There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.
THE DREAM OF LIFE was ending, and he was returning to the unformed state where consciousness could not follow. Having accepted the inevitability of this moment many years earlier, having made it a daily meditation, he was now without apprehension. If anything, he experienced a mild curiosity, faintly eager to experience the phenomenon of death.
For several hours he had lain in what appeared to be, to those gathered around his bed, a deep coma. But he was in fact fully awake. Having spent his entire career in the service of others, he gave himself permission to take these last few moments for himself, sinking lazily into his thoughts, savoring the voluptuous cadence of his breath, wandering down the corridors of memory to gaze upon the thing he had been, the infant, the boy, the man, and finally, the unencumbered organism coming to its predestined conclusion.
In the room sat his wife, his four children, his oldest friend. His favorite cactus plants had been moved in from his office so he might have the solace of their presence, reminiscent of the silences of the desert, the same silence he now prepared to enter. The six people waited, not speaking, wrapped in the wide calm that emanated from the man in front of them.
He felt no pain. The garment of flesh that had served him faithfully for so long had worn out and was ready to be discarded, to go back into the earth.
“I wonder what happens to the I in me,” he said to himself, “to the intelligence that is even now asking the question. Is there any chance it might continue after the body ceases to function?”
As though in response, some strange sensation seized him, held him for an instant, and then disappeared.
“I’ll know soon,” he thought. “Or perhaps I won’t know anything at all.”
The situation amused him, and he smiled. The sudden appearance of the seemingly incongruous expression startled the others, who were watching him closely, half ashamed of their subliminal desire to have the whole thing over with. His eldest daughter leaned over and whispered in her mother’s ear, “He must be a saint, to be able to smile on his deathbed.”
“Wouldn’t it be peculiar to die and find myself face to face with old Jehovah,” the man thought. “Imagine all that nonsense turning out to be literally true. It’s a mysterious universe, and anything is possible.”
He chuckled, causing the hair on the necks of the people around him to rise.
The breath caught in his throat and his frame shuddered. There was no specific point at which he could grasp the unfamiliar process of passing away, but he knew that the moment of departure was very near.
“This is really very odd,” he mused, “I can feel it happening, but it seems so distant, as though it had nothing to do with me at all. I don’t feel like I am dying. There is just death going on, and I am one of the people observing it. The only difference between me and the others is that when it happens, they will stand up and walk out and I will be left lying here.”
Then abruptly, as though he had fallen from a great height, he felt everything drop away from him. Time underwent a cataclysmic change, and he was swept by a sensation of rocketing through space at an exponentially increasing speed, until he was going faster than light itself. And yet, the faster he moved, the more still everything became. Opposites lost their identity.
One by one, his faculties shut down. Hearing, touch, taste, smell, all disappeared. His thoughts blew off his mind like shingles from a roof in a high wind. He opened his eyes for the last time.
“Sam,” his wife said.
“Goodbye Constance,” he croaked and saw nothing more.
Relinquishing everything he had ever imagined he might lay claim to in the universe, he bade farewell to himself. In a microsecond of utter clarity, he saw what an ironic play life was, what a strange dance of fantastic reality. Beyond all ability to apprehend his experience, he gave himself up to death.
But it was not yet time.
He lost awareness of the external world, and his breathing stopped, but the vital force which had animated the inert elements of his body and sustained the cohesion called existence had not yet dispersed. A doctor would have pronounced him dead, for his heart had stopped beating. But beneath the measurable manifestations, in the core of his being, the finest thread of electricity still hummed. All that he had been was now reduced to that single throb of energy.
Subjectively, it was like falling asleep, and into a dream. First, a total loss of self-consciousness, then a sentient blackness, and finally a slow discernment of form. A blank screen lit up, and on it appeared the thin line of a far distant horizon, such as the edge of ocean seen from shore. It separated sea from sky, both the same shade of deep cobalt blue.
For an eternity, nothing moved. And then, faintly, a dot emerged from ground into figure, balanced delicately on the line. Subtly, slowly, it grew larger, obviously coming closer to the shore where the man stood. Without any landmarks, there was no way to estimate its size. As the relatives and friend began to look at one another, attempting to decide who should approach the body to find out whether the end had come, the man began to hear the first low ripple of trumpets which seemed to accompany the object.
Now, measuring the thing against his own height, he was able to assess its scale. As the music swelled, a jagged burst of golden light shattered the scene, and he gazed up at what thunderously swept toward him, a thing a thousand feet high and perhaps a third as wide, taking up his entire field of vision. It flew forward with majestic ease until it stopped suddenly, a few feet in front of him, and his knees buckled when he realized what it was.
He looked up into the face of a giant, encompassing, and perfectly formed cunt, quivering in purple radiance, a great mandala enveloping him in its aura. He gazed upon it reverently. In smell, in texture, in pulsating vividness, it was the quintessence of cunt, ideal in its every fold, its every hue.
“My Lady,” he whispered, and fell prostrate before it.
In the mind of the man within his mind, kneeling before his object of worship, he was twenty-five again, in his last year of medical school, wondering whether he should become a specialist or go into general practice. He was talking it over with a friend, when the young man told him, “Why don’t you become a gynecologist. You’re always complaining about how horny you are. If you become a cunt specialist, you won’t have any trouble at all getting laid. Just think of all those women coming in and spreading their legs for you. And paying for it to boot!”
As the entire course of a great river can be traced to a tiny bend at its source, so his career was shaped by the offhanded bit of half-meant advice. He shaped his studies in that direction, giving his parents rationalizations which involved the greater profitability of that particular line of medicine, and within two years, he began practice.
His first patient had found him almost unbearably nervous. The woman was infected with some baroque venereal strain, and when she split herself apart on his table, the smell which seeped from the tainted organ caused him to retch. He was fortunate that she was a prostitute with no false modesty, and so was saved from embarrassment by her remarking, “Yeah, that’s the way my clients feel. Can you fix it up, doc?”
He performed a series of tests, sent smears to the laboratory, and finally doused her with antibiotics, vaginal jellies, and suggestions for douching. A week later he saw her again and her cunt was as good as new. When he examined her the second time and pronounced her well on the way to cure, the gratitude in her eyes was as much payment as the money she gave him.
How many cunts had there been after that? Middle-aged housewives with bored cunts, young girls with puppydog cunts, whores with leathery cunts, nuns with pimply cunts, secretaries with pornographic cunts, witches with velveteen cunts, grandmothers with withered cunts, children with unarticulated cunts, passionate women with engulfing cunts. Cunts of a thousand eyes, cunts of a million moods. Smiling, pouting, shouting, brooding, yearning, burning, angry, gay, hungry, sad. Again and again the same single action – the legs swinging wide at his request, like the gates opening to the thief upon saying the magic words, “Open Sesame.” He would first see the hair, sometimes sparse, sometimes thick, or coarse, or fine, or black, or golden, or red, or curled, or straight. And then the thing itself.
Where few men looked and few men touched, he prodded and pulled and stroked. He dove in with instruments, he slithered in with fingers. Sometimes he found disease, often he found nothing more than the desire to be entered. And when his hand came out it was not infrequently covered with secretions that were something other than the lubricating cream he had used to ease his penetration.
At the beginning he had kept what they had taught him in school was the proper professional distance. All the doctors had been trained to treat the cunt as something septic, something to be approached only with gloves on, with formal face and averted glance. Something to be pried apart with metal shoe horns. But he could not maintain that artificial pose for long. He loved cunts. That was the reason he had become a gynecologist: to see cunts, to touch cunts, to smell cunts, to heal cunts.
It was in the third month of practice that his first thrilling contact took place. The patient was the wife of a prominent psychoanalyst, in her early thirties. She came for a general checkup, saying she did it once a year and that his name had been recommended by a friend. She wore a tight sheath dress, outlining her ample buttocks, showing her bulging thighs, accenting her full breasts. She was a beautiful and sultry woman, and the doctor felt his cock stir at the thought that he would soon have her lying on her back, her legs hoisted over stirrups, and with what he knew would be a luscious cunt lying agape, waiting for him to minister to it. His lips trembled slightly as he spoke, so calmly, in such a sophisticated manner, saying all the lines proper to the doctor-patient scenario.
“It’s amazing what you can get away with,” he thought, “once you put it in a socially acceptable context.”
In the examination room it went as he expected, except that when it came time for him to slip on his plastic gloves, he boldly discarded the gesture. When he touched the fragile edges of her pink cunt, it was with his bare fingers. He seemed to enter some sort of trance, his ratiocinative faculties mesmerized. He entered a world of brute sensation, and without his understanding the process as such, his hands began a complex communication with her cunt. He found he was talking to her as he moved inside her, in a way that augmented the medical patter, the stock phrases . . . “does that hurt? is it sore there? this seems fine.” When he stroked her cervix, it was not sex, and yet it was not not-sex. It was like the perfect edge of good massage, in which the mode is tactile ambiguity, where meaning and message continually inter-penetrate.
A sigh escaped her lips. “She’s enjoying this as much as I am,” he thought, “and for the same reasons.” Her cunt was already wet and the aroma it gave off was unmistakably erotic. His eyes moved from her cunt up past her belly between her breasts and into hers. She was watching him.
“Yes,” she said.
He took off his clothes and fucked her as she lay. He came standing up.
From then on he fucked on the average of two women a day. Once he had broken through the convention of professional coldness, he was able to see with mounting acuity that at least half the women who came to him came simply to be caressed.
“Where are the men?” he said to himself over and over again. “Why isn’t anyone loving these poor women?”
At first he made some mistakes, occasionally pushing for a sexual encounter when one hadn’t spontaneously arisen, and he succeeded only in frightening the women involved. He often had doubts as to what sort of danger he might be in; might not a complaint end his career, or even land him in jail? Finally, he made peace with the fact that if he paid attention to business first, the business being the diagnosis and cure of disease, then whatever plums fell his way were his right to eat, and no bad fortune would be attached to that.
The woman he married was frigid. He chose her precisely because she was frigid. Examining her one afternoon, he saw that she had absolutely no sensation in her vagina. Her pelvis was locked in a chronic muscular spasm and her entire attitude was one of distaste for anything carnal.
“She’s perfect,” he thought, “she’ll never bother me with excessive demands.”
He courted her and married her and within a week after the ceremony she was overjoyed when he suggested separate bedrooms. He only fucked her about a hundred times in over thirty-five years, in groups of about twenty-five each, to conceive children. She settled into the role of mother and housewife, and purred in constant contentment that her husband allowed her to remain chaste.
Meanwhile, back at the office, he fucked himself silly.
By the time he was sixty, he had fucked more than fifteen thousand different women and had had his hands in the cunts of at least five times that many. “This is the best job a man could ever have,” he told himself often, as his door opened, and his nurse ushered in yet another woman, and he would look at her the way a man looks at a woman’s body in the street, calculating its curves, imagining its charms. But with a crucial difference.
“In a few minutes,” he would think, “you’re going to spread your legs for me, and offer me your cunt. And it will all seem very proper until I touch you a certain way, and you will realize that, all social rationalizations aside, you are opening your cunt to the eyes and fingers of a total stranger, a man you have never seen before, and one who, you will comprehend with a delicious shudder, wants to fuck you. And will we fuck? Or will I eat you out? Or will you suck my cock? Or will I have you get on your hands and knees so I can ‘examine’ you from behind?”
As the darkness of his death deepened, the memories faded, and the immense cunt before his mind’s eye began to tremble, and open. From its roseate serrated center another cunt emerged, and another from the center of that. Cunt after cunt opened from the cunt preceding it. It was an infinite progression, never fully reaching him, continually spilling forth. He strained forward, to be taken into the heart of the budding cunt machine. It was the baby attempting to return, it was the man diving into the mystery, it was both and all.
And as he reached up in revery, the body on the bed bent at the middle and sat bolt upright. The people in the room were shocked at what they thought was a corpse perform such a sharp strenuous act. His lids flew up, but he saw nothing. His lips moved. A single word leapt from his throat.
“Cunt,” he said.
And from the depths of his desire, the face of death spun forward at lightning speed to snatch him in its jaws. What it looked like, no one will ever know, for death comes differently to each human being.
The gynecologist fell back on the bed. This time he was really dead. Those who heard his final word claimed that he had said nothing when people asked if he had said anything before he died. They did not understand what he meant, and ascribed it to delirium. It was given out to all his friends that he had died happy. As indeed he had.
In one of his notebooks there was found the notation, “There are too few doctors who remember the original reason for playing doctor.”
HE MAY HAVE seen her hundreds of times before he noticed her. Every weekday morning for over four years he had reached the Christopher Street station at a little after eight o’clock and stood with scores of others waiting for the train to take him to the world uptown where he spent half his waking hours, sitting in a cubicle, performing obscure and largely meaningless rituals with thousands of sheets of paper. Like the millions who descended daily into the tunnels to be shunted back and forth like cattle, he was usually in a foul mood. But the woman changed all that.
She had just lost a dime in a gum machine, and was standing in front of it, fuming and banging at the coin slot, when he passed by. Something about the quality of her energy at that point arrested him and he stopped to look at her. He drank in her features with a single visual gulp. But the subway car came thundering in and braked to a halt with a sickening screech of metal against metal, and he was jostled out of his stance. He did not think about her further that day.
The next morning, he saw her again, and once more swallowed her whole with his eyes. He stopped, taking a more detailed look at her, scanning her jet black hair, worn in a pony tail, her thin nose with flaring nostrils. Her body was wrapped in a thick winter coat, protection against the February cold. To his surprise, she glanced at him, her eyes oddly troubling, and then looked away.
During the next few weeks, although he made no special effort, he ran into her almost every morning. She was beginning to take on the air of an acquaintance. Once he started to greet her before he checked himself, remembering the strict New York etiquette which absolutely forbids talking to, smiling at, or in an way being friendly to other people on the street. It took him a while to realize that he was coming to relish seeing her, that it added a spark of interest to an otherwise dull and tedious beginning to his days.
By the end of March, he knew a good deal about her. The range of her wardrobe, the texture of her moods, the rhythm of her walk, had all been openly accessible to his study. It was amusing to speculate. Judging from the quality of her clothing, she probably made no more than a hundred and fifty dollars a week. She was probably a secretary. She wore no rings of any kind, and almost certainly lived alone. She used a minimum of makeup, a faint flush of lipstick and light eyeshadow. Her reading taste was random, as she might carry St Augustine’s Confessions one day and a popular book on astrology the next.
It wasn’t until the first week in April that he felt a desire to get closer. The first day on which it was warm enough to do without a coat, she appeared in a tight skirt which outlined a full high ass and rounded thighs, and in a jacket which, when unbuttoned, showed breasts that were just large enough to fit into each of his cupped hands. The thinness of her mouth, at first glance giving her a prim look, now contrasted with the electric sensuality of her body. It occurred to him that it might be possible to fuck her.
That galvanized him into action.
From the status of a charming novelty to add a touch of mystery to his mornings, she became a goal, a prize for him to win. He began to get up earlier each day, in order to shower, to choose his clothes with care, and prepare his mood. He went through the mating ritual which is common to birds and fish and beasts that share the same biosexual heritage as humans. He thrilled to his own sense of purpose, and attempted to calculate whether she might find him attractive. Without describing it as such, he began to court her.
Hers was the stop before his. As the weather grew warmer and her clothing grew lighter, he arranged it so he stood closer to her in the tightly packed car. He was finally able to smell her perfume, mingled with the crisp aroma of her firm flesh. He was able to perceive the delicate whorls of her ears, the slight tensions in her throat as she swallowed. He wondered what her name was. He even became aware of her imperfections, and could judge from her complexion on which days she had her period. He also thought he could detect, from a general looseness and jauntiness in her manner, when she had fucked the night before. One Wednesday, he actually touched her, feeling the rough tweed of her skirt against the tops of his knuckles. His knees sagged and he had to grab the hanging support strap to keep from falling to one side.
