What Lee had left on the table in a friendship he asked himself in good time, time after time, if time for the Big Reveal had arrived in time.

He contemplated the situation.

When first he entered Bai’s flat, Lee had counted two when he wanted to count only one but he had counted on two, just not the two he counted.

Then the number became three including the two he anticipated and the subset of one he wanted, too.

Aussi. You see?

Was he down for the count?

What in the Christmas presents did he want Bai to open when no one else was present?

Would he take the safe route as he had in times past or dare branch off as he had a time or two before?

Which gift would she appreciate most?

The houndstooth fabric his wife had sent him to buy for Bai? The fabric fusion? The houndstooth ribbon?

Or the gifts he’d bought himself at the railroad station antique shop?

What if…hmm…

Did he pick out a piece of jewelery?

A bracelet? A bauble? Another tennis bracelet to be lost?

What if…

What if he asked for a fashion show for one?

Would the count count then?

And what would he asked to be modeled if not a bauble, bangle or bead?

Certainly not by the Bede?

But what about the Bangles?

Not the Beatles?

Or beetles with barbs, bangs or bobs?

How about safe but daring at the same time?

Accessory or Successory?

If you could dare to wear only one thing, what would it be?

Your heart on your sleeve?

A question mark pattern on your supervillain tights?

A groove in an LP?

“Hey, you’ve got to open your Christmas presents. Close your eyes and hold out your hands.”

As Lee removed the fabric from plastic shopping bags, he left a door in the future open.

In fact, he created a hallway of doorways leading to passageways.

[Time passages. Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight…]

As Bai looked at the fabric, he placed in their shared thoughts a moment in the future, a skip ahead in an advent calendar, a calendrous adventure.

Lee saved the all-but-personal present for last.

Bai set down the fabric and accepted the gift bag, untying the simple bow.

She reached down into the bag and removed a shiny sheet of tissue.

She pulled out a scarf.

She announced to her flatmate and assistant. “Just what every girl needs — another scarf!”

Tied strips of tie-dyed T-shirt material formed a latticework flowing from Bai’s hand.

“There’s another gift inside!”

Bai removed a tissue-wrapped present.

Lee held his breath. It was the first of many gifts, a seed planted in the present, a present for the future.

A pink cashmere scarf.

“It matches my skirt!”

Exactly. A model’s model model.

Was it time for Alaur’s massage?

Not exactly.

To be continued…

Lee asked himself what happened during the 37 minutes he was zoned out on the massage table?

He waited until Bai held onto him with both hands, joining their body rhythms together.

Had he kissed an angel?

Angels don’t kiss on the lips.

Their kisses meet at the center below their thoughts, unconscious, devoid of the here-and-now.

Had they?

Was that why he would not say out loud what had happened?

With an inner solar system to populate, Lee kept asking himself what he was doing here, now.

What was his subcultural training worth and how was the subculture to which he was barely attached important to the future?

The only way to get there was to get over or around the current stumbling block, commit himself to the future rather than the past, a past which gave him a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle that those in relative poverty might wish for.

Lee had always wanted more.

No one was going to give it to him so he just had to take it, leaving the armchair critics (especially the one in his thoughts) behind.

It is never too late to change, never too late to practice.

Lee squirmed under Bai’s control.

She found more knots in his shoulder muscles and worked on them over and over, one by one, zeroing in on a knot’s kernel core and driving a finger or elbow in to break the knot apart.

Lee wanted to shout but kept quiet, allowing the pain to pulse through his body.

He suddenly saw himself driving through a subdivision outside downtown Ennis, County Clare, Ireland, on the way from the Old Ground Hotel to the office in Shannon. He remembered seeing Irish drivers lining up on the main road, waiting thirty minutes to get to and through an intersection. Lee experimented each morning for a week until he found side roads that passed in and out of subdivisions and carparks, cutting the drive time down to ten minutes from city centre to dual carriageway.

He raised his legs in the air, trying to escape Bai’s grip on him, literally and figuratively.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure?”

“Maybe.”

“Okay. Sit up. Time to take a break, anyway. Drink some water.”

Lee looked at the clock. Bai had been working on him for 37 minutes. He drank from the measuring cup she handed him.

“Feeling better?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Move around. How does it feel?”

Lee rolled his shoulders. The stiffness was gone. “Hmnh…it…it feels great. Sorry I don’t sound so enthusiastic. It’ll feel even better tomorrow when the torture is over.”

