The Shaft (2 page)

    The icebox doors no longer have a function. Nobody makes linoleum floors anymore.

    Because Kenilworth has been subdivided so often, its schematic of rooms has mutated from the original blueprint. Today it is a haphazard warren of so-called 'studios' and 'singles' littered with sealed doorways, casement windows that slide up to reveal plywood or brick, and interior walls at unexpected angles and locations. Boner must unlock two doors to enter 307. The first is thin masonite, decades younger than the building's vintage paneled doors. It opens into what was once the common hallway of a large one-bedroom apartment. When opened, the door totally blocks the little passage; Boner has to dance around and shut it before he can proceed. Enclosing each end of the passage is another door, secured by a cheesy knob lock, strictly for show. Boner can slip it with a comb. Behind the far door lives a plump, stringy woman who keeps cats and works, Boner thinks, as a part-time telephone operator. He has never been interested enough to ask. What would he gain? As it does for most, the building is merely a downscale way station. From here, people either moved up-market, or were cast in TV-gray oblivion.

    Boner's neighbor got the half of the original apartment containing the kitchen. He got the half with the bathroom.

    Not a bad trade off. What she uses for a bathroom is probably a nightmare, and Boner prefers not to cook. Instead of a kitchen, he got an extra closet. From the tall corner windows overlooking the intersection of Garrison and Kentmore, he knew he'd also gotten the original living room.

    He has to force his own inside door. It is unbelievably tight tonight - as though the frame had decided to shrink an inch all around.

    Inside, the wall switch does nothing but click. And click. Fergus the super - building manager - has been dicking around, turning on too many things at once again. The breaker box is in a basement corridor near the laundry room. This has happened too many times for Boner to raise a decent mad, and before he fixes the lights he still has to piss. Boner believes that dope has made his bladder contract to the size of a pack of Luckies.

    It stinks inside. Like ammonia or stale hamburger; like toilet leakage. Terrific. If the sewage pipes have frozen, ice plugs would have to be torched out. if the plumbing and electrical foulups are related… well, then maybe this whole firetrap could be history by morning. A good conflagration would warm everybody's buns for sure.

    Boner's aquamarine eyes adjust to the darkness as he picks his way around the corner. The windowshades across the room are matte white rectangles, backlit by the luminescent combination of streetlamps and reflective snow. Boner can see the shadow-shapes of his bed, his dresser, his ghetto blaster, even the little space heater on the floor, plugged into a temporarily useless socket.

    There is a silver glow of ambient light in the bathroom. Boner knows the window next to the bathtub does not open to the outside world. The light he sees is residual, akin to the afterimage of a flashbulb, yet faint and cold, with an organic quality that makes him think first of dead fireflies, fading out, then of ghosts.

    Boner's bladder is hollering for relief. He sweeps aside the shower curtain and unholsters his weapon. He will whizz in the tub so as not to miss the toilet in the bad light. Look out below. He cannot really perceive his own arcing stream of pee.

    The tub is even darker, as though clogged up with black water. Boner wonders if this is what stinks so much. He imagines the largest turd in the world, bilirubin-black, coiled up in his very own bathtub, smelling richly enough to steam the windows. Waiting, as the world's largest, to have its picture taken, perhaps. Boner thinks again of his Polaroids.

    He giggles. While his laugh is still echoing off the bathroom tiles there comes a flurry of fast, dark motion in the tub. One of Boner's fingers is bitten off and swallowed, along with the tip of his cock.

    Boner falls backward, piss and now blood squirting, his legs atangle in his dropped jeans. The pain of amputation slugs in. The arm he throws out to balance himself is seized by a wet mouth and ovoid shape of a football. Needle fangs slide through the ligatures of his wrist, slipping between the fine bones to mesh with a silver razor hiss. Arm-first, Boner is snapped back toward the tub, keys jangling, rills of blood coursing down the inside of his jacket sleeve. He cannot see the blood but he can feel it. His dick feels as though an icepick has been jammed through it. More blood. He remembers the wino's fresh puke, how body heat made it steam when it came out.