That evening he pondered talking to her. It maddened him that, while on one level he knew her intimately, in terms of social intercourse they were total strangers. He had watched her walk across the platform and knew the way her buttocks jiggled as she moved, and yet he had not yet heard her voice. He considered that were he to speak to her, he might find her terribly ignorant. Too often in the past he had desired a woman’s body and had his lust shrivel upon coming in contact with her mind.
“What if she is shallow?” he said to himself. And in the end decided not to make any overture just yet.
Wondering whether it was cowardice or wisdom that chose his course of inaction, he worked toward more physical contact without any formal introduction or exchange. The following morning he moved with the force and agility of a star halfback in arranging it so that he stood behind her without having drawn undue attention to himself. Sliding and jostling with consummate skill and experience, he followed her through the densely packed crowd until she stopped at one of the vertical support bars in the center of the car. He eased in close.
It had been subwaymanship of the first water, and no knight jousting for a lady’s favor could have performed better. As the train pulled away from the station with its customary lurch and everyone in the car swayed with it, he looked down the length of his body. Her buttocks were less than an inch away from his cock.
“So near and yet so far,” he thought. He dared not move.
The train gathered speed as it clanged toward Fourteenth Street. It hit a curve and once again the mass of humanity within its iron confines, like fluid in a container, rolled to one side. Unbelievably, and to his stinging joy, the twin mounds of her ass cheeks swung pendulously back and nestled for a brief tingling second in the hollow of his crotch. Fire alarm bells went off in his groin, and he was almost instantaneously erect, the bulging cock straining the fabric of his pants.
She did not touch him for the rest of the ride, and when he got to his office he went directly to the john where he sat, massaging his cock with quiet frenzy until the autonomous ejaculation relieved him of the almost unbearable pressure. The fleeting contact was enough to serve as fuel for the most outrageous fantasies. He imagined that her cunt was endowed with a special heat-generating faculty, that merely to be near it would be enough to trigger orgasm in an army of men. He went through the rest of his day in a stupor, relegating the tasks to be done to his instinctive center, and saving his intellectual ability to enrich the pictures in his mind.
The next day was a Saturday and he was too overwrought to spend the weekend alone. He knew he was at the edge of some mammoth foolishness, but he could not help himself. “I only rubbed against a woman on the subway,” he repeated to himself. “I mustn’t let it get blown all out of proportion.” But the woman had been transmogrified into an idee fixe, and he was succumbing to its magnetic power. To ease his tension, he called an old girl friend and fucked her five times in the sixty hours he had to wait before he would see the lady of the subways again.
And when he did, he knew he was lost. She wore a skirt so tight, with material so thin, that both the outline and color of her panties could be seen. Her blouse was diaphanous, and he could make out the pale gold of her skin beneath it on both sides of the brassiere which cupped her breasts in its white plastic grip. Despite the debauch of the weekend, desire boiled in his blood.
The train moved smoothly, and he cursed the efficiency of the engineer. But just before Thirty-third Street, it stopped altogether, and the lights dimmed. There was a two-minute wait before the conductor’s voice rasped over the loudspeaker, “There’s a train stuck ahead of us, and we’ll have a short delay.” It was a crashing stroke of good luck.
His strategy was to try the mano morte, the deadhand technique used by the Italians. The fingers are allowed to rest against the body of the target woman in such a way that there is no suggestion of attack. If she seems not to notice, the pressure can be gradually increased. If she fidgets, he can take refuge in the fact of the extreme crowding to silently plead innocence of wanting to have touched the delicious skin in front of him.
The middle knuckle of his middle finger came to rest exactly in the center between her buttocks, where the skirt pulled tautly over the valley. For a number of seconds he dared not even allow himself to feel the sensation, so delicate was his approach. Then, she shifted her weight, going from one leg to the other, and her cheeks moved, suddenly, grandly, sweeping across the width of his hand. A burbling moan of pleasure chugged to his lips, but he suppressed it sharply. He waited a short while, and then put his hand against her once more. Again she shifted, and again the treasured ass slid beneath his touch.
Now he was in a quandary. Was she unconscious of what was happening and moving randomly, or aware of his touch and showing her annoyance, or aware of his touch and cooperating in the encounter? It seemed as though his entire manhood was on the line. He had waited a very long time, and now was the moment to test their relationship. Boldly, he pulled back his hand and with a sense of historical finality, shuffled forward two tiny inches, just enough to ease the front of his body against her back.
Sheet lightning played over his sensorium. He was as alert and balanced as a man on a tightrope. She might whirl around and say something ugly, something terribly ugly, and inflict a wound on him that would take a long time to heal. Or she might respond to his overture. He waited, tortured by the suspense.
And upon that, quite easily, simply, and gently, she relaxed into her heels, throwing her weight back, and let her body rest with utter passivity against his. She had accepted the touch.
The train leapt forward just as his erection began to poke into the space between her legs. They rode that way until reaching her stop, his cock sizzling with the secret contact in the packed subway car, while his face remained calm, his eyes darting about to see if anyone saw, and finding nothing but the stunned gazes of the city’s wage slaves being transported to another day of empty drudgery. When they came to her station she stepped away from him quite deliberately and before getting off looked once over her shoulder and into his eyes. He could not tell what her expression meant.
It escalated rapidly after that. He was soon pressing into her very tightly, pushing his pelvis with tiny surreptitious strokes as she squeezed her buttocks and released them. On some days she wore no panties and he gave up his boxer shorts altogether. He almost screamed the day she reached behind her and caressed his cock with her hand.
They took to meeting at the back of the subway car so she could lean into the corner while he covered her. If he kept his raincoat on he could slip his cock out of his fly with no one seeing. One morning she wore slacks and he put his erection between her legs, coming in her woolly crotch as the train slugged its way uptown. They suffered a near fatal accident one morning when a young schoolboy, recklessly making his way from car to car, opened the connecting door and they almost pitched forward into the narrow platform. He had a wild impression of gleaming tracks before he recovered his balance and pulled himself back in, grabbing her waist to keep her from falling. The boy caught a glimpse of his cock and blinked in disbelief before a slow smile spread over his face and he whispered, “Sorry to crash in on your party, mister.”
Still, he was loath to speak to her. “What can I possibly say at this point?” he thought. “We’ve already progressed beyond conversation.” And then, “Why spoil a good thing? If we start dating, instead of being the most extraordinary experience of my life, she’ll show up as just another woman.”
He was amazed that the affair had progressed from discovery to infatuation to consummation to cynicism so effortlessly, and all within the parameters of an eight-minute subway ride.
Yet, what could be accomplished in the crowded car was painfully limited, and he was bursting for a more total encounter. Then one morning, as he waited for the train, he saw her standing next to the women’s toilet. She nodded, and he edged toward her. She backed up, put a nickel in the slot, and opened the door, beckoning him to follow. Like one in a trance he moved past her into the tile room. She slammed the door behind them and jammed the lock with a piece of metal.
They were alone in the white gleaming cubicle.
“This is insane,” he hissed, the first words he had ever spoken to her.
By way of reply she peeled off her clothes. He watched mesmerized as the long-desired body appeared before him. When she was naked she abruptly threw herself at his feet, begging him to fuck her. She tugged at his pants and licked his shoes, rolling across the filthy floor. The woman of his dreams lay before him, a panting slut, fingering herself shamelessly.
Propelled from the mundane to the baroque with such rapidity that the pulse in his temples began pounding painfully, he tried to put the event in some context. But it was all exploding too quickly, too forcefully. The girl groaned with desperate want and he could do nothing but succumb to the moment.
The many months of slow building broke in the instant, and for the following five minutes they did practically everything possible for a man and a woman to do together, playing out Krafft-Ebing and the Kama Sutra at high speed. At one point she lay bent over the porcelain pissoir, her face in the water, as he whipped her with his leather strap. Some instinct told him he would never have another chance with her and that he had to get it in all at once. And it was not until he found himself foolishly ejaculating in her right ear that he came to his senses, aghast at the situation he found himself in.
He stepped back and leaned against the wall; he was slightly delirious. The woman dressed. When she was ready, he fumbled for something to say before they left the john. But his eyes grew wide as she reached into her purse and pulled out a police badge and a .357 Magnum revolver.
“You’re under arrest,” she said. And added, “I’ve had my eye on you for some time now.”
The case, when it finally appeared, was thrown out of court. The city, due to the uproar being raised by Gay Activists’ Alliance, was enjoying a spell of liberalism in what were technically considered sex crimes. The judge ruled that the man was a victim of vice squad entrapment, and, as such, his arrest was unconstitutional.
He was so shaken by the entire course of events that he moved to San Francisco. He was just recovering from his ordeal when he learned they were planning to build a subway there. He then jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.
The woman began another long lonely vigil, seeking sex offenders in the tunnels beneath the city, riding the rails until some man touched her, and then rubbed his cock against her, letting him have his way until he was fucking her and stomping her and pissing on her and doing god-awful things to each of her orifices, at which point she would arrest him. She felt that sex was holy, and had chosen her job to keep it that way.
IN THE VALLEY not far from where the mythical realm of Shangri La was reputed to have been, there flourished a people who lived for almost three thousand years without a government. They had no laws, no organization of any kind, and were guided by a spiritual leader who was chosen from among the children born on the day of the winter solstice, each serving for life, and then passing the mantle on to whichever of the eligible candidates gave the wisest answer to the secret question, which only kings and queens could ask. The leader, when he or she was close to death, would have all those born on the shortest day over the years of his or her reign gather in the wood outside the village, see them one by one, and decide who was to succeed to the position of eminence.
It was a strange role, for in no one’s memory did the guide ever have to do anything. There were never more than several thousand people in the land; children were considered such rare and wondrous creatures that there was a trembling hesitancy about bringing them into the world. Everyone ate the same thing: fruits and nuts which fell from the trees, and a form of yoghurt made from goat’s milk. They all drank the highly mineralized water that flowed from the mountains. They never killed anything. Their clothes were made from the skins of animals that had died a natural death. They did not work, except to fashion garments and cups, and build shelters to live in. They had no formal sports, although wrestling was popular, as was reindeer riding, climbing, and swimming.
Among them were a few who grew up with a deep inner distance from the others, and they spent most of their time alone, fashioning drums and flutes from wood and hides, giving the others music. Some made strange shapes out of clay and gave the others images to ponder. Some appeared periodically to tell long stories in hypnotically rhythmic language, speaking of things no one had ever experienced but which sounded mysteriously familiar.
When the spirit moved the guide, he or she would begin to dance, and then a feast would take place, the people making a fire and brewing tea from a grass that grew on the far side of the mountain that overshadowed their land, a drink with magic powers of intoxication. Sometimes the celebration would last for days, until the entire population had been so perfectly unified in a vortex of energy by the sacred dance and the sheer power of their massive gathering, that the field they moved in became the scene of a single orgiastic organism, pulsing in ponderous and quickening tempo.
Generally, however, they spent their time contemplating the wonder of creation.
The guide possessed one idiosyncrasy as a mark of office; he or she ate nothing but sperm. In fact, to the degree that the people had a formal culture at all, it centered around providing the guide with enough to eat. Since sperm is a perfect food, the guide needed nothing else. And since the people lived a rarified existence, eating only the purest foods, drinking only the most vital water, breathing only the sharpest air, and since they were exposed to nothing but peaceful manifestations of the life energy, they were as sensitive as flowers in their capacity to take nourishment directly from the sun. It is not surprising that the guide’s daily intake was relatively small, usually amounting to no more than the combined volume of seventeen ejaculations.
Over the span of history, of course, different guides developed individual feeding habits. The conventional method was for male guides to use the cunts of young maidens as cups, having the day’s male volunteers mount the female volunteers and make love lustily until orgasm, at which point the guide would put his mouth to a succession of still hot trembling vaginas and suck the sticky deposit from the freshly fucked lips. Most of the female guides took their sperm straight, lying languidly on a couch while the day’s complement masturbated over her and at the moment of climax putting the spurting cocks into her waiting mouth. There were what the people called “interesting” guides, men who sucked the sperm directly from cocks, and women who preferred using cunts as a vehicle.
Occasionally there would be a guide who developed more esoteric tastes and might request a daily dollop of yak sperm. One guide took a fancy to tiger sperm, and since the people were so gentle they could approach the fiercest beasts and coax the vital fluid from them, the wish was able to be granted. That particular guide was legendary for his sexual prowess, for after half a cup of tiger sperm he was able to fuck twenty women to satiation without stopping once. Another guide, a woman, ate only hummingbird sperm, and before she died had become totally transparent.
It never occurred to anyone at any time that things should be different. They were the only people in the history of the species who did not let the acquisition of language rob them of their primal simplicity, and so they attained true human dignity. Possessing wisdom, they had little use for knowledge; living in a state of tranquil bliss, they had no inclination to intensity of purpose. They watched the universe in its constant infinite turnings and workings, understanding that they were blessed just to be alive and know the wonder of it all. In touch with the primordial realities of the cosmos, they were beyond the superficialities of civilization.
It is conjectured that they were the descendants of a small band of people that followed Lao Tzu out of China after he wrote his Tao Te Ching. Instead of going to the mountains to die, as legend has it, he went to live. Leaving China at the age of eighty-five, he continued for another sixty-three years, teaching the people non-ado. So powerful was his influence that it sustained them for almost three millennia.
In the seventeenth century of the Christian era as measured by western calendars, they were visited by two Dominican priests who came upon their valley by accident. The men were scandalized by what they considered obscene rites and general godlessness. They attempted to preach the gospel, but were met by a respectful indifference. They became an odd sight, flapping furiously about in their black and white robes, brandishing crucifixes, waving their bibles in the air, shouting at the people to put their clothes on and repent. It must be admitted that it was difficult to preach hellfire and brimstone to a people who had no concept of sin except “doing what is unnecessary,” a faculty the priests excelled in. But the people were willing to let them be, viewing them as merely one of the more bizarre manifestations of the unfathomable universe.
The missionaries were able, however, to test the tolerance of even this ultimately benign people, first by chopping down living trees to make a dead church, and then by running through the grove where the guide was awaiting his daily meal and lashing the backs of the happy fuckers who were preparing his food. The people, for the first time in centuries, were confused, and they asked the guide what they should do, an action no guide in anyone’s recollection had been asked to perform.
He thought about it a while and requested that the priests be restrained. Then, hoping to pierce to the core of the situation, he asked two of the young maidens to draw forth some sperm from their bodies so he might take their measure. The priests howled with outrage at the tender ministrations being given them by the gentle fingers and loving tongues of the women. And when they came, it was with horrible curses mingled with terrible prayers.
The king tasted each of their deposits and retched violently.
“These men are . . .” he began to say, and then paused, not having a word for the concept “depraved.” He spit out the sperm and pondered for a while. “Take them to where the eagles nest,” he said at last, “and push them from the mountain.”
The priests were disposed of and the people remained undisturbed for another three hundred years.
Yet, their time was marked. In one of the wars which continually erupted about them, their valley was discovered by a platoon of Chinese soldiers. Shortly thereafter, they were descended upon by a delegation from the People’s Republic, and told that they were to be liberated from the chains of spiritual autocracy and introduced to the wonders of democracy.
