Four New Messages (19 page)

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 Mor
e,
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—super
hott
—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: [email protected]—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.