“Thanks. Roll over on your stomach. I need to work on your back. How long do you want me to go?”

“As long as you think.”

“Great. I’ve got more work to do than I can get done in an hour.”

“Sorry, Alaur!”

“No problem. I’ve got to finish folding her clothes, don’t I? Bai, I don’t know how you pack your bags.”

“Here, I’ll show you. Lee, just relax and quit raising your shoulders. I’ll be right back.”

Lee checked his smartphone.

Unbeknownst to Bai, Lee ran a side business that dealt solely in audiovisual stimulation. A private contractor had hired Lee as a consultant for a secret project, an immersion technology planned for release in theatres, supplementing 3d glasses with cardionervous system feedback devices meant to read people’s bodies and instantly align their thought patterns and body functions with the on-screen character(s) their bodies indicated they most sympathised with and/or desired.

Initial tests had shown that audience members could actually recall sights, smells and sounds from the film as if they’d been on-screen in filmed scenes themselves.

A message on his phone told him that some audience members were experiencing unusual side effects, as if they could read the thoughts of the actors as they struggled to stay in character while surrounded by lighting, crew, camera and soundstage equipment rather than the imagined scenery and characters portrayed for entertainment purposes. The contractor was worried about lawsuits.

Lee told the contractor to simply include a more encompassing disclaimer about the total experience, stating that depending on your work in such fields as the film industry and/or psychology industry, your level of suspending disbelief would give you a unique perspective that cannot be duplicated with any other entertainment device available on the market — satisfaction guaranteed that your 5D Immersion would be yours and yours alone or your money back.

When they first worked on this idea, they decided that everyone on the project had to tell people they were former drug users in order to throw people off course, unable to guess that the technology the project team was developing was much more precise than even the best designer drugs, with little to no downtime, susceptible to abuse by addictive personalities at about the same rate as gambling, smoking, drug use, gaming and social media political chattering.

Lee put the phone back in his coat pocket.

Bai returned to see Lee resting on the massage table, his chin on the lip of the face hole, avoiding another asphyxiation.

“Your back looks so much better! It really shows how the work I’ve done on you has paid off!”

Lee mumbled affirmatively.

He watched through the hole in the massage table as her black-painted toenails, framed by the wood struts and wires of the table, walked into view, each big toe covered with a five-petaled hand painted flower and the cuticle lined with blingy crystals.

She finished an episode of “Witches of East End” and started an episode of “Sleepy Hollow” on the tellie.

Alaur brushed by Lee’s hip as she scooted between the sofa and the massage table.

Lee could see Alaur’s alluring purple-and-black eye shadow in his thoughts. What if…

A moment later, his thoughts vanished again as Bai pressed her whole body weight into a point on his back. He stopped breathing. He entered a transient trance, another fleeting glimpse of life outside the four dimensions of space and time. His heart pumped arrhythmically, restarting and restarting like a car with a gummed-up carburetor.

Bai realised Lee had stopped breathing. “Breathe!”

The trance was broken. Lee had wanted to stay in the trance but attempted a breath to please the woman, a foot shorter than he, domineering over him.

Lee had entered trance states only a few times before, rarely without pharmacological assistance.

In this particular trance, Lee saw the energy traces connecting people and things. Most significantly, he saw they were nameless.

He also saw a crossroads in the future he could reach by answering a single question one way or the other.

But which question? Planning a pro-am dance competition with Bai in February? Dancing into the late night with her at an event in January? Letting her work on his hips when she returned a month later so she could get his spine straighter?

In the trance, Lee saw his love for Bai had been and remained timeless, sensing something in her the first moment they met and she began to describe all of her dance instructors as Lee encouraged her to give him her life history to write about, fascinated by the exotic nature of a wild but tame animal in front of him.

Lee wasn’t a believer in past lives but he knew that some people had a way of connecting that made them feel as if they had already been close companions upon their first meeting.

Lee wanted to discount these connections, unable to accept that his flawed personality was not so very much flawed and his connections with others was truly wonderful because of perceived/real flaws and life scars, not despite them.

He just didn’t expect Bai to have this effect on him. He thought Guin was the reason for his recent happiness.

To be continued…

Bai checked her Fitbit stats on the laptop screen. “I’m 60 calories over my limit for the day. But wait — your massage will cause me to burn those off. I’ve got to eat something. Hmm…”

“How about…?”

