Lacunea By Karl Edward Wagner They were resting, still joined together, in the redwood hot tub, water pushing in bubbling surges about their bodies. Elaine watched as the hot vortex caught up streamers of her semen, swirled it away like boiled confetti, dissipating it throughout the turbulence. I'm disseminated, she thought. Elaine said: "I feel reborn." Allen kissed the back of her neck and brushed her softening nipples with his fingertips. "Your breasts are getting so full. Are you stepping up the estrogens?" His detumescent penis, still slick with Vaseline, tickled as it eased out of Elaine's ass. Allen's right hand moved down through the warm water, milked the last droplets of orgasm from Elaine's flaccid cock. Gently he turned Elaine around, kissed her lovingly -- probing his tongue deep into her mouth. "Here," said Allen, breaking their kiss. He pushed down on Elaine's shoulders, urging her beneath the foaming surface. Elaine let her knees bend, ducked beneath the water that swirled about Allen's hips. As Allen's hands cupped her head, Elaine opened her mouth to accept Allen's slippery cock. She tasted the sweet smear of her own shit as she sucked in its entire length. Suddenly swelling, the cock filled her mouth, hardening as it pushed deep into her throat. Elaine gagged and tried to pull back, but Allen's hands forced her head hard into his pubic hair. Water filled Elaine's nostrils as she choked, bit down in an uncontrollable reflex. Allen's severed cock, bitten free at the base, wriggled inward, sliding past the back of her throat and down into her windpipe. Elaine wrenched free of Allen's hands. Blood and come filled her lungs-spewed from her mouth in an obscene fountain as her head pushed toward the surface. But her head could not break through the surface, no matter how desperately she fought. There was a black resilient layer that separated her from the air above, closed like wax over her face, pushed the vomit back into her lungs. A vortex of blood and semen sucked her soul into its warm depths. The first thing she heard was a monotoned shit-shit-shit -- like autumn leaves brushing the window. She became aware of an abrupt pressure against her abdomen, of vomit being expelled from her mouth. She was breathing in gasps. She opened her eyes. The layer of clinging blackness was gone. "Shit goddammit," said Blacklight, wiping vomit from her face and nostrils. "Don't ever try that alone again." Elaine stared at him dumbly, oxygen returning to her brain. Beside her on the carpet lay the black leather bondage mask --its straps and laces cut. The attached phallus-shaped gag, almost bitten through, was covered with her vomit. A spiked leather belt, also slashed, was coiled about the mask. "Jesus!" said Blacklight. "You OK now?" He was wrapping a blanket around her, busily tucking it in. There was a buzzing somewhere, in her head or in her pelvis -- she wasn't sure. Memory was returning. "I dreamed I was a man," she said, forcing her throat to speak. "Fuckin' A. You nearly dreamed you were dead. I had a buddy from 'Nam who used to do this kinda shit. He'd been dead two days before they found him." Elaine looked upward at the chinning bar mounted high across her entrance-hall doorway. The leather mask with its padded blind-fold and gag-sensory deprivation and sensual depravity-cutting out the world. The belt, looped around her neck, free end held in her hands as she kicked away the stool. The belt buckle should have slipped free when she fainted from lack of oxygen. Instead its buckle had become entangled with the complex buckles of the bondage mask, not releasing, nearly suffocating her. Friends who had shown her how to experience visions of inner realities through this method had warned her, but until now there had been no problems. No worse than with the inversion apparatus. "I heard you banging about on the floor," Blacklight explained, taking her pulse. He had been an army medic until he'd Section-Eighted -- no future for a broad six-foot-eight medic in the paddies. "Thought maybe you were balling somebody, but it didn't feel right. I busted in your door." Good job through two dead bolts and a chain, but Blacklight could do it. Her neighbor in the duplex loft had split last week, and the pizzeria downstairs was being redone as a vegetarian restaurant. Elaine might have lain there dead on the floor until her cats polished her bones. "I dreamed I had a cock," she said, massaging her neck. "Maybe you still do," Blacklight told her. He looked at his hands and went into the bathroom to wash them. Elaine wondered what he meant, then remembered. She reached down to flick off the vibrator switch on the grotesque dildo she had strapped around her pelvis. Gathering the blanket about herself, she made it to her feet and waited for Blacklight to come out of the