And just what would other people think of the Fermata? What would they do if they were me? Although I have up to now been able to keep my powers a strict secret, I have gone through periods when I have been eager to get some idea of what others would do in my place. I am superstitious, though, about describing what actually goes on — fearing, even when I put it hypothetically, that if I conjure up the possibility in too complete detail for someone else it will no longer be my secret and hence my temporal competence will leave me forever — so superstitious in fact that I often instead ask about ideas in the neighborhood of my secret, such as what a person would do if he had X-ray vision. What would he look at if he had X-ray vision? I had an interesting talk with a man named Bill Asplundh about this. Bill is one of the few truly fast-typing non-gay temps I have run across — he types much faster than I do. He drifted into temping while working on a master’s in something or other, as I did, and now he genuinely likes it. We were at a Chinese restaurant one time when I asked him what he would look at if he had X-ray vision. He was eating a yellow curry chicken dish. He said that the first thing he would do would be to look through the walls while the cooks were making up their curry powder, since it was extraordinarily good curry powder and he wanted to be able to duplicate it at home. Then he admitted that he would probably use it to look at women. “But what people don’t think about when they talk about X-ray vision,” he then said, suddenly animated, “is two things. First, what you’re talking about is not a blanket sort of X-ray vision, where your sight penetrates through any substance, but a very specific sort of X-ray vision that only goes through clothes. Textile X-ray vision is what we’re talking about. That’s pretty obvious, but perhaps less obviously, think about what you’re going to see when you see a woman who is wearing clothes but you can’t see the clothes she’s wearing. You have this idea that you’re going to see her with no clothes on, that her breasts are going to be there looking the way they would look without a bra on, but remember, she has a bra on, you just can’t see it, so you’re going to see indentations where the seams are, and if it’s a push-up bra, her breasts are going to look all squished out of shape, not the way you imagine them at all. And think if she’s wearing some kind of support pantyhose, and it’s tight — you’re going to see all this squeezing around her rear end and stuff like that. You’re going to see the panty lines there, red lines, but without the panties actually being there.”
I admitted that he had a point, but countered that the sight of breasts in a bra, without the bra visible, might be kind of wonderfuclass="underline" if you could see her breasts moving as they would move in a bra and yet the bra was out of the picture it might be a totally novel kind of semi-constrained motion — not even the kind of motion you would expect in zero-gravity environments, because the undersides of the breasts would be held relatively firmly, within the limits of the give and take of that particular bra, but the top would shake a little more where it wasn’t being held. Maybe the sight of breasts in invisible bras would be incredible. But he was probably right, I conceded, the nipples would probably have that flattened quality of faces pressed against panes of glass; and what makes the sight of kids squishing their faces against glass comic is that it takes away their “faceness” and substitutes a sort of monstrous nostrilly planar expression. It would be strange to see the shape of the bra outlined in indented plump back-skin. There might be some interest, we agreed, in seeing extremely saggy breasts hoisted up in an invisible bra, since the idea of sag is very stimulating, as is the notion of hoisting.
But, though it interested me, what Bill had to say about X-ray vision didn’t really bear on the Fold, so I went ahead and described to him the possibility of halting the universe and remaining mobile oneself, as if the idea had just occurred to me for the first time. What would he do if he had some machine that could switch everything off and he was here in this restaurant? Bill answered without hesitation that the first thing he would do is go back to the kitchen and try to find and copy the curry-powder recipe. His voice went low and he said that he might even take a little curry powder, if there was a lot of it, home with him, looking awed at his own wish to thieve. “Okay,” I told him, “but after you had all the curry you knew what to do with, then what? What would you do vis-à-vis that woman over there?” I indicated a blond woman in black whom he had noticed with approval earlier. “Would you go over there and check out her tits, or what?”
“Possibly,” he said. He asked me a few more questions about how quickly he would be able to switch time on and off. Then he said, “No, what I would probably do is hide out so that I could watch couples I knew. I’d be very curious to see that.” His idea surprised me, since I have almost no active interest in seeing couples I know have sex, or seeing couples at all. I have of course seen it from time to time, but only in pursuit of other sights or experiences. After Rhody broke up with me, in part over the very issue of time-perversion, she started going out with an older divorced man, and I did hide out behind the tired gold wing chair in her bedroom and watch them have sex once or twice (well, six times) — and the last time in fact I did a very very wrong thing. Rhody was on her knees, with her ass way up in the air, licking and biting the pillowcase of the pillow she held, which was our favorite way for a while, and I felt violated and hurt that she would be doing this now with him, with this divorced consultant who looked like the “before” sketch in a NordicTrack ad, so I stopped time with my fingernail clipper (each time I snipped a fingernail, time toggled) and pulled the guy off her and out of her and hauled him to the garage, where I tied him securely to a piece of plywood; then I stationed myself in exactly the same position that he had been in, with my cock inside Rhody, and clipped time on, and was pleased to hear her surprised change of tone: “Oh yeah! Wow! That’s good! Like that!” I pulled out and let my cock rest against her tailbone and pressed down on it with the heel of my hand, which was something we used to do a lot that she liked, because when I shot she liked to feel the come-tangents reach up her back. I could sense her immediate surprise as I did this—Could it be? — and just before she looked back to see if it was really me, I stopped everything and got the divorced guy out of the garage and put him back where he had been and stuffed what was left of his erection back in.