I'm floating face-up in a mineral-rich cunt. The Dead Sea looks like a pussy and smells like a pussy. Sulfur and sapphires rise like incense inside her. The Sea smells like Carla's pussy and other holy places. The Jordan River, wriggling like a sperm southward from Mount Hebron and the Sea of Galilee, empties out into the egg-shaped depression to form the Sea's oval body. The Dead Sea is two miles across and about 15 miles long. The proportions are about right for a gigantic cunt. So is the temperature of its waters. Its waters are beneficial to the skin and to the memory and I remember when Carla and I first met.
We had both come to Israel on a pilgrimage. I needed redemption. My soul leaks like a bad radiator. Divorce, middle age, another divorce, and a broken pelvis exhaust the spirit as well as break the bones. My mid-life crisis was stereotypical. The only thing I didn't do was buy a sports car -- and only because I couldn't afford it. I felt sexless and soulless all at once. The libido leaks out in drips and drabs. Vital energy evaporates. I needed something archetypal and palpable. I needed manna from heaven, to drink from the living waters. My skin needed cleansing from toxins both alive and inanimate. I needed an antidote for indifference and the abstract. I was hungry for the holy and wanted to know my body on sacred terms.
Carla and I met in Tiberius. Both our bodies were under siege. The airlines crammed us into tourist class seats. At Customs, armed guards picked through our luggage, looked through our cameras, undid our shaving cream cans and unzipped the pouches for our brushes and toothpaste. Our luggage was strip searched and our persons were scrutinized. Afterwards, my body tensed like a runner at the starting line. But the gun never goes off. It hangs suspended and silent in mid-air.
Each of us was drawn to the land of milk and honey. The land of blooming almonds, pomegranates and the succulent Eden. Our first stop was Tiberius. We drove at night from Tel Aviv to Tiberius, the ancient Roman port city on the Sea of Galilee. It was famous for its trade and its spas. I needed redemption of the soul through the agency of the body. Both soldiers and off-duty soldiers in civilian clothes carried M-16's. The soldiers had removed the ammunition clips, but I was only slightly relieved. Watching them hoist their weapons and their ice cream cones, I felt horny and vulnerable. The more frightened I felt, the more my cock filled up. The more automatic weapons on the street, the greater the need for the soft assurances of skin on skin. Touching is an antidote for terror. And there was a great spa near the old Roman center of town.
*****
I lay face up, floating in the spa. The waters were so thick with magnesium, copper, manganese, sodium, selenium, and even sulfur that bodies float easily. The steamy gasses soaked into my body and insinuated themselves into my muscles. I lay down in the water and floated on my back. Yells and retributions oozed out of me. The screaming resentments in my skin retreated into whispers. I closed my eyes and let the water recite rosaries all over my body.
"Isn't specific gravity wonderful?" someone said to me.
I opened my eyes. Carla's green eyes and auburn hair lay over me like a jade veil. She was on the plane with me and we exchanged glances when the green uniformed security officers singled out us both for additional searches. Her long auburn hair was matted against her pale skin like after some muscular exertion. Her full lips dripped sweat from the steamy water.
I know about gravity in general," I said, "but I'm not sure about specific gravity."
The body's weight is lighter than the heavy water," she said bending lower in the water. Her green eyes glistened.
"It's like swimming in cappuccino," I said.
"Yeah, but you'd better not drink this stuff," she said, pointing at the far wall where charts of minerals were listed, along with their relative proportions. "A couple of cups of this brew and your blood will turn into a toxic waste dump."
I shut my mouth.
"But," she hasted to add, "the minerals work wonders on the skin."
"How can you tell?"
"You have to feel to tell," she said, offering me her arm.
"Smooth as polished wood," I said.
She said, "lacquered with cum and a long tongue."
She stuck her stomach out to me, navel stud and all. "Polish this."
Then she laughed, embarrassed by what she had just said. Her long fingers covered her full lips.
She wanted to be touched. We both did. Our bodies had been under siege.
Too shy to say anything else, we splashed around in the water. When muscles unwind, they release energy and when they release energy, they become ecstatic. We flipped each other over our shoulders. We spun each other around like little motorboats. We got accustomed to the text and pronunciation of each other's bodies.
