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From: Denny Wheeler <dennyw@zipcon.net>
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Subject: {ASSM} Write Club duel: Father Ignatius v. Nicholas Urfe
X-Original-Subject: Write Club duel: Father Ignatius v. Nicholas =?iso-8859-1?Q?Urf=E9?=
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 21:10:04 -0400
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Here are the stories from this non-simultaneous duel. Nat wrote his on
Saturday morning, in his timezone. Nicholas did his midday Sunday. I
announce the results in a post to ASSD. (alt.sex.stories.d)
The words:
Father Ignatius:
basketball, classroom, lawyer
Nicholas Urf :
clay, Cartesian, sclerotic
Referee (me:DennyW):
peripatetic, cancer, eagle
=================================================
Pro boner (mf 1st oral teen<*>)
(c) September 2000 Father Ignatius
FatherIgnatius@hotmail.com
-----
High-school students can get up to all sorts of mischief hanging
around after school waiting for their lifts to arrive. The
lift-kids form a special social group of their own. I've noticed
that kids usually have pretty much horizontal social groups,
hanging around mainly with kids around their own age. The
lift-kids are a vertical social group--all ages are brought
socially together through communal hanging around the main gate
every afternoon and coming up with ideas for relieving the
boredom. Studying in the library is an option, of course, but
scarcely a popular one.
The day this all started, I arrived pretty late to the party.
Basketball practice had run late and I'd dallied in the shower
afterwards, daydreaming. The coach had chewed me out about it; he
wanted to lock up and go home, like everyone else--"Marco, I dread
to think what's keeping you in there. Get your butt in gear."
The school was almost deserted by the time I joined the hard core
of lift-kids at the gate.
"What's going on?" I asked Felicity. She's a pretty little kid, a
ninth-grader, I think, with imagination and a quirky sense of
humour. She has straight fair hair that hangs down to the small
of her back. I mention this because one of the activities she got
us into one day was playing "Catch". We'd more or less given up
that sort of thing around the time we reached the heady maturity
of grade five or so. Reviving it, as Felicity did, for a bunch
of eighth- to twelfth-graders added a whole new dimension. It
became more of a contact sport with players of the opposite sex
strangely interested in catching the player who was "it" of the
moment. And long, fair hair, I have to tell you, is very useful
for grabbing a scampering, giggling "it" who is trying to cheat by
running into the sacrosanct girls' toilets.
I carried her captive back to the playground. She was going, "Ow,
Marco, you bastard, you hurt me" and giggling and wriggling. I
was enjoying myself enormously. "The penalty for cheating is a
kiss," I said, revelling at the surging, swelling feeling in my
crotch. She flickered a glance up at me. For a brief, wild
moment, I thought she was going to do it and then another kid
appeared from somewhere and called out, "Oh, she's here. Marco
got her."
Immediately Felicity twisted out of my grasp and turned to face me
from the safe distance of a few paces. She had instantly become
spitting angry.
"Go _away_! Leave me _alone_!" she shouted, red-faced. "I'm not
playing any more." She made as if to slap me.
"Marco is 'it'," called another kid, "Catch him!"
A calculating look flashed into her eyes and she lunged for me. I
skipped aside and ran off, with the other kids after me. We gave
each other a cautious wide berth for a few days after that, after
which she started getting friendly again.
"What's going on?" I asked her, the day this all started.
"I've started a new game," she said, "It's called 'Hide and Go
Seek'." It's played in Miss Dixon's classroom. Count to a
hundred and then come looking for me."
She darted away before I had a chance to climb on my twelfth-grade
dignity.
"Count slowly," she called back over her shoulder.
The classrooms are out-of-bounds after school. If Mimi had turned
up to lift me home, I would simply have left Felicity hiding and
teased her the next day but Mimi didn't arrive. When I
guesstimated the right time had passed, I walked casually to Miss
Dixon's classroom, wondering what Felicity had up her sleeve this
time.
I pushed open the door cautiously and peeked in. Felicity was
kind of wild and booby-traps, shied blackboard dusters--or
blackboard compasses, even--were quite possible. I couldn't see
her anywhere, and classrooms are not good places to hide.
Wondering whether I'd been had, I moved a few cautious steps into
the classroom. That was when I noticed the blackboard. Last time
I'd seen it, earlier that morning, there had been diagrams from
Miss Dixon's Cartesian geometry lesson. Right now, one of the
boards had an enormous cross-section of a human eye on
it--"vitreous humour", "cornea", "sclerotic envelope" and so
forth. Yuck.
But whatever had been on the other blackboard had been scrubbed
off and replaced by an enormous heart. Not an "auricle",
"ventricle", "aorta" sort of heart, a Valentine's Day sort of
heart, with a Cupid's arrow through it. And, in huge letters,
"Marco is Love". What the..?
The door creaked behind me and swung closed and there was
Felicity. She had been hiding in the corner behind the open
door--about the only hiding place in the room, come to think of
it. Her clothes, I saw, were on one of the desks. Which is to
say that Felicity was naked. Unless you count the small, white
ankle-socks that, for some reason, she still wore.
I looked from her to the board and back again, feeling an enormous
blush spreading across my face and chest. Felicity blushed too
and looked briefly as if her nerve was failing but then her little
chin tilted up and she struck a defiant pose, hands on
little-girl-turning-woman hips, showing off her little,
half-formed apple breasts, her flat little belly, her little
blonde bush.
"A genuine blonde, as you see" she said formally and then spoiled
the effect by giggling at her own daring.
"Do you like my board-work, Marco?" she asked, and started walking
towards me, sliding her socked feet in a fake, hands-on-hips,
model-on-a-runway, showing-off walk.
"Um, yes, it's... um... very nice," I said, wondering what to do.
Truth to tell, I was nervous. I didn't know what to do and,
clearly, Felicity had some pretty clear ideas. Twelfth-graders
aren't accustomed to being controlled by ninth-graders, especially
naked ones. While I wondered what to do, I stepped back, trying
to keep a distance between us. This worked great until the back of
my thighs hit up against Miss Dixon's desk. She caught up to me
and stood a little too close and eyed me out, head cocked on one
side, with mischief in her style.
