The Erotic Comedies (Vassi Collection Volume XI) (2 page)

In the room sat his wife, his four children, his oldest friend. His favorite cactus plants had been moved in from his office so he might have the solace of their presence, reminiscent of the silences of the desert, the same silence he now prepared to enter. The six people waited, not speaking, wrapped in the wide calm that emanated from the man in front of them.

He felt no pain. The garment of flesh that had served him faithfully for so long had worn out and was ready to be discarded, to go back into the earth.

"I wonder what happens to the
I
in
me
," he said to himself, "to the intelligence that is even now asking the question. Is there any chance it might continue after the body ceases to function?"

As though in response, some strange sensation seized him, held him for an instant, and then disappeared.

"I'll know soon," he thought. "Or perhaps I won't know anything at all."

The situation amused him, and he smiled. The sudden appearance of the seemingly incongruous expression startled the others, who were watching him closely, half ashamed of their subliminal desire to have the whole thing over with. His eldest daughter leaned over and whispered in her mother's ear, "He must be a saint, to be able to smile on his deathbed."

"Wouldn't it be peculiar to die and find myself face to face with old Jehovah," the man thought. "Imagine all that nonsense turning out to be literally true. It's a mysterious universe, and anything is possible."

He chuckled, causing the hair to rise on the necks of the people around him.

The breath caught in his throat and his frame shuddered. There was no specific point at which he could grasp the unfamiliar process of passing away, but he knew that the moment of departure was very near.

"This is really very odd," he mused. "I can feel it happening, but it seems so distant, as though it had nothing to do with me at all. I don't feel like
I
am dying. There is just death going on, and I am one of the people observing it. The only difference between me and the others is that when it happens, they will stand up and walk out and I will be left lying here."

Then abruptly, as though he had fallen from a great height, he felt everything drop away from him. Time underwent a cataclysmic change, and he was swept by a sensation of rocketing through space at an exponentially increasing speed, until he was going faster than light itself. And yet, the faster he moved, the more still everything became. Opposites lost their identity.

One by one, his faculties shut down. Hearing, touch, taste, smell, all disappeared. His thoughts blew off his mind like shingles from a roof in a high wind. He opened his eyes for the last time.

"Sam," his wife said.

"Goodbye Constance," he croaked and saw nothing more.

Relinquishing everything he had ever imagined he might lay claim to in the universe, he bade farewell to himself. In a microsecond of utter clarity, he saw what an ironic play life was, what a strange dance of fantastic reality. Beyond all ability to apprehend his experience, he gave himself up to death.

But it was not yet time.

He lost awareness of the external world, and his breathing stopped, but the vital force which had animated the inert elements of his body and sustained the cohesion called existence had not yet dispersed. A doctor would have pronounced him dead, for his heart had stopped beating. But beneath the measureable manifestations, in the core of his being, the finest thread of electricity still hummed. All that he had been was now reduced to that single throb of energy.

Subjectively, it was like falling asleep, and into a dream. First, a total loss of self-consciousness, then a sentient blackness, and finally a slow discernment of form. A blank screen lit up, and on it appeared the thin line of a far distant horizon, such as the edge of ocean seen from shore. It separated sea from sky, both the same shade of deep cobalt blue.

For an eternity, nothing moved. And then, faintly, a dot emerged from ground into figure, balanced delicately on the line. Subtly, slowly, it grew larger, obviously coming closer to the shore where the man stood. Without any landmarks, there was no way to estimate its size. As the relatives and friend began to look at one another, attempting to decide who should approach the body to find out whether the end had come, the man began to hear the first low ripple of trumpets which seemed to accompany the object.

Now, measuring the thing against his own height, he was able to assess its scale. As the music swelled, a jagged burst of golden light shattered the scene, and he gazed up at what thunderously swept toward him, a thing a thousand feet high and perhaps a third as wide, taking up his entire field of vision. It flew forward with majestic ease until it stopped suddenly, a few feet in front of him, and his knees buckled when he realized what it was.

