Unconscious Camilla was in the middle of reliving a memory from two years before the aquarium incident.
She was thirty-five at the time, and doing a lecture on
The Taming of the Shrew
for her students in a classroom in McGill University.
"Female audiences don't need to be offended by Kate's speech, advocating wives' subservience to their husbands, at the end of the play," Camilla said. "For none of the story of Kate and Petruchio matters. Remember that it is a play within a play, a farce put on to entertain Christopher Sly, the real shrew who needs to be tamed at the beginning, in the Induction."
A number of Camilla's female students, who had feminist sympathies, weren't convinced.
Camilla continued: "The Induction, as short and brief as it is,
is
the real play, not the farce that comes after, even though the Kate and Petruchio story takes up most of the time of the whole thing. Nobody would say that the brief 'Pyramis and Thisby' play within
A Midsummer Night's Dream
is the real story there; nor would anyone say the brief play staged before King Claudius, 'The Murder of Gonzago', is the main story in
Hamlet
. The length or brevity of a play-within-a-play does not determine whether it's the real story or not. The play-within-a-play is always a theatrical illusion, a non-reality Shakespeare was particularly sensitive to as a playwright. The play-within-a-play is never real, so ultimately, it doesn't matter what happens in it."
One of the young women put up her hand. "If the story of Kate doesn't matter, why make it the vast majority of the play's length?" she asked.
"To trick the audience, that's why," Camilla answered. "This whole play is about deception and denial of reality. Christopher Sly, a common drunk, is found asleep on a chair in a tavern. He is taken upstairs to a bedroom, had his modest attire switched with that of a wealthy man, and when he wakes up in bed, everyone tells him he's woken up from a coma, a coma he'd been in for years. They trick him into thinking that he's a lord, and that his memory of his whole life as a common oaf was just a dream."
"Yeah, I know that," the female student said. "But what does that have to do with not worrying about the misogynist speech at the end of the play?"
"Everything in this play is a deception, and a denial of reality," Camilla went on. "Lucentio tricks Bianca's father, Baptista, into thinking Lucentio's a Latin teacher, instead of a suitor for Bianca. Petruchio denies Kate's perception of everything, that well-cooked food is badly cooked, that the time of day isn't what it is, that the sun is the moon, and that Lucentio's father--an old man--is a pretty young woman. If all of that is deception, all illusion, then so is the idea of woman's subservience to man in Kate's ending speech. Sly is tricked into thinking he's a lord, a master, when really, he's nothing; the same is true for husbands. However they may thump their chests in public, when their wives get them home, the men shut up. Shakespeare, with his deep understanding of human nature, knew this reality of the sexes, and he shows it here, if indirectly."
"I think I understand now," the girl said.
"Dream and reality: which is which?" Camilla asked, looking up at the ceiling. "Sly must have been asking himself that question as he watched the Kate and Petruchio farce, before falling asleep again. When do we see illusion, and when do we see the truth? So often, illusion and reality get switched around, as was the case with Sly, and with so many other characters in this play." Camilla now looked at her class with a rather far-away, almost trance-like look in her eyes. "When I was a little girl, about ten, I fell into a coma; I don't remember when I woke up from it, and that's strange, because normally I remember just about everything. I was certainly dreaming during the coma, a long coma...I'm not sure how long..." She gazed up at the ceiling again.
Her students were looking askance at her.
"Is she okay?" one male student asked his neighbour.
"I've heard other students of hers say she's been going nuts like this ever since her husband died," said another student.
**************
That night, Camilla was at home, and she went up to Eros' bedroom. The 16-year-old had finished his homework, and was looking at pictures on his computer. He sensed her coming, and used Nigrovum to alter the image of a woman that was on his monitor--changing her face in particular.
Camilla barged into his room, her psychic powers making her suspicious that he was up to no good.
"Sweetie," she said as she approached his computer. "What are you up to?"
"I'm just doing a report on Gustav Klimt," he lied, while psychically blocking her with the utmost subtlety, so she wouldn't suspect the lie. She looked at the monitor, which showed the painting
Danae
.
"I see," she said, and feeling her suspicion fade away, she left his room.
**************
Now that 37-year-old Camilla was reliving these memories, and in her expanded consciousness she could see what hadn't been revealed to her before, she realized Eros had been lying. The picture on his computer screen wasn't Klimt's
Danae
: it was a page from
camillacome.com
.
Camilla woke up in a shock, finding herself still hovering naked over the water tank in the public aquarium, and being gang-banged by the ghosts of her former lovers. Her large audience was still all there, gawking at her like TV-watching zombies, and getting video of her. The international media was still covering the event, and her come virtually never stopped gushing out of her pussy in an arc into the water below.
The ghost of Dr. Lawson was fucking her pussy; his large invisible cock was making her squeal and scream, more from instinctive pleasure than from fear. Alain's ghost was fucking her ass, his invisible cock gently massaging her anal walls and making her sigh. Desiree's ghost was sucking on her left nipple while Mercedes' invisible lips were sucking on Camilla's right nipple--both tits were pointing at attention. Joey's invisible cock was slipping in and out of Camilla's salivating mouth.
As pleasurable as the physical sensations were for her, the sight of the ghosts' threatening, revengeful eyes--eyes only she, other ghosts, and other psychics could see--was much more frightening for her. Even though the ghosts all knew the masked men were responsible for their afterlife woes, they still blamed Camilla for tempting them into this eternal nightmare with her charms.
The lechers up on the ledge, all with their cell-phone cameras out, never stopped getting video of poor, degraded Camilla. They all tried to get a close-up, detailed image of her gaping pussy and asshole, and of the expression of humiliation on her face as she helplessly watched them all ogle her. The cameras all caught an image of her with her legs spread wide open and up over either side of her head, with her agape pussy-lips and anal lips slightly widening and contracting, like the lips of a fish, or of a smoker blowing smoke rings. Her erect nipples would bob up and down slightly in reaction to the sucking lips of Desiree's and Mercedes' ghosts. Camilla's eyes showed near despair as they helplessly beheld the lascivious smiles of all those men pointing their cameras at her naked body. She couldn't even frown, so busy was her mouth taking in Joey's invisible cock, feeling it poke a bulge against her right cheek, and her kissing and licking the knob.
Among all of Camilla's living watchers, only one looked on with compassion instead of lust. His name was Armand, one of Dr. Singh's former AIDS patients.
***************
HIV-positive, he'd gone to Vancouver from Los Angeles a week before, and he received a small portion of Singh's Nigrovum-enhanced blood in a shot. He and Singh meditated together, visualizing Armand completely cured, and the HIV virus in him disintegrated within seconds of their most focused meditation.
Overjoyed at having a new chance at life, Armand asked, "Dr. Singh, how did you find this miraculous Nigrovum?"
"I didn't find it, actually," Singh said. "A girl I know found it over two decades ago on the Vancouver grass; her name is Camilla Mennon-Fox. Back when she was living here in Vancouver, she and I had sex, and ironically, she passed Nigrovum on to me, as if it were an STD. When I learned of the amazing healing abilities I'd acquired from it with the aid of visualization, I tried it out as a cure for sexually-transmitted diseases. I was amazed at how quickly and easily it can cure all diseases, including AIDS. But I had to make sure that the patients I cured had good hearts, so as not to misuse this power once they had it. That's why I had to make sure you were a good man before offering you the cure. Otherwise, you might have gone back to your old promiscuous ways, or done something worse with it."