The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Erotica

The Penis of My Beloved ^{Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia}

During my Beloved’s lifetime his penis was of great importance to me – how could it be otherwise? Of course, there was much more to my Beloved than his penis. For instance, there was his tongue. I don’t merely refer to his skill at licking, but also to all the words he said to me (except obviously whilst licking). Words are so important to a woman during love, just as they are in the everyday aspects of life. Also, there were his dark eyes, which spoke volumes of silent poetry. Also, there were his arms which held me. I need not enumerate more – there was all of Oliver.

When my Beloved suddenly died of a heart attack, how desperately I craved to have him back again, alive.

This was possible due to advances in rapid cloning. However, a whole body cost a small fortune. Oliver and I had never given much thought to the morrow. Even by availing myself of a special offer from the Bodies’r’Us Clinic, and by paying on the instalment plan, the most I could afford was the cloning of a small part of Oliver.

Which part should it be? His right hand, sustained by an artificial blood supply and activated to a limited extent by a nerve impulse box with control buttons? Even a whole hand was out of my financial reach!

Should it be his tongue, likewise sustained by a costly blood supply?

Minus mouth and throat and vocal cords, a tongue could never say anything even if it wanted to, although it ought to be able to lick, for such is the nature of tongues. Body parts are aware of the role they play in the entirety of the body, consequently this memory lingers on even when they’re amputated or dissected, or in this case cloned. Oh yes, his tongue ought to be able to lick, although the sensation might seem to me more like a warm slug than his robust tongue of yore.

How about one of his eyes, which spoke volumes? The eye could rest upon an egg cup and form an image of me. Before going to bed I could perform a striptease for his eye. Yet to be perfectly frank, what could his eye do for me? Also, although I had no intention of ever being unfaithful to my Beloved, a naked eyeball might seem like a spy camera keeping watch. This wasn’t the kind of continuing intimacy I craved.

Really, my choice could only be the penis, especially as the cost was based upon the “normal” size when flaccid rather than erect. In this instance, the money I would be paying in any event for the blood supply, so as to keep the part alive, would provide a special bonus benefit, namely erection when the penis was caressed. You couldn’t say about any other cloned body part that your investment could grow ten-fold, as it were!

“You mightn’t realize,” the cloning salesman said to me, “that a penis becomes stiff not because of blood pumped actively into it by an excited body, but because certain penile muscles relax, which allows the blood to flow in and fill it. Normally the muscles are tense and inhibit the volume of blood – otherwise men would have permanent erections.”

“So if you feel nervous and tense, you never get an erection?”

The salesman flushed, as though I had touched on a sore point. He was a young man with ginger hair and many freckles. The wallpaper of the consultation room was Klimt, so we were surrounded by hybrids of slender women and flowers.

“Madam, it’s simply that you might be expecting too much. We can’t absolutely guarantee erection, for that would be to alter the biology of the penis. In effect we would be providing you with a bio-dildo rather than with a genuine cloned organ – and we don’t supply such things. Prostho-porn isn’t our profession.” This was spoken a shade tartly. The salesman may have been upset by my previous remark, supposing that it reflected upon his own virility.

I was sure that my Beloved’s cloned penis would remember my own particular touch and wouldn’t feel inhibited.

I made like a wide-eyed innocent. “Is ‘prostho-porn’ anyone’s profession?”

“I’ve heard that in China…” The salesman lowered his voice. “Multiple cloned cunts of pop stars in pleasure parlours…” Now he seemed mollified and was all smiles again. “This won’t be the case here! Your commission will be unique to you.”

“I should hope so!”

It goes without saying that I’d arranged for sample cells from all of Oliver’s important organs and limbs to be frozen in liquid nitrogen – which wasn’t too expensive – before the majority of his dear chilled body finally entered the furnace at the crematorium. I’d read that in another few years it might be possible to coax a finger or a penis, say, to diversify and regenerate from itself an entire body, but apparently this was a speculative line of research pursued by only a handful of maverick scientists. Small wonder: it’s much more common for a body to lose a penis than for a penis to lose a body! So I was sceptical of this possibility. In the meantime my dream of recreating the entirety of Oliver, to rejoin his penis, would remain a dream because of the cost.

