The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus

by Jeremy Reed

  But she was hurrying away again, running naked with her arms full of dresses down a high street she partly recognised, only the shops and houses had changed order, and when the rain came down it blotched her skin with blue splashes. It was an inky rain that ran cobalt in the gutters. She didn't know where she was running; only that she'd recognise the place instantly when she saw it. There were eagles in the sky, and one of them dropped a red flag at her feet. She draped herself in it, and ran on with the dresses loading her arms. The traffic had its lights on, and the rain flashed up in white dipped arcs.

  Betty was aware of the urgency of the man's thrusts, he was gagging her with his deep placement, it felt like her mouth was being expanded to three or four times life size. But mentally she had found the place.

  She went in through a wide open door. The shop was dark. There was a white cat sitting on the counter. The silence was loaded. It was a mannequin that came out of the dark, wearing a white wedding veil spotted with blood. She knew without questioning it that the thing could speak.

  'You will wait in this shop a thousand years,' it said. 'When the wind comes in, rusty eyed and dragging its dead tail, and when the rain arrives in the form of a sequined fish, expiring, deoxygenated, and the sun bounces in as a red ball no larger than your compact fist, then...'

  The man was starting to come, for Betty could feel the hot salinity decanted into her throat, his agonized pleasure exploding from a volcanic core. And no sooner had he withdrawn, than another penis entered her mouth, and the chant continued, a ritual incantation gradually receding to a sustained whisper. Betty didn't know how long she had been here, or after a time even what had happened or was happening. She moved between inner consciousness and jabs at reality. But she was aware at some stage that she was being marched back through the confused maze of corridors, and this time she was dressed in a violet tunic, and someone had placed flowers in her hair. The midget continued to walk ahead, and the monkey kept an exact pace. They were going back through halls, complexes, and she was finally shown into a bedroom. It was almost dawn. She had completed her journey to the end of the night.

  *

  Part III

  Another Sex

  He lacked eyebrows, and two silver pencil lines served as substitutes. His grey eyes had an interior luminosity that unnerved Leanda. It was like they would suddenly open up and you'd find yourself on the inside. He was the leader of the deathless cult, slim, angled into a green jumper and blue jeans tucked into silver boots. His movements were quiet and undemonstrative, his voice pitched at a tone of assured conviction. Leanda saw there could be no oscillating pivot to his commitments. He had come to the château at her invitation, and expressed little surprise that a midget dressed in a matador's jacket should conduct him through an elaborate entrance hall with columns to what Leanda called the second library, a glass and aluminium construct with futuristic sculptures, a predominantly silver and blue pyramidal shape in which she sat waiting in a silver sequined micro-skirt.

  He called himself XZ, explaining in a circumspect aside that he omitted the Y because he had found the causal link between life and death, and that intermediary states of existence were of no use to him. XZ, he added, was the name of the capsule that he and his initiates had taken in order to transcend the death state, and instate immediate genetic repair. They were here and would be for a long time. The destruction of the planet was programmed for 3,083. They, the deathless initiates, calculated they had a thousand years of earth life ahead of them. Leanda didn't doubt this. The man's authority was indisputable. He didn't need to state things. He spoke the truth. Leanda was fascinated by his neural charge. No-one she had met had ever come from such a big interior space. Each time he looked at her it was as though he had travelled through the galaxies to meet up with his eye pupils. And it wasn't unnerving. His aura was one of invincible calm. Green, silver and purple spilled from him as a vibrational halo. He took in everything, but objects were clearly incidental to his inner perceptions. Leanda knew that gurus needed money to finance foundations and projects, and this she was prepared to offer. She imagined writing a cheque, sealing it in a gold envelope, and sending her servant out to XZ's car with the keys, so he could unlock it and place the envelope in the dashboard. It would require that sort of sensitivity to get him to accept. Or she could do it by direct transfer, but she was a ritualistic person and preferred the idea of a gold envelope.

