Rhumpa held the machine to her nose and smelled the distant sharpness of the pepper, which made her smile. And then the pepper grinder got bigger and she jumped down into it and fell through tumbling peppercorns, and she smelled a hundred dinner parties of the past.
Then she was herself again, but standing on the porch outside the House of Holes. She rang the buzzer. A man with a bag on his back answered. He introduced himself; his name was Daggett. He took her into a small room with a round wooden table and, referring to a clipboard, began asking her questions. He asked her to describe her ideal man.
“I like men who are intelligent and witty,” Rhumpa said. “Also kind to animals and interested in other people and able to hold a conversation of a reasonable length.”
Daggett frowned and looked at his clipboard. “It says here that you favor a man with a heavy, dark dick. It quotes you as saying, ‘Some nice things are just not possible with a small, pale dick.’ ”
“Where did you get that piece of information?” Rhumpa asked, outraged.
“During reassembly they do a spectrum analysis,” Daggett said. “They screen for diseases, of course, and comb through for lurid thoughts. What’s your ideal sexual encounter?”
“Oh, touching, kissing, caressing,” Rhumpa said, at a loss.
“It says here that you would favor having three Italian airplane pilots in uniform shoot their comeloads onto your belly while you cup your clitoris with a wooden spoon.”
“They don’t necessarily have to be Italian,” Rhumpa said. “And they can be race-car drivers if that’s easier.”
“Because of your interest in pilots, we thought you might be a good person to fly one of our pornsucker ships.”
Rhumpa asked what a pornsucker ship was, and he explained. “It’s an airplane that flies around sucking up bad porn from cities.”
“Why?”
“Because bad porn is bad porn—it’s depressing and drowns out good porn. We store it, letting objectionable content settle out. The less porn there is overall, the more likely people are to come to the House of Holes.”
“How sordid,” Rhumpa said. “I don’t want to spend time doing that.”
“Oh? It says here that you’d definitely like to steer an airplane with your crotch.”
“I do believe you’ve got the wrong clipboard,” Rhumpa said.
“I don’t think so,” Daggett said, a trifle testily.
Rhumpa asked him if she was a prisoner or a guest.
“Do you want to be here?”
“I’m not sure,” said Rhumpa.
“If you do, then you’re a guest,” said Daggett.
He looked at his notes again, and then at her. He seemed a little hesitant.
Rhumpa asked him, “Are you a guest, too?”
“Yes, but I’m on an intensive work-study program because I accumulated a great deal of debt and they assigned me to do intake.”
“I see,” Rhumpa said.
He changed his tone. “You’re very pretty,” he said, leaning forward. “You have a lovely spicy smell. Excuse me.” He sneezed.
“What else does it say on your clipboard?”
“It says you’d like to dance in a solo porn video and hold your pussy folds open with your hands, and then you’d like to watch nine men watching your video and getting completely out of control.”
“Hm, is that so?”
He tapped his finger on the page. “I’m just going by what it says.”
“Well—I do like the idea of men being out of control at the sight of me.”
“Ah.”
“But I don’t want anybody to watch me making the video.”
“Of course. You can do it in your hotel room. I’ll take you there now.”
They rose, and Daggett led her to an elevator and down several hallways and then they came to a catwalk. “Don’t be worried,” Daggett said. “We’re going through a visual privation area. You’ll probably hear some shouting. The men are Deprivos. They haven’t been able to see nude breasts in any form for three full weeks. This is the last day of their treatment, and they’re in pretty sorry shape.”
Below was a crowd of men looking up at her. “Take off the top, baby!” they called. “Show us the titties! Flash them, honey, just for a second! Shake them, jiggle them, squeeze them together!”
Finally, Daggett exploded. “For gosh sakes, men, Rhumpa’s not going to show off her titties right here! They’re way too hot for that. Have some sense. If you want to see her nude you’ll have to go to one of the booths in the boothbay after you get out of Deprivo. Check channel six, where, if we’re lucky, she’ll be doing the homemade amateur nasty for us and showing us her hot fat warblers. Right, Rhumpa?”
