Sexytime

By Michelle Kaeser

Photo by Kate Pulley

It’s a curious mix of people, those who find life intolerable. You can’t peg ‘em. At least not always. Sure, you’ve got some red flag cases; total loonies, die-hard depressives, angsty teens, these are obvious picks. This last example, though, really only half counts. Adolescents get in on the suicide game for the show, amping up their lives with a little razzle dazzle, a spoonful of attention. They’re children, they lack commitment. And once the perils of puberty have been safely navigated, the drama ebbs, the flags drop, useful adults emerge, and society more or less deems their existences bankable. No, you just don’t ever expect the great offing from a full-grown, functional member of your sphere. And then it happens that one day, out of the clear blue sky, you see your neighbour, maybe your sister, could be your mother falling and falling and falling from a tenth story window.

There’s a girl named Mary. She’s a superhero, sort of. No cape, no costume, no front page news, but Mary does lay claim to a few superhuman powers and puts these to a virtuous use, fighting the communist agenda the world over. She can’t fly exactly, but she can coast for minutes; a giant leap, a smooth glide. She’s strong, too. Not quite Herculean strength, but those guns of hers easily harness the power of three virile men. Yes, she’s a force in the world, our Mary is. But there’s a catch here – there always is – and here the catch is that Mary’s powers aren’t assured. Her hold on them rests on one teensy tiny wee bit of sacrifice on her part: lifelong virginity. If ever Mary yields to that primal temptation, if ever she does the deed, knocks boots, rides the rocket, rolls in the hay, she’ll lose her superpowers forever. Penetration? Forget it. Oral? Verboten. Manual, please? No, it’s out out out. Poor Mary, she’s horny as hell.

When Mary was fifteen she tried to kill herself. It was a violent love that did it. Unconsummated desires will easily rend the teenage soul apart and so they did with Mary. She fell for the dopey schoolboy across the street. They took in movies together, drank milkshakes, they laughed and canoodled, they saw ever more of each other. Mary’s thoughts grew sexy, lusty, bawdy, then downright depraved with the lack of satisfaction. The cabal of Catholic priests who raised Mary kept keen eyes on this infatuation, fretting day and night that Mary might succumb to her urges and lose her powers, a circumstance which could not be countenanced. From day one, the priests had groomed Mary to be a warrior, a champion fighter in the battle against the communists. She was to be their hero in the clash of ideologies, but here she was tiptoeing toward a precipice, flirting with notions of sex, toying with the termination of her superpowers. Could they really risk losing their hero to some trite teenage romance? No, surely not. Something had to be done. Something was done. The priests moved Mary from the mansion that had been her lifelong home. It took six of them to do it given Mary’s great strength, but they managed the task and set her up miles away in a lonely cathedral up on deserted hill. Mary was heartbroken, furious, rebellious. One night she decided to teach those priests a lesson. She snuck down to the great hall and downed all the sacramental wine she could find, a bottle of aspirin to accompany the brew. Suicide attempt number one.

The priests found her before she was even properly passed out. She knew they’d be around, it was a hollow attempt, a teenage try. The priests could have bellowed at her for this supreme transgression of the Lord’s law, but instead they bestowed kind attention on her in the aftermath and soon she began to feel some shame for her unholy act. She even began to regret having met that boy across the street and having let her carnal urges lead her so close to total disaster. After this bit of adolescent drama, Mary made a turnaround. She buckled down and devoted herself to her studies. The priests were delighted to receive her rapt attention. They spent hours, days, years offering her rigorous schooling in anti-communist philosophy. They explained quite definitively that the communists were a heretical, ignorant and indolent sect of destroyers, biding their time, building stores of resources, all in an effort to launch a global revival of their heathen creed. It wasn’t the opposing and erroneous religions that would end the Church’s reign, but the left-wing political economy that threatened the entire superstructure. The time was coming when wars would have to be fought and Mary, gifted as she was with extraordinary powers, would be an invaluable asset to the side of right, the side of God. Mary readied herself for the day.

