"Sure, that's the point, isn't it -- to cop the sinewy power of those big beefy beasts?"
"But the animal's soul, the state it's in by the time you gobble it down. Are you aware of the details of modern slaughtering techniques?"
"Enlighten me."
"This is serious, you know, life-and-death stuff."
"You're worried about the state of your soul and you come to a party like this?"
"I'm a big girl. There's more to life than food."
"An actress, right?" Unable to stop munching indiscriminately on the proffered goodies, Perry popped an innocent-looking cherry tomato into his mouth and immediately began gagging, as tastefully as possible, on the creamy paste within, pureed clam whose souls were obviously confused.
"You're so psychic," she was saying, sarcastically. "You must be a Scorpio."
"I'm a Druid." He managed to clear his throat with a foul sip of Bergenspritzen, "the bold new Ice Age flavor" distilled from melting glacial shelves.
"Oh, one of those."
She didn't know a Druid from a drawing board. "So," he asked, "have I seen you in anything?"
"Own a VCR?"
"You're a Cool Cat."
"Warm Satin Nights, Valentine Fanny, Cowgirls in Leather Chaps.
The rocking horse in the bunkhouse with the specially designed saddle horn. That was me up top."
"Nice adductors." He studied her for a moment. "Listen, a slight confession. I'm an actor, too, and I think we should consider working together."
"Well, Saul, I have a rule: no action with strangers, no exceptions. I need to know the guy, I want to like him, I want to make a sincere picture. I want to have fun."
"Good rule."
Her eyebrows moved into a wry lift. "You'd be surprised by the number who disagree."
"Civilian dicks."
"You got it -- don't know what they want, don't want what they get."
"Look, I have this car -- well, a variant species of car, but it putts me from place to place and --"
She was shaking her head. "Can't. Got a gig here tonight."
"Not the crucifixion?"
"Don't tell me, you're Judas Priest."
"I'm the cameraman."
"You said you were an actor."
"I do both. I'm ambidextrous. A wizard with the lens. I'll shoot you like a goddess."
"I hardly need your help to look good."
"You know that's not what I meant."
"I don't know anything about you, other than your gross eating habits, your ridiculous name, your lying tongue."
"After we wrap, I'll drive you home."
"Persistent little guy, aren't you? Like I said, there's certain information I require: birth date, hobbies, favorite Beatle, HIV test results."
"To go for a ride?"
"Especially to go for a ride. Who knows what borders we might be obliged to cross?"
"Well, I'm afraid I don't pack the necessary documentation."
"Your mistake."
It occurred to Perry that the only access he was likely to achieve to the treasures hidden beneath Ula's provocative T-shirt would be provided through the intercession of a rolling camera. Personal rejection was interrupted, however, by the arrival of Ula's roommate, Morag, who was cinched into a black Vampirella gown, her face a chalky cosmetic mask, her lips a deep nocturnal blue. Ignoring Perry, she whispered gravely into Ula's bowed ear.
"I'm needed," Ula said.
"Fire in the hold?"
"No, this time, I'm afraid, it's in somebody's pants and Morag and I have been delegated to extinguish the blaze." She leaned in close and for one dazzling moment Perry believed he was about to be accorded the consolation of a perfumed kiss instead of the comment, sotto voce, "Be careful in the John. I think you peed on yourself." Then she patted him on the back -- good fellow -- and slipped away.
He was reinspecting his trousers, spreading tented folds of material between his fingers, when he realized he was not alone in his attentions. Then his nostrils were assailed by the funk of smoldering bog.
"Lose something?" asked Rags, waving his black cigarette about for emphasis.
"No, no, minor party accident, spilled a cup of mead, that's all."
"Enjoying yourself?"
Perry wasn't sure whether he meant the evening's revelry or Perry's own hand-on-leg action. "Yes," he admitted.
"Ah." Rags's mouth snapped open as if about to catch a reward biscuit. "The irresistible banality of sex."
Perry, a mere supplicant here at the feet of higher wisdom, smiled wanly.
"I am referring of course to the ludicrous behavior you can observe in tiresome progress all about us."
