“Those bastards,” said Mr. Michaelmas, “will knuckle under or so help me, I’ll have their goddamn plant burned down to the ground.”
Joe Flagg looked nervously across the big boardroom, where the opposition was huddled around their accountant.
"They’ll hear us," he cautioned unnecessarily; there were chances a man like Michaelmas just wouldn’t take. Then: "Why be so hard-nosed, Mike? We can carry them for a long time with the stock we already hold and never feel it… at least until they get their new line out. They have a hell of a process there."
"I told you, don’t call me Mike. Hell of a process, yes, and they are using it for what? Museum reproductions, for God’s sake! They will release that stock, they will give us control, we will shut them down, we will take that process, and we will make toilet seats. That is the way it will go, Mister Flagg, and if it doesn’t, we will blow them away."
At his own peril, Joe Flagg ignored the "Mister" — a danger signal. "You’re costing a lot of good people a lot of jobs, you know."
Mr. Michaelmas took a gold key out of his vest pocket. "I’m going to take a piss, Flagg. Hold on to the thought that while I am in there I am pissing on your bleeding heart." Teeth closing on his lower lip, Joe Flagg watched the chairman of the board head for his personal private rest room.
Mr. Michaelmas always enjoyed the effect of the self-closing door of his rest room — silent, solid, certain, with a pulse of pressure in his eardrums accompanying the discreet click of the latch. It suited his taste for impregnability, just as it suited him to churn up as many noisy suds as he cared to with the conviction that nothing could be heard outside.
These very suds utterly concealed the faint whisper of the shower curtain, so that his first knowledge that he was not alone came when a velvet-cool hand slipped up between his legs and enclosed his penis, and a cool, velvet voice said, "Nice. Very nice."
Mr. Michaelmas stood transfixed for a moment, watching a blaze of shock behind his eyes. The moment lasted long enough for two fondles and a squeeze from the little hand before he could turn around.
As he turned, she rose from her one knee and stood against him smiling — a long-eyed girl with a fine fall of hair.
He gasped, "Who the hell are you?"
"Apricot," she said; and her skin was peach, and she wore a yellow dress, but indeed her hair was apricot. She slid a hand up and around to the nape of his neck, and so great was his shock that he hardly felt the tiny scratch there; and she flung both arms tight around him and held him with his arms trapped against his sides. He tried to inhale to shout, but she anticipated him with a powerful squeeze, so that all that came out was a hoarse "What the hell is this?"
She tipped her head back so he could see her smiling face. "This is a kidnapping, Mr. Michaelmas." He tried to struggle, whimpering, and found to his horror that his efforts were noticeably weaker. He began to feel the scratch on the back of his neck, and from it, increasing waves of nausea and weakness, matching his pounding pulse. With an enchanting quirk at one corner of her mouth, Apricot said, "You are about to experience two perfect snatches, Mr. Michaelmas: yours, and mine."
She swung him around like an oversized doll, propped him against the wall and confidently released him. Holding his sagging body upright with one firm elbow in his solar plexus, she produced a plastic glove from her cleavage and worked it over her left hand. With this she reached over his head and turned the T-handle of the window latch.
The heavy steel-framed window, hinged at the top, swung open a little; she caught it and drew it toward her, and immediately two leather loops fell into the room and dangled. On one of these hung a broad leather belt. This she removed and draped over her shoulder. She put one of Mr. Michaelmas’ now-flaccid arms through a leather loop, then the other. Then she passed the belt behind him and cinched it tight around his body and upper arms. She gave two sharp tugs to one of the loops, and Mr. Michaelmas instantly began to rise. Apricot with one hand considerately held the window wide as he passed up through it. With her other hand, and with equal consideration, she zipped up his fly as it went by.
In a moment one of the leather slings fell back into the room. Apricot took a turn around her left wrist and let herself be drawn up and out through the window, which she lofted with her foot as she emerged. It swung up and then down, latching with the same solid click as that which Mr. Michaelmas had so much admired.
* * *
In a strange place a concentric Mr. Michaelmas was afloat.
The licking began almost immediately. It was part of everything, underlay everything; it was the ambience of being there asleep and awake (as much awake as he was permitted, at first, to be). A long froth of gold across his chest and stomach. A soft rope of brown, a sentient halo of auburn, and again the gold, again the brown, and from time to time the apricot. How count the hours of a dream — and why?
