The Man From Maybe Page 3

  “I can touch it,” he answered, gripping her arms. “It feels as soft as –”

  “As sea foam on a fiery ocean.”

  “Yes. I could drown in it.”

  “Come,” she commanded and led him deeper into the bower.

  They were alone now as they walked on together beneath the delicate flowers and the stars. Superstud had withdrawn. So had the girls. For a moment, Smith imagined the girls mounting their pneumatic ponies and climbing their ropes of pastel polymers to disappear like gusts of morning mist. He discovered that he could remember nothing of their faces. He could not recall their names. The world was all about him, but he and Jessamyn were its only inhabitants.

  Moving along through it with Jessamyn, he heard drums beating and the sound of bare feet somewhere slapping the ground, practising the intricate patterns of an unknown dance. He knew he was imagining it, calling up images both tender and bizarre as his body sent its secret signals to his brain and he shivered with an excess of emotional energy.

  Drums.

  No, one drum, he realized as he halted to listen.

  Jessamyn, when she saw that he was listening to the deep and distant sound, relaxed and smiled at him. “It is only Marsman,” she commented and placed her hands over her ears. When she took them away after the steady sound of the drumming had ceased, she added, “He beats his drum to summon armies. He sends out messages in the night to tell all those who dwell in the Valley of the Maimed that they must take up weapons else he and his mercenaries will spill their blood.”

  “Is he everywhere?’

  “Marsman? It does seem so. His battles are many but his victories are empty triumphs.”

  “Empty?”

  “What is emptier than death?”

  Smith was not certain that he understood Jessamyn’s question. Instead of answering it, he asked her a question. “Where is the Valley of the Maimed?”

  She pointed, but her gesture told him nothing.

  “What is it?”

  “Don’t you like me?” she inquired with a calculated pout.

  Smith bent his head. His tongue circled the nipples on her breasts.

  Jessamyn sighed, her head thrown back, her long hair hanging down her arched back as she abandoned herself to the sensation Smith was creating within her. A night bird awoke above them and gave one mournful cry before falling silent again.

  On they walked until they came to a small lagoon that lay at the foot of a dashing waterfall. The scent of limes lay on the still air above the surface of the water. Smith seized Jessamyn and moved to pull her down beside him upon the mat of moss bordering the lagoon, but before he could do so she was gone from him. She raced to the edge of the lagoon and rose on her toes, her arms held high above her head, her palms touching. Then the arrow of her body sprang from an invisible bow and she was streaking downward. Her body split the smooth surface of the water and disappeared beneath it.

  Smith rose and went to kneel at the edge of the lagoon, his nostrils filled with the bittersweet smell of the air. When she broke the surface of the water, Jessamyn drew back her dripping hair and called his name.

  He dived into the water after her. But when he surfaced, she had vanished. Treading water, he looked about. She appeared briefly, only to dive down beneath the surface of the water a second time. He also dived and soon their two bodies came together in the silent world below the world.

  For some time they swam, exchanging the roles of pursuer and pursued. Finally they emerged on the bank of the lagoon and lay down side by side, both of them breathless, both aware of the possibilities of their bodies, partly as a result of their recent joyous exertions.

  Smith, when his lungs stopped heaving, seized Jessamyn and pulled her close to him. He did not speak as he covered her body with his own.

  But Jessamyn spoke. Her words were breathy as if they came from some distant place within her. At last, she could utter no more words as her body lurched and writhed beneath Smith.

  He felt the pressure building within him. He felt the blood beat through his body, a drum louder and more insistent than the one struck by Marsman, somewhere in the encompassing night.

  The explosion of himself, when it came, was a violent cascade which Jessamyn received with a matching violence. Her 28 buttocks rose from the ground as if they sought to rocket Smith into the sky that vaulted unseen above them.

  “I love,” Smith sighed after some time had passed, the sound of his voice bright in the dark air.

  “But not me,” Jessamyn said.

  He ran his hand along her body, letting it come to rest between her thighs. Something in her remark had troubled him. He could not meet her gaze when he said, “Not you. But someone.”

