Chapter 37: Char’s look and Aaren’s fantasy
Revolutions. On the Outside. On the Inside. Political. Spiritual. Reality. Dreams. Although the Ride has ended on the Outside, it has never stopped speeding along on the Inside. Tonight, the smoothest whiskey he’s ever drunk is an elixir that revives his dreaming self. His comrades in arms, his lovers, seducers and sexual revolutionaries await. He dreams.
The look is how Jared remembers it. How it touches him. How her gaze fills that common blank of air between them with abstractions like longing and eagerness. Ah! Jared slumbers deeply.
Char looks at him. She moves to become rider. He fancies this position—not one of dominance, but of control from another side. He likes to have her slide. Likes to watch her face, which at first he didn’t. He was almost paralyzed the first time she gently rolled him over and gloved the stick shift. Your face! he almost screamed, I can see your face!
She is the look.
“Fuck the bitch!” and all the “Roll ’em over and groove the tube!” ringside cheers scramble through his mind just below recognition as she comes on top. He wants to grab her by the throat (maybe her titties) and yank her down. Throw her, throw her hard on her back and slap her. Slap her like every bitch needs slapping when they want to play the Man. Slap her and spit at her, “Bitch!” Conveying in that one exhaust of breath the ageless condemnation, the exhalation of Yahweh’s expulsion of Eve from the Garden: “Bitch!” Oh, the word fits so well, draws the cheeks into gullies of bitterness. It’s a word that spit easily accompanies. For what are they but to be spit upon? Beaten and rammed with the rod? “Spare the rod and spoil the child!”
Uneasy with this switch in roles, his body expresses the violent thoughts he’s suppressing—he squirms, pushes her hips this way and that, but soon it all subsides as she looks at him—Char’s eyes! He is snared by her coming at him like bay fog. Floating above him like a mist over an island. Her breasts are soft clouds, her slender arms like sun rays raining down from heaven, all about her is tender beauty. He’s dumbstruck.
As she brushes her hair backward, nothing like the word bitch or whore or piece of ass or cunt comes anywhere to life. He’s not thinking about himself as dick, cock, stud or ballbuster. He’s not even feeling himself as hard and pole. What comes to him in this moment is a full-body shiver. It’s as if she is singing his body, as with a throatily sighed “Ohhh!” he is hers, totally possessed. Char looks at him.
For some time now, Char and Jared have consciously worked to move away from being a young Catholic couple for whom sex is fairly embarrassing to sex as an adventure, even an abandonment. Tonight, they shared orgasm while she was on top of him. Amazing. He laughs a bit, lightly swats her on the butt. He’s remembering that when she first stated firmly but not with venom, “I am not satisfied,” he simply didn’t get it.
“What’s there to satisfy?” is how he related it to the guys. They all laughed. Each one had been there.
“I came! is what I said,” he recounts as he belly-slaps and thumbs-up his laughing crew. Their laughter shakes the room, beer bottles clank. “And she looks at me and says, Well, stud . . . Jesus, I mean, she says that like it has four syllables, S*T*U*D! Man, was my ass fried!
Believe me, she takes my hand, I pull it back, she glowers at me, ‘I’m not going to bite it!’ and then she puts it on her pussy. Jesus, man, I mean I never played with pussy. I didn’t even know it meowed!”
As brotherly bond, the others throw things at him, pretzels and other tokens of their own foolishness. He goes on, “Hold on to this! She gives me a short lesson in female biology . . . fuck, I don’t have to go into that for you guys, do I?” He smirks.
“Asshole!” is shouted four times around the room.
“Did she give you a map?” This and other mocking teases shower him. Only his stomping machismo and swigging the bottle covers the absolute seriousness of the episode.
Jared is looking for affirmation, confirmation, and clarification from his buddies. He’s still not sure that this is what “men should do.”
Ever since she looked at him, all he knows for sure is that Char has changed his sense of what sex is, should be, can be.
