Contours of darkness, p.20
Contours of Darkness, page 20
“Don’t laugh at me. Jerry,” Conrad said. “I need to understand it.”
“You’ll find out,” Jerry told him. “Maybe I’ll come visit you in Idaho.”
They stood up, brushed off their pants, and climbed back into the van. Conrad drove and Jerry sat crosslegged in the front seat, his attention removed from the past and cast into the future, where it curled around the five thousand sticks of dynamite they were on their way to pick up.
8
The Frigid Orgasm
Florid fantasies flushed through Aaron’s mind. It was one in the morning and there was no sign that Cynthia had been home at all during the day. He arrived at the house petulant with paranoia and defensive from the guilt he felt at fucking the girl in Conrad’s living room. He suffered the letdown which follows a period of concentrated drug use, and was shaken by the startling arrival of the short man with the black hair, and his own subsequent fumbling flight from the scene. As he walked hurriedly back to his own place, he soothed himself by concluding that he had fallen into a world that was too dangerous and fast-moving for him, and formulated another resolution to discipline himself in the virtues of what he had defined as normal living: the work which gave him security, the woman who shared his bed, and the apartment where nothing unruly entered. All the insights which had thrilled him now showed their subversive underbellies; all the glimpses into freedom whirred about him like ghosts, mocking him with what they had earlier used to tempt him into renunciations of his life style. The previous five months of relationship with Conrad and their culmination the night before were placed under the heading of irresponsible flirtation with insanity, and in the firmness of his putting it all down, he nimbly neglected to acknowledge the deep frustrations which led him to search out new modes of understanding and action.
It had not occurred to him that Cynthia would not be in the apartment, and it took him several minutes to assimilate the fact. He went through all the rooms, seeking not her so much as her presence. He poured a glass of milk and took it into the bedroom, where he kicked off his shoes and lay back on the mattress. His proclivity was to lie back and play a rerun of recent events through his head, transforming his experience into a kind of filmic narrative and thus gaining some perspective on it. But the very absence of Cynthia, which gave him the time and space to reflect on his situation, deflected his energy into brooding on her whereabouts. It was not long before his mood coagulated into a jealousy of activities which, so far as he knew, had no basis except in his imagination. But the power of that function has been able, throughout history, to seduce men away from the actual and into the swamps of the speculative.
He reached for the glass oh the table next to the bed and noticed that his fingers were still trembling. He recalled the scene in Conrad’s living room, and the wild man who had burst in, looked once at Aaron, and jumped back as though he had stepped on a snake. Aaron, the impress of the girl’s kisses still on his lips, naked and smelling of sweat and saliva and vaginal secretions, had been seized by an atavistic embarrassment, and could think of nothing but getting his clothes on. The man looked like pictures of radicals he had seen in the newspaper accounts of revolutionary violence; he had, to Aaron’s eyes, none of Conrad’s gentleness, but seemed capable of killing without qualms. He had turned to Conrad, only to find him smiling as the girl slept with her head on his belly. He felt instantaneously excluded and left abruptly, his thoughts stampeded by panic.
“He’s never been interested in me,” he said to himself as he walked down the dark street away from Conrad’s house. “He’s just been trying to soften me up so he can get to Cynthia.”
Now, as he recalled the scene, the memory of what Cynthia looked like as she lay between Conrad’s legs, her lips wrapped around his cock, flashed in his mind and erased all the channels which led toward Aaron’s spending his time in ruminations about the past forty-eight hours; he lurched into the theater where Cynthia starred in a tour de force performance on the explication of the obscene. He saw her in a hundred positions of abandon, each following the other with the rapidity of rippling playing cards. She was surrounded by men who strained toward her, slobbering to reach her body. And in the scenario he wrote, unaware that it was his need for purgation which shaped Cynthia as the whip with which he would flog himself, she opened herself everywhere to let them in. She lay in the classic pose of lasciviousness, her legs spread wide, her knees in the air, her arms out at her side, her mouth pursed, her eyes smoldering and wanton.
