Awake In The Dark

Rosa ❤️ eye contact

“It seems impossible, in fact, to judge the eye using any word other than seductive, since nothing is more attractive in the bodies of animals and men.” — Georges Bataille

Sometimes my eyes blind me.

Take Rosa. I should know better by now, especially after last time. But when her name appears on my phone — the thumbnail of her most seductive booth face staring back at me — my focus is instantly gone.

Friday? Mine?

The question marks are Rosa’s idea of compromise. Like she’s inviting my input. But a question from Rosa is an implied command. Rosa is not a question mark kind of girl. If she were any Unicode symbol, she’d be an interrobang.

The wine is heady with legs that climb the glass. I brought a red I thought she’d enjoy, something full-bodied. We sip silently on opposite ends of her couch. My other gift to her — a pot of croci, her second favourite flower — sits beside her, in a saucer of shallow water.

It’s not the pastel purple petals she loves but the stigmata — plucked, dried, and withered into saffron. It’s transforming something ordinary into something exotic which gets Rosa off.

Her flat is a sanctuary of esoterica. The lighting is low, filtered through kerchiefs and gauzy drapery. An ossuary of wire-framed skeletons, a taxidermy menagerie, a rock garden of crystal-corruscated geodes. And books, sumptuous, heavy-bound, embossed in metal leaf, their bindings held tightly by straps, ribbons and twine. I feel privileged to be here. She wears a loose hoodie emblazoned with a caricature of herself vomiting the five letters of SHITE, her band’s acronymous name.

She reaches to the side table, slides open a discreet drawer, and extracts a baroque, multi-fronded silver implement.

“It’s a wine wand,” she says. Then, seeing me mentally conjuring a comeback, she cuts me off: “Don’t fucking mention wizards.”

I’ve heard of wine wands before. Supposedly they neutralise histamines, prevent hangovers. I don’t have much confidence in the science, but then, with Rosa, it’s not science which underpins her methods.

But I’ve never seen one this ornate. It’s a miniature staff, a pocket-sized sceptre, spiral-knurled along its shaft, and tipped with a thistle of silver tendrils that form a tight but wine-permeable knot.

She wraps her fingers around my fingers around my glass and slowly stirs the wand in my wine and muttering. An incantation, no doubt. Rosa and her magicke… I wonder what book from what clandestine antiquarian inspired her this time.

Red beads flick from its crown before she slides it back into the drawer.

I sip. With a finger, she elevates the base of my glass. The wine pours faster down my throat until it is gone. A corvid glimmer scintillates her black eyes.

“Right.” She turns decisively, plucks something else from her drawer. “I want to try something.”

These words are always thrilling and chilling coming from Rosa. In her hand is a plastic box containing false eyelashes.

“Let me put these on you.”

There’s no let with Rosa. Only do not resist. She carefully pinches one lash, its dark brown fibres much like her own. Rosa loves her self-image reflected back at her, especially on others. She picks up a black pot with a brush screwtop, and applies a thin crescent of blue paste to the base of the false lash.

“Chin up and look at my tits.”

I hold my head straight and peer down her cleavage. She presses the lash into place, at each end, then the middle. I feel the weight and the adhesion. My lids part tentatively, peeling then snapping open. I give a cock-eyed blink and feel the microgust of synthetic filaments.

“So pretty!” she says. “Wanna see?”

I don’t, but Rosa doesn’t wait. The second set is already pasted.

“Chin. Tits.”

I look down as my left eye is liberally gummed with cooling blue paste.

“Can I open them now?”

She laughs. “I don’t know. Can you?”

I try. I cannot. My lids are fully bonded.

“Beautiful.” She sounds satisfied.

The dark is absolute. I put my hands to my eyes, as if to check they are still there.

“Don’t fuck ’em up! That took effort.”

I touch the lashes gingerly. The disconnect between my fingertips feeling plastic hairs and my eyelids feeling nothing is disconcerting.

The sofa shifts. She skips from the room. I am alone.

I reach cautiously toward the coffee table, rediscovering my local topography, now unfamiliar. My senses don’t feel heightened; they feel twitchy. I worry about knocking something over, breaking a glass, making a mess.

“Is that some kind of dance?”

Her footfalls strain the floorboards. She drops onto the cushions which guff dust. My nose tingles. I snatch my hands to my face, misjudging the distance, smacking myself on the nose.

“Are you quite done?”

She takes my jittery hands, lowers them to my lap. Cradles my chin. Tugs at my lids. The dried adhesive pulls at my crow’s feet, stretches my face taut. My skin is curiously numb to her touch.

Then something gives. The tension snaps. My eyelids are not closed, but I cannot see. The black is entire. Even though I am awake, I am not in the dark. The darkness, it seems, is inside me.

Her hand tightens on my chin and there are wet sounds, hard feelings, a strange invasion. An airy coolness in places I have never felt before.

The sofa shifts. Rosa stands. Three short steps. Two small splashes. A rotary tinkling. She is stirring something. The wand? My wine?

My vision flickers. Light dapples, a spreading red liquescence, a slow returning of sight. Images appear — disordered, aberrated, inverted. Then: clarity. I see myself. A few metres away. Sitting, swaying, buttressing my own torso with my arms. But that self is a different self.

Because, I realise, my eyeballs are floating in Rosa’s wine, across the room. Being stirred by that silver sceptre, dizzied and swimming.

I raise my hands to my eyes. My empty sockets are numb to my fingertips. I press the thin membranes lining the orbital bone, slick with lacrimal fluid.

She lays down the solid wand and her rippling silhouette returns to me.

My vision settles and focusses. She draws my fingers from my gawping face holes. My lids flutter over hollows. She traces the rims, snagging lightly on the preposterous lashes, then sinks into me, pressing her fingers into my empty perianths, plucked of stigmata.

The sensation tingles through my endosensory system — neither pain nor hurt, but an alien compressure, distant yet deeply near.

My fingers claw the cushions. My nails invert.

This out-of-bodiness is what Rosa conjures. Even sitting on her sofa, chatting vacuities, this is how she makes me feel: conscious of my skin. Alert to my awareness. My vitality tangible. In her presence, I let myself become lost, seeking something even more remote. And in her absence, I crave it.

But the peak always passes. An ache at the periphery.

My eyes cramp, their aqueous humours turning vinous. The 12% alcohol seeps across the choroid membrane. My lenses misbehave. My focus flutters, my pupils vacillate. My reflexes try to blink away discomfort, but my lids are metres from my corneas.

She leaves my side. She picks up her wine glass, swirls it playfully. I teeter on the settee. Then she raises the glass to her lips. Swallows. Gulps once. Twice.

I am blind again. The peripheral ache is all-enclosing. Though my eyes have no sense of gravity, the slow descent is unmistakable.

She coughs as the twin boli of my ocular amuse-bouches abrade her oesophagus, pass into her depths where they drown in an acid sea.

She returns, pressing her hands into my shoulders.

“Get comfortable. You’re not going anywhere.”

My body caves. My unsupported lids flap at her closeness.

“Give it eighteen hours. Twelve if I drink coffee.”

The scent of crocus reaches my nose.