Access & Egress (Part 4)
C. Steinmetz

Jenn had lately been finding herself, mostly when walking from the trolley garage park to her office, mentally cataloging an index of potential dating subjects of male friends she could let herself sleep with, and could also then maybe try to build from that first sexual incident into a functioning romance. Not just a one night fantasy within a fantasy. A wrecking ball of a fantasy. One that ripped down the framework of friendship, replaced it with the skeleton of something petty and puerile, begging for the circulation of a decent, healthy, loving interaction. And almost always, in these projected scenarios, her male friends that she would have figured on not even really enjoy sleeping with but just wouldn’t eventually hate herself for doing so, and also were males that she could trust with her body, sort of accidentally found themselves next to her in the morning, still in her projected scenario, and then through various factors of profound guilt on their parts, wanted to erase her from their lives — pronto.
She was spending absolute gobs of time creating these scenarios and filing and then refiling platonic males in order of a) attraction, b) function and then c) the potential to actually fall in love with the person. And this last one, the one concerning love, she couldn’t even resign herself to title this column when she was actually writing the lists out by hand on the back of grocery receipts. Instead she marked the column with a letter “V” enclosed in quotation marks, because she told herself an “L” enclosed in quotation marks might clearly delineate “love” to some house mate or co-worker who might go through any of her trash bins and find the crumpled receipts with the columns and the names of the men she obsessed over under them. And even the act of writing out just an “L”, was enough to fill Jenn with absolute full octane anxiety about her capacity for love, like a rising gauge on a barometer, and how that reflected upon her standing as a functioning member of the human race, that she would have been totally paralyzed with dread and self-doubt. And also, she never abbreviated subject headings with vowels. So “O” in quotation marks was definitely out of the question as a column heading.
All of this self reflection was just under three seconds of her thought stream during the elongated kiss between Jenn and The Actuary, followed swiftly by a self-conscious realization of her teeth as they clanged against The Actuary’s incisors during the open mouthed exit in which she tried to tongue at the top of his palette. But he deftly jerked forward, resulting in the two of them backing up to look at one another’s faces for gestures of pain. Jenn looked, with the most sincerity she would express all evening at him, before she thought about him seeing her teeth and then thought about him thinking about her teeth. She dove back in for closed mouth contact.
There was a percolator and a French press next to her futon on a raised white wicker stool, with little half opened paper baggies of spilling coffee beans underneath it. She drank a mug full of the stuff before even putting underwear on in the mornings, instead opting to sit over her down comforter, slumped forward on her elbows, watching the black drip. Her teeth, particularly her top canines had taken such a hit from all the coffee sifting through them, day after day, that they adopted an eerie luminescence. Sometimes they almost seemed translucent and she would tilt her head around in the mirror, trying to practice angles to pose her head properly so that it didn’t look like the branched creeping lines of roots were exposed beneath her canines’ veneer. She assumed these poses again, as she moved away from The Actuary, pulling his lower lip with her.
She and The Actuary were already buck bare. She had led him upstairs and into her bedroom wearing just a robe and then serenaded him with the shakuhachi while he removed first his brown leather loafers, then his cotton button down shirt, wool slacks, long underwear, his boxers and finally, most awkwardly, two grey tube socks. He’d done a terribly unattractive little jig, pulling on one sock while rabbiting on the other foot. She guessed he had no idea who Black Sabbath was. He wouldn’t recognize it anyway, played not-so-expertly on an obscure Zen Buddhist wind instrument.
Now he leaned back on the futon, crossed his legs Indian style and smirked with his stubbled hairlip, slowly glancing down at himself, always keeping one eye on her right hip’s crest.
“Have some fun with it,” he said.
Her stuffed plush E.T. doll was pushed into the corner where the futon and the wall met, by his elbow. She put a palm over the toy’s chipped plastic eyes. It was watching. She tilted her head, pulled her hair back, slid down, feeling her small breasts against the mossy patches of hair on The Actuary’s white thighs. Before actually Having Fun With It, she initiated a gag reflex, clamping her throat and forcing saliva from the glands at the front of her mouth into bubbled spit. Jenn recognized that in a depraved way this was almost nurturing. A mother bird dropping chewed particles of partially digested worm from her gullet.
