The Tides of Lust

by Samuel Delany

  The she-beast nosed the burnings around his feet. The captain reached out with flickering palms (swords of light swung through the gauze on Robby’s eyes) to grasp her ears. Her head came up. Her tongue’s double serpent lazed about his sack and shaft. The captain wrestled her.

  The tail, thicker at its base than the black thigh, beat about his head.

  The hand had scuttled to the captain’s foot. Tacky with the same gum that dribbled Robby’s cheek, it clawed to the ankle, clawed higher, hung a moment from the calf, then scurried up the wet thigh, palmed the testicles, and thrust the long cock in as the tail swung away. She swiveled against him, forepaws collapsing in the ashes. The captain stretched along her green back, sank yellow teeth in her scales. Blood scarfed her throat, steamed on the coals, while she hiccupped and hissed. The perspiring sides of the black buttocks hollowed, retreated, hollowed. Slowly she began to crawl forward.

  The dog hobbled the whining blind woman across the floor.

  The dragon reared and pranced beneath the Negro, nearing.

  Robby crawled the gritty boards, his pants twisted up about his ankles. The little beast rode his ass, jutting its head down to gnaw the pursed sphincter. Blood lay on his thighs like red string.

  The brass door swung open before him, and he gazed down the dark chancel. The dog, rutting the gut-hung red-head, yapped to his left. To his right, the master, laboring on the thrashing worm, ground his heel in ashes.

  “Robby?” (A man’s voice from the shadows.) “Come in here a minute?”

  The man who stepped from the door had short white hair, wore jeans, and a work shirt. He smiled and held out his hand.

  Something scuttled by Robby’s knee, paused before Proctor, flattened on the cinders. The fingers bunched. It sprang through the air. Proctor caught the hand, grinned at Robby, winked. Then he walked back into the dark.

  Robby felt desire. He felt it, suddenly and surprisingly, like a violent bird in the gut. As he crawled the dark, it struck out through his body and shook him.

  “Do you see what they’re doing to her?” the voice asked, in front of him.

  The hunger that was pleasure twisted down his belly. The twisting thing was a blade. Was a fire. His teeth clicked. His lips drew back. His shoulders shook. The cinders chewed his left wrist, his right palm. And pleasure beat its wings all about his body, near to knocked him over. Sensations, which, had they been visual, would have been sparks and metal, danced on the back of his neck, showered his shoulders, rolled in the valley of his back and behind.

  Other voices about him now, mumbling: male, male, male, female, male. They blundered over and around each other. He crawled between them, sick with ecstasy.

  “Oh, this must be getting you horny, boy!”

  The pressure at his belly’s base struck in the muscles of his thigh and stomach. He doubled, hit the floor.

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk! You ought to get down there, boy, and rip off a piece of that! I hope you realize the trouble I’ve gone through to set this up!”

  Robby’s breath went out of him. His throat ached. His arms locked across his chest. His heels dragged up cold coals. His sides cramped. But the pain circled pleasure. Black pleasure (with its white after image) worked between each bone and tendon. His bones burned. His muscles melted.

  “Get with it! Don’t tell me you’re just going to lie there leaking all over your leg?”

  An explosion, long, slow, dark, and before it ended, centered in it, overwhelming it, an explosion that was light, and long, and did not end.

  “You’d make some fine jail-house pussy, boy! You know that? These guys that can come without even touching themselves . . .”

  His head went back. The sensation mounted a spectrum without terminal. He opened his mouth and tried to scream with airless lungs. His face locked on a smile; the immobility was agony.

  “Now what the hell you call yourself doing?”

