Afterburn

She nodded at the bouncer. He came over and patted Rick down. 'He's okay.'

'We have a lot of very nice girls.'

He doubted that this was true, for if they were nice girls, then what were they doing here? He was buzzed through a second door into a larger room decorated in leather and chrome. Seven girls, each wearing a bathing suit and high heels, sat around in oversized chairs, reading the paper or watching the television. The room smelled like Chinese takeout.

'I need two,' Rick told the woman, noticing the hallway that led to a series of rooms, each of which had a red door.

'Two? We can do that. Who do you-'

'You pick,' Rick sighed. 'I just need two.'

She started to tell him that he had to pay her the house charge and each girl negotiated her own fee.

'Fine, fine.' The whole tab came to nine hundred bucks. 'Put it all on the card.'

She looked him up and down. 'I think I better give you LaMoyna. You don't mind a black girl?'

'It's fine.'

'Some men don't want the black girls, they get intimidated.'

'It's fine.'

'The other girl's going to be Kirby,' she said as if picking for him a kindergarten partner.

'Kirby?'

'It's one of those California girls' names.'

THE BLACK GIRL had enormous breasts that had long ago proven the existence of gravity and a skin problem he didn't understand. The small blond girl's hair reached her waist. Tiny shoulders, tiny ass. Lips like boiled shrimp. He felt attracted to neither.

'What do you want, sweetie?' asked the black girl, leading him by the hand to the room, her blue robe open, its belt trailing along the floor. Her feet had heavy calluses, the skin dry and cracked.

'I want to switch off, back and forth,' he answered.

The bed was large and clean, with sheets but no blanket.

'You want us to do the switching or you to do the switching?'

'I don't care.'

'What's the other gal supposed to do when she not doing you?'

'I don't care.' He wondered if maybe he should just leave. 'Have fun,' he answered. 'Have fun with me, have fun with each other.'

'Sort of just mix it up, like?'

'Yeah, fine.' They asked him if he would put some drinks on his tab and he said fine and they made a call.

'You paid for two hours?' asked the black girl.

'Yeah.'

'Why?'

He shrugged apologetically. 'Seemed right.'

'We gone wear you out sooner than that, guy.'

A knock at the door. Another girl came in with a tray of drinks and a bottle.

'We ordered kind of a lot,' giggled Kirby. 'Okay?'

'That's fine.'

The girl with the tray waited. He got up and handed her a ten.

'You don't talk much, do you?' Kirby teased.

'I can talk.'

'Come here, I have to check you out.'

He walked over to the black girl, and she turned on a lamp next to the bed and pulled him close to the light. She slipped a thumb under the elastic of his underwear and pulled it down.

'You're all folded up.' She moved the light closer. 'Like one of those accordions.' She pulled at him until he began to fill a bit. He breathed in through his nose. 'There, now we can see.' She pointed to a raised circular scar, ran her thumb over it. 'What's this?'

'Cigarette burn.'

'Mmmn, what happened, baby?'

'A girl burned me there with her cigarette.'

'She was mad at you?'

'Very mad.'

She continued to work him, her fingers tight. She knew what she was doing and he closed his eyes. 'Didn't want you sticking this in somebody else?'

'Right.'

'Kirby, this going to be a problem?'

The blond girl came over, looked. 'Yes.' She smiled at Rick. 'But I kind of like this guy.'

'You play football?' LaMoyna asked. 'You remind me of that guy, some guy who came in here, said he played for the New York Jets.'

'I played in high school, that's all.'

While the women finished their drinks, he went to the window and watched the traffic three stories below. The sky looked heavy, rain coming. On the sidewalk an old man consulted his watch, walked a few steps, glanced at his watch again. At the corner a woman in a yellow dress stood holding the hand of a small boy, waiting for the light to change.

Just do this and clear your head, Rick told himself.

Eighty minutes later, the black girl announced, 'My time now.'

'Not yet,' cried the blond girl.

'No, no, it's my time now.'

He heard these things but as if from a great distance. The black girl was whacking him on the ass playfully, so he got off the blonde, who immediately curled into a ball and rolled onto her side. The black girl spread her legs and presented him with a full beard, two dark lips, and something that could almost be the pink tip of a tongue. I've only studied four things in my life, he thought to himself as he shoved in, I have studied how to steal big things, how to get fish into a boat, how to lift weights, and how to fuck. Only the fishing is good for society. With each topic you studied it and then it got frustrating and then you unexpectedly learned more. With fucking, if you could keep from ejaculating for the first half hour, you passed into a zone where you could get the real work done. This was where he was now. He was driving the black girl hard, as hard as he wished, but with no rising pleasure for himself. Just driving, minute after minute. Her head was thrown back, eyes shut, and when he pushed, her brow furrowed. She made little analytical grunts. The bigger the thrust, the more animated and inflected the grunt. 'Huh. Hu- uh uh.' It might have been pain but it wasn't. She hooked her legs up over his shoulders and ran her hands over his thighs like someone dreamily feeling the finish on a new car. The cadence was steady and she had a moment to recover before he went back in, and every three or four strokes her cunt rippled out the air being pushed in. It was an embarrassing, flatulent noise, but they were well beyond that now; questions of embarrassment and identity and power and race and who is the President of the United States and what day of the week is it had all been obliterated by the idiot donkey machine of lust, to which he was helplessly shackled, waiting for it to release him, not yet ready for it to release him, and so he drew a breath that cleared his wind-he was running six or seven miles on the treadmill these days-and kept on, not knowing why exactly, and the black girl rolled her head left and right on the pillow, talking to herself in a demented, hallucinatory whisper, her lip caught up in an angry sneer, her tongue tasting the sweat dripping off his chest, and sometimes her right hand would ride up and down the thick pillar of his arm, squeezing or shaking it, and other times she made a fist and punched his chest in weak protest, frowning with her eyes closed, as if to press wordless unanswerable questions upon him. Why are you doing this to me? Why do I want you to? How do I know you and how do you know me? And then she would give up the interrogatory and lapse back into herself, her hand falling back against the pillow. He glanced over at the blond girl, who had slowly lifted herself to her hands and knees, perhaps to crawl off the bed and go pee, and that-that sight of her, unthinking of him, lost in her own vulnerable moment-was what he wanted. He wanted her disinterest in