Future Sex (23 page)

As I stood there squinting a sleepy-looking tall man with a shaved head ambled forth from beneath a tent, holding an enameled metal cup of coffee. He was sunburned and blue-eyed and spoke with
a northern European accent. He sat down on the other side of the booth. I sat facing him. The sun beat down. “Would you like an umbrella?” he asked. Two umbrellas were leaned against the advice booth. He opened a rainbow umbrella and I opened a black one and we now looked at each other from beneath our umbrellas. I took off my sunglasses.

“Do you have a question?” he asked.

I didn’t. I told
him that my last relationship had ended two years ago. I supposed that since then I had been nonmonogamous, in the sense of sometimes having sex with several different people within a specific period of time. As I said this both the idea of counting people and the idea of grouping them within a time frame seemed arbitrary. This was just my life: I lived it and sometimes had sex with people. Sometimes
I wanted to commit to people, or they to me, but in the past two years no such interests had fallen into alignment. Once I had gone about this behavior more or less by accident, still thinking that I would find someone to love and start a relationship. Now I sought out sex even when it would lead nowhere. I thought of it as a way to become closer to people who intrigued me, whom I wanted to understand
better. It was always a surprise, the differences between the people with whom I shared a physical connection and those with whom I connected on the level of ideas. But there were still some problems, I said.

I still did not feel as free as I wanted to. Sometimes I could not cross the barriers that keep people from expressing their desires. Rejection did not hurt any less, although it did not
hurt more, and I knew better now how to work through it, by trying to accept the rejection as an honest expression of the other person’s feelings, not as a negative verdict on who I was or had failed to be, and that pursuing sex with other people really could help me reconnect with the world after heartbreak. Sometimes, in sexual relationships that would only ever be casual, my nerve would fail me
or a grasping would set in. It was still difficult to get from point A to point B with total ease, despite all of the facilitators specifically designed for that purpose on the touch screen of my mobile phone.

I said all this to the guru. He took a sip of his coffee. The day was starting to warm. I had no practical questions. I tried to think of problems. I asked him about jealousy.

“Jealousy
is something you have to feel,” he said. “I don’t try to argue it away, or pretend it isn’t happening. I just sink into it.”

He was from the Netherlands. He had been in a polyamorous relationship that had ended when he realized he and his girlfriend no longer loved each other. Maybe polyamory was just a slower way of breaking up with someone. I considered that perhaps it was a more humane way
of breaking up with someone and that anyway, in most relationships, at most times, both people can already fathom how the relationship will end. Eventually I put on my sunglasses, closed my umbrella, and stood up to continue walking. The streets were still mostly deserted. It was early for Black Rock City.

I walked past a library. I went in and sat down and started looking at the broadsheet daily
newspaper that someone prints during Burning Man. The issue I read was from Wednesday. Today was Friday. A caption described people falling off a sculpture of a coyote. Across from me a man with dark hair and black glasses sat looking through a stack of comic books. We began to talk.

Like me he lived in Brooklyn. It was his fifth time at Burning Man. He had just gotten a haircut at a salon theme
camp. Since we were in the library we talked about books. We talked about a book called
The World Without Us
, which describes what would happen if humanity suddenly disappeared: how nature would reclaim the planet, how our cities would decay, how long it would take the effects of global warming to fully mature, how long plastic would remain. We talked about megafauna, which are mentioned in
The World Without Us
, how the nice thing about megafauna was that they had coincided with human history—that even six thousand years ago there were still small woolly mammoths living on an island off Alaska. He wondered how dinosaurs had overtaken megafauna in the popular imagination. We talked about the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, an organization started by Stewart Brand, founder of the
Whole Earth Catalog
, who is trying to genetically resurrect megafauna. I talked about how I had gone to see Charles C. Mann, the author of the books
1491
and
1493
, speak at the Long Now Foundation. He had listened to the podcast. We talked about
1493
, about how in North America, before the Columbian exchange, there were no earthworms, and how the Spanish had hired samurai to fight the Aztecs in
Mexico, and how somebody should make a movie about that. We talked about Narnia and Ursula K. Le Guin. He was reading
The Wizard of Earthsea
. We talked about how Le Guin was an anarchist and a polyamorist. He told me that when Le Guin was a child, her family had sheltered the last Native American living a traditional life in California, who had wandered one day from the forest into the parking
lot of a grocery store. I asked if it was the same man described by Claude Levi-Strauss in
Tristes Tropiques
. It was, he said.

