As we left that dinner party, Sarah and I felt so far behind the curve. Here we were considering a child of our own, and we'd never even tried anal. We'd never even discussed a three-way. A few days later, we phoned the Tyson-Neals and asked how they'd met a woman who'd consider intimacy with a couple. They knew a young lady who worked with no one except couples our age. A Nighttimer girl who'd be happy to come to our apartment after the curfew.
Echo Lawrence (Party Crasher): Forget it. The police never found the fucker that smashed into my family. The last I remember of my parents, we were driving. We were always driving. My mother always drove a gray car that came with her job, so covered with dents it looked like tinfoil someone had balled up and then tried to press smooth. As an infrastructure engineer, my mother always lectured me on service flow rates: Level of Service E versus K. She'd stop in the middle of an overpass so we could look at the roadway below with the traffic passing under us, and she'd quiz me about Hourly Volume and the Peak-Hour Factor of measuring traffic flow.
I was asleep across the backseat of that gray car when someone smacked into us, head-on.
Sarah Mercer (Marketing Director): When she arrived, the young woman had what I'd call a withered arm. One of her elbows was crooked, bent a smidgen, and that hand seemed stunted. The fingers curled into the palm, and she never used them to grasp or lift anything. Her leg on that same side was shorter, and she seemed to swing it from her hip with each step, walking into our living room with a pronounced limp.
She would've been very pretty if it hadn't been for a palsy or paralysis that seemed to leave the left side of her face slack and immobile. The poor dear, she'd come to the last word of a sentence, then stop with her mouth gaping open, clearly trying to force out the exact word. It was agony, the effort it took to not jump in and finish her every thought. After a glass of Merlot, she told us her handicaps stemmed from a single brain injury, caused when her mother had struck her in the head.
Echo Lawrence: I do. I tell people that. My mom did hit me. So did my dad, but not the way I let people imagine. Well, technically, I hit them. At the pulse of the car accident, I came rocketing out of the backseat and hit them both in the back of the head. The officer at the scene never put this on paper, but I broke both their necks. My head slammed against my father's so hard it compressed my right temporal lobe. The tiny arm I have now is the arm I had when I was eight. My leg's grown, a little. The aphasia, when I struggle for words, that's a little put-on. I'll pretend the last word in a sentence is almost choking me to…and I'll pause…death. Like I can't quite force out the right…word. That tension makes people really listen to me.
The car that hit us was another gray sedan owned by the county traffic division, exactly like the one my mother drove. Dinged and dented all over. A head-on collision, and they never found the other driver. Sounds…wait for the word…fishy.
Sarah Mercer: The girl had grown up an orphan, dating anyone who asked. One of her boyfriends escorted her to a private swingers' club where people do their business in front of each other. He convinced her to have intercourse standing in the center of this club. Entered her from behind. She's the first woman to arrive that evening, so they have plenty of unwanted attention. To endure this, she shuts her eyes, tight. The entire time, her boyfriend holds her withered hand, whispering "Meine kleine Hure…" in her ear.
Secretly, she's flattered by all the attention, dozens of strange men bothering to watch. When the ordeal is finished, she finds her skin running with something more than sweat. She's awfully glad she kept her shoes on, because she's standing in a little puddle. All their sperm is dripping off of her. Grotesque as it sounds, apparently that evening did wonders for her self-esteem.
Until then, she didn't even know that particular boyfriend spoke German.
Canada Mercer: The subject of venereal disease came up, and she insisted it wasn't a problem. The Lawrence girl, she explained that sex workers regularly perform oral sex as part of foreplay. She told us the true purpose of the act is to routinely test a client for illness. Syphilis, she said, tastes like curried chicken. Hepatitis tastes like veal with capers. Gonorrhea, like sour-cream-and-onion potato chips. HIV, like buttered popcorn. She looked at my wife and said, "Let me lick your pussy and I can tell if you've been exposed to venereal warts, and if you're at risk for developing cervical cancer." Most forms of cancer, she said, taste similar to tartar sauce.
Echo Lawrence: As an adult, I found riding the bus made my hands sweat. Riding in a taxi, I could hardly take a deep breath. Driving, my heart would pound in my ears, and my vision would lose any awareness of colors. I'd get that close to fainting. I was so sure I'd be rammed by another car. On an unconscious level, my memory of the head-on collision was controlling me. It got so bad I couldn't cross the street for fear that a driver might run a red light.
My world kept collapsing down, getting smaller and smaller.
Sarah Mercer: Canada will tell you. We had this dear, sweet crippled girl here, and she'd brought along a black leather shoulder bag that she set on the dining-room table. At some point in the evening, she set down her glass of Merlot and went to the bag, unzipping it and unpacking these…things. Long thick pink rubber things that were so worn in places that you'd be terrified of them breaking in half inside of you. Pink rubber that looked stained and smudged. Brown stains that might've been old blood. Black deposits, where the batteries had leaked. Things, I couldn't say what they were. Handcuffs and blindfolds. An enema bag with a nozzle that didn't look any too clean. Latex gloves. Some horrible spring-loaded things that looked like jumper cables—she called them "tit clamps." Everything just reeked of chlorine bleach.
All these horrors, this girl was putting on my polished Drexel Heritage dining-room table, right where we set the turkey at Thanksgiving. And a speculum, oh Lord, so old it had a crack in the clear plastic. I remember her saying, "You can do any of these things to me…"
Echo Lawrence: My routine—where I talk about tasting people for hepatitis or gonad warts—I was saying that long before I met Rant Casey. The fact he could actually do that trick, it was un-fucking-believable. He licked me one time and told me to lay off eating whole eggs. From the taste of my pussy, he said my cholesterol was too high. Later, the blood work came back that he was dead-on.
Canada Mercer: This girl, Echo, she took out a thick white candle and lit it, telling us to let the wax melt so we could pour it onto her bare breasts. She shook out the match and told us, "I don't want you to torture me just because you feel sorry for me. I want you to really enjoy hurting me." She said, "I want tonight to be about you."