Murmurs, in and out. "Load him with C — 6,000 or better. Time-release." "Twelve patches should cover the spectrum for now." "It’s a good one. How can a man let himself dry up like that? Erectile response not 20 percent of norm!" "Blood sugar too low. Blood pressure too high. No wonder." "Increase niacin 200 mgs twice a day until you get a rush. Talk about deficiency…!"
Hours and hours, asleep and a little awake, the licking went on. It felt good.
Visuals. In a dream one can ignore bare breasts and soft female laughter and the sense of caring in mysterious utterances like "Up the E 400 IU and pack in that ginseng." The frequent tender face framed in apricot, cool hand on stubbled cheek. Bright attentive eyes, close and closer, sometimes brown, often green, huge finally and lost in a presbyopic haze as they fall half-hooded and become tactile instead of visual: soft lips against his lips, smooth cheek against his growing stubble.
Growing stubble. How long? Who knows? Who cares! Oh, but it feels good…
Murmur murmur. "Wassermann neg. Gonococci neg. Anaphylaxis neg, except guess what? He’s mildly allergic to horses."
"So guess what? We’re fresh out of horses around here."
"Did you say ‘horse’ or ‘whores’?" Tickle of laughter: female, four, five.
Head lifted and cradled; woman-smell. Thick warm soup, delicious, overtone of something … medicine? Thiamin? She wiped his lips with a nipple…
Night. The sleep had been different somehow; unforced. There was a long, soft body beside him in the bed. Over them in the warm room, only a sheet. Soft fingers holding his genitals, gentle, firm, barely pulsating. Cool, velvet voice calling quietly: "Pam…"
Half-awake. Two-thirds-awake. Sheet drawn aside, a gentle cloud of dark, soft silk descending on his stomach and chest, and, oh, lips enclosing the head of his penis while the hand slid downward, a knowing finger pressing on the firm flesh underneath his scrotum, pressing, pressing, while the lips and tongue, the tongue, the lips and tongue….
It came up like pain. It wasn’t pain, but it was like that; a Hood with a bead leading it, a seed pushed up through a slender pipe. The lips, the tongue, sucked and flicked; warm arms slipped tight around him; other lips surrounded his, and another tongue slipped into his mouth and battled his. The traveling bead approached, exploded outward, and Michaelmas uttered a succession of barks, gasping barks, while coruscations of light sprinkled the insides of his eyes. Then everything began comfortably to fade. The lips around his penis stilled, held for a while (thank God they had stopped moving; he could not have borne the intensity) and slipped away. The arms around him became gentle; the tongue withdrew from his mouth, though the lips remained on his until his breath quieted, matched the warm currents of the woman who held him.
His vision cleared. He lay on a broad, firm bed, and the woman beside him was Apricot. He didn’t have enough tonus left in his drained body to react or to move. All he could do was to speak; all he could say was "Where am I?"
"You are in the Country of Afterward. The very best place in all the world. How do you feel?"
He closed his eyes to consider this, and felt himself rushing so swiftly into total sleep that he snapped them open again. "Who are you?"
"You remember me. Apricot. And this is Pam. She just made you come."
"Finally," said Pam; but she said it kindly, smiling. She patted and stroked his now-shrunken penis affectionately, and then, as if reading the distress from his mind, drew the sheet over it. She pulled up her leg, placed one foot on the edge, rested her chin on the knee and smiled at him. She looked absolutely beautiful. He wrenched his gaze away from her and found that this made him look directly at Apricot, who had now withdrawn from him and was propped up on one elbow, her cascade of extraordinary hair flung back and to the side, not quite covering a breast and permitting a firm little nipple to peer through its curtain. Mr. Michaelmas said, "You! You kidnapped me!"
"That we did," she assured him cheerfully.
"You’re not going to get away with it, you know."
"Honey" (and it was said as a real endearment), "we did get away with it."
"You know what I mean. These days there’s a thousand ways to track you down and nail you. The instant you demand the money, you’ve lost. Don’t you know that?"
"Demand what money?"
"What else would you be kidnapping people for?"
"You’ll find out," said Apricot sweetly.
Mr. Michaelmas tried to sit up, but the movement was met immediately by Apricot’s rolling toward him, her breasts against his chest. Mr. Michaelmas struggled weakly and uselessly and spit out, "Damn you bitches, you let me the hell out of —" and was then muzzled, muffled, silenced by the soft lips surrounding his.
"You know, Ape," he heard the lovely
Pam say, "that’s not the kind of talk we tolerate in the Country of Afterward."
Apricot lifted her mouth away from his long enough to say "You’re right, Pam," and came back to him again. He was appalled to find the sheet withdrawn from his lower body, to feel the soft, dark mist of hair flung across his belly, to feel Pam’s mouth around his limpness, drawing him in entire. He twisted away from Apricot, crying, "What are you doing? What are you doing?"
