FREE EXCERPT FROM THE FIRST FEW CHAPTERS OF THE NOVEL
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (February 25,
2013)
ISBN of the print edition - paperback: 9781481031776
ISBN of the Kindle edition - Mobi format: 9781623472061
Love is transformation. I found a man who turned lead into gold, but he
disappeared. I looked for him violating all rules, until I discovered
that I myself was the key. Everything depended on whether and how I
carried out a terrible assignment. Love, world peace, and my own
conscience were at stake.
My little Erato, I beg you, help me!
THE SEXIEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS
WEDNESDAY 7
Naked in the mirror. Your body is fine, small size, moderate breasts,
dark hair on the head and on the pubis. You like to caress yourself
from the bosoms down to the clit. But you did not undress to your
rawest reality just to enjoy this insignificant pleasure, rather
because from there you will better notice the leap.
How are you going to do it this time? You know you can take off even
with your eyes open: your imagination is powerful enough to deliver you
instantly to a tribe of cooks with their gadgets, eager to experience
new recipes with you. If you close your eyes, you can turn into a
goddess with big bosoms full of sweet milk, even without giving birth,
nursing a thirsty Priapus and drinking from his extraordinary phallus,
before sucking it with your vagina and swallowing into your womb his
entire body. Or you can piss soda or Girl Cola and offer it to the
naughty son of the neighbors, as when you were a kid, or be yourself a
shaggy man and raise your penis to penetrate the lips and labia of a
curvy, groaning nymph.
But today, instead of closing your eyes, you look into them and let
them gaze at themselves. You dive into your brown iris and go down
through a blue and green and black ocean. You have just fallen on the
retina, you kiss it and climb up the optic nerve to discover a velvety
tunnel leading to the ear, which you lick and nibble from inside. The
tip of your tongue exits through the eardrum to reach the earlobe, but
it can’t stay there since its root gets twisted with your other tongue
and is drawn into its mouth, to let you savor its honey while its taste
buds sample your entire salivated body. You cling to the uvula with
your arms and swing, letting your legs hang down, but you slip and
fall. If you keep going down, you will reach the lungs or the stomach.
It might be good to eat, digest, assimilate yourself, but the bubbling
of the acids down there suggests you should move to the larynx instead.
You land on the vocal cords, where a musical note wraps you up. With
the next inhalation you are aspirated into the lung. A chilling breeze
on your neck makes you lose control of your movements. You end up
crossing a stroking membrane and fall into a white lake: you are in
your own breast, caressing it from inside and bathing in your milk.
Both your host and guest bodies start to tremble, but you have to obey
the call of the unexplored world down there. You resume your journey
and reach the belly, where you relax your back against the large rectus
muscle, feeling on your front the caress of the elastic epidermis that
emanates a soft pink light. The mattress is firm, even if you never
worked hard to train it, as evidenced by the soft pillow of grease that
gently tickles your neck so you do not lose the excitement. Once you
retrieve your breath, you wrap your arms and legs around the navel and
go down as a firefighter sliding down the pole till you land on an
ovary, causing hormones to boil and an egg to mature. You enter it and
descend through a Fallopian tube to the womb, where you install
yourself as your own beloved daughter. Now you are truly pregnant, and
as a mother you feel the explosive inflation of your breasts, while as
a daughter you thrash about in the amniotic fluid, suck your thumb,
blink your eye, and take advantage of the contractions of the womb to
go down through the vagina, stimulating the G-spot and discovering new
points from H to Z. Next time you will pay a visit to your buttocks,
legs, and feet, but now the placenta is broken and there is no way
back. As a mother you are already shaking and shouting, moaning and
groaning, panting and gasping; as a daughter you head out, pull your
shoulders and arms, climb up the front of yourself, not without giving
a lick to your maternal clitoris. With a final scream of painful
pleasure your hips emerge, followed by the legs that come together like
a mermaid’s and only separate when the feet lastly escape. And there
you are, mother and daughter, both wet from hair to nails, pressing
lips to lips, breast to breast, navel birth-cord navel.
Then you separate from the mirror and cry like a newborn.
FRIDAY 9
I
The building was a black pyramid straight out of a manual of
Ecofunctionalism. On a cloudy day and without GPS, nobody could
distinguish the two photothermovoltaic southeast and southwest sides
from the third, but for a hole that occasionally opened and closed at
the north base to swallow a black egg advancing on two wheels. From the
high class of the motor vehicles and the fact that we started at ten
o’clock, two hours after ordinary mortals, a possible observer of the
parade could have inferred that we were privileged people. And it was
true, even though we tried to hide it. I, just twenty-eight, was
enjoying the employment I had always desired. As for the kind of job it
was, no hint appeared on the building’s facade.