“So that’s the famous penis!” exclaimed my neighbour Andorra, who was short and who spoke her mind. Andorra and I were best friends even before the sudden death of my Beloved, about which she was very consoling. Currently Andorra was working for the Blood Donor service.

Her parents chose the name Andorra to suggest that she would be adorable. Naming her after the tiniest independent state in Europe did prove prophetic as regards her stature and personality – she was short and assertive. Yet as regards adorability in the eyes of the opposite sex, the ploy failed. Andorra had only had one boyfriend, and he was a disaster. No one else tried to get into bed with her, or courted her. I think Andorra trained as a nurse due to reading too many doctor-nurse romance novels, many of which still littered her apartment next door to mine.

Next door to our apartment, I should say. Oliver’s and mine; mine and that of his penis.

Andorra’s dog Coochie sometimes chewed her romance novels or carried them around her apartment while awaiting her return from work, and a walk, and an emptying. Coochie was a yellowish Labrador.

“Famous?” I replied. “There’s nothing famous about it except in my own eyes.” And in my hand, of course.

“It’s a bit small…” But then she quickly added, “At the moment.” She eyed the apparatus to which the penis was attached by two long connecting tubes. “Will you pump some more blood into it?”

So that she could behold an actual erect penis in the flesh at last?

“That isn’t why a penis stiffens. Don’t you know anatomy? What’s important is the receptive mood of the penis.”

“Well, it would be more impressive…” She tailed off.

Did she hope that I would stimulate the penis of my Beloved for her benefit? I almost succumbed to her implied entreaty, if only to demonstrate Oliver’s penis in full gory, I mean glory, but this was an intimate matter.

“I’m perfectly satisfied,” I told her. Only as I spoke did I realize how this might imply smugly that Andorra herself remained unsatisfied. She had mentioned dissatisfaction with dildos. I might seem to be cock-crowing, lording it over my friend.

Andorra looked thoughtful.

Due to the length of the blood-tubes it was easy to take the penis to bed with me so as to stroke it in just the way my Beloved had liked, then pleasure myself after it stiffened. It remembered me. Because only Oliver’s penis was cloned, not his prostate and other attachments, inevitably there was no ejaculation, yet this was no disadvantage – on the contrary! I would hold the rubber grip-mount, shaped like a small plant pot, in which his penis (as it were) grew, and much prolonged joy was mine. I was blissful. Sometimes after an orgasm I would take the penis out of me and talk to it, or use my mouth for a different purpose. I felt like a little girl: the penis of my Beloved, my lollipop.

But then came a problem with the blood supply – I don’t mean the tubes and pump, but rather my finances. Bodies’r’Us strongly recommended renewing the blood each month to prevent degeneration of the penis. As part of the initial cost, I’d received five vouchers for replacement blood. Now I’d used those vouchers, and I discovered that in the meantime the cost of blood had risen by 25 per cent.

Bodies’r’Us was a significant user and retailer of blood, needing to buy blood, good blood, too, from healthy sellers. Nobody would donate blood charitably so that some rich woman could maintain a clone of her dead poodle, or me a cloned penis. Andorra had complained to me that the Donor Service, which supplied hospitals, was suffering a bit of a blood drain because former donors were choosing to sell rather than donate, but luckily altruism and generosity still prevailed in society, not to mention donations by way of the vampire churches as part of their safe sex campaign.

At this point I consulted Andorra and she made me an offer…

… to smuggle blood from the Donor Service – providing that I let her use the penis of my Beloved privately one evening each week, say every Friday.

I was astonished and disconcerted.

“I’m your best friend,” she pointed out.

