Susan eased the tinted window of her 2023 Ford Explorer SUV down slowly for effect. She wanted the officer to enjoy the full impact of her face, her eyes, her hair, her neck and just the hint of cleavage showing through a lacy, charcoal-gray bra. She wanted him to take it all in very slowly – like catnip – one sprig at a time.
“No transit allowed without a minimum of two passengers,” the officer said flatly, his eyes lingering unofficially over the gray lace.
“Officer, please. I’m already late. I’ve got to be on the other side in fifteen minutes.”
“Sorry, lady. No exceptions,” his voice snapped back to attention, taking his eyes with it. He then waved her quite officially out of the lane and back onto Tillary Street for access to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Her canary-yellow vehicle had just become another errant cow; and he, a horseless cowboy with a herd to move.
“But where? How?”
“Triboro Bridge. Closest access point for Manhattan-bound, single-passenger vehicles at this hour.”
“The Triboro? But that’s miles from where I need to be. I’ll never get there in time.”
“Move it, lady. Or park it and wait until ten o’clock. Nobody goes over with less than two passengers before ten.”
Susan had erred. Not once, but twice. She’d misjudged in not taking the subway or a taxi. Now she’d blundered a second time in assuming she could negotiate her way across the bridge during High Occupancy Vehicle-only hours. Two miscalculations on a day she could ill afford to make any mistake at all. She absolutely had to be at Temple Street in twenty-five minutes, or her prospect would likely walk. No wiggle room. No margin of error for log-jams or traffic bottlenecks of any kind. Her prospect didn’t know her, had never met her face to face, had not yet given her the chance to implicate herself and her cleavage in his mind. Her prospect had simply designated a meeting time and place by telephone. If she failed to appear at exactly nine o’clock, her prospect would walk. They always did.
Susan felt a single bead of perspiration drop from her armpit into the seam of her dress. ‘Oh, God, now that!’ she thought. She squeezed her arm against her chest wall like an ink blotter. She glanced down at her dress to see if the single bead of perspiration had left a mark. Instinctively, she lowered her head and sniffed. Good. No stain, no odor. She glanced at her watch. Twenty-three minutes to nine. A bit of chaff formed at the corner of her mouth, and she snatched it away between two fingers. ‘Jesus,’ she thought, ‘get a grip, girl.’
The officer stood in front of her vehicle, hands on hips. She wasn’t moving out of her lane fast enough to please him, and the line of cars forming behind her own was turning sullen. No one dared honk – not with a cop standing by. But the subtle revving of a car engine was an acceptable way to chide one recalcitrant cow without also running the risk of offending a cop. Several now began to turn up the RPMs in unison.
Just as Susan was about to swing out and away from the bridge, the image of a young man entered her peripheral vision. He was apparently headed towards the pedestrian walkway in the direction of Manhattan. His pace was neither random nor hasty. Susan first noticed the predominance of black leather. And that his shoes badly needed a shine. She didn’t particularly like black leather on men, but it was a question of fashion, not an instinctive dislike. She really needed more time to observe and to think. But the officer was waving her on, and the cars behind hers were getting downright restless.
“Excuse me?” Susan shouted over the roar of car engines behind her as she lowered her driver’s side window. The young man didn’t turn his head in any particular direction, yet he appeared to register her shout as a signal to him and him alone.
“Over here,” she yelled louder. This time, he turned his head directly towards her vehicle. She leaned her own head out the window at a coy angle and let her hair cascade across the door handle. Then, without reflection: “Going my way?”
Susan immediately realized her error, but there it was, already out and said. Too late to retract or rephrase it. The young man squinted at her, but otherwise remained expressionless.
“S’pose it depends which way you’re going.”
Susan didn’t know whether this was an attempt to be witty, or just stupid. She decided to ignore the gambit.
“Look, I’ve got to get across this bridge and into Manhattan in twenty minutes. They won’t let me across unless there are two of us in the car. Can I interest you in a ride to the other side?”
This time, just the slightest smile formed on the young man’s lips.
“To the other side? You mean, to the wild side?”
The line of cars behind Susan’s was edging up on her rear bumper. The revving was becoming an angry bovine chorus. The police officer rapped his knuckles against the hood of her vehicle and indicated the direction in which he wished her to move now. A bead of perspiration fell from Susan’s other armpit. She glanced at her wristwatch. It was 8:40 a.m.
“C’mon, guy, I can’t afford to quibble. If you’re interested, jump in.”
In spite of her best efforts to remain calm and in command, he detected an edginess creeping into her voice. He liked that. He also noted the familiar ‘guy’ – not exactly a word that fit well in this woman’s mouth. A woman already of a certain age, he thought, and likely just a certain age for fun.
“Well, now. Maybe if you ask me very nicely," he smirked. He toyed with her as he might have toyed with an older sister – if he’d ever had one – laying down a bit of sexual undertone in order to bring into bolder relief the clash of cymbals of an opposite-sex sibling rivalry.
At that moment, the officer abruptly pulled a memo book out of his hip pocket and marched up to the driver’s window.
“OK, lady. Enough’s enough. I gave you a chance. Now you can discuss it on your lunch hour with the judge.”
Susan put on her most contrite face.
“Officer, I’m sorry. This young man and I were just agreeing to share a ride over the bridge.”
The cop looked the young man up and down. “All right. Then let’s get a move on.” He put the memo book back in his hip pocket and pounded the hood of Susan’s SUV as if to prompt it forward. Susan – exasperated – but with no more time or room to negotiate, turned her full attention to the young man.
“Please. Pretty please. With a cherry on top.”
The young man smiled and skipped around to the rider’s side of the SUV. He put his hand on the front door handle and attempted to open the door, found it locked. Susan hastily looked for the universal power lock and threw it, but by that time he had already moved to the back door, which he opened and entered.
“No, no, I didn’t mean that you should sit in the back. I just didn’t realize.” Susan attempted.
“No problem,” the young man answered. I like it here just fine.” He signaled to her with a flick of his wrist and forefinger. “Drive on.”
Susan felt slightly nettled at his quip. But with time running out, she settled for irony. “Certainly, sir.”
They drove straight on in silence. She caught just the hint of cologne – Aramis, or something – she wasn’t quite sure – and cracked her window. Traffic was heavy, bumper-to-bumper, and the going was slow. She glanced at her wristwatch: 8:45 a.m.
