He reached for the lamp a second time, feeling the bed shake as the harridan prepared to make her escape. Fumbling for the switch, he brought the lamp off its perch. It didn’t smash, but its beams were cast up at the ceiling, throwing a gauzy light down on the room below. Suddenly fearful she’d attack him, he turned without picking the lamp up, only to find that the woman had already claimed her clothes from the snarl of sheets and was retreating to the bedroom door. His eyes had been feeding on darkness and projections for too long, and now, presented with solid reality, they were befuddled. Half concealed by shadow the woman was a mire of shifting forms—face blurred, body smeared, pulses of iridescence, slow now, passing from toes to head. The only fixable element in this flux was her eyes, which stared back at him mercilessly. He wiped his hand from brow to chin in the hope of sloughing the illusion off, and in these seconds she opened the door to make her escape. He leapt from the bed, still determined to get past his confusions to the grim truth he’d coupled with, but she was already halfway through the door, and the only way he could stop her was to seize hold of her arm.
Whatever power had deranged his senses, its bluff was called when he made contact with her. The roiling forms of her face resolved themselves like pieces of a multifaceted jigsaw, turning and turning as they found their place, concealing countless other configurations—rare, wretched, bestial, dazzling—behind the shell of a congruous reality. He knew the features, now that they’d come to rest. Here were the ringlets, framing a face of exquisite symmetry. Here were the scars that healed with such unnatural speed. Here were the lips that hours before bad described their owner as nothing and nobody. It was a lie! This nothing had two functions at least: assassin and whore. This nobody had a name.
“Pie’oh’pah!”
Gentle let go of the man’s arm as though it were venomous. The form before him didn’t redissolve, however, for which fact Gentle was only half glad. That hallucinatory chaos had been distressing, but the solid thing it had concealed appalled him more. Whatever sexual imaginings he’d shaped in the darkness—Judith’s face, Judith’s breasts, belly, sex—all of them had been an illusion. The creature he’d coupled with, almost shot his load into, didn’t even share her sex.
He was neither a hypocrite nor a puritan. He loved sex too much to condemn any expression of lust, and though he’d discouraged the homosexual courtships he’d attracted, it was out of indifference, not revulsion. So the shock he felt now was fueled more by the power of the deceit worked upon him than by the sex of the deceiver.
“What have you done to me?” was all he could say. “What have you done?”
Pie ‘oh’ pah stood his ground, knowing perhaps that his nakedness was his best defense.
“I wanted to heal you,” he said. Though it trembled, there was music in his voice.
“You put some drug in me.”
“No!” Pie said.
“Don’t give me no\ I thought you were Judith! You let me think you were Judith!” He looked down at his hands, then up at the hard, lean body in front of him. “I felt her, not you.” Again, the same complaint. “What have you done to me?”
“I gave you what you wanted,” Pie said.
Gentle had no retort to this. In its way, it was the truth. Scowling, he sniffed his palms, thinking there might be traces of some drug in his sweat. But there was only the stench of sex on him, of the heat of the bed behind him.
“You’ll sleep it off,” Pie said.
“Get the fuck out of here,” Gentle replied. “And if you go anywhere near Jude again, I swear . . . I swear . . . I’ll take you apart.”
“You’re obsessed with her, aren’t you?”
“None of your fucking business.”
“It’ll do you harm.”
“Shut up.”
“It will, I’m telling you.”
“I told you,” Gentle yelled, “shut the fuck up!”
“She doesn’t belong to you,” came the reply.