The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 11

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “Idiot!” huffed the blonde, vacating her seat and pressing the red request button for the next stop.

  Several women jostled the Red Brassiere as they left the bus, as if they did not see it. But Pascal sensed the sure and steady gaze of every male passenger – sitting or standing – their eyes, young and old; blue, green, grey, brown and hazel, uniformly fixed on the Red Brassiere, surrounding it from all spots in the bus. Pascal could see their erections, in various stages of angle development like a progressive geometry diagram, pointing at the Red Brassiere from their trousers, a collective of anatomical radii, as if the Red Brassiere were Étoile and the fleshy pointers radiating spokes of the surrounding streets – avenues Victor Hugo, Kléber, d’Iéna, Marceau, the Champs-Elysées . . . Pascal felt cornered. There was a quick change of plans: he would not go to the magic club today. At the next stop Pascal swiftly grabbed the Red Brassiere by a shoulder strap and hurried off, several pairs of men’s hands trying unsuccessfully to snatch the delicate fragrant gossamer as it passed – like sticks thrusting at brass carousel rings in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

  “Françoise!”

  “Adèle!”

  “Lucienne!”

  “Mignon!”

  The men followed Pascal off the bus in pursuit of the Red Brassiere, and with each block more added to the mob, the mass of hands and shouts expanding like a bubble. A dozen Chinese men practising tai chi in the Parc de Belleville got wind of the Red Brassiere, each man smelling a different woman. They tracked their noses and joined the rumble. Pascal broke into a sprint, the Red Brassiere an angel’s wing above him, just clear of the men’s grasps.

  The Boulevard de Belleville was crowded, the market stalls taking up the shaded pedestrian median. The sidewalks on either side were filled with young women in hijab and shawls, men in kuftis and caftans – some of them shopkeepers in long blue smocks over their street clothing lounging in front of their stores, suitcase-sized bags of rice at their backs.

  Pascal ran in and out of traffic, on and off the sidewalk. He passed an Algerian patisserie, a Cambodian sweet shop, a kosher restaurant, a halal boucherie, le Marché Franprix. A laughing teenage boy on a motorbike grabbed at the Red Brassiere, almost pinching it. The Muslim grocers in sandals, the kosher felafellers, the Chinese and Vietnamese restaurateurs, the African marketers – all relinquished their posts to follow the Red Brassiere, each one with a massive erection, plainly visible, no matter the type of costume. Some were openly stroking themselves, with one hand or two, under and over their clothing. The men yelled women’s names in a Babelous ruckus:

  “Minou!”

  “Bashira!”

  “Habiba!”

  “Wei!”

  “Hong!”

  “Falala!”

  “Batool!”

  “Odile!”

  “Halima!”

  “Shoshana!”

  “Li Li!”

  “Malika!”

  “Ming!”

  “Haboos!”

  “Sultana!”

  “Mei Xing!”

  “Kalifa!”

  “Hua!”

  “Tzipporah!”

  “Jìng Yì!”

  “Magali!”

  Pascal reached for his mobile phone and tried to ring the police. He managed the 1 button twice but the gadget slipped to the ground and into a sewer grate before he could press the final 2. Pascal kept running, through the market stalls and along the shops on the margins, passing the sidewalk vendors and the crowds browsing their merchandise – sacks of dried lentils and peas, fruits and vegetables, bolts of African fabrics, plastic crates full of mini-Eiffel Towers, flat displays holding cheap telephone cards. A man in front of the “Tout à 1€” store stuck out a foot to trip him, withdrawing it in the last second.

  The lanes of the boulevard were filled with cars. There were few taxis, and those present had solid orange roof lights indicating passengers. Pascal crossed the street, dodging the moving vehicles. He found a narrow alley, the width of one person. A man carrying two pillows on either side of him approached from the opposite direction. Pascal managed to pass him but the pillows momentarily blocked the rush of the screaming crowd on his heels. There was a pop and a million white and grey feathers filled the alley. The Red Brassiere ricocheted off the walls in a zig-zag with the velocity of its forward propulsion. Pascal spotted a patch of grass beyond a decaying wooden fence matted with movie posters, away from the melee. He checked to see that the Red Brassiere was steadily behind him. It lurched over the barrier while Pascal scaled the structure and for a moment everything stood still.

