I followed her down a short, narrow hallway, then, into the room where she said she did most of her work. The walls were painted a deep cranberry shade of red, and there was an assortment of Macintosh computers, scanners, a light table, several expensive-looking cameras (both digital and the old-fashioned analog sort), and so forth. She said she used another room, farther down the hallway, for her clients’ photo shoots, and that the bathroom doubled as her darkroom.
“Where do you sleep?” I asked, sipping my coffee, aware that I was asking another question entirely.
“I don’t sleep,” she replied. “Not much, anyway. But there’s a futon in the front.”
“Insomnia?”
“Not exactly. I go to sleep just fine, when I let myself. My psychologist calls it an NREM parasomnia, an arousal disorder that takes place between the third and fourth stages of NREM sleep. Same thing as night terrors. You’ve heard of that, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I told her. “I’ve heard of that.”
“Moderately rare in adults. Maybe three percent or so suffer from it as badly as I do. Oh, and I also grind my teeth. You should seemy dental bills. Fucking brutal. I’ll have dentures by forty at this rate.”
And then she sat down in front of one of the big iMac G5s and flipped it on. It hummed to life, and her desktop image, near as I could tell, was a color photograph of a dissected cat. There wasn’t another chair anywhere in the room, so I stood while she explained that she had printouts, of course, hard copies of everything, but that she really preferred the way her art looked on an LED screen.
“When I was a kid, I always wanted a Lite-Brite, but it never happened. These babies here”—and she paused to kiss the white monitor—“are my inner child’s vengeance against unresponsive parents.”
And then she started opening files, one after another, the pale plastic bulb of her mouse clicking icons to reveal impossible creatures engaged in unspeakable acts. And for a while I forgot about pretty much everything else but those sublime, grotesque, and beautiful images. Centaurs and satyrs, dryads, a host of dragons and merfolk, Siamese twins, men and women so completely undressed that every muscle, every tendon, was clearly visible. There were were-wolves, wereleopards, weretigers engaged in acts of feeding and copulation, and sometimes both at once. There were women tattooed from head to toe, endless debaucheries of fairies and trolls and goblins, genderless beings and hermaphrodites, alabaster-skinned vampires, and rotting zombies. Women with the serrate teeth of sharks and men with blind, toothsome eels where their cocks should have been. There were unnamable masses of tentacles and polyps and eyes, escapees from a Lovecraft story or a John Carpenter film, their human elements all but obscured. I’d honestly never thought of myself as much of a deviant, beyond the way that my upbringing had trained me to view my lesbianism, of course. But standing in that cranberry room, seeing all those fabulous beasts, those impossible, exquisitely rendered hybrids born from the melding of Amanda’s skill and imagination with the secret fantasies of her “clients,” I found myself growing light-headed with excitement, sweating, my heart beating too fast, too hard, my mouth gone dry. And if, at the time, my reaction disturbedme (and often the hybrids and the things they were doing were undeniably disturbing), it hardly mattered to my libido.
“Most of the compositing is done from photographs,” she said, opening a new file, something that was more machine than woman, “but I also work with a couple of local makeup artists, from time to time.”
I said something, and maybe it made sense, but more likely it didn’t. Regardless, she didn’t seem to notice.
“For some, it’s just a kink. You know, a fetish. For some others, there really isn’t much of a sexual component involved. But I do get some pretty serious cases, from time to time. The self-described therianthropes, for example. The Otherkin. The Transhumanists and parahumanists. The occasional necrophile. But, when you come right down to it, they’re all auto-voyeurs. They’re all Narcissus staring into that damn pool, you know.”
“Frankly,” I said, and I think my voice was trembling, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Amanda, but, right now, I’d really like to fuck your brains out. If the futon’s good for that, I mean.”
“If not, there’s always the floor,” she said, and there was no change in her expression or the tone of her voice, no change whatsoever. She closed Photoshop, then shut off the computer, and led me to a room near the front of the attic apartment. The walls were lined with bookshelves. There was a television and VCR and an X-Box (even through the lust clogging my higher brain activities, the X-Box surprised me). There was an assortment of animal skulls, set on the shelves or hung above them on the walls: coyote, horse, antelopes with spiraling horns, the fully articulated skeleton of a monkey of some sort. There was a single window — no blinds or curtains — looking down on Ormewood Avenue. We didn’t bother with the futon. Because, just like she’d said, there was always the floor.
“Take your clothes off,” she said, and while I struggled with the zipper of my jeans, she took a very realistic dildo out of a box beneath the futon, the dildo and the leather harness she fitted it into. I stopped fighting with the disagreeable zipper and the buttons on my shirt and watched, speechless, while she undressed, letting her clothes fall in a pile at her feet. Her nipples were erect and the color of walnut shells. Maybe I can’t remember what we talked about on the way from the club to her apartment, but I recall the exact shade of brown of Amanda’s nipples. They looked almost hard enough to slice me.
Maybe that’s all I ever actually wanted from her, for those walnut nipples to cut me open. Make me bleed. Maybe, Amanda, that’s the one thing you were never able to understand, because I was never able to articulate the desire.
She fastened the leather harness firmly about her small waist, the molded silicone phallus drooping obscenely between her thighs, and then she undressed me herself. I do not know how many times I came that night, or how many times she came. It seemed to go on forever, our lovemaking, the hammering of our sweaty bodies one against the other, even if there was no love there anywhere. Finally, towards dawn, I slept, and awoke hours later, hungover and disoriented, staring out that attic window at the sky above Grant Park. She was still sleeping there on the floor beside me, snoring very softly. And that was the night I met Amanda Tyrell. October 13th, 2006. Never mind if I don’t genuinely recollect even half the shit I’ve written down here, if I’ve just made stuff up to fill in the gaping mnemonic crevices. Whatever. A necessary fiction, and if the facts are compromised by my lousy memory, I don’t think the truthis any worse for it.
You want words, Dorothy? Well, you could have these. Maybe they’re not Shakespeare or Updike or Stephen goddamn King, but they aresincere and sincerely unexpected. Jesus fuck, how long’s it been since I’ve written this much at one sitting? I don’t even know. My wrist has stopped aching and is going numb. And there are pages and pages and pages. I didn’t notice the sun go down, and that was almost two hours ago.
Here you are, Amanda, like a wasp sealed in a hard, translucent nugget of Baltic amber, like a pearl, like a splinter wedged beneath a fingernail. Here you are, recorded for future demonologists to summon or puzzle over or merely fear. I need food. I need a goddamn drink.
CHAPTER TWO
Editor’s Note: A full twenty-six days elapsed between Sarah Crowe’s last entry in that part of the manuscript I’ve labeled “Chapter One” and the first entry in the section I’ve titled “Chapter Two.” Almost all that is known of her activities and experiences during this hiatus — almost a full month — is what she’s chosen to set down on paper. I have confirmed that some of this time was spent at the Tyler Free Library in Moosup Valley, and there were a few emails and phone calls to her agent in New York. Beyond that, we must rely on her account. It should be noted that it was not unusual for Sarah to put a manuscript aside for weeks at a time before returning to it, and, in that respect, the gap is not unexpected, however frustrating it might be to the reader approaching this work as a novel, rather than what can more accurately be described as a journal or diary.