Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [34]
For it soon became clear that no mere woman could satisfy him—not Vernon. His activities moved into an entirely new sphere of intensity and abstraction. Now, when the velvet curtain shot skywards, Vernon might be astride a black stallion on a marmoreal dune, his narrow eyes fixed on the caravan of defenseless Arab women straggling along beneath him; then he dug in his spurs and thundered down on them, swords twirling in either hand. Or else Vernon climbed from a wriggling human swamp of tangled naked bodies, playfully batting away the hands that clutched at him, until he was tugged down once again into the thudding mass of membrane and heat. He visited strange planets where women were metal, were flowers, were gas. Soon he became a cumulus cloud, a tidal wave, the East Wind, the boiling Earth’s core, the air itself, wheeling round a terrified globe as whole tribes, races, ecologies fled and scattered under the continent-wide shadow of his approach.
It was after about a month of this new brand of skylarking that things began to go rather seriously awry.
The first hint of disaster came with sporadic attacks of ejaculatio praecox. Vernon would settle down for a leisurely session, would just be casting and scripting the cosmic drama about to be unfolded before him—and would look down to find his thoughts had been messily and pleasurelessly anticipated by the roguish weapon in his hands. It began to happen more frequently, sometimes quite out of the blue: Vernon wouldn’t even notice until he saw the boyish, tell-tale stains on his pants last thing at night. (Amazingly, and rather hurtfully too, his wife didn’t seem to detect any real difference. But he was making love to her only every ten or eleven days by that time.) Vernon made a creditable attempt to laugh the whole thing off, and, sure enough, after a while the trouble cleared itself up. What followed, however, was far worse.
To begin with, at any rate, Vernon blamed himself. He was so relieved, and so childishly delighted, by his newly recovered prowess that he teased out his “sessions” to unendurable, unprecedented lengths. Perhaps that wasn’t wise … What was certain was that he overdid it. Within a week, and quite against his will, Vernon’s “sessions” were taking between thirty and forty-five minutes; within two weeks, up to an hour and a half. It wrecked his schedules: all the lightning strikes, all the silky raids, that used to punctuate his life were reduced to dour campaigns which Vernon could never truly win. “Vernon, are you ill?” his wife would say outside the bathroom door. “It’s nearly tea-time.” Vernon—slumped on the lavatory seat, panting with exhaustion—looked up wildly, his eyes startled, shrunken. He coughed until he found his voice. “I’ll be straight out,” he managed to say, climbing heavily to his feet.
Nothing Vernon could summon would deliver him. Massed, maddened, cartwheeling women—some of molten pewter and fifty feet tall, others indigo and no bigger than fountain pens—hollered at him from the four corners of the universe. No help. He gathered all the innocents and subjected them to atrocities of unimaginable proportions, committing a million murders enriched with infamous tortures.