A Fig, a Red, Red Rose, and Eggs Benedict

Sunday, November 25, 2012

SEESAW LOVE: THE VOLATILE NATURE OF EROS

                                    PRECOCIOUS LOVE
Sexual desire, love and its mate, betrayal, haunted me before my ninth birthday. Freud coveted his mother and feared his father, leading to repressed homicidal rage and castration anxiety, and his maternal longing perplexed me. My mother, all adults in fact appeared to belong to different species before my sensual awakening and they had the amorous allure of, say, a Cabbage Patch Doll. Killing my father with a gun fashioned from a Tinkertoy had its obvious limitations. However, I had devised a plan to kidnap Barbie Benton, Hefner's love if I recall, but a Playmate for certain, whose ethereal beauty had legend suggested transformed a slab of petrified rock into a tumescent human object that stalked her.

My sensual yearning during Freud’s erotically quiescent years, or latency period from five to eleven, had made me into a sexual Sisyphus; a child pushing the boulder of his avarice toward an unknown summit of my obsessive sensual demand. In the third grade, my cupidity prodded me to kiss L’s cheek and my intense longing purchased the gift of many ecstatic hours in which I played grab the warm, tingly thing with L. and her beautiful friend, A in a precocious ménage a' trois.
I had developed into an excellent hopscotch player, while adroit at masculine sports, driven by my androgen inspired erotic ache and the demand to get as close to the intoxicating scent of pre-adolescent girls as feasible.

Then during a fateful summer along came Marge. Maligned by its dreadful brevity and premature decease, my love for eight-year-old Marge was as poignant as any affection since our first kiss. My dearest Marge and I stood on a verdant slope, skirting Crystal Lake- the Jungian fount of the feminine archetypes-which elevated and made the loss of our innocence due to the sharp blade of our longing and its temporal brevity most piquant.

We were on a seesaw giggling that night after dinner when after we dismounted; I wrenched her to my gagging heart, imparting a pale lavender bruise on her beige shoulders then with unbearable tenderness my salacious lips found hers. Marge’s eyes quavered beneath the shades of her closed lids and our strange yearning became forever encrypted in our hearts and loins. It stunned us, we were vertiginous, and that kiss amplified my thirst for Marge whose name and soul inhabited every cranny in my mind. This fantastic specter loitered in the attic of my soul from the instant our eyes unveiled our shame and I could not evict any thought of Marge with any other idea. Why the taste of her mouth and her scent conjured images of the glutinous coils of flypaper, dangling from our bunk’s rafters with their litter of imprisoned flies, has remained an enigma to this day.

In my reticent exploration of her lips virtue and grace vanished and it bore the cryptic foreshadow of a more intense erotic avarice to unfold in a matter of days. The single edgy probe of my tongue against the tip of hers yielded to a more intense and furtive promise of a most wicked delight. The intoxicant of our agitated respiration coalesced with the images refracted on the mirrors of our pupils as we cosigned the pact we sealed with the insignia of a most faint yet persistent osculation, but the infant of our love died of known causes in its crib.

Our screen reminiscences, our puerile attachment merged with the omnipresent bouquet of freshly mowed grass, the stench of gasoline, of stagnant thistle, of dead crabs and the carcass of a large-mouth bass wedged in the lake’s muddy shore in a fetid olfactory orgy. The omniscient lawnmower encircled the lake, clattering in the distance and circling us while drawing closer in its perpetual grooming of the campus grounds. Its driver bore a resemblance to a burnt reptile, and this ghoul was never without the cigarette glued to the hinge of his lower lip. He sat at the wheel of this clacking black contraption, similar to a stove chimney, whose second purpose was to suffuse the ether with an acrid plume of pesticide a carcinogenic cloud that subsumed the entire campus to extinguish airborne pests and perhaps even a few campers. Whatever concoction it discharged it was so acrid it scratching lungs and evoked conjunctivitis. The jangling and mewling of his fumigator was the metal personification of a baying wolf baying. Even in the middle of the night, it clanked through nocturnal darkness only found in the woods and mountains far from city lights, anthracite darkness, while it spewed its vile nimbus of insecticide into the bunks to continue to burn the sensitive tissue of our eyes, and our lungs.

My love for Marge sealed with the sweet bequest of our kiss surrendered to a more urgent and sweeter obsession for a woman that Saturday night. The entire camp had squeezed into the social hall redolent of pine, perspiration, and pesticide for a variety show. A moist breeze filtered through the screened windows or the heat and stagnant air might have claimed lives. Several comic skits led to the primordial epiphany of my brilliant salacious life. The crossed-eyed beams klieg lights’ undressed the drama counselor who’d managed to entangle her body in the curtains. She spun, this way and that, a bottle, and her quandary educed tics of laughter from the mob until she was undraped in a spin that disoriented her.

The tattered patched cloak parted, revealing a line of older women, they had to be fourteen or fifteen, performing a kick dance. Their shrink-wrapped, sweat-dappled T-shirts were a second skin. Their breasts, their curves, their puzzling ovals and scanty shorts pressed into the dampened knolls defining their sex all those feminine curves and secondary sex characteristic I’d seen for eights years but went had gone unobserved until then had transfigured me forever. Those sirens launched their legs and the buried archetypal images rose from the recesses of my mind into reality into consciousness. What had been black, white, and blurred was now in living Technicolor™.

A mosquito circled– the vector of Eros–descended and its proboscis scribbled the epic of my own desire into the flesh of my neck. Crimson droplets clung to the wheal on my pristine flesh and claimed my psychic virginity as she—the woman in the center—kicked her sneaker-ed foot into the crisscrossed lights. This mature woman, in a millisecond, had become the locus of the Platonic feminine ideal of perfection. My erotic odyssey begun with Marge was accelerated by each thrust of her legs, and I was helpless the child of my desire. The affection Marge had instigated formed a tear I noted on my cheek for I’d betrayed Marge in the intense desire my ignorance had miss-perceived.

My eyes, my depraved yearning, my initials became branded into the flesh of the woman before me, and in an instant aborted the place where Marge had reigned. My thirst, my divine lunacy was a worn pinball machine whose steel ball activated vicious lights, hideous radiance; wild squeals and it tilted no matter what I tried. I had seen thousands of women before and though I had a keen eye for the grotesqueries due to overindulgence, disease, and senescence. My absolute initiation into manhood allowed me to see beyond my former blind spot as she danced a mere ten yards from where love and sweat had left me frozen.

My heart, in a its congenital vertical position, was a fist slamming out a steady rhythm; its knuckles cracked my ribs, and terror transformed my tongue into a bloated slug and a reminder of my swollen epiglottis and my many wars just to breathe. Ensnared in the light’s lone pearl colored eye her form stenciled against the oft sewn and patched drapes, her body with its veiled and overt ovals, curvilinear legs, arable breasts, and the rippling parabola of her deep and baffling hips riveted this captive. Her effort raised shadowed islands on the flimsy weave of her T-shirt, and my throat closed like a crushed can. My veins suffused with roiling blood and a white-hot needle of blood filled the cavernous pocket of my wayward fleece-collared cock. Her twitching, oh, dear God, her taut and striated muscles rippled beneath her flesh was torturous as was the rhythmic propulsion of her legs left me lust-addled and all non-sensual idioms were evicted from the crypt of my consciousness.

