by Jeremy Reed
‘Tell me more about what you remember of our lives here,' Marciana said, fitting her sleek-lipsticked mouth to her brother's. 'I'm frightened we may lose in time the memory of the château.' Marciana who had been temporarily sitting on Donatien's lap, her bottom fitted to his explosive crotch, returned to her place on the bed. A little rain of black sequins popped from the constricted sit of Marciana's dress and shone brilliantly on the blond flooring.
'All memories are essentially one,' Donatien said, again throwing his eyes up to the black night sky framed in the window. He was concentrated now, as though actively separating the free-associated stuff from experience which had sunk basements in his psyche.
'Much of my life spent at this château in the years up to and around 1775,' said Donatien, 'were years of monastic asceticism. I would sit in the study, knowing that the gates had been locked at nightfall, the lights extinguished and the kitchen closed. My wife would be somewhere else in the house. I used to forget her existence. That was part of the problem. Without knowing it I had begun at this time to dissociate from reality. In my mind, Marciana, I was in a house at the edge of the world, a place in which I could indulge in the sexual fantasies which had come increasingly to occupy my waking hours. There was just me and the white-hot temper in my balls. Nothing else mattered. My masturbatory impulses were volcanic.'
'It was then,' Donatien continued, 'that I evolved my obsessive preoccupation with numbers. The sexual act was dominated for me by the need to count the number of rhythmic thrusts to orgasm, the number of strokes cut across me or my partner by a whip, the number of agonized entreaties which preceded orgasm, the whole computation of the event as transferable to numerals. I had begun with threesomes. A girl called Jackie, and a boy called Paul. Paul would enter Jackie and I would enter Paul, but the arrangement was too simplistic. When Paul penetrated me with his rootingly youthful energies, I would persuade Jackie to strap on a dildo and enter Paul. The configuration was partly satisfactory, but not fulfilling. I had discovered in myself the need to have done to me what I was doing to others. If I was fucking, I needed to be fucked in the same manner.
‘It was then that I began to form a sexual cult. My wife was aware of these extracurricular practices and never complained. I somehow brought together street boys from the neighbouring towns, and girls who were clearly open to experimentation. There was Lucy, a shy girl dressed all in white, who hadn't decided in her mind what sex she was, and who wanted to be treated like a man and buggered by a consortium of bisexual youths. Lucy would fellate me, while I cocksucked a boy, who in turn would enter Lucy from behind and set up a chain reaction, so that he was had by a partner who was had by a partner, ad infinitum. I was the metaphoric head of a snake, whose tail was measured by an increasingly extensible number of orgiasts. And while these orgies brought me partial gratification, I was still left unsatisfied by what I took to be their commonality. My fantasies soon developed a tolerance to what others were to condemn as extreme sex acts. I was quickly bored, Marciana, and correspondingly isolated. I felt like a tiger let loose in a countryside without prey. I would ride furiously through woods all day and return home savage with frustrated energies. I treated my wife like a sailor and she never protested. I fitted her to the hilt and inside she became pressurized like the air in a Boeing's cabin.
‘But nothing was enough. I spent my time mentally refigurating complex sexual geometries, and always they involved the idea of breaking into a body from behind. Lucy introduced Mathilde to the company, who in turn brought Marsha to La Coste. As my needs grew more extreme, so I would stage orgies in the newly built theatre. I assembled a willing cast of seventeen participants and flexed a whip over their buttocks like someone flicking through a tie rack. I was never sure where all this would end, but I was compelled to follow my instincts. One afternoon I faced sixteen naked bottoms, and had the one youth omitted from the voluntary line-up whip me with a ferocity comparable to the force driven by my own arm. It was a revelation to me to realise that pain worked on the orgiasts like a drug. After the initial resistance to being flogged had been overcome, both male and female participants relaxed into a trance-like participation in the experience. Lucy began to speak in prophetic voices, and Paul and Marsha similarly broke through to paranormal thresholds. Lucy would sometimes astrally project and look down from the ceiling at the absent body I was sounding to breaking point. I too would be taken over by dangerous energies, and the more I surrendered to irrational impulses the greater the kicks I achieved.
