"All right. Off with those boxer shorts," Lady Rudolphine commanded briskly.
"Can't we just go to sleep?" I pleaded, covering my nakedness. "You can have the bed. I'll sleep in an armchair."
"Oh, do be quiet," Lady Rudolphine snapped. "You don't think I'm doing this for fun, do you?"
"You're not?" I asked, slightly affronted. "Why do you want me to get naked then?"
"I shall teach you how to sleep."
"But I know how to sleep," I cried. "It's practically all I've done since I was born! I'm an expert sleeper. It's what I do best!"
Lady Rudolphine sighed, gracefully subsiding into an armchair. "Look, dear, just go into the bathroom, take a shower, as hot as you can stand it, and come back out... without those absurd shorts." She shook her head in disbelief. "Were you a clown in the circus?"
I gasped in outrage at this gratuitous slight to my beloved boxer shorts. I vividly remembered that wonderful day in my first month at Oxford when I had finally been allowed to lay my greedy little paws on my monthly allowance from my mother. My bank had decided that the amount sent was far too large for a mere student and that I must be making money by pushing vast quantities of hard drugs and I was only saved from languishing behind bars by the direct intervention of the Amerikan Ambassador, whose children had trustingly played `Doctor' with me in my degenerate days as a diplomat's brat in El Salvador, and while I had almost entirely reformed after my mother caught us in a particularly ambiguous `hospital' scene, my other playmates all became ambulance-chasers, dentists, and hypochondriacs, causing their parents to feel a dazed respect for my mother and to wonder where they themselves had gone wrong. When Uncle Sam persuaded the British police that it was all right for me to spend my own (well, my mother's) money, I prudently went first to the local fine-wine shop and bought large quantities of premium Bordeaux, and only then, having paid my dues to the inexorable dictates of good taste, scurried around the corner to a dark little shop in whose windows I had greedily coveted many bolts of brightly colored silks. After an afternoon of fun, wallowing in yards of canary yellow and permanganate purple and arterial crimson and tropical green, a chance glance at my watch reminded me of the pressing errand yet to be done: throwing large bills at the shopkeeper, I marched into Oxford's staidest haberdashery, plunked down my brightly-colored silks beneath the twitching nostrils of the old geezer behind the counter, and demanded boxer shorts. It took a little while because of all the fuss, commotion, and delay caused in sending off the old geezer to the emergency coronary ward, but eventually a younger and more stout-hearted fitter took all my measurements imperturbably, shook hands with me respectfully, and, when I expressed concern for the old geezer, gravely replied, "Well, sir, if we had known of his heart condition we would have terminated his employment much earlier. A tailoring establishment in Oxford is no place for the faint-hearted, sir. As they say in Amerika, `If you can't stand the heat get out of the oven!'"
And so I resented Lady Rudolphine's slurs about my boxer shorts. Admittedly, they were yellow and purple and red and green and very dirty to boot, but they were mine, just about all I had in the world, I couldn't help reflecting.
"Just do what I say," Lady Rudolphine murmured wearily. "Don't you want Anastasia back?"
I turned on the shower to the hottest possible setting, and screamed as excruciating needles of steam pinned me to the slippery wall like St. Sebastian, except that the arrows with which he was martyred hadn't been heated red-hot first. But as a good martyr ought, I fixed my mind on my divinity, my idol, my Anastasia. Eventually I found myself slumped on the floor of the shower, muttering her name over and over again... I didn't know which hurt more, the stinging steam or my heart's anguish as I remembered the face of my lost love. I crawled out of the shower, patted myself dry, wincing at the touch of the towel on my boiled flesh, and walked back into the dark room.
"Here," a voice softly directed and I groped towards it obediently, too weary and sick at heart to resist. Covers were drawn over me. At first I could hear only the pounding of my heart. After a while I could distinguish the regular sound of soft even breathing. I tried to breathe to the same rhythm but it was no use, my breath sounded ragged and oddly squeaky. I began to shiver uncontrollably. A velvety hand gently caressed my forehead and temples. I began to cry. The tears sprang out of my eyes and coursed down my face as though a strange hand were pumping them forth from some deep arterial well of misery, some subterranean strata of my soul, a deep dark liquid reserve which had been discovered and tapped only now, only now...
