The Fermata (10 page)

Reading over what I’ve put down so far makes me conscious of many imbalances and omissions, but there isn’t too much I can do about them. I do, though, want to point out sooner rather than later that my sexual life has not been entirely made up of the sorts of Fermating activities I just described at the library. Rhody and I had good, friendly sex (though I tended to talk too much throughout, perhaps), real-time sex, and we were together for long enough, a little over sixteen months, that we were able to marvel at how many incremental variations a couple could come up with—variations so minor that they couldn’t really be codified. It wasn’t a question of distinct “positions” but of—I don’t know—crystals grown in slightly different concentrations of a reagent, or grown in the presence of one or more trace impurities, or grown while subjected to faintly stronger or weaker gravitational fields. And we did even from time to time try
new things
, in the textbook sexual sense. I cut an unpeeled avocado in half one Sunday, along its poles, and pulled it apart so that one half
held the blunt, slimy seed. Though not a devotee of food-sex mixtures as a general rule (not whipped cream, not peanut butter, not champagne), I do think avocado flesh is so extremely similar in its slippery bland softness to the labial rheology that it makes sense for a woman to cup half of one in her hand and press it against herself so that the big nub of the seed noses at her natcho. Rhody seemed to like it, and I was gung-ho, too—but while I was testing out our new guacamole recipe I had the further idea of cutting a small hole in the avocado skin and stuffing Rhody’s electric toothbrush at an angle into the fresh flesh so that the brush head was buried somewhere near the seed. That was how she good-naturedly came, in fact, and came big, holding the humming toothbrush-driven avocado-half between her legs while I played with the wisps of hair at the nape of her neck. I record this here in passing so that I won’t seem, with all of my somewhat aberrant sneaking and skulking in the Cleft, totally devoid of more typical sexual instincts.

And just what would other people think of the Fermata? What would they do if they were me? Although I have up to now been able to keep my powers a strict secret, I have gone through periods when I have been eager to get some idea of what others would do in my place. I am superstitious, though, about describing what actually goes on—fearing, even when I put it hypothetically, that if I conjure up the possibility in too complete detail for someone else it will no longer be my secret and hence my temporal competence will leave me forever—so superstitious in fact that I often instead ask about ideas in the neighborhood of my secret, such as what a person would do if he had X-ray vision. What would he look at if he had X-ray vision? I had an interesting talk with a man named Bill Asplundh about this. Bill is one of the few truly fast-typing
non-gay temps I have run across—he types much faster than I do. He drifted into temping while working on a master’s in something or other, as I did, and now he genuinely likes it. We were at a Chinese restaurant one time when I asked him what he would look at if he had X-ray vision. He was eating a yellow curry chicken dish. He said that the first thing he would do would be to look through the walls while the cooks were making up their curry powder, since it was extraordinarily good curry powder and he wanted to be able to duplicate it at home. Then he admitted that he would probably use it to look at women. “But what people don’t think about when they talk about X-ray vision,” he then said, suddenly animated, “is two things. First, what you’re talking about is not a blanket sort of X-ray vision, where your sight penetrates through any substance, but a very specific sort of X-ray vision that only goes through clothes. Textile X-ray vision is what we’re talking about. That’s pretty obvious, but perhaps less obviously, think about what you’re going to see when you see a woman who is wearing clothes but you can’t see the clothes she’s wearing. You have this idea that you’re going to see her with no clothes on, that her breasts are going to be there looking the way they would look without a bra on, but remember, she
has
a bra on, you just can’t see it, so you’re going to see indentations where the seams are, and if it’s a push-up bra, her breasts are going to look all squished out of shape, not the way you imagine them at all. And think if she’s wearing some kind of support pantyhose, and it’s tight—you’re going to see all this squeezing around her rear end and stuff like that. You’re going to see the panty lines there, red lines, but without the panties actually being there.”

I admitted that he had a point, but countered that the sight of breasts in a bra, without the bra visible, might be kind of
wonderful: if you could see her breasts moving as they would move in a bra and yet the bra was out of the picture it might be a totally novel kind of semi-constrained motion—not even the kind of motion you would expect in zero-gravity environments, because the undersides of the breasts would be held relatively firmly, within the limits of the give and take of that particular bra, but the top would shake a little more where it wasn’t being held. Maybe the sight of breasts in invisible bras would be incredible. But he was probably right, I conceded, the nipples would probably have that flattened quality of faces pressed against panes of glass; and what makes the sight of kids squishing their faces against glass comic is that it takes away their “faceness” and substitutes a sort of monstrous nostrilly planar expression. It would be strange to see the shape of the bra outlined in indented plump back-skin. There might be some interest, we agreed, in seeing extremely saggy breasts hoisted up in an invisible bra, since the idea of sag is very stimulating, as is the notion of hoisting.