“You will be removed from your primitive state,” the directive read, “and given factories and schools and police. Women will be free and allowed to work side by side with men. Everyone will learn to read and illiteracy will be eliminated.” Finally, they were informed, they would elect their own representative to sit in the People’s Assembly in Peking. Beyond that, they would be taught how to farm, pen animals, make iron, and build roads.
The people were stunned. The night the representatives left, with word that they would return in a week with soldiers, planners, teachers, officials, and anthropologists, the guide summoned the entire village.
“There is no way to know why these things happen,” he said. “It is like watching the night sky and seeing a star suddenly plunge into the darkness of space. It is our time to be destroyed, and there is nothing we can do.”
He stroked his wispy beard. “For myself, I will not live to serve those smiling and well-intentioned brutes who think their primitive machinery is superior to our formless understanding. I will go to the place of the eagles and throw myself into the air which is the sustainer of us all. You may come with me, or you may stay here, and learn to survive amidst the stupidity which is fast descending upon us.”
He sat silent for a long while and then his face brightened. “Yet, we still have seven sunrises and seven sunsets. Time enough for eternity.” And with that he jumped to his feet and began to dance.
The morning of the day when the delegation was scheduled to arrive, the entire people, spent from the continuous orgy of the previous week, went to the nearby mountain top. They sat in a loose circle and entered a state of communion, sharing their vibrations, sharing their breathing, their awareness. Finally, the guide stood up and walked to the edge of the precipice. As he stared down, a small boy’s voice called out to him.
“Before we all return to the flow, can you tell us what the secret question is?”
The guide turned around and looked into the child’s open face. “There is only one question,” he said slowly, “and that is this:
“Why are there no questions at all?”
The boy’s lips began to move and he started to speak. But then as though a light had gone on within the light of the sun, his entire expression changed and became one of perfect understanding. His face relaxed and his eyes grew soft. He looked back at the guide, and said nothing.
The guide smiled.
“Yes,” he said to the boy and to the whole people, “the answer is not to say the answer, but to be the answer.” Then to the child alone, “You might have been guide after me.”
And with a cry of rapture, he threw himself off the cliff.
One by one and two by three they followed, until the last man and woman stood looking down at the rocks below.
“When we die, there will be no humans left,” she said.
“Then so be it,” he told her. “It is as the guide has said: it is our time to be destroyed.”
They too flew into the void, and when the Chinese arrived that afternoon they could not make sense of what had happened. They made an official report to their headquarters, and by the time the sun had set they had planted their flag and given the place a name, something that no one had ever bothered to do before.
SHE STARED INTO the mirror for a quarter of an hour, taking inventory, integrating the perceptions.
The legs are long and muscular, the shoulders broad, the hips narrow. The skin on her face is delicately etched, the result of two years of electrolysis. Straight black hair to the base of her neck, covering her ears, curling around her throat. Breasts curved like soft sherbet, the children of injected hormones. She is a handsome woman, as once she was a pretty man. Her ass is androgynous, and between her thighs the infolded scrotal sac.
“I have done it,” she thought. “At last I have a body to match my desires.”
She ran her hands over her belly and cupped her breasts, stroking the nipples with her fingertips. They wrinkled, and stretched taut. She smiled.
“Alexandra,” she said out loud. “Men will want you.” And with that did a slow bump and grind for her reflection in the glass, all the while hugging heself with satisfaction.
As with all transsexuals, her road had been painful and difficult. For her entire youth and young manhood, she was unable to understand herself as anything but a homosexual, a condition she despised. Impotent with women, she had been, as a man, wretched in her need for men. And after many years of therapy, she came to accept that the condition of homosexuality was intractable.
The conclusion that followed, while logically ineluctable, had been for a long time too frightening to consider seriously. The existential force of having one’s penis cut off shook her to the roots of her being. But her torment knew no surcease, and the choice between radical change and suicide became quite clear. She opted for the former.
She began tentatively, making enquiries, writing letters of application to doctors who had performed the process of transformation. Before long, the fantasy began to precipitate a reality, and she found herself having interviews with psychologists, talking to other transsexuals who had come out the other side, several in each of the two directions, and finally entered the actual mechanics of transition, beginning with hormone shots, hair removal, special counseling, and on one unforgettable day, the first operation. And with all this, lessons on how to dress, how to move, how to speak, how, in short, to behave like a woman.
It had taken three years to reach this point, watching the final result in a mirror. A miracle had been performed, and it seemed to throw open a sparkling new world. She could enjoy men at last, as she always had, but now freely and openly, without the homosexual guilt she had never been able to shake off. She understood that from a certain viewpoint, her present condition might be considered even more pathological than the former one. But she didn’t feel ashamed, and it is one’s feeling about oneself that, in the last analysis, is the basic criterion for all judgement.
Now, when she flirted with a man, it would be as a woman. And when she gave head, it would be a woman’s lips around the cock she sucked. Her face would be smooth, powdered, her mouth slightly rouged. Her chest would hold a woman’s breasts for a man to fondle, and while the nipples would never yield milk, that would make no difference to her or to the man who was taking his pleasure with her. And when a man fucked her, it would be as a woman that she received him, and not as a “pervert,” the word she had always used to describe herself. And after all this, she had, instead of the embarrassing penis, a cunt opening into her body, not as pretty as a real cunt, nor with a real cunt’s smells and juices, but for all that, something that would serve. Its very artificiality, in fact, might give it a power of attraction and appeal that no real cunt could have.
“After all,” she reasoned, “there can’t be more than a couple of hundred artificial cunts in the whole world.” She consoled herself that rarity overshadowed any intimations of the grotesque.
She opened the closet door on which the mirror hung, and began to choose her attire for the day. While recuperating from the final operation, she had not gone out or seen anyone, wanting to make her entrance into society all at once, whole and resplendent. She dressed beyond her usual simple taste, knowing that she was overdoing it, but unable to resist the temptation to go out in full drag.
“But it’s not drag any more,” she exclaimed. She was no longer a man, and the nylon stockings and panties and garter belt and brassiere and slip and dress and earrings and nail polish and lipstick and pumps and eyeshadow were now her legitimate clothing. A rush of excitement surged through her as she thought of bathing suits and the beach, of tight slacks and swinging her hips as she walked.
And for an instant, she even thought of Ralph, her friend for so many years, the man she loved more than anyone in the world, but to whom she could never venture a physical overture. Ralph had known that she was homosexual, and it had not affected their friendship, which was based on an intellectual affinity. Still, he had made it clear that he could not consider her sexually. During the time she was undergoing her transformation she had asked him, “Do you think you might desire me when I am a woman?” And he had not replied for a long time, then answered, “It might be possible. I don’t know. It’s extraordinary just to think about, but I won’t know until I see you in your new body.”
Now, glorious in full regalia, she looked at herself once more, and a well-dressed, very attractive woman of about thirty-five looked back, and winked. She was feeling just the tiniest bit randy already.
“Would you like to go for a drink?” Alexandra said to her image.
“And perhaps meet a man?” the image asked.
“Or should I call Ralph?” Alexandra replied.
“Not yet,” her image told her, “you need some experience first.”
Alexandra felt a shiver go down her spine as the impact of the reality she had become grazed her deepest sense of self. She checked herself out one last time, picked up her handbag, and walked out the door to see what the world had to offer.
As she stepped into the street, apprehension gripped her. At the back of her mind was the thought that someone would notice, would point to her and say, “Look, there’s a transsexual.” She glanced down to see if her slip was showing, and the already conditioned gesture of a woman brought her new courage.
She attracted no attention at all, except the routine stares of men who looked at her breasts as she approached and at her ass as she went by. She had to suppress her exuberance which threatened to propel her into long striding steps, and remember to walk as her coach had taught her, keeping her awareness on the sensation of her thighs rubbing against one another.
“Stay with your feeling of sensuality,” he had told her, “that will keep you from reverting to masculine mannerisms.”
Feeling more and more secure, strolling down the sidewalk as though she were a queen dressed as a commoner, her royalty apparent to no one but herself, she turned into one of those small dark restaurants which dot midtown. She stood uncertainly in the doorway for a moment, and was taken with a small edge of panic when the floor manager came up to her and said, “Will there be just yourself, madame?”
Madame!
She smiled graciously. “Just a drink, please, I won’t be having lunch,” she said, using the voice the same teacher had coached her in, making her sound a little like Marlene Dietrich with a bad cold.
He led her to a tiny round table, and she lit a cigarette to steady her nerves as the waiter brought her a Brandy Alexander, a drink she had always felt diffident about ordering when she went about in a man’s body. She sipped slowly, relishing the fact that she left lipstick marks on the glass. Her joy was total, and she was torn between wanting to weep and wanting to throw up her arms and shout with pleasure.
Instead, she looked around discreetly, and several tables away a man of about forty, dark and rugged, wearing a very expensive suit, was looking at her with an unmistakable glint of desire. He was exactly her type, the kind of man who, when she had been a man, she would have done anything to have, and then have felt guilty about wanting. But now she could accept his overture, talk to him, and swim in his hunger for her. She would have to go slowly, waiting for the proper mood to tell him that she was a transsexual. And if he still wanted her, then she would have him, have a man at last, freely, openly.
She began to return his stare, but felt herself floundering in her response. She could not smile, nor lower her lids, nor shift her body, nor give any of the clues women use when they want to tell a man they’re interested. She looked away in confusion.
“What’s wrong?” she wondered. “Why don’t I respond?”
She was about to ascribe it to nervousness in her new role when she realized that she was not really reciprocating his desire, and could find no feeling upon which to mount even a seductive glance. Intellectually, she could tell herself why she should desire him, could remember that there was a time when she would have been attracted to him, but now, he had no more sexual appeal to him as a woman than women used to have for him as a man.
She bent her head over her drink, pondering the strangeness of the situation, and was lost deep in thought when she sensed someone sitting across from her, at her table. Her heart skipped as she guessed it might be the man, and she didn’t know how to deal with him.
But when she looked up, she found a woman looking back at her. A slim, well-groomed, utterly composed woman, who wore no makeup, and was dressed in a tightly cut suit. Her hair was short and her eyes were very very knowing.
The woman smiled, an expression that flushed through Alexandra like the embrace of a hot bath after a long stiff walk on a winter day. Her limbs grew weak, and the rest of the restaurant faded into distant obscurity, behind the irresistible magnetism of the woman who sat before her.
“I’ve been watching you,” the woman said. “It was clear that you had no interest in that man who’s been trying to catch your eye.”
Alexandra knew at once that the woman was a lesbian, knew at once that she was making an overture, and knew at once, with stomach-shrinking certainty, that her new body was responding.
The homosexuality had pursued her through the entire change of gender, and in her transformed loins there flickered the familiar flame of an old forbidden desire.
WENDY DELICATELY SHADED the corner of her mouth with her lipstick brush, took a long deep look at herself in the professional makeup mirror with the tiny frosted bulbs all around the edge, and smiled radiantly. From her sequined shoes to her beehive hairdo, she was perfectly rendered, ready to win all glances at the Senior Prom. The other men would neglect their dates just to have a dance with her, and she would flirt outrageously with them, knowing all the while that no matter who held her in his arms, only Jeff could hold her in his heart.
“Jeff,” she whispered, and her fingers trembled at his name. Tall, rugged Jeff, with his lopsided grin and his playful blue eyes, his electrifying figure on the football field and his deep love of humanity which would one day earn him the initials M.D. after his name. She rubbed the pin he had given her just six months earlier, on that night when the moon had lit up the waters of the reservoir as they sat in his Maserati and he spoke those fateful words in her ear.
“Be mine,” he had said. And hot scalding tears of joy had spilled from her eyes.
Now she stood up, regarding her young figure in the glass. The wide gown hid her long shapely legs, shaved and oiled for the night’s special date. Her waist was narrow and flared quickly to pearl-white breasts that swelled over the tops of her bra cups. No man had ever seen her nipples, or put his hands on the sweet mound between her thighs. She was more than a virgin; she was a consciously constructed landscape of hesitant delights, nurtured and guarded, prepared for the appearance of the single gardener who would enter some day to gather up the fragile buds of her tender flowers. She had been kissed so few times that her lips still tingled when another mouth brushed hers. And no fingers had ever traced the luscious curve between her firm full buttocks.
“But tonight,” she breathed, and trembled over the expanse of her entire body at the thought of what the night would bring.
There was a light tap at the door and her mother came timidly into the room. The two women looked into one another’s eyes through the mirror, and then Wendy turned.
“Mother,” she gushed, “I’m so happy.”
“And I’m happy for you,” her mother replied. “It seems just like yesterday that I was standing where you’re standing now, thinking about the man who was to become your father.”
“We’ve lived in this town a long time, haven’t we?” Wendy asked in that solemn voice which always overtook her when she thought of her American heritage.
The older woman swept forward and held the young girl by the arm. Her face was troubled. She had the look of a person who was about to enter into a necessary but difficult conversation.
“There isn’t much time before Jeff gets here to pick you up,” she began, “and there’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“I think I know what it is,” Wendy said, spinning out of her grasp.
“You’re thinking of letting him do it tonight, aren’t you? You’re planning to go all the way!”
“Please, mother,” Wendy pleaded, “I’m a grown woman. It’s time I decided these things for myself. And I do love him. Don’t spoil it by trying to argue me out of it.”
“No, no, it’s not that. I would be the last to try to dissuade you. After all, I did . . . the same thing, the night of my Senior Prom.”
“You?” Wendy asked, aghast.
“I was young once too,” her mother said. She eased Wendy into the rocking chair that had been in their family for a hundred and twenty-seven years. “I just want to be sure you’re careful. And perhaps if I tell you a little story, it will help you understand.” The woman sat down opposite her daughter, and began a tale which her mother had told her, and had been told by her mother before her, insuring that each generation was aware that its children did not lose the historical continuity which kept the blood line strong.
“It was your great grandmother who was first seized by the seemingly irrational desire to eat shit,” the older woman said. “In those days, people didn’t have the enlightened attitudes we have today, and what with killing Indians and chopping down trees, there just wasn’t time for bedroom finesse. Lil was seventeen when she got married, as cheery a cherry as you are right now. Her husband was a good man, dependable, but boorish. She didn’t even know how to broach the subject of her secret desire to him.
“One day, while he was off on a four-day hunting trip, a knife-grinder came by their house. She describes him in her diary as gaunt and salacious, and adds, ‘just what I was looking for’. She invited him in for lunch, and when they were finished eating, she blurted out what she wanted from him.”
Wendy paled. Like many young people, it was almost inconceivable to her that what she had looked upon as an intensely private urge might be common place to the rest of humanity. Her mother’s voice went on, describing what their ancestor had done, but she heard little of the narrative, her own mind being filled with the image she had cherished for so long.
She saw herself lying on a couch, her skirt hiked up over her thighs, her cunt redolent with pungent slime, toes curled in anticipation. Above her, his piercing eyes boring into her tender flesh, Jeff bears down, his great buttocks crushing her cheeks, his terse anus pressing against her sweet innocent lips. And then, with a subtle shift, the passage begins. She gasps, she moans, she faints, and in succumbing, her mouth falls open. He pushes down, and with a fanfaronade of aggressive thoughts, voids his bowels on her immaculate face. She tried to escape, knowing all the while that she does not want to escape. She chokes as the hot suffocating mass slides onto her tongue, into her throat, and down her chest, scorching her lungs and filling her body with the vile and glorious fulfilment she had always understood would be hers. She cries out and rises to actively cover the pulsing hole, stretching her lips until they crack, sucking the final product of the body she loves until she almost bursts from lack of breath, as she combines the lowest servility with the highest daring, the profoundest love with the most scarifying sensuality.
