Chapter 9: Music For a Saturnine Love Affair

9

Norman arrives downtown early, parks on the street and walks around for a while in order to focus his mind on projecting the full romantic being he wants himself to be. Intriguing passersby and wet-pavement-reflections sweep against his thoughts as he swims through their midst, filling him with some kind of potent romantic mana. He inscribes his heart with lines from Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Pushkin’s beautiful Onegin, the White Stripes and the Magnetic Fields, all half-remembered and no doubt filled in with his own subconscious eloquences. It is a cool, cloudy evening, so Norman is wearing his warmest jacket, a thick suede one that fits him tightly, with a puffy white lining and collar. In one of its pockets he has a small bag of weed and in the other a mixtape for Laura titled Music For a Saturnine Love Affair. In one of the large cargo pockets on his gray pants is the director’s cut of Blade Runner on DVD. He stops in at a general store near the Old Port, down a block from the pub where he and Laura got drinks that first night, and buys some cigarettes and a bottle of wine. He throws away the plastic bag for the wine as he exits the store, preferring the image of himself just carrying a bottle through town on the way to Laura’s. All various elements of the evening work together in making Norman feel like he is in Paris or some other nameless, blurrily beautiful city of magic. He walks into the vestibule of the Metropolitan at two after eight (he does not wear a timepiece, but the nearby Time and Temperature Building rhythmically broadcasts its eponymous data from on high). Norman types her apartment number into the keypad on the wall. There is a ringtone, and then Laura’s voice comes soft and enticing through the single speaker, “Hello?”

Music for a Saturnine
Love Affair

“Laura,” Norman says, smiling instinctively at the sound of her voice. His smile is instantly followed by an explosive buzzing from the door to his left as it clicks open.
In the elevator he can feel the ghost of that gorgeous kiss he shared with her there a week before. The two moments seem to overlap briefly in his heart. Norman wonders if he felt this moment then at all, though he would not have recognized it at the time.
As an experiment, he focuses his will on sending the thought I am in love with you back to that moment, whispered in the air to Laura while the past him was kissing her.
He considers asking Laura if she heard it.
It takes Laura several long seconds to come to her door after Norman’s knocks. When she does, she is wearing an extravagant ruffled white shirt and gray pin-striped pants that fit her hips magnificently. On her neck is a semicircle of pearls. Her hair is pulled back and up, giving center stage to her elegant face, her blue eyes bright behind dark umbrae of eyeshadow.
She smiles, shyly recoiling her chin a bit, and beckons him inside. “Good evening,” she says softly as he walks past her, following him with her eyes.
Norman steps inside enough for Laura to shut the door behind him, then turns to her just as she turns back around. He holds up the bottle of wine. “I come bearing gifts,” he says.
“Ooh, beware,” she chides playfully, taking the bottle from him and carrying it into the kitchen. “Thank you very much.” Norman follows behind her, retrieving the mixtape, the weed and Blade Runner from his pockets. “Take off your coat,” she says, looking over her shoulder at him and then noticing the objects in his hands. “Oh, is there more?”
“Yes. I also made you this mixtape, and I brought my copy of Blade Runner, in case you felt like watching it at some point. And I brought a little weed. I don’t know how long you wanted to hang out tonight…” He smiles and shrugs, focusing on beaming charm her way. Laura catches it in the air like a blown kiss, puts down the wine and sidles his direction.
She puts her hands on the collar of his coat. “I was, honestly, hoping you could stay the whole weekend again,” she whispers sexily, “but if you can only hang out for a while, then I’m sure I’ll forgive you eventually.”
Norman laughs, and they kiss for what ends up becoming a long time, delivering them to the couches, where Norman finally pulls away, lying on his back with Laura straddling him. She giggles and leans up away from him, massaging the sides of his hips in her hands.
“I can stay all weekend,” he says.
Laura grins beautifully and bends down to kiss him. Norman notes that every kiss between the two of them seems to create a tiny baby universe of love with entrances in her eyes and his heart, and that the more he kisses her, the more he sees only love when he looks in either place.
“Shall I put on your mixtape?” she asks.
“Cool,” Norman nods, still out of breath from making out.
Laura climbs off him and goes to a closet by the door to her bedroom, from which she pulls a small boombox with a tape deck. After she puts the tape in and presses play, setting the boombox on top of her huge flatscreen TV, she sits down next to Norman on the couch and flips through the little booklet he made to go with the tape. “I haven’t gotten a mixtape in years,” she says. “I’m so excited.” She leans over to quickly kiss him on the lips, then returns to reading the booklet.
Tinnilly from the boombox comes the Morrissey song Let Me Kiss You.
“Oh, I love Morrissey,” Laura sighs. “You remind me of Morrissey, actually.”
“Yeah, I pretty much want to be Morrissey and masturbate,” Norman jokes, and Laura laughs.
“My friend knows him,” she says. “I’ve not met him, though. Well, she sort of does. She’s kissed him onstage twice.”
“But she’s just a fan, she’s not, like, close friends with him?”
“Exactly.”
“Right on.”
“Music for a Saturnine Love Affair,” Laura reads from the spine of the mixtape booklet. “I love that.” Laura reaches down under the couch and pulls out a silver laptop, opens it up and rubs her fingertip on the touchpad. “But now I need to look up saturnine.”
“I’ll be interested to see what the definition is,” Norman admits. “I came across the word in an alchemical/mystical context, where it referred to a certain type of angelic entity. So, that’s kind of all I know about it.”
“It doesn’t just mean from Saturn?” Laura jokes.
“It might, for all I know. In that case, though, I think it would be capitalized.”
