The Female Riddle Mixed With a Hurculean Task

by Erin Jourdan

I sit at the computer. I am obsessed with the space between my thoughts. Between the last letter and the first of the next. Empty space, but even nothing is always something. Nothing may be more than something. Whirling past, a phoneme, morphine, a molecule. I take another snort of the hot pink powder, the label on the plastic baggy says Pink Peregrine—it makes me feel sparkly and opalescent. It is brighter than cotton candy, but not as good as the lime green Alaskan Thunderfuck, which I am saving for later. The powder is silty and granular like fine sand. It sits in my nose and travels down the back of my throat, slowly tickling and making me gag. My dog, Fifi the poodle, comes over and licks what is left on the mirror. Fifi goes over and stares intently out of the third floor window. She thinks she is the watchdog of the block, keeping the birds in check, the homeless, the pedestrians and the other dogs she can smell from stories above.

The drugs have become part of my every day life, just as I dream and fall into my subconscious at night. I am inhabited by powders setting free memory and fantasy. There is the strength of the Presa Canario, the Double Agents that are myself and yet another, the Chupacabra that rises out of the murkiness of the city and thrills me with its exotic urban legend. On the thin streets of New York, the few dark back alleys of Chinatown, little Italy, Alphabet City, there are vendors opening their dark overcoats and inside there might be shiny gold fake watches, but instead there are thin baggies and packets of rainbow colors, each named by some sort of Wizard of Oz, a pharmacological genius who has unlocked the mother lode of the brain, the ability to choose feelings, images, so strange yet so real and in front of you, thin as membrane, a vast catalogue of desire.

My head is static, on top of my body, but my mind is traveling out the window, where Fifi sits regally watching, patterns of woolly white clouds sheared into her fur. I go through the atmosphere, stratosphere, cumulous, homunculus. I live on the corner of Bleecker and Tenth, which is a blind intersection. When I turn the corner I hold my breath because there is no way to know what is on the other side, beyond the squat brick tenement and Moroccan knick knack store, full of dusty rugs and crooked pottery. He is on the other side of the corner and I turn and run into him.

            Fuck him, I think. He is one of many people running through the city like ants---right, left, right. He is not unique. I snort another line, this is a brilliant blue ciel. This is the color of the ceiling at Grand Central Station. It flickers with constellations, the big dipper; a centaur shooting an arrow of light across the sky.

A Secret Path mixed with Slip Back Into Your Role

Through the window of my apartment I look up at the sky, it is like a cinema screen and notice that this time he starts at my back. He bites my spine and spanks me, the sting permeates my groin. I am stretched across his lap. I am Bastat, the queen of the holy Egyptian cats, black and sinewy with golden eyes. I kiss him with my slender tongue, it is rough like sandpaper. He is a centaur, the face of man and the body of a horse. He is wearing a silver breastplate with ornate medallions. He has on a large metal helmet with red plumage jutting out of the top. He has the penis of a horse. I have the breasts of a cat. He has the face of a man. I have the face of a Goddess. He is a warrior. I am an immortal. I want to scratch him. He wants to mount me.

Perhaps I have been waiting to run into him. I miss his body, because I never held his heart. New York City is a strange mezzanine; a cavernous soul that I believe has intention. Out of a million intersections, a million blind turns I ran into him. I narrow my eyes and glance up, slightly sideways, stroking my left arm almost absentmindedly, but with clear purpose. I don’t have a plan, there isn’t a statistical analysis of what will happen, but I do have my innate, subconscious need to act, I have my ability to go on autopilot and feel a small breeze float down Bleecker street and blow his hair a bit to the left and then that same breeze touches me, caressing my shoulder much more sweetly than he ever did.

My ex-lover picked Café Rossi and I immediately know it is not repetition. This is a new café. Not one of the ones that we used to hang out in before we parted. This is not a whirlwind tour through the past. This is not nostalgia for an ex-lover. But this is the start of something new, the creation of a new memory to file in the category: sex, possible love, marriage, children, friendship, hatred.

