Lucia's Masks (16 page)

Her feet twitch, making him all the more aware of their transparent spotted skin. Her skirt is calico, with a flounce at the hem. He has seen such skirts on the young whores in the Pleasure Zone; and such blouses too. You can pinch their nipples through the filmy gauze as you pass by, and those pleasure girls will smile at you alluringly. For a second, he wonders if this painted abomination on the bed is a chimera sprung from his own brain, intent on self-punishment. Is this what his lecherous past has conjured up? If so, he can imagine no more harrowing spectacle than the one before him.

The old woman is screaming now. The smudged eyes are fixed on him. He sees Lucia move to the bedside, softly touch the withered, gaudy face, and unpluck the crone’s fingers, one by one, from their rigid grip on the bedstead. Lucia sits on the bed, stroking the old woman’s hand. Her long ebony braid falls over her shoulder. The old woman reaches out, her gaunt hand trembling, to touch the glossy plait. Her gesture is so tentative, so civilized, that the Outpacer is encouraged to move closer to the bed.

The transformation is immediate. The crone is once again a gargoyle, her mouth a dark hole spouting curses at him. “Dirty, filthy priest-man. Keep away, you bugger. Burn in your own hell, nasty monk-man! I know what you’re thinking and hatching under your robe.”

She knows, he thinks; and so the idea comes again that this decrepit woman is a necessary aspect of his penance. Snarling, pathetic yet terrifying, like a skeleton rouged and dressed up for a dance, she is another ordeal he must undergo.

She lurches forward. Her long, sharp nails flash near his face. He fears for his eyes. As he jerks his head away from her assault, the hood of his robe falls backward. For the first time in many weeks, the Outpacer stands with his naked face exposed to another being. The crone is able to view his face in those few seconds before he can rearrange the folds of the shadowy hood over his eyes. Lucia does not see him because she is directly behind the old woman, arms gripped round her waist, attempting to pull her back down to the bed.

But someone else has seen him. He is aware, even as he tugs the hood back into place, that there is another person in the room. Not Candace, he implores whatever beneficent forces might still visit the world. Please, not Candace.

He turns to see Bird Girl standing just inside the bedroom door. She stares directly into the dark well of his hood. He knows that from now on she will see the actual features it hides. Bird Girl runs the tip of her tongue over the length of her upper lip. He has no time to ponder what this gesture might mean because the old woman is babbling, making little clucking sounds. Her cracked tones have softened, and it takes him some seconds to recognize this is her attempt at seduction. She is crooning to him, the honeyed words of some bed chamber of a century ago. “Boo-ti-ful man. Such a handsome man. Like a god, my dah-ling. Come lay your head between my breasts.”

He steps back in disgust. His deepest wish is to flee. He ought to have stayed stock-still because his symbolic retreat sends the old woman into a frenzy. She wrenches herself from Lucia’s circling arms, and reaches out to him, rising on her haunches.

“I know tricks to make you quake in pleasure, handsome man.” He cringes inside his monk’s habit as she raises her hips toward him. “I am the reincarnation of Lola Montez,” she exclaims, “lover of kings and great composers. I have the secret knowledge of the courtesan.”

She wriggles her hips under her flounced skirt, then draws up her knees.

Afterwards he tells himself that he ought to have anticipated her next move. He should at least have had the sense to turn his head away, and so spare himself the unwanted vision he will never be able to expunge from memory.

But this ancient woman wriggling obscenely on her metal bed exerts her own iron compulsions. He cannot look away. She is too horrific. She is her own vulgar carnival, and like a child, he must stand and gawp. So that when she flings up her skirt, exposing her spindly thighs and her bald pudendum, he must look. What he feels above all is a scalding shame — for her, for himself, and for the state of the world. At first, he does not fully understand how the world comes into it, and why this incident strikes him as so much more than it was: an old woman who has gone mad and forsaken her dignity.

In a right and proper world, this kind of unseemly behaviour would not occur. Aged women would sit with their knees decently covered, in long, warm skirts. They would hide the mystery between their legs and sometimes speak of the one in their breasts, telling stories droll and wise. A right and proper world — what does he know of such a world? He was born in a time in which the sun was already an enemy, when all birds — with the exception of tortured battery hens — were extinct, and all fish were hermaphrodites. Did the old girl eat too many poisoned fish, he wonders. Or sniff the wrong air of the wrong sky at the wrong moment? There are so many ways to be imperilled in this worst of all possible times.