He looked up into the face of a giant, encompassing, and perfectly formed cunt, quivering in purple radiance, a great mandala enveloping him in its aura. He gazed upon it reverently. In smell, in texture, in pulsating vividness, it was the quintessence of cunt, ideal in its every fold, its every hue.

"My Lady," he whispered, and fell prostrate before it.

In the mind of the man within his mind, kneeling before his object of worship, he was twenty-five again, in his last year of medical school, wondering whether he should become a specialist or go into general practice. He was talking it over with a friend, when the young man told him, "Why don't you become a gynecologist. You're always complaining about how horny you are. If you become a cunt specialist, you won't have any trouble at all getting laid. Just think of all those women coming in and spreading their legs for you. And paying for it to boot!"

As the entire course of a great river can be traced to a tiny bend at its source, so his career was shaped by the offhanded bit of half-meant advice. He shaped his studies in that direction, giving his parents rationalizations which involved the greater profitability of that particular line of medicine, and within two years, he began practice.

His first patient had found him almost unbearably nervous. The woman was infected with some baroque venereal strain, and when she split herself apart on his table, the smell which seeped from the tainted organ caused him to retch. He was fortunate that she was a prostitute with no false modesty, and so was saved from embarrassment by her remarking, "Yeah, that's the way my clients feel. Can you fix it up, doc?"

He performed a series of tests, sent smears to the laboratory, and finally doused her with antibiotics, vaginal jellies, and suggestions for douching. A week later he saw her again and her cunt was as good as new. When he examined her the second time and pronounced her well on the way to cure, the gratitude in her eyes was as much payment as the money she gave him.

How many cunts had there been after that? Middle-aged housewives with bored cunts, young girls with puppydog cunts, whores with leathery cunts, nuns with pimply cunts, secretaries with pornographic cunts, witches with velveteen cunts, grandmothers with withered cunts, children with unarticulated cunts, passionate women with engulfing cunts. Cunts of a thousand eyes, cunts of a million moods. Smiling, pouting, shouting, brooding, yearning, burning, angry, gay, hungry, sad. Again and again the same single action—the legs swinging wide at his request, like the gates opening to the thief upon saying the magic words, "Open Sesame." He would first see the hair, sometimes sparse, sometimes thick, or coarse, or fine, or black, or golden, or red, or curled, or straight. And then the thing itself.

Where few men looked and few men touched, he prodded and pulled and stroked. He dove in with instruments, he slithered in with fingers. Sometimes he found disease, often he found nothing more than the desire to be entered. And when his hand came out it was not infrequently covered with secretions that were something other than the lubricating cream he had used to ease his penetration.

At the beginning he had kept what they had taught him in school was the proper professional distance. All the doctors had been trained to treat the cunt as something septic, something to be approached only with gloves on, with formal face and averted glance. Something to be pried apart with metal shoe horns. But he could not maintain that artificial pose for long. He loved cunts. That was the reason he had become a gynecologist: to see cunts, to touch cunts, to smell cunts, to heal cunts.

It was in the third month of practice that his first thrilling contact took place. The patient was the wife of a prominent psychoanalyst, in her early thirties. She came for a general checkup, saying she did it once a year and that his name had been recommended by a friend. She wore a tight sheath dress, outlining her ample buttocks, showing her bulging thighs, accenting her full breasts. She was a beautiful and sultry woman, and the doctor felt his cock stir at the thought that he would soon have her lying on her back, her legs hoisted over stirrups, and with what he knew would be a luscious cunt lying agape, waiting for him to minister to it. His lips trembled slightly as he spoke, so calmly, in such a sophisticated manner, saying all the lines proper to the doctor-patient scenario.

"It's amazing what you can get away with," he thought, "once you put it in a socially acceptable context."