II
I, too, advanced in my motoregg to the entrance, lowered the window, and looked into the iris scanner.
“Welcome to work, divine Ishtar. Your pretty eyes shine more than ever. Have a nice day.”
I opened my mouth wider than the hole that was waiting for my entry:
the programmers had changed the greeting! I was used to the formula
that had received me until then, “Welcome to work, pretty eyes of
Ishtar.” The first time, the compliment made me smile, but a year later
I knew that my colleagues were all greeted with the same words of
admiration. I was glad that arrival was the only repetitive part of my
workday, though sometimes I wondered why the message did not vary. Any
of us could have invented an endless sequence of charming welcomes; we
could share the duty of choosing the next day’s phrase for each other
and always have a surprise. Now I got one, but the new formula also
lacked imagination. For a moment, I thought someone was making fun of
the new emotions that were shining in my eyes. Or maybe the scanner had
been dazzled by the image of Utu’s eyes, still reflected in my iris
since our previous day’s erotic coffee.
Once in the parking lot, I left my motoregg on the automatic platform
that would deliver it to its space and entered the one-person elevator.
The half-minute trip was dedicated to developing a strategy: if I
didn’t see Utu during the coffee break, I would knock on his office
door, just to say hello. Like a teenager experiencing her first love, I
had counted the hours since we’d met in Liberty Park. Fifteen. Some
seventy thousand beats of my racing heart. And I couldn’t even console
myself by reading his latest news report that morning. If he had
prepared one, for some reason Nergal had not published it.
While I was wondering how anyone could reject one of Utu’s articles,
the elevator opened at the floor corresponding to my iris. To my
surprise, I found myself in a new world.
III
The hallway was similar to the one I was used to seeing. On the left,
the break room was followed by a row of offices; today, however, they
were less numerous and at greater distances from each other than
yesterday. On the right wall I could see four large glass doors, and in
front of me stood two strangers.
The column on the left, a graceful, tall man in his fifties, black hair
and silver temples, looked at me with two gray storms. Despite his
gentle smile, I couldn’t help imagining him transformed into a
waterspout: whipping me with hurricane winds, soaking my clothes until
dissolving them, twisting all my skin from the navel outward.
The right column was an attractive woman in her forties, long, straight
black hair, dressed like her colleague and me in a blue shirt under
gray jacket and pants, but with a wide arc glowing in her mouth from
east to west and north to south, reflected in the huge silver necktie
that sliced through the center of her breast. I imagined that while
making love she would become a beautiful elephant and introduce her
proboscis into my vagina, giving me pleasure with her rough skin. Then
she would blow strongly to inflate me from the womb, until I exploded
or started to fly.
“Welcome!” they said in unison, opening their arms wide.
I shielded myself with “Must be a mistake.”
“No mistake, Ishtar Benten. Congratulations on your promotion.”
What did they mean? I hadn’t asked for a change, nor did I think there
was any opportunity for promotion, other than becoming one day the
director of the Department of Written Chronicles, replacing Nergal or
one of his successors, possibly Utu himself, who was senior to me, as
most colleagues were. But now I was on another floor, with these
strangers waiting for a hug. I remembered that Nergal had welcomed me
in a similar way one year before, on my first day at the Agency. As I
had done then, I finally opened my arms and delivered myself to my
future.
“My name is Shiva Anu,” said the woman. She pressed her chest against
mine, leaning forward to compensate for her higher stature. For a
moment I felt her nipples squeezing mine. It was no time to ask if the
promotion meant I would not have to deal with Sexual Undertones
anymore; I waited in confusion to be released, which she did at last
after giving me two kisses on the cheek and one in the air, brushing my
lips with hers.
“I’m Zurvan Enlil,” said the man. He pulled me to his chest to repeat
the same ceremony, which ended with a kiss on the top of my forehead.
“Zurvan represents the creative force, constructive and pro-positive,” explained the woman.
The man nodded with a slight smile. “And Shiva is the great destructor,
the critical, pro-negative force,” he said, emphasizing each word as if
it were the compliment of a lover. “Thanks to her, we can attain
perfection.”
Such strange presentations only succeeded in increasing my confusion. I
didn’t know where I was, or why I had been chosen for this promotion. I
was flattered to think that someone had appreciated my chronicles of
Sexual Undertones so much, but I thought I couldn’t do anything else.
