I got dressed, got back in line, flipped on the universe, and checked out my books, looking at my watch to make the checker-outer hurry. Outside, I spotted the woman at the corner of Boylston and Dartmouth, where she was waiting to cross the street. I loitered, hoping that she would go down the steps to the T, which, lucky for me, she did. I was observing her in the shadows; nobody could see me and so nobody would notice if I suddenly disappeared from where I was standing. I stopped time and caught up with the woman. Her name, I found, hastily looking through her purse, was Andrea Apuleo, a perfectly reasonable name, though like all names something of a surprise for the first few minutes if you have had the opportunity to develop an idea of the person in advance. She lived in Chestnut Hill. I hopped down the stairs ahead of her and took a seat on a bench on the platform, so that when I got on the same train as she did she wouldn’t have any suspicion that I had been following her. (I was pretty sure that she hadn’t gotten a good look at me in the library.) When a C train finally showed up, ten minutes later, she took one of the forward-oriented seats and I took one facing sideways. I had been worried about Andrea’s bodysuit, thinking I might have to take it off or slide it to the side, but when I began putting the Butterfly on her in the Fold I found that it worked beautifully to hug the device tight against her inner drapery. It could be set very low and yet she would feel something. I shook the battery case to awaken it within the Fold and turned the dial and brought it down to the barest hint of vibration — and then I thought better of it: the first time I turned time on in this sequence, she should just have the device strapped on, unvibrating, so that her body would get used to its presence. Over a series of six or seven time-perversions I gradually increased its flutter-level. Pretending to read, I watched her. At a certain point, she made a peculiar expression that was clearly pleasure and covertly reached down to feel between her legs to find out what was going on (nobody was sitting next to her): just before she would have felt the shape of the alien Butterfly with her hand, I stopped time and removed it. Satisfied that there was nothing there, Andrea sat back, and when I had reinstalled the machine and gradually accelerated its vibration with the thumb dial, as the train accelerated between Copley and Kenmore, she let herself feel good, her hands resting on the back of the seat in front of her, her head resting on the black glass of the window. She wanted to look as if she were having a long and complicated train of memories of something faintly sad and peaceful in the distant past, as if her thinking were accompanied by a soundtrack of Gregorian chant, but I could read through her veneer of inner peace to the sexual fizz that was definitely there. Very slowly her lips parted and her mouth opened, or almost opened: her lips were only in contact in the very middle, where there was a fuller part. By this time I had abandoned my book, unable to keep from looking directly at her. The train rhythm sounded like appetitive, appetitive, appetitive, appetitive. In a book called Love Cycles, about hormonal rhythms, parts of which I have read with great interest, Winnifred B. Cutler (Ph.D.) cites a study by Sullivan and Brender in a 1986 issue of Psychophysiology in which women were shown “sexually stimulating videotapes” while their faces were wired with electromyographic sensors. Consistently their zygomatic muscles (one of the several sets of smile muscles) contracted subtly as they watched the tapes, an effect which the researchers took as an indirect marker of arousal, like pupil dilation. Since reading around in this book (and I must point out in passing that Dr. Winnifred Cutler is photographed with a very slight Mona Lisa-esque zygomatic smile in her jacket photo, and that, according to the flap, the book’s publication date was October, the month, says Dr. Cutler, that male hormones reach their highest levels), I had been on the lookout for these secret zygosmiles, and had not noticed many — but I think that between Copley and Kenmore Andrea Apuleo was offering the world a stunning example of one right in the T.
