Birthmark
I had always been so bored when having sex. It was a source of great contention between Lynette and me. Every night in bed I felt the suffocating hands of her desire. She would give me a certain look through half-lidded eyes and I would duly lie down. Then she would sit on my face, her hair falling down her back. She made me touch her nipples, fingertips overflowing with pink. Sex was a place where my mind was sliding and slipping. I couldn’t catch on to a feeling. Lynette’s body appeared to me as disjointed shapes. I was mechanical and dissociated. A trundling train line of monotony. I thought about my tongue, pink and pointed, poking inside her. Slimy and slick. Everything felt grotesque, I would often start to feel sick. I was so aware of her guttural sounds, and how her fingers were white claws ending in shiny, glittery tips, grasping at the walls.
In desperation at my disinterest, Lynette sent me to a sexologist. The sexologist was not much older than I was. There was art on her walls showing women wrapped in elaborate bondage and my eyes kept darting up to them as she asked me a series of questions about my sex life. I felt stupid as I told her that sex didn’t seem to turn me on at all. She didn’t laugh or even seem shocked by this. She nodded carefully, leaned back in her velvet armchair, and asked me instead to tell her about the last time I’d felt truly alive. I squirmed and didn’t want to tell her the truth. But the soft look on her face burst the dam of my shame. I told her how Lynette and I had once been play wrestling as the sun poured warmly through the windows. The light peachy and pure as summer bled into autumn. I had Lynette’s arms pinned above her head. Usually I would let her up and we would go again. But this time I saw a real shine of terror in her eyes, just a second of it, as I pressed on her wrists, dug my knees into her thighs, and didn’t relent. The fright flash in her gaze careered through every nerve in my body. A steely line snaked to my cunt. I poured myself off her. Embarrassed, wet, flustered, flushed. I’d wanted to hurt her, really hurt her. I wished that I had pushed it a little longer. I wished she’d said no and really meant yes. The sexologist gave me the name of an S/M anthology written by 1980s leatherdykes. I read it online as a PDF until my eyes were square. The next day I broke up with Lynette. ‘I don’t know how to want what you have to give,’ I told her. Her eyes were wet but she refused to cry. Gathered up her things. Was gone by morning.
When the Virus came we were told it wasn’t a cause for real concern. Even as people died or were reduced to shadows of their former selves there was much talk of it being just another Flu, nothing to heed. At first there was a feeble attempt at containment; people were told to stay at home and the State made a great show of sluicing rivers of redundant disinfectant down the streets every day, washing chemicals into the groundwater and deadening the grass they seeped into. But the markets were crashing, and so it was deemed okay after all to walk the streets in a fever dream. What else could we do? Stocks were down and the sanctity of life was out.
Whilst we lived in willful denial the Virus surged in our veins, greedily laying waste to the promise of life. People couldn’t get pregnant, people couldn’t stay pregnant. Blood leaked out, rusty and dead. Sheets filled up with red. Abortion was banned without exception. Women who agreed to quit their jobs in order to concentrate on getting pregnant were given big government payouts. IVF doctors were practically printing cash, so in demand and sought after. The State was rabid with fear, terrified that humanity was about to die out—seemingly unaware of the fact that we had long been living on borrowed time. Fires burned continually, storms rained down unendingly. There had been no urgency in fixing it. Quite the opposite. It had always been more important to lacerate the lifeblood of families with borders and stockpile weapons that could effortlessly obliterate us all. Into this gaping wound, the black hole of a poisoned planet, the State frantically and fruitlessly tried to pour more tiny baby bodies. Condemning them to a life marked by death. And then came the Company, with the promise of a different way.
The first time I went to see my Other, I signed a waiver.
‘The Company will not be liable for any emotional distress resulting from encounters with your Other.’
‘You will only have contact with your Other on the Company’s premises.’
‘You will not cause lasting physical harm to your Other*.’
Next to the asterisk at the bottom of the page was a long list of acceptable violences. I read them carefully.
I wrote my name on the designated line and handed the paper back to the receptionist. She gestured for me to follow her. She led me down a long hall, past many identical doors. Behind them I could hear moaning and giggling and crying and screaming. We reached the last room, the only one with a green light lit above the door instead of red. The receptionist duly ushered me inside. The walls were blank and bare and bright. There was no furniture apart from a shiny vinyl mattress, a black void floating in a white abyss.
My Other was naked, sat cross-legged and facing me. I saw the puffy cloud of my Afro, the splattered splotches of my freckles, the squish of my tummy. I walked tentatively over to her, blinking my eyes hard and fast to adjust to the harsh fluorescent light, so that the image of this sort-of-self slipped in and out of sight. She reached out her hand, her slim wrists a mirror of my own. We were so equally sweaty that our hands glided straight past each other and we giggled simultaneously as our hands hit the same soft mirrored pillows of our thighs. It was uncanny. I felt manic. It was me.
I tried to reconcile the spit I’d gamely spat into a test tube and handed over to the Company with the woman in front of me. I wanted to cry. Felt as if I’d pushed her out of my womb myself.
Imagined seeing her as a pulsing grainy orb on a screen, growing every week. Imagined that I’d held my hands over the space where she slept for nine months, imagined that I was her everything, imagined that she lived only because I fed her from my body. I felt the wet of tears slink down my face and drop unceremoniously into my mouth. I tried to remember what I had read in the booklet the Company sent home. The Other shared my memories, as well as my body. She was a carbon copy ‘in many respects.’ But the Company had been vague on what the remaining respects might give rise to. I thought about my propensity for violence, the many bloody noses I’d given as a kid on the playground. Wondered if this impulse lived in her too.
Wondered if her mind worked just like mine. My brain was so loud all of the time. I made calculations daily, staring at the news. How many years left to glean a sliver of joy before the apocalypse was omnipresent and not just mediated through my screens? I was so tired of thinking, I was so tired of discerning who could be trusted and realizing it was no one. My arms were the only ones I wanted to run to, even if I knew what they were capable of. I didn’t want the world to get me, didn’t want to die in a flash flood, or of a disease spread from pig shit and misery, or from a heat dome, or from not being able to afford chemotherapy, or from my heart giving out because it was filled up with microplastics.
I saw the light of my own thoughts in my Other’s eyes. She pushed me forcefully down to the ground until I was kneeling, gaze shining up at her. We moved in tandem. She took the belt from my waist and knotted it around my wrists. She stared intently at my mouth, following my ragged breath. With patience she put one finger in my mouth and then less patiently, another. She pushed in and down the wet slope of my throat and her hands were soft and my spit was all spilling out. She took the scarf from my hair and blindfolded me. I couldn’t flinch away from her hand as it smacked into my face, once and then twice in quick succession. There was a hole inside me shaped like myself. She gathered my hair up in her hands. I moved away from her, straining against her touch. I moved away from how I thought life would be and toward the way it actually was. She squeezed her hands hard around my throat. And then there was only one of me, and I was alone again.
