Phoenix Café

by Gwyneth Jones

  “Lick them up.”

  She tasted nothing but the salt of human skin.

  “You don’t need a Buonarotti engine,” he said, licking up his own share, “to take you to another world. It happens all the time. You step over a line and you’re somewhere else. You don’t know how it happened, and you may never find your way back.” His eyes gleamed. “Take off your clothes.”

  She had accepted that there would be no excess. No whips, no manacles, no props, no violence. She would not be beaten, or chained up, or left to lie in shit and piss in a solitary cell. She would not be mutilated, burned, electrocuted, gang-raped, tortured. Made to eat her own feces, forced to watch as her lovers and children were violated and slaughtered. There must be nothing that might rouse an instinctive resistance. No humiliation so crude as to restore her dignity. But what there was, was not enough. That brusque, brief penetration, (in spite of her pleading; without a single gesture of affection) was becoming stale. Since he’d introduced this room into their pattern she’d been hoping for something more. She obeyed, trembling with anticipation; and knelt facing him on the bed. He reached out and pushed at her shoulder: the autistic gesture, void of contact. She lay flat.

  “Lie with your knees up. Lift your head. The foam will prop your shoulders, it’s smart. Keep looking at me. I want to see your cunt and your face.”

  He bent forward with an expression of awe: almost of humility. He examined her genitals with his fingertips, pulling the furred petals of flesh apart to reveal the darker inner folds. He probed the whorled, hooded arrowhead, and traced a line down the shaft of the arrow to the slightly reddened slit of the female opening. She imagined what he saw. A woman’s sex is not simple and contained like a man’s. Folded and infolded, it emphasizes surface, extension, irreducible difference. It is the whole limitless world turned into a soft, vulnerable rosy plaything. Misha eased two fingers inside, looking her in the face.

  “Now masturbate.”

  “I can’t,” whispered Catherine. “I’ve tried. It doesn’t work.”

  “Try again.”

  She began. Her fingers were cold and clumsy.

  “Keep looking at me,” he ordered, “as long as you can.”

  She knew why he wanted her to masturbate. He had forced her whenever he wanted to, but she had been a bystander. She had only been half raped; only half humiliated. She had to participate. That had to be the next step. Her face had begun to flush; there was a burning pressure in her nipples, in the furred mound and the folds of those petals. It was not her own awkward fingers that started this response. It was Misha’s cold gaze, the way he was dressed and she was naked, the way she was exposed, negated, handled like a dead thing.

  “This is wrong,” she whimpered. “I can’t do this. Please don’t make me.”

  “You don’t have to do much. Just keep playing with yourself.”

  Touched her. Catherine started and looked around, bewildered. Two hands had gripped her shoulders: big hands, a man’s hands. There was nothing, only empty air. A mouth brushed against hers, vanished, returned. She could see nothing. The tip of a tongue probed between her lips, withdrew, thrust deeper. Her mouth opened, the thrusting fell into a pumping rhythm; she was being mouth-fucked. The hands slid from her shoulders to her breasts, the mouth fuck went on. The claw, the male member of her invisible assailant, nudged at the mouth of her sex-opening and vanished, nudged and vanished, while the mouth fuck continued and her nipples were sucked and bitten. She tried not to respond; she could not help herself. She heard herself gasping: oh please, oh please. She was sobbing, desperate, thighs spread taut and spine arced, agonizingly open. The claw slid in, and vanished again; slid in, and vanished. Oh please, oh please. The desperation was beyond words. She heard Misha laugh. She saw herself, a last image far away, falling on the dusty floor: howling, mouth wide, head fallen back with her hair in the dust, crawling backward on her knees like a contorted insect with her sex-mound thrust upward: avid, abject, frantic…

  When she came to herself she was sitting against the wall in a corner of the room: covered in drying sweat, and shivering in huge belly-deep tremors. She’d bitten through her lip. It was stinging: she tasted blood. Misha lay on the bed, watching. He was still dressed but he too had been sweating hard. His clothes were open. He wiped his claw with a handful of filmy tissue.

  “That’s paper flowers. D’you like it?”

