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“What was that?” he asked in amazement.
“Now you understand,” Undine said. “Orgasm is more than just a squirt of salt fluid.” She was moving atop him, like a ship in the swell before the storm, her eyes half-lidded, her mouth open slightly. She licked her lips, smiled almost jeeringly. Her hair and breasts were sweaty. “You haven’t mentioned Gregorian recently. Have you run out of questions?”
“Just the opposite, I’m afraid.” He played with one breast, tracing circles about the aureole, lightly tugging at the nipple with thumb and forefinger. “My questions multiply with each answer. I don’t understand why your mistress mistreated Gregorian so, why she tried to break him with pain. Surely that was counterproductive.”
“With Gregorian it was,” she agreed. “But had it worked . . . There’s really no way to make you understand this without undergoing a similar experience. You’ll have to take my word for it. But when the goddess claims your life, the first thing she has to do is to shatter your old world, in order to force you into the larger universe. The mind is lazy. It’s comfortable where it is, and can only be driven into reality with pain or fear.
“But this is never done with malice, but with love. At the end of her test, Madame hugged me. I thought she despised me, I believed I was about to die, and then she hugged me. I can’t tell you how good that hug felt. Better than anything we’ve done tonight. Better than anything I’d ever felt before. I cried. I felt wrapped in love, and I knew that I would do anything to be worthy of it. I would have died for that woman in that instant.”
“But this didn’t happen with Gregorian.”
“No.” She rocked slightly from side to side, moving him within her. “She never broke Gregorian. She tried many times, and each failed attempt made him stronger and more savage. And that’s why he’s going to kill you.” Abruptly she rolled him atop her. For a second he was afraid he’d hurt her with his weight. “Well, in the meantime,” she said, “I have my own uses for you.”
He had four more orgasms before he finally came, and that final time was of an order of magnitude more intense than anything he’d ever felt before.
He did not so much fall asleep as pass out.
When he awoke, Undine was gone. Groggily he looked about the room: The furniture remained and a few discarded oddments. The fantasia lay on the floor, sad and a little tattered, several of the long rainbird plumes already broken. But there was an emptiness, a sense of abandonment, about the room; all personal touches were gone. He dressed and left.
It was late in the morning. Prospero was already high in the sky, and the town was empty. Doors hung open. Bedthings lay where they’d been flung in the grass. The husk of last night’s fantasias littered the streets, like abandoned cicada shells. The bureaucrat strolled back to the center of Rose Hall, head clearing slowly, and felt like singing. His body ached, but pleasantly; his cock felt pink and raw. All he needed was a good breakfast to put him right with the world.
Chu stood by a truck with the NEW BORN KING painted on the fender, and ARSHAG MINTOUCHIAN’S STRING THEATER and ILLUSARIUM OF HEAVEN AND HELL, THE TEN MILLION CITIES AND THE ELEVEN WORLDS in seven garish colors on the van’s sidewall. The bureaucrat remembered seeing it last night, shutters open and a puppet play in progress. Chu was talking to a fat, sweaty man with a fastidious little mustache. Arshag Mintouchian himself, evidently. “Have a good night?” she asked, and abruptly burst into laughter.
The bureaucrat stared at her in astonishment. Then Mintouchian too began laughing.
“What the hell’s so fu
“Your hand,” Chu said. “Oh, I see you’ve had a night to remember!” Then they were off again, the two of them, soared aloft on gusts of laughter like kites.
The bureaucrat looked at his hand. There was a fresh new tattoo there, a serpent that circled the middle finger of his left hand three times and then took its tail in its mouth.
6. Lost in the Mushroom Rain
“I’m the biggest thing you’ve ever seen,” Mintouchian’s thumb said. “Hey, I don’t want to brag, babe, but you’re go
“Mmmm, I can see that,” said Mintouchian’s other hand, the one held closed with a long vulval slit between thumb and forefingers slightly ajar. “Come here, big boy!” He gaped it suddenly wide.
Everybody laughed.
“Modeste!” Le Marie called. “Arsene! Come and look at this.”
“This isn’t really the sort of thing children should witness,” the bureaucrat demurred softly. Two pig farmers and one of the evac pla
But none of the youngsters came in from the next room. They were watching television, engrossed in a fantasy world in which people traveled between stars not in lifetimes but in hours, where energies sufficient to level cities were wielded by lone altruists, where men and women changed sex four and five times a night, where everything was possible and nothing was forbidden. It was a scream straight from the toad buried at the base of the brain, that ancient reptile that wants everything at once, delivered to its feet and set ablaze.
The children sat in the darkness, saucer-eyed and unblinking.
“I’m so good. I’m go
“So you keep saying.”
It was raining outside, but the kitchen was an island of warmth and light. Chu leaned against a wall, drink in one hand, careful to laugh no more than anyone else. The room smelled of fried pork brains and old linoleum. Under the table Anubis noisily thumped his tail. Le Marie’s wife bustled about clearing away the dishes.
The landlord himself brought out two more pitchers of blood mixed half and half with fermented mare’s milk. “Have another glass! I can’t give it away!” The ski
“Don’t you want any?”
“No, no, I’m stuffed.”
“Try some! Do you have any idea how much this costs down North?”
Smiling, the bureaucrat held up his hands and shook his head. When the old man shrugged and turned away, he slipped backwards out onto the porch. As the door was closing, Mintou-chian’s fist spat out a limp and subdued thumb.
It giggled. “Next!”
Raindrops fell like small hammers, so hard they stung when they struck flesh. The bureaucrat stood on the lightless porch, staring through the screens. The world was all one color, neither gray nor brown but something that partook of both and neither. A sudden gust of wind parted the rain like curtains, and gave him a glimpse of the barges anchored on the river, then hid them away again. A house and a half down the street, all of Cobbs Creek faded to nonexistence.
Cobbs Creek was all hogs and lumber. The last of the pigs had already been butchered and hung in the smokehouses, but logs still floated down the creek to the mills, in a final fevered slashing of timber before the tides turned the trees to kelp. The bureaucrat watched the rain splash mud knee-high on the clapboard walls. It forced up the stale smell of earth from ground and road, tempered by the rising odors from the tomato bush by the herb garden and the red brick walkway around to the back.
He felt sad and lost, and he could not stop thinking of Undine. When he closed his eyes, he could taste her tongue, feel the touch of her breasts. The nail tracks lingering on his back stung at the memory of her. He felt utterly ridiculous and more than a little angry at himself. He was not a schoolboy to be haunted so by the vision of her eyes, her cheeks, the warm amusement in her smile.