The Sex Sphere (22 page)

“Look,” said Huba, “I’ll call in sick tomorrow. We’ll go fishing…right down there by the Neckar. It’s the last place the bulls would think to look for you. And…” He glanced over his shoulder, checking that Ute was out of earshot. “Give me that sphere. I want to try it after the wife’s asleep.”

“OK.” I took the soft little bean out of my pocket and handed it over. “Just make a kissing noise with your lips when you want her.”

***

Huba woke me at 6:00 the next morning.

“Come on,
Herr Professor
. The fish are biting.”

Ute had already left for work at the grocery. She and her boss went to the farmers’ vegetable market at 5:00 every day. Huba gave me some coffee for breakfast, and a stale bun. In Europe they don’t really understand about breakfast.

Sipping my coffee, I stared out the kitchen window. The Neckar was covered with mist. Cars streamed into Heidelberg, bumper-to-bumper, everyone’s lights on and the whole procession looking like a pearl necklace.

“She’s Hungarian,” said Huba suddenly.

“Who is.”

“Your
Sex Kugel
. Babs.”

“You fucked her?”

He looked a bit embarrassed. He wasn’t Westernized enough to be comfortable talking dirty. “Well…if you so flatly ask, I have to say yes. But she talks too; she talks Hungarian.”

“That’s because…” I was about to explain how Babs had eaten Zsuzsi, then thought better of it. What if Babs decided to chew up all the women who wouldn’t go along with her? No point upsetting Huba. I myself felt oddly neutral about this prospect. “Oh, never mind. Do you have a fishing-rod for me?”

“But naturally. How about a little
slivovitz?
” He reached down a medallion-shaped bottle of plum brandy from the cupboard. My stomach heaved.

“Maybe later.”

“I’ll bring it along. We’re going only right down there.” He pointed out the window to the grassy band on the other side of the road. “Did I show you my movie of the rats?”

“No.”

“This you have to see. In the apartment across the hall live two old women. Cows. Always complaining about noise. Sisters. They put bread down there, down on the railing by the river. They think they are feeding the swans. They are like
this
, these women.” Huba widened his eyes and let his mouth go slack, then moved his open palm slowly back and forth in front of his face, miming the unresponsiveness of extreme idiocy. “Rats eat their bread, lots of big rats. From here, from this window I made a movie of them. Wait!” Huba rushed into his dining room and set up his film projector. “Look, Alwin, look at the rats!”

He really did have a film of river rats as big as cats creeping through the grass, then climbing onto the railing to get the bread. More and more rats came, a fight started, the film ran out, the projector squeaked.

“And they won’t listen to me,” muttered Huba.

“You should show them this movie.”

“Stupid cows. Before I woke you today, they were already fighting. I’m surprised you didn’t hear the screams. You’d think they were being eaten alive.
Ach
, let’s go fish, away from women.”

“OK. But could you lend me a sweater? It looks chilly out there.”

“Sure, of course, take mine.”

When we got down to the river, the sun was starting to show. The river was still foggy, foggy in an interesting way. Instead of just coming up all over like steam, the fog seemed to come off the river along certain lines. It was as if there were invisible atmospheric vortex rings over the river, and the fog could appear only at the boundaries between cells. There was a picnic table to sit on. I took a bit of
slivovitz
. The rats were lying low.

“Bacon rind,” Huba was saying. “That makes the best bait. You see? I use a long piece that’s shaped like a little fish.”

He baited a hook for each of us and we cast. His cast went a good ten meters, but I did it wrong and landed my hook in the shallows. Some tiny fish, minnows smaller than the hook, nibbled at my bacon rind. A long barge chuffed past and the backwash pulled the little minnows upstream, then down. I tried another cast.

“Let it sit on the bottom,” urged Huba. “There’s eels down there. Delicious, but very hard to kill.”

The sun was out in earnest now, burning away the fog and dew. I laid down on the grass and closed my eyes. The sunlight through my eyelids was a pleasant yellow-orange. It was nice not to have any women around. I drifted toward Hilbert Space.

“Don’t you want her back?” asked Huba just then.

“Who?” I shaded my eyes against the sun.

“The sex sphere.”

“There’s lots of copies, all connected in some higher dimension. Like fingers. Babs plans to saturate the Earth, and to make everyone love with her. I’m supposed to make speeches that she’s good for you.” But today I barely had the energy to sit up, let alone go out and start a new religion.

