The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 5 (23 page)

Complete bliss. That was what I felt. Then suddenly, there was a giddiness, a disorientation. My body was moving, floating upward. A shard of terror threatened to rend my joy, but his voice knit up the fabric of my concentration. “I choose you, I anoint you. Trust me. Yield to me. I am the One, the One you seek, the One you crave.”

I was suspended in his net of words. I understood with new wonder that my body hung unsupported in the air, mysteriously buoyant. I was literally flying. I could still feel the embrace of leather on my wrists and ankles, yet somehow, irrationally, I knew that I hovered several feet above the seat.

Suddenly I comprehended the reality of his power. This was no illusion, no hypnotic suggestion. I knew, with total conviction, that magic truly lived in this man’s voice. “Yield to me,” he said softly, and touched me between the eyes with one delicate finger. A fireball of an orgasm seized and consumed me. I swear that I smelled burned flesh as I convulsed blindly in the air.

The next thing I knew, I was crying. He was brushing my hair back from my face and speaking some soothing nonsense. I looked into his eyes, excitement flooding through me. “It’s real, isn’t it? The tricks, the magic? The power?”

He smiled enigmatically. “As real as your submission. As powerful as your concentration.” He handed me a glass of water, and my skin tingled at his brief touch. “In any case, Myra, you’ve got the job.” There was mischief in his eyes. “That is, if you want it.”

I did not have to answer. He knew my thoughts.

“We’ll start work tomorrow. I think that tonight you will need some rest. You will call me ‘Master’. And to honor this occasion, I believe that you should have a new name. I will call you ‘Ariel’. Does that please you?”

I smiled through my tears. “Yes, Master.”

The training was as rigorous as he had claimed. Sometimes he would bind me; sometimes he would beat me. As long as I yielded totally to him, shut everything but him from my ken, I felt no pain, no matter how he abused my body. Sometimes I would climax during our sessions, though he never touched me in any carnal way. Always I shivered with arousal in his presence.

We practised the levitation sequence, but he never brought out the rack of swords. When I questioned him about this, he smiled his secret smile. “I do not want to dull your edge, sweet Ariel. I need you to be afraid, when I cage you and pierce you with my blades. Your terror feeds my power. Or more correctly, the strength of your trust, overcoming your terror.”

He saw the worry in my face. “Trust me, Ariel, and all will be well. ‘There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.’” I recognized the verse, a dim memory from catechism class. The Gospel of John. What an unlikely soul to be quoting scripture!

Finally, the night of our debut arrived. My hands were bloodless and cold as I waited in the wings for my cue. When I saw my Master, resplendent in his costume, however, everything drained from me but total devotion. That night I heard him dually, his physical voice and his voice in my mind, equally real. In fact he was my only reality. I did not hear the clank of the cage enclosing me or the click of the padlock. I was deaf to the gasps and applause from audience. Each time he threaded a sword through my flesh, he whispered in my mind that it was his cock, penetrating to my core, and that was what I felt: a hot, hard penis piercing my loins. Each time he pulled a blade from my body, I shuddered in a silent climax.

When we stood together and bowed, energy surged between us. That night, he made love to me for the first time, and I understood that up until now, I had only felt the shadow of his power.

The weeks flew by in a blur of pleasure and exhaustion. I gave up my apartment and moved into the Dolores Street flat. We performed four nights a week, to packed houses. A bewhiskered German came by to discuss a European tour.

I was happier and more fulfilled than I had ever been. All the ghosts of my past seemed to have dissolved in the brightness of my Master’s presence. Little by little, though, I sensed some restlessness in him, some urge to explore new frontiers, to push past our current limits. One day, he called me to the dungeon.

“I want you to see our new piece of apparatus,” he said, pointing to a roughly rectangular object about his height, draped in the same purple satin he used in our levitation sequence. With a flourish, he whisked off the cover. Despite myself, I gasped in horror.

A wooden frame constructed of thick beams. A rack near the bottom, pierced with a circular hole, stained a rusty brown. A silvery steel blade suspended from a pulley, glittering in the candlelight. A guillotine.

