Dating with Dan

Mostly, people have out of body experiences when they are about to die. They float gently away from themselves, watching without passion while doctors doctor, nurses nurse, and their relatives relate to one another in the corner of the room, flashing bovine glances to . . . well, to whoever. Medical personnel shout encouragingly hospital-dramatic things like “Clear!” and “Stat!” to one another while their patients’ apparently untethered spirits, like helium balloons, bounce inexplicably off fiberglass drop ceilings, watching pityingly all the while, full of an emotion that would manifest itself as the shaking of a head if they still had heads to shake. Subtly, they feel an unfocused revulsion at witnessing this quivering, busy mass of bodies. Suddenly, there is a flash, a spasm, and their consciousnesses are again crammed back into unwell corpora. At least, that is what the internet has told me. As everyone knows, it’s completely trustworthy.

From somewhere outside my body, I watched myself attempt to go through the motions of mating. With a resignation born not so much of regret as a private, internal expression of preference, I allowed myself to know that, wherever I was going that night, it wasn’t to my own bed. I missed my bed intensely. Our clothes already littered the hitherto spotless floor of the guest bedroom. While dressing and leaving remained possible, it seemed rude somehow.

Andi’s head lay on the sumptuous and entirely unnecessary mound of pillows, improbably intact despite the disarray of the sheets. From my vantage point between her thighs, I watched her face while I went down on her. She held her eyes tightly closed, thrashing her head in what I assumed was pleasure, although I suppose it could have been a particularly emphatic negative, silently signifying an internal monologue: “No. You’re doing it wrong. No, faster. Not that fast. Not so hard. Fuck you, you’re doing it wrong.” And so on. Silently, I waited for her to wear herself out.

After the subsidence of the shudders of what for all I knew had been an orgasm, she reached and pulled me toward her so that my body lay the full length of hers. She kissed me. “Fuck me,” she said.

An instant epistemological transfer occurred between my detached self and my body, utterly bypassing any cognition that might have been occurring uselessly between my ears in response to Andi’s command. The abstract me focused the complete events of the evening—her river, her tallboys, her general heedlessness of anyone not named Andi—into a single holistic message, combined it with the complete absence of condoms, and sent the whole in an irresistible pulse to my genitals, where it was agreed that, despite what my brain might think it wants, it was a Bad Thing to put myself at the slightest risk of impregnating the locus of crazy currently in bed with me. My dick went into immediate hibernation.

Andi reached between my legs, tugging at me. “Come on,” she whined. “Fuck me.”

I raised myself to my knees. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe it was all the beer. My dick’s just not cooperating.”

She threw the covers aside and swung her bare feet to the floor. “Well, your dick is stupid. I’m going to bed. Goodnight.” She walked out the door and up the stairs, not looking back, leaving me alone in the guest bedroom.

Open-mouthed, I stared after her.