1. The problem is physics.

2. As my performance reviews indicate, I exceed proficiency in hygiene, punctuality, theoretical modeling, and inconspicuous ambiance. My problem is physics: Newton, the apple, light bending through prisms into rainbows and whatnot. And vibration. Amplitude, frequency, acceleration. I should have known better. My mother enrolled me in a retro hip-hop dance class when I was a girl believing I was destined for the Star Search reboot with animatronic Ed McMahon, but the dance instructor said fat white girls don’t have the rhythm to do the Roger Rabbit. It’s a fact.

3. You are a daughter of Eve, the intercom voice tells me during morning prayers, the first oscillator.

4. But am I? Most days I feel like Schrödinger’s tuning fork.

5. I could blame the heartstopper. Or as I described it in my recent self-eval, the one that got me demoted back down to the thirty-first floor, the Anomalous Metaphysical Experience.

6. Listen. I’m not one of these people who wants to see the metaphysical. I like to keep the physics in my life of the less than meta sort. True, I used to visit Las Vegas twice a year—for the buffets, not the nightlife, except maybe the Wayne Newton hologram which happens to be the closest thing we have to heaven—but otherwise I am not a phantasmagoric kind of girl who enjoys malfeasance. I am twenty-nine, Sagittarius, unvaccinated, and still a virgin. I prefer the anomalies in my life to be good feasance.

7. I live in the Institute. Downtown next to the temple. It’s shaped like a beehive. Each floor a tapering spiral stacked on the previous with hundreds of honeycombed cells full of apprentices like me studying to be jump humpers.

8. Proof No. 9: I will remember there is soaking and there is jump humping and see that all things be done in wisdom and order.

9. It was my boyfriend who taught me about soaking. It’s the most Mormon thing imaginable. A man and a woman in flagrante delicto. Only the key inserted into the lock without turning. The key perfectly still, soaking. 

10. A loophole in God’s fornication policy.

11. My boyfriend invented it. I never learned his name. Only that he was tired of being like every other particle in the universe, passing through town on his way to places unknown. The earth is spinning a thousand miles per hour and even now, he said pointing to the stars, endless heavens are folding up like a scroll and worlds without end are fading into a cosmic smear.

12. Let’s be still, he said.

13. We got nude as scallops in the motel. While he soaked inside me he told me things. Inside the atom is the electron, the proton, the neutron, my boyfriend said. Inside those are quarks and muons. Inside those are neutrinos. The ghost particles. Inside ghosts are tiny strings that vibrate endlessly. 

14. It’s ghosts all the way down, he said.

15. It was our second date. He proposed an hour later. It was beautiful.

16. Proof No. 3: I will begin all jump humping with a prayer.

17. There are soakers in my bed. Specialty simulation mannequins so we can perfect our jump humping techniques. Less dolls than animatronic puppets. Very lifelike and full of the appropriate fluids to simulate real bodies. 

18. Every room in the Institute is equipped with two mannequins. I don’t tell them they’re mannequins, of course. I call them Adam and Eve.

19. Adam will make various grunts and sighs and wheezings when properly stimulated. Eve has flexible limbs, no voice box. Maybe she was manufactured this way, or it’s an assembly defect, or perhaps an accident like when I was on the fourteenth floor and jump humped too zealously. The Adam short-circuited, catching the Eve on fire. 

20. I watched them burn. 

21. That was my first demotion. REFRACTION, the performance evaluation said in bright red letters.

22. This place used to be Utah. Now we’ve rebranded. Deseret Nation, the flag says. Where soaking is the only permissible marriage sacrament and the science of jump humping will save us.

23. Proof No. 11: I am only an oscillator, not the primum movens. 

24. I perform anywhere between ten to five hundred jump humping simulations per day. Every morning I wake up and find Adam and Eve soaking in one of the Church-approved fourteen positions. Missionary, flatiron, reverse cowgirl, Butter Churner, Sphinx, Snow Angel, Crooked Spoon, etc. My job is to shake the bed in such a way to bring them to climax without the two of them ever moving voluntarily. They soak, I jump hump. This is the system.

25. I have sixty seconds between sessions. Rest. Recuperate. Repeat. I keep my eye on the clock.

26. We are human vibrators. Batteries not included.

27. Adam is not what I expected. Neanderthal forehead, bearded, slim, a wonky eyelid that flutters when I jump hump as if he’s winking, and generously endowed, albeit hooked, like a donkey. It detaches. The handbook says this is abnormal, but Adam doesn’t seem to mind. 

28. Sometimes I use it to scratch my back. You know that spot? The one right under the shoulder blade that always hurts but is impossible to reach?

29. Eve’s eyes are glued shut.

30. Proof No. 71: I will abstain from worldly lusts, transforming my garden into a beehive for the Lord.

31. When Adam first came apart, I thought I’d broken him. Scrolled up inside his detachable were instructions for his appropriate care and use: Lonely white male more lovable than E.T. looking for mentally-stable, disease-free quiet woman who speaks in tongues to share long walks on the beach. Must be equal parts undiluted love and charm with a generous heaping of honesty. Must be modest in dress and spirit and averse to heavy petting or other unwholesome recreations. Must love flea markets and lunar libations. Must love fruit.

