Four New Messages

1. Com

_________________

They say in this Industry you need a professional name because then it’s the professional who’s guilty and not you, then the profession is at fault and not you or your parents, your schools or the way you were raised.

This professional name — and no, it can’t be as rudimentary or flippant as “Professional Name”—becomes a sort of armor or shield, speaking in newer terms a version of what this Industry in its more responsible incarnations requires: protection, a prophylactic.

A condom, a condom for a name.

(Or else, consider it like you would an alias for the internet, an avatar that can investigate realms that you with your own name couldn’t. A safer way of being yourself, by being someone else.)

And they say that one not particularly unique way of identifying this unique professional name is: first name the name of your childhood pet and secondly, as surname, the name of the street on which you grew up — in which case I’d be Sparkin West 2nd after my parents’ dog (that shepherd we had for only a year, though I was also something of my doggie’s dog), and a lane that subtly grids the wealthier suburbs of Jersey, where my father sits wrapped in the robe of his disused urban planning degree as the hypochondriacally retired founder of a successful addiction counseling business and from which my mother, trained as an historian, commutes daily to the city to edit the travel and health sections of a trendy magazine for women and men who read like girls.

Which is how I’ve come here or why.

From now on, in accordance with accepted journalistic practice, I will keep myself out of it. Kept distant, alone. He was no journalist but the son of a journalistic mother who in middle age had capitulated to exposés on waxing and superfoods that stop aging — and his assignment so vague as to be birthright.

Grow, change.

He’d heard different things, not from any pros who know but from hearsay, from wasteful reading around the internet, clicking through the links.

He’d heard that his professional name should be, first name the last name of his fifth grade mathematics teacher, de Vaca, last name the first name of his favorite aunt, Diana — and so de Vaca Diana. Or else that he should use the first name of his favorite brand of candy and as last name the full name of his favorite baseball player who played for the Giants until getting enmeshed in a major steroid scandal — Berry Berry Smackers Barry Bonds. That was what he’d do in school. He’d sit with notebooks, filling them with pen, with pencil, with names. Of other people he’d rather be, of other personalities. He’d sit with pen and pencil, gnawing their spans to match the gnarled branches just beyond the window, wet with rain, saliva. Always a thigh warm against the radiator. Then Ms. de Vaca, Mr. Heller (English), Mrs. Rae-Heller (social studies), would draw the shade.

He was a mediocre student, but in order never to work every degree had to be obtained.

College was enrolled on the other coast, expensively intentionally, though it was called a university, despite its being the only institution that accepted him.

It was May and all those not vicious enough to have found an offer to stay seaside went home to their agrestic Midwests, back to Mommy and Daddy, inferior internships, inferable jobs. And he was going back too, he was scrambling to pack the room into the U-Haul rented for the week — pick it up on one coast, drop it off with another franchise on the other.

He’d found a parkingspace too far from his door, down the block. Opposite the dogrun overrun that bright breezy Friday, the benches surrounding filled with profs and students who dressed like profs, standoffish admins lisping infidelities by phone and the hirsute homeless underliners of paperback books — he passed them sweating up and down the three flights from his room to the truck, down the block, each load he carried farther down. Weightlifters in the park, lifting weights, lifting weights, lifting weights in reps, in tight swimsuits, in reps. The busstop crowded with blondness for the beach. Hot and blandly still. Clear. That scape so different from this, so different from here. (But it seems this might be the incorrect approach.)

He laid the carpet down in the back, then the shelves and endtables and wobbly coffeetable and coffeemaker by the kitchen corner, above a low shelf kept always for his pan, his pot, his fork and knife, spatulation. He was drenched, wiping the hair from his face then stooping to lift, with the knees, with the knees, his body carrying the boxes and its boxy self — overdressed in sticky jeans, but all the shorts were packed — in sudden jerks, in spasms. Bicycles swirled around, walkers walked and runners jogged, a tanned xanthous man in the park, lifting weights, lifting. Everyone was light, was weightless, he felt, and only he was sulking, pale and big and bloatish, loading himself down in this lumbering truck — he’d become a mover, a slomover, a driver, a slodriver, he had no plans for what would happen at home or what he’d do with the degree he wasn’t picking up. Media, PR. IT, finance. Generous options, given Mom’s connections. This country should take only four, five days to drive — he and Mom were supposed to have their conversation come Friday next, graduation being that week too, he wasn’t sure which day.

When he was finished clearing the room he sat on the bed wondering if he’d forgotten anything, but he’d only forgotten what he was sitting on — tedious, it couldn’t not be overlooked — Ms. Zimmer’s bed, the saggy loaner.

He scooped through his pockets, the jeans dried rough and hot, felt the truck keys, found the keys to the apartment. He left them on the pillow but didn’t leave a note, no paper — he’d coordinated his departure with Ms. Zimmer’s root canal appointment, giving dumb excuses about slots and fees, the traffic.

It’d been too soft a bed, it’d gone too softly on him, he smoothed it, smoothed the pillow too, he’d never had sex there, he’d stopped even having dreams.

He called his parents to say he was leaving — sure as he was that his mother wasn’t home — left a message:

I’ll be back soon, Dad, nothing special to eat, just make sure to make the sofa up downstairs.

He thought about just sending an email, then thought the better of it: he’d email them later, as reminder, forty-eight hours or so into his crosscountry drive — on a heartland signal wavering like grain in the wind, wavering then true, fixed and true.

What would he say then? what would be the Subject?

The man who invented email — sending messages from one computer to another — never revealed what was said in that first email ever sent. Unlike with the innovators of the telephone, whose testimony we have — unlike with the first man to swagger pithy on the moon.

What did that first email say? why did the inventor never tell us? Probably because that message was obscene. Probably said, “Sveta, lover, I want to fuck your face off!” or, “Daddy, why’d you touch me there?”

This was Illinois.

He’d been up all night so late that it was two nights — so this was Illinois. And had finally slept by dawn and woke by noon, undressed at his computer.

As he stretched a yawn his computer woke too, its screen confirming: he’d bought a ticket for an international flight departing in six hours.

Such are the problems you get giddily into when you have access, the situations brought about by life’s late convenience — how convenient it is to be connected, modern.

His parents’ credit card.

He checked out of the motel — as if his purchase on bliss couldn’t be roomed anymore — found his rental, that cumbrous truck packed fully, got behind the wheel, and drove toward Chicago — he was on the highway, he’d clung to the outskirts.

He left the truck in extended parking — one lot the same as another, or it’s only that he’s misplaced the number, his section, his row — there unburdening himself of his dirty bedding and dirty clothes, the corrugated boxes of incorrigible books, loose Registrar slips and Bursar receipts, the last days of being a student condoms optimistically purchased, bilingual dictionaries overdue, photographs of parents but none of friends, not that he wasn’t into photography but that he had no friends. He had a wallet on his person, that abused credit card.

The check-in clerk asked, No luggage?

He said, No thank you, but the clerk didn’t laugh, a mousy nondescript whose only pleasure was making hassle.

OK, description: her eyes were small and her vest was on too snug (he couldn’t look at other women).

Then he explained, he had a girlfriend where he was going who had everything already: clean boxerbriefs his size, toothbrush and paste, multiflavored flosses — all he needed was his computer, computerbag on his shoulder.

Imagine that truck, then, the back of it.

Open it, scroll up the rear door and what you’ll find is his room, wholly intact, packaged just as it was: carpet sample put down first, then the shelves surfeited with shelfware, the two lamps on the two endtables below the two speakers installed one each to the high rear corners, the interstate miles of stereo wire, even the empty bottles he wanted to keep as proof, the winebottles, the beerbottles — proof of what? 80 proof, 90 proof — he’d hung a couple of frames on the truckwalls for art: one abstract, one not, a print of a celebrated portrait but he always forget of whom (though “a muse,” she had to have been).

Still, he couldn’t have slept there, couldn’t sleep even in the bedroom’s original setting. Not that he’d neglected it, just that it wasn’t his. Ms. Zimmer’s bed, her spare, sitting back on the other coast in an otherwise stripped room, waiting for her sergeant son’s disposal (after court, after a doubleshift policing Venice) — it’d been lying around her basement for years before she’d struggled it upstairs. She’d rented him the apartment, offering the bed only to rob him on utilities. He’d stolen the linens in revenge but then remembered they were his, he’d bought them, white on white. The mattress still pristine, the frame as unsturdy as it was the day he’d put it together again — decrepit, a pall plot missing screws.

Now his last communication, after passing through Security — not that phone message he’d left on his parents’ machine, but the email he sent from this airport halfway across, the tarmac tailgating the plains.

Crosslegged by the gate, he wrote, he typed:

Dear Mom, I’ve gone on assignment. Reserve me space in the spring issue next year.

Dear Dad, Hope your disability case goes well with the Port Authority. I can’t think of a second sentence for you.

Sincerely, David.

He pressed Send.

Your message has been sent.

His message has been sent.

XXX

_________________

He’d wanted a different life, a new life. Which should have been as easy as buying something. As simple as opening a new account. He’d wanted to make a new name for himself and the new password that would access his secrets would be (“preferably some combination of letters and digits”) — no, no passwords. And no different names — no name at all.

Whole afternoons used to be as quiet as that Illinoisan motelroom was by dawn — once upon a time (childhood) whole weeks and even months passed by that satisfied, that ecstatically calmly, drugged on the horizonlessness of time, on his being alone and lazy and too young to know any better, before the days became broken up by access, noised by opportune technologies.

He’d been rockabyeing in a rockingchair, then on the bed, thickly rumpled. On that motel bed big and foreboding, as large as the room and as hard as the floor, a lump of carpet topped with a pillow as sharpcornered as a box. Through the window he saw the parkinglot, the truck, a smudge of moon, a muggy night, the window fogging. The bed was soundlessly elemental, like a boulder or tree grown up from the floor, from the fields, the soildark asphalt. The television could be turned on but no higher or lower than no volume on Channel 3—the remote control was missing.

