What Kind of a Man Couldn’t Even Bleed
by Charlene Elsby
(We’re thrilled to present this expurgated excerpt (aka “deleted scene”) from Charlene Elsby’s new novel Affect. It’s bold and shocking, and stands on its own just fine. Please enjoy responsibly.)
If there’s a head in my pussy, the thought will cross my mind to grab it and ram it in there, to drown it in its liquids. Part of it is definitely to eliminate the consciousness that’s been there, to unsee the things it has seen. But you don’t do that to people. The thought itself is abhorrent, and what makes it abhorrent is that that there’s a subjectivity in that head. At the same time, that pussy head can’t be thought of as a full sort of consciousness, whose vantage point you could adopt for the sake of subjective variation. I don’t want to imagine what it’s doing, because in this scenario I am the subject. It’s impossible to orgasm and be the object. The fact that I’m heterosexual factors in as well. I can’t take on the subjectivity for that which takes my pussy as an object because it’s not what I like, and then the sex isn’t any good. The head must be an object conducive to my subjectivity, but still it is a subject. That’s what’s so wrong about it.
So what if I eliminated the subjectivity of the head? I could not drown it, sure, but I could also not worry about its vantage point. And that would be something, at least. I wouldn’t have to worry about other subjectivities around. But the head must be a head still; otherwise, what was the point?
At once I thought of a head that wasn’t a head but made to look like one. In the attic was a head I’d been saving, in case my own proved not quite right for something. In and amongst the old papers meant for nothing and the objects whose pasts couldn’t be separated from their materiality was a head I had found one time. Someone had meant to recycle it, but I knew it wouldn’t go with the papers or the plastics. The head was ceramic and wouldn’t go, I was sure, so I pulled it out and took it home with me. This head didn’t deserve to be trash, I thought.
When I had brought it home, I put it around the place a few times. I would wait until it no longer surprised me from the corner of my eye, making me think there was a human there, and then I would move it again. Left alone, it would become part of the environment and then unable to startle me, but that would defeat the purpose. When I was startled by the head, it was serving its purpose. Until all at once I tired of him and put him away upstairs. His eyes didn’t seem so blue anymore; they were opaque and full of deception. I couldn’t see any eyes at all, just a crude representation meant to trick me into thinking they were there. Its hair didn’t move on the windiest days, and the colour didn’t variegate like the hair of a subject does. I could imagine its body attached wherever it was, and it was complete, but not real. It had an ideal body, an abstract body, and as such it wasn’t there. It wasn’t right that the manufacturer had had to complete the neck. It should have contained the infinite possibilities of an actual neck, full of flesh and blood and striations. Instead, the neck finished in a circle of flesh that flattened, containing everything above within and everything below without. The circle of flesh negated the possibility of the head ever having a body, for there it sat, directly in the way of its growth. It obscured what was in the head, as well, so that I had to imagine that the inside of the head had tried to extend beyond the neck, but had had to double back once it arrived there, at the flesh circle, so that the head was more full of striations than it should have been. The ears were stuck to it like no ears could have been, but if they weren’t constructed this way, they might have broken off, which would also have been unrealistic. So the ears had to stick there, more as a relief than anything, which would have been a relief to the head, who would probably have been more concerned if his ears were capable of protruding (the fear, of course, that he might lose them in the shuffle, to which he in no part contributed).
Part of it was that I couldn’t get my own face right, at least to look at it. It worked all right; it served its purpose, but to look at it, you would never know that. I had tried to make it look like what it seemed like, but it had never worked (various paints and goos). But here was this head and it was everything that it was and that’s it. The face didn’t change as time passed or when you spoke to it in a tone it didn’t like. The face was there and definitely human, but for all that it wasn’t.
So you fucked it?
So I fucked it.
I guess it had it coming.
Nice one.
How was it?
Terrible.
The head had all sorts of resistance to it, but at the same time, none at all. Its resistance was completely material, but as a whole, I could put it wherever I wanted. At the same time, it refused to yield, even in the slightest, because of the material of which it was constructed. It did not protest, but at the same time, its manner of existence was a protest. I began to conceive of a will in him greater than any man, whose wills were certainly strong but in such a weak flesh that one couldn’t even trust it to stay alive from one moment to the next. The dead were devoid of wills, but the non-living… the head had an advantage no man could ever have known, a built in resistance so strong that to bend it would contradict its entire nature. The head was not something over which I had complete power, for I had no power over it whatever. Whatever I did to him, whatever I made him do, it was all me in the end and not him at all. You can’t force an object into anything, it turns out.
The whole thing turned out very uncomfortably, for everyone involved. I would make the head move against me, but it was my motion all along, and not the head’s at all. Its face became more and more inhuman, the more I could feel it not resisting. The object head, knocking against me with my own motion, was no better than a table against which I persistently banged my knee. The effect was the same. The more I came to resent the head, the more frantic its motions became. The blood came and went, all over the place, and I could tell it was all mine and not his, and I resented it all the more. What kind of a man couldn’t even bleed, I chastised him. He could not bleed or drown or pleasure a woman; there was no good in him at all.
So I broke him.
I had to see what was inside that was keeping him all within like that. First I knocked the end of the neck off, where everything should have been behind the circle of flesh. But there was nothing there. It was like he was saving that space in case something came along that he would mean to keep. But he hadn’t yet found the right object for that space, and so empty it remained. The head was abstinent for never finding anything to fill its holes. Its ungratified existence made it incapable of gratifying and such its emptiness revealed itself. The upper portion, behind the face, held nothing at all. The thickest part was the back of the skull, and I thought that the best place to kill him. It would be weaker of me to kill the face, as the face, it turned out, was the weakest of all. Instead, holding him face down on the ground, I crouched over him and smashed the back of the head into my vagina. I felt it crushed against my pubic bones, just at the bottom of my labia. The face, too, disintegrated, and then to the bottom of the pile it fell, on top of which I knelt and finished the job myself.
The moral of the story is, you think you can control objects but not people, but you can’t even control objects.
I can control myself.
Only insofar as you’re neither a person nor an object.
That’s enough.
Is it?
I think it is.
I guess we’ll see.
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This story also appears in EXCUSE ME Mag #4. You can find out more about Affect and order your own copy via the publisher, The Porcupine’s Quill. Do it. Do it right now. Thanks!