Jenn didn’t fool herself into thinking that sexual glee would be akin to some big glowing plus sign, counteracting the minus signs her insecurities had accumulated with the continuous mental projections of scenarios involving her platonic dudes screwing and abandoning her. They weren’t some hulking incubus on her back. At moments, she saw the scenarios and the columns and the letter “L”s in quotation marks very objectively and realized fully that they were temporary lapses in maturity. The outcome wasn’t what was bothering her. It was the process. It distracted her from ideas. It distracted her from productivity.
After a while of Having Fun With It, Jenn started to feel The Actuary’s pulse inside her, thumping. This was beyond nauseating. She rose up, reached over with one hand to the percolator’s wicker stool, and grasped at a Panasonic hand held micro cassette recorder there, next to tomorrow’s already brewing coffee. The tape inside was cued. She lifted it in her palm and pressed the red RECORD and the black PLAY button down simultaneously with her thumb and then set it back down, this time on the window sill behind The Actuary’s head.
“Page Twelve. Panel One,” she spoke with command, aiming her voice from her mounted position on The Actuary’s ankles at the microcasette recorder.
“Content: Quantum runs at hyper-speed across an alien, barren and craggy landscape towards a setting purple sun. He is wearing a different costume, sort of a blend between the Golden Age Quantum and the costume that the future Quantum from issue number three-seventy-five wore.”
The Actuary sort of half sat up on the backs of his elbows with a queried look on his face.
“What are you doing?”
“Writing.”
“What?”
“...”
“For what?”
She pushed down palms first with both her hands on The Actuary’s abdomen, arms straight just above his belly button, careful not to come down on his zyphoid process, and lifted her pelvis over his. He groaned and made a contracted wince at this pressure, but then figured out what she was doing and ignored the conversation for his desire to be inside her. He used his right hand to go around her left thigh and positioned himself correctly. She came down on him slowly, feeling a give at first almost half way, then came up a bit and finally back all the way down.
The Actuary made a tiny falsetto moan that Jenn felt was too forced; maybe even entirely false.
“Caption (internal monologue): I’m Weston Foster, the man of speed. Only there’s no where to go. I keep running and running around this planet, but there’s either nothing here or it’s as big as several solar systems.”
Again a queried look came from The Actuary.
“Page Twelve, Panel Two. Content: Quantum, speed dimensional sparks shooting off of him, breaks through the barrier between the dreams of Pantheon members. His reality shatters like a sheet of glass and reveals another underneath it. He almost runs directly into Athena, standing with her palm outward, sword raised in the other hand. An army of Feminons behind her. She looks different too, wearing an altered version of her Greek battle armor.”
The Actuary, mid-thrust, started to speak over her but saw the look on her face and stopped his voice in a clipped choke. She was filled with a look of such utter, fierce determination. Her eyes were focused, not on him, or even the microcasette recorder, but just on the blank off-white shade above them. And her jaw was jutting and stiff.
She spoke again, “ATHENA (dialogue): I’m trying to work here!”
Jenn’s cheeks were almost flat, drawn against her skull in a way that exposed the detailed texture of flesh, where the pock marks descended or half-formed moles rose and little wispy hairs suddenly became visible. The Actuary got the slight impression that the febrile look with the locked jaw that pulled her skin taught was just as involuntary as her deep breathing that accompanied this sex, seeming to come out of some small damp box just inside her throat. He wondered whether Jenn’s recital of her ideas or even her verbatim script instructions were, as he first assumed, part of some pretentious sexual experiment she had concocted or if it was deeper than that, making him maybe even more incidental.
“Page Twelve, Panel Three. Content: Quantum and Athena talking. In the background we can see that Athena’s army is faced off against another army on a vast battlefield. ATHENA (dialogue): There is something amiss Weston. Where are we? ATHENA (dialogue/new word bubble): Look at us! We are not ourselves. I must use the w-force to rebuild our reality.”