‘The theatre would be in darkness, and the place sealed off by locked doors from the rest of the château. I took to placing funeral wreaths round the waists of my youthful orgiasts. I painted their bottoms in loud primary colours so as to distinguish one from the other. A pink Lucy, a blue Jacques, a yellow Mathilde. I saw their bottoms as undiscovered planets on which I the first arrival was leaving traces of conquest. It never occurred to me that these young people had to go back to ordinary homes and account for where they had been and why they were acting strange to their parents. I saw these sexual rites as legitimate theatre. I was acting out something in myself which called for complicitous participants.
‘I don't need to tell you of all people, the whole story. Autumn had deepened to winter and big fires blazed in the château's hearths. It seemed kinder at the time to protect my sexual cast from the cold, and a reality which they had begun to fear by keeping them in one of the castle's disused wings. I revelled in the secrecy of the act. We were hidden away as fugitives from an unpropitious century. I took to avoiding my wife for weeks on end, and busied myself writing plays about the secret community at La Coste. And at night I would walk sleepless through the château's corridors, and imagine I could hear somebody pounding on the main entrance gate. I would hear the same hollow blows resounding there night after night.
‘Four days before Christmas, I encouraged the youths to return to their homes. I had looked after them well, and I provided each one of them with money to take to their families, as an offering from the Seigneur. I had anticipated no recriminations on their part, as no harm had been done. But as you know, things turned out otherwise. There were investigations, and I found myself having to answer criminal charges.’
'You told me once,' Marciana interrupted, 'that what sex meant to you then was a smell. The smell of wet cow parsley, was what you said.'
'You know me too well,' Donatien reflected. 'If I can account for first sensory stimulus as I experienced it as a child, then it was the smell of tired cow parsley flooding me on a dusty road in summer. If you understand me I was going somewhere by walking nowhere. And my first encounter with sex happened just like that. It was back of a wood shed after the sun had beaten me to spontaneous erection. I won't tell you with what sex I first arrived at orgasm. There are events so important to the individual that they should never be demystified.'
He stopped speaking, as though swallowed into a black hole, and poured another slug of Isle of Jura whiskey into his tumbler. The liquid stood up like an amber coloured paperweight. Marciana arched her silk-stockinged legs, and lay back on the bed. It seemed to her that the whole force of history bled from the bedroom walls.
'When in early January, 1775,' Donatien continued, 'a criminal investigation was begun in Lyons on the palpable evidence of children who claimed to have been mistreated in this house, so my destiny closed on me. I was thereafter to have a prison cell fitted to me like a snail wears its shell. In the mid-twentieth century I was to meet Jean Genet in a bar and see the same stone lines written on his face. I claimed to be a friend of Jacques Guerlain's and to be interested in buying manuscripts, but Genet wouldn't have any of it. He closed up, told me he despised literature, put up the collar of his leather jacket in anticipation of the cold and stormed out into the frosty Paris night. He turned round once not to wave at me, but to present a fist at the window where I sat. The whole encounter was so ugly that for a long time the memory lived in me like a probe. Genet and I: two prisoners
who were freed by imagination.'
Marciana watched her brother backtrack through virtual continents of accessible memory. The whiskey tumbler represented his point of stability. He teased his nether lip with the rim and continued.
'I looked for slaves, Marciana,' he resumed, 'and discovered that they were angels. The more I subjugated the submissive, the more I realised that it was myself who I was breaking. I would stand in a hot sweat after presenting the whip to compliant buttocks, and the object I had punished would leave the room unchanged. That was the light for me. I realised then that the victor is always the victim. But the real turning point came for me in an apartment on East 42nd Street. The girl was called Donna. I had hired her for corrective purposes, and because I liked her storm of red hair. Donna was no different to the thousands of girls I had disciplined over the centuries. The same mini-skirted, stereotyped appearance: the same calculating review of the client: the same vulnerability cased in a hard shell. I had seen all these girls as interchangeable: one with the other. The boys also.