  XZ had all the time in the world about everything. He took in the environment without comment. The library gave him the impression that he had exchanged one glass terrarium for another. He told Xenia as he picked up a silver juggling ball from a black bowl on the glass-topped table, that he had arrived at the notion of symmetry.

  'Cosmological expansion is isotropic,' he remarked. 'It's like this spherical ball. It displays no directional bias. Life should be like that in proportion to death. One's psychic chemistry increases only in accordance to universal vibration.'

  He extracted a book from its shelf, and said, ‘The message reaches us in diverse ways. I used to read everything I could on psychic research, cosmology, space travel, the now obsolete figure of the astronaut, but of course we, our cult, realised that everything occurs in inner space. The great discoveries are made at the interior.'

  He opened the book and appeared to read at chance. “In the contra-terrene universe that lies beyond Andromeda, a man becomes a star, and a star becomes a man. One is a black radiating body in a white space." You could spend a lifetime exploring that concept, or any other notion connected with extraterrestrial intelligence, but we chose to go in a different direction. We reversed interplanetary travel and directed the telescopes inward. As a non-initiate you can only receive certain information from me, and nor would it benefit you to do other.'

  Leanda watched as the man took a dark blue capsule out of a star-shaped pill container, manoeuvred it into his hand, and swallowed it with the mineral water he had requested on arrival. Part of her wondered if his remove wasn't drugs. He appeared chemically spaced. The sceptic in her imagined he was flipping into pharmaceutical travel. She was conscious, whatever the validity of his claims, of someone who affected mystique. His gestures were stylised, his needs different. And given her cultivation of the bizarre, she could accommodate his drug interests. She could feed him lines of cocaine coloured by food dyes to his preference. He could snort green, scarlet or cobalt crystals. She would stop at nothing for his knowledge. She would reinvent the vocabulary of decadence to appease his nerves. The château was a centre from which to conduct sensory experiment.

  XZ sat back in his chair and looked up at the skylight. The glass was dark blue like the gelatin shell of the capsule he had just swallowed. Leanda couldn't access this man's emotions. The positioning and repositioning of her legs usually served as the focus of visual attention. XZ transmitted no sexual impulses. Her curiosity was heightened by his neutrality. What she wanted to how was how the deathless have sex, or if areas of hypnagogic meditation sensitise nervous impulses not usually associated with sexual desire. Her own controlled nymphomania wanted to learn ways of heightening orgasmic sensation. There wasn't any form of physical sex that she hadn't experienced. In the château's private chapel she had known sex with her leopard. She had resolved the enigma of bestiality. There were no limits attached to what she had tried. She had lain naked in the swimming pool, her genitals smeared with fish food, in order to feel how her clitoris responded to the soft-lipped grey mullet brought there for the experiment. But each new experience only increased her appetite. She needed to entertain extreme fantasies in order to feel excited. And with Nicole as her partner, there was no lack of practise. They were continually learning how to intensify sensation, and in particular by delaying pleasure, working on each other so slowly and with such consummate expertise that the way to orgasm built through excruciating suspense. Leanda, even now in her state of metaphysical disquisition, longed to be fucked in a way she had never experienced. She was continually build
ing on that fantasy. She fidgeted in her micro-skirt and ached for starved philogynists. She excited herself by conceiving of improbable encounters. She would like to have visited a men’s toilet, knelt down in front of a marble urinal and been sodomised in that position by a rent boy. She imagined herself in a boy's dormitory, going from bed to bed of the sex-starved teenagers, their hormonal urgency having them jump on her like a trapeze. And with the shy ones, pretending to sleep despite their serious erections, she would slide in on top, her full breasts having the boy gasp, her pelvic buoyancy riding the impalement to fury.

