Dark Matter (Modern Erotic Classics)

by Michael Perkins

  Laura Aurora whispered in Robin’s ear: “Dominique is a big star in porno movies, you know. She was married to Star years ago.”

  Dominique’s body was wrapped in chains light enough to allow free movement, and they were arranged so that her perfect breasts and buttocks were exposed.

  Iolanthe’s muscular thighs gaped wide, and she was straining her face red, puffing with the effort of delivery. Her groans grew louder and also more masculine, and Dominique busied herself between her wife’s thighs. Her bottom wiggled enticingly as she assisted in the birth.

  What she at last pulled forth, with the appropriate savage reverence for the ritual, was a large piece of bloody meat. She placed it carefully on lolanthe’s breasts and then left the table for a moment. When she returned, she wore a harness around her waist to which was strapped not a dildo but a blow torch. She took the bloody meat from Iolanthe’s chest and held it aloft for all to see its dripping reality. Then she lowered it into the blow torch flame.

  Meat seared, the smell of burning flesh rose in the air. In the silence there was only the gassy breathing of the blow torch. Stomachs turned. Someone screamed.

  Robin felt people looking at her and remembered what Laura had said, that in some way this ritual was for her. But it was for all of them. By it, Dominique and Iolanthe celebrated the birth of their love. It was sustenance for Baron and Laura Aurora, and for two skinny junkie girls who knelt before Dominique and opened their mouths like hungry birds. The meat blood of the cannibal sacrifice ran down their chins and trickled across their parsimonious chests. They chewed and sucked noisily and Robin felt her stomach protest again.

  But Laura Aurora smiled, a mother lion watching her cubs play with a piece of antelope meat. She gave Robin a satisfied, slow wink. The gesture had the oddly endearing effect of half shutting her other eye.

  “Just another night at the end of time,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is the year a lot of people like your father say is the last year of the world. Judgement Day is coming.”

  “Well, it may be his last year.”

  “You’re dangerous, Robin. You’ve made your eyes opaque, so I can’t look inside.”

  Before Robin could reply, I’m afraid of what you might find, Baron appeared wearing a turban through which blood still oozed.

  “Life is beautiful when you wear a crown,” he said, beaming and flashing his perfect white teeth. He was three or four sexes at home in the same body, operating with a self-confidence Robin had never encountered. He was happy, she saw. Truly happy.

  Laura Aurora kissed her husband and knelt to take Baron’s strap-on dildo into her mouth. The rubber glistened wetly after she’d paid her tribute. She stood, wiping her lips.

  “You look like you’re praying,” Robin told her.

  “This is more fun. I like to take advantage of every opportunity. ‘The wheel might not come round again,’ my grandmother used to say.”

  “My grandmother must have known your grandmother.”

  “My grandmother was Russian. She was a radical — a believer in free love. People thought she was crazy.” She laughed. “Don’t tell me our genes don’t control us — we even inherit our desires.”

  “I don’t think so. I’m not like my father.”

  “Your mother then?”

  “I suppose so,” Robin agreed, thinking: such a slut!

  “You see? It’s a good thing Baron and I don’t have kids!”

  “Men are different.”

  “The poor bastards are cursed by testosterone poisoning. Except for Baron. He is always on the sunniest side of every street, aren’t you, darling?”

  Baron smiled at them indulgently. With his bloodied turban and nose bone he might have been a maharajah or a head-hunter.

  “What’s your secret, Baron?” Robin asked him.

  “Secret?”

  “You’re so cheerful.”

  “I’m lucky.”

  “You mean you wear a rabbit’s foot and throw salt over your shoulder?”

  “No, I know who I am, and I know what I want. That’s lucky.”

  “So?” She wanted more.

  “So, knowing what I know, I can do what I want to do. Simple.”

  “Doesn’t it hurt?”

  “That’s the best part of it.” He turned to watch a young woman pass, gazing longingly at her callipygous buttocks. He looked to Laura for her permission. Laura sighed and nodded.