I didn't know what to do with my hands. I found I had crossed my
arms across my chest, which felt stupid, so I put my palms on the
desk by my thighs.
Hands still on hips, Felicity swayed back, like a limbo dancer,
and sank to her knees, placing one each side of my bare feet. Had
she been rehearsing? I wondered crazily. Her hands left her hips
and snaked round behind me. She hugged me round the thighs, with
the side of her face pressed against my crotch, where there was an
immediate reaction. Part of me, at least, wasn't wondering what
to do. Felicity's head did not move as her hands moved to my
buttocks, squeezing gently. She slipped her hands down to the hem
of my shorts, and back up, against the skin, inside the shorts,
and again squeezed my buttocks through the fabric of my
underpants.
She swayed back and looked up at me, expressionless, as her
fingertips felt their way under the underpants and back up against
my skin. Her wrists dragged at the cloth as her circling thumbs
felt their way from my hips across my lower belly, towards each
other. She stopped when she hit hair and cocked an eyebrow at me.
I discovered that I was gripping the edge of the desk very hard. I
tried to smile, as best I could.
Felicity slid her thumbs slowly down, under my balls, and pressed
gently upwards.
"I can't see what I'm doing," she said and drew her hands out. She
pulled at the hem of my shorts and drew them slowly and firmly
down to my ankles. I looked down as I stepped out of them at the
swollen, stretched fabric of my underpants. My half-swollen cock
was held, pointed down, by the friction and elasticity of the
cloth. Felicity tossed my freed shorts away over her shoulder and
sighed, "Dammit, I still can't see what I'm doing."
She looked up at me while running her fingernails up my calves,
behind my knees, up my thighs, until they hooked in to the waistband
of my underpants. Still looking unblinkingly into my eyes, she
firmly pulled downwards, very slowly and deliberately. As the base
of my cock became revealed, she broke our gaze and leaned forward
into my crotch. Her little pink tongue came out and burrowed and
darted around in the hair at the base of my cock, which responded
immediately and, when the underpants were finally drawn down far
enough, sprang free and whacked her under the chin.
She laughed delightedly and pulled my underpants down to my ankles
and tugged impatiently, willing me to step out of them. When I
did, she threw them away and turned back to my swollen,
stretching, bobbing, eager cock. She blew on it, shooting
mischievous glances up at me under her eyelashes. It bobbed
obediently, and she giggled again. Cupping balls in one hand and
taking shaft in the other, she sucked my cock into her mouth like
a lollipop, in one long, slow, suck until she couldn't get any
more in. Then, getting to her feet and bending over as she did
it, she slowly pulled back, sucking hard and working away with her
tongue as she did, straightening up as she went.
When my eager cock was finally free, she carried on standing up
and lifted the hem of my T-shirt up my torso until we were
standing chest-to-chest with the fabric bunched between us. She
kept lifting and I obediently raised my arms above my shoulders
and let her pull it off and throw it away.
She hugged me hard, and I felt her hard little breasts pushing
into my upper belly. I hugged her back and, when she lifted her
face, we kissed. Her little tongue darted out and fought its way
into my mouth, wriggling around in an exploratory fashion.
She broke the kiss by sinking again to her knees, her hug sliding
down my ribs, past my hips, to my thighs and, again, I felt her
warm little mouth sucking my engorged cock into its warm,
welcoming depths. My hand were resting lightly on her shoulders.
I closed my eyes to focus on the sensations of the sucking, the
little tongue darting about. I felt my head go back and my mouth
opened in sympathy with hers.
L4: 'My hand were' presumably s/b 'hands'
"Just what the hell is going on here?"
I snapped back to reality as Felicity swung round guiltily,
leaving my frantic, frustrated boner waving in the air. Miss
Dixon was standing in the doorway, arms akimbo, looking at it. We
hadn't even heard the door open.
* * *
"Here's the thing," Mimi, my step-mother, said to my father, "Marco
is seventeen. Felicity is fourteen. According to the headmaster,
that makes it statutory rape. Felicity is getting two weeks
suspension, suspended so as not to jeopardise her social standing
with her classmates. And Marco gets expelled."
That was the bottom line of the hastily-convened meeting in the
headmaster's office involving him, Felicity, me, the peripatetic
Miss Dixon and the belated Mimi, who, it appeared, was never going
to be late picking me up ever again. It was a weird meeting. I
never did find my underpants. They were next seen atop the
flagpole at recess the next day, I was told, but I wasn't there to
see it, thank God. I was at home on suspension pending expulsion.
My father was still trying to take it all in. Mimi said, "I'm
going to call Evelyn." Her friend Evelyn is a lawyer--a very
zesty woman who knows how to fill out a power suit. When she
visited Mimi she would tease me about, "My, you're all grown up,
Marco. Filling out splendidly." Looking me up and down the
while. And sending me on little errands, to get her juice and
what all.
"Love to see that kid bending down," I once overheard her say to
Mimi.
"Hush, Evelyn. Stop it, now," said Mimi.
There was no kidding around when she came over this time, though.
"Okay, let's see if this headmaster of yours has feet of clay
or real balls ," she said. "Mimi, set up a meeting with him. Don't
tell him that Marco and I are coming. Marco, be properly washed
and shaved and looking sharp in a jacket and tie, okay?"
"Okay."
* * *
The headmaster's secretary showed us in to his office next
morning. She flicked me an interested look as I edged past her
through the door. Word had got around, no error.
"Hi, Larry, remember me?" said Evelyn, "We were classmates here
together back in 19-nevermind."
"Uh, yes, um, it's Evelyn, right?" And, remarkably, he blushed.
"That's right. Now, let's deal with the common cause first," said
Evelyn, taking control while the he was still trying to get over
whatever-it-was and offer tea-or-coffee, "Marco got caught with
his pants down, no doubt about it. He's seventeen, she's
fourteen, statutory rape, no argument. If it should come to
that."