“All these letters are capitalized,” Laura notes.
“Well, and also it would be capitalized there anyway, even if I didn’t write in all caps, because it’s among the words of a title, the title of the mixtape. But the way I was using the word, were it in a normal sentence, I don’t think it would be a proper noun, I should say. At least it wasn’t where I read it. But the word meaning from Saturn would be capitalized, presumably – would be a proper noun, that is – like Lithuanian or Basque.”
Laura laughs, apparently finding the same sort of humor in absurd linguistic semantics as Norman does. “Or maybe it means like Saturn, you know, like elephantine or leonine?”
“Oh, nice,” Norman agrees, chuckling. “So, big and blue and spherical?”
“Is Saturn blue,” Laura asks, “or is that Uranus?”
They both laugh, and Norman corrects himself, “You’re right, I believe it’s Myanus that’s blue.”
Shaking with laughter, Laura opens up her browser and googles the word saturnine.
“Here we go,” she says when the results instantly appear, “melancholic rock from the Netherlands. Is that what this tape is? All melancholic rock from the Netherlands?”
“Psch. I wish,” Norman jokes. He picks up her Sherlock Holmes pipe and stuffs some of the weed from his baggy into it.
“Oh here – dictionary dot com word of the day; saturnine. How mysteriously synchronous. Click.” She clicks the link and it brings up a definition of the word. “Born under the planet Saturn,” she says, reading. “So it does mean from Saturn, at least astrologically. But apparently it mostly means melancholy, or bittersweet in disposition. Hmm.” She eyes Norman with mock suspicion.
“You are so fucking gorgeous,” Norman remarks genuinely with awe, smitten by the sultry fire that seems to undulate just behind every glance she sends his way.
She leans in close to him, putting her hands on his thigh and hip, and says, “You’re just trying to change the subject. You made me a mixtape for a melancholic, bittersweet love affair.”
“Eh,” Norman shrugs. “Ish.”
Laura laughs. “I love how ish has become a word.” She slowly leans in closer to him. Her eyes lower from his eyes to his lips.
“Ish is totally a word,” he says just before her lips finally find his and grab them for a kiss. The kiss lasts several delicious seconds, and something about the combination of intimacy and comfort at its heart makes Norman feel like it is their first kiss truly as Lovers. He is all smiles for several minutes thereafter.
“Oh, I packed a bowl. Here.” He hands Laura the pipe, and for a while they pass it back and forth, taking hits and sharing silent, smiling eye contact.
“So how has your week been?” she asks him after they both have taken several hits and put the pipe down. She scoots her body closer to his on the couch. “How’s your new job?”
“It’s good,” Norman nods. “It’s actually kind of unheard-of-ly good in certain ways. My hours are completely open, and there isn’t really any supervision, and we’re in a windowless room where they keep the door closed, so … I could totally spend most of my time there writing, honestly, which I’ve just now realized. Fuck, that’s awesome.”
“That is awesome,” Laura enthusiastically agrees with a little laugh. “I’m jealous.”
“Yeah, and the guys I work with are totally cool,” Norman adds, adjusting himself on the couch to face Laura. “Much of the time we just sit around talking about politics or the Revolution or metaphysics, or whatever.”
A surprised look crosses Laura’s face. “That sounds perfect. I’m really glad it didn’t end up just being a total drag.”
“Don’t get me wrong; it’s kind of a drag. It’s very Fitter-Happier, if that makes any sense. Every day I’m inputting the fucking number of tons of PCB’s, which are this deadly pollutant that electrical boxes are full of, or made with, or something, or the dollar amounts that it took to pay off the Massachusetts government for going over their allowed amount of pollution, or whatever. Seriously, as if it isn’t appalling enough that there is a very high legal amount of polluting waste these plants can pour into the neighborhood rivers, when they go over that amount all they have to do is pay for it. Like, a few thousands of dollars. Fucking money. Fucking capitalism!” Norman shakes off the minor fury that was beginning to build inside him and smiles an apology. “I’m sorry,” he laughs, “I…”
“Don’t worry about it,” Laura says, putting her hand on his knee. “I know what you mean. At least it keeps you aware, right?”
“True,” Norman nods, “and that’s a good thing. That’s just what I told my friend Lou, actually. That it’s good to be constantly reminded of all that bullshit, since it’s so easy to ignore if you don’t live in the town with the green, bubbling river.”
Laura nods, her eyes seeming to drift off toward her thoughts.
“Anyway,” Norman says to signal a potential change of conversation, just as the Morrissey song is coming to an end.
The next song begins with a sample from some old anti-drug scare film, a man’s voice saying, “Good kids. No trouble to anyone. Just a harmless evening smoking pot.” Laura laughs, listening, foxily eyeing Norman. “They think there’s still a future,” the man continues with a scoff, which makes Norman laugh. “But in a year, half of them will be on the hard stuff. And in another year, three out of every ten will be dead.” The song comes in with a slow trip-hop beat touched by the occasional flourish of eerily descending horns.
Laura keeps eyeing Norman with that magical foxiness and slowly leans over to meet him in a kiss. With her face pressed against his, their eyes a mere inch or two apart, Laura opens her eyes in the kiss and meets Norman’s there (he always kisses with open eyes), and the two sets of eyes seem to connect in some etheric way that both of them feel; it seems to create a psychic bridge between them; Norman experiences a flood of emotional information that he instantly imagines to have originated from Laura’s mind, mostly joy and desire, (all this in the midst of a very sexy kiss), and he feels his own thoughts and feelings leak in through her eyes as well. He notes with a certain scientific intrigue the look on her face as it reacts to her reciprocal experience. And yet even this train of thought, he realizes upon thinking it, he seems to share to some degree with Laura through their circuit as he simultaneously experiences her unique form of intrigued awe. He puts his hands to the sides of her face and closes his eyes, presses deeper into the kiss and finds her tongue against his; with his eyes closed, he feels as if they are there together on the tongues in the darkness, a millimeter tall, waltzing. The shock of being full again in his body when Laura pulls briefly away from the kiss is startling.
