The Convulsion Factory

Heartsick

i. need

The wet spot is still on the bed when they retreat, come first light of morning, or sooner. After she sees the last of their backs out the door there is plenty of room in the bed, but still she sleeps atop the wet spot. Cool beneath her, sticky to the touch. Beneath her hip sometimes, other times her back … perhaps even her shoulders, depending on earlier acrobatics.

Awake and dreaming, tracing fingers through that dewy patch, their mingled fluids — mostly his, the ever interchangeable he — and she brings its musk scent to her nose. Then dips her nose to the source itself, breathe deeply now, as if to swim in their communal pool. Or duck beneath and drown.

The wet spot is still fresh when they leave.

But Stefan is different.

Connie, awake and dreaming, all nude and half covered by the rumpled sheet. The visible breast is small, firm, pointed. Her hair still crimped and now in stiff clumps, last night’s mist having lost its hold like so much surrendered self-control. And will she cry? No, no more, at least that’s one benefit of lowered expectations.

Two can play the game, gender being no barrier, affirmative action and equality: I can be just as callous as you, bastard, and if we were at your place instead, you couldn’t keep me from that door. Just you try.

Sure. Sure.

Just try, once, just … once?

Connie smiles dimly at the ceiling with lips that recall the press of another’s. Oh, the places she’s put her tongue. In retrospect it’s probably best she never sees them by true daylight; the night adds so much more mystique. In the dark, anything can dwell, any promise hold a core of truth.

Fan above, blades of wood and cane, slow circles for a draft to cool moonlit sweat, flesh on flesh, ghost white on silver. And if this ceiling could talk, what 3AM murmurs might it have learned, parrot-fashion?

i don’t usually do this, really i don’t … but it was your eyes i think

don’t you hate that smoke smell, so do i, isn’t this better?

your hands, i love the way your hands feel, i need them here

i love to give head

i’ll do anything you want

need them here too

okay? okay?

walk your dog now? i thought you said earlier you didn’t have any pets

Sometimes these exchanges seem as rehearsed as they are spontaneous, and probably this is so. Identical players memorizing identical scripts of hunger and desperation and pathological fears of loneliness, endlessly played out by new pairings of performers. On interchangeable stages.

But Stefan is different.

Endeavoring to persevere, Connie has tried pursuit, a follow-up of the heart once the ice of loins has been broken. Pop-psych gurus, “Don’t be afraid, men are flattered when the woman takes the initiative,” and now she has a whole shelf filled with pastel paperbacks she’d just love to cram down the throat of the next self-appointed expert. Here you go, digest this and see how it correlates with actualities out there, see if you can look me in the face then.

And then…?

…maybe I’ll buy your book anyway. It can’t hurt. Can it?

Taking the initiative, she knows all about that. Connie knows romance. Knows her heart and her soul, knows that fairy tales really can be hammered out of them with enough force.

The catered lunch at Andy’s office, address right there via Tuesday night’s exchange of business cards — are you surprised? she asked, flushing with obvious pleasure, and yes, oh yes he most certainly was, then had a question of his own, and her face began to crumble like a broken mask. connie. connie martin? we met … the other night, we … um… Standing unprotected in a strange office she’d never seen before, and how brutal the air suddenly felt in her throat, on her eyes, peripherally aware of the caterer in his white jacket, starting to squirm and shuffle his feet and refusing to look up any more. She supposed it was his idea of discreet pity. Share her embarrassment and maybe he gets a bigger tip.

Overpriced luncheon, trout almandine, taken home in the world’s most humiliating doggy bag. White wine half-drunk in the taxi, one batch of leftovers eaten in front of evening TV news and quickly thrown up into the toilet, the other shoved to the back of the fridge until it grew blue mold. So much for romance.

She’s far wiser these days. Lapsing occasionally, still that hunger for another, deeper, voice to reassure her of beauty, of desirability, even if it is calculated for short-term goal attainment. But overall, preferring to stick with the certainty of lowered expectations and its attendant sure thing. That guarantee of no abrupt abandonment.

Stefan has brought that much into her life, at least.

ii. desire

Connie knows she’ll not get back to sleep, not now. With barely an hour left before the alarm and shower and curling iron and work, it’s hardly worth the effort.

