The Fermata

6

I HAVE WRITTEN ALMOST ALL BUT THE BEGINNING CHUNK OF this autobiographical work not sunk in the Fold but moving forward in “real time” (a term that Rhody, my ex-girlfriend, hated, though, let me tell you, substitutes are hard to come by), over two weeks of evenings, sitting at my desk in my room, smelling the smell of burning dust given off by my high-intensity lamp. I thought when I began this recital that I would write every word of it in the Fold, but, like most of the extreme ideas that I find so exciting when I first have them, I have had to abandon it in the execution. Writing is solitary enough (especially the way I’m writing now, which is with a set of earbuds in, listening to music, and thus existing unaccompanied in the very middle of a vast artificial stereophonic space, like one of those tiny figures, each accompanied by its perfunctory shadow, in a Le Corbusier drawing of an urban landscape) without intensifying the sense of solitude by stopping time. Also, the radio stations don’t broadcast when the universe is stopped. And furthermore, writing takes a great deal of time. A paragraph can take an hour! I’ve already noted that I have spent close to two years in the Fold: which makes me really thirty-seven, not thirty-five, if you measure my age by my internal cellular time. Were I to add to that secret aging all the time I will ultimately spend writing this book, I might begin, would probably begin, to look noticeably older than my birth certificate says I am, and I have no interest in inverted remakes of Dorian Gray.

Reading over what I’ve put down so far makes me conscious of many imbalances and omissions, but there isn’t too much I can do about them. I do, though, want to point out sooner rather than later that my sexual life has not been entirely made up of the sorts of Fermating activities I just described at the library. Rhody and I had good, friendly sex (though I tended to talk too much throughout, perhaps), real-time sex, and we were together for long enough, a little over sixteen months, that we were able to marvel at how many incremental variations a couple could come up with — variations so minor that they couldn’t really be codified. It wasn’t a question of distinct “positions” but of — I don’t know — crystals grown in slightly different concentrations of a reagent, or grown in the presence of one or more trace impurities, or grown while subjected to faintly stronger or weaker gravitational fields. And we did even from time to time try new things, in the textbook sexual sense. I cut an unpeeled avocado in half one Sunday, along its poles, and pulled it apart so that one half held the blunt, slimy seed. Though not a devotee of food-sex mixtures as a general rule (not whipped cream, not peanut butter, not champagne), I do think avocado flesh is so extremely similar in its slippery bland softness to the labial rheology that it makes sense for a woman to cup half of one in her hand and press it against herself so that the big nub of the seed noses at her natcho. Rhody seemed to like it, and I was gung-ho, too — but while I was testing out our new guacamole recipe I had the further idea of cutting a small hole in the avocado skin and stuffing Rhody’s electric toothbrush at an angle into the fresh flesh so that the brush head was buried somewhere near the seed. That was how she good-naturedly came, in fact, and came big, holding the humming toothbrush-driven avocado-half between her legs while I played with the wisps of hair at the nape of her neck. I record this here in passing so that I won’t seem, with all of my somewhat aberrant sneaking and skulking in the Cleft, totally devoid of more typical sexual instincts.

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 wonderful: 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.

“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!’ ”

“Interesting!” I said, enjoying Arlette’s filth. “Couldn’t you spread those thighmasters for me? Show me that big fat Georgia O’Keeffe?”

“Never,” said Arlette. We laughed because it was so obvious an impossibility. Neither of us wanted the other, but we did want to get close to what we really wanted by talking about it. I pushed my glasses up on my nose Clark Kentishly, forgetting that I was in a period where pushing my glasses up actually did trigger a time-stopping Drop. Out of curiosity, realizing I’d triggered a Drop, I slipped my hands under immobile Arlette’s skirt to see if talking about Kari Thalmeiser had made her detectably wet. It had not. Her idea was to her at that moment no more than a verbal flourish, a rhetorical bit of self-display — her exuberant pleasure was in being cheerfully shocking as much as it was in really feeling the sexual charge of her flowershop-idyll. But I had the strong suspicion that there would be a residual effect — that when she got home from work she would think again about Kari and the flower-cooler and, without the distraction of my being there as an audience, would allow herself to become worked up by it, and I found that I wanted very much to see that happen.

