The Venus Fix

Twenty

Dearest,

I miss you the most at night. Sometimes missing you is a

soft ache, but tonight it is like sharp spikes pushed into every joint of my body. Except now I have a goal that keeps me going-knowing that I am doing what has to be done. All five of them will be punished by your birthday. Sixteen days left. Sixteen. Sweet sixteen days. That allows me no room for mistakes, which is why I have to be invisible everywhere I go, in everything I do, even while I’m on the Internet. Invisible me. Visible women. Too visible. Too visible with all of themselves. There were other terrors, other weaknesses, other gross abuses and influences before the Internet, I know there was porn in magazines and X-rated movies and live theaters where women stripped down and danced naked while men sat behind glass walls in little booths and jerked off to prostitutes who cost money.

But these women are not limited to time and place: they fly, they spread their wings and more than their wings, and they are in front of ten thousand, twenty thousand, fifty thousand eyes at once, in living rooms and bedrooms and offices, all at the same time, talking, seducing, acting out, safe with their distance and yet dangerous with their reality.

Sometimes I sit in front of your computer and watch them and try to figure out exactly what it is about these others, these women, that makes them so addictive. I sit at your desk, fingers on the keys of your computer, and try to understand, and eventually the effort leads me back to you.

I miss you and I love you. How could you ever wonder about that? You. You. All I had and all that mattered-that ever mattered-was you. Did I tell you that? Did I tell you that I recorded Penny getting sick but have not watched it again? I don’t have the nerve. I have watched enough of her on that screen, playing with herself, the pain kicking in, taking her by surprise. Taking her by surprise the way you took me by surprise, and with pain that kicked in and kicks in. That is why she lost her place in her crude sex play, why she was naked and her body glistened with the perspiration that dripped down her neck like tears, down her breasts and her stomach until it reached her pubic hair, where it disappeared, why she was dizzy and her eyes couldn’t focus. She didn’t even know what to do to help herself by the time she doubled over and her skin had turned chalk white. Her nipples were erect and they stayed erect, by the way, the whole time she was sick, so that it even seemed like the drug had turned her on.

After it was over, I sat there for a long time and felt as if everything that separates us had disappeared and we were together again. Only then, only when she was dying, did I feel alive and know that you know that I love you, and that I am proving it-that Penny died for our love and so will the next woman. This I do for you.