Hovering above Norman on the couch where he is slouched, Laura seems to notice the moment of shock in his eyes. “Are you okay?” she asks with a little smile, her fingers frolicking between his shirt and his stomach.
Norman bites the inside of his lower lip and smiles, hypnotized by the shameless, fully-exposed love in her eyes. “I’m perfect,” he says.
She looks down behind herself and finds the pipe and a lighter, lifts them to her lips with a foxy look in her eyes and takes a hit. She extends her svelte arm down toward Norman with the bowl as she holds smoke in her lungs. Norman takes a hit as well, hands it back to her, and she puts it aside, then carefully removes the ashtrays and lighters from the back and arm of the leather couch.
She turns to him in a manner that makes Norman feel intuitively like the love scene has just begun (as if he hears a cliché music cue, though he does not). Behind the look in her eyes he can already see the two of them fucking.
“I’ve been thinking about you all week,” she says with just a touch of sexy shyness, looking down briefly, then back up into his eyes.
Norman leans forward slowly, carefully, into a kiss, but once their lips are all there is, they both rise quickly to passion and are groping and scratching blindly at each other’s clothes as they maneuver through awkward trial-and-error down to a supine position on the couch, Norman on top of Laura, their legs tangled, his left arm holding her body close, the other hand finding thigh, then hipbone, then the blissful border of Panty and Soft Flesh. She bites his lip and opens her eyes, gasps as he tenderly rakes down along the quickly-moistening front inner wall of her vagina with one long finger, then reenters with two. He holds her pelvis for a moment between thumb and fingers, his thumb amongst her pubic hair helping to push aside the panties. With such a grip he pulls himself closer to her, into a kiss, as she grips his arm against his waist between her knees.
As soon as Norman realizes that he is in this sex scene with Laura, the pages of the book he is going to write about these days seem to enfold him. It’s like he can see himself onscreen in the future, in people’s minds as a phantom of words, but this, fucking with grace and passion and a lack of pretense that other scenes he involves himself in cannot as easily be said to have. There is some kind of simple, primitive perfection to his love scenes, and he knows it. He knows that there will be future young women and men who will read words that will bring them to this moment with him, and all of these nametagless people seem to queue up into his spirit and into Laura’s as they shamelessly, literately milk pleasure, joy and love from each other’s bodies.
The colloquially literal version is that there, on Laura’s leather couch, he finger fucks her through a long few minutes of indistinguishable orgasms and then she ravenously climbs down and sucks his formidable cock (he comes once, she swallows and keeps sucking, he remains hard) until neither of them can take their separation any longer (a psychically shared split second of eye contact) and he turns her around and fucks her from behind, her clawing at the back of the couch, him relishing her ass in his hands, until he finally pulls out and comes on her ass with his hand inside her, upon which she comes again, bellowing unsilencable pleasure. The perhaps more literary version might say something like that Laura and Norman are mythic lovers, that within that love scene with her Norman is supernaturally himself; he is everything that could possibly be sexy about that tall, lean man with the barely-mismatched gray-green eyes that obviously really look and two long-fingered artist’s hand-widths worth of scepterish cock when every dark, damp bed of romance in his heart has bloomed into engorging blood flowers. Both versions would be true. Norman feels (at least moments later, in hindsight, he does) like while they are fucking, he and Laura exist in some kind of jointly-created baby universe where they are both incarnate love gods. Even the air comes a few times. In the moment of his final orgasm, Laura’s soft back receiving the mana from his heaving cock, somehow the power of his desire to be coming inside her mixed with his will to have pulled out mixed with the light on Laura’s skin and her hungry purring seems to form a key that unlocks the mystery of what a tip of an iceberg the three-and-a-half-dimensional version of this love scene really is, but just for that moment. The feeling fades as all do, but leaves an ornate I was here carved into the wall at the bottom of a stairwell in the back of Norman’s brain.
Afterward they stumble nakedly together into the bedroom and fall on top of the covers.
“You are amazing,” Laura testifies, grinning as she grinds her body against his side.
Norman lies still in a field of awe and beauty. “So are you,” he sighs. He lets his head sink between the two pillows. “It’s like we’re a myth about modern love,” he says with a joyous grin. “Mm, I’m in the inter-pillow cavern.” He stares at the ceiling of Laura’s bedroom for a while, his view book-ended by the dark off-white of Laura’s pillows, while Laura softly gropes the skin of his chest and stomach.
“That went beyond orgasm for me,” Laura grins.
Norman laughs happily. “What do you mean?”
Laura just shakes her head and then pulls him against her body and kisses him. She squeezes his ribs with her fingers and whispers, “I love you.”
“Mmm, I love you too,” he says. They kiss again.
When Norman pulls away and slowly pans his gaze down along his own naked body, arbitrarily imagining this moment in a film, he stops when the shot is centered on his crotch, where his hand is idly blocking his cock from view and on the base of his thumb there is a square of Sharpee containing the words, IT’S ALL ABOUT THE EDITING.
He laughs softly through his nose.
“What?” Laura asks.
