Dark Impulse

"Oh, all right," he groaned.

"Love you."

"Me too."

As I started to leave she dropped the towel and pressed her damp firm body against me, but I'd had enough of the greedy slut.

THIRTY ONE

"This is horrible," Sarah said, gazing at a picture of herself being plastered all over the TV news.

"Wanted by the FBI for possible complicity in a plot to assassinate the president," a talking head was saying. To insure the police would be looking for her, I had made an anonymous call and implicated her.

I turned the set off. "I know it looks bad but the lawyer I told you about is one of the best. He'll get things straightened out. In the meantime you just have to hang tight."

Her pretty face was lined with worry. Even so I was impressed with how gorgeous she looked as a blonde. She was shorter than Carla but well matched.

"It has to, James," she said, in an anguished voice. "I can't go to prison for the rest of my life. I couldn't take it."

Her distress excited me, and I knew I would have to fuck her soon. And I think I knew just how to arrange it so that it would not look as though I'd done so.

THIRTY TWO

Ben Goldstein was a criminal lawyer—and I stress the word criminal. Smooth, slick. Gray hair combed straight back like a twenties' gangster. Gold rimmed glasses. Clean shaven. Armani suit. Gold signet ring on little finger. A sonorous baritone voice calculated to win over any jury.

"I rarely go to trial," Goldstein said, looking at Sarah. "Only lawyers on TV do that. Too unpredictable. Far better to bribe the judge." He chuckled, fiddling with a Montblanc fountain pen as he leaned back in a tufted leather swivel chair behind his desk. "But in this case we couldn't go to trial even if we wanted to."

"I don't understand," Sarah said. "Why not?" She was wearing the plum colored blouse and gray skirt I'd bought for her--since the police had confiscated all her belongings at her apartment.

"Well, before you arrived, just now, I received word that your fiancé has been disappeared. He no longer exist."

Sarah was motionless for a moment. "But what...how is that possible? What, what do you mean he doesn't exist?"

"Hm, just that. He's been designated a terrorist. As such he no longer has any legal rights; no access to legal representation. He'll be held incommunicado. His location undisclosed."

"But how is that possible in America. That's unconstitutional."

Goldstein smiled whimsically. "This isn't a free country anymore, Miss Collins. Since 9/11 we've been living in a police state. But more to the point, you are considered an accomplice, and if caught you will be disappeared also."

Sarah looked at me, her eyes full of disbelief, uncertainty.

"What can we do?" I said.

Goldstein rubbed his chin between his thumb and forefinger. "Well, I know people who can supply you with a new ID: passport, birth certificate, driver's license and such. But it will be expensive."

"Is there nothing else to be done?" Sarah asked.

"Nothing," Goldstein answered. "You might evade the police for a while, but eventually they'll find you."

"That's it," Sarah said, as we drove back to my apartment. "My life is over."

"We'll get you a new ID," I said.

"And where will I get the money for that? And even if I did what will happen to Martin. I have no life without him." Tears glistened on her cheeks. She put her face in her hands. Her shapely body shook.

I was touched...momentarily. But whenever I feel a noble impulse I always count to ten.

"I know it's hard," I said, "but you have to think of yourself. Martin wouldn't want you to give up."

She raised her head and looked at me, eyes full of puppy dog tears. "But you speak as if Martin were dead."

I pinched my lips and tilted my head slightly, feigning the I-give-a-shit-look. "Well, where the government will send him, he would be better off dead." Her eyes widened in horror. I wanted to scare her. "Those who are rendered to foreign countries are often tortured to death." I saw her smiley face world crumbling around her.

"Surely to god not," she gasp.

"Oh, yeah. It's always been the fate of political prisoners—only now it's done openly. But," I added after a pause, "there are ways to get around these things. The right amount of money here, the right amount of finagling there and the charges against Martin could be quietly dropped when media attention has dwindled."

A glimmer of hope shown in her expression. "Could it be?" she murmured.

"Grease the right palms," I said.

"But where can I get that kind of money?"

I smiled.

THIRTY THREE

It was a lot of trouble to go through for just a piece of pussy, but it's never about the pussy per se, is it? It's about delight in the destruction of virtue. That is the premise one draws from Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses: that there is no greater thrill than to destroy someone's virtue. Happy endings are for the weak who insist upon being fed tripe.

