by Dean Koontz
He said, “I want to see you entirely nude.”
“Entirely, yes, all for you.”
“I have to know how much of the rest of you is as perfect as the perfect parts that I can already see.”
“You’re so sweet,” she said, hastily inserting the correct key into the dead-bolt lock.
“From the soles of your feet to the curve of your spine, to the backs of your ears, to the pores in the skin of your scalp. I want to see every inch of you, nothing hidden, nothing at all.”
Throwing open the unlocked door, rushing inside, switching on a kitchen light, she said, “Oh, you are too much, you are so strong. Every crevice, darling, every inch and fold and crevice.”
As she dropped her purse and keys on the kitchen table and began to strip out of her coat, he followed her inside and said, “But that doesn’t mean I want to undress or…or anything.”
That stopped her. She blinked at him.
He said, “I want to see. And touch you, but not much of that. Just a little touching, when something looks perfect, to feel if the skin is as smooth and silky as it appears, to test the resilience, to feel if the muscle tension is as wonderful as it looks. You don’t have to touch me at all.” He hurried on, afraid that he was losing her. “I want to make love to you, to the perfect parts of you, make passionate love with my eyes, with a few quick touches, perhaps, but with nothing else. I don’t want to spoil it by doing…what other people do. Don’t want to debase it. Don’t need that sort of thing.”
She stared at him so long that he almost turned and fled.
Suddenly Eve squealed shrilly, and Roy took a step back, more than half afraid of her. Offended and humiliated, she might fling herself at him and claw his face, tear at his eyes.
Then, to his astonishment, he realized that she was laughing, though not cruelly, not laughing at him. She was laughing with pure joy. She hugged herself and squealed as if she were a schoolgirl, and her sublime green eyes shone with delight.
“My God,” she said tremulously, “you’re even better than you seemed, even better than I thought, better than I could ever hope. You’re perfect, Roy, you’re perfect, perfect.”
He smiled uncertainly. He was still not entirely free of the fear that she was going to claw him.
Eve grabbed his right hand, pulled him through the kitchen, across a dining room, snapping on lights and talking as she went: “I was willing…if you wanted that. But that’s not what I want, either, all that pawing and squeezing, all that sweating, it disgusts me, having another person’s sweat all over me, all slick and sticky with another person’s sweat, I can’t stand that, it sickens me.”
“Fluids,” he said with revulsion, “how can there be anything sexy about another person’s fluids, exchanging fluids?”
With growing excitement, pulling him into a hallway, Eve said, “Fluids, my God, doesn’t it make you want to die, just die, with all the fluids that have to be involved, so much that’s wet. They all want to lick and suck my breasts, all that saliva, it’s so hideous, and shoving their tongues in my mouth—”
“Spittle!” he said, grimacing. “What’s so erotic about swapping spit, for God’s sake?”
They had reached the threshold of her bedroom. He stopped her on the brink of the paradise that they were about to create together.
“If I ever kiss you,” he promised, “it’ll be a dry kiss, as dry as paper, dry as sand.”
Eve was shaking with excitement.
“No tongue,” he swore. “Even the lips mustn’t be moist.”
“And never lips to lips—”
“—because then even in a dry kiss—”
“—we’d be swapping—”
“—breath for breath—”
“—and there’s moisture in breath—”
“—vapors from the lungs,” he said.
With a gladdening of his heart almost too sweet to endure, Roy knew that this splendid woman was, indeed, more like him than he ever could have hoped when he first stepped out of that elevator and saw her. They were two voices in harmony, two hearts beating in unison, two souls soaring to the same song, emphatically simpatico.
“No man has ever been in this bedroom,” she said, leading him across the threshold. “Only you. Only you.”