I cried for a long time. In that dark warm moist place my tears were a salty river rushing past massive rocks, corroding the granite of my thoughts at their foundations. My conscious mind continued feebly to resist all this gushing emotion but the rocks swayed, tumbled, and fell into the dark swift current. The rumble of thunder, the unending noise of falling water, and then a warm red darkness...
And in that darkness I saw Anastasia, that heart-shaped freckled face framed by flaming curls. But the fire in her eyes was gone, she looked out at me as though blinded. I groaned and reached out to her, but my hands encountered a cool hardness, as though I were stroking glass. As in a mirror, I saw Anastasia's hands reach out for mine, and I felt a confused tumult in my soul. Then I felt a dark brooding presence behind me and I saw Axel appear behind Anastasia. He laid his hands on my darling's neck and I cried out in anger, reaching out to tear away his brutal hands. His hands were on my throat, squeezing and I was gagging, choking, struggling for air. But then an odd calm descended on me, and I realised that I was free. Axel could never hurt me. I dropped all resistance and when I stopped fighting, Axel's hands tightened vainly and he struggled and cursed hoarsely but to no avail. He rolled around the floor like a fool fighting with a ghost and I stood over him, smiling.
I felt weak as a kitten when I woke up, and as blind. The light flooding into the room dazzled my eyes. After a while I saw Lady Rudolphine standing by the window in an azure satin dressing gown. "How do you feel?" she asked gently.
"Axel!" I fought with the sheets for a moment, struggling for breath. "He was choking me…"
"Astral combat. Quite normal. How do you feel now?"
I didn't know how to answer. How does a new-born feel? "Hungry, I suppose," I replied solemnly.
Lady Rudolphine burst out laughing. "Good! We were supposed to meet Otto and Pipi for lunch about two hours ago."
"Whatever," I said, still dazed. I got out of bed and looked around. I recognized the room. I was in the building owned by the University of Truth and Justice in Prague. Had I ever left Prague? I suddenly realized that I had no clothes on. Lady Rudolphine burst out laughing again at the look of total confusion on my face. Strangely enough, I felt no embarrassment standing stark naked in front of this old lady who was, after all, by conventional standards, a total stranger. I did, however, look around for my clothes. They were lying on a chair, neatly folded. I picked up my boxer shorts and sniffed incredulously. They smelled clean. After consecutive days on which I had been kidnapped, freed, tied up, and trapped in strange confabulations, the smell of clean clothing wafted into my amazed nostrils like the aroma of freshly baked bread, like good dry champagne after a wine tasting orgy, like an unexpected blessing.
"They certainly are efficient around here," Lady Rudolphine remarked as I got dressed. "I gave our clothes to be laundered just yesterday afternoon and here they are, cleaned and pressed."
"Yesterday afternoon?" I asked, a sock in one hand. "But we only got here last night."
"The night before, my dear. You slept a whole day. Thirty hours to be exact."
"That's a new record!" I exclaimed, impressed with myself. "My longest sleep until now was sixteen hours."
"This doesn't qualify as a record." Lady Rudolphine smiled. "It was drug assisted."
"It was? What drug? Who drugged me? When?"
"I did. Before you slept. How does your forehead feel?"
I raised a hand to my head. "It feels frozen," I said in bewilderment. "It's like ice." I sat down again and mechanically put on my socks. "Did you inject me with a sleeping pill?"
"What an extraordinarily stupid thing to say. But I won't hold it against you," Lady Rudolphine promised kindly. "I just rubbed your forehead with a lotion called Lethe. You feel all right, don't you?" I nodded stupidly. "Good. Quite a few people have allergic reactions to it. I was taking a slight chance."
"What does this lotion do?"
"It does many things in the right hands. You have only just begun the river ride."
"The salty river!" I cried. "But the river was my tears..."
"Did you see Anastasia?"
"She seemed so blank. And then I was fighting with Axel but somehow when I stopped fighting, I won." I shook my head in confusion. "No, it doesn't make any sense... But how do you know what I felt in my sleep?"
Lady Rudolphine gave me a long cool stare. "You boasted yesterday that you were an expert sleeper. You merely meant that you lie in bed with your eyes closed and snore for too long. But I, on the other hand, really am an expert in in all kinds of sleep."