“That is fucking brilliant,” Norman laughs, straining now to keep his hand in its relaxed repose guarding his cock from view. “I just looked down slowly from your face, along my body, and I was seeing it as a shot in the film version of this moment, right? And the shot went down along my body and ended on this, with my body all supine and my hand just barely covering my cock like it is, kind of idly…”
As Laura follows his instructions for the shot and looks down at his hand, she starts to laugh, seeing the words written on his thumb.
“…and then this is the end of that shot. And presumably it would cut then to a reverse shot from my cock-slash-hand’s perspective, of my face realizing the brilliant levels of meta involved in that moment. Because I thought about the film version of that moment and then realized that to accurately capture this moment then the actor who plays this role in forty years or whatever would have to play the role of thinking about himself in the future, how he would have to play a moment in which his character was thinking about that actual moment he was experiencing then as an actor … And then he would have to talk about it, like I’m doing now, and the moment would just sort of overwhelm itself with levels of meta. And just how marvelously all of that is brought about by the fact that I wrote this on my thumb yesterday while thinking about some completely other thing.”
“Why did you write that?”
“Well, I think I was thinking about this kind of thing – the process of artistic creation being the choice of what to include and what to leave out, like Michelangelo saying that the sculptures were waiting inside the stone to have the excess removed. How to turn a mistake or a fluke, or randomness, into something brilliant and meaningful. It’s all about the editing. I was sort of thinking about it in terms of my narrative-based idiom of spirituality.”
“You are a supernatural being,” Laura declares. “I’ve never met anyone like you before. Do you know how amazing you are?”
Norman, never having known how to respond appropriately to such compliments, simply kisses her in reply. “I need a glass of water,” he says as he gets up on one arm and looks around, having forgotten where they were and what time it was, that there was even a world around them. “Do you need anything, baby?”
“Mmm,” Laura purrs, “I love it when you call me baby,” and she inches her lips toward his until they are just barely touching.
Norman presses his mouth against hers and takes her head in his hands, suddenly overwhelmed again by love. He can actually feel little sparkles of love floating between their faces. As the kiss climaxes Norman uses all of his imaginary willpower to make the love sparkles that he can feel between them gather together into a tiny singularity and flash etheric light into the real world. He closes his eyes as the final component of the spell and there is, indeed, it seems to him, a tiny flash just beyond his eyelids.
Laura pulls away from the kiss with a gasp, her eyes wide, and she asks, smiling, “Did you see that?”
“See what?” Norman asks, smiling.
“There was, like, a little flash of light. I don’t know if it was just in my mind, or what, but I could have sworn I saw a flash of light brought about by our kiss.”
“That’s gorgeous,” Norman says, his heart overflowing with energy as he keeps his knowledge that the light was an actual willful event tucked away inside himself, lest the spirits of lameness in the world sense the event’s weak hold on trueness and somehow smother it, forcing it somehow to never have been true in the first place. “I think I saw it, too,” he has to add.
Laura’s eyes are pure adoration. Her smile is inextinguishable. She kisses him again quickly, then stands and walks nakedly out into the main room, calling behind herself, “Do you want something to drink? A glass of water, you said?”
“Mm,” Norman replies gutturally, unsure whether or not he does want something to drink. He has a tendency to keep himself hungry and dehydrated, as the taste of food or succor of drink tends to always make him feel heavily within his own body, when he prefers a certain levity of spirit. “I don’t think so, actually,” he finally calls after her.
“You don’t want a glass of water?”
“No, I’ve rethought that. I tend to prefer to keep myself hungry and dehydrated to a certain extent, honestly, as it allows me to retain a certain levity of spirit, a looseness from the ties to my body, almost, if that makes any sense.”
“Alright,” Laura laughs from the kitchen. “Man, it is cold in here.”
“Yeah,” Norman agrees, hopping out of bed to put his clothes back on. “Here’s to the guy who invented clothes.” He pulls his pants on and is reaching for a shirt when Laura returns holding a tall glass of Diet Coke, which she places on her dresser.
“I think it was definitely a woman who invented clothes. And I love how you pronounced the th diphthong in clothes.” She pronounces the full diphthong herself when she says it the second time. She pulls on a brown skirt and a small, white chenille sweater.
Norman laughs. “I love pronouncing the th in clothes,” he says. “I think it’s hilarious to do so. I don’t know why.”
“It is funny,” Laura agrees. “Either that or I’m just really stoned.”
“I think when you smoke regularly, there must come a point where you can’t just chalk things up to being stoned anymore. I retain all kinds of shit that came to me when I was stoned and made perfect sense and were brilliant – often those things still are later, if I can just remember to write them down.”
Laura laughs. “I’m still laughing about clothes.”
“It’s a hell of a one-syllable word, isn’t it?” Norman laughs. “It really takes some dexterity of the tongue to accurately utter.” He watches Laura laugh for a moment, himself grinning shamelessly. “Within the standard temporal understanding of Earth History, I wonder how long there has been laughter. And if laughter preceded the awareness of humor. I mean, I’m sure it did. Precede its own understanding, that is. Do all things, I wonder? Must things exist before they can be understood, or do they, perhaps, come about only through our truly understanding them? That seems almost like a quantum physics version of wisdom, or something. Hmm.”
“Meaning is given,” Laura says cryptically with a shrug, then holds up a camera at arm’s length in front of them and kisses him on the cheek as she presses the button. The flash occurs just as Norman is realizing that his picture is being taken.
He laughs, “I think you’ve just immortalized me with a ridiculous look on my face.” Laura laughs and kisses him again, and for this kiss he turns in to meet her lips. She holds her arm out and snaps another picture, then bites his lip softly as she comes out of the kiss and reaches down to pick up a pair of panties from the floor.
