Erasure

"Just make it go away now"

Kate Bush








Content Warning:
Sex references

Transcript

Erasure

I can always tell how stressed I am by how quickly a cigarette disappears. In my more jocular moments, I call them stress sticks, or stress pens. Yesterday night, three hours after succumbing to anger, and finding myself in a rage, I found myself outside my parent’s house, smoking a cigarette in the back garden. There was a dull throb in my head, and my voice was husky, both familiar withdrawal symptoms that the “red mist” leaves. In no time at all, the cigarette was little more than filter.  

            Of course, I regretted blowing up at my mother. The hours after the episode were proving typical: the triviality of the cause, for example, became resoundingly clear, and I felt ashamed and humiliated and, ironically enough, angry. Sad too, of course. I have a problem with anger management but my difficulties managing sadness are even greater. I realised also, in the distant company of the stars, that what I called “the cause” of my enragement was more of a pretext for rage than a genuine generator of it, a trigger for it, the permission it was seeking for release, expulsion. Once the right conditions of trigger were met, it was free to develop as it pleased. For twenty minutes, management of that most scarlet of emotional states was utterly out of my hands.  

            In the hours ensuing once it was all over, I felt all those awful feelings that I had known full well I would have to confront even while I screamed uncontrollably. I felt unclean, I felt my status as a being, as a human, degraded by its sudden and persistent uncleanliness. I remembered a line from Gibran’s A Prophet. “Those who have sinned must wait awhile outside the gates of blessed”. Or was it something to do with clamour, knocking at the door, their knocking, their clamour unheard by “the blessed”. In any case, I found this line unbearably apt. I knew that for many writhing, agonised hours, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself. I knocked, unanswered, at the door of the blessed. 

            Lighting up a second cigarette, I thought of my younger sister, and the pain became unbearable. I thought of her sleeping in her bed, and the railing screech of my voice still ringing in her ears. I thought of her running away, slipping away in quick, abashed retreat to her third-storey room and having to hide from the world that I had woven with my shouts, with my voice, with my rage. The thought of her seeking solace from horrors of my creating, my saying, hurt me deeply.

            Dad had been dead for four years. My status as “solitary male” was nothing new. I am not, have never been, nor will ever be the “man of the house”. I am the “solitary male”. We have no pets. We have only ourselves. Me, my sister, and my mother.

            I combed my mind for memories of rage. I tried to console myself with the notion that this was far from the worst episode of rage I had ever conjured, in our house, or in any other house or building. Unfortunately, my recollections did not confirm this. The evidence was far from compelling. 

            I began to experience a very definite craving for occult gifts in my fingertips. I tried to imagine myself a kind of Midas, but spookier, more nocturnal, stranger. Instead of converting substance into gold, my touch would only work upon human heads and it would erase whatever I purposed to erase of their memory. I imagined creeping into my sister’s bedroom, and laying light hands and fingers upon her forehead. An unconsented, subtracting benediction, I’d remove from her mind the bad memory for which I was responsible. She’d wake early, fresh, unweighed, pure of my shouty spectacle’s aftertaste. I longed for this ability, the possibility of this power. It took all my powers of imagination to imagine possessing it but the desire was as real as could be. Not only did I want it, I wanted to want it. I wanted to ache for it and have someone come to relieve my ache.

            And at that very moment, with uncanny punctuality, I felt a hand upon my shoulder. It wasn’t my father, or Jesus, they or their ethereal way of being with me in times of trouble. Mother Mary, as the song says. But instead of these unsexual visitants, it was a beautiful man I had never seen before. 

            “Hello,” he said. I felt that I should have been the one to speak first. His voice was quite bright, but low in level. 

            “Hello…” I replied, a little glumly. 

            I sensed immediately that he had this desire to know me. It was so strange and beautiful, the thing he seemed to make me, make of me. I could see in his eyes: with what abrupt immediacy he was able to dote upon me. It takes me far longer to feel that way about a person, to dote. But he was pretty, I’ll admit. 

            His appearance in the garden was strange, it was as though he’d materialized out of nowhere. Apparently, he had just come along, had just come along to be with me when I needed him, like an escort. He was like one of those strange guides in PSAs and infomercials. The helpful, dead-eyed confidant and samaritan in an advert about workplace safety, or fire, or kitchen hygiene suddenly whispering over a man’s shoulder, telling him what he’s doing wrong, how he could do better, offering unasked-for counsel. They have a nothingness about them, an airy, contingent identity. Like the Cat in the Hat, a sinister uninvitee. This man in my garden was like that, was like those characters, but with some extra and exalting quality, some essential sexual-ness. He was just a boy really. Slender, beautiful. Right away I found his voice appealing. Then I began to find his muscularity, its polite, unalarming level, curiously perfect.

            He laid a hand upon my head, and told me to remember the worst day of my life. I knew exactly what it was. I refused to revisit it initially. But, of course, the mind has a life of its own and my mind was suddenly full of it, that day. Within seconds, all trace of what I had just been thinking about and which my mind’s eye had reluctantly looked upon was gone and I couldn’t even remember why this man’s soft, strange hands were upon me.

            “I erase things,” he said, calmly, in a voice not much more than a whisper. “I make things go away”.

            “Even memories?” I said.

            “Especially memories.” His voice smiled but his face was deadpan.

            The blessed had come to me! Hearing this, I was blessed again. 

            So, I led him, this blessed eraser, up the stairs. He trod with tiny, adept steps. I had the curious inkling, feeling the soft, slender approach behind me, that he had never woken anyone by accident. In all things, he was deliberate, he was graceful.

