His Sex Addiction Is Proof of Free Will

“Love of Fate” by Rafael Frumkin

Professor Fulton Mathis’s vehicular misadventure had been devastating for him, but the university had taken it in stride. As long as he could ensure that his duties would be completed with minimal accommodation, the administration would be more than happy to welcome him back to work. In exchange, the university would budget for a semester-to-semester research assistant who’d function more like a personal aid. It was also suggested—not unkindly—that he consider early retirement. 

“Given the impressive scope of your professional achievements, I’d expect you to find great success on the lecture circuit,” the first research assistant, Kevin, read aloud to Mathis. It was an email from the dean. “Your precocious appointment to full professor last spring would also ensure a generous disability payout, should you choose to take that route.”

But Fulton was too busy taking in the sonic dimensions of Brodsky Hall to listen to Kevin, whose voice—still a bit reedy, though settling into its depth by the day—denoted a young man in the prime of his youth, the kind more inclined to be crushing opponents in beer pong than sitting through a philosophy lecture. Yet here he was, loping along next to Fulton in rubber-soled shoes with unthreaded laces whose plastic tips tapped the floor as they walked. Fulton regretted rushing his return to campus; if Kevin was to function as his “mobility aid,” then surely he should just refrain from motility altogether. 

“Kevin, why did you apply for this job?”

Kevin paused his recitation mid-sentence. For some reason, this necessitated a pause in their walking as well: Fulton stood still, listening to Kevin breathe contemplatively through his mouth. 

“I’m sorry, professor. Am I in trouble?”

“What? No. Of course not. I’m just curious.”

Kevin’s sigh was loud and a little fragrant. Fulton resisted a reflexive sigh of his own. 

“I’ve never been, you know, the most academically gifted,” Kevin said. “But last year, I heard you on the Jack Render Show and I honestly had no idea that philosophy could apply to life like that. I actually switched my major because of you, Professor Mathis.”

Fulton nodded at the floor and made a noise like Mmh. This admission from a student like Kevin would have flattered Fulton in the past, even served as proof of the validity and far-reaching appeal of his message. But now he just winced at the memory of the “brain strength nootropics” Jack had paid him $2,000 to promote during his follow-up interview, and wondered if there was a young man alive who didn’t stream that podcast. 

“So, when this opportunity came up—and I’m so sorry about your accident, professor—but yeah, when it came up I knew I needed to apply.”

Fulton made his affirmative noise again, having become so lost in thought that he’d barely noticed they’d resumed moving through space. Now, Kevin’s rubber plodding generated an echo far grander than its origins, as if the two of them had just shuffled underdressed and unshaven into a medieval basilica. Really, they’d arrived in Brodsky’s high-ceilinged auditorium: stately and uncarpeted, the largest on campus, and Fulton’s dedicated lecture home since the publication of Nonsense Autonomy. Not even fear of the Delta variant could keep students from filling the hall once they’d returned to in-person classes a few years ago. “It seems your flirtation with pop psychology may be the very thing that keeps this virus alive and mutating,” a jealous colleague had sneered at him. Fulton could have quipped back, but it would’ve been too easy: his colleague’s seminars on Jeremy Bentham hardly qualified as superspreader events. 

“Here we are,” Kevin said. His voice had shifted into a minor key, the melancholic croak of a thwarted adolescent. “Do you need any help getting to the podium?”

Fulton knew this space better than any on campus. He relished the opportunity to let Kevin fall away, and with him any reminder of his own impairment. He gripped the edges of the podium and paid attention to the electric hum of energy in the room. Students greeted him as they walked past, spoke loudly about things they wanted him to overhear (what they’d read over break, how many of his YouTube videos they’d watched) and less loudly about things they didn’t (who was currently high, who was hooking up with who). His hearing wasn’t so much better as varied: he cared more about what he heard now, which gave him the impression of hearing more than he had before. When his team of graduate teaching assistants had assembled, he made small talk with them, joked about his accident before they could try to console him over it, relished the opportunity to show up as their all-knowing, if slightly diminished, god. “If you’re going to fuck your life up, you might as well fuck it up to get famous,” Tatiana once said to him. Had she had any idea how prescient she’d been?

After the head TA introduced himself and Fulton and the bubbly chatter of the undergrads was silenced, Fulton began the class the way he always did in the Brodsky auditorium: “Tell me, which of you chose to come to class today?”

Chatter, giggling, a presumable show of hands. He pressed on. “And how many of you chose to take this class in the first place?”

Again, the chatter, the laughter. Fulton let it percolate for a moment, ignoring the head TA’s flutters behind him. “But surely none of you would claim that you’d chosen to be born?”

Now the auditorium was quiet, and Fulton dove in. This particular lecture was well-worn, an adumbrated version of the ninety-eight minute YouTube video that had been the first of his to go viral. The video was more of a rant than anything, its title eminently clickable: “Is Human Stupidity Proof of Freewill?” At first, the comments had been what he’d expected from modest viral fame: he was a pedant, he was a crank, he was saying something other academics were too chickenshit to say. But then had come the high-profile tweets—first from Joy Behar, whom he would never have guessed shared his interests in freewill and compatibilism, followed by another supposedly written by Oprah herself—and after that the praise, fast and strong like a fire hose pointed directly at his face. He was no more a saint than the next assistant professor (he wanted to negotiate an additional raise on top of his promotion; he wanted to stick it to Yale for cutting him loose pre-tenure), but no amount of vanity could make drinking from a fire hose possible. But he’d drunk, and he’d drowned. The affair with Tatiana would have been evidence enough of this, and yet things had turned out so much worse. “The uncoolest of all possible worlds,” as Tatiana liked to say.

But the undergrads couldn’t know the extent of his drowning. To them, this was yet another weird chapter in the life of Professor Fulton Mathis, a plot whose scope had rapidly expanded to accommodate the entire university. And that meant it had to involve more and more of their little lives, their half-formed ideas about books and art, their all-important grades and letters of recommendation. Fulton couldn’t let the enormity of his flagging brand stagger him, so he let the enormity of their youthful ignorance comfort him. The applause at the end of his lecture was no less robust than it had been before, and as the TA announced the homework and the students filtered out, thanking him as they left, Fulton turned to the hovering presence at his right shoulder with a smirk. “See how I can’t be vanquished, Kevin?” he almost said. But it wasn’t Kevin who stood at his side. 