    Boner does not have a lot of time to ponder these sensations individually. In five seconds he will be dead.

    His boots thud into the wall hard enough to wake people in the basement. Before he can cut loose his first yelp his face is engulfed by something cool, chamois-soft and blubbery, packed in an inch of sliding goo. His last thought is of the gel they use to pack Spam. It doesn't smell so great, either. Boner is reeled in.

    Past that, it was no contest.

    

    

    The window panels on the Greyhound bus were made out of some kind of tough plastic. Scratch patterns stood out in three dimensions, causing passing city lights to halate and issue rainbow coronas. Just now, the streetlamps of anonymous towns were not coming too frequently. There was no moon tonight and beyond the windows it was dead dark.

    
'No.'

    Jonathan stripped off his featherweight headphones. He disliked cutting off music before it was finished, but he had lapsed into a doze and now the outer rims of his ears were throbbing. Truncating music was a matter of personal control; when it was done for you, it was called commercial radio. The regret he felt as he poked the STOP button was trivial but genuine. Tangerine Dream ceased to exist in mid-bridge. Jonathan had been rotating the Walkman's batteries. Long haul, no spares, poor foresight. When you need to conserve your batteries you should at least stay awake for the performance.

    The running noise of the bus soared into his ears, unmuffled and crisp. They were cruising at a dull and steady fifty-five in the slow lane. Jonathan's overhead reading light was off and no other passenger cared to differ this late at night. Their driver was a robot, a professional white-line jockey who had not uttered a syllable past his pro forma departure spiel about all the things you were not supposed to do on a Greyhound bus.

    All there was: Night and blackness and time and bus noise, and Jonathan, all by himself now.

    
'No.'

    He remembered the last time he had slept with Amanda.

    Wine with dinner always felled them both on workdays. They had snuggled for an hour before coasting down into sleep. He thought he had undressed her. Sometime after midnight he had awakened and gone to work on her. Their progression had become almost ritualistic.

    He scooted down, turned on his side, and insinuated his first and middle fingers between her legs, so gently. Amanda slept soundly on her back - a trick Jonathan could never duplicate - and he was in a position that allowed him to monitor the meter of her unconscious respiration, even her very heartbeat. He set up a soft rhythm, rubbing, using his saliva as a buffer, teasing the periphery of her perception for half an hour or so, until he could tell she was floating up from sleep to vague doze.

    His first reward came in the tiny moan that escaped her, and the way her legs drifted apart across cool blue sheets to permit him better access. This was the time when pressure and tempo became important.

    Her clitoris fattened beneath his fingers, swelling up firm and prominent as she began to assist him with sleepy, tidal movements. Another fifteen minutes passed. Jonathan watched the digital clock tick over as Amanda was jolted through a pleasantly fuzzy, half-asleep orgasm.

    Now his index finger was inserted and he kept the beat with his thumb, feeling her contractions
bam bam bam
, the familiar fluttering in the ring of vaginal muscle. He saw her fingers grip the sheets and tighten, then relax as the afterburn warmed her extremities. Fingers, toes, forehead hot now, body demanding breath. When she rolled over, cocking one leg, she was so wet that Jonathan's fingers barely recorded the friction of her rotating pussy.

    His erection was excruciating by now.

    He guided her ass slightly higher. She was in focus enough to help him. Only just. She arched her back.

    'I don't know why I love it so much this way,' she had told him so long ago. Before they had moved in together, back when it was imperative for them to hump their brains out every single night, no gaps. Every time she mentioned this, and she mentioned it almost every time, her admission was seasoned with her characteristic guilt. 'I don't know why I like it; I just… I jussst…' She usually dissolved into sibilance, far beyond words.

