SWNOVELS Chapter 14
Xenon Gas Drugged-Up Massage.
The massage therapists enclosed their arms around their subjects, making the PLUR heart sign with their hands and fingers just in front of them.
“...Preserved roses. There are some for you to take home with you.
“...To properly preserve these fresh flowers, it’s critical that the luxury roses are cut when they are at their most beautiful. The flowers are then put into a mixture of glycerin and other natural plant elements. This re-hydrates the rose from its petals to its stem and replaces the sap within it.
“Close your eyes if you feel like doing that,” the voice on-screen continued.
The PLUR sign was broken open at the thumbs point, and the fingertips of the top of the heart-shape that was being formed with the therapists’ hands came down to the sternum, the little fingers resting inside the slight xiphoid process gap, touching the covering layer of thin muscle, and in touch with the splanchnic nerves and the celiac ganglia. Slowly, the fingertips were being rotated over the hard bone of the lower sternum.
“This works if you do it on yourself, but it’s much better when someone else does it for you, don’t you think?”
None of the two answered. They were both already completely ‘out of it.’
*
Much more than ten minutes later, hot and cold towels were used to revive the two sleeping beauties. First warm towels around the left wrist, and then the right wrist, and then cold towels the same way, then back to warmish/hot towels.
One girl took a warm towel and raised it close to her face and eyes.
Seemingly, there was a rose-y pink mist falling down from somewhere in the ceiling in front of the wall-screen which was off now. The rest of the large suite was almost in full darkness, with only a few of the original electric Baccarat candle stands still illuminated. All the attendants and massage people all left the large suite. There was only Charlotte and Vera-Lucien and the two young women in there.
An old, quite old gentleman in a very sharp black suit entered the room and went straight up to the front and looked over all the people in the place, until his eyes came to rest on the two ladies sitting in the very comfortable plush velvet seats. Everything about him seem as though it had a flourish although he was very normal in how he moved and how he stood, and yet, he appeared poised in every sense. Silvery grey hair slicked back, black eyebrows, another one with wide lips like Charlotte - or Mick Jagger, for that matter - and also with that highly extended it seemed, philtrum. He had spectacles but he took those off and leaned forward. He had dark piercing eyes.
Everything about him was perfectly, very perfectly groomed.
High French shoulders on his extra-long suit jacket, three large Paspaley pearl working buttons on his jacket sleeves, all pearl buttons elsewhere too, all equally, working buttons; none just for show.
Ice white shirt and simple, elegant black Matellasé cloth tie -, black leather trouser belt.
He raised one knife-edge pressed trouser leg onto the cross-strut of an empty chair in front of the two girls and rest his right elbow on his knee, an extended hand with the spectacles held in between rather long philosopher’s fingers.
“Bon soir, mademoiselles. Good evening. May I say how wonderful it is to be here with you and how certainly – how truly beautiful you are.” He made a circular expressive gesture with his left hand. “In the face. You have truly beautiful faces.” He smiled away to one side. “We leave the bodies to the men-folk to decide naturally. Humph. We need not to talk about this ourselves at this point. The couturiers yes, they will consider the body.” Once again he gestured – a long vertical signal with his right hand this time, the one with the spectacles in it.
“...I hope you are thinking about being mothers one day. It does not matter how, we acquire the children, yes. The world is so filled with the children, that we have to mother sometimes the people too, you know, all the people, as though they are like children. Pah! But this is for much later on.
“I want to tell you a short story about my mother now. May I?
“In the way of the natural world, you understand, the material world and its time sequence, its duration, its meanness, its insensitivity -, I only knew my mother for perhaps a few weeks. Though in reality I knew her since forever.”
He never looked away except for only a very few brief moments, and looked at them plainly, at an even angle as you might say – neither up at them nor downwards at them. This made the two women feel as if he were saying he was like them, not above them at all.
“With my young life filled with confusion and so many mixtures of feelings, such emotionality of anger, my accusation of my mother for going somewhere, who knows where -, yet, and yet, it felt that my persisting thoughts of her implied that in a way, she had not left at all, that had never left.
“I cursed the heavens. And the heavens, they heard these curses of mine, and they replied though not with their own anger. The world of men had accused my mother. And I had accused the world, and my mother. And then, as I grew up, I learned to accuse the world of men, and not my mother, and then, not even the world, but only men; human beings and at last, the world herself, she answered me and I could suddenly see as though literally through the eyes of my mother.
“We have an expression, a word, in the French – it is ‘déclic’ – it means that something suddenly goes off in your head, a sudden understanding which has been triggered by a certain something. At this time there was an assured déclic for me when the world then replied to all my complaining.
“And though the world’s answer to me was not the answer of God, but it was at least an answer from out of the heavens, and the answer covered all of my questions, my uncertainties, my pain...
...with a purity without sin, a whiteness uncompromised, an anaesthetic that numbed all of my pain - which was still there beneath the surface – and like a soft sugar the world covered and coated all of my bitterness and pain...
...with snow.”
Clare Stagg came on the big speakers singing ‘All I Want’ in her strong Irish accented voice. And the place exploded in light and white and silver glittering snow flakes with projecting mapping scenes of the inside of Notre Dame with its glamorous stain glass colours all over every inch of ceiling and wall and floor.
No one noticed Xan the strange elfen fairy creature entering into the room.
’All I want is nothing more, to hear you knocking ahn my door, ’cause if I could see your face once more, I could die a happy girl I’m sure.
’When you said your last goodbye, I died a little bit inside, and I lay in tears in bed all night,
’Alone withoutchyer by my side. But if you luved me, why’d yer leave me, take my body, take my body – and all I wanted and all I need is, to find somebody, I’ll find somebody...
’...like -,
’You oh oh o-oh...
‘Like you-oh oh. Ooooh oh oh woah.’
An old Gaelic culture folk-song, really.