Chapter 22: Peeking Into The Epicenter

It was a fairly long wait for the bus; it was a Sunday and there was less frequent service. But I felt warm and happy and didn’t mind the cold. I need to give more thought to pacing, I realized, the change in intensity of orgasms. There’s probably an optimization curve for orgasms in some academic journal somewhere. I should look it up someday.

And that weird thing happened again with my orgasm triggering hers, and based on what she said I guessed there was some kind of connection where we were sharing sensations all through the orgasm, and after. I had no way of controlling it, it just happened.

But wouldn’t it be interesting if there were a way to do that at will, to inject sensations or specific emotions into someone’s mind. Earlier I had speculated about finding the control panel in someone’s mind so I could trigger the length and intensity of a partner’s orgasms. Maybe this was just another way of looking at the same thing.

I resolved to catalog my arsenal of visual metaphors so I could apply them to produce a specific effect, like big or small orgasms, one or a series, long or short. There’s got to be a way to do that. You know who’d be good at that? Poets. Poets were really good at devising images that implied something else. I should read some romantic poets. Rowley would be proud of me.

Oops, here’s my stop. I pulled the cord and got off the bus and walked the rest of the way home. My mother was in the kitchen, cleaning up. She gave me a bit of a glare. “Dinner’s over, you’re late. You know the rules, if you’re going to be late, you call, so we know where you are.”

“I’m sorry, Mom, I didn’t realize it was so late. I just lost track of time.”

“Why don’t you start wearing a wristwatch like everyone else in the world? Your father has some old ones.”

“Okay, I will.” Time didn’t have much meaning when I was younger, so I never got in the habit of wearing a watch. I could always count on my sister to kick my door to get me up for school, and there were always clocks around if I needed to know the time. But not, apparently, in Kelly’s bedroom. I really hadn’t known how late it was.

But she relented and put some leftovers on a plate for me, so I was fed, and had enough energy left over to get up the stairs to my room. Barely. I lay on my bed and started making a mental list.

One, if I was going to keep looking for women to sleep with -- and it was a reasonably good bet that I would -- I had to be more careful about the ‘big orgasm’ fallacy.

I didn’t think that was what women always wanted. Maybe sometimes, but mostly they wanted to feel closeness and a kind of flush of pleasure, many times, rather than a single, huge, crashing orgasm that left them depleted. Though those were nice, too. I’d need to do some research, real research on what women were looking for from sex. I could ask, I suppose.

Two, I needed to follow up on my idea of cataloging and classifying these visual metaphors so I could employ them with a little more precision rather than as a blunt object to be wielded when it was time for them, or me, to cum.

And I needed to find some better metaphors than volcanoes and breaking waves. Those were useful, I suppose, but fell into the category of ‘blunt object’. No subtlety.

Three, this whole ‘induce an erection’ thing was still pretty crude. It worked, after a fashion, but there ought to be some way to fine-tune it, make it work with more finesse.

And four, I was no closer to finding a way to hook into someone’s mind other than in the middle of an orgasm, and even then I couldn’t control it. It was nice to know it was there, but not of much use if I couldn’t manipulate it somehow. That’s gonna take a lot more thought.

And speaking of thought, I had no more energy, physical or mental, and so surrendered to sleep.

Mindy’s pounding on the door woke me. “Hey, get up, it’s time for school.” I hadn’t heard ‘stupid-face’ in quite some time, so it must be a sign that she is maturing.

I thought about Kelly’s plan to stay home from school, and it sounded like an excellent plan, but I remembered I had a math quiz today so forced myself up and into the shower. I hoped I’d make it through the afternoon without falling asleep in class.

With a quick breakfast in me, I made it to the school bus and to class. The math quiz went fine, I thought. And blessedly I did not fall asleep in any of my classes, though some of them were a challenge to stay awake. My mind was half asleep, drifting, not surprising with the amount of physical and emotional energy I expended yesterday.

I kept an eye out for Kelly between classes, but didn’t see her. I did see Rowley, however, who gave me a big smile and a wave in the midst of her dash to her next class.

In study hall I went to the school library and asked the librarian for some recommendations for the romantic poets. She didn’t get many requests like that, I suppose, so went out of her way to help me. I took notes on her recommendations, and took out a few books by various poets. I’d better be careful not to let my friends -- or worse, the jocks -- see me with these or I’ll never hear the end of it.

In American History, my vow to stay awake received its biggest challenge of the day. Why isn’t there a class that teachers have to take in order to complete their degree which instructs them how to talk about their subject with enthusiasm and excitement, on the off chance that it might inspire their students?

No, Mr. O’Donnell reads from his lecture notes in a monotone and expects us to absorb it. It’s no wonder that young Americans don’t know anything about their own history.

And that got me to thinking how wonderful it would be if we could have memory transfers of the stuff we’re supposed to know, some machine that would transmit one person’s specific knowledge into another’s head and store it there. Presto, we’re all experts on history. And economics. And chemistry. Good idea, I’ll put it on my list of things to invent when I have time.

But of course, I have a leg up on all the other students who have to read and memorize and try to understand. I can tap in to a teacher’s brain and get some of that. Too bad it’s only the thing they’re thinking about right now, at this moment, not the full breadth of the subject they’re teaching.

I wish there were a way to get a larger picture of history, not just the specifics of the Louisiana Purchase, what it cost, and why it was such a political gamble. Because that’s what Mr. O’Donnell was talking about now.