I sit at the café across from my ex-lover. He still looks magnetic, but I am not quite sure what I want to have happen. I take a bottle out of my purse, clear plastic with a white label, and take two oval tablets of The Female Riddle. It makes me feel alluring, mysterious, and a little obscure. It feels like I have a really good secret I am not going to tell him. It takes me a moment to remember to stare at my hands, that by looking at them I will remember it is a dream, that I need to make this moment lucid, and remember the pills, the encapsulated thoughts and symbols of my interaction that will give me a clue. I go back through old mixtures we used to take before making love. Great Expectations mixed with Kleptophobia. Pegasus mixed with Medusa. Smoke and Mirrors mixed with The Prodigy. Bite the Bullet mixed with Valhalla. But no matter how many different potions we tried, it was The Female Riddle mixed with Herculean Task that always felt like truth, like a nail through my heart.

I did not want to believe that our combination said something about our relationship, but it did. But in my world, symbols speak for themselves. He was a man looking to do the impossible and I was a woman looking to be an unsolvable game. He looked to lift the heaviest weight, to clean the stables with brute force. I wanted to be an enigma---fascinating and unknowable, to be pinned down for only a moment before I morph into another that must be puzzled over.

It is his serenity that loops me back. He is always very much in control of himself. You seem well. You look great! Heard about the promotion. Yeah, it is a new haircut. Think it’s too short? Oh no, it makes your eyes look more piercing. He pours another glass of bubbling mineral water. He looks so healthy, as if he has been taking the right vitamins, sun, and fresh air. I wish I could be as solid as him. I feel pale, translucent in comparison, he is growing opaque and hard to read and I think of the one place I miss. The space between his shoulder blades. Where wings would start to sprout if he was another type of creature. It is smooth and then there is a jut of bone connecting the shoulder. It is a small, almost secret indentation, softer than the rest of him. If wings were to sprout would they be fire-red like an archangel?

1oo Percent Perfect Girl mixed with a Backhanded Gesture

I enter the house on top of 18^th Street through a side door. It is Halloween and I met him at a party in the city. I am dressed as a flame, sparkling shirt, crimson fishnets, skirt sewed with facsimiles of orange, yellow and fiery red flames. My red wig sits crooked on my head as I proceeded to drink my way through the night. I meet the devil standing in line for the bathroom. Blonde hair, blue eyes and huge ruby feathered wings sticking out from his back. Horns grow from his temples. His nails are painted black as cloves. He follows me into the bathroom and says, I want to taste you. He stares at me ardently, big blue eyes translucent with a hint of smoke, brimstone, mechante. I ask, Boy, have you ever tasted fire? Aren’t you afraid to burn your sweet mouth? He says he loves the taste of chilies and cinnamon. I sit on the porcelain basin and he pulls up my skirt, ripping a hole in my fishnets to let himself in.

It has been about eight months since we suddenly quit calling each other. It seemed mutual, but then we ran into each other on Bleecker and Tenth. A swarthy, hot day that lifts you off the street and I just glide with the sunlight on my face. We flirted on the street corner and seemed to be in our own little module, each recounting old times, where we have been. We eye each other. His smile is so sly, I think he may care more. I think of my promotion and the review of my book and think that I have moved on more. He looks tan and relaxed, he has never been without a roster of other lovers. I had decided not to see anyone for a while after we ended our affair, it took me a while to process the whirlwind. I am sure many have touched him, and I see invisible hands, a procession of female ghosts following him around, rose petals tossed in his path out of baskets. I do not want to be one of them. But still, my mind races, how many people have seen the port wine mark on his left buttock? The one that looks like Rasputin. The one that when I would touch it my fingers would burn.

