Edward Lee - Quest for Sex, Truth & Reality

A hush swept over the crowd. Lisa shuddered at the first thrusts, then slipped into the rhythm, more and more intent. That’s all Smith could see in her now, an intricacy of intentness, matrixes crossing — flesh and spirit. The clarity of details revolted him, the shine of sweat on skin, the motion of muscles, the moaning and the wet sounds in sudden pin-drop silence. It hurt just to watch. The girth of the penis stretched Lisa’s sex to a tight, bright-pink rim. With each thrust, Smith feared it might break.

Do-Horse was an iceman, his grin false, his arousal automatic and cold as slate. His ministrations progressed with no more passion than a derrick wheel pounding dirt. Yet Lisa reacted the opposite. Again it was her intentness, like light focused to diamond-points. Her nipples stood up stiff and pink. Her shiny breasts quivered with the blows. She moaned and whipped her head around and locked her ankles behind the broad, tapered back.

Perhaps intentness was contagious. The once cacophonous crowd had transposed to a room full of frozen, staring faces and unblinking eyes. Every attention held fast, in compounded silence, to the lighted stage. Smith felt himself shivering. Was this truth, this one-act play of copulation as spectator sport? These were human bodies submitted for mutual use, the act of love corrupted to parody. Or perhaps it was Smith’s misconceptions. Besides, every night is packed, Lisa had told him. Maybe Smith’s ideals had kept unadmitted attractions buried to his consciousness. If not, then why hadn’t he left? It was the same sensation he’d felt upon entering, a melting pot of revulsion and excitement. Everything was opposites here, negative poles being forced to touch.

Lisa seemed close to convulsions when Do-Horse took her out of the harness. He lay her on the floor and straddled her, sat right down on her belly. The wet penis pointed up, pulsing. Lisa looked at it as though it were more than a cock, as if it were an icon of vast complexity, the graven image of the cult of flesh. She grabbed it with both hands, stroked back and forth first slowly, then with vigor. Do-Horse’s grin looked like a knife-cut in clay. His buttocks constricted as his climax broke. The long spurts of his semen jumped out in flying lines which formed chaotic glyphs in the air, arcane messages or even epitaphs. They landed on Lisa’s breasts and face as she milked out the last. The finishing touch surprised no one; Do-Horse leaned over and licked it all off.

In the aftermath, a great empty space filled Smith’s gut. The crowd was roaring again, standing in demented ovation. Amid the rain of applause, Lisa and Do-Horse rose, their naked bodies gleaming under the lights. They stepped to the stage edge, exchanged grins, and bowed to the audience.

The act was over. Smoking, drinking, oblivious, Smith felt consigned to stare back into his own thoughts. Other acts followed, variations of the same crossed matrixes of flesh and bipolarity. More bodies for use. More sex as spectacle. The Anvil thundered after each performance, while Smith’s despair sunk to the lowest stratas. Sometime later, a shadow listed behind him. He was stupefied and drunk. Only the trace scents of clean hair and soap caused him to look up. Purity in the Hall of Filth, he thought. Everything is opposites.

“Oh, Jesus,” came the sad voice. “You look so innocent sitting there.” Lisa was dressed again in the shiny new wave coat. The tiny silver penis dangled on the choker. “Shocked?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“People change. Changing is an unchanging fact. I’m not ashamed of what I do.”

“I don’t expect you to be.”

Her words rose like an incantation, very far away. “I hope you find what you’re looking for. But in the meantime…” She slipped him a piece of paper.

“Here’s my address.”

Smith thought about her for days. He drank his meals and chain smoked, trying to refit the pieces of his psyche. He saw her in nagging images, he saw her in his dreams: the montage of flesh and throbbing lights, how her skin shined in sweat, how her eyes rolled back in her head as she was penetrated.

His manuscripts were waste to him now, all dissolution. He burned them in the fireplace and watched the flames. What did he expect to see? Revelation? Truth? All he saw was her, and the only thing even close to his concept of truth gazed back at him night after night from the blank page in his typewriter.

Knowing that he must not go to her only made him want to more. He felt buried alive in a grave of abstractions. Somehow, she was the key, she was the answer to the question, and Smith knew this without even knowing what the question was.

It was a cold night, and very quiet. He saw things in rhythms and weaveworks of textures. Colors hummed, unreal yet painfully intense. Streetlights burned like pots of phosphorus in a darkness of steeped dimensions and hidden heights. Before he knew it, numb from the wind, he was trudging up the steps of the stark rowhouse, was knocking emptily on the door.

“I knew you’d come,” she said.

The sound of her voice made Smith want to wilt, or even cry. Inside was warm as a womb; she brought him in and closed out the cold. A long, dark hall led to a room laved in twilight. There was only a bed and bare walls. Behind them, a narrow window framed the moon.

Neither of them spoke; words seemed a pointless objectivity. Smith’s heart thudded when she wriggled out of her jeans. The blouse slid off her shoulders like dark liquid. Moonlight etched her contours in tinsel, pools of shadow, luminous swirls of flesh.

She stripped him systematically, appraising him in circles. When she knelt, he felt tremendous embarrassment, but what man wouldn’t, knowing what she was used to? “It’s not big, it’s not like Do-Horse,” he muttered, a dreary excuse.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered.

The touch of her lips on his penis made him feel speared by current. He came in her mouth almost spontaneously, which made him feel even less adequate. He was mad to have come here, idiotic to think he could pass for the man she needed him to be. He shivered as he limpened; his knees almost gave. “Jesus, I’m…” But she was smiling, already leading him to the bed.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “We have lots of time, don’t we?”

Time, Smith thought. Somewhere, a clock was ticking. Who even knew what time was?

She gradually caressed out his fears, kissed away his inadequacies. The warm bed felt like clouds. Mere seconds revived his erection; her hands on his skin, like catalytic prods, gave him life. Suddenly he felt powerful; he felt ready. What could constitute so rapid a resurgence of vitality? Their mouths bathed every inch of the others’ flesh, tongues wringing pleasure out of nerves. She tasted lovely and sharp. Her fluids sheened his mouth and ran down his neck. Her jerking orgasms made him feel brighter than the sun.

Eventually his cock found her sex. They coupled in every conceivable configuration, and in some perhaps not conceivable. Passion or lust — it didn’t matter because it was real either way, shreds of truth seeping into his mind through her body heat, her sweat and her musk and her kisses. That same intent — his own quest, perhaps — incited him. Was he giving to her, or was she taking? The question seemed meaningless; truth was not a question, and truth was all he’d ever been looking for. Truth, he thought. But what had she said? He came in her repeatedly, ignoring exhaustion. The channel of her sex seemed to gulp each release of his semen, seemed to rejoice over it as a gift, as though he were indeed giving something of himself.

But what had she said, earlier at the club?