  He rolled over on his back, “Oh God. Synthesized and purified, straight to the brain. With any other drug, a little part of you stays conscious, still hurting, however high you are. Sex is the best, it wipes the slate. I’ve never tried the legendary heroin but I bet sex beats it. I bet fucking, now we’ve got it properly refined, beats the fuck out of heroin. What do you think?”

  She couldn’t answer. She didn’t know if she was ever going to speak again. Misha came and picked her up and carried her to the slab of foam. Even in the necessary closeness of this action, in their shared exhaustion and the warm smell of bodily fluids, there was no lapse into tenderness. No contact. He laid her down and lay beside her. She was still shivering. He turned her on her side, with her arms behind her. He parted her thighs with one hand, holding her wrists in the other, and drove his new erection up into her from behind: “Cunt,” he muttered, childishly intent on the word, “cunt cunt cunt.”

  When he’d finished Catherine waited for a while, then moved herself to the other side of the bed. The room was warm but she was cold. She wrapped some of her discarded clothes around her. Now he would sleep and she would wait. He would get up, she would dress; he would put her in a cab and send her home. She tried to doze, listening to the chirping sparrows, the rustle of pigeons’ wings. It was no use. The dangerous moment had come. She could not stop herself from thinking: this is ridiculous. One cannot take punishment as an epicurean pleasure. And the spell was broken.

  “Misha?”

  “Hmm?”

  She sighed (feeling it leave her, goodbye to a strange interlude: nothing lasts). “Misha, why are you doing this to me?”

  She felt him recoil, outraged by this betrayal, but she persisted.

  “We know my history, whether I’m an Aleutian in a human body or a poor deluded human girl. The person I think I am raped Johnny Guglioli and started the whole shameful process of Aleutian rule on earth. I raped, I want to be raped. Even after three lifetimes I can’t let it go. That explains me. What about you? I know Traditionalist society is strange, I know there are pressures. But we were friends, and what you are doing to me is not friendly, not on any terms. Why do you want to be the rapist? What is your problem?”

  He had rolled over to look at her. He lay back, covering his eyes.

  “Do you think I’m Johnny Guglioli?”

  “What?”

  “When I do it to you. Do you believe I’m Johnny getting his own back?”

  Catherine sat up, pulling the chador around her.

  “I was fifteen,” she said. “All right, I was an immortal visitor from an alien star system, and our years are not your years, but forget the technical details. Think of it. A kid, a teenager, captain of a spaceplane privateer, with a crew of dashing, adventurous adults calling him Sir and Lord Clavel. Deferring to him, taking orders, loving him. I’m not really a Lord of Aleutia. I’ve told you this before. I use articulate language, which separates me from our Silent majority, the ones who process the world with their bodily secretions. Who sometimes get very rich and who are often in charge, which you people find mysterious, though it happens as often here. I’m a Signifier: I have followers. I rarely have to work for a living. There are people who are prepared to give me food and service and whatever is passing for money whenever I appear, and all I have to do in return is be Clavel. Don’t ask me why. But I’m not important. The most I am, to my Brood, is a notorious nuisance. I was fifteen, a poet: a minor-celebrity brat who’d joined forces with the buccaneers. I saw Johnny Guglioli in a café one day, and I fell in love. I thought Johnny was older than he was.
I thought he was my Daddy, my true parent: another me but older, wiser. We’re expected to look for lovers in the older or younger generation. Ideally, we’re supposed to be looking for another self, a twin soul. According to our popular science the same embryo won’t develop twice in a generation, we are not born if we are already living, so it’s a hopeless romantic fraud: I mean it never happens. But nothing like the way I felt then had ever happened to me before, so I was convinced. Don’t ask me how I thought my double had been born on this unknown planet ‘three thousand light years from home.’ I suppose I believed, same as Peenemünde Buonarotti, that there is only one species of intelligence in the cosmos, and therefore Johnny and I might truly be fated lovers. It made sense to me at the time. Later we got together, we three landing party crews, and devised an elaborate scam involving our supposed super-powers and the faster-than-light drive you were sure we possessed. I helped to plan it. Then I didn’t like the way things were shaping so I went to look for Johnny.

