"Maybe that's the key. You are not satisfied, so you can't let it go."
"Why the hell should I let it go?" Colene flared. "Those turds raped me! They destroyed my innocence with my virginity. They crippled my soul. I'm supposed to forgive them for that?"
Pussy realized that even in the throes of facing the mind monster, their dialogue could have problems. "I hesitate to argue—"
"Argue!" Colene said. "You've been right so far, damn you."
"When Doe was raped, she had to let it go, not for the rapist, but for herself. His power was over her until she dealt with it. When he was killed, she was able to let it go. But at that point neither her acceptance nor her forgiveness could do the rapist any good. It was only to do her good."
"I know the theory," Colene said bitterly. "It's like religion: all those churches and faiths don't do much to obtain justice, they just find ways to forgive sin. That doesn't do it for me. I don't want forgiveness for anyone, I want justice."
"I don't think you do."
Colene whirled on her. "What are you talking about?"
"Those rapists have been brought to justice, but you remain tormented."
Colene stood still. "Maybe so. Because I'm the victim. I'm the one who lost it. I can't just say okay, that's all in the past, and it's okay now, it wasn't that big a deal. It was a big deal. I tell you I hated being raped. I HATED it. I hate it now. You tell me I'm supposed to figure it's all right now, just because they maybe serve some piddling time in jail? I'd rather seem them fry! I want their eyeballs to heat up and pop as the current goes through them. I want them horribly dead—and I want them to know it's because of what they did to me."
"I don't think you do," Pussy repeated.
"Okay, femme Feline. What do you mink I really want?"
"To be free of the memory."
"I don't want to forget what happened! I want vengeance."
"Would vengeance undo what you suffered?"
"That's not the point. They did it, and they should pay. If not with their lives, then with castration, so they suffer as I do."
"How would it help you if they suffered that?"
"It would satisfy me that they have been served as they served me. That's justice."
"But wouldn't it be better if it had never happened?"
"Yes! But it did happen, so it has to be settled. And it hasn't been. Not as far as I'm concerned."
"If you forget it ever happened, wouldn't that restore your innocence?"
Colene stared at her. "Pussy, where the hell are you getting these questions? You sound like a damned psychiatrist."
"From the other side of your mind," Pussy said. "They are your own doubts, open to me now that we share the ambiance of the mind monster."
"Trust the monster to torpedo me," Colene muttered. "Okay, already: if I forgot all about it, sure, I'd be innocent again. Mentally, if not physically. But it wouldn't be right. It would be papering over a chasm. It did happen, and it messed me up something awful, and now I can't even be with the man I love."
"So what you need is not to forget it, but to be able to handle it. To put it in perspective so that it no longer cripples you sexually."
"You got it, sister."
"So what happens to the rapists doesn't matter. What matters is how you handle it."
Colene raised her hands in mock surrender. "Okay, okay! It's me who counts, not them. But they are part of it, because without them I wouldn't be suffering. I can't just forget them and still be a victim."
Pussy nodded. "I wasn't at your rape. I really don't know anything about it. Let's look at it. Maybe there's something you haven't considered."
"Look at it! It's past and done, Puss. No way to see it happen."
"It is there in your memory. Open that chamber."
Colene quailed. "Shit, Pussy! That's the last thing I ever want to do."
"That's why you have to do it. We can't do surgery on your damaged innocence without exposing the injury to it."
"Surgery!" But Colene became thoughtful. "That's a nice concept. You do surgery to fix something wrong. The surgery cuts you open and hurts your flesh, but it fixes the problem. Then you slowly heal until you're better than before."
"Yes, that is the concept. We must do it to free you of the monster's hold."
"Not to fix my relationship with Darius?"
"The monster feeds on emotional conflict. That conflict bars you from Darius. So they are the same."
Colene considered that. "I thought it was dolor the monster wanted."
"I don't think so. Not now. In your mind is the memory of Provos, the woman who lived backward. She was not dolorous, but the monster attacked her first. She must have had a conflict."