She looked up out of her revery and into her mother’s smiling face. The woman seemed to be reading the pictures in her mind. Wendy blushed.
“There’s no way to explain it, really,” she said. “Doctor Cory thinks that the desire is an inherited characteristic. It just seems to run in the family.”
Wendy began to speak, hesitated, and then began again. “But I’m not the only one,” she said. “Most of the other girls talk about the same thing.”
“They’re not allowing sex education in the class-rooms, are they?” her mother shot out, ready to be incensed at the notion that the board of education was usurping what she believed to be the duty of parents.
“No,” Wendy told her. “We get together at the soda shoppe and talk about our feelings. You know how girls do. And just yesterday Clarissa asked me whether I thought it was all right to let a boy shit in your mouth on the first date.”
“In my day a girl would want at least an engagement ring before she’d let a boy take such liberties.”
“I think so too, and that’s what I told her. I think a girl and boy should know each other for a few months at least, and be going steady, before they get that intimate. But at least half the girls think that’s old-fashioned.”
“Well, times do change,” her mother sighed philosophically. “But they’ll learn the value of holding certain things back unless a man is extra good to them. If a woman gives a man everything at once, she has nothing to manage him with. You may not think that’s important now, but wait until you’ve been married a few years.”
“I don’t know if I can hold myself back,” Wendy pleaded.
Her mother took Wendy’s hands between her own and held them to her breasts. “Jeff’s a good boy,” she said, “and I’m sure he’s serious about your relationship. Just be careful that’s all.”
“Will you give me some advice?” Wendy asked, capitulating at last to a recognition of superior wisdom in this area on the part of her mother.
“Well,” the woman said, “make sure he doesn’t eat spicy food or drink too much early in the evening. If he gets the runs it will ruin it for both of you. And don’t get shit on your dress. It’s almost impossible to wipe off and you’ll stink all the way home. Make sure he doesn’t think you’re too easy or he’ll lose respect for you.”
Wendy put her head on her mother’s shoulder. “I’m so lucky to have such an understanding mother,” she said.
“My mother did the same for me,” the older woman went on. “And you might as well start practicing how to cook from now on. After you’re married you’ll have to be very careful about his diet. See that he gets enough roughage. And feed him the healthiest food you can. You might as well be getting some good shit from him if you’re going to get any shit at all.”
Wendy’s mother stepped back and the two women gazed at each other with moist eyes. “My little baby’s going to be all grown up after tonight,” the older woman said.
“You’re the best mother a girl could ever want,” Wendy told her.
Just then the door swung open and a man walked into the room. Portly, red-nosed, and kindly, he beamed at the picture before his eyes.
“Daddy!” Wendy squealed.
“That Jeff certainly is a lucky man,” he said, looking at his daughter’s shining face. And then he turned to his wife and in a gruff jocular tone asked, “Is there any chance of getting something to eat around here tonight?”
Wendy and her mother looked at one another for a few seconds, and then burst out laughing, leaving the man smiling in gentle confusion. He and his wife had had separate bedrooms for almost five years, and for him the ingestion, digestion, and elimination of food was no longer a process that held any trace of erotic passion.
PAUL THOUGHT HE knew why women resisted, and his unwillingness to let any external reality alter the system of his perception was, paradoxically, his greatest advantage over them. He lived in a world of images, and ruthlessly imposed his projections on everyone in his life in order to attain his ends. He had no feeling for women as autonomous creatures, but worshipped them passionately as objects of desire. He easily equated conquest with caring.
For him, a woman’s sexual response functioned exactly like a neural synapse, in an all-or-nothing manner. In the same way that a large number of electrical stimuli build a charge that, at a crucial moment, fires the spark across the gap between nerve endings, a series of fucks would mount a readiness until, with shocking speed, the woman would surrender to her most uninhibited expressions. Generally, women held back, even in orgasm, sensing that once they let go, an unfathomable chasm would open up, and all that could save them from dissolution would be the continued attention from the man who brought them to that condition. They would then be, for all practical purposes, in his power.
Paul was an expert at enticing women to disregard their warning systems, their memories of broken hearts, betrayals, refusals; he was a master at pushing them to the edge of the erotic abyss and seducing them to leap. His was the knack of easing women into insouciance, yielding their essence to his demand. For Paul, only that moment of yielding counted. Before she surrendered to her need in his arms, a woman was an object of dalliance; and afterward, she had nothing further to reveal.
He possessed a rare combination of genius and lasciviousness. He might have modelled himself on de Sade, except that he livid in a technological era, and looked upon tying virgins to stone walls in hidden crypts with a certain condescension. He had more sophisticated machinery at his disposal.
From the first moment, when he was just nineteen, that a woman let drop the veils of her public countenance and revealed the terrible beauty of a face that had become no more than a pool within which to see the rigors of a soul in ecstasy, he knew that nothing else in life would have any real value for him. He dedicated himself to the elicitation of that brief moment when absolute openness flowered before his eyes. No priest ever served any god better than Paul the cultivation of women.
In the course of a decade he had found hundreds of them. He learned exactly how to manipulate himself to get them to offer their treasure to his insatiable eyes. He was handsomely endowed, a little over six feet tall, his body combining the best features of a lumberjack and a Martha Graham dancer. He wore his blond hair slightly long, and spent six hours each week at a gym, in narcissistic contemplation of his muscular development, as he lifted weights, swung on trapeze bars, or swam lustily in the pool. Otherwise, he was at work, doing a job which bored him, but which allowed him to live in fairly opulent fashion. After having taken a Ph.D. in molecular chemistry, he landed a position at Johnson and Johnson, joining a vast staff of laboratory workers whose projects included searching for ways to produce more long-lasting glue for Band-Aids.
At night, he fucked.
He continually looked forward to the bliss of having an attractive and intelligent woman squirming under him, his cock splitting her throbbing cunt, her fingers raking his shoulders, her legs shamelessly pulling him more deeply into her, and through it all her face a mask of capitulation to unholy joy. It was the face, more than the mere sensations of the act, which transported him. When the stilted mask of civilized appearance melted and the beast emerged, the angel could be born. And if she were, in her daily life, ultra-sophisticated, ultra chic, then when she broke, he was blessed with seeing the contrast between that artificiality and the ultimate gift that can ever be given to man: the perception of the naked female soul.
But it was all so fleeting! He might watch a woman edge her way toward frenzy, see her hover at the very brink, and then go wild with the joy of wanton release. As the deep-chested howls burst from her throat, he could hold her only a few seconds, using her entire body as a feedback mechanism to orient the angle and intensity of his cock and thrust so that he extracted the maximum response, before she slipped into an orgasmic fury so private that the shades came down once more over her eyes. There were never more than those few brief moments during which he could gaze upon her, with the rapt expression of a saint in the midst of a beatific vision. And then it was gone. Gone forever.
“If only there were some way to preserve the stickiness indefinitely,” he heard a colleague say one afternoon during a seminar on the relationship between the respective surface tensions of skin and plastic.
“Preserve!” The word echoed in his mind.
“Yes,” he thought, “if only I could preserve that instant.”
That night he cancelled his date in order to ponder the implications of his insight. “What if I could,” he mused, “freeze the woman at the very second she is producing the expression which is her most perfect, her highest manifestation of beauty?”
He thought of photography, but discarded the idea. A two-dimensional representation was not what he wanted. He desired the real thing. His mind leapt from personal to social ramifications. “I would not only possess the thing that is most precious to me in the world, but will have created a work of supreme art, and in the process have immortalized a woman who would otherwise have passed into oblivion unknown. Such a piece would make the Mona Lisa seem the work of a primitive.”
He was quite mad, of course, but also extremely, brilliant, and with the resources of one of the nation’s foremost chemical plants at his disposal, he was soon experimenting with a formula that would have the properties he required of it. It would have to be liquid, for he saw that he would need to use a syringe. It would have to work instantaneously, to keep the body he used it on in semblance of the full flush of life. And it would have to penetrate to every last cell of the person’s physical structure.
Fired by the flames of monomania, he poured his genius into the project, and within a year he was ready to make his first try.
He decided to start with Cathy. He had been fucking her desultorily for several months, and she had peaked rather early in the affair. It was only a sentimental fondness for her that kept him seeing her. She was still capable of producing first-rate expressions, especially in the way her lips fell open after he came in her mouth, allowing his sperm to dribble down her cheeks and over her chin. He had seen that half a dozen times already. Her orgasm expression was neoclassic, the suggestion of pain in her furrowed brow contrasting exquisitely with the sucking gesture of her lips. After considering all contingencies, he decided to attempt to capture her reaction to being fucked in the ass. Primarily because the hypodermic would be easier to use if he was behind her, and secondly because during that particular variation she attained an attitude of licentious imbecility which he fancied.
When the moment arrived, he was very sad. His body and mind working with the skill of a master technician, he savored the depth of his emotions. In order to accomplish his aim he would, in effect, be killing the lovely woman now groaning under him.
“But, in a sense,” he rationalized, “I am doing her honor. She would have died one day anyway, aged and infirm, her body a mass of sagging wrinkles. This way, I freeze her at the height of her beauty, and in the process make her immortal.” It reminded him of the fact that the samurai chose the cherry blossom as their symbol because, unlike other flowers, it falls from the branch in the fullness of its fragrance, sacrificing itself so that others might know its precious scent.
It was with mixed feelings that he pressed the needle to the base of her skull, just as she tilted the pelvis backward to impale her buttocks on his thick cock. He slid into her, causing her to gasp, and at the moment he was imbedded completely between her cheeks, and the look of unutterable pleasure that he was seeking moved across her face, he injected the potion into her skin.
At once she was completely paralyzed. Even her heart stopped mid-beat. For an instant he was breathless at the transformation. She had become a statue. He pulled out slowly, his cock feeling as though it were stuck in a piston tube packed with axle grease. He knelt next to her and turned her over. He could scarcely believe his eyes.
She had been caught at the edge of becoming. Her face was a map of demon lust. As he gazed into her fixed stare, he had trouble convincing himself that she was dead, for even the glint of passion had been captured. For a few seconds he was chilled by the notion that she was still alive, imprisoned in that rigid coffin of flesh.
“But that’s absurd,” he said, as he went to get a saw.
It was not difficult to sever the head from the body, which he was not really interested in except as a curiosity. It was fascinating to observe that the entire inside of her cunt was flexed in an orgasmic spasm. He put the torso in the bathtub, where another brew of specially prepared chemicals neatly dissolved it.
He brought the head to a special laminating machine he had devised, and placed it in a hollow, where a fine electron mist covered it completely. It sealed the woman in a very delicate plastic, as securely as if she was a driver’s license. When he took her out, she looked like a woman about to come, except that she had no body.
“You are mine forever,” he whispered, “the real you, the true you, the you that lives eternally in beauty.”
After that, his collection grew steadily. He became regular at most of the singles’ bars on the upper east side, and each evening he left with yet another candidate for immortality. Most failed to meet his increasingly exacting standards. Only the best were considered for his hall of fame.
He became adept at discerning types amidst the confusing superficial appearances. With no research ever having been done in the area, he had to construct his own system of classification, a Linnaeus of the rapturous expression. He divided women in scores of ways, such as the various degrees of opening between their lips at certain crucial check points; whether they kept their eyes open or closed, whether or not their nostrils flared. The quality of the eyes was a world of exploration in itself, and he was able to distinguish fifty-three distinct shades of cheek coloration.
His most frequent mistake in the beginning, when he was still exuberant over his success, was to confuse the excitement of fucking with the nature of the expression produced. Some fucked so well that he forgot to watch closely enough. The best fuckers were not always the best lookers, and vice versa.
When he found one that seemed promising, he would not take her all the way on the first night, knowing that the longer he cultivated her, the more sublime would be her expression when she finally did let go. He would nurse her the way a gardener will care for young shoots. The ones who were fortunate enough, or unfortunate enough, to fail to meet his criteria, were shooed out the next day, unceremoniously, so they would know not to try to come back.
Each morning, as he sipped his coffee, he would stroll among his heads, kept in a room empty of everything except the pedestals they rested on, and talk to them. He would look from expression of unbearable bliss to expression of deeply tormented joy to expression of total giving, and say, “Well, I had hoped to have another friend for you girls to chat with, but she didn’t turn out. For a while there, when she put her ankles around my neck, I thought she might produce a really fine expression, but she was too jaded for me to reach her. An airline stewardess. She later told me she had once been fucked by a mule in a Mexican stag bar. Her face barely lost its composure all night. Or, on those days when he had captured another woman, would proudly carry the head in and say, “This is Frances. Isn’t she exquisite?”
And then would light a cigarette and say, “Well, another try tonight,” and go up to each one and kiss her full on the mouth, whispering endearments, murmuring, “Remember the night you made it all the way, how good it felt, how close we were?” And then would put out the light and go to work.
His doom was nicely ironic. As he injected a Balinese Temple Dancer who was part of a troupe visiting the city, her cunt contracted in an esoteric convulsion known only to a few initiates of the cult she had been trained in. His cock was gripped in an unbreakable grasp that was meant to last for no more than a split-second and provide a totally unique sensation. But frozen as she was, he was trapped inside her, a paralyzing spasm of pleasure-pain coursing through his body.
He tried for over an hour to extricate himself, when he realized that gangrene was setting in. He saw the implications fully. To seek medical help would mean being charged with murder, for questions would be asked, his apartment would be searched.
He decided not to prolong the agony. He lifted her up and carried her into the room of heads. He took all his women down, one by one, and put them in a circle on the floor. He lay down in the middle, the woman of the night still in his arms. For a long time he looked from face to face, remembering, weeping. And when his heart was full, he took the instrument he had used on all of them and plunged it into his chest.
He died as he had lived, a slave to the beauty of women.
AT FIFTY-FIVE, there were few pleasures left to him. He enjoyed sleeping, he enjoyed drinking wine and talking with his friends, and he enjoyed renting young Irish prostitutes and having them take their clothes off before him as he watched, his eyes sardonically drinking in their flesh, knowing that they found him repulsive, and then directing them to kneel between his thighs and suck his thick cock until he came, usually not for at least an hour, all the while telling them stories of his childhood in Italy, and when they were finished, dismissing them abruptly. He never had any girl more than once; after he had seen a woman’s ass, he lost all further interest in her.
On this day he was in a particularly pensive mood, almost philosophical, as the whore dutifully slavered over his cock. Me had just concluded a fairly complex deal which involved the takeover of the Chase Manhattan Bank and all the Rockefeller oil refineries in New Jersey through his company. The Capa Tosta Concrete Corporation. From his offices on the hundred and tenth floor of the World Trade Center Building, he looked down over the grimy expanse of New York City.
His eyes narrowed when they rested on Central Park, Prospect Park, and all the other small sections where nature still had some small toehold. He estimated that he had twenty-five years of vigorous health left, and in that time would not rest until every square inch of the city was covered with cement. Until all five boroughs were drowned in buildings.
His gaze went west. There was still the rest of the United States. But that would have to be for his sons. For himself, he would be content if the city became a single giant mausoleum, a final testimony to his power. It would be a feat such as would make the pyramids of the Pharaohs pale into insignificance.
He patted the head of the girl sucking his cock. “You know, Irish,” he said, “all those people down there, they are children. They are fools. Even the educated ones.” He paused a moment and added, “Especially the educated ones. They don’t know what’s real.”