Before that day came, however, the cathedral up on the hill burned right down to the ground. Big blaze. Everyone dead. All but Mary. She was just shy of nineteen and now all on her own. Amid the rubble, atop the hill, she avowed never to give up the cause, to fight the good fight, to foil the enemies of the Church. Out on her own, out in the real world Mary saw communists everywhere. Everywhere! She saw their corrupt, lazy, red stink on everything and everyone. Her time had come, battles were imminent. Away she went.

It was a zealous energy that spurred her forth at the start, but without the daily dose of indoctrination she’d received at the cathedral, her enthusiasm began to waver. With no clear path in front of her, Mary found her way to college. She’s a few years deep now and these years in the academy have encouraged her to relax her views on the reds, noticing as she has, that the capitalism her priests had always exalted has its own distinct and offensive odour. She’s even made a few lefty friends at school and decided they aren’t so bad. A little misguided maybe, but not worthy of blanket extermination or enslavement. These realizations confound her thoughts. The nuances of the political landscape suddenly seem so tricky to grasp, the necessity of warfare seems uncertain and Mary feels her zeal for the cause slip, slipping away. Ideologies are dampened, they always are. Her acts of heroism become humbler in scope. Anonymous aid, thwarting robbers, frustrating muggers, that sort of thing. There’s no big picture anymore, no endgame, no supervillain, no ethos to weave her deeds around.

Besides, she can’t offer the cause nearly as much focus as she used to. College has shifted her attentions elsewhere. On men. All kinds of men. They’re everywhere. She starts fraternizing with Jews. Hobnobbing with liberals. Hanging out with working class activists. The priests would be tearing out their hair in an expression of aggressive disappointment, but Mary can’t help herself. Passionate men, lackluster men, buff men, pudgy men, they all hold a magnetic draw. They’re all so handsome and willing to flatter her, to court her, to lay their hands on her. At night she lies in bed, wide-eyed, and catalogues the day’s crop. She meditates on the techniques these sundry men might use to fuck her. Big hands, strong backs, and her thighs wrapped tightly around the whole scene. There’s so much temptation and oh, how she’d like to yield. But the cost. Sigh. The cost is just so high. It’s all right that she’s started boozing with the commies, but sex? No, not at the expense of her superpowers. It’d be like sacrificing a limb, an organ, a part of herself that she can’t do without. What is she without her powers? Shudder. She doesn’t want to consider it.

She’s still out in the mean streets some nights, fighting crime, righting wrongs, but even these small-time acts of heroic goodness leave her with misgivings. The mugger is stealing to feed his family – is it really her place to stop him? She doesn’t know which side to root for in a fight, which side to fight for. Which side is God’s side? She’s a sheep without a shepherd, roaming tortuously around the cityside and all she really wants is to find a mighty ram who will mount her from behind and put her to rest.

She winds up in graduate school; history. It’s not occupying nearly as much time as she thought it would. Empty hours are no good for Mary. They offer her occasion to wallow in her problems, dream up sexy scenarios until she finds herself awash in a sea of frustration. But she’s a shrewd girl, she realizes this pitfall so she tries to busy herself elsewhere. It’s off to the bar with her friends. What’s grad school without healthy doses of liquor? The time is tolerably spent. It passes quicker when she’s been drinking.

But the grad school league has some real go-getters. Always researching, working, striving, whatever. It doesn’t matter which. Her buddies aren’t always available, so she has to keep up the party by herself. Party of one, it’s no less fun. Only now it’s happened that she can’t sleep well after the drink wears off. Nights are restless and long, days are long and restless. Time stretches and stretches. There are so many hours that need to be filled and she can’t figure out how to fill them. She knows how she’d like to fill them. She spends her life planning the scene, imagining the congress. A troupe of potent lovers, different arrangements, different instruments, different pleasures and then a solid night’s rest. Some nights when sleep just won’t come, she lets her fingers spiderwalk down her belly toward the source of her misery, that demanding core. She brushes fingertips over it, tickles it, but she can do no more. Tears come, bouts of desperate weeping while she waits for the sun to rise. The days are not much easier to while away. She’s listless, she ambles, one long random route. Often her course lands her down at the beach, some latent act of masochism steering her steps. Left and right, she faces virility. It’s in the half-clad men, striding and swimming and jumping and flexing. She watches them all. Hard-bodied, soft-bodied, disable-bodied, any body would do.

