Erotomania

They were making love, euphemistically.
“Does it feel…good?” she murmured.
“Is it supposed to?” he asked, so absently as to not cause offense.
“I…suppose so,” she bit into his shoulder uneasily, muffling a cry to spurn him on. Seeing that he remained…disinterested, she faked an orgasm soon after. He could tell she was faking it, but they smiled at each other complacently, perfunctorily, when she rolled onto her side, panting and giggling. She flattered him, overbearingly concerned with the women he claimed he no longer companied with, even though they were only strangers to her.
Once she was gone, he reached into his bed-stand drawer and, sighing, rummaged for a bottle of pills. Side effects: Life.
Vanya rolled over, breathing hoarsely, waiting apprehensively for the medication to dissolve and onset. Her name had been…it had been a placating, halcyon name; Alina, that was it. Alina. He had met her through an ex of his. He was reluctant to sexually mire himself with anyone but she seemed innocuous enough. He wasn’t looking for the company. He wasn’t even looking for the affection. A distraction, maybe, but in truth he had no idea why he bothered with her. It felt like what someone his age would—should indulge in.
Someone had been trying to assassinate him for quite some time now. He wondered what was taking them so long. At first Vanya was wrought with anxiety, and not before long despairing, distraught in his feeble attempts to substantiate his life. He didn’t know the five stages of grief, let alone two, but he knew every dog has its day, just usually after it’s put down. He couldn’t substantiate his life. At twenty-four, there wasn’t much to substantiate. A legacy, perhaps? No. He found plebeian goals, goals in general, absurd. Impermanence eroded such trivialities. Maybe a fancy funeral.
So he began to accept his fate.
For awhile he was abjectly paranoid. He boarded up his windows, bought an assault rifle, left traps at every possible entrance of the house. He lived off of bananas and tap water for two weeks, sleeping upright in the rocking chair beside his bed until he could no longer keep berserk vigilance, despite his inhuman spurts of insomnia. And when no one killed him, he became frustrated. What were they waiting for? Eventually, he encouraged them. He left every door in his house unlocked, his shades drawn. If he was going to be assassinated and he had no say in the matter, then let them hurry up and be done with it.
But as the weeks passed, no one raised in him as much as a suspicion. He grew restless, agoraphobic. He thought about taking his own life in his assassin’s stead. Perhaps they’d forgotten. Perhaps they made a mistake. It was possible, he mused. Not likely, but possible. However, he was more terrified of the thought of their being no one conniving to assassinate him at all. He preferred knowing that he was going to die, and that someone was going to kill him. Had he not known that someone was going to kill him, his fate would be out of his control. The reasons for his death were irrelevant. To survive, he needed to know he was going to die, that there was always going to be someone there to kill him.
He was lying on his stairwell, eyeing a soccer ball down by the landing, nudging against the first step. He had no urge to kick the soccer ball. In fact, he had no idea how he became in possession of this soccer ball. It was as if it had manifested out of thin air. There was nothing unique about the soccer ball, and yet, it fascinated him. It was almost…reassuring, to be next to a soccer ball. His hair was tousled. He hadn’t showered in days. He enjoyed the soccer ball’s company. The necessity of his assassination became subsidiary to his relationship with the inexplicable, novel soccer ball. He was very fond of the soccer ball. Why would someone ever want to revolve a game around a soccer ball?
He began to wonder what designated the ball as a soccer ball. Yes, it looked like a soccer ball, but having similar markings on its exterior did not condemn the ball to be a lowly soccer ball. It could have been a ball with a significance of its own.
“Vanya?” Alina asked, standing beside the soccer ball, interrupting his trance.
“How did you get in?”
“The door was unlocked,” Alina blushed. “I’ve been worried about you.”
“Why?”
“You haven’t called in…a long time. You haven’t called anyone for that matter. No one has seen you, around. And you…certainly do look a mess.”
“I’m waiting for someone to kill me.”
She looked at him quizzically. “Someone…is going to kill you?”
“Yes.”
“But why would anyone ever want to do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Aren’t you going to report it to the police?” She seemed to be pleading with his rationality. She looked up at him with longing, wistful eyes.
