B. Worthy in the Flesh
"Let us enthrall you," Nieppe said.
I smiled, perhaps almost eagerly, for this struck me as the kind of bravura I might relish. Humor always had the backside of blood in its veins, and always was a fond rupture of reality. "You don't mean it?"
She stood, pulled off her sweater with determined, rakish air and threw it in the oblivious Frip's direction.
"I've never meant anything more in my life," she said with a faint muskiness, her virtually superb breasts — with each roseate aureole of tit tilting above and beyond — trembling not three feet from my famished face. "O my soldier," she crooned, "my fierce, benevolent darling. Let me rivet you to this chair," she laughed abruptly, with magical flair. "You'll like it immensely, I'm sure you will, and I'll tell you many intriguing stories in the meantime, beautiful stories."
I wondered how she expected to secure me to this flatulent sofa chair (for that's what it suddenly appeared to be) without benefit of some miraculously long ball-and-chain, or convenient rubber hosing, which were nowhere in sight.
She whispered, "We can do it, just lean back, my sumptuous paragon, and let me take these rags — strip them — from your achingly desirous flesh, paltry though that body might now seem.
"Yes ... here, let me ..." She had me shorn of clothing quickly enough, then said she'd be right back.
"Don't send out for breakfast."
Her naked departing back was molten as wet plaster in the lamplight. Soon Nieppe returned with a large copper coil which she added to her sexual arsenal.
"My dear," she began in sibylline manner, "this is only a taste of what The Burgher has in store for us. Believe it or not, you are now digitally enhanced -- & wired to the max!"
Nieppe reached down, cupping my balls onto the wiry nexus, then pricking my scrotum with her long nails. She began kneading me into exuberant hardness: kissing, sucking, lathering me with saliva, probing all of me with pinpoint tongue. Her hands reached up to steadily massage my undulating torso, and she was deep into the heaviness of a rhythmic bounce that prodded me into a willing effigy of suspended self as I came with staccato spurts. The dregs of her lovemaking whistled my spent flesh, under which bones still danced. Gone were my transcendental yearnings for peace, I was left buzzing in that ethereal air where cyberorgasms confounded my long sleep of reason.
* * * *
Nils was dragging on a joint when he inspected me the first time ... "Welcome to the Cyber Club, comrade. The Dam is everything here, if you know your Euro history." A soporific density had overtaken my flesh, but I was beginning to stir. "Ever been to the Rijksmuseum? ‘The German Renaissance was marked by an anticlassical period.'" He was aping a scholarly baritone. "I don't even know if there are any Germans collected there, now or ever. The 17th century was a big time, I hear, for our native artists. Do you think I look like a pimp?"
Blinking across at his shrouded figure in the simulated crepuscule, I was trying to draw such sketchy evidence into benign conclusions.
"I'm not a pimp, nor have I ever been one. I'm Lelica's friend. But your friend, Nieppe, is a practicing pro now and then." He lit a cigarette, leaning back in his corner chair. "Frip is her sorry boyfriend. She's an actual degenerate, believe me, in the pursuit of scientific enlightenment. What she did to you was the most cyber-erotic thing I've seen in a while." He coughed noisily, his great bulk threatening to fall over. "I understand you're missing from the military, is that it?"
"I'm temporarily estranged from it."
"Well, buddy, Nieppe says you have an artistic soul and that you plan to pursue art upon discharge from the army?" His voice swayed along the way a radio dial changes channels, never arriving at any point before moving, without digital relief. "In the 17th century three historic canals were brought to fruition. Are you aware of them? The Keizersgracht, Herengracht, and Prinsengracht. Repeat them please. Say: The Keizersgracht."
I turned my head slightly toward him, wondering whether injunction or put-on was in order. He pulled out a German pistol and fired it over my left shoulder. Something in the way of a bullet whizzed on by my ear, snapping into the wall.
Gradually I was aware of being in another room. A depressingly small and musty one, slovenly functional for this sort of thing, I suppose. It was an unclean room. There was oppressive lint in my nose — had someone plugged up my nostrils with the insufferable stuff? Everywhere there was a residue of dust, something adhering to the white-flaking plaster walls. "I could damn well baptize you," Nils said. "Would you like that?" The idea brightened him, like he were offering me a drink. He aimed the pistol at my face, holding it aloft steadily.
"Say Keizersgracht."
"Keizersgracht."
"Say Herengracht."
"Herengracht."
"Say ... Prinsengracht."
I repeated that too.
My voice was hoarse, barely audible. He lowered the pistol to his lap. "Keizersgracht, Herengracht, Prinsengracht," he nodded. I repeated them, fumbling, with dire exactitude. "Keizergracht, Herengracht, Prinsengracht," he began to sing, snapping his fingers. Nils began toe-tapping and chanting in a deadpan tenor, swiveling in his chair, head bobbing. "Can you hear it? Can you hear it, brother?" For about a minute he was in his own musical. He finished with a finger-popping flourish, holding his shades aloft: "Dah-da!"
The door to this room was wide open, and I could see down a murky-blurred hallway where there seemed other doors. A curious bit of architecture, like someone had come in with a chainsaw and refashioned the place, cutting a swath all over and leaving precariously disjointed ends just barely meeting.
Nils was pulling something close to him so I could see it. Upon a small table he placed an antique record player. He lifted its arm, set the needle on a vinyl record and some awe-inspiring scratches ensued. Then came a campy version of "Yes Sir, That's My Baby" sung by a tone-deaf Slav you might think was singing for his life, and would brave execution should he stop. Nils, fascinated, listened astutely, critically, his face seriously composed. The song over, he sipped a drink and returned the table to a shadowy corner.
"Are you uncomfortable?" he asked me.
I stared a long while without nodding perceptibly.
"Perhaps the army is to your liking, buddy. Perhaps you are a fascist at heart." He rose and went to the doorway, drink in hand and head lowered, acting like he expected to hear something outside. Finally he blurted out, "Lelica! Come here, sweet darling!"
There followed the distinct clicking of high heels approaching on the cement runway outside. Lelica appeared finally wearing her silver-plated shoes, along with blue stockings, hot pants, and a sequined blouse revealingly open where strings of jewelry descended into her cleavage. She was carrying a bucket of something, which (after surveying the situation, and standing three feet from me) she upended and tossed over my right shoulder. The whole business clanked fitfully against the wall, dousing me with its watery contents.
"What are you doing to him, you asshole?"
Nils shrugged disagreeably, waved it all off and departed with the pistol tucked inside his belt. Lelica approached me, extracted a switchblade from her shorts and began to cut into my bonds. Brow sweat on me curlicued its post-roust relief, tinting me colorless.
She told me I could leave anytime.
But the shedding of some indefinable burden is always difficult after the way they've carried on. The day after the cruel binding, Nieppe and Nils behaved as if it were the farthest point from the avenue of memory: it might just be a mistake, one demanding no clarification. Lelica was assigned the task of redressing my emotional contusions, nudging me to those amenable reaches where such madness is mundane experience.
But did Lelica expect me to really stay on? I managed to elude her the afternoon after the incident (she had business elsewhere, I was told), retrieving my tote and setting forth back into the city. I returned to my hotel, and up in my room discovered that all my suitcase clothes were sewn together like a doll's giant quilt!
How, I ask myself, can I possibly requite such magical people?