“It won’t respond to you,” I said.

She pouted at me, full-lipped. “I’ll find a way.”

I should have refused. Yet if I refused, I might embitter Andorra. It must have cost her dear to make this request, this admission of craving for the real thing – or at least for the cloned and partial thing. Refusal might seem like a slap in the face. But also, of a sudden, I was curious as to whether my Beloved would respond to the touch of a stranger!

According to Andorra, the penis did react to her, and very satisfyingly too. She might be fibbing so as to salve her pride, and I could hardly ask to be present while Andorra writhed on her bed. Besides, I wouldn’t have wished to behold this personally. Consequently, every Friday evening Andorra would carefully carry the pump and the penis along to her apartment and bring them back to me a couple of hours later. During this interval I would watch TV and try not to think about what might be happening. Once the penis was mine again, I would wash it, irrespective of whether Andorra had already done so. Washing excited the penis as much as caresses, since the actions were very similar. The penis seemed to be wishing to make up to me for what had occurred, even though it was I who owed the penis an apology.

I would kiss it. “Forgive me, my Beloved. You earned your blood, that’s the main thing.”

After some weeks I made a terrible discovery. When Andorra brought the penis back, Coochie was with her, pawing at her thigh and sniffing.

“Stay!” ordered Andorra, but Coochie pushed his way into my apartment. The dog’s gaze was fixed on the now floppy penis. He seemed to want it – not for a snack, which was my first fear, soon dispelled by a much worse realization: Coochie wanted the penis as a penis.

When I stared accusingly at Andorra, she broke down in tears of remorse.

“He’s become addicted,” she confessed.

“Do you mean… do you mean… you’ve been giving your dog bestiality treats with the penis of my Beloved?”

“He’s an unusual dog! I love Coochie, and Coochie loves me, but I knew he was gay!”

“Gay? How did you know that?”

Andorra remained silent.

“Did Coochie bugger some other male dog while out walkies with you?”

More silence. My best friend couldn’t tell me an outright lie. Suddenly I realized that if Andorra’s discovery had not occurred during walkies then only one possibility remained…

“You used to try to get Coochie to fuck you! But no matter how you went about it, Coochie couldn’t get it up because—”

“—because Coochie’s gay. It’s the only explanation.”

I felt sorry for Andorra. Yet I also had a persistent image in my mind… of Coochie, who was gallumphing around, his anus frequently visible. How degrading for the penis of my Beloved!

While performing that canine service, Oliver’s penis must have been stiff! Was the penis utterly undiscriminating?

“Look,” I told Andorra, “you must promise me, don’t do it with Coochie again. That’s unhygienic.”

“I always did me after I did Coochie.”

That would have cleaned the penis?

Resulting in Andorra’s vagina smelling of male dog? In due course Coochie might learn to associate… Andorra had not given up hope.

“I’d be well within my rights to refuse you the penis ever again.”

“And I to refuse you blood,” she murmured.

She had a point. Consequently we didn’t quarrel.

With some difficulty she hauled Coochie away. Alone once again, I eyed the wilted penis. “Beloved, how could you do it with a dog?”

I tried to come to terms with what had happened by being objective and logical. The episode with Coochie was not my Beloved’s fault.

The next week Andorra remarked, “Maybe the penis has erections in a Pavlovian way regardless of with whom or with what. Poor Oliver loves you, but he can’t resist. You really ought to have more of him cloned.”

How would I pay for that?

Oh but she had the answer!

At the hospital where Andorra worked previously, she knew a junior anaesthetist who moonlighted as a stud in porn movies. Mark’s rugged good looks and intelligence made him a desirable actor. As for his prowess, before each performance Mark would sniff a stimulant gas to keep himself stiff irrespective of ejaculation. Unfortunately, Mark had recently been sacked for stealing gas from the hospital. Now he needed to rely full-time on porn to earn his living just at the time when he’d lost access to what boosted him.