“No,” he said finally, shirking his gaze from her. The both of them remained there motionlessly; he had one knee cocked up, his other leg stretched out, one arm hanging over the propped up knee. He knew she was trying to…understand his predicament, but he also knew that would be impossible for her. He was suddenly filled with a grief that caused him to become ashamed of himself.
“How do you know that someone is going to…kill you, Vanya?”
“I just know. And no, there’s nothing I can do about it,” he added sternly. Alina glanced down at the soccer ball, which now seemed neglected and forlorn. She fleetingly felt the…bond that he shared with the soccer ball, but quickly passed it off as a whim of her cloying, vagary imagination. She even felt a tint of jealousy, the way he ogled at that ball, enthralled. It was the way she wished he would look at her.
“Vanya…are you alright?” She asked politely, as to not offend him of the simplicity or redundancy of the question.
“Yes, are you?”
“I…no, no, I am not.”
“I’m sorry,” he remarked, enthralled, insensate. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Don’t worry about such things; someone is going to murder you! Vanya, aren’t you afraid? Something must be done. You simply can’t stow away into your house and wait to die.”
“What would you rather me do, Alina?” He looked at her, but his eyes whorled with absence. He looked at her as if she was a dummy, a doll. His eyes implied that she was astray from her doll-house. He reassumed his enthrallment with the soccer ball.
“Well, you must be…put into protection, at the very least. And this person, whoever they are, must be persecuted, stopped.” At this, Vanya began to laugh. Alina, unable to repress her melancholic blushing, stood at the landing of the stairwell, petrified by his...his doggedness. She continued to blush helplessly, waiting for him to respond, remotely gazing at her pockmarked sneakers. She had bought them that way.
“…Are you the assassin?” He asked curtly, not bothering to look at her.
“Vanya…what a silly question to ask. I could never do such a thing. Besides…I would have done it long ago. Or,” scrambling to rephrase herself, “already.”
In bed he noticed that her breasts were meek, her limbs limp and forlornly pliable. She avoided his eyes. They had become inured to such pleasures. Their expressions were both hazy and distant, their love befogged with nostalgia.
“Why did you stare so intently at that soccer ball,” Alina asked, one arm crossed over her chest. She was preferred not to expose herself unless it was during the act itself. “Earlier.”
“What makes you think it was a soccer ball?”
“Well, what else could it be?” She replied. What did it matter?
“A ball that, perhaps, was disguising itself as a soccer ball.”
“But why would a soccer ball do that?”
“To conceal its ulterior motive or significance.”
“Are you implying that the soccer ball was spying on you?”
“Not at all.” Vanya leaned back, folding his arms behind his head. He stared at the ceiling. He missed the soccer ball’s presence. He thought about suggesting that they return to the stairwell and recline there, so that he could be near it; or, even scampering off to bring to his bedroom.
“Vanya, you worry me,” Alina sighed, shutting her eyes.
“I’m not alright, but you shouldn’t worry.”
“Why aren’t you alright?”
“Well, someone is, after all, going to assassinate me.”
Alina relished the ensuing silence before saying anything. “That’s what worries me.”
“It should; wouldn’t you be worried if you were going to be assassinated?”
“No, not that you are going to be. But that somehow you are under the fanatic impression you know you are going to be.” His back was turned to her; he was on his side.
“What’s so…strange about that?” He chuckled, perplexed.
“How could you possibly know? You can’t foresee into the future, nor rationalize such intuition.”
Vanya, no longer listening to her, his thoughts having trailed off. She continues to stare at his shoulder blades, long after she’s realized he’s not going to answer, even after she’s realized he’s paying no attention to her at all. Sulking, she reaches out her arm as if to touch him, but keeps the tip of her finger between the space of his shoulder blades, writing in the air, now, with her index-finger, refraining from touching him. She knows he’s dreaming and knows better than to disturb a dreamer indulging in his only solace. Is she not a dreamer herself? Weaving in and out of the stories of others, such as those you see on season after season of a television show, so close to the characters that when she’s done watching each season it pains her to realize the characters aren’t real nor know her at all. She knows them! Too well, she sulks. He turns over, trying to relieve the chronic pain in his back temporarily.