I hung my head for a moment. Then my instinctive inquisitiveness overcame me again. "Where did you get this drug?"
"In Amsterdam. But you cannot get it in any hashish bar or coffee shop even in that pleasant little town. Someone makes it to my specifications."
"Hans van der Annersvoort," I suggested, more out of curiosity than certainty.
Lady Rudolphine probed me again with her scalpel stare. I tried not to look away. After a while she smiled and shook her head. "Anastasia was quite right," she murmured. "You really are full of surprises. Where did you hear that name?"
"From a friend of mine," I replied. "He's an underground drug designer in California and he told me that this Annersvoort is one of the best in the world."
"Van der Annersvoort," Lady Rudolphine said, correcting me in the disinterested tones of someone who has just been reminded of a very distant mutual acquaintance in the course of idle chitchat at a cocktail party. I had obviously stumbled onto a secret of vital concern. "What is your friend's name?"
"Well, I call him Sleaze but his name is actually Luke Leazy."
Lady Rudolphine nodded almost imperceptibly. "What a very peculiar name. No more questions for now," she said, putting a restraining finger to my lips. "I too must dress. Be a dear and respect an old lady's modesty. Go upstairs and look around for Pipi, will you? I need her for a little while."
I obediently left the room although I didn't for a moment believe that Lady Rudolphine had ever had any modesty either in her wild youth or her dangerous old age: the only use to which she put her fig leaf was to tickle her lovers in unmentionable places. Why had she ended our conversation just then? I tried to think but I had more pressing concerns: I desperately needed to take a leak. Even though one doesn't drink anything in one's sleep, thirty hours in bed places a considerable strain on the bladder. It was with a sigh of relief that I found and used the facilities, but my relief was replaced by concern when I discovered that my scrotum had the same dry icy feeling as my forehead. Clearly Lady Rudolphine had other reasons besides hygiene for insisting that I remove my boxer shorts before I went to bed and I could only fervently hope that her mysterious lotion, Lethe, didn't make things shrivel up and fall off.
"Can't we just go to sleep?" I pleaded, covering my nakedness. "You can have the bed. I'll sleep in an armchair."
"Oh, do be quiet," Lady Rudolphine snapped. "You don't think I'm doing this for fun, do you?"
"You're not?" I asked, slightly affronted. "Why do you want me to get naked then?"
"I shall teach you how to sleep."
"But I know how to sleep," I cried. "It's practically all I've done since I was born! I'm an expert sleeper. It's what I do best!"
Lady Rudolphine sighed, gracefully subsiding into an armchair. "Look, dear, just go into the bathroom, take a shower, as hot as you can stand it, and come back out... without those absurd shorts." She shook her head in disbelief. "Were you a clown in the circus?"
I gasped in outrage at this gratuitous slight to my beloved boxer shorts. I vividly remembered that wonderful day in my first month at Oxford when I had finally been allowed to lay my greedy little paws on my monthly allowance from my mother. My bank had decided that the amount sent was far too large for a mere student and that I must be making money by pushing vast quantities of hard drugs and I was only saved from languishing behind bars by the direct intervention of the Amerikan Ambassador, whose children had trustingly played `Doctor' with me in my degenerate days as a diplomat's brat in El Salvador, and while I had almost entirely reformed after my mother caught us in a particularly ambiguous `hospital' scene, my other playmates all became ambulance-chasers, dentists, and hypochondriacs, causing their parents to feel a dazed respect for my mother and to wonder where they themselves had gone wrong. When Uncle Sam persuaded the British police that it was all right for me to spend my own (well, my mother's) money, I prudently went first to the local fine-wine shop and bought large quantities of premium Bordeaux, and only then, having paid my dues to the inexorable dictates of good taste, scurried around the corner to a dark little shop in whose windows I had greedily coveted many bolts of brightly colored silks. After an afternoon of fun, wallowing in yards of canary yellow and permanganate purple and arterial crimson and tropical green, a chance glance at my watch reminded me of the pressing errand yet to be done: throwing large bills at the shopkeeper, I marched into Oxford's staidest haberdashery, plunked down my brightly-colored silks beneath the twitching nostrils of the old geezer behind the counter, and demanded boxer shorts. It took a little while because of all the fuss, commotion, and delay caused in sending off the old geezer to the emergency coronary ward, but eventually a younger and more stout-hearted fitter took all my measurements imperturbably, shook hands with me respectfully, and, when I expressed concern for the old geezer, gravely replied, "Well, sir, if we had known of his heart condition we would have terminated his employment much earlier. A tailoring establishment in Oxford is no place for the faint-hearted, sir. As they say in Amerika, `If you can't stand the heat get out of the oven!'"