Crazy!
His hand rests upon her lower belly. He feels her breathing coming through like tiny footsteps. As he rests there, his hand being almost the width of her slender self, he is beset by unfamiliar stimuli. Warily, he senses desire and invitation.
Her soft emerald greens beckon. “Yes sweetheart, touch me, explore me, feel me.”
He hears this and without knowing how or when his fingers slip like knots unfastened and find their way down the inside of her left leg. Fingers breathing messages of “Yes” and back upward to her mound where like the potter’s throw he gently begins to mold her, knead her, design his heart through his fingertips and kiss her tip of symbolic maleness, that female phallus so tiny, almost infinitesimal, but yet so powerful, here at her entrance.
When he first touches her clitoris he fears that he will break it off by rubbing it too hard. Its midget firmness almost draws a “Nawww! Ya don’t mean this, babe, do ya?!” But then the jolting response he draws from Char assuages any doubts: “I mean, man, it was like igniting a Roman Candle. Believe me Jesus, she just took off, vabloom!”
As she rocks and moans he fears that he might kill her. Not from any violence, but from his desire not to stop. As she moves, shakes, jerks, grabs him, her head bounces up and down, she tries to roll away but he keeps at her, for he is mad with creative ecstasy, she is so totally plastic, “Almost rubbery . . . I mean, I’ve never seen anything like it. She sounded like death. Fucking-A.”
He hardly realizes how fatigued his hands are. Aches abound from his wrists to deltoids, but he’s in love or madly in pursuit of love, or he isn’t just sure. Relentlessly, near savagely, she keeps coming back to look at him, and when she rises from a bout with “Yes! Yes!” and low and high pitched moans and sighs all she has to do is look and he’s at her again, to the joust, wearing her favor.
He moves his right hand, strong, basketball-disciplined hands, moves into her, two, three fingers, leans over and kisses her, lets her legs fly over him, and he moves . . . and she moves, and it’s like landslide and fleeing from landslide. He’s coming, ejaculating, getting off with a newfound part of his heart and soul. He licks her, finds himself aware of their heat, of the wondrous shower of their sweat, laughing drops flying onto his chest, and he dips his beard and sops the trickling drops on her forehead and her chin that cling like diamond fragments, and he glistens.
He pauses, wipes his hands all over her, soaking up her bodily steam, and then anoints himself from head to foot with their shared wetness. He stands—to her he is Great Pyramid and Eiffel Tower, and to him she is mystic mirage on the desert and the beach at ocean’s edge. He drops, kneels, not kneeling as he had in monastic obedience but kneeling in true wonderment, bends, humbles himself before her, confessing with eyes, “Yes, I love you . . . God, you’re beautiful,” and a thousand postcards and radioed transmissions and himself like a child playing in the sand, happy under a late afternoon sun, he leans forward to rest beside her; embracing.
For Jared that day, that moment, remains as something only his dreams interpret and unravel. From that day forward, on his soul, he finds the mark of her kiss. She is always present with him, in him, although not always seen nor felt.
“Major Jennings!” His name comes at him like cannon fire. “Major Jennings!” and he snaps to. Before him is Aaren, but not as he remembers her but as she most wants to be, in full North Vietnamese military dress. Stunned and at a loss, his disorientation is heightened by the feel of his military garb. It’s the same room. He’s lying on the same bed. It’s a dream within a dream. Has to be!
Aaren strikes him with a drill sergeant’s switch. It stings like hell. She’s not smiling. All is stated through her bodily manner. Fully dressed and pistol armed, her stance clarifies the situation. Jared’s a prisoner of war!<
br />
“Major Jennings, you have been found guilty on all seven counts of war crimes. If you were a foot soldier or even a noncommissioned officer, we might have considered mitigation. But you are an officer. An educated man. A leader of your people. You are personally responsible for this war. Your men act out the moral mandates of your soul! When they kill and maim, rape and pillage, it is you who are acting. Such heinous crimes, such imperialistic crimes must not, cannot be forgiven. It is just, it is justice, that you die!”
