The God of the Labyrinth

  The strange thing was that I was no longer feeling fatigued. A strange glow had started inside me.

  We were interrupted by a group of six: four women and two men; they wanted to change clothes again. Norma looked resent­ful, but slipped off my underpants resignedly. She was handed a pair of black briefs in exchange. I was given the French knickers that I recognised from that afternoon. I exchanged the mini-skirt for a longer one, worn by a pale, intense-looking girl. When this was over, Norma said: ‘Come on, my turn now.’ And then, with a shock, I realised that I had been Esmond for the past five minutes, and that this explained why I had been feeling slightly puzzled by these odd garments. It was as if Esmond had emerged from some depth of my consciousness to find out what was going on. As soon as I became aware of him, the effect of double exposure increased, so that for a moment I felt almost sick, and the sexual excitement vanished.

  We had found a quiet place on the edge of the crowd. Gwyneth, no longer looking in the least school-marmish, was leaning back against the wall, her eyes closed in an expression of almost agonised ecstasy. A man was kneeling in front of her, his cheek against her thigh. When he turned his head I saw it was Alastair. Esmond said to him: ‘Greetings, comrade’, and Alastair looked suddenly startled. Gwyneth had sunk gently to the floor, and was half-sitting, half-lying, her eyes closed, her knees apart. Then Alastair winked at me. ‘You should try her. She’s marvellous.’ The faun-like expression on his face was new to me—but not to Esmond. I realised that this was a lineal descendant of Horace Glenney.

  The effect of double exposure ceased to be unpleasant, as if Esmond and I had made a bargain to inhabit the same body without argument. The feeling was clearer now than it had ever been, and I could no longer believe it was some odd quirk of my subconscious.

  I put my arms around Norma from behind, caressed her breasts, and then, with a twist of either hand, freed them from the brassiere that held them. She sank back gently against me, and I felt her dress rough against my bare flesh. She leaned her head back on my shoulder, her face raised, and I bent down and touched her lips; as I did so, she reached behind her and gripped me tightly with her hand. She said: ‘You’re getting over-­excited.’ I continued to stroke her, enjoying her response; she was like a cat that arched its back against me and purred. I realised, with sudden awe, that she had achieved the ‘suspended orgasm’, and then realised, a moment later, that it was not I who knew it, but Esmond. He was infinitely more experienced in such things than I.

  Norma suddenly said: ‘Look, there’s a table free. Let’s go over. I can’t stand up any longer.’ In fact, her knees seemed to be buckling. I helped her over to a table near the fire, where Körner was standing, looking benevolently at the room, nodding and smiling. He patted me on the shoulder. Esmond said to him: ‘Greetings, dark one.’ Körner’s hand dropped, and his face went very pale. He leaned forward and stared into my face. ‘You knew all the time?’ ‘I’m not a fool, domine’, Esmond said. Körner said quietly: ‘So you’ve been playing with me.’ It was not a question. ‘But why?’ I was touched by his expression of sad dignity; I wanted to explain to him, but it was too ridi­culous. Then Körner seemed to pull himself together. He pursed his lips, gave a wry smile, and shrugged. Then he went towards the door, and out of the room. I said: ‘What the devil do you mean?’ But Esmond ignored me.

  Norma was lying on the table, her eyes closed, apparently asleep. I went over to her, and slipped off her shoes. Her small feet looked very white. I bent down and kissed the sole of her foot, and then took the toes in my mouth. She stirred and sighed. I moved my head up and kissed her thighs, at the same time slipping my hand into the waist of the panties. This time she gasped and made no attempt to stop my explorations. In spite of the people around us, it was hard to resist the temptation to move on to her.

  Glancing around the room, I saw that Esmond and I were among the last on our feet. I now understood why the carpet was so thick. Prostrate bodies were lying everywhere. I could see Angela, lying on her back, her legs open, without panties, appar­ently fast asleep; Paul was lying beside her, one hand on her thigh, his eyes also closed. Gwyneth, who seemed indefatigable, was now naked, lying on the carpet, a man sucking her breasts. Another was stroking her legs and stomach, as her hips rose and fell gently. Other figures were entangled in absurd configurations that looked as if they had been dreamed up by a pornographer with a sense of the grotesque.