So I followed her home, pushing up on my glasses when it was necessary, as when I slipped past her as she was frozen in the act of opening her door. Standing silently in out-of-sight corners and closets, I watched her take off her work clothes and sit at her kitchen table in her sweats eating a bowl of rice with soy sauce while she watched the news. When she had finished her rice, she began tugging and twirling her pubic hair. She tapped her middle finger to her opening and smelled it. And then she went to the bedroom. It was almost dark by then. She had a solidly sexy field-hockey-playing sort of body. No snake tattoos anywhere; no pierced body-parts. She made herself come twice, first with her fingers, wrongways around in the bed with her feet on the wall, one fingernail tickling the frustum of her ass, and the second time with her Hitachi vibrator — and the second time her eyes were closed in bliss and her left arm was thrown sideways on the bed, so that her hand, palm up, was out in midair, looking as if it wanted something to hold. I pushed up my glasses, stopping events in progress, and emerged from the shadows of the open closet and knelt so that my big silent dim-witted dick hung near this upturned palm. I wanted to close my hands around her hand, around my dick. It was as if her description of what she would impermissibly do with Kari Thalmeiser made it okay for me to give her a handful of myself unasked, though of course I knew that it really didn’t. There is nothing so sexy as seeing a solid young dyke coming with her legs bent in a diamond shape, feet together, and one of those Hitachi camping flashlights, those Hitachi huge-eyed deep-sea exotic fishes, doing its blunt tireless thing in her Marianas Trench. I risked being seen, emboldened by how loud the vibrator was, timing my mastur-strokes to the shaking of her knees and the somewhat Zen-like whooshing of her breathing, and when she began to come for the second time I did in fact stop time for an instant and laid my dick in her palm and closed my fist around her fist, and squeezed on it so tightly my knuckles turned yellow, sliding within my skin in and out of her grip. As the inexorability of my clasm began I pulled down on my glasses so that she and I were living coterminously, and as she came I released one-liners of sperm up her forearm and then squeezed the last semi-painful droplets of my orgasm out on her curled fingers. I let her just begin to register the fact of my cooling slime on her arm after she finished coming herself before I stopped time and toweled her off and left. The next day she looked at me oddly — she said, “Were you …?” and “Did you …?” and then stopped. I said, “Was I what?” smiling innocently. She didn’t pursue it.

Now that I have recorded it here, it seems to me that Arlette’s flowershop story and my behavior in her apartment afterward may mark the end of one phase of my Fold-life and the beginning of another. I was always, or almost always, quite careful, even painstaking, in my sexual adventures in the Fold up until then, but Arlette’s recklessness liberated me, at least to a degree. I still revere the word “painstaking,” as I always have — I pronounce it and think of it as if it were divisible into “pain” and “staking,” because the “staking” contributes a tweezery sort of push-pinned delicacy to the connotation and is in its pointedness the secret reason for the word’s success, even though technically it merely means taking pains, or exerting oneself. But sometimes when I’m recording detailed notes as I remove a woman’s clothes (“left bra strap fallen” or “panties inside out and worked partway into asscrack”) so that I will be sure to replace everything perfectly, just as it was, I feel a gurgle of Arlette’s joyful who-gives-a-fuckness working in me, and I want to strip the entire city of Boston and mound all the clothes together in the middle of Washington Street and dance on top of them screaming, “We’re totally fucking naked, we’re totally fucking naked!”—or failing that (since sudden widespread big-city nudity could lead to rapes and other unforeseen turbulence), I might want to strip everyone in an idyllic small town like Northampton and see how they would adjust to it. That actor on Unsolved Mysteries could do a nice twenty-minute segment about the event — the Quiet Little College Town That Stripped. Nobody would connect it to me and my Solonoid. Since Arlette, I have taken many more risks; I have increasingly wanted to give the world something to digest — something big and anarchic and sloppy but not (I hope) harmful or even particularly embarrassing in any permanent way to the individuals concerned. Probably my decision to assemble something on paper about my life flows in part from this urge.