Holding him close, her voice soft and cool and fond as ever, she told him:
"We’re making you come again."
"You can’t!"
"Why ever not?"
"I just did!"
"So?"
"I’m 58 years old!" he howled.
"So?"
Exasperated, he fell into a sullen silence. Apricot shifted her weight and got an arm under his shoulders. She lowered her head to his chest. "You’d be astonished," she said conversationally, "how few women know and appreciate the fact that a man has nipples." And she began to tongue them, one and then the other, nip them ever so gently, suck and stroke them. The sensation was amazing, unnerving, quite unlike anything he had experienced in all his life before; it was almost pain; it was enough, for a while, to distract his attention from the expert application of Pam’s mouth down below. Left to its own devices, and temporarily freed from the attention of his inhibitions, his astonished penis found itself: too long to be swallowed whole.
His eyes closed, and this time there was no rush to sleep. He tried to speak, to think, and found both less possible with every breath he drew. And the breaths came more swiftly and deeper, and he became aware of something he had forgotten, oh, years ago… or had he only dreamed it? He couldn’t remember, but it was the knowledge that the woman with him was feeling his currents, his surges. What little sex he had allowed himself in his later years — before he had given it up altogether — had been his concern, and not that of the female he happened to be penetrating; but there had been a time … hadn’t there? Hadn’t there? … When he took joy, took pride in the knowledge that he was pleasuring a woman. Now, now, here and now and real. Apricot was trembling with him, sharing a rising current with him, breathing as he deeply breathed, her breath now rustling, now becoming whispered moans.
And Pam, Pam now working hungrily, thirsting, faster and harder; Pam cried out with a call almost unheard from her busy mouth, but a cry sending its vibrations into and through him through his incredibly rigid, incredibly pulsing rod. Absolutely without his command, his pelvis began thrusting.
"Now!" Apricot gasped, and as if choreographed, Pam withdrew and Apricot rolled completely on top of him, and he found himself plunged deep inside her. His thrusting would not stop, and hers matched and met his strongly; suddenly she reared up, her eyes closed and her mouth in a vertical oval, and she cried out hoarsely, a sound absolutely unlike any he had yet heard from her; and his penis was clutched, released and clutched, clutched again, powerful as a hand, smooth as a predawn lake; and he peaked, they cried out together, and again, and again, and, tenderly less, again, and once more, pleasant and light as the briefest smile, and then a long slide into panting quiet. The cords in his inner thighs thrummed with reaction; the calves of his legs would have knotted had they had the strength; even the soles of his feet tingled.
When he was still, Apricot rolled off him, and the withdrawal wakened him with a gasp. She pulled up a corner of the sheet and wiped the sweat off his brow and cheeks and, gently, his eyelids; it felt good. "This is the Country of Afterward, again," she whispered to him, the echoes of her own panting still in her voice. "There’s no place here for anger or meanness or fear. Think about this, and sleep now. Sleep."
All but a dim night-light went out. Mr. Michaelmas heard: "Night, Pammy." And when he turned on his side, he felt Apricot at his back, fitting shin to calf, knee to knee, an arm around his chest, and the small, strong hand spread there, comforting. He slept.
* * *
It must have been hours, for he felt totally rested; yet the room was the same, the same dim night-light from somewhere. (But how count time in a dream? and — why?) And there was a new woman in bed with him, larger, stronger, fuller. Somehow he had reversed positions during his sleep, and he lay at her back, nested like spoons, with his arm around her, and his hand up between her breasts. She smelled good.
He was so rested and so comfortable that he forgot for a measureless instant to be afraid, indignant, even to wonder. He must have made some small movement, because her hand slipped over his and moved it to cup her nipple. She sighed and, lying very still, he felt the nipple increasing in his palm. The fear and indignation and demand were manifest, down there somewhere, but he would not, for this moment, permit that to matter. What mattered was lying still and warm and rested, appreciating this almost motionless movement, the erection of a nipple in his palm.
With amazement and delight he became aware that his own erection was matching hers. I’m 58 years old! but’. So? And how long had it been since his last explosion? Surely not very long; but, then, there was no time in this place, and if it had been only a short time, too short a time ago to make another one possible, that seemed not to matter any more than the numbers attached to the years he had lived. So?…
Mistrusting his own evidence, he felt the urge to reach down and feel himself to be sure it was true; and oh, and oh! it was true. And when she felt his movement, the woman flung back the covers and spun around, rising — a beautiful movement that ended with her seated on his groin with most of her weight carried by her knees, and his penis buried deep inside her. He looked up at her; she was magnificent rearing up, with a muscled torso and firm breasts, the nipples standing out proud; she threw back her head atop its strong column of neck, her teeth gleamed, and she climaxed immediately. He had never seen nor felt anything quite so marvelous.
