I woke up and I knew Brick had gone. It wasn’t only the physical absence, I felt it mentally too, as if his leaving had dislodged something deep within my psyche. It scared me more, this empty unknowingness in my soul, than perhaps, the actuality of his leaving.

The night before we had had a furious argument. I had come home earlier than usual; an unexpected and unexplained power outage having closed my place of work for the day.

On entering our second storey single-room apartment I had found Brick spread-eagled and naked on the bed, his ankles and wrists tied securely to the bed posts with fluorescent pink ribbon. Coming out of his mouth was a length of industry standard rubber hose. At the other end of this hose was a funnel.

The funnel I distinctly remembered buying from Ikea when Brick and I set up home together a year previously. A lack of funds had led us to the idea of making our own wine. We both believed that to achieve these ends a funnel was of absolute necessity. It seemed of significance now that we had never made the wine, or indeed, attempted to.

The funnel, today, was being held by one of the other two men in the room. The men were unknown to me, although they were both dressed in the distinctive blue uniform of the local sanitation department. This was either ironic or par for the course. I say this because each man had his trousers around his knees and was peeing, in what appeared to me, a quite copious fashion into the funnel.

For the moment after I entered the room nobody spoke. It was one of those awkward silences that could only happen in situations such as these. The only sound I could hear was the gentle gurgle of the urine as it continued on its passage down the tube.

Eventually my eyes came to rest on Brick. I noticed a number of things. Firstly, he had an erection. Secondly, the almost metronomic way his Adam’s apple moved beneath his skin to allow the passage of liquid. Thirdly, how not a single drop of this liquid had spilled onto our bed. That was typical Brick, fastidious as ever, and it was this that caused me more anger than anything else.

How, even in this situation, Brick was so intrinsically himself. This seemed to me to represent a shattering of our intimacy.

It was later, after the two men had gone, that we argued. I stated that if this was what Brick truly wanted, then I could oblige myself. That was what a relationship was; a negotiated stance of give and take.

“You don’t understand,” Brick had shouted. “This is a comfort that only can be given by strangers. To establish any kind of sanity we must live our lives with a dual universe, separate from each other. Now you have straddled both of mine, I feel you have spoilt everything.”

Those were the last words Brick ever spoke to me. The next morning he was gone.

I fixed myself two rounds of toast and strong black coffee. After, I called my boss to enquire whether the problem of the day before had been solved.

“Problem?” he barked into his end of the receiver. “What problem?”

I mentioned, as casually as I could, the previous day’s early closing of our facility.

“I’ve got bigger fish on my plate,” came the boss’s reply. “Do you think I’ve got time to take calls from every tomfool member of staff? Just get your ass in here.”

The underground was less crowded than normal, and by the end of the line, my carriage totally empty. The absence of people almost led me to wonder if I was, in fact, there myself. I was on the point of shouting something out, I wasn’t sure what, when with a vroom of air, the train arrived at my station.

I showed my security pass to the guard on the gate and went directly to the changing-room. Here I inserted my key into my personal locker and carefully removed my clothes, item by item. As always, my underpants were last, and as always, I folded them neatly into a square and placed them on the top of the pile. I closed the locker and hung the key from its chain around my neck.

My place of work was on the eighth floor. I took the lift naked and alone, showed my pass to the guard and entered the access corridor.

My position was six down on the right. I nodded to the other workers already at their stations and then, when I got to my spot, I turned around and put my naked bottom through the hole in the wall.

I was an integral part of the ‘Bums of the World’ exhibit. On the other side of the wall beneath my bottom was a plaque inscribed with ‘Replica of Edwardian Posterior, circa 1920, England’.

On my right was the supposed bottom of a Dinka tribe member, and on my left, the bottom of a cowboy. Our section, give or take a few temps, numbered twenty-four.

I had started work at ‘The Living Body’ museum approximately eleven and a half months previously. Initially I had had some trepidation about even going for a job at such a place but at the interview everything was conducted in a most professional manner.

One week after making the initial enquiry I was phoned to say I was in.

“An opening’s come up in bums,” said the clipped tones on the other end of the line.

Of course, the first thing that crossed my mind was that I would have to be naked. I had imagined myself in the mouth, or perhaps, foot section.

“Don’t worry,” came that clipped voice again, “there’s a rope around the whole area. No one can touch, and believe me, the bum section is one of our best jobs. If you want, you can read all day.”

