"..."

...there remained between them the dull throb of the vast unsaid...

sex bomb

Rags is from Iceland. His wife Freya organizes regular 'parties' at her ranch, the Bridge. Quoth Rags:

"Our worlds are in torment, you see, this urgent clamorous asylum of the senses and that silent majestic Other realm, grinding perpetually against one another like great invisible tectonic plates, and as the sun declines, the barriers are attenuated, pared daily by knives of darkness, until wall is reduced to membrane and membrane to rupture and the dead are permitted to mingle freely among us and we, if we possess the knowledge and so choose, may pass through into the land of the dead. These are events for which the word 'truth' was coined. A culture which elects to inhabit a fun house of falsity will, not surprisingly, find it difficult to locate these actualities.

"This, of course, is what we attempt here at the Bridge, to create an atmosphere where one truth, actual sex, can be exalted. But what do we get? This comic book sex you Americans seem to wallow in. It is your charm, I suppose, the ground for your material success, the reason you are inundated with immigrants. Who does not love a good fairy story? But you want to make a cartoon of everything: your movies, your clothes, your furniture, your books, your food, but especially your sex. Everything bright and tasty. But this is a dirty game you are playing with yourselves. This ideal of honesty and openness is a pathetic fraud. You pretend to be so innocent when none of you are and it is this charade that is genuinely pornographic."

Going Native
Stephen Wright
1994