Read Sphinx for Free Online

with charges of sound and bombarding it with lightning. I thought about my work—admittedly mortal and ephemeral—with fear, the fear of a demiurge caught in the position of damned hero, who finds a brother in Sisyphus. The fear of God when He realizes, without having foreseen it, that His first act has now made Him a slave of continuous Creation. God cursing when He realizes that without His knowledge, He has been made the driving engine of the morbid embraces crossing this panicked body born of Him, of His sweat, of His strained efforts and His unarticulated cries. A dizzying disgust would take hold of me as I overcame the inertia of these separate bodies, still reluctant to come together.
    However, I did experience nights of rapture that no human ecstasy can equal, those nights when, for some unknown reason, a sort of inspired fury seized the entire club. This trancelike state that I provoked and prolonged vibrated through my body and carried me to unimaginable excesses of delirium. One such night is still carved into my memory,a Saturday in October—coincidentally also my birthday. The party lasted well beyond the usual timeframe. Strictly speaking, I was no longer listening to the music; it was passing through me. I was cuing up the records as if by instinct, my vision obscured by a veil of blood. I was in a coma agitated by rhythms that were more and more painfully arousing my desire without ever draining it. In a vague fog I discerned the compact mass of people dancing, flattened one against the other and yet swaying, lifted up in waves. United almost without fissure, they were probably incapable of moving, but the entire mass vibrated in rhythm, all individual drives undone and lost in a higher, sovereign need. George told me later that everyone who entered the club mixed gradually into this mob and that between the hours of two and six in the morning nobody left, the employees were overwhelmed. At eight in the morning, emptied, I collapsed onto a bench and went to sleep.
    That night sealed my reputation. It still reigns supreme in my memory; no other night ever achieved such furious intensity. From then on they all seemed bland and nondescript. That night inflicted a violence upon me, an annihilation; I experienced what only sex at its extremes allows one to feel, infrequently and fleetingly. I had reached a limit, and after that came repetition and ennui.
    I was guided by habit, or maybe addiction, as I left my house every night around midnight. I no longer slept at night; what had previously been a tendency of mine became a permanent mode of being. Anxiety would propel me into the streets and at nightfall, as if mechanically, I would get dressed to go out. The pallor of my complexion was heightened; in the light of day I looked like a corpse. Moreover, the sun’s glare hurt my eyes, so I started to avoid it.
    Even when I didn’t have to serve as DJ at the Apocryphe, I would go out to other clubs where I was always let in because people recognized me.I would check out half a dozen, ending up each morning in the club that stayed open the latest, frequented by a mostly black clientele. I dawdled in all the places that were in vogue at the time. My eclecticism pushed me to ignore differences and transgress against exclusions; I entered indiscriminately into clubs that were gay or straight, male or female. I didn’t mind whether the place was a notorious dive or a hideaway of respectable sharks. By nature rather silent and reserved, whether from a sense of privacy or from my convictions, I had little to fear from these drunken late-night wanderings through this beautiful world abandoned to vice. The exquisite correctness of my manners, the benevolent moderation I flaunted in every place and in every circumstance, made it so that I was easily accepted: the Mafiosi propping up the bars would offer me cigars and pat me warmly on the shoulder; the groomed, bejeweled women adored the air of dreamy