by Dan Simmons
Several Thai men glanced at us as we stepped into the covered barge, and then they looked again, obviously surprised that farang were allowed there. But then their attention was drawn back to the makeshift stage in the center of the barge. I stood there blinking, peering through the heavy cloud of cigarette and marijuana smoke; the stage was no more than six feet by four feet, illuminated only by two hissing lanterns hanging from overhead trusses. It was empty except for two women performing cunnilingus on one another. Crude benches ran four deep around the stage and the twenty or so Thai men there were little more than dark shapes in the haze of smoke.
“What…” I began, but Tres hushed me and led the way to an empty bench to our left. The women on the stage were joined by two thin Thai men, little more than boys, who ignored the females as they caressed each other into an excited state.
I was tired of being hushed. I leaned closer to Tres and said, “What the hell did we have to pay three hundred American dollars for this when we can watch it for a couple of bucks in any bar on Petchburi Road?”
Tres just shook his head. “This is just the preliminary stuff, Johnny,” he whispered. “Warm-up acts. We paid for the main event.”
A couple of men in front of us had turned and frowned, as if we were making too much noise in a movie theater. On the stage, the two boys had finished their preparations and had become involved with the young women as well as each other. The combinations were complicated.
I sat and crossed my legs. We didn’t wear underwear in Nam because it caused crotch rot, and like a lot of grunts I’d gotten out of the habit of wearing it even while in civilian clothes on R&R. I wished I’d pulled on some jockey shorts under my light cotton slacks tonight. It seemed bad form to have a visible hard-on around all these other men.
The four young people on the stage explored combinations for another ten minutes or so. When they came—almost simultaneously—the women might have faked it, but there was no doubt that the men’s orgasms were sincere enough. One of the Thai girls caught the semen on her breasts, while the other girl spread the second boy’s jism on the buttocks of the first boy. The bisexual stuff disturbed me and excited me at the same time. I didn’t understand myself well then.
Finished, the four young people simply stood and exited through a tunnel-door in the far wall. The patrons did not applaud. The stage was empty for several minutes and I thought that perhaps the night’s program was over despite all of Tres’ talk about main events, but then a short Thai man dressed in black silk shirt and trousers stepped onto the stage and said something in low, serious tones. I caught the word “Mara” twice. There was a sudden tension in the room.
“What did he…” I began.
“Shhh,” said Tres, his eyes riveted on the stage.
“Fuck that,” I said. I’d paid for this crap, I deserved to know what I was getting for my money. “What’s a Mara?”
Tres sighed. “Mara is phanyaa mahn, Johnny. The prince of demons. He is the one who sent his three daughters—Aradi, discontent…Tanha, desire…and Raka, love…to tempt the Buddha. But the Buddha won.”
I squinted through smoke at the empty stage and slowly swinging lantern. A boat had passed through the hidden lagoon and its wake rocked the barge ever so slightly. “So Mara’s a man?” I didn’t know if I could take any more of this queer stuff.
Tres shook his head. “Not when the spirit of the phanyaa mahn combines with the naga in a demon-human incarnation.”
I stared at Tres. We’d each smoked some good shit since we arrived in Bangkok—the Thai stick was almost free here—but Tres’d obviously been doing more than was good for him. He noticed my stare and smiled slightly. “Mara’s the part of the world that dies, Johnny…the death principle. The thing we fear more than Charlie when were out on night patrol. Naga is sort of a snake god that’s associated with water. The river. It can take or give life. When the spirit of the naga is given to someone possessed by the power of the phanyaa mahn—Mara—the demon thing can be male or female. But what we paid to see was a female Mara that’s supposed to be phanyaa mahn naga kio. That doesn’t happen once in a thousand incarnations…”
I stared at Tres. His whisper was so soft that I could barely hear him, but some of the Thais had also turned to stare. I hadn’t understood a fucking word he’d said. “What’s a kio?” I said. I had the sinking feeling that I’d blown three hundred bucks on nothing.