Zurvan burst into a bass laughter. “Want to know where you are? This is the Department of Scriptwriting.”
I didn’t know there was such a sector in the News Agency. Did that mean
I was going to deal with explicit fiction? The two columns each caught
one side of me, and arm in arm we entered the temple. First stage: the
break room. I was relieved to see that the atmosphere was similar to
that of the analogous room in the floor of Written Chronicles, with the
same daylight diffused by a fake white window. Only the space was
larger, with many chairs and a round table in the middle. I sat on the
couch and accepted the steaming cup that was waiting for me. As soon as
the coffee touched my lips, I knew it had been sweetened with a
spoonful of honey, just as I liked it.
“We are the gods,” Shiva said.
I could not help smiling to myself, remembering that Nergal had said the same a year earlier.
“We are the true gods. We create the real world,” insisted Zurvan.
“We’ve chosen you because of what you’ve shown this year, and above all
because yesterday you demonstrated a special talent for teamwork.”
“This might be a case of mistaken identity: I’ve created all the news
alone so far, from the idea to the final version. That’s the norm in
Written Chronicles.”
“Yesterday, in the break room,” Zurvan said simply.
No! That was too much. Either Utu had betrayed me by revealing our
conversation, or we had been spied upon. Just as there were cameras
watching the streets, there could be some inside the Agency, although
we had not been informed of this. The two hypotheses horrified me, but
of course I preferred the second and decided Utu had kept our secret.
Then I remembered that the data protection law prohibited any
nonconsensual recording. Only the police were allowed to break it, and
could monitor every citizen in public places, such as the Internet or
the streets, for the sake of general safety. It was true that the
directors of a company like ours had the right to control the
employees, to the extent needed to maximize labor efficiency. Was that
enough to justify the recording of a private conversation?
“You’ll have a very significant raise in pay, and your work day will
start an hour later and finish an hour earlier,” said Zurvan. “In fact,
today we’ve got about fifty minutes before the arrival of your new
colleagues and the beginning of your workday.”
This development surprised me as well. I could not even imagine a
salary much higher than the extraordinary pay I had earned till then.
This promise had the immediate effect of placating my spirit and
dispelling any doubts.
“Can I go and say goodbye to my former teammates?” I asked.
Zurvan and Shiva exchanged a quick glance.
“To tell you the truth, we don’t know which floor they are on,” she said.
“No way to reach them by the elevator: now your eyes will take you here,” he explained.
“And the stuff from my old office?”
“It’s already in the new one,” Shiva replied.
“It was brought before we arrived,” pointed out Zurvan.
Should I be angry? Someone had moved my stuff without asking, assuming
that the change would be accepted without protest. But my cowardice was
purchased with gold and incense, so I forgot about the myrrh. I tried
to remember if I had left something to be ashamed of in the old
office—my little Erato! I had the urge to get up and run for her, but I
could not show such mistrust. So I postponed the search, while my right
brain prayed for two incompatible desires: that my muse was alive and
safe in the new office, and that she had not been touched at all. At
the same time, the left hemisphere was looking for a way to visit my
former colleagues—Why fool myself? The one I wanted to see was Utu. For
a moment, I thought about how to announce my promotion to him.
“Of course, you can’t tell anyone outside this department about your
new job,” Shiva said. “As in Written Chronicles, we are under a secrecy
contract. And your new salary will also remain confidential.”
I thought there was a contradiction in her statement. It was true that
Chroniclers were not allowed to talk about their work outside of their
department. But Scriptwriters knew many things about them: Shiva and
Zurvan, at least, demonstrated detailed knowledge about my previous
activity. In fact, it was evident they had accessed the recording of my
erotic coffee with Utu. I blushed, thinking of people who could have
viewed the scene. We had been treated like guinea pigs, and I had
passed the test. What would Utu say if he knew that? He could not
console himself with a promotion. Would he share my sense of having
been abused? Would he be happy about my promotion?
IV
I looked into the iris scanner of my new office, which had already been
programmed to recognize me, and the door opened. In principle,
henceforth it would obey only my eyes. However, just yesterday my
previous office had betrayed me. Who could assure me this wouldn’t
happen again? I remembered when Nergal guaranteed that nobody could
violate my space, the room featuring a nightly self-flushing system so
that I only had to keep order as much as I liked. Now I wanted to think
that inviolability was interrupted only during the few hours that I had
ceased to belong to the Department of Written Chronicles. And I
silenced the doubts, because my new world tenderly caressed me and this
office was wider than the old one, with a large bouquet of flowers of
all colors welcoming me in the daylight coming from the false window.
