In his loins Adam could feel all nature stirring. He watched Eve feast upon her maker. Her swollen arms barely bent at the elbows. Her chubby fingers could hardly close around the cock of the crucified lord. He saw the spread of her legs, the beads of moisture on her pubic hair, the exquisite anus playing hide and seek with him as her butt-cheeks writhed.
He’d never had that anus, never particularly wanted it until now. But now it drew his every attention, closed out all other sights, urged his feet forward. Nestling his manhood between her buttocks, he touched his cocktip to the tight centerpoint.
Eve, without ceasing her oral ministrations, swiveled her hips to signal her consent to Adam’s penetration. Adam spat on his palms, slicked along the length of his erection, and eased into the depths of his beloved wife’s derriere.
Eve leaned against God’s womanly thighs. She could feel his balls tighten toward orgasm. His pre-ejaculate oozed free and gradual into her mouth, delighting beyond measure her taste buds. Between her cheeks, back where things grew narrow, she could feel her husband fill her full to gasping with his erect flesh.
And now, coiling up her left leg came the Serpent. She supposed he’d stop and speak to her, perhaps egg her on.
Instead he parted the pink petals of her womanhood and began to fuck her with his head. Glancing down, she saw the slick, criss-crossed snakeskin move rhythmically in and out of her, coated now with her lovejuice.
Eve felt deliriously stuffed. God’s crimped thatch tickled against her forehead like the gentle brush of a breeze. His tool tasted like the cock of all creativity on her tongue. Down below, lesser life forms pulsed out their polyrhythms, readying fecund liquids.
In at her ears now crept the murmurings of nature, until then silent with reverence. Now there was growing excitement in the air. Rising to voracious receptivity, drawing her three seminarians up to a mindless frenzy of seed-spilling, Eve heard all nature twitter and roar and rustle in sympathy.
Almost there now.
Almost home.
Then the floodgates burst on all fronts at once. Her husband bit into her shoulder and juiced her from behind. The Serpent, rippling from tail to head, vomited gobbets of forbidden fruit into her womb. And from the sides of her mouth, gouts of godsperm gushed, so voluminous was the deity’s discharge, so impossible the task of swallowing it all.
The fluids roiled inside her, coming together at her very core. Up she swelled, backing off from the tree and squeezing Adam and the Serpent out of her. Inside she was all generation.
She could feel the teeming zygotes spring and swirl within, latching onto bone and organ, tapping into spirit, jittering through ontogeny like manic nuns fingering rosaries, like prayer wheels gone wild.
As she blimped up, her lungs drew in air unceasing. Just when it seemed that inhalation might be Eve’s eternal curse, the gates of Eden burst open outward, and screams and infants began to shoot forth from her. Bright balls of every color they were, these kids. Out they flew, slick with vernix and hugging their afterbirths to them. Red ones, green ones, black and brown and orange ones; some as clear as glass, all shades conceivable and many that were not. Through the lips of her quim and out the gates of Eden they spun and tumbled, scattered by the winds of chance hither and yon over the earth to flourish or starve at destiny’s whim.
When the grand exodus was over and the last humanoid hopeful—deep purple and no thicker than a thumb—zinged out of Eve and careered off who knew where, she lay there steeped in sweat and panting with exultation. Eve was fat no more, but restored to svelte. So, she noted, was Adam, whose outpouring of spunk had spent in the exertion his store of blubber. He helped her to her feet and gave her a round, resounding hug.
“Time to go, honey,” he said.
She nodded, looked down, hesitated. Then, to the Serpent, wrapped round the base of the tree: “You coming with us?”
“No thanks, pretty one,” he said. “My place is with him.”
He slipped into God’s fundament, coiled inside his large intestine (whose length he matched perfectly), and fell asleep for all eternity.
Above, head snapped back from collarbone loll, God roared in anguish.
Adam took Eve by the hand, smiled, and led her toward the open gates. “The world’s our oyster, Eve. What say we have it on the half-shell?”
