by Alina Reyes
He had lost all notion of time when the splendid Cadillac spun out of control, lost its grip on the road and flew off a bend into the dark mass of the forest, where it embedded itself in a din of screams and twisted metal.
* * *
The day was dry and clear. Tommy and Carroll, in the first of a short line of cars, stopped in front of the window of the drive-in funeral parlor, where the attendant passed them the two urns. They took one each and placed them on their knees, while the pastor, wired up with a microphone, came over and began reciting a standard homage to the deceased, whose names, Babe and Bobby, he read off a form that he had pulled from inside his toga. He concluded the ceremony with an absurdly theatrical prayer, in imitation of the style of the wealthiest TV evangelist of the time.
Carroll placed the urns beneath her legs, and they set off slowly, followed by five other cars. A large 4×4 brought up the rear. The pastor’s gaze lingered on the woman who was driving it, a dark, corpulent woman who was giving him flirtatious looks. Next to her was a pretty girl in a black outfit, staring fixedly ahead, sitting upright and motionless next to the chubby boy with whom she shared the seat. Before the vehicle drove away and disappeared round the bend, Shirley Gordon, face painted like a tart’s, popped her head out of the window and whispered:
“Hi, Reverend!”
What a slut! the minister couldn’t help thinking, as he felt a surge of sexual arousal insinuate itself into his body like a serpent and spit out a desire for death.
ω
When the bodies of Babe Smith and Bobby Wesson slid into the furnace of the World Village crematorium, the infernal heat that raged around their coffins expelled the torpors of death and ignited searing dreams, the ultimate fantasies of their dismal existences.
Bobby, who had fantasized all his life about the array of girls with sculpted bodies who posed with their legs apart in men’s magazines, or who indulged in every imaginable practice in repetitive videos, their charms silicone-enhanced for the voyeuristic pleasure of contemporary manhood, Bobby, who, though he had had his fair share of dogs, had only ever considered that the most attractive girls met his rigid criteria (as vigorous as those of the social body as a whole), Bobby, then, in a flashing contraction-dilation of time, succumbed one last time to earthly pleasures thanks to his fat, vulgar, no-spring-chicken neighbor, Shirley Gordon.
The scene of his cremation dream was identical in every detail to the residential zone where he and Babe had bought the house of their dreams a few years earlier. So much so that one might think it was purely the flames of death that had inspired this illusion. For the fantasy that sputtered forth from his corpse that day was perhaps no more than an old lucubration, forged in the course of the never-ending rosary of nights when he was driven, in order to palliate his conjugal frustration, to indulge in secret onanism, the ardent fist, subsequently to rejoin his tender but cold other half in sleep.
Be that as it may, the furnace, which had witnessed many such scenes, observed, with professional indifference, this final spectacle produced by the incineration of a body that had once been alive, young and handsome, and full of the usual disgusting desires of the human species. From the heart of the flames, spurting from Bobby’s liver, two wide-open eyes appeared, glistening in a halo of half-light.
From this static shot a swift zoom-out, revealing in succession Bobby’s head, motionless, lying on a pink pillow; then the comforter, beneath which could be made out two elongated forms; then the whole bed, the bedroom; and while the lens, which was probably trained on this scene through the window, continued its backward flight, the night grew darker and shadows attached themselves to the outside walls like leprous sores, and when the whole of the Wesson house could finally be seen in the frame, it seemed so ghostly, sinister and ruined that one might have expected the dream to stop right there and then.
But the mysterious camera continued to roll, and there was Bobby in his pajamas, outside on the doorstep, watching the following: a line of men, all similarly dressed in striped pajamas, illuminated by the yellow light of a sliver of moon intermittently masked by scudding clouds, stretching from the house next door, down the street and ending who knows where in the pitch-black night.
The front door of the Gordon house was open, the only clear rectangle of light in the whole scene. Old Stanley, Shirley’s husband, stood in the doorway in a suit and tie, ushering the men in, one by one and two per minute. Bobby walked across the lawn with great difficulty—for every step demanded a considerable effort of his benumbed body, and the effect produced was one of ponderous slow motion.
