Midnight in the Garden

Bodybuilding is about a certain type of control over cell metabolism. And that material control is actually a force of mind.

Ultimately all is about beauty and nothing else.

To live or to die procures for Mankind only strangeness and suffering, or disturbance of the inner person. But to live in genuine beauty is to live or to die in absolute happiness. And to possess true happiness, one must have reached that ineffable state of the limitless. Happiness – that is, veritable happiness – also means limitlessness and endless happiness.

Thalia had met the old Indian philosopher from Bangalore quite by accident, when attempting to seek out ideas about vegetarian food – not that she herself was actually a vegetarian of course. She had merely gone to the owner of a very reliably traditional, if rather upscale Indian restaurant, to seek his insights on the cooking and preparation of vegetables from his ethnically traditional viewpoint.

And then a casual introduction to an old Sikh man sitting at a table in a darkened corner, wearing a striking blue turban and an ice-white beard, had led to her eventually following what was now her current daily ritual of sitting crosslegged in a bare room, on a plain rough woollen rug, listening to a recording of a Sikh religious song or chant called the 'essential words' - which were sung on this particular audio program by an amazing female voice, to the accompaniment of the lonely-sounding sacred Sarangi instrument. And in here, in this bare room, cossetted by something completely mystical within those exotic sounds, Thalia found her total centre point of calmness.

No disturbing thoughts from the disturbed world entered her emotions and the whole of her days wended their unremarkable individual ways to the quiet evenings each and every day. On through the hard and often painful bursts of fast reps of weights, through the saunas, through the street running, through the naps, the systematic stretching, the hydration from endless bottles of filtered water, and sometimes flower-infused water, the arthrospira tablets, the krill and fish oil capsules, the glucosamine, the unsugared cranberry juice, the rare melanotan capsules. Through the steamy showers and the cooler showers and the cold showers and the ice water dips, the regular long hot streaming pissing... To the quiet evenings and the unremarkable ends of each of the unremarkable days, and to sleep.

Little concerned most of the time about fashion, Thalia wore the very common plain clean white sleeveless cotton bodybuilders' shirts and loose cotton pants with string ties, and Mizuno Prophecy sneakers. And she carried her plain Hedgren towel bag with her everywhere she went. She was one of those girls who didn't really look muscularly big when she was just walking around. If anything, she looked like those Olympic female pole vaulters, or one of those male boxers who looked positively thin until they pumped up before a battle and stripped off into their war gear and then only took to that roped square of canvas where they put their actual awesomeness out on display.

Not overly tall naturally, Thalia knew all about the human growth hormone that secreted itself whenever you had a really good and long and deep night's sleep.

But the Sikh philosopher's spellbinding words had introduced a new thought into her very being; namely that with the holy mantras from great sages - truly, very truly - anything was possible.

Each day, when the singing woman's voice reached up, climbed, ascended into that heavenly height through its almost despairingly anguished beseeching of upspiralling notes, a bridge was crossed from the mundane into the realm of the indeed all-possible. Each night, Thalia grew by subtle micro-millimetres. She was not a tall girl, but like the mythical genie, she now had the gift of magical powers of size and shape-shifting.

And the gym was its own earthly forge of magic too. A steel bar or a weight disk banged down every now and then... And the glowing embers of muscle heat and the steady burning of willpower and determination fires, sparked and mixed their Merlin and Morgana smells of demon anvil sorcery in with the oily, slightly oceanic-odoured strong fit human body sweat. And flying embers hissed mingling with the sexual sweat. And a toledo sword of cold-steel flesh and bone, shining and metallic, was slowly being crafted by the artisanal hands of their witch mistress of her own bodywork.

But yet too, everything was about balance - the fine balance of energy and fuel and natural secretologues and the well-functioning of the human cellular metabolism.

A word like 'lipotropin' - which meant something that got rid of fat – was merely the commonplace sort of word among ordinary bodybuilders and even the professional performing sportspersons of today. Thalia was light years beyond such rudimentaries. For Thalia knew what real natural things contained what really critical things. When she ate fish lathered in coconut milk, with fennel and clove and little black papaya seeds, no one else really understood what it meant.

She ate a lot of coconut. And not so much fennel.

She went through extended ranges of motion when she did bicep curls – like twisting the bells inwards at the end of the lift – and extended ranges in all of the typical rep sets. And all the parts of each worked muscle therefore got larger.

One day a man came to her from a very well-funded German company called 'the human regenerator...' Gmbh.

In the end of course, along the way somewhere in an outstandingly decadent research project to gain feedback and potential Q-rating endorsements for the advanced pulsed electro-magnetic wave full-body pod, the whole thing turned into just sex.

The Jumeirah Beach Dubai five-star resort hotel had already installed one of the half-million dollar items of spa equipment – 'the human regenerator.' But did the thing really work? It was beautiful, it was expensive, it was futuristic, it was a good marketing tool – but did it actually work?

The test subjects were really quite an interesting mix: a thirty-year old extraordinarily pretty New Age guru-ess, a sixty year old divorcee from Baltimore, a fifty-five year old University chemistry lecturer from the East Coast who spent most of his time managing a campus pension fund and who had sleep problems and whose psych professor friend suggested that he take part... And Thalia. And some twenty-three-ish year old raven haired, typical Hungarian-looking but otherwise and by I.D. Australian girl with flashing eyes and an exaggerated patrician nose that pretended to hide her absolute breathtaking beauty.

Someone had waved a magic wand and weaved a spell over the whole thing.

Thalia found herself one rapid evening that came upon them all so quickly, applying Revlon Simply Red and fine metal flakes to her lips...

