The Secret Sex Museum: Exhibit 321ph10

   K.  Holland & M.  Mackenzie

   {And that brings us to:} Exhibit 321ph10, directly to your left.  I must
remind you that no photographic equipment is permitted.  That, by the way,
is under the strictest penalty of what laws apply--and they are many and,
umm, quite fearsome...

   {So just imagine this,} says the catwalk-thin cutie, trembling all over
from head-to-toe, her blue lips blood-flecked, blood-glittered,
blood-dusted, and her large painted eyes not quite, and yet, even so,
coquettishly a-flutter:

   My lover informs me that she's planned a surprise dinner party--a
surprise to me, anyway, a sort of debutante's death-ball, is how she puts
it, my "coming-out" party, with an ominous, secret little smirk that only
strikes me as ominous and secret when it's no longer any secret, plenty
ominous, and way too late to escape.  In the meantime, I mindlessly fret
and flutter about what to wear; in the end, of course, it's not important,
because the plan doesn't require me to wear much, but I don't know
that--it's part of the fun to keep me blissfully ignorant, in a state of
perpetual pre-orgasmic suspense.

   I've managed only to don a sexy little half-bra and ruffled panties when
the injection kicks in, the curtain goes up, the show begins; half-blinded,
I struggle to slip into a pair of thigh-high stockings, clumsily getting
the seams straight, costing myself valuable seconds.  It's when I bend
forward over my ankle to buckle the strappy stiletto sandal that the inky
black fingers of whatever illegal cocktail of drugs that's been introduced
into my bloodstream slides over my brain like a malignant mutant
(nine-legged) octopus, smudging up and squishing out the last of my
consciousness and thereupon I tumble forward in slow-motion to the polished
hardwood floor like a soft little pillow at my mistress's booted feet.

   For half the party--my own party!--I'm just not with it, drugged dopey,
I stare through glazed eyes at a lot of people I don't know, or half-know,
or, worst of all, know all too well, these emissaries from the past and
present intermixed, like in a dream set in a place I don't recognize and
have never been before, but familiar all the same, an archetypal banquet
hall, like the kind they use for weddings or mitzvahs, bar or bat, and I'm
still in my underwear and I'm seemingly hovering just above the crowd,
(look at them down there), god, I'm so loopy, and it's a good thing, too,
since I'm starting to understand that, as unreal as it all seems, as
surreal as it looks to my own eyes which are only inches away from my open
palm, my head having flopped lazily to the side at the prompting of a dull,
faraway pain, like the flicker of distant lightning or the faint drums of a
still far-off marching band, I see the impossible: the fact that I'm nailed
to a wooden cross erected in the middle of this milling gathering like
nothing so much as an incidental conversation piece!

   Well, maybe not so incidental...

   But, then, certainly not so important either; this isn't my party, after
all, but hers, my pre-op transsexual mistress in her ultra-glam gold lame
evening gown, an ex-male bodybuilder turned glamour-puss film star, or
something of the sort, well, you know what I mean, not exactly a film star,
per se, but...

   Listen...they are mingling, chatting, sipping cocktails and noshing on
catered hors d oeuvres and hozzie-whatzies, every so often throwing a
glance my way, curious, bored, chuckling at my precarious plight--"whose is
that freakthing anyway?" To which comes the ubiquitous response "Cyn's
little girlfriend." The retort to which invariably is some variation of
"Oh...(laughing)...Jesus...I didn't recognize...well, I'll be damned
they've finally gone and done it then...well, good for Cyn; she deserves
it...by the way, have you seen the first rushes yet?" and so it goes, the
small-talk people make, even at funerals, the chitchat they generate
clustered around sickbeds, and deathbeds, the pointless albeit essential
buzz they doubtless made on the walk back from the crematoriums in the
concentration camps, the firing-squads, the death marches, too...

   Tears have meanwhile dried in my thickly-applied make-up, so
thickly-applied, in fact, that it's like a mask of sludge, so thick, to be
precise, it's like my face is under an inch of mud; why, I wonder. 
Why--this heavy-handed, intentionally inexpert job?  It's theatrical
make-up, that's why, corpse make-up, that's what I suddenly realize,
puddinged on the way they prepare the dead, or the slow dancing actress
portraying an archetype of death on stage, her face emotionless,
unblemished, vacant--serene, by which I mean to say, soulless,
un-transcendent in every sense...does that make sense?  Yes, there is no
other conclusion to draw.  I've made up my mind.  I have been made-up like
this because in everyone's mind I am, in fact, already dead.

   I whimper.  My bowels, as the Bible has often put it, have turned to
water.

   An older man, sipping a Cosmopolitan, perhaps (I'm no Mr.  Boston!)
puffing a cigar, appraises me meditatively, almost appreciatively, but
nonetheless with blank unseeing eyes, as if he were thinking of something
else entirely (which, quite naturally, he is), which would mean he wasn't
appraising me at all now wouldn't it?  for crissakes you're not the
goddamned center of the universe, you fucking egomaniac, you!), that he was
merely looking, absently, because I am absent; occasionally someone (is it
Cyn?) quiets my groans by thrusting a sponge between my teeth; it's soaked,
I think, with a lemon-flavored tranquilizer; the older man gets bored,
resurfaces from his private meditation, gets tapped on the shoulder, knocks
the ash off his cigar and extinguishes it, off-handedly, against the inside
of my left thigh, and so it goes.

