THRESHOLD
John Edward Ames
Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished colleagues,” said Oxford Professor Barry Atherton, President of the International Society of Philosophers. “It is my distinct pleasure—albeit one laced with considerable envy—to introduce a woman who, at the scandalously young age of twenty-seven, is already relegating us mature old mavens to the tomes of cracker-barrel philosophy.”
Polite laughter rippled through the crowded auditorium. Kevin Sanford, sitting down front with the hoary-headed elders, was the only guest wearing blue jeans among all the dinner jackets and tuxedos. He felt belly flies of excitement stirring.
“Indeed,” Atherton continued in his quaint, pedantic, veddy-veddy proper intonation, “it is not at all hyperbolic to suggest that her last few articles on the theory of consciousness have occasioned a veritable paradigm shift in the world of ideas. They have certainly advanced her beyond the status of a young Turk to the first rank of international philosophers, which her presence here tonight as keynote speaker eloquently verifies. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my sincere pleasure to present Dr. Shireen Carroll, currently occupying the prestigious William James Chair of Philosophy at the University of Michigan and this year’s recipient of the ISP’s Golden Quill Award for her seminal essay ‘Space, Time, and the Nature of Consciousness.’”
Kevin was among the first to come to their feet as applause crackled through the cavernous lecture hall. He watched Shireen rise from her chair at the edge of the dais and move to the podium. She looked a little nervous, but Kevin knew this amazing woman did her best work in a state of mild anxiety. His lips tilted into a grin when even this politically correct gathering—most of whom had never seen Shireen or a photo of her—loosed a collective sigh of delighted surprise at her striking good looks.
Take a good look, folks, he thought with the toe-curling elation of someone who knows a thrilling secret. That lady is a traffic hazard, and I’m the lucky mutt who sleeps with her. Evidently she did not boff her way to the top, huh?
Shireen had chosen her respectable but figure-flattering white knit dress. He liked the way the snug belt accentuated the curving sweep of her hips. Her hair was a platinum crop in the stark lighting, though from here Kevin had to imagine the smoke-colored eyes. Eyes that said come thrill me, knave, though he’d also seen them look like two pools of burning acid when she was on the warpath.
“Thank you, Professor Atherton,” Shireen began, speaking without notes. “But according to your introduction, I’ve already eliminated the competition and solved all of life’s Enduring Questions. So why don’t we all just go get drunk?”
This time the laughter was heartfelt, not polite. When it subsided, Shireen added, “Professor Ather-ton is being hyperbolic, though it’s quite flattering. The truth, as so often happens in the world of ideas, is that my name has been linked to perspectives developed by group endeavor. Much of my own work was directly inspired by Professors David Chalmers and Owen Flanagan.”
Ahh, skip the modesty schtick, sweet love, Kevin thought. Steal from one, it’s plagiarism; steal from two, it’s research.
“There are legions,” Shireen continued, “who clamor incessantly that the wondrous puzzle of consciousness, of subjective awareness, is no puzzle at all, much less a wonder. Thanks to a long, grinding century of Behaviorist and Positivist tunnel vision, ‘consciousness’ is too often perceived by science and philosophy today as the by-product of separate mechanical processes, merely the higher-order ‘hum’ of complex neural circuitry at work. The whole, in this view, is really just an abstract illusion, the complex sum of many separate parts. The bee seems to buzz in our head, this view reminds us, but in reality it’s in our bonnet.”
Shireen finally spotted Kevin and flashed a little grin at him before she went on with sudden forcefulness:
“Well, malarkey! Such reasoning is reductio ad absurdum masquerading as doctrine. Science does a wonderful job of describing neural-impulse transmission, for example, by looking closely at each component in the process. But mere description is not always complete explanation. The mechanical processing of a visual image is distinct from the subjective experience of seeing. Since various machines incapable of self-awareness do an impressive job of processing shape, color, even of identifying and classifying objects, why are we humans ‘aware’ we are doing these same tasks? This question is crucial because mechanical science cannot take us beyond it. To put it crudely, something elusive is always left intact after mechanical science has deconstructed consciousness. And that ‘elusive something’ that won’t go away is in fact the real essence of consciousness.”
