The Sex Sphere (19 page)

Sawyer’s Island in the muddy James, summer camp for the Christian Children’s Morality Crusade. There was a big meeting-house and little cabins laid out on a grid. Loudspeakers. Cora had her first vision of God there…a sinful vision not found in the Good Book. She’d been alone in her cabin, touching herself, and the buzzing growing roar of some approaching train had seemed like the Lord’s own voice. Hot, hot. God, it was hot.

Her eyes snapped back open. Some…presence was here. There, o there, floating in front of her, was a white eye. God’s eye. God knew her secrets; God always watched.

Cora rolled down her SuppHose and opened her legs. The roaring in her ears grew louder.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Thoughtland

The Germans are nuts on the subject of terrorism. They had our apartment staked out, and busted me as soon as we got home: around noon on Easter Monday. This was no big surprise to us; Cortland had warned us to expect it. He’d already hired a lawyer for me in Heidelberg, and the lawyer got the Germans to turn me over to the US Army. I had my own 2
³
cubic meter cell in the Army lockup. It was just big enough to lie down in.

And lie I did. I was bone-tired from the big Easter, and from the long train-ride back. We’d all agreed on the strategy Sunday morning: enjoy Easter, get out of Italy and only then let the pig catch up with me. For the moment, thanks to my trip into the higher dimensions, I was still off the public radar.

Cortland, Sybil’s father, got the hotel to send up breakfast for all of us: prosciutto, melon, rolls, omelets, hot coffee and pitchers of foamy hot milk.

The kids each had a giant chocolate Easter egg with a toy inside. Tom got the highest-bouncing Superball I’ve ever seen, Ida got a fuzzy little round mouse that rolled around when you wound up his tail, and Sorrel got a nested set of spherical doll’s heads…each one wearing a funnier expression than the last.

Then we went to see the Pope in St. Peter’s Square. The radio said the fallout was all washed away, and there was the biggest crowd ever. It was weird, the way all the streets were full of people, all walking in the same direction. It made you feel like an iron filing...or a pilgrim. We saw the Pope, all right. You want to know what he looks like? Find a white drawing-pencil and hold it out at arm’s length. See the tiny lead tip? That’s the Pope on Easter.

There were vendors selling special, perfectly round balloons…real shiny. Mylar or something. When the Pope came out, everyone let his or her balloon go…everyone except Ida. I said a prayer for Giulia, and one for me and my family. It felt good there in St. Peter’s Square. The sun was really hot.

When the Pope got through, the kids were sort of tired, so Cortland hired an open horse-drawn carriage for fifty dollars or something. Lotte and Cortland wanted to go back to the hotel, and we dropped them off near it. Sybil and I decided to stay away with the kids…in case there were cops or reporters nosing around. By now the chase might be on again.

We five bought some sandwiches at a stand, and had a sort of picnic in the Roman Forum. It’s like a meadow with ruins and broken stone. A big place. Lots of Italians were doing the same thing as us. There were plenty of excited children, all dressed up and playing with the neat round toys from their chocolate Easter eggs.

We passed most of the day at the Forum, had a late supper in a cheap restaurant, and caught the nine-o’clock night-train north. Sybil had managed to reserve us five sleeping couches under her maiden name. Good old Cortland met us on the platform of the Rome train-station with our suitcases and one of his spare passports. The picture even looked vaguely like me, not that it mattered. The night-train crosses the Italian-Swiss border at 3:00 A.M.

When we got to Heidelberg the
Polizei
were waiting for me.
Bullen
, the Germans call their police. “Bulls.”

So Monday night I was lying there in my Army cell, my mind running a mile a minute. I was tired, but I couldn’t sleep. There was music outside. I wanted to see where it was coming from.

By standing on tiptoe on my cot I could see out of a high, mesh-covered window. Now I could tell what the music was.
Grease
. They were showing
Grease
as a special Easter Monday treat for the folks on the American Army base. It was the last big song, “We’ll Always Be Together,” with the title phrase repeated a zillion times amid a sea of shang-langs and doo-whop-a-whops.

My mouth twisted in contempt. The fifties are supposed to be some golden age when the pig had everything his way. That’s what TV and the government wants us to believe: there was a time when no one made trouble. What about Kerouac, you assholes? What about Neal Cassady?