“A piece of bread.”

“Toast? With tofu?”

“What?”

“Yeah, like what you brought to the studio.”

Bai pulled a cellophane-wrapped square of yellow-orange American cheese out of the fridge and folded a slice of bread into half a cheese sandwich, the cellophane (Mr. Cellophane, do you know my name?) disappearing ritually yet unceremoniously into the rubbish bin.

Almost blending into the futon, Bai’s assistant, Aluar, looked up from her tablet PC. “Hi, Lee.”

Lee waved. “Want some moonshine?”

“No, thanks.” She poked her Scotty dog asleep beside her. “Wakey, wakey! You aren’t going to fall asleep on me now and want to play in the middle of the night.”

Bai padded the folding massage table. “Okay, Lee, I’m ready. Lie on your back.” She turned from Lee to Alaur. “And you can start packing bags for my six a.m. departure and worry about your dog later.”

“When do I get my massage?”

“Sorry I’m running late, but I’ll get you both in, I promise.”

George stood up. “I’ll see you guys later.”

Bai looked disappointed. “You aren’t staying for a movie.”

“Naw. I’ve got something else going on.”

Lee leaned up from the table. “Tell her I said hello.”

“Sure. Thanks. See ya.”

Bai leaned her face in toward Lee’s, purposefully moving closer until she’d satisfactorily broken through his personal zone, Lee unable to push his head deeper into the folding table’s mat. “Are you ready?”

Lee looked into Bai’s dark eyes, her chin a few inches from his, smelling her breath, her body wash, the dye in her hair, telling himself, alone with two women on a cold night, his hands and wrists aching, chilled to the bone, his body cooling down after a group dance lesson, that Bai’s first admonition she gave him the moment they met in the merry month of May, that it wasn’t always about his male thoughts and what was in his pants.

What was in his pants?

His jeans pockets were empty.

Lee wanted to pull Bai closer, taste her breath, feel her lips on his, his hand holding the stiff violet locks of hair on the back of her head as they tested the internal magic of a new dance.

Lee sensed a deep happiness in Bai that had been missing the last time they shared this position three weeks before.

She all but begged him to stay, having just heard her gentle boyfriend yell at her on the phone from Paris. She had wanted comfort, to be held for two or three hours, seeking solace in the company of a man she could trust.

Lee didn’t always understand women, although he had gotten the hint Bai was hurting when she banged around the kitchen, insisting Lee stay until she had started supper, thrashing through the fridge’s freezer compartment to find a large frozen length of turkey sausage which she proceeded to scald in a frying pan, torturing the meat with a spatula in ways that made Lee more fearful than usual of his dominatrix dance partner, massage therapist and friend.

When Lee said he probably should go, Bai looked at him with reddened eyes that opened her thoughts to him, a view he hadn’t seen with another woman in years.

She had been in severe pain.

Lee knew what that meant.

Bai was vulnerable.

Lee, ever sympathetic, even empathetic, sometimes pathetic, prefix unneeded, wanted to stay.

He wasn’t sure what held him in place like a statue, just as he’d been the first time he played spin the bottle at age ten, the times backstage in high school when girls wanted his hugs, which he gave, disappointed he didn’t know he was supposed to kiss them, too, all the way up to a recent visit with a former college girl friend who lived alone, invited him inside, and kissed him on the lips as a dare, shocked when Lee continued to hold her but broke away the kiss in a sense of…what did he convince himself it was…propriety? Respect? Fear?

Lee stood at the door that night as Bai gave him one last lost puppy dog look and wanted to kick himself for carrying in his thoughts the subcultural training that all but forbid him staying a few more minutes in close proximity with the woman he wholly trusted with his body.

His will had been strong before but he hadn’t been arm-in-arm for hours, or stretched out on a massage table with those women.

Lee didn’t kid himself. He knew polyamorous relationships were unique, intertwined, complicated, unfettered by time or pretense.

But his wife wasn’t polyamorous, he reminded himself, preferring one man, him, for her dance partner.

Lee had started keeping a secret journal, secure from the analytics and prying eyes of computer networks, in which he documented his innermost feelings, compartmentalising his thoughts, pulling apart his blended self, creating a schizophrenic existence that twisted space and time.

