Passages
Back in their apartment again, Ray deposited the cadcam on the coffee table on his way to the kitchen.
"I guess you didn't need this after all," he opined with reference to the tape they'd shot. "You just needed to get out, and move around."
"I'd still like to see that," Jasmin called after him as she finished working her way through the doorway of their place.
"Let's have dinner first," he called from the kitchen. "It's getting pretty late."
Jasmin grunted noncommittally to his suggestion as she closed the front door after herself. She pulled her hair loose, shook it free, then stepped carefully toward the coffee table.
"What would you like?" Ray called from the kitchen.
"Ehea," she answered with a disinterested curl to her lip. She knelt beside the table, and picked up the cadcam. "I'm not really hungry."
It took a moment for Ray to reappear in the kitchen doorway.
"What?" he asked her aggressively.
She looked up at him.
"What?" she asked, wondering what he meant.
"You're not hungry?" he asked as though it was an accusation.
His tone made Jasmin uneasy to the point where she had to look away. She focused her attention on the cadcam in her hands.
"What is this with your appetite?" he wanted to know.
Jasmin continued fiddling distractedly with the cadcam. She didn't want to look at him.
"Ray, I don't know," she confessed, and then she faced him. "I . . . just don't get very hungry lately, and when I do, it doesn't take much to fill me up."
"That doesn't make sense," Ray tried to reason. "I mean; here you're getting bigger, and bigger, and yet you're eating progressively less, and less."
Jasmin busied herself with the camera again.
"I know it seems strange," she offered, not knowing what else to say.
"Seems?" he fretted. "There's no 'seems' about it. It's . . . it's . . . "
Words failed him.
In an effort to get his mind off what was becoming an unpleasant topic, Jasmin puffed herself up, then bore down with her fists dug into her sides to give him an enticing view of her ever more massively developing musculature.
"Does it look like I'm starving?" she asked with a knowing little smile, as she held the pose Gwen had once shown her.
But her gesture was lost on him.
"It just doesn't make sense," Ray continued. He approached, and placed his open hand to her forehead to check for fever. "Are you sure you're feeling alright?"
Jasmin relaxed, and sat back on her heels while looking up at him.
"Ray, what is 'alright' for me now?" she wondered.
His upraised hand remained where her forehead had been as Ray considered her question. Ultimately, he rested the hand on her shoulder.
"I don't know," he had to confess. "I don't know."
She placed her own hand over his.
"Well, I don't either," she said, hoping to reassure him. "Okay? Just . . . trust me, will you?"
He tried to understand this new, and, yet again, inexplicable phenomenon about her. He couldn't though as he gently stroked her shoulder.
"Would you please eat something?" he asked her with tender urgency.
Jasmin looked away, and sighed. She was, herself, at a loss to understand the strange diminishing of appetite she was experiencing.
"You've got to eat something," Ray gently persisted.
"Alright," she relented, "I'll have something."
Happy at last, he gave her a hug, and a pat.
"That's my girl," he said before he left her, and returned to the kitchen. "Okay, what'll it be?" he called back to her.
Jasmin busied herself with the cadcam again as she mulled over his question, then a wicked idea occurred to her.
"Do we have any pickles?" she asked.
"You want pickles, we got pickles," he assured her.
She was going to enjoy this, she thought as she freed the tape cartridge from its compartment.
"I know we've got some ice cream in the freezer."
Ray appeared at the doorway.
"Uh, since you're eating so little," he asked her pointedly, "could we keep the nutritional value just a bit more significant?"
"Mmm, that sounds good," Jasmin enthused, disregarding his suggestion with a toss of her hair.
She looked straight at him as she conspicuously passed a hand across her taunt, little belly.
"I'll have pickles, and ice cream," she beamed.
Ray ejaculated a nervous, grunting laugh, for some reason, then his eyes seemed to glaze over as he continued to stare blankly in Jasmin's direction. It took him awhile to regain consciousness, and then awhile longer to rediscover his voice.
"Nah . . . you . . . yer not . . . ," he stammered, "no, you can't be . . . are you?"
She was enjoying this, and even decided to make him squirm a little more.
"What if I am?" she asked coyly, seemingly busy with the tape as she turned it over in her hands.
