The world is always looking for a new energy source, natural, ecological, never-ending, renewable, eco-friendly, and something the population can really get into. Oh, stop smiling! I figured you’d start thinking about it…
Junie and Kamal stood in their taped-off squares, not looking at each other. They’d been told they were not allowed to look, and they were absolutely forbidden from touching.
Hmm, Junie thought to herself. It seems like I could just glance over. They told us not to, but they made such a big deal about the touching, maybe they were actually hinting that we could look.
She gazed down at the tape of her square. It seemed home-made and permeable. Not legally binding. She looked an inch outside of her tape. No alarms went off.
The room was like an airplane hangar, enormous, several high school gymnasiums wide, the ceiling at least three stories high. She’d been brought in first, before Kamal. Guards had marched her past the scientists’ viewing area, which was so far away now she could almost forget it was there.
The guards had put her in her square, about ten feet back from the Machine, a divided glass box, open on the side she was facing. She could direct her eyes at Machine, or at the floor inside her square, but nowhere else. She’d been briefed extensively.
She felt like she knew the Machine by heart, she’d looked at it so long. It was like a life-size glass diorama with a cloudy, nearly opaque wall in the middle. In order for the Machine to do its work, the wall would come down when she and Kamal were in their places on each side.
She really wanted to look over and see Kamal. Any part of his body would do. A wrist. A strand of hair. She just wanted proof he was nearby. She was almost vibrating with her need to see him. It had been three weeks since they’d been allowed any contact, and even “contact” hadn’t been contact, it was talking, a few minutes of talk in a darkened room. Three weeks she’d been made to collect her desire, to gather it into her body, for the Machine.
We are here to save the world, she reminded herself. Any pleasure is secondary.
But it felt primary, and the Machine wasn’t going to work if it felt any other way. She shivered under the sheer weight of her desire and glanced another inch or two beyond the tape. She was not supposed to speak to him or make any sound at all. She wasn’t even supposed to breathe in an audible way.
Thinking about that made it hard to breathe at all.
If she passed out, the whole thing would have to start all over again. She couldn’t take that. She couldn’t go another three weeks without him. Kamal, she thought. There was no clock, no countdown, but it felt as though it must be almost time. Kamal. She spelled his name in her mind, as slowly as she could. K, a vertical down stroke, a diagonal down stroke, then turn and go the other way down and diagonal again, like an I and then a sideways flattened-out V, when will they let me look at him.
By the time I get to the M they’ll let us look, she thought. M for Machine. M for murder, I feel like I could murder somebody. M for magic, minotaur, Marilyn Monroe, murmur, mountains, Mmmmm. She was going to have to go to A.
No, she would stay in M a little longer. She could do it. They’d chosen her because she was capable. They needed her, and there would be no Junie, no Kamal, no anything, if she couldn’t wait a little longer. M for macaroni. M for Macarena. She suppressed a smile. What would they think if she burst out laughing? This was no laughing matter, despite the picture in her mind now of Kamal and herself doing the Macarena inside the divided glass box taking up her field of vision. As if that’s what they would want to do – as if that’s what the world was waiting for.
M for
M for
M for mature, m for manage. Be mature and manage this. You are twenty-seven years old. You are a grown up lady. M for madam. M for mad. Think of the brown-outs and the curfews and all the many electric things this day might make possible again if the Machine was successful. M for movies, medicines, merry-go-rounds, Minecraft, remember Minecraft, how much she’d loved playing Minecraft with her sister, before the halt on non-urgent computer use. Milk, cold from the refrigerator, remember refrigerators? M for microphones, for singing Karaoke with Kamal on their third date, before the halt on electricity for amusements. Kamal, she was halfway through the letters in Kamal, how much longer could they make her wait. M for please, please, please, please, please…
A voice came from a loudspeaker. “Five minutes,” it said.
M for minutes! M for mive minutes more muntil mhe Machine. M for monely mive minutes. Surely she could look at him now. They’d almost told her to look at him.
She was so tired of their instructions. Why were they the boss?
