THE SEX MACHINE

The two women are naked and intertwined on the platform with their heads buried between each other’s legs. Each one recites a muffled prayer to the shining pearl of lust hidden deep inside the womb of the other. Their faces submerge, recede, submerge, then recede. With every rhythmic forward thrust, the features of the face are lost in the damp glove of flesh, like the head of a praying mantis burrowing into the helpless shuddering body of a pinioned victim, devouring its insides.

The room is silent except for the distant fuzz of city traffic entering through the air vent in the ceiling, and the steady mantra of their coupling.

The circular platform is in the center of the room, covered with a cheap orange velour spread. Spotlights shine on their white flesh from each corner of the room. As the platform slowly circles, their skin changes to purple, then yellow, then pink as they work. The spotlights contribute to the close heat of the room, and this heat mixes with the sweet fullness of their sweat, giving the atmosphere in the room an underwater tangibility.

A switch is turned on in the front office. Heavily amplified disco music pounds the air in a monotony of thudding bass frequencies. Their bodies indicate only a vague casual response to the sudden intrusion of the overwhelmingly physical sound. Soon their flesh can be seen moving in subtle variations of the mechanized rhythm, like two eels twisting in the mud of the ocean floor.

Signaled by the disco, the attendant opens the doors to the stalls surrounding the room, and the men enter, positioning themselves in front of their windows. The windows line the walls of the room where the women are on display. If the women looked up from their ritual on the platform, the windows would at first appear to be mirrors. But if they chose to peer through them up close, they could discern the inchoate dark shape of a man in each stall, and the glow of the fluorescent light above his head, behindthe smoked reflective surface.

The disco music enters the stalls through a speaker in the ceiling. The enclosed closet-like space acts as a resonating cabinet for bass frequencies, adding to the already claustrophobic confinement of the stall. The sour metallic smell of semen thickens the air just beneath the more immediately acrid odor of disinfectant. The men take this smell down into their lungs, where it’s diffused and absorbed into their bloodstreams and nervous system, poisoning their perception. The potential for murder and perversion, normally suppressed, is fertilized and intensified. The certainty of anonymity opens the door further. If one of the women were to enter the stall physically, as something more than an image seen through a screen, she’d certainly be disemboweled, cannibalized, mutilated. The men are incapable of self-control. They all have a repressed need to taste blood. When they masturbate, beneath the benign and childish fantasies they conjure up, the real thrill of potential violence is always the true erotic secret.

My hands are soft and cool. When I touch the smooth enamel walls of my stall, I feel the warmth of the women pass through the wall and into me. I absorb everything around me. I can taste the bitter luminous gas trapped in the fluorescent tube above my head. I can decipher the single note hum of the light beneath the depth-charge rhythm of the disco. The beat of the music pummels my body and spreads me outwards against the walls of the stall. I’m no longer contained in myself. I’m joined to the walls, part of a living cell. The stall is an organism. The circle of stalls is a circle of malignant cells surrounding a cancer. The women are rotting, sucking each other and transferring their corrosive juices back and forth, sharing their disease. I can smell them, ammoniac and fetid, through the wall.

Cued by a change in the music, the women get up from the platform and dance listlessly around the arena. The lights swirl, saturated and acidic, shifting like tides in the liquid interior of the room. The women move through one color after another, like drifting willless bodies in an amniotic universe. In our cells, our arousal is increasing. I’m the first to reach my hands through the rubber-lined hole in the wall into the warm place where the women live.

Responding quickly, multiple hands press into the arena from the surrounding walls. Disembodied feelers, they form the interior nerves of an underwater creature groping for nourishment and stimulus. The fingers gesture, twitch and writhe, trying to attract the attention of the dancers. From the inside, the women see flickering mirrors reflecting the colored lights, and beneath the mirrors they see gummy prehensile pods, swaying frantically in the quickened current.

After teasing us for a few minutes, they answer our silent call and allow the centrifugal force of their dancing to push their bodies out to the periphery of the arena. As they twirl against the walls, they’re passed from hand to hand, invaded, pinched, molded, penetrated. If my hand had a mouth and teeth, I’d rip the skin open and drink down the thick blood, pumping it directly into my stomach, filling myself up with murder.

She feels like she’s in ecstasy. The pores in the exterior lining of her skin leak out the juices brewed in her insides. My hands are slippery with her liquid, electrified with the sensation of her interior. I squeeze a rubber nipple, run my hands over her smooth stomach, pick at an inflamed scar above her pubic hair. I form my fingers together into a funneled point and press into her womb as she butts against the wall spreading her legs. She looks up with her eyes rolled back in her head, the pupils retreating behind her eyelids. Her tongue lathers her lips, dripping spit down her chin.

We’re unified, from stall to stall, man to woman, hand to body, liquid to solid, animate to inanimate. It doesn’t matter if it’s my hands inside her or someone else’s as she rolls and glides from feeler to feeler. We’re one creature, pulsing with bliss, sight, sound. Our orgasm never ends.