She pointed to her chest with both her free arms.
"Nice, very nice," she said, caressing her chest.
"They're tightly bound," a distant, shadowy voice tells him. Everything but her arms and head appeared to be tightly bound in what he assumed to be gauze.
"Tight," she responded to the voice. "Yah, tight, tight yah, yah." Her hands moved upward to her crotch; her right hand forcefully cupped the area. "Tight again, yah."
He gazed disinterestedly. She tried to smile. She tried to put him at ease. She tried to please.
"You like?" she giggled. "You like tight?"
Her voice resonated a sweet, erotic innocence; her wide untamed eyes betrayed an ingenuous mania concealed by skin and gauze. He ignored her and forged ahead through the series of dangling parcels. At close quarters, from a cursory glance, he could tell that some were asleep, hands defiantly crossed onto their chests. Others were completely immobile, their cold blue lips gave off not the slightest hint of life. A few, like the girl, brimmed with exuberance, overcome with energy - or maybe simply desire and hunger - threatening to burst the constraints that contained it.
"Come here," the shadowy voice commanded. It took him a moment to grasp where the voice came from. He waded through the misty, cool, nearly ubiquitous, fog filling the room. After traveling ten paces toward the presumable source of the voice - he made a habit of counting paces while exploring strange spaces, he saw the outline of a figure, dangling - perhaps floating - from a chain attached to the floor. It dangled - or floated - by its neck, feet facing skyward. The body was straight, perfectly perpendicular to the ground. Unlike the others, its arms, if it had arms, were not free.
"Come closer, I won't bite, unlike Helga there," the voice, now produced a cleaner, crisper sound. At closer proximity, the voice sounded familiar.
"Helga?" he asked, although he knew full well whom the voice referred to.
"Yes, she is tight, as she claim. But all who have dared to venture to that terrain have yet to return," the voice faded with every passing word into silence. It remained silent.
--
Misdirected passion led him to this room. His initial impression was as follows: there must be a reason these figures are here. He presumed these were domesticated brutes: sociopaths, accountants, retired pitchmen, lawyers, politicians, and debutantes. If freed, each would inflict untold horror on others. Collectively, they would annihilate humanity en masse. This was the reason, he believed. This was the reason why Helga, blessed with the elegant, flawless visage of a beauty queen dangled like a piece of butchered flesh. Justice cannot be without reason, nor reason without justice. He continually tried to convince himself of this.
He stared at the still shadowy figure, ostensible source of the enigmatic voice. He peered back and could see only a distant outline of Helga. He imagined she was licking her lips with a perverse formality, cupping her bounded breasts, letting out tiny, polite, lascivious moans.
"Words are truth," the voice continued. "Action, in its truest sense, is merely a series of accidents - haphazard, stupid, and without direction."
He knew the voice. He was certain now.
"Then again, isn't that how you have reached this point, Franz?"
He stood motionless, petrified by the sudden revelation. The voice, however, continued prodigiously.
"Impatience permits an inquisitive eye no more than a cursory glance at life. A reality of images, of supposed beauty and boundless enthusiasm, vibrant and unbounded, overwhelms the senses. The sensual transcends the senses. Physical, empirical, sensual beauty - this is what is fixated upon. Smooth, unblemished, perfect, abundant: an image is invested with all improbable aspirations - absolute unity cobbled from the infinitesimal fragments of salvation, immortality, and acclaim."
"Images, inviting images, erect icons, titans, and gods before the unseeing eyes of mere mortals. Alas, images lie; icons are mirages, distracting from the parched desertscape of sensory reality. Accursed recognition, hollow shallow glory - these manufactures of our natural egotism and shared insecurity."
The voice went silent, again. He walked five paces closer for a clearer look. But as he approached, the figure became increasingly pixellated.