"The way you're changing, I . . . really don't know . . . " He couldn't even fathom the prospect. "You . . . yer not really . . . are you?"
Fun's over, she thought. Time to fess-up. "No, I'm not," she informed him.
She rose up on her knees, absently examining the tape. Her exotic, oriental eyes observed him.
"But . . . what if I was?" she asked rhetorically.
"I . . . don't even want to think of it," Ray managed, truly not knowing what else to say, or think. "It's hard enough just dealing with you right now." He looked at her again. "Yer sure yer . . . "
"Not," Jasmin volunteered with a reassuring smile.
She noted her image in the nearby mirror. She put the tape down, and raised her elbows high over her head, like Gwen had shown her. Trying to remember a particular pose, she began rolling her pelvis.
"Even if I was," she noted as she ceased her movement, then bore down hard, crushing out every last microscopic detail in her deeply etched cobblestones, "with this stomach, I could probably give birth, and make a field goal at the same time."
She punctuating the last statement with a sharp forward thrust of her pelvis to force out even more definition from the thick, modeled speed-bumps that lined her tummy.
"So what would you like, really?" Ray asked.
Jasmin relaxed, and returned her attention to the tape.
"Whatever you want, Deedee," she replied in a bored, but placating tone.
After they'd dined, with Jasmin eating more than enough to satisfy her, but not nearly enough to satisfy Ray, they settled themselves in front of the TV to watch her tape. As she'd been dancing, Jasmin knew that all of her moves had been 'right', but still she was curious to see just what her transformed body actually looked like in motion.
Having born witness to her breathtaking spectacle - and being prejudiced as hell - Ray knew she looked incredible, but, at the same time, he was also capable of enough objectivity to realize that that was only his view, and that he was prejudiced as hell. As the time for viewing the tape was now at hand, however, he half-way wished that he hadn't filmed her out of concern that her hypercritical eye would find enough dingleberries in her performance to plunge her into another depression.
His mind ruminated over her possible reaction to seeing herself dancing in the guise of her vastly augmented physique as he sat down on the couch facing the screen, and Jasmin arranged herself comfortably on the floor at his feet with one enormous arm perched on top of his lap. He took a cushion, and positioned it on her shoulder so she could rest her head on it. Appreciating his thoughtfulness, Jasmin hugged his knees in thanks. With a tense jaw, Ray aimed the remote, and pressed 'PLAY'.
Having filmed over the section of tape that recorded her awkward beginning, Ray breathed a sigh of relief to see her gigantic image confidently attacking, and executing, a wondrous array of beautifully graceful motion. As they watched together, he couldn't imagine how she could possibly find anything to not like about it, but he was, all the same, nervous that she would find something. His concern lead him to distraction as his hand began to absently knead the thick muscle that capped her shoulder, and then he felt her hand over his.
"Hey," he heard her tell him in a soothing tone, "relax."
She didn't look at him, but she did give his hand a reassuring squeeze.
"'t's not all that bad."
Ray gazed at the back of her head from where he sat. It took him a moment to realize what'd happened, then he had to smile as he patted her shoulder affectionately, and let go of the rest of his tension with a gratifying sigh.
Both of them were fascinated by the section of her standing on the curb, waiting for traffic to pass. Ray played the segment over twice, and they became quite animated, and, sometimes, just as adamant, in their discussion over it.
"How did you do that?" Ray asked.
"Ray, I don't know," Jasmin declared, being every bit as flabbergasted as he was. "I had no idea I was moving that fast." She looked back at the screen. "My God, how am I doing that."
"Do you even remember it?"
"Oh yes," she insisted excitedly. "I remember everything about it, but I . . . I just don't know."
"Wul, come on now. Calm down a bit, and let's figure it out."
"It must be some kind of time compression thing. It seems like it's taking a certain amount of time to do a certain thing, but it's actually taking less time."
"Due to . . . ," he prompted her.
"Increased efficiency?"
"Hmm, that's not exactly where I was headed, but it'll do."
"Well, what were you thinking, because efficiency can't possibly be all of it."
