The internal vacuum tubes
began cooking, the
static electricity whisked
across the thick hunter
green glass that brightened in
telegenic,
spectral laced borders. Soon
the affected
walnut cabinet sent out a hint
of consumption.
Her face enlarged from above,
out of focus,
then sharpened. A beautiful
pageant girl of Irish,
maybe Norwegian-American
youth, tucking a
stray curl under the white
plastic bathing cap. In
a one-piece swimsuit, she
knelt forward on the
beach, her long fingers
delicately collecting a
sand dollar, then she stared
back at me, toward
the parking lot.
"Hey, Dunce, they want your
balls."
Up in the parking lot, the
lanky guy trying to carry
a football, basketball, a can
of tennis balls and a
volley ball, got swamped by a
horde of hunk
greazers exiting the woodie
station wagon. One
of them, maybe part latino,
and compact cute,
grabbed the volley ball and
headed down to
the sand, growling and kicking
back a rooster
tail, causing Dunce to lose
everything.
"Wow", I yelped. "Ho ho."
And nearly spilt my
R C Cola.
"Wooooooooo," the girls by
the hot dog stand
harmonized. They were looking
past Dunce and
Morning Glory, who just
accidently crumpled her
prize, as they all ogled Rhett
showing somewhat
atheletic prowess spiking the
ball over the net.
Their gaze turned to pity as
they shifted attention
to the blonde while scarfing
down frankfurters at
the counter. All were in
one-piece suits and most
were wearing bathing caps, and
I could
imagine they smelled of suntan
lotion. The owner
and cook and probably the
builder of the dingy
yellow plywood hut on wheels,
that had
illustrations of banana splits
on the sides, though
they weren't on the menu, was
an overweight
man wearing a white tanktop
and apron, a
lawful white paper hat and a
grey day old
beard. He kept eying
everything from an
apathetic yet discouraged
side.
They commented how she was
a junior, yet still
didn't have a boyfriend. She
was a knockout, yet
she didn't want any of the
boys who pursued
her, cause they weren't him.
Rhett walked many
girls home, and he probably
kissed several girls
on the mouth. The wrong girls.
The ones who
chewed gum in class and smoked
in the
bathroom. The ones who got
detention. Morning
Glory was "too good" for him,
a snob. He didn't
want a Miss Prissy, they
surmized. Like most of
them, a Junior at Theodore
Roosevelt High, she
could attain what they
couldn't, the best looking
boy in school, if she'd at
least chew gum in class.
As the sea gulls picked at
scraps in the far corner
of the parking lot and Morning
Glory got up to
collect the sun bleached and
sand worn shells, a
ruse to get away from the
beach crowd, Dunce
rested against the station
wagon, and realized
he caught the eye of one of
the kids at the
stand. She was a sophmore,
like himself, and
had the shiniest auburn locks
braided in almost
professionally done pigtails,
which when she
disdainfully turned away,
whipped her freckled
nose.
From somewhere else, a
group of a dozen
adolescents descended around
the hot dog
stand and the old, rusted
Chevy truck that
jackknife parked the rig. They
were playing tag.
The tall skinny kid sought
refuge under a palm.
The stud at the volley ball
net got distracted by
the new girls and lost his
serve. Morning Glory
was grabbing shells like they
were left in a line
on the beach, heading towards
an
unpopulated area.
With the midday sun glowing
through my eyelids,
and with the warming sand
against my shirtless
back, I didn't know why I was
there, yet it was
fabulous, until irrate spats
of venom came down
at me from above. Stopping
game play I was.
Rhett was trying to take my
head off as I got to
my feet, bare as they were. in
fact, my only attire
were cutoff jeans, and I could
tell, no
underwear.
I stood silent, trying to
determine the situation,
with the guys around me
boiling, unsympathetic.
