The Butterflies are Laughing

von Sam Vaknin (Copyright)

My parents’ home, it is dusk time, and I am climbing to the attic. I settle on my childhood’s sofa, whose unraveled corners reveal its faded and lumpy stuffing. The wooden armrests are dark and bear the scratchy marks of little hands. I contemplate these blemishes, set bright against the deep, brown planks, and am reminded of my past. A light ray meanders diagonally across the carpet. The air is Flemish. The fitting light, the shades, the atmosphere.

There is a watercolor on an easel of a thickset forest with towering and murky trees. A carriage frozen in a clearing, a burly driver, looking towards nowhere, as though there’s nothing left to see. No light, no shadows, just a black-singed mass of foliage and an incandescent, sallow
.

My little brother lies bleeding on the rug. Two gory rivulets, two injured wrists, delineate a perfect circle. They cross his ashen palms and waxen, twitching fingers. It may be a call for help but I have been hard of hearing.

I crouch beside him and inspect the wounds. They are shallow but profuse. Red pain has broken past his skin, his face is wrinkled. I wipe him gently, trying not to hurt.

He stares at me, eyes of a gammy colt awaiting the delivering shot. He radiates the kind of gloom that spans the room and makes me giddy. I cower to my heels, then squat beside him, caressing his silent scream. My palms are warm.

We while the time. His frothy exhalations, my measured air inhaled, our lungs entwined in the proliferating density. The volumes of my childhood mob the shelves, their bindings blue and rigid.

I look at him and tell him it’s alright, he shouldn’t worry. A mere nineteen, he gives me a senescent smile and nods in frailty. He grasps it all, too much. Shortly, I may have to lift him in my arms and set him on the couch. We are not alone. Echoes of people downstairs. I can’t tell who. Mother, our sister, Nomi perhaps. Someone arrives and sparks excited speech and lengthy silences.

I descend the steps, some hasty greetings, I stuff a roll of coarse, green toilet paper in my pants. Back to the horror, to frisk around the crimson wreckage. I wipe my brother wrathfully from floor and carpet and from couch, reducing him to a ubiquity of chestnut stains. I am not content. He is
writhing on the inlay, attempting tears. It’s futile, I know. We both forgot the art of crying, except from torn veins.

The light is waning. The brown blinds incarcerate my brother behind penumbral bars. His bony hands and scrawny body in stark relief. It is the first time that I observe him truly. He is lanky but his face unchanged. I was no child when he was born but he is still my little brother.

He is resting now, eyes shut, our lengthy lashes – both mine and his – attached to fluttering lids. Birds trapped in quivering arteries flap at his throat. He is sobbing still but I avert my gaze, afraid to hug him. We oscillate, like two charged particles, my little brother and myself. His by his side and my arms by his side, divergent. I thrust into my bulging pocket a ball of ruby paper.

There is a clock in here that ticks the seconds. They used to sound longer. It was another time. The hemorrhage stopped. A mournful lace of plasma on his sinewed wrists. It must have hurt, the old corroded blade, no flesh, just coated skeleton. To saw the bones till blood. To hack the skin, to spread it like a rusty butterfly, dismantling slithery vessels. I move to occupy the wooden ladder back, near the escritoire that I received as gift on the occasion of my first year in school.He nods affirmative when asked if he can rise. I hold him under hairy, damp armpits. I confront him, seated on my grandma’s rocking chair, a cushion clad in Moroccan equine embroidery on my knees. I gently hold his hand and he recoils. I didn’t hurt him, though.

I wait for him to break, his hand in mine. Thus clenched, our palms devoid of strength, we face a question and a promise, the fear of pain and of commitment. We dwell on trust.

He unfists and bleeds anew. I use the paper ball to soak it up. It’s dripping. I gallop down the spiral staircase and collect another roll, adhesive bandages, and dressing. Into my pocket and, speechlessly, I climb back. He is sitting there, a Pharaonic scribe, wrists resting on his knees, palms lotus flowers, but upturned. His gifted painter’s fingers are quenched in blood.

I mop and dab, swab and discard, apply some pressure and erase. My brother is calling me in sanguineous tongue and I deface it, incapable of listening, unwilling to respond.

I bind him and I dress and he opens his eyes and gapes at the white butterflies that sprouted on his joints. He feels them tenderly, astonished by this sudden red-white beauty.

I count his pulse and he gives in to my pseudo-professional mannerisms. His pulse is regular. He hasn’t lost a lot of blood, therefore.

He tells me he is OK now and asks for water. All of a sudden, I remember. One day, he was a toddler, could hardly walk, I led him back from the clinic. He gave blood and was weeping bitterly. A giant cotton swab was thrust into his elbow pit and he folded him arm, holding onto it tightly.

One jerky movement, it fell and he stood there, gawking at the soiled lump and whimpering. He was so tiny that I hugged him and wiped the tears from his plump cheeks.

I improvised a story about “Adhesa Cottonball”, the cotton monster, who forever wishes to return to the soil, her abode. His eyes cleared and he giggled nervously. This sound – his chuckle – is in my ears, obscuring all real-life acoustics.

He gulps down the water silently, his eyes a distant blackness, where no one treads but he, his forest, among the trees, perhaps this carriage and ist attending coachman. Where does he want to go, I wander?

My brain is working overtime. My skull-domiciled well-oiled machine, whose parts are in metallic shine, impeccable, unerring, impervious to pain. Machines don’t ache this brother, sprawled on the couch, his shoulders stooping, in torn shirt and tattered trousers, my erstwhile clothes, his chest hirsute, his face adorned with budding beard and whiskers.

What story shall I tell him now to clear his eyes? How shall I make him laugh again? What monster should I bury in the sand?

I tell him to pack few things and come with me. He acquiesces but still won’t budge. His twin wrist-butterflies are quite inert. He sighs as he buttons his shirt and rolls unfastened sleeves to cover his abrasions. When he gets up I see him as before: a gangling figure, an angular face, two cavernous sockets, big brown mole. He drags his feet.

We both descend. Don’t tell our parents, he begs, I promise not to. Enters his room and exits fast, carrying a small plastic bag with severed handles. A pair of worn jeans spill from the top to cover some half-deleted lettering.We bid farewell and walk placidly to the car. He freezes on the back seat, still cradling his plastic treasure, gazing forward but seeing little.

Nomi is driving while I watch him through the windshield mirror. His inanimate stare, directed at the window, is deflected by transparence. Slumped on the imitation leather seat, he and his trousers bump from one side to another on the winding road.

He falls asleep this way, sack closely clutched, chin burrowing into his hollow torso. At times, he shakes his head in stiff refusal. He is very adamant. Only his hands are calm, as though detached from his rebellious body.

Nomi is negotiating the parking and I touch his shoulder. He opens a pair of bleary eyes and looks at me like he used to when I was still his entire world. I touch once more and gently. When he was two years old , I left home for many years, never to be heard from. The hurt resides still in his eyes, that injury.

I touch a third time, thus pledging to remain, thus telling him my love. I study him at length and he does not divert his eyes.

Suddenly he smiles and dimples collect around his lips. He flings his hands high up and waves his red-white butterflies. He imitates their flight. He plucks their wings. He laughs and I respond by laughing and Nomi joins and the space of our car is filled with laughs and butterflies and butterflies and laughter.

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Author Bio:
Sam Vaknin ( {Link2}http://samvak.tripod.com{/Link} ) is the author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain – How the West Lost the East.
He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory Bellaonline, and Suite101.

Sam’s Web Site: {Link1}http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com{/Link}

The Con Man Cometh

von Sam Vaknin (Copyright)

Swathed in luminosity, we stir with measured competence our amber drinks in long-stemmed glasses. You are weighing my offer and I am waiting for your answer with hushed endurance. The armchairs are soft, the lobby is luxurious, as befits five-star hotels. I am not tense. I have anticipated your response even before I made my move.

Soon, temples sheathed in perspiration, you use the outfit’s thick paper napkins to wipe it off. Loosen your tie. Pretend to be immersed in calculations. You express strident dissatisfaction and I feign recoil, as though intimidated by your loudness. Withdrawing to my second line of defense, I surrender to your simulated wrath.

The signs are here, the gestures, the infinitesimal movements that you cannot control. I lurk. I know that definite look, that imperceptible twitch, the inevitability of your surrender.

I am a con man and you are my victim. The swindle is unfolding here and now, in this very atrium, amid all the extravagance. I am selling your soul and collecting the change. I am sharpened, like a raw nerve firing impulses to you, receiving yours, an electrical-chemical dialog, consisting of your smelly sweat, my scented exudation. I permeate your cracks. I broker an alliance with your fears, your pains, defense compensatory mechanisms.

I know you.