Then something wondrous happens.

He hears an intake of breath, but whose? This is followed by a silence that seems somehow musical, and a subtle shift in the quality of the light. He has the notion that both space and time have been purified. For a moment the box-like bedroom is transformed into the green-gold pasture of some long-ago poem, a place where one obeys a beautiful compulsion to dance, or to make up a song of praise. It
is
a kind of dance that he witnesses, and he is filled with wonder at the way its simple gestures open another world inside this place they are.

There is only this
: two young women gracefully attendant on an elderly one, both of them intent on restoring her dignity. Bird Girl stands on one side of the bed, Lucia on the other. Together, as if choreographed by an unseen hand and mind, they cover up the old woman’s nakedness. Drawing the cloth of her skirt gently over her knees, they tuck it under her feet.

Why does this scene move him so? He watches as Bird Girl and Lucia stroke the old woman’s hair and temples. Apparently soothed by their touch, she lies down again, her head on the pillow. Her eyes close.

With her face in repose the kohl-rimmed eyes and carmine-stained mouth are softened. This is no longer farce, he thinks, but tragedy. For a moment, he sees the pale, withered visage with its crudely daubed colours as a grieving mask. And beneath the glaze of grief is something else — a contradictory surging vitality, and absurdly, yes, hope. It is as if things have for the moment tumbled back into place. The plot of the tale is back on course, which is why the room seems to him to have burst its bounds and to float upon a sea of light.

The crystalline spell is shattered by a voice that could only belong to Candace.

“Ugh!” she says.

“What a fright!” she exclaims.

“It stinks in here,” she says.

“There’s always a fly in the ointment,” she tells them.

Who has let this donkey into the cathedral, he wonders. He has no idea how this image has entered his head for outside of the vintage films he watched as a young man, he has never seen either a cathedral or a donkey.

“Someone should put her out of her misery,” the donkey says.

“Well, she can hardly have much longer to go, can she?” it brays.

A quick glance at Lucia’s and Bird Girl’s faces confirms that he has indeed heard what he thought. They look as stunned as he feels.

He is amazed at himself when he raises his hand as if to strike Candace. Although he does not actually follow through, the gesture nakedly reveals how ragged is his fury.

Candace glares at him. He stands before her, face covered, unnerved by his own loss of control and by the image that now fills his mind. He sees himself upending the noxious Candace and paddling her fleshy buttocks with the sole of his rubber sandal. What he wants desperately is to humiliate and hurt her. He takes small comfort from the fact that this imagined scenario causes him not the least sexual thrill. Nevertheless he is frightened of his own rage, and beset by guilt. For has Candace not merely spoken aloud thoughts that have already passed through his own brain?

“I need air,” he announces.

And so he leaves them all on the second floor of the stone house, for Harry and Chandelier are now also on the landing just outside the old woman’s door. He leaves them but of course does not abandon them. He is their sworn Protector. They are his fate.

He seeks a temporary refuge from the human donkey and her unholy pragmatism in the property’s wooden outbuilding. The wood is so old it has developed long fissures through which he can peer and maintain his watch. He decides that at some point during the night, he will go back inside the house and sleep in a chair with his feet against the door.

To his distress, he nods off. What wakes him is Candace’s shout: “Socks!” he hears her cry out. “I’ve found socks.”

He can all too easily picture her hopping from foot to foot. He groans aloud.

When he sleeps again (inside the house, with his feet against the door) he dreams of a donkey with Candace’s face. Strapped to the beast’s sides are panniers stuffed with pairs of thick woollen socks. He is also in the dream, as the donkey’s master, driving her on with sharp goads to the flanks. The dream donkey howls. The Outpacer jerks awake, a cold sweat prickling his chest under the burlap of his gown.

He feels the silence of the house circle him like a noose. In his former life, he could have plucked from his personal pharmacopoeia some vial or pill to obliterate the day’s vexations. He recalls one drug in particular that seemed to render him weightless, where he thought he floated above the stamen of a closed lotus. When the flower opened, he had no doubt he would look out through the eyes of some god or other, the cosmos swirling in a mesh of black and silver at his feet.