Colene nodded. "Maybe she did. She risked everything to travel the Mode with us. She finally rescued two people from my Mode of Earth and took them home with her, and they were really fouled-up folk. I think she adopted them, and they lived happily ever after."
"So the conflict was in her relationship with those from whom she was separated. Once she got them back, the conflict ended. Then the monster had to search for another mind to feed on."
"You know, it could be something like that. Sure as hell I've got conflict!"
"Yes. So you need the surgery. When the monster loses its power over you, you will be free to be with Darius."
"I guess I knew that. Otherwise why would I have come here? But, lord, that surgery scares me."
"I know. That is why I am holding your hand."
"And thank you for that, Pussy."
"Open that chamber."
"Damn." Colene looked around. "I'd rather face the monster. It's hardly bugging me right now."
"That's because it uses your own horrors to defeat you," as you figured out. When you address your horror, the monster loses force."
"But this—Pussy, this is ugly."
"Open the chamber."
"This'll kill me!"
"It is killing you already."
Colene sighed. "I guess this is what I came for." She turned and walked to the house. She put her hand to the doorknob. She turned it. She hesitated, nerved herself, and opened the door.
Pussy was watching, but had no body. She was an invisible ghost in the air, focusing on Colene at age thirteen. The girl was on a date with a boy she liked but knew only slightly. She was wearing a party dress with a bow, dowdy in her opinion but racy by her mother's standards. But her mother was drinking, so her caution had been successfully brushed aside for this date. Colene was looking forward to some real fun for a change. Getting this date with an older boy was a real prize.
As they entered the house, she hesitated. "Where is the party?"
"Inside," he said. "There's rare entertainment."
Intrigued, she suppressed her doubts and moved on through a short hall. They came to a pleasant living room, where three other young men stood to greet them. Bottles of beer sat on a low table.
"Where's the party?" Colene repeated, looking around.
"Right here," her date said. "Have a drink." He picked up a bottle and opened it for her.
She hesitated. "I'm not supposed to drink that."
"No, it's okay. This is a private house. You can do anything you want."
She had heard that. Wickedly tempted, she accepted the bottle. She sipped it. The stuff tasted foul, but she didn't want to show her naïveté, so continued sipping. "Where's the entertainment?"
"It'll be soon," her date said, taking his own beer. "Have a seat."
She sat where he indicated, on a plush couch. It was very soft, and she sank down so far that her knees were higher than her bottom. Her shirt rode up along her thighs. She tried to restore it with one hand, but it wouldn't go. So she settled for keeping her legs together. She took another gulp of beer. Her mother was alcoholic, and that was no good, but of course Colene herself would never be that way. Anyway, this was only beer, not the dangerous stuff. She could handle it.
They talked about this and that. C
olene kept hoping that some other girls would appear, but they didn't, and after a while her head got pleasantly dizzy and she didn't care. When she finished her beer, she was immediately given another. It didn't taste as bad now. She saw at one point that her knees had fallen apart, and the boys were looking, but who cared? If they thought there was anything there worth seeing, that was maybe a compliment. She just didn't have the kind of figure some girls did.
But this was getting dull. "Where's the entertainment?" she asked again.
"Oh, that's in the bedroom," her date said. "Here; I'll help you up." For she, in the deep couch and burdened by the bottle of beer, was having trouble getting to her feet.
"The bedroom! I'm not going in there!"
"Sure you are," he said, smiling. "Here, maybe you've had enough beer." He took the bottle from her hand, then reached down to put his hands under her shoulders.
"Hey!" she said as his hands missed her armpits and landed on her breasts.
"Sorry." He got them placed correctly and hauled her up. The room whirled around her and she would have fallen, had he not caught her. This times his hands passed around her back and took hold of her buttocks through the dress.
She tried to pull away, but was so unsteady she couldn't do it. He half carried her to the bedroom and pushed the door shut behind them. Then he let her fall onto the bed.
