Perfect Stillness
~ This story has a soundtrack—listen while you read ~
You know what I think about when I'm this close to another body? I think: one day, at one moment, this body that I'm holding in my arms will stop breathing, stop living. Just...stop. One day, you'll see my name in the obits and you'll remember this moment.
— Burr Steers, Igby Goes Down
You weren’t beautiful. You didn’t have money, or power, or success. Your apartment was cramped, and you weren’t well-liked in the mean little circle you’d chosen. But you were good in bed.
You hadn’t wanted me to come to your place, but you agreed when I’d said you could blindfold me the entire time. I was glad for an excuse to drive over the Bay Bridge: to be so high above all that space and the sea. I stopped in Outer Richmond, in front of the humped little house you lived under like a troll.
You were a magazine photographer and a good one, with a Time Life spread and everything, but you hadn’t managed the switch from film to digital and ended up planning corporate events. With the Great Recession, you’d lost that job too. Your unemployment was running out and now, in your fifties, you were worried no one would hire you ever again.
I was still technically a student, though I was spending more and more time in a dissociative fog that left me unable to do much besides whimper and thrash. It was looking like I’d have to drop out of school any day now, so we were both free on a Tuesday in the middle of the afternoon.
You opened the door, and blocked any view inside with your body. You were on the tail end of middle age---short, round, and bald as an octopus. You smelled like leather and a cold, damp place. I was quivering, seeing you again. You smiled.
You put a sleeping mask over my eyes. You tied a scarf over that, and I couldn’t, actually, see anything.
~~~
We had met, for the first time, at the Folsom Street Fair, a weekend-long festival for kink in San Francisco. We met on the corner of Howard and Ninth, early, while the streets were still empty. I’d responded to your ad on Craigslist—you were giving a demonstration on short-range whips and needed a body, and I’d been able to get to our meeting place on time, and that had felt like luck.
You wore green reflective sunglasses and, despite them, looked intimidating. Your clothes were ugly and functional and covered you fully: a black fedora with a leather braid, a long-sleeve shirt with every button buttoned, a black leather vest studded with pins, and heavy hiking boots I would learn you wore even inside, right out of bed. You carried a sack that looked like something you’d take on an expedition.
Despite all the black and all the leather, you had the mild sweetness of a teddy bear. Your mouth was small and feminine, and when you took your sunglasses off, your eyes were kind.
I’d been so happy to be exploring BDSM. I couldn’t make it to class on most days and I’d abandoned a string of increasingly menial jobs, but in this one area of my stupid life, nothing was getting in my way.
We started walking. At a seemingly random intersection, you stopped and asked to tie my hands.
I took off my shirt. The street was full of mirrors. You stood next to me, with the same expression on your face.
The early morning fog had burned off, by then, and the air was cool though the light was still tender. In the absence of crowds, the metal fences blocking off traffic looked forlorn.
“Your bra?” you said.
I hesitated. I’d thought I’d be leaving that on. I thought I’d negotiated thoroughly, but I was new at this, this rigorousness.
“You don’t have to.”
I made a decision. I unclasped it, folded it, and handed it to you. You put it in your sack.
I was still standing on the street, and the air was still the same temperature, and there I was, with my tits out, in public.
You didn’t look at me, immediately. You took a coil of pink braided rope out of your sack, and held my hands together loosely, as if in prayer.
The ropes were soft. Inside them, I was in perfect stillness.
You draped two cords over my shoulders. Looping, pulling, knotting, you created a complicated lattice against my chest. I wanted to close my eyes.
You brought my hands up, secured them between my breasts. I could see our reflections in a store window. I watched as you circled me, tugging on the knots you’d made. My chest was a starburst of pink and red.
I noticed one of the pins on your vest.
“Is that...Winnie The Pooh?” I said.
Your eyes crinkled. “I’m the Grand Pooh-Bah!” you said. You lifted your hands and did a simpering little dance. I laughed, and it was easy, like that. We walked through the fair and I forgot that my hands were tied in front of me, that my breasts were bare, that my nipples were pinched between pink chopsticks.
At your demonstration, one detail drowned out all the others. You took off the rest of my clothes, leaving just my underwear. You whipped and handled me. Widening my stance, you ran your hands under, and between. I could feel the brush of your fingertips through the cloth.
Like we’d agreed, you did not go further.
You found my labia, lingered, moved your fingers back and forth.
After you finished, my hands were still tied, so you helped me back into my pants. Being dressed felt so much more intimate than being undressed. I felt like a kid being helped into snow clothes.
I didn’t want a relationship, but I’d been trawling Craigslist for someone to dominate me and had met a lot of preening assholes. I liked your lack of hard edges. That, your deep voice, and that you were neatly twice my age.
I thought about the touch of your fingertips for a full week, in my car, in front of my stove, in my shower, and knew I wanted to see you again.
~~~
Three weeks after the festival, I’d called you, and you’d agreed to blindfold me. You lived far enough away that driving to you felt like a pilgrimage.
You led me through your doorway. Once inside, I took small steps where you directed me. Then you were gone. I waited, turning my head to follow the sound you made. In the absence of sight, the space around me felt both constrained and limitless.
You opened my dress. There was pulling at my bra; it slackened. I shrugged, and the cups fell from my body.
