All Our Wrong Todays(11)
I never really got to do anything cool while immaterial. It was only for experimental training purposes. I’d spend on average twelve minutes going through a routine series of tests and then, when I hit the two-minute red zone, hurry back into the defusion sphere to be reconstituted. You’re sluggish for a couple of hours afterward, like your molecules need to get familiar with gravity again, but otherwise you feel fine.
Not that it mattered how I did on my immateriality tests. There was zero chance I’d be going back in time. Penelope was too good at her job to even need an understudy.
I was there for four reasons, but really it was one reason—pity.
16
Why am I going into such detail about the defusion sphere? Because it’s how I saw Penelope Weschler naked for the first time. It’s also how she saw me naked for the first time. I was way more interested in the former, but the latter turned out to be way more significant.
Penelope and I are doing a routine training module, this virtual simulation on how to walk when immaterial so you don’t, like, sink into the ground or float off into the air and can actually put one foot in front of the other. It requires lining up the intangible molecules in your feet with the coherent molecules of the floor, sort of like strolling across a pond that’s frozen over with a thin layer of ice and trying not to fall through.
I do what I usually do, which is to try to imitate what Penelope is doing to the best of my ability and falling dramatically short. And she does what she usually does, which is to excel at the given task beyond all previous metrics while ignoring me completely.
And then . . . something goes wrong. Alarms honk, red lights flash, Penelope and I get hustled into a locked decontamination chamber. A voice, too loud, the speaker giving a tinny buzz on the vowels, tells us the security system flagged an unidentified pollutant that exceeds medically safe radiation levels. They have to follow protocol.
We’re told to remove our clothes. I’m a bit numb, because someone just told me I may have been contaminated with a lethal dose of radiation, so not really registering that I’m in a small room alone with Penelope Weschler and we’re both undressing. I take off all my clothes and she takes off all her clothes and we place them in a container that’s withdrawn into the wall by robotic arms.
I’m standing there, naked. She’s standing there, naked. They spray this mist onto us from nozzles in the ceiling and it smells metallic but it looks, basically, like glitter. You know, the kind that kids sprinkle on glue for craft projects. I’m sure there’s a sound medical reason for its appearance, but it makes my possible death by radiation poisoning seem awfully festive.
We’re six feet apart, glitter clouds whirling around us. I do my best to avert my eyes, because I don’t want her to catch me looking at her, but I also know this is almost certainly my one and only chance to see Penelope naked. So I dart a furtive glance at her.
She’s staring right at me.
Physiologically, it’s not exactly a surprise what happened next, but still—and I’m telling you this next part only out of full disclosure, so you’ll believe this is the whole truth, because if I admit something this mortifying and weird, what else is there to possibly conceal?—standing there naked with Penelope in the swirling glitter, both of us looking at each other, I can’t help it. I get an erection.
Penelope looks, you know, surprised. Since we’re being doused with an emergency antiradiation treatment. And I know it’s ridiculous. I might be about to die, horribly, lesions waffling my flesh, my organs liquefying, my bones ropey and gelatinous. But I don’t feel like I’m dying. It’s stupid, I know, but what I feel is vividly alive.
And Penelope, well, she looks at me like she just noticed me for the first time.
To clarify, it’s not that my penis is so magnificent she was overwhelmed with desire. It’s more that I’d never done anything notable in her presence before and this was such a demented response to the situation that it couldn’t help but stand out.
There’s a jarring buzz and the glitter spray stops. The voice on the speaker tells us they ran all the requisite tests and there was no radiation leak—the alarm was triggered by a malfunction in the security system that monitors contaminant levels, but all precautionary protocols were followed, we performed admirably in a high-stress situation, and we can resume training as soon as we get dressed in the clean uniforms already waiting for us outside the decontamination chamber—but I’m not really listening because I’m trying to memorize every contour of Penelope’s body in the last few seconds we have together.
The air lock pops open with a depressurized hiss, and without a word, Penelope turns to exit ahead of me. And I think that would’ve been the end of it, I would’ve stuffed my febrile crush down into the fertile self-loathing I keep watered in my guts, and the rest of it never would’ve happened. Except as she bent over to squeeze out of the air lock, Penelope looked back at me. It wasn’t to confirm that I was okay after the scare or that I was following protocol. She was checking to see if I was staring at her ass on the way out. Which I was. By the time I understood why she’d even care it was much too late.
17
As the boss’s son, my introduction to the chrononaut team inspired some initial curiosity. A few of the understudies even flirted with me. But it didn’t take long for them to lapse into resentment and contempt. It was like my new colleagues took the same emotional journey my father did from the day I was born, except it took them only a month instead of thirty-two years.