Spirited applause interrupted Shireen. Kick ass and take names, chippy, Kevin thought.
“The dominant, mechanistic, ‘break-it-on-down’ view of human self-awareness,” Shireen continued, cutting now to the vital heart of her recent work, “stems historically from the ancient Greek atomistic concept of reality, which posits that smaller units always combine to make bigger ones. But atomism is logical only when applied to solid matter. And just as matter is not the only state of our universe, some of the most valuable concepts in science are both indispensable and refer to realities incapable of being atomistically reduced to smaller parts—notably, space, time, and mass.
“Similarly, I and others like Chalmers and Flanagan have argued that human consciousness, too, should be viewed as just such an irreducible entity. It is not ‘peripheral’ to human functioning, not an accidental spin-off of neural activity. You can name all of its parts, but that will never convey its complete essence. Or in the spirit of Yeats: You cannot separate the dancer from the dance.”
Applause exploded through the auditorium, loud and sustained. “Human freedom and dignity,” Kevin and the rest of this select group realized all too well, had taken one hell of a battering in the Age of Anxiety. Pavlov and Skinner had replaced the inner man with a stimulus-response automaton. And few had seriously challenged them or the New Age silliness that had cropped up to fill what Kevin sardonically called “the Conrad Aiken-void” in humanity—the heartfelt need to believe that man is somehow central to it all, a noble piece of work, after all, not just puppets made out of meat. Shireen’s essays, while precise and scientific, proved emphatically that the bee-in-the-bonnet boys were all, philosophically speaking, butt-naked under their starched lab coats.
Maybe, Kevin told himself, Shireen really was shifting a few paradigms in the increasingly irrelevant world of the Intelligentsia. Why not? The world’s most passionate minds were often also its most passionate lovers, and damn straight Shireen could make thirty minutes in the sack more therapeutic than a week in the country.
But such thinking only robbed his brain of vital blood and made it difficult to concentrate on Shireen’s keynote speech. Christ, he upbraided himself. Here the woman is, inspiring the cream of the world’s philosophers with flights of stirring rhetoric, and all you can do is think about schtupping her.
Reluctantly Kevin shunted his thoughts to a more celestial plane.
“You’ve never been very impressed with my theory,” Shireen complained on the first night after they returned to Ann Arbor from Oxford. “I saw all that smirking you were doing down there in the front row while I was speaking, shithead!”
“I was not—”
“Oh, yes you were, Kevin Sanford! Every time my work is mentioned, you get that knowing little grin on your face. What makes reality your private theater? Why are you so sure I’m wrong?”
Kevin was sprawled naked on the queen-size bed’s sateen-quilted spread. Shireen, wearing only her lace bed jacket, sat on the edge of the bed kneading his back muscles—or at least she’d started to, he noticed with a little flush of irritation. The woman never went into deep-think mode on him until it was his turn to get a massage.
“Wrong?” he murmured, still drifting in a postcoital daze. “I never said that. Hell, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”
A moment later Kevin shouted, startled, when Shireen rained a flurry of blows on him with a pillow. “I’ll stop your clock, mighty mouth. Now you tell me, from your smug, august position as an unemployed cosmologist, what I don’t know that you evidently do.”
Kevin groaned and sat up in the middle of the bed. “Look, what does Her Nips care about the warped perspectives of a thirty-five-year-old graduate-student bum? I’m just a loner with a boner, a cowboy in the boat of Ra, a fowl owl on the prowl, a—”
“You are a bum,” she cut in. “A brilliant, infuriating, arrested-adolescent bum. Professor Oakes told me you could name your position if you’d just get off your lazy duff and finish your dissertation. Half the academics in the philosophy department take their articles to you for critique before they’re submitted.”
“That’s right,” Kevin boasted. “And the other half are unpublished.”
“Mmm. So tell me, you underachieving, oversexed, laid-back genius—why so cool toward my theory of human consciousness?”
