Nut-hash

He bragged so frequently about smuggling a lump of hash into the country by tucking it behind his balls that at last I was forced to assume that he wanted me to smoke it for him. Presumably, the hash had been wrapped before it came in contact with his scrotum. In any event, sack hash was better than no hash.

The weed in Israel was uniformly depressing, sold by seedy British guys in back alleys of Eilat, thirty shekels a matchbox. Weed came in matchboxes—about the equivalent of a nickel bag—gritty, dusty, low-quality. We’d separate it on plastic plates: a pile of ganj, a pile of sticks, a pile of seeds, and a pile of sand. Every matchbox contained a nice helping of sand.

Nut-hash didn’t belong.

We were, for the most part, in our late teens and early twenties, hiding from the people we were in our home countries, volunteering on the kibbutz for room and board and a pittance that earned us enough to purchase a candy bar or a stick of real butter in the kibbutz store.

Nut-hash was forty-two, a professional chef who “followed the season,” three months in a hotel kitchen in Hawaii, four weeks at a resort in Thailand. Whatever, wherever. He came to Israel because the foreign girls were easy. The British, I noticed, threw off their inhibitions along with their clothing as soon as the sun hit their skin.

But he seemed stuck on me, and never lost an opportunity to brag: underwear models he’d had, exotic ports he’d explored, the beauty of his ex-wife, who he’d left because, “Can you imagine sleeping with the same person for ten years?” And, of course, the lump of Dutch hash he’d taped between his penis and his testicles.

His chunky but good-hearted redhead roommate had a crush on my well-endowed raven-haired roommate. She and I would stay up late at night, laughing about how they’d never have their way with us. I was in fact sleeping with a Russian body builder who had his own house on the other side of the kibbutz, far from the horrifying volunteer quarters, and also with a soulful Moroccan engineering student, who was running away from his Borderline fiancée. They knew about each other and were good friends, often boring me with long-winded conversations about math.

The Moroccan revealed to me the redhead’s real reason for being in Israel: he was wanted on a drug charge in New York. His mother had made him come. My roommate was running from her dangerous obsession with Mexican-American gangsters. I was running from adulthood.

Technically, that’s what nut-hash was running from too, but I was twenty-one at the time, and he was twice my age.

The Russian body builder was not running. He had citizenship and lived on the kibbutz because the IDF had deemed him too crazy for the mandatory military service required of every other Israeli.

I didn’t like to smoke pot with my lovers; they were both lightweights. The Russian would take a few hits, cough madly, and then spend an hour debating with himself about whether or not drugs made him crazier. The Moroccan would take a few hits and fall asleep.

Mostly, I smoked with the redhead, because he was a real drug dealer and didn’t mind dealing with seedy British guys in Eilat alleys, whereas I found it distasteful and nerve-wracking. On Rosh Hashana, we took an apple from the dining hall and carved it into a pipe, lighting the weed with a lighter my roommate had brought from her local Hillel.

We didn’t hatch a plan to get at the scrotum-hash, but after the fiftieth time he bragged about his act of daring, my roommate and I double-teamed him. We had shared our sandy weed with him. Didn’t he like us? Didn’t he want to come over to our room and share his stash with us? The redhead got in on it, too. Nut-hash either needed to pony up the hash or stop talking about it.

“Come after dinner,” we advised them.

It wasn’t a terribly impressive lump: a fraction of a gram. Perhaps he had already smoked some portion of it. The guys were overly solicitous, lighting the pipe, complementing the way we’d decorated our room: a combination of our own artwork and images torn from magazines.

When the hash was gone, we stretched our arms in mock exhaustion. “Well, goodnight, then,” we said, shoving them out door. Afterwards, we laughed. It didn’t occur to us that we might be cruel. They had wanted to take advantage of us.

Late at night, the Moroccan and I took a walk out in the desert, where I almost fell into a wadi. Although slender and without strength, he caught me, twisting his own ankle in the process. We laughed together, and I supported him with my shoulder all the way back to the kibbutz, where we had a little sex, but only a very little, because the workday started early.

Nut-hash got some sandy weed from the redhead and invited me to smoke down in the desert, and I went, for the drugs.

I fell into another wadi, but this time there was no one there to catch me. Nut-hash stood up on the ridge watching dumbly as I tumbled into the sand and climbed out again. He didn’t offer to help as I limped back to the kibbutz.

We sat behind the dining hall while he bragged about the places he’d been and girls he’d laid, and the Russian wandered out into the pavilion, but he couldn’t see us in the shadows.

“What’s he doing?” Nut-hash interrupted his narrative to wonder.

“Looking for me,” I said. “He’s my lover.”

“Oh.” He sounded hopeful. “Do you have a lot of lovers?”

I smiled in the darkness. “As many as I need.”

