Age of Desire Read online

  “An aphrodisiac?”

  “Most are useless, of course. Rhinoceros horn, live eels in cream sauce: symbolic stuff.

  They’re designed to arouse by association.” Carnegie remembered the hunger in Jerome’s eyes. It was echoed here in the monkeys’.

  Hunger, and the desperation that hunger brings.

  “And the ointments too, all useless. Cantharis vesticatora—“ ”What’s that?”

  “You know the stuff as Spanish fly, perhaps? It’s a paste made from a beetle. Again, useless. At best these things are irritants. But this…” He picked up a vial of colorless fluid.

  “This is damn near genius.”

  “They don’t look too happy with it to me.” “Oh, it’s still crude,” Johannson said. “I think the researchers were greedy and moved into tests on living subjects a good two to three years before it was wise to do so. The stuff is almost lethal as it stands, no doubt of that. But it could be made to work, given time. You see, they’ve sidestepped the mechanical problems. This stuff operates directly on the sexual imagination, on the libido. If you arouse the mind, the body follows. That’s the trick of it.” A rattling of the wire mesh close by drew Carnegie’s attention from Johannson’s pale features. One of the female monkeys, apparently not satisfied with the attentions of several males, was spread-eagled against her cage, her nimble fingers reaching for Carnegie. Her spouses, not to be left loveless, had taken to sodomy. “Blind Boy?” said Carnegie. “Is that Jerome?”

  “It’s Cupid, isn’t it?” Johannson said:

  “Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

  It’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

  “The bard was never my strongest suit,” said Carnegie. He went back to staring at the female monkey. “And Jerome?” he said.

  “He has the agent in his system. A sizable dose.” “So he’s like this lot!”

  “I would presume — his intellectual capacities being greater — that the agent may not be able to work in quite such an unfettered fashion. But, having said that, sex can make monkeys out of the best of us, can’t it?” Johannson allowed himself a half-smile at the notion. “All our socalled higher concerns become secondary to the pursuit. For a short time sex makes us obsessive. We can perform, or at least think we can perform, what with hindsight may seem extraordinary feats.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything so extraordinary about rape,” Carnegie commented, attempting to stem Johannson’s rhapsody. But the other man would not be subdued.

  “Sex without end, without compromise or apology,” he said. “Imagine it. The dream of Casanova.”

  The world had seen so many Ages: the Age of Enlightenment; of Reformation; of Reason. Now, at last, the Age of Desire. And after this, an end to Ages; an end, perhaps, to everything. For the fires that were being stoked now were fiercer than the innocent world suspected. They were terrible fires, fires without end, which would illuminate the world in one last, fierce light.

  So Welles thought as he lay in his bed. He had been conscious for several hours, but had chosen not to signify such. Whenever a nurse came into his room he would clamp his eyes closed and slow the rhythm of his breath. He knew he could not keep the illusion up for long, but the hours gave him a while to think through his itinerary from here. His first move had to be back at the laboratories. There were papers there he had to shred, tapes to wipe clean. From now on he was determined that every scrap of information about Project Blind Boy exist solely in his head. That way he would have complete control over his masterwork, and nobody could claim it from him.

  He had never had much interest in making money from the discovery, although he was well aware of how lucrative a workable aphrodisiac would be; he had never given a fig for material wealth. His initial motivation for the development of the drug — which they had chanced upon quite by accident while testing an agent to aid schizophrenics — had been investigative. But his motives had matured through their months of secret work. He had come to think of himself as the bringer of the millennium. He would not have anyone attempt to snatch that sacred role from him.

  So he thought, lying in his bed, waiting for a moment to slip away.

  As he walked the streets Jerome would have happily affirmed Welles’s vision. Perhaps he, of all men, was most eager to welcome the Age of Desire. He saw its portents everywhere: on advertising billboards and cinema marquees, in shop windows, on television screens — everywhere, the body as merchandise. Where flesh was not being used to market artifacts of steel and stone, those artifacts were taking on its properties. Automobiles passed him by with every voluptuous attribute but breath — their sinuous bodywork gleamed, their interiors invited plushly. The buildings beleaguered him with sexual puns: spires, passageways, shadowed plazas with white-water fountains. Beneath the raptures of the shallow — the thousand trivial distractions he encountered in street and square — he sensed the ripe life of the body informing every particular.

