Read We Won't Feel a Thing Online
Authors: J.C. Lillis
We Won't Feel a Thing (12 page)
“You shouldn’t do that,” she murmured.
“I know,” he said.
The water glass slipped from her grip and clunked to the floor. She pulled him closer and paused her cheek in the warmth of his neck, praying her nose wouldn’t bleed on his shirt and cursing him because he wouldn’t care at all if it did, and that was sexy. She smelled his cool blue Tidal soap. Other smells drifted in from the open windows, the everyday scents of Donnybrook Lane: the creek where they’d caught summer crayfish, the fresh sheets billowing on the Watsons’ clothesline, the roses and basil on their own windowsills and the front-yard lilac bush they used to crawl under, pretending they were Bob and Athena in a cave of lavender coral. Rachel and Riley pressed into each other, as if they were pages of a heavy book and their memories were trapped in wax paper between them.
A hammer-bang downstairs. The dental whine of a drill.
“Let me go,” Rachel said into Riley’s shirt.
“Okay,” Riley said into Rachel’s hair.
They disentangled themselves. The nosebleed had stopped. Rachel shut the windows—one, two, three. An odd flash of green winked in the lilac bush. She pulled the shades down too.
“We should keep our hands busy,” she said.
“Right-o,” Riley softly Britished.
On the red side of the room, Rachel grabbed the program for Trick and Laurie Semper’s vow-renewal ceremony and attacked the first sentence:
We could not of asked for better family and friend’s to celebrate love with.
On the blue side, Riley knelt by the mosaic with his chipping hammer, making new fragments from five clamshells and two blue soup bowls from Jonah’s Junque. They worked until Riley’s hands stung with cuts, until all twelve pages of the Semper program bled.
Then they fell asleep, and the nightmares began.
Chapter Seven
Dear Rachel and Riley,
Thank you for the email update and the detailed field notes. I was mildly concerned when you went silent for two days in the wake of Step Two.
I’m sorry to hear of your misfortunes. Yes, nosebleeds have been observed in several past pilot studies of the WAVES Forbidden Love Module; keep your nasal membranes moistened with a saline spray, and all should be well. Please be assured that the other effects you’ve experienced—PARTICULARLY the “sexy nightmares”—are not expected byproducts of WAVES. For those, I encourage you to lay the blame (and possibly a lawsuit) squarely at the feet of Peter (Pierre), who sounds like a terrible waiter and an unconscionable human being. From your description, I estimate you ingested more than one thousand grams of natural aphrodisiacs, likely augmented by a synthetic love drug. I should have warned you to avoid French restaurants; I’ve heard the less reputable ones retain customers by lacing their food with bootleg aphrodisiacs, the kind developed for the express purpose of coaxing pandas to mate. I’ll be sure to include a disclaimer from now on.
I am tempted to have you repeat Step Two, since the results were skewed by your unfortunate choice of restaurant. However, I would first have to check the console to be sure the Lemnos Mechanism isn’t malfunctioning, and your email indicates a clear desire to move forward. So let’s march on to
Step Three: Visual Intervention.
EXAMPLE:
Let us imagine, for the sake of this fiction, that Tilly has a crisis with Hitch.
“I need your opinion,” she tells me near the Colorado border, picking up speed as we head toward our next tour stop. Then, illogically, she adds: “Take me out to dinner? My treat.”
The Wagon Wheel Family Restaurant, although not as aggressively romantic as the French abomination you described, nevertheless exacts a similar toll on my good sense. Imagine her confiding in me about their glorious problem: where to have their honeymoon if they get married. “I’m dying to go to the Sirens Resort in Florida, and he says Florida’s so hot it makes him angry and we should go ice fishing, and we had a huge fight,” she tells me, the person who would hypothetically vacation on the surface of the sun if she were in the next hammock. “Is that a bad omen?” As I dispense sensible opinions, let’s say Tilly touches my arm three times and her sequined sandal accidentally (?) brushes my pant leg. I am forced to confront the truth: she is possibly flirting, and I fear I am returning it. Naturally, I find this unacceptable. Ever since Gannon spirited Lotte away from me all those years ago, I have cultivated a special passion for not stealing other people’s girlfriends.