She felt a nervous tingle rise up in her from no place in particular, then noticed that both of her armpits had grown warm and damp. Still, she could detect no odor as she bent her head down to sniff first one and then the other. Her deodorant was clearly doing its job even on overdrive. Or maybe it was just the Aramis doing double duty.
When she looked up again, she glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the young man smiling oddly at the back of her head. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You smell just fine back here.”
Susan began to feel something vaguely unsettling, as if there were some other bad smell she could not identify or get rid of, and which insisted upon muddling her other five senses. At the same time, the young man had started to hum and softly mouth the words over and over to a song she registered as something out of a far-distant past, absurdly out of season, and which now grated upon her nerves like the sound of a steel circular file being forced to expand a round hole:
“I’m dreaming of a w-h-i-t-e Christmas, just like the ones I used to k-n-o-w.”
She settled upon talk as a means to clear the air and kill the tune. “You live in Brooklyn, work in Manhattan?” she asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Walk to work and back every day over the bridge?”
“Walk on the wild side.”
She ignored the comment. “Nice. Must be a good stress-reliever at the end of the day. Always the Manhattan Bridge, or sometimes the Brooklyn Bridge?”
“Yeah. Stress-reliever,” he chuckled. “Nothing to relieve stress like a walk over the bridge.” He didn’t offer any further information about his preferred bridge of transit.
“It sure beats driving.”
“Then why do you drive?”
The young man had a way of saying things that seemed to put Susan off balance. She felt as if as if his questions and answers were uneven cobblestones in a street she was trying to walk in high heels. And yet, she wasn’t sure whether it was really intention on his part, or simply a matter of social awkwardness.
“These windows are cool. I guess you can see out, but they can’t see in, right?” he asked.
Speaking of windows, finally a window of opportunity to get the conversation back on a lighter track, Susan thought, and she threw this one wide open. “Yeah,” she said. “Exactly that. Sometimes I make faces at people as I drive by, and they have no idea. It’s a game I play by myself when I’m bored or lonely.”
“Like one-way mirrors, right? The kind they have in casinos on the ceiling and probably in lots of motel rooms. The guy at the front desk takes your money and gives you your room key. Then he smiles politely, wishes you a most pleasant and restful evening, and goes around back to a false wall. On the other side of this wall, he’s got a one-way mirror looking directly over your bed or into your shower stall.”
The slightly unsettled feeling Susan had remarked earlier was now giving way to queasiness. “I don’t know. I guess I never really thought about it.” Looking for a way to detour the conversation, she had stumbled, giving the young man just enough of an opening to squirm through.
“Never thought about it? By the way, do you play with yourself only when you’re bored or lonely, or other times, too?”
The queasiness of seconds earlier now became vertigo. Susan fixed her gaze on the rear bumper of the car in front of her so as not to let her eyes catch sight of the drop to the water of the East River far below. Beads of perspiration under both arms were becoming rivulets. For the first time that morning, she could smell herself. She glanced at her watch, but failed to register the hour. She studied the speedometer, and noted that the needle lurched only occasionally from zero to five as her foot danced back and forth from gas to brake pedal. She looked out her driver’s-side window and across at the Brooklyn Bridge, then re-focused on the Statue of Liberty beyond. Like a satellite GPS triangulating between three points, her brain quickly calculated that she was not yet even halfway across the Manhattan Bridge.
She looked again at her watch: 8:48 a.m. She’d never get across this bridge and onto Canal Street in twelve minutes unless there were a sudden change in the flow of traffic. She was going to miss her appointment, miss her sale, maybe even lose her job. She’d have to give up the SUV, give up her apartment in the Heights, move out to Bensonhurst or Grave’s End, for God’s sake, or to some nameless corner of Queens. She’d be shunned by her friends, disowned by her family. Only her pet iguana would agree, begrudgingly, to stay with her. And now she had this creep to deal with.
Why, goddamn it, hadn’t she taken the subway or a taxi this morning? Why? Because an SUV, like a Rolex or an American Express Platinum card or maybe even just a Cross pen if you can’t afford a Mont Blanc makes a success statement to a prospect. This, the sum-total wit and wisdom of her Sales Manager.
She heard a clicking sound and realized that the young man was playing with the child’s lock on the door directly behind her, trying to pry it open with something hard and metallic that kept slipping out of the locking mechanism. She couldn’t see the metallic object in the young man’s hand however much she angled her head to look through the rearview mirror. She reached out to and rotated the automatic side mirror adjustment mechanism in an attempt to see the young man and his metallic mystery thing. She realized that she could not see back in through the tinted windows, however, and promptly abandoned the effort.
In desperation: “The switch is up here. I’ll pop the lock if you like. You think you might have more luck walking?” she asked optimistically.
“Walk on the wild side, baby. Walk, walk. Wild, wild. Wild and weird, wonderful world, baby.” The young man’s tone became abruptly stentorian and reverberated throughout the confines of the SUV as if in a canyon. “Don’t touch a fucking thing! Just keep driving.”
Susan squealed – a rat staring down the headlights of an oncoming subway train. Once feeling unsettled, then queasy, finally vertiginous, she was now descending into delirium. Her SUV was moving forward in the center lane a yard or two at a time and directly behind a sanitation truck whose stench penetrated her vehicle’s air circulation system and so entered the SUV without possibility of exit. To either side, she felt squeezed in by a pair of dirty and rusting yellow school busses, a din emerging from within each that was matched in its ugliness only by the jeers of the schoolchildren as they pressed their faces up against the bus’s greasy fingerprinted windows and looked down upon the roof of her SUV. One of them spit on the sunroof, and Susan noted how the glob of spit stuck hard to the fiberglass. Behind her, and practically riding up on her rear bumper, was a cement truck. Although it was bright morning, the truck’s headlights were on highbeam, and they stared through the charcoal-tinted glass of her rear window like two angry electric eels.
Without warning of any kind, the young man reached up under her and released a lever so that the vertical half of her seat lost its brake and fell back into a semi-reclining position. With his other hand, he then took hold of a fistful of her hair, and pulled her head back hard against the head restraint. Her arms were now taut, and it was with her fingertips only that she was able to manage the steering wheel.
“Got children?” he asked.
“No.”
“Married?”
“No.”
“Got a boyfriend or a girlfriend, then?”
