Jordan’s greatest fear was that she wasn’t a great artist. That the bright flame of artistic passion she felt burning in her breast was actually only heartburn from all the coffee she drank.
At the beginning of this story, Jordan was sitting in her attic studio, bent over her drawing easel with chalk smudged across her forehead and oil paint spattered on her arms. She was surrounded by paint cans, piles of raw lumber and stacks of drywall because her crumbling Victorian house was in the throes of remodeling.
Jordan was drawing and muttering to herself about Jamie Leigh Curtis and Activa commercials when a remote control car careened around a corner, balancing on only two wheels. It flipped over twice and miraculously ended up on all four wheels. It sped off again, hitting maximum speed within a few feet and popped a wheelie without slowing down. It hit a bump, skyrocketed in the air, performed a slow-motion somersault and landed upright in just enough time to crash into a wall.
Mr. Pip jumped to his feet and shrieked. He arched his back. His tail went rigid. He bared his fangs and hissed. The little remote control car backed up, slowly turned to face Mr. Pip and accelerated. The cat screeched and leapt onto the drawing table, knocking over a glass of iced tea.
Jordan jumped to her feet as the tea splashed all over her lap. “Dammit!” She grabbed the nearest book, a dog-eared, yellowed paperback copy of Moby Dick, and threw it at the speeding car. She had not been reading Moby Dick. But she had tried to read it several times over the years. She had even gotten so far as the chapter on A Bosom Friend, but couldn't make it any further. Not one to give up though, Jordan kept the book on her to-read pile right next to her easel on top of the copy of Catch-22 that she couldn't get through either.
So, Jordan threw Moby Dick at the car but only succeeded in taking out another hunk of crumbling drywall. In the space of three seconds, the car had attacked the cat and the cat had attacked the tea and the tea had attacked Jordan's lap and now Jordan was attacking the car.
Jordan yelled, “Edison! I'm trying to work up here!”
Sorry!” Edison yelled to Jordan. “I’m trying to fix it!”
Meet Edison Burnett. Edison was short and rather plain looking, but not without her charms. As the French are wont to say, she had a certain je ne sais quoi. Edison tried to overshadow her plainness by dressing and behaving oddly. She was under the mistaken impression that the stranger she was, the more people would love her - like how people with lousy comic timing think that the louder they say the punch line the funnier it is.
Edison was Jordan's ex-lover and still-roommate. Actually, classifying her as an ex-lover would be overstating the case. Edison and Jordan had only had sex once and Jordan didn't remember much about it as they had spent the evening sampling what was left in her grandmother’s abundant wine cellar. Despite the wine and the drunken sex, Jordan and Edison remained best friends.
At this point in the story, Edison was sitting in her bedroom, two floors below Jordan's attic studio. She sat in a rolling office chair in the middle of her dark laboratory wearing a pair of sunglasses that weren't really sunglasses. They only looked like the type of mirrored sunglasses that cops always wore in the movies. They were actually monitor screens. Edison held a remote control in her hands and was moving the little joystick in tiny circles with her thumb. Edison had invented a remote control that you could control from a distance of up to one mile. By installing a teeny tiny camera on the front of the remote control car, she could see from the car's point of view on the monitor in her sunglasses.
Edison had invented dozens of things. All of which were abject failures with the exception of sex toys. Edison was quite well-known in lesbian circles as the mother of sex toys. She thought this invention may be her best one to date. And if she could just fix the glitch that made the camera see things in reverse--left was right, right was left and sometimes up was down and vice versa - then she could patent her invention. Edison was ironing out the bugs on the long-distance remote on the car. If she could master the car, then she was going to up the ante and use it on a vibrator by connecting the glasses to the fiber optic network to the gadget itself. She could then market the item to long-distance couples. That way a lesbian could sit in her hotel in Paris and make love to her partner in Omaha.
Though, as Jordan so eloquently pointed out, “Why the hell would a lesbian in Paris want to hole up in a hotel room to have weird long-distance sex through a camera when there's all those sexy French girls who are notoriously bisexual?”
Edison believed in her idea, though. She thought it was a breakthrough in the adult toys market and one that would put her on the map right next to Steve Jobs. That is, if Steve Jobs didn't work with computers and instead worked with women's personal massagers shaped like the male organ.