“So that’s the famous penis!” exclaimed my neighbour Andorra, who was short and who spoke her own mind. Andorra and I were best friends even before the sudden death of my Beloved, about which she was very consoling. Currently Andorra was working for the Blood Donor Service.
Her parents chose the name Andorra for her, to suggest that she would be adorable. Naming her after the tiniest independent state in Europe did prove prophetic as regards her stature and personality – she was short and assertive. Yet as regards adorability in the eyes of the opposite sex, the ploy failed. Andorra had only ever had one boyfriend, and he was a disaster. No-one else tried to get into bed with her, or courted her. I think Andorra trained as a nurse due to reading too many doctor/nurse romance novels, many of which still littered her apartment, next door to mine.
Next door to our apartment, I should say. Oliver’s and mine; mine and that of his penis.
Andorra’s dog Coochie sometimes chewed her romance novels or carried them around her apartment while awaiting her return from work, and a walk, and an emptying. Coochie was a yellowish Labrador.
“Famous?” I replied. “There’s nothing famous about it except in my own eyes.” And in my hand, of course.
“It’s a bit small . . .” but then she quickly added, “at the moment.” She eyed the apparatus to which the penis was attached by two long connecting tubes. “Will you pump some more blood into it?”
So that she could behold an actual erect penis in the flesh at last?
“That isn’t why a penis stiffens. Don’t you know anatomy? What’s important is the receptive mood of the penis.”
“Well, it would be more impressive . . .” She tailed off.
Did she hope that I would stimulate the penis of my Beloved for her benefit? I almost succumbed to her implied entreaty, if only to demonstrate Oliver’s penis in full gory, I mean glory, but this was an intimate matter.
“I’m perfectly satisfied,” I told her. Only as I spoke did I realize how this might imply smugly that Andorra herself remained unsatisfied. She had mentioned dissatisfaction with dildos. I might seem to be cock-crowing, lording it over my friend.
Andorra looked thoughtful.
Due to the length of the blood tubes it was easy to take the penis to bed with me so as to stroke it in just the way my Beloved had liked, then pleasure myself after it stiffened. It remembered me. Because only Oliver’s penis was cloned, not his prostate and other attachments, inevitably there was no ejaculation, yet this was no disadvantage – on the contrary! I would hold the rubber grip-mount, shaped like a small plantpot, in which his penis (as it were) grew, and much prolonged joy was mine. I was blissful. Sometimes after an orgasm I would take the penis out of me and talk to it, or use my mouth for a different purpose. I felt like a little girl: the penis of my Beloved, my lollipop.
But then came a problem with the blood supply – I don’t mean the tubes and pump, but rather my finances. Bodies’r’Us strongly recommended renewing the blood each month to prevent degeneration of the penis. As part of the initial cost, I’d received five vouchers for replacement blood. Now I’d used those vouchers, and I discovered that in the meantime the cost of blood had risen by 25 percent.
Bodies’r’Us was a significant user and retailer of blood, needing to buy blood – good blood, too – from healthy sellers. Nobody would donate blood charitably so that some rich woman could maintain a clone of her dead poodle, or me a cloned penis. Andorra had complained to me that the Donor Service, which supplied hospitals, was suffering a bit of a blood drain because former donors were choosing to sell rather than donate, but luckily altruism and generosity still prevailed on society, not to mention donations by way of the vampire churches as part of their safe sex campaign.
At this point I consulted Andorra and she made me an offer . . .
. . . To smuggle blood from the Donor Service – providing that I let her use the penis of my Beloved privately one evening each week, say every Friday.
I was astonished and disconcerted.
“I’m your best friend,” she pointed out.
“It won’t respond to you,” I said.
She pouted at me, full-lipped. “I’ll find a way.”
I should have refused. Yet if I refused, I might embitter Andorra. It must have cost her dear to make this request, this admission of craving for the real thing – or at least for the cloned and partial thing. Refusal might seem like a slap in the face. But also, of a sudden, I was curious as to whether my Beloved would respond to the touch of a stranger.
