.

“Max. I didn’t bring my…you know…I didn’t think this was going to happen.”

“You think too much,” he said and stared at the curtains. They were drawn but light glowed from all the edges. He listened to the whooshing noise of the air-conditioning and felt the low ceiling of prefabricated panels close in. It was similar to being in the DC-10. Everything modern was a coffin. He had struggled so hard to use the new materials, cheaper and faster to manufacture and install, and yet you could make nothing but death containers out of them. There was no wood on earth wide enough to make the floors of even the meanest barn of a hundred years ago. Nothing could achieve the simplest beauty of a Shaker table without their purer wood, their purer paint, maybe without even the pure air of a world gone forever. He had only colors that never lived, fabrics fused in laboratories, and walls created out of the letters and numbers of the periodic table. He had turned his back on the past and its impossible abundance and impractical patience; he had embraced the technology of his world, determined to be a man of his time, and it had tried to assassinate him.

“Max, we don’t have to…Max!” Her head was a gargoyle snarling: “You bastard, I just wanted to talk!”

She was lying under the bedspread, covered up to the neck, embarrassed and angry. I’m not being dutiful, Max realized. He moved from the floor (how he got there he didn’t know) to beside her on the bed. His body sloshed as if it were a half-full pail of water. He heard the cheapness of the room: everything creaked and groaned. He pried her hand away from the bedspread. Her fingers seemed to break under his pressure, but she didn’t cry out in pain.

“Oh…” she sighed and shut her eyes as he lifted the covering off and exposed her.

The white slab of flesh shivered and talked to him. He touched the palpitating hollow of her throat with the tip of his tongue and she was animate, rumbling. He trailed down the soft body, tasting salt and flour, and all over him happiness tingled. There was nothing skimpy or flimsy here: this was pure.

He found a nipple and fed. He found folds and more nipples. He fed and fed. There were teats everywhere and heat, terrific heat, a sauna of love. “Take off your clothes,” he told himself, but there was no body to remove them from. He was only a mouth of liquids. He counted the breasts. There were five. He counted arms and there were eight. He counted the lips and there were six.

“Oh my God,” she said.

He was a mouth but no voice. He tried to ask why she wanted to discuss God but forgot the previous word as each new one was formed. Anyway, it wasn’t important. A sea poured up his body: hot, unwinding his muscles, and melting his bones.

Where’s my cock? he wondered and opened his eyes. He didn’t have one. He had grown an abundant woman from his stomach. She swam out of him, her face relaxed.

“You’re not angry anymore,” he said, the words sounding through his nose.

“Oh God,” she answered.

He laughed and told her: “There is no God.”

The FBI man’s head was wide to begin with; and yet his ears stretched his face even more, comically projecting flesh farther from the center of his face, which was a small nose and tiny red lips. “Are you Max Klein?” he asked.

Everything in Max’s mouth was stuck together; there didn’t seem to be any free space inside. “Hmmm,” he mumbled his yes. He realized he had no clothes on and hid his body behind the hotel door, clutching the edge of its frame. He had a headache too, he noticed, two lines of pain running from his cheeks and crossing his forehead, burning to the back of his skull.

The wide-faced man opened a leather wallet. Inside there was a picture of that face with FBI in big letters beside it. “I’m Agent Parsons. This is my partner, Agent Smith.” Smith was black and skinny. The cool white collar of his shirt shimmered against his ebony neck. He seemed to be staring at a point above Max’s head. “You’re registered as a Mr. Max Klein of 505 West End Avenue? Is that correct?”

Max felt shame. He knew he had been naughty, but he wasn’t sure what to select from his buffet of guilt: taking LSD, committing adultery, eating strawberries, the death of his partner, the abandonment of the children he had saved, peeing on private property…

Meanwhile he mumbled, “Wait,” hurrying into his pants — he couldn’t find his underwear or his shirt. He let the G-men in, prepared to surrender. It wasn’t the sixties anymore: his behavior deserved punishment.

“Do you have any identification?” Agent Parsons asked.

Max gave Parsons his wallet and watched Smith wander around the room searching for something. “No bags?” Smith asked when he opened the closet and saw it was empty except for Max’s underpants and polo shirt.

“It’s him,” Parsons said and showed his partner Max’s photo on his New York State driver’s license.

I didn’t call my wife and son, Max remembered. That was the crime he had committed.

“Were you on a flight to—?”

“Yes,” Max interrupted. “I was there.”

“You took a hike straight from the scene?” Smith asked. “Just upped and left?”

“Yeah…” Max’s head throbbed and he held it in his hands. A vivid neon flash of his first and ultimately rejected drawing for the Zuckerman house on Long Island pulsed against his eyelids.