by Krissy Kneen
‘Choose,’ she said, the word a growl in her throat as yet another climax began to build in her loins. ‘Choose one girl and shoot inside her now. Shoot in me.’
But Nick pulled at Holly’s hips instead and lifted her, burying his hand in the bald slick pussy of their companion and letting his well-lubricated cock slip easily into Holly’s arse. She felt its spasms and resisted, so soon after her most recent climax, the urge to follow him in his pleasure, looking instead to the light bulb, which was shining bright and steady. No final glare of impossible brightness, just a steady angelic pulsing. Holly reached over to tweak at Mary-Ann’s cock as Nick’s fingers still thrust inside and the woman came again, growling deep in her throat like a cat winning a fight. The light at the top of the bed flared as if to signal the latest orgasm. Holly stared at it in wonder. Perhaps this hermaphroditic woman was another conduit for orgone. Holly circled Nick’s hand with her fingers and felt the pulsing contractions of the woman’s cunt as she came around his hand. The light pulsed along with the contractions, brighter now, and brighter.
‘Suck me,’ Mary-Ann cried out, her voice a deep, rough rasp. ‘Suck me now!’ and Holly felt the pop and suck of the cock slipping out of her mid-thrust as she turned to push her head onto the woman’s little penis. It seemed bigger, suddenly, each pulse seemed to extend it. And Holly saw the woman’s hands reach out towards the still-twitching, still-hard penis of her lover. Holly sucked her cock and watched the woman push Nick’s cock into her. Nick thrust again, again, again. She knew he was still expending the last of his seed into this woman’s slit and as if in sympathy the cock in her mouth began to pump its second jet of pleasure, swelling now to a size that she might choke on. She tried to hang on, to swallow, to suck, and just when she thought she could take no more the woman reached out and slipped one finger into Holly’s cunt, another into her arsehole so that Holly could feel the fingers touching through the sensitive membrane of flesh between these passages. Mary-Ann’s thumb pressed out and rubbed against her clitoris and Holly opened her throat as the orgasm ripped through her, swallowing the now-sizeable length of cock, milking the last of the juices with the contractions of her throat.
The light exploded around them. Forced to shut her eyes against the glare, she gagged and coughed and freed herself from the invading member, feeling the fingers slip away from her own pulse of flesh. When she opened her eyes she was startled to see Mary-Ann had transformed. A spray of bearded growth had pushed through the soft skin of her cheeks. Her cock was a massive hang of meat between her legs, her pussy was now hidden under a thicket of dark and wiry pubic hair. Mary-Ann still wore lipstick, she still had the narrow waist of a girl and the petite breasts she had had before, but her face and her genitals were now all man.
She screamed, touching her beard with sticky, flustered fingers, another of her French obscenities. She leaped over the edge of the accumulator, landing heavily on the floor, pulled her dress clumsily over her head and swept her shoes and handbag up in her fist.
‘Wait!’ Nick whispered, breathless, spent. ‘You don’t have to go.’ But she was gone. The door slammed shut behind her. The sound of panicked footsteps echoed, diminishing, on the staircase.
Nick looked stunned. ‘You saw the light?’
Holly nodded.
‘Mary-Ann was another channeller of orgone.’
‘Did you see her beard come through? Is that a thing? Have you ever heard of that happening to someone?’
Nick shook his head. ‘Quick, let’s check the charge on the battery.’ He almost ran to the side of the bed and reached beneath it, dragging out the large and heavy black box that he had spent a whole day assembling. He checked the dial on the front and whistled. ‘That light. Did you see how bright it was? I hope no one could see it from outside.’
‘The curtains were drawn.’
‘Yes, but they are cheap thin curtains, surely you would still be able to see it.’ He tapped the dials. Whistled. ‘Holly, my darling Holly,’ he said, ‘I think we have done it.’ He kissed her full on the mouth, the taste of Mary-Ann’s cunt and the dried come from her cock causing their lips to stick momentarily.
‘You are,’ he proclaimed, ‘incendiary.’
Again. She woke and turned. Again he paced between the window and the desk. Scribbling, peering through the curtain. His leg was jiggling up and down. He was all insomnia and anxiety.
‘Come to bed, Nick.’
‘Shhhh. Do you think they saw it?’
‘What?’
‘The light. Our light. Your light and Mary-Ann’s.’
‘Who? Who would have seen it?’
‘You have no idea, Holly. You are an innocent.’ He shook his head. ‘You have absolutely no idea.’
Holly pulled the bed curtain across and turned away from him. ‘Come to bed soon.’
But he merely grunted once, and then there was the sound of his pen, scratching out his notes.