And on they went into the evening. At the end of the tape, they watched her final step; a penché arabesque executed sur la pointe. When it was over, Jasmin, perhaps for the first time ever, hadn't made one single negative remark about her dancing, and Ray was besotten with admiration for her. He just had to grab her, and hold her, and kiss her, and nuzzle her, and Jasmin hugged his knees, and beamed with appreciation for his affection.
"There was something about the way you did that last move that was so beautiful," he told her very quietly after they'd both calmed down, "and yet I . . . I jus' . . . I can't describe it."
She lifted her head from the cushion on his lap to cast a glance at him.
"Wanna run it again?" she asked.
"Sure," he smiled agreeably. "Why not."
Ray backed the tape up as Jasmin settled her head back onto her cushion, then he pressed 'PLAY' again. The tape ran, and there she was, coming out of her final turn, pause, demi-plié, left foot tendues an avant, then spring up lightly to piqué arabesque sur la pointe on that one single great toe of hers, arms a la seconde. Hold the pose, then tilt slowly forward into a deep penché. Hold the pose at the bottom of the move. That personal little working of the lowered wrist, then rise up out of it just a tiny bit faster than gone into, achieve full third position arabesque, lift high, then right leg swings down and forward to demi-pointe with head bowed slightly.
"Stop," Ray heard her say in a way he didn't like.
Oh jeez, here it comes, he thought, expecting her to bury herself in a delayed reaction avalanche of self-critisism.
He pressed 'STOP', and her image froze in the last described pose. Jasmin slowly raised her head up from the cushion, watching the screen all the while.
"Go back, and run it again," she told him with a strange distance to her tone.
There was also a note of urgency to her voice that bothered Ray. He regarded as much of her face as he could see, and gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze.
"Did you see something?" he asked her cautiously.
Jasmin shot a glance his way.
"I don't know," she hurriedly admitted.
She returned her concentration to her image on the screen.
"Backup, and run it again," she told him.
Her hand was clutching his knee a little too tightly. Ray hit 'REWIND' on the remote as he too gingerly stroked her shoulder.
"Hey, relax," he told her reassuringly. "There's nothing to get upset about. Hm?"
"Please," was all she would say as she nervously began chewing on a knuckle.
She sounded frightened. Against his better judgment, Ray replayed the final section again. He didn't know what Jasmin was seeing, or what she thought she was seeing, but he did not like the way it seemed to be affecting her. She'd just gotten herself out of the doldrums, and now it looked like she was diving right back into them. As she watched the tape segment that time, Jasmin left the sanctuary of his lap, and gradually worked herself closer to the television. Eventually she was close enough to where she was squinting terribly, being hardly able to distinguish any detail on the screen, but she could tell that the moment she was looking for had passed.
"Stop!" she cried softly. "Go Back!"
"Impy," Ray pleaded, leaning forward to prop his elbows on his knees.
As though she hadn't heard him, Jasmin looked back, and reached out almost desperately to him.
"My glasses."
Luckily, her glasses were close enough to where Ray could quickly find, and grab them. He passed the spectacles to her. She took them with a barely audible, "Thanks," then looked back to the screen as she hastily arranged them on her face.
"Go back," she pleaded once again.
He really didn't want to pursue this any further.
"Jasmin," he tired addressing her once more.
She turned on him impatiently.
"Do I have to do it myself?" she snapped.
"Alright!" he shot back as he pressed the rewind button again. "I don't know what you're seeing here, but you are getting way too carried away with it," he told her heatedly.
She looked away, and calmed herself.
"Sorry," she offered quietly.
She gazed back at the television screen.
"It's more feeling than seeing."
Ready to run the segment again, Ray alerted her, "Alright, here we go."
"Wait a minute," she told him.
Jasmin reached a hand toward her frozen image on the screen as it was about to spring into the piqué arabesque. She began drawing lines in it with a finger.
"Can you crop the picture . . . here," she asked, "around my supporting foot?"
"Sure."
"Then blow it up to a full frame, and play it that way."
"Yeah, okay."
It took a few moments for Ray to do the necessary programing, but soon they were watching only Jasmin's greatly enlarged left foot entering, and exiting the dark background of asphalt pavement. It entered the frame once more, and became stationary on full pointe.