The ergonomic chair was more comfortable and allowed me to choose from
a hundred different types of massage. But above all, there she was,
upright on the table. My little Erato. How did they dare to touch you,
my dear? They tried to put you in the same position as in my old
office, but they couldn’t resist and have dropped your tunic to reveal
your little nipples, here behind the harp. How could they expect that I
would not notice it?
V
At eleven o’clock Shiva and Zurvan called me to the room facing my
office. They opened the large glass door with “Welcome to the
conflict place!”
I looked around. The daylight of the usual false window, a table with
four chairs, screens on the walls, plenty of space to move. And an
enormous redheaded man in his mid-thirties, politely smiling at me from
near the ceiling, above a sharp chin that resembled a bird’s beak. I
had never seen anyone as tall and wide, and thought he could not even
exist: a basketball player would look like a dwarf next to him. I
imagined him with a raven’s head and wearing metal armor, stretching a
bow loaded with a long, hard penis pointing like an arrow to my pubis.
“Ishtar, this is Ashur Morrigan, your partner of war,” Zurvan said.
“Ishtar Benten,” I introduced myself, extending my hand up to him.
Ashur overlooked it and embraced me the Agency way, stooping down to my
height. I smiled in apology while our cheeks crossed, although in that
moment he couldn’t see me, and when we came face to face I kissed his
lips instead of the air, trying to remedy my novice clumsiness with
excess. His lips tasted like lemon.
“Today is a notable day,” Shiva said. “We are going to launch a new program.”
“And a new team,” Ashur added in a sweet voice, looking at me with the same warm smile as before.
“You will sing, divine Ishtar and Ashur, the wrath, war, and loves of
the selected heroes and heroines who will cross the sea to seek glory,”
explained Zurvan. “We have the island. It’s a small rocky place in the
Caribbean Sea with two abandoned villages on opposite sides of the
central mountain. Their names will be your choice. And it will be your
responsibility to create encounters and clashes between the two
communities, which will soon result in a bloody conflict.”
“You have to invent imaginative situations in a simplified context,”
added Shiva. “There has to be a villain, a dictator, causing the
provocation that triggers the war.”
“Although there may be righteous heroes fighting for the wrong side,
due to their high sense of honor or patriotic loyalty,” Zurvan
continued.
“Above all, the conflict has to seem inevitable, to make the story plausible,” Shiva returned.
I kept following the explanations of the two directors, moving my head
like in a tennis match. Now it was Zurvan speaking again, “Of course,
all areas of the island will be covered by cameras, and viewers will be
able to choose which scenes to watch.”
“You’ll know their votes, who are they willing to sacrifice in the
battle of the day, who they want to fall in love with whom. But the
destiny won’t change however much they pray and vote, nor will they be
able to foresee the future.”
“You’ll decide everything,” Zurvan emphasized, becoming more and more
excited. “So you’ll dominate the public in pleasure and in pain,
hooking them to the expectation of what might happen.”
“But…will there be characters of flesh and blood?” I asked.
“Of course,” said Zurvan. “Everything is real. Our ideas would remain
in the cave if the filmmakers, actors, hosts, and media did not bring
them to life in the world.”
“The chosen ones will obtain the fame,” Shiva continued. “But they will
be allowed to improvise only in minor matters, taking care not to
contradict your script or draw too much attention to their own
initiatives. In fact, only we, the gods, can achieve perfection, since
we see the world from above and know everything.”
I began to understand what they expected of me. And to think that I had
always despised reality shows! In the belief that they would have
offended my imagination, I hadn’t seen one in my life. Now I discovered
I was wrong: behind a semblance of truth, every reality show followed a
detailed script, and I myself would be in charge of creating new ones.
All of a sudden, a distressing thought assaulted me. “And…the deaths?”
Zurvan laughed. “The deaths will be represented by mortal wounds, but
they’ll be fictitious, though the audience will come to believe in
their reality. The result will be the elimination of the character from
the island, after a funeral at which friends and family truly
cry—because what one misses is the presence, more than life, and
especially because you’ll ask them for rivers of tears to thrill
viewers.”
“I love the idea!” Ashur said, winking at me from on high.
I did not share his enthusiasm, not yet. But the work didn’t seem to be
unpleasant. Basically, it remained healthy fiction, and it was a new
challenge for my imagination.
