One of the many
interesting things Melissa said before she dumped me and moved out, going back
to university to learn more interesting things of little practical value, was
that a French term for ‘orgasm’ is ‘le petit mort’. Literally translates as ‘the little
death’. I didn’t understand it when she
said it, as up until then I’d found the act of ejaculation to be positively
life affirming, but now, after recent events, I know what it means only too well. I wish to God I didn’t.
It all started the week after
Melissa packed up and left. The flat was
quite bare now, with only my things in it, and also quite lonely too. Of course, I knew she’d go eventually, long before
she made the announcement. It wasn’t
that we lacked commitment; at least, we were both good at creating the
appearance of being serious to the outside world. It’s just that whenever we discussed the
future, regardless of what she said, I knew that she had no intention of seeing
it through.
She was a rotten liar, although she did it often. I guess intelligence can make you cold that
way. And love can make you spineless,
like I was: not believing her but pretending anyway, just in case she’d come to
believe her own lies one day. Not only
that, but I’d got so wrapped up in her that I had let nearly all my friendships
wither and die, even old ones. Now she
was gone, all I had when I came home from work was a half-empty flat, a
television, a pile of washing-up, some wine, and masturbation.
Yes, masturbation. The irresistible habit that manages to
simultaneously console and mock the lonely bachelor in the very moment they
engage in it. You might think its
lingering after-effect of emptiness and self-hatred would put anyone off ever
trying it more than once, but soon enough you can feel its inevitable approach,
and you know, that soon you will be answering its siren call with the palm of
your spittled hand.
I was answering
it nearly every night, all the easier now with the internet transforming my
home computer into an electronic version of the dirty shops I’d never had the
courage to enter in my younger years: featuring a bigger selection of products
than one shop could ever stock, and no risk of anybody seeing you enter or
leave. The ease, convenience and
anonymity of it all were nearly enough to assuage the guilt. Nearly enough, mind you.
After a week of this self-abuse, my
body was beginning to tire.
Nevertheless, the compulsion carried me through until, on that first
lonely, silent Saturday night, I found myself caressing a member that just
refused to maintain rigidity, let alone produce an outpouring of semen. It was a fight between the limits of the
flesh and the desires of the mind, and however tightly I clenched, or however
much I lubricated, it would not abandon its flaccid retreat. The flesh had won, it seemed. Sadly, I wiped my palm and looked for my
pants.
And then the noise started. A moaning.
Unmistakable. The moan of a
woman. Foreplay. Voices.
A woman and a man, talking quietly, too quiet for me to hear what they
were saying, but the woman’s voice was eager, directing the man over her
body. It was obvious. She moaned again, then once more, rising in
pitch. Now rhythmically. He must be inside her. I could hear the creak of a mattress spring,
synchronised with the sound of the woman.
And now I could also hear the man, low, quieter, but there.
Moans became grunts. Her grunts became shrieks. I looked down. My exhausted soldier had found its strength
and stood proud. Furiously I leapt to
action, two of my down-strokes to one of their thrusts. The shrieking became yelping before lowering
for a moment back to a moan. Then it
began to build. She was about to come, I
knew. And as she did, and he did, so did
I.
Little did they know that they had just had a threesome with their new
next-door neighbour. Until that moment,
I had not realised anyone had moved in.
The flat on that side had been empty as long as I had lived there.
It was Sunday
morning. I lay in bed, strangely at
peace. For some reason, the despair
brought on by my excessive masturbation no longer afflicted me. In fact, memories of the night before filled
me only with delight. Rather than
feeling ashamed of my invasion of their personal moment, I felt happy to have
been included, albeit unknown to them.
And then I heard them again. It was less than eight hours later, but they
had more than enough energy to go through it all again, harder, louder, faster,
longer. And again, I reached inside the
bedclothes and joined them.
There was a further engagement
between the three of us at quarter past five that day, then again, six o’clock
the following morning. But when I heard
their sudden grunting coming from a part of their flat that could only have
been their kitchen at half-six that evening, shortly after I came home from
work, I had to admit defeat. I could not
keep up with them. They were simply
having more sex than I was physically capable of engaging in, even at one
remove.
The next evening I was back on
track, however. As I had done on the
previous occasions, I imagined what they looked like and precisely what they
were doing. I liked to think they were
young and attractive, of course, although their physical qualities changed
continuously in my mind. As to
positions, the laws of biology and physics did not apply to this invisible
couple. They could bend round each other
as if, rather than a skeleton, they merely had a wire inside them, like
pipe-cleaner figures. Now I was thinking
of them up against a wall, her body miraculously spinning round without
interruption, wrapping her legs round his torso. He was an olive-skinned man from the
Mediterranean, although he never gained more than a vague form in my mind; she
an oriental, her hair black and long, her brown nipples peaking out between the
strands.
