Lucky Pierre in the Doctor's Office

The nurses strip away his gown--and the cameras whir in the background

"The doctor will see you now."

The patient, a livid mass of welts, bruises, abrasions and deep discontents, wearing only a short hospital gown tied at the back and laid out on an examining table like raw stock, is wheeled, cold and half-conscious, into the doctor's office.

"Well, well!" exclaims the doctor, exhibiting a professional jollity. "And what have we here?"

Lucky Pierre, skin-flick hero, does not answer, keeping bottled up his scripted groans. He lies darkly in his wounds, his knees and elbows turned out, as though he were coming unspooled. By contrast, the doctor, who directs this in-house segment, which for all he knows may be his last, is glowing with well-being, her silvery-blonde hair pulled back in a tight bun at the neck, her teeth sparkling, her complexion radiant, her bright uniform (continued on page 212)Lucky Pierre(continued from page 136) clean and fragrant. Cast in his misery, he is offended by such a picture of health. She picks through an array of instruments, her metallic nails clicking, selects an otoscope and a sensitometer.

"Looks like a bad case of advanced misentropy!" she chuckles, winking at her colleagues.

"Critical, doctor?"

"Fetal, I'm afraid."

Her breasts are high and pointed, her belly as flat and tight as a drumhead, her buttocks packed full and firm in the starchy white skirt. She is encircled by the glint of stainless steel and the glaze of lights, by wall charts and diplomas, by the hum of apparatus and the soft, hushing movement of nurses and production assistants. She peers under his eyelids, into his ears and nostrils, down his throat, dictating to an aide: "Signs of hypopraxia, idio-dynamic delusions, hot lips and circadian decubitus. Deglutition and exteroceptors normal. More or less. There are cunt hairs between his teeth: Query cohort relationships."

"He seems so cold and lethargic, doctor...."

"Yes, a consequence, perhaps, of over-cranking...."

She leans down to listen to his heart, pressing her pubis against his hand: seems almost to move, to caress him. Curious, or perhaps simply because he is who he is, he turns his hand over to hold it in his palm, less numb, somehow, than the rest of him.

"Aha!" She smiles. "Feeling better?"

She peeks under his gown.

"My goodness! I guess you are!"

"A...terrible fall, Clara...."

"Yes, I recognize the symptoms."

"No, the fall, I mean...a rupture of some kind. Permanent, I think...or worse!"

The End, he means, but she just laughs and stuffs his awakening hand up her skirt.

"You're too suggestible!"

Her mound is warm and wet, thickly padded with wiry little curls. Her labia seem to reach out, grip his fingers, count them, twist his knuckles, read the palm.

"Hmm. Moderate hypopselaphesia, probably transient and cryogenetic. Ugly wart on the social finger. Diarthrodial articulation, synergetic and tender. Severe agnails, symptoms of ambivalence, but effectively excitomotory."

"Voluptafacient, doctor?" asks a nurse.

"Quite. Feels good, too. Yum! Decussate life and love lines, implying endopathic abiotrophy of the essential humors. Turn him over and let's have a reverse-angle look at his old arrière-voussure!"

As they pull his hand away to roll him over, her cunt sucks up his fingers...then--fffffpop!--lets them go. Procumbent, he feels the chill come on again. That fall: no saving jump cuts this time, no fades, no soft dissolves; they let him hit bottom and even filmed the bounce. Didn't even slow it down. Neorealism, they called it. For Clara's sake: her demand for unmediated authenticity. You can't anatomize a mock-up, as she likes to say. She wants the truth, the hard-core truth, 24 times a second, even if she has to create it herself. Now her assistants spread his knees and elbows out, adjust his balls for him, untie his gown. Clara smiles down at what she sees, slaps his buttocks.

"On the homely face of it, I'd have to describe it as dasygenal, wouldn't you, girls?"

"Is it...is it serious, doctor?" he wants to know, prepared for the worst.

