The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine (26 page)

‘Nick, we need to sleep. You should come over to my hotel room. Clean sheets, blankets.'

He bent to the side of the accumulator and began to fuss with the strange contraption,
all tubes and pipes and dials.

‘You can take the battery with you, Nick. We should go. Honestly. I am so exhausted
I could sleep on the floor.'

Nick shook his head. ‘We can't transport this now. Do you know how much orgone's
been captured in here? It would be like carrying a nuclear weapon in your handbag.'

‘So no one will hurt us then. We have all that energy to protect us.'

‘But we don't know what to do with it yet. What if they find us before we figure
out how to use it?'

‘OK, then.' She moved to hug him. His shoulders were cold and so thin she thought
her hug might break him. He turned and buried his head in her chest, breathed her
in. He was shaking slightly. She kissed his cheeks.

Nick pulled away suddenly and moved back to the window. He pulled the blanket aside
and peered up into the scrap of sky.

‘What are you looking for?'

‘I am sure they must have seen.'

‘Who?'

‘Holly, you have no idea.'

‘Nick. We're in this together, remember?'

‘The government wants to get their hands on the accumulator.'

‘Which government?'

He gave a tense laugh. ‘Well, most of them really. But they're not the only threat.
And certainly not the most powerful one.'

He looked back up through the chink in the blanket towards the darkness of the night
sky.

‘Holly.' He turned to her and pressed something into the palm of her hand. She shivered.
It was cold, metal. She opened her hand. A flash of silver. A key.

‘Do you know the Musée de l'érotisme? In Pigalle?'

‘No. I haven't been there yet.'

‘Well, if anything should happen to me you must go there.'

‘Nothing will…'

‘Holly. There is a room of phalluses. In the room there is a box. This key fits the
lock in the box.'

‘What's in the box?'

‘A relic. The last remaining relic. Promise me you will go there. Take the relic
and run. Go home. Hide.'

‘OK, but nothing is going to happen.'

He shook his head and glanced up and out of the tiny crack in the window. She followed
his gaze. There in the night sky she could see a pulsing orange glow that might have
been a star.

The She-devils

by
PIERRE LOUŸS

Holly's cheeks were icy from the chill of the day as she bustled through the streets
of the 4th Arrondissement. Her head was crowded with architecture. She wished Nick
had agreed to come with her, and now she wanted to tell him all about Lacoste, the
palace of the Marquis de Sade, once a crumbling ruin, now restored; the symbolism
of it, a restoration of the great satirist himself. We can now lift de Sade back
onto his terrible throne of glory, she had realised. He can continue his reign of
glorious perversity with our blessing.

Somehow this idea heartened her. Having spent the day in the great man's chateau
she felt as if Nick's work had a context. As if their orgiastic revelry belonged
in a venerable tradition of moss and stone. Where lawns were mown and tended, shrubbery
clipped into shape. The shapeless mass of writhing bodies she had been part of the
night before seemed to draw a meaning from today's exploration. This is what she
would say to Nick
when she pushed through the door and he lifted her up into his
arms.

She had her own key now and she used it. Entering a room clothed in darkness, the
blankets blocking out the afternoon sun. She felt for the switch, fumbling at the
wall till she found it. Even before the room flooded with light she knew that there
was something wrong. It felt strangely empty, bereft of energy, a dead space. And
when her eyes made sense of what the light touched, the fragments of their weeks
together, what she saw dismayed her.

The bed was torn apart. Not disassembled but destroyed: beaten into submission. The
wood cracked and splintered, the steel wool spilling from the wreckage. She could
see the intricate construction of the accumulator, the layers of zinc, the wool,
the wood now no more than an archaeology of its components. All the craft that had
gone into making the thing utterly trashed. The desk was broken too, the lock destroyed,
the drawer hanging open. She remembered the leather-bound notebooks, could feel the
soft covers in her hands. She knelt in the remains of the broken desk and placed
her hand in the empty space where Nick's life work had rested. She remembered the
diagrams in his notebooks, the one with her own naked body at the centre. She imagined
some faceless man in a cheap suit placing his finger at the point where the orgone
began. And what of Nick? Where had they taken him?