  XZ was so laid back he continued to drink the silence as though he was attuned to whatever cosmic vibration relayed his equibalance. He placed one silver boot over another and waited. He would volunteer nothing. It was his refusal to expatiate on his difference that afforded him fascination. Leanda had never found it so difficult to make contact. He was secure in the invaluable knowledge he retained. She wondered at his lack of personal security. He had come here without guards, perhaps in the knowledge that he was invincible. Perhaps, she thought, it wouldn't touch him if someone was to fire pistol rounds through his heart and head. He'd continue to sit there with the same imperturbable cool, no hole in his skin, no blood leaking across the floor. He'd get up and walk over to a shelf and take down a book on quantum physics, and then look over to her as though the action had never registered. She had met smackheads who were like this, so far out of it on heroin that even the effort to articulate a word had seemed a betrayal of an inner state. Only XZ was armed with formidable intelligence and articulacy when he cared to open up. She imagined his sexual interests were as omnivorously restrained. If he possessed male genitalia, he would be capable of anything. She thought of him doing it noncommittally, his eyes planted deep in inner space, his orgasm withheld and kept from lighting up a star in his lover. And he calmly saying that if he chose to come it would be a silver apocalypse. It would be a continuous supernova.

  Leanda felt a restive heat, and got up and walked over to the drinks table, her long legs travelling right up to the almost non-existent hem of her silver skirt. No-one, she knew, could resist this provocation. She poured herself an Isle of Jura scotch, while he refused anything but his mineral water. Leanda wasn't sure if she had made the right decision in having him here. XZ was naturally defensive, and being away from his own cultic microclimate didn't help matters. He was talking quite suddenly about virtual body images, and quantum leaps in identifying psychological states. He was concerned with imaginary rather than real time. This wasn't a clue to his condition, but it was something; an oblique deflection, an obsession, an enigma he was trying to resolve? Leanda didn't know.

  ‘The answer,' he was saying, 'is movement in real space without any movement in real time. You have to think of a person in the shape of a space-time triangle with its real leg longer than its imaginary one. This figure in the form of a hypotenuse will represent a real space interval, so that if he goes up city three microseconds, and then across town a distance of five blocks or five microseconds, the hypotenuse will represent a real length of four blocks or four light-microseconds. If we work out this person's speed it's 5/3 or one and two thirds the speed of light. We call this movement imaginary time. It's the future of any potential species who want to outlive the purely temporal. That is, defeat biological time.'

  He sat back deeper in his chair, took up his glass, and continued reflecting on the blue skylight. It was like there wasn't anyone in his body again. It was like he had travelled off into imaginary time.

  Leanda felt a deepening sense of alienation. XZ defied her by his aura. There was no way in to discover his putative authenticity. His thoughts went off on trajectories where she couldn't follow. She wondered if their both snorting lines of multi-coloured coke would have them share a common dimension for the time the drug lasted. She would offer him silver and blue crystals, while she opted for green and pink. She lifted her mobile and ordered the midget to bring in the glass box.

  'It's the best Bolivian coke,' she told XZ after the midget had left the library in a blaze of rhinestones. Shall we lift off together?' But he disdained interest in the substance, waving it off in the way a connoisseur rejects an inferior wine. He must have been through all this, she imagined, or else he had his secret drug in the form of the blue capsule she had seen him swallow. She too declined to go through the ritual of lining alone. She would select a colour later when she and Nicole were seated in the red gothic library, reading perhaps Robert Desnos's Liberty Or Love, or a piece of erotica she had chosen to have hand-bound in black watered silk.

  'But what is it you want of me?' he asked, as though he had re-united with body consciousness after a phase of astral projection. 'Your letter wasn't clear. As a sect we're inundated with requests. Everyone wants to tap our resources. But we're not like that. We may in time consider taking initiates, but that's a long way in the future. For the moment we're busy learning. Knowledge is vital to our continued future.'

