Vox by Nicholson Baker

Author:Nicholson Baker [Baker, Nicholson]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-307-80748-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2077-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

“She said that the copied cock looked like a sonogram.”

“That’s it?”

“I’m telling you, she had it very bad for this Lee guy. I suggested that she could take the two pages if she wanted, for her reference. She said no thanks. We had lunch a week or so after that. She moaned about Lee, I listened sympathetically. Then I asked her, I couldn’t help it, I asked her, I said, ‘Never mind the photocopy,’ I said, ‘let me just ask you, was the cock tracing I showed you in any slight way arousing? Not right then in my office, to be sure, but later? Did you feel the slightest smidgin of arousal later?’ And she gave me an indulgent look and she said, ‘I’m really sorry, the pictures made me feel tender feelings for you, but they just really did not arouse me.’ So that seemed conclusive.”

“I would say so,” she said.

“Yep. Yep. It wasn’t. More happened.”

“You mean you and she ended up getting together? What was her name?”

“Emily.”

“That’s right, you told me that. Well?”

“Well, we did spend an evening in my apartment,” he said.

“The usual? You draped your best cummerbund over the lamp shade? She toasted you with the Koromex tube?”

“Something like that. But anyway, that was what I thought of when you asked me to look straight at my cock and talk about it. I have to say, that was one of the more unsettling questions I’ve been asked in my life.”

“Would you like to know whether I would find a tracing of your cock arousing?”

“I would be curious about that, yes.”

“I suppose it would depend on my mood. I might like to perform the tracing. If you traced my whole body, I might in exchange trace your pale Ramone … This mouthpiece I’m talking into? Of the telephone?”

“Yes?”

“It’s like a sieve. It’s like those little filters you put over the bathtub drain. Sometimes I think with the telephone that if I concentrate enough I could pour myself into it and I’d be turned into a mist and I would rematerialize in the room of the person I’m talking to. Is that too odd for you?”

“No, I think that sometimes,” he said.

“But the interesting part,” she said, “is that the trip itself would take a while. I think a lot about what it would feel like to be turned into some kind of conscious vapor. You know those trucks that come around on streets and grind up the brush on the curb? Those droning trucks? The guy throws a branch in, and it goes mmmmn-yooonnnng-mmmmmm, and all these tiny chips fly out of a high pipe? I think of that, except of course it wouldn’t be painful—I think of the part where I’m just this spume of wood chips and pieces of leaves. Or you know what else? You remember those birds that were getting sucked into the jet engines? Sometimes I lie in bed at three or four in the morning and I imagine myself flying miles

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