Contours of Darkness (11 page)

Finally, Aaron stirred. His eyes opened slowly and with the sense of being entombed still dominant, acknowledged his actual physical environment. Like a person who has lived for months on amphetamines and has come to accept that psychic state as permanent, and then stops injecting the drug and descends to the chemically normal equilibrium only to find it massively depressing, Aaron stepped into the world he had created for himself out of the pitiful tools he had been given as a birthright and saw it to be absolutely stifling. Forgetting that the power of the perceptions was due to the increased energy released by the acid, he thought he would have to live for the rest of his life with this frightful aspect. And with an elegant leap of rational intelligence he understood that the awesome immediacy of the insight would be tempered by time, but that its factual reality would continue. In sum, in a few days he would feel better about his condition, reverting to his customary level of consciousness, but his condition would continue to be a denial or a translation of the fierce life energy inside him.

'It's all true,' he said aloud.

Conrad blinked and looked at the inert form. 'How you feeling, man?' he said.

'I've been under a long time,' Aaron responded.

'About three hours/ said Conrad.

'About thirty-one years/ Aaron said.

'Ah.' Conrad added, 'You've seen all that.'

'Yeah,' Aaron said in a low vibrant voice, 'I've seen all that.' He stared at the ceiling. The conversation lifted much of the weight from his chest; they were two solitaries sharing the darkness of the night, the way wolves howl to relieve their plaintive loneliness under stark moons over frozen hills. 'You are my comrade,' he said.

Conrad cocked his head. 'I don't know what that word means,' he said. 'All I know is friends and strangers. And you aren't a stranger any more, and I don't know whether you're my friend.'

'Are you all right?' said Cynthia.

'I feel like the past few hours have been one long breath,' Aaron told her. 'And I've filled my lungs and can be here for quite a while, but soon I'll be letting it all out again and breathing it all in again.'

'The next cycle will be less intense,' Conrad said. 'And the one after that even less so. Until you'll be breathing normally again.'

'Will I go back the way I was?' Aaron asked.

'No point in talking about that,' Conrad answered.

Aaron closed his eyes again, but instead of sliding back into the austere realm of cerebration, he fell into a pool of sensuality, his brain retiring to the task of sorting all the new data and structuring new gestalten to pattern it. He descended into his body.

It was as though a spirit entered the room, changing the very molecules of the air.

There was no change immediately observable to gross perception. Aaron seemed as still as he had been earlier, but to one who could read the language of the body, the difference was marked. Whereas his energy

had been flowing up into his brain and inward toward his centre, giving him the appearance of a man in shock, and instilling that feeling of constriction which he had translated into an image of the grave, it now moved downward and outward, charging his pelvis and legs, so that he seemed to swell and radiate; to the degree he had appeared deathly, he now was seen to overflow with life. His thoughts became, instead of the laboratory of crucial considerations, like the delicate riffs of a piece by Mozart heard in the background while fucking. No imitation of sex as such intruded into the atmosphere, for the other two had not yet moved into that realm of expansion which now transformed Aaron and imparted to him a radiant beauty.

Conrad was the first to be affected, noting with almost cynical satisfaction that the contours of the trip were developing along expected paths. The realisation caught him in a bind, for he knew that in a short time the scene would move into the area of orgy, and to succumb to that temptation was too easy for his liking; it also carried the threat of repercussions from Aaron. He did not wish to subject their relationship to more strain than the older man could assimilate, especially under the influence of the drug. In the outlaw lifestyle that had become his role it was more important to be secure within a narrow ground with people than to indulge in far-reaching romps over untested terrain. Aaron and Cynthia were as much a possible source of help in a crisis as people he wanted to become more intimate with. The two functions were reciprocal, but to pursue one at the possible expense of the other was foolish.