This final piece of information cinched the deal for me. Ever since I was a small child I had had a love of reading. And every day in the job I had read. Every day, that is, until today.

I had a book with me, Jack London’s ‘Call of the Wild’ but somehow the words looked alien, like Japanese kanji or Egyptian hieroglyphs. Going around and around in my head were the words Brick had said. I wondered particularly what he meant about a dual universe.

Sure, there were things that I had thought about that I hadn’t done but that was the same for everybody. If we all went about doing exactly what we wanted then the world would be chaos. Or perhaps that was what Brick did mean. That we had to find an alternate space to carry out these desires.

Now that I was thinking about it, perhaps the whole situation yesterday had not, in fact, happened. Perhaps I would go home and find Brick there, evidence of this so called dual universe.

I was knocked out of these thoughts by Gus, owner of the cowboy’s arse next to me, prodding me in the side.

“Are you alright?” he said. He gestured to my book. “Not reading.”

Gus, as ever, had a porn mag in his hands. He always had the same kind of porn. It involved women with exceptionally large breasts interacting with animals. I don’t mean sexually interacting, quite the opposite.

These women always were involved in scenes of bucolic innocence; kittens gambolling or cows being milked. However, quite obviously, they served the purpose.

Gus had received two warnings for masturbating. He had an enormous penis and in more than one way I was scared of it. Several times on my days off I had attended the museum and stood looking at Gus’s arse. I wanted to spend hours there buried deep inside it, almost suffocated. That scared me too.

“Not reading?” said Gus again, as if I hadn’t heard.

I tried to think of words to answer this question but finding none, I merely smiled. Gus seemed happy with this. However, after five minutes he lowered his magazine again.

“You heard about the massive shake up on the arse section? Apparently we’re going to be told tomorrow.” Gus made a dry hacking sound in his throat and spat a string of phlegm into a tissue. “It don’t sound like good news to me. No sir, not at all.”

When I got home, one part of the riddle, at least, was solved. Brick was not there, and the scene that I had so precipitously barged in on, was not a dream.

Not feeling hungry I took a can of beer out of the fridge and lay down on the sofa. I knocked the can back quickly, went to get another one and returned to my former position.

I thought back to when I had first met Brick. This had happened shortly after I had started work in the Living Body museum and in my mind these two events were linked as the start of the most harmonious period of my life. In fact, my meeting with Brick was linked to my work at the museum.

On receiving my first pay cheque I had decided to go out and celebrate. I took a table at a restaurant more expensive than one I would usually frequent.

It was as I was having the desert, a banana flambéed in the particular style of a particular region of France when a number of drunken voices began to drift over.

“Have you seen that new Living museum?” one of them said.

“I like the bums,” said another one.

This brought a general murmur of amusement.

“No really,” said the same voice. “The Edwardian one I have taken a particular shine to.”

I felt my cheeks glowing in embarrassment. I glanced over my shoulder, thinking perhaps that I was the butt of some cruel joke, but no, the voice continued in a manner that was obviously quite genuine, if a little drunk.

“I have been to see it five or six times alone this week. It is like those books your parents buy you when you are thirteen or fourteen years old and they are too shy to talk to you about the birds and the bees. Of course, they think they are doing something educational, but what could be more exquisitely erotic?”

The matter might have ended there, but on attending the urinal I found myself standing next to the speaker of those complimentary phrases. I noticed that he had a beautiful penis, the kind of one you sometimes see in underground European art films and despair of ever finding in the flesh.

Not knowing exactly how to start up a conversation I decided for once in my life just to go for it. I mentioned to the young man that it was my arse he had been recently talking about.

There could have been only one answer to this and it was the one I got.

“Show me.”

I did and moments later a tongue was exploring there.

The next day, on arriving at work, I was told to go to the conference room. Already there were the other members of the ‘Bums of the World’ unit and at the head of the table, our illustrious boss.

He gave a long speech punctuated at various points by colourful pie charts and diagrams with fierce looking diagonal lines and numbers. The general gist of the matter was that while the Living Museum had started off well, for the past number of months numbers had been declining.

“What we need to do,” said the boss, “is to make the whole experience more interactive.”

“There’s nobody getting interactive with my arse,” said Gus loudly and this was followed by other similar complaints.

