Oneiron

Polina. When arrival number five, Wlibgis, appeared and in rapture mouthed the words, I’m alive! No more pain!—at that moment the matter became as clear as day to Polina. Her final doubts disappeared. They were all as dead as rocks. They could go without food and drink. They had no need for sleep (privacy, yes, and then they closed their eyes). They had no need for any of the other normal, daily bodily functions, such as urination or defecation, for example. No one even missed the movements and gestures associated with urinating and defecating. No one mimed them just for the pleasure of miming them, unlike the choreography of eating (although they soon tired of that as well). Only Maimuna’s bowels had worked here, once. This occurred around the time of her arrival, soon after she had rolled out prone and materialized from the white. She squatted and squeezed a small, dry turd out of her anus. Then everyone had gathered to admire and wonder at it (it didn’t smell, which they noticed), and that was that. The only known shit in the whole place. Things like that simply stopped existing—the feeling of pressure on the bladder, grumbling intestines, heaviness in the anus, sphincter contractions, the rhythm of holding in and release.

Of course Maimuna’s excrement existed. It existed so strongly, so disturbingly, that with one accord they decided to move away from it. The shit didn’t actually disgust anyone as such, its presence simply confused them. It was something at once too familiar and too strange: the Last Time embodied in shit. And that was why it began to signify things they didn’t want to remember yet. The condemned do not enjoy their final meals either, do they? (According to one former prison cook, a cheeseburger and French fries were the most popular last meal. He prepared 220 last meals in Texas from 1991–2003 while serving a fourteen-year sentence for kidnapping his brother-in-law and raping his ex-wife. In a way, it’s sad that the average murderer in Texas headed for a lethal injection wants to eat that specific variation of the hamburger invented in the United States in 1935, and not, for example, a double cheeseburger or a bacon cheeseburger, not to mention any other foods. Why didn’t anyone ever order vorschmack, for instance? Fortunately some had the sense to cut loose. They ate until they were so bloated that death must have felt like a relief rather than a punishment.)

Or when a person has sex for the last time with their beloved (or with anyone)—isn’t that sad too? At least it’s something. It’s strange and significant. The last intercourse before the car crash that takes a spouse. Or the more common case: the last intercourse after which intercourse simply stops. Too old. Can’t or won’t. Not interested. The last sex was five years ago on the sixth of April, at home in the bed as usual, in the usual way, a bit limp, a bit dry, prodding but well intentioned, and then—that was that. All the sex you would ever have.

And there is always a last time, Shlomith says, breaking the silence and drawing together every possible incomplete thought that might be spinning in the new arrival’s head. The last time of all last times. And because in these exceptional circumstances it is possible to experience that specific last time (fortunately Ulrike had been very gifted in this regard), there was no reason to skip the intervention. Simply put: Shlomith licked Ulrike down there because soon she wouldn’t be able to experience anything like that any more. No physical pleasure and no pain. She licked Ulrike down there because every woman present—Shlomith, Polina, Rosa, Nina, Wlibgis, and Maimuna—desired pleasure (each in her own way), or at least just touch. She licked Ulrike instead of, for example, beating her, because these women weren’t sadists, and if they were, they didn’t have any room here for sudden, inordinate bursts of violence. They knew without saying it that now was not a time to rock the boat. The mere thought of violence felt more improper here than in that other world, where there were police, law books, trials, judges, fines, prisons, and in some countries even capital punishment. Here there was nothing. Presumably the target of the attack wouldn’t even be injured, at least not permanently. Again, this was one of their hypotheses, and they had even done some cautious tests a little before Ulrike’s arrival by pinching each other. Each found that the pinching felt the same as squeezing or scratching an arm that has gone to sleep under a pillow. It felt like nothing. They saw it with their eyes, but the skin on the arm didn’t react, and they started to laugh. There they sat next to each other, scratching and pinching and squeezing each other. Nothing that held true before held true any more. That was what they wanted to demonstrate to each other with the pinching, even though none of them knew what to do with this fact. Or did this fact comfort them? Did it fill them with faith, did it give them a reason to go on? And what did going on mean? What the hell would they do after they stopped pinching each other? None of them knew, and that was why they were all laughing.

They laughed until Shlomith noticed a bundle resembling a human figure lying somewhere in the distance, a figure who later turned out to be none other than Ulrike. When they set off, moving toward the bundle, they decided to try to satisfy the being, whether it was a woman or a man (of course, with a child they would have given up their plan). Shlomith, still excited about the pinching, came up with the idea, which almost all of the women thought was excellent, nourished as they were by their laughter. The women decided that Shlomith would lick and suck the erogenous zones of the being they found until