Rhumpa shrugged, a little nervous. “Maybe.”
“And congratulations, men, on making it through the program.” That quieted them down, and Rhumpa and Daggett passed on without incident.
They turned down a hall and reached Rhumpa’s room, number 715. Daggett opened the door for her and ushered her in. He set the bag down on the bed, massaging his stiff fingers.
“What’s in your bag?” Rhumpa asked.
“This is the bag of bras. Aside from intake, my job is to carry this bag on my back and help women choose a new bra for their time in the House of Holes.”
“That must be fun for you,” Rhumpa said.
He nodded. “Yes and no. The bag is a burden to me at times, because of the conditions of my assignment.”
“You must like breasts.”
He nodded. “Of course. All sizes. And I do believe I have a bra for everyone.” He began grabbing handfuls of them from the bag and made a huge mound of every color and style. “If you’re going to make a solo amateur sex video, which bra you wear is important. It may be the most important choice you ever make.”
“And you’d like to help me choose?”
“Very much. But the unbreakable rule is that I can’t ever look at your breasts.”
“What—you’re a Deprivo, too?”
Daggett hung his head. “Unfortunately, I am, yes.”
“You mean that if you see my breasts you’ll be turned to stone?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then what?”
“If I see your breasts,” he said, “they’ll take me away and perform a reversible orchidectomy on me.”
“What’s that?”
“They remove my balls and put them in storage for a couple of weeks.”
“That’s harsh,” said Rhumpa. “The empty sack?”
“Yes, it happened to me once, and it was bad.”
“Who takes care of your balls while they’re in storage?”
“Aunt Maven has a number of female helpers. They’re called ‘ballkeepers.’ ”
Rhumpa took this in. “So how will you help me choose?”
“Take a shower, and when you come out I’ll have all the bras arranged on the bed, and then you can try them on, and if we need to we’ll use the Silken Flesh Communicator.” He held up a finger. “But first, of course, I’ll need to see your current bra.”
“On me?”
He nodded quickly.
“You mean, unbutton?”
He nodded again, waiting.
Rhumpa began unbuttoning her shirt, and to overcome the awkwardness that she felt—along with some excitement, for what woman can avoid feeling a thrill as she unbuttons her shirt in front of an attentive stranger?—she asked Daggett what the Silken Flesh Communicator was.
“It’s hard to describe. It works pretty well if you know what you’re doing. You’ll see.”
Rhumpa’s shirt slid off her arm onto a chair, and she stood looking at the corner of the room, a little embarrassed, with her palms toward him. “Me in my bra,” she said.
Daggett exhaled and slowly sat on the bed, staring. His eyes were large, and they were fixed on her breasts. He began muttering to himself. “Oh, those are so beautiful and generous and so lonesome and shy and so full and soft,” he whisper
ed, almost inaudibly.
“Sorry?” Rhumpa said.
He made an effort to collect himself. “A fine T-shirt bra,” he murmured. “With a lovely woven starfish pattern. Is it a Luleh brand or is it an Olivia Wallenstein?” He made a brief show of looking into his bag of bras and then gave it up and returned to staring directly at Rhumpa’s titboobs.
“I think it’s an Olivia Wallenstein,” she said, smiling.
“Make the porno in it. It’s perfect for you. You don’t need any of my bras.”
“Ah, but I do. I need to feel like a different person. This old bra is too—autobiographical.” She pulled down on it to seat it better, and then shrugged. Daggett’s breath caught at her motions, and she laughed at her casual power over him. “They’re just breasts,” she said. “I wish they were a little bigger.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “You mustn’t say that around here.” He leaned forward and whispered, “Be careful what you wish for.” His eyes moved hungrily from her right breast to her left, and then back.
“So you’re saying if right now I took this bra off in front of you you’d really have your balls removed?”
