“The FOXP2” by Sean O’Siadhail

Jonathan is beside himself, that’s all.

He spends an hour in the store playing with it, oblivious to anyone else waiting for a turn,  and then he has to have it, there’s just no question.

It’s expensive, too expensive right now and everyone knows the price will start coming down in a few months so he has to beg Helen, plead with her to let him get it.

So that’s what he does.

And now here it is.

In his basement.

Being assembled by Francisco, a cherubic and weary-looking techie from the store, a man who himself comes with all the options already uploaded: goatee, weight problem, damp underarms, bad breath and so on.

Jonathan waits anxiously, gazing at the back of Francisco’s sweaty neck, willing him to finish.

“God, I can’t wait”, he tells Francisco.

“Almost finished,  just another five minutes and then you’ll be ready to go.”

If anything, Jonathan suspects Francisco to be enormously amused by the whole thing.

Jonathan paces up and down nervously, his head beset by random nodding and the other trappings of anticipation.

He remembers using a typewriter as a kid.  It had been a big clunky thing, originally belonging to an uncle, long deceased. Jonathan had loved that machine so much that sometimes he just typed out random passages from books and magazines, just for the pleasure of seeing the words appear on the page.  His words. Put there by him.

He remembers in his teens moving on to an electronic word processor that had once belonged to his brother Karl. He’d never really liked that one but shortly after that he’d got his first crappy PC.

Then a few years later came a slightly less crappy PC and when he’d started to make money of his own back in the mid-90s he’d finally got a pretty good PC and then a laptop, and then a better laptop and so it went.

Year after year.

Moving with the times and the technology, the tablet, a Viewpal, a Viewpal Plus, a Touchmate and now this, the Touchmate Ultra.

“Ok, that should be it”, says Francisco.

Jonathan grins.

“Just log on like normal using your omnicode and then select the hands-on working options from the menu,  I’ve transferred all your category 17 files and preferences over from your old Touchmate, the rest will just stream from the cloud.”

“Great, thanks so much Fernando,” Jonathan starts to walk him to the door but doesn’t even make it halfway up the stairs before he stuffs a tip into Francisco’s hand, thanks him again and makes his way back down the stairs, leaving his guest to find his own way out.

With Francisco out of the way, Jonathan is now free to play.

“Computer, user Jonathan, open hands-on working option.”

He sits on the large old leather couch in the middle of the den.  He inhales deeply. Before him, about ten feet away is his 50” viewscreen.  He issues an instruction and the projectors installed in the room are activated so that the icons are no longer just on the screen, they hover in midair right in front of him. His pulse is racing, he takes another deep breath but it feels like his heart is about to pop from his chest and join the icons floating in the air in front of him.

Slowly, he extends his arm, index finger shaking slightly as he reaches forward, touching the icons and feeling his shoulder muscles clench as they respond to the touch.

They’re there. Really there.

He stabs the ‘Word’ icon gently with his finger and all the other icons recede into two dimensions on the screen behind while the 3D Word icon grows larger before him.  He reaches out and holds it bringing it closer to him so he can sit back down on the couch.

“Computer, open file ‘The Mistress and the Horror’.”

The file opens and instantly four neat paragraphs float in the air in the middle of the room.   He gasps. It looks amazing. The definition is amazing, it’s all so clear.

And now it’s time to have fun.

“Computer, change font to Verdana, change font size to …”

He looks at the screen to see what the current size is, each of the letters is about 2 inches in height.

“….size 16”

With that, the letters seem to double in size but halve in number. The maximum size of the projection seems to be about six feet by six feet, it makes sense that the bigger the letters, the fewer words can be fit into the projection area.

‘What am I doing?’ he thinks, ‘there’s a much more fun way to do this.’

Reaching out he jabs at the font-size and grabs at ‘48’, wrenching it out of the drop down box and throwing it at the words on the screen.  There’s a discreet little popping sound as the words expand to several times their previous size.  Now there are only two words sitting in the air before him.

He reaches out and touches them:  ‘intellect is’.

He runs his hand down the curving exterior of the last ‘S’.  It still blows him away, how solid they feel, it doesn’t seem to matter that he’s tried it several times in the store. How do they manage the temperature? The letters feel no warmer or cooler than his own hands.  They feel smooth and soft, he can grab a letter or a word and move it around, even move it from its position flush with its peers.  They’re firm but he soon discovers that he can squeeze them like a soft toy and they’ll spring back into shape.

Then he has a thought.

It comes to him with prompting and he isn’t questioning its emergence.  He reaches out and takes the ‘is’.  Holding it right before his face with his right hand he reaches up with his left and changes the font from Verdana to Calibri, a grin breaking-out across his face as the word writhes in his hand.  He pulls it a little closer and feels the tug of resistance grow sharper as the word is taken further from its fellows.  

He looks at the basement door, it’s still closed. Slowly be pulls the word down his body and holding it against his groin he starts to change the font but using verbal commands this time so he can hold the word in place with both hands. Calibri to Verdana again and to Times New Roman to Trebuchet and Arial and so on, every font he can think of – and then starts from the beginning again. He presses the word more firmly against his center as he feels himself get even harder.

Just as he starts to move his body and gyrate with the writhing word he hears footsteps coming down the stairs toward the den.

He releases ‘is’ and it glides through the air and back into place beside ‘intellect’ just as Helen comes through the door.

“Heeyyyyyy!”, she’s grinning.

They both are – albeit for quite different reasons.

