“Yes, you have this magical quality with words, and you take one on a wonderfully sensual journey. It depends on the type of woman, where each is drawn by such a spell — the field is vast in the world of imagination, whether erotic or entirely concrete. Everything radiates outward in circles; some orbits lie closer together than others.” M.

*

“This whole chapter is like dialing into a magical data highway — the full force of the signals, all the pride, is mine again. Only to my master would I, like a little kitten, lick his hand and purr… completely tame… A very arousing passage. I think I need to take a short reading break here.” Christine Zarrath

“Narrative thinking offers a genuine survival advantage.” Fritz Breithaupt

*

“(The Cherry Orchard) was Chekhov’s final masterpiece, a celebration of life even as he himself was dying of tuberculosis.” Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

*

C.Z.: “My dearest reader, where are you? I miss your interest in my ass. Are you sleeping? If so, I hope you’re dreaming of me.”

Reader: “I’m here, and I’m just reading the sentence you wrote to Goya: ‘I want to lose myself with you in the chimeras we have created.’ Can’t you say that to me too?”

Hours later ...

C.Z.: “I’m so sorry I kept you waiting so long, but I just had a conversation with a globally active literary agent who absolutely wants to represent me. Until now I was a literary wallflower — and now people who know what they’re talking about say that I’m not only a carnivore in real life.”

Erotic Fog World

Half a century after Erasmus of Rotterdam had died, Cornelis de Houtman (1565–1599) wrested the East Indian pepper monopoly from the Portuguese and made Bantam on Java the first Dutch outpost in Indonesia. In the fighting, he lost two ships and nearly all his sailors. One bay has been known ever since as the “Graveyard of the Dutch.” Sandra Langereis opens her Erasmus biography with an expedition that departed in 1598 from the harbor of Goeree-Overflakkee, conjuring the “Protestant entrepreneurial spirit and evangelical optimism” of Rotterdam’s spice traders and slavers, who entrusted their fortunes to Admiral Jacques Mahu (1564–1598).

On June 27, 1598, Mahu set sail with five ships and just under five hundred men — the prelude to an unbroken chain of disasters. He sailed aboard the Erasmus, later rechristened De Liefde.

“Even then,” Nana writes, “the Eurostar of the scholars bore his name as the figurehead of the epoch.” She is draped in a black-violet satin robe à la française, its Watteau pleats quoting the Rococo with a deliberate flirtation. Once, the garment was a déshabillé, a domestic plaything, a provocation in silk; now it functions as a signal, a sign for those who understand the necessity of refinement. It allows the wearer to reveal herself without constraint, to tease and inform simultaneously. Every connoisseur of historical costume recognizes its double meaning, its playful yet deliberate invitation. Like a litmus test, it measures those who approach it — only those with the right sensibilities respond as intended. Its promise is bright, exquisite pleasure: an erotic cheerfulness that hovers just at the edge of propriety.

Ned embodies the major player on the ideal line. Thirty-two, academically ennobled, wealthy by birth, athletic, virile, still childless. Philologist, yes — but also breeder of glowing mice, specialist in bioluminescence.

Their game begins at her university desk. The air smells of ancient stone, the residue of generations of pipe-smoking professors. Ned grants Nana the pleasure of long, looping passages that never escape a single, obsessive detail. The erotic exercises are simultaneously psychological studies. In her notes, Nana records: The social contours of a man disrupt my lines of arousal. I always know the point beyond which I cannot go; half the pleasure is mine alone.

She withdraws into an erotic fog world, a liminal space of sensation and imagination. Then, suddenly, the overcast of melancholy shatters. Desire strikes her like a physical blow, a shockwave reverberating through her body, igniting her from the inside. The fog thickens, yet clarity blooms within it: she is both orchestrator and audience, conductor and instrument, and Ned — for all his skill and virility — is caught entirely in the world she manifests.