"It has come to that," said the headmaster, trying to volley,
"Teenage sexual promiscuity is a cancer in our schools and I am
charged, and determined, to stamp it out."
"Give me a break," said Evelyn. "Maybe the Education Department
has you say that but you've been in the business, and the human
race, long enough to know that no-one, absolutely no-one, is going
to stop teenagers screwing around if they've decided that's what
they're going to do, am I right?"
He shot me a look. I was still trying to pretend I wasn't there.
He raised his palms to Evelyn and shrugged ever so slightly.
Evelyn forged on.
"Here's the thing," she said, "on the one hand, the girl gets not
even a slap on the wrist. You suspended her suspension, whatever
that means, for God's sake, to spare her the social embarrassment
of people enquiring into why she was suspended. On the other
hand, you're proposing to expel a twelfth-grader who's in sight of
graduating. He's a good kid, Eagle Scout, an athlete, on the
basketball team, does his homework, doesn't cause trouble,
promising future at college and beyond. And you're going to expel
him?"
"Yes," said the headmaster. "I am required to."
"Larry, Larry, Larry," said Evelyn, "You can't expel him for
something you know nothing about. Now hear this: if Marco gets
expelled, the whole city is going to hear about this. I have
journalist friends who would plaster this Felicity girl all over
page three and be trusted to keep mum about their sources. They'll
get the whole story about how this teen Salome seduced this poor
innocent boy,"--and she waved a hand at me as I prayed for the
ground to open up and swallow me rather than be reported in the
papers as a seduced, innocent boy.
"And, Larry," said Evelyn, leaning forward and changing her brisk
tone for a lower, menacing one, "don't think I can't dig up dirt
on how you behaved when we were pupils here together."
It was someone else's turn to blush, thank God. He shot another
look at me. I sat there trying to look as if I hadn't heard
while, inside, I was thinking, Oh-ho? Really?
"Larry," said Evelyn remorselessly, "do we have a deal? Everyone's
clean or everyone's in it, up to their eyebrows."
Long silence.
"Answer me, Larry."
He sighed. "Okay, Evelyn, we have a deal. Everyone knows
already, so two weeks suspension for both of them. But you, young
man," he said menacingly to me--and I started nodding compliantly
right there--"are on the thinnest of thin ice. If there's a next
time, I don't care if it's the day before graduation, you're out.
Okay?"
"Deal," said Evelyn, quickly, taking it on herself to speak for
me. "I will look into this young man's case myself and see what a
little mentoring can do. Okay, team, we're done."
And out the door we went, with me still thinking, "Eagle Scout?
But I was never in the scouts at all." But I knew better than to
open my mouth about anything.
* * *
"Okay, Mimi," said Evelyn in the car park, "You heard. Marco and
I have some talking to do so why don't you take yourself off to a
movie or something, and Marco and I will go back to your place and
have a little talk."
"Now, Evelyn..." started Mimi, concerned.
"Now, Mimi," interrupted Evelyn, "Do you want me to explain
explicitly to you what 'pro boner' means?"
Mimi tried to fight it but Evelyn looked at her meaningfully until
she gave it up.
"Okay," she said, it's the movies for me."
"And then maybe a little lunch?" said Evelyn, pressing the
advantage.
"And then maybe a little lunch," said Mimi, resigned.
* * *
Back home, Evelyn, my mentor, pulled off my tie and dropped it
into my dad's waste-paper basket.
"Lawyers are often called in to solve problems," my mentor Evelyn
told me, unbuttoning my shirt as I stood with my back to the desk
in my father's study as I had earlier stood with my back to Miss
Dixon's, "but I often feel that our time would be better spent in
avoiding the problems in the first place."
Evelyn, my mentor, eased my shirt over my shoulders and down my
arms. My cuffs were still buttoned and the bunched cloth made a
sort of handcuff, binding my hands behind my back.
"There seems to be something in here trying to get out," my
mentor, Evelyn, said, eyeing my crotch, "As a lawyer, I think my
time would be well-spent dealing with it now before it becomes a
problem. What do you think?"
I nodded. It was all I could trust myself to do. My mentor
unzipped me, undid my waistband and drew trousers and underpants
down to my ankles, hobbling me.
"Now then..." said my mentor, speculatively.
My period of suspension looked like being an instructive two
weeks' mentoring. At least, I knew, I would never again have to
mess with jail-bait on school premises which was, after all, the
object of the exercise.
* * *
And, when I went back to school, Miss Dixon took me aside.
"I want to apologise to you, Marco," she said, "for my hastiness
the other day. After a talk with the headmaster, and thinking it
over for myself, I believe I made an error of judgment in
intruding on your privacy. I would like to make it up to you in
some way, and be your friend. Would you like to come to my
apartment after school so I can give you some catch-up coaching?"
"Yes, please, Miss Dixon," I said, "I'd like that very much."
-----
ENDS
============================================================
Silk and Amphetamines (Doom Patrol No. 34)
by Nicholas Urfe (nickurfe@yahoo.com)
You have to imagine The Divine Comedy in full swing, soaring up
behind Neil Hannon's basso voice as he sings:
"With a wave of his red
White and blue hand
Cross a glittering Las Vegas scene
He said
A true showman knows how to disappear
In the silk, and amphetamines..."
In the silk and amphetamines. Yeah, I know. Mark Eitzel wrote it.
I like Hannon's cover better. So sue me.
I've been awake for, let's see. Thirty-seven hours.
Ready?
Show time.
"Nixon in the motha fuckin house!"
Gee, thanks, Turk. Not like I love the spotlight or anything.
