The Book of Revelation (3 page)

Without a hint of shyness or hesitation, the woman pulled down his track-suit trousers and took his penis out of the jockstrap he was wearing underneath. He sat down to urinate, something he had never done before. He had the idea it might make things easier, somehow, even though it meant he had to face the woman who had escorted him into the room. She seemed the more bizarre for being so close to him, in such a confined space. . . . In the silence before his urine came, he heard her breathing. It must be hot, he thought, wearing a hood and cloak—and, almost immediately, he imagined he could smell her sweat, bitter as the sap in a spring flower. He knew which woman she was. The raw knuckles, the chewed nails. . . . She had served him his first meal. She was also the only one whose voice he had not heard as yet. All of a sudden a feeling of power ran through him. It seemed so out of place, so utterly unfounded, that it made him catch his breath. But it was fleeting, too. No sooner had it registered itself in him, than it was gone, leaving not even a flicker of itself behind.

When he had finished, the woman pulled up his jockstrap and his track-suit trousers, then, reaching past him, flushed the toilet. Once again, there was no hint of awkwardness or prurience on her part, only a kind of methodical efficiency; a task needed doing, and she was doing it. Still, it felt odd to be handled in that way. It had brought back a period of his life that he had thought was lost for ever. With just a few simple actions, she had closed a gap of thirty years, returning him to his first few moments in the world.

•

The two women who had taken him to the toilet wasted no time in chaining him to the floor again, then they hung the handcuffs and leg-irons from conveniently placed hooks on the wall behind him and retreated to the left side of the room.

The woman with the white hands and the darkly painted nails stepped forwards. She stood so close to him that he could see a small, right-angled tear in her cloak, about hip-high, as if it had caught on a nail, and there were spots of something that looked like dried mud along the hem.

“Better?”

He nodded.

She stood over him, peering down. Her shoes showed below her cloak. They were black, with rubber soles. “Are you cold?”

He shook his head.

“No,” she said, “it is quite warm in here.”

She kneeled beside him, looked right at him. Perhaps because her eyes were framed by the fabric of her hood, they seemed to glitter with an almost supernatural light.

“You see, we don’t want you to suffer,” she said. “On the contrary. . . .”

As if responding to a signal, the other women approached and kneeled. One sat at his feet while the other took hold of his sweater and eased it gently over his head. Underneath, he wore nothing except his old torn shirt. Starting at the collar, the woman began to undo the buttons. Her fingers were elegant but strong. This undressing was quite unlike the undressing he had just experienced in the bathroom, and not simply because a different woman had taken over. There was stealth in this. There was anticipation.

Wanting to make things difficult for her, he tried to move sideways, but with his wrists and ankles secured by the stainless-steel rings, there was very little he could do. He could only watch, in fact, as, one by one, the almost transparent pearl-white buttons sprang out of their holes.

“Ah yes,” one of the women said—or, rather, breathed. Their interest was in the air; it was palpable, like a vibration or a pressure.

He closed his eyes, darkness as a form of denial, darkness as escape, but found he could see more vividly than ever, the women’s hands, what they were doing. Their fingers on the drawstring of his track-suit trousers, slowly teasing the knot undone, slowly loosening the waistband. . . .

“You’re very beautiful,” he heard one of them say.

“Such smooth skin,” said another.

A third woman spoke, a murmur of corroboration.

He felt them begin to touch him. Sometimes their hands were tender, sometimes they were only curious, but there was no part of him, no curve or hollow, that they did not, in the end, explore.

He couldn’t have said how long this adoration of his body lasted.

Once, the colour of the inside of his eyelids altered, and he opened his eyes to see that one of the women had switched the main lights off and that another was bringing tall candles into the room. The atmosphere became intimate, but also oddly medieval. That flickering, unstable light, and his clothes laid open, peeled back, like the skin of an animal that was being dissected. His nakedness—three figures, hooded, crouching over it. . . .

He shut his eyes again.

There was a moment, too, when he felt the beginning of an erection, that gradual tightening at the base of his penis, that slow, almost luxurious rush of blood. It was as if his body was taking sides against him. Betraying him. Though his eyes were still closed, he could hear the women’s voices:

“Look.”

