John Domini - Bedlam and Other Stories

Most of our charges had been rendered impotent, in their post-Judgment bodies, and the others had been condemned to insatiable lust. Therefore sex was the perfect subject for a show, dividing our audiences into mutually antagonistic extremes. We would pit some picture of innocence, such as Miplip’s girl on a swing, against my febrile approach, and the effect on our guilt-ridden spectators, all of whom had at one time or another allowed their own good natures to be usurped by evil, was immensely gratifying. Even those that did not leap upon their fellows in a paroxysm of need were nonetheless overwhelmed: they wept, waving their arms, clapping their hands, flopping about, and they silently shouted and shouted. During one such performance…

Oh yes, I remember. I may not remember the moment Miplip and I were first brought together — thrown together, forced together — but this I remember. My overseer had assumed the form of a loving and discreet young mother, sitting in a rocker, smiling gently, knitting some garment for a child while at home alone one evening (that I had painted, darkly shining, outside windows I had painted), and then I finished my painting and climbed in through one of my illusory windows, menacingly drew near, and took hold. Him? Her? Miplip? What did it matter? A human form. And I went into my puppet act, the same act that according to Miplip tired husbands and tired wives had once enacted repeatedly in their own incomprehensible imaginations, and not just tired husbands and tired wives but lovers too, lovers, imagining other races and mechanical devices and other species when they had no devils handy, because somehow that husband or wife or moment’s lover was not enough (in all that magnificent world’s variety — not enough! Perhaps the idea was only one of Miplip’s tales, something to keep me cynical and in control of myself), but even while meditating this way I experienced the impossible tremor that uprooted my stagnant spirit, shook it so it would not be held still, and informed me that there would be no puppetry because this was no act, it was not a suggestion but an order, and Miplip heard the order too because in wholehearted response he at once caused his wifely clothing and rocking chair and uncompleted knitting to disappear, and lay naked beneath me on the air. I closed my eyes; they were all too familiar with his deceit. In my arms he became human.

Unfortunately, genuine sexual congress between myself and Miplip had a ruinous side effect. I did not notice this side effect that first time, because I kept my eyes closed, and my overseer remained blind to what was happening a much longer time, a lack of perception which would have disastrous ramifications. This side effect occurred, always, at the moment of climax. Devils do experience climax — the letting go, the timelessness. At his climax, Miplip would lose control of his morphology and revert momentarily to his natural state. On top of that, he would return to himself as he was at that moment: in transports.

From his natural ugliness he then always returned, as the orgasm wore off, to his previous shape. Whatever small changes were thus produced he either ignored or failed to notice. It was a humiliating, not to say sickening, process. And as for myself, well, I lacked the heart to tell him. Implausible as it sounds, centuries passed before Miplip learned what our lovemaking did to him.

Look at that: “It was a humiliating process.” For him , of course. “And as for myself, I lacked the heart.” The word for it is revenge , one might think. But I cannot agree that revenge was my sole motive in continuing our onstage trysts, even as much as I hated Miplip, even as long as it had been since I held the upper hand. I was shocked, more than anything else. In the rising steam of new emotions brought on by our lovemaking I lost sight of any one particular feeling; only much later on did I recognize sour little Revenge among them. By then I had long since gotten even, long since, so debasing were Miplip’s transformations.

Indeed, in all the uncountable times my overseer and I had intercourse, his sudden metamorphosis never caused me to feel any emotion but sadness. How could it have done otherwise? I made sure always to finish quickly, while I was still connected with a human being, because when Miplip reverted to his natural shape my blood shrank with acute, total disappointment. To fall from inexplicable rapture to this repulsive eyesore of a rutting partner from whom I was never free…who can find revenge in that? Oh, there was some satisfaction earlier on, before I finished. I do not deny feeling happy then, in those brief moments. But then, to wait…to know what was about to happen…every single time I wondered if I could possibly survive (though how I got the idea that there is anything besides survival, I cannot imagine), and yet every single time I survived, and Miplip survived, and together we would return to ourselves, transient Lords of partial Torture over some of our unforgiven subjects.

If I was cruel about keeping what I knew from Miplip, it was not so much because of him and me as because of our audience. What happened to Miplip during ecstasy was, from the point of view of our spectators, hilarious.

It soon became obvious that our public intercourse was having an opposite effect from the one intended. When, at the close of each performance, Miplip and I broke apart and attacked our charges, pronging and clawing and whipping, they seemed to welcome us. They laughed — or grinned and shook, at least. They toyed with us, feinting and parrying my thrusts, trying to grab hold of my overseer’s whip. They picked up flakes of stone or handfuls of excrement and heaved them at us. Worst of all, they clasped each other and rolled around in vicious imitation of our intimacy. Miplip recognized what they were doing, but unlike me he did not understand.

Yet my overseer did not, as I was certain he would, put an end to our shows. His reaction, in fact, was unlike anything I had seen in Miplip before.

Concerning other matters besides our assignations, he became meaner and more superior than ever before. He strutted and floated around our domain in every kind of insulting disguise, railing at me, bragging of trips to earth and to Dis, drumming in his greater knowledge, greater status, greater gifts. At no time did he let slip an opportunity to tear at the skin of my feelings and expose— there! — one of my nerves. Perhaps my memory is not entirely accurate, for his infinite unkindnesses do tend to become confused, but I know that it was during this period that once in a while I looked upon our love-making as a form of revenge: well, it serves him right . More often, however, I got my revenge simply by keeping silent. Whenever I could summon up the strength, I fielded his insults without a word. I would not give him the satisfaction; I made no response. And Miplip, Miplip. This forebearance, when I could hold it, drove you to your wildest excesses. It was degrading. Even I was surprised, my overseer lost control of himself so utterly: falling into apoplectic riots of crack-voiced provocation, involuntarily changing shape, becoming several different creatures at once with several different parts of his body, and descending even to physical abuse. Miplip, what did you need, to put yourself through such abasement?

Yet concerning our performances his behavior was just the opposite. Miplip became uncertain, tentative. He made four or five suggestions, more or less along the lines of dropping the show, or nine or ten suggestions, or nineteen or twenty-nine or maybe ninety, but all of them were no more than the merest suggestion. “Only mentioning it,” he was, in a voice devoid of belligerence, sounding halfhearted, half himself, half afraid. He sounded a bit like those demons with whom we had discussed the human passerby. I find I cannot fully reconstruct any of these conversations in which Miplip spoke of putting an end to the performances, and this lapse of memory is the natural result of the way in which he always handled the subject. Miplip talked of it as if he wanted me not to notice.