“…and so, upon spreading her cheeks, as one is poised to push one’s cock into her round, beautiful rump, the question one mustn’t be afraid to ask oneself is, ‘Am I maximizing the amount of pleasure I could be having at this very moment?’ If the answer to this question is a resounding ‘no,’ it is very simple to signal a change to a position more reliable for giving pleasure to both, without effectively destroying the moment. However, if one still imagines there to be a kind of enhanced sensation to be found by plunging between those cheeks, it might be worth exploring, while keeping in the back of one’s mind that there is a notable risk involved. Regardless, the experience is a valuable one and certainly worth considering for no other reason than to keep it interesting. Although, I can only stress ad nauseum the importance of making sure the woman has both properly evacuated her bowels and bathed —preferably in that order—before initiating any of this. If one isn’t careful, after all, one may run the risk of contracting what the experts collectively refer to as Fudge-packer’s Remorse.” Bunnu repeated Diogenes’s words verbatim to Motiwala, trying to maintain his composure.
“Thank you, my boy!” Diogenes said through a speaking tube from inside the rubber suit that his brother, the viceroy, had brought back for him as a gift from Charismatic K. The suit was composed of a transparent rubber that encapsulated the naked Diogenes whole and contained a kind of clear pink fluid that was pumped in through a hose connected to a vast glass dome in the middle of the Grand Ballroom that contained tens of thousands of drowned kittens floating around in a pink herbal tea. Swimming amongst the kittens, were two skin divers, who moved about in synchronous, yet opposing and symmetrical figure-eight’s, so as to create an agitation—a current, rather—in the fluid, as they reached out with their hands and meticulously moved each kitten that crossed their path, in a seeming effort to create the illusion that all the submerged kittens were, in fact, still alive and swimming merrily along through the liquid. Inside the suit itself, wires pierced Diogenes’s flesh at specific points to allow for the fluid to enter his system. Another hose bifurcated, one end hooking over his penis, while another entered Diogenes’s backside, which Bunnu imagined, was there for the purposes of allowing excrement to leave his body without creating a need for him to remove the suit.
“Sir, if you don’t mind my saying…that’s a very nice suit.” Bunnu said, deciding it best to acknowledge his host’s new attire.
“While, I’m sure he’d appreciate your bumbling attempt at being a polite guest, he can’t hear you,” Motiwala said. “It’s a Desensitization suit.”
“You mean…a Sensory Deprivation suit?”
“No, I mean…really. It’s a Desensitization suit. It overloads the senses as it desensitizes your emotions to the harmful effects of the people and things around you. Which essentially means that you become capable of filtering out anything, if not everything, that might elicit a negative emotional response. It normalizes you to painful or traumatic situations, causing them to be processed merely as facts, rather than stimuli. I guess you could say it kind of makes you numb to the sadness and grief that surrounds us. I mean grief is a rather painful sensation. Physically and emotionally! And a tiring one, at that! How is one to go about one’s everyday life, if one is plagued with despair? And if you have a tendency to brood things over, as my father does, measures like this are necessary. Don’t you think? He has a tendency to really let things affect him. Like this one time, Sanchez had some Untouchable reciting poetry at one of his parties. You know Sanchez, don’t you? The conceptual artist?”
Bunnu nodded even though he didn’t know him.
“Great guy! You should meet him sometime. Anyway, it was a great party! And that Untouchable was an absolute riot! But my father was so intimidated by the Untouchable’s stage presence that he went through this self-loathing phase for about a week. I don’t know! He’s just so sensitive! He crumbles so easily…and he really can’t seem to let these things go. But this suit here…this marvelous suit has the ability to deaden his sensitivity to any bad vibes that might hurt him, in favor of keeping the mind sensitive to anything that can initiate a feeling of blissful oblivion. So, that’s where the kittens and the herbal tea come in. Papa loves kittens! And herbal tea really helps sooth his aching soul.”
“Is your father sick?” Bunnu asked, slightly concerned.
“Well…Papa’s been a little more depressed than usual lately, so my uncle thought this sort of apparatus might help. The Queen has one, too, apparently. It’s been quite helpful in controlling her… uh… moods.”