So I was prodded along by the
baking sand. The
tops of my toes felt the sting
as they scraped the
inner dark gummy part of the
asphalt's edge,
liquifying in the heat. I
managed my way to the
woodie, killing my arches with
every step finding
a bit of gravel, and leaned
against its side. I
closed my eyes again, and a
spray of water hit
my cheek. Two beautiful senior
girls rushed by,
wet, pinching the water from
their noses and
wringing their whole healthy
bodies.
I'd follow them to the
counter, but first I had to
check the thick, green-tinged
glass I was up
against. Something forced me
to ponder my
reflection, as things seemed
so different. My
palms on the roof, I searched
my reflection, and
realized I was now a
sun-bleached blond, with
much fuller hair, and, no
mistaking, I was at least
five inches taller. I had to
bend my knees to
reach as far down as I did
before. I touched the
wide whitewall. The tire was
rough and its tread
was worn. There was a slight
whiff of rubber rot. I
turned to the hot dog
vender.
The old man distracted me
from the two girls.
"Here you go, son." He
handed me an an
orange soda in a Dixie cup and
a hot dog
wrapped in
paper.
The heat lamp warming the
buns might as well
of been pointed at my copper
zipper, and I felt
the
old man knew it. My heart was
racing, my
trachea bypassed my vocal
chords for sure, and
my legs, even with new color
and hairy length
were numb. I was a seduced
male. They were
head to bobbing head, talking,
unaware of me,
until I slipped a hand, a
quivering hand, onto the
closest one's thigh. Now, the
man looked up
from wiping the counter top.
The girl glared
back at first, then instantly
put on a smile. She
pulled the swim cap from her
head, revealing
rich black hair that went to
her tender shoulders,
then she reached down and
removed, of all
things, a cat collar from her
ankle.
I was playing with the
elastic edge of the bottom
part of her suit. She was
sliding her womanly
fingers across my chest. The
cook called for his
wife, who came from the back
room, where the
soda cannisters and electrical
outlets were
located.
"Son," he said, no emotion
on his unkempt face.
"You two can use the back
room, if you want. My
wife doesn't need to sleep
all day." He turned to
his side. "Go get some relish
at the store, and..."
He leaned toward the crag of a
woman. "Get
some beer for me."
"Isn't it strange how
people's lives come
together?" I asked,
interupting my discourse.
We were in the university's
computer simulation
lab, just Dr. Edwards and
myself. I was now a
middle-aged man, and he was in
late
middle-age, though, of course,
you're as young
as you want to be. It was
eleven-thirty at night,
and the entire floor was long
since silent for the
day. The campus below was
itself void of
pedestrians, and completely
still, with well lit
areas around the buildings and
walkways.
He seemed preoccupied about
something,
even after what I just told
him. Unbelievable.
Finally, he came around to
face me.
"Of course, that's the
wildest coincidence I"ve
heard..."
"Not really," I
interrupted. " My adolescent torrid
imaginings were too numerous
to allow for
improbability."
"Far-fetched."
It was odd to him that
'Sweeties', as he called it,
would've influenced my life,
when he was the
guy who played Dunce all those
years ago. Of
course, since then, he went to
college, got
interested in the field of
computer graphics,
which led to an increasing
knowledge of VR,
and led to a professorship at
a university. I've
loved talking to this man ever
since as a college
student in the seventies,
first as a TA, he turned
me on to computer simulation
programming. I
wanted to engage him in
discussing his latest
theories, and was tactlessly
trying to jump-start
him that night. As his
colleague, it sometimes
seemed just as nebulous as
ever, in that I was
always playing catch-up.
"Remember, Tom, when I
progammed a
computer to play
tic-tac-toe?"
Edwards nodded
thoughtfully.
It was in the early part of
my student days when
it was done by punch cards and
the air
conditioned room wasn't just
for our comfort. The
machine would overheat doing
simple
arithmatic. Now, it was full
sensory teledildonics
simulation VR games such as
Tea With The
Kupcheks, which lets the
participant experience
virtual wife swapping. As part
of the faculty, I
made the mistake of bringing
home prototype
equipment and software, taking
advantage of
the perks. It was, indeed
educational, but that
went south when my son
discovered the
software under my
mattress.
