Thrust: A Novel

My soul Aurora,

Your story of this David moved me mightily, and thus conjured another in me. The first time I saw David, the statue, I visited so often that the guards made inquiries. I was warned many times to refrain from touching him. I could not eat or sleep without torment for weeks thereafter. I carried a profoundly base thought in my body: Why is this magnificent David not a possibility in my life? Why can’t my obsession take form in his body? His desire taking me into back alleys and bathrooms and forests at the edges of cities… anywhere I could be unseen and feel the dirt and grime and sweat and cum coming up against the white of marble and perfectly clean skin that plagued my thoughts.

Where is my David?

Do you recall when we first rediscovered each other as adults? Come, you invited me. Come and see what I’ve done with your gift, you said at the door to the boardinghouse I bought for you. The building was brick, painted black, rising three stories into the air — its bulk heaving almost directly out of the water, so close I could throw a cup out of the window and hear a splash. Each story of the building had six rooms. A beautiful banister staircase made of cherrywood to seduce those who enter ever upward.

That night, I asked you if you were a prostitute.

It’s not like there was a shortage of high-end ladies’ clubs peppering the neighborhood. The most esteemed was probably Kate Woods’s House of All Nations, where the claim was that foreign-born women of any extraction could be purchased for the right price. And baser brothels thrived amid the dense and raucous workers’ neighborhoods too. The business of pleasure was booming. It seemed an innocent question.

But it was your answer that arrested me — an answer pushed through lips pursed so tightly, I imagined your teeth screaming.

“I am neither a madam nor a prostitute — not ever again in this lifetime, my love. I do not traffic in the bodies of women. I traffic instead in stories — ones that take a body to its edges.”

You remember how I looked at you. With the blank stare of a bovine, you said later.

But that night you were patient with my dullness. Leaning close enough to kiss me, you whispered: “I draw a very different client, Frédéric. Those who enter my rooms come away not in some banal love or lust, but with a craving to exist, again and again, inside a much more interesting and intense space. An ecstatic state. A space between.”

The cilia in my ears stood up. I said, “Death?” Then I laughed — the laugh of an educated and refined idiot who doesn’t quite know what is going on.

“Close,” you replied. “More like the meniscus between pleasure and pain.” You pinched the skin near my nipple so hard, my lip twitched. But I did not make a sound.

We were children again in that moment.

“I bring to the surface of the body, and the psyche, stories held so deeply within us that we shudder to speak them. I bring stories to life, so that we might recover our own bodies. I am wholly narrative, I am the hole of narrative, I am the holy narrative. These rooms are a storyletting,” you said. And that was true — but I was ignorant, insecure, too anxious to sound witty and knowing.

“Do you mean that you are an endless hole, my love?”

You looked at me in a manner that would shrivel both brain matter and scrotal sack into ash.

“Certainly not. Have you lost your mind in your travels?” You poured more whiskey. “Have you become my gorgeous yet slow-witted cousin since we’ve been apart? A witless beautiful object — what a terrible combination. No, what I’m referring to, my angel, are the systems and practices that humans rely on to interpret behavior. Rules and practices eventually become the very system they were meant to describe. Exhibit A”—and here you outlined your own torso and head with a flurry of gestures— “the object we call ‘woman.’ I am, in short, unbearable, overwritten by imbeciles.”

I stood. You pushed me back down, so that your body rose above mine.

You explained an entire court proceeding, somehow turning it into a seduction. Something about criminals and corporations and I don’t know what, but I did not turn away, not in my head, neither in my other head. You concluded with an illumination I think about still: “If I can only exist as some dim object, inside an insipid story laid out for me before I was born by morons who need the stories of mothers and whores to keep the social house in order”—you pressed your sex down harder onto mine—“then at the very least I am going to require my own fucking pen.”

The vast wet of you became apparent in my lap.

“I am not a prostitute, as noted earlier,” you said. “Now let me show you my rooms.”

The answer to my prayers began there, Aurora.

I therefore remain devoted to you above all.

Your Frédéric