Phoenix Café (23 page)

“Catherine?”

A sound of flint striking against metal. A chip of orange light broke out. She’d almost stumbled over one of the guards; it was Mâtho. She dropped on her haunches beside him.

“I want to leave,” she whispered. “How do I get out of here?”

“You just leave,” he said. “If you want to go back, you’re back.”

But the Blue Forest stayed, strong as pitch and strangely scented.

“Everybody wants different things,” whispered Mâtho, very sad in the glow of his tinder-box light. “But it fits together somehow.” He was holding her hands. He seemed to understand that someone might even want, positively want, the shame and sorrow of loving a person like Misha Connelly.

“We don’t have to go anywhere,” he said. “We can have more and more worlds, without going anywhere. A universe can fit into someone’s head. I think that’s what God said to Adam and Eve in the garden. Stay here. Become more and more yourselves: don’t spread out and get lost. But they wouldn’t listen.”

She crouched there for a while, feeling the forest that stretched limitless around them, immovably real as her need for pain. Then she went back and lay down again in her place; and waited for the night to end.

iv

Misha had rented a room, an hour’s journey away in a neighboring
quartier.
Chance opportunities were no longer enough, they needed a place to go. His family home was impossible, Catherine understood that. She also understood that he wanted badly to rape her in Maitri’s house: but that she could not allow, however covertly; and she waited in vain for him to force her outright. He was too frightened of the aliens.

They traveled to their secret room together one day, a short time after Catherine’s visit to the Blue Forest. He collected her from the Giratoire in a cab, but had it drop them at the nearest lev station. He repeated his warning about traveling on the metro alone, then led her to the standard class gate. Their carriage was crowded. They stood in the aisle, pressed by the bodies of other passengers. He bent to whisper in her ear.

“You see why you mustn’t do this?”

“What happens?”

“Someone will fingerfuck you. They’ll get a hand inside your honor cloak and up your skirts when you’re pushed so close in the crowd that you can’t escape. Or they’ll rub up against the cleft of your buttocks, and come that way. You’ll find their stuff on your clothes afterward.”

“Who will do this?” she asked softly.

“Some man. The sperm count may be low but there are enough men around. Not only in my party: think of Joset. It used to happen to my sister.”

Catherine stood in the charged air, surrounded by these secret gropings and penetrations. The women were all veiled; or the veiled were all women. It had become a city ordinance, in the growing intercommunal unrest. Reformer women, and the less male-looking Reformer men, must all wear the chador in public, or their safety could not be guaranteed. These were ordinary people, far from the baroque inventions of the rich, but they were playing the same game. The women’s heads were bowed. The smothering cloaks had the strange effect of making their bodies naked. They were dry-mouthed and compliant, nipples stiff and cunts wet with perverse arousal. They had chosen their role. Like Catherine they were greedy for abuse. Maybe they thought they were paying for humanity’s crimes. Maybe they thought that this way, some day, they would be loved. The men’s eyes were pinpoint blank, like Misha’s eyes in the forest night.

It was noon. The streets were very quiet where they emerged. They passed through a narrow lobby guarded by a concierge of ancient make, into a cobbled courtyard and up flights of steps clad in some long-lost form of polymer sheeting. It had a static pattern of green and grey:
Maitri,
she thought,
you’d like this
…. Their room was at the back. It was bare except for a hybrid foam bed, without legs, an ancient bentwood chair, and a washstand with a waste bucket, standing without a screen against one wall. Catherine looked out of the window. Tiers of ancient glazing stared back at her: festooned with drying laundry, patched with barrier gel; some frames empty and sprouting fronds of grass. Rock pigeons stepped the cobbles below on coral feet, and crooned overhead in the cliffs of crumbled stone. A sparrow hopped on the windowsill below, and looked up with a bold, questioning chirrup. It was late summer again, she remembered: how strangely the time had passed. She wondered why Misha had chosen this gentle place, its quiet melancholy and air of dusty romance. Did he, too, think wistfully of what might have been? But she did not want to think about him as a person, about his feelings. That was dangerous.

He lay on the foam bed, in his Aleutian overalls, propped on one elbow.

“Have you heard of paper flowers?”

