Friday, July 18, 2008

Jayne & the Satanists --Chapter 30

 

Later that night, feeling metabolically mellow, but sexually frustrated, I wove my way home.  Lex greeted me with a throaty arpeggio.  He sniffed my torn pantleg and hissed.  "Lemme tell you about a nasty female cat I met." Muttering out the story, I fixed him some Dinty Moore and poured him a saucerful of beer.  I went out on the balcony to see if the girls next door were out.  The brunette and the redhead were out smoking cigarettes.  They had retired their bathing suits for the day and were dressed in pants and light sweaters.

      I made some small talk, but I could feel the cocaine wearing off quickly, giving way to the wine in my system and the beer I was drinking.  My knees were going soft on me and my lids were drooping.  I went inside and stripped and dropped into bed.  Lex came to keep me company and set himself on my chest for optimum petting.  Then, as was his habit, he nuzzled his nose into my slowly returning mustache.  I drifted into sleep with the odd sensation that I was inhaling his exhalations and he mine.

     Blame it on the drugs, I suppose, but that night I had disturbing dreams.  A man dressed in a long black trenchcoat walking through darkened streets of different cities, different centuries.  A man laughing as he watched people in mortal conflict.  His drawn aristocratic face etched with the character lines of cruelty.  And flames, cities and homes burning.  Their people crying out in despair and sorrow.  The screams of children and mothers.  Of fathers and husbands who had betrayed them.  A phantasm of naked grotesque bodies, coiling and slithering, their loins burning with need, yet no cessation of yearning, no calm. And central to it all: this pallid sickly god thing, its priapic organ throbbing and surging, its vagina clenching and questing like a hungry sea anemone.  Its head lolling weakly on its sloping shoulders.  Its dugs, modest but so round and firm, sweat-shining nipples painfully arching upward.  A thing whose sex parts were thriving while the rest of the body wasted.  And coursing through the corners of my dream screen, the eternal man skulking, leering, gesticulating, urging me to join him.  But, in that sourceless logic of dreams, I knew that if I went to him all would be lost.  Yet the urge to abandon everything was intensely seductive.  Abandon petty morality and convention and surrender to a never-ceasing abandonment to the sensual and sinful.  And in that dream, I saw Lex, an emaciated, battle-scarred Lex, crying out in pain, but lunging through the flames to attack the eternal man who always seemed to recede just further in the distance.  And Lex’s fur burned and his flesh bubbled and his head tossed from side to side in agony, yet he plunged on into the hell and snarled at the god thing that lay pustulent and beckoning in his path.

     And I awoke, sweat drenched and nauseated.  I flapped my hand around on the coverlet and found Lex snuggled in beside me.  When I touched him, he let out a sleepy trill, wondering what was going on.  I pulled his large muscular body to me and he began his reassuring purr.  And I told myself, he’s only a cat, but that was enough at that moment.  And I hugged him close and noticed that tears were falling from my eyes into his ebony fur.  And he looked at me with those mysterious golden eyes and nuzzled into my sweaty neck and fell asleep again.  As I did too, momentarily.

No comments: