by Dino Parenti
You push past black, muslin drapes that stink of old prop-plane diesel and emerge into a large, barrel-vaulted volume where seven gorgeous women on a dais are hooked up to saddled vibrators, the controls of which run through remotes issued to every spectator. Each woman is miked to a specific auto-tuned note in the musical scale, and when the vibration is increased in a specific saddle, the corresponding woman squeals her respective tone.
Depending on whom the crowd sets off and for how long, entire warbled phrases and melodies carom organically off the grand concrete chamber.
If a saturnalia could be interpreted via Gregorian chant, this would be the result.
This rattles your world like never before, and as a memento, Roxy procures for you a CD of the night’s final symphony.
Cabbing back to downtown afterwards, you marvel at what she’s seen and done compared to your thirty-eight-years, and she gazes back girlish reverence through vibrant blues, confirming your status as the diversion of her dreams—a title neither her lawyer husband nor your professor wife can ever achieve.
What the website you found each other on promised for the low, low price of $19.99 a month.
Later at the Ritz-Carlton, with the CD spinning and your thumbs boring twin funnels into her comet-tail tramp-stamp, she glances back over her shoulder and asks between slams if you’ve ever heard of teledildonics.
Before Roxy, you thought electricity only approached sexy with black-lights and bras dangling from lampshades in your UCR dorm-room.
Then she introduces you to Jupiter and Juno: the Roman gods of remote vibrator technology.
Synthetic, portable deities of foam latex and circuitry, Jupiter breaches the girl, Juno engulfs the boy. And as with any god, distance is rendered moot. Now with just a simple phone call, you can launch your lover into orbit with a downloaded app and a minor pelvic thrust. Through a plastic-encased silicone-rubber sheath named Juno, your hump gets translated through the cloud, whereupon receivers in Jupiter’s phallic business-end consecrate her holiest of holies in the form of purred blessings.
Before Roxy, you thought Bluetooth was only useful for avoiding traffic tickets.
Then she shows you a new way to die good.
After the smoke clears and your eyes stop throbbing, you observe the collateral damage across a California-king: the snarled bedding between her still-shuddering legs, your near-drained phone battery, your nacreous purge inscribing atolls on the jute runner between your feet.
Before Roxy, you were sheltered from the lures and perils of escalation.
Then, before you can even clean up, she asks if you’d mind getting her a kale-and-couscous salad from the Whole Foods on Sepulveda.
Oh, and could you take Juno with you.
Stalled on the 405 rush in the shadow of the Getty museum twenty minutes later, you get a text. See me, it says. You pull her up on your tablet, and she’s still on the rumpled hotel bed, fingers splaying her sex to reintroduce Jupiter.
Join with Juno, she rasps, and you swell with pride at your ability to remain inconspicuous in lane-two as you unbuckle yourself under your bulbous belly and slip her on with one hand, this while the unawares twin girls in the SUV ahead of you stick out their tongues and play peek-a-boo. But you’re good at this. Puberty made you a weapon, honing your inelegance by arming you in the clandestine arts.
Roxy starts gyrating, and Juno hums awake in your lap. Only then do you notice the phone in her hand, the newfangled ecstasy pooling in her eyes, and her ultimate fancy has finally revealed itself, her trigger of triggers: watching you watching her through a screen.
Her blood-orange bob-cut rages an oversaturated scarlet on the tablet as she amplifies Juno’s power by scrubbing her crotch with cat-nipped vigor against a rough braiding of pima cotton sheets. Bottom lip crunched between glistening incisors, her umpteenth petit mort looms rapidly. Soon your hips rise to meet hers in the heavens, hands white-knuckled on the wheel, sweat snaking hot through your bleached-platinum hair plugs, and amidst a four-way of Electra, Nova, Eos and Caprice, both your mind and your skivvies are blown for all time.
Before Roxy, you thought that one quickie you and your newly-wedded wife shared in a truck at a USC tailgate party made you versed in voyeurism.
Then she takes you back to that Long Beach hangar one year to the day after that first show.
