Now there was only the act, and without a flicker of tension, without a distortion of intellect, without a cramping of the feelings in my emotional center, I let my body ride its ride. My legs braced against the bed, my pelvis gyrating in its own rhythm, my hand curled around my cock and stroking up and down, my chest rising and falling with sharp breaths, my mouth slack and emitting sounds, my head thrown back, and unifying it all, my cock in growing heat and excitement.
Then I felt a turmoil in my bowels, and all of a sudden it felt like the bottom fell out. My asshole opened and the walls inside rippled to discharge my finger. The heat tingled and began to rise as wave after wave of sheer energy rolled through me. It was immense and went far beyond pain and pleasure. It was the actual energy of the universe shooting through me.
My body grew huge with the charge that was building, and I felt a great reservoir of force building in my belly. It grew greater and greater, until no more could be contained, and then a long, slow, mighty eruption began. It flowed from every cell of my body, from every pore. It rushed through my entire frame, moving in gathering speed and intensity toward a single spot. It came together in the pit of me, somewhere just below the navel and deep inside, and then spun around on itself and plunged into my balls, which churned and then released all the sperm accumulated there. It boiled up my cock in scalding layers, and as my entire body rolled in spasms my pelvis broke into easy undulating thrusts, and the sperm spurted out in jet after jet for a long, long time, until it was all spent and lay in drops and rivulets across my chest and stomach.
For a long time I hovered in that space, and then sank back with a large sigh, a deep peace already beginning to pervade my body. Although I was already lying full on the mattress, the feeling of sinking into it continued, and I closed my eyes and seemed to be falling a great distance, falling and floating through space. I let myself go and plunged into myself, finding a great void, a featureless universe of movement with objects, of law without manifestation, of feeling without person. And for a brief instant, the single absolute true understanding of the condition of existence flashed in my mind, and I lost consciousness.
That night no one in the entire world could have slept more perfectly than I. But when I woke up in the morning, a profound sense of depression had already seized me.
THIRTEEN
AS THE DAY progressed, my mood grew worse. However, there was a difference from depressions I had suffered in the past. This time, I was strangely content within it. There was no sense of conflict, no feeling that I ought to be feeling something else. In my acceptance of how I was, I found a peace that was astonishing. I simply let myself go with the emotions and thoughts and sensations, not judging them, or condemning them, or making plans on the basis of them. I felt not a little like a character in a play whose script called for depression at this particular time in the action. And so the heaviness became no more or less important than the sunshine streaming in through the windows.
I lay in bed for a long while, and then, with no purpose in mind, got up and dressed and went out for a walk. It was a clear Spring day, trees very green and vibrant and the constant dance of birds winging through the air. Without changing, my mood lightened, and although I felt totally friendless, without any understanding of myself or my problems, and with no one to turn to, I felt a release in the very fact of my poverty. I stood in the middle of a small grove and came to terms with the universe. Deeply and suddenly I ceased struggling. Everything was clear, and in a flash I realized that there would always be ugliness and pain, as there would always be truth and joy; there would always be the moment of total communion between one human being and another, and there would always be times of betrayal. And yet, somehow, if I simply stopped attempting to figure it out, trying to change it, but accepted the gift of my life with all its hardship and confusion as well as its beauty and elation, then never again need I feel that terrible sense of having been cheated, of wanting more, of insisting that things must be other than they are. And in that realization, everything was better, without having become at all different.
My reflex was immediately to do something with this new understanding, but there was nothing to do. I realized that I had lost that urgency, that sense of quest. I was myself, totally and inexorably. No Tocco or sexual institute could change me because . . . and the insight came with the strength of thunder . . . because the change had already occurred. Somewhere, somehow, a mutation had gone on inside me, and although not a whit of my entire personality was different, I was utterly transformed.
