The Fermata (32 page)

“Well, why not?” she said. “And you’d use our dummy keyboard, too. We’re trying to simulate real-life conditions. We unfortunately can’t use real keyboards, because we can’t
have any ferrous metal within the magnet.… Now, you don’t habitually masturbate wearing a studded cock ring or ball separator, do you?”

“God no.”

“Fine, because that might create real problems in a magnetic field of thirty thousand times earth gravity. So—I don’t want to put you on the spot, but are you sincerely interested? I’m thinking out loud now, which I don’t normally do, but my sense is that this could be an important new line of research. Who knows—you might make
The New England Journal of Medicine
. Anonymously, of course.”

“Well,” I said, pleased, “I suppose if I can be of some small help to others …”

A week later, I showed up at the MR wing of Common-health’s hospital at a quarter to six in the evening, after an untaxing day at an accounting firm. My arm hurt, which pleased me, because I felt that I wasn’t wasting anyone’s time. In a conference room, Dr. Orowitz-Rudman explained in her friendly, faintly ironic way what was going to happen to me: some reference dots were going to be painted on my arm and penis, so that the imaging system could keep a fix on these two elements as I moved. She said she wanted me to type and masturbate just as I would in real life. She got up, and then remembered something.

“One thing I do have to ask,” she said. She looked through some drawers in the back of the room. “I’m looking for something with a particular shape,” she explained. She held up a tongue depressor, but rejected it: “A little unromantic. I should have thought to bring in a prosthetic penis-form of some kind.”

“I could just show you mine,” I suggested.

“No—no—then we have to get observers in here and worry
about all sorts of things. Thanks for offering, though. Ah! This will do.” She brought out a stick of lipstick from her purse and handed it to me. “Can you hold that and show me roughly how you masturbate? I realize that it’s a little smaller than you’re used to.”

I held it and stroked it several ways.

“Ah,” said the doctor, “so you use both a fist grip and a finger-and-thumb grip. That’s what I wanted to know.” She tapped her lip, thinking. “I don’t want to prejudice you in favor of either one. I’m going to have to ask you to announce when you’ve switched from one to the other. It will make it easier for us to get the imaging system to keep up with you, and eventually, of course, to isolate which particular grip is distressing your nerve. In fact, do you think you would be able to offer a kind of running commentary as you masturbate? You could tell us what you are doing, what hurts, what doesn’t hurt—whatever’s going through your mind.”

I said that I would certainly try. She led me to an examining room, where I changed into a hospital gown. Two nurses or technicians or post-docs painted rows of silver dots up my forearm. They painted a silver square over the inside of my wrist. Then they lifted my gown.

“Should we trim him a little?” one of the technicians asked the other. She looked at me. She was Chinese. “We’re going to trim your pubic hair.”

I looked down at it. “It has gotten a bit unruly.” I couldn’t remember the last time I had trimmed it; it could have been a decade earlier. They pulled on the thick tufts and snipped them off. Then one stretched my penis and painted a silver dot on its circumcision ridge. Paintbrush hovering, she became uncertain. She called in Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. The three of them conferred in low tones.

The doctor put a hand on my arm and smiled at me. “Will you masturbate just a little now?” she asked. “Don’t go hog wild. We just need you to be fully erect to get the reference dots on your penis spaced properly.”

“Oh, sorry. Sure. Just take a sec.”

“Fine.” Dr. Orowitz-Rudman left.

I stroked my yokel while the two attendants waited. I noticed with some satisfaction that they seemed to appreciate its size and girth and garish coloration. (It is, I think, a more handsome penis than I deserve.)

One cradled it gently while the other painted the silver dots down the underside and the top, measuring their distances carefully. The soft contact of the brush was soothing.

They brought me through the control room to the door into the scan room. “Good luck,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman, waving. She sat at a table with two monitors on it, a three-ring binder open before her. A window looked through some sort of fine-mesh screen into the room with the magnet in it. The technician stopped me. “Your watch has to come off.” She pointed to a poster with a number of forbidden objects pictured with red bars across them—fire extinguishers, pacemakers, watches, steel skull-plates, anything metallic, evidently.

