Lily King: Euphoria

His hands slid down the back of her cotton pants, grabbed the flesh of her bottom, and pressed her groin to his. It reminded her of how she used to smack her paper dolls together after she had outgrown them but had not yet put them away. But it didn’t work, so he took her hand and brought it down and once she had gripped him fully, he covered her hand with his own and brought it up and down in a rhythm she knew well but he would never let her try on her own. His breathing quickly became fast and labored, but it took a long time for the penis to show even the slightest sign of stiffness. It flopped beneath their two hands like a jellyfish. It wasn’t the right time, anyway. She was about to get her period.

‘Shit,’ Fen muttered. ‘Bloody hell.’

The anger seemed to send a surge of something down there, and suddenly it shot out of their hands, huge, hard, and flushed purple.

‘Stick it in,’ Fen said. ‘Stick it in right now.’

There was no reasoning with him, no speaking of dryness or timing or oncoming fevers or lesions that would open when rubbed against the linen sheets. They would leave bloody stains and the Taway maids would think it was menstrual blood and have to burn them for superstitious reason, these beautiful fresh clean sheets.

She stuck it in. The small sections of her flesh that did not hurt were numb if not dead. Fen pumped against her.

When it was over, he said, ‘There’s your baby.’

‘At least a leg or two,’ she said, as soon as she could trust her voice.

He laughed. The Mumbanyo believed it took many times to make a whole baby. ‘We’ll get to the arms later tonight.’ He swiveled his face to hers and kissed her. ‘Now let’s get ready for that party.’

There was an enormous Christmas tree in the far corner. It looked real, as if they’d shipped it from New Hampshire. The room was crowded with men mostly, owners and overseers, river drivers and government kiaps, crocodile hunters with their smelly taxidermists, traders, smugglers, and a few hard-drinking ministers. The pretty women from the boat seemed to glow, each at the center of her own ring of men. Taway servants wore white aprons and carried trays of champagne. They had long limbs and long, narrow noses, unmarked by piercings or scarring. They were, she guessed, a nonwarring people like the Anapa. What would happen if they ever put a governor’s station down the Yuat River? You couldn’t tie a white apron on a Mumbanyo. You’d get your neck slit if you tried.

She took a glass from a tray held out to her. On the other side of the room, beyond the tray and the arm of the Taway man who held it, she saw a man beside the tree, a man quite possibly taller than the tree, touching a branch with his fingers.

Without her glasses, my face would have been little more than a pinkish smudge among many, but she seemed to know it was me as soon as I lifted my head.

Three days earlier, I’d gone to the river to drown myself. Are you serious, Andy? The question beat through my body at regular intervals, sometimes in my own voice, sometimes in one of my brothers’: Martin’s full of the irony of the situation, John’s more concerned but still with a bit of an eyebrow raised. There was a thinness to the air as I moved through the bush beyond my village, northwest, toward an empty spot on the water. A few steps closer to London, just a few. Hello, Mum; goodbye, Mum. I loved you, I did, before you drove me out of the bleeding hemisphere. I wasn’t sure I was taking in oxygen. I couldn’t feel my tongue. He cain’t feel his tongue, wha? I could hear Martin call to John in the voice of our old cook Mary. John was laughing too much to answer. The stones were ridiculous, and clacked loudly against my thighs. Now my brothers were laughing at the linen jacket, our father’s, the one that had the egg stain Martin would be remembering. He had a proper fit, didn’t he, Andy, when I kindly brought the splodge to his attention. I swatted through the thick growth, my brothers miming me, exaggerating me behind my back, John telling Martin to stop making him laugh or he’d piss. I came to the place where Teket’s boy had been bitten by a death adder. He died quickly — the respiratory system shuts down entirely. Some chaps have all the luck, eh? Martin said. Funny how when you have a purpose the misery goes and hides. The feeling that had clung to me like wax for so long was gone, and I felt strangely buoyant, my humor returned to me, my brothers closer than they had felt in years. Almost as if they were about to truly speak again. Perhaps all suicides are happy in the end. Perhaps it is at that moment that one feels the real point of it all, which, after you get yourself born, is to die. It is the one thing each and every one of us is programmed for, directed to, and cannot swerve away from indefinitely. Even my father, also dead, would have to agree with that. Was this how Martin felt marching toward Piccadilly? That’s how I’d always imagined it, not walking or running but marching, marching like John marching to the war that ate him. And then the gun, from his pocket to his ear. Not his temple, but his ear. They had made that clear, for some reason. As if he had just meant to stop hearing, not stop living. Had the metal touched skin? Had he paused to feel the cold of it or was it all done in one moment, one smooth gesture? Had he laughed? I could only see Martin laughing at that moment. Nothing had ever been particularly serious to Martin. Certainly not a young man in Piccadilly with a gun to his ear. That’s what bothered me so much when I heard, when the headmaster came and fetched me from French class. Why had Martin been so serious about that one thing? Couldn’t he have been serious about something else? I felt the slough coming back now, a sort of mental suffocation. Old Prall in my office would get the news and he would feel as I had done that day in the headmaster’s room, staring at a fern on the windowsill and doubting that Martin had been serious. Prall would hardly know whether to laugh or cry. Bloody Bankson’s gone and drowned himself in that river, he’d sputter to Maxley or Henin down the hall. And then someone would laugh. How could they not? But I could not go back and sit in that mosquito room alone again. If I did not turn toward the river (it was glinting now through the waxy green platter-sized leaves) I’d just have to keep walking. Eventually I’d reach the Pabei. I’d never met one. Half of them had been calaboosed because they wouldn’t abide by the new laws.

I headed toward the water. I bit hard on the muscle of my tongue. Harder. I could not feel it, though the blood came, metal, inhuman. I walked straight into the river. Yes, it had probably been all one gesture, out of the pocket and to the ear and bang. The water was warm and the linen jacket did not float up. It hung heavy and tight against me. I heard movement behind me. A crocodile perhaps. For the first time I felt no fear of them. Eaten by a croc. Tops blowing your head off in Piccadilly Circus. Crocodiles were sacred to the Kiona. Perhaps I would become part of their mythology, the unhappy white man who became a crocodile. I went under. My mind was not still but I was not unhappy. Unfortunately I’d always been able to hold my breath. We used to compete, Martin, John, and I. They thought it was funny that the youngest had the biggest lungs, that I passed out before giving up. You’re part fainting goat, Andy, my father often said.

They grabbed me so hard and fast I took in water and, though I was in the air again, I couldn’t breathe. Each man had hooked an arm around my shoulder. They dragged me to shore, flipped me over, pounded me like a sago pancake, and pulled me back up to standing, all the while lecturing me in their language. They found the stones in my pocket. They grabbed them, the two men, their bodies nearly dry already for they wore nothing but rope around their waists while I sagged with the weight of all my clothes. They made a pile of the stones from my pockets on the beach and shifted language to a Kiona worse than mine, explaining that they knew I was Teket’s man from Nengai. The stones are beautiful, they said, but dangerous. You can collect them, but leave them on land before you swim. And do not swim in clothes. This is also dangerous. And do not swim alone. Being alone you will only come to harm. They asked me if I knew the way back. They were stern and curt. Grown-ups who didn’t have patience for an oversized child.