I’ve got to meld us into one. As dusk gives way to night, you trust me as you do yourself, for now I am nothing less than you. Having adopted your particular gesticulation, I nod approvingly with every mention of your family. You do not like me. You sense the danger. Your nostrils flare. Your eyes amok. Your hands so restless. You know me for a bilker, you realize I’ll break your heart. I know you comprehend we both are choiceless.

It’s not about money. Emotions are at stake. I share your depths of loneliness and pain. Sitting opposed, I see the child in you, the adolescent. I discern the pleading sparkle in your eyes, your shoulders stooping in the very second you’ve decided to succumb. I am hurting for what I do to you. My only consolation is the inexorability of nature – mine and yours, this world’s (in which we find ourselves and not of our choice). Still, we are here, you know.

I empathize with you without speech or motion. Your solitary sadness, the anguish, and your fears. I am your only friend, monopolist of your invisible cries, your inner hemorrhage of salty tears, the tissued scar that has become your being. Like me, the product of uncounted blows (which you sometimes crave).

Being abused is being understood, having some meaning, forming a narrative. Without it, your life is nothing but an anecdotal stream of randomness. I deal the final, overwhelming coup-de-grace that will transform the torn sheets of your biography into a plot. It isn’t everyday one meets a cheat. Such confident encounters can render everything explained. Don’t give it up. It is a gift of life, not to be frivolously dispensed with. It is a test of worthiness.

I think you qualify and I am the structure and the target you’ve been searching for and here I am.

Now we are bound by money and by blood. In our common veins flows the same alliance that dilates our pupils. We hail from one beginning. We separated only to unite, at once, in this hotel, this late, and you exclaim: “I need to trust you like I do not trust a soul”. You beseech me not to betray your faith. Perhaps not so explicitly, but both your eyes are moist, reflecting your vulnerability.I gravely radiate my utter guarantee of splendid outcomes. No hint of treason here. Concurrently I am plotting your emotional demise. At your request, not mine. It is an act of amity, to rid you of the very cause of your infirmity. I am the instrument of your delivery and liberation. I will deprive you of your ability to feel, to trust, and to believe. When we diverge, I will have molded you anew – much less susceptible, much more immune, the essence of resilience.

It is my gift to you and you are surely grateful in advance. Thus, when you demand my fealty, you say: “Do not forget our verbal understanding”.

And when I vow my loyalty, I answer: “I shall not forget to stab you in the back.”

And now, to the transaction. I study you. I train you to ignore my presence and argue with yourself with the utmost sincerity. I teach you not to resent your weaknesses.

So, you admit to them and I record all your confessions to be used against you to your benefit. Denuded of defenses, I leave you wounded by embezzlement, a cold, contemptible exposure. And, in the meantime, it’s only warmth and safety, the intimacy of empathy, the propinquity of mutual understanding.

I only ask of you one thing: the fullest trust, a willingness to yield. I remember having seen the following in an art house movie, it was a test: to fall, spread-eagled from a high embankment and to believe that I am there to catch you and break your lethal plunge.

I am telling you I’ll be there, yet you know I won’t. Your caving in is none of my concern. I only undertook to bring you to the brink and I fulfilled this promise. It’s up to you to climb it, it’s up to you to tumble. I must not halt your crash, you have to recompose. It is my contribution to the transformation that metastasized in you long before we met.

But you are not yet at the stage of internalizing these veracities. You still naively link feigned geniality to constancy, intimacy and confidence in me and in my deeds, proximity and full disclosure. You are so terrified and mutilated, you come devalued. You cost me merely a whiskey tumbler and a compendium of ordinary words. One tear enough to alter your allegiances. You are malleable to the point of having no identity.

You crave my touch and my affection. I crave your information and unbridled faith. “Here is my friendship and my caring, my tenderness and amity, here is a hug. I am your parent and your shrink, your buddy and your family.” – so go the words of this inaudible dialog – “Give me your utter, blind, trust but limit it to one point only: your money or your life.”

I need to know about your funds, the riddles of your boardroom, commercial secrets, your skeletons, some intimate detail, a fear, resurgent hatred, the envy that consumes. I don’t presume to be your confidant. Our sharing is confined to the pecuniary. I lull you into the relief that comes with much reduced demands. But you are an experienced businessman! You surely recognize my tactics and employ them, too!

Still, you are both seduced and tempted, though on condition of maintaining “independent thinking”. Well, almost independent. There is a tiny crack in your cerebral armor and I am there to thrust right through it. I am ready to habituate you. “I am in full control” – you’d say – “So, where’s the threat?” And, truly, there is none.

There’s only certainty. The certitude I offer you throughout our game. Sometimes I even venture: “I am a crook to be avoided”. You listen with your occidental manners, head tilted obliquely, and when I am finished warning you, you say: “But where the danger lies? My trust in you is limited!” Indeed – but it is there!I lurk, awaiting your capitulation, inhabiting the margins, the twilight zone twixt greed and paranoia. I am a viral premonition, invading avaricious membranes, preaching a gospel of death and resurrection. Your death, your rising from the dead. Assuming the contours of my host, I abandon you deformed in dissolution.

There’s no respite, not even for a day. You are addicted to my nagging, to my penetrating gaze, instinctive sympathy, you’re haunted. I don’t let go. You are engulfed, cocooned, I am a soul mate of eerie insight, unselfish acumen. I vitiate myself for your minutest needs. I thrive on servitude. I leave no doubt that my self-love is exceeded only by my love for you.

I am useful and you are a user. I am available and you avail yourself. But haven’t you heard that there are no free lunches? My restaurant is classy, the prices most exorbitant, the invoices accumulate with every smile, with every word of reassurance, with every anxious inquiry as to your health, with every sacrifice I make, however insubstantial.

I keep accounts in my unstated books and you rely on me for every double entry. The voices I instill in you: “He gives so of himself though largely unrewarded”. You feel ashamed, compelled to compensate. A seed of Trojan guilt. I harp on it by mentioning others who deprived me. I count on you to do the rest. There’s nothing more potent than egotistic love combined with raging culpability. You are mine to do with as I wish, it is your wish that I embody and possess.

The vise is tightened. Now it’s time to ponder whether to feed on you at once or scavenge. You are already dying and in your mental carcass I am grown, an alien. Invoking your immunity, as I am wont to do, will further make you ill and conflict will erupt between your white cells and your black, the twin abodes of your awakened feelings.

You hope against all odds that I am a soul-mate. How does it feel, the solitude? Few days with me – and you cannot recall! But I cannot remember how it feels to be together. I cannot waive my loneliness, my staunch companion. When I am with you, it prospers. And you must pay for that.

I have no choice but to abscond with your possessions, lest I remain bereft. With utmost ethics, I keep you well-informed of these dynamics and you acknowledge my fragility which makes you desirous to salve my wounds.

But I maintain the benefit of your surprise, the flowing motion. Always at an advantage over you, the interchangeable. I, on the other hand, cannot be replaced, as far as you’re concerned. You are a loyal subject of your psychic state while I am a denizen of the eternal hunting grounds. No limits there, nor boundaries, only the nostrils quivering at the game, the surging musculature, the body fluids, the scent of decadence.

Sometime, the prey becomes the predator, but only for a while. Admittedly, it’s possible and you might turn the tables. But you don’t want to. You crave so to be hunted. The orgiastic moment of my proverbial bullets, penetrating willing flesh, the rape, the violation, the metaphoric blood and love, you are no longer satisfied with compromises.

You want to die having experienced this eruption once. For what is life without such infringement if not mere ripening concluding in decay. What sets us, Man, apart from beast is our ability to self-deceive and swindle others. The rogue’s advantage over quarry is his capacity to have his lies transmuted till you believe them true.

I trek the unpaved pathways between my truth and your delusions. What am I, fiend or angel? A weak, disintegrating apparition – or a triumphant growth? I am devoid of conscience in my own reflection. It is a cause for mirth. My complex is binary: to fight or flight, I’m well or ill, it should have been this way or I was led astray.I am the blinding murkiness that never sets, not even when I sleep. It overwhelms me, too, but also renders me farsighted. It taught me my survival: strike ere you are struck, abandon ere you’re trashed, control ere you are subjugated.

So what do you say to it now? I told you everything and haven’t said a word. You knew it all before. You grasp how dire my need is for your blood, your hurt, the traumatic coma that will follow. They say one’s death bequeaths another’s life. It is the most profound destination, to will existence to your pining duplicate.

I am plump and short, my face is uncontrived and smiling. When I am serious, I am told, I am like a battered and deserted child and this provokes in you an ancient cuddling instinct. When I am proximate, your body and your soul are unrestrained. I watch you kindly and the artificial lighting of this magnific vestibule bounces off my glasses.

My eyes are cradled in blackened pouches of withered skin. I draw your gaze by sighing sadly and rubbing them with weary hands. You incline our body, gulp the piquant libation, and sign the document. Then, leaning back, you shut exhausted eyes. There is no doubt: you realize your error.

