156 - In the fire of full-bore expression

Before I began writing, so that my life became a book, I would sometimes ask myself what its theme would be if it were one. That divided it in my mind to several parts, including the one about my time in the Mezem, of which the theme was suffering. Its nature, its touch, its smell, its taste, its edges, its rhythms—I came to know it all as a shepherd knows his stick or a bureaucrat her pen.

Torture I have heard defined as being subjected at length to the unbearable; and so I came to know the nuances, the ebbs and flows, the processes, of the unbearable, searing and crystalline.

Subjected at length to the unbearable, do we learn to bear it? No, else it is not unbearable. We have borne it, as we still live; and yet we have not.

The Mahid made as fine a show as Mahid ever can, shackling and cuffing my wrists again after I’d received my chain, just to free my wrists, at least, the moment we were out of the crowd’s eye. Pretending the writers hounding me weren’t there, I headed to the baths, with Skorsas and the Mahid shadowing me, while Iliakaj headed to the infirmary; he looked all right, moving the same as ever, but Iska never let you go away unexamined after a head-blow.

I was just thinking that next time I saw Iliakaj I wasn’t sure I’d be able to look him in the face after what I’d done to him, and yet at the same time yearning desperately to speak to him, when my thoughts seemed to dissolve outwards and something huge, flat and immovable thumped into my shoulder from the side. As Skorsas grabbed me, I realized distantly it was the wall. I’d gone faint; I felt as if I was half-floating under water, and as if something within was tearing me apart, both at the same time. I’d join Iliakaj in the infirmary after all.

It is all vague. I remember the feel of the bed-frame in both my hands, as I clutched it; I was thrashing. I remember Skorsas saying, “Cruel Gods; defeat is a curse to any man. Why must victory also be a curse to this one?” I remember the dully sweet tang of poppy juice as Iska mixed it; then a flatness that was not the mind sheltering itself, but being dulled. I went still, and Skorsas stripped me and washed the sweat off me with a cloth and toweled me dry, tenderly as if I would break if he were even slightly rough. Then he climbed onto the bed with me, pulled me against him with my head on his shoulder and held me hard. “Stay like that,” Iska ordered him.

Everything I’d endured in the Mezem seemed to rise in me, poising to break over me like a sea-wave. Thinking of going into the Ring next, I couldn’t imagine being able to fight, let alone win. It seemed even my bones shook. “This is beyond my skill,” Iska said to Skorsas. “He needs a Haian.”

“Can’t be the one he used to have.”

“I’ll find another.” He was gone. Skorsas didn’t even loosen his grip on me until Iska came back, with the Haian in tow. That was as the effect of the drug was wearing off; he’d told Iska that he could not know my true state until it did. While Skorsas kept his arms wrapped around my neck, the Haian, Sasaber, felt my wrists.

My strength is gone, all of it, just like that... I don’t know how, and yet part of me knows it could be no other way. He knew nothing of my life. I explained it all. I feel like I am dying though I know I am not. I am breaking; I guess this is what it feels like. And yet I was dry-eyed, that obsidian flatness still in me.

“He needs greater privacy for what I will do,” Sasaber said. Iliakaj had been cleared to go up to his room while I’d still been on the poppy juice, and I couldn’t see far beyond the bed for the curtains they’d pulled around, but I could hear the voices of boys and guards. They took me up to my room, Skorsas and Sasaber with their shoulders under my arms, while the Mahid noiselessly slid up after us like two black ghosts.

Once Skorsas had obsequiously closed the door in the Mahid’s faces, and I was lying down again, Sasaber told him he needed to be alone with me, and Skorsas went through his door, bolting it on his side as he was now required to. Sasaber asked me the last thing in the world I expected. “When was the last time you had sex?”

Niku… I hadn’t even had the urge to whack. I counted days in my mind. It was like a time so long-gone it was in truth another world. I flew… I thought I did… was that a dream? “More than a moon,” I said.

“You need the opening of it,” he said. “Relax.” He made me breathe to his count, which made it very slow and deep, then talked me through relaxing, instructing me to loosen each muscle in turn from my toes up to my head, since I could not keep track of them well enough now to do it all at once, or even this way, by myself. I lay lax if not peaceful then, and he took hold of my manhood.

A man my age deprived so long should turn to fire in a moment and hit the ceiling with his seed in the next, even if the touch has only the impersonal tenderness of a healer healing. I felt instead as if the skin of my penis were the skin of my elbow or my knee, and there was stone inside. There truly is something wrong with me, I thought.

“You have walled yourself up all around,” he said. “Locked yourself away from feeling.” You must be kidding, I thought. When feeling is shredding me? But I thought of the flatness. “Open yourself.” He spoke as if it were a choice. There seemed to be no more choices for me in this than there is movement for a rock.

But no one is more patient and persistent than a Haian set on healing, and he had tricks. He somehow found the faintest thread of a vein of it in me, that seemed to want anything but to be grown into what it should be. It fought him all the way, like an animal thrashing so as not to be dragged out of its cage. Fighting is all… I fight in waking, I fight in my dreams, the edges that are my insides clang against each other and spatter what I am scarlet onto the golden sand. I came fighting, a violent ripping come, like the thrust of a sword and the spurt of heart-blood, and after I had screamed and thrashed like death-throes from it I didn’t stop screaming and thrashing like death-throes.

“Go on,” he said. “Release it. Let it out.” He had felt in my wrists, somehow, that sexual pleasure would shatter the flatness.

I went for a good bead. I cannot describe it in words since there was no thought, no more than for a screaming infant. I felt as the infant must feel, a deliciousness in the total release that is deep as the bones and down to the toes. In the fire of full-bore expression, one’s suffering is somehow knitted together from shattered bits into something coherent and therefore understandable, forged into something that may somehow, in spite of all, lend strength. In the rage of full-bore expression, one’s suffering is made into story, observable and so bearable.

Sometime while I was in it, Skorsas came back in and took me firmly in his arms again. All through, Sasaber stroked the air around me as if he were caressing some aspect of me that extended beyond my skin. I went until I was exhausted, already spent from the fight, and fell asleep like the dead, sleeping through dinner. When I woke up, I felt renewed, at least somewhat. I was myself again, at least as I was now.

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