Yuri Herrera: The Transmigration of Bodies

He raised his head, racing breakneck through half-a-dozen idiotic replies.

Like you know mine.

That’s not the same, you swine.

He’d had the good sense not to stop moving his fingers for the duration of that exchange and by the end Three Times Blonde had stopped worrying about names and he let his tongue revel the way a tongue can only revel when nobody’s asking it for words. As soon as he sensed he didn’t need further permission he pulled off her panties and got naked and pulled her to him by the hips but then she said Where’s the condom?

Motherfuck the condom. He’d asked himself the same thing and had answered himself Don’t fuckin worry about it right now.

He put his pants back on, said Don’t move.

He stepped into the hall barefoot. The anemic student was nowhere to be seen.

He ran into his apartment reciting the prayer of the overheated horndog:

Oh please, oh please, oh please

May he, the drunken me

May he, the dumbfuck me

May he, the me who never ever ever knows where shit is

May he have saved one

Just one

Lubricated or corrugated

Colored or flavored

Magnum or tight-fit

Oh please

Holy Saint of horndogs

Grant me just one condom

But he knew there were none. He’d used that prayer the last time, months ago, and managed to unearth one under the bed, gleaming and glorious as a national hero. The very last one. This was not a time for heroes or miracles. Fear was what had granted him these hours of intimacy but now it was showing its virulent side. Go on, off to the shop, ladykiller.

Across the street was an old-school pharmacy run by little old men who still wrapped condoms and sanitary napkins in brown paper so the customer need not feel self-conscious on the way out, but in the mental photo he’d taken that morning the metal awning was down. He triangulated the hood in his head, locating shops and less-far pharmacies and said to himself, Be right back, no big deal. He walked out of his place and before walking back into Three Times Blonde’s saw the anemic student at the end of the hall, staring at him, fiery-eyed, glassy, on his way out the door.

Three Times Blonde was still splayed across the love seat, transfixed by the shadows cast by the candle. He told her what he’d told himself:

Be right back, there’s a pharmacy close by.

She sat straight up on the couch.

No no no, how could you leave with that thing out there, it’s not like we’re that desperate.

Evidently she knew nothing about him. In other circumstances he wouldn’t have listened, but the current circumstance, the one that concerned him, wasn’t the epidemic so much as Three Times Blonde herself, naked before him, adamant, insisting Come. That was all. No pharmacies and no condoms. Locked up with a woman who was calling him.

Like a wrestler, he said to himself, I surrender. He approached and attacked her tongue as he once more undressed and then she said We can’t get comfy out here and led him into the bedroom where at first she just let him adore her unwrapped three-times-very-taut skin and run his lips across it and his fingers inside it, but then she put her mouth to his cock, no talk; they rolled around clutching bony and fleshy backs, round and skinny buttocks, until there in the center of it all he felt her so wet and so ready and so present that he just slid inside. It was worth it, no matter the price, just to feel her drawing his cock in from the deepest part of her body, even if only for an instant. He did it fast but in that time a million epidemics came and went, through a million deserted cities in which the only sounds were deep sighs, and then she, once more, looked at him like he’d done something unforgiveable, a thing that for one very long minute he did not want to end: she trapped him with the lips of her sex, with her legs, with her fingernails, and then said, in a steady but almost inaudible voice, Off.

He pulled out and slumped beside her. He thought she’d kick him out and told himself the same thing he’d told himself so many times in so many situations: All good things are but a part of something terrible. But instead of shouting at him she reached out a hand and took hold of his cock, squeezing and stroking steadily until he came, tho he begged Wait wait wait, stop, because he had his hopes set on who knows what.

He dreamed. Among the succession of images in his dream, a replay of his half-assed hungover day, was one of a black dog who turned up often; this time the black dog, shaggy and wet, was shaking himself energetically, whipping out shards of water like little sliced-up lakes, and with each sliver that flew off he felt himself — since the dog was also him — grow lighter, lighter, lighter, lighter, until he awoke so light he could touch the ceiling.

She was still there beside him. Not once in the night had he lost awareness that she was there. Not when he was an animal shooting out shards of water, not in the flickering light at the end of the hallway, not in the face of the anemic student staring at him one last time before he left, had he ever stopped knowing she was there, spooning him. Yet he told himself anyway: there they were, the two of them, at the same lock-in under the same roof.

He started stroking her from curve to curve. He heard the fridge start up behind the door and panicked. The power had come back on and he feared she might flip the lights and see him, squalid, ruining her mattress the way he ruined suits, so when he felt her start to stir he said Shh shh shh and slipped a gentle hand between her thighs to rouse her sex softly, awaken it gently. He moved his hand ever so lightly and as he did she moaned, and he moved a little more and felt his sorrow start to slip away and himself finally defeat what his roughneck cousins used to say to one another if they saw a drop-dead gorgeous girl: Ain’t nothin the likes of you could do with the likes of that.

He felt her body contract and release and then languish again, but awake now.

Bet you can’t do that, she said after a minute.

What?

See colors like I do. When I was a girl it was just bright lights but now I see colored lights.

What colors did you see just now?

I don’t know. They were pastel. When they go out I forget.

This was exactly the way he wanted everything to stay. Let them bury me, he said to himself, let them scatter dirt on me, mouth wide open, snuggled up just like this. Let them bury me. Let them burn me and turn me, mark me and merk me. They can deep-six me if they want, but let everything stay like this.

Suddenly, like an involuntary twitch: guilt.

I meant what I said yesterday, he declared. I said it to sway you but I meant what I said.

She said nothing.

You mad?

That stuff about how great it’d be if the world was all loved up?

Yes.

Pfft, I knew that. What, you think I’m stupid? That’s just a way to flirt, right? Why bring it up now? Silly.

Why indeed. She was right.

It’s just habit, tricks of the trade, but I didn’t want it to be like that with you. You know what I do?

Yes.

He sat up, and it was he who turned on the little bedside lamp to look at her.

You do? For real?

Of course. You’re a fixer. Take care of stuff under the table at the courts.

He froze. For her to call him that, after all those kisses.

One time I heard la Ñora say The landlord told me not to bother the guy in 3 if he’s late with the rent — that man knows a lot of people and he doesn’t want any trouble.

He said nothing, but the silence was interrupted by his phone. He decided to answer. Like a man who goes to the john to sidestep the bill.