In Touch (The Vassi Collection)

by Marco Vassi

  “Why are you all stopping,” she said, her voice strident. “Do you think that I have some special message for you, some answer from the mountain top, some new game to entertain you? Haven’t you—” she paused, shook her head and went on—”haven’t we learned anything? Are we going to fall into authority structures with all that we know?”

  They gazed at her like children who are being admonished but don’t know what for.

  “Who are these people?” she asked herself. “What are they doing here? Why are they in my home, eating my food, sleeping in my bed?”

  The room began to go flat before her eyes, appearing two dimensional, and the faces of the people melted, lost their shapes. Everything seemed ringed in black. It was as though she had suddenly fallen into a nightmare. The guiding perceptions that she had been raised with, which formed the common pool of human definition of reality, was no longer operative. She had discarded that. And what was to have been her new mode, the transportation of fantasy into that world, was on the verge of becoming a weird travesty. Nothing was happening that hadn’t happened before; the major difference was that now she had no guidelines with which to judge and handle it. She was totally awash in the chaotic vibrations, and the room and the people and the very structure of her life swam before her and through her and the next thing she knew she was lying on her back on the living room table staring at the ceiling.

  At first she thought something was wrong with her eyes for the light seemed to be flickering, and then she realized that she was surrounded by candles. Her body was laid straight out, her arms stiff at her sides. She still wore her mink coat and shoes. All around her rose and fell the low murmur of voices. She tried to shake loose from the web of immediate confusion to sort out specific aspects of the scene. She could make out sobbing and whispering and, in the background, a monotonous chanting. The smell of incense and flowers choked the air. She blinked several times to clear her head and tried to move. But found she couldn’t. It was as though she was paralyzed. She went to speak, and couldn’t open her mouth.

  Fear shot through her, first sending a harsh tingling through her limbs and then churning about in her belly. She cast about for some explanation, any conceptualization that would describe her situation in such a way that her mind could make peace with it. A score of possibilities reared up like frightened horses and started to stampede down the ravines of her consciousness before she took hold of the reins of speculation, drew in the runaway herd of malevolent images, and rested in a settling dust cloud of fragmented doubt. Taking a deep breath, she reached down into her psyche and chose a single conclusion with the care of an archer picking the best arrow from his quiver.

  “I’m dreaming,” she said to herself. “I must have fainted. The last thing I remember is the room going black. I must have passed out, and now I’m dreaming.”

  She recalled that the most successful nightmares convey the most chilling sense of reality, and so she expected that she wouldn’t be able to find the same in the dream. Yet, she would try. For years, when she was a teenager, she had trouble falling asleep. She would lie in bed thinking, feeling herself, saying over and over, “In a few seconds I won’t know I’m here. I’ll still be here . . . my body will be here . . . but I won’t be aware I’m alive.” And as she sensed herself falling asleep, she’d jerk up in bed and force her eyes open, doing that again and again until, suddenly, she woke up and found that it was morning.

  In later years, during her early therapy, she’d seen the whole process as an early cognition of death and a fighting against the inevitability of ultimate unconsciousness. She told her therapist how she was plagued by a peculiar form of nightmare. She’d find herself in a perfectly normal setting, going through mundane routines, until something very small but very striking, such as a clock’s not being on the mantle where it belonged, would trigger an explosion of unbearable terror, and she’d start to struggle to escape, fighting to remove herself. While that was happening in the dream, the person on the bed would be whimpering and moaning, trying to punch her way into consciousness. Sometimes the experience revealed seemingly endless layers, as when she would think she was awake, but only be dreaming that she was now lying on her bed after just having surfaced from the nightmare. But when she attempted to move, the same paralysis afflicted her and once again she’d struggle and moan until she dreamed that she had awakened again, but by now be sitting up in bed, relieved at being out at last. But then she’d sense the presence of someone or something else in the room, someone or something coming toward her in the dark. She would try to scream, but find her vocal cords paralyzed. And still once more understand that she was still dreaming, and fear that she would always be dreaming, never to emerge from the countless dimensions of the nightmare world, until, with an effort of will that flowed from her toes and sucked strength from her entire body, she would scream, this time bursting through, waking herself up, and discovering herself lying on her back in her bedroom, screaming and screaming and screaming, until the lights went on in the hallway and her mother came flying into the room, clasping her to her breast, rocking her, and sighing over and over, “It’s all right, it’s all right, it was only a dream.”

  Yet the memory of those nights haunted her through the years, and after she had completed the bulk of her therapy she told herself that she understood the process and therefore was no longer vulnerable to it. When she first began to explore the question of fantasy in relation to consciousness and what is normally termed reality, however, those incidents came up for re-evaluation, although she had been unwilling to delve into the darker implications. For to open oneself to one’s fantasy life meant not only discovering the latent joyousness and liberty which is strangled by the confines of civilization, but tampering with the hidden demonic forces that lay coiled at the roots of existence.

