“In Saudi Arabia, where I grew up, my brothers and father would fill a box with rocks and line me up against the wall for what I’m about to do tonight.”
—Marika Madiha
McMahon opened the door to his palatial hotel suite and entered his sitting room. He paused to study the long, rectangular, intricately carved ebony coffee table in the room’s center, which was surrounded by a curving couch of vermillion velvet and overstuffed chairs of the same gaudy hue. Various other pieces of furniture, including the large ebony desk flush against the far wall, filled out the rest of the room, and a plush wall-to-wall crimson carpet covered the floor. McMahon loved this suite even though he derided its garish décor to friends—scarlet as sin—as “whorehouse red.”
Still he was in a foul mood. He’d spent the evening desperately searching for the blisteringly hot, raven-haired Middle Eastern woman in the front row, the one in the short yellow dress and spike heels, whose come-fuck-me eyes had cock-teased him throughout his show. He’d told his producers and production assistants not to let her leave without him meeting her. Unfortunately, they’d returned empty-handed, saying she’d bolted out a side door and vanished without a trace. He’d wasted so much time yelling at his staff, drinking scotch, smoking his hyperpotent hydroponic weed, scrutinizing security camera footage, interrogating everyone around him in an insane attempt to track her down—to learn her name, get her contact info, anything—that before he realized it, it was too late to find another date. Anyway, he was too drunk and too hopelessly stoned to get laid. Wasted, horny, pissed off, miserable and exhausted, he’d finally returned to his hotel.
Throwing his suit coat on the couch, he momentarily glanced at the 96-inch flat-screen TV hanging on the wall. Too tired and grumpy to watch the tube, he trudged over to his bedroom, opened the door and walked in.
To his undying surprise, the mystery woman was in his bed, leaning against pillows, which were plumped up against the white padded-leather headboard. Scantily attired in a short black negligee with matching six-inch heels, she was pouring herself a goblet of Cristal, which had been chilling in a silver ice bucket.
“Mr. McMahon, I hope you don’t think me too forward. In Saudi Arabia, where I grew up, my brothers and father would fill a box with rocks and line me up against the wall for what I’m about to do tonight.”
“Luckily, I share none of your country’s values, attitudes or beliefs.”
She treated McMahon to a dazzlingly bright smile.
“Please, Mr. McMahon, make yourself comfortable.”
With a nonchalant shrug, he began taking off his shoes, socks and pants.
She then poured him a goblet of champagne.
Stripped naked except for his white shirt, he sat down next to her, leaning back against the pillows. He sipped the champagne and groaned with pleasure.
“Allah never tasted anything better,” McMahon said.
“Then Allah sold himself short. There are far better things in this life than a mere taste of the bubbly.”
Unbuttoning his shirt, she leaned her chin on his chest and stared longingly into his eyes.
“I intend to bring you far more pleasure than a simple glass of fermented grape juice.”
“Even though I say such terrible things about your faith, your country and your people?” McMahon asked.
“You just don’t know us yet.”
“I want to get to know you very much—every square centimeter of you,” McMahon said.
“You’re about to get to know me better than you think.”
Seating herself on his lap, she placed her hands around the back of his head and pulled him toward her, artfully rimming the inside of his mouth and teeth with her licentious lips and dexterous tongue. She finally pulled away and stared searchingly into his eyes.
“Maybe you know me too well,” McMahon said.
She kissed him again, long, hard, all the while rubbing his chest, stomach and thighs. Pulling way again, she said:
“Would you like to know me, our ways, our wicked, wicked ways … far, far better?” the woman asked.
“As long as it doesn’t violate my religious principles?”
“Which are?”
“Anything that don’t fly or have web feet.”
“Do you see any feathered wings or webbed toes on me?”
“Not a one.”
“Good, because I want you to not only know us but to see the world through our eyes. I want you to understand us down to the core of our being—our wants, needs, dreams and desires.”
“You sure that doesn’t involve sex acts with dromedaries?” McMahon said.
“No, but maybe it might involve some very unconventional congress with me,” she said, “an erotic odyssey which will change you from your hairs’ split ends to the bottom-most soles of your feet.”
“Then I’m all yours,” McMahon said. “I want to know everything about your world—you, in particular—down to the last microscopic detail.”
“Then you must. You shall.”
She turned away and poured him another glass. When she turned back to him, she had the champagne goblet in one hand and a big bulging doobie along with a box of wooden matches in the other.
“You speak continually of your love of the herb. I thought you might like to sample some of my country’s hashish. It is utterly illegal in our kingdom, but some of our more adventurous citizens grow it in greenhouses and labs. They are quite scientific in their methods, and I am told it is the finest in the world.”
McMahon immediately took it from her, struck a match on the box and fired it up.
Holding the smoke in a full half minute, he languorously let it out.
“Wow!” was all he could say.
“In my country, we are experts in fine herbs, Mr. McMahon,” the woman explained. “Hashish is derived from the Arabic word Hashashiyyin, meaning ‘hashish-eating assassin.’ In this case, however, this herb will only assassinate your mind.”
He immediately took another pull, held it in.
Then another.
Then another.
“Excuse me while I bogart this joint,” McMahon said.
“Help yourself,” the mystery woman said. “I’ve already indulged.”
She poured him another goblet of champagne.
“There,” the woman asked. “Are you now feeling better about our country, our way of life?”
“Am I ever.”
“Even though you’re a Muslim-hater and you view women as your rightful, lawful prey, as your own eminent domain—as mere disposable pleasures?”
