On Saturday night after coming home from
Club Ritz
, Camilla was in her bedroom, lying on her bed, thinking about Akemi's succubus visiting her in her dream the night before. To appease Akemi's spirit and ease her suffering, Camilla not only made love with her in the dream, receiving her cunnilingus and making yet another mess on her bedsheets, but also held the recent suicide in her arms, rocking her back and forth as Agape used to do when little six-year-old Camilla ran home from school crying.
Camilla still remembered the dream vividly.
In the dining room of the mansion of the Satanists where she'd made love with Li-ping, Camilla caught her breath after coming from the licks of Akemi the succubus. The faint smell of smoke hovered lightly in the air, as the mansion was on fire. Camilla said, "I'll always welcome you in my dreams, Akemi. I won't reject you here. I'm so sorry I hurt you when you were alive. In my dreams, we'll love each other as much as you want. Please don't be sad anymore, sweetie."
"I still love you, Camilla," Akemi said repeatedly as they held each other.
Confident that Akemi's ghost was appeased as well as could be expected, Camilla now turned the attention of her meditations to her father, Agape. She'd sat in on his lecture on Thursday a second time; again, her photographic memory allowed her to recall his words as though she was hearing them right then on Saturday night.
He had been discussing another scene from
Hamlet
, the one with the suicide soliloquy ('To be or not to be'). Though her by-now-predictable awe and admiration of Agape's erudition was in great part due, obviously, to her love's biased estimation of his virtues, he also said things about Hamlet's speech that resonated powerfully with Camilla, in terms of her recent troubles.
"'To die, to sleep; /Perchance to dream,'" Agape quoted. "'Ay, there's the rub; /For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, /When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, /Must give us pause. There's the respect /That makes calamity of so long life;...' Hamlet is comparing death to sleep, of course. If in sleep, we rest from our troubles, then death means forever resting from our troubles. Hence, the desire to kill oneself. When we sleep, however, we dream, and if death is endless sleeping, is dreaming the afterlife? Will they be the pleasant dreams of heaven, or the nightmares of hell? As the Church teaches us, suicide is a sin. He who commits suicide is declaring his total lack of faith in God; this sends him straight to hell. Therefore, in killing oneself, do one's troubles end, or do they only just begin, never to end? This realization turns Hamlet's despair over itself: he has little hope in life, but even less hope in death as a cure for his pain. He's gone full circle.
He despairs of his despair
, and therefore chooses to go on living, as hateful as his life may be to him."
These were, in her opinion, the most profound words she'd ever heard in her whole life; once again, her father's sexy insightfulness was driving her wild. His words contained, however, perhaps some of the most painful truths she'd ever heard. Small wonder Akemi felt the afterlife as a 'hard' experience, and Camilla as an empath shared that pain, coincidentally, in a dream. Camilla had always feared death, but now she had an especial dread of it. Love may have been a dangerous emotion, but despair was far more perilous, particularly for those with microscopic ovoid black aliens swimming around in their bodily fluids, aliens that mysteriously strengthened every emotion one felt. Bad feelings, therefore, were to be shunned like lepers; and glee had to be tightly embraced and clung to. From then on, Camilla was resolved to live, love, and laugh as much as she could; for however risky love may have been--especially the incestuous kind--compared to despair, love was as safe as a child in his mother's arms.
"Daddy, you're so deep; and I want you deep inside me," she said to herself, imagining that his interpretation of Hamlet's words was a warning shielding her from danger.
In a way, you saved my life by making me pull myself out of my despair, as Dr. Davis saved my life by pushing me to cure myself of my speedball overdose,
she thought;
now I wanna make love to you, Daddy, as I did with Dr. Davis.
She went downstairs and into the living room, where her father, at his chair by the coffee table, was drinking as usual. She used Nigrovum to make her eyes temporarily blue, then got out her bag of marijuana and papers from the drawer of the coffee table.
"Wait, Camilla," Agape slurred. "Maybe we shouldn't get stoned tonight. These parties seem to be g-getting out of hand."
"How?" she asked, sprinkling the marijuana on a paper. "You're just getting really stoned and having wild dreams about Carrie, that's all."
"Yeah, but those dreams, if that's what they were, seem to be m-more than that. And it doesn't seem to be C-Carrie that I'm with."
"Oh, come on, Daddy. Candice doesn't come over anymore. It's just you and I now. You trust me, don't you?" She rolled the joint.
"Yeah, of course I trust you," he said, looking away.
"Then there's no problem," she said, and sucked on the joint to seal it. She looked sadly in his still suspicious eyes. "C'mon, Daddy: these months have been the first in years that I've spent any time with you. Let's have some fun." She handed him the joint.
"How can I say
no
to those baby blue eyes?" he said, taking the joint and reaching for a lighter.
"Thanks, Daddy," she said. "Your glass is empty; I'll refill it for you while you puff away." She took it into the kitchen and put some more ice and
Jim Beam
in it. As usual, she mixed a half pill of ecstasy in it, then got a can of
Heineken
for herself out of the fridge, and brought the drinks back into the living room. When she gave him his bourbon, he gave her the joint, having puffed on it several times.
A half an hour went by, and he was starting to feel the ecstasy. She hadn't taken any this time, because she no longer needed to have so extreme a high to lessen her inhibitions, now that she'd accepted the reality of her incestuous love; also, being less wasted helped her to be in better control of the situation. To do a better job of convincing him that the lovemaking was all just a dream, she used Nigrovum to make him temporarily drowsy, even though he was now peaking on the E.
He briefly closed his eyes, then opened them. He seemed no longer to be in their house, but in the mansion on Grouse Mountain, the setting of most of Camilla's dreams with the ghosts; only in this Nigrovum-enhanced setting, the mansion wasn't on fire. There was a beautiful inner decor all around Agape.
He looked up and no longer saw Camilla, but Carrie, naked, with Camilla's body.
"Carrie?" he asked. "W-where am I?"
"Heaven," Camilla said in Carrie's voice. "The palace of pleasant dreams."
"I see. Where's Camilla?"
"She's upstairs."
"In a higher heaven?"
"Oh,
yeah
. Let's make love, Aga." Camilla had laid those dirty towels on the floor again, and Agape got on them on his back. She pulled down his pants and underwear, got on top of him in the cowgirl position, and fondled his penis, which became semi-erect. Then she bent forward and reached down to his face, kissing him hard on the mouth. He opened his mouth, and she slid her tongue inside.
As they French-kissed, their tongues rolling over each other, he noticed the smell of beer and marijuana on 'Carrie's' breath. He pulled his tongue out of her mouth.