Contours of Darkness (9 page)

Aaron waited until both of them had regained their breath, letting the cycle conclude, and then pushed his face into the slack softness of her stomach. He bit the grainy skin until she put her hands on the back of his head, forcing him down, making him burrow deeper. 'You sure are hungry,' she said. Her words released him further, and he gouged into her the way a shark sweeps in to scoop meat from a wounded whale. He could feel the organs against his nose, and the atavistic cannibal instincts all rose up as he lost his sense of balance and leapt into the full ritual, clamping on her hip bones, scratching her thighs, throwing her from side to side to bite the fleshy parts of her, her arse, her calves, her shoulders. For her it was a cacophonous symphony of sensation. Temporarily crippling ripples of indescribable immediacy thrilled through her. Mammoth frissons held her in thrall.

He took her toes and half of one foot into his mouth and set her to writhing as he licked the spaces between each toe with his tongue. He lapped the soles of her feet like an abject slave. He made slurping sounds. 'Lordy, lordy,' she thought. 'It's all blocked up inside him.' The men who came to her fell into two categories: those who felt so much shame and guilt that they fucked briefly and left hurriedly, and those who used her as she was meant to be used, as the one place where they didn't have to be afraid to be naked. And over the years she had heard all the stories, seen all the drama, and known all the secrets that the heart of man can hold. She knew more of human nature than any psychiatrist or priest, for unlike the respectable professionals, the tool she used was her total self, and unlike them, she did not forbid the full range of intimacy. Men came and paid her to pee in their mouths, and she watched, dispassionate, as they grovelled under her. And others tied her with leather, and blistered her nipples with lit cigarettes, and she watched, compassionate, as they lorded it over her.

Aaron crept up the length of her legs, his eyes wild, his teeth bared, to her cunt. She saw him coming and closed her eyes again. T don't even want to know what's going on inside him' she thought. T got enough to do to take care of myself.' And like a woman who watches a man go to his death by drowning so she can get into the lifeboat, she settled back and relaxed to enjoy the voyage.

He sucked at her cunt for almost an hour. Like a violinist who is able to so wrap himself up in the total concentration necessary to produce his work of art, he swept forward, leaving all considerations aside except the fullest, most perfect eating of a cunt possible. He spent aeons on the tastes, the sweet early paraffin secretions, the acrid flow when the sex got dirty in both their minds, the wholesome smell like baking bread right after orgasm, passing almost immediately and reverting to a thin machine-oil flavour. He mar-veiled at the versatility of the organ, its ability to change its mood the way a chameleon changes colours.

He licked the rare texture of the flesh between the outer cunt lips and the first bulge of thigh, and then each of the individual layers, and into the central bud, looking like the corona formed when a drop falls into a saucer of milk. She was tight at first, unwilling to loosen up to the intense assault. He took immense patience, licking up and down the slit for a long time, going from the rough bitterness of her arsehole through the yielding salt softness of her bulging slit, over the delirious clitoris and into the starched pubic hair. Finally, he brought his hands up and peeled the cunt open with his fingers, took a deep breath, pressed his lips to the hole, and blew inside as though he were filling a balloon. She gasped and her legs went up slowly and regularly, like counterweights on an elevator. He sucked all the air out and continued the suction until he had pulled her cunt lips into his mouth and between his teeth. 'God damn,' she hissed. He let go, and her cunt belched, the stale fumes from inside rushing out in a wet gust as she pulsed in deep contractions. He covered the rippling hole with his mouth and let its excretion pass into him, taking the full measure of its vileness with the pungency of its beauty.

Again and again he blew her, until she was weak with coming, and then he wormed his tongue inside, feasting on the textures of the lax tunnel, lapping tiny pearls of dew from the ridges of the cave. And when he could not ring a single variation more on the theme, he came up on his knees and peered down on her. His cock, rousing itself from the hibernation imposed on it while waiting for the winter of the mouth to pass, stirred and grew stiff.