   My ribcage, exposed below my pink polka-dot halter (yes, I'm now wearing
a polka-dot halter and pink short-shorts, don't ask me how this is
possible) is slashed (for effect, non-lethally, Cyn assures me, she looks
so radiant!) and my taut tummy is stretched (and similarly slashed with
what looks to be some sort of Mayan hieroglyphic) between my prominent
hipbones, navel pierced, of course, with a dangling rhinestone trinket.  A
party game has started up, seemingly spontaneously as these things often
do, with the abrupt and incongruous appearance of an aluminum baseball
bat--"Break the Pansy's Legs" it seems to be called--is that what this is
really all about?  Someone has tacked a sheet of paper above my head with
the words "Impotent Fag" scrawled across in pink block letters, and so, now
that all's prepared, let the game begin!

   I guess you could say that the general idea of the contest resembles
(more than anything else I can think of at the moment) a sort of cross
between pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and beating a piata.  Someone takes up
the bat, they blindfold him or her, turn them around two or three times,
set them in the general direction of my crucified body, let them go with a
push forward--and the hilarity ensues.  Staggering towards me,
bat-on-shoulder to the accompaniment of encouraging cheers, hoots and
laughter, to the spirited and shouted instructions (left, right, no left,
left, left, now right, that's it, a little bit forward, not so much,
almost, almost, right, yes...right there...stop...SWING!  SWING!).  Each
participant eventually arrives in the approximate vicinity of my cross, at
the foot of it, I mean, and, with all their might, takes an awkward,
off-balance hack, the idea being to break the bones in my legs so that,
unable to support my weight at all, unable to relieve the pressure on my
nailed wrists and feet, my diaphragm will collapse, my lungs fill with
fluid, eventually cease to function, and in exhaustion and agony, lapsing
into shock, I'll suffocate and expire, which is generally the way the
crucified of all centuries meet their deaths.

   And nothing more than this is the goal of the game, this is how the
winner is determined!  Who'll be the one to succeed in breaking my legbones
so that I croak, that person is the lucky champion!  Can you imagine?  What
kind of people are these, anyway?  What kind of world is this that they
inhabit?  The worst part is that this isn't even the worst part of my
terrible ordeal.  The blows, you see, are excruciating in themselves, but
invariably, (barring a lucky strike--lucky, that is, for me--which,
unluckily--for me--is never struck), they are for the greater part wildly
inaccurate, more painful, perhaps, for their wildness and their inaccuracy,
thunking as they do across my shins, glancing off my kneecaps, clipping my
ankles.  They cause pain, in other words, but they do not lead to the quick
and efficient end of my life (suffering).

   The game doesn't hold everyone's interest, not at first, nor all at
once--two or three take it up, abandon it, then two or three more, another
and another, joined by four or five, losing a few here and there who drift
off by ones or twos, until sometimes for a time, at least, the game is
neglected altogether, and then someone weaves drunkenly up or takes up the
bat while waiting for the bathroom, and without even bothering with the
blindfold that supposedly provides the challenge--yadda yadda yadda...

   There's my ex, oh Christ, it's true, there she is, I can't believe Cyn
invited her, here she comes, blindfolded, grinning, her chopping blow
catches me in the groin, the backswing lands square on the nail driven
through my right instep--I go icy cold with pain, blinded by a brick wall
of white light.  Her lover comes up behind her, wraps his arms around her,
guiding her through a swing or two.  The blows land without a great deal
more accuracy, but they provoke a good deal more amusement .  At last, oh
thank god at last, the coup de grace is delivered; it's her new lover who
takes the bat, removes his sports coat, and takes what is recognizable to
anyone as an expert stance.  A crowd materializes out of thin air, like
ants around a fallen chunk of cherry popsicle (even Aristotle believed in
spontaneous generation).

   Tall and athletic, broad-shouldered and muscular, an ex-ballplayer in
the minor leagues of one professional team or other (the St.  Louis
Cardinals?  the Cleveland Indians?), he won't be cheated, so he cheats.  I
catch his eye from beneath the blindfold he's managed to partially slip to
the side as he strides purposely and unerringly forward, takes up that
expert stance--he's a switch-hitter!--first from the right side and then
from the left, his beautifully fluid and level swing measures me up just
right and he catches me on the sweet-spot (an inch above each knee), a pair
of homeruns for sure, going, going, see ya, gone!  He wins the game, my ex
throws herself ecstatically into his arms ("my hero!"), and the crowd goes
wild.

   I sag down, fatally, on broken legs, never to rise again for breath (or
anything else); my head drops dumbly to my chest and through fluttering
lashes I see my pink bikini-style panties rapidly redden as my bladder
empties, and I wonder, am I actually pissing blood?