She rises, doesn’t bother with the robe hooked on the back of her bedroom door. Carpet soft beneath her feet, and then she’s in the hallway, varnished wood suddenly and pleasantly cool. She lies naked out here some mornings, stretches herself along the bare hallway floor like a scrawny cat in a windowsill. Ever the sensualist, tender skin soaking the night’s chill from rigid floorboards. Although this summer she doesn’t do it nearly so much as she used to.

Not since Stefan. Aesthetically, he and the morning floor have so much in common.

Down the hall to the second story’s other bedroom, she’s known all along she would be coming here this morning. That gentle ache inside, something left untouched earlier, some hollow unfilled. Some flower ignored.

Stefan waits on the bed, flat on his back, as always, and she draws down the sheet that modestly covers him. Never speaking in moments like this. With her eyes there is no need, and he has long since lost the ability. He’s limited to the occasional soft, low grunt. She’ll speak to him afterward, when it’s more meaningful. He will appreciate it more then, she’s sure of it.

Connie slides into bed with him, draws alongside as her eyes close with waking dreams. Letting fingers become her eyes, taking in his smooth lines, muscled curves. His flesh warm in places, cool in others, always comforting because he’s there, going nowhere. Stefan has time for her. At last, she is someone’s priority. Connie finger-traces him from toes to knees, knees to waist, waist to chest, chest to eyes. Kissing him in the wake of her fingertips, and if there is any common denominator in the miracle of this particular male physique, it is that everywhere he is so very very hard. Like a man of marble. It’s not unarousing. Alien, yet familiar.

She pulls herself to her knees. Throws one tender leg across him to straddle his thighs, leans forward to run palms along the cobblestone path of his stomach, chest. Her unkempt hair brushes across her face, barely touches Stefan, and she wonders if he can still be tickled.

Connie’s breath quickens, oh the heat, and it’s always a pleasure to feel Stefan warming beneath her. He is Michelangelo’s David come to consciousness, so pale, the color of chalk. Would that he could return these tender caresses. She would give much to feel the rough warmth of his hands again … cupping a breast, splaying her thighs. But Connie has quickly realized this was a trade-in for his loyalty. At least his eyes follow her. His gaze was not frozen in place with the rest of him.

She lets it build inside…

build, her tongue on him, like licking a salty stone…

and at last she mounts him, positioning herself above his permanent erection, lowering herself until they are joined. She rocks, front to back, and tries to tell herself that a fleeting glimpse into Stefan’s eyes doesn’t really register his fear. She’s careful, never reckless, knowing full well that if she were to let go with too much abandon, she could snap him off at the root. Leave him like an ancient statue, emasculated by vandalism, or erosion and acid rain.

Silly Stefan. Connie’s a considerate lover. Responsive to a touch made perfect by precision rather than brute pressure. Does Stefan even understand that women are all different that way?

She grinds upon him until she trembles over her brink, then rises up and off with utmost care. His shaft glistens alabaster in the morning sun, and she dries him with the sheet. Sighs and lies beside him with her wound still wet, still throbbing, and for now the ache has been assuaged.

“I know what my problem is,” Connie tells him, this man like stone whose bed she shares. “Emotions.”

Silence in the house. Outside the birds are near, and the morning traffic distant enough that she never has to worry about distractions, intrusions into their sanctuary.

“I’m addicted to emotions I haven’t even felt yet.”

iii. icon

He’s a man in a shell, and the shell used to feel. Used to flex. If he lost his mind, maybe he could leave the shell behind, free of care and no longer shackled to its tonnage.

When he’s dead, will he rot? Or lie as a stone mummy, his own flesh become his sarcophagus?

Stefan has ample time for contemplation. By admittedly loose calculation of dawns and dusks, he’s been here just over a month. Immobile, his limbs and trunk and neck no longer his own, instead a sculpture frozen in the pose of sleep. Muscles brittle beneath skin like stone.

Ossified. Flesh gone to bone.

And how has this happened? He remembers an evening a month distant, but in these two-plus fortnights of silent immobility, he’s lived a numbed eternity. Memories of vertical perspective and movement beyond eyelids seem ancient.

An evening of newfound companionship, it would do for a night or for a week. Her name was Connie — wasn’t it? It seems so very long ago since those guardedly suggestive introductions over drinks and happy hour hors d’ouevres, and since then she has never referred to herself by name.