“I don’t know where she is,” he said to himself, switching back to the Cynthia of space and time, and not the movie star of his mind. He realized that it was the first time in years that he was not either with her or cognizant of her location. That he had not the slightest idea of how to reach her staggered him, and braced him with the awareness of how much he had come to take her for granted. “Right now she could be on her back with someone working his way inside her,” he thought. The words danced over the tender tissues of his brain. “On her back…on her back…on her back,” went the refrain, the phrase hypnotizing him with its suggestion. And then the others came. “On her knees…on her knees…on her knees,” and “in her mouth…in her mouth…in her mouth.”
He recalled the morning and what it had been like to fuck Cynthia on acid. Ecstasy and insight vied for supremacy as the delicious sensations he found in her cunt sparked metaphysical fireworks in his mind and he found it impossible to keep his attention on the two centers at once. The result had been a mounting anger. After following him into the bedroom where he had begun to find a modicum of peace in the darkness and silence, and rousing him to fucking, she had rolled over on her stomach and let him perform over her, while she did nothing but revel in the rapture of the moving cock. The beauty of her utter vulnerability spurred him on to deeper penetrations and more excruciatingly subtle variations, which brought her cunt to life, hot and wet and responsive. He worked at her like a surgeon with a sledgehammer, operating with brutal delicacy. But by the time he came he had become so wrapt by his own virtuosity that she had ceased to exist for him except as a passive audience which did not even acknowledge the cycles of expansion and contraction which ran through the sexual act. He had left her abruptly, partly because he was angry, but also because he was disgusted by the entity which the two of them became when they fucked. Now he wondered whether that might have prompted her to vengeance, to seek another man to use as a weapon against him. There was no time at which he was able to think of her as existing in her own right, and not merely as someone whose definition came through her relation to him.
“This is crazy,” he said to himself several times, “she’ll be home any minute.” But the minutes piled upon minutes, the hands of the clock creeping toward a point where he was forced to admit that she would not be returning that night. The licentious images pulled at him, and he fought against them the way a man will struggle with the waves that roll inexorably in to obviate all his attempts to reach the shore, sap his strength, and finally drown him. Anxiety clouded his reason and kept him from asking himself the few simple questions which would have put the situation in perspective and allowed him to change his mood. Like an actor whose audience has left the theater but who is compelled to go on with the drama, Aaron wrestled with his erotic demons until they conquered his whirlwind of baroque constructs which lacerated him with the thin whips of fantasmagoric possibilities.
Like a man whose nausea has begun to trigger a reflex of vomiting, Aaron attempted to suppress the upheaval. “I ought to have learned the last time,” he thought, recalling his experience in the desert and his subsequent resolution to let nothing shake him loose from the rigidly defined parameters of his life. He longed to return to dullness and disquietude in order to be rid of the torment of enormity which engulfed a man who even momentarily discards the shields of routine and ambivalence. To take a clear step in any direction brought consequences that, like a genie from a bottle, could not be controlled once the cork had been pulled unless one knew the secret of taming it. At that moment Aaron did not, and did not want to, know how to deal with such forces.
Cynthia appeared large-screen before his eyes, the leitmotif of his lonely opera. She turned a dozen different ways at the verge of taking a man inside her, his cock tentatively nudging the cunt which had become so precious over the years, and which, although he did not note this to himself, he had begun to find tiresome. He saw her lips pucker, her forehead wrinkle, her hands flutter, as the shaft slid slowly between her legs. He heard her moan, and her arms went around his neck, her cunt swimming in the balance of the jewel motion of her hips. He watched her face change as she slid down the chute of surrender, her eyes closing, her mouth stretching wide, her expression melting to one of unutterable pleasure, and then heard the faint gentle total sigh of release puff from her throat. “Oh,” she said, half in wonder, half in affirmation, and he clenched his fists in anguish and beat them against his thighs.
