Beyond Limits Ch. 04

"No."

"You've got April who's crazy about you, who'll do anything for you."

"Yeah."

"Then let her go. Leave her to this Cormac if she's so crazy about him."

"I can't, Sandra. I just fucking can't. She took a piece of me with her."

Sandra blew out smoke and dropped the cigarette into the empty wine bottle. "Well grow some new ones because she's not going to give them back to you. She's going to make you fucking crazy, Russell. Absolutely crazy. Whatever you may think of her, take it from me: the woman's a bitch. She knows exactly what she's doing to you."

Lexi still called me maybe twice a week and I took the call in the spare room where I slept. When she asked me how I was I told her, "Fine." I didn't know what to say anymore. She talked about rehearsals, about life with Cormac. She talked as if we were old friends. I suppose to her we were.

"Oh, Russell, listen, remember that stuff I got from you? The Rose in the Sea stuff?" she asked me one night.

"Yeah."

"Can we get some more?"

It had been over three weeks ago, a leisurely pace for using what I'd given her.

From my bedroom window I could see the moon shining on the dark, frozen waters of the lake, so deep, so still.

"I don't know, Lexi. You know, I don't like being mixed up in this. This is very dangerous stuff. Are you taking this too?"

"Me?" She sounded offended. "Oh, I sniff a little, just a little. Mac knows what he's doing, though. He's amazing. He knows everything."

"Is that right? And does he know enough not to get strung out on this? How often are you doing it?"

"Oh, Russell,"—her bored voice. "He used to do it in Philly, kind of like you. Did a lot and never got hung up on it. Anyhow, it's just like a weekend thing, special occasions. We're careful. You don't think I'm careful after all you told me?"

"I don't think you ever heard a word I told you, Lexi."

I could hear her smile her sweet smile. "Well I did. But one thing you definitely got wrong. You said this stuff ruined your desire? Really, where'd you get that idea? We go for like hours on end, Russell! It's embarrassing!"

I didn't say anything.

"Oh. I'm sorry. That was thoughtless, Russell. I'm sorry."

"Sure."

She was silent for a moment, wondering whether she should try and say anything else. She decided not to.

"So will you? Please, Russell? You can bring it to the theater on Friday, Cormac will be late so you won't have to see him. I'll pay you. What's it worth?"

"Nothing. It's free to you, Lexi. You know that. Let me think about it. This is dangerous stuff. I have a bad feeling about this."

"I hurt your feelings, didn't I? I'm really sorry, Russell. I don't know why I do that."

Don't you? I thought.Don't you fucking really?

After I hung up I sat there and stared at the darkness outside, the darkness, the darkness out over the lake, out past the ice, below the moon, The darkness is what the dead see, those at peace—what we'll all see eventually: me and April and Lexi and Cormac, our feelings and wants and hurts all gone, our dreams gone, joys and pain gone, gone. The lake is so big, so empty, with all that darkness piled on top of it, darkness going straight up into space and never stopping. Never.

I'd never free myself of Lexi. She'd always be there to apprise me of things between her and Cormac, to remind me of my loss, my failure and shortcoming as a man. Maybe she'd mean it and maybe she wouldn't—a word she'd let slip, a bruise he'd given her that showed through her make-up, a secret smile on her face, that lie she refused to tell for me—the motivation hardly mattered. She knew what she'd done to me. For whatever reason, she preferred things like this—dark, my heart crushed with darkness like at the bottom of the icy lake. She wanted me to glimpse them in what they did, seen through the flashing light of a bedroom window on the passing El, my imagination filling in the details.

There's a negative space around us, around each of us, where air and light are pushed back to make room for the solidity of our bodies. It's like an echo of ourselves, a cave in the universe carved out to contain us, and there in that beauty dark we live our lives, looking to touch another person and fuse. Sitting there in that room, I felt my space expand. Expand enormously. Expanding to seek Lexi, it became huge, became something terrible, monstrous and blind.

What does it mean to love? What does it mean to be so dependent on another's opinion of you that the fortunes of your life rise and fall with it, that your own sense of worth is no longer yours to control but theirs? That the way they think about you determines whether you live or die. What does that mean? How does that work?

