“Christa, would you like to see my study? I couldn’t help but overhear that you are a fan of the more Neptunian and Vernian artes and I may have a few relics in my office that would amuse you. I promise I am too old to bite.“

His last comment would have scared me but his goofy English charm showed some of his higher judgments and I felt somewhat of a relief from the man’s distinct charm. A real Donald Sutherland type, Janus is. 

So I followed Janus through the double glass doors into this mahogany study, air humid with feverish ambrosia. 

 “Christa, I’m in my sixties but I feel much older. I have two daughters, both who mean ten sephiroths to me. You have met my lovely Marcia and her charming temper. My other daughter is estranged and has been for a very long time, not out of any ill will but it’s due to her nature. My other daughter, you see, has this ability to influence people in strange ways and because of this she has to live a life of solitude and travel.”

“What kind of strange ways?” I asked. 

“She can control people’s memories, and how they perceive them later on. But a wretched mess she is; hardly human so she disguises herself in with disheveled artists. She attracts martyrs, sometimes I think she’s the one who turns people into them.”

“How does she do that?”

“Because of how beautiful she is, you remind me of her Christa.”

“I would like to meet her. Sometimes I fear that I forget my memories. That I almost forget who I am, looking to men to help me understand who I should be.”

He crosses his legs and looks at me as if I had just stolen something from him, he subtly grins. He doesn’t believe me, doesn’t trust that I’m telling the truth. The high, black ceiling of his office drapes down to try and touch me. I could tell he used to be a butcher, or some kind of leather maker.

Thick, dark fuschia drapes linger over the windows, dampening all day light and all sound. Pink lips closed, hiding a Sun resting upon my skittish tongue. Because of the citrine glare from the candlelit lamps, shadow play is strange in this room. He’s sitting across from me on a french rococo couch and I’m left dangling in a cocktail sofa chair. 

He responds, “You want a lithean release just to see if a man could remind you of who you were before you got all old and crazy. This way, he can just tell you what you are instead of you having to figure it out for yourself. 

My question to you is, why are you sitting here in my office playing this mind game with me and not the man you came here with? Your boyfriend, Christine. Why are you sitting here, lying to me?”

His voice was too calm to respond with an emotional reaction. He’s playing a game of chess with me.  My tongue swelled up slightly, my chest and neck began to sweat. A suppressed warish fever exacerbated the air.

“I am not lying, only trying to make you understand. And Lee isnt my boyfriend. He doesn’t see me in that light.” His idea of understandment is sticking his cock into a venus fly trap, he’s not opposed. He chose to stare and analyze me. The bottom of his eyes dropped into limitlessness. He’s now finding what would dominate my muses. Grazing, stalking the R’lyehian field mines of my mind.

He unfolds his legs. Taking only what’s been peeled raw, an occupational hazard. In order to cure what had been tainted after death, he prefers to get his leather unprocessed so he can dehair it himself. “Does he not see you in that light only because he knows he shouldn’t?”

“Why would he think he shouldn’t?”

“Christa dearling, anyone who approaches my house (which is extremely rare) is immediately profiled. Decades of high service granted me some nice skip tracing software. And it looks like you and Lee are cousins.”

I could tell this Janus character was trying to provoke me anyway he could which I found kind of dirty. And I chose safely to not dignify his crude comment with an answer.

            Realizing I was too tense to open up, we changed the topic and talked about a recent deep sea exhibition he did out in Chilé. My scattered thoughts inflected into a masochistic syntax. I was trying my best not to imagine his arms reaching into opaque absences, inside somatic coral. Every word he said is always more unexpected than the last. I may as well sit here dispossessed.

“What were you hoping to find the most when you were going down?” I asked.

He ran his fingers through his thick white hair, pulling a lock back from falling in his face.

“I always search for the same thing when I’m diving; the Tyrianna Nobilis. A certain breed of the species that lives near those coastlines.”

“Nudiplura, I frequent sea slug forums all the time.” I stopped myself before getting too wordy. The more flashy or flamboyant I’ll become the more he’ll sense I’m trying to derail the conversation. As if he thinks I’m the shiny lure in this situation. 

“Why do you like that one in particular?” I asked strategically meekly.

He cocked his head slightly to the side responding, “Why have you been going on Nudiplura forums? Perhaps you do to feel something. Tell me some of the causes why women endure physical numbness during sex. Most importantly, tell me what the difference is between sociological excuses and reasons for vaginal wetness.”

“I can feel things down there, up here just fine. Why would you say Lee and I are cousins?”

My muscles started to tense up again, my inner thighs and lower abdomen. He leaned back on the couch, spreading out his arms. His lower jaw structured to tear the throat out of Cerberus. Large draconian teeth trying to hide themselves from me yet peaking out so subtly as he said, “I’m surprised you’ve been so pent up as of late, you know you have to avoid stress. And it’s not my fault he didn’t tell you, it’s not my fault you’re obsessed with him.” 

