I’m flying again. And again, I approach the woman on the LifeCycle, this time as I hurtle in the opposite direction.
“Don’t I look awesome in my boyfriend’s ‘Greek Week’ T-shirt?” she asks.
And then she doffs the shirt and casts off her sports bra.
Deploying various aeronautical techniques, including using my arms as rotors and churning them about perpendicular axes, and forcibly exhaling from my mouth for retrothrust, I’m able to decelerate from a velocity of about Mach 2 to a complete standstill.
I’m hovering now, and watching her breasts undulate in rhythm with her strenuous pedaling.
We are enveloped in a thick cumulus cloud.
And when we emerge, she is holding my stiff penis in her hand. I’ve lost the power of flight, and I am dangling by my erection from her grip, some 36,000 feet above the ground. It’s not painful, as one might expect, but there’s definitely a significant amount of strain. But it’s a very pleasurable strain. And I know that if she lets go of me, I’ll fall out of the sky. But I feel very peaceful. Very dreamy. There we are, suspended in the perfectly empty azure void, which is absolutely quiet except for the sound of her pedaling and the occasional electronic chirp (she’s doing a “hill program” on her LifeCycle, and whenever she completes a “hill,” the display panel emits a short little beep).
And I want to ejaculate, but I know that if I do, I’ll become flaccid and shrink, and there won’t be enough for her to hold on to, and I’ll fall. And I’m also concerned that if I fall, I’ll hit innocent people on the ground and perhaps kill them.
But then I have another powerful revelation — one that perhaps every male in every species has in his life, and one that might very well mark the passage from boy- to manhood. I realize that at this moment, ejaculating takes precedence over absolutely everything else in the world, including the death of innocent people. I realize that this overwhelming, heedless desire to ejaculate right now so dwarfs any other consideration, including my own death and the death or grievous injury of others, that I’m incapable of resisting it and unwilling to even try. And I succumb. It’s literally a letting go. A release. A surrender. A fall. A fall from grace.
And I begin to plunge again.
This descent is the stuff of nightmares — the terror excruciating, maddening. The acceleration of the free-fall seems to produce an internal decompression; I have the sensation of a vacuum in my hollow organs, cavities, and sinuses. Adrenaline spews across my nervous system, a gelid effervescence of animal panic.
I shut my eyes and cover them with both my hands.
And then, after what seems like hours and hours of falling, I finally open them …
I’m in the warden’s office.
I’m seated on the couch.
And now I experience a steady return to baseline consciousness. The neon checkerboard patterns and microelectronic overlays, the Paleolithic imagery and blue-green ooze all revert back into familiar aspects of the room. And the keening carrier tone fades to silence.
WARDEN
Pretty intense, huh?
MARK (voice-over)
I checked my watch. From the time we returned from the Contraband Control Room and drank the Gravy to now, only thirty seconds had passed!
Part of me wanted so much to profusely expatiate upon this bewildering, implosive contraction of time; to concoct some erudite correspondence — to propose, for instance, that it was like not only seeing your entire life flash before your eyes in an instant, but like experiencing the entirety of Homo sapiens phylogeny, as narrated by some jabbering Dominican A.M. drive-time merengue DJ, in the time it takes for an air bag to inflate in a 90-mile-an-hour head-on collision (and you’re in, like, one of those little Suzuki Sidekicks and the other vehicle is, like, a fucking Amtrak locomotive); part of me desperately wanted to somehow articulate to her my sense of awe and wonder that, from a warm broth of prebiotic molecules splashed up on Precambrian rocks and baked in the sun some 4 billion years ago, three pounds of deeply fissured neural tissue could evolve — the human brain — capable of apprehending — as evidenced by my own dumbfounding epiphanies (e.g., the karmic and eschatological merits of body-fat composition and LSAT scores, etc.) — not only the most recondite principles of the physical universe, but the origins, structure, procedures and modalities of consciousness itself.
But all I said was …
CLOSE-SHOT of MARK
MARK
It was weird … like a video.
WARDEN
Are you OK?
MARK
I feel kinda … kinda like I’m still … falling.
WARDEN
Post-lapsarian Stress Disorder, n’est-ce pas?
SUBTITLE: Post-lapsarian Stress Disorder, isn’t it?
MARK
Uh … peut-être.
SUBTITLE: Uh … maybe.
WARDEN
Venge-toi, punis-moi d’un odieux amour.
Digne fils du héros qui t’a donné le jour, délivre l’univers d’un monstre qui t’irrite.
SUBTITLE: You were blown into the sky by an exploding cow pie, a mythological gym siren gave you a hand job, and then you experienced a terrifying plunge to earth, yes?
MARK
Madame, pardonnez. J’avoue, en rougissant,
Que j’accusais à tort un discours innocent.
Ma honte ne peut plus soutenir vontre vue.
SUBTITLE: Yeah … pretty much. Whatever.
WARDEN gets corkscrew and two wineglasses from cabinet, and sits back down on couch. She arranges an assortment of pills — Fentanyls, Roxanols, and Demerols — on an antique Persian brass tea-glass coaster, opens a bottle of wine, and lights a hollowed-out Phillies blunt filled with marijuana.
She takes a long hit and passes the blunt to MARK.
WARDEN
Glass of wine? It’ll help cushion the fall.
MARK
(Exhaling thick plume of smoke)
Uh … sure. What is it?
WARDEN
It’s a white Burgundy — a ’73 Meursault-Charmes from the Domaine Roulot.
She pours, and then raises her glass in the air.
WARDEN
To Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo.
MARK
To Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo — without whose wise, generous, and indefatigable support, the screenwriting aspirations of seventh, eighth, and ninth graders at Maplewood Junior High School might well go unfulfilled. We thank you from the bottoms of our hearts and will never forget your unswerving commitment to this venerable art form.
They click glasses and sip.
MARK grimaces and spews wine back into his glass.
MARK
(indignant)
It’s hot! Shouldn’t a white Burgundy be served chilled?
WARDEN
Oh, it’s still warm? I’m sorry about that. We just pulled it from a convict less than an hour ago, and I never had a chance to get it in the fridge.
MARK takes bottle and reads affixed Contraband Control label.
INSERT SHOT of labeclass="underline"
Contraband Control Number: 56113
Confiscation: 5/21/96, 1630 hours
Inmate 77-64-0835
Body Cavity/Rectal