heiligen

Dr. Chatterjee and Angela were sipping the last of the coffees the Woronovs had brought, watching the laboring boy as he recovered from his fifth orgasm and the machinery relentlessly drove him to his sixth.

“He’s entering heiligen now,” Dr. Chatterjee said, watching the sweating, quaking body.

“Yes, the signs are all there,” Angela said.

Dr. Chatterjee smiled. “You speak with an air of knowledge.”

“Yes, I read the paper,” Angela replied, with some pride.

As they continued to watch the naked Sire, his sweaty body twitching and lurching as it was being suctioned, frictioned and penetrated, Dr. Chatterjee relaxed a bit, putting his thumbs into the little pockets of his vest. “German scholarly writing is famously prolix,” he said. Angela rolled her eyes and they both shared a little laugh.

They were referring to the long monograph by Dr. Horst Breuer that appeared in the peer-reviewed Sire Journal. Dr. Breuer was a physician who had been sent from Germany to observe a couple of the Sire’s drainings last year. Angela had laughed when she saw his photo —he looked like he was entering a Sigmund Freud lookalike contest. But the paper, wordy though it was, was interesting. It turned out that as Kai-Kai passed his fifth or sixth ejaculation, forced by manipulation and stimulation into further orgasms despite his body’s “natural desperation for quiescence”, he entered an altered state, a kind of full-body continuous “background orgasm”, with contractions only at the (by then minimal) ejaculations. Dr. Breuer called this state “heiligen”, which was apparently the German word for “aura” or “halo”. Based on the boy’s facial expressions and his responses to verbal and physical stimuli, Dr. Breuer concluded that Kai-Kai’s mind in the heiligen state was disordered, his words and emotions nonsensical, fantasy and reality intertwined.

Dr. Breuer considered this heiligen state to be unique, not previously encountered in the literature, the nearest equivalent being “model psychosis” states observed in subjects taking LSD in laboratory settings in the early 1960’s (which unfortunately had to be ended when LSD became illegal). He recommended further study, but the topic seemed unrelated to the goals of the Project, and Kai-Kai’s mother was dead set against probing her son’s mind, either through therapy or otherwise. Kai-Kai, of all people, deserved his own private space, and she was upset at the Germans for investigating more deeply than had been agreed to. It was hard to avoid the Germans; theirs was the most penetrated country on earth (Kai-Kai had 201 children there so far, with 48 more unborn) and as such was deeply involved in the Project organizationally, and they did have many constructive ideas. But aside from Mrs. Schreiber’s disapproval, Dr. Breuer’s suggestion for further study was quashed by Frau Redl, Germany’s national liaison to the Project. Which led to some whispered comments by Shonda and some others on the medical team. Frau Redl, who visited often, looked about 30, and was built like a sex dream: tall, gorgeous, with big boobs, a tiny waist, and a naturally sexy walk which she showed off in tight dresses. The wisecracks were all pretty lame; Shonda admitted, “There’s a really good joke in there, but no one’s found it yet.” . . . All this being as it may, “heiligen” turned out to be a handy term to refer to Kai-Kai in the later stages of a draining, after he no longer could converse coherently.

Now Kai-Kai moaned again, in pleasure or pain, it was hard to tell.