“He’s ready.”

“Who’s going first?”

•

The ceiling was no longer there, the walls slid away, and he had views at last, wide open spaces, the bright sky arching over him, the dark vault of the earth. And the landscape kept changing before his eyes. He saw glittering salt flats that stretched for miles, and fields of tall grasses shifting under heavy dark-grey clouds. He saw a yellow prairie bounded by a range of mountains; they stood in shadow, tilting slabs of black and indigo. A fresh wind moved over his face, into his hair. It wasn’t raining, but the air smelled of rain; rain had fallen recently, perhaps, or else it was on its way.

The air smelled of distance.

Land all around him, vast and dramatic, land as he had rarely seen it in his life, and he was alone in it. Alone, but not lonely. There was that sense of being at the centre, of being somehow fundamental, the hub of a wheel that includes the universe in all its aspects and dimensions. He had felt this before, though not for many years. Perhaps it was simply the feeling of being young.

Sometimes he was standing still, sometimes running, but he was always alone, untroubled and curiously absorbed—a kind of rapture. . . .

Though there was a part of him that knew a door could open and lights could flicker on, brilliant and merciless, and then something could take place that would fix him exactly where he was, in that white room, his wrists and ankles shackled.

Even in his dreams there was a part of him that knew.

•

Waking in darkness, not knowing where he was. Then noticing a faint light falling from the window high above. Landing on his body, soft as snow.

Night now.

He lay still and listened. There were no sounds coming from outside. No police siren in the distance, no drunk man singing—nothing.

Knowing nothing, and then remembering. The smell of rubber. Thin. Almost comforting. The cold grip of the stainless steel. The delicate, metallic chinking of the chain’s links shifting as he turned over. . . .

After the women were done with him, after they had finished, they adjusted the rings so as to give him more freedom of movement. By sliding the rings along their rails, he found that he could alter the position in which he slept. He could lie on his stomach, if he wanted. Or turn on to his side. He could bring his hands close to his face or draw his knees up towards his chest. He was freer, but not free.

What had that woman said?

You’re ours now. You belong to us.

He felt nothing but shame and humiliation. No, wait. That wasn’t entirely true. There had been another feeling there, a feeling that lurked behind the others, shadowy and sly—insidious: a feeling of excitement. . . .

Once he had an erection, it had taken him almost no time at all to come, the sperm seeming to leap out of him, to catapult across his stomach. The women had taken it in turns to lick him clean, bending over him with warm, wet tongues. They had even argued over who should have the cloudy pearl of liquid that had formed at the tip of his penis, the last remaining evidence of orgasm. There had been a moment when he tried to say something, but one of the women put a hand over his mouth, a hand on which he could faintly smell himself.

“No, don’t talk. You’ll spoil it.”

Afterwards, he needed to urinate. This time they chose not to take him to the toilet. Perhaps they were afraid that it might break the spell. Instead, they allowed him to use a metal bedpan, which they had brought into the room with them.

Later, they removed his clothes completely and washed him, every part of him. He felt as if he was in a painting, the darkness all around him, a tin bowl full to the brim with water, his naked body, and everything lit by candles. Shadows jostled on the walls, like people who had been drawn to the event. Like crowds.

When the women had dried him, they dressed him in clean clothes, then slipped a pillow underneath his head. They left the room in silence, blowing out the candles as they closed the door.

“Sleep now,” he heard one of them say.

•

He woke again at first light. He was lying on his side, one hand under his cheek. Two or three drops of candle-wax had landed on the floorboards close to him; they could have been old coins, coins that had been handled for so many years that they had been worn quite smooth. He looked down at his body. He was wearing a white T-shirt and white underpants. They were not his clothes. The events of the night came back to him, and he felt a sudden queasy hollowness in the pit of his stomach. He had allowed the women to do exactly as they wished. He had submitted without an argument, without a struggle. What sort of man is it, he thought, who just submits?