“There are an infinite number of pictures taken anyway,” Laura remarks as she pulls her underwear on under her skirt. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“You know, you’re right,” Norman notes, struck by the fact. “There is so much documentation of this period of history; it’s insane.”
“It really is.”
“I wonder how many pictures are taken in a day on planet Earth.” Norman stares into space, trying to Fermi-estimate in his head. In the corner of his mind’s eye he creates a gradient-edged screen where every time a picture is taken, he sees it happen. It is a constant, dizzying blur of snapshots of people’s faces with cameras held up to them. After a moment, he releases the thought and the image vanishes from his mind’s eye as Laura glides her fingertips across his bare chest, walking past him out of the bedroom with her Diet Coke held gracefully in her other hand.
She sits down on one of the leather couches and picks her laptop up off the floor, puts it on her lap. She fingers the touchpad to wake the machine. “Come and join me,” she beckons. Norman sits and cuddles his knees up to her knees, at which her smile glows extra brightly for a moment.
“What are you doing on your computer?” he asks.
“I was going to put these pictures on my computer and then fuck with them in Photoshop for a minute,” she says with a smile, and takes a surprise picture of him from point blank range.
“Aw,” he protests, reaching out for the camera, “do you mind if I take a picture or two for you?”
“Not at all.”
She hands the tiny silver camera off to him and he holds it out at arm’s length to the side and leans in for a kiss. The kiss lasts several long seconds, going through four distinct stages (soft caressing of her bottom lip between his; full-mouthed/heavy pressure; lips apart, save one corner where they are stuck together, tongue to tongue; a series of hesitant-to-leave-the-kiss pecks), and through the course of it Norman is able to take five pictures. He puts the camera back in her hand out of view below as they kiss again after looking at the pictures together on the camera’s display.
“What are you thinking about?” Laura asks softly, looking into his glass eye.
“You want me to rant more?” Norman asks with a smile. “I feel like I’ve been rambling about randomness all evening.”
“I love the things you say,” Laura says with an irrepressible smile, and leans in close to kiss him. “I love the things you think.” She kisses him again, her lips remaining close to his when she speaks. He sees her in extreme close-up, out of focus, her two eyes merged into one fuzzy one, staring into his. “I think you’re a genius.”
“Well,” Norman begins, “I was actually thinking about my book, the book I’m writing in my head. The second novel. I mean, not including the romance novels. Actually, I was sort of thinking about the Universe as a whole, in terms of the book. Like – because, the book is about this Norman character, right, but it’s also about the World now, you know, and the World-at-large, the purpose of existence and the nature of choice and experience. Right? Everything.” He laughs. “Of course. But anyway, I was thinking about the way the World is awash with lameness and bullshit and violence and vengeance. And, like, everyone I know seems to be a reasonable, compassionate human being, but it’s like simple proximity is the engine of love. Like, you’re naturally going to care more about the people you see every day, and so the people on the other side of the world or whatever … no – that’s not really what I was thinking about; that’s me digressing elsewhere. What I was really thinking about was the nature of evil – of lameness, of bullshit. You know what I mean? Because clearly, it seems to me, as a rational being, rationality is the guiding force of my decisions. Like, we are smart animals, we can make righteous decisions, we can see the truth of the World around us, and yet still some people seem to get caught in the violence cycle, or the bullshit fake world of media, or just generally sell their souls and stumble blindly and numbly through life. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“So where does that come from? I use all my willpower to remain keenly aware and choice-making, but I can still feel the pull toward inertness, toward lameness – I understand where the desire to fall comfortably into that comes from. But what is that drive? That gravity pulling toward lameness? It fights the force of awesomeness – of will and beauty, of true righteous volition. And I was thinking that maybe it has something to do with the Heisenburglar, because it has to do with fear at its heart, or perhaps a lack of fearlessness if a distinction can be made, and the Heisenburglar is the god of fear insomuch as he is uncertainty, he is the void, the inertness of awarenesslessness.”
Laura smiles, her attention pulled intermittently from his real eye to his glass one.
“I mean, it seems like the World is kept constantly just at the edge of true freedom, true awakening into awareness, by some nefarious force invading it. It’s almost like we’re here as agents of awesomeness and beauty, and there are also enemy agents of lameness and chaos and fear. It’s like some force is trying to keep us docile and working on whatever this large-scale goal of humanity might be – does anyone really know? Do we have a goal? No. World peace? Yeah, right. I mean all this stuff we’re building, and the macro-scale computer the Earth is beginning to look like from above. It’s like there’s some force, some Illuminati-level Zeitgeist force trying to keep us numb and unquestioning and working these bullshit jobs toward whatever shadowy ends. When in fact we could all wake up and realize that we’re free, and that happiness and peace can be as simple as a moment’s choice (the constant-moment’s choice), and that all lack is illusion. We only have. We do not not have. It’s an illusion. The idea that there isn’t anything. It’s absurd. That’s the Heisenburglar’s lies.”
Laura’s head shaking and smiling grow in intensity until she leans in and kisses Norman passionately for several long seconds, then sits back and plugs her digital camera into her laptop.
“I am so lucky,” Laura laughs as she idly manipulates the touch pad on her laptop, managing the downloading of the pictures they have just taken. She looks up into his eye. “I’m so lucky I found you. Or you found me, I guess. Or your winged kiss found me.” She beams charmed; it glows from her skin.
“I don’t believe in luck,” Norman says with a contented half-smile. He feels his body growing more comfortable around her, and his spirit spilling out like invisible dry ice smoke from his body because of it. “Everything’s connected, and causality is just a temporal term.”
“Pardon?” she asks, cocking her head to the side and squinting.
