"And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A quistus chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells."
-- Hart Crane, "At Melville's Tomb"
.cet.art.io.dactyla.
.
The inflatable whale costume. Seifer has her wear it every time.
"Leave the glasses on," he says tonight, voice husky in the dark. It might be a request. She is not fooled. Beneath his velvety tone, she can hear the steel. Even through the stifling grip of the plastic, she can hear the steel.
He likes to see her try to put her glasses on over the suit. When they shift suddenly against the plastic's slippery surface and clatter to the floor, as they often do, he makes no move to retrieve them. He'll wait patiently for her to waddle over, pick them up again with her flippers, put them back on. Sometimes as he watches her struggle, he smiles. Or laughs, or pushes her with one foot at the very instant when she has them balanced on the bridge of the whalesnout, so that she has to start all over again.
Other times he only stares at her, breathing heavily.
Her flippers rub clumsily against the suit now, making a sound as of a miniature trumpet. She doesn't mean to ask him why, but she's spoken the words before she can help it. He smirks, of course. She can see it even though the blurry plastic lenses. What else would he do? What else has he ever done? But then he surprises her with an answer.
"I like to see them on you" -- and he has caught her, again, like he's the whale and she's the fish, not the other way around.
And then, like a fisherman, he jerks back, and his hook digs in her mouth, burning, cruel.
"But mostly because I ٭can٭, chickenwhale. Because I can."
"Seifer --" she begins, her voice muffled by the ever-purring drone of the vacuum running in reverse, against nature, that gives her breath in this vulgar balloon. She repeats his name, louder, in a parody of passion. "The glasses will break. I can't, I can't even ٭see٭, I -- it doesn't ٭matter٭ --"
He places a finger against a latex orca mouth, firmly. She can feel it against her human lips, entombed but still needful inside this secondbody. /I am his tortoise/ , she realizes, as the night's first tears prick at her whaleshrouded eyes, /and gladly would he leave me in this shell forever./
/Entombed but still needful inside this secondbody/ -- is it a tomb, truly? Or a cocoon? Is she hiding anymore, as she was when this all began, in a night of hazy summer and sweet alcohol and a softly spoken order by a Balamb pool? She doesn't think so -- no, she doesn't think so, because in here she feels more alive, more ٭real٭, then she feels out there, even in the rare times when she's in his arms and not in his miasma of derision. It is safer here in this shell, this soft blubbery womb of whale and denial.
Yes. This is her. This is ٭her٭.
"Time to free Willy," Seifer says, barking loudly over the hum of the vacuum, over the secondbreath, and Seifer has spoken; Seifer must be obeyed. She shimmies to him in a desperate waddle, fins battering at him in love or hate, equally bestial and violent in this sin-streaked darkness. The struggles sound like the squeaking of a parade of balloons. He laughs as she stumbles on clumsy whalefins like a hobbled thing.
She was a gazelle once, longlegged, racing, and no man had ever caught her. Now she is just a tortoise.
/No/ , she thinks, horror rising in her like a corpse dredged from the silt of a lake. /I'm a whale./
She begins to beg. It is a natural thing for a whale to beg, she tells herself, fighting back the shame that emerges suddenly from the dusty, closeted corners of her mind, screaming at her in her mother's voice. It's a natural thing for a whale to beg. She has seen them at Dollet Aquarium: Esthar, their fat black faces poking over the rim of the tank, their greedy, tooth-lined mouths desperate for the slimeslick pleasure of fish. Their squeals, keening and grotesque. Yes. It is a natural thing for a whale to beg.
But those whales didn't beg for this. No. No. She had seen Moomo the Wonder Whale's Wednesday Whaleapalooza with Seifer a dozen times (always too aware of his dilated pupils, his face, more flushed than the most enthusiastic of the grade school viewers, the rasping of his breath, the shrouded form of his arousal, visible against his leg like a long, low stone). Moomo had never whispered "I need you inside me" in Seifer's ear, no matter how many times Seifer had longed to hear it.
Zell comes by, every Tuesday. Zell comes by to pick up the recycling; this and nothing more. She wonders how much Zell knows. She wonders, sometimes, when Seifer is away and the whale cavorts within her mind and loins, if Zell has ever tasted the salt spray of a sea like hers. It is meaningless folly. The whale surges, a final slap of a broad tail against the diseased heart of her lust, and is gone. Seifer. She is only for Seifer, for whales mate for life.
She cannot wait anymore.
"Now, ٭NOW٭ -- " she screams against the wailing of the vacuum, of her bitter plasticine lungs. She needs him inside her. She needs his penetration, painful and sweet like the snap of breaking glass.
And he gives it to her.
A sharp crack, the smell of cordite, and a bullet punches into the side of her belly, where her whalependix should be. There is no flesh there, nothing to wound or bleed. There is nothing there but air, and the bullet punches clear through, piercing the plastic, defiling the sanctity of her secondbody with the whipcrack popping sound of destruction.
But she'd always known he would do this, hadn't she? He breaks her down whenever she finds comfort from anything other than ٭him.٭ She knew from the start it would end like this, her absurd plastic sheath collapsing around her like the crumpling of a dying insect, bleeding air in a flatulence of despair and humiliation. The vacuum is off; the only other sound is his laughter. Soon she will have to go back out there, into that laughter, to breathe.
The plastic clings to her face, to her mouth -- she has to go back out there --
She wonders if he would let her die like this.
"Hurry up," he says lazily, grasping her left breast. "I'm horny. And I don't want my willy to end up like ٭YOUR٭ Willy, get my meaning?"
She thrashes crazily, deflating, dying, and the latex is sucked into her mouth, clinging to her lips, her cheeks, her teeth, and somewhere far away, somewhere along the shores of some mental ocean, she can hear Seifer and he is ٭giggling٭, giggling girlishly as he places a hand at the juncture of her convulsing thighs.
/He draws me like I draw Blizzaga. He draws me --/ but then there's no air, no air, and the animal in her is at last free as she claws and bucks and tries to scream and scream and breathless ٭scream٭ --
-- and then she's free, and when she can focus on Seifer's face, the face of the man who pulled the skin off, there are three red lines across his cheek. She feels blood cooling under her fingernails.
He stares down at her. Was there a flicker of concern; a flicker of regret? Had he seen something, in those last few minutes when the whale gave birth to Quistis, wet as a babe with sweat and tears and shameful, undeniable, sexual anticipation, that gave him pause?
"Fucking ow," he says, churlishly, holding his face. "Crazy bitch. Put the glasses back on and let's finish this up."
She reaches for them, tangled in the shed skin of the suit. They are still there. She can still see. She sees everything.
And that is the worst part.
It is many hours later, in the blackest part of the night that is intangible and silent and seafathoms deep, when she is finally drifting off to sleep beneath that heavy haze of degradation and indemnity, that he leans close and whispers but one word into the pink shell of her ear.
/"Athene."/
.
.fin.
With apologies to Michel Foucault.