“Yes. Uh, uh, a boyfriend.”
“Then I guess that means you get horny, right? But stay tight. Horny and tight, everything right. That’s what little girls are made of.”
The young man plunged a blade into the leather top of the armrest between the two front seats. Susan now realized what the metallic object was that he’d been using to tease the rear child’s lock up and down. It was a stiletto with a retractable blade. The grip, seemingly of ivory, was the body of an absurdly buxom woman dressed in a kind of toga. Two transparent glass beads posed as nipples. She stood upright, her legs slightly apart, sandals peeking out from under the hem of her toga, each one resting on the twin quillons of the stiletto’s cross-guard. What Susan could not see was the trigger mechanism tucked up somewhere between the woman’s legs. What she could see quite clearly was the figurine’s ivory breasts and glass nipples, pointing directly up at her, the blade deep into the leather of the armrest.
In a panic, Susan reached out to unlock her door, but the mechanism didn’t respond. She now realized that the young man had jammed or broken the power lock system with his knife. They were both locked inside. Doors locked, windows up and locked. To all appearances, just a quiet gray beetle crawling forward in stops and starts somewhere on a bridge over a river, moving on over that river with the steel and glass canyons of lower Manhattan in the foreground and off to the left, a bright early winter sun reflecting hard back off of the same steel and glass, but whose rays were muted as they passed through the charcoal tint of the windshield of this quiet, gray, beetle crawling its way to the island of Manhattan.
As if by instinct, some ‘fight or flight’ kind of thing, she stretched her neck out and put her nose and mouth to the little bit of horizontal relief she’d facilitated moments earlier in an attempt to rid her SUV of the suffocating combination of Aramis, garbage, and her own disintegrating antiperspirant. It was like a last, desperate gulp of breath before the vortex sucked her down. Eddies of fear and repulsion pressed in from both sides as the unrelenting, deafening, blinding, blasting centripetal force claimed her, staked her, nailed her feet fast to the floorboards.
“Let’s see just how tight, how firm we are, whaddya say, doll?” As he pronounced the words ‘tight’ and ‘firm,’ he squeezed her hair tighter and pulled her head back harder against the head restraint.
Another sound involuntarily escaped from Susan’s throat, this one more like a gurgle. And then: “Please, Mister.”
He liked that. Addressing a man easily ten years her junior with "mister." He liked that a lot. The implied deference of it. And that she understood their respective positions.
“No, no, lady. Please is how you asked me to get into your car, remember? With the cherry on top? We’re already done with 'please'. Very soon, we’ll be moving on to 'Thank you, thank you'.”
“Look, I’ve got money. Not much. But I’ve also got an ATM card. We can find a machine just as soon as we get across the bridge.”
The young man let his eyes narrow into two wintry quarter moons. “Do I look poor to you? Do I look like I want your money? Do I look like I need your fucking money? ATM cards are for bankers and other losers. I don’t deal in plastic. No, what I want is your chips.”
Susan didn’t understand where he was going with this. Chips? What did he mean by chips? Was this some kind of code, or slang, or street talk she’d never heard before on the fine cobbled streets of Brooklyn Heights? Or was this his own private invention?
“My chips?”
“Yeah. Like in a casino. With one-way mirrors. Chips.”
Susan held on to the steering wheel with one set of fingertips, unbuckled her shoulder strap seat belt, and reached over to her purse with the other hand, both arms taut and splayed out like those of a sea star clinging hard to the face of a rock on which the surf is crashing, only the tube feet at the very tips of its arms released and allowed to explore other sources of nourishment and retreat. She snapped her purse open and began to rummage around inside, but she really had no idea what she was looking for or even what she was supposed to look for. In the meantime, the young man’s grip on her hair remained relentless, and she was beginning to feel the strain in her neck muscles.
“Here, let me make this easier for you.” He used the fingers of his free hand like a zipper to pop the buttons on the front of her dress from neckline to waist in one motion. The material fell back against her softly rounded, yet respectfully muscular shoulders, exposing her breasts inside of a lacy push-up bra. A silver St. Christopher’s medal danced briefly at the end of a chain and came to rest on the bridge of that bra.
“Nice set of chips,” the young man said nonchalantly.
Susan gasped. The world outside her SUV became like a glutinous, whirling soup in her brain. She no longer perceived the vehicles in front, behind, or to either side of hers as solid objects. Even the bridge and skyline began to melt and dissolve into one viscid mass. She was only vaguely aware that the young man’s hand had left her dress and moved to the stiletto, which he withdrew in one smooth motion from the leather armrest. That vague awareness turned to ion-charged recognition, however, when she saw the dagger directly before her eyes, the blade pointing indecently southward at her crotch. The young man cupped the ivory grip with four fingers while his gloved thumb massaged the figurine’s back. Susan grasped in the same instant that only action would divert this man from whatever scheme he had in mind for her. For both of them. Her eyes re-focused past the figurine to the dashboard, then to the windshield and to the vehicles surrounding her own. She could stomp on the gas pedal and smash into the car in front of her. Or she could hit the brake pedal without warning and hope that the car behind hers would slam into her rear.
Either way, she’d get the attention of someone outside, she hoped. Blindly, irrationally, against all of the evidence, against all of the history of this city in which screams of violation, degradation, of agony even, tended to get lost in the shuffle.
As if he could discern Susan’s intentions, the young man suddenly rotated the stiletto up to a horizontal position, and brought the tip of the blade directly to Susan’s bottom lip. “Don’t even think of parking here!” he hissed into her ear.
Susan’s plan was foiled. She wanted to crumple up in the seat and give herself over to childlike grief. But the young man continued to hold the tip of the stiletto against her lip, now trembling.
“Time to accept Jesus as your personal savior, little darlin’. Ya know, on second thought.” The young man smiled. “Move into the right-hand lane. Susan immediately dismissed the temptation to crumple. Here was a command to act. She understood commands. She understood action. She put her blinker on and gradually edged her SUV over to the right-hand lane, as ordered. She could clearly see the East River below. “Put the emergency lights on.” She complied. “In thirty seconds, you’re going to come to a complete stop and turn off the engine.” The young man began to count backwards from thirty. When he reached zero, Susan complied and turned off the engine. “Give me the keys.” She withdrew the key from the ignition and handed him her entire set of house-, work-, and car-keys.
