Floozman: First Episode
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Part 11: The Sleeping Beauty
part 3 of 4 |
“With a scandalous abundance, he brings deliverance.”
“I’m dead,” Fred thinks when he discovers the limbo surrounding him. Then he falls back to sleep for a moment, snuggling up to the warm body of the mummy.
The mummy! Lady Sophie?!
“So what? I’m dead.” And again he feels his penis moving on his pelvis then against the leg of the corpse. “So what? I’m dead.” But arising from contact with this silky, close-grained skin, invisible sparks fly into the night of his nerves.
In the protocol proper to the root of the two souls, non-human messages are exchanged and confirm an eternal accord.
“There is no death. Look, I have hair,” says the mummy.
“I don’t see anything,” Fred answers as he discovers with his hands the face, the shoulders and all the unspeakable beauty of his strange companion’s shape.
The warrior princess involuntarily clutches the bandages at the moment when Fred lightly touches her clitoris, and she rubs the gold ring she wears on her index finger. Then a golden quivering glow fills the glass cage, like a new caress on her naked breast. Fred’s dead heart starts to beat again, very fast. Outside, the humid rock faces contain the water’s reflection and make an undulating shelter resembling that of the mummy’s pelvis, where small, circular movements bid Fred’s hand to remain.
“I have too much Mana,” she breathes while arching her back. “We are going to awake!”
“Whatever you want!”
“This is not my will! It’s the healing of the world, remember! Take me.”
Despite the torment of his erection and the hot moisture of his partner, Fred wants to delay the moment all their senses are calling for.
“Tell me again...” whispers Fred while his hands slowly bring on the unbearable paroxysm.
“We came from the light! He... he exiled himself, withdrew to make the world emerge out of chaos (her voice chokes). Chaos... For love, I believe, for love... Then we were born, you and I and the others, all united. And then the world broke up and we fell into the abyss. We are sparks that have fallen into matter. Come! We will bring them all back to us and we will be One. We will see the plenitude again! We are the light! You have no idea... Not yet... Come!”
Then her beautiful veiled eyes roll up into her secret sky. She starts telling in the old language the revelation, the fury of the battle, and the fervor of the prayer. She is still speaking when Fred penetrates the infinite sweetness that has been waiting for him since the beginning of time.
They swim, they swim and sink together in the all-powerful inner glow. Instinct conveys its wild movement to the loins. Sex engulfs them for a long while in its ecstatic kaleidoscope until violent spasms of the uterine body shake the resuscitated lover. The flesh shivers. Blood presses so hard that it must be assuaged. Time exists no more. She shrieks above, He bellows below.
Then, gradually, the atoms which constitute them begin to diffuse their energy. A vortex forms at the center of the pool and draws them downwards while the entire river turns to flame. A forest of multicolored beams links the blaze to the sky. The world melts around the lovers like a cosmic caramel. At last, Fred and the mummy disappear, sublimated in a fantastic explosion.
Their awakened spirits extend to the universe and merge. The new conscience sees what it sees, then why, at last, after many eons, must it retract? After many worlds have been created and destroyed, dragged down into the gaping shell of terrestrial existence, decelerating absolutely and relatively, it recoils in the spire until it reads the hieroglyphs on the chamber walls occupied by life as we know it. When the movement comes to a halt, the One conscience has split. Why? Fred wonders.
“Because I am not Sophie, darling!” answers an invisible demon, laughing. “But I assure you that I have done everything as she would have. Even better! And please note that I haven’t annihilated us. It was good, wasn’t it? I hope you don’t regret anything.”
“I... but... we were, we are...”
“Brothers and sisters, yes. Our souls belong to the same root and we are journeying. Some become prophets in their own lifetime, like Sophie or yourself. As for me, I exiled myself in the world of spirit, so I am always there... yes, always there. But I love to have a trip like that from time to time. I know the name, you know. The ineffable name. I wonder if I wouldn’t like to go to the end, finally. The end of the world... To begin anew? I don’t know what I want, I think... I am good for nothing. That’s why they don’t like me...”
