Epilogue:
Passenger
2003-04
Twenty one pigmented ink jet prints
One Leporello (artists’ book)
Prints: 12x16 inches / 30.5 x 40.6 cm
Leporello: 10x224 inches / 25.4 x 570 cm
Editions of three
Snuff a short story by Rob Maitra
Snuff
Rob
Maitra
The pills drop to the floor a
second time. You want to say something
about them, something that gets more answers than the first time. But before you do, an ambulance or police siren
floats through the duct—drifting lost through the machine-manufactured
breeze. No other air can reach its way
into those booths, into that basement-like maze of videos and sex, just like no
other part of the night can find you buried there in the dark. The evening continues on, even when you’re
not there, like the lives in the houses that thrive and die after your commuter
train window left them behind you.
Someone closes a shade or a family sits down to dinner and then you are
gone, looking into the windows of other lives.
This boy is there in front of you.
You have no idea what he thinks, what he sees or smells. Did he hear the siren or even a scream for
help?
Maybe someone
on the other side of that airshaft has died, has been shot down, and he’s
bleeding on the sidewalk somewhere between Christopher and Canal—maybe some
sixteen-year old drag queen—stabbed by a father of three, one of four sons, who
was blackmailed by that “little bitch I’m goin’ to kill you” knowing that he’d
never get caught because as he told her before “no one cares about your dirty,
whorin’, faggot Puerto Rican ass.” He tried to be what he thought was kind, but
when the fake Gucci and Movado’s had to be “the real shit,” he had enough, too
much for even his mid-level Morgan Stanley salary and constant craving for
her. By now his late model sedan has
gotten him through the tunnel to the NJ Turnpike, to a house too far from the
commuter train for it to be convenient.
The extortion cleanses the crime in his mind for “one dead whore is
better than a destroyed family of five.”
Or she attacked him, and left him for dead, tired of watching him count
through Franklins to pull out the measly fifty, tired of calling him
“daddy”—she threw her heel into his throat and cut his face with the blade she
carries in her bag, taking his wallet—keeping the money, throwing the rest into
the Hudson River on her walk back to Christopher. You even possibly passed her on your way to the booths, to the
sex and its odors, to this person struggling to please you.
Maybe it was the siren sounded
just long enough to run a red light—to turn the corner in the only place in the
nation where it is illegal to make a right turn on red—only to find another red
light shining above the street.
You don’t drive
or take the train out to the suburbs anymore, but you used to do both, before
you left Connecticut and your foster family that supposedly saved you from the
City and the group homes—the family who was understanding when you dropped out
at seventeen, understanding when you moved back to your block in the Bronx
without telling them, understanding when you do not call them for months at a
time, so understanding that you have come to believe that they have not
understood you at all. You want to
imagine that in these five years since you left, you have done well enough, but
the world around you now might make you think differently in the morning.
And then you hear the bottle of
pills fall to the floor for a third time—is it the same bottle, you
wonder in a sentence spoken to yourself out loud. After the first time, you asked, “What are those?” and he got the
point, so he answered “Nothing, only medicine for my allergies” or did he say
“Prozac”? It doesn’t matter to you
because you know what he didn’t say, what he wouldn’t say anyway, for no one
says that to someone who is about to enter him in a video booth at five
AM. This is your own form of
profiling—a faggot with the orange-brown pharmacy pill bottle is a suspect—you
know that and thus you speak like a black man in a Lexus does to a white police
officer when you explain to your friends, with uncomfortable precision, the
details of your visits to the doctor for a check-up or a sore throat.
But maybe the pills are his own
form of disclosure. Dropping the hint
three times to the recently cleaned, always sticky and pine-smelling, floor
gets him off the hook. “I showed him
the bottle three times” he would tell himself later. He bends over in the small video booth, banging his head against
the control console, in which you already deposited five dollars, but hardly
watched a scene of the three hung men, wearing Santa hats, jerking off around a
Christmas tree. And when he hits his
head, you pull back as much as you can, only a few inches, and your cock pops
out of him. You wonder why he doesn’t
just leave them on the floor. Is it his
way of saying “You’re it”?
You are not bothered enough to
stop and soon you will forget it happened, just like you did the first two
times, just like you will forget about the siren, only to remember all of it
later, when you are not yet asleep, sitting in the park drinking your coffee
and reading the Daily News as the rush hour ends or possibly later, when
you lying in bed at four in the afternoon, trying to remember who and what you
did—and before the images of the night flash in your mind, you remember the
sounds of the siren and bottle of pills rattling on the floor.