  Norma was holding my hand tightly, to prevent it escaping, and moving her thighs up and down with it trapped between them. As I looked down at her, a memory stirred; I tried to fix it, but it evaded me. I made another effort, staring hard at the rounded golden flesh of her thighs. It came to me that Esmond had seldom made love to sunburned women. Although there was as little prudery in his day as in our own, clothes were regarded as a part of the essential humanity of men and women; naked sunbathing would have been regarded as a curious eccentricity. So the thighs of Esmond’s mistresses were always white and soft.

  And then, in some way that I fail to understand, Esmond and I ceased to be two men inhabiting the same body, and were suddenly identified. To explain this would be of far more interest than to describe the mere physical events of the next few hours; but I cannot do it. Language was not made to express the subtleties of the human psyche. I can only say this: it is almost impossible for human beings genuinely to forget themselves, to escape their obsessive self-preoccupation, and to realise that there is a world outside them. Blake understood that every bird that cuts the airy way is ‘an immense world of delight, closed to your senses five’. But here, suddenly, in a flash, I was inside somebody else’s consciousness, a human being whose life and experience had been in every way different from my own. It brought a feeling of tremendous delight and freedom. It was like being let out of a coalmine. What had suddenly vanished permanently was that basic fear that enters the mind of all intelligent people at some time in their lives: that they are really the only person in the universe, that life is an elaborate joke, a film show created by a bored god who knows he is alone, and who has given himself amnesia to forget his loneliness. For here was Esmond’s conscious­ness, as undeniably real and elaborate as my own, mingled with my own.

  And in a flash I understood the meaning of sex. It is a craving for the mingling of consciousness, whose symbol is the mingling of bodies. Every time a man and a woman slake their thirst in the strange waters of the other’s identity, they glimpse the immensity of their freedom.

  Esmond’s memory was far more powerful than my own. Because of the powers he had developed, he could recall past epochs of his life with incredible vividness. And this, I now saw, was why he had chosen me. I have always been aware that human life is dream-like because most human beings exist pas­sively. Their consciousness is little more than a reflection of their environment. In the sexual orgasm, the voltage power of their minds surges, and they become momentarily aware that they are not forty-watt bulbs, but two hundred and fifty, five hundred, a thousand. . . . Then the voltage drops, and they sink back to forty watts without a protest. They are like empty-headed fools who cannot remember anything for more than a few seconds. Human beings are so mediocre that they can scarcely be said to possess minds in any real sense. In a flash, I understood the absurd and obvious truth: nothing is worth possessing except intensity of consciousness. This is the truth we glimpse in the orgasm. If human beings understood it—if their minds were not so incapable of understanding even the simplest things—they would abandon all other pursuits for this one. What does it matter where you are, what you are doing, how much you possess, if your mind is limp and feeble?—just as the most beautiful surroundings mean nothing to a man suffering from a fever. On the other hand, because Esmond had understood this, and pursued the secret, he had solved the problem that occupied Proust throughout the twelve volumes of the Recherche du Temps Perdu, the problem of how to tap our enormous and unimpaired stores of memory. If I try to recall my c
hildhood, my memories are a dim carbon copy of the real thing. Yet some accident, like Proust’s biscuit dipped in tea, can momentarily revive some distant time as vividly as if it happened yesterday. Why is the memory so feeble? Because consciousness is contented to run at forty watts, when it has all the power of the universe available to it.

  In this moment, I recalled suddenly an event that should have taught me what Esmond knew. A few years ago, a schoolgirl had written me a letter about one of my books. She sounded intelli­gent, so I met her in Cork—where she was at a convent school. She was a dazzling girl—one of those lovely, healthy, self-confident products of a wealthy home with riding stables and great lawns. She fascinated me—not because she had any power over my emotions—which were fully committed to Diana—but because perfection always fascinates, in a landscape, a race-horse or a symphony. Apparently I fascinated her too, for she declared her intention of marrying me, although she was a Catholic and she knew I was married. She expected her family to use their influence to get a Papal dispensation.

