The Pleasure Tube Read online

  I stare at the attendant blankly, stupidly; I don't know what to think.

  "Look," he says, pulling his chair up against the desk so he can hunch over the chessboard, "you want an interfaith minister or something? We can call upstairs."

  "No," I answer. "I'll be just fine."

  In the chilly air I stare at the pathetic sack on the slab, the body bag from which wisps of CO2 rise like smoke from a dying fire. I wonder why I've come. Now it seems so useless. I stand silently, lost in my thoughts. I recall Massimo's kindness to me on the last day he was alive, the enthusiasm with which he seemed to lose himself in his cars—to be utterly lost, in the end, in a blur of acceleration in the Ferrari. That is what he might have preferred; I accept that, it makes his death sensible to me. Yet it reminds me of the ways in which I've lost myself, reminds me of the moments before the blow four year ago. In the instant before I blacked out I thought I was dying, remember experience becoming an all-consuming blur, passing into something from which I never thought I'd recover. I sigh. Well, friend, I think, peace be with you.

  After a while I look through Massimo's scattered effects. Behind the separator in the body drawer lie his tagged leather luggage, suit bags, several briefcases. I stare for a while at his unfamiliar things. There is a tagged video cassette lying alone, which I pick up, examine. It is dated the second day of the trip, and in the title box are written the words "To my survivors"; the handwriting must be Massimo's.

  I anticipate its contents, guess a dozen things on my short trip up to the morgue's first level to run the tape, expect an explanation to a question I can't quite formulate. I'm given a machine without signing for it; nothing I've done has been logged. When I run the tape I look with infinite sadness at Massimo's smiling, animated face, see his sly kindness and sense of his own end evident even before he speaks. Of course, I think, he was coming on against medical advice, he knew that he might well die. What he has to say has nothing to do with his Governorship, or with SciCom, or with the trip; it is a message to his household, and to his friends. "You belong to a new age," he says. "Go in pleasure and in peace."

  I stare at his still image fixed on the final frame.

  I am passing back into the bowels of the ship when it happens. The chill intensifies, the brightness of the morgue goes, and in its place is the shaky dimness of the hatch passageways. I am lost in thought, vaguely wonder how Collette is making out. I still have a long way to go, stop at a hatch only one flight up to take another look at the superstructure of the ship.

  I unseal the hatch, push to go through—and it swings open to a howling bright light, the white light of a whirling sun, intense, overwhelming, incredible. A screaming rings in my ears, the light is blinding me. I wonder if I've been hit, if the ship's been hit, my arm is still on the hatch lock, I shade my eyes with my forearm and slam it closed.

  Silence. The dim light. My heart is pounding, the blood banging in my ears.

  A morgue attendant who's heard the slam is at my side, asking me what happened, what's wrong.

  The hatch swings open at the touch of his hand. I had not set the lock. Beyond it lies another metal stairway, the dim light of the ship's interior, the pall of machinery, nothing else.

  "Look at you, man. What happened?"

  "I don't know," I say, leaning back against a metal stair. "My God, I don't know."

  The cabin's soft brown walls, the faint hexagons of its carpet, the Rubens, pink and fleshy, comfort me with their familiarity. Collette is in the kitchen/bar assembling dinner. I catch a whiff of piquant sauce, feel my stomach tighten, put one hand on the couch to steady myself against the ship's motion. God, what is it, I wonder, the instability of the ship, the last days of the trip, or what I saw, what I saw? I notice now the velour headrests for the hologram sitting on the carpet near the recliner; they connect to the recliner's base through an array of gray cables.

  "I'm really having problems," Collette says, coming out empty-handed. "The bearnaise sauce keeps separating on me, it's curdled twice."

  "I'm not really hungry," I tell her, see now she seems a little pale herself.

  So we sit on the couch sipping Cinzano for our appetites, watching the last of the instructional programs for the hologram on Videon 33. The white-haired physician I've seen twice before is summing up a long, personal theory. He says in the end, translating from archaic Greek, that the highest pleasure of an organism consists of its return to its own true nature.