Limelight Ambition mixed with A Fling With the Wolf

Out the window of my apartment the sky grows cloudy and the sky has an overcast hue, I see the film flicker, numbers in a bull’s-eye as the tape forwards. My lips brush his beard and he smells of war. Last night he made love to me in his shack in the country, not far from Baba Yaga’s house built on chicken legs. He had found me on a chaotic street corner in St. Petersburg, crumpled on the cobbled street. He marches past me until he hears my mutterings in French, it was my delicate accent that made him stop. Or perhaps it was a waft of my violette perfume. Are you lost, shvibzik, little imp? Shouldn’t you be in the castle with your sisters and brother having tea? This is probably the first time dear Anastasia’s precious little feet have touched the ground. Let me help you, he says, with a steely glint in wolf yellow eyes. He picks me up like a sack of potatoes and puts me on his shoulder. He stands nine feet tall, and his hair against my face is wiry and coarse. A rope holds up his trousers and his boots are caked with mud. I grow frightened when I glance at his face and see the gashes, red and purple like cabbage. He is damp from dragging himself off the barren coast of the Neva River where he was left to die. Grigori, known as The Debauched One, throws me like a saddle over his horse and we ride off into the crisp Russian night.

After eating his buttered roll, he pulls out a bottle of pills. He takes two square tabs labeled Lake Placid, with a swig of water and asks if I would like one but I decline, it has never been one of my favorites. He seems to be made of granite moments later, his muscles stiffen and he becomes angular. Conversation begins to falter, and I tell him I have to go to the powder room, and laugh at myself. In the gold gilt stall I do a few lines of the best lime-green powder off my makeup compact. I shake my head back and forth and wait for the feeling to settle in much different than the pink. Do I care what he thinks of me? I shake my head some more, hoping the anxiety will be overtaken and fade away. The words pound in my head, loud and tunneling. Why didn’t he love me?

Coming out of the stall I notice a woman scrawling some graffiti above the toilet. She had been sitting at a table across the room and I had felt her eyes on me intermittently throughout lunch. She is balanced on tiptoe leaning against the porcelain sink. She writes, “This space intentionally left blank” in a black scrawl with thick magic marker above the mirrors. I think she has the same obsession that I do, about the space between thoughts.

The woman sees me staring at her. I am curious, backwards in the mirror. She turns and looks straight at me, her eyes feel so sharp on mine that I blink. She has a slick, black bobbed haircut like a 20s flapper and a very thin nose, like a line drawing. She stares at me and asks, “Is that Alaskan Thunderfuck?” I smile and nod, not realizing it has such a distinct odor. “I can smell it from a mile away.” She says with a glisten in her eye. She turns to the mirror and applies a thick coat of raspberry colored lip-gloss. I should probably offer her some but then there won’t be enough for Fifi when I get home.  Fifi just absolutely loves Alaskan Thunderfuck. “Well, see you around.” I say and make a dash for the door. Before I can open the door the woman grabs a hold of the sleeve of my coat jacket, the fabric is balled up in her fist. She hands me a card with her name and phone number. I look at the card and in bold block letters it says:

Sarah Tonnen

Molecular Pharmacology and Dream Interpretation

By appointment only.

339-6666

Letting go of my jacket she runs her bony hand across my shoulder, “You can find happiness in the thoughts between the spaces.”

“Ok, I’ll try my best.” I say, and walk out of the bathroom, confused yet somewhat vindicated, pocketing the card to take a look at later. Sarah Tonnen sits down at a booth across the room from me and my ex-lover. This is what she sees from across the room.

A Hideout mixed with The Queen on Hearts

Sarah sees the both of us together, strangers at a table, and thinks we are extremely mismatched in an almost amusing way. I am a scribble or a tangled piece of yarn and he is an elegant cursive, full of inky flourishes and broad strokes. She returns to her meal at her table, hoping I will call her. I stare at my hands. They are pale, beginning to wrinkle a little bit as I age. I need to remember to call Sarah, I know she has some sort of key as to my happiness. I try to make the moment lucid, I try to gain control of the moment but my mind spins and I am back at the table with my ex-lover and the meaning has disappeared and there is nothing to give me solace. Just an empty hole that seems to be the exact size of a pill, a gelatin caplet, a tablet filled with compressed powder and hope.

At the table I am pushing my food around my plate. Sarah doubts I ever spent time looking for my lover’s Achilles Heel. She thinks I am too self-involved to have stayed up hours after he fell asleep scouring his body for a sign. Even if I did find the soft space between his shoulder blades, she doubts I would of used this knowledge to my advantage.  Sarah thinks I never would of worked up the courage to massage that sweet spot and press on it like an acupuncture pressure point. She believes I would have been afraid of the torrent it might produce, that I wasn’t ready to make him mine. Sarah is an explorer and knows that men make very interesting terrain.  She sees the skin of men as a virgin territory of sweetness: untouched by crèmes, lotions, panaceas.