What, suggested Andorra, if I were to offer the penis of my Beloved as a stand-in for Mark’s penis while limp? With clever editing, viewers mightn’t notice the temporary substitution, the tubes, the little plant pot clutched by Mark, or by whichever woman.

My Beloved’s penis would be earning some money with which to recover more of himself for me.

“How is Coochie coping?” I asked.

“I lock him in the bathroom with a lot of cold turkey. He loves that. It takes his mind off the penis.”

Andorra made arrangements. A couple of weeks later I watched a copy of the video in order to see with what sort of woman the penis was unfaithful.

The poor editing hid little. It was obvious that part of the time a detached, hand-held penis was in use. Not a dildo, oh no, but a living penis which happened to lack a man attached to it.

What a dream for a woman, you may well say! And you would be right. Thanks to chat on the internet, word spread rapidly. The video became a wow among women. Few men bought it, maybe because of castration fears, but the producer was jubilant. Here at last was a porn video uniquely suited to females. Therefore, we must make another video quickly – starring the detached living penis itself. Mark would play the role of a sex counsellor administering the penis as therapy to a patient.

Not long after this second video was released, requests began arriving from dozens of sophisticated high-society women requesting “private performances”, and offering to pay well.

Thus it was that at a private orgy, held in a woodland clearing on the outskirts of the city, the penis of my Beloved was mounted on the bonnet of a Jaguar car in place of the usual little model of a leaping jaguar. Several naked women wearing Venetian carnival masks took turns ascending the front of the car while friends cheered. This gave a new meaning to auto-eroticism.

Because of those private performances I was accumulating money fast. A down-payment on cloning all the rest of my Beloved looked possible, not least because the wife of one of the directors of Bodies’r’Us was one of those who had privately enjoyed the penis of my Beloved. She regarded my quest for the entirety of my Beloved as so romantic.

This woman, Natalie, made short art films as a hobby. She was convinced that a film made by her about my eventual reunion with my Beloved might win her a prestigious award given for short art movies featuring sexual themes, the Shiny Palm. This trophy took the form of a polished feminine metal hand grasping an erect penis made of purple glass.

On account of the porn movie about the autonomous penis, Bodies’r’Us had gained new customers. Wives who had seen that movie, and whose husbands failed to satisfy them sufficiently, urged their spouses to have their penises cloned so as to support the men’s performance in bed. An identical understudy, or penis double, would increase the women’s pleasure and offer extra possibilities.

Excellent publicity for Bodies’r’Us! In Natalie’s opinion an artistic movie would add true chic to the cloning of small body parts.

Not necessarily always penises, either! A lovely nose might be cloned and mounted on a plaque, like a small hunting trophy, the blood supply out of sight in a hidden compartment. A hand might be cloned. Or a finger. Due to lack of auxiliary muscles, one couldn’t expect the hand to flex its fingers dramatically, or the finger to bend much. A finger is not a penis. Probably penises would be most popular.

“Rivalry might even arise among men who have cloned penises,” Natalie declared to me on the phone one day. “Those can be displayed on the wall as a talking point at a dinner party. You know how men boast – but it would be most unsuitable for a man actually to pull his own trousers down during a fashionable dinner party! Besides, he mightn’t rise to the occasion on account of too much alcohol or shyness. A cloned penis, which wouldn’t imbibe, can represent him at his best. Wives will take pride in demonstrating the penis to their guests.”

She speculated further: “Failure to mount your cloned penis on the wall might even give rise to suspicions as to the quality of the original penis. Too small? Too thin? Whatever! Maybe deficient men will buy more magnificent penises not cloned from themselves – provided by third-world companies without the scruples of Bodies’r’Us. On the other hand, the display of a less than splendid penis on the dining room wall might be a form of inverted boastfulness: ‘It may not look much, but if only you knew what I can do with it, and for how long!’ You do want your Beloved back, don’t you, dear? If you let me make a film about your quest, I’m sure Bodies’r’Us will be very easy on the terms for a full Beloved. My film wouldn’t be intrusive, just a few remote-control mini-cameras concealed in your apartment.”

