Dr. Lethargy and Joe

You can learn how to crochet granny squares on YouTube, and you can memorize a recipe to make a peach-infused Sex on the Beach. You can master bleaching your hair, follow a Disco Fox tutorial, build a mini-replica of the Colosseum using gluten-free pretzel sticks.

But Joe was the last man on earth who knew how to kiss.

The scientists had predicted this might happen. They’d sifted through the data as the young people became more isolated, addicted to their screens, unable to preen or flirt or attract one another in the standard, old-fashioned ways. And soon those old ways were forgotten entirely. The anthropologists wrote papers about how humans were reducing their attention span by “watching” a movie while simultaneously answering texts, talking on the phone, and playing virtual chess against robots.

Writers (AI writers, obviously, because the studios—run entirely by AI heads—had long ago replaced the human writers) were required to constantly re-explain plots to viewers in dialogue otherwise nobody knew what was going on. Even in 12-minute sitcoms. Even in infomercials. Humans couldn’t follow the most basic plots. Characters often faced the camera to give updates of what was happening in the shows.

But the biggest worry was how “swiping left” too often on every dating app had literally left people out in the cold when it came to kissing…. and more.

Joe was the last one.

It took a lot of digging to find him. But they found him.

He was the very last person on earth who could cradle a woman’s face in his hands and make her melt in the way that those vintage romance novels talked about. The ones you used to be able to find on shelves at the drugstore. When once upon a time people went to the drugstore to buy a malted, and bat their eyes at the soda jerk, and sit in a booth and read about… kissing.

Joe took his time. He never rushed. He knew what anticipation meant. He wasn’t into instant gratification of any sort. Joe understood instinctively that foreplay began with the first hint of a whisper of a touch. The first glimmering heat of a blush.

Joe didn’t believe in screens, had an old-fashioned rotary phone on his kitchen counter, drove a pick-up truck he could fix himself. He mowed his own lawn, rowed a boat for real in a pond that nature (not humans) had made, liked to go fishing in streams that weren’t stocked with synthetics. He had simply refused to upgrade every single time. No cordless to no cell phone the size of a brick to no Blackberry to no Myspace to no Facebook. He had none of it.

What he had was a bookshelf in every room filled with battered tomes on subjects that interested him. A cozy fireplace. A golden retriever named Lou.

He did crossword puzzles on paper, and he sometimes played himself a game of Solitaire on his Formica kitchen table with an actual deck of cards.

The scientists found him after looking for a very long time and interviewing people and observing folks in the wild. Nobody was kissing. That’s what they realized. Because nobody knew how. Sure, some actors kissed in movies—and the scientists had studied the Golden Age of Hollywood, Bogart and Bacall. Bogart and Bergman. Bogart and Astor … Bogart and apparently almost anyone, it seemed.

Somehow watching the movie versions hadn’t translated into knowing how. And even when the scientists, hired by the government because the birthrates were non-existent, tried to explain to the average lay person how to kiss using diagrams and animation, they failed miserably. They’d done outreach. They’d held conferences. They had attempted to create virtual reality devices that mimicked the sensations, but the VR versions were too wet, or too sloppy, too rough or too soft.

People weren’t kissing because kissing had no meaning anymore. What was a kiss when you could clear a row of brightly colored dancing candy with your thumb on your phone? What did a kiss mean if you could steal an animated car or take out a make-believe bad guy?

The thing was that Joe hadn’t kissed anyone for a while either.

Scientists had interviewed his last girlfriend, who had left him for someone with more pizzazz. Someone with nine vehicles and 19 houses, because that was the current level one needed to be considered rich. Someone who was, in her words, “going places.” Joe was not going places.

“What do you miss about Joe?” they’d asked her, and she’d gotten an almost faraway dreamy look in her electric violet eyes (contacts, natch) and tried to wrinkle her brow but there was no way an actual expression could fight the fillers. Finally, she’d said, “There was this thing he would do with his mouth…”

“Does your new beau not do that?”

She shook her head. “We tried once, but he bit me and my lip deflated.”

They interviewed the girl Joe had dated before Pixel. A chick named V-Hold. She said almost the same thing. Wistful. A little nostalgic. She said, “Yeah, I left him for this man with a Lambo, because all the songs I listened to were about Lambos. And all Joe had in his garage was that dumb, beat-up truck.”

“But he could kiss?”

She nodded. “We’d go down to the levee, and he’d have a bottle of homemade dandelion wine, and we’d spread out a quilt under an apple tree…”

“And now?”

