“I’ll be waiting right here,” I promised. “Sure as hell got nowhere else to go.”
“I won’t be long. She’s here somewhere. And, yeah, it’ll be cool, you’ll see.”
The party was in some East Atlanta dive, the sort of place that works hard at being a dive, and we would have taken Moreland Avenue down to Ormewood Avenue SE, I suppose. I don’t recall, precisely. I was too drunk to be driving in the first damn place, but my old Ford truck was a stick, and when she saw it, Amanda informed me that she could only drive automatics. Later, I would learn this was a lie, but, let’s save later for later. And that was much later. Not too many concrete memories about our conversation on that drive. I was trying too hard to focus on the road and the street signs and not getting pulled over by the boys and girls of the APD.
Turned out Amanda lived in a huge old Victorian that had been converted into three apartments — first floor, second floor, and the attic. She had the attic, of course. The drive from the club to that house, it’s all a blur of street-lights and traffic lights, stop signs and yellow center lines. The great jungle of urban squalor and gentrification south of I-20. Yuppie condos and million-dollar flip jobs rubbing shoulders with ghetto pawnshops, fast-food restaurants, crack dens, and gangbangers. The neighborhood got a little bit better after we turned onto Ormewood, approaching that great swath of sculpted urban wilderness known as Grant Park. In 1890, a mere twenty-six years after Sher man ordered his troops to burn the city to the ground, the Olmsted Brothers of Brookline, Massachusetts — sons of the great Frederick Law Olmsted — were hired to design Grant Park. But I digress.
Always, I digress. I may have mentioned that already.
So, I followed Amanda up wobbly back stairs and into her apartment. It was small, but nicer than what I’d expected. She complained about roaches and her downstairs neighbors, whom she said were Scientologists. She also claimed they abused their dog, a golden Lab named Shackelford. Amanda said they frequently beat the dog, and that she’d called the cops about it a couple of times. She offered me coffee, and I gladly accepted, wanting to be sober. I sat in a kitchen chair (she had no table), and I suppose we talked about nothing in particular until the coffee was done. I asked for milk, no sugar, and when she wanted to know if half-and-half would do, I said sure. Half-and-half would do just fine.
I followed her down a short, narrow hallway, then, into the room where she said she did most of her work. The walls were painted a deep cranberry shade of red, and there was an assortment of Macintosh computers, scanners, a light table, several expensive-looking cameras (both digital and the old-fashioned analog sort), and so forth. She said she used another room, farther down the hallway, for her clients’ photo shoots, and that the bathroom doubled as her darkroom.
“Where do you sleep?” I asked, sipping my coffee, aware that I was asking another question entirely.
“I don’t sleep,” she replied. “Not much, anyway. But there’s a futon in the front.”
“Insomnia?”
“Not exactly. I go to sleep just fine, when I let myself. My psychologist calls it an NREM parasomnia, an arousal disorder that takes place between the third and fourth stages of NREM sleep. Same thing as night terrors. You’ve heard of that, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I told her. “I’ve heard of that.”
“Moderately rare in adults. Maybe three percent or so suffer from it as badly as I do. Oh, and I also grind my teeth. You should see my dental bills. Fucking brutal. I’ll have dentures by forty at this rate.”
And then she sat down in front of one of the big iMac G5s and flipped it on. It hummed to life, and her desktop image, near as I could tell, was a color photograph of a dissected cat. There wasn’t another chair anywhere in the room, so I stood while she explained that she had printouts, of course, hard copies of everything, but that she really preferred the way her art looked on an LED screen.
“When I was a kid, I always wanted a Lite-Brite, but it never happened. These babies here”—and she paused to kiss the white monitor—“are my inner child’s vengeance against unresponsive parents.”
And then she started opening files, one after another, the pale plastic bulb of her mouse clicking icons to reveal impossible creatures engaged in unspeakable acts. And for a while I forgot about pretty much everything else but those sublime, grotesque, and beautiful images. Centaurs and satyrs, dryads, a host of dragons and merfolk, Siamese twins, men and women so completely undressed that every muscle, every tendon, was clearly visible. There were were-wolves, wereleopards, weretigers engaged in acts of feeding and copulation, and sometimes both at once. There were women tattooed from head to toe, endless debaucheries of fairies and trolls and goblins, genderless beings and hermaphrodites, alabaster-skinned vampires, and rotting zombies. Women with the serrate teeth of sharks and men with blind, toothsome eels where their cocks should have been. There were unnamable masses of tentacles and polyps and eyes, escapees from a Lovecraft story or a John Carpenter film, their human elements all but obscured. I’d honestly never thought of myself as much of a deviant, beyond the way that my upbringing had trained me to view my lesbianism, of course. But standing in that cranberry room, seeing all those fabulous beasts, those impossible, exquisitely rendered hybrids born from the melding of Amanda’s skill and imagination with the secret fantasies of her “clients,” I found myself growing light-headed with excitement, sweating, my heart beating too fast, too hard, my mouth gone dry. And if, at the time, my reaction disturbed me (and often the hybrids and the things they were doing were undeniably disturbing), it hardly mattered to my libido.
“Most of the compositing is done from photographs,” she said, opening a new file, something that was more machine than woman, “but I also work with a couple of local makeup artists, from time to time.”
I said something, and maybe it made sense, but more likely it didn’t. Regardless, she didn’t seem to notice.
“For some, it’s just a kink. You know, a fetish. For some others, there really isn’t much of a sexual component involved. But I do get some pretty serious cases, from time to time. The self-described therianthropes, for example. The Otherkin. The Transhumanists and parahumanists. The occasional necrophile. But, when you come right down to it, they’re all auto-voyeurs. They’re all Narcissus staring into that damn pool, you know.”
“Frankly,” I said, and I think my voice was trembling, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Amanda, but, right now, I’d really like to fuck your brains out. If the futon’s good for that, I mean.”
“If not, there’s always the floor,” she said, and there was no change in her expression or the tone of her voice, no change whatsoever. She closed Photoshop, then shut off the computer, and led me to a room near the front of the attic apartment. The walls were lined with bookshelves. There was a television and VCR and an X-Box (even through the lust clogging my higher brain activities, the X-Box surprised me). There was an assortment of animal skulls, set on the shelves or hung above them on the walls: coyote, horse, antelopes with spiraling horns, the fully articulated skeleton of a monkey of some sort. There was a single window — no blinds or curtains — looking down on Ormewood Avenue. We didn’t bother with the futon. Because, just like she’d said, there was always the floor.