lickhaven

[This is a segment of a revised and rearranged character study from the first novel I attempted, decades ago. Most of that would-be book was crap, but I think Rylla is worth it. Hope you do. And whether you do or not, I’ll likely bludgeon you with more of her later. X-rated material unapologetically included.]

“What’s that girl doing over there?”

Isa Roswald pointed his chin at a young, frizzy-curled someone performing a series of rapid motions with a contained nervousness that was almost electric. Her eyes held an alert, slightly mad look.

“She’s working on the mechanism for the production of glycine, Strudle explained. “That’s an amino acid. She’s one of the horizontals. I’m a vertical.”

They approached the bench. The girl was immersed in her work with an intensity out of all proportion to what she seemed to be actually doing. When Strudle spoke to her, she snapped her head back like a poorly articulated marionette.

“Rylla, this is Mr. Roswald. He’s from the government. He’s taking a tour of the project, and I thought you might give him a quick rundown of what you’re up to.”

Her expression, looking at Roswald, seemed to encompass both the experiment and herself. “Oh! Well. Each of these test tubes holds a concentrate from a different hormone, all to be tested for the same length of time… after the hormone has been added. To the solution. Thirty minutes. We test for how much glycine is produced – that’s an amino acid. What I do is take the concentrate and – ”

She snapped off a rapid-fire synopsis of each step in the process, finishing her sample as she spoke. Her accent was distinctly Irish, but there was no time or place in her express-train delivery for brogue or lilt. It poured out with an intensity that both dazed Roswald and etched every abstruse sentence into his brain. She finished her discourse in the corridor and looked across at him with nervous expectation.

What do I say now? “Uh, you… you’ve been doing this for long?”

“A furlong is at race tracks. About six months. Here. I might, would like to take up biochemistry as a profession. I never finished university but I’m going back now. Manchester. Part time. Then I’ll be able to… understand better what I’m doing.”

“You seem like you understand it well enough. A lot better than I understand what I’m doing, most of the time.”

“I mean, I already know the terms and things, but I want to know how it all fits together. Don’t you?” A shyness, almost unworthiness, seeped in. “Excuse me, but I have to get back in. To the lab.” She turned without further word and closed – almost slammed – the glass-paneled door.

Roswald paced back to Strudle’s office, where they traded bland observations, the kind that reminded him it was time to scrub his bathroom sink. “Thank you very much, Mr. Strudle. This has been a most enlightening visit.”

“You’re quite welcome. Can I show you the way out? It’s a bit labyrinthine, as they say.”

“No thank you, I think I’ve got it all right.”

Roswald snaked through the ranks of cubby holes, set for a quick exit, when he almost plowed into the girl again. She was pulling a cigarette from her mouth like unplugging a cord from a socket. He stood in her line of vision, afraid of upsetting a balance he couldn’t define, but the effect was as dramatic as before. She popped backwards, almost spilling the beaker she was holding with the non-cigaretted hand.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.”

“I shouldn’t be smoking, you know. They give me hell. Once I dropped a big ash into a flask and fouled the reading. Wow did they give it to me that time.”

“You do get a break?”

“Twenty minutes. I try to stretch it to thirty, half an hour, when I can.”

“Maybe we could talk for awhile for the other ten?”

“Oh, that sounds such fun.”

“It does?”

“Doesn’t it?”

They walked down to the lounge, where Roswald learned that her name was Rylla McKinna, from somewhere he couldn’t pronounce outside Dublin, that she had an opinion on everything imaginable, and that that opinion was likely not one he had heard before. She approached technical matters with a brash naïveté that splintered topics into fine particles according to her fancy, reassembling them as personal visions near an internal juncture between fantasy and cosmic relevance.

At the moment she was in an uproar about the sense of smell. Her instructor at Manchester, Swengdon, had posited that identifying odors was a response to stimuli excited by molecules that fit into microscopic niches in the upper reaches of the nose.

“Can you believe that? Tiny bumpy things floating through the air that just happen to be the right shape to fit into holes in your nose? That’s such – I wanted to dash up and ask him where he could come up with such an idea. But that didn’t seem a wise thing to do.” She puffed her cigarette and gulped another blast of coffee as though preparing to meet her fate. “Oh lord, I’m late, we’ve been three-quarters of an hour. I’ve got to go. Really.”