  “Who?”

  He shook his head. Her question left him confused. Anxious. Who indeed? There had been a girl in that old time before the time of his crystal casket, a girl he could not now remember, who had said the same words to him that Jessamyn had just used while they rode the stallion of their lust together. But her name was buried in the ruins of his mind where memory was an outcast. When he became aware of the wetness streaking his cheeks, he raised a hand and touched the thin rivers his eyes had released.

  “Is she dead?” Jessamyn asked gently. “Humans die. Crutch told me that once. Is that why you weep? Because she is dead?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. I think –” The thought wouldn’t come. Spent as he was, his past stolen by some unknown and unsuspected thief, Smith could only feel the pain that sliced his sinews as he struggled to remember the lost girl and his equally lost love for her.

  “I’m sorry,” Jessamyn whispered. “You humans are so – so –”

  “Vulnerable.” The word slipped unexpectedly from his lips.

  “Vulnerable,” Jessamyn repeated thoughtfully. “Yes, that is true. Like Loman.”

  “Who is Loman?”

  “One of us.”

  “A simulacrum?”

  Jessamyn nodded. “He is almost as susceptible to sadness and pain as humans are. In fact, he is the most nearly human of us all.”

  “You mentioned someone named Crutch before,” Smith murmured as sleep began to slip down upon him.

  “Crutch is not whole. You are. So it is most unlikely that you will meet.”

  “I don’t understand,” Smith said, a note of desperation in his voice.

  “Perhaps it doesn’t matter,” came Jessamyn’s ghostly voice.

  “It does matter. I know it does. I have to understand.”

  “Why? We are together.”

  “That isn’t enough.”

  Jessamyn turned her head to one side. She moved her legs so that Smith’s hand fell away from them.

  He said, “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re different from Superstud.”

  “I know.”

  She turned back to face him. “No, I don’t mean just that he is a simulacrum like me. Not just that. I meant that he wants women the way a miser wants coins. There is no commitment involved, no surrendering of any part of himself. Superstud uses women without giving anything of himself to them. You shared yourself with me. I could feel it.”

  “I suppose it is the way I am. Why is Superstud the way he is?”

  Jessamyn frowned and gnawed her lower lip. “It is the way he is made. His memories make him that way. He has no choice in the matter, none.”

  “Perhaps, his experience –”

  “When he was made – when Crutch, Marsman, Loman and all the rest of us were made –” She gave a little moan of distress. “Oh, I’m tired of talking. Take me.”

  But Smith was not tired of talking. He reached out and caressed Jessamyn’s face. “Who made you all? Who made Superstud?”

  “We don’t know. He doesn’t know. One day he didn’t exist. The next day he did and he remembered wanting women. I remember nothing.”

  “Nothing?” shouted Superstud as he bounded into the glade and stood towering over Jessamyn and Smith. “Don’t you remember the
last time I sent you soaring girl? You couldn’t forget that!”

  “I remember,” Jessamyn admitted, her eyes on Superstud. “But that isn’t the same thing. You remember things I can’t even understand. It’s different for you and Crutch –” Her voice faded.

  “Superstud,” Smith said, rising. “What do you remember?”

  “Equations. Logarithms. How to plot the proper path for a bird to follow. Mozart. But most of all, moist female thighs and the twining together of tongues. I remember fucking and counting and that only the fucking and not the mounting numbers mattered.”

  Smith shook his head in bewilderment. Nothing that Superstud had said made any sense to him. What did equations have to do with women? When Superstud spoke of mounting numbers, did he mean the numbers of women he had taken in his time or did the numbers relate to the other, the equations? Smith felt again the thin despair that seemed to ferment in his bowels and boil up when he realized that not only did he not know who he was, he also did not know who – or what precisely – were the simulacra, seemingly the only other active inhabitants of this otherwise empty Eden. He recalled the caskets lying in the great hall. Were the sleepers confined within them also simulacra? There was no way of knowing for sure unless he could find his way back there and awaken one or more of them. But of one thing he was sure. He was not a simulacrum. His flesh was not like Jessamyn’s. His was soft and pliable. Hers was taut and stiff. His body was warm; hers was cool. A pump laboured in his chest, but from beneath Jessamyn’s breasts came the dull thrumming sound that made him think of the computer that had so recently summoned her into his eager orbit.

