Em Dupre

1

JEZEBEL

Tonight, her name will be Jezebel.

That is always her first thought as the Chrysalis rouses her from the deep chemical slumber. Jezebel belongs to a fringe sorority of provocative women who earn hard money the easy way. Or rather, vice versa.

Arriving at her appointment feels like waking from a delicious nap, her limbs all lubricant warm and relaxed. She never remembers the travel from her apartment to wherever here is. As if anyone could recall dreaming in nothingness, where time has no meaning. Inside that technological marvel, she is reduced to a speck of existence, becoming a passenger that can only see from a dream distance.

The silken tangle of grooming filaments that manicure, pedicure, style hair, and apply preprogrammed selection of cosmetics delicately caress her skin as they withdraw. The look they give her will last for three days unless she smears on a special solvent butter the company provides for just such a purpose. Silent top-of-the-line oxygen generators that keep her air as fresh as a newborn’s breath stop their tiny vibrations. The lid to her Chrysalis parts.

With a final spritz of perfumed mist made specifically to amplify her carnal pheromones, the multilayered wings of her Chrysalis unfurl. Jezebel emerges yawning in greeting to the elaborate overhead light feeling as if she’s molted into a sensuous butterfly. Nude, she tiptoes out into a lavish suite. Her pod sighs as it closes.

She imagines that the many different porters who wheel her sleek bullet-shaped Chrysalis down the countless hallways to her various destinations, probably think it is just another oversized vanity trunk. How would they react to find out that within that exotic piece of luggage, she is bound in a swathe of windfibre soft as cotton candy while immobilized in a loving embrace tighter than a quadruple laced Victorian corset? Or did the porters know what they were delivering?

The sheer enormity of the room, complete with a bathtub big enough for a village, means she is most likely checked into an exclusive invite-only hotel. A king-sized bed she will never sleep on dominates the far wall. Sultry strings of punk jazz fill the empty spaces. She pops a juicy red strawberry in her mouth from the welcome fruit arrangement. After the first year working as a courtesan for Yoshiwara Pleasure Quarters, or the PQ for short, she stopped seeing luxury, developing an immunity against anything that promoted style over substance. Another occupational perk.

Jezebel touches her birthcoded wrist to the clear glass terminal on the table next to the fruit. It chimes, authenticating her genetic signature as the room’s sole occupant. On the touchscreen, she directs the room console to draw back the heavy pooled curtains. The mood lighting is set to default and the air, balmy. With a wide sweeping gesture, the opaque windows become transparent.

Monday night’s engorged moon graces the sky, reaching down with splendid thick shafts of light. In the city below, night crawls, electricity quenching the lunar brightness that sinks between the upthrust of buildings. For Jezebel, the skyline is blurred, the details edited from her mind by her implanted bioware and replaced by a twinkling smudge. Jezebel loves this anonymity, this lack of knowledge. It’s what she signed up for, to never remember how she spends her evenings. Outside could be any metropolitan area. Without a clear view of landmarks, she would never know if the city is Paris, Kyoto, or Detroit.

It doesn’t matter much because all cities, plus or minus a few hundred buildings all look the same, clustered in a dick-measuring contest of engineering splendors. Jezebel turns her back to the window to finish getting ready.

The small designer tote on her plush bed resembles a shiny red fortune cookie with a subtle handle. Jezebel untwists the purse and spreads it open. Nestling inside a buckled pocket behind her Anospray, she plucks out two foil squares, one small and one large. The siliflex intimacy sheaths with their invisible nano wells trap anything--viral, bacterial or otherwise squirming—unseen by the eye.

The flimsy packaging rips diagonally, well askew of the easy-open notch. Jezebel places the square on the tip of her tongue and the moisture of her saliva does the rest. The siliflex melts, flows through her mouth, coats her tongue and inner cheeks, eventually wraps around her uvula and outside, past her lips, leaving a thin outline that lipstick covers seamlessly. With one leg hiked up on the bed, Jezebel repeats the same with the larger square, feeling it spread like warming honey. The barely visible edges won’t matter as much down here as on her face unless her date is wearing a miner’s helmet with the headlamp on. Barriers firmly in place, she dresses.

Jezebel unzips her expensive Isabella Pierson designer garment bag to see what’s expected tonight. The costume choices always said more about the client than herself. From the runway designer clothing selections, she understands this evening will be a straight girlfriend experience, but she’s been trained to role-play winsome virgin all the way to utilizing floggers and restraints.

She shimmies into a dress slit thigh-high on both sides, with three jewel-encrusted metal rings on either hip holding the material closed. Attached at the left shoulder, Jezebel’s onyx gown swirls around her frame like a flicked whip, accentuating the dark bronze skin her mixed-race ancestry blessed her with.

Her outfit is the latest in escort-wear, top-of-the-line synthesilk that gives off not a whisper of a rustle as she struts like a supermodel with nowhere to go. This little number clings like plastic wrap but glides like an oil-dipped finger.

She looks in the full-length mirror to see what makeup the preprogrammed selection applied to her face. Tonight, her war paint is lids of smoky diamond shadow with indelible, dark poisonous red lips. The pink tip of her tongue glides over her mouth in a sultry display. Irresistible.