  Leanda was again left in the dark. He spoke always in terms of impersonal generalisations. She could find no way to his centre. She had hoped the château's contrasting atmospherics would encourage him to give something away about his attainments. But the dungeons, bedrooms equipped with every aid to sexual stimulus and the availability of every form of sex, were clearly of no interest to this detached mystic. If he had told her that he had been an astronaut prior to studying the cult of deathlessness, she wouldn't have been surprised, given his apparent sense of temporal dissociation. Leanda had once heard the story of a man who tried to have an elephant's trunk go up him, and for some reason the concept of this extreme aberration crossed with the more metaphysical plane she was pursuing. She had been told stories of men who had a fist, a head or a saddlebag go up, but never an elephant's proboscis.

  'You have probably heard of the notion of parallel worlds,' he began. 'Space-time distortion allows us to travel out of time. We're not all heading for the same future. There is no fixed future, there are an infinite number of possibilities, in the same way as there are multivariant parallel universes. Your letter hinted at your concern about these things. We in the cult accept a number of theories to do with quantum physics, but in large have cultivated our own scientific hermetica. And we're relaxed about that. We keep our theories cool. Maybe if we could enter an electron, we'd understand the feedback from black holes. And by doing this we'd better understand the existence of parallel worlds in our own electrons. And then for some humans it might be possible to become a time machine. We wouldn't have to die because we'd know how to break the biological clock. That's not what we've discovered, but it's a theory, and one to which I subscribe.'

  He took up his glass again, his eyes avoiding Leanda's, and popped another cobalt capsule. He seemed to be on a direct flight line for the stars. Leanda was starting to feel uneasy. She couldn't twist a flex in the conversation. She wanted information about disembodied sex, or sex with extraterrestrials, and she was getting nowhere. She had read about humans being abducted by aliens, taken on ship, and having organs extracted for the purpose of alien intelligence. One girl had been placed in a gold tank, and the liquid had turned her skin transparent. The alien conducting the experiment had immediately pinpointed the area for surgery, and the whole thing had appeared to take place instantly. And in place of the organ removed the alien had transplanted one with an independent biorhythm which would go on functioning indefinitely. She wondered if there wasn't a connection here with XZ. Were his intentions predominantly and unemotively experimental?

  A cold friction pressed on Leanda’s spinal nerves. She was convinced she was in the presence of someone who had removed himself from the human race. And all the time her conceptual thinking was interspersed with erotic images. She was thinking of ways to make love to Nicole in a real tomb. She had had erected in the château grounds a black marble tomb. On a given autumn day, mist wreathing the procession, she would be carried in an open coffin to the site, and there the ob
sequies delivered over her body which would be dressed in nothing but a silk chiffon negligee. And there, lowered into the earth, she would embrace Nicole who had jumped down into the open coffin. She imagined the passionate lovemaking which would ensue, while the midget sprinkled earth over their convulsed bodies. The two of them would walk back to the château naked, the heavy yew trees dripping from the mist, a roaring fire in the hearth awaiting their arrival. It was a recurrent obsession of hers. Leanda liked to subvert the whole notion of conventional erotica. She planned to write a new Karma Sutra, her directives aimed solely at the perverse. Nothing natural would exist in the book.

  Her urgency to seduce XZ's apparent asexual leanings was growing progressively more intense. He was drifting so far out, he looked like he would never re-earth. At such times his eyes turned silver, and he looked like no-one at all.

  'I'll be very specific,’ Leanda said. 'I've spent my life researching the erotic in its every form of expression. I'm interested in sex magic, cults who incorporate these practises into their beliefs, and of course in discovering new sensations. And I've the wealth to accommodate my interests. I want to know what you've discovered about sex, both before and after your deathless experience. I want in be turned on by the impossible.'

  XZ retained an air of impassive indifference. She wasn't sure if he'd even heard her requests. Again she thought of the possible influences of smack — and how he would be right out of it. If he was focused anywhere, it was right into his own mental dialogue. He picked up the tumbler attracted by the way the light was falling on its rim, and seemed obsessed by this particular. He then studied a fingernail which she had neglected to notice was varnished silver. The man was weird even by her standards, in his absolute centring in himself. She wondered what it was he had to draw on — light, energy, oracular guidance, an inner face that stared him into silence.