I was so excited I would have agreed to almost anything.

Bodies’r’Us must have exploited some of that research by those maverick scientists I mentioned. Instead of cloning 100 per cent new body complete with brand new penis, they integrated – as they put it – the already cloned penis into the ensemble of all the rest of Oliver’s cloned anatomy. The cloned penis which I already knew was precious to me – it stood for continuity. I could hardly discard it, but it would be downright silly to maintain that autonomous penis unused, expensively keeping a blood pump working at the same time as the full Oliver maintained a blood supply to another cloned penis by natural means. It was only sensible that the original cloned penis should be coupled to the rest of the clone.

And so my Beloved came back to me.

Along with some cameras and microphones for my apartment.

In years gone by, scientists predicted that a duplicated brain shouldn’t retain any of the memories of the brain that it was cloned from. According to past scientific wisdom, the new brain should only exhibit the same capacities and personality traits and tendencies as the original brain – for instance, the tendency to fall in love with somebody looking much like me, or the ability to learn languages easily.

Now we know that a cloned brain actually inherits many of the typical dreams of its source brain. This is because dreams are deeply archetypal. The original brain and the cloned brain are genetically identical, so by morphic resonance the cloned brain acquires much of the dream experience of the original from out of the collective storehouse from which dreams emerge, and into which they return.

Thus my cloned Beloved couldn’t remember any actual incidents of our waking life together, but he knew who I was in a dreamy way. And because dreams contain speech, he could speak, although in rather a dreamlike manner.

“You are an almond tree,” he told me, shortly after Bodies’r’Us delivered him to the apartment. Was that because of the colour of my eyes? If so, this must be an endearment.

Yet to my horror I very quickly found that my Beloved was impotent with me! No matter what I did, or how I displayed myself, his penis remained limp – that very penis which had previously responded so enthusiastically! This shocked and chagrined me – and I regretted the cameras and microphones Natalie had installed.

We have all heard how the arm of the executed German mass-murderer, Sigmund Hammerfest, was grafted on to an amputee, Rolf Heinz, who’d lost his arm in a car crash, and how the murderer’s arm subsequently made Herr Heinz homicidal. While Herr Heinz was making love to his wife one night, the arm broke Frau Heinz’s neck. The organs and limbs of the body possess a kind of memory, as I’ve said.

Could it be that, rejoined to its body, the penis conveyed memories of its multiple infidelities to my Beloved’s body? And the body, now powering the penis, developed guilt, which disabled the penis? Thus the memory of the penis was contaminating the true wishes of its owner.

Yet what really were the true wishes of my Beloved? Could it be that the penis had truly loved me, but that Oliver himself as a complete person hadn’t been quite so devoted? Could it be that formerly the penis had been ordering my Beloved to love me and nobody else? That it was the desire of the penis, rather than true love, which had made Oliver want to fuck me? Yet I had permitted the penis to respond to anybody; in a sense I had trained it to do so. Consequently, now I was no longer a unique focus of desire. My Beloved might call me an almond tree like some medieval Arabian poet, but those were just pretty words! This was very confusing.

Why, oh why, had I cloned all of Oliver at such cost when the penis had been my real lover all along! I had prostituted the penis, the only part of him that truly loved me. Now Oliver was inhibiting the penis from performing, and I might be discovering all too late that my Beloved’s flowery sentiments were hypocritical!

I accused my Beloved.

His replies were hard to understand – unlike the formerly clear, if non-verbal, responses of the stiff penis to me.

“You didn’t truly love me,” I cried.

“Balloons bring roses,” said Oliver. “Scent escapes from bursting balloons.” Did this mean that love dies?

“It was your penis that loved me, not you!”

