A few miles west of Spartan Hill, a number of corporations make their headquarters. Small clusters of high white and silver buildings rise above the attractive corporate meadows. Flowers bloom in corporate gardens, and ducks and geese drift across the corporate ponds. Beyond these buildings, meadows, gardens, and ponds lies a wilder area filled with thickets and copses and creeks and untended patches of semi-wilderness. Sometimes, especially on warm days in the late summer or early fall, Harvey Besch buys a take-out lunch at Mary’s Deli in the lower level of the KelCore Building where he works as a refraction engineer, and he takes whatever book he’s in the middle of to a bench near one of the many small ponds, there to read and watch the waterbirds and think slow thoughts.

A few weeks ago, Harvey ordered a compact disc on-line. Cyborgasm II. It arrived in yesterday’s mail, and with great anticipation, Harvey opened the package as soon as he was safely inside his small apartment, but he resisted playing it. A year earlier Harvey had ordered Cyborgasm I, and he’d found it disappointing. He was hoping for a fresh, vital eroticism—something to spark and quench his imagination, but the stories were either stultifyingly lame or outrageously incredible, and the characters’ voices, both male and female, sounded forced and unnatural: the women were nothing like the girl next door, nothing like the girl of his dreams, and the men were exactly like Harvey himself and not like him at all. True, the disc got slightly better the second time he listened to it, but by then he wasn’t expecting anything extraordinary—he knew the stories would be banal or unbelievable and the characters hokey. Well, maybe some of it wasn’t so bad—for all he knew, some of it was even real. Still, it fell far short of his desires—a dreadful contrast to what he believed sex should be. Something was clearly missing. No music, no magic. Nothing to spark and quench.

Harvey doubted Cyborgasm II would be any different, but who knows? Desire breeds hope—among other things. This morning Harvey took the CD to work in his backpack, having transferred the disc first to a plain jewel case and then carefully obliterating the label with permanent black marker. “Just a private mix,” he planned to tell anyone who asked, but as expected, no one asked.

At lunchtime, orange soda pop in a can and tuna salad on whole wheat (extra mayo, extra tomato) in a slick white sack, Harvey set out across the corporate campus, his headphones adjusted, the new Cyborgasm spinning in his trusty Walkman. This is where we find him now, listening and strolling.

A couple of Cyborgasm II’s early tracks almost please Harvey, but by and large it is the same old stuff. Nothing to give him an erection, if that’s the measure. “I’m being too critical,” he says to himself, “and anyway what do I expect?” He sits on a bench at the far side of the most westerly of the ponds and mindlessly unwraps the tuna. A few moments later, sandwich eaten, Harvey gets up, dusting his lap, crumples the white sack, tosses it into the wire trash bin, and pops the top of his orange drink. The taste of sweet rust scrapes his throat as he walks west away from the corporate campus. Soon the orderly meadows end, but Harvey wanders on, listening to the Cyborgasm skits while hiking dutifully into the wilder part of the preserve. Here the mowers haven’t been; the grasses grow above his knees, and brittle bulges of dry thistle waver in the warm breeze. “This is pretty,” Harvey says to himself, admiring the flowing tufts of silver-green grass, the play of butterflies upon clusters of tiny buttercups. Ah, Nature!

But it is time to be getting back. Cybogasm II has perhaps another twenty minutes to run, and Harvey figures if he turns around now, the timing will work out perfectly. Okay, so the material hasn’t been sexy—still the walk has been satisfying, the exercise good. Harvey takes a deep breath, and he is about to begin his return journey when he notices something—a small structure partially hidden among some scruffy trees fifty yards in advance. Curious, he walks towards the small building.

It is a gazebo of some kind, and in surprisingly good condition—not rundown or weathered at all. But who would have built it way out here? And why? The thing is open-air, two cement steps up to a circular platform about ten feet across. Five sturdy wooden beams support a conical roof, and four wooden benches line each edge save the opening. Harvey settles himself onto the bench just to the left of the entryway, and lets the smell of freshly sawn lumber, a hint of pine scent, tickle his nose. “Maybe I should take up woodworking,” he says to himself, and he sips the last of his soda and shakes his head at the silly antics of Cyborgasm. The soda finished, Harvey gets up, tosses the can into the wire receptacle just opposite his bench, and looks out across the meadow at the way he has come. No sign of the corporate buildings. Harvey considers that he must have gotten turned around somehow, or maybe it’s the terrain, the trees, or a trick of sun. He sits down in his original spot to think things through, and when Harvey looks up again he sees that someone is coming towards him.

A woman, Harvey sees when she gets closer—a young woman, slim and pretty in a pale blue dress—not someone he had seen before at KelCore, the girl has blond hair in ringlets, and a a book in her hand. The bottom hem of her dress touches some inches above her knees and rises up several inches with each step. Nice legs. Harvey is sure he would have noticed someone this pretty at KelCore. He wonders if she’s been following him. But a few dozen steps from the shelter, the young woman suddenly stops, obviously surprised to see someone, or to see that it is Harvey. She stares at Harvey for a few seconds, then looks back over her shoulder. Then, with a self-conscious half-shrug, she steps onto the walk which leads up into the gazebo. Smiling slightly, she sits on a shaded bench almost opposite Harvey. Soon the open-topped trash receptacle just to her right catches her attention.

“The bees are bad there,” Harvey says.