The portion of the walls immediately to the left and right of the bed, as well as the area of the ceiling directly above it, was mirrored. Otherwise, the walls and ceiling were upholstered with midnight-blue satin the precise shade of the carpet. A single chair stood in a corner, upholstered in silvery silk. The two windows were covered with polished-nickel blinds. The bed was sleek and modern, with radius footboard, bookcase headboard, tall flanking cabinets, and a light bridge; it was finished with several coats of high-gloss, midnight-blue lacquer in which glimmered silvery speckles like stars. Above the headboard was another mirror. Instead of a bedspread, she had a silver-fox fur throw—“Just fake fur,” she assured him when he expressed concern about the rights of helpless animals—which was the most lustrous and luxurious thing he had ever seen.
Here was the glamour for which Roy had yearned.
The computerized lighting was voice-activated. It offered six distinct moods through clever combinations of strategically placed halogen pin spots (with a variety of colored lenses), mirror-framing neon in three colors (that could be displayed singly or two or three at a time), and imaginative applications of fiber optics. Furthermore, each mood could be subtly adjusted by a voice-activated rheostat that responded to the commands “up” and “down.”
When Eve touched a button on the headboard, the tambour doors on the tall bed-flanking cabinets hummed up, out of sight. Shelves were revealed, laden with bottles of lotions and scented oils, ten or twelve rubber phalluses in various sizes and colors, and a collection of battery-powered and hand-operated sex toys that were bewildering in their design and complexity.
Eve switched on a CD player with a hundred-disc carousel and set it for random play. “It’s loaded with everything from Rod Stewart to Metallica, Elton John, Garth Brooks, the Beatles, the Bee Gees, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, James Brown and the Famous Flames, and Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Somehow it’s more exciting when there’s so many different kinds of music and when you never know what will be playing next.”
After taking off his topcoat but not his suit jacket, Roy Miro moved the upholstered chair out of the corner. He positioned it to one side of the bed, near the footboard, to ensure a glorious view yet to avoid, as much as possible, casting his reflections in the mirrors and spoiling the multitudinous images of her perfection.
He sat in the chair and smiled.
She stood beside the bed, fully clothed, while Elton John sang about healing hands. “This is like a dream. To be here, doing exactly what I like to do, but with someone who can appreciate me—”
“I appreciate you, I do.”
“—who can adore me—”
“I adore you.”
“—who can surrender to me—”
“I’m yours.”
“—without soiling the beauty of it.”
“No fluids. No pawing.”
“Suddenly,” she said, “I’m as shy as a virgin.”
“I could stare at you for hours, fully clothed.”
She tore off her blouse so violently that buttons popped and the fabric ripped. In a minute she was completely nude, and more of what had been hidden proved to be perfect than imperfect.
Reveling in his gasp of pleased disbelief, she said, “You see why I don’t like to make love in the usual way? When I have me, what do I need with anyone else?”
Thereafter, she turned from him and proceeded as she would have done if he’d not been there. Clearly, she took intense satisfaction from knowing that she could hold him totally in her power without ever having to touch him.
She stood before the mirror, examining herself from every angle, caressing herself tenderly, wonderingly, and her rapture at what she saw wa
s so exciting to Roy that he could draw only shallow breaths.
When she finally went to the bed, with Bruce Springsteen singing about whiskey and cars, she cast off the silver-fox throw. For just a moment, Roy was disappointed, for he had wanted to see her writhing upon those lustrous pelts, whether faux or real. But she pulled back the top sheet and the lower sheet as well, revealing a black rubber mattress cover that instantly intrigued him.
From a shelf in one of the open cabinets, she removed a bottle of jewel-pure amber oil, unscrewed the cap, and poured a small pool of it in the center of the bed. A subtle and appealing fragrance, as light and fresh as a spring breeze, drifted to Roy: not a floral scent, but spices—cinnamon, ginger, and other, more exotic ingredients.
While James Brown sang about urgent desire, Eve rolled onto the big bed, straddling the puddle of oil. She anointed her hands and began working the amber essence into her flawless skin. For fifteen minutes, her hands moved knowingly over every curve and plane of her body, lingering at each lovely, yielding roundness and at each shadowy, mysterious cleft. More often than not, what Eve touched was perfect. But when she touched a part that was beneath Roy’s standards and dismaying to him, he focused on her hands, for they themselves were without flaw—at least below the too-bony radii and ulnae.