“Is it a body-morphing cosmetic? Something you swallow, and you get a temporary shift in your appearance?”

“It can be. It used to be. D’you want to try some?”

She came over. “What does it do?”

“Hold out your hand.”

He took out a small tissue folder, and shook two or three minute slivers of pastel colored wafer onto her palm.

“Lick them up.”

She tasted nothing but the salt of human skin.

“You don’t need a Buonarotti engine,” he said, licking up his own share, “to take you to another world. It happens all the time. You step over a line and you’re somewhere else. You don’t know how it happened, and you may never find your way back.” His eyes gleamed. “Take off your clothes.”

She had accepted that there would be no excess. No whips, no manacles, no props, no violence. She would not be beaten, or chained up, or left to lie in shit and piss in a solitary cell. She would not be mutilated, burned, electrocuted, gang-raped, tortured. Made to eat her own feces, forced to watch as her lovers and children were violated and slaughtered. There must be nothing that might rouse an instinctive resistance. No humiliation so crude as to restore her dignity. But what there was, was not enough. That brusque, brief penetration, (in spite of her pleading; without a single gesture of affection) was becoming stale. Since he’d introduced this room into their pattern she’d been hoping for something more. She obeyed, trembling with anticipation; and knelt facing him on the bed. He reached out and pushed at her shoulder: the autistic gesture, void of contact. She lay flat.

“Lie with your knees up. Lift your head. The foam will prop your shoulders, it’s smart. Keep looking at me. I want to see your cunt and your face.”

He bent forward with an expression of awe: almost of humility. He examined her genitals with his fingertips, pulling the furred petals of flesh apart to reveal the darker inner folds. He probed the whorled, hooded arrowhead, and traced a line down the shaft of the arrow to the slightly reddened slit of the female opening. She imagined what he saw. A woman’s sex is not simple and contained like a man’s. Folded and infolded, it emphasizes surface, extension, irreducible difference. It is the whole limitless world turned into a soft, vulnerable rosy plaything. Misha eased two fingers inside, looking her in the face.

“Now masturbate.”

“I can’t,” whispered Catherine. “I’ve tried. It doesn’t work.”

“Try again.”

She began. Her fingers were cold and clumsy.

“Keep looking at me,” he ordered, “as long as you can.”

She knew why he wanted her to masturbate. He had forced her whenever he wanted to, but she had been a bystander. She had only been half raped; only half humiliated. She had to participate. That had to be the next step. Her face had begun to flush; there was a burning pressure in her nipples, in the furred mound and the folds of those petals. It was not her own awkward fingers that started this response. It was Misha’s cold gaze, the way he was dressed and she was naked, the way she was exposed, negated, handled like a dead thing.

“This is wrong,” she whimpered. “I can’t do this. Please don’t make me.”

“You don’t have to do much. Just keep playing with yourself.”

Touched her. Catherine started and looked around, bewildered. Two hands had gripped her shoulders: big hands, a man’s hands. There was nothing, only empty air. A mouth brushed against hers, vanished, returned. She could see nothing. The tip of a tongue probed between her lips, withdrew, thrust deeper. Her mouth opened, the thrusting fell into a pumping rhythm; she was being mouth-fucked. The hands slid from her shoulders to her breasts, the mouth fuck went on. The claw, the male member of her invisible assailant, nudged at the mouth of her sex-opening and vanished, nudged and vanished, while the mouth fuck continued and her nipples were sucked and bitten. She tried not to respond; she could not help herself. She heard herself gasping:
oh please, oh please.
She was sobbing, desperate, thighs spread taut and spine arced, agonizingly open. The claw slid in, and vanished again; slid in, and vanished.
Oh please, oh please.
The desperation was beyond words. She heard Misha laugh. She saw herself, a last image far away, falling on the dusty floor: howling, mouth wide, head fallen back with her hair in the dust, crawling backward on her knees like a contorted insect with her sex-mound thrust upward: avid, abject, frantic…

When she came to herself she was sitting against the wall in a corner of the room: covered in drying sweat, and shivering in huge belly-deep tremors. She’d bitten through her lip. It was stinging: she tasted blood. Misha lay on the bed, watching. He was still dressed but he too had been sweating hard. His clothes were open. He wiped his claw with a handful of filmy tissue.

“That’s paper flowers. D’you like it?”

He rolled over on his back, “Oh God. Synthesized and purified, straight to the brain. With any other drug, a little part of you stays conscious, still hurting, however high you are. Sex is the
best,
it wipes the slate. I’ve never tried the legendary heroin but I bet sex beats it. I bet fucking, now we’ve got it properly refined, beats the fuck out of heroin. What do you think?”

She couldn’t answer. She didn’t know if she was ever going to speak again. Misha came and picked her up and carried her to the slab of foam. Even in the necessary closeness of this action, in their shared exhaustion and the warm smell of bodily fluids, there was no lapse into tenderness. No contact. He laid her down and lay beside her. She was still shivering. He turned her on her side, with her arms behind her. He parted her thighs with one hand, holding her wrists in the other, and drove his new erection up into her from behind: “Cunt,” he muttered, childishly intent on the word, “cunt cunt cunt.”

When he’d finished Catherine waited for a while, then moved herself to the other side of the bed. The room was warm but she was cold. She wrapped some of her discarded clothes around her. Now he would sleep and she would wait. He would get up, she would dress; he would put her in a cab and send her home. She tried to doze, listening to the chirping sparrows, the rustle of pigeons’ wings. It was no use. The dangerous moment had come. She could not stop herself from thinking:
this is ridiculous. One cannot take punishment as an epicurean pleasure.
And the spell was broken.

“Misha?”

“Hmm?”

She sighed (feeling it leave her, goodbye to a strange interlude: nothing lasts). “Misha, why are you doing this to me?”

She felt him recoil, outraged by this betrayal, but she persisted.

“We know my history, whether I’m an Aleutian in a human body or a poor deluded human girl. The person I think I am raped Johnny Guglioli and started the whole shameful process of Aleutian rule on earth. I raped, I want to be raped. Even after three lifetimes I can’t let it go. That explains me. What about you? I know Traditionalist society is strange, I know there are pressures. But we were friends, and what you are doing to me is not friendly, not on any terms. Why do you want to be the rapist? What is your problem?”

He had rolled over to look at her. He lay back, covering his eyes.

“Do you think I’m Johnny Guglioli?”

“What?”

“When I do it to you. Do you believe I’m Johnny getting his own back?”

Catherine sat up, pulling the chador around her.

“I was fifteen,” she said. “All right, I was an immortal visitor from an alien star system, and our years are not your years, but forget the technical details. Think of it. A kid, a teenager, captain of a spaceplane privateer, with a crew of dashing, adventurous adults calling him
Sir
and
Lord Clavel.
Deferring to him, taking orders, loving him. I’m not really a Lord of Aleutia. I’ve told you this before. I use articulate language, which separates me from our Silent majority, the ones who process the world with their bodily secretions. Who sometimes get very rich and who are often in charge, which you people find mysterious, though it happens as often here. I’m a Signifier: I have followers. I rarely have to work for a living. There are people who are prepared to give me food and service and whatever is passing for money whenever I appear, and all I have to do in return is be Clavel. Don’t ask me why. But I’m not
important.
The most I am, to my Brood, is a notorious nuisance. I was fifteen, a poet: a minor-celebrity brat who’d joined forces with the buccaneers. I saw Johnny Guglioli in a café one day, and I fell in love. I thought Johnny was older than he was. I thought he was my Daddy, my true parent: another me but older, wiser. We’re expected to look for lovers in the older or younger generation. Ideally, we’re supposed to be looking for another self, a twin soul. According to our popular science the same embryo won’t develop twice in a generation, we are not born if we are already living, so it’s a hopeless romantic fraud: I mean it never happens. But nothing like the way I felt then had ever happened to me before, so I was convinced. Don’t ask me how I thought my double had been born on this unknown planet ‘three thousand light years from home.’ I suppose I believed, same as Peenemünde Buonarotti, that there is only one species of intelligence in the cosmos, and therefore Johnny and I might truly be fated lovers. It made sense to me at the time. Later we got together, we three landing party crews, and devised an elaborate scam involving our supposed super-powers and the faster-than-light drive you were sure we possessed. I helped to plan it. Then I didn’t like the way things were shaping so I went to look for Johnny.