by Krissy Kneen
‘When we have altitude, then I’ll go down on you and I’ll stay down.’
Nick’s cock was straining in his own dirty trousers. He was breathing in pure orgone. The world was suddenly filled with it. It made him light-headed, but he was used to resisting the inexorable pull of pure orgone. He had practised resisting Holly’s energy. He pressed his erection down. It was exquisitely painful. It would continue to be so till he found the source of the orgone spill.
She’s done it, he thought, Holly has done it. She’s trapped so much orgone it has changed the very fabric of the world.
‘Take me to Australia,’ said Nick hoarsely, and when they had reached a proper cruising altitude he went, greedily, down.
Nick found Holly standing in the wild garden outside the telephone booth. She had not been hard to find. He stepped into an abandoned car, the keys still swinging in the ignition, the driver’s seat slicked in vaginal juices. He indicated unnecessarily, drove on the wrong side of the road for a block before realising that in Australia they do things differently. It didn’t matter. The streets were littered with abandoned cars. He followed the pulse of light through streets. The smell intensified as he inched past naked, writhing bodies.
Nick found Holly. Above her pulsed three spectral lights. The lights were orange and seemed to hover in clouds that glowed as brightly as Holly’s vulva. Nick recognised her immediately. It was Holly, but not exactly the Holly he remembered. This woman, standing naked, proud, tall, was a vision. Her skin seemed translucent. He was treated to more than her nakedness. Under her skin there was a pulse, a blue glow like a heartbeat; from her mouth came a noise that seemed to transcend sound. All the bodies in the street were copulating to the rhythm of it. She was surrounded by a group of men and women. Each was holding an open book and there were words, sex words, dripping from their mouths. And yet, together like this, reading in a chorus, it was a sound like hymns rising to the tallest spires of a church. A litany of sex.
There was sex everywhere. Wherever he looked there was a fuck happening, people rutting on top of parked cars, cunnilingus in the gutter, fellatio up against telephone poles. A bitch and a dog joined in a painful embrace, arse to arse. A man with his cock visibly inserted into the neck of a bottle, the member bright red like his face, the tip of it squirting great globules of ejaculate into the vessel while another man, still half-dressed in a policeman’s light blue shirt, pounded his prick into the man’s exposed behind. Everywhere another body writhing in a pained and exquisite ecstasy, everywhere a spattering of come and juice.
He remembered the night she helped him recreate The 120 Days of Sodom. Here, now, was something de Sade would have been proud of, and at the hub of all this fuck was Holly herself.
Holly. His love. But more than the warm body he used to embrace, here was a different Holly, a glowing creature of astounding beauty. There was an older woman kneeling at her feet, her mouth locked to her cunt as if they were conjoined, this woman’s fist was buried to her elbow in Holly’s vagina, pistoning back and forth in a way that must, surely, be bruising her womb. Nick stepped carefully over a couple locked in a carnal embrace. His shoe slipped on a puddle of pearly white, he looked down to see a man tugging at his own cock convulse as a jet of semen slapped against the leg of his trousers. Nick’s shaft had been emptied a dozen times on the flight to Australia and still he felt it swell painfully, tenting his crotch.
Above him in the sky the three orange craft, for they were indeed craft of some sort, began to chant in harmony to Holly’s music. He remembered the sound of Buddhist monks he had once heard, a sound that was at once discordant and yet harmonious. This was a tune that surpassed that sound and yet was reminiscent of it. He stared up into the orange light and watched as their hard metal carapaces began to crack. A note was reached, a perfect, pure pitch. The sides of the spacecraft slid open.
Within was a wondrous vision of flesh and mucus, three gigantic vulvas, their lips trembling, juices beginning to drip, slick and glowing blue down onto the revellers below. Each drip that plummeted to earth caused the ground to shake, the earth to rupture. The revellers beneath faltered in the midst of their fuck and toppled into the earth.
Nick unzipped his pants and stepped out of them, picked his way across the crazy paving of limbs, genitals, open mouths. Someone rose up from the pile of bodies and slipped his lips onto Nick’s cock and he paused for a moment to enjoy the sucking sensation before pushing the fellow roughly onto the tit of a woman. Nick stepped, his cock hard and throbbing, towards the true centre of his life.
Holly’s eyes focused on him and he tripped clumsily towards her. He saw the tears travel easily across her cheeks, heard the crack of thunder and a bright flash of lightning break the darkness of the sky.
He found her breasts first, then her mouth. His cock pressed into the back of the kneeling woman’s head. He rubbed himself against her short-cropped hair. He kissed till there was no breath, and disengaged to gasp at the hot, heady air of the sex-filled street.
Nick looked up at the glowing sky. ‘He was right,’ he rasped, breathless, ‘Dr Reich. Those are alien craft.’
‘It’s OK,’ Holly said. Her voice raked at his skin. She made words, at the same time still singing, a weird quartet in an unknown key, with the dripping sexes above her. She was pure fuck. He wanted to find his end in her.
He stepped around her, behind her, into her. Her buttocks were like butter. He could feel the woman’s fist pounding against his cock through the thin membrane of Holly’s body. He reached around to hold her breasts. His hands squeezed them roughly. It was impossible to be gentle. The pulse of her energy seemed to demand this kind of gorgeous violence. He felt her breasts swell beneath the pounding of his fingers, a jet of liquid spurting out of the great round globes. He looked over Holly’s shoulder and saw the electric-blue sparks shooting from her nipples and falling onto the backs of the revellers where they settled into radiant white-blue puddles.
‘It’s all right,’ said Holly, her voice crackling like an exposed electric cable. ‘We figured out how to direct the energy. Now everything is as it should be.’