Two paramedics burst into the room, both of them pacifyingly obese, immediately stunning Vanya and Alina. They chortle merrily, and Vanya has the impression of two buddies nudging each other in the ribs while observing them. They smile as if nothing’s wrong, and have trouble fitting themselves through the doorway with a stretcher. Without saying anything, they scoop Vanya up and lay him on the stretcher, strapping him down and rolling him out of his house, into an ambulance. Alina follows them wordlessly, stepping into the back of the ambulance and sitting next to Vanya. The paramedics bustle sanguinely about, preparing him fastidiously for the ER.
Vanya glances up at Alina in a beseeching manner; she shakes her head, leaning over to kiss him on the forehead. “Alina, I’m not…dying,” he whispers.
“Vanya…,” she pouts, blushing tumescently.
“You are is dying,” the paramedic in the back of the ambulance with them confirms, smiling deviantly. Vanya stares up at him in horror.
“Of…what?”
The paramedic continues to smile at him. “You are dying.” Alina begins to sob. Vanya sits up in his stretcher and yanks an IV out of his arm.
“What the hell are you talking about? Someone’s supposed to kill me.”
The paramedic’s smile remains eerily unflappable. “You are dying. You must be saved.”
“Yes, but,” Vanya lies back down uneasily, recognizing the man’s intolerance. “I must be dying of something.”
The paramedic reaches beneath the stretcher and readies the paddles of a defibrillator. As he does so, the other paramedic flips on the sirens and begins driving. Vanya gawks up at the paddles, terrified. “You don’t have a choice,” the paramedic winks, avoiding the question. His eyes remain locked with Vanya’s.
“Don’t have a choice…?” Vanya flinches at the paramedic’s clownlike smile.
“No,” the paramedic confirms, wiggling his tongue. His hair is nauseatingly curly and reminiscent of the seventies. He smacks his lips together and begins to howl, similar to that of a cow that’s mistaken itself for a wolf. His partner, who’s driving the car, spanks the steering wheel, laughing gluttonously. Vanya notices that Alina is wincing and jerking violently. He puts his hand on her knee; she recoils as if his mere touch must be quarantined.
“Do you want to be saved?” the paramedic hunched over him asks quizzically, albeit deliberately unconcerned with his answer. Alina begins shrieking. The paramedic’s throat begins to undulate as if in dance, shimmying from side to side like a charmed cobra. He reminds Vanya of a dark jester, the ballooned face of a sadistic Jack-in-the-box. Alina shrieks, and shrieks, and shrieks. Vanya attempts to reach out to her but the paramedic smothers him, grinning wickedly. The paramedic driving the ambulance swerves to the left, nearly careening the ambulance on its side. He laughs rabidly and drives in circles. Vanya tries to shut his eyes but the paramedic hovering over him sticks his thumbs under the crook of Vanya’s eye sockets, pinning his eyelids open.
“Not particularly, seeing how you haven’t specified exactly what substantiates my impending, irrefutable doom.”
The paramedic, apparently feeling privileged to chaperon Vanya to whatever macabre cult or occult treatment he’s been employed to do so, has an incriminating smug and ruddy leer on his face. “Anything regarding your personal embroilment, involvement, or detriments are negligent to the necessity of your treatment.” The paramedic, still grinning and flashing his jaundiced teeth lewdly, suddenly becomes stricken with pensiveness, detaching himself and dissociating from the matter at hand.
“Why?” Vanya asks, beguiling the paramedic with his seductive curiosity and aloof naivety.
“Because you are an exigent hazard to anyone that comes into contact with you.” The paramedic resumes his unhinging pensiveness, no longer piqued by the supposed crisis at hand.
“But how can you…treat me, if there’s nothing wrong with me?”
“I’m afraid I’m not authorized to tell you any more information; my job is on the line as it is.” He pauses, gazing beyond the objectified fixation he’s chosen to hypnotize himself with.
“Is…Alina alright?” The paramedic grins with half of his mouth open; Vanya can infer the artifice bubbling carnally beneath it. His duplicitous reassurance unnerves Vanya.
“Alina will be fine,” he drawls, reluctantly composed. “She’s under…the best of care.” Vanya glances over at her and notices that she’s having a Grand Mal seizure. His eyes, bloodshot, obtrude with impertinence.