But, though it interested me, what Bill had to say about X-ray vision didn’t really bear on the Fold, so I went ahead and described to him the possibility of halting the universe and remaining mobile oneself, as if the idea had just occurred to me for the first time. What would he do if he had some machine that could switch everything off and he was here in this restaurant? Bill answered without hesitation that the first thing he would do is go back to the kitchen and try to find and copy the curry-powder recipe. His voice went low and he said that he might even
take
a little curry powder, if there was a lot of it, home with him, looking awed at his own wish to thieve. “Okay,” I told him, “but after you had all the curry you knew what to do with, then what? What would you do vis-à-vis that woman over there?” I indicated a blond woman in black
whom he had noticed with approval earlier. “Would you go over there and check out her tits, or what?”

“Possibly,” he said. He asked me a few more questions about how quickly he would be able to switch time on and off. Then he said, “No, what I would probably do is hide out so that I could watch couples I knew. I’d be very curious to see that.” His idea surprised me, since I have almost no active interest in seeing couples I know have sex, or seeing couples at all. I have of course seen it from time to time, but only in pursuit of other sights or experiences. After Rhody broke up with me, in part over the very issue of time-perversion, she started going out with an older divorced man, and I did hide out behind the tired gold wing chair in her bedroom and watch them have sex once or twice (well, six times)—and the last time in fact I did a very very wrong thing. Rhody was on her knees, with her ass way up in the air, licking and biting the pillowcase of the pillow she held, which was
our
favorite way for a while, and I felt violated and hurt that she would be doing this now with him, with this divorced consultant who looked like the “before” sketch in a NordicTrack ad, so I stopped time with my fingernail clipper (each time I snipped a fingernail, time toggled) and pulled the guy off her and out of her and hauled him to the garage, where I tied him securely to a piece of plywood; then I stationed myself in exactly the same position that he had been in, with my cock inside Rhody, and clipped time on, and was pleased to hear her surprised change of tone: “Oh yeah! Wow! That’s good! Like that!” I pulled out and let my cock rest against her tailbone and pressed down on it with the heel of my hand, which was something we used to do a lot that she liked, because when I shot she liked to feel the come-tangents reach up her back. I could sense her immediate surprise as I did this—
Could it
be?
—and just before she looked back to see if it was really me, I stopped everything and got the divorced guy out of the garage and put him back where he had been and stuffed what was left of his erection back in.

“What’s wrong?” Rhody said, as soon as I clipped time on.

“Nothing,” said the divorced man. He tried to pretend to be fucking her with abandon, but he was almost completely limp by now.

“Something’s wrong,” said Rhody. “What’s wrong?”

“I had the
strangest
hallucination,” he said. “I thought I was tied up against a board, looking up at the skis in the ceiling of the garage. Beyond weird. Sorry, baby.”

Rhody comforted him. Lying on the bed with his hands doing unpleasant things with his own chest hair, he began describing the “incredibly vivid” out-of-body experience he had just had of being tied up, staring at the skis. Eventually the two of them tiptoed giggling off to the laundry room to find some rope and the ski boots. I left soon after.

Another person I asked, a guy who worked for Boston University, said that, given time-perverter powers, he would wander through women’s locker rooms for a while; then he said, after much hemming and hawing, that he would “probably want to see people I knew.” This was after I had described a hypothetical scene in which someone is watching a rented copy of
Metropolitan
on his VCR and he really loves it, but he needs to piss extremely bad, and he points the remote at the machine and hits
PAUSE
, but finds that instead of pausing
Metropolitan, Metropolitan
continues and the entire rest of the world is in a freeze-frame—so that the remote-owner has however long it will take for the movie to finish playing to run outside into the suspension and pry and peep to his heart’s content. As I mentioned earlier, I have never had any success
with remote-control keypads, which is exactly why I used a remote
PAUSE
button in the scene I offered him—it felt far enough removed from things I had actually done. I asked one or two women as well, and one of them said she would be eager to see her friends having sex. “I’d probably be grossed out, but I’d want to see it anyway.” I felt a little sad that I didn’t have this temptation in common with my respondents.