* * *
According to Andorra, the penis did react to her, and very satisfyingly, too. She might be fibbing so as to salve her pride, and I could hardly ask to be present while Andorra writhed on her bed. Besides, I wouldn’t have wished to behold this personally. Consequently every Friday evening Andorra would carefully carry the pump and the penis along to her apartment and bring them back to me a couple of hours later. During this interval I would watch TV and try not to think about what might be happening. Once the penis was mine again, I would wash it, irrespective of whether Andorra had already done so. Washing excited the penis as much as caresses, since the actions were very similar. The penis seemed to be wishing to make up to me for what had occurred, even though it was I who owed the penis an apology.
I would kiss it. “Forgive me, my Beloved. You earned your blood, that’s the main thing.”
After some weeks I made a terrible discovery. When Andorra brought the penis back, Coochie was with her, pawing at her thigh and sniffing.
“Stay!” ordered Andorra, but Coochie pushed his way into my apartment. The dog’s gaze was fixed on the now-floppy penis. He seemed to want it – not for a snack, which was my first fear, soon dispelled by a much worse realization: Coochie wanted the penis as a penis.
When I stared accusingly at Andorra, she broke down in tears of remorse.
“He’s become addicted,” she confessed.
“Do you mean . . . do you mean . . . you’ve been giving your dog bestiality treats with the penis of my Beloved?”
“He’s an unusual dog! I love Coochie, and Coochie loves me, but I knew he was gay!”
“Gay? How did you know that?”
Andorra remained silent.
“Did Coochie bugger some other male dog while out walkies with you?”
More silence. My best friend couldn’t tell me an outright lie. Suddenly I realized that if Andorra’s discovery had not occurred during walkies then only one possibility remained . . .
“You used to try to get Coochie to fuck you! But no matter how you went about it, Coochie couldn’t get it up because—”
“– Because Coochie’s gay. It’s the only explanation.”
I felt sorry for Andorra. Yet I also had a persistent image in my mind . . . of Coochie, who was gallumphing around, his anus frequently visible. How degrading for the penis of my Beloved!
While performing that canine service, Oliver’s penis must have been stiff! Was the penis utterly undiscriminating?
“Look,” I told Andorra, “you must promise me, don’t do it with Coochie again. That’s unhygienic.”
“I always did me after I did Coochie.”
That would have cleaned the penis?
Resulting in Andorra’s vagina smelling of male dog? In due course Coochie might learn to associate . . . Andorra had not given up hope.
“I’d be well within my rights to refuse you the penis ever again.”
“And I to refuse you blood,” she murmured.
She had a point. Consequently we didn’t quarrel.
With some difficulty she hauled Coochie away. Alone once again, I eyed the wilted penis.
“Beloved, how could you do it with a dog?”
I tried to come to terms with what had happened by being objective and logical. The episode with Coochie was not my Beloved’s fault.
The next week Andorra remarked, “Maybe the penis has erections in a Pavlovian way regardless of with whom or with
what. Poor Oliver loves you, but he can’t resist. You really ought to have more of him cloned.”
How would I pay for that?
Oh, but she had the answer!
At the hospital where Andorra worked previously, she knew a junior anaesthetist who moonlighted as a stud in porn movies. Mark’s rugged good looks and intelligence made him a desirable actor. As for his prowess, before each performance Mark would sniff a stimulant gas to keep himself stiff irrespective of ejaculation. Unfortunately Mark had recently been sacked for stealing gas from the hospital. Now he needed to rely full-time on porn to earn his living just at the time when he’d lost access to what boosted him.
What – suggested Andorra – if I were to offer the penis of my Beloved as a stand-in for Mark’s penis while limp? With clever editing, viewers mightn’t notice the temporary substitution, the tubes, the little plantpot clutched by Mark, or by whichever woman.
