We live and die in agony
Dancing in the flame
We live and love in ecstasy
Dancing in the flame....
The voice sang on into the night, her flesh in theirs, their flesh in hers, a single organism communing with its own being through Star, its creation and creator.
For each of us is destiny
Passing through the flame
And each of us is ecstasy
Laughing in the rain
Dancing in the flame
Passing through the flame
Dancing in the flame....
The song trailed off into silence, and then she was back on the stage in the avalanche of applause, back inside the envelope of her own skin, trembling, blinking, shivering in terror as she tried to comprehend who and where she had been. And yet... and yet the terror was tinged with a strange sense of sadness, of ineffable loss.
“I felt myself slipping...” she muttered into the dark.
“Huh?” Bill said against her body.
The cool blue-blackness enfolded her like a cloak of forgetfulness, like pulling the covers up over her head when she was a little kid hiding from the phantom monsters of the night. Bill’s body against her was a warm, cozy reality. His arms around her were what was real.
Memory’s just a ghost. I’m Susan. I’m with Bill. I’m here.
“Nothing, babes,” she said. “I must’ve been drifting off, talking in my sleep. Just a weird dream.”
She snuggled closer to him, making the drone of the air conditioner, the beat of his chest rising and falling against her, a mantra of forgetfulness to fill her mind, an empty place in which to hide from the demons within.
Half dozing in the cool darkness of Paul’s room, Sandra Bayne blinked herself to full wakefulness as the door opened, spearing her eyes with lances of light from the brightly lit hallway. She could see Paul’s figure outlined against the light for a moment; then he slammed the door shut, returning the room to darkness.
She pushed the pillow up against the headboard and sat up as she heard him kick off his shoes, fling off his clothing. His breathing sounded ragged and shallow, and she could sense his enormous fatigue.
He walked across the room, lifted the covers, and flopped heavily into bed beside her. At the touch of her naked flesh, he grunted and instinctively pulled away in surprise.
“Remember me?” Sandy said. She rolled over onto him, threw her arms around him, and kissed him wetly on the lips. His arms went around her, and his mouth opened to her; but she felt the utter slackness of his muscles, the mechanical passivity of his kiss, and his breath was rank with the sourness of metabolic exhaustion.
“Sandy...”he muttered. It might have been a greeting, or a question, or a sigh of pain; he exhaled her name like an animal cry, turning it into a meaningless sound. She kissed him once, twice, on his bare chest, tasting the salt of dried sweat.
“Tired, lover?” she said, rubbing her cheek against his skin.
“Uh-huh,” Paul grunted, putting his hand absently in her hair, but otherwise lying passively beneath her.
She took his nipple in her mouth and nibbled at it, prodding it with her tongue. Paul moaned weakly, but it seemed more a sound of protest than of passion.
“You really are exhausted,” she said. “Has it been that rough?”
“You have no idea,” he said. “No idea.” A tremor passed through his flesh.
Sandra moved her mouth up along his chest and neck in a series of little licks and kisses and opened it wide around his ear, caressing the inside of it with her tongue. Again he moaned, this time almost a cry of agony.
“Jesus.... Oh, Sandy, please....”
Sandra placed a finger on his lips, then replaced it with a quick gentle kiss. “I know,” she said. “It’s all right. You don’t have to do anything, lover. You just relax. Mama will take care of you.”
She kissed him slowly and wetly on the throat, let her open mouth glide softly down his chest, running her lips along the tired salty sweetness of his skin, teasing the little hairs with her tongue, gently stroking his inner thighs with her hands, up, up, up, as her mouth went down, down, down across his chest, the dimple of his navel....
As her lips touched the roughness of his pubic hair, she moved her hands into the quick of him—and his body suddenly went rigid, arcing up toward her, as if her touch carried a high-voltage shock.
The touch of fingers around his cock, the warmth of palms against his balls hardened Paul’s flesh in a mindless reflex reaction even as it ignited painful cells of memory in his exhausted brain. The animal pleasure of his body called up the vile image of Rick Gentry’s violating hands and sardonic, triumphant face.
He groaned in pleasure—and in anger at the tormenting treason of his own mind. He stiffened, paralyzed in the tension between Sandy’s hands in the now and Gentry’s hands in the throbbing marrow of his brain.
