Castration - (A horror story about a quiet boy in love with a ... special woman)

It took a long time to work up the courage to approach her. She was taller than he was, which offended him somehow. A silly thing, considering his profession, his friends, the whole heaping leftist world of academic one-upmanship and sensitivity. Yet there it was, in his chest, in the presence of her. A glowing ember of offense.

“You smoke?” she said before he got there. She swung the living crane of her anatomy to an about-face with a cigarette jutting from her lips. “I do. But I don’t light.”

“It’s a disgusting habit,” he said without meaning to, and praise god, the barroom music swelled just then and she leaned in closer and the corner of her mouth that wasn’t clutching the cigarette curled into a curious grin that showed she hadn’t heard him. “I don’t, no.”

She frowned. “A shame.”

The offense inflamed to anger; rage.

“I have a light at my place. You could use the whole fucking stove.” The music ducked itself into a corner and a few heads turned as he said it. But the giantess in the white dress, sitting with one flamingo leg crossed and that stupid fucking cigarette in her mouth didn’t even flinch. He couldn’t believe he’d said it, much less that she was still looking at him. He lifted the drink in his hand. “It makes me bold.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Bold is better than boring.”

That was how Frank Butcher met Lilyan Cruz.

*

After it was done and the length of her legs were twisted around and through his like an ivy, they didn’t speak for a long time. The room smelled like sweat and cigarettes. He was still angry, had demonstrated that rage in ways that embarrassed him now, laying here, looking up into the ceiling he’d had refinished after last years’ salary increase. Idly, he wondered if anyone had ever done that to his mother, or his sister Elen who volunteered at the school her daughters went to. An endless chain of women flung out into the darkness of the world. Did this happen to all of them? Was this nature?

“You look angry,” she said, curling a hand into his chest hair and tugging it playfully. It smarted and he grimaced and grabbed her hand a little harder than he meant to.

“I am angry.” Again, the bluntness that was not a part of who or what he was tumbled out of him. Frank Butcher, sociologist by trade, was a gentle pushover six days out of seven. He had an overwhelming disproportion of female friends he often dreamt of sleeping with. He had poetry collections. He wept every year in the front row of Phantom of the Opera, overwhelmed by an almost erotic ache that swelled in the vibrations of a well-played organ. Until he’d been twenty-three, most of his family thought he was gay. None of them saw this woman here, beautiful and strong and taller.

“Why?” she asked and sounded genuinely interested. “This is a really nice place.”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, and that made him angrier. “Why did you come home with me?”

“Why did the dinosaurs go extinct?” she shrugged.

“A comet,” he said. “The gulf of mexico. You don’t strike me as a reader.” And that felt good, it felt great, to jab her. To have conquered her, then savored the exquisiteness of condescension. “Tell me why.”

Her eyes flashed and she stood up and again he was struck by how wonderful she was, how magnificent. In his twenties, playing clarinet, talking at length with his friends about what war meant, why banks thrived on geo-political disagreements, on what the NSA was probably hiding, he had dreamt of women like this. And now? Now he wanted to boot her like a snarling dog. He wanted to cut her skin off and hold it up to her in a flapping wet sheet to show her that it didn’t matter.

“Maybe I should go.”

“No. No, stay. I think maybe you’re so beautiful I’ve lost my mind.”

She glanced over her shoulder. “That might be enough to earn you a second round.”

A round? Like this was boxing. Bloodsport. A fucking round.

“I think I heard a bell,” he said, so fucking smooth he would congratulate himself later, and pulled her back into bed. This time he was rougher than the first time. This time he left bruises.

*

They met often, at least twice a week. And in his life, at class, at the university filled with conceptual trip-wires and human sensibilities too numerous to handle without fracture, he lost his mind in slow increments. The whiteboard reminded him of her paleness. The click of his wood-heeled boots--they gave him three whole inches of height--against the floor of his empty class made him think of the thudding headboard, the dowels of his bedframe ripping themselves apart.

He was thinking of precisely this when a student interrupted him. She was tall, young, shy. She looked at him for a long moment before speaking. “Professor Butcher?”
“Yes?”

“I was wondering if you could help me understand something.”

“Sure.”

