Songs_of_the_Satyrs Read Online Free PDF Page B

have any kind of neurodegenerative disease, and they weren’t doing drugs—or at least nothing that would send them on a sexual bender.
    She flipped through the textbook, checking off positions they had tried in her mind. She realized she was feeling drunk and woozy. It was hot in Samantha’s room. She could hear drums and flutes.
    “What is that music?” she murmured.
    “Oh God, Sasha down the hall has been on a Depeche Mode kick lately.”
    Samantha was braless beneath her T-shirt, and Jess could trace her nipples along the light cotton fabric. Samantha caught her eyes and Jess shifted on the bed. They kissed, giggling. They had kissed once before playing spin the bottle at a party, but it hadn’t done anything for either of them then.
    This time she grew hot and wet immediately and they locked tongues, stripping off their clothes and burying themselves in the exotic sameness of each other.
     
    ***
     
    She found Denny in his room the next afternoon. He smelled of sweat and perfume and other women, and without a word he peeled away her panties and bent her over the couch, his thrusting like a pounding drumbeat. His sweat dripped on her neck and back. The last thing she remembered clearly was the sound of drums as she began going in and out of lucidity.
    In fact there were drums all around, and naked slaves holding burning brands, their dark skin glistening with sweat and oil in the torchlight. The flames glittered on the polished wood and marble of the hall. Or was it a church? She could remember walking in the cold echoing space once when she was a girl on a grade-school field trip. The beautiful lacquered millwork and brocade tapestries along the walls. She squinted at small, engraved plates that labeled each artifact of colonial history in the dry and sterile space, while their docent, prim and proper, cautioned them not to touch anything.
    Now in the past, what looked to be a future governor’s mansion, filled with heat. August men dressed like English lords in embroidered silk and tight wigs encircled women in various states of dress: fine velvet gowns and simple linen shifts. Their wives and servants. Their slaves. Soon they were taking them aside in twos and threes, imported finery and homespun dropped carelessly on the parquet floors as they began their ecstasies.
    Singularly and in groups, again and again, in permutation after permutation of entanglement and animal frenzy, they grew more crazed. Here two men pummeled one another with bloody fists. There, the wife of a minister knelt before a wealthy plantation owner, punching him repeatedly in the scrotum as he came, his semen spurting out as if driven forth by her blows.
     
    ***
     
    Jess regained consciousness some time after midnight in the stillness of Denny’s room. She was naked and alone, salty crust on her face, hair, and back. She staggered to the bathroom and rinsed her mouth. How many times had they done it? Seemed impossible. Foggily, she tried to remember what was real and what was a dream.
    A dream. The thought instantly sobered her. Visions she had seen, strange alien memories from history: manic sexual abandon and increasing violence that had ended with hacked and bloody corpses lying among the discarded petticoats and torn stays. Somehow she knew in her core that it had been real.
    She shuddered violently, then began looking around for her clothes. She found her underwear hanging from Denny’s computer monitor. She reached for them and the screen caught her eye. It was a painting of one of the city’s early luminaries. He had a visible scar on his face which she’d been taught had happened in a battle with the French. She had seen him that night, choking a maidservant in the throes of his lust until someone smashed a bottle against his head. Afterward, his teeth had flashed white and feral beneath the running blood as he beat her to death.
    Denny had left dozens of windows open on his desktop. She began to flip through them.