I went to my stash of heroin—the pure ounce I'd taken from April's original kilo, not the cut stuff—and I measured some out into two small vials, neat, uncut, deadly potent. This was twenty times stronger than what I'd given Cormac last time, but I tried not to think of that as I opened the vials and scooped up some of the brownish powder.

Cormac knows what he's doing though. He's amazing. He knows everything.

He knows fucking everything.

He knows how to make Lexi crawl, how to make her come, how to make her cry his name and dream about him, how to shudder in his arms and sob with her legs open and her knees up and his big cock inside her. He knows the words to say to her to make her his, to make her want to do whatever he wants, to hold her in the fist of his regard so that she wants nothing else. How to take another man's power from him so that he doesn't know who he is anymore or what his is and is reduced from a presence in the world with a force that used to get things to a beggar and a creature of self-loathing.

I was doing nothing. I was fate, that's all. I was an event in a whole concatenation of events stretching all the way back to Afghanistan and a chance meeting in a bar in BelPierre, Michigan. I was the invitation to Cormac to prove his cleverness. I was Lexi's unfortunate rejection of me. I was all the things she'd never given me, Cormac's decision to take her to dinner and to experiment with drugs.

I was a great passageway of failed potential, and I saw myself as this maze of hollow moonlight in the January sky above the lake, branching off into a thousand passageways of could-have-been.

I was all the things I'd ever told Lexi about heroin.

I was all the things she'd never tell Cormac when he fixed up his next shot.

I was silence on the moon, the ice, the water...

* * * * *

At the memorial, the skies were gray, the tone was hushed, everyone was shocked. Cormac's body was shipped back to Philadelphia for cremation and we had a memorial in the theater, which was strange, aching and empty. Lexi pulled out of the play for a week and was replaced by her understudy, Barbara Stuyvesant. Bud took over directorial duties, and after staggering, it looked like The Given would go on with a life of its own—strange, a life not mine, nor Cormac's, nor Lexi's, but belonging to the character's we'd all created.

With word of his death came word of the way Lexi and his body had been found, and speculation of what kind of outrageous sex they'd been into and the fact that I'd been Lexi's lover suddenly was significant. No one knew exactly what was going on, but there was an investigation underway and Lexi was a target and so was I. The coroner had ruled it a self-administered accidental overdose but there was some interest in where he'd obtained the drugs, though it wasn't pressing; they weren't treating it as a homicide. Lexi had been right: Cormac had a history of drug use in Philadephia and LA, though apparently his experience didn't come to diluting what he had. A bad move, an idiotic mistake.

Supplying drugs to a known abuser who then OD's could be accessory to murder. I myself could argue I had no way of knowing about Cormac's past if it came down to me, but as his lover, Lexi could hardly say that. She would be in very serious trouble if I said anything. Very serious. And I had the vials with her fingerprints on them

We learned about this at the office of Daniel C. Hearn, a criminal defense attorney my manager set me up with. I went to see him with Lexi. Before we told him what happened, he told us this:

"The deceased, Mr. Cormac Brendan George Grehan was a known narcotics user. The Cook County Coroner has determined that Mr. Grehen died of respiratory failure caused by a self-administered overdose of illegal heroin, almost certainly inadvertent.

"You, Mr. Backuss, are known to have associated with users of illegal narcotics in the past and are therefore a person of interest in this case.

"You, Ms. Samos, were Mr. Grehan's lover and were with him when he died.

"Since Mr. Grehan was new to the area, it's very probable that one of you provided him with the heroin that killed him. If it's Ms. Samos, she could be facing accessory to murder charges.

"Whether this goes anywhere or not all depends on whether the DA wants to pursue this, whether he feels he has a case."

Lexi's expression didn't change.

I sat there, uncomfortable in my tie. "What do you think we should do?" I asked him.

Hearn leaned back and sighed. "Personally, I don't think they'll bother. Your friend Mr. Carlton has some pull in this town and he's trying to keep this quiet, and no one wants to get involved in what's basically a common dope case that goes nowhere. I'd just lie low and expect it to blow over. Another showbiz tragedy is how the world will treat it. And very off-off-off Broadway at that. For God's sake, stay out of trouble, and you're messing with this crap, stop it right now."

We rode the El back to Lexi and Cormac's flat, Lexi looking pale, staring out the windows at the buildings passing by in the gray light.