  The spectacle kept the fire in him well stoked. It was all that will power could do to keep him from pressing his attentions on every creature that he met eyes with. A few seemed to sense the heat in him and gave him wide berth. Dogs sensed it too. Several followed him, aroused by his arousal. Flies orbited his head in squadrons. But his growing ease with his condition gave him some rudimentary control over it. He knew that to make a public display of his ardor would bring the law down upon him, and that in turn would hinder his adventures. Soon enough, the fire that he had begun would spread. Then he would emerge from hiding and bathe in it freely.

  Until then, discretion was best.

  He had on occasion bought the company of a young woman in Soho; he went to find her now. The afternoon was stifling hot, but he felt no weariness. He had not eaten since the previous evening, but he felt no hunger. Indeed, as he climbed the narrow stairway up to the room on the first floor which Angela had once occupied, he felt as primed as an athlete, glowing with health. The immaculately dressed and wall-eyed pimp who usually occupied a place at the top of the stairs was absent. Jerome simply went to the girl’s room and knocked. There was no reply. He rapped again, more urgently. The noise brought an early middle-aged woman to the door at the end of the landing.

  “What do you want?”

  “The woman,” he said simply.

  “Angela’s gone. And you’d better get out of here too in that state. This isn’t a flophouse.” “When will she be back?” he asked, keeping as tight a leash as he could on his appetite.

  The woman, who was as tell as Jerome and half as heavy again as his wasted frame, advanced toward him. “The girl won’t be back,” she said, “so you get the hell out of here, before I call Isaiah.”

  Jerome looked at the woman. She shared Angela’s profession, no doubt, if not her youth or prettiness. He smiled at her. “I can hear your heart,” he said.

  “I told you—“

  Before she could finish the words Jerome moved down the landing toward her. She wasn’t intimidated by his approach, merely repulsed.

  “If I call Isaiah, you’ll be sorry,” she informed him. The pace of her heartbeat had risen, he could hear it.

  “I’m burning,” he said.

  She frowned. She was clearly losing this battle of wits. “Stay away from me,” she said.

  “I’m warning you.”

  The heartbeat was getting more rapid still. The rhythm, buried in her substance, drew him on. From that source: all life, all heat.

  “Give me your heart,” he said.

  “Isaiah!”

  Nobody came running at her shout, however. Jerome gave her no opportunity to cry out a second time. He reached to embrace her, clamping a hand over her mouth. She let fly a volley of blows against him, but the pain only fanned the flames. He was brighter by the moment. His every orifice let onto the furnace in his belly and loins and head. Her superior bulk was of no advantage against such fervor. He pushed her against the wall — the beat of her hea
rt loud in his ears — and began to apply kisses to her neck, tearing her dress open to free her breasts.

  “Don’t shout,” he said, trying to sound persuasive. “There’s no harm meant.” She shook her hand and said, “I won’t,” against his palm. He took his hand away from her mouth and she dragged in several desperate breaths. Where was Isaiah? she thought. Not far, surely. Fearing for her life if she tried to resist this interloper — how his eyes shone! — she gave up any pretense to resistance and let him have his way. Men’s supply of passion, she knew from long experience, was easily depleted. Though they might threaten to move earth and heaven too, half an hour later their boasts would be damp sheets and resentment. If worst came to worst, she could tolerate his inane talk of burning; she’d heard far obscener bedroom chat. As to the prong he was even now attempting to press into her, it and its comical like held no surprises for her.

  Jerome wanted to touch the heart in her, wanted to see it splash up into his face, to bathe in it. He put his hand to her breast and felt the beat of her under his palm.

  “You like that, do you?” she said as he pressed against her bosom. “You’re not the first.” He clawed her skin.