"Where's the—" she started. But as he sat beside her and ran his hands up her legs, the chilling truth penetrated: she was the entertainment. They had looked; now they were touching.
She rolled clumsily over, trying to escape him, but he put one hand on her back to hold her down, and explored her bottom with the other. "Hey!" she cried, trying ineffectively to crawl away. She felt his fingers hook into her panties and pull them down. "Stop that!"
But he didn't stop, and she knew it was hopeless. She could hardly walk straight, and even if she got away from him, she would have to go through the other room where she would be intercepted by the other three. If she fought, they could readily overpower her. She could get hurt.
So she stopped trying to resist. She just lay there as her date took off his trousers and joined her on the bed. But she didn't cooperate; she remained on her stomach, her legs spread to brace her that way, so he couldn't actually have sex with her.
He covered her. His weight squeezed her breath out of her. "Hey!" she gasped. Then he eased up—but something else happened. Something hard and hot was pushing into her bottom from below.
He was doing it from behind! In her naïveté she had thought that impossible. Now, too late, she knew it wasn't. Indeed, she realized she should have known, because she had read of different positions. She had been willfully blind, to her cost. She was caught in a worse position than otherwise. He found the place, her quivering vulva, and wedged painfully into the crevice. "Hey!" she cried once more, but there was no stopping it. She felt something tear and give way, and the pain surged, but she lacked breath to scream. He impaled her on his huge hard penile stake, and it rammed up into her belly so far she thought it would never stop.
Then he shuddered, and she felt hot fluid inside her. She knew what it was: he was ejaculating. He had reached her secret inner core and was jetting his passion there. She was disgusted; it was the last thing she wanted in that region. She wished she could spit it out, blow it out, get rid of it like noxious garbage.
After an eternity he withdrew and got off her. At least it was over. She struggled to roll onto her back, too confused and distracted to do more. She had been raped, and she hadn't done a thing to stop it.
She was vaguely aware of the door opening. Thank God he was leaving! But then she saw that one of the others was there. "Hey, what—?" she started. And saw that he was taking down his pants.
She tried to get off the bed, but he caught her and held her easily on her back. He came down on her, and she saw his erect penis. She had never seen that before, and was appalled. It was huge and ugly and horribly menacing, but she didn't know what to do, so she did nothing.
He got his member lodged and thrust in and up. Her raw crevice stung, but he covered her faint scream with his face, kissing her open mouth. She tried to turn her face away, and succeeded, but meanwhile his member was deep into her, thrusting repeatedly. It jetted inside her, like a huge hypodermic, filling her with its septic discharge.
He got off her, and she thought it was over, but then there was another man, and this one squeezed her breasts through the cloth of the dress as he lay over her. Then he jammed inside her. At least this time there wasn't much new pain, because it was thoroughly wet and slippery down there. The first two had poured in dirty hot grease, and now her cleft was a river of slime. She didn't protest at all; she just waited for it to be over.
The fourth man wasn't satisfied to have her lie hopelessly sprawled out. He turned her over and made her get on her hands and knees. She cooperated, just wanting to get this dirty business over. He told her to say she liked it. "I like it," she said obediently, hating herself. Then he flipped her dress over her back, squeezed her bare bottom, and thrust from behind, his hands on her hips holding her in place. "You like it!" he said. "I like it," she echoed. "You just love to have it in you." "I just love to have it in me." "Do it harder, Joe." "Do it harder, Joe." Satisfied he did it harder, almost knocking her over, and climaxed. "Good doggie," he concluded, laughing. "Good little bitch." She felt like dying.
After that they were done. But she wasn't. She crawled off the bed, got her feet on the floor, pushed herself up, and stood unsteadily, loathsome gunk squeezing down one leg. She saw that there was a connected bathroom. She made her way to it, using bed, chair, and wall for support. She put her head over the sink and vomited out what remained of the beer in her stomach. She heaved and heaved, but what she really wanted to get out was not in her stomach. It was in her belly.
