Motel Memento Mori
by Andy Nowicki“Tell me, Miss… Have you a name?”
The girl wasn’t expecting to hear this question, of all things, from the lips of her professor as he greeted her at the door of the stately but modest motel room he’d booked for their night together. She shuddered a little as she pondered the implications (but wasn’t that just like her, immediately to ponder implications!), and recalled that this tendency of his to ask abrupt and cryptic questions– challenging her to reconsider things she’d always taken for granted—had in large part been the very quality that had drawn her to him in the first place. A big brain can be a very sexy organ, after all.
But it hadn’t just been his supreme intellect, or his tall, lean, lithe body, or his soulful brown eyes that had rendered her so breathlessly helpless against his charms. No, it had also been his utter lack of self-consciousness and his seeming disinclination to take in what lay plainly before his face. She’d practically had to announce, in bold-letter script, how badly she wanted him, how she fantasized about him for hours every night in her dorm room, how she’d even begun to wear short skirts with no underwear to class, in part because she desperately wanted to catch his eye, but also because such a wardrobe choice enabled her to touch herself surreptitiously under her desk as he lectured in wonderfully mellifluous tones about the works of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Dante.
She’d expected a class on Medieval and Renaissance Literature to be boring as hell, but he’d made it very interesting indeed; as he stood at the board and discoursed, she would fixate on his towering voice and intense eyes, burning with conviction behind his delightfully old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses; he’d even made her care about such matters as Iago’s apparent lack of villainous motivation in Othello, or the buried theological implications of the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. And when he spoke admiringly of Dante Alighieri’s soaring love for Beatrice, which persisted and grew in strength even after that famous Florentine beauty died and ascended to Heaven, she’d fairly well swooned, like the silly little schoolgirl she was, but tried hard not to be.
But the professor also brought out an aggressive streak in the girl that she found she couldn’t restrain or control. She’d flirted with him shamelessly after class on numerous occasions, batting her pretty lashes and twisting her hair through her fingers with a coy smile as she chatted with earnest, purposeful forwardness, but if he ever comprehended what she was driving at, he never showed it. He did not seem in the least discomposed by her brazenness, nor embarrassed, nor even flattered.
For her part, she often marveled at just how bold she became in his presence. She’d been well aware of her good looks for years now, since the onset of puberty, in fact; she’d learned early on that there was no need to come on too strong if she happened to fancy a boy. Sooner or later (but usually sooner), the boy would approach her; the most she’d ever needed to do was innocently lock eyes with him a time or two; after that, he’d get the hint; his appetite would be whetted, and everything would run its sweet course from there.
This unassuming approach had always suited her well before, but now things were different. This professor was a grown man in his forties, and thus impervious to the subtle manipulations that worked so well on boys her own age. At times it seemed there was almost something sinister to the pull the man exerted on her; her fervid, never-ending fantasies of him often took a dark turn into an inexplicable terrain of terror and fright. Yet she could never relinquish her ardor for her professor, nor did she ever wish to do so. She had married him in her mind; he would always be hers, for better or for worse.
During the break between semesters, she’d suffered horribly upon discovering that he’d only given her a “B” in the class. Apparently her open flirtation during the year had had little, if any effect upon him. Of course, she hadn’t been crassly angling for a better grade, but she still felt crestfallen by this seeming sign of disapproval on his part; it even made her wonder if she’d done something to offend or disappoint him. So once school was back in session, she finally screwed up her courage, put on her tightest sweater, applied her reddest lipstick, and made a beeline for his office. She hadn’t embarked on this mission with any notion of getting him to change her grade, but only out of an uncontrollable compulsion to see him again; or rather, to be seen by him again, to have him once more behold her in his beautifully hypnotic gaze.