His eyes grew watery and dim. “When I was a boy in Italy,” he told her, his voice thin, its rhythms moving in cadence to her bobbing head, “we never had all this shit. Dirty air, filthy water, traffic jams, people unhappy all the time. We laughed and we fought. We sang songs and ate fresh fish. We had figs growing in the back yard and I drank goat’s milk for breakfast. We lived near the sea, and in those days the sea was clean, the water sparkled. We swam every afternoon. And then there was the wine, and the bread fresh from the oven, and the stars at night, and making love in the hay. Oh, what a time that was! Every week we celebrated the birthday of some saint, and we even had a priest to remind us that there are higher things in the world than man. It wasn’t like this pig pen, where the people roll around in garbage and think they are the kings of creation.”
He sighed and gave himself over to the sensations produced by the friction of her delicate tongue around the tip of his cock. She swept forward and took the rod into her throat, held it until she gagged, and pulled back There was something about the old man’s calm, his quiet voice, which pacified her, nullified her initial feeling of distaste. The thing in her mouth was iron-hard, and gnarled like a De Nobili cigar. Sucking it was like sucking her thumb when she was a child; it was relaxing, easy, with the single difference that this experience was raked by spasms of such tingling sexuality that her toes curled. Despite her desire to remain detached, she had found herself blowing him with mounted excitement.
“But my stupid mother,” he went on, “may the devil stick hot pitchforks in her ass, wanted to go to America. ‘The streets are paved with gold,’ she kept saying, until my poor father finally gave in, sold the farm, and moved us all here. There was no gold. Just misery, and poverty, and filth. And even if there had been gold, what good would it have been? You can’t eat gold, it won’t keep you warm at night, it has no love.”
He beat his fist against the arm of the chair he was sitting in. “That’s what’s wrong with this country,” he shouted, “there is no love here.”
He put his hands on her hair. “Lick it at the tip,” he said, and for a few moments he did nothing but watch as she lapped the glistening tool, and paid attention to the fluctuations of pleasure brought by each movement of her tongue.
“But an animal learns to survive wherever it is,” he said after a while. “My father bought a grocery store, and we started a new life. It wasn’t long before we were paid a visit by the Honored Society, and when I compared their methods of doing business and their success to my father’s way of life, well, the choice was obvious. There’s no point trying to be honest in the city; it’s all based on lies anyway. I became a member of the Family, and today I am don of all the dons.”
It struck the girl for the first time that the man whose cock she was sucking was perhaps the most powerful man she might ever meet. Most of her time was spent with fifteen-dollar-a-throw longshoremen, and while she wasn’t destitute, she was far from any real financial comfort. The fact that she had been offered five hundred dollars for a few hours of work was astonishing in itself; that it was being paid by the highest Mafia chief in the country was almost too much for her to assimilate.
She had no way of knowing his reasons for picking her, that when he was nineteen he had been struck with an overpowering infatuation for a blue-eyed auburn-haired Irish girl whose fair skin made his dark Mediterranean blood boil. But when, after much trepidation, he had approached her, she had laughed at him, calling him a “spaghetti-stuffed garlic eater.” Of course, he had shot her and thrown her body in the East River, but even that was not compensation enough for his wounded pride, and over a thousand times afterward, he had had his men scour the entire eastern seaboard for young Irish girls that he could subject to the – to his mind – degrading ritual of cock-sucking.
“The mayor, he thinks he runs the city,” the old man continued. “But all he does is prance around and look pretty. Nobody with any real power listens to him. He’s somebody to put in front of the television cameras so the cattle think their vote means something. No, it’s the ones who control the life systems and the death systems who are in command, only most of them are so stupid, they don’t realize it yet.
“Look at the police. Some of the commanders are beginning to figure out that they have thirty-thousand men, armed with hand guns, and with access to machine guns, horses, tear gas, tanks, grenades. But if they made a move, they’d have the state militia to contend with, and the federal government. They’ll have to lie low until the whole nation is falling apart in chaos.
“But they are only the most obvious candidates. Think of the firemen who can allow the city to burn, or perhaps even burn it themselves. And the garbagemen, who only strike for higher wages, but could consolidate as a political force, threatening to let plague conditions arise if their demands weren’t met. Still, none of these people have any political awareness.”
The girl continued sucking. He had put his hands on the back of her head and was guiding her by imparting a momentum to her motions. She let her lips go slack and allowed his cock to bob in and out of her mouth, her tongue licking it each time it entered and each it left. She had begun to have fantasies that he might want her as his private whore, and drew pictures in her mind of a swank apartment, a complete wardrobe, a sports car, charge accounts, and trips to Puerto Rico in the winter. She dropped her reserve and worked up a feverish pleasure in what she was doing, giving herself up to wanton expressions, hoping he would be taken by the masks of lasciviousness she wore. The old man had seen all of this before.
“And even they don’t strike at the heart of things,” he went on. “Who controls the drinking water, the water to put out fires? Did you ever give a second thought to all those men you see climbing in and out of sewers? Everybody looks down on them, but no one stops to consider that they have access to switches which control the city’s vital fluid. While the mayor makes speeches for the newspapers, grimy men with wrenches hold our destiny in their hands.
“But it doesn’t end there. You can almost hear the people from Con Ed smirking. Do you remember the night of the great blackout? That was just a test to see if it could be done. It was fun for a few hours, but what would happen after a few days and nights without electricity? Suck it, Irish, suck it! No lights anywhere. Traffic snarled because the traffic lights didn’t work. Refrigerators useless, food spoiling. No radio, no television, no elevators, no subways. We would be plunged back into the Stone Age in no time. Bands would form. The gun and the knife would be the law. And not too many would survive.
“And there are other possibilities,” he said, waving his hands through the air. “Radicals blowing up the bridges, tunnels, subway tracks. Or the telephone company, operating the central nerve cord that runs through all city life. It is the indispensable tool of business, and without it business would fold. And without business, there is no New York.”
He was approaching orgasm. The moment of climax was still five minutes away, but he could sense its beginning. With his body as calm as it was, he was able to give himself to sensation without tension, and thus truly savor the long deep swell which preceded ejaculation. Capable of dispensing with any consideration of the girl except as a tool for his pleasure, he could devote his undivided attention to his inner state.
“But not one of them suspects the overwhelmingly obvious truth as to what real power is.” His voice held a tremor of excitement, partially from the growing heat in his loins, partially from the impact of articulating his vision. “And that is with me,” he continued, “because the one thing they all have to do is live here! They must spend their time here. And I’m the one who decides what kind of place they get to stay in. No matter who’s in command, no matter what form of government, no matter what the state of the economy, the most important reality of the city is its environment. And what makes the environment is the architecture. And I control the architecture.”
His voice purred. “I’ll make sure there is nothing left but concrete. Mile after mile of living earth has already been covered up, suffocated, and giant stone buildings loom where trees used to grow. There is almost nothing natural left. Most plant life has been destroyed, most animal life, most insect life. The people have nothing left but hard surfaces to walk on, to sit on, to lie on, to look at. Even the sky is hard to see. They are allowed some few cats and dogs and horses, and the pitiful specimens they put in the concrete prisons they call zoos. But that is all. And soon, even they will disappear. The pigeons will be killed. Only rats and roaches will remain. Rats and roaches and people.
“And as they become sicker and sicker, more and more confused and unhappy, they will never begin to guess what their trouble is, that’s how unbelievably ignorant they are. They will blame the mayor, they will blame the police chief, they will blame drugs and permissive education. They will revolt, they will change leaders. They will try everything. But the obvious will never occur to them, that they are slowly dying, being killed by the lack of life around them. They will go to their graves as blind as blind as when they were alive. And I shall win, I shall build everywhere. Cement will rule the earth!”
As he said the last words his thighs tensed and a voluminous spurt of sperm burst into the girl’s mouth. She went through all the motions of swallowing it as though it were some kind of nectar, hoping to please the old man with her gusto. But the instant after he came he pushed her away, stared into her face for a moment, and shook his head to deny the memory which refused to let him rest.
“Go suck the boys in the back room,” he said.
She began to protest, caught up in a swirling disappointment, but a glint in his eyes told her she had better not say a word. She stood up, licked a few drops of semen form her lips, and petulantly walked towards the door, her buttocks jiggling as she went, to the back room where seven men sat around a wide table playing cards. She would be told to crawl under the table, and go from cock to cock until she had done them all, and then be bundled out into the street, a half a thousand dollars and several insights richer.
The old man buttoned his pants and walked to the window. The city was practically invisible because of the thickly polluted air. Even from his great height he could hear the infernal roar, the din of triumphant machinery. Everywhere cars chugged like ancient beasts, spewing gases in their wake, and at a thousand sites the relentless momentum of construction, more and taller buildings rising to occupy even the samllest bit of free space. And through all this the people walked, their ears shattered by the noises, their nostrils pinched against the stench, their entire bodies incessantly punished by the crunch of crystallized finance. Seem from above, the scene resembled nothing so much as a danse macabre of zombies, hulks whose souls had long since been sucked dry.
“I will have revenge on you,” he muttered, “for fooling my mother that there could be a good life here, for taking my father away from his land and causing him to die in an unheated tenement, away from the sea and the sky, and for forcing me to become such an evil man to survive. I will destroy you, and my children shall destroy your entire nation. Just by giving you what you want, more cement, more concrete, more steel. To cover the beautiful earth, to tear down the forests, to poison the lakes and the rivers.
“And for what? To build these human garbage dumps, these cities. To construct highways and bridges and dams and all the stupid structures that you worship.”
He laughed, a horrible creaking sound.
“I will give you what you want, America,” he shouted. “I will give you progress. And it will take you straight into the mouth of hell.”
BUTCH MEDUSA LAY amidst the pile of bodies. There were eleven other women in the heap, the result of the most ambitious project she had yet undertaken. The group contained representatives of each of the world’s races, and was a palette of wildly complementary skin colors and hair textures. Both tall and short were there, as well as fat and thin. Each of the women was from one of the sun signs of the Zodiac, and Butch had personally tested and tasted all of them for copiousness and flavor of vaginal secretions. But now, after all the drugs and music, after the hours of flirtation and foreplay, after the weeks of preparation and expectation, as asses and cunts and mouths and breasts and feet rolled and flashed in a continuous panorama of sensuality, Butch had to admit that she was bored.
“This orgy has no socially redeeming value,” she said to herself as a lithe Ethiopian sword-dancer sucked one of her nipples between her lips. Loath as she was to admit it, Butch had come to the end of a cycle and was unwilling to garner the energy to break into a new phase.
She had begun her career one night by sweeping into a lesbian bar dressed in a suit of chain mail and carrying a mace. The place was instantly polarized, the more strident exponents of the new female image finding her intolerably outré, while the lustier women flocked to her side, glad that at least one person was still ready to champion unfashionable stereotypes. For five years subsequent to her coming out, she had run amok in the ultra-sophisticated circles of post-decadent tribadism, imparting a quality of aesthetic ruthlessness to a life style that had been foundering in sterile polemics. Among her vassals were many daughters of the wealthy, and she had no difficulty producing the money she needed to support her rampant metatheater.
The thought she had been suppressing for months now came to the surface of her consciousness. “To do what I want to do, I really need some cocks.”
She blew a whistle and the writhing mass of bodies quivered once and fell still. She leapt to her feet, breasts jiggling.
“Sweet Sappho’s pussy,” she yelled, “is this the best you can manage? If I want choreography I’ll find a bunch of fags. I want passion, goddamnit. And reaching behind her, she picked up a fourteen-foot bull whip with which she began to flay the women lying in front of her.
“What do I have to do to get some feeling around here?” she shouted, and laid about her with the thick ugly leather instrument.
The cries she extracted, however, were only bleats of pain, and she was no longer interested in mere sadomasochism, having had her fill one afternoon when she flogged three virgins into insensibility on the secluded grounds of a Connecticut estate an admirer had put at her disposal. She threw the whip down in disgust and went to her study to ponder.
“It’s not their fault,” she thought, “they’re doing the best they know how. It’s just that there’s no sense of purpose.” She lit a joint and settled back on her zebra-skin watercouch. Plunging into a deep trance, she found many of the fragments of a vision that had been haunting her coming into place. It was an idea so compelling that she hesitated even to think about it. But she was hungry for challenge, and within an hour knew what she had to do.
“It won’t be easy.” she mused, “finding the men I need for the job. The gays are free enough, but they don’t really want to fuck women. And I have to have both male and female energy for the project. The straights are so crippled I couldn’t even put an honest proposition to most of them. Aren’t there any lovers left? Men who are pliable enough to take orders from a woman one moment and then throw her down and rip off a piece of ass the next? I need men with firm bodies and warm hearts, men with hard cocks and clear minds, men with fire in their blood and mercury in their egos. Where will I find them?”
The next day began a quest which was to take her over the entire nation and last for almost a year. She put her affairs in order and left a skeleton crew behind to answer her mail and maintain her Park Avenue duplex. And then she began her search.
The technique she used was simple. Whenever she saw a man she sensed was ripe for plucking, she would walk up to him and say, clearly and directly, “Would you like to fuck me?”
If he answered too quickly or was thrown into confusion, she abandoned him at once. She wouldn’t consider any man who wasn’t together enough to assimilate her approach instantaneously, take a moment to breathe and look at her, peer into her eyes and appraise her body, and respond from the core of some real impulse.
Those who passed the first screening were taken to her hotel room and allowed to fuck her. And as the man went through his motions, she registered impressions of his total being. If, at the end of the first fuck, she still thought he had potential, she would outline her scheme and offer him room and board to work with her. After she had hired her first helper, of course, the game became trickier, for the ensuing prospects would be confronted not only with a woman’s asking him what no other woman had probably ever asked before, never so honestly and openly, but also with the man standing next to her.
At the end of three months she had found four men.
The movement began to grow interesting as a spirit of camaraderie seized the group. It was the first time Butch had seen America and was amazed at how much of it was still unspoiled by urbanization. In Santa Fe she picked up a deaf mute, and she took her band into the surrounding hills for a retreat.
That night Butch found herself lying naked on her back, bent over a bedroll, as the men played poker and drank coffee around a fire. Every once in a while one of them would stroll over to fuck her. For her part, it was pleasant to enjoy the cool night air and look at the stars, letting her mind drift, to have her revery interrupted only by the sweet penetration of a cock or by a mouth on one of her breasts or by a hand under her buttocks.
The men, on their part, enjoyed a kind of friendship almost impossible for men to know any longer. Free from financial worries, they could allow themselves to relax. With a woman they could fuck at any time they wanted, they were liberated from sexual tension. And since they all shared the same woman under the same conditions, they had no cause for jealousy, and the bond among them grew unhampered. And it was just the strength of the bond that Butch relied upon for the realization of her vision.
At the end of a year she had gathered seventeen men and returned to the city. The power of their circle was enormous and she was ready to try the next level of operation. She got back in late August, a month before the beginning of the New York season, and started her preparations at once.
First came the costuming. The men were all dressed alike, with short leather skirts, gold earrings in their right ears, and jade bracelets on their left wrists. She led esoteric psychophysical exercises and dances to coordinate their reflexes and cement their sense of unity. She gave lectures to pinpoint her objective. During that period they were allowed no sex so their lust would build.
And when they were at a fine edge, she brought in a victim for them to practice on, a nineteen-year-old debutante, slim, auburn haired, with only a handful of fucks in her experience and a literary infatuation with lesbian love. Butch picked her up at one of the consciousness-raising sessions that have superseded bars as cruising grounds, ravished her for an entire night, and primed her for the experience of being had by a band of men. Half hypnotized, half yearning to live out a fantasy she had been barely able to admit to herself, she agreed to cooperate.
“It’s a shame to have to destroy her,” Butch thought, “but the men have to be forged into a seamless unit, and only a ritual murder will really do the trick. Besides, once she is really opened up, it would be impossible for her to live in the world anyway.”