One other woman, a paralegal at a small firm in a building with a statue of Edward Coke in front, gave me a long and interesting answer to my question one evening, when we were working late assembling the documents in a huge real estate sale-and-leaseback agreement. Her name was Arlette. We walked around and around a conference table, piling one copy of some ancillary agreement on top of another in a soothing rhythm, and eventually I asked her for her thoughts on what she would do with a
PAUSE
button that stopped life rather than videotapes. Let me try to record what she said exactly—I took a few notes at the time. “Well,” she said, “I think first I would just sit and think for a while and try to comprehend the fact that I was the only person around who was able to move. Then I’d plan out the little revengeful things I could do. I’d bring it to work, definitely. I could put some of those Dennison colored dots on Stephen Milrose’s evil face, one by one. While he is sitting there at Tuesday Conference, making his nasty little comments, shooting everyone down, ridiculing people for no reason, I’d pick a word, some harmless word that he says a lot, like for instance ‘backside.’ Every time he said that some deal or some client was going to ‘turn around and bite us in the backside,’ I’d hit the
PAUSE
button and stick a yellow dot on his face. I would
love
to do that! They would add up, too! That would give me enormous satisfaction, to see his face fill up with a rash of
dots. Nobody would say anything, but he’d be covered. He loves to say, Time out, time out.’ I’d be merciless—every time he said, Time out,’ making that T with his hands, I’d time-out for real and stick a little green dot on his face. It would be such a screech to see his evil little face get totally covered with yellow and green dots. So that kind of thing is number one—performing little pranks like that on the top two or three true assholes on this floor. I’d have to get that out of my system. But then I would have to think, I’d have to think …”

I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want to prejudice her response in any direction.

“Well,” she said finally, with some decision, “what I think of is going over to Mark Thalmeiser and chitchatting with him about something or other, and while he’s looking at me and blinking innocently, I’d pause him right in the middle of one of his blinks and stand over him and take out my boobs and sort of fluff them in his eyes. First I’d take a big powder puff and get them all powdered up, and then I’d fluff my nipples in his eyes. That would be fun.”

“Would that be classed as an act of revenge, or an act resulting from sexual attraction?” I asked her.

“Both. Mark is sex on wheels, in a way. His wife is sex on wheels, too.” She looked at me significantly.

“Yes?” I said, stretching the word out.

“Yes. I don’t really like Mark, I like Mark’s wife. Well—I like them both. She has the best
mouth
. It’s sort of like Leslie Caron’s mouth. No—here’s what I would do if I had a remote that freezes the world. I’d be in a florist’s shop, and Kari Thalmeiser would come in to get some cut flowers. She dresses beautifully, in an expensive loungey way—yellow pants and that kind of thing—but she pulls it off. She would lean into the flower-cooler to smell a bunch of flowers, cold
flowers, and I would pause her as she’s smiling, with her eyes closed, breathing in the scent of some really filthy-looking flower. Or no, better yet, some bunch of nice simple pretty flowers, like carnations. Whatever the flower is, I move it aside after hitting the remote, because it’s
my
turn, Kari Thalmeiser, and I adjust the wire shelf on the cooler so that it’s just below her chin, and I like climb up on it, get up on my heels, and spread my big solid mega-thighs wide open for her, so she’s half an inch from this giant, sopping, sloppy, juicy, dripping flowerbox of mine. I can feel that I’m dripping all over the blossoms that are in the vases on the floor of the cooler. The metal is cold on my ass. I see her mouth, that Leslie Caron mouth, smiling at the smell of the flowers, her eyes closed, and that makes me jill at myself really fast. When I’m just about to flip and I can’t stop myself, I hold the back of her head and I jam her face into my juice-box and I hit the remote so that time flashes on for her for just a half a second. Too quick for her to know. As I start coming I’m merciful and I pause her again and I just come and come and come against her beautiful lips—and even against her nose, her nose would be just right for my clit. Yeah, I’d hold her earlobes and pull her face into me until I’d humped every little come-kick out of my hips, and then I’d climb out of the cooler and put everything back where it was, all the nice pretty carnations and baby’s breath and shit, and I’d carefully dab at her pretty face with some floral tissue, because we wouldn’t want pretty Kari to look like she’d been eating a watermelon. I’d spend a couple of minutes fixing her lipstick. Then I’d start things up again and I’d go, ‘Wull, Kari Thalmeiser, how are you!’ ”