Strange Flesh

by Michael Olson

  She gave me a long appraising look and finally pointed to our bar. “Might I suggest you liberate that scotch?”

  Out on the street, Blythe was less stable. She whispered into my neck, “You know, you’re very sweet, but all this really isn’t necessary.”

  “Well, I’m getting a milk shake, and it’s going to seem a little strange if I’m sitting there by myself mumbling about how I used to jerk off to Murder, She Wrote in junior high.”

  Blythe allowed a ripple of laughter and slapped me on the chest. She turned to face me and said, “Milk shakes, then. But I must warn you, I have a lot of secrets.” She wobbled, and I caught her in a half embrace.

  Behind me I heard a soft male voice say, “Blythe.”

  At first I thought it was Coles, in which case I’d have retreated and let her have the fight she was looking for. On turning, however, I saw that it was Blake, headed toward the Bat. Blythe stiffened, her buzz draining right out of her.

  I said, “Hey, Blake.”

  “How are you doing tonight, Blythe?”

  “I guess I’m getting by. James was just taking me for a milk shake to cheer me up.”

  “Well . . . What a gentleman you are, James. Listen, I need to have a word with my sister. Would you mind having your milk shake another time?”

  I shrugged and gestured to her.

  Blythe closed her eyes briefly and said, “Fine. What do you want?”

  He put his arm around her, saying, “Let’s talk on the way back to your room.”

  I watched them cross Mt. Auburn Street, Blake speaking into his sister’s ear. She began rubbing a temple. After another moment of his rebuke, Blythe stopped in the middle of the still, snow-covered street and said, “Blake, I can do whatever the fuck I want.”

  Blake raised his voice too, but he was turned away from me, so I couldn’t hear him.

  Whatever he said, the last bit of his speech caused Blythe’s face to freeze. She slowly straightened, and then unleashed a wicked backhand that connected with Blake’s cheek so hard he stumbled sideways. He grabbed her and shook as if building up to further violence.

  I had enough Texan chivalry in me that I wasn’t going to stand by while a woman was assaulted in the street. I started walking over to where the Randall twins were locked in their vehement pas de deux.

  Blythe saw me move, and she went rigid. Blake, always attuned to her, let go instantly and turned. Doing so snapped him out of his rage, and his face displayed plummeting grief as it dawned on him what had almost happened. A desperate urge to make amends flowed into his eyes, and he reached out to his sister.

  But Blythe was having none of it. Looking back to ensure he was still watching, she marched up to me, took a deep breath, and then, incredibly, kissed me gently on the mouth.

  Even at the time, I was well aware of my role as a mere prop in their family drama, but nonetheless, the touch of her lips was clearly the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. All my thousand versions of this dream uniting in one surpassing moment of consummation.

  I might have felt differently had I known that when she kissed me, that surge of divine electricity she sent through my mind would prove overpowering. So strong that it melted the delicate reset circuitry that would allow me to ever really love anyone else.

  5

  After Blythe, I, like my father, transferred my passion for women to one for men: Jim Beam, Jack Daniel, and Basil Hayden.

  Memories of my sophomore summer are pretty blurred around the edges. By the end of it, a vast misunderstanding with the Cambridge police had landed me in a tense meeting with my house master, an old Bat alum. He suggested that I could avoid a dire encounter with the Administrative Board—famously eager to make disciplinary examples at the beginning of a term—by voluntarily taking a year off in order to “better reach my full maturity.” The date was September 8, 2001.

  A week later, I got a message that a grad was looking for me at the Bat. He was a fairly young but professorial guy, and without so much as an introduction, he asked me, “So how’d you like to help us rat-fuck Osama?”

  Seeking vengeance quickly cured my depression, and I developed a reputation as a technical asset who also enjoyed the “operational” side of our work. This led to training across a wide spectrum of the clandestine arts, and I discovered a certain bloodlust and an aptitude for duplicity, both of which served me well during several pretty hairy undercover assignments.

  All told, I guess we know that bin Laden’s life wasn’t much affected by my efforts in the Global War on Terror. But there are several Saudi financiers who are right now wondering how the hand of Allah guided them to Kazakhstani prison camps.

  I never went back to school, and five years of such quiet victories garnered me Susan Mercer’s contact information. Which proved to be worth a quadrupling of my salary upon joining Red Rook Security.

  I found myself well suited to my new job and advanced rapidly. But my pleasant routine was again swamped by romance. I managed to meet and hang on to a lovely girl named Erica, a whip-smart redhead brimming with levity. Though a member of the class two years below mine at school, she’d already made vice president at a stylish record label. We spent long nights at outer-borough rock clubs and abused the flexibility of our work schedules with endless mornings of canoodling sloth. Last winter I tendered a big diamond on a Balinese beach under an almost unrealistic canopy of stars. We’d been very happy.

  Six weeks before our wedding, I walked into my study to find Erica leaning over a series of pictures spread out on my desk. I prepared a guilty cringe, thinking of the palliative measures my friends had recommended for when the fiancée discovers your porn stash. But as she turned, I noticed that the photos had been scattered with wet blotches.

