Nicholson Baker - The Fermata

“Yes, do it. Oh yeah. Do it.” Adele would be lost in her onan-world.

“I’m going to push into the washcloth with my middle finger,” I would then say. “Okay? Just half an inch. That will keep it in place.”

I would find the right spot and I would push. White wrinkles would form in the fabric — a sort of plush white terry-cloth sphincter would gather around my stiff middle finger as I forced my way in.

“Eeeeeyeah!” Adele would say. “The texture of it!”

Carefully I would withdraw my finger, leaving the washcloth in place. “Now tighten it and make yourself come,” I would say.

“It really tingles in there,” she would say.

I would lean all my weight against the door and aim my cock through the gap. Adele would begin pushing against the doorjamb in a steady rhythm. This movement would finally make the washcloth slide off her ass-curves and hang down; but it would not fall to the floor, since it was still held tightly by her asshole. She would sense something amiss. “Oh no!” she would say breathlessly, alarmed.

“It’s all right!” I would reassure her. “It’s hanging there! I still can’t really see anything. Just hold it in there real tight, don’t let it fall, okay? I’m going to deliver a whole candygram of come right through this doorway any second.”

“Ooh, you are?” Adele would say. She would be pushing against the door with her ass so hard now that she would practically be shutting it in my face. “Come on my washcloth!” she would call. “Squeeze it off on my washcloth!”

In my frenzy, I would aim wrong and release my first two smut-schnapps on the carpet and the door, but with the third I would manage to fling some fertile distillate on her upper thigh. Feeling it, she would give her commotion the final go-ahead — and the limply hanging washcloth, tightly cinched in her raving sphincter, would begin to move hypnotically, pulling in and out several times where it disappeared, making the free end gently lift and wag, like a handkerchief waved in farewell from an ocean liner.

She would turn and sit and look in at me. We would describe how pleasant it had been. “And see?” I would say. “The washcloth did not fall. Your modesty was maintained.”

“Now I can sleep,” she would say. I would refocus on her hair, which would look beautiful and thick and tossed around. Though we wouldn’t be able to shake hands properly through the door, we would hook index fingers and shake good-bye that way. Her door would close and I would hear the lock on the knob turn and the bolt slide spftly into place. I would close my door, too, and lock it, but I wouldn’t reinstate the chain lock on my side — for it would seem to me that the sound of my chaining would constitute a faint rudeness after what we had done together.

The next morning, when I opened the door to the outside, I would find a small white bundle at my feet. It would be the Suzanne Vega tape wrapped in one of the now-stiffened washcloths, with a note saying, Take care of yourself — A.J.S . I wouldn’t be sure if this gift was meant to show that she knew that I was the one who had switched the tapes in the car, or whether it was simply a friendly gesture. But I would take care of myself, at least twice, before driving back to Boston.

That was what I planned to happen. What did happen, though, is that after an hour and a half or so of steady driving on the Mass Pike, an hour and a half full of hope and keyed-up concentration, I saw a small twirling rectangular shape fly out of Adele’s car window.

She hadn’t liked it. How very sad and disappointing. Had she listened to all of it and then decided she didn’t like it, or had she hated it so much that she had tossed it halfway through? I pushed up on my glasses and checked her car stereo: yes, Suzanne Vega was back in place. Nor were Adele’s nipples noticeably erect under her pink floral sweater. Was she made of stone ? Imagine her chucking my cassette right out the window! Hours and hours of work, all custom joinery, all for her, dismissed. Of course I had said that she should feel free to do that, but still, I hadn’t expected her to do it. My pride was hurt. I paced around in the tall grass where I thought I had seen the tape land, but I couldn’t find it. And I didn’t want to spend much time out of the car, because the grass I walked in had the same disturbingly blurred quality that the road had — I felt I would inflict some rending injury to the network of cosmic wormholes if I walked on the median strip for too long. I started up time and drove slowly, until Adele was way ahead of me. At the next exit, I turned around and drove home. When I woke up the next morning, my Fold-powers were gone.

THE WEEK FOLLOWING MY FAILED DRIVE, I WORKED FIFTEEN hours of overtime at a consulting firm. I was bothered by a persistent tingly feeling in the base of my right palm and increasing pain in my forearm. I needed at least a week off from typing, but because my Fermatal visitation-rights were now denied, I didn’t get one.

What was clearly a carpal-tunnel problem got quite bad over the next several months. An over-the-counter wrist brace didn’t fit properly and made the pain worse. I was able to alleviate the symptoms a little by sleeping with my arm embracing a spare pillow. After a particularly trying stint typing an eighty-page price list, I went to Commonhealth and saw several nurse practitioners and doctors. Each of them tapped the inside of my wrist hard and asked what it felt like. Every diagnostic tap further injured the nerve, it seemed to me. I went up the chain of specialists until I reached the in-house repetitive-motion expert, Dr. Susan Orowitz-Rudman, a short cheerful woman of forty. I told her that I was a career temp and that I really had to be able to continue using the keyboard. She was full of ideas and theories. I found her hyphenated name powerfully attractive.

“Is there any other related repetitive motion that you engage in?” she asked. “One patient of mine was a legal secretary and a fanatical bicyclist on weekends, and it turned out that it wasn’t the typing but the combination of typing and pulling on the hand-brakes of her bicycle that was causing the carpal flare. She switched to swimming and took a week off from work and she was able to keep her job and not have the operation. I’m happy to do the operation,” she added. “It’s not a big deal, it’s just a matter of making a little incision right here — but I’m just saying that sometimes there are ways to make the problem go away by itself.”

I told her that I snapped my fingers to music sometimes, and that I did some writing of my own in the evenings and on weekends which added to the overall amount of typing I did.

“What sort of writing do you do?” she asked politely, noting this down.

“Just stories. Nothing published. But I get caught up in it and I keep typing and typing and typing. The whole wrist problem has gotten much worse since I’ve started doing it.”

Dr. Orowitz-Rudman talked about alternative keyboards and about dictating my own writing and then having a friend transcribe it. She suggested two weeks off from work. She also spoke highly of manual typewriters: since they took more muscle strength, they seemed to bother the nerve less. Some anthropology professor at Harvard had gone back to his old Olivetti portable and been cured completely. She described some research she was doing: “I’m interested in developing a wrist sensor,” she said, “that will work as a biofeedback device, signaling the user when a motion is in progress that is likely to further inflame the nerve, based on certain correlations. But what I’m doing now is not that advanced, although it’s quite interesting — I mean, of course it is interesting to me, but it can also be interesting to my patients, and helpful. I’m trying to develop a set of MRI motion studies for various characteristic motions, such as typing a particular letter of the alphabet, opening an oyster, salad prep, and so forth. We use something called a fast-pulse-sequence echo-planar MRI machine, which essentially shows the nerve responding to the motions as they proceed. Would you be interested in taking part?”