By BRB
He’s the kind of guy who calls you up just after dawn and says look I wanna tell you something. Sleep-blurry, disoriented, you don’t ask who it is because that’s the one thing you know. Instead you croak, yeah what? And then you hear about how the patent office screwed him again, the conspiracy of those threatened by what he can do, what he can show the world, this world that’s going down the tubes so who needs it anyhow? There’s talk of hell, and handbaskets, and then, inevitably, handmaidens: Linda, or Paulina, or Claire. What does she want now? Everything, you know. Everything. I dunno. What does anyone want? What do you want? What do I want? She wants to destroy me. All of them wanna destroy me. Well, anyway…. and then the click, and then the dial tone. The receiver replaced, your hand is free to wipe your face from crusty eyes to crusty lips. The pale light on the wall opposite the window lets you know that it isn’t worth it to try to get back to sleep. Your hand reaches across the bed but encounters only sheets, layered and blank like soft pages. The pillow beneath the back of your head feels like home, but it’s not.
You up, Chuck? A voice from the other room tells a familiar joke. There’s clinking, which you hope foretells coffee. I’m….awake, you croak before swallowing painfully and slowly opening your eyes again after having shut them equally slowly at some point following the phone call. Sam comes in, smiling, a steaming mug in each hand. My eyes just popped open at five and I couldn’t get back to sleep. Sam sets one mug on the side table with a chipper air that you struggle in vain not to find abrasive. I wanted to let you sleep but I guess the phone had other ideas. You can tell he wants you to tell him who it was without having to ask. The expectation reflexively rankles you, but you also know that he knows who it was already, he just wants confirmation. He just needs you to own up to it, to own it, so he no longer has to. I think I called him once from this phone, that’s how he knows the number. I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. What are you sorry about? Sam smiles reassuringly and sits on the edge of the bed, making you have to tense your muscles a bit to avoid rolling into him. I told you, I was already up. He reaches a hand to pat your thigh, giving you the type of permission that’s more like a demand; you comply and relax and roll into him.
Heat transfers to your groin through the sheets as you curl gently around Sam’s back, the part he jokingly calls his “lowest back,” a faintly fuzzy expanse between the edge of his tanline to the cleft of his ass that makes him shudder when you draw a line across it with your tongue-tip. Sam absently reaches over and tries to guide the mug of coffee from the side table to your grip without spilling. He’s only partially successful, and a line of small brown dots appears on the sheets, tracing the mug’s flightpath like a series of belated shadows. You smile gratefully to offset the mess and try not to dribble too much down your chin. Sam smiles back, then gets up. Coffee sloshes across your bare chest and onto you arm, hot then quickly cooling. I was going to wash those anyway, he says, and then leans down to lick the coffee from your shoulder before walking again into the other room. You wonder if the phone call will be mentioned again today, maybe at lunch on the phone or after work.
You think back on the machine, the obsessive applications for patents, grants, funding for further development, investors, interlocutors, the endless phone calls, the endless nights of talk and beer and the black stench of burnt coffee in a mug as it grew stale, then cold, then into a thick sienna stain. The Infernal Machine, you called it, first jokingly, then less so. But it was intoxicating to be obsessed, to join an obsession, to have this thing between three people in a room that shimmered above the metal and wires and plastic like a picture of yourself perfected, an angel made of heat and hope. The three of you, arrayed so many times in different combinations in the room, clustering and separating as you collectively pondered the meaning of clustering and separating. You remember chopping carrots into progressively tiny slivers as you wondered if Zeno was really onto something after all, about how things that split could always be split again, that when you keep halving the distance to the far wall you’re not just splitting space but splitting difference itself, splitting time, that a split atom is a split second, that the smallest space within is also an infinite space that takes an infinity to traverse, that the key to everything you want from the world, from each other, from the splitting cells of your brain and skin and the splitting cells of each other, the displacements that constituted breathing and thinking and moving, maybe it was somewhere in this logic loop, this infinite regress, this infinite redress to the injustice of linear time and exclusive space, that maybe somewhere in this loop it turns Möbius, turns every split into a doorway, every atom into a second and every second into just another atom to rearranged, displaced, manipulated, breathed in, breathed out, split again. You remember looking down at the counter and seeing paper-thin carrot discs sliding across a spreading pool of blood from your own finely sliced fingertips, and you remember a hand heavily placing itself on your other arm, the one with the knife. You can tell me your idea on the way to the hospital. His voice was fuller then, less hoarse than his current urgent croak, but the bass notes have remained constant, a lulling roar in the bones that accompanies whatever makes it into the ear. Okay. Okay. And you let yourself be guided from the room, followed by Sam, who hadn’t noticed what had happened until you passed him and now trailed after, full of questions and needs and concerns. In the car you whisper your magic words that could only be heard within the intimate space enclosing driver and passenger, the back seat too far, forgotten. Three two one, it’s the same as one two three. Backwards, forwards, it’s all just a relation. There’s two in three and one in two and one in three but there’s also two in one and three in two and three in one. It’s just a matter of how you split them, slice and dice them. That’s good, that’s good. I see what your saying. That basso rumble, that urgent assurance. And then you remember getting woozy and the darkness that accompanied it, and the sudden slap of the hospital fluorescents, and then the stitches. And in the room as it happened, in the corner, there he was, his hands busy with a sketchbook as he watched, busy busy, busy all the while.