Then she lay down in the water. I held her at the small of her back and beneath her shoulders. She spread out her legs in the water. Tiny hairs escaped from beneath her swim briefs. They floated on the surface like letters for some ancient, erotic alphabet. Steam rose from her bulge and, for a moment, I was a tongue of water exploring her in slow-motion tides.
Afterward, we lay in the sauna. She stretched her feet across my lap and tickled my cock with her toes. Touching came easy. Our skin was hungry for touch. Foreign places are ripe for fucking. The greater the uncertainty, the more touch is necessary. Our bodies were hot and flushed and coated with a thin layer of mineral wash. Our skin slipped over each other. Skin for skin. Finger for finger. Toe for toe. A skin relish. A full body lubricant.
She lay back. "I'm ready," she said and she slid her slippery thigh against mine.
I eased a finger inside her. Her cunt felt steamy and spongy. After a moment's tightening, her pussy rolled out its pink carpet. The steam opened up our pores and our imaginations and she seemed to suck my hand
inside her. I imagined how David's blessed spirit reached across the palace courtyard overlooking her bath. Did he like her to see him watching? Was her body the new scroll unrolled as he studied the curves of her pagan undress?
This is a land of erotic righteousness and the prophets were the first pornographers. David danced naked before the Ark of the Covenant. The prophet Isaiah walking naked through Jerusalem pronouncing blessings and woes with his waving cock. The prophets were the first pornographers. They brought the erotic worship of Astarte and Ishtar up to their nostrils for a better smell.
*****
We toured all the shrines of the usual suspects: Jericho, the Mount of Transformation, and The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Wailing Wall, and the Dome of the Rock. But still I felt my body was unrepentant. I jerked off instead of meeting others. Fantasizing was safer than trying to meet women-sometimes even more fulfilling. The risks were lower that way. My own hand on the seamless length of my cock was calculable and controllable. My hands were articulate agents of my own pleasure. But I still felt awkward and pained speaking to women. I felt suspended in mid-air.
"What brings you here now? Terrorism-inspired, low air fares?" I joked to Carla in a café across from the Franciscan Church. Jesus was supposed to have changed large pots of water to wedding wine here. We looked across the narrow streets with few passers-by.
"No," she said, "new skin."
I looked at her hoping she'd explain.
"I'm here to get some new sights and some new insights," she said, almost sighing between her teeth.
"It's my first time out of the country since 9/11," I said, "and I wanted to visit this old land, this ancient land. This land of dark-eyed women and ancient epiphanies. The place where people saw God in the bushes and in pillars of smoke and fire. Where they have wrestling matches with angels and dreamed the wet dreams of Jerusalem."
"I came for the land of milk and honey," she said, trying out a sly smile.
Why are her answers so much more articulate than mine? I wondered. I admired her literacy and her luxuriant auburn hair.
We visited Bethlehem and the armed guards around the Church of the Nativity. The birthing place of the lord of the dance was fortified, scrutinized. The glint of rifle scopes and binoculars from rooftops had an
oppressive, ass-puckering effect. So did the sweltering glare of the sun off the marble church. The heat dissipated as we descended into the belly of the damp church. The more flights we stepped down, the heavier the incense smell and the thicker the smears of candle flame and prayers in urgent languages. The walls were sweaty with frantic prayer.
Three flights down we halted to let another tour group view the "Star of Bethlehem." As we waited, I smelled the garlic-ginseng scent of heavy breathing. The breath of the faithful can be as foul as any sea port. When it was our turn, we filed into the cramped room. The altar was vested in purple -- the color of divine kings, the color of engorged cock.
The hole was the size of my fist. It was surrounded by a silver star. The star was worn down by the eager fists of pilgrims.
I stuck my hand into the hole up to my wrist and got a hard-on. Carla did the same and looked at me. We felt the damp rock, the birthplace of the so-called savior. The hole felt like the cunt of the world. And we rolled up our sleeves to reach inside. My hand hit rock, a cool stone. A hard place for the neonatal unit of the king of creation. I felt like I should feel a shudder or something. But I didn't.
My body still felt suspended in mid-air, unsure of the gravity of its space. We visited a thousand shrines; but bricks and stone couldn't heal me. One of my favorite shrines was Kafr Kana, or Cana. Jesus was supposed to have juiced up a wedding party by changing water into wine.
We shared a bottle of merlot from the Negev desert. Shops along the brick and limestone streets sold Israeli and Greek wine as well as marriage renewals.
