The Hardyman | Page 2

stare as he would, Jack had found that he could not bring his furtive exercises to what other boys in his class had described with graphic enthusiasm to be the appropriately explosive conclusion. When almost there, his mind would set off on a different path than the road down which his body was pointing. The women on the pages would take on strange, disruptive metamorphoses. The leggy brunette grew a hand from behind her head that waved distractingly at him. The big bosomed blonde sprouted a third breast with a disarmingly winking eye for a nipple. Jack's desires were an enigma to him.
It wasn't until the school year had ended and the blistering summer had set in that Jack was driven from his sweaty seclusion. To the red velour seats dappled with chewed-up bubblegum and slick black floors coated in melted butter of the local movie theater he went. There, he looked into the dark movie-house sky hanging over him and saw on its towering screen a woman who was altogether unlike his silent mother, the incomprehensible girls of the eighth-grade, or the silent ladies of his X-rated magazines.
Atop her head a yellow beacon flashed and gyrated as if heralding her advent into Jack's life. Her two enormous metal arms reached our to him as if in eager expectation of his lover's embrace. Her robot legs pitched her forward in a gait not dissimilar to the manner by which Frankenstein's monster had staggered towards its maker. In the recesses of his mind, Jack knew that this was a movie, that this was a made-up character, that this actress was simply playing a role. Regardless, Jack was paralyzed by her presence. She administered punishing left-hand and right-hand blows to her alien attacker, shooting her flame-throwers shamelessly into the air, revving her engines so her robot claws gnashed and snarled at the universe around her. When she fell into a full-body sprawl atop her quarry, grinding her hips down into it, it took everything Jack had not to fall into pieces. I have seen the mother lode, he realized.
On the movie screen, the male android, white internal fluids leaking, croaked at the woman, "Not bad--for a human." With that, young Jack promptly came in his pants.
3
Sixteen years of Jack's life passed by him. He went to high school. He went to college. He received a bachelor's degree. He became an engineer. He bought a medium-sized house. He purchased a mid-level car. He went to work in a tall steel tower. He came home to a small stucco house. That was his life.
As an administrative engineer employed by the train system of the city in which he lived, Jack had spent the last four years overseeing the endless reams of printed materials related to the city's myriad train routes. Every day, he worked diligently at his desk, reminding himself what a privilege it was to be one of the many cogs in this well-oiled machine. Below him, and because of him, the city's engines onward churned.
His friends were few and far between. His extracurricular interests were cursory. His relationship to the opposite sex was superficial. Women were like a fleet of automobiles, the model of which he could never quite make out. In his brief romantic relationships, the woman would invariably look to him for some kind of emotional connection that he could never parrot to her satisfaction. At those times, a vision of the mechanical woman would erect herself in his mind's eye, and Jack would go drifting off with her, leaving the real woman's distantly frowning face behind him.
As Jack's life wore on, the number of unprocessed files atop his desk grew taller and the grip of his hand around his remote control grew tighter. It seemed to him that a man could engage in occasional acts of intercourse, speak politely to his mother on the phone every weekend, and jump out of an airplane along with several male co-workers one Labor Day weekend, but all the women would expect him to ejaculate at the drop of a hat, his mother would invariably sigh disappointedly just before hanging up, and if he did ever go skydiving with his coworkers again, he had the distinct impression that he would be the one coming back down to Earth with his parachute wrapped around him like a funereal shroud.
The aging bachelor who lived across the street from him had recently spent all of his free-time arranging ten marble statues of naked Greco-Roman male gods in a semi-circle on his front lawn, erected a fence around the perimeter of the compound, and, upon it, in curling metal letters, proclaimed the place YOUNGWOOD. Coming home to that sight every night was more than Jack could stand.
Until the wee hours of the morning, Jack would lie awake,