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Sunday, 8 March 2015

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EDVARD TUSK: without his face

[Part 10]

I waited on the balls of my feet, the back of my calves tightening, aching, my abdomen, in turn, tensing stiff from the posture, head craned and every ripple of the air wafting in down my flared nostril distinct, tongue wetting lips left right left right underneath it.

I let the garrote dangle In limp motion, only one grip held in my left hand—my right hand mussing my hair, scratching my neck side, giving pokes to the inside of the door flat—the other grip of the thing twitching a tip tap on the motel carpet as I tensed my fist tighter in sets-of-three jerks.

The knock on the door was not long in coming—was sudden, really, I’d expected to somehow know whoever was there had approached, some sound of their feet outside giving things away, a sigh or a sniffle, a cough into a delicate hand.

My top teeth scraped wrong over my bottom, bit my cheek’s inside, a sore (perhaps blood, too, but sweet tasting if it was) rising from the slick flesh, the garrote now tightened bone stiff between my hands (fingernails, I could feel, digging in to the scotch tape, in places, and in places into the skin of my sweated palms). There was a second knock—tip tip tip, like the way a cowed husband might test at the bedroom door after a spat with the jilted wife—this giving me the briefest moment’s pause, confusion as to whether I was behaving properly.

No—I had to stop myself vocalising these thoughts—no I should not open the door, they were not going to walk away (a dread rising from the lizard base of my intelligence, a childish anxiety of not being given the treat I felt promised) I should wait, as I was, as though choreographed and staged carefully, just so, a set-piece, myself, in the exact spot all eyes were meant to fall on me, none of this to be toyed with, fretted, as natural as the first pain of food being chewed into the spot where a tooth had just been pulled.

Lock device

The soft spit sound, the oddly analog jigger of the lock device of the door (I quickly glanced—yes, I had remembered to undo the deadbolt latch) responding to the key card, the refrigerator door suction of the base slowly being draw open—I heard all of this, moving to one side so that the leaning open door would obscure me as the person entered, my legs bending, taut, at shoulder length, and a line of dog-thick drool linking from the bulb of my lower lip all the way into the fabric of my shirt at the right hand rib.

The wire was around the woman’s throat before I realised it was a woman and I’d fallen backward into the room, to the bed top (she off her feet, wriggling arms and legs, hair in my nose) while the door smacked shut—it was mistake, recognised, the peppermint odor of her shampoo up my nostrils, the easy lift of her slight frame obviously incorrect, far too malleable by my tightening the garrote, but a mistake there was absolutely nothing to fight against, this was happening (simply happening) and needed to be tended to quickly: as absurd as it was that she had knocked, had the key, as insane and wrong as this situation was, it still needed to be done (she could not be allowed to leave, after all) and done with sloppy haste (for all it mattered) all in the off chance the man who was supposed to have opened the door, stepped into the room, was still coming (even as I tightened the cord as best as I could my thoughts were more on my hoping this was not all my being caught out in a ruse than on the buck of the woman’s struggle against me).

Fingers

It took me a moment to realise not only was she free, but I was splayed, wounded on the floor—I heard her gasping a cartoon high pitched ee-e-eek, something like a balloon being hideously deflated by an hysterically guffawing child—took me another moment to acclimate to what I was seeing (a blade—a letter opener?—had pierced my right hand, entirely, the fingers in constant motion from the insult, as though trilling piano keys, blood the color of rotted driftwood in the dim the light of the room covering my sleeve, the carpet, my pant thighs).

She struck feebly at my face as she whirled to move back to the door, and I lunged, wrapping an arm around the bare part of her leg beneath her skirt, biting the flesh of the side of her shin blindly, taste filling my mouth—but a moment later I was unsure was it her blood or mine, as again I had been struck, rent face down to the carpet, ears ringing and a lacquer of green over my vision when I rolled over and tried to get the lay of the room, my position in it, hers.

I found she was also on the floor, relatively immobile (my best guess was she’d lost her footing, struck the blunt corner of the room table) blubbering sounds of her trying to catch proper breath through mucus and hyperventilation.

I found the garrote (it had wound up on the bed pillow) and staggering with the full extent of my injuries (several mis-steps, once suddenly back peddling almost to the opposite end of the room, pang of severe headache in my left eye) took it up, wrapped it short, the grips feeling as though nothing, hands numb to the extent they might as well have been ivory bureau legs, and heaped myself over her, wire catching in her mouth (perhaps this was defensive, perhaps she’d bitten it to stop in getting under her chin) then was again repelled, her elbow striking me square in the nose, the room going to shambles, fracturing, my surroundings appearing to me like dozens of poorly exposed photographs having soaked in an oily rain puddle.

Why was this woman here? Why did she have the key? The voice on the telephone had said man—it had said “Man,” I heard myself saying, as though watching from a little window in the ceiling—and so this must be a trick.

But how a trick? Who would know to do this—and if she had known I was here, if the man had sent her, why not send her prepared, warned?—if this was to undo me, why not make an utter work of it?

Stream

I had my wounded hand under a stream of water at the faucet (hot? cold?) observing in the mirror that she, for all her success in fighting me off, was still just where she had been, floundering, wheezing.

I held the hand up—though it had been bore through, clean, the wound seemed rather minor, amateur stage-make up, flesh something like a frog soaking in formaldehyde—and tried to reason: she’d come with a blade, yes, so in that sense it could be argued she’d been prepared, but this did not factor out correctly, for her having the blade (unless coincidental) was at odds with her walking in to the clumsy trap of my first assault.

I shut my eyes—more vexed by this misalignment of reasoning than the physical pain I was in, petulantly annoyed that the man had not come, but this woman had—and when I opened them the woman was collapsed, full stop, no motion to her, no sound, not even a scriggle like an overturned cockroach stuck out too long in a parking lot sun.

In a tipsy series of muscle memory cues, I turned the door latch, clicked on the television (taking a moment to select a program I vaguely recognised) and turned on the shower, shutting the bathroom door as I stepped back into the room, sat to the bed, staring at the telephone.

I kept my eye on it, expecting it to ring—expecting the very form of it to begin speaking, even—while I licked at my wounded hand, discovering the side of my forearm had also been slashed in a loping curve ending in the rough skin of elbow.

My mouth was gummy from the violence—the struggle which now seemed days old, but which really might even that moment have been being reported by some other motel guest as “in progress” (I doubted it and, moreso, did not care enough to entertain a plan concerning what I would do were authorities to arrive)—and I sat looming my jaw in lazy opens, lazy closes, eyes feeling wide even when I knew they were shut, just sat in the vulgarity of these cud-chew lip smacks, belly protruded, gurgling enough that (after however long) I giggled, almost embarrassed to have the sounds rising from me, as though someone intimate were there to catch me in my blushing.

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