The Erotic Comedies (Vassi Collection Volume XI) (12 page)

"Orgasm is the quintessentially private experience," she continued, "and the notion that we must share it with others is the final corruption of what's left of civilization. The only time that people should fuck is to make babies. Everything else is sheer indulgence."

Accordingly, she locked herself in. She had her food delivered, she had her phone taken out, and she devoted herself to exploring a realm where many go with feelings of shame and defeat, but which she entered with a sense of triumph and arrival.

She prepared a single room for her ritual, sealed the window and painted every surface black, removed all the furniture except for a single mattress which she covered with a black satin sheet. Whenever she closed the door on herself, no sound or light could reach her. She was launched immediately into interior space, the turf of contemplation.

Immediately following her decision, a great peace descended upon her. The first artifact which fell away was the need to perform. It became clear at once that almost all her behavior was unconsciously geared toward some real or introjected audience, that far from being free, she had been a captive actress forced to play a multitude of roles for her parents, her lovers, her friends, her enemies, and even strangers in the street. At once her entire attitude changed, and a profound relaxation overtook her. No longer concerned with what anyone thought of her, including herself, the umbilical cord which had bound her to propriety, even when she was shrieking in wanton release running naked through a roomful of men, was cut. She saw that those actions which she had thought most uninhibited were nothing more than the strident proof of her inhibition. By herself she became truly wild, and in that wilderness found a deep calm.

And when she gave herself to masturbation, unfathomable vistas opened. Not constrained to compromise herself in order to accommodate the expectations of anyone else, she flowered in the fullness of her being. She discovered a connection between her clitoris and her third eye. As she incessantly brushed the tip of that lower instrument of pure erotic pleasure, the world of psychic reality unfolded. She could peer into past and future by seeing the present in great depth. She was able, after a while, to transcend relative time altogether and abide in the sense of the eternal. She cried out in terror once when, from a region she could not have imagined existed, she beheld the ultimate reality, the single truth which embraced all partial images. Absolute Time seized her in its jaws and laughed as she danced along the ridges of its gleaming fangs.

Her memory returned. All the scenes and feelings of childhood, so long buried, came to the surface, and for the first time in her life she was able to see her life as a single gesture, a woven fabric with a unitary design. Her body found its most meaningful expressions. As she revved up the energy in her cunt, her spine would shake, her head roll from side to side, her tongue lap the air, her legs tremble and kick, her buttocks lose their tension. Three, four, five spasms would shake her frame, but instead of having a heavy body lying on her, or an importune hand feeling her, she would be blessed with the lightness of solitude, and would rise from the floor and dance, joyously, sombrely, beautifully, all to herself, in pitch blackness, relishing that no one could see, or would ever see, the real person that she was becoming.

She destroyed all the mirrors in the apartment so she would not distract herself with her own image; she had come to view perception as an impediment to vision. She was transmogrifying into something beyond all human standards to judge, a creature of fierce tangled beauty. She lost her conventional good looks and became sublime, the way a snarled tree ravaged by wind and salt air grows terrible in its aspect on cliffs overhanging the ocean.

Occasionally, that portion of her mind which had been socially conditioned stirred itself to condemn or worry her. "You are going crazy," it said, "you have no more friends or family, you never go out, you never see people. That's unnatural, pathological." And when she withered the superego with a scorn born of solitude, it changed its attack and used the final weapon in the arsenal of those who would rob an individual of his or her personal reality.

"You have lost the ability to love," it said, "you are selfish, uncaring."

It was not too long before she saw that it was thought itself that was the real enemy, the thing that separated her from herself. During her spells in the black room, after a long long time doing nothing, letting herself be, and then gradually drifting into an awareness of her body, she would begin again the exquisite rite of masturbation. Unimpeded by the demands of another, she soared again and again into the heights of sexual ecstasy unknown by all but a few, those very few who have had the courage to admit that sex is the sister of death, and thus can only be known alone. The orgasms she experienced surpassed the paltry twitchings given to those who still require support for their pleasure, in the way that the flight of eagles goes beyond the spastic flappings of sparrows. And after returning from the mountain tops, the first thing to cast a pall upon her spirit was always language, the limitation of thought.

Her diary reads: "The space I call my
self
was clear. There was no split in me, no confusion. I was a single entity, a thing. Distinct from everything around me, yet part of it all, I had no identity at all. I don't really know how to explain it, since the experience was deeper than language. I don't know how long it lasted, for time was not relevant.

"Then something stirred. I sensed it the way one might be aware of the movement of a small animal in tall grass. I felt as though some precious balance were being lost, some vital equilibrium. And in the wake of that feeling, the words appeared.

"They flew across my mind like the banners tied to dirigibles which sweep across the skies on summer afternoons. I watched, and for a few seconds they were just another phenomenon, no different than the beating of my heart, the coursing of my blood, the rhythms of my breath. The words had no special weight. They were merely aspects of the all.

"But some strange and hideous transformation began to take place, and they started to grow stronger, louder. It was as though they weren't content to be part of my being, they demanded dominance of it. I became annoyed and turned my attention to see what they wanted. And in that instant of shifting center, I realized that T had returned. There was suddenly a platform of observation which was removed from the process being observed.

"Like a person caught in the net of a suffocating nightmare, I struggled. But as I fought, the words proliferated. They poured into my consciousness from a thousand sources, booming, crackling, sighing, shouting. Strings of sentences intertwined and formed fantastic patterns which came to constitute the stuff of images.

"And from that whirling energy concentration of exploding verbiage, pictures were born, faces of real and imagined creatures, denizens of memory and desire who proceeded to act out intricate dramas in which I was invariably a hero or a victim. I was swept into a maelstrom of abstraction, and was drawn, gasping, into the symbolic world, the fantasmagoric kingdom of concepts.

