Four New Messages (16 page)

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.