"Very serious," she laughs. "It means you have a hairy ass. Ex facie. Relax. You may as well enjoy this."

She spreads his cheeks, sniffs about critically, squeezes a pimple, pokes a proctoscope into his rectum.

"What does it look like in there, doctor?"

"Not a pretty picture, I'm afraid. Some evidence of diathetic dysteology, as well as time-orientation compulsions, possibly due to a faulty diet. Better stick an explosimeter up there, while I take a look at his tail. What's left of it."

"An explosi--what?"

She probes the base of his spine, finds a raw nerve, sending him bucking off the table.

"Yowww! Damn it, Clara, take it easy! That hurt!"

"There it is, girls, that's where the old caudal appendage got broken off. The original hypostatic disunion; he's been looking for it ever since. Thus, the first phase of hominization: the quest motive. Which in the present instance has degenerated into a kind of sacral eschatology--you can see the open sore here--confused by the dysgnostic assumption that woman was created from that severed tail and to this day, as the doggerel goes, must serve his will and solace his posteriors still!"

The nurses hoot mockingly at that and beat his nates with stethoscopes and clipboards, artificial limbs, leather traction belts and rubber blood-pressure tubes, wagging their own tails excitedly and scratching their fleas.

"But it's true!" he protests weakly. "I remember it...."

"Forget the past, dear Lucky, it's mostly waste. There is, as they rightly say, no future in it."

"But what does it matter, Clara? There's no future anyway. I'm finished, I know that. The reel's run out...."

"Bullshit. Despair is a metaphor, like any other."

"I just want to sleep...."

"No doubt. We all suffer these gesticidal tendencies. The lure of the fade-out. But don't worry. You're in my film now, dear boy, my care. Experto credite. Look: Already your ass is as red as a rose in bloom! It won't soon go to sleep again!"

"It's not my ass that's the problem, Clara, it's my head, my heart...!"

She laughs at his confusions. It's true. What does he know about anatomy? He's a complete dope.

"Rig him up for stress analysis," she says to her assistants.

His feet are bound together in ankle cuffs, and Lucky Pierre, last of the great pornographic-film icons, is hoisted upside down and hung from a gambrel stick. The gown is stripped away and he is smeared over with a photoelastic covering. Weights are suspended from his arms, neck, mustache, penis and navel, and a stereoscope is fitted to his eyes. He is subjected to a sequence of 3-D images--body parts, falling buildings, circus acts, snowstorms, genteel sodomies, worm fucking, electrocutions and the like--while the doctor studies the isochromatic patterns got by bombarding him with polarized light.

"But I've given it all I've got, Clara," he whimpers, his tongue flopping against the roof of his mouth. "I've really tried...."

"I know. That's why you've been sent to me. Have faith. And don't press the chicken switch. When in doubt, exercitate! Orthopraxy saves and all that. My! Look at those gorgeous colors!"

While she watches him, he is watching the collapse of ecosystems, the gang bang of a child star, castrations and bicycle races, the fall of an airplane, the discovery of the optical printer, and as blood rushes to his head, he thinks, She's right, our bodies are full of chaos and violence; it's the way they express themselves. All actors have to understand that; the integrity of our performances depends upon it. Let it roll.

"Each color indicates the magnitude of stress at each part of the system," the doctor is explaining to her assistants, who are oohing and ahing at the sight of him all lit up like that.

"What lovely spots of blue there in his belly, doctor!"

"Yes, the hypochondrium, of course. Nearby, that ugly black spot is the liver, where much of the murder takes place, and, as is to be expected, it's the locus of least stress."

"But, oh, my, look at his testes! It's almost as though they're on fire!"

"Yes, while by contrast, observe that the penis, which is self-evidently diageotropic and so subject to additional gravitational demands, runs nevertheless--following the speeding train of received images--the whole spectrum, now black and flaccid, now crimson and aroused, now a straining, luciferous white, as though unsure of its own enthusiasms or responsibilities."

