Prodigals Read Free

martyr’s passion to the task of getting Lily spread-eagle and receptive, but all I managed to say, interrupting her arbitrarily to say it, was “I’m very stoned.”
    She looked at me curiously. “Really?” she said. I thought it was so obvious that I was briefly furious at her—that she was so wrapped up in telling me whatever shit, none of which I could translate into meaningful ideation anyway, that she had failed to notice I was demonstrating the vital signs of a Pet Rock. Eli walked over to ask if I wanted lunch, or anything, or what did I want, and I said “no,” “maybe,” “later” in some order, and then I realized that there was something I wanted, although it was not exactly a group activity, which was to lie on the bathroom floor and masturbate until I died.
    â€œExcuse me,” I said, getting up. I was not terribly steady on my feet and had to brace myself on furniture all the way to the bathroom, but I was excited, let’s say ludicrously excited, at the prospect of masturbating, and more than that even amazed that I had forgotten the possibility of masturbation as a sort of compromise formation in my ongoing sham coupledom with Lily. And although I could barely breathe or stand, the sensitivity I felt to the world just then was a revelation. It was as though every surface of my body, inside and out, had thinned to the basis weight of tracing paper. I seemed to feel the blood in my body coursing along the inner banks of its vessels, a trembling life force lighting up my meridians like neon, and as I pushed off from the free-form couch by the fireplace, the lone thought surfacing within the indiscrete salmagundi of my brain was something like: I know what a chakra is.
    In the bathroom I locked the doors and stripped to nothing, put the cold-water tap on low, and lay down on the bath mat. Something like fevered joy clenched in my abdomen. If there is an end point to the confessional mode it is surely the things we think about while masturbating, but here goes: I thought of the breasts of a woman who had been at dinner the night before, big, heavy breasts. I thought of her telling me to fuck them, or maybe having multiple dicks, or a kind of Matrix -like displacement of dicks, and fucking her and her tits at the same time. I thought of ass-fucking. I thought of someone wanting it, maybe begging for it, maybe Lily. There were mirrors all over the bathroom, and I thought of fucking Lily standing up, of gazing at the mirror and our eyes meeting in a look that said, Wow, we are fucking and it feels awesome . I thought, Mental note: return to question of mirrors, why we like watching ourselves fuck in mirrors—then I forgot this immediately. I thought, This feels so good, and when it is over I will die, but there won’t be any reason to live anyway, so that’s fine. And I thought, What am I doing with my life? And I thought, Am I a good person or a bad person or just a person? And I thought, Am I powerful or weak? And I thought, Now’s maybe not the time … And I thought, Let’s pretend powerful, just for now, let’s pretend I’m powerful and Lily’s powerful and I’m fucking her in the ass, and she’s asking for it, pleading probably, and our eyes meet in the mirror in a look of concern or coital oneness or existential hurt or gratitude that something could feel this good. Yes, that . Let’s pretend that .
    And I came just then, for the first time in my life, before even getting hard.
    *   *   *
    At dinner that night I gave a drunken toast that couldn’t have made much sense. After dinner we sat in front of the glass fire. To get it lit you had to open two separate valves, and even then it wasn’t clear where the gas emerged from, so when the flame finally took, the whole fireplace, which by then had filled with gas, came alive suddenly with the whoosh or whoomp of a fireball