She sighed, locked her hands under her knees, and waited, knowing that in a moment he would enter. Her cunt felt like a steaming marsh. She had lost all sense of its firmness. There was only a hot zigzagging tingling between her thighs, and the hard cock would bring it all together into a single sharp spasm of completion. She was opened up.

He slid slowly towards her, his cock pressed the fringes of her saturated cunt, and he started to fuck her.

He felt free. He had paid for her time with money, and had paid for her attention with lavish service, and now could reap the harvest of his pleasure unencumbered by any consideration of having to please her. It was in this area that he often came to grief with Cynthia. The inhibitions which kept him from fucking her cleanly, and the lack of expertise which kept her from fucking him fully, forced them into a mutuality, which was most glorious when it was an actual exchange and not a muddled compromise; but it was almost always the latter.

Aaron tingled from the moment he penetrated the woman. He lay fully on top of her, not supporting his weight on his elbows, but letting her have the bulk of his body. He let himself be absorbed, sucking in through his pores all the energy he had lavished upon her. She fed it back unstintingly, holding herself against him, ready to let him gorge himself while he pumped his cock into her.

He humped the small of his back, bringing his cock in at a more vertical angle, rubbing against her clitoris, making her squirm under him, her arse wrinkling the sheet as she moved. He brought his hands under the rolling cheeks and felt with his fingers into the crack, touching the rough kernel of her arsehole and the bottom stretches of her cunt. He kept her wriggling while he planted his hands in the most intimate crevices of her body, letting her feel him feeling her feel her own wanton response. Aaron shuddered and moaned. His mind went black.

She put her hands on his back and dug lightly into his skin with her fingernails. The encouragement cheered him on, and he slid back so that he entered her from the bottom angle, allowing his cock to spring forward to its regular upward tilt. He felt the tender vein along the bottom rub the lower channel of her cunt. Her legs trembled.

'Oh, my poor knees/ she said. 'I sure am going to be stiff in the morning/

'No pity,' he said, and thrust into her with a more vibrant pitch. He hit a tender spot too hard and she screamed. He pulled back and touched her there again. It was a blunt knife hitting into her core, and he pressed it in once more, increasing the pressure until she realised it wouldn't damage her, and gave into the sensation of being stabbed at her centre. He came at her again and again, causing her to groan, and then cry out in deep throaty moans, spilling her soul out in sound.

Like a tuner listening to the fine vibrations of a piano cord, he tasted her voice until he had homed in on the source he was seeking, slipped his cock up and under to a deeper place inside her, and from the sudden sense of convulsion in her cunt and the column of heat coursing up the shaft, he knew he had found the vulnerable core.

She swooned and was transfigured. All the harshness drained from her features, the weariness, the cynicism, the restraint. She allowed herself the grand luxury of surrender to herself, and was made beautiful by it. He saw her in her archetypal guise, the black skin glistening, the strong body swinging through high jungle grass, the haunches and arms muscled, and her face a broad field of living sagacity, sensitive to the teeming and intoxicating rushes of life within her and without.

'Earth,' he thought, and then, 'Mother.' The two words began as separate conceptual entities and joined in a single meaning. The ancient myths came into vital focus and Aaron lived for a moment in the spirit of the planet.

She began to move beneath him, not so vigorously as to upset his own equilibrium, but with enough gusto to assist, like a horse that enjoys the way its rider feels on its back. Her many years of practice allowed her to maintain a discipline of movement without tampering with the flow of energy which gave rise to that movement. He let his strictures go and let himself move freely. His eyes closed, his mind empty, all immediate concerns dissipated, he gave all his attention to the life between her legs. His cock grew thick and hot and sent sweet tremors into his groin. He fucked her without reserve.