Summernight sweat, they lathered each other well in this very bed. Their wetness flowed like earlier wine, and if by the end of the carnal netherhours he felt his joints stiffening, he thought it only as side-effect of her insatiability. Which he would not have classified as nymphomania, precisely. Such insatiability had to go deeper than the libido, a chute emptying into a bottomless chasm of need. She wore him out, and despite the landscape of an unfamiliar bed, he slept deeply and well.

Like a petrified log.

Awakening the next morning to a deep and overall soreness he had never quite known. Movement equated with pain, like muscles wrenched during autumn’s first pick-up game of football with friends a few years ago, before families were begun in earnest by so many of them. Stefan asked to sleep in, you don’t mind, do you? And she did not. He blithely loved her in that moment, her bright understanding, her trust.

Awakening later that afternoon to realize the pain was gone, while even the possibility of movement had been taken with it. His fear was great, an awesome weight to bear, the same fear the fox or mink must feel with the first slam of trap jaws on its paw. And then, compounding the misery, he knew the shame of embarrassment.

He was lewdly, permanently, erect.

Awakening with a hard-on had always been a matter of goofy pride, everything in working order and ready for action. It had become the most ironic of curses.

He glanced down along his length, could tell a difference in skin color, healthy fleshtones gone dusty white. His internalized horror at this was exceeded only by Connie’s nonchalance when she came home to find him this way, not as if she had been expecting it, but worse: as if it were the answer to some incoherent prayer. He knew the moment she walked in that she would never summon help. With moist and loving eyes, she sat and stroked his new body for a time, and if he were outside himself, he might have marveled at the fact that no matter how firmly she pressed, poked, or prodded, his skin would not dimple.

Connie designated this room as his, converted the second floor guest room for her own use. He would be harder to move than a dresser emptied of its drawers — oh, here was morale. And she began to care for him like a nurse, of sorts. He can no longer move his jaws to eat, though she is able to force a stout straw through his lips, and he can suck up water and thin broths. Apparently his internal metabolism has slowed, for this meager diet seems sufficient. His resultant messes she cleans without complaint. Defecation is a thing of the past. The occasional spout of urine is all.

Nurse and keeper she may be, but she is also mistress, and he lacks even the physiological cop-out of impotence to deny Connie her satisfactions. Strong in the beginning, now hate is no longer in his remaining psychological framework. For further irony has not escaped him: She has her own design firm — this he remembers — and owns her own home. Isn’t this the dream of every guy teetering on career burnout, to kiss it goodbye and become a kept man?

Stefan still contemplates the why of it all. Vengeful wrath of some newly stirred deity? It’s crossed his mind, though this seems extreme. He’s been no saint, but no plundering cocksman, either. In terms of callous usage and abandonment, he has known far more deserving of punishment. Which is no excuse, Stefan supposes, but in this day and age, it seems as if the women he has known have been equally handicapped at making some genuine connection. All of them, male and female, fumbling in emotional darkness like blind, mad children.

Which, in retrospect, made his own heartfelt numbness seem quite normal. Apathy has just never seemed very important.

He’s had time to think himself through quite well.

And if he were to be run past a physician and a psychiatrist, what would be their diagnosis?

Patient exhibits symptoms of new, as-yet-unclassified social disease afflicting, in order: heart, soul, and finally body. Emotional rigidity and isolation seem to stimulate sudden massive production of osteoblasts and fibrous matrix. Accumulation of calcareous deposits continues until intramembranous ossification is complete.

And the prognosis? More of the same, perhaps, no cure and no preventative. He finds himself almost insane with curiosity: Is this scenario being repeated in other homes, other bedrooms? The lonely and the battle-scarred, awakening to find their night’s lover gone stiff beside them. The callous, rising to morning pain and finding surrender more attractive than fighting joints in protest. This city of men and women, one by one and two by two, sculpting unwilling new bodies of bone.

He wonders. It’s a theory, at least.

But if Stefan is anything, he is adaptable. He has adjusted to this new life, new flesh. A part of him now feels entirely divorced from that carnal Stefan of the past, he of curly dark hair and thrice-weekly health club workouts. He now knows the harsh ascetic rapture of the penniless holy man, the vow of silence and the wisdom that comes from motionless meditation. There is much to understand once the barrier of self is broken.