But I do have limits and hesitations. Only a few days after my evening chat with Arlette, I was waiting in the lobby of the same building for a cab to show up. It was about eleven at night. A Hammermill box full of backup documents was to be put in a cab to go out to a partner’s house. (The partner was sick but, good man, planning to work all night.) The cab was delayed. Every so often I spotted a rat moving fast across the plaza in the dark. The security guard was in a chatty mood. I knew him slightly. He was in his forties, with some serious dental problems. Once, when I had stopped to say hello for a second, he had raved about a piece of music on his radio—“Listen to this, I just love it! I wish I knew what it was. It’s mint!”—proud of himself for his sudden affinity for what he took to be Rachmaninoff or Bruckner or somebody. I listened for a phrase or two and inquired whether it wasn’t the theme from Love Boat. His face went through a male menopause as he realized that I was right and that his attempt to demonstrate his culture had betrayed him into humming enthusiastically along with a tired old TV show. So in a general way I thought I liked him. While I was waiting for the cab, I decided to ask him what he would do if he had a remote-control device that, instead of pausing a video, froze the entire universe. He understood the sexual implications of what I was asking immediately.

“What would I do?” he said. “I’d find the nicest, best-looking chick I could find and rip her clothes off and plank her right there.”

I was a little taken aback. “But she wouldn’t be moving. You would really fuck her?”

He said absolutely he would. “I’d find the nicest, mintest chick I could find and carry her off to an alley and rip her clothes off and start hammering the shit out of her.”

“But she wouldn’t be responding!” I again protested.

“So what? I’m talking about a mint chick now, a really mint chick. If she was mint I wouldn’t care if she was moving. Or, okay, if she wasn’t moving, I’d just click the remote on for a second, and she’d start fighting a little, and then she’d be moving, and then I’d turn her off and I’d hammer on her some more.”

“But then she’s fighting you,” I said. “That’s rape.”

“Well, yeah, it’s rape, I guess,” he said. “Call me a sick fucked-up guy, but that’s what I would do. Now my friend Jerry, he’s a ladies’ man. He probably wouldn’t shove it in and start whaling on her. He’d probably eat her out, suck on her tits and all that.”

“But that’s not really right, either,” I said, feeling increasingly confused and unhappy.

“I know,” he said. “Or — maybe he’d just look at her, I don’t know.”

“I suppose it’s all basically equivalent,” I said, thinking out loud. “I mean, unbuttoning one button is just as bad, since it’s done without her say-so. But I don’t really believe that, for some reason. I think there are levels to it. I personally would just undress her.”

“What, undress her and pound your pud, man?” he cried. “You’d just unbutton a few buttons and catch a bit of tit and go, Oh, sorry I had to lay a hand on you, and then you’d fucking masturbate, man? What a waste! I’d fucking jump in there. I’d fucking yank the remote from you and start whaling on her. What’s the difference? As far as I can see there’s no difference between just tearing her clothes off and hammering on her.”

“I guess not, essentially,” I said. A brown and white cab drove slowly by but it didn’t stop. “Still — there she is standing there, in a certain position, not moving. She’s dry! How could you possibly want to fuck her?”

“Easy, I’d just move her arms around, adjust her legs.”

“But, I’m telling you, she’s dry!” I was trying to give him every chance to reconsider and retract.

“All right. Say I see this incredible chick coming out of NAPA.”

“Out of what?” I asked.

“Out of NAPA. Auto parts. I haul her to the alley, I rip her clothes off, and I try to stick it in her, and she’s a little dry, right? Then I notice that there’s some fucking grease in the bag she’s carrying, this tube of axle grease she’s bought for her husband, right? I squeeze some of that on my cock and I fuck her with the help of that, and then I leave her there, and she wakes up, and she goes, What the fuck? Or no, I dress her back up, and I put her back where she was in front of the store, and I take off, and I click the remote, and she’s there on the street, and there’s this tingling in her cunt, and she goes to wipe herself later, and this fucking black grease smears all over her hand, and she thinks, What the fuck is going on here?”

“I don’t understand why you have to haul her off to an alley,” I said. “Why not right there in front of the NAPA store?”