“I’d like the heroines to be just as strong and brave as the men,” I said, “and love to be given as much importance as war.”
When speaking, I gazed directly at the two directors, to make it clear
to Ashur that our future collaboration would be professional and
egalitarian.
Zurvan smiled, “This is precisely the reason you’re here, divine
Ishtar! We’re happy to see the ease with which you assumed your role.
In your team, Ashur invokes hatred, Thanatos, the death wish. You,
Ishtar, will promote love, Eros, the life instinct.”
“Although both of you also carry inside the seed of your contrary,” Shiva said.
“This conflict inside you will be the life force of your scripts,” Zurvan hit the ball.
“You’ll not neglect other sources of dramatic tension, however, so that
your world can have more dimensions, while remaining simple in each of
its components.”
“For example, a key element will be the struggle between Good and Evil.”
“But what is the Good?”
Shiva’s question caught me by surprise. I tried to guess the answer she
expected, but I felt confused, as if being examined on the only subject
I had not studied. Luckily, Zurvan came to my rescue before I was
forced to improvise.
“According to Zoroaster, the Good was the Truth,” he said. “The Ancient
Greeks thought that it lay in Beauty or Knowledge. Monotheistic
religions, however, found it in the submission to God or in Chastity…”
“Or in Love,” I took the easy opportunity to break my passivity.
“Or in Love,” smiled Zurvan. He seemed to take advantage of all occasions to make me feel at ease.
Shiva interrupted our idyll to return to the subject at hand. “Finally,
in the past century, they discovered that there is no truth.”
“So it’s better to opt for fiction,” the pro-positive director
continued. “As did Socrates and the prophets, we, the gods, seek a
truth inside ourselves. And as the founders of the great religions, we
offer our invention to humans to provide security, to fulfill their
lives.”
“So what is the Good?” Shiva struck again.
“It will be what Ishtar and I decide,” Ashur said. He might have seemed
a bookworm trying to impress the teachers, were it not that, rather
than looking at them, he kept gazing into my eyes from the top of the
mountain of his body.
“Exactly!” Zurvan congratulated him.
“However, the public must believe that what they see is real,” said the
pro-negative director. “So the gods have to hide from humans. We don’t
ask to be revered but through our work.”
“And also through human life itself,” pointed out Zurvan in turn. “In
fact, at the end of the day each viewer will inadvertently force
himself—or herself—to follow a script, imitating one of our
characters.”
VI
One morning was enough to complete my education as a Scriptwriter. When
we stopped, I felt a mixture of relief and giddiness, as after a
lengthy examination. If the test was to demonstrate my learning speed,
I passed with flying colors. By lunchtime I had digested the rules and
earned the right to go to the lounge for a banquet with my new
colleagues. There, amid ritual hugs and kisses, I met the other
Scriptwriters.
This is Tapio Tammuz, a youthful man in his forties. His constitution
is strong, but on a small scale, probably about five feet, that is four
or five inches shorter than I. Golden hair, tanned skin, bright slanted
eyes. I imagine him as a hunter chasing me in an autumn forest with a
penis rifle that shoots sperm balls. He hits my face and I fall on a
bed of dry leaves. He reaches me, ties my hands and feet, impales me
and lights the fire to roast me. And I am pleasured by every bite as he
checks the doneness of my ear, my nipples, my lips and labia…
“Tapio, the great optimist, believes in solidarity and loves change,”
said Zurvan. “He aims toward a future of progress and prosperity.”
“However, I do have ancient roots called Locke, Spinoza, and Keynes,”
the new acquaintance told me with a slight stammer, turning on his
almond eyes.
This is Artemis Lahar, a maternal chestnut, though somewhat masculine,
slightly hunchbacked, and in her fifties, I guess. I see her turned
into a scarecrow with the angelic face of a straw doll. She rages and
whips me with a bundle of spikes, then ties me to a woolen web and
penetrates me with an ear of corn.
“Artemis, the great pessimist, believes in selfishness,” Shiva
explained. “Her objectives are safety, the conservation of old values,
the return to a past paradise.”
“My tradition is as old as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Malthus and Smith,” said Artemis.
This busty blonde with cheerful eyes and wavy medium-length hair, who
welcomes me bouncing, as if she were recovering her best friend after a
long separation, is Enki Neith. She must be entering her thirties,
although her skin and spirit seem ten years younger. I imagine her as a
goat with a fish tail, breastfeeding me with sour milk full of oxygen
bubbles so that I can breathe while she drags me inside the sea. There
she drives her head into my naked pubis, transforms her lips into a
sucker, and engages my vulva like a tapeworm.