He plucked an Apple — his. It had been a gift from his parents — for his birthday, for their having oblivioned his birthday — congratulating him on having been graduated from the age of being gifted. Whenever his parents gave him a gift it was so rarely specified what occasion it was for, often one gift would have to suffice for an entire year and then in one month, spring’s, there would be this random, guilty superfluity of presents.

It was insufferable, their worming. His mother had deadlines and the internet (where she’d met her new friend, whose Manhattan condo she’d been staying at most weekends), his father had not having his mother and a phone that followed him everywhere (though only his addicts ever called and he didn’t get out of the fridge much) — this was their remorse. His computer. Peel the screen away from the keys and all the letters glistened. It could spell cultivar and calyx and stamen, it could spell exocarp and endocarp and mesocarp and pome—it could spell spelling and apple, a-p-p-l-e, apple—all while circumscribing the cryptogeography of Eden, vegetarian recipes, porn.

The white box whirred as he began to waste — life the same as battery life, he couldn’t be bothered to plug anything in, he was tired but wouldn’t yet crash.

He had to sap the stress of driving — enough driving the trees and the roads, the rubbaged rumbling shoulders — this screen less boring than a windshield.

How could he even begin to map what was inside his Apple, its pulp contents? its seeds? On top of everything, on the desktop, there’s a folder called Davids documents and in the folder called Davids documents there’s a subfolder called Sophomore_year, which contains in itself subsubfolders called Math and Science and Math_again and Science2 and Language-and-literature-requirements, which contains inside not a folder anymore or folders within folders like a Slavic doll nested one doll within another within another like they’re pregnant already — that’s what happens whenever a user turns his back and leaves them, even toys, alone — but files, files upon files listed and named and the names of these files are Gandhi and Gandhi-one-more-time and Pilgrimsprogress and Pilgrimsprogress-final and, lastly (alphabetically), What activitees I did on my summer vacation, which is a file, no, an essay, no, a paper from as early as fifth grade, which begins: “What activitees I did on my summer vacation was to go with Mom to gazebo. We went sailing and I got ‘severely sunburn,’ the doctor said, then chickenpox also and laid in bed with vanilla ice cream, taking weird smelly baths … The End,” he actually wrote, “The End.”

He sat out on the furthest bough of his Apple — leaned against the cold headboard, plastic, against the cold wall, the wallpaper testing its pattern of bars. He was a file called Him in the folder known as Motel—the motel’s proper name lodged in the throat. Its decor was worse, inconsequent. A mess of burns, of stains — but who hasn’t read motel descriptions before? who hasn’t stayed in motels themselves? Any description would be extracurricular unless he could blaze another way, an alternate route — the green road branching from the red road, the main road always the red road smoldering down south into the black.

Imagine there is a God. Just imagine, you don’t have to all of a sudden believe in anything and cut your scrotum or go bathe your head in rivers. Imagine to yourself that there’s this omniperfect entity looking down upon us all, with eyes, with real anthropomorphic eyes, really looking. Now, imagine He’s doing so from just above this motelroom, which is a rectangle of sorts, it actually looks like a screen — and there is no roof, God has taken the roof off Himself. You can locate our hero in the lower righthand corner. There, he’s a dot. A forgettable pixel, the whim of a bawdy baud. You thought only a splotch of coffee, a sneeze’s stain or semen. But him, picture him. Now, God or the motel’s invisible management, take Your giant finger and place it over him, Your cursor. Place it directly above his face. Directly above and blinking. Click.

He opened a window — not an actual window onto Creationdom, just something we call a window. An opening into a new otherness or alterity, not to make it sound any better than the depressing it was. Though it was good the motel got such good service — he was connected, stably online, for a fee. To be added to his bill. Spending so much money, so much of it not his.

He was tired of unfinishing delinquent assignments, tired of rereading homework done in a rush. He entered into the browser the address, which he wouldn’t store in memory. Instead he’d stored it in his own memory and supplied it every time. Daily, often twice: www., the name of his preferred diversion, com, which stands for “commerce”—he pressed Enter, depressed, also called Return.

This site he frequented on select evenings and weekends and weekday mornings and afternoons loaded new vids daily, that’s how they’d advertised at first, “Tens of New Vids Daily,” then it was “Dozens of New Vids Daily,” and then in flusher times (flush the fraught tissue down the toilet), just “New Vids Daily Cum Check Them Out,” and sometimes he sampled those new vids while at other times he sampled the other vids he’d missed on the days he’d fructified with only one or two of the tens and dozens on offer. An incentive to, as the site’s top teaser banner advised, “Xxxplore.” None too brilliant but comprehensive, the site gave variety, moreover, it was free, he assumed supported by its ads: swinger networks popping here, loading there the freshest fleshlight sextoy (now phthalate-free), longdistance callingcards (Centroamérica).

We wish to communicate how guileless he was — there in that middling motelroom as in his dormer apartment, no expert, no connoisseur. He had experience but no discernment, and anyone who tells you that the more time you spend with something the more particular you get about it has never been stuck in a marriage to his parents, has never grown up a boy with appetites and television: more is only more of more and to invoke subtlety or fuss is merely to show fear in the face of glut — Jersey boys in neon motels are never intimidated, they’re never afraid.

They just drop their pants (he dropped his pants). Stretched the underwear down — there’s no concern for not being prepared, no worry as to whether or not he’s ready. The computer is always ready, the internet’s always open (he’s never been unattracted to himself).

Bound by gridded paper, between panel ceiling and patchy carpet, he was as erect as the walls, as hard as the walls (telling someone how hard you are is to flatter yourself in lieu of claiming girth or length).

We shouldn’t be so crude. Though we’re sure whatever document we’ve opened, still unnamed, still unsaved, we’re sure it won’t be saved. They-say-in-this-Industry. Keystroke, stroke. Drag to trash.

When you’re on that first page or window of the site, when you’re in its Home, you’re faced with a list of vids, and each vid is advertised, in a sense, by a still from the vid, a stilled scene from the moving scene to come — a freezeframe or screengrab, a capture.

If you like the looks of that single, practically measureless moment, you click on it and the still image loads into a moving image — the vid moves, a movie (we can’t justify explaining this here, it just feels like it needs to be said — we’d rather not presume as to the depravity of our audience: Hello, Mom).

A taste is always given first, a still and silent taste, because if everything was sounding and in motion all at once, all the vids, you couldn’t decide which One would gratify desire, you’d become confused, Mom, and the warmth of your breath would become the overheating of anger.

Her screengrab seemed unpromising — he didn’t know why he clicked, maybe because even in the context of amateur porn, theirs, hers, was the most amateurish and he felt for that, not erotically, he felt pity. Even in still silence it came off as wrong, as wrongly incompetent. Fuzzy, unfocused. Angled oddly. The fan whirred to cool the drive, cooed. His mouth was dry, tongue heavy. It was a corner of her mouth then a swatch of smaller penis (onscreen all penises are smaller), a tracery of drool.

The room was dark. Nothing existed outside the spotlight of the screen — bluish, greenish, mucoid, queasily regorging — nothing existed outside the weakly fluctuant cast of its halo.

How could we remember any of the vids before her? how could anyone? She erased them, what deleted them was her apparition, her apparency. Though we might, like the virtual does, lie: we might say it was a big lips blonde that did it for him, or a shy spinnerette with tiny thimbleplug anus, we could say Latina mature with redblue hair and puffy nips for knees, we could say young teen hairlessness, Black Mama, we could fabricate forever …

He was of a generation — no, bad word, bad habits … we’re trying to say that everyone is our age now, even if they’re not. We all grew up with this crap, we didn’t know anything else — like Dad did, who masturbated to paper, to brownpaperwrapped magazines: pages glossy like lips, breasts shot verso, recto displaying recto, the navel that is the centerfold. Magazines not like the ones you work for, Mom — not fair that your son’s father had to be your husband too (though Dad never mentioned sex).

Our generation doesn’t have to hide anything under the bed, to secrete the forbidden in the closet, behind the shoes, behind the socks smelling like semen, the socks smelling like shoes. Instead ours is a practical pornography, with no awkward visits to newsstands or subscriptions to renew — there are no secrets, the entirety is acceptable. The computer sits proudly on the desk in plain day. There to help with the spreadsheets, with directions. We can just press a button and, naked lady. Press another button, another lady, nude. Point, click, penetration, it penetrates, it rewires your brain. You come to expect that all women take it up the pooper, take goop on their faces and into their mouths and, swallowing, that they all do so voluntarily, with nary a complaint in rooms like this one: unlived-in-looking, filthily-linened, plywood-doored.

You—

You are not always a reader, you are occasionally a human. You are, often enough, a human who is not masturbating. There are other things to do with your hands.

Write. Type, type.

Write, I want to be a writer.

Write, I am a writer now.

As a human, ask yourself — would you describe, publicly, losing your virginity? Would you, Mom, freely detail the first time you ever had sex in love or how exactly your husband or boyfriend moans, what they say during sex in the throes, would you tell that to a stranger, would you make report, could you bring yourself to recall and divulge that night you faltered or conceived, that sensation — and here we’re asking Dad now — of being inside someone for the first time bare, unsheathed, how that felt so wet and hotly illicit without protection?

If you know how difficult that is, to describe such feelings and to do so unabashedly, without scruple, then you know how difficult it would be for us to describe this — this vid, her sex in it.