“The rubies of your nipples are so hard they could cut glass.” Was he complaining about my nipples? In the old days of our passion, had they hurt his chest?

I was shouting at him in angry disappointment when a knock came at the door.

Andorra stood outside, Coochie on a leash.

The blood froze in my veins. Here was the moment I had been fearing.

“May we come in?” Andorra asked with a big, insincere smile. The dog wagged his tail, excited, probably foreseeing who knows what kind of filthy development.

No, no, no! I thought with all the power of my mind. However, I heard my voice answer politely: “Yes, of course, feel at home.” Oh the hypocrisy of etiquette. I could have bitten off my tongue. But there was no escaping from destiny.

Oliver remained expressionless as he met the gaze of Andorra, then of the dog. Andorra was observing Oliver inquisitively, as if to perceive a penis improbably hidden between his eyes. The gay dog was salivating, detecting the smell of a friendly penis that it knew… in the biblical sense. Coochie pushed close to Oliver and insolently sniffed his genitals through the trousers. Was the trace of an erection swelling in there? Oliver’s forehead was knit. Did Coochie awake in him those dreams that I feared? Under no circumstances should I leave Oliver, and above all my penis, alone together with these two sexual jackals. As yet we were only in my hallway, which was quite large.

The doorbell rang and I turned to open the door once more. Etiquette!

Outside stood two mature women.

“We’re from the Church for the Protection of Genital Organs,” announced one of the ladies. “We’d like to interview you for our religious magazine.”

This church had sprung up recently. Advances in plastic surgery were making it possible to have one’s genitals exotically customized. Surely this insulted the sexual organs God designed for Adam and Eve and for all of us! Biblical believers had long since abandoned defending the sanctity of marriage as a lost cause, consequently they poured their piety into defending the sanctity of copulation as God intended, using the exact organs He provided, not pudenda reshaped into orchids or trumpets, or giant clitorises or bifurcated dicks.

As I later discovered, Bodies’r’Us – who approved of exact copies, not baroque variations – had given some money to the Church of PGO and encouraged them to interview me to make an interesting scene in the movie. Drawing the attention of the Church of PGO was a big mistake, as subsequent events proved. But meanwhile I got rid of the two women as quickly as possible, although not fast enough. When I turned back to my guests, they were not there any more. Andorra and Coochie had vanished along with my Beloved and his/my penis!

Obviously they had gone into the lounge, but why then had they closed the door? Worry clutched at me. I gripped the door handle to follow them only to discover that the door was locked! With a shiver I imagined the spectators of the movie seeing my face turn pale at this point as the most horrible of scenes formed in my mind, of my beloved Oliver buggering the Labrador, who in turn was buggering Andorra who, between moans, was sipping champagne from one of the crystal glasses my grandmother had left me in her will.

Was the artistic, romantic movie of reunion with the Oliver of my penis destined to turn into the usual bestiality porn reality show, the commonplace of television? I banged loudly on the door, but the only response was what sounded like a suffocated whine. Nobody came to let me into my own lounge.

“Oliver!” I shouted. “Andorra!” For answer, just another whine.

This was too much. I fainted.

When I recovered, I was lying on the couch in the lounge. Andorra and Oliver were watching me with worried expressions. Coochie was sitting looking sleepy.

“How long have I been unconscious?”

“A few minutes,” replied Andorra, whether this was true or not. “We heard a thump and found you behind the door. You ought to have the handle seen to. I don’t think it works properly.”

Was she sincere?

“Why did you close the door at all?”

“To be discreet. You had visitors.” Oh, etiquette again. If I believed her.

I turned to Oliver. “What happened in here before you found me passed out?”

“What is passed or past is the turd of the fall, come springtime.”

In other words, No use crying over spilt milk? By which he might mean spilled semen. Did turd allude to a dog’s anus? To my mind those two items are always closely linked. Oliver was no help at all. I’d been getting along better with his, or rather my penis.