“She’s having a seizure for fuck’s sake you deranged sociopath,” Vanya foamed while incoherently rationalizing the situation, his face engorged. “Aren’t you going to do something?”
“She is irrelevant,” the paramedic stretches his back, emphasizing Vanya’s helplessness. He winks at him. “She’ll be fine.” Vanya continues to writhe in his stretcher, attempting to unfasten his restraints. He knows nothing about how to mitigate a seizure but in his furor he feels capable of anything. “She’ll be fine.” The paramedic sticks his blubbery, blackhead ant colony mug against Vanya’s, sweat dripping off the man’s forehead onto Vanya’s lips.
“Home sweet home!” the paramedic driver whoops, speaking akin to a pilot over an intercom preparing his passengers to buckle up before landing. The paramedic hovering over Vanya jabs a syringe into his jugular vein, sedating him within seconds.

Coming to, his vision still too bleary to focus on anything, Vanya can almost make out the shape of a shrimp, which turns out to be the head of a man wearing a gauzy lab-coat. He has a wan complexion and a pair of awry eyeglasses.
“Hello, Vanya,” the man mutters, his eyebrow perking up out of habit. The man’s Adam’s apple reminds Vanya of a talking turkey gizzard. “God, I hate this job.” The man begins to pace back and forth, thinking with his hand in his chin. “It seems you have found yourself in somewhat of a predicament.”
“What is…going on?” Vanya heaves.
“As I’m sure you already know, you must be saved,” the man sighs. “Don’t get me wrong…I’d rather not save you.”
Vanya ogles at him flippantly. “Why is it that I…must be saved?”
The man in the lab-coat chuckles, not bothering to pay any attention to Vanya while mulling over how to respond without answering the question. “It is none of your concern, nor would it make a difference if it was. You must be saved because you are an imposing threat to anyone in your immediate vicinity.” The presumed doctor smirks . “Including me.”
“I am a contagion?” Vanya squints.
“Yes. I’ve put myself at risk merely by consenting to save you. Even though…I didn’t have much of a choice,” the man hunches his shoulders and shakes his head in a manner resenting his subordination.
“But there’s…nothing wrong with me,” Vanya scoffs, rolling his head back impatiently. The doctor glances at him incredulously, then resumes pitying himself, pacing somberly from one end of his mistress’s apartment to the other.
“We’re not at a hospital yet, are we?”
“No. We’re…not.” The supposed doctor drones, scanning over a clipboard and mumbling what he’s reading beneath his breath. Despite that the doctor insists that they’re not in a hospital, the room that Vanya’s in is remarkably uncanny to an intensive care unit. He’s propped up on a sterilized bed that only reinforces the conjecture that he, actually, is in a hospital.
“Then where are we…if you don’t mind me asking,” Vanya asks, repressing a justified outburst.
“I’m afraid I don’t have the authorization to disclose this information to you.” The doctor, if he actually is one, continues to avoid eye-contact with Vanya. The man appears to be shackled by uxorious guilt. Vanya can visualize the ball and chain clanking behind him reproachfully as he paces.
“Well. Do you think you could save me so that…I can return to my perfunctory life?”
“What life? You are to be assassinated on…no date is specified,” the doctor seems surprised, clasping his chin again.
“I have already accepted my fate. I’d just like to…go home, live my final days on my own or maybe with—hey, was a woman, blond hair, Russian, admitted to this…facility?”
“I…believe so? But I would have to double check. I can’t keep checks on everyone you know.” The doctor’s ensuing sigh encompasses an entire lifespan of regret. Vanya almost pities the emotionally disheveled martyr. Without glancing back at Vanya or bidding him goodbye, the doctor shuffles out of the room, his shoulders radiantly hunched. As soon as Vanya is certain that he’s unsupervised—the room, empty, is ripe for pharmaceutical hoarding. He voraciously disembowels the room, scavenging for any prescription bottle or a trace of narcotics, haphazard syringes, etcetera.
Satisfied, he wrestles himself back into the condemning ICU bed. Pulling out a glass jar of morphine he loads a syringe and wraps a latex glove around his lower bicep.