Swirling colored spotlights merged on my retina inducing a precipitous bout of double vision as the girls’ linked by their arms and now chained with their neighbors their legs rose even higher. My love’s legs exploded through the dense shade toward my transfixed eyes, skewed by my rapture, they lingered in defiance of gravity taunting me, and then they receded from my visual clasp and my extended arm. The mosquitoes, flies, and gnats sustained their blood banquet, drawing sustenance from my throat, as she completed her possession of my mind with her tawny legs, whose preposterous length I explored down to the folded lips of the socks choking her slender ankles while each leg perpetuated in making my heart soar toward the cobwebbed rafters.

Turning from the stage, I sought Marge who I’d lost in the shadows, amid the meandering light beams and silhouettes of campers in my uncanny state of disorientation. I needed relief from my transgression, ablution from my guilt, and my loss of innocence. Searching, half-crazed, I scanned for Marge to emerge, to quell my callous mutiny. Marge had stooped, I learned, to attend an insubordinate shoelace, and she resurfaced in her need to exonerate me for my betrayal by her prosaic act. My madness and stupefaction escalated, causing me to push my mates aside for fear that my spiny erection would surrender its furtive commentary, and I ran outside to anoint the sacrament of my Eros, but hardened by what I needed to commemorate, desire punished and prevented me from consecration by urination. Blood stretched the shameless caverns of my penis exacting a severe urethral itch whose divine sensation I could not expunge by for another two years.

Inside, I caught a glimpse of a young girl impersonating Brenda Lee singing All Alone Am I. My love was the last dancer to file down the steps in the shadows at stage right, my left, and her descent into the embrace of her progenitor’s corpulent arms. Her mother tousled her hair, and I watched them exit through the side door.

Oh, lithe, Marge, whose soft flesh remained vibrant on my fingertips, and whose androgynous form enabled my transition into the thorny thicket of Erotic love and my endless contemplation of this mature woman.

My camp-mates detested girls, and they chided me for having a real girlfriend while they played with their gas propelled model planes. I suffered more from their innate hostility than the bed wetter, who befouled the nocturnal air, but their jealousy was translucent and my adoration of the feminine form and intellect has remained constant, and I’ve been in too many fights to protect those I loved, and some I barely knew, to mention.

My dancing goddess was not a pretty woman. Close-up her angular features suggested a cubist portrait, but from my pine bench, in the frayed and oft spliced film of my reminiscence, her harsh makeup had a paradoxical softening of her face, giving her a sensuous rather than angular appearance. I had tried, without success, to get close to my dancing queen whose image kicked my mind like stones amid the rising dust. Curious as it seemed then my ardor was satisfied by seeing her from a distance like living snapshots I glued in a photo album tucked in my mind, and I settled into the role of a prepubescent voyeur with equanimity.

A few hours before the convoy of chartered buses carried us home; I’d been skimming flat rocks off the skin of Crystal Lake. I had tossed the slab of slate when I looked up and saw her strolling with her father. They stopped and he opened his Cadillac’s rear door. Then her porcine sire signaled for two waiters to place her large trunk and valises into the car. She wore a sailor hat and carried a teddy bear. Her father tipped the boys, her buck-toothed mother grinned, straightened her floppy hat, smacked her lips—a chimpanzee adjusting her lipstick--and they drove slowly down the dusty road passed me. My love sat in the back of the car. Her face somewhat obscured by her tennis racket and the teddy bear she clutched. She didn’t look my way, although I somehow thought she would, and I was worthy of but an ephemeral glance into her amygdaloidal eyes but it was then more than enough.

http://bunsarenotcake.tumblr.com/
http://aaradavid.wordpress.com/
http://catsgotmythumbs.blogspot.com

Hitler Used Performance Enhancing Drugs

Adolf Hitler, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing slightly left (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The other night I watched the film The King’s Speech, and in one scene, a newsreel segment, King George the VI was watching a broadcast of one of Hitler’s tirades before hundreds of thousands of Germans,, with the usual show of might evinced by hundreds of thousands of goose-stepping troops, tanks, and armaments. Hitler’s impassioned vitriol and hysterical body language suggested a man on an annoying, under ordinary circumstances, speed jag, a bombardment of words delivered along with a salivary spritz. King George, played by Colin Firth, was asked what Hitler was saying by Princess Margaret, and he stated he didn’t know but whatever he said he did it quite effectively.

In his book, A First-Rate Madness, Nassir Ghaemi, MD, a professor at Tufts University Medical School and head of their mood disorder clinic, discussed in detail, Hitler’s use of methamphetamine, barbiturates, morphine, and anabolic steroids. His physician, Dr. Theodor Morell, began treating Hitler with amphetamine, along with Goering and other members of the Reich in 1937. In addition, to consuming amphetamine tablets throughout the day, Hitler mainlined methamphetamine three times per day. Thus, it can be said that Hitler was using performance enhancing drugs at an unprecedented rate and this scenario lends credence to the old saw that speed indeed kills and in this case in a fashion probably never conceived by those who spawned the maxim that has become so prevalent in our lexicon. It's clear that the use of amphetamine and anabolic steroids fed directly into Hitler's paranoia and I wonder how much these drugs played in Hitler's grandiose final solution and what would have been the course of WW II if Dr. Morell did not supply Hitler with drugs that enhanced the Fuhrer's underlying pathology.

King George V with generals (Photo credit: Astral Pax)

http://www.blogger.com/blogger

Friday, November 16, 2012

RODENBERRY'S WALL: LOVE IN THE AGE OF ASPERGER'S

Aaron David

US Copyright Protected ©

The slender woman wearing blue tights revealed the classic hip, waist, and breast ratio of nudes chosen for magazines. She had just finished jogging four miles. She wore a glistening mantle of sweat. Her almost flawless features gave her an arrogant expression that appeared wind‑swept flowing from her chin back toward her raven-colored hair, evoking a vague resemblance to a plane's fuselage, suggesting a state of perpetual arousal.

She refused to do her exercises. Instead, she sat on the floor, staring into the mirrored wall and indulged herself, grasping the tendrils of the erotic fancies floating through her mind. As she rolled off her tights and thong, whose density was comparable to dental floss, the cold floor in her current state of derealization remained unnoticed as she began gentling herself. She showered in a wooden bathhouse shrouded in the foliage of her imagination. She awaited her lover who had arrived later than expected. He was less reticent today, swooping down, enveloping her within his shadow, combining tenderness and cruelty like Leda’s Swan rather than the extended romantic prelude she’d thought she wanted. Although impersonal, it was far more moving than she had thought, but at the apogee of her orgasm, the prism of her composition revolved, replacing the man between her legs with another whose face, though familiar, eluded recognition. Then she noticed Rodenberry watching.