We will not describe it, we cannot — describe her hair, her dense brownblack hair and thickly furred furtive eyebrows of same, the brownblack but also yellowish eyes their flicking lids, sorry, we won’t describe them either. We will not describe her interview — brief because ashamed of accent and, he suspected, a deceiver in her answers — cannot describe her undressing, how slow it was and how methodical her removal of clothing to bare skin like a cashier she was meticulously smoothing one item at a time, folding each garment like a bill at the edge of that fantastic bed we won’t describe that gave such horrid creaks when she threw herself upon it flat and splayed for his ravage, apologies, it sounded like—it sounded like—

We won’t narrate the foreplay, what of it there was, first kiss the last, the same as the last. Won’t detail the oral, cannot in fact put into words the oral eyes that flickered in and out of contact. With him, with the camera. That first push into her, through her, stop. The jointed sighing, sighing. Won’t describe the swirl of breasts like clapping hands, as he — the man — pushed in and out, in and out and in. The two positions requisite then the third — missionary, her atop, reverse cowgirl leveraged canine from behind — the old bed’s collapsing rattle. Couldn’t hear her voice. Couldn’t hear his own. Won’t describe the sound as wrenching, a car crash of woods and metals. Then him, “You like it you like it, what a pussy, say cum for me baby,” and her, “Come for me baby, tastes too big, feels so salty”—two lines shot across the breasts we won’t describe not even one, that dab on her tongue, collected in a dimple of her cheek.

The broken bed widelimbed, a dead huge hairball spider — we won’t describe any of it.

That’s the problem with the screen, you can’t. You’re always one step, but the crucial step, removed.

2. Moc

_________________

Hello my name is Moc and today I have make my first sex on camera. Just for you @ 1stsexoncamera.com

Let’s try that again, he said, just read the card he’s holding.

The card? she asked.

Read it.

Hello my name is Moc and today I make my first sex on camera. Just for you @ first-sexy-on-camera.com

Try it again.

Hello my name is Moc and today I make sex with cameras. Just for you @ first-sexy-cameras.com

Say it com, not cum—do you know what that means?

Hello my name is Moc.

Can you stop? I asked you a question. Cum—don’t you know what that means?

Com?

Yes.

No.

Cum means open your mouth and take what I give you. Cum means open your fucking mouth and take it.

Fuck?

Good. Do you know what the redlight means?

Redlight?

It means fuck. Means fuck till I cum.

Fuck means cum?

Very good.

Money?

How much I say?

You said 5000 much.

That’s what I said?

You said.

3000.

That was their exchange — and, Cut! — unfilmed. But later they’d pretend they’d just met each other, when they began filming, when the redlight lit red.

O fancy pantsing you here, what’s your name, beautiful? do you want to go back to your house and get better—ak-vaynt-ed was their pronunciation?

ON, we’re rolling…

Moc, “the friend,” his pardner holding the camera — having dealt with the lights and mic — holding the cuecards too, because the girls could never be trusted to remember: Say the website’s address at the beginning, repeat it at the end, www., with shotwad slopping from your face.

They were just passing through.

Who are you? the girls would ask him, would ask the pardner, Who is he?

He’d answer, I’m just passing through. Hanging out. Hanging. As if a gunslinger from a Western, a drifting private eye. Doing the circuit, the stations, making passes. The tiny villages off the highway. Little tiny townlets far enough from the capital’s allures. He could’ve been a bonafide desperado, a bonded dick — none of these women, these girls, had met an American before.

Have you ever met an American before?

She shook her head, they shook her head into smoky curls, into corkscrews — Say, No.

And though it was the same script every time, each fall was as unique as its fallen:

In each Location — as they called every town where they porned — the first thing they’d do would be to identify the raggiest regional newspaper, where were sold birds not yet caught and deceased grandmothers’ furniture and preowned cats, the paper most people used to wrap fish in, to wrap trapped Rodentia for placement outdoors and severed limbs too, in the hope of reattachment — their ideal a paper that informed on local gossip while providing annual photos of the mayor in a goofy folkloristic helmet slaying a marionette dragon at Carnivaltime, this being the news most preferred. With papers like that rates were cheap for double columns in inksmudged color and half or even full page spreads, but they always requested something small so as to seem special, unobtrusive — a small box relegated to the crossword’s classifieds, a clue.

He and not his pardner, who’d always ask to place it himself, would place this advertisement and the ad would say: We want girls 18 to 25. Must be nice.

But it said all this in the wrong language, in this language—“the friend” didn’t know the right language, he never would, the language things were in over here. That was the problem that was, at the same time, an asset — that he only knew how to speak what was not spoken too well by must be nice girls 18 to 25.

He was from — I don’t know where he was from — Ohio, where his mother lived, say. He was big, broad and jangly in big fat stretched college sweats, always sweatshirts, always sweatpants (he didn’t like zippers, he didn’t like teeth). A whole wardrobe of that mottled blackswirled collegiate gray — a color that exists nowhere in nature. He was a beerdrinker with a beergut like he’d swallowed a keg but also swollen all around — beerwrists, beerneck, beerknees. Eight countries’ worth of change in his pockets. He wore sandals, never socks.

Strange — I was always hearing about the no socks whenever I asked about his looks — his toes were long, his feet flat, apparently he was bowlegged.

But I’ve heard other things that conflict.

That despite being baggy—“skin like a paperbag,” said one woman who introduced herself on a streetcorner on my first morning abroad, a girl he’d propositioned at a public pool — he was actually a trifle handsome. He was bald, not bald, balding, with black plastic glasses, with bluetinted metal sunglasses in the aviator style. Prescription, nonprescription. Never with a baseballcap, never without one, glasses resting on the brim, no glasses but a single studly earring. Hanging down from the cap a fringe of grayish white hair like an uneven row of incisors grown from the back of his head.

“The friend” always with a toothpick. “The friend” never with a toothpick. The ladies asking, Who is toothpick?

I’ve also invented a lot, for you, for myself.

After his mother remarried — a soybean farmer — he moved in with his ailing father: Sandusky, then a suburb of Indianapolis, and then New York for two years for film school. His father paid tuition, incidentals.

Imagine, two years of incidentals: Central Park swanboating through springtime afternoons into one night stands with women from the same hall, from adjacent dorms, with divorced faculty who’d loan him keys to Harlem — the next mornings the endless circling for an uncrowded bagel brunch, before a mile of museums to trudge, jamming to gentri-fi in Brooklyn, gentri-lo-fi in Queens, buying skank weed in Washington Square.

And his face was said to be a square, though wrung loose, spongy, and he didn’t shave that often, he didn’t have to — he shaved down there more than he ever shaved more north. When it came down to it, he wore no underwear so that his erection poked its hyperactive contour through the sweats. Jingling testicular pockets stuffed with coin. His cut cock was as hairless as a tongue. And had a tongue’s dimensions when flaccid. When it came down to it, “the friend” had only one language fluently — this speech emerging slickly before the punctuating cash.

Whereas his girls had many languages among them: they spoke Slavics like Catholic Polish, irreligious Czech and Slovak, and Hungarian, which is not Slavic, and Orthodox Ukrainian and Russian, which are.

Moc—which was or is her name, whether it’s a pornonym or not I didn’t know then, I couldn’t have — is a word common to all Slavic languages but with multiple meanings and in not two of those languages does it mean the same thing. In Czech, moc means “extremely,” “very,” or “much,” and in Slovak moc means that too, but it also means (I’ve been told, I have no way to gauge for myself) “might,” or “force,” while in Polish moc means something like “might” as well, though I’ve been told it’s more accurately “strength,” or possibly “power.”

How do I look? they’d ask unclothed, disrobed from solo showers, embedded.

Look good? and, Good, “the friend” would answer from atop her, or from behind the camera if he’d let Yury indulge, Moc good.

Men had used guns and fountainpens previously. They shot hot bullets into the mouth of the enemy or wrote vast scrolling poems to denounce their close friends — and this was how a life was destroyed. Several ounces of dun lead in the skull or O your politics are as ideologically corrupt/as an autumn without pears. And only memory would remain until the last remembrancer, he who squeezed the trigger or wrote the rhyme, had perished himself, his memory gone with him — but then they invented the camera and nothing would be forgotten again.

Moc was then — Describe yourself.

Use your fantasy, your imagination — your sister as model if sister you have.

As blackbrown hair with streaks of blonder dye like the markings of an insecure woodland pest runover by a van on a highway also striped like her hair, eyes bluewhite — but raptured with revelry’s conjunctival bloom in the stills he took for his personal album, the tattered scrapbook “the friend” kept in the glovebox, along with the maps, Yury’s ammunition — just a barrette over 5, converted from the metrics she gave, 105.821 lb. the same.

In her purse was an apple, at bottom the tobacco from a broken cigarette like a crushed finger.

And her phone, stored in it the last number she’d dialed or that had dialed her. (“The friend” kept boxes of new phones in the glovebox too — a new number sometimes each village, sometimes each trip.)

Her wiping up with a towel — having dumped the phone and apple from the purse to locate her lighter — was the last shot in her vid. A light for that comminute cig. Or to spark the mortal kindling around her.

But then the lens fluttered its lashes, blinked its cap — and she wasn’t there, she wasn’t only there:

Moc wasn’t at home anymore, Moc was home already.

Whereas “the friend” lived in the capital. An expiscatory expat who’d recently sunk the bulk of his inheritance from his father’s death back in Indiana (diabetes???) into a gorgeous old palace in the old city center. Wainscot for the halls, bespoke boiseries for the rooms, faux chambres set with arched fireplaces like windows — windows to flame, to hell — pastel friezes arched above the doorways depicting either nobles hunting a stag or a stag running away from a band of men intent on pinning it down, forcing it to admit what it really symbolized — Nature, innocence or freedom, art thou Christ?

The stag ran around and around the rooms, above the doors, insouciantly gallivanting mantels, gamboling sills, threatening to shatter the rosette and tulip moldings, the ceramic tiled stove. The parlor areas — there were perhaps three proper parlors plus two possible bedrooms he also referred to as parlors — he’d left flagrantly unfurnished: windy spaces canvassed with renovation’s remnants, plastering arras, blank tapestries of polymer sheeting.

