Leslie Glass - Burning Time

The guard looked at it and shrugged. “There’s still nobody here. It’s spring break.”

April Woo cursed herself five hundred times as she walked back to where she left the car. See what happens when you leave out one tiny question. One detail that changes the whole story. The parents didn’t bother to tell her everybody disappeared. All the students, and even the professors disappeared. And she didn’t think to ask. It wasn’t very smart.

She would talk to the parents in the morning when they came in with the girl’s picture and ask them if they really wanted to put their daughter in the system when she was probably skiing in Vermont. With the Barstollers, who had a Chinese maid. She smiled at the thought, as she took the car back.

8

Troland Grebs was up all night with bad dreams again. Monkeys were beating each other. A bull in the garden was goring somebody. He was in a cold sweat, only half drunk from a long evening of drinking. He couldn’t stop thinking about that girl in the movie. First time he saw it, he had to walk out.

At three he gave up trying to sleep and went outside for a walk. The smells of the ocean off Pacific Beach, the palm and orange trees, the smooth green grass of front lawns soothed him. He walked around, circling his neighborhood many times. Just as the light was graying and before the sun rose, he was back in his one bedroom apartment, sitting on the tiny terrace on the third floor waiting for the jogger to come by.

For months he had been waking up early to sit up there and watch her. She lived on the third floor, too, on the other side of the garden. He had heard people call her Jane, but he had never spoken to her. She kept her shades drawn. He never saw her undressed except this way, in the bicycle shorts and two tops. One stretchy thing made of a few straps over a similar thing with more straps in different places. Crisscrossed and so tight Troland wondered every day how she got them off. He knew how he would get them off. From the terrace he watched her dispassionately.

She came out of the door and stretched. He could see her raise her arms and breathe. She started jogging in place, looking up at the sky. She plugged her Walkman into her ears. She never saw him, never looked in his direction. She took off at a moderate pace and disappeared into the street. After she was gone, he went in to shower, then dressed carefully and went to work at the plant just north of Lindbergh Field.

He wasn’t talking much any more. He sat at his drafting table for hours every day, working on the intricate details of jet engine modifications, sunk deep in his own thoughts. Ever since the Persian Gulf War he’d been moving closer and closer to the insides of the cruise missiles he’d worked on all the years they hadn’t been needed, and no one believed would work. Now everybody knew that they could seek out and destroy. He felt his mark was on every hit in Iraq. It made him feel powerful. He had started seeking out and destroying, had gone back to where his own power used to be.

What the soldiers did in Kuwait got him thinking about things he hadn’t wanted to do for years. But they just raped. He liked adding his mark afterwards. Long ago he got in trouble doing it to whores in Mexico, and had to stop. He had put the urge away in a drawer, along with the colored pencils and the old drawings. He had been good a long time, and then the war came. His very own missiles started killing people, started talking to him like they knew him. And he found out he could get away with it now. But right now he felt bad, and was pretty sure the movie had put a curse on him. But he wasn’t sure exactly why.

At work he started thinking about it again. It was so boring. At first it was just people talking about sex and their “feelings.” It was so bad he almost walked out. But then the girl suddenly was naked, and he decided to stay.

All at once he felt a flicker of something unpleasant about her. Then that was quickly overridden by the excitement he had thinking that the other actor resembled, and might in fact be, him. He was aroused. He folded his leather jacket across his lap.

The guy in the film was fucking the girl with his leather jacket on and nothing else. This was also like him and turned him on. He looked quickly around, then burrowed his hand under his jacket. The bulge was enormous, too large for his pants. He rubbed back and forth with the palm of his hand. Except for the woman’s nudity and the man in the leather jacket, this was not very exciting sex. He switched his thoughts to the jogger who never had a name when he imagined fucking her.

He called her the jogger and thought about grabbing her before she got to the street. Just taking her by the arm. He unzipped his pants and untangled his dick. The softness of his skin around the hard core always surprised him. It was a tool, a defier of gravity like the cruise missile. It could seek and destroy. He thought of shoving it into the jogger and watching that stuck-up, satisfied face fill with fear. He liked the idea of scaring her—no, filling her with fear so big there was nothing left of her but cunt and pure terror.

The fuss they made in the paper all the time made him mad. Don’t make such a big deal of it! Real men always did it, always would. Rape wasn’t so bad. It was a natural thing, happened every day. Soldiers did it. He touched himself, thinking of the Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait. Things they did to the girls with their fathers watching. Shot the brothers in the street. No mercy. In the ass and everything. Probably did it with their clothes on, too. Grabbed women in their own houses and slammed them against the wall. Even made the children watch. Well, he’d seen his father do it.

He stared at the screen, but didn’t see it. It was natural to conquer. He thought of pushing the jogger to the ground, getting on top of her and shoving his dick into her, of making her kneel in front of him and suck him off. Put her lips around him hard, and move her tongue just right.

You could kill someone that way. Shove too hard and just keep going down their throat. It was good to force his way into places he wasn’t wanted. They were just cunts. Places to put sperm. They had no right to get their noses out of joint. Drops of semen oozed out onto his hand, lubricating his dick. It felt good.

The Kama-sutra advised murdering the husband, father, brothers—anybody attached to a woman who resisted a man she didn’t want. That’s what the famous book said: When every attempt to get her failed, they had the right to kill her protectors and then rape her. Take her off and do whatever they wanted with her. The pressure intensified.

He didn’t know why he thought of the Kama-sutra now. It was a book he read years ago. He used to masturbate while studying the chapters on the special marks you could make biting and scratching and slapping. Scraping the skin and biting so hard the skin broke or went black and blue. In India, no one was ashamed of walking around with bite or scratch marks. They were considered signs of mastery. It was only the West that was behind.

The scene changed. Troland’s eyes flickered. They had their clothes on again, were talking. There was something familiar about the girl on the screen. Now she was walking down the street with her back to the camera. It was a familiar walk. It irritated him that the actress seemed to be someone he knew. He couldn’t be interested if he thought he knew her. His dick became soft in his hand. Who was it?

It was impossible that he knew her. He couldn’t know her. The film was somewhere else, in a city. Looked like New York. He’d been there once. It wasn’t here. Was it a bimbo he knew from the beach? No, he didn’t know anybody who looked like that. Her skin was really white. He tried to relax. There was no way he could know her. But he couldn’t get excited again. He began feeling bad. What was the matter with this stupid movie? It wasn’t even right. He felt angry.