I was the only one in the clink, except for the night-shift guard. The day-guard had been a lifer alky called Bing. He’d sold me a pack of Old Golds. I got one out and lit it, then went back to staring out the window.

The crowd was drifting out of the theater, gliding groovily on the beat of the title song.
Grease is the word: it’s got rules, it’s got meaning
. I sort of wished I had another A-bomb handy. It’s being in jail that makes you feel that way.

Just then I noticed something really odd. Almost every single person coming out of the theater was carrying a shiny ball. Free Christmas-tree ornaments? On Easter Monday?

Without even thinking it through, I knew that those balls had something to do with Babs. And —oh, oh—so did the balloons at St. Peter’s. And all those spherical toys. Sybil and the kids were home with three of them! Holy shit.

Two kids stopped under my window. I strained my hardened criminal ear against the mesh, trying to overhear.

“You shouldn’t have done it, Vernice,” said the boy. A dark-skinned kid, maybe sixteen. He held his shiny ball clutched against his body. Made me think of Lafcadio, the loving way he held it.

“Oh yeah?” sassed back the girl. Thirteen and with short dishwater hair. She looked like a sharecropper’s daughter. “Yew promised me a real date to the movies an’ then you dint even watch. You were jest starin’ at naked wimmen in yore little crystal ball. Well, ah got one at home, ah’ll have you know. Mama does, too.”

“
Every
one has one now,” groaned the boy. “When you threw mine at the screen, about two hundred copies blew off. I could have been the only one to know about them if it weren’t for you, you stupid noisy brat.” He made as if to shove the girl with his free hand.

She danced out of his way and slapped his ball out of his other hand. “Yah, Joey, keep lookin’ at dirty pictures and you’ll go blaaahnd. And
ah
know
whaah!
”

The little ball fell slowly in the night air. As it fell, other shining balls appeared in its wake. It was a little like soap-bubbles coming off a waving bubble-wand. A sudden updraft caught one of the bubbles and whisked it against my window. The glass shivered briefly, and then the ball was right in my cell. I grabbed it eagerly and sat down on my bed. Outside the two quarreling voices receded.

At first all I saw in the ball was Travolta’s bestial, moronic, sensitive-lizard smile. Then Olivia, the tacky Cybis china doll that costs more than a car. Music tinkled up at me. “Summer Lovin’.” Good, solidly blocked chords, I had to admit. But…

“Come on, Babs, I know it’s you.”

“Tell me more, tell me more, was it love at first sight?”
Girls’ voices. Babs was obliquely talking to me.

“You know I love you.”

“Tell me more, tell me more, did she give you a treat?”
Boys’ voices.

“Did Sybil? Don’t ask me about Sybil, Babs. Why don’t you give me a nice blow-job and then we can talk things over.” Invitingly, I unzipped my fly.
Goin’ trollin’
.

The little sphere grew larger and pinker. The dark nipples and pubic hair came fading in like photographed features in a safe-lit bath of chemicals. That musky dusky sex sphere odor floated up, and I was instantly hard. But she didn’t go for the knob-job. Instead she planted her luscious quim on my sturdy staff and rode the cattle to St. Louie. My zipper teeth were chewing hell out of my cock-skin, but for the moment this didn’t seem to matter much. We kissed and came.

“What’s the story, Babs? Are all those other spheres you, too?”

“Sure zing, dollink.” For the first time, her red waxy lips talked to me. I hadn’t been sure they could do anything but suck. “I’m more zan four-dimensional, you know. Not just a simple hyperzphere. My real home is Hilbert Space.”

“Infinite-dimensional space? Could you take me there?”

“Vhell, I vhas about to, last time. After I got zat stupid knot loose, I rushed to Hilbert Space to check it vhas OK. First I laid you down in four-dee spacetime. I zought you’d vhait for me. But vhen I came back, vhas nozzing zere.”

“How was I supposed to know you’d be back? I couldn’t stay there anyway. My children pulled me back.”

“
Tchildren?
Don’t you love me more zan zem?”

“Will they keep me from going to Hilbert Space?”

“No, no, dollink. Vhe can go out zrough za fifth dimension, or za sixth. Zen is no problem vhiz za timevhorms. Are you ready?” She began to grow again, getting bigger and bigger like at the Borghese museum.

“First answer my question. Why are you splitting apart like this? Lots of copies of you in Rome, and lots of copies at the movie theater.”