That evening during a dinner of London broil, broccoli with hollandaise sauce, hand cut home fries, and chocolate cake, Edward Reynaud, whose uncanny sense of smell made him the world’s most prominent perfumer, noted a sweet yet fetid odor. Only Edward’s acute olfactory epithelium could have detected this bouquet masked, for an instant, by the mushroom gravy Laura passed to him. The scent re-emerged, as said in the industry ‘through smoke,’ with greater pungency once he placed the gravy boat on the table. “It's my wife,” he thought, “my beautiful wife. I will kiss her throat. I will make love to her like a brute, an animal.”

Laura cleared dishes from the table and took them into the kitchen; Edward began to follow but his son Rodenberry gnawing his food with slurping noises stopped Mr. Reynaud. “Must you chew like a pig? Answer me! What is it with that scarf? You are never to wear that rag to the table again! Answer me! You're not washing under that scarf. Don't lie to me!”

The huge square-faced boy sat in silence except for his salivary symphony, twining the frayed fuchsia scarf he’d wrapped around his left hand with his right hand. The handkerchief had belonged to his deceased grandmother. In the kitchen, Edward grabbed Laura and kissed her with a satyr’s passion.

“It’s not you!” he said backing away. “Your scent is lovely, but it is not you… and, if it isn’t you, it must be the boy.”

“What are you talking about?”

“But how could it be him?”

Edward neglected Laura and lumbered into the dining room where Rodenberry sat licking his fingers. Edward pressed his face close to his son’s and about to speak when the aroma—a fragrance whose tincture was strange and erotic—forced him back into the kitchen. “I don't know how to put this, but we have a problem. Has Rodenberry been acting unusual of late?”

“I don’t know what you mean?”

“He smells odd. At first, I thought it was you; if you know what I mean?” They returned to the dining room, sat down, and Edward asked the boy if he had done something unusual that day.

Rodenberry said, “I plucked the glop out of a cat’s eye.”

“And did you wash your hands? You didn't. Remember our discussion regarding washing before meals, brushing your teeth, and showering.”

Laura revisited her erotic fancy while Edward rattled on, “Why are you wearing grandma’s scarf? Give it to me, please.”

Rodenberry stared at his father. Edward lunged at the boy. Rodenberry drew his hand to his side, a lame animal, and said, “It was my present from nana.”

Edward stood up knocking his chair backward; it teetered before it struck the Oriental rug covering the mahogany floor. He rushed toward Rodenberry. The boy smiled before skipping from the room. Laura thought, “Leave the boy alone. He’s experienced enough.”

Laura became unnerved, considering that Rod might tell his father what he’d seen that afternoon. What would Edward do given he inhibitions—despite purchasing her a vibrator that coiled in a sinuous complete 360° circle? The idea of his wife masturbating while observed by their son would create... well, she couldn’t be certain, but she knew it wouldn’t be pleasant. She had to preserve her secret and her irrational sense of guilt perplexed her. She decided to mention her ‘feeling of shame’ to her psychiatrist, Dr. Isidore Abelhard.

Laura found the next two days difficult, living in constant fear, Rodenberry would tell Edward. Even though her self-pleasure in masturbation and her concomitant fantasies had enhanced the couple’s sexual pleasure, she knew Edward would be perturbed. Dr. Abelhard, during an emergency session, asked her why she had felt intense shame and her answer led to his unsubstantiated conjecture. Abelhard’s transference manifested itself as love and lust for Laura. (His obsession would drive him to consult with his mentor and shrink Dr. Heinrich Helmholtz, regarding how to handle his conundrum.) In Laura’s next session, she and Abelhard stared at each other in silence save for the metronomic ticking of his office clock and his high-pitched wheeze as he exhaled. “Who doesn't masturbate these days?” Laura said. Abelhard nodded, imagining Laura naked in his arms, and he had not heard another word she spoke, sitting still, legs crossed, concealing his erection until the session came to a merciful conclusion.

Coyote Wild, a Life of Pleasure, starring Lana Velvet and Jonnie Longwood was Laura’s scenario in which a jealous female porn star had smuggled the film from the set, uploaded it to You Tube, and it had gone viral. Her smile faded when she decided Edward wouldn't tolerate her indiscretion. Abelhard and Laura had discussed the fact Rodenberry surprised her and he had a play date and was not due home before he caught her ‘in the act.’ Even if his intellectual gifts were normal, Rod might not understand why she needed to indulge herself. Her mood almost an ineffable idea fluttered away and her inadvertent exposure chilled her marrow. Perhaps Rod didn't see enough, or was oblivious, as was often the case with children suffering from his malady. Maybe she noticed him when she had finished. He probably didn’t even notice given the tenacious lure of his internalized world. If Rodenberry mentioned the incident to Edward, she’d deny everything but given Edward’s less constrained sensual attitude? Rodenberry walked in when she had thought she was alone, nothing to it, but the consequences, whatever they might be educed the mantra like sense of her anxiety.

Edward and Laura had reached the wearisome stage of their marriage where they conversed in idiosyncratic grunts only they could decipher. Rodenberry hardly spoke, and when he did, it was gibberish. If Edward believed Rod and confronted her, her tendency to blush would unravel the skein of her secret, but she hoped the incident based on Rodenberry's limited cognition would disintegrate. Complicating her predicament—and why did it matter—Edward had complained that Rod’s body odor had become more intense since the episode and kept pressing Rodenberry regarding his hygiene, causing an escalation in Rod’s terrifying tantrums, and Rodenberry had even pushed Edward who swore that if Rod was normal, he would have “gotten the strap.”

‘Post rage’ that night, Edward and Laura made love, and it was the most lascivious experience they had in, well, they could not remember. “I was just thinking about Rod,” said Surrounded by the curtains of their four-poster in their coital afterglow, Laura said, “I believe I'm beginning to smell the distinctive scent you’d noticed.”

“Not with your inferior olfactory instrument. I wish you could, but the scent is much too subtle for you to detect. I thought it was you. I can't place it. You know I have total recall for every bouquet. It’s maddening. I swear to God, mentally slow, smentally slow, I'm gonna drag that animal into the shower every day and scrub him.”

“Why are you getting so worked up?”

“Because you don't know what it's like smelling odors other people can't detect... You can’t imagine how ambivalent I am about this gift, or curse, of mine.”

Two nights later, Laura answered the telephone and Rebecca Feinstein, Harriet’s mother, had called. Yes, Laura remembered her daughter, the prematurely florescent girl—a woman really—who befriended Rodenberry, and had cookies and milk at their home on many occasions.

“We must see you and your husband tonight,” said Rebecca.

“Perhaps some other time, we're tired. Edward, Mr. Reynaud, hasn’t even gotten home.”

“No, Mrs. Reynaud …”

“Oh, please call me Laura.”

“You don't understand; this isn't a social call, it's about Rodenberry.”

“Is something wrong?”

“I must insist that you and Mr. Reynaud come over tonight.”

Regarding Mrs. Feinstein’s call, Edward said, “If he did something dreadful again I’ll rip...I don’t know what I’ll do. The clumsy oaf probably broke a family heirloom.”

