He led her in that manner until they were some fifteen feet from the edge of the cliff and then he pulled his fist out as abruptly and harshly as he had pulled his finger out. Constance did a small dance around the sudden emptiness at her core and after a minute sank to her knees. She lay down, convinced he was going to fuck her, or subject her to some new indignity. Part of her was apprehensive, but part of her tingled in anticipation.
“Maybe your time is up, bitch,” he said, closing in on her. His face was pure anger. “Maybe you’ve teased your last cock. Maybe it’s time for you to meet your Unmaker.”
For the first time since she had arrived at the Parlor, Constance was run through with a chill of serious terror. The man came to within a foot of her, then stopped. He looked down through slitted lids, and once again raised his hand and snapped his fingers. Four guards ran out of hiding and sprung to attention at his side.
“Rig up a drop,” the man said.
Then, turning to Constance, he dropped to his knees beside her, and buried his face between her breasts.
“Oh Mommy, Mommy,” he sobbed, “I’m sorry, Mommy.” To her surprise, Constance felt hot tears on her tits. The man was crying loudly and wetly into her bosom, the tears soaking the thin material of her blouse. He tried to burrow more deeply into her, and tore the fabric away so he could clamp his mouth on one of her nipples. He sucked at it ferociously, and Constance hovered between pain and a species of hurting pleasure. There was nothing much to do, so she lay back and let him have his way.
She had lapsed into a dreamlike revery when the guards returned carrying a large wooden structure that looked like a frame for hanging. They struck one end of the vertical beam into a specially constructed hole at the very edge of the cliff. The horizontal beam now hung over the abyss, a rope dangling from its tip.
Constance looked at the device with horror.
“Oh no,” she murmured. And then screamed, “Oh my God! No!” And tried to pull away and run. But the young man held her in an iron grip, his mouth glued to her nipple. She beat at him with her fists and finally he pulled away, smiling, cursing, and sobbing all at once. He didn’t give the impression of a man who was responsible for his actions. When he stood up, Constance saw that he sported an enormous erection.
The guards pounced on her and held her down while one of them tied the rope around her ankles. Then she was carried to the edge of the cliff. She was too frightened to breathe. They counted to three, heaved, and threw her into the abyss. She closed her eyes and died a thousand deaths in that split second of falling before the rope caught and held her there, dangling, head down, four hundred feet above the rocks and surf.
She swung back and forth, dizzily, crazily. The cliff swam before her eyes, the shale, the tiny flowers, the grass, the bird’s nest, all hyperrealistically etched into her brain like high contrast, precision photos. Below her, unimaginable horror and shattering death.
She looked up. The four guards were standing at the edge, looking down dispassionately. The young man was pointing down at her, laughing madly, slapping his knee and jumping up and down. She closed her eyes and resigned herself to her fate.
She swung a long time and came to a standstill. The day effected its closure around the hideous happening. Once again, it was a hot, quiet afternoon. Constance noticed that her nose itched.
She opened her eyes and looked up. The guards were gone, and the young man was sitting at the edge looking down at her. He had the same expression of artistic attention as he had shown when sketching her. It was almost a loving look.
“He’s come full cycle,” she thought. “A perfect psychotic, in complete identification with each of his aspects. And with no central self to inform the whole. The structure of enlightened beings and monsters.”
The man was staring at her cunt, and Constance realized that she was completely exposed. Her tits hung upside down and almost came to her mouth. Her ass was an open gash for him to peer down into. She took a deep breath and calmed herself. It would be an interesting fall, and she imagined the impact itself wouldn’t even be felt. She’d be unconscious before she felt pain. She’d be dead before she was unconscious.
“They told me I couldn’t kill you,” he said at last in a soft voice. “I wanted to know what made you so special.”
“Who are they?” she wondered.
“But they didn’t say I couldn’t scare you.” He paused and peered into her eyes. “Are you scared?”
“I was,” she responded. “But I’m not any more. I suppose I should thank you. You cured me of my fear of death.”
“Oh, I’m so glad,” he said, unexpectedly, and for an instant she thought she detected a note of authenticity in his voice.
“You’re very beautiful,” he told her.
“It’s the most bizarre circumstances for a compliment I’ve ever experienced,” she thought, “but a girl can’t be too choosy.”
“I want to come in your mouth,” he added.
“Why not?” she said to herself. “Just about everybody else has.”
