In a very minor way, too, Enron was uneasy about the electrodes and bioamplifiers. Unless he had completely lost his capacity for judging human beings, this woman was harmless, a mere silly innocent with ridiculous taste and a slipshod mind and the morals of a she-camel But what if he was wrong? If she was in fact a functionary of Samurai counterintelligence, and had cunningly set him up with the uninhibited use of her lusty energetic hips and dark musky loins for the sake of administering a brainburning here this evening?
Paranoia, he told himself. Idiocy.
“All right, now. We’re ready to go. Which one first?”
“Which what?” Enron asked.
“Sculpture.”
“The one in back,” he said at random. “Ad Astra Per Aspera.”
“A good choice to begin with,” she said. “I’ll count to three. Then you start walking toward it One—two—”
At first he saw nothing except the sculpture itself, an ungainly, unappealing-looking assemblage of wooden struts arranged at awkward angles with some sort of metallic armature visible within. But then something began to glow in the sculpture’s depths, and in another moment he became aware of a distinct psychogenic field beginning to kindle within him: a pulsation at the back of his neck, another in his belly, a sensation of odd disorientation everywhere. As though his feet were beginning to leave the ground, almost as if he was starting to float upward and outward, through the doorway that led to the main part of the house, up through the ceiling, into the hot muggy night—
Well, it was Ad Astra PerAspera, wasn’t it? So probably he was supposed to be experiencing a simulated star voyage, then. Upward and outward to the for galaxies.
But all Enron felt was the initial sense of rising. He went nowhere, he experienced nothing beyond a certain queasy strangeness in his nervous system. It was as if his starward impetus was limited, that he could journey only so far and no farther before he hit some kind of psychic wall.
“There,” Jolanda said. The sensations went away. “What did you think?”
He was ready, as always. “Magnificent, wholly magnificent. I was scarcely prepared fully enough for the intensity of it. What I felt was—”
“No! Don’t tell me! It has to stay private—it’s your personal experience of the work. No two are alike. And I wouldn’t presume to ask you to put the essentially nonverbal into words. It would spoil it for you, don’t you think?”
“Indeed.”
“Shall we do Tower of the Heart next?”
“Please.”
She touched each electrode, as if adjusting the receptors in some minor way, and went to the cupboard again.
Tower of the Heart was wide, squat, not in any way towerlike that Enron could see. The glow of its internal workings was of a deeper hue than the other’s, violet blue rather than golden pink. Approaching it, he felt very little at first, and then came some of the queasiness he had felt with the first sculpture, indeed pretty much the same sensation. So it is all foolishness, he thought, a mild electric current that gives you the twitches and some gentle discomfort, and then you pretend that you have had a deeply moving aesthetic experience which—
Suddenly, without warning, he found himself on the verge of an orgasm.
It was immensely embarrassing. Not only was it his intention to save that orgasm for better use a little later in the evening, but the whole idea of losing control this way, of staining his clothes like a schoolboy, was infuriating to him. He fought it. The emanations coming from the second sculpture were far stronger than those of the first, and it was a struggle for him. His face, he knew, must be ablaze with shame and rage, and his erection was so powerful that it made him ache. He didn’t dare look down to see if it showed. But he fought. It had probably been thirty years since he had had to fight so desperately against the release of pleasure: not since the hairtrigger days of his hot adolescence. His mind was filled with thoughts of Jolanda Bermudez’s overflowing body, her immense swaying breasts, her hot slippery throbbing hole. She was devouring him, she was engulfing him, carrying him away on a tide of ecstasy. Think of anything, he ordered himself sternly. Think of the Dead Sea, the harsh metallic taste of its water, the thick slimy coating on your skin after you emerge from it. Think of the Mosque of Omar’s golden dome shining in the noon sun. Think of the nauseating ball of greenhouse gases that surrounds the spinning globe of Earth. Think of yesterday’s stock-market quotations—of toothpaste—of oranges—of the Sistine Chapel—
—of camels in the marketplace at Beersheba—
—of lamb kebabs sizzling over a grill—
—of the coral reefs at Eilat—
—of—of the—the—
But the pressure lifted, just then. The surging tide of his blood receded; his erection subsided. Enron caught his breath and forced himself back toward calmness.
The room was very quiet. He had to make himself look toward her. When he did, he saw that she was smiling—slyly, knowingly, perhaps? Was she aware of what had happened? Impossible to tell. She must know what effect the work had had on him. On the other hand, everyone was supposed to respond to these things differently. A purely subjective art form.
He would reveal nothing. As she said, a person’s experience of her art was his own private business. “Extraordinary,” he told her. “Unforgettable.” His voice, hoarse and breathy, sounded almost unrecognizable in his own ears.
“I’m so glad you liked it. And shall we do the Agamemnon now?” she asked cheerily.
“In a little while, maybe. I would like to—savor what I have already been shown. To think about it, if I may.” Enron was sweating as though he had just done a ten-kilometer race. “Is that all right? That we wait until later for the third one?”
“It can be overwhelming, sometimes,” she said.
“And perhaps if there is something to drink—”
“Yes. Of course. How stupid of me, to haul you right in here so fast, without even offering you a drink!”
She got the electrodes off him and found a bottle of wine. White wine, warm, sweet. Americans! What did they know of anything that mattered? Gently Enron asked if there might be red, and she found some of that too, even worse, dusty-tasting stuff, full no doubt of baneful pollutants and ghastly insecticide residues. They left the studio and settled on a sort of divan before a long low window in one of her front rooms, and sat looking out at a sunset of stunning photochemical complexity, an astounding apocalyptic Wagnerian thing: enormous bold jagged streaks of scarlet and gold and green and violet and turquoise warring frantically with each other for possession of the sky above San Francisco. Now and then Jolanda sighed heavily and shook her shoulders in a little shiver of aesthetic joy. Ah, yes, such beauty, God’s own heaven dazzlingly illuminated by God’s own industrial contaminants.
We will go for dinner soon, Enron thought, and there I will ask her the things I must ask her, and then we will return here and I will have her right on the floor of this room, on the thick Persian carpet, and then I will go back to the city and I will never see her again; and in a pig’s eye will I let her put those electrodes back on me, not tonight or any other night.
The investigation, first, though. How to bring the subject of discourse around to the area of his main interest here? A little maneuvering would be necessary. And with all this romantic business going on in the sky—