“That was wonderful.” It was a woman’s voice, deeper than a fawning girl’s and more even-keeled. “It’s such a treat to meet you in the flesh.”

The way she said in the flesh set the back of Fulton’s neck ablaze, something he would have much preferred to feel in private, though he’d be the first to admit that there was a certain eroticism to public exposure. He stuck his hand out into the void; a soft and slender feminine one received it. He suppressed a shiver.

“I’m sorry, I’m not sure we’ve met. Are you a student here?” 

“I’m just auditing,” said the woman’s voice. “Artie. Short for Artemis, of all things.”

Fulton arched his eyebrows, smiling. “A huntress,” he said. 

She laughed. “Maybe. I think of myself more as a single mom who wants to funnel her alimony into a humanities degree.”

“So the opposite of a huntress,” Fulton quipped, immediately regretting it.  “I’m sorry. That was stupid of me.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s honest.” Self-deprecating laughter, then the breathy sigh of a beautiful person. He ought to punish himself for making a joke at her expense. “I know it’s foolish, but I’ve always loved philosophy. Not more than my son, of course, and he didn’t choose to interrupt my degree.” 

“Then let me choose to be less of an ass,” Fulton said. “Again, I’m sorry. I’m so glad to have you here. I’m positive the students feel the same. Frankly, I find what you’re doing inspirational.”

“You think so?”

Her voice was silken, her question unashamed. No self-conscious avoidance of “vocal fry,” no obvious hesitation over appearances. Here they were: an adult man in conversation with an adult woman who had no qualms revealing the approval-seeking girl inside of her. It was hot, and perhaps she meant it to be. Or perhaps she didn’t. But for Fulton to leave the possibility unacknowledged would be a missed opportunity.

“I know so,” he said. “And my office door is open to you anytime. Really.”

---

“Well, you’ve certainly been busy for a philosophy professor,” Jack had said during Fulton’s first appearance on the podcast five years ago. “Aren’t you guys supposed to be in ivory towers writing jargon-filled papers no one reads?”

“I suppose so,” Fulton responded. He hadn’t had to force his laugh: the whole situation was so ridiculously surreal, such a delightful fuck-you to the academic middle class and its laughable pieties, the dissertation advisors who would have preferred he stayed a spineless peon trapped in shame spirals for the rest of his career. “I mean, I used to do all that. But I got tired of being forgettable.”

At this, Jack slapped the table between them and brayed his hoarse, muscular laugh. “That’s definitely not your problem anymore, is it?”

Not then it wasn’t. But a decade before, Fulton had been another fifth-year PhD student casting around for a dissertation topic. He wanted to be an ethicist, so he chose to write about freewill and determinism, the equivalent of wanting to become a chef and “specializing” in cheese. The topic’s too broad, his friends told him. That field’s too well-trod for a PhD candidate to say anything worth getting hired about, his advisor had chuckled. 

But what none of them had counted on was Fulton’s need. Not just for a job, but for humans to have freewill. So potent was this need that he dug up a dusty old folio at his institution’s library in which were stuffed the letters of a virtually unknown philosopher, a contemporary of William James and John Dewey whose single contribution to the field had been to argue that our actions physically shape the world around us. The philosopher—Cassius Artemé-Feti was his oddly memorable name—hadn’t been saying anything terribly original, aside from a small footnote in which he suggested that “such creative capacity may be the basis for an inductive proof of freewill.” Fulton took this footnote and ran with it.

The ability to effect a material difference in the world through sheer force of will, in addition to the variety of nonsensical conflicts arising from these differences, is proof not only that we act of our own free will but irrationally so, he’d begun his dissertation. During office hours, Fulton’s advisor handed him the first chapter back with a sour expression. The papers were curiously empty of his jagged pen marks. 

“It’s too risky,” he’d said. “Fly-by-night. Specious.”

It’s too original, Fulton translated in his head. Clearly written. A breakthrough. His subsequent hiring at Yale confirmed this.

Fulton was a philosopher and not a novelist precisely because he didn’t want to be on the hook to anyone for an explanation of his interests. He found it a strange and somewhat prurient thing, broadcasting to the world the details of one’s life, especially under the unconvincing veil of “fiction.” Had Fulton written a novel instead of that dissertation, it might have been about a thirty-two-year-old philosophy PhD with an impressive CV hired to an Ivy League university, and how that young professor’s sex addiction was fed by hours of porn consumption, and that porn consumption was fueled by dopamine-seeking fueled by the same sense of self-loathing that had likely made him want to get a philosophy PhD in the first place. The character would be named something other than Fulton Mathis, something asinine like Scott or Louis. At the beginning of the book, Scott-or-Louis would swear up and down that he was a great respecter of women, would go on normal dates filled with normal banter and ending in pleasant sex. When the date dressed to leave, she’d give him a peck on the cheek and say, “We should do this again.” Scott-or-Louis would agree enthusiastically, see her out the front door, and then hurry back inside to his office, where he’d strip off his pants and flip open his laptop to watch videos of women being choked and gagged and jabbed and ejaculated-upon. Women dressed to appear very young being assaulted by vile, brawny men and screaming how much they wanted it so bad before their assailants muffled their screams with pillows. Women being gang-banged and “forced to submit” (always the men’s words), women being fetishized and humiliated in every conceivable manner, women being kidnapped and handcuffed and trafficked (THIS IS A SIMULATION, read the title cards at the beginning of these videos, a phrase Scott-or-Louis might repeat to himself like a mantra), women being degraded on the basis of their race or sexuality or ability. The worst of the worst, for hours at a time, the Scott-or-Louis’s grip on reality slipping, his self-loathing increasing with every tortured shudder and soiled Kleenex. Papers ungraded, articles unwritten, faculty meetings missed. 

