Dark Rivers of the Heart

infrared look-down."
        "Look-down?"
        "Eyes in the sky."
        "God? "
        "No, the cockroach."
        "The cockroach has eyes in the sky?"
        "He and his people, yeah."
        Spencer thought about that. Finally he said, "I'm not sure if I'm awake or dreaming."
        "Some days," she said, "neither am I."
        In the black-and-white world, the sky seethed with eyes, and a great white owl flew overhead, casting a moonshadow in the shape of an angel.
        Eve's desire was insatiable, and her energy was inexhaustible, as though each protracted bout of ecstasy electrified rather than enervated her.
        At the end of an hour, she seemed more vital than ever, more beautiful, aglow.
        Before Roy's adoring eyes, her incredible body seemed to be sculpted and pumped up by her ceaseless flexing-contracting-flexing, by her writhing-thrashing-thrusting, just as a long session of lifting weights pumped up a bodybuilder. After years of exploring all the ways she could satisfy herself, she enjoyed a flexibility that Roy judged to be somewhere between that of a gold-medal Olympic gymnast and a carnival contortionist, combined with the endurance of an Alaskan dogsled team.
        There was no doubt whatsoever that a session in bed with herself provided a thorough workout for every muscle from her radiant head to her cute toes.
        Regardless of the astounding knots into which she tied herself, regardless of the bizarre intimacies she took with herself, she never looked at all grotesque or absurd, but unfailingly beautiful, from any angle, in even the most unlikely acts. She was always milk and honey on that black rubber, peaches and cream, flowing and smooth, the most desirable creature ever to grace the earth.
        Halfway through the second hour, Roy was convinced that sixty percent of this angel's features-body and face overall-were perfect by even the most stringent standards. Another thirty-five percent of her was not perfect but so close to perfect as to break his heart, and only five percent was plain.
        Nothing about her-no slightest line or concavity or convexity-was ugly.
        Roy was certain that Eve must soon stop pleasuring herself or otherwise collapse unconscious. But by the end of the second hour, she seemed to have more appetite and capacity than when she'd begun. The power of her sensuality was so great that every piece of music was changed by her horizontal dance, until it seemed that all of it, even the Bach, had been expressly composed as the score for a pornographic movie. From time to time she called out the number of a new lighting arrangement, said "up" or "down" to the rheostat, and her selection was always the most flattering for the next position into which she folded herself.
        She was thrilled by watching herself in the mirrors. And by watching herself watch herself. And by watching herself as she watched herself watching herself. The infinity of images bounced back and forth between the mirrors on opposite walls, until she could believe that she had filled the universe with replications of herself. The mirrors seemed magical, transmitting all the energy of each reflection back into her own dynamic flesh, overloading her with power, until she was a runaway blond engine of eroticism.
        Sometime during the third hour, batteries gave out in a few of her favorite toys, gears froze in others, and she surrendered herself once more to the expertise of her own bare hands. For a while, in fact, her hands seemed to be separate entities from her, each alive in its own right. They were in such a frenzy of lust that they couldn't occupy themselves with just one of her many treasures for any length of time; they kept sliding over her ample curves, up-around-down her oiled skin, massaging and tweaking and caressing and stroking one delight after another. They were like a pair of starving diners at a fabulous smorgasbord that had been prepared to celebrate the imminence of Armageddon, allowed only precious seconds to gorge themselves before all was obliterated by a sun gone nova.
        But the sun did not go nova, of course, and eventually-if gradually those matchless hands slowed, slowed, finally stopped, and were sated.
        As was their mistress.
        For a while, after it was over, Roy couldn't get up from his chair. He couldn't even slump back from the edge of it. He was numb, paralyzed, tingling strangely in every