  The voices got louder, closer.

  “Galia, I can smell you!” cried one man.

  “Kumani, I know you’re there!” screamed another.

  “Mahmoode, I’m coming to get you!” bellowed a third in a caftan.

  It was too late. The gang broke down the fence. The Red Brassiere gave off an odour of pure fear as its strap snagged on a café sign shaped like a top hat. One man scrambled onto the shoulders of another and dislodged the Red Brassiere, yanking it down.

  Droplets of nervous perspiration formed on the piece of lingerie. It crumpled and shuddered, then disappeared from Pascal’s view, obscured by the drapery of a sea of hands. One hundred erections pointed towards the Red Brassiere like hungry knives. The knot of men released an intense heat. There was the sound of cloth being ripped, and ripped and ripped again. When, finally, there was no more rending to be done, the men retreated, man by man, each with a shard of red lace or silk as bounty. Three had hooks, three more eyes. One man held the small decorative bow from the front, still intact like a perfect unmolested rosebud. Short scarlet threads covered the ground, twitching like organisms under a microscope. Pascal sat forlornly, abandoned by the crowd of men, holding the very last piece of the Red Brassiere, a tiny red sliver, off which hung the tattered label – now a blank scrap without a name – soiled with shoe scuffs, a discarded grape skin. There was no smell.

  In that moment, one by one, brassieres were seized from every corner of the city. Women strolling each rue, boulevard and avenue felt themselves coming undone – unravelled – the intimate harnesses drawn out through their sleeves. In thousands of boudoirs, from the First to the Twentieth, drawers slid open, their contents unfolding and taking flight out of windows and skylights. A parade of fantasy lingerie emerged from the department stores. Street-market brassieres displayed on headless mannequins unhooked and dashed away. In Père Lachaise a half dozen Wonderbras were pulled from the hands of young female tourists about to fling the apparel onto Jim Morrison’s grave. The gigantic brassiere of Babar’s cousin Celeste vacated Jean de Brunhoff’s book illustrations and took to the air like a magic carpet.

  Women all over Paris stood at their windows – topless and stunned – watching the silent flight of silk, satin, lace and nylon in hues of white, yellow, orange, red, blue and green. One woman tried to loop a strap as it passed.

  The brassieres formed tandem rows, filing through the streets and across the Seine, on and off bridges, the march of an invisible, scantily clad army; bounding on cobblestones in a rainbow arc, going up stairs, turning corners in a calico jumble. People seated in cafés dropped their glasses at the sight of the promenading spectacle.

  The brassieres headed skywards in Pascal’s direction, single file now, making dotted lines like trolley wires above the centres of streets, an airborne queue flanked by pitched rooftops. As they flew, other objects joined the mass in solidarity: a fleet of berets and handkerchiefs from Left Luggage at the Gare du Nord; bows from the hair of well-dressed children in the Parc Monceau and silk scarves from the necks of their nannies; one hundred paper airplanes set into motion by schoolboys in a hundred classrooms; pornographic passages ripped from paperbacks sold by the Seine bouquinistes; a stream of orphaned gloves from the Bureau des Objets Trouvés, forefingers all pointed towards Pascal. Rose petals fresh off the faces of women getting floral treatments at the hammam bundled with others
plucked from the garland of florists and gardens woven through the city. Taxidermied birds left their gnarly branches at Deyrolles. Kites were whisked from small hands in the city parks. Braiding, embroidery, fans and parasols trailed from the Musée de la Mode. The stockings of Madeline’s Miss Clavel stepped up – in two straight lines, sails detached from toy boats on the pond in the Jardin du Luxembourg and peacocks lost their quills in the Bois de Boulogne. In Père Lachaise, Isadora Duncan’s last scarf slid out from her tomb like a long pink tongue while lipstick kisses unpeeled themselves from Oscar Wilde’s headstone, hanging in midair for a moment like frightened spots off a cartoon leopard. Glittering in the evening’s final light were sparklies from Joséphine Baker’s last revue, followed by feather boas from the Moulin Rouge, hose and garters once belonging to Kiki of Montparnasse, and, running to keep up, Edith Piaf’s little black dress and tiny shoes.

