by Krissy Kneen
I nod and point down into my lap where my penis is still just a little tingly. ‘I felt the orgone energy, Dad. I felt it when I was talking to Amalie.’
He nods, sagely. He knows all about orgone. He learned from Dr Reich. He reaches across and for a moment I think he is about to pat my groin to feel the swelling of my penis, but instead he pops the glove box and a spill of red paper and black curling ribbons falls out into my lap.
‘Your mother would be so proud of you.’
‘What’s this?’ We don’t have money like the other kids. I am here on scholarship. Birthdays are a time for cake and lasagne, but never gifts. It has been a rule in our house since Mum died.
‘An artefact,’ he tells me. ‘The changing of the guard.’
I am ripping the paper off too roughly, but I can’t control my excitement. It has been a great day, the best day, and when I see the leather cover exposed through a tear in the paper, the letters WR pressed into the soft skin of the notebook, I feel like all the air has been punched out of my chest. My fingers are trembling and I force myself to slow down. WR. Wilhelm Reich.
An artefact indeed.
‘I thought they burned all Dr Reich’s books.’
‘I stole this when I was your age. Perhaps I shouldn’t be proud of that, but I am. All the other notebooks ended up in that pyre. I was there, watching the burning books, the orgone accumulators, the orgone shooters, the cloudbusters, all the equipment that Dr Reich used to gather the sexual energy. All his notes and his research…well, you can imagine the flames, Nick!’
I am imagining the flames. Bright blue, the colour of orgone, crackling with phosphorescence. I wrestle the bow off the book and press my hands against the cover. I can almost feel the energy throbbing against the soft leather.
I open the book and run my fingers over the paper. The indecipherable scrawl. The pen that Reich held in his thick fingers. An artefact indeed. I feel like Moses has just come down from the mountain and presented to me the tablets from God’s hands. This is better, though. This is the original power, the one true thing connecting us all. The origins of orgone energy, the source of sexual health. I know my eyes are damp when I look up to my father.
‘You have come of age, son.’ My father’s voice sounds strained. He is as emotional as I am. He holds out a key and presses it in my hand.
‘The key to…? The cellar door?’
The one room that I am not allowed to open, the mystery of my whole childhood. I’m overwhelmed. I can feel the tears spill over my lids and track a wet line down my cheeks.
‘You are thirteen, Nicholson. A magic number. You have reached full sexual maturity. You are ready to test your power.’
I close the book and press it to my heart. The key is clutched so tightly in my fist that it will leave an imprint on my skin when I finally place it on the desk beside my bed. I lurch forward and hug my father. He smells like pipe tobacco and aftershave, soap and sunlight. I breathe him in and whisper into his chest, ‘This is the best day of all my life, Dad.’
He hugs me back so hard that my ribs hurt. ‘Remember this day, Nicholson. Today is the beginning of your adult life. Happy birthday. Now you are a man.’
I can feel myself inflating with joy. My father, Amalie, even Wilhelm Reich all conspiring to bring me happiness. Did Dr Reich know that his work would live on in the body of a young man some day? Was he all-seeing? I can feel the beating heart of his notebook against my chest, an echo of my own excitement.
A Sport and a Pastime
by JAMES SALTER
University. Lecturers in shabby ill-fitting jackets, with hacked-into hair, blinking like moles as they raced from battered old cars to shiny halls. Students mocking them in faux vintage chic, the jeans carefully faded and custom torn. Shiny cars. Cars waxed by employees. Daddies’ cars. Cars that were gifts for graduation from private schools.
Holly walked through the car park and waited for a blocky black vehicle to edge in front of her. There was a dead flower hanging from the mirror, a withered reminder of a kiss, perhaps, now shrivelled and no doubt smelling slightly of decay. She could imagine the girl at the wheel looping string around the single bright iris. The colour of it singing in the harsh light. Now, with the passing of a day or two, the purple was almost grey. The girl at the wheel shifted a lock of orange hair behind her ear, bit the corner of her lip. Holly was startled by the immediacy of everything, the scent of exhaust buffeting her. Her own shadow draped on the asphalt in front of her. The dead iris swinging back and forth as the girl parked the car inexpertly, a little crooked, a little too close to the car beside her. She had to squeeze out of the vehicle with the door half closed. She slid along the side, throwing the locks with an unconscious flick of her wrist. The car barked like an abandoned pet.
The dead iris mesmerised Holly, the way it turned its languid circles, petals tipping into and out of a small patch of sunlight. The iris was somehow significant, special enough to be singled out for preservation. Some story behind it, some hint of love. A vision rocked Holly, sudden, brutal, the girl with her thighs spread wide like the woman in Mandy’s needlepoint. The single still-fresh flower outlined with a blaze of orange pubic hair, the stem electric green with life dipping between the almost-hidden folds of the girl’s vulva. A man’s hand pulling the flower slowly from its makeshift vase of flesh.