The young man re-inserted the stiletto into the gash in the leather armrest. Susan strained out of the corner of her eye to see him take the key ring between thumb and forefinger, then raise his still gloved hand to his mouth. He grasped the lip of the glove with his teeth and pulled it back over the keys and off his hand, then took the leather ball of inside-out glove and keys and pushed it into the pocket of his jacket. His now ungloved hand reached out and withdrew the stiletto once again from the armrest. At a glance, Susan took in the long, spindly fingers like raven’s claws, nails bitten back almost to the quick, cuticles red and white and raw like fresh-cooked lobster meat.
“Now, let’s take that stroll on the wild side.”
Susan’s only plan of escape had just been dashed almost at the point of conception, and her mind was blank. She was entirely at his command. They both knew it. And the bile born of helplessness and fear rose up from her stomach and settled on the back of her tongue.
“For the love of fucking Christ, please don’t hurt me.”
“Don’t you listen?” he shouted at her. “I told you already: we’re already way past 'please'. If I hear it one more time, I may just have to excise it.” With this, he jerked the tip of the blade across her lower lip. Susan felt the sharp point, but it didn’t penetrate. No taste of blood.
“P-l-e-a-s-e-c-t-o-m-y,” he hissed again in her ear.
The young man removed his stiletto to a point six inches in front of Susan’s nose and positioned it on an imaginary vertical axis. At the same time, he reached up under the figurine’s robe with his pinky and pressed the trigger mechanism. The blade retracted with a snap. With his left hand, he continued his grip on Susan’s hair, but now gently pushed her head forward from the restraint. With the thumb and index finger of his right hand, he grasped the robed figurine by either side.
“Now, may I present Matilda?”
Susan stared at the figurine, but made no sound or motion.
“Be polite to Matilda, goddamn it, or she won’t be polite to you!”
Susan was entirely nonplused. “But what does she? Do you want me to do?”
“Be polite, I said. That means introductions all around. Be friendly. Offer her some libations.”
Susan inhaled deeply. “Hello, Matilda. My name is Susan. Can I offer you anything," she gulped, "to drink?”
Quite ironically and sing-song: “That was very good. Matilda is happy now.”
“And I’m – I’m happy, t-to know that Matilda is happy.
“Do you know Matilda’s favorite thing? I mean second favorite, really, after cutting and slashing and stabbing?
Susan tried in vain to suppress an involuntary whimper. At the same time, her eyes began to tear. “No, what is Matilda’s second favorite thing?”
“Matilda likes to go waltzing.” The young man snorted. “Yeah, really. Waltzing!”
Susan attempted a smile through her tears, “Waltzing Matilda.”
“But first things first. And right now, Matilda is thirsty.”
“Huh?”
“Be polite! Offer her something to drink!”
“But I don’t have anything to offer. Not here in the car.”
“You do! You do! You do! You have a milk-bar and dispensers.” The young man pointed with the figurine in the direction of Susan’s breasts.
The suggestion hit home, “Oh, my God!”
“Do it. Matilda wants to drink, goddamn it!”
In quiet surrender, Susan unsnapped her bra. Her breasts fell gently forward as she squeezed her eyes shut. A couple of tears fell from the corners of her eyes onto her torn dress, now darkly stained around the armpits. The young man thirstily moved the figurine towards pay-dirt. As he did so, however, he drew the tips of his fingers as far back as possible so that he was holding the piece almost exclusively by the folds of its ivory toga. Susan felt the hard contours of the figurine touch her skin. It was not cold, but rather warm – and clammy – as was, no doubt, the hand that had been cupping it for some time already. What particularly impressed her, however, was that none of the skin of that hand came into contact with her skin. He was touching her in a private place, but through the medium of a robed, female figurine, under whose ivory dress there lodged a single, carbide-tempered, stiletto blade. Neither the skin of his fingers nor the blade of the stiletto touched her; the only contact he sought was between her warm, soft human breasts and the warm, hard, somewhat clammy ivory breasts of the figurine.
The young man nestled the figurine in under one of her nipples and began to make slurping sounds. This pantomime continued for perhaps a minute, during which Susan’s mind began to turn as if on a potter’s wheel, drifting through a dense fog between successive scenes. She first saw herself as a child, holding her favorite doll up to her own flat chest to let it suckle. Next, she saw herself in early puberty, bending down and pushing just the sprout of a breast up to her own mouth to taste the sensation of lips on nipple. Next, she saw herself as a young teenager, her first boyfriend struggling clumsily to claim the prize of an early conquest. Next, her breasts now fully developed, prom night her senior year in high school.
The low cut of her gray, velvet dress held them for display, like two soft, milky-white mollusks peeking out over the mantle edge of their shells. The eyes of grown men –- of male teachers and of the dean and even of the school principal –- drawn to them very much against their responsible, paternal, adult will. (It was delicious, this power to attract older men; she suddenly had no use for her young date with his white carnations and Clearasil-covered acne.) Next, she heard her own among a chorus of girls’ giggles, her freshman year in college, an evening with a bong, two or three or four classmates – she didn’t really remember -– naked and silly and self-conscious lying in bed, nobody wanting to initiate, nobody wanting to terminate, and the strangely mixed sensation of others’ hard nipples against her own hard nipples, against her will, against their solid collective will, yet no one able or willing to defy the natural, sensuous pull of warm bodies mingling. Then she saw herself, the fully developed woman, with her fiancé, her breasts against his chest, both bodies heaving, both bodies lusting, both bodies searching for something beyond swells of fleshy pleasure and sufficiency.
The potter’s wheel was slowing down. In her inner ear, her mind’s ear, she thought she heard a click, a metallic swish and lock and then the sound of gears grinding to a halt. With eyes still tightly shut, she perceived just the slightest twinge of pain in one of her nipples.
She opened her eyes. The young man had released the stiletto blade and was now teasing her nipple with it.
“Oh, please. Don’t do that. Don’t hurt me. I’ll do whatever you like. Just tell me: Why? Why me?”
“Matilda’s happy now. Matilda wants to waltz.”
“How would Matilda like to waltz?” Each word dripped out a syllable at a time.
“Barefoot.”
“I don’t understand.”