Which is shining on me, now, with a stutterpulse timed to the
skittery beat of the old school illbient groaning out of every
speaker, DJ Spooky or some such shit, some little girl's voice
giggling "It is the business of the future to be dangerous," and baby
ain't that true. And the gang's all here, there's Solitaire and
Tucker and Cliff, the Big Red Doc, and there's Pokey Jones the
Berber, his Eraserhead pompadour bobbing to some private drum over
the crowd on the John Travolta Memorial Dance Floor, his black and
blue djellabah whirling round and round, he hasn't looked up to see
me yet, but pretty much everyone else has, and thank God and the
motherboard I came dressed to kill: an old silk slip that's cut off
maybe an inch below my ass and a string of pearls a couple inches
longer than that and white over-the-knee stockings with a bit of lace
trim above the red ribbon garters and sensible black shoes like my
ever-so-great grandmother might have worn at the turn of the last
century, and my hair's in a flapper's bob with razor-sharp,
laser-sharp bangs and my eyes are dark with sooty lashes and my mouth
is cherry red and my body's as tight and taut and tuned as a
seventeen-year-old pop star's, or an eighteen-year-old porn star's,
and is there a difference these days? Was there ever? So I turn and I
twirl under the flashing lights and I throw them a smile and a flash
them a little of what I'm not wearing underneath. Subtle? Fuck that.
I came here to get laid. But not by the tattooed ex-basketball player
with the grey dreads down to the middle of his back (and no way
that's really him, anyway, and why on earth would you want to do him
now instead of him then?) and not by the one, no, ye Gods two Hiero
Protagonist wannabes shuffling up in their black ninja pyjamas, and
not by the gal in the off-the-rack Klingon suit with, fuck, the TMs
and marcae registradae still floating in the air above and behind her
shoulders, how on earth did she even get in here, anyway? Nope.
Anyone who knows me at all ought to know that Nixon Rising is having
none of that. So I turn and I make my way to the bar.
It's not that kind of bar, of course.
Tenderloin throws me a wink and a leer as I sidle up and he
conjures up a couple of sample displays flickering in the air, porn
loops repeating themselves in stuttering bursts, come on in and have
a good time: a ballet dancer plieing in a simple black sports bra and
nothing else; a classroom filled with schoolgirls in kilts and ties,
passing time in various delightful ways; two girls in a hottub in the
dark somewhere, waving. I shake my head. "No dolls tonight," I tell
him.
"All done?" he says. "Done in?"
"All done," I tell him, "a thirty hour push and now the
motherfucker's in beta. Disney's never gonna know what hit them."
His eyebrows go up. "Disney? I thought you were doing something
with the Dark Angel stuff."
"That was last week, hon. You know that. Paid off in spades. So I
got to do a labor of love: Wally Wood's unforgettably Disney orgy,
live and in three dee." I spread my hands and give myself a
congratulatory grin, which I damn well deserve. "The Tinkerbelle
alone is gonna be worth the price of admission."
"Which is free."
"Well. If you can find it." I turn to survey the bar, and most
everyone has gone back to whatever they were doing, dancing or
flirting or talking or pretending to fuck or even coding, at least, I
think that's what Dandy Don is doing there in the corner with his
neon Mac which always looks like it's on fire. ("It's cause I'm so
hot," he'll tell you, over and over again, because he never remembers
whom he's told a joke to and whom he hasn't.) The ex-basketball
player is showing a high school cheerleader (some things never go out
of style) just how big his hands are, and you know, maybe it is him.
Balls indeed to come in here as who you are and nothing more, but
he's always been known for his balls. "So I'm done," I say, "and now
I want to be done, dammit. But no dolls. I've had enough of that.
Give me a real live girl. Give me real lips to kiss and tits to hold
and a real live cunt to suck. I want it all, Tender. I want
everything I've ever seen in the movies."
"Are you sure?" Tenderloin is saying. "I've got this great David
Duchovny..."
"Fuck you," I tell him. "I wrote the fucking Duchovny you have,
you bastard."
"Nixon?" says this girl's voice, nice. "Nixon Rising?"
"My nom de guerre, my nom de plume," I tell her, warily. Otaku can
be a pain, sometimes. "Don't wear it out."
She's cute, in a frumpy kind of way, an interesting choice here in
Glitterdammerung, where everyone goes for overkill, my humble self
included. Black hornrims like a thoughtful folkie and brown hair just
soft and wavy enough to want to be touched and the sort of face I
guess some folks might call heart-shaped. She's interestingly dressed
for the frumpy look, though: a T-shirt covered in lines of shifting,
changing code. And nothing else. That I can see. "Nice shirt," I say.
Nice legs, too. And lovely little feet, with a ring on a toe or
three.
"It's dex," she says, or something that sounds like that.
"Dex?"
"Code for playing DVDs."
"Christ below," I say. Old school indeed. "Who the hell would want
to hack DVDs these days?"
"Precisely," she says, as if I've hit a nail on the head.
Whatever. "I've got something to tell you. Is there somewhere more
private we can go?"
"Well," I say, "yes, but why should I--"
And that's when I see her. Not the frump, cute though she might
be. Her. Or me. Sort of.
She's standing at the edge of the crowd by the brightly lit
squares of the Travolta floor, and she's staring right at me, and
there's a smile on her face, my face, the face I'm wearing right now,
like she knows she's got my attention, like she knows I'm going to
get up and walk over to her, like I've got no choice. Which is true,
true indeed.
"Nixon?" the frump is saying.
"In a minute," I tell her, getting to my feet.
"It's really important," she's saying, but fuck. It's not this
important.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I'm vaguely aware that the
Spooky's crashed and burned and swiveled with the magic of Turk's
turntables into one of my favorite songs, gee, thanks, Turk. "Act
Two, Scene One," it's called, for reasons I can't figure out. It's
one of those songs that begins with a slow, slow burn, the kind that
reaches out to a dancefloor filled with sweating bodies and stills
them, waiting, feeling the music swell and grow and there's hints
inside it of the monster beats to come, but not yet, not yet. The
tension grows and tightens and pulls you taut, unbearably, as the
voice, that voice whispers:
Along the shore the cloud waves break
Twin suns sink behind the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa...
And someone somewhere moans as the beats slowly, so slowly,
ratchet up a teeny-tiny notch.
And I'm standing before her. Looking in a mirror. Looking at my
twin.
The slip is a yellower white, older, perhaps. The pearls aren't
quite so long. The eyes, the eyes are different, but then, the eyes
are always different.
"If you want my attention," I tell her, "you've got it."