My ex-lover describes a dream he had recently. He starts out calmly, as if none of it really bothered him. He leans forward across the checked tablecloth.

“I have been walking for days, with only a scroll in my hand. I am afraid to open the scroll but know that if I don’t I will never receive my instructions and be given a reason for why I am wandering aimlessly. Finally I come upon a river.”

“Do you know which one?” I ask. Sometimes rivers are good signs.

“No. I don’t know, or at least cannot remember. I decide to sleep by the edge of the river. The bank is on a slope and I wake up that night many times fearing that I am going to fall into the river and drown. But still I don’t move.”

“Sounds like anxiety.” I add, it is somewhat pleasurable to hear him feel discomfort, that perhaps somewhere he feels like I do.

“Perhaps, it is. I wake up in the middle of the night and my scroll has fallen into the water. I am completely bereft; it is the only thing I own. I wade out into the strong current to catch it before it floats downstream. I flail in the water and try to catch it. I know I might die and may not be strong enough to fight the water for the scroll. When I do finally retrieve it from the water the ink is smudged. It is almost impossible to read, but it says, ‘your heart has a blind spot.’”

“What does that mean to you?” I ask.

“I think it is about having the strength to be true to your heart.” He answers, and shrugs his shoulders. “Or to be aware of my heart.”

“I was never quite sure you had one.” I said.

“It’s there, you just never found it.” He gives me a crooked fox smile.

“Maybe I wasn’t looking for it.”

Rewind.  I dare myself to press play. Documentary this time, not fantasy. Gritty high-eight, crackles and bumps on the screen, shaky hand-held camerawork. This reality is in black box, not pan and scan, the black border around the image feels like a tunnel.

He arrives a half hour late and does not apologize. I was growing anxious and sitting at the bar, flirting with the young bartender. I imagine my self-respect drifting out of your body like little streams of sand. He arrives and comes up behind me, placing his hands around my waist, and I see his face in the mirror behind the bar. Cocky. Slightly distracted. He holds me like he owns me. I am angry at myself for letting him hold me like an object. Even though I pull away he grabs me harder. Let’s go, he says, and puts ten dollars on the bar.

My apartment is right around the corner. He smacks my ass on the way up the stairwell and I know my neighbors can hear my high-pitched giggle. Fright mixed with lust and anger. Anger mixed with love mixed with dependence. Dependence mixed with sadness and loneliness. When we get inside I offer him a drink. I know that he needs the drink to have sex with me, otherwise he would be too tense. He drinks fast and long and pushes me onto the bed. He takes his hand and pins my neck to the mattress. I am in a vise. I am completely there in that moment, on that bed, in the room, on my sheets, held down. I come the minute he enters me, and soon its over.

He lays on top of me for a few minutes, still inside. It is my favorite part, being weighted down. There is no question—I am solid inside my body. His cock comes out and he goes to the bathroom. I lay there alone, on my bed, in the quiet apartment and wait for him to come back. He never touches the bed again, after sex. He put his pants and shirt on a few feet away. “I know you have a lot of work to do,” he says, putting on his shoes as I lay there on the bed. I don’t look at him and pretend to be sated and unwilling to notice him packing up so quickly to leave. He kisses me on the mouth, fast swooping down, “see you later, sweetie.” I roll over, away from the door, trying not to make a big deal, trying to keep my mouth shut and my eyes closed. Trying to imagine that there was something more beautiful, open, and shared.

At the café I tell him about how I have started to write in a journal again.

“Why did you quit the first time?” He asks.

“I found that I was lying to myself in my journal.”

“Editing the truth?”

“Yes, and bending facts, and sugarcoating situations and my reactions.”

“Were you afraid someone was going to see it?”

“Yes, and I think that person was me.”

