Headcheese, page 7
Xiomara never wakes up from the dream, and I can’t tell you if she goes to heaven or not. This is not omniscient narration, but a record of how it was.
LORRIE meets ANNA at a club. Anna is celebrating her 21st birthday with bumping and grinding and too many tequila shots. Anna raises her empty glass and three fingers above the throng at the bar to signal the bartender “three more,” and her apparent vitiligo catches Lorrie’s eye. She’s never seen such a perfect demarcation between hand and arm, a veritable line at the wrist like a scar-bracelet joining. Fusing. Lorries quickly runs through all the possible explanations. Self-mutilation. Accident. But what could have caused the bleaching of Anna’s skin? Beautiful, exotic, obviously Asian Anna. Unless—
That Anna might have been the recipient of new hands, hands other than her own, is almost too difficult to grasp for a woman who daydreams about separating herself from herself. Then other ideas begin to form: hazy rum-punch notions of donating parts she doesn’t need to someone who could use them. Like she is a character from Never Let Me Go,57 born and bred just to grow parts for others. It gives Lorrie an odd sense of pride, this niggling seed of what if, and a thought for the first time that her deformity can in fact be somehow useful.
As red and yellow disco lights swim over the hybrid girl’s body, Lorrie feels her own head swim and decides only another drink will set it right.
Lorrie watches as the bartender sets three wobble-full shots before Anna then waves her own white hand at the man. He’s cute, she notices, though his arms aren’t as built as the guy she was just dancing with. He’d been wearing a hoodie with the hood up. Not the most pretentious of club wear, but then his biceps pulled the terrycloth tight. She couldn’t see his face, but the lights had danced on his eyes every so often with the same intensity with which he’d danced—precise; controlled; an artist responding to her like a machine. Lorrie had let him dance with her because he’d made no move to grope her, only to act as her fluid shadow, sliding hips against hips without ever once touching, respecting her space but his desire evident in the way he also strained at the crotch of his jeans. Lorrie didn’t know quite what to make of him, except for the fact that the greater the pains he took not to touch her, the more she desperately wanted him to. Parched, she’d gone to get a drink at the bar when she’d spotted Anna. Who knew if she’d find her suggestion of a lover again.
In the bathroom, Lorrie checks her eye makeup, applies more lipstain, squats above a toilet seat already saturated with piss. She checks to make sure there’s still a condom in her purse, just in case. She flushes, wiping the seat off for the next woman, just because. Because it may be a club meant for booze and bad decisions, but goddammit a girl should be entitled to a clean public toilet even if its next occupant will throw up all the alcohol she just threw back, spotting seat and tank and miniskirt in the process.
Lorrie smiles at the women in line as she exits and she’s still smiling when she looks up into his eyes. Mr. Almost-Lover. Her smile morphs into a self-conscious grin, into a tiny moan as BARTHOLOMEW’s strong right hand and stronger left hook finally grip her wrists, circling like scar-bracelets between hand and arm.
57 A 2005 dystopian science fiction novel by Japanese-born British author Kazuo Ishiguro.

There’s a special spot in Canyon de Chelly where GEORGE likes to go because the wind funnels and tunnels through the crevasses with such force that it howls, and when the very air is screaming his ears don’t ring. Well, probably they still do, but he can’t hear the cursed things for once and the respite is blessed.
Unlike B. B. cannot be blessed because yesterday he jumped from canyon top to bottom, and taking the life God gave you before God does is an unpardonable offense. B. had been panhandling at the four-way stop in town (it gets a lot of tourist traffic from blue-hairs headed to the casino) and his pockets were still full of loose paper and change when he jumped. Which is why George thinks that maybe he didn’t jump.
CAPTAIN HOOK watched LORRIE at the bunker show in Chicago. He danced with her at a club two weeks later. On Thursday, Bartholomew, having done his due diligence, pulls up the barstool next to Lorrie’s and doesn’t say a thing. He doesn’t order a drink or hit on his prize; just taps the metal knuckles of his fancy prosthetic arm (unlike any Lorrie has ever seen) against the beer-damp wooden counter and waits for Lorrie to look up from her phone. Tonight he will tell her that she is his.
