by Sera Gamble
(03/08/06)

The clay man is sitting against my front door, which is why I can't get it open. He is crying. I hear his wet, dirty sobs, and a growing wash of mud is sliding under the door towards my feet. I bang on the door. He bangs back, heavy clay thuds that sound sticky.

I made him from the recipe in the old story. On my day off last week, I sat in the bookstore coffeehouse reading books other people had left lying on the floor. In one was The Golem. I went to the art store and I bought two hundred pounds of pottery clay.

Then I'd spread sheets of LA Weekly on the wood floor of my living room and stabbed through the cardboard box of the first package with a pair of scissors. The phone rang.

"What the hell are you doing?" My sister hissed.

"Nothing."

"Liar."

Then I remembered that I had dropped out of school this week and the news would have reached her in New York by now.

"I'm not into it," I said, unwrapping the wax paper from around the first musty block of clay.

"What about...everything? What are you thinking?"

"I have a job. I don't want a degree. Degrees are bullshit."

"You are such a child." She smushed her words around the cigarette I knew she'd jammed into her mouth. I heard the click of her vintage Zippo, then the exasperated jerk of her breathing.

"You know, I told Mom and Dad you quit smoking."

"This is not about quitting smoking. This is about quitting any chance you have of rising above the sad, tired, dwindling middle class. You have no excuse. You should have come here."

Victoria is an assistant professor in the law department at NYU, teaching a course in criminal psychology for lawyers. Victoria: never Vicki.

"Vicki, me no wanna be lawyer."

She hung up on me. I thrust the scissors into the second package, which oozed red wet clay through the gash in the paper.

When I was twelve years old, I decided I would become a witch. Not the Halloween kind, but the real deal, a member of the Wicca religion, making wands of twig and burning sage and worshipping the earth. I wasn't going to kill anything, hex anybody; I was going to be a white witch, and harness the powers of good for such noble tasks as landing a cute boyfriend.

We're Jewish. I suppose I was rebelling against the Bat Mitzvah, the conservative synagogue dresses, the endless reminders that ours was a legacy of persecution, that I would always be a Jew and must embrace this or else all of my ancestors who died horribly would have suffered in vain for me. I had no idea then that Jews were some of the oldest witches.

The Golem is yet another tale of Jewish persecution. The rabbi created a Frankenstein monster man out of clay because his village had endured one too many pogroms. Two things stuck out to me about the story: the fact that this Jewish holy man was basically a witch, and that the bit about creating the Golem read like a recipe.

I own about forty cookbooks. I don't cook much, but when I do the study shows. I can bake a seven layer tiramisu that's not too wet. I know exactly how many seconds to sauté garlic so that the flavor explodes into marinara sauce. But I rarely have anyone to cook for, and I hate cleaning up.

So I was sitting on my living room floor, my bare legs smeared with newsprint, roughly fondling my new two hundred pounds of clay. The phone rang again, my sister calling back. I ignored it for about ten minutes as I rolled an oval thigh of clay.

Finally, I answered the phone. "Fucking WHAT!" I yelled.

"Leslie," my sister began, her voice calm and syrupy, dripping cigarette smoke, "I want to read you this article about our department. Okay? It's written by a former high school dropout who went back to school in his late twenties. He discusses quite passionately how NYU is the best thing that happened to him since methadone."

Because she was going to keep calling me unless I placated her, and because if I took the phone off the hook she was going to actually get on a plane and fly here, and because if I didn't let her in she was going to get my father involved, I let her read me the entire article. It was long.

As she read, I started on the other thigh. I put them together and examined the cleft, contemplating the space where the clay cock would attach. Of course, there was no information about the anatomical correctness of the Golem in the fairy tale.

I wet down a thick cylinder of clay and mold, punctuating my sister's dissertation with periodic mmm hmms in the pauses. I'd mounted the cock on bulging clay testicles before she'd finished. I heard the Zippo snap as she lit a fresh cigarette.

"What do you think?" she asked.

"That really gives me something to think about."

"Don't you dare condescend to me. I'm trying to help you."

I realized for the first time that, at least in her own mind, she was. "I know. You just have to give me some time to...reevaluate my life."

"Did you hook up with some boy? Is that it?"

"No," I told her, smacking the balls into place.

"Are you lying to me? Answer me, Leslie. I know what's-his-name, in Entertainment, didn't work out, we only saw that coming five hundred miles away. So let me just say: you better not be throwing away your future in law for some loser with a big dick."