“I don’t see how you and Babs can enlist the women,” said Huba. “They don’t think like us, you know.”

“Babs doesn’t have to be just a big ass,” I protested. “She can be a crystal ball showing nice things, or a man’s head. Don’t you think women would like a man’s head that always listens to them and agrees?”

Huba shrugged. “Women have no fantasy. They want the world just like it is. With all the little touches and details.”

“Yeah…maybe you’re right. Women care about specifics. Men care about generalities, about abstract principles. I’m ready to wipe out all the details of the world as it is, just for the sake of the beautiful general principle of Hilbert Space. Sort of like selling the family silver to buy drugs. The women won’t like it. But...” My voice trailed off. It was as if Babs had hypnotized me.

“What can the sex spheres do to the women?”

In the distance I heard a siren. And faint screams? How many copies of Babs were loose in Heidelberg? One for each woman? Oh God, what if she was killing them? I let my mind spread out into Hilbert space, trying to set things right. A strange, twinkling interval of time passed.

“You’ve caught something, Alwin,” exclaimed Huba. He’d set the two rods into special holders, so all we had to do was watch the tips. Mine was twitching.

Rather than sitting up, I reached out with my magic energy field. Whirl, whirl, whirl, the reel wound in. Something slithered ashore…something odd.

“
Mein Gott!
” shouted Huba. “What is going on?”

Lying there on the grassy riverbank was a sort of little…man. Instead of arms and legs he had only a single wheel at the bottom, a small spoked wheel like from a tricycle. Running up from the wheel was a long tubular leg…or was it a neck?…and at the other end from the wheel was the creature’s head. His skin was yellow and hairless, his bald head was long and thin. He had a projecting cucumber-nose and a smiling, lipless mouth-slash.

“Hi, Rubber,” said the little man, spitting out my hook and sitting up. “I’m Wheelie Willie. Remember me?” He had a high, lively voice. By way of jogging my memory, Wheelie Willie straightened out his body and putt-putted around me in a small circle, riding his wheel like a unicyclist. “Hooray for Rubber v. B. Tire!” he piped.

Remember? Of course I remembered. Wheelie Willie was a character I invented back in graduate school at Rutgers. I used to draw his adventures for the college paper, the Rutgers
Daily Targum
. You could look it up. Most of the strips were about drugs and radical politics, so I used a pseudonym: Rubber v. B. Tire.

“What were you doing in the river?” I asked him.

“Looking for women.” His smile broadened. “It’s hard because there aren’t any. There’s hardly any women left in Heidelberg.”

“
Was ist den los?
” asked Huba for the second time. “What’s going on?” Wheelie Willie and I were speaking English, of course, which left Huba in the cold.

“This is Wheelie Willie,” I explained. “He’s from a cartoon strip I used to draw.”

“Then, why is he real?”

“This is
Doktor Bitter
’s doing,” said W.W. in German. “He is like a hole in the fabric of reality. All around him it starts now to unravel.”

“Ah, German he speaks,” exclaimed Huba. “But why doesn’t he have arms?”

“I can’t draw arms,” I apologized. “I can never get the shoulders right. And his nose stands for a dick.”

“I’m a muffdiver!” shrilled W.W. “A man about town.”

“Do you know Babs?” Huba asked him. “She’d be perfect for you.” Huba fumbled in his pocket and pulled out the soft bean. Before I could stop him, he’d
smeep
ed Babs up to standard size.

“Cowabunga!” cried Wheelie Willie.

“Alwin, I’ve been very bad,” whispered the hovering sphere. A bedroom eye peeped out at me from beneath a puddled jumbo breast. In an instant, Wheelie Willie was beneath her, pumping at her slit.

“Hot dog!” yelped the yellow little clown presently. “I’m cookin’!” He buzz-sawed back a few feet and sneezed. A gusher of sperm shot from his nose—how disgusting. Babs looked like the old Sherwin Williams Paint Company’s “Cover the Earth” logo, a sphere half-covered with dripping paint.

“Blurp,” she blubbed, and bounded into the broad brown brook.

Just then Huba’s rod-tip started twitching.

“You reel it in, Alwin,” said Huba. “I’m scared.”

“No thanks. If we keep fishing, this is going to look like a Bruegel engraving. Let’s split before Babs comes back.”

“Could you wipe my nose?” requested Wheelie Willie.

