by Adam Felber
She’s still coming! Nine minutes have passed, and Deborah Johnstone’s monumental orgasm is still going strong. Now she’s sprawled across her lover, her face buried in his neck, as she sobs and moans and laughs and writhes against him. It is necessary that you appreciate just how wonderful she is feeling right now. Deborah Johnstone has been on a plateau of ecstasy for a long, long time.
Deborah Johnstone has a life, of course, full of friends and ambitions and hobbies and concerns. But those don’t matter right now. In the operating system of her brain, this climax is the only open application. There are no other open windows in the background consuming RAM and providing distractions. This is full-screen, a singularity of consciousness that takes contemplative monks a lifetime to perfect.
It is a feature that comes standard with Deborah Johnstone.
That is Johnny at the end of the bar, Arlene thought. He looked … different, somehow. But in what way? Well, for one, he was looking straight down into his drink and giggling, which was admittedly a new thing for him, but that wasn’t quite it. He looked—dangerous, like a hyperactive boy with a grenade in his belly. No, that wasn’t it at all, Arlene realized, though she took a moment to congratulate herself on the imagery and hope briefly that she’d be able to recall it later, when she had a pen and paper and a less emotionally fraught moment. She shook her head to refocus her mind. Johnny looks different tonight, she thought slowly and carefully, because my cat is dead.
She was almost right about that.
A few facts about Deborah Johnstone:
1) She is twenty-four years old.
2) She is disease-free.
3) Everyone who meets her instantly likes her.
4) She genuinely cares about her friends and family.
5) She is capable of experiencing astounding amounts of ecstasy.
6) She’s always at least as happy as you were on the happiest day of your life.
It was a dark and stormy night. A knock on the door awakened us. Unbelievably enough, it was Dr. Schrödinger. He was soaking wet and looked kind of desperate, water streaming down a face too frantic to be handsome, hopelessly unfashionable glasses fogged and partially obscuring those disconcertingly wobbly blue eyes. He was too pitiable to turn away, so we let him in. Just for a minute.
“The thing you must remember,” he says as he huddles under a blanket and sips from his miserable little thermos of hot cider, “is that quantum theory is not the theory of relativity, though they are of course inextricably interrelated. Relativity talks about how you look at things. Quantum theory depends on whether you look at things.”
“Meow …” we suggest hopefully.
“Oh, very well!” he snaps. “If no one opens the ‘box,’ the ‘cat’s’ fate remains not just unobserved but really undetermined—it honestly behaves like a ‘cat’ that is both ‘alive’ and ‘dead’ until you look at it.”
This is great stuff, as long as you ignore the sarcastic quotation marks that the doctor makes with his fingers when he says words like “cat” and “alive.” Which we do. Pointedly. Then he lapses into his usual blather about particles and waves, and we leave him there to sleep on the couch.
Before Johnny Felix Decaté could get bored with his revelatory beer glass, he sensed something looming to his left. He didn’t look up immediately, because the sensation of something looming was so delicious, and when you look right at a looming thing it ceases to really loom properly. Eventually he heard his name spoken, and in a sunburst of flashing connections he identified the loomer as a person, a woman, a friend. Arlene. This is the conversation that followed:
“What’s so funny?”
“Looming.”
“Was I looming? I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Nothing wrong with looming. If more people loomed, less people would be getting directly in your face.”
“Am I in your face now?”
“Are you, like, oversensitive today?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
Pause.
“Do you wanna know why?”
“Can I help?”
“No.”
“Then no.”
“What!?”
“The past is a total burden. I have enough trouble forgetting my own without having other people’s to forget.”
“Fuck you!”
Pause.
“And stop that!”
“Stop what?”
“You don’t smile lovingly at someone who just said ‘fuck you’ to you. It’s rude.”
“I like you.”
“My cat died.”
“So did Winston Churchill.”
“What is wrong with you tonight?”
The most active part of Deborah Johnstone’s orgasm is over. It is now eleven and one-half minutes since she sat bolt upright and, well, squeaked through her suddenly constricted throat. Now, as she sprawls and stretches over her lover, she begins to feel that she is floating, and she thinks to herself: Now here comes the really good part.
The bathroom was actually much nicer than one would expect, especially for a place like the Abbey. The black tiles on the floor and halfway up the walls were as shiny as the white grout between them was white. A streamlined sink curved up from the floor like a black porcelain cobra poised to strike. The very large mirrors accurately reflected that there was no one in the room.
It was obvious that Schrödinger had nowhere to go. He spent the whole morning puttering around, drinking herbal tea, and trying to get us to talk about physics. He was none too subtle, either, trying to disguise his intent through “idle chitchat.”
“Bit of a drizzle falling this morning,” he observed slowly, watching us out of the corner of his eye.
We agreed, warily, that there was.
“Do you see,” he began, with bone-crunching nonchalance, “how the rain appears not as a series of plummeting drops but, rather, as a set of flickering points as some droplets happen to refract photons into your eyes?”
We tried to tell him that we really didn’t want to get into this….