    Amanda loved being entered from behind - her spine arched, face hugging the mattress, hands hanging on, her splendid rump pointed perkily up at her lover. She could never articulate why she favored this position over all contenders. It was a thing of sensation, not logic. Or her mind just refused to analyze it. Sometimes it was possible for Jonathan to nail down isolated details: The comfortably possessive grip of his hands on her hipbones; the optimum penetration; the freer rhythm that came from bearing straight into her instead of heavily atop her. But mostly, Amanda treated this as an exceedingly guilty pleasure. Maybe Mommy had warned her this was something nice girls did not do. Or worse, maybe Amanda had told herself this.

    Jonathan could never fathom who Amanda thought she was apologizing to. She had discovered a position that made her senselessly happy. Thousands had not.

    He remembered sliding into her, feeding those first few inches with no thrust at all, and the last thing he had anticipated was her voice. Amanda's voice, in the dimness, resolving to wakeful clarity to tell him
no
.

    Amanda enjoyed waking up in a state of sexual high-burn. He was not taking advantage of her sleeping vulnerability; no way. No fucking way. If she even thought that, she would have stopped the sequence much earlier. She had pounced and taken Jonathan by sleepy surprise just as many times. More. Predawn was one of their mutually approved favorite times for lovemaking. It offered a nice buffer of sleep, a couple of hours to either side, followed by the deeper slumber of the satiated.

    
'No.'

    Lately their bedwork had become sporadic, by rote, sometimes almost a matter of resigned duty. An exterior reflection of internal problems that Jonathan had hoped would never find their way into the kingsized that he and Amanda had agreed to share for two straight, monogamous years.

    He was, he saw, a fool.

    Here he sat, northbound on a Greyhound redeye in the middle of the night, with a truly Olympian hard-on straining against the button fly of his 501s… with dead batteries. He was thankful for the dark, which obviated public embarrassment. He was not thankful for the night, because it made him think endlessly of the last time he had slept with Amanda… and not made love.

    It had happened the night Jonathan had hoped to jump their lives back on track.

    That night, it had not been a
Dinner from Hell
. That was what he had come to call the stiff social intercourse they shared on their nights out - a mostly spidess meal punctuated by migraine-inducing silences and overpolite nonconversation. No. That night, things had gone swimmingly. No arguments, almost no snapping. Amanda had even laughed out loud once or twice, and it hurt him to think that he might be responsible for stealing the laughter from her eyes.

    Back at their place he had drawn her a hot bath dense with oil and scented bubbles. She sank in to the tip of her nose and simmered for half an hour. She surfaced just to kiss him with a mouthful of Cabernet Blanc. When she stepped from the tub to the shower stall, he joined her. They lathered each other in familiar ways and she ducked out first, to change CDs on the player in the living room. He emerged from a cloud of steam, wound into a towel. She wore her favorite blue silk robe, her hair free and damp and shaggy. The robe's hem brushed the floor, but the topography emphasized by its sheer, slinky fabric was almost too much for any mortal man to bear.

    They were tired. At least this was detente. She instructed him to lay on his stomach, on the cool blue sheets, and she straddled him to work the kinks from his back with strong and practiced fingers. Her crisp, close pubic thatch teased his butt. Then he did her. She suffered a touch of Marfan's Syndrome, a looseness of ligaments at the joints. It was perpetual bother. She could pop her entire skeleton like a trucker cracking his knuckles. Her shoulders and hands ached much of the time; Jonathan feared incipient arthritis. In ten more years those joints would begin to swell.

    For her to rub him down was a matter of caring, of saying
I still love you despite our problems
. For him to rub her was a matter of knowing from experience what to massage, and how rough to be with each area, because she was hurting.

    Afterward, they had fallen asleep, entwined in each other's arms, and a stranger would have said that these were two people in love.

    Until Jonathan was hallway inside of her, gliding easily into the embrace of her musky orchid cunt. Until she told him no.

    'No, Jon. Don't. Hurts.'

    He backed off, reining himself, fighting not to be a Visigoth about how badly he wanted her just at that moment. He parted her vulva with his thumbs, so gently, and tried again. No strain. She was as wet as a thunderstorm.

    'No.'

    She had jerked down and away. It was a definite physical rebuff. She had not meant that his angle hurt. She had not meant not now but in a minute.