by Jeremy Reed
The Purple Princess was shown into a chair by Nina, and there she sat facing the mirror from which she could never be separated. Her black lipstick defined an unsmudgable gloss, and before she would even look at Donatien she bent forward and worked her lips into her dead lover's.
Donatien let his head rest on his hand, and experienced a state of deep empathy with the disconsolate woman who refused to enter into any other relationship than that of mourning for her deceased love. He looked at her distraught vulnerability, and was moved by the irrevocability of her uncensored grief. He would like to have been able to step inside her, and reverse her loss. He had decided a long time ago that whatever the circumstances of' his life, there would be room in it for the Purple Princess.
Donatien was attentive to her every need, and he couldn't help but think how her dead lover's body must have fitted her generous curves. Her nipples were splashed with areolas the colour of black pansies. Her bottom was moulded to invite desire and her lips professed the full sensuality of a flower split open by loaded stamen. The Purple Princess emanated a mystique and untouchable provocation that Donatien savoured in a corresponding manner to the admiration he nurtured for his sister's monogamous dignity.
Donatien asked about her life, intending by his enquiry to relate to her feelings of loss, rather than to her everyday living. 'I know there can be no end to your suffering', he said, 'but is there no way in which we can resituate or revision your grief? I'm thinking that with our discoveries at the château, we will soon be able to access the dead through virtual travel. As death is about entering another space, then in time we will take you there.'
Donatien could sense that the strategy he had adopted was making no inroads on the Purple Princess. She continued to consult the mirror with obsessive regularity. Donatien had observed that it was impossible to break the circuit of her grief. If a gap showed in the Princess's eyes, then it was like an internal speck in her eye that would never clear. And he guessed that without the irritant, the Purple Princess wouldn't know how to function.
She sat opposite him, crossing and uncrossing her catwalk legs. Donatien had the idea that if it wasn't Marciana who he was to marry, then it would be the Purple Princess to whom he would devote his life.
Donatien felt inadequate, to his task of alleviating the Purple Princess's grief. He left her settle to her resting point, which was a state of introspective distraction. But he was gratified to see on looking up once that she smiled in his direction. It was a smile that appeared to have been years in the formation, as though it had been lifted from an impossible interior. When he looked again, it had gone, and Donatien found himself constructing the metaphor of desert rain to the dust-choked cactus.
Donatien spoke of his imminent marriage to his sister. He told the Purple Princess of the profound significance this union constituted, and of how he surmised that she alone would understand the spiritual overview of the undertaking. There was a tragedy implied by such a union, he added, and one almost comparable to the original fall. Donatien explained to the Princess that should his mission be denied by the angels, then his own fall would be irredeemable. He risked, he said, having his name erased from the Book of Life by taking his incestuous marriage to heaven, He told the Purple Princess that even though the idea was sanctioned by his tutelary guardian, Laura, and that she had appeared in vision to him throughout the marriage preparations, he was still apprehensive that he would offend the spiritual orders.
Donatien poured another drink and settled deep in his chair. He was beginning to feel time as a speeded up phenomenon, as though the illusory suspense created by the night's deep watches had been converted into a more rapidly relayed transmission of events. He knew instinctively that the dawn had arrived in the permanent autumn that existed at La Coste. The happening was coded in his nerves.
To his amazement Donatien noticed that the Purple Princess was sitting with a melancholy smile framing her downturned lips. He could sense a give in her emotions, as though a contracted coil had ever so slightly expanded. It wasn't much, but it looked to him like a beginning.
Nina came into the room and advised the Marquis that it was time for him to start the elaborate ritual of dressing. He insisted that the Purple Princess stay, and Nina began shaping his eyebrows, Nina wanted to exaggerate the wide space beneath the brow, so she plucked stray eyebrow hairs, and recreated the arc with a pencil. She wished to create a 1930s feel with Donatien's eye-shadow, and to this effect she introduced pure gold to his lids, and then added a mauve sheen. She mascaraed his eyelashes, and added transparent foundation. He had chosen to dress in purple and black; their sombre, but majestical tones evoking his authoritarian role as a watcher over the centuries. Donatien was to wear a purple satin shirt and a Regency styled black velvet coat. His black velvet trousers were fitted into black knee boots.
As he dressed with Nina's assistance, he remembered the happy days in the mid-eighteenth century, when he would return to La Coste after a journey to Avignon. He recalled how he would take the Apt road, and he would then turn right at Notre Dame de Lumières, or else he would proceed as far as the Julien Bridge and cross the Calavon, from where he would look across at farms lying in the shadow of the blue Luberon mountains. He saw himself again on a sinuous path bordered by the gothic arch of the Clastres gate, and on to the castle ramparts. At that time his true destiny had been only germinating, although he realised that he had always lived at an angle to society, from his earliest days. He threw his mind back to the Chinese pines, cedar, and stone quarries that had surrounded the estate. They had resembled empty film sets, and he could smell the fragrance of lavender rising off the back of a field on a day so long ago that it seemed impossible he was still alive. On that summer's day bees had stumbled as top heavy satellites through the loaded grasses. He remembered how the sunlight had bleached everything to his foreground, and how he had believed that time had stopped suddenly in the mountains. He had been isolated in time as though a photographer's flash had frozen him in the instant.