In the examination room it went as he expected, except that when it came time for him to slip on his plastic gloves, he boldly discarded the gesture. When he touched the fragile edges of her pink cunt, it was with his bare fingers. He seemed to enter some sort of trance, his ratiocinative faculties mesmerized. He entered a world of brute sensation, and without his understanding the process as such, his hands began a complex communication with her cunt. He found he was talking to her as he moved inside her, in a way that augmented the medical patter, the stock phrases . . . "does that hurt? is it sore there? this seems fine." When he stroked her cervix, it was not sex, and yet it was not not-sex. It was like the perfect edge of good massage, in which the mode is tactile ambiguity, where meaning and message continually interpenetrate.

A sigh escaped her lips. "She's enjoying this as much as I am," he thought, "and for the same reasons." Her cunt was already wet and the aroma it gave off was unmistakably erotic. His eyes moved from her cunt up past her belly between her breasts and into hers. She was watching him.

"Yes," she said.

He took off his clothes and fucked her as she lay. He came standing up.

From then on he fucked on the average of two women a day. Once he had broken through the convention of professional coldness, he was able to see with mounting acuity that at least half the women who came to him came simply to be caressed.

"Where are the men?" he said to himself over and over again. "Why isn't anyone loving these poor women?"

At first he made some mistakes, occasionally pushing for a sexual encounter when one hadn't spontaneously arisen, and he succeeded only in frightening the women involved. He often had doubts as to what sort of danger he might be in; might not a complaint end his career, or even land him in jail? Finally, he made peace with the fact that if he paid attention to business first, the business being the diagnosis and cure of disease, then whatever plums fell his way were his right to eat, and no bad fortune would be attached to that.

The woman he married was frigid. He chose her precisely because she was frigid. Examining her one afternoon, he saw that she had absolutely no sensation in her vagina. Her pelvis was locked in a chronic muscular spasm and her entire attitude was one of distaste for anything carnal.

"She's perfect," he thought, "she'll never bother me with excessive demands."

He courted her and married her and within a week after the ceremony she was overjoyed when he suggested separate bedrooms. He only fucked her about a hundred times in over thirty-five years, in groups of about twenty-five each, to conceive children. She settled into the role of mother and housewife, and purred in constant contentment that her husband allowed her to remain chaste.

Meanwhile, back at the office, he fucked himself silly.

By the time he was sixty, he had fucked more than fifteen thousand different women and had had his hands in the cunts of at least five times that many. "This is the best job a man could ever have," he told himself often, as his door opened, and his nurse ushered in yet another woman, and he would look at her the way a man looks at a woman's body in the street, calculating its curves, imagining its charms. But with a crucial difference.

"In a few minutes," he would think, "you're going to spread your legs for me, and offer me your cunt. And it will all seem very proper until I touch you a certain way, and you will realize that, all social rationalizations aside, you are opening your cunt to the eyes and fingers of a total stranger, a man you have never seen before, and one who, you will comprehend with a delicious shudder, wants to fuck you. And will we fuck? Or will I eat you out? Or will you suck my cock? Or will I have you get on your hands and knees so I can 'examine' you from behind?"

As the darkness of his death deepened, the memories faded, and the immense cunt before his mind's eye began to tremble, and open. From its roseate serrated center another cunt emerged, and another from the center of that. Cunt after cunt opened from the cunt preceding it. It was an infinite progression, never fully reaching him, continually spilling forth. He strained forward, to be taken into the heart of the budding cunt machine. It was the baby attempting to return, it was the man diving into the mystery, it was both and all.

And as he reached up in revery, the body on the bed bent at the middle and sat bolt upright. The people in the room were shocked at what they thought was a corpse perform such a sharp strenuous act. His lids flew up, but he saw nothing. His lips moved. A single word lept from his throat.

"Cunt," he said.

And from the depths of his desire, the face of death spun forward at lightning speed to snatch him in its jaws. What it looked like, no one will ever know, for death comes differently to each human being.