  “Are you spent?” inquired Superstud of Smith. “Or do you still have currency in reserve that you would be willing to invest?” Without waiting for a reply, Superstud hurried on. “I’ll bring you a full bouquet, Smith. I’m sure Jessamyn has been delightful, but still she’s only a single flower. To appreciate lilacs, one must learn about roses. To admire roses, one must know something of weeds. Ah, weeds! Tania!”

  In response to Superstud’s call, a black girl came gliding into the bower and Superstud’s open arms. They embraced. He told her what he wanted her to do, and she looked up at him, a smile of sharp white teeth and faintly glossy lips. The moment Superstud released her, she went and knelt in front of Smith. While Jessamyn, leaning back on her elbows, watched with unconcealed amusement, Tania followed Superstud’s instructions, embellishing them with actions born of experience, sharpened by imagination, and stimulated by Smith’s own responses. He found in his body a well of ecstacy that at times, as Tania dipped and rose above and about his body, bordered on a delicious agony.

  As the minutes matured into hours, Smith alternately exulted and groaned from exhaustion. But whenever his exhaustion became apparent, one or another of the girls moving about in the sultry night would bend to him, would touch him here or taste him there so that his flaccidity would end as his phallus phoenixed upward to impale the stars.

  Throughout the long night, as the moon moved on through the sky and then dropped down toward the horizon, Superstud would occasionally call for an intermission in the gamboling and the games in which he, like Smith, was vigorously engaged. During these respites, he talked to Smith. He told him that nothing mattered, nothing other than sex. Sex, said Superstud, was both the beginning and the end. It was the ripe fruit on which a man must feed if he was to live fulfilled. Chastity, he mused at one point, lying on his back while Tania sat waiting cross-legged at his side in earnest silence, was the fruit of a poisoned tree. Celibacy, he claimed, was the only perversion, insofar as it denied the essential nature of man. Would Smith willingly and knowingly choose never to bend his fingers? Smith said, no, he would not so choose. Why then, asked Superstud, should he deny the sultry demands made by his genitals? Was not the first action – the refusal to bend one’s fingers, a perverted act in that it denied nature and the intent of nature’s clever engineering? Yes, Smith agreed, it could be so called. Then, Superstud insisted, so was celibacy a perversion. Bodies were made to be enjoyed. They were, he argued, the source of all surcease and all pleasure.

  “Then you must often fall in love,” Smith remarked when Superstud finally paused to draw a deep breath.

  Superstud’s eyes, which he had closed in lazy content merit, opened at once. “In love? Me? Yes, I suppose that once upon a time I needed to call my behaviour falling in love. But such talk is but a shadow upon the face of truth. Men talk of love when they need to deny what they consider the grossness of their appetites. They say they love in order to dwarf their towering guilt about sex. Love! Love is the pigment with which an untalented artist transforms the lily into something hideous and artificial. Better, I say, to let the lily live in naked splendour than to unnecessarily gild it. No, Smith, I think I have never been in love if the truth were to be told, which it so seldom is even among friends. I have merely cared for my garden. I prune a branch here –” Superstud touched Tania’s navel, “– bend a stalk in a more desirable direction –” he ran smooth fingers down Jessamyn’s arm and received her smile, “– and let desire germinate under the hard winds and soft rains I bring down upon my flowers.”

  “I remember –” Smith began and then, frowning, fell silent.

  Superstud sat up. “You remember? What do you remember?”

  “She said she loved me. I’m sure she did. I can almost remember her.”

