Nine Kinds of Naked

by Tony Vigorito

“As if you haven’t already tasted my spirit,” Elizabeth dismissed.

  “Yes, well,” Diablo continued. “If there is any attraction here, it is a spiritual beckoning, not a sexual imperative.”

  “If there is any attraction?” Elizabeth smiled, enjoying the heat of their shared breath.

  “Indeed I see your point,” Diablo granted. “But there need be no inevitability in this encounter. Nakedness does not demand sexuality.”

  “You needn’t be such a goddamn gentleman,” Elizabeth whispered, balancing herself with her right hand as her left stroked the hair on his lean chest. “It is only you and I alive in this moment. There is no one to judge but those whose voices you permit within your mind.” She drew an inch closer, stroking his nose with her own. “What say you, Mister Mastermind? Is there any impulse deeper than this? The world could ascend into transcendental chaos tonight, and you still haven’t let go. Can you love without fear? Can you walk the talk you talk so well?”

  Diablo capitulated, nuzzling her nose in turn and running his fingers up one side of her spine and down the other. “Did you know,” he offered, “that two-thirds of people instinctively turn their head to the right when they kiss?”

  Elizabeth experimented turning her head both ways, caressing only the air across his lips. “Hmm,” she purred. “I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a left-handed kiss.”

  “Oh, you don’t know what you’re missing.” Diablo’s hands ventured softly onto the curves of her rump. “A left-handed kiss illuminates the right hemisphere of your brain, which is the intuitive, artistic, and spiritual side of the mind.”

  “Mmm.” Elizabeth tilted her head to the left. “Do you believe in magic?”

  “I only believe in magic.”

  “Good answer,” Elizabeth praised, regarding him but a moment before crawling entirely on top of him, making herself comfortable upon his crossed ankles, wrapping her thighs around his hips and pressing her breasts against his chest. Spines arced, breath deepened, and fingertips curled into fingernails as they gently clawed their hands across one another’s back. Eyes lightly closed as she ran her breath across the skin of his face, Elizabeth gradually found her way back to his lips and they fell into a deep, lasting, left-handed kiss.

  116 BLINK BLINK. It was all Special Agent J. J. Speed could do. Blink blink, sitting stupidly on the sidewalk, guddled, muddled, huddled, befuddled. Not only had the scolding gnome vanished, but everything else had banged back into life at the same instant. Blink blink. Wailing car alarms competed with roars of incredulity from a crowd of bystanders, and scattered everywhere down the sidewalk behind were groaning and moaning pedestrians sitting up dazed, bruised, and whimpering, “Wha’ happened?”

  Nursing his own injuries from his tumble onto the pavement, at least Special Agent J. J. Speed didn’t look out of place. He had ample company among those whom he had only moments ago thrown down behind him on the sidewalk, though this fact did nothing to comfort him. Blink blink. What the hell is happening? Blink blink. Am I dreaming? Blink blink. Is this real? Blink blink. Did I cause this? Blink blink. Blink blink. Blink blink.

  Blink blink. No answer dared sass any of these questions, but after a few more blinks it all became irrelevant and utterly forgotten anyway. In the place of his perplexity, indeed in place of that which was once himself, there remained nothing but a lust so covetous that it eliminated any distraction from its own satisfaction.

  Possessed with this flaming clarity of desire, Special Agent J. J. Speed stood up, stepped over a couple kissing passionately on the sidewalk, and started jogging toward his hotel. He needed to retrieve another weapon. And then he needed to find that bough of mistletoe.

  117 “DID YOU KNOW,” Elizabeth softly interrupted their extended foreplay, “that during World War II, the closer to the front lines soldiers were, the more milk they drank?” Maintaining eye contact as she spoke, she slid her right hand between them and laid hold of him.

  Diablo raised his eyebrows and smiled. “That’s very interesting, and of course they did. An instinctual longing for nurturance in the face of manufactured madness. Why, it wouldn’t surprise—” Diablo caught his breath on the last word, unintentionally giving it undue emphasis as Elizabeth abruptly pulled several times. She knew if he found an opening he’d talk till tomorrow, and this encounter was hers to direct. He understood her point well and fell silent, contenting himself with softly stroking the contours of Elizabeth’s breasts until her nipples grew alert.