“A kio is a…shhh,” hissed Tres, pointing to the stage.
A woman came out onto the stage. She was dressed in traditional Thai silk and was carrying a small baby. Her face was sharp, almost masculine, and her hair was a nimbus of tangled black. She was older than the sex performers we had seen earlier, but still not much more than twenty. The baby mewled and tugged at the silk over her small breasts. I realized that the Thai men in the room were bowing slightly from where they sat. Some were making the traditional palms-together wai of obeisance. It seemed an odd thing to be doing toward a sex performer. I frowned at Tres but he was wai-ing too. I shook my head and looked back at the stage. Most of the men had put out their cigarettes now, but there was so much smoke in the covered barge that it was like peering through a fog.
The woman had gone to her knees on the stage. The baby hung limp in her arms. The man in black silk came onto the stage and said something in low, flat tones.
There was a long silence. Finally a fat Thai in the front row stood, turned to look once at the crowd, and then stepped onto the low stage. There was a general expulsion of breath and I could feel the tension in the room shift focus, if not actually lessen.
“What…” I whispered.
Tres shook his head and pointed. The fat man was handing over a thick roll of baht to the man in black silk.
“I thought everyone had to pay to get in,” I whispered to Tres. He wasn’t listening.
The man in black silk took a minute to count the money—there had to be many thousand of baht there—and then he stepped off the stage. As if on cue, the two young women we’d seen earlier came back out. They were dressed in some sort of ceremonial garb that I associated with a formal Thai dance I’d seen photos of; each wore a tall, peaked hat, weird shoulders, and a blouse and pants of gold silk. I began to wonder if I’d paid three hundred dollars to see four people have sex with their clothes on.
The two boys came onto the stage wearing costumes of their own and carrying an ornate chair. I was afraid we were going to get into more of the gay and lesbian stuff, but the boys merely set the chair down and disappeared. The two girls began to undress the fat man while the woman named Mara stared out at nothing, paying no attention to either the man, his attendants, or the crowd.
Having undressed the patron in an almost ritual manner and folded his clothes away, the girls pushed him back into the chair. I could see sweat beading the man’s upper lip and chest. His legs appeared to be shaking slightly. If he had paid for some sort of erotic services, he certainly didn’t seem to be in the mood for it all. The poor guy’s cock was shriveled to almost nothing and his scrotum looked like it’d shrunk to walnut size.
The girls bent over and began to work on him with their hands and mouths. It took a while, but they were very good and within a few minutes the fat man’s cock was hard and lifted high enough that the glans almost touched his belly. It still wasn’t anything to write home about. Meanwhile, the ugly one named Mara was still staring out at nothing, the baby wiggling slightly in her arms. The woman seemed disinterested to the point of catatonia.
My heart began to pound then. I was afraid that they were going to do something to the baby and the thought made me physically sick. If Tres had known that there would be an infant involved…
I glanced at him but he was looking at the hag named Mara with an expression of what might have been a mixture of fear and scholarly interest. I shook my head. This was weird shit.
The two girls left and the stage was empty except for the seated man with his modest erection and the woman with her child.
Slowly Mara turned toward him and a trick of the lantern light made her eyes gleam almost yellow. It suddenly seemed too quiet in the barge, as if everyone had stopped breathing.
Mara stood, took three steps toward the man, and then went to her knees again. She was far enough away that she had to bend forward just to set her hand on his thigh. I noticed that her fingernails were very red and very long. The fat man’s erection began to visibly flag at that point and I could see his balls rising again as if they wanted to hide in the protection of his body.
Mara seemed to smile at the sight. She leaned forward, still cradling the infant, and opened her mouth.
I expected oral sex then, but her head never came closer than eighteen inches to the man’s genitals. Instead, her tongue slid out from between sharp and perfectly white teeth until it arched to a point where it could touch her own chin. The fat man’s eyes were very wide now, and I could see his arms and belly quaking slightly. His erection had returned.