She sat on the toilet and used a sponge to clean her legs and bottom. She was revolted by the gelatinous fluid with its streaks of red, but she had to get it out and off. She rinsed the sponge repeatedly and used it until nothing more showed. She wished she had a water jet she could jam in there and use to blast out every bit of egg white at high pressure. Then she stood, looked in the mirror, and used the sponge to wash her face. What difference did it make? She was filth all over.
Pussy broke in. "Filth? That was sex." The scene dissipated; she had ended it with her intrusion, but she had seen enough.
"Same damn thing. I never got that foulness off me after that. I never told; I was too ashamed, and knew nobody would believe me, and anyway I didn't resist, so it was my fault."
Pussy had been drawing most of her thoughts from Colene's mind, but now she didn't. "Sex is not dirty. I have done the same thing you did, with multiple null males, and loved it all. They forced it on you when you didn't want it; that's what makes it wrong. Why do you think it's dirty?"
"It just is. Sex is filthy business. Every child knows that. It's why it's kept secret from them as long as possible. I wish it had been a secret from me longer. I washed and washed, I practically scoured my vagina raw, but it's still foul."
"I don't believe it. Your culture differs from mine, but not by that much. Sex is a gift for adults, perhaps life's single greatest pleasure. It has nothing to do with dirt."
Colene looked at her. "Boy are you from a different planet! It's even in our literature. The Bible shows how God kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden for discovering sex. Plenty of religious folk will tell you that the naked human body is obscene. Everyone knows it."
Pussy was puzzled. "DoOon does not have a god, but I have the concept from your mind. Did not your God fashion your body as it is?"
"Yes, of course. God made everything. What of it?"
"Yet that body, as God made it, is obscene?"
Colene halted with her mouth half open. "I never thought of it quite that way. I guess you'd have to go to a Biblical scholar to answer that one. But maybe it's that using it for sex is what's obscene."
> "Didn't God make sex too?"
"For procreation, not just fooling around."
"We nulls can't procreate. We are all sterile. Yet we enjoy sex. Are we obscene?"
Colene paused again. "No. It's natural for you. It's the way you're made."
"And if you love Darius, and want to have sex with him, but don't want a baby yet, that's obscene?"
Colene looked at the ground. "My mind says no. But my emotion says yes. If those four kooks had just kissed me, or peeked into my bra, or even felt me up some, I guess I would've been annoyed, but not devastated. It's what guys do; they're chronically hooked on peripheral sex. But they raped me. They got into my pants and pumped their sewage into me. I can't forgive that."
"Sewage," Pussy said thoughtfully. "There's that filth theme again. I never thought of it that way when Buck humped me. I loved making him spurt. I made him do it over and over until he was worn out. We had a great time."
"Well, you're animals." Then Colene reversed. "I didn't mean that, Pussy!"
"It's all right. We're nulls, which are mock human animals. Maybe we are different. But I still don't see dirt in semen."
"Well, maybe it's because it's so close to the dirt."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, like what that poet, William Butler Yeats, said. I always liked to check into what the teachers didn't recommend, and I found this poem he wrote, "Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop." It tells how this old hag Crazy Jane met the Bishop, and he told her to get out of the foul sty and live in a heavenly mansion. I think he meant she was going to die soon, so she should purify herself so as to be ready to meet God. And she wouldn't have it; she said that fair and foul are near of kin, and the one needs the other. And when he tried to argue, I guess about how far apart they are, she said "But Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement." I guess that fractured his cross! Because she's right: look at a man: he pees through the same penis he uses to have sex with. And look at a woman: her vagina is right between her urethra and her anus. So fuck is between piss and shit. The place of excrement. How much uglier can you get? Isn't it like some huge cosmic joke, that if you want to make a baby you have to put your excretory organs together? If you want to have sexual fun, you have to get close to urine or feces. Some dirty fun!"