  Elizabeth smiled, pleased both with his submission and her own arousal. “So,” she continued, enjoying her soapbox. “That’s exactly what’s happening across the world right now. As we collapse into chaos, we are stripped of our illusions and left with nothing but the very root of our being, and the very root of our being desires nothing more than to bask in the magnificence of one another one love. Only our illusions, from nationality to personality, cajole us into acting otherwise.”

  Diablo nodded. “Aye,” he said slowly, carefully, not wanting to overstep his bounds. “’Tis but a prayer away.” Elizabeth tightened her grip as if in warning, and Diablo fell immediately silent, smiling at her in perfect contentment before he leaned forward and began nuzzling his face against her breasts, kissing and licking, teasing at her nipples with his tongue and gently caressing her curves. Elizabeth shuddered from this exploration and released her grasp, stroking her hands through his hair as she drew herself onto her knees.

  Elizabeth moaned involuntarily when Diablo’s hands found the inside of her thighs, her body radiant with the desire to dissolve into unity. Drawing his face into her bosom, she rolled her hips down, encouraging his hands in their exploration. He found his way soon enough, grazing his fingers cautiously around her petals before presuming their way inside. Sighing at these delights, after several minutes she pulled his head away from her breasts and he gazed at her with a passion that could only be a reflection of her own.

  “Do the walls of civilization tremble so terribly from the bareness of a breast?” Elizabeth smiled, lolling her words as if talking in her sleep, eyes half-closed in a grog of ecstasy as she massaged herself against Diablo’s palm.

  Realizing that she no longer had hold of him, Diablo dared to speak back, very slowly, very softly. “Forbidding the breast is forbidding that which nurtured us all into life, that which reminds us that we are one.” Elizabeth began to move more emphatically against his palm, which Diablo took as an encouragement to continue. “The breast is forbidden because it inspires the maternal memory, the opposite of everything this civilization is built upon, love instead of fear, jubilation instead of tribulation, chaos instead of control. Misogyny is nothing more than the fear of chaos.”

  At this, Elizabeth smothered Diablo’s face once again, and he happily ceased his exposition as she reached a climax in his hand.

  118 AS HE ROUNDED the corner onto his street, Special Agent J. J. Speed was dismayed to discover that his hotel was covered in toilet paper. Now, this was not the product of some grade school ninja mission, succeeding in sailing a few streamers over some trees. This was the entire edifice of a six-story hotel. Hundreds of miles of toilet paper mummified the building, carefully wound around it with scarcely a twist in the ream.

  Crowds were thick and rumors were rampant. Pushing his way through the throng, Special Agent J. J. Speed overheard someone say that a tornado had toilet-papered the hotel, they had seen it. Someone else said the city was about to be evacuated; others argued that they weren’t going anywhere. Special Agent J. J. Speed didn’t care about any of this. All he cared about was getting to his hotel room and retrieving his backup pistol before that grinning twin on a jackass showed up again.

  Unwilling to jostle his way into the lobby where the toilet paper had been torn away, Special Agent J. J. Speed headed instead down the side street that bordered his second-story room. It wasn’t until he was hoisting himself onto his balcony from the banyan trees that bordered the building, tearing his way through a memb
rane of toilet paper in the process, that he remembered with a groaning goddamnit that he had closed and locked his balcony door that morning.

  But no, apparently he had not. For there, guarding the wide-open door to his room as if in formal sentry, stood the grandfather clock. Though he knew very well that he had not only closed and locked the patio door that morning, but also that he had positioned the grandfather clock against the far wall, none of this alarmed him. What alarmed him was the motionless pendulum, suspended several obvious degrees off center, and notably not ticking.

  119 SUCKING. Sucking is an innate survival instinct. Humans are born sucking, not only to ensure access to the milk of our mother’s bosom but also to create a deep and lasting memory of that oceanic unity to which we must all inevitably return. Indeed, this is the unity we seek in sexuality, and it is why we find ourselves sucking at one another so helplessly. This is also why the legendary position in which Elizabeth and Diablo next dared to engage is so effective at dissolving the boundaries of the self. Soixante-neuf it has been called, 69, though even a cursory glance upon this number reveals two number nines turning upon themselves, the supreme superlative dancing with that which cannot be surpassed, yin and yang dancing the Tao.