Jezebel puts the other dress choices back into her garment bag, zips it up then lays it on the protective origamisteel exterior of her Chrysalis. Her pod intuitively camouflages itself to match the repeated IP monogrammed design.

She knows her job, as always, is to appear in her client’s life for the briefest of moments, riding a wave of mystery, while sporting a body only science can provide. The patrons who partake in such luxuries want one thing from Jezebel, to resist just enough they feel like they are working for that bald prize between her legs.

She didn’t need her university classes in women studies to tell her it was the world’s oldest profession. The practice began with Akkadian women known as Qadishtu, spreading their legs in temples for the fertility goddess Astarte: the most human of ways to show their devotion. Money wasn’t exchanged until the inception of the goddess Aphrodite’s Hetairai, holy prostitutes in the ancient city of Corinth, chipping away at temple fees one miserable fuck at a time.

If she could go back, Jezebel would tell her professor that no one ever desires to become a whore. She has never heard of the little girl who lays her sleepy head down on her fluffy pillows and dreams of growing up to be the Big City tamer of a strangers’ raging red unicorn horn. She certainly didn’t.

Jezebel’s kind might be considered one of those necessary evils, but Jezebel herself operates at a stratospheric level of elite. Unlike the harlots of yore whose tales made them infamous, forgetting is her specialty. After each transacted encounter, when Jezebel peels away the evening, lies back into the Chrysalis, and is sealed away from the rest of the world, she knows that every kinky, filthy, lascivious action she performed will be erased clean. Her agency outfits all their independently contracted employees with a synaptic memory drawbridge, SMB. Military-grade consciousness occlusion bioware that compartmentalizes remembered experiences and information. Their parent company, Yoshiwara, holds the patent and specs for the technology. That’s why getting a companion from the PQ is the preference of the half percent.

With a last unintentional glance toward the adjoining door to the adjacent suite where her evening will conclude, Jezebel steps into the golden lights of the minimalistic hallway and the room door clicks shut behind her. An almost giddy impulse blossoms as the bioware urges her to go to the mezzanine bar. Whispering the idea in her head neatly as she steps into the elevator. She can always tell when the thought is not her own because there is a different quality to the feeling.

By the time the elevator deposits her on the second floor Jezebel has since reminded herself that she is a living doll, an empty, the envy of ignored housewives worldwide. Beluga caviar beautifully presented on a cushion of seaweed, the very definition of getting what you pay for, a demimonde so cultured that you can make yogurt from her thighs. When she is thirty-five and done with this job, she could have all her fedcoin converted into a mattress of pure platinum if she felt like giving herself back problems.

When the elevator opens, sparks fly from Jezebel’s pumps as she crosses a black marble floor so thick and lustrous it looks almost poured. She is a bowlful of yeses strutting on six-inch daggers. If there is a rating system for walking in stilettos, Jezebel would be considered a Kung Fu High Heel Master.

Jezebel never sweats, she glistens. Any moisture rising from her skin is recycled by her dress to regulate her blood alcohol and street pharm levels, then eventually expelled as a dusting of glitter. The refuse sprinkles away in crystalline drifts from Jezebel’s skin as she holds the arm of whoever can afford her that night. It’s been said that the matching thong and rip-proof thigh-highs could be struck by a samurai’s katana and never, never shred.

A piano tinkles from a shadowy corner. The man at the keys is shrouded in a nullifying helmet for security reasons and plausible deniability. She recognizes the piece, Ravel’s Oiseaux Tristes, the sad birds. He’s playing her song.

Jezebel’s customer lounges on the tufted sofa, easy to find, the only clear face in a synaptic-memory-blurred background. Jezebel gathers her smile and struts over, an invisible band hitting the cymbals with each swing of her hips. Her personal glow illuminates the room as she walks. Jezebel tosses her mass of tight, gleaming curls in a practiced gesture to catch his eye. He relaxes patiently in the furthest back niche, a clone of Magritte's son of man, indistinguishable and forgettable.

Her client is not alone. There is a figure, angled close in a way that only men who knew each other will do. The bioware in her head, though, does not give her brain leave to clear up his image. Both men stand as she draws near. One arm drapes around his friend’s shoulder, but only her client speaks.

“Upside-down porcelain tulips. Plus one.”

His password activates a unique customer key stored in a synaptic vault implanted in her head. Specialized amino acids gather and release a neurotransmitter that unlocks her scribbled memory, lowering a drawbridge across a moat in Jezebel’s brain. Her ready mind is immediately engulfed by a surge of past remembrances. A reflexive smile that stops at her tight cheeks rearranges Jezebel’s face. With the receipt of her newly revealed knowledge, the smile surges to gigawatts and she beams.

“Craig! I’ve missed you.” The flash of emotions feels so real that even Jezebel believes it. Hot liquid sex sizzles on every word.

Jezebel’s mindware tells her that Craig is a regular, otherwise known as Senator Hampstead from the great state of California. Is she in Los Angeles? Jezebel slides next to him on the couch, wrapping herself around his body as only she can. She knows he craves the attention and holds his gaze as her soft lips linger on his cheek. She strokes his graying brown hair, ignoring the slightly too-red nose.

