Everything was going to be just fine. The blowjob was business-like but reassuring, and afterwards the I-Ching reassured Theo even further, providing a good omen for once. He didn’t want Kathy to notice that he was consulting the I-Ching— she always called it “the horoscope” or “that stupid book”— so he used his cellphone and found an online version that was as good as the Pocket I-Ching on the coffee table. With the online version you threw the coins by tapping a button, and the hexagram was calculated automatically by the website. He thought the words, “What will happen to us if we try Mind Leap?” and then clicked the button six times. The answer it gave seemed positive: Ten— Worrying the Tiger— Heaven shines down on the Marsh which reflects it back imperfectly. Though the Superior Man carefully discriminates between high and low, and acts in accord with the flow of the Tao, there are still situations where a risk must be taken. You tread upon the tail of the tiger, Not perceiving you as a threat, the startled tiger does not bite. Success. A risk must be taken! Success! The digital coins had spoken: He was worrying Kathy with all his negativity, and for the sake of his relationship he needed to take a risk and try Mind Leap, because everything was going to be just fine.
His mom would call that Sunday night around 8 o’clock like she always did on Sundays, and so he stepped outside onto the red-lit balcony to wait for the phone to ring. He had always disliked the name Theodore as a kid, and he used to beg his mother to give him a different name. His older brother was named Andrew, which seemed like a much more normal name. His parents told him Theodore meant “Gift of God,” which made him like the name a little more, because it had some meaning other than just a name. It made him feel like an indian, with a metaphor for a name, instead of just a bunch of letters, which may as well have been numbers. Over time he started going by Theo and by Teddy. Teddy sounded less pretentious, but Theo meant “God,” so he was fine with either. Canal Street was swarming like an ant highway, and the traffic was backed up from Broad Street all the way to the river, where the old World Trade Center, now Mind Leap headquarters, loomed over like a watchtower. The late sunset morphed from red, to peach, to purple, the colors amplified, reflected, and refracted by the dense network of contrails hanging over the horizon like a cobweb. He had a theory the planes were dumping chemicals to make clouds and block sunlight, and the news earlier had tickled this distrust of contrails, but he forced it to the back of his mind when the phone finally started buzzing in his hand. Whenever he expressed a “conspiracy theory,” his parents tended to react with great suspicion and concern for his mental health, so he bottled it up and greeted his mother with a “Hello there!” like a kid yelling into a tube and hoping the message comes out on the other side. “Hello there!” she echoed back. “You’ll never guess what happened at the grocery today.” A nice “Arabian gentleman” had helped her put some groceries into her car. Later, at the dog park, Maxy refused to retrieve the ball, which was very much out of character. Theo told her about the Mind Leap plan and that everything was going to be fine, that the I-Ching had given a good omen for once. She dodged the bit about the I-Ching and said, “Oh, that’s wonderful, honey! So romantic. Who will you be?” He said he didn’t know yet— they hadn’t picked out their Vessels. “Oh, you’ve got to!” she said. “If you wait til the last minute all the good ones will be gone!”
“I know, I know,” he said. “We’ll pick them out later tonight.”
“Oh good! I wish your father and I could try leaping, but you know how he is about those sorts of things. He says ‘hi’ by the way. Oh and he wanted me to ask you how your book is coming.”
“Marvin the Manatee? It’s finished, mom. Finished it a month ago. You’ve read it I thought?”
“Yes, but we can’t support you forever, you know, and if you don’t get it published or find a job we can’t afford to keep paying for your condo. It isn’t cheap, you know.”
“I know, I know. But honestly, I’ve got a really good feeling. I really, really think Marvin will get published really soon, and then I’ll be able to turn my attention to other more important stuff. I had a great idea for a Humpty Dumpty story, too. Just this morning. It’s like the regular Humpty Dumpty, except that Humpty Dumpty gets put back together again with help of a Sphinx that’s good at jigsaw puzzles and this genius kid who everyone thinks is dumb because he eats paste, and—”
“Well that’s great honey, but just remember that the clock is ticking. I’ve actually got to run— the dogs are scratching at the door like they want me to throw the ball, but I love you! Your father loves you!”