And then it all came pouring out. “No shit, you don’t understand! None of you fucking-Yuppie-SUV-Roto Rooter-scumbags understand. This is pay-back, little darlin’. The rest of us out there? The ones you don’t see, because your fucking SUV big-ass driver’s seats are too far off the ground, your noses too far up in the air or up some other fucking-Yuppie-SUV-Roto Rooter-scumbag’s asshole to even take a glance. This is pay-back. Three cherries on the slot machine. I’m taking the whole bundle home with me. Then I’m gonna spread the wealth. Robin-fucking-Hood, they’ll call me.” Here, the young man paused and took a breath to regain his composure and his command. “But first, a little fun.”
“Then it is about money. Perhaps we can come to —- to some arrangement.”
“Oh, yeah. We can come all right, doll. But I don’t know about any arrangement. You’re not really in a position to arrange now, are you? I’m the composer here. I write the composition. You just feed me data. Oh, and by the way, feel free to come whenever the spirit moves.”
Susan deliberately ignored the implications of his last order. “What kind of data?”
“Well now, I think we’re getting the hang of this. A real feedback loop. Straight questions to straight orders. No detours by way of 'Please, Please, Please' or 'Help me, Help me, Help me'. You learn fast for a Yuppie bitch. Data? Like, for instance: Wha’d you lose on 9/11? Your cherry? No, I think we know that that little pop-tart had already been plucked a long ago. Money? ‘Doubt it. Probably made some the very same day. Quick little investment in a weapons-producing gig, something like that.”
“I don’t invest. I don’t make enough money to invest. I just sell real estate. Small parcels of land and buildings.”
His sympathy for this brief, self-serving defense lasted the space of two blinks. “But more to the point: Who’d you lose on 9/11, huh? Friends? Family? Not likely. Oh, yeah. There were a few hundred of your kind inside, weren’t there now? A few hundred who got the big, crocodile tears on CNN, and that their mugs still look out from the front pages of the Times like little orphan Annie’s. But fact is, most of the people who tried to get down and out the service entrance that day were nameless-fucking-robots. Back-office people. Greencard-less, working paper-less, minimum wage GEDers. And let’s not forget the few hundred coppers and fire jocks, stupid enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and not get the fuck out. All because some fucking white-collar maverick engineer had never considered – at least never thought to inform their sorry blue-collar asses – that when jet fuel ignites at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the stacks of paper begin to burn and burn and burn, everything – and I mean everything, little darlin’ – comes down. Sooner rather than later. And that you don’t send a bunch of dumb, obedient, cheerful, thrifty and kind, blue-collar yellow jackets, each carrying over eighty pounds of gear, up the fire escape to a blind, stupid, inhuman death so that you can then play out their heroes’ hand over the coming weeks and months to keep people from asking the harder, more embarrassing questions.”
“I’m sorry, truly sorry, about those people.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. I’ll even bet you have your very own souvenir surgical mask, right? Hangs right there on the wall with some newspaper clippings from the day after. Whaddya you call that, a montage or something? I’ll bet you got all weepy-eyed putting it together, hanging it on your bedroom wall. Got some votive candles burning in front, right? Your big boyfriend comes over, you have a nice little glass of Chardonnay while he looks over your artwork. You get naked, then have a little more Chardonnay while he looks over that artwork. And then you start getting all rabbit-like, him looking at you, the two of you looking at your montage. At the total fucking destruction. At melted steel girders and the spoiled meat products buried underneath.”
“That’s not me you’re talking about. Not me, or anyone I know.”
Susan for perhaps the first time in her life began to think outside of herself. “But, you? Did you lose anyone or anything? I mean, like someone close?”
“I lost a fucking dead-end job, that’s all. I lost my way back over the bridge. But then I got entrepreneurial. And I walk the bridge daily to remind myself. You know that word, I’ll bet, entrepreneurial. Or maybe you don’t. You sell real estate, right?”
“I’m happy for you. But then, why this?”
He sensed that she was getting a bit too cozy. “Okay, doll. This feedback loop has clearly crashed. You’re really a nosy bitch, you know? And boring. All I know, all you need to understand right now is that Matilda is running out of patience. Listen carefully and see if you get this now: Matilda likes to dance in her bare feet. She likes to feel the floor under her bare feet.”
“But your kni -- your Matilda is wearing sandals. Ivory sandals. How can she dance in her bare feet?”
“Bare feet, bare floor. It makes no difference to Matilda. She just likes it bare. Naked. You with me now?”
Susan’s understanding of the young man’s off-ramp way of thinking had gained exponentially in the twenty minutes they’d spent together in her vehicle. Soon, she realized, they would require no further words to complete the transaction of command and obey. Her only wish now was to remain alive and, if at all possible, unharmed.
Her vehicle was still at a standstill. The emergency lights blinked on and off. Other vehicles behind hers moved quietly around to the lane directly to her left and passed by, not one of them stopping to offer assistance. Faces appeared through half-open windows. Glared. Searched briefly for information or entertainment. Found none. Stared dumbly or cursed at the reflecting glass for the bottleneck her SUV had become, and moved on.
Susan leaned forward, reached up first to one shoulder, then to the other, and pushed her dress down to her waist. Her bra fell to her lap. Several buttons sprang out, hit the dashboard, and bounced back to the floor. As she reached the juncture of waist and hip, just an inch below her navel, she hesitated and slowly turned her head in the young man’s direction.
“Bare floor,” he stopped her pivot short. “Those are the rules. Barefoot or bare floor.”
Susan turned back towards the windshield and stared straight ahead into unfocused emptiness. She hooked her thumbs inside her dress and pantyhose as she kicked off one shoe, then pushed the other off with the toes of her now shoeless foot. Using her feet for leverage, she pushed her hips up and off the driver’s seat and slid her dress and pantyhose down over her thighs, her knees, her ankles, and let them drop off. She continued to stare straight ahead, awaiting the young man’s next order.
Holding the stiletto in a vertical position, the young man moved it from one breast to the other, then very slowly down towards Susan’s crotch. He inserted the point just inside the elastic waistband of her panties, pulled them out to expose her pubic triangle, and held the elastic band in suspension.
“Bare floor.”
Superfluous declaration. To become independent of her last shred of modesty. The command was clear, even before he’d spoken the words. But Susan had wanted, needed, demanded, in her own turn, this further order from him.
As she had with her dress and pantyhose, she placed her thumbs alongside the twin buttresses of her pelvic girdle, inside her panties, and pushed them down and off. They now lay on the floor of the SUV together with her shoes, dress and pantyhose.