"No. Stop. Stop!" Jasmin uttered excitedly,
The frame froze again as Ray stopped the tape.
"Impy, what is wrong?" he insisted on knowing.
This wasn't the typical self-demolishing, fault-finding mission that he was accustomed to hearing from her. It was a reaction altogether different, and it was scaring him.
"I can't see where I am," she said hastily, her eyes roaming about on the screen. "I have to see where I am."
Not knowing what else to do at this point, Ray did his best to accommodate her.
"Okay, I can restore the full frame in a reduced screen."
"Do it," she pleaded.
Jasmin ran her fingers along the screen as if she were trying to feel something from it.
Ray added the program change, then alerted her again, "Okay, I'm going to back up a bit."
"Fine," Jasmin replied, sounding calmer.
She moved to one side of the screen without diverting her attention from it for so much as an instant. They both watched as the huge screen image of her foot exited the frame. Ray stopped the tape, activated the new program change, then pressed 'PLAY' again.
"Okay," he told her. "Upper right corner."
A miniature full image of Jasmin appeared in the upper right hand corner of the screen. As the image sprang forward from the tendu position, the enlargened image of her left foot entered the frame again, and placed the end of its great toe on the ground as her body rose to its second arabesque pose. Neither of them could help noticing how the flesh at the tip of her supporting toe appeared to be hardly compressed at all, even though it was the only thing sustaining the full weight of her huge body. The foot remained firm, and sure, as her body tilted into the penché move. When her image was at the bottom of the move, Jasmin, once again, told Ray to, "Stop."
Both images froze as Ray complied with her request.
"What now?" he asked her.
"Slow it down from here," she instructed him.
"You want to rewind again?"
"No. Just go to slow motion from here on."
Ray entered the change into the remote, then hit 'PLAY' again. Jasmin's small image now barely moved for an almost frame by frame eternity as it paused at the bottom of her fully descended penché arabesque. The lowered wrist did its barely noticeable rotation near the pavement, then, after another eternal pause, her massive body finally began tilting back upward to achieve its second arabesque position. When the ascent was finally completed, the pose was held for awhile. Then the outstretched hands raised a bit. The chin lifted, and the chest swelled as the image inhaled. It was the final 'lift', executed at the end of nearly every upward aspiring ballet pose, just before proceeding into the next transition.
What happened next couldn't've been detected in the full image display, but in the enlarged image, her supporting foot was seen to rise along with the rest of her, and then that one, single, great toe, which bore her entire weight, suddenly lost contact with the pavement, and rose, ever so slightly, from the ground.
Jasmin let out a hoarse scream, and, bodily, threw herself back from the image of her toe, her body, all of her hovering in mere air less than an inch above the pavement. Ray blurted, "'lying" an instant before he dropped the remote along with his jaw. The remote struck his foot, and jammed the rewind control. The additional shock of rapid-fire images put the panic-stricken giantess over the edge as she screamed anew, and turned away from the screen, striking her shoulder against the coffee table. She saw Ray in front of her, gape-eyed and babbling she couldn't tell what.
'Get to him!' her instincts shrieked at her. She tore her glasses from her face, and, with a sweep of her hand, Jasmin sent the table sailing across the room to embed itself deeply into a far wall. Ray held his hands out to her as she crawled to him, both of them mindless of how the room shook from the impact of her knees against the floor. He only seemed to be getting further away the faster she tried to reach him. So far away. So further away! A final, desperate lunge for him placed her hand atop his foot. Not yet there, but just some more! Frantically, she groped, and clawed, her way into his lap as far, far, far as she could get, then buried her face deep into his warm, secure body. She didn't dare attempt to hold him, but clutched his shirt, tearing it from his shoulders.
There Jasmin remained for such a long time; crying, and trembling. Without regard for his own astonishment over what they'd witnessed on the tape, Ray did what he could to console her. He talked to her in as steady a voice as he could manage, all the while stroking and caressing, kissing and holding her wherever he could reach. More than once she simply howled her terror into him. Throughout, Ray strove to comfort her, to calm her and coax away her incapacitating fears.
Gradually, Jasmin did recover, and calmed down enough so that they could talk. Though she was coherent, she still clung to him for protection, and was subject to fits of trembling. He spoke as quietly as he could, and held her tighter when he felt she needed it.