“Love you too, mom. Talk to you soon.”
“Buh-bye.”
He had remained on the balcony during the brief conversation, looking South East at the white, yellow, and orange lights enveloped by the river, all flickering like a field of stars. None of the real ones were visible yet, and the ant highway below looked about the same as it did a few minutes ago. The street lamps were lighting up, turning the pavement and the palm trees white in their glow.
He never quite knew how to think of New Orleans. It was easy to define and simultaneously impossible. “There’s no other city like it,” seemed to be the most commonly held definition, which meant exactly nothing. The name was easy enough— it meant New Orleans— but all the locals pronounced it “New Ore-Leens,” and all the tourists called it “Nawlins" to sound more local. It was a town full of pretending in that way. The type of place where everybody supposedly loved everybody, but Tulane students still commonly debated “the black problem.” The type of place where “folk music” and “folk art” were “chic” and “trendy,” but homeless artists and musicians begged on every other street corner. A place where you could legally walk with a beer, but logically shouldn’t risk it. A place where you can find a hooker easier than you can find a— there was a hooker teetering on the corner of Royal and Frenchman. An asian or maybe a hispanic— it was too far to tell— wearing cheetah print and black highheels and a shiny wig of straight pink hair. Theo made a judgmental sigh, but simultaneously began to wonder what she was like between the sheets. His own “shortcomings” aside, Kathy had been a dead fish in the sack ever since she started blacking out every night, and it was getting redundant. Boring. Like the verb not just the adjective. He was boring into something that was merely there. Physical. Lifeless. He stepped back inside, and Kathy looked up from the couch expectantly.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Cool, get your laptop,” she said. “Power off.”
The TV turned itself off, and Theo walked to the bedroom to get his laptop. It was easy to tell Kathy was getting excited. She’d worn it on her face like a mask all day, and it was rare to see her turn the television off for anything. She’d watch TV as she talked to her dad in Milwaukee or her mom in Tampa Bay, and she’d spend the whole conversation narrating whatever show she was watching like: “Oh my God, Dad, you’ll never believe it— Kelly just told Sandra that she looks like a crabapple, and she does! She looks exactly like a big crabapple! I wish you were here right now.” Theo didn’t know what a crabapple was, or if crabapple was even the exact word Kathy had used, but she was always narrating dumb stuff like that. When he returned with the laptop, Kathy had swiveled around on the couch and was sitting on her knees. “Come on, come on!” she said, beckoning wildly.
He hurried over, shuffled past the coffee table, and plopped down on her left. He opened up the laptop and Kathy scooted closer, placing a hand on his shoulder in order to lean her freckled face toward the artificial light. “Get all this Marvin the Manatee crap off the screen! Pull up the website!”
He was slightly annoyed by her impatience and her disrespect for Marvin, but he was used to this sort of thing. His surface remained genial and placid. “Yes, missus Kathy,” he said in a deep, dumb voice. “Whateva you say, missus Kathy.”
“Your impression sounds racist.”
He knew, but the website was already popping up so he didn’t respond. TAKE THE LEAP! loaded in giant green letters before the rest of the images— photos of people shaking hands, of smiling Vessels, a guy on a treadmill with wires coming from his head, and buttons like “ABOUT US” and “SIGN UP NOW.” He clicked “SIGN UP NOW” and another screen started loading.
The Sign-Up process was broken into five stages, all labeled along a progress bar at the top right: Who? What? Where? When? Who?
The first page was simple enough. It asked for their full names and their ages. Theodore Atticus Greenbaum and Katherine Sarah Carmichael. Age 23, Age 22. It didn’t even ask for “gender,” which the Supreme Court had ruled a social construct.