Ethics

Like some morally ambiguous cartoon character, he carried an angel on his right shoulder and a devil on his left. Unlike the proverbial indecisive animation, he carried them at all times, even in the absence of ethical dilemma, and they weren’t adorable miniatures with cherubic faces. They were full size, slightly larger than his own six feet, and while they possessed no earthly mass, they still weighed him down spiritually.

They didn’t look like any popular conception of angels or devils.

The angel had a smooth, flat face, like a white pebble, with water-worn holes for eyes, nostrils, and mouth. Its head, covered in stiff, alar hairs, attached directly to its shoulders like a bird’s, and also swiveled and twisted like a bird’s. Its stick-figure body dangled from the head like strings from a helium balloon, and its wings hung in airy folds, bleached sheets clipped to wiry frames.

The devil looked almost exactly alike, except darker: the crisp and flaking black of a third degree burn. Where the angel had feathery hair, the devil had charred hair shafts. Where the angel had billowy and draping wings, the devil had ragged membranes.

To say that they enjoyed arguing with each other would be an understatement.

If there could be found a moral angle, they would exploit it. Veal, one-night stands, offering ones seat to an elderly woman on crowded public transport: all were dilemmas necessitating a screaming tirade. Even minor matters, such as the purchase of a bottle of water (“Plastic is bad for the environment; consider your carbon footprint” versus “You’re thirsty; you can’t control the packaging; it’s cleaner than tap water, and colder, too”) initiated disputes that could last for hours, long after he had made his choice, until they pounced upon the next ethical dilemma (“You can’t shop there; they underpay female employees and minorities” versus “Corporations make decisions based on feasibility, and have every right to set their own pay scales”).

The nonchalance with which other boys made decisions amazed him. They could skip homework, cheat in math, or hide in the girls’ shower at overnight camp, and appeared not to hear a word of bickering from a pair of moon-faced creatures who insisted upon being carried everywhere.

Was there nothing they could agree on? Clean coal? Small-scale local shrimp farming? Consensual polyamory?

“Too dirty,” sniffed the angel.

“Not dirty enough,” grunted the devil.

In college, he took an ethics class, believing his life experience would translate into an easy A. Instead, he failed, too overwhelmed by the running commentary to focus on lectures, retain textual information, or write a coherent paper. Korean pottery, French cinema, Egyptian history, and Ornithology 101 all proved hot-button topics. Through trial and error, he determined he could graduate only by majoring in pure, theoretical mathematics.

With prodigious application of alcohol, he tuned them out long enough to lose his virginity, but he paid with weeks of debate on the advisability of sexual purity, the ecological impact of condoms, the politics of STDs, and the legitimacy of the sexual revolution. When he got up in the morning, they were fighting. When he went to bed at night, they were fighting. They only interrupted that argument to weigh in on other important matters, such as turning up the heat versus putting on a sweater, paper versus plastic, and exactly how horrible hopping on an unprotected Linksys network really was in the grand scheme of things, but sex proved irresistible and they kept returning that the subject.

“Far beyond physical purity or moral fiber, this is about spiritual cleanliness,” the angel yelled.

“He’s built for sexual pleasure,” the devil retorted. “Denying a natural and healthy release muddies his spirit more than acceptance of his true physical nature.”

“Overcoming the base body is the path to spiritual purity!”

“Spiritual purity is shorthand for total emptiness.”

Earlier in the day, while discussing functional analysis in the library, a brainy and busty blonde had uncrossed and recrossed her legs right in front of him. After six hours of cogitation, he calculated with ninety-percent certainty that she had provided that glimpse of her lacy panties with perfect deliberation. This conviction emboldened him for the first time in his life.

“Why don’t you two just fuck each other already?” he shouted.

“I’d rather fuck a moldy apple,” said the devil.

“I beg your pardon,” the angel said. “I do not fornicate.”

“Whatever,” he said. “You obviously have a thing for each other. You enjoy arguing way too much. You’re overcompensating for your forbidden attraction. You,” he said, pointing to the angel, “get your hands dirty for once in your existence. Learn something about the world you condemn.

“And you,” he continued, pointing to the snickering devil, “get your ass up out of the mud. This will come as a complete surprise to you, but it’s possible to experience pleasure without being a selfish bastard.”

At long last, the angel and the devil fell silent. Instead they both gaped at him, round little mouth-holes open and speechless, dark little eye-divots surreptitiously glancing toward each other and then down to the floor.

“There’s no shame in admitting your feelings,” he said. “Surely you can agree on that.”

“Feelings are dangerous,” the angel whispered.

“Emotions indicate weakness,” the devil grunted.

“Whatever,” he said. “Deal with it. I’m going out. You’re not invited.”

And he brushed the astonished creatures off his shoulders like lint, with such ease that he couldn’t believe he’d never tried before, and he went out of the dorm, texting the brainy and busty blonde.