Ignoring the gaze of my Beloved, I looked lower, so as to distinguish within his pants my more beloved penis, probably the only part of Oliver which ever really loved me. That wasn’t difficult – an evident protuberance seemed likely to perforate his pants at any moment. Obviously Oliver’s penis was completely erect, the way I remembered it, the way I had long loved it. Hidden as it was by trousers I couldn’t actually see it, and this seemed unjust. Forgetting about the presence of Andorra and the hidden cameras, instinctively I reached out a hand sweetly to caress my beloved penis, which I hadn’t seen – nor felt – in its full, majestic, generous erection for far too long. In the very moment when my hand grazed it, the penis imploded like the Hindenburg airship, deflating at once and evading my contact. Suddenly everything became atrociously clear beyond any doubt!

The penis itself could not know so quickly that it was me who touched it, because the trousers were a barrier to its sensitive nerve endings. Therefore, the order to deflate must have come directly from the brain of Oliver. I became furious and shouted: “You treacherous fuckface prickhead, get out of my home! Get out, but leave my penis here!”

Seizing Oliver, I propelled him with all my strength out of the lounge, through the hall, to the front door. He didn’t resist but let himself be thrown out, although of course he took my/his penis with him. Those two damn churchwomen were still loitering outside, index fingers scribbling on smartscreens nestling in their palms. Were they inventing a non-existent interview? Aurora and Coochie hurried past me without a word or a woof, and I slammed the door behind them. Then I allowed myself the wisest feminine recourse in emergency circumstances: I began to cry.

Oliver took up residence in Andorra’s flat. Some days later a man with the face of a mummified pig presented himself at my door.

“I’m the lawyer of the penis,” he introduced himself.

I discovered that the Church for the Protection of Genital Organs had arrogated to itself the right to represent the interests of Oliver’s penis. From Pigface I heard talk about the rights of genital organs to self-determination and about some Treaty of Independence from the Bearer of the Organ. Oh the mysteries of jurisprudence! The ways that lawyers get rich!

Pigface explained to me that Oliver’s penis had gained the status of an individual by virtue of having lived independently for a sufficient time before finding itself again attached to a human bearer. The Church for the Protection of Genital Organs was entitled to represent the penis because it was the first to claim that right, without the penis raising any objection.

“But the penis wouldn’t be able to understand any of this!”

“Exactly. So it needed legal representation.”

Later I learned how the judge at the court in question had become obsessed with making controversial landmark judgments in the hope of being retired soon with a knighthood or some other honour. The Church of PGO had been well aware of this.

In Andorra’s flat there were no hidden cameras. Andorra had refused the TV company permission to install any cameras in her home – probably so as not to expose to the world her affair with the dog. For the TV company and for Bodies’r’Us this was unacceptable. On the other hand, the impotence Oliver’s penis displayed towards me when it was attached to Oliver hardly made his return to my own home a very exciting prospect for Natalie and the other people involved in the production of the movie. The public doesn’t much care for erotic dramas with impotent characters. Therefore, the lawyers for Natalie and Bodies’r’Us were petitioning to have Oliver and his penis separated again, so that the penis could go back to performing in the role that had made it so famous, the penis without a man.

The penis without its Oliver had already become a star. A poll revealed that as an anonymous part of a normal person it wouldn’t be so interesting to people.

The Church for the Protection of Genital Organs likewise wanted the penis to be separated from Oliver, yet not so that it could perform in porn movies or couple with me again, which they viewed as unnatural. Instead, they wanted it to retire to a zen monastery. Oh, the moral obsessions of churches!

Thus there was conflict between the movie producers, with whom I had signed an agreement on behalf of the cloned Oliver, and the lawyers for the penis and the Church of PGO.

“We won’t allow you to go on sexually exploiting that poor penis,” Pigface told me at a deposition hearing.

“It’s a sexual organ. It was born to be sexually exploited,” I retorted.