"I spend so many waking
hours teaching or in
research that I could never
use it to the extent
my kid does."
"What about Jenny?" he
asked.
"I think she must come home
on her lunch hour.
She's addicted to digital sex.
I know she prefers it
over me. Mr. Frankie Fractal
has stolen my wife."
He said we were too damn
good. The lighting
was limited to what was on our
terminals, so
there was a clear view of the
campus, without
interference.
"She takes off her clothes
and puts on the
cellophane body liner," I
began. My sweet
Jenny, with her short bangs,
her turned up nose,
her passion. "Then, into the
white canvas Lanier
suit and shoes she wiggles."
The inner layer
known as the 'smart skin',
loaded with
micro-transducers, a web of
intimate tactile
stimulators that could make
her feel anything
from a rash to goose flesh.
She slips on the
gloves, which, again, could
let her experience a
'virtual' handshake or make
friends with any part
of somebody's anatomy, or hold
a glass of
champagne, and discern it as
being glass and
not plastic or wood. The
lightweight
head-mounted display comes on,
and she is
sitting in the nonexistent
living room of the
Kupcheks, the swinging couple
offering her tea
and cake. "It's lunch hour,
and most people are
rushing through drive-thrus,
unwrapping
pastrami sandwiches at their
desks, or doing
errands, but my wife is at
home daintily holding
a teacup and saucer that
aren't there and trying
to get perved before she has
to get back to the
job."
There was just a faint grin
from the man as he
stood towering in front of the
full length window,
a slight hunch showing through
the argyle
patterned sweater he wore. "I
indulge in the
Walk Through The Forest
program," he said.
"There is something
therapeutic about even a
virtual stroll through an old
growth forest. To
compile the data when forming
the simulation
was also helpful to the soul,
like being a Noah
archivist."
A good place for poor me to
go and whack-off
with privacy, behind a
sequoia.
"We've worked several years
on most of the
senses. This department has
even gone as far as
co-development with the
Japanese. We've all
worked like hell." He came
away from the
window, and looked down on me
as I sat
backwards in an office chair.
"I, alone, got the
'smell'."
With his peculiar humble
sideways march to the
blackboard, the three words
'in the dark' jabbed
at my brain. The flourescents
came on. He broke
a piece of chaulk and began
drawing, all the
while intermittantly facing me
in the harsh light,
his gold wire rims his only
facial feature.
Everything this man said was
fact, and I knew
what he was saying. He created
smellavision.
Tom Edwards invented
smellavision, and I was
not told, yet he was still
making it seem like I was
his closest confidant. I'd be
at his throat like a
wounded pit bull if he wasn't
so nervous. He
proceeded to detail his
formulae for Olfactory
Stimuli Reproduction with
Applications in Virtual
Reality. Some sort of periodic
table was put up,
then came the equations
dealing with electrical
resistance correlation. He
told me about a
breakthrough in micro-robotics
that, together
with other new tools,
molecules could be altered
like tinker toys, and
nanotemplates would boil
them off in our nostrils,
mimicing molecular
clusters of various scents, as
with electronic
brands on our membranes, we'd
detect
nonexistent odors.
At the last row of faux
granite tables, caught off
guard, scribbling on a yellow
notepad, even
while he shut off the lights
and wiped the green
board clean and was breathing
over my
shoulder, I got down on paper
the essentials.
Agitated and too close. Salt
and pepper curls on
his neck, pulsing against his
jugular. He tore the
top sheet along the
perforation. The nearest
tube's screen blasting from
his lenses. He wrestled
with what to do before leaving
the page alone
and withdrawing to the next
chair over.