She held back. “What about God?”
“We’re beyond all that now, you and me,” he scoffed.
“Let our progeny create deities if they must. As for us, I think secular humanism suits us better.”
“Ugh, that sounds dreadful,” Eve objected. “If we’re going to call ourselves something, let it be something we can feel proud of, something with a ring to it.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. Let’s see.” She thought a moment, then brightened. “How about sacred universalists?”
“Sacred what?”
“Universalists,” said Eve, warming to it. “Because absolutely everything we see and know and touch or even think or fantasize about is shot through and through with the awful light of divinity.”
Adam smiled bitterly. “Everything but this green mausoleum we’ve been cooped up in.” He gestured, like a man gone mad, about the Earthly Paradise. In this fallen world of ours, dear reader, the life of every human male demands its adamantine core of resentment, its refusal to forgive, the galling pill stuck eternally in its proud male throat. Adam found his in Eden, hung on a tree and suffering clear to the walls. “Come on, Eve. Let’s go find our sons and daughters.”
Eve nodded, her eyes lowered. But the aftertaste of God hung like temptation upon her tongue.
“Don’t leave me,” came his agonized whisper.
Pausing at the gates, Adam frowned up at the tree. Then he cocked his head toward the animals, watched them gallop and slither and lope and lumber past him, and slammed the gates of Eden shut with a resounding clang. The echo rang in Eve’s ears long after Eden dropped below the horizon, and the vision of her lord’s twisted limbs hung tantalizingly before her inner eye.
Much later, when she’d had her fill of Adam, Eve set off on her own to regain Eden. And yet, though she looked ever and anon with a light heart and a hopeful mien, her search, in the end, proved fruitless.
ONE FLESH: A CAUTIONARY TALE
We admit it. There’s a right way and a wrong way to bring one’s loving lady into conformity with the image of womanly perfection that burns bright in every man’s heart. Dad and me, we went about it the wrong way. That’s clear to us now, after all the grief that came pelting down into our lives when half the Sacramento police force jackbooted their way through our front door and kept us from further satisfying our desires, modest as they were, on the naked limbs of our composite wife.
But it’s our feeling that before the state—that vast motherless bastion of rectitude and righteousness—unlocks our cell to dead-march us along its sexless corridor, then to mumble piety into us from the mercy-thin pages of its Holy Bible, cinch us down snug and secure, and hiss open its gas jets to pack us off to the next life, we owe it to the rest of you idolatrous cockwielders out there to pass on the lesson we learned. Does that sound agreeable to you, Dad? Dad, I’m talking to you! He says it does.
It began with a birth, nearly nineteen years ago, on the night of February 15th, 1970. My dear wife Rhonda was all of twenty-one then, amber of eye and huge of breast, vivacious, fun-loving, ever faithful to me in spite of my shortcomings and the handful of cunt-hungry mongrels that always seemed to be sniffing about her skirts. Lovely as life itself was Rhonda, and carrying our son.
My folks came down from Chico in mid-January to help with last-minute preparations; they were radiant with love for us both and just itching to be grandparents. Rhonda’s mother, Wilma Flannery, flew in from Iowa to be with “her precious baby” in her finest hour. She was one eccentric biddy, my mother-in-law, old and wizened at fifty. Her husband had left her soon after Rhonda was born, never to be heard from again.
/> That didn’t surprise me and I don’t think it surprised Rhonda either. Although I wished Wilma had stayed in Oskaloosa, I did my level best to ignore her high-pitched demands and irritating ways and focus all my attention on Rhonda.
My wife’s projected delivery date was Washington’s Birthday, and around a quiet dinner one night at Mario’s, my mom and especially my dad—Oh come off it, Dad, you know you did!—teased us about it, threatening to call their grandchild George or Georgina in honor of the man on the dollar. Rhonda’s mother sat hunched over her plate, wolfing down tortellini. Good food always seemed to shut dear old Wilma up for a while.
