Christopher WunderLee: Moore's Mythopoeia

She was a year older, a respectable girl from an A-list family who was in the midst of her adulthood bloom and wore grown-up clothing, a thick line creased the back of her shirt where her training bra met her skin, she shaved her legs and wore heeled shoes, she wore eye shadow and rouge on her cheeks. She manicured her black hair in the fashion of the magazines, always based on the queen of the moment’s sensibilities, she was courted by older boys and boys who were well known in the education universe. She had laughed and shown her friends his first letter.

Joseph was over-flowing with adulation for her, she embarrassed him, she laughed in his face, she even, at one chance meeting, intentionally flirted with him, when they were alone in the hallway, putting her rank arm around his neck, whispering so close to him he could feel the petals of her lips brush against the peach-fuzz of his cheek, only to discard him, denounce him, and despise him. For Joseph brought unwanted attention to her during a sensitive time, when she was uncomfortable with her contorting body, when she did not want anyone to notice the material stretching over her breasts, he was in love with her, everyone knew it, he did not try to hide it from his face, and if he would be so enthralled with her, it brought other eyes upon her, other eyes that would calculate her features, inspect her curves, rate her attributes, and this was for her, a cruel torture.

It was luscious and supreme misery, a plague that gripped young Joseph and left him bed ridden, repenting for ever seeing her, forever imagining her giving him a kind look or a kind word, and as he laid in his sweaty sheets, convulsing in his agony, he grew calm and quiet. His caretaker bending over him as if she thought he might have died or passed out from the pain, because the shock was over, because Joseph had made peace with it. He said farewell that day to hope and fear, swore to himself that he would never again try to be like a man, because all good was lost and he could not live in envy. He was paler than usual for a while, but slowly the color returned, his icicle blue eye, which seemed to have turned an ivory with flaws, returned to a brilliant blue, he stopped shaking, he slept, he ate, and he never again allowed himself to gaze upon her again.

* * *

It was the rituals that destroyed Joseph Moore, the daily routine of his domestic life. As a young man, completing his secondary education and impassioned by notions of the future, he had reasoned that he would find a woman with whom he could share the escapade of life. Joseph had been educated based on the arbitrary decision of a department clerk, since he had no familial records, it was not known if he was an A-lister, B-lister, C-lister, D-lister, or X. The clerk, a haughty man sitting in an elevated chair behind a large desk, compensation, in an obvious projection of his own failures, had eyed the youth for a few moments and scribbled down a pronouncement which would rule Joseph’s adult life — he was a C-lister, the largest demographic of citizens in the econopublic. That meant that regardless of his means, which were microscopic, since he was the one sole ward of the state in existence, he would be allowed four years of secondary education in a field becoming to his List. Joseph had no say in the field in which he would study; he was maneuvered by the phantom hand of the great bureaucracy towards the administrative sciences in the industry of biochemistry.

Joseph accepted this pronouncement as he had accepted all the seemingly fateful decisions of his life, for he had not been allowed to choose to be an orphan, he had had no say in his adopted mother, whom he revered as though she was the mother of all things, as she often seemed to him, since she had taken sole responsibility for his education, habits, and values. Joseph entered secondary education in his eighteenth year, fearing, like so many ill-bred young men, that he would not be fit for so much attention, and aware that this would be the first time in his life that he would not have a caretaker on-call twenty-four hours a day (which has been the cause of so many youthful marriages, ignoring the obvious Oedipal references) and that it would be the first time in which he would have unmitigated access to the opposite sex on a regular basis.

The day Joseph left for school, the hospitals’ twenty-eight nurses, all of which felt some seemingly tardy regret for not attending to him, now imbued a maternal connection to the dear boy that had lived amongst them for so many years, threw a celebration in his honor that spilled out onto the hospital grounds and caused more than a few problems for the hospital’s administrators. Joseph was tearfully appreciative of the attention, for he had always simply believed that they viewed him as yet another patient, a permanent ward that required more care than any of the others, he embraced each one as though they were his sole mother and spent an attentive hour with all of them so that each felt as though they had done their very best to prepare the young orphan for the outside world. However, it was the relic that received the most of Joseph’s appreciation, she had been useless to the hospital for almost a decade before Joseph arrived and had off-handedly been given the task as his primary care-giver in order to find something for her to do. She was the unfortunate victim of an experiment that had gone array.

Doctor William Mendelson Fiber Optics, the preeminent sexologist in the territory had become world-renowned for his comprehensive book on female titillation based upon years of research, The Feminine Eros . In order to best his award-winning, however scandalous treatise, Mendelson had decided to conceive of a machine that would calculate the exact response to certain stimuli on the female anatomy and in this way, discover the definitive Don Juanian mystery. The question proposed, of course, was why a woman could be requited in one instance by a ten-minute session, but then, in another instance, find this quick burst of ecstatic energy unsatisfying. Mendelson, like all great Casanovians, hoped to uncover the reason for this apparent paradox by using the much-fabled scientific theory of observation, experiment, hypothesis, and proof.

In order to treat each subject in the same manner, and to keep the experiment objective, as introducing different types of men would obviously cause different types of responses, Mendelson invented the most perfect (patent number 4,505,706,407) fornication machine the world had ever known. PAN, as it was called, was not simply a mechanic Bos phallus; it was a multifarious apparatus. It hung from a large circular frame in a complex hammock that looked very much like some device used to train astronauts and cosmonauts, in which the female subject was eased into, strapped in certain places (although not impeding movement), and wired to a wall of computers that monitored responses. The process was not the type of activity normally respectable women would engage in and after millions of numbers in construction costs, the entire operation was almost abandoned because of lack of female volunteers. It was then that the medical agency came up with the economical, if not circumspect, idea to use nurses. Involvement in scientific research was mandatory for anyone entering into the medical sciences; however, the work of Dr. Mendelson was notoriously the favorite of most. Chosen at random, first year nursing students were required to undergo strict regimens of chastity and the avoidance of any sort of sexual stimulation, until they completed their tenure in Mendelson’s laboratory.

Mendelson himself had handpicked Joseph’s primary caregiver when he had seen her in a local cafeteria (of course the rumors abounded of the respectable doctor’s decisions on subjects, as well as certain reputed stories of his own sexual Napoleonisms of otherwise decent young women). She had no right to refuse, although later in life she would tell others that she’d campaigned fervently to be removed from the project before her first session.