The boss held out his hands palm forwards and he stayed like this until the room had returned to a semblance of quiet.

“What we are talking about are speakers. A small speaker will be placed in the rectum, then at the push of a button, a commentary will be given from the speaker detailing the history of that particular bottom in history.

“Ears will be placed against the sphincter but that will be the only contact. We’ve done our research. It’s what the public want.” The boss coughed gently into his hand, like a crow. “Anyone not complying will be out on their arse. So to speak.”

It seemed the boss had us over a barrel. As I stood in the queue waiting for my speaker I had again that feeling of unreality. Brick had gone and now this. I felt as if the world were slowly unravelling and I was somewhere near the centre of it. I felt powerless to stop the process, rather like a pea fired from a heavy duty gun.

At last it was my turn to enter the room. The nurse was at the sink washing his hands and as I went in he twisted his neck to face me. As I did I had the feeling one has upon entering a church; that you are nearer to God despite your disbelief in his existence.

“You’re the Edwardian, right? If you could take off your clothes and hop up onto the bed.”

The nurse was younger than I expected and more male. He had an unusual face that, to my eyes, was remarkably attractive. I looked around for a robe. Although I was naked daily in front of any number of people I was still more than somewhat shy.

“It’s ok,” said the nurse. “I’ve seen it all before. Believe me.”

Up on the bed the nurse instructed me put my feet in the stirrups there, hanging down from the ceiling.

“You may find this gives you a hard-on,” he said as first he dipped his fingers in a bowl of viscous looking liquid and then thrust the fingers inside me. “Yep, there she goes. Don’t worry. It’s quite natural.” And he smiled.

Lying flat on my back as I was I managed to lift my head slightly. “I’m sorry about this.” I tried to find the right words. “My boyfriend, he left me. Before that, I don’t know, we hadn’t been having sex. That’s natural, isn’t it? We had been together a while.”

“You might be more comfortable on all fours,” said the nurse. “If you’d like to twizzle round.”

I shook my head.

“I was having these thoughts myself,” I said. “About this cowboy that I know. Actually, he’s a work colleague.”

“Everybody has fantasies,” said the nurse. “Don’t beat yourself up about it. The passage seems free and no sign of distension. Now I’m going to fit the speaker.”

“Will it hurt?”

“Do you want it to?”

The air suddenly seemed to have been vacuumed out of the room. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on something purposeful. I couldn’t think of anything.

“All done,” said the nurse. He wiped his fingers backwards and forwards against his white coat. “If you don’t mind, I’ve given you a more experimental speaker.”

“Experimental?” I said. “In what way?”

But the nurse refused to answer. As I made my way to the display I thought how some could see the nurse’s penetration as a violation but, strangely enough, it felt like the most human contact I had had in a long while.

It was partly his good looks, partly his jokey manner, but more than that it felt like the beginning of something new. Part of me regretted mentioning the cowboy.

The boss must have put word out for no sooner had we taken our positions then we heard the buzz behind us. Next, I felt a hand touching my bum, my cheeks being deftly parted and something warm placed against my sphincter. I guessed, from the whole communiqué, that it was an ear.

Gus lowered his magazine. “I’m hoping mine is some busty chick. Who else would want to listen to the history of a cowboy’s arse? If she wants she can tongue me.”

Gus was evidently putting a brave face on the whole thing. For my part, I did not try to picture those behind me. Warm hands, cold hands, it was all the same to me. I even liked the sensation of the ear pressed against me. It reminded me somewhat of a conch shell and for the whole day I could hear the reverse of the sea in my head.

Brick had never placed his ear there. True, I didn’t have a speaker implanted at the time, but it made me wonder when had we ever listened to each other truly. Now, for the whole day, a whole procession of strangers were listening to me most intimately.

Then, like a hammer late at night, it struck me what Brick had said, that I didn’t understand the comfort of strangers. Yet here I was now.

I was on the point of following this thought further when to my left Gus suddenly lurched forward with a yelp. He reached behind him and came back with a lollipop stick.

“Some little bugger shoved this right up my arse.”

I looked at the way his penis dangled between his legs and for the first time, it didn’t scare me so much.

That night at home again I found that I wasn’t hungry. I took another can of lager from the fridge and went to what was now my habitual spot on the sofa.

Not wanting to spend another night in fruitless self examination I picked up my book, Jack London’s ‘Call of the Wild’. The story was a simple one, the tale of a journey across icy plains, yet it seemed that these days it was a story that would never be told.