It’s not too late. The document lies there, it’s ready for the tearing. But you refrain. You will not do it.

“Another drink?” – You ask

I smile, my chubby cheeks and wire glasses sparkle.

“No, thanks” – I say.

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Author Bio:
Sam Vaknin ( {Link2}http://samvak.tripod.com{/Link} ) is the author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain – How the West Lost the East.
He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory Bellaonline, and Suite101.

Sam’s Web Site: {Link1}http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com{/Link}

The Future of Madeleine

von Sam Vaknin (Copyright)

Madeleine lodged us in a tiny cubicle at the end of a corridor. Her establishment is all tidy and neat, but miniature. Madeleine’s doll house, this hotel. At dawn, she rises and fixes a basic breakfast in the ground floor kitchenette. Scents of bacon and fried eggs waft through the building and shifts change at the reception desk, the weary loudly welcoming their alert replacements.

Madeleine takes note with gravity of the report submitted by the outgoing crew and updates the incomers with its details. Her make-up always fresh, her hair fluffy, her attire impeccable and stainless. Her sexuality harnessed by a prim-looking business suit, her lipstick an insinuated crimson.

Eli blinks at the sun and shields his eyes under a sinewy arm, flanked by two thick and raven eyebrows.

“They should pass a law.” – he argues to no one in particular – “People ought to work by night and sleep throughout the day. Let the nocturnal be diurnal and vice versa.”

The same sentence every tortured awakening. His ostentatious misery provokes contagious mirth in both of us. We go hysterical among the crumpled sheets, beating the shrunken pillows with our fists (his outsizing mine). At long last, Eli gets up and goes to shave and shower in the nude.

I am not embarrassed. Straddling the minuscule bath tub, I mutter:

“We are penniless.”

“Yes, I am aware of it” – sighs Eli and whips the sink with lathered razor. He uses his fleshy backhand to wipe the frothy mirror. Pressing his nostrils upwards, ham-handed, he shaves the cobalt patches of his nascent beard and whiskers.

“I got myself a sucker for a backgammon match. He is from Iran. Was a Minister of labor or agriculture or something like that …” – he hisses a curse and cleanses a pearl of blood from prominent chin.

“What else?” – I enquire offhandedly. I know Eli well. He is too calm.

“Listen,” – he enthuses as though the idea just budded in his mind – “there is this Jewish cardiologist, filthy rich, Marc. He lives all by himself in a six-room apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement. I introduced him to this

chick and now they are getting hitched.”

I keep my peace, awaiting the dénouement. Eli eyes me slyly:

“I told him you are a genius and that we are planning a convention of Sephardim in Israel, sponsored by Itzhak Navon, the former president. It set him on fire.”

I cross my legs and inspect closely a bloodied mole embedded in my thigh.

“What have you got there?” – enquires Eli – “Anyhow, this guy is loaded, I am telling you. We can easily fleece him for five grand or more for the consultancy we are planning on opening here, in Paris. Add to this my cousin’s money and the dough from the dentist and that computer guy – and we are in business.”

“If it survives your gambling” – I interject tranquilly.

“You are such a doomsayer!” – Eli fumes, banging the bathroom door behind
him.A minute later, smirking – “Remember the wife of the Sorbonne professor at yesterday’s dinner?” – I nod – “She called me this morning. She wants to interview me for a WIZO newsletter, or some such. I told her the only way to quiz me is on my bed, in my hotel room. She laughed and said that this is how she conducts all her assignments anyhow.” – marvels Eli – “So, take a walk, knock back some coffee, munch on a croissant or something.”

There is a cramped restaurant on the intersection, up the street, opposite the Military Academy. Every afternoon, for months now, I eat my duck in garlic there. Sometimes, Eli and I adopt this mock Swedish accent and demand the most improbable of dishes, barely able to contain our hilarity. The tortured waiters shun us.

Now, waiting for a table to clear, I bury my head in giant mug of greasy coffee replete with floating isles of pastry. Then back to the hotel in a deliberate slow motion.

Eli is sitting on a chair, bare feet on window ledge. The bed a muddle of ejaculated sheets. He casts a sluggish glance in my direction, upheaves, and dresses perfunctorily.

“I fixed with Marc. He is waiting for us. Don’t start with petulant expressions and your usual brattiness. Be nice, we can no longer afford even our morning coffee.”

A scarface Vietnamese with a tintinnabulary dialect minds the reception desk in the deserted lobby. Eli looks disappointed but mumbles “morning”. We stroll towards the nearest metro station down the street.

Marc’s spacious abode is in a newly renovated building. Bareness reverberates through six high-ceilinged rooms. The hulking cardiologist lives in the kitchen. He butchers meditatively a silver herring wrapped in a slab of putrid cheese laid on an ageing slice of bread. He licks lubricious swollen fingers, extending them for handshake, and smacks his fleshy lips.

“Sit down, please” – he utters cordially – “You’re welcome!”. His Hebrew, guttural and broken. Though somewhat stooping, Marc has the countenance of a Belmondo. Eli attacks the remnants of the kipper, stuffing his face with staling crumbs. “Where’s Mazal?” – he enquires, between the mouthfuls, dodging digested scraps.

Masticating, Marc responds:

“She suddenly took off. She said she couldn’t stand it here.”

There follows a duet of smarmy nibbles, the unctuous morsels of a feigned alliance and selfish solidarity, the smutty autopsy of smoke-dried, gutted love.

Eli assures him: “I will get her back to you” and Marc embarks on careful planning, strategy and tactics of the reconquista – when Mazal steps indoors. A vague air of long lost familiarity, a memorable face – the curving forehead, dark ponds for eyes, a boxer’s nose.

“Marc” – she exclaims.

Sheathed in a hail of breadcrumbs and disintegrating cheese, the ursine pilgrim approaches her: “Mazal!”

They do not touch each other, not even the customary kiss on cheek. Mazal says: “I am going to put my things in the bedroom” – and smiles at me.Eli coughs politely:

“Marc, we will leave you, guys, alone. Be a man, won’t you? Show your love, woo her, be romantic. A woman is not a cow, to mount, to screw, and then to turn your back on and go to sleep. A woman needs attention, flowers, a restaurant and orchestra on her birthday, buy her a fresh dress here and there. Plunge your hand in your pocket. Be stingy and die lonely!”

Marc assents despondently, his eyes riveted to Mazal’s swaying buttocks.

“Marc” – implores Eli – “let’s finish this business with the money. To establish the firm, I must deposit it in the bank this afternoon. ”

Marc casts a haunted, ensnared glance at Eli’s general direction.

But Eli strikes relentless:

“Marc, she’ll be out of the room any minute now. If we keep arguing over these stinking five thousand dollars, you will lose her forever. Either you’re in or you’re out. The time to decide is here and now.”

“I’m in, I’m in” – stammers Marc, defeated. He noisily dodders to the adjacent room. Eli winks at me expectantly. Marc returns with a bulky wad of cash and a stained, much folded, piece of rubricated paper.

“Sign this, both you” – he growls and, mournfully, to himself: “fifty thousand francs.”

“A mere five thousand dollars” – Eli corrects him – “and the money doubles each half a year or so. Welcome, partner!”

Marc reciprocates with a feeble handshake and crumbles onto a kitchen stool. The flickering neon light weighs on his luxuriant eyelids, skirting the shady folds under his sockets. Eli bows and whispers hoarsely in our sponsor’s hirsute ear: “Go to her, Marc. She is waiting for you. She is a woman.”

Marc gestures half-heartedly but doesn’t budge. Eli shrugs disparagingly and signals me to follow him.

Back in the street, he gleefully observes:

“She’ll never stay with him.”

We promenade in silence and then:

“It’s five thousand US dollars we made today! We earned ourselves a normal lunch for a change. I haven’t eaten properly since all those bets.”

Eli used to wager meals in fine eateries on the outcomes of a quiz. The terms were thus: the dupe he lured could ask me ten questions which I correctly answered. I, in my turn, would then perplex the prey with a single, insoluble, challenge. I never lost. But when I won from Eli his platinum tie clip and pair of cufflinks, the betting stopped.

A tangled web of avenues and squares, the foliaged daubs of green and orange, the ash-clad buildings eerily aglow. Swirling bouquets of men in women, hormone-exuding teens, whores and their clients are negotiating seed. Paris perspires lust under the seething sun.The corner drugstore is congested. Eli devours the headlines of a week-old Israeli paper. He doesn’t even notice Mayer who occupies a seat beside him. His lips give shape to writhing syllables. Mayer regards his efforts with nauseated fascination.

“Eli” – I exclaim – “Look who is here! If it isn’t Mayer!”

“Mayer!” – Eli wrinkles the daily – “What are you doing here? When did you arrive? Care for a little backgammon match?”

Mayer sneers, his bellows chest pulsating. With effeminate hand, he smears the effluence of the mall’s tropic micro-climate on his balding head.