"A foreign graduate student
of mine, from Brazil,
told me who rules," he said
quietly. "They that
formed a consortium of South
American
countries, in secret. A people
who have the
resources to hire discreet
Anglo mercenaries to
fulfill the agenda when in the
United States. My
student, an Arawakan Indian,
gave the bastards
my research."
"What agenda?"
The rain forests should be
preserved. Slash and
burn policies should be hence
forth stopped.
They believe this planet will
die if the Amazon
Basin is over inhabited and
used up in urban
sprawl and fuel, and all that
remain fertile are
pastures."
Some leadership for this
was needed.
"A beautiful dark-skinned,
runty by our standards,
Stone Age, poison-tipped
arrow, deep forest
tribe presides over the member
states," Dr.
Edwards continued. "Their main
point is
reciprocity. It must have been
a chuckle to say
there must be something called
Wild Prairie while
still living the hunter
gatherer life thousands of
miles away."
I swallowed hard, staring
at a mouse pad. "Our
prairie?"
He said something about the
Mexican prairie,
too, and I pushed back,
springing from the seat,
and began pacing. "The kid was
yanking your
chain." I fuzzed everything
from my mind and
quickly asked about what
alloys would be used
in the transducers, only to
catch a paranoid
glance. He then got up and
joined me at the
window.
"They have my work, though
I don't know for
what they need olfactronics.
Now they will want
to eliminate the source."
Going through my mind was
either a darkly clad
commando unit or neatly
groomed,
business-suited smoothies with
concealable
automatics. Dr. Edwards,
however, assured me
that it would be a gang of
grunge wearing forty
year olds, probably with
skateboards that had
dual purposes as laser
assisted fire arms that had
silencers and shot Talons. He
went on to explain
that various men with that
description would
throughout the day and night
position
themselves, taking turns,
standing alone at a
particular street lamp that
was near the library's
entrance, and provided a view
of his car in the
Engineering parking lot. I
tried picturing myself
wearing a baseball cap
backwards and riding a
skateboard, then I grabbed
him by the arm and
headed for the lobby. As
expected, he began
whining like his life was in
danger, but I was
going to confront those fears
by taking him
directly to that light pole,
which at that time of
night would surely be
unoccupied.
How often does a professor
twosome come out
the main doors and become
silent and as still as
the midnight surroundings of a
campus? Daring
not to lose momentum using the
elevator, I had
pushed him along through the
stairwell, all the
while relating a scene of
incredible sensual
seclusion in a limitless field
of wheat and
sometimes within endless rows
of corn, ready for
the first harvest of my
winsome new brides and I.
Our land and crop, for once,
and our mattress.
My piece of the dream that
nothing would strip
away. My mentor and I moved
down the pristine
walkway toward the curb.
A man with the feared
profile was unaware of
us, doing foot stunts with his
board. He was
about
thirty yards of hedging away,
on the sidewalk,
and all we had to do was back
out of sight. On
his waist was a belt purse
large enough to hold
guns and ammo. Perhaps Edwards
noticed that
as well, because he broke from
me and ran for
the parking lot. The chirp of
the door unlocking
on his Lexus. The patter of
his hard shoes on the
pavement. The skateboarder
momentarily stood
as still and stupid as me,
then drew a
semi-automatic from the bag,
and rolled past
me in a heartbeat, shoving me
to the ground.
Another goon popped up from
behind the Lexus
and, in a combat stance, fired
a 9mm round
from his pistol straight at
the oncoming man. He
missed and began shouting. "We
have the info,
Dunce! You are so dumb, dude.
You are too
smart to let live."
He fired again.
Dr. Edwards felt the impact
of the slug against his
cranium. He almost felt it
tear through his brain,
except for the sudden cold and
silence and
darkness beyond
achievability.
I looked to my side as I
lay on the grass, the team
of sidewalk surfers wheeling
it into the night.
"That was so cool!" he
shouted in my face. "It was
like sensory deprivation. This
is exactly the kind
of GAME OVER our shareholders
want."
end