The Dark Space (5 page)

Touch me. Touch me.

I touched my stomach. He told me it was soft as a chinchilla’s belly, which made me smile. His eyes licked over my teeth. His mouth whispered against my nipples.

His hand was on his own stomach, two fingers rubbing restlessly up and down the arrow of hair beneath his navel. Twisting those hairs into soft spikes, tugging at them until his fingers bumped against the snap of his jeans and I felt his surprise.

That we would do this, too.

Yes
, I thought, and his zipper yawned open. His hand rustled around in his shorts, emerging triumphant with his bare, bold cock.

“You too,” he said. “I have to see.”

It’s difficult to explain what it was, that first time. Not a fog or a fever dream. Not a spell or a hypnotic state. I knew exactly what I was doing every second, and I didn’t feel as if he’d drugged me. I’d never done any of this before. I wasn’t doing it then. It didn’t count on the scales of my lifetime, this thing with Cal — it was an exercise. An assignment.

It was a compulsion that came from the dark space inside us both, that part of us that was
more
us, each imprinted on the other for reasons that didn’t need reasons.

I sat up on the bed to push off my pants and underwear, hooked my socks off nonchalantly, spread my knees wide, closed my eyes and listened to him tell me what to do.

My finger his tongue. The heel of my palm, the press of his nose. My moisture his saliva, my vacant cunt his breath, my excitement his own. His hand that was my hand stroking him, amazed because I’d wondered about this, wondered what it would be like to have a penis hard and warm and pressing into my palm, and here he was telling me, showing me, letting me feel it over two empty feet of space between us that had filled with that syrupy, lemon-tasting light.

Cal talked and talked me through it, his voice quiet and frantic and joyful, so joyful, and that pink spot in my brain turned orange, turned yellow, turned red, crimson, purple-blue. I breathed in short pants and bucked my hips into every frantic rub of my-fingers-his-fingers.

The hot splash of his semen on my hand in my head was the benediction I never knew I wanted.

When I came, the light bulb shattered, but the room didn’t go dark.

It couldn’t. We were drenched in light.

We were ambient sources of light.

I wasn’t nothing, I was never nothing, I was always light.

Between Cal and me, darkness wasn’t possible.

“I really do want to hear it again.”

“You always make fun of me when I tell you that story.”

“I want to hear it now.”

My mom woke up when she heard me crying in the shower after getting back from Winnie’s. Fucking
crying
. Other than a few dude-tears at concerts when I’ve been stoned, I haven’t cried for years. I couldn’t explain myself to my mom. She just cracked the door and said,
Baby, I’ll make some tea, come out when you’re ready.
And then I cried some more.

We sat on the sofa and drank tea, which was half sugar, and eventually, I put my head on her shoulder. I couldn’t remember the last time I had touched my own mother, except for quick and obligatory one-armed hugs. But as soon as I rested my head there, she looped her arm around it and started messing with the hair over my ear, like she did when I was little.

Like she had never stopped doing it.

“Okay. You know I grew up next to a big stone quarry that had been played out, and so was filled with water. It was bottomless, cold, and clear, and the summer I was seventeen my friends and I had figured out a way past the security fences to go swimming. We were good swimmers, careful. There was no real danger, though the water was deep. We swam and sunbathed on a ledge that overshot the water, and often dove from that ledge.

“Late in the summer we had to stop going. They had fixed the fences. Put up signs. One afternoon, it was hot. So hot. I used to have these heat rashes in the summer, they were itchy and drove me crazy. I got it in my head to climb the lower part of the fence and just jump in, just for a little while, just to feel cold all over.

“I made it over the fence, and I was all scratched-up because like a dummy I had only worn my bathing suit. The ledge was right in front of me, and I started for it at a dead run. I wanted to swan dive into all that cold.”

“Then you heard something,” I said. My eyes were closed and felt swollen from crying, but I was listening to my mom like her voice was the only one left in the world.

“I did. Right in the middle of the ledge, right before I would have leapt up to dive, I heard a voice, right inside my head, say,
Stop, wait up.
”

“You thought it was your boyfriend.” Every hair on my body raised, my chest tight.

“I did. I thought it was. I stopped and turned. No one was there.”

“Then you looked back.”

“Then I looked back, thinking I would just jump in, since my momentum had been interrupted.”

“There wasn’t any water.”

“No. There wasn’t any water. All those fences were put up because they had drained the quarry. If I had dove in, I would have dove a hundred feet to the bottom and died.”

“Tell me the end again.”

“I went home, completely shaken up. I never told anyone. Like all stupid things you do when you’re a teenager, I kind of forgot about it.”

“We had that fight.”

“Yeah. Right before your eighth-grade graduation. You didn’t want to go, and I had already bought you that suit you begged for.”

“The white linen one.”

“Like Mark Twain’s, you said. Jesus, a thirty-four short white linen suit is expensive.”

“I didn’t tell you that I had been asked to give the speech.”

“And that you had neglected to write it.”

“So I said I was sick, that I couldn’t go, and you were totally onto me.”

“I knew you were hiding something, but I didn’t know what. You thought you were the shit in that suit. No way you would pass up an opportunity to show yourself off in it, unless it was bad.”

“That was the worst fight. You never yelled, and you were yelling at me, and then you totally freaked me out. You pushed over a chair and slammed out the door, and I heard you start the car. I suddenly remembered all those things Dad says about not driving drunk, tired, or angry, and I got up and starting running toward the door.”

“You yelled at me from the porch,
Stop, wait up.
”

“And you turned off the car and put your head on the steering wheel and started crying.”

