The Green Lady 🗽 NYC
The Luxorium
🍒
Three seconds after Curtus inserted his penis into the plush bottom of Phyllis, the sky exploded. The city outside his window was bombarded with bright orange streaks. It was as if the insertion of his cock had exploded the New York skyline. Once again, the greatest moment of pleasure led to a moment of collapse, the same brief moment of depression he always felt right after he got what he really wanted.
The orange beams discretely sliced and evaporated several of the buildings around him. He heard fizzling and grilling sounds even in the bowels of his own building, which had hitherto been as solid as Central Park West itself.
After about three minutes the streets were silent, as if al-Quaida was successful this time around. What Curtus didn’t know however was that al-Quaida and ISIS had nothing to do with it. Nor did the Russians or the Chinese. The press couldn’t even blame the Canadians, those smug defenceless Northerners who Curtus thought took American good will and protection for granted, and then complained about the military-industrial complex. No one, not even the eagle-eyed scouts of Area 51, had a clue what hit them.
Apparently Donald Rumsfeld was right: there are things that you know and things that you don’t know, and then there are things that you don’t know that you don’t know. Among the latter, one of these things was that Curtus had been spared for the most preposterous of reasons.
In a galaxy so far away that Curtus couldn’t even imagine it, there was a pink marshmallow Empire that coveted the clear blue water of Earth. The pink controllers of this Empire saw what the humans had done to this water and felt a moral imperative to act. Of course, this Moral Imperative went hand in hand with their political and military aim of conquering the Violet Hoop, and so they framed their goals in all sorts of altruistic and flowery language. The Common Good of the Three Universes, an Inconvenient Truth that must be faced, the Fate of Nations, Manifest Destiny, all the usual capitalized culprits.
Another unknown within Curtus’ vast hidden world of unknowns was that in this faraway galaxy there existed a sect which had a great affinity for people just like Curtus. The sect was called The Luxorium, and was dedicated to the idea that the world of practical things only existed to ensure the survival of Beauty and Pleasure. On Earth we would call them aesthetes, decadents, or lovers of art for the sake of art. Some just called them perverts. On Baulis Prime they were called luxuriants.
The Baulians had learned over the last twenty thousand years to tolerate this pleasure-seeking cult. Indeed, the Baulian Empire had existed long enough to become somewhat decadent itself, at least in the private realm. And so they enacted privacy laws that agreed with The Luxorium’s prime directive, which was to make sure that everyone had the freedom to do exactly what they wanted to please themselves in the privacy of their own space and in the freedom of their own time.
Curtus looked at the cork walls and the crumbs of cherry macaron on the pink, late 19th-century Sèvres porcelain plate. He looked at the leather chairs and the Louis XIV table stands. He saw Phyllis, now upright in their bed, her short black hair curling like a question mark around her small, exquisite ears. Outside the window, which was bordered by Antwerp lace in heart-shaped patterns of mirth and debauchery, he saw a few plumes of soft black smoke and one or two orange beams quietly exterminating stragglers who didn’t meet the Empire’s criteria for continued existence. These were what some Baulians jokingly referred to as The Seventeen Percent Solution.
Together they got down from the bed and walked to the window. They saw a Hassidic Jew screaming down the street. Over to the far right he thought he saw the Lenin memorial go up in flames. Curtus imagined it was John, the beetle, not the Russian one.
They remembered that there were still several macarons in the fridge and that they hadn’t yet gotten to the bottom of that jeroboam of Pol Roget. Turning toward Phyllis and fitting his naked white body into her naked white body, Curtus remembered Voltaire’s famous words: We live in the best of all possible worlds.
🗽
Next: 💚 The Anunnaki
Table of Contents - Chart of Contents - Characters - Glossary - Maps - Story Lines