Bluebeard Update

A year into his second novel, John Hanson developed the habit of staying awake at night while his girlfriend Luna slept and drawing pornographic comics of the two of them having sex. She found them one day in his desk drawer. They were were not just midly perverse. John gave himself multiple phalluses, and often depicted Luna dead after the sex act, her brains blown out by the fire-hose pressure of his semen, or drew grotesque “internal” diagrams of her colon and vaginal canal during penetration. Luna knew that John often had a reason for what he did. John was strange, but it was partly a persona, and his first novel along with his persona had been reviewed well. She decided to just ask him about the drawings. “That’s an exercise in alterative lives,” he told her. “I’m living the life of someone very similar to me, someone who indulges in every one of his perverse desires. It’s for my character.” Luna hadn’t heard of John’s new character, since he rarely talked about his work with her. But this time he was inspired to share with her. He took her into a secret basement room to their house, a room she never knew existed. It was a second smaller room connected to the basement storeroom. Behind a wall of boxes and a stack of card tables was a small wooden door. Inside the cold little room were two naked light bulbs and a stained pullout couch. There were racks of drawings, most of them pornographic, as well as hundreds of swastikas and recreations of Nazi propaganda posters, each laboriously inked and colored in with pencil crayon. On a shelf was a row of large jars containing neighborhood cats and dogs soaking in preservation fluid that had gone missing in the neighborhood over the last year. There was a mini-Fridge filled with Amsterdam maximum alcohol beer, Red Bull, and Russian Standard vodka. (And yet, a year earlier, John’s friends staged an intervention for him and John broke down, vowing he would never drink again.) Nailed to the wall were women’s panties and thongs, as well as Polariod photos of humiliated prostitutes and underage street girls with come on their faces, or rolled up hundred dollar bills inserted in their rectums. Finally, squashed in the corner of the room was an old school desk with an IBM typewriter and a stack of file folders. – Meet John Hanson 2, he told Luna. – Oh, fuck, John, she said, unable to contain her disgust. – You mean to say you’ve been coming in here for the last year every day while I'm at work and writing your new novel on that shitty old typewriter? No wonder it’s taking you so long.