Chapter 45: Spelunking The Epicenter

I woke up so late on Sunday that everyone had gone out to do errands or visit friends. I made coffee and some breakfast, then took my second cup out to the beach chair in the backyard and sank into it.

I liked Greta, and I think in a short time she was going to discover what she liked in sex and was going to get very good at it. It would be fun to help her learn. But I didn’t think that, ultimately, there was much of a connection between us. She was beautiful and sexy, but she didn’t have much interest in what I liked, and hadn’t yet found her own calling.

Besides, I was in love with Karen, who was even sexier than Greta. But I would always be grateful to Greta because she was the link that helped me discover the “control panel” I always thought existed. I needed to learn more about that, how it worked, what it could do.

And I thought that I had also confirmed my suspicion about what women liked to have happen during sex, what they wanted to feel like when it was over. I’d need to verify it with other subjects -- the work of a scientist is never done! -- but this felt somehow right. It might need some fine-tuning, but it was pretty damn close.

I finished my coffee and had nodded off when I heard someone knocking on the back door. I twisted my head around and saw who it was.

“Jeff, over here.”

“Hey, Carter, what’s up? Whoa, you look like you were rode hard and put away wet. Rough night?”

“Thanks, Jeff. That’s very cowboy of you.”

“Okay, I won’t ask. How’s things in the exciting world of translation?”

I gave him the updates on the job front and he did his best to look interested. “And what of you and young Kate?” I asked. “Any orgies yet? Sex toys?”

“She seems to be taking a step back from the experimentation. I did think about those things we talked about last week, what I wouldn’t or couldn’t do, and things I was still unsure about.

“And I finally got up the courage to talk to her about it, ask her how far she planned to push this experimentation. She was a little put off that I was questioning her about it, because I think she thought it was her business alone.

“But I said if she was involving me, then I was a part of it, too, and I should have a say. I told her I liked -- or at least I didn’t hate -- the things she had tried with me, except for the spanking, and I was okay with trying other things, but I thought we ought to talk about them first.

“Then I told her, here’s the things I don’t think I like at all, and if there’s something you want to do that involves some of those things we’re going to have to talk it over. You were right, I think, Tom, she really hadn’t thought this through, about the danger in some of the things she was thinking about.”

“So you’re still on speaking terms, then?”

“Oh, yeah, and we’ve even had sex. Normal sex. We’ll see what happen with the other stuff. I really like her, Tom, and I don’t want to have to give her up if she decides she wants to do something I don’t like. I don’t want to hurt her and I don’t want to see her get hurt.”

“She’s a smart girl, Jeff, maybe just a little excited to learn about new things. I don’t think she’ll do anything dumb, and I don’t think she wants to lose you. She knows you care about her. Keep talking to her.”

We talked a little longer, then he took his leave and said maybe we’d go to a movie some night this week.

After he left, I thought about going back to sleep, but went inside and read some of Grigio’s Italian grammar book instead. That was the high point of my day, having the energy for almost nothing else.

Monday I felt better, my body having slept off the exhaustion. I got in to work around ten and found a note on my work station asking me to stop by and see Prof. Grigio. I decided to do it now, before I got started on the next questionnaire.

He looked up from his reading and saw me. “Tom, good, I wasn’t sure when you’d be in. I finally got through to the head of the language lab and got her to give you a card that allows you to use the lab until the beginning of the next term. Because she couldn’t find a better classification for you, you’re officially a ‘visiting scholar’.” He smiled, amused at seeing me as a visiting scholar.

“Anyway, the lab is in the basement of the Pearson Building. Ask for Dr. Howrigan, and she’ll give you the card and show you how things work. It’s open Monday through Friday until about seven, and some part of Saturday, you’ll have to verify the lab hours. They’ve got some Italian works you can practice on that will help you with sentence structure and conversational phrases.”

I thanked him, then went back and started work. Around one, I realized how hungry I was, and trotted over to the student union for some food. I got a sandwich and coffee and a donut, and found an empty table. Halfway through my sandwich, Nancy brought her tray over with her partially-eaten lunch.

“Tom, are you ignoring me?”

“No, I didn’t see you. I was so hungry I just found the nearest table and started stuffing my face.”

“Hmmm, you must be trying to replenish your depleted energy reserves. And I’m not surprised, from what I heard.”

I stared at her, the sandwich halfway to my mouth. “Is this like a bonding thing among women, you tell each other all about your sex encounters each time you see each other?”

“It’s not like that at all, Tom. You think too little of us. Sometimes friends will talk about the exceptional things, the really good or the really bad. And whatever you did to her, she was still smiling and happy about it.”

“Where is Greta, anyway?”

“Dentist, poor girl. Just a checkup, I think. Anyway, she said it felt like a hundred orgasms in a row, and it was wonderful.”