Even the Master Bedroom, the only bedroom occupied, was bereft — just a sleepingbag strewn small on the floor like a leaf fallen from a crude fresco of trees (eastern wall through northern wall continuous). The bathrooms were highly ceilinged — with a stock of mints in each bidet — the hallways long and, since he didn’t use any of the unreconstructed salons they connected to, utterly pointless. Only parquetry buffing the reflections of chandeliers — and of the screens on every surface: in the Master Bed, the Master Bath, suspended above the elevator doors, screens for screening, for televisionwatching and movies, screens for editing, for web support and maintenance, screens for power failures and backups (hooked to a somniloquent standby generator), screens for screens in banks.

The main entrance to all this flaunted an anteroom entirely empty except for a single tabling entity — a mediumsized chest or toppled armoire cluttered with par avion and torn aspirin packets — that he called the piano though it was, in truth, a harpsichord. He never played it but sat on its stool occasionally and when he looked at the stool and saw, instead, a steeringwheel, he knew it was to time to get moving.

He was hardly at this home, however, and so did most of his living, as he did most of his editing — his editable living — in transit. On the road. Always being driven by that swarthy pard with the spray of sesame seeds across his face — potentially a birth condition — and breath that smelled of “pomace” (according to the dictionary of one interviewee — an evenbanged brunette with diacritic zits who contacted your correspondent about a week after he landed in-country — who gave Yury’s name as I˙lgiz I˙rekovich, said he was partially Tatar and the father of her child).

Barreling in that bloodred van (all the interview subjects mentioned that, as red as blood), from borders as illegible as signatures, to checkpoints blurry like their stamps. While idling at a crossing, the joke was: Where’s the separate lane for the Americans? The guards kept the envelopes they were handed, sealed — they didn’t need to be reminded of their lines.

From goatweed town to village, the farther away the better, the better chance at gullibility on the part, and it was a part played, of the girl. Same gist, different oblast. But never getting so far from civilization — twin crowhaired Gypsy subjects stated that Yury had told them — that they’d lose their signals: their phone reception, a dependable internet connection (who were the sources for the rest of this? bartenders and barbouncers and disco DJs, an incompetent candidate for a regional legislature, the owner of a settlement’s only electronics outlet where Yury had bought brake fluid and nine volt batteries once, and, of course, obviously, local girls — girls who’d declined advances, girls with kasha teeth and bellies like pregnant dumplings who swore they’d refused “the friend,” who promised they hadn’t been refused by him—never a girl eventually filmed, never One who’d become a star).

Usually the morning after they’d met at whichever hamlet’s lone bar or wannabe club he’d call her whose number he’d tattooed dramatically along an arm in the midst of frenzied dancing — he’d call early to disorient, waking the girl only to do her the favor of giving her an hour, for her parents to clear out for work, for her to apply razor, makeup, brush (he and Yury slept in the van or, if awake, “the friend” would flip through last night’s polaroids).

They’d arrange an interview as if this were a professional engagement—this was a professional engagement — meeting for creamed coffees at the hamlet’s sole barclub reopened by morning as a canteen serving what can now be confirmed as a light but succulent Frühstück (when “the friend” wanted to persuade through intelligence he’d find the German word).

There he might ask straight out to see some identification. The other conceit was inducement: he might neg and argue and feign incredulity, convincing the girl it was her idea to show it to him — figuring if she’d spread her wallet, she’d spread something else.

It was only when he saw her sum that he solicited (with allowances, reportedly, for girls whose age of consent was within a year or two or three).

After this vetting the appointment might adjourn to the van, its wheels astride the canteen’s curb, where Yury, bleary, would buckle the girl up front and interpret the terms on the dash — explaining, or obscuring, the particulars involved, then guiding her hand to fondle the appropriate releases (“This is a translated contract, it says the same as it does in English,” except it doesn’t).

Though obviously an encounter like this was no guarantee, especially not when compared to an email — the prospects who’d responded to the ad, the pursued pursuing, seeking stigma with alingual typos.

That ad, being untranslated, flattered:

It said, If you can understand this you’re special and deserve to be treated specially, you’re the elect, lucky enough to give us an address and we’ll drive up direct, hump our grip up eighteen flights of stairs to knock on your door (the elevators having been installed out of order) — you’ll open and greet us, you’ll hug us and kiss us, you’ve won us, we’ll ply you with substance in thanks, then strip and fuck you for posterity — with your husbands and fathers and boyfriends out belaboring the docks and hangars, ensconced behind their paleotechnic computer terminals the size of motelrooms, slobby in their pinching jeans and unironic tshirts, too tired to prevent or remedy.

You don’t have to leave your tower, which was an identical copy of the prior tower visited, you don’t have to leave your apartment, which was a perfect clone of the previous “flat”—a number of the females surveyed spoke a studious Anglo-English — you don’t even have to be sober, shouldn’t have to be sober again (the substances provided were vodochka, a nailbite of cocaine). If porn was concrete, these girls were cement — cement being the most important component of concrete, what makes concrete stick, what makes it bind, the rest is just sand, water, and air — without these girls, the porn would never adhere, the screens would go blank, the towers would crumble.

In winter, on a junket to a smaller burg whose snow and ice kept the populace indoors, “the friend” proposed to meet a girl vanside, parking that bloodbright mobile in the square by the townhall and plague column, by the manger and tree, by the monuments to horsebacked wars saddling generations with occupation. He drove the girl to her dacha — which was abandoned for the season — where they dressed a tripod in her clothes for a scarecrow, put a picnic blanket down and thawed the garden.

Another winter another dacha, but this dacha used yearround since the family had been evicted from their permanent residence for nonpayment. The girl’s deaf or blind or both deaf and blind grandmother was exiled to the kitchen, while Mama — laid off from her banktelling shift, home from selling knitwear in the market — joined in her horny self — no need to look at her ID.

However, all prospectives were made aware: if there were ever any parental or supervisory issues that rendered filming in their cinderblock villa or cottage not feasible, or just undesirable, “the friend” was prepared to relocate to virtually any area cemetery, junkyard, or gully and fuck in the back bay of the sanguineous van — amid the hubby spare tires and jutting jack, the encompassing external drives and menagerie of woofers and tweeters — with always newly purchased, still in its shrink plastic bedding rolled down: latex beneath her, latex inside.

They’d make do with the van instead of renting a room or putting up at a pension — but was this because the accommodations available were so horrible (the bedbugs scuffling, hatched from the sconces)? or because when a room was cheap, its trouble was free? As policy, shakedown money, to neighborhood operators or the mafiavory, never was paid. Yury kept a gun in his pants, the uncircumcised coming more naturally than feminine circumspection. This amateurishness, a voluble amateurishness, was their aesthetic, all of theirs.

And finally — after the rubber was removed to unleash another manner of voluble across a girl’s eyebrows — there’d be an outro Q & A, postmortem.

How much did you like it?

I liked it moc! very much!

Last session, “the friend” had mislaid the cards, and a vibrating pouch of dildos and lube, and so here he’d had to improvise — with bottoms ripped from pizzaboxes scrawled across with marker:

“My name is YOUR NAME. Today I had my first sex on camera.”

Say it, he said, waving the cardboard spotted with cheesegobs and grease.

My name is YOUR NAME, today I — but this peroxidized little sister of a girl he’d had the previous Easter was interrupted by a drip in her eye.

Just for you @, “the friend” prompted, and the sister, who’d been sororally recommended, repeated.

Say, Goodbye.

That day might have seen this girl’s first sex on camera, but not on film — nobody used film. Rather they used a format more indestructible, yet even more evanescent — Digital. “The friend’s” digit dangled at its largest size, glabrousized. Then shrank at sixty frames per second.

After the redlight was no light, was dead light, it was his turn in the shower. He toweled his cock dry, put it to sleep in the cinch of a drawstring.

Yury was packed.

By the time our peroxider had gathered her halter and mini and arose — she’d ascended — upon her pleather stilettos, “the friend” had seeped through his pants.

So was she still named Natasha? or was she Molly [from] Darabani, as she was posted last week? or was she Poly [sic] Sofia, as the commentariat corrected? but what about this Obsessa O’dessa—is it me, or did I take ballet class with her?

Anyway, her name was never Natasha—she’d given “the friend” the name of a friend.

In their vignette, “the friend” called himself Greg.

Now Natasha did it for the rush, Molly out of desperation, and Poly liked the cash — but what about the girl who bore them all, gravid with their shame?

She did it for the hope.

These women lived in hope, they lived for the future as if they were every one of them already characters in a movie that projected well beyond one orgasm’s duration — a movie of constant orgasm being constantly filmed: a wishful collectivist biopic accumulating footage — incessantly accumulating reels and gigabytes of footage — for all that dirty work of editing into coherence and happy endings somewhere years from now and countries away.

They lived as the aspiring stars of the movies of their own lives, which themselves contained the movies of others (much as nuclear reactors contain their cores):

Like the Innocent boy from around the block movie about an Innocent boy from around the block who begins driving a better sportscar and sporting better muscles, crucified in a black leather jacket, hung with gold chains (though he sold heroin substitute, though it was said he sold women — look how motivated he is, look how rich—Innokenti, I remember when we both were just kids).