“Enki the feminine represents control, group coordination, and planned order,” Zurvan said.
And finally, this slim thirty-something with a goatee, premature gray
hair, and twisted eyes is Haddad Hoder. I note with surprise and
concern that I could imagine sex with him without the need of any
transformation. But the gap doesn’t last long, and finally the vision
arrives: he becomes thunder and lightning and falls upon me, giving me
electric shocks that make my hair stand on end.
“The male Haddad represents chaos, competitive individualism, and messy genius,” said Shiva.
Haddad dedicated a grin to me, “I’m the lord of thunder and lightning.”
His hoarse voice hit me like a thousand-volt shock: was it possible
that he had read my fantasy?
Sitting at the round table, which was ready for lunch—although it was
clear that none of us had lifted a finger to prepare it—I enjoyed a
variety of gods-worthy delicacies, enchanted with such witty and fun
company. What a difference, compared to the loneliness of Written
Chronicles! There you worked alone; you ate in your office and could
only interact with another colleague in the twenty minutes of the
coffee break. Here, most of the working hours were shared. It was clear
that we formed teams of two that represented the poles of a conflict.
But what were the tasks of the other couples? I posed the question to
Haddad, the lord of thunder and lightning, who was sitting beside me.
“I cast euphoria and excitement,” he replied.
I knew that we were forbidden to talk about our work outside of our
department, but I had not been told that the secrecy law also applied
internally. I thought maybe it just wasn’t the right time, so I didn’t
insist and went along with changing the subject. Now the conversation
was about going to a party.
“It’s tomorrow night,” explained Zurvan from the other side of the
table. “Marduk invites all the Scriptwriters, along with the best in
society.”
Haddad turned to me, looking at my earlobe with one eye and my lips
with the other. “I promise there will be thunder and lightning.”
I remembered that in Written Chronicles we had only had a couple of
parties, all at Nergal’s home, without any guests outside our
department—and, of course, without the presence of Marduk, the great
producer, owner of the Agency, whom, to date, I had failed to meet
personally. However, even if the parties with my former colleagues had
no thunder or lightning, I still found myself desiring that they would
find a way to invite me to the next.
“Where’s the party?” I asked.
“In the castle,” answered Ashur, whose tone meant “Of course.”
“What castle?”
To my dismay, all my colleagues laughed.
“You don’t live in Olympus Hill, do you?” said Enki, her voice excited
as if she had just seen an alien. “We all live there. Why don’t you
move there, too?”
“To the castle?” I asked, surprised that they lived together.
More laughs.
“No,” Enki said. “The castle is Marduk’s. It’s on top of the hill.”
“We live close by,” explained Ashur, “each one in their little castle.”
“Come on, honey!” insisted Enki. “Move to Olympus Hill. Please!”
VII
My motoregg runs home while the front transaxle of my mind is moving to
the castle of my new golden life and the rear wheel of my heart is
stopping to wait for Utu. She climbs the hill with the autopilot on,
wondering if on the peak of success I will find the station of
happiness. She crosses the lush streets of Valhalla, the village that
has lodged a year of my silver solitude, and I go back to the present
and ask myself if it is true, if it is true that everything has
changed.
I enter via the little path in front, contemplating my home as if I
already had to say goodbye to her. She is a building like those in the
classic movies. Even the roof has the familiar look of the old series,
although I know that the tiles are photothermovoltaic. She is my first
house, after the tiny student apartments, since I left my family to go
to college when I was seventeen. The first home I have owned…Well, the
first that will be all mine, after extinguishing the mortgage in a few
years thanks to my good salary. I feel I love her, despite having
shared her rooms with only loneliness. I look into the iris scanner
with moist eyes, and the garage takes me into her womb, lenient as a
mother from the old movies receiving her daughter who returns after
running away.
VIII
Once inside, I extracted the two purchase boxes from the front entrance
and took them to the kitchen. The contents of the cold storage box went
straight into the fridge, without me checking whether the distributor
had fully satisfied my order, but when I started to unpack the other
container in the pantry, I had the impression I heard a noise from
upstairs.