The resolution to this novel would come not from Scott-or-Louis “safely and responsibly” living out his fetishes, as many an online forum member encouraged him to do, but from the application of his analytical skill to the problem of his desire. If he could prove his desires to be something other than brute facts—i.e. things that were inherently, unavoidably, a priori true about him—but choices he was making, however subconsciously, then perhaps he could will himself to choose differently. 

In real life, Fulton couldn’t make these choices fast enough. One too many meetings missed, email chains un-replied to, parties unattended. He published his dissertation and then another book, a largely unread monograph about the life of Artemé-Feti, but it made no difference. Too much gooning, as the students would say, and not enough ass-kissing. He was denied tenure. “Of course, you’ve worked at Yale,” the department chair said with a razor-sharp grin. “So you ought to have no trouble getting hired elsewhere.”

It was a noxious thing to say—in the academy’s illustrious past, scholars had threatened bodily harm over much less—but it wasn’t untrue. Fulton was snapped up with tenure by a well-funded state school after just a few months on the market. The salary was generous and the hiring committee obsequious, but he missed the pleasure of teaching so many unrealized versions of himself. Also, his laptop was a wreck of m-preg and bukkake videos. He had made no progress towards claiming his agency. He feared addiction and compulsion were the best and only models for human volition. Addiction to God, compulsion to confess. Addiction to history, compulsion to revolutionize. Addiction to tits, compulsion to film oneself wearing a silicone rack and sending it to open-minded women on kink sites whom his r/NoFap interlocutors noxiously termed “like-minded community.”

There’s a Nietzsche quote about needing chaos in oneself to give birth to a dying star, a quote Fulton might have remembered had he not been busy going full nihilist-Superman less than a year into his second job. Sex with grad students. Sex with one undergrad, then another and another. One of them published an alternately scathing and adoring LiveJournal post about him and then swiftly deleted it; another left to “visit her grandma” after a semester and never came back. Glasses of gin, palmfuls of Adderall, night-long Pornhub binges: Eiffel tower; spit on dick; spit roast whores; workplace orgy; workplace abduction forced orgasm; DD/LG Thanksgiving; Mormon threesome; Mormon abduction; sissified bimbo bitch; castration sissy hypno; big ass hentai teen. For this state of affairs, he could’ve blamed the not-Yale-ness of his surroundings, the devaluation of reading among his students, the general decline of the humanities, the vitiation of liberal democracy, the obvious failure of the American experiment. But these things only further robbed him of his agency. In a just and free universe, the kind of universe Fulton actually wanted to live in, who else ought to shoulder the blame but himself?

It was in this mood that he began speaking truth to power on YouTube, decrying not his own content consumption habits but the state of political discourse and the “cultural chaos” that had taken grip over America: “We’re living in rubble, but there’s one good thing we can surmise from that fact. We made the rubble, which means we get to change it.” 

By the time the Mischievous Will was under contract, he was a bestselling writer in several languages, a guest on popular podcasts and a wearer of bespoke suits. The university was struggling to keep him. And while fame didn’t cure his obsessions, he was happy to find it transformed them. The grimy laptop stayed closed, his home office unoccupied. In their place: well-compensated speaking engagements, multi-city book tours, over a million YouTube subscribers. No more student affairs or sex dungeons: such things struck him as boorish and adolescent, especially given the caliber of woman now available to him. Women who were themselves famous and influential, who brought up the chapters on sexual indiscretion in his books over drinks after his speaking engagements, who told him with knowing smirks that his research corroborated their lived experiences. Women highly adult and adventurous in ways he’d always dreamed of being. Women like Tatiana. 

Tatiana Abramov was a decade older than Fulton and held an endowed chair at a prestigious university where she’d rubbed shoulders with many of his heroes. In fact, she was one of his heroes, a rockstar scholar of ancient philosophy who required all her PhD students to learn ancient Greek and then take her seminar on Plato’s Republic in the dead language. She and Fulton met at a sold-out event at her institution during which he wore a headset mic and shared with a young and restless crowd his Six Ideas About God and Authoritarianism. She’d just been profiled in the New Yorker, a story about how her ex-husband (and ongoing colleague) currently lived in the garden apartment beneath the house she now shared with a twenty-seven-year-old woman and a rotating cast of sexually available young idealists. Fulton had read the profile with a kind of sweltering thrill, and then dutifully purchased a copy of her latest book, The Ethicist’s Non-Monogamy.

When he saw Tatiana in the signing line, he thrilled again. She set both his books down in front of him, smiling demurely. 

“If you could make both out to T-A-T—”

“I know who you are,” Fulton interrupted her. “What kind of philosopher would I be if I didn’t know your name?”

Fame, or at least its implication, is a powerful seduction tool, one that worked both ways for Fulton. He signed her copy of his book, and she signed his copy of hers. Then they left the grad students to clean up the auditorium while they had dinner together, which became drinks, which became more drinks and two blunts with Tatiana’s wraithlike Czech girlfriend as Tatiana’s ex-husband watched what sounded like an episode of Home Improvement in the garden apartment. Then came the sex: first with the girlfriend, whom Tatiana referred to as “my little Soviet satellite,” and then without her (though not without the double-wide swing). Fulton missed his flight back home. Instead, he rented a car and drove five hours, arriving back just forty minutes before the start of his Monday seminar. Luckily, he didn’t check his phone until after he’d taught, because he had ten texts from Tatiana and none of them could be safely viewed in his place of work. 

This cycle—the heated texts, the driving, the sex—repeated itself about once a month, sometimes twice if he was desperate, for a year. Fulton found himself both ferociously consumed by the intensity of it (a feeling he quite liked) and, perhaps stupidly, falling in love. Tatiana had assured him that she was a total relationship anarchist, meaning that she had no primary partner and placed no limit on the amount of partners she maintained nor the feelings she allowed herself to develop for them. But even then Fulton couldn’t quite ascertain his place in her web of connections. Would it throw a wrench in things to tell Tatiana that he loved her? Or would she say it back?