“Yeah, I’m everyvhere, svheetie. All zings to all men…and vimmens, too!”

“But what’s your motive?”

“I vhant you all to come togezzer. I vhant to get your group-mind loose. Come on, svheetie, get naked.”

Without thinking about it too much, I went ahead and stripped. The giant cunt-lips slid over me headfirst. I didn’t resist.

Babs must have plugged me right into her nervous system this time. When she swallowed me up, things got bright and brighter. I was seeing hundreds, thousands, of images at once. I was seeing what Babs was seeing out of each of her earthly cross sections.

Dreamy girls, panting boys, excited women, grunting men; moistened lips, pumping hands, spreading legs, pushy cocks. Babs was having a good time.

But not many of Babs’s partners were women. And not everyone was glad to see her. There were some twisted faces out there, some people screaming in fear and anger. Fists and knives flailed in, but Babs never budged.

The aggression on those faces gave me pause for thought. What
was
Babs up to? A full-scale invasion of Earth? I didn’t feel right, wedged deep down inside her vagina like this. I thought of the wasps who lay eggs in paralyzed prey. Was I to be Earth’s first casualty in the Attack of the Giant Ass From Hilbert Space?

“Hey Babs!” I tried to shout. “Let me out!” But my face was smothered in the slick folds of her wet flesh. Good God! Why had I stood still for this? Yet, all the while, I had a soggy, stubborn hard-on.

The multiplexed image of Babs’s lovers and haters faded out, and it was dark. There was a sensation of motion. I struggled and struggled, trying to find my way back out to light.

And then, all at once, I was free.

***

Well…how do you want it? Music and a light show? Strobing image-montage? Men in funny hats? Did you see Ken Russell’s
Altered States?
My favorite part was after the guy takes the mushroom potion in the FZAAAAT cave ZUZZZUZZZUZZ and THUBBZZZT reels out. Lizard out there. Or his wife. Lizard. Sphinx. Tits. The sand is blowing hard. They’re both gray with sand, she sphinxing on her elbows, he fetal on his side. The wind blows and blows and blows. The sandblast eats away at the two figures, which go from real to rudimentary to elemental. Then there is only the wind and the rippled desert.

Start with the noise of that wind. It’s a sound you may have heard before, some night when your brain kept running though your body was asleep. What is a dream really like? How can we forget them so easily?

What is it like in Hilbert Space? You should know. You live there.

At the most elemental level, reality evanesces into something called Schrödinger’s Wave Function: a mathematical abstraction which is best represented as a pattern in an infinite-dimensional space, Hilbert Space. Each point of the Hilbert Space represents a possible state of affairs. The wave function for some one physical or mental system takes the form of, let us say, a
coloring in
of Hilbert Space. The brightly colored parts represent likely states for the system, the dim parts represent less probable states of affairs.

The arrangement of the color
shades
is a subtler affair. A system’s tendency, for instance, to move from State A to State B, but not from State B to State A…a tendency like this is not any specific event which you can point to in space and time. These nonspecific properties correspond to overall
gestalts
in the Hilbert Space coloring. Alternating bands of red and green might, for example, represent a particle which is moving from left to right but which has no specific location. A good mood could be a golden haze not tied to any particular cause.

We can think of Hilbert Space as a vast cataloging of all possible events. The events are arranged along infinitely many perpendicular axes: right/left, happy/sad, near/far, sober/drunk, past/future, hot/cold, true/false, male/female, wet/dry, sun/moon, bitter/sweet, matter/antimatter, etc.

Each part of the universe makes its own contribution. You are reading, I am writing. Two spots of brightness. Going out from you are various bands of color, indicating your moods and predilections. Bands emanate from me as well…and where our color-bands cross each other there is interference. You change me and I change you. Each part of the universe makes its own contribution.

Taken as a whole, these individual contributions add up to the world as it is: a certain coloring in of Hilbert Space: the Universal Wave Function. Keep in mind that time itself is coded into the pattern. The pattern is not something that evolves: the pattern
is
.

Theologically, this idea is expressed by saying that God creates the whole universe
now
. God makes yesterday, today and tomorrow at the same time. Has to, since everything depends on everything else. The image is of a heavyset white-haired figure throwing a bucket of mingled paints at a wall. SPLAT,
fiat lux
, the job is done.