Physical Culture
An excerpt from the novel by Hillary Louise Johnson, originally published by Simon & Schuster in 1989, and reissued by Dymaxicon in 2011.
The first person Stephan ever introduced me to was a man six-foot five, with an orange beard that I remember distinctly because the hairs were twice as thick as any human hair I had ever seen. They were curly, too—tight, wild curls. He took off my shirt and wrapped my upper body in barbed wire, under my armpits and down my arms, then dressed me in a padded vest, a starched white dress shirt, an evening jacket, and took me out dancing.
In the cab he said nothing; he was plainly interested in only the necessary facts, not in the fantastic embellishments—a very practical person, someone who didn’t have to make believe about something he was really doing. We didn’t take a table or order drinks but went straight to the dance floor, where he crushed me to his chest, spun me around, and turned me with precision. He only gave in once: his tongue shot out and licked a drop of sweat from my temple. I could feel the trickles of blood run down my waist and between my legs; now and then, when I bowed my head, I could see little dimes, quarters, and pennies of blood fall to the floor, as if through a hole in my pocket, and get scuffed into streaks by a herd of feet.
In his room, he unwound the length of barbed wire, then rubbed a mixture of mustard and gunpowder into each of the wounds, one puncture at a time, starting on the left and moving right. My body is still covered with tiny black buttons. I know where they are; I can feel them through my shirt.
When he finished, everything else was just as hasty, in his bathroom with the glaring light. I folded my arms on the edge of the sink and lowered my head against them. Then I blacked out—from the waist up, I think, because his hands, which were fleshy and warm and ordinary on my thighs, were numb on the back of my neck. Standing up, with my head at that strange level in space, I grew curious about the way sensations traveled down, and how my legs were then privileged with feeling.
I’d love to have a zipper in my abdomen, to open and close my guts when the body’s solitude became too much. I’d love to live in there, bleeding profusely, in the threads of molecules, and feel nothing but cell against cell, burnishing each other into reproductivity.
I want to hold my entrails to my cheek. I want to kiss them and say how much I love them. I want to soak in my lonely, atomic brain and sob through a hole in my head. I want to live as a warm pool of blood—a close, warm, unafraid darkness of blood.
Excerpted from Physical Culture, a novel by Hillary Louise Johnson, available on Amazon. Johnson is the founder of Dymaxicon, a publishing house run by and for authors.