IRA and ELIOT have only been together a little over a year and the sex is already boring.
One night Ira goes home with somebody else, learns a thing or two, and returns to Eliot ready to rekindle their last-gasp relationship. He knows what he needs now, he tells a dubious Eliot, who forgives Ira’s transgression only because he’s ‘comfortable’ and scared of starting over again. Especially when he’s not yet ‘out’ to his family. Especially since Ira is his first true love. Eliot knows the sex is boring, but it’s safe. Neither has any STDs (save for what Ira might’ve caught in a stranger’s bed—though he swears they used condoms [multiple / Ira doesn’t bother to hide the enthusiasm in his voice] because that stud was ready to go again just as soon as they’d finished—the implication being that he was unlike [and therefore better than] Eliot, who preferred cuddling to back-to-back bareback—not that he ever would’ve voiced such a thing to Ira).
Though he supposes that Ira knows it anyway and it’s just one more thing for Ira to get fed up with. Grow tired of. Replace him over. Knowing all these things, Eliot merely meekly asks, “What do you want me to do?”
“Choke me,” Ira says.
Asphyxiation is a fetish like any other, but that’s not the kind of choking Ira means. He laughs derisively when Eliot gently puts his hands around his lover’s neck as they fool around in bed later that night. “Not there,” Ira says. “Here.” He guides Eliot’s hands down to his hard cock, confusing Eliot, who can’t believe that his hardcore boyfriend, always too good for handjobs, would request such a thing now. Ira places Eliot’s fingers in a tight little ring around the base of his penis, then tells him to squeeze—hard. “Harder!” he nearly yells. Ira’s default coping mechanism is anger.
Eliot squeezes at about 50% of his maximum capability. No matter what Ira tells him, he isn’t out to hurt his lover. “Now, when I’m about to come, I want you to squeeze, just like that but harder, you son of a bitch.” Ira never speaks to Eliot endearingly and in fact has only once told him he loves him—while shitfaced at a New Year’s Eve party. He’d later kissed someone else that same night. “Squeeze so hard I don’t ejaculate,” Ira continues. “Like a vice, get it? My splooge won’t even get through, if you squeeze right.”
“But you’ll still orgasm?”
“Oh yeahhh,” Ira says, grinning.
Eliot frowns. “What’s the point?”
“One, it feels amazing. Two, it will force you to grow some balls and be a fucking man for once. Take some control; don’t make me do all the work all the time.”
This is news to Eliot. As the dominant one, Ira never wants anything more from his pussy sub than complacent obedience. Suck harder. Flip over. These are the commands that Eliot is used to hearing. Not ‘Man up.’ But if Ira is giving him a chance, Eliot will at least try. How hard can it be to choke a cock?
-
At 22, Eliot has a degree but no real direction other than what Ira tells him to do. He prefers taking orders to charting his own course—and it isn’t a matter of laziness. If Eliot thought Ira could love him, he would work tirelessly toward the goal of earning that love. But asked to write a 10-year (even a 2-year) life plan, he looks to Ira, who always has the answer for everything. Where should they live? Upper east side. What color should the bath towels be? Black, to complement the clean chrome of the recently renovated bathroom hardware. Where will they go to dinner, and what should Eliot wear? Las Flores, with a bright green bowtie. The color makes his eyes pop and looks good next to Ira’s tailored tweed. Good without being too matchy-matchy. Ira plans their vacations and says when Eliot’s sister can visit (the only person to whom Eliot is out). Eliot does not feel deprived of power because he’s willingly given it all to Ira—just one of the many gifts he’s given his lover this year, to show his love. Just because Ira doesn’t show his love in the same way, doesn’t mean Ira doesn’t love Eliot. And that is okay. Ira takes care of ‘things’ and Eliot takes care of Ira.
