In Extremis Page 27

  She was succulent; he wanted her almost as much as her paycheck.

  He watched the mosquito.

  If he lifted his arm up, would the mosquito stop drinking? He hoped not. He could feel a faint ghost of a pinch, a sensation he saw in his mind’s eye as a rose bud opening, and opening, and opening, more than any rose ever had petals.

  Careful. He swung his feet on the floor, without moving his arm. The mosquito didn’t stir. Then he lifted the arm up, very, very slowly, inch by inch, so as not to disturb the mosquito. It kept right on drinking.

  With exquisite languor, Hector stood up straight, keeping the arm motionless except for the slow, slow act of standing. Then—walking very carefully, because the dope made the floor feel like a trampoline—he went to the bookshelf. Easing his right hand onto the edge of a shelf to keep the arm steady, he ran his left over the dusty tops of the old encyclopedia set. He was glad no one had bought it, now.

  The lettering on the book-backs oozed one word onto the next. He was pretty loaded. It was good stuff. He forced his eyes to focus, and then pulled the M book out.

  Moving just as slowly, his right arm ramrod stiff, so as not to disturb his beloved—the communion pinch, his precious guest—he returned to the sofa. He sat down, his right arm propped on the arm of the sofa, his left hand riffling pages.

  Mosquito . . .

  (There was another shot ready on the coffee table. Not yet, pendajo. Make it last).

  . . . the female mosquito punctures the skin with equipment contained in a proboscis, comprised of six elongated stylets. One stylet is an inverted trough; the rest are slender mandibles, maxillae, and a stylet for the injection of mosquito saliva. These latter close the trough to make a rough tube. After insertion, the tube arches so that the tip can probe for blood about half a millimeter beneath the epidermal surface . . . Two of the stylets are serrated and saw through the tissue for the others. If a pool of blood forms in a pocket of laceration the mosquito ceases movement and sucks the blood with two pumps l ocated in her head . . .

  Mosquito saliva injected while probing prevents blood clotting and creates the itching and swelling accompanying a bite . . .

  Hector soaked up a pool of words here, a puddle there, and the color pictures—how wonderfully they put together encyclopedias!—and then he let the volume slide off his lap onto the floor, and found the other syringe with his left hand, and, hardly having to look, with the ambidexterity of a needle freak, shot himself up in a vein he was saving in his right thigh. All the time not disturbing the mosquito.

  He knew it was too big a load. But he’d had that long, long jones, like mirrors reflecting into one another. It should be all right. He stretched out on the sofa again as the hit melted through him, and focused on the mosquito.

  Hector’s eyelids slid almost shut. But that worked like adjusting binoculars. Making the mosquito come in closer, sharper. It was like he was seeing it under a microscope now. Like he was standing—no, floating—floating in front of the mosquito and he was smaller than it was, like a man standing by an oil derrick, watching it pump oil up from the deep places, the zone of sweet weight . . . thirtyweight, ha . . . An Anopheles Gambia, this variety—same as the one in the encyclopedia thumbnail. From this magnified perspective the mosquito’s parts were rougher than they appeared from the human level—there were bristles on her head, slicked back like stubby oiled hair, and he could see that the sheath-like covering of the proboscis had fallen in a loop away from the stylets . . . her tapered golden body, resting on the long, translucent, frail-looking legs, cantilevered forward to drink, as if in obeisance . . . her rear lifted, a forty degree angle from the skin, its see-through abdomen glowing red with blood like a little Christmas light . . .

  . . . it is the female which bites, her abdomen distends enormously, allowing her to take in as much as four times her weight in blood . . .

  He had an intimate relationship with this mosquito. It was entering him. He could feel her tiny, honed mind, like one of those minute paintings obsessed hobbyists put on the head of a pin. He sensed her regard. The mosquito was dimly aware of his own mind hovering over her. He could close in on the tiny gleam of her insect mind and replace it with his own. What a rare and elegant nod that would be: getting into her head so he could feel what it was like to drink his own blood through the slender proboscis . . .