It’s not so bad, really.

Except those infrequent nights when he hears Connie readying to go out, smells the perfume, the hair mist, the very scent and essence of her need. Stefan, lying awake for hours, recognizing the key in the latch when she returns, and he swears even the lock sounds different when she’s not alone.

For hours, he listens. For hours, he prays.

These nights he hates most of all. Because he knows she’ll be coming to him in the morning.

To finish the task of satisfaction.

Connie fears, above all, the same solitude he so desperately craves.

iv. contagion

She has always hated autumn. Autumn brings sad change and a cyclical melancholy. Rains and chills, the false beauty of trees that will soon enough show their true colors, stark dead etchings against gray skies. Connie has always taken for granted that she will die in the fall.

Never has she considered it might be her time to nurture within the bud of new life.

Of sorts.

The cessation of her period four months ago did not seem undo cause for alarm. This has happened before, unintentional metabolic tampering through extremes of diet and exercise and stress, and the menstrual flow is dammed. That she never missed a single morning pill was more weight to her belief that this was simply another one of those episodes.

But tests, run and rerun, don’t lie. Nor does the blatant concern on the face of her gynecologist. But what, she’s not entitled to a mistake now and then? She’s human.

Unlike the thing in her womb.

He’s told her that it’s rare, but it does happen. It’s a documented alternative to successful pregnancy; one of the many biological missteps that can occur early on, through no fault of her own; one that did not happen to spontaneously abort. Just one of those things.

If he only knew.

Her gynecologist, of course, has never seen the father.

“Embryos can ossify, Connie. But it’s nothing you could have foreseen, nothing you could’ve prevented.”

Sure. Tell me some more fairy tales.

Connie drives home on autopilot, hands and feet independent of thought. Having left the doctor’s office before he can get her to agree to another appointment, chip this calcified lump of child off her uterine wall. No, she’s told him, she’ll have to think about this, the doctor dogging her footsteps, insisting it will not, repeat, will not take care of itself —

She would’ve liked nothing better in that moment than to have whirled upon him, let him know just what a shitty deal their six-year patient/doctor association has been from her point of view. Connie’s own thousand points of spite: you think you know me, think you know how i feel? i can hang my feet in those stirrups and open wide and you can poke and probe and name every part in English and in Latin, but you have no idea what it’s like inside my heart and my soul, no idea how hard it can be for some people to fall in love, so don’t you try to heal what you don’t even understand.

Of course she did not say this aloud. Public spectacle is public embarrassment. And later demands public apology.

Connie arrives home with the past twenty minutes of transit in blackout, forgotten or never registered. Her quiet street of century-old oaks and two-story homes, dignified, shutters and curtains aplenty behind which to hide their iniquities and secret shames. She keys off the ignition and sits behind the wheel in her driveway. Hands gently resting across her stomach.

Look into the rear view mirror and what does she see? The dark mascara runoff, so-blue eyes filled to overflowing with too many fears, too many questions, and a lower lip left ragged by nervous teeth. Hello young mother.

Hasn’t she known all along that something has been growing inside her? Something white and chalky and hard, this child of her own isolation, its skull a smooth dome of rock. She knows it never had a chance — it was never right and proper to begin with, and as such, what about its gestation period? How long will it take to come to term? And when its moment of delivery arrives, will it be like trying to squeeze a boulder from her body, and tear her in half with a rush of blood and chalky limewater flood?

There are no self-help books for this, are there?

Connie steps from the car with a deep breath, and at last prepares to live life according to her deepest instincts.

v. anastomosis

Standing in the doorway of Stefan’s room, she now sees him with new perception. Connie sags against the doorjamb, suddenly tired, exhaustion having found a home in her muscles, her bones, her soul. The climb up the stairs was an expedition.

She slips her suede jacket from her shoulders, lets it fall to the floor.

“I quit bleeding four months ago,” she tells him.

Stefan, of course, does not answer. Cannot even turn his head to acknowledge her in the doorway. Flatbacking, eyes toward the ceiling, without so much as the motion of perceptible breath.

“But that’s okay. I’ve bled enough.”