  “What we do when we lie down together doesn’t trigger pregnancy. But it means something like the same for us as it does for you: it’s about bio-chemical communication. The little social gestures where we exchange our wandering cells are a repressed, diluted hint of what happens in lying down. Your claw and your lover’s claw grappling, your two cups opened and spread wide, those inner surfaces running, melting, streaming into each other. I thought if I lay down with Johnny it would solve everything. I would flood him with Aleutia and he would pour Earth into me. The information we exchanged would pass from us into both communities, there’d be no more deception. I found my way to his room in London. It was a rainy night in September, the air smelled of drenched dust; air full of water instead of life, it tasted of grief. I’d never seen a human without clothes on. I believed our minds were the same; I didn’t know our bodies were different. I told him that I loved him. He said, get away from me you monster, but I took no notice.

  “I remember it as if it were yesterday. Sometimes I know everything that followed would have happened anyway. You’d have had your catastrophic Gender Wars, ruined your own weather systems, destroyed your own living space. Sometimes I know it was all our fault: our doing, my doing. Maybe I’m crazy. What do I care whether I’m crazy or not? The rape continues. I can’t stop it so I want to be raped too. To be abused, humiliated, despised by someone who should have been my friend. What was the question? No, I don’t think you’re Johnny. It never crossed my mind. I don’t care who you are. You’ll do.”

  She turned to him, eyes narrowed. “Was I supposed to think you were Johnny? Is that what all this has been about?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “It doesn’t matter at all.” She had dropped into the Aleutian crouch—a gesture of flight, aborted. She sat up again, intent on her story.

  “In my next life, as you know, I had my artisans build a hybrid, something that was supposed to be a Johnny who would love me; using an Aleutian host, and his identity, to disguise what I’d done. That was Bella, and that’s partly why I had this done to myself. To make reparation. When I knew I hadn’t created what I wanted, I took to hanging around the gaming hells here in Old Earth. I’d pick up young halfcaste gamers, the younger the better. I’d pretend they were what Bella was supposed to be: my true child, my Johnny born again. I’d take them home and make them act out the rape with me. I was addicted to my guilt; I didn’t care what I was doing to the children. Did you know about that, too?”

  “I think you’re being hard on yourself.”

  “Think what you like. I was there, you weren’t. I mean it doesn’t matter. Whether I’m brainwashed or I’m the real Third Captain, you can’t treat me worse than I want to be treated. Because of the things I’ve done, and because the rape goes on. But don’t you have anything better to do with your time?”

  “I used to write to you,” said Misha. “Years ago, I used to send messages to you: Kevala the Pure One, the great Aleutian poet. I wanted to know about your art, the images you made, the human artists you’d known. The records and pictures and stuff you’d seen that I could never see in the real, because the War had destroyed them. I wanted you to teach me. I don’t know what I was talking to: a piece of software cobbled up from press releases, some halfcaste who believed he was your incarnation. There are so many kinds of simulacra on the grid. There’s a whole virtual Madame Tussaud’s in there, if you know what that means. Whatever you were, you answered me kindly. From a great height. You were very sweetly condescending.”

  Catherine had begun to cry. She wiped the tears with her fingers. “It wasn’t me.”

  “It didn’t talk much like you.”

  “Is that why you rape me? Because a grid persona was condescending?”

  “Does what we do need so much discussion? I do it. You like it.”

  She lay down. They lay facing each other, not touching.

  “Misha,” she said, “I hate to sound grown-up and responsible, but I have to ask. What you do with me…have you done it to anybody else? Have you done anything worse?”

  He flushed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t…. I’d never done it with another person, in the real, before I did it to you.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Straight up,” he confessed, sulkily. “I was a virgin. What’s it to you?”

  “Well, that could explain a lot!” She sighed in relief. “I think I believe you. That’s good news. That’s a weight off my mind.”

  “I know you like it. I may be very young, Miss Alien, but I can tell. If you refuse to move a funxing muscle you still get wet. And you can’t stop the stuff inside from moving when you come. Why don’t we just say we both want this?”