Rodenberry remained at home, as they walked over to the Feinstein’s white colonial, down the hill from the Reynard’s English Tudor, where the cul de sac was widest and near the water’s edge. Harriet greeted them at the door with flushed cheeks and the reddened nostrils of a crying jag. Laura had the desire to gentle the girl's cheek, to brush her long hair, draping her pretty face. Rebecca entered the oval foyer and Laura inquired about the problem. Rebecca kissed Harriet’s forehead, whispered something in her ear, and sent her upstairs to finish her homework.

Lawrence Feinstein entered, greeted them, and they exchanged introductions, and they all agreed that they should have met earlier since they were neighbors. Lawrence had red hair, even features, and a complexion without any freckles, a rarity, Laura decided. Rebecca was a bovine woman whose girth had surpassed the limit of what a girdle could transform into pleasing amplitude.

While showing their guests into the den, Rebecca turned to Lawrence, with her habitual sense of self-recrimination and said, “I won't cry. There’s nothing left.” She cried.

“What is this? Did the boy break something?” asked Edward.

Lawrence said, “Remember those words, Mr. Reynaud; they were ill chosen if not malicious.”

Lawrence led his guests into the den. They decided to have drinks and their cook, an emaciated crone, brought out a pitcher of Margaritas with crystal glasses on a ceramic server surrounded by hors d'oeuvres.

“We’ll need chemical comfort,” Lawrence said as he filled glasses, handing them to the women, and gave Edward his martini. Lawrence prepared a recording as they sat down and guzzled their drinks.

“Larry, you can't show it to them,” said Rebecca, “I've thought it over, and I can’t watch it.” She fingered a five-milligram Valium in the pocket of her tunic, before letting the pill fall to its bed of lint.

“I don't see why they should be spared,” said Lawrence.

Edward downed his martini, asked for another, and said, “What is the emergency. Has Rodenberry broken anything?” Edward was either reaching for his wallet or scratching his ass.

“Just relax. You'll see in a minute. As soon as I can, get this things working. Verizon hooked it up to so many devices. Listen, Reynaud …”

“My name is Edward.”

“Edward was there any predominant reason for naming your kid Rodenberry?”

“Call me Ed.”

“Are you a Trekkie or something? Dumb names are a pet peeve of mine. Imagine going through life with that name?” said Lawrence.

“It’s a unique name,” said Laura, “It wasn’t my first choice.” They both wondered how they came up with the name. It now struck them as a weird and poor choice. Edward said that the creator of Star Trek spelled his surname with a double d.

Lawrence looked at Laura with the blood shunting desire everyman had experienced once she ripped her post-pubescent chrysalis, glancing at Rebecca, and back to Laura, conjuring a plan to access a more intimate view of her luscious form. He looked at Rebecca with disdain, and his silent fart made Edward gag.

“Look,” said Edward, “I have no idea why we’re here, but unless that’s a gun in your pocket I can... get to the point.” Edward leaned forward on the leather chair, realizing his alcohol-inspired comment was moronic.

“I was rude and apologize,” said Lawrence, “but how would you react if you came home and saw your thirteen-year-old child cavorting naked with a bunch of little brats? Did I say little? Well, can you guess who the ringleader was? Yes, your Rodenberry, Ed, was belly-to- belly with my baby. I predict he’ll be a porn star; a real stallion that boy, boy, he’s a giant!”

Laura thought he said, scallion. She accepted another drink from Rebecca who underlined every word with an asthmatic sigh. “And you're about to show us a recording of this episode. A guy that keeps a surveillance camera on his daughter is a sicko.” Edward said.

“No, I wouldn't say that.”

“Of course you wouldn’t.” Edward asked for another martini.

“I thought it was best to leave the house and allow them to get decent,” said Lawrence.

“What does get decent mean?” asked Edward.

“You know what I mean.”

Edward said, “Clichés and euphemisms are a pet peeve of mine.”

Lawrence said, “Their precocious sexual experimentation has a natural progression.”

Edward said, “No shit!”

Rebecca had downed her Valium with a slug of her Margarita and poured a second. She babbled and thought someone else said, “They were acting like animals and whores.” Her own voice had the whine of bow sliding over threadbare violin strings.

“What's the fuss?” asked Laura. Woozy, inebriated, she accepted a second Margarita. “They're experimenting. It's innocent curiosity. Didn't we do the same things? Perhaps not to the extent of kids today but even one’s libido is inflationary.”

Laura laughed at her pun. It occurred to her that she was reducing the collective anxiety in preparation for the moment, Rodenberry told his father he had seen her masturbate.

“I don’t mind a little experimentation...but what happens when my baby gets pregnant?” Lawrence asked.

“We’ll get her on the pill,” said Rebecca.

“Very clever; she'll be dead from phlebitis before she's fourteen,” said Lawrence.

“I want you to get her down here,” said Edward.

“Do you think I'm going to subject her to your interrogation? I'm telling you, Rodenberry is the ringleader. Things will never be the same around here,” said Lawrence.

“I warned you, I'm getting mad. Okay,” said Edward, facing his wife, “tell them.” Laura shook her head.
“Then I'll do it; you know how painful it is for me.” Edward told his hosts how he had struck Rodenberry’s head, inducing a concussion, with a golf club when he had been practicing his swing in the den.

Lawrence fought the temptation to ask Edward what club he had used. “The blow opened our baby's head and resulted in a subdural hematoma, a clot, and permanent brain dysfunction. I’ve labored with guilt to such a degree I have not played golf since. I can’t watch it on TV. He can't be the ringleader; he doesn't have the capacity.”

Laura said, “Dr. Abelhard said Rod was sick before and you are exaggerating the effect of the golf club incident.”

Lawrence, his words, a slur, “Is that the talk show head case, the shrink?”

Laura said, “Yes, it is. Abelhard said, you made the story up to obscure the truth.” Her alcohol-inspired comment surprised her. The truth had emerged from the art of disheveled reminiscence and they repressed their ‘genetic’ contribution to their son’s symptomatology, but that was a product of their denial for they suspected Rodenberry’s cognitive insult was bound to their psychological conflicts and the crumbling edifice of their cadaverous love.

“Your Rod was reciting poetry to my baby.”

Rebecca said, “Our, she’s our, baby.”

“He made our baby dance with a pink scarf tied about her waist. I could’ve killed him!”

“It was tied to her thigh,” added Rebecca lounging in the hammock of her chemical comfort. “It was a poem by Walt Whitman, I think, maybe Hawthorne,” said Lawrence.

Rebecca burped and said, “It was Poe’s Annabel Lee.”

“The boy can't ride a friggin’ bike,” said Edward.

Rodenberry removed his diary from beneath loose floorboards under the leg of his desk and wrote in his concise hand; The essential news of the day is that Harriet’s (my love is the lance on which time warps its petals of light) parents came home during the weekly meeting of the Crescent Street Dumplings. Mr. Feinstein marched into the room and screamed, ‘What's going on here?’ It was obvious. We all tried to conceal our primeval nudity. He had to ask that moronic question. Harriet was standing next to me and she was shaking, the poor thing. He made us stand there, stark naked, so he could humiliate us, and launch into a dumb irrelevant lecture about responsibility. When he finished his speech he grabbed Harriet by the arm, twisting it while, he dragged her from the room. Mrs. Feinstein waited by the door, and the minute she got her hands on Harriet she began shaking her until Rebecca and Harriet cried, their screams became tensile and attenuated as they ran upstairs. It was horrible. Mr. Feinstein stood by the arch leading into the den stood with his arms folded glaring at us. We fumbled around for our socks and dressed amid what a sate of electric embarrassment. Julian, our diminutive mascot, sat on the floor and whimpered.