The Actuary felt like a bystander, but continued at her methodically. He was doing the work now, clutching at her hips and drawing up and then pushing his waist into the futon for leverage. A board of blonde wood creaked under their consistence.
“Page Twelve, Panel Four. Content: Athena raises her staff up towards the alien skyline and draws the w-force energy down into in it’s rainbow signature. Now the Athena reality shatters, the same way Quantum’s did two panels previous. ATHENA (dialogue): These are the most important events of our lives. And yet nothing has happened?”
Old issues of “The Pantheon”, “The Visitor From Mars” or “Psoriat, Man of The Sea” lay about the bedroom floor around the personal word processor stacked on a cardboard box, tattered covers up with the pages spread out, staples coming loose and tiny white creases forming along the binding, corners and edges. She kept self addressed, previously mailed manila envelopes, sealed with script copies inside, in the first drawer of her desk. This was precaution, a do-it-yourself copyright. In the event that a major publisher hoisted an idea or original character from her submissions, those manila envelopes were her legal ticket ride.
She could feel him below her, moving like a song. Like riding the trolley to the office in the mornings; the first congruous thought she could form. Everything was goal and process. From production to marketing to squinting and sitting on a vacuum tubed monitor screen. “Dynamic multi-tasking” was what her resume said. The trolley was the only time of the day she didn’t have to feel responsible for herself, for the destination of her physical form or for the tasks it occupied itself with.
When the trolley would scuttle into the suburban, fenced in, garage park where the transit authority kept skeletons of antiquated vehicles, it was making it’s final stop before lumbering back downtown. The drivers, unless stalwart veterans of city transit, always over depressed the brakes, herky-jerking the beast forward, wires snapping behind with an insect like hum of steel whipping backwards, cutting oxygen, sometimes coming loose from electric cables, spitting blue sparks and then halting the machine altogether, like a broken watch. Jenn never had to consciously keep her eye on the route and wait to push the stained black rubber lining that triggered a bell and lit up small bulbs behind the block windshield, illuminating STOP REQUESTED. The second-to-last stop the trolley made, just before the garage park, was only fifteen feet away at an intersection that marked the town square. Most of the young professionals got off there. It was faster to walk than to wait through the three lights the trolley had to get through before circling into the garage park. Jenn always waited, relishing the ride, usually the last to disembark other than a sooty, sweatered elderly gentleman rocking back and forth and rambling anecdotes to each driver. Once she was off and her boots touched the chipped asphalt of the garage park, it was Back To Responsibility. Back To Maturity. Back to the walk, towards the work house ahead, slipping out of being-there into the column fixing and the scenario projections of sleeping with her unaware platonic male pals. The real being-there, the being-here actually, was anonymous men like The Actuary, filtering in and out, genial and buying drinks for her in smoke trench bars, well within walking distance of Happy Harbor.
“Page Thirteen. Panel One. Content: Athena and Quantum are now in an immense red desert, the last shards of Athena’s reality trickling off the panel, her army and dream gone. In the distance we can see a figure sitting in the lotus position as the red sandstorms rage around him. The figure is garbed in an impossibly long blue cloak that whips in the winds. It is The Visitor.”
The look on The Actuary’s face was now that of animal in process of defecation. An ermine or rabbit. A sheath of glaze reflected fog across his cornea. What is it about that glazed stare that connects to lack of faculty? The same non-being-there attenuation came to his gaze in the bar, through haze and smugness. Intense concentration across all boards. Cheek bones spasm. Nostrils in flare. Perpetual open mouth syndrome. Maybe a choking face without gesture of hands to throat. Alcohol, disposal of waste, orgasm. Something biologic and non-objectively hazardous to consciousness here. He lost himself to lack of knowledge. Return to basic function. It’s okay.
There was control fading there and Jenn felt herself begin to teeter away. His loss could be hers and she raced toward it. Her own visual organs filled with milky lucency in recognition, vibrating in sockets. Webs of tingle spat through the nervous branches in her thighs and everything; emotions, organic mechanics, mentally bulleted list items; came spilling down in resignation. Her body felt like it was changing shape into gelatinous, formless object.