Towards the end of a particularly lusty summer, Fulton packed among the paddles and gags in his overnight bag a handwritten note in which he confessed his love for Tatiana.

Towards the end of a particularly lusty summer, Fulton packed among the paddles and gags in his overnight bag a handwritten note in which he confessed his love for Tatiana, his delicious obsession with her body and mind, and vowed to resolve the distance between them. He could wrangle a lectureship at her university, in her department, where they could duck into storage closets and empty offices after faculty meetings. 

When he arrived at Tatiana’s brownstone, it was to find her at the kitchen table toggling between her phone, a lit joint, and a bottle of vodka. Her hair was unwashed, and she wore sweatpants and a faded sweatshirt that read BROWN CREW across the chest. Fulton set his bag down, and zipped his letter into the front pocket. 

“It’s a travesty,” she said without looking up. 

“What is?”

He sat down across from her and made to rub her back, but she shrugged him away. 

“The foolish little satellite has broken off the mother ship.” She took a long, crackling inhale from the joint and then passed it to Fulton, who followed suit. “She says I’m bad for her. She’s gone to live with some pigheaded physics student.”

Fulton chuckled. “They’re all like magpies, aren’t they?”

Tatiana glared at him, eyes flinty even as they were filling with tears, and he realized he’d said the wrong thing. 

“I love her, Fulton,” she said. “I left my husband for her. I gave her this.” She gestured to the exposed brick walls of the kitchen they were sitting in. “And for what? Little brat pisses it all away.”

I would make such better use of it, Fulton thought, but knew better than to say. “I hate to see you hurting,” he said instead. “What would make this better?”

Tatiana told him she needed a moment to consider. During this moment, they each consumed two shots of vodka and finished the joint. 

“I want her back,” she said at last. “I want to go to that stupid apartment building and knock on her door and tell her to come out right now, because I love her.”

Fulton was pouring another shot. “A display of affection. Like in Say Anything.”

“What?”

“An American film, made during the perestroika years. But I’m saying yes, I know what you mean.”

He did his shot, and then poured her one, after which she looked at him giddily. “And perhaps we can say to her that we’re a package deal? That Fulton Mathis is joining our polycule” —she pronounced it pollicool— “and so she’s with you as much as she is with me?”

Fulton flushed and nodded. He was very pleased.

Tatiana clapped her hands together and fished her phone out of the pocket of her sweatpants. Fulton poured them each a final shot, listening as Tatiana said, “Hello? Melkiy satellite? Well, I’m glad you answered, because we’ll be over in the next fifteen minutes.” The girl was still making distressed noises as Tatiana hung up. 

“Come on,” she said to Fulton. “We’ll take my car.”

Fulton understood then that he had a choice to make. He could have told Tatiana that she was drunk, and that that they ought to give up on the girl and stay home together. He could have begun kissing her, pulled off her sweatshirt and distracted her with the equipment in the overnight bag. He could have told her that he was drunk, and that she could do what she wanted but he would stay put, perhaps have a shower and a nap so he’d be fresh for her return. But maddeningly, none of these options presented themselves to him. Not as a mounting anxiety that cut through his intoxication, nor a nagging suspicion that there was something better he ought to be doing. 

Instead he looked on in a state of dreamy hypnosis as the future folded itself into the present, feeling for all the world like he was watching a celebrity chef fold cheese into a soufflé instead of standing by as the greatest mistake of his life unspooled before him. By the time he’d decided to accompany Tatiana to her girlfriend’s house, he was already getting into her car. By the time he’d plugged the girl’s coordinates into his GPS, they were already knocking on her flimsy door. And then the girl had emerged onto the fire escape, her sweaty and shirtless beau behind her, and both of them were shouting that this had to stop, that they were going to call the cops. Tatiana stamped her foot, her rail-thin body quivering, and shouted back in a Slavic language only the girl could understand. 

Should Fulton have said something? Done something? Of course. But could he? Debatable. These events seemed to be happening before he understood himself as part of them. Therapists would subsequently describe this as trauma and dissociation to him; he would describe it as unmitigated freewill and incoherent compulsion back to them. And it wasn’t until he and Tatiana were back in her BMW and she was hurling foreign-language insults out the window that the lag between the recent events of his life and his consciousness of them began to bother him. It would have been helpful, for instance, to know that Tatiana was turning the wrong way onto a one-way street instead of dimly realizing that she’d done it sometime before fishing for her phone, which he could see ringing persistently from the floorboard. It seemed an eternity after Fulton apprehended all this that he finally began saying, “Look up! Jesus Christ, look up!” But she didn’t. Instead: a mighty crack and a great spray of metal and glass and Tatiana’s voice distant, fading, vanished. And then Fulton saw nothing at all. 

---

Of course Artie was the first to come to Fulton’s office hours. She wanted to meet outside of class regularly. He barely held office hours anymore—his TAs took care of all the administrative busywork of running a class for him—but now he informed Kevin that he wanted to be on campus at least three times a week, drafting the coltish young man into an arcane conflict. You know, they’ll put me out to pasture if I don’t make an effort to show my face around Brodsky as much as I can. Never mind that it wouldn’t be a few missed office hours that the university could use as justification for forcing Fulton into early retirement: if they really wanted to quarter his handsome salary, they could cite the dwindling speaking engagements, the stalled publication record, the fading-from-relevance, and then put him on “extended medical leave” until he died. 

So Kevin arranged with his other (very irritated) professors to leave class early or arrive at class late so he could unlock Fulton’s office door and then retrieve Fulton from his rideshare, after which Fulton sent Kevin to heavy-breathe in the hallway so he could have the pleasure of thrilling to Artie’s feather-light steps alone. Her greeting, “So good to see you, Professor Mathis!”, then a series of little scuffs against the hardwood: she must have been wearing ballet flats. Fulton was not so old that he hadn’t known plenty of women in his own generation who’d worn them; he’d just missed being an “elder millennial” by a handful of years, a fact he never would have known had Artie not told him. Apparently, she was only a decade his junior.