"It's rather like his head, doctor. It looks like a bowl of lit-up fruit!"

"True, but the head contains all these colors at once, like a syncretic contexture of shifting options, you might say, while his penis' dysmnesiac experience of these states is serially diachronic."

"Gosh, you're right! That sure makes it a whole lot prettier, doesn't it?"

"It's wonderful what you can learn from a silly old dick, doctor!"

"Ex pene Herculem, my dear!"

"But--Good heavens!"

"Yes?"

"His...his heart, doctor!"

"Mmm. You've noticed."

"It's...it's green!"

The doctor sighs, smiles, casts a long, affectionate glance at the patient.

"Yes, it...it almost makes you believe in love again, doesn't it?"

"Doctor!"

The doctor laughs and switches off the polarized light.

"Take him down, exuviate him, then osculate his pecker, please, and give me a co-efficient of viscosity reading in centipoise."

While the doctor withdraws to her desk to fill out her examination report and feed the data into her bank of computers, her assistants unshackle him, remove the stereoscope and peel off the photoelastic sheath. One of the nurses slides a catheter down his urethra, reaches up under his scrotum and manipulates the vas deferens with little pumping motions and, sucking gently on the tube, draws off a small specimen of semen. He shudders: a certain tingling reminiscent of orgasm but without the spasm. Leaves him feeling suspended, weird, nervous somehow, at the edge, much as one feels when one has to sneeze but cannot, and he worries now about having come here: Is there to be an operation? Will he leave here alive? He reaches up to give himself relief, but they rap his knuckles with a steel rule.

"Don't make us strap you down, now!"

"The doctor wants it spick-and-span! She'll see you in a minute."

"Pl--Ah-choo! Please...."

"The sample, doctor. It's pretty sticky stuff."

"Thank you. Mmm, tastes good, too. I can see why they are using it as an excipient. Pity he's been wasting so much of it."

"Come on, Clara, goddamn it! I feel all wrong! Help me get it off!"

"Are you always in such a hurry?" she asks with a smile. "We've only just begun!"

She weighs his stones on a ballocks balance, listens to them, waggles them about, beats a small electronic gong with them: hollow, echoey sound. Why does she care? Her appetite for knowledge arouses in some small part his own. It's important, he thinks, to be possessed like that. To be so eager to be alive and aware, it drives you mad. She reads the signals from the gong, runs a profilometric check on his penis, tries to bend it, slaps at it to see in which direction it bobs.

"Pubes: pterygoid. Calluses: clitoridean. Shear modular: impressive."

She nips at his glans with her teeth, stretches his prepuce, clucking her tongue ominously, separates the lips of his penis, peers down the urethra.

"Whew! That's a pretty long fall at that!" she admits.

"I told you...."

"Would one of you girls dim the lights, please?"

The office darkens. Clara adjusts the aperture with a little twist at the base of his prick. Her hands are smooth and cool, good hands to be in in this crisis.

"What's important about these little things," she says, squinting, "is their power of resolution. It's a kind of optical illusion...."

The nurses murmur appreciatively and take turns peeking inside while the doctor holds it open. As she touches and plays with him, he relaxes. He knows that, sooner or later, she will satisfy him, and will satisfy him as no one else can, because the inevitability of her doing so is part of the subtext that informs all her films, unscripted though she pretends them to be.

"Now, the heart of these systems," the doctor is explaining, "is the intermittent mechanism. This one uses an advanced spring-loaded, oscillating claw--if you look down in there, you'll be able to see it--which in turn is backed up by one of the most ancient of such devices, the old-fashioned dog movement, using the eccentric pin. See it wiggle there? Yes, that's it."

"Isn't it rather troublesome to have two paradoxical systems in one mechanism, doctor?"

"Perhaps. But this is the price for versatility and sufficiency."

"What's that little gaugelike device up here near the nose, doctor?"

"That's to adjust the speed. It's what makes many of your special effects possible."

