Bruce Sterling - Distraction

“Don’t be grumpy. I feel better now, it’s all right. Let’s go and break the bed now.”

She lured him into the bedroom. The damp air sang with erotic tension. “Shall I keep the mask on?”

He took his jacket off. “Oh yes. The mask is definitely you.” He set to work on her in a particularly levelheaded and elaborate fashion. During their long separation he had had enough time to imagine this meeting. He had formed a multilevel erotic schemata with a number of variable subroutines. The sheets were soaked with sweat and the veins were standing out on her neck;. With a strangled cry she tore the mask from her eyes, tumbled out of bed with a thump, and hurried out of the room.

He followed her in alarm. She was digging desperately in her purse. She came up with a pencil stub.

“What’s …” he began gently.

“Shhh!” She began scribbling frantically at the back leaf of a New Orleans travel guide. Oscar found a cotton bathrobe, put it over her shoulders, found his pants, sipped half a bottle of cold mineral water. When his temples stopped throbbing he returned to the bal-cony.

There were extraordinary scenes down on Bourbon Street. Their balcony, divided into segments, stretched the length of the little hotel and there were four women and three other men on it. There was a bizarre interplay between the people up on the balconies and the crowds at street level.

Women were showing their breasts to crowds of strangers, in exchange for plastic beads. Men were hoarsely yelling for the spectacle and throwing the beads as bribes. Women in the streets would display themselves to the men on the balconies, and the women on the balco-nies would display themselves to men on the streets. There was no groping, no come-ons; cameras would flash and gaudy necklaces would fly, but there was a ritual noli-me-tangere atmosphere to these exchanges. They were strangely old and quaint, like an elbow-link in a square dance.

A pretty redhead in the balcony across the way was tormenting her crowd of admirers. She would kiss her boyfriend, a grinning drunk in a devil suit, and then lean out with an enormous dangling swath of gold, green, and purple beads around her neck, and she’d teasingly pluck at the hem of her blouse. The men below her were booing lustily, and chanting their demands in unison.

After torturing them to a frenzy, she slung the beads over her shoulder and bared her torso. It was worth the wait. Slowly the stranger deliberately caressed her own nipple. Oscar felt as if he had been fish-hooked.

He went back into the hotel room. Greta had leaned away from her scribbling. Her face was pale and thoughtful now.

“What was all that?” he said.

“A strange thing.” She put her pencil down. “I was thinking. I can think about neurology while I have sex now.”

“Really?”

“Well, it’s more like dreaming about neurology. You had me all excited, and I was right on the edge… you know how you can sort of hang there where it’s wonderful, right on the edge? And I was thinking hard about wave propagation in glial cells. Then suddenly it came to me, that the standard calcium-wave astrocyte story is all wrong, there’s a better method to describe that depolarization, and I almost had that idea, I almost had it, I almost had it, and I just got stuck there. I got stuck there on the edge. I couldn’t get loose and I couldn’t quite come and the pleasure kept building up. My head started roaring, I was almost blacking out. And then it came all over me, in a tremendous rush. So I had to jump out of bed to write it down.”

He stepped to the table. “So what does it look like?” “Oh” — she shoved the paper away — “it’s just another idea. I mean, now that I can see it down on paper, there’s really no way that a glial syncytium can behave like that. It’s a clever notion but it’s not consistent with the tracer studies.” She sighed. “It sure felt good though. When it happened. My God, did that ever feel good.”

“You’re not going to do that every time, though.”

“No. I just don’t have that many good ideas.” She looked up, her lips still swollen from the grip of his teeth. “Don’t you think of something else, too?”

“Well, yes.”

“What?”

He drew a little nearer. “Other things that I can do with you.” They climbed back into bed. This time, she did black out. He didn’t notice her deep slide from consciousness, because her body was still moving rhythmically, but her eyes had rolled up in her head. When she began to speak to him, he blacked out at once.

“Are you with me?” she whispered blindly.

“Yes, I’m here,” he said, struggling to speak through his body’s gasping. They had merged now, together, from areas of cognition so low and so blind to conscious awareness that they were barely able to manifest themselves. But they had chosen a good moment to take the mind’s central stage. Their sweating bodies began to slow, to melt together gently into deep relaxation. It was all very easy now, a vast moonlit Pacific of sexuality, washing some distant shore. They could breathe together.

When they woke, it was ten PM. Streetlights crept through the blinds to stripe the ceiling. Greta stirred and yawned, prodded his bare ankle with her foot. “It’s sweet to have these little naps, after.”

“We seem to be making a habit of passing out.”

“I think dreaming is good for us.” She pulled herself out of bed.

“Shower …” Her voice faded as she padded off. “Oh, they have a bidet! That’s great.”

He followed her in. “We’ll wash now. We’ll get dressed,” he told her cheerfully. Lovemaking was behind them now, always tensely awaited but maybe just a little bit of a burden, in retrospect. Still, he felt good about it. They were all purged, the tension had sung out of them; they were having fun together. “We’ll put on our masks, we’ll go out and have some coffee. I’ll take your picture in the street, it’ll be fun.”

“Good plan.” She examined her smashed hairdo in the mirror, and grimaced. “One martini too many …”

“You look great. I feel good, I feel so happy now.”

“Me too.” She stepped into the shower and set it to hiss.

“It’s a holiday,” he said absently. “We’ll just have our little holi-day now, we’ll live for the moment, we’ll be just like real people.”

When they were dressed, they stepped onto the balcony. The balcony was crowded now, with many friendly strangers. As Greta appeared, she was instantly greeted from the streets below with howls of male demand.

Greta’s eyes grew wide with shock behind her feathered mask.

“Good Lord,” she said. “I always knew that’s what men want from you, but to have them just standing there, publicly yelling it… I can’t believe this.”

“You can show yourself off if you like. They’ll give you beads for it.”

She thought about it. “I might just do it if you went down into the street, and yelled up at me.”

“That’s a distinct possibility. Let me get my camera first.”

She smiled wickedly. “You’ll have to throw me my beads, though, mister. And they’ll have to be very nice ones.”

“I enjoy a challenge,” Oscar said.

A string of green-and-gold beads flew up to strike at Greta. She batted at the necklace, tried to catch it, missed. In the street below them, a tall middle-aged man with a mustache below his mask was jumping up and down, and bellowing at her. He was waving both arms frantically, as if trying to signal an airliner.

“Look at that clown,” Oscar said, grinning. “He’s really smitten.”

“He’s got a girlfriend already,” Greta said.

The man and his smiling girlfriend fought their way valiantly through the passing crowd, until they had wedged themselves directly below the balcony.