“Having a kid in your twenties ages you, I don’t care what they say,” she said with a laugh. 

“But surely there are advantages to being a young mom, like having more energy?”

That glittering laugh again. He could see its contrails on the insides of his eyelids. 

“Energy is about the only thing I still have going for me, against all odds. That and my looks.”

There it was: his helpless surge of arousal. She spoke like they lived in a different time and place. And most alluringly, she only did this when his door was completely closed. Then they were sealed off together, in a fish tank or a dreamworld, someplace unimpregnable and free of judgment. He asked her about her academic interests and she told him about the abandoned graduate degree, the dissertation-that-almost-was. After that, their conversations slipped into an easy intimacy: her divorce, his accident, the pitfalls of single motherhood, the academy’s bluster.

“I feel like people don’t take me as seriously as they should with all the makeup I wear, but I can’t help it, I love wearing it,” she said.

“I don’t know if this is weird of me to say, but I don’t want Joey to have any frail men in his life. Just decisive, strong ones. Smart ones. Of course you know the type,” she said.

“It took four years after the divorce until I finally felt liberated enough to start sleeping around. Is that a normal timeline?” she asked.

He was impressed with her that he hadn’t needed to solicit these statements, and with himself for not asking her to elaborate on any of them. Instead, he pushed breathlessly past each surge of arousal to professional matters, enjoying the game he was sure she was playing. 

“Tell me about your academic interests,” he said. “I would love to help you return to dissertation work.”

Artie was ambitious, he was delighted to find. She wasted barely any breath on being deferential —So sweet of you, with your busy schedule!—and dove right in: she was interested in consequentialism. The best indicator of an action’s moral goodness was its outcome, she believed, and she wanted her research to concern outcomes. What was a “good” outcome, and who was its beneficiary? Could an immoral act be justified if its outcome were deemed “good” enough, as in utilitarianism? Was it better to measure outcomes on an individual basis, or could a standard code of conduct be inferred from a large sample size of acts and outcomes?

“Watch out, Kant,” Fulton joked. “The huntress is coming for your metaphysics of morals!”

When their dynamic turned overtly sexual, it took even Fulton by surprise. Artie said, “Do you think I have a shot of getting into the PhD program?” and put her hand on his knee. 

“Any PhD program would be insane not to let you in,” he breathed, and twitched as she walked her fingers up his inseam. “We’d be very lucky to have you.”

“You don’t read the applications, right? So you could help me with mine?”

So charming that she was concerned with conflicts of interest even as she pressed her hand into his crotch. So sweet of her to think that even if he could read PhD applications, he still would. 

He called Kevin in to tell him that office hours were over. Artie here was applying to the PhD program, and Fulton needed to help her get her application started over lunch. Silently, without so much as a mouth-breath, Kevin held open the office door and then locked it behind them.

“Should we get takeout?” Fulton asked as she led him to her car. He could have proposed going straight to bed, but maintaining the façade of gentlemanliness meant maintaining the façade of lunch.

“We should,” she said, which surprised him. “From the new Thai place. And let’s get wine.”

Had his life ever been this easy? Had he really lost so much, if this is what he gained? He felt as if he were living in a dream. Wine poured, pad see ew steaming, her knee kept brushing against his, her laughter like a windchime stirred by his humor and insight. Then there was her hand on his thigh again, her plate pushed aside, her mouth on his. He kissed back vigorously, led her ploddingly to the bedroom. She laughed again, he was practically sweating with how much he wanted her, how mercifully stuck-together the broken pieces of him now felt. To want and be wanted: that was the whole point of everything! The whole point of being alive! 

Their congress was bubbly, even a little innocent. It reminded him of his adolescence, though not in a bad way. (He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been reminded of his adolescence in a good way.) Both of them spent and slippery afterward, he felt sure he was right about her. He’d held her hips, run his hands up and down her sides while she moved against him, cupped her breasts, groaned spectacularly and seen great, giddy bursts of light all the while empirically determining that she was slim, strong, hairless and about two or three inches shorter than him. Her face, which he traced as she slept in the crook of his arm, was soft-skinned, with a little upturned Protestant nose and lips full and moist. He guessed they were pink; all the most beautiful women he’d been with hadn’t rouged their lips, had known that it was pink and not red that commanded attention, that could melt the resolve of the most powerful figures in any room. 

Eventually he slept, too. When he awoke, it was to her kiss. She wanted to do this again. 

“I want that too,” he replied. “Very much.”

---

That semester, which Fulton in his sightless fugue had originally believed would be the first few months of the end of his life, proved instead to be the second time he ever fell in love. 

He and Artie spent whole weekends together, eating at odd hours and having sex on odd surfaces. She liked many of the same films he did—Videodrome, Boogie Nights, No Country for Old Men—and spoke enthusiastically during the moments without dialogue, something he allowed her to do even though he could still remember each scene clearly: Ha, he drinks so much milk in this! Ugh, it’s so creepy the way the TV just seems to grow skin. Oh my god, this moment when Marky Mark just looks at himself in the mirror!

Fulton himself could have been Mark Wahlberg then, favorably assessing his youthful reflection. But then why assess, contemplate, analyze when he could feel, with every aspect of his being, Artie’s life-brightening presence buzzing around his home? She was beautifying things, she told him: a checkered throw for the couch, a milk glass vase with fresh-cut flowers, a piping hot tray of brownies (his favorite kind, with marijuana). All this was nice, but it was her appetite for kink that really mattered to him. She was more vanilla than Tatiana—another way to look at it would be “less deranged”—but still playful. He liked her tastes.

“I put a little mic next to the bed,” she told him, lips close to his ear. “A little one, so we can listen to ourselves again after the fact.”

Indeed she had, and what incredible recordings they were! What had he done to deserve such a gorgeous freak? Fulton considered all sorts of arcane possibilities: Was this some kind of cosmic rebalancing after his accident? An abstruse message that he ought to pursue the Good with more commitment and rigor? Could he actually have lived a past life before this one, in which he’d been a far worthier person than he was now? He had to pay it forward, of course, by satisfying her sexually and promising to meet her adolescent son and ensuring her entrance into the PhD program. He was reminded of the last line of a fairytale he’d read as a boy, in which an aging queen is turned into a withered witch after denying her subjects bread: One is never too old to learn that all actions have consequences. 