"I was
thinking
again."

As she approached a state of brute intelligence, a stark sensitivity to the fact of existence, rationalization fell from her like dead skin from a shedding snake. She emerged cleansed of all the impacted overlay of culture which had been grafted onto her soul from the very first moment she became a seed growing in her mother's belly.

On the day of her thirtieth birthday, she had achieved an unquenchable autonomy. As she took herself to her room to masturbate, she was so filled with herself that it seemed no external force could ever impinge upon her again. But as she reached down to cover her cunt with her hand, the space around her was slowly suffused with a golden light.

She stared in dumb wonder at the phenomenon. In front of the mattress, a curtain of silver needles shimmered and took shape, until a tall naked man, with green skin and long curly violet hair appeared, his red eyes piercing her gaze, his succulent cock throbbing gently. Her surprise was total, and she did not stir, but continued to lie there, her legs parted, her breasts lolling on her chest, her mouth wet and open, her fingers spreading the cleft between her thighs.

"Very nice," he said.

She blinked. "Who are you?" she asked, the first words she had spoken to anyone in almost three years.

He smiled. "I have been called many names, not all of them complimentary. I have been known as Zeus, as Jehovah, as Baal, as Thor. I am who am, and all that, and have assumed a thousand forms. But most people nowadays refer to me as GOD."

"God?" she whispered. "But I thought there was no God."

"Many people have denied my existence," he said with a droll intonation, "even to my face. It's part of the overall perversity of human beings."

"But what are you doing here?" she asked.

"You have attracted me," he told her. "As your species falls further and further into conformity and mediocrity, I find fewer and fewer occasions to visit earth. In fact, I come so infrequently that there is a rumor that I have died. I used to stay here a lot, in the old days, when there were some fantastic people on the globe. And you're the first thing to arrive in a long time that's got that kind of quality."

"But of what conceivable interest could I be to you?" she said. After having learned to discard the company of people as something trivial, she was amazed that God would seek that very thing.

"Why, to fuck you, of course," God replied, and laughed, a deep baritone rumble. "Why else?"

She raised herself on one elbow. "To fuck what you have created? That doesn't make sense."

"Oh, I haven't created anything," God said, sinking to the floor and sitting on the edge of the mattress. "I'm just here, like the rest of you. The only difference is that you come and go, and I'm immortal." He scratched his head. "It's really very peculiar. I mean, I just woke up one day and found that I was God. I couldn't remember what happened before I was born, didn't know where I came from, and knew that I would always be. I've seen universes come and go, worlds born and die. I am old beyond any comprehension you might have, and yet I am always fresh, always new. I am the synthesis of all contradictions. I. . .""

He smiled again, and broke off "But you've heard me described well enough by your own prophets and poets. No need to give you a resume."

She sat up. "But if all this is true, why should you want something as limited as fucking?"

He reached forward and stroked one of her breasts. "Well, for me, everything is limited. To amuse myself I have to make my choice among limitations. And on the scale I see things from, one limitation is no different from any other. For example, I just came from watching an entire galaxy explode, a happening that had been building for seventy-nine quadrillion years. It covered a space your mind couldn't begin to encompass. And that was interesting. But then I wondered what to do next and I thought, 'I haven't been to earth for a while, let me go see if there's anybody around worth fucking these days.' I scanned the planet and was discouraged at first glance. I saw nothing but a plethora of such shallow sensualists that it made my cock-form shrivel. Why, the very sexes themselves are on the verge of total alienation from one another. But on a second look around, I saw you. And here I am. Although, in a sense, since I am everywhere, I have been here all along."

"And you want
me
?" she asked, beginning to be impressed with the enormity of the personage who stood before her. She put one hand on her hair and said, "I must look a mess."

He laughed again. "Your lapse into vanity is charming, my dear," he said, "but I wouldn't have come if you weren't beyond judging things by the standards of the crowd. I'm not interested in anyone until he or she has gone beyond the illusion of group standards and has hacked a hard-won path through all the tedious variations on the public sexual act, including that which requires fantasy for its completion. I want a soul that has striven to burst the bonds of common understanding and can appreciate the unique."

He lowered his head and stared between her thighs. "When you fuck me, you can experience everything you have when you are alone—everything. And I will infuse that state with such awesome power that you could never even dream of with your puny human faculties. With your mind, you can grasp the structure of the universe; with mine, you can see into the heart of the void from which all existence springs."

"And what do you get out of it?" she asked.

"Just a piece of ass," God said. "My tastes are simple."

She pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around her shins. "I'm not sure I want to," she told him, "even if you are God. I've worked hard to get where I am. Why should I give you pussy? I'm happy with the dimensions I already know."

He pursed his lips. "I can make it worth your while," he answered.

"Well, how good a fuck can you be? You're still in the form of a man. That thing between your legs is only a cock."

"I don't claim any special skill," he replied. "But I can offer you something else."

"You mean you want to
pay
me?" she asked.

"I can offer you Heaven," he said.

"Heaven!" she exclaimed. "You mean there's really a Heaven too?"

"Oh, nothing like they tell you about in Sunday school. It's a bit more chic than that. More like a private club, for my special friends." She regarded him suspiciously and shifted her weight. "You really do have a nice ass," he said. And then, with an abrupt change of tone, continued, "Whichever God made me God seems to have defined my powers clearly. I can't create anything new, but I can change the nature of what already exists; I can do things with what's already here."

He waited a long time in silence, and then in a hushed whisper said, "I can make you
immortal
."

Her jaw fell open. "Immortal?" she repeated. "You mean ... to live . . . forever?"