“What I meant to say,” he corrected himself hastily, “is: See how the rain sparkles?”
The rain did indeed sparkle, we allowed.
“Well, oddly enough, that effect can be replicated in a lab by directing a beam of—”
We rushed to the door and headed off to work, telling this one-hit wonder of popular science to please be gone when we returned, and that the door, independent of any observer, would lock itself.
“Let’s do something.”
“We are doing something, Johnny. We’re drinking. This is what we do.”
“Well, let’s do something else. I’m going to—”
“No, wait. Hang. Everybody will be here by ten.”
“And I would dearly love to see my friends, with whom I’ve shared so much….”
“What are you—are you high?”
“I think that friendship is just a habit. A good habit, but don’t be fooled into thinking that it has any other power on you besides force of habit.”
“Well, that’s a pretty strong force, isn’t it? I mean, Furble died today, and I still feel him, scratching the couch with his little claws and begging for food and—”
“It’s only strong because you say so, Arlene. You decide how strong things like that are.”
“Yeah, but I don’t consciously decide. It just happens.”
“We’ll come back in an hour and a half.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Are you coming?”
“Why do you want me along?”
“You’re here.”
“Thanks.”
“And I clearly remember that I’ve always liked you….”
“Oh … thank you, Johnny, really. I’m sorry I’m crying…. I guess I just really needed to hear something like that, weirdly put or not….”
“Bye.”
“Wait, fucker!”
One half-hour after Deborah Johnstone first
began to climax, she finally comes back to herself. First she becomes aware of her heartbeat and her limbs, slightly cramped. Soon the body underneath her begins to take form and gains an identity: Colin. She feels a surge of gratitude toward Colin, who has waited so patiently for her to return. But a quick look at his face tells her that thanks are not necessary; he is awestruck and proud, now convinced that he is truly the most remarkable lover the city has ever known. So everybody wins, Deborah thinks. She rises off him gently and watches him stifle a slight twinge of fear and loss. Deborah doesn’t say anything about it—such comments are never well received, being taken for emasculating at best. Instead, she stands above him, stretches, looks at the clock. It’s eight thirty. Perfect. “Just enough time for a bath or a shower,” she thinks aloud. She’s out of the room before there’s any reply from Colin, who actually was waiting for a round of applause.
At 8:55 P.M.:
1) We are in the corner of the Abbey, watching Dr. Schrödinger bore an old barfly. We’re hoping he doesn’t see us.
2) There’s this box going meow. And it’s not going meow, too.
3) Deborah Johnstone is showering and thinking about tonight, slipping her life back on like a comfy sweater.
4) Arlene is screaming.
5) Montana, in most people’s opinions, is still a state in the Union.
6) The bathroom of the Abbey is really quite nice. And empty.
7) Colin is wishing he’d gotten everything on videotape.
8) Johnny Felix Decaté is on fire.
Chapter 2
THE ABBEY HAD ALWAYS BEEN THERE. Tim always bragged that it had been the first bar to open when Prohibition was repealed. But if that was the case, it must have been mere coincidence; the architecture made it pretty clear that Prohibition had been exactly what the Abbey’d been built for. The two windows in front were tiny, round, and thick-paned, little more than portholes. Johnny Felix and Grant were known to argue drunkenly whether this was because the Abbey flew (J.F.’s opinion) or swam (Grant’s view). The theories were both based on the idea of Pressure: Grant thought that the Abbey was a submarine, its stucco walls and thick-paned windows keeping the enormous pressures of the outside world from bursting in and flooding the cabin. Johnny Felix Decaté had always maintained that the Abbey was an airplane and that if the windows ever broke the feverish social energies that were generated by their intense clique would fly out and be loosed upon the world all at once, in a rush that would make Pandora’s box look like a bargain-bin firecracker. One particularly drunken evening, the argument had grown so heated that they raced to the windows and began hammering away at them with black plastic ashtrays to settle the dispute once and for all. Tim had to come out from behind the bar to show them the door and, in a tough-but-considerate manner, shove them through it. The door, it had already been agreed, was a magical airlock that allowed people to pass in and out without too much discomfort (though Grant was fond of pointing out that one often experienced “the bends” when leaving the Abbey, further proving his theory; the others called this a premature hangover).
At 10:11 P.M., Deborah Johnstone and Colin enter the Abbey Lounge, walking like cowboys. Colin’s walk is a swagger: “cocksure,” thinks Deborah, grimacing to herself. Deb herself has other reasons for her gait, and those reasons are all that are keeping her from ditching Colin right there and then. Still, she thinks as he claps an arm around her and “leads” her to her corner and her friends, this guy’s definitely got an early expiration date tattooed on his ass.
Arlene isn’t moving, but she’s thinking, sort of:
Johnny’s dead, Furble’s dead. Furble’s dead, Johnny’s having a beer. I saw Furble dead. I saw Johnny die. I didn’t see Furble die. I didn’t see Johnny dead. They both died. Johnny died but he isn’t acting dead. Furble must have died, because he’s dead and you need to die to get that way. But you also have to be dead after you die. That’s a rule. You have to play that way. Should I tell Johnny that? He really seems to be enjoying his beer and the company, the last thing he’d want is some killjoy telling him that he has to put his drink down and be dead—that’s rude. “Killjoy”—ha—I get it. I wonder if it’s ever been used in that sense before….