Fulton was no witch; he knew that part of keeping a good thing going was evincing gratitude for it. A thing as good as this one might require a wholesale readjustment of his perspective, including his ethics. Was a world all that bad which could give rise to someone as good as Artie? His dim view of freewill, that it was only exercised stupidity, now struck him as crotchety and Hobbesian. Someone could choose, as Artie frequently did, to ambush her lover at work and kiss him in his office; someone could choose to learn how to cook a delicious risotto, or to apply herself to the study of ethics so that she might write sentences as incisive as this one: If a moral agent must choose among a peculiar set of hypothetical consequences without the benefit of a test case, then said agent may be inclined to recast both selfish and selfless behaviors as merely “original.”

The day he resolved to tell her he loved her was a crisp one in the depths of fall. He’d finally built up the confidence to walk with a cane to campus—Brodsky was only a quarter mile from his front door—and he imagined he was doing so among a small forest of changing leaves. With a vividness so sudden it shocked him, he saw the afterimage of a leaf he’d found in the yard years ago, its veins a deep mauve and the skin a highly saturated umber. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought about color.

He hadn’t realized he’d stopped moving until he registered the voice in front of him. His name, pronounced fool-ton. It was Mrs. Vazquez, his next door neighbor. 

“My god, you scared me,” he said. 

“I’m sorry, Fulton.” She was a cheerful old woman, with a granddaughter who’d be attending the university next fall. He wasn’t used to her voice sounding this dour. 

“Is something wrong?” he asked. 

She sighed, sucked her teeth. “Well, you know, I wasn’t going to say. My husband thinks I’m a busybody.”

Fulton laughed. He knew a thing or two about this dynamic.

“But if he isn’t here, and it’s just me bumping into you when I’m gardening, then he can’t judge, can he?”

Fulton rested his cane on his shoulder and folded his hands. “No, he certainly can’t.”

“Ah, well fine then.” He could feel Mrs. Vazquez approaching the short row of hedges that separated her yard from his. Her voice became low, a little strained. “Fulton, there is something wrong with the woman you’re seeing.”

Fulton’s eyebrows shot up. Had it been anyone else—a colleague, a conference friend, his speaking agent—he would have wanted to slap them. But this was Mrs. Vazquez, he reminded himself. Nothing more than a sweet elderly woman prone to old world theatrics. He would indulge her, he decided. Allow himself to be entertained. 

“Oh?” he asked. “How’s that?”

She leaned in so close he could feel the sting of her peppermint mouthwash. “She comes around here in a car and just sits there. At the end of the driveway.”

“Well, she visits me often.”

“Ah, that’s it though! These times she doesn’t visit you. She sits there, doesn’t go in, drives away. And one time, Fulton, in the nighttime, I swear, she wasn’t alone.”

Now she had his interest. “Maybe she was with her son? He’s a sophomore at the high school.”

“No, no. It was another woman she was with!”

He knew it was eye-rollingly predictable of him to think it, a vestige of the goony manchild who would have given anything to be airlifted out of New Haven and dropped into his favorite porn, in media rut. But wasn’t it also a little hot, to be spied on by a woman? And with Artie and some mystery woman as the voyeurs? 

But wasn’t it also a little hot, to be spied on by a woman?

“Do you spy on me?” he asked Artie later that day. They were working on her PhD application, and she had just finished reading aloud a section on marital infidelity that heavily cited The Mischievous Will.  

“What?” The question was followed by a brusque rustling of papers.

“Are you into voyeurism? Is that something that might turn you on?”

“Jesus, Fulton, is there a way we can maybe not talk about sex right now? I know I’m the pot calling the kettle black here, but I really do want to make some headway on this today. The deadline’s in two weeks.”

“I’m sorry.” He sat up and forced himself to sigh noisily, which he did whenever he wanted to ignore his desire. “I was just thinking of it because Mrs. Vazquez next door said she saw you watching the house from the end of the driveway with some mystery woman. Of course I was curious. But it’s not a big deal.”

He would have dropped it then and there, would have happily dug back into speech acts and consequentialism, had he not heard a birdlike tremulous noise that he realized was Artie crying. He rushed to her, knocking his calf against the coffee table in the process, and felt supremely satisfied by the opportunity to hold her close, stroke her hair as she wept into his shoulder. When she finally peeled herself away, her voice was smaller than it had been before. 

“I’m sorry. This is so stupid. I’m so embarrassed.”

“Not at all. You can tell me anything.”

“That’s Anita. My half-sister. We work together. She’s actually the one who got me the barista job at Barnes and Noble.”

All this time, and he’d never asked her what she did for work. In fact, he’d asked her very little about herself. Fulton felt naïve, self-recriminatory, and resolved to do his best to conceal his embarrassment. 

“I wanted to introduce her to you, but I changed my mind.”

“Why was that?”

“Oh, Fulton, this is so pathetic. That was the night after her husband gave her a black eye. She’s been staying with me now, trying to get her kid back. He said he was taking Charlotte to his parents’ place in Pennsylvania, but she hasn’t heard from any of them in two weeks.”

“Oh my god.”

“Exactly.” She separated from him, drifting towards the fireplace. “It’s such a bad situation. I was so overwhelmed. The only thing I could think to do was come here and talk to you, because I trust you. But then I realized how that would look.”

“Would look? What do you—?”

“Come on, babe, you know what I mean. Your broke girlfriend telling you some sob story about her broke sister? You’d think I was trying to take advantage of you. I don’t want that hanging between us.”

He knew she’d said something after Come on, babe, but he didn’t hear it. Babe! The sweetest, sexiest, thing you could call another person. The kind of nickname he associated with young lovers, hands slipped into each other’s back pockets. What he’d be calling Tatiana now, if she were still alive.  

He found his way to her again and shepherded her into another hug, this one more sensual than the last. 

