The Wallcreeper. Nell Zink

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СКАЧАТЬ taking you, you particularly, to this horrible bar. I see now it is so very horrible, this bar.”

      “Elvis, calm down,” I said. “You’re a model of successful integration. You even speak Berndeutsch, and you’ve only been here eleven years!”

      “Are they speaking Berndeutsch in this club? No, they speak French!” I didn’t know how he had decided on that one, because I could barely hear even him, much less other people. “I speak the language of the gas station! I have shamed myself. I hoped to leverage one woman to meet another. Not to earn a woman with the honest work and the natural beauty of my body! This crazy Swiss language has made me a capitalist of women! And what is my wages? I insult you, the most beautiful woman in Switzerland. This town has made of me a body without a brain. I will leave this place and go to Geneva,” he concluded, taking both my hands.

      “Don’t do that,” I said.

      “No, I won’t if you don’t permit it!” he cried ecstatically, throwing his arms around me.

      Stephen drifted over, bouncing on the tips of his toes, and beckoned to me. “You need ketamine?” he whispered.

      “Umm, no?” I said.

      “I got three,” he said. “I think I might stay here. You want the car keys? I’ll take a taxi.”

      “Don’t give Elvis any drugs.”

      “I don’t take drugs,” Elvis volunteered. He had never been in a band, so he could hear much better than we could. Stephen and I were always stage-whispering about people sitting near us in cafés and drawing stares.

      “That’s dandy,” I said. I pocketed the keys and took Elvis’s hand. “Let’s blow this joint. That okay with you?”

      Stephen mouthed the word, “Arrivederci.”

      We arrived at the wind-struck farmhouse where Elvis lived with (judging from angle of the stairs) a herd of chamois and mounted to the third floor hand in hand. After a warm and harmonious session of sixty-nine (Elvis was not too tall) to the sounds of Montenegrin folk rock (East Elysium—my favorite song was “Wings [Who You Are?]”), he said, “I want to buttfuck you.”

      “What is it with guys?” I said. “You’re all obsessed.”

      “I never mentioned it before!”

      “So where did you get the idea? From bad porn with stock footage from the sixties? From daring postmodern novels like Lady Chatterley’s Lover?”

      “From doing it.”

      “FYI, it’s no fun, so forget it.”

      “Just forget it?”

      “Forget it.”

      Elvis said mournfully, “If you loved me, you wouldn’t care that it’s ‘no fun.’ That’s the difference between our thing and a real love.”

      “Wait a second,” I said. “I don’t mean to sound like a crank, but are you saying that what makes our relationship valuable is my willingness to suffer for you? Are you aware that I’ve never suffered for you for even, like, one second? That’s what makes our relationship so optimal, in my opinion.”

      “You must have done buttfucking to know that it’s ‘no fun.’ So you suffered for someone else, right?”

      “So now you want to move up in the world?”

      “I’m in love with you. I want a sign that I mean so much to you.”

      “You asked me if I’d move to Geneva with you, and I said no. You accepted that right away.”

      “I can’t ask so much of you. That’s too much.”

      “Are you aware that if you gave me a choice, like if I actually had two options in life, anal sex and moving to Geneva—”

      “You would move to Geneva?” He threw his arms around me again, quivering with spontaneous joy.

      “You’re not understanding me,” I said, pushing pillows in the corner so I could sit up. “There’s suffering, and then there’s boring stuff, and then there’s stuff that’s just plain stupid. I’ve done my share of suffering for Stephen. And other guys. Like crucifixion, I mean that level of suffering. Like St. Laurence. ‘Turn me over! I’m done on this side!’ I don’t see what that has to do with having a good relationship. It should be about getting through difficult stuff together. Difficult stuff the world throws at you, not difficult stuff you do to each other. The difference right now between me and St. Laurence is, he didn’t have the option of taking his hand off the hot stove.”

      “You are fierce,” he replied, pulling the blanket up around his naked body to hide it. “I am never asking another woman for buttfucking.”

      “Are you bisexual?”

      He frowned. “I am polymorphous pervert! Where I find love!”

      I shifted back into neutral and once again accepted the need for negative capability in this world. We had loving, beautiful sex just as soon as we could get ourselves to stop talking—loving and beautiful in the expressionist, pathetic-fallacy sense in which you might say a meadow was loving and beautiful even if it was full of hamsters ready to kill each other on sight, but only when they’re awake. I mean, you just ignore the hamsters and look at the big picture.

      The next day, around six p.m. after he woke up, Stephen said, “Let’s make a baby.”

      “I feel like Saint Laurence on the gridiron,” I said.

      “No, you’re mixed up. Miscarriage is nothing compared to childbirth. You got off easy. You’re like Saint Laurence saying he doesn’t want to go to Italy in July. I’m asking you right now to risk your life and health for my reproductive success. I feed, you breed. Come on!”

      “Sounds tempting,” I said. “If I could lay eggs and you agreed to sit on them, I might even do it.”

      “Can we fake it?” he said. “Are you fertile?”

      “Not exactly.”

      “Then meet the father of your triplets!”

      “You’re totally insane,” I said approvingly. Stephen was actually sort of interesting when his mind opened the iron gates a crack and let the light out.

      “The central ruling principle of my life,” Stephen explained in a grandfatherly way, “is ‘Let’s Not And Say We Did.’ Most people don’t give a fuck what you’ve done and not done. If I put a picture of you and a baby on my desk, I can get promoted. All anybody wants to know is little sketchy bits of information, strictly censored, and that’s enough. It’s more than enough. Did you ever sit down and actually make a list of what you know about, like, Togo? ‘Is in Africa.’ That would be the grand total of your knowledge. But when people say the word ‘Togo’ you let it pass, the same way you let hundreds of people pass you on the street and in the halls every day. And every one of them is as big as Togo, inside.”

      “That’s pure bathos, and I know nothing about Togo,” I said. “But somebody like, say, Omar’s wife, СКАЧАТЬ