He turned on to his back and watched a cloud drift through the skylight. There was another dimension to what had happened too, a dimension that was even harder to acknowledge: the excitement he had felt, despite himself. Had the women identified some kind of need in him? Had he tacitly encouraged them? Was he, in some fundamental sense, responsible for all this?

This was a version of himself that he didn’t recognise.

Perhaps, in the end, he had simply been taking the path of least resistance.

He still had not decided what he thought when the door opened and a woman appeared. She was carrying the bowl they had used for washing him the previous night, and, judging by the angle of her head and the cautious way she moved across the room, the bowl was full of water. She set it down on the mat, no more than a foot away from him, then left the room again, returning moments later with a towel, a flannel and a washing-bag. Settling beside him, she unzipped the bag and took out a disposable razor and a can of unscented shaving-foam. She shook the can a few times, sprayed foam on to the palm of one hand, then used her other hand to smooth it on to his face and neck. She had bitten her nails so far down, he noticed, that they were almost circular, which made her fingers look blunt, like roots.

She shaved him quite differently to the way he would have shaved himself. She started with the groove that ran from the base of his nose to the middle of his upper lip, small vertical strokes of the razor, then she moved along the right side of his upper lip and out across his cheekbone towards his ear, still using the same small strokes. After finishing the right side of his face, she returned to his upper lip, the left side now, and repeated the same manoeuvre—or, rather, its mirror-image—before dropping downwards to his chin, and then still lower, to his neck. He noticed that she held her breath each time she laid the blade against his skin, then let the air rush out of her as she leaned back and rinsed the razor in the bowl, and he thought of children, how they do exactly the same thing when they’re drawing. He couldn’t remember if he had ever been shaved by anyone before. He didn’t think he had. She was surprisingly good at it. He never once had the sense that she might cut him.

As she was about to complete the job, a sharp pain twisted through his lower abdomen, just above his groin. He told her that he needed to use the bathroom. She withdrew immediately, returning a few moments later with one of her accomplices. He watched the two women as they went through the ritual of locking and unlocking, and, once again, he was struck by how smooth the operation was, as if they had rehearsed it many times. As before, one of the women, the tall one, waited outside the bathroom door while the other one, the one with no fingernails, escorted him inside. She stayed in the room with him throughout, even though he was doing more than urinating this time. It was like water, what fell out of him; it had the pungent, almost rotten smell of game. For once, the woman’s hood seemed fitting—a display of delicacy on her part, as if she were averting her gaze.

When he had finished, she wiped him clean, pulled up his underpants and flushed the chain. She behaved exactly as she had behaved the night before: she was methodical, efficient—matter-of-fact. Afterwards, she stepped back to the hand-basin. There was a flaw in the white porcelain, at the base of the hot tap. He saw her touch it with one finger. She seemed to think it was something that could be dislodged—a hair, perhaps. When it didn’t move, though, when she realised it was just a crack, a murmur came out of her, as if she felt she had been the victim of a practical joke.

While the woman held her hands under the hot water—how odd, he thought, to have someone wash their hands on your behalf—he stood back and looked around, trying to find out more about the room. A naked light-bulb hung from the ceiling. Philips. Sixty watts. The floor was lino—white dots on a dark-grey ground, a kind of stippling effect, like a TV screen when all the stations have closed down. To the left of the toilet there were two larger splashes of white that didn’t appear to be part of the original design. Looking closer, he discovered they were paint. They must have dropped from some decorator’s brush. He nodded quickly to himself. Other people’s carelessness was something he needed reminding of. He had to believe that people could slip up. Make mistakes.

•

Back in the white room he waited until the women had gone, then he turned on to his side and faced the wall. The room still smelled of candle-smoke from the night before, a smell that reminded him, curiously enough, of Brigitte. Whenever Brigitte found herself inside a church, she always lit candles for members of her family, not just for those who were dead, but for the living too, even her cousin, Esperanza, whom she had never met, one candle after another, and her face as mystical, as solemn, as a three year old’s.
What would the candle-makers do without you?
he had said to her once, outside the basilica in Assisi, a comment that drew an uncomprehending look from her, and then a smile and a remark about English humour and how she would never understand it, not if she lived to be a hundred.