“I’m with Hayden70293. He doesn’t take me to apple trees.”

“Where do you guys go then?”

“Nowhere,” she said. “There are screens on all the walls, so we stay in and choose a location. Paris, France. Paris, Texas.”

“And there’s no kissing?”

“You know, we tried one time, but he just kind of licked my face. And he didn’t like the way my glass skin tasted.”

“Glass skin?”

“Lips. Cheeks. Chin,” V-Hold explained. “There’s this new shellacking method that makes you look exactly the same as your three-dimensional avatar.”

“You can taste the coating?”

“Sure. It’s kind of vanilla meets ozone, if I had to give it a name. He said it tasted like what he thought rust would taste like if rust were a dessert.”

“But you did kiss with Joe and he didn’t mind the taste?”

She said, “I wasn’t using back then. But I started having forehead wrinkles and smile lines…”

“And Joe didn’t like that?”

“Joe loved it.” She stared into the middle distance, like people always do on the 'gram. This was supposed to be an attractive pose, but she mostly appeared blank.

When the swarm of scientists finally tracked Joe down, he was tinkering with his truck in the driveway. His beer was nearby, sweating cold beads down the glass bottle. The head scientist said, “Excuse me?” to the rear of the truck. They could only see his legs. “Excuse me, Sir. We’d like to ask you a few questions,” and Joe pushed out from under the chassis and said he was all ears. They were standing there in their white lab coats, e-clipboards in hand, and he could already feel them assessing him.

After verifying that Joe was the man they were looking for, the head scientist said, “We’ve undergone a lengthy research process, and ultimately, we have determined that you are the last man on earth who knows how to kiss properly.”

Joe grinned. “Really?” he asked. “What type of research?” He looked pointedly at the blonde scientist with the black glasses. His eyes did a quick sweep of her whole body, and even in her sensible slacks and lab coat, she felt her cheeks go pink. She was glad not to be the one asking the questions. Instead, she took rapid-fire notes.

Joe had blue eyes that weren’t fake, she could tell. She was a good observer. His body was lean, arms muscled, 501s fit him like a dream. Suddenly, for some inexplicable reason, she wasn’t using her scientist brain—couldn’t think to say, “The subject is a well-built specimen, aged 37,” because some other part of her body was just saying, “Damn.… does he look fine in those jeans.”

He had a strong jaw and full, dare she say, kissable lips. That wouldn’t play in the forms, though. Kissable. Dear lord, what was happening to her? She stared at her e-clipboard, but there was no help for her on the screen.

“The thing is,” said the head scientist, “we’ve done our due diligence. And it seems that the low birth rate…”

“Non-existent birth rate,” his cohort interrupted.

“Negative birth rate,” said the scientist in the back.

“We’ve determined that apparently kissing leads to… well, other things. And those other things might help us not become…”

“Extinct,” chimed in a fifth scientist.

Joe shrugged. “It’s nothing really. I can’t imagine how I know more than anyone else.”

“But you do,” insisted the head scientist. “Trust us.”

“I don’t trust you,” Joe said. “Because I don’t even know you.”

The other scientists weren’t sure what to do with this. They stood in the driveway looking at each other. Most of their subjects were more compliant, juiced up on whatever it was in those vapes these days. Lithium and Helium? Nitro and Cobalt? Valium and Carbon? They were used to complacent humans who would participate in any study for a little prize. Offer them the equivalent of a piece of cheese, and they’d make their way through all the mazes.

The scientists huddled together to see if they could come up with an offer that might tempt this subject.

While they did, Joe took a step closer to the blonde. “Do you want a beer?” he asked. She nodded. Joe motioned for her to follow him into his small house. It was painted a pretty yellow. The door was pink. There were flowers growing in the window boxes.

Joe asked the blonde her name, and she said, “We’re just known by our thesis papers.”

“Seriously?”

“So I’m Dr. Lethargy, because I wrote my paper on the fact that most people prefer to spend their days in bed.”

“Sounds fun…”

She had that sensation again. Blushing. She said, “I see what you mean, but not like that.”

“But you’d like that?” he asked as he led her through his simple house. She was unaccustomed to an abode that didn’t have screens on every wall. The fact that this house had windows, and the windows were open letting in a breeze, was exotic to her. She lived at the lab, in a small room behind her research station. There were no windows. The “breeze” was artificial and scented in what some scentologist believed lilacs smelled like. Down the hall in Joe’s house, she could see the door to his bedroom was open, and the sheets were rumpled.