“You are still the same, you piece of shit” – he roars and they embrace affectionately.

Eli and Mayer are always in the throes of some conspiracy and I stay in the room, deterred by the metropolitan expanse, leafing through an illustrated French encyclopedia. Madeleine intrudes infrequently, ostensibly to enquire of my needs, but really to find out if Eli had returned.

I pity her. I say:

“Eli met a friend of his from Israel. His name is Mayer.”

She snorts bitterly and hangs up on my compassion.

Eli and Mayer stagger into the hotel at night, with fur-packed beauties hanging on their arms. Up, in the room, Eli points a stubby finger and enquires: “How much to do this guy?” – They gauge me unappreciatively and mumble something. Eli and Mayer burst into convulsive merriment.

Eli continues, exhaling heavily: “And that includes his dog?”

The girls recoil, torrentially blaspheming, and fling their imitation leather purses at the now much-bolted door.

Their voices fade along the corridor and up the creaking stairs.

I am left alone, in thought, pierced by their assaying gaze, when Eli breaks into the room, stark-naked, and drags me to the floor above.

“Come, come!” – he hastens me – “You mustn’t miss this! Two stunners making it. This is something you have never seen before, I bet!”

“I don’t want to!” – I whisper, prying my shoulder loose from his clammy vise – “Leave me alone!” – and I retreat, scuttling, to the safety of the landing.

“You are a nutcase, that’s what you are!” – Eli now pelts me from his elevated perch – “Even a homosexual would be excited! Such knockouts, a ton of breasts, exquisite asses, that’s what you are missing, you hear me?”

By morning his wrath subsides. Casting a waxy arm over his fluttering eyes, he blocks the fervid light and croaks:

“They should pass a law.”

“Where’s Mayer?” – I enquire.”Up in the room.” – he giggles – “Stuck with the whores. They claim to have been nurses in a hospital. When he revives, he will have to pay them.” – he finds it sidesplitting.

“Madeleine was looking for you.” – I informed him and added – “Many times.” I evaded his scolding stare, turning the pages in my book in the wrong direction.

“What did you tell her?” – he rasps.

“Nothing whatsoever.”

“And she?”

“Said none.”

“We will visit her this evening” – Eli decrees and drops the subject altogether.

A few minutes later:

“Stay here” – he exits and locks the door behind him.

I contemplate the wooden planks that stand between me and the hallway and ruffle the pages of my book. When I rise to fill my cup with water from the corner sink, the walls reverberate with Mayer’s blows.

“Where is the son of a bitch?” – he bawls – “Wait till I lay my hands on him!”

“He is not here. He descended earlier.” Mayer digest the information and then attacks the doorknob viciously. “Is he inside? He locked you in?” – suspicion-impregnated pause – “Open the door! You won’t?”

“He locked me in, he’s gone, I have no key, I cannot open up” – and Mayer curses audibly. He is suddenly besieged by agitated female voices and tries to weave his tattered French into a sentence. The sounds recede as, having yielded, he climbs to the cubicle, apparently to recompense them.

By now the hotel is virtually deserted of its guests and of their echoes. Time is marked by the cheerful banter of the staff, some heated arguments, the weary vacuuming of carpets, the squeaky linen trolley. The equanimity of the eternal. Bathed in anemic light, I watch my legs and arm, propped on a thickset book, with growing alienation. When Eli unlocks the door, he, too, does not belong. Not an invader but an error, the wrong protagonist of an unfinished novel.

Failing to pierce the dusk, he blinks his way towards the light switch and beats it into brightness. He eyes me intensely, his rare but most inspiring insect. “Get dressed. We need to be at Madeleine’s in half an hour.” A feline leap into the bathroom and Eli, urinates, legs wide apart, the door ajar, letting out the hissing voice and pungent smell of fizzing pee.

Still steeped in unreality, I kneel. From battered suitcase, tucked under the bed, I extract a rumpled blazer, age-patinated pants. “Put on cravat!” – he snaps – “She is not a floozy, has a lot of style.” – he sounds proud. I don a necktie.

“Now listen up” – Eli expounds – “I told her about you, she thinks you are a demigod. She is convinced that you can tell the future. A few things about her: she is widowed, rich, and lonely. She has a Turkish paramour, a yachtsman. He works the Paris line and ends here once a month.”

“What does he look like?” – I probe and Eli, violently revolted, unfurls my tie knot and motions me to start anew.”Tall, swarthy, beefy, moustache. She is addicted to me. She wants me to move over to her place.”

“I realize that” – I retort, irritably – “I am not blind, you know.”

The taxi crawls into a murky parking lot and Eli and I sneak towards the glass paned entrance and press the intercom. Madeleine buzzes us in immediately, no questions asked. Silhouetted against the backlit doorframe, extended arm on jamb, she is carved into her wavy gown. Eli pecks her turned cheek and brushes against her nipples. I do not.

She doesn’t even wait for us to settle down, thrusting her palm forward, digits outspread, under my flushing face. Her robe unravels some, hinting at ample, creamy breasts.

“Give me a reading” – she commands me hoarsely. I notice now her layered makeup, the sweat ravines and mascara pools, shaven abrasions where chin meets neck.

I contemplate her tiny hand, curvaceous, and say:

“I see a man.”

“Who is he?” – she prods with bated breath – “How does he look and what is our future?”

“A towering man of dark complexion …” – a built-in hesitation, the vision blurring, Eli and I have practiced this on many women, a tiresome routine. I close my eyes, waggle my head, clasp knees in helplessness, writhe for a while, exhale:

“He wears a fine moustache. I see great waters …”

She yelps in fear and joy.

“You are two lovers … A boat, he is on it … and the sea …”

Eli suppresses yawns, but Madeleine vaults into her bedroom, barefooted thumps on tiled floor. These fleshy thuds arouse. She reappears and kneels beside me, scattering purplish Polaroids on a nearby coffee table.

“That’s him” – she pinkie-indicates a snapshot – “In Turkey, Istanbul …”

Her scent is primal, her neck too short but sculpted, she moistens lips with lithe, inviting tongue.

Eli boasts of me: “You see, what did I tell you? There’s nothing he don’t know, he see it all, a genius, he is the talk of every town in Israel …”

“You must have told him in advance” – Madeleine pouts and lays a shapely arm on Eli’s thigh. Hair sprouts shaggy in her cavernous armpit.

“I swear to you I haven’t!” – Eli withdraws, offended.

“Your father took you when you were a child” – I startle both, reading the headlines of an inner bulletin unfolding – “You conceived his child and then aborted. I hear the baby whimpering.”

For one delirious moment, they both appraise me, shocked, albeit for different reasons.”What did you say?” – Eli recovers first but Madeleine shrieks, reduced to a blubbering heap of mouth and shoulders. The muted violence of buried words tears at her body. She rends the carpet and vainly reconstructs it. Still sobbing mutely, Eli consoles her impotently, casting condemning glances my way as though exclaiming “Look what you have done!”.

Madeleine is quieter now but welled-up ripples traverse her crouching figure.

She whispers something and Eli puts an ear to quavering lips. Another hiss and Eli lays an incidental hand on Madeleine’s heaving chest and counter-whispers. A lengthy verbal intercourse ensues. She nods assent and Eli jumps, enthused.

“Join me today to see something you haven’t seen in your entire life!”

With Eli this could only mean sex but something in his voice forbids me to refuse, an ominous promise, a kind of incest. Madeleine strolls dreamily into her bedroom and emerges molded into a mustard toga and silver stiletto heels. Under the flowing robe, she is ensconced in nylon tights and a bikini top.

We drive through fluoresced, abandoned boulevards, awash with rustling leaves. A car or two speeds by, the metro stations gargle. Madeleine’s numb face is ravaged by the intermittence of the lights. Her lifeless hands clutch at the steering wheel and hardly turn it left or right.

“It’s here” – says Eli.

We descend few stairs to face a peeping hole embedded in a metal door which Eli raps. A mushroomed eye appears, withdraws, the gate is opened by a decaying woman, a brownish cigarette holder dangling from scarlet orifice. She motions us in with remnant grace.

We deposit overcoats and bags in a tucked-in wardrobe and negotiate a red-lit passageway into a bar. It’s crowded. The patrons, slumped in upholstered armchairs and facing round glass-tops, are catered to by bow-tied waiters. These take their orders, serve them, replace the overspilling ashtrays, collect the checks, and smile profusely at the favored clients.

Eli shoves me towards a giant curtain.

“Cent-six” – he sounds awed – “One hundred and six. This is the address and the name of this establishment. The bar is merely cover. You could call it a hundred and five.” – he tsks and snickers gruffly, his hand engirdling Madeleine’s waist. Her eyes are distant now, her hair atypically disheveled. Skimpy clothes askew, her chalky body flares into the haze.