bathroom. When she had removed the rest of her costume and washed herself, she put on a Chinese silk kimono and went to look for Blacklight. She felt little embarrassment. Between cheap smack in 'Nam and killer acid in the Haight, Blacklight's brain had been fried for most of his life. He was more reliable for deliveries than the Colombians, and old contacts supported him and his habit. Blacklight was standing in the center of her studio-the loft was little more than one big room with a few shelves and counters to partition space-staring uncertainly at an unfinished canvas. "You better look closer at your model, or else you got a freak." The canvas was wall-sized, originally commissioned and never paid for by a trendy leather bar, since closed. Blacklight pointed. "Balls don't hang side by side like that. One dangles a little lower. Even a dyke ought to know that." "It's not completed," Elaine said. She was looking at the bag of white powder Blacklight had dropped onto her bar. "You want to know why?" "What?" "It's so they don't bang together." "Who doesn't?" "Your balls. One slides away from the other when you mash your legs together." "Terrific," said Elaine, digging a fingernail into the powder. "You like it?" "The thing about balls." Elaine tasted a smear of coke, licking her fingertip. "Uncut Peruvian flake," Blacklight promised, forgetting the earlier subject. Elaine sampled a nailful up each nostril. The ringing bitterness of the coke cut through the residues of vomit. Good shit. "It's like Yin and Yang," Blacklight explained. "Good and Evil. Light and Dark." One doesn't correct a large and crazed biker. He was wrestling his fists together. "Have you ever heard the story of Love and Hate?" Across the knuckles of his right fist was tattooed LOVE; across those of his left: HATE. Elaine had seen The Night of the Hunter, and she was not impressed. "An ounce?" "One humongous oh-zee." Blacklight was finger-wrestling with himself. "They got to be kept apart, Love and Hate, but they can't keep from coming together and trying to see which one's stronger." Elaine opened the drawer beneath her telephone and counted out the bills she had set aside earlier. Blacklight forgot his Robert Mitchum impersonation and accepted the money. "I got five paintings to finish before my show opens in SoHo, OK? That's next month. This is the end of this month. My ass is fucked, and I'm stone out of inspiration. So give me a break and split now, right?" "Just don't try too much free-basing with that shit, OK?" Blacklight advised. He craned his thick neck to consider another unfinished canvas. It reminded him of someone, but then he forgot who before he could form the thought. "Your brain is like your balls, did you know that?" He picked up the thread of the.last conversation he could remember. "No, I didn't know that." "Two hunks rolling around inside your skull," Blacklight said, knotting his fists side by side. "They swim in your skull side by side, just like your balls swing around in your scrotum. Why are there two halves of your brain instead of just one big chunk-like, say, your heart?" "I give up." Blacklight massaged his fists together. "So they don't bang together, see. Got to keep them apart. Love and Hate. Yin and Yang." "Look, I got to work." Elaine shook a gram's worth of lines out of the Baggie and onto the glass top of her coffee table. "Sure. You sure you're gonna be OK?" "No more anoxic rushes with a mask on. And thanks." "You got a beer?" "Try the fridge." Blacklight found a St. Pauli and plinked the non-twist-off cap free with his thumb. Elaine thought he looked like a black-bearded Wookie. "I had a buddy from 'Nam who offed himself trying that," Blacklight suddenly remembered. "You told me." "Like, whatever turns you on. Just don't drop the hammer when you don't mean to." "Want a line?" "No. I'm off Charlie. Fucks up my brain." Blacklight's eyes glazed in an effort to concentrate. "Off the goddamn dinks," he said. "Off 'em all." There were old tracks fighting with the tattoos, as he raised his arm to kill the beer. "Are you sure you're gonna be OK?" He was pulling out a fresh beer from behind the tuna salad. Elaine was a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter, and aerobicised muscles weren't enough to overawe Blacklight. "Look, I'm all right now. Thanks. just let me get back to work. OK? I mean, deadline-wise, this is truly crunch city." "Want some crystal? Got a dynamite price." "Got some. Look, I think I'm going to throw up some more. Want to give me some privacy?" Blacklight dropped the beer bottle into his shirt pocket. "Hang loose." He started for the door. The beer bottle seemed no larger than a pen in his pocket. "Oh," he said. "I can get you something better. A new one. Takes out th...
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