“Vanya? Vanya? Vanya…wake up darling.” Groggily reluctant, blood spatter on his gown from gurgling and regurgitating it; Alina puts her hand on the side of his face, affectionate and diffidently rubicund. The touch of her hand against his face causes him to myoclonic jerk. Her sievelike, porous skin ameliorates him upon touch. He closed his eyes, trying to doze off. She lies down next to him, slinging her arm around his chest.
Vanya clamps his eyes shut, drearily winnowing the ambulance ride, the crustacean doctor, and everything he can recollect up to now. He places his hand over Alina’s, disappointed in her but grateful for her company nonetheless.
“Where are we?” he asks, ensconcing her hand in his.
“I…don’t know. It appears to be some kind of hospital but it’s deserted as far as I can tell. That man…the one in the lab-coat—I haven’t seen him since his initial visit with you.”
Vanya sits up, slightly nauseous and suffering respiratory depression. Alina crawls tentatively into the hospital bed, curling up against Vanya wistfully. She leaves her lips slightly open and rests them on his clavicle. He always had an affinity to being tactfully stimulated by the knobs of his shoulders: the socket in which one dislocates. It was an erogenous zone for him. Alina has no intention of arousing Vanya; she kisses and mouths his shoulder as a means to relieve him of his tumescence. He immediately swats her face away from his shoulder, rolling over onto his side and exposing his ebulliently muscular back.
Dejected by his response, she curls up into a fetal position, pleading with his back, her head tucked between the daggerish shadow between her meager breasts. He rolls onto his back, then onto his side, facing her. She’s shivering; he pulls the blanket up but knows that he’ll start sweating like a man feeling privileged to sleep with a woman he doesn’t deserve. She nestles against him solicitously, tears of rue sidling down her milky, sullen cheeks.
“Were you…” meekly, she trails off her sentence, mustering up the courage to finish it. “Were you…trying to kill yourself?”
He scrutinizes her absently for a moment, then smirks in a consoling manner that causes her to rush towards him and throw her arms around his neck. “I thought you were dead.” He kisses the tears that swell up in her eyes; they don’t make it as far as her nose. He has doubts as to whether she actually finds his licking of her tears cloying, but it’s an impulsion he’s resorted to when jeopardized by bawling women.
Musing for a moment, his bloodshot, suspicious eyes transfixed on a quotidian blemish on the wall adjacent to him.
“Vanya…we should flee. There’s no one here and—”
“That’s what they expect us to do,” Vanya broods, rendered impotent by his hemorrhaging vortex of thoughts. We must be saved…Vanya ruminates this phrase and its phraseology raptly, withdrawing from Alina despite her insistent fastidious endearment. “We should first find something to arm ourselves with, then survey the area,” Vanya says, propping a chair against the door and beneath the doorknob.
“How are we going to get out?” Alina raises an eyebrow, crossing her arms incredulously. Vanya glances at her like a slasher movie without character development. He reaches into his pocket and wonders if this is a premeditated gambit, a machination of some sort connived by the three medicinal imposters. “If we lock ourselves in then—”
Vanya cocks his head towards the direction of the window. “We must be on the first floor or ground level.” Alina nods, breathing deeply and readying herself for Vanya’s hands to fasten around her waist—not to elicit any tension—and bolster her up out of the window Vanya’s already busy cracking open. He manages to by scavenging through the drawers in the room for a tool that’s ghastly in its similarity to a torture device. Alina observes Vanya shatter the window and smiles at his inept determination. She moseys over to the drawer Vanya had been rummaging through only to find bloodied medicinal instruments.
“Vanya…” Alina bites her lip, preparing to reveal something she deems critical, “there’s something I need to tell you.”
“Not now; we need to shatter this window before we’re apprehended.”
“Vanya, I have trust issues.”
“Find a coat hanger. Now c’mon, help me bash this window open.” Alina starts naming the children she’s not pregnant with. Vanya wails at the window frantically but only manages to splinter a crack. He slumps his shoulders and figures it best to keep the tool at hand in case the doleful doctor returns. Alina is perched on the cot, checking her vitals. The sterility of the hospital’s atmosphere only accentuates its nauseating bleakness. Linoleum flooring is enough to make anyone queasy.