“He’s an individual with full rights, including the right of freely choosing the modality of his sexuality.”

“It’s a penis. If it becomes hard that means it wants to fuck.”

“Not at all! Diseases exist, such as priapism. Erection can be the symptom of a pathology.”

I decided to change my strategy. “It’s a piece of meat without a brain. It’s not compos mentis.”

“Another reason to protect his dignity. We will never allow that poor penis to be forced into any more intercourse for which he didn’t give written consent.”

“How can a penis write anything?”

“If held properly, it can produce a DNA signature.”

“Without a prostate it can’t ejaculate, so where’s the ink?”

“We can prepare all necessary documents before the separation.”

Suits and countersuits were heard, and the lawyers were all very happy until at last no legal problems prohibited the penis being separated from Oliver. Final judgment was that since the penis was cloned before the body, it was the one who owned the other, and not the contrary. The penis owned the man, namely the cloned Oliver; Oliver did not own the penis. If it’s legitimate for a man to cut off his own penis, provided that he isn’t attempting suicide, logically the penis could decide to cut off its own man. The lawyer for the penis, as his legal representative, had full power to act in this regard – and to steal the penis of my Beloved, I was thinking in anger and frustration.

The judge duly retired and became a lord.

However, we live in a strange and unpredictable world.

Under its various Patriot Acts, the USA had permitted itself to intervene in any part of the world in defence of its homeland security and its supplies of oil and cheap obesity fast food, full of oil and sugar and additives. To signal to the world its rise as a rival superpower, China enacted the Salvation of Culture Law, by which the Chinese gave themselves the right to intervene anywhere to protect the interests of art. This was something that the American government found hard to understand, so they did not threaten the Chinese with thermonuclear war.

If the USA was the Global Cop, China would be the Global Curator. A popular US slogan was “Kick Ass America!” So Beijing declared “Save Art China!” And why not, China being the oldest civilization on Earth? When Venice began to sink rapidly, swift intervention by Chinese technology had rescued the Italian city, preserving it in a dome to the applause of most nations. From then on, China could take great liberties in the defence of art.

Art included performance art, and one of the many ways of preserving art was Gor-Gon, a polymerizing nanotechnology inspired by Gunther Von Hagen’s corpse plastination factory in the north-eastern Chinese port city of Dalian. In just a few seconds, a jab of Gor-Gon administered by injection or by a dart fired from a gun could transform any living being into plastinated artwork, petrifying for ever (though by no means as stiffly as stone) the target animal or person at that moment.

The penis had been quite a performer, and the legal case was by now notorious worldwide, as was the prospect of cloned penis and cloned person parting company. So Chinese art agents targeted Oliver. Already Chinese art agents had overenthusiastically targeted several famous opera singers and actors for a Hall of Fame. Since the salvation of Venice, the Chinese could do pretty much as they pleased, but plastinating artists suddenly while they were on stage caused demands for ticket refunds, arguments about civil rights, and also poorer performances by many divas and stars who didn’t wish to be plastinated, which was all very regrettable and counterproductive. So this was made illegal. But according to Chinese law, plastinating a clone was just as acceptable as plastinating a criminal for export to medical schools…

I’m so lucky. At the moment of petrification, the penis of my former Beloved was fully erect – he had to be slid out of Andorra by the Chinese agents who invaded her flat. So now I live in China, inside a big transparent cube. I couple with the penis attached to Oliver whenever I want. Plastination keeps the penis stiff, yet soft and comfortable to use. Of course, plastinated Oliver never says a thing, nor moves, although I arrange him artistically just as I please.

Outside the cube every day, crowds of visiting art lovers and connoisseurs admire us and shoot holographic movies, so that we never feel alone. Inside the cube, the air is always fresh and rich in happy-making hormones. The Chinese takeaway meals supplied to me free are so varied and delicious. Life is beautiful! Or maybe life is simply too complex to understand.