She sat at his desk. The chair was too hard, high-backed, severe. She thought it must hurt him terribly to sit here for hours poring over his notes. He had leather-bound notebooks. She slid her fingers over the top one, soft as a woman’s skin. The paper was so fine that she lifted it and pressed her cheek to it. There was a certain smell to the pages, binding-glue, ink. Age. The notebooks had initials embossed in the soft leather. NB. Nicholson’s initials. There were water stains on the pages, a yellowed edge framing the diagrams. This one in particular looked like a relic. They all looked old and sacred, of course, even though she knew he had been writing in one of the notebooks no more than an hour before.
She could hear the steady rush of the shower, through the closed door, the sound spurring her on. She always felt uncomfortable touching his notes when he was in the room. He seemed so furtive when he worked, glancing up at the slightest sound, flinching, slapping the cover shut. Nick let her look over his shoulder, but she had noticed that he always closed his book when she perched on the desk beside him.
Now she eased the notebook open, flicked over to the last page. The diagram was a series of interconnected pulses, like a tracing of soundwaves, energy pulsing from point to point. At the centre of the page was a picture of a woman, her arms outstretched. The vulva very detailed, each hair individually drawn. The lips slightly parted, the labia minora exposed. It was a picture of her body, Holly knew it. The face was a blank, but she recognised her own body. Stretched out, her own vagina at the centre, drawn as the point at which the lines of energy intersected. It was an almost perfect representation of her flesh. The picture reminded her of the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci. Too much like art to be science—and yet from his diagrams flying machines had taken shape.
D.O.R: the letters sketched beside wavy lines, hard-edged, angular. It looked like the softer soundwaves were emanating from her body. Next to these flowing shapes Nick had written the word orgone. The sharper lines seemed to be attacking the representation of her body. The orgone energy waves defending it. Danger from the D.O.R.s was scribbled there. And Dangers: Alien/Government. We are under attack. MUST BE MORE CAUTIOUS, this last underlined three times. She heard the sound of the shower turned suddenly off and closed the notebook. She almost ran to climb back into the accumulator.
She had noticed before that reading in the accumulator affected th
e brightness of the light. Whenever she lingered over the most erotic passages in her books the light glowed more strongly. When she was reading less sexual paragraphs—the simple mechanics of the plot, descriptions of people or places—the light dimmed to almost nothing so that she had to squint to make out the words. The accumulator fed off sexual energy, particularly Holly’s own sexual energy. As soon as she climbed out of the tall-sided box the light ceased to glow entirely.
Nick emerged from the bathroom damp-haired, wrapped in a large white bath-towel. Holly peered over the edge of the bed and the light glowed just a little brighter.
‘Pleased to see me?’ Nick grinned.
She watched as he unwrapped the towel from his waist and was treated to the pleasant sight of his semi-erect penis. He shivered and pulled the towel close around his shoulders, rubbing one end of it into his hair.
‘I’ve been wondering why I can power your accumulator, me and Mary-Ann, when other girls couldn’t. I wonder if it is because you like me a little bit more. Enough to light you up. The glow of love, perhaps?’
She watched as his cheeks flushed bright red. She liked it when she made him shy. It filled her with a little rush of power. She knelt just a little bit higher in the bed.
‘I would say that is a very unscientific observation, Holly. Dare I say romantic?’
‘Well it can’t just be my…flesh. My body. I am human, just like every other girl.’
Nick stepped towards her, pulled the towel around his shoulders like a shawl and rested his fingers on hers.
‘I have a very complex feeling for you, but I am afraid that has little to do with the work. You saw the light you made using Mary-Ann for sex. Did that mean you loved her?’
Holly relaxed back into the softness of the bed. Nick dropped the bath towel and clambered in beside her. The bed smelled gloriously of sex and sleep. His skin was fresh with the spicy tang of soap. She rested her head on his chest and breathed an aromatic cocktail. The light glowed brighter. They both glanced up at it and smiled.
‘Have you always been so sexually attuned?’
Holly snorted. ‘Oh god no. Six months ago I was living under a vow of abstinence.’
‘I find that impossible to believe.’
Holly held her hands up to cup his ear and said, ‘I lost my virginity here in Paris.’
‘No!’
‘Having sex with a stranger after reading Nin.’
‘Nin,’ he said, picking up the battered volume of de Sade that she had been flicking through. The 120 Days of Sodom. Some passages were underlined. There were notes in the margin. He squinted, trying to make them out.
‘Oh, I didn’t do that. Mandy gave me this book. She runs a sex book club back in Brisbane.’
‘I think I should meet this Mandy.’
‘You’d like her, you would like fucking her, I think.’ Holly snuggled into Nick’s shoulder.
‘It is so strange, Holly, you say this without the slightest hint of jealousy. Like the way you watched me fucking Mary-Ann. With a generosity I have never seen before.’
‘Yes. It’s true. I haven’t been jealous since I read a book by Angela Carter. I was terribly jealous, so much so that I thought I was sick with it, it was a hard lump of hate, I could feel it like a tumour. Mandy gave me Angela Carter and it changed everything.’