Kevin watched the twin dark spots where Shireen’s plum-colored nipples dinted the lace of her jacket. “My objections can best be expressed as a formula, m’lady,” he assured her solemnly. He brought his lips close to her right ear and whispered: “‘The mass of the ass, plus the angle of the dangle, equals the scream of the cream.’ C’mon, fox, let’s pitch whoopee!”
He lunged at her and grunted like a caveman. Shireen slapped his hand away from her tits. But his lewd “formula” forced an unwilling grin from her. “Skip the frat-boy graffiti. I’m serious. Why are you so skeptical of my theory?” she demanded.
Kevin surrendered with a martyr’s groan and flopped back to the bed. “Because it places man at the center of things, that’s why. But in fact, man is simply one more entity in the universe—one that rots fairly quickly, at that. There may be a higher purpose to the universe, but unlike you and your ‘humanistic’ peers, I don’t privilege man’s role in that purpose. ‘The snow doesn’t give a soft white damn whom it touches,’ etcetera.”
Kevin slyly rolled onto his hip, while he said all this, and nudged his uncoiling sex into the concave warmth of the dimple at the left base of her spine. But Shireen was mulling what he’d just said, the furrow between her eyebrows deepening in her concentration.
“Straight out of Wordsworth, nature boy,” she dismissed him. “So your view decentralizes man in the universe and mine doesn’t. It’s just a shift in point of view. Even accepting that difference, why can’t my theory still hold? Why can’t consciousness be one of the irreducible forces in the cosmos like space or time?”
“Because that view still arrogantly privileges man and exaggerates his capacity to know himself. When ‘consciousness’ itself is applied to the very problem of consciousness, you are making the object of the study the same as the subject doing the study. Do the words inherent bias mean anything to you? Sweet love, we can’t look under our own hoods—it’s a crapshoot, at best. At worst, it’s a one-way ticket to the rubber Ramada.”
It fascinated Kevin, the way Shireen always listened to him as she was now, with the intensity of a cat focused on a rat. But although she always gave him a fair hearing, her ultra competitive nature would not often concede a major point. He thought of the motto taped over her computer: Second place is first loser.
“You’re overstating Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty,” she finally decided. “Granted, the process of observation distorts everything it studies. But that doesn’t render all observation null and void. We just need to compensate for the distortion.”
By now Kevin’s sly movements had hardened his cock and started to evoke a reflexive response from Shireen, who was beginning to move willy-nilly with his rhythms as he pressed more and more urgently into her.
“Hmm,” he replied, obviously not caring a frog’s fat ass, right then, about Heisenberg as he softly kissed her ear. He ran one hand around to the hard curve of her stomach and caressed it through the delicate lace. He slid the hand up and cupped one of her breasts, taking the nipple between fingers and thumb and teasing it stiff. He heard her breathing quicken as lust triggered a galvanic tickle in her loins.
“Uh-oh,” Shireen said, nudging him back onto the bed. She stretched out beside him and squeezed his erection until it pulsed hard in her hand, the glans purple with hot blood. “This conversation has gone as far as it can go.”
Kevin started to roll onto his side, but Shireen planted a hand on his chest and pushed him decisively onto his back. An ear-to-ear smile divided his face when he recognized her mood. Shireen was indifferent to hugging and kissing and was no big fan of foreplay, either. Although Kevin missed all that, Shireen’s aggressive hunger was just compensation. At times the sex need would come over her so suddenly and forcefully that she simply took him like a shameless bitch in heat, whimpering with greedy impatience when his cock wasn’t ready fast enough.
But now it was ready, so tight and swollen it leaped with each heartbeat. Shireen swung her right leg over him, settled her taut-muscled butt onto his thighs, and lined his prick up with the chamois folds of her labia. She was already wet enough to take all of him in one hard, forward-sliding plunge, her vagina opening to his thrust before the well-trained muscles closed snug as a velvet glove around his cock, gripping and releasing, gripping and releasing, milking him.