He dropped his pants and held his cock in his hands. He squinted over the bent top like a hunter looking down the barrel of a rifle. Constance looked up at him and a thrill of eerie companionship ran her. It had been a complex relationship, beginning with his exquisite portrait, going through his walking her around with his finger up her ass and then with his fist in her cunt, and flying with him through his changes from aesthete to sadist to little boy and back again. And now including his forcing her to look death in the face. She realized that she was quite turned on.
“I’d rather have you fuck me,” she said.
“Later,” he told her. “Tonight. In your room. Make it like a date. I like girls who put out. Dirty girls. Girls who like to have their cunts rubbed.”
“All right,” she said. “Later.”
And then opened her mouth. And, hanging four hundred feet above her doom, suspended upside down over an abyss, she watched him masturbate slowly, and then more rapidly, until he was bringing himself off with reckless abandon, until the sperm shot out and curved in a long arc into space, splashing on her belly, on her tits, and finally on her lips, at which point she ran her tongue over her mouth and drank in the extraordinary gift from his loins.
“But what do they get out of it? I can understand the physical part, the simple use of a body for one’s pleasure, and I can get some understanding of the psychological aspect, the fact of having someone tied down and helpless. It is enough to make a person feel like God. But all of that seems pretty superficial. I mean, for the money I imagine a man spends for a session in the Parlor, he could have a hundred different women blowing him on consecutive nights throughout an entire winter. Now that would be real pleasure. And the psychological part, well, it shouldn’t take more than a moment’s reflection and thought for a man to see through the game and discard it as unworthy of an adult.”
Constance spoke slowly and languidly, pausing often to take puffs of a cigarette and blow clouds into the cloudless night. Robert lay on a chaise longue next to her. They were on her balcony, and it was two hours before she was scheduled to go on duty. He had dropped by an hour earlier to ask if he might visit for a while. She was glad of the distraction, for after a three-day rest the thought of going back into the Parlor was starting to create obsessive fear patterns in her mind. She’d fixed him a drink, and they had taken to the out-of-doors to enjoy the balmy air and the spectacle of the naked universe. Their talk had gone from the conventional to the specific to the personal in quick, easy stages until they arrived at the delicious level of true philosophical discourse, ruminations on the meanings of one’s experience as an aspect of common human consciousness.
“You give a lot of undue credit, Constance,” Robert replied. “The people who come here aren’t capable, most of them, of reflection and thought. They are mere automata, with as much free will as marionettes on a string. They are the privileged wealthy, from all nations, all races, all cultures. They are the Noble Scum of the Earth, the ones through whom our destiny is shaped. When they enter the Parlor, they maintain as much consciousness as a mesmerized gambler at a craps table. As for pleasure, I’m sure that if one of them ever felt a true moment’s pleasure, a real throbbing and melting and surrender, they would think it was some form of attack and run to see a doctor.”
Constance smiled, although the corners of her mouth didn’t go as far as they might, the movement being checked by her remembrance that she was due to be subjected within the hour to the very monsters they were discussing.
Robert watched her through lids that were almost closed. He was resting his eyes but also slipping into a posture of utter indifference so that Constance would be less on her guard.
“The next question you are going to ask, I’ll bet,” he said, “is, ‘What’s a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?’”
It was the first time since their initial meeting that he indicated by tone of voice or any other signal that he was still courting her in his peculiar fashion. She remembered his warning that sooner or later she would be hungry for a relationship, which combined the vibration she received from men in the Parlor with the tenderness and intimacy she had with Madge and the other women. And that when that time came, he would be there, waiting, ready to receive the full flowering of her new womanhood. She had come so far as to accept that that would indeed happen, but was taking her time about it, judging that keeping Robert at precisely the right distance was the best life insurance she could take out.
“No,” she replied, “I know what you’re doing here. And you know that I think that you are immeasurably lower than the swine who patronize the place. As you point out, they are largely too stupid to know what they’re really doing. But you know exactly what you’re doing, which is the first requisite of doing evil.”
She stared at him as she spoke, and was surprised to notice that he flinched when she said the last word. She had said worse things to him with no noticeable effect, and she wondered why he had suddenly developed such a thin skin.
“Have I offended you?” she asked in mock innocence.
“Wounded,” he replied.
“Really?” she drawled, smirking.