  During the holidays, her family sent her to Dublin to stay with an aunt, and I was able to find opportunities to see her about once a week. The whole thing was fairly innocent, physically. At sixteen, she was a romantic virgin; she was infatuated with me, but afraid of sex. And then one day, just before she was due to return to school, she apparently decided that it was time to allow the affair to progress a stage further. It was a rainy August afternoon. We had parked in some woods at the edge of a great estate. And ten minutes or so after we had begun to pet in the back of the car, I realised that she had decided to allow me as many liberties as possible, without actually yielding her virginity. But her own temerity frightened her. She allowed me to unhook her bra and remove her pants, then suddenly began to worry in case anyone looked in through the windows of the car—which were too steamed-up for anything to be visible. Aching with frustration, I locked the doors of the car to reassure her. Then I set out to make her forget her guilt in physical excitement. It took a long time—a very long time. It struck me that part of her trouble was that she felt like a harlot without her pants, so I put them on again. This made her confident enough to allow me to lie across her, with her skirt around her waist; but when I tried to move into a position where friction would satisfy my own excitement as well as hers, she became frightened again, and I had to start from the beginning. I found her so delicious that I would have happily started a hundred times over; she aroused in me the appetite of a starving man. To be in this situation, caressing the most beautiful girl I had ever kissed, seemed more like a sexual daydream than reality. The final act of lovemaking was unimportant; absorbing her femininity was enough to slake my thirst. An hour later, when I realised that she had reached a pitch of excitement that dissolved all barriers, I deliberately kept my word, and allowed my accumulated excitement to explode harmlessly against her. It was enough that she had withdrawn all prohibitions.

  But as I drove home, after dropping her back in College Green, I was aware that my consciousness had not relapsed to its old level of fatigue. My two hours of intense concentration had im­planted in it a habit of intensity, of refusal to allow the energies to sink back to their source in the subconscious. And as I drove back slowly through the dark, I was aware that my mind had achieved a new level of power; the heartbeat of my vitality was deeper, stronger; my memory functioned better than usual; my capacity for intuition was deepened. . . . And the long drive home failed to lessen the intensity; I arrived at dawn, feeling as fresh as when I set out from Dublin.

  And yet I had allowed myself to relapse back to the old level. My discovery was wasted: the knowledge that two hours of con­centrated effort can intensify the mind until it approaches the vision of mystics. And now, in this room, surrounded by prostrate men and women, I rediscovered that insight. They looked strange to me, as if I had never seen them before. This room was not familiar. Familiarity is a function of the fatigue of consciousness; to a fully awake mind, everything seems new.

  I was free of sexual excitement. My chief feeling towards these people was one of amused contempt. As Norma moved convul­sively against my hand, I felt that she was caught up in a reflex over which she had no control. At the same time, it struck me with great force that I was completely the master of my own sexual desire. Whether or not these women attracted me, I could perform my male function. It was an interesting idea, although not particularly attractive. It was far more interesting to recall the exact intonation of Doctor Johnson’s voice and the aggressive outward thrust of his lower lip as he said: ‘Sir . . .’, the malicious twitch that convulsed the left corner of Voltaire’s mouth before he delivered himself of a witticism, the high, strained note of Shelley’s voice as he read his Adonais aloud to me. But Esmond had a point he wanted to make, and since he was my mentor, I was willing to wait. At the moment, he wanted to demonstrate to me that sexual desire is entirely a matter of imagination—or of intentionality, as I would say. My attitude towards Norma could be altered according to my own will. I could see her as a rather stupid, oversexed girl who was incapable of thinking beyond the pleasure of her loins, or as an incarnation of the earth goddess. And if I chose to regard her in this way, then I should make a formal act of obeisance, like a priest before the altar. Accord­ingly, I removed her pants, then my own, and climbed on to her. She opened her eyes in surprise for a moment, then gasped sharply as I entered her, and began to move under me. Since this was an act of ritual worship, not of desire, I concentrated on giving her the maximum of pleasure, adjusting my forward drive to her movements.