Was there anyone inside? How could anybody be there without having
triggered the alarm? Just in case, I grabbed my cell phone, ready to
call the police, and kept waiting, concentrating all my blood into my
ears. After a couple of minutes with no new sign, I crept to the hall,
glanced up from the base of the stairs, and checked that the alarm was
on in the control box next to the front entrance. If there was a thief,
he could only get out through a window, or down the steps that I kept
in view while my thumb was poised to press the emergency call button on
my phone. I remembered with relief that the police would take just a
few minutes to arrive, but then it occurred to me the criminal might
try to escape by taking me hostage. Now, however, technology came to my
aid. I inserted the code into the alarm system, put on the multiscreen
view, and rewound to see if anyone had approached the building in the
last few hours. Then the girl appeared at the top of the stairs with
her arms raised in surrender.
“Please don’t call the police,” she whined.
I was going to pull the trigger of my phone when the intruder appeared
to have a spasm, bent over double, and tumbled down the stairs until
she lay on the ground a few feet away from me. The surprise was greater
than the fear, and I remained paralyzed watching the girl, who was
writhing in violent convulsions, beating on the floor with hard strokes
that I felt hurt me more than her.
Suddenly she stopped and lay on her back with terrified eyes and foaming lips.
“Please don’t call the police,” she repeated.
“I’m calling a doctor,” I said.
Only then did she seem to realize that she was on the floor, injured. “No! I have no insurance. It was just an epileptic fit.”
Even today, knowing the enormous consequences of my encounter with the
girl, I wonder why in that moment I felt moved, as perhaps I had never
been before. My eyes still get wet with tenderness, as when I watched
her, with that scattering of teenage pimples, lying on the floor and
crying like a kid. I left my phone on the table, crouched beside her,
and began to caress her to calm her down. Why did I do it? Why didn’t I
think she could be feigning her pain, that she could have an associate
upstairs waiting for the right moment to attack me? Did something
inside me know she was going to change my life? I felt she surrendered
to my touch like a kitten rescued from long neglect, and I gave myself
as a kid would recover her pet after believing it to be lost forever.
And in that moment my imaginative power was gone: I could not visualize
any erotic transformation of my new acquaintance.
“Forgive me, Ishtar,” she said when she managed to control her sobs.
How did she know my name? It was not written on the front door. Perhaps
she could have read it upstairs, in a document on my desk…
I looked into her eyes...and I was shocked!
IX
We were sitting face to face on the floor of the hall. I had stopped
caressing her and felt stunned, looking at those irises that I found
extraordinary, even though they were common brown.
“Oh, of course. The eyes. It’s true…they’re yours.” She put her
forefinger on her right eyebrow and her thumb under the eye. Then her
other hand pinched the crystalline lens and withdrew a small colored
membrane. “This is how I got in.”
I took the contact lens in the palm of my hand. “It’s my eyeprint? How
did you get it?” I almost shouted. I remembered the reckless video
chats with strangers in my adolescence. Someone could have captured my
image, and found a way to print the lines of my iris in a lens.
However, even if this girl had obtained my eyeprint that way, how could
she have discovered my identity? How had she found my address? Bank and
public administration sites, in addition to eye identification, always
required a security code. She couldn’t know mine. And I was sure that,
in the risky days of my virtual youth, I had never used my true name or
any other real data, but…What if she was a cop? In that case she could
have gotten my eyeprint, but why all this staging? And why search my
house?
“I’ve stolen it from the News Agency site,” she said, “along with your name and address. I’m a pirate.”
That was a really good news story. How could a mere mortal violate the
secrets of the gods? This helpless girl, who didn’t seem older than
twenty, defeating the Agency’s state-of-the-art computer system...I
looked at her again, now staring at her actual eye, which was still
common brown, similar but not equal to mine. And I was convinced that
her explanation, incredible as it seemed, had to be the most
reasonable. Perhaps the girl was not so helpless. She could even be
dangerous.
I got up and armed myself with the phone again. “What did you want from me?”
“I just wanted to steal.”
I couldn’t help bursting into laughter. Just wanted to steal.
“I also found your work timetable on the Agency site. You were expected
to be out later,” she added, as if to justify herself. It was true:
that day I had returned home an hour earlier than usual, after joining
the ranks of the Scriptwriters. She must have pirated my data before my
promotion had been made official.
“What did you find in my house?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
Of course, I didn’t believe her.
“Undress yourself,” I ordered.
“What?”
“Get naked!”
Her expression traveled from surprise to malice. She was very mistaken.
My plan was simply to search her clothes without frisking her body.
Even so, she seemed to have fun with the striptease and took off her
bra and panties with a little dance. Her body was rather small, firm
and slim, with narrow hips and an almost flat chest. She had less than
me of everything, but she didn’t lack charm. Once naked, she took a
slow turn so that I could see her from all sides. But I had already
picked up her clothes and was examining them. No phone, just a piece of
plastic as small as a nail.