  His calf, beyond unengulfable oceans, shook. One arm beat about his head. And a voice, a woman’s voice, pricked him with jewels of what was so much more than pleasure he could not define it. He sobbed (without voice), while she cried out in the darkness:

  CATHERINE FROM THE ALTAR:

  I could be crass and simply begin by saying: that I am sitting here on this stained napkin, my legs spread, a cross in one hand, a cock in the other, and still I have time to think, means (by definition, no?) you’ve failed. But I beg the point. Who can satisfy me? You, or you, or you? None of you comes at me with that complete, unbridled lust to which I would quite happily give myself up. I have seen more of it through a ship’s porthole hours ago than any of you can demonstrate. The rest of you arrive with variations of pride, resentment—Oh, Jonathan, that you blame on your obsession with me whatever imbalances mar your creation as proof of my culpability: for shame! That may be enough to keep a stiff dick or a sloppy box. I do, however, demand more than that, even without broaching the swamp of love that already you have so dishonestly touched your toe to—let’s be honest—not to prepare for the truth you had to tell, but to mask that other you have so unfairly left for me. Seven times between noon and midnight? Frankly, Captain—and I am sure more than one of you has had the thought trickle through—if the devil can’t accomplish that with ease, he isn’t much of a man. Had you set your task, Jonathan, as the rounded and rich rendering of the interface between the actual and the ideal, I would be bound, however reluctantly, to accept any amount of moral slippage. But what am I—what are any of us—to do with such concise and conscious striving after the false note, the mawkish, and the thin? No, the lack of interest you have shown in your satisfaction since sunset is indicative of something more. A new age? Perhaps it signals an inchoate uncertainty whether or not you really want to give up this present one. After all, it’s been quite good to you. It has granted you all these previous joys. Are you willing to relinquish them for the fifty-fifty possibility of pain or pleasure? As well as a certainty of the unpleasantness bound to accompany the adjustment period? What is required here, someplace between the kisses and the bites, the whips, the thrusting loins, the tensed buttocks, is one consciousness that will move freely to its own total engulfment in pleasure. Though I look over all your assembled faces, from the most demented rapist to the once-a-Sunday diddler who retires to the john with dirty novels, the self-consciousness in all of you prohibits just that step, that one extension of the will which causes not the fantasy to become concrete—for that happens all the time, and we pay for it—rather for the concrete to crumble with the advent of the fantastic. That is revolution. Lord, my crotch aches for it. I would have you all until I passed out if I thought there were the least chance of giving birth to it. You accuse me, Jonathan, of having gone on to stranger pastimes. Alas, I have only had to come to terms with the facts. You, who are the most timid, Master Proctor, are so terribly much closer to the efficacious being you seek to present me with. The confusion between Faust and his Demon is private as well as public. No, Captain, you will definitely not do. There now, your vanity certainly can’t be wounded. Perhaps I simply cannot satisfy you; I dare say if I presented that image of totally engaged lust I demand you to be, your balls would empty themselves in three thrusts. For it is the mystic, black devil who must be satisfied for the new age to begin—what a magnificent vindication for the poor violated girl on the parish sitting-room couch. She died, you know, twenty minutes after the priest left. I, who loved her, mourn her with this orgy. I am the one who has failed, if it makes you feel better. But commence a little sucking, fucking, shit-licking and the like; somewhere in this world there are creatures deranged with the desire for their own satisfaction, and in honor of their lust, I jam your cock between my legs, thrust my tongue up your pussy: and I try to forget that they are not among our number. We only imitate them, fantasize them as our masters or slaves, inform the momentary object of our passion with their attributes. With them, Captain, is the key to that most frightening of tomorrows. Kiss me. And Jonathan, you will remember each mod
eled thigh, each shadowed breast, the moonlight through the stained glass on the sweaty rumps and heels; remember it and render it in pigments submitted to the most exacting aesthetic on sized panels of masonite. And perhaps they, in whose honor we perform, will (inspired by us, shadows though we are) move a step nearer the entrance of the labyrinth—which is so cunningly reduplicated about itself that, even with feet on both sides of the final doorsill, it is still impossible to be sure whether movement in either direction will take one out or in. Come, glut yourselves on one another, on me; and try not to entertain even the slightest suspicion that the bright creatures I invoke in actuality do not exist at all—that, indeed, we are all there is. Occupy your minds, instead, while you hump and suck, with how disconcerted the old fart-face will be when he returns to pee stains on the altar cloth and semen in the chalice; and his little girl dead on the sitting-room couch. For one is a truth too horrible to dwell on more than moments; the other is the root of pleasure.