In the darkness, fingers had no gender, and all mouths were one. Fingers stroking his cock, hands kneading his buttocks. Gentry’s hot eyes, his lips wet and glistening. “Why don’t you let me take care of that for you?” Lips opening wide under downcast eyes between his legs. “You just relax.” The tip of a pink tongue circling around wet white teeth. “I know what you need.” Lips opening wide. “Mama will take care of you.”
No, no! Yes, yes! Physical pleasure pulsed from his loins to his brain. Waves of nausea radiated from his gut. He writhed and moaned on the soft white sheet. Gentry’s leering face began its inexorable downward descent....
Warm, wet lips touched the crown of his manhood, paused, then slid slowly down the shaft behind a shock wave of physical delight. Up... down... up... down.... Sandy’s mouth, Sandy’s,
Sandy’s!
Up... down... up.... The mouth enveloping him, Rick Gentry’s lips upon his flesh, Gentry’s triumphant pleasure, those leering eyes, hands between his legs.... Up... down... up... down....
The pleasure built in his flesh, cresting quickly toward a peak, and with it the nausea, twining around the lust and turning it to something torturing and loathsome, Gentry’s face jeering at him triumphantly, that sardonic mouth sucking at his substance, goading him, longing to gobble his very essence—
Angrily, Paul tried to hold back, to deny Gentry his victory, but those lips made his flesh the master of his mind, drawing him onward and upward, becoming themselves the moving circle of tension between pleasure and pain, a red-hot interface between ecstasy and disgust, a thin bubble that grew... and stretched... and burst!
He groaned—in physical ecstasy, in mental agony, in defeat, in release, and the tension went out of him, pouring through those soft willing lips into the greedy mouth of Rick Gentry, that spectral face floating before him in the darkness. Eyes closed in delight, licking his obscene lips slowly and languidly, like a cat savoring the last droplets of a dish of cream. A triumphant face that whirled around and around, down and down, into a welcome pit of black velvet darkness....
Sandra Bayne lay with her head nestled in the hollow of Paul’s stomach, listening to his regular, heavy breathing in the cool airconditioned darkness of the bedroom. The taste of him lingered in her mouth, and the smell of him was rich in her nostrils.
Yet somehow, in this most intimate of all moments, she felt that she had lost him, that, in some strange way, he had never been there. She told herself that this was pure paranoia. But still she felt it, and she wondered why.
A million feather-soft insect legs pattering across her skull, tiny pinpoints of sensation on the eyelids of her mind—up through the mists of sleep came Susan, awakening to the sound of light rain whispering against the facets of the little dome. The palest hint of light shone through the nearly opaque blue plastic, filling the sleeping quarters with a strange radiance, a tactile presence on her skin, rather than a message to her eyes, as if the material of the dome were her extended skin, as if the raindrops misting its surface were somehow transforming themselves to corpuscles of light that penetrated and refreshed her substance.
Bill lay on his stomach in the bed beside her, his face buried in the pillow, deep in untroubled sleep. Some inner clock, some cellular response to the motion of the earth through space, told her that this was a moment near dawn, when the world was still and the human heart was closest to its own solitude. Outside the dome, beyond the fenced perimeter of the performers’ compound, she could sense the quiescent human bulk of the sleeping multitude—lovers resting in each other’s arms, the lonely huddled into themselves against the immensity of night, the tired and the twisted thrashing in their frustrated dreams of redemption. Thousands upon thousands of human minds slowly being called up from the body’s sleep by the dawn’s quickening of life’s blood.
It seemed to her that she had been summoned up from sleep to uncharacteristically greet the dawn, awakened to bright clarity in life’s dimmest hour, by some irresistible interaction between the great wheel of her karma and the biochemistry of her blood.
With a little sigh, she gave herself over to that unheard summons, quietly slid out of bed, gently rearranged the covers over Bill’s sleeping body, and padded naked across the carpet to the door, her body humming with energy, her nipples firm and taut.