My Master seemed to take some pleasure in my terror. “Lovely, isn’t it? Finely engineered, and guaranteed to make our audience squirm in their seats.”

“Surely you don’t intend to use this in our act? To use this on me?” Much as I loved and trusted him, the thought chilled me.

“Ariel, it is just another blade. You know that the swords do not harm you. Why should you fear this instrument?” He gathered me in his burly arms, and I melted, as always. “Trust me, lovely Ariel. You are dearer to me than my own life. I will not let you come to any harm.” How could I refuse him? Or refute him? I had experienced firsthand the potency of his will.

Still, that night, I was not as much at ease, at first, as I usually am. Then, while my Master spoke to the audience, expounding on the history of the guillotine and its legendary effectiveness, I heard him in my mind, reassuring me, commanding me, filling me with his glory. As he positioned my head in the stocks, I heard him singing, a lovely melody without words that turned my flesh to rippling water. Yes, I cried with the remnants of my mind. Yes, yes!

I did not feel the blade slicing my vertebrae. There was only the dappled light of his smile, the peace of a summer breeze, the delicious sensation of his caresses. I heard him call out to me: “Ariel!”

“Yes, Master. What is your will?”

“Tell me how you feel, Ariel.”

I could feel his arms, cradling me, cherishing me. “I feel perfect, Master. Perfectly whole in my love for you.”

Suddenly, there was a bolt of darkness in the summer sky. “Myra!” The name was familiar, someone I had known once. The voice was familiar, and full of angst. Then my unconscious betrayed me. I smelled vodka and intoxicating sweat. Dylan! All the pain of our relationship poured into me, the longing and the frustration, the always-foiled closeness. Then the stink of a hospital reached my nostrils, antiseptic and vomit; my mother’s face swam before me, skin stretched tight over her bones, sad gentle eyes. Next in the parade was my father, flushed, disheveled, snoring off his drunk on the living room sofa.

“Myra!” cried Dylan’s voice again, loud against the murmurs of the audience, and then the physical pain engulfed me, and I forgot my memories. Every nerve screamed with the anguish. My flesh was being ripped apart. I was burning at the stake, my skin blistering, my bones cracking and crumbling to ash. Poison was racing through my veins, leaving agony in its wake.

Dimly, I felt wetness and knew it was my own blood. Everything became dim. I was slipping quickly into death, and knew this well enough to know the terror of that final moment.

Then the voice, quiet, sure, strong, deep in my soul. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” Master! I reached out to him with my last ounce of strength, and mercifully, the pain ebbed, faded away into darkness.

His power saved me, his power and my trust. I am grateful. I lie here, watching the sun sparkle on Sausalito Bay, breathing the floral scents, waiting for my Master to return. It does not matter that I cannot move, paralyzed by my moment of doubt. My Master knit together my bones, but so far, we have not succeeded in mending my nervous system.

He has renounced performing in order to concentrate on healing me. He blames himself, his arrogance and his pride, for my injuries. I smile quietly and try to soothe away his guilt. We spend time each day on rituals, exercises and ordeals. When he lays his hands on me, I sense his caress and it inflames me as always. Is this sensation born of my mind of my re-enlivening flesh?

I do not care, not really. My Master loves me and cares for me. He raises me up with his power. He takes me to places where I have never been. He nestles in my heart. Nay, he is my heart. I know that the next time that I meet death I will yield gracefully and without pain, for my Master is with me, now and always.

Rabbi Klum chuckled and belched behind his rugged beard. He put down his silver fork without excusing himself and spoke to David in his sweet lisping voice. “Having a wife doesn’t necessarily bind you to practising monogamy. It’s a popular misconception, of a dangerous kind I would say.”

David, a young man of twenty-five nodded reluctantly: “You may consider me naïve, but I know so little about this matter.”

The rabbi looked intently at David’s father Abel, a generous contributor to the reconstruction of the synagogue, well-known and respected for organizing charities for the various needs of the Syrian-Jewish community. He was sitting quietly, consuming macrobiotic food. Abel caught the Rabbi’s penetrating look and held it without blinking, until the rabbi turned back to David. “You must get married, young man. We’re talking about a deadline.” Then he added promptly, “You are going to be like King Solomon, given a choice of the most beautiful brides in the community. All virgins. You shall be the first and the last man in one of those girls’ lives.”