“Well, what is causality?” Norman asks rhetorically. “It’s simply our word for one thing causing another thing, which is to say, in a four-dimensional sense, simply that those things are connected; those events are connected somehow to each other through the changing of states. But, seen from above, time is just a shape of change, and whether you look at it from one direction, moving this direction through time, or the other direction, or from above, or whatever, the ‘causality’ changes. What we originally saw as the result becomes the cause, and physics work backward, it would seem. But really, it’s all just pathways through a matrix of information, because really there are, theoretically, all those possible results of any moment, and so all these possible moments are also attached to the moments we experience going out in different directions in yet more dimensions, and what we experience as the timeline of events is just, like, where we’ve chosen to cast our perceptive eye for whatever reason. But, of course, all of us are struggling against each other with the perceived state of the universe, which is why, I think, so many people get so upset when they are confronted with vastly different views of the world from their own.”
“Hmm,” Laura nods. She looks back and forth between the screen on her lap and Norman’s mouth and eye as he speaks. “So you think it was meant to be, is that what you’re saying? That things are predestined to a certain extent?”
“Not predestined, per se, no, not at all,” Norman replies energetically. “Just that all possible moments can be said to exist at least as much as the past can be. All there ever is proof of, of course, is the moment. The now and here. The me and you. This paragraph of this scene, with the recent past and perhaps the near future (or at least the possible ones, and our goals) in the periphery of our perception.”
Laura’s eyes are now focused on the screen of her laptop, and Norman begins to feel self-conscious about how long he has been rambling. He scoots up closer to her so he can see the screen, where she has already opened the pictures they took in Photoshop. He watches as she manipulates the hue and color saturation of one of the images he took of the two of them kissing. She smoothly adjusts the hue of the image using a tool on a sidebar consisting of a point that she moves around a color field. The image, as she moves the dot around, fades softly from color to color psychedelically. It strikes him how masterfully we have designed our user interfaces for even such complex tasks, and he begins to wonder what it will be like when the machine and the experience of human existence are utterly entwined, when we have an adjustable brain interface upon which we can store any number of various input layers, and within the constraints of an enormously powerful, super-fast computer as opposed to a biological brain, the possibilities logarithmically multiply.
“It will be unbelievable when computer interfaces like this are seamlessly interwoven with living as a human. Like, when the neural connection is made – when the monitor becomes your vision and the speakers your mind’s inner ear. I’m just imagining the possibilities.”
Laura listens to him, leaning in close and smiling, and kisses his neck when he is finished. “You’re beautiful,” she says.
“Say, do you want to see something awesome?” Norman asks, and reaches for the laptop. Laura transfers it to his lap and slouches down next to him, with her face against his arm. “There’s this program that Lou showed me called Celestia. We can download it for free.”
“Do it.”
“Cool.” He puts the Ethernet cord that was on the floor into the laptop and connects the computer to the Internet. He googles Celestia and finds it instantly; he is downloading it within seconds. “It is insane how easily we can retrieve information,” he remarks. “I mean, we’re just sitting here in your warm apartment with this little metal book with this little plastic string attached to it, and somehow all this information is available to us. It’s fucking mind-blowing. It’s magic, really, is what it is.”
Laura laughs. “It is magic. It’s incredible.”
“It’ll take a while to download and install this.”
Laura smiles at him, her torso turned in his direction, her hands folded casually on her lap. Her face is still, but he can see behind it that in her mind they are already kissing. He moves his face across the air to hers slowly, trying to let his movements follow the current of how they ought to happen in her mind. His lips meet hers slowly, like a docking spaceship, and then he imagines the docking clamps taking hold as he presses his lips around hers, and when her tongue lightly touches the inside of his bottom lip his imagination makes it some kind of fueling system trying to fix onto the ship, and this makes him laugh.
“What?” Laura asks, laughing along with his laughter, coming softly out of the kiss but still holding his face close to hers.
“Nothing,” he replies. “I was just imagining my lips and your lips as a spaceship docking at a space station, and then when I felt your tongue I imagined it was, like, the fueling system or something coming in, and it made me laugh.”
“You’re the greatest,” Laura says after she has finished laughing.
Norman sits back and his gaze falls upon a framed painting on the wall above and to the right of Laura’s huge flatscreen television. The painting is of an androgynously faced woman wearing a propeller beanie with curly red hair pillowing out from beneath it. She peers to the side at the viewer with kind eyes and a long nose held in profile. She wears a black suit jacket, white shirt and red tie; a crow sits on her shoulder and the hand of that arm is held up gesturally in front of the face, daintily holding a cigarette.
“Of whom is that a painting?” Norman asks, smiling at the absurdity of his own grammar.
Laura laughs a little and says, “That’s Collette. She was a feminist of some note, or so I’m led to understand. I bought her at a sidewalk art sale a few years ago.”
“She’s fabulous,” Norman remarks.
“Thank you. I like her.” She lazily looks across Norman at the painting with the fading remnants of a smile.
Her eyes flit to his and her smile resurges. Through their eyes he feels something in her spirit lock onto something in his, and a rush of mysterious information starts flowing through that conduit of eye contact. He dips barely the tip of his blossoming love for her into the current between their eyes and she reacts by releasing the joy behind her expression and letting all of her reciprocal love flood out into her gaze.
“You’re so elegantly beautiful,” Norman comments.
“So are you,” Laura replies. “I can’t believe this is happening. You’ve created such a beautiful situation that I can no longer retain my suspension of disbelief.” They both laugh. “Sorry, Norman.” She leans in and kisses him, gasping against his lips, “You’re just too good to be true.”