My Beloved’s penis would be earning some money with which to recover more of himself for me.
“How is Coochie coping?” I asked.
“I lock him in the bathroom with a lot of cold turkey. He loves that. It takes his mind off the penis.”
Andorra made arrangements. A couple of weeks later I watched a copy of the video in order to see with what sort of woman the penis was being unfaithful.
The poor editing hid little. It was obvious that part of the time a detached, hand-held penis was in use. Not a dildo, oh no, but a living penis which happened to lack a man attached to it.
What a dream for a woman, you may well say! And you would be right. Thanks to chat on the internet, word spread rapidly. The video became a wow among women. Few men bought it, maybe because of castration fears, but the producer was jubilant. Here at last was a porn video uniquely suited to females. Therefore we must make another video quickly – starring the detached living penis itself. Mark would play the role of a sex counsellor administering the penis as therapy to a patient. Not long after this second video was released, requests began arriving from dozens of sophisticated high society women requesting “private performances” – and offering to pay well.
Thus it was that at a private orgy, held in a woodland clearing on the outskirts of the city, the penis of my Beloved was mounted on the bonnet of a Jaguar car in place of the usual little model of a leaping jaguar. Several naked women wearing Venetian carnival masks took turns ascending the front of the car while friends cheered. This gave a new meaning to auto-eroticism.
Because of those private performances I was accumulating money fast. A down-payment on cloning all the rest of my Beloved looked possible, not least because the wife of one of the directors of Bodies’r’Us was one of those who had privately enjoyed the penis of my Beloved. She regarded my quest for the entirety of my Beloved as so romantic.
This woman, Natalie, made short art films as a hobby. She was convinced that a film made by her about my eventual reunion with my Beloved might win her a prestigious award given for short art movies featuring sexual themes, the Shiny Palm. This trophy took the form of a feminine hand, in polished metal, grasping an erect penis made of purple glass.
On account of the porn movie about the autonomous penis, Bodies’r’Us had gained new customers. Wives who had seen that movie, and whose husbands failed to satisfy them sufficiently, urged their spouses to have their penises cloned so as to support the men’s performance in bed. An identical understudy, or penis double, would increase the women’s pleasure and offer extra possibilities.
Excellent publicity for Bodies’r’Us! In Natalie’s opinion an artistic movie would add true chic to the cloning of small body parts.
Not necessarily always penises, either! A lovely nose might be cloned and mounted on a plaque, like a small hunting trophy, the blood supply out of sight in a hidden compartment. A hand might be cloned, or a finger. Due to lack of auxiliary muscles, one couldn’t expect the hand to flex its fingers dramatically, or the finger to bend much. A finger is not a penis. Probably penises would be most popular.
“Rivalry might even arise among men who have cloned penises,” Natalie declared to me on the phone one day. “Those can be displayed on the wall as a talking point at a dinner party. You know how men boast – but it would be most unsuitable for a man actually to pull his own trousers down during a fashionable dinner party! Besides, he mightn’t rise to the occasion on account of too much alcohol or shyness. A cloned penis, which wouldn’t imbibe, can represent him at his best. Wives will take pride in demonstrating the penis to their guests.”
She speculated further: “Failure to mount your cloned penis on the wall might even give rise to suspicions as to the quality of the original penis. Too small? Too thin? Whatever! Maybe deficient men will buy more magnificent penises not cloned from themselves – provided by Third World companies without the scruples of Bodies’r’Us. On the other hand, the display of a less-than-splendid penis on the dining room wall might be a form of inverted boastfulness: ‘It may not look much, but if only you knew what I can do with it, and for how long!’ You do want your Beloved back, don’t you, dear? If you let me make a film about your quest, I’m sure Bodies’r’Us will be very easy on the terms for a full Beloved. My film wouldn’t be intrusive, just a few remote-control mini-cameras concealed in your apartment.”
