up against the pillows, her legs spread, and ran one hand over the muscles of his smooth chest.
Her mind began a downward spiral of swirling coloured lights, like the credits of a bad Seventies movie.
CLUB KOYAANISQUATSI
Miss Izzy, Singapore
“On a diet?” she asked, giving him a lopsided smile that spoke of contempt and a gross fascination with his bulbous shape.
She was beyond beautiful, with straight, smooth dark hair tied tightly into a French braid and a body of toned, tensed muscles wrapped over a slender frame. Her pale breasts nearly spilled out of an indecently buttoned blouse.
He had been inspecting the chocolate bars on the whole-foods shelf: 100 % organic, high in protein, antioxidants, good cholesterol-but laden with three hundred calories, the equivalent of one meal under his new diet.
He looked at her glumly, a little confused. She raised an eyebrow; “Well?” it said. Her smile taunted him for an answer.
“Uh… yes. On a diet.”
She chuckled audibly before stopping herself by jamming her teeth on the end of her thumbnail. “Sorry, sorry. I couldn’t help it. But I know exactly what your problem is,” she told him.
Kenneth didn’t know whether to feel angry and insulted or flattered that a woman like her was even interested enough in him to say more than,
“Hi!” Yet, an undeniable interest in her eyes suggested something beyond a cruel desire to make fun of him. Perhaps his embarrassment at being seen like an alien object showed on his face because her expression softened. She apologised.
“I know how you feel,” she said. “And I know what you need to do.
You need to stop being afraid of life. When the excitement of other things becomes the chief motivation in your life, then the lazy comfort of food is less of a necessity.”
Kenneth looked at her blankly for a moment before he managed to absorb what she had just said. “Uh… okay,” he replied lamely.
“Come to my place for dinner tonight. Forget your diet. I’ll make sure of it,” she said smiling, her lips curling with excitement. Kenneth swore that look she gave him was carnivorous, but he pushed it out of his mind almost immediately. She pulled out her loyalty card for a club called Koyaanisquatsi, with her name and number on it, and told him to call her later in the evening.
“Just before nine. Let me get my apartment in order and cook up a little something before you arrive. Don’t play me out,” she said, turning on her heel and walking away.
He had turned up that night, and the last couple of weeks had seen the most bizarre days of his otherwise mundane existence. Club Koyaanisquatsi had turned out to be an exclusive place for sexual perversions of all manner, and although it had frightened him initially, making him run away, he came back soon enough.
The decision had been sealed when, the morning after his daunting first introduction to the club, his chaste girlfriend Lynette called before dawn to tell him how much she loved him and to ask if he would please quickly decide on a date for their marriage so she could have her fucking babies and they could use her dying mother’s money to live together in a flat somewhere in the arse of Singapore.
Club Koyaanisquatsi frightened his balls off, but it was a fantasy like he’d never experienced before. He put down the phone on Lynette with a smouldering anger inside, not against the poor girl, but against himself.
That he had been so afraid all his life and stayed fearful of “attempting the uncharted experiences of physical sensation.” That was the exact phrase Vanessa used, and he quite liked the sound of it.
It was a Thursday night, and Kenneth was having problems finding something he was comfortable playing with to add another stamp to his loyalty card.
He’d exhausted the number of times he could claim credit for getting his bottom paddled by the newly initiated dominatrix, and he’d done with the horsehair whip as well. That, he thought was quite unpleasant and unexciting but no worse than getting a tattoo.
He looked at the girls lying on the dining tables, having sushi eaten off their bodies, and wished he could just do that. It actually looked exciting and relatively easy, though he wasn’t quite sure about the wasabi on the balls. But people had to invite you to serve them and only the most gorgeous ever had any opportunity at all.
Vanessa came into the room and spotted him almost immediately; she had a knack of doing that. Kenneth felt like her pet project of late. It seemed that she was adamant about turning him into one of the Koyaanisquatsi clergy: the sexiest, most louche individuals in the “family”—a term Vanessa liked to use when referring to the members of the club. He thought she was out of her mind, of course. Those people were like her: rich, sexy, and when they weren’t spanking each other in lion cages, they lounged over expensive cigars late into the night and discussed Derrida and the possibility of comprehending the breadth and depth of infinity.
She invited him to have dinner with her, and as they passed the statue of a gargoyle that he thought looked vaguely like an armadillo, he dropped some money into it, making sure to do so only when Vanessa was clearly not looking. He was ashamed of the paltry amount of money he could afford to put into the donation box. No matter how often Vanessa told him the club was rich enough, that money was not an issue, he would always feel ashamed of being unable to contribute more.
They settled at a table, and as soon as they took their seats, a girl in a kimono came over and threw herself onto the table. As her body hit the black marble, her arms and legs splayed and her kimono burst open to offer her naked body. Another girl followed and started laying sushi on her. Kenneth had gone through the whole routine every night he’d come to the club, but he still cringed when the wasabi was slathered onto the girl’s clit.
As soon as the girl had thrown herself onto the table and assumed a comatose demeanour, a few other people joined them at the long bench, seating themselves politely on either side of the girl, everyone sitting cross- legged on tatami mats. Vanessa broke the silent anticipation by saying grace:
“Thank you for the body upon which we nourish ourselves, for her absolute worthiness as an individual, and ours, and our right to help ourselves to all the pleasures of life. The right to get drunk on the beauty of our existence and celebrate its autonomy from death and eternity. Amen.” She picked up a piece of glistening raw tuna on rice, dipped it into the puddle of soy sauce poured into the cavity of the girl’s belly, and pressed it against the pearl of wasabi on her clit. Everyone else followed suit, eating neatly and slowly, occasionally pausing to sip from little cups of sake. Some people engaged in polite conversation about nothing much; the couple across from Kenneth seemed to be contemplating inviting the bagel-delivery boy from their office to the club. Then the lady beside Vanessa decided to break the prevailing protocol and started eating sushi off the girl’s body without her chopsticks. She climbed on top of the girl and picked a piece off her shoulder with her teeth, dipped it in soy, rubbed it against her clit and tilted her head, allowing it to slide easily into her mouth. Everyone followed suit. Everyone except Kenneth: he never felt worthy, no matter how many times Vanessa intoned that prayer of hers.
There were seven people participating now, all licking, sucking, fondling, jostling one another, kissing one another. But mostly they teased the girl, and she tried her best to bear the sensations without revealing that she felt anything. Some of the men had taken their cocks out and were slapping them on her face, her breasts. The woman who had been sitting beside Vanessa now sat on the girl’s face, and Kenneth felt embarrassed for the man trying to get his cock into the girl. At the same time, Kenneth wished he could be the one pushing his cock into her tight wet pussy.
The girl on the table was so petite and so pretty, she looked barely eighteen. He wondered who she was and how she’d ended up here. But she was no slave. He saw her lips curl into a self-satisfied smile as the man above her gasped, his cock having finally managed to force itself into her.
Vanessa asked to look at Kenneth’s card, and he slipped it to her uncertainly. She had a habit of suggesting, quite forcefully, he try things he wasn’t ready for. But then again, if she never had, he would never have done anything. He had been to clubs like Koyaanisquatsi before, and all ever he’d done previously was sit in a corner