“Yeah,” Norman says into her kisses, thinking back to the last time he was in this position and the vision he had of the Man when he blacked out, “except when I’m blacking out on you.”
Laura pulls away from the kiss and looks apologetically into Norman’s real eye. She is silent for a moment then begins shaking her head and says, “Oh, no, Norman, that was no big deal. I hope I never made it seem like that was a big deal. It happens.”
“Well, it happens to me. It doesn’t happen to everybody.”
“Do you know what causes it? Do you take medication or anything for it?”
Norman can’t help but laugh softly through his nose. “No,” he says. “I’m not epileptic or anything; I just have these weird blackout/vision moments from time to time. Time to time is even hyperbole. It’s happened, what – four times? Five? Five that I can recall, including last weekend.”
Laura’s expression of compassion and concern becomes somewhat more relaxed, but she squints at Norman and asks, “You have visions?”
Norman slowly nods, biting the inside of his mouth. “The first … it’s weird. You really want to hear about this?”
She nods, her eyes fixed on him, stiffly smiling.
Norman raises one eyebrow and hesitantly begins, “Okay, well the first time I remember it happening this way – like, I’ve blacked out all throughout my life from time to time because I have low blood pressure and I’ll just stand sometimes and brown out – but I remember it happening this way, where it just happens out of nowhere or in a particularly potent moment of some sort, for the first time when I was hanging out with Lou one time. I was … we were doing some of our existential experimentation, if that makes any sense.”
Laura frowns, nodding, listening.
“And I – can I bum a cigarette?” Laura quickly grabs her pack beside them and lights one for him, hands it to him, then lights one for herself. “Thanks. I was – well, we were trying to affect the physical universe by pure thought, which we had tried many times before, telekinesis, you know. But this time I was trying to move something across the room with my mind, a pencil or something, and I had something else on my mind as well and was getting really frustrated. So I looked over – I gave up, I looked over, out through Lou’s apartment’s sliding glass patio door at this bird that was flying past.
“I don’t know quite what happened. All of a sudden I was surrounded by a spinning tunnel with glowing symbols etched into the walls and it was all spinning around me, throbbing with information that I could somehow understand but not understand. I don’t know how to explain it. And then slowly my awareness faded back in and I realized that I was slumped back, twitching, like last weekend with you, my eyes rolled back. My vision was all black and fuzzy, but slowly came back and my control over my body slowly filled back in starting at the base of my back and spreading down my limbs and to my face. And when I came to, there was Lou standing over me, his mouth agape, and the glass patio door was a shattered spider web, but apparently nothing had happened to it that he could see. Just – I fell; it shattered. There was no point of impact – the whole thing just shattered homogenously as it were, and it stayed up, it stayed in the door, it was just shattered.” Norman is back there in his mind, seeing the door, his heart filled again by the wonder, the fear, the mystery of what happened that day.
“And then it’s happened a few times since, and every time it does, I have a vision of some different kind. The last time, before last weekend, I saw a sky full of crows. So, things like that. I don’t know.”
“Interesting,” Laura says. “Have you thought about getting it checked out by a doctor or something?”
“I’m fine,” Norman assures her. “The heavens are ready for us. Check this out.”
Norman opens up Celestia, which has just finished downloading and installing. The program’s display brings up an image of the Sun in space, then turns and flies across the astronomical unit to Earth, centering itself there.
“So, this is Celestia. Have you seen Google Earth?”
“Oh yeah – is that the thing where you can zoom in anywhere on Earth and it’s pieced together from satellite maps?”
“Yeah, yeah. This basically takes that and extrapolates it to the entire universe. I exaggerate, perhaps, but check it out – you can go to other stars…” He types Betelgeuse and the perspective of the screen zooms through space away from the Earth, the fixed heavens begin to shift parallaxically (a word Norman invents in his mind while he watches it happen, and the word makes him snicker to himself a little as he imagines it), and then the big red sphere of Betelgeuse fills the screen. Norman spins the camera with the touchpad, keeping the star in the center, displaying the field of stars that surrounds it. “This is what the heavens would look like from Betelgeuse. A completely different starfield, but the same stars. I don’t know. This shit blows my mind.”
Laura leans forward, staring at the screen, her face intensely focused. “This is amazing. What’s the nearest star to Earth?”
“Probably Alpha Centauri, or Proxima Centauri, its companion.” He types in Alpha Centauri and the display again swirls up the stars like a snow globe and zips toward the Centauri system, where just before the screen is filled by the Alpha star, its companion, Proxima, can be seen to separate out from the single point of light and flash out past the camera. “That was Proxima that just flew past. Because it’s a binary system.”
“So where is our sun in the sky, here?”
“Hmm, I’m not sure. I don’t know if it’s visible.” He spins the camera around Alpha Centauri anyway, passing the cursor over various stars to display their names. “It might not be visible from here. Our sun isn’t a particularly bright star, after all. Here, let me show you some of the planets. That’s what blows my mind most of all.”
Norman takes Laura to the Earth’s moon, which he spins around to show her the dark side that is never visible from Earth. He shows her Mars by centering on its moon Phobos and showing her what marsrise would look like from that potato-shaped perspective. He does a quick scan through the various Jovian moons that he thinks are particularly beautiful – Europa, Io, Ganymede. Lastly he takes her to Saturn’s moon Titan, where the camera lands on a mesmerizing display of Saturn with its gorgeous rings hanging in the sky behind. Laura stops him, pulling his hand away from the touchpad.
“Stop here for a moment,” she says, gazing with awe at the stunning display on the screen. “This is beautiful. Just let it stay here for a minute.”