He takes me a week to finish. I work in the evenings, surrounded by candles and takeout Chinese. First I create the basic form: lying on his back, about six feet tall, broad shoulders, lean frame. Then I begin the real work, adding detail, carving muscles, scratching in curls of hair with my fingernails. For this I steal reference books from the bookstore where I work as associate manager: Gray's Anatomy, Da Vinci's sketches. Renaissance sculpture, which I look at till my eyes burn, trying to copy the face of one of the smooth church angels. By the weekend he looks positively pornographic.

Finally, on Saturday morning, I carve the magic word into his forehead. Emmet. It means Truth. And then I sit and I wait, leaning against his chest.

The first thing I notice is that the clay grows warmer. At first I think I am imagining it, but soon it's unmistakable. Something is happening.

Then vibration: first at the toes and fingers, moving inward. It's working. I don't know why, but I'm not surprised. I sit and watch as the figure begins to flex, to move. Shortly after sunset, he sits up and opens his eyes.

"I'm Leslie," I tell him. "I made you."

I play my own version of He Loves Me He Loves Me Not. It's how I make many of my major decisions: computer solitaire. If I win in under three games, then the answer to my question is yes.

Because I have no idea what to do with the clay man I just created, I settle in for a few rounds of computer solitaire. If I win in under three hands, I have to talk to him.

I lose three times, but as usual feel compelled to keep playing. He finds his feet and tracks mud footprints all over my apartment as he explores, looking out every window, touching everything.

"Keep your hands to yourself," I tell him. "You're making everything dirty."

His head jerks to me, hungry for my voice. He clears his throat, which sounds like wet towels filled with gravel.

"Leslie," he says.

I lose my hand of solitaire, click on "deal again."

He kneels in front of me. Part of me wants to slap him. I'm used to slapping him, in a way, pounding all that clay over the past week to pop the air bubbles. "Leslie," he says again, sounding bewildered, his baritone strangely clear from deep in his clay chest.

"There's guy's clothes in the closet," I tell him, "if you're cold."

He walks in the direction of my bedroom.

Three things you should know: 1. My boyfriend of three years, Tom, got me pregnant. 2. I got an abortion. 3. He didn't take me.

I suppose it is my own fault. After all, I was sleeping with his cousin, Robert the Public Defender; Robert the Public Defender is so passionate about the law I wanted to absorb some of it, and sex seemed the obvious way. Though I'm sure Tom doesn't know about Robert the Public Defender, on some level it serves me right. Besides, I knew better than to tell him I was pregnant on his voicemail. It was too easy for him not to call me back. What message?

All of this was last month, when I was still a student and future lawyer. This is how it happened: We were short three people at the monster chain bookstore, so I actually shelved a few books in the name of teamwork. The Collected Works of Gertrude Stein, hardcover edition, fell from the oversized-book top shelf onto my left foot. The big toenail turned deep, inky blue. The next day the whole thing was so swollen and meaty I had to limp to the phone to call my insurance company to find a doctor in my area.

The doctor prescribed me Keflex, a particularly turbo-charged antibiotic. Which gave me: hives, a stomach ache, diarrhea, and the worst yeast infection of my life. Which brought me to the gynecologist, who offered to throw in a complete pelvic exam since I hadn't had one since my freshman year.

Which is how we discovered that I was two and a half months pregnant. With twins.

Getting an abortion would have felt much more automatic if he hadn't told me it was twins. Something about the two of them floating in there together, holding hands. An old discount store jingle kept popping into my head: two for the price of one, two for the price of one. But anyway, fuck it. I was planning by then to drop out and that's just what they would have needed, a career bookstore-scheduler for a mother, and a distant, ambitious entertainment lawyer for a father. Or his poor, excitable Public Defender cousin.

I call the clay man back into the living room. When I touch him, he embraces me immediately, as if he's been waiting and waiting for me. He begins to quake, unable to gulp enough air into his lungs.

"Relax," I tell him. "Let go of me."

He backs away reluctantly. I see that he is still naked, that the cock I'd worked on for most of Sunday and half of Monday night is erect and pulsing. "You couldn't find the clothes?"

"I didn't want to touch anything. You told me not to." His voice like the growl of a big cat, like a souped-up engine.

"Never mind," I say.