Just as the waiter brings our death-by-whatever desserts, Tilly receives a phone call from the stupidhead himself. I urge her to take it and then stare at the salt shaker, blinking back two profoundly humiliating tears. After ten minutes of hushed conversation by a rack of postcards, they have reached some sort of agreement and she is bidding him goodnight with an audible kissy sound. I eat my whole Black Forest Torte in three bites. I am more than ready for Step Three.
Back in my room, I plug the goggles into Port C and press button 3. After they are fully charged and loaded, I unplug them and strap them on. I press the button on the left eyepiece, and for the next thirty minutes, I envision my ideal life without the burden of my Tilly obsession. Near-miraculous technology, co-developed by my dear friends Paul and Wendy, transforms my thoughts into visual stimuli. A glorious aspirational fantasy unfolds before me: Tilly marries, but stays a trusted friend and associate. My quiet success with WAVES expands; new letters of thanks pour in every day from clients who credit us with changing their lives. And I find true and lasting love with a delightfully sensible new woman friend, a handsome mechanical engineer who wears tweed and reads historical nonfiction and never questions the validity of my research.
Be sure to visualize in rich and bold detail, as I did. The receptors embedded in the goggles will keep up with your imaginings. The dazzling visions you see will reprogram your brain with the truth: a future minus your foolish attraction is not only possible, but an outcome devoutly to be wished.
My fictional self is now 48% over Tilly. And I can’t wait to see what Step Three does for you.
Optimistically yours,
David A. Kerning
***
At 8:24 in the morning, approximately three days, seven nosebleeds, fourteen cups of strong tea, and twelve erotic nightmares after the L’Amour Food! debacle, Rachel and Riley climbed the long ramp that led to the Marymarsh Memorial Library. The weak sun wobbled in the sky. Shadows had deepened under their eyes, as if they both had a dire Victorian illness that required leeches and bloodletting. They kept two feet of space between them at all times, which is the sensible thing to do when you are in love with the wrong person and have spent three days racking up surreal sex dreams.
“Okay. Here’s the plan.” Rachel tapped the goggles around her neck. “So we’ll get there right at 8:25, which gives us a solid half hour for Visual Intervention. Sound good?”
“Not really.” Riley’s goggles sat high on his forehead. He looked like the ghost of an aviator.
“Why not? This step seems insanely cool.”
“I have a bad feeling.”
She paused on the ramp. “A
Riley
bad feeling, or a legitimate bad feeling based on logic and empirical evidence?”
“Like a
something’s-out-to-get-us
bad feeling.”
“Like the time you saw the Mothman in the Solomons’ cornfield?”
Riley rolled his eyes. “I’m just saying. Step Two backfired pretty badly, and—”
“Step Two did not
backfire.”
Rachel took off again. “It was actively foiled by a dingus who thought he was using his powers for good.”
“But shouldn’t the console have—”
“Bootleg aphrodisiacs.
You heard David, Ri
.”
She picked up her pace, the front door in sight. “WAVES can’t be held accountable for those. And neither can we.”
“I guess.”
“We’re in control again. End of story.”
She swiped her card key at the heavy glass door. Riley held it open and made an
after-you
gesture, the way a gentleman might defer to a stranger.
Rachel and Riley loved getting to the library before anyone else. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, they would show up thirty minutes early for their shift and sneak into Everafterland, the elaborate indoor playroom funded by a great many bake sales and car washes. They would clamber over the locked picket fence, and for half an hour they would goof around, trying on plastic crowns and making dirty tableaus with the fairy-tale dolls and reading books they remembered from the ancient gray stretch of childhood before they knew each other.
Today there was no time for that.
Rachel scanned the deserted playland, tapping the crooked metal street sign that said TO GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE (two summers ago, she had added the apostrophe in white-out). She wore her most authoritative outfit—her Queen Vesuvia t-shirt and a black pencil skirt, something she planned to wear on her first day at Martinet College. She appraised their options: the barn, the castle, the candy cottage.
“Where do you want to do it?” said Rachel.
Riley tingled. “Please rephrase that.”
“Sorry.” Rachel folded her arms. “Where would you like to conduct the step?”
The words had barely left her lips when Rachel and Riley heard a series of unsettling sounds drifting down Everafterland’s Yellow Brick Path. They paused. The sounds were coming from the candy cottage, a pink storage shed donated by Brenner Home & Garden and encrusted with Styrofoam gumdrops and lollipops.
“Is that—” said Riley.
“Shh,” said Rachel.