Messiah Complex mixed with A Trapdoor

It is intermission. It is the space between your thoughts. It is a fast-forward through a fantasy. It was intentionally left blank until now and it starts again, colors and patterns swirling on the screen, turning into narrative, desire and lucidity. This is the Technicolor of a Hollywood musical, without the saccharine sweetness. He starts at your feet, the white thin arch like a swan’s neck. He kisses you there and his lips are broad and moist, alternating between a slip of tongue and a subtle gesture of top and bottom lip. He massages your calves like he is trying to divine your viscera. As if a big knot of muscle could be touched away and dissolved, turned into something more beautiful, open, shared. He admires your toenails; each painted a bright shade of azalea, each toe topped with a petal.

As he moves up my inner thigh, with a wealth of tongue, a flux of kisses, a hand floats so slightly from its place on my calf, he smells on my thighs a slight scent of jasmine. It wafts past kneecaps, thick as a swarm of bees. I look at him, eyes half closed; he is a mosaic. He is shards of color, black, red, pearly white, shifting in a kaleidoscope, changing patterns as his head moves, a secret message moving towards me. He is the tap of a machine speaking in Morse Code, hard, soft, hard hard, soft. I take off my wig. Sprigs of fire red hair fall to the ground. I shake my head to let the tresses loose and he moves forward.

My hands are above my head, and my body grows long. He licks the zenith, fast and moist placing his tongue inside you. He finds the wishbone. I beg for him to make his wish. He snaps it quickly, knowing his luck that I am his. His hands cup planets. My hair swirls in a galaxy on the sheets. He considers swallowing me whole, like a god swallowing his children.   He thinks about me as firm meat in his mouth. He thinks about how I are nourishing, obese with life, white and luminous space filled with possibility. Moving past my stomach, the open canvas of it, ready to be drawn on, finger-painted, touched, he licks moons, soft and round on his tongue, he tastes empty space.

He is between my legs, slowly nuzzling, enjoying the soft space of downy hair and treacle. He is wide and hard and you think it reminds you of a bar of chocolate. It is like a milky way, beginning to melt at the tip, a fine cocoa spreading my legs. I feel the warmth and curiousity. I feel a grain of sand inside. I need him to fuck that grain of sand, to find it and push it inside so that it can grow to rock, to earth, to meteor, to planet.

He teases my lips, slowly caressing the slick lips, wet and sweet as you come towards him. I thrust but he remains at my lips, slowly caressing with the soft tip. He kisses me and his tongue goes deep into my porcelain skin, my rosy pink mouth. I smell his hair and think of a strange potion. I cannot remember the name. He moves, conquering the land inside me, strong brushstrokes pull me, make me know, I see the picture take form.

My body caves, high tide comes in and fills me. All of the places, long exposed and dry since the tide went out returns in a crash, rivulets of salty water seeking their place. I contract and feel it in my stomach, my muscles hard as a sheet of granite, I harden, holding onto a rock in full tide, the waves threatening to send me to sea, the undertow is coming now.

The truth is that it is wrong, vastly wrong, to be embarrassed about your body, about your desires. About your thoughts. About hunger. About the way your eyes roll into the back of your head when you have an orgasm, like a shark about to take down prey. Writing about it does not implicate me. Reading about it does not implicate you. Acknowledging it does not make it more powerful. Does it?

My ex-lover continues. “How do you know you are not still lying in your journal?”

“I don’t think I could ever know. I am just making more of an attempt to allow myself fantasy.” I finger the card in my pocket that was given to me in the bathroom. “I think the attempt is the worthwhile act. Whether I am successful or not is inconsequential.”

He says, “You know what the one thing is I just could never figure out about you?” He waves away the waiter trying to grind pepper onto his pristine salad, “We were involved for almost a year and you never once asked me for anything.”

I am not sure what he is talking about. I feel Sarah’s eyes on me. She seems to be reading our lips from across the room, I get a maternal feeling, a protection being offered to me. She seems to be a guardian of my happiness, nudging me on.

“You never asked for a foot rub, an outing to the countryside. You never asked for a kind word, even a gesture.” When he first met me, he defined me as hot. Fuckable. Later I was expendable. Not good enough. Unable to find the trap door. Too big to fit through the crawl space. Big eyes, soft skin, liquid boiling heart. His secrets are not trusted with me. Here we are, at lunch, Café Rossi in broad daylight, and he says these words. The words sit inside, hiding in the space between thoughts, the fantasies that tie my consciousness together. To ask for something is to venture receiving the wrong thing.