I really belonged in the library! As helpful as the advice guru had been, I decided I should only ever try to make friends in libraries from now on. The next time I came to Burning Man I would make a beeline to the Black Rock City library, a direct vector to the heart
of things.

He was going to try and go to have a steam bath, he now said. Did I want to come? If we got there before it opened at noon we would have a good chance of avoiding the line. As we walked to the steam bath theme camp, we introduced ourselves. Let’s call him Lunar Fox, which wasn’t his name, but sounds like a name someone would make up for Burning Man. I asked him how old he was. He did
not want to say. “I’m thirty-two,” I volunteered. “I’m thirty-three,” he said.

We arrived at the steam bath just after noon. There was no line. The man in charge gave us each a red wooden stake. “You’re the last two!” he said. We would have about an hour before he would be calling people with red stakes to the steam bath. It seemed serendipitous. “He probably says that to everyone,” my new friend
said.

We walked to his camp. It was called Desperado and was vaguely cowboy themed, or at least had a pair of saloon doors at its entryway. He prepared a funnel with coffee for me and went to do something. I waited for the water to boil. Twenty-somethings from Santa Cruz milled around, eating apples and putting hazelnut milk in their coffee. I watched one young man give another a pill capsule
filled with white powder. “What is it?” asked the recipient. The other man shrugged. “Sparkle dust,” said the guy, and swallowed the pill. I had not yet figured out how to get drugs at Burning Man. I had hoped they would simply appear. Instead a tall blond twenty-something man walked in and asked if anybody had any sunscreen. When my friend returned I was rubbing sunscreen on his broad, tan back.
I prepared my coffee and we walked back to the steam bath.

We arrived just as our turn was called. We stripped naked and stood in line. The sun felt good on our naked bodies. We were given umbrellas to stand under. The steam bath was in a hexayurt. We stayed inside for a while. It was a collegial atmosphere, with people singing songs and spraying each other with a hose. We met a guy from Mongolia.
We washed off the dust with Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap. Afterward, the ovenlike desert air felt cool. We dried in the sun, then put on our clothes again. We decided, next, to go to the orgy dome, something one could do only as part of a “couple or moresome.” First we had to get my bike.

To get my bike I had to tell Adam something about where I was going. I introduced him to Lunar Fox. I figured
Adam had his own conquests. His tan had deepened and he wore only a small pair of shiny golden shorts.
Feel the jealousy
, I told myself, looking at him.

On the way to the orgy dome we stopped at a
Miami Vice
–themed party for some drinks and snacks. The door was manned by a white guy and a black guy dressed as Crockett and Tubbs. I got a rum cocktail. Lunar Fox got water. Lunar Fox, it turned
out, did not drink. We sat among pillows in an empty inflatable swimming pool and smiled at each other.

We had not discussed our purpose for going to the orgy dome. We had, after all, just met. The orgy dome was said to be air-conditioned, but it was barely air-conditioned. We were handed a bag with condoms, lube, wipes, mint Life Savers, and instructions for how to dispose of our materials afterward.
We entered the dome. I was disappointed that there wasn’t much of an orgy. In fact, it was all heterosexual couples having sex with each other. Lunar Fox and I sat on a couch and watched. We felt strange. It was clear that we should either do something or leave.

“Should we have sex?” I asked.

“Yes…” he said. “Do you want to?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you sure?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. The woman
who greeted us at the door had advised us to express loud, enthusiastic consent.