It was archetypal and our society was no longer one which cared for such things. In our shying away from dealing with the big issues, out of fear that they had already been dealt with, we ended up saying nothing. In our world of mass communication we had lost the ability to communicate.

It was as I had this thought that I became aware of a low buzzing. No, it wasn’t a buzzing. If I listened carefully I was just able to make out words.

“Testing, testing, one two three, testing.”

Thinking that perhaps the young male who rented the flat next to mine had invested in a CB radio I went over to the notoriously thin wall and pressed my ear against it.

The phrase was still there, however, it was no louder or distinct than before. Puzzled, I tried each of the walls and each time the sound was the same. It was then that it hit me. The sound wasn’t coming from either without or within the room, it was coming from inside me, from the speaker.

Quickly I took off all my clothes and at once the words were clearer.

“Testing, testing, one two three, testing.”

As they finished their looped phrase, I don’t know why, but I said, “Hello?”

“Hello,” came back the reply right away, “so you are there after all.”

I laughed at this, the irony of it striking me. “And where else would I be?”

The voice belonged to the nurse. Like when he had inserted his fingers inside me, I didn’t feel him speaking to me like this an imposition.

“I did tell you the speaker was experimental. Are you sitting down?”

I went to the fridge, retrieved a beer and lay back down on the sofa. I lay with my legs slightly apart, my head on the arm and I put the beer on my chest.

“Now tell me,” said the nurse, “what are you wearing?”

Situated as I was I had a clear view of my body. The beer can moved up and down as it followed the pattern of my breathing. It was not in my habit to lie naked thus.

“I’m not wearing anything,” I said.

“And you are hard, yes?”

“Look, about before, I shouldn’t have told you about my boyfriend. Or about that cowboy. My life is quite normal.”

“Close your eyes and whatever you do, don’t open them. This is very important.”

I thought back to my meeting with the nurse, the way his neck twisted. I could see the scene with utmost clarity, the way the tap gleamed, the material of the cotton trousers, how they clung against his buttocks.

For perhaps sixty seconds images of our life together flashed through my head; naked walks along a beach, moonlit treks to hospital to visit a birthing sister, having sex in a taxi in New York, sudden trips to poorly air-conditioned hotel rooms in Abu Dhabi.

These were things that may or may not happen.

“This speaker,” I said, “why did you choose me?”

“Just keep your eyes closed. And don’t say a word.”

I heard the door to my apartment open. I thought it might be Brick returning, but I remembered the nurse’s order and I kept my eyes closed. I knew it wasn’t Brick.

Footsteps came across the floor to where I was lying. There was the sound of a zip and trousers being dropped. I felt that I could see the nurse, for I knew it was him, stepping out of his underpants.

When I was younger I had never indulged in promiscuous sex. I believed, somehow, that me being me, I wouldn’t be able to please anyone. My first boyfriend had been thirty-five years older than me. I chose him because I thought he would be grateful.

I felt something cold on my erection, like a jellyfish perhaps, and then a hand running smoothly down it. A body moved across me. I put up my hands and felt the clear outline of a chest. It was there because I could feel it and also not there because I hadn’t seen it. The two senses in conflict with each other.

There was a hand on my again and this time I felt against the tip of my cock, the crinkly sensation of pubic hair, then skin.

The body pushed down and I was inside. I thought I had not heard that voice for a while and then all sensation was directed towards my penis as the hips of the person on me began to gyrate.

The desire was there equally to both open my eyes and to keep them closed. I felt somehow that if I opened them, then this sensation would be finished and I squeezed them tighter shut.

I thought of Abu Dhabi again. The hotel room sweats and the nurse comes out of the bathroom naked apart from an old sock pulled over his cock. “Is this respectable for dinner do you think?” and we laugh and I take the sock off with my teeth.

Moments later I came and to my surprise I felt a spattering of come against my chest.

My eyes racked open. I blinked and clearly in my head I could see the naked body of the nurse. It was like a photograph from a holiday I had taken years before. I blinked again and the image was gone.

“Hello,” I said. “Hello,” I said again. “Is there anybody there?”

“Testing, testing, one two three testing,” came the voice from my arse.

It repeated this over and over. In a loop.

 

© 2006 Drew Gummerson - Contributor's Bio