Permafrost
"As the day stops dead
at the place where we're lost
I will drug you and fuck you
on the permafrost."
The relentless heat of a Californian summer has passed by me unnoticed this year. My body sweats, of course, and thirsts. My pupils shrink painfully from the brightness should I venture out. But I do not feel warmed, and I do not feel enlightened. I have lost the sun.
Lilah lays beside me on the dirty sheets, the material rank with the filth of yet another of our frantic, emotionless couplings. Why do we do it? I cannot answer for her, as I have no more understanding of her motives and desires in this matter than I had that first night. For me, it started as a cry for help. Surely someone would notice this suicidal plunging into the crack of doom, pun intended, and rescue me.
No one did, of course.
She sleeps contentedly; that's not what I imagined. She has a soul, how can she be so peaceful knowing what she's responsible for? Why doesn't the guilt keep her locked in perpetual, tormented insomnia, staring myopically at the ceiling as she sees her failures replayed upon it again and again?
How dare she be so... free?
I would hate her if I had any capacity for passion remaining. I do my best to show her this when my body and heart are briefly heated during sex. She seems to like it. I have learnt that if ennui threatens to sap my ardour prematurely, the quickest way to push her to the release I feel obligated to provide is through the cold, verbal violence I have become so practised in.
In tones of bleakest winter, I name her 'bitch' and 'corporate whore' and 'trash' and 'object' as I prod and stir the pits of hell towards orgasm. Each accusation brings a spurt of flame, a rumbling and shaking. Some part of me is amazed at the power I have in my fingers and tongue to provoke hell itself to such reaction. And once the tremors calm, I thrust my ice into the fire and pray that this time, if only for a few seconds, the permafrost will thaw.
I can almost hear the hiss each time I enter her: the melting of surface chill and the extinguishing of a flame or two. It's meaningless and without ramification. No one cares what we do, and afterwards, the world is utterly unchanged.
I would hate her. Or perhaps, I would love her. She alone seeks me in my ice age. She alone values me. I run my hand over the curl of her hip and thigh, and study the lines of her form. She has the sleek, potent beauty of the predator. The natural feline shape of her face is emphasised by the calculated arch of her brows. She has a powerful jaw and perfectly manicured nails that she loves to scratch and tear with. My back is a criss-crossed maze of raw or half-healed wheals. I am numb to them.
Were I capable of caring, it would astound me: the things we have done, what is possible when one ceases to use sex as an expression of affection. I have, with Lilah, satisfied kinks on which I have fantasised for years, since school in fact. Themes of humiliation, violence and shame, things I could not do with any partner I respected. And yet through indulging in mutual debasement with Lilah, I have discovered some variant of respect for her.
She is not merely the evil and cunning adversary. She is not just the designer clad hell-bitch always struggling to be one move ahead in our ethical chess game. There is more to Lilah. Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only person ever to have seen it. I don't believe she herself is aware that she has length and breadth beyond her ambition and career.
Lilah is running scared.
She loves order and beauty and peace. This is obvious in her choice of décor and wardrobe, in her classical CD collection and the care she takes to present everything she is responsible for, be it her hair or a complex legal report. She craves the simplicity of impeccable design, of symmetry and structure. Chaos, cacophony, the raw stuff of the natural world, repel her.
For the unnatural paradigm she desires, she could have sought the ordered pattern in orchestral music or higher maths. She could have created and tended a Japanese sand garden. She could have retreated to a nunnery and quiet, regimented seclusion. But Lilah is too alive, too vibrant to be happy in the complete repression of her humanity.
Instead of denial, Lilah chose control. She made her life a prolonged endeavour to gain control of the chaos that offends her. I'm sure a part of her must realise how foolish she is. No matter how high in the Wolfram and Hart ranks she rises, she will always be the marionette and not the puppeteer. She will never be given the power of full disclosure. She will never even be able to reliably control her own small empire.
I would pity her. And I would admire her because, even though her struggle is hopeless, she will never surrender.
If I could.
Beams of sunlight slice through the gaps in my blinds and stripe our naked bodies, giving my lover the tiger striations she richly deserves. Her pale skin absorbs the light, becoming warmed and golden where it touches, and yet mine remains colourless and chill. As the day wakes up, haze will shimmer from the sticky sidewalks and the air will dry bake those foolish enough to venture into the full sun. It is mid-July in Los Angeles,
And I am colder than Angel's heart.
Permafrost lyrics © Magazine
Many thanks to Poodle for the read-through and encouragement