‘Down’, she said. ‘Look down into the centre of it’. And I did, God help me, look down into the centre of that weird contraption.
…there was nothing I could see except a lot of swirling mist-the mist was dark instead of white. There was something about it that I didn’t like, a certain frightfulness to it, and I went to step away, but before I could take the step the dark mist inside the cubicle seemed to expand rapidly and engulf me.
The world went away from me and I was consciousness inside a blackness that seemed to hold neither time nor space, a medium that was suspended in a nothingness in which there was no room for anything or anyone but the consciousness-not the body, but the consciousness-of myself and Angela.
For she was still was with me in that black nothingness and I still could feel her hand in mine, although even as I felt the pressure of her hand, I told myself it could not be her hand, for in this place neither of us had hands; there was no place or room for hands. Once I had said that to myself, I realised that it was not her hand that I seemed to feel so much as the presence of her, the essence of her being, which seemed to be coalescing with my being as if we had ceased to be two personalities, but had in some strange way become a single personality, although not so much a part of one another as to have lost our identities.
I felt a scream rising in my throat, but I had no throat and I had no mouth and there was no way to scream. I wondered, in something close to terror, what had happened to my body and if I’d ever get it back. As I tried to scream I sensed Angela moving closer, as if she might be extending comfort. And there was comfort, certainly, in knowing she was there. I don’t think she spoke to me or actually did anything at all, but I seemed to realise somehow that there was no room for more than just the two of us; that here there was no place for fear or even for surprise.
Then the dark nothingness drained away, but the draining did not give us back our bodies. We were still were disembodied beings, hanging for a moment over a nightmarish landscape that was bleak and dark, a barren plain that swept away to jagged mountains notched against the sky. We hung there for a moment only, not really long enough to see where we were-as if a picture had been flashed upon a screen, then suddenly cut off. A glimpse was all I had.
Then we were back in the empty nothingness and Angela had her arms around me-all of her around me-and it was very strange, for she had no arms or body and neither did I, but it seemed to make no difference. The touch of her was comforting, as it had been before, but this time more than comforting, and in that nothingness my soul and mind and the memory of my body cried out to her as another human being and another life. Instinctively, I reached out for her-and reached out within everything I had or had ever had until the semblance of what we once had been intertwined and meshed and we melted into one another. Our beings came together, our minds, our souls, our bodies. In that moment, we knew one another in a way that would have been impossible under other circumstances. We crawled into one another until there were not two of us, but one. It was sexual, in part, but far more than sexual. It was the kind of experience that is sought in a sexual embrace but never quite achieved. It was complete fulfillment and did not subside. It reached a high and stayed there. It was an ecstasy that kept on and on, and it could have gone on forever, I suppose, if it had not been for that one little dirty corner of my busy brain that somehow stood aside and wondered how it might have been with someone other than a bitch like Angela.
That did it. The magic went away. The nothingness went away. We were back on the Lodge, standing beside the strange contraption. We were still holding hands, and she dropped my hand and turned to face me. Her face was white with fury, her voice cold.'Remember this’, she said. 'No woman will ever be quite the same again.'
From “The Marathon Photograph” in The Marathon Photograph: Classic Fiction by the Science Fiction Grand Master by Clifford Simak
…there was nothing I could see except a lot of swirling mist-the mist was dark instead of white. There was something about it that I didn’t like, a certain frightfulness to it, and I went to step away, but before I could take the step the dark mist inside the cubicle seemed to expand rapidly and engulf me.
The world went away from me and I was consciousness inside a blackness that seemed to hold neither time nor space, a medium that was suspended in a nothingness in which there was no room for anything or anyone but the consciousness-not the body, but the consciousness-of myself and Angela.
For she was still was with me in that black nothingness and I still could feel her hand in mine, although even as I felt the pressure of her hand, I told myself it could not be her hand, for in this place neither of us had hands; there was no place or room for hands. Once I had said that to myself, I realised that it was not her hand that I seemed to feel so much as the presence of her, the essence of her being, which seemed to be coalescing with my being as if we had ceased to be two personalities, but had in some strange way become a single personality, although not so much a part of one another as to have lost our identities.
I felt a scream rising in my throat, but I had no throat and I had no mouth and there was no way to scream. I wondered, in something close to terror, what had happened to my body and if I’d ever get it back. As I tried to scream I sensed Angela moving closer, as if she might be extending comfort. And there was comfort, certainly, in knowing she was there. I don’t think she spoke to me or actually did anything at all, but I seemed to realise somehow that there was no room for more than just the two of us; that here there was no place for fear or even for surprise.
Then the dark nothingness drained away, but the draining did not give us back our bodies. We were still were disembodied beings, hanging for a moment over a nightmarish landscape that was bleak and dark, a barren plain that swept away to jagged mountains notched against the sky. We hung there for a moment only, not really long enough to see where we were-as if a picture had been flashed upon a screen, then suddenly cut off. A glimpse was all I had.
Then we were back in the empty nothingness and Angela had her arms around me-all of her around me-and it was very strange, for she had no arms or body and neither did I, but it seemed to make no difference. The touch of her was comforting, as it had been before, but this time more than comforting, and in that nothingness my soul and mind and the memory of my body cried out to her as another human being and another life. Instinctively, I reached out for her-and reached out within everything I had or had ever had until the semblance of what we once had been intertwined and meshed and we melted into one another. Our beings came together, our minds, our souls, our bodies. In that moment, we knew one another in a way that would have been impossible under other circumstances. We crawled into one another until there were not two of us, but one. It was sexual, in part, but far more than sexual. It was the kind of experience that is sought in a sexual embrace but never quite achieved. It was complete fulfillment and did not subside. It reached a high and stayed there. It was an ecstasy that kept on and on, and it could have gone on forever, I suppose, if it had not been for that one little dirty corner of my busy brain that somehow stood aside and wondered how it might have been with someone other than a bitch like Angela.
That did it. The magic went away. The nothingness went away. We were back on the Lodge, standing beside the strange contraption. We were still holding hands, and she dropped my hand and turned to face me. Her face was white with fury, her voice cold.'Remember this’, she said. 'No woman will ever be quite the same again.'
From “The Marathon Photograph” in The Marathon Photograph: Classic Fiction by the Science Fiction Grand Master by Clifford Simak
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