And so I resented Lady Rudolphine's slurs about my boxer shorts. Admittedly, they were yellow and purple and red and green and very dirty to boot, but they were mine, just about all I had in the world, I couldn't help reflecting.
"Just do what I say," Lady Rudolphine murmured wearily. "Don't you want Anastasia back?"
I turned on the shower to the hottest possible setting, and screamed as excruciating needles of steam pinned me to the slippery wall like St. Sebastian, except that the arrows with which he was martyred hadn't been heated red-hot first. But as a good martyr ought, I fixed my mind on my divinity, my idol, my Anastasia. Eventually I found myself slumped on the floor of the shower, muttering her name over and over again... I didn't know which hurt more, the stinging steam or my heart's anguish as I remembered the face of my lost love. I crawled out of the shower, patted myself dry, wincing at the touch of the towel on my boiled flesh, and walked back into the dark room.
"Here," a voice softly directed and I groped towards it obediently, too weary and sick at heart to resist. Covers were drawn over me. At first I could hear only the pounding of my heart. After a while I could distinguish the regular sound of soft even breathing. I tried to breathe to the same rhythm but it was no use, my breath sounded ragged and oddly squeaky. I began to shiver uncontrollably. A velvety hand gently caressed my forehead and temples. I began to cry. The tears sprang out of my eyes and coursed down my face as though a strange hand were pumping them forth from some deep arterial well of misery, some subterranean strata of my soul, a deep dark liquid reserve which had been discovered and tapped only now, only now...
I cried for a long time. In that dark warm moist place my tears were a salty river rushing past massive rocks, corroding the granite of my thoughts at their foundations. My conscious mind continued feebly to resist all this gushing emotion but the rocks swayed, tumbled, and fell into the dark swift current. The rumble of thunder, the unending noise of falling water, and then a warm red darkness...
And in that darkness I saw Anastasia, that heart-shaped freckled face framed by flaming curls. But the fire in her eyes was gone, she looked out at me as though blinded. I groaned and reached out to her, but my hands encountered a cool hardness, as though I were stroking glass. As in a mirror, I saw Anastasia's hands reach out for mine, and I felt a confused tumult in my soul. Then I felt a dark brooding presence behind me and I saw Axel appear behind Anastasia. He laid his hands on my darling's neck and I cried out in anger, reaching out to tear away his brutal hands. His hands were on my throat, squeezing and I was gagging, choking, struggling for air. But then an odd calm descended on me, and I realised that I was free. Axel could never hurt me. I dropped all resistance and when I stopped fighting, Axel's hands tightened vainly and he struggled and cursed hoarsely but to no avail. He rolled around the floor like a fool fighting with a ghost and I stood over him, smiling.
I felt weak as a kitten when I woke up, and as blind. The light flooding into the room dazzled my eyes. After a while I saw Lady Rudolphine standing by the window in an azure satin dressing gown. "How do you feel?" she asked gently.
"Axel!" I fought with the sheets for a moment, struggling for breath. "He was choking me…"
"Astral combat. Quite normal. How do you feel now?"
I didn't know how to answer. How does a new-born feel? "Hungry, I suppose," I replied solemnly.
Lady Rudolphine burst out laughing. "Good! We were supposed to meet Otto and Pipi for lunch about two hours ago."
