The couple slept soundly despite what had happened the previous night. Ishmael's arm was behind his head at an impossible angle that would soon cause him to lose circulation and to have a frightening dream. In this dream he would struggle to reach out and grab something -- a door handle, a key dropping into a sewer grate, an elevator button in a burning building -- and his real-life arm would snap out as well, freeing itself from behind his head.
S---- was curled up facing the wall. She wasn't dreaming; she wasn't in that sort of sleep yet. Ishmael reached his arm out in the air, freeing it from behind his head, and it fell by his side, outside of the covers -- sure nuff. Now his arm was free but cold even with the rush of blood rushing in to tickle his fingertips.
S---- hadn't moved for a while. She was warm and comfortable in that small pocket of body heat that persists as long as one remains motionless in bed, and she had tucked in the sheets well the night before so that Ishmael wouldn't steal them again.
Ishmael had a dream in which a doctor whom he had feared as a child was about to give him an injection with an absurdly inflated needle. He brought his arm up close to his body and pushed it beneath the warm sheets and turned away from S----. Turning on his side had pushed the sheets up and, as nature abhors a vacuum, cold air rushed in to fill the space.
This cold air hit the small of S----'s back and pushed her over the edge into what collectors of trivia call REM sleep. This freed her to dream of being a California Condor. She, with her giant wingspan, soared over cliffs and scanned the ground below for food. The wind rushed through nature's perfect airfoils that were her wings. The sun pleasantly heated her back, and she tilted slightly to gracefully turn circles in the air, letting the wind do most of the work. A man on the ground shot her right through the wing, near the shoulder, and she came plummeting to earth. S---- was an environmentalist and a cynic.
She woke up, decided that it was a dream, decided that of course it was a dream -- don't be stupid -- and decided that she didn't like the way the dream turned out. She turned toward Ishmael. Ishmael was asleep. Dawn was making parallel lines on the woodgrain ceiling by pushing through the venetian blinds. It looked like cartoons in which light shined through prison bars, S---- thought. She got up slowly, trying not to wake Ishmael. She removed a piece of bedspread fuzz that had snagged on her jagged fingernail, rolled open the bathroom door, entered the bathroom, closed the bathroom door, and peed.
She hoped Ishmael wouldn't wake up yet. She thought Ishmael might think that she had left. She wondered if Ishmael would actually think this. She wondered if Ishmael might not notice that her clothes were still piled on the floor. She wondered if Ishmael might feel the sudden, hopeless shock of abandonment and betrayal. She wondered if Ishmael would be relieved and thankful and would try not to show it when she reentered the bedroom. She wondered why Ishmael was so horny in the morning. She wondered if Ishmael was still asleep.
She rolled open the bathroom door and reentered the bedroom. Ishmael was still asleep. She pulled down the covers and slipped back into bed. She saw Ishmael's hand by his face. Men have awfully big thumbnails, she thought. She started to pick little balls of fuzz off of the bedspread. She pushed these little balls together into a bigger ball of fuzz. She put this ball of fuzz in the palm of her hand, held her hand up to her face, and blew on it. The ball of fuzz flew gracelessly from her hand, landed on the corner of the bed, and rolled off the bed and onto the floor.
S---- looked back over at Ishmael. She ran the back of her hand across Ishmael's shoulder and down his back. He woke up, turned over, and planted a filmy kiss on S----'s mouth. He smiled and put his left hand on that concave part of her side between her hips and her ribcage. His warm erection fell against her leg and the arch of his foot was so cold as it touched her calf that she reflexively yanked her leg back. "Sorry," he said.
He shook another dream out of his head. It was a dream of roach motels -- giant roach motels, laid out like a suburban tract in a field. And in each roach motel, a husband and wife presided over a couple of roach-like children. They had been singing joyfully in their roach motels, as if it had been a Broadway musical. Then he remembered what he and S---- had decided the night before. "Acid?" he asked and she remembered that she had said she wanted to last night before they had argued so she said "uh huh, sure."
Ishmael kissed S---- lightly on the mouth and got up to go to the bathroom. He tried to walk in such a way as to avoid that pace which was the resonant frequency of his erection. If he were to walk at such a pace, the bobbing of his penis which accompanied his steps would increase in amplitude like a sine wave trapped between two exponential functions and he would repeatedly, and loudly, slap himself in the belly with his own hard-on. This, he thought, would be silly.