The most beautiful rose in the world – the Lili Marlene – has the most exquisite scent, the most velvet-like dark crimson to deep-red petals, and the most starkly heavy green leaves that stand as a dramatic background to the flushes of flowers and coming buds. But the amazing decadent classic rose scent doesn't ascend off the Lili Marlene's flowers equally strongly during all hours – unlike even the room-filled-with-violets redolence, for example, of a bottle of 'breathing' Lafite.

For there was a bottle of Lafite standing there, opened, in the room.

Somewhere along the way the word 'aphrodisiac' had cropped up in the casual discussions about bodybuilding techniques. Melanotan, testosterone, cyanobacterium, vitamin B, carotene... And 'aphrodisiac.' And enhanced sex drive...

As time passes in life, as you get older, you get used to some things; things that might have once shocked or appalled you, or caused you to halter in amazement – now, well they just were passé. And many things were indeed very appealing to people of more mature years that would have caused the young ones to blush.

Yes, Thalia told the German guy, she did have a very high sex drive. Yes, she used sex to increase the secretologues in her brain chemistry – those were neuropeptides that provoked HGH to be secreted. Yes, she would accept, and often even welcome, sex from total strangers (it wasn't really true, but it served a purpose for now since he was a more than 'acceptable-looking' big hard prick, not to mention with a Mercedes AMG and a useful Stuttgart expense account for all those times when you just simply had to be outside of the bedroom or the gym).

That was all before she told him she would meet him back in her room in the early evening – in two hours more – where she would have sex with him if he wanted, and where she would show him what a real bodybuilder was all about.

Some things in life are very hard to understand: how they happen, why they happen, that they ever happen at all. Between the very pretty New Ager and the strange young Hungarian-looking almost-just-girl woman, somehow thoughts and ideas had passed that it 'was going to be on' between the German marketing manager and the bodybuilder tonight. They basically knew or suspected and then came to believe, that an assignation had taken place and that a rendezvous subsequently would. And open discussion ensued along those lines.

Surreptitious walking seemingly aimlessly around in corridors and lobbies, was all aimed at observing any indication that their conclusions were safely well-founded...

Inside her suite, Thalia selected the kind of evening number that had a skirt with its knife-edge hem not so long away that one couldn't, with mere economical actions, raise it or even lift it to perform a straightforward overt inciting 'come on.' Around the waist a tight, starched, broad-belted satin panel juxtaposed a straightlaced impression that was entirely false. The thing about the serious designer clothes was that they all made every slut look like a very expensive and a glamorous slut – but a slut all the same. Lagerfeld, Ballenciaga, Zaitsev, it didn't matter – nobody looked cheap wearing them. And if you were sexual – a sexual person – they made you look sexual, indeed highly sexual.

No, the best scented roses exploded their classical venerial scented waves of perfume at specific times. And you had to be there to get it. The warmth of the mid-morning sun, the moisture from the very early morning dew, the languid insects, or the butterflies or the hummingbirds beating the still air about... The high frequency smell of strongly-scented roses is the most sexually relaxing thing that allows you a patient time of it in anticipation, prior to the smell of cunt.

And when the German guy patiently knocked on the door which was ever so slightly ajar, he could have had little prior expectation of what was to greet him there inside...

For Thalia was pumped. Her skin was glowing, really glowing. The veins in her arms and around her neck were standing out like weaving traffic tunnels in an erector set structure and the invisible extra-sensory signal lights were all 'on' and flashing green. She was very muscular and the vicious curves of her full arse swelled tight into the fabric of her dress.

He just stared at her legs, and the girl warrior calves, and the machine efficient knees, and the beginnings of the hypo-style column base of each of her thighs. And the tight skin and muscle and vein surfaces.

She was used to men looking down there these days. It was nothing to her; in the sense that it was nothing she despised. No, she even welcomed it and encouraged it and she did so in a fulsomely mature sexual way too. There was a complete understanding that there was cunt down there, there was a certain amount of hair, there was pink crenelated genital skin, there was lubrication, there was intent, and desire, desire to have the juicy slit wedge entered with the knob head of a hard prick and then fucked silently in and out with the slippery co-operation from her dirty-minded, and indeed slightly smelly pussy, and then fucked very hard too, gruntsomely with the gruesome effluvium of her woman's sex smell welling up into the nostrils of the both of them in their panicked intensity of the life/death act of the human being.

She was used to all those ideas and she smiled almost grimly as only a 'to-be-fucked woman' can smile, downwards towards the boy-man as he fell to his knees at her feet and at the doorway to her black french lace-pantied pussy, that was there somewhere beneath the innocent, crystal clear moraled, dry-clean pure fabric folds of her expensive designer fashion skirt.

But it was the thundering into life then in that room, of the song in the German language - 'Sehnsucht' - by the contemporary trance artist Schiller, that in a way knocked him completely senseless. As a German and German-speaker he knew the meaning of the lyrics, and therefore he understood the 'longing' that she was inviting him to immerse himself in as she ever so slightly raised her skirt with a bunched hand and held his eye steadily with hers.

Of course, for his part he hadn't properly closed the door behind him and now eyes, not furtive, one set confirmedly bisexual and the other set, merely seekers of all human knowledge, watched as all judging watchers watch, the possibly eternally damned.

The body can do what it can do at the extreme edge only because of what the heart and the mind and the soul want to do. Posing is the expression of the acceptance of what the human's desires are; the heart's acceptance of what the body wants, the mind's acceptance of what the heart desires, and the human spirit's power to deliver it all.

And all watchers must also fall to earth. As god knows that it is their fate so to do.