"Good," she says, and her voice is different, too. Lower. A little
huskier. As if she smokes. More than I do, anyway.
"Did you hack my desc? Not that it's that hard."
"Maybe," she says. "Maybe not." She reaches up with one hand and
in a curiously ritualistic gesture touches my forehead. My skin burns
there. Not that it really burns. Not that I'm feeling it there. Not
that she's rigged something in her fingers to do that. My skin burns
because I want her to touch me, and not just there, either. My skin
burns because my nerves practically leap out of me to meet her
finger, soft, light, delicate. My finger. Her hand.
The song is swirling faster, now.
Song of my soul, my voice is dead,
Die though, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
Lost Carcosa...
"Well?" I start to say, but she reaches out a hand, and I reach
out a hand, and one of us pulls the other closer, and we are
touching, pressed together, a perfect fit, knees beside knees,
breasts to breasts, arm around waist, thigh already nudging between
thighs, our pearls clicking together maybe a touch too loudly, but
that can be fixed, later. She sways, to the music, as it starts to
swallow its own tail. The beats are coming. They're coming. The whole
crowd is starting to sway to it, feeling it, crying out, the chiming
bells and the swelling chords chasing each other around the abyss,
the drums louder now, a skittering cymbal crash promising what's to
come, as the voice is losing itself in grief, in ecstasy, repeating
over and over and over again, "In Carcosa, lost Carcosa, dim
Carcosa..."
The music explodes, the crowd roars, the dancing begins, and she
kisses me, or I kiss her, and I am lost, and so is she, my God.
Sometime later, she murmurs a lipsticked whisper in my ear, "I
want to go away with you."
And my lipsticked lips whisper into hers, "I think I can arrange
that."
Tenderloin grins from the bar. The ex-basketball player leers and
whips out a visual pickup, filming us, twins walking away, a mirror
holding hands with itself. The frump is waving, trying to get my
attention, but I'm terribly sorry, my dear. She--this person--God, I
don't even know her name yet, which is cool, just great in fact--she
got here first, and most spectacularly.
I make my secret sign and my desktop appears in the air before me.
I pull her close to me, and touch, and go.
(Miles away, somewhere deep in the drill core of the old abandoned
oil rig that hosts The Glit, and more terabytes of other stuff than
it's worth your life to figure out, a processor looks over my
request, checks my codes and doublechecks, and okays it and sets
stuff up and a bank of memory comes to life and fills itself with my
personal environment set and sits there, waiting. I pay them enough
for the service, so I'd damn well better get preferential treatment.
[I'm not stupid enough to leave that shit lying around any computers
hereabouts, let me tell you.] Signals flash from broadcasters to
satellites and back down again, and in I go, and wherever she is, in
she goes, too. And there we are.)
It's an empty room, nice hardwood floors, big ceiling, open
windows looking out on a nice spring day, curtains tossing gently in
the breeze. Lozenges of light float in the air, spaced regularly,
rotating gently, freezeframes of places to go.
We're maybe five feet apart, and that's too far. Stand still,
though. Be cool. Let her make the first move. I've got a sardonic
grin on my lips. Its mate is curling hers. She reaches out, runs a
hand through one freezeframe. "Looks like detention is a lot of fun,"
she's saying.
Oh, fuck. I've left quite a bit littering the floor here,
including that damn schoolgirl orgy that Tenderloin tried to push on
me in the Glit. (Hey. Every now and then you just want to unwind in
the most cliche-ridden way possible. Okay?) I roll my eyes and fiddle
a little with my desktop, sweeping that and a couple of others into a
private directory tree. Lozenges flow and shift and reorder
themselves. "Maybe something a little more classy," I say.
"Oh," she says. "How about a nice intellectual property lawyer we
can discipline, hmm?"
I look at her. I'm ninety per cent positive that's a joke, but.
Something in her eyes...
"What's your name?" I ask.
"Sheila," she says.
Sheila. Okay. Can't win them all. "Well, Sheila," I say. "How
about this."
I reach out and touch a lozenge, and it gives a little under my
hand, a lovely tactile sensation that, believe me, probably wasn't
worth the amount of time I spent coding it. The room fades away, and,
well, we're elsewhere. Again.
It's a riverbank.
I'm not going to tell you where it is, really. I used to live
there, a long time ago, and, well. You'd probably guess it was from
somewhere in the Southeast US of A, and you'd be right, as far as
that goes, but even though it's a big river it probably isn't the one
you're thinking of. It's summery hot and the sky is high and hazy
white at the edges and the river's low and slatey grey and sullen,
down from the springtime highs that cut the riverbanks so deep and
steeply. We're at the foot of a gully, a small creek that flows into
the river, choked picturesquely with trees and undergrowth the names
of which I've never bothered to learn. The only one that's important
is the apple tree, blown over long ago and hanging horizontally over
the gully. Its roots are still deep within the earth, though, and
it's still in bloom, still alive, leaves a lovely light green,
filling the air with delicate white blossoms, all around us. It's an
image from my own personal Tarot, okay, the cards that flicker
through my memory, like the bird that flies over our heads, eternally
circling above us, never beating its wings. It's an eagle, maybe, or
a hawk or Christ maybe a vulture, I have no idea what kind of bird
hangs out in the sky like that in that part of the world, and I
didn't even bother being that accurate, just grabbed it from the
background of a travelogue I hacked into once. The movement felt
right. And though I haven't been back there in years, it is somehow
important to me, vital to me, that this place exist, unchanged. The
apple tree, in constant bloom. The bird, circling.
The two of us, standing there. Stop and smell--the summery air,
the greenery simmering in the heat and lightly cut with the delicate
sweet smell of the apple, and just enough of dank Old Man River to
give us a sense of place. Listen to the breeze, the water flowing by.
Silence.
She takes a deep breath, and her sardonic grin is gone. "Oh," she
murmurs. "Oh. It's lovely."
"Indeed," I tell her.
