The Sex Sphere (14 page)

“It’s fine for you,” railed the simulacrum. “You go to your office, you go to your conferences. What do
I
have? Nothing but your coldness. And thankless work day after day.”

God, what a bummer. The hypersphere must have looked into my brain and read my memories. I’d taken Sybil to Rome specifically to get away from this shit. It occurred to me that it would all start again as soon as our trip was over.

The pseudo-Sybil was crying now. I knew it was a fake, but the force of habit brought me to my feet. “Don’t cry, Sybil. Things aren’t really so bad.”

“Ha!” Her face was red and wet. “When was the last time you washed a single dish? You treat me like a servant, like dirt! There’s no room for anyone but Alwin Bitter, Alwin Bitter, Alwin Bitter.” In her mocking mouth my name became a curse.

“That’s not true,” I protested. “I’ve just been wrapped up in my work. But I
do
care. You know that.”

“You do not. You just wish I would shut up. Why did I ever marry you? We haven’t had one single good time together in years. I can’t remember the last time you smiled at me.”

“What about last week? When we were in the restaurant and had trout?” I was having trouble remembering that this wasn’t real.

“Oh, sure, if we’re out drinking our heads off you can put on a happy face. But when was the last time we did something normal together or even
talked?
”

“Look, do you want to take a walk or something?”

“And what about the children?”

“They can come, too.”

“You know they won’t. Sorrel will throw a fit.”

“So let’s take a drive.”

“And you’ll lose your temper and spank poor Tom again. I couldn’t believe when you did that last week. You’re really sick, you know that Alwin? You’re a sick, selfish person. It’s just me, me, me, and anyone else might as well be dead.”

I was getting mad now. “Look, Sybil, I don’t have to listen to this crap.”

“Oh, sure. Get mad and hit me. That’s your only answer, isn’t it?”

“I have no intention of hitting you.” I was fighting for control. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll go out for some air.” I skirted her, heading for the door.

“You mean, sneak out and get drunk, don’t you, Alwin? And leave me to spend Saturday cooped up in this horrible apartment with all the children in the building.”

“I’ll take the kids, I’ll take the kids.”

The “door” held out a pink hand to me, and I pulled it. It thopped open and closed and I was in a different space, a copy of the single bedroom our three children shared. I felt spaced and half-crazed with hangover, just like on a regular Saturday. I had forgotten how to move
ana
and
kata
. I was locked into a bad-trip rerun the sex sphere had read off the wrinkles of my brain.

“Hey, kiddies,” I called. “Do you want to take a walk?”

I could hear them giggling, but couldn’t see where they were. The room looked the same as usual: Ida’s sleeping-couch on the left, Tom and Sorrel’s bunk beds on the right. But the desks were tipped over, and there were clothes and pieces of toys everywhere. They’d really trashed the room, the rotten little turds.

There was a sharp scream from behind me. I turned and opened the door of the kids’ clothes closet. The three of them were squeezed in there, faces dirty and eyes rolling. Tom was yelling about something Ida or Sorrel had done to him. They all looked frightened of me.

“Come on, children, get out of there.” I stepped forward and something smeared underfoot. A sudden, fruity smell filled the air.

“Ida did it,” shouted Sorrel joyfully. “Ida put banana on the floor.” She gave Tom another poke in the kidneys and he turned on her, flailing his arms.

I pulled them out of the closet, one by one.

“God damn you, Sorrel, get out of that closet and pick up this room. Why do you have to eat on the floor, Ida? What kind of pig are you? Just calm down, Tom.” His hair was in his eyes and he had a fleck of foam on his lips. “Try to act human.”

I got a piece of cardboard and scraped the banana off my bare foot and off the floor.

“Pssss,” said Sorrel, pointing at my penis. I suddenly remembered that I was naked. Why was I naked here in our crummy Heidelberg apartment on another horrible Saturday morning? For the moment I couldn’t remember. “Pssssssss,” said Ida. I wondered if there were any beer left from last night.

Just then Sybil walked into the room. “Didn’t I tell you children to clean up in here?”

Tom gave a wild, unhappy laugh. “We’re cleaning cleaning cleaning,” he shouted, grabbing a broom and waving it. “I’ll get the
spiders
.” He flailed at the ceiling. His broom hit the paper shade covering the light bulb. The shade fell off.

My heart ached for my son. Obviously this was all my fault. “Why do you work them up by coming in here naked?” demanded Sybil.

