Clive Barker - Age of Desire

“This is damn near genius.”

“They don’t look too happy with it to me.” “Oh, it’s still crude,” Johannson said. “I think the researchers were greedy and moved into tests on living subjects a good two to three years before it was wise to do so. The stuff is almost lethal as it stands, no doubt of that. But it could be made to work, given time. You see, they’ve sidestepped the mechanical problems. This stuff operates directly on the sexual imagination, on the libido. If you arouse the mind, the body follows. That’s the trick of it.” A rattling of the wire mesh close by drew Carnegie’s attention from Johannson’s pale features. One of the female monkeys, apparently not satisfied with the attentions of several males, was spread-eagled against her cage, her nimble fingers reaching for Carnegie. Her spouses, not to be left loveless, had taken to sodomy. “Blind Boy?” said Carnegie. “Is that Jerome?”

“It’s Cupid, isn’t it?” Johannson said:

“Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

It’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

“The bard was never my strongest suit,” said Carnegie. He went back to staring at the female monkey. “And Jerome?” he said.

“He has the agent in his system. A sizable dose.” “So he’s like this lot!”

“I would presume — his intellectual capacities being greater — that the agent may not be able to work in quite such an unfettered fashion. But, having said that, sex can make monkeys out of the best of us, can’t it?” Johannson allowed himself a half-smile at the notion. “All our socalled higher concerns become secondary to the pursuit. For a short time sex makes us obsessive. We can perform, or at least think we can perform, what with hindsight may seem extraordinary feats.”

“I don’t think there’s anything so extraordinary about rape,” Carnegie commented, attempting to stem Johannson’s rhapsody. But the other man would not be subdued.

“Sex without end, without compromise or apology,” he said. “Imagine it. The dream of Casanova.”

The world had seen so many Ages: the Age of Enlightenment; of Reformation; of Reason. Now, at last, the Age of Desire. And after this, an end to Ages; an end, perhaps, to everything. For the fires that were being stoked now were fiercer than the innocent world suspected. They were terrible fires, fires without end, which would illuminate the world in one last, fierce light.

So Welles thought as he lay in his bed. He had been conscious for several hours, but had chosen not to signify such. Whenever a nurse came into his room he would clamp his eyes closed and slow the rhythm of his breath. He knew he could not keep the illusion up for long, but the hours gave him a while to think through his itinerary from here. His first move had to be back at the laboratories. There were papers there he had to shred, tapes to wipe clean. From now on he was determined that every scrap of information about Project Blind Boy exist solely in his head. That way he would have complete control over his masterwork, and nobody could claim it from him.

He had never had much interest in making money from the discovery, although he was well aware of how lucrative a workable aphrodisiac would be; he had never given a fig for material wealth. His initial motivation for the development of the drug — which they had chanced upon quite by accident while testing an agent to aid schizophrenics — had been investigative. But his motives had matured through their months of secret work. He had come to think of himself as the bringer of the millennium. He would not have anyone attempt to snatch that sacred role from him.

So he thought, lying in his bed, waiting for a moment to slip away.

As he walked the streets Jerome would have happily affirmed Welles’s vision. Perhaps he, of all men, was most eager to welcome the Age of Desire. He saw its portents everywhere: on advertising billboards and cinema marquees, in shop windows, on television screens — everywhere, the body as merchandise. Where flesh was not being used to market artifacts of steel and stone, those artifacts were taking on its properties. Automobiles passed him by with every voluptuous attribute but breath — their sinuous bodywork gleamed, their interiors invited plushly. The buildings beleaguered him with sexual puns: spires, passageways, shadowed plazas with white-water fountains. Beneath the raptures of the shallow — the thousand trivial distractions he encountered in street and square — he sensed the ripe life of the body informing every particular.

The spectacle kept the fire in him well stoked. It was all that will power could do to keep him from pressing his attentions on every creature that he met eyes with. A few seemed to sense the heat in him and gave him wide berth. Dogs sensed it too. Several followed him, aroused by his arousal. Flies orbited his head in squadrons. But his growing ease with his condition gave him some rudimentary control over it. He knew that to make a public display of his ardor would bring the law down upon him, and that in turn would hinder his adventures. Soon enough, the fire that he had begun would spread. Then he would emerge from hiding and bathe in it freely.

Until then, discretion was best.

He had on occasion bought the company of a young woman in Soho; he went to find her now. The afternoon was stifling hot, but he felt no weariness. He had not eaten since the previous evening, but he felt no hunger. Indeed, as he climbed the narrow stairway up to the room on the first floor which Angela had once occupied, he felt as primed as an athlete, glowing with health. The immaculately dressed and wall-eyed pimp who usually occupied a place at the top of the stairs was absent. Jerome simply went to the girl’s room and knocked. There was no reply. He rapped again, more urgently. The noise brought an early middle-aged woman to the door at the end of the landing.

“What do you want?”

“The woman,” he said simply.

“Angela’s gone. And you’d better get out of here too in that state. This isn’t a flophouse.” “When will she be back?” he asked, keeping as tight a leash as he could on his appetite.

The woman, who was as tell as Jerome and half as heavy again as his wasted frame, advanced toward him. “The girl won’t be back,” she said, “so you get the hell out of here, before I call Isaiah.”

Jerome looked at the woman. She shared Angela’s profession, no doubt, if not her youth or prettiness. He smiled at her. “I can hear your heart,” he said.

“I told you—“

Before she could finish the words Jerome moved down the landing toward her. She wasn’t intimidated by his approach, merely repulsed.

“If I call Isaiah, you’ll be sorry,” she informed him. The pace of her heartbeat had risen, he could hear it.

“I’m burning,” he said.

She frowned. She was clearly losing this battle of wits. “Stay away from me,” she said.

“I’m warning you.”

The heartbeat was getting more rapid still. The rhythm, buried in her substance, drew him on. From that source: all life, all heat.

“Give me your heart,” he said.

“Isaiah!”

Nobody came running at her shout, however. Jerome gave her no opportunity to cry out a second time. He reached to embrace her, clamping a hand over her mouth. She let fly a volley of blows against him, but the pain only fanned the flames. He was brighter by the moment. His every orifice let onto the furnace in his belly and loins and head. Her superior bulk was of no advantage against such fervor. He pushed her against the wall — the beat of her heart loud in his ears — and began to apply kisses to her neck, tearing her dress open to free her breasts.

“Don’t shout,” he said, trying to sound persuasive. “There’s no harm meant.” She shook her hand and said, “I won’t,” against his palm. He took his hand away from her mouth and she dragged in several desperate breaths. Where was Isaiah? she thought. Not far, surely. Fearing for her life if she tried to resist this interloper — how his eyes shone! — she gave up any pretense to resistance and let him have his way. Men’s supply of passion, she knew from long experience, was easily depleted. Though they might threaten to move earth and heaven too, half an hour later their boasts would be damp sheets and resentment. If worst came to worst, she could tolerate his inane talk of burning; she’d heard far obscener bedroom chat. As to the prong he was even now attempting to press into her, it and its comical like held no surprises for her.