Roswald wanted to delay her by any means. “Is there anything funny going on here? Strudle acted like I should be followed by security.”

“That’s probably because of me. We’ve been… going out, together, and he’s getting, I guess, possessive. I don’t like that, it makes me nervous. How do I get into these things, I’m not his – you don’t want to hear about it, I’m sure. Well, goodbye, I wish we could talk more…” Her face slipped into a haunted vision of personal conflict, but through it he still glimpsed an overriding sense of purpose.

“Are you doing anything for dinner tonight?” Roswald snapped it out on impulse and as quickly felt himself an aging failure. Why am I panting after eighteen year old lab assistants?

“Tonight? That would be good. Yes, it would be fine,” a smile shooting across her face like she had changed masks.

He looked at the tight muscularity of Rylla (when had she shed her clothes? what had he been doing not to notice?), eyes too large, chin too small, but a body that did things, that stood with simmering motion, yet in Victorian terms “pleasingly plump,” roundly sensual. How did she manage all of it, her body forming a deliberate manifestation of herself? Her body must call men down from the trees. It had called Roswald in from the dryness of bureaucracy to the center of himself, though he could not have named that center, and now had no power left to do so.

He reached across and ran his fingers down the lines of that pleasingly sensual, plumply round body. He leapt into the moment with an intensity which blotted all considerations, ground into her, humped, banged, tupped, snorted and screwed. He did not make love. He needed something above and beyond love, verification of an existent self that could interact – the more brutally the better – with another.

They lazed through a long post-coital silence.

Over the days, Roswald grew more gentle in his lust. Once, in the moments before they came, Rylla spoke and continued to speak through climax, gasping around phrases, emphasizing adjectives with her nails, spiraling into cessation with words rolling from her as tickertape spills.

“Women are the dark side of the moon, they’re supposed to be the moon, Diana, huntress, but nobody, men, thinks they’re hunting, they think women have already found, found everything at home or inside, they can’t want but they do want, I want, keep doing it, don’t stop I can talk and still – I’ve wanted everything I’ve ever done, almost done everything I’ve wanted, no, wanted everything I’ve done, even if I’ve regretted it afterwards, years when I regretted every last thing I’d done because I didn’t know how… to… want… oh yes Isa yes… wanted to want the right ones, the ways best for me, I didn’t, didn’t know what to want, I’m beginning to know, frightens men to find a woman wanting, frightened you when you first, first time didn’t it, you had to learn… are you going to Isa are you yes… wanted to know, be able to tell what people were thinking, why they weren’t better than they are, you went ahead like I didn’t frighten you but I did, frightened, all the time, both of going to come, feel it Isa, not like anything anybody says it is because it satisfies, nothing else quite satisfies, inside and under what you are comes up and overwhelms and completes you-u-u-u-u-u-u yes-s-s-s-s I’m crazy crazy let everything fall into satisfaction what are desires why do I have desires when I’m satisfied other parts of me still looking for satisfaction martyrs looked for completion end point so final they could burn out easy while their flesh burned smell themselves roasting… in England executioners roasted entrails still attached to martyrs who knew nothing done in their lives satisfied like that smell satisfied the senses a physical thing in us telling us this is… what happens when I die I find I have a soul that must go roaming or there’s a heaven or I  come back as someone I’ll never know, or I’ll be a man next time to find it no more complete to be a man I thrive on being me thriving… thriving… thriving say a word over and over it’s just noise, dirt and worms, what’s more complete in death if you aren’t complete here you’ve failed a martyr to win every bit back at the last second I want to be satisfied before I die smell in my nostrils flowers living not flowers on a dead-woman coffin so easy to spill into death-asleep the way dreams fit together explaining what they are exactly by the way they are nightmares a different completion we don’t want to face I don’t want to face but good dreams in the night soft not clouds or heaven, heaven is hard night is good… good night…good night. With dreams.”

Rylla fell into sleep as a tree falls, a non-rational rustle accelerating through snapping conscious connections, crashing into the otherland where obtuse angles define the geometry of cubes, her head on his arm, slowly deadening it, the loss of feeling in his forearm creeping up past the elbow where it met the resistance of his biceps. That great muscle fought anesthesia, but lost.