House of Doors

Knowing that I was in his sperm, that his own leavings were greasing our actions -- this idea overpowered all my other thoughts. I emptied into her with a long, low primal groan, my testicles driven to divest their load, until my prick was dead inside her, slowly retreating, and her hands caressed my back.

The possibilities the house offered were endless. I never knew quite who would be behind the door I opened. It struck me that the experience of the house was the inverse of normal life.

During my typical week, there were dozens of women to whom I would speak, when leaving my apartment, at work, casually in various situations. For all of them I had some sense of their emotional and cognitive landscapes. I knew their expressions, how they talked, bits and pieces of their lives in varying degrees. Yet I did not know them internally, carnally as it were. This arena was off limits for obvious reasons.

But at the house, at best I only got the most fleeting sense of a woman's external life. Instead my knowledge was entirely haptic, sensual, from the inside out. I came to know a woman's smell, the sounds she made when aroused, the feeling of her flesh on mine, the sensory overload of one or more of her orifices encompassing my penis. Which way was a more complete mechanism of understanding? This question puzzled me continually.

I opened a third-floor door one night to a woman with taffy-colored hair. Her limbs were lithe, her clothing long and flowing. Her manner was warm as we talked, her smell intoxicating. The way her breasts, long and drifting, moved about unrestrained in her blouse was ravishing.

When I eventually pulled her clothes off, I stood and stared. And inhaled. Her hips were narrow, her legs slender. Her breasts were long and pointed, I had the thought that when we coupled she would be able to impale me with them.

Indeed, on top, she was aggressive when we were joined. She dangled each of her spears into my mouth, then batted my face on one side and then the other with the soft insides of their pendulous mass. Their texture felt like satin, yet her nipples were blazingly sharp and hard.

She was loud when she climaxed and my sperm was wrenched forth from me with considerable violence from the squeezings of her cunt. Afterward she lay on top of me, sweaty, limp. I kissed her neck while her hair draped my head. I wanted this to last forever.

I was determined to find her again, and over many weeks of plotting had developed a stratagem for just this eventuality. While the hallways were endless, circular, uniform, one could at least determine which floor one was on. While each level had several possible staircases, dependent on which entry one had used, I had constructed a method to mark her location.

After making my departure, I counted doors until I reached the nearest staircase. I took out a small, insignificant ribbon, and tied it unobtrusively to the staircase railing. When I next came, I would ascend to the correct level, walk until I found the ribbon, then count down the five doors to my consort's room.

I could hardly wait to arrive the next night. My mind was fixated on those pointed breasts, what I would do with them, how they would feel on my face, my cock. I wanted my sperm to discharge in their valley, smear their insides with my mucilage.

Up the staircase to the right floor, I circled the hallway -- but there was no ribbon. Frantically I retraced my steps, sure that I had missed my marker, but there was none to be found. I finally counted five doors in from what I judged the most likely staircase, but of course it was a different woman, short and round, with saucy, dark eyes and wide hips.

My time with her was not wasted, she took me in her mouth and managed long sessions licking my testicles while pulling on my member. My sperm exploded down her gullet while her mouth suctioned me to depletion.

I tried repeatedly to make return visits to women who particularly aroused me, but was never successful. I made small pencil marks on doors that only I would be able to notice, then established definite distances from that door to staircases on identifiable floors. I took notes, made calculations. Once I even carved a small mark in a door with a knife, but all efforts were fruitless, my clandestine signs either disappeared or I was unable to find them.

The variety at the house assumed insane proportions. Every night a new set of eyes, different hair, soft or lean limbs, a new mouth, a new womb. Each one glorious, never the same.

Sometime after the third year of visits the monstrous nature of the house began to sink in.

Upon waking I could not get a trip to the house off my mind. I would visit sometimes three or four nights in a row, until my balls rebelled in exhaustion, and I would vow that that was my last time. My resolve might last perhaps for a week, until my erections grew constant and impossible to ignore. My inevitable return was always explosive.