At the black drapes that still waft dead plane fumes before the main show-space, she asks you to wait five minutes before following her through.
When you finally whip them aside, some stranger is there to hand you a remote control.
This is because Roxy’s now straddled atop vibrating saddle number-four. The D-note in the center.
Like that first time, it’s a packed house. Unlike before, you’re the only one in control. Unbeknownst to all in attendance, their remotes have been rendered inert. Her special gift to you.
With an encouraging wink from Roxy, you begin to craft your own opus.
Amidst confused murmurs from the audience, her soaring, solo moans are soon pumping feedback through her microphone, jolting all hands in the room into covering ears while yours remain trembling at your navel.
And the protests begin.
My chick ain’t buzzing, man, one man says.
What about the other girls? another asks.
We didn’t pay good money to watch your grandma get off, one yells, and soon, they’re all yelling.
But Roxy’s your headliner. Your diva. Your Victorian era prostitute’s great grand-daughter. Your role-mate.
Thirty-three years your senior, and an order-of-magnitude zestier than the bored, glassy-eyed nubiles that bookend her.
The moment soon approaches, and those around you give unqualified berth as you free your turgidity for Juno.
Phones in hand now, you and Roxy watch one another’s credit-card-size doppelgängers writhing in your palms. Her C-section scar and the moon-shaped one on her forehead, red-glowing like magma cracking through snow.
The space has become a super-collider of careening objections and guffaws, yet you manage to tune them all out except for Roxy. Both your likenesses judder. Every pixel comes alive—each a perfect unit—and when you crescendo as one, she wails some name that isn’t yours and isn’t her husband’s, but you don’t care because Roxy isn’t hers, but yours and yours only. At the threshold of ecstasy, you can only ever take that next step by renouncing all beliefs you’ve held near and dear, and committing to the current. You have to let your testicles contract, your eardrums explode, the cartilage in your knees wilt, and as your eyes roll back and the world starts to blacken, you must laugh at the jeering, hooting assembly that bats at the air and jabs their thumbs downward in a parade of ghosted, super-slow-mo Cesars.
Before Roxy, you thought aneurysms only resulted from excessive toilet straining.
Then she showed you how wrong the French were in referring to any death as little.
PETRICHOR
2018
MY EYES SWIVEL between the two human skulls minding the corners of the old man’s desk.
It’s a big son-of-a-bitch. Less writing surface than altar, topped by two live-edge slabs of curly cherry sutured down the middle by bowtie splices the color of ox blood. Varnished tastefully, it hints to the Norse. Of forgotten histories. And yet I’m hooked to the skulls. Because they’re discolored too perfectly. Nicked in ways no machine could mimic.
And one is smaller than the other. An adolescent’s or a child’s.
Neil West isn’t watching me watching his skulls, what with him shifting between elocutions of leatherwork, Scotch distillation, and Pre-Columbian naval navigation techniques to shame most PhDs. But I feel other senses at work. Perceptions deeper than eyes can plumb. Not that his words alone don’t hold sway, even in his asides. Especially in his asides. Man of his station, words arrive barbed and hungry with intention, so while I steal looks at the skulls, he keeps wielding his oiled and seasoned rap until settling at last on his pitch.
“One weekend a month each autumn, my wife basically vanishes.” He speaks a languid New Orleans from behind a knurled highball grafted to his lips. “Never mentions where beforehand, never talks about it when she reappears afterwards.”
The old man comes from a line. Lumber, gold, aerospace. Each iteration of income and flesh folding into the other across a century. Money sloughs from him in thick peals. It thrives in the gilded wallpaper, the game trophies, the dart of eyes tuned to the most minute facial and ocular twitch.
He noticed my gloves before he noticed my breasts and my face. Kept canting his head at them while shaking my hand. Maybe they remind him of the ladies of his time. Maybe he’d been slapped once or twice by similar fine leather.
Eventually he draws an 8x10 from a desk drawer. Instead of handing it over, he rests it bib-like against his bolo tie beneath a grin that’s its own act of aggression. And still he eyes my gloves, long broken in and soft as baby skin.