But when he replied, there was an infinitesimal tremor in his lower lip. “I’ve come to grow very fond of you, Constance, even in my monstrous fashion. And it shouldn’t come as too big a surprise for you to learn that even monsters can be vulnerable.”
“Yeah, I hear that Himmler used to weep when he listened to Chopin.”
Again, at the reference to the Gestapo leader, Robert winced. Constance began to wonder whether he were a consummate actor or whether she were actually touching some chord in him, and whether that might be exploited. It was odd, however, that she now almost never thought of escape, but burned with a passion to know who was really running the place.
“I really ought to take you to my private parlor and work you over,” he said in an incongruously light tone. “It might teach you some respect.”
“Not to speak of a few new tricks,” she quipped.
Their conversation turned on its edge, skirted the periphery of banter, and metamorphosed into silent mutual appreciation. She was constantly surprised at the ways in which she found herself liking the man.
“Speaking of which,” she added, “who is that lunatic that grabbed me yesterday?”
Robert smiled grimly. “I heard about that,” he said.
“Good God!” she exclaimed. “Do you realize he had me hanging by my heels forty storeys above the ground? Do you have any idea of what that feels like?”
“Did he show up for the date?”
“What?” She pretended not to understand.
“The women he ravishes usually fall for him,” Robert went on. “And they agree to meet him later to make love. But he’s never shown up as far as I know. I was wondering whether he made an exception in your case.”
“And what makes you think . . . ?” she began indignantly, but couldn’t go on with the pretense. She laughed. It was all the answer he needed.
“I frankly don’t know who he is,” Robert said after he had lit a cigarette and poured another daiquiri from the pitcher next to him. He was totally at ease, dressed only in tennis shorts and a linen T-shirt. Constance wore a thin cotton robe, but during the course of their talk it had worked itself open and now covered only part of one thigh, a portion of her pubic hair, and her right breast. She enjoyed the ambiguity of the garment, since nudity was no special event on the grounds nor clothes any mark of status. As he poured his drink, Robert took in the exposed curves of her body with his lidded eyes and his stare seemed to want to slither under those portions of cloth they couldn’t get to in order to touch with jellylike avidity the membrane, hair, and flesh. Constance smiled to herself, proving her point that the direction of true eroticism was toward subtlety.
“All I know,” Robert went on, “is that he has four armed guards as his personal entourage at all times, and that all the other guards have been ordered to give him absolute priority in any dispute arising from conflicting orders on any issue.”
“Sounds like the boss’s son,” she said.
“The boss,” Robert mused. “I wonder who that is?”
“How did you get this job?” she asked him.
“Answered an ad in the Times,” he told her and then, seeing her beginning grin of disbelief, added, “It’s true, honest to God. There was an ad for an ‘Executive Assistant.’ It offered high pay, pleasant surroundings, very interesting work, and indescribable fringe benefits. So I replied, and they tested me, screened me, put me through paces, fed information to me slowly, until they finally brought me here. Just before the departure I had been told that once I arrived at the job site itself I would know too much to ever be allowed to quit the organization and did I want to leave then? As I told you, the promise of money, leisure, dictatorial power over others, and a supply of women whom I might use as slaves sounded like the fulfillment of my most cherished childhood dream.”
“And what keeps you from escaping?” she asked. “I don’t mean just you, but people in your position? I’m sure that one of the stewards or attendants or even the guards has tried to get away.”
“Escape is impossible,” he said flatly. “Of course, the idea of escape is essential. There is always that percentage of the population that needs its myth of reassurance. And so the ‘revolution’ among the women is tolerated and even smiled upon. The notion of having to get into orgies in order to whisper secrets to one another behind the screen of moans and cries is a priceless gem, actually. A perfect wedding of sex and politics.”
Constance’s mouth dropped open. “You know about that?” she asked, aghast.
“Everything is known that can be known,” he said. “And that which can’t be known either doesn’t exist or is beyond our ability to know it. Yes? Why struggle in a masque of naivety?”
“And what do you know about me?”
“That you will be predictable,” he said. “You will explore all the games available here, the erotic, the political, the personal, the theatrical. You will take notes in your head and try to puzzle out who the boss really is. And you will wait your opening for escape. No opening will ever take place. You will have your affair with me, during which you will probably try to take my life one time. And finally, after an indeterminate period of time, you will be too scarred and too hard and too tired and too much overdue, and then you will be scheduled for the Snuff.”