There’s enough passion in the world already. Everything trembles with it. The words had leaped suddenly from the page as she read them. She heard them now, not in Salter’s voice, which she imagined to be soft and wise and masculine, but in the deep treacle of Mandy’s tenor.
Holly blinked. The ginger-haired girl was just a smudge of colour at the very edge of her vision; in a minute she would disappear completely. The iris now hung motionless from the rear-view mirror. Just a flower fading away from the memory of its origin. Sooner or later the girl would cut the shrivelled plant down from its thread and throw it away. Holly re-shouldered her book-bag and climbed the steps towards the buildings.
When a group of students brushed past her their short skirts caught a breeze and tugged outwards. There was a hint of soap in their wake, a delicate trace of perfume, the schoolyard whiff of bubblegum, ‘—at 5 a.m. Can you believe that—’ the scrap of conversation as they passed. Holly was suddenly imagining this girl awake at the first hint of dawn, 5 a.m., her bare arms colouring with the gorgeous amber light of early morning, her hair a liquid measure of gold poured over her delicate shoulders. The world seemed closer than it had ever been and it had something to do with reading the illicit book.
It was different somehow. Something had changed since she had begun to read A Sport and a Pastime. It was as if just reading the book had changed her relationship to time and space. Holly steadied herself on the railing and felt it sharp and cold on her fingers. The very steps had somehow become more solid and defined. As if some exterior designer had touched the world with light and shadow, making everything more distinct, sharpening the edges, smoothing and polishing every flat surface.
The Angels always sat on the hill beside the history block. None of them did history and this place was like a small island of anonymity. The girls stretched gorgeously out, their limbs tan against the lushness of the lawn. Holly saw her own group of girls now as others must see them, a sweetnes
s of perfection. The history students, a shorter, stockier, more bookish breed, stomping past them in heavy boots and various shades of khaki, glancing enviously in their direction, appreciating the apparition, this glow of beautiful young female flesh.
Holly slipped easily into the group, folded herself into their greetings.
She leaned back on her elbows, propping herself up so she could look up at the sky. The trees threw mottled light and shade onto the ground beside her. Light like confetti. ‘Huge party,’ someone was saying and Holly thought, ‘Fete’. In the novel by James Salter they would call it that, a fete.
She wanted to talk about A Sport and a Pastime. She was confused by it, disoriented. There was a rare break in the conversation and she could mention the book casually. If only her friends did not find reading such an ugly chore, suitable only for nerds and geeks. She could tell them about the passage where the man puts the pillow under the girl’s naked hips, a brief moment of being still in one room when all the rest of the book is lurching from town to town, party to party, dinner to drinks to dancing in Parisian bars. She had felt a visceral longing to go to Paris, now, without preamble, to run into the fete. And then this one still moment when the lover is inside her, driven to the rim with his balls brushing against her flesh. He reached down and traced the wet circle of her cunt with his finger and ejaculated, so suddenly that Holly was forced to put the book down for a moment, trying to calm the suddenly frantic beating of her own heart.
Holly had fallen asleep, her head resting on the stockinged legs of the girl on the cover of the book. She had dreamed the position. She was in his place, her own balls swinging gently, slapping against the young girl’s thighs. She reached down then and felt the wet slit, not the one that her own cock was buried in, a second cunt, thick wet lips. She traced them gently. The young girl lifted her hips and Holly felt her own strange little penis gripped in the most delicate glove. The girl turned her head to the side, her cheek down and pressed into the bed with each thrust of her hips.
‘Don’t worry,’ the girl had said to her in her sweet French accent. ‘It is impossible to control your dreams. The forbidden ones are incandescent. They burn through resolutions like parchment.’
The girl turned her head back into the sheet and began to grunt. Holly pushed forward, into her, trying to stop the terrible sound, the sound of an animal, a pig perhaps. She reached down to the second cunt and felt it wet, a perfect ring of muscle. It came to her then, suddenly.
‘I’m in the wrong hole,’ she said, a terror pouring down over her shoulders. A trickle of ice dripping down her spine.
‘No such thing as wrong,’ the French girl grunted. But when she turned her head it wasn’t the French girl at all. Mandy grinned up at her. Holly tried to pull out of the woman’s arse but her penis was held fast.
‘I’m in the wrong one,’ she said, her eyes tearing up, her hands brushing against the great pale globes of flesh, tight as knees at her crotch. Her balls were poised, tensed, she shouldn’t spill, not here, not in a woman’s arse, a dirty place, a place for secret defecations. She shouldn’t ejaculate here where it was so wrong. Her head tipped back, she felt her balls tighten, her mouth became a perfect o, she was swallowing the universe, stars and planets, hurtling past her teeth. But then she was awake blinking in the dark, restless on the sweat-wet sheets. Only it wasn’t dark. She felt her flesh pulsing as if she was indeed ejaculating in time to the pulsing of a pale blue light. Everything was illuminated by it. She lifted her cheek off the cover of the book, felt the line of it branded on her face.