  "My nature at the moment doesn't feel very steady," I tell Collette, think I need to do something, to get myself occupied. I go with her to the kitchen and we try the sauce again—once more wind up with thickening butter and specks of egg. When I tell Collette I'm not interested in eating, anyway, she says the motion is getting to her as well, she isn't particularly hungry herself. She says she thinks we ought just to enter the hologram, plug in. The electronics are ready and it's always worked for motion sickness for her. I wash my hands at the metal sink. I just want to forget. I tell her that now seems as good a time as any other, and so we clear away the aperitif glasses, set the cables into their racks, change into robes.

  I have a pleasant moment as Collette sets my head in the headrest before a pastoral videon screen, nervous as I am.

  Then a severe, searing pain begins at the tips of my fingers, shoots straight to my sinuses and teeth, grips me in the spine. My stomach muscles contract to double me up, but I can't move. The pain is razor-sharp, burning, takes my breath away, my fist flails out and slams into the side of the recliner. I am out of the headrest, doubled up now, gasping for breath, the pain receding. "... Jesus."

  "I'm sorry, Rawley," Collette says, biting her lip. "That had to be done to clear your neurology for contrast. I'm sorry. But if I had told you, it would have been worse."

  "Worse?... Jesus."

  "Lie back," she says.

  "Oh, now..."

  "Trust me," she says. "Lie back."

  Collette self-induces her own initial neurological clearing with a timing mechanism—I can hear her catch her breath. Then she tells me everything is ready, makes herself comfortable on the couch, her full hair spilling over the headrest. I'm not at all certain what to expect. Despite my apprehension, with the ship unstable I do feel far more comfortable lying down, I'm sure now I won't be sick. I lie there watching a pastoral scene on the videon screen, rolling hills, cultivated land, a farmhouse, and a young man and woman doing something by its door.

  "Say, Collette, when will I—"

  Suddenly there is a flash of white-yellow light, I am blinded, not unpleasantly, but I am consumed in light. The vision quickly passes, fades in diminishing visual echoes, then my mind, my senses, go blank—my vision utterly obliterated, I cannot hear or see a thing. Slowly my mind fills with a color, pure, throbbing red, then pure, cool blue, then a deep, iridescent green, the colors fill all of my senses, seem to saturate every cell in my body, I have never had a sensation such as this. It is both frightening and compelling at the same time. It goes on and on, the colors begin to mingle and shift, swirl into unutterable combinations.

  The light shifts to yellow-white again, fades, and I find myself transported to a beach. A beach? I wonder, reach out and touch the sand. Its grains slide between my fingers, smooth, weightless as dust. I inhale—salt-rich air. I turn and Collette is lying on her side on a mat, boosted up on her elbow. She seems as vividly real to me as she did on the day we lay just this way on the beach of the island off Vietahiti; the surf is booming out at the reef with a deep roar I can feel in my bones. I reach out to touch her—she seems real, but my hand passes through her arm with a tingling sensation—not Collette, but a holographic representation.

  "What would you do?" the specter of Collette asks in an eerie, hollow voice. "What would you do if you were utterly free in time?"

  "I'd put myself somewhere pleasant," I answer, laughing because I know we've had this conversation once before, giddy at the sound of my own voice, queerly unreal. "I'd put myself right on
this spot."

  A feeling is spreading throughout my body, a rich, warm, pleasant feeling, a feeling like orgasm, but broader, wider, suffused into every limb, reaching into every part of me, permeating every cell.

  I reach out to touch Collette again, concentrate—focus my eyes, move my arm slowly. There is a sensation in my hand, a sensation like the soft touch of her skin, but cooler. The moment of touch extends itself, seems to last forever as the warmth grows inside me, seems to lift me higher and higher....