“Do you think it’s possible for women to eventually overpower men? What I mean is that do you think we’re living in the era where masculinity will be completely erased? That Fem Lib and pay equality are just the beginning of what we’ll look back on as the days in which the Western Man was castrated? I mean, take yourself for example. You’re good looking, smart, young, and you sit on an educational board that’s been displaced by women at a rate of 12% per decade. It’s fifty-fity now. That’s … well, that’s unheard of. I’m writing my thesis on--” she stopped suddenly and looked down at the coke in his hand, the coke the red of Lylian Cruz’s lips, now gushing foam and corn syrup onto the floor between them.

Gushing because he’d crushed it in his hand.

*

“You crushed it?” The Dean stared down over horn-rimmed glasses not worn like a crone but in some fashionably sensible way, a throwback to Jacki-O, retro come again oh ye wheel of history. “In front of her? Frank, she’s calling it assault.” The glasses came off in a whip and Carolyn Wellington, queen of academic politics, was pursing her lips like mommy come to spank the bad, bad boy. “This is serious.”

“I had a muscle spasm.” This was the only defense worth taking. To his knowledge he hadn’t looked aggrieved or made any complicated gestures. The fucking can had quite literally exploded in his hand. Barry, his friend and physician, would gladly write a note. “This is just a big misunderstanding…” No it wasn’t. “I hit the gym right before she got there.” The bitch had threatened castration.  “I have this awful tension in my brachialis and it cramps.” I imagined it was her neck, Carolyn. “I’ll gladly do what I have to in order to clear this up.” Or yours, Carolyn.

The lips pursed further. An impossible purse. He imagined a fly landing on it. A long pink tongue snapping out to catch it. “Is everything alright with you?”

He offered his best disarming smile, the one he’d used when his father asked if he was gay. The one he’d used when his mother asked about those images she’d found on his computer. The one he’d used when cold coke splashed onto the student’s blouse from the can he’d imagined was her larynx.

“Everything is fine. I’m well. My research is going smoother than anticipated. I’m seeing someone.”

“You’re seeing someone?” Was that genuine shock in her voice?

“Yes. I mean, Carolyn, things are better than they’ve ever been. This is a serious misunderstanding. Just tell me what to do. A formal letter, an in-person apology, a--”

“I want you to take the week.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Even if it’s nothing, Frank, a student charging faculty with assault has to be reviewed. You can’t be teaching with a formal complaint in my inbox.”

“Bullshit.”

She stiffened. “Excuse me?”

“Excuse me, Caroyln, but that’s bullshit and you know it. Do students run the college? Do we even teach them? Do-” and he must have been yelling because he saw the fearful tears in her eyes then, a glassiness he associated with babies. Things intellectually defenseless.

“It’s insulting,” he said, much quieter. “It insults me.”

“Being yelled at and sworn are also quite insulting, Frank. Make it two weeks.”

*

That night he was so rough he made Lylian bleed. She wiped the bloody lip on his bedsheets and smiled and looked at him in that dewy way that made him desire her and hate her in equal parts.

“You’re falling apart, Frank.”

“What are you talking about? My life is great. I’m great. This is a misunderstanding.”

“No, darling.” She pointed to her lip. “This is a misunderstanding. You are unraveling, and mostly because I grew up in chaos, it attracts me. I enjoy it. I like swirling next to drains.” She crawled across the bed and kissed his chest. “You are my favorite drain.”

And just like that, the anger was gone. Blown out. Like a candle. Her touch. There was something about her touch. Something soft in the eyes that reached into him at a chemical level. Reached into him and pulled up pieces, dormant fixtures of biology unknown in the simple, agreeable creature he had always been. He thought on it, deeply, looking down in the distracted way people do when they are thinking of secret things that absorb all their attention. He didn’t feel Lylian get up or hear the door close as she left. It was just him and the darkness of his tasteful condo. Him and his refinished ceiling. Him and the cramping memory of fingers closing around aluminum with a fervent life-ending wish.

*

The next day she didn’t answer his call. Or the day after. Or the day after that. He got a text 87 hours later--he’d done the math--with a simple noncommittal word.

Busy.

He worked out and played racket ball. Not basketball or soccer or anything remotely masculine but the sport people gave up in the nineties unless they were over fifty. The easy, simpery sport that was only competitive in the world of investment banking. He swung with his entire life focused into his wrist. Each swing was primal, desperate.

