“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “I’m really glad. But what took you so fucking long?”
“Could I ask a question too? Which is like how come you aren’t willing to wait patiently when waiting patiently means that something good is about to happen? Isn’t waiting kind of a good thing, and don’t you have a life that has some other stuff in it besides me that you could do while you were waiting?”
“Well, let me ask you if you know the meaning of the words ‘Come right over’? Don’t those words like mean anything to you?”
“Haven’t I heard this speech like fifty fucking times? Can’t you fuck off?”
“Do you want to see what I got or do you want to see what I got?”
“How could I answer a question like that, since I don’t know what you have, so how could I know if I want to see it?”
“What are you talking about? Or are you like such an ape that you can’t even come up with an idea of what you are talking about? Because if you had any idea what you were talking about, wouldn’t you want to see what I’m going to show you, like when I promise that it is totally worth it?”
“Am I supposed to be able to follow your totally obscure type of thinking?”
“I don’t know. Are you?”
“Or am I just supposed to let your incomprehensible whatever wash over me like a fine bottle of fucking champagne?”
“Sound sexy to you? Champagne?”
“I’m figuring you’re figuring how sexy it sounds to you. Am I therefore right?”
To which, in the doorway, she made no audible reply. Vienna took him by the hand, to lead him into the inner sanctum of youth and sexuality.
“Are you,” Vienna said, “like at all informed about the post-technological, post-manufacturing, post-stagflation, mass-merchandised device known as the Pulverizer?”
“The what?”
“The Pulverizer?”
“Do I look like I’d know anything about a Pulverizer?”
“Is it that you’re trying to be like coy or something?” Vienna continued. “Would I be coy about cyborg sexuality? Would I be coy about a device that’s all about turning the tables so that what’s wrong is right, and what was bottom is now top? Would I be coy about how this device is meant to break down the last bits of human, you know, resistance that people have in proto-hominid sex, or whatever, until they are like shattered animal versions of themselves, because it’s wires and microchips and titanium that are able to make human beings into the subhuman animals that they really are? Would I be coy about that? Would I be coy about how I think I’ve never really felt anything, you know, sexually, or whatever, until I saw the Pulverizer being utilized?”
“I mean, can I fucking ask how you got to see it utilized? I mean, should I be a little jealous, because maybe it’s like I fucking don’t want you pulverizing or getting pulverized or witnessing pulverization unless I’m there? And are you somehow retroactively saying something about all our other fucking proto-hominid-type adventures?”
At the top of the stairs now, and beginning to march down the stairs into the fallout shelter that Vienna’s parents had expanded since they bought the place, because they were sure that Islamists or Central Asian despots or the Sino-Indian military agents or narco-traffickers would launch missiles that would wipe out most of the remnants of this nation and its free-trade satellites, just because. And, you know, nobody in Rio Blanco had a real fallout shelter, because they didn’t have basements.
“Haven’t I told you?” Vienna said, as she reached the bottom step.
“Told me what?”
“What?”
“What what?”
“That photographer, like a big international photographer, has been pursuing me, trying to offer me a multimillion-dollar contract to appear in his advertisements that are all about female slavery?”
“This is supposed to be, like, a believable story?”
“I’m not saying it is or it isn’t, but is it enough that you want to hear about the Pulverizer?”
“Well,” Jean-Paul said, “wouldn’t that depend if I were in a state of, I don’t know, arousal or something? Wouldn’t I need to evaluate certain kinds of symptoms, like I could evaluate whether I had an elevated heart rate? Or maybe my blood pressure had risen? And what about blood flow to the region of my fucking genitals? Like wouldn’t there maybe be a tightening of the tissue in my, you know, my scrotal area, or whatnot, perineum, like when I heard you use the word Pulverizer? And wouldn’t that be enough of a telltale sign that what I really wanted, at this point, was to see the Pulverizer, instead of being told some story about how you first saw it with some photographer?”
Interrogatives temporarily expended, Vienna flung off the sheet from the Pulverizer, and he could fucking well see that she had got herself this ridiculously large device that looked more like a butter churner or something, comatose, my brother, and it was affixed to this rolling cart, and it had all these onboard computer monitoring devices, and then there was a butt plug on the end of the thing, and it was just like the Pulverizer was somebody’s old-fashioned juicer, or somebody’s old-fashioned lawn mower, except that now somebody was going to have the lawn mower pound this hilarious piece of silicone into them, and he didn’t know if he was supposed to use it on Vienna fucking Roberts, or if Vienna fucking Roberts was going to use it on him, Jean-Paul Koo. He had his suspicions.
“Is this gas powered? Or electric? If it’s electric, is there some kind of generator? And if there’s a generator, where’s the generator located?”
“I didn’t really read the instructions yet. But I think it’s got a solar panel, as well as AC, and I think it’s all charged up.”
“Do your parents know that you are charging an expensive fucking anal battering ram in their fallout shelter? Like what would happen if the nuclear attack happened today, and the mushroom clouds rose over Phoenix, and we can only fucking hope, and you had to go down into the fallout shelter and spend the rest of your youth waiting for the gamma radiation to fucking die down, and the whole time there would be this silicone butt plug thing in the corner, ramming into stacks of canned goods?”