Nicholson Baker - The Fermata

An intensity in my gaze may have unsettled her slightly. The more her enthusiasm for the whole idea appeared to diminish, the eagerer I was to convince her that it had to be attractive to her. Any tiny Latino swimsuit was fair game, I said. Any penis-bulge in the world that she wanted to inquire into and even heft was hers to inquire into and heft. Right? But despite her having clearly said at the beginning of the plane ride that the idea of seeing naked beautiful men held more and more appeal, she now began to contend that really the sight of a penis per se didn’t do all that much for her. Yes, possibly, she would investigate a crotch or two hands-on, if the crotch-context was truly extraordinary, but what she really needed was the possibility that a given penis could become aware of her and could grow and develop with the help of this knowledge. She needed to be in some sort of unfolding dramatic relationship with a specific penis for it to become a full-blown sex-object.

“But you’re such a voyeur,” I countered. “When we go for walks, you’re always trying to get a look in the windows.”

“It’s foyerism, not voyeurism,” she replied. “I want to look in windows because I like to see how people arrange their rooms, how they have decided to live. If I had a magical Tristan chord on tape that stopped time, I probably would wander through people’s houses, if they were unlocked.”

“Ah! Okay!” I said wildly. “Now we’re getting somewhere. And if in your wandering you came across a paused couple having Sunday-afternoon sex, wouldn’t you at least walk up and touch the man’s flexed butt-muscle between her parted legs as he drives that dick home? Or if you happened upon a guy doing himself up right, pumping his fluke with two fists, his eyes closed, his face all slack from the pleasure, wouldn’t you pull his hands away and give that fucking girder of a dick a suck or two, if it looked extra good and suckable? You would!”

Rhody thought. “I’m not ruling it out. But I need movement. What you’re talking about is so static. I need to be seduced. That’s what I really want. I want to be seduced .” She said this with such conviction that I dropped the whole subject. It was obvious to her that if the universe were stopped, any form of seduction would be impossible. I resisted the temptation to itemize the manifold ways in which a Fold-effect could make certain kinds of seduction possible, because I didn’t want to seem to have given it a lifetime’s thought. I just dropped it. I thanked her again for finding my glasses.

A week after that I had a revelation while browsing in Kibbeson’s Discount House of Electricity on Mass Ave. after work. I realized that all I had to do was buy a handful of really cheap remaindered switches — perhaps the one-hundred-milliamp push-button switches with the twelve-millimeter bushings, which looked especially promising — and carry them around in my pants pocket. I had a hunch that if I held one tightly and pressed it with my thumb while thinking as hard as I could of an hourglass being spun in a centrifuge, I could easily force a minor concession from the elemental forces and descend into the temporal Cleft that way. Even if the switches burned out after only one Drop, as the race-track-transformer toggle had, they were cheap enough that I could afford it. I bought a bunch of different microswitches and tested them out on the street, fumbling with them in my pocket as I frowned out at the traffic. None of the momentary-connection push-buttons worked, to my surprise, but an undistinguished-looking plastic sixteen-amp spade-terminal rocker-switch did beautifully. I bought a dozen for five dollars.

Rhody and I had sex that evening — not outré toothbrush-driven avocado sex, but not all that bad sex either. While I was fucking into her slowly from behind, she began to come, muff-finger flying. I still had a ways to go. I never liked coming after she did, because I could not convince myself that she was still interested. Hastily I fished one of the rocker-switches out of my pants pocket (fortunately my pants were right there on the bed) and envisioned a spinning hourglass while I tripped it. There was a smarting spark against my palm as time’s fuse blew. I pulled out and looked at the alluringly open negative shape in Rhody’s vadge where my cock had just happily been — it didn’t close on itself as it would have out of the Fold. I went and stood in the other room, looking through the frame of the open door at what she looked like as she was fucking me. Her glasses were on. Folds of the sheet were clutched in her hands. Though she was supporting her weight on her elbows and knees, her breasts weren’t hanging straight down, as they would have been if she had posed herself in this position, but were shaped on the fly, the centers of gravity looming forward, because we had been slapping against each other quite hard and she had just begun a drive back onto my richard. She was looking down past her breasts at her own thighs or perhaps at my ballions swinging just below her tuft. Her face was very flushed, in part because her head was held down the way it was — there was a vein in her forehead that I could clearly see. My girlfriend! I pulled off my condom, disliking the wrinkly sounds it made as I mastur-worked myself. The coolness of the open air on my richard made it remember how good it was to be hard. I lay next to her on the bed, looking at her slung-forward drones and flushed face, and I imagined her imagining sucking her piano teacher’s languid elutriator, or thinking about somebody or — bodies a great deal sexier to her than I was doing something nice and kinky, and in my anxiousness to catch up with her I almost went too far and came all alone — I clenched once in a false-dawn sort of pre-orgasm, which is a spasm (if I may be pardoned for an inelegant simile) very similar to the false flush-moment that can occur in a toilet tank if you don’t hold the handle down quite long enough for the mechanism to confirm your unambivalent wish for it to go through a full flush cycle. I let my cock settle down for a minute, and then began driving up the grade again. It was now so mindlessly hard that the sensation of a pinchingly new condom being unrolled down its length was a matter of complete indifference to it. I pointed myself back inside Rhody and pressed the rocker-switch and, slapping against her as if there had been no break in the action, came just when she did. I felt a little guilty about having thus engineered a simultaneous orgasm (and what if by some mischance she found the second condom later?) and I lay there in the otherwise happy post-coital calm, seriously weighing whether I should just go ahead and tell her my entire history of time-perversion.

“What do you have in your hand?” she asked, undoing my fingers.

“This thing? It’s just a sort of charm.”

She looked at the burned-out rocker-switch, which I stupidly hadn’t gotten rid of during our orgasm. “You were holding on to this the whole time?” she said, looking at me uncomprehendingly.

“I don’t think the whole time,” I said.

“Where did it come from? I don’t understand.”

“Well,” I said, playing for time, “it’s just that — I remembered I had a bunch of rocker-switches in my pants pocket and grabbed one when I was going at you from behind. That was great , by the way.” I needed twenty minutes or so to think about how I should answer her, and whether I should tell her about the Fold, but I couldn’t very well reach for another rocker-switch while she lay on her side, propped on one elbow, looking at me with such a troubled expression. I had to go with my flash assessment, which was that this was not in fact the time to tell her about my Fold-life after all. I disliked how strange I must be appearing to her.