  Laura and Robin watched as he whispered in the woman’s ear, grinning like a schoolboy sharing a joke. She touched his arm in response and followed him to a whipping post, where he bound her wrists and fastened them above her head. Three or four people gathered to watch as he snaked a cat-o-nine-tails across her plump, protruding buttocks, reddening them with graceful, loving skill.

  “I’m a dreadfully jealous bitch,” Laura Aurora admitted. “He always asks if he can play with someone else, but I’m afraid that one day he won’t.”

  “Is it worth it?”

  “Robin, I’xve tried the rest. Believe me, Californication is a state of heat like no other. But I’ve got the best, and I’m holding on tight.”

  “I think Buddy Tate would fit right in here,” Robin mused.

  “Your assassin?”

  “I can’t stop thinking about him, but I’m afraid to see him again. Does that sound crazy?”

  “I hear it in your voice. Watch out, Robin: passion will drive you like an out-of-control car, I know. It happened with me. It wasn’t with Baron, it was with a woman. We nearly killed each other. We would have driven off a cliff together if I hadn’t escaped.”

  “I don’t know what I’m getting into, but I’m getting into it, I think,” Robin said, sounding rueful.

  “Don’t be so gloomy. The Castro Street Fair is tomorrow night. Come with us and we’ll have some fun.”

  XVIII

  The Castro Street Fair

  Laura Aurora’s positive nature recognised no obstacles to the daily realisation of her destiny. Nor was she conscious of the oppressive weight of humanity when it reached critical mass, as it does every year at the Castro Street Fair. She liked crowds, in fact, and as far as she was concerned, the best place to be in a Halloween crowd was at its centre. She located this as just beneath the ornate overhanging marquee of the stately movie palace, the Castro Street Theatre. That was where she had arranged to meet Baron.

  But she and Robin were now three blocks from the Castro marquee, on a side street, and there were thousands of people in masquerade between them and the centre of things. Walls of noise and flesh. Beer-drinking werewolves and heavy metal hell.

  Robin, who didn’t at all relish the idea of being pressed up against — squeezed through — so many distorted and even disturbed strangers, had dressed down in basic survivalist black: leather vest, t-shirt, jeans, boots. But she wore a white cat mask with long whiskers.

  Laura had worn one of her basic costumes too, but it wasn’t self-effacing black she chose. A white garterbelt and sheer stockings drew attention to her legs, her best feature; tight red satin panties revealed the bulge of her pubic mound, and emphasised the beauty of her ass. A black leather corslet strained to cover her breasts. Her mask was home made, from a life-sized photo of her face.

  Robin regarded her new friend with proper awe.

  “You are fearless, aren’t you?”

  “I still get scared, but not so much anymore. Mostly I’m scared of wasting time. So I do what I want. I suppose someday it’ll catch up with me, but meantime, I will have had some fun.”

  “I wish I could look at it that way.”

  “I look at it one day at a time — and it works.”

  “Was it your grandmother?”

  “Oh yes. But my father, too. My mother was scared of her shadow. She let me down. I decided I liked men better. Poor bastards don’t know what hit them when I come along.”

  She smiled at men passing near them, her eyes challenging them. “This is f
un,” she said. “Wild women on the loose — and a big party!”

  “I don’t know. Not my kind of fun, I guess.”

  “I love it. The noise, the lights, the spectacle. The idea of all these different people gathering to celebrate a pagan holiday. It brings out the exhibitionist in me.”

  “From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t take much,” Robin jibed.

  “Well, why should I hide my real self from people? If you feel good about what you’ve got, show it off! You won’t have it that long, anyway.”

  They turned to avoid a pack of costumed devils pushing their way through the growing crowd. There were sirens sounding and giant lights thrown up at the sky. The roar of 10,000 throats.

  “How are we going to get through this?”

  “I don’t know. But I know Baron is waiting for us on the other side of this wall of people, so we’re going to have to go through it.”

  “You’re going?”

  “Yes, and you with me, little one. It’ll be an experience.”