“She’s laughing,” said Deborah’s voice. Johnny assumed that Deborah had said it, but he was too busy looking at the wood grains in the tabletop.
“Who?” asked Johnny Felix Decaté as he completed tracing one line all the way across the table.
“Arlene. She laughed—she’s stopped now. It’s like some kind of a coma. Johnny, what happened to her?”
“Lots of things. To hear her tell it, she’s led a rich life…. But today I’d say two things of importance happened.”
“Yeah? What?”
“Well, her cat died …”
“Furble? Oh no. Shit. And … ?”
“… and I didn’t.”
“So she’s upset about her cat dying?”
This voice was different. It had strange, soupy, adenoidal contours, not as familiar as Deb’s or Arlene’s, so Johnny looked up and reminded himself: Colin, Deb’s lay du jour. Johnny looked at his face, loving all the unfamiliar details—the big Roman nose, the absurdly pronounced cheekbones, the light-brown stubble. None of this, he knew, mattered to Deborah. She had described her criteria for a Level 1 Lover (which Colin obviously was) very specifically to her friends: Agreeable Personality, At Least Six Inches Long, and Good Stamina. Higher levels had more stringent intelligence and charm requirements as well as more exacting physical specs. She truly had it down to a science.
“What?” Johnny asked.
“I said, she’s like this because her cat’s dead.”
“No, I think it’s more because I’m not. She’s sort of in shock.”
“What the fuck? Did you die sometime recently?”
“You see me here, don’t you?”
“That’s my point, fuckhead!”
That was it for him, Johnny realized right away. Not that Deb disliked profanity. But she had the very strong conviction that the word “fuck” should be reserved for phrases that actually had to do with fucking. If Deb had had any hopes for Colin, she’d be correcting him now. Johnny gave Deb two beats to speak up. Nothing.
“I’m really sorry, Deb,” he said.
“Thanks. It’s no big deal.”
“What’s no big deal? Come on, what the fuck are you talking about?”
Johnny looked at him with compassion. “I was telling Deb that I was sorry that you two weren’t going to work out.”
“Johnny! Shut up!”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that if I were you,” said Colin, settling smugly into cliché. He draped one arm over Deb’s chair back.
“If you were me you wouldn’t be here right now.”
“Oh yeah? I—what?”
“Johnny, what’s with you tonight?”
“I’m just saying what I’m seeing.”
“Yeah, well, I just wouldn’t be so sure.” Colin’s eyebrows didn’t move as a unit, Johnny suddenly realized. The right side was always the first to rise, but it followed the left brow downward. Amazing. Johnny wanted the eyebrows to move more. And he wanted Colin to know what an ass he was making of himself. And these two desires were in perfect harmony.
“Listen, Colin, man, you’re working with incomplete info. Deb is an incredibly, uh, gifted woman. We all envy her. But if you think you’re special, just keep this in mind—she once had a twenty-minute orgasm with two fingers and a stalk of asparagus! So, before you decide that you can be an asshole to everyone else, bear in mind that you probably only slightly outperformed a thin green vegetable.”
“And it was probably better company, too,” piped a small, dazed-sounding voice.
“Arlene!”
“Welcome back, sweetie.”
“I’m outa here. You coming, Deb? Deb? Fuck!”
We are hunched up in the corner, facing the wall. Dr. Schrödinger is just one table away, patiently explaining flu
id dynamics to a homeless man who is too toasted even to request another drink. The good doctor has already bought the bum’s attention three times.
“… So here comes the really tricky part: What if you cool the fluid very quickly—so quickly, in fact, that the molecules don’t have time to organize themselves as a solid?”
“Mmrrgg …” says the homeless man, slumping down on the table. With morbid fascination, we watch Dr. Schrödinger press on.
“Ah! Very good, Mr. Barnes, very good! You’re right—the lowering of the temperature can’t occur without molecular reorganization; it was in some ways a trick question. However, just suppose for the moment that we were literally able to suspend molecular motion—”
Mr. Barnes collapses to the floor, destroying the aging Ph.D.’s feeble illusion of having an audience. He’s obviously used to this sort of thing, however, and he resolutely begins to scan the room for fresh blood. We cower and turn away; if he sees us here at all, he’ll approach. Just when we think discovery is inevitable, a plume of cigarette smoke carries the word “cat.” across the air. Turning toward it, Dr. Schrödinger faces a table in the corner where two perfectly innocent young couples are talking and smoking. Poor kids. They’ve unwittingly offered Dr. Schrödinger an opening for his one and only socially acceptable conversation-starter. As he sidles toward the table, one of the young men gets up angrily, shouts something, and leaves, pushing Dr. Schrödinger aside as he does so. The doctor doesn’t even notice; all his attention is focused on the three young people at the table and the one suddenly, miraculously empty chair.