Eli rams his tailor’s dummy toward the draped partition. He lets her pass and follows. I join them in a musky, clouded room. The light is dim, the cubicle immersed in droning chatter. Eli directs attention to the furthest corner: “She comes here every day. She must consume a bucketful of sperm.”

A woman’s head is bobbing in a virile loin, with one hand she is kneading his erupting masculinity, the other rubs another’s member. Right next to them, a female self-impales on hoary groin. Eli drives Madeleine to the center, disrobes and strips her of her vestments with rapid sleight of hand.

She stands there, nude voluptuousness, uneasy feet and fisted palms, her eyes occluded. She breathes tortuously. Eli fondles her breasts and passes a lustful hand between her legs. Others approach and taste her hesitatingly. Five minutes later, she vanishes under a pack of males, tree branch obscured by bee hives. Only her toes are visible, bouncing, contracting, flexed and still, fanned and convergent. Men rise, wiping off semen and others take their steamy place. Men on her breasts, men on her limbs, men in her orifices.A tall, dark woman invites me to a party. I decline, she shrugs and proposes to another. I fall asleep.

Eli stirs me awake.

“Let’s go home” – he croaks. He rubs a pair of bloodshot eyes between two fingers.

“Where is Madeleine?” – I cover my mouth to arrest the morning odors.

“She is gone” – says Eli, ireful – “She went home and so should we. Come on.”

It is a lengthy, silent stride to our hotel. Eli stops by the reception desk, as though awaiting someone.

Back in the room, he asks:

“How did you know about her father? He really mounted her when she was young.”

“I didn’t know. It sometimes happens. I can’t control it.”

Eli regards me skeptically and plunges to the bed, fully-attired. He rests his head on interlocking hands and canvasses the slanted ceiling. Then he turns on his side and begs:

“Please read my palm.”

“Stop it, Eli. I am exhausted. It’s been a long day. Anyhow I am bluffing, it’s a charade, a con, a trick. You of all people should know that.”

“Please divine my future” – Eli pleads, alarmed – “I have a feeling something real bad is going to happen soon.”

I hold his massive palm in mine and study the sooty definite creeks that cross and intersect.

“You are losing your wife these very days” – I pronounce, almost inaudibly – “You are in Paris and she is no longer yours back home.”

“What did you say, speak up, I am telling you!” – Eli panics.

“You are losing Zehava, OK? Now will you let me be?” – I shrill and keep grumbling – “You have already lost her, she is no longer yours”, until I drop off.

I wake into the cadaverous silence of an early afternoon. Madeleine is on the phone:

“Samuel” – her voice is as imperious and decisive as ever – “Eli departed in the morning. Went back to Israel. Some kind of family emergency, he said.”

I wait.

“I ask you to leave this hotel.” – she carries on – “You owe me nothing, you don’t have to pay. I will settle the accounts with Eli when he is back. I simply want you out of here this instant.”

Sleep-drunk, exuding tar and alcohol, I petition her:

“Where will I go?”

“There’s a small inn on the Left Bank. I reserved a room for you, it’s cheap.”

She hangs up on me.I am in the midst of hurried packing when Eli calls:

“Shmuel” – his voice is crackling static, dim, and foreign – “Zehava has someone. She wants a divorce and to take the kids. I feel like a boatman who has lost his oars, the bitch. I go to Paris to make a living, to create a business for our future, and she whores around…”

I gently place the sizzling receiver on the bed and drag my book-laden suitcase to the corridor and then, thunderously, down the spiral staircase.

—————————————————————————————————

Author Bio:
Sam Vaknin ( {Link2}http://samvak.tripod.com{/Link} ) is the author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain – How the West Lost the East.
He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory Bellaonline, and Suite101.

Sam’s Web Site: {Link1}http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com{/Link}

The Out Kid

von Sam Vaknin (Copyright)

Sima was six years old when she died. Mother turned off the television and instructed me to go to my grandma’s home at once. It was that time of day between retiring sunlight and emerging gloom. My grandmother was sobbing silently, seated gingerly on a shabby couch, her face buried in an oversized and crumpled handkerchief. My grandpa, muted, just hugged her close. It all reminded me of a Passover Eve, refreshments strewn on tables, hastily appended by my uncles and covered with flowery rags.

All lights were on, tarring the wiry tree in the garden with juddering shadows. I sat in the corner, thinking about Sima, wondering if her beauty survived her death. They said she had leukemia and vomited blood incessantly. She died, awash with it, her pallid face depressed against my grandpa’s shoulder. I pondered if it was right to go on loving her. I thought about Uzi, her brother and my cousin.

After the funeral, Uzi was sent to a Kibbutz, never to return, leaving behind unfinished cowboy-and-Indian games on my grandmother’s verandah. There were so many things I had to tell him but he was gone.

A few months later, my aunt invited me to join her to visit the Kibbutz. In her youth, she was a green-eyed, lithe beauty – cascading, raven hair and my mother’s cheekbones, but gentler. She divorced still young and then Sima died on her and she found employment in Haifa, in a hospice for the terminally ill.

She was a recluse, living in a tiny, viewless flat which she compulsively scoured and polished. She spared her words and I was deterred by these and other eccentricities. But I wanted to see Uzi again and talk to him, as we used to. I imagined his full-cheeked laughter and the sparkle in his eyes, under his curls.

So, I said I’ll come along and found myself, one summer morning, accompanying my aunt to the Kibbutz, a winding, dusty way. We switched countless buses and sipped orange juice through straws and my aunt tilted her wide-brimmed hat to expose a lock of graying hair. Her eyes were moist. She said: “I am going to see my Uzi now. It’s been so long.” The sun invaded her fedora, imprisoning her quavering lips behind a beaming grid.

I wanted to enquire why did she send Uzi to the Kibbutz to start with and tell her how I missed his smile, our games, the bucket loads of water he would pour on me after we bathed in the nearby sea. But I refrained because her eyes went metal when she mentioned him. She never even mentioned Sima.

So, there we were, standing at the gate, she and I and our gear, all packed in fading plastic bags at our feet, enshrouded by the black vapor of the shimmering asphalt and the roaring and receding bus. My aunt, contemplating the waning transport, grabbed my sweaty palm and lifted the rustling shopping bags. A whiskered driver of a tractor regarded us with curiosity, then guided us to our destination.

My aunt clenched a childish fist to tap the door, but left it hanging in mid-air awhile. Then, she let it drop, an alien appendage. She removed her hat, clinging to it awkwardly, straightened the wrinkles in her dress and gazed at her flat patent shoes uncomfortably. She knocked on the outer screen rigidly and the sounds reverberated in the house like distant thunder.

The door was opened so instantly that we recoiled. My aunt stared at the middle-aged woman and returned her barely audible “hello”. It was as though her body shrunk. She undulated with her baggage eagerly. The older woman’s lips were smiling at my aunt, but her eyes remained on guard.

She told me to look for Uzi in the animal corner, close to the mountain, among the cowsheds and cages. She needs to talk to my aunt in private, she ventured unnecessarily.She softly shut the door behind me and I stood, dazed by the scorching sun. Barefoot and well-tanned kids, clad in shorts and T-shirts, surrounded and studied me and I reciprocated. I froze and they did not get closer. We formed two groups and measured one another.

A bird-like girl broke the spell: “Are you a new Out Kid?”

I didn’t know what was an Out Kid. I told her that I was Uzi’s cousin and that I am searching for him.

She gave a toothy smile, crossed the invisible barrier and held my trembling hand: “Let’s go”. She examined me, astounded, when I withdrew and violently extracted myself from her grasp.

We silently traversed some green-hedged paths. Brown signs with massive yellow lettering were everywhere. She navigated deftly among the gravel and the fences until we reached a bank of crates, laid on the sun-parched ground and hosting rabbits. Their wheezy, ribbed breathing nearly unstitched their fur.

Uzi was standing there, his back to us. He leaned his head on an extended arm, supported by the cage’s frame, perusing a frightened rodent, whose nostrils twitched with desperation.

I called out: Uzi! He turned around listlessly and looked at me, as though unsure of my identity. My guide hopped from one dainty foot to another, her discomfiture increasing. Finally she departed and joined the growing bunch of children that monitored us from afar.

“It is a porcupine” – said Uzi, his eyes averted. “I tend to it and to the entire animal corner. We have sheep and horses, too” – he hugged the circumference with a bronzed gesticulation. “I climb the mountain daily with my father” – he added. I kept silent. His real father deserted him when he toddler.

Uzi grew quiet, too. He kicked a pile of dry manure and asked me if I want to see the cows and I said I did and off we went. It was like in the olden days, when he and Sima and myself strolled down the white-hot pavements. She had an auburn mane she locked into a ponytail, her mother’s eyes, green tarns, a swan’s own neck. She made us laugh at the unexpected femininity of her most childish enquiries.

Then and there, with Uzi by my side, it was as nothing happened, a midsummer’s nightmare, when you wake, perspiring, but in a familiar bed.

