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A Box of Dark
By
Kris Saknussemm
“San Francisco is no excuse,” a girlfriend once told me, and she was right. But I was trying to be honest, trying to explain. I think the Dobbs hat box made more sense to her. Maybe it will to you too.
One of my earliest memories as a kid—in a cupboard in the bathroom, the
top shelf of the linen closet, where I wasn’t supposed to look, was a Dobbs hat box, Dobbs of Fifth Avenue, New York. An amazing object, icon. Eight-sided. Black and brilliant yellow with the emblem of a Central Park horse carriage and a driver seated on top of the cab with a long whip. The hat was long gone but the box had been saved and I was fascinated. Octagonal! Black and almost luminous yellow. Reaching it, up on the highest shelf was no easy thing. I had to scale the shelves like a ladder, desperate not to disrupt the towels and sheets, or worse, drag down the boards themselves—my dread—creating total havoc, letting everyone know what I was doing.
All going well, I would lock the bathroom door, take off all my clothes (usually just my pyjamas) climb atop the toilet with the seat down and examine my body in the mirror, the strange cold-warm glare of the bulb above the sink—the hard bird bones of my body becoming fleshed with young muscle—or where the baby fat still clung, a slow melting transformation I could almost watch.
It was hypnotic to examine myself in the mirror. The rubbery little walnuts of my testicles. My penis. Stiffening in the frosty silver of the mirror. I came, in a ritual magic sort of way, to associate these early erections with the Dobbs hat box. Discovering it during my rites of investigation and therefore psychically linking it to my petrified magnetic nakedness, how could I resist its calling? Inching it from the top shelf, risking losing control of it, the booming echo of the great black hollow cardboard carton striking the tile floor—destroying my privacy…breaking all the spells and dooming me to supervision! How it spoke to me. Burning through the chill white tile of walls and voices during the day—gleaming in the dark at night. Octagonal. Black, electric yellow, brighter than any bee or hornet…with the skeletal x-ray drawing of the horse and carriage…the intricacy of the ornate wheels, the high stepping horse and the top-hatted driver with his long prod extended.
To feel the sharp, precise edges and then to lift the lid…
I longed to climb inside it. To hide as I did in the cubbyhole back seat of our Volkswagen Beetle (which no parent in their right mind would let a kid ride in today). It would be like being inside my grandmother’s medicine tablets, swallowed like the wafer at Communion in my
father’s church. Or into the deeper dark…down the rabbit hole…
through the wardrobe…between the worlds.
Later we would learn in physics that a box of light is heavier than a box of dark. It’s the infinitesimal weight of the electrons that does it. And still later Mistress Zhang, goddess of black silk rope and the glinting silver of piano wire—the same tint as the mirror in that snowbound bathroom—would teach me other lessons.
She had a mansion in the Western Addition and what she called a “suite” of containers in her dark play rooms. The rooms had various cells and dungeonesque attractions, which seemed either outright gruesome to me or just plain silly. But the Mistress, who claimed to come from Kowloon but who I believe was Cambodian—had more authentic, interesting implements and restraints.
It was almost impossible to guess her true age. 35. 40? (She always insisted she was 31.) She had a rich Vietnamese boyfriend and a young blond hulk of streetsurfer to run her errands and service her sexually. Who knows how many other lovers, clients, servants.
She said she’d lived in London and Tokyo, where she’d made a lot of money—and her French was very good. You could never tell where the truth ended and fantasy began with her, which was of course a crucial part of her appeal, her power.
She was extremely petite except for her breasts, which were large for her frame, with a tortured waist not much bigger than my
neck… powder white vampire skin, perfectly trimmed dagger fingernails painted a metallic ruby, thick jet pearl diver hair plaited to her ass—and eyes like black bamboo. She was always dressed in black, unless wrapped in sheer white gauze, in which case her entire body and face were obscured, except for her shaved sex (which had the puckered, molded look of a rose of sashimi shaped by a master chef’s sharp steel and then threaded by a gold ring from which dangled a jade dragon like a lockbox). She wore dark lipstick, like calligraphy ink and always had a strange scent—narcotic and disorienting like a mix of opium, oyster sauce. Some cloying kind of incense.
In the outer alcove of the playrooms were aquariums, one filled with large and heavily armored albino crabs, another with freshwater eels, a third with Siamese fighting fish. She had a pet monkey named Lord Sussex (a name that in her heavy accent, she particularly enjoyed pronouncing) who was usually dressed in white silk pyjamas with braided buttons and a midnight blue fez, although once I saw him wearing a kilt. (Seriously.)