  “So,” she now thought, “it’s happening again. Another one of those dreams.”

  Yet, there was something about her present condition which inclined her to think that she was really awake. She recalled the anecdote of the old Taoist rational lunatic Chuang Tze who noted that he fell asleep and dreamed he was a butterfly and now didn’t know whether he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. Lydia tried to roll her head around but found that it was bound tightly. That was the odd note. In her dreams, the paralysis had always been without an obvious cause. Now however, she could feel the ropes and tapes holding her. Her ankles, calves, thighs, waist, torso, wrists, elbows, chin, and forehead were all tied to the table. She was pegged as firmly as Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians. And the reason she couldn’t speak was the strip of surgical tape over her lips. Her back itched and she was sweating.

  She moved the only part of her she could, her eyes, but couldn’t make anything out. The flickering shadows and highlights on the ceiling, and an occasional movement along the periphery of her visual field, were her only clues. She took another deep breath and tried to sort out the sounds at another level. The audio resembled nothing so much as a scratchy recording of some jungle ritual recorded on a cheap tape recorder by an anthropologist. It had the same roughness, the same communal energy. But what was the ceremony? The tone was one of sorrow, and the mood was somewhat depressed.

  Then, with rapid shifts of figure-ground perception, the picture snapped into focus. The scene was a funeral. The people around her were mourning. And she was the corpse!

  She would have smiled in relief except for the tape which kept her lips immobile. Now it was clear. She had fainted just when she was on the verge of heaping a tirade on their heads, and while she was unconscious they had worked up the fantasy of her death, taking her attack on their over-dependence to its logical conclusion. If there were any truth in the notion that they were draining her by being unable to find their own centers of energy and enthusiasm and direction, they would bury her and find out how they fared using her as a totem instead of as a living guide.<
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  A fluttery elation tickled her chest. This was a vindication, somehow, a feeding back to her of all the energy she had poured out. Also, it allowed her to be totally passive, something she had been finding impossible for months. At the heart of the entire bondage and submission exercise which has begun to attract so many people is nothing more complicated than this desire to be helpless in the hands of someone who will bring pleasure and caring.

  “Luckily, I’m with people who won’t hurt me,” Lydia thought.

  But even as she was thinking that, the sounds around her subsided and from the corner of her eye she saw John Abbot standing next to the table, facing the others, his back toward her. He waited a few moments until there was complete silence, and then began to speak.

  “It’s difficult to know what to say,” he began. “We all knew her, or thought we did. But somehow, when someone dies the way she did, we are always left wondering whether we ever got to see more than the mask. Nora found her, and thought she was sleeping. Then she found the bottle of pills on the night table.”

  John paused and seemed to be sniffling. When he spoke again, there were tremors in his voice.

  “Why did she kill herself? How can we ever know?”

  “Good Lord,” Lydia thought, “they’ve imagined me a suicide.”

  “She left no note,” John went on. “I’m sure all of us have examined our memories and consciences to ask whether there was anything in what we said or did, or didn’t do or didn’t say, which helped push her over the edge. She was a woman struggling with the final contradiction, one foot in the cultural world and one foot in the world of becoming. She was torn between a desire to discover a way out of the straitjacket of the traditional civilization and a hunger for the false freedom it offered. Just before she killed herself, she had dressed in the style of her previous values, and was gone for twenty hours. When she returned, it was obvious to all of us that she had debauched herself hideously. We can only imagine that she despaired of ever breaking loose from the appetite for what the world calls reality, or of ever committing herself fully to the communal fantasy that has become our new reality. She saw us first as her patients, and then as her children and followers, and finally as her burden. She couldn’t do herself what she was trying to teach us to do, which is to plunge into the most painful portion of our perception to emerge purged on the other side. She tried, perhaps more than we can understand. But somewhere inside her she must have judged herself a failure. She couldn’t face us with that, and so she killed herself.”

  “Oh, I can’t believe she’s gone,” a woman’s voice wailed. To Lydia it sounded like Nora.

  “Well, she is and she isn’t,” John continued. “The body will decay and be buried. So much for reality. But she has taught us to go beneath the surface of things, to find a world within ourselves which is infinite and eternal. It no longer matters what happens to any of us as individuals. For the dream we have liberated now carries us in its arms. We now exist beyond truth, beyond love, beyond beauty. These are only the steps that lead up from the tomb of reality into the fields of fantasy, the realm beyond all definition. It is where language loses its content and becomes pure form, where form loses its outline and becomes pure potential, where potential sheds its dynamic and becomes pure awareness, where awareness discards its consciousness and becomes what the great mystics have tried to point to.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” Lydia thought, “they’ve made a god of fantasy. I’ve really created a band of fanatics.”

  She tried to feel horrified about that, but the sensation would not come.