What a choice to make. Superpowers or sex. Who could make that decision? It’s not pride, hollow pride, that has her clinging to the powers. Who among us would trade our more modest capabilities, our sense of sight or smell or taste, our functioning muscles, our opposable thumbs for a few dances between the sheets?  Ooooh damn, though, how she wants that dance, her body quivers she wants it so much. And what good are her superpowers these days anyway? The communists aren’t the threat she once thought they were. She has no one to fight, no cause to believe in. No hero is called for, what use is she? Oh, please, Jesus, just give her what she needs, let her have a piece of man between her legs, a minute of fabled sexytime. In humble prayer she asks the Lord to guide her way, to show her a path out of her plight. But Jesus is truant, no one answers. Left to her own counsel, her thoughts are predictable: sex, sex, sex, suicide.

Thoughts of self-destruction will often simmer on the backburners of our minds, an abstract possibility, a comforting alternative to combat deep despair, but for Mary these thoughts have begun the march to the fore. She’s never happy, never sated, she knows she never will be, she just wants time to pass and it passes so slowly. Life is so hard, it’s just too hard. Why was she saddled with such a yoke? Why must it be one or the other? The conflict beats within her breast, she knows not what to do, she’s pulled both ways, torn and tired, frustrated, irritable, fed-up, and hornier by the second. Enough!

One morning she awakens at 1:45.  She tries reading, but it’s been ages since she could focus on a book that isn’t pornographic. The effort hurts her head. She gives the TV a shot, but there are too many infomercials, the sound is grating. She lies and lies and waits and waits for day to break. It’s a torturous, agitated night. At five o’clock she gets up, takes a shower, eats breakfast out of habit. Her hands are shaky, and cold. They don’t want to warm up.

It’s still early down on the beach, the people are few. She sees the muscular outline of a Greek god walking the shoreline, a cooler slung over his shoulder. It’s a familiar body, he sells booze on the beach on the sly and she’s been a regular patron. It’s early, but she approaches him anyway, hoping he’ll be stocked up or maybe carting leftovers from the day before. He pokes around inside the cooler, checking his supply while she considers how much she’d like him to be poking around inside of her, how she’d like him to lay her down right there on the sand, rob her of her garments and give her a good, deep dicking. She settles for the wares he’s offering her instead: booze-infused freezies. She buys eight and retreats to a more private alcove, a patch of beach between big rocks and a blackberry bush. Before she opens her mouth to take in the first freezie, she pauses to appreciate its phallic nature, letting her mind play this game of makebelieve one last time. She sucks on the freezie, imagines she’s sucking on something decidedly less cold.

The sun rises up, higher up, while she alternates freezie pulls with sleeping pills, a few bottles of cheap wine to bridge the gap. It’s not a hero’s end, it’s not a tragic lover’s death, she’s unable to satisfy either of these fates. It’s just an end, a quiet, discreet sort of finish. And somehow she feels like she’s won; she hasn’t yielded, she’ll die intact, superpowers, virginity and all.

It’s sudden and it’s not. Her friends are surprised, the priests wouldn’t have expected it, not from the full-grown Mary. Had they gleaned her intentions, they might have descended from heaven or risen from hell or assayed in some way to intervene and reorient her to the chosen path. Her comrades, her many suitors might have lent caring ears, though none of this would have helped our Mary. The hours of the day, the hours that put smiles on faces, orgasms in bodies, fulfillment in hearts, the hours that make us feel alive, well for some unlucky ones, for a curious few, these hours are just too long and too much to bear.