  The charcoal masses of her hair fell forward. She pushed them back again. They looked at each other as if each was staring into a mirror: without tenderness, without surrender but with knowledge and complicity. At last Catherine turned from him. She began to dress.

  “I’ll be out of town for a while,” he said. “We’re going to spend some time in the Atlantic Forest. I’ve asked my father to invite you to visit us, at the Warden’s Lodge. You ought to come. You might even like my father. He’s interesting. Will you come?”

  “Will I meet your sister?”

  “She’ll be there. I don’t know if you’ll see her. She’s a bit of a hermit.”

  It struck her, alone in her cab on the way home, that he had not answered the other question she’d asked: though in the silent subtext of their relationship he had admitted a thousand times that he was in desperate trouble. Perhaps the invitation was his answer. You want to know what’s up? Come and see.

  Maitri was in the atrium, pretending to admire a planter of giant orchids. His embroidered robe of maroon and silver, gorgeous as the flowers, stood around him like a splendid company of courtiers. He smiled as she came in: a smile so warm, so ruefully tender that Catherine had to laugh.

  “Why are you looking at me like that? Am I such a pitiful spectacle?”

  “Not at all.” He held out his hands. “You look remarkably well.”

  She sat at his feet, resting her cheek against the deep red robe. She touched her lip, it was already healing.

  “I do worry,” confessed Maitri, in his best maiden-aunt style. “The intercommunal violence is not directed against Aleutians, so far. But you don’t look like an Aleutian, especially not in those clothes, charming though they are. I wish the Departure was over and done with, so we could calm down. But at least we can feel that you are safe with Michael.”

  Catherine chuckled. “Did you know he’s a junkie?”

  The ageing adventurer was neither shocked nor surprised.

  “He is? I suppose it’s ‘testo,’ the sex drug. One hears about that.”

  “The stuff I had tonight was some kind of cocktail, involving void-forces wizardry I don’t begin to understand. But sex hormones were a large part of it.”

  “Was it good?”

  “Unb
elievably good, my dear guardian. Rather horrible, but very good indeed.”

  “Can you get me some?”

  “Certainly not! It wouldn’t work on your chemistry, anyway.”

  The indoor fountain murmured, palms and ferns stirred softly in the cool, hazy air. Maitri inquired delicately, “So, without wishing to be prurient: I am wishing to be prurient but one must make concessions to the good taste of sensitive people…. You take your cocktail, and then you lie down together?”

  “Sort of,” agreed Catherine. “But not at all. It isn’t like lying down. It’s almost the opposite. There’s no contact, zero communication. You’re completely alone, and possessed by an appetite, a greed of such power and desperation that nothing else exists.”

  “There never is any contact between humans, lying down or any other way. Not in our sense of the term.” Maitri winced at his own lapse. “I know I’m not supposed to say things like that, but I’m getting old and loose-mouthed.”

  Catherine shrugged and smiled, one finger tracing a path of knotted silver in plum-shadowed folds. “You are getting old, and taking refuge in commonplace opinions. I’m sure humans make love, and love each other, all the ways that we do. Even now, even now. But this is sex, distilled and purified. It has no affect at all. It’s an engine, an engine and a fire. It burns. When you take sex as a drug—as we did, Misha and I—you become a machine. You become one with mindless life, with not-self. It’s extraordinarily violent, and in a way transcendent. Think of their cults. Especially the Christian cult.”

  “My least favorite of your enthusiasms. Those horrible incunabula!”

  “Horrible, yes. The lives of the saints, gruesome ‘miracles’ of disease and suffering and mutilation. It all seems so disgusting and meaningless until you realize how their world is saturated by disease and suffering and death. Then you understand that even spiritual joy has to take the same imprint. We’ve always found their obsession with sex grotesque: we felt like that from the start, when we thought sex was the same thing as lying down. But it isn’t, it’s the mindless engine of territorial expansion; which has become their engine of destruction. They know that, they’ve known it for a long time. How can they stop thinking about this destroying angel? How can they ever think about anything else? We stopped the Gender War, but the obsession just went underground. It comes out in everything they do when we aren’t looking—”