Like the movie about the defense contractor billionaire who’d financed a production of his own out in northeastern Randomstan, but without even filming it, with epic thousands of extras but no cameras or crew: it’d been a Passion play, one night only staged on the steppe, ever since being nearly hazed to death as an Air Force mechanic he’d wanted to experience that many people taking orders from him — the one about the former bricklayer turned gas refinery tycoon who, to repent for having inflicted Orthodox baptism on his ten year old stepdaughter (and to mortar his relationship with her mother, a lingerie importer), had bought the girl her own television broadcast: she’d babble to the world about her friends, boys, school, and sport for an hour each night at eleven — the port concessions magnate who’d financed a judge’s vanity recording of Liszt — the financial services mogul who’d commissioned a mural of his transgender mistress/master for a flank of his bank — the politician who’d hired a Muscovite screenwriter to ghostwrite a book exposing the corruption of his, the screenwriter’s, uncle, a Navy embezzler who’d sunk submarines: the nephew took the work, he was broke.

This was an ambitious time and the girls knew their movies — they knew those had by hearsay or passed down the bulvar as well as they knew those of their siblings and intimates — they traded their stakes and plot points and narrative arcs — they quoted from them until they couldn’t separate the quotes from their own conversation — they repeated and repeated them, you couldn’t avoid them, you can’t avoid summary — they even ambitiously invented them to reinvent themselves:

A man thrashed his wife whose head spurted oil — another billion, trillion — googillionaire. A man from the next town over, it was said, always just the next town, battered the gut of his pregnant wife and their son was born fluent in C++ and Chinese. Soon he had women at his door lining three deep, begging him to go to work on their issue. Then yet another nouveau oligarch who’d kickstarted his fortune marketing fire extinguishers throughout the Baltics or Balkans, parlaying that lode into funding lucrative eCommerce interests — it was said (apparently, it even made international headlines), he intended to launch a blue whale into space and was designing a shuttle whose fuselage would be equipped with a seawater tank. Once safely in orbit, the tank’s hatch would open, releasing the water and whale to float dead forever in blackness — our earth a bruise the size of its eye …

But the most successful of these movies, the widest cited, it seemed — whenever a teacher assigned the composition theme of Hope, whenever any of the girls skipped their composition tutorials to hitchhike to the gorge for a swim only because they were young with plombir skin and fit and ruthless and happened to spot speeding from the opposite cardinality a vehicle as red as (some of these epithets were used, others are fictitious) “the Soviet flag,” “a fire siren,” “the covers of the Russian passport,” “menarche”—was this, was the story of “Mary Mor.”

Which is also the story of the unpopular Hollywood film Sleepwaker V, dir. Edison Lips, 1998.

Sleepwaker V is the most famous but also only film of this “Mary Mor,” who does not star in it with her name shining pointedly above the title, but plays Hotty #3, whose total screentime is ≤ forty-five seconds.

“Hotty Mor” as she was called — with the accents of these tellings a binomial classification perhaps best transliterated as Chotty Mor or Khoti Mor—was a success story to trump all success stories, her movie widely heard of but seldom seen — it became more potent the longer it went unviewed, as if an ineffable dictator.

She was a model of what every girl wanted — not just an actress, was she a model too?

Her recent naturalization by the United States government revealed her to be Toyta Dzhakhmadkalova — and this attempted journalism, this inept investigative reporting, is dedicated to her.

She was born atop a tiny speck of static blown just outside Vedeno, Vedensky District, Chechnya, a mudspot like a mortifying stain on the dress of the land. Must be laundered, must be treadwashed by tanks. Russian was not her native language, she had no dialogue, she was frequently silent. Her home, an apartment complex hastily built to gird Vedeno’s outskirts, has been almost totally destroyed. It was, by the time of her leaving, that proverbial heap of concrete surrounded by field the color of a suicidebombed circus and the miry consistency of mad tigress dung. The following things, things being weaknesses, made her cry: faded wallpaper in a scythe pattern similar to what they had in the kitchen of her family’s apartment (but every family had similar wallpaper), last cigarettes not shared, dying ficus placed by unsunned windows (in apartments where none of the windows were sunned), cold tea — and now, for the uninitiated, the briefest of history lessons: border skirmishes by separatist guerrillas vs. Russians, Russian army incursions, hilariously vituperative decades of on again off again conflict you might’ve caught on television or not.

It has not been recorded — how Toyta found her way to Grozny (lit. terrible), capital of the Chechen Republic, following the First Chechen War. Perhaps she was there visiting a relative close or distant, the aunt of her aunt she called aunt too, the wife of a father’s friend from hydroelectric engineering school she called Peacock — because of the woman’s plumage, the feather she tied to her braid — but privately. Supposed to meet her at the bus terminal. Never knew which three o’clock train. Nor is it known how Toyta was supposed to have supported herself. Whether she cooked for monks or did laundry for a nearby madrassa, whether she cleaned floors for whatever government offices were left or washed windows in what official residences in the diplomatic quarter hadn’t been razed. What retails as fact is that one night in an impromptu Grozny discotheque (formerly a dairy) she met a Russian soldier — cleancut, tightbodied, tightclothed in uniform plus mufti sneakers — who managed through bribing a general it must have been to bring her back to the site of his patriarchate: 180 kilometers outside Moscow and then, for a weekend, to Moscow Herself, neighborhood Ostankino, where a comrade soldier also discharged had an uncle who commanded a balcony over Zvyozdny (but the uncle spent whole months what was characterized as consulting in Crimea).

We will pause here to allow you to recite your PIN numbers to yourself.

By Saturday Night 1996, she’d escaped a Ciscaucasian death. Toyta would become, if the girls who’d tell this story were aware of the concept, Immortal—which Slavic languages too tend to render in the negative, as if it were regrettable: “never-dying,” “never-ending.” At a bar in Moscow she left her solider for a visiting American, a roving producer of pornographic movies.

This reporter was told that though the bar’s ambiance blarneyed Irish, its name was very much of its place and time, ambitious, nearly excessively utopian: The Brothel Under the Sign of the Dice with Three Faces, Where Lesbians Drink Free on Sundays, Male Homosexuals Eat Free Every Second Monday, Where Behind One of the Toilet Tanks Is Said to be Hidden a Jew’s Treasure, and the Rook’s Nest in the Garderobe Has Been Formed from the World’s Longest Lime Twig That if Ever Unraveled into Its Original Curvature Would Spell Out the Word Typewriter … (but I think here I might’ve been toyed with).

You ask, you might, how could an American who respects women and gives them jobs with equal wages and higher ed degrees and diligently keeps his paws off them — how could he ever expect with his solicitousness and always asking and nerves to take a woman away from a Russian soldier? from an officer — we’ve just promoted him — an officer with holstered sidearm, this major in Czarish bluegreens the color of a Romanov’s blood? To answer that, however, you’d have to think bigger than masculinity, bigger than the sexpower of violence, of war. It should be understood that the American in the sideways porkpie hat still dangling its pricetag was no mere gap year visitor or sex tourist but an approximate Russian himself (such is the nature of the American problem: who are you? whose are you?), an émigré who’d come to the United States in 1984 or thereabouts via Israel and was here returned to Moscow — though he was born in St. Petersburg, or Leningrad, and had never been to Moscow before — recruiting talent or the eligibly cheap.

After Toyta had filmed a luxuriously uxorious — read: unremunerated — scene in his room in the starriest hotel in Moscow (don’t believe it but this is what he almost certainly had her believe: with marble baths, marble sinks, marble floors, with beds as rare and expensive as arabescato and just as uncomfortable to stay the night in), this hyphenated-American, this Russian-Israeli-Floridian — Iosif, Yossele, let’s call him Joe, regular Joe — procured for her a legitimate work visa #H1B and flew her to Los Angeles, whose airport bears the acronym LAX.

Los Angeles, despite belonging to dreams, also belongs to America. This means that Toyta’s life was set, her survival assured by Marines. Here she could become someone named Tanya and this Tanya Someone could become a success. The rest, the dénouement as it’s said in film, the finale, is scarcely as important.

In LA, Toyta/Tanya became Tina Toy, then, because she was once mercilessly lashed with the word “tiny” by a wheelchaired dominatrix in a Thai noodlerie’s ladies’ room, “your waist is soooo tiny!”—Tanya/Tina at the mirror slurping up the word in an endlessly looping waist of tiny tiny tiny—she became Tiny Toy, until a reputable casting agent she met at an audition for a low budget, character driven thriller told her she’d had her typed from name alone as black, not white and foreign — and so she became Mary Moor, who became Mary Mor (both at the suggestion of a Brit cameraman with bum knees who’d tried to date her), because in porn, which genre it seemed she’d be condemned to forever, there was already an established Mary More, another tanned to public transport upholstery texture girl with platinized tresses once notorious for the development of her kegels but now on her way out who, due to unspecified viruses — definitely herpes, allegedly hepatitides — could perform by industry decree only when protected, with the man maintaining on his erection a condom.

Toyta, for her part, was never infected with the worst of the diseases you could contract in America — doubt — she was positively immune to fear and doubt and so was incapable of being anything but fun, firm, and objectively reckless (not even that monthly test could scare her: the butch boss nurse, the kit’s prick, a fink of blood to clog the vial — while waiting, she counted, the results always arriving punctually, by thirty).

It was on the set of a pornographic movie whose title has not survived and whose content has since like a failed family been broken up into short few minute clips all over the internet and there, meaning everywhere, aggregated under myriad descriptors and tags (the disparate keywords: Teen — Interracial, Anal, Trib, POV, Mary Mor), that she met a porno actor who — due to his 12 fame, the presumed prowess that went along with it, along with a concomitant legend regarding the size of the loads he routinely “unloaded”—was asked to play weekly poker with legitimate Hollywood television and film actors who only minced and otherwise faked the act of sex for much more money than was paid the people, just as attractive, who had sex really.

One Sunday during a game of Texas hold ’em, he (“Neo” of the prickly cactus muscles and tribal tatts, his head to toe entirely depilated) raved to his host’s brother inlaw — this producer/director Edison — about his costar Mary — superhott—recommending her as a miscellaneous Eastern girl/stripper/prostitutka who might even be able to negotiate small speaking roles, ten words or less, tiny.