It was at this point that I heard a noise, or felt a presence, and looked up to see Tocco standing by my side. He was barefoot and wore only a great white loincloth. His body gleamed with oil. And on his face was an expression of total openness and warmth. It seemed that I was seeing him for the first time, not as a guru or an insane fat man, but simply as a human being, filled with beauty and love, with great sorrow, and heavy with the understanding in his heart. I felt myself grow warm, and pure simple love poured out of me and washed over him. He smiled and his eyes shone, and for a long moment we remained like that.
I started to speak, but Tocco held up one hand. "The details of what you are feeling are unimportant, Michael. I know where you are, and it's good to be here with you."
I wanted to respond but no words came. He saw my impulse, reached down one hand, and helped me to my feet. We stood there, and he said, "Now, there's something I want to show you. And there is only one thing I want to say about what you are feeling, just some words to plant in your awareness and let them grow." He paused and turned as if to indicate the fact of our being there and said, "It is obvious."
I waited a long moment for him to continue, and then gradually realized that that was the entire message. I looked back at him but he just smiled a kind of cat-who-ate-the canary grin and said, "Come, let's take a little tour."
We went back into the house and into Tocco's study. We walked straight through to a door which he opened to reveal an elevator. We entered, and then began to descend for a space I couldn't calculate, and stepped out into a hallway which ran in three directions from where we stood. On the right was a sign which said: "Vuvu"; to the right another sign read "Exit"; and the center sign had written on it "Corridor of Ultimate Experiences." Tocco set out straight ahead and said, "We go this way."
The hallway was longer than I could see to the end of, and on each side were a series of doors. We went past the first of them, and each had a placard on it which read, "Ultimate Experience: Fetichism", or, "Ultimate Experience: Transvestism." I soon saw that behind these doors was a representation of each of the so-called perversions of mankind. Tocco began speaking. "In this hall are the people who have gone through all the preliminary adjustments to their understanding of sex, and are now single-heartedly exploring the variations within individual forms. Once one understands fully that there is no such thing as an unnatural act, then any act can become an area of study, and through understanding it, one understands all."
"How do they come to choose their . . . uh, specialty?" I asked.
"It's a matter of temperament mostly. Of course, there are interdisciplinary seminars, and the work-day is limited. After-hours even the researchers like to go blow off steam." He paused and turned to me. "Where would you like to begin?"
I looked at the nearest door on my right and saw the sign, "Exhibitionist-Voyeurist." "That looks a good a place as any," I said.
We entered the room and an astonishing sight met my eyes. Scores of men and women lay and stood and knelt around in odd poses, some alone, some fucking in groups, while others peered from behind chairs or through tiny binoculars. Although there were the usual sexual sounds, the room held an unusual silence reminding me, incongruously, of a library.
I scanned the room and my eyes fell on a young woman who couldn't have been more than twenty. She had long silky blonde hair, and wore an open blouse and slacks, which she would pull slowly down past her waist and over her buttocks as though she were undressing. But when she had pulled her pants down to her knees and bent over to accentuate a full, lush-lobed ass, she pulled them up again. I watched her for a minute, and when she caught my eye she repeated her act while staring unblinkingly at me. She looked down and I followed her line of sight to those inviting sweet buttocks, and then looked back at her to see her mouth the words, "Don't I have a beautiful ass?" I shuddered and felt a thrill of excitement go through me.
Tocco whispered in my ear, "She wouldn't let you fuck her, but if you wanted to, she would let you worship her, or, more precisely, her ass. You would have to learn to navigate the waters of her narcissism, to kneel to her ass, to lick it, to murmur into it." But I was already doing something else, a kind of long-distance Tantric yoga, my body moving in almost imperceptible gestures to complement her dance. She picked up on it and for a while we just kind of leaned into one another with subtle vibrations, and without touching her, I was able to fuck her in the ass in a dozen different ways, knowing that she felt it, and was playing back with complementary movements.