I lay on the bed smoking and listening to the rain tap against the window. The lights were out all over town. Rolling blackouts or something. Another Enron-like scam probably. Occasionally a flash of lightning would light the room up in a bluish fluorescent glow making the darkness seem even blacker afterwards.

"It's like being back in the days before electricity," Sarah said, "or at the end of the world." She was sitting on the edge of the bed wearing cutoffs and a tank top.

"Wanna go for a walk?" I said.

"In the rain?"

"Yes."

"Okay."

I grabbed the umbrella. The rain was heavy, but there was no wind, so it covered us. It was balmy. She moved up against me. I put my arm around her waist. We headed toward town, toward the river. It was odd not being able to see the skyscrapers, leaning against the blackened sky, except in blinding flashes of lightning. The booms of thunder that always followed reverberated through the streets off old residential homes from the Victorian age. The ground seemed to shake. It was late. Few cars passed by, their tires hissing on the flooded street.

When we got to town candles glowed in some of the clubs. We entered one. A few patrons sat at the bar. And one or two in the booths. I ordered two club sodas, and we picked out a booth near the entrance. Rain washed against the plate glass window.

Two gang bangers, oversized clothing and black head wraps, came in ten or fifteen minutes later, soaked. They shuffled about kinda loose jointed looking about. They ordered a couple of beers and sat down.

"Yo, man, it be fuckin' on down out dere."

We finished our drinks and continued our walk and hadn't gone far when I felt cold steel pressed against my back.

"Yo, bitch. What say you be showin' us niggas your pussy."

In a flash of lightning I saw one of the gang bangers holding Sarah with a knife at her throat. The other one was pressing what was no doubt a gun barrel against me.

They navigated us into an alley and made Sarah strip. The one with the knife made her get on her hands and knees. I watched in fascination as he fucked her, the strobic flashes of lightning creating something like a phantasmagoria. The second nigger fucked her then made me fuck her. I think I came harder than I'd ever done in my life. How sweeter still the forbidden fruit plucked from another's garden.

It was impossible to find Sarah's clothes in the darkness. The alley acted like a sluice. They had probably vanished down a drain. I gave her my t-shirt to wear. With heads bent against the downpour we battled endlessly against the current back to my apt.

Sarah showered even though the rain had thoroughly cleansed us, although probably not as much as she could wish. I showered too. The prickling needles of warmth felt good. When I came out, Sarah was lying on the bed naked curled in the fetal position. I lay down behind her and pulled the blanket over us. Sometime into the darkness, wind rattling the windows, rain tattering down, Sarah moved to me pressing her warm flesh against mine. Her hand gripped me guiding me into her.

THIRTY FOUR

She had accepted her lot. When you no longer have a choice, life, once full of complications, becomes simply a matter of going with the flow.

"I'll do it," she said. She was wearing my red bathrobe sitting across the table from me sipping a cup of coffee. I was wearing only a pair of khaki shorts and a gold necklace with a pendant that said 'FUCK YOU' in Hebrew. I took some photos of her in the nude.

THIRTY FIVE

I parked on the small gravel lot of Thermopylae Studios and found Gregory Pope examining the unshaven cunt of one of his actresses on a bedroom set.

"Bitch had fleas," he said, as he walked me to his office, a partitioned room in the back of a Quonset hut. "Probably got'em from all the doggy shit she's been doing." He raised two fingers as we passed his black secretary reading a magazine. Inside, he flopped down behind a metal desk and propped his feet up. I took a seat across in a swivel chair that had seen better days.

Not for the first time I glanced around the disheveled room, the metal shelves along walls full of bent canisters, make up shit spilling from kits, random piles of whips and chains, black, brown and pink dildos, boxes of tampons and assorted junk used to fill sets stuffed in boxes stacked on the floor.

The secretary brought coffee in paper cups and a couple of packets of sweetener along with tiny squeeze tubs full of whatever passed for milk inside them.

"This shit will kill you faster than anything," Gregory said, shaking sweetener into his cup. Fucking aspartame causes all kinds of cancer. That old fucker Secretary of State Rumsfeld had stock in the company that put the crap on the market. It's in everything. It's like the government's out to kill our asses. But let the bastards see a tit and they scream like it's the holy fucking end of the world."

He lit a cigarette. "What can I do for you, Jimmy?"

He never got my name right. I showed him the pictures I'd taken of Sarah.

