I reach for another book: Indian mythology. It’s easy to find the page I want. I have looked at it so many times I can smell my skin on it. It is a painting of Kali. Great mother. Killer. Next to her image, her story.
Once upon a time, there was a war. A young woman named Durga was facing a demon named Raktabija. Durga wounded the demon, in lots of ways and with many weapons, but she made things worse, because for every drop of blood that was spilt, the demon made a copy of himself. The battlefield was filled with him. Durga, in need of help, prayed for Kali to fight the demons. With a gaping mouth and red eyes, Kali killed the demon by sucking the blood from his body and putting the many demons in her mouth. She ate them. Then she danced on the field of battle, stepping on the dead bodies.
I do not care about India, or Hinduism, or Buddhism. I do not need a savior.
It’s the art of her.
I stare and stare at it. I can feel the blood under my skin. Her picture gets inside me, so that we are not two, but one. No longer a picture, but a mirror. I open my mouth. I stare at the image until it is everything, and I go, I mean I literally leave and go wherever the image takes me, and I am glad, for I have no ties to this world. Such images make me a different kind of alive. I become the thing I am looking at. Her body my body. I touch between my legs. Heat. My mouth fills with spit.
Bloodthirsty warrior mother. I envy her tongue and might. Can this house even hold the two us?
The widow drinks tea and reads from an underground newspaper; she says Democracy is coming.
An Invisible Union
I’ve never written about this. I’ve not told anyone. To my knowledge, the experience exists only in memory between us, a writer and a photographer, but it has no representation, so it may not even be real.
The camera had nothing to do with anything. It didn’t matter.
I’m lying. It did matter. It mattered that she used a camera. It mattered so much that my mouth fills with spit as I think of her, even now.
For example. She walked into the white room of our motel. She stripped the mattress white.
This is important. The whiteness. And her volition.
She was dressed in tight black pants, tight black sleeveless cotton shirt, Gap-like and stiff and new. Her hair the precise wheat color of mine, only short and raging. Her eyes the precise transparent blue of mine, but more driven. Us both Geminis but not quite twinning. Sexual questions between us — her insistently straight, me bisexual — the what of it.
Her camera gave her self-possession. I did not expect her to direct things; I thought she would want me to. But immediately she said lie down on the mattress. I did it. Her voice was calm and quiet. She said take off your pants. I did it. She said take off your shirt. I did it. Sweat formed on my upper lip simply from her asking me to do ordinary things. From language out of the mouth of a woman. She said touch yourself. I petted myself lightly. Heat. She said close your eyes. I did. I heard the first click of the camera. She said — but it was not as if she was saying it — it was the power of the camera in front of her face giving her the means to direct things — squeeze the meat of your pussy until you are wet. I did. That’s when I felt her eye on me close in — the lens of her. She said take one of your tits out of your bra and squeeze it like it’s full of milk. I did. She said milk it. I did. My mouth opened barely. My pussy became wet.
She said take off your panties. She said take off your bra.
I heard her steady the camera. She said whatever you do, don’t open your eyes again. I don’t. Everything becomes present and past tense, like in a photo.
She says play with your tits. First, I squeeze the full-palmed whole of each breast, kneading them up and out as if I am readying them to be devoured. They become swollen and my nipples harden. I pinch my own tits over and over again thinking I will make them red for her, I will make them mouthable and hard and huge and reddened. I picture them as I play with them. I keep working them until I can feel them becoming the picture I want. I can hear the camera and I can feel her moving in and out and in and out. When she is near I feel heat, and while I am pinching my tits I can’t help it: I undulate my hips and my pussy begins to cream.
She says play with your tits again so I start to shake them by holding my nipples and jiggling my tits. This makes me arch and moan and I lift my hips up to where I imagine she might be. Then I cup each tit with each of my hands and jiggle it for her like a porn-paid woman might for some sap of a man. She says put your hand up yourself and I do, and my pussy becomes swollen and like a begging mouth.
I moan and whine.
I can feel her photographing me. I can hear the shutter clicks. I think I might lose my mind.
I pull my own tits up so hard it makes me cry out. I push them together and I wait and wait doing that until I cannot wait any longer and then I shove one tit up to my mouth and suck my own nipple. I bite and suck myself. I say please and spit covers things. I can feel her lens very close to me but not touching me and I think a little this is what it is like to go insane.
Or this is desire, convulsive.
It is no wonder men cheat.
It is no wonder women cheat.
Desire is larger than god.
Ask a believer.
While I’m sucking myself hard and wild like an animal or infant, I suddenly hear her say play with yourself.
I let go of my tits and they drop like fallen faith.
I move my hands down. She says pull yourself apart first and show me. She says show me your clit, I want to see your swollen clit. I do it. I drive my hips toward her voice. I think I hear her use a zoom. I fuck the air showing her my clit and my wide-open pussy, as slowly as possible. The throbbing seems like it’s bringing me close to death.
She says finger your clit. She says play with it between your thumb and forefinger, hard. I do it. She says with your other hand shove your fingers up into yourself. I do. I think I am maybe panting and sighing or crying. My fingers are swimming. I’m creaming. She says taste yourself. I do. She says now lift your legs up show me all of yourself. Make yourself come for me.
I can’t see her, but I know the camera is nearly touching me at the site of all creation.
If a camera could record smell and heat and taste.
Click. And click. Clicking like sparks.
I begin to cry inside my ecstatic state, I am close to release, she knows it, she photographs it a frame at a time, I picture the obscene position I am in, I am close to surrender without touching anyone or anything except this woman with her lens.
When I come I make an animal sound and the shiver overtakes me endlessly. The cum shoots from my body in a way that has never happened before. Like a man’s. I come and I cry. The shivering lasts several minutes. This opening that is me, it opens and closes in violent contractions, the dark of the inside of me meeting the light of the white walls, the production of an image, the intimacy of art, the space between two women, everything balanced in its dark and light. My eyes still closed, I feel the weight of her body, finally. She lies on top of me, naked. That’s all. She doesn’t move. She asks me not to move. She cries, and her tears fall on my face, wetted whispers.
When I open my eyes she is back in a chair in the corner, sitting like a beautiful and quiet bird. Taking film from the camera. As if it was all the camera.
She never speaks to me that way again.
This is the only night between us like this.