He did not return to until the next morning, at which time he was a little surprised, but not very, to find the angel and the devil, their faces deeply engaged between each other’s legs. On his bed, of course.

He shoved them to the floor and fell to sleep, scarcely noticing the faint squeaks and growls of pleasure. The next day, they were still at it, seemingly glued into an alchemical knot, and each day thereafter they appeared smaller, lighter, and stiffer, until, by the end of the semester, he was able to hang them on the wall, where they were mistaken for an ethereal and remarkable yin-yang sculpture by a string of women who truly appreciated fine art.

13 Ideas I Did Not Submit to the Upcoming Cthulurotica Anthology

• Orgy at Randolph Carter's dream dungeon


• The tender love between an innocent young girl and whatever sires the half-breed fish people. Actually, maybe the above girl actually falls for a fish girl, and they are impregnated at the same time by a fishy horror


• What really goes on after lights out in Arkham Asylum


• Mating rituals of the giant albino penguins of Antarctica


• Anime-loving girl, obsessed with hentai, experiences a real tentacle raping


• When I was a student at Miskatonic U, you would not believe what we got up to in the stacks during finals week


• Prim and proper conservative fundamentalist is a secret masochist who actually relishes the horrors that await in Cthulhu's embrace


• Call of Cthulhu LARP gets way out of control


• The secrets of the not-so-amorphous appendages of Nyarlathotep's amorphous idiot flute players: those aren't flutes!


• Herbert West overcomes erectile dysfunction with a little elective surgery


• The mad harem of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred


• When Elder Gods love, they love deeply


• Pickman's model on the casting couch

Yes, I chose not to write those stories. You're welcome

Dissonance

I took Psych I and Psych II, which is where I learned about cognitive dissonance, reconciling ideas which are opposite in your mind, but I thought of sensory dissonance myself. It’s when the way something looks or sounds or feels doesn’t match up to what’s really inside it. Like, take for instance, the Pink Floyd song, “Comfortably Numb.” Maybe you hear it on someone’s Dad’s car radio and it seems like a kind of nice song, like a song about relief after pain. But then you actually watch The Wall and you realize it’s not like that at all; it’s just the beginning of the worst freak out for this guy, and things are only going to degenerate for him.

Or like Jenny Snowden, whose acquaintance I also made in Psych I and Psych II. On the outside you never saw a more beautiful creature, her eyes so big and soft, and the way those fuzzy pink sweaters cupped her breasts and the dark opiate of her perfume it’s a wonder I learned anything at all next to that girl. You wanted to believe everything she said, that she never met anyone like you, that it was a safe time of the month, that two people could have a little fun without worrying about the consequences. But then you find out none of that is true, and that’s only the beginning of the deceit and the meanness, and things are only going to degenerate from there.

And now her dad’s got me by the balls and it’s a question of doing the honorable thing or hiding on an island somewhere. I look at her and it’s like these two giant rocks colliding in my brain, her captivating beauty and her castrating bitchiness. Or two even bigger rocks: the knowledge that I’ve chosen to stick around like a stupid puppy dog simpering at its master’s feet, and the knowledge that I’ve chosen the path where dreams die.

The Optical Engineer

His first wife was a flight attendant, and he likes to be awakened in the middle of the night, as she once did, to a woman straddling him, pumping like a piston and squeezing like a milking machine. The typical male achieves erection four to six times throughout the night, during REM sleep, at intervals of approximately ninety minutes. More often than not I just let him pass out, work for an hour or so, and then check to see if he’s ready. Sometimes he doesn’t even realize he’s fallen asleep. He thinks he’s been making love to me the whole time. Since he drinks, it works out better this way.

So I’m not too upset when he pulls back from my advances. “I’m so sorry. I completely forgot I have work to do. There’s a meeting tomorrow. It won’t take long.” He reaches one hand past me, to the bed table, lays his fingers on a ball point pen and an old envelope, pulls the envelope apart by its seams, flattens it onto a clipboard.

He scribbles the pen around to get it going, then scrawls out a string of numbers and letters. Mostly it’s like little F subscript parenthesis one end parenthesis, little F subscript parenthesis two end parenthesis, long strings like that. There are a few Xs and Ns in there, as well, I think, and some other abuses of the alphabet.

When he’s locked up half the envelope in these inky chains, he swears. “I better do this right.”

He gets out of bed, goes to his desk, finds a fresh leaf of printer paper, and starts copying his equations. They flow without effort, the way I write when I’m deep inside a story, and he writes them with a kind of calculating love, scientific attachment. His work is huge, bigger than us.

“What happens if you make a mistake?” I ask, hanging over the back of his chair, laughing.

His pen never stops plotting its course. “Then a ten million dollar mirror turns back into sand.”