We talked profusely and laughed and I inevitably dived into some straw-infested fertilizer and didn’t mind at all because Uzi was with me to pour large bucketfuls of glacial water he carried from a nearby stream. I closed my eyes and pretended to be at sea, to have brought along the spraying waves and the caressing breeze, a gift to Uzi, and a reminder.

The native kids just followed us, their eyes azure, their skins a seamless copper. They tracked our movements with naked, strapping bodies and clean-smelling hair. They clung to us and giggled secretly and pointed at Uzi and whispered in each other’s elfin ears, and then they chuckled.

Uzi said not a word. He passed a soothing hand on a horse’s muzzle and a cow’s leg and the pulsating furs of bunnies. He gently pulled their elongated ears and they scurried to and fro and made him laugh. He had a gurgling, erupting laughter, Uzi had.We climbed a thorny, stone-filled road atop a hill, pausing to look at the vanishing Kibbutz at our feet. “There’s my home” – Uzi singled out a cubicle. I wasn’t sure which one he meant, but I did not insist. I only looked at the hazy greenery and at the gleaming swimming pool and said: “Let’s go down, I am worn out.”

The children awaited our descent and cried at Uzi, who ignored them. He only hastened his steps and so did I. They followed us. Surrounded, stranded on a tiny path, we stopped. They shoved Uzi and pulled.

“Who is he?” – they demanded – “Why did he come here? Where is he from?”

He frowned and said: “It’s no one special. He just came with my mother from over there” – with a vague gesture to indicate the nowhere.

The girl fixed me with her gaze.

“It’s nothing, it’s no one! He is only here for a visit, I am telling
you!” – Uzi pleaded.

“He must return where he came from” – said one of them, his eye a cold blue sparkle. His jaws rippled as he spoke, skin smooth and dry. My shirt was dabbed in sweat and hung, keeled over, from my thick, long trousers. “Let him go back” – echoed the girl – “We cannot have another one of you. Isn’t it enough that you gorge on our food and have new parents?”

Uzi was soundless, his head lowered. I couldn’t look into his eyes like we used to do when we were sad. Sima and I had this game of who would be the first to stare down the other with an invincible, metallic look. Deep inside, I thought, this must be how Uzi sees them – as enemies to be stared down and out and away.

One kid approached and tugged him at the shoulder and Uzi stooped. It was as if a valve was drawn, the air let out, to render a misshapen Uzi. Another child stepped forcefully on Uzi’s earth-baked, sweat-furrowed toes. His breath mingled with his quarry’s as he increased the pressure. Uzi’s face contorted but he didn’t budge.

Jaded and starved they left and we proceeded to Uzi’s new abode, amidst the well-trimmed lawns and neck-high hedges. He knocked hesitantly and someone let us in. Uzi erupted in bitter sobbing, beating his sides with pale-clenched fists. He stood there, squealing and grunting, like the animals in his corner and the muffled sounds filled the house and washed over the bowl of fruits and the heavy, murky curtains, and the antique wooden furniture, rebounding, a thousand echoes.

My aunt called his name. His new parents entered the kitchenette and sealed the sliding door. I had nowhere else to be. “I brought you some food” – said the mother and he nodded bravely and brushed aside the tears that threatened to emerge. She opened the overflowing plastic bags with learned helplessness, displaying pastries she prepared at home.

But Uzi selected a mid-size orange and peeled it expertly, stuffing his mouth as he progressed. The orphaned pies adorned the table that stood between them. They both avoided looking at each other. Still with diverted eyes she extended an uncertain hand and touched his shoulder. He shrank under her stroke, so she withdrew and sat up, tense, straddling the edge of a recliner.

Thus, they circled one another wearyingly. A longcase clock ticked minutes and then hours before my aunt got up, mauling her wide-brimmed hat, and said: “I must be going now” and Uzi nodded, devouring yet another orange. He didn’t even rise to bid farewell.”I’ll come to visit you” – she promised but her pledge sounded tinny and rehearsed. Uzi consumed the fruit and stared intently at the floor. His mother took my soiled palm in hers and exited the house. No one escorted us to the gate or to the grimy station. We stood there, in the sweltering sun, until we heard the bus, uproarious, like echoes of a far-off battle.

—————————————————————————————————

Author Bio:
Sam Vaknin ( {Link2}http://samvak.tripod.com{/Link} ) is the author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain – How the West Lost the East.
He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory Bellaonline, and Suite101.

Sam’s Web Site: {Link1}http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com{/Link}

Write Me a Letter

von Sam Vaknin (Copyright)

He looks at me with his single surviving eye and pleads: “Write me a letter”.

I smile and remove the women’s magazine from his hands. Under “Singles Ads” it says:

“165/33, feminine, rebellious, striking, looking for a man for serious relationship, Postal Box Office”.

“Write me a letter” – he repeats and his lonely eye gleams.

“Soon, I am going to get my second, more beautiful one” – he adds apologetically.

We are in a residential caravan in a prison camp, whiling the time away. I am waiting for my inevitable, unnerving, early release and he is looking forward to that feminine, rebellious who will discern in his solitary eye that which he craves to witness in both hers.

I acquiesce and write to her, the mysterious stranger. My writing is calligraphic and Maurice convinces me that it, alone, should make the prospect meet him.

And when she does, it will all be different. He will demonstrate to her that there’s a soul concealed in his awkward flesh and how his lonesome eye grasps colors and sun and light and shadows. Lots of shadows.

At night, he wakes, perspiring, stifling whimpering, panicky sounds, like beavers struggling to emerge, consuming his insides, driving the torture wheel called Maurice. He rises from his nightmare and shuffles to the slimy toilettes on the remainder of his leg. When he is back, face rinsed, he looks around, alarmed, climbs laboriously into the upper bunk, and tries to
sleep.

But the sirens of that particular patrol car haunt him with red-blue flashes in the desiccated socket of his long-gone eye. He can’t erase the gunfire sounds, the streaking bullets that carved his flesh with long, brown scars. The raining glass that gouged his eye erupts anew.

“I lost my eye in the showers” – he nags the dwindling numbers of his unwilling interlocutors. They heard it all before – the tale of Maurice and his magnificent porcelain ball that cost him 5000 New Israeli shekels.

“I was scared, so I pretended to be violent, so they became afraid of me. Everyone knew that I am not to be messed with!”

Maurice recounts to me his prime: replete with eye, a serviceable leg, and human form.

Now he frequents only hookers. He calls them “escort girls”. They have been escorting him a long time now and he is a heaving cyclopedia of their addresses, official prices, negotiating tactics, and final offers. “Half an hour” – he lectures me – “and you can come but once. So you better masturbate before. But you can still strike a bargain with them even if it happens.”

He finds them pretty. As far as he is concerned, they are all attractive and stunning and he keeps wondering aloud why they ended up in bed with him. He relishes his good fortune and frequents their cubicles and sweaty cots. “In Haifa, some of them do it for 50 shekels!” – he gasps incredulously.

Maurice does not neglect his physical exercises.

“Am I triangular?” – he demands to know, swerving on his healthy limb, a dented nakedness, we are in the showers, avoiding effluence.I study him closely. He has a well-developed torso, like a miniature Schwarzenegger. He is trilateral both front and back. His shoulders a triangle, imposed on squarish chest and powerful hands. I tell him so. But Maurice seeks second and third opinions. He circles the muddy pathways of the camp for hours, only a towel to his loins, and pesters every passerby. They all confirm my observations.

“Your stomach is repulsive” – he tells me earnestly – “Stop eating so much. Work out!”

I give him the letter I composed and he ponders it gravely. Then he folds it carefully and withdraws an envelope from his peeling iron dresser.

“Write me the address, too” – he says – “It must be the same hand.”

I do so obediently. He inserts the letter in the envelope and licks it. Thus opaque and sealed, he places it gingerly in a drawer.

It joins four identical epistles.

“Maurice, when will you send these letters?” – I demand.

“Soon” – he laughs – “I don’t have stamps. Every time I go on detail I forget to buy them. Tomorrow I will remember. Tomorrow I will dispatch them and you will write me more. One of them will surely answer. Something will come out of it.”

I suggest to him to address some his missives to the beauties on the TV soaps. He sign up to my charade enthusiastically and insists: “Write, write me a letter to them” – he doubles up in laughter.

Maurice carries in a moldy plastic bag a few fading and creased photographs of himself before. He is surrounded with minimally-attired knockout adolescent girls. These may be the “escorts”. He confesses to wedding three of them and to fathering a brood.

I notice a sad-eyed kid, sprawled on a sofa, gaping at the camera. It’s unmistakable: a tiny Maurice. You also can’t misjudge the expression in Maurice’s single, dewy, eyeball.

But Maurice the Cyclops never cries. His vising headaches merely reduce him to reclining on his rusty metal bed, turning his back to us, pretending to be slumbering. His shoulders quaver, yet we never dare approach him.