The night of the affair, after the girl was fucked for the fifty-third time, the last edge of her resistance to madness cracked, and for the next five hours she screamed herself hoarse, pleading for more. “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” she shouted over and over again, a hundred times, a thousand times, ten thousand times, the skin of inhibition totally torn and the well of her inexhaustible sexuality yielding its waters.
Finally, Butch dispatched her cleanly, a single bullet through the temple, snuffing out the torment that had its roots in ecstasy, in the eternal restlessness of the flesh.
“This is the power we are going to tap,” Butch told the men who looked at the corpse with wide eyes. “We have just begun to unleash the limitless force of sexual energy. When we can control that force and harness the power of the orgasm, we will have a weapon which will reduce all the atomic stockpiles on Earth to the status of toys. And then we shall impose peace on the world. But first, we have to get rid of the body.”
Butch called on her reserve army of women, and found an equal number to match the men. There was another month of intense preparation, and then she was ready for her first test: the formation of a sexual cyclotron.
The women all knelt in a circle, their asses up and away from the center, while the men crouched behind them, their cocks at the openings of the cunts. Butch lay in the center, her head pointing north. At her signal, the men all entered the women at once, and began fucking with slow regular strokes. The women held hands all around, as did the men, so that from above, at a Busby Berkeley angle, the whole thing looked like a jellyfish pulsating at the edges. And at the brain of the superorganism was Butch Medusa, coursing all the vibrations through herself. The rhythm increased as a group consciousness began to form. Everyone was aware of the state of everyone else’s being.
Gradually, control shifted from the individuals to the group as a whole. A power emerged that was greater than the ability of any single person to claim. It began to take over by itself, reducing the men and women to units in a conglomerate. Unity was achieved through adherence to the dictates of the over-soul.
Orgasm approached, a single orgasm which included the bodies of everyone in the circle. The men joined through their arms, the women joined through cock and cunt, all eyes on the body in the center, all minds empty of thoughts, and Butch gathering all the energy in a single sustained awareness, they came together. And at that instant, Butch was buoyed by a sheet of blue light and lifted six feet off the floor. She hovered for eight minutes and then drifted slowly back down to the rug.
For that period of time, through the city, all hostility in every human being was allayed. Policemen stopped with their fingers on the trigger, husbands and wives stopped mid-argument, taxi drivers stopped with curses on their lips. Not one violent act was committed. Everyone was enveloped in a euphoric cloud, and for weeks afterward scientists speculated as to whether some electronic mass hysteria was the cause. Many found grounds to reaffirm their faith in God. Some claimed that extraterrestrial beings were influencing the earth.
The group was giddy with success, but Butch calmed them down. “We can’t go too fast,” she warned. “Too much joy all at once would destroy the fabric of every civilization in the world. People would revert to their simple animal state. Governments would collapse. And the havoc that followed would mean the death of millions. Let them get used to happiness little by little. And meanwhile, we can increase our numbers. One day we’ll be able to sustain the effect indefinitely, and then we can open all the switches and fuck the species into survival.”
The plan might have worked except for an unforeseen event. Butch Medusa fell in love. She met a man who filled her with all the inane and irresistible feeling such as used to propel teenagers into romantic raptures. The rational part of her realized that to give in to her emotions would destroy the final chance humanity might have to keep from going over the brink into total ruin. But she was helpless before the mood of surrender.
“It’s what I get for fooling around with all those cocks,” she said to herself bitterly. “Such a fate would never have befallen me if I had stayed a lesbian. This is what I get for trying to do good.”
The man was not the kind who would tolerate her unbridled promiscuity, so she abandoned her commune. She moved to Long Island, where he worked as a professor of sociology at Stony Brook College. She had three children and spent her days at war with herself, hating the fact that she really enjoyed her new situation. She never spoke of her past even when the women in her bridge club began to talk about sex, revealing their fantasies and infidelities. Everyone thought her a model wife, which indeed she was.
The people in the duplex, without the unifying power of her vision, soon degenerated into a crowd of rowdy low-level orgiasts. The neighbors started to complain, and one night the place was raided. They were all booked on charges of indecent behavior, given suspended sentences, and told to leave the city. The body of the girl who had been shot had been smuggled out and buried on Staten Island, and thus was never found.
ONLY HER BODY was tied down; she could still move her head and look around the room.
It was ten feet high by ten feet wide by ten feet long. It was constructed entirely of tile. There was a vent in the ceiling to let in air, and a vent in the floor to let water drain out. A spout jutted from one wall, and over it was a shelf with various instruments.
She was chained to a table built of soft stone, held utterly immobile. Her wrists were manacled at her sides, a steel band went over her waist, and her feet were fastened to raised stirrups so that her legs were lifted and spread apart. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.
The door opened slowly, a thick wooden partition with sound-proof slats cemented to both sides. The doctor stepped in. He was one of the world’s foremost therapists, having written a book called The Secondary Stutter, in which he traced all neurosis to the suppression of embarrassment people feel when farting. He closed the door behind him and beamed on the woman.
“Well, Ms Schneider,” he said in a booming voice, “how good to meet you.”
She looked up and gasped. The man wore hip boots, a long raincoat, and rubber gloves. His face was covered with a black mask. She had been told that he would want to remain anonymous, but it hadn’t occurred to her that he would hide more than his name. The social worker at the clinic she had applied to for psychotherapy had explained that she might partake of an experimental program without charge, and in addition to having her difficulties cleared up, would be helping the march of science in its striving to obliterate all mental illness. She was told that the treatment would have to remain secret and that she would not know who would be treating her, in order to protect him from lawsuits. Ms Schneider had had her doubts, but she felt in desperate need of help, and couldn’t afford to pay for it, so she agreed.
He walked over to the table. “Before we begin,” he said, his voice deep and reassuring. “I’m sure you will have a few questions. But first I’d like to tell you a little about what we’ll be doing.”
The woman shifted her weight and he glanced at her through the narrow slits of his disguise. She was thirty-nine, worked as an elementary school teacher, and had never been married. Her body was slim, the flesh still firm. Uneventful legs blossomed into arched buttocks, and small breasts nicely graced her upper chest. Her pubic hair was sparse and her outer cunt lips were folded against each other like hands clasped in prayer.
“To put it most directly,” he began, “my work is not a departure from, but the most recent development of, the psychoanalytic discoveries of Sigmund Freud. You’ve heard of Freud? The orthodox analysts would have me tarred and feathered if they knew what I was doing, but mostly because they are afraid to face the logical conclusions of their own theories. That is why I must say nothing about my work until I can prove that my technique is effective.”
The woman opened her mouth to speak but he cut in before she could say a word. “Although I subsume the work of all the men and women who have gone before me, my approach is original, a totally new synthesis. And beyond the theoretical correctness is the fact that my technique is absolute.” His voice rang with a strange vibration, sounding hollow beneath the mask. “You see, that has been the problem. All the great minds have understood neurosis and formulated their theories, but none of them could come up with a cure that would work in all cases. And this is to be my immortal contribution. The infallible cure for all mental and emotional disturbances.”
He began pacing, but since the room was so small and the table took up the central space, he was forced to walk in a circle around the woman’s body. She attempted to follow him with her eyes as he prowled. “The discovery of my technique, as with that of penicillin, was accidental. All the elements were present, and I just happened to be there to put them together. I remember the afternoon well, I had just finished reading the passage in Function of the Orgasm where Reich describes his basic insight into masochism. He found that what the masochist really seeks is the feeling of bursting open, of having his energy flow outward, through his armored self. The masochist doesn’t enjoy pain itself, but hopes to find a release in pain.
“That was on my mind when I opened my mail and found a brochure from the Eulenspiegel Society, an organization composed of sadists and masochists dedicated to erasing prejudices about their condition. I was struck by the way in which life is always struggling to express itself in a positive fashion, even when it passes through what must seem like terrible aberrations.
“It was just then I felt the first peristaltic wave that signals a bowel movement. I went into the bathroom, closing the door behind me. As I turned the knob, however, I realized that there was no one else in the house! I was thunderstruck. My shame at such a basic biological activity was so deep that it led me to the most absurb behavior, closing the door against the censure of society when no other member of society was even present. I sat down and my eyes moved idly across the wall opposite and fell upon my wife’s douche bag which hung from a hook. I don’t know how to describe that moment. Choirs sang, and the room filled with light. It all came together in a crescendo of truth.”
He stopped pacing and grabbed one of the woman’s ankles tightly. “Do you see?” he said, his voice brimming with emotion. “Does it begin to make sense now?”
The woman thought he was stark raving mad. She did what people in rising panic often do, and reached into the recent past to recall the last moments of normality she could remember. The clinic was a highly respected institution, so when the nurse had asked her to remove her clothing and had fastened her to the table, there was still some sense of being connected to the workaday world, even though the trappings were bizarre. Ms Schneider had a fully conditioned faith in public organizations, and she drew on that to counter the brunt of her perception that she was helpless in a locked room with a maniac peering down at her naked body.
“I don’t think I want to continue with this,” she bleated.
“Ah ha!” he shouted. “That’s the point. Very few people do. All other therapies have failed simply because at the point of greatest resistance the therapist allowed the patient to leave. I will change all that. My vision demands it. People must be saved in spite of themselves. That’s the whole issue with neurosis. And nothing except my technique has any chance of curing neurosis, and of ultimately saving the world. Nothing else includes all the necessary elements. Bringing forth childhood repressions, it will allow that feeling of bursting so you will stop shrinking from life, and it will put you in touch with your need and your pain. It will allow you your full range of expression, and plumb to the core of your sexual nature. It will attack your most deep-seated inhibition, the one which grows from the cornestone contribution of our civilization to the world, early toilet training.”
The woman started to protest that none of this seemed connected to the relatively uncomplicated problems she had been dealing with, but he seemed to read her mind. “Your unhappiness is felt by you in one way, but its causes are beyond your awareness. You will see. You will fight me because I will snow you your true self. You will scream, you will hate, you will cry, you will yearn, you will surrender, and you will win. You will have a total experience and for the first time in your life you will come alive. And nothing or no one will prevent you from achieving your goal, least of all yourself. I won’t let you stop yourself from becoming healthy. I will force the neurosis out of you.”
He reached to the shelf behind him and picked up a long hose with a plastic nozzle. “Ms Schneider,” he said, “you have the honor to be the first patient to try the most revolutionary treatment in the history of psychology: Enema Therapy.”
The woman sobbed openly. She could not believe that she had allowed things to go so far, that she hadn’t stopped when she saw the room, or when the nurse tied her to the table.
“I don’t want to,” she cried out to the doctor.
“Of course you don’t,” he said cheerfully, attaching the hose to the spigot on the wall. “At least, the superficial part of you doesn’t. But the deeper part, the part that brought you to seek help in the first place, is calling for help, and help it shall get.”
He brought the nozzle level with the table top. He fingered some Vaseline from a jar on the shelf and delicately applied it to the woman’s anus.
“No,” she keened, now almost totally out of control.
“You’ll see, you’ll see,” he crooned.
He placed the nozzle between her clenched buttocks and gently pushed, inserting it fully into her body. She tried to squirm away but was held too tightly. Her thighs bulged with tension. The doctor stepped back and viewed his handiwork.
“No matter what happens,” he said, “just remember one thing: no physical harm can come to you here. Your own worse enemy is tied securely to the table. You may go insane for a while, but that’s the only way to reach true sanity. There can be no reconstitution without regression, that’s my motto.”
He reached behind him and, taking a few seconds to appreciate the historic import of the moment, he turned the handle, beginning the flow of water into Ms Schneider’s ass.
She filled up for almost twenty minutes. As the hot fluid entered her, she began to howl. Again and again she reached a point where she thought she could take no more and begged him to stop, but he was implacable. “It’s all been measured ahead of time,” he would say. Pain enveloped her in waves, giving way to a peculiar kind of pleasure, a sort of tingling release. She tried to back away from the nozzle, but her body was fixed in place. The doctor got an erection, watching her thrash about, her cunt winking lewdly above the phallic nozzle, but he maintained professional discipline and his stiff cock did not show beneath the heavy raincoat.
He maintained stoic composure. Even when she seemed on the brink of collapse, ready to faint or actually pass away, he never lost the necessary faith in his treatment. She was like a film shown by a berserk projector, her body threatening to burst as it yielded thousands upon thousands of repressed memories and feelings and thoughts locked in her muscles and brain cells. It was like a seven-year analysis gone through at the speed of sound, and with total abreaction. Her frame shuddered like a test plane in a wind tunnel. And she reached a state of such complete energy expansion that her hair stood on end, rising two feet from her scalp.
Finally, he turned the water off. It had begun to seep out around the edges of the nozzle and he knew that she was filled to the brim. When she felt the stoppage of flow, there was a momentary relief, but with astounding swiftness he pulled the nozzle out and stuck in a stopper, corking her as neatly as a wine bottle.
“Oh God,” she wailed.
“We are going to remain like this for a little while,” he said. “The first phase is over, and you have survived the initial trauma. Now the real work begins, for you will no longer be able to hide behind your freneticism and hysteria. In this treatment, all the masks of defense must be stripped and you must face your actual condition. We must go on until you are literally incapable of sustaining your experience, and your mind shatters with trying to rationalize it all. Then the unconscious will be liberated and the basic structural changes can take place in your character.”
The following five hours were chaotic. She became feverish and then snapped into lucidity. She fell asleep and had bloated dreams. She babbled out loud. She tried again and again to expel the cork and push out the fluid, but was thrown back into helplessness. She entered the death state. For a while, she was raked with erotic flashes, and at one point began to grind her hips up toward the ceiling, running her tongue over her lips and moaning until she had an orgasm.
Occasionally the doctor added more water to replace what had been absorbed through the colon. Some of the sounds that ripped from her throat would have melted the heart of Satan himself, but the therapist was unshakeable.
“I must help her see it through,” he said to himself. A lifetime of work was culminating in this experiment, and not only his reputation but his deepest definition of self was at stake. He hated neurosis the way a saint hates sin. His hope to rescue the world from destruction was wild enough to tax the limits of his rational mind, but some more primitive center within him goaded him on.
“The enema,” he thought, “our only hope is in the enema.”
He watched, waiting for the sign that the treatment was complete. He did not know what form it would take, but had unmoveable faith that she would come out the other side of her heightened anguish and go on into a life of freedom. All the while she seemed to be in the throes of unbearable suffering, radical internal changes were taking place, and he could do nothing but wait.
Finally, a profound shudder went through her. She had come to the end of her metamorphosis. Her soul had been scrubbed clean and brought to its basic grain. She was utterly naked. A lifetime of overlay had loosened and now floated inside her. Her characterological tensions had been dissolved and there was no portion of her mind which was any longer unknown to her.
“I’ve done it,” he whispered, “I’ve accomplished in a few hours what therapists take years to do. She is cured. I can see it.”
At that instant, the woman let out a wail that was indistinguishable from the cry a baby lets out right after birth.
“Love,” the woman said, “I want love.”
The doctor’s eyes stung with tears. The woman had contacted the core of her being and been reborn. His approach was vindicated. He took a deep breath, and with a sweeping gesture, he pulled the plug.
She gushed for an eternity. Jet after jet of water burst from her. She vibrated with the release of all her sickness, the literal and metaphoric shit she had been keeping inside her. The brown fluid splashed on the walls over the floor, ran down the therapist’s raincoat, poured down the drain.
“Free,” he shouted, “you are free,” and turned on the spigot again, this time to play the hose in a stream over her body as he undid her locks and chains. She sprang up from the table, pulsing with the river of new life that filled her, with the cosmic energy that was once more a part of her heritage. He put down the hose and the woman stood in front of him, her face radiant with happiness, a blue aura shining around her head.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said, “everything is . . . different now.”