“I tried to get you to open up, to share your desires with me.” He put a taste of bitter greens in his mouth. “How many times did I ask you?” He peers over his right eye, leaning in, knowing the answer. He wants to hear it, he wants it to be demanded. He had a way of getting his eyes to gleam with possibility, light blue turned smoky gray. He wants me to demand his love, in this place, a table by the window at Café Rossi, in unretouched broad daylight.

 “I suppose I don’t want anything that I have to ask sweetly for, that isn’t given out of desire and a purity of intention.” I respond.

“You are getting too old to sit on your laurels and expect someone to come along and magically read your mind.” He knows I will be thirty in August, but even though I don’t look much older there is a different air. There is a smudge of tiredness around my eyes.

“How long do you think I can play the ingénue?” I ask. I know I don’t have any desire to play the ingénue; I don’t want to be the big-eyed innocent anymore. I want to be able to demand what I want from someone who has the ability to give.

“Depends. There aren’t a lot of good roles out there for aging actresses, you know.” He takes a roll and splits it in half, placing a crease of butter on one side. “Maybe you should create a new one for yourself.”

“How do you suppose I do that?” I am curious to hear what he thinks I should do, who he thinks I am and can become.

“I don’t know, I’m not a therapist. Maybe you should get a self-help book.”

He sees my eyes turn black as midnight and he looks me straight in the face. “You know I’m not evil, don’t you?” The plates are cleared away and the table is scraped for crumbs.

“There are many things I will never know for sure.” I answer, and smile.

The bill comes and I wonder who should pay it. He is the man. We have had sex but it is over. We don’t owe each other anything. He opens his wallet and slaps down a square of plastic. I sit with my hands folded in my lap like a churchgoer. I think I am close to the end. I wonder how you deal with the unconventional. I wonder if you will ever know me, if you could know what I feel when I turn into a bad photograph of myself. I would get the film back and be blurred, in mid-motion, frozen like one should not be until dead. I am out of focus, inanimate and two-dimensional. I do not look like myself. I am an inkblot, a Rorschach, a bit of grease on the sidewalk in the shape of a woman. I watch him take another bottle of pills out of his vest pocket. It is brown and cloudy and has a label that says, Disappearance. He takes two with what is left of the water from my glass and does not offer me any.

Solve et Coagula

The sky outside grows dark and a summer storm is on it way, and I think that New York City appears so constructed, it seems odd that it has weather.  A trailer is played on the sky for movies coming to a theatre near you. Don’t smoke. Don’t speak. Don’t be a nuisance. Sit still and enjoy the show. The credits and opening sequence fade away and I am a succubus, a female demon born of a million orgasms. I am Lust and I come to him at night and find him alone, deep in a trance, swaddled in downy sheets. He is naked and taut, a sweet look of sleep masks his face. The room is warm and the steam radiator whistles like a teakettle set to boil. I know what I want. He does not know what he is getting. I take his sleep filled cock in my talons and move, up and down, placing my mouth around him. My mouth is a cavern of pleasure, built to excite so that I can take the currency of lust that is mine, the form of payment for a succubus. Full and broad I mount him, and let his cock move in and out, he sweats but does not wake. His lids quake with dreams of being touched by a phantasm, ethereal pleasure he is unable to touch. He grinds into me, phantom movement. I take what is mine and leave in a whisp of steam out the open window. He awakes to the sound of his own voice, a scream.

Sarah Tonnen exits stage left.

            My ex-lover looks at his watch.

            I search for my purse under my chair and smooth my hair.

            Bus boys clear the table and refill our water glasses.

            Neither of us takes a sip.

            One question replaces another.

            Why didn’t he love me becomes why didn’t I love him?

            I stare at my hands and I know why.

Some people are only full when you dream into them.

He signs the credit card slip and in the tray that the bill came in is a Baci chocolate. Putting the hazelnut mound in my mouth I read the fortune tale of love printed on the wrapper. It says, “The worst nostalgia is for something that never happened.”

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