“Pssssss,” said Sorrel and Ida, each holding a pencil between their legs like a penis. I found a wet towel on the floor and wrapped it around my waist.

“Fix that shade right away,” Sybil ordered Tom. “Sorrel, you put those desks back. Ida, start picking up.”

I sprang to do these jobs, knowing the children wouldn’t. But the shade tore in my hands, and when I tilted the first desk back up, all the drawers fell out. One drawer landed on my bare foot.

I roared and threw things. BANG, a table hit the wall and gouged a hole! WHAM, the desk flipped and snapped a leg! CRASH, went the whole fucking box of Legos!

The children screamed in terror. Sybil crouched in front of them, tense and protective. Flaring up like this, I’d put myself so far in the hole that it’d take a week to square it. Sybil might even leave me. Garbage, garbage, my life was garbage. I rushed out the door, face twisted in anguish.

As I stepped through, the space around me gave a strange twitch. There was nothing outside. I was floating in emptiness. The door had disappeared. I waved my arms and legs. There was nothing to push against. Slowly I remembered I was not really in Heidelberg. I was somewhere in hyperspace. But why couldn’t I see anything?

“Alwin?” The sweet sound came from all around me. “Alwin, zis is Babs.”

“Are you the sex sphere?”

“I’m Babs za bad hypersphere, za one who ate you up.” The accent was pure Zsa Zsa Gabor.

“Am I inside you?”

“Your vhife, she don’t understand you. You zshould love me best.”

“What do you want from me, Babs?”

“I vhant to be free.”

This was getting nowhere fast. I still hadn’t gotten back my ability to move four-dimensionally. As a physicist, it occurred to me that I might be imprisoned on the hypersurface of a hyperspherical vacuole in Babs’s body. A kind of bubble.

There was nothing around me, nothing but empty curved space. In the distance I could make out a sort of shimmer, a hugely distorted human form. That was me. I was seeing myself around the curve of the hyperspherical space bubble that Babs had stuck me onto.

By way of testing my hypothesis, I took the towel off my waist, wadded it up and tossed it. It dwindled away from me, slowly twisting. Just as the towel seemed to reach the distant shimmer, I felt something hit me in the back of the neck. The towel had circumnavigated my cramped hypercell.

“Let me out,” I begged. “Please let me out of here.”

I can’t take being cooped up. And now my position was like that of an ant on the surface of a toy balloon. No exit. It reminded me of a plastic Thermos bottle I’d had back when I was teaching at State. On the Thermos was a picture of a school bus with Donald Duck getting out, and of schmucky goody-goody Mickey Mouse right there holding up a stop sign. If Donald went right, he’d run smack into Mickey Mouse’s
Stop
. If he went left, he’d immediately be at the back of the bus, and would then proceed up along it to that same mickey-mouse stop bring-down.
In real life
, the picture seemed to tell me,
there’s no escape from fascist bullshit mickey-mouse stop stop stop
. Though, of course, D.D.
could
have slid up over the lip and into the milk.

Idly I flipped the towel up overhead. A minute later it plopped against the soles of my feet.
Huis Clos
.

“Are you listenink, dollink?” thrilled the sphere’s rich voice. I hadn’t heard her last few sentences.

“What, Babs?”

“I vhant you to help me free myself.”

“I’d like to be free, too. Offhand, I’d say you’re a lot freer than I am.”

“But Lafcadio trapped a piece of me. Vhat your vhife has in her purse now. A nasty knot in my tail. Oh!” A little exclamation of anger there. “Talkink is zo slow. Here, just let me…”

A tendril came invisibly
kata
and plugged into my brain. Babs fed me the story of her capture: Zsuzsi and Lafcadio at work under Mont Blanc, their assistant Jimmy Hu, Lafcadio’s “vacuumless vacuum.”

Apparently Lafcadio had bulged space up in such a way that he could knot it into the fabric of Babs’s body. She was tethered to our space, and she didn’t like it. The first thing she’d done was to kill Zsuzsi Szabo. I could see the little bean lying on the concrete under Mont Blanc, angrily buzzing in a puddle of blood.
Ugh
.

“You mean you
ate
Zsuzsi Szabo?” I demanded. “Chewed her up?”

The space around me gave a rippling chuckle. “Vhell zhure. I vhas really mad, you know. But I saved Zsuzsi’s brain-patterns. Zis is Zsuzsi’s softvhare talkink to you right now, Alwin.”

“You mean you’re Zsuzsi?”

“Ha, zat cow? No vhay. Now I just got a little Magyar in me is all.”

