Smoke And Mirrors

Virus

This was written for David Barrett's Digital Dreams, a computer fiction anthology. I don't play many computer games anymore. When I did, I noticed they tended to take up areas of my head. Blocks fell or little men ran and jumped behind my eyelids as I went to sleep. Mostly I'd lose, even when playing with my mind. This came from that.

This story was commissioned by Penthouse for their twentieth-anniversary issue, January 1985. For the previous couple of years I'd been surviving as a young journalist on the streets of London by interviewing celebrities for Penthouse and Knave, two English "skin" magazines-tamer by far than their American equivalents; it was an education, all things considered.

I asked a model once if she felt she was being exploited. "Me?" she said. Her name was Marie. "I'm getting well paid for it, love. And it beats working the night shift in a Bradford biscuit factory. But I'll tell you who's being exploited. All those blokes who buy it. Wanking over me every month. They're being exploited." I think this story began with that conversation.

I was satisfied with this story when I wrote it: It was the first fiction I had written that sounded in any way like me and that didn't read like me doing someone else. I was edging toward a style. To research the story I sat in the Penthouse U.K. Docklands offices and thumbed through twenty years' worth of bound magazines. In the first Penthouse was my friend Dean Smith. Dean did makeup for Knave, and, it turned out, she'd been the very first Penthouse Pet of the Year in 1965. I stole the 1965 Charlotte blurb directly from Dean's blurb, "Resurgent individualist" and all. The last I heard, Penthouse was hunting for Dean for their twenty-fifth-anniversary celebrations. She'd dropped out of sight. It was in all the newspapers.

It occurred to me, while I was looking at two decades of Penthouses, that Penthouse and magazines like it had absolutely nothing to do with women and absolutely everything to do with photographs of women. And that was the other place the story began.