Last month, before a wedding reception for two of Ira’s newly-nuptialed friends, Eliot had weakly protested his own appearance at the social event. “I won’t know anyone there,” he’d said. “You’ll have more fun without me.” Or that biggie: “You know I hate having my picture taken.” Photos are proof that things happened, and were real. For that reason, Eliot loves being behind the camera, capturing in still moments the world as he sees it and sharing, in that way, his own reality with Ira, who takes at least a cursory interest in Eliot’s art. But Eliot hates being the subject, the photographed. He doesn’t care for how he looks in photos (always a little lost) or how they tie him to places and people both irrevocably and out of context: the frame never captures what was happening off-camera, which makes or breaks any story. Wedding receptions—especially gay ones—are notorious for flashy decor and noisy photographers who see too much: unspoken jealousies, secret affairs, drunken drama. Eliot had wanted no part of it, especially because Mr. and Mr. Blankenthal’s wedding would (and did) make the society section.
“You ready?” Ira had yelled that night from the bedroom.
“Yes,” Eliot had replied softly. He’d been ready for ten minutes, waiting patiently on the couch for Ira to finish primping.
“Help,” Ira had said, walking into the room, tie extended. Ira could tie a tie, of course, but Eliot did it better and Eliot liked feeling useful.
“What’d you get them?” Ira had asked while Eliot worked.
“A Valentino bowl.”
Ira had smiled, pleasantly surprised. “That’s perfect. They’ll love that.”
Eliot had finished tucking Ira’s tie into his vest, and Ira had kissed him. A rare moment of ebullience.
LORRIE doesn’t worry about AIDS because it’s 2016 and HIV long ago ceased being a hot-button topic. Sure, she knows its not ‘just’ gay men who get the disease—she saw Dallas Buyers Club58—but AIDS is so 1980s. Ebola and the Zika virus—hell, even Chipotle’s continued E. coli outbreaks!—are ever so much more pressing. If a guy says he can’t come wearing a condom, she doesn’t force the issue. Skin-on-skin always feels better anyway. Aside from a tussle with the all-pervasive HPV, that scourge of the early 2000s infecting 75% of the sexually-active American population, and one case of molluscum59 that while unsightly was not dangerous, she’s been downright lucky. Oh, and only a couple pregnancy scares. Minor ones. A day or two of panic at most before her period arrived, the playful minx.
The problem is (and at 32, Lorrie is just beginning to realize this), she thinks every one is The One. If they show any promise at all in bed, if their breath doesn’t make her shy away in horror, if they take semi-decent care of themselves, have a job—the basics!—that’s all she asked for. She’d even been known to overlook one of the basics if it meant everlasting love. It never does though. Or hasn’t at least. Not that she’ll never find it. And there, that eternally hopeful romantic, positive in fallow periods that no one will ever want her again, sure when the new guy comes around that they’ll live happily ever after. The back-and-forth, up-and-down threatens to tear her heart out every time. Only by her bootstraps does she recover: sheer stubborn will. Until the next time, when it starts all over again.
Just to be sure, and because she’s recently entered a new relationship, Lorrie’s doctor recommends a blood test at her next Well Woman exam.
“A blood test? What for?”
“Oh, cholesterol, kidney and liver function, a general health panel.”
“Oh.”
“Also HIV.”
“Oh?”
Lorrie’s a fucking nervous wreck for the week it takes the office to call with the results. Ear pressed to the phone on a Friday, Lorrie sinks to the floor, pale and crying.
For seven long and utterly torturous days, much worse than any pregnancy scare (abortions are a thing even if a last resort; AIDS, on the other hand, is a death sentence), she convinces herself that God is punishing her for her indulgent, indiscriminate ways. She doesn’t even believe in God, her mother did, but she can get behind a vengeful universe theory. For 7 days, Lorrie runs through her mind every single time she’d been sick with something remotely like the flu (it wasn’t many), as she’d read that was the first symptom following HIV exposure. She’d had a cold just a month ago, but it’d been a legitimate cold, with congestion and drainage, not just a fever and body aches. If AIDS could be induced by thought/fear alone, Lorrie would contract it. When the not guilty verdict finally comes down, she collapses all right. Is even disbelieving. Most people, on hearing they’ve been infected, will ask, “But are you sure?!” Lorrie, on hearing that she had not, fairly screamed, “But how can you know?! What if you’re wrong?!”