There is that in all humans which captures an experience in all its aspects, sight, sound, sensation, indelibly; and Mr. Michaelmas knew in this moment he had a memory, a nested jewel in his personal treasure chest, which would far outlast any tangible thing he had ever owned, and which, unlike stocks and bonds and country houses (or, for that matter, a welfare check, should he ever come to that) could never, never be taken from him.
Three times she moved, up and down; then, throwing her head from side to side and crying out, she came again, with a series of spastic contractions so powerful that she ejected his penis, which she quickly recaptured and then was still, so that he might feel her cascading aftershocks. She bent forward and locked his eyes with her own, while her face became smooth, almost slack, as she began to move again. The smooth, oiled pressure of her vagina increased steadily as she approached another climax; breathless, almost awed, pinned by the intensity of those eyes, he felt his own currents rising in response to hers.
Her mouth twisted, her eyes screwed shut, back went her head, and she howled and she came, and so did he, oh, and so did he!
Gasping, she slid her knees down and out from under her and fell weakly on top of him, driving the wind out of his laboring lungs, rolled to the side and lay against him, panting and smiling and sharing his breath.
It was hardly a conscious movement, but he put an arm around her, and she shifted until their bodies fit and they quieted together, reading each other’s eyes in the dimness. He could feel the thud of her heart. In time they slipped unmoving into a quiet space, not sleeping, not awake either: just being.
After a time (in this place where there was no time) she sighed and sat up. She hit a switch somewhere, and an oval of light etched itself on the bed from a floor lamp nearby. "Look," she said. "Look at this." She arranged herself with her legs wide apart and the light flooding down on her crotch "Did you ever really look at one of these?"
He never had; never, certainly, on a black woman before. The hair was thick and blue-black and, in the center, divided on an area of a red quite surprising in its intensity. She began to speak, her strong slender fingers moving from time to time in demonstration. Her voice was full and rich, and her diction faultless.
She said: "This is the beginning; this is where it all starts — life and joy and all the things that come from both of them. Look at it; look here: I read of a little girl who saw a picture of it and said, ‘Oh, it’s just like a flower!’ And indeed it is; see the petals here and here? See how it folds into itself?
"See the wetness, yours and mine together. I honor the wetnesses of the body, especially when they come from loving, and most especially when they are mingled. Your sweat is drying on me, and mine on you, and I think that is just beautiful.
"Look. Look. Look at the shape of it. Forget for a moment what it is, and just draw in your mind the shape of it. Do you see there the shape of the arch, the Gothic arch you’ll find in the great old cathedrals? Do you recall how many of them surmount and surround those gorgeous round rose windows, exploding with all the colors there are, and with all the light God and man can pour through them, each in his turn ? If you think for a moment, man, that I’m irreverent when I make this comparison, or that I’m out to destroy worship and holiness, you’ve got me all wrong. I believe with all my heart that God made us as He would have us be, and that when we make joy with what He gave us, we praise Him for his good works. I think the idea of such praise began long before there was a church, any church, and that this special joy and the act of worship were once the same thing, and that they were driven apart by dried-up old men who had lost the joy and found a way to substitute power for it — earthly power, not heavenly power.
"Look! You are looking at the gates to heaven, not the gates to hell! You are looking at an altar, man, at which you can worship a woman and through her Woman with a capital letter: all life and all joy.
"Then if you can learn to think of all this in this special way, go outside a cathedral and look up, and if you can’t see the symbolism of those strong stretching columns and towers and steeples reaching toward God, then I do indeed pity you.
"When a man gets horny and needs his ashes hauled and drives in here and dumps them, he commits a sacrilege. When a man stabs in here with a rape, he violates the intention of God who made him. When he comes to it with joy and reverence, he worships. And if he comes to it with love — man, he has it all."
"I never …. " Mr. Michaelmas started to say, but it wouldn’t come out as words; it was a speechless mumble. He wet his lips and tried again. "I’ve never heard anyone talk like that." He lay relaxed, looking at the curves and petals in their oval of light.
The overhead lights came on, not at all harshly, and the woman’s hand descended on his shoulder, carrying the clear message: You needn’t move; not Don’t — just You needn’t, a message so clear and strong that he did not even start, even when Apricot’s clear, cool voice said, "Let’s eat!"
