Operational Log - Entry 2

Kitty told the cab driver she would give him a fifty dollar tip if he didn't stop. He didn't.

I was sweating, the sound of screeching tires still ringing in my ears as she pushed me up the stairs from behind, not gently.

When she opened the door to her apartment, my pause before entering was like a dog at the door of a veterinarian's office. A huge star chart and giant maps of Asia and Africa dominated the walls. There was no furniture to speak of, but stacks of papers and manila folders all over the floor. An M-16 was leaning in one corner. She lowered her shoulder and shoved me in.

I was about to ask questions when she pulled me by my jacket sleeve to her bedroom door and kicked it open. She had a hospital bed covered in red satin sheets and a tailor's dummy sporting a leather corset. She swung me towards the bed with the ease of a Judo expert and I fell onto it. The walls were covered in panels of cork. I was scared shitless.

"Say, can I have a drink?" I said as if I weren't afraid she was going to murder me.

She stared at me hard with her almond-shaped eyes while undoing my tie, then whipped it out of my collar, tore my shirt open so that buttons skittered along the hard wood floor, and pushed me back down on the bed. She put one hand in a tight leather restraint then hopped on my chest, hiking up her tight skirt so that I could feel the lips of her vagina on my belly through her sheer panties. I was paralyzed. She put my other hand in a restraint and secured the strap, and I was well and truly bound to the bed as surely as a patient in a psyche ward for the criminally insane.

"I've never done anything like this before," I gasped. "Do we need a safe-word?"

She snapped my belt out like a bullwhip and ripped off my pants and boxer shorts.

"What? Sure, whatever," she muttered.

"OK." I breathed a sigh of relief, "What should it be?"

"Huh?" she looked up at me, annoyed, biting a perfect lip like a split cherry as she fumbled with an ankle restraint.

"What should the safe-word be?"

"Whatever you want," she said as she cinched the ankle strap so tight I cried out.

"Hey, that's a little tight!"

She didn't answer as she moved to the other ankle.

"Excuse me, but that's a bit tight on my right ankle there." I repeated.

"Yeah, I haven't done your left one yet, so it would have to be the one I had just done. What's your safe-word?"

"What?"

"What is your safe-word?" She cinched the other ankle just as tight.

"OW!"

"Well, we don't need one now, anyway."

"Why not?"

"Because now I am going to interrogate you." She opened a drawer built into the bed frame and produced a medical tray on which were laid out a number of syringes with glowing liquids in them. She tied off my arm with a rubber tube, then turned back to the tray and ran her finger along the row of needles, looking for the right one, tested it with a squirt that sent a day-glow pink jet of fluid in an arc over the bed, and stuck it into the vein bulging at my elbow.

"Oh shit!" I shouted.

"This place is sound proof up to 110 decibels, so unless you think you can be louder than a chainsaw, I actually encourage you to make as much noise as you possibly can: it will exhaust your inner resources and this process will be that much shorter. I assure you, once I have the information I want I will release you. The truth serum I just injected you with is also a slow-acting poison. Before it kills you, it will induce muscular contractions so powerful you could quite possibly dislocate major joints and crack your molars. This is the antidote," she held up a glowing green syringe. "This antidote is also powerful neuro-enhancer developed by the soviets for pilots who might have to fly through deadly radioactive clouds so that they could complete their missions. Injecting it will bring on a sense of euphoria and well being far stonger than anything you have most likely ever experienced, unless you were a serious heroin addict at one time. But unlike heroin, it will give your thoughts a clarity and a speed that will make you, for a brief period of time, many times smarter than you actually are. The experience is said to be something like the spiritual enlightenment. So not only will you be saving your life, you will be significantly improving it. The first contraction from the poison should come on right about now."

A deep chill went through my body as though a profound need to defecate had taken hold of me. Though it passed in an instant, I was nonetheless soaked in a cold sweat.

"Now, tell me everything you know about the stasis field generator," she affixed a tiny microphone to the bed rail near my head, "and I will administer the antidote."

Operational Log, Entry 1

Kitty Ceylon changed the universe on our first date. She was a young graduate research assistant at The Bright Foundation, which had offices in Baltimore, where I had just graduated from Johns Hopkins. I met her at an Art School party where she was dressed, quite provocatively, like Cleopatra. I got loutishly drunk and hit on her, lied, and said that I was a particle physicist who had just returned from a secret mission to Russia to examine a new kind of bubble chamber that could, as an unforeseen consequence of an analytical function, create a stasis field. When pressed for details, I had insisted I had already divulged classified information, and that my life was in danger if I said anything more. She was not impressed, slapped me when I tried to kiss her, and threw a drink on me when I told exactly what was on my mind. So I was surprised when she gave me her number.

The secret intergalactic war for universal supremacy was in its thirtieth millennium at that time, though I didn't know that then.

I called Kitty later that same night. I don't remember the conversation, but the next morning, when I woke up I found that I had written "Gertrude's" in blood on the linoleum of my studio apartment's kitchenette corner. I had broken a glass and cut myself, apparently.

I sent her a text message to ensure that we were still on, and she wrote back only, DON’T BE LATE. I looked in the mirror at my unremarkable features and thought to myself, "Still got it."

Gertrude's was a fashionable dinner club. Seating was arranged around a dance floor. The performers that evening were erotic mimes.

We had had a terrible dinner. It was the worst chicken parmesan I had ever had. In fact, it tasted like it came out of a box. A box of bad food. Witty banter abounded, and she noted I was balding. I thought that was charming. A black man set up a box outside our window. He started playing the dirty blues.

"My woman fucks a man with money, and it ain't me."

“Freud says our own death is unimaginable," she said, "and to conceive of it in any detail is to be a spectator to one’s imagination.”

“Disagree completely. Could say the same thing about eating apple pie.”

The Indian Cigarette girl came by. I bought a pack with an atomic symbol on the front.

“You were mentally undressing her,” she accused me.

“I may’ve been mentally undressing her, but there wasn’t much to take off.”

"You say that because she is a symbol of some unattainable racial diference, which, possessing, you would surpass."

This, I thought, is racism.

"Oh, we can't go see their women on the other side of town anymore, but ours keep going that way just fine. Is that it?"

"That thought is evil."

"Well, think about the facts of history—"

“There’s no point in trying to cover the baldness of your assertions with some sad toupee of facts. You're afraid some form of life or another will become irrelevant, pass away? Well, maybe some should, maybe all should, after the expiration of the period where they benefit existence. Maybe that is the way of things, the way of all things, to pass away—in a great turbulence of passing—just as the night comes on.”

“How do you know when you’re drunk?”

“When you find errors in judgment amusing,” she took a long pull on a flask she pulled from her pocket, “often to the extent that you begin making them to entertain yourself.”

She threw a two hundred dollar bills on the table and grabbed my tie.

"Come on, let's get out of here. I'm horny."

I slammed my Dewars on the rocks and followed her, led as if on a leash, into the hot, hot night.