Saline Solution (16 page)

'I'll come back, after the war,' he said

She seemed taken by a peristaltic spasm, and pressed a rosary into his hands. 'Here, take this,' she said.

'The girl's a nun,' Carol said. 'She's helping him escape from the Germans.'

Her words returned a dangerous quality of surface normality to the scene. I clenched my fists. 'What's the matter?' she said.

'Quickly,' the nun said, 'follow the tunnel until you come to the iron ladder. There will be friends waiting at the top.'

'You don't want me,' Carol said, 'you want my cunt. Why are you wasting your time with me?'

I looked at the tuft of hair between her legs. It seemed utterly trivial. Even in square or cubic inches, it assumed a tiny percentage of the body's total area or volume. It was, literally, a hole. That is to say, an emptiness. And was all this torment over a nothingness?

The man attempted to kiss the nun, but she pulled back, and suddenly he was ashamed of himself. His concept of what a moment of unbearable agony might look like on the face of an American pilot shot down in France during the war was etched by a billion electrons against a curved

sheet of coated glass. 'God bless you,' the nun said.

I sank to my knees and then lay full-length on the mattress. Carol rolled to one side.

Suddenly the door burst open and four Nazi soldiers spilled into the room. One was a colonel and the others were enlisted men. The colonel grabbed the nun by the wrist and twisted her arm, but by this time she had closed the trapdoor and covered it with the rug. 'Where is he?' he said. He spoke with a German accent. 'If you don't tell us, I will turn you over to my men, and they will not only torture you, but . . . ' He let the silence trail off and raked her body with his eyes glowing like dislocated diamonds.

Her face showed the expression which the actress probably considered went with the feeling,
A fate worse than death
, and she broke free and ran out of the room.

Three submachine guns rattled into the darkness. The screen cut sharply to the front yard of the house. The girl was lying on her back. Oddly, her face held the kind of beatific smile one would expect of a nun who has just been martyred to save her virginity, an American bomber pilot, and the matchlessness of five distinct myths. The colonel's face softened. 'She was too pure for this world,' he said, turning on his heel, and strode away. The final shot was of the nun's face surrounded by a four-inch aura. The screen went dark and obscure music played.

I knelt between Carol's legs, rubbing the outer lips of her cunt with the thumb of my left hand, and nudging my cock along the inside of her right thigh. I felt no passion, no excitement, no interest. I grabbed my cock with my right hand and brought it to the cunt lips I had now partially parted. She ground her pelvis gently up and forward, inviting me to enter her. 'Fuck me good,' she said, 'I haven't been fucked good in a really long time.'

For the next half hour I fucked her with the concentration and
sangfroid
of a masseur. I took a certain chilly technical pride in the accomplishment. With no real difficulty I opened the layer after layer of resistance, lodging finally into the deepest possible cunt of her cunt. She had countless orgasms, great shuddering affairs which bunched the muscles in her belly, and made her emit a noise like a vigorous death rattle. When I had completed the entire set of postures, the exercise was completed, and like a Tai Chi practitioner who comes to the end of the series, I simply came to rest. After a while my erection subsided, and I sat back.

'You didn't come?' she asked with some surprise after she had pulled herself together. I abstractly admired the sheen of sweat on her skin, the hardness of her nipples, the utter abandon of the angle of her legs and the cant of her cunt. She shrugged. I changed the channel.

Raquel Welch was saying, 'The mind is the most erogenous zone of all.' David Frost, a slight tic developing near his right eye, said, 'What do you mean by that?' And she knighted him with a look of disdain he richly deserved. Carol started sucking my cock. 'I smoke too much dope,' I thought. 'It interferes with my concentration.'

She fell into the greedy-gobbling-child pose, lying on her side, her knees to her chest, both hands around my cock, pulling it into her slackly open mouth. The pressure on the base, the friction against her lips, and the sweet sensation of her wet tongue hitting the tip each time she pulled, quieted my thoughts. She was most gentle and loving, lapping, juice-hungry. I could have come easy, but I changed my ways.