He glanced up. Apricot and the dark-haired girl Pam were pushing a wheeled table toward the bed. They were both naked arid completely at ease in their nudity. Apricot moved around in front of the table (from which fragrances emanated that made his salivaries squirt).
"Let’s eat."
He sat up, and he was ravenous. Fluffy yellow omelets, stuffed with mushrooms and with an incredible orange sauce; a pyramid of filet mignon in little cubes, quite raw, and tender as a serenade; a dark bread, obviously homemade, with an elusive smoky overflavor; four kinds of cheese, passion fruit and (of course) apricot nectars, a green tea and a wonderful black coffee. "Lord! you can cook!"
"We didn’t do this one; it was Rorie. She’ll be along in a minute."
"Rorie. She’s the one with the, ah —"
"The fuzzhead. That’s right. And your latest conquest there is Rietta. She’s our resident God-freak."
To his surprise, Mr. Michaelmas felt mildly defensive.
"I don’t think she’s any kind of a freak."
"Well, bless your thing!" cried Rietta, and kissed his ear.
Mr. Michaelmas felt himself flushing with pleasure. He was amazed.
Rorie, the one with the halo of pale, fine hair, appeared, a girl so perfectly proportioned and so graceful in her carriage and movements that it was easy to notice, last of all, that she was over six feet tall.
"Mr. Michaelmas says, if you could marry, he’d cook you," said Pam.
"Well, thank you," said Rorie graciously, and sat on the edge of the big bed, looking at him with frank and open liking.
They ate companionably and, without being fussy about it, they all saw that Mr. Michaelmas had everything he wanted a second or two before he knew he wanted it, while good talk rolled and swirled about the group. He learned that Pam was a registered nurse with a degree in biochemistry, that Rietta ("It used to be Henrietta, but women’s lib got that far into my name. A hen I ain’t.") had an M.D. and that Rorie — Aurora — was a pharmacist.
"I’m a high-school dropout," said Apricot, "with a libido I insist is normal and maybe a little more chutzpah than most. I rounded up these three in the same hospital."
"It was a veterans’ hospital," said Rietta. "Apricot blew in one day to visit her girlfriend’s boyfriend who’d lost an argument with a grenade."
"He was a double amputee with half a face," said Apricot, "and nobody was lining up on both sides of the street, cheering like they did when he marched off to war. Hardly anybody ever drops in to chat with those guys, and when they do, they take care of their brains or their boredom or their immortal souls, but pay damn little attention to their gonads. A lot of them, there’s nothing wrong with their gonads. So, well," she shrugged, "I did something about it."
"Did she ever," said Rorie admiringly. "She recruited a whole detachment of us. Next thing you know there were flying squads of us visiting hospitals all over."
"You mean they — you…." Four nodding heads answered him. "What about the administration?"
"We’re not stupid," said Rietta, "and don’t forget — we know the rules. Mostly, administration didn’t know what was going on, which is SOP for administration everywhere. Once in a while there was a ripple, but we found most of ’em willing to look the other way as long as we could assure them that they wouldn’t have to take any heat. It worked beautifully, right up until —"
"Never mind the details," Apricot said quickly, and then laughed. "Let’s just say we ran up against a front-office type with a small mind and desiccated scrotum who apparently felt that decency, morality and frustration were the proper environment for his veterans. We saw it coming and quietly removed him. We gave him a full treatment and put him back where we found him, and to this day he’s got as happy a population as you can find in any hospital — which is never very."
"Our first case," said Aurora, smiling reminiscently.
Case? Am I a "case’’? Mr. Michaelmas looked around him at the four relaxed, pleasantly smiling women, and past them at the room.
Timeless. Large, carpeted in neutral gray with a warm blush to it, and the walls were draped — all of them. No sign of windows; there must have been doors, because the women came and went, but from where he sat on the huge square bed, there was no way of telling where a door might have been. None of the girls wore watches; the light was artificial; there was no radio, no TV.
Timeless.
Abruptly, he demanded, "How long have I been here?"
Pam looked at him searchingly. Rorie uncrossed her long legs. Apricot looked across him at Rietta and asked, "How long would you say?"
Rietta looked pensively at the ceiling for a moment. "Fifty, 55 minutes maybe."
Mr. Michaelmas looked at each in turn, and got smiles. "I don’t know what you mean," he said levelly.
"I mean 50 minutes or so in the Country of Afterward," said Rietta. "Nothing else matters here."