He rolled open the bathroom door, entered the bathroom, and rolled the door closed. He reached for the bottle of Once Daily multivitamins. He tried to open the cap, then he reached over to dry his hand on a towel and tried again. He knocked a can of shaving cream over with his elbow, but this time he opened the bottle. He turned over the cap and pried off the plastic sealer-thing underneath and took out the remaining blotter doses.
He had three hits left. Ishmael ripped one of the hits off at the perforation and put the other two back under the sealer-thing underneath the cap and put the cap back on the vitamin bottle. He hoped his erection would subside so he could piss. He opened the other rolling door to the bathroom and walked into the kitchen. He took a pair of scissors out of the drawer and cut the piece of paper into two equal triangles. Then he turned around and went through both rolling doors back to the bedroom.
Ishmael handed one of the triangles to S---- and put the other one in his mouth. Strong stuff, ought to be enough, he thought. It tasted like paper. Ishmael eased himself down in bed and reached over S---- to turn off the electric blanket.
S---- put the piece of paper in her mouth. She said, "I'm worried about last night."
"Whaddya mean."
"Well, we were arguing and I don't think it's resolved and I hate to trip when there's something like that hanging over me."
Ishmael leaned over and kissed S---- on the forehead. "I love you very much. Don't worry about last night. It doesn't matter at all. I was just trying to define things I shouldn't have been trying to define I guess. This is a fun relationship and a light relationship and I shouldn't try to confine it or put labels on it or anything. You were right; I was wrong. I love you."
S---- didn't feel reassured but she decided it would be best if she acted as though that were just what she wanted to hear. She smiled and kissed his neck and put her arms around him and pulled him down to her. He put his arms around her back and slid down to kiss her.
While they kissed he wished that they hadn't argued last night. It wasn't really an argument about anything. It was just a matter of deciding on definitions. What's the relationship all about? Sure, it's open, but what does that mean? What do we mean to each other? Do you love me like you love anyone you fuck or is it something more? Do I dare let myself fall in love with you, or will you just break my heart if I do?
While they kissed she wished that they hadn't argued last night. She just wanted a fun relationship. They had so much fun when they were just having fun together. Now he wanted to put names on it and put it in a box. He wanted commitment and true love and permission to feel and other postgame nonsense.
He kissed her breast; she spread her legs. He wished they would spend more time on foreplay; she wished he didn't feel so obligated to do so much foreplay. He entered her.
She remembered that they had discussed sex last night. He said that they had both agreed on an open relationship but that he still felt guilty and ashamed when he went to bed with other people. Then he said that he read a book that said he should stop being ashamed and guilty about it anymore. Then he listed all of the people he had gone to bed with since he had started going out with S----. There was L----, whom S---- knew, and there were K---- and A----, whom she did not know.
S---- did not feel hurt by these names, but she felt that Ishmael had brought them up to try to hurt her and by this she was hurt. She felt that Ishmael wanted her jealous and this made her angry. She tensed her body. Ishmael interpreted this as impending orgasm and gave himself the go-ahead to come as well.
Ishmael wondered whether S---- was enjoying herself or not. She seemed preoccupied. But maybe not, maybe he was just paranoid. How am I feeling, he wondered. Is this as good as usual? What could I be doing different? God, orgasms are a drag when I think about them too much. Maybe if I could just let myself go next time.
S---- thought that Ishmael held her too tightly when they made love. She thought that maybe she should be on top more often. Ishmael, on the other hand, hated it when she was on top because he felt that she used his penis as if it were a fun sex toy that was, unfortunately, attached to a person.
It was over. So they lay on the bed, only moving to breathe, sweat dripping from his left temple down his cheek to smear on his forehead. They stayed like this for some time. Ishmael's breath returned to normal and eventually his penis slipped out on its own. He took this as his cue to get up and go to the bathroom. "I'm going to the bathroom," he said.
A corner of the sheet had worked its way in between Ishmael and S---- as they made love and its seam had made lines of indentations on S----'s left breast. She rubbed her finger along this groove on its path under her armpit and then back to her nipple and then back again. It felt funny and so she smiled.
Ishmael pissed into the toilet very accurately. It seemed further away than most toilets. His penis seemed different. It was a little slimy now, of course, but it was more than that. It felt different and it looked different. The way his fingers felt it was different from the way it felt his fingers. Maybe it is just a sex toy and not a real part of me, Ishmael thought, like fingernails or hair.
He went back into the bedroom and saw the closet door move. He looked at the closet door and saw that it was still closed so he looked down at S----. She put a Beatles tape in the stereo, looked up at Ishmael and smiled. "I think it's starting," she said.