If only we went to a normal house for a spare tire; I was beginning to grow suspicious of who exactly I was dealing with. Wondering if he knew that Lee and I came from the astral, if he knew who or where Hely Scemath was. We exchanged a glance of mutual understanding and silence filled the room with a kind of sorrow.  

But before I started to derail into wariness something about his eyes, a kind of Wisdom that lingers under a mothers foot gleaned something within me. That sea slug he loves to search for must be as charming as a soothsayer is to Judgement. 

He went on, “you know, when i’m down there looking for Tyrianna Nobilius, I always have to fish out these salvatory cottony webs that hover over the opening walls of coral caves where they usually hide themselves in. These specific types of slugs like to create what some call ‘veil plasm’. It’s part of their only defense mechanism towards larger predators; they create an optical illusion by creating these attractive webs to distract the perpetrator from the actual slug. It’s what gnosticism did to Wisdom, adding a price to something free. 

The treasures you let yourself keep, Christine, in Death or Life, will always be.”

I hesitantly gleaned further into his silvery eyes. Thinking of Tyrianna’s web. (Indra’s Net).

The web stretched apart in my mind like wet, blonde hair covering the face of a sea nymph. Now I know what turned Janus on; women bred without hypocrisy. Someone who knew Judgement well, to the point where they knew Judgements falsities. Yet my legs were glued shut with sweat, sitting there on that chair, I am probably just a Nebulis’ veil to him, something that has to be scrubbed clean to see a mucusy polished shine. A perfect oyster fits into a perfect bed in his mind. 

The moisture in the air grew heavier from our tandem, my degeneracy from suppression gave weight to my eyelids. I kept pretending that I wasn’t turned on. The last thing I’d want to do is appear to him as unclean. Shadows dispersed along the walls above us like black inky sea urchins. Fordyce spots, soft and strange, lingering everywhere above our heads. 

“Take your sweater off, you look febrile.”

I did and he quickly asked, “do you know how to remember who you are?” 

“I think so.”

“No you dont. You hide yourself away, under a veil. Under a nueraplura’s shell. If you think you’ll stay afloat with borrowed legacies from other men, whom you have never spoken to but only have read, you’ll only drown back to me, back into my office that you’ll soon call the Deep Sea. Take off your shirt. You get off so much by the Judgement of Mars, I could only assume you have enough confidence to do at least that, lest you’re riddled with hypocrisy. Playing games of Venus that are written to serve only you, must be convenient.” 

I tightened the corners of my mouth with a viced grin and took my shirt off.  If he thinks he can crucify me, that id burst into flame from showing myself half naked. I took my shirt off. I knew Lee was somewhere off in the mansion with Marcia, too reserved and shy to make a move on her cause he never would with me.

I didn’t want to argue with him, debate was out of the question in this game of chess. Instead, I said,

“I have never abandoned Venus, maybe I have been feeling tense lately because i’ve seen what others are capable of. And it’s necessary to have Judgement in place to structure that. But I’ve never lost sight of Love.”

Janus replied, “your wrong. Venus only can relay flashes of what love is. Where you’re heading, she’s far behind us now. And clearly you’ve failed Judgement. You can’t even properly negate time enough to figure out why you get off by Lee rejecting you. You should take off your pants. And Christine, modesty and grace are far more impressive than mathematical plots and fictions. Clinging to your veil, thinking separation from Man will keep you from sorrow. 

You have to swallow back sorrow as if it were the only thing that would save you from the Abyss. Stripping you of your irreverent reward systems by stripping you of your sleeping flesh. Take your pants off.” 

The room went from feeling wombishly compact into a brisk vastness. Even the temperature of the lighting, once small and golden now splinters off into rainy, amber glares. Lean pieces of light traveling like baby serpents inside a dark ocean. Horripilation scaled my aging legs, suddenly I felt an excess of memories and thoughts disperse into a quiet vacuum. 

Alabaster thighs, bare and patient stood in quietness. White clay slowly melting in the embrace of his absent touch. The dream is dead, my fantasy has been granted. 

Janus across the room, his face rests into a murderous calm. His kind eyes looking at my body as he marks the date of a wars ending as he sends me to the Abyss of sex.

His voice cutting like knives made from calcified milk, sharp blades of doves wings pulsing in the declivities. 

“Now pour that glass of water over your face. And as you do it say, “Atah.”

My face dripping in this lukewarm water. He directed me to the couch where he was sitting. I was thinking that he would finally see me deemed worthy beyond the veil, for him to touch me. He was still fully dressed. Ironed pants and black loafers. But instead he had me lay down on the couch and gestured to spread my legs slightly apart to the missionary. 

He left the room without explanation and as soon as he reemerged from whatever deep corner that briefly consumed him, I saw like a confused red flare in a dream, I saw on his left arm a huge brown owl perched and calm. He walked back over to the couch and kneeled beside me, the owl has not flinched.

“Christine, you are the one who instructs Venus, you are the one who offers strategies for Judgement.” Janus then placed the owl between my legs. The sumerian creature stayed still though his wings fully expanded, between my thighs, beneath two sanguine eyes I felt a warmth.