“Wow”, she says, looking quizzically at the words hanging there in the middle of the room “intellect is…’ I can’t wait to see how that sentence ends. Show me how it works again.”

So he does. He takes her through the whole thing,  working with files, surfing the web,  creating and editing documents, even playing games – something neither of them did very much of.

At first he just sits there and she figures it’s because he wants the whole thing to look as effortless as possible, but soon he’s up on his feet throwing icons and menu items around the place.

After about twenty minutes they go back upstairs and have a bottle of wine with their dinner. She’s glad to see him so happy. He doesn’t think about what he’d been doing when she’d interrupted him.

It was just a silly thing, like a joke, nothing to worry about.

The next day he starts to really work with the software. His latest essay opens before him in all its glory, floating in the air before his eyes, each of his words, each of his lines looking like the first words there ever were, new to the world.

Expectant.

He spends about an hour working on it, moving words around, toying with synonyms and generally finding reasons to keep playing with and manipulating his own words.

When he’s finally satisfied with the piece he throws himself on the couch, puts his hands behind his head and lets out a contented sigh. He deserves a drink, maybe some rum, yes that would be nice, or some vodka. Maybe when his wife comes home he’ll get her to mix one for him, he likes it a lot better when someone makes his drink.

He gazes up at his words floating in the air. It’s almost magical to see the words lifted from the page, he thinks, lifted from the humming screen and cast out into three dimensions.  They’re almost like sculptures now, catching the light, throwing shadows about the room. Isn’t this what words had been waiting for since the beginning?

“Change text to size 38”, he says.  The text dutifully expands, he moves it around and keeps expanding it until he’s made the word ‘solipsism’ fill the centre of the room, with no space for any other word.

‘Christ, how I love that word’, he thinks.

It was a college thing at first, long before he’d even met Helen. At least that’s where Jonathan and the word had first met and unlike several of his others from that time, ‘solipsism’ has stayed with him through thick and thin.

He’d used it (and ‘solipsistic’) a lot in his early work, most notably three times in the review that had helped to make his name. He’d even used it during the divorce litigation against his first wife, partly because she hates the word and one night, about the time their relationship had started to disintegrate, she’d made fun of him for overusing it.  He’d recently taught it to his son when helping him with a school assignment on degenerative nervous disorders.

Now he’s going to hold it in his hands.

He sits up.  Reaching out, he takes the word in his hands and pulls it toward him, feeling the now familiar tug of resistance as it tries to return to its default position. He lies down on the couch again but with the word in his hands this time.

”Look at you,” he whispers “what a great fucking word you are. Let me help you look your best.”

Then more loudly: “Computer, change font to Verdana.”

He feels the word squirm in his hands as it changes form into the new font. He beholds it, turns it around, upside down.

“Nah, computer change font to Trebuchet MS.”

Not right either, he thought.

“Computer, please vary font every three seconds.”

He isn’t sure that it’ll work but the computer understands and ‘solipsism’ starts to morph from one font to another in his hands.  It’s quite a sight and quite a sensation to be holding the word as it seems to writhe and squirm rhythmically.  His hands begin to tire from holding the word above his face so he gives them a rest by bringing them back down to his chest where the blood can flow into them more easily. It feels good, he can feel the mild ache leaving his hands and arms as he holds the word to his chest.

It’s only now that he remembers what had happened the day before and as if summoned by that memory his penis seems to awaken and command attention.  Holding the word so close to his body is still a pleasant sensation and so he holds it closer and moves his right hand to hold the middle of the word more firmly to his body. He feels himself getting harder and his heart beat faster, just as it had a day before.

A polite, bemused voice, from somewhere deep inside him suggests that he should take a moment to think about where this is going, but it’s drowned out as blood and hormones are shaken from their stupor and directed to different parts of his body, giving him a giddysick feeling in his stomach that he hasn’t felt in years.

Holding ‘solipsism’ tightly with his left hand, he moves his right hand to his zipper, opens it and disrobes his anxious phallus.  He’s surprised by its stiffness and size. He reaches up for the end of ‘solipsism’ and brings it down slowly onto his lap.   At first he doesn’t move, ‘solipsism’ continues to morph and squirm as its form changes with each new font, but within a minute has found his way between some of the letters and is quietly groaning with pleasure.

Within seconds the momentum seems irresistible, as is generally the way with momentum.

A few seconds after that and ‘solipsism’ is being crowned in semen just a voice from the darkness cries out:

“What the hell are you doing?”

Terror stricken, he leaps from the couch, trying to maneuver his engorged member back into his trousers at the same time.

‘Solipsism’, now released from his grip, starts to float back through the air in the same direction from which Helen’s voice has come, all the while changing font, dripping and flicking fluid.  If it’s possible for a word to look abashed, solipsism is doing it, a hussy trying to slip away from the scene of its shame.

He casts it a betrayed look.

“Oh my God”, shouts Helen.  Her eyes, Jonathan briefly notes, like size 48 Arial ‘O’s.

She looks more closely at the licentious noun as it moves towards her.

“I should have known it was fucking ‘solipsism’”, she says “you and that fucking word.”

He knows he has to get rid of it.  He can’t have this argument with it floating there between them, glistening and oozing.

“Close file,” he shouts, ‘solipsism’ disappears in an instant and his semen, after appearing to hang in the air for a moment, falls to the floor with the gentlest of splatters.

Sean O’Siadhail is a 39 year old Irishman living in the United States since 2007. Before moving to the USA he spent a number of years working on development and human rights issues in Asia. He is married with two children.