Ishmael nodded his head slowly a couple of times, and then decided that it was interesting the way things moved when he nodded his head so he kept nodding slowly, and then from side to side and then around and around and then he moved his eyeballs from side to side with his head and sometimes against his head and things in the room slid closer and further away and grew and shrunk depending on how he coordinated his head and eyeballs. Ishmael thought briefly that a study could be done in which a grid would be set up with one axis being differing head movements and the other axis being eyeball movements, and at the coordinates of this grid data could be entered concerning the movement of objects caused by these two movements. This, he thought, would provide much helpful analysis. Then Ishmael realized that he probably looked a little foolish, so he stopped moving his head and his eyeballs and he sat down on the bed.
S---- didn't notice Ishmael moving his head and his eyeballs because she was too preoccupied with the ceiling. The wood-grain on the ceiling was very interesting, she thought. It was like the surface of Jupiter. She looked at two knots in the wood and thought that they looked like birds. She thought they didn't look like birds at all but like plastic bags. She thought they really looked like witches on broomsticks. "That one is catching up with the other one," she said. She could pretend they really were witches and that they were having a race to see which one could get to the wall first. S---- noticed that the ceiling seemed to flow like water as if it were the surface of a lake and she was below the water looking up at the surface and she took a deep breath just to make sure and she thought it was foolish to have done so. "The fishes are my friends," she said.
Ishmael thought S---- was absolutely the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his whole life. "The fishes are my friends, too," he said. "Your feet are like fishes." He thought that the alliteration was appropriate. He reached out and touched her foot.
"And your hands are like crabs," S---- said. She thought that that finished off the analogy quite well. An analogy shouldn't be left unfinished. "Not like crabs, but like crab hands, you know -- the hard things that go like this -- clop clop."
"The fishes are my friends, too. The fishes are everybody's friends!"
"It's beautiful. Everybody has friends in fishes. Fishes are like your feet."
"And your hands are like crabs.... Not like crabs but like crab hands. You know -- clop clop."
S---- felt her hands and thought that they didn't feel like crabs or crab hands but like fishes. Not the fishes that are her friends but like the fishes that you catch.
"Isn't it beautiful?" he said.
"What isn't beautiful?"
"Everything, isn't it? This is the best thing we could have done. It's so easy to love you now."
She twisted into a little roly-poly ball and stretched the pillow over her head. The pillow felt nice against her nose. She didn't like the feeling of his crab hands and she didn't want them to grab her because it might hurt.
Ishmael noticed that when he rubbed the arch of his foot against the corner of the closet that it felt like electric violins playing dissonance. He couldn't see the fishes but he knew they were his friends. He wondered if he should get up and check the mail.
"I think I'll get up and check the mail," he said.
"Are you going to put some clothes on?"
"I can't hear you speaking within the pillower love please speak without the pillower."
"Are you going to put some clothes on?"
"That's funny. Within the pillower; without the pillower."
"The pillow is real."
"Is the pillower your friend?"
"The pillow is my friend with the friendly fishes." She held on to the pillow.
"Do you want to make love?"
"No."
"Do you want to help me get dressed?"
"So you can get the mail."
"Yeah."
"I don't think I can."
"Too many fishes."
"Too much fishes. Huh?"
"Too many fishes to help me get dressed."
"I like the fishes."
"I like you."
"I like you like the fishes. As long as there are stars in the air and fishes swimming in the ceiling I'll love you through than true."
"That sounds like something real."
S---- thought about the music playing. She realized that they were playing it intentionally and that it wasn't simply a natural phenomenon. She thought it was terrific that they could influence their own environment to the extent that they controlled what music was playing. There are so many things we take for granted, she thought. She suddenly felt powerful, like the things in her life were truly under her control.
Ishmael thought that it was really odd when you are in a different color and it's moving away from yourself. He asked S----, "isn't that weird?"
"I think the fishes are going into the next room. I'm going there."
"Can I come with you?"
"No; you'll scare them away."
"Stay with me then."
"No. I want to stay with the fishes. The fishes are my friends."
The electric violins grew louder and more dissonant and they didn't turn off
like the Beatles and Ishmael noticed the bars of light on the ceiling and how
they were much more stable than the ceiling they were projected against, and
the rolling bathroom door sounded like something awful from the Bible when
it slammed shut and he looked around but sure enough the fishes were gone.
email Ishmael