Aaren draws a knife and slits his belt, clutches his trousers and starts to carve them away, exposing his nakedness. He is half undressed, totally bewildered. He feels nothing in his legs. Am I paralyzed? Then she comes at him again. She kneels, bedside, and strokes his inner thighs. She begins to massage his penis, rubbing a soothing, spicy-smelling lotion all around his private areas.
Unable to control anything, lust burns his flesh. A sudden, then rapidly flushing wave of heat washes all over him. His cock rises. Again he struggles fiercely but cannot move, not a pinkie. His mind shouts and screams words that never yield sounds. With eyes that are unable to shut and must follow her as if commanded, he watches her loosen her blouse and start to sway seductively, enticingly, hands cupping her rosebud breasts which she ever so slowly offers to him, up and down, a flowing, a slight swaying, denying to his mind the repulsiveness of her military garb. He becomes hard, terribly hard, concrete aching hard. She casts aside her warrior tunic and exposes her midriff nakedness. It’s all milky cloud and comforting hillocks to rest upon. And he tries to reach, strains to reach up and touch her, but can’t.
He falls back without falling and watches her eyes. They are tending to him, and in a flash they are Char’s tender eyes, but like a wisp of hay lost in fire flare Char is gone and Aaren is there. Her look.
The deliciousness of her tongue is palpable and upon him. It touches him, makes him sharply conscious that it is her. It draws forth his deep hungers. Her hair gently brushes across his face and thrills his earlobes, they fill with hot flush and she bites them, blood dropping onto her tongue. He’s enflamed. His desire is beyond his heart’s boundaries. He’s churning under her, rather she’s churning him, and he loves it, somewhere a voice counsels “Don’t let her!” but he does. And she is upon his breasts, deft movements slice his shirt and she’s breathing softly upon his nipples as if blowing out small candles. Then she bites and tears him—excruciating pain as if she has latched his nipples and lifted him on ropes, but he loves it. He wants it. He wants her to chew him. “Punish me! Punish me! I am guilty!” throttles through his mind, but not a word does he say, yet she smiles.
He knows, she understands!
She moves down his body like a sculptor refining her work. Her fingernails are scarlet with his blood, crimson droplets from tattoos which she has scratched out upon him. Words in Vietnamese, cryptic symbols signifying for her this style of punishment. Marking his body with a record of his evil deeds. Mylai and other unrecorded massacres are noted. The image for napalm burns which the illiterate peasants suffer are incised. A thousand names of a thousand villages, now obliterated, are etched with “Searched and Destroyed.” A heap of bones, a headstone for all—every beast of the field and child at suck—who were never buried with dignity are inked. Such does she draw, a microscopic artist with blades of fingers. And the pain for him is as intense as pleasure, such is her intent.
He flushes and writhes and groans and finds himself possessed, and as possessed desires that she not stop. “Punish me, more!” She reads it in his eyes, and she is pleased.
“Long live the Glorious Defenders of the Fatherland!” and her second assault is launched. She straddles him, rising up and down upon him, working his cock with her disciplined cunt, she is master of her art, expert in her trade. She craftily watches him grasp for pleasure among pain and pain among pleasure. She laughs within herself; stoically she tears him apart, stroke by stroke, slowly shredding him. “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is Gonna Win!” she chants.
As she pulls herself off him, he bounds back to a certain reality as if sucking in his first breath after near drowning. His lungs and whole body ache and he feels all the pains she has inflicted: ears pierced, breast savaged. As she moves back off of him, the sight is more brutal than the resounding numbness between his legs can convey. She holds his severed penis in her hand, dangles it, her war trophy. It jerks spasmodically as if alive. “It is alive!” he yells, a yell which he hears, she hears, everyone hears, and she haltingly laughs, sniggers as he makes to move but collapses sideways, draws fetal like the just-raped, fears to touch himself, begins to sense the blood, his own, flowing down his inner thighs.
