Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

Proto-hominid sexuality, according to the books, was forged in the prehistory of humankind, in our evolutionary prehistory, the time in which we never experienced nor worried about love . Back then, we experienced only sexual longing and duty. Sexual longing was incredibly violent, and here Vienna Roberts was quoting from the pages of a book she had downloaded many times; sexuality was closer to cannibalism than it was to intimacy , which was not a word that proto-hominids would have understood in any way. What we failed to do, according to Allan Spinrad’s Sex for Hominids and Proto-Hominids , which spawned a long-running infomercial as well as a reality program, was utilize all the sexual tools at our disposal, including neglect, contempt, hatred, murderous rage, and despair, let’s not forget despair, or even dishonesty, as well as the kind of stunning, overwhelming joy that one feels in having crushed the will of the loved one.

Proto-hominid! There had to be a better way to say it. But no one had come up with that better way. For the moment, women were ripping off their golf dresses and were trying to get their husbands to ravish them in the parking lots of emptied shopping malls, and they were shouting out gibberish (part of Spinrad’s argument related to speaking in tongues ), which was hard to ignore, if you were coming back from the ice cream shop, with your double scoop and jimmies, and your best friend’s mother was wearing a shark mask and red high-heeled pumps and fucking the pool boy, who had a hairy back, just like a chimpanzee.

She and Jean-Paul got into it, because you couldn’t not get into it, because these trends came in waves, and when the world was falling down around you, you did what you could do to stick your head in the sand, the desert sand, to feel as little as possible. This the proto-hominids must have done, when they were going extinct. Like the Neanderthal had to watch the first Cro-Magnons in Central Europe, knowing how much smarter those new guys were, the brand-new Cro-Magnons. She and Jean-Paul got into it, because all the kids got into it, because the kids got into what their parents got into, even if they ridiculed their parents a little bit. And what she noticed, when she was a prodigious reader of Spinrad and the commentators on Spinrad, was that certain ideas did make her a little bit, well, there was no other way to put it, certain things kind of made her wet , when she thought about them with Jean-Paul, like there was one thing that really kind of made her wet , and not just a little bit. This one thing was a faucet being turned open, which was not what she had experienced, for example, when she had first slept with that lacrosse-playing hunk of wood Damien Lorenzo, which had been like trying to stick a fence pole into a block of concrete — anyway, what really made her wet , at first, was the idea of gagging Jean-Paul, like actually gagging him, pretty tightly, so that he couldn’t say anything. She had a horror of stuff like this at first, but then she kind of liked it. She had a kind of a high-pitched screech she got into, and she imagined this was the cry of some kind of rhesus monkey, while she was gagging him, and then when she was done gagging him, she liked to blindfold him. Now, what kind of proto-hominid male, you might ask, would be willing to be gagged and blindfolded? She wasn’t totally sure why Jean-Paul Koo was so willing to go along with this stuff, but she thought it probably had something to do with the Dead Mother, who was always around him everywhere, or so he said. She was in his back pocket. The Dead Mother. She was in his glove compartment. Only proto-hominid sex , he said, allowed him to put aside all these feelings of filial duty or whatever. He needed to really go back down through the evolutionary chain of sexuality.

Getting him out of all of his rags, so that he had on only the satin jockstrap thing, out on the desert floor, with the big clouds massing in the west, there was something about it that was enough for her, or temporarily enough, proto-hominid enough, never mind hominid , which was level two, and when she got him like that there was always some other thing she wanted to do, some other degradation that she wanted to visit upon him. It was in fact never enough, and in this case she wanted to tie him up, and she had some of those things, what were those things called, those cords that you used to attach to things, bungee cords? She could bungee-cord his wrists, and then instead of laying him down gently, she would just pummel him until he was on his back on the desert floor, and he was still laughing, which was always a good sign, and she took off everything except her bra, because the one thing that Vienna Roberts couldn’t stand was anything to do with her nipples. Maybe for this reason, if she left Jean-Paul’s wrists unbound, he was always ripping at her bra, trying to get at her nipples, biting at them and generally causing a lot of trouble. She hated that maternal thing, didn’t like feeling that anyone was using her in some maternal way, because she wanted all the maternal parts of her shut off; she would have been glad, as a teenager, to have her cervix and her uterus and all that stuff taken out of her body, because you know, proto-hominids had no idea that sexuality caused babies; that wasn’t something they put together at all. They didn’t make decisions about sexuality based on anything to do with procreation. They just wrestled around and bit one another and penetrated one another and had orgasms, and in the process, they got covered with sweat, blood, and come, and then some time later, in a completely different place and environment, ordained by the plentiful gods, the females swelled up and went through that agonizing labor business.

Naked as a primate, she located a furry eye mask of her own. If the desert was about death, then she wanted the possibility of death, she wanted the reintroduced wolves hovering just out of range of the rutting proto-hominid teenagers, and she wanted the coyotes and the mountain lions all getting ready to devour them, hopefully waiting right behind that stand of greasewood until the moment when they were about to come together, she and Jean-Paul, and then the mountain lions could jump out and sink in their teeth. Before she put the blindfold on, she tried to get the harness on, and the floppy Pulverizer rigged up flush against Jean-Paul’s ass. There was lots in Allan Spinrad’s book about anal penetration. Nothing was more important in indicating the limits of civilized masculine power , in this day and age, than the anal penetration of the male, and in Vienna Roberts’s opinion (because eventually she had gotten even that block of wood known as Damien Lorenzo to agree to allow her to put things up his ass), no male really felt anything , not even a little, unless he had something up him, and this was because he hadn’t given up enough yet, enough self-respect; proto-hominid sex was nothing if it wasn’t about casting off any last remaining bit of self-respect — but the problem was that notwithstanding Spinrad’s advice, she kind of found the whole anal thing gross , you know, she just didn’t like getting anything that was in there on herself, and you just couldn’t trust guys, not guys like Jean-Paul who are hooked up to their computer like ninety hours a week, guys who’d already had three or four screen detoxes to their credit, you couldn’t really expect them to bathe , and in fact, people just didn’t bathe all that much in the desert anymore, because there wasn’t really enough water. What little water was left was saved for hospitals and mining operations. And so it wasn’t like Jean-Paul wasn’t going to, well, you know, it was like there could be all kinds of stuff down there, who knew, things growing, encrustments. She tried to get the Pulverizer in there a little bit, and there was a kind of hiccuping laugh from him, and then she pulled down the eye mask and then rolled onto him, in the dark, and there was the breeze, and the babbling creek of the distant interstate, and there were the clouds massing, and she knew they were massing, and then she and Jean-Paul were rubbing against each other, and nowhere in the proto-hominid manual did it say what you were supposed to feel really, because feeling things , that was so old-fashioned, you know? And guys never wanted to feel things anyhow, emotions, and she kept privately to herself that one last little bit of feeling, the kind she wasn’t supposed to have, and that last little bit of feeling was for having the part of him inside of her, and even if she did kind of think that it was disgusting, that part of men was disgusting, the mandrel was disgusting, she just hadn’t gotten past it, and even if she did think that, that they were disgusting, there was a way in which she still wanted to have him inside of her, not that she needed completing, forget it, nothing about completing, she was complete as she was, she didn’t want to be completed, she wanted to take things away from other people, and she wanted to squander what she took away, but something in her quieted when he was inside her, and maybe something quieted when the Pulverizer was inside of him, if it was really in there.