“I understand,” he replied.
“I didn’t realize how afraid I was. Not only on the table, but for my whole life. Afraid of everyone and everything. Why, I even used to be afraid to cross the street!”
She got dressed and the two of them talked in his office for a while. After removing his mask he proved to be a pleasant-looking man in his early fifties.
“Come back tomorrow,” he said. “I want to take some psychological tests and tape your account of your experience. I’m going to present this to the world.”
After she left, as he sat in silent enjoyment of his accomplishment, he heard a screech outside his window, followed by a hubbub of voices. Crossing the street bravely, the woman had been hit by a bus and was killed instantly. He rushed out. As he stood over her body a small tic developed at the edge of his mouth.
“It’s always more complicated than one thinks,” he muttered as he went back inside the clinic where he sat at his desk and began scribbling furiously in his notebook.
“BLESS ME FATHER, for I have sinned.”
“Yes, go ahead.”
“It is the same. I have been looking at the Mother Superior again.”
The priest sighed.
“Did it arouse you?” he asked.
The Pope looked up. “Arouse?” he repeated. “I’m almost eighty years old. I haven’t been aroused since World War II.”
“Then why do you keep going there?”
The old man shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said sadly. “I just find it compelling.”
The confessor put his hand over his forehead. He was a Jesuit monsignor who had, after two years of special training, been given the delicate task of hearing the Pope’s confessions. He could still remember the talk his own superior had given him on the first day he began his new duty. The head of The Society of Jesus, the man they called “The Black Pope,” had impressed the seriousness of the task upon him.
“The Holy Father is the voice of God,” he had said, “but he is also a man, subject to the same weaknesses which tempt all of us. You must not let his high office intimidate you. In the confessional you must treat him as you would any other sinner.” Then he had leaned forward and whispered, “Should he let fall any bit of information which might be useful to our cause . . .” he began. The monsignor had jumped up in fright. “You are not suggesting that I break the seal of the confessional!” he exclaimed. “Of course not,” said the superior, “but there is a difference between breaking and bending. I only suggest that you learn to bend, lest you yourself break. Or,” he added, squinting meaningfully, “be broken.”
“I curse the day I ever discovered that secret passageway,” the Pope went on. “I searched the records and discovered it was Alexander the Second who had it built. And it was designed by Leonardo himself.” He groaned as he recalled the night he reached for a rarely used book in the library of his private bedroom and discovered, deep in the corner of the shelf, a small switch. He pulled the lever and a small door opened at the back of the fireplace. Crouching, he entered, and found a candle that must have been made a hundred years earlier. He followed the tunnel for half a mile until he reached a narrow flight of stairs leading to a small platform. Standing on the ledge, he saw a space with two tiny discs hung from thin chains. He moved the bits of metal and was stuck by twin arrows of yellow light.
They proceeded from holes which opened into the bedroom of the Mother Superior of the order of nuns that serviced the Vatican, providing its cooks, cleaning women, and other menial servants. From the other side, the holes would not be noticed, since they were in the eyeballs of a painting of Saint Francis of Assisi, a huge masterpiece done by Michaelangelo, totally unknown to the outside world, and one of thousands of priceless art works casually strewn about the hallways of the global center of Christianity.
Peering through the holes, the Pope had looked upon a strange scene. The chief nun was lying on her cot, her knees up, her thighs trembling, her breasts heaving, her face a mask of joyful anguish, as with her hooked fingers she told the beads of her rosary. Her voice, as she recited the Ave Marias and Pater Nosters, rose and fell, at times almost indistinguishable from a deep moan. The Pope had scratched his head.
“If she wasn’t saying the rosary,” he thought, “I would swear she was having an orgasm.”
He had looked in on her dozens of times after that. He had no way of telling what was going on in her mind, what baroque images cascaded upon her seared soul like scalding sperm from a celestial cock. It was several months before it occurred to him that he might, in some obscure way, be committing a sin. He told the story to his confessor who advised sealing up the tunnel, thus removing the temptation.
“But why do that unless what I’m doing is a sin?” the Pope argued. He did not want to stop his visits since they provided him with the only private excitement in an otherwise totally public life. Yet, he could not be at peace about them. Again and again he would kneel in the confessional and state, “I’ve been watching Sister Angela pray again.”
They decided that since no sexual excitement was involved, and since the Pope had not had an erection for several decades, there could be no sin of lust. Individually and together they searched the lists of transgressions, going through the thousands upon thousands of thoughts, actions, and intentions which the Church had labelled as sin and for which a person could, with no qualms, be condemned to Hell. But not a single one seemed to cover the act of a Pope watching a nun say the rosary, despite the unorthodox way in which the prayer was said. They talked about mentioning the matter to the nun herself, but reasoned that if she were acting in innocence, their words might only raise scruples in her mind.
“If there’s no rule in the books that says it’s wrong, then why should I stop doing it?” the Pope asked.
“Why do you feel guilty about it?” rejoined the monsignor.
“Can’t you advise me any better than that? You’re my confessor.”
“Well, you’re the Pope,” the monsignor answered, “why don’t you ask God for advice?”
“I don’t believe in God,” the Pope said.
The priest felt as though he had been struck on the nose with a rubber mallet. “You too?” he said. “I thought I was the only priest who didn’t believe in God.”
“Nobody really believes in God,” the Pope went on.
“Then why do we continue to do all this?” the confessor asked, his question taking in all of Catholicism.
“Well,” the Pontiff drawled, his hands describing an arc in an Italianate gesture that seemed to subsume all the weariness of civilization, “this isn’t such a bad job. We get enough to eat, a place to sleep, nice clothes to wear. And we don’t have to knock ourselves out. I mean, it’s not like digging ditches. You know what I mean?” He winked and nudged the monsignor in the ribs. “It’s all a big game.”
“But if you don’t believe in God, why do you make such a fuss over your confessions?” The younger man was perplexed by the turn of events.
“Just because there’s no God doesn’t mean there’s no sin,” the Pope said. “A man still has to decide what’s wrong and what’s right for him. And he has to live by that if he is to respect himself at all. I bring these things up in confession because you seem like a sensible person and I enjoy talking to you.” He stood up and walked to the window overlooking an immense, perfectly manicured garden. “I never cease being surprised at finding myself here,” he said, his voice somewhat distant. “I was raised as a peasant. Becoming a priest was the easiest way to excape the drudgery of the farm. My promotions all took me by surprise, and by the time I was a bishop I realized that I was just a marker in the sweep of history, chosen by some quirk of destiny to rise to high office. When I was elected Pope I was no longer amazed.”
He turned to face the monsignor, a gleam in his eye. “But the ones who gave me the office have had ample opportunity to wonder whether I am their ecclesiastic frankenstein monster. We all know that this complex of cathedrals is nothing but an elaborate stage set, and our daily rituals an empty charade. But I am the first to openly suggest it verbally, and they are beginning to worry. And the Council I convened is only the start.”
The Pope went back and knelt on the prie dieu once more. “Since we are under the seal of confessional,” he went on, “I can tell you something. A plan to completely overshadow what has gone before.”
The monsignor blinked.
“Listen,” the Pope told him. “I’m going to announce that on Easter Sunday of next year, I will issue my final dogma, ex cathedra. I will send a call throughout the world that I will speak from my highest spiritual authority and deliver a message directly from God Himself. I will advertise it for almost a year. I will say I have had a vision, a visitation from the Throne of Heaven, and on the given day, I will open the gates of Rome to the world. I will ask the heads of state to gather in the Vatican, and call in the leaders of all the religions of man. I will use radio and television. Saint Peter’s will blaze in all its Renaissance glory, with lights, candles, torches, incense. The full Swiss Guard on display. The College of Cardinals, dressed in their finest livery, in attendance. And me on my most sumptuous throne, bedecked in gold and emeralds and diamonds and rubies. I will wear the Triple Crown on my head, and carry the mitre which signifies me as first among all the bishops of the earth. I will say High Mass and have a dozen choirs perform the most perfect works by Palestrina. And when all is prepared I will say the following:
God has spoken to me from the bosom of His infinite and mysterious wisdom. He desires an end to all false divisions between man and man. To this end, He declares all religions null and void. He will answer no prayer that is not spoken in absolute silence and privacy. As the Pope, obedient to His wishes, I hereby dissolve the Catholic Church, and urge all my fellow churchmen of rival faiths to do the same with their religions. Let us abolish formal religion in order to return to God. I speak this as an official pronouncement and declare that any Catholic who continues to profess himself or herself as a Catholic is automatically excommunicated from the Catholic Church which, from this moment on, doesn’t exist any longer anyway.
The monsignor stared at the old man. “You’re really going to do that?” he asked.
“Sure,” said the Pope cheerfully, “why not? The trend is toward unity. And the best way to unify the world is to do away with all these silly religious organizations.”
“But what about our jobs,” the monsignor cried out.
“It will force a lot of people to earn an honest living for a change,” the Pope told him. He was silent a few moments and then added, “But we still haven’t decided anything about Sister Angela. I really want to come to some kind of decision about whether what I am doing is wrong. It really disturbs me.”
The monsignor had difficulty tearing his attention away from the mammoth scheme the Pope had just outlined to turn to something he considered trivial, but it was not his hour. He pulled himself together. “What happened the last time you went there?” he asked.
“When she finished the last sorrowful mystery, she threw open her arms and screamed, ‘Oh sweet Jesus, come and take me NOW,’ and then sobbed for about five minutes, at one point so violently that she fell off the bed and began writhing about on the floor.” He paused a moment. “She had nothing on under her robes.”
“I see,” said the monsignor, whose years did not prevent him from appreciating the more sensual aspects of the scene described.
“Oh, if only I were younger,” the Pope said, “it would be a pleasure to sin with that woman.”
The monsignor finally decided that the Pope was innocent of any wrongdoing, and what he felt as guilt was merely frustration. That afternoon he visited the Mother Superior himself, and with what he knew, coupled with the prestige of being the Pope’s confessor, he did not find it difficult to suggest hearing her confession. As he suspected she might, she told him of her evening’s activities, and he advised that he could not make any judgment on her behavior unless he saw it in person. They made an appointment for him to visit her quarters a week in the future. While she said the Act of Contrition, her gray eyes looked unblinkingly into his.
An hour later, he was closeted with the Head of the Jesuit Order, requesting that his confession be heard. He reasoned that if he revealed the contents of the Pope’s confession in his own confession, he wouldn’t, technically speaking, be breaking the seal of confession, but merely transferring it. And if the man he confessed to wanted to do something with the information, he would have his own conscience to struggle with. “Let him deal with his own seal,” the monsignor said to himself.
Five days later, the Pope died under mysterious circumstances. During his brief illness he was kept inside his room and only a few cardinals, his doctor, and his confessor were allowed in.
“Tell me,” the Pope said to the monsignor during his last confession, “are they poisoning me?”
“I really don’t know,” the monsignor replied.
“It feels like they’re poisoning me,” he said. “I wonder what sort of politics is buzzing around in their heads now. Do you know who’s been fingered for succession?”
“I try to stay out of those things,” the monsignor told him.
“Very wise,” the Pope said. He took a deep breath. “You know, I looked at myself in the mirror the other day and I thought, ‘To millions of people you are the Pope, the supreme spiritual leader. But to me you’re like an old man dressed in drag, haunting this ancient marble theater.’ And now, they’re going to bring in a new act.”
The Pope died feeling he had lived an interesting life. The monsignor went that same night to the Mother Superior’s room, and discovered that she didn’t believe in God either. But did have a sense of sin.
“Well, what the hell,” he told her, “I can forgive sin. It says so in my contract.”
He heard her confession and for penance told her to recite a rosary. And as she lay before him, her legs opening with each new level of rapture she reached imagining her Redeemer descending to fill her with His joy, the monsignor slowly took his clothes off, preparing to serve as a very real handle for her fantasy.
Finally he mounted her, and as she surged against him, her robes awry, her beads rattling, he whispered over and over again. “Your sins are forgiven you, go and sin some more,” while behind him the eyes of the man who might have brought down the curtain on the entire show would never again appear to watch their scene through the holes in the ancient canvas.
NEITHER COULD REMEMBER how or where they met; they assumed it had been at a party. But suddenly, they were friends, and from the first shared an intimacy and trust which went deeper than anything they knew with anyone else, including their mates.
They experienced that rare and precious gift of total communion. They could sit for hours, holding hands, speaking or not speaking, attuned to a communication which went from words to silence and back to words without an interruption in the flow of meaning. Unaware of themselves, they often struck classic postures, and one might find them lost in one another’s eyes, their fingers intertwined, sighing openly.
Albert was a poet, and chained to his dry despair. The wife and two children who inhabited his days seemed something of an afterthought, a footnote to his central concern. He held a job to support his family, and went through the motions of relationship, but it was only when he was alone, a beam of light transforming his desk top into a stage as he hunched against the glare of the white sheet of paper that challenged him, his hand holding a sharpened pencil hovering like a hawk about to strike, that he felt whole.
Until he met Margaret.
“You are as real to me as poetry,” he told her, and she wept with the joy of recognition.
Through the years they came to comfort one another in times of crisis, to celebrate in times of plenitude. At first they attempted to integrate the singularity of their bond into their wider social contexts, but both her husband and his wife began to seethe with jealousy even though the two of them had not known so much as a kiss by way of sexual contact.
“I’d almost prefer it if you fucked her,” his wife told him, “then you’d stop idealizing her and imagining that she’s all that different from me.”
Margaret’s husband left her, and Albert began to visit her at her apartment regularly, lying to his wife about where he was. “It’s strange,” he said to Margaret, “you’re like my sister, and I have to sneak off to see you.”
At first they spoke mostly of her marriage, her suffering. Albert was a mountain of support, listening, guiding, caring. And leaning on him, she was able to effect the difficult transition from knowing herself only through the reflection of another to having a sense of identity as a single woman.
And as that took place, of course, she began to feel her need for a man once more, but this time promising herself that she would not allow herself to be vulnerable, but would take what a man had to offer by way of completion, and give back as good as she got. For her deeper aspects, she had Albert.
In this mood, her encounters with men began to take on an odd twist, for she discovered that she hungered for bad treatment. Her husband had known how to be mentally and emotionally cruel to her, and it was, in fact, his disgust for himself for falling into that trap which had prompted his leaving; but she could not find the same sort of punishment with men who were essentially one-night stands. A shift took place, subtle at first, but with rapid acceleration into clearly defined forms, until she recognized her craving for physical pain.
She didn’t want to tell Albert, for fear she would repulse him, but one night she could hold it back no longer.
“I think I’m a masochist,” she said.
“You’ve always been,” he told her. “We’ve talked about that before.”
“It’s different now,” she said. “It used to be passive and unconscious, but now I’m an active masochist. I openly ask for it.”
She told him about the previous night. She had been sitting at home, knitting and listening to music, when a great restlessness seized her. Her legs trembled and she found her heart beating quickly. She went out into the street like a zombie, heading for the nearest bar. It wasn’t too long before a man sat next to her, a grizzled dockworker in his mid-forties who looked as though he had been drinking steadily for the past thirty years. His very gruesomeness sent shivers of contorted desire through her, and while he was not cerebrally capable of formulating and articulating the nuances of the situation, his animal intelligence understood at once what was going on.