Diogenes’s depression in recent years had stemmed from his failures as an aspiring playwright. As the brother of the viceroy, he understood the necessity of trying to step out of himself to create and frame a universe beyond his own everyday perceptions and, thus, for a brief period of time, had decided it best to make a conscious attempt to suffer for his art. So, he purposefully drove his loving wife to madness and his faithful dog to suicide, shortly before taking up full-time residence by himself in the Grand Ballroom. He had had all the furniture cleared, but for one large throne that he kept for himself, placed in the middle of this enormous room of marble floors and columns with arching sculptures of his own likeness. Above the entrance, there was one giant stained glass window that took up half the wall and curved at the top at the same arc as the roof of the building. Once a day, around noon, the heavy iron doors below it swung open and a xylophone player came in to play him soothing nursery music, so that he might ‘ease his conscience.’ The rest of the day, his hours were spent in solitude with his elbow on the arm of the throne, propping up his head, as he examined the in’s the out’s: the very nature of his own self-pity. “God made me flawed! Oh yes, he did! What kind of man am I? What kind of flawed, sick man drives his loving wife to madness and his faithful dog to suicide? Why did God make me into such a wretched, unwholesome creature? Oh dear, oh dear… it’s such a curse…” he whispered over and over to himself as he shook his head.
Recently, all of this had begun to take a bad turn, as his brother, who in all his good intentions, had decided to have a theatre built in Bahlia to bring the work of Diogenes to the people. However, as all of his works were incomplete, Diogenes hadn’t been able to prepare anything good in time for the theatre’s opening and as a result, his rival and arch-enemy, the wicked Sir Natsume, had seen to it that he had a troupe of actors on hand and rehearsed with one of his own scripts just in time to steal Diogenes’s big debut away from him. And it was because of this that Sir Natsume had been able to garner all of the acclaim that had been meant for Diogenes, leaving no recourse for his already fragile spirits but to plunge even deeper into despair.
“Is the suit doing him any good?” Bunnu asked.
“Well…he doesn’t feel much of anything now. I do have to say, though, I’ve never seen him at such peace before. I’m not sure if it’s doing any good. But it seems to be making some kind of difference. Just look at him!”
Diogenes stared ahead blankly from inside his suit, as two of his servants squeezed him back into the seat of his throne. There was this look about him, as though he were allowing himself the momentary luxury of forgetting just where he was and what had been troubling him before putting the suit on. The apparatus seemed to be working wonders!
“Well…” Bunnu said slowly as he stroked his chin. “At least, he’s stopped crying all the time.”
“Right?” Motiwala responded.
“But what’s the purpose of the kittens and the herbal tea? Does it really make him feel better?”
“Chemically, it has no effect. There aren’t any therapeutic properties to the liquid, per se, as it’s more likely attributable to the spiritual energy that it gives off. Call it a placebo effect, or what you will, but that energy has enough intensity to keep Papa stimulated enough—maybe even overstimulated enough—to ignore his surroundings. And watch this.” Motiwala nodded at a nearby servant who was holding a s
lim wooden case flatly upon the palms of his two hands, which were turned inward and touching at the tips of the middle fingers, thumbs forward. The man bowed his head as he presented the case to Motiwala, who opened the lid to produce a tiny syringe and a vial. He opened the vial and drew some of the liquid within into the syringe.
“What’s that?”
“New invention. They call it a syringe.”
“No, I mean inside of that thing.”
“Oh, yes. The Divine Nectar. Fresh from the banks of Placenta-C. It was a gift from the Morellan envoy, who had arrived in Karasujima a fortnight after we got there.” Motiwala responded as he walked over to the rubber hose that connected his father’s Desensitization Suit to the apparatus.
He injected some of the fluid into an insertion point in the hose, no sooner doing so than his father began to shake as he screamed out, “Oh…uh…ohhhhhh!” The whole throne started to vibrate with his motions, its legs scraping and rattling against the floor of the Grand Ballroom. Bunnu started to move forward in an attempt to help him, but stopped as Motiwala held up a hand. Suddenly the motions ceased with a resounding, “Haaaahh!” and Diogenes’s whole body relaxed. He sunk down into his chair, out of breath. “Thank you and a good day to you, Madam,” he uttered into the oblivion.
“Is he OK?” Bunnu asked Motiwala.
“Man…is he ever!” Motiwala said, as he shook his head and snickered.
On the Relevance of Principles