“That was the spring your voice started to change. It was so funny — you were this little guy, sorry, and your voice was so big. Like a man’s.”

“It was the exact voice you heard on the ledge when you were seventeen.”

“Exactly. It was exactly that voice. I put my head down and cried because it wasn’t just like it, it
was
it,
you were
, exactly, what I heard that day.”

“Since then, you’ve always believed that your kid saved your life when you were a kid.”

“I have. I do believe that. I’m not that person, normally, and I have no explanation, it’s just something I know.”

We were quiet.

“What brought this on, baby?”

I sat up and gave my mom a hug. Kissed her on the forehead. “You’ll be the first one I tell when I figure it out.”

“Fair enough,” she said.

I wanted to tell her how much her heart was glowing through her clothes, a kind of warmth right up to her throat.

I wanted to tell her she was a life worth bending time to save.

“I am here.”

“You are here.”

“I am here.”

“You are
here
.”

I was in lotus, sitting on the stage, facing Sarah, a girl who I didn’t think remembered me. We had Intro to Macroeconomics together, and she was in my midterm project group. She didn’t do her part of our presentation. I stayed up all night doing it for her. On the day of the presentation, she wasn’t in class, and I found out she’d dropped.

At the time, I had hated her. Thought her tattoos and her half-exposed breasts and gauged ears were the most obvious kind of posturing ever.

Sometime in my sophomore year, after seeing her sing with her acoustic guitar in the cafeteria — her voice so sad and tired-sounding and beautiful, I felt almost angry — I could admit that I was jealous.

Jealous of her skin, inked clean with her thoughts and ideas and feelings. Jealous of her wild black magenta-streaked hair and gauged open ears and shiny piercings — everything pried open. Jealous of the dramatic and sexy exposure of her big, lush body.

Open. Open.
Open.

Our knees were touching, our hands palm-to-palm between us.

Before we started the exercise, she had smiled at me, so big that deep dimples pressed into her cheeks and I realized the piercing in her cheek was nestled in that dimple, meant to decorate her smile.

I nearly told her that I was sorry, sorry for every cruel thought about her that she didn’t even know that I’d had. I hoped she didn’t remember the freshman who’d treated her with such contempt, sent her endless emails “suggesting” how she do her part of the project.

Instead, I sat on the stage with her, not saying anything.

She moved to touch our knees, was first to reach out when Maggie told us to rest our palms together.

This was a Meisnerian exercise of repetition, meant to help us understand the answer to questions like,
What are you playing?
The exercise would connect us to the authentic actions of our partner.

We were to start with a simple statement that was true and repeat it back to the other until it felt as true as possible, until we understood the complete possible spectrum of truth in our statement and what it was we were really saying to the other.

This was meant to prepare us to play together. Maggie promised she would help us understand play all over again. That we’d be able to play as we had as children.

Sarah had started, “I am here.”

My hands and knees against hers, I had answered, “You are here.”

At first, that day in class, I couldn’t contain the spill and scatter of golden light I kept shedding, like glitter, like dust caught in a sunbeam. That was Cal.

Cal, who had hung a bag on my doorknob the morning after he came to my room filled with banana bread and a container of cream cheese.

It tasted so good. It tasted like everything good I had ever tasted.

I knew we were supposed to wait to see each other again when we were here. Except I could almost always
see
him. I had been going to bed early and sleeping until the last possible moment in the morning, drowsy with the efforts I spent on awareness of him, sleepy from orgasms I gave myself in long, teasing sessions of masturbation.

“I am here.”

“You are here.”

At first, I couldn’t hear Sarah. Cal was sitting with Jason Somer but still reaching out to me. Then, as the voices in the class started weaving together into a blanket of white noise, that new pink and golden place in my brain heard her.

“I am here.”

When I answered,
You are here
, the first time after I heard the truth in her statement, her dimples sank before she even smiled.

“I
am
here,” she said.

Then it was easy. It was Sarah, and she was here. I was here. The truth was her presence, which couldn’t exist without mine.

“I am here,” she said, and I became overcome with the grief of all of the times she wasn’t here, of all of the times no one was here for me, of the times I wasn’t here for anyone.

Our tears fell at the same time.

“I am here.”

“You are here.”

At the same time, we reached for each other.

“This is Sarah,” Winnie said to me after class, as we fell into step outside the arts building. “Do you guys know each other?”

Sarah cast me a look that meant,
This one’s all yours
, and I said, “We had a thing sophomore year.”

“What kind of a thing?”

It was such a neutral question that I reached out in my head, wanting a read on her real feelings. She smacked me away, a little psychic slap that I felt across my nutsack.

Dude, grow up
, the smack said.
You don’t get to use it like that.

It was almost fond, though. My nutsack didn’t entirely disapprove.

“A sex thing,” I said. “Four or five times.”

Sarah made a scoffing face. “Try two.”

Okay, yeah, two times was more like it. Two times was exactly like it. I had the occasional fond jerkoff session, still, to the moment that second time when I squeezed her hip and she turned over onto her belly, flipped like a pancake and shoved her round ass up in the air, wiggling it at me.

She was wearing leather pants, shoved down, and those pants and that ass, her pussy spread open and glistening . . . Jesus God.

Sometimes I can’t believe the things girls will let me have. I want to stop and ask them,
Me? Have you seen me? Are we operating in the same dimension here?

Sarah avoided me after, and there have been times I wanted to stop her and tell her,
Look, I don’t know if you feel guilty or what, but I’m holding no grudges over here. I’m pasting your ass into an album and keeping it there for the rest of my days.