He grabbed her arm and led her out into the night. By that time she was quivering in anticipation and could barely stand. She dimly remembered lurching through obscure neighborhoods, and being half carried up a flight of stairs to his room. He flung her down on the bed and leapt up next to her. For a few moments he was pure frenzy, all the frustration of his lifetime pouring out on the willing woman who had given herself up to be used. He slapped and pawed and bunched her up, flinging her back and forth like a half-empty sack of flour. She could recall none of the details, only being aware that he might kill her, and not caring for anything except the brute energy that erupted from him.
“That’s what I remember most clearly,” she told Albert, “that I was sucking his energy from him, and I would do anything for that energy, even to letting him beat me.”
“What happened then?” Albert asked, his voice calm and gentle, his mien serene, his attitude one of total compassion and acceptance.
“He ripped my clothes off,” she continued. “And then it was sheer jungle sex. He had a cock like a policeman’s billy, and he used it the same way, to beat me with. He didn’t know what to do first, and he kept tossing me around in a dozen different ways, fucking me in the mouth, in the cunt, in the ass. All the while he kept slapping me and calling me the most foul names. And I . . . well, I enjoyed it so much it scared me. I just kept shouting, ‘Yes, yes, this is what I want, this is what I’ve always wanted.’”
She paused. “When he came, I dug my nails a half inch into his skin and he didn’t even feel it. Afterward we were both a little flabbergasted, and when I was leaving he said, ‘I’m going to make believe this was a dream because this isn’t going to happen to me again, and I don’t want to start wanting it, because you aren’t going to want me another time. Your type, you’ll do this a thousand times with a thousand different men before you’re through.’ And I knew he was right. He was so dumb and sweet and sad that I got carried away and I went down on my knees and gave him a long, slow blow job. And I loved it. Being in that tawdry apartment sucking that stranger’s cock after he had practically torn me apart.”
She looked up. “What do you think, Albert? Am I sick?”
He stroked her hair and held her head in his hands and gazed deeply into her liquid eyes.
“I’ve only had one criterion in my life,” he told her. “Anything which can be seen as poetry is its own justification. If you view it as something ugly, then that’s what it becomes. If you can sing its beauty, then that is all there is. And your soul is the soul of poetry. If you remember that, you are free to do things which would horrify the timid and the trite.”
Then he smiled, and added, “But none of that should let you forget that one time you might meet up with someone whose frustrations lie deeper than your dockworker’s, and you could very well end up tied to a bed while some maniac tattoos your body with a razor blade, Or even less dramatically, but more probably, that same man loses his sense of proportion and smashes a fist into your mouth relieving you of a dozen teeth.” He frowned, lit a cigarette, and went on, “But the real danger is more insidious. The body builds a tolerance for any sort of sensation, and if you take this path, you will start to need more and more violent behavior to achieve the same levels of stimulation. It’s like heroin or any other drug.”
She lay with her head against his chest and wept silently. “You are such a beautiful person and such a dear, dear friend,” she said. “You care so much for me, and yet you leave me absolutely free. You never censor or blame.”
“How could it be otherwise?” he replied.
The more lurid of the possibilities didn’t come to pass, but the last one did. While Margaret didn’t fall into the hands of a madman or receive any scars or permanent damage, she did enter an escalating cycle of sadomasochistic activity. Like so many in that particular endgame, she learned the value of choreography and expertise. She came to prefer a man who knew how to use a whip with discretion and skill over someone who struck out blindly and in rage.
In time she was introduced among a number of the formal and informal circles composed of people who shared similar tastes. She was initiated into more delicate forms of torture, including the judicious use of hot wax, the proper placement of needles, the hanging bar and nipple clips. She once spent a weekend as slave to an entire household, being used and abused by almost twenty men and women for three days. And, in logical progression, she developed a taste for what were called, in that clique, water games.
“It was extraordinary, Albert,” she said. “There I was, my hands tied behind me, having just been fucked by three men at once, kneeling in front of a fourth. He told me to open my mouth and I thought he wanted me to suck his cock. But when I took it, it wasn’t hard. The upper part of my face was covered with a leather mask, so I didn’t know what was coming. Then this incredible sensation, a stream of hot liquid on my tongue. I still didn’t know, and then the taste hit me. A fantastic taste, pungent and sweet and bitter and salty all at once. And then I knew. He was pissing in my mouth! And it drove me wild. I reached up and put his whole cock inside me and let him piss down my throat. And all the while my knees were shaking and I almost climaxed with excitement.”
She looked at him, wondering whether this outrage would perturb him at all. Telling him was a treat, for she was able to experience her episodes at another level, but from time to time she became afraid of alienating his affection. But he only nodded and said, “Unless the person has some disease, urine is perfectly sterile. It can’t hurt you. In fact, it’s probably safer then the city’s drinking water.”
“Have you ever done anything like that?” she asked.
“I’m afraid my sexual tastes have always been suffocatingly pedestrian,” he told her.
They continued in that manner for more than a year, and one night he arrived looking drawn. She tried to cheer him up with wine and stories of her week’s activity but he became more and more glum. Finally he blurted out, “Susan left me. She’s taken the children.”
For the first time in their long relationship, she listened more to him than he to her. And after long, long hours of his pouring himself out, exposing a weakness and sensibility to pain that he had never shown before, at four in the morning, exhausted, he asked, “Do you mind if I stay here a day or two? I don’t want to face that empty apartment just yet.”
The two days stretched into four, and the four into a week, and finally he left. It was as though he didn’t want to go, and yet felt extremely awkward staying longer. Her heart went out to him. After so many years, she had a chance to help him, to provide succor for his hurt.
But he did not call her for several weeks, and she could not reach him on the phone. Finally, she went to his apartment, and found him drunk and disheveled, the place a shambles. She got him to shower and shave, cleaned the house, and made a huge dinner for him. Later, they sat on the couch and talked. It was the first time that she knew him without his having his wife, and the difference was palpable.
During a deep silence, something totally unforeseen happened. He held her to him, as he so often had, but this time his arms tightened until her face tilted up, and his lips covered hers in a kiss that transmitted an unmistakable urgency.
Something profoundly deep within her melted. The transcendent liberty she had discovered in her body blended with the hunger in her heart, and in an instant she surrendered totally to him, on fire with that unique melange of physical desire, emotional need, and intellectual affinity to which is given the name love.
Instantly they were one, and without a thought they launched themselves into a total lovemaking which thundered with the force of so many years of waiting and building. The form was completely constructed, their friendship was absolute, she could give herself, give herself rapturously, having the abandon she had known in her body with others and the fullness she had felt in her heart for Albert. Now they were one, and it seemed as though her entire life had been a preparation for this moment.
The next morning they decided to live together, and they moved to a new neighborhood, wanting to make a clean break with both their pasts. They found an apartment, and had a glorious honeymoon of sorts for three weeks. And Without marking the moment as such, they passed into that space in which they were grafted onto one another, and could not hence-forth part without a terrible tearing and rupture. In an informal and real sense, they were married.
And one night, as they sat on the couch, reading, she felt a strange vibration in the room. She looked up from her book and found Albert watching her, his face slightly distorted.
With dire premonition she asked, “What is it, darling?”
His voice was hard, his eyes narrowed, “I was just thinking about that dockworker you told me about,” he said.
For a moment she couldn’t think of what he was talking about. And then it came to her. The dock-worker she had gone with shortly after her husband left her.
“I was thinking about all the things you did with him,” he went on, his voice thin and febrile, “letting him fuck you in the ass, sucking his cock.”
And with a slow, mounting dread she realized that his entire system was laced with scorching jealousy and anger, a pervasive and unrelenting possessiveness, spiteful and thorough. She hoped it might be a momentary mood, but at a glance she understood that she was only seeing the tip of the iceberg. For he not only remembered that one night, but had catalogued in his memory every incident she had ever told him about. He knew every action, every feeling, every moan that had been hers for the past eight years. His control was absolute.
“But that was before . . .” she began to say and stopped. What was happening was beyond logic or reason. A cold clammy hysteria clutched her belly and fear flashed in her eyes like a trapped rat in a flooded cellar. The days of physical suffering were finished, and she was returning once more to the other kind of punishment, the emotional and mental murder. Her independent self began to crumble as she found herself once again at the mercy of her vulnerability. She felt a quick impulse to flee, but was helpless against the undertow of her conditioning.
Her friend had become her husband, and he wanted revenge.
AT THE AGE of seven, Carl was taken into the old man’s house, and after proper softening with ice cream, comic books, and discreet caressing, seemed to have no objection to holding the wrinkled penis in his mouth. He sucked it until it was hard, and when the sperm was plunked on his tongue, he tasted it ingenuously, not knowing that what had just happened would raise the unbridled fury of the caretakers of the world’s official attitudes.
Ironically, the old man was a retired judge, and Carl’s parents were pleased that their son should spend time in what they thought was an educational atmosphere. Until he was nine, Carl visited on the average of once a week, until his taste for the experience began to exceed the old man’s ability to provide it. After his somber initiation into the realm of sex, he went in search of others.
His understanding of the role of sex in society was rudimentary and inchoate. Beyond the judge’s admonitions that he must never speak about what they did except to tell his parents that the nice old neighbor had read to him and given him cookies to eat, he had no grasp of the hysteria which such simple behavior as cocksucking engendered. Yet, with animal instinct, when he began his forays into the wider world, he knew to seduce only those who he sensed were willing to be had.
By the age of twelve, Carl had thrilled scores of men with his surprising eagerness to service their unspoken desires. He developed a way of standing, of looking, which set up the necessary vibrations between himself and available provender. Playing with his schoolmates, he would often disappear for an hour and prowl strange streets, finding what he wanted, and consummating his quest in hallways or cellars or the back seats of cars.
Carl knew no genital excitement himself, and was somewhat perplexed that his ministrations would bring grown men to tears. The gasps and moans which showered his ears as his delicate child’s mouth would cover a cock and his tongue tingle intricate patterns over a thigh he appreciated only through empathy. What he did seemed to make others happy, and that was gratification enough.
He was first anally penetrated at the age of fourteen one summer afternoon. He was hitchhiking through the Long Island suburbs, sizing up the men who stopped for him, and either proceeding with them to a secluded space or perceiving rapidly that there was nothing to be had from that particular person. When the huge trailer stopped, the boy was taken with an unusual premonition that set him shivering. As he climbed into the cab, he was overwhelmed with an impression of muscular thighs and calloused hands. The man glanced at him once and seemed to know what Carl wanted before he even made an overture. He took the truck to a rest stop and led the boy into the back, where an entire household of furniture was stacked and being moved from South Carolina to Wyoming. It belonged to a nuclear physicist who, sickened at the corruption within the Atomic Energy Commission, had decided to become a sheep rancher.
The man pushed Carl onto a couch and stood over him, his cock straining against his pants. With expert fingers, the lad pulled the zipper down. Gently, he tugged the thickly veined tool out, and with a flutter of his eyelids, took it between his lips. He sucked for a long time, his thin young body gradually working up to a feverish pitch, tossing to and fro as he worked on the huge organ. Then, to his surprise, the man pulled back.
“Get on your stomach,” the driver commanded.
Carl lay down, uncertain as to what would happen next. The man yanked his pants down, pulling them over his legs and past his feet, until the boy was naked below the waist, his slim virginal buttocks gleaming in the dull light. The man spit on his fingers and thrust them into the tiny anus, lubricating it slightly. Without a wasted gesture, he lowered his bulk onto the child and thrust his cock into the puckered opening.
A bolt of pain shot through the boy and he gasped for breath. But hot upon the pain came a flash of sweet burning, a tender yielding that brought tears to his eyes. Grunting and huffing, the truck driver fucked the boy a long time, putting him in a dozen different positions, maneuvering the small body with ease, using his brawny arms to arrange the slender limbs in the most open poses, and then bursting in with all the power and force he could manage.
He came as the boy knelt over the arm of the couch, his buttocks raised, his legs dangling, and himself crouching behind, half raised on his toes, his heels pressed into a chest-of-drawers for leverage. As he bucked into orgasm, he drove ruthlessly into the boy’s bowels and lifted him half a foot into the air.
Not long after that, Carl left home. He had already begun to see that the semi-conscious world of home and school was a restricting and artificial facade imposed over the true facts of life. He was developing a wisdom which transcended the artifacts of conventional knowledge, and he could no longer pretend to possess the naiveté and immaturity expected of someone his age.
He went to San Francisco, where he discovered the baths. Because of his youth, his good looks, and his unbounded willingness to please, he soon became a favorite in gay circles. One night he was spotted by a faded millionaire who offered to house him with the others in the harem he had built in an effort to pique a glutted appetite. Carl accepted, and within a short time ascended to the status of superstar.
But none of this seemed to affect his basic humility, and his unabashed desire to provide sexual pleasure for others. By seventeen, he was a virtuoso in the art of passive homosexual performance, and highly skilled in all the nuances of surrender. His patron grew proud, and then jealous, of his charge, and forbade him to have contact with anyone but himself.
Soon after, he left the mansion, and on his way along a highway, accepted a ride from a bestial looking motorcycle rider who took him to his camp, where several dozen others lounged in snarling lassitude. The boy was thrown to them the way meat is thrown to lions in a zoo, and for several days he served as a slave to their every whim, catering to their surly need for stimulation.
On the fourth day, lying over a pile of sleeping bags, having been fucked by twelve men in succession, he was initiated into the form that he had been unconsciously evolving toward for his entire life. The leader of the pack, kneeling behind him, placed his bunched fist between Carl’s buttocks. The boy gasped, and then relaxed, and the huge curled hand pressed tightly against his asshole. Slowly, he gave way, and the fist entered the hot opening. The universe seemed to crash about Carl’s head as the man behind him continued to push, engulfing his hand, his wrist, and then his whole forearm up to the elbow. At that point, he stopped, and with a deliberate motion, flexed his entire arm, filling the pulsing channel completely with hard bulging muscle.
Carl smiled in ecstasy. After a decade of service, he felt he was finally being satisfied.
He continued drifting from adventure to adventure until one morning an eerie mood enveloped him. He was walking down a street and as he looked at the faces of the people who passed, he realized they were all asleep. He saw that, through his peculiar metamorphosis, he had become an utterly superior human being. By virtue of having lived in the realm of excess, where others were too fearful to venture, he had attained a depth of awareness that set him apart from the human herd.
Not intrinsically cerebral, and his formal education having ended early, he was not able to articulate the insight with any degree of precision. But as the bright western sun sparkled in his eyes, something like a religious revelation exploded in his brain. If it is true that a person who masters any one thing has mastered all of life itself, then he was a realized human being, for he had become an emperor of perversion.
Thereafter he wandered the country like a ghost. Men would encounter him and tell their friends of an apparition of startling beauty, who sucked cock and allowed himself to be laid and gave a pleasure that went deeper than the sexual, that ultimately soothed the soul. And if asked what he wanted in return, he would say simply, “Fist-fuck me, please,” and would lie in rapture as the clenched hand went deeper and deeper into his entrails.
There is a photo of him, the only one in existence, in which he is suspended from a wooden crossbeam. He is shown being lowered onto two men, each of whom has one arm, up to the elbow, buried in his ass at the same time. The boy’s eyes are closed, so it is impossible to tell what he is thinking. His face is in repose, and his body is in a state of complete relaxation. A Buddhist monk, seeing the picture, was heard to exclaim, “That is a man who has attained Nirvana.”
He was found dead, at the age of twenty-four, wrapped in a mattress in a ravine outside of Los Angeles. No one knew his name or where he had come from, so he was buried in a public field. His life had been a total and selfless giving to others, and he was not known to have sought anything for himself, except the blissful trance state which occurred whenever he was lovingly fist fucked.
Several of the members of Troy Perry’s Gay Church subsequently began an official movement to have him proclaimed as their first saint.