Nina left Donatien alone with the Purple Princess and went off to add the final touches to Marciana's dress. The chapel had been prepared by the castle's staff with an even more extravagant panache than had gone into choreographing the chapel for Raoul's concert. The red, black and purple drapes were all monogrammed with the arms of Sade: a star with eight golden rays on a field of gules. The abundance of dark red roses in the chapel bled into presence as a romantic backdrop. Nina had told Donatien that the air was so loaded that making contact with it was like dropping a live microphone. There was to be no officiator over the marriage, and Donatien had decided that he and Marciana would be bonded by each placing a ring on the other's finger. There was to be a castrati choir, and Raoul was to ceremonialize the occasion by singing Barbara's 'Incestuous Love.'
Donatien crossed the room and placed his hand in the Purple Princess's. He knew from her warmth that a tacit bond of love would exist forever between them. His wound corresponded to her own, and his unbearable scar in being excluded from reality was matched by the inseparable gulf placed between her and her dead lover.
There wasn't much time to wait. The arrangement was that Marciana would be led to the altar wearing a black sheath, and her hair bunched with roses and ivy picked from the château's walls. He answered his mobile once, and was assured that XZ had elected to stay in his room and meditate. Leanda and Nicole, each dressed in a transparent negligée, would escort Marciana to the altar. Nina had arranged for the altar vessels to be filled with gold sequins. The entire party were to be blessed with sequins. It was all only minutes away.
It had taken him three and a half centuries to reach this threshold. He offered the Purple Princess his arm. It was another beginning to his continuity. He could hear the rain slamming down outside as an accompaniment to his assault on heaven.
*
The End
THE PURPLE ROOM
Jeremy Reed
"Purple haze all in my eyes…
> 'scuse me while I kiss the sky"
Jimi Hendrix
It was night. Donatien had married his sister, and he stood with his back to her, an open coffin full of dark red roses placed on the bed. The last of the guests had driven away from the château's redoubtable precinct, and the silence on which Donatien fed had returned as a necessary relaxant to his nerves.
He had married his sister, Marciana, with the impulse of a snake endeavouring to swallow its tail. They were the last survivors of a lineage he had made infamous by the crimes associated with his books. Donatien was aware that his fingerprint on time was inerasible. His name was like a wrecked car left out in a field for the elements to sort through, but never finally erode. He repeated his name to himself on his breath like a mantra: Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade. He was resolved that he and his sister should leave La Coste as virtual bodies and be received into death as mystically united apotheoses. And Donatien knew precisely where they were going.
He had explained to Marciana that the dead lived in fractally constructed hotels. Their own destination was a place called the Purple Room in which all the ruined icons throughout history evaluated their lives. Donatien knew that the giant condominium known as the Purple Room also housed more recent dead like Jane Mansfield, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Jim Morrison. He know also that if you travelled deep enough into the Purple Room, the likes of Nero, Heliogabalus and Caligula were to be found as virtual lives on this reservation. There would be no end to accessing the great and the fallen, whether they were the Emperor Tiberius, Lord Byron or Jimi Hendrix.
Donatien pulled off the leopardskin knee boots which had belonged to Brian Jones circa 1968. His purple velvet suit sat on him like a personally fitted night. The centuries had exhausted him, but without serious inroads into his defiantly rebellious nature Living as a post-human he had experienced life in four different centuries. Infiltrating society and derealising on the instant that he knew himself to have been detected had been his way of recriminating against a world which had interposed between him and his individual destiny. He could still situate the prison cells in which he had suffered in his arteries. On rainy days their smell rose to his throat, and hung on his breath as a prolonged autumn.
He let silence snow the room. In the manner of a Helmut Newton shoot, Marciana arranged herself next to the coffin on the bed. Dressed in a black sequinned sheath and with her spikily pageboy-styled hair dyed purple, she too was reflective of all they had experienced together by way of sexual rites at the château. At the moment of orgasm they had mutually sighted the eight-rayed gold star which presided ascendant over Sadean mysteries, and knew it to be authorised by his guardian, the Laura of Petrarch's sonnets, Marciana had been initiated by her brother into PHSA: post-human survival awareness, a state she had come to understand as being contingent on the mastery of certain sexual practices. Marciana slipped off one green velvet court shoe, and then a second one. Her violet lacquered toenails twinkled through the toe-points of two silk stockings.
It was to be their great night. Within days they would migrate from the château and leave it in flames. They would begin their psychic migration towards the Purple Room located in the E sector of the astral condominiums and begin the process of letting go earth commitments. From within the château's subterranean chapel Donatien could hear the castrati choir celebrating over and over the marriage of brother and sister with ethereally falsetto pitch. Their voices could penetrate stone and go on by the collision of molecules to ring with refined sonic clarity. He had ordered twelve choirs on a rota basis to sing for the next twenty-four hours. They were to wear feathered hats and Mae West boas and were grouped around a glitter fountain, an idea Donatien had conceived after learning that Elvis Presley had installed a Pepsi-Cola fountain in his living-room at Graceland.