When struck with the remorse and confusion the house now brought me more and more often, I took to hiding the key in my apartment. I would put it behind a book on my endless bookshelves, bury it in a corner of my cluttered desk, behind some container in a high kitchen cupboard.

Days, even weeks would go by, and I thought I had freed myself. Yet always I was driven to find the key again, tearing my apartment apart until I had located the precious talisman. And another round of compulsive visits would ensue.

Tetas would be thrust into my face, my penis suctioned lovingly by willing lips into a sodden inert state, my testicles grew weary from depletion. And I would vow again that this latest visit was my last.

By the fifth year my colleagues at work had noted my enervation, disruptive changes in my behavior.

"Luis, are you well? Your eyes are sunken, your cheeks hollow. Enough to eat at home? Sleeping all right?" I shook them off with a wave of my hand, but I too had begun to worry.

I received a phone call one night from Felix Rodriguez. "Luis," he said, "we have not heard from you in ages. Is all well?" Felix was an editor at Dialéctico, a political journal I wrote for on occasion, as often as twice a year in more productive times.

"Yes," I replied. "I have been busy."

"Are you working on anything? Might we have something to take a look at?"

"Yes," I lied. "On the fatalist nature of post-rationalist economics. It is going slowly. Far more statistics and quantitative analytics than I am accustomed to."

"Don't worry over that," Felix laughed. "You know most of the time theory is good enough for us."

He pressed me, and I confess I told him I might have a draft of something for them in a month or two. I knew it was a hopeless promise.

My writing and creative works had ground to a halt.

I could not concentrate. The discipline of the written paragraph escaped me. I made careless errors at my job. Instead, visions of delightful things happening to my member intruded. All I needed to do was hop a collectivo, use my key, and give my groin a timeless journey of pleasure.

My mind could generate thoughts of nothing else. I woke with erotic visions of cunts hungry for my sperm, fantasies of soft, wet lips slithering up and down my shaft, and could not rest until my lusts were satisfied.

For two years I tried to determine the best way to divest myself of the curse. My first thoughts, I am ashamed to say, involved revenge of various dimensions. I would find a way to get the key into the hands of one of my many enemies, knowing the torment that would eventually be visited upon them.

Yet there were clear problems to my thinking. How could I do this in a way that would not be obvious but would let my victim know it was me who caused the anguish? None of my enemies would take the key naively as a "gift," they would smell a rat. Even worse, what if my victim died within a year or two of receipt? He would think I had graced him with an unexpected boon. My intended target would need to live for some amount of time for proper revenge to result.

I thought about ditching the diabolic key down a storm drain, throwing it into the forest somewhere, renting a boat and casting it into the river, the sea. None of these were satisfactory, for reasons I cannot explain.

One night one of the house doors opened to an evidently Jewish woman. Dark, deep eyes, an unmistakable nose, and features that could have come from no other lineage. Long, unruly brown hair flowed energetically from her head. That her chest was pushing impressively against her buttoned cotton blouse did not diminish her appeal.

We were in conversation longer than usual. By employing the few words of Yiddish at my command I confirmed my guess as to her heritage. Her mind was agile, I liked the way her eyes expressed sexual interest, took me in from top to bottom, how attentively she listened to my stories, then responded with her own.

I was excited to a high degree when I finally unbuttoned her blouse and removed her brassiere. Her breasts tumbled out, round and heavy at the end. She was short-waisted, with sturdy hips. Her navel sunk deeply into a smooth white belly. She had to lean up a bit to kiss me.

I carried her to her bed. The pacing of our sexual dance that night, for whatever reasons, was intoxicating. We were in no hurry. I rubbed her chest and her nipples grew marvelous hard.

She avoided my penis forever, making me all the more aroused. She kissed her way down my body, neck, armpits, flanks, then spread my legs and settled in between my thighs.

By that time my penis was in agony, desperate for attention. It pointed stiffly up my body, my testicles drawn up in excitement, and my anus would clench involuntarily with every touch she provided.