“You’re…you’re not going to eat me, are you?”

“Vhy bother? Your softvhare I can see like a tile floor. Main zing is zat you help me blast off zat goddamn knot.”

“Sure. But how?”

“Wiz za atomic bomb I’ve been gettink together for two months now!”

“You? It was me and the Green Death who did it.”

“Sure. Zat’s vhat you zink. But I’ve been callink za shots. Usink Lafcadio. Vhatch some more pictures.”

***

Montage: Lafcadio slugs Jimmy Hu. Runs back to pick up the Babsi bean. Rushes out into the parking lot. The Fiat skidding down the mountain curves. Then speeding down the smooth autostrada. Highway signs flicker past:
Torino, Milano, Brescia, Verona, Padova, Venezia
. Lafcadio in his car, talking animatedly to no one.

Night: Lafcadio in a cheap hotel room. A half-empty bottle of red wine on a table covered with red circles. Lafcadio is cocked back in the desk chair, reading Dante’s
Inferno
by the light of a bare bulb overhead. He chuckles softly. Somewhere outside, a church-bell rings midnight. Lafcadio jumps to his feet, picks up the wine bottle and with one smooth motion uses it to break the light bulb. Spark and sputter. By his bed we can make out the faint glow of Babsi on the bedside table. Lafcadio’s dark form glides over and stretches out on the white bed. He is shaking gently, sobbing. “
Zsuzsi
,” you hear him mutter, “
O Zsuzsi, non voglio dormire solo
.” At the sound of his voice, the glowing little sphere twitches and grows. You can see an ass-crack now, and breasts on top…. “
Zsuzsi
!” cries Lafcadio, his eyes white and crazy in the dark. “
Cara mia!
” He picks up the sex sphere and begins to kiss it, his face bathed in radiance.

Morning: Lafcadio inside a café, having breakfast. He chews with his mouth open. One hand stays in his coat pocket, ceaselessly fondling something. There is a newspaper on the table. It has a picture of Beatrice and the headline:
Morte Verdi Terroristi
. Lafcadio stares fixedly at the accompanying article, reading out loud while he continues to chew. Finally he stands and walks across the room to a phone booth. We can see his face talking through the glass. He writes something down on a paper napkin.

Afternoon: Lafcadio at the police station, distraught and weeping. “
Mia povera figlia
.” The cops are sympathetic under their stiff-billed hats. They let him in to visit Beatrice. Fear and calculation in her hard, skanky face. He whispers a message, passes her the napkin and leaves, apologizing to the police. “
No che mia figlia
.”

***

“So he used his connections to find out how to steal reactor fuel,” I mused. “And he fed the info to a terrorist. How did he end up in Rome?”

“He followed za Green Death. Zen vhent to vhork vhiz Virgilio, keepink an eye out for a man like you. He did zis all for love. Your vhife is mean, Alwin. Don’t you love me best?”

I was feeling more and more uncomfortable in my hyperspherical prison. With no definite objects but me and the towel to look at, I was beginning to suffer visual hallucinations. Or maybe Babs was still trickling things into my cortex. Bad, heavy, bloody visions. I understood now what she wanted.

“I’ll help you,” I blurted. “I’ll put your cross section…the little Babsi bean…I’ll put it in with the plutonium and set the bomb off. That should get you loose, all right. That should do it.”

“Vhonderful. So I’ll let you out.”

An intricately patterned sphere formed in the air in front of me. A breeze blew out of it. I reached for it, feeling a sort of ridge in space all around the sphere. I dug in my fingers and pulled. The little sphere was a sort of porthole. I slid through it and landed back on the pink outer hide of Babs, the bad sex sphere. Once again I could move my limbs
kata
and
ana
, once again I was free in hyperspace.

CHAPTER TEN

The Film Burns Through

The floodlights through the windows covered the ceiling with a complex pattern of squares and triangles. Sybil stared up at the design, trying to ignore the pain in her arms and legs where the ropes dug in, trying to breathe shallowly under the crushing weight of Virgilio. Beatrice, the hard-faced American terrorist, had thought it would be funny to tie up her two hostages in this position: naked and bound ankle-to-ankle, wrist-to-wrist, and with a tight band ringing their two waists.

For the first half hour it had been exciting…they’d even fucked again. Ironically, this had been one of Sybil’s favorite fantasies as a teenager, the fantasy of having a man
tied onto her
with
no clothes on
. But now several hours must have passed and her joints were numb. She wanted nothing more than to get out from under.