  I have no idea how much time passes—the moment of touch modulates, all my sensations undergo a shift through odd, funny exchanges with one another. I taste the color pink; a moving pattern of lines sounds like running deer. Then a series of scenes begin to pass through my mind, complete with all their sensations. One instant—or is it hours?—I am holding Collette for the first time, feeling the warmth and weight of her, the firmness of her back muscles, their modulation as she moves against me; then I am reclining with her on the soft loam of woods in broken sunlight, hear the murmur of a stream, feel the soft caress of her hand stroking the back of my neck, my shoulders. And then I am turning in my cabin, watching the window/wall open into another cabin, Erica turning simultaneously, Erica's smile wide and arms rising; then I am moving toward Collette in the cabin, to music that is everywhere, above, beneath, beside me. Again I am pressed against the leather seat of the Ferrari as the car, its steering wheel in my hands, curls with smooth adhesion around the hairpin; the thrust of its acceleration coming out into the sun goes on forever; and I am sitting with Collette, her lips full and shiny, her loose hair backlit by the sun, her face inches from mine, the odor of gardenias everywhere. The experiences seem simultaneous, yet each has a full integrity, seems separate, through swimming in the soft bulk of the Pacific over an involuted reef, walking through the green mansions of palace gardens among rainbow blossoms and clucking, iridescent blue peacocks. At times they seem distant, at times so present in each detail the effect is overwhelming. In one sequence I bite into a piece of filet and see the fibers snap as in a blown-up picture, follow the process of its saturation with saliva, the chewed bit sliding with a scraping sound down my esophagus and falling with a splash into the cave where gastric juices swarm over it like foam from a wave. Collette hands me a glass of red wine and I smell sugar, grapes, the sunlight of the vineyards; she wipes my lips and the sound is like skis on fresh snow. And then I am watching myself from a distance again, the Ferrari from above a smooth blur of red, bright in the sun. The pleasures amplify, intensify, in these and other ways. The pleasures seem to grow, a surge of pleasure which, like my first moment of touch, extends itself, sweeps me away, loops me into whirlpools of memory, timelessness, sensation, a rush I have never known.

  The scenes recur, roll into and through one another, green mansions and blue water, the curves of a woman, the sweet freedom of flight; they go on and on, I am in and out of them, they roll on and on.

  The sky above is motionless, a sea of stars, snow at the Milky Way. The Crab nebula is overhead. I look up, and in looking I begin to feel the sky widen and begin to fall through it—falling into it, falling among the stars as the infinity of space opens before me like a window, like a door. I can feel the blood coursing through my veins, the rhythm of my heart the rhythm of my body.

  A sound nearby. Collette steps out of the dark, naked, glistening with sweet oil, her breasts jutting out. She kneels before me, and when I quickly thrust inside her, she wraps her arms around my head and only her fingers move through the hair on the back of my neck. A series of jolting shocks pass through my groin, a stream of delight which does not seem to belong to me but takes the last breath from my lungs, continues, continues, continues. ...

  Finally Collette rises to her feet, sends her arms outstretched to the stars; the low fire gives her a golden glow, her skin glistening with the sheen of the fragrant oil as the light plays over the curves of her body.

  "A goddess?" she says softly, tenderly, looking at me with a gentle smile. "Yes. And you are a god, Rawley."

  She laughs, wrinkles at her eyes, holds out her hands. "You are a god."

  Her eyes are jade-green, striking. Her broad face is framed by black, loosely waved hair. Her tongue touches the edges of her teeth as she laughs. I kiss the soft hollow between her shoulder and her neck, chocolate skin lushly warm, smooth, soft. She moves from me, whirls away, stops. "You think this is all? You think we're finished?" she says breathlessly, Collette says breathlessly. "Oh, Rawley."

  Her eyes are jade-green, striking. Her broad face is framed by auburn, loosely waved hair. Her tongue touches the edges of her teeth as she laughs. I kiss the soft hollow between her shoulder and her neck, pinkwhite skin lushly warm, smooth, soft. She moves from me, whirls away, stops. "You think this is all? You think we're finished?" she says breathlessly, Maxine says breathlessly. "Oh, Rawley."

  I see Massimo's face, broad and radiant, the radiance seems to come from deep within his bones, his eyes smiling, his lips cherry-red, his shock of white hair and white beard brilliantly white.

  "You belong to a new age," he is telling me. "Go in pleasure and in peace."

  Each scene comes again, recedes, these and others, they shimmer through one another, whole scenes and fragments freeze, their images recombine: green mansions, summer wheat, the gulf of space, a sun of ice. They freeze again for a time I have no sense of, then expand into vivid swaths of pure, electric color, roll on, memory and desire mingled into a timeless rush of ecstasy and delight, roll on and on....

  Then there is a jolt, a jolt like no other. It shakes me whole and violently, fixes itself in time to the thumping of my heart, reverberates intensely, then reverberates again. It is outside me, a severe jolt as from a ship, a jolt through the recliner, through my body, a jolt of massive weight and inertia.