Around them he could hear the phrases spill from the mouths of the readers, who managed to keep their voices steady as they held their books in one hand and frigged each other at the same time. He heard the voice of de Sade, of Nin, of Boccaccio, Sacher-Masoch, Anon, Anon, Anon, Anon…
‘Oh god,’ Nick groaned, ‘I’m going to split in half. I’ll die.’
‘I know,’ said Holly, calmly. ‘This is how it is supposed to end. Beautiful, isn’t it? Come inside me, Nick.’ She rested her hands on the head between her thighs, ‘Mandy. It is time. Come with me now.’
He felt Mandy’s hand begin to slip though Holly’s flesh. Her fingers surrounded his thick pulsing shaft. She took hold of him as if Holly was insubstantial, nothing more than smoke. The three space-cunts began to spray like taps turned on full. The ground around them began to dissolve. The people thinned out, their flesh became amorphous.
Nick felt himself falling forward as if Holly had liquefied and his ejaculation exploded through the phantom spectre of his love. His come hit his own cheeks with the force of tears. His cock pulsed, Mandy’s hand pulsed, the writhing bodies all around them pulsed. The world was the contraction of his balls, its death the expiration of his seed,
his come dissolving into space like a galaxy being born. The force was cataclysmic. A shout like the beginning of things, and when the final echo of the climax was resolved there was not a thing but silence where it all had been. A silence so beautiful that nothing in the clutter of the past or in the wonderful peaceful emptiness of the future could ever be as perfect as this moment, this little death.
Now.
Acknowledgments
Quoted material used with thanks.
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. Copyright © Angela Carter 1972. Reproduced by permission of the estate of Angela Carter, c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.
A Sport and a Pastime. Copyright © 1967, renewed 1995 by James Salter. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Quotation from Anaïs Nin’s A Spy in the House of Love used by permission of Sky Blue Press.
Other Anaïs Nin quotations used by permission of Tree Leyburn Wright.
The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille, translation copyright © 1977 by Joachim Neugroschel. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.
Thanks
To:
Michael Heyward, who pitched me an idea for a novel. Sorry I am terrible at sticking to a brief and I do hope you enjoy the crazy book that eventuated in place of the one you were hoping for.
Mandy Brett, for agreeing to go on this crazy journey with me. Thanks for your wonderful and tireless editorial work and for laughing at my jokes.
Katherine Lyall-Watson, always my first and closest reader. I would be lost without your amazing eye.
Anthony Mullins, your structural notes on this project were invaluable as were your constant love and support. I hope you know how important you are to my work. I could not continue to do this job without you.
Emerald Roe, for your generous gift of a shack by the ocean called Bliss, in which I wrote most of this book.
Barry Elphick, beloved father, and Denise Elphick, who made my writing retreats possible, topping up the wood for my fire, lending me a vehicle and making sure I was safe and comfortable whilst working.
The Avid Reader Good Sex Book Club who joined me on this reading journey and allowed me to pillage our conversations to write this book. I love Sex Club and I love you guys. And with particular thanks to Naomi Stekelenburg, philosopher of sex, who helped me understand my own philosophical bent.
My first test readers, Benjamin Law, Helen Bernhagen, James Butler, Trent Jamieson, Chris Somerville. You guys are my sexy entourage.
Maureen Burns—thank you for Wilhelm Reich. You turned this book off the safe and narrow path and into the energetic world of orgone.
Tim Coronel, who loaned me a stack of reference material. I promise I will send your books back before you read this. Promise!
Thanks to my orgiastic buddies Tom Brown, Nicholas Ib, Steve Watson, Ronnie Scott, Ann-Frances Watson, Martin Chatterton—it was pretty fun wasn’t it?
Thanks always to my families, Wendy and Sheila Kneen and to my sister Karen. And thank you to my writerly family in particular, Steven Amsterdam, Kristina Olsson, Ashley Hay, Nigel Bebe, Ellen Van Neerven, Scotty Spark, Michaela McGuire, who joined me to co-work or co-whinge about this book and to the Cosiers, Becca Harbison and Kasia Jancewski and Jason Reed.
Excerpts from earlier drafts of this book appeared in BUMF magazine, Scum and The Lifted Brow. My gratitude to the literary journals and magazines of Australia, who keep the wheels turning.
Holly White finds her sexual power through reading the erotic classics. This is something that she and I share. I owe a debt of gratitude to those who have boldly gone before me, leaving a trail of crumbs for me to feast on as I picked my way out of the woods and towards to the completion of this book. The books I devoured in order to produce this book include the ones referenced within. These are…
Guillaume Apollinaire The Eleven Thousand Rods
Louis Aragon Irene’s Cunt
Nicholson Baker Vox
Georges Bataille The Story of the Eye
André Breton Nadja
Angela Carter The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos The Dangerous Liaisons
Marguerite Duras The Lover
Linda Jaivin Eat Me
Erica Jong Fear of Flying
Yasunari Kawabata The House of the Sleeping
Beauties
Pierre Louÿs She-Devils
Henry Miller Quiet Days in Clichy
Vladimir Nabokov Lolita
Anaïs Nin The Delta of Venus
Little Birds
A Spy in the House of Love
Pauline Réage (Ann Desclos) The Story of O
Peter Reich A Book of Dreams
Alina Reyes The Butcher
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch Venus in Furs
Marquis de Sade The 120 Days of Sodom
Justine or The Misfortunes of Virtue
Philosophy in the Boudoir
Felix Salten Josephine Mutzenbacher
James Salter A Sport and a Pastime
Jack Saul The Recollections of a Mary-Ann
Various authors A Thousand and One Nights
