Robert Devereaux - On the Dangers of Simultaneity,

I 've related elsewhere the catastrophe that befell when, one Christmas Eve in the late sixties, the archangel Michael, entrusted with the whole ball o' wax while God was vacationing, inadvertently allowed Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy to cross paths.

By no means was that the archangel's only screw-up. Michael was renowned for screw-ups. But his other major gaffe, which the heavenly host oohed and aahed and tut-tutted over for eternities afterward (though God proved kinder), came when he unleashed, by mischance, the Orgasm Fairy upon the world.

Before the ninth of February 1964, no lovers had ever truly had a simultaneous orgasm, which is to say, one in which amorous jet-fuel propels them at precisely the same moment along precisely the same giddy arc of glee. Michael, you see, had been given the crucial task of assuring unaligned orgasms, since God knew what would happen if two human beings ever experienced such a conjunction. So, around the clock, God's spy into the world's bedrooms tracked copulators (and those who, either through cross-genital stroking, or through mutual masturbation and the visual stimulation it brings, likewise approached synchronous derailments) to ensure that, if only by a hair's breadth, the sexual surge came upon them asynchronously.

For centuries, Michael's sneeze built.

His nostrils tingled as he knocked out of phase the oral bespurtments of Burr and Hamilton weeks before the lovers' quarrel which history-swallowing Hamilton 's spin with as much zeal as Burr his sperm-ever after passed off as political in nature.

Michael's right index finger hitched to his upper lip even as its tip flicked toward Toklas and Stein, putting a hair fracture in what would otherwise have been a perfect union. No matter. The pink roses of their twinned mouths and vulvas bloomed with sufficient ooze and pucker that, by any measure, there was plenty of there there.

But the archangel's sneeze peaked just as the Beatles laid their first chord atop the screams of young girls on The Ed Sullivan Show and, far more germane to this tale, at the exact moment that Hap and Meg Osborne, de-pajama'd in bed-Hap's pud cuntily beslubbered as it jaunted in and out of his wife-went ballistic. Michael blinked into the sneeze, losing his grip on the groaning pair. In that instant, there came a-borning between them the Orgasm Fairy.

Meg had known her impending climax would be grand. It skittered upward like a megalopolis of skyscrapers rising in time-lapse photography. And when those upswept edifices began jutting and thrusting into the heavens, her detonations pounded out with increasing force. Ka-booml Ka-booml! Oh-my-god- ka-boom!!!

No perverts they, Hap did his sexual pushups as Meg lay quiescent beneath him, and the bedroom lights they kept of course discreetly off. But an eel-like phosphorescence now coated the air between them. It writhed and wriggled to the bestial gruntings in their throats, to the slippery lock of their loins. The form it took was female. Suddenly Meg and her husband were making love to it as much as to one another.

Worse, Meg found it absolutely delightful! "Honey," she gasped, "what's-?"

"I don't (umpfh!) know." His words strained up an octave, no longer his deep baritone nor the above-glasses quip-voice of his Sunday-morning funnypapers snap, but rather the scranneled woe-ache that piped from Hap's lips whenever his man-gloop blurted out inside her. "Jeepers, I can't stop myself from… you know!"

Nor could she.

The ghostly creature between them grew a new face and soul-kissed both of them, her moon-slick tongue setting Meg's mouth afire with steam and sizzle. Her wanton touch thrilled their bodies in every secret place. Then she vanished, slipping away like sun-glints passing across the hood of a Chevy. But unending orgasm billowed anew even as she vanished, threatening swift terminal overload.

But lo, effulgence unexpected flooded their bedroom with spun gold.

"Be not dismayed," said a distraught angel, for angel he surely had to be. His eyes flitted from Meg to Hap to the wall their ethereal lover had hurtled through. "Pray excuse the intrusion, pardon the liberties, no time, we'll talk on the way."

It was as if the angel embraced them, still coming, and zinged them smack into the bedroom wall. They broke no bones nor did they splat, but arrowed straight through, cradled in the arms of their protector, sweeping past neighborhood homes and out into the night.

Their thighs rocked deliciously. The agony of sensory overload had vanished when the angel enfolded them. In its place, pure pleasure sprang up. "I'm Michael," he said. "We've got to… ah, but there she… damn!"

Moaning with love for Hap, Meg saw atrocity flash by: another bedroom, bright and tacky. Upon the wall, a sequined matador on midnight velvet thrust an estoque into an enraged bull's back. But what hurt Meg's eyes was the pair of lovers that reached out of a muddle of melted flesh on the bed. The woman was bone-thin, olive-haired, saucer-eyed, her head atwitch on a stretched stalk. Her lover's mouth gaped, his shouts dopplering by as he struggled to free himself of their mingled putrescence.

"They're toast, alas. That's how you'd have been," Michael said, blithering on as they brushed treetops and sped through the night. "We've got to stop her before she mucks up the entire world." But what conceivable role, Meg wondered in among a continuing concatenation of body-explosions, could she and Hap play in stopping the Orgasm Fairy? For such was implied in the archangel's statement. He wasn't merely keeping them from turning into orgasmic pudding. She sensed, too, even as they hurtled over forests and graveyards and light-scoured highways, that Michael maintained his task of unsynching lovers all over the globe. Though his face was as calm as wisdom itself, his mind appeared to boast more facets than the eyes of a swarm of fruit flies.

Said Hap in mid-hump, "Isn't that-?"

"It is." They swooped down into an extremely well-known theme park, eerily quiescent by night. Outlines of idled rides evoked TV memories as they slammed down into a brick walkway and passed along a brightly lit tunnel below.

Meg wasn't sure if her loss of breath came as part of her unending climax or because of what she saw next. Three huge-headed creatures, cartoonish above the waist, humanly naked below, were engaged in white-gloved prick-and-pussy stroking. At the tunnel's far end, an insane phosphorescence corkscrewed up into nothingness. Despite her orgasm, Meg giggled. Then she covered her mouth, at once aghast and aroused. Smoke rose from cotton fingers that caressed squirming thighs. Gloves caught fire. Yet Meg's childhood fantasy friends moaned with pleasure through neck-gauze beneath beak and snout, as below the belt they sizzled and flared.

Again the archangel swept Meg and Hap away, a swift smack upward past hums of fluorescent light, then a zoom into darkness. "We're gaining on her," insisted Michael as Hap gasped, "I love you." It was unclear whether he was addressing Meg, or the archangel, or both. Not that it mattered. It was all love. Every shred of life was love. Such was the message of this unending, unifying, edifying climax.

"We'll outfox her," declared Michael as they changed course, trebling their breakneck pace. Meg was blessed with a glimpse inside the archangel's mind. Like skate-scorings on ice, swift tangents etched along the hunted fairy's erratic track, sweeping beyond its obscure end into God-granted certainty.