  “But they won’t move. How...?”

  “Oh, yes they will.” She unbuttoned her leather corslet to expose her full breasts. A piercing in her left nipple glinted. Her nipples hardened in the cool evening air.

  She strode forward, parting a muscular nurse in a short white uniform from her bandaged and bloody patient. The crowd parted and she didn’t hesitate. Robin followed, holding her hand so they would not be separated.

  “It always works. I learned it when I was in college. It gives me more power than men get with an Uzi.”

  Robin was astonished to see that Laura was right. Her bared breasts acted as an open sesame on the thickly milling crowd. When a young man saw Laura’s breasts aimed straight at him — coming at him as if to go through him — he gulped and ducked out of the way, his gaze locked on her bosom.

  Over Laura’s shoulder Robin had a fisheye view of humanity, and tried to control her fright about what she saw. At Halloween, people chose scary masks to represent or mock the dark sides of their lives, and Robin thought that many of the masks were more revealing than their wearers imagined.

  They pushed forward, never pausing for fear of losing the next opening and being crushed in a whirlpool of demons. Robin saw the faces of men leering so that they seemed mask-like, and hands reaching out to almost touch Laura’s breasts before she dodged and pushed into the next opening, the next crevice.

  “They love us, Robin,” she shouted over the noise of the crowd. Her voice was exultant, a scout in a new land.

  “They want to touch you, Laura,” Robin said, feeling panicky about Laura’s bold display. But more than to touch, they desired to photograph, to tape Laura’s breasts for instant replays and reruns throughout eternity.

  Japanese tourists with faces like fat silly children shoved them at Laura’s breasts, and when she side-stepped them they claimed their trophies anyway with video cameras. Because of the Evangelical Evening News, Robin knew that television was a soul-stealer; and these little cameras in the hands of amateurs horribly multiplied the opportunities for theft.

  But her mask protected her, she followed, and the crowd continued to part. Fingers that Laura eluded grabbed at her, but she twisted away. It wasn’t the men she minded so much, or their childish awe at seeing Laura’s breasts on public display, it was the glimpse she had of her fellow beings en masse. Their gestures were coarse, and the expressions on faces not masked were frightening.

  Maybe, she thought, I am a snob. Too many people. My father lives on crowds, I can’t. They want too much from you.

  In the middle of their passage, when she estimated they were half-way to their goal, they appeared to be trapped. Laura had stopped to pose for a newspaper photographer and the crowd had closed up all exits. Surely this time they could not escape, for the bodies were pressing against them, all the flesh forming a wall, hands reaching out...

  “I love the attention, don’t you?” Laura shouted, giggly with excitement.

  Laura absorbed the energy coming at her from the crowd and used it to make herself stronger. Robin felt herself being drained, losing what little identity she had forged for herself from scraps found here and there. She was being swallowed by a 10,000-legged beast that acted not on passion or instinct, but on something more primitive: the rhythm of blood, of hearts beating in unison, systole and dystole, whup, whup, whup....

  She owned nothing, not even the moment. She was a drop of saltwater in a tidal wave, and it wouldn’t have mattered where the wave took her. She felt herself being pushed and pulled by the crowd — movie stars and monsters, bikers and bad girls — holding to Laura and helpless in the uncontrollable, claustrophobic human wave.

  The wave tossed them up at last under the marquee of the Castro, and there stood Baron, the centre of attention to the people immediately around him. He wore a short leather tunic, the feather in his ear and the bone in his nose. There was a whip in his hand, and a wicked look in his eyes.

  Someone was dancing on the hood of a Cadillac parked before the theatre. He wore a ballgown that glittered in the marquee lights and a long blonde wig in bouffant style and he was trying to dance in eight inch spike heels. The crowd good-naturedly spurred him on with their applause, and then he threw himself into a sea of waving arms and was carried off, to be replaced by the next entrant in the follies, a black boy covered in silver paint, no more than sixteen and flaming. Laura embraced Baron and he stood with his arms around her watching the entertainment.

