I don’t think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you consider other people’s lives, makes you more polite to those you deal with in passing, dampens irony and cynicism. The interior of the Fold is, of course, the place of ultimate loneliness, and I like it there. But there are times when the wish for others’ voices, for friendliness returned, reaches unpleasant levels, and becomes a kind of immobilizing pain. That was how it felt as I finished packing up the box of sex machines. I used a “tape gun” to tape it back up, just like the pros at Mailboxes USA. A tape gun is a triggerless machine with a handle that enables you to dispense tape from thick rolls one-handed. It has a set of sharp metal teeth that cut the tape at will, like the row running along a box of plastic wrap that can hurt your finger if you rummage overhastily in a drawer, but its whole function stands in swords-into-plowshares opposition to the gun — it is meant to seal, to mend, to hold together, rather than to injure and rend. I bought it at an office-supply store as a reward after an awful week working for the Department of Social Services typing Social Security numbers in boxes that were not spaced to fit either of the type sizes of the typewriter. Now, in my moment of despair, taping up the carton of sex toys, I lifted this nicely balanced tape gun and held it to my temple, and investigated my wish to die — and in doing so I immediately realized how laughably far I was from actual suicide, and how good, happy, lucky, fundamentally, my life was. The idea of trying to commit suicide over a box of vibrating dildos with a tape gun held at my temple struck me as almost comic. It got me over the hump of Joyce-loneliness. I decided that what I really needed to do was go to the library and get out some more autobiographies and read them, so that I would have a better idea of how to write this one properly. Before I left, I cut open the carton that I had just sealed up with tape and took out one of the vibrating dildos (not the Pleasure Pallas, a medium-sized Japanese-made one in the shape of Athena holding an oddly flamed torch of wisdom in her hands, the torch being in fact a pliant clitoris-stimulating projection; but rather the Monasticon, which was a large twisting Capuchin monk holding a clit-nuzzling open manuscript), and put it in my briefcase. I brushed my teeth. Then I reconsidered, and put the hot-pink vibrating Butterfly in my briefcase as well. It would be a waste of life’s possibilities to send them dolefully back, I thought, just because I might never use them with Joyce. Much more sensible to distribute them free at the library.
I was luckier than usual in finding the books I wanted. Maurice Baring’s autobiography, The Puppet Show of Memory, was on the shelf, as was George Santayana’s Persons and Places, The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, and Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull-House. I sat down at a large table and looked my books over. The particular library table I had chosen with some care, of course: it had one other resident — a petite woman in her late thirties with curly salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a short-sleeved top and earrings made of cloudy yellow glass. She was looking through several piles of microfilm copies, sorting them and circling paragraphs every so often. She spun her pen gently, silently, on the table as she read, as if it were a spinner in a child’s game. Her eyes moved with impressive speed over the chemical-smelling legal-sized pages, but she looked tired from spending hours gazing at the gray light of one of the library’s horrible microfilm readers, contending with the trembling magnified crotch hairs and scratches on its screen. I stopped time to find out what she had been microfilming: it turned out to be copies of Harper’s Bazaar from the late forties. I didn’t touch her. I wanted only to arouse her — or not even to arouse her, but simply to be a subliminal part of her life. I wanted her to become vaguely aroused, without knowing I was the source of her arousal.
She needed, it seemed to me, to see, or sense, my Moving Psi Squares. I had in my briefcase three rarely opened envelopes. One held many one-inch squares of construction paper, some black, some pink. The second held one-inch squares I had cut out of fashion magazines and Garnet Hill catalogs, just faces: beautiful, interesting, exotic, or otherwise noteworthy women’s and men’s faces. The third envelope held squares I had cut out of a flyer I had gotten in the mail from a place called Elmwood Distributors, a somewhat low-end distributor of porn films, most of which were compilations, or “revues,” of surprising specificity, with titles such as Double Hand-Job Revue, Brunette Lactating Hermaphrodite Blowjob Revue, and Big Uncut Dick Facial Cumshot Revue. Each film was illustrated by a single one-inch-square still, some of which I had cut out. Now I arranged many of these squares randomly in a rectangle around the microfilm page that the woman was gazing at, took my seat, lifted my book, and snapped time on for a fraction of a second and then off again: snap snap. Then I went over to her and displaced each square in a counterclockwise direction, again took my seat, again snapped time on and immediately off. I did this repeatedly, dozens and dozens of times, wanting to offer her a pulsing marquee of images on the periphery of her vision as she read her forties Harper’s Bazaars. I must say, the work was tedious in the extreme — whenever I do my Moving Psi Squares I feel new respect for the most primitive of Sesame Street animated shorts, and I’m awed by Hanna-Barbera. (Sometimes, when I have less energy, I employ just one square, a face-square or a porn-square, something that I think, judging by the way the woman looks, might interest her, flashing it for an instant every minute or so in a different position on the open page of the book she is reading.) In the present case, the woman with the cloudy yellow earrings sighed and lowered her head for a moment. I stopped time and removed all the squares and put them away, then switched time on. She yawned, throwing her head back with her hands held behind her neck; then she pressed her thumb hard between her eyebrows. She thought she had been working too hard, seeing things — and in fact she had been seeing things: she had been seeing the little sexsquares that I was strobing into her life. I sensed her glance at me for a moment. I didn’t look up: I was paging in a leisurely, preoccupied way through Maurice Baring’s account of his years in Sweden. The woman yawned again and gathered her things. I had no idea what she was thinking. She walked over to the trash can beside one of the other tables. Just before she threw out some of the Bazaar pages, I stopped time and put my Monasticon vibrator on the top of the trash, where she might spot it peeping out of a paper bag. She did see it: she lifted the bag and peered inside, looked to her right and to her left, checked the contents of the bag once more. What on earth, she was wondering, was a brand-new, mint-in-box, sealed-in-plastic vibrating dildo representing a Capuchin monk and his clit-fondling manuscript doing in the trash of the Boston Public Library? She stood there for a second or two, pondering what to do, frowning, and then the bagged vibrator went quietly into her Boston University book bag. She walked toward the exit. I blew a kiss at her back. Good luck to her.