“That’s basically every force in life,” I said.
“The Baphomet scares people because of that,” he said. “Everyone has this demi urge to destroy and to create.” He moved his face closer to mine. His eyes got really serious and he talked in a low voice. “The darkness inside of them that wants to destroy, to do the bad thing, that wants to serve themselves over others. Everyone has it.”
“Is that why I’m here?” I asked. “Are you serving yourself?”
“What I’m telling you is that wanting to serve yourself isn’t a bad thing,” he said. “Frances was feeling isolated being a new mom. But it’s also a way for all of us to push our boundaries a little, don’t you think?” he added.
I wondered if Frankie had decided that she needed companionship, and why that companionship had to include sex. At the same time, I had never been very close with any girls in my life unless I was also trying to sleep with them. I think it was less a tendency to sexualize every relationship and more that straight women did not understand me. I naturally disconnected from them. I wondered if this was because sex, that coagula, was the real undercurrent of life. Maybe I had to be sexually attracted to someone to bother spending time with them. Or maybe I craved a tenderness that could only be traded through opening up and sacrificing the vulnerability of my body to another human being. A kind of closeness that I could get from only one other place, a place that disappeared the day my mother became a widow and retreated into herself.
I often felt my presence on Earth served as a daily reminder to my mother that the man she loved so dearly was dead.
Matt sat so that our legs were touching on the couch. Frankie continued to clean in the kitchen. She might walk in and end this short moment we had. His face was close to mine. The heat of his breath emanated between us. He moved his mouth to my ear.
“That’s how black magic scares people,” he said. “When people come into contact with the things that allow you to communicate with that dark part of yourself, it puts a fear in them. A holy fear. Why do you think Christians fear it so much?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I thought back to the times I went to church, which was not that often. “Do they?”
“Because they are lying to themselves!” Matt said. “That’s all god is anyway, a lie you tell yourself that you’re good and wholesome. Everyone is bad. Everyone. And the world is so fucked up because people aren’t willing to accept that being bad is a natural thing humans do. They are all just playing a game, where they’re lying to each other constantly until they die, because they are afraid.”
I was less interested in the religious aspect of his motivations and more interested in this dark space inside of him that seemed to assume the worst in everyone. Was I bad, too? I wondered what he thought of my motivations to be here, and of his own motivations, if he was the one who wanted to open their relationship up more than Frankie.
“So what of it,” he said. “Are you afraid?”
The whisper sent an electric pulse through my body, raising all the hair on my skin. My mouth went dry and my hands felt numb. I thought about the way Frankie pulled me through the apartment for the first time, how her eyes watched every movement I made. I wondered if she was also as nervous but had sequestered the feeling within herself. The authority with which she wanted me to do things, and how I followed—the way she gleaned pleasure from my embarrassment. She really did enjoy me, so long as I did what she said. I feared her authority, how sure she was of herself.
That was the fear I had. I didn’t know if it was holy.
FROM FEATHERS
FRANKIE HAD BEEN CALLING me Lilith since the first night I came over, since the night Matt grabbed the words hopeless and romantic on the backs of my thighs with his thick hands. She said it when she tied me up, whispered it to Matt when she told him what to do. Like a pet name, as though this were part of what being loved felt like.
I was a pet though. It is important to remember that. What it means to be chosen first is different—to be under the arms of someone, close to the ribs. Right up next to the chest, but not in the heart. Lilith, a pet who isn’t from the body of man. Every time Frankie said it, I believed it a little bit more. I started to be it, started to be Lilith, whoever she was. Something about me slipped away, a letting go. Lilith. Each moment the name left her mouth, I liked to imagine I was someone or something else, a hard candy softening my edges against each curl of her tongue. I imagined myself disappearing granule by granule into the pores of her body. Whenever she tied me up and watched as Matt entered me, she watched as though I were a flower, something delicate to be seen and smelled and caressed, and every time he entered me, I didn’t need to see myself in the reflection of