  “Gently, sweetheart,” she chided him, looking over his shoulder to see if there was any sign of Isaiah. “Be gentle. This is the only body I’ve got.” He ignored her. His nails drew blood.

  “Don’t do that,” she said.

  “Wants to be out,” he replied digging deeply, and it suddenly dawned on her that this was no love-game he was playing.

  “Stop it,” she said, as he began to tear at her. This time she screamed.

  Downstairs, and a short way along the street, Isaiah dropped the slice of tarte francaise he’d just bought and ran to the door. It wasn’t the first time his sweet tooth had tempted him from his post, but — unless he was quick to undo the damage — it might very well be his last. There were terrible noises from the landing. He raced up the stairs. The scene that met his eyes was in every way worse than that his imagination had conjured. Simone was trapped against the wall beside her door with a man battened upon her. Blood was coming from somewhere between them, he couldn’t see where.

  Isaiah yelled. Jerome, hands bloody, looked around from his labors as a giant in a Savile Row suit reached for him. It took Jerome vital seconds to uproot himself from the furrow, by which time the man was upon him. Isaiah took hold of him, and dragged him off the woman.

  She took shelter, sobbing, in her room.

  “Sick bastard,” Isaiah said, launching a fusillade of punches. Jerome reeled. But he was on fire, and unafraid. In a moment’s respite he leaped at his man like an angered baboon. Isaiah, taken unawares, lost balance, and fell back against one of the doors, which opened inward against his weight. He collapsed into a squalid lavatory, his head striking the lip of the toilet bowl as he went down. The impact disoriented him, and he lay on the stained linoleum groaning, legs akimbo. Jerome could hear his blood, eager in his veins; could smell sugar on his breath. It tempted him to stay. But his instinct for self-preservation counseled otherwise; Isaiah was already making an attempt to stand up again. Before he could get to his feet Jerome turned about and made a getaway down the stairs.

  The dog day met him at the doorstep, and he smiled. The street wanted him more than the woman on the landing, and he was eager to oblige. He started out onto the pavement, his erection still pressing from his trousers. Behind him he heard the giant pounding down the stairs.

  He took to his heels, laughing. The fire was still uncurbed in him, and it lent speed to his feet.

  He ran down the street not caring if Sugar Breath was following or not. Pedestrians, unwilling in this dispassionate age to register more than causal interest in the blood-splattered satyr, parted to let him pass. A few pointed, assuming hi man actor perhaps. Most took no notice at all. He made his way through a maze of back streets, aware without needing to look that Isaiah was still on his heels.

  Perhaps it was accident that brought him to the street market; perhaps, and more probably, it was that the swelter carried the mingled scent of meat and fruit to his nostrils and he wanted to bathe in it. The narrow thoroughfare was thronged with purchasers, sightseers and stalls heaped with merchandise. He dove into the crowd happily, brushing against buttock and thigh, meeting the plaguing gaze of fellow flesh on every side. Such a day! He and his prick could scarcely believe their luck.

  Behind him he heard Isaiah shout. He picked up his pace, heading for the most densely populated area of the market, where he could lose himself in the hot press of people. Each contact was a painful ecstasy. Each climax — and they came one upon the other as he pressed through the crowd — was a dry spasm in his system. His back ached, his balls ached. But what was his body now? Just a plinth for that singular monument, his prick. Head was nothing; mind was nothing. His arms were simply made to bring love close, his legs to carry the demanding rod any place where it might find satisfaction. He pictured himself as a walking erection, the world gaping on every side. Flesh, brick, steel, he didn’t care — he would ravish it all.

  Suddenly, without his seeking it, the crowd parted, and he found himself off the main thoroughfares and in a narrow street. Sunlight poured between the buildings, its zeal magnified.

