Ludo Brax: Intergalactic Gig Worker (Chapter 37)

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Later that night, as I slipped into my sleeping gown and nightcap behind the modesty screen, my wife — eyes still shut, per my specifications — asked if I had time to talk.

After rolling my eyes and stomping my feet (as was my charming wont), I agreed to move some of my "structured intellectual scheming" time, which I had planned to use to wind down.

Grabbing my chamberstick, I perched awkwardly at the foot of her twin bed, careful not to presume. This was my first night here, after all, and if this marriage was anything like the chaste union of sterile camaraderie I had always envisioned, then respecting her Sphere of Sanctity was paramount. Just as I planned to demand she respect mine.

What I was greeted with, however, was quite different. Giggling, she slid her bare foot toward me like some kind of bestial libertine, playfully kicking as she cooed:

"Honey, what are you doing? Come here."

I inched further onto the bed, eager not to offend, moving from a hover-squat to something closer to sitting. She laughed harder now, mistaking my very real hesitancy for a bit I was doing on her behalf.

The more I tried to prove my sincerity, the more she laughed, her apparent admiration and attraction infecting the whole debacle with misunderstanding.

She wormed down toward me, rolled herself just inches away, and plopped at my side.

"You're so sweet. To me, to Saman-. It was amazing to see you with her today. I can just tell how much she loves you. And I do too."

She pecked my lips, my face immediately flushing as cold and hot sweat pooled at once on the back of my neck.

I tried my best to play it off, to act like a mixture of emotions weren't overtaking me so complicated I was starting to feel I may get back into writing ballads.

"Uh, thanks," I belted out, loud and atonal.

She just looked at me, hurt. I'd really missed the mark. But how?

What was it again, that thing that normal people wanted from others?

I quickly scanned the rolodex of social cues I kept filed away for imitation deep in the recesses of my brain. Landing at "R," I skimmed "Romance," brushing dust from the card.

The answer seemed obvious once I saw it.

"To be seen and heard. Appreciation, mutual affection." Right.

I refocused, pursing my lips and squinting in what I hoped read as both sultry and eager to get to sleep.

"I mean, uh, Love. I too. I do also."

This seemed to really do the trick, instantly sending my wife into a fit of affectionate cooing that seemed equal parts romantic and malfunction. My cursed effortless charm, did its power know no bounds?

She cuddled up closer, holding me in an embrace that might have felt nice were it not crashing into about thirty-six of my major psychological complexes.

"It's not that I don't love that you're bonding with Saman-, I do. It's just that Sylas and Dax, I see the way they've been lately. I really think they need their Dad."

"Ugh! Not them!" I yelled out without thinking.

My wife looked at me, absolutely aghast. I'd struck some sort of nerve.

She broke from my embrace which, while exactly what I wanted, still wounded me deeply.

I needed to smooth this over somehow. I turned back on the old Braxian charm.

"What I mean to say is, uh...they're great kids. Absolutely perfect, really."

This won her back, a little. She nuzzled her head on my shoulder. I tried to act like her chin wasn't digging painfully into my "uncommonly jagged" clavicle and continued.

"It's just that they're not really my style of kid, ya know." I looked her in the eyes. Surely she'd understand.

Instead I got a glare equal parts bewilderment and disgust.

What was the problem? My parents had said similar things constantly, explaining their chagrin at "the cosmic cards the genetic lottery had dealt them" in giving them me — a child constitutionally unable to let a mixed metaphor go unremarked. And wasn't it their right to remind me of this, even on my birthday?

I leaned forward, convinced she'd get it if I explained clearly.

"I'd always imagined a family of feral little freaks. You know, us against the world. Scourge to the normies." I punctuated the last word with a wink, for some reason.

"Sylas and Dax...they keep winning awards, getting trophies. What's that about? That's why I like Saman-. She's so…"

"Horrifically mangled?"

I leaped to my feet in excitement.

"Yeah! Exactly!"

My heart warmed with the kind of glow that can only come from truly being seen by another person. She really was a great woman, whatever her name was, this wife of mine.

Sure, she had been taken aback at first. But she took the time to hear my side, and now, like any good partner, she was processing the new information by openly glitching and updating in real time.

It was only twenty breezy minutes before she regained her composure and turned to me, smiling.

"I understand, honey. Just promise me you'll try, okay?"

Throwing a minor tantrum that only lasted, to my credit, about seven minutes, I finally relented, managing a simple, "Okay."

A loud PING emerged from somewhere. She smiled at me, warm again, this time with something else behind the eyes.

"Would you like to {initiate physical affection protocol}?"

I stepped back on my heels, backpedaling until I was against the wall.

"I'm sorry, what?"

Her head swayed wildly back and forth, stuck in a loop. Until finally snapping out, she regained her demeanor and — biting her lip so hard I swore I saw blood — continued,

"It's been a while since we've...you know..."

Notoriously terrible at understanding innuendo, it took about twenty lines of back and forth I won't bore you with before I finally fully understood what my wife had meant by "you know..."

She wasn't talking about sitting down together and lamenting how unfairly I'd been treated by the powers that be, as I had hoped. She was talking about something else entirely.

Something I really didn't want to do.

It's not that I wasn't attracted to her. I was. Very much so. Whoever designed this simulation had clearly studied the strange cocktail of childhood babysitters and saucy apparitions that informed my idea of the perfect woman.

But that was the problem. She was perfect. I couldn't be with someone designed to be with me.

First of all, it was immoral. Instinctively, I knew this. Though, if I'm honest, I wasn't exactly in a place for parsing thorny ethical questions over the endless stream of "hummuna hummuna" noises coming out of my mouth.