"You can fly now," he informed her as delicately as he could.
"No!" Jasmin asserted through her diminishing sobs. "I shouldn't!" "I can't be doing this!"
"You can," Ray told her gently, "and now you must."
"Nooo!" she cried. "I don't want this!"
"It's a part of you now."
"No . . . ," she moaned sadly.
"Yes, it is," he insisted between reassuring kisses. "You have to accept it."
"I don't want it!" Jasmin tearfully declared. "I don't!"
"You have to, because it's a part of you now," he told her. "It's just another one of the many, wonderful things that only you can do now."
"But why?"
"Because you're you."
"Oh yeah, right," she asserted bitterly as she rose up, and sat back on her heels. She was recovered enough to be away from him, and to be mindful of other things as she began to wipe the tears from her face.
"Whatever the freakin' hell I am anymore."
"Hey . . . ," he admonished her gently, leaning closer.
"I'm jus' . . . turning into a big, fat, mega-freak!"
"Come on now, knock it off will ya," he advised, resting a reassuring hand on her thick shoulder. "You just got yourself out of a hole. Don't go crawling into another one right away, okay?"
"But, Ray," she begged him, "what am I now?"
He thought a moment, then told her gently, but firmly, "You're the same person that you have always been."
She forcefully twisted her shoulder from under his hand.
"No I'm not!" she asserted adamantly, flinging her hair back from her face. "You know that's not true. I'm getting to be as big as a horse, I eat like a bird, I'm probably stronger than a dozen bulls, I'm doing things that only a spaced-out science fiction writer could dream up."
She looked up at him helplessly.
"Where, in all of this, am I anymore?" she asked. "Where's me?"
Ray looked at her as only he could, then reached out a thumb, and wiped away a tear from just above her cheek.
"Sitting right in front of me," he informed her tenderly.
"No . . . ," Jasmin whined, unwilling to believe him, though she leaned her face into his caring hand.
"Look," he said, cradling her jaw so that she wouldn't look away, "it just occurred to me that you are the same person."
She sat up, and regarded him doubtfully.
"What? You were just saying it before?"
"No," he assured her, then he went on to explain. "It's one of those things where you have to say it before you can realize it."
She waited for him to continue. The muscles around his eyes tightened.
"You know, that formula, it didn't give you all these things."
"Then . . . ," she was about to ask, but Ray held up a silencing hand, which she respected.
"It didn't give you anything, because it couldn't."
He was thinking the notion through as he spoke it.
"It can't make something out of nothing. Nothing can do that, because that's creation, and only God can do that. Everything that you feel, everything that you can do, everything that you are, and, yes, will yet become, every bit of it was already there, inside you, already a part of you, already you. All the formula did was just . . . bring it out. It released parts of you that would've otherwise remained forever hidden, and unknown. That's, literally, all it did, because . . . that's, literally, all it could do."
Jasmin heard, and understood, his comforting words, but still she wondered, "How can you be sure about that?"
"I'm not," Ray answered, "but can you come up with a better explanation for what's happened?"
She reached out to him. He took her hand.
"No," she answered softly.
She lay herself across his lap once more, and he embraced her.
"No I can't," she said.
The crisis over, they calmly watched the telling portion of the tape twice more to be sure that they had actually seen what they had seen. After the second viewing, Ray watched her resting quietly on the floor beside him, her arms loosely folded over his lap. He gave her shoulder a loving squeeze.
"Time, and space, are now your toys," he told her from the depths of quiet reflection.
She looked away from the screen, and perched her chin on top of her wrists. Something caught her attention from across the room.
"Sorry about the table," she quietly offered in apology.
Ray turned his head in the direction she was facing, and saw a little more than half of the coffee table protruding through the middle of the far wall where she'd dispatched it. He studied the odd looking sight for a time, and imagined the other end of the table to be projecting into their bedroom.
He returned his attention to his beloved once again, and stroked her reassuringly.
"Eah, don't worry about it," Ray droned easily. "I never liked that table anyway."
Jasmin smiled, and rested her cheek on her hands.
"Never liked that wall either," he added.
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