  For a moment I don't know where I am. My heart is thudding in my chest, my blood is racing, a terror laces through the incredible sense of well-being that I have, my body feels lusciously pleasant but for the throbbing in my hand, the fright in my heart. I am struggling for consciousness, struggling to bring my dislocation under control. I feel the light pain my eyes as I open....

  "Wake up," Collette is saying, holding a glass of orange juice to my lips, her hand shaking. "Something's wrong. Something's wrong with the ship, there's an alarm. Werhner called down from the dome."

  The cool liquid runs down my throat, its sweetness heavy on my tongue. "How... long... ?"

  "We've been under all night, it's day fourteen, Rawley. Here, drink more. This will detoxify you. There's an alarm. He wants you to come up to the dome."

  My eyes blink, I see Collette, robe open, perspiring, fear in her face, I reach out and touch the pulsing vein in her neck. Turn to see the cabin, its edges sharp—the paintings askew, utensils tumbled from drawers in the kitchen/bar, the closet door hanging open, the lights dim and flickering, coming steady.

  "There was a jolt, Rawley."

  My mind comes awake; the drug, I wonder, the fright. I am sitting up and rubbing my face for a long minute, feel the blood rise to my cheeks and temples. I look up to the videon:

  ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM

  "He wants you to come up to Dome A."

  I have slipped off my robe, pulled open my bag, and am pulling on my flight suit, stop with one arm remaining to shove through and punch Dome A on the console:

  ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM

  TRAFFIC DOWN TRAFFIC DOWN TRAFFIC DOWN

  ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM

  The ship is terribly unsteady. I run my hands through my hair, the ship pitches, and I have to reach out for support against the recliner. I see Collette wiping her face with a towel, reaching for a silver jump suit.

  "Look, Collette..."

  "I'm coming along," she says.

  On the lift to Dome A I hold the cold handrail so tightly I know without looking that the back of my hand is white—with my other arm I hold Collette against me, her silver jump sui
t slides against the palm of my hand, her body warm beneath.

  "Kiss me," she says, her face close to mine, she's barely smiling. I look down at the glistening of her lips, into her liquid green, frightened eyes.

  I meet her lips, her tongue, lose myself for a moment in the flesh-and-blood warmth of her, run the back of my hand over the soft chocolate skin of her cheek. I don't know what to tell her, how to articulate the terror I feel lacing through the pleasure of her presence. What was it that I saw, I am thinking now, what was it through the hatch, familiar and strange at once? The question mingles in my blood with echoes and reverberations from the hologram, the eerie sense of its unreality and the vividness of its visions.

  My hand grips the handrail even more tightly, aches. The fingers of my other hand run their course through Collette's black hair, twist together before they have passed through. I pull Collette's head back by the hair down her back. Her eyes widen, her mouth opens, her gaze is directly into mine. Her neck muscles tense, her head seems an upward weight against the pull of my twisted fingers.

  Smile lines creep from the corners of her eyes." Ahhh," she says, "You have an imagination."

  "I do," I say, releasing my fingers, relaxing my hand. "I have an imagination, all right." Collette shifts her weight against the accelerating upward pull of the lift, leans against the spun-steel wall still watching me, smiling. How odd, it wasn't my imagination, but an impulse to feel the simple, present reality of her that made me cause her pain. Even as I think this I begin to lose it again in our distorted reflection on the opposite wall, the vague soft map of ourselves which moves even as we both move to unlock our knees and stand flat to the wall behind us against the abrupt deceleration of the lift as the panel light begins to flash DOME A.

  Something's wrong. As the lift doors open I am feeling the ship's slow roll to steady, feel for a moment that odd sensation of leg muscles ready to move for balance when there is no need to, suddenly steady on, I almost fall stepping from the lift. As the lift doors close behind I can see in the amber light of the hatchway to port pontoon a large, blue-suited figure across in program, yet the dome seems deserted—a half-eaten sandwich on a near console, equipment out of place, a thick oil seeping over the magnesium-alloy floor from the high bank of condensers. As if by habit I close a slowly swinging locker door, only then look across and see Werhner seated at the navigator's console, absorbed, intent on his instruments, digging into his curry, so absorbed he isn't looking at his plate but eating heartily. I feel a temperature change on the exposed surfaces of my skin, cold. I look up.