  And so they occupied themselves, pulsing with one heartbeat, utterly lost in the orality of the experience, Elizabeth sucking as much of him into her mouth as she could while she pulsed against his tongue until she could bear the scald of pleasure no more and lifted herself out of reach and drew her mouth back.

  “Do you believe in sex magic?” Elizabeth asked breathlessly.

  “I only believe in sex magic,” Diablo panted in answer, continuing to suck on the inside of her thighs.

  “I mean, do you understand that you can intentionally manifest synchronicity by charging your vision with sexual energy?”

  “Of course,” Diablo answered, trying to pull her back within reach of his mouth. “Everyone knows that.”

  “Okay, good,” Elizabeth replied, stroking his length. “Do you know what the visionary position is?”

  “Can it be anything other than this?” Diablo asked, desperate to resume.

  Elizabeth rolled herself back against his mouth. “The visionary position is when you offer a prayer at the moment of orgasm, when our boundaries are obliterated by ecstasy and we’re most in tune with the undivided divinity underlying existence. But the prayer has to come entirely from the heart, and in that case the only thing you can really pray for is a higher love. Wanna try it?”

  Diablo was unable to answer directly, though there was no question of his enthusiastic participation in this project as his tongue went wild. Sliding his arms under Elizabeth’s legs, Diablo permitted her to pin him in this position, and she immediately reciprocated by entwining her arms into his legs, restraining herself into position as well. Flattening her body upon his, she pressed the insides of her thighs against his ears as he did the same to her, muffling all sound as they locked themselves into a writhing circuit of unfathomable rapture.

  And thusly did they pray.

  120 “TIME TRAVEL is easy,” spoke Special Agent J. J. Speed’s grinning twin, amiably exiting the hotel room and now curiously dressed as some kind of medieval crusader in a costume that was too small on him. “All you have to do is enter into the eternal moment. As it turns out, every second is a wormhole that empties into the entire universe.”

  Despite being confounded by everything that happened since the moment he met his grinning twin, Special Agent J. J. Speed’s most immediate question demanding an answer was, “How come you’re not naked?”

  His grinning twin leaned comfortably against the ledge, leaning his sword next to him. “The Golden Bough,” he gestured broadly. “When you touch the Golden Bough, you gain access to the ecstatic underworld, a life outside of time. Obviously, now you can see less of your own hallucination and more of who I really am.”

  “And who are you?”

  “I am King of the Wood, keeper of the Golden Bough. I don’t pretend to know who I am, but I like to think of myself as the embodiment of the impulse. You may call me Clovis.”

  “Clovis,” Special Agent J. J. Speed snorted. “Your costume doesn’t fit you, Clovis.”

  “Actually,” Clovis replied. “It fits me perfectly. Obviously, you continue to hallucinate that I am you, and in that case, it is you for whom this armor is ill-suited.”

  Special Agent J. J. Speed had no idea what Clovis was talking about, but he no longer cared about anything except for one thing. “Where is the mistletoe?” he demanded.

  “It matters not, it is yours for the taking.”

  “Well where is it then?”

  Clovis ignored him. “Anyone who touches the Golden Bough earns the right of combat.”

  “To the death?”

  This paused Clovis momentarily. “Actually, I think we are already dead, or something between life and death, anyway. I’m not entirely sure. Think of it this way: In the same way that improper is the opposite of proper, immortal is the opposite of mortal. But there are aspects of this position that still confuse me. What I know for certain is that it is our irrefutable duty to battle.”

  Special Agent J. J. Speed eyed the sword warily. “So why aren’t we battling?”

  Clovis shrugged. “I see no reason to hurry along. You are actually my first challenger, and I’m curious what this is all about. To be perfectly honest, it surprises me that it’s you. You don’t really impress me at all. But, I suppose that’s the way the fortune cookie crumbles.”

