With the fits and the bombers, Aimee had reached a kind of breaking point. She had to get away from it all, go into seclusion until she could find a way to reimpose some measure of normality. The chamber in which Aimee had isolated herself was a perfect gray cube, oppressively small and punitively bare, with just a straw sleeping pallet on the hard stone floor, a knotted scourge hanging from a nail driven into the wall, and an overhead light so intense that it made relaxation impossible. It had been designed as a place for self-mortification and introspection, but neither of these seemed to be doing Aimee any good. She had spent the first day alternating between flagellation and lamentation, but even with her bared back bloody from repeated self-thrashings with the scourge no relief came. No insight or enlightenment, no peace of mind or redemption, just an ongoing fury at Semple. Where was her sister? What was she doing?
On the second day, in an attempt to answer that question, Aimee had conjured a television in the hope of picking up some ether-born image of her sister, but even that refused to come out right. She had hoped for a modest Sony Trinitron, but what materialized was a dubious piece of highly deviant equipment with exposed circuitry, a weird triangular screen, and no remote. No matter how many times she sent it back and tried again, it always returned the same. Finally, in exasperation, she turned it on, hoping it would do the trick. Even in that, the thing failed her. She found she had no way to tune it or even surf the channels. All it seemed able to do was flip through an endless sequence of random soundless images at rock video speed-an atomic explosion; a parade of some kind; giant ants in the process of destroying a gas station; some lewd TV show with naked young men and women being paraded down a catwalk; a black and white Philip Morris cigarette commercial; grainy sadomasochistic porno; an unshaven man in leather pants and a dirty shirt struggling through a swamp in the company of a small mammal; the same man with an older individual on a boat on a river; what appeared to be the interior of some potentate’s harem; a scene from Bewitched featuring Agnes Moorehead as Endora; giant black men armed with gold spears attacking a crowd in a cloud of dust; a public hanging; black-faced sheep wandering in the desert and drinking at a water hole.
Then, after much more of the same, and to Aimee’s total shock and horror, the headlong MTV imagery halted and held on a lingering long shot of Semple. Aimee had been hoping to catch a glimpse of Semple, but this was hardly the glimpse that she needed. Her sister was spread-eagled on a bed, in what looked to be a large and very well appointed tent, locked in a furious, passionate coupling beneath a tall man with an almost perfect body and the face of a 1950s movie actor. Suddenly sound cut in, deafeningly loud in the confines of the bare cell. “Fuck me, you bastard! Fuck me until I die!” over and over in lewd and rhythmic repetition. Aimee recognized them as the selfsame obscenities she herself had mouthed during her seizure; she bit deep into her lip, drawing blood but saying nothing. She only began to scream when Semple, pausing between eager pelvic trusts, looked directly at whatever served as a camera and winked lasciviously at Aimee. “Hi, sis. Wish you were here!”
***
“Do you have a cigarette?”
Semple lay back heavy-eyed, her breathing slowly returning to normal. How long would it be until she could once again have sex just for amusement? She was getting more than a little weary of being forced into positions where she could only save her ass by giving it up to the local number-one bull goose freak. First Anubis, now this seven-foot streak of Old Testament self-indulgence. To be strictly truthful, though, she had to admit that having sex with the self-created Moses was hardly a chore. He had been appreciative and seemed at least marginally to care if his partner had a good time.
Obviously, leading this tribe of disgruntled Bible Belters around the desert had afforded him little in the way of protracted romance, and when he’d first taken Semple to his tent and watched her wash the worst of the desert dust from her body, he had become positively cross-eyed with lust. Not that she had given him a chance to go any other way. She had stood flagrantly naked in the large porcelain bowl that he had thoughtfully provided, using water so freely that the parched tribe outside would have been scandalized to witness the display. At the same time she had recounted, in very matter-of-fact terms, an edited version of her encounters with Anubis, culminating in her escape from Necropolis. The contrast between her precise narrative and the sensually slow and suggestive way she moved his borrowed washcloth over her bare skin, paying particularly loving attention to her breasts, buttocks, and inner thighs, had robbed Moses of all biblical reason. Before she had even had a chance to dry herself off, he had picked her up bodily and carried her to his large and highly comfortable traveling bed, laying her atop the silk sheets, fur rugs, and embroidered cushions.
Forty-five very relative minutes later, Semple found herself satiated, probably bruised, and fighting off a major craving for nicotine. About the only thing that spoiled this otherwise satisfactory picture was an irrational impression that somehow Aimee had been watching her and Moses fucking. It was a feeling like the old days, when the two of them had been one, and Semple had brought home sailors or cowboys; Aimee had pretended to vacate the body, but got her kicks just the same. Moses lay flat on his back, eyes closed, his chest rising and falling, a smile of patriarchal satisfaction playing at the corners of his mouth. When she asked him for a cigarette, he opened his eyes and he smiled. “Under the prevailing criteria, cigarettes won’t be invented for another five thousand years.”
“Are you telling me you don’t have any? This tent hardly conforms to any five-thousand-year-old criteria.”
And indeed it didn’t. Compared to the wretchedness endured by the faithful outside, the interior of their leader’s tent was chock-full of goodies from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The atmosphere was chill, as though cooled by a hidden and silent air conditioner. Books and magazines littered small folding tables, a portable refrigerator and a water fountain stood in one corner of the rectangular bedouin structure, while Moorish hangings and Persian rugs provided a surprisingly decorative touch. Semple could only wonder which of the poor ignorant bastards outside had the unenviable task of toting all this stuff across the desert when the tribe traveled. Semple also noticed that there were an inordinate number of clocks and other timepieces scattered around the place, from hourglasses to ultramodern digital space chronometers, but she was too burned out to start conjecturing on Moses’ time fetish.
Moses had leaned over and was rummaging among a collection of stuff on a bedside table. When he found what he was looking for, it turned out to be a pack of Lucky Strikes with the pre–World War II vintage red and green pack. He shook one loose, tapped it on his thumbnail, and put it between her lips. Her mouth twisted into deliberate tough-gal angles around the unfiltered cigarette. “So light me.”
Semple knew the only way to deal with the likes of this Moses was to give as good as she got, if not better. She had, of course, come across plenty like him before. All those traveling preachers in the old days had been just the same. In public they’d preach hellfire, damnation, family and moral purity, but back at the hotel, they’d want nothing more than to drink prohibition needle gin and do the eagle rock all night long with two or three or more professional sinners or amateur enthusiasts; and, being natural performers, with a performer’s need to please the crowd, they could usually muster as much style and grace as this Moses. After a little more rummaging, he came up with a book of matches with a shocking pink cover that bore the inscription BABY DOLL LOUNGE. This little artifact was something else Semple tucked away in her memory for future consideration.