The “what” page had a drop-down menu. They were supposed to check every item that fit their circumstances, then elaborate in a little white box. The options were: Business, Therapeutic (psychological), Therapeutic (physical), Recreational, Erotic, Educational, and Other. Business was mostly for people who wanted to Leap around the world for an overseas meeting or attend a local meeting with a more handsome face. The therapeutic options were mostly for people with handicaps. You lost your legs and now you want to walk around for a day, or something like that. Theo checked Recreational and Erotic. In the little white box he wrote: We want to do something romantic for Valentine’s Day. Kathy said, “Tell em we want to look hot and fuck the shit out of each other.” Theo said, “I don’t think they’ll appreciate the F-word, but whatever you say.”
We want to do something romantic for Valentine’s Day, and we want to look hot and fuck the shit out of each other.
He clicked “Continue.”
Great! You’re almost halfway there!
Where will you be leaping from?
New Orleans, Louisiana.
Where will you be leaping to?
New Orleans, Louisiana.
Great! You’re more than halfway there!
When will you be leaping?
There was another drop down menu with dates on it. Another with times. The times were 10 AM, 12 PM, 2 PM, 4 PM, or 6 PM. Shifts were a standard four hours, with an hour before and an hour after for the technical stuff. For a 6 PM you would have to be there before 5, and you’d get done around 11. Kathy said she wished they could choose a later time, so that they could go surprise everyone at the bars. Theo said he was glad the times were early, because he’d just as soon not see anyone at all. They settled on the 6 PM for February 14th. Theo clicked “Continue,” bringing them to the final page, and even he had to admit he was getting a little excited.
“I have to admit,” he said. “I’m getting a little excited.”
Great! You’re almost there! Now tell us who you will be, Theodore!
This menu was different, interactive and high-production. It looked like a choose-your-character screen in a video game. All the vessels stood side to side, men and women, and they were all naked. You could scroll left and right by clicking on the purple arrows at the ends of the screen. The Vessel in the middle had a plus-minus button on the right side that zoomed you right up to the high-fidelity genitals, in this case a giant brown schlong. The computerized junk seemed like CGI, but it looked so real it could have also been composite videography, and probably was. Theo laughed and zoomed back out, but he couldn’t help but notice Kathy biting her lip before she said “damn.” A button beneath the muscular black guy said “ROTATE” which made him spin. Theo scrolled right to move to the other Vessels.
Kathy was looking at the screen in puzzlement. “Why do they have girls on here too?” She said it in an impersonal way, like she was pondering out loud. “Can a guy go in a girl’s head?”
Theo didn’t know, but he offered that “gender’s just a social construct anyway.”
Kathy nodded thoughtfully, as if to let this altruistic truth wash over her. “Yeah, true,” she finally said. “So who do you want to be?”
The screen was on the big, hung black guy again, but it was loading strangely with pixels sputtering from the top down.
“How about him?” Kathy asked abstractedly. She approached the question as one might approach a tricky Jenga block. The schlong hadn’t loaded yet. It was just one brown pixel in a sea of white. Theo was uncomfortable with being this black guy, or any of these people for that matter, thinking Kathy might develop a penchant for variety. This guy, even with half his pixels missing, was infinitely more attractive, a fact that any intelligent mirror on Earth would surely corroborate.
“Him?” Theo asked in a chipper-sounding voice, but he hoped Kathy would sense his discomfort and let him off the hook. She didn’t.
“Yeah,” she said. “Why not?”
The schlong had finished loading. This Vessel would lie pretty high on the global penis chart, and wouldn’t have to endure insults from his mirror for at least another twenty years.
“Nothing!” he blurted. “I guess it could be fun. I mean, it’s not like we’d get a schlong like that with a white guy, ha ha.”
“Exactly.”
He couldn’t produce another laugh, or even a “ha ha.” He was beginning to sweat, or had been for a minute and was just starting to notice. He probably reeked of body odor, and he hadn’t even left the house or exercised all day. “Well,” he said, squirming slightly and pretending to yawn, “I guess I’ll go ahead and click this guy if that’s who you want.”