‘But let me tell you what happened during the two hours in which I had paid for Donna's services. It's of direct relevance to our state now, as we prepare to leave the château for the Purple Room.'
With one hand behind her back Marciana inched her dress zip another fraction over her bottom, knowing that at some point in her brother's narrative she would stand up and walk free of the sequinned sheath on extravagant spike heels.
'That afternoon I saw a transformation occur in Donna, for which nothing in life had ever prepared me. The apartment was as you would expect tacky. Red drapes in a clinical leather cell. Donna's bottom conformed to the proportions which have always been my ideal. As I made inroads into her flesh with a bullwhip I noticed that try as I did I could leave no mark on her skin. Even the most savage of cuts made no track, despite the severity of the flogging.
‘What happened was that I found myself being humiliated by the inadequacy of my role. I knew that I was hitting somebody who wasn't there. In the process of trying to inflict pain I was alerting myself to the realisation that Donna inhabited an absent body. I was about to strike with renewed ferocity, when my arm froze in mid-movement. Donna had succeeded in effortlessly freeing herself from the complex knots with ,which I had roped her into bondage. I couldn't believe my eyes. It didn't seem possible to me that this was happening to the Marquis de Sade. Donna danced free across the room and shook her red hair out. But what I couldn't take about the whole unreal scenario, was the forgiving smile with which she confronted me.
‘There wasn't anything I could say. I was so unnerved by the experience that I turned on my heel and walked out of the apartment and straight into the elevator. Outside in the street I found myself still shaking... And as I continued walking down the street I had the feeling that a hand had succeeded in turning me round to face the light of a spectacular pink sunset. That Marciana was what I called my first realisation. What it triggered in me was not so much the modification of my sexual habits, as a realisation of the capacity for good within evil.'
Donatien stopped talking. It seemed to Marciana that her brother had laser-cut his way through the centuries, deleting everything insignificant in the process, and had arrived at this point in time with the truth he had discovered on that New York day in 1976. Marciana knew that it was partly on the strength of this truth that Donatien had revised the neuronal formulae which permitted him to constantly resample the DNA which they shared as a prophylactic against genetic breakdown. She knew that they would never experience natural death, and that once relocated to the Purple Room, they would live as posthuman cosmonauts able to travel between life and death at will.
Marciana felt the need within herself to be totally consumed by her brother. She wanted the escape velocity of his orgasm to enter her with the impacted combustion with which together they would torch the château. Over the years the interior passage through which he entered her had become the navigable geography of an infinitely extensible tunnel. Marciana knew her brother as someone engaged on a journey to the centre of the underworld. She was that place, and she lived with the expectation of their two lives meeting at this physical juncture.
Donatien had switched off all the monitors in the room, even the maxi-screen fitted into the ceiling above the bed. Periodically he checked a small digital implant in his wrist, the watch-sized screen providing him with access to his private neuronal database. It was to a read-out of his personal biology that Donatien turned, before once again giving his attention to his sister.
Marciana imperceptibly inched the dress zip over her bottom. She was ready. She sat on the edge of the sumptuously purple bed, and narrowed her stockinged toes into leather points. She had chosen strappy silver sandals with six inch heels as the pivotal constructs to give lift to her bottom. She got up slowly from the bed, and stood in the constriction of her sequinned sheath like a flower forcing free of a tight bud. With forbidding detachment from the whole scene, Donatien mobiled for Nina to come into the room and assist Marciana in disengaging from her dress.