Amongst the containers that she used with clients were various steel boxes, a wooden tea chest, and some island-made oblong cane creation that suggested fishing, but which she called a “ghost trap.” With me she used a vessel that was both intensely simple and yet ceremonially decadent. It was constructed of some birdlight timber like the balsa wood I used to make airplanes out of as a kid, coated with excruciating care in unknown coats of black lacquer, so that it appeared to be perpetually wet and glistening. At first I thought it was some artistic rendition of a clam shell, a giant clam shell, like Tridacna gigas, known as the bear’s paw clam, the largest bivalve mollusk in the world. Mistress Zhang knew a lot about these clams, and had once been given a baptismal font made from the shell of one found in the Indian Ocean by a clergyman client. She even knew of the green algae that live symbiotically within the clams—but the box did not in fact have anything to do with these peculiar creatures. Its origins were simpler and darker. It was a heart—or an attempt at a heart shape, subtly hinged, softly lined with sheeny pincushion satin.
It was only from the inside of the lozenge that the fine holes appeared, like the lights of stars when she had the candles lit in the outer room. Then one by one the stars would go out as she inserted the wires—long delicate but sharp strands she whispered came from a temple stove brush—some ancient tool used to herd cinders and now to penetrate the shell of the black lacquered heart through the countless specially made holes. Keys, she called them and the discipline of true release would come when I’d counted them all.
Why you ask?
A beautiful Asian woman in black vinyl or sheer netting?
Yes, but why would you want even her to do that? Why in hell?
I could say it had something to do with San Francisco—but the truth is the lacquer heart had a false bottom. When just enough of the wires had been inserted and the stars had gone out, a secret door inside the heart opened—that led to a flight of stairs in the Village in New York…to huts in Thailand—grim little vaults with soiled sheet pallets and bare bulbs and you could hear men in the near distance betting on a cockfight…then back…beyond…thunder of the waves, lying drunk among the dunes in Mexico…back to the linen closet in the bathroom of my old childhood house.
Because a box of light is heavier than a box of dark. Because in submission there is mastery, the timeless mystery—the black mirror. Because
the mask always reveals the face. Because in pain there is sometimes transcendence. Because in containment there can be contentment. Because in
theater and ritual there is escape from Time. Because in stylized, cultivated fear there is freedom from Terror. Because a box of dark must be opened and a box of light cannot last. Because of the womb, the tomb and all the doorways in between. Because we are meat until we are only memory. Because of old felt and perfumed kid gloves. Because of the scent of wicker and mothballs. Because of boxes of ashes and flower petals. Because of mirrors and erections and dreams. Because of the hot piercing stars of a stranger who knows you better than you know yourself.
The day after Mistress Zhang died I was invited over for lunch with some friends. They were both pot heads and they had two young sons. We had a feast. Ginatonics, spare ribs, Jamaican weed. At one point Richard got out his guitar and started playing and little Alex, the oldest boy started fooling around, trying to climb in the guitar case. I was pretty high and from across the room, the case looked like it was lined with blood-red velvet—the shape half-way between a Venus figurine and a sarcophagus. Of course the boy didn’t fit—which both frustrated and amused him. Too big, too old to reenter the womb. Too curious and too alive for a coffin.
Then we all went to Golden Gate Park. We spread out blankets under one of the big oak trees. People were everywhere. The grass was very green and had just been mowed and there were kids playing and teenagers flirting.
Oddly enough, right where we were stretched out, leaning up against an oak
was a large pushbroom. One of the maintenance crew must have left it, but
it was a long way from any of the walkways and we all commented on how out
of place a broom on the lawn looked. Alex took quite an interest in it and began trying to sweep the freshly mowed lawn, which got us all laughing. Just then this group of 12-year old boys sauntered past, looking self-conscious, whispering. A moment later a gaggle of girls their age followed, acting very conspiratorial and giggling. I noticed one carried a water balloon—and suddenly I knew exactly what was going to happen.
Sure enough, a heartbeat later one of the boys clued in and they all bolted, not fast enough to get away, just fast enough to trigger the chase—and the girls tore off after them, one of the water balloons exploding on them, setting them all laughing. Everything happened so fast, so subtly between them, synchronized as they all were. It seemed so poignant—all of them on the cusp of puberty, the edge of innocence, flitting between the shadows of the trees and the sharp light reflecting off the grass. I could taste the fresh grass scent tickling the back of my throat—chasing Sandy Sweeny one day in another century, when Capture the Flag suddenly led to pulling the strap of her training bra—and I glanced down to see the mark on my wrist from my last visit to Mistress Zhang.
There was another little boy with a family on the other side of the oak
tree and he had cardboard drum hanging on a string around his neck. He beat
on it with his fat little fists and it sounded just like the Dobbs hat box when it struck the tile floor the day my mother heard it. I realized I was crying.
“What’s wrong?” Christie asked, looking over at me through stoned eyes—still rebelling against parents who were long old and crippled.
“I don’t know,” I said, as the as the boys pursued by the girls swept toward us like leaves, little Alex ready to meet them with his big broom.
Copyright © 2005 Kris Saknussemm
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