Belonger (An erotic novel): Part One (9 page)

Indeed, he could conceive
these phenomena at any level of detail he desired. But the Merkin
was ultimately forced to speculate about what life was
actually
like on the
streets, immersed in the influence of his rivals.

He
blinked, banishing the metropolis to its own purposes,
and
settled back against a compliant mound
of pink lingerie to regard a shadowy landscape of skirts and
blouses and dresses, a stacked and piled maze of clothing almost
limitless in extent. He was deep in the laundry of his Tent, which
occupied its entire lowest level; a convoluted space where true
isolation might be found among slant-lit neighborhoods of clothing
long out of fashion, sometimes forgotten to anyone but
himself.

From an inner pocket
he withdrew
his sewing
things
,
threaded a
needle with a
finger-twitch
and
opened his play
script,
a
valley
of
limber
canvas sheet
s laced with intricate flows of cursive text, secured in a
soft pink jacket by three fabric ties.

Each letter and line of his
play was hand sewn
,
a
formidable
requirement, but essential
to
the
continuity
of
his
work. No other method would preserve
the order of his words through unconsciousness, for sleep rendered
any ordinary technique of composition useless; on waking from dream
the writing would be meaninglessly arranged, all sequence and
context gone. The Gnomon had a similar problem with locks and keys,
which never matched after a few uses. As a practical issue
i
t didn’t matter that
hand-stitching was required—t
he Merkin
had
long ago
become
so proficient at
this craft it
ceased to impede his creativity at all.

He had been working on his
script for
some time, but it had
only recently solidified to the extent
that he
was
ready to
search for
thespians who could answer to its contradictory requirement for
sincerity and artifice
. On the next level
up
his S
tage
M
anager
was
busy preparing the theater
for
the even
ing.
Legions of
men
working under t
his stolid man’s
oversight were
furnishing the deck with set pieces and props, and a new group of
auditioners would shortly vie for the Merkin’s consideration
there.

But for now the dim radiance
of a distant gnome lent a peaceful rouge ambience to his hiding
place in the laundry, and the Merkin
found
the
last stitched words of the day before;
a scene involving himself and the other judges. A seemingly
frivolous interaction, it indirectly referenced profound notions
about social sexuality.

His
needle hovered speculatively, then
blurred into motion…

SCENE: Three men meet by a small pool. A
woman bathes within, resplendent in the wan light of a crescent
moon. She looks up innocently at their approach, then resumes
caressing herself with a soft lozenge of soap.

NARRATOR:
“How shall men of equal status share a pleasure
that can’t be divided? Will some humbly give way to the ambitions
of others? What injury to their collective masculinity is
done?”

THE MERKIN: “Fair night, friends!”

THE GNOMON: “Indeed.”

THE DOWSER: “So it is.”

A brief interval of silence transpires as
they watch the woman address the deep valley between her luxuriant
breasts, lathering and rinsing them without concern for her
audience. Her nipples hover just above the waterline, swaying
gently on the even rhythm of her ablutions, constantly threatening
to submerge from view.

THE MERKIN: “She is beautiful…”

THE DOWSER: “Yes. Very desirable.”

THE GNOMON: “I wish to see her fully
exposed…”

THE MERKIN: “She will surely oblige us if we
exhibit our masculinity.”

THE GNOMON: “Perhaps… I am willing.”

THE DOWSER: “Together, then?”

Moving to positions evenly spaced about the
pool, the men ritually unzip their pants and produce rapidly
engorging genitalia to view. The woman smiles and rises slightly to
show the promise of her hips. Water drips with obvious reluctance
from her innocently roused nipples. She cannot suppress an
interested expression as she surveys their virile presentation,
eyes traveling a slow circuit from one man to another.

THE MERKIN: “Will you oblige us with
penetration?”

The woman smiles and nods without
hesitation, but makes no indication as to which man will occupy her
first. Seeking to clarify their priority, the men advertise their
intentions less generally.

THE GNOMON: “I will enter you from
behind…”

THE DOWSER: “I will put you on your
knees…”

THE MERKIN: “I will spread your legs and
rapture your vagina…”

The woman acknowledges their promises with a
sultry nod, but makes no move to approach them. Silence descends on
the group again.

THE DOWSER: “I am uncertain how we should
proceed.”

THE GNOMON: “Perhaps we should take
turns?”

THE MERKIN: “But that would grant someone
the honor of first occupation. Who knows if there will be a second?
Do either of you volunteer to cede the initial penetration?”

THE GNOMON: “No… I do not.”

THE DOWSER: “And neither I.”

They lurk silently for a moment as the woman
watches them with a subtly evaluative expression. Their erections
begin to falter in the ambience of this unmanly irresolution.

THE GNOMON: “Perhaps we could require her to
make the choice?”

THE DOWSER: “Which of us would begin this
coercion? Shall we take turns or impose on her all at once?”

They muse on his proposal for a little, but
it is soon clear none of them are too happy with this protocol.

THE MERKIN: “That is no answer. It would
injure the masculine prerogative and reflect badly on the men
chosen second and third.”

NARRATOR:
“The pressure to resolve this situation hangs
heavily on the men. Then a new thought arises…”

THE MERKIN:
“We are all nominally equal in status, so we
could vote on it; caucus until two of us can agree on a man to go
first.”

THE GNOMON: “That is interesting… The honor
of sexual precedence would be countered by the power to determine
who will have it.”

THE DOWSER: “Let us try this.”