There was no blood. This in itself was a relief. If they had injured him then it
wasn't in this room. Either he had fled, or they had taken him without violence.
They had certainly taken their anger out on the furniture. The orgone-measuring instruments
were missing, the notebooks, the shooter tubes and
funnels, all gone. Holly felt
a wave of rage overtake her. She picked up a chair leg and swung it forcefully into
what remained of Nick's desk.

Her own suitcase had been forced open, the books strewn, the spine of
Venus in Furs
rent in two,
Irene's Cunt
torn into its component parts, and she felt a sudden shock
as she saw her copy of
Josephine Mutzenbacher
ravaged and curled in a corner like
a tiny frightened fawn. There was only one book left intact,
The Story of the Eye
by Georges Bataille. She picked it up, held it in her lap like a frightened child
with a doll. She sat in a pile of torn cushions, watching feathers swirl and settle
on her skirt. She wanted to cry. She would have, but then she remembered what Nick
had told her.
The Relic. Find the relic and run
.

She had put the silver key in her pocket. She took it out now, the metal cold against
her fingers.

It was late afternoon. She would need to hurry to get to Pigalle before the Musée
de l'érotisme closed. Would it be open after dark, she wondered. Exactly what kind
of place was it anyway, this museum of sex?

Holly brushed the feathers from her skirt. She slipped
The Story of the Eye
into
her bag like a talisman. Then she hurried out of the room and into the bright cold
glare of the afternoon.

She was exhausted. Her feet were sore, her head felt dense, fuzzy. In her bag
The
Story of the Eye
beat against her thigh like a rider's crop, urging her forward on
her headlong bolt from the Métro.

Pigalle was a place she had heard of—a red-light district, a suburb of bodily delights.
The Moulin Rouge, the haunt of prostitutes and procurers.

And here was the museum, exactly where Google said it would be. Holly paid the entry
fee to a bored-looking man at the counter. Beside him was an array of old-fashioned
porno magazines, glossy books featuring naked women, postcards, dildos, vibrators.
From the front—even here in the foyer—it looked like nothing more than a sleazy sex
shop. She pushed past the automated gate.

Dazed as she was, she failed to spot the narrow staircase. She peered instead at
glass cases crammed with explicit sexual carvings and replicas of famous dildos.
The Japanese seemed to be the most perverse: dogs and horses with their stiff pricks
poised to enter prostrate women. Monkeys humping rabbits, men penetrating women's
anuses. She blinked, dumb with fatigue, examining figurines of bone, combs, leather
harnesses, odd chains designed in some way for female pleasure. There were phalluses,
plenty of them, but nothing that resembled a locked box where she might try the key.

She noticed the staircase on the second pass of the room. It was more of a ladder
really, only just big enough for her to climb. The paperback thudded against the
wall as she hauled herself up, as if Bataille himself were urging her on, setting
her pace.

On the second floor there was a screen with pornographic films playing, old stag
films in black and white. Holly glanced at the people on display, people from another
age disporting themselves in all the positions a modern couple might attempt. The
men and women on the film were dead now. She watched them, young, fleshy, virile.
Imagined the slow creep of age, the skin slackening, the bowels loosening, the cheeky
grins replaced by slack-jawed, toothless smiles. It was unsettling to watch coupling
after coupling, knowing the people were old enough
to be her great-grandparents.
Holly shuddered. She continued up the stairs.

Floor after floor of erotic delights, and yet there was a veil of neglect over everything.
A veneer. It was more than just the dust, it was the carelessness. Original artefacts
crammed in beside clever reproductions, a sloppiness in the labelling, a disregard
for era.

On the very top floor she found an exhibition of posters for pornographic films and
beside that, finally, the phalluses. There was nothing here that was not phallic:
wall-hangings in the shape of penises, penis-shaped cigarette lighters, a chair with
a penis backrest and balls that would slip easily between the sitter's thighs. Shoes,
handbags, walking sticks, toys with giant phalluses and, of course—almost anti-climactically—an
array of carved dildos. Some of the dildos were in open boxes lined with satin or
velvet. One of the boxes was closed.