"Whatever," I said, still dazed. I got out of bed and looked around. I recognized the room. I was in the building owned by the University of Truth and Justice in Prague. Had I ever left Prague? I suddenly realized that I had no clothes on. Lady Rudolphine burst out laughing again at the look of total confusion on my face. Strangely enough, I felt no embarrassment standing stark naked in front of this old lady who was, after all, by conventional standards, a total stranger. I did, however, look around for my clothes. They were lying on a chair, neatly folded. I picked up my boxer shorts and sniffed incredulously. They smelled clean. After consecutive days on which I had been kidnapped, freed, tied up, and trapped in strange confabulations, the smell of clean clothing wafted into my amazed nostrils like the aroma of freshly baked bread, like good dry champagne after a wine tasting orgy, like an unexpected blessing.
"They certainly are efficient around here," Lady Rudolphine remarked as I got dressed. "I gave our clothes to be laundered just yesterday afternoon and here they are, cleaned and pressed."
"Yesterday afternoon?" I asked, a sock in one hand. "But we only got here last night."
"The night before, my dear. You slept a whole day. Thirty hours to be exact."
"That's a new record!" I exclaimed, impressed with myself. "My longest sleep until now was sixteen hours."
"This doesn't qualify as a record." Lady Rudolphine smiled. "It was drug assisted."
"It was? What drug? Who drugged me? When?"
"I did. Before you slept. How does your forehead feel?"
I raised a hand to my head. "It feels frozen," I said in bewilderment. "It's like ice." I sat down again and mechanically put on my socks. "Did you inject me with a sleeping pill?"
"What an extraordinarily stupid thing to say. But I won't hold it against you," Lady Rudolphine promised kindly. "I just rubbed your forehead with a lotion called Lethe. You feel all right, don't you?" I nodded stupidly. "Good. Quite a few people have allergic reactions to it. I was taking a slight chance."
"What does this lotion do?"
"It does many things in the right hands. You have only just begun the river ride."
"The salty river!" I cried. "But the river was my tears..."
"Did you see Anastasia?"
"She seemed so blank. And then I was fighting with Axel but somehow when I stopped fighting, I won." I shook my head in confusion. "No, it doesn't make any sense... But how do you know what I felt in my sleep?"
Lady Rudolphine gave me a long cool stare. "You boasted yesterday that you were an expert sleeper. You merely meant that you lie in bed with your eyes closed and snore for too long. But I, on the other hand, really am an expert in in all kinds of sleep."
I hung my head for a moment. Then my instinctive inquisitiveness overcame me again. "Where did you get this drug?"
"In Amsterdam. But you cannot get it in any hashish bar or coffee shop even in that pleasant little town. Someone makes it to my specifications."
"Hans van der Annersvoort," I suggested, more out of curiosity than certainty.
Lady Rudolphine probed me again with her scalpel stare. I tried not to look away. After a while she smiled and shook her head. "Anastasia was quite right," she murmured. "You really are full of surprises. Where did you hear that name?"
"From a friend of mine," I replied. "He's an underground drug designer in California and he told me that this Annersvoort is one of the best in the world."
"Van der Annersvoort," Lady Rudolphine said, correcting me in the disinterested tones of someone who has just been reminded of a very distant mutual acquaintance in the course of idle chitchat at a cocktail party. I had obviously stumbled onto a secret of vital concern. "What is your friend's name?"
"Well, I call him Sleaze but his name is actually Luke Leazy."
Lady Rudolphine nodded almost imperceptibly. "What a very peculiar name. No more questions for now," she said, putting a restraining finger to my lips. "I too must dress. Be a dear and respect an old lady's modesty. Go upstairs and look around for Pipi, will you? I need her for a little while."
I obediently left the room although I didn't for a moment believe that Lady Rudolphine had ever had any modesty either in her wild youth or her dangerous old age: the only use to which she put her fig leaf was to tickle her lovers in unmentionable places. Why had she ended our conversation just then? I tried to think but I had more pressing concerns: I desperately needed to take a leak. Even though one doesn't drink anything in one's sleep, thirty hours in bed places a considerable strain on the bladder. It was with a sigh of relief that I found and used the facilities, but my relief was replaced by concern when I discovered that my scrotum had the same dry icy feeling as my forehead. Clearly Lady Rudolphine had other reasons besides hygiene for insisting that I remove my boxer shorts before I went to bed and I could only fervently hope that her mysterious lotion, Lethe, didn't make things shrivel up and fall off.
No comments:
Post a Comment