By no means was that the archangel's only screw-up. Michael was renowned for screw-ups. But his other major gaffe, which the heavenly host oohed and aahed and tut-tutted over for eternities afterward (though God proved kinder), came when he unleashed, by mischance, the Orgasm Fairy upon the world.

Before the ninth of February 1964, no lovers had ever truly had a simultaneous orgasm, which is to say, one in which amorous jet-fuel propels them at precisely the same moment along precisely the same giddy arc of glee. Michael, you see, had been given the crucial task of assuring unaligned orgasms, since God knew what would happen if two human beings ever experienced such a conjunction. So, around the clock, God's spy into the world's bedrooms tracked copulators (and those who, either through cross-genital stroking, or through mutual masturbation and the visual stimulation it brings, likewise approached synchronous derailments) to ensure that, if only by a hair's breadth, the sexual surge came upon them asynchronously.

For centuries, Michael's sneeze built.

His nostrils tingled as he knocked out of phase the oral bespurtments of Burr and Hamilton weeks before the lovers' quarrel which history--swallowing Hamilton's spin with as much zeal as Burr his sperm--ever after passed off as political in nature.

Michael's right index finger hitched to his upper lip even as its tip flicked toward Toklas and Stein, putting a hair fracture in what would otherwise have been a perfect union. No matter. The pink roses of their twinned mouths and vulvas bloomed with sufficient ooze and pucker that, by any measure, there was plenty of there there.