Finity of Sex and Death

Finity of Sex and Death

Posted by A Great Liar

 

I quickly entered my apartment, hoping for a reprieve against the cursed Karachi showers, and predictably found Ammo sulking in her private studio, in a middle of her artistic endeavors, her loose Victorian sleeve dress looking rather loose and shabby on her painfully thin figurine, and tears on her deep narrow eyes, giving a slight bluish tinge to it, however slight.

I dutifully inquired the cause of her current predicament, while taking off my heavily dripping raincoat, which is now partially ruining the rug.  

“What’s the matter dear?” I asked, partly believing that one of her recent residue of boyfriends have dumped her, yet again. Of all the women in the world of Karachi, Ammo had dated just about anything that walked or crawled or could merely breath like a Stonehenge on this land, ranging from a bad ass hip hop richer-than-thou sun of a gun to a male version of femme fatale.

I went back down the memory lane and recalled the long queue of male specimen she had gone out and possibly slept with in the last few years. Her perfidious sexual adventures were never the least of my concerns and it wasn’t something I would grudge against her. Over the years she had gone from the best of all possible to the worse, from the ultimate six-packs homo-erectus to a lily white college sophomore with an expensive tortoise shell arched over his studious nose, ten years her younger; one of those assortment of men that were every cosmetic manufacturer’s dream come true, men obsessed with looking like Robert Pattinson with spectacles and spent many hours practicing in front a mirror talking like Hugh Grant.

As far as I knew, that college boy was someone she had been recently going out with. And last I heard, the sensitive flame of physical endorsements were well alighted between a marijuana stricken artist who had recently had her first taste of turning thirty, and the pretty twenty-something boy from the blocks of DHA.

Or so it seemed.

In response to my initial inquiry, she merely sobbed, a grim orifice opening as her thin pursed lips parted hesitantly, but nothing audible came of it.

I decided to pursue the matter at hand, civility is a burden that not even that secret villain present in us all can do much against.

“Ammo”. I carefully called out her name.   

I have long been convinced that there is no place on earth with more dumb people per square foot than a college in Karachi. Given my conviction in case, there was no doubt that the impudent boy in question have waved farewell to their private little adventure, leaving my poor Ammo at my disposal, grief stricken and sobbing to her heart’s content.

But I couldn’t have been further from the truth.

“Is it about him?” I asked, more firmly this time, feigning anger, since I realized she could use a bit of shaking up from her morbid trance. “Has he done anything to hurt you?”

After few seconds of struggle against her inexplicable grief, she finally managed to moan out few words. “He …. he ….. I suppose … he has …. has hurt me the worse possible way ….. you can … hu…. hurt someone.”

I asked, knowing it was time to drive the point home. “Is he cheating behind your back? That good for nothing educated mongrel. Just say the word Ammo. Just say the word.” All of a sudden, I felt stronger, and few feet taller than I actually was; a champion of her cause, her lord protector.

In return, she gave me that look, a look that I didn’t like one bit. A look that could kill. Shaken up she sure was, but not to the desired effect I had privately hoped to achieve.

I looked back at her inquiringly; my expressions blank, now wondering where I have gone wrong.

And that’s when she eventually blurted out the truth, and it felt like a hammer against my unsuspecting ears. “He … he is dead, Lev. He is no more”. And broke into wild sobs, unable to continue further.

Stunned, I could barely believe myself. I tried hard not to feel ashamed of my earlier suspicions, and triumphed. As always, a die hard survivor against the most devastating of attacks by the inner conscience, I happily laid the accusing voice within me to silent.  

I hurriedly swapped my role and was by her side for most of the evening to follow, comforting her with my arms around her, and making careful inquiries as to the actually cause of his death once she was able to converse. 

From her fragmented replies I mustered that the unfortunate soul, once left to his own devices in the house with the rest of the family out on the visit, the poor boy couldn’t resist the temptation that comes with all forms of self annihilation. And once the family was back, they found him dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in the kitchen, with his head in the oven, having sealed all the rooms of his apartment with wet towels and cloths.

It was impossible to decipher why he did what he did. Ammo kept asking, more like thinking out loud, to herself, the reasons that drove him to this point. To quote in her own words, he was one of the happiest dudes going around, and wasn’t even on antidepressants or anything, as if that would have justified the choice he made.

That night, in my bed, I found myself thinking. Realizing that death is but a form of distraction and nothing else. A few square box of mud and earth or ashes in the urn of the loved one lost, it’s an abstraction we culminate in our drawing rooms or in our muddled thoughts. Call it a vaccination of sorts that fills may sore gaps in the life of an individual.

And sex does the same. 

I had even wanted to tell her that within few weeks, she would be fine as dandy, that sexual encounters, like all the paintings she did, are finite, but the desire to be creative and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.

But I decided not to. I could wait and let her bathe in the ambush of her vainglory, namely grief, however temporal that was meant to be.

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