“You don’t need to worry about how anything looks, Artie,” he said. “I love that you trust me. I love you. Just tell me what your sister needs, and I’ll help.”

He felt her body melt into his before she began shaking harder with sobs than she had before. So smart and funny, so unbelievably sexy, and she trusted him with her vulnerability! Fulton was moved, but even more so, he was surprised. For not only had he told a woman that he loved her, a first in his adult life, but he’d promised to do something good immediately after. Something charitable and selfless. Had Aristotle been so right about love, that it has the power to completely transform the lover? Was it finally time to put musty old Artemé-Feti and his loathsome view of the human heart to bed? 

When Fulton took $500 out of the bank later that day to give to battered Anita, it was Artie’s body he was thinking of: seducing it, holding it, petting it. And mere hours later, he was doing all three. 

---

The semester sped by, something semesters rarely did in Fulton’s experience. He lectured. He helped Artie get her PhD application in on time. He listened to Kevin read his emails out loud and dictated curt responses to the various beleaguered administrators who now saw Fulton’s full-time salary as excisable overhead. He had sex, lots of it. 

And he gave more money to Anita: $500 here, $700 there. It was the least he could do, and Artie was excited to tell him what a huge difference it was making in Anita’s life. That these small sums could do so much for someone else filled him with a vigor he didn’t know was possible, a kind of full-body relief at the idea that true ease and delight had been staring him in the face all along. And here he’d thought these things were permanently out of reach, the remit of the truly virtuous. Who knew that even he, erstwhile viewer of wretched content, slavering lover of the female form, could also access them? All he’d needed was for one of those females to step out of the screen and love him back. 

A few days before winter break, he told Kevin to call him a rideshare to the credit union. In the spirit of the season, Fulton wanted to withdraw a cashier’s check of $5,000. A gift for Anita and Artie both. 

Kevin’s response was an uncharacteristic grunt. 

“Sorry, what was that?” Fulton made no effort to filter the severity from his voice.

“Sorry, Professor Mathis. I, um, I’m like, trying to get rid of all the spam here?”

“What spam?”

There was a tense semi-silence. All Fulton could hear was the soft ding of the web client deleting emails and Kevin’s grunts of embarrassment. 

“What are you doing, Kevin? You’re deleting a lot.”

“We can also get a screen reader for your office desktop,” Kevin began, then caught himself. “I’m really sorry, Professor Mathis. I know you said that’s not a priority now. It was dumb of me to bring that up.”

“Just tell me what it is. You sound like someone’s hung you up by the toenails.”

Fulton waited while Kevin squirmed. At last, the boy caved.

“Penis enhancement, penis enlargement, dick performance juice,” Kevin said thickly, as though reading from a teleprompter at gun point. “Stay stronger harder faster longer. You’ll never be alone—”

“Okay, okay. Thank you, Kevin. I get it.” 

“There’s like forty of them, Professor Mathis. And they keep coming. And it’s from a private account, weirdly?”

“What account?”

“Cassie one-one-eight at Gmail.”

That seemed odd. But then what did Fulton know about spam? He tried to recall the e-scam and fraud training he’d completed once five years ago. “Just block it. Report my account hacked.”

“I have, professor.” Kevin’s voice cracked. “Like, five times. But then it just comes from a new email. Some variation on the Cassie address.”

“I don’t have time for this, and neither do you.” Fulton hoped Kevin would be flattered by the idea that Fulton found his time valuable. “Just take it to campus IT.”

Later that evening, Artie was so excited about the $5,000 that she wept again. She planned a family dinner for after the holidays, one where Fulton could meet Anita and Artie’s son, both of whom already held him in very high regard. 

“I just want to be able to introduce you all when I’m not so jumpy about getting into the PhD program,” she said. “I’ll be a nervous wreck until February.”

“There’s no need for you to be, but I understand,” he said. “Perhaps you and I can ease that stress together this Christmas?”

No such luck: Anita’s daughter had finally been located, and Artie and Anita were going to Pennsylvania to get her back. Fulton wasn’t about to get in the way of that, plus it was his money that was making such a crucial trip possible. So he spent winter break listening to their homemade audio porn on his phone, daydreaming about Artie’s body, and contemplating marriage. He would take on her student loan debt, her son’s college debt, if it meant he could spend the rest of his life being transformed by her love. And he would wait as long as she needed to hear her say I love you back.

There was little snow that year and even less ice, so he felt emboldened to take walks around the neighborhood whenever the need to be with Artie struck him. He lost all sense of time, his internal clock ticking loudest at the oddest hours, his body surging with animal cravings for her. There was something pleasurable about being lost in the funhouse of desire, something that appeased the submissive in him. He didn’t know where the night ended and the day began. He didn’t know where he ended and she began.  

One evening after half-eating some microwaved chicken strips and doing nothing to escape the widening gyre of his carnal fugue, he was shocked to practically bump into Mrs. Vazquez on the street.

“Fulton!” she exclaimed, ever the worried grandmother. “You haven’t shaved!”

He rubbed his chin, chuckling. “Indeed I haven’t. But I like to grow out the beard in the colder months. I think you probably know this by now, Mrs. Vazquez.”

He expected her to laugh with him, but she just clucked. “It’s nearly nine at night.”

“That late?”

“My husband tells me not to say anything.”

There was something about the rare severity of her tone that made his shoulders stiffen. “Then maybe you shouldn’t.”

“He says you’re a famous man, I shouldn’t burst the bubble. We watched you when you were on the talk shows. So intelligent! You should go back on.”

He shifted from one foot to the other. “I doubt they’d have me now.” 

He’d hoped the statement would make her pity him, give her a hitch of embarrassment, but she plowed on: “Fulton, I’m a God-fearing woman. I believe in doing what’s right. You are a great man, a thinker like Octavio Paz. You have the ability to help many people. So I will help you: the woman you are seeing is a thief.”

This again. “Mrs. Vazquez—”

“Ah, please wait for me to finish. I’m not saying she stole anything. She is a time thief.”

