Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

He unbuckled his pants and let them drop and stepped out of his underwear feeling moonlight on his ass. He moved out of his jacket and tore off his shirt, his undershirt. He ran up against the bear. He slapped at it with his dick. He turned his back to it and moved the spread cheeks of his behind up and down the pelt. He climbed it, impaling himself on the strange softness of the enormous toy. He kissed it.

Pet, pet, he thought. “ Pet, ” he moaned, his eyes closed now. “My pet, my pet.” Yes, he thought, yes. And remembered, suddenly, saw, all the animals he had ever petted, all the furry underbellies, writhing, inviting his nails, all the babies whose rubbery behinds he’d squeezed, the little girls he’d drawn toward him and held between his knees to comfort or tell a secret to, their hair tickling his face, all small boys whose heads he’d rubbed and cheeks pinched between his fingers. We are all sodomites, he thought. There is disparity at the source of love. We are all sodomites, all pederasts, all dikes and queens and mother fuckers.

“Hey bear,” he whispered, “d’ja ever notice how all the short, bald, fat men get all the tall, good-looking blondes?” He was stiffening fast. “Hey bear, ma’am,” he said, leaning naked against her fur, bare-assed and upright on a bear rug, “there’s something darling in a difference. Why me — take me. There’s somethin’ darlin’ in a difference, how else would water come to fire or earth to air?” He cupped his hand over one of its cute little ears and rubbed his palm gently over the bristling fur as over the breast buds of a twelve-year-old-girl. “My life, if you want to know, has been a sodomy. What fingers in what pies, what toes in what seas! I have the tourist’s imagination, the day-tripper’s vision. Fleeing the ordinary, crossing state lines, greedy at Customs and impatient for the red stamps on my passports like lipstick kisses on an envelope from a kid in the summer camp. Yes, and there’s wolf in me too now. God, how I honor a difference and crave the unusual, life like a link of mixed boxcars.” He put a finger in the lining of the bear’s silken ear. He kissed its mouth and vaulted his tongue over her teeth, probing with it for the roof of her mouth. Then the bear’s tongue was in his throat, not horrible, only strange, the cunning length and marvelous flexibility an avatar of flesh, as if life were in it like an essence sealed in a tube, and even the breath, the taste of living, rutting bear, delicious to him as the taste of poisons vouchsafed not to kill him, as the taste of a pal’s bowel or a parent’s fats and privates.

He mooned with the giant bear, insinuating it backwards, guiding it as he would a horse with subtle pressures, squeezes, words and hugs. The bear responded, but you do not screw a bear as you would a woman and, seeing what he was about to do, she suddenly resisted. Now he was the horse — this too — and the bear the guide, and she crouched, a sort of semi-squat, and somehow shifted her cunt, sending it down her body and up behind her as a tap dancer sends a top hat down the length of her arm. With her head stretching out, pushing up and outward like the thrust of a shriek, cantilevering impossibly and looking over her shoulder, she signaled Ashenden behind her.

He entered her from the rear, and oddly he had never felt so male, so much the man, as when he was inside her. Their position reinforced this, the bear before him, stooped, gymnastically leaning forward as in the beginning of a handstand, and he behind as if he drove sled dogs. He might have been upright in a chariot, some Greek combination of man and bear exiled in stars for a broken rule. So good was it all that he did not even pause to wonder how he fit. He fit, that’s all. Whether swollen beyond ordinary length himself or adjusted to by some stretch-sock principle of bear cunt (like a ring in a dime store that snugs any finger), he fit. “He fit, he fit and that was it,” he crooned happily, and moved this way and that in the warm syrups of the beast, united with her, ecstatic, transcendent, not knowing where his cock left off and the bear began. Not deadened, however, not like a novocained presence of tongue in the mouth or the alien feel of a scar, in fact never so filled with sensation, every nerve in his body alive with delight, even his broken hand, even that, the nerves rearing, it seemed, hind-legged almost, revolting under their impossible burden of pleasure, vertiginous at the prospect of such orgasm, counseling Ashenden to back off, go slow, back off or the nerves would burst, a new lovely energy like love’s atoms split. And even before he came, he felt addicted, hooked; where would his next high come from, he wondered almost in despair, and how you gonna keep ’em down on the farm, and what awfulness must follow such rising expectations?

And they went at it for ten minutes more and he and the bear came together.

“ ouhw ouhw nnng,” said the bear.

“ ” groaned Ashenden, and fell out of the bear and lay on his back and looked at the stars.

And he lay like that for half an hour, catching his breath, feeling his nerves coalesce, consolidating once more as a man, his hard-on declining, his flesh turning back into flesh, the pleasure lifting slow as fever. And thinking. So. I’m a sodomite. But not just any ordinary sodomite with a taste for sheep or a thing for cows, some carnivore’s harmless extension of appetite that drives him to sleep with what he eats. No. I’m kinky for bears.

And then, when he was ready, when at last he could once more feel his injured hand, he pushed himself up on his elbows and looked around. The bear was gone, though he thought he saw its shape reclined beside a tree. He stood up and looked down and examined himself. When he put his clothes back on, they hung on him like flayed skin and he was conscious of vague withdrawal symptoms in his nuts. He moved into the moonlight. His penis looked as if it had been dipped in blood. Had it still been erect the blood might perhaps have gone unnoticed, a faint flush; no longer distended, it seemed horrid, wet, thick as paint. He cupped his hand beneath himself and caught one drop in his palm. He shook his head. “My God,” he said, “I haven’t just screwed a bear, I’ve fucked a virgin!”

Now his old honor came back to chide him. He thought of Jane dying in the castle, of the wolf mask binding her eyes like a dark handkerchief on the vision of a condemned prisoner, of it binding his own and of the tan beard across his face like a robber’s bandanna. Ashenden shuddered. But perhaps it was not contagious unless from love and honor’s self-inflicted homeopathy. Surely he would not have to die with her. All he had to do was tell her that he had failed the test, that he had not met her conditions. Then he knew that he would never tell her this, that he would tell her nothing, that he would not even see her, that tomorrow — today, in an hour or so when the sun was up — he would have Plympton’s man take him to the station, that he would board a train, go to London, rest there for a day or two, take in a show, perhaps go to the zoo, book passage to someplace far, someplace wild, further and wilder than he had ever been, look it over, get its feel, with an idea of maybe settling down one day. He’d better get started. He had to change.

He remembered that he was still exposed and thought to cover himself lest someone see him, but first he’d better wipe the blood off his penis. There was a fresh handkerchief in his pocket, and he took it out, unfolded it and strolled over to the pond. He dipped the handkerchief in the water and rubbed himself briskly, his organ suddenly tingling with a new surge of pleasure, but a pleasure mitigated by twinges of pain. There was soreness, a bruise. He placed the handkerchief back in his pocket and handled himself lightly, as one goes over a tire to find a puncture. There was a small cut on the underside of his penis that he must have acquired from the bear. Then the blood could have been mine, he thought. Maybe I was the virgin. Maybe I was. It was good news. Though he was a little sad. Post-coitum tristesse, he thought. It’ll pass.