'We're almost there at last,' Donatien said, as though affirming a thought, rather than addressing Marciana. 'Nobody will ever destroy our happiness now,' he continued. Donatien was characteristically withdrawn, his taciturn nature defrosting by fractions as he realised the immensity of revelation they would soon experience together. His head was full of it. He liked to think that, while he and Marciana were on their way to the Purple Room, the bureaucratic would be gridlocked into toxic traffic queues en route to switching on desktop monitors. Donatien despised every form of totalitarian conformism. Life at the cost of losing individual freedom was the killing ground occupied by the collective. If, as he reasoned to himself, he had begun by offending that society through performing minor sexual aberrations, then he would finish by denying it knowledge of how to achieve the deathless state in which he lived. The denial would comprise his supreme act of individual freedom. Human hardware and software would continue to grow biologically diseased, and he would be free of it all.
Donatien had known every form of sexual excess over the years, but had never separated the act from the quest for vision. He had tunnelled into his sister's backside and excavated gold. He had grown sated on the heart-shaped proportions of her liposuction-perfect bottom. And he knew now that when he entered her tonight he would realise erotic apocalypse. Marciana's orgasmic delirium would contort her beyond anatomy. He would stand over his incestuous wedding like an astronaut reviewing the cratered surface of Mars.
Marciana was engaged in extracting roses from the open coffin, and placing them on the black silk pillows heaped on the bed. A part of her was sad at the prospect of leaving the château, for she knew her brother had made preparations to have the castle torched. She had come to love the château's labyrinthine recesses, and had lived in it wing by wing, like someone growing familiar with their obsessively recurrent dreams. She had accustomed herself to her brother's prolonged absences, but had celebrated his returns with a love of the château which had extended to draping its rooms in purple and scarlet velvets. Once she had made of the library floor a wall to wall fitting red velvet heart-shaped carpet and they had made love there on his arrival from New York with the seriousness of two beings intent on exchanging skins. His force within her had been like a solar wind and hers by way of establishing an opposing rhythm had assumed the predatory nature of a jungle cat. They had ended up disembodied, making love to themselves in the absence of a beaten partner. It all came back to Marciana now, as she sat looking out of the window at stars proliferating along the galaxy's spiral arms. There was light and there was dark: and each was dependent on the other. If dark was an absence of light, as Marciana told herself, then light was no less an absence of dark.
'There are memories I'd like to share with you, Marciana,' Donatien said, looking up from the velvet chair in which he had immersed himself like a floor tub. 'What we have shared together belongs to a time and a place, and before we leave it, we should have the important things kick in. I remember telling you how I dropped in on Leonard Cohen in the Chelsea Hotel in the early 1970's and found him in the exact moment of inspiration. He was writing the song "Who By Fire", and in between the time of opening the door and motioning me to a seat on the paper-littered bed, he wrote down the line "who by barbiturate" out loud on his breath, You could call it pinching the moment. He had hurried back into the room carrying the weight of that line in his head. It was then that I realised I had achieved knowledge of genetic longevity in exactly the same compressed method. The formula given to me had occupied the space of a nanosecond, but what I had received was the secret for which men had enquired for millennia.'
Donatien paused, and Marciana saw the sense of sweet revenge written into her brother's features. She loved it that he who had been ostracised, and who was thought to have ended his life in the asylum at Charenton, had been rewarded in this way. The man sitting before her in a rippled velvet suit was the outlaw who had at one time escaped from prison, and been hunted across Europe by the representatives of a punitive judiciary. She knew that he had kept on going because something inside him had sensed the potential to know absolute truth. And that running away he had never deserted himsel
f.
'We're everything and nothing,' Donatien continued. 'I've stood listening in apartments where emeralds and diamonds were as commonplace as speech. I've been fucked in saunas where men did it in the knowledge they were HIV positive. I've spread caviar on the convex surface of your buttocks, and although I've lived for hundreds of years I too have known the shortness of life. Now that we're about to leave, it's as though our lives have never existed.'
Marciana stood up from the bed, and placing one hand on her nape activated the downward tracking movement of her zip. A groove opened which revealed the green horizontal of her bra, and as the zigzag trail continued so the specifics of her back shot with the blue contusions left by his lips became visible. Marciana was revealing to her brother a body over which he had fought with a conflicting desire to hurt the zones he loved. Her buttocks had proved the disaster site to which he had returned with increasingly renewed ferocity; an obsession which drove him to have virtual sex with computer images of her Monroe-proportioned bottom during intervals in which she rested from his sex-addicted compulsion.
Marciana brought the zip to the small of her back and no further. She was going to have him wait and reflect on the deep night and their lives together before revealing herself to his indomitable need. She knew that when he looked through the window of her flesh-coloured transparent panties that he would also see in the divide of her bottom the fortress of La Coste with its blind walls facing out over the height into a deep valley. In scaling her bottom he would be claiming his sovereign rights to the château. The monogrammed star sewn on the beige chiffon which moulded itself weightlessly to her buttocks, was the symbol her brother recognised as representing erogenous paradise.