Shireen progressed from fast rocking to a hard, even faster, and more luscious plunging up and down the entire length of his erection. She power-fucked him so energetically that Kevin had to grab her tight-flexing ass while she, in turn, gripped the headboard to steady herself.
Soon his belly was slick with her drippings, and her groin slapped into it over and over with a sound like a kitten lapping milk. Kevin groaned uncontrollably, feeling his cock tense as hard as steel cable while her cunny stroked it in a maddening pleasure grip. Shireen began that low keening that always preceded her most powerful orgasms.
“I’m gonna … oh, Kevin, I’m gonna … gonna … I’mm gonn-nahh … ANHH! … ekss-splode!”
Shireen thrashed around spastically as a climax ripped through her like electric death, whip-snaking her body. She was still grinding, though the spasms were slowing, when Kevin moaned hard and thrust his hips hard off the bed, lifting Shireen high and driving his cock so deep the glans kissed her cervix when he ejaculated.
For a long time both exhausted lovers lay in a dazed, confused tangle of limbs, only slowly returning to awareness. It was toward the end of that postorgasmic lull, Kevin realized much later—after it was too late—that his free-floating mind idly formed the fatal question.
“Tell me something, chippy,” he teasingly opened the debate with Shireen. “If self-awareness is as irreducible an entity as space and time, where does it go when you have one of those ballistic orgasms like that one—the ones—you just had? Girl, you were out of it. Gone. Zombified.”
Clearly he was teasing her, and Shireen’s first response was to tweak his cock. “Where does it ‘go’? Are you getting astral on me?”
“Yeah, where does it go? What happens to it?”
“Who says it goes anywhere?”
“You did, for one. What about that slick fluff piece you sold to New Woman last summer? You summed up Reich’s theory of the orgasm as a ‘temporary escape from the tedium of cognition,’ or something like that. You went on to say that we seek the release of orgasm for just that reason: release from the self. You compared it to the ‘no-mindedness’ of Zen meditation.”
Shireen rose on one elbow beside him, frowning. “Yeah, so? If you drift near a point, big boy, feel free to make it.”
“It’s made! Look, you’re hypothesizing that self-consciousness is, categorically speaking, as real and undeniable as space itself. Fine, very exalted. But consider this: You can easily visualize a space with nothing in it, can you not?”
Shireen snorted. “Sure. Your bank account, for example.”
“Careful, your claws are showing. Now just tell me this: Can you visualize no space?”
Shireen’s frown etched itself deeper. “Of course not. As Kant argued, space is a categorical imperative.”
“Meaning space is truly irreducible and thus undeniable. Same thing with time—it takes time to refute time, so it proves itself. But how can you deny that self-awareness is definitely ‘reduced’ during climax?”
For Kevin all this had begun as just an amusing thought experiment. He forgot about it later that same day. But thus toying with an idea, he fired a new research obsession in Shireen: to pin down precisely where awareness “goes”—for lack of a better word—at the sexual peak. Facetious or not, she told herself, Kevin’s criticism did point to a potential weakness in her theory of consciousness.
Shireen positively delighted in the attention she was getting lately for her writing. But it was her nature to earn her breakfast. And since Kevin must of course be wrong, she determined to discover the proof of his error.
Only wimps, she steeled herself, cringe before their critics.
“No offense, sweet love,” Kevin said, his tone a hybrid of exhaustion and contrition. “But I’m working myself into a slight overbite here.”
Reluctantly Shireen unwrapped her legs from Kevin’s shoulders so he could sit up in bed. He made a show of cupping his jaw. Clearly, the gesture implied, even good oral sex could last too long.
“What’s going on here?” he demanded. “You used to be a regular orgasmatron. Lately, I couldn’t thrill you with a kick-start vibrator.”
Shireen, too, sat up. Her clothes lay in a puddle at the foot of the bed. She ignored his question while she dressed, still preoccupied with the implications of yet another experimental failure.