He drained the contents of his glass, took a long puff on his cigarette, paused for the desired effect, which was to fix her attention one hundred percent, and then added, “Or . . .”
She leapt right to the bait. “Or?” she repeated.
Robert laughed. “Caught you, didn’t I?” He gave her a few seconds to wonder whether she’d been cruelly tricked and then said, “Or we might consider taking you on to the staff.”
She sucked her breath in. Robert smiled, his lips thin.
“Interesting, isn’t it?” he asked.
“You son of a bitch,” she spat at him. “You would tempt me with something like that.”
“Of course,” he replied.
“To exchange an innocent slavery for an evil slavery. To become one of the masters, slaves who are foolish enough to think they are free. And for what? To live another twenty . . . thirty . . . forty years?”
“That’s all there is, isn’t there?”
“I must admit I haven’t been asked the question in such immediate and serious circumstances before.”
“How long do you think you’d require for an answer?”
“It would probably depend on the measure of my extremity at the time the offer was made, quite frankly.”
“Bien entendu,” he replied.
There was a silence such as surrounds the growth and maturation of mushrooms and cucumbers, the quiet which attends the consciousness continually forming at the very edge of life’s appearance into the material cosmos.
They remained for several minutes, floating in the shards of space, lurching like great cakes of ice broken loose from the great floes that cover the poles. The awareness of their mood held the sort of mammoth sluggishness felt by tusked and shaggy elephants in the white din of the long Arctic night. They sank far beneath the surface identity of human and human, male and female, and tapped into the eternal fact of raw unstructured life, sentient, awake, infinite.
Outside that awareness, in the narrative of their behavior, a small breeze had sprung up to dust their skins like a delicately applied powder puff. Slowly, Constance stretched and pulled herself out of the free-floating state into which she had drifted.
“I think I just had an out-of-the-body experience,” she said.
“How about an in-the-body experience?” he asked.
She looked at him. Boyish, perfect features, a trim, tanned body. She enjoyed his mind and had no doubt but that he would be an exquisite lover. But to accept him would be to go over the final edge, to have that last ledge of inner autonomy crumble and for her to go flying into the arms of a new reality. It was something like giving up the citizenship of one’s native country to become a denizen of a foreign land, yet a land which has come to seem to the wanderer to offer a haven for dreams which one had, since childhood, despaired of ever having come true, but dreams which flew in the face of all one’s conscious, social training. If she gave herself to Robert, she would have to say good-bye to Chet, and to a Constance that had crystallized around a different matrix of constancy.
“I’m on duty soon,” she said.
Robert rolled to his feet and padded into the bedroom. He picked up the house phone, said a few words into it, and walked back to her.
“I found you a substitute,” he said.
“That’s not fair,” she replied. “I can’t let you do that to one of the other girls.”
“We have a special stand-by team,” he told her. “We call it the cow pen.”
Her breasts rose and fell as she breathed a sigh of release. Some deep tension inside her gave way and she succumbed to that part of her which she had always known existed and yet had always denied. And now that she accepted it, owned it as herself, she was astonished to realize that it had always formed the central focus for her understanding of life. And precisely because she had blocked herself from acknowledging it, she had spent most of her years living in a kind of sleep. What had taken place struck no analogy so strongly as that of the Jew in the concentration camp taking on the role of minor functionary in order to save his life. Constance was going to go further; she was going to fall in love with the Nazi colonel.
For love it would have to be. Robert was too sophisticated a task master, too subtle an observer for him to allow her to sham the emotion.
“Well, how do we proceed?” she asked looking up at him.
“We go to my room,” he told her.
“It’s just like the my-place-or-yours cliché that used to run around the singles’ bars,” she said. “But I’ve never been to your room. It will be a romance.”
“Of sorts,” he told her, smiling strangely, his lips twisted into the shape one might expect of a mouth that had just tasted its first shreds of human flesh.
She put a cloak on over her robe and followed Robert down a succession of hallways until they reached a check point where a guard stood, rifle over his shoulder, to let them pass. They went into a section Constance had never seen before, and Robert explained that this was where the entire staff was housed. They got into an elevator and got off at the fifth floor. Robert had a complete suite to himself. He showed Constance in to a huge living room with a magnificent view of the sea. To one side there was a kitchen, and a bath led off a small hallway at the opposite corner.