She presses a little trigger under the shaft, his hips buck and slap the table and light pours through, casting a moving image on the ceiling: He, Lucky Pierre, is wallowing in heaps of unwound film up there and beautiful young starlets are cracking their maidenheads on his cock like champagne bottles.

"It's only recently," the doctor is saying, "that we have come to understand the gonads as part of the central nervous system. In the past, we tended to isolate them purely in terms of their hypothetical reproductive functions, failing to see that this anthropocentric bias ignored the communities within and the universal order without."

Her grip on his prick is firm but soothing. His hips have stopped bucking, but he still seems to be experiencing the orgasm. Not as good as most orgasms, true, but better than the frustration that went before, and he enjoys the prolonged effect. On the ceiling, dying spermatozoa are arranging themselves into astrological signals.

"We now know that no sense data--which is to say, no data at all--enter man's central nervous system without simultaneous transmission to the gonads and, at the same time, that no mental processes take place, no matter what logic circuits may have been implemented by prior environmental engineering, without gonad feedback and involvement."

He seems to remember a time when a mean girl in school stuffed his prick in an inkwell, but on the ceiling now, his teacher is showing him an apple with the laws of gravity written on it.

"And as you may have surmised from our previous stress analysis, the peculiar design factor of the gonads, perhaps because of the relative brevity of their intracommunal life cycles, is their augmented processor impact and diminished storage capacities, such that their peculiar contribution to mental activity is projection...."

He eats the apple and falls through space at 32 feet per second per second, thinking, This apple tastes just like a cunt! Somewhere, he hears the sound of blades being sharpened, and the doctor's fingers have become as rigid and cold as steel.

"I assume you all know how this gadget works. You've taken these things apart... ?"

"Yes, but if there were snatching or excessive tension on our perforations, doctor, where would we...?"

"You'd open it right here."

On the ceiling, the doctor has grown fangs and scowling brows and is stealing up on the patient with a gleaming scalpel.

"You see? We could completely dissemble it, if you like...."

The doctor, grinning evilly, has slashed off the patient's genitals and is going for his heart, his head, but he pulls himself together. The doctor withdraws, cowering in a dark corner, her eyes gleaming like burning coals. Perhaps she has not yet struck the first blow. Perhaps she is naked.

"Efforts have been made to temper the impact of the gonads' signal digression and distortion through increasingly complex program designs for nonhuman cybernetic components, but, clearly, if man is to remain relevant, he must remain close to the transdimensional mainstream of life and, thus, must keep his gonads plugged into all his mental processes, and screw the consequences, to coin a phrase."

The doctor has discovered his throbbing cock. The scalpel falls from her trembling hand. Her fangs recede, her eyes glaze over with excitement. Cautiously, she approaches, her heart thumping visibly in the walls of her steaming cunt.

"That's not to say that these projections of the gonads are in themselves reliable stimuli for sound behavior--on the contrary! Barrel distortion, curvature of field, chromatic aberration, recurrent clap and flicker are only a few of the typical defects. The circle-of-confusion factor has never been satisfactorily resolved and tends to be infectious. Moreover, just as cerebral logic systems attempt to think out problems, the gonads instinctively try to fuck their way out. Thus, as you can see above, our subject somehow supposes he can neutralize what he has interpreted and projected as hostility by fucking me into quiescence or even affection. And who knows--ha, ha!--he may be right!"

Before mounting him, the hovering doctor inserts an endoscopic camera in her womb to photograph the attitude during entry and exit and shoves an extensometer up her ass to measure him through the separating membrane. Her golden body is as sleek and hard as a mannequin's--nothing sags or wobbles, not a blemish or a wrinkle--yet it's rumored she may be more than 300 years old! The wonders of science!

"He even perceives this coitus to be initiated by me, but these projections are occluded by a veritable montage of ambivalence. Behind the mad-doctor sequence, you will discover the indifferent doctor, the heroic doctor, the incompetent doctor, the corrupt and the distracted doctor. If I adjust the focus, you will see projections that include yourselves, others of the city streets, his workplace, the decaying cosmos, his assumed past."

