Four New Messages (17 page)

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.