Nicholson Baker - The Fermata

A conviction began to grow in me that as soon as I put my glasses back on (the side-pieces and nose-pods would be quite hot by now — I liked being burned this way) I would again have control over time. Whenever I pushed them up on my nose with my index finger, time would immediately go idle. My wish to look more closely at something through them would be enough of a trigger. So sure was I that my glasses had become, through my having finally simply seen them, Fold-actuators, that I didn’t even try them out at first: I lay instead recalling a time when I was at a beach with Rhody. I went out in the surf with her with my glasses on so that I could for once see the Hokusai trim-work on the waves. I knew that I was risking a major loss (I did still have my contacts, unwearably moldy, no doubt), but I foolishly thought that I would know how to keep above the breakers. Rhody said, “Are you sure about wearing them?” I said I would be very careful. After twenty minutes, the second of two big unexpected waves tumbled us both. When it withdrew, my glasses were not on my face. They were somewhere in the ocean. I was blind, standing in five feet of cold choppy salt water. Rhody and I groped in the sandy turbidity, laughing hopelessly. I began to adjust to the fact that I had been very stupid and had lost my beloved eyewear. But seconds later, amazingly, Rhody felt them brush past her leg, and she caught them and waved them in the air. I put them on and liftingly embraced her, as in a travel poster. It was the best moment of the trip; we fought on the plane ride home — mostly because I felt, like Tolstoy when he showed his rakish journals to Sonya after they got engaged, that I had to try out the idea of time-perversion on her (presenting it only as fantasy, of course). She took it very badly — and we broke up a month later.

I rose from the towel onto my knees and put on my glasses and my watch. I looked down at the shadow of my semi-stiff richard against the blue stripes. What else was there in the world beside masturbation? Nothing. I pushed up on the bridge of my glasses and verified that the wind and the clouds had stopped. In the Fold, singing “Back in the Saddle Again,” I got my Casio typewriter and went out to Storrow Drive and pulled a guy off his motorcycle and drove it out to the Cape, between the lanes of halted cars. The beaches were not crowded at all, which was just fine; I walked for about twenty minutes until I found a woman, fairly nice-looking, lying on her stomach on a towel in a two-piece bathing suit the gray-green color of the plant called dusty miller. She was in the process of blindly digging two diagonal down-ramps into the sand on either side of her towel, which was what I wanted. Her top was undone, the straps lying endearingly untautly with their inner surface visible; her back was not very tanned, and in her application of sunblock she had missed a triangular place near one of her very expressive, well-made shoulder blades, which was going to be painful in a few hours unless I put a little lotion on it for her, which I did. I sat cross-legged next to her in my bathing suit and turned on my typewriter and began to write a story that I hoped would interest her on some more or less debased level.

Naturally I had no idea what she liked, whether she was a particularly sexual person, but she happened to be the person on the beach who was idly digging in the sand, and that was all I required from her. The rest was up to me. I wrote a story about vibrators and dildos. I worked for about seven hours (seven personal Strine-hours), perhaps longer. It was one thirty-eight the whole time. I didn’t worry about getting sunburned; you can’t tan or burn efficiently in the Fold. Whenever I thought that my glasses were starting to slip down the bridge of my nose, I hurriedly pushed them up in place, not wanting my perspiration to restart time by mistake. I only took a few breaks; one to press her breasts gently from the side to be sure she had no implants (the knowledge that a pair of breasts are fake unfortunately kills my lust); and one to go for a swim in the motionless surf. Swimming in the Fold was something I hadn’t done up to that point: the water’s viscosity varied, areas of paused turbulence in a crashing wave dissolving like lumps in batter as I swam through them. Shells and pebbles were suspended in the undertow like forest underbrush. I ran my finger along the quiet sharp crest of wave and flicked a hanging drop of seawater into vapor with my fingernail. It was very tiring breast-stroking my way up and down the stiff-peaked pectinaceous swells. But I found the “swim” refreshing (I wore my glasses this time as well, since I was in no danger of being thrown by any surf), and I further cleared my mind as I came ashore by pulling on the front of a bathing suit of a woman of fifty or so who was standing in an inch of water regarding her feet; I peered down it to see her fat low white breasts in the filtered light of her suit.

As a novice porniste, I meant only to dash something off that would have a reasonable chance of arousing the sun-bather beside me when she found it. (I knew at least that she could read — there was a James Clavell novel and a book on how to get a job in her beach-bag.) But as I wrote onward (about a librarian, a youthful next-door neighbor, and a UPS man, since, being a beginner, I thought I should at least make an attempt to follow the conventions), picking the setting and the physical traits of my few characters pretty much at random, I got interested in what I was doing and found that it was making me want very much to make myself come. In fact, for the first twenty minutes or so, every time I typed the word “she” or “her” I slowed way down to press the component letters, overcome in the act of placing a feminine pronoun on the page by an almost irresistible need to whale on my bone. But I denied myself; instead I took off my bathing suit and knelt, crouched over before the typewriter as if I were on a prayer rug, showing the ocean my open ass and udderously self-juggling balls. I was not then used to nude sunbathing, as I have said, and I discovered that the sensation of the halves of my upraised ass being out of contact with each other — the sensation of a slight evaporative outdoor coolness on my very ass hole , and on the usually damp stretched skin high up on the sides of my balls — was most interesting. I didn’t want anything to go in my asshole, no, no, I just wanted it out in the open, sunlit for once, flaunting wavewards its showered cleanness, exposed in a way that was both lewd and vulnerable. In this devotional position I worked for several intense hours, writing.

Not that I thought what I was writing was necessarily by external standards good: it was simply that I was positioned right next to a woman who would be my audience, though she didn’t know it right then, and I was in her immediate presence creating for her alone an alternative “she” character, who, in thinking exactly as I wanted her to think about dildos and vibrators, would possibly entertain the real random “she” beside me. Basically I was feeling for the first time that heady paired combination of satisfactions that the sexual proseur can encounter at the outset of a new enterprise, as his long-neglected artistic ambition, however tentative or internally scoffed at — the wish to create something true and valuable and even perhaps in a tiny way beautiful — combines with basic grunting cuntlapping lust, the two emotions reinforcing each other and making you, or rather me, feel almost insane with a soaringly doubled sense of mission. At one point, finishing a paragraph, I shouted, “ I am a writer of fucking erotica!” into the still close air. It was then, in fact, that the first twinges of dissatisfaction with the word erotica asserted themselves. I ditched the word permanently for its abbreviated replacement, rot , and I have never regretted it. Yes, I was out on the beach on a rotter’s retreat, with my cool and drying Arnus exposed to the sun, my cock as hard as an empty Calistoga bottle, but untouched for hours and hours. I was denying myself for my rot.