Distraction - Bruce Sterling [228]
He followed her in alarm. She was digging desperately in her purse. She came up with a pencil stub.
“What’s …” he began gently.
“Shhh!” She began scribbling frantically at the back leaf of a New Orleans travel guide. Oscar found a cotton bathrobe, put it over her shoulders, found his pants, sipped half a bottle of cold mineral water. When his temples stopped throbbing he returned to the balcony.
There were extraordinary scenes down on Bourbon Street. Their balcony, divided into segments, stretched the length of the little hotel and there were four women and three other men on it. There was a bizarre interplay between the people up on the balconies and the crowds at street level.
Women were showing their breasts to crowds of strangers, in exchange for plastic beads. Men were hoarsely yelling for the spectacle and throwing the beads as bribes. Women in the streets would display themselves to the men on the balconies, and the women on the balconies would display themselves to men on the streets. There was no groping, no come-ons; cameras would flash and gaudy necklaces would fly, but there was a ritual noli-metangere atmosphere to these exchanges. They were strangely old and quaint, like an elbow-link in a square dance.
A pretty redhead in the balcony across the way was tormenting her crowd of admirers. She would kiss her boyfriend, a grinning drunk in a devil suit, and then lean out with an enormous dangling swath of gold, green, and purple beads around her neck, and she’d teasingly pluck at the hem of her blouse. The men below her were booing lustily, and chanting their demands in unison.
After torturing them to a frenzy, she slung the beads over her shoulder and bared her torso. It was worth the wait. Slowly the stranger deliberately caressed her own nipple. Oscar felt as if he had been fish-hooked.
He went back into the hotel room. Greta had leaned away from her scribbling. Her face was pale and thoughtful now.
“What was all that?” he said.
“A strange thing.” She put her pencil down. “I was thinking. I can think about neurology while I have sex now.”
“Really?”
“Well, it’s more like dreaming about neurology. You had me all excited, and I was right on the edge … you know how you can sort of hang there where it’s wonderful, right on the edge? And I was thinking hard about wave propagation in glial cells. Then suddenly it came to me, that the standard calcium-wave astrocyte story is all wrong, there’s a better method to describe that depolarization, and I almost had that idea, I almost had it, I almost had it, and I just got stuck there. I got stuck there on the edge. I couldn’t get loose and I couldn’t quite come and the pleasure kept building up. My head started roaring, I was almost blacking out. And then it came all over me, in a tremendous rush. So I had to jump out of bed to write it down.”
He stepped to the table. “So what does it look like?”
“Oh”—she shoved the paper away—“it’s just another idea. I mean, now that I can see it down on paper, there’s really no way that a glial syncytium can behave like that. It’s a clever notion but it’s not consistent with the tracer studies.” She sighed. “It sure felt good though. When it happened. My God, did that ever feel good.”
“You’re not going to do that every time, though.”
“No. I just don’t have that many good ideas.” She looked up, her lips still swollen from the grip of his teeth. “Don’t you think of something else, too?”
“Well, yes.”
“What?”
He drew a little nearer. “Other things that I can do with you.”
They climbed back into bed. This time, she did black out. He didn’t notice her deep slide from consciousness, because her body was still moving rhythmically, but her eyes had rolled up in her head. When she began to speak to him, he