“I don’t know who you mean,” she said.
“Come on,” he said. “Come on. I can’t believe I’m blanking on his name. He was really important to me. And not just to me. His thing—his excerpt—we talked about it a little. Maybe more than once. It was in some old course packet you gave me from that class you used to teach at NYU.”
“ ‘Our Bodies, Our Contraptions’?”
“Yes! Right. That was the class. What was the guy’s name?”
“That was a thick packet, Trip. We talked about a lot of it.”
“Wait, I got it!” he said. “Marcel Marceau.”
“No,” she said.
“Yeah,” Trip said. “Marcel Marceau. That was the guy.”
“It wasn’t,” Fon said.
“He’s a mime,” I said.
“A mime?” Trip said. “Why would I even know a mime’s name, though? Anyway, okay, I’m starting to believe you. Marcel Marceau sounds not exactly right. Guy’s French though, this guy. Fon? French?”
“Half the authors in the packet were French.”
“His whole thing was—he’s the French power guy, come on. It’s crazy I can’t remember his name.”
“French Power?” Fon said.
“Not like French Power,” Trip said. “Like, he was French and his whole thing was about fisting? How getting fisted was a new kind of power?”
Fon said, “That’s not exactly—”
“I know,” Trip said. “It’s more complicated than that. But what’s the guy’s name?”
“You’re thinking,” Fon said, “of Michel Foucault, but—”
“Michel Foucault! Exactly. Have you read this guy, Belt? Michel Foucault?”
“I haven’t,” I said.
“And neither have you,” Fon told Trip. “That was a paper about Foucault. A chapter from a dissertation by a friend of mine—a former classmate at Columbia, David Ballard.”
“Ballard!” Trip said. “Right. I got confused. But this paper by Ballard was on Foucault. Foucault and fisting.”
“Yes,” Fon said.
“So that’s all I’m saying. Have you read it, Belt?”
“It wasn’t published,” Fon said.
“That’s crazy,” Trip said.
“David died of AIDS,” Fon said, “just shortly after he finished the chapter. He never got to finish the whole dissertation, so.”
“You put it in your course packet, and it wasn’t even published? Actually, I guess that makes total sense. It really was that good. It inspired me so much.”
“I didn’t realize,” Fon said. “That’s wonderful to hear.”
“Yeah,” Trip said. “That paper was huge for me. It’s why I quit trying to be a great novelist.”
* * *
—
“See, the paper basically explains,” Trip continued, “how fisting was maybe the most important and revolutionary innovation of the twentieth century. It’s so important because it uses the body in a sexual way that no one ever used it before, a way that gives you whole new pleasures, whole new thrills. Like, the point of fisting isn’t to get to the orgasm at the end, right? Maybe the orgasm doesn’t even happen. Or maybe it happens right at the beginning, but that doesn’t mean you stop fisting. The point of fisting is to be fisting. Or to be getting fisted. And the history of it is really crazy because people have been having sex with other people for as long as there have been people, for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, and they’ve always had everything you need to fist—cavemen had what they needed to fist, they had it before they had the wheel, before they had fire, it’s basic anatomy—but it wasn’t til the twentieth century that anyone ever fisted. The means to do it were there all along, but nobody ever thought to try it out. That’s basically the paper’s main thing, Fon, right?”
“Well, there’s more—”
“I know, but it basically is. And anyway, that’s what inspired me. How revolutionary it was. Fisting, I mean. And it got me thinking: What else could be like that? What else could be like fisting? What else is right in our faces, totally available, and ready to be innovated—like to make new, revolutionary thrills and pleasures—by the first person to really just open his eyes? And the answer was…not literature. And I don’t mean I think that literature can’t be innovated. I mean that it’s not all that available to be innovated, you know? People have been innovating it from the beginning. Geniuses have. For centuries. You could even say that the tradition of literature is a tradition of literary innovation, right? Same with the tradition of painting. Sculpture. Photography even. Everyone’s been trying to innovate forever, and most of them failed, but a lot of them succeeded, so it makes sense that there’s just not that much revolutionary potential in those art forms left to discover or innovate, you know? And like maybe I’m a genius of literature or painting or sculpture or whatever—it’s possible—I do think it’s possible I could innovate one of those art forms if I studied it closely and practiced doing it all the time, but it would probably take me years, and I don’t have the patience for that, especially because whatever innovation I came up with—maybe it wouldn’t even be revolutionary. Maybe it would just be…kind of interesting. Like it would start a movement or something, you know? Like, other writers or painters or whatever would apply some version of my innovation to making new writings and paintings and stuff, but…probably not even that.
“Curios, on the other hand—I saw all this massive potential there. They would be the fist I would work with. Or the ass. No, the sex. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. They’d be what I worked with. I’d been fascinated by them my entire life. Most people my age had, but almost none—you’re tilting your head like a…a curious Labrador, Belt. Did I lose you? I mean, you didn’t read Foucault or Ballard, I know that, but like…You do know what fisting is?” With his hand he made a goose-head shadow-puppet shape, pushed it forward, very slowly, as if meeting with resistance, and in doing so gradually balled up the goose head.
I looked to Fon. Another micro-shrug.
“You don’t have to get permission from the parent,” Trip said, repeating the gesture. “You can admit you know what fisting is. It doesn’t have to be all taboo and uncomfortable. Or maybe it does have to be a little uncomfortable at first, cause it’s, you know”—he did the gesture again—“ha! But it’s just a kind of sex and I’m not a little kid. I can talk about sex. I can talk about whatever—right, Fon?”