Nick was staring at her intently.
‘Nin?’ he said. ‘Angela Carter? Marquis de Sade?’
He vaulted over the side of the accumulator and sat naked at his desk. His cock quivered excitedly as he scrawled in his notebook.
Holly shuffled over to lean on the thick wooden frame.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said, admiring the goosebumped flesh of his naked back.
‘Not wrong.’ He squinted in her direction. He was looking right through her as if there were something written in the air behind her, the answer to a universal puzzle written in ghostly letters in the dark. ‘Something is right. Maybe just perfect. Maybe it’s the books, Holly. The missing piece of Dr Reich’s research, the missing piece for the orgone charger box. What if…What if the energy is channelled through you, but stored in the books? The Nin, the de Sade. The mung beans are just dry inert things till you add water. Add water, and put them in the accumulator and they grow at twice the expected rate. The books are the beans. You are the water to activate the growth which is accelerated in the accumulator.’
Holly watched as he scribbled, beads of excited sweat beginning to pearl on his shoulders. His hair, a messy shock of damp spikes. He looked quite mad and for a moment Holly saw him in a new light, a slightly crazed light. Not a mad scientist at all, just a madman. Mistaking his flights of fancy for scientific fact.
She clutched the fat copy of Sodom to her chest. They locked de Sade up in a prison for his words, kept him there till death took him. Nick had told her that the American government burned all of Wilhelm Reich’s books. The last big book burning: dangerous words destroyed for the greater good.
The lamp in the accumulator was dark. She pulled the blanket up over her shoulders, thinking Nick would catch cold, sitting naked in the chilly room. She almost called out to him, begged him to come back into the bed. He pressed his fingers into his hair, pulled at it in clumps. His back was hunched, his eyes intense as he filled page after page with his spidery writing.
She turned away from him then and opened the book, read a page, two. The light remained dark. She was self-conscious, monitoring her own reactions to the words, too aware of her own responses to feel anything. The book itself meant nothing, there was no power in words on a page. This is what the book-burners and the censors throughout history did not realise. It wasn’t the words at all. It was our reaction to the words that mattered, the power was in the firing of synapses in the brain, the creation and the distribution of new ideas. The words were just the raw materials, the unshaped clay. It was the alchemic reaction of the human imagination. This was where the magic was occurring. If Nick had joined her in bed she would have told him this, wrapping her legs and arms around his icy body, warming him with her physicality and her care.
But Holly was invisible to him now as he followed a train of thought across page after page, reducing her desire to a diagram. The book was just a seed. Like the dried mung bean, not yet activated, a dry collection of words just waiting for the fluid of the right enquiring mind. This is not a book, she thought, remembering a painting by René Magritte. This is not a pen. This is not desire. Holly closed the de Sade and her eyes and snuggled down into the warm nestle of the blankets.
The 120 Days of Sodom
by MARQUIS DE SADE
They could safely fit six, maybe seven more people into the accumulator. Ten would be the maximum; with ten there would be barely any room to move at all. Holly leaned into the bed trying to imagine the complications of limbs. She had no idea how she would be able to convince that many people to accompany her back to Nick’s tiny flat, but she could barely contain her excitement at the prospect. They would be artists mostly, writers or painters or sculptors, who would easily see the value in recreating a scene from a great work of literature. Holly suspected that mention of de Sade might frighten the group rather than excite them. She had spent a long and sleepl
ess evening wrestling with the cruelties of de Sade’s orgies, the pleasure in the pain, the ridiculousness of virtue.
She pulled on her stockings and adjusted her breasts in the black lace bra. She was getting used to using herself as bait. Nick looked sweet but a little nervous in his thick woollen overcoat. She pushed a wild shock of his hair back behind one ear as he transferred his notebook from his outside pocket to the breast pocket and then back again.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked, adjusting his collar for him.
‘What if someone reports all those people coming up into the room? What if we can’t control the energy accumulated? What if the government gets wind of this experiment?’
‘You know you are sounding like a crazy person? It will be fun. The best fun. Imagine how much pleasure we’ll generate.’
‘Holly, do you understand what we are playing with? This energy is…well, it’s not safe. We need to be careful.’
‘You can’t change your mind about this now. We’re all dressed up. We cleaned the apartment. We’re not doing anything illegal, are we?’
‘What? Procuring for an orgy?’ He seemed to think about it. ‘I suppose not.’
‘And you’ll protect me. No one will dare to hurt me when they take one look at you.’
He wrapped his arms around her waist.
‘Give me your eyes,’ he said; it was what Dr Reich used to say to his father. Holly looked straight at him, unblinking. His stare was warm and open.
‘You know how you asked about love?’ And she looked away, stepping out of the warm circle of his arms.
