Louse (10 page)

I reach out and take hold of her hips, holding her weight so she can maneuver more easily. And with this done, she slips me inside and grips me tight with a slight quiver. She bends forward and places her chest on mine, arms extended over my shoulders, breasts pressed firmly against my clavicle. I raise my ass off the mat and allow her to use me as she likes. She digs her fingers into the back of my head to gain leverage. She pushes the weight of her ass onto my penis, so hard that my penis bends backwards.

Her motion is slow and rhythmic. I guide her with my hands; I run them from her hips to her ass as she rises and falls.

It is increasingly apparent that as interspecies battles have declined and intraspecies battles have increased, man's urge to possess his counterpart has naturally grown more determined.

“Oh,” she whispers in my ear.

I moan for her.

“Oh,” she says again.

I moan for her some more.

I push her ass onto my penis so I can feel it more.

“Oh,” she groans.

“Oh,” I groan.

And as if off the wave of my exclamation, she rises off my chest.

Anonymous procreation, therefore, is a necessary deterrence to maintain the status quo
…

I let go of her hips and take hold of her breasts, dimpling and squeezing her nipples with my fists. She squeezes my nipples; I tighten my grip. She twists mine; I twist hers. She grabs the back of my ear with her finger nails, and with that she begins to come. And with that, so do I.

She shrieks.

I moan.

She shrieks some more.

I moan some more.

And for whatever reason, we both begin to weep a little.

And then we become silent.

My penis is still inside her, throbbing against her weight, but it's shrinking and I can feel my sperm seeping out of her and all over my groin.

“Stay there a moment,” she says. “Don't move.”

She pulls herself away. Meanwhile, I allow myself to enjoy the warmth of my ejaculate in my pubic hair; I touch it with my fingers and bring it up to my nose.

She returns and says, “Hold me a moment longer.”

“Of course,” I say.

She takes hold of me; and when she does, I feel her slip something between my thighs.

I reach down to feel what she's doing.

“Be careful,” she says playfully.

I touch carefully and can feel she's attached something to my leg.

“Just be gentle,” she says.

“What is this?” I say.

“A little something to remember me by.” She giggles.

“I don't understand,” I say and then stop myself from saying more, for I'm afraid of saying too much of anything that could be held against me.

“Will you think of me when you go back to your quarters?” she whispers as she taps the thing she's attached to my inner thigh.

“Yes, of course,” I say.

“As you should.”

“What is happening?”

“Good-bye,” she says moving away from me.

“Good-bye,” I say, thinking I should hold onto her until I can get an answer as to what this all means.

“It was a pleasure,” she says from a distance.

“It was a pleasure,” I say, hearing her door revolve back to the other side, as I feel the thing between my legs. It is slick and plastic and attached so tightly I'm afraid of ripping it off because of the noise it might make.

When I step through the revolving door into the antechamber I hear the Sex Room's self-cleaning function go into effect. A loud hiss of water pressure vibrates the floor and the walls. I am now required to shower. The shower in the antechamber turns on automatically. The thing she attached to my leg is a small package wrapped in a shrink-wrap whose color very closely matches my skin. I, therefore, step into the shower and scrub my entire body clean. I am tempted to rip the package off my leg and have a look, but decide it would be best to do it in my quarters, since that is where she implied she wanted me to do it. Perhaps Poppy is testing my common sense with this encounter? It is very difficult to say. I simply have to have faith that this is the case; and if it's not, I have to have faith in Poppy's surveillance system to discern that my intent is not to be clandestine, but compliant.

As the hot mist of the shower rises, this entire experience suddenly feels so unreal I can hardly feel the scalding water touch my body. I step out onto the white tiles and dry myself. I send the towel down the incineration chute. I open the armoire and carefully slip on my underwear and pants and the rest of my clothes. I tie my tie
into a firm knot and step out into the lounge. The man who was waiting before me is no longer there. In his place is another and two more beside him. They don't regard me as I walk to the desk.