  He could do it. He could superimpose himself and fold his own consciousness up into the micro-cellular spaces. Any mind, large or small, could be concentrated in microscopic space; micro-space was as infinite as interstellar space, wasn’t it? God experienced every being’s consciousness. God’s mind could fit into a mosquito. Like all that music on a symphony going through the needle of a record player, or through the tiny laser of a CD. The stylet in the mosquito’s proboscis was like the needle of a record player . . .

  Hector could circle, and close in, and participate, and become. He could . . .

  . . . see the rising fleshtone of his own arm stretching out in front of him, a soft ridge of topography. He could see the glazed eyes of the man he was drinking from. Himself; perhaps formerly. It was a wonderfully malevolent miracle: he was inside the mosquito. He was the mosquito, its senses altered and enhanced by his own moreevolved prescience.

  His blood was a syrup. The mosquito didn’t taste it, as such, but Hector could—and there were many confluent tastes in it, mineral and meat and electrically charged waters and honeyed glucose and acids and hemoglobin. And very faintly, heroin. His eggs would be well sustained—

  Her eggs. Keep your identity sorted out. Better yet, set your own firmly atop hers. Take control.

  Stop drinking blood!

  More.

  No. Insist, Hector. Who’s in charge, here? Stop drinking and fly. Just imagine! To take flight—

  Almost before the retraction of her proboscis was completed, he was in the air, making the wings work without having to think about it. When he tried too hard to control the flight, he foundered; so he simply flew.

  His flight path was a herky-jerky spiral, each geometric section of it a portion of an equation.

  His senses expanded to adjust to the scope of his new possibilities of movement: the great cavern, the massive organism at the bottom of it: himself, Hector’s human body, left behind.

  Hector sensed a temperature change, a nudge of air: a current from the crack in the window. He pushed himself up the stream, increasing his wing energy, and thought: I’ll crash on the edges of the glass, it’s a small crack . . .

  But he let the insect’s navigational instincts hold sway, and he was through, and out into the night.

  He could go anywhere, anywhere at all . . .

  He went downstairs.

  Her window was open.

  From a distance, the landscape of Lulu was glorious, lying there on the couch in her bikini underpants, and nothing else. Her exposed breasts were great slack mounds of cream and cherry. Her pale skin was glossy with sweat. She’d fallen asleep with the radio on; there were three empty cans of beer on the little end table by her head. One of her legs was drawn up, tilted to lean its knee against the wall, the other out straight, the limbs apart enough to trace her open labia against the blue silk panties.

  Hector circled near the ceiling. The radio was a distorted boom of taffied words and industrial-sized beat, far away. He thought that, just faintly, he could actually feel radio and TV waves washing over him, passing through the air.

  He wanted Lulu. But suppose she felt him, suppose she heard the whine of his coming, and woke up enough to slap him in reflex, and crushed him—

  Would he die when the mosquito died?

  Maybe that would be all right.

  Hector descended to her, following the broken geometries of insect flight-path down, an aerialist’s unseen staircase, asymmetrical and yet perfect.

  Closer—he could feel her heat. God, she was like a lake of fire!

  He entered her atmosphere. That’s how it seemed: she was almost planeta
ry in her glowing vastness, hothouse and fulsome. The hot night had made her even more tropical. He descended through hormone-rich layers of her atmosphere, to deeper and more personal heats, until he’d settled on the skin of her left leg, near the knee.

  Jesus! It was revolting: it was ordinary human skin.

  But up this close, it was a cratered landscape, orange and gold and in places leprous-white, flakes of blue where dead skin cells were shedding away. Pools of sweat, here and there, looked like molten wax. As he watched, sweat brimmed from a puckered pore. Around the bases of the occasional stiff stalks of hair were puddly masses of pasty stuff he guessed were colonies of bacteria. The skin itself was textured like pillows of meat all sewn together. The smells off it were overwhelming: rot and uric acid and the various compounds in sweat and a chemical smell of something she’d bathed with—and an exudation of the food she’d been eating . . .