Just as I resumed time after turning the Butterfly up almost to full, she noticed me looking at her, and our eyes caught and laser-locked; I tried to tell her with my look that I understood how good it felt, though she was doing a tremendous job of suppressing it, and that I was the only one in the train who could see what she was going through, and that I was very moved to be able to witness it and would make no sign to anyone else of what she was letting me see. I nodded, closing my eyes, and looked at her again: giving the nod to her approaching clasm. She looked away, up at the ads for temporary agencies over the windows, and then she looked back at me, and I watched her put her lower teeth over her upper teeth, her eyes getting bigger and browner and fuller — and (I am almost sure) she came. Then she took a deep breath and gathered her hair in an O made of her forefinger and released it and reached down again tentatively to her legs, so that I had to fermate quickly and remove the Butterfly from her and wipe it off (using several Wet Ones) and put it back in the case so that it looked unused. I put it in a blank manila envelope. Time rolling, I smiled at her again, in a wowed, foolish sort of way, and she smiled uncertainly back, not quite sure how to explain to herself what had just happened. At the Chestnut Hill stop she stood and passed where I was sitting. I said, “Excuse me?” and handed her the vibrating Butterfly in its envelope and then touched my fingers to my lips. I didn’t get off at that stop because I didn’t want to unnerve her or seem threatening; I reached home an hour later feeling that, in making gifts of two of my sex toys, I had turned the day around.
6
I HAVE WRITTEN ALMOST ALL BUT THE BEGINNING CHUNK OF this autobiographical work not sunk in the Fold but moving forward in “real time” (a term that Rhody, my ex-girlfriend, hated, though, let me tell you, substitutes are hard to come by), over two weeks of evenings, sitting at my desk in my room, smelling the smell of burning dust given off by my high-intensity lamp. I thought when I began this recital that I would write every word of it in the Fold, but, like most of the extreme ideas that I find so exciting when I first have them, I have had to abandon it in the execution. Writing is solitary enough (especially the way I’m writing now, which is with a set of earbuds in, listening to music, and thus existing unaccompanied in the very middle of a vast artificial stereophonic space, like one of those tiny figures, each accompanied by its perfunctory shadow, in a Le Corbusier drawing of an urban landscape) without intensifying the sense of solitude by stopping time. Also, the radio stations don’t broadcast when the universe is stopped. And furthermore, writing takes a great deal of time. A paragraph can take an hour! I’ve already noted that I have spent close to two years in the Fold: which makes me really thirty-seven, not thirty-five, if you measure my age by my internal cellular time. Were I to add to that secret aging all the time I will ultimately spend writing this book, I might begin, would probably begin, to look noticeably older than my birth certificate says I am, and I have no interest in inverted remakes of Dorian Gray.
Reading over what I’ve put down so far makes me conscious of many imbalances and omissions, but there isn’t too much I can do about them. I do, though, want to point out sooner rather than later that my sexual life has not been entirely made up of the sorts of Fermating activities I just described at the library. Rhody and I had good, friendly sex (though I tended to talk too much throughout, perhaps), real-time sex, and we were together for long enough, a little over sixteen months, that we were able to marvel at how many incremental variations a couple could come up with — variations so minor that they couldn’t really be codified. It wasn’t a question of distinct “positions” but of — I don’t know — crystals grown in slightly different concentrations of a reagent, or grown in the presence of one or more trace impurities, or grown while subjected to faintly stronger or weaker gravitational fields. And we did even from time to time try new things, in the textbook sexual sense. I cut an unpeeled avocado in half one Sunday, along its poles, and pulled it apart so that one half held the blunt, slimy seed. Though not a devotee of food-sex mixtures as a general rule (not whipped cream, not peanut butter, not champagne), I do think avocado flesh is so extremely similar in its slippery bland softness to the labial rheology that it makes sense for a woman to cup half of one in her hand and press it against herself so that the big nub of the seed noses at her natcho. Rhody seemed to like it, and I was gung-ho, too — but while I was testing out our new guacamole recipe I had the further idea of cutting a small hole in the avocado skin and stuffing Rhody’s electric toothbrush at an angle into the fresh flesh so that the brush head was buried somewhere near the seed. That was how she good-naturedly came, in fact, and came big, holding the humming toothbrush-driven avocado-half between her legs while I played with the wisps of hair at the nape of her neck. I record this here in passing so that I won’t seem, with all of my somewhat aberrant sneaking and skulking in the Cleft, totally devoid of more typical sexual instincts.