She could not allow him to come in contact with her (any outside stimulation was too much) and so she supplanted contact with vocal caresses. She adored the child, not so much because she could never conceive, due to her condition, but because it made her useful again. Years had passed since the fateful day of her extreme ejaculation and she had become a charity case at the exact hospital in which she had been experimented on. Unable to treat patients or work in an administrative capacity, she spent years simply roving the halls of the hospital, watching patients come and go, seeing nurses off to weddings and death, and desperately dreaming of some function she could perform. That was when he was delivered to her, like a gift from fortune.
The day of the celebration though was not a joyous one for her, Joseph’s departure after eighteen years of work, would leave her in the same state in which he found her, utterly useless. It was magnified by her adopted son’s actions that day, he treated each and every nurse as though they were his mother, and gave the one true caregiver the same hour he reserved for everyone else. In Joseph’s mind, he saved her for the last, a symbolic “save the last dance for me” homage to what he knew she had done. But the disabled nurse did not see it that way, for her he was already abandoning her and in a fit of melancholy that did more to combat the ever-present rise of sexual fervor, she invited the young boy up to her room one last time. Joseph believed it was just her way of saying goodbye, one last time in her room, one last visit, but when he arrived, he immediately understood she had other plans.
Since he was a small boy, Joseph laid in a bed she had specially made for him in the corner of the room, he did not sleep there, but laid and listened to her as she read to him or as the two talked about any number of subjects. She bade him to take his place in the bed and before he could offer an argument on the contrary, she had removed the finger gloves and the mask from her mouth, unstrapped herself from the chair and joined him on the bed. Joseph, who had been initiated into the ways of love by a now married nurse during a power outage, in which the young woman sought him out as he laid in his lonely bed and mounted him, quickly jerked against him like a cat in heat, and departed before he had time to realize what had occurred, felt his adopted mother’s lips touch his for the first time, felt her hand roam over his belly and down into his pants as the first contact with her skin in his entire life, did nothing but allow the event to take place. He knew that she was choosing death, but years of her wisdom and his subjugation, made it impossible for him to object. In less than a minute, at the first insertion, she uttered a guttural release that echoed throughout the halls of the hospital and collapsed. Joseph knew that she was no longer breathing, that she had disappeared from the body he was inside, but he could not let himself end the embrace, even after he had finished and felt himself slipping out of her, he did all he could to remain within her, remain in her tender arms.
The romanticism of her adopted mother’s death and his own actions did not escape poor Joseph. As he began his first year of secondary education, he mourned her death, but also couldn’t help anticipating what other extraordinary events would befall him in the coming years (being endowed with a Heraclitian perspective on things). The fact that nothing did, that was what ruined Joseph.
* * *
His conception that he would be ill prepared for education was completely false. Joseph was, in fact, due to the work of his dotting nurse of a mother, who had occupied so much idle time with books and imparted this practice onto her son (a Vallaian endeavor, admittedly), as well read as most of the professors at the college. He was allowed the unusual honor of skipping his first year’s studies and immediately entered into specialized courses.
It was in these classes that Joseph began to flourish, both as a student and a social animal. Years of isolation and access to only one other person for majority of his time, had made the young man pensive in overt ways and his silence amongst the loud and obnoxious majority of male students, who thought it becoming of young man to holler his ideas and force himself on other people, made him appear particularly appealing to many of the girls in attendance. He would listen to them, he would devote several hours of thought to their seemingly (although superficially) life-changing problems, and this enamored him to them to such a degree that he was not want of female companionship.
Most young men of Joseph’s age would have fallen into rather benign relationships with female confidantes, but Joseph had a rare gift for turning what appeared to be comforting caresses into arousing provocations that quickly made the girl forget her woes and focus on fulfilling the stirring need for gratification that had been slowly growing in her loins. This sensory foreplay of which he was naturally adept, was coupled with his poetic timbre, which could clandestinely change a few kind words of encouragement into a love ballad so romantic his prey often found themselves believing the young man was not after them sexually, but spiritually yearning for a union. They were obliging, in that they had not heard enough of these kinds of tricks yet in their adolescent forays into the tropics of desire, and accepted his words in their literal sense (not as they were intended). This also armored Joseph against accusations of mistreatment, for no one could conceive of his actions in any other light than that of friendship and honest sympathy, so perfect was his quiet demeanor.
Joseph had grown up in a hospital as well in the midst of a large pod of female nurses who were quite effusive with their conversations, which invariably always turned to sex and so, he was well versed in anatomy and feminine profundity. Women who had been attached to him during his college years had their negative opinions of him, but not one was based on his performance in bed.
When Joseph met his future wife, he did not fall in love with her at first sight, nor did he after several dates and several innocent fumblings in the dusty corners of libraries, dorm rooms, and park benches. In fact, Joseph, who was a successful bachelor, meaning he had sex on a regular basis, did not particularly like her. He had allowed her to initiate a relationship simply because he was of the opinion that one could not have too many mares in the stable, as they say, and her rather common appearance led him to accept the prejudices of her kind, or rather the urban legends of plain girls as nymphomaniacs. She was the polar opposite, a virgin at twenty, she was nothing special, most women her age had not given themselves to a man yet, and she followed stringently the social mores of the day, no sex prior to marriage.
They had met in a survey course on music appreciation, after they were thrust together by a befuddled professor who liked to have his students count-off and form groups. Joseph and Norma (his wife’s given name) were the only two who had been fives, and so they were forced to work together on explaining the difference between the popular waltz and the more technical one. They begrudgingly began their project with a meeting at her apartment, a few blocks from campus, but it was cut short by Norma after Joseph laid his hand on her naked knee, which she had unknowingly exposed.
Uninterested in waltzes or any other type of musical arrangement, Joseph had joined the class in order to fulfill a liberal arts requirement while his partner was a music major and took the course very seriously (having not yet been in secondary education long enough to realize its futility). Like many girls, Norma was free to follow her fancies, since her only real goal in college was to find a suitable fellow to support her for the rest of her life, as was the custom of the time, so she choose something that she thought would make herself more appealing to potential mates — music. She imagined herself singing a cappella in a large living room for relatives, a talent her husband could show off and pride himself on.