Hearing his parents,’ Rodenberry replaced his diary, wrapped his hand in the fuchsia scarf, and extinguished his lights, climbed into bed, pretending he was asleep. Edward headed straight for the boy’s room; Laura tried to snag his arm. “Remember, if you hit him, you'll hate yourself.”

“What if he gets Harriet pregnant?”

“She’ll probably have an abortion. I mean she’s thirteen.”

“You think it's that simple?” Edward opened the door to Rodenberry’s room.

“No, don’t, he’s asleep,” said Laura.

“We're waking him.” Edward flipped the switch of the covered wagon lamp on Rodenberry's night table. The boy held the scarf and Edward jerked it from his wrist where it had begun to unravel.

“There’s Jezebel’s scarf.” Edward tucked it in his pocket.

“No…No.” Rodenberry said. Wedged into the cinderblock of his massive face, his eyes looked as if coated with grease. When Laura looked at her son, her tears fled in two caravans of crystalline-like ants down her cheekbones and funneled toward her mouth. She felt compelled to shave his beard. At twelve, Rodenberry’s precocious physical maturation, made him taller than any boy in his class by six inches, and he had a man’s beard.

“What were you doing at Harriet's house?” Rodenberry remained dumb. Edward shook him as if he was emptying a piggy-bank. “Our twelve-year-old son cannot understand a simple fucking sentence.”
Edward apologized to Rod, but the infuriating musky aroma was such a poignant violation of Edward’s hypersensitive instrument it infuriated him. “Listen son you are never to go over to Harriet's house again. I know you like Harriet but you got her in trouble...okay?”

Rodenberry smiled at Edward and said, “I plucked the glop out of a cat's eye.”

Edward decided, in spite of Laura’s reservation, that Rodenberry should be confined to his room after school where he would remain until dinner and return to wash, brush his teeth, shower, and be in bed by nine. “As soon as he’s forgotten about Harriet Feinstein he can come and go about as he wishes as long as he studies.”

Thus, after school every day Rodenberry went into his room and closed the door behind him. Living in the same house but not seeing Rodenberry until dinner induced in eerie feeling in Laura. She often paused outside his door trying to determine what he was doing based on the sounds emanating from within his room. He often played rock music, forcing Laura to knock on the door and making him to decrease the volume so it wouldn’t ruin his hearing.

One afternoon Laura received a special delivery letter from the local post office. She did not recognize the ornate handwriting and there was no return address.

Dearest Laura,

Aren't you the hypocrite? A former president of the P.T.A., a devotee of yoga, who scrapes her tongue, rinses her nostrils with tepid salt water, freshens her system with coffee enemas inconvenient as they may be. You have incarcerated your Rodenberry who may or may not suffer from Asperger’s because of his innate curiosity. At least his actions had a social motive. One can only guess what the outcome (Oh, dear!) of the gathering at and you’re your visit with the Feinstein’s and the excessive and warranted punishment, I repeat, of your son, who suffers from soft neurological signs and post-concussive symptomatology. I’m talking about creativity, about architecture, about science, about political leadership, and about cultural progress. No, I'm afraid this involvement with his fellow corprophiles is the healthiest behavior he has demonstrated to date. Look around, in basements all over the world, children are trying to solve the riddle of the sphincter, and what are we to make about your behavior? I have watched your hand ferret through the folds of your desire. Stopping… shopping…and sopping while awaiting the lover who pries you from your family, and what can we discern from the minutia and paraphernalia of your affair. The afternoon jog, the tights, the room lit for romance, casting shadows that partially conceal your digital exploration and the mirror for the supposed lone witness to your own purblind finale. Shame on you and shame on the dexterous fingers you use to gentle and manipulate your precious glans and fancy.
End of Part One

The missive disturbed Laura. Who could have written it? Who had violated her privacy? She was embarrassed and angered, because the letter was a series of lies. By exploring her fantasy life, she had freed her sexual essence that had gone unexamined before her search into her intimate compositions, her habit and her liberation unveiled an unknown aspect of her sexual persona that stimulated Edward’s desire for her, and he became more loving, more affectionate, making the note far more dangerous and important. In a fit, she tore the letter up, burning the fragments in the kiln used to glaze her pottery, and why did it strike her as a cremation? Ah, the act was an iconic burial of her inhibitions.

She placed the ashes in its envelope and scattered them during her daily run around the Great Neck North Junior High School track.

Later that afternoon, Rebecca Feinstein called. “Excuse me, I'm a little spent,” she burped, “I can't keep away from the tequila and Valium since we interrupted their adolescent sex group, or grope, I guess. What do they call themselves?”

“They are the Crescent Street Dumplings.”

“I just want to tell you that everything is okay. Larry felt ashamed and burned the recording like some sort of cremation, I guess.”

Laura recalled the letter and her own ritual. She even wondered if Rebecca Feinstein had spied on her through their basement window. Laura knew she was being ridiculous.

Rebecca said, “I just couldn't bear that recording around. Larry's still mad but I couldn't care less. I was terrified that my mother would see it like my mother. Could you imagine?”

When Laura hung up the phone, she had the odd notion she had never received the letter and had imagined the episode. In a way, the impression of never having read the epistle was more intense than its detailed content. She was now unable to envision the mail carrier’s face. Maybe she hadn’t received the letter. Maybe her morbid sense of guilt initiated a form of dissociation, and she had never received the letter.

Before dinner that evening, Edward kissed Laura with uncommon passion. “I know it's unusual, of late, my pet, but I'm in a good mood now that the scarf episode is buried, and my olfactory gift has assumed its prior clarity. A prolonged inability to discern the nuances of various scents could cause a great loss of income.”

Rodenberry walked into the kitchen and punched his father in the arm. “Willie Mays play on sunny days.”

“My child,” said Edward, “My child.”

“Willie Mays plays on sunny days.” Rodenberry laughed. They all laughed.

Laura, Edward, and Rodenberry had a family hug before they sat down for dinner.

As time passed, Laura felt assured that Rodenberry had not seen her masturbating, which enabled her to obscure the letter from consciousness. With a renewed sense of freedom, she indulged her fantasies with greater excitation. She welcomed every nuance of her routine, the paralysis of time, the augmented texture of familiar settings, her run, affording her an ever-increasing awareness of her body, her dances exercises, and the shower in the woodland of her fancy, the mirror, the intense orgasms, and its aftermath. Her ritual became more intense and served as a prelude leading to Edward’s nocturnal clasp.

Then one day she saw Rodenberry watching! “What are you doing!” she shouted.

The boy said, “I plucked the glop out of a cat's eye.”

“You weren't supposed to leave your room. I'm telling your father young man. Go back to your room and don't come out until dinner.”