Clearly, a lesson was about to be imparted. It was Perry's task to receive it. Eric, Rags's wingman, hovering in routine formation off the chief's port side, was staring at Perry with the supremely bored expression of a government agent indifferent to the fact that he will derive no pleasure whatsoever from beating the living crap out of you. He had never uttered a word to Perry again after initially bringing him to the house, introducing him to the Nordic cross-sex team. Freya and Elsie, Rags and Eric -- in how many directions did the current flow, or were these potential linkages simply poses, another set of veils hung between themselves and the public's inquisitorial fixations? In either case, the implied message was the same, a crucial aspect of Freya's overall program of applying, if not a blowtorch, then at least a scented candle to the hard edges of gender identity in her time, in her adopted place -- The Soft Revolution, a campaign more subversive, more revolutionary, and, she hoped, more lasting than guns in the streets. Nature rewarded the pliable, let us follow her guide. The pity was that so many of her adherents, like sullen Eric here, were about as pliable as glass tubing.
"Freya remains amused by the game," Rags said, his head a disembodied apparition speaking from within a cloud of smoke, "but the enchantment for me, I'm afraid, is growing thin, rather like the walls between worlds at this precarious season of the year. Perry, do you know about Samain?"
Perry did not.
"My favorite holiday. Our worlds are in torment, you see, this urgent clamorous asylum of the senses and that silent majestic Other realm, grinding perpetually against one another like great invisible tectonic plates, and as the sun declines, the barriers are attenuated, pared daily by knives of darkness, until wall is reduced to membrane and membrane to rupture and the dead are permitted to mingle freely among us and we, if we possess the knowledge and so choose, may pass through into the land of the dead. These are events for which the word 'truth' was coined. A culture which elects to inhabit a fun house of falsity will, not surprisingly, find it difficult to locate these actualities.
"This, of course, is what we attempt here at the Bridge, create an atmosphere where one truth, actual sex, can be exalted. But what do we get? This comic book sex you Americans seem to wallow in. It is your charm, I suppose, the ground for your material success, the reason you are inundated with immigrants. Who does not love a good fairy story? But you want to make a cartoon of everything: your movies, your clothes, your furniture, your books, your food, but especially your sex. Everything bright and tasty. But this is a dirty game you are playing with yourselves. This ideal of honesty and openness is a pathetic fraud. You pretend to be so innocent when none of you are and it is this charade that is genuinely pornographic.
"Back home in western Iceland there is a holy place called Helgafell. Today busloads of tourists are shuttled in and out -- the view of the mountainous coast is spectacular -- but one thousand years ago this outcropping of rock was recognized as the site of a door into the Other World. It was sacred ground to which one prayed, you dared not gaze upon the hill unwashed. What rituals were practiced there we can only imagine. One night, intoxicated with the sagacity of the young, Freya and I snuck out onto the rock and committed our first act of renegade sex, a raid on normality. We ceremoniously stripped to our skin and made love like animals into the teeth of the wind and the groan of the sea. Sex under these circumstances is thrilling beyond fantasy and you have to wonder, why is that so? The exaltation of your blood, your muscled flesh, elevates your being, offers it up, whatever creature it is that lies sleeping along the twists and turns of your nerves is awakened, comes vividly alive like the magnetic field pulsing about a high-voltage line, its yellow eyes slide open and it rouses itself to a howl that is answered by the elements, your dragon calls to the dragon of the natural world and receives a gorgeous reply. This was the reality our ancestors moved within and one still available to us today through any of three separate doors: sex, art, and murder. And each of these separate acts, curiously and appropriately enough, partakes of equal elements of the other two. I think Freya is resisting, but eventually she will arrive at the logical end of our ideas. For the true revelation of all our work, even these silly erotic videos, is this: we do not know who we are.
"Well, scary stuff, boys and girls, and the only answer to dread, as our ancestors well knew, is ritual, the placation of fright. Because when you're out there in the living dark and suddenly feel a proprietary paw laid across your rabbity heart, upon the bag of meat you believed was you, what choice but to bow down in prayer, put on the armor of nakedness, the shield of grace.