“An alarm would go off in Lila’s office,” Daggett said. “Two headless men would come and take me away to be reversibly castrated. My testicles would live in a little mesh bag in a special lobster tank filled with a charged nutrient broth.”
Rhumpa was appalled. “You mean with the lobsters in there?”
“No, no, no,” he reassured. “Just a special tank.”
“Oh.”
“And meanwhile I’d wander around visiting museums and, you know, reading travel magazines and listening to choral music and feeling sorry for myself.”
“Sounds not so bad,” Rhumpa said.
“Oh, it’s bad.” He cleared his throat and stood. Rhumpa thought she saw a distinct hump in his corduroys. “So—why don’t you have your shower and I’ll get to work out here choosing and sorting. It’s not easy to lay out a selection, and I’ll need at least four minutes of complete concentration, I’m afraid.”
Rhumpa went into the shower and was stepping out of her panties when he knocked. “Yes?” she fluted through the door.
“Sorry, I’ll need your bra, as well, for comparison,” he called. “You can just hand it out.”
So Rhumpa opened the door and swung the bra out through the crack.
“Got it,” he said cheerily.
While she was waiting for the shower water to adjust its temperature, she took a moment to look at herself in the mirror. Not too terrible, she thought. Admittedly her thighs were on the verge of jiggly, but her skin was smooth and almondy-brown, and her dense black bush was shiny and not unattractive. She pulled out her hair clip and looked at her face. Men liked her lips, she knew. No, she thought, it wasn’t inconceivable that she could be in a solo sex video.
Rhumpa’s hearing had always been keen. As she was about to step into the shower, she heard a tiny clink from the hotel room. Noticing that she’d left the bathroom door slightly ajar, she peered through the crack, at an angle, and was surprised to see Daggett with his back to her and his pants around his ankles. He looked around at the bathroom door to be sure it was closed—it wasn’t—and as he turned she saw that he was clutching his erection in one hand and her bra in the other. He turned back and paused, evidently undergoing an inward struggle. Suddenly, with a moaning expression, he began wrapping her bra straps around his erection, which was startlingly large and curved upward slightly like some exotic purple tusk. Holding his hands motionless around her bunched and jumbled brassiere, he rocked his hips, poking and shoving the head of his cock into its waddedness. Then, doubling over, he folded one cup around the length of his cock and made several long gimbaling strokes.
Rhumpa watched, fascinated. Daggett seemed almost on the verge of coming, but, with what seemed to be an immense effort of will, he straightened and gained control of his compulsions. He flung the bra on the bed and pulled up his pants and buckled himself away. In a trice he had himself more or less arranged. His wary eye then darted once again to the bathroom door, but Rhumpa was too quick for him—she’d already pulled back from the gap. She got into the shower and began humming. Who could blame the poor man? Forbidden as he was to see any living breasts, he yet had to spend his life carrying around a bag of bras. It was no wonder that he developed what seemed to be a fetish. Rhumpa felt sorry for him. She liked him.
Cardell Goes to the Laundromat
Cardell put on a black corduroy jacket and went to the laundromat at 18th Street and Grover Avenue. A woman was peering into the dryers. “Do you know which dryer leads to the House of Holes?” she asked, giving him an appraising look. She was pretty in an ethereally wavy flaxen-haired way.
“Well, I was told it was the fourth dryer from the end,” he said.
An old man spoke. “It is indeed the fourth dryer from the end,” he said. “But stay away from the House, both of you. Lila will suck you dry. You ever heard of King Nynus?”
Cardell shook his head. The ethereal girl nodded.
“That was me. I wasn’t a king, but I was rich. I had a harem with eighteen women, each lovely in a different way, and I spent my days eating watercress sandwiches. Now that’s all gone.”
“What happened?” asked the ethereal girl.
“Debts. I couldn’t get enough of the summertime Tit Swarm. That’s when they put a lot of women in a dark room and tell them, ‘Okay, tops off, girls, it’s a tit swarm!’ Then they let in one guy—me. The speaker says, ‘Man entering, repeat, man entering,’ and then the man gropes around, feeling everyone’s breasts. It’s so damn much fun.”