“Give me a break. A hundred. I’d be dead, and she’d be in a coma. Maybe smiling, but she’d be in a coma. Anyway, not even in shouting distance of a hundred.”

“Well, she may have exaggerated a little. But it was really nice to see her so happy. She’s always been a little uptight about sex, I don’t know if you noticed.”

I nodded. “She’s a nice girl. And somebody is going to think himself very lucky someday.”

“Not you?”

“Probably not. She’s gorgeous and very sweet, but we don’t have much in common, so probably not a good fit. Anyway, I have someone else I’m interested in.”

“Okay. I don’t know what her long-term plans are, for you or anyone else, but it’s good to see her so happy for once.”

We talked for a couple more minutes about her calculus class -- she was feeling reasonably confident now -- and then I headed back to do two more hours of translation.

I stopped around three-thirty and looked at a campus map to locate the Pearson Building. It wasn’t far off, so I walked over and found the lab in the basement.

I introduced myself to Dr. Howrigan and she gave me my visitor’s card and talked about procedures and hours. She asked what languages I was interested in, and I told her I had French and Spanish, and was looking at Italian because of its similarities to Spanish.

Without hesitation, she dropped into Spanish, asking me how I had learned it, how long I’d been speaking, and so on, trying to determine the depth and breadth of my Spanish skills.

Apparently I passed, because she nodded and reverted to English. She suggested I start with a certain tape and its accompanying workbook.

I had a little time, so I did, repeating the phrases and trying to reproduce the accent and phrasing. This would be much easier if I had a tutor or instructor, into whose mind I could peek, because I picked up language much easier in that way. First things first, I’ll try to understand the sentence structure and widen my Italian vocabulary.

I was teaching tonight at Kim’s, so I left around four-fifteen, got my bike and rode to the school, arriving in time to change and talk briefly with Master Kim. Class started in the usual chaos of kids goofing around and talking with one another. They understood the theory of being quiet and attentive in class, but attaining it in practice was always a challenge. I set a couple of recalcitrant students to push-ups for not paying attention, and that quieted the others.

Once they got focused, they were pretty good at picking things up and applying them. We were doing wrist locks today, and they liked the idea of being able to reduce an opponent to whimpering and begging, so I took time to reinforce how easy it was to hurt someone inadvertently. The mechanics of this were always simpler to teach than restraint and how to judge how much force was required.

Class ended and some of the kids wanted to know about fights I’d been in and how I beat them. These are sometimes called ‘teaching moments’, so I told them, without giving names or specific locations, about Norm Atwell and Ryan Coolidge, the football players who had attacked me in the hall at school, and Kevin Mullaney and his cohorts who had jumped me at the beach, emphasizing that I had used only enough force to stop the attack. They were suitably awed.

One of the kids said, but what about those guys with knives at that fruit stand? In truth, it had slipped my mind, but I gave a short reprise, emphasizing that I had not had to think about how to defend myself because I had paid attention in class (!) and reacted as I had been trained to. I think -- I hoped -- they found some new resolve in that.

After I biked home I took a shower, being a little sweaty from class, and had dinner with the family. It was my turn to help with the dishes, which didn’t take long, then I went upstairs to read. I studied some more Italian grammar and vocabulary for awhile, but found my mind drifting off to control panels and sensation and how we perceive it.

I recalled a hypnotist’s show I had seen once in a hotel – I wasn’t supposed to be there, but I was with an adult who had stepped outside for a smoke – and adult members of the audience, volunteers, men and women, were hypnotized and seated on the warm stage. He told them that the temperature had suddenly dropped to ten below zero and that they had no coats, and they started shivering violently, their teeth chattering.

Then, after the “temperature” in the room had returned to normal, he told them that it was the height of summer, the temperature had just risen to 95 degrees and was continuing to rise, and the humidity was now at one hundred percent. The subjects started removing articles of clothing until they were almost naked.

So it was possible to change the perception of sensation, what our noses and tactile receptors and even our eyes and ears were telling us, and change it to something else and the body would believe it and respond to it accordingly.

A hypnotist, I presumed, convinced the subject to alter how they perceived sensation, how they interpreted reality, and it must somehow involve this vague “control panel” -- I really must find another name for it. The subject’s mind must make the suggested adjustments to the perception of sensation, for example, telling the body that it was currently ten below even though the body’s temperature receptors were signaling a comfortable seventy-two.

If I could learn to work with this panel or whatever I was going to call it, it would open up a lot of possibilities, and not just for sex, either. I decided that ‘panel’ made it sound too much like a mechanical device, like the faders and buttons on a recording studio console. It wasn’t, it was just an ... interface. A perception interface. I liked that better.

