Case and the Dreamer (24 page)

When he was still, Apricot rolled off him, and the withdrawal wakened him with a gasp. She pulled up a corner of the sheet and wiped the sweat off his brow and cheeks and, gently, his eyelids; it felt good. “This is the Country of Afterward, again,” she whispered to him, the echoes of her own panting still in her voice. “There’s no place here for anger or meanness or fear. Think about this, and sleep now. Sleep.”

All but a dim night-light went out. Mr. Michaelmas heard: “Night, Pammy.” And when he turned on his side, he felt Apricot at his back, fitting shin to calf, knee to knee, an arm around his chest, and the small strong hand spread there, comforting. He slept.

It must have been hours, for he felt totally rested; yet the room was the same, the same dim night-light from somewhere. (But how count time in a dream?—and why?) And there was a new woman in bed with him, larger, stronger, fuller. Somehow he had reversed positions
during his sleep, and he lay at her back, nested like spoons, with his arm around her, and his hand up between her breasts. She smelled good.

He was so rested and so comfortable that he forgot for a measureless instant to be afraid, indignant, even to wonder. He must have made some small movement, because her hand slipped over his and moved it to cup her nipple. She sighed and, lying very still, he felt the nipple increasing in his palm. The fear and indignation and demand were manifest, down there somewhere, but he would not, for this moment, permit that to matter. What mattered was lying still and warm and rested, appreciating this almost motionless movement, the erection of a nipple in his palm.

With amazement and delight he became aware that his own erection was matching hers.
I’m fifty-eight years old!
but: So? And how long had it been since his last explosion? Surely not very long; but, then, there was no time in this place, and if it’d been only a short time, too short time ago to make another one possible, that seemed not to matter any more than the numbers attached to the years he lived.
So?
…

Mistrusting his own evidence, he felt the urge to reach down and feel himself to be sure was true; and oh, and oh! it was true. And when she felt his movement, the woman flung back the covers and spun around, rising—a beautiful movement that ended with her seated on his groin with most of her weight carried by her knees, and his penis buried deep inside her. He looked up at her; she was magnificent rearing up, with a muscled torso and firm breasts, the nipples standing out proud; she threw back her head atop its strong column of neck, her teeth gleamed, and she climaxed immediately. He had never seen or felt anything quite so marvelous.

There is that in all humans which captures an experience in all its aspects, sight, sound, sensation, indelibly; and Mr. Michaelmas knew in this moment he had a memory, a nested jewel in his personal treasure chest, which would far outlast any tangible thing he had ever owned, and which, unlike stocks and bonds and country houses (or, for that matter, a welfare check, should he ever come to that) could never, never be taken from him.

Three times she moved, up and down; then, throwing her head from side to side and crying out, she came again, with a series of spastic contractions so powerful that she ejected his penis, which she quickly recaptured and then was still, so that he might feel her cascading aftershocks. She bent forward and locked his eyes with her own, while her face became smooth, almost flat, and she began to move again. The smooth, oiled pressure of her vagina increased steadily as she approached another climax; breathless, almost awed, pinned by the intensity of those eyes, he felt his own currents rising in response to hers. Her mouth twisted, her eyes screwed shut, back went her head, and she howled and she came,
and so did he
, oh, and so did he!

Gasping, she slid her knees down and out from under her and fell weakly on top of him, driving the wind out of his laboring lungs, rolled to the side against him, panting and smiling and sharing his breath.

It was hardly a conscious movement, but he put an arm around her, and she shifted until their bodies fit and they quieted together, reading each other’s eyes in the dimness. He could feel the thud of her heart. In time they slipped unmoving into a quiet space, not sleeping, not awake either: just being.

After time (in this place where there was no time) she sighed and sat up. She hit a switch somewhere, and an oval of light etched itself on the bed from a floor lamp nearby. “Look,” she said. “Look at this.” She raised herself with her legs wide apart and the light flooding down on her crotch. “Did you ever really look at one of these?”

He never had; never, certainly, on a black woman before. The hair was thick and blue-black and, in the center, divided on an area of a red quite surprising in its intensity. She began to speak, her strong slender fingers moving from time to time in demonstration. Her voice was full and rich, and her diction faultless.

