Have you ever wanted something you couldn't have?
I don't mean the 'forbidden fruit' angle, although that's probably part of it. I'm talking something that's actually unobtainable, something that you obsess about with every fiber of your being, but it's completely and totally out of reach. Like a baseball card collector wanting a Honus Wagner card, even though he works as a security guard and the thing costs two million bucks. We've all got something like that, I think. A sort of Holy Grail in our lives, something we'd do anything to get. Sometimes we do crazy things to get it. I mention that only because it'll help to explain a lot of what I'm about to tell you.
For me, it was Lydia. She worked with me at the technology firm I used to work for. She was in Human Resources, I was in R&D, but it was a small company in a small building, so we saw each other a lot. Lydia was a girl you'd definitely call "unobtainable". She wasn't gay, or anything. She just was one of those women who, for whatever reason, wasn't into romance. Sex, love, men, women, she just didn't care about it. Some of the guys at work called her "frigid", but I always thought that sounded kind of cruel. I always thought of her as "asexual." I remember she told me once that she'd never even masturbated before she met me...
But I'm getting ahead of myself. When I first met her, as a 22-year old engineer fresh out of college and happy to land a job, Lydia was still asexual. Very prudish, totally uninterested in romance, just got along with her job and her life and didn't seem to even know sex existed. Which is a shame, because...look, not to be mean, but when I describe a woman like that, you have a mental image of her in your head, right? Either skinny as a rail and mousy, or else about fifty pounds overweight and wearing a cardigan. But that wasn't Lydia. No, sir. Lydia was gorgeous. Drop-dead gorgeous. Skin like milk; long, lustrous black hair (she kept it in a bun, but if you ever saw it down, you'd never forget it); perfectly-toned body, with long, beautiful legs that she always kept covered up in dull, sensible skirts; and breasts that...well, she always wore bulky, unflattering outfits, so it wasn't like we got a look at them or anything, but when I finally did, they were perfect. Absolutely perfect. She had a body that would not quit. In fact, it wouldn't even punch in.
I fell in love with her the second I saw her. She shot me down cold. "Sorry," she said, "but as we have a professional relationship, it'd be a serious conflict of interest for us to fraternize in that fashion." It's cold enough just to hear the phrasing, but she put a spin on it that made it pretty obvious that I could win the lottery and quit my job, and she'd still find a reason for us not to date. I tried not to let on, but I took it pretty hard. Later, I found out that was practically a rite of passage at the company.
For the rest of the guys at work (and a few of the gals), that was it. Plenty of fish in the sea. But me, well...like I said. Unobtainable, but it didn't stop me from wanting. I got kind of nuts about it, but not at first. Work kind of kept me busy. The company was a cybernetics research firm, real cutting-edge stuff, and I was involved in some of the other end of it. After all, if you wanted to make machines that interfaced with human brains, you had to know how the brain worked as a machine. We were breaking down human thought all day, every day, reducing the brain to a two-pound computer made out of water and fatty tissues and trying to figure out how to program it. To be honest, I shouldn't even be talking to you about it, technically; some of our funding came from the government, and I think the CIA was more interested in my department than in the others. Between you and me, I think they were a lot more interested in finding ways to program the human brain like a machine than in finding ways to get the brain to program machines.
And so there I am, working on ways to reprogram the human brain, and there's Lydia, who makes my cock rock-hard just to think about her, and I'd be lying to you if I said I didn't make that connection pretty damn quick. That kept me up a few nights, giving myself the old firm handshake, if you know what I mean. Thinking about reprogramming her brain, making her more the person I wanted her to be...I'm not trying to justify it, or even apologize for it. It's not my fault temptation got put in my way, and I don't think there are many people out there who could have resisted doing what I did. Because she was the one thing I wanted that I thought I could never have.
She had something like that too, as it turned out. That was where all this started, the whole big mess I'm trying to explain to you. See, Lydia was into Dis--sorry, I better not say it. You'll understand why by the time I finish. She was into kid's cartoons, in specific a certain very large company that you're probably very familiar with, wink wink. Yeah, that's the one. Sorry, I'd say it if I could, but...you'll see. I don't want to get ahead of myself, like I said.
She loved that stuff. Everyone at work knew it. Lydia was in charge of writing the "desk decoration" policy, and she made sure that she was allowed to display the little figurines, and pictures, and all the collectible stuff she was into. And we talked--she shot me down that first day, sure, but like I said, I didn't let on how bad it bugged me, and I got to the point where we were on a first-name basis. She talked about those animated movies, and I listened, because I just liked hearing her talk, and I dunno, maybe she thought I was a fan too, or maybe she just thought I was a good listener. But she told me all about 'Peter Pan' and 'Alice in Wonderland' and all those old cartoons, and she mentioned once or twice how there was one in particular she wanted that she was never going to get. Seems it was kind of, um..."old-fashioned", let's say, about race. So it was never coming out on DVD, or video, or even back into theaters. It was the one movie she was never going to get to see, no matter how much she wanted to. Unobtainable, like I was saying.
That was my in with her. This was a couple years after I'd first met her, and we'd gotten pretty comfortable with each other--especially since I hadn't even tried putting the moves on her since that first day. So when I walked over to her cubicle, and showed her a DVD case, and said, "Guess what this is?", she was pretty cool.