In the journal, he wrote to himself about his true desires, his true self not typed for the sake of a global audience composed of strangers, friends and family whom he did not want to offend with his personal opinions that, like noses, mostly smelled.

In the journal, he tasked himself to design one or more futures that branched from the one currently on track.

Lee looked at the details of Bai’s face looming over him, her lips so close to his chin he couldn’t see them.

Lee knew with his worsening hearing loss came memory store-and-recall changes, his sense of reality shifting outside of “normal” spacetime, his fiction masking facts in favour of a good storyline.

Lee couldn’t remember how much Bai had whispered in his ear as she began to massage his right shoulder because he couldn’t hear what she was saying.

An incantation? A prayer?

He only knew she had put a spell on him for life.

She did not have to wear her public face for him.

The whispers echoed a day later. “I want you to relax. I want you to be mine for as long as I say this time, all right? You cannot control every moment of your life. You are my experiment and will have to deal with it. You say you love me, then you say you hate me, but you keep coming back for more, like everyone else, don’t you?”

Lee closed his eyes. Bai brushed his face with a finger and Lee involuntarily shook his head. “Sorry. I’m trying not to flinch.”

“That’s okay.”

Her face still lined with his, Lee admitted with words what he could not fully articulate emotionally, either alone with Bai or in the presence of her assistant. “I do love you, you know?”

She nodded. “I hear what you’re saying.”

They both left what was unsaid as a small cushion between them.

Lee felt Bai wince. She rubbed her right pinky finger where her fingernail had fallen off.

Right after he had left her flat that night three weeks before, Bai was emotionally distraught, torn up over the argument with her French boyfriend and rejection by Lee the same night.

She closed the door, hearing Lee bound down the outside stairwell. Then, unstable on her feet, she stumbled across the room, reaching out for a doorway and falling, jamming the top edge of her fingernail into a doorway, tearing the root of the nail and peeling it back, the nail attached to her finger by two hangnail points.

“I’m sorry [I wasn’t there for you when you needed me most,” Lee finished saying with the intonation of his voice].

“That’s okay [there’ll be time to make up for it in the future,” Bai finished saying with her eyes as she kissed her sore pinky finger].

To be continued…

Lee looked up through the cathedral windows of his modified ranch house, the cobwebs cupping leaves like babes in cradles.

The outside temperature stabilised just above the freezing point of water.

Lee thought back to the previous night, trying to separate fact from fiction.

His wife working the night shift, he made his way over to Bai’s flat after an hour or more on the dance floor with new instructors Maelzel and Katerina a married couple who taught Lee the nuances of ’40s Charleston.

He recalled muscle memories, the light touch of Katerina’s waist on his fingertips as they performed the barn door and mirror moves.  He ran his internal eyes through visual images stored like a video recording her long, red hair, sculpted eyebrows and dance style that made her look like she floated on air, a graceful double-jointed marionette.

Her green eyes were well-hidden mysteries she shared most often with Marvel, doling out eye contact to Lee with private, reserved purposes.

Maelzel stretched his arms in the air like  with happiness, seeing his partner enjoying the dance lesson.

Lee walked into Bai’s flat.

He carried Christmas presents for her.

Her flatmate, George, opened the door and smiled, inviting Lee in.

“Bai’s not here.”

“No problem. I can wait.  I brought some moonshine, if you want some.”

They clinked glasses. “Cheers!”

After two heavy shots of the peach liquor, Lee heard Abi arrive.

Looking cute but sexy, Bai walked in wearing a short skirt and cap made from the same lime-and-pink Argyll-patterned sweater.  She removed the cap and tossed it on the sofa with her ivory wool coat.  Her hair, freshly-dyed purple and still wet but drying, was pulled back with barrettes.

“Hey, Lee.”

His silly grin crossed his face. “Hey. Want some moonshine?”

“No thanks. I’m on a 24-day cleansing diet.  What do you think?”

She spun around on her toes.

Lee’s heart skipped a beat.  He thought Bai was really going to kill him one day…like a moth to the proverbial flame, he was…

He nodded. “You’re slimmer. Your waistline looks great!”

“Good.  Let me change and I’ll be ready to work on you.”

To be continued…

Every so often, I retire a blog and move on, creating a new thought set for myself to explore the universe in the only way this humble set of states of energy can.

This is my last entry in this blog.

Thanks to those of you who stopped by to glance at another person’s writing.  I appreciate your kindness and generosity.