"The image lies. Stand down, its useless to proceed any further." He heeded its reproach and retreated five paces. Helga's tiny moans grew louder in his mind. He imagined her tightness was a distraction by design. He cleared his mind, recalling a mantra the familiar voice once taught him, "Concentrate, concentrate, my dear old friend, concentrate..."
---
In prior times and a past life, he filled his days with activity. He was at a lost when idle; felt incomplete and profane. Every morning he would read the paper cover to cover, have a bagel - plain, no cheese, and mull over the current events on an early jog. Recurring sights blurred by as he ran his nine minute mile, three times, twenty seven minutes and he would be home; three minutes to strip and he'll be in the shower - under thirty minutes all told. The morning shower gave rise to mediative thoughts; profound musings, dripped in languor and which demanded patient attention, ended abruptly when the water ceased and he stepped in front of the mirror.
In and out in under five - a motto he rarely contravened, except on those lonesome occasions of involuntary arousal, which took some time to alleviate. Onanism provided occasion for prolonged thought. The mind emptied as his motor activity proceeded according to instinct and automatism. He would close his eyes to seek a complete image of existence. A random draw of ephemera streamed through him and into oblivion. As he approached alleviation, the images attained a startling clarity, intensifying a fear stirring beneath a well regimented life: an awareness that time is death unfolding without direction, without purpose, and without end. On occasion, when the fear struck him most potently, he would kneel down and watch the water, spiraling near the drain, carry off his spilled seed towards the sewer. The sight solidified a paradoxical neurosis. It made him feel at once a profound power and a miserable impotence. The spiraling stream of squandered sugars and proteins served as reminder of his power over life - its creation and cessation. But the sight of an infinitesimal series of possibilities now rendered impossible laid bare the fragility and insignificance of his own being - life, the most unlikely of impossibilities. These two paradoxical thoughts would often visit him, taking a brief, intense sojourn from the unconscious into waking life.
These thoughts passed away and quickly as they came and the activities of routine continued unabated with the precision of a metronome. But they would recur, coincidentally when primal desires overflowing its bounds and demanding, at least in his case, a most routine conclusion. After his morning shower followed brushing his teeth, shaving, and applying deodorant...
---
In prior times and a past life, he filled his days with activity. He was at a lost when idle; felt incomplete and profane. Every morning he would read the paper cover to cover, have a bagel - plain, no cheese, and mull over the current events on an early jog. Recurring sights blurred by as he ran his nine minute mile, three times, twenty seven minutes and he would be home; three minutes to strip and he'll be in the shower - under thirty minutes all told. The morning shower gave rise to mediative thoughts; profound musings, dripped in languor and which demanded patient attention, ended abruptly when the water ceased and he stepped in front of the mirror.
In and out in under five - a motto he rarely contravened, except on those lonesome occasions of involuntary arousal, which took some time to alleviate. Onanism provided occasion for prolonged thought. The mind emptied as his motor activity proceeded according to instinct and automatism. He would close his eyes to seek a complete image of existence. A random draw of ephemera streamed through him and into oblivion. As he approached alleviation, the images attained a startling clarity, intensifying a fear stirring beneath a well regimented life: an awareness that time is death unfolding without direction, without purpose, and without end. On occasion, when the fear struck him most potently, he would kneel down and watch the water, spiraling near the drain, carry off his spilled seed towards the sewer. The sight solidified a paradoxical neurosis. It made him feel at once a profound power and a miserable impotence. The spiraling stream of squandered sugars and proteins served as reminder of his power over life - its creation and cessation. But the sight of an infinitesimal series of possibilities now rendered impossible laid bare the fragility and insignificance of his own being - life, the most unlikely of impossibilities. These two paradoxical thoughts would often visit him, taking a brief, intense sojourn from the unconscious into waking life.
These thoughts passed away and quickly as they came and the activities of routine continued unabated with the precision of a metronome. But they would recur, coincidentally when primal desires overflowing its bounds and demanding, at least in his case, a most routine conclusion. After his morning shower followed brushing his teeth, shaving, and applying deodorant...