It was a particularly intense
session that night. Like the night
before, there had been no foreplay, just the brutal outburst from a sudden
penetration. The cries were louder, as
if, it seemed, she was gasping for breath.
He too, was crying out. It made
me all the more excited. I was worried,
in fact, that I would not be able to hold on for them and come too soon. Somehow I thought that they would be
disappointed.
I was close to coming, as the rush
of semen gave its first tingle, when it happened. My eyes were shut tight in
concentration. And then, strangely, I
could see. I tried to close my eyes
again, but I could not. In front of me
were the books on the shelf that ran above my computer. I must be standing up, I thought, but why
would I be doing that? Not only that, I
saw that I was rising, and that I could see the ceiling. I looked down. There, to my horror, was myself. Sat in my computer chair, eyes scrunched up,
still furiously pumping away. In
defiance of everything I had previously thought to be possible, I was outside
my own body.
How had this happened? The only thing I could think of was that my
masturbation had achieved the level of some sort of meditative ritual, and
through it I had accidentally freed myself from my physical form. At first I panicked, and desperately tried to
get back down, but my astral being did not want to comply with my wishes. Instead, it stayed where it was, bobbing
about near the ceiling, before I sensed a soft, gentle movement forward,
towards the wall. I was heading straight
for it and I could not stop.
I prepared myself to be knocked back, trying and failing to protect my
astral head with my similarly astral arms.
Surely a nasty knock was about to come my way. But it did not. Instead, I found myself actually inside the
wall. I could see insulation, wires,
plaster. And then I was somewhere I had
never been before. And underneath me
were my neighbours, naked, intertwined, fucking.
I was so embarrassed I found myself
looking round their room, at anything and everything that wasn’t them. Nice furnishings, quite minimal. Browns and creams. A set of weights sat in the corner. A full-length mirror formed the door of a
cupboard. On the floor were clothes,
undergarments. A pair of women’s
knickers, torn apart. The sheets of the
bed had been pulled off and covered much of the carpet. And the sight of the sheets led me back to
the bed. I could not help it. I had to look.
The man was, I would say, in his
forties, although his body was in excellent condition. Gym-toned, nearly hairless. A tattoo of some oriental writing was on his
left breast. His face was handsome:
strong cheekbones, a dimple chiselled into his chin. Head closely shaven, no doubt to disguise
hair loss. Nevertheless, you could still
see that it was flecked with grey, as was the little wisp of pubic hair above
what was a frankly impressive cock.
Thick. Long. Guaranteed to please but not to hurt.
And it certainly was pleasing his
partner as she pushed herself down on it with ever more forceful
movements. She was much younger, in her
twenties most likely. Petite, her
breasts small and rounded. Beautiful and
elfin, her nose running to a little point; her lips were full, her mouth a
little round hole from which her yelps were sent skyward. Eyes closed as tight as mine: my body’s eyes
that is, on the other side of the wall.
Her hair was dyed a deep red, pubic hair shaved into a tiny runway of a
line. She too, had a tattoo: a mandala
on her thigh. There was another mark,
also, on her neck: a fat, brown bruise that ran most of the way round.
She came. And as she did so, her eyes opened wide and
she looked straight at me. Oh my god, I
thought, how can I account for my presence here, hovering above them in this
most intimate moment? I tried to form an
apologetic sentence but found that I had no mouth. But then she lowered her head and closed her
eyes as she rode out the ripples of the orgasm.
She had not seen me. I was
invisible.
The man lowered her onto her back,
preparing her for his own orgasm. What
would it be like to come inside a woman that beautiful, I mused, for indeed,
she was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. At that thought, I sensed I was getting
lower, and there was nothing I could do to stop myself. The pair of them became ever closer, their
grunts and groans louder. Soon I would
be on top of them. If they couldn’t see
me, would they be able to feel me? I was
about to find out, as I was now just centimetres from the man’s hairless back,
which rose and fell as he came closer to release.
He came, as did I - a fantastic rush
that spread throughout my body in a way that I had never experienced
before. Now I knew I once again had
eyes, real eyes in a body. for they were shut.
Once the last tremor had past, my eyes opened, not so much by me, but
for me. I saw her face smiling up at
mine. Then, I found myself lowering
myself down and kissing her passionately, my tongue sliding against hers. My arms wrapped around her. It must have been because my desire to do
these things was so strong that it was not until some minutes later that I
fully realised I was not in control of these movements. Indeed, a sudden, dizzy and sickening sense
of what I can only call alienness left me with no doubt. This body was not mine.
The body removed itself from between her legs and got up. In the mirror on the wardrobe opposite, I saw
it: muscular, nearly hairless, well endowed, tattooed. I was none of these things. But now I was he, it was clear. At least, I was looking out of his eyes. I could physically feel what he was
feeling. Panicking, I summoned all my
willpower to get myself away, but it was no use. I was now trapped inside the body of my
next-door neighbour.
