Daniel shut his eyes and concentrated on his upturned hands on the table. He felt a tingling in his left index finger and told Willie.
‘Yes,’ Willie muttered, ‘continue.’
Daniel felt a burning sensation on his right ring finger. Then his left thumb itched, then his left middle finger tingled. Willie said, ‘Bah. Poor summation. A plus B, but no C. Clogged thresholds. You can open your eyes.’ Willie was glaring at him. ‘Virtual tactile insentience. A turtle has more feeling in its shell. So be it. As they say in Yugoslavia, “Tell the truth and run fast.” I’m afraid we’ll have to start with the absolute fundamentals. You do understand that opening locks is an art, and that a necessity of art is to intensify the organs it employs?’
‘No,’ Daniel said hesitantly, not without a touch of perversity, ‘I’m not sure if I do understand that.’
‘Muddy mind, troubled water. All right. Consider what Sickert had to say: “The whole of art is one long roll of revelation.” And it is revealed only to those whose minds are what Horace called “vacant” – though he was actually speaking of a woman whose heart is free. Get rid of yourself, Daniel. To open locks you must open yourself. Disappear through your fingertips.’
‘Suppose I don’t come back?’
‘A door always opens.’
Daniel started to say something but Willie cut him off. ‘No. No more abstractions for you. You are the kind who can swim in them, but you should be bathing in water squeezed from stone. If you’d please close your eyes, and place your hands palms upward on the table again.’
Daniel immediately felt something light and papery settle on each palm.
Willie commanded, ‘All right, open them.’
In his right hand Daniel saw a hundred-dollar bill. In the left, a slip of paper with a series of numbers.
Willie explained, ‘The phone number belongs to Oriana Coeur. The money is to pay her.’
‘For what?’ Daniel demanded.
‘For her profound sensual dimensions. You will see her every Thursday until you develop tactility. From seven o’clock in the evening till three o’clock in the morning on the other six nights of the week, you will meet with me here for study. We will start with alarm systems. Locks must await your work with Oriana. As an Estonian proverb has it, “You can’t expect the mute to sing.”’
‘What did you mean about Oriana’s “sensual dimensions”?’
‘Ah ha! You see? Attention begins when the imagination is seized. Oriana is a woman of the evening who has a remarkable sensitivity to touch. The fee for her company is usually five hundred dollars a night, but since she and I developed the exercise together, the charge is considerably less.’
‘So what will she and I be doing exactly?’
‘Oriana will give you the exact instructions, but essentially you will touch her where she directs you, using a variety of pressures and movements. You will practice until Oriana is satisfied. She, please note, not you. You keep your clothes on. Your purpose is not only to please her, but to literally have her life put in your hands. Literally. If her pleasure is the answer, your task, as Krause put it, is “to provide the riddle.”’
That evening, Oriana, her reddish-gold hair spilling over the pillows, arms flung wide, gave much more explicit instructions on where and how she wished to be touched – everywhere and any way she could imagine. At the height of her pleasure, Daniel imagined she was touching him, and for a long spinning instant lost all distinctions between their skins. Afterward, his hands felt like globes of light. But when Oriana, still flushed, began kissing his fingertips, asking what his pleasure was, he said he’d like to wait.
Oriana bit his middle finger gently. ‘So Willie told you to keep your pants on, huh? He’s such a purist.’
Daniel said, ‘It’s not really that. In the past, I’ve only been able to be with a woman once.’
‘What do you mean be with? That you could only come once a night?’
‘Once, period.’
Oriana was interested. ‘Then you can’t get it up again for her, ever?’
Daniel nodded.
‘Not even a little tremor of a twinge?’
‘Nothing.’
‘These ladies knew what they were doing?’
‘They were extremely desirable, and remarkably patient.’
‘So what do you think is going on?’
‘I don’t know. It could be from an injury. A tiny sliver of metal was once blown through the right front quadrant of my brain.’
‘Good Lord! What happened?’
‘It’s complicated, Oriana. My mother was killed in an accident and I almost was, too.’
‘Oh honey,’ Oriana said. She took Daniel’s hands in hers and pressed them to her face.
Daniel felt a tear against his palm. ‘Don’t cry,’ he asked her. ‘Please?’
Oriana flung his hands off her face and sat up on the bed, facing him. ‘Fuck you,’ she spit. ‘I’ll cry when I feel like crying.’
Daniel fell in love. He told her, ‘I want to wait to have sex with you because I’d rather have a future than a past.’
In reply, she embraced him in her bare arms. ‘Any time and all the time you want.’
Every Thursday evening Daniel was a brilliant student, but the rest of the week he was dunced by distraction. His mind wandered over Oriana’s lush and astonishingly responsive body. Willie’s mind was as interesting as Oriana’s body, but not nearly as provocative.
Nonetheless, over the next three months Daniel learned to disable fifty different alarm systems and pick almost any lock that could be opened with a key. As they entered the fourth month of instruction, Willie introduced him to combination locks. At the first week’s session, Willie made him sit for two hours blindfolded, ears plugged, wearing thick gloves before allowing him to attempt the simplest $3.95 combination lock. As Daniel twirled the dial, Willie coached him. ‘Feel inside the lock through your fingers. As if they were root tips seeking water. Feel for the slightest drag, the friction between molecules. Trust your fingertips. They are closer than your brain, far less busy, and immensely less complicated. You need to open this lock to see yourself, and as Edgar Davis Dodds said, “Freedom resides in being equal to your needs.” But first you must comprehend the difference between necessity and desire.’
Daniel wondered if he merely desired Oriana or actually needed her.
‘Daniel,’ Willie scolded, ‘is that a pretty sunset you’re watching up there on Jupiter?’
Daniel went back to work on the lock.
That night Daniel got some homework – a cheap combination bicycle lock. It was locked. When he returned it the next evening open, he received two locks to take home. Willie promised they’d begin the field-work portion of their study when he could open twenty at home overnight.
Willie scouted the first few jobs, and put Daniel through his paces, from disabling the alarm system to locating and opening the safe. Soon Daniel’s responsibility expanded to include scouting and planning. They made about one field-trip a week, or about as often as his visits to Oriana. Daniel had suggested to Willie early on that he thought working with Oriana twice a week would be doubly helpful. Willie said he was sure it would, but that he couldn’t afford it. Oriana, when Daniel asked if he might see her more often, had claimed that the pleasure center in her brain would fry shut if she saw him more than once a week.
Daniel, with Willie’s guidance, opened twenty-three safes during his apprenticeship. To Daniel’s utter dismay they never stole anything. The rule against theft had been firmly established on his first job, a dentist’s wall-safe in Tiburon.