   Standing on hand, monitoring my progress (Progress?  Can you really call
it that?  Sure!  Why not?  Fine...progress then) is the surgeon with his
scalpel and his cooler of dry ice.  Nothing here will go to waste; after
all, a human body is a treasure chest of invaluables--an iconic senator
dying of nephritis, the aging rock star with the pickled liver, the clogged
and rotten heart of the ruthless venture capitalist-turned-philanthropist
alas too late--who said money can't buy everything--it can by whatever you
can afford!  Already, unable to wait, and because it makes for better
theater than carving up a corpse, the surgeon has worked the urine-soaked
panties over my hips and down my smooth thighs and is performing a
makeshift orchiectomy, that's castration for you laymen, slitting my
scrotum open down the middle (my what?!  How did that get there?!),
reaching inside and prying out my testicles (my what?  My testicles?!  Hey,
what gives?  Surely you jest!), cutting the cords and nerves and whatnot,
his latex fingers slick with blood and unexpressed semen.  There's some
impotent Russian bazillionaire somewhere in the Urals who's convinced that
a ground and dried concoction including such illicit ingredients harvested
fresh from the source makes Viagra seem like baby aspirin.  Corneas, hair,
teeth, not to mention lungs, the pancreas, and adrenal glands, the skull
cracked open, that jellied meat a delicacy, the pituitary rare as a
four-leaf clover, bones have uses too, damn it's all good, and when the
body is empty so long as there are recognizable orifices and a certain
quantity of meat a necrophiliac can be found somewhere who'll pay to fuck
it, a cannibal to eat it, and when that's gone there are master tattooists
around the world would kill for skin to stretch and ink with secret
grimiores; rich collectors are paying fortunes even as we speak (so to
speak) to secure such precious canvases for the unimaginable collections of
the darkest galleries of the most private museums.  Cyn will make a bundle
on my carcass, not to mention the film she's paid a photographer to make of
my torture and butchering, enough to never have to work again, even if her
film career doesn't work out the way she plans, and knowing her, with that
short attention span, addictive personality, and alarming tendency to
self-destructive dissolution, it surely won't.

   Well, she'll be able to have that child she always wanted and that's not
cheap without a womb and all, but what can science not to if it has a mind
to--and a full enough pocketbook...in a word, nothing!  They'll implant it
in her tummy, or thereabouts, like a virgin birth, a child of no man (and,
in this case) no woman born, a propitious and unprecedented pseudo-event.
It's always been a dream of hers, motherhood, that is, the ultimate
fantasy, to be a big-bellied, big-titted, transsexual earth mother with a
Munchausen's fetish--it's nice to be able to help a dream come true,
although I have to admit I wish it hadn't cost me quite so much, speaking
of which, why haven't I lost consciousness by now, haven't I suffered
enough, why does this horrible moment seem frozen, like it's going on
forever, if only I could wake up, if I could wake up, maybe, just maybe, I
could die once and for all at last...

   {This way, folks, please,} this way follow right along, no lingering
before the exhibits, please.  Catalogs will be available for purchase in
the gift shop at the end of your tour.  That's it, thank you very much, let
us proceed, then, shall we?

   The preceding diorama is one of countless others, innumerable in the
sense that additional ones are being constructed all the time, each
illustrating a new discovery in the compendium of research compiled by that
preeminent sexologist, secret police interrogator, serial killer, museum
curator, surgeon, and god knows what else who, up to now--and from now
on--we've been pleased (as we've no choice but to be) to identify in our
narrative (inasmuch as it narrates anything whatsoever) as "Mr.  Thoth."

   Each previously heretofore undreamed of variation of sexual fantasy
unearthed, coaxed, coerced, induced, deduced--well, take your pick--by the
esteemed Mr.  Thoth is thus represented here in these wonderfully intricate
and disturbingly lifelike tableaux for the education and illumination (and,
in some cases, let it be admitted, the titillation) of visitors such as
yourselves.  Endless hallways of such exhibits, a vast and labyrinthine
network not unlike the inextricable (and inexplicable) knot of a large
tree's root system, a kind of psychic world oak of humanity's sexual
psychopathology, impossible to uproot, is laid out here, far beneath both
ground and consciousness, as museum, symptom, and scene of the crime--all
at the same time!

   Quite a feat of inhuman engineering, don't you think?

   On the wall beside each sickeningly lifelike diorama is a descriptive
plaque offering Mr.  Thoth's ruminations upon the matter which opens up
before you, these being updated and expanded in real-time even as Mr. 
Thoth continues to ruminate, which he does, let us assure you, constantly,
like a cow.  With incomparable art and technological artifice, the
characters appear to move and speak as if they were, in fact, still alive,
and, thus, they seem to suffer the same cruel sufferings again and again,
lending the facility a certain similarity, we must admit, to commonly held
notions of Hell.

   So be it.  We make no apologies.  Even if we did, they'd fall on dead
ears.  Ha ha...did we say "dead"?  We meant "deaf," quite obviously.

   Come now, step lively.  Careful, don't slip on that slick patch.  You
wouldn't want to break a leg at this point.  We'd have to leave you behind
for the wolves.  After all, we are very nearly done with our tour...

   --from our upcoming novel The Mansion of Beautiful Corpses available
Fall 2010 our website: thefreakbox.blogspot.com
