Nicholson Baker: The Fermata

I snapped my fingers. At once I was lying in complete euphoric silence. My Fold-powers were back.

I crawled out of the machine and walked naked into the control room, my weighty richard leading the way. Dr. Orowitz-Rudman was wearing headphones. She was leaning back in her chair, her hand resting thoughtfully on her mouth, frowning in concentration at a monitor that showed an image of me lying feet first, legs parted, with my hand clutching my erection. I’d never seen myself from that angle before. It was not a pretty sight. One of the associates was sitting at the other large monitor, which showed a long glowing thing that was apparently the nerve in my wrist done up in the usual intense greens and blues and oranges. The other woman, the Chinese woman, was standing behind Dr. Orowitz-Rudman, looking on.

I knelt and opened Dr. Orowitz-Rudman’s lab coat and pulled her ribbed green turtleneck out of her pants. I bunched it up at her collarbone and pulled the cups of her bra down so her nipples popped out. They were erect, I was pleased to notice, and surprisingly dark, like two Raisinets. “I can’t help it — I need to suck your tits,” I said to her, and I did, tactfully, untheatrically. I wrote, “Thanks,” on a white Post-It note and stuck it on her left breast. Then I put her clothes back in order and went back in the scan room and climbed into the magnet and resumed my former position. I snapped my fingers again. The noise of the coolant started back up.

Immediately I heard Dr. Orowitz-Rudman exclaim, “Whoops! Lost our fix. Arno, we lost our fix on you. What happened in there?”

“I snapped my fingers.”

“Okay, look, please don’t do that. There are limits to our tracking system. Just keep stroking your penis if you can.”

“How much longer do you want me to continue?” I asked. I was jubilant at having my powers back.

“How much pain are you in?” she asked.

“Mmm, this is about as painful as it gets — tingling up my whole forearm,” I reported.

“I think you should go ahead and climax soon. I think we’ve got enough now to generate quite a thorough neural conductivity profile.”

“You want me to come for you?” The foul-patter urge was rising in me.

“Yes,” she said neutrally.

“You want it? You want to see it? Oh, God, I want to give it to you. This guy, this guy who’s in the MRI machine, he snaps his fingers and time stops. He understands what’s going on, he’s not freaked, because it happened once before when somebody put a sample of his blood in a centrifuge and spun it very fast and time was interrupted. So time is stopped, and he crawls out of the machine, naked, jerking on his big swollen dick-knob, and he scampers into the control room and he throws back the doctor’s lab coat and pulls up her shirt and brings her tits out and he laps at them. That’s what he’s wanted from the moment he saw her, he’s wanted to suckle.

those hard little nipples with his mouth — oh, man, ma-ha-ha-ha-han—”

“A little slower if you can, Arno,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman gently. “The image is degrading.”

“I forgot. I’ll try. I’ll try. And so then he puts her tits back in her bra and tucks her shirt in and scampers back into the magnet and he lies there on the pad just where he was and snaps his fingers, and time starts up again, and he lies there thinking of the tits he has just sucked on, how great they felt in his hands, and it’s such a tremendous thought that he has to come, he doesn’t care how much it hurts — oh, that’s right. I want to come inside your magnet, doctor. It hurts, but I don’t care. I like you to take all kinds of graphic pictures of my nerve while I pump this hot nasty piece of meat off for you. I like being hard and hot in your core. Oh, doctor. Doctor? I’ve got to call you Susan when I come. Sorry. Is that okay?”

“That’s okay,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “Just try to stroke a little slower, if it’s at all possible.”

“Oh, thank you. Oh Susan, oh Susan, oh Susan, uff, uffuck . Tell me you want to see me come. I want to hear you say it.”

I heard only silence over the intercom, and then: “As I said before, I do think it’s important for you to climax.”

“I will climax, you bet, you got it. I’m going to think of your tits and climax. Oh, you gave me your lipstick to hold. That was so good of you. I wish I could’ve circled your lips and nipples with it. Oh that feels nice. Squeeze my meat, Susan. Squeeze it in your big magnetic hole. Open that hole up for me. Suck me in, baby. Oh God yeah. Tighten that force down on my cock, uffuck. Uffuck. Here it is: oh yeah, oh fuck yeah. Oh yeah! Urrrrr!” I let the comeshots jump up and land on my stomach muscles. I lay there for what seemed like a long time, breathing peacefully. “Am I done?” I beatifically asked at last.

“Almost,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “Normally, at this point might you resume writing?”

“If I’d been alternating writing and jacking, yes.”

“Then could you type the baseline sentence again?” she said. “It might be useful to have. Remember it? ‘The cure …’?”

“Don’t tell me!” I put the fake keyboard on my chest, avoiding the sperm, and typed the sentence from memory.

The technicians dragged me out on the gantry and handed me a brown paper towel. I sat up, feeling a little sleepy and dazed, and put on my gown. In the control room, Dr. Orowitz-Rudman met me and led me to the room where my clothes were.

“I think that went well, don’t you?” she said.

“I’m sorry I fixated so totally on you.”

“Don’t apologize,” she said. “We were fixated on you, you were fixated on us.”

“It’s just that a woman doctor asking me to masturbate is like a dream come true …”

“I understand — let’s not belabor it. My only regret is that the imaging system couldn’t quite keep up with you and I had to keep telling you to slow down. I hope you had an okay orgasm even so?”

“Oh, it was a dandy. No, that was fine that you told me to slow down — slow is good.”

She told me that I could set up an appointment with her in several weeks to go over the nerve-profiles. “But from what I saw on the monitors, I would suggest that you switch to your left hand if you want to get rid of your carpal-tunnel problem.”

“I’ll begin tomorrow,” I said. “Thank you, doctor.” I couldn’t quite say “Susan” at this point.

“Thank you for taking part,” she said. We shook hands. Then, smiling, she snapped her fingers. “Just like that?”

“Right, just like that,” I said, pleased. I snapped my fingers for her, and while she stood fixedly, still in the midst of her good-natured, faintly flirtatious leave-taking smile, I kissed her name-tag and removed the white Post-It note from inside her bra. It would only have perplexed and disturbed her to discover it stuck to her breast (that soft, heavy, somewhat sticky breast) that evening. And what if she took off her bra in front of her husband, and he noticed it there before she did — a note saying THANKS on her breast? It would have caused needless suffering.

To recuperate from the experiment, I spent the next five days snapped into the Fold reading Louisa May Alcott; I didn’t go near a computer keyboard or my penis the whole time. My wrist pain, which at first was so bad I could barely open a piece of junk mail, moderated considerably. I borrowed a friend’s Hermes manual portable and used it to do some of my creative rotting; the deeper keystrokes were, as Dr. Orowitz-Rudman had suggested, a kind of physical therapy. And I did briefly try to teach myself to jack ambidickstrously, but I failed: my left hand simply did not feel good enough. After a month, I called Dr. Orowitz-Rudman to schedule a follow-up visit. She called me back that evening. I told her that my wrist was doing a lot better, thanks to her. I asked her how the motion studies were going, and she said they were going well.