Now you’re sitting in a comfortable, plush chair where the feeling of heaviness completely disappears. A movie is starting, and the screen is full of light even before the film has begun to roll. But this time more than light fills the screen, because something is stuck to the film gate. Bits of fuzz that vibrate in the air from the fan. You count them to pass the time. There are six in all. Hairs from the projectionist’s knuckles? Are they hairs? But don’t think of men right now. Stare at the bright white screen and the six pieces of fuzz. They’ve moved close enough now that you have to believe: a woman, each and every one. And they aren’t thin bits of fuzz any more, except one of them, the one in the middle, who remains terribly skinny. She walks a little ahead of the others, pulling the rest behind like the leader of a wedge of cranes. An enormous, auburn cloud of curls bounces as she takes nimble, swaying steps through the air on nothing. Behind her walk five women, two to the left, three to the right. They tread the air as if treading water, with some effort, except one who appears to dance.
The women are easy to tell apart. The one to the left has enormous, swinging breasts that barely fit in her magenta polo shirt even though four of the five buttons hang undone. The breasts belong to a sturdy brown-skinned woman, whose face is blank just now, lacking any expression. Next to her traipses a mound of stomach, a blond, pregnant woman dressed in a black shirt and turquoise trousers. She exudes health and wealth. She is wrinkle-free, stain resistant, and Top Quality.
To the right of the emaciated woman with the curls strides an overweight matron, with smeared make-up wearing a knee-length sable fur coat. On one foot she wears a red woolen sock, on the other a heavy boot that extends to her knee. Next to her skips a tall, copper-brown beauty in a yellow dress with an enormous Afro. On the outside right, a little separated from the others, slinks a bald, shriveled woman in a poison-green hospital gown, looking like the most woebegone creature imaginable.
Six women walk toward you out of the white emptiness. You start, as if waking from a dream, turning around, looking to either side, up and down. But you see nothing to anchor your gaze, nothing beyond this peculiar company floating ever closer.
You feel faint. You feel your ears stopping up, your head ringing. Your legs give way. You fall into something. It isn’t soft and it isn’t hard. Not cold, not hot. You collapse into it as if resting in snow. You close your eyes and wait to wake up somewhere else. At the movies? Just before the end of Solaris? In that moment when the camera rises into the sky, revealing that Kris Kelvin’s homecoming is a dream, an island on the planet’s surface surrounded by a sea with no shore, when the clamorous music accompanying the final scene begins to surge, to penetrate your body chilled by a fitful sleep. Suddenly the music stops, and you stare in unbearable silence at the white screen and the black letters there: . You hear nothing but your own heart, which still pumps in time with the music.
Do you believe you’ll wake up that way again this time?
You hear sounds of movement and can’t bear not to peek. Instead of moviegoers rustling as they leave the theater, you see those women before you, those six beings who appeared from nothingness. They’ve fallen to their knees next to you and surround you on all sides.
Suddenly the leader, the one who’s all skin and bones, begins to tug the shoes from your feet. She pulls off your corduroy trousers and underwear, and bends your knees as she spreads your legs. Two of the women hold your ankles tight, and two grab your arms. The sad one with no hair has lifted your neck onto her knees and gently strokes your hair.
The thin woman shoves her head between your legs, and you do exactly what is best for you in this situation. You close your eyes again. You submit. You let it happen, because that’s all you can do. You feel the cool, soft tip of the tongue begin to dig into you. It seeks and finds your most sensitive spot. No evil is being done to you. The bony one seems to know how to satisfy a woman. She takes the hood of the clitoris between her lips and sucks out the tiny protuberance hiding beneath. The glans clitoridis. Or, if you please: the tongue of Cleite the warrior queen, the pink joy buzzer, the love button, the little man in the boat, the devil’s burning teat . . . This she energetically begins to lick, at once strongly and lightly, varying the rhythm with purpose, now pressing more, now brushing only gently.
You submit. You want nothing else.
How is it possible to think of pleasure? You can’t. Instead think of light. Bright, eyelid-penetrating light. You become part of the orange flame, the solar wind, the plasma flares, the throbbing coronal holes. Within you is the core of the universe, a mysterious generator, that divine nodule with its perfect minefield of eight thousand nerve endings that send fibers all the way to the spinal cord and central nervous system, all the way to the sun and the foundations of the universe.
Your body tenses, preparing for the wave beginning to form deep inside. The surge builds from small, tenuous pulses, radiating ripples to every part. In your toes and fingertips they