Oh, right, because the fate of the world hung in the balance. Because soon there wouldn’t be enough energy to run the Machine.
She shook her head a tiny bit. It was almost, almost time. Kamal, she thought. The letters she’d been spelling out ballooned up, filling her whole brain, then her whole body. She was made of Kamal. There was no Junie, unless Kamal had filled himself up with her name. She didn’t know what Kamal was thinking, so close by, his taped-off square less than two feet from hers for the past hour. Her knees were weak. She’d been standing in the square forever, it seemed. She couldn’t remember a version of herself outside the square.
The buzzer sounded and Junie threw herself into her side of the glass box and burst into tears. The rules hurt, they physically hurt her, the pain was excruciating, she would be able to look at him now but not touch him. The median wall in the glass box was opaque, but soon it would shimmer into transparency. It would, right? It would. That was the plan. She’d had to listen to the plan every day for a week. The script was imprinted upon her, memorized.
The opacity of the median wall would shrink, slowly, from the top and bottom, in an unknown amount of time. It was mostly soundproof, but if they shouted they might be able to communicate, even if they couldn’t see each other’s lips.
Lips, Junie thought. Oh god lips.
The median wall began to change. The frost-like covering on the upper few inches appeared to be melting, so slowly – nothing could be fast if the Machine was going to succeed. Junie felt like screaming.
She could, actually, scream, she remembered. A low growl erupted out of her, expanding into a scream-howl-shriek. The stillness of the past hour could end, too. She lifted both arms over her head and smacked the median wall. No matter how hard she hit, there was no smacking sound, though. She thought she could see something through the top few inches of the wall. A shadow, two shadows, like birds. Kamal’s hands. He was punching the wall with the sides of his fists. She could see the dark shapes of his hands on the other side of the median, as if he were on the other side of a powerful waterfall.
That’s all I need, she thought. That’s enough. A little of the craziness seeped out of her. For a moment she felt a kind of relief and then the craziness enveloped her again, from the inside, bursting, was she dying? Was her heart going to give out at this important juncture?
Now the lower part of the median wall was becoming less opaque. Junie threw herself onto the ground. She could just barely make out a shape on the other side of the median, next to her, so close to her. She pressed her whole body into the wall, writhing horizontally against it. He was doing the same thing, just an inch away.
She hadn’t thought about this in advance. Imagining this day and all that hinged upon it she’d always pictured the opacity melting downward, so that she would see Kamal’s face before the rest of him. This was a surprise, this sudden whole-body almost-visibility at floor level.
Junie pulled off her shoes and socks, her tunic, her underthings, all the while keeping her eyes on the shape that would be Kamal.
The opacity stopped decreasing at about five inches up. Junie let out another howl, this one like operatic singing, a long aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh going up at the end. She wiped tears from her face. How long would they keep him from her? She knew about the delicate balance, the careful calibration, she’d read all the literature, she’d studied the math, she didn’t understand how the Machine worked but she understood that it did work and that there would be only the one chance. If they weren’t able to hit their marks –
But she wouldn’t think about that. There was only despair in that direction.
Was the wall changing again? Was it lowering? Junie leapt to her feet. She could see the top of Kamal’s head! Oh, Kamal. Kamal. Kamaaaaaahl you are really there. She pressed her face to the wall. Her body made a kind of melty form in the median. Kamal had seen it too, from his side. He put his whole self just opposite Junie and it was definitely happening, the wall was almost clear where they were.
If she stepped back could she see him? Would the wall melt back to opacity? She drew back just a bit and the wall stayed clear.