A longtime practitioner of “directed thought” and other meditation techniques, Shireen had decided she might be able to monitor herself during sex. Her goal was to experiment with levels of awareness, to see if she could experience the “release” of sexual pleasure while also retaining her mental awareness of that release—much like those who, simultaneously, experience dying from within while also viewing it from outside their bodies.
So far, however, the effort had been a miserable failure. Dancer and the dance, she reminded herself ruefully.
Kevin knew this long silence now signified some major problem, and he suspected what it was. Shireen had never confused serious, which she definitely was, with humorless, which she definitely was not. Never, that is, he chastised himself, until he recently opened his big fucking mouth and proposed his “thought experiment.”
Shireen, still deep in her thoughts, moved into the living room and sat down at the piano, warming up with some scales. Kevin followed her out. He crossed to the wet bar and poured himself a bourbon over shaved ice.
“Drink?” he called over.
She shook her head, ignoring him, watching her fingers.
“Shireen,” he said quietly. She stopped playing and revolved on the bench to watch him, still saying nothing.
“You told me one time that you don’t believe in pushing the learning curve for its own sake. I think you’re getting carried away when you start sacrificing your—our—sex life on the altar of experimentation.”
“Pee doodles! You challenged my theory, and I accepted that challenge.”
“Jesus, lady! Your whole theory doesn’t go kaflooey just because I—”
“A-hah! Now he’s a True Believer! For a honking good fuck, ladies and gents, the noble cosmologist will move to a new metaphysical home. Next stop: politics.”
“Piss on it,” Kevin snapped, polishing off his drink and banging the glass down on the bar. He headed for the bedroom, then stopped in the doorway to look at her.
“Like I said, we can’t look under our own hoods. Not like you’re trying to do. The mind-body nexus is highly volatile synergy and must be respected. You are intruding Ego into space reserved for Id. You keep splicing modes, and believe me, you will sure as shit regret it.”
Kevin was, by turns, pissed and then worried. As Shireen’s determined quest gradually ratcheted up to an obsession that consumed her, he needed more space. He began spending more nights back in his dingy little walk-up in the student ghetto behind the football stadium.
But inadvertently, by leaving her alone more, Kevin indirectly provided the first major breakthrough in Shireen’s quest. For his absence, and her present lack of any suitable surrogates, forced her to rely on an expedient she had never really fully explored before—masturbation.
She had always had an intense imagination. But Shireen was raised to believe that self-stimulation, while not exactly shameful, was certainly sad—something only lonely soldiers and inveterate losers resorted to. With one of her very first solo sessions, however, her attitude underwent a sea change.
It was all her practice lately with meditation, especially controlled imagery, that provided the breakthrough. Shireen began by setting aside plenty of time on a weekday when she didn’t have to lecture. She put on some bossa nova, which always relaxed her, set a demijohn of wine on the night table, and crawled naked between her favorite satin sheets.
She used no sex toys, and in fact didn’t even touch herself for quite some time. Shireen let the swaying rhythm of the music infuse her while she used systematic desensitization to relax all her muscles.
This bed, she thought, was where Kevin always fucked her so wonderfully, his lean, hard ass flexing with athletic vigor while he held both hands under her butt and lifted her to him, over and over, pounding into her until they both groaned in a sweet agony that could only be death or the glory of the rut.
Thinking all this, then seeing it on the screen of her mind, Shireen pulled one corner of the sheet taut over the silky rise of her mons veneris. Pushing against it sent a sweet, hot current of pleasure strobing through her. Her free hand slid up to her breasts and kneaded the nipples while she continued the pressure around—but not directly on—her clitoris.
Shireen held the image of Kevin riding her as she pulled the sheet aside and scissored her legs open wide. She probed three fingers into the glazed folds of her labia, teasing the little pearl out from its sheath. Shireen rubbed it a bit more directly now, her breathing beginning to quicken.
The first orgasm sneaked up on her, a sudden, welling peak that only made her excitedly go for more. In her building pleasure Shireen’s long, coltish legs rose from the bed, and she bent at the knees as if Kevin really were writhing between them.