Mara shifted her head slightly, shook it as if loosening her neck, and her tongue continued to glide out. Six inches of it. Then eight. A foot of fleshy tongue sliding out of her open mouth like a pink adder uncoiling from its dark nest.
When eighteen or twenty inches of thin tongue had slid into sight, draped across the fat man’s thigh, and began to wrap itself around his cock, I tried to swallow and found I could not. I tried to shut my eyes and found that my eyelids refused to close. Mouth open, breathing harshly, I just watched.
Mara’s tongue slid around the head of the man’s uncircumcised cock, pulling down the foreskin as it went. The lantern light reflected off the pink moistness of that tongue and glistened where it had lubricated the man’s erection.
More tongue uncoiled, the tip of it spiraling down and around like the probing head of a wide-bodied serpent. The fat man closed his eyes just as the long tongue completely encircled his shaft, the narrow tip of that fleshy ribbon swaying and bobbing toward his tightened testicles. Mara’s lashes also lowered but I could still see the glimmer of white and yellow under the heavy eyelids as the man’s hips began to move.
The sight of that moist tongue in the yellow lantern light was terrible—nausea-inducing—but it was not the worst. The worst was the glimpse I had caught of the lesions on that tongue: openings, oblong slits in the fleshy inner part of the tongue as if someone had taken a very sharp scalpel and made a series of bloodless, centimeter-long incisions.
But these were no incisions. Even in the weak light I could see the fleshy lesions pulse open and then close of their own volition, like the feeding mouths of some hungry anemone surging in a soft tidal current. Then the tongue wrapped more tightly around the man’s straining penis and I could see almost peristaltic contractions as the ribbon of pinkish flesh pulled and tightened, tightened and pulled. Mara closed her lips, pulled her head back like a fisherman with a hook deeply embedded, and the fat man moaned in ecstasy. He gripped the arms of the chair and pumped his hips more wildly, eyes half open now but seeing nothing but the red surge of his own pleasure.
Now, after years of experience as a physician, I know precisely what was occurring. It helps to think of it in clinical terms.
The overweight Thai man had experienced normal sexual arousal and had passed through the excitement phase to the plateau phase very quickly. Inside his penis, three spongy columns of tissue—the two long corpora cavernosa and the corpus spongiosum at the head of his penis—had become almost completely engorged with blood. All during the stimulation the penis continued receiving arterial blood from the dorsal, cavernous, and bulbourethral arteries while valves in the dorsal veins that drain blood from the penis shut off, allowing little or no blood to escape back into the body during the period of plateau excitement.
Meanwhile, that excitement continued to build. Involuntary tension included semispastic contractions of the Thai’s facial, abdominal, and intercostal musculature. At the time, I witnessed that as a pained scowl on his straining, sweaty face and a rapid pumping of hips in the smoky light. If I had been taking his pulse, I would have found his heart rate climbing to somewhere between a hundred and a hundred seventy-five beats per minute. His systolic pressure shot up to somewhere close to 80mm Hg while his diastolic elevated to 40mm Hg or higher. At the same time, his rectal sphincter would be contracting and a maculopapular rash was beginning to spread across his face, neck, and chest.
Normally such symptoms meant the onset of orgasm, a brief spike into higher systolic and diastolic regions, and then a quick recovery as the body shifted to a resolution phase and blood flowed out of the now-open veins of the penis.
There was no such resolution.
Mara’s tongue wrapped in tighter coils and continued to tug and flex. The fat man’s face grew redder as he continued to pump his hips. His eyes were still open, but only the whites showed now. The head of his cock, just visible in the lantern light, seemed engorged to the point of bursting. A thick coil of tongue slid across it and around it.
The man went into what I now know are the final stages of ejaculatory response: muscle group spasms, loss of voluntary control of facial muscles, respiratory rates exceeding forty-per-minute, massive body flush, and a frenzied pumping of hips. In those days I just thought of it as coming.
Mara’s head lowered as if she were reeling in her extended tongue. Her eyes were open now and very yellow. Eight or more inches of tongue were still wrapped around the man’s thrusting cock as Mara lowered her red-lipped mouth to his groin.