She opened the door, stepped outside, and quickly closed the door behind her so as not to disturb the untrammeled rhythm of Bill’s sleep. The grass was dewy-wet under her feet, and the rain was no more than a lightly falling mist, a gently blowing fog that turned the world into a shimmering Chinese landscape painting. It caressed her skin, a cloak of delicious coolness, earth’s own touch of love. She felt a oneness with the grass, the air, the fog that made everything glisten with its moisture.
The sun was nothing more than a pale radiance over the lip of the eastern hills, a pearly patch of sky somewhat lighter than the gray luminescence which roofed the world and faded seamlessly into the opalescent substance of the air.
Looking southeast, she saw a panorama of little tents, quiet campsites, and sleeping bags, a vast dreaming caravanserai of pilgrims, the people of her heart, those she loved, her maker and her creatures, and beyond, barely visible in the mist, the spectral shapes of the People’s World’s Fair, Camelot awaiting the dawn. Her bones ached with the beauty of the moment, and her flesh pulled her toward the sleeping world beyond the fence like the sea drawn into bulging tides by the inexorable attraction of the moon.
Her feet began carrying her south toward the fence, past the clusters of little blue domes, past a helicopter like a huge dragonfly resting in the mist. The fog condensed into droplets on her bare skin, made her black hair sparkle, and caused her flesh to shiver in delight.
There was a gate in this part of the fence, and about forty yards from it, a gray portable toilet. As she walked slowly toward the gate, the single guard who had been standing beside it walked rapidly toward the little gray shack and stepped inside, closing the door on the world behind him.
She saw this not as fortunate coincidence, but as an inevitable quantum of her destiny. She, the guard, the gate, the toilet, the demands of his bladder, the sleeping world beyond, were all aspects of the one indivisible Whole, cells in the body of the All. She saw nothing more coincidental in his stepping aside so as not to impede her passage than she did in the way the bones of her feet flexed perfectly to compensate for the movements of her legs as she walked.
She reached the gate, opened it, stepped through, and carefully closed it behind her, so as not to create disharmony in the guard’s personal aura. Robed in the crystalline tranquility of the fog, her consciousness diffused into the interface of mist and skin, and beyond, through the medium of the mist, into the air and the glow in the eastern sky and the field of sleeping souls. Star walked down the gentle slope toward the tents of her people.
In a few minutes, she was among them. Here was a small brown pup tent painted with rainbows and peace signs, and inside a black girl sleeping in a white man’s arms, his long blond hair fanned across her face. Outside were three couples in sleeping bags and four boys sleeping alone. Then a makeshift tepee, more couples in sleeping bags, more lone men, and a girl who couldn’t have been more than fifteen naked in her sleeping bag, her tiny breasts peeping out of the opening, a small smile on her sleeping face. Star walked on into the campgrounds, her heart bursting with love for the sleepers.
At her feet, a thin man with long matted hair and a big black beard stirred in his sleeping bag, blinked, and propped himself up on one arm to stare at her. She smiled at him straight from her glowing core, and it touched the light within him. He smiled back, and love was between them. She leaned down, diamonds of moisture dripping from the points of her breasts, and kissed him on the lips. He kissed her back, and one gentle hand touched her breast, nothing more. Star walked on, buoyed by the glow of love at her back.
A couple was making love in their sleeping bag a few feet in front of her; quiet, gentle love in the soft morning mist, stirring each other’s bodies to a warm rosy glow, lovemaking that moved toward no end beyond the moment-to-moment sweetness of its own steady rhythm. Soft moans and sighs so as not to disturb the sleep of those around them. She felt a surge of love for their tenderness toward each other, toward the world around them. As she walked by, they looked up, smiled shyly without breaking their rhythm, and three pairs of eyes shared a silent communion. Star could feel the contented glow of their love in her own loins as the three of them lay in the arms of morning.
Two young boys peered out of their tent nervously at her. She smiled, and walked over to them, saw their nakedness.
“Are you—”
“Yes, I am.”
She took each of them by the hand and hugged them to her body, feeling the joy in their loins as they hardened against her flesh, then their embarrassment as they became aware of her awareness.
“It’s all right,” she said, and kneeling, caressed both of them briefly with her mist-moistened lips. They gasped in quiet pleasure and asked for nothing more, looking after her as she walked slowly away into the fog.