  Hector was an experienced hand with drugs; he shifted his viewpoint from revulsion to obsession, to delight in the yeasty completeness of this immersion in the biological essence of her. And there was another smell that came to him then, affecting him the way the sight of a woman’s cleavage had, in his boyhood. Blood.

  Unthinking, he had already allowed the mosquito to unsheath her stylets and drive them into a damp pillow of skin cells. He pushed, rooted, moving the slightly arched piercer in a motion that outlined a cone, breaking tiny capillaries just inside the epidermis, making a pocket for the blood to pool in. And injecting the anticoagulant saliva.

  Her blood was much like his, but he could taste the femaleness of it, the hormonal signature and . . . alcohol.

  She swatted at him, in her sleep. He felt the wind of the giant hand, before it struck. Her hand wasn’t rigid enough to hit him; the palm was slightly cupped. But the hand covered Hector like a lid, for a moment.

  The air pressure flattened the mosquito, and Hector feared for its spindly legs, but then light flashed over him again and the lid lifted, and he withdrew and flew, wings whining, up a short distance into the air . . .

  She hadn’t awakened. And from up here her thighs looked so sweet and tender . . .

  He dipped down, and alighted on Lulu’s left inside thigh, not far from the pale blue circus tent billow of her panties. The material was only a little stained; he could see the tracery of her labia like the shadows of sleeping dragons under a silk canopy. The thigh skin was a little smoother, paler. He could see the woods of pubic hair down the slope a little.

  Enough. Outside.

  No. He was in control. He was going to get closer . . .

  When at last he reached the frontier of Lulu’s panties, and stood between two outlying spring-shaped stalks of red-brown pubic hair, gazing under a wrinkle in the elastic at the monumental vertical furrow of her vaginal lips, he was paralyzed by fear. This was a great temple to some sub-aquatic monster, and would surely punish any intrusion.

  With the fear came a sudden perception of his own relative tininess, now, and an unbottling of his resentments. She was forbidden; she was gargantuan in both size and arrogance.

  But he had learned that he was the master of his reality: he had found a hatch in his brain, and a set of new controls that fit naturally to his grip, and he could remake his being as he chose.

  A sudden darkness, then; a wind—

  He sprang up, narrowly escaping the swat—the wind of her hand, the slap on her thigh. Then a murky roaring, a boulder-fall of misshapen words. The goddess coming awake; the goddess speaking.

  Something like, “Fucking skeeter . . . get the fuck out . . .”

  Oh, yes?

  The fury swelled in him, and as it grew—Lulu shrank. Or seemed to, as rage pushed his boundaries outward like hot air in a parade balloon, but unthinkably fast. She shrank to woman size, once more in perspective and once more desirable.

  She screamed, of course.

  He glimpsed them both in her vanity mirror . . .

  A man-sized mosquito, poised over her, holding her down with slender but strong front legs; Lulu screaming, thrashing, as he leaned back onto his hind legs and spread her legs with the middle limbs . . .

  In her delighted revulsion, she struck at the mosquito’s compound eyes. The pain was realer and more personal than he’d expected. He jerked back, withdrawing, floundering off the edge of the bed, feeling a leg shatter against the floor and a wing crack, one of his eyes half blind . . .

  The pain and the disorientation unmanned him. Emasculated him, intimidated him. As always when that happened, he shrank.

  The boundaries of the room expanded and the bed grew, around him, into a dirty white plain; Lulu grew, again becoming a small world to herself . . . Her hand sliced down at him—

  He threw himself frantically into the air, his damaged wings ascending stochastically; the wings’ keening sound not quite right now, his trajectory uncertain.

  The ceiling loomed; the window crack beckoned.

  In seconds he had swum upstream against the night air, and managed to aim himself between the edges of the crack in the glass; the lips of the break like a crystalline take on her vagina. Then he was out into the night, and regaining some greater control over his wings . . .

  That’s not how it was, he realized: she, the mosquito had control. That’s how they’d gotten through the crack and out into the night.