She swallowed hard, and she wondered what it was about this man that was making her so unsteady. He asked her if she really wanted a beer, and she said, no, she’d just wanted to get away from the rest of them. Dr. Flaccid (they called him ‘limp dick’) behind his back. Dr. Anxiety. Dr. Dry Mouth.

“So what is your real name?” he asked.

She licked her lips and said, “Rose. I used to be called Rose.”

They were in his cheerful kitchen. There was cherry paper on the wall and a pink fridge. He took a step towards her. She took a step back. He brushed a curl from her forehead. He seemed to be enjoying himself. She tried to regain her composure, and she said in the most business-like tone she could muster, “How do you know so much about kissing?”

And he said, “Practice.”

She swallowed again. She’d never been so aware of her mouth before. She said, “That’s kind of like research, right?”

He nodded.

She realized she was pressed back against the cherry wallpaper. She would meet Joe’s eyes and then look down. She wasn’t used to having any type of chemistry with her subjects, who were generally pretty, well, lethargic. Joe emanated energy. She could feel attraction in waves. She bit her lip, looked out the window at the shimmering blue pond in back of his house, looked back at him.

He was so close to her, smiling at her, and he seemed to be waiting for something. She wondered about the rest of the scientists. Were they poking around Joe’s garden, looking for clues? Were they inspecting his truck? Categorizing the contents of his garage?

She said, “I don’t know how to kiss. I’ve read the papers. I’ve seen the movies…”

“But you’d like to.”

“It’s my job.”

“You’d like to know for other reasons, wouldn’t you?”

She nodded. He said, “Get rid of the rest of them.”

She hurried to the front door and found the compendium of her companions standing in a group looking baffled. One of them said, “Do you think he would agree to be studied if we offered him a t-shirt? Or a key-ring? A beer holder? A styrofoam hand with a finger up? A bumper sticker?” She said, “Go on back to the lab. I have this under control.”

The men looked immediately relieved. They could return to the comfort of their controlled research centers, studying output and entering input and not engaging with actual humans in a non-sterile environment.

But Dr. Flaccid said, “How will you get back?” They were using the solar-paneled hover car.

“I’ll figure it out,” she assured them, and they didn’t hesitate.

Back inside, Rose found Joe waiting for her in the entryway. He took her by the hand and led her to his bedroom. She was trembling all over. She took off her lab coat. She stepped out of her rubber-soled shoes and let down her hair.

Joe sat her on the edge of the bed, and he said, “We’ll go slow.”

“Is that a rule?”

He shook his head. “Nope. But we’ll start like this,” and he lifted one of her hands and kissed her fingertips. She closed her eyes, and then he kissed the inside of her wrist. There were sparkles through her whole body. She felt as if she might faint. She moved closer to him, and he held her in his arms, and he kissed the hollow of her throat, and she moaned softly, surprising herself. She fell back against his pillows, and she opened her eyes and looked at him, and said, “Do we have to go slow?”

And he said, “No…” and then they were kissing. They were kissing like she’d read about in a paperback she’d found discarded once on a park bench. She’d dog-eared the pages, studied every description. Lips to lips, hearts racing, the excitement and the fire. The building to something else, something bigger. She’d kept that book for years until the pages had actually fallen out, and then she’d tucked her favorite pages into her jewelry box.

She and Joe were kissing like that, hard and fast, and then more, his hands in her hair, his hands everywhere. She understood in a way that felt transcendent why studying him would be not only impossible but useless.

Nobody could teach this without doing it. No step-by-step method on YouTube or virtual reality gimmicks could mimic what this felt like. It was magic. And most scientists that she knew didn’t believe in magic.

He cradled her face in his hands and said, “Look at me,” and she did, and they were locked together in a connection that was more powerful than any sensation she’d ever felt before. He said, “So do you want to do that again?”

“Oh, god, yes,” she sighed.

“For research purposes?” he teased, watching as she slowly undid the buttons of her shirt.

“We’ll have to do it a lot,” she said, “to make sure I fully understand all the steps.” And this time, she was the one to kiss him, to press her body to his, to feel as if she might melt into him. Then she moved so that she was astride his body in the bed, and he was on his back, and they were kissing so fiercely that she thought she might pass out from lack of oxygen. She pulled back, panting, and he said, “What are they going to call you now? Dr. Smooch? Dr. Make-Out?”

And she smiled to herself thinking that maybe this was one study that would go unpublished.