"Well, goddamnit, it matters to me!"
"I really don’t like that kind of talk," said Rietta. Clearly, she meant it. "I guess he’s out."
"Seems so," said Rorie, rising like a swift flower in stop-motion; and the next thing Mr. Michaelmas knew he was hit in four complex ways from four directions, and sank under a choreographed tangle of soft, strong, skilled limbs and torsos.
In the next timeless time, two things utterly astonished Mr. Michaelmas. The first was that after a few minutes of intense battle, he laughed. Mr. Michaelmas laughed! A great peal of unexpected, uncontrollable laughter, coming from a place where no real laughter had lived for years!
The other thing was that, one way or another, he brought off all four women. The ways, and the other ways, cascaded over him, presented themselves, demanded themselves, created their own hungers and urgent demands.
Then his own incredible peak and eruption flung him away into sleep.
He awoke alone and, realizing it, felt a vague sense of pique, of abandonment. He moved, and was aware of the warmth of the bed beside him, and understood that he hadn’t been alone after all; that probably he had awakened because she had silently slipped away. (She? Which she?) Now he came all the way awake and sat up. He was more alert than he had yet been, here — almost normally so. To be awake, and alone, was something of a novelty in this cave of novelties.
He slipped off the bed and felt pleasure as his bare feet took his weight. The carpeting was resilient, crisply but pleasantly tickling. He moved silently to the draped wall and put his hand against it, pressed, felt nothing back of it but a solid surface. He paused, then, hand over hand, he felt his way all around the room; there had to be an opening, a door, somewhere. And, of course, he found one.
The bathroom.
The light came on automatically as he passed through the just-overlapping drape. Not quite angry, not quite laughing at himself, and commanded by his bladder more than by his brain, he used the bathroom "now that I’m here." And as he emerged, "Wouldn’t you know…" he said ruefully, for there on the edge of the bed sat the long-limbed Aurora, wheeled table alongside, pouring coffee. Not for the first time he was struck by her beauty: How could anyone that tall be so perfect? The cup, the saucer, the coffeepot seemed like doll furniture in her long, tapered hands. She smiled at him, set down the coffee, and rose to meet him halfway, put her arms around him, pressed him to her wonderful body, held him, released him. "I’m glad you’re still here," she said.
"Where else would I be?"
"Wherever it is you go when you leave —"
"I know. I know. ‘The Country of Afterward.’ When are you going to give me a straight answer about that?" And he felt a flick of astonishment on hearing himself, for though the words were those of the crabby and testy Michaelmas, the tone was, for him, something new. The cutting edge wasn’t there. Rorie captured his eyes with hers for a moment; her face flicked from profound seriousness to a radiant smile, as if she had found something she had hoped for. "That’s exactly why I came in just now — to give you answers. Come sit by me."
They perched together on the edge of the huge bed. The table was a vase, the food a bouquet: yellow rice, tiny green peas, scarlet pimentos, orange-pink lobster meat, blue-black mussels, white chicken, mother-of-pearl inside the just-burst, juicy clams.
"I’ll tell you a story," said Rorie, around and between her food. "Maybe you’ve read it, maybe you know it, but let me tell you anyway, because I have a point to make.
"It’s in Victor Hugo’s big novel Les Miserables, and it’s one of the finest pieces of writing anywhere in this world. It deals with a sailing ship, a French naval vessel and a terrible storm. The ship had a weather deck, and right under it the gun deck, where the cannons were kept. They were tied down behind the gunports, ready to be run out and used in battle. Big brass cannons, you know, on wheels.
"Well, in the storm one of the cannons got loose, and I’m sorry I don’t have the book with me to read you that part; you’d never forget it; you’d think you’d been there. As the ship rolled and plunged in the storm, the cannon was like something alive and crazy, charging up and down and across, smashing into the bulkheads, splitting the timbers of the ship’s sides, bearing down on crewmen trying to find some way to stop it. It began to look as if that berserk cannon was going to sink the ship and kill everybody.
"Then a young gunnery officer snatched up a long ramrod and ran out to the middle of the gun deck. He was like a dancer, a matador, a prizefighter all at once; and he dodged, and he spun, and he ducked this crazy cannon as it ran at him until he saw his chance, and then he dove under it and shoved the ramrod into the wheel spokes, stopping the thing in its tracks until the crew could get ropes on it and tie it down.
"Want some more lobster?"
Mr. Michaelmas, munching and agog at the thrum of her voice, shook his head.