  Let the mosquito mind take control, for now, while he rested his psyche and pondered. That great yellow egg, green around the edges with refinery toxins, must be the moon; this jumble of what seemed skyscraper-sized structures must be the pipes and chimneys and discarded tar buckets of the apartment building’s roof.

  Something washed over him, rebounding, making him shudder in the air. Only after it departed did it register in his hearing: a single high note, from somewhere above.

  There, it came again, more defined and pulsingly closer, as if growing in an alien certainty about its purpose.

  The mosquito redoubled its wing beats in reaction, and there was an urgency that was too neurologically primitive to be actual fear. Enemy. Go.

  Hector circled down between the old brick apartment buildings, toward the streetlight . . .

  Another, slightly higher, even more purposeful note hit Hector, resonating him, and then a shadow draped him, and wing beats thudded tympanically on the air. He saw the bat for one snapshotclear moment, superimposed against the dirty indigo sky. Hector knew he should detach from the mosquito, but the outspread wings of the bat, its pointed ears and wet snout, fascinated him with its heraldic perfection—it was as perfect, poised against the sky, as the mosquito had seemed, poised on his arm.

  Sending out a final sonar note to pinpoint the mosquito, the bat struck its head forward—

  When Lulu woke, she had cramps. But it was the aftertaste of the dream that bothered her. There was a taintedness lingering in her skin, as if the nightmare of the giant mosquito had left a sort of mephitic insect pheromone on her. She took two showers, and ate her breakfast, and listened to the radio. By comforting degrees, she forgot about the dream. When she went downstairs the building manager was letting the ambulance attendants in. They were in a hurry. It was the guy upstairs, the manager said. He was dead.

  No one was surprised. He was a junkie. Everybody knew that.

  Next day Lulu was scratching the skeeter bites, whenever she thought no one was looking.

  TIGHTER

  It occurred to Janet that one notch tighter would kill him.

  They were in Bedroom One, stark naked, her and Harry, the trick she was straddling—and strangling. Bedroom One even had the 1 on the door of the two-bedroom apartment that her and Prissy rented on West 12th, just off Broadway in Manhattan. It was a working crib—Janet and her partner, Prissy, didn’t live here—so it was pretty minimal. In each bedroom was a queen-sized bed, with a mirror headboard, red satin sheets, no blankets; a blue carpet that they vacuumed every day, a dial-control light turned low, the radio on the floor. The tricks only cared about clean sheets, and
things not smelling bad; also they wanted no used condoms lying around, and the girls needed to keep themselves pretty fresh. The tricks cared about that, and they cared about not being here during a raid.

  Harry, the big-money trick, was about fifty. The mat of black hair on his flat chest going white at the roots, like the oily, swept-back hair on his head. He had a bulbous belly, powerful short legs, long arms; on one wrist a fading tattoo of two dice rolled to snake eyes. He wore thick glasses, even while they were doing it—so he could see her sitting on him naked, he said. See it clear. The coke-bottle glasses made his eyes seem like big glossy-brown blobs; the glasses usually got steamed up, after a while. You’re so full of shit your glasses are steaming up. He had a long narrow nose, with little black hairs growing out of it; same kind of hair in his ears. She was straddling him and she was strangling him, and that’s what he’d paid her to do. Erotic strangulation. She was supposed to tighten the narrow black leather strap, crossed in an unfinished knot, until he came near to blacking out; and then she was supposed to loosen it so he could breathe, gulp big draughts of life, she pumping up and down on his thing while he was sucking in the air. His thing had a metal cock-ring around the base of it, keeping the blood in, almost like it was being strangled too. He paid her triple rate for this, something kinky and risky. Three-hundred-sixty a session. “Just try saying no to that,” she’d told Prissy.

  They were a good team. Prissy was the blond, you needed a blond, and Janet was the brunette, her hair cut like Betty Page. With the bangs and all. She was half Puerto Rican and half Russian, which was all she knew about her parents.