“Someone out there must be trying to save us,” Alina sulks, hypnotically saturnine. Vanya rummages through the drawers in the room again and ferrets a syringe and a jar of morphine, repressing his fortuity.
“Why would they leave syringes and narcotics lying around? That’s prohibited by medical sanction.”
“Perhaps so we can put ourselves out of our misery if it comes to that. At least they endorse euthanasia.” Vanya rolls his eyes, scrutinizing the room for anything pertinent. Alina has snuggled herself onto the cot, her legs jutting out in a position of hopeless giddiness. She suggestively admires Vanya’s rakish, neurotic body; his tendrilous knotted back, his prominent lionhearted chest, his restless, turbulently rigid demeanor; he lives in his impenetrable head. Impassioned by her despair and panic induced loss of inhibition, she cattily gets up out of the bed, wearing imaginary high heels and poses voluptuously akimbo to Vanya’s lithe, sculpted back. She approaches him as if drunkenly strutting down a runway aisle, placing her tiny double-jointed hands provocatively on his sleek shoulder blades.
Vanya springs back, cuffing her wrists. She smiles at him lewdly, raising her chin and exhibiting her neck. “Alina…?” He looks at her concernedly, at least, as concerned about someone as he can be. She advances towards him, pressing her pitiful breasts against him and throwing her arms around his neck. “This isn’t the time to fool around. We’ve got to find a way out of here.”
“Oh, c’mon…” she finagles her hands down and begins unbuckling is belt. “It’s not like we don’t have fifteen minutes to kill.” Vanya shirks away from her, repulsed by the sight of her gauche attempt at prepossessment.
“The only reason couples get married is to commit adultery,” Vanya sneers. He considers drugging Alina for the time being. “Stop pouting, would you?” He glances at her dangling her feet off the cot having sit back down it. Her dejection angers him, and it riles him even more that he can’t reason why.
“I wasn’t proposing to you, Vanya,” Alina mumbles lachrymosely. He turns away from her brashly, clenching his fists. Once he raises his head from testily shoegazing, he comes face to face with the Devil. Uncertain to how he knows that the demon smirking deviantly before him is the Devil, he stands palsied by consternation. The Devil looks like a bubble-gum pink genie; a tiny, malicious rogue. His arms are crossed regally.
“I give up,” he sighs; his voice is spidery and alien. His tongue is turquoise.
“You’re a…teenager?” Vanya ogles at him skeptically.
“No, fool, I have Down’s syndrome.” The Devil laughs heartily. “Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the most fucked up of them all?” He hops into the air and a cloud apparatus beneath him; he sits on it cross-legged. “Hey chief, mind if I bum some of that morphine?” The Devil’s eyes are black with crimson irises, sinisterly playful. Alina tremulously gets up and hands the Devil the jar of morphine and the syringe.
“Thank you,” the Devil bows his head. He momentarily chews on his thoughts then swoops next to Vanya on his tufted cloud, grinning like a pyromaniac. “I’m here to offer you a deal that’s auspicious to the both of us. You see, I know there are a group of hired philanthropists ordered to save you against your own will.” The Devil pauses, stabbing the syringe into his jugular vein. “I’m impartial to this whole imbroglio. I don’t even know why anyone would feel the inclination to save you. From the looks of it, there’s nothing wrong with you. Unfortunately, it’s been ordained that saving you is imperative and irrefutable.” The Devil cracks his neck from side to side, then his knuckles one by one. “So here’s my proposal. I’ll provide you with fortification and sanctuary against anyone with the intent to save you. All I ask for in return is…”
“My soul?” Vanya scoffs.
The Devil squints mischievously, crossing his arms again. “No. I want you to love someone you don’t love.”
Vanya peers at the Devil incredulously, gloomily assimilating that this is a serious request.”But that’s…impossible.” Vanya glances at Alina incriminatingly. The Devil shrugs and waves goodbye casually, swirling off on his throned cloud. “Wait!”
“Mmm?”
“But what about the person who is going to kill me?”
The Devil smiles amicably. “Dear, the only one out to kill you is yourself.”