I sat on her chest and lifted her head from behind, bringing her mouth up. I slipped a pillow under her head, freeing my hands. Then I fucked her in the mouth, penetrating her throat until she gagged, then pulling out and letting her splutter around the tip of my cock, whimpering and licking, finally taking the meat into her mouth again. That was quite exciting and I shot a very heavy deposit of swirled sperm onto her tongue, and she swallowed until my entire cock was drained, and then kept her mouth on me until I had grown totally limp.

'Would you like some coffee?' she said.

'Would you like to stay the night?' she said.

'Would you like to fuck me again?' she said.

And added, 'Any way you like.'

During the night I woke and heard her mumbling and moaning in her dreams. I wondered what sort of interior life she had, and speculated on how tedious it might be getting to know her. I glimpsed an impulse to wake her up, to talk to her, to ask directions to the person. But all the experience of my life brayed with laughter, and I closed my eyes to wait for sleep again.

In the morning I dressed before she woke up. 'You're going?' she said as I went. 'The others won't be back until tomorrow.'

'It's better that I leave,' I said, cursing myself for the quality of dialogue, blaming it on the television.

XII

The price for pleasure is certainty. Perhaps that is too flip. Pleasure underscores the reality of dying, for the same process of letting go takes place in both manifestations. But of course, the French refer to orgasm as the little death, and the Tibetans picture their Tantric deity with a string of skulls hanging from his scrotum.

My life is plagued by a conditioned search for the ultimate. My mind has been made hierarchical by the frocked fiends who seized me when I was totally vulnerable to impressions and fed me with winged strictures. The journey has been an odd one, although reducible to statistical normalities, and has led me into the arms of women who wondered at my desperation. Understanding that no final solace lay in any woman's arms was the most difficult disillusionment.

Prior to that I went the conventional route, first seeing the priests and politicians as playing the most ancient and sweeping of con games, pretending to represent a power greater than themselves. But so many of them are ugly in their eyes and mouths that a direct glance is enough to unmask their rhetoric and perceive them as hollow and

vicious tricksters.

More subtly, I yearned towards the abstract as the end of my quest. I phased through the appreciation of pure thought, or truth, or beauty, or Absolute Reality, as the ideal. It took a while to learn that I was merely kneeling before the rationalisations of my own projections.

Finally, I fell into the swamp of experience. If, I concluded, I experienced the fact of existence for myself, if I knew terror and joy and bliss and boredom for myself, through experience, then I would know all that it is possible for a person to know. Naively, I neglected to come to terms with the 'I' who was experiencing. When 'I' knew something, I had to ask myself, 'Which "I" is this?'

At which point I cursed the Pope and all his legions, and surrendered to a state of vacuous vibration, disdaining all the products of my mind as so much read-out having to do with nothing except the internal state of the think machine. Practically every value held by the moiling majority of my species, I have discarded as worthless, only to rediscover the organic immediate basis upon which the phony historical morality is based. I have let all this learning be fired with a river of LSD, and become transmogrified. I am now a mutant. The soft machine is still the same as all the others which walk around and practise the dances of their days, but the person inside has become alien, essentially
other
than those who gave him birth.

'Daddy, why is the grass green?'

' Why
is an inadmissible question except as used by Heidegger in "Why are there essents rather than nothing at all?" If you wish to understand the
how
of grass and green, look to science.'

The son of the mutant grows up.

Now the summer vacation was over, and it was time to centre ourselves once again in the city, amidst the decay, the poisoned sky. Lucinda had gone in earlier to take care of business and now three of us sat on the train, Francis and Bertha in glum hostility. The air conditioning in our car didn't work, and we were too steeped in the undulating frisson of masochism to change cars.

I went for some water and met Patricia, the dark and moulded airline stewardess I had met on the Island. We rapped for a while. We flirted with our eyes. I went with her back to her seat and for a few minutes we shared the view of auto graveyard and sooty lumber factories which line the route of the Long Island Railroad.