  The various objects filled the skies and soared towards Pascal, sitting long-faced in the grassy lot, staring at the shattered Red Brassiere remains, both spirit and cock deflated. He welcomed the inventory, tethering everything together. Celeste’s brassiere formed a hammock underneath him and he fell backwards into it as into a giant open hand. His cock immediately asserted itself, encouragingly resuscitated. Every item found its place as if part of a puzzle, creating a complex latticework. The craft took flight with Pascal at the helm using scarves and straps as directional reins. The toy boat sails spined the ship like dinosaur’s scales, acting as rudders. A poufed string of chef toques encircled the assemblage, jewelled with bits of cotton candy from the Bois de Vincennes.

  The multilayered, multidimensional sling caught the wind and Pascal was pulled aloft by the cluster, a helix pulled high over the beige-grey city. It began a large path of outward-moving spiral flight, mirroring the layout of the arrondissements below – a beignet, an escargot shell, a coiled snake.

  Pascal veered away from Notre-Dame to avoid the low-voltage shocks intended for gargoyle-bound pigeons. Beneath him he saw the City of Light: the twinkling tiaras of the bridges spanning the Seine; the unbroken red and white meandering automobile beam stripe blurring the boulevards – a long slice of the Tricolour; the blinking green neon animation of pharmacy crosses.

  From the Fontaine Stravinsky, Jean Tinguely’s shiny red puffed lips blew Pascal a kiss. In unison, the light-sensitive windows at L’Institut du Monde Arabe closed their shutters like camera apertures – 240 portals momentarily constricting in a conspiring wink, giving him the gazes of 1,001 Arabian nights from sheathed feminine eyes behind a thousand burqas. The Tour Eiffel grew another six inches – the full extension of its phallic architecture – and spouted fireworks from its tip in a lusty salute.

  Birds spiralled around Pascal, now moving like a rapid current, intoxicated by the fragrant tufted cloud trapping him in a tangled skein, a tempestuous tempting agglomeration. He stroked himself in sheer abandon as he inhaled the combined bouquets of the unseen women whose garments surrounded him, cradled him – women from past and future, known and not, spanning the centuries. Female names appeared on the hundreds of fluttering labels, writing and rewriting themselves in endless succession – like magic slates ad infinitum. Pascal laughed and sang while he alternately pulled at himself and guided the barrelling sphere. He rode the edge of light turning to darkness as night blanketed Paris. A golden swirl of shimmering Michelin stars, shot in a farewell booster from the restaurants below, formed a constellation around the flying contraption, raising it still further skywards, pulling Pascal up, upwards over the city – ascending far and away – his cock aimed towards the end of the sky.

  The Antidote

  Lisabet Sarai

  ‘Yeah, I can get it – well, I can tell you where to get it. But it’s expensive.”

  Merle and I huddled together on the bench in the fifty-second-storey roof garden of the New Sears Building where we worked. Even here, talking was risky. There were certainly cameras, but mikes were less likely out in the open.

  “I’ve been saving. How much do you think it will cost?”

  Merle named a figure four times what I had squirrelled away.

  “Gads, Merle! It’s not gold!”

  “No, it’s more valuable than gold. What do you expect? People will pay almost anything for the forbidden.”

  I blinked and looked away, not wanting her to see my incipient tears. After a few deep breaths, I thought I could continue the conversation without embarrassing myself. My friend wasn’t fooled.

  “You really want this, don’t you, Lena?”

  “More than anything.” It was true. I’d been experimenting on my own, trying to reverse the effects of the government’s anti-sex interventions, with no success at all.

  No one knew exactly how the drugs were delivered. I went two days eating nothing, drinking only rainwater gathered on our unit’s balcony. The fact that Jeff travelled so much for his job had made it easier. I just waited until he was away on one of his trips. Then, physically weak but determined, I hacked through the Net filters to one of the most notorious underground porn sites, hosted, according to Merle, in Kazakhstan.

  Nothing. I felt nothing. I watched the contortions of the naked bodies, the penetrations and the climaxes, and felt no desire, only a vague, painful sense of loss.

