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2002-04-26 - 1:23 a.m. It all started with pity. When she was just a teenager she thought about how many lonely people there were in the world, and how much they needed to be loved. And not love from a distance, love of telepathic caresses and bouquets of prayers, but love as presence. Mercy is when you use your own body to shade those of others', casting your shadow over them. Sometimes she thought she went further than that--she allowed them to find shade in her body, even consented to them depositing their shadows in her. She started with those she thought were the easiest ones: the blind. She had a strict policy not to insult them by always dressing nicely for appointments, applying eye shadow down to the use of the tiniest brush, combing her hair and spraying it with various aerosols (if they couldn't see the effort put into her appearance, they would at least smell it). She wore tight clothes whose buttons, when unfastened, would release the palpable sumptuousness of flesh as she inhaled, exhaled. She also bought a thesaurus. She used a variety of words to describe her body to them, often ending her sentences with harsh monosyllables. Tactfully, she avoided using colours in her descriptions. They were gentle with her. And she always felt her body transforming under their caresses; it was now mapped differently--her moles erased, birthmarks like wine patches disappearing under miracle stain removers. She knew to them her skin was a uniform sheath, smooth, interrupted only by various checkpoints: the powdery roughness of her elbows, sometimes the sweaty stickiness at her throat, the wetness of her pubes like the slick fur of an otter. She had to admit to a secret preference for the blind. It was the way she was touched by them, as if all her contours were roads that needed to be carefully traced by all manner of night-time travellers: fingers, palms, tongues, and the surprise that came unerringly when there was a bend in the road (from her neck to shoulder, the crook of her knee), or a pothole (her lips, parting slightly). And when it was time for the climax, she felt her whole body hardening, becoming more solid, as they grabbed her tight, almost as if she were a raft, or the edge of a cliff. Never before had she experienced someone else's orgasm like that: as pure vertigo, with her body as the only spider-thread which connected the black vacuum of their world with one infinitely more real. Of course she moved on to other customers. For the paraplegics she learnt how to manouvre her body such that immobility never became a hindrance. She trained herself to be hyper-flexible, practised yoga, and figured out how a disciplined control of her breathing transferred the element of air, almost, to her bones. Sometimes as she performed one of her unbelievable contortions, she imagined that she was channelling air through the marrow of her skeleton, and making music, like breath through a network of flutes. Once, though, she encountered someone who claimed, in a strange tone that combined vulnerability and arrogance, that he had 'osteogenesis imperfecta'. She knew immediately that he had bones like chalk, that would break under the slightest exertions. And so she only worked on two parts of his body, both boneless: his stiff member, his leathery tongue. By this act she effectively re-wrote evolution: all their other body parts were redundant, joining other vestigeal organs like tail-bones and foetal gills. Her list went on: hunchbacks, the clubfooted, the amputees, the burn victims, the ones with crooked spines or webbed necks, those with cleft lips and glass eyes. Whatever deficiency they felt they possessed, she always kept a spare part in her catalogue. She was an acrobat to the paralysed, a prosthetic to the incomplete, and for the asymmetrical ones, her masterful double-jointed embraces felt like the most natural thing in the world. Her fame spread wide. She was always in demand, this woman who was solid to the blind, whose caresses were like water, who had air moving through her bones. And she was fulfilled by the work she was doing; even though she was a commodity in a transaction, the gratefulness she received was palpable. It was only when this gratefulness extended into yearning that she felt a terrible burden on her shoulders. As she cradled a man one day, patting his thigh, carefully tucking in all the vulnerabilities she had pulled out like coloured streamers in the anarchy of ecstasy, she caught the deep meaning in his eyes and shivered. An appeal was etched in those irises: "I want you to be my wife. I want you to carry my children. I want you to give birth to perfect children in a perfect world where the likes of you would never need to exist."
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