Author: Jon Gluckman

Thursday, I found a pen. Not a Mont Blanc. A plain BIC. A yellow barrel with a black cap, resembling the black bishop on a chessboard. Or an uncircumcised penis. They don’t make these anymore. The year is now 3035. Nobody uses a pen. I doubt anybody knows what a pen is. However, I’m privy to such knowledge, having come to this time by unconventional means, and then been fortunate enough to secure this library reference position. Last I remember, my cousin Nick told me to get into the bathtub. That was 1975. Time travel makes a man lonely. All his loved ones are dead. All my loved ones.
Later, in the lounge, I sip coffee with Saba (an ACG Femmel Series IX with Hydraulic Push/Pull Doolittle Systematic Reflex Technology, which turns a man to liquid). I told Saba I’d found this pen.

“LET ME SEE IT.” A voice from the bottom of an oil drum.

I brandished it for her to examine.

“LET ME HOLD IT,” and so I handed it to her, to it, however, you’re supposed to refer to an ACG Femmel Series IX. And she/it inked my forearm with a Shakespearean sonnet about love, how it had teeth, that ate out your heart, and then Saba powered down because curfew kicked in, and Maschinenmensch are required to power off at curfew, drain memory, and reboot fresh as a newborn, tabula rasa, daisy, so I’d never know what she or it meant. And I wanted so much to love “her.” But that’s impossible. A flesh-and-blood male can’t love something concocted from some 3035 Erector Set. And what’s the difference? Seems like just yesterday, drunk and horny, I was with Sheila in Nick’s basement (New Year’s, 1975), and I couldn’t get it up.