He suffered scores of such scenes. At one point, lying like a catatonic wired to a pornographic computer, the multiple harmonics of all erotic probabilities sounding discordantly in his mind, he observed as she sat in a strange apartment, two men across from her, and allowed them to look as she fondled herself, building the tension until they would have to burst the bonds of restraint and hurl themselves upon her. She jiggled her breasts with her hands and rubbed her fingers over her crotch; she twitched her ass and licked her lips with her tongue. She smiled into their lust and showed them that she knew what they felt, and delighted in it, and wanted it to reach a peak of boiling frenzy before she would split herself apart at the seams of all her openings and swoon at their assault. In a word that has come to lose the voluptuous connotations impossible in an age in which women have lost contact with the glory of their sexuality, she tempted them.
Three hours passed in a melange of anguished variations on the single theme of Cynthia’s wayward cunt, and by four in the morning he was spent. He had held vigil to Cynthia’s fucking and lit candles to her orgasms; he had prayed to her infidelity and sung hymns to her lust; he had watched, down to the tiniest detail, the movements of her fingers over the anonymous buttocks that pumped into her with such glee, and he had burned with hateful envy at the thought of the pleasure the other man was feeling in finding a woman who fucked so amorously, a woman he was certain he had lost. And like a priest after a sacrifice, when he had stabbed her so often that his own agony was relieved, he turned from the altar with a sense of shame disguised as righteousness.
He stirred and looked at the clock. “I’m supposed to be at work in a few hours,” he thought. He shook his head. The idea of standing in front of a classroom filled with children and attempting to pretend interest in their acquisition of masses of data recorded in texts that were masterpieces of oversimplification to the point of falsehood was shriekingly unreal. If Cynthia was not back by the time he had to leave, he would not be able to mask his agitation well enough to fool the sensitive evaluation of his students whose true education, beneath all the rigamarole of their program, was to learn to read the feelings of their teachers well enough to manipulate them to their own ends. He decided that he would take the rest of the week off, that more than anything he needed time unencumbered by outside demands.
His thoughts drifting toward the realm of the selfish and the pragmatic, he relaxed enough to begin to feel his great fatigue. It had been almost forty-eight hours since he slept last, and he was ready to succumb to his physical and emotional exhaustion. His eyes burned, his limbs grew numb, and a kind of fuzzy lassitude spread from his brain into his body. He reached over and flicked out the lamp, stretched once and without removing his clothing closed his eyes for sleep. But like a man in the last rushes of an amphetamine high, a core of him remained alert. It burned with a disconcerting intensity, and with a child’s gesture of self-reassurance, he put his hand over his cock.
He lay in that dangerous state halfway between wakefulness and sleep, where revery and reality mixed to conjure an intimation of understanding. With his lids lowered, and in the dark, it was as though he could still see the room. Familiar and drenched with associations, it now presented itself to him without the comforting sense of spatiality between objects. He became the ceiling; he was the walls, the chair. He entered the flow of impressions and became one with them. But without the ability to articulate his psychic state, he fell prey to its contours, not understanding that consciousness is merely a reflection of phenomena and has no substance in itself. He was joyfully empty, but did not know it. Were he of a different culture he might have been quietly thankful for being blessed with the only true bliss which is man’s lot on this earth: the trembling awareness of being itself. At such a time, when he ought to have been fortified with conceptual models which allow an appreciation of mystery without a flight into either mysticism or rationality, he had nothing to guide him but the rigid infantile paradigms of a low-level civilization. He possessed only a grab-bag of orthodox Catholic dogmas, pressed into his mind by rote as a child, and the muddled social science of entrenched imperialism. There was no way for him to subsume his experience as it passed through him, and he seized the most primitive mode of expression as a means to clutch, as though it were a lifeline, what he could salvage of the identity he felt most directly: his male sex. Like a baby in gurgling exploration of its genitals, he opened his pants and let the limp penis fall out.