Smell her. The spicy orange perfume, like mine, citrus and
sandalwood and something else that isn't quite right for here and
now, but so what. Her desc is as sharp as mine, of course, which
means that her hair now smells as if it's been warmed by the sun,
which it sort of kind of has been. The faintest whiff of makeup, the
powders and oils and colors, as I step closer and she steps closer
and we kiss again, not the knock-your-socks off dancefloor wow we
just shared, but something smaller, more intimate, even, because less
epic; hinting at what's to come.
"Why me?" I ask when we've finished and we stand there, entwined.
"I like your work," she says, her fingers toying with the hem of
my slip.
"I can see that. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I
suppose."
She laughs, a little, at that, and looks down, away. "Who wouldn't
want to try to fuck themselves, hmm?"
I cock an eyebrow at that. "I'd rather fuck you," I say.
She shakes her head, still looking away. "No," she says. "You
wouldn't."
"Then this," I say, "will have to do."
Sometimes, you just have to fuck the preliminaries, and so I do.
I'm trusting her desc, again, is as good as mine (it is mine, she
hacked mine, there's no other way she could be this close) and I drop
to my knees in the cold clay before her, suddenly, and kiss her
thighs and her belly as my fingers find her cunt and if the feedback
loops are all feeding back she's as turned on as I am. Her hands grab
my head as I lick her open and dive in, and she groans somewhere
above me, and it doesn't take long, at all, and as her body (my body,
dammit) is shuddering she nearly loses her balance, and what the
hell, I pull her down with me to the soft, cool clay, and let her
feel how wet I've made it, cool to the skin, perfect for a hot day
like this, and who cares about the stains to stockings and slips when
the silk can be reset with a blink of the mind's eye?
"God," she's saying, "God, oh God, this is good, this is very,
very good."
"It's my job, hon," I tell her.
"I know," she's murmuring, "I know. I know."
"You like it?" I ask her.
"It's so subtle," she says stretching like a cat in my arms,
feeling the body I've coded, the desc I've put together. How did she
hack it? What am I dealing with, here? Nixon, you moron, you've
dragged someone in who can hack your files and pulled her into this
private and personal space, and how the hell smart is that, and who
the fuck cares, in the end, when her hand slips between my legs like
that and her finger slips along my slippery slit like that, and oh,
my. "So warm," she's saying. "And so wet. I can feel it, and I can,"
and her other hand, slipping between her own legs (my legs, still),
"I can't tell the difference," she says, "you're as turned on as I
am."
"More," I tell her. "You owe me one. You do." Blossoms drift over
us like snow.
"Oh," she says. "I owe you more than one."
Her tongue slides between my lips at the same time her finger
does, and I arch my back and give myself up to her as another finger
slides in, and out, and in, and she licks my lips, and smiles down at
me, and says, "I almost hate to do this."
"What?" I say.
"Almost," she says.
The pain is intense.
I black out.
I come to in my apartment, screens snowy and blued and greened out
around me, still shuddering. Hot flashes. Oh, God. My heart racing
and something, something is triggering a fullbore relapse and at
first I figure that's got to be it, but no.
One screen is still live.
TO: NIXON
FROM: TNDRLOIN
Sorry. Hope this reaches you in time.
Bug out.
Fuck.
Mother of fucking God.
Jesus H. Christ humping his mother on a goddamn flaming pogo
stick.
I'm trying to force my body to move, sit it up, swing my hands up
to the keyboard, trying to feel the goggles and subvox and feedback
trodes and check connections and there's too much to be fucking done,
I have to get back in, back where my fucking body can't betray me,
back where I can fly as fast as my mind can think, back where I stand
a fucking chance. My backbrain is whirring, trying to figure out who
could be after me, who could have compromised the The Glit and gotten
Tenderloin and Turk to sell me out. Who gives that much of a fuck?
Christ. Tenderloin was asking about the Dark Angel gig. Which he
knew I'd finished. Mother fuck. Every now and then one of the Big
Boys decides to take out a hacker like me. They think it makes an
example and maybe things would be worse from their point of view if
they didn't but all I can see that it does is make us paranoid and
more determined than ever. But maybe he was trying to hint that Fox
was after me? Maybe? But it's only a week old, for God's sake. Their
lawyers can't even sneeze that fast, much less organize a hit like
this.
Fuck. Maybe it's that ancient Duchovny fuck fantasy. Oh, that
would be funny.
I can move, barely, my arms clumsy, my head still spinning, and my
brain, so much faster than this hunk of meat, even as it tries to
figure out how bad it is and what I've got to do can't help but
flickering back to another image from my personal Tarot, let's call
it The Traitor: nerves along my arms and legs and back, winking
dimly, the fatty myelin sclerotic with burns and scars and angry
black and red rashes spreading like cancer down the sparking,
misfiring chain. Me, eating myself.
Stop it, Nixon. (I haven't thought of myself by any other name in
years.) Snap the fuck out of it. I'm sitting there, naked (hey, I was
trying to get laid, okay?), and I have to pull myself together, get
some of this unnecessary shit unhooked. I pull the feedback trodes
off my cock and my groin and I nearly fall over when I reach down for
a pair of shorts and my feet tremble, more heat shooting through my
nerves and flashing painfully in my joints, as I try to pull them on.
Fuck clothing, Nixon. Try to get the system back up and see where you
are, you're blind here without a hookup--
The system's coming back online. By itself. My big cinematic
display, my workscreens, my chat and email screen, the goggles, even,
filling with my face. The face that caught my eye, that turned me on
so much I stole it from a group photo found on a corporate website a
couple of years ago when I first wrote this ultimate fuck-me desc and
started wearing it to the Glit. Which I'm starting to figure out is
her face, really.
Fuck. This isn't suits and lawyers. This is personal.
"You don't know me," she's saying, and the voice is lovely through
the earbeads and the speakers and the clear crystal woofers and it's
perfectly modulated and it's there, right there in the room with me,
the voice I stole and shifted slightly to make it a better fit for
me. "You have no idea who I am, or what I do, and you took me anyway,
and you had fun with me. My face. My body. Putting it on to fuck
around with. I've hacked your system, I've crashed your files, I've
got your number and I've got a couple of goons with very big guns
coming to finish the job. You think you're such a bigshot? Nobody
even gives a fuck about you and your friends and your little snotty
games. You had to piss me off personally to get me to notice you, and
I reached out and killed you without even breaking a sweat. Ta-ta."