  In spite of my detachment, it was like having sex for the first time in my life. Most of us are aware that sex is sometimes better than at other times. Entering a girl can generate an electric shock like accidentally putting your finger into a light socket, or it can seem dull and ordinary, a physical act like any other. This is because of the human capacity to go into a hypnotic state of blankness, of taking-for-granted. I was not only not taking Norma for granted; I was aware that she was simultaneously every girl in the world. I felt like an eagle poised in the air, looking down into an immense gulf.

  The power being generated by Esmond was affecting the others in the room. They felt it as an obscure excitement, ‘a certain odour on the wind’. Some were watching us; others were following my example and ignoring Körner’s rule against actual copulation. I felt a hand running gently down my back, over my buttocks, then between my legs; it was Tessa, leaning over me, an oddly dreamy expression on her face. Suddenly, I remembered whom she reminded me of; it was Minou Bauer, Esmond’s first mistress; I had not known her surname before, but now I remembered it. I increased my speed, feeling Norma’s mounting excitement; then, as her stomach curved and pressed tightly against my own, I simulated a climax, feeling at the same time Tessa’s fingers squeezing and kneading me. Norma relaxed slowly; I withdrew. Someone said: ‘My God.’ It was Gwyneth, who was standing on the other side of us and staring with admiration at the member that, even to my own eyes, seemed unusually swollen. Alastair, who had just risen to his knees from a girl I at first mistook for Angela, said with amazement: ‘Incredible!’ Tessa seized my elbow and said: ‘Now me.’ Gwyneth pushed her aside, seizing me lower still, and said firmly: ‘No, me.’ As far as I was concerned, it made no difference. Esmond, for reasons of his own, was determined to complete the demonstration. And although his memory was accessible to me, my own consciousness could not embrace the full extent of his intentions. I only knew that he intended to use my body to satisfy as many of the women who should choose to call upon his services. And so, when Gwyneth leaned back against the wall, pressing the instrument of pleasure against her moist outer lips, I reached my hand behind her, and guided it to the orifice; then, with an upward thrust, penetrated and drove until she was pressed tightly against the wall. The position was not entirely comfortable, since I was taller than she. There was a table close behind me; I moved backwards and rested on its corner, drawing
her astride me. She groaned, pressing down, then raised herself and plunged down quickly; I pulled her close to me, holding her tightly against me, somehow conscious of her as though she were a familiar musical instrument. It was her intention to remain there as long as pos­sible; her capacity for sexual stimulation was almost limitless, and the present situation appealed to an element of exhibitionism in her nymphomania. Esmond had other plans; he was skilled in the principle of the conditioned reflex; a few delicately sensual thrusts undermined her control; then a surge of what I can only describe as sexual electricity made her contact points—the points of the nipples and the distended anus—spark with an intolerable pleasure that approached pain. She gave a wailing scream, writh­ing and twisting, and I had to prevent her from falling off me. As I kept her pressed against me, the convulsions subsided; the moan changed into a deep sigh. I pushed her gently off my lap, and supported her as she sank to the carpet. The unfatigued godhead sprang upright like a jack-in-the-box, and I was startled by a burst of applause. Seated with my back to the rest of the room, I was unaware of the audience that had gathered to watch. Paul and Angela were leading the clapping and cheering. Paul said: ‘You are a Master’, and I realised with a shock that he knew more of the Sect of the Phoenix than I had supposed. I restrained the immodest comment that Esmond started to make. Angela pushed towards me, but Tessa was there first, saying: ‘No, it’s me’, and pressed me back against the table, trying to move on to me. I helped her—since she was even smaller than Gwyneth—and lifted her slightly before allowing her to sink down upon me. Her head collapsed on my shoulder, and she gave a long sigh, then began to move slowly, as if tired, giving small cries as she did so, like some tiny animal being beaten. I put one hand up the T-shirt and pinched her nipple; she con­vulsed gently, her small tongue thrust deep into my mouth, and went slack against me. As I eased her gently off me, a man with a Scottish accent said loudly: ‘The man’s a freak.’