Sisyphus

I awoke gasping for breath. She had come to me in my dream, wrapping her sweaty thighs around my head and making me taste her, laughing at me as my eyes bugged out in surprise. She slapped the top of my head over and over, grinding against me, and I struggled to find air.

Once I came to my senses, I tasted blood. For a moment, I mistrusted reality. Would I perhaps awake from a dream within a dream? She had been bleeding in the dream, this I remembered, and now I was tasting it. I rolled my tongue around inside my mouth. It was thick, swollen. I felt raised flesh around both sides, and finally understood that I had bitten it in my sleep.

I went to the bathroom and splashed some cold water on my face. I could still hear her laughter. It was sadistic, maniacal. The top of my head hurt like my hair had been pulled, and this with no reason. Had I thrust myself against the headboard, trying to escape the dream in my reality? Had I pulled my own hair? This pain would never be explained.

I sat down on the toilet to pee. It would have been impossible to do it standing up; I was hard, from both the pressure in my bladder and the content of the dream. It was a struggle to relax, to let it go. And when it was over, I was still hard, and I masturbated into the bowl, leaning over and resting my right hand on the floor when I came, groaning, hoping for some kind of relief to the tension.

I crawled back into bed and thought about her, about us, how far we had come sexually. When it started, it was romantic and playful, light, cautious. Within weeks, the lovemaking had become more aggressive, her asking for harder, rougher contact. My fingers would dig deep into her ribcage. She insisted I squeeze her hips as hard as I could when she rode me, and there were times when, the following day, my hands would ache. I left teeth marks on her sides, on her ass, on her shoulders, inside her thighs, wherever she wanted to feel me bite her. I didn’t need any of it; it was all her, but I was willing to give. I loved making her feel good.

She would be turned on by things that surprised me, since she was so shy in public. Once, my friend Charlie came up from the country to stay for a few days, sleeping on a pile of down comforters on the living room floor. She had heard the floorboards creak when he got up for a midnight piss, and she woke me with her hands and mouth, pulling me on top of her, jabbing at me, prodding me until I moaned, then slapping me to elicit more noise. She wanted Charlie to hear me. She laughed every time I made the guttural sounds that surely carried into the next room where he lay. In the morning, at breakfast, Charlie looked at us uncomfortably, but she just hummed Beethoven with a sly smile on her face while scrambling eggs in the frying pan. Charlie never stayed with us again.

The paramedics told me she suffered, which may be why I’ve been unable to let go. She had been awake, aware of what was happening, but unable to escape her fate. True to form, she accepted it and had ripped her own panties off from under her skirt so she could touch herself one more time before… before….

I take the bus to work now. I take it everywhere, really. Everywhere it goes that I need to reach, at least. Once in awhile I need to take a taxi, but I am never comfortable. The cabbies pick me up out front and ask about the car in the driveway, why I wouldn’t want to drive it everywhere just to be seen in it. I make up excuses, that the starter’s busted, that the brakes are shot, that I haven’t had a chance to renew the insurance. Sometimes they ask to look under the hood, but I feign that I’m in a hurry. I am never in a hurry.

My work has suffered because I can no longer concentrate. When I show some potential buyer a stove or refrigerator, I seldom hear their questions. I tell them what it does. I answer whatever question I think I’ve heard. They rarely buy. The manager has been decent about it. He understands that I am still lost, but I can sense his patience is running out. Soon I’ll be asked to straighten up or find another job. This should scare me more than it does because the job market is so shaky, but I also know I have enough of her life insurance money left to last me a few months if I need it. The only money I’ve spent from it was on her funeral, which was so surprisingly expensive. They were nice people, sympathetic and willing to do whatever they could to make my transition easier, but I couldn’t help but think how much of that money was going to new suits and ties. My transition. It was more hers than mine, I suppose.

Charlie let me stay with him in the country for a few days. I slept on the couch. He was distant, but had a willing ear. Neither of us brought up his last night at our place, but we were both thinking about it. We sat at his table and I scanned the walls, counting six crucifixes and one set of rosary beads hanging off the curtain rod above the kitchen sink. No wonder he was uncomfortable.

I tossed and turned for awhile, hoping to get back to sleep, looking at the clock every 15 minutes until the sun started coming in through the blinds. I got up, made some instant coffee and choked down a bowl of cereal. The hot coffee felt like shards of glass against my ragged tongue. I sucked on an ice cube and looked through the medicine cabinet for some Orajel to rub on it, anything to deaden the pain. Her toothbrush still hung on the rack behind the mirror. I hadn’t gotten rid of anything but the dress they buried her in.

I cried in the shower, something I do most days. I threw up after, as I also do most days. I pulled a clean shirt off the line in the basement and ran the iron across it, straightening the roughest edges but forgot the collar, which I hadn’t noticed was rumpled until I’d put it on and made my third attempt at a Windsor knot. I noticed the time; it was too late to fix it now or I’d miss the bus.

I slept through my stop, having fallen asleep to Hayden on my iPod. I walked the six blocks back to the store and punched in at the time clock. The manager didn’t look upset. I did some morning cleaning, dusting off the countertops, checking price tags for expired sales, slicing open an index finger on one of the thick labels. I sucked the blood off until the wound stopped bleeding. Again, that taste of blood, cleaner than hers but just as salty.

She’d taken a turn too fast one night, clipped a guardrail and nosed over into the river, and no one was around to see it happen. The car sank quickly, and she wasn’t able to open a door or break a window. Her seat belt had jammed tightly across her shoulders and hips. The water seeped in slowly, and while she must have had a few moments of panic, I doubt it lasted long. She was too strong for that. And then she reached between her legs, pulled her panties off from the crotch, and rubbed herself one last time. When they pulled her car out and drained the water, her hand was underneath her skirt and her panties had come to lie on the dashboard. They said she was smiling, but that her eyes were open and scared. The slow drowning, that’s why they said she suffered. A horrible way to go, they said. They didn’t question the position of her hand, her ripped panties, any of it, but I told them just the same. Knowing she was going to die, to drown, she was looking for that supposed “ultimate orgasm,” and desperately tried to make herself come while her air ran out.

Every night I wake up like that, gasping for breath. Every night I dream of her, something physical, something degraded, something messy. Every night I wake up hard, go for a piss and pull myself off into the toilet, and then struggle to go back to sleep. Sometimes it works. Sometimes I sleep and she comes to me again, begging for another finger or spitting in my face or into my mouth, biting my lip. She yanks my chest hair. And I wake up again and repeat the pattern of piss and come and then struggle to sleep.