“What’s wrong?” Rhody said, as soon as I clipped time on.
“Nothing,” said the divorced man. He tried to pretend to be fucking her with abandon, but he was almost completely limp by now.
“Something’s wrong,” said Rhody. “What’s wrong?”
“I had the strangest hallucination,” he said. “I thought I was tied up against a board, looking up at the skis in the ceiling of the garage. Beyond weird. Sorry, baby.”
Rhody comforted him. Lying on the bed with his hands doing unpleasant things with his own chest hair, he began describing the “incredibly vivid” out-of-body experience he had just had of being tied up, staring at the skis. Eventually the two of them tiptoed giggling off to the laundry room to find some rope and the ski boots. I left soon after.
Another person I asked, a guy who worked for Boston University, said that, given time-perverter powers, he would wander through women’s locker rooms for a while; then he said, after much hemming and hawing, that he would “probably want to see people I knew.” This was after I had described a hypothetical scene in which someone is watching a rented copy of Metropolitan on his VCR and he really loves it, but he needs to piss extremely bad, and he points the remote at the machine and hits PAUSE, but finds that instead of pausing Metropolitan, Metropolitan continues and the entire rest of the world is in a freeze-frame — so that the remote-owner has however long it will take for the movie to finish playing to run outside into the suspension and pry and peep to his heart’s content. As I mentioned earlier, I have never had any success with remote-control keypads, which is exactly why I used a remote PAUSE button in the scene I offered him — it felt far enough removed from things I had actually done. I asked one or two women as well, and one of them said she would be eager to see her friends having sex. “I’d probably be grossed out, but I’d want to see it anyway.” I felt a little sad that I didn’t have this temptation in common with my respondents.
One other woman, a paralegal at a small firm in a building with a statue of Edward Coke in front, gave me a long and interesting answer to my question one evening, when we were working late assembling the documents in a huge real estate sale-and-leaseback agreement. Her name was Arlette. We walked around and around a conference table, piling one copy of some ancillary agreement on top of another in a soothing rhythm, and eventually I asked her for her thoughts on what she would do with a PAUSE button that stopped life rather than videotapes. Let me try to record what she said exactly — I took a few notes at the time. “Well,” she said, “I think first I would just sit and think for a while and try to comprehend the fact that I was the only person around who was able to move. Then I’d plan out the little revengeful things I could do. I’d bring it to work, definitely. I could put some of those Dennison colored dots on Stephen Milrose’s evil face, one by one. While he is sitting there at Tuesday Conference, making his nasty little comments, shooting everyone down, ridiculing people for no reason, I’d pick a word, some harmless word that he says a lot, like for instance ‘backside.’ Every time he said that some deal or some client was going to ‘turn around and bite us in the backside,’ I’d hit the PAUSE button and stick a yellow dot on his face. I would love to do that! They would add up, too! That would give me enormous satisfaction, to see his face fill up with a rash of dots. Nobody would say anything, but he’d be covered. He loves to say, Time out, time out.’ I’d be merciless — every time he said, Time out,’ making that T with his hands, I’d time-out for real and stick a little green dot on his face. It would be such a screech to see his evil little face get totally covered with yellow and green dots. So that kind of thing is number one — performing little pranks like that on the top two or three true assholes on this floor. I’d have to get that out of my system. But then I would have to think, I’d have to think …”
I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want to prejudice her response in any direction.
“Well,” she said finally, with some decision, “what I think of is going over to Mark Thalmeiser and chitchatting with him about something or other, and while he’s looking at me and blinking innocently, I’d pause him right in the middle of one of his blinks and stand over him and take out my boobs and sort of fluff them in his eyes. First I’d take a big powder puff and get them all powdered up, and then I’d fluff my nipples in his eyes. That would be fun.”
“Would that be classed as an act of revenge, or an act resulting from sexual attraction?” I asked her.
“Both. Mark is sex on wheels, in a way. His wife is sex on wheels, too.” She looked at me significantly.
“Yes?” I said, stretching the word out.
“Yes. I don’t really like Mark, I like Mark’s wife. Well — I like them both. She has the best mouth. It’s sort of like Leslie Caron’s mouth. No — here’s what I would do if I had a remote that freezes the world. I’d be in a florist’s shop, and Kari Thalmeiser would come in to get some cut flowers. She dresses beautifully, in an expensive loungey way — yellow pants and that kind of thing — but she pulls it off. She would lean into the flower-cooler to smell a bunch of flowers, cold flowers, and I would pause her as she’s smiling, with her eyes closed, breathing in the scent of some really filthy-looking flower. Or no, better yet, some bunch of nice simple pretty flowers, like carnations. Whatever the flower is, I move it aside after hitting the remote, because it’s my turn, Kari Thalmeiser, and I adjust the wire shelf on the cooler so that it’s just below her chin, and I like climb up on it, get up on my heels, and spread my big solid mega-thighs wide open for her, so she’s half an inch from this giant, sopping, sloppy, juicy, dripping flowerbox of mine. I can feel that I’m dripping all over the blossoms that are in the vases on the floor of the cooler. The metal is cold on my ass. I see her mouth, that Leslie Caron mouth, smiling at the smell of the flowers, her eyes closed, and that makes me jill at myself really fast. When I’m just about to flip and I can’t stop myself, I hold the back of her head and I jam her face into my juice-box and I hit the remote so that time flashes on for her for just a half a second. Too quick for her to know. As I start coming I’m merciful and I pause her again and I just come and come and come against her beautiful lips — and even against her nose, her nose would be just right for my clit. Yeah, I’d hold her earlobes and pull her face into me until I’d humped every little come-kick out of my hips, and then I’d climb out of the cooler and put everything back where it was, all the nice pretty carnations and baby’s breath and shit, and I’d carefully dab at her pretty face with some floral tissue, because we wouldn’t want pretty Kari to look like she’d been eating a watermelon. I’d spend a couple of minutes fixing her lipstick. Then I’d start things up again and I’d go, ‘Wull, Kari Thalmeiser, how are you!’ ”