“What do you do now?” asked the flaxen girl.
“Now I sit here and tell people never to go to the House of Holes.”
“You’re kind of a naysayer, you know,” said the flaxen girl. Her curiosity piqued, she opened the door of the dryer and peered in.
“See anything?” said Cardell.
“Looks pretty ordinary to me,” she said.
“It’s not ordinary,” warned King Nynus.
The girl climbed in and pushed with her fingertips against the back. Cardell stared at the pockets of her jeans. “I think I found the way,” she called excitedly. Then suddenly she disappeared.
“Don’t let it close up, hold it open for me!” said Cardell. He climbed in after her, but when he pushed on the back it didn’t budge.
“It’ll be shut for a while now,” said King Nynus. “They never listen.”
“Damn,” Cardell whispered.
“Don’t worry, you’ll find a way in.” King Nynus pulled a small vial from his pocket. “Let me give you this.”
“Thanks, what is it?”
“It’s a powerful aphrodisiac. Lila sometimes sprinkles it in the water at the House of Holes. That’s one of her little secrets. It’s made from Prince Bohuslav’s beard. Give a gal a drop or two of that, and powee boom bang.”
“Fireworks?”
“Oh, heavens, yes. Do you know the story of Prince Bo-huslav’s beard? Surely you must.”
“No.”
“Then I’ll tell it to you.”
The Story of Prince Bohuslav’s Beard
Bohuslav was a powerful prince in the country of Bohrania. When he was nineteen, he married a tall comely princess, with pale eyelashes and freckled shoulders, who bore him a son. She had an unusual habit during their lovemaking: At the point of her climax, she would bite hard on his luxuriant braided beard. As a result of this repeated act of passion, Prince Bohu’s beard began to develop a memory.
For the most part he ruled with fairness, and he loved his tall pale queen, but every few weeks her perfect beauty and her perfect goodness made him restless, and he became possessed with the need to plunge his purple cameroon into an ugly-but-lovely woman. He liked them plump and awkward and shy and full of jokes, with a gap between their two front teeth. He called them Uniques. When his queen visited the sick in the northern colonies every ot
her Thursday, he would whisper to his court, “Find me a new and wonderful Unique for tonight,” and then he would begin washing and singing and braiding his enormous beard. When the candles were lit, he sat on his throne, wearing a tiny toga, and the Unique was brought in, holding a penis sandal made of heavy black ribbon. She had been bathed and scented and told strange stories about mountain zebras mating, and she had been closely instructed in the art of lacing the penis sandal.
The king would ask her to kneel before him and he would open his legs, and she would lace the ancestral sandal around his swelling penis, telling him the new jokes that were circulating in his kingdom. He would laugh loudly, and his penis would become as hard as applewood and knotted with veins, whereupon he and the Unique would begin kissing eagerly on his throne. Then he would say, “Untie the sandal,” and with one pull, as she had been trained to do, the girl untied it, so that it hung dangling for a moment from his royal turgidity.
“Stuff me full of your hot substance, oh mighty king, for I am Unique,” the girl would say, as she knelt over him on the throne, planting her hands on his enormous chest. And at the moment of their perfect union, King Bohuslav would seize his black braided beard and hold it to her mouth, whereupon she would clamp down on it to stifle her cries. Thus the memory of innumerable couplings entered his beard.
This went on for almost ten years. Bohu’s beard by now had a huge double braid and looked like a loaf of pumpernickel challah. It was said by some in the court that if you held your ear to his beard, you could hear the pleasure cries of a thousand women.
One night, though, a Unique of uncommon intelligence was lacing up the penis sandal. King Bohuslav groped for her breast and tried to kiss her, but suddenly she pulled out a large pair of shears and lopped off his beard with one powerful snip. King Bohuslav let out an agonized bellow and lost consciousness. The girl ran out the side door and hid carefully for a week in the hills with a friend.