For a long time there was sensation without an accumulation of form; he fondled and manipulated his cock simply to feel himself, to reassure himself. The major structures of his life shaken to their foundations, he returned to the source of life to find a base to build upon. At that moment, the elements he had come to depend upon, to invest with a quality of permanence, showed themselves in their actual limitation. Only the eternal was eternal; all of its manifestations were provocative shapes of time, doomed to a dance of emergence and extinction. Having been purged, willy-nilly and without his full prior consent, of his attachments to his social role, his ego entanglements, and the very woman whose energy he had come to rely upon as a source of revivification, he was prepared to enter the realm of raw sexuality, without images, without cooperation from another, without any illusion as to its nature.
His cock stirred, thickened.
But never having been trained to flow only in its own channels, the sexual energy, once roused, spilled heedlessly into the other centers of his body. Most destructively, it roared into the domain of intellect and gave birth to a legion of images. And at that instant, when he might have, even for a second, stepped free of the spectrum of ideas through which he had been habituated to perceive the universe, he slid back into the trap of conditioned thought, and once again began to use that distortion of the life force as his misguided reference point from which to deal with reality. As his cock got hard the solace of fantasy oozed over the gaping insights into the actual nature of things, insights which caused him to seek refuge in oblivion.
From the recesses of his subconscious where he had feared to go, a creature of exotic qualities emerged to serve as his partner in the ritual of masturbation. It was Cynthia’s body, wedded to Aaron’s mind, his projection of what it might be like to have the full promiscuity of his nature living within the flesh of a woman, with what he conjectured was a woman’s ability to simply walk out into the street and procure all the sexual provender she might want.
Had he been able to detach himself from the process he might, again, have learned something not ordinarily accessible. He could have used the experience to apprehend some of the secrets which male and female, each constituting one half of the secret of manwomankind, keep attempting to shout, whisper, and speak to one another across the chaos of their divisive desires. But he was swept forward by the mounting excitement in his cock, and, like many men who reduced their sexuality to the barometric variations in that organ, had his vision obscured by the shadow of his erection. That sensitivity which disdains concentration and is the quintessence of organic intelligence was crippled by the narrowing need to ejaculate. He sought to discharge the very tension he had fled to as a refuge, thus creating the rack which was to pull him apart.
As he massaged the thick base and fondled the sensitive velvet head, and progressed to a more frantic jerking of his hand up and down the shaft, he felt his body as hers. He imagined the cunt between his legs, and opened to a phantom cock. He tasted the mixture of apprehension and release with which a woman accepts penetration into her center. He swam into physical changes which, had he seen them from outside, would have astonished him. His left arm floated through the air and caressed his nipples, the fingers drumming a teasing tattoo on his chest. The hand slid between his legs and he felt the soft cleft between the buttocks. His chest swelled with yearning, and the outline of flat curved breasts pressed against his shirt. His legs were open, and shook from side to side as though wanting to rise up and clasp the waist of someone above. A shift of attitude restructured his consciousness and it was Cynthia’s ass which accepted the touch, Cynthia’s breasts which pointed toward the heavens. As he was she on his own bed, he was she as she might have been at that very moment, lying on another man’s bed. For a split jagged second there existed six distinct permutations of the single deed: he was himself masturbating, he was himself as Cynthia masturbating, he was Cynthia being fucked by another man, he was the man fucking Cynthia, he was the man fucking him, and finally he was a point of awareness outside himself observing the entire process. His own hands caressing his own buttocks became the hands of another man holding the weight of Cynthia’s cheeks as her wide yielding cunt mouthed his cock with its wet kisses. The two cocks merged into one pole going in two directions at once through the double-ended cunt. The excitement of the concatenation of forces plunged him recklessly into a further pursual of the evolving image. He was like a consummate mime playing his complex role in stark silence, and the vivid pictures told no story except the struggle of a single confused man trying to find, amidst the proliferating uncertainty of his life, the expression in which he might find truth.