"How are you doing, Lexi?" I asked.

She didn't answer for a while, then she looked at me through her dark glasses.

"You think you killed him, don't you?" she asked. "You think that stuff you gave him was too pure and it killed him and you're responsible."

All I could see in her glasses was the image of myself. Her face showed no emotion.

"But I knew how strong it was. I could have told him. I could have made him cut it. I tasted it. April had even warned me. She told me it was like twenty times stronger than what you'd given me before. I could have told him but I didn't. I was angry at him when I gave it to him that night and I didn't even warn him! Angry at him for using. I was just stupid."

She turned back and looked out the window again. Sitting next to her, I could see inside her sunglasses and see her eye behind the tinted lens staring out the window. She was wearing mascara, which she'd never done when I was with her. I noticed now she was wearing make-up on her skin too that here in natural light made her look cold and composed.

"I thought he was experienced," I said.

"He was. In most things. In others he didn't know anything."

We rode in silence for a while as I stared at her face. Then I said, "I still have those vials."

"Oh?" She was looking out the window.

"They have your fingerprints on them."

A train passed us going in the opposite direction, making it too loud to talk. The faces were blurs, not three feet away. Lexi's eyes didn't move as she waited for the train to pass.

"Well get rid of them, Russell. Would you please?"

"I don't know. What's it worth to you, Lexi?" It felt bizarre saying those words to her, dreamlike.

She looked at me. "What's it worth to me? Come on, Russell, not now."

My stomach tightened and I pressed on. I forced myself. "I'm serious Lexi."

"You're serious? Serious? What is this, Russell? Are you blackmailing me? Mac's just dead and you're blackmailing me? I don't fucking believe you! What do you want? you want me to fuck you? Is that it? You think you can blackmail me into fucking you or something?"

"Shhh. Keep your voice down!"

"What the hell's wrong with you, Russell? Goddamn it! What's wrong with you?"

She put her head against the window and started to cry.

"Don't call it blackmail—" I began.

"Oh shut up! This is unbelievable! Not from you, Russell! Not from you! This is just unbelievable. You're going to try and blackmail me into being your goddamn sub or something aren't you? You honestly think that would work?"

I stared into the blanks of her sunglasses as she fumbled in her bag, only now seeing how totally insane this idea was. I flushed with embarrassment. She got some tissue from her purse and lifted her sunglasses and wiped her eyes, which were alarmingly red.

"You're such an idiot," she said. She gave a little, sobbing laugh. "I guess can tell you now. It doesn't matter so I can tell you now. I don't want you telling anyone else, but I'll tell you."

She lowered her sunglasses and put the tissue back in her purse and snapped it shut.

"I was the dom in my relationship with Cormac. He was sub to me, Russell. We kept it a secret but that's the way it was. I've always been dom. I just never knew it till him but I was. I was when I was with you and didn't realize it, and that's why it didn't work out between us, because we're both that way. That's why it wouldnever work out between us. Do you see? That's why I could never tell you I'd let you dom me. Because I'm not that way. Do you see now? Do you understand?"

I smiled at her but I knew she wasn't joking. It made too much sense. It was perfect, obvious, ridiculously apparent. Looking at her with her dark glasses and black coat, her dark skirt and tights and black shoes, she was so conspicuously domme that it was absurd. It was right there before my eyes, had been since I'd known her. It was the lack of anything masculine about her that had deceived me. My own prejudice. I'd assumed a dom would be male and Lexi was certainly not male.

"Oh God," I said. "Oh my fucking God."

"Well don't stare. Don't tell me you didn't know, you never suspected?"

"I didn't. I was totally blind. I had no idea. You mean, all this time...?"

"Not all, no. Shortly after I met Mac. He brought it out in me. But it's always been in there. I see it now."

I leaned forward and put my fist on the back of the seat in front of me and rested my chin on it. A thrill coursed through my body, almost sexual, like someone was pulling something out of me, a part of me, pulling it out and letting it float away through the window of the El car.