Her penis was gone. Or, more correctly, had never been there at all. She reached down and felt her vulva twitching as if it were kissing the tips of her fingers. When Holly held her hand up to her face, her fingers were moon-bright.
Now, outside the history building, she blinked up at Jennifer’s face, refocusing.
‘Are you OK?’
Holly was lying on her back. She glanced over to a group of students ambling by.
‘—their feet freeze to the ground and there’s no way to save them without amputation,’ one of them was saying.
‘Yeah, I’m OK.’ Holly lifted herself up to sitting. She took a deep breath to calm herself. She smelled Jack, suddenly, the earthy musk of him. It was a smell so strong that she looked behind her, imagining that he must be standing there. In a moment the scent was gone and there was just the overwhelming sweetness of Jennifer’s perfume. She wondered where the smell of her boyfriend had come from. Perhaps she was losing her grip on sanity.
‘Well? Are you?’
‘What?’
‘Coming to the party tonight. Holly, keep up, will you?’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I was invited.’
‘Don’t be stupid. Why wouldn’t you be invited?’
Holly noticed the fall of light against her knees.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘confetti.’ And she pointed to the little scraps of light with her fingertip.
‘You need to get out more, Holly. We barely see you anymore. You didn’t come to Diane’s yesterday at all.’
‘Yeah, Holly.’ Becca flicked her hair back behind her ear. ‘What are you doing all the time?’
‘Reading,’ she said. The word was out of her mouth before she realised it was there.
Becca laughed sharply, knowing it must be a joke.
Holly tried to smile. She had been reading, and while she read something had subtly shifted, the world tilting off its axis by a fraction of a degree. A tiny shift in the universe, but the earth’s trajectory had altered irreparably and Holly was afraid that the very laws of gravity might buckle under the strain.
Lolita
by VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Same crumpled linen jacket. Same half-crooked smile, same intent stare that made it seem that he could see right through her shirt. Michael tilted his head and looked down at her bare feet, up a little to her tight, childish pleated shirt, tan coloured, a little too short. She smoothed it down over her hips. In the daylight he seemed less enigmatic. She could see that his skin was not luminous. His eyes squinted in the harsh light streaming through the kitchen window. There were darkened creases under them as if he were hung over, even though it was clear he had just come from work.
He leaned against the kitchen bench and sipped black coffee and when she tried to reach the refrigerator he didn’t move aside and she was forced to step around him, uncomfortably close. He smelled elusively of spices—cinnamon, cloves—and beneath this a rich wild trufflish musk like the den of a fox.
He slipped his hand into the bag dangling from her shoulder and plucked out her book. It was a strangely intimate gesture, as if he had slipped his hand into the neckline of her blouse. He stroked the dust jacket and she imagined him stroking her own flesh.
‘A Sport and a Pastime,’ he said, smiling into the distance. ‘This is a great book. I can’t believe you’re reading it.’
She was stony-faced, determined not to blush.
‘You know, Holly, when I read this it blew my mind. I wanted to run off to Paris immediately.’ He leaned a little closer to her, lowered his voice. ‘I wanted to find a French girl who would let me try…anal sex for the first time.’
&
nbsp; There was a little pause before the word and she knew he was gauging her reaction. Holly was determined not to flinch. Her face was a mask, impassive.
‘I’m reading it for uni,’ she lied, moving out into the lounge room, slipping her shoes off onto the mat, manoeuvring a toe under each one to kick it free. She folded her legs up under her, aware suddenly of her thighs, her short cropped top, the way it exposed the tight, pale expanse of her belly. She tried not to squirm under his gaze. She wanted to be as bold as the French girl in the book, as brave as someone with experience of love and sex and life.
‘Are you waiting for my parents?’
He nodded. His eyes did not leave her. His gaze was constant and probing. She felt completely exposed and yet it wasn’t a leery look at all. It was the kind of long, careful gaze you would use when examining a work of art, appreciative and respectful.
‘Work function?’
He grinned as if she had made some kind of joke. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘All work and no play. We are terribly boring middle-aged folk. Never grow older, Holly. Stay just as you are.’ Michael took her hand, stroked her ring finger, grinned. ‘Or perhaps not exactly as you are now.’
The door swung open and her father blustered in. He was carrying a satchel overstuffed with paper files and a box of manila folders. He thumped the box down on the kitchen bench and let the bag crash to the floor at his feet before flinging his arms around his friend.
‘Why do we bring our work home, Michael? Why can’t we run away back into the bosom of our families? Ah.’ He turned to Holly and bent to deliver the rasp of a stubbly kiss on her forehead. ‘Here is the bosom of this family right here.’ He winked and Holly pushed him away, wishing she had worn more concealing clothes. She could feel that appreciative gaze settling on her slightly indiscreet cleavage.