Удушье (Choke)

Leeza spreads her hands open against the wall and shoves her­self back at me.

All these names for the same place, all these symbols for the real thing. The Federation of Feminist Health Care Centers calls it the urethral sponge. The seventeenth-century Dutch anatomist Regnier de Graaf called this same mass of erectile tissue, nerves, and glands the female prostate. All these names for the two inches of urethra you can feel through the front wall of the vagina. The ante­rior wall of the vagina. What some people call the bladder neck.

All of this just the same bean-shaped territory everybody wants to name.

To stake with their own flag. Their symbol.

To keep from triggering, I picture first-year anatomy and dis­secting out the two legs of the clitoris, the crura, each about as long as your index finger. Picture dissecting out the corpus cavernosa, the two cylinders of erectile tissue in the penis. We cut out the ovaries. We removed the testes. You learn to cut out all the nerves and lay them off to one side. The cadavers stinking with Formalin, formaldehyde. That new-car smell.

With this cadaver stuff in mind, you can ride for hours with­out getting anywhere.

You can kill a lifetime without feeling anything but skin. That's the magic of these sexaholic chicks.

When you're an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and de­pression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option.

Monday, I stay home after work and sort through my mom's old tapes from therapy sessions. Here are two thousand years of women on one shelf. Here's my mother's voice, steady and deep the way it was when I was a little shit.

The bordello of the subconscious.

Bedtime stories.

Imagine a heavy weight pressing your body, settling your head and arms, deeper and deeper into the cushions of the couch. The tape playing in headphones, remember to fall asleep on a towel.

Here's the name Mary Todd Lincoln on one taped session.

No way. Too ugly.

See also: The Wallis Simpson session.

See also: The Martha Ray session.

Here's the three Bronte sisters. Not real women, but symbols, just their names as empty shells you can project into, you can fill with antique stereotypes and cliches, milk-white skin and bustles, button shoes and hoop skirts. Naked except for whalebone corsets and crochet snoods, here are Emily and Charlotte and Anne Bronte lying around naked and bored on horsehair settees one fetid hot afternoon in the parlor. Sex symbols. You fill in the rest, the props and positions, the rolltop desk, the pump organ. Insert your­self as Heathcliff or Mr. Rochester. Just put in the tape and relax.

As if we can ever imagine the past. The past, the future, life on other planets, everything is such an extension, such a projec­tion of life as we know it.

Me locked in my room, Denny comes and goes.

As if it's just some innocent accident, I catch myself thumb­ing through the Marshalls in the phone book. She's not listed. After work some nights, I take the bus that goes past St. An­thony's. She's never in any of the windows. Riding past, you can't guess which is her car in the parking lot. I don't get off.

Whether I'd slash her tires or leave a love note, I don't know.

Denny comes and goes, and every day there's fewer rocks in the house. And if you don't see somebody every day, you see them change. Me watching from an upstairs window, Denny comes and goes pushing bigger and bigger rocks in a shopping cart, and every day, Denny looks a little bigger inside his old plaid shirt. His face gets tan, his chest and shoulders get big enough to spread the plaid out so it doesn't hang in folds. He's not huge, but he's bigger, big for Denny.

Watching Denny from the window, I am a rock. I am an is­land.

I call down, does he need any help?