Deformation

  Christopher Lloyd

So much pain, burning across my back and arms, and it’s exquisite. I have never felt this constricted before, but there is joy in the discomfort. I’m able to relinquish into it. The negation is absolute.

The rope chafes my wrists and ankles, even though he hasn’t tied it as firmly as I’d expected. Nonetheless, I am unable to move, stuck in place.

I am born bent. Contorted, a spine spun in curves. But I don’t notice until later in life, until I am too far gone.

The doctor asks, how could you not have known? My parents are ashamed, teary as they think they have failed me, and in a way, they have.

We’ve spoken solely online, and I’ve only seen small parts of him, chopped up in photographs. The images always disappear.

There is no other way to put it, but I am being broken into pieces.

I only know his face from one angle.

After a car accident when I’m a teenager, the doctors try to take x-rays of my body. The radiographer can’t get a clear image because of the turnings in my spine. Two of them pin me in place, force me to stay still, and then back away to take the shots. Eventually, they have something workable. I feel like a dissected animal.

They are the ones to tell me how warped I am, as though pointing out something obvious. I see myself in the mirror differently as soon as they say it, remade by this one moment, and I cannot be put back to my former self.

My friends tell me I think too much about him, that he consumes my time. But they’re straight, so I don’t think they get it. They don’t understand the ways I am bound by him.

They think he must be a pervert, or that he’s probably got a wife. I don’t have the strength to tell them I don’t care, that actually, these possibilities make me more excited.

Online, he shows me his smooth chest, his arms, his bushy pubic hair. It spills out above the waistband of his underwear. I am entranced. There is more eroticism in that hair than in most men’s bodies. It is because he hides the rest.

I do not need to see the flesh concealed within those loose boxers straight away. His body is a landscape I chart digitally, eked out over days and weeks.

I speak to doctor after doctor. They can’t help me. Some shrug me off. Some say I’m overreacting or it’s too late or I should exercise more or I shouldn’t worry about it.

I finally see a doctor who seems concerned. Shocked, even. He sees my back and makes a face that I can’t and won’t forget. The distress in his eyes is enough to make my stomach fall.

He says his name is Lukas, but I don’t believe him. I can’t say why I don’t, it’s just a feeling. He doesn’t say where he’s from. I wish I could say that his secrecy is annoying, but it only adds to the pleasure.

I finally get an appointment to see a physiotherapist. Beforehand, they make me download an app where I input lots of personal information.

The conversations we have are more revealing than I expected. We start in one place—with our days, with work troubles—and we end up pressed against his bedroom wall. He has an ability to derail things, to derail me.

I imagine what he will be like in person, in real life.

My physiotherapist repeats the word deformed over and over. I don’t think English is her first language, but nonetheless, I am dismantled by the word. Walking into the room upright, I am suddenly hunched and twisted.

She gives me exercises to do; snaps a royal blue band from a drawer, showing me how to raise it up and over my shoulders. The other people in the room are all over seventy. I age rapidly.

At work, I sneak into the bathroom to look at his messages, reread his instructions. As I sleep, he sends a long list of demands that I must follow: not to touch myself, not to watch videos that might get me excited, not to talk to anyone else about our arrangement.

I have played games like this before—entered into propositions, setups—but they don’t usually cause so much friction in my gut.

I now have stretchmarks across my back, striations that look like tree bark. The skin ripples as the spine gradually curves.

Lukas says he has no limits, except for pee.

Each time I go back, I am always seen by the same curt physiotherapist. She is small and lean, with hair tied back so severely it looks like her skull is in pain.

The therapist in the next curtained cubicle is a young man: blonde, sweet, and handsome. I wonder why I can’t have him. I hear him sing-talking to an old woman to get her to relax.

Every morning, I feel like I could throw up. Through the day, I struggle to keep things down: coffee, toast, apples. My body wants to evacuate itself.

When we finally meet, he doesn’t quite line up with his pictures. In the flesh, he is taller, slim but sturdy. I think he could hurt me, and I am terrified and aroused. I barely know him.

The way he holds himself reminds me of my father in some ways, assured and insistent. In others, he reminds me of my ex, who never knew how to wield physical power.

During my third appointment, the physiotherapist once again calls my back deformed. You are deformed, she repeats, as if I haven’t understood. I say to her, that’s a cruel word, but she doesn’t seem to hear me.

We spend a while discussing rules, outlining boundaries. I pick a safe word that amuses him. We tend to make each other laugh, though it seems to ruin his hardened façade. He thinks he can’t dominate me if I make him audibly break the performance. To me, it’s silly, but he’s inhabiting this role so absolutely I don’t want to question it.

My clothes begin to warp. They don’t quite fit me as they once did. They hang on my shoulders oddly and askew. I hope no one notices.

The first time he hurts me, it is with some simple slaps and hair pulling. He wants to show me control, even though I let him do this to me. It escalates suddenly and he’s inside me and finishes quickly.

