“Dancing,” Kynthia said. “Do you dance?”
“Why me?” I asked. “All these young, tanned little stud-muffins unce-unce-ing about. Any of them would give their six-pack abs to get up with a woman like you.”
“Eager is boring,” she said, smoke streaming from her nostrils. “Those bruises, the scars on your knuckles, that split lip—you look like you were just in a fight. You look dangerous; I’d wager you’re the most dangerous man in this club.”
“You’d win,” I said.
“Have you ever killed anyone?” she said, leaning forward and sipping her drink.
“You just lost points, darlin’,” I said.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said. “Dance with me.” It was an order. I narrowed my gaze, and we locked eyes.
“You can ask prettier than that, a fancy lady like you.” I saw a tiny flash of real fear pass behind her eyes. She hid it well.
“Please,” she said, a smile playing at the edges of her lips. I crushed out my cigarette and took her hand, leading her toward the dance floor. I hadn’t danced since Magdalena. It felt good. The smoke was rainbow-hued clouds drifting, the bass was thunder, and then came the electronic rain falling on the crowd, on the floor, washing away our minds, our sins, sweating out the poisons, and making us all pure and one. Dancing, at its core, is ecstatic ritual, is magic.
When the two of us couldn’t anymore, just couldn’t, Kynthia and I fell back to the bar. She drank water that cost as much as a swimming pool and smoked, and I bought some water laced with K from a nice young lady selling it covertly at the fringes of the crowd. I chased it with another beer, and more tequila. By the next song, an extended mix of How to Destroy Angels’ cover of “Is Your Love Strong Enough?” I was deep in the K-hole, feeling like I was watching my life from a detached, comfortable distance through a warm, soft gauze of pleasure. I drank some more of the water and kissed Kynthia deeply, enjoying the playful wrestling of our tongues, the taste of the nicotine smoke, the soft, yielding of her lips, the salt of her perspiration. It was all so familiar and so alien, so different than with …
My last memory of the club was seeing a woman undulating to “Secret” by Oceanlab. She was swinging two glowing poi, one in each hand, and was wearing an oversized mask on her head, à la deadmau5, but this mask was of a cat. She nodded to me, and I gave her the sign of the horns.
A warm, dry wind embraced my sweat-soaked body outside the club. There was a hint of the moisture of the sea, the slight tang of salt on my lips. Was I kissing Magdal … Kynthia … Kynthia, or was I kissing the sea?
Her driver was taking us to her home, one of her homes. Time was flipping like still images on pages in a book, one after the other, speed giving the illusion of movement to frozen pictures. Through the tinted windows of the car, I watched the lights stream by us, like trails of burning, neon starlight. I watched the people walking the street, in the dregs of the night, morph and stretch, swell and diminish. I was a fractured mirror, and the light of the world moved through me, twisted and distorted by my flaws, my broken, jagged paths.
I felt Kynthia’s hand slide between my legs; it pulled me back out of my broken shell and to the safe place of observing, of feeling nothing, remembering nothing but sensation. I grabbed her by the hair and pulled her to me, almost kissing her, but then looking into her eyes.
“What are you going to do to me?” she whispered, fear and excitement wrestling behind her eyes.
“You don’t know a goddamned thing about me,” the broken, flawed thing in me said to her. I clutched her hair tighter, and she hissed a little in pain but also in pleasure. “You have fucking everything you could ever want. People over on the mainland are starving, desperate, shooting poison into themselves to ignore the misery of their lives. Begging, waiting for death to end their suffering, and you actually court suffering.” She struggled to reach my lips, they were a breath apart. “You’re a spoiled, slumming dilettante, playing at pain, aren’t you? Answer me!” I growled. Her driver looked back; he looked confused and worried. I watched his eyes melt along with the dripping silver of the rearview mirror as the ketamine burned through my brain.
“Madame?” the driver said. I was trying to figure out how he could speak with no face.
“It’s … it’s all right, Barry,” Kynthia said. Her hand was working frantically below, tugging at the zipper of my jeans. “Please raise the partition.” Barry did as he was told, and shadowed glass slid between him and us. I saw our distorted faces in the glass; they didn’t sync up with our movements. “You don’t give a damn about those whining parasites,” Kynthia hissed to me; there was some anger darkening her eyes now too. She still struggled to reach my lips, and her hands were pulling me free of my jeans, frantically. “Just like you don’t give a damn about anyone but yourself, about what you want, how unfair life has been to you, you poor little criminal. You think you’re better than me? You’re just like me, except you can’t wash the stink of shit and poverty off you. You think that you’re some champion of the working class? You use them, just like you use everyone else. You’re a parasite, a fraud, a hustling fraud, you fucking peasant.”
She saw she got what she wanted from me in her words. I felt cold cruelty settle over me and with it calm control and disciplined desire. This woman’s words were a mirror. “I’m glad,” I said as