I tried to understand his enthusiasm for his subject, if he had any left after teaching high school for a few years. I could “hear” him building up to his final points, like I was listening in with a fuzzy wiretap to someone speaking in a room. I couldn’t “hear” the precise details of his thoughts, because the wiretap was a poorly made Taiwanese knockoff, but I got the gist of his understanding.

That got me to thinking about that intense interlude with Kelly when we both orgasmed at the same time and shared our sensations and emotions. That was a two-way link, which I couldn’t control, but definitely existed.

This, with Mr. O’Donnell, was one-way: I could hear him thinking, albeit hearing him poorly, about this specific topic that he was about to speak aloud. Could I tap in to his enthusiasm for and understanding of the wider subject of history?

This process has always been passive, where I “overhear” him preparing to talk about something specific. I could also hear him thinking about me -- that’s when the silent alarm bell went off, when he was about to call on me in class. So there was definitely a link there. Could I manipulate it?

I looked down and closed my eyes, still listening. I tried to follow the link without looking at him, trying to sense the connection. I imagined myself in his head, looking at his notes about the Louisiana Purchase and trying to see where it had come from and how it connected to the rest of American history. What’s outside of this room in his head which is apparently dedicated to the Louisiana Purchase, because there’s nothing else here?

I call it a room, but not in the physical sense of four walls, a floor and a ceiling. Rather it was a dedicated area compartmentalized in some nebulous way to isolate it from the other areas which contained other kinds of information, but “room” is a convenient way to describe it.

I’ll call it the ‘epicenter’ to indicate what I’m talking about, because it was the focal point of the person’s current activity, the focus of their attention, not unlike the wheelhouse of a ship where the captain assesses the progress and direction of the ship, monitors its speed, the state of its various systems, and provides the instructions to the crew to keep the vessel running on schedule.

But wait, there’s a door here in this “room”. Is that how he got in? What’s on the other side of it? I open it. It’s another room, surprise, surprise. But this one contains information on the economic impact of the Louisiana Purchase and how that affected the economic balance of power between the South and the trading centers of New England, and how that fed into the conditions that led to the Civil War.

I drew back suddenly. This was a place I had not been before, and it was not information he had discussed in class. Was this a “real” place in his head, or was I imagining it? Well, that’s interesting.

If it’s “real”, then because it’s a connected room, it’s probably because its contents are logically connected to the first room, perhaps because it is likely something that he will talk about soon. So we have a way of proving or disproving the “reality” of the connected room.

I should have noticed whether there was a door or doors off the connected room. Because things always have connections and relate to something else, or to many other things. Well, we’ll find out. Probably in the next class.

But I noticed one other thing, and I wasn’t sure if it was real, either. The information in the new room about the economic impact of the purchase, and the economic and political ramifications of it, were something I now understood as if I had learned them. I saw how they fit into the larger social and political context. I didn’t yet know if my understanding was real. I wouldn’t know until another class.

In my head I could hear the stentorian voice of the TV announcer intoning, “Tune in next time for another exciting episode of “Thomas Jefferson and The Louisiana Purchase, where we’ll hear Jefferson say, ‘Those Federalists don’t know what they’re talking about!’”

Then the bell rang marking the end of the period. Everyone grabbed their books and headed out.

Next class was French. Mme. Connolly tried to make it interesting, a mixture of vocabulary and syntax, along with awkward attempts at conversational French. I wasn’t bad at it. Having a wiretap into a teacher’s head allowed me to at least speak with a reasonable accent. That was the “radio” that I heard last year in French class where I could listen to the phrase pronounced correctly. And I got a sense of the correct sentence structure and verb tenses by listening to her listening for student’s mistakes.

But I still had to memorize verbs and nouns, masculine or feminine, regular or irregular. Tedium wrapped in routine surrounded by monotony, like memorizing multiplication tables. We all had to take a language, however, and since I had already taken French, I just naturally fell into it.

We settled in, and Mme. Connolly said, “Bon jour, Mesdames et Messieurs.” And we all answered, as if we were in third grade, “Bon jour, Mme. Connolly.” She was doing her best, but there is only so much interest and enthusiasm one can generate for irregular verb forms. My mind wandered, as it tended to do.

I was idly thinking about the epicenters in Mr. O’Donnell’s head -- boy, does that look weird when written down -- and I was also listening to the “radio” of French pronunciation, when I suddenly found myself in Mme. Connolly’s head where she had lists of irregular verbs on a virtual blackboard. Huh?

I looked at the blackboard in her head, then at the whiteboard on the wall here in class. Many of the verbs were written down, and as I watched she copied the others from the blackboard in her head, until they were all there, though not in the same order. Looking at the whiteboard on the wall it all looked strange, unfamiliar, as any new information would.

I closed my eyes and looked at the blackboard in her head. Reading it, I understood it. I knew these verbs, I had known them for some time, they were familiar friends to me. I opened my eyes again and looked up at the whiteboard. Now I understood them, knew how they were used in a sentence, knew when to use which form of the verb.

My hand was shaking a little, maybe because I was still energy depleted from yesterday, but maybe because I had had a breakthrough.

Oops, silent alarm, heads up. She was looking my way and asked me to select the proper form of the verb Apprendre (meaning learn or teach, depending on how it’s used) for second person future singular. I could look at the whiteboard -- no, I didn’t need to do that, I knew how this verb was used.