She said: “This is the beginning; this is where it all starts—life and joy and all the things that come from both of them. Look at it; look here: I read of a little girl who saw a picture of it and said ‘Oh, it’s just like a flower!’ and indeed it is; see the petals here and there? See how it folds into itself?

“See the wetness, yours and mine together. I honor the wetnesses of the body, especially when they come from loving, and most especially when they’re mingled. Your sweat is drying on me, and mine on you, and I think that is just beautiful.

“Look. Look. Look at the shape of it. Forget for a moment what it is, and just draw in your mind the shape of it. Do you see there the shape of the arch, the Gothic arch you’ll find in the great old cathedrals? Do you recall how many of them surmount and surround those gorgeous round rose windows, exploding with all the colors there are, and with all the light God and man can pour through them, each in his turn? If you think for a moment, man, that I’m irreverent when I make this comparison, or that I’m out to destroy worship and holiness, you’ve got me all wrong. I believe with all my heart that God made us as He would have us be, and that when we make joy with what He gave us, we praise Him for His good works. I think the idea of such praise began long before there was a church, any church, and that this special joy and the act of worship were once the same thing, and that they were driven apart by dried-up old men who had lost the joy and found a way to substitute power for it—earthly power, not heavenly power.

“Look! You are looking at the gates to heaven, not the gates to hell! You are looking at an altar, man, at which you can worship a woman and through her Woman with a capital letter: all life and all joy.

“Then if you can learn to think of all this in this special way, go outside a cathedral and look up, and if you can’t see the symbolism of those strong stretching columns and towers and steeples reaching toward God, then I do indeed pity you.

“When a man gets horny and needs his ashes hauled and drives in here and dumps them, he commits a sacrilege. When a man stabs in here with a rape, he violates the intention of God who made him. When he comes to it with joy and reverence, he worships. And if he comes to it with love—man, he has it all.”

“I never …” Mr. Michaelmas started to say, but it wouldn’t come out as words; it was a speechless mumble. He went his lips and tried again. “I’ve never heard anyone talk like that.” He lay relaxed, looking
at the curves and petals in their oval of light.

The overhead lights came on, not at all harshly, and the woman’s hand descended on his shoulder, carrying the clear message:
You needn’t move;
not
Don’t
—just
You needn’t
, a message so clear and strong that he did not even start, even when Apricot’s clear, cool voice said, “Let’s eat!”

He glanced up. Apricot and the dark-haired girl Pam were pushing a wheeled table toward the bed. They were both naked and completely at peace in their nudity. Apricot moved around in front of the table (from which fragrances animated that made his salivaries squirt).

“Let’s eat.”

He sat up, and he was ravenous. Fluffy yellow omelets, stuffed with mushrooms and with an incredible orange sauce; a pyramid of filet mignon in little cubes, quite raw, and tender as a serenade; a dark bread, obviously homemade with an elusive smoky overflavor; four kinds of cheese, passion fruit and (of course) apricot nectars, a green tea and a wonderful black coffee. “Lord! You can cook!”

“We didn’t do this one; it was Rorie. She’ll be along any minute.”

“Rorie. She’s the one with the ah—”

“The fuzzhead. That’s right. And your latest conquest there is Rietta. She is our resident God-freak.”

To his surprise, Mr. Michaelmas felt mildly defensive.

“I don’t think she’s any kind of freak.”

“Well, bless your thing,” cried Rietta, and kissed his ear.

Mr. Michaelmas felt himself flushing with pleasure. He was amazed.

Rorie, the one with the halo of pale, fine hair, appeared, a girl so perfectly proportioned and so graceful in her carriage and movements that it was easy to notice, last of all, that she was over six feet tall.

“Mr. Michaelmas says, if you could marry, he’d cook you,” said Pam.

“Well, thank you,” said Rorie graciously, and sat on the edge of the big bed, looking at him with frank and open liking.

They ate companionably and, without being fussy about it, they
all saw that Mr. Michaelmas had everything he wanted a second or two before he knew he wanted it, while good talk rolled and swirled around the group. He learned that Pam was a registered nurse with a degree in biochemistry, Rietta (“It used to be Henrietta, but women’s lib got that far into my name. A hen I ain’t.”) had an M.D. and that Rorie—Aurora—was a pharmacist.