A boa slithered down a chairback. Edison’s inlaw, an awardwinning screenwriter with an intellectual reputation, entirely intolerant of the career of his wife’s kitschmacher brother, weekly invited the owner of a prominent Animal Handling company to play because the man, who worked only for topflight productions — dogs only for the best children’s dogmovies, his lizards and apes regularly preferred over computer effects no matter how perfected — brought the snakes. A month before, and he could’ve lost his license for this, he’d brought a baby lion. “Leo” prowled around the balmy house, was soon forgotten and lost, only later did they find it stuck in the dryer.

The Animal Handler said this Sunday:

Them women from over there are gorgeous. But I don’t know they worth the trouble.

He proceeded to tell the story of a friend and onetime employee (a janitor, a hoser) who had, he said, Ordered one of them from one of them services online — they sent her off and she ruined him, took every fucking follicle.

(The boa was coiled safely in a donut box.)

No fault divorce, he said, no shit, wasn’t no time for fault. Four years in this country and the cunt was entitled to half.

Edison, shockhaired, sensitively chinned — before he produced he’d inherited his father’s storage facilities throughout LA, he’d joke on first dates that he’d inherited emptiness—told Neo to tell Toyta to come by the studio next Friday and — Hotty #3 was born. A minuscule part, a negligible role (Neo’s bluff was called by a rash of queens, he’d left down $2K to Edison).

The film was the fifth in a series, a franchise — the fifth sequel, the pentaquel perhaps — but who recalled what the first four had been about, what’d happened in them when and where, who’d lived or died while making adolescent love on a rope bridge restive above a torrid ravine in Ventura steep enough to roll the credits down, there was no sense before there was no continuity …

… The old man, lupine, spry, and hairy, wiped down the bar and continued his story:

Unfortunately our Hotty’s only line was cut, for being unintelligible. A tragedy — her words.

He paused, drank some sort of murky plumwater, took puffs on a short handrolled stub.

But then somebody uploaded that scene to the internet, he said, where to this day you can find it.

He turned behind the bar to wind the clock.

Business was changing, he said.

Movies where you sat in the dark with a hundred people groping one another gave way to television where you sat in the dark by yourself. Then the internet came around, cords became cordless, wires became wireless, suddenly entertainment was free and everyone’s an amateur — amateurs at being themselves — because only celebrities are lucky enough to get paid just for being. Buy a camera, convince your bestlooking kinsfolk, upload, and Play — no more packaging, no more distribution where the smut’s hauled out to the far bazaars among the bahns. This was democracy, this was enfranchisement, all that other sluttery you sold us — CocafuckingCola, shiny motorcycles parked between the legs of our mothers.

The bartender’s eyes were elder, rheumy, his mouth disfigured, raggedly burnt and rimmed with moles like a castellated ashtray, like the hoops and arches of a crown. He snuffed his rollie, cleared the ashtray behind the bar.

His nose was a sharply tuned muzzle, was a hatchet. He was wolfish, vicious.

He said, Toyta returned to doing porn after her serious stint — she was savvy. She founded her own singlefee, multipass network — a dozen sites, a dozen girls, independents under her personal curation. An entrepreneura — that and not any implanted measurements is why her story is still told.

(I’m certainly polishing his English. Through the flit of whiskers he was facile but incorrect and interspersed locutions in French, in German, Italian — I’ve also filled in details and — no, you’ll decide.)

It’s said that the neighbor of her Grozny aunt had a daughter who was sold via Ukrainians to an au pairship in the West. My own—Grossnichte, Grossnichte—grandnieces, yes, grandnieces ended as Gulf commodities, whored to the oily emirates, the sheikh sex dens of Dubai—

XXX

_________________

He — I—sat listening to this story, to the script of this tale and to others. Dizzied by the dates and locales, the vertiginous names — what linguæ!

He sat on a stool at the bar and let this wizened bartender give him an education — this tender who’d taught himself the idiom by studying a UK travelguide “to Swiss.” He had a cigarette and a drink, unidentifiable, he was learning how to smoke and how to drink, he’d been abroad for a month already but was not going back, he felt as if he’d graduated from even himself, that he was a new person now waiting only to receive the new skin to prove it — signed by no one, signifying nothing.

In the vid, behind Moc’s head, a calendar had hung. The image on the page for the month of May showed a bouquet of blossoming trees — birch?/dogwood?/willow? — in front of the castle he’d stood in front of that morning (apparently, it was a renowned castle, though arduous to find — tired afterward he’d wandered into this bar at random, it had about it the rogue air of foreignness, of youth).

He’d had reprinted — at a kiosk in a webcafé huddled between a shashlik stand and a kvassarium — a stack of that screengrab, which froze mild May above Moc chastely clothed, or in that interim declothing phase (it was the only frame that satisfied all criteria): just her face and, regrettably, perhaps the top cleave of her breasts. He’d been asking around for weeks: Is this setting in any way familiar? do you recognize the girl or just last month? He’d handed one to this proprietor’s hispid paw not an hour before — this proprietor who called himself Publicov and was closer to being an upright verbose lupus than anything human.

How do I know you’re not another filmmaker? Publicov asked. Or maybe this Moc owes you money and you want to do worse things to her than what is done for the pleasuring of cameras?

He said to Publicov, You have to believe me — I was sent by her family in America.

Now she has family in America? The barwolf sucked his lips, fanged stiff the hair around them.

Cousins — I’m Moc’s cousin from Jersey.

Roland Jersey — what did you say you were called?

Orlando, he said, Orlando Kirsch (first name the city his mother was born in, last name that of his father’s orthodontist).

Publicov said, I don’t know what I’m looking at, and lit another rollie.

Izvinitye, turning away from the smoke to busy with the bottles — containments undusted, displayed like women tall and smooth and without protuberance, ranks of uncomplicated women, easier to uncork, easier to pour.

But Publicov hadn’t returned the printout, it lay like a rag sopping up the bar — the same printout posted that morning all over the ornate ironwork gates surrounding the calendared castle, on grave crucifixes in the dim midden yards of ruined churches, across the graffitied walls of gnomish humpy bunkers and imperious towers — glued and taped and stickered and tacked and nailed.

He asked Publicov, Please keep an eye out for her, telling him he was staying at a certain “Hotel Romantical,” where he’d also left the desk clerk, an obliging pink boy of approximately his age, with a sheaf.

There was no text on this primitive poster save an address for an email account he’d opened the night of his arrival: meetingmoc@moc.com — the new address of his newest domain, $5/month in perpetuity it cost, and his bank, his parents’ account at the bank, was scheduled to make the payment on the first of the month, the first of every month, and to do so indefinitely or until his parents’ funds were depleted, which meant this empty website—We’re Under Construction, We’re Still Under Construction—and its full inbox of tipsters’ emails might outlive him.

Publicov, finished prepping for lunch’s rush, turned to him and said as if in afterthought, And you might not want to try asking the police.

He said, So I won’t.

We’ll drink to that, and Publicov poured himself a glass, then refilled his, both to their brims. Together they clinked, took down the warm shots colored like a bruise. Publicov’s glass hit a tooth, a slimy cuspid, which fell out and soaked in the dregs, a lonely rottenfaced fang. The bar was beginning to fill with customers, with noon, and Publicov must have been distracted. The drink tasted like the colors of the walls, like the turpentine that would remove that black. That spore, accreted grime.

The windows were open, the door, like a wing, aflutter. The crowd, on surrounding stools, in chairs at wheeltop tables, was vocal, was warming — they were sweating what they had drunk. Bluish ghosts wisped from their lungs but above him hovered only a miniature white cloud and he did not suspect his cigarette brand, he suspected himself, his soul (and hungered for a waitress — he wondered why there wasn’t one around).

In a high nook, nested amid a thatching of cables, a television was playing sport — which sport he didn’t recognize, he was too impaired. It wasn’t darts — because that was being played against the door with a kitchen knife — nor was it a game exclusively of running or jumping. The rules, assuming there were any, involved a ball round like a spot but spotted itself, impregnated with a rambunctious demon, it hopped and skipped and jumped around as a team of perhaps fifty grown men had to run and avoid it, because it wanted to hit them and kill them, and the men could run but they could run only in the confines of the stadium, and the stadium, as the volume was lowered throughout the afternoon, got smaller and quieter until it was just a silent spit of light and he was alone with Publicov, who handed him his bill.

Dusk was just beginning, in the bar it was almost too dark to read — anyway the napkin had too many numbers.

He might have been drunk but still hadn’t imbibed that much and said so and Publicov, offended, said, But it is only an address, maybe it will help.

Thank you, Publicov.

He thought, this book — this will be a book — is hereby respectfully dedicated to you.

He walked through the dusk to clear the head, to sober. Give himself time to decide whether to walk or be taken by what’d take him. The wind blew harshly, exhaled from the debauched cherubs’ cheeks of the arcades. Lampposts lofted lamps that were out but the posts themselves were justification enough, drastic lancing efflorescences, metal trees set starkly against the grayscale of the sky. He decided on a taxi but couldn’t find a taxi, could find no tram either, no tramstop though there were tracks over which to stumble, no buses or huffy marshrutky despite the poles that served as stops where he’d plastered over the timetables with posters of his Moc. Each cobble felt like a hill he had to ascend, a mountain, between them deep smutted river valleys filled with 50 ml nipbottles filled with the messages of wet butts. Pedestrians, mere bundles of cloths and threads and yarns, baskets with pasty arms and legs protruding and, from the tops, heads swollen like kerchiefed treats, passed him in the street, their very lives averted. Setts and pavingblocks gave way to a prospekt expansive enough for the parade of tanks and trucks in convoy, pulsing traffic away from the asbestine heart installed at the horizon — this city’s entire historical centrum, intended only for the necrophiles and thanatos tourists, giving way to asphalt, the fancy fachwerk and gingerbread facades faded, even that fairy castle smogged, the leanings of centuries collapsed into piles of wood and stone until only boxes remained.