“I’m sorry,” he
mumbles and smiles, and places the pills back into his coat, which he is
holding, folded over his arm. His pants
are down, and his shirt is pulled up over his head, allowing his back to be
exposed. You position your fingertips
just above his ass and try to move yourself back into him, without using your
hands. He reaches behind and guides
your cock, which is quickly hard again in spite of the Hennessey, blow, weed,
and poppers you consumed in the last five hours, into his hole. Inside, he feels hot, like he is burning
with a fever. This burning makes you
thrust harder, to want to be further inside, to be completely inside, not just
your dick, but all of you—your head and feet and arm pits, smelly from a long
night pouring drinks and washing glasses.
Your body drives into him, slapping against his ass, and he moans, not
because of bodily pleasure, you assume, but because he wants you inside of him,
all of you, and this makes you want him more, and you tell him that. He moans louder, drives his body backwards
onto you, which in turn causes you to groan from deep inside your belly.
The series of
beeps sound from video machine, signaling the last ten seconds of your
video—soon the distorted soundtrack will stop and the booth will go not quite
completely dark, but you and he will continue until the attendant knocks on the
door and says, “More dollars or get out of booth.” But it shouldn’t matter because you’re almost there and you hope
he is too, although you have no idea how fucked up he is and if he will even be
able to finish. Tomorrow you wouldn’t
be able to pick him out of a police line-up if you had too, or identify his
body down at the morgue—neither of which seem out of the realm of
possibility. “I’m going to come soon,”
you say, moments before you do and smack into his body one last time, before
pulling out.
At some point during all this fun,
the poor dry condom you put on broke.
It was bound to happen. It is
only made of latex and you had no lube.
You knew it probably broke, even if this information was not based on
anything empirical. He knew it too,
because he reaches in his coat for a napkin when you finish and wipes the cum
out of his ass without a word, without any sense of surprise or urgency. Nor were you shocked when you looked down
and saw the remains of the rubber hanging off of your piece, which was wet and
muddy. He cleans his backside as
thoroughly as the small pizza shop napkin allows, before he drops it on the
floor. When it lands, it does not make
a sound and you probably will not remember it tomorrow.
“That was
really great,” he whispers, and he smiles and kisses you on the lips. You can barely make out his thin black body
in the booth that has recently gone dark.
He begins to masturbate and you help him by putting your mouth to one of
his nipples and twisting the other one with your fingertips. His right hand works faster on his cock,
while with his other hand, he reaches us up and massages your head. You lean the side of your head into his
chest and rub against his body—he cradles it.
Then you hear him breathe deeper and there is the knock at the
door. You pull your head away from his
body and hear his fluids hit the floor or wall. Before he has let go of his cock, you button up your jeans.
“Are you
ready?” you ask, as you zip up your coat you never took off during the whole
affair. You want to be outside, roaming
the streets, waiting for the sun to rise, which it probably already has begun
to do, and watching the people shuffle through the city morning—guessing that
one of them might be your mother or maybe a sister or half-brother you have
never met. You want to get your coffee
and your Daily News and feel out the morning, because, as you believe,
there is no reason to go to bed before rush hour, if you’re still up when the
sun rises.
“Okay baby,
let’s go,” he says somewhat sweetly, and like a couple walking out of the
church on their wedding day, you exit the booth, but there are none of your
friends waiting with rice, but only a man with mop, who says nothing to you,
and a few lurkers sprinkled throughout the prize corners of the room.
When you walk out to the
lobby you want to ask, “Has anyone ever fallen in love in these video booths?”
but you don’t because that is a line for a movie—when in actuality you think it
should written above the stairs. And
then you are both out the door, and although you do not know where you going to
head at the moment, you do know that you will walk in the opposite direction
that he is headed, and you assume he probably wants or at least expects the
same.
Outside the air is hard and the
sky the darkest blue you can imagine.
You look at him and he leans eastward, and you look to the Hudson, which
is only a block away. In his eyes you
see the recognition of the end—but you cannot tell who he feels has put an end
to this twelve-minute relationship. And
then he asks, “Will you remember that my name is Thomas?”
Unfortunately you have no answers
to questions that seem so absurd, so cheap and sincere, especially at dawn, so
you smile and he responds with a less optimistic gape. You shake hands, but he pulls you into a hug
that lasts longer than a moment.
Pulling away you say, “Thanks” and turn towards the Hudson.
He almost yells as you walk away,
“Take care, sweetie.”
There
are still a few hours before rush hour, and you head to the park along the river,
and wait in the cold breeze that blows off of the river from the west.