And the screens go dead.
In my line of work it pays to have a peripatetic lifestyle. With
my condition, that's difficult, at best.
I manage to get myself out of the chair and pull on some shorts
and a T-shirt and sit there, on the floor, shivering. I have a rather
unique perspective on the old Cartesian duality, my traitorous nerves
wracked with multiple scleroses, unable to keep up with my flying
brain, but it's never been this bad before. My mind is flying so
quickly through all the possible outcomes that even I can't keep up,
and all my body can do is shiver and run a hand through my hair over
and over until I notice it's coming out in my fingers and I stop.
God.
I'm going to die.
So it's a miracle I don't piss myself when the door thuds open,
and there she stands. Not Sheila. If that really is her name. Not her
as-yet unseen goons.
The frump. From the Glit. In a black pleather jumpsuit and
nightvision goggles and her hair pulled back in a tight, no-nonsense
braid and one of those Belgian bullpups with the helical magazine in
her hands, the kind that spits spent shells like a hailstorm when
it's going full-bore.
She blinks at me, and pulls her goggles off. "Nixon?"
"What?" I manage to say.
"Nixon Rising?" she says.
"What the fuck?" I say.
"Sorry," she's saying. "You don't look like I was expecting."
I guess fortyish, plump and balding isn't quite up to my online
glamor.
"You were expecting a girl, maybe?" Thank God I still had the
nerve for the bitter, acerbic comeback.
"You want to live?" she snapped back. A sensible question under
the circumstances.
So down the stairs we go and out of the fleatrap apartment complex
that's itself worth maybe as much as the equipment and code I'm
leaving behind, never to see again, and I'm stumbling after her, and
I nearly trip and fall down the stairs. This relapse is bad, and is
going to get worse, and I'm starting to wonder if maybe she's got a
collapsible wheelchair somewhere in her paramilitary getup. There's a
van outside, as nondescript as an old blank white van can be, in the
parking lot of this squalid little complex under the pink and orange
sodium vapor lights, and she has to help me into it. "Are you okay?"
she's saying. "Did they tag you with something? Some kind of feedback
ice?"
"Who the hell are you?" I ask.
"Later," she says. There's a guy behind the wheel of the van,
moony-eyed, a ratty beard over most of his face. I just have time to
register the ancient Earth First! bumper sticker pasted to the
dashboard before my eyes drop shut under an inexorable weight.
"Viva la revolucion," I mutter. And I'm out for a while, again.
Thirty seven hours of coding and nearly getting laid and then
getting screwed will do that to you, you know.
My head is in her lap when I come to, and I'm just starting to
figure out how bad this is. I start to shiver.
"Shh," she's saying, above me. "Shh. What's wrong. What's wrong."
"Fuck," I say, "you. Okay? What's wrong. Fuck."
"You're Nixon, right?" the guy is yelling from up front. The van
is rumbling somewhere into the night and the engine is loud and I
yell back, "Fuck, yes, I'm fucking Nixon!" and then start coughing.
"What's wrong?" she's asking me, again. "Are you sick?"
"I heard she's got cancer. I mean, he's got cancer," the guy yells
from the front, trying to be helpful.
"It's not cancer," I tell her. "It's MS. And I think I'm swinging
into a relapse. And I have no idea how bad it's going to get. And
even when it's good, it's bad. And I've just lost the stuff that
makes this pathetic existence bearable, okay?" And even though I
didn't raise my voice, the force with which I spit it out is enough
to set me coughing again.
"It's just a computer," she's saying.
"Fuck that," I snarl. I try to sit up and she lets me,
reluctantly. "Fuck that. It was a fine tuned VR hookup tailored to
me, okay? And it's more than that. Much more. If this Sheila hacked
my desc and compromised the Glit, she's got all my files, too.
Everything. All of it that I've spent the past fifteen years building
and designing and coding, all gone."
"There's a lot in the net," she's saying, trying to be helpful.
"Not the personal stuff," I say.
"Shh," she's saying. "Shh." She reaches up to touch me and I jerk
away and my nerves flare and fire through the tiny, tiny scars and my
muscles spasm and I fall to the floor of the van and lie there,
feeling the wheels hum against the pavement, so far below. She tries
to pull me up and then sits down beside me when I don't let her.
She's pulled off a lot of the gear, her gloves, her goggles, the
gun's gone somewhere, and thank God it never went off. The skin of
her fingers is cool on my skin, and I don't care if it feels more
real than the VR feedback, I don't. What's real? I like my mind
better. God. I'm trapped. I'm stuck, forever, in this traitorous
body. If she found me, she found my credit, my money, the Glit's
closed to me forever now, too. All my contacts, gone. All my work,
and all my potential work. I could slave away at a menial job, sure.
Something suitable to my physical capabilities. Maybe apply for one
of those state healthcare pensions for disability and if I'm still
alive when they process the paperwork I can maybe save up and afford
a minimal VR rig by the time the next century rolls around.
Fuck. I think I'm crying. She's stroking me, rubbing my shoulders,
trying to get me to relax. "It's not that bad," she's saying. "It
isn't."
"Shows what the fuck you know," I snap. "I'm trapped. I'm fucked.
I'm screwed. I'm left inside this lump of meat that's eating itself
from the inside-out and I can't run away from it, ever." That's what
I try to say, anyway. I'm choking on the words, my throat hoarse,
rubbed raw as I sob.
"Shh," she's saying. "It's not that bad. It isn't." And she kisses
my forehead, and she kisses my cheek. Her mouth isn't as perfect as
it was in the Glit. I can feel the little kernels of skin where her
lips are chapped rubbing against my skin, and even as all of this is
happening I try to file that sensation away, remember it for the next
time I code a desc, and then I remember I can't, not ever again, and
it all whirls away once more.
She's kissing my lips. Her lips are still dry, but she pulls away,
and she licks them, and she kisses my lips again.