  She regarded me red-eyed, evaluating. And I realized how bad this was. Which pictures she’d found. I stayed silent for a moment, thinking, I’m not that awful. It’s not as terrible as it seems.

  “You know there’s really nothing you can say.”

  She was right.

  I’d often marveled at the way my peers tended to date bad women. Bossy drunks and fashion monsters. But the peril of living with a brilliant and marvelous lady is that she’s hard to fool, and the guilt is crushing when you disappoint her.

  The images would look almost innocuous to most people. The surprisingly tasteful artifacts of an intimate photo session between two young lovers. But the model was a slender collegiate woman with long blond hair. You’d have to call her willowy. Her only adornment in the last of them: a string of pale scarlet pearls. I was always amazed that Blythe had let me photograph her, and I savored those demonstrations of her trust.

  “James, I just can’t ever be her. I’m sorry.”

  I wanted to explain. Not to defend myself; I’d have gladly swallowed a puffer fish if I thought it could magically draw away her pain. I wanted her to know that I’d kept those pictures not as fetishes to creep in and venerate late at night, but rather as proof that I could bear thinking about Blythe. That it was safe to revisit those moments. In the same sense that former smokers always say, “You haven’t really quit until you can walk around for a month with a pack in your pocket.” The fact that I hadn’t pulled them out in years proved that I was cured.

  But the last stage of beating cigarettes is when you tire of carrying around that stupid box and finally discard it. Erica had said to me at the beginning, “Creature, I know what she meant to you back then. I know how intense young love can be. So I need to know, once and for all: you’re not still holding on to any of that, are you?”

  And now she’d run the numbers and come up with the only logical answer. Weaselly quant that I am, I fought to suppress the protest that numbers are just symbols and thus are infinitely malleable. Two and two doesn’t always equal four. But normal people view those who make such arguments with even greater contempt than the ones who can’t do the arithmetic to begin with.

  The undeniable fact of the matter remained: when I bo
ught the ring, those pictures had to go into the fire.

  Classy to the end, Erica departed without hysteria. She left me alone with the images I had kept to help master the moment when the fissure in my heart had first formed. But the spell had backfired, and now my protective wards were streaked with tears from the wonderful woman whose heart they broke in turn.

  Harvard’s tragedy telegraph operates with shameful efficiency. Though six months have passed since our broken engagement, I’m sure I have that episode to thank for Blythe’s reappearance in my life. Blake hears of my “troubles” and then thinks of me when he has some trouble of his own.

  Of course, mine have gotten even worse in the interim. Women, naturally, remain the problem.

  Men invariably prescribe a single remedy for a serious breakup: get as many bodies as possible between you and her. The underlying theory being that your anatomy will convince your pining mind that there isn’t really any “one” woman. There is only all women. And that by screwing a diverse cast of these lovelies, you’re reminded of all the scintillating possibilities life has to offer.

  Though I’ve fully adopted that course of treatment in recent months, the difficulty has been recruiting willing therapists. I don’t know what does it; maybe my eyes skitter away from theirs, maybe my manufactured smile betrays the flux of pain within. But most women can sense that there’s something a little broken with me. And the ones who can’t, well, there’s usually something very broken with them.

  This state of affairs leaves me, like the majority of my demographic, to content myself with the fire hydrant of pornography that is my cable modem. I can’t imagine what people did before the internet arrived with its grand smorgasbord of pictures, video, chat, and webcam girls. But too much netporn turns one’s mind into a Superfund site of frustrated lust. I find myself wearing out into the world the subtle but alienating caul of shame one gets from constantly wallowing in commodified filth. Another thing women can sense. Which makes me a more and more permanent citizen of this virtual Gomorrah we’ve built, the gateway to which sits innocently on our desks, pretending it’s for work.

  But on occasion, the ache of solitude simply demands real human warmth. So I’ve recently been driven to the teeming swamp of no-strings dating sites, erotic social networks, and “casual encounters” ads on Craigslist. In that arena, “real” becomes a somewhat loaded term.

  One thing the internet reveals is that the world contains multitudes of people just like you. We’ve always known that there’s this vast nation of lonely, isolated people out there, but now we’re not just watching TV anymore. We’ve started coming up with ways to reach out. Some people are looking to share their thoughts, others are looking to share . . . other things.

  Usually one finds a fellow forsaken soul who just wants a dose of companionship or a specific act performed and isn’t very particular about the details. But often enough, you’ll open the door on a lunatic or a criminal. The varieties of each are astounding.

  On the crazy side, I’ve found everything from garden-variety weepies to scary “Miss Andreas”—women trying to work out profound man-hatred through anonymous sexual episodes. They want to hurt you, or at least scare you.