We traded body cues across the space between the seats, and at one point she slipped her hands between her legs and bounced her thighs from side to side. I took a number of quick polaroid shots of her, the delicacy of her upper lip dewdropping forward at the center, the dark spaces under her blouse which show the size of the aureola around each nipple, the curve of one cheek bulging out where she sits. I noted the long fingers, and the suppleness of her waist as she twisted around and bent slightly to one side. She was an exquisite morsel, her flesh alive, and she being chatty, intelligent, and familiar with the major cities of the world.

I fantasised spending an evening with her, but within a flash comprehended the totality of the night. I realised that there would not be one unrehearsed word, not a movement which sang with spontaneous passion. We were both very hip, chic, sophisticated, jaded. We understood the intricacies of pseudo-intimacy perfectly. I would be thrilled at discovering the texture and smell and sound of her, but I would not be surprised. I was almost stunned by my own ruminations. In an instant I had reduced her to an old movie, pleasant enough to see again, but only if one had nothing else to do.

And what else was there to do? I suddenly seemed to be staring down a long narrowing tunnel which had a brick wall at its end. I looked down the abstract contour of my own life and found it empty. And the only thing to relieve that emptiness would be the conflict I might find in engaging myself in some project with another, in some war. I had come to the end of my tether, and even the prospect of twelve hours of fresh, never-before-tasted, hot and dripping cunt left me uninterested.

'Then how will I amuse myself?' I thought. And then, 'What a shallow epicure I have become.'

I sighed and found myself looking into Patricia's eyes. She smiled coolly, as though she were reading my thoughts. I lit a
Gitanes
. We became very suave for a while, sharing our effete mutual self-consciousness.

'One can always take refuge in boredom,' I said. 'If we had a closed car, you would kneel before me and take my limp warm penis in your mouth, and lap at it gently until it became firm, and then nibble until it was hard, and then suck until I sprayed your mouth with sperm. And all the while I should continue to smoke, and gaze out the window, gently contemplating the destruction of a civilisation, the end of the culture, the curtains on history.'

Her breathing became ever so slightly more quick and her lips glistened. She looked quickly around the car without moving her eyes. I saw the non-movement and flashed that she was looking for some safe spot where we could go for the few minutes necessary.

'Yes,' I said, 'our grey convoluted lives sparked only by the most tawdry petty spectacles. If I had you alone I would insert my entire clenched fist into your cunt and punish you with my wrist.'

Her jaw went slack. She was already on the edge of a mild hypnotic stupor. I stood up abruptly. 'Forget everything I have said,' I said.

Francis looked up from his bout of hatred with Bertha. They were in the ninth round of a scheduled fifteen-rounder. 'If I were a shallow and utterly worthless hedonist,' I said, 'against what criteria could that be measured?'

'Importance is just a matter of timing,' he said. 'When the connection happens, it's all there. When it doesn't happen, there's nothing you can do about anything. Then it's best to sit down and read a book.'

'What are you talking about?' said Bertha.

XIII

For a few brief weeks in the fall New York is habitable. The hot air masses are sharply cut through one night by a clean chill wind from the North. And for a time the negative ion content increases, and one can almost smell the air which usually serves as nothing but a cushion for the clouds of death which spew from cars and factories. People walk more briskly but are in less of a hurry. And a sense almost of what used to be called humanity pervades the town.

There must be an instinct in our species which tends us towards the destruction of the weak. Before the junk-yard of civilisation was organised to insure that the aged and infirm are at least taken care of, those who could not keep up on the hunt were killed or abandoned. Now, living our lives of concrete cycles, we roar down trails of psychic exploitation, and the hunt has shifted its milieu. Food is brought in by ship and truck and train from farms and slaughterhouses thousands of miles away. And we in the capitol have nothing more crucial to do than maintain the equilibrium of the zombies and cripples who perambulate this great buzzing crypt.