When he finally reached his neighbors’ property, a murmur went up and traveled the length of the line: “Join the line! Join the line like everyone else!” The men’s faces, perched like scarecrow heads on top of the stripy outfits, which seemed to hang from coat hangers rather than bodies, grew longer and filled with ever more alarming shadows as their disgruntlement turned to anger, then to hatred. No one moved a muscle—each man was firmly rooted to his place in the line, which he had no intention of surrendering—but the line as a whole quivered like the spume on the crest of a wave which was about to break over the miserable human body that had ventured out to face the sea. Bobby took a step back and turned his head to catch Stanley’s eye—old, skinny, taciturn Stanley, with whom he had never exchanged more than a dozen words at a time, and who now seemed to be his only means of escaping from this nightmare. With a slow, broad sweep of his arm, Stanley waved him over.
Bobby cast a glance at the line. There was a murmur of disapproval at the doorman’s action, but they soon grew resigned and settled down. He reached Stan in a few strides, and was placed at the front of the line. A few seconds later, he was let in.
Once he was through the door he realized that the line continued inside the house, stretching upstairs, one man on each step. A strong, feral smell impregnated the hallway and became more powerful between the narrow walls of the stairwell. On reaching the bottom step, each man drew his penis out of the fly of his pants and started to masturbate. The line kept its shape but stirred with light moans and groans and small spasmodic movements, caused either by the stimulation of members or by the protests of those who felt encroached upon by the fellow behind in this atmosphere of enforced promiscuity.
Every thirty seconds, the line collectively took a step up. Bobby soon arrived at the bottom step, whereupon he swiftly did as was required, because, firstly, there was little chance he would be able to go back, and secondly, although disgusted by his situation, he was unable to resist the enormous sexual tension that pervaded this narrow passage and he was already erect. Like the others, he grabbed his penis, which had virtually popped out of his pajamas of its own accord, and began to stroke it slowly, taking care to delay his pleasure until the unknown but inexorable end. Among the faces grimacing with excitement that he saw in profile at the turn of the stairs, he recognized several of his neighbors, but, other than feverishly working away to maintain their erections, they all behaved as normally as if they were standing in line at the supermarket or in a social security office.
The smell of this collective rut became more powerful the higher Bobby climbed the stairs. After about ten minutes he arrived at the top. The line, still in the same rhythm, shuffled into a bedroom.
When he reached the door, Bobby finally discovered what was awaiting him. Lying on her back in the center of her double bed, her legs spread wide and raised up as if for an induced birth, Shirley offered a choice of orifice to the men who took their turns with her every thirty seconds.
Even more than usual, her face was caked in makeup. She wore a totally see-through tiny pink baby-doll nightie, which displayed all her fat white flesh; her stomach was trussed like a sausage in a garter belt that held a pair of sheer black stockings halfway up her thighs. The slip had been ripped to allow access to her breasts; her face was smeared with red lipstick and black and blue eye shadow. From her thighs up to her hair, her body was splashed with sperm. Sh
e didn’t move, but merely emitted a cluck of satisfaction each time a man penetrated her and ejaculated somewhere in or over her.
When his turn came, after a moment’s hesitation, Bobby chose her mouth. He crouched over Shirley’s face, pushed his penis in and after three thrusts came in long convulsive spurts. Half suffocated, Shirley clucked through her nose, looking him in the face with an even more depraved expression than usual.
He couldn’t have held out a second longer. Liberated, he began to laugh nervously, and withdrew to make way for the next man. That was when he realized with horror that it was his turn to be transformed instantaneously into ashes, like all those who had preceded him and whose dust now littered the floor in a thick, warm layer.
Thus was the body and soul of Bobby Wesson extinguished forever. As for Babe Smith, his deceased wife, she experienced in the furnace a final surge of life and a much simpler dream, though in its way no less delicious and terrifying. She could feel a warm, ample, fleshy appendage push itself so fully and forcefully into her mouth that it yanked her, perhaps for all time, from her eternal sleep. This flesh was both a giant breast and a giant penis, at once delectable and suffocating. Shifting between terror and greed, Babe kept her eyes closed, and in the dark fury of her incineration continued to suck, with growing appetite.