She glanced around. There was no one else here. She looked into the upper corners
of the room. Cameras. Holly angled her body to block a direct view of her hands.
They were shaking as she took the key and fitted it into the lock. The box sprang
open to reveal another dildo, an ivory beast of a thing resting on a silk handkerchief,
and carved with the bodies of people caught mid-fuck. She didn't have time to examine
it. She slipped the dildo into her bag and pulled aside the handkerchief to reveal
the leather cover of a notebook. The notebook was thick, the edges of the pages sealed
in gold. The letters WR were pressed into the cover in gold leaf. Holly picked up
the book, slipped it too into her bag and locked the box again. Her heart was pounding.
Too fast, she could barely breathe. She turned and hurried down the looping flights
of stairs. The sound of
long-dead couples fucking, on and on into infinity, was a
counterpoint to the
thump thump
of her bag against her leg.
The Story of the Eye,
the last remaining notebook of Wilhelm Reich and a disembodied cock providing the
percussion track for her flight. Her own heart contributed a frenetic counterpoint.
What strange music she was making in her panicked flight.

She hurled herself out onto the footpath and leaned on a sculpture to catch her breath,
a large crouching woman carved from stone, her generous breasts exposed to the passing
traffic. She touched the statue's left breast as if for comfort. She had made it.
She had the relic.

When she looked up there was a man watching her, thin as a street lamp, the glow
of his cigarette flaring greedily as he sucked. The cloud of smoke and warm breath
as he exhaled. He saw her notice him and looked away. Holly took her hand off the
statue's breast. She crossed the street quickly and disappeared into the ornate
mouth of a Métro station.

On the train she risked a peek into her bag. The gilt edge of the notebook gleamed.
She pulled it from her bag; the thing seemed warm, alive. She could feel it pulse
under her fingers. She squeezed the cover and the page edges slipped to an angle,
slightly askew, the front cover angling forward from the back cover. She drew in
breath as an image became visible. There was an image drawn on the very edge of the
pages, she saw it had been hidden by the gold edging, but when the pages were spread
out just a little the image leaped into sudden clarity. It was a picture of a woman,
legs splayed, breasts round and prominent. A set of sun-like rays seemed to radiate
from her vulva. Holly realised that the woman in the image hidden in the edging of
the book looked very much like herself.

She pushed the notebook deep into her bag. She didn't want to open it. She was suddenly
afraid of what might be inside. Instead she pulled out the other book, the Bataille,
tried to concentrate on the words. Her heart was beating too fast. She needed to
calm herself. The text made no sense to her at all. She read one paragraph over and
over again. She was distracted. She had Reich's notebook and all that was left to
do was to pack her bag and run to the airport, but first she had to endure the train
ride back to Nick's place. She took long, deep, calming breaths. She pressed the
book flat open on her knee.

As far back as I can recall I was frightened of anything sexual.

Only a matter of weeks ago Holly had felt just like that. A simple fear of the unknown.
So much had changed in so little time. She continued to read, but even as she read
she became wary. The pornographic images described in the book were like nothing
she had read before. It was more perverse than she could have imagined. She glanced
up often; the hairs rose at the back of her neck.

She put the book down and stood, walking from one end of the train carriage to the
other, suddenly very afraid. She peered through the doors to the next carriage. She
saw him there. Tall, thin, still smoking his cigarette. Holly crept towards the main
doors and stood, trembling, poised to run as soon as the train pulled up at the next
stop.

She felt their momentum slowing. She felt the lurch of inertia. She heard the doors
hiss open. And she ran.

The Story of the Eye

by
GEORGES BATAILLE

He chased her. She could hear his heavy shoes cracking against the pavement. She
didn't dare turn to see that he was gaining on her. She ran and ran and ran, and
Bataille and Reich and the huge ivory tusk of a dildo spurred her on, thumping her
so hard on the rump that she was sure she would soon be as red and bruised as Apollinaire's
spanked heroines, as rent and bloodied as O herself. She ran down streets and avenues,
fended her way across jammed traffic, leaped over cobblestones, grazed past lovers
and loners and turned finally into a tiny street that went nowhere.