Conner, Michael and Gene surprised Jonathan on a Wednesday morning as he was leaving for work and dumped him into the back of an SUV and set out for the mountains. They had arranged everything ahead of time with Jonathan’s editor and, naturally, with Mary. Mary had let them into their shared apartment at the time and helped them pack up all his gear. They were popping beers in the back seat before they even hit the interstate.
They didn’t make it to Pasternak that first night. Too eager to get on with the drinking and partying, they stopped in the small city of Allentown, three hours south of Pasternak. The town’s entire economy relied on a strip club owned and operated by the Hell’s Angels and attached to a seedy motel in a hidden enclave just outside the town proper. The club was a two-story industrial-looking monstrosity set below hills with a wide parking lot bathed in the neon glow of a nude woman with horns and a tail. It was a Wednesday night, but the lot was half-full of cars and trucks. Gene, Jonathan and Michael were already drunk. Conner took a long pull from a bottle of whiskey in the parking lot.
The doors opened to a purple haze of colored lights. Women danced on stage like snakes rising out of the grass, hypnotizing and deadly. Mirrors lined the walls; dark rooms were set off from the main stage. Big, hard men lurched over the bar, beers in one hand, cash in the other. The four of them joked with the bartenders, bought drinks for the locals, waved cash at the girls, who then came over and sat on their laps and draped thin, strong arms over their necks. Their asses soft and warm; their skin smelled of perfume and sweat and sparkled with glitter. The girls all laughed with them, sold them lies, pretended to enjoy this life and their company. For all their willingness to expose their naked bodies to the world, the girls dancing on stage were the biggest mystery and the boys – each and every one of them – perfectly played their role of the willing and eternal sucker.
Then it was as if something shifted. Jonathan was unsure how long they were there, but suddenly he noticed a strange, new intensity, as if everyone were suddenly plunged into a thrashing, living version of hell. The music grew louder. The whole world seemed lost in an LSD haze. The women danced with renewed vigor; they began doing things to themselves and each other – touching, kissing, fingers reaching into flesh. The club itself seemed to undulate with the hips and legs of living ghosts. Men laughed and fought, cash spilled onto glossy stages, lights shifted. A tight quadricep brushed just beneath Jonathan’s nose, and suddenly he thought of splitting a deer open from stern to stern, spilling out the guts, stripping the meat from the bone.
A sweet-smelling, doe-eyed girl took Jonathan’s hand and led him from his barstool through a mirrored corridor of violet light. The club suddenly seemed as large as all the world – a maze in which he was now lost and she his only guide. Everywhere he looked there was a distorted image of himself reflected back, superficial and flat and glass. Even now, Jonathan remembered that moment with shame and regret, realizing how he’d never truly known himself. He saw in those mirrors a dopey kid, ugly with flesh and drunkenness, lost in some kind of vague illusion. The entire world was nothing more than a strip club filled with lies of coming pleasures meant to rob you of your very essence. When he saw himself in that moment, hand in hand with this dark-haired, beautiful girl, stumbling along like a diseased cur, it was the second worst moment of his life. He stared into the mirror and something awful stared back.
She took him into a small room behind a curtain. She wrapped her arms around his neck. He stared into those dark eyes. He felt pure rot. He buried his face into her chest. He plunged into her and she raked her fingernails across his back, leaving bloodied streaks across his spine. He knew that he was infecting her with some spreading, moral disease, a genetic mutation that had infected all men since the dawn of time and left the world a horrid place. In the strange light, as Jonathan plunged in and out of her, he looked into her eyes and she seemed utterly different – inhuman, an animal. For a moment in his drunken, debauched haze, he saw her as a buck, a crown of antlers reaching out from her dark, luminous hair. He was terrified. He fucked harder and harder until he finally came and her body stiffened under his melted weight, and he lay on top of her – near dead – while she stroked his hair like a long-lost mother.
Jonathan woke in terror the following day. He was in a bare, cheap motel room and had no recollection of how he’d got there. Gene was on the other bed. Jonathan was in nothing but his boxers. His head lost in a fog; missing memories from the night before came to him but seemed nothing more than flashes of forgotten dreams. Gray light glowed behind the curtains of the lone window of their motel room. Jonathan walked over and peeked out. The strip club was next door, quiet and dark, the hills beyond trapped in a dull shadow. The neon was gone, the multicolored light. Now there was only the pale grayness and cold. In that moment he remembered the girl, the nails raking across his back, her body under his, and he wished he could go back in time and erase it all. That was the worst part of guilt, he thought – the inability to make