That night the
body I was in did mundane things. Made
some food, performed some household tasks, watched a bit of telly. Every so often, it would say the odd thing or
two to the woman, and it was very strange to feel my mouth moving in speech but
not knowing what words were going to come out.
Likewise, the minutiae of the body were disturbing. Itches I could feel, but could not dictate
when or even if they were scratched.
Little habits like the drumming of fingers that I literally could not
stop. Bowel movements. All these things I felt as if they were my
own, but had no say over how they were dealt with. I was paralysed, and yet invaded by
sensation.
Strangely, I had soon stopped
panicking. Even though I was worried
about what was happening to my body next door, surrendering control of the
physical brought with it a new calm, as if a weight had been lifted which, I
suppose, in a sense, it had been.
When he slept, I slept. Strange dreams where people I knew
intermingled with people I had never met.
Maybe I imagined them, or maybe they were from his past. All the dreams turned out the same. Everybody, my old friends, relatives,
strangers, wherever they were, whatever they were doing, would end up
fucking. In corners, in cars, up against
walls, under tables. And I, or he, or
we, would stand in the midst of it all, masturbating our impressive manhood,
while always, inevitably, man after man, sometimes a woman, would screw his
red-headed partner in front of us as she laughed.
We woke up at
six o’clock, aroused. The woman was
awake also, and was idly stroking our shared cock. She put it in her mouth and sucked for the
longest time. Although he could have
come straight away, he held on to it until he could do so no more. She let it jet over her, then raised herself
up over us, and I felt his tongue as it worked to return the kindness.
He got up and did his weights. Strange to feel the strain on muscles I never
had, along with the exertion of strength I had not previously possessed. He showered, ate a healthy breakfast, sprayed
himself with deodorants and scents, moisturised, and dressed smartly for
work. She was still in her dressing gown
when she kissed him goodbye as he made his way out the door to the car park.
We drove for nearly an hour. I had never driven before, and now found
myself to be both the driver and the passenger.
We were on the outskirts of London.
There, we made our way slowly in the rush-hour clog until we took a left
into a business park. Futuristic,
spacious, expensive. He parked the car,
entered a building with the swipe of a security pass, said hello to the people
in the lift, and entered an office. From
people’s reactions, it seemed to me that this open-plan space was his domain.
The morning disappeared behind a
desk in a private office, with a see-through wall through which his kingdom
could be observed. He worked his way
through an avalanche of paperwork and telephone calls I could not
comprehend. Every so often he would pop
his head round the door and a work colleague would be called over to discuss
something, or there would be a knock on his transparent door from someone with
a printout in their hand, requiring his attention.
All the staff were smart, confident,
professional. The men wore suits or
neatly ironed shirts, and the women wore blouses, skirts and tights. Even the older members radiated a youthful aura, their age disguised by
careful attention to hair, clothes and bodily maintenance.
There was a knock on the door. A woman - young, blonde, hard-faced but coldly
attractive, her hair pinned back - put her head round. She was going to e-mail the spreadsheet, she
said. Did he want to check it before she
did so. He said he did want to, and
would look at it in five minutes.
Ten minutes later he walked out of
his office, through the open-plan space and into a corridor. He followed it and took a right. There he came to a door, which, after he
checked he was not observed, he pushed open.
She was waiting for him inside.
It was a storeroom, full of boxes of hand-towels and the like. He pushed a stack of boxes in front of the
door as she pulled down her tights and her underwear. She stood with her back to him, resting her
hands on boxes of photocopier paper as he put himself inside, moving quickly,
vigorously. The anticipation of the
extra five minutes had made her wet it seemed, and it was not long before they
- we, came together, almost silently.
He left first, leaving her to dab
herself with a tissue. He washed his
cock and his hands in the toilet and returned to work. Two hours later he would return to these
toilets and masturbate furiously.
He fucked his partner on the kitchen
table as soon as he came in from work that night, the pair of them assuming the
same position as he had with his work colleague not seven hours before. He took her again, gentler this time, later
that evening, then again, first thing in the morning.
At work the next
day, his colleague did not request his attention, but when he got home, his
partner was waiting for him: her face made-up, her skirt tiny, her top low,
smelling of sex. She told him that she
had just got back from the red-light district of town, and that she had stood
on the street corner as if she were a prostitute, and had taken four men down
an alleyway one after the other and gave it to them for free. She laughed at him and said that even the
pathetic, pitiful kerb-crawlers were better at fucking her than he was.
He pushed her to the floor and put
his hand round her neck and squeezed.
With his other hand he unzipped himself and he slid inside her. There was no underwear to get in the
way. Furiously he thrust until he came,
all the while squeezing her neck. He lay
on top of her shuddering as she gasped for air.