32. There are no instructions for Eve.

33. Which means she doesn’t know anything about being a woman. How you must spend your day playing games and winning tickets like at the arcade, but when you get to the trade-in counter all the prizes are cheap plastic trinkets that fall apart after two seconds.

34. Sometimes after a simulation I’ll hold up Eve’s face to my own in the mirror. Our hair is cut almost the same and were it not for the cigarette burn scars on my thighs like old arabesque wallpaper, and that her garden which is much better pruned than mine, I might forget which of us is real and which of us is synthetic. Luckily, her foot is stamped: MADE IN INDONESIA. 

35. God is kind and gentle and loving, I tell Eve, but he’s just a small thing in the chaos of the universe. Look around. This is the best he could do.

36. The Mormons say one day we too can be gods with a world of our own. But I think we’re already gods. Dressed up in these human skin costumes trying to remember what it’s like to feel.

37. And then my sixty seconds are over, and it’s back to the problem of physics.

38. Proof No. 17: I will remain blindfolded during all simulations, for when we are blind then we can see.

39. I teach Eve lots of words. Witch, Madonna, crone, maiden, mystic, midwife, harlot, huntress, spinster, priestess. Most girls only get one of these words, I tell her, unless you learn how to babayaga them. A word after a word after a word makes a soul. 

40. I don’t have many words to explain the Anomalous Metaphysical Experience.

41. We were on a shift break when my boyfriend said, Let me cook you a Big H triple-chili-cheeseburger with the special sauce, and then I knew he was one of them. The Three Nephites. That old Mormon legend of the spiritual gurus who wander the earth like those Scottish highlanders who are friends with Sean Connery.

42. But how can you be sure an indigenous Israeli-Mormon convert from the Yucatan, alive these last two thousand years and fixing flat tires for stranded motorists up and down I-15 to prepare for Christ’s second coming, is working as a short order cook at the Big H? And how do you know he will teach you the true order of intercourse? 

43. Six-five, mocha skin, hair like Bon Jovi, and a Peter Pan tattoo on his forearm. I’d recognize the Lord’s disciples anywhere.

44. Besides, only ancient Mormon prophets have beards like that.

45. They call it a heartstopper, I said, licking the chili off my fingers, that ever happen to you? It won’t be your heart that stops, he said. I wanted to ask what that meant, but then he winked and said, You ever hear of soaking?

46. Proof No. 4: I will jump hump for Jesus, not pleasure. In His name will I oscillate the population back from the brink of extinction. 

47. When I informed my bishop about the Anomalous Metaphysical Experience, he had me write a detailed complaint—confession, he called it—and assured me it would make its way up the Church chain-of-command. The next thing I knew I was at the Institute surrounded by physics with an itch I couldn’t scratch.

48. Proof No. 5: I will not deviate from my instruction, for obedience is the first law of heaven.

49. The body is a temple, the intercom voice reminds us every evening. But really it is an attic crawlspace full of somebody else’s ghosts. The future is in squatting.

50. Proof No. 31: I will be paid in blessings, the exchange rate to be determined post-Rapture.

51. It could be I’m delusional. I have trouble sleeping. I used to count sheep but now I rehearse my proofs. There are ninety-five in the handbook, one revealed on every floor of the Institute.

52. I am making my own handbook. Recorded one whisper at a time into Eve’s circuits in sixty second intervals. 

53. I used to believe that one day I’d graduate and be rented out from one family to another, jump humping our Deseret Nation back from population collapse. But now I know I’ll never leave the Institute. But Eve might. Back to the garden for reprogramming. 

54. I wish I could see the look on their faces when they dissect her motherboard and find the malware that is me.

55. Don’t forget to bite that apple, I whisper in her animatronic ear. Sink your teeth into it first so your daughters will know the new physics.

56. Other times I’ll look out my window and try to count all the soakers in this desert. Thousands of them right now, everyone connected by stillness. So still they’re not even sure they’re alive.

57. Proof No. 10: I will neither shake nor tremble nor jiggle nor wobble nor gyrate nor quiver the bed. I will move it with the faith of a mustard seed.

58. Once when I couldn’t sleep, I put the Adam in the closet and spooned with Eve. I told her about the time I won the tickets at the arcade playing the Whack-a-Worm. The one with the mechanical worm that pops out of the hole and if you smack it with the mallet it glows. 

59. They looked like the tongue worms the goats used to get on the farm when I was a girl. We’d find the goats out in the fields all hollowed out inside. The worms had magic tongues, my daddy used to say, given to them by God. They were always swallowing, burrowing labyrinthine tunnels through liver and lungs and brains until there was nothing left. 

60. The day I won all the tickets the game malfunctioned. The worms popped up but never went back down into the hole. I tried to break them, but the more I clubbed the brighter they glowed.

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Ryan Habermeyer is the author of the short fiction collections Salt Folk (Cornerstone, 2024) and The Science of Lost Futures (BoA, 2018). His stories and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from Conjunctions, Alaska Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, Massachusetts Review, Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, Wigleaf, and others. He is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Salisbury University. Find him at ryanhabermeyer.com