“Yes, but I’m oh-so-lovable.”
He took another long pull on the doobie.
“Maybe I can break down your oh-so-hard resistance,” the woman said.
“I can be an awfully hard nut to crack.”
“Consider me your personal nutcracker.”
“But I am notoriously stubborn.”
“Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff until I … blow … you down.” She began massaging the insides of his thighs.
McMahon lay on his back and stared at the ceiling.
The room was slowly starting to sway, then revolve.
“Who are you anyway?” McMahon asked.
“The one who loves the pilgrim soul in you,” the woman said.
“You’d have to find it first.”
“Is it small?” the woman asked.
“Vanishingly minute.”
“Really tiny?”
“Approaching nullity.”
The room was now starting to spin, even as she continued her sensuous caresses.
“Suppose I told you, Mr. McMahon, doomsday looms. Suppose I told you that I fear for your immortal soul.”
“Right now, I’m more concerned with my mortal flesh.”
“Then let us tend to your trembling and tortured loins,” the woman said.
She crawled down his body and turned around, until her head was directly over his crotch. Giving McMahon the most terrifyingly wicked smile he’d ever seen in his life, she lowered her eyes, her face, her mouth.
Suddenly, he was possessed with an all-consuming passion for the gorgeous Middle Eastern mystery woman, whom he’d believed he would never see again. Flipping her on her back, he threw himself onto her, wanting to devour her whole—body, mind and spirit—to touch and tongue every throbbing, palpitating inch of her, to drive her into fierce frenzies of insane excitation till there was nothing left to rub, caress or luxuriate over.
When neither of them could stand it any longer and they were both delirious with lust, he entered her. Racked by a heart-pounding, mind-cracking, hip-slamming fury, he was no longer a man but a trip-hammer from hell, going at her harder, harder, faster, faster, forcing her on a horrific hajj—that he seriously doubted she was prepared to make—a demented journey to the end of her soul’s blackest night. Lost in the throes of their infernal fornication, they were fucking their brains out in a never-ending apocalypse of crazed cravings and criminal carnality.
Every time she came, she howled “Daruba!” and “Haram!” which he vaguely recollected as Islamic pleas for religious absolution. The realization that every one of her orgasms filled her with Islamic guilt and religious self-hate, combined with all the weed and alcohol he’d consumed, got him even hotter, turned him on even more, making him hopelessly, helplessly, hideously horny. He was employing every sick, dirty, kinky, perverted stratagem in his interminably twisted trick book of sexual turn-ons. Driving her to the furthest extremes of her most dangerous desires, McMahon kept her coming over and over and over again, her whole body crescendoing and climaxing into one final mind-blowing, pelvis-pounding, obscenity-screaming, genital-detonating roar of … DA-RU-BA!!!!!
Which McMahon loosely translated in his lust-mad, doped-up mind as:
“Allah, please forgive me for … COMING SO GODDAMN HARD WITH THIS OUT-OF-CONTROL INFIDEL … MO-THER-FUCKKK-ERRR!!!”
Then McMahon was exploding into a universe-generating Big Bang of lewdly libidinous proportions. It began with the creation of hydrogen, then helium, then stars, black holes, the heavy elements coalescing into solar systems, galaxies, the Milky Way, Earth, humankind. McMahon was born and lived his life right up through to this evening’s show, right up through the entering of his hotel suite, finding the enigmatic creature in his bed, continuing right up to the point that they were making love, getting and giving head, fucking like maniacs, then coming over and over, the ecstatically electrifying spasms pumping out of him and her, through them both, again and again, a planet-killing Armageddon of voraciously voluptuous, luridly prurient convulsions.
Now, even worse, he was not the only thing going nuts. The room itself was vibrating, twitching, gyrating, ripping itself apart. It was as if his inner being, his mind’s eye was free of his body, was drifting high overhead, floating above him along the ceiling, staring down on his trembling remains, spread-eagled on the bed. He was too weak to move; the mystery woman was now doing all the work, her head between his legs.
Then he was back in his body, watching her, her head still going up and down, up and down, in an eternal sequence of concupiscent collisions, merging into one single, white-hot, agonizing, insatiable, gargantuan … Götterdämmerung.
Then the room detonated too, blowing him out of the hotel, up above the city, through the stratosphere and into space. All by himself, naked, alone, soaring away from Earth, past Mars, Jupiter, he was picking his way through the shooting gallery of a million billion careening asteroids, then Saturn, Neptune, on and on, into the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt, the circumstellar disc beyond Saturn, home to Neptune and Uranus, that remote realm where the planetoids lived, thrived and died. Cavorting with the comets, he bid the solar system a fond farewell, spun free of Sol’s stern hold, and shot off into the everlasting vastness of the interstellar void.
And then suddenly everything around him was whirling out of control, a widening gyre that knew no stint, a burgeoning vortex of infinite infinitesimal bits, beyond time, beyond God, beyond madness, clarity and everything in between. Then the maelstrom was expanding exponentially, everywhere at once, ballooning into a massive ball of flame, and he was hurtling through it, plunging headlong into hell’s deepest abyss. Down, down, downward to darkness he plummeted, until, in the end, all he wanted was surcease, all he wanted was for the terror to end. And then, to his surprise, his wish came true. Infinitude groaned, Eternity closed, the lights went out, and with a last gasping sob, Daniel McMahon gave up the ghost.
After that he knew no more.