He looked at me as if I was unable to understand the obvious. “I could never do it on the street. I couldn’t do it in public. Even though everyone’s frozen stiff. With my luck, one guy’s eyeball would still be moving around, and he’d see me and he’d be able to give a positive ID. I’d haul her off somewhere secluded and hose the shit out of her until my dick was sore. Then I’d start thinking about some banks.” He got a faraway look, imagining it all. “Ah-hah, but what if I click on the remote while I’m fucking her, so she fights me a little, and she sees my face? What do I do then, huh? What do I do then?”

“You don’t mean you’d kill her, do you?” I said, with some actual horror in my voice. “Are you married?”

“Yeah, I’m married.” On cue, he brought out a family photo of his wife and one blond kid and one infant and displayed it proudly. Then he said, “No, I wouldn’t kill her. Actually you know what? I’d rather be invisible, then I’d jump on the chick and hose her while she was fighting me the whole time. I wouldn’t care, why would I care?”

“That’s rape,” I said again.

“Right,” he said.

“Okay, but now, say it was someone you knew.”

“A chick I knew?”

“Right,” I said. “Someone you really thought was beautiful.”

“Someone I’d always wanted to fuck and she’d turned me down?”

“Okay, yeah,” I said.

“I’d probably kiss her before I hosed the shit out of her. I’d hit the remote and I’d say, ‘You turned me down, but you’re my puppet now.’ ” Then he had a further thought. “No, okay, say if she was a nice girl, a really nice girl. Say I go after her, thinking I’m going to hose her, and I hit the button on the remote and freeze her, and then I’m starting to grab her tit or something, and something comes over me, and I can’t go through with it, even though I want to so bad, and a big tear runs down my face, and I say, ‘I could have had you, but I let you go.’ Right? That would be a real tearjerker. And I take off. But first—mint! — this would be mint! — first I write my phone number on her tit. Right? That’s what I would do in my imagination, but I’m telling you what I would do for real, right? I’d go after somebody I always thought was great-looking, like this chick I know from high school, Christine — her mother is fucking fantastic. Her mother is nice. Yeah, Wheelers’ is probably the first house I’d go to — I’d hose the shit out of Christine’s mother, then I’d hose the shit out of Christine.”

I was distressed by this conversation with the security guard. I felt that he and I were radically different sorts of people (a realization that can be in itself dispiriting, because you want the rest of randomly encountered humanity to be comprehensible), but at the same time I felt that a case could be made for our fundamental likeness, and I really didn’t want to be like him. Morally, I am different from that security guard — no, let’s not mess around: morally, I’m a little better than he is. I am. But I acknowledge that some of the things I have done are — let me just say it — rape-like acts that some observers would condemn more vehemently than they would condemn the security guard’s offhand remote-control fantasies, because I should know better, and because, in my own case, they really happened.

But I mention the security guard, and Arlette the paralegal, and my friend Bill Asplundh, not so as to raise the fretful subject of rape theory. I just want to point out what I think is my own oddity: unlike any of those I questioned, what I want to do, and what I in fact end up doing, in the Fold is to live out my perennial wish to insert some novelty into the lives of women. Arlette wanted to mash her clit-folds into the life of a woman; the security guard wanted to insert his small-minded dick into the lives of women; but I don’t want to be quite that direct. Instead I replace the white chalk in Miss Dobzhansky’s hand with blue; I put the fortune-cookie fortune under one of Joyce’s bottles; I leave the vibrator where the woman in the library can find it. I am still imposing my will on their lives, of course — but I want to arrange things so that they discover my imposition, and I want the imposition, however calculated, to have an element of simulated fortuity. I’m captivated by the simple idea of putting something in the path of a woman, so that she can choose to look at it or read it, or, on the other hand, choose to walk on by. In college I bought four brand-new copies of Kinflicks and left them one by one on a sidewalk near a gingko tree in front of one of the freshman dorms so that women on their way to class would see them and bend to pick them up and take them off with them. (A woman in my own dorm had told me that the book was very “orgasmy”—I hadn’t read it then, and still haven’t.)

