Incubi

“There,” Khoronos said. “Art is transcension, and transcension, ultimately, is transposition. Art transposes something small with something great. It becomes something else of itself, something more than what it was.”

Transposition, she thought again. The word now made her whole life, and all that she’d created in life, insignificant.

“Now.” Khoronos rubbed his palms together. “You are creating a specific work, a definition of your dream. But you can’t move on for one obstruction. The obstruction is yourself. Do I have it right so far?”

“Yes,” Veronica said.

“The dream is the paradigm of the project, and you are an ingredient of the dream, which means that you must not only redefine the dream, but you must also redefine yourself as a component of the dream. You must turn your creative instincts upon yourself.”

“How?”

“By looking at yourself more completely than you ever have. Truth is the veil, Ms. Polk. You must look at yourself in truth.”

She felt sweat begin to trickle under her arms. It was what he’d said earlier that scared her most of all — the challenge. It was easy to challenge ideals, it was easy to challenge concepts, insights and politics. But it was not easy to challenge oneself in the same light.

“Look now,” Khoronos commanded.

She turned to a mirror panel and looked. She must look at herself as more than a woman; as an object of transposition. She knew that now, and that was how she tried to see.

But… Nothing, she thought.

“Tell me what you see.”

“Nothing.”

It was just a reflection, a simple, physical replication in glass of nothing more than she was in life.

“Take off your clothes,” Khoronos said.

In the mirror, her eyes widened at the brash request. Khoronos stood up. “I’ll leave if you’re modest,” he said.

“No,” she whispered.

She stripped quickly, casting each garment aside like pieces of things no longer wanted. She tried to avert her eyes but couldn’t. No matter where she looked, her own face was there, looking back.

Naked, she stood up straight. The reflection showed Khoronos appraising her in the silver background. He wasn’t appraising her body, though. He was looking straight into her eyes.

“You are a beautiful woman,” he said.

Veronica tried not to gulp. She wanted to winnow her thoughts but she found his gaze too distracting; she couldn’t concentrate on the matter at hand. Ingots of sweat formed between her breasts. Others broke and ran down her back. Was this Khoronos’ way of seducing her? Was this how art preceptors made passes?

She almost hoped it was, for that she could deal with. She hoped he would remove his slacks in the reflection, come up behind her, and start. Then she could relate.

But none of that ever happened.

“Look at yourself, first, as though you were an object,” he said. “Say you’re painting a still life — you’re painting an apple. Don’t think of what you see in the mirror as a reflection, it’s an object. Assess that object now, with your eyes, and transpose the objectivity of that object through your artistic muse.”

The reflection isn’t me, she convinced herself. It’s an object. It’s an apple that I’m going to paint. The mirror created a sudden intense clarity, surfacing the details of her body to razor sharpness. She could see each detail of her nipples, her navel, the shine on each strand of pubic hair. The profuse sweat made her flesh look shellacked. Soon she felt close to blushing; seeing herself through such extreme lucidity began to excite her, or perhaps it was the hope that Khoronos was seeing her the same way. Her sex began to moisten. Her nipples swelled.

“Now,” Khoronos said, “Close your eyes and continue to look. Retain the visualization, and examine it with your mind.”

When she closed her eyes, the image did indeed remain. Only the background changed, from bright mirror- silver to utter black.

No, it didn’t change. It transposed.

“The mirrors are gone now,” he said. “You are standing in the grotto of your dream. You are no longer an object, you are a woman. You are the most creative, and most beautiful… woman…on earth.”

Veronica saw. She was standing identically — naked, sweating — in the hot, dark place of her dream. She seemed to be waiting for something.

Or someone.

“Go on,” he said, perturbed. “You’re not looking closely enough.”

She stood in limbo, in black, staring through closed eyes.

“If you don’t look closely enough, you will fail.”

Now she whimpered. She could feel her mind exert upon the image, squeeze it like squeezing juice from a pulpy fruit.

“Imagine your passion,” he said.

Her mind scurried. What was her passion? She imagined herself masturbating on the terrace, the moon watching her. She imagined Marzen deftly knelt between her legs as his mouth tended her clitoris. She imagined her bacchanal night with Ginny and Amy, and the glut of lavish sensation, their hands and tongues investigating every inch of her flesh.

But nothing happened. The image remained unenriched.

What about fantasies, or passions that had not yet occurred? She imagined Marzen’s penis in her mouth, his testicles warm and large in her small hand. She imagined Gilles pushing her knees back to her shoulders and penetrating her, flooding the moist purse of her sex. She imagined Khoronos—

The disappointment was thick in his throat. “You’re failing, Ms. Polk. I guess I was wrong about you.”

He must see the anguish on her face. She could think of nothing else that might allow the image of herself to transpose. She would never be able to do the painting now. Quit, she thought. You’re a failure, so quit. You’re not an artist, you’re only pretending to be — you’re a fake. You can’t see, you can’t even see yourself. Quit the whole business. Go back to Jack, get a normal job, lead a normal life. What good is an artist who can’t see past her own nose?

“Try again,” Khoronos said more softly. “Look deeper. If you visualize your rightful place in the dream, the image will transpose into what it must be in order to create it. Try again.”

She remained standing, her head back and her eyes squeezed shut. She wanted to bolt. She wanted to grab her clothes, find Ginny, and get the hell out of this crackpot madhouse of foreign studs, carnival mirrors, and art- weirdo philosophy.

But— Try again, she thought.

The dream is black, but she is bright within it: she is almost luminous in the explicit clarity of her flesh. It’s a black grotto, some subterranean fissure of her id. She is waiting for someone. That is the key. Whoever she is waiting for will make the image transpose. She will find her transposition through the acknowledgment of her passion — not fantasies or past sexual experience. Real passion. Passion which transcends. She knows one thing; whoever is waiting for her is her passion.

The grotto’s empty black space thickens with heat. The rough pocked walls begin to tint, tongues of wavering orange light growing bright. Out of nothing, the burning man rises, the man made of flames. The fire-lover.

She sees him. His body is beautiful and sculpted of millions of tiny points of flame. He is hissing. His large, delineated genitals are pulsing for her, rousing. In his fire-eyes, she sees all the passion of history.

Then she sees herself. She is more than herself. The splendor of her passion transcends her flesh. In this bright, hot unreality, she is now more real than she ever has been or ever could be. Her spirit now transposes with her flesh. It has made her greater, more beautiful, truthful, and real than all the sum of her worldly parts.

She is arching back. Her arms are rising as tears are squeezed out of her eyes.