58 A 2013 American biographical drama, the film tells the story of Ron Woodroof, an AIDS patient diagnosed in the mid-1980s when HIV/AIDS treatments were under-researched and the disease was highly stigmatized.
59 Sometimes called water warts; a viral infection of the skin and occasionally of the mucous membranes.
GEORGE hasn’t eaten for 24 hours. He’s abstained from alcohol, caffeine, sex, and electronics. George is ready for the shaman to work her magic.
300+ days out of the year, the shaman is a lawyer named MONICA LIGHTFOOT. She’s 42, very pretty, with straight black hair that falls to her hips and hasn’t a single strand of gray. Professionally-speaking, she’s won 96% of her court cases, a near statistical improbability. Rumors circulate of Monica’s using magic to sway her juries, but of course it’s never been proven. Modern-day courtrooms protect their borders with metal detectors and concern themselves with keeping out weapons and keeping in the system the accused. No one asks Ms. Lightfoot about the tiny leather pouch at her neck, the mementos—the magic—she keeps inside it.
Approximately sixty days out of the year, Monica exchanges her tailored suit for a rag dress. Her long hair, normally secured in a tight plaited bun, blows wild as the wind on an empty plains night, tangling with her crown of dove white feathers, clicking with the weight of threaded blood clay beads. She is not Ms. Lightfoot on these occasions, but Nihimá, our Mother. A terrible, world-ending karmic mother, blue eyes blazing and fire in her fingertips. At such times as George dares to look at her, Monica appears nothing like her sweet-though-strong civilian self. She is a woman possessed—a conduit for some power far greater than George or Monica, and hopefully great enough to contend with whatever malevolent force seems intent on sucking the joy from George’s twilight years. Such joy as he can have, anyway, without Sarah.

The language that Nihimá chants is not recognizable as English or Navajo. It’s more guttural than that, stabbing into the black sky and wrapping George in a straightjacket of irrational fear. He wants Monica’s (Nihimá’s) intervention. He trusts her. But he’s heard what can happen when one aggravates intentionally a sleeping monster.
Nihimá directs him to lie on a woven mat near the fire. They are outside, but George can barely make out the stars this close to the light. As he tries to relax, his old body creaks and groans settling into and against the contours of the ground. One particularly sharp rock juts just under his right shoulder blade, but watching Nihimá from the corner of his eye, George doesn’t dare move.
The instant the shaman cups her hands over George’s ears, the ringing stops. For what feels like at least five glorious minutes, he knows nothing but beautiful, merciful silence. The silence that must have existed before sound. Pre-dawn, Bible-black silence. It’s like being dead and buried and back in the womb all at once. A bliss he never wants to leave, and the desire to start living anew—to reclaim the life he’d lost to old age and the cruel tricks of coyote-hearted spirits.
She packs something cool and damp into his ears. Soothes the auricle folds like the folds of mitochondrial DNA. Great Mother, going home.
When her two favorite masked lovers enter LORRIE’s room, Larry the frog burps a cherry hello. That’s why Lorrie will later believe it had to be real: their nocturnal visit, emerging bent double from a tiny door in the wall, HANNAH’s full breasts rounding above a black leather bustier, the tiny door in the wall definitely not there the next morning. Lorrie has just time enough to reflect that only terrifying things come through tiny doors: trolls and little doll-shaped monsters and, shudder, human children.
There’s a knock from what would normally be the bathroom, just on the other side of the wall. Then the door opens and out crawl those two beautiful creatures, nothing monster-like about them at all.
Except for their appetites. Those appear insatiable. And the only food they seem to need is Lorrie.
This time it’s her legs they bind in hospital-grade cuffs, tightening the belt cinches until no blood can possibly squeeze through. Her feet so unfeelingly thick after awhile that they might as well not be there. As they then fasten her restraints around the posterior bed posts, Lorrie thinks briefly of Paul Sheldon60 in Misery, his ankles bound to a block then snapped with the dull end of a sledgehammer. She sees again the guillotine that wavers above her like a promise. At the peak of her orgasm, two tongues and twenty fingers attending to her most sensitive parts, the blade falls with a most satisfying speed.