But how far indeed has he progressed from that voluptuary he once was? Is he not still shallow and vain?

Even today, had he not wondered how Bird Girl reacted to him when his hood fell away? It was seconds merely, but long enough for her to get a good view. The thought did cross his mind as he saw her eyes widen. Does she find me remarkably handsome? Irresistible even? And only then did the salient question strike him: Does she recognize me from my antics on those cursed sky-screens?

He had been famous once. Or “infamous,” as he now realizes. He had belonged to the spoiled and feted elite whose images dominated the mammoth sky-screens spread above the City’s crowded streets. The EYE’s official line was that the sky-screens gave the rabble dreams to which to aspire: a cushioned, perfumed idyll where pleasures never cloy, where all faces and bodies are flawless and no one ever grows old. He saw through the sham. He knew the sky-screens’ vacantly glossy productions were designed to keep the populace in a malleable, vegetative state. And why not, if it helped the indigent to endure their miserable existences? Why not?

Besides, it was foolhardy to turn down the EYE’s invitation to join the sky-screen roster of scintillating celebrities. One never knew where a refusal might lead. A precipitous and inexplicable drop in one’s financial holdings perhaps. Or a lethal microbe invading one’s personal water supply.

So he had become one of those gods in the sky, sporting, diving, dancing, savouring delicacies, even making love for the arousal of the watching plebs below. Foolishly he had agreed to allow the boys from the EYE’s propaganda department to bring their cameras into his bedroom. He had performed sexually for them only twice, slithering and panting with some particularly luscious Love-Girl on black silk sheets. But he had forgotten that the sky-screens also transmit smells. What is it about our own odours, even the stink of our shit, that makes us want to hug them to ourselves, keep them wholly intimate? An invisible tent of self.

So that he had felt plundered, raped even, when he found himself by chance one day on the street, staring up at a gigantic, three-dimensional image of himself. There was his brown-tipped cock entering the Love-Girl. There he was, teasing the rim of her hole with the glossy head of his prick. Teasing and teasing, so that she did genuinely moan and cry out and shudder. She was an exceptionally ripe girl, he remembered, full-breasted, the cheeks of her ass like cinnamon moons. She smelled of oranges and of cloves. She had a look of the Levant. Of course, he did not remember her name.On the screen in the sky, he saw his cock plunge into her, her buttocks tensing under his iron grasp. Then he smelt it, caught the potent whiff of that most personal of a man’s scents. The salt pong of his semen wafted in the air around his head. He felt invaded, wronged, violated, and ashamed.

A voice cried out in a language he had not heard for many years:
Aidez-moi! Aidez-moi!

It took him a full minute to realize the voice was his own. He was on his knees, his clipped fingernails scratching at the piss-encrusted pavement, and he wept as he had not done since he was a boy.

Yet even then he did not really see. That incident was not his revelation on the road to Damascus. Although he never again allowed their cameras into his bedroom. But in all other ways, he continued to live as he had always done, sealed off from the bestial happenings on the City’s streets, chauffeured about in a silver-plated, armoured car.

His avowed hedonism, and the multifarious designer pharmaceuticals, conspired to hide from himself what he was. He particularly favoured chemicals that intensified the charge of every kind of erotic experience, and the hallucinogens that dissolved not only time and space and the structure of matter, but also his actual sense of a separate identity. And of course, his entire fortune was founded on illusion. Not smoke-and-mirrors or wearisome sleight of hand, but something far more insidious — the illusion that actually invaded human consciousness, and planted the spore that left its host moribund.

As a young man, he had watched the spread of this fungus with disdain. A virtual reality machine in every home; a compact model for the bedroom. Marketed first as “dream machines,” and subsequently as “wraparound reality,” the craze rapidly became a social addiction. Live your most secret fantasies.
Touch the breast and vulva of your preferred goddess. Put your finger inside her. Have her do your will. Taste her saliva and her sweat. Quake in pleasure.
The marketing goads were the old reliables: sex and violence. One highly vaunted product — popular with males of all ages — put the viewer inside the skin of a wolf. The scenario was in fact a thinly disguised vampire fantasy. The victim was invariably female and young.