In Bed With Sean Connery

It was all beginning to come together into something solid: Deveraux putting out the psychic dragnet for me, the whiskey, Lukas lying drugged above the covers just two nights ago and now Connery. Everything was coming full circle. It was like Deveraux had actually been inside of my head, working himself deeper into me like an incubus, with subliminal caresses and serpentine whispers. Like how in Swann’s Way, Proust agonizes over the tortures of unrequited love, how it really is nothing but vanity, hurt pride when that inflated ideal of the beloved falls short, how you want that person to be with you, to behave, to think and the disconnect, the daydreams, delusions, bending reality, thinking of nothing but this one person, this person who’s no longer really human but has morphed into some third alien entity. Neither his nor yours. The slip betwixt the cup and the lip. You’re blinded by it.

All the hard edges between people rising and converging and splitting off like chaff on a breeze, the lover and the beloved, that hot sweat rising just being near to that person, drawn to the sublime pleasure of his name against your lips, measuring your time until he walks toward you in the afternoon as if by accident, thinking you’ll force his hand just by the sheer force of your presence, that he’ll betray his deep all-consuming love and affection by catching your eye or speaking the words of a secret language, tellingly brushing against you. A calm surface betraying a disjointed internal world, the itch just below your skin and something stirring in your guts, that damp bottomless restlessness reaching out from your center and seeping in your pores until you’re drowning in it, how out of that boredom you orchestrate dramas, trouble unfurling languorously before you. You are the god and the mortal, the object and the force. Whatever was in that potion was a part of it, the surging release of memories and images and things locked deep in my mind, the synapses that were firing and reeling now like crossed wires.

I knew now it wasn’t entirely what Deveraux had said in my dream as much as the fact that he, the man himself, seemed to have designed every step of this mystery, up to this, the very moment when I would start to realize how all of it fit together. How the mind tortures itself with elisions and obsessions and all those other terrible things. I lay in bed next to Connery, a man who had only come into my life through a death. If Reynard hadn’t been killed, I wondered when and how Deveraux would have gotten to me. If what Deveraux said was true, that the Order of Thoth could generate entire libraries within the space of their brains, able to affect the noösphere disproportionately to those around them, then I was in serious trouble. Considering their apparent ability to generate extreme transfers of energy and alter the psychic makeup of whomever they chose, I wondered why I was being singled out for their research.

I knew the fact I’d watched that episode of X-Files was just a fluke, and I really didn’t think that even in my basest subconscious I could murder someone in Reynard’s league of adversaries: he’d never really gotten to me, not deeply enough that I would cause him any real harm. Sure, I’d drop some four-letter words and at most threaten to kick him in the balls. But it was hard for me to accept that anything could be reduced to coincidence. But what could it be instead? A glitch in the noösphere? A psychic sensitivity to events that had already been set in motion?

“Earth to Maya,” I looked up as Sean Connery elbowed me softly, an amorous twinkle in his eye. “You were saying something about swallowing serpents?” he looked suggestively beneath the drawn sheet.

“Listen. I just remembered something Deveraux said to me when he uh, entered my dream the other night. ‘Hungry serpents swallow themselves whole’ he said. Weird, right?”

“Actually, I don’t fully believe that I am totally qualified to make these distinctions but, as usual, if you’re asking the answer is probably yes. Yes, I suppose that is weird.”

“Oh, please. You know it’s weird.”

“Mmmm. I’ll show you something weird.” Connery pulled me toward him by the neck.

“Whoa, hang on, hot pants. I’m serious. So Deveraux is in my dreams, talking about serpents. So he’s trying to get me under his thrall, something like that, right? But then, I think I’ve got this right but I’ll have to look it up, but serpent dreams mean power and deception, the balance of good and evil. Obviously it’s a threat, some sort of subconscious danger. And of course the whole phallic symbol, the serpent in Paradise, knowledge as a curse. Eve takes a bite of the apple and gets Adam kicked out from Eden and he’s been punishing her ever since. But that whole ruthless sexuality and temptation is just Judeo-Christian mythology. Because in Eastern mythologies, serpents can also represent transformation, something positive. Like snakes shedding their skin, becoming something new.”

“How in the hell do you know so much about snakes?” he drew my body closer to his with warm strong golden arms.

I narrowed my eyes at him and shrugged. “You know about the Ouroboros? It’s like this ancient symbol, a snake swallowing its tail. It’s like, you know, supposed to symbolize the cyclicality of life and all that.”

I was sitting upright and wide-eyed as Connery lay with a lascivious smirk, drawing dreamy circles on my back with his index finger. “Really, you know, your pillow talk leaves something to be desired,” he said softly.

“Oh, my god. This is fucking uncanny.”

“No, you know what’s really uncanny? The fact that here we’ve got two astral bodies naked in bed together and you don’t know when to shut up. I mean, damn, girl. Relax. This is supposed to be fun.”

“Now look here, you goddamned Scorpio! I don’t see where you fit in all of this. I don’t know where I fit in for that matter.”

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to show you”

Sean Connery pulled me toward him with force and kissed me hard on the mouth. My body went limp, slowly building the rhythm to counter his steady urging. My mind was clear and void like the dark waters of chaos before creation as our bodies moved together, hot breath and sweat and skin melding together like molten lava.

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