  Paradoxically, although she was tied to her table in her living room while a score of people held a mock wake for her, she felt more in touch with herself than at almost any other time in her life. The situation was the living proof of what she was trying to work out: that in going to the farthest extreme of fantasy, one touched an entirely different reality. The thing she kept reminding herself was that this was real. The best way to put it into sharpest contrast was to imagine what would happen if the door suddenly burst open and a dozen policemen and reporters rushed in, perhaps led by Fred who would be “trying to save her from herself”. The happening would be viewed as a freak-out, as an orgy, as a witches’ sabbath, as a far out therapeutic experiment, as avant garde theatre, and, in fact, as anything but what it actually was, which was life.

  Incongruously, she remembered the feeling she had had as a child when the family gathered for a holiday and everyone got a bit drunk after dinner. With the ties so strong, and with everyone knowing everyone so perfectly, their sore spots and foibles and grace points, they could become more and more boisterous, more crude, more intricate, more down-home than most alienated people would think possible. A stranger walking in would have seen only what passed for fighting and off-key singing and earthy erotic innuendo. But when everyone is kin, the human drama is just that, a drama, with no persnickety intellectual building a fancy theory over the raw fact. Similarly, in her living room, Lydia felt totally relaxed, at home. Even though the razor-thought that they might serve her up as a human sacrifice to meet the standards of the fantasy sizzled through her brain from time to time.

  “As a farewell to the vessel which held Lydia’s spirit,” John was concluding, “we are going to pay our last respects to her corpse. I guess none of us wants to go so far as to cut her up and make a soup out of her, but neither do we desire anything so abstract as a wafer to serve as a symbol. So, since she’s been dead for less than an hour and the body’s still warm, we can say goodbye to her in a way that would have pleased her immensely.”

  Lydia watched as John leaned over her after he finished speaking. His hands came up toward her face. He was holding a strip of black cloth. She could not protest as he placed it over her eyes and fastened it around her head. And then everything went dark. She now could not move or speak or see.

  In a few seconds, she felt her coat being parted. Then her dress was lifted. And she heard the thin sound-slivers of steel against steel as a pair of scissors snipped off her panties. It was then that she knew what they were going to do.

  “This is the body of our beloved, dead Lydia,” John said. “We have all known its countless delights when she was alive. And we can pay her no greater homage than to re-create the ritual of sex now that she is gone.”

  Lydia felt the bonds around her legs being cut and then her legs being spread apart. It was the single most vulnerable moment of her life, to have her bare cunt opened before a room full of people that she could not see. Someone slipped a finger into her pussy.

  “Hmm,” Robert said, “it’s all wet and sticky. She’s pretty randy for a corpse.”

  “Let me taste,” said Marie. “I’ve never eaten a dead body before.”

  Lydia felt the lips against her lower lips, the tongue sliding into the moist sanctuary, lapping up the juices and then slipping up to rim the clitoris. She would have thrust her hips forward but her pelvis was still taped down.

  “Nice,” Marie said. “Tastes just like she did when she was alive.”

  “Her tits,” Arthur said, “I want to see her tits.”

  The scissors went to work again and the top of her sheath dress was sliced open, baring her breasts to the room.

  “Beautiful,” said several people at once, and she felt hands skating up and down her rib cage and mouths descending on her nipples. From the impression, it seemed that five or six people were sucking on her tits at once. Squirmy sensations coursed through her immobile body.

  It was then that she got the point. She was not to respond. She was to sense herself as a corpse. This was the fantasy exercise the others were imposing on her; it was not just for them to work something out, but for her to learn something. They were telling her that she did not have to carry the burden of responsibility all the time, that although they loved her and needed her, they existed independently of her, and even though they tended
to flock about her and look to her for clues, they were quite capable of carrying on on their own.

  Lydia let herself imagine her own death, that she had indeed passed from the realm of activity, and was now slowly decomposing and becoming one with the elements without her ego trying to convince her otherwise. And with that, a great peace descended. She saw that everything would continue. The universe would go on working out its mysterious and awesome patterns; the planet would continue to revolve around the sun; life would not cease from producing new forms; human beings would proceed to act out their scenarios.

  Perhaps most importantly, people would go on fucking and loving and striving for freedom. And she did not have to do anything special, save to be herself. There was no success or failure, only process. It was possible for her to die, and for that to be all right. This was something she had known conceptually ever since the age of reason, but this was the first time it emerged as an emotional reality.

  “Fuck me,” she thought, “fuck my corpse. Pump living fluid into the dead so the dead may know that they are still alive.”

  From then on it was a feast for Lydia. The ritual lasted for several hours, during which there was not a second in which she was not being licked or prodded or spanked or kissed or fucked or fondled. After a while she could not easily distinguish her body from those of the others. It was all heat, all contact, all secretion, all sensation. Even the notion of orgasm lost its meaning. The entire thing was one long sustained climax. All the particular acts, the being fucked in the ass, the sperm on the tongue, the piss in the mouth, the fingers in the cunt, the cocks on the belly, the cunts on her lips, the bites on the nipples, lost all individual significance. Nothing existed but heat and movement and surging waves of yearning.