The young man abruptly retracted the blade of the stiletto, and Susan gasped. Was this a retreat? Was he finished? Had it merely been a bizarre game of strip poker in which he controlled the outcome of every hand by dint of his weapon and the subterfuge of jammed door and window locks? For one brief interlude in what seemed to her like time out of joint, she noticed the morning sun reflecting off some of the skyscrapers in lower Manhattan. Just beyond the gray tint of her windshield, the reflected sun shown brilliantly back towards the bridge, her SUV, and Red Hook; as it had that day, but for the gray filter of buildings collapsing and going back up, literally, in smoke.
With the blade retracted, the young man again began to move his stiletto back and forth across her pelvis. After a series of horizontal swipes, he stopped and paused directly over her vulva. He dropped the piece slowly down until the stiletto’s very hard, very male-contoured cross-guard made contact with Susan’s very soft, lightly down-covered upper thighs. The figurine’s sandals now rested in the crook of Susan’s legs, and its glass-bead nipples stared directly at the upper horizontal line of her pubis. Still, Susan noticed, the young man allowed absolutely no contact between his skin and hers.
His next directive was unspoken, but firmly communicated through the movement of the figurine. He was fanning the piece gently from side to side, brushing up against one thigh and then the other. Susan swallowed hard. Perhaps his game had only just begun, she thought.
She parted her legs an inch or two. The young man continued fanning the figurine a bit more persistently now. Susan closed her eyes tightly and opened her legs until one knee touched the median armrest, the other, the driver’s door. She felt hot and damp all over, but it was the hotness and dampness of fear. She could again smell herself as the odor of her body in distress filled the SUV.
A snap, followed by a metallic swish, and Susan knew the blade was out once again. The muscles of her inner thighs trembled violently as she felt an overwhelming desire to snap her legs shut and blunt the anticipated thrust of cold, hard instrument into her liquid soft, most tender parts. Just as suddenly, however, the nerves of those same inner thighs sensed a blow to the driver’s seat, while her eardrums simultaneously registered how the blade first ripped, then penetrated, the seat-leather just in front of her vulva. The young man’s gloved knuckles inadvertently and almost imperceptibly grazed her pubic hair as he yanked his hand away.
“Now, drive on.”
As precipitously as the delirium had overtaken Susan, it now left her. She was in the driver’s seat, naked, sitting in front of a fully clothed stranger. A stiletto stood upright between her legs. The scene was grotesque, absurd, yet somehow definable and manageable within its own peculiar context. She was still alive. She was not wounded. He had not physically violated her with any organ or any instrument. The only part of her body he’d even touched was her hair – and that, through a gloved hand.
The SUV was drivable. Manhattan was less than half a bridge away. She conjured up an imperative voice: “Give me the keys. The car won’t move without my keys.”
The young man reached into his pocket and withdrew the ball of inverted glove and keys. He held the whole lot out to her as he clumsily peeled back the leather with his own free hand to reveal her key ring. She took it, found the car key, inserted the key into the ignition, and turned the engine over. It started immediately. She turned off the emergency-light blinker and slipped the transmission into Drive.
The SUV moved forward and joined the procession of morning commuter traffic into Manhattan. There was a more even flow now, and she thought she might be able to reach the end of the bridge and entrance into Canal Street in a few, short minutes. What would happen to her and the young man and her SUV once they reached Manhattan was anybody’s guess. But that curiosity was at this moment entirely in the future conditional tense. She simply drove forward, eventually easing again into the center lane so as not to have to see the water below.
From what seemed to be all directions at once, she heard the sound of police sirens. She checked her rearview mirror, but saw nothing. The young man let go of her hair. She leaned forward and checked both of her side mirrors. Still nothing. She wondered whether the sirens were just wishful thinking and in her ears only.
“Keep driving,” he commanded as he dropped to the floor behind the driver’s seat.
Apparently not. They were real sirens. The young man’s reaction was clear evidence of their reality. Never had Susan found the scream of police sirens more comforting than in this instance. It was, to her mind – now kneaded and beaten to a kind of infantilized pulp – like the sound of a posse on tall horses come to rescue her from the clutches of a vile villain, and she wanted to cry great, warm tears of appreciation.
Still, she could see nothing through any of her mirrors. Although the windows of her SUV were up tight and locked, the wailing of police sirens was becoming almost deafening. Sound, but no sight.
Just as Susan moved her foot to the brake to slow down and eventually stop her SUV, two police cars raced past to either side of her. The Doppler effect of their quick retreat worked as much on her spirits as it did on her eardrums. And what had just welled up in her eyes as warm tears of gratitude now spilled over in cold tears of despair.
The young man raised himself slowly from the floor, once again grabbed a clump of hair on the back of her head, leaned forward, and whispered in her ear: “Wild and wonderful! NYC’s finest! Wizards on the warpath of death and destruction! I’m really sorry -– aren’t you? –- they couldn’t stop and pass the time of day. But you know? I’m in kind of a hurry myself. So you would have had to do the talking for both of us. And you don’t really seem to be in the mood for talking just now. You strike me as more of an action girl than a talk girl anyway.”
As if she’d entered the wake of a speedboat, Susan noted even through the distorting cataracts of tears filling her eyes that the lane before her was clear of all traffic. She accelerated sharply in a headstrong wish to sprint off the last couple of hundred yards of the bridge, maybe even to crash her SUV into the tower just short of the island of Manhattan only seconds away.
“Slow down, Action Girl.”
She obeyed. The SUV passed under the bridge’s tower and rolled onto the abutment on the hard granite of Manhattan. “Mommie,” she said to herself quietly for perhaps the first time in twenty years.
“Move to the curb right over there, Action Girl.”
The young man indicated with his right hand, once again gloved, the spot at which he wanted her to stop. She obeyed, pulled up to the curb and stopped the SUV. She stared straight ahead, hands clenching the wheel, feet flat on the floor.
And now, in sing-song: “I think it’s time to say 'Thank you,' for all your com-pan-y.” Susan nodded her head, but said nothing. “M-I-C. Cee? Because we’ve seen your cookies and your batter. K-E-Y. Why? Because we love the sight and sound and smell of you while you’re baking. M-O-U-S-Eeeeeeeee.”