  Special Agent J. J. Speed wasn’t listening. The only thought he could fathom was that he must possess the Golden Bough and that he must defeat this annoying crusader to do so. He was consequently consumed with rehearsing the actions necessary to lunge across the patio and seize the sword, so much so that when he actually made his move it was so clumsily premeditated that he was immediately met with a flash of steel across the side of his face, severing his left ear.

  Special Agent J. J. Speed recoiled in horror at this amputation, cursing wildly and stepping carelessly on his own ear. Looking enraged toward Clovis, he found him only furrowing his brow, his face confounded with amazement, his sword again leaning next to him as if it had never moved.

  “Now I remember you,” Clovis announced, grinning broadly as he recollected his predecessor. “You are much more well-rested than before, but without the ear I see the resemblance.” Clovis shook his head in wonder. “Jacob Jingelheimer, isn’t it? I remember well how poorly this armor fit you.”

  “How do you know my name?” Special Agent J. J. Speed demanded, his mind racing again with paranoia. This Clovis was obviously an operative. He’d never told anyone what J. J. stood for, not since he changed his last name from Schmidt when he was eighteen.

  “This is not the first time we meet, Jacob Jingelheimer,” Clovis replied. “Truly, there is only one moment.” He watched with unavoidable compassion as his predecessor gingerly picked up his own ear. “My apologies for the loss of your ear. It’s probably no consolation, but since you are no longer really alive . . . ”

  “I am alive!” Special Agent J. J. Speed roared.

  “I am afraid not. As I say, it is unwise to touch the mistletoe, Jacob Jingelheimer.”

  “Where is it?” Special Agent J. J. Speed demanded, once again forgetting everything but the Golden Bough. His voice was hoarse and depraved. “I want it.”

  “Believe what I say,” Clovis replied as he idly pulled out a crumpled strip of leather and began tying knots in it. “Immortality is not life. It is better to die now than to live forever.”

  “I want it!” Special Agent J. J. Speed yelled. “Where is it?”

  “You like to imagine you are in control, but I assure you that you are not.” Clovis continued tying knots, unworried and unhurried. “Freedom comes only from the embrace of chaos, the embrace of death.” Clovis closed the fourth knot and picked up his sword. “Death animates existence. The denial of death is the destruction o
f life. Death is the chaos that lights the fires of life.” Laying his sword carefully on the ground between them, Clovis went on. “I see where your heart lies, Jacob Jingelheimer, and I respect your necessary role in this universe as the dark side of the Tao, but I caution you nonetheless against the hapless decision you are about to make. The Golden Bough enchants, and this is not an enviable crown. I say again, it is better to die now than to live forever.”

  Special Agent J. J. Speed seized the broadsword and drew it back. Clovis continued talking. “The archetypes possess us, I see that now. I am chaos and you are control, and it never could be any other way. Slay me with your sword, oh King of the Wood, for I am the impulse, the death of history, and I am entirely, and absolutely, out of control.” Grinning mischievous, Clovis tossed the knotted strip of leather at him. “But whatever you do, Jacob Jingelheimer, do not untie any of these knots.” At that, Clovis felt the steel effortlessly split his chain mail and pierce his sighing heart, and as his form evanesced the last thing he heard was the erupting cheers of the gnomes:

  “Hooray for the day! Hooray for the day!”

  121 “OH MY God, that was fantastic!” Elizabeth exclaimed as she snuggled against Diablo’s trembling chest. “I think I prayed five times!” Wrinkling her nose in faux ferocity, she growled, scratching her nails ungently across his torso and making him yelp undignified. Diablo wrapped his arm around her and laid firm hold of her hips, mostly to restrain her from scratching anymore at him.

  “Such pleasures are the privilege of womankind,” Diablo sighed. “It has long been noted that women have a higher pain threshold than men, but it’s not so widely known that you also have a higher capacity for pleasure. Indeed, the clitoris is the only organ that serves no function other than pleasure. Why, a man would be a gibbering idiot by now if he’d experienced five prayers like you just did. Even with one prayer you’re capable of at least twice as much pleasure, since there are twice as many nerve endings in the clitoris as there are in the penis. Eight thousand, someone once counted.”