The Fermata

  She would turn and sit and look in at me. We would describe how pleasant it had been. “And see?” I would say. “The washcloth did not fall. Your modesty was maintained.”

  “Now I can sleep,” she would say. I would refocus on her hair, which would look beautiful and thick and tossed around. Though we wouldn’t be able to shake hands properly through the door, we would hook index fingers and shake good-bye that way. Her door would close and I would hear the lock on the knob turn and the bolt slide spftly into place. I would close my door, too, and lock it, but I wouldn’t reinstate the chain lock on my side—for it would seem to me that the sound of my chaining would constitute a faint rudeness after what we had done together.

  The next morning, when I opened the door to the outside, I would find a small white bundle at my feet. It would be the Suzanne Vega tape wrapped in one of the now-stiffened washcloths, with a note saying, Take care of yourself—A.J.S. I wouldn’t be sure if this gift was meant to show that she knew that I was the one who had switched the tapes in the car, or whether it was simply a friendly gesture. But I would take care of myself, at least twice, before driving back to Boston.

  That was what I planned to happen. What did happen, though, is that after an hour and a half or so of steady driving on the Mass Pike, an hour and a half full of hope and keyed-up concentration, I saw a small twirling rectangular shape fly out of Adele’s car window.

  She hadn’t liked it. How very sad and disappointing. Had she listened to all of it and then decided she didn’t like it, or had she hated it so much that she had tossed it halfway through? I pushed up on my glasses and checked her car stereo: yes, Suzanne Vega was back in place. Nor were Adele’s nipples noticeably erect under her pink floral sweater. Was she made of stone? Imagine her chucking my cassette right out the window! Hours and hours of work, all custom joinery, all for her, dismissed. Of course I had said that she should feel free to do that, but still, I hadn’t expected her to do it. My pride was hurt. I paced around in the tall grass where I thought I had seen the tape land, but I couldn’t find it. And I didn’t want to spend much time out of the car, because the grass I walked in had the same disturbingly blurred quality that the road had—I felt I would inflict some rending injury to the network of cosmic wormholes if I walked on the median strip for too long. I started up time and drove slowly, until Adele was way ahead of me. At the next exit, I turned around and drove home. When I woke up the next morning, my Fold-powers were gone.

  16

  THE WEEK FOLLOWING MY FAILED DRIVE, I WORKED FIFTEEN hours of overtime at a consulting firm. I was bothered by a persistent tingly feeling in the base of my right palm and increasing pain in my forearm. I needed at least a week off from typing, but because my Fermatal visitation-rights were now denied, I didn’t get one.

  What was clearly a carpal-tunnel problem got quite bad over the next several months. An over-the-counter wrist brace didn’t fit properly and made the pain worse. I was able to alleviate the symptoms a little by sleeping with my arm embracing a spare pillow. After a particularly trying stint typing an eighty-page price list, I went to Commonhealth and saw several nurse practitioners and doctors. Each of them tapped the inside of my wrist hard and asked what it felt like. Every diagnostic tap further injured the nerve, it seemed to me. I went up the chain of specialists until I reached the in-house repetitive-motion expert, Dr. Susan Orowitz-Rudman, a short cheerful woman of forty. I told her that I was a career temp and that I really had to be able to continue using the keyboard. She was full of ideas and theories. I found her hyphenated name powerfully attractive.

  “Is there any other related repetitive motion that you engage in?” she asked. “One patient of mine was a legal secretary and a fanatical bicyclist on weekends, and it turned out that it wasn’t the typing but the combination of typing and pulling on the hand-brakes of her bicycle that was causing the carpal flare. She switched to swimming and took a week off from work and she was able to keep her job and not have the operation. I’m happy to do the operation,” she added. “It’s not a big deal, it’s just a matter of making a little incision right here—but I’m just saying that sometimes there are ways to make the problem go away by itself.”