Nina came in wearing a pink sequinned choker and matching hot pants. She bowed low to the floor in homage to Donatien before working with intimately light fingers to free Marciana from her seam-splitting dress. Marciana stood with her figure windowed by a green see-through bra and nude-coloured see-through panties. She remained with her back to Donatien knowing that his whole concentrated attention would be focused on her bottom. Her purple silk suspender belt flared at the hips, the taut straps keeping two pencil-line seamed stockings resonating to the contours of her legs. Marciana conformed so fully to Donatien's deal of the body as aesthetic construct that at times she believed she had no autonomous existence of her own, and she was simply an image escaped from her brother's head. She remembered how he had told her over and over that the entrance to her bottom symbolised for him the blindside door in the château's left wing which he had always called the slave door, on account of its being used to bring rent boys into the château on autumn days.
After Nina had supplied Donatien with four night pills called Cryoglitz, she was required to read brother and sister a short erotic story, the theme having been set by Donatien. According to an established ritual Nina had to remove her hotpants, and read out her story while sitting on Donatien's lap. She made a customary elaborate display of removing the garment, and dressed in snugly fitting black silk panties arranged herself on the Marquis's protrusive crotch. She announced the title of her story as ‘Sinbad And Nicole', which strongly hinted at the autobiographical components buried in the narrative, and was prompted by Donatien to begin.
‘Sinbad lived on a houseboat on the Seine. He was a man who claimed to have spent the first twenty of his thirty years at sea. In fact he had been born five miles North West of Ecuador on a cargo ship tramping into port one blustery equinoctial day. And even as a child he was renowned for the indomitable size of his penis. It was said that before Sinbad had his penis operated on he could swing it round his neck and have it hang there like a curious item of jewellery. It resembled a fleshy liana, and in his pubescent years Sinbad was in danger of waking up to find himself strangled by his torso-climbing penis. And if the length was a questionable asset, then the girth was prohibitively incomparable. By the age of seventeen Sinbad had built muscles from masturbation. Unable to find any orifice wide enough to accommodate his penis, he was reduced to the role of solitary onanist. He had rhinestones sit in the tissued walls of his cock, and tattoos frescoed on the head.
‘Sinbad liked to walk around alleys leading to the river. His father, a retired sea captain had returned to the family house in Paris, and nightly he would entertain his son with stories of his maritime adventures on the high seas. Sinbad's mother being dead, his father had remarried, and had taken for his wife a sultry Parisian blonde called Nicole. Nicole in her tight skirts and with her mascara-blackened eyes exuded an air of smoky eroticism. Several times Sinbad had felt her eyes jump to his massively protuberan
t groin, and on one occasion going up the stairs behind her, she had turned round and looked at him in a way that was a clear invitation for him to join her in the bedroom.
‘Sinbad's father was out most of the day, for he liked to meet friends in local cafés, and to talk politics and machismo to his friends. As Sinbad was provided for, he spent much of his time working on his columnar muscle, inexhaustibly fisting his prize and cultivating fantasies which kept him hard all day. Such was his expertise in methods of ejaculation that he grew adept at writing with his semen as he came. He soon found himself tracing out actual names with his come, and the word Nicole glittered and solidified on his bedroom wall.
‘Nicole too was bored, and with the exception of having girlfriends over for coffee, stayed in her bedroom most of the day, reading, or as Sinbad surmised from her attention to detail, making up. His father paid little attention to his wife's feline mystique, and Sinbad began to track Nicole's constricted walk, whenever he encountered her in the house. Sometimes he would stand outside her bedroom door and inhale the perfumed sensuality which hung outside as an erotic signature to her curtained den.
‘Early one afternoon, after his father had gone off to his usual bar, Sinbad heard a note being slid under his door. The folded piece of paper was of course from Nicole, and she asked if Sinbad would come to her room to assist her in replacing a light bulb which seemed to resist its fixture.
‘When Sinbad knocked on her door, there was a playful flurry in Nicole's voice, which suggested that he had caught her in a state of undress. She giggled with exaggerated femininity, told him to come in, and before there was time for her to slip on a black kimono, Sinbad caught the delicious rear view of Nicole in impossibly sheer panties. "I was just changing," was her immediate excuse. "I've got to go out and meet a friend."
