In Touch (The Vassi Collection)

by Marco Vassi

  “All you are doing is providing one more special case of the general rule. Don’t you understand? You have missed the point about fantasy. You have not realized that the ruling fantasy is the unconscious mythos of the age. While you lie around and diddle one another’s delicate parts, you are falling into a most humdrum pattern. And on one level it’s fine. The goats and the soy beans and the fresh air are not the issue. The issue is that you are still operating at the level of second-class mind. You have not seen deeply enough into the essence.”

  As Fred unrolled his catalogue, Lydia felt herself shrinking into herself. Too much of what he said hit sore spots inside her. But, as always with him, it was more the manner of his speech which did her in. Now he was whirling verbally about like a brilliant and flashy swordsman, leaping on tables, swinging from chandeliers, parrying six thrusts at once, a sort of Douglas Fairbanks of the conceptual encounter.

  “My, he sure can talk pretty when he wants to,” she thought, admiring him despite her growing need to flee his presence. “If only I could grab hold of him at the center, shake him, make him see.” And then, with the sadness of insight she was growing used to experiencing, she realized that he was probably thinking the same thing about her. No right, no wrong, simply the hopelessness of a man and a woman caught in the mutual vision of their separateness, with Lydia wanting to find union through merging at a deeper level, while Fred insisted that the deepest level was not available to experience. And each of them played leapfrog with the substance of the other’s needs, Lydia calling Fred’s “epochal myth” a form of alienation, and Fred referring to Lydia’s “fantasy level” as a mediocre vulgarity.

  Each human being has, or ought to have, a place or posture or mood which defines their ultimate sense of what’s real, and at moments of high personal risk, there is a tendency for each of us to retreat to that circle of comfort. Fred had already found his in his attack; Lydia now drifted back from the hard edges of their confrontation into a world in which no other voice but her own carried meaning. From that viewpoint, Fred became a strange stick figure making unintelligible noises at the edge of a high cliff.

  “Why won’t you just accept that I can be happy living the way I am?” she asked as she swam under.

  Fred did not notice that she was drifting, for from his space Lydia was an intelligent cunt with pretensions who underneath it all wanted to have a man tell her what was real and what wasn’t.

  “If you were happy, I’d let it go at that,” he said. “But you’re not. I can tell. Don’t forget, I know you in a way that these people can’t. They’re all so fogged up by confusing fantasy with myth that you could give them any reality and they would put it in their mouths like a pacifier. Honestly, you could talk this bunch into living in the Arctic and eating walrus turds and have them convinced that they were at the pinnacle of human accomplishment.”

  He reached forward suddenly, taking Lydia by the shoulders, his fingers digging hard into her flesh.

  “Sweet Jesus, Lydia, can’t you see? You’ve become just another dictator. You’ve betrayed the very freedom your entire life has been an effort to find.”

  They did not speak again. The feel of her skin in his hands electrified Fred’s awareness. Then, all the paraphernalia of the novelistic necessities fell away. His concept, her fantasy; their names, all the circuitous plot turnings which brought them there. Now, it was simply man and woman alone at the beginning of the world.

  Their movement was as simple and direct as that of two animals in the field, or that of two debauchees who know one another’s tastes perfectly. There was not even communication, for that would imply time for the messages to be conveyed. And there was no time. Neither was it eternity. Nor could the instant be given any designation at all.

  To Lydia, it happened as from a great distance. Fred was already a phantom, and the relationship between the ghost of her reverie and the actual figure who slipped the straps over her shoulders and tugged the overalls down to her ankles, was tenuous. For all practical purposes, Lydia was alone.

  When Fred’s sucking mouth pulled one of her breasts into its wet heat, she was alone.

  When his fingers curled between her buttocks, slid up the quivering valley of clutching flesh, and danced into her pink, perspiring pussy, she was alone.

  When he tore the clothing from his body and bared himself above her, his cock throwing a shadow across her belly, she was alone.

  When he thrust his cock between her slack lips and her tongue lapped the bulky shaft and twirled around the purple head, she was alone.

  He sank onto her body, grasping and stroking, licking and kissing, biting and sucking, spanking and holding. At the lip of the abyss he hunched his cock into her waiting cunt and fucked her.

  They fucked in the position of simple coupling which lies at the core of all the translucent variations. Lydia lay on her back with her thighs spread, her legs lifting into the air, forming a double ski-slide invitation into the wet hairy hole at the center, now running with juice and the beckoning aroma of arousal. Fred lay between her knees, his erect cock throbbing, his pelvis pumping with slow fury.