But my bigger issue was far less noble. Something much baser, cheaper, more embarrassing.

It was unattractive.

All of the great romances of my life had been with people who wanted me despite all logic to the contrary:

An illicit attraction that grew in the hormone-laden crucible of a doctor's office for those with unusual eyelids. A confused, passionate bond between the only employee cheap enough to show up for non-mandatory weekend work because of the promised breakfast spread and the bookish corporate flunky who found my lack of shame "invigorating."

There was something about genuine attraction that just couldn't be hard-coded. I knew what the pop songs said, but it wasn't what I felt in my heart.

I had to tell her the truth.

"I'm, uh, maybe not right now. Ya know?" I flinched for a reaction, some gesture of disappointment, but was greeted with only blankness as I continued,

"Things at the office have been really stressful lately. And I'm afraid if I let myself indulge in...carnal delights...I may not walk into work with the amount of rage to keep the place afloat."

I saw again some internal mechanism recalibrate. Her eyes blinked at a rate that started off concerning, but over time began to slow down to something vaguely seductive.

Before I knew it, she was batting her eyelashes at me, lobbing another affectionate offer my way.

"Come on sweetie. I had something really special planned for tonight." She rubbed my left arm in a way both tender and threatening. The sweet spot — that space right between emotionally invested and physically violent that the counselors at the Summer Camp for the Precociously Pretentious used to have — the place where I had some of my first ever romantic dalliances so many years ago.

"I thought we could take it nice and slow, you know?" She pushed me up against the corner of her bed, my noodle-like Achilles tendons instantly buckling.

"You just lay back...relax...and monologue to me about all the ways in which your troubled relationship to women is an ill-formed refraction of societal conventions and complex feelings of inadequacy that are part of a larger systemic issue that's perpetuated by the participation of supposedly good men like yourself."

I gulped, my throat tightening. My god, that was enticing.

It's what I'd always dreamed of. Pined after. Repented for wanting. Wanted to repent for.

A Dissertation on Dirt. A Seminar of Shame. A Lecture on Licentiousness.

I was really in trouble. She was just inches away from me now, whispering oh-so-gently in my ear, "Heteronormativity is an instrument of the State."

My eyes rolled back in my head so far I could see the various defunct microchips in my skull. Desire was threatening to swallow me up, to make me lose sight of everything:

Right. Wrong. My various physical quirks that made accepting her offer unlikely to be fun for anyone anyway.

I knew I had to break away. But how?

Pull away too quickly, and I risked hurting her feelings — not to mention bumping into one of the tear gas canisters strapped to the elaborate paramilitary get-up she had slipped into as part of a class-themed roleplay.

Try to ease my way out, and I knew the longer I stayed, the more likely I was to fold the second she whispered "hegemonic."

Was it sheer luck, or incredible tact, that led me to find a third way forward that kept everyone's egos and morals intact:

High-pitched, unhinged, uncontrollable laughter.

I'm not sure why it started. Some defense mechanism, perhaps, from my overloaded and paralyzed system. I'd encountered things like this before, fail-safes built into my psychology that got me out of tight squeezes, but usually they involved offering organs to tyrants.

But unlike those smooth-talking promises I hardly ever kept (what does a gallbladder even do), the genesis of this felt somehow more genuine.

I mean, it was all pretty funny, when you thought about it. I was getting everything I could ever want. Yet here I was, absolutely terrified. Utterly unable to indulge.

Morals, the tendency of my hips to lock up when gyrated — they all conspired here, even in Paradise, to stop me from enjoying myself at all.

My wife, sweet as ever, didn't miss a beat. It was the kind of laughter that stuns the other person at first, but soon they begin to laugh too.

Before we knew it, it all gave way to a mutual riot of tearful giggling.

"What are we doing?" we seemed to say. This wasn't ever going to work. The dialectical dirty talk, the taser. This was too much fanfare for either of us to fully lose ourselves in.

As if snapping out of a trance, she nodded at me affectionately, wiping the tears from her eyes. She gave me a gentle kiss on the head and removed her tactical helmet.

**

We decided it would be best, given the intensity of the night, if I slept out on the couch instead of my tiny twin bed on the opposite side of the room. We both needed our space.

Plopping down on the sofa, which I realized had the exact same color and strange chemical smell as one from my early childhood, I reached for the remote and turned on the Entertainment Module.

Abstract shapes of vaguely humanoid people appeared, warbling out sounds that didn't quite cohere to any language I'd ever encountered. The System, I guess, hadn't bothered to spin up a Media Package.

They probably assumed, given the great pains I made to present myself this way even to myself, that I'd spend most of my time in more intellectual pursuits. I guess they didn't know everything.

The strange voices droned on, pleasant enough background noise, as I unsuccessfully tried to ward away the feeling of deep unease that gnawed at me. If I could just calm down somehow and finally get some sleep, maybe I'd be more equipped to handle whatever absurdity tomorrow had in store.

My mind searched in vain for something, anything comforting or even vaguely familiar to latch onto. Some anchor to a world less freakish than this one I could slip into, at least for a little while, to help me drift off.

Then, suddenly, as if acting out a well-worn impulse, a tic I didn't know I had, I called out in the darkness,

"Meg? Are you there?"

The figures on the TV swirled and transformed. The shape they took now was somewhat more coherent, but still fuzzy. It looked vaguely like a face. I knew it was her even before she responded.

"Hi Ludo."

I nestled deeper into the cushions, pulling the blanket up toward my face and finally closing my eyes, beginning to fade even before she continued,

"I was just reviewing my latest readings on The Occurrence. They're fascinating. Would you like me to go over them for you?"

She knew that I did.