She does a kind of split across his body, one hand on his knee, the other pressing down on his belly.

"Does it hurt? Good...."

Slowly, methodically, she lowers herself, and he feels her clitoris probe the length of his penis, feels the lips caress, suck, nibble, taste, pucker, blow, nip, feels her pubes thud softly, springily against his own.

"There is an associative rhythm to all these projections, which will become more evident as coitus proceeds, but it is clear that the projections are not any freer from the influence of the primary and secondary sense organs than our so-called rational operations are from the influence of the gonads."

He seems to see the wet red walls of her vagina, as though lit by quartz-iodine lamps, and beyond the lamps' glare, the fierce dark lens of the endoscopic camera. He wishes to perform well.

"Thus, advanced cineman's relationship with his gonads is not more remote; it is simply more complex. He has a heightened awareness of pattern, but also a heightened awareness of immediacy and randomness. Cineman is more space conscious, but he is also more time conscious. Motion is his very essence, yet no humanoid in the evolutionary scale was ever more conscious of configuration, fields, reaction formations or paradox. Kinetics is, finally, that science exclusively concerned with stasis."

He leaps and thrusts in the glistening red chamber, the insouciant pupilless eye of the camera now taunting him, infuriating him: He strives to reach it, to smash it with a head-on blow.

"He knows the circular reel and the square frame. His logic systems have led him to transcend art, his gonads have--ah!--led him beyond history...."

The oozing walls flex and ripple, pushing him away, pulling him back. The extensometer is grabbing at him through the thin membrane, testing him.

"He knows he must turn away from abstractions and--foo!--fantasies toward the concrete, knows he must cope more directly with--ungh!--with disorientation and--ah! oh!--oh, this is beautiful! this is good!--with disorientation and entropy, yet he achieves this--ah! uf!--through a new respect for--oh!--for symbolic systems--hah!--and purely conceptualized--wow!"

Strains toward the fucking lens, can't reach it. The walls grab him. He feels himself coming gloriously apart. "Now!" he cries, explodes, smashes the lens with his own eruptive death. Strobes spin and crash, screams rend the deep silence, darkness falls about him, collapsing like a starry sky. Some lost part of him shudders and sinks away.

Later, he hears his own heartbeat. The wet red walls are the insides of his own eyelids. He thinks, I have been dreaming all this. I will awake in my own bed, my pajamas sticky and wet with cold come. I will walk through the sullen crowds and the blowing snow to the studio. My staff will give me a hot bath and we will make films together. But when he opens his eyes, he is still in the doctor's office. This frightens him: Something real is happening! The doctor, in her immaculate white uniform, is taking read-outs from her computers. Her assistants are dismantling and storing apparatus, preparing flow charts, admiring the splotch of dripping sperm on the ceiling high above.

"Am I ... am I going to be all right?" he asks faintly.

The doctor comes over to him, gazes down, touches a cool hand to his forehead.

"Yes, I think so," she says.

He knows she is lying. It is serious, after all. He has made some kind of mistake. It's as though the very genre has been violated at the root, and there's nothing he can do about it.

"I want to know everything," he says, as a confession.

"You are suffering from hypotyposis compounded by severe parabologyny. I predict an episode of feverish protocunnicide, but this should be for the best, and at least an entertainment."

He sees something in her eyes he hasn't noticed before. A glint of communicative warmth behind the professional detachment. And the way she said entertainment....

"Clara, I...I love you! What shall I do?"

"Eat more balanced meals, exercise regularly, brush your teeth at least twice a day and, for the present, go home and get under a sun lamp."

"No, I mean--"

"That's a print," she says firmly. She hands him a prescription the size of an idiot card and he is wheeled out of the office and off the screen.

"Lucky Pierre, last of the great pornographic-film icons, is hoisted upside down."