            I led him across the landing to my sister’s room. The door was ajar and we peered in at the darkness. Within, quite audible, I could hear her little, nasal snores. The man crouched down and solemnly bowed his head. The open door, the room, the soul inside: my sister’s room became a kind of portal, a portal to another world. At the brink, the man seemed pensive.

            I whispered into his ear:

            “I want you to make her forget today. Just today.”         

            The eraser nodded.

            “Just today?” he confirmed.

            “Just today.” 

            “Today- gone?”

            “Absolutely gone”.

            I took my mobile phone from my pocket and shone a very calm shaft of light into the room. The eraser followed it to my sleeping sister and very softly crossed the room on his knees. With great seriousness, with the weight of knowledge, with cognizance of the powers that were his, the eraser performed his erasure. The night was blue in the windows. The eraser laid his hands upon my sister’s forehead, daintily parting the fringe in the right place, and touching that sacred spot where memory softly burned. In sleep, it was nothing more than an ember. There, lit, but so quelled that it was almost nothing.   

            There was no sound or flash of light as he did it. Only a sense of change in the air. A click which having clicked made one feel that the temperature was different or the time in which one stood was suddenly different. Like a sudden change in room tone on film, accident or otherwise. A jump cut. 

            The eraser smiled, standing up. His face, which had briefly grimaced, relaxed. The brain behind his eyes had whirred briefly while he performed the act, the circuity of his gift had come quickly, painfully alive and he had been somewhere else, absent, his eyelids quivering with the movements of his eyes. Now he was returned to the dark room, looking down at my sister, and with us both, present again. Watching him survey her subtle, altered sleep, (though she didn’t change position and her snoring remained the same), I began to feel love for him. Not only attraction, titillation, a deeper, more mastering, more consuming thing. Something which took up more room in my being. And I was happy. This dream was happiness: my sister’s small, soft head, emptied of its latest terror. And in the heavy midst of things, my life, this house, my sister, her room, he was there, and had almost become one of us with surprising swiftness and grace. The moonlight did not reach him, nor did its pallor fill the windows. But he was moonlit: this was a moonlit moment. The eraser withdrew from my sister’s room.

            He had done what I wanted. Outside, on the landing, taking hold of the eggshell banister and running his hands along it, I began to fiercely desire him. He looked at me, wise, aware, sensually aware of my intensity. The most beautiful detail was the acknowledgment, the acknowledgment he offered of the hardness with which I looked at him. He teasingly brushed my leg.   

            We went downstairs. To that ground-level place, I followed him. He would glance over his shoulder at me as we descended. He looked beautiful going downstairs; it was odd, the act of walking down a staircase made him more beautiful to me. I began to feel that it was unconquerable, this need to hold him, firm and much. I took hold of his hips, his shoulders, my clasp symmetrical with intent. And I imagined the prim, pale arse I would find when I unbuttoned him and took down his trousers. I felt reckless with shame, and emotion, and regret. Somehow, my pitiable condition aroused me more.

            We went to the kitchen. I offered him a drink but he said he didn’t drink. So I offered him instead a small length of chain with a padlock. (I kept them in a toolbox on the highest shelf, right at the back, where no-one could easily get to them). I made sure the key was where it should have been. I asked him to lock up my hands, to arrest my wrists in place behind my back. He consented with a look of wonder, a kind of laughing and consenting wildness in his eyes. Once cuffed, he asked me to suck him off. I did. Then he sucked me off for my reward. Then he insulted me, threatened to leave. When the ecstacy became too painful, too intense, he emancipated me from my chains. We went, with a little urgency, to the living room and we made love on the rug.

            “I want to sleep with you. I want to wake up next to you…” I said to him, when it was over. 

            The chaste, nude swoon of post-coital peace came upon both of us. He had a childlike glow about him, a shining freshness like a just-bathed baby. We went to my bed and we lay, two spoons in a drawer, unable to resist slumber with lovely speed.

The next morning, I woke up alone. My dreams had been intense and they seemed to have been preparing me for this discovery. Waking up alone after you’ve gone to bed with someone, laying down to rest twinned but finding yourself solitary in the morning isn’t at all like waking up alone if that’s how you went to sleep. There’s a feeling of absence, of something necessary being dislodged from the warm, white space in which it belongs when the figure that partnered you no longer partners you. 

            I felt a little groggy. Foggy more than groggy. I put this down to the shouting.

            My mother and sister had already woken. I could hear that they were already up and in the kitchen. The murmur of their voices drifted through the air. There was a sharp fresh hush about the world, a small splash of cold sunlight, and a few birds singing dutifully, dispassionately. I found myself looking at the living room rug. Secretly thrilled and mortified by what it meant. In the kitchen, my mother and my sister were talking in familiar voices but in a register I didn’t recognise. The chain and padlock were in their box on the shelf.

            They became suddenly aware of my presence. My sister looked at me with a very confused, confusing expression. A total lack of recognition.

            “Was there someone in the house last night?” my mother asked. Her suspicion was quite cool.

            “No,” I said, quickly.

            My sister’s big eyes remained fixed upon me. Her eyes were strange; for I was a stranger. 

            “Who is that, darling. Tell me who that is,” my mother said with grim resignation, indicating in my direction. It was a test. She thought she knew the answer she was going to get. I began gradually to understand what had happened. And then, with unexpected certainty in her tone, my sister spoke:   

            “Not sure,” she said. “Daddy?”