“What is this?” I asked.
“It’s mine!” she screamed, reaching out to take it from me. I dodged
and aimed my phone at her, motioning for her to take a step back as I
opened the piece and revealed a microchip.
“It’s a memory card,” she confessed.
“I see that.”
“Please give it to me.”
“I want to explore it first.”
“OK, I confess. I copied data of yours from upstairs. But I left the original where it was.”
How could I not get angry? Copying my memory was much worse than raping
me; it was kidnapping my past, my ideas, my whole life…and my data, of
course. What was she going to do with it all?
“And I should have let you take it?” I threatened her with my
telephonic weapon. “Tell me the truth at once. Who are you? What did
you want from me? To destroy me?”
“No, no. I didn’t want to damage you. You were not supposed to discover
the theft, and I’d never have used your memory against you, nor would I
have communicated its contents to anybody.”
“Then why did you want it?”
“I just wanted to know you.”
“Enough! No more lies!” I shouted, determined to fire a call to the police.
She knelt down, joining her hands in theatrical prayer. “Wait! I’ll
tell you everything, I’ll do whatever you want, but please, wait a
moment before calling the police. If you want to be sure I won’t
escape, tie me up. You can interrogate me better that way. Torture me
if you want. I only ask that you listen, before you report me. Tie me
up with the belt of my pants, or with the cord of that curtain, or with
whatever you want, but please, tie me up.”
Then she lay face down on the floor, joining her wrists behind her back. I did what she asked.
“Tighter, so I can’t free myself,” she said.
I pulled her belt a bit more tightly, ending with a triple knot.
“The feet—tie my feet, too, so I can’t move.”
I obeyed. Again she asked me to tighten the knot, though I could already see welts forming on her ankles.
“Thanks,” she said. She managed to turn around and sit with her back
against the wall, the soles of her feet together on the floor. Then she
separated her knees, giving me a full frontal view of her nudity. Her
shaved vulva looked at me shamelessly, her purple labia majora standing
out in contrast with her pale belly.
“Who are you?” I asked again.
“My name’s Arianne. I’m a memory thief.”
X
“What do you want?” I asked.
“I look for the truth and don’t find it anywhere.”
I laughed in annoyance. “That’s why you’ve been lying so much, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes you have to lie for the sake of truth.”
Her answer surprised me. The girl was not at all helpless, and no doubt she was still hiding her true motive.
“Don’t you ever lie?” Arianne asked.
“I’m not pirating data, raiding homes, or stealing eyeprints.”
“Have you ever stolen the truth?”
“No!”
“In your news, you always tell the truth?”
Another surprise. Was it possible that she knew the secret of the
Agency? I was sure she couldn’t find any evidence on the Internet that
Written Chronicles stories were invented. And I was not going to betray
my former colleagues now, certainly not with this little hotshot
smelling like a spy. At any rate, there could be nothing wrong with
giving the readers a nice story. Lying would be telling a fact by
changing it deliberately, if only to make it more attractive. That was
the old journalism. It was precisely to avoid lying or harming anyone
that Written Chronicles had already left the boring field of reality to
create a fictional world that was also the sexiest of all possible
worlds. The criteria of plausibility we obeyed ensured that our stories
were even more real than reality. Besides, she didn’t know I was no
longer working in Written Chronicles. The scripts that I would create
with Ashur would materialize in the physical world, played by
flesh-and-blood actors.
“Of course we tell the truth,” I said, with all my good faith. I looked
into her eyes and noticed that the left was still mine. “Explain what
you do with the memory you steal.”
“I search for a personal diary, or any sincere note that people can’t confess to anybody other than themselves.”
“How did you expect to get away with it? What were you going to do about the security cameras?”
“If you’d come home at the scheduled time, you wouldn’t have noticed
anything out of place and wouldn’t have any reason to watch the
recording of an entire day in an empty house. And without a complaint,
the police wouldn’t have wasted their time chasing me on street
cameras.”
“Tell me a reason not to report you.”
“You still have my data, pictures of me breaking into your home on the
cameras. I’m in your power. If you forgive me, I’ll be your slave,
knowing that you can report me if I don’t obey you. If you want, I’ll
give you a thousand caresses and I’ll purr under yours. I’ll steal for
you, if you ask me.”
There was one thing she could do for me.
END OF THE FREE EXCERPT
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