"Mm, mm, nice looking piece of ass. I can use her. I've got a rape with five niggers coming up. She'll do nicely. Have her cunt shaved."

THIRTY FIVE

I went back on campus to see Beth. I couldn't tell if I'd actually branded her or just dreamed that I had. And I was curious to know. That's the problem with fucking opium dreams. They can be as firmly fixed in memory as real events. Life is fucked up enough without that. But then there was also the problem of Sarah fucking up my life. As long as she was staying at my apt. I couldn't have anyone else over. But there wasn't anything I could do, for I wasn't through with her yet. And it was still necessary for her to believe I was working in her interests for the present. It made me hard just thinking about how I had deceived her, destroyed her life, but she hadn't reached the bottom yet, the one I had planned for her.

But as I was going up the library steps I froze. The girl in the cut-off jeans I'd raped off River Road was coming out. This was sure to fuck up my day. She was still wearing short, tight cut-offs—and bra-less under a white tank top. I guess the little bitch hadn't learned that you don't advertise what you don't sell.

She walked straight toward me. Staring straight at me. Two campus cops were standing outside the administration building—across from the library. Well...a lawyer once told me that if you rape a woman you'll get twenty-five years, but if you kill her you'll only do five. Lesson to learn? She rushed toward me as I reached for my switchblade, but she was on me before I could get it out.

She wrapped her arms around me—and began hugging me.

"I forgive you," she said. "God is love."

I could feel the firmness of her tits and the warmth of her body through the thin cotton of the tank top and an erection build.

She placed her hands on the sides of my head, pressing like a vise. Slowly, the pressure of her hands lessened and a beatific smile formed on her face.

She took pen and paper from her purse and scribbled something down, stuck it in my shirt pocket and walked off briskly, her sandal heels clicking on the flagstones. Her phone.

THIRTY SIX

"I will if you want me to," she said.

I was hallucinating. I hadn't branded her. Her naked body was unsullied. I lay next to her smoking. What the fuck. I was losing it. I was unable to tell what was real and what was unreal. Was there any fucking difference? Isn't everything a fucking illusion? I mean we live our whole fucking lives out of sync. By the time we perceive something it has passed into memory. It no longer exist. And since we are only memory, we do not exist. Fuck. I guess pain is what makes us buy the illusion. If Superman can't feel bullets, he can't feel anything. A man of steel knows nothing's real. Without pain we would know the illusion for what it is. I think I think. Dreams end and we say they are only dreams. But life ends too, and is it anymore than a dream and death but an end to pain?

THIRTY SEVEN

There comes a time in some people's lives when they realize it's all bullshit. And that realization can affect them differently. Some will withdraw into their shells and live lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau said. Or others will go postal and kill everyone in sight. Some will become fanatics of one sort or another. But there's no telling who will become what or when. But surely all are insane.

Omar said, Make sport of that which makes as much of thee. And that's kinda the road I took. The one less traveled. I mean after all it's all just bullshit. Why take it seriously. It's not like it's our game. We have no stake in the course of universal ping pong. We are not even a blink in the eye of time. We are no more important than a fly's fart.

But then what do I know? I was never deep in anything but pussy.

THIRTY EIGHT

LOLA'S GANGBANG

Scene one: middle class living room.

Lola: Darling, how long will you be gone?

Nate: Just for the weekend, sweetheart. Mr. Briggs wants me to attend the regional sales conference.

Lola: I'll miss you.

Nate: Me, too.

"Not bad, Jimmy. The cunt didn't flub her fucking lines. Course being able to act ain't essential in this kind of shit. Assholes into porn aren't the brightest fucking bulbs on the shelf. Things like acting and plot confuse them. It's got to be endless fucking and sucking."

Sarah was casting worried looks at me from the set.

"In fact," Gregory said, "I might cut the first scene and go straight to the rape." He lit a cigarette. "When I first started out in this business a wise old pro told me to start every scene with a dick going into a pussy. Plot, character development or dialog and you'll lose 'em. And I've found that to be true."

Not bad advice, I was thinking. I was already getting hard just thinking about Sarah's rape scene.

"Does the cunt know what we're going to do to her?"

I shook my head. "I wasn't specific."

"Good. It'll add realism to the rape scene if she's not programmed. I like to put out a quality product, even though I know it's a waste of time. But what the hell. If a man can't take pride in what he does, what's he got, huh, Jimmy?

"Nothing good," I said.