“All my women betrayed me.” – he tells me every morning, awakened by the screaming wardens. I wonder what he dreams of that makes him reiterate so often.

“The minute I entered the pen, they strayed with another. That’s why I divorced them, all three.” – he elaborates.

Maurice places little trust in women. They hurt him so. “But they are so beautiful!” – he utters wistfully, as he measures a new pair of jeans he bought in his last vacation. They are too loose. I tell him. He spends the remainder of the evening refitting them and adding holes and buckles to his belts.

“How is it now?” – he anxiously enquires of no one in particular.

“Much better, Maurice” – I reassure him.

At night, when no one sees, he changes the soggy patch covering his missing eye. It’s nothing but a gauze and two adhesive bandages, plastered directly over the shriveled, murky hole that’s left of the glistening, jocular eye in Maurice’s photos.He is ashamed and doesn’t want to nauseate us. Maurice has a developed aesthetic sense. He still remembers beauty and wants it in his life. But all he has right now is a dehydrated wrinkle above a hollow abyss in his skull. It’s where he used to gaze at beauty from. But now it’s dark. Only the muscles that surround it still react to absence. He mocks himself self-deprecatingly. There’s nothing else to do without an eye, a leg, one’s looks.

Maurice is suing the police. In his mind he has won and is already divvying up the reparations. He is going to buy a flat, a car, and then a girl. She is bound to adore him and they will live in happiness and wealth and many children and Maurice will grow with them. “This is my second childhood” – he hums along with a hit song on the radio. In such times, Maurice is no longer in jail but in the hereafter, in a world of warm and loving families.

“I spent fourteen years inside” – he confides – “My father says I am lucky to have been shot. Maybe this way I will settle down. Maybe I will have enough money not to work and only raise my children.”

The offspring he has already had are held back by his women. The same females who do not visit him and force him to stagger on the steep hills of Haifa just to see his kids for an instant and give them gifts. Maurice saves all his meager pay and uses it to buy his children presents and himself more clothes.

“Some girls make advances in the cab on the way back to jail” – he brags – “I tell them that I am doing time for burglaries and this turns them on. When I returned from my last vacation I met one girl, she fell for me, she asked me to sit next to her, she twisted her face like this” – Maurice demonstrates a yielding, kiss-ready, feminine mouth.

He can’t believe his luck: “she is so beautiful” – he moans longingly. He thinks this can’t be true, something must be wrong with the girl, that this may be a trap. She must be married – he freaks. “We are so miserable” – he sighs – “The minute we cross the gate, they go looking for someone else.”

Maurice yearns for the olden days, ten years ago, when a woman was a woman and he was a proper man with eyes to look dames over and legs to chase them. Maurice isn’t good at expressing pain. He prefers to measure shirts or to ask me to write him letters.

That evening, when I come back from the detail, I find Maurice parked on his bunk, his ailing leg impossibly extended, weighed down by a bulky orthopedic shoe. He avoids me, dejected. And then:

“Vaknin” – he calls – “Come here, Vaknin”.

I go and sit by him. At his request, I tie his laces: one cross, one over, and a butterfly. He shuts his eyes while people fuss around him. And now, the humiliation and the embarrassment – both mine and his. The intimate togetherness, a man, shoelaces, man, at dusk, a drafty room, in prison. The closest two can get – sometimes more than carnal. A kind of love.

“Vaknin, thank you” – he says, inspecting my endeavors critically – “Vaknin, what shall I do if someone answers my letters? What will happen then? I am afraid to post them, not to get a response. I only have a socket. My beautiful eye hasn’t arrived yet. I am crippled, crippled …”

Maurice breaks into a sob and I move closer and hug him and nestle him and wait for him to calm down.But he does not. He is devoured by weeping. He crumbles in my arms, the tears engulfing both his eyes, ungluing the adhesive bandages and loosening the gauze. It falls. His triangular rib cage trembles, his inert leg twitches, and his absent eye, and all his offspring that are strewn across the city weep through him and the long years and his father, who is happy he was shot and the wall, the only witness to the anguished nights of Maurice.

And I weep with him. I, too, weep with him. Together.

—————————————————————————————————

Author Bio:
Sam Vaknin ( {Link2}http://samvak.tripod.com{/Link} ) is the author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain – How the West Lost the East.
He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory Bellaonline, and Suite101.

Sam’s Web Site: {Link1}http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com{/Link}

Northanger Abbey

von Jane Austen (Copyright)

ADVERTISEMENT BY THE AUTHORESS, TO NORTHANGER ABBEY

THIS little work was finished in the year 1803, and intended for immediate publication. It was disposed of to a bookseller, it was even advertised, and why the business proceeded no farther, the author has never been able to learn. That any bookseller should think it worth-while to purchase what he did not think it worth-while to publish seems extraordinary. But with this, neither the author nor the public have any other concern than as some observation is necessary upon those parts of the work which thirteen years have made comparatively obsolete. The public are entreated to bear in mind that thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes.

CHAPTER 1

No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard–and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable independence besides two good livings–and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on–lived to have six children more–to see them growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself. A family of ten children will be always called a fine family, where there are heads and arms and legs enough for the number; but the Morlands had little other right to the word, for they were in general very plain, and Catherine, for many years of her life, as plain as any. She had a thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong features–so much for her person; and not less unpropiteous for heroism seemed her mind. She was fond of all boy’s plays, and greatly preferred cricket not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush. Indeed she had no taste for a garden; and if she gathered flowers at all, it was chiefly for the pleasure of mischief–at least so it was conjectured from her always preferring those which she was forbidden to take. Such were her propensities–her abilities were quite as extraordinary. She never could learn or understand anything before she was taught; and sometimes not even then, for she was often inattentive, and occasionally stupid. Her mother was three months in teaching her only to repeat the “Beggar’s Petition”; and after all, her next sister, Sally, could say it better than she did. Not that Catherine was always stupid–by no means; she learnt the fable of “The Hare and Many Friends” as quickly as any girl in England. Her mother wished her to learn music; and Catherine was sure she should like it, for she was very fond of tinkling the keys of the old forlorn spinner; so, at eight years old she began. She learnt a year, and could not bear it; and Mrs. Morland, who did not insist on her daughters being accomplished in spite of incapacity or distaste, allowed her to leave off. The day which dismissed the music-master was one of the happiest of Catherine’s life. Her taste for drawing was not superior; though whenever she could obtain the outside of a letter from her mother or seize upon any other odd piece of paper, she did what she could in that way, by drawing houses and trees, hens and chickens, all very much like one another. Writing and accounts she was taught by her father; French by her mother: her proficiency in either was not remarkable, and she shirked her lessons in both whenever she could. What a strange, unaccountable character!–for with all these symptoms of profligacy at ten years old, she had neither a bad heart nor a bad temper, was seldom stubborn, scarcely ever quarrelsome, and very kind to the little ones, with few interruptions of tyranny; she was moreover noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house. Such was Catherine Morland at ten. At fifteen, appearances were mending; she began to curl her hair and long for balls; her complexion improved, her features were softened by plumpness and colour, her eyes gained more animation, and her figure more consequence. Her love of dirt gave way to an inclination for finery, and she grew clean as she grew smart; she had now the pleasure of sometimes hearing her father and mother remark on her personal improvement. “Catherine grows quite a good-looking girl–she is almost pretty today,” were words which caught her ears now and then; and how welcome were the sounds! To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.

Mrs. Morland was a very good woman, and wished to see her children everything they ought to be; but her time was so much occupied in lying-in and teaching the little ones, that her elder daughters were inevitably left to shift for themselves; and it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, baseball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books–or at least books of information–for, provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all. But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine; she read all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives.

From Pope, she learnt to censure those who “bear about the mockery of woe.”

From Gray, that “Many a flower is born to blush unseen, “And waste its fragrance on the desert air.”

From Thompson, that –”It is a delightful task “To teach the young idea how to shoot.”

And from Shakespeare she gained a great store of information– amongst the rest, that –”Trifles light as air, “Are, to the jealous, confirmation strong, “As proofs of Holy Writ.”

That “The poor beetle, which we tread upon, “In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great “As when a giant dies.”

And that a young woman in love always looks –”like Patience on a monument “Smiling at Grief.”

So far her improvement was sufficient–and in many other points she came on exceedingly well; for though she could not write sonnets, she brought herself to read them; and though there seemed no chance of her throwing a whole party into raptures by a prelude on the pianoforte, of her own composition, she could listen to other people’s performance with very little fatigue. Her greatest deficiency was in the pencil–she had no notion of drawing–not enough even to attempt a sketch of her lover’s profile, that she might be detected in the design. There she fell miserably short of the true heroic height. At present she did not know her own poverty, for she had no lover to portray. She had reached the age of seventeen, without having seen one amiable youth who could call forth her sensibility, without having inspired one real passion, and without having excited even any admiration but what was very moderate and very transient. This was strange indeed! But strange things may be generally accounted for if their cause be fairly searched out. There was not one lord in the neighbourhood; no–not even a baronet. There was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door–not one young man whose origin was unknown. Her father had no ward, and the squire of the parish no children.