  “Forget her. Touch Tania. Say sweet words to Jessamyn. Memory is a dusty trunk that is better left locked. Spiders spin in its dark interior, and their webs are strong enough to catch the unwary. Then, once caught in the web, down the steel strands comes the spider to sting. Smith, Jessamyn and Tania are here now. They are real. Take them. Let memories lie at peace in their graves.”

  “But she was –”

  “I warn you, Smith.”

  “What is wrong with remembering? You said you remember things.”

  “I had no choice. I was made to remember.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Nor do I, my man. It is simply the way of things. When pleasure is present for the taking, questions only confuse issues. To enjoy is all.”

  “Superstud –” Smith wrapped his arms around his body as if seeking shelter from a cold wind.

  “Yes?”

  “What do you remember?”

  “Women; I told you that.”

  “That’s all?”

  Superstud raised his arms and stretched languidly. “Isn’t it enough?”

  “For you, maybe. But what I don’t understand is why you remember only women. Is there nothing else that you can recall? No other events or incidents?”

  Superstud idly scratched his knee. He shook his head. “For me, memory is mainly a list of names, a catalogue of nights and afternoons of pleasure. And yet –”

  “And yet?” Smith prompted, leaning forward slightly as Superstud’s eyes narrowed and his brow wrinkled.

  “Sometimes I hear music. Sometimes symbols shake themselves free of the spiders’ webs, and I think of the elegance lying in the heart of numbers. But such thoughts – such recollections – are only distractions from my primary concern. Nothing more than that. What I am trying to say I am trying to say to you that my distractions are no more important to me than the thoughts of peace that occasionally occur to Marsman. When he speaks of them, it is as if they belonged to someone else entirely.”

  “For you, it is women,” Smith mused. “For Marsman, it is –”

  “War and its glories,” Superstud interrupted. “But we have talked enough. Words weigh upon us. Get up, Smith. Shake yourself and send all your words tumbling away and out of sight. The night is not yet ended although the moon looks weary as it descends the sky. Come!”

  Superstud’s last word, a command that ripped through the night, brought girls rushing toward him. Jessamyn was on her feet and dancing. Tania clasped Smith’s hand and whirled about with him, laughing and urging him on to eager excesses.

&nbsp
; Whips appeared in the hands of some of the girls. Flowers sprouted in their scented hair. The sibilant sound as the little whips touched Smith’s body blended neatly with the notes from the flute at the lips of the young girl darting in and out of the bushes bordering the glade.

  Jewels flashed on feet and fingers.

  Juices flowed between Smith’s body and the bodies of the simulacra – salt, sweat, hot dots of blood released by teeth and nails, fluids erupting from hidden places, the vaguely acrid scent of lubricating oil, perfumes.

  Bare feminine feet appeared wearing laced shoes with heels many inches high. Sleek furs flashed in hands and wrapped about writhing loins.

  Feathers flared about a fire Superstud had set blazing beside the lagoon in which its reflected flames leaped.

  Jessamyn bounded into the arena, chains weighing down her body, taunting Smith and telling him in wild words that bound as she was, so was she helpless, while his hands were free to inflict…

  Tania handed him her braided whip.

  Smith felt his arm rise, the whip arcing into the air. He heard the sound of its slap, heard Jessamyn scream, saw the smile that lent the lie to her agony. He watched as she dropped to her knees at his feet, her head bent forward, her long blond hair billowing out and down to hide her face, her hands in the black iron bracelets raised to him in silent supplication…

  The scene before him – the raging fire, the chains, the fur, feathers, and leather whips – roiled in his mind, a scenario of broken images. Jessamyn was begging him not to strike her again and yet he heard the yearning lurking in her tone. He felt Tania’s hands everywhere upon and within him. He existed as the whip Jessamyn waited for. He was the metropolis being plundered by Tania as she urged him on to odder delights.

  He was –

  Who?

  The word screamed in his mind. He dropped the whip and seized Tania. With one thrust of his arms, he sent her toppling to the ground. Superstud sprang toward him but Smith’s fist reached Superstud’s jaw and the simulacrum crumpled, fell, and was quiet.