"Goddamn right. If nothing else I can keep it for my own private collection."

Some gaffers rearranged the set until it was a bedroom.

Scene two:

Lola comes out of the bathroom into the bedroom wrapped in a towel.

Five black men are waiting for her. They are naked, stroking their hard-ons.

Lola: oh, god, no.

Bk 1: we gonna fuck you.

Lola: oh, no, please don't.

Bk 1: yo, bitch. We are.

Bk 1 throws her on bed after pulling off the towel.

Bk 2:mighty fine pussy.

As Bk 1 pounds Lola's pussy the others gather around the bed whacking off. When Bk 1 finishes, Bk 2 fucks her, then Bk 3, 4 and 5. Eighteen minutes apiece. Each dumping their load on her belly for the money shot.

"Fucking great, wasn't it, Jimmy?"

"Masterpiece." One of the blacks had kept chewing gum through the whole shoot. What rapists come on the victims belly? But, hell, I'm not an art critic.

"We'll add bongo drums later," a technician said.

"You know, it's funny, Jimmy, but films with niggers fucking a white woman sell like hotcakes in the deep South and the Bible belt." Gregory lit another cigarette off the one he'd been smoking. A reflective look passed over his face. "You know I might cut out her entrance into the bedroom and just start with the nigger shoving his cock in her. Don't wanna lose 'em."

Sarah was so sullen on the drive back to my apt. that I almost beat the shit out of the ungrateful bitch.

THIRTY NINE

What would de Sade say about the rising price of gasoline? That was the thought going through my mind as I forced Sarah onto the bed face down. I stared at her shapely nakedness as my cock jerked into an erection. The honeymoon was over. Now she would satisfy my raging need. And going to the police wasn't an option for her.

I rammed my cock into her at the same time reaching under her, cupping her tits, pinching the nipples. Most men naively think women want to be aroused through gentle, skillful lovemaking. Would that I could disabuse them of that twerpy notion. Women want to be taken in a white hot heat of raw savage passion. They want to be raped. A man who worries about satisfying them through tenderness is going to be a very sorry fuck indeed. Women want rawness--to know they're wanted so badly that the man cannot restrain himself.

Make a woman come once and she'll tolerate you. Make her come three times and she'll be your fucking slave.

Ironically many women thrilled to my cruelty mistaking it for unrestrained passion. When, in fact, all I wanted was to hurt them—crush them like a bug under my foot.

I fucked her. She lay passive. My cock swelling even as I was in her. I pushed deeper. The cheeks of her ass full, warm and firm against my belly. I pulled her head back by the hair. How little effort it would take to snap her slender neck like a twig. A line from Blake's poem came to mind: "Did he who made the lamb make thee?" Yes, what kind of god created me—would that such a bugger existed? Certainly not the one religions proclaim. It would be a dark impulse indeed. De Sade said, The purpose of life is to spew fuck. What other impulse so simply stated sums up our purpose? All that motivates the universe, one dark impulse. Spreading like a blot of ink throughout eternity.

She began to squirm about. My cock was like a joy-stick up her ass. I bit her neck. I could have ripped the flesh out with my teeth. She gasped. She cried out, whether from pain or desire I couldn't tell. Her body shuddered. She tensed, groaning between agony and ecstasy. A premium liquid shot out my cock filling her tank.

It never ceases to amaze me what gluttons for punishment women are. She lay nestled in my arm, a soft hand on my chest, as I smoked.

"If you stay with me it'll be by my rules. Otherwise I'll sell you to the street."

She nodded.

I took her to the closet and tied her to the chair, pushing a ball gag into her mouth and tying leather over her eyes. As a final act of isolation, I plugged her ears.

FORTY

Reporter: Senator Bradford, sir, could you explain why we have placed sanctions on Iran?

Bradford: Well, Bob, as you know Iran is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons. The judicial use of impediments to their said attempt to do so will frustrate their achieving any foreseeable conclusion in that endeavor.

Reporter: But, Senator, what proof is there that the Iranians are attempting to develop nuclear weapons? Isn't the real reason for sanctions because Iran is about to sell its oil for euros instead of petrodollars which would bankrupt the US?"

Bradford: Oh, that's balderdash. Rest assured, Bob, the evidence has been clearly and firmly substantiated by the most reliable and impeccable sources—beyond doubt, that Iran is building a nuclear arsenal.