Kenny tapped the pen on the surface of his desk for the seventeen thousand, four hundred and thirty-sixth time.
There was nothing the matter with him. It wasn’t like it was an obsession or anything. It wasn’t like he didn’t do anything else. Since his sixth-grade teacher had first introduced the idea to him twenty years ago, he’d done all the normal things — he’d graduated from high school, he’d graduated from college, he’d met Tiffany, fallen in love, married, fathered two children, and found himself a perfectly respectable job with a perfectly respectable firm. There was nothing unusual about Kenny except his little hobby. And that’s all it was — a hobby, he didn’t bother anybody with it. In fact, nobody knew he did it, not even Tiffany. It was just a hobby, an interest, an experiment that nobody else had ever had the patience to see through.
Mr Neill had only tapped his pen five times, for example.
“So it’s theoretically possible,” Mr Neill had said, sounding almost as bored as the fifty twelve-year-olds who were doing their best to pretend to listen to him, “that, if you kept tapping this pen on this desk long enough, one time it would just slip through the surface.”
He’d been giving the class a glimpse of the New Physics, a taste of the theories that were revolutionising the way scientists looked at the world, a hint that the matter that made up the forms of this world which everyone accepted as solid and separate was in fact all one and that only probability kept everything as it was and kept our reality apart from a multiverse of others.
Kenny hadn’t been particularly interested in the theoretical and metaphysical implications of what Mr Neill was saying. He was twelve years old, for Christ’s sake. He’d just thought it would be really fucking cool to see a pen slip through a desk and had been disappointed when, after his fifth tap, Mr Neill had put his pen down and moved on to something else.
Quietly, and without drawing anybody’s attention, Kenny had started tapping his pen. And counting.
Seventeen thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven. Seventeen thousand, four hundred and thirty-eight.
It wasn’t the same desk, of course, it was the sixth desk since he’d started. But it was the same pen (dry now of ink, chewed up and useless for anything but its secret purpose), and that had to count for something.
The phone rang. Kenny picked it up, dealt with the call, hung up. He laid the pen down throughout the call and it didn’t bother him at all. After all, he wasn’t crazy. Life had to be lived. Work had to be done. His experiment required patience and tenacity, and Kenny prided himself on possessing plenty of both.
Seventeen thousand, four hundred and thirty-nine. Seventeen thousand, four hundred and forty. Seventeen thousand, four hundred and.
The pen slid effortlessly and smoothly into the desk.
Kenny, letting go instinctively, threw himself back in his chair, an adrenal shock of surprised fulfillment shooting through his entire body. He looked up, ready to shout his triumph to the rest of the large open-plan office.
But the office wasn’t there.
Kenny was staring at a kaleidoscope world of shifting, flickering lights, a surfaceless void with an unimaginably distant vanishing point near which huge amorphous shapes twisted and writhed in a constant fury of becoming. Lightning in colours he couldn’t name seared across the infinite and multi-hued sky in jagged shards the size of which he couldn’t conceive. Alien winds screamed their impossible being in warring cacophonies of notes he couldn’t believe at volumes he couldn’t bear.
Had he still had hands, Kenny would have grabbed at his chair (had there still been a chair). Had he still had a mouth, Kenny would have screamed. Had he still had eyes, Kenny would have closed them.
Had he still had his pen, Kenny would have started tapping.
Kathe Koja
Bondage
Kathe Koja lives in the Detroit area with her husband, artist Rick Lieder, and her son. Her Bram Stoker Award-winning debut novel, The Cipher, appeared in 1991, since when she has published Bad Brains, Skin, Strange Angels and Famished, plus the short story collection Extremities.
Her short fiction (including several collaborations with Barry N. Malzberg) has appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Dark Voices 3, 5 and 6, Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2, A Whisper of Blood, Little Deaths, The Year’s Best Horror Stories and Best New Horror 3 and 5.
According to the author, “My own sense is that ‘Bondage’ is as close to a pure morality play as anything I’ve done.”
She was shaped like sculpture: high bones, high forehead, long fingers silver-cool against his skin as they lay side by side in the deep four-poster, princess-bed draped in lace and gauze and “Don’t ever buy me a ring,” she said; those fingers on his belly, up and down, up and down, tickling in his navel, playing with his balls. “I don’t like them.”
Even her voice, as calm and sure as metal. “Why not?” he said.
“They’re just — ” Fingertips, nipping at his thighs. “They’re bondage gear.”
“Bondage, sure. Like a wedding band, right?”
And her shrug, half a smile, one-elbow rise to reach for her drink: that long white back, faint skeleton trail of bones and “What do you know about bondage?” her smile wider now, canine flash. “B & D, S & M. You ever do that, any of that?”
Have you? “No,” he said. “I’m not into pain.”
“It’s not about pain,” she said, “or anyway it doesn’t have to be. Bondage and discipline,” tapping his chest for emphasis. “Who’s on top.” She drank what was left in the glass, set it back on the floor, climbed atop him so her breasts were inches from his mouth. “Like now,” she said.
Her taste of perfume, of faintest salt: long legs hooked high above his hips, strong and growing stronger, wilder as she rode him, head straining back, back, as if she would twist that long white body into a circle, bend it like sculpture, like metal and stone and when he came it was too soon, fast and over and she was looking at him and almost smiling, lips spread to show those little pointed teeth.
“Not so bad, was it?” she said. “Woman superior?”
“But that’s not the same thing,” he said, still breathless. “Not the same thing at all.”
Next day’s dinner, some Tex-Mex place she loved: plastic cacti, the waiters in ten-gallon hats and reaching for her bag beneath the table, reaching and: a box, gift box embossed black-on-black, SECRET PLEASURES and “Here,” she said with half a smile. “For you.”
“What’s this for?” he said.
“No reason. - Go on, open it,” and he did, something soft and limp inside and, curious, he unfolded that softness, spread it flat on the table between them: supple white leather oval, no true eyes, gill-slit where the mouth should be and “Pretty cool, isn’t it?” she said. Tangle of black strings, one black grommet on each side, simple as desire itself. “Do you like it?”
“Where’d you get this?” The box in hand again, examination and “From a sex store,” she said, “downtown. Thumb cuffs and cock rings, nipple clamps. Piercing jewelry.” Touching the mask. “And these.”
And a server there to refill their water glasses, frank stare at the mask on the table: “What’s that?” Eighteen, nineteen years old, faint drift of acne across his forehead beneath the ludicrous hat. “For Halloween?”
“No,” she said before he could speak, “no, it’s for sex. A sex toy,” and the boy laughed a little, hasty to fill the glasses and be gone and “Why’d you have to say that?” he said, annoyed. At the work station see the boy with another server, their tandem turn to stare and she laughed, reached to take the mask and place it back inside the box.