Maybe she is just a crazed otaku who wants to bag the one, the
only Nixon in the flesh. What a disappointment for her.
"It's okay," she's saying.
"Sascha?" the guy up front says.
"Shut up, Roary," she snaps.
"What are you doing?" I ask.
"Just be quiet," she says, not as gently as perhaps she intends.
"Why me?" I ask.
"Because," she says. "We knew you were in trouble. And you can
help us. With our work."
I don't even ask what that is. Her hand is stroking my leg.
"What," I'm saying.
"Flesh," she says, "isn't all that bad."
"You don't understand," I'm saying. "The MS--it fucks me
up--normal sexual response, it just doesn't--" What am I blithering?
I'm in the back of a van with what might be a couple of crazed
paramilitary environmentalist off-the-grid whackos and she's coming
on to me and I'm lecturing her about MS and maybe it was the coitus
so rudely interruptus, but damned if I'm not responding, my
traitorous body betraying me once again, my shorts tenting.
"See?" she says. "Nixon's risen."
"If you think you're the first to ever make that joke," I say.
God. I haven't felt quite like this in, well. A long time. A flash of
pain shoots through my joints, nerves flaring through thinning myelin
fat, creaking with the effort, but it enhances things, somehow, and
doesn't take away.
Her hand is in my shorts, now, and her fingers are on me.
"I had a fantasy," she's saying, "about doing Nixon Rising."
"Fantasies are very different than real life," I say. Christ. Is
this really happening? So it would seem.
"Can you," she says, and she kisses me again, "unzip me?"
My fingers are numb, but they manage.
"Oh, fuck, Sascha," Roary's saying. "Not again."
This is crazy and it's insane and it makes no sense and it's
utterly, utterly necessary, and somehow she knows it as much as I do.
Her body is soft and pale in the dim van, softer than I'd expect for
a crazed paramilitary environmentalist whacko. Somehow I'd thought
they'd be doing more calisthenics or something, up in the redwoods.
Of course, she was wearing that T-shirt in the Glit; my memory's
remembering that it's "DeCSS," not "dex," and it was one of the first
skirmishes we the people lost against them the corporations. And she
has access to the Glit in the first place. Things are more complex
than they appear, but that's for the rational brain to sort out
later. Right now there's a very simple problem of leverage and
geometry to solve, but first, she hisses and says, "I'm not ready,
not yet."
"Are you ready at all?" I ask her. Am I?
"Can you," she asks, and I can, and she's kneeling over me, I'm
lying on my back in a van roaring down a highway who knows where and
I'm tentatively nibbling at her, my lips oddly numb, my tongue clumsy
but wet, and she opens above me and sighs and her hand finds mine and
squeezes it, tightly, and I'm remembering the taste of the desc I
wrote, the desc Sheila hacked, the salt and the tang of it, and the
sweet, and Sascha smells of pleather and metal and oil and she's
pissed recently and I can taste that, even and there's a bit of
toilet paper stuck there that I just managed to work out with my
numb, clumsy lips and I'm obscurely proud. And she's murmuring above
me, "Oh, oh yes, attagirl, attagirl."
She doesn't come, but that isn't the point. Sometime later she
lifts herself from me, and before I can raise my hand to wipe my
mouth she kisses it, and kisses it some more, licking herself up. She
doesn't wear lipstick. She probably never has.
"Are you guys done back there?" yells Roary, his voice oddly
distant.
Nope.
I'm somehow by some miracle still hard. No feedback circuits to
feed back, no nerve simulations to make up for my faulty wiring, and
I'm so used to feeling a cunt down there, or the eidolon of a cunt,
the symbol, the imago, that it's something of a shock when she pulls
my shorts aside to reveal a yang instead of a yin. And it's more of a
shock to slide inside her, to feel her around me, surrounding me,
warm and wet and there, so very there. Nerves flare and fire and I
don't care, it's hot, it hurts and I don't care, I can't do much of
anything but that doesn't matter as she rides me, gently, and her
kisses cool my burning, fevered skin. And I don't care. There's a
red-hot bard stuck through the head of my cock and it's pulling and
pulling and when it finally comes free I think I shout and maybe I
even pass out a little and I don't fucking care.
She's still naked, later, lying in the back of the van with me,
and there's a ratty blanket that smells of old sweat over us. It's
gotten colder.
"I don't know," she says. "Being in the field like this, running
an op; it always turns me on." And she chuckles.
I think she's as embarrassed about it as I am.
Yes, it's a revolution. No, I'm not going to tell you where I am.
Nixon Rising is still alive; the rumors of my death and destruction
have been greatly exaggerated. I've just gone underground.
I try to tell them I won't help them. I try to tell them about how
stupid fighting back like this is. You can't beat city hall,
incorporated; you can just sniff around the foundations and make off
with crumbs of cheese, here and there. I try to tell them how short
their life expectancies are. And they laugh and ask me stuff and I
show them how it's done, anyway.
I don't go live online much anymore. Their VR rigs are crude and
can't compensate for me and it hurts too much. And anyway, what's the
point? The Glit's cut off to me. My whole world is gone. All of them,
Solitaire and Cliff and Tucker and Pokey Goddamn Jones and even Turk
and Tenderloin, whom I can't bring myself to hate. They kept
themselves alive, I'm sure, and I know, somehow, it was worth it. The
sum is greater than any one of its parts.
Sascha will hold me, from time to time. She's good when it gets
bad. We fuck, too, from time to time; rather, for the most part, she
fucks me. And it may be more real and there may be more, much more
than I ever managed to code in any smutty desc I ever wrote, so much
more, but it's so much less, too.
It's getting worse. There's medicine, I know. I was taking some of
it. But we're limited, out here in the woods.
So I lie back and sometimes her hands are enough to build
something and sometimes they aren't, but when they are she will ride
me. And she murmurs "Attagirl," when I come.
It isn't much, but somehow, it's enough.
nicholas urfe
--
-denny-
curmudgeonly editor
--
The more people I meet, the more I love my cat.
-unknown
--
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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