There was only glass between them now. Kamal couldn’t take his eyes off her, but he had to get his clothes off. This resulted in a kind of hopping acrobatics that would have been comical if Junie’s entire body hadn’t been on fire. What was his expression? It wasn’t a smile, it was like –
Like –
A wild animal, call the rabies experts, call the police, call the guards, call the hospital, call an ambulance, Kamal’s eyes were enormous, she could go swimming in them, why couldn’t she touch him? If the wall came down now she would be on top of him like a hyena, it wouldn’t be pretty, it would break all the cameras, it would destroy the Machine, they’d been warned about this, the calibration, the delicate balance, Junie couldn’t protect the Machine, she could not stop anything now. The median was coming down, actually coming down now, sinking into the floor. Her hands were in Kamal’s hands. Her arms were against Kamal’s arms. Her eyes were looking into his eyes with no glass between. Junie jumped, banged her forehead into Kamal’s nose, he didn’t care, she didn’t care, the median continued its progress and now they were kissing
(M for Mmmmmm)
and they were naked and rolling around inside the glass box and crying and laughing and trying to wrap all their molecules up inside the other person’s molecules and trying to explode all their skin, nothing was required of them anymore, they were free inside the glass box, there was no gravity except the magnetic pull of each other’s bodies, they were all teeth and tongue and love and the Machine was humming at an impossibly high pitch and everything went white and there was a roar and something was hailing down on them, warm pebbles of clear glass hail, but they didn’t care, Junie and Kamal no longer existed, language no longer existed, the universe wasn’t anything, everything was nothing everything nothing nothing nothing everything
#
[newspaper clipping]
The World Honors Our American Heroes
“It all started a decade ago, when we in the sciences had all but given up on getting funding to try for new energy sources,” says Dr. Paulette Trissell, one of the recipients of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize in Sustainability. “My team’s grant funds had all but dried up, and Dr. Nussbaum said the problem was that energy-centered grant proposals weren’t ‘sexy’.”
Dr. Grace Nussbaum meant the comment metaphorically, she says, “But it was like a lightbulb went off over Dr. Trissell’s head. Could we somehow harness sexual energy? Could we store up enough sexual tension such that when it released the energy outpouring would be akin to a nuclear reaction? Could we then store that energy in some form and return our planet to something like normalcy?”
The answer, it turns out, was yes. The Trissell Team received four hundred million dollars in grant funds over the next few years to build the Machine, but according to Nussbaum, that wasn’t the hard part. “We had to find two people whose sexual tension could be cultivated right up to the breaking point, and then capture that energy at the exact right moment.”
Over 10,000 couples, singles, and polyamorous groups went through an arduous screening process involving experimental hormone modification, blood tests, long periods of abstinence, and friction endurance studies. “After two years of screenings,” Dr. Trissell says, “It became clear we had only one shot at making this work, so we had to be very careful.”
Junie Berg and Kamal Shah were chosen according to a matrix involving, among other things, emotional and physical compatibility, ability to delay gratification, and “pure American gumption,” says Nussbaum. “Those two were in the lead in most categories, but it wasn’t until we did the test runs that we knew we had found our first and probably last Machine participants.”
The world thanks Berg and Shah, whose whereabouts are currently unknown. Rumors abound as to their fate: one anonymous source, close to the lab, used the term “spontaneous combustion,” and another source stated, likely in an attempt at humor, that they may have “burned up on re-entry.”
Trissell and Nussbaum deny that their Machine killed its participants. “Their location is a state secret now,” says Trissell. “For their own safety, Junie Berg and Kamal Shah have received new identities and are under the protection of the United Nations. We don’t know where they are. We don’t even know who knows. But I can confirm they left our facility safe and healthy – if perhaps somewhat fatigued.”
And what of the Machine? Will it be used again? Will screenings commence? “Not at this time,” says Nussbaum. “Our team is working on repairs and enhancements to the Machine, which was somewhat damaged in its maiden voyage.” According to an anonymous tip, the damage may be even more severe than Nussbaum suggests.
“The Machine’s in an infinitely growing number of pieces right now,” says one lab technician. “We didn’t know that was even possible. Every time we touch one of the fragments it breaks into two perfect halves. Cleanup is difficult, and rebuilding the machine is impossible.” Luckily, according to Trissell and Nussbaum, if the earth is responsible about energy use, Junie and Kamal’s time in the Machine has generated enough for centuries to come.
END