The young man reached down between her legs with his gloved hand, careful not to touch any intimate part of her, grabbed hold of the stiletto and paused. As they had once before, Susan’s thighs began to tremble. She closed her eyes hard, and two new pools of tears emptied themselves from between her lids and streamed down her cheeks, over her breasts, and down to her thighs. Whatever had not been absorbed by her skin in its fast waterfall from cheek to groin now disappeared into the grotto of her pubis. She did not see – but she could very much sense – the presence of the black, gloved hand poised over the stiletto standing sentry between her legs. The muscles of her inner thighs screamed out to snap shut, but she couldn’t obey their command. Not while the ivory-robed sentry with her sharp, steel bayonet stood guard just an inch in front of Susan’s exposed vulva, holding her legs splayed as if with invisible traction restraints.
The gloved hand, slowly and deliberately, withdrew the blade from the leather seat that had been its sheath. The gash, the wound in the leather, did not close as the blade came out. The gloved hand pinched the sides of it together like a pair of soft and swollen labia, and gently pressed each lip down. Once again the snap and swish, and Susan knew that he had retracted the blade. But to what end?
“Before she goes, Matilda would like to request a little souvenir to remember you by.”
Susan kept her eyes shut, but forced herself to ask the question she knew he was waiting to hear. “What would Matilda like as a souvenir?”
“Matilda likes soft things. Not too wet and not too dry. Not too clean and not too dirty. Not too new and not too old. You’re a smart Action Girl. Get smart and active.”
Word games and riddles had never really been Susan’s forte. But thirty minutes with the young man had supercharged her mental batteries with his own very peculiar kind of current, and it was as if his thoughts and language had become hers by some sort of mystical, electrical transfusion. She reached down to the floor, picked up her panties, and offered them to his outstretched glove. He balled them up and put them in his pocket.
“Now, I believe, we’ve come to 'Thank you', don’t you, Matilda? I believe that Susan would like to show her gratitude for this quite fun-filled inter-borough field trip we’ve shared today.”
Susan’s extraordinary effort to put a voice and sound behind her words resulted only in a hoarse whisper: “Thank you, Matilda.”
“No, no, no!” the young man said. “You’ve got to smile and open your eyes and look at Matilda when you speak to her! Don’t you yet understand the meaning of the word 'courteous' after all of the lessons I’ve given you today?”
Susan slowly and mechanically opened her eyes to see directly in front of her face the glass-bead nipples of the toga-clad figurine. Once again, and with excruciating difficulty: “Thank you, Matilda.”
The young man withdrew the figurine with a swipe and placed it in the inside pocket of his black leather jacket.
“Well, I hate to eat and run. But duty calls.”
He put his gloved hand on the door handle to open the rear door. The handle moved up and down, but the door would not open. He pulled the stiletto back out of his pocket, released the blade with its usual snap, then put the tip into the child’s lock and pried out the stub of a wooden pencil.
To the back of Susan’s head: “You should never let children play in the car without first setting the child’s lock and checking around for sharp objects. No, no, no!”
This time, he reached out to the door handle and opened the door easily. Sunlight flooded into the SUV in the three seconds it took him to exit the vehicle, shut the door, and vanish.
Susan sat motionless in the driver’s seat. She heard the ticking of the dashboard clock and looked up at the console. 9:20 a.m. Every muscle in her body felt as if it had been strained to the breaking point. She gave in to her exhaustion and collapsed onto the steering wheel. At the same moment, her urethral sphincter emptied her bladder onto the driver’s seat.
The young man walked quickly to the subway stop at East Broadway and descended to track level. He took the first train on the “F” line to the other side of the East River.
Once in Brooklyn, he stepped out at the York Street station in Vinegar Hill, close to the Navy Yard. He saluted briskly in the direction of the Yard, then walked west the three short blocks to his apartment on Plymouth Street, climbed to the top floor of his four-story walk-up, and pulled out his door key. On the door hung a hand-lettered cardboard sign – his own little creative effort at Americana. It read: The Rock.
He opened the door and stepped in. He then closed and locked the door, turned on his PC, and emptied his pockets.
He opened the bottom drawer of his dresser and threw Susan’s panties in with the dozens of others he’d retired from the sport. (The young man liked to think of his collection of panties as others might a collection of athletes’ jerseys: the really good ones were pinned to a clothesline that spanned the hypotenuse of his one-room apartment from corner to corner; second-best got retired into the bottom drawer of his dresser; the not-so-good ones simply got dropped into a Dempsey Dumpster somewhere between the foot of the Manhattan Bridge and the subway entrance at East Broadway. Sometimes, the women had soiled themselves even before he could persuade those same women to take them off. In that case, he didn’t bother to take their panties home as souvenirs, and he knew that the women wouldn’t either. Some evidence is just born to die on the vine, was how he summed it up.)
One pair in particular, however – a single pair of very sheer cotton, pale emerald green in color with a couple of dark green pythons stitched into the seams and disappearing into the crotch – he’d actually framed behind matte glass and hung at the head of his bed.
Now, as he prepared his little digital Eucharist, he genuflected soberly before the emerald green and made the sign of the cross with his own thumb on his own forehead.
He wasn’t in the least religious, never mind Catholic.
The young man picked up the figurine and twisted the cross-guard. Out fell a tiny diskette. With lint-free paper and a can of Radio Shack’s own anti-static spray, he carefully cleaned the glass bead nipples. With a flashlight, he then looked up inside the figurine past the blade and its release spring to inspect the connections between glass bead lenses and the tiny digital TV camera. All good and solidly intact. He hooked the figurine up to a re-charger and verified that the connection was a secure one, and that the current was flowing. When the connection was secure and the juice flowed, the glass bead nipples signaled the injection of current with a beep and a green glow.
He next slipped the diskette into its tiny player. His PC had completed its warm-up exercises and invited him to log on. He did so with his own password, Pilgrim, and awaited a further invitation to log on to the Net. The pop-up appeared on his screen and he completed the instruction set. Within seconds, he was on through his high-speed DSL connection, courtesy of a pal at Verizon off of whose truck enough spare fiber and backhoe loaders had fallen to get him hooked up to the trunk line that ran through Pratt Institute. In exchange, the pal got sweetheart access to his video library for life.