Silence. Closed up for late autumn, the house is as quiet as a mausoleum. An occasional creak, the settling of the house’s wood and iron bones. The occasional rattle of wind at windows. She has always felt safe here. There’s so much she makes sure remains outside.

Although, any more, she has to wonder if she belongs out there too. No longer to taint this house, its ageless serenity.

And, loudly, eternally, Connie screams.

At neither herself nor Stefan, yet at the same time both, at her home, at the world. She screams in potent raw distillation of feeling, without words. There are no words for this, the dawning revelation that betrayal has been in the works for a long, long time, and she has never chosen to believe it. Until now. “There’s someone for everyone,” her mother used to tell her, and she believed. And it’s true, but the truth is too spiteful to accept.

Someone for everyone — there he is. They deserve each other.

She blames Stefan for everything and nothing, knowing that half the fault falls squarely on her own head. Had she never let him get so close, he could never have infected her soul with whatever virulence had taken root in his own. Had she not continued to drape her own tender skin across his hard shell, he would never have violated the sanctity of her womb. It had never been made to grow anything like this.

Her scream is forever, it permeates walls and floor and ceiling, and after it drains her of breath, Connie steps into the room. With small, quavering grunts, she spins Stefan’s rigid form a quarter-turn on the bed, so that his legs hang over the floor. Then she maneuvers him up, onto his feet, and while his eyes are the only part of him that can move, can respond, she will pay them no heed. With her hands steadying his shoulders, he is balanced upright.

She moves him toward the door, into the hallway, rocking his weight to one foot, then the other, back and forth. Like walking a heavy piece of furniture into place.

Until she stands him before the flight of stairs.

Stefan is making a soft, high whine inside himself, and she can hear the crisp whistle of breath through brittle airways. Her hand firm on one shoulder as she bites her lip and moves around to gaze, at last, into his impassive face.

Only his eyes are vast and feverish, glazed with the terrible knowledge of expectation and damnation. Down his cheeks trickle white tears. Miracle of miracles, a statue that weeps.

“No,” she thinks she hears Stefan say, with ghastly effort.

“I can’t be afraid to be alone,” Connie says. “Be free.”

Then, lightly, she shoves him. His own weight and imbalance do the rest. He falls, striking down upon the staircase with a thunderous crash.

And Stefan shatters.

Connie stands with tears of her own, watching it happen, fragments large and small flying apart to rattle down the wooden stairs. They litter the staircase from middle to bottom, pieces of Stefan … bone china, and inner tissues like red sponge. Not nearly as much blood as she would have thought.

Call the king’s horses, call the king’s men. A fairy tale ending for her at last.

Too many dreams unfulfilled, too many expectations that were evidently too great, realized only too late. Love and family and security, so sorry, these belong to others, not for you, never for you. Maybe next life, ha ha. As she gazes down upon the fractured spill that was Stefan, she understands: This is the sum total of her life. Wouldn’t her mother be proud now, if she could see?

Footfalls soft upon the stairs, Connie makes her way down to sort among the debris. Stefan’s head is at the bottom, halfway across the dining room floor, and it is whole, but not much else is this recognizable. She finds what may be a piece of his arm, split lengthwise like a greenstick fracture, radius or ulna tipped by a point to reckon with. Long sharp shard.

Connie holds it in both hands, and it’s rough in some places, smooth in others. Moist. Moving to stand before a hallway mirror, she watches herself cradle it close. Mother … stone child … shattered father? What poignant destiny that they should all end up in the same body.

She strips, tossing clothes to the floor, until she beholds herself naked in the mirror. Her bony frame, small ribs in bas-relief, can anorexia be far away? Her hair seems the biggest part of her.

Connie takes the stake of Stefan’s arm and, like a young Shakespearian lover wronged by family and fate, presses its point to the skin just beneath her breastbone. Angles it upward. Wraps both hands around the thicker base…

And shoves as hard as she can.

There is pain, the rending of skin, and she feels the last of Stefan slide in, an inch, no more, and then it stops. Feeling deep within a terrible scrape, the meeting of irresistible force with immovable object.

Hands falling in defeat to her side. Bone shard slipping free to fall and shatter on the hardwood floor. The spill of tears that descends to anoint her breasts, her new wound, bleeding both red and white.

Dear God, it’s worse than she thought.

But there is no piercing the calcified heart.