But she still avoided my member. She kissed the inner part of my thighs, until I raised my knees for better access, then she nuzzled my balls, taking one, then the other, into her mouth for an extended suckling. My perineum was massaged with fingers, then kissed and licked.

Unlike any of the other rooms I had visited in my time at the house, this woman had arranged a long horizontal mirror alongside her bed. It was possible to look over and see our actions reflected. The smooth contours of her breasts from the side, squashed into my body or as they dangled over me, her mouth working its way along my flanks, her head-hair waving, my penis bobbing. "Enchanting" is an inadequate adjective for the experience, our pleasures were multiplied visually in the looking-glass.

When she rose up from my groin, my penis was dying to have her mouth over it, but even then she did not accommodate. She eased up my body, straddled my hips, and rubbed her labia up and down the outside of my shaft. Her lips were already slippery wet, although I had done nothing to stimulate them.

The look in her eyes as she faced me with was as wanton as any I could recollect. Then she slid her way up my body, leaving a damp trail along my torso, until she presented her well-furred groin to my face, and a prolonged cuntal kiss ensued.

Her scent was strong, her lips wet, and she was not shy about pressing herself into my face. My penis quivered, alone and untouched. I brought her close with my mouth and tongue, but she seemed determined to extend our dance.

She reversed herself on top of me, now facing my penis, and lowered her cunt back onto my face. She took my cock into her mouth.

I exhaled noisily into her groin thicket. Her lips and tongue caressed the head of my penis then slid down my shaft, while her thick thighs hugged my head and she pressed her cunt onto my mouth.

She was careful. She knew how excited I was and the danger of an early ending. But her licks and sucklings were divine, with lots of time spent on my balls while I tongued her increasingly aroused cunt.

I brought her off once with my tongue up her channel while she ground her hips into me. She had detached from my prick, held it in one hand while her hips quivered and shook and her fluids sopped forth. If she had kept me in her mouth, I surely would have erupted at the same time.

She reversed position again. I was frantic with desire. I wanted to be on top, feel the violence of my hips thrusting into her, but she pushed me back on the bed and slithered her cunt down onto my cock.

Despite my excitement, we coupled for some time. I would feel her cunt clip my cock, revel in the up-and-down, back-and-forth movements on my shaft while her tongue sought mine. My hands were on her soft ass, and I could feel her cheeks quiver as they clenched.

She uncunted twice, to lick my balls, prolong my arousal, and then went back to work. Glances at the mirror with her heavy, swaying breasts in profile inflamed me. She came again and her frantic hip quivers and violent squeezing on my penis fetched me as well. I humped into her, wishing I was on top, but in ecstasy as my sperm filled her.

I had not climaxed this hard in months.

We lay panting, hot and sweaty, fused together. We kissed, my fingers traced her vertebrae, then cradled her ass cheeks. I may have dozed off with exhaustion for a few minutes.

I certainly did not want to leave, but finally had to.

A kiss at the door, I wanted desperately to return to her the next night, but knew it to be impossible.

On the way home the streets felt endless under my feet. I took a long route, seeking to walk some serenity into my head, my testicles warm and tingling in their happy state of depletion, while my mind rued its fortune. I stopped at a bar for a beer, still half an hour from my apartment, my thirst having grown strong. I sat at a window-side table overlooking the darkening boulevard.

Melancholy resided within me. A stranger whose chin jutted forward walked over from the bar to my table and introduced himself, a beer in his hand. His accent branded him as an American, although he threw his Spanish around with misplaced confidence, the Spanish of perhaps his own borderlands, not of Argentina.

"Your face is long, caballero, what troubles inhabit your mind?" I took an immediate dislike to him.

I looked back at him, trying to decide whether to initiate a real discussion or generate an ellipse.

"Life is hard, there is time, but little movement." I hoped opacity might discourage him.