  I told her that I snapped my fingers to music sometimes, and that I did some writing of my own in the evenings and on weekends which added to the overall amount of typing I did.

  “What sort of writing do you do?” she asked politely, noting this down.

  “Just stories. Nothing published. But I get caught up in it and I keep typing and typing and typing. The whole wrist problem has gotten much worse since I’ve started doing it.”

  Dr. Orowitz-Rudman talked about alternative keyboards and about dictating my own writing and then having a friend transcribe it. She suggested two weeks off from work. She also spoke highly of manual typewriters: since they took more muscle strength, they seemed to bother the nerve less. Some anthropology professor at Harvard had gone back to his old Olivetti portable and been cured completely. She described some research she was doing: “I’m interested in developing a wrist sensor,” she said, “that will work as a biofeedback device, signaling the user when a motion is in progress that is likely to further inflame the nerve, based on certain correlations. But what I’m doing now is not that advanced, although it’s quite interesting—I mean, of course it is interesting to me, but it can also be interesting to my patients, and helpful. I’m trying to develop a set of MRI motion studies for various characteristic motions, such as typing a particular letter of the alphabet, opening an oyster, salad prep, and so forth. We use something called a fast-pulse-sequence echo-planar MRI machine, which essentially shows the nerve responding to the motions as they proceed. Would you be interested in taking part?”

  “Remind me what MRI is?”

  “Magnetic Resonance Imaging.”

  “Oh!” I said. “Big time!” Extremely flattered, I said I probably would like to take part. We made an appointment. Then something suddenly occurred to me that I couldn’t resist bringing up.

  “What I still don’t understand,” I said, “is why it’s all happening exclusively in my right wrist. Shouldn’t I have a touch of it on the left side?”

  “Are you a heavy user of the backspace key?” she asked. “Several of my patients have reconfigured their keyboard so that they controlled the backspace key with their left hands, eliminating that constant reaching up with the little finger as they corrected their typos, and they improved immediately.”

  “Interesting. Maybe that’s it,” I said, nodding thoughtfully, signaling that I was thinking of something else. “Maybe that’s it.”

  “Well? What were you going to attribute it to?” the doctor asked.

  “How shall I put this? The stories I write are quite—they’re pornographic stories.”

  She took this in. Her face was sensual and intelligent and canny. “I don’t see why what you write would make a bit of difference to your wrist. A letter f is a letter f to the nerve concerned, no matter what risqué thing it happens to be spelling.”

  “That’s right,” I said eagerly, “and yet the letter e is the most frequent letter in English, right? And the letter e is a left-hand letter. So it should be as much a left-wrist problem as a right-wrist problem!”

  “That’s why I mentioned the backspace key,” the doctor explained patiently. “Or it could easily be the cursor keys, or the mouse. The mouse gives people terrible trouble.”

  “I use hot keys almost exclusively,” I said haughtily.

  “All I’m saying is, you have to look very carefully at how you really move at the keyboard and make some subtle changes. People think they can install a wrist pad or do a few exercises and everything will be hunky-dory. It doesn’t always work that way.”

  I looked at her name-tag. I liked very much that her first name was Susan. I said, “I’ll do that. But—what just occurred to me is—well—I write pornography.”

  “I know. So?”

  “Well, as I wri
te I often find that I get myself in something of a lather. I imagine someone reading it, you know, a female someone reading it, and I find that …” I held my hands out as if what I was going to say was self-evident.

  Suddenly she understood and laughed. “Ah, ah, ah. You’re just trying to tell me that you masturbate while you write.”

  “Exactly,” I said with relief. “With my right hand.”

  “Constantly? Are you constantly masturbating while you write?”

  “Not constantly, no. I’ll type, say, a word or a phrase and then masturbate a little, and then another phrase, masturbate a little more, like that.”

  “Are these alternating sessions protracted?” asked Dr. Orowitz-Rudman, after a pause.

  “Sometimes. I once wrote a story on the hood of a car for twelve straight hours.”