Laura tugged her tights up and escorted Rodenberry back into his room. He broke free, pushed her, and she smacked into the wall. She was frightened. He was grey and ugly. Her on child terrified her and never had his coarse beard seem so unbearable.

“You’re not nice,” he said.

“You get into your room, mister.”

Rodenberry locked his door. Laura shook the doorknob. “Open the door,” she said.

“You told me to stay in my room and that's what I’m doing.”

“I want you to open the door, now, Rodenberry! Open the door! What did you mean when you said I wasn’t nice?”

Edward and Laura sat at the dinner table that night. “What’s our boy going to eat?” asked Edward.

“He's not coming to the table. He said I'm not a nice mommy and he's not coming out as long as I live here.”

“I'll get him.”

“He was emphatic. Don't force him Edward, please.”

Edward had already headed to Rodenberry's room. “Son, this is daddy. Answer me Rod. Your supper is getting cold. Linguini with clam sauce, your favorite”

Laura said, “Let him be. He'll come out to use the bathroom. He can do without supper. You’ll fight and one of you will get hurt.”

Edward noted the full aroma of Laura’s ‘perfume.’ “Well, I suppose you’re right.”

I'm lucky to have such a beautiful wife. It will be nice to have an evening alone. I can have her over the ottoman and peek at the football game every now and then.

Three days had passed and Rodenberry had not emerged from his room though he ventured out during the night because Laura found a mess in the kitchen every morning. For hours, Laura did not hear a sound from his room. Fearing she could no longer endure her perturbation, now induced by the scraping noises emanating from Rodenberry’s room, she went outside and peeked in his windows, but he had drawn his shades. Desperate, standing in front of Rodenberry's door, tears flowing she threatened to notify the police. Her dread turned to anger and she pounded on the door. Shaking the doorknob in a furor, she demanded he open his door. “I’m getting a screwdriver and removing the doorknob.”

After searching through Edward's tool chest and his workshop without finding the appropriate implement, Laura threatened to call “daddy,” and make him come home. Frustrated she waggled and tugged the doorknob to no avail. She telephoned Edward. “What are we going to do? I can't stand it. He refuses to leave his room and is giving me the silent treatment.”

“Relax, he has come out of the room and he will tire of his game. We can wait up for him tonight or I can take the doorknob off.”

Edward had begun to enjoy their privacy. After her conversation with Edward, a loud bang from within Rodenberry’s room, startled Laura, and she noticed a white envelope he had slipped underneath the door. She tore the envelope open and began reading a letter composed by someone with elegant handwriting.

Laura, as you have so fervently wished, and at times suspected, I do not have a learning disorder, a low IQ, or suffer from the national epidemic of Asperger's disease, which is a means of selling antipsychotics to children by the pharmaceutical industry. It is clear that this is most efficacious because it allows parent’s who have bestowed their unresolved conflicts upon their children. On the contrary, I possess superior mental agility, and I’ve found it is in my best interests to play “dumb.” I admit to having stumbled on this tactic by happenstance; however, the advantages of this policy are so obvious, so blatant that only in a country with millions of incompetent and remorse-ridden parents could fall for such a ruse.

My predominant interest was predicated on the privacy allotted a ‘retarded person.’ Oh, excuse me, I meant to say, a mentally challenged individual. I loathe absurd euphemisms that mock rather than ennoble its victims—incurring the opposite effect for the putative reason that various interest groups had them created. Nobody was concerned with what I had to say once I was ‘accused’ of being ‘backward’ so I could utilize the freedom for more inspired cognition and observe the mores and jejune machinations of our relatively primitive culture as only an ‘outsider’ or a ‘stranger’ can. Once you sent me to a host of special classes and tutors, (my relationship with Bertine Clyde has been invaluable to my intellectual growth) this had both advantages and disadvantages. There was no pressure on me to perform, or maintain a lofty academic record that I could have easily achieved but again I had the liberty to devote all my time to my own more intriguing, and infinitely superior cognitive pursuits. On the other hand, I had to acquire the rudiments of a liberal education on my own, which proved to be more costly than I would have wished. I know that this is not a challenge for you to believe. Look how easy it was for you and dad’s remorse and anguish to betray the both of you. You had feared that your child would be mentally deficient because father's brother had been. Why were you so convinced that your child would be? Was it something within you? Heredity is only a fragment of our primitive apprehension of our own mysterious physiological cosmos. After our beloved Allison’s death from the poorly understood phenomenon of SIDS, and an example of our intellectual frailty. I would imagine that your sense of culpability was unbearable, and the evidence, or the wrath of the gods, who bestowed upon the House of Reynolds some unfortunate heritable defect must have overwhelmed your capacity to tolerate grief of that magnitude. What is the imperative that drives, excuse the pun, you and Edward have to hide behind the mask of that silly story of Edward’s clobbering me with an errant golf swing? Do you think that jejune tale ameliorates your stigmata? What is one to make of the diagnosis of all those specialists you paid to examine me (the great Dr. Ludwig and now Abelhard to mention but two.). Well mother, I know your needs and now you know mine.

Rodenberry had sent those letters and this launched Laura into the vise of a previously unknown state of horror. She struck the door with her fists, calling his name until she fell into the poignant silence of someone whose lover had died in their arms, succumbing to their end in an instant and without a moment’s warning. Laura imagined his face—the grey mask with a man’s beard.

“I know what you must be thinking, but Rod, darling; I don't know what you want, honest. Dad and I will make it up to you.”

Within the odd silence that one hears in a vacant chamber, so similar to the murmur of a conch shell, Laura’s words seemed so inane to her.

Just then, the doorbell chimed; it was their elderly neighbor, Louella Kierkegaard, who grew, what could only be described as redder than red tomatoes in her backyard, that Rodenberry often picked off their vines on his way home from school.

“Mrs. Kierkegaard, if you're about to suggest that Rodenberry has been at your tomatoes again, I must inform you that he has been grounded, and he’s been in his room for the entire school recess.”

“Well, unless there is a young man in the neighborhood who looks exactly like him, I must be going mad because I saw him taking wheelbarrows filled with bricks from the site of the new house they are erecting next to the Feinstein’s.”

Laura and Kierkegaard looked toward the naked structure at the end of the block. “I’m telling you this because a child like Rodenberry is special.”

Laura thanked her. Edward came home the night in a mood Laura had never seen before. He was wild and his kiss was brutal it left her feeling as if she would faint. He insisted they dine at Bruce’s new restaurant on Middle Neck Road that Newsday’s brilliant restaurant critic, Mike McGrady, had given a rave review. Laura wore a low‑cut black satin chemise by the hottest designer, Chester Preene, and Edward held her hand across the table while humming, The Shadow of Your Smile, the only melody he had mastered, as they nibbled on their Caesar salads. Laura had decided it was best not to mention Rodenberry’s letter.

The house held the uncanny hush it had earlier, and Laura thought about the bricks Mrs. Kierkegaard had mentioned. When Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds were about to express their devotion, Edward excused himself to fetch an antacid and walked, proud as a cock, into the bathroom. Laura decided it was time for her to apply her KarmaSutra Fire and Ice lubricant. Finding the phallus-shaped receptacle in her night table drawer empty, she followed her consort. As she entered the bathroom, Edward had the odd look of a man caught in a shame-inducing act, and he hid something behind his back.