He then went to 9-11Gold.com and scrolled down to the click buttons for Members, Guests, and Producers. He clicked the third button and typed in his other password, “Entrepreneur,” which gave him access to his account status, including number of visitors and subscribers current to the minute. The count was mounting impressively, now that he was able to supply live-action material on almost a daily basis, and the hundreds digit of the pop-up counter registered loggers-on, even as he watched it, in rapid succession.
Forget the tens and singles digits; they spun round in a whir. This, he knew, was not yet prime time. Most Japanese eyeballs at this hour were dead behind eyelids turned to curtains of lead either from too much booze or from overwork. India – for whose 1.036 billion this would otherwise be the hour of peek pleasure – had limited access because of the dip-shits at VSNL who kept all the really good stuff for themselves. Ditto for the entire Middle East with its censor police – except, of course, for certain privileged clientele. In Europe, most folks were just finishing up a late lunch with their lovers, or – lacking a lover – were on their way home to an early dinner with the wife and kiddies, and wouldn’t be logging on en masse for another few hours. When they did, however, varoom! (He could say a lot – statistically speaking – about certain late-night habits of the German middle class in particular.)
But on the East Coast – ah, yes – just after morning meetings, millions of instant needs for gratification and a quick, refreshing dip into his Coney Island cyber-sideshow would translate into a huge spike just over an hour from now and just before lunch. By four in the afternoon, between East Coast boredom-on-the-job and West Coast lunch break, he’d practically be able to smell the ozone burning off the servers in Brno. More eyeballs on my girls, he liked to muse, than maggots on road-kill. Another spike following morning meetings on the West Coast, and then on into the night.
Our young man, in a manner of speaking, liked to think of himself as a modern-day astronaut. Not as the old kind, who would climb first into ill-fitting space suits, then into cramped capsules, then be shot up into God-knows-where, for God-knows-what reason, to be mentioned in God-knows-what-perfuctory-NPR-salute-to-our-space-fucking-explorer-heroes. No, our young man was the newer, cutting-edge kind of astronaut who never had to leave his living room to circle the globe. Not in seven hours, nor in a sweaty space suit in a cramped capsule. But in fractions of seconds, in satellite hops and fiber rings, in the comfort of his own zone, providing fuel and entertainment – even information, he sincerely believed – to every one of the world’s twenty-four time zones.
By four o’clock in the a.m., East Coast time, eyeballs had begun to dwindle. He was always slightly amused by the mini-spike indicating intense and disproportionate interest from down under. But Australia’s and New Zealand’s eager-beaver populations just didn’t matter enough to his global business to get all hot and bothered about.
He’d already had his ten-millionth visitor in less than two months. Life-time subscribers numbered in the hundreds. One-month and one-week subscribers, of course, were his bread and butter, and they numbered in the hundreds of thousands. He wondered whether this increase in traffic might be overtaxing the server, and made a mental note to have his pal at Èeská Televize, Bohumil, run another check on it at the cyber hotel in Brno. Churn is the Enemy of Progress and Profit was the title of a presentation he’d once attended at an industry trade show in Vegas, and he’d made the title of that lecture his mantra. ‘"People don’t like to wait for their cyber fix," the young man reckoned. “The ‘Net is not the fucking post office,” he now and again snapped at Bohumil every time they came to loggerheads over the matter of further hard-Krona expenditures. It was the great cyber dilemma: whether to upgrade for growth, or simply to cash out and move on to the next game in town.
Slow or not, customer retention was no longer the problem it had once been – now that he’d moved off of the porn sites and onto 9-11Gold.com, where visitors and members alike could buy almost anything even vaguely related to that second date of great American infamy. He, personally, thought that some of the stuff was really in bad taste, and he occasionally felt a twinge of remorse about many of the vendors whose digital – if not exactly physical – company he was forced to keep by the nature of the business. (Some, he’d seen first-hand. But lots of it was very black-market stuff, and he didn’t yet have the kind of disposable income that would buy him a key to those clearing-houses whose singular clientele consisted of very rich, very liquid, one-of-a-kind collectors.)
As the purveyors to those collectors liked to say: “to stare is human.” God knows he’d seen more than his fair share of gawkers on and since 9/11.
Besides, in his mind at least, he was an artiste, not just a vendor or purveyor. He’d invented a whole new genre of Internet cinéma vérité he liked to call “scratch ‘n sniff” films. Nothing, he thought, beats fear. He knew it was only a matter of time before the forward march of technology would allow him to install a tiny microphone in his Matilda in order to capture audio – i. e., sighs, groans, weeping, pleading, begging for mommies elsewhere in the night.
Still, nothing – nothing – would one day compete with the ultimate sideshow: digital smell. In fact, he already had a pal at IFF, Inc. working on it for him. In exchange for “sweetheart” access, natch’.
And then there was the money. It was all flowing into a bank account in the Cayman Islands, untouched by human hands (including, for the time being, his own) until the day he’d readily give up his passport and buy an island in the South Pacific. His own entire freaking island. He’d never again have to worry about wearing leather gloves – not in the South Pacific, that was for sure. He’d visited an educational Web site or two in his time, by God, and he knew that the temperature never dropped below 70° in the South Pacific. “Sure beats sweater weather,” he often chuckled to himself, and also shared with anyone who cared to inquire about his exit strategy.
He clicked around the content providers’ section of 9-11Gold.com until everything was in place for him to encrypt and upload the video. Then he keystroked in a title for the trailer, laying the dark brown letters with black borders down against his favorite shade of pale emerald green wallpaper:
[c]“Susan’s Chocolate Chippers.”[/c]
“Showtime,” he breathed to himself in imitation of Susan’s hoarse whisper as he clicked the command to upload his material. As the pop-up giving him the bit-rate at which he was transmitting appeared on the screen, he began to sing an old Woody Guthrie tune.
He figured he could cut, edit, label and archive on the fly. Reduce the lot to five minutes, then re-purpose the remainder for a rainy day. Maybe add some digital effects, new background, new players from other episodes.
“Nothing like re-purposing to goose the revenue stream,” he sometimes mused to himself.
“Little darlin’ Susie,” he murmured to the still vivid memory of her. “I’m gonna make you a world-wide starlet in less time than it’ll take you to get back home here to Brooklyn and find yourself a fresh pair of panties!”
“Charcoal gray is nice,” he mused. He glanced reverently at the matte glassed frame hanging over his bed. “But there ain’t nothing, nothing, like emerald green.”