While I found a hankie, Huba took out a knife and cut his fishing line. We took apart the rods and hustled up the riverbank, Wheelie Willie in the rear.

“There’s my car,” shouted Huba. “Get in and I’ll take you downtown. Me, I’m going to work. This craziness is more than I can outlast.”

I got in front next to Huba, and Wheelie Willie installed himself on the floor between my legs. He was only about one meter tall. He wanted to know if I had any marijuana.

“It’s
slivovitz
or nothing,” I told him. “This is Germany. I haven’t scored since I got here.”

“Have you tried Turks?” piped the yellow little head. “Hash from Turks?”

“Shut th’ fuck up.”

I had to think, think about what was real. Start with Hilbert Space, the ultimate reality. Every possibility there, no one possibility chosen. Everything equals Nothing.

Yet there was something, call it U, something that I had in the past called the real world. The world as we knew it. The facts of the situation. U for universe.

There was something else, perhaps just as big: B. B for Babs. I was in some way coupled to Babs now. B wanted to absorb U. B wanted U to be a possibility instead of a reality.

There was a third thing, call it I. I was like a window from B to U, a hyperspace tunnel, a wave-function amplifier, a hole in the dimensions. Things were gushing into U through I, things like Wheelie Willie.

High on our left, the Heidelberg Castle slid by. There was still some mist in the trees beneath it, and the huge ruin seemed to float on the hillside, weightless and unreal. Then we were in the city itself.

“How about here?” suggested Huba, pulling over by Heidelberg’s quaint and scenic
Alte Brucke:
the Old Bridge. In point of fact the Old Bridge is about thirty years old. Some nameless asshole blew up the original on the last day of World War II. But, hey, the replica is beautiful anyway. If you look down at it from the castle, the Old Bridge looks sort of like a dragon crossing the water: regular arches for centipede legs, two towers like horns at the Heidelberg end, and a yawning portcullis mouth. It’s a pleasant spot, sunny and mellow. But today something was wrong.

There were no women in sight. Just men and children. Men and children and sex spheres. I should have been upset, but—God forgive me—I wasn’t. I was happy. Babs had really and truly gotten to me.

The spheres floated among the men, arousing no more comment than if they’d been real women. They wore clothes…skirts or tight jeans on the bottom, and T-shirts or blouses on top. You could see their mouths set down in the necks of the shirts, and below the breasts, the blouses had lacy holes for the eyes to peep out.

“Look what you’ve done!” cried Huba. “The sex spheres have eaten all the women! Ute! I have to go see about my Ute!”

I should really have ridden right back with him to check on Sybil. But, hell, I could fly back to her any second. Right now I just had to check out this action. Big guns boomed in the distance. That would be the Army, reacting.

Wheelie Willie and I jumped out of the car, and Huba sped away.

“I saw some super-funky Turks back there,” coaxed Wheelie Willie. “For sure we could score off them.”

I looked down at him, the personification of my 1972 psyche. Thin and yellow, he looked like a tightly rolled wheatstraw-paper joint. With a wheel at one end, and a cock for his nose. “It’s great to see you in real life, Wheelie Willie. Would you settle for a beer?”

“You think they’ll serve me?”

Two brightly dressed sex spheres brushed past. Shopgirls on an outing. Nice tits. Across the street a gangly young man was necking with his sex-sphere girlfriend. She wore a cute lavender dress. Right down the sidewalk were two mother sex spheres. One bounced along next to her two young children, keeping up a steady stream of chatter. The other hovered over a baby carriage, big fat tit hanging out of her sweater. Happy baby sucked his milk.

I led Wheelie Willie around the corner and into a place called the
Schnookeloch
. They have a good Munich beer on tap there: Hacker-Pschorr. A sex sphere in a white apron and a tight black top floated over. I ordered two big
Exports
.

“What does
Export
mean?” asked W.W.

“They have two types of beer,” I explained. “
Export
and
Pils. Pils
takes longer to draw from the tap. It’s bitterer and foamier. Don’t worry though,
Export
is still German. You’ll know you’re in Heidelberg.”

Three sex spheres were drinking together at a table near us. Looked like students from the University. Jeans, skimpy T-shirts and big knockers. They drank by tilting forward and sticking their rolled-up tongues into the beer.
Ssssuuuuuck
. Big mouths and strong tongues. One of them peeked over at me from under her breast. I waved.