I was so excited I would have agreed to almost anything.
Bodies’r’Us must have exploited some of that research by those maverick scientists I mentioned. Instead of cloning a 100 percent new body complete with brand new penis, they integrated – as they put it – the already-cloned penis into the ensemble of all the rest of Oliver’s cloned anatomy. The cloned penis, which I already knew was precious to me – it stood for continuity. I could hardly discard it, but it would be downright silly to maintain that autonomous penis unused, expensively keeping a blood pump working at the same time as the full Oliver maintained a blood supply to another cloned penis by natural means. It was only sensible that the original cloned penis should be coupled to the rest of the clone.
And so my Beloved came back to me.
Along with some cameras and microphones for my apartment.
In years gone by, scientists predicted that a duplicated brain shouldn’t retain any of the memories of the brain that it’s cloned from. According to past scientific wisdom, the new brain would only exhibit the same capacities and personality traits and tendencies as the original brain – for instance the tendency to fall in love with somebody looking much like me, or the ability to learn languages easily.
Now we know that a cloned brain actually inherits many of the typical dreams of its source brain. This is because dreams are deeply archetypal. The original brain and the cloned brain are genetically identical, so by morphic resonance the cloned brain acquires much of the dream experience of the original from out of the collective storehouse from which dreams emerge and into which they return. Thus my cloned Beloved couldn’t remember any actual incidents of our waking life together, but he knew who I was in a dreamy way. And because dreams contain speech, he could speak, although in rather a dreamlike manner.
“You are an almond tree,” he told me, shortly after Bodies’r’Us delivered him to the apartment. Was that because of the colour of my eyes? If so, this must be an endearment.
Yet to my horror I very quickly found that my Beloved was impotent with me! No matter what I did, or how I displayed myself, his penis remained limp – that very penis which had previously responded so enthusiastically! This shocked and chagrined me – and I regretted the cameras and microphones Natalie had installed.
We have all heard how the arm of the executed German mass-murderer, Sigmund Hammerfest, was grafted on to an amputee, Rolf Heinz, who’d lost his arm in a car crash – and how the murderer’s arm subsequently made Herr Heinz homicidal. While Herr Heinz was making love to his wife one night, the arm broke Frau Heinz’s neck. The organs and limbs of the body possess a kind of memory, as I’ve said.
Could it be that, rejoined to its body,
the penis conveyed memories of its multiple infidelities to my Beloved’s body? And the body, now powering the penis, developed guilt, which disabled the penis? Thus the memory of the penis was contaminating the true wishes of its owner.
Yet what really were the true wishes of my Beloved? Could it be that the penis had truly loved me, but that Oliver himself as a complete person hadn’t been quite so devoted? Could it be that formerly the penis had been ordering my Beloved to love me and nobody else? That it was the desire of the penis, rather than true love, which had made Oliver want to fuck me? Yet I had permitted the penis to respond to anybody; in a sense I had trained it to do so. Consequently now I was no longer a unique focus of desire. My Beloved might call me an almond tree like some medieval Arabian poet, but those were just pretty words! This was very confusing.
Why, oh why, had I cloned all of Oliver at such cost when the penis had been my real lover all along! I had prostituted the penis, the only part of him that truly loved me. Now Oliver was inhibiting the penis from performing, and I might be discovering all too late that my Beloved’s flowery sentiments were hypocritical!
I accused my Beloved.
His replies were hard to understand – unlike the formerly clear, if nonverbal, responses of the stiff penis.
“You didn’t truly love me,” I cried.
“Balloons bring roses,” said Oliver. “Scent escapes from bursting balloons.” Did this mean that love dies?
“It was your penis that loved me, not you!”
“The rubies of your nipples are so hard they could cut glass.” Was he complaining about my nipples? In the old days of our passion, had they hurt his chest?
I was shouting at him in angry disappointment when a knock came at the door.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 7 Page 16