As if cardboard boxes, crates for the packing, stacked into towers, these hundreds or thousands of modular units making of the suburbs a boundless concatervation — as if the world had surrendered its rolling fields and city streets and instead cast itself up, straight up, as if the three dimensions of our experience had been upended, to two — as if he were headed toward not an address but a setting, a set …

How to explain such a scene to Sunday brunch readers at home? How to situate you — how to acquaint you but only with words?

Your correspondent did not know, your apprentice artist had not an inkle, how to describe the towering above him. Think not of livingspace, of cozy homes in distant faubourgs and kieze, but of officeparks, think of malls. Risen tiers and superseding levels of commerce, of store. But not stores as you might be used to them.

Where offices and shops should have been were domiciles, were private apartments — though from the outside, approaching the pathwork from the windblown street, they provided anything but privacy. They were glassed, they were entirely glassed floor to ceiling and any visitor could see in. He could look in where an accountancy should be and there was a family arguing at supper. Observe where managers should reign and surveil a grandfather at stool. Hello, grandfather! How are you feeling? how commoted are your bowels this evening?

A building cubicled, celled, seen — its exterior lit from within into a screen. The lobby door was locked, a smashed metal door loosely locked. He twisted the knob and pulled, pulled. He checked the address again and the address was correct, unless a disgruntled resident had reaudited some numerals. Someone would leave, he was certain, he didn’t know why he was certain — so vitrined, everyone appeared exhausted, appeared asleep.

He waited but no one came. He leaned against the jamb and, though he didn’t know which unit he was looking for, tempted the buzzers, which were anyway unlabeled. He buzzed one and then another and yet another, but they were not buzzers. They didn’t buzz an apartment with a familiar tone so that the party buzzed would be alerted that he was outside downstairs waiting for the door to open — instead they were eavesdroppers, they were monitors. When he pressed one he heard, through the fixture’s grill, a baby’s tin crying, when he pushed a second he overheard gerocomically gluttonous breath, fingering still a third, it was ragged sex, while from others was speakered indistinct talking, murmuration and scold, snoring, a lot of snoring and even silence, but needless to say only the silence baffled — perhaps that apartment was vacant or its buzzer, broken — and he didn’t comprehend any conversation.

Moc — if she was in residence — which foursquare screen above him was her gleaming? which button would give him access to her sighs? In his hand, Publicov’s napkin was streaking, had smirched — never having noted which floor was hers, it was presently expressive of even less: just a clot of phlegm, a florid spew. He considered hurling it like a rock at a pane — then went scrounging for a more stolid embodiment under a precise hedgerow welded to the ground — but there were no rocks and there was a redundance of panes. He threw the paper and away it flew. The swingset had no swings. The slide was a ladder up. The weather was as oppressively changeless as the consecution of the development’s paths.

The door clicked and out staggered a group of intimidating children, overgrown children. Their youths were stuffed like sausages into the casings of overalls, in the fashion of gastarbeiters, their faces were slabs of borodinbread swabbed with butter, their noses whole potatoes and ears, the toothpicked rinds, their fingers livid burns as from carelessness with methpipes. They stared at him, spoke cacophonic codes and then — nudging one of their race forward, a manboy with crusty, distended lips, trollishly stunted — inquisitioned:

Does David ever make it back home—or, Ever go home do David? or, Did home ever David make go? and though through the measured, mechanical accent he understood the words because they were in his language, he didn’t know what they meant until, a breath, he realized they referred not to him, rather to an American television show he’d never watched but had heard of — a hysterical serial, he thought, impossible not to have heard of (though it’d been over for a season, its antics supplanted), as he told this insistent, scarcarved, tough as warts horde:

Yes, David goes back home to marry Samara from college — though his father dies or is kidnapped for ransom, but only after his mother’s investment firm fails or is arsoned, I hesitate to say which, and no — he said in answer to the youngest trollnik stroking his leg — no, I don’t know what happened to your sister!

They lured him into the tower talking as if talk would be enough to resist them — them grasping at every scrap, at jeanpocket and jacketflap, at the frayed bills filched from his pockets and at coins — down a hallway suffused with noxious stench: fuming nettles, as if in the production of a remedy for this hallucination in progress.

The back of the tower was not, like its frontage, glassed, but concrete poured floors above a courtyard. Only the front’s sheer veneer was new.

It was a courtyard strung across with links for laundry — light frilly cirri of negligee and peignoir, lowhanging nimbi of thong and garter — filled with receptacles and trash. And he was tossed like a bag of trash himself — thrown atop the bags, rolled over their blackly bodied putrescence, needle shards of mirror, a slough of diapered spoiled lard — tumbling into another hall, to his knees at the threshold of an opposite tower.

The boys emerged from behind — having slipped past the dumpsters at the yard’s periphery — dragged him to his feet, to an entryway as dark as fur.

Just inside, seated in a chair with a singular daintiness, was a bear. A bear distinctly untaxidermical. It was a crossdressing bear, if animals can be said to be transvestite, if creatures have enough gender identity to make their wearing of the opposite sex’s human clothing something approaching a meaningful statement, any statement at all. A pince-nezed male shebear in a windsocklooking bonnet speckled with sunflowers, above skirts of billowing hospitalgowns patched with flag, the vex of a nation he could not place. The entirety had been cashiered from a fable, discharged from a land of porridgecomplexioned dwarves (his youthful escort, assembling protectively around).

The mamabear gestured him to a chair of his own, of a similar make: a fussy interiorism high of haunch, tiny of limb — as if not a perch but perched itself, upon fluted legs, the feet with chiseled toenails, with claws — upholstered in pelage, in uncomfortable quills that rustled with every shift and he shifted, he couldn’t force himself to keep still. Between the chairs was a table as swarmed as the sexagenary square of a chessboard, draped with a drab spiderweb lace doily, set with a corroded samovar fixtured with a bulb, its stray filament illuminating two saucers, two companion cups. A battered phrasebook’s pages folded down. Not a phrasebook but his passport, atop his wallet, blueblack both. And the keys to a faraway home tenanted, it must’ve been, by faraway and worried parents.

It was the dusty sittingroom of a pensioner with no children or none who visited regularly, only the relict thievelets who, kissing their mamabear’s jeweled paw, raised that dust in the rowdy muster of departure. They shut the door behind them — that door set flush with the shadows — spun its lock, as if adjusting a radio, or as a vault is sealed — suddenly, it was as if he wasn’t sitting in a room anymore but amid night itself.

He felt tickling, below it all — but how had he not noticed — a rug of bearskin.

His host growled in response to this inspection, said, Publicov’s no liar — he said he’d never met anyone who wants a girl like you do.

So what type do you want, my dear? of what species, my dearest? I have every model in stock.

Slav slave or Central Asian combination? vagina where the anus is or anus where the vagina is? there’s nothing we don’t do: oral exclusive, mutual masturbation, S&M, gruppengrope, frottage.

I want one, he said, her name is Moc.

Roleplay then?

No role, Moc.

No doubt we have her too — with this, the bear madame growled a woman from out of the fuscation: a big brutish wench with a figure like a log her employer could hibernate inside, who looped her wildweed hair and pouted lechy her smacked black lip, where she had a sore.

That’s not her.

Of course it’s her — the newest version. You won’t recognize the difference.

I want Moc.

You would.

The woman’s giant trunking mass dulled abruptly into furniment again: secretaire, escritoire — into nothing that refined, just a handleless lunk of domesticated linden. Where you’d keep a will you’d like to lose.

And I want immortality, said Madame bear, but I can’t have it — I want to own a helicopter and a yacht and a gym franchise, I want to downsize half my staff and fix the lottery in Kyiv — but who can live from wishes?

Who?

Having held every other bodypart, his hands could hold his hands.

Madame bear sniffed, said, OK, so you’re searching for this Moc — I’ll tell you what, I’ll help you, I’ll tell you how to find Her.

And from now on, dearest Reader, it’s too late to doubt—

There is, the bear said, a place.

Then it covered itself with a shawl, tugged from a puddle in its lap — the fringe of that rug of bearskin, omnivorously soiled, full of thistle.

It was deeper night and eurous gusts found the spaces between words to fill them with their chill.

This isn’t a story, David, this is a place (and here another creature’s prose is indiscriminately enhanced: the bear’s original locutions being even more melodramatic, more foreboding, stalled by tedious epistolaries) — but it is Far far away, it is dangerously enchanted.

The bear paused to siphon tea for two from the samovar looming like a fervid moon above them. Lighting his wallet, lighting his keys.

The brew was black and ropy, with a hint of citrus, of bergamot, then, he sipped again — it was still too hot — this taste unplaced, hot and dull but rublesucking sour.

He put his cup back on the saucer, placed the saucer atop his passport for a coaster: his passport picture, he felt, already out of date — it was mortifying and he hoped the bear wouldn’t ask to examine it, wouldn’t comment.

Or it both exists and doesn’t exist, the bear went on, I myself don’t know how it manages that, but you will.

My lovely, my darling.

Though when you’d know is precisely when you’d no longer be able to tell me.

It’s distant, David, I can tell you that, then once there, go higher.

Go high atop a mountain, a hill that’s been fortified, a walled settlement walled deep in the past.

At least you’d think it was centuries ago — all that mud, that woodstirred mud. Before electricity even — this is important — before all that current that connects the world like lines of latitude, reception like lines of longitude, the equator of constant signal.

The houses look that old too, they look ancient, they’re falling down, their foundations rotted stumps, sinking, sunk, their roofs are thatched and leaking weather.