“Death to the Imperialists! Long live the Viet Cong!” and in a movement which he is not conscious to remember, she runs his anus with her blade, twists right and then left and with a knee to the small of his back pins him and jams his own penis up his ass shouting, “Victory! Victory! Victory!”
Her shout, rising to yell, swells to cosmic chant. For her all is orgasmic.
Jared wakes abruptly. He’s oddly calm. His sheets are sweat-soaked but he’s calm. He stares, forces himself to stare harder. “Did I dream that?” goes unvoiced but heard. He whispers as if in private prayer, “I do not want that.” Repeats it over and over. Offers it up in propitiation, “Not that!”
Aaren enters the room as midnight sets its mark. Jared and the guys are drunkenly draped around chairs and sofas. Bodies, like unwashed clothes, are strewn here and there. She walks in, a bit hesitant about entering the lair. Jared sees her. “C’mere, Liquid Fire!” he commands, and she comes, obediently. He stands and places heavy hands upon her shoulders, pushes her to her knees. “Here, this is what you want!”
Jared’s penis is hard and erect. “Go on, go on! This is what you want!” She lightly fingers and unbuckles his belt. With a practiced hand she drapes his trousers around his ankles, then strokes and strokes his penis, licking him, taking him into her moist mouth. He moans, jerks and moans. She greedily sucks him in until he comes. Within his pleasures, Jared laughs loudly, for he knows she is his. She’s my bitch!
Proud of his possession Jared turns to the others and beckons with inviting hand. “C’mon, she’ll take you all!”
One by one, Aaren is led around the room. She kneels and happily blows the minds of the besotted crew. Services rendered, Jared lifts her up, comes again in her hair, comes on her face. He snorts, starts ripping her clothes off and at half-naked trips her to the floor and jumps on top of her, dives into her. “This is what you want! You always want this!” Fiercely, savagely, into exhaustion, he fucks her, rolls her over and fucks her from behind, whacks her butt and sticks his cock in her ass— wildness insatiable. Finally spent, he rolls off her and calls again, with a leer and a triumphant chortle, “C’mon, she’ll take you all!”
For hours, they stream towards her, rising like the flood, sweep over her, run through her like kids at the beach kicking waves, and she moans and screams and is the goddess of all pleasure. Each guy proclaiming, stating, whooping, “You like it, don’t you!” Neverending, she shouts, “Yes! Yes!” What fun! Everyone’s laughing, having just such a good time, and so he sets her up on her knees and mounts her behind while another stuffs her mouth and another sucks her teats and yet another probes her pussy. With the greatness that is she, athletic goddess, strong and taking more than she gives, she outdoes them all by simultaneously jacking off two others.
It’s all the acrobatics of total submission. Ah, she is jerk off and beat off and whack off and cock suck and ass ream and quick feel . . . totally his.
This is what Jared dreams within his dream is Aaren’s fantasy. It enables him to sleep soundly, embraced by the protective arms of the gods of cruelty.
At the times when he wakens and this scene lingers, he states out loud to himself, “I do not want this anymore.” The Ride is making him dream more but also remember more and more clearly. He feels the cruelty of these dreams as he progre
ssively remembers them in fuller detail. It’s been coming increasingly clear that these dreams are his cage, not the County jail bars or Millston’s razor wired fences or Attica’s impregnable walls. It’s seeping into his consciousness that he’ll never be truly nonviolent until he deals with these fantasies of sexual violence. “I love you,” he says to Aaren and Char as they float above his bed. He wants so terribly much to make his love mean something, something different from how they all related in the past.
For the first time in a seemingly long time Inside, Jared feels hopeful, even that he’s becoming sane or maybe just less insane, he laughs at himself. If he can deal with these dream fantasies, Maybe, maybe, being in here will mean something. Maybe.