The scanner stood in the middle of a large empty room. It was an enormous white edifice, like a very thick wall, with a large hole running through it into which patients were slid on a gantry. Something was making a great deal of fairly unpleasant noise. I removed my gown and lay down on the pad. A dummy computer keyboard was placed on my stomach and I was slid headfirst into the bore of the superconducting magnet.

“Can you hear me, Arno?” I heard Dr. Orowitz-Rudman say through the intercom.

I said that I could.

“Good. Give us a few minutes to get things set in here before you start. Are you comfortable?”

“I am. It’s
very
vaginal in here, doctor, in a smooth-muscle sort of way. Is the magnet on?”

“Yes, it’s always on,” she said.

“I expected to feel claustrophobic, but oddly, I’m not. There was this guy in college … excuse me—I’ll shut up while you get set up.”

“No, go on,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “The technicians are getting set up—I’m just observing at this point.”

“What is all this tiresome noise?” I asked.

“That’s the coolant. The magnet has to be kept very cool, and the coolant has to be pumped around.”

“I see. Well, there was this guy in college—” There was this guy in college, I said, who used to mime inserting one finger in a woman’s vadge, then two, then four, saying, “Yeah, baby. Really? More?” Then the whole hand would go in, then his arm up to the elbow, then up to the shoulder; then he would slide his other arm in, still saying, “More? You
sure
, baby? Okay.” He would place his head at the opening of the imaginary vadge and strainingly push up, turning his face, and suddenly his grimacing head would slide in alongside his arms, and finally he would squirm as much of his body into the vaginal canal as he could fit. “I feel a little like I’ve just done that,” I explained. “I’m in this huge electrovagnet. It isn’t womblike,” I babblingly hastened to qualify. “It’s purely vaginal.”

“Interesting,” I heard Dr. Orowitz-Rudman say absently. She hadn’t been listening. She said something I couldn’t catch to one of her associates, then I heard her say, “We are? Okay.” Then she addressed me in her pleasant Susan Stamberg
voice: “All right, Arno. First we’re going to get you to use the keyboard a little bit. I’m going to read you a sentence, and you type it. Ready?”

I said I was ready.

“ ‘The cure …’ ” she read.

I typed. “Okay.”

“ ‘… for the greatest part …’ ”

I typed. “Got it.”

“ ‘… of human miseries …’ ”

I typed. “Okay.”

“ ‘… is not radical …’ ”

“Yep.”

“ ‘… but palliative.’ Period. Good. Thanks. That’s our baseline sentence. Now, Arno, I want you to go ahead and use the keyboard for about five minutes to warm up the nerve.”

“Just type anything?” I asked.

“Right,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “I can read you something if you would like, or you can make it up. It would be nice if it were similar to the typing you normally do, but that doesn’t matter all that much. It has to be in English, though.”

“Why?”

“So that the letter-frequencies are representative.”

“I see. No problem,” I said. I began to type, in the self-conscious way people do when they’re testing typewriters and computers at a store, though in my case the words I was typing were not being recorded anywhere. It’s strange to be typing here in this magnet, I clicked out on the keys. But I kind of like it I’ve never typed supine before. I recommend it to all interested parties. This keyboard has a nice sloppy feel, probably because it’s been messed with inside and doesn’t work. Feels like some of the old Wang keyboards. Since it is dysfunctional, I suppose I can type anything I want. Doctor Susan could possibly follow my fingers on a video
monitor to find out what I’m typing, or study the tape later, but I doubt very much she’ll bother. She’s cheerfully all business. She really attracts me. That’s not surprising—it is much more surprising to me when a woman fails to attract me than when she does attract me. Very occasionally I meet a woman and afterward I think, That’s incredible—nothing about that woman attracted me. It almost never happens. All women merit love and constancy. That’s true. All women should be loved by someone good and dependable and honest. I am good, I think, but I am not honest or dependable, so I have to pass lovingly through their lives without their knowing I have been there. Man I like Dr. Susan’s tits under that lab coat, with that name pinned on one. Short funny forty-year-old women with big tits should reign supreme. Or if I could just cycle between silky-voiced tall women with small tits and short happy women with big tits—plus medium-sized affectionately sexy women with medium-sized tits and short women with small tits and southern accents, and medium-sized women with small tits and Hispanic accents—now there would be a life. I like the fact that Dr. Susan doesn’t know that I’m typing how much I’d like her to squat over me and rip open the white cotton crotch of her black pantyhose and grind her salty puss into my face. I stopped pre tend-typing. “Is that enough?” I asked
.