A black-and-white still, staged like a femme-fatale. Bette Davis sass meets Gloria Swanson ache, and I wonder which trait dominated her daily life. Either way, Brook West is a stunner. Eyes blue or green by their lightness. Half the old man’s age at least. How I imagine my mother might’ve looked in her thirties had my father smiled a bit differently whenever she tried to pamper, and not curving one corner of his lip while his eyes tumbled away from the present.
“You find where Brook goes,” says Neil West, “and you’ll have served a greater function than you’ll know.”
Before I can reply, he throws out a figure that would’ve dropped most PIs. The number has me, at least for a few seconds, reconsidering a return to missing children cases had that been my new standard fee, but verging on fifty, money’s no longer the juice. I’m a saver. Always have been. In any case, the dying doesn’t need more zeroes. A couple of cancers have joined forces and posted running bets as to which will take me down first. Within the din of three separate medical opinions, the words six-months kept crowning. Their consensus before I’m to top off from the world, and rather than go quietly into that good night, I keep working. It affords me momentum, the thrill of the chase. And maybe I can leave something of myself behind for someone to hold dear.
The alternative is to sit home and watch the cancer bout from the cheap seats.
“So then, Madam locator of wayward souls,” says Neil West—or his tumbler does. “Up for giving Brook your best shot?”
His grin is my father’s to the pores, except for the eyes—near-black agates frozen forever in the now.
I accept. Of course I accept, even if he’d offered to pay in skulls. When we shake hands, he does me the courtesy of eye-contact, and his grip on my gloved hand lingers well past decorum.
2004
Six-year-old Leah Ross disappeared during a drought some thirty miles south of Louisville, and I never found her. Not alive, anyway. Ten years of successfully locating the lost and missing, upended by a shy third-grader with strawberry hair.
It was her case that started me chewing my fingernails all over again, a habit I thought I’d shed in my late teens. It was her case that also prompted me to start on the change, and I would begin hormone treatments not long after.
Several locals had sworn to seeing a strange sedan about the camp grounds and trailheads near South Park Country Club around the time of her disappearance. And yet the more questions I asked and the more CCTV videos I poured over, the less convinced I became it was an abduction.
When someone mentioned the pond on the family acreage, something in the deeper recesses of my mind stretched and yawned.
***
The pond was located at the western extents of the Ross property, or so the mayor confided. Some denied or played ignorant to its actual existence, while those that talked described in hushed tones that it lay at the edge of a neighboring holler, shaded in perpetuity from the sun.
The more weathered spoke of things ancient and otherworldly dwelling in its waters. That the girl was likely taken as a sacrifice by denizens without shape, and good luck finding anyone willing to dive or dredge it.
I humored their superstitions. My experience, most missing children get found within a few miles of home. Also, I figured my outsider’s curiosity might prompt one of the more adventurous residents to volunteer as a guide. I was a good looking man with charm to spare, and it worked just as well on the fellas as the ladies.
Within a day, one bit. A local dope-slinging ginger with a broken nose offered to take me on his ATV for fifty-bucks, a six-pack of Falls City, and complete anonymity.
***
To call the pond remote was an insult to understatement. It took twenty minutes from the closest road to final reach it.
Water black and tar-thick, circled at the outskirts by thigh-deep lantana speckled with tiny, clustered flowers too much like wedding bouquets in miniature.
The closer in though, and its shores vanished under coiled brambles of cockspur thorn and barberry shrub.
The ambient light sat heavy, cloaked in the cobalt of dusk. There the drought played no part. The air hung moist, placental. Self-contained, almost. Stunk of steam from a clambake.
My mother supposedly drowned in a cove that ferried the same musky air, and I would’ve thought it all in my head, except for the ginger’s reaction. He kept a good ten yard’s distance, scowls channeling folds twenty-years-too-premature on his face while I walked the pond’s circumference, thorns as long as sewing needles snagging my jeans. I sensed other motives for his getting me out there alone and away from prying eyes, but once he realized his false impression regarding my carnal slants, his focus was back on the water. Or rather, what may lurk within it.