Afterwards, he smokes a cigarette; I drink wine. We start over again.

An old man comes up to me on a train station platform. He doesn’t say anything, just makes a curved movement with his hand. Concerned about the way I am bent over my bag, it seems, he keeps cutting through the air, his hand miming my flaws.

I blush and take my bag up the platform, since standing in front of him wears me away.

So much pain, burning heat across my back and arms, and it’s exquisite. I try not to cry, but I am kept in this position for such a long time and begin to make noises. I wear nothing but rope. He is in a suit in front of me, showing himself off, revelling in the fact that I cannot touch him.

After a while, he pushes my shoulder with his foot. A stabbing pain shoots up my left side. I cry out. He looks worried. I don’t say a thing, but my face is contorted. He starts to untie me—I say no—but he carries on anyway, stating that I am not the one in charge. That the pact I have organised is one he can rip up at any moment.

On the way home, I buy a packet of extra-strength painkillers, swallowing them without water as I hail a taxi.

Our time together is an education. I am teaching him, and he smashes up the classroom like the boys at school who used to sit behind me in French class. The teacher would set a task—read page twenty—and leave the room for forty minutes. In that time, the boys would throw things around, crack the spines of textbooks on each other’s heads, and upend tables.

I am that teacher, waiting to instruct the sadistic boys with their excesses. I teach him to hurt me in ways I did not know I wanted.

The physiotherapist is concerned I am not making progress. She asks if I am doing my exercises, my yoga, asks about pain thresholds and stretch technique.

If she sees the rope burns on my wrists and ankles, or the red marks on my neck and chest where his mouth and teeth were, she does not say anything.

He has a habit of closing his eyes when he’s inside me, and I think he’s imagining someone else. When he finishes, he likes to talk about other things immediately: books, politics, the weather. He says this is what British people talk about. I laugh. It feels like he is avoiding what just took place, avoiding me.

I am eventually discharged with simple instructions. Do this, do that. Come back if you are in serious pain. I ask what serious means and the woman says, you’ll know. I think, this is not how health professionals are meant to speak.

For days on end, he refuses to let me finish. It is his ultimate power. I have to stop myself, renounce my instincts, hold everything in. I’m a taut balloon, and only he is allowed to burst me.

A week later when he doesn’t want to have sex, we just lie there, me naked, him fully clothed. He’s in light jeans and a white t-shirt that rides up his stomach. A tattoo pokes out, along with the barest blonde hairs beneath his navel.

He traces lines up and down my back, following the curve like a pregnant belly. Fingering the vertebrae that protrude, he massages them between two fingers, and I feel one of his nails catch the skin. I am beyond embarrassed and ashamed he has such access to my distortions. Yet I have never felt so carefully held.

I dose up on medication to dull the pain that is coursing through my body. It has gotten worse in recent months, to the point that I struggle to stay upright. Walking around weighs me down and makes me ache.

I cannot stop letting him string me up or hold me in position.

Before he unties me for good, he tells me that I will never see him again. That I won’t hear from him, that I should not try to reach out. If I do, he will ignore me. He does not give a reason why.

Just as soon as he arrives, he disappears. Sometimes I think it is because we lay there that one time, shorn of our roles and positions.

I was under no illusion that this would not eventually happen, but when it does, it deflates me like a punctured tyre, overused and slowly losing traction. In time, I skid off the road.

Weeks later and the pain is unbearable; I can’t accomplish daily tasks as I once could. I wonder how much of it is also psychological.

I call the physiotherapy clinic; get put on hold.

Scrolling dating apps in bed, I try to find men that look like Lukas. But none of them have his physicality, the look in his eyes that I can’t put into words. In the past, Lukas and I would answer the video call laughing, as though just seeing each other made us nervous.

The apps now are filled with blank and flat profiles; nobody sparks my attention, my desire.

Eventually, I return to the physiotherapist. The pain is too much. Friends start noticing the jaunty ways that I hold myself at the dinner table.                    

This time, I am seen by someone else, a man. Not the cute young man, but an older one with hairy forearms and a hard jawline. He is quiet and direct. Doesn’t say much beyond very specific instructions and assessments. His orders wake something inside me.

For a week, I follow his guidelines, abide by his strict rules. I flush red and feel ashamed when I don’t complete them entirely, even though he doesn’t know.

I go back the next week for a follow-up.

As he takes me through some exercises, standing behind me to elongate my spine, pressing his stomach against my back, I get hard.

I wonder whether I can see him again.

Bio

Christopher Lloyd (he/him) writes on and teaches contemporary US literature and culture. He is the author of the micro-chap PUT MY HEART DOWN (Ghost City Press, 2021) and other stories and poems that have appeared in Fruit Journal, FEED, Impossible Archetype, and elsewhere. He lives in the UK and tweets @clloyd.

christopherianlloyd.wordpress.com