The three men set to discussing the various
choices and a long while passes as the woman continues bathing,
listening without comment. And eventually an axis forms between the
Gnomon and the Dowser; they take control of the group and designate
the Merkin to go first.

THE MERKIN: “It shall be myself, then?”

THE GNOMON: “Yes. Then we will vote again to
determine who shall go next, and so on.”

THE DOWSER: “I can see no defect in this
protocol. Let us proceed.”

THE MERKIN: “Very well, then!”

The Merkin’s erection straightens decisively
and he wades into the pool. The woman smiles deferentially at his
rigorously established authority.

THE MERKIN: “Recline against the side of the
pool and spread your legs.”

She does so and he lifts her thighs to
either side, hoisting her pubis above the waterline.

NARRATOR:
“And so the bathing beauty finds herself properly
exercised on the Merkin’s erection. And when he is done with her
flesh the vote is taken again to grant the next man his turn, and
so on…”

The Merkin’s brow
narrowed
in dissatisfaction, and
h
is needle
faltered
. He reflexively smoothed the
triangle of soft hair at his jaw, pondering the stitched words
lacing the canvas.

He knew it was not likely the foregoing scene
would survive to opening night, which was a pity as it playfully
delineated an answer to the great conflict that lay ahead. But even
if he could get it competently performed on stage it would never be
engaging enough to captivate the Dowser and Gnomon themselves,
whose personalities were by all accounts as formidable as his own.
He had never met either of the other judges in person and could
only conjecture about their inevitable confrontation.

The Merkin
sighed
, lanced his needle
into
the open page with an irritated
flick
and leaned back on the soft contour
of fabric things mounded behind him. Closing his eyes, he let
himself be lulled by the
faint sounds of
the Tent
for a while as twilight was
ushered onto gnome-lit darkness in the unseen metropolis
beyond.

Closing his script he rose, straightened his
suit and left.

Not long after he was moodily treading the
labyrinthine neighborhoods of his laundry, reflexively hewing to
the stealthiest route available through folded and stacked clothes,
lingerie and bath things and blankets fashioned from every
conceivable sort of fabric and piled on hammocks suspended from the
ropy undergirding of the theater level above.

He was far from anywhere important at the
moment, deliberately lost. The wares of the laundry towered well
overhead, often limiting sightlines to a few paces, and the
many-layered canvas floor he traversed changed elevation
constantly, generating endless veering horizons to further confound
navigation. It was almost impossible to negotiate the mysteries of
the laundry without patient exploration and memorization.

Everything in his immediate view was imbued
with a reddish tint by a lonely glow-gnome hanging far off to his
right. It was dressed in jeans and a tee shirt, the nearest
garments that would fit its compact body. Its eyes cast steep
shadows through winding drifts of lingerie, once neatly organized,
now randomly tumbled to disheveled mounds and slopes the Merkin
clambered over almost without notice. No one came here but himself
according to his long-practiced skill at tracking; he could read
much from the imprint of hand and foot on laundry, especially where
it was littered all over. As in the present locale, which hadn’t
been maintained for longer than he cared to remember.

That was due to the unfashionable nature of
the apparel archived there, which belonged to an age long past,
when color and cut and texture were outlandish by the present
reckoning. Even the soap was different then, and the redolence
wafting from the abandoned habiliments in his vicinity filled him
with a soft nostalgia for lilac and daffodil…

Where had the time gone?

He began a long descent through a barely lit
tract of skirts that wound and switched about so obtusely as to
baffle even the Merkin’s orientation; a place that could only be
fathomed by estimating factors like slope and illumination. There
were many such territories in the laundry, and the Merkin used them
to exclude potential intruders onto his privacy. When he wanted to
be truly alone, utterly certain of his isolation, only physical
impediments such as these would guarantee it.

He backtracked from a clogged elevation of
toppled blouses, electing not to attempt an excavation to their far
side, then tacked left to assay another route. The light had grown
warmer, yellowish, and a soapy odor reminiscent of sunlight and
fresh air washed his nostrils. He could barely remember the natural
world, grass under his feet and trees vaulting high into the sky,
so long ago when the City was young…

He crawled through a long tunnel twisting
under low-slung quantities of pleated petticoats, taking the time
in one place to shove some of them aside where they almost closed
the passage. It was a rite of maintenance he might never profit
from, but his fastidious nature had a stubborn lower limit that
capriciously intruded from time to time. Fatigued by the effort, he
leaned back in the cramped cross-section of the passage to catch
his breath. It was sightlessly dark, absolutely silent but for the
sound of his own respiration, and the Merkin felt a ripple of
sadness impinge on his customary exuberance, prompted perhaps by
the loneliness of the locale, a wilderness of raiments he had once
loved, now disdained by everyone but himself.

He moved on after a little, escaped to open
air again and took a long breath of it, pungent with perfume from a
sprawling pit of towels and blankets, their orange and green and
red hues plainly disclosed by the white regard of a robed gnome
dangling overhead. He knew this place, or at least its general
location in the laundry, had used it before as a reference for
secrecy-minded excursions, mostly when he needed to write.
Clutching his play script close, he sprinted forward down a long
slope, trampling piled textiles underfoot with a skillful,
high-kneed gait that kept his legs free from entanglement by their
treacherously varying topology. He accelerated almost to a sprint,
glorying for a moment in the unwitnessed thrill of total exertion,
then slowed as the strata of blankets leveled out and lifted,
bringing him to a steep premonitory that overlooked a sodden pit of
sweaters and casual jackets and who knew what else. Water lurked
underneath.