Finally, just as I feared he might have killed her, he let go. He got up, zipped himself, and left the
room. After he had a shower he came back
in. She was in a dressing gown, still
smelling of his and other men’s semen.
They talked as if nothing had happened.
Days became
weeks and I was still trapped in the man’s body. During that time, he would have numerous
appointments in the storeroom at work, as well as two liaisons in his car with
a temporary admin assistant. Often he
would go to a bar on the way home and pick someone up there, using no chat-up
line or even overt body language, just dull conversation about traffic or
atmospheric conditions, that would nevertheless be almost immediately followed
by fucking in the toilets or a side-street.
When in town at the weekend, he would, without fail, find a fellow
shopper, or a waitress in a café or, on one occasion, a traffic warden, to
frantically take up against the back door of a shop where they could so easily
be seen.
It was a
secret world that I never knew existed: a network of men and women who shared
this strange lifestyle, most of them in their thirties or forties, although
some were certainly older, albeit as well-preserved as the man’s more senior
colleagues. In any case, none were ever
turned away. They somehow all knew how to recognise each other, as if the very
banality of the brief conversation that they engaged in acted as a code for
what they did and where to do it: out of sight and earshot, but only just. And
though the man whose body I inhabited might keep each encounter a secret for a couple
of days, it was only a matter of time before he would be on top of her, telling
her exactly how he had betrayed her, while they fucked. And then the next day,
the situation would be reversed, with her mocking him as she sat on the couch,
touching herself as she recounted how she had been spending the time that he
had been at work.
Contraception did not seem to be an
issue for them. I picked up from their only very occasional exchanges that the
man's partner had had abortions in the past, but she was not on the pill. I considered that maybe she could no longer
conceive. Nevertheless, the risk of STDs must have been enormous. In fact, I
could not shake off the sensation that some of the people we came into contact
with were dying. There was just something in their eyes.
As for me, I was getting used to
being in his skin. As I got to know him,
I began to be able to guess his next move, and it became less strange to be
trapped in another’s body, even though I had no control over it. After a while, his desires became mine, and I
became as excited as he was when a new conquest was on the horizon. There was a disturbing moment when I
discovered he did not limit his partners to women, and at first I felt revolted
by the cock I could feel in his mouth and the movement of the tongue on it that
I was powerless to stop. But that had
faded by the third encounter with a man.
As he went down on me - us, in the multi-story car park, I was as turned
on as if it were a woman.
For those first weeks it was as if I
were in a state of delirium, lost in this other man’s life and the intensity of
his sexual existence. Yet, every so
often, a thought would occur to me in the gaps between encounters. What had happened to my body? I began to worry about it more and more. And as I did so, I found that I could no
longer disappear in the wave of the inevitable orgasm. Indeed, the sex began to slightly bore
me. The third ejaculation of the day
started to feel very much like the first.
I wanted a break. I wanted my own
body back.
I had been
trapped a month before we noticed the smell.
We left for work that morning, and there it was, an unpleasant sickly
odour in the corridor. I knew that he
had registered it from the way he sniffed the air and made a face. It was there again, stronger, when we came
back, as we passed a flushed-looking man in a boiler suit with a clipboard in
the hall. Our partner was waiting for us
inside. She was lying naked on the bed,
her legs apart. She said that not two
minutes ago a man had just left. He had
come round to persuade her to change electricity suppliers, but she had started
to suck him off when he tried to get her to sign the contract. He had fucked her on the bed, and she said it
was the best orgasm she had ever had.
His semen was still dripping from her, still not entirely cold as our
cock passed through it. Once we had
come, as our partner ruffled our hair and smiled, the man sniffed. The smell had entered the room.
He got dressed and went into the
corridor. It was coming from my
flat. He knocked on the door, but of
course nobody answered. When still
nobody was answering his manly, authoritative demands for entry several hours
later, he broke the door down with a few deft blows of his muscled
shoulder. We walked in my flat. He looked in the living room first, then the
kitchen, but I was not there. Neither
was I in the bathroom. He found me in
the bedroom, sitting in my computer chair, my trousers round my ankles, hand
clasped around my withered penis. An arc
of dried, crystal semen marked the carpet in front of me. My body was dead, rotting. Flies had begun to hatch out of it.
Our partner was waiting in the
doorway of my flat. He rushed out and
closed the door, commanding her to call the police. When they arrived, a WPC stepped into our
flat to interview us while their colleagues investigated the body. She was about thirty-five, dark skinned,
mixed race. She looked at us. We looked at her and mentioned something
about a slight drop in temperature that morning. She nodded.
She hitched up her skirt and we slid our fingers under her underwear,
while our partner kissed her and slipped her hand into her bra. The policewoman dropped to her knees and we
took her from behind, while our partner let her lick her. As we all came together, in one unholy,
terrible orgasm, another piece of me died a little death.
No comments:
Post a Comment