Then a flicker caught my eye, and I wheeled around to see a giant video screen come alive with a picture of a cunt which formed the total image. It stood twelve feet high by eight feet wide, and must have been shot with a close-up lens, because every fold, every hair, every glisten of secretion stood out in giant relief. Then fingers came into view, and slowly, very slowly, pulled the lips apart, and layer after layer of cunt opened endlessly, until the very bud center lay exposed, pink, and pulsating slightly. One finger went to the heart of it and inserted itself, no more than an eight of an inch. But with such magnification, it was possible to see the core of the cunt opening and sucking at the finger like a child's mouth at a nipple filled with milk. The finger tip went back and forth in the tiniest of movements, and rolled gently around, slightly expanding the grasping cunt hole.
I wondered why, when such exquisite grace was possible with such small subtle movement, did we spend so much time grunting and crashing into one another? It seemed that in fucking we get carried away by the mounting energy, and lose sensitivity control. And as with any other interactive machine, the less sensitivity there is the more signal input there has to be, and in our case that amounted to adding on more bodies, more drugs, more whips, more of everything, until one was glutted. But when the sensitivity increased, one could do less until, doing almost nothing at all, everything was explodingly vital!
Tocco broke my reverie. "They do very little but look and be looked at. Sometimes the tension gets so high in here, though, that all hell breaks loose and there is more sustained fucking and sucking and carrying on than you can imagine. Personally I have always found this particular style a bit tedious, but I can appreciate the purity of line it involves. With a body the size of mine, exhibitionism would verge on the grotesque." This was the first time I had heard Tocco make any reference to his personal preferences, and it amused me to hear him, of all people, use a word like
grotesque
disparagingly. He nudged my elbow for us to leave, and as I walked out I glimpsed a man squeezed so far down to the floor that his chin was pushed in, looking between the legs of a couple fucking. And as he watched a thick cock thrashing in and out of the stretched churning cunt lips, his eyes grew wide and his face lit up with what surely must have been glowing revelations.
We went diagonally across to a door marked "Sadist-Masochist," and I almost hesitated to enter, fearing blood and gore on the other side. Tocco sensed my mood and hastened to reassure me. "Nothing crude goes on in these corridors, Michael. The people here, although they are engaged in what seems infantile behavior at times, are quite serious and intelligent. There's none of that silly chain and leather business here. They are all specialists who, like yourself, know what it is to be broken by pain, and it is from that vantage point that they study its effects."
We opened the door onto what seemed to be a lecture room. A man was standing speaking to a group of about twenty people who sat facing him. It might have been a schoolroom except for two things: they were all nude, and a woman was tied to a long table in front of the speaker. We walked around to the back and joined the audience.
"So," the speaker was saying, "it is clear that pain has at least two primary functions—releasing energies within oneself, and serving as a counterweight to the partner's pleasure. The more A suffers, the more B can enjoy himself or herself, and the fuller is A's experience." He looked down at the woman in front of him, her legs rising to the rich hills of her thighs, her pubic hair bristling up like grass between her legs, and a thin waist flaring up to huge breasts which now sank to either side of her rib cage like great mounds of jello. "Barbara here is quite tense in her rectum and abdomen, although she is not ordinarily aware of that. Let us picture what might happen if she went to bed with, as they say on the outside, some man she has come to like.
"As they fuck, she experiences initial pleasure, but as it starts to mount, it is somehow cut off. She doesn't know why, for she is not in contact with the tensions in her body and mind which keep her holding on. Her mind starts to work, and she begins to wonder what is wrong. Perhaps she blames the man, or condemns herself. If he is a typical lout, he is so busy enjoying the simple friction of rubbing his cock inside her cunt to notice anything, and will fuck her until he comes. But if he is somewhat sensitive he will notice that something is wrong and wonder why she isn't enjoying herself fully. Then, if he is an intellectual, he will stop to ask her about it, which will, if he does not possess the utmost empathy, embarrass her and put the two of them through one of mankind's most tedious scenes, the frigidity rigamarole.