When she’d arrived at his room, she was shocked at how much of its décor seemed to be dedicated to the theme of death. There were paintings, both classical and modern, of dead and dying saints and martyrs, and some particularly graphic photographs of corpses in various stages of decomposition. All were quite beautifully, if creepily, rendered. Most notably, a human skull sat prominently on the man’s otherwise immaculately clean mahogany desk. Once she got over her shock at the sight, she’d managed to make a clever, if obvious, reference: “I see you’ve brought Yorick to work with you…” to which he’d smirked and muttered, “Alas, yes. Quite chap-fallen he is. No one to mock his own grinning…”
After that initial exchange, the rest of their conversation was still a hallucinogenic blur in her mind. Somehow, some way, in the course of the next few minutes she’d told him plainly just how badly she wanted to be fucked to utter oblivion by him (her mind boggled at how easily she’d expressed such a sentiment directly to his face, there in his office, with the skull on the desk keeping a kind of mute, amused witness to the moment). She didn’t recall him saying much, if anything, after this revelation escaped her lips; instead, he took her in coolly, like an astute physician expertly assessing a patient, deciding what needed to be done to effect a cure. And in some manner or form, in precise words she couldn’t recall (or had it in fact been a wordless moment, one which they’d telepathically shared?), she’d agreed to meet him at this motel just outside of town, in the room where she now found herself, bewildered by the question with which he’d greeted her: “Tell me Miss… Have you a name?”
* * * * *
The girl was immediately struck by something in the professor’s bearing: he’d assumed a supremely authoritative air, much like he always displayed in class, only now with a seemingly harder edge to his low voice and a certain barbed glint in his dark eyes. He was clad in a tight white T-shirt which accentuated a set of surprisingly impressive pecs, and a pair of form-fitting jeans fully revealing the lean and muscular physique she’d only barely glimpsed before. He was indeed in excellent shape for a man of his age—for a man of any age, in fact. He regarded her with a calm, lordly expression of easily assumed command: he was the one in charge, she was the pupil—what precisely he intended to teach her this night she wasn’t yet sure, but she found herself eager to find out, very eager indeed.
She shrugged awkwardly in response to his odd query, tried unsuccessfully to stammer out a reply. He cocked his head in indulgent sympathy for her flustered, temporarily tongue-tied state, and told her: “This may help…. Close your eyes.”
She obediently did, then heard him continue:
“Now, you see nothing at this moment, but I see you. You stand before me, a girl of around twenty: a clever, engaging, and intelligent young woman with a shapely figure and a most endearing eagerness to please. I am, of course, drawn to you; what man wouldn’t be? Yes, I can discern that you are flattered to hear me say these things; you attempt to hide your gratification, but can’t prevent the light rosy blush from leaping to your cheeks… and I can see that this discomfits you as well; you are embarrassed by your embarrassment, and even more mortified by the fact that I’ve noticed it… You are, I gather, unused to being the pursuer. Thus, your pride is bruised; you feel thoroughly exposed before me…”
He touched her gently from behind, on the bare skin of her neck, and she jumped a little, in spite of herself. He brought his face to her ear and spoke in a low whisper now: “Open your eyes, my dear.” She did, inhaling the minty scent of his aftershave; it carried a faintly rugged kick, one that for some reason made her picture a brooding, shadowy figure from a black-and-white silent movie.
“What do you see?” he asked her. She hesitated. “Go ahead,” he encouraged, still softly.
She answered, “I see a motel room.”
“And where is this room?”
“It’s about a mile outside of town, I think,” she replied. “It’s funny, though… I don’t really remember how I got here…”
“Look at the wall,” he now implored, his long fingers now slowly stroking her slender shoulders. “What do you see?”
“There’s a mirror, and there’s a painting of a pastoral scene,” she reported. “Rather pleasantly bland, with dark, muted colors.”
“Quite so,” Now examine the window for a moment. You’ll note that the thickly draped curtain just above the air conditioning unit has been parted: what can you discern outside?”
She looked through the window. “A parking lot,” she replied.