The other gentleman is now recognizable too, with his light-brown hair and hawkish features. Craig’s executive assistant. Intimately private executive assistant. Craig needs to watch before he gets up the gusto to join in the fray. Most times Anamyn provides a male escort but occasionally, like today, it is someone the senator has on staff.

“Jezebel, you remember Anton.”

“Of course, of course.” She flutters her lashes demurely as if she cares enough to be embarrassed. Anton, straight sex, prefers missionary. Surprisingly impressive at cunnilingus but bland in everything else. Bland like his face or plain cold leftover oatmeal.

Craig winks. “I believe he wants a hello kiss.”

Jezebel leans sideways to the adjacent chair where Anton relaxes. As she moves closer though, there is something different, something discordantly off about his appearance. Like a wrong note struck in a familiar song then quickly moved past.

Beneath his collar a whip of color twists under his skin, winding and unwinding like an anemone caught in a gentle underwater current. When Anton notices Jezebel staring, he tightens his posture and adjusts his shirt. The movement under his skin retracts to where her eyes can’t follow.

Probably some new form of aniderm, injected animated artwork that becomes part of the skin. Even Jezebel once succumbed to getting her governmental birthcode covered with animated pigment. Her left wrist permanently reads “Sola Es,” Latin for “You are alone,” a piercing reminder of a previous life. The words shift to the government- approved one-inch squared bio-electric scattercode only when under a birthcode reader.

It is not just Anton’s tattoo: even his behavior has changed. The Anton in her memory guffaws and back-slaps, laughing too loudly at his own jokes. There is no heavy cigar smell and he is more restrained. Civilized. Polite. Completely alien.

A bottle of ruby Krug is delivered to the table. It is the only champagne she drinks when she must drink champagne. It is a stereotype her clients love to believe is true.

Jezebel returns to the senator and rubs his back slowly. Jezebel’s nails tink on the glass as she raises the flute to her lips. It smells of alcohol-soaked rose petals. The bubbly pink liquid chills her throat as she finishes half the glass in one swallow.

“My baby loves her champagne, doesn’t she?”

Jezebel nods like a little girl getting spoiled by her daddy, the way Craig likes. She’s fully attentive to the senator, gazing at him adoringly, intently, desirously as if he is the bright and shining sun at the center of her universe. She gives him a half smile, the kind that made the dimples in her cheeks barely show.

Effortlessly she steers the conversation. Men like these have an urgency to unburden their minds. This is the most honest they will ever be because Jezebel has no judgements. Whores aren’t allowed such hypocrisy.

In his nasally voice, Craig tells her about the new house in the desert that he is building and his wife gaining back the hundred and fifty pounds she lost and removing his kids from that new private school. Jezebel rests her hand on his knee, smiles sympathetically at all the right times, and laughs at the proper cues.

Anton watches with a queer bemused look sticking to his face. When he touches his scotch, Jezebel notices that each fingertip on both his hands are gradient metallic, as if they have been dipped in liquid silver and left to stain permanently. Anton must have fallen in with a new body-modding crowd. She looks away from the lingering, wet passes of his purplish tongue as he stares, drinking in her face.

Jezebel’s streetwise mind has a bothering realization while looking at Anton’s new body art. The Craig she knows would be concerned about how this reflected on his administration, and for someone with higher political career aspirations, declaring yourself a tattooed renegade surely wasn’t the way to achieve tenure . . . although his new, poor decisions could be a stroke of luck for her because it probably means he won’t be on staff much longer. That delicious spike of burgeoning logic quiets any further judgements. Jezebel takes comfort in the fact that this will be the last time their paths will probably cross. Tonight, her awareness regarding Anton is as sharp as her dagger shaped fingernails she used to claw passionate reminders into a willing client’s back. Jezebel needs enough time to react in case he does anything weird.

The senator’s face is crimson from having gotten his glass refilled twice. His voice drones in Jezebel’s head like the background hum of an air conditioner. She lets her mind drift as her smile digs further into her face, setting up a temporary permanent residence. Her glassy gaze of admiration never leaves her eyes. Craig soaks it up like a lizard in the sun.

When the talking ebbs, she leans in close, lips ready. Her saliva is a love potion, her perfume a cocktail of raw pheromones that make up a sultry atmosphere. Jezebel’s warm velvet mouth caresses Craig’s lips, elongating the kiss to time-slowing proportions. “It’s time to go upstairs.” Her voice husky smooth, the senator can’t help but like it.

While Craig’s wrist scattercodes the champagne to the room, Jezebel links her arm in Anton’s as she knows the senator wants. From now on he desires to be a spectator at his own party. Unacknowledged. The burst of color returns, this time emerging from Anton’s French cuffs and the collar at the same instant.

Their threesome enters the elevator, and after they exit, the thickly carpeted hallway muffles their steps to the proper door--the one adjacent to her own. The suite is reverently silent as if the walls themselves suck away any noise. No one speaks, talking will ruin the mood. From here on out, for her it’s showtime.

Jezebel brings up the room console and filters the lights, damping the fabric of the billowing ceiling.