Saline Solution Read Free Page B

at her, suddenly and fiercely hating her presence.
    'It's actual theatre,' said Francis. 'I mean, it grips my attention.' He brought his hand up and clutched at the air, making a fist. He was a painter, but I suspected that
    his true art lay in poetry or dance.
    'It can't be painted,' he said. 'It has to be put on videotape.' He paused. 'Do you realise that painting is the last art to lose its atemporality?' I stood in salute and went to pick up the sodas.
    By the time I came back, I had lost contact with the nymphet who would cry so beautifully the first time I made her realise the utter reality of the cock which lambasted the hard rubber walls of her tight shiny twat. I tried to spot her in the crowd and saw her staring into the eyes of a pre-teenage hyponist, who had sat her down and was ripping off her mind with his rap. Her face was rapt in an approximation of awe, and she was squirming in her chair.
    'Ruin,' I thought. 'If I had just taken her earlier and made love to her on the beach, she would not have fallen into the hands of the Scientologists.'
    The summer season was coming to a close, and the air of unreality which is the Island's major sociological feature had caught my mind. I was ready to freak out, but I felt trapped by Lucinda. Oddly, I didn't miss any particular freedom of behaviour, but was limited in the scope of my mind. As usual, this condition was accompanied by an increasing frequency of deja vu experience, one of which surrounded me at that moment. 'I'm going back to the house,' I said.
    We returned to find the other groups milling around. One family was in the small alcove off the living room. The man was a teacher of physics in high school. His total understanding of the universe seemed reduced to whatever answers appeared in the back of the textbook. His wife was a woman whose face I had no trouble forgetting after each of the hundreds of times I saw her. Their son had all the moody craftiness of the ten-year-old. And their dog, named Hot Dog, was absolutely paranoid and would bark at people for hours after they'd come into the room. They were sitting around in a fuzzy silence.
    'Yes, that's marriage,' I thought, and felt another pang in my groin at the memory of the little girl at the ice cream parlour.
    'Do you have a television set here?' Francis asked.
    Lucinda and I looked at each other, and through the door into the scene in the next room. We smiled at one another.
    'There it is,' she said to Francis.
    The four of us sat, drinking tea and smoking grass, under a Halloween lampshade some ten feet in diameter that Donna had installed. The entire house had the air of a Hitchcock movie, although most of the dialogue was out of Beckett. Once again, it was all a play. Reality was merely real. And made up of plays within plays. Lucinda and Francis and I agreeing to a momentary perception; then Lucinda and I; then Bertha and Francis; then Francis and I. Occasionally all four of us would share the moment.
    And within myself an infinity of costumes beckoned for realisation. An army of identities marching through oblivion. I became light-headed with the vision as we all sat quite still in the wooden seashell of a house, listening to the sound of waves. For a long bent instant I was held in phenomenological thrall.
    In my mind I had the teenager tied to a bed: She is pure motherscreaming cunt, she is quintessence of handgripping tit, she is ultimate arse begging to be fucked. I am into a stoned De Sade head, and my cock will never get soft, not once. I go and get her and get her and get her until she is as raw as the belly of a scraped artichoke leaf. Her legs kick off into the sky. And finally she snaps the final thread and sails into the eye of the sun crying YES down the corridors of infinity while I bask in the great heat of her sacrifice and sing ME! ME! ME!
    'To be divisible is to be ontological,' Francis was saying.
    I looked at him. Ah yes, back to the reality of the room.
    'Somehow,' I thought,