As I popped the lock on the door, I had to take a deep breath and wonder how I'd come to this sorry state. I was a grown man, free and otherwise in control of his life, who had surrendered to a whim. A dark whim. An unusual whim.
A whim that would make most people want to lock me up and throw away the key.
I looked through the clear sheets of security glass. There, gleaming in the half-light, was the object of my desire. She beckoned me with folded flesh. I could smell her, smell her intensely with the same animal fervor that let me know I was rocked by lust. She called to me and I could not have stopped myself from obeying.
How did I get to this point, again? I am such a normal person. Normal as in I manage an AT&T store, I drive home in my ten-year-old brown Accord, and at my two-story townhome I kiss my fat wife and settle in for a few hours of TV before bed. It's so normal it hurts, like the paper cuts you get when you crush an official document. It's real, unlike this bizarre corrupting obsession that has taken over my waking hours and nocturnal hopes.
I have been unable to shake the visions. For weeks she has haunted me, dominated my dreams and taken away all my pleasures. I can think of nothing but her. Her bewitching scent, so like the lawless rain forest from which she comes. The erotic curl of her purple flesh. The hint of her radiant sex, so close and yet just out of reach.
Like a man obsessed, I kept the webcam of Lois open on my desktop at work. Whenever I was on the phone, or even just looking up when I had a spare moment, I would stare at in, drinking in her lush sensuality, her surging power, the stimulating colors of her calyxes and the pulsing, forbidden inner regions of her corolla.
"Bob, you just don't seem like yourself lately," my co-worker Dewayne would tell me. Little did he know that I inhabited another world, one of raw lust for a corpse flower. I pulled it together after one day at the office someone cleaned out the 'fridge and found an old Chipotle steak burrito.
"Gross," said one of the secretaries. I took the styrofoam container from him and deeply inhaled the essence of rotting meat. "It's fantastic," I said. "Just like -- " and I almost, but did not, speak the name of the forbidden, the inattainable, my beloved -- Lois.
I recovered and said it smelled like a battlefield, then threw out the offensive mess, but I would never forget that smell. That deep, penetrating, powerful smell. Her smell.
My wife complained that I was no longer interested. I meant her no harm; I was simply distracted. How could I desire a normal woman, once I have seen feminine perfection? My filing cabinet overflowed with clippings from newspapers and my bookmarks in Firefox centered around the articles. Lois. Corpse Flower. Blooming -- oh, tantalizing wait! Just out of reach, she toys with my emotions. I started carrying a photo of her in my wallet.
"That's pretty weird dude," said the young policewoman who pulled me over for speeding -- I was distracted. I couldn't put her out of my mind.
Which brought me back to the present. The museum has good security, but not good enough. I found a ghillie suit at the Army Surplus store on North 59 (say hi to Phil there, he hooked me up with a red filter flashlight as well). The rest was trivial, simple, a small detail compared to my love for her. My unconsummated love, thrashing inside of me like red rage, a fire scorching reason and taboo right out of my mind.
I walked in with briefcase, stopped at the gift shop and bought a t-shirt -- mere mortal trinket! -- so that they would give me what I needed, which was the shopping bag with the gift shop logo. I pitched the tshirt into the fake lagoon at the dinosaur exhibit, then stuffed the ghillie suit into the shopping bag, abandoning the briefcase in my hiding place behind the live cuttlefish exhibit. Then all I had to do was take position and wait.
For any ordinary person, the task of crouching for a half-dozen hours in the hot, humid and damp atmosphere of the Cockerell Butterfly Center would be impossible; unthinkable, even. But for a man with love burning through his veins, it was trivial. I laughed it off -- light as a cloud, as bodiless as a ray of light, I crouched for hours.
I had put on the ghillie suit, a mesh vest and trousers stuffed with fabric leafs and moss to resemble heavy foliage, and sweltered in it as the museum closed down for the night. Despite the fog of my unconsummated lust, I had the presence of mind to pick the one day in a dozen when the museum was closing for the night to help Lois bloom. Tonight they locked the doors, sent away the people, turned off the webcam... and she would be alone, a dream finally come true. She... Lois -- the only one I could imagine.
Lois! The mere word sent chills through me and I thought I might faint there, crouched next to a fern between the honeybees and some infernal lizard who kept hissing at me from his cage strewn with children's toys. I thought the night would never begin, and that I would never hear the last calls of the security guards as they bolted the doors and left for other parts of the museum.
I did not move a muscle. When their footsteps faded, and I could see by the emergency lights that no guards were near, I rose slowly and moved at a glacial pace to fool the motion sensors. A step every two minutes made climbing the stairs an eternity. Yet she was so close to me I dared not even entertain the thought of failing her. The moon blazed above as after hours I reached the top of the twisting stair, near the door that led me to her and eternal happiness.
As I raised the crowbar, I knew that I was crossing the threshold. At the moment before the snap of the lock, I would still be at worst a trespasser, some clueless dude who may have fallen asleep in the butterfly center wearing a ghillie suit. After that lock snapped, I knew I would become a foreign agent, or a mercenary, come to whisk the affections of a corpse flower away from her loveless guardians.
The lock snapped with a quick sharp sound. I waited; no response. After a half hour, I made my move, sliding into the room below the laser that detected intruders. I moved slowly -- what is an hour, when you have eternity to gain -- and minced across the room to the security panel. With my screwdriver, I opened it, then poised my wire clips over the strategic wire I need. With a deep breath, I cut.
Silence.
We were now free to be together.
Tentatively, holding my breath, I stepped forward to be closer to her. In the pure moonlight her beauty washed over me like a wave of warmth and comfort, stirring in my trembling breast feelings of such intensity I thought my nerves themselves might vaporize. My nostrils tensed with the first delicious waft of her scent, like decomposition with an erotic undertone.
I had to have her. There could be no other way. I approached with caresses and soft words, reciting to her poetry and the rhymes of love songs, soothing with a voice that hid its inward ardor. I felt as if she heard me and relaxed, releasing more of her intoxicating scent. I kissed her sweet calyxes, and pressed my tongue lightly along her bunched petals, the moisture and warmth causing more of that delicious odor to waft from within.
"I must have you," I cried, and she must have felt my passion, for at that moment with a gentle ruffling noise she began to open -- she opened for me. I teased her with my mouth, then my fingers danced lightly over her zones of pleasure, as the gateway to pleasure separated before me. Tearing off my clothes, I brushed aside the calyxes with the roughness that offsets the gentleness of the lovemaking act, and with my mouth stimulating her corolla, plunged myself into the moist delight of her inner chamber.
Time defies description in this state. How long we were locked in that lustful embrace, tasting the delights of each other's bodies and intimate areas, I do not know, but it was the most amazing span of my life. I was one with the corpse flower, and she with me. I felt pleasures I cannot describe and although she was coy, I feel that she did as well.
Life is not kind to lovers outside of the act of love itself, and morning came too quickly with the outraged shout of a security guard. Soon they had me bound, chains swinging across the limbs that had held her, and I cried out, "I will never forget you, Lois! We shall be together!" A dark shade crossed my mind as the tazers hissed at my side.
When I look back on it now, there is nothing I regret. I found the great love of a lifetime, and I pursued her, and I had her with all of the beauty and pain that such a great event entails. Regrets do not trouble me, nor does fear for the future. I have found love and become one with it, through her. A happier man in a straightjacket you will not find!
Still I possess her in my dreams, and I know that if I ever escape this foul hell of a mental ward, we will be together forever at last, in body, mind and soul.
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