When we left the dome, we walked over to a nearby shade structure where sitar music was playing. We sat in two camping chairs and talked about our experience. A woman who said she was from Columbus, Ohio, came by with a pitcher of iced coffee and offered us some. I accepted. It was cold and delicious, made with sweetened
condensed milk. I offered some to Lunar Fox, who sniffed it and looked tempted but ultimately said no. He tried to be entirely straight edge, he said. The only time he allowed himself drugs was at Burning Man. He was an anarchist. He tried to live as closely to his political principles as possible, which meant, in part, not partaking of things that come from thousands of miles away, like
coffee. He also forbid himself from watching porn, did not have a cell phone, and made a point of trying to get by on as little paid employment as possible, as a sort of protest.

I asked him why he did not watch porn. He said he thought it messed up his mind. We talked about the differences between male and female sexuality. I said I thought men and women wanted sex equally, but maybe the female
body has a hard time having sex repeatedly. I was, at that moment, thinking of my own body, which felt tired.

“It’s frustrating, because I could have sex three more times today, if my body could take it,” I said.

“I could have sex five more times,” he said.

He said the thing about sex was that if you don’t have it for a long time your drive for it wanes, but if you have it once then you want
to have it all the time again. Lunar Fox said that in all the times he had been to Burning Man he had never had sex or made out with anyone. I found this impossible. “It’s easier to be a woman here,” he said. I was not so sure. There were so many beautiful, naked bodies prancing around.

We both felt tired. He said that if he doesn’t nap after sex, he spends the rest of the day trying to recapture
the opportunity to nap. We talked about how sex wakes women up and makes men tired. It felt like a relief to throw out some generalities along gendered lines. Just throw them out there, lazily, without having to take the position I try to take when I am writing, that there are no such entities as “men” and “women,” just spectrums of behavior and of being in the world, that can be shifted by technology
and synthetic hormones.

We left the sitar tent, got on our bicycles, and cycled toward the playa. We wanted to look at a sculptural re-creation of Russia’s
Mir
space station. We found it and went inside. One of the Russians who built it was dismantling the lights. The space station was going to be set on fire later that night. We went and talked to him. He was dour, as one hopes a Russian to
be. “First time in America. First time at Burning Man,” he said with a thick accent. We asked if he would take Burning Man back to Russia. “There is no place like this in Russia,” he said. “There would be rain.”

We left the space station, bicycling toward the Temple of Whollyness, where some friends of friends of his were due to be married that afternoon. We passed a Mayan pyramid topped with
the giant thumbs-up of a Facebook “like,” which would later be set on fire. Lunar Fox told me about the first time he had come to Burning Man, in 1999. None of this had yet existed—Facebook likes, cell phone cameras, Russian delegations. Burning Man was smaller then, just serious environmental activist types with a hard-core leave-no-trace ethic. But it was the same, he said. Anybody who said it
had changed was wrong. It was just bigger now, and as any society grows it experiences the same stratification, the same problems.

The temple was also a pyramid. Inside, objects from religious traditions had been removed from their history, thrown together in a panspiritual mixture of, well, whollyness. A Buddhist anvil dominated the center of the room, around which several hundred people sat
on the floor in silent meditation. Gongs on the walls struck in automatic intervals. Outside, Burners had decorated the walls with shrines to people who had died, pets who had died, problems they were trying to let go of. I looked at photo collages of people with their dead mothers, brothers, and friends. All of this love, so poorly managed, so rarely expressed. I looked at Lunar Fox and we both
had tears in our eyes.

We couldn’t find the wedding we were looking for, but someone was getting married, and we cheered them. Afterward, sitting together in the sun and dust, we assembled a plywood hexagonal structure that joined with other hexagonal structures in a plywood molecule. We were supposed to write something on it, but we did not write anything. We watched it placed with the others
and then we left. On Sunday it would be set on fire.

The day was fading. “This is normally when I go back to take a nap, but this day…” said Lunar Fox. “I don’t know what to do about this day.”