The Thai man continued to writhe in the throes of orgasm. There was not a sound from the twenty or so men in the smoke-filled room. The man’s groans were the only noise. His orgasm went on and on, far beyond the time it took for any male to ejaculate. Mara’s distended face rose and fell, and each time it rose we could see the tongue still wrapped tightly around the man’s still-rigid member.
“Jesus Christ,” I whispered.
I know now that resolution-phase penile detumescence is rapid and involuntary. Within seconds of expelling seminal fluid, the penis begins a two-stage involution that begins with loss of about fifty percent of the erection in the first thirty seconds or so. Even when some vasocongestion remains—“keeping a hard-on” I would have called it in my ’Nam days—it is not, cannot be, a full pre-ejaculatory erection.
This Thai still had a full hard-on. We could see it every time Mara’s mouth lifted above her coiled tongue. The Thai seemed to have succumbed to an epileptic fit: his legs and arms thrashed wildly, his eyes had rolled back in his head, his mouth was open and drool ran down his chin and jowls. He kept on coming and coming. Minutes passed—five, ten. I rubbed a hand across my face and my palm came away greasy with sweat. Tres was breathing through his mouth and staring with an expression suggesting horror.
Finally Mara pulled her mouth away. Her tongue unwrapped itself from the Thai’s cock and slid back between her lips as if it were on a tension reel. The Thai let out a final groan and slid out of the chair; his erect penis was still thrusting into empty air.
“Christ Almighty,” I whispered to myself, relieved that it was over.
It was not over.
Mara’s lips looked swollen, her cheeks as puffed out as they had a second before. I had a momentary image of her mouth and cheeks filled with the huge, coiled tongue and I almost lost my lunch right there in the smoke-filled darkness.
Mara pulled her head back farther and for a second I noticed that her rouged lips seemed to be growing redder, as if she had somehow managed to apply a thick layer of glossy lipstick while performing oral sex. Then her mouth opened a bit more and the red slid down off her lips, dribbled across her chin, and spilled onto her gold silk blouse.
Blood. I realized that her cheeks and mouth were filled with blood; her obscene tongue gorged with blood. She choked it back and something like a smile filled her sharp features.
I fought back the nausea, lowered my head, and thought: It’s over now. It’s over.
It was not over.
; The baby had been cradled in her left arm all during the endless fellatio, hidden from sight by Mara’s head and the fat man’s thigh. But now the infant was visible as its small arms clawed at Mara’s blood-spattered blouse. Even as the woman arched her head further back as if sloshing the blood around in her mouth like a fine wine, the baby began pulling itself up her chest with its tiny fists sunken in gold silk, its mewling mouth pursing and opening.
I looked at Tres, found myself unable to speak, and looked back at the stage. The Thai boys had carried the still-unconscious fat man off the stage now and only Mara and her infant remained in the lantern light. The baby continued climbing until its cheek touched her mother’s; I thought of a film I had seen of a tiny kangaroo baby, half-formed and almost embryonic, pulling itself through its mother’s fur in the live-or-die trek from the birth canal to the pouch.
The baby began licking its mother’s cheek and mouth. I saw how long the baby’s tongue was, how it slid like some pink worm across Mara’s chin and lips, and I tried to close my eyes or look away. I could not.
Mara seemed to come out of her trance, lifted the baby closer to her face, and lowered her mouth to the infant’s. I could see the baby girl open her mouth wide, then wider, and I thought of baby birds demanding to be fed.
Mara vomited blood into the baby’s open mouth. I could see the infant’s cheeks fill and its throat work as it tried to swallow the sudden onslaught of thick liquid. The process was amazingly neat; very little of the heavy blood spilled onto the baby’s gold robes or Mara’s silk.
Spots danced in my vision and I lowered my head to my hands. The room was suddenly very hot and my vision tunneled to a narrow range. The skin of my forehead felt clammy to my touch. Next to me, Tres made a noise but did not look away from the stage.