She climaxed several more times, each one a bit more intense than the one preceding it. Shireen knew she was building toward an explosive orgasm, and this time she managed to maintain focus, to hang on toself-awareness—managed to actually will herself attentive—even as the tidal wave of carnal pleasure threatened to overwhelm her senses.
Looking back on it later, Shireen realized that first session was only a partial success. But it gave her an exhilarating foretaste of what she was soon to grow very adept at. For a few incredible moments, her frenzied fingers managed to balance her precisely on the feather edge of that final, incapacitating climax. Somehow, her clitoris and her intellect became one, so that as her pleasure intensified, forbidden insight deepened.
For a moment, only a few heartbeats, Shireen actually monitored the initial “escape” of her own awareness. Then, frustratingly, she lost the critical balance and ruined everything—came thumping back to earth like a bird shot on the wing. Lost the insight and the powerful climax toward which she had been welling.
But, for that brief time, she had experienced the incredible elation of progress. She was on track toward the truth she sought.
“‘In summation,’“ Kevin read in the glow of a flexible Tensor lamp, “‘the body, senses momentarily overloaded, virtually dies at the height of orgasmic excitation. At this peak, consciousness or self-awareness energizes to pure aura and, in effect, hovers just outside the body, an etheric double, until the body regains vital functioning and the self is reintegrated. That is why awareness returns only in increments after powerful orgasms, never all at once—very much like blood returning to a “dead” limb. We may thus accurately say the self is temporarily displaced during orgasm, but it is not demonstrably eliminated or reduced.’”
Kevin dropped Shireen’s rough draft back onto thedining room table and looked up at her. Those smoke-colored eyes of hers scintillated with the ecstasy of intellectual triumph. But he shuddered inwardly at the shocking change in her appearance since he’d last seen her a week ago. The haggard shadows under those eyes, the oily, lopsided clump of her hair—Shireen, who usually showered twice a day, now looked like she’d spent several rough nights in detox.
“Well?” she demanded. “All subjective, undocumented bullshit, right?”
That new tone, too, Kevin noticed—as if she felt a huge, bottomless contempt for him and anyone else who dared dispute her. Shireen had always taken strong stands, but this ride-it-till-it-crashes arrogance was new and alarming.
“It’s not bullshit at all,” he told her truthfully. “It’s brilliant. Look, I got goose bumps reading it. But Jesus, lady. Have you looked at yourself in a mirror lately?”
“I’ve been doing a lot of things with myself lately,” she assured him.
“I see that. And David Oakes told me you canceled your Friday lectures? You never cancel classes.”
“Oh, spare me the fallen-woman spiel. Do you comprehend what I’ve accomplished here? Do you? I am sure as hell not the only person capable of this—based on my report, my experiences can be replicated, verified. This will stick a Skinner box right up the Behaviorist butt!”
“Shireen,” Kevin said, concern lending him new patience, “this is all fascinating, but you’re carrying on like you’ve found a cure for AIDS. Calm down and—”
“Fuck AIDS, you simpering, bleeding-heart wuss! You’re just jealous. I proved you wrong.”
“Listen to yourself, would you? I don’t care if I’m wrong. Fine, you’re right. Okay? You’re missing thepoint here. This … stuff you’re fooling around with is obviously dangerous, it—”
“Prove it!”
“You are proving it for me, right now. The way you look, the way you sound. This isn’t you, Shireen. That ‘hovering’ business you keep raving about—don’t you understand? That has got to be a vulnerable and unstable time for the self. Judging from your description, at that moment the self has been torn loose from its usual moorings. What if you push it out too far, somehow lock it out? Maybe it could drift off and never return, like some astronaut sucked out of his capsule into the endless maw of outer space.”
Shireen gathered up the pages of her essay, her face hardening. “You know what? You obviously don’t know dick about my work. As usual, you’re spouting a priori bullshit and I am describing empirical research.”
“Empirical? You diddled yourself, for Christ sakes!”
Shireen smacked the table hard. “That’s why you’re so bent out of shape, isn’t it, you ‘sensitive’ hypocrite? How dare I cut off your God-given ration of pussy?”