"It'd be cheaper if we could turn water into wine as well," I said, pouring out our glasses.
"Yeah, I'd have to see that," she said evenly.
"Doubting Thomas," I said teasing her. "We could call the wine 'the first miracle' or something like that. Our slogan could be 'Taste a Miracle.'"
"Doing miracles sure would make life easier," Carla said. She twisted her short skirt at the hem. It was almost as if she revealed her skin as she revealed herself. "I doubt if we'd sell much wine with such an uncertain economic market... with the price of gas and all..."
"So many uncertainties," I said. "Life is full of them. They don't even know which 'Cana' is the real one."
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"There's supposed to be three towns with the same name 'Cana' around here."
"This place is most certain," I said, the one with the most effective PR."
"So how do we know which one is real?" she asked.
"The one where miracles happen."
"I sure could use a miracle right about now," she said. Her full lips turned again into a wry smile.
"Healing," was all she said. And that's all she said about it.
I got the feeling that her silence marked some deeper hurt. Sometimes the deeper the wound the harder it is to speak about it. Sometimes only the language of silence is articulate enough to articulate substantial scars
She was jilted, jabbed and jaundiced. She was wronged in some untold, irreversible way. Her mysterious wound rested raw just beneath the surface, waiting to be seen, waiting to be acknowledged. Or perhaps waiting to be ignored? If you pick at scabs hard enough, they'll make their own wounds. Sometimes our own wounds are the hardest to forgive.
I kissed her cheek and she kissed my hand. Her mouth lingered there. At first I thought she was reading my palm. Then I realized she was breathing into it. Her breath pressed into my palm like a tattoo with a
long tongue.
Maybe Carla didn't realize it, but she was attracted to the healing waters. So was I. Like wounded animals, we sought out the right herbs to eat. But we were equally instinctual and equally cerebral. We wanted to know our touch meant something. Even if it meant just a moment of connection.
Everywhere the body is under siege. Our every touch is an erotic protest against the obliterations of the body.
*****
The spirit is attracted to flesh and bone, not to bricks and stone. The tour group rode from site to site. But they seemed so sterile, so abstract. Others in the tour group were hoping for salvation from sex. I was praying for salvation through sex. That makes all the difference. The tour-bus pilgrimage drove us from site to site, from stone to stone, and from ruin to ruin. But for all their antiquity and aroma, they felt empty. These were ancient places, even holy places. But the spiritual elements have fled the holy places and hide now in the body -- the last place anyone would look. In the old days, the spirit drove people into the desert. The spirit drives me into flesh.
So we both escaped. We rented a car and drove into Palestinian territories border. We rode near to Qumran on the Dead Sea--to the land where the Essenes founded a New Jerusalem, to the land where a dead lake is so toxic that one cup of water will kill you, but one cup of its mud will cure you. That's where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some Bedouin shepherd threw stones to gather his goats. His shot went wide of the goats, but hit the archaeological discovery of the 20th century. The first millennium founders of Qumran sealed scrolls in Hebrew and Aramaic. They chronicled the end of the world. Warfare among angels, their wings rolling in flames, their bodies hell-bent against flesh.
We picnicked in the land of perfect paradox. The waters of the Dead Sea are vaginal warm and floatable. The chloride content is so high that the salts and irons buoys up almost everything alive. A salty sheen coats the skin. For 3,000 years people swam in the waters to cure skin diseases, arthritis, psoriasis, lupus and shingles.
Queen Cleopatra traveled to the Dead Sea to ease her long thighs into the body of the Sea. She came to smear the mineral-packed mud over her flawless body. She rode these same waves. This is the Cleopatra Sea, her shape for its properties for health and beauty. The oils in the water cleanse the skin of sores and dryness. Its waters satisfy thirsty skin. The oils leave a residue that protects and moistens the skin for days afterward.
The Dead Sea is also called the Devil's Sea. It is a deadly place. One cup of the water will kill you; it petrifies your pancreas and turns your intestines into tungsten. Local legend has it that an unmanned Israeli submarine exploded when it went on a test dive to the bottom of the Dead Sea. But every death contains the seed of transformation. A special kind of death is the cure for death. Orgasm, le petit mort, is the cure for the greater death, the death of the spirit. An erotic death yields an erotic life. The body killed by lust gains everlasting life.
