I did what she said. I lay in a tableau. Her pussy got really hot. It ballooned on my cock. Like it was gorging, regorging, coming out of itself. I was going to cum inside with no condom.
Don’t you dare, my mom said.
Go on, Jew-boy, come.
My eyes rolled. Dropped the knife. Ripped panties. Black tape.
God, I backslid. My cum pooled on the floor underneath our four legs. She rolled away from me blind. I watched her slick naked. She crawled on all fours. Her ass started shaking. She wasn’t really moving, just her ass was. A bouncing, blurry, butterflied sponge. She put her fingers inside herself. I saw this weird shining circuit of pinkish white light. Squelching sounds came. She was butterfly-fucking. Gnawing on air, bouncing her ass. I got instantly hard all over again. I looked back and forth between her ass and her pussy. There I was, fire rod, bucking in time. I watched her ass shake till she fucked something out of her. I watched her ass shake till her cunt squirted a spring.
§
In the rotunda, the forces of security were hiding. Professor Sugarman told me that I could not call my thesis The Hoax of Early Holocaust Lit. Fine. This was it. Our final showdown. Sugarman was forty years old, pregnant with twins. She admitted to me that her brain had gone lax. I told her that I would think of a more specific pronouncement.
I came up with The Goat Humper and the Schizophrenic.
‘Your work is important, don’t cheapen it,’ Ariane said.
‘You are joking, surely,’ Sugarman said.
No. The Goat Humper and the Schizophrenic might win a Pulitzer Prize!
In fact, goat humper came straight from this text I read by Sander Gilman about Jewish bestial proclivities – this was back when people told anti-Semitic stories to rouse each other to pogrom, when it was rumoured that Jewish women fucked goats because their weak-dicked men were busy sexmurdering Christians.
I said to both Sugarman and Ariane at different points, ‘Guys, free association is not mind-cheapening!’
Ariane knew I couldn’t make the institution work. She knew I was not a born academic like her. Ariane was writing about the unpublished works of Iris Chang. Everyone wanted Ariane’s stuff. She got every single scholarship she’d ever applied for. Just like Abigail, it occurred to me.
After two straight years under Sugarman and Ariane, what I’d come up with for my thesis was this:
1. Truth is subjective.
2. Sadism is pervasive.
3. Victimhood is not a permanent state.
I shut out weird thoughts of Barbra molesting my mind as I walked through the rotunda for the seven-thousandth time. I got very specific. This was my thesis. She could take it or leave it. I went to Sugarman’s office, banging on her door.
‘After World War II, listen to me,’ I said, ‘the men and the women who had been concentration camp inmates needed to tell the world what had happened to them, right?’
‘Right, right,’ Sugarman absentmindedly said.
‘And sometimes, they embellished, sometimes they spun high-octane yarns. Sometimes they even took shits on the page! I do not want to call this testimony! I want to call this literature. Political literature. Not diversity.
‘Sugarman, listen. This is my A-B-C-D:
The traumatized prevaricate.
To hoax is to live in the state of survival.
Survivors aren’t empty, they’re frenzied.
Language is perverse.’
‘These are not my scheduled office hours,’ Sugarman said.
‘Dr. Sugarman, just hear me out, please! The Hoax of Early Holocaust Lit, also known as The Goat Humper and the Schizophrenic, is based on the most important book of Holocaust fiction, the first-ever book of Holocaust fiction. House of Dolls by Ka-Tzetnik 135633. Sugarman, you asked me what is my thesis really about? It’s about a half-naked, blond, cleavageridden death-camp prostitute! Separated from her mother and brother, Daniela was forced to service German soldiers at Auschwitz. And Harry, the narrator of House of Dolls, details his sister’s victimhood as if he were watching. That’s an important part: as if he were watching.’
Sugarman sighed. She gulped Gatorade, gripped her phone.