  “Masturbating intermittently the entire time? I take it you were in a secluded spot.”

  “It’s a spot that’s accessible only to me.”

  “Good.”

  I gave her an inquiring look. “Is this an area that you would be interested in studying?” I asked her.

  She looked skeptical at first, and then more interested. “Well, you know, I have to admit that in the past I’ve had some fleeting suspicions in that direction. I mean, why shouldn’t frequent or prolonged masturbational episodes aggravate, or even cause, CTS? But until now, no patient has spontaneously suggested it as a cause, and I’ve been reluctant to mention it. It’s definitely worth looking into. Perhaps we could scan you as you …”

  “Really?” I said. “You’d have me pleasure myself in one of those gigantic magnets? The ones like iron lungs, that take pictures of brain tumors?”

  “Well, why not?” she said. “And you’d use our dummy keyboard, too. We’re trying to simulate real-life conditions. We unfortunately can’t use real keyboards, because we can’t have any ferrous metal within the magnet.… Now, you don’t habitually masturbate wearing a studded cock ring or ball separator, do you?”

  “God no.”

  “Fine, because that might create real problems in a magnetic field of thirty thousand times earth gravity. So—I don’t want to put you on the spot, but are you sincerely interested? I’m thinking out loud now, which I don’t normally do, but my sense is that this could be an important new line of research. Who knows—you might make The New England Journal of Medicine. Anonymously, of course.”

  “Well,” I said, pleased, “I suppose if I can be of some small help to others …”

  A week later, I showed up at the MR wing of Common-health’s hospital at a quarter to six in the evening, after an untaxing day at an accounting firm. My arm hurt, which pleased me, because I felt that I wasn’t wasting anyone’s time. In a conference room, Dr. Orowitz-Rudman explained in her friendly, faintly ironic way what was going to happen to me: some reference dots were going to be painted on my arm and penis, so that the imaging system could keep a fix on these two elements as I moved. She said she wanted me to type and masturbate just as I would in real life. She got up, and then remembered something.

  “One thing I do have to ask,” she said. She looked through some drawers in the back of the room. “I’m looking for something with a particular shape,” she explained. She held up a tongue depressor, but rejected it: “A little unromantic. I should have thought to bring in a prosthetic penis-form of some kind.”

  “I could just show you mine,” I suggested.

  “No—no—then we have to get observers in here and worry about all sorts of things. Thanks for offering, though. Ah! This will do.” She brought out a stick of lipstick from her purse and handed it to me. “Can you hold that and show me roughly how you masturbate? I realize that it’s a little smaller than you’re used to.”

  I held it and stroked it several ways.

  “Ah,” said the doctor, “so you use both a fist grip and a finger-and-thumb grip. That’s what I wanted to know.” She tapped her lip, thinking. “I don’t want to prejudice you in favor of either one. I’m going to have to ask you to announce when you’ve switched from one to the other. It will make it easier for us to get the imaging system to keep up with you, and eventually, of course, to isolate which particular grip is distressing your nerve. In fact, do you think you would be able to offer a kind of running commentary as you masturbate? You could tell us what you are doing, what hurts, what doesn’t hurt—whatever’s going through your mind.”

  I said that I would certainly try. She led me to an examining room, where I changed into a hospital gown. Two nurses or technicians or post-docs painted rows of silver dots up my forearm. They painted a silver square over the inside of my wrist. Then they lifted my gown.

  “Should we trim him a little?” one of the technicians asked the other. She looked at me. She was Chinese. “We’re going to trim your pubic hair.”

  I looked down at it. “It has gotten a bit unruly.” I couldn’t remember the last time I had trimmed it; it could have been a decade earlier. They pulled on the thick tufts and snipped them off. Then one stretched my penis and painted a silver dot on its circumcision ridge. Paintbrush hovering, she became uncertain. She called in Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. The three of them conferred in low tones.