Carla and I get wet just talking about God. It's rare that our imaginations are baptized in the waters of the erotic. I wanted to crawl into the water on all fours. Let my cock sip the top off the waves and drink its healing vapors with its lipless mouth.
I floated on the waters, that familiar nibble of desire lifting my cock in the waves like a new wide boat. Carla's long, gauze skirt was slit up to her thighs and flapped over her lap in the breeze. Her long, olive legs splayed over her white towel and the white sand. The cool wind blew goose bumps on her legs and her nipples were stiff and large beneath her top.
"Don't worry, you won't get sunburned," I called over to Carla.
Even in April, the sun was fierce. She was wrapped in a large, translucent shawl, aviator sunglasses. Her olive skin shone slippery with suntan oil. I was glad she came and hoped to see more of her.
"You don't have to wear a suit you know," I called over to Carla.
She lifted her head up from her book. She was reading Joyce's Ulysses and was flipping through its thick pages in combinations of puzzlement and appreciation.
"You wish," she called back.
"No, really, you won't get sunburned," I said.
What do you mean?
"This is the lowest spot on earth," I said. "Thirteen-hundred feet below sea level. Ultraviolet rays have to travel so far down into the atmosphere that they are 90 pound weaklings by the time they reach us."
She placed a bookmark in the middle of Ulysses. Then she peeled back her shawl from her shoulders. She never took off her sunglasses.
"The tour busses will come soon," I said.
"We've got time," she said and waded into the water.
She floated beneath me and by the time she broke the surface, she had stripped off her bottoms. She swiped my suit off in one fluid motion.
"Hold me up," she said.
I slid my hand into her long slit and they sank deeper and deeper like that Israeli submarine.
Her pussy spoke in prophetic verses to my fingers. I dipped first two, then three fingers into her Devil's Sea and she spoke unclean thoughts into my hand. Pulling off her sunglasses, I propped them on my forehead. Carla arched her back and I could see her eye lids flutter as her eyes rolled back.
She leaned against me and her ass and thighs rested on top of mine. The tip of my cock eased inside between her legs. My cock tasted her stinging salts. The chloride-laden, cunt of the Dead Sea reminded me of Carla's cunt. We were eating falafels and oranges in Bethlehem. They were so close we could almost smell their gun grease. Or was it her? Her pussy was polished and lethal, too. I couldn't tell the difference. Both were dark-eyed, breast-totem vessels of truth. The Dead Sea disgorges its truth reluctantly. A Bedouin boy discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls only a few miles from here. I dreamed of the Aramaic aroma of her asshole, the iron-rich metaphors of her mossy bush.
I rolled over on my back and let the water talk to my skin. They spoke in blank verse to our bodies.
Skin is the text of the infinite, it said, lapping. The blessing of the flesh is flesh.
It whispered verse into the mouth between her legs. Its language flowed along the inside of her ass and followed the contours of her inmost thigh. It filled the cracks and the holes inside us.
I was only half-way through the pilgrimage when I made my escape. They went to Jericho and I hopped a bus to Qumran.
The body is still under siege and everywhere the erotic is under siege-by governments, by terrorists, by the fearful and by the fanatic. I'm hiding out in smooth tongues of water until the smoke clears.
Dead Sea coughed up one truth. The truth of our bodies is a licking truth, a vaginal text. Truth has the exact weight of Carla's ass throbbing against my thighs. Her ass made the sign of the cross across my thighs.
Ecstasy is the body's reaction to ultimate reality and I suspended myself in mid orgasm. We both came about two minutes apart. Her scream scattered pelicans over 100 meters away. My jism floated to the surface in globs of secret parchments and I studied them for some clues to truths. I found no prophesy there either.
Our bodies walked all week from shrine to shrine, until I finally realized that our bodies were the shrine. It wasn't the water. It wasn't the healing mud. It wasn't the relics of Cleopatra's visit. It wasn't in the remains of any holy people who came seeking blessings or offering blessings to others. There was no truth in this water.
Our pilgrimage led us to the Church of the Most Holy Open Thighs. Carla's slick thighs are thoroughfares of the spirit. Carla spread her wings as wide as any angel -- and she was just as holy. Absolute truth is a licking truth, a sucking truth and her skin is the absolute truth of scripture. Her flesh is the truth of the infinite.
Not even this water can redeem me. Only skin summons the infinite.
Originally published June 2006: Sexy, Strange & Strangely Sexy