He began to detect the changes in himself which enticed him into the world of sucking and licking and sighing. His legs grew heavy, his groin flushed with heat, his shoulders slumped and his fingers curled and uncurled, as though he were bunching silk into his palms. He looked at Cynthia. She sat sprawled in the large chair, her shirt unbuttoned to her chest, the tie-dyed fabric a frame for the swell of her breasts. The bottom of the garment had ridden to the tops of her thighs and her pubic hair was a black shadow deep between her legs. His cock stirred. With the knowledge born of patient observation he could now read the alterations in her attitude; she was coming undone.

'She's ready for anything,' he thought, and wondered whether she had the power to be wanton. A woman come upon with a passion could stand five times the number of men presently in the room on their ears, making them perform like so many trained lions, leaping through the hoops of their own desire and over the poles of their own erections, all the while allowing them to think it was they who were running the show. But it would take a woman with absolute confidence in the sublimity of abandon; one slip and she would become the wretched object of a shoddy gang-bang. Conrad made peace with his ambivalence by deciding to remain passive, taking whatever sensual gifts were handed him with gratitude, but doing nothing to structure their flow.

But Cynthia did not know how to proceed and was wishing that one or both of the men would go to where she was and do something with her. She was intimidated by Aaron's status of tripping and didn't want to interfere with a process she didn't yet understand. She could feel the vibrations emanating from him, and knew from experience that he was rutting heavily. Conrad's eyes were like hot hands on her body, and she still tingled at the memory of their encounter in the kitchen. She closed her eyes and slipped into a state of imminent waiting.

The three of them sank into a wordless swirl of sexual yearning. Aaron centred his attention in the beating of his heart, returning to the awareness of life as a single throb, a blind pulsation in the dark. The great complexities he had been dealing with reduced to the critical moment when the muscle in his chest contracted and released, contracted and released; once more he returned to the theme of mortality, but instead of understanding it in imagistic terms, he saw it as the simple physiological question of continuation. From the top of his head to the soles of his feet he thrilled with the simple joy of breathing. For each it was almost impossible to tell which feelings were generated from within, and which were being received from another. They were a circuit the nature of which was determined by the totality of all their impulses, and the communications were too rapid and subtle to be sorted as to origin. Their minds were drenched with erotic images dimly projected, and their mouths were shaped for moans of the ecstasy that can only come from capitulation to a force greater than the intellect is willing to acknowledge.

Aaron brought his hands to his chest, pausing to relish the concrete reality of his own form, and then, something he had never done before, caressed himself gently, sliding his hands to his belly, which rose and fell in a soft rhythm, and to his crotch, where his cock lay in tender readiness. A shiver of sweetness tickled his thighs, and his muscles tasted a sensation akin to the first mouthful of ripe melon crumbling on the tongue. He rubbed the shaft slowly until it swelled, causing a bulge down the right leg of his trousers, to him a centre of almost unbearably precious carnal contemplation, but to Cynthia a focus of temptation.

With great trepidation, she slipped off the chair and moved cautiously to where Aaron lay, walking on her knees. She knew that he had no need of her at that moment, but something about his vulnerability to his own pleasure stirred her to involve herself with him. The sound roused Conrad and he opened his lids to watch as she advanced, the undulating womanflesh going to drench the stiffening male in her pungent juices. To his sight, which at that point beheld the whole world as a fluid mass of shifting sand, she possessed the stateliness of a long-necked dinosaur marching solemnly through tall waving marsh grass. A strong urge to rise to meet her was checked by his reluctance to add to the violence which was about to be perpetrated on Aaron at that moment. He was certain that he did not want to be impinged upon, even by an almost naked, and randy woman who wanted very much to be had by him. Conrad stared at the lolling breasts which preceded her, huge mammalian sensors feeling their way in the dark. His teeth itched with desire, but he held himself with an iron discipline which was becoming his central pride and pleasure, and only watched, the way a jackal will stand at the periphery of the circle where several jungle cats devour a succulent zebra, hoping that some will be left over for him.