The sight of Eve upon the glistening black rubber, her lush body all gold and pink, slick with a fluid that was satisfyingly pure and not of human origin, had elevated Roy Miro to a spiritual plane that he had never before attained, not even by the use of secret Eastern techniques of meditation, not even when a channeler had once brought forth the spirit of his dead mother at a séance in Pacific Heights, not even with peyote or vibrating crystals or high-colonic therapy administered by an innocent-looking twenty-year-old technician dressed accommodatingly as a Girl Scout. And judging by the lazy pace that she had set, Eve expected to spend hours in the exploration of her magnificent self.
Consequently, Roy did something that he had never done before. He took his pager from his pocket, and because there was no way to switch off the beeper on this particular model, he popped open the plastic plate on the back and removed the batteries.
For one night, his country would have to get along without him, and suffering humanity would have to make do without its champion.
Pain brought Spencer out of a black-and-white dream featuring surreal architecture and mutant biology, all the more disturbing for the lack of color. His entire body was a mass of chronic aches, dull and relentlessly throbbing, but a sharp pain in the top of his head was what broke the chains of his unnatural sleep.
It was still night. Or night again. He didn’t know which.
He was lying on his back, on an air mattress, under a blanket. His shoulders and head were elevated by a pillow and by something under the pillow.
The soft hissing sound and characteristic eerie glow of a Coleman lantern identified the light source somewhere behind him.
The lambent light revealed weather-smoothed rock formations to the left and right. Directly ahead of him lay a slab of what he supposed was the Mojave with an icing of night, which the beams of the lantern couldn’t melt. Overhead, stretched from one thrust of rock to the other, was a cover of desert-camouflage canvas.
Another sharp pain lanced across his scalp.
“Be still,” she said.
He realized that his pillow rested on her crossed legs and that his head lay in her lap.
“What’re you doing?” He was spooked by the weakness of his own voice.
She said, “Sewing up this laceration.”
“You can’t do that.”
“It keeps breaking open and bleeding.”
“I’m not a quilt.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re not a doctor.”
“Aren’t I?”
“Are you?”
“No. Be still.”
“It hurts.”
“Of course.”
“It’ll get infected,” he worried.
“I shaved the area first, then sterilized it.”
“You shaved my head?”
“Just one little spot, around the gash.”
“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”
“You mean in terms of barbering or doctoring?”
“Either one.”
“I’ve got a little basic knowledge.”
“Ouch, damn it!”
“If you’re going to be such a baby, I’ll use a spritz of local anesthetic.”
“You have that? Why didn’t you use it?”
“You were already unconscious.”
He closed his eyes, walked through a black-and-white place made of bones, under an arch of skulls, and then opened his eyes again and said, “Well, I’m not now.”
“You’re not what?”
“Unconscious,” he said.
“You just were again. A few minutes passed between our last exchange and this one. And while you were out that time, I almost finished. Another stitch and I’m through.”
“Why’d we stop?”
“You weren’t traveling well.”
“Sure, I was.”
“You needed some treatment. Now you need rest. Besides, the cloud cover is breaking up fast.”
“Got to go. Early bird gets the tomato.”
“Tomato? That’s interesting.”
He frowned. “I say tomato? Why’re you trying to confuse me?”
“Because it’s so easy. There—the last suture.”
Spencer closed his grainy eyes. In the somber black-and-white world, jackals with human faces were prowling the vine-tangled rubble of a once-great cathedral. He could hear children crying in rooms hidden beneath the ruins.
When he opened his eyes, he found that he was lying flat. His head was now elevated only a couple of inches on the pillow.
Valerie was sitting on the ground beside him, watching over him. Her dark hair fell softly along one side of her face, and she was pretty in the lamplight.