  Her voice throbbed too much in the resonant chambers of undelved experience. Robby was dying of suffocation; and could not die. All the terminal points of existence glowed and ran and fused and—

  “What the hell do you think you’re . . .”

  —and stopped.

  “. . . doing here?”

  He shot over the cliff of reality. And fell miles. Someone shook his shoulder.

  “Now . . . what are you doing in here, boy?”

  He breathed in. And when it came out it was sobbing. He brought his hands to his face and cried into them.

  A woman said, “Proctor, maybe you better . . .”

  “It’ll be all right.”

  Robby spread his fingers, opened his eyes. Behind the white-haired man’s shoulder a candle guttered in the coils of a cast, black dragon.

  The dark-haired woman beside him said, “He seems to be awake now.”

  Proctor stood. “Are you all right, boy?” Before Robby could answer, Proctor turned to the woman: “Perhaps you should go now, Kim.”

  “I will.” She looked around the room. “Can you tell me when you will be able to have the painting restored?”

  Against the wall was another panel. On a dark ground, the woman, in leather, was lit by a single unfrosted bulb overhead. The highlights were harsh. The surfaces had been built of the thinnest glazes.

  Proctor put his thumb on the paint. “I suppose I shall always be doomed to restoring old work with the energy I want to put toward new.” He turned his finger around. “It won’t take very long. I can have it for you Monday.”

  “Fine.” She leaned against the table’s edge to look at the painting herself. “You’ll bring it up to the Hill, then? We’ll have lunch when you come.”

  Proctor nodded, still regarding the portrait. “I don’t think it really suffered that much damage when it fell.”

  The woman said, “Perhaps when you come we can talk about financing this new mural you are so enthusiastic about?”

  “I hope so.”

  She laughed. “You have seen Nazi in the alley by the Hall mash his toes in dog shit, then stick his foot through the bars of the cellar window, to draw it out a minute later, clean?”

  Proctor looked back at her, surprised. He nodded.

  “I think as you put your brush in your pigments, then let the canvas lick them from the bristles, you indulge the same process.”

  Now Proctor laughed. “Go away,” he said. “I will see you up at your home late Monday afternoon.”

  And her laughter, terribly musical and winning, threaded his. “What about . . . ?” She glanced at Robby.

  Proctor nodded her to silence. “He’ll be all right.”

  “Then I’ll go.” Her hand came from beneath her cloak. “I must thank you for the spectacular entertainment you staged this evening.”

  He took her hand. “I must congratulate you on your spectacular performance.”

  The candlelight behind her set fire to the edges of her black hair. She whispered, “I think even she was pleased . . .” turned away, her cloak opening a moment to block the light.

  “Are you going back up to the Hill?”

  “No,” laughing, “I’m going to wander back down to the boats.” Pauses. “She went with them to the wharf. Goodnight, Jon.”

  “Goodnight.” She paused; “Take care.”

  Light again; and Robby found himself looking at her portrait against the wall, and wondering if she had really been.

  Proctor came over to him, kneeled by him “Try to sit up?”

  Robby pushed himself from the floor. He looked around the study. He frowned at the paintings. “Where am . . . ?”

  “My studio.” Proctor looked over his shoulder. “Benny, make some coffee for us.” And the sullen boy who had been sitting in the corner with his hands too deep in his pockets stood up and went to the stove.

  “Are you some kind of an artist?”

  Proctor nodded.

  “You paint this stuff?”

  “I also write poems, stories, music.” He sat back on his heels. “But the renaissance ideal comes to so little in a specialized world. Do you feel better? You looked fairly sick when I got here.”

  “Yeah, I guess . . .”

  The Puerto Rican boy brought coffee.

  They talk a while. Robby talks about where he’s come from, where he wants to go, the things he wants to do. It makes him feel better. That is because he is saying things that he has said before to other people, and the artist smiles, nods, makes explanations of complicity or indignation in the places where other people have, and it is reassuring. Occasionally Robby finds his eyes suddenly snatched away from the sympathetic face by some trick of a candle on the paintings, and chills clutch along his nerves. Still, Proctor listens like any ordinary man.