She went on:
"Late the next day when the sea was calm, the captain called up the whole crew on the main deck. He and his officers were in full dress. He had the gunnery officer come up front and center, and he came down with a medal on a chain, and he decorated the officer and kissed him on both cheeks, the way they do in the French military to this day.
Then he went back up on the high poop deck and called down a question, ‘Now which man is responsible for that cannon getting loose?’
"And the hero with the shiny decoration on his chest, proud and honest, answered, ‘I was, sir.’
"Then the captain called up the sergeant of marines. ‘Sergeant,’ he said, ‘take that man, and a squad, up to the foredeck and shoot him.’
"And they did."
Mr. Michaelmas took a while to realize he had stopped chewing. This lady really knew how to tell a story.
"That’s one part of what I have to tell you," Aurora said. "Push it aside —" (she pushed his plate aside as she said this, and replaced it with a dessert, a whipped and shaped mound of something with real flower petals in it) " — and let me give you another part. They’ll all come together. You’ll see."
He started to respond, then gave it up. He was beginning to learn (relearn?) that things could happen without his having to make them happen.
The tall girl lay down and rolled over on her stomach, and propped herself up on her elbows. "That Apricot," she said fondly, "she’s crazy, you know, but she’s also some kind of a saint. And she — well, she just doesn’t think like other people. The veterans’-hospital bit was only the beginning. Want some more coffee?"
"I’ll get it," said Mr. Michaelmas. "Go on."
"She read an article in an old magazine one day. It was a very funny bit, written during one of America’s so-called ‘police actions’ against Communists. This writer had gotten hold of a newspaper story about how much money it cost to kill one of the enemy. He multiplied this by the total body count to date, and came up with a huge figure, which he said would be enough to buy a villa on the Riviera for every family of five in the entire enemy country. He said this would do two things: It would stop the killing, and it would knock the hell out of communism."
They laughed together. Aurora said, "That’s funny, and it’s sharp, but it set Apricot to thinking: Here was an alternative to war, ridiculous as it was. She’d never wondered before if there could be alternatives — who does?
"And that led her to wonder how it was, if there were alternatives, the final choice always seemed to be mass killing. What bothered her most was that in a war a country always screens out the strongest, the quickest, the smartest young men that can be found and sends them out to get their heads blown off.
"And she thought, who makes these decisions? Almost always, old men. ‘Old’ didn’t have to mean years; ‘old’ means with all the juices dried up. ‘Old’ means (whether or not they know it themselves) that they hate the young just for being young; they are jealous, envious and angry. It’s nothing new, you know. The old bulls are always afraid of the young ones coming up. This kind of thing was around before humanity was out of the trees.
"Now here’s crazy Apricot deciding to do something about it. If the old ones are sitting safe in front of their acres of polished mahogany, sending the young ones to die with a stroke of their ballpoint pen, then, says Apricot, let us find a way to put the juice back into them. Because she believes that a good little man is as good as a good big man, and a good old man is as good as a good young one. Sometimes better," she added, smiling and reaching to stroke Mr. Michaelmas’ thigh.
"Now," she said, "you. Some men collect companies to make conglomerates. You’ve been collecting conglomerates. I don’t know why — you certainly don’t need the money, and you’ve proved yourself over and over; I don’t understand it, and I won’t try. But I won’t’ fault you for it. It’s your thing, and it’s what you have to do.
."But in doing it you became a gold-plated bastard. You got so you didn’t care how many faces you walked on with your climbing cleats on, and then you got so you enjoyed it. You especially enjoyed crunching young people, young enterprise, young ideas."
"Now, just a damn minute —"
Aurora raised a finger, overriding him. "I’m reading from the record, Mr. Michaelmas. We’ve planned this for you for a long time. And I’m not saying what you are," she added. "I’m saying what you have been." She rose up on the bed and came to him, pressing him back with one hand while the other sought his groin. "Your juices are running again. You’ve been fed and rested and tuned up, and you’ve been balled to the point where you had all the pleasure you could handle and have started to give it back. You know what you did for the four of us. Stiff or limp, fingers, mouth or whatever, you looked out for us all; you wouldn’t quit until you were sure.
"And that’s what the Country of Afterward is all about, Mr. Michaelmas. You take off your clothes to have sex, right? Well, good sex takes off your gender — do you see what I’m saying? It’s the one time when human beings have the chance to meet each other without the old chase, without game-playing and manipulating and tit-grabbing. And it’s the one time when a lot of people — I’m sorry to say, mostly men — roll over and go to sleep, leaving the other — usually the women — depressed, even crying, and not knowing why."