Cynthia stopped, reached tentatively forward, and touched Aaron's cock with her fingertips. He flinched as though he had been slapped and brought his knees up like a man protecting himself. Into the domain of subtle vibration he had entered, her touch came as a gross intrusion, and wakened a hundred reflex reactions which frightened him with their clamour. The sense of relaxation had transported him to realms of quiet bliss, and he silently screamed against any request for movement, any demand for him to reach out. She understood his response as a sexual spasm, as in part it was, and was emboldened to bring her head down to rest her cheek against the hard cock that filled out the fabric. He put his hands over her ears, holding her head still, trying to communicate his wish to be left alone. She took his movement as a challenge and began insisting by grabbing his hips and pulling his body into her as she attempted to force her face between his legs. Conrad looked on. The woman's legs, now naked to the ass, were kicking against the rug, and her torso squirmed lasciviously; she presented the classic picture of every man's most rudimentary wet daydream: that of the woman who had divested herself of all defense and pretense and is allowing herself to sail off into an elongated gesture of bestial groveling begging. Aaron pushed her away, and his efforts only served to inflame her; she thought he was interested in another round of their favourite scenario, which always ended with him subjugating her, abusing her, and then sinking bewildered into her arms.

'Why do they fight one another so much?' Conrad said to himself. He had no way of knowing both were, in large measure, still working out the traumas of their childhood and teen-age, when sex was less a shared activity than a series of shivers linked to a sense of shameful wrongdoing. Although they now had adult rationalisations for their behaviour, and more sophisticated forms of presentation, what they did was limited by obsolete dynamics.

'Please,' said Cynthia, 'you have so much energy. Don't keep it all inside, Let me. Let me.'

She tugged at his zipper, staring at the work of her fingers with the look the demented attain during odd moments of concentration. She crooned as she hauled his cock out, the rigid member bending perilously as it was pulled from inside the tight trousers through the narrow opening. It flared in her fist, twitching in anticipation. Aaron rolled his head back and forth on the floor, battling, but with less conviction. Her nose wrinkled, her eyes went unfocused, her mouth opened tremulously, and her head dropped down, her hair spilling on his belly as she kissed his balls and then licked the length of his cock to the violet tip where a single drop of moisture was balanced, like dew on a rose. She sucked up the fluid, enraptured by the taste, and then in a single motion gliding with the grace of a swan, she swallowed his entire cock.

He groaned once, and surrendered to euphoria.

She sucked him lovingly, giving it her total attention, her lips acting as divinators for the explosions of pleasure in his cock, so that she moved unerringly in the way he would have done were he blowing himself. 'Oh you beautiful thick cock,' she said again and again. 'Put it in my mouth.' Her voice lapsed into a patter of gurgles and sputters. That's better,' she said after a while, 'so much better.' For a while she experienced the quiet rapture of a baby nodding off on the nipple.

Aaron fluctuated between melting into the flutter of Cynthia's tongue all around the tip of his cock, and the knowledge that Conrad was watching. He imagined what the other man could see, and the resultant images sparked eruptions of lava through his veins; at once he envisioned the thin curved lips in the expression of imbecilic rapture that emerged when she smiled with a cock in her mouth. Cynthia at first blocked the awareness of the third person, pretending that she was alone with Aaron, but the hot presence behind her could not long be ignored. She swung to the opposite end of the spectrum into exhibitionism, and also projected herself into Conrad's view of her. 'I'm on my belly sucking a cock and showing my arse to another man,' she thought, and tried to match that reality with what she would have thought of such a thing five years earlier, and enjoyed the shock which comes of having one's previous self, dormant within the character structure, wake up to see what a later self has become.

To the degree that she and Aaron kept to their own business, the energy flowed freely between them, reduced somewhat by Aaron's resistance and Cynthia's anxiety. But their increasing referrals to Conrad's presence pulled at their bond, and sought to include him. Fear, inhibition, lack of clarity, all intervened to keep that from happening, and instead they began to perform for him, without knowing they were doing so. Their
act
became an 'act'; yet they were not able to turn themselves into theatre. So her cocksucking was distracted, and his appreciation of what his cock felt like in her mouth was muddled. In a while they became bored, and could not admit that they were bored. Cynthia worked her tongue twice as fast, and Aaron started to lose his erection.