“If you would, Mr. Louse,” the woman says to me as she turns the roster in my direction. She hands me a pen. I sign my name next to the date and time. I hand back the pen. She turns the roster back toward her.

“Good fortune,” she says.

“Good fortune,” I say.

I walk out into the corridor and go directly to the elevator.

Two men stand on either side of me, wiping a few beads of water from their brow.

When I return to my quarters, I remove my jacket and take a seat on the bed. I can hear the weak buzz of a fly bumping against the window pane. But I don't look. I listen and wait as it pushes away and lethargically circles around the room. I can tell it is a fat little fly and doesn't have much fight in it. It is probably wondering how it is that it actually found its way up the air conditioning shaft to this place, only to find a piece of glass separating it from the outside. The fly buzzes and swoops around my head and lands on my nose. I look at it as it struggles to groom itself. It acts out its instinctual behavior to the very last swipe of its little arms and then slopes down the narrow ridge to fall dead into my lap. I walk the fly to the incinerator in the bathroom, open the door, and watch it disappear into the hot darkness. I go to the toilet and stand before it to relieve myself, wondering how to remove the package from my leg without it looking obvious that I am removing a package from my leg.

I'm unsure if removing the package from my leg in the open is an acceptable thing to do considering how I received it. I don't recall anything within my contract that addresses a situation such as this; which leads me to believe that I should follow my intuition,
which should resemble common sense, that is if I am still in my right mind. If my intuition is wrong then I imagine I have failed the test and Poppy or Mr. Sherwood or Dr. Barnum will deal with me in the appropriate manner. There is therefore very little for me to do other than to do what I feel seems most right. And what feels most right at this particular moment is to remove the package in the most subtle way I possibly can to avoid detection of the removal by the cameras. I received the package while it was out of sight; I should remove the package, or at least the contents of the package, so that it remains out of sight.

I walk to the hole between my room and Mr. Crane's room and crouch beside my bed. I find Mr. Crane standing in the middle of the room in his shorts. He is looking up through the skylight as the sound of a plane passes overhead. He stands motionless. I wait for the noise to disappear, thinking of the woman's movements in SR-5, how she crept up my body with such fluidity and how the entire experience was one long, uninterrupted movement. As the drone of the engine drifts away and turns back into the white noise of my quarters, Mr. Crane continues looking through his skylight, gazing up at the muted stars. His large head tilts back onto the fat folds of flesh on his neck as pale moonlight juts down his jaw from his chin.

When I get up, I go to my desk, pull out my chair, and take a seat. I pull my chair under my desk and in an inconspicuous way dislodge the package from my leg by pulling at its corners through my pants. I push it down just below my knee. I then adjust my chair ever so slightly so that I can cross my legs. And then as if to scratch my shin, I reach into my pants leg, slide the package out, and cup it in my hand. I uncross my legs and then roll my chair over to my filing cabinet. I open the cabinet drawer, wedge my hand through
the opening in a folder and gently insert the small square of plastic into the file. When this is done, I notice, to my relief, a slit in the section that was taped to my leg. Acting as though I am removing a new document from the file, I remove it from the slit, unfold it, and place it on my desk.

I am nearly sweating when this is through.

I roll my chair away from the filing cabinet and pull the document back to my reading area. To my surprise, it is a copy of my contract; or so it appears to be at first glance. The more I look at it, however, I realize that it isn't at all. Yes, it does contain sections of the contract verbatim; though interspersed between these sections is bold print that looks like the contract, but isn't.

The very first bowdlerized section begins,

I am stunned at the sight of this. What agreement? I never made an agreement other than the official agreements.

I turn the page and search through the fine print.

Mortimer Blank no doubt! Who else could it be?

I stop reading for a moment and weigh the two alternatives, wondering which would be the best, and wondering how he could keep them from reading what I am currently reading unless this individual is part of Intelligence or Internal Affairs or has similar capabilities as those in Intelligence or Internal Affairs.