Mr. Michaelmas felt very strange. Aurora’s lovely face and brilliant eyes seemed to be coming into sharper and sharper focus, while the rest of the room seemed to be fuzzing out. What’s the matter with me?
To his astonishment, Aurora put two fingers in her mouth and produced a short, piercing whistle. Somewhere behind her the drapes billowed, and they all came in — Rietta, Pam, Apricot. He could not move … and the hand moving in his groin was exquisite. "Must’ve been something I ate," he mumbled.
"Sure it was," said Aurora. Her face, her eyes, moved closer; her voice soft and strong, drove into him. "When anybody, young or old, starts showing the signs of being the kind of bastard you were before you came here, you remember that you’re the captain. You’re going to find a phone number in your side jacket pocket (when you have a side jacket pocket). You’re the captain," she said again, "and you will call that number, but you won’t say ‘Take that man out and shoot him.’ You will say ‘Take that man out and fuck him.’ And if, when he comes back, he still acts like a bastard, you will call again and say ‘Take that man out and fuck him again’ — which, you will agree, is better than having to shoot him again. Mr. Michaelmas, we are going after bastard captains in government and industry, and we won’t stop until the juices are flowing again all through the summit."
Apricot vaulted lithely to the bed behind him; lifted his head, put it in her lap. Rietta fitted her strong body to his; Pam flung her dark silk over his torso and smoothed his chest with her cheek. No one hurried. Gently, sensation rose without pausing at any plateau, rose and peaked and gently overflowed, and he fell asleep in the Country of Afterward.
* * *
Mid-morning. Autumn. Warm. A laughing wind. Traffic. Voices. Mr. Michaelmas opened his eyes; whatever it was that had blacked him out left him with a click. He felt fine, and more alert than he had been in years. He looked across a small park at the front of his own office building.
"Jesus Christ! Mr. Michaelmas!"
"Wrong on the first, right on the second. Hello, Joe."
Joe Flagg dropped down on the bench next to him. "I got your message that you were out here. Someone phoned. Where were you? I began to think you were never coming back. I even thought you’d been kidnapped, but nobody ever —"
"Been minding the store?"
"I’ve done the best I could, Mr. Michaelmas. Well, what I did, I tried to do everything the way you would."
"Did you, now."
Flagg began excitedly to recite what he had done. It went on while they crossed the park, crossed the street, crossed the lobby: foreclose, acquire, outbid, outplay. Freeze, force, pull the rug. Variously, men squealed, ran, turned pale, you should’ve seen his face when I. By the time they entered the elevator, Flagg had almost run down. Mr. Michaelmas interrupted the last punch line of corporate triumph with "You’ve turned into a gold-plated bastard, Flagg."
"Thanks. Thanks a lot."
Well, thought Mr. Michaelmas, he’s had a good teacher. They entered his private office from the back corridor; a gamut of astonished staff was a thing he was not prepared to run. Mr. Michaelmas dropped into his familiar old chair. The convolutions of the old leather seat did not exactly fit his buttocks as they had. Well, of course: Flagg had been using it. He looked up at his Number Two Man, who was (a little nervously) picking up things from the desk: a picture, a file of papers, a little clock. "Get this stuff out of your way…. You want me now?"
"Not now."
Flagg backed out. Backed out. Was he in the presence of royalty, or did he expect to be shot if he turned around?
Mr. Michaelmas stretched. He felt just fine. He put his hands in his pockets, found his wallet, keys. A card with a phone number. He dialed.
Two rings. "Afterward." An answering machine.
He said, "This is Michaelmas. Tell Apricot the gunnery officer is Joseph Flagg."
Clopclick, and a voice: This was no machine saying excitedly, "Mike! Oh, Mike, I hoped it was you! This is Apricot."
He felt, suddenly, like a blushing high school kid. "Apricot … Apricot, am I ever going to see you again?"
"You just name it. You really are wonderful, you know."
"Really?"
"Honest to really, Mike."
So he made the date. Then he buzzed Flagg.
"Get in here."
Flagg appeared, his face carefully composed, but his hands holding his hands very hard.
Mr. Michaelmas detached his gold key from the bunch and slid it across the desk. "Have one of these made for yourself. And call me Mike."
He thought Joe Flagg was going to cry. "Yes, sir, Mr. Michaelmas. Thank you, Mr. Michaelmas." He backed out.
Mike, Mr. Michaelmas told himself, feeling the juices run within him, you really are wonderful, you know. Honest to really. He leaned back and stretched, feeling the old leather molding again to fit his body, and fell to thinking about his date, and afterward.