I drifted off into other thoughts, then started thinking about Greta’s ass. I smiled at the memory. It really was a gorgeous ass. Someday I’d love to fuck that ass, but it was going to take her a while to come to terms with things in her butt. I thought she’d love it once she was able to rid herself of her mother’s opprobrium.

I envied her, actually all women, in a way. Their ability to float from one orgasm to another, almost without limit, seemed so effortless.

I wished I had that ability, even a little, but right now it was either ejaculation with big orgasm, or just hanging on the edge of not-quite-orgasm. At least I could tweak the strength and shape of the orgasm.

As I spoke the either-or statement in my mind, I caught myself. I had made this mistake before, making assumptions about how things must be, most recently my uncritical supposition that the perception interface must live in the epicenter. I had spent months, years, looking for it there and not finding it, because it lived elsewhere!

It may well be that men weren’t capable of multiple orgasms not accompanied by ejaculation, but it had to be proven, not assumed.

I yawned and looked at my watch. I wasn’t going to get much more studying done tonight, so I called it and went to bed.

The next couple of days were pretty uneventful. I spent four or five hours a day translating, and an hour or more in the language lab. I ran into Greta again at lunch on Tuesday, and she was all smiles. She looked a little more confident, but I didn’t get a chance to talk to her alone.

I went over to Karen’s later on Tuesday and showed her a few more moves involving throws and arm locks. She was learning that she liked this sense of power and control.

I had decided over several days that I really needed to learn more about the perception interface that governed interpretation of sensation. I wasn’t sure how I would do that, since my sexual encounters weren’t that frequent.

Did it have to be a sexual encounter? Probably not, but do I just go to the mall and pick out a subject at random? Wherever I did it, I’d need to be careful about playing with a person’s sensations. It shouldn’t make them suspicious and it shouldn’t expose them to embarrassment or hurt them.

On Thursday, after I finished work, instead of going to the language lab I went to the mall. I had no plan, no strategy. I needed anonymity in a public setting in order to experiment. I got a coffee and a donut and went to sit on one of the benches, and started people-watching.

In order to establish a link that would allow me to connect to a person’s epicenter, I first needed to get their focus on me. I could channel a specific action, or I could linkcast a more complex emotion without first having their focus, but not step into their epicenter without having their focus on me.

So I just sat and watched for awhile. When I was younger I used to try to imagine what each person’s life was like, what their interests were, what they did with their time, but it was just guesswork then. Now I had the ability to find out more very quickly, but I still had a lot of ethical reservations about doing that. I didn’t know how to reconcile those with what I had to do if I were to learn more about this perception interface.

A group of younger girls walked by, five of them all about fourteen, my sister’s age. The one at the back of the pack was carrying a shopping bag filled with purchases. As she was jostled by one of the others, a plastic bag slipped out and onto the floor, and she missed it. I put my coffee down on the bench and walked over and picked it up, then called after her.

“Miss, you dropped this.”

They all turned around, and the one carrying the bag said, “Oh, I didn’t even feel it fall. Thanks.” She smiled and took it from me, and I had her focus and was able to grab the connection. They continued on their way and I returned to my coffee and a perusal of her epicenter. They all sat at one of the public tables not far off, and piled their purchases around themselves like a rampart.

Her head was a mess, chaotic, disorganized. I’d seen this before. Some people didn’t have much of a sense of logic and order, and it was particularly true in most younger people. Logic is a skill developed over time. The mind is naturally chaotic and becomes logical only through training and mental exercise and discipline. At her age, that was still a way off.

Her attention was on her friends, on the things she bought and intended to buy, on looking good and being attractive, and on boys. Nothing surprising there, just not very interesting. It was a bit of a challenge to separate the flood of unrelated thoughts and impulses and try to understand what was relevant.

She was happy that she had bought some cute new tops, and happy to be with her friends. Oh, except for Monica, who she thought was a bitch because she was making a play for Bobby, who Monica knew damned well that she had liked first. But she had to be nice to Monica because Monica was friends with Amy who was her friend.

Christ, I was tired already. This was worse than Karen’s telenovelas.

She was going to wear one of the new tops to Jennifer’s party tomorrow and she hoped Bobby would be there again, because at the last party he had squeezed one of her tits and it felt nice but she wouldn’t tell him that, of course, and then he had tried to get his hand under her skirt but she wouldn’t let him, but maybe she would this time because that Monica was a little priss and would never let Bobby do that to her.

Jesus, I’ve got to get out of here. I tried to remember what I had done with Greta. I had thought of the epicenter as merely one of the command centers in a large, complex organism. When I had done that, then the “walls” that defined the limits of the epicenter’s purview became sort of porous, translucent, and I was able to sense the other control areas, like smell and touch and balance. Oh, and orgasms.