  I was second-generation post-Plague. I knew the history, but I didn’t remember the Troubles: the millions of deaths, the riots, the massacres of homosexuals and prostitutes. None of it seemed real to me.

  When the Council had introduced its libido-suppression programme to stem the spread of the virus, most people were enthusiastically in favor. Now it had become second nature. Society ran perfectly smoothly without the lubricant of lust. But I resented it. I wanted to know what I was missing.

  Not sex. Of course Jeff and I had sex, once a month when our fertility booster package arrived. And our coupling was fabulous, as the Council intended, thanks to the hormone supplements and the stimulants and the fact that Jeff and I had been matched for compatibility long before we’d even met. When he was inside me, it felt as though we were a single being. I loved my husband deeply. That wasn’t what this was about.

  I didn’t want societally sanctioned, procreationally focused, conjugal sex. I wanted to fuck strangers. Nobody used that word anymore, but that’s what I craved. I wanted sex for its own sake, wild, extreme, dangerous. Sex with men – more than one man. Maybe even sex with women. And for that, I needed the antidote.

  It was strange. My fantasies did not arouse me physically – the drugs prevented that – but I still continued to rehearse scenarios in my mind. I prodded the empty place in my psyche like someone would poke her tongue into the socket of a pulled tooth.

  Merle watched me, sympathy softening her sharp features. “There might be a way for you to get it for free,” she said, sotto voce. “If you’re really desperate.”

  “How? I’m desperate, believe me. I can’t stand it any longer.”

  “The clubs – some of them will give you the antidote without charge, if you agree to perform.”

  “Perform? What do you mean?”

  “Put on a show for the clientele. Screw strangers on stage while other strangers watch.”

  I shivered. My stomach did a little dance. Could I do that? Did I dare? It might be the only way. I’d never be able to raise the sum that Merle had quoted.

  “Tell me where to go,” I whispered. “Who to talk to.”

  “I can set it up.” Merle gave me a conspiratorial smile. “When do you want to do it?”

  “Tonight.” I swallowed hard. “Jeff will be back tomorrow and his next trip isn’t for three weeks. It’s got to be tonight.”

  * * *

  The club was in a crumbling district of deserted warehouses, down by the lake. At some point the government would probably raze them to build modern, hygienic high rises, but right now there was no pressure. The population was recovering, but slowly. This space wouldn’t be needed for decades.

  I took t
he skytrain to the closest station and walked from there, my heart slamming against my ribs. I kept an eye out for Inspectors on the prowl, the alibi I’d concocted ready on my tongue. But the streets were empty, dark and silent.

  I stumbled over the cracked pavement in my high heels. I didn’t really have the right clothes for a sex club. Under my raincoat, I was wearing my shortest skirt, black, and a tight scarlet top with a scooped neckline. I had made up my eyes, painted my lips, and let my hair flow over my shoulders, but I still looked more like the customer service manager I actually was than a porn performer.

  The stretchy fabric of my blouse hugged my breasts, massaging my nipples each time I moved. Tiny sparks sang through my body. The mere prospect of receiving the antidote seemed to have awakened my senses.

  I stopped in front of a massive steel door at the address that Merle had made me memorize. This looked like it. There was no sign, of course, no lights, no sign of life. No bell or knocker, either. I wondered how I was going to get in.

  “Name?” demanded a gruff voice, from somewhere above me. Of course they would have cameras – I should have realized.

  “Lena.” No one used last names in these places, according to Merle.

  “Who sent you?”

  “Sigmund.”

  “Let me check my list.” After a moment, the door swung silently open on well-oiled hinges. Behind it was a giant of a man with a shaved head and bushy black eyebrows, carrying an LCD beam. His lips stretched into a grin, but his eyes cut right through me. “Welcome, Lena. I understand that you’re part of tonight’s entertainment.”

  “Um – yes, that’s right.” He closed the door behind me.

  “Good. We can always use fresh blood.”

  My stomach did a somersault. I looked around. A vast dark space echoed above me. My guide shone the torch on a spiral stairway to our left. “Downstairs,” he said. “All downstairs. The bar, the dance floor. The stage.” My insides started to jitterbug as he took my arm. “Bolt’s the name. Don’t trip. They’re steep.”