The phone starts ringing again when I kiss him: his mouth a few degrees warmer than mine, not smearing as much as I'd expected. I wonder if he is still forming, if he's solidifying, becoming less like clay and more like flesh. He tastes of freshwater rivers and trapped air and my own fingers. He doesn't touch me until I put his hands on me and move them, starting them on the course I want them to travel. Quick study, he has to unlock his mouth from mine to breathe, his eyes clouded with concentration, dizzy with new knowledge.

I do believe in God now. I think I proved His existence in making this man. I could be wrong. This man touching me could just as easily be proof of something else. But he feels much closer to proof than I ever expected to see, like following a rainbow for a few blocks and finding a little green man with pointy shoes, guarding a pot of gold by the side of the freeway.

He moans.

The phone seems to be ringing louder, if that's possible. I break away from the clay man and answer it. At first all I hear on the other end is crying. "Who is this?" I wait what feels like a reasonable amount of time for the crier to calm down. Then I ask again, less patiently.

"Robert," he chokes out.

"Why are you crying?" Robert the Public Defender: passionate; overwhelmed at the sight of a beggar in front of the grocery store; in bed, the endless giver, apt to wrestle me down rather than remain in the recipient position for more than a moment ("No, this is for you, this is for you."). Robert who begged me to break it off with his cousin so we could marry and be poor, passionate public defenders together. Who cried when I said no way, who told me he could only hope, then, that he would never, ever see me again.

He takes a few deep breaths and then launches into his explanation with the focus of a seasoned lawyer, emotion tightening his voice. "I'm house-sitting over here for Thomas, as you may or may not know. I was perusing his datebook for the return flight information and here under the 15th it says 'Leslie's abortion.' I can only assume that this means you had an abortion on the 15th, Leslie, and I want to know a) if this is true and b) if it is, what possible reason you could have had for not calling me, having every reason to infer that it was our baby you had chosen to abort on the 15th."

He sniffles, waiting for my response. My first impulse is to correct him: babies, not baby. Instead, I say, "I'm kind of busy right now, could you call me back in about an hour?"

"No, I can't call you back in an hour. Did you have an abortion or didn't you? This is something you should be able to answer in one word, busy or not busy."

"Yes," I answer, and hang up. Predictably, he calls right back. I stare at the phone, marveling at how it brings me only unwanted conversation.

"You pick it up," I tell the clay man. He does so without hesitation.

"Hello," he says, then listens for a long moment. "I'm not certain," he says. A moment later he holds the phone out to me. "He'd like to speak to you."

"What?" I demand.

"'I'm not certain'? Who is it that you have over there who, when asked his name, replies 'I'm not certain'? Will you kindly tell me what's going on?"

Poor Robert. Poor, upright, honest Robert, fallen into my life like tripping over chicken wire into a sink hole.

"It doesn't matter whose fucking kid it was."

"How can you say that?" I hear him banging his fist on something. "Should I call Tom? I should call him. We have to have this out. Help me here. I don't understand this."

"If I hang up now are you going to call me back?"

He's silent for a moment. "No," he says finally, his voice hollow.

I remember lying next to him after we fucked, my forehead pressed against his back, trying to absorb some of his energy. Thinking: this is a person who cares about things. Aware that this made his life -- shitty car, moldy office, Top Ramen and all -- simpler and more fulfilling than mine has ever been. Robert the Public Defender was the lucky one.

I met Robert the night Tom bailed him out of jail. Robert had been found in contempt of court that day for throwing his briefcase at a judge in the heat of argument. On the way to the jailhouse Tom described Robert to me as "hopeless. An idealist."

"I wish I was an idealist," I remember saying. "I wanna be hopeless."

"Oh, you are," Tom had said, and we'd laughed, and kissed at the red light. We pulled into the jailhouse parking lot with his hand in my panties, but I already knew that if Robert the Public Defender was even passably attractive, I was going to construct the proper excuse, have him over to my place, fuck him and fuck him till my head filled up with purpose.

The clay man is kneeling before me again, his hands hovering above my thighs, waiting for me to tell him it's okay to touch me. I made a man, and he does exactly as I say. I start to laugh. I laugh until whatever spiked thing is lodged between my lungs snaps open and then I do it; I slap him as hard as I can. I slap him so hard I leave a perfect imprint of my hand across his face. He flinches. I close my fist and hit him. He grunts in pain but doesn't back away. If he had a will, he might, but I made him and he has to sit there and take it. I stand up, letting the phone drop to the floor. Then I kick him.