...do you think we’re living in the era where masculinity will be completely erased?
 
THWACK!

When he was done and covered in sweat, he looked at himself in the mirror. He was thinner. He was shaggy on top, stubbly on his sides. He realized with some alarm he was his father, returning home after sixty-hour weeks to a house filled with three boys, two in constant trouble with girls and teachers, and the other an avid clarinettist who might be gay. Except he wasn’t working sixty-hour weeks. He was awaiting academic review, playing racket ball, getting ghosted by the woman he’d been fucking.

He was failure embodied. He was castration.

*

On the sixth day he stopped eating, stopped getting dressed. He roamed from his bed to the bathroom to the kitchen to his bed again like some hulking unshaven troglodyte. He could smell her on his pillows so he stripped the bedding, wadded it up, and threw it out his window. He spent the next thirty hours on a bare mattress drinking water and whiskey in turns.

Carolyn, the student, Lylian. Hamlet's three witches. They circled the skirting darkness of his mind, faces slipping in and out of light.

Failure. Castration. Failure. Castration.

“ENOUGH!”

Frank Butcher got dressed, shaved his beard, and went to the only place he could think might mean something. The place that could perhaps reverse this avalanche. It was magical thinking, he knew, superstitious and illogical. And yet the rage and hopelessness had become autonomous within him. He now felt as a type of housing to its whims. He drew from psychological assays on the power of aversion therapy and spun the small scraps of logic into a shape that his level of education could justify. But in his heart he knew the stripped truth of it. He was a peasant returned to the carpathian crypt where first drops of blood had been spotted. He was clutching garlic and thrusting crosses toward the dark.

By the time he got into his car, he had convinced himself Lylian was something much more than a woman.

*

He stepped into the bar and looked around. The normal young crowd peppered with flagging middle-age hung to the refinished industrial corners. Neon lights painted a single lone dancer, hugging herself to Chris Isaac on the sound system. When he was sure she wasn’t there a great wave of shame enveloped him. It was childish. He was childish.

Are you a faggot, son? You can tell me. I’ll still love you.

He ordered a double and found a booth and drank, gripping a sheave of his hair so hair he thought he might be bleeding. And then he saw her. With a cigarette in her mouth, turning all 6-feet of her body toward some asshole in tight jeans and a knitted sweater. He offered her a light. She smiled.

Frank felt a great uprushing rawness of hot white heat and then it quieted, pouring back into the center to cool, to smolder, returned unto the ember from whence this whole charade began. That should have been enough for him. A man’s man like his father would have nodded, tipped his hat, and walked away without looking back.

But Frank Butcher was not his father.

He followed them.

*

He could not say what happened when the police knocked on his door. He could not explain the blood on his mattress, on his neck, under his fingernails. He did not in all truth remember anything past following them to a house in Woodland Park, where he idled without his lights on, blasting the heater despite the humid summer night, whispering to himself things that were not unlike incantations, thinking of his mother, his father, his sister and her daughters, thinking of all of them in a circle with Carolyn and the student whose name he could not remember because he’d never had the courage to open the complaint. In the fetid wind of the sweltering heater Frank Butcher imagined them laughing, all of them laughing. Here was his father poking the index finger of his right hand into the hole made with his left hand, circling it and pumping his eyebrows, mouthing the word faggot. Here was his mother holding a pinky up and wiggling it to demonstrate his penis. Here was Carolyn patting the student on her back, smiling proudly, her lips forming the words that became like so many nails in the soft curd of his brain: We’ll replace them. All of them.

He struggled when they tried to cuff him, even though he was naked. He screamed and whimpered and shrieked like something wild and possessed. He kicked one officer in the knee and heard the wet snap of fresh celery echo against his refinished ceiling. And in the struggle, the tangle of limbs and stomping feet, they dragged his bed frame a full four feet across the floor.

He saw it as they slammed him onto his belly, as they kicked him in his kidneys and his spine. He couldn’t take his eyes from it

The red of Lylian’s lips. The red of the Coke can.

Symbols were scrawled into the floorboard, arranged in a loose circle. Five black candles at each point. And in the middle. All the condoms they had used. His seed. His lifeforce. He saw and knew and felt the rage evaporate in a blast cold blue light.

Frank Butcher, the small, quiet boy who had always kept to himself, began to scream.