George Saunders - Escape from Spiderhead

D rip on? Abnesti said over the P.A.

Whats in it? I said.

Hilarious, he said.

Acknowledge, I said.

Abnesti used his remote. My MobiPak whirred. Soon the Interior Garden looked really nice. Everything seemed super-clear.

I said out loud, as I was supposed to, what I was feeling.

Garden looks nice, I said. Super-clear.

Abnesti said, Jeff, how about we pep up those language centers?

Sure, I said.

Drip on? he said.

Acknowledge, I said.

He added some Verbaluce to the drip, and soon I was feeling the same things but saying them better. The garden still looked nice. It was like the bushes were so tight-seeming and the sun made everything stand out? It was like any moment you expected some Victorians to wander in with their cups of tea. It was as if the garden had become a sort of embodiment of the domestic dreams forever intrinsic to human consciousness. It was as if I could suddenly discern, in this contemporary vignette, the ancient corollary through which Plato and some of his contemporaries might have strolled; to wit, I was sensing the eternal in the ephemeral.

I sat, pleasantly engaged in these thoughts, until the Verbaluce began to wane. At which point the garden just looked nice again. It was something about the bushes and whatnot? It made you just want to lay out there and catch rays and think your happy thoughts. If you get what I mean.

Then whatever else was in the drip wore off, and I didnt feel much about the garden one way or the other. My mouth was dry, though, and my gut had that post-Verbaluce feel to it.

Whats going to be cool about that one? Abnesti said. Is, say a guy has to stay up late guarding a perimeter. Or is at school waiting for his kid and gets bored. But theres some nature nearby? Or say a park ranger has to work a double shift?

That will be cool, I said.

Thats ED763, he said. Were thinking of calling it NatuGlide. Or maybe ErthAdmire.

Those are both good, I said.

Thanks for your help, Jeff, he said.

Which was what he always said.

Only a million years to go, I said.

Which was what I always said.

Then he said, Exit the Interior Garden now, Jeff, head over to Small Workroom 2.

II

I nto Small Workroom 2 they sent this pale tall girl.

What do you think? Abnesti said over the P.A.

Me? I said. Or her?

Both, Abnesti said.

Pretty good, I said.

Fine, you know, she said. Normal.

Abnesti asked us to rate each other more quantifiably, as per pretty, as per sexy.

It appeared we liked each other about average, i.e., no big attraction or revulsion either way.

Abnesti said, Jeff, drip on?

Acknowledge, I said.

Heather, drip on? he said.

Acknowledge, Heather said.

Then we looked at each other like, What happens next?

What happened next was, Heather soon looked super-good. And I could tell she thought the same of me. It came on so sudden we were like laughing. How could we not have seen it, how cute the other one was? Luckily there was a couch in the Workroom. It felt like our drip had, in addition to whatever they were testing, some ED556 in it, which lowers your shame level to like nil. Because soon, there on the couch, off we went. It was super-hot between us. And not merely in a horndog way. Hot, yes, but also just right. Like if youd dreamed of a certain girl all your life and all of a sudden there she was, in your Domain.

Jeff, Abnesti said. Id like your permission to pep up your language centers.

Go for it, I said, under her now.

Drip on? he said.

Acknowledge, I said.

Me, too? Heather said.

You got it, Abnesti said, with a laugh. Drip on?

Acknowledge, she said, all breathless.

Soon, experiencing the benefits of the flowing Verbaluce in our drips, we were not only fucking really well but also talking pretty great. Like, instead of just saying the sex-type things we had been saying (such as wow and oh God and hell yes and so forth), we now began freestyling re our sensations and thoughts, in elevated diction, with eighty-per-cent increased vocab, our well-articulated thoughts being recorded for later analysis.

For me, the feeling was, approximately: Astonishment at the dawning realization that this woman was being created in real time, directly from my own mind, per my deepest longings. Finally, after all these years (was my thought), I had found the precise arrangement of body/face/mind that personified all that was desirable. The taste of her mouth, the look of that halo of blondish hair spread out around her cherubic yet naughty-looking face (she was beneath me now, legs way up), even (not to be crude or dishonor the exalted feelings I was experiencing) the sensations her vagina was producing along the length of my thrusting penis were precisely those I had always hungered for, though I had never, before this instant, realized that I so ardently hungered for them.

That is to say: a desire would arise and, concurrently, the satisfaction of that desire would also arise. It was as if (a) I longed for a certain (heretofore untasted) taste until (b) said longing became nearly unbearable, at which time (c) I found a morsel of food with that exact taste already in my mouth, perfectly satisfying my longing.

Every utterance, every adjustment of posture bespoke the same thing: we had known each other forever, were soul mates, had met and loved in numerous preceding lifetimes, and would meet and love in many subsequent lifetimes, always with the same transcendently stupefying results.

Then there came a hard-to-describe but very real drifting-off into a number of sequential reveries that might best be described as a type of nonnarrative mind scenery, i.e., a series of vague mental images of places I had never been (a certain pine-packed valley in high white mountains, a chalet-type house in a cul-de-sac, the yard of which was overgrown with wide, stunted Seussian trees), each of which triggered a deep sentimental longing, longings that coalesced into, and were soon reduced to, one central longing, i.e., an intense longing for Heather and Heather alone.

This mind-scenery phenomenon was strongest during our third (!) bout of lovemaking. (Apparently, Abnesti had included some Vivistif in my drip.)

Afterward, our protestations of love poured forth simultaneously, linguistically complex and metaphorically rich: I daresay we had become poets. We were allowed to lie there, limbs intermingled, for nearly an hour. It was bliss. It was perfection. It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.

We cuddled with a fierceness/focus that rivalled the fierceness/focus with which we had fucked. There was nothing less about cuddling vis--vis fucking, is what I mean to say. We were all over each other in the super-friendly way of puppies, or spouses meeting for the first time after one of them has undergone a close brush with death. Everything seemed moist, permeable, sayable.

Then something in the drip began to wane. I think Abnesti had shut off the Verbaluce? Also the shame reducer? Basically, everything began to dwindle. Suddenly we felt shy. But still loving. We began the process of trying to talk aprs Verbaluce: always awkward.

Yet I could see in her eyes that she was still feeling love for me.

And I was definitely still feeling love for her.

Well, why not? We had just fucked three times! Why do you think they call it making love? That was what we had just made three times: love.

Then Abnesti said, Drip on?

We had kind of forgotten he was even there, behind his one-way mirror.

I said, Do we have to? We are really liking this right now.