Lexi was a domme. Cormac was her sub. For all his bluster and arrogance, in private he knelt before her and let her control him. He groveled at her feet and did her bidding, gladly, gave himself over to her, and Lexi thrilled at the power she had to manipulate and run him and take what she wanted from him. All these nights when I'd sat home alone, agonizing at how he was domming her and taking what I could never get from her, having her undiluted worship and admiration, her obedience and compliance, I'd been wrong, totally wrong. I'd been in love with the wrong woman, with some woman who didn't even exist. I felt sick, dizzy.

The feeling of having something pulled from me was more pronounced. It was something battered and bruised and horribly damaged, like a piece of newspaper or an old plastic bag that had been lying in the street where everything had run over it and stomped on it; snow had fallen on it and sun had burned it; tires crushed it and feet ripped it, and now it was being pulled from me and let go in the February sky of painful, azurine blue.

"Why didn't youtell me?" I asked. "Why didn't you fucking tell me and put me out of my misery, Lexi? You knew I was suffering! Why couldn't you fucking explain to me what was going on? Huh? You couldn't do that for me?"

She turned her head and looked out the window. "I didn't think it would make that much difference. You were suffering over the break-up. I didn't want to stir it all up. And I was protecting Mac. The way you were feeling, who knows who you might tell or what you might do with the information."

"Well what did you do with him? What kind of things? I have to know, Lexi. You have to tell me!"

"I can't Russell. That's personal. I'm not going to tell you things like that."

"You fucking raped me, Lexi! You lied to me! How could you have done that?"

"Oh come on! I did no such thing. Look, I told you, didn't I? I didn't have to tell you but I did. I would have told you sooner or later anyhow. I was just waiting for you to settle down."

"You bitch. You fucking bitch." My voice was level but it was as if someone were still pulling out those pieces of paper from within me, as if I were some sort of dispenser for this garbage and they kept on coming out, one after another, and with each one I was getting closer to the surface, seeing things more clearly, peeling off this dead outer skin and exposing fresh cuticle. Something alive and enraged in me was getting closer to the surface, was coming closer to being exposed, like peeling away a callous and getting to the red, raw center.

"You knew but you couldn't tell me. You just let me suffer. You left me in my humiliation and self-loathing, my hatred and self-contempt. You did it because you knew it made me crawl to you! You did it because you wanted me like that, you fucking cunt! Because you were domming me even as I was crawling to you for help, you shit! Even as I was begging you for fucking help, sitting there with a gun in my mouth begging you for help, you were getting your rocks off seeing me suffer—"

"Russell, it wasn't like that—"

"Wasn't it? Then why didn't you tell me, Lexi? Why didn't you tell me? And don't give me that bullshit that you didn't think it was important."

"Russell, you know me. Would I do anything to hurt you on purpose?"

"On purpose. On purpose? What does that mean?"

What did that mean? By not telling me about her and Cormac she kept me following after her like a dog, calling her, crawling after her. Why should she tell me? She had both of us in her little menagerie, Cormacand me. Did she do it on purpose? Consciously? No, probably not. She just probably thought over the status quo and figured it wasn't so bad, figured I wasn't hurting that much, not enough to risk Mac's reputation, which was in fact exactly what she said she'd thought.

We were coming to our stop at Rockwell. I took her wrist and stood up. "Come on. This is our stop. This is where we get off."

The doors opened and we stepped out onto the wooden platform into a sun wallowing in a cold and lonely dusk. My head was full of images, of Lexi in a black corset and stockings, stiletto heels and a whip and Cormac naked on his knees with his face in a dog bowl; Lexi, shoving his face into her pussy, grinding her foot into his balls, fucking him in the ass with a strap-on. I was dizzy. I couldn't believe it. Shock and elation and spun around inside me.

The train moved on and we crossed the tracks and suddenly I wondered why the hell was I doing this? Why was I walking her home to her empty apartment? I was keeping her company, easing the pain of Cormac's passing. But what did I owe her?

I mean, on the one hand, I should be totally healed, theoretically at least. If Lexi was a domme herself, I had no reason to reproach myself for any failures in my attempts to dom her, because that could just never have been. It had been hopeless from the start. What had happened between her and Cormac at the beginning had been some sort of anomaly that had quickly passed as her real nature asserted itself, and during her time with me her latent domme tendencies would have prevented her from ever submitting to me. We'd been two dominant personalities together, two positive charges repelling each other. It was amazing we'd survived as long as we had.