And now you were split from that time and place, a distance both quantifiable yet containing infinities; you live in a space of two and the third has become one. The coffee had turned to whiskey and the rush of obsession into morbidity and stupor. Out of the entropy you salvaged what you could, and it turned out to be Sam, an entity made of concern and good cheer and sanity, a body comfortable where it is, where it’s going, comfortable with directions like forward and up, suspicious of the corkscrew pull of Möbius motion, Möbius desire. Split off and cocooned away from the indulgences and ridiculous excesses of word game philosophy and silly syllogism, you live on while the Infernal Machine lies forgotten, or rather cordoned-off, a crime scene, a primal scene, a dead end that was also a beginning. You live normal lives now, find normal happinesses, and only the phone and the hoarse desperation it carries breaks the barrier anymore, the corkscrew cord to the wall allowing time to overlap upon itself, the present punctured by the past, at least until the click. As you pull on your shirt and look at the wall, you contemplate the only memorial to the past Sam allows, the last group picture of the three, tweedy and green and so, so young. And yet even there you can see the split beginning, you soulful and Sam grinning like an idiot with a secret, and the third, looking off to the side, his bull-head slightly bowed, contemplating a maze he was about to be left within alone. You touch it and for split second your fingers remember the texture of atoms, the voids between them. And then, just as suddenly, it’s smooth again, just glass, faces under glass, faces preserved forever, gone forever.
It’s dinner when Sam brings it up again. What did he want? The dinner is sensible, protein and vegetables balanced on the plate, steak and asparagus curled around each other, yin and yang on white faux-china. Part of a new regime of Sam’s. We’re not getting any younger, you know. You try to focus on what he is saying now. Nothing, you know. He just needs someone to talk to. I just let him talk. I don’t want us to get mixed up in that again. By us you know he means you. The weak one, the one who almost cut himself into atoms contemplating time. The one who’s susceptible to low voices and persuasion, suggestion. Don’t worry, that’s over. He seemed to want to talk more about Claire anyway. I think she’s suing for alimony. Isn’t he broke? Well you know. There’s always something to sue for. What is it with him and all these women anyway? He never used to be like that. I always thought he wanted you, but I must have just been projecting. Who knows what he wants? I don’t think even he knows. How do you like the steak? It’s good. The marinade is good. Good job. Brown juices drip onto the green stalks from the steak-bit that hangs suspended from your fork before your lips as you tell him this, forming a stain that briefly looks like a shadow until you move the fork and it remains where it is.
That night you make him shudder with your tongue-tip, drawing the line up from the cleft of his ass to his tanline, but slowly, slowly, until the tongue-tip is nearly stationary, but not quite. You attempt to savor each tiny hair as your tongue moves over it, try to feel each skin cell as it sloughs off and is replaced by another, try to burrow into the space between each shudder, time wrinkling like a sheet, swelling like the parabola of his ass below your chin and the shallow valley of his spine as it extends up and up, beyond your range of sight. That night you make him shudder, and you feel enclosed there as if time were a pocket lined with the softest fur, enfolded and protected and warm. You slowly close your eyes and concentrate on the feel of the skin beneath your tongue, the taste like salt and cola, the smell like the coppery sea.
And when you lift your head at last and your eyes open, you aren’t surprised by the broadened back and darkened hair, the bull-head as it swivels on the pillow and smiles back at you, the rumble of the voice that reaches your bones before your ears. That’s a new one, where’d you learn that? None of your business. And you smile, and dip your head to do it again. The truth is you don’t remember. Your tongue-tip touches down where the cleft of his ass begins and you draw a line up toward the tanline, but slowly, halving the distance to it, then halving it again, and so on until your tongue is almost stationary, but not quite. You savor it as he shudders to life beneath you. He shudders, and you savor it.