Just as if everything were spinning down into a pinprick, it came back up again larger than ever, vomiting the one color transparency of reality, slapping it down violently onto blank template. The Actuary sat up with a gust of breath and wrapped his arms around her back, pulling himself further into her. Faetia popped. She felt a twinge of pain and then relief. Her lumbar vertebra locked and reminded her back into consistent corporeality. It would not shift with his clutching embrace. He squeezed so tight she could feel the loose parts of his arm flesh fold against the pressure, emanating warmth and caring. Projecting all his world into hers. Physically thanking her for allowing him to relinquish posterity, relinquish authority and influence over to her. She could feel the ends of his mouth smile a longing satisfaction against her right breast.
And then it was all malleable again. He slid out from under. He wiped himself with his skivies. He was self conscious with his back to her. He sat down. Her back was still caught in the block. She slowly edged herself against the pillows, tender — like post surgical. They looked at each other briefly, trying to lose again. He dragged his fingernail against a chip in a front tooth.
The Actuary attempted an open dialogue, trying to assume a healthy act had occurred, “Tell me about your story.”
She stared at him. Her windpipe contracted in a fake swallow.
“Well... it’s about a group of super heroes, The Pantheon actually, if you’re familiar with that comic book... who are trapped inside a prison of their own imagination. One of their villains... this weird one left over from the Silver Age, named The Sequence, well he hooks them up to a machine. It keeps them unconscious and dreaming.”
“Oh yeah?” he feigns emotional depth and interest.
“It’s based on a Descartes philosophical question. He asked whether we could all just be brains in a vat, imagining our own existence and even our three-dimensional physical bodies.”
“So how do they get free?” he asks.
“The Visitor From Mars. He’s their telepath.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Page Thirteen. Panel Two. Content: Close in on The Visitor as he meditates in the desert. Caption: Telepathic interface is increased by discarding superfluous brain matter. Begin alteration. Page Thirteen. Panel Three. Content: The Visitor in the same lotus pose but this time from a ninety degree opposite angle from the previous panel. His skull is twice as large as before, mutated veins stretch down his neck to his heart, feeding the meta-brain ichor blood. Caption: Think their echoes. Nothing is happening. Freedoms are illusions. Page Thirteen. Panel Four. Content: Twist The Visitor one-hundred-and-eighty degrees now. His body begins to disintegrate, cracking and phasing in with the landscape. Caption: Circles. Rings. Cyclic. The real trap! I am all thoughts but my own. ‘The Visitor’ was erased in the tandem.”
Through this hectic notation, The Actuary slowly put his clothes back on, mumbling “huh” a couple of times while she rambled forward. Grey socks, then thermals, then boxers. He had both legs in the air, balancing back on the futon, with slacks in hand when Jenn put her hand on his and then on his thighs, pushing them down so he was sitting again, looking at her with a calculated wonder.
She picked up the recorder, thumbing the black STOP. With the other hand she reached for the shakuhachi.
“Page Thirteen. Panel Five. Content: Quantum and Athena approach The Visitor. But he explodes into a burst of dust before them, losing his physical body to the orgy of everyone else’s infinite thoughts, becoming one with the sandstorm of his own imagined reality.”
And she pushed STOP with a click. Jenn brought the shakuhachi end to her mouth, stopped in reflection and said to him, “It reminds me of something I said earlier this evening.”
The Actuary pulled his pants off again. One leg was still caught inside out. His boxers pulled down partially, exposing his hip bone.
“What was that?” he asked. She was not sure if he was asking about what she said then or now. He was thinking about his naughty nuggets more than anything.
“I told all my roommates, even my brother Arthur, that I thought we should fuck each other. In a seven person orgy. The result would dispel the house tension over dirty dishes and unpaid bills and replace it with all sorts of sexual anxiety between one another.”
The Actuary stood up, kicking off the pant leg. His flaccid penis peeked out through the unbuttoned slit in his boyish boxer shorts.
“Given the choice between those two realities,” he said, “I’ll take the latter.”