Dr. Orowitz-Rudman said, “That’s plenty. We’ve got a good fix on your nerve now. Can you type the reference sentence again? You remember?”

“Sorry,” I said, “I think I forgot it.”

“ ‘The cure for the greatest … part of human … miseries is not radical …’ ”

“ ‘… but palliative,’ ” I finished, eager to prove to her that I was no clerical robot, but rather a typist who reflected on whatever he was asked to type. “Got it.”

“How about pain levels?” she asked.

I snapped my finger several times to test how my wrist felt. “I feel the usual tingling in the base of my palm and some significant forearm involvement.”

“Fine,” she said. “We can go back to the keyboard later if we need to. I want you to put it aside now. Good. Except for your arm pain, are you comfortable? Are you ready to start masturbating?”

I told her I was.

“Okay, in just a minute I’ll ask you to start.”

I lay at peace, with my hands resting on my chest. I heard some more murmured conversation on the intercom, then, “Arno, why don’t you go ahead and start.”

“Can I lift my knees?”

“Can he lift his knees?” I heard her ask. Then: “Better not. We lose you on one of the axial monitors. Is it going to be a problem to proceed with your legs flat?”

“Not at all—it’s fine,” I said. “Can you see me? I mean, not my nerves, but me?”

“Yes. We have several video monitors in addition to the MR image.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Be sure to let us know any changes in the pain you feel,” she said. “Keep a running commentary, if you can.”

I hesitated, then plunged ahead. “The problem is that the pleasure from one source masks the pain from the other source,” I said. “I think that’s part of the reason it’s gotten this bad. But, okay, I’m touching my—penile organ now. I have it, as I guess you can see, in the thumb-and-finger grip that we discussed. We might call it the Kokomo grip. I’m beginning to tug on it slowly, using the Kokomo grip, and at the moment I feel no distinct pain—well, there is a warm twinge, but nothing bad.” Since I had avoided all orgasms for
three days, I expected to have little trouble getting hot and nasty, even enveloped as I was in an electromagnetic field so powerful that it could potentially suck oxygen tanks and scissors and other ferrous objects lethally into the chamber with me. When I was fully erect, I held my richard vertically for a moment by its base, wanting everyone in the control room to get an eyeful of it on the monitors.

“Hold that for a second,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman, unexpectedly. “Don’t move. We need to get a fix on those R-points. Just hold still. Good. Great. Good. You still comfortable?”

“I think so.”

“Good. You seem comfortable. Now we need to get a few motion-profiles. This is an entirely new repetitive motion for the real-time tracking system, so you have to bear with us, please. The software is going to teach itself to follow your arm. Okay—first will you go ahead and masturbate slowly, just as you would typically do it perhaps in an early phase.”

“In an early phase …” I mused. “Probably I would change to the tight-fisted grip. And probably I’d squeeze it hard while I pumped it very slowly up and down. Like this.” I parted my legs, so that my feet rested on the curving, culvert-like walls of the magnet’s bore, and pumped. “Ooo, I like to feel the little hole get pulled open when I pump.”

“Great, thanks. Okay.” There was more murmuring among the researchers. I loved being studied. I loved that my simple self-pumping pleasure was going to yield scientific results. Dr. Orowitz-Rudman came back on and said, “Arno, now could you stimulate your penis fast?”

“How fast?”

“As fast as you normally might. We want to be sure we don’t lose the image when you get serious.”

“I understand.” I pounded my cock as if I were shaking a
daiquiri in a busy bar, as if I were applauding after a marvelous performance of Ravel’s
Mother Goose Suite
, as if I were playing the only maraca in a salsa band. My body bounced and flopped on the vinyl pads.

“Whoa,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman.

“Could you track that?” I asked.

“No way,” she said. “Go slower. Slower.”

“How about that?”

“Nope. Slower. Slower. Slower still. Slower. There! That’s the fastest you can go. Is that going to be fast enough?”

I made a doubtful noise. “That is awfully slow. Isn’t that about how slow I was going when you asked me to demonstrate my slow speed? I really honestly don’t know that I will be able to come going that slow.”