"Si, si" he waved a hand, and began to discourse on the nature of human existence. His frizzy brown hair shook as he talked, his features heavy and broad, chin protruding with his excitement. He spoke of Husserl and Wittgenstein, familiar names and notions, yet not ones I had indulged for some time. Against my instincts, our conversation grew animated. I bought another beer.

"I am new to town," he divulged, although this was obvious. "From the great northern city of New York." He glanced around the bar. "Might you know good places to find women?"

My body tensed, not only at his directness but for the eerie sequence of thoughts that began to run through my head.

I raised my eyebrows. "You enjoy feminine company?" I asked innocently.

He leveled his gaze at me.

"You have already demonstrated intelligence, caballero. I can also tell your own appreciation for our fellow compatriots in lust."

I looked back at him.

"I can smell cunt on your beard," he said simply. "I am guessing it is not your wife."

I laughed. "Fair enough."

We talked of desire. He announced that he had a "large and urgent penis" using the word espada, "sword," which annoyed me.

"And you need a scabbard," I responded wearily.

"Daily if possible," he looked at me sternly.

"Normally a marriage would take care of the frequency part." I looked for a wedding ring but saw none. "You are maybe looking for a long-term connection?"

He shook his head. "No. I seek variety. I grow excited easily with new opportunities. The same set of legs, however alluring, become wearisome over time on even the most handsome bed-mate. My company has sent me here on a project that will take at least a decade to complete. I crave diversion for the duration."

I leaned back, put my hands behind my head. "And you think you might avail yourself of local knowledge?"

He tried to gauge my expression.

"Money is not a limitation, although safety and discretion are."

I fingered the key with one hand in my pocket. Perhaps fate was speaking.

"I may have an arrangement that may interest you. Although it is not without complications."

He raised his eyebrows. "Yes?"

I described the house, mentioned a few of my experiences, the latest an especially fresh story to relate.

His salivation at my narration was not just metaphorical. He licked his lips, to my disgust. Our discussion did not need to go on for long, it was just a question of my positioning the deal, timing and framing the arrangement, and reeling him in. Negotiation is not a normal strength of mine, but that night my path was easy.

Naming the amount I wanted for the key was the hardest part. It had to be high enough to underscore its value, and while I sensed his finances were robust, I naturally couldn't know their true extent. Although at that moment I would have been happy to divest the key for a pittance, for nothing if I could be truly free.

We haggled and agreed on a respectable sum. We agreed to meet back at the cafe in a week's time.

At home I agonized over making one more visit to the house, but decided, perhaps wisely, against this. I would keep my last memory of the Jewess as my final act.

Some lingering thoughts intruded. I had not been entirely honest, or at least thorough, in my narration to him. What were the chances I would meet him again some time in town? What if he became convinced that I was the cause of the inevitable sense of having acquired a curse through my lack of candor?

These thoughts did not trouble me for long. He did not know my name, my place of work or residence. The cafe where we had met was outside my normal circuit, and I would now ensure it to be completely out of my orbit. The chances of an accidental rendezvous were remote and even so, what could he do? Sue me? For what? I had even hinted at the potential drawbacks of endless female variability but he had waved a hand in dismissal. Tranquility descended on me. The circumstances were scarcely different than those by which I had acquired the key myself.

I accepted the bills he handed to me that evening a week later. I passed the key to him with the address, and we shook hands. I knew very well what his "large and urgent" organ would be doing within the next twenty-four hours. I just hoped it would not be inside one of my favorites at the house.

I opened the bar door and savored the sights, sounds and smells of the street. Rarely have I stepped out into the thick evening atmosphere of Buenos Aires with such an airy feeling of relief as I did that night, making my way home, my feet light on the backstreet pavements.

* Diego took particular exception to my defense of Márquez' magical-realist approach, insisting, quite illogically, that this interpretation disguised the Colombian writer's innate "sexual and ontological confusion." I had taken Diego's stance as a deliberately provocative goad for debate, yet it ultimately achieved his aims.