  When the crowd began chanting for a woman to dance on the Cadillac’s hood, Laura saw her opportunity and stepped forward. Woman had arrived.

  Hands helped her up onto the hood and she stood there for a minute gazing down at her subjects, her naked breasts thrust forward, wearing a defiantly seductive smile. She shook her breasts and rolled her hips, and when she had their attention she spoke in a loud voice:

  “I am your girlfriend. I am your wife. I am your lover. I am the eternal woman! My dance is hers — and it is sacred!”

  And she began her intoxicating dance, moving slowly at first as the crowd clapped the rhythm, then faster, until she was almost whirling. She danced, and she looked out over the crowd — her audience — with the eyes of Salome. She danced, and the collective energy of the crowd moved in her. She was eternal. Her gestures had been there from the beginning — each turn of her wrists, each movement of her hands, each shimmy of her breasts and hips, each offering movement of her pelvis and her thighs.

  “Go! Go! Go!” the crowd screamed as she danced for them, her breasts bouncing and her hair flying, a look of ecstasy on her face.

  Baron moved close to the Cadillac so that, at the climax of her dance, Laura could dive into his arms. Robin was enchanted.

  “I guess I got too wild,” Laura gasped, exhilarated.

  “You are never too wild, my darling,” Baron assured her.

  “I wasn’t the dancer — I was just being danced.”

  Baron and Robin hugged her. “Let’s find some place to sit down before I fall down,” Laura said.

  XIX

  Baring Her Bosom

  They managed to push their way through the crowd to a coffee shop not far from the theatre. Magically, there was a table for three next to a window overlooking Castro Street, which swarmed with darting beauty and contrasts like an aquarium full of tropical fish. The coffee shop was warm and noisy.

  Laura moved her chair so that she could watch the street. Baron lounged regally, content in himself and cheerfully patient in the intervals between actions. Robin stirred her cafe latte, recovering her individuality, such as it was, thinking that so far friendship with Laura was a series of initiations taking her further away from her father and deeper into herself.

  A small boy with black hair cut in a pageboy brought water to the table. He asked Baron about the silver bone in his nose.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said admiringly.

  “That’s what it’s for,” Baron told him. “Just to be beautiful.”
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  Robin sipped her coffee. When she looked up again, a video camera was being pointed at her. The bearer of this bad tiding was a young woman with frizzy brunette hair and a distracted look. Her body was hidden in a costume: she was a nun, asking for confession. She addressed Laura.

  “Wow, that was something. You were a goddess out there!”

  The woman’s enthusiasm buoyed Laura. “It’s simple but effective — your costume.”

  “It’s my sister’s habit. She really is a nun.”

  “Well...” Laura cocked an eyebrow at the camera.

  “Oh — can I interview you? I have a show on cable, and we cover all kinds of wild things. Alternative ways of seeing things, from modern art to modern primitives.”

  “What do you want to ask me?”

  “Throwing yourself topless into a crowd like that took a lot of guts.”

  Emboldened by her dance, Laura seized the opportunity to address San Francisco. She was impish: “I suppose I could talk about my tits.”

  “Would you mind... showing them while we talk?”

  Laura looked down at her bosom and slowly undid the loops holding the corslet over her breasts. Baron watched benignly. Robin pushed her chair out of camera range.

  Laura Aurora held her breasts in her hands for the interviewer and cable viewers. Delicately, she pulled on a nipple ring to make her brown nipple stand up. When she spoke her voice seemed to issue from her breasts.

  “You have to start somewhere to educate people about the power of sexuality. Why not breasts? If you think about it, naked breasts can’t be exploited as easily as clothed breasts. What we hide, we fear or we covet, don’t you think?”

  The interviewer wasn’t prepared for Laura’s thoughtfulness. Serious talk wasn’t the point of her show; exploitation was.

  “Yes, but... why don’t you tell us why you went topless to the Castro Street Fair?”

  “It was an experiment to prove how powerful a woman’s breasts are. It doesn’t hurt that I’m an exhibitionist, too.”