"Nonsensical mumbo jumbo to modern ears, I know, hip trendettes like ourselves who prefer to take our doses of fever and musk at the end of a long camera spoon. The emotions cathedrals were once built to house now seem to have fled to the dark sanctuaries of our hallowed multiplexes. A temporary relocation only, I'm afraid. Each passing year the viewing rooms -- who could call them theaters anymore? -- get tinier, the screens shrink, become less awesome, as we approach, in all aspects of life, the dimensions of TV. Like the lady said, 'it's the pictures that got small'; unfortunately, so did we. But then, make-believe can only carry us so far, right, Perry? That's why I'd like you here for my Samain gala. It'll be a mindblower. Are you one of the warriors, Perry, a true berserker?"
Rags smiled, his teeth as old and yellow as the artifacts in Freya's office.
Before Perry could formulate a suitable response, Elsie arrived with news the shoot was about to begin. Perry's services were required out back. Elsie and Eric glared at one another with the unforgivable enmity of aides-de-camp to rival generals in the same army.
"Remember, Perry," cautioned Rags, "here be dragons" -- and he touched his crotch -- "and here" -- his head -- "and here" -- his heart.
What an evening. His sensibility felt embarked on a perilous voyage, internal gyro beginning a wobble premonitory of on-your-back illness or another, less comprehensible mode of mental deficit where your remaining wits (a slapstick posse of armed clowns) find it necessary to circle the wagons and start rationing the ammo. His mood was not lightened by his initial glimpse of tonight's star, who had groomed and costumed himself into a passable likeness of the standard Caucasian Christ with the shoulder-length chestnut tresses, the manicured beard, the brown eyes, the white robe, the leather sandals, the complete complement of Hollywood props. It was a role Mr. Dyne had been in training for since puberty, crawling between the bedraggled tomato plants in his indulgent parents' backyard garden, homemade cross lashed to his bleeding back, impressive crown of thorns digging into his scalp, a series of Polaroids memorializing the event now circulating among the rowdy and the randy gathered to witness the transfiguration of those crude rehearsals into an elaborate full-dress and somewhat revised version of the four Gospels.
On the patio, to Perry's surprise, stood a blazing grill the size of a billiard table, its bloody array of spitting meats attended by a sweaty oxlike man who had quit a promising career in pro wrestling to run security for Cool Cat Productions -- Freya's fame, though quartered off the blaring midway, still of sufficient intensity to attract its share of dangerous bugs. This illustrious worthy, barbecue implements in tattooed hands, posed behind the crackling flames, smoke streaming over him in a constantly rising curtain, the image of Vulcan at his forge.
Ingewald, the dwarf, sat forlornly on the grass, vomiting noisily into a silver ice bucket. A fellow countryman of the Baldurssons, he roomed in a Spartan basement cell (no pictures, no plants, no windows) beneath The Rainbow Bridge. He spent his days reading empirical philosophy, his nights on the phone with relatives back in Reykjavik. He had appeared in more than two dozen videos and was beloved by sexers of every taste.
"I don't feel so good, Perry, I'm afraid I might do something bad."
"What are you talking about? You're incapable of giving a bad performance."
"I don't mean videos, asshole, I mean in real life."
"How bad?"
"Things, you know. My head's tight. I've lost breathing space. I wake up in tears."
"I felt like that once."
"Really? What'd you do?"
"Isn't it obvious? I killed myself."
Perry had to move smartly to avoid being splattered by a flung bucket of multicolored stomach chunks, simultaneously dodging other wet matter that happened to be flying through his air space from sources unknown. The earlier prevailing tone of controlled riot seemed to be balancing now on the edge of something worse. There were men wearing tube socks as penis sheaths and women with G-strings fashioned out of dental dams. There were fistfights in the hydrangea, orgasms among the croquet wickets. Freya was over by the picnic table, setting up the Last Supper scene, the participants in sundry intemperate states of mind, too busy clowning around with the hot dogs and the pickles to pay much attention, until Mr. Dyne, in a character-breaking outburst, began berating his apostles -- the flux of unexpected obscenities positively exhilarating -- for gum chewing, talking out of turn, and touching one another inappropriately. Freya handed Perry the camcorder and told him to shoot on his own initiative, the theme of this scene: food as sex and sacrament. Perry's main impression: John the Baptist had an extremely long tongue.