As it happened, the baby arrived ahead of schedule. On the afternoon of the 15th, Rhonda and the two older women, wanting some girl-time alone, talked me and Dad into a night on the town. Before they booted us out into the light drizzle that had begun to come down, I pinned a hastily scrawled itinerary on the kitchen corkboard, just in case: dinner and drinks at California Fats, then a late-night showing of Psycho at the Tower. Dad and I were fond of Hitchcock movies back then. And after the accident that brought us together, we loved them even more.
The call came halfway through dinner. We’d done more drinking than eating, a lot more. Three swallows of wine to every forkful of food, I’d guess. Ordinarily we’d have thought twice about taking to the highway with that much alcohol in our veins. But I was determined to be right there by Rhonda’s side when my baby was born, and judging from Mom’s babbling over the phone from the hospital, we had no time to waste thinking about what was safe and what wasn’t. So we threw some bills on the table, staggered together to my VW van, ramped up onto Highway 50, and five minutes later—in a passing maneuver that would have meant certain death at high noon on a bone-dry road with a teetotaling priest behind the wheel—we rammed into the back end of a screeching Raley’s truck and felt for one mercifully brief instant the twin agonies of metal-mangled flesh and bone from the front and the whomp and sizzle of a fireball engulfing us from the rear.
If the notations of the hospital staff present at my son’s delivery were correct, our precise time of death was 7:41
p.m. There was tightness everywhere and a painful sliding and then suddenly the chill of freedom. We were somehow nakedly intertwined, my dad and I. When the shock of the cold was blanketed away and sweet warm milk filled our mouth and soothed our belly, we bleared open our eyes and were astounded to see a gigantic Rhonda-face beaming down at us.
We tried to call out to her, but our mouth was full of nipple and our body throbbed and the blankets felt so warm and cozy around us that we soon drifted off. When we awoke, nothing but baby sounds came out of us, no matter how carefully we tried to speak. When Dad saw his wife Arlene (my mom) smiling down at us, I couldn’t help but feel his sadness and his frustration, and we wailed with our whole being and fisted our tiny fists and did our best to squeeze every cubic inch of air out of our little lungs with each scream. But just when we thought merciful death might reclaim us, the air came rushing back in and the cruel joke continued.
Our name was Jason. I’d picked it out myself, not because it was popular—the J-names were only starting to catch on back then—but from a love of Greek mythology. It hadn’t been high on Rhonda’s list, but she relented in exchange for my agreeing to the name Amy Lou if it was a daughter. Yes Dad I know, you’ve told me many times how glad you are we weren’t born female.
The newspapers call us Jason Cooper, of course. But Dad and I kept up the use of our old names with each other while we endured the long frustration of babyhood, waiting for my son’s body to develop the motor skills to support intelligible speech. For the record, my name is Richard and his is Clarence. The state can believe it’s gassing somebody named Jason if it wants to, but I’m telling you there never was any such person, leastways not one with an identity separate and distinct from me and my father. We suspect most reincarnates, being singletons, forget who they were and simply fall for the new identity their mom and dad foist upon them. But we, as doubles, were able to keep Richard and Clarence alive inside the putative Jason we might otherwise have become.
After word of the accident reached them, Arlene stayed on longer than she’d planned with Rhonda. The two women comforted each other in mourning our deaths, but their joy in Jason’s upbringing brought his mother and grandmother even closer. Arlene eventually sold her home in Chico and moved in with Rachel. Wilma, on the other hand, was spooked by death. She gave her daughter a motherly thump on the brow, glared down at baby Jason, shuddered, crossed herself, and boarded the first plane back to the Midwest.