  The doctor put a hand on my arm and smiled at me. “Will you masturbate just a little now?” she asked. “Don’t go hog wild. We just need you to be fully erect to get the reference dots on your penis spaced properly.”

  “Oh, sorry. Sure. Just take a sec.”

  “Fine.” Dr. Orowitz-Rudman left.

  I stroked my yokel while the two attendants waited. I noticed with some satisfaction that they seemed to appreciate its size and girth and garish coloration. (It is, I think, a more handsome penis than I deserve.)

  One cradled it gently while the other painted the silver dots down the underside and the top, measuring their distances carefully. The soft contact of the brush was soothing.

  They brought me through the control room to the door into the scan room. “Good luck,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman, waving. She sat at a table with two monitors on it, a three-ring binder open before her. A window looked through some sort of fine-mesh screen into the room with the magnet in it. The technician stopped me. “Your watch has to come off.” She pointed to a poster with a number of forbidden objects pictured with red bars across them—fire extinguishers, pacemakers, watches, steel skull-plates, anything metallic, evidently.

  The scanner stood in the middle of a large empty room. It was an enormous white edifice, like a very thick wall, with a large hole running through it into which patients were slid on a gantry. Something was making a great deal of fairly unpleasant noise. I removed my gown and lay down on the pad. A dummy computer keyboard was placed on my stomach and I was slid headfirst into the bore of the superconducting magnet.

  “Can you hear me, Arno?” I heard Dr. Orowitz-Rudman say through the intercom.

  I said that I could.

  “Good. Give us a few minutes to get things set in here before you start. Are you comfortable?”

  “I am. It’s very vaginal in here, doctor, in a smooth-muscle sort of way. Is the magnet on?”

  “Yes, it’s always on,” she said.

  “I expected to feel claustrophobic, but oddly, I’m not. There was this guy in college … excuse me—I’ll shut up while you get set up.”

  “No, go on,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “The technicians are getting set up—I’m just observing at this point.”

  “What is all this tiresome noise?” I asked.

  “That’s the coolant. The magnet has to be kept very cool, and the coolant has to be pumped around.”

  “I see. Well, there was this guy in college—” There was this guy in college, I said, who used to mime inserting one finger in a woman’s vadge, then two, then four, saying, “Yeah, baby. Really? More?” Then the whole hand would go in, then his arm up to the elbow, then up to the shoulder; then he would slide his other arm in, still saying, “More? You sure, baby? Okay.” He would place his head
at the opening of the imaginary vadge and strainingly push up, turning his face, and suddenly his grimacing head would slide in alongside his arms, and finally he would squirm as much of his body into the vaginal canal as he could fit. “I feel a little like I’ve just done that,” I explained. “I’m in this huge electrovagnet. It isn’t womblike,” I babblingly hastened to qualify. “It’s purely vaginal.”

  “Interesting,” I heard Dr. Orowitz-Rudman say absently. She hadn’t been listening. She said something I couldn’t catch to one of her associates, then I heard her say, “We are? Okay.” Then she addressed me in her pleasant Susan Stamberg voice: “All right, Arno. First we’re going to get you to use the keyboard a little bit. I’m going to read you a sentence, and you type it. Ready?”

  I said I was ready.

  “ ‘The cure …’ ” she read.

  I typed. “Okay.”

  “ ‘… for the greatest part …’ ”

  I typed. “Got it.”

  “ ‘… of human miseries …’ ”

  I typed. “Okay.”

  “ ‘… is not radical …’ ”

  “Yep.”

  “ ‘… but palliative.’ Period. Good. Thanks. That’s our baseline sentence. Now, Arno, I want you to go ahead and use the keyboard for about five minutes to warm up the nerve.”

  “Just type anything?” I asked.

  “Right,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “I can read you something if you would like, or you can make it up. It would be nice if it were similar to the typing you normally do, but that doesn’t matter all that much. It has to be in English, though.”