  He was about to turn back to join the crowd again when he caught a scent and sight that drew him on. A short way down the heat-drenched street three shirtless young men were standing amid piles of fruit crates, each containing dozens of baskets of strawberries. There had been a glut of the fruit that year, and in the relentless heat much of it had begun to soften and rot. The trio of workers was going through the baskets, sorting bad fruit from good, and throwing the spoiled strawberries into the gutter. The smell in the narrow space was overpowering, a sweetness of such strength it would have sickened any interloper other than Jerome, whose senses had lost all capacity for revulsion or rejection. The world was the world was the world; he would take it, as in marriage, for better or worse. He stood watching the spectacle entranced: the sweating fruit sorters bright in the fall of sun, hands, arms and torsos splattered with scarlet juice; the air mazed with every nectar-seeking insect; the discarded fruit heaped in the gutter in seeping mounds. Engaged in their sticky labors, the sorters didn’t even see him at first. Then one of the three looked up and took in the extraordinary creature watching them. The grin on his face died as he met Jerome’s eyes.

  “What the hell?”

  Now the other two looked up from their work.

  “Sweet,” said Jerome. He could hear their hearts tremble.

  “Look at him,” said the youngest of the three, pointing at Jerome’s groin. “Fucking exposing himself.”

  They stood still in the sunlight, he and they, while the wasps whirled around the fruit and, in the narrow slice of blue summer sky between the roofs, birds passed over. Jerome wanted the moment to go on forever; his too-naked head tasted Eden here.

  And then, the dream broke. He felt a shadow on his back. One of the sorters dropped his basket he was sorting through; the decayed fruit broke open on the gravel. Jerome frowned and half-turned. Isaiah had found the street. His weapon was steel and shone. It crossed the space between him and Jerome in one short second. Jerome felt an ache in his side as the knife slid into him.

  “Christ,” the young man said and began to run. His two brothers, unwilling to be witnesses at the scene of a wounding, hesitated only moments longer before following.

  The pain made Jerome cry out, but nobody in the noisy market heard him. Isaiah withdrew the blade; heat came with it. He made to stab again but Jerome was too fast for the spoiler. He moved out of range and staggered across the street. The would-be assassin, fearful that Jerome’s cries would draw too much attention, moved quickly in pursuit to finish the job.

  But the tarmac was slick with rotted fruit, and his fine suede shoes had less grip than Jerome’s bare feet. The gap between them widened by a pace.

  “No you don’t,” Isaiah said, d
etermined not to let his humiliator escape. He pushed over a tower of fruit crates — baskets toppled and strewed their contents across Jerome’s path. Jerome hesitated, to take in the bouquet of bruised fruit. The indulgence almost killed him. Isaiah closed in, ready to take the man. Jerome, his system taxed to near eruption by the stimulus of pain, watched the bade come close to opening up his belly. His mind conjured the wound: the abdomen slit — the heat spilling out to join the blood of the strawberries in the gutter. The thought was so tempting. He almost wanted it.

  Isaiah had killed before. He knew the wordless vocabulary of the act, and he could see the invitation in his victim’s eyes. Happy to oblige, he came to meet it, knife at the ready. As the last possible moment Jerome recanted, and instead of presenting himself for slitting, threw a blow at the giant. Isaiah ducked to avoid it and his feet slid in the mush. The knife fled from his hand and fell among the debris of baskets and fruit. Jerome turned away as the hunter — the advantage lost— stooped to locate the knife. But his prey was gone before his ham-fisted grip had found it; lost again in the crowd-filled streets. He had no opportunity to pocket the knife before the uniform stepped out of the crowd and joined him in the hot passageway.

  “What’s the story?” the policeman demanded, looking down at the knife. Isaiah followed his gaze. The bloodied blade was black with flies.

  In his office Inspector Carnegie sipped at his hot chocolate, his third in the past hour, and watched the processes of dusk. He had always wanted to be a detective, right from his earliest rememberings. And, in those rememberings, this had always been a charged and magical hour.

  Night descending on the city; myriad evils putting on their glad rags and coming out to play. A time for vigilance, for a new moral stringency.

  But as a child he had failed to imagine the fatigue that twilight invariably brought. He was tired to his bones, and if he snatched any sleep in the next few hours he knew it would be here, in his chair, with his feet up on the desk amid a clutter of plastic cups.