“What are you concealing, a vibrator?” Laura reached for Edward who stepped back from Laura’s hands. He insisted it was a surprise, he’d purchased at The Pink Pudenda. Edward’s flushed face and perspiration was indicative of deceit. Laura was about to return to their connubial bed with a fresh supply of Fire and Ice, and placed her lips on Edward’s when she noticed the waggling of the fuchsia scarf Edward had tried to conceal behind his back. In a moment of clarity, Laura knew why it inspired Edward’s rage when Rodenberry had it wrapped around his hand. She darted from the bathroom room and threw herself onto their bed. Edward placed the scarf in his dresser drawer and attempted to placate Laura who had masked her face in a pile of pillows.

Edward said, “It's nothing. You don't understand. You're so beautiful. Don't cry.”

“That scarf you couldn't tolerate, you sick bastard, was worn by Harriet Feinstein. Her scent turns you on. You need a whiff of her before you can make love to me!”

Edward bandaged her mouth with his hand. “Quiet! That's not fair. Yes, the scarf turns me on. However, it has no bearing on my love for you and it has a matrix of estrogen-inspired scents.

Remember what Lawrence said about Rod being a porn star.” Edward removed his hand from Laura’s mouth and continued. “At first, I was concerned that I was perverse so I spoke with Dr. Abelhard, and he stated the obvious. First, given my olfactory gift it was an amalgamation of aromas I had detected, not just Harriet’s, and it’s normal for a man to be turned on by another woman's scent and a stimulant that inspires making love to his wife.”

“Harriet Feinstein’s is a child and her scent is the predominant one embedded in that scarf. She’s also a friend of your son’s.”

The sunrise failed to disinfect the wounds of their dreadful night. Mr. & Mrs. Reynaud met in the kitchen, which had often displayed the affects of Rodenberry's early morning foraging but it was now in its familiar state of near pristine cleanliness.

“I thought I heard him around three. He has gone too far,” said Edward, mentioning that

Rodenberry had consumed the last of the eggs. “Frankly, I’ve rather enjoyed these few weeks with him in his room, and I don’t feel guilty about it either. That was another item I had to discuss with Abelhard, and we agreed that having a family session was prudent now.”

After returning from Manhattan the next night, Edward demanded that Rodenberry open the door. There was no reply. “I’ll break the door down if necessary so open it up kiddo. This business has gone far enough. I know you’re troubled.”

Before using his shoulder as a battering ram, Edward thought it best to remove the doorknob, but his entire collection of screwdrivers was missing along with other tools from his basement workshop. He ran up the stairs, through the narrow vestibule, leading to Rodenberry's door, and slammed into it with his shoulder. Edward’s rage inspired adrenaline permitted him to pummel the thick walnut without noticing pain until he had a hairline fracture—revealed later that night in the North Shore Hospital ER—but the threshold was unblemished, and he began kicking the door in a state of fury. Laura had brought him his electric drill, a jigsaw, and a large hammer, and if those utensils failed to achieve the requisite result, she mentioned his sledgehammer. Edward looked at her with a dullard’s expression, suggesting he had regressed to a stage of evolution indicative of man’s primate ancestry.

She though he would be better off using the drill, the small handsaw, and remove the doorknob. He accepted her advice.

At the end of the knotty pine vestibule leading to Rodenberry’s room was a solid brick wall. Behind that barrier, Rod had replaced the door with a slab of steel. Near the top was a square cutout backed by a sliding steel plate similar to the entrance of a speakeasy. Edward and Laura stood in the foyer, exchanging glances. Edward, handed her the doorknob, and he felt the solid wall. “Rodenberry!” he screamed.

Rodenberry slid the metal plate open and peered out at his parents. Edward, feeling the pain from his fracture, screamed louder, “What the fuck is this!”

Laura looked at her son’s grey face with the coarse stubble from his beard. He couldn't have written those letters.

“I'm hiding like a bear,” said Rodenberry framed in the square cutout.

“Couldn't you stop him from doing this?” Edward said to Laura. “How could that kid build a fucking fortress in there without you knowing it?”

“And why didn’t you stop him?” said Laura.

“I was running our business. Rodenberry, you get out of that room!”

“I'm hiding like a bear. I plucked the glop out of a cat's eye.”

Edward ran to get a ladder when he felt the intense pain radiating from his shoulder. Edward set the ladder down against the brick facade in the backyard, and climbed up to look into Rodenberry’s windows, but he had locked them and drawn the drapes closed. Edward, with a furious effort, tried to lift the windows. When he couldn’t budge them, he punched out one of the glass panes. It wasn't until he got the window frame up and was about to climb in when he noticed, behind the drapes, a solid wall of bricks. He shouted his son's name then ran back into the house. “How could that kid build a fucking fortress in there without you knowing it?” said Edward.

“A lot you care,” said Laura.

“Rodenberry, you get out of that room!”

“I'm hiding like a bear.”

Edward called Dr. Abelhard, the next afternoon from Manhattan, wanting to know why Rodenberry would do such a thing and how it was possible for a boy with his limited capacity to accomplish such a complicated feat. Dr. Abelhard told him the boy was an autistic savant. “A person with meager general intelligence but who in one area has the psychic energy and clarity normally associated with genius. The boy was obviously insecure and suffered from castration anxiety and his own emerging, turbulent libido.”

Laura had called Dr. Abelhard before the eminent archeologist of psychological runes, spoke to Edward. “In your son's case his impressive ability has settled in two distinct areas, architecture and literature. Not common I can assure you but no wholly unique either.”

“But his writing was not literature. It wasn't a story or anything like that. It took thought,” said Laura.

“Not thought as we know it, but the combination of recalled paragraphs culled from books, he has read. It's called eidetic memory—photographic memory. As you know, Laura, I have seen your boy. If you like I can refer him to a psychologist for a battery of tests.”

Rodenberry had left the sliding plate open. Laura, noting the invitation, stood on a kitchen ladder and peered into his room. Maybe, thought Laura, the doctor was right, as she watched Rodenberry playing with some bricks. The castle he was constructing was quite ingenious, but he had such an insipid look about his eyes that Laura didn’t think it possible for any “real” cerebration to occur in his brain.

She called out to Rodenberry and he failed to respond at first. Then he slowly turned to her. “Did you make up those letters you sent to mommy of did you copy them?”

He indicated that he copied them. Laura fought hard to believe Dr. Abelhard but wondered where the boy could find anything that corresponded to their familial melodrama.

“Will you show me the book where you got the idea?”

Rodenberry agreed to show her but it would have to be later because he was building the Great Wall of China.

“You must come out of your room. You can't stay in there forever. Now come out like a good boy.”

“I'm punished. I'm hiding like a bear. Ignatz! Ignatz! Ignatz! No! No!”