  They looked into one another’s eyes. Fred saw the naked female, specific and anonymous. Lydia saw the naked male, abstract and personal. In giving birth to an idea, man discovers what is real. In giving birth to what is real, woman discovers the idea.

  Fred leaned into her and was consumed by her embrace. Her cunt convulsed and sucked his cock as a mouth might, the mouth of some blind leech which feeds on hotblooded creatures which stray into the turgid waters of its jungle swamp.

  For Fred, then, only pleasure existed. The cascading, surging sweetness of surrender and release, the extraordinary delight of getting laid. He felt like an orange being sucked dry through a hole made in its skin. But the juices which ran out of him were being pulled into another creature, were feeding someone else, were the seeds of creation.

  “Yes,” he sang, “yes, yes,” as he spilled his guts.

  And Lydia swooned with the intensity of her fantasy, a crowning projection in which she was being fucked at the edge of a lofty plateau under the scorching sun.

  His orgasm blasted him out of consciousness. His toes curled and his spine melted. His eyes turned up in his head and saliva drooled from his mouth. It was not that he pumped his sperm into her, but that he was the handle being used by a force far greater than himself.

  And when he was finished, when the last of his milk had been drawn into Lydia’s gulping cunt, it was several seconds before he could distinguish his sensations of orgasmic flying from the fact that he was actually falling, that she had rolled him over onto his side and pushed him gently, that he had spun over the edge of the cliff and was now sailing through the air, gliding, plummeting, hurtling to his doom, to discover whether death was precisely what he thought it would be or whether existence had one last nasty surprise up its wrinkled sleeve.

  11

  “Fred. Fred!”

  “Hunh?”

  “Fred, wake up.”

  “What?”

  “You were screaming in your sleep.”

  “Oh?” Lydia reached over and turned on the light next to the bed. Fred threw on arm over his eyes to protect them from the glare.

  “Was it a nightmare?” she asked.

  The words fought their way through the sleeping layers of his brain, tripping over snoring synapses, alarming napping axions, and stumbling through spun ganglia like a man catching cobwebs on his face as he crashes through the forest. After a long time as measured by the speed of impulses along a nerve, he made sense of what she was saying.

  “Strange dream . . . “ he muttered.

  He lay still for a long while, breathing heavily. Then, slowly, he lowered his arm and pushed himself up to a sitting position.

  “Want to tell me?” she asked.

  “It’s already starting to fade,”
he told her. “But the end!”

  “What happened?”

  “You were leading some kind of revivalist therapeutic commune in New Mexico. I went down to visit you and we argued, and then we fucked, and then you pushed me off a thousand foot cliff.”

  “That must have been some fuck,” she said.

  “A lot of that went on. Your patient . . . what’s her name . . . Marsha, jumped off the World Trade Center building. And old Monroe had a heart attack while you were fucking him. And there was a weird orgy in Provincetown, with you dancing naked and getting gang-fucked by a bunch of freaks.”

  “Jesus, what did you have for dinner?”

  “Lobster.” He squinted and seemed to peer into a far distance. “That was another thing. A big scene between you and me at the Four Seasons. And you had your license revoked for holding orgies at your group sessions.”

  “My, more orgies,” Lydia said.

  They did not speak for a few minutes. It was three thirty in the morning. The light hum of the nighttime city kept watch outside the open window. A spring rain fell, washing the air.

  Lydia’s eyes grew heavy and she yawned. She put one hand on Fred’s chest.

  “Think you can sleep now?”

  “I was doing fine until you woke me up.”

  “Well, so was I, until you screamed in my ear.”

  “Want to put out the light?”

  “Mmmm.”

  They both slid down under the blankets and, as though on signal, rolled onto their left sides, her buttocks cradled into the hollow of his groin. He held her breasts gently.

  “Heavy day tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Not bad. Four patients and a group. You?”

  “Script conference. We’re thinking of adding a new character to the series.”

  They squirmed against one another for a while. Then, slowly, each mind began to melt and dissolve, like filters on a too-hot bulb, until they trickled into sleep, leaving behind all memory of the bodies lying on the bed. Drops of scorching wax dripped into the moon-struck sea and blossomed into rowboats. Two rowboats, separate and tied, rocked in undulating crescent rhythms by the same ceaseless waves.

  As the city slumbered in its concrete husk, Fred and Lydia burrowed deeper into the rich texture of oblivion, and after a while, from the core of the long preconscious truth, a light began to flicker, like the beam from a projection booth in a darkened theatre, and bye and bye, they began, once again, to dream.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 1993 by Marco Vassi

  ISBN 978-1-4976-3278-3

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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