THE FUTURENESS Ch4: Immersion

“You don’t look like yourself.”

“But it is I,” I said.

“I don’t like the look of the weather in there,” Michelle said. She stood on her toes, peering into my forehead with concern.

I was giving off the smack of fear. I’d been projecting an image of the competent crisis survivor, a freaked-out figure who still stoically spoke sense. Now, I just needed an oxy. Michelle didn’t know about the pills. I’d been planning on no one ever finding out. Aventura will always ever be available to laugh at my plans with its hearty, mountaintop bellow.

“It’s probably Xavier, like you said.”

I always brought Michelle something when I saw her, a corn muffin, particularly good gum I order online from Japan, sometimes something larger. I slowly stopped doing it, and maybe that’s how she’d known when to stop talking about leaving Dayton.

We kissed quickly.

I said, “My car radio is dead.”

“Hmm.”

“Does yours work?”

“I don’t know. I never listen to the radio.”

I knew that, of course.

The two extra Oxycodone had kicked in just as I pulled up to the curb in front of her house. I never parked in her driveway, so as not to box her in. It was a white, shingled two-story house of no character. After the questions about leaving stopped, Michelle decorated with a new Pottery Barn charge card.

“Ten percent off,” she said, just returned from a two-week, sort of intense Radical Acceptance boot camp, “Why don’t I just get everything now?”

I dissolved into one of her matching aqua-blue Queen Anne chairs facing the TV screen. She had CNN on but had muted the sound. A nighttime house fire raged. Flames churned out of a broken window in swirls. I felt a broad, warm embrace coming from inside my body, the pills settling in, and passed into reflection, turning over the same thoughts I received every time I’d taken more than two pills within an hour: I must have been in so much pain and not known it, because this makes me feel right, and whole. Low-registering aches and tightnesses, the life-long, mild swelling of my feet at the end of the day, were banished. What good did any of those points of pain do? What was the evolutionary purpose of feeling pain that you have no power to soothe?

“That happened to my friend,” I said.

“What?” Michelle said.

“A housefire. He collected insurance money on his comic book collection. Maybe he even started it.”

“Who was he?”

“I need you.”

“That’s why you came over so quickly,” she said.

“It was the Winnebago man,” I said. “He finally took the exit for Glassbie county.”

I told her about the newspaper and the cowboy gutting the fish.

“What? Why were you following him in the first place?” Michelle said.

“I know what’s going on around here. Something’s changing in Dayton.”

“What? It’s getting bigger,” she said.

“More than that,” I said.

Michelle settled herself across my knees, her legs on either side of mine. Her skirt rode up, revealing her sheer white leggings. She wore her bleached white hair up in a bun for work, but had taken it down before I arrived. It was the first time in a while I’d seen her long hair down. I wanted to pull it, just to see what she’d do, like a pre-teen, just to see how it would feel to gently tug her head back.

“And how’s your father?” she asked.

“No one will take out his pack. Everyone wants his old doctor to do it. I don’t want him going back there.”

My father’s ex-doctor, who was disgraced in the news for peddling pain pills, was now the only doctor willing to touch the drip he installed in my father’s spine. But the doctor was under investigation and his license, suspended. It was unclear whether he would be allowed to operate again, so I’d started taking my father to a new doctor, an addiction specialist, who filled my father’s morphine pack with methadone regularly diluted with saline.

I unbuttoned Michelle’s pink silk blouse. I put my face between her breasts, felt the curves of both against my cheeks, smelled her skin, an end of day scent. She’d been stressed about something. I could smell it in her breath and her body. Heartburn, or days of nothing but salad suddenly kicking her into ketosis sweat that dried a while ago.

“I thought you had to pick up Costco,” she said, hoarseness coming into her voice.

“I parked the Aventura, today. It’s where we were, the fish-cleaning.”

I slid my right hand over her left breast and willed her nipple to stiffen. My left hand cupped her ass under her skirt.

“Are you starting to feel like going inside?” she said, breathing in.

I said, “I’ve been reading a lot of negative comments about Immersion Therapy lately, and it doesn’t seem like a good idea right now.”

Her nipple wasn’t getting hard, but I am unmoved by what might demoralize another, weaker man. Michelle’s body language didn’t change with sex. If she wanted me to go faster, she clasped her hand on my hip and quickly pushed and pulled it, toward her and away from her, like an arm working a pump. At first, of course I saw it differently. I thought she was frank in bed, drunk on being so turned-on and direct.

She whispered demands, but primarily she spoke to someone else. Her imaginary voyeur stood in the room with a video camera, watching, filming, occasionally directing her to get her hair behind her ears and out of her face, to get in a different position, to get more into it. She called the observer her out-loud fantasy. I had gradually developed a picture of the absent person and imagined him shape-shifting between my version and Michelle’s, the true one.

“It’s summer and it’s fucking freezing,” I said.

“His hand’s moving to the middle of my ass now,” Michelle said.

Michelle’s face was dissolved into two faces. I put my other hand on her ass.

“Can you see that?” she asked.

I’d known about her ghostly pornographer for years, since the day we got all-but-married. In other words, just after I promised I would propose to her one day. That’s when she told me about her kink. She admitted that she’d been too afraid it would scare me off to tell me about it before.

“But if you’re essentially promising me we’re going to be married in the future,” she said, “I have to confess something.”

Two people from New Mexico, boy-girl, meeting at Arizona State. Michelle approached the pretty-boys, Jordan and Chris, the fat hacker, asking each for only a portion of their test answers, homework results, classroom notes from the days we skipped and went for coffee and talked about the buying some of the art, that one time, from the walls of that one café.

She told me that during sex with me, she’d been fantasizing about another man, or TV crew, watching us. Broadcasting us. Listening to her describe her kink overwhelmed me, made me ask how’d she’d kept the two worlds, her dream peeping-Tom and me both in the present, never making me feel distanced as she fantasized about the watchers.

“Tell me where you want me,” she said.

“I like this,” I said, out of breath.

“Can you see my ass?”

“No.”

“No,” she said. She opened her eyes and turned them on me.

“You know. Him.”

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