I could hear my eyelashes moving against the sleeping mask, when I blinked.
You pulled my underwear down. The fabric grazed my thigh as it fell. Under the darkness of this blindfold, in the absence of your touch, I was alone.
Something leather and braided was touching my chest. I closed my eyes beneath the blindfold, breathed, and began to disappear.
Light, downward strokes against my breasts. Behind my back, my fingers intertwined.
You hit harder, hurting me. I gritted my teeth. I didn’t want to cry out.
You stopped, turned me around, bent me forward.
A crack. The sound made me jump, and the sting and the surprise of the impact ripped a cry from me. I started to shake, and my breath was coming in too fast. I tried to focus, slow it down, but I couldn’t.
“Breathe.” You said. Your hand. You stood behind me, put your weight on me. My breathing slowed. You touched my back, my shoulder. Your fingers grazed the tips of my labia. I could feel the heat and sweat on you.
You started up again. The lashes drew together, formed a single, shining wire. I shook my head, stamped my feet. I couldn’t observe my sounds and movements anymore, I simply made them. I grunted, yelled.
You hit me again, with something wider, heavier. The hurt and the weight of it crowded out every thought. I was getting closer to something. A vault was being opened, a truth dislodged. Whipped, scourged, livid, I felt the same on the outside as I did on the inside. I testified, with my body.
The illness is back.
Slap.
I am reeling from it.
Slap.
It has taken so much from me. I can’t make it stop.
Slap.
Slap.
Slap.
I was walked, and laid down, and tied down. I was hovering so high above my body I could barely feel what was happening to it. Your teeth were at my labia. Your cock was pushing inside me, inch by inch. By the time you’d finished and had laid a blanket over me, a demon had been exorcised. I had the run of my own heart, for a little while.
~~~
Years later, I was driving north on the 101, just past Goleta. My phone rang with an unknown number. The day was cloudy and the sea was luminous, in the particular way it is along that stretch of coast: glowing, like silver clay.
Against my better judgement, I picked up the call.
“Hello?” It was a woman's voice, someone I didn’t know.
“Yes?”
“Is this Paper Crane?” The voice sounded tremulous.
“Yes,” I said.
“He’s dead.”
Silence.
“Who?”
“Grizzly. J—?”
Oh. She must have said, “Grizzly’s dead.” For months, I worried this woman thought I’d forgotten who you were.
~~~
There had been a moment against the couch when the blindfold had slipped, and I’d seen your apartment. Plastic storage tubs were stacked on top of one another in columns that reached the ceiling. The room was a maze of them. There was garbage everywhere, and pieces of things, and food. In a corner, a plastic frog swung back and forth on a pendulum. There were clock hands on its stomach. Its features were cartoonish, sweet. Beneath it was the word “Love”, in pink letters.
You noticed I was looking. You made an embarrassed noise and covered my eyes.
~~~
These things would happen a million times:
You would fuck me with a dildo shaped like Jesus, with a dildo shaped like the devil, with a glow-in-the-dark dildo shaped like a nun. You would position me, turn me, wrap me in blankets. You would fuck me with my hands tied to the bedboards, my legs over your shoulders, and this would keep me at a place just below orgasm for what seemed like forever. You would bark at me to come now, now.
I would lie on my back, my inner thighs touching and then not touching your ears, while your tongue moved. Untied and unblindfolded, I would feel like a mollusk, removed from its shell. In my line of sight, absurdly, would be a picture of a woman with a sea monster between her legs.
You would buy me dumplings and wor wonton soup from a place down the street, and these gifts, which you would insist upon, represented great sacrifice. I would stand, shirtless, on a little ladder, with a bucket of bleach and rubber gloves, and try to scrub the mold from your walls. We would sit naked on your tiny couch, and I would rest my head against the grey thatch of your chest hair while you complained about what seemed like everyone in the kink community: for their cattiness, for their rigidity, for their rejection of you, over and over.
I would think, but never say, why do you keep trying to run with this crowd if you don’t even like them?
~~~
One night, you had a heart attack. Or you had heartburn. We sat up into the small hours, while you debated going to the ER. You worried you might finally, actually, ruin yourself financially over what could have just been gas. I wouldn’t tell you what to do, but, Jesus, go.
After a few hours, you were feeling better.
“It’s the 25-year-old in my bed,” you said.
~~~
We saw each other for three years. We did not say “I love you”, but when I told you I wanted to move to Seattle, you cried like it was the end of the world. Even so, you wouldn’t let me keep so much as a toothbrush in your dumpy little cave, and you spent every Christmas alone, watching Lord of the Rings.
In the end, I was the one who pulled away. My ship slowly righted itself. Yours just kept on sinking.
~~~
Once, after you’d hurt me, I remember getting home, showering, sitting on my bed. I was still marked up and sated, still in that place of stillness, still carrying that glow. I wrote you an email:
“I wanted to thank you for today. I really enjoyed it, and, more importantly, it’s helping me heal.”
You wrote back with just a smiley face. It was the kind you write yourself, a colon and parenthesis.
On the page by itself, with no words, it looked guileless, and delighted.
:)
This is an elegy for you, J—. I love you. I am leaving you behind.