Nicholson Baker - Vox

“Yes.”

“So the problem then is that only a little sliver of the tip of my cock was going to make it in range of the footprint of a normal eight-and-a-half-by-eleven copy. There were ways I could straddle the machine, but this just seemed ludicrous. Finally I made a seventy-percent reduction copy of my dick, because the highest reduction setting used the whole area of the glass that my dick could reach, and so I captured something vaguely obscene-looking, even if the total overall scale was reduced. It looked like a little Quonset hut, halfway up the right side of the page. I wrote 70 % reduction on the copy. But obviously my plan to strum off hastily and then make the second copy had to be abandoned, because my dick wouldn’t even begin to reach over the plastic strip between me and where the glass started when it was soft. But by now I was crazed with the idea of doing something for this woman that retained some shred of playfulness to it, so she could think to herself, All in fun, all in fun, and yet which conveyed the full force of the idea that I had been alone in that office that weekend with a huge erection, thinking of her. How do I give her that sense? Actually come onto the asterisk memo? That seemed crude. Do you think that would have crossed the line?”

“I think, yeah.”

“I thought so. So instead what I did was — you remember making outlines of your hands in kindergarten? You held your hand still on the page and you traced around each finger, and all the little contours of your finger joints were captured, and you would go around a few times, and each time the pencil was at a slightly different angle, so you got this aura of your hand, that was so much more accurate than you could ever draw, and all you had to do was put in the fingernails and the little wrinkles on the backs of your fingers and you really had something? Once this girl traced my hand and I traced hers at the same time — I went very slowly, which triggered her ticklishness, and she laughed hard every time my pencil made it to the place between two of her fingers, but she was brave, she stayed put. Her name was Martha. I’m pleased to have remembered that! A teacher showed us how to make a turkey, using two hands superimposed. But that wasn’t interesting, that was just a trick. It’s the same with shadows: the beautiful thing isn’t the alligators or bats you can make with your hands, the beautiful thing is the way the shadow image allows you to see so precisely what the outer contour of your own hand really looks like, those little bunches of flesh under each bent finger joint. Obviously this was what I had to do. So I closed the top of the copier and I took a blank piece of paper and again I concentrated on the idea of this woman’s surprise and then transfixion when she saw my memo until I was hard again. I traced around my dick with a pen, holding myself in place with a finger and holding the pen straight up and down, and it was a very interesting sensation, not pleasurable, but very interesting, this cold pen. I went around about five times. And the great thing was, on paper, my dick looked really impressive. It looked like a big dick. Because of course the image you get is bigger all the way around by what, two pen radii, or one full pen diameter, so a good quarter of an inch. Much better than the copy, which as I said was this miniature sideways thatched farmhouse there in the right margin. So I wrote full — scale cock tracing, you know, 11:43 p.m., sunday, november 24th or whatever the date was. And I put the memo and the two pieces of artwork in her in box.”

“You’re kidding! Did somebody find them?”

“No no. I plucked them back out just before I left.”

“Ah, okay.”

“And I didn’t send her any asterisk memos at all for about a month after that, which was highly unusual. She started giving me quizzical looks. Then one afternoon she came by and she asked me what was up. She said I wasn’t my usual buoyant self. And I griped to her about a certain person at work, I lamented the fact that we were a second-rate company when we could be a first-rate company, the usual junk. And then I said, ‘And there’s something else.’ She said, ‘Well, what is it?’ She knew it was about her. So, with this weird combination of reluctance and eagerness, I confessed to her that I’d made a copy of my cock and a cock tracing and that I’d put them in her in box late one night and then thought better of it. She said, ‘Well, do you still have them?’ I said, ‘Gee, I think I do!’ ”

“You’d kept them? In a little file of your own?”

“Of course,” he said. “After all that trouble? Plus this was in some way part of the whole thing, that I’d blurt out what I’d done and she’d ask to see and I’d have it on hand to show her.”

“What did she say?”

“She said that the copied cock looked like a sonogram.”

“That’s it?”

“I’m telling you, she had it very bad for this Lee guy. I suggested that she could take the two pages if she wanted, for her reference. She said no thanks. We had lunch a week or so after that. She moaned about Lee, I listened sympathetically. Then I asked her, I couldn’t help it, I asked her, I said, ‘Never mind the photocopy,’ I said, ‘let me just ask you, was the cock tracing I showed you in any slight way arousing? Not right then in my office, to be sure, but later? Did you feel the slightest smidgin of arousal later?’ And she gave me an indulgent look and she said, ‘I’m really sorry, the pictures made me feel tender feelings for you, but they just really did not arouse me.’ So that seemed conclusive.”

“I would say so,” she said.

“Yep. Yep. It wasn’t. More happened.”

“You mean you and she ended up getting together? What was her name?”

“Emily.”

“That’s right, you told me that. Well?”

“Well, we did spend an evening in my apartment,” he said.

“The usual? You draped your best cummerbund over the lamp shade? She toasted you with the Koromex tube?”

“Something like that. But anyway, that was what I thought of when you asked me to look straight at my cock and talk about it. I have to say, that was one of the more unsettling questions I’ve been asked in my life.”

“Would you like to know whether I would find a tracing of your cock arousing?”

“I would be curious about that, yes.”

“I suppose it would depend on my mood. I might like to perform the tracing. If you traced my whole body, I might in exchange trace your pale Ramone … This mouthpiece I’m talking into? Of the telephone?”

“Yes?”

“It’s like a sieve. It’s like those little filters you put over the bathtub drain. Sometimes I think with the telephone that if I concentrate enough I could pour myself into it and I’d be turned into a mist and I would rematerialize in the room of the person I’m talking to. Is that too odd for you?”

“No, I think that sometimes,” he said.

“But the interesting part,” she said, “is that the trip itself would take a while. I think a lot about what it would feel like to be turned into some kind of conscious vapor. You know those trucks that come around on streets and grind up the brush on the curb? Those droning trucks? The guy throws a branch in, and it goes mmmmn- yooonnnng -mmmmmm, and all these tiny chips fly out of a high pipe? I think of that, except of course it wouldn’t be painful — I think of the part where I’m just this spume of wood chips and pieces of leaves. Or you know what else? You remember those birds that were getting sucked into the jet engines? Sometimes I lie in bed at three or four in the morning and I imagine myself flying miles above the earth, very cold, and one of those black secret spy planes is up there with the huge round engines with the spinning blades in it, the blades that look like the underside of mushrooms? The black plane’s going very fast and I’m going very fast in the opposite direction and we intersect, and I fly right through one of those jet engines, and I exit as this long fog of blood. I’m miles long, and, because it’s so cold, I’m crystalline. Very long arms, you’ll be pleased to hear. And then I recondense in bed, sshhp, as my short warm self. It must have something to do with my estrogen level. But that’s what telephone travel would be like out there, I think. What am I saying, that’s what it is like.”