Exit to Eden Read Online Free PDF

Ultra-lite plane as high and as fast as it will go on a teacup of gas."
    He had nodded for me to go on.
    "There is something compulsive, stupid about it all. For two years I've been working as a photographer. But in a way it's the same routine. More and more danger. The scrapes I've gotten into are obscene. Last time, I nearly bought it in El Salvador, ignoring the curfew, like some rich kid on vacation…"
    Don't really want to talk about that. Those awful endless seconds in which for the first time in my life I could hear my own watch tick. Couldn't stop running it by over and over afterwards, what
almost
happened: TIME-LIFE PHOTOGRAPHER GUNNED DOWN BY DEATH SQUAD IN EL SALVADOR. The end of Elliott Slater, who could have been writing the great American novel in Berkeley, or skiing in Gstaad instead of doing this.
    Wouldn't have made the network news for two nights.
    "But that's often the
type
of man who comes here, Elliott," he said calmly. "The kind of man who submits to no one and nothing in the real world. The man who's used to wielding power and fed up with intimidating others. He comes to us to be turned inside out."
    I smiled at that, I think. Turned inside out.
    "Don't edit the fantasies, Elliott. Just talk to me. You're obviously articulate. Most of the men who come to us are articulate. They have keen and elaborate imaginations, well-developed fantasies. I don't listen to these fantasies like a doctor. I listen to them as stories. Like a literary man, if you will. Do you want a drink to help you talk? Maybe some Scotch, a glass of wine?"
    "Scotch," I had said absently. I didn't want to be drunk. "There was one fantasy in particular," I said, as he stood up and went to the bar. "A fantasy that used to obsess me when I was a boy."
    "Tell me."
    "God, you don't know how felonious it all was, having those fantasies, thinking I was some sort of lunatic when everyone else was gaping at the
Playboy
centerfold and the cheerleaders on the football field."
    Johnny Walker Black Label. Good luck. Just a little ice. Even the aroma and the thick crystal glass in my hand had its effect.
    "When people discuss their fantasies they often talk only about the acceptable," he said as he settled behind the desk again, leaning back. He was not drinking, merely drawing on the pipe. "They talk about the cliches, not about what they really imagine at all. How many of your classmates had the same fantasies, do you think?"
    "Well, I used to imagine something of a Greek myth," I said. "We were all youths in a very great Greek city, and every few years seven of us—you know, like in the Theseus myth—were sent to another city to serve as sexual slaves."
    I took a little sip of the Scotch.
    "It was an old, sacrosanct arrangement," I said, "and an honor to be chosen, yet we dreaded it. We were taken into the temple, told by the priests to submit to everything that would happen to us in the other city, and our sex organs were consecrated to the god. It had happened for countless generations, but the older boys who had been through it never told us what would take place."
    "Nice," he said softly. "And then…"
    "As soon as we arrived in the other city, our clothes were taken away. And we were auctioned off to the highest bidder to serve for several years. It seemed we brought luck to the rich men who bought us, we were symbols of fertility and masculine power, like the Priapus in the Roman garden, the Herm at the Greek door."
    How strange it felt to be telling it, even to a man who seemed the perfect listener. Not the faintest indication that he was shocked.
    "We were cherished by our masters. But we weren't human. We were utterly subservient, meant to be played with." I took another slow drink. Might as well get it all out. "Meant to be beaten," I said, "and sexually tormented and starved—driven through the city for the amusement of the master, made to stand at the gate for hours in a state of sexual tension while the passersby stared, that kind