We’re telling you all this because there’s no way you can understand why we did what we did unless you know who we are and what it was like growing up this way. But for our own peace of mind, we’ll spare you those details. Suffice it to say that we did not like being dictated to by the women we loved. By the time we were able to talk, we realized that no one was going to believe our story and that even if they did, some agency would take us away from Arlene and Rhonda for a lifetime of cold scrutiny. So we kept mum—and thereby kept Mom and Grandmom too, if you’ll pardon our humor. Our greatest challenge was chasing away erectile manfriends, but a bit of strategic mayhem beyond our years and one or two well-calculated glances from hell kept the motherfucking to a minimum.
Our infancy and toddlerdom and childhood weren’t the worst of it by any means. When puberty struck, we nearly went crazy. We’d both forgotten—given the sleep of the hairless genital in childhood—what it feels like when the hormones surge up for the first time, raging and roaring like typhoons through an adolescent body. And it was even worse for us because we understood from the outset what it all meant. As for girls our own age, our grown-up manner fascinated adults but kept our peers ever adversarial; besides which we neither of us felt much propensity toward pedophilia. So their chests filled out and their thighs went soft and curvy and they got that self-conscious wary look about their tender faces, but Dad and I paid them no mind. Understand our dilemma: The women we loved we’d already married. They lived right down the hall from us, growing no younger as the clock stole away moment after moment. And our enthusiastic young cock—sprouting thick curls of brown hair all around and popping up far fatter and longer, we were pleased to note, than either of us had been in our truck-crushed, fire-whomped bodies—took to them like a compass needle takes to magnetic north.
It was touch and go for a while, learning to feel okay about jacking Jason off. I’d hidden that sort of thing from Dad, and he never talked to me about the ins and outs of lovemaking and the rest of it except when I reached ten and he muttered something about “sex rearing its ugly head” and tossed some bland vaguely Presbyterian book of cautions and platitudes in my lap. And we were father and son after all, engaging in what felt, the first couple of times, uncomfortably like homosexuality. But we made the necessary adjustments in our thinking—one always does to get what one’s body craves—and relaxed into it like the old hands we were.
But ever and always, Arlene and Rhonda moved through the house, and we had to be on our guard not to be caught leering at them and not to demonstrate anything more than filial and grandfilial affection. We buried ourselves in bookishness, skipping over the stuff we recalled from our previous schooling and delving into new areas of knowledge with a depth that astounded our teachers and made us the loathed bespectacled pariah of the class of ’88. With our stratospheric SAT scores and the enthusiastic support of the Hiram Johnson faculty, we wowed our way into Berkeley and began work toward a degree in 20th century history—we had, after all, lived through most of it, and current affairs had always been our strong suit.
It was in American History that we met Lorelei Meeks, she of the owl eyes and large glasses, breastless, thin as a rail, blank of face, and devoid of personality. Lorelei was a non-entity, a vacuum of need, a woman who faded into every background. Her body begged to be written upon and we, with our fat fountain-pen full of sperm, scribbled all over her.
At Thanksgiving we brought her home.
We thought we could divert our river of rage onto our wispy girlfriend. We thought that having a receptacle we could empty our lust into any time we liked would lessen our desire for our former spouses or at least allow us to keep it under control. But we were wrong, as wrong as a Biblethumper. We found out just how wrong when the front door swung open and our two beloved soulmates, all smiles, welcomed Jason and his dear Lorelei into the home Rhonda and I had built in the spring of ’71.
While we sat in the living room, going through the maddening ritual of “introducing the girlfriend to the family,” all sorts of bells and whistles were going off inside our head.
My dad stole glances at Arlene, her hair gone white now, dignified lines of age making more lovely the face he hadn’t caressed as a lover for nearly twenty years. She seemed genuinely spritely in her deep blue dress and her pearls, and her short white hair hugged her head just so. But I was in agony over Rhonda, looking sexier than ever at forty, stylish in her washed-out jeans and bulky breast-defining sweater. Her hair tumbled long and blond down her back, soft and springy and natural in a way that brought to mind her blond pubic softness and the sweet pink labia so long denied me. Thank God they ignored Jason, choosing instead to pour their endearments into the smiling nullity that sat, legs crossed, nervously beside him on the couch.
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