“Indeed,” he exclaimed, sounding thoroughly pleased with her simple observations. “The room in which we dwell is like a million other motel rooms across the country—nay, across the world. We are about a mile outside of town, or at least we think we are, but we could in truth be absolutely anywhere. And that speaks to what I find so invaluable, so absolutely essential, about the motel setting. It obliterates our illusions, reminds us of the undeniably transitory nature of the world in which we have been thrust…”
With that last word, “thrust,” he tapped her hip three times, and she, as if by instinct, knew exactly what he wished; feeling a delicious little shiver of anticipation, mingled with a no less urgent rush of nervous apprehension, she strode to the room’s dresser, placed her hands over the surface of the top shelf, and bent over, arching her back, flexing her knees, and sticking her bottom in the air. He lifted her skirt and fingered her inner thighs; she inhaled ardently at the touch of his smooth, dexterous hand, as his finger crept along the border of her panties, by now grown supremely wet with excitement from her lubed-up crotch.
“You were given a name at birth,” he told her, “but that name doesn’t reveal who you really are… It is but a feeble effort to stake out a phony identity in this passing realm of naught. But this spare, generic motel room demonstrates the lie of such a ludicrous claim…. Your real name is unknown, even to you. You won’t learn it until you return to your true country, and exit this cheap mirage we call ‘existence.’”
She sensed at that moment, without exactly hearing him speak it, a clear directive that she shed the shell of garments that still hung on her body.
“Our clothes are like our skin; they deceive; they fasten us to a false reality,” he told her, though he hadn’t actually spoken the words; she immediately began to unbutton her shirt, fumbling a little, so eager she was to bare herself at his unsaid command; with shaking hands, she unhooked her bra from its front clasp; meanwhile, his fingers had penetrated beneath the sheer silk of her underwear and were slowly, teasingly tracing the opening of her labia, each stroke provoking little inhalations of longing from her moistened lips; she ached for him to fuck her fully and properly, to suck her dry and spit her out, but his expert hands insisted on a torturous leisureliness of pace, which in turn made her all the wetter in her nether region. She wondered how she’d ever hold out, felt sure she’d perish, just knew she’d soon dissolve in a spasm of excruciating hunger.
“We moderns,” he was saying, “have lost what we most desperately need in this life: awareness of this life’s complete insignificance. The ancients and medievalists had a name for this: memento mori, a reminder that death comes for us all, takes every single one of us to that “undiscovered country,” from whose borne no traveler returns. That place is God’s country, and we are its true subjects; we belong nowhere else…” As he spoke, he slid her panties down her legs and unzipped her skirt, which presently fell with a soft thud to the floor; she now stood, or rather bent, naked before him; she sensed him take in all the curves and crevices of her now fully revealed form. Flushed with the heat of his mounting desire, she begged him silently to fuck her at once with full force, to hold back nothing.
“Life is drawn to Death, and vice versa,” he muttered solemnly, as if in prayer. “Life is as ephemeral as a stay in a motel…We must all check out. Death takes you eventually, thrusts himself into you like a knife into your heart. Do not fear Death as he enters you… he only aims to bring you to the place you truly belong, the place of permanence…”
What he next put inside her wasn’t a knife, though it was long, pointed, and unfathomably hard. She nearly screamed as a glorious sensation she’d never before known rocketed through her body and soul. “Oh God… Oh God… Oh God,” she kept shouting as her professor’s enormous cock literally lifted her off her feet, over and over and over again.
“Yes,” he answered huskily, between irregular breaths, in time with his generous thrusts. “Yes… God, God, God…”
She squeezed her eyes shut, her mouth widened, she flung her head back with a furious jerk; a scorching flame engulfed her as she flew towards the light of her true deathless self, there in that motel room, so like all the others in this transitory world, this malignant mirage masquerading as truth, this bitter and deceptive realm of naught.
Andy Nowicki is the author of The Columbine Pilgrim and three other books. He lives in Savannah, Georgia, USA, with his wife and two children.