We go on like that for three days. I take my anger out on him until I've drained it. He follows me around. I eat whatever's in the fridge, sleep in my clothes with his arms around me. Dropping the phone broke it, so no one calls to berate me for my poor choices. I smooth the dents I've made in the clay man's body and kiss them, then let him touch me, study me, figure my body out.

His top layer moves over the structure underneath, pinkened like skin. When I touch him his cheeks grow darker. He doesn't leave fingerprints and smears any more, just a fine clay dust that floats away on its own. When I put my ear to him I hear things: breathing, a heartbeat like a whisper. I didn't mold internal organs, I made him out of solid clay, but I understand that he is changing.

He sits on the toilet watching me in the shower, riveted to the sponge in my hand as it coats my body with soap. He holds a towel open for me. He dries me, and carries me to the bed. He says "Please," and I tell him "Okay," and he parts my legs with his warm brown hands and examines me softly.

My sweat and my spit make us muddy. We come together on the bed like swimming. I'm filled with the smell of earth, the taste of it; I'm coated inside and out. It even fills my ears, till his groans and cries become distant and all I can hear is the pounding.

It isn't until later, when he's sleeping and I notice the teeth marks I've left in his shoulder, that I realize: when I bit him he tasted metal, like blood. The thought that races in is: he's getting away from me. I don't know where this will end, what will happen, what I could be responsible for. In the story the Golem kills people. Even if it doesn't come to that, it's wrong. The fact that it happened, that he came to life and continues to grow more and more alive, proves that it's wrong. I've fucked with something I shouldn't have. I shower the dried clay off, trying to convince myself to do it.

But I don't want to. I want to stay here in my apartment with this man who is devoted and cares what I want and in three days has learned me better than anyone in my life.

Finally, as I slip off to sleep, I decide: tomorrow night. I can do whatever I want to him all day long. But tomorrow night, that's it. Unsure of whether or not I really mean to do it, I slip off to sleep, the clay man's chest against my back.

The clay man is on the other side of the door. He is crying, which reminds me of Robert on the phone three days ago. The mud is creeping towards my feet. I only went to get the mail.

I don't know how he figured it out. Maybe he can read my mind. That would make sense, since he seems to know exactly what I want almost immediately. Maybe it is only that I left him alone.

"Let me in," I tell him, kicking the door. He kicks back.

"I can't let you in," he moans. "I can't let you in, Leslie."

It only took him three days. Now I'm locked out, standing barefoot in the hall in my dirty pajamas. Somehow it feels familiar, it feels typical; it feels inevitable. I kick the door again, cracking a toe -- or not a toe, though it does hurt -- cracking the door. If he weren't sitting against the door, I could get it open. It's a cheap door.

"Leslie," he sobs.

"Shut up," I tell him. The noise stops. "Oh, are you doing what I say now?"

"I can't."

"You have to. You have to."

I suppose I can sit here all night. My apartment is on the far side of the laundry room; no one is going to walk by. I settle into the doorway and begin to sort through my mail.

The door opens a sliver. "If I let you in," he whispers, "You'll kill me."

"How do you know?"

"I read the story."

"Listen," I tell him, as soothingly as I can, "I'm not going to hurt you."

"Why did you make me then?"

Because...because fuck him, nobody ever sat me down and explained, I'm in charge, and I'm not up for the big existential questions, so instead I back quietly away from the door and then rush at it. He's caught off guard, and in the moment that he loses his balance, I get the door open enough to squeeze back in.

He's a mess, his face half-melted by the tears. Though I was furious a moment ago, now I'm surprised to find myself sad for him. His face: it's actually quite beautiful. I did an amazing job, especially considering I'm no sculptor. Making him brought out a perfectionist I didn't know was in me. I realize again that I don't want to kill him. I go to the computer and pull up the solitaire window.

He kneels in front of me, crying silently, awaiting execution. And I do it. I cup his slick face in my hands, then swiftly rub out the first letter of the magic word. The word Truth becomes the word Death. He doesn't collapse, nothing dramatic; he just stops.

The cleanup is going to take days. I can't face it. I can't face anything. Or I won't; same thing. "I miss you," I tell him. Then I gently mold his face out of existence, and pry it off his body. I carry it under my arm to the kitchen where I hunt for trash bags.

"Clay Man" is included in Best American Erotica 2006, edited by Susie Bright. For more amazing and erotic works of fiction, check out this newly-released collection, which features some of the country's best writers, including John Updike, David Sedaris, Carol Queen, Rachel Kramer Bussel, and Gwen Masters.

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