Quest for Sex, Truth & Reality

“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?

They made love and they fucked — all night. The moon watched them over their backs. Their sweat drenched the bed, along with her own fluids, and his that ran out of her. When there was nothing left, absolutely nothing, Smith rolled over, gasping air. Traced in moonlight and sated, she leaned up, very gently stroking his chest and shriveled penis, cupping the spent testicles. Truth, he thought yet again. Then he remembered what she’d said: But even truth has a price… Smith gazed at her now.

Then he screamed.

The hand playing over his penis was now no more than gray-white skin stretched taut over bone. Her eyes looked sightless, huge, like crystals. Her features blurred and prolapsed. A stench rose. Her face drew out to a long, thin shape, her cheeks sucking in, her nose receding to a pair of skeletal holes. Smith was in bed with a corpse.

“Truths change,” grated the dead voice.

Smith could not speak, could not break the paresis.

The corpse smiled. “I’m your truth. The new truth.”

Smith convulsed, in waves. Even truth has a price.

“Pay me,” it said.

***

I work at The Anvil now, with Lisa and Do-Horse and all the rest. We are the oligarchs of a new order, not remnants of eons past but seeds of a new truth. We are the prize and the penalty, what is wanted and what can never be had. Others rise, wither, and die unnoticed, but we go on forever, changing only faces with changing times. We slake our lust on the passion — and the truth — of the world.

Stop in and see us sometime.

Afterword

This story has never been reprinted since the first edition of this chapbook. It’s socio-philosophical pornography. I wrote it, as I recall, in 1982 right after my first — awful — novel, Nightbait, was published. The story was immediately accepted by Hustler magazine, even to the point that the manuscript was copy-edited and sent to the typesetter. But it was typical new-writer luck. Right before they were going to pay me something like 800 bucks, the fiction editor left the company and the story was rejected by his successor, who said Hustler was no place for philosophical fiction. Fuck you. It’s the only time I’m ever gotten a manuscript returned with copy-edit marks. In other words, this story’s about twenty years old. Jesus. Not bad, I guess, for a twenty-four-year-old kid — er, well, you be the judge. It’s a symbology about how we viewed the beginning of the eighties: an age of sexual terror. Man, those were the days.

***

Edward Lee has had more than 40 books published in the horror and suspense field, including CITY INFERNAL, THE GOLEM, and BLACK TRAIN. His movie, HEADER was released on DVD by Synapse Films, in June, 2009. Recent releases include the stories, “You Are My Everything” and “The Cyesologniac,” the Lovecraftian novella “Trolley No. 1852,” and the hardcore novel HAUNTER OF THE THRESHOLD. Currently, Lee is working on HEADER 3. Lee lives on Florida’s St. Pete Beach. Visit him online at:

http://www.edwardleeonline.com