“It’s not about who I want. But yeah. You should.”
He clicked around the belly button.
A bubble appeared from the side of the Vessel’s head like a cartoon thought, and inside the bubble was a brief bio:
Name: SOCRATES
Age: 24
Ethnicity: Brazilian
At the bottom it said: Socrates is as athletic as he is sexy. Kindness, longevity, beauty, and intelligence run in his family. Outside of Mind Leap he is a practicing Buddhist and a talented yogi. Get deep with this perfect Vessel! CLICK HERE TO SELECT SOCRATES
“Click it,” Kathy said.
“Yes, masta.”
He clicked it.
Great choice! You’re almost there! Now tell us who you will be, Katherine!
The rest, as they say, was history, and a week later Theodore Greenbaum found himself across the street from Harrah’s Casino in a blue collared shirt, the sun beating down on him, standing on the first of twenty-something stone steps up to the glass front doors of Mind Leap, holding Kathy’s pale, mushy hand to be cute. The building before him was shaped like an X and stretched thirty-three stories up into the sun, crowned by a circular office that used to be a restaurant. The building backed up to three train tracks and the Riverwalk shopping plaza. The Tricentinneal Tower stood in the background, with a double helix of observation gondolas curling around it. All the threes were making Theo nervous. Numbers often made him nervous, but particularly threes. It was like God’s way of telling him something, but he never knew what the message was. He felt the tug of Kathy’s hand and he took his first step upward. She was wearing a white sundress polka-dotted with Strawberries, the top of her melons bulging out over the rippled hem of the fabric. For now, at least, she looked amazing, determined, and exactly like herself. Theo wondered where he had gone wrong; what he had ever done to deserve what was coming. Kathy had selected an Argentine woman called PRAXIS, with big lips and big breasts like Kathy’s, but darker hair, and an italian-looking face. Turn ideas into action with this perfect Vessel! She looked how Kathy might look after a visit from her fairy godmother, but all Theo could think of was an iron maiden. The Vessels were like well-disguised coffins they would step into willingly, venus fly traps ready to consume what was left of their love and their future together. He had come to this conclusion gradually over the last seven days, as Kathy got more and more excited for the trip, and less and less excited about everything else. She must have gone through fifty or sixty Kathies— an entire orange script bottle anyway— in the last week alone. To make matters worse, Theo realized he had completely misinterpreted his I-Ching hexagram. He had only read the first half, and the other half changed everything: You tread upon the tail of the tiger. You must proceed with extreme caution. You are facing a gamble, a calculated risk. If you win, you will reap the rewards you desire. If you lose, you may lose more than what you have placed on the table.
Having already thrown caution to the wind, he figured a loss was fast approaching. Somewhere in the searing, cloudless future their break-up and his despair already lay in waiting, and all life consisted of now was the opening of the door and the walking through it. The circling of the drain. The spark was gone, Kathy was eyeing other men and pouring her life down the Katharax bottle, and how would this Leap help anything? Get it out of her system? It would only make her realize what she was missing in Theo, only make pleasing her that much more impossible. If the date went well the credit would go to “SOCRATES,” and if it went bad the blame would rest upon Theo’s neuroticism or lack of confidence. Either way, the leap was a Pandora’s Box that would not likely be closed. Even if they walked away now, the idea had already been planted in her mind, growing over her old thoughts like sinister Kudzu, where no amount of goats could possibly be of service. To deprive her of the giant brown penis at this point would be as disastrous as giving it to her. They were at the top of the stairs now. He was sweating. His arm hair glistened, and he tried to remember if the mirror had suggested removing it or not. It looked dwarfish. He let go of Kathy’s hand so that he could wipe his own against his collared shirt. They were in front of the doors now. The only thing left to do was open a door and walk through it.
TO BE CONTINUED
Cover Photo: Image Source