Without warning, he felt his orgasm announce itself. His first impulse was to hold it back for he did not want the intense pleasure to come to an end. But he kept himself from interfering and watched the development take its course. The sensation of coming rose higher and higher, and he relaxed every muscle in his body, especially the sphincter of his anus, and his desire to let go of the bubbling sperm clashed with his desire to let it subside. 'Stop moving,' he whispered to the woman under him. She froze on the spot, and they clung to one another with the silence of submarine officers listening for the fatal hum of ship motors overhead. The ejaculation lost its momentum and slowly evaporated.

With a happy jolt Aaron realised that he had got through a very narrow spot and entered a new level, that he could continue to fuck as he had been doing, staying at the very edge of coming. He shook his head and threw himself back into the fucking, words coming unexamined from his mouth, his limbs fluttering, his torso shifting. He fucked her until he felt her, and at the impact of contacting the reality of the person underneath him, he was grabbed up in an orgasm the way a kitten can be picked up by the scruff of the neck, and was shaken by it, the shudders wracking his body without his having the slightest say in what went on. He came into her with relief and gratitude, and then collapsed on her breast.

She held him a long time and did not move. She was tremulous with need. Towards the end he had lifted her utterly out of herself and brought her a way of being that made all the rest of her life seem drab and shabby. For a few brief minutes she had soared like the eagles over the mountains of earth. And just when she thought she might lift bodily from the bed and once and for all be free of all the pain and misery that was her day to day existence, he exploded inside her and lost all his power, and she tumbled down in the wake of his ruin.

She felt his cock get soft and begin its slow slide out of her. She was close to tears. It moved slowly and slimily, retreating from the niche in her where not all men went, past the pulsating walls, by the lips, and then outside. His cock was gone, and a cold breeze like a wind from the grave flickered over her cunt. It was finished. And once again she berated herself, again for allowing herself to forget that the fire of passion stoked by a man always ends in the cold ashes of loneliness afterwards.

She stared at the ceiling, tracing the tiny cracks in the plaster. If an earthquake was to hit now and kill me on the spot,' she thought, 1 wouldn't mind.' And on the phonograph Billie Holiday sang about life's being so sad she just wanted to end it all.

Aaron got up and dressed. He felt as though the two of them had just officiated at some diabolic rite. He knew her at great depth and yet not at all. He would almost certainly never see her again, this woman who had accompanied him through such ferocious changes. He gave her thirty dollars, indicating that he didn't want any change. She put on a dressing gown and took him to the door.

'Why is it like this?' he asked. 'There must be some way out of it all.'

'You got a plan?' she said.

'I feel so good and I feel so bad,' he told her. 'I don't know which way to go.'

She held his face between the palms of her hands, like a mother holding her small son. Tve found it and I've lost it so many times,' she said, 'that I know there ain't nothing but the coming and the going.'

She closed the door behind him and he went back to the empty apartment where he watched a dull movie until he fell asleep. He said nothing to Cynthia the following day, and that night, when they fucked, he wept in her arms. She took it as evidence of love.

Blind Vision

With labyrinthine stealth, the acid dissolved the neuron pathways in Aaron's brain, exposing his thoughts to their own reality. He woke up to his own structure, an event which surprised him by coming as no surprise. Nothing changed; he merely realised the fact of his own existence, saw himself as a thing in the universe, in relation to all other things. The world manifested itself to him as though for the first time and the vaunted clear white light turned out to be nothing other than, the mysterious glow which imbues the mundane and to which most people, in their usual sleepwalking state, are blind.

He looked about the room. The huge easychair, the fifty-year-old walls with the coats of white paint he had sweated to apply five months earlier, the Wool-worth lamps that had seemed such a bargain at the time of purchase, all stood forth, radiating a sense of presence that gave them the aura of being alive. What he did not expect, and what rushed upon him with suffocating speed, was their ominous quality of structure and function. The housing and furniture which had been designed to serve the needs of his body became the parameters beyond which his body could not move. A vision of a monkey bar, of the type that was once popular in the playgrounds he frequented as a child, seemed to symbolise his life, which appeared as an endless scramble from one level to the next, from one section to another. He saw his existence as an exercise in glorified futility.