“Cool,” Norman agrees. “And all of this – all the locations of the planets and everything – is real time; it’s how they are right now. And you can zoom it ahead to any point in the future or back into the past, too. When were you born?”
“Seven-twenty A.M. on November twenty-second, nineteen seventy-six.”
“The cusp, eh?” He inputs the information into the program’s time and date field, then hits Enter and the background behind Titan switches only slightly; the light changes to the other side of all the spheres. Saturn, in the distance, jumps a couple of degrees downward.
“That is so gorgeous. That’s what Saturn looked like from Titan at the moment I was born?”
“That’s right.”
They both gaze in silence at the majesty of Saturn as the seconds tick by in the date/time field. Norman puts his arm around her shoulders and, with what feels like luscious gluttony, takes in the softness of the skin of her arm against the palm of his hand.
“I’m now one minute old,” Laura says. She turns to meet his eye, looks at it specifically. “How did you lose your eye, Norman?”
He is silent for a moment, looking into her eyes, trying to see her spirit through them. “Accident,” he finally says.
She nods, then smiles.
“I am so in love with you,” he says.
“I’m in love with you, too. I don’t know how it happened. It feels like it’s always been true.” She lays her head on his shoulder and lets her body rest against his. “I’ve never felt so sure. I’m completely overwhelmed.” She gazes at Saturn. “I think we should move there. To Titan.”
“Might be a little cold for my tastes, although sweaters do suit me. But once we have robot bodies, I will totally move to Titan with you for a few hundred years or whatever, if you still want to. Or maybe just for a month. We can summer on Saturn.”
Laura laughs. “Robot bodies?”
“Yeah, girl,” Norman confidently replies with a chuckle. “The Machine Enlightenment. Seriously. You realize we’re at a point technologically where we could be among the oldest immortal post-humans? By which I mean that in our lifetimes it will likely, or possibly at least, become, well, possible … to effectively immortalize one’s awareness in a massively more powerful machine brain/body. So in a hundred years, for all we know, we could be nanocloud robot body versions of ourselves making love on Titan and waking up to saturnrise.”
“Is that true?” she asks.
“Well, potentially,” he replies. “I mean, let me put it this way – it certainly seems likely, in my optimistic opinion, considering everything. At this point it’s all about living long enough to live forever. Speaking of which…” He retrieves a cigarette from the pack beside Laura.
Laura gets up suddenly from the couch and prances over to the bookshelves near the door, where she picks up something from behind a book. She very slowly dances back to the couch with her hands behind her back and a cute, shy look on her face.
“What have you got?” Norman asks, standing as she approaches him.
“I had these made on a whim last Sunday, after you left, and I almost called you that day to give them to you but then I thought again, that maybe I was being a bit hasty, so I just held onto them. But now I know that I really want to give them to you. So … here.” Laura hands Norman a black velvet box that looks uncannily like the box that the ohm eye that Lee gave him came in. He opens the box slowly, revealing a glistening new set of keys attached to a heavy, sterling silver lower-case n. He hooks his index finger into the n, notes that it feels uncannily familiar to do so, and looks up at Laura, overwhelmed.
“I want you to bring over your computer, if you want to,” she says. “I want you to feel free to come and go as you please. But I love the idea of you working on your writing or your music or anything like that over here, if you want to.” She smiles shyly.
Norman kisses Laura with the keys jingling on his finger, the paintings on the walls stoically watching them, a bus on the street outside just pulling up to the Monument Square light and a gentle breeze just beginning to race past the window, and he uses his heart to bring them all together like a conductor with a spiritual baton and focuses their collective momentary magic on injecting the kiss with all the shimmering love in his heart.



Axerxes, look, Wazzz says, awakening his hypersquidly companion from a sound sleep. It’s them! They’re the Lovers!
What? Where are we? Axerxes lurches awake, shooting nervous glances around at the pearly clouds of titan fossil that rush past all around them (a weird weather).
We’re on watch, ass, Wazzz snaps, relishing the chance to catch Axerxes in a moment of social vulnerability. Norman and Laura just partially merged a couple of times, and then the next thing I know there’s an FES alert. Norman and Laura are the prophesied Lovers! It’s happening just like he said it would. Still think he’s not going to evolve or whatever?
You don’t even know what you’re talking about, Axerxes snorts, grabbing a frog from the bin. ’Evolve or whatever.’ He mocks the way Wazzz said it. He may be able to jump high, but he can’t fly and he’s got no one to hold him up. Two people are no taller than one. Fully-Emergent Superlove, my eye. He would need to reignite the whole species, and they the whole solar system. That’s what you don’t get. It’s not just him. It’s the whole thing. It’s every single one of those creatures you see in the periphery while you’re watching him – the ones walking past and handing him things and taking his money and all the ones walking past those people and on and on. It’s not Norman Newman you need to be afraid of; it’s Humanity.
What about the FES alert, then? Wazzz asks with mild frustration.
The sensor must be broken. It’s stupid there’s even a sensor for that.
Wazzz thinks, frowning. But there’s obviously something about him, or we wouldn’t be here watching him, right? We wouldn’t have been given these sensors. I mean, he’s got to be some kind of instigator or catalyst or something. I mean, it’s prophesied. And look, there it is happening just that way. The way it’s supposed to. Anyway, I’m not afraid. I am literally not afraid at all. Wazzz holds a posture of confidence.
Axerxes reaches up and slaps Wazzz across the eye with one long tentacle.
Wazzz flinches and shakes himself, looks questioningly into Axerxes’ eye. What was that for?
That was for making God laugh by talking about prophecy, Axerxes replies matter-of-factly. He looks over the edge of their blind at Norman driving to work, already the next morning.