“Mrs. Vazquez, I’m getting cold,” he lied. 

“She’s wasting your time, Fulton. Maybe she’s wasting your money, because you’re in love.”

“Alright, enough!” He stamped his foot, a juvenile gesture that he decided to pretend hadn’t happened. “I understand you’re concerned for me, and I appreciate your concern. But you have to understand that this is my private life, and I really would prefer my neighbors not being involved in it. When you stand at these hedges and look down my driveway and see my girlfriend sitting in the car with her sister, perhaps you’re the one spying on—”

“Sister?” Mrs. Vazquez’s laugh was loud and bitter. 

“Yes, her sister. Half-sister, actually. Who happens to be in the midst of a very difficult situation with her ex-husband.”

“Not a sister, Fulton.” There was her peppermint breath again. “And not a woman with a husband. There’s a word for her in Spanish. Marimacha.”

“I’m going home.” Fulton was petulant. “I’m going inside. I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Not a wife, with a shaved head like that. Not a sister, the way she looks at your girlfriend.”

But Fulton had decided not to hear these words. In his mind he was already inside, pouring himself another Scotch. 

And that was how he managed to get through the rest of the break: by imagining himself ahead in time, having already lived the less-important chunks of life that lie between him and the far more important swaths of life he was to live with Artie. This worked surprisingly well, for no sooner had he decided to do it than she was back from her trip to Pennsylvania, and no sooner were the two of them back in bed generating fantastic audio than she learned from the university that her PhD application had been among the most impressive they’d received that year, so impressive that the committee not only wanted to offer her early admission, but a generous fellowship as well.

“I can’t believe it,” she said over Thai that night. The pad see ew had become their go-to dish for both celebration and sentiment.

“Well I can,” he said. “And you should. I spoke to the chair, and he said yours was in the top one percent of applications we’ve ever received.”

He was lying about speaking with the chair. Last semester’s curt email about rectifying Fulton’s “spam problem” would be the last communication the two men would have outside of a disciplinary hearing. But Fulton knew her application front to back, and he knew it was true. Plus he loved feeling her warm to the statement, hearing her shy giggles from across the table. 

She told him she felt bold. She wanted to “do things to him” now, things she’d been too timid to try before. Not only was he game, he had a few suggestions. 

What followed was pure ecstasy, a scene that could have been ripped from the more tasteful annals of Fulton’s stash. She strapped him to the bed so tight he couldn’t move, with a hood over his head so snug he couldn’t speak, and spoke to him as he submitted helplessly to her ravishing: “You’ve shown me so much, babe. Given me so much. I just wanted to see what I could do, you know? How far I could take it. My education, that is. My joy, my growth. And you’ve given me that chance. You’re such a noble person. I’m so lucky to know you.”

When she was nearly done with him, she ripped the hood off and asked him if he was willing to modify his thesis. Was it in fact human virtue that proved the existence of freewill, not stupidity? 

“Yes!” he shouted, but it sounded more like Mmf! from behind the ball gag. And he lay there prone, spread-eagled, waiting for release. But her hands leapt from his thighs, and she laughed. 

“Be patient,” she mock-scolded him. “There’s no real pleasure in instant gratification.”

---

It was easier for the university to place Fulton on permanent leave when they had credible grounds for dismissal, and those credible grounds were as follows: first, an explicit home video emailed from his address to the sixty-four-students in his spring lecture class, plus the philosophy faculty and staff listserv. The video was filmed from above, Fulton gasping and naked-faced beneath a lithe woman in a fetish mask, one Artie had worn at his insistence. Next, Cassie118’s entire penis enlargement canon forwarded to the same set of addresses. And finally, Fulton’s insistence, less and less convincing with each repetition, that he’d been maliciously hacked.

Would Fulton have preferred to skip the endless inquests and investigations and college-wide Title IX hearings? Certainly. Would he have preferred that Artie answered his calls and texts, that Kevin vouch for him about the hacking, or that someone by the name of Anita was actually employed by the Starbucks in the Barnes and Noble? Yes, yes, and yes. Would he have preferred not to learn that the contents of his Roth IRA, managed via an app on his phone, had mysteriously dwindled from a high six figures to a low four? Obviously.

But what choice did he have? Who was he, the man who’d once told Jack Render’s fifteen million podcast subscribers to “kick fate in the ass,” to slink from the consequences of his own actions? Was he a real man, or a peepshow creep so fetid with the stenches of guilt and self-loathing the evidence of his perversion all but wafted off him? No, better to admit that he’d been an autonomous agent—a stupid autonomous agent, for there could be no other—who’d also been acted-upon, victimized by a criminal sociopath. His new obsession became understanding the warped contours of his situation. He would sit through hearing after hearing if only he could learn more about who she’d been, get some insight into her motives and methods. And, perhaps most stupidly, discern if any of what passed between them had been real. 

Eventually the police department got involved, and as “Artie’s” aliases and SSNs proliferated, Fulton felt smug. What weighed heavier on the scales of Justice? The testimony of a public intellectual who’d just happened to be led astray by his all-too-human vice, or the actions of a criminal? A lesbian criminal who seemed to love hopping towns with her partner and running small cons, who hadn’t held a single real job in her life? Her real name was Martha Causwell, and having a son was pretty much the only thing she hadn’t lied to Fulton about. 

“That and college,” the police chief told him. 

“I’m sorry?”

“Yeah, weirdly enough, we were able to trace her back to the university. She spent a few semesters here, but it was years ago. I don’t know if it was your department.”

“Oh, god,” Fulton blurted, and pinched the bridge of his nose as if trying to occlude his memory. “Oh god!” he repeated, staggering from his seat and stumbling down a linoleum hallway, heedless of the police chief’s objections. Because as sudden and vivid as the leaf had been in his mind’s eye appeared the image of a girl’s face, young and blonde and sharp in class. Wholly devoted to him when he chose her. An undergrad, the one who’d gone to visit her grandma and never come back. Who’d cried in his car, he recalled now, over her missed period. Why hadn’t he bothered to find out why she left? Oh god. What was her name?