But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.

Mr. Allen, who owned the chief of the property about Fullerton, the village in Wiltshire where the Morlands lived, was ordered to Bath for the benefit of a gouty constitution–and his lady, a good-humoured woman, fond of Miss Morland, and probably aware that if adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad, invited her to go with them. Mr. and Mrs. Morland were all compliance, and Catherine all happiness.

A Beheaded Cart

von Sam Vaknin (Copyright)

(In Hebrew, the word “Agala” means both cart and the feminine form of calf. A beheaded calf is among the sacrificial offerings enumerated in the Bible).

My grandfather, cradling an infant’s crib, departed. Navigating left and right, far along the pavement, he reached a concrete, round, post. There he rested, sheltered from the humid sun by peeling posters for lachrymose Turkish films. He pushed the crib outside the penumbral circle and waited.

Curious folks besieged the old man and his orphaned frame and then proceeded to buy from him the salted seeds and sweets that he lay, meticulously organized, inside the crib. My grandfather smiled at them through sea-blue eyes, as he wrapped the purchased sweetmeats in rustling brown paper bags.

My embarrassed uncles built for him a creaking wooden cart from remaindered construction materials. They painted it green and mounted it on large, thin-tyred, wheels borrowed from an ancient pram. They attached to it a partitioned table-top confiscated from the greengrocer down the lane. Every morning, forehead wrinkled, my grandfather would fill the wooden compartments with various snacks and trinkets, at pains to separate them neatly. Black sunflower seeds, white pumpkin seeds, the salted and the sweet, tiny plastic toys bursting with candies, whistles, and rattles.

Still, he never gave up his crib, installing it on top of his squeaking vehicle, and filling it to its tattered brim with a rainbow of offerings. At night, he stowed it under the cart, locking it behind its two crumbling doors, among the unsold merchandise.

With sunrise, my grandfather would exit the house and head towards the miniature plot of garden adjoining it. He would cross the patch, stepping carefully on a pebbled path in its midst. Then, sighing but never stooping, he would drive his green trolley – a tall and stout and handsome man, fair-skinned and sapphire-eyed. “A movie star” – they gasped behind his back. Day in and day out, he impelled his rickety pushcart to its concrete post, there dispensing to the children with a smile, a permanence till dusk. With sunset, he gathered his few goods, bolted the fledgling flaps, and pushed back home, a few steps away.

When he grew old, he added to his burden a stool with an attached umbrella, to shield him from the elements, and a greenish nylon sheet to protect his wares. He became a fixture in this town of my birth. His lime cart turned into a meeting spot – “by Pardo”, they would say, secure in the knowledge that he would always be there, erect and gracious. Like two forces of nature, my grandpa and the concrete post – older than the fading movie posters – watched the town transformed, roads asphalted, children turn adults, bringing their off-spring to buy from him a stick of bitter black chewing gum.

Lone by his cart, he bid the dead farewell and greeted the newborn, himself aging and bending. Creases sprouted in his face, around his dimming sights, and in his white and delicate hands.

My grandfather had one love: my grandmother. A ravishing, proud, raven-haired woman. A framed retouched photo of her hung, imposing, on one of the walls. In it she stood, defiant, leaning on a carved pillar in a faraway place. This is how he must have seen her at first: a mysterious, sad-eyed disparity between dark and fair. Thus he fell in love and made her his only world.

This woman sat by his side, adjacent to his azure pushcart, day in and day out. She said nothing and he remained mute. They just stared with vacuous eyes, perhaps away, perhaps inside, perhaps back, to previous abodes in bustling cities.At first, she seemed to like being his sidekick, confidently doling confectionery to toddlers, whose mothers remained forever infants in her memory. Intermittently, she laid a shriveled hand on his venous knee, leaving it there for a split, fluttering, second, conveying warmth and withdrawing as unobtrusively. It was enough to restore him to his full stature. But then, the municipal workers came and pasted funereal announcements onto his concrete pole and the magic was all but gone.

My grandma withered, dilapidated by this onerous existence. Eveningtime, she would get up and carry her stool afore, clenched in two twiggy hands, tediously dragging her reluctant self on the long march home. My grandfather observed her, his eyes a moist, eroding guilt. His disintegrating pushcart, the rain-drenched figure of his loved one, the whizzing torment of the desert winds, the sound of the crackling paper bags in her arthritic palms -hey all conspired to deny him his erstwhile memory of her.

Each morning, my grandfather woke up to study this ageless image as he glided over her translucent skin, high-arching cheeks, and sleep-fluttery eyelashes. He fended off the intrusions of the world as he smoothed the covers and tucked her figure in. Then, he would get up and make her breakfast, arranging ceremoniously her medicines in multicolored plastic containers on the tray.

But my grandma rejected his sunup pleas. She wouldn’t go on living. One silent morning, she clung to her sheets and wouldn’t rise and accompany him. That day, gray and defeated, my grandpa ploughed the pavement with his barrow, unfolded a worn deck chair, and sank in, awaiting my grandmother’s reappearance.

When she did not materialize, he left his post much earlier than usual. He emptied the compartments duteously, packed the unsold goods in large canvas sacks, tidying them away behind the two bottom doors of his cart. He then unfurled a polyester sheet above it and sailed home, shoving and cajoling his screeching and scraping workstation.

My grandma was in bed, as he had left her, ensconced in blankets, a suicidal tortoise, glaring at the ceiling as it bled in aqueous abstracts. My grandfather parked his rusting, faded, wagon and climbed home. His wife awoke with startled whimpers, tears streaming silently down her creviced face, tearing his heart with the iron grip of festering love. He hugged her and showered her with panicky little kisses.

She froze and fortified her berth with pillows piled high, staring at him through narrow cracks of oozing sanity.

One day, my grandpa, returning in the evening, left his cart outside, uncharacteristically. He entered and, for a few minutes, he and my grandmother just watched each other wearily. He extended a calloused hand and she dreamily stood up and escorted him to their porch, which overlooked the weed-grown garden.

My grandfather draped her shoulders with a knitted woolen shawl. He tightened it, and then, her shivering hand in his, he sat his love among some cushions he prepared. She glanced aimlessly at a guava tree that shot among the trail of graveled stones. My grandfather contemplated her awhile and then, with sudden resoluteness, left.

Seconds later he reappeared among the shrubs, saluted her with a sledgehammer he held tenuously with both hands. She strained her face, attentive, consuming his image, like a flower would the sun, or the blind do the sounds.Gasping and panting, my grandpa heaved the pushcart to the center of the plot. With repeated, furious, blows, he dislocated its wheels and doors. Reduced to splintered wood and twisted metal, he cocooned it in the nylon throw and left it, devastated by the trees.

Sitting beside, they watched the setting sun diffracted from the green-hued sculpture in the garden. A smile budded in my grandma’s honeyed eyes and spread into my grandfather’s deep blue gaze.

The cart stood there for years, disintegrating inexorably beneath its blackening shield. Its wheels, now rooted in the soil, it sank into the mildewed ground, another, peculiarly shaped sapling. My grandpa never adjusted the synthetic sheet that swathed it, nor did he dig out the burgeoning wheels.

My grandpa was visiting a pharmacy, replenishing her medications, when my grandma died. With the dignity of the indigent, he never bargained, never raised his voice. Packed in small, white, paper bags, he rushed the doses to his wife, limping and winded.

This time the house was shuttered doors and windows. My grandma wouldn’t respond to his increasingly desperate entreaties. He flung himself against the entrance and found her sprawled on the floor, her bloodied mouth ajar. As she fell, she must have hit her head against the corner of a table. She was baking my grandfather his favorite pastries.

Her eyes were shut. My grandpa knew she died. He placed her remedies on the floured and oiled table and changed into his best attire. Kneeling beside her, he gently wiped clean my grandma’s hands and mouth and head and clothed her in her outdoors coat.

His business done, he lay besides her and, hugging her frail remains, he shut his eyes.

My uncles and aunts found them, lying like that, embraced.

My grandparents’ tiny home was government property and was reclaimed. The sanitary engineers, revolted, removed from the garden the worm-infested, rotting relic and the putrid sheet concealing it.

The next day, it was hauled by sturdy garbage collectors into a truck and, with assorted other junk, incinerated.

—————————————————————————————————

Author Bio:
Sam Vaknin ( {Link2}http://samvak.tripod.com{/Link} ) is the author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain – How the West Lost the East.
He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory Bellaonline, and Suite101.

Sam’s Web Site: {Link1}http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com{/Link}

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