  “You seem a lot better,” Proctor, finally. “Perhaps you can go now.”

  “Oh,” Robby, warily. “Yeah, I guess I should.” He stands, a little shakily. “Thanks. For the coffee.”

  At the bottom step he realizes how cold it is. And the pressure on his bladder. Leaning one hand against the wall, he urinates, occasionally looking up to see if anybody is coming. Down the street, toward the harbor, there is mist. He starts for the coiling fogs. A sound makes him look back.

  A black dog has come around the corner, has stopped by the door frame. He laps the puddle by the wall. He looks up, panting, drops his head again. Robby puts his hands in his pockets to stop the terror that begins at the base of his spine, and hurries toward the wharf.

  Sambo’s cock came out of her ass, and she was left sucking Dove deep, and the smell of his groin, and her fingers pressing brass hair, and the smell of the water around the boat. The smell of fog, the rocking around them, Her tongue played him, troweled beneath the foreskin, and as she felt the boy’s father’s juice dripping down the back of her leg, she drank the son’s first gout, and let it wash about the cylinder as he spilled in her.

  Later, when she thought they were asleep, Kirsten went to the rail and looked at the ordered arc of moons the dock lights made in the fog. The night poured its damp smokes over the water. She heard bare feet behind her on the wet deck.

  Nig grinned at her. His shirt hung open, his left hand held his balls. His cock angled like a piece of the night between the fallen flaps of his pants. His right reached for her smock hem. He put his other arm, now, around her shoulder, brushed his lips on her cheek, mumbling, “. . . Hey, sweet pussy . . . oh yeah, some shitty pussy . . . ain’t this little blonde whore got some hot ole nasty pussy . . .” There was the smell of old effort, and on that new effort bloomed. He moved his fingers back and forth in her. She had to shift her feet apart on the wet wood. He covered her mouth, pushed his tongue in her mouth. He lifted her breast again and again so that her nipple rubbed his palm. Then his fingers made bars about her head as he searched her throat with his tongue

  With one hand he took her buttocks, and bent his knees to push his cock on her hair, and pushed harder. She touched the tight hair at
his groin; her fingertip felt a drop of her own juice trickle. He shoved and she slipped around him. She held his head, while he turned it back and forth, rasping her palms with his hair. Her buttocks came away from the cold rail. His warm fingers moved down them. The weight of him bent her—she started to slip.

  He caught her and took her down on the wet boards. A stray cord made a hard line under one shoulder. She pushed her tongue beside his, beneath his, moved it beneath his lips covering. He pulled her up against him, got his hand under her and pushed away the twine, while the weight on her took all breath out of her before his thrust; she gasped beneath it. Her knees wagged beside his hips, and she pushed back. Somebody else, vaguely she knew, kneeling over them:

  “Hey there, boy. How about lettin’ your pappy get his old black hog-sticker in the other end of that.” And a stronger hand, warm between her and the deck. “Yeah, that’s it, honey.”

  Robby’s fists hang in his pockets like warm rocks against his loins; he walks the dock trying to define what had been loosed in him. His stomach hurts. The fog licks his neck, dampens his shirt, gives him bad memories. The billows disappear before him, close behind, and the long sounds of the dock roll around. A breeze picks up the short hairs from his neck and kisses him like a corpse.

  In quiet storms mists swirled the lamps. He looked at the boats, shifting, listing at one another. Nets hung from raised cranes; weathered floats swung between reefs of chain. Rope and cable sang along the outriggers. He could make out names: Dawn Star . . . Laocoon . . . catherine . . . Black Lightning.

  And the faintest flicker from The Scorpion’s portal. He took his fists from his pockets; cold washed his groin. But it was the laughter, it was the glass breaking, that stopped him. Gingerly he went to the dock. Inside, one shutter obscured half the glass, but as he hooked his fingers on the curved ledge (the gentling of the boat tugged his wrists) someone inside knocked against it and it swung away!