There in the center of town, because it is a town, there in the center of the center as if the hub where all the wheelspokes meet, is a square, and in the center of that square is a well and if you gaze and gaze and gaze into that well late at midnight you will see, it’s said, your own reflection — this is because there’s a measure of water at the bottom — what else would you expect to see down there, tell me?

But.

(The bear tugged tight its holeworn shawl — that thorny fluff indistinguishable from its fur — then crossed one leg over another like a popular child psychologist, and this struck him as faintly ridiculous: one claw resting on a claw of the chair — the bear was smaller than he’d thought, it didn’t reach the floor.)

But the inhabitants of this town — they are why it’s so special, David, Orlando, friendly Greg — whatever you wish to be called.

Cinching its socky bonnet, the bear’s ears skewed out the sides: mangled ears, one lively, the other limp, like the rushing minute and lagged hour hands of a clock.

When a girl like Moc decides to shed her coy lycras and molt her cloying denims to engage in sexual intercourse on camera, that’s when it happens — that’s when the, shall we say, “funniness” happens.

(Please forgive my language — when you recall in your own words how I’ve told this tale to you tonight I hope you’ll have me speaking better.)

This is a special change I refer to, a sort of conversion. After they’re shot, if you’ll follow my explanation, after these girls are shot, they cease to exist.

Rather I’m speaking of an existence that’s not an existence — after these girls are filmed doing what it is they do, they no longer belong to themselves but to the world, as they’re no longer merely physical but image too, they are everywhere, they are everyone’s.

Where do they exist then, ask yourself, if they do?

In themselves, in their own skin, or as imagined — as unimagined — on the screen in your lap?

They become women/nonwomen — having been used, having been overused, and so weakened, weak, there’s a grain and a haze to them, a sapping depletion (indeed, everyone’s fate is the same and is sordid).

Not anymore pure people of skeletonized flesh, yet also not purely data transmission of image and sound, they dwell instead in the middle — limboed, in an interim stage — abiding a gaplife as something between.

At best as an essence of what they once were — half theirs and half yours now: David’s, Orlando’s, gregarious Gregory and Yury’s — shut into this secret repository, into this archive they live in, a cache of the senselessly undead.

For steadiness he sipped at his now tepid bitter tea, keeping his eyes on the rude snout of his ursal host, on the ear that kept twitchily ticking.

Your Moc — the bear producing a rumpelskin paper from a slit in its parachute housedress, the printout showing the Missing caged on a page, caged in a screen, depicting the Wanted at the very beginning of mid-act — your Moc is not as she was, but she is still herself.

She has already entered that other realm, that porousness beyond borders, that Freedom …

The bear crumpled a corner of the printout in its paw, dipped it in its own tea (untouched), began eating it wet. Those eyes nailing themselves into his. As drops of the drink smeared its fur, matting the fur that was just then wrapping around him, he who couldn’t help but stare — at that lewd dewy snout, that lurid ear tick, the sharpened nails of those eyes — couldn’t help but close his own now, he was exhausted, he was softly enfolded, he apologized, mumbling, he hadn’t properly slept in over a month …

XXX

_________________

(notes for a videographer)

He wakes in the forest. It is dark and it is thick, with green and brown like the swirl of a clogged toilet. Wastepaper hanging from the trees, lots of trees. Sweaty profferings of verd as if not grown but enlusted, bouquets of let loose bush. Pubescent stalks sprung up between pawprints, deep but shallowly filled, like wells with toes, with talons, their moisture stagnant, a dankness pervades, the stalks decompose. Evidence of uprootings. Trees big and wet — when did it rain? up on their roots exposed like rusted struts, like scaffold. Hills just ahead like steppingstones to hills, like stones topped with walls of trees, with a sky of trees screening out the sun. (I’m doing my best here. This would all sound so much better in an original.)

Af yge enneb inle mezre ygu … it feels “like being inside wood” (as if I’d been spellbound, trapped, imprisoned within a tree, then axed). He’s bruised all over his body, bruises brackish in color like his skin’s a passport cover, or as if his insides have been stamped with the splotch of poisonous berries — apparitions smeared across his stomach, faces null like navels. Everything hurts, his ribs hurt. His arms and legs feel shorter, he feels smaller, like a boy, younger than a boy. Wondering, wondering — what miracle decoction was that? what potion that stranger bruin conked me out with?

He’s cold, wearing less clothes than he had been. Less a jacket, there’s nothing returned to his pockets, there’s no wallet, no return tix or pass. No oily key hard alongside his hardness, his wakingtime erection. An eye is swollen, a lip bleeds, he feels like he’s broken a bone in his cheek. In his throat. He is thirsty — he goes.

The trickle is from a nearby stream whose water could not be anything but fresh, flowing, as even he’s aware, from uphill even sweeter.

He follows, follows the stream’s sharp dark carving of the hill, pausing only to wash himself and sip at a knotted pond, continuing.

This compulsion to ignore the fakeries and secondlives, for the origin, the source — he wants not the trickled down, he wants the wellspring only.

He trails through the woods, along the weedy banks in squeaking sneakers. The grain grades steeply, while the pits he has to avoid on his way are not wells to other worlds but the wet sucking prints of the outsize dogs that roam here. The big shaggy shepherding monstrosities he could ride atop — they prowl patrol around the summit’s settlement, chaining the moat, the wall’s circumsomnia.

Now he is hot, being so close to the sun — a lamp brought close by an invisible hand from above, swiftknuckled, silent. The summit rising only to flatten toward a desk, a desktop. And somewhere farfaraway — the sound of pages being turned or the clicking of keys — a chair unreclining, brought closer, closer.

Each of his bruises pulsates, pounds, giving off heat of its own, like he has circuits secreted inside, like overwork has ruined them.

The dogs he recognizes, just then, he recognizes as Sparkins — a litter of them, more, litters’ clones of the one he’d had to be named after, nicknamed after, that one disastrous year before his parents were forced to sell it, or maybe, he’d suspected, put it down, because Dad in his couched craziness got allergic. But Sparkins a bit larger than the Sparkin he’d had, quite a bit larger, even from a distance. Enormous lumbering Sparkins trundling their guard, stepping over stumps, stepping through trunkhoarded piles of leafy cereal flakes, flecked with crystals of sugar, of salt. Blown piles up to the moat, then on the moat’s other marge up to the fortress wall, blown spoons and bowls and the smothering plastic that bagged them — as if cumulus that’d been slammed by the wind into the trees and wall, becoming stilled, dispersed, disincarnated.

This city, being walled, is inherently attractive — not just in the artificial picturesque sense. When you are not wanted in, you want in, but maybe making you want in is the sense of a wall, its purpose. Where you are not needed you run to make yourself, you must, indispensable. He comes unheard and unseen, but perhaps the Sparkins are used to him already. Unheard because of their enlarged dogtags jingling in stride, jingling like bells. Unseen because he sneaks his way low and nimble. Toward the bridge’s access, the bridge over the moat. The moat heaped with gray and creamcolored boxes. With monitors and drives, modems and printers — all the elements of an obsolete technology, too useless to be recycled as another’s access and so, their discard to hazard a fall: no water but a bog of coaxial cables in barbed coils, sharded screens of bridgelike wires, their innards exposed to spears and spikes, gutted lengths unwound to a murderous serration.

No foreigner storming invasion but a hero lost from a bedtime telling of immemorial nights, wandered from a page: he stands as if a pixel, a lone pix fixed at the drawbridge’s lip — a drawbridge, a moat, each flattened, flat, smooth the page, Reload.

To enter through the portcullis withdrawing, through its portal … (this is where I write from now — Dear Mom, cc: The End — I must have fainted).

I wake in a square, undressed but tended. My bruising beginning to subside. And in its stead, a glow fanning through me, as if the opening rose of health, as if vigor.

The town is a setting of lithic streets and alleys, the houses themselves logged of dilapidated wood — but lived in, not neglected, textured.

Nobody is around — no presences I sense directly — but I feel, I prickle as I feel — these floatings, these passings.

A brush of hair or a gusting sway, as if the skirt of the wind blowing by me, blushing up my cheeks. A skin’s prick to horripilate the wrist, a nail’s graze or a lovemark left by teeth. As I begin — this is how I begin — gradually, after days, a week, to see.

Everywhere — as if enclosed, as if my life’s been flattened up against the seething surface of my eye — everywhere I look soon there are women, there are girls.

I see them, by seeing through them. Their beings projected onto every surface, on every ceiling and floor and sky, projecting across every window and alley’s curve, across and as every doorway’s gracious waist — the walls, visible through them in wrinkle crack and cellulite chip, in spall and score and peeling paint, temporarily aging them in their revenance. But then they float again, they pass again — eidola of posturing plank, with glints of screwy smiles — their youth preserved only in their motion.

Girls throughout alight and nude, or not nude but purified, thoroughly pristinated as I proceed — through the statics of climate — to recognize: Natashka one and another from that vid with the Cuban I think and yet another from a schoolyard seduction and still another from the bucked back of a moving truck and a girl I recall her name too, I think Masha, Sasha, Svetlana (trans. luminance) — and they are themselves but aren’t, as they were both onscreen and you have to guess in life itself, but not.

You can speak to them but there’s no indication, Mom, that they can hear you and certainly they can’t speak to me, Mom, not yet — if they did then in what language?

You go to touch and you touch right through them. Snug a breast and end up feeling up a boulder, flick a lip and end rubbing tongue against a sill.

They just hover, Mom, amongst their daily tasks — gathering water they won’t drink, steaming suppers they cannot eat, but I can.

I am sustained, they take good care, don’t worry.

I’ve even stopped asking after Moc.

I’m sure, one day, I’ll notice her appearance. As a shadow’s missing features. As faced light thrown across a wall that is not home’s.

Your message has been sent.

My message has been sent.