The rabbi turned to Abel for paternal affirmation of his sales pitch. Abel was concentrating on the food. David looked at his father and wondered, “If the eyes are really a window to the soul, what is that cryptic, dull message in those black eyes meant to represent?”

A middle-aged waitress scurried to their table. Her smile was as broad as it was fake. Seeing her prostitute herself before his father’s money only heightened David’s annoyance. “What else would you like?” she asked in a heavy Middle-Eastern accent.

The rabbi inspected his guests’ plates, “I’ll have another pasta primavera.” Father and son were brooding, deep in their private stormy thoughts.

“Sure,” the waitress exclaimed, “not a problem.”

David inspected the waitress’s body, hipless, large-breasted, chunks of fat dribbling over the bra band on her back, pockmarked face, and greedy eyes.

The rabbi anticipated the arrival of another delicious meal. “David,” he said, “let me explain your role in this world.” The rabbi’s eyes darted towards Abel, but the latter was picking at his food nonchalantly, immersed in a chewing meditation. The rabbi continued in a whisper, “Life is a business enterprise. So is marriage. There are rules that you have to follow but, trust me, this system that has lasted for more than three thousand years was designed specifically for male convenience. As a man, you can only benefit from it.”

David nodded tentatively. He finished his frittata and began to diddle with a spare fork. The rabbi continued, “After getting married, you will start making money. It won’t be a challenge either. Your father’s business is profitable as never before. You will work hard and bring all the money home to your wife and if she says a word you shut her up and the Torah will be on your side. Your wife will do nothing but have children and take care of them. She won’t work, and,” the rabbi looked mischievously at David, “never will she be unfaithful to you. She knows that if you catch her once, she will be excommunicated. That has not happened in this community for two generations. Women are smart; when they know what they have to lose, they restrain themselves from rash, emotionally impulsive actions. You, on the other hand, can have any woman you want outside the Syrian-Jewish community.”

The pasta primavera was placed in front of the rabbi. Already he was grinning, anticipating its familiar pleasure. With his eyes on the plate the rabbi said, “This system was made by men and caters to men’s needs. Don’t you forget it.”

Silence reigned over the table. David was tearing the soft tissue of a napkin with the glittering tines of a fork. The rabbi was shoveling pasta into his yellow-toothed mouth. Abel stared through the window at passing cars. “Look,” David began uneasily, “I can’t marry a woman I don’t love.”

“Love?” The rabbi cringed, as if punched in the face. Theatrically he threw a fork down and exclaimed, “An idiotic notion of feudal Christians commodified by post-industrial pop culture.” Then he realized that he was not lecturing his yeshiva students, caught himself, changed tactics, retreated back to familiar territory. “If not for Shakespearean fairy tales, Christians wouldn’t even consider getting married. Their priests and politicians had to trick them into marriage by inventing the concept of romantic love. Don’t tell me you believe in all that romantic bunk?”

“You can’t deny the existence of love between man and woman,” David said.

The rabbi was good at polemics. He would counter every contradiction with another one of his own. “When you get married you will love your wife, no less than those supposedly-in-love, married Christians do. G-d—” Abel looked at the rabbi in wonder. The rabbi rarely spoke of G-d in casual discussions but when he did it was always in connection to a very important issue, “always wanted man and woman to be together, rather than wandering the world in search of ‘true love’. That’s not only ridiculous, it’s sinful.”

“But in the Torah one can find many an example,” David began.

“You compare your case to the Torah?”

“No, but . . .”

Abel raised his hand, silencing the two quarreling men. His rigid body language conveyed that he would accept no compromises. He said calmly, emotionlessly, “For three thousand years this system has worked, David. You will not change the rules of the game on a whim just because you have some idiotic secular notions. You will be married by the end of the year. You have seven months to find a bride. Rabbi Klum will help you. Otherwise you will be stripped of your inheritance and be free to wander the world in search of your true love.”

David jumped to his feet, “I’ll do whatever suits me without following your outdated codes of behavior,” he exclaimed, bolting for the door.