They listened. Their skin prickled. They hoped that if they listened long enough, the sound would turn out to be an overly zealous janitor instead of what it clearly was: a man and a woman, moaning in unison.
“Oh,” said Riley, “my
god
.”
“Thaaat would be sexual intercourse, Bob.”
“Let’s go.”
“Why?”
“Why?”
Rachel’s eyes glittered. “I want to see who it is.”
“Don’t—!” Riley tried to catch her arm, but she was already creeping down the path of yellow-painted bricks donated by Greenthumbs Nursery. He followed, tossing a worried glance over his shoulder.
Rachel and Riley crouched at the cottage doors, which were painted to look like huge chocolate bars. They peeked through twin gold keyholes. In the next instant, they wished they hadn’t.
For the six years Rachel and Riley had known their supervisor, Jeanette, she had dressed like a teacher in a British boarding-school drama, her sharp petite frame lost in dumpy tweeds and sweat-stained blouses. Today she wore a red cape from the dress-up box, with exactly nothing underneath. Her bobbed brown hair was dyed an atomic orange. She was on her back on the candy-cane table, and she was being—what was a good word? Rachel and Riley had once made a list of the funniest sex words,
porked
and
rogered
and
boinked
being three of their favorites, and all of them neatly described what the man in the Big Bad Wolf mask and MEN AT WORK shirt was doing to Jeanette. The man had an intensely white bottom and craft-fur paws. Rachel and Riley drew back in horror, hands over mouths.
A crash rang out behind them.
They whipped around. The TO GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE sign had fallen on the Yellow Brick Path. A muffled commotion started up in the candy cottage, hissed words and table legs scraping the floor.
Rachel and Riley fled.
When Jeanette emerged five minutes later, they were reshuffling the Employee Recommendations shelf, the Step Three goggles stashed in a library tote bag. Riley was candy-apple red. Rachel was choking back giggles.
“Morning, Tweedles Dumb and Dumber.” Jeanette wore a suit the color of lint and her usual grim-joker expression. She showed no signs of having just been
boffed
by a mystery man in a wolf mask. “What are you bums doing here so early?”
Bums.
Bums.
Rachel tried not to ogle her. “Our house is being fumigated, so we—”
“You two weren’t—poking around in Everafterland, were you?”
“We just got here.” Riley looked at the ceiling.
“Good. It’s not your personal fun-time party place.” She scribbled something on her clipboard, her thin lips bunched up. “You two can stop staring at the hair.”
“Sorry,” said Rachel.
“You try being forty-two and having the same job for twenty years. You get ideas sometimes.”
“It’s cool,” said Riley.
“Oh, I was hoping you’d approve.” Jeanette gave a smile that made his stomach flinch. “Got an assignment for you, Curly Sue.”
My, what big teeth you have.
“M’kay,” said Riley.
“Cassie is sick. There’s a 9:30 storytime. I need you to step up, sir.”
“Storytime?”
She unclipped a book from the clipboard. “It’s
Crab & Clam’s Fun Day
. You’ll do props, sound effects, and a post-story Q&A. I’ll debrief you in the Happy Endings Castle.”
Rachel turned away and bit her knuckles, damming a giggle. Riley went cold. Children terrified him even more than public speaking; he was unnerved by their honesty and felt sure they could smell shameful truths the way a hungry dog might sniff out a roast beef sandwich in a backpack. Plus there were few things he would have liked to do less than retreat to the Happy Endings Castle with Jeanette. He hadn’t looked her in the eye yet, and he was certain that when and if he did, it would be a chore not to blurt out MEN AT WORK.
“Can I do storytime with him?” said Rachel. “He gets ner—”
“Hang on, Little Miss Queen of Darkness,” said Jeanette. “I’ve got a cartload of donations I need to turn you loose on. You’re my fastest shelver.”
“Can’t I do it after?”
“Nope.”
“But he—”
“Come
onnnn
,” said Jeanette. “Can the two of you not take a shit without holding hands?”
Rachel and Riley glanced at each other and sighed.
Step Three would have to wait until lunch.
***
Riley paced in the Happy Endings Castle beside a miserable mural, which was supposed to be a knight slaying a dragon but looked like a robot menacing a dead crocodile. Jeanette had given him strict instructions to practice at least twice, and now he was alone with a prop-filled laundry basket and a copy of
Crab & Clam’s Fun Day
.