“I’m a high school dropout,” said Apricot, “with a libido I insist is normal and maybe a little more
chutzpah
than most. I rounded up these three in the same hospital.”

“It was a veterans’ hospital,” said Rietta. “Apricot blew in one day to visit her girlfriend’s boyfriend who lost an argument with a grenade.”

“He was a double amputee with half a face,” said Apricot, “and nobody was lining up on both sides of the street, cheering like they did when he marched off to war. Hardly anybody ever drops in to chat with those guys, and when they do, they take care of their brains or the boredom or their immortal souls, but they pay damn little attention to their gonads. A lot of them, there’s nothing wrong with their gonads. So, well,” she shrugged, “I did something about it.”

“Did she ever,” said Rorie admiringly. “She recruited a whole detachment of us. Next thing you know there were flying squads of us visiting hospitals all over.”

“You mean they—you …” Four nodding heads answered him. “What about the administration?”

“We’re not stupid,” said Rietta, “and don’t forget—we know the rules. Mostly, administration didn’t know what was going on, which is SOP for administration everywhere. Once in awhile there was a ripple, but we found most of ’em willing to look the other way as long as we could assure them that they wouldn’t have to take any heat. It worked beautifully right up until—”

“Never mind the details,” Apricot said quickly, and then laughed. “Let’s just say we ran up against a front-office type with a small mind and desiccated scrotum who apparently felt that decency, morality and frustration was the proper environment for his veterans. We saw it coming and quietly removed him. We gave him a full treatment and put him back where we found him, and to this day he’s
got as happy a population as you can find any hospital—which is never very.

“Our first case,” said Aurora, smiling reminiscently.

Case? Am I a “case”?
Mr. Michaelmas looked around him at the four relaxed, pleasantly smiling woman, and past them at the room.

Timeless. Large, carpeted in neutral gray with a warm blush to it, and the walls were draped—all of them. No sign of windows; there must have been doors, because the women came and went, but from where he sat on the huge square bed, there was no way of telling where a door might have been. None of the girls wore watches; the light was artificial; there was no radio, no TV.

Timeless.

Abruptly, he demanded, “How long have I been here?”

Pam looked at him searchingly. Rorie uncrossed her long legs. Apricot looked across him at Rietta and asked, “How long would you say?”

Rietta looked pensively at the ceiling for a moment. “Fifty, fifty-five minutes maybe.”

Mr. Michaelmas looked at each in turn, and got smiles. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said levelly.

“I mean fifty-five minutes or so in the Country of Afterward,” said Rietta. “Nothing else matters here.”

“Well, goddammit, it matters to me!”

“I really don’t like that kind of talk,” said Rietta. Clearly, she meant it. “I guess he’s out.”

“Seem so,” said Rorie, rising like a swift flower in stop-motion; and the next thing Mr. Michaelmas knew he was hit in four complex ways from four directions, and sank under a choreographed tangle of soft, strong, skilled limbs and torsos.

In the next timeless time, two things utterly astonished Mr. Michaelmas. The first was that after a few minutes of intense battle,
he laughed
. Mr. Michaelmas laughed! A great peal of unexpected, uncontrollable laughter, coming from a place where no real laughter had lived for years!

The other thing was that, one way or another, he brought off all four women. The ways, and the other ways, cascaded over him,
presented themselves, demanded themselves, created their own hungers and urgent demands.

Then his own incredible peak and eruption flung him away into sleep.

He woke alone and, realizing it, felt a vague sense of pique, of abandonment. He moved, and was aware of the warmth of the bed beside him, and understood that he hadn’t been alone after all; he probably awakened because she had silently slipped away. (She? Which she?) Now he came all the way awake and sat up. He was more alert than he had yet been, here—almost normally so. To be awake, and alone, was something of a novelty in this cave of novelties.

He slipped off the bed and fell pleasure as his bare feet took his weight. The carpeting was resilient, crisply but pleasantly tickling. He moved silently to the draped wall and put his hand against it, pressed, felt nothing back of it but a solid surface. He paused, then, hand over hand, he felt his way all around the room; there had to be an opening, an door, somewhere. And, of course, he found one.