Body Surfing

thousand pardons, mademoiselle. It has been so long since I have had a like-minded conversational partner, and such a lovely one at that.” Dumas blushed. He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out paper and a pouch of tobacco. “What I meant to say,” he continued, nimbly rolling a cigarette on his thigh, “is that this is not the first time I have seen such behavior. Indeed, I have encountered it so often that I’ve done a bit of research. The Bible tells us that the hedonistic perversity of Sodom and Gomorrah only increased as God’s wrath destroyed the city, and Homer writes that the Greek armies were able to storm Troy because the inhabitants of the city were engaged in orgiastic celebration, despite the pyres still burning outside the city walls.”
    He finished the cigarette. Ileana produced a lighter, sparked it.
    “Take Boccaccio’s Decameron ,” the Frenchman continued, his words acquiring a professorial air. “The predecessor of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales , in which a group of people hiding from the Yersinia pestis bacterium—the Black Death—hole up and tell each other tales to while away the time. Many of their stories are quite ribald, licentious even.”
    “Dirty,” Ileana cut to the chase.
    “Indeed,” Dumas’s hands plucked at his pant legs. “Dirty. Cochon . Historians believe these tales are a reflection of actual behavior that Boccaccio was forced to couch at a narrative remove, so as not to offend conventional pieties. But there is in fact a documented case of a large monastery in the south of France. When the plague swept through, it killed some three-quarters of the monks. Later, a nun found the survivors engaged in what could only be described as a bacchanalia. Their attentions were focused not just on each other, but on their servants, their livestock, even the decaying bodies of their dead brethren. The nun herself claimed to have been violated by no fewer than seven of the anchorites before she could make her escape, and, though her attackers disavowed any memory of their actions, or claimed that ‘the spirits of the dead’ had taken control of them, the Holy See concluded they had in fact been agents of Satan and burned them at the stake.” Dumas paused, smiled grimly. “They burned the nun as well, of course. Just in case.”
    Ileana had to fight to keep her face impassive. In fact she knew this story. Knew the nun’s name, and the monks’. Knew exactly how close Dumas was to the truth. How close, and how far.
    “And the refugees? You think perhaps they were just trying to fuck the pain away? Pardon my French.”
    Dumas found the joke entirely too funny, and his laugh rang out in the bar.
    “Since the beginning of time, sex and death have been inextricably linked in the mind of man. Indeed, in France we still refer to orgasm as le petit mort . The little death.”
    Ileana looked at the tuft of chest hair. A wave of nausea churned her stomach. “We’re not talking about a seduction that takes place over a fine Bordeaux. We’re talking about bruised, battered, diseased refugees copulating next to corpses. That is not exactly le petit mort .”
    “No no no, you misunderstand me. Certainly I do not think there is anything romantic or erotic in what is going on in Darfur. But the universality of the symptoms suggests we must broaden our focus. I was in Iran after the 2003 earthquake, in Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami, in New Orleans after the 2005 hurricane. I have been in Bosnia, Rwanda, Afghanistan. In all of these places, in the midst of unimaginable devastation, I have seen a version of this epidemic of lust, as you called it. I have come to believe that death on such a scale fractures the societal restrictions that normally curtail man’s desires. The beast within is loosed. And the beast wants to, to…”
    “Fuck?”
    “Oui.” Dumas pulled at his open collar. “To fuck.”
    Again, Ileana marveled at how close to the truth the epidemiologist was.
    “So you think it’s just psychological? The id asserting itself in the breakdown of superego control?”
    “Sex and death are the polarities of physical and psychological existence,” Dumas answered. “The natural reaction to such horror is, in some way, a turn to life, although not necessarily in a loving or even positive way. Neither ovum nor spermatozoon knows from morality, after all.”
    “You mentioned the soul earlier. Do you honestly believe we do nothing more than enact the dictates of the