But an undeniable throbbing quality hummed from that dark pond. A chance for me to dance with things niggling and unfinished, and I chomped down on the bait and nibbled away at my nails.
2018
It takes me three days to track down Brook West and where she disappears to once a month each fall.
I don’t tell the old man about it. Not because I’m trying to milk him, but because his wife deserves to have her side known, even if it’s only to a tired, middle-aged PI on the outs.
Also, Brook West is just plain good. That Seattle traffic had turned to shit in the decade I’ve been living here doesn’t help in keeping up with her, but my tracking chops are still sharp. It’s the one thing I do well in this world, young Leah notwithstanding, and proficiency at something is enough to set the alarm again every night. It’s something to tell myself before facing my dreams.
But Brook moves like a veteran con, often backtracking, sometimes swapping rides. And she does it in the open, electric with confidence. The way my mother moved whenever away from my father—with the exaggerated strides of one freshly freed from leg-irons after weeks of shuffling feet.
The ungainly, loping way she parried from me whenever we played tag.
And yet those pained grins of hers. More a kind of surrender than consent. They greeted my every indulgence, and each of those smiles has since spliced to my soul, along with each wince sparked from my every tag on her body, especially around her midriff, as if protecting a pouch of joeys she never let on she carried.
***
With a 400mm lens, I take my pictures as Brook West, along with two-dozen other women, young and seasoned alike, board a ferry called Petrichor at Pier 55.
Every woman sheened and masked in period costume. A Roaring Twenties thing. On their arms, tuxedoed gentlemen—definitely not their husbands. Likely some bawdy swinger’s soiree on Bainbridge or Bremerton. Some I recognize. The new tech money. The biggies.
Even catch a glimpse of fellow PI, Billy Wentz, surely working his own top-shelf adulterer. He’s built like an offensive tackle, and I would’ve probably made him without the long lens.
It took a few years after my voice changed and body hair sloughed before I stopped deluding myself to the likelihoods of affections from certain types of women. Old-style, classy types like Brook. Yet as a
rresting as she is, it’s not her beauty that snares me so much as a certain intangible quality. A timelessness. For a woman in her mid-thirties at most, Brook West wafts sapience, even from behind a black lace veil and under a dress of leather and plumage. Her lines like something off a cave painting, stepped from limestone and stretching to the moon, laden with the same eldritch quality that consigned me to a remote pond many years earlier, and my eye aches from straining through the eyepiece.
***
The following morning when I try to make inquiries, I hit a wall.
Nobody has heard of the ferry, Petrichor, nor was there record of any craft leaving at midnight.
When I seek out Billy Wentz that evening to ask about the boat, I find his office door ajar.
I call his name from the threshold, but only shadows and traffic hum reply. The occasional curse and pot clang from the Thai restaurant downstairs.
I go in and approach his desk. A peeling, water-stained thrift-shop throwaway. From the gaping top drawer, the wink of chrome. I open it fully to a .38 snub-nose.
So Burt Lancaster. So Bogart. Then again, Billy was always a professed born-in-the-wrong-era type of gent. Each time he vainly tried to ask me out, it was always a declaration, never a question:
“We’re having dinner tomorrow, doll.”
“Hormonal play is far more dangerous than gun play, and both should be surrendered at before someone gets hurt.”
“Blondie, you and I should join at the hottest crossroads God ever devised.”
Never mind that men were never my thing to begin with, he would’ve been in for quite a shock since I’m still pre-op.
Eventually I spot the letter on the blotter.
According to the surprisingly legible script, Billy skipped town. Moved back to Omaha that morning. Left everything, including a flowery manifesto about missing farm life and the joys of genuine hellos.
How the city was sick.
I understand the sentiment. After Leah Ross’s body was found, I fled a dying town back east for a greener one out west. But the same hope cities offer for renewal, they also drown. They devour. At night, the world is seen through the eyes of trench rats.
