In writing you, calm, proud G., I see your cropped hair, following the curves of your skull, your shoulder blades, the dotted line of your spine, your hips, your knees, the scar in the shape of a sailing ship on the instep of your left foot. At waist height I see the arrow pointing upwards that has been the symbol of the male sex since time immemorial. The comma is the small, dark opening that promises a new, better destination for curious, skilful fingers. You are a letter, G, a Helvetica, all strict Swiss honesty.
[…]
You whispered very quietly, almost ashamed, that you had a ‘shy libido’. It must have been gone twelve, the buzz in the café had swollen to shrieks behind us, and perhaps that’s why you did it, but it was still special what you did, while you stacked one beer mat on another like a series of cardboard moons shifting before the sun, to smile and say that shyness often comes from the fear of losing all your reserves as soon as you produce the first word, the first gesture, drawing back all the curtains to leave you naked on the stage, yes, skinned even: an illustration in an anatomical atlas, a perverted form of a human being.
[…]
Hard, guttural Dutch could be heard all around us, it was noticeable, and I was convinced — oh, arrogance, will you never end? — that all the other people in the café would be jealous of our conversation, that they would want to be just as much strangers to one another as you and I, two characters sitting at a bar who, with every word they uttered, were revealing more to one another, and who, with every sentence they spoke and every anecdote they told, were taking on more of a fixed form. You said that your resolution was to be more honest, more honest to yourself, more honest about the desires you harboured and that you had never yielded to because there is always another day, an inner voice, a doubting alter ego who watches and shakes its head. And I thought I saw you glance away for a moment, irritated or ashamed, and that you thought I thought you were making an unsubtle pass, which may well have been the case, but I wasn’t able to judge given how late it was, and you started on about your yearning for release, a release from all desires, but then didn’t contradict me when I said such a release would simply turn you into a completely sexless being, a bronze statue of Buddha who gazes down contentedly from the window sill as the world around him ecstatically embraces all kinds of illusions.
[…]
You talked about your talent for table tennis — about the hours you spent as a child and teenager under the roof of a sports hall and how you loved the artificial light shining from high above down on the green floor and red and yellow lines; how when you were sixteen, you went on an internship to China where you were blindfolded and had to try and react to the sound of the ball bouncing. Of course no one could do this, even the Olympic champions never hit the ball back over the net, but the advantage was that when they removed the blindfold even the fastest and most difficult balls no longer seemed impossible. You showed me a photo, of you bent over the table, your muscular legs contrasting with your brief, white table-tennis shorts, and you told me — when you spoke, there was always an initial moment of shame, mixed with pride and even passion that you were able to overcome that shame, and turn yourself inside out — about that time in the sports hall when you had seen a woman high up in the stand, sitting there for an hour and watching you that entire hour, how you had stood there and moved about in your shorts and you had become so aroused that you lost your concentration and hit all the balls into the net.
[…]
You know, G, I thought you smelt strange when we lay next to one another — it was a vague smell of sweat, on top of which was a hint of — what’s that stuff called, the stuff you rub on your skin when the muscle pain is killing you? Only later that night did you lose that smell, or I stopped noticing it, and together we could mainly smell the cotton in the hotel sheets, sheets that must have spent a long time in storage. Did we know what we wanted from one another? The way in which you stroked my throat, my mouth and my closed eyes so very gently with your fingertips, the palm of your hand. Soft as if they had just come out of the bath, and the way in which you grabbed hold of me and took my breath away five, seven, nine.
[…]
Tiger balm: the smell of changing rooms and colds.
[…]
Your body in the hands of someone who doesn’t know you but stopped being a total stranger several minutes ago. Does it grow, respond, produce substances, start vibrating at the sight of so much nudity so close by?
[…]
Halfway through the night, and the only light in the room came from the bright red digits on the alarm-clock radio, which was one hour ahead, summer time, which seemed appropriate, us in our own time zone, and you told me about your best friend and about a job interview where she was in the appointment committee and had gone for a stocky, muscular man with a large plaster on his chin — because she always found it touching to see men with a plaster on their face or an arm or a leg in a dressing. She often dreamed of meeting an astronaut wrapped in a thick crust of medicinal plaster of Paris that she would cut loose using surgical scissors, and then rub a cream into the shrunken, wrinkled, flaking skin — rub it in until she had reached all his folds and hidden corners and holes. She talked a lot about sex to you. I wondered whether you would tell her about us and if so, how we would look in your description for your friend. Whether she would picture me as I rolled onto your side and took hold of your slender neck, massaging it, with one hand.
[…]
A stomach burbling, not surprising after such a long night, but neither of us knew whose stomach the burbles came from! We had to laugh, like a couple who, in a few hours, had seen time accelerate to cover an entire decade. And that was precisely the obscene aspect of that moment: that we had acquired a familiarity that was based on nothing other than an empty stomach.
[…]
It must have been very early, about six o’clock, when we heard thumping above us. At first I thought it was a couple making love but there were no moans or sighs. There was a loud bang, as if someone had tumbled out of bed, a bunk bed. Up above, furniture was being moved and a solitary vacuum cleaner let out a thin cry.
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