Which brings me at last to my own self-published erotica, or “rot.” A while back, while I was lying out in the sun in my yard on a beach towel, I became interested in the idea of using the Fold to have a woman encounter my very own words. Too undisciplined to write simply for the pleasure of writing, I nonetheless felt able to write as long as it served some specific sexual end. At first I imagined hovering at a bookstore a few shelves away from a woman who appealed to me: as she pulled a book off the shelf and began to flip through it (something like Eva Figes’s Light), I would fermate and inscribe dirty messages in the margins, like “I need a big jumping clit under my tongue right now!” Then I’d watch her read my annotation and shake her head with disgust and replace the book. But maybe she wouldn’t replace the book; maybe she would buy the book anyway; maybe she was in fact in the bookstore looking not for a copy of Eva Figes’s Light but for a live nude tongue on her jumping clit; maybe my marginalia would be taken by her as a portent of sexually fructifying times to come.

Oddly enough, I didn’t act on this rather crude idea until quite recently, because the thought of vandalizing a trade paperback with pornographic graffiti made me sad: a wheelchair-bound art-history teacher in college once gave an impressive sermon out of the unparalyzed side of his mouth on the viciousness of writing in books one didn’t own, and I took it to heart. A few months ago, however, I tried the idea out one evening at the Waterstone’s bookstore on Exeter. A finely constructed woman of thirty in a black curl-necked cotton sweater with gray sleeves stood in the fiction section and pulled a copy of something called Paradise Postponed by John Mortimer off the shelf. It was a red paperback. I hadn’t read it, though I’d heard of John Mortimer. She glanced at the back, then flipped to the first page, then skipped to somewhere in the middle, where a scene caught her eye. She read for a few seconds, and then she did what I was hoping she would do: she curled the corner of the page under her fingertip so that she would be able to turn to it immediately when she needed to — thus signaling to me that she was definitely going to look at the next page. I snapped my fingers to invoke the Clutch and gently removed the Mortimer novel from her hands and wrote on the page that she would be turning to, in as elegant a cursive as I could muster, I need to pop my nuts on a pair of small sexy tits right this second!! I snapped out of the time-clutch and watched her from a safe distance as she turned the page and read what I had written. She did an almost imperceptible double take, then flipped around in the book to see if there was anything else handwritten. She looked about her, noticed me absorbed in a copy of The Princess of Cleves, and, because (though somewhat rough-hewn) I look “intellectual” (the glasses), she was reassured that whoever had written that desideratum in the book she had picked up had done so a while ago, perhaps months ago, and was in any case no longer in the store. Then she sighed conclusively and put the book back on the shelf and inspected something by Muriel Spark called Loitering with Intent. Titles are so important to lonely browsers. I could of course have written something dirty in that book, too, but I resisted the urge, not only because it would have made her fearful that someone was singling her out somehow, but also because I couldn’t for some reason make myself write nasty things in a book written by a woman. I could deface John Mortimer without compunction, but not so Muriel Spark. I hovered there until the woman in black cotton finally left (with Breakfast at Tiffany’s), and then I bought the Mortimer myself, since I had ruined it. I still have it; I mean to read it someday.

Many, most of my fold-adventures are like that — inconclusive; wastes of time by some standards. But I like when my little schemes don’t really work out — I still feel that I have created some bond between myself and the woman with whom I have decided to meanwhile away the time. The woman in black will eventually forget about the writing I did for her at the top of the page of Paradise Postponed, since it is difficult to retain the active memory of minor incidents which are in a small way inexplicable and random-seeming, and yet for a short time that evening, for a few hours, she might possibly have entertained herself by speculating about what sort of person would browse Waterstone’s writing apostrophes of smut in modern English novels. She might have brought it up that weekend at a dinner party — maybe someone was talking about the history of the Waterstone’s building and she would be reminded of the oddity I had given her and start to tell the story and realize that she would be slightly embarrassed to repeat in company what I had written, and then someone else at the table, a catty gay man, would say, “Oh, come on, Pauline, you can’t bring us this far and not finish us off, we’re grown-ups after all,” and she would repeat to the dinner party, in her own thoughtful, even voice, surprising herself that she did in fact remember the text, “Well, I believe that it said, ‘I need to pop my nuts on a pair of sexy little tits right now.’ Exclamation point.” And there would be whooplets of mock-shocked mirth. All because of me, all because of me.