“Are you a spirit?”
“I am the first woman, formed from the dust of the earth. I was already in the primordial breath. I was in the shadow of the Tree of Knowledge, with the two happy campers. I launched them into life and then I wandered in the deserts. Tough times! Now, what will interest you is that I had intercourse with the beggar who was asleep by the withered fig tree. In broad daylight! Sophie’s ancestor.
“I took his semen — as I took yours — and I let him harness all the fig tree Mana that was floating around in the void. The prophet who had killed the tree that same morning had used a unique power incommensurable with this world. For naught, in my view! But I don’t know everything, even if I knew him too, in the Biblical sense, if I may say so.” She laughs.
“Afterwards, the Mana passed into the business world, and then it grew by itself in the treasure, like a living thing. And I was not through with it yet. One day I was summoned by a magician to take over the accursed banker’s accounting, and then Sophie’s. I had been minding my own business, but I went so far as to fight alongside with her... Yeah, we put up a good fight. We were bursting with Mana. That was good too...”
“Where is she?”
“...”
“Where is Sophie?” For the first time, the new Fred feels the powerful flame which burns in the depths of his heart. He feels strong, able to move mountains.
“I don’t know where she is any more.”
“You lie! How did you take her place?” he says in anger. Mountains quake.
“Maybe I ate her? Anyway, I’m the one who was embalmed by the council, not she. But do you know that I am not accountable to anyone?” Quantum fields swell and vibrate silently as she says these words. “I am leaving you, with all the Mana. We shall see...”
“Come back!”
“You will find me in the desert!”
Silence settles, and then Fred feels a fluttering of wings. Suddenly, the female demon is standing behind him. It has the appearance of a tall winged red-haired woman with a skin as white as a third day of snow on the mountaintops. She is naked. She is so beautiful that he stops breathing.
“Sophie had a second-class mummification, instead of me. Upon my death on the battlefield, I rose and went to the monastery where the dwarves were preparing to embalm her. It occurred to me I could take her place and rest for a few centuries. She’s in the catacombs, now... but in bad shape!”
She crouches down like an old aborigine and, while playing with a pebble, she stares at him with the hurt gaze of a runaway teenager. “Listen... everything you have seen with me is the truth of the created world, but I think Sophie could see beyond, because she had a righteous heart that I do not have. The spirit that inspired her in battle comes from higher, maybe from the King in whose train we live, maybe from the supreme emanation. You see? I have never felt anything so strong... That is what I wanted to tell you. Hear that, if you have ears to hear.
“And above all, above all, remember that you are no longer human: you can be an angel or a demon. Your power is the magical money from the dead fig tree... Hahaha!” she laughs, nudging him with her elbow like a young girl. “But the ways of the All High are not our ways. After all, the spirit may have to fall into the bankable to redeem the world! Go, then! Be the money man! The ‘Flouze’ as we say in the desert. Be the Floozman! Hahaha! Good luck!”
Lilith flies away. “Good luck...”
“I will find Sophie again,” the Floozman shouts, and he joins the eternal battle in his mind, suddenly seized by an idea higher that the Just, higher than the True and the Beautiful.
“I choose death!” He decides in less than seven breaths.
His sharp and virile will spreads downward into the underworld. On its way, it passes through the darkness of the lower necropolis where Sophie’s poor body is located, returned to the degraded forms of life and time. In the slumber of the depths from which all consciousness has withdrawn, it comes to name things anew: gases subjected to the elementary forces of entropy, organic linkages without design, bacteria, brittle bandages, bleached bones, tufts of hair and crooked nails.
This invisible presence brings into being a silent duration that no movement could summon: neither the trails of blind insects, nor the falling of earth clods on rusted armor. Thus do centuries of slumber come to an end for Sophie. She hears the call and starts digging the ground with the supernatural strength that Floozman gives her.
“Long live death!” she echoes in thought.
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Copyright © 2005 by
Bertrand Cayzac
Dépôt S.A.C.D. 174 627