Laura left the house for two hours of shopping. She returned and heard loud music coming from Rodenberry's room. The sliding plate was open and as she climbed the kitchen ladder, she wondered if it would be possible for her to squeeze through the opening. Laura was astonished to see Harriet Feinstein in the room with Rod. Laura imagined Lawrence and felt an acute and inexplicable loathing for the girl that she had formerly adored. Harriet looked extremely pretty in a grey jumper and navy crepe blouse. Harriet greeted Laura with her usual cheerful affect.

Laura said, “What are you doing here?”

The children giggled before Harriet stated she had come to visit her best friend. By the time Harriet closed metal plate, Laura had called her a “tramp,” while attempting to reopen the immovable steel panel. That night Rodenberry refused to leave his room despite the vehement pleading of his parents with promises extravagant material rewards, a new Xbox, a Bose sound system, and a new TV. Edward tried entering the room through the sliding panel that Rodenberry had left open but managed to get no more than his head and left arm through the opening in part because of the cumbersome cast on his humerus. Rodenberry had constructed the opening specifically to exclude his father from gaining entrance. The width of his father's shoulders was twenty‑three inches. The opening was twenty‑one inches.

His parents decided that if Rodenberry didn't come out of his room by the following night they would have Dr. Abelhard come over. When his wife was asleep, Edward went down to his workroom, grabbed his sledgehammer, ran back upstairs, but was unable to lift the hammer with his broken shoulder. The turmoil woke Laura who joined her husband in Rodenberry's foyer.

“At least this is bringing us closer together,” she kissed Edward on the cheek but had yet to forgive him for his attachment to the scarf. They went back to bed and slept together bent into a puzzle.

After Edward had gone to work, Laura discovered another envelope in Rodenberry's foyer. He now

left the sliding panel always open. She had the peculiar thought that perhaps if she ignored the presence of the envelope it would disappear and prove that she had imagined the other letters. She fought the urge to ask him if he had dropped an envelope on the floor. Fighting her virulent curiosity, she delayed the inevitable, jogged five miles before opening returning home and opening the envelope.

Laura, Having Harriet Feinstein visit me the other day was more than pleasant. It was a hint. Don't you have a jumper like the one she wore, or am I mistaken? There really is only one way to make me come out of my fortress and nobody knows better than you do what I mean. I have just enough bricks to seal the room. How long do you think I can live before I suffocate? Personally, I don't think I will get that far. The moment I feel the slightest difficulty in breathing I will reach for dad's Rockwell power drill and bore several 5/8 holes allowing some enough air in or will it be too late.

The letter enraged Laura and she retrieved the kitchen ladder, peered in and said,

“You're going to get hell, young man!”

Rodenberry was busy pinning photos he had cut from Sports Illustrated onto a cork board at the far end of his room. He looked toward his mother and continued.

Laura said, “Are you writing me letters? It can't be you; is it Rodenberry, RODENBERRY ANSWER ME! Stop writing me letters.”

As she spoke the letter she had rolled up in her hand inadvertently fell through the open panel. She lunged for it as it fell to the floor on Rodenberry's side of the wall and found herself halfway through the open panel so it was apparent that she could enter the room if she desired.

Of course, why hadn’t she realized the obvious before? If Rodenberry was able to get in and out of his room through the panel, so could she. She could slip in during the middle of the night, get the power tools and hand them to Edward.

How unnecessary though...all they needed to do was to hire a building contractor and have them demolish the wall. No, calling a stranger wouldn't be right. It would be embarrassing. Edward could have borrowed the necessary tools but now with his broken shoulder. Why was it so easy to believe that he had a genetic form of cognitive disability?

When Edward got home, he gave Laura a perfunctory kiss and went straight to Rodenberry’s foyer. He produced a tape measure he had just purchased. Rodenberry had taken the tape into his room. Edward measured the dimensions of the panel, and wrote them on a little pad. “This is what's happening,” he turned to Laura.

“Tonight we make a last ditch attempt at wooing him out of the room. I bought him a TV and we’ll set here as a gesture of appeasement. In the event that he remains, ‘hibernating like a bear.’ Abelhard will come over here with a colleague and administer a sedative. If that doesn't work, we'll get a contractor to tear down the damn wall.”

“How will Abelhard be able to give him a sedative if Rod won't let him in?”

“His associate is has narrow shoulders and can climb in. That's why I'm getting the measurements. The man also knows a little karate so that if Rodenberry won't hold still for the injection he can subdue him with a pressure point.”

Edward and Laura carried the TV from the car and placed it in the foyer. Laura laughed. It was funny, she thought, how Rodenberry had brought her and Edward closer than they had been in years. Their lovemaking had the intensity they enjoyed during their honeymoon and the tender weeks that followed. She knew this also related to her ability to indulge her fantasies. The following morning, Laura was aware of her extreme sexual excitation. Prior to her “sexual awakening,” she would go for long intervals of time without any conscious sensual ideas or reveries.

Perhaps when she finished her chores she would indulge herself. While putting away several of Edward's hankies she noticed the corner of the fuchsia scarf peeking from under the corner of his monogrammed leather jewelry box. She took the scarf and ran into Rodenberry's foyer, dragging the kitchen ladder along with her.

“You knew about this all the time didn't you, you bastard! Your father is falling for that little bitch. He kisses her through me. You knew what you were doing. Answer me you bastard!”

Laura waved the scarf as her arm dangled through the open panel. “Answer me!”

Rodenberry looked her in the eye, and resumed tacking photos on the cork board. He'll do that forever, she thought.

In the afternoon, driven by her anger toward Edward, she set out to masturbate as an act of infidelity. She would flow into the arms of imagined lovers and they would have her in a fashion that Edward with his ludicrous olfactory fetish could never comprehend.

She wasn't able to get comfortable since Rodenberry kept emerging in the foreground of each fantasy. She knew what to do. She would get the boy out of his room. Hadn't he constructed the cursed thing so that a narrow shouldered person like herself could force him out? We don't need Dr. Abelhard here! I'm going to look so beautiful Edward will flip, she decided, settling into her bath. She shaved her legs and spread soothing aromatic after bath oil on them. She redid her eyes with a tawny eye shadow, put on lip-gloss, a subtle base, and a dab of rouge on her cheeks. She put on a baby blue blouse Edward had bought her. At that point, she stood at her open closet undecided on how to proceed, when she noticed the grey jumper that Rodenberry had recalled as being similar to the one that Harriet had worn the other day. She reached for the garment thinking it might coax Rodenberry. He was obviously partial to the style. Edward had also shown a preference for it and had stated how it displayed her gorgeous figure. She stood in front of her full-length mirror pleased by her appearance.

When she was in Rodenberry's foyer, she said, “Okay, buster, this is your last chance to come out or mommy’s coming in after you.”

She climbed through the panel easily, though for some reason she thought it would be difficult. Standing in his room, she had a strange, almost nostalgic sense of something ineffable.

“Look what I brought for you.” Laura showed him the scarf. “You may have it if you leave the room, understand?”

He looked at her. His eyes looked bottomless, empty and for his entire life, he will cut pictures out of magazines and make collages. She pushed the hair from his forehead. “Promise me that you won't tell daddy I came in to get you. Rod, are you coming with me sweetheart?”

Rodenberry walked over to Laura and placed his hand on her shoulder.