Robert Onopa - The Pleasure Tube

“Collette?”

“Whoever, handsome man. I’d take better care of you. I will.”

“I can’t complain,” I say with a smile.

“You could not only complain, you could have her transferred. She should be here. I need body oil; the recliner should be turned. We need a pipe.” She inhales the odor of the hashish, offers it for me to smell.

“I have a small tobacco pipe in my bag,” I say. “It’ll do.”

“Very interesting,” the girl says—she is small-boned, dark-eyed; the sarong gives her a doll-like presence. “Just like kiddies playing with daddy’s drugs.”

I raise my hand, I don’t know why, maybe the idea that she is so young—or is it the sneer that has come to her lips, her fleshy, glistening, and sensual lips?

“Slap me if you want to,” she whispers. “Slap my bare skin, I’ll undress. I want to be your slave.”

DA3//I spend the morning working out in the A-deck pool, swimming laps. The spa complex includes a paddle tennis court, an exercise room, a bar, and the Olympic-sized pool itself, ringed by a narrow artificial beach. Its half-dozen butterfly palms are yellow-green, drooping; the sand, I’m not certain it is sand, is dusty, it is a place without life. The pool, small as its deck is, is an obvious place for—casual pairs. Perhaps thirty men and women lie tanning themselves under SunBanks on the far side; the people are oddly private toward one another, most rather old, their flesh doughy, the investors and administrators who Collette told me usually rode first class. On the other hand, there are five extremely attractive women and four men at the thatch bar in the corner, all Oriental. Service, I wonder? I see that one brought a basket of drugs, so I don’t think so. I consider asking what they are taking, meeting the extra woman, but I concede to my sluggishness from last night and dive back into the pool instead. I swim twenty-five laps, the water thin and chemetic after the soft salt wash of the Pacific, its dead calm bathlike after the surge and rip of the sea off Guam. I dreamed last night of Cooper, an unsettling dream, saw him crouched over a downhatch ladder in the dome, a wild look in his eyes, his mouth open as if he were howling in pain, but there was only silence and the dome had lost almost all of its light. I see his broad, bearded face again even as I swim, do not shake the vision until I finally leave the water.

Back at my cabin, I cannot resist the whirlpool shower head again. I towel off before the blank window/wall, then punch through the videon and do sit-ups with Erica’s exercise class, Collette’s and my private joke. Collette has left instructions to meet her at the biosphere rest house where we spent yesterday. I’ll be late enough. Yet I frankly wonder where she’s been.

Collette is standing outside the screened porch in the early-afternoon sun; evidently she heard the tram. She’s tall, has a dancer’s body, both more graceful and slimmer than the Vishnu dancer at the club. But she is better filled out than the Spanish girl from last night, an entirely different body under her halter and sleek denim pants. Collette is woman to that girl: her cheekbones are as high as the girl’s were shallow. Collette has the slightest scar above her lip, thin, obviously well sutured; it gives a sense of mystery to her face, to the cafe au lait of her skin. Her hair is drawn back under a silver bandana pulled around her forehead and tied at the nape of her neck; her green eyes are catlike; she has the most gorgeous smile.

“I did the craziest thing,” she tells me. “I missed the crew tram last night, called in O.D. I stayed out here last night.”

“Alone?” I say.

She nods, she is grinning.

“You’ll get paranoid, too,” I tell her with a smile.

“Paranoids are survivors.” She shrugs. “That’s what my brother used to say.”

“Where did you sleep?” I ask, then see a set of rumpled sheets on the daybed. I kiss her neck, stop her answer; somehow I’ve begun to trust her implicitly, anyway. “Is it serious?”

“Cold poached salmon again. Short on champagne. Were you lonely?”

“Not exactly,” I admit. Paranoid? I think. What spooks me? It’s not her. But now I have the feeling that I’ve been here before.

Today we take what Collette calls a naturalized path on the mountain rather than the meadow side of the tramrun. At first it meanders steeply uphill along a face from which hulking slabs of granite protrude; the near vegetation is strewn with granite boulders and rubble. The vegetation is sparse, the sun warm. I carry a soft, insulated pack into which Collette has put our late lunch.

The relative proximity of the ship, the fact that I spent the previous evening, night, and morning among spun-steel surfaces and machine hum, the sensation of these shoes, make me feel again as if we are exploring a planet from a landing site. I tell Collette how I spent my time. I expect her to tease me about the Spanish girl, but either her attention isn’t that close or she doesn’t care. She is taking in the meadow opening up as we ascend the switchback natural to the face; I can feel the climb opening up my lungs.

We have been gaining distance and elevation on the rest house, the meadow farther beyond has been expanding, the face we are on remains barren. But once we come around the face of the switchback, we are facing a wide, deep draw, a valleylike draw, thick with trees. The trees are evergreen, pine, and fir, and the brush is many-layered, the tree branches umbrellas upon umbrellas. Some of the trees rise a hundred feet or more; their trunks rise from the tiers of brush.

We stop at an outcropping and admire the view—we have it both ways here, the meadow and the draw. We have hiked three kilometers, judging from the distance we have gained on the meadow.

“You went all the way down there?” I say to Collette. “Did you see anything?”

“Just the woods. The sunset. I did my yoga for an hour and a half.”

On the far side of the meadow I can see an occasional flash of glass, the single roof of a cone-shaped pavilion just into the trees.

Collette sits on a smooth rock and leans back. “Time to eat,” she says. “This is as far as the trail goes.”

We sit at the outcropping and eat cold salmon again; the aspic has begun to run. I cannot resist the draw which spreads beneath an escarpment, out of sight of the meadow, the tramrun, the rest of the reserve. I wonder how many people have been into the small valley, I wonder when my next opportunity will come, if at all. Collette says it isn’t safe. But when I tell her that I am going, she says she’s coming along. We pack the food and leave it where we ate, the insulated carrier propped against a half-hidden signpost: DO NOT PROCEED.

The face we descend is rust-swathed from decomposing pitons hammered in long ago, steep but negotiable hand under hand.

The rock base is thick with brush, litter in fertile soil—the trash is ancient, soft-metal cans overgrown, rotted into fragments. I think we are the first here in some time. We catch our breath at what appears to be a cairn near the base. Collette confirms that it marks the limit of PleasureTube grounds. Then Collette smiles, looks up for a long moment; her smile fades.

“No need to be grim,” I say.

“I’m thinking about our being off the reserve. Look at that face. We should have used a rope.”

“We made it down, we’ll make it up.”

“Sometimes I just get depressed,” Collette sighs, turning to walk. “I don’t even know why I mention it.”

The stream bed, I discover, is not entirely dry, as it appears from a distance. The bed is wide enough to disguise a meter-wide stream meandering down its middle—the larger bed is a wash, eroded by heavy rains. We follow its surface slightly uphill and toward a woods. Collette walks alongside me; her wide-soled shoes, the PleasureTube insignia on her halter top, reinforce my initial feeling that we are on a planetary expedition. The unreality of what we are doing, the strangeness of the surroundings yesterday and today after all these years—I have an impulse to go back to the ship, to shower in my cabin’s bath, to find a D-bar or club somewhere on the ship with spun-steel walls, artificial light. Both strange and familiar here.