This is an excerpt from my new novel, The Wrong Planet, available at www.amazon.com/author/gsrichter
7
Seth emerged from a hot black gulf to find that he was in bed with a woman sitting astride him. She was nude, the curves of her body torturously familiar, although where the look of pleasure or boredom should have been on her face, there was only a heavily pixelated smear. No matter how he craned his neck or squinted, he could not see her face. He groped around for a remote control and pointed it at the blot of pixels, mashing all the buttons until the blot finally disappeared. Behind it was neither the face of his wife nor that of a stranger but a slender neck spilling multicolored wires that stretched off into the darkness of the room, where some kind of giant processing unit hovered, reading and manipulating his pleasure levels through a fiber optic network connected to the vaginal receptors between the woman’s thighs.
It was a dream, of course. He awoke and checked his boxer shorts. They were miraculously dry; the dreamed stimuli had produced no emission in reality. (No real mystery, this particular dream, given that before hitting the sack, he’d seen an advertisement for a cutting-edge Japanese sex robot and then had battled insomnia by tumbling down the rabbit hole of sex robot porn. . . .) His body was stiff, ossified by a million disparate points in a network of inflammation. With difficulty, and a groan, he reached out for his phone, checked the time. It was just past six a.m.; his alarm would go off in less than fifteen minutes. The desire to spend as many of those minutes as possible in sleep was strong—almost irresistible—but there was no point.
He could feel Ingrid sleeping her silent, motionless, deathlike sleep beside him, the only sign of life the obscene warmth of her nighttime body radiating to him across the two feet of empty mattress between them (across the space formally reserved for their daughter). He was still hard. He rolled toward his wife, pressed the tumor against her, pulled her pajama bottoms down so that he could rub it up and down the crack of her ass. It wasn’t until he reached around to nestle his fingers in her pubic hair, in search of her on-switch, that she stirred, swatting his hand away and wriggling closer to her edge of the bed. “Is Haley up yet?” she moaned. Not so much a question—not even a rhetorical one—as an instruction: a thorough, calculated evasion, one so practiced that it had become automatic. The pain of being thwarted shouldn’t have been so intense; though Seth had expected it to grow dull over time, in fact, it grew worse with each tacit rejection.
He passed Haley’s room on his way to the stairs, poked his head in to find her still asleep. Recently they had taken the plunge and converted her crib into a proper bed. Ingrid had worried over the prospect for weeks, wondering if it was too soon, consulting her library of parenting books (most of which contradicted one another). Her worries seemed a bit erratic, given that they’d already argued over whether or not to buy Haley her own tablet computing device, her own cell phone. The reality, Seth knew, is that in parenthood everything comes too soon. In the mere blink of an eye, his daughter would be menstruating—at which point his primary role in the family would be to inhibit a young male population’s access to her vagina.
The next room over—ostensibly reserved for the second child they had not yet discussed having—acted as a studio for the online Yoga & Wellness video-tutorial channel that Ingrid had launched the previous spring. On the recommendation of friends who did the exact same thing, she’d recently upgraded her production value with the purchase of a new camera and an array of microphones. She spent most of her free time here, speaking to her audience of upwards of one hundred regular viewers, some of whom provided supplemental income in the form of donations. Seth was psychologically incapable of setting foot inside this room, as if barred from entry by some sort of protective spell. He crept silently downstairs and into the kitchen, brewed some coffee. Grasping blindly in the cupboard, he located the “I ♥ You Daddy” mug, a Father’s Day gift from two years ago, and poured himself a cup. After nibbling noncommittally on a granola bar, which only induced nausea, he took his coffee back up to the bedroom.
The bed was empty; Ingrid emerged from her walk-in closet dressed for a morning run. While she stretched, he climbed back into bed with his coffee and awoke his tablet to check his email. Aside from the predictable barrage of male enhancement ads, the inbox was empty. He gazed down into his lap, wondering what good a bigger penis would do him if his wife refused to honor its size all the same.