“Take the pine cone out of your ass, I—”
“God, did I delude myself,” Shireen fumed, her throat swelling shut from anger. “You’re nothing but a glib little ectomorphic bookworm! Get out of my apartment, nowhere man, or I dial 911.”
Kevin’s jaw fell open in astonishment. “Just like that?”
“You got it in one, Cosmo,” Shireen informed him. She crossed to the door and opened it for him.
“See you in the funny papers,” Kevin muttered on his way out. But just before she slammed the door on him, Kevin recovered from his shell-shock long enough to feel a resurgence of coppery-tasting fear.
He caught her arm by the wrist and added, his voicerising in his urgency: “Shireen, for Christ sakes please don’t go on with this!”
Kevin was wrong … oh, so hopelessly, blindly, wonderfully wrong, Shireen soon discovered.
At first, immediately after he left her place for the last time, she had felt guilty for her treatment of him. But even then the forbidden knowledge loomed in the back of her mind, her silent secret: With what you’ve taught yourself, girl, you’ll never need or want a sexual partner again. This isn’t virtual reality, it’s ultimate reality.
This, Shireen repeated, writhing between the satin sheets. This … it was Wednesday, just past three P.M., and she had skipped yet another lecture to enjoy another “afternoon delight,” as she now termed her exciting sessions of autoeroticism.
Her right middle finger was in fast motion, teasing the slick nubbin of her clitoris up from its hood. Warmth like the sudden glow of a toaster coil moved up into her lower belly. Faster, two fingers now, and Shireen’s heels began to rumple the sheets as more blood engorged her clitty, exciting her. It was swollen so hard it felt like a small penis.
This … oh, this … and now Shireen was soaring toward that final, incapacitating peak. She gave in to pleasure, but also held on to awareness, balanced on that fine, feather edge between Thanatos and lust oblivion. Soon Shireen was literally “beside herself,” watching the pretty girl on the bed drive herself to an ecstasy. She felt the sensation of weightless flight and the exhilarating rush of timeless, limitless motion.
This … oh, God, this….
“We’ve not only done every known test, Mr. Sanford,” the internist assured him. “We even made a few up. Tests for toxins, viruses, any parasites—all negative. Her CAT scan is normal so far as organic functioning. So are her body reflexes and pupillary response to light and darkness. It’s extremely baffling—if you tickle her feet, for example, her toes will curl. She requires no life-support system except IV feeding, yet brain-wave activity is virtually nonexistent. Such cases are not unheard of, but this is the first I’ve seen. Her family is absolutely devastated.”
“Yes,” Kevin said tonelessly. “I’m sure they must be.”
It had been six weeks since Shireen gave him the boot, riding the high of her experimental triumph. And now look at the great thinker—turned into the very thing she had passionately claimed human beings were not—mere puppets of meat. A medical Maxicart sat beside the bed, recording the vital functions that were no longer vital—just functions. And where, Kevin wondered, his flesh crawling against his shirt, was the rest of Shireen?
“I hear,” the medico volunteered politely, discreetly glancing at his watch, “that she was—ahh, is—quite renowned in philosophy?”
Kevin nodded. Looking at the wan, expressionless face on that pillow made him feel like he was trying to swallow a nail sideways. God, couldn’t they at least somehow shut her eyes—no longer eyes, just two gray buttons stuck to a headpiece filled with straw.
“Yeah, she was,” he finally managed to answer, not bothering with the hypocrisy of the present tense. “She was always one for staying ahead of the curve.”
The force field of her will radiated out of her, expanded away from her like a hot spirit wind howling over a dark wasteland. The thoughts, the desires, the shameful and hopeful secrets of countless minds surrounded her now in an incoherent white noise, got mixed with hers, and now her mind was a field of oscillating waves mixed with so many others in a wild, tumbling rush of images and thoughts, and then those, too, rushed off in the shrieking, empty vastness, and Shireen’s mind shut down to a long, silent, eternal scream.