“You’re pretty in the lamplight,” he said.
“Next you’ll be asking if I’m an Aquarius or a Capricorn.”
“Nah, I don’t give a shit.”
She laughed.
“I like your laugh,” he said.
She smiled, turned her head, and ruminated on the dark desert.
He said, “What do you like about me?”
“I like your dog.”
“He’s a great dog. What else?”
Looking at him again, she said, “You’ve got nice eyes.”
“I do?”
“Honest eyes.”
“Are they? Used to have nice hair, too. All shaved off now. I was butchered.”
“Barbered. Just one small spot.”
“Barbered and then butchered. What are you doing out here in the desert?”
She stared at him awhile, then looked away without answering.
He wouldn’t let her off that easily. “What are you doing out here? I’ll just keep asking until the repetition drives you insane. What are you doing out here?”
“Saving your ass.”
“Tricky. I mean, what were you doing here in the first place?”
“Looking for you.”
“Why?” he wondered.
“Because you’ve been looking for me.”
“But how’d you find me, for God’s sake?”
“Ouija board.”
“I don’t think I can believe anything you say.”
“You’re right. It was Tarot cards.”
“Who’re we running from?”
She shrugged. The desert engaged her attention again. At last she said, “History, I guess.”
“There you go, trying to confuse me again.”
“Specifically, the cockroach.”
“We’re running from a cockroach?”
“That’s what I call him, ’cause it infuriates him.”
His gaze rolled from Valerie to the tarp that hung ten feet above them. “Wh
y the roof?”
“Blends with the terrain. It’s a heat-dispersing fabric too, so we won’t show up strong on any infrared look-down.”
“Look-down?”
“Eyes in the sky.”
“God?”
“No, the cockroach.”
“The cockroach has eyes in the sky?”
“He and his people, yeah.”
Spencer thought about that. Finally he said, “I’m not sure if I’m awake or dreaming.”
“Some days,” she said, “neither am I.”
In the black-and-white world, the sky seethed with eyes, and a great white owl flew overhead, casting a moonshadow in the shape of an angel.
Eve’s desire was insatiable, and her energy was inexhaustible, as though each protracted bout of ecstasy electrified rather than enervated her. At the end of an hour, she seemed more vital than ever, more beautiful, aglow.
Before Roy’s adoring eyes, her incredible body seemed to be sculpted and pumped up by her ceaseless rhythmic flexing-contracting-flexing, by her writhing-thrashing-thrusting, just as a long session of lifting weights pumped up a bodybuilder. After years of exploring all the ways she could satisfy herself, she enjoyed a flexibility that Roy judged to be somewhere between that of a gold-medal Olympic gymnast and a carnival contortionist, combined with the endurance of an Alaskan dogsled team. There was no doubt whatsoever that a session in bed with herself provided a thorough workout for every muscle from her radiant head to her cute toes.
Regardless of the astounding knots into which she tied herself, regardless of the bizarre intimacies she took with herself, she never looked at all grotesque or absurd, but unfailingly beautiful, from any angle, in even the most unlikely acts. She was always milk and honey on that black rubber, peaches and cream, flowing and smooth, the most desirable creature ever to grace the earth.
Halfway through the second hour, Roy was convinced that sixty percent of this angel’s features—body and face overall—were perfect by even the most stringent standards. Another thirty-five percent of her was not perfect but so close to perfect as to break his heart, and only five percent was plain.
Nothing about her—no slightest line or concavity or convexity—was ugly.
Roy was certain that Eve must soon stop pleasuring herself or otherwise collapse unconscious. But by the end of the second hour, she seemed to have more appetite and capacity than when she’d begun. The power of her sensuality was so great that every piece of music was changed by her horizontal dance, until it seemed that all of it, even the Bach, had been expressly composed as the score for a pornographic movie. From time to time she called out the number of a new lighting arrangement, said “up” or “down” to the rheostat, and her selection was always the most flattering for the next position into which she folded herself.