  For example, Penny_S_Evers delivers a very hot oral experience with perhaps a little too much biting. In the morning, you wake to find “AIDS” scrawled on your mirror in lipstick. Of course, we’ve all already heard that story, but it’s still enough to make you upchuck your Cheerios. I took the time to scope her medical records. She doesn’t have AIDS, just a whopper of a borderline personality disorder. There are freelance voodoo surgeons and ladies possessed by dead celebrities. I’m still not able to parse the treatment I suffered at the hands, or rather other body parts, of Ms_Ophelia.

  It all makes me curious what kind of ghastly characters the W4M dredge up.

  The criminal side is occupied mostly by those aspiring to blackmail straying husbands. Rumors of organ harvesters abound, but I’ve never uncovered a credible case. Though as illustrated by my most recent debacle, I have run across plenty of more traditional thieves.

  Last night, I’d found someone calling herself 1Ton_1—which I read as “wanton one” rather than “one-ton Juan”—posting about her desire to “party with an open-minded stud.” A possible sneeze hooker, but since she didn’t actually demand “skiing” (cocaine), I thought I’d take a chance with the pic4pic exchange. She emailed me an authentic-looking shot from her phone that showed a slender Mediterranean girl who could well have been the nursing student she claimed to be. I traced her IP and ran the name and address on her account through the NICS and KnowX crime databases just to make sure. She came up clean, so I invited her over.

  In my foyer, she seemed a little nervous, but that’s not unusual. Some guys like to play up the erotic tension of walking into a complete stranger’s home for sex with dangerous looks and chilly silence, but I try to put people at ease with church-social friendliness.

  I made drinks while she took off her shoes and got cozy on the couch. She savored the first sip of her rum and Coke and then asked slyly if perhaps I might have a lime. Something breathy in her voice implied she had perverse intentions toward the fruit, so I eagerly brought her drink back to the kitchen and sliced up a garnish.

  A rookie mistake.

  When I got back, she’d shed a layer of clothing and had draped herself with a blanket, which helped prevent me from thinking clearly. We clinked glasses, and she downed her entire cocktail, a gesture meant to impatiently dispense with the preliminaries. I slammed mine too, liking this girl more by the moment.

  I registered the faintest hint of an acrid taste to my bourbon, like an evil spirit had crawled into the barrel while it aged. But she started kissing me with an ardor that emptied my head of petty cares. My last impressions were that her mouth didn’t feel quite right, and for that matter, neither did mine. And why was I drooling down my chin?

  I woke up bound, choking on an inexpertly applied gag. 1Ton_1 was a honey trap after all. I assume her boyfriend had been waiting in a car downstairs.

  The appalling thing is that this has happened before. I’ve been prowling the no-strings world relentlessly in the past months. The incessant probing of my day job now leeching into my nightlife. Always searching, always trying to connect. In the past six months, I’ve been left tied up three times, robbed four times, and assaulted twice. Yet none of it has been enough to make me stop. The compulsion is strong, the risk outweighed by what I’m seeking.

  But what exactly am I looking for? Solace? Pleasure? Action?

  This last incident makes me fear the real answer is a darker word.

  In penance for my behavior, I make it a point to flag or otherwise warn the community about the more egregious scams, blackmailers, and crooks I happen upon, alerting the police when it feels warranted. As though I fancy myself some kind of prurient superhero. Of course, the lonely and lustful are ever willing to make themselves victims. The police are correspondingly unsympathetic.

  Despite this, my nighttime search goes on. And it had appeared I’d keep collecting rope burns until one day, not unlike this morning, the devil would take his due, and I’d miss my next meeting with Mercer.

  But now I’ve felt the earth shift, and a new passageway has opened. This morning, Blythe’s delicate smile made me remember a time when I felt almost normal. And she’s asking me to take on an undercover assignment that offers a brand-new artificial world to inhabit. Just the thing for someone who insists on making a shambles of his real one.

  6

  Even if I wanted to ponder the merits of their cause, the Randall twins don’t allow me the leisure. Judging from the welcome message I get from the director of Billy’s most recent “place of business,” my assignment has already begun.

  They want me to infiltrate GAME, the Gnostic Atelier for Machined Experience. Founded as a colony for artists working in tech-heavy media, it’s become the forward operating base for the Jackanapes movement.

>   The abuse of the term “Gnostic” by so many New Age sects has drained it of precise meaning. I gather from reading their online manifesto that GAME uses its original definition: that certain esoteric knowledge allows one to transcend the corrupt material universe into the realm of mystical Truth. This idea has been repurposed by hard-core trans-humanists who believe that as mankind merges with machines, we’ll be able to remake reality into a Platonic wonder of pure data. Thus liberating ourselves from the scarcity, ugliness, and strife of physical existence. Unsurprisingly, obsessive gamers make up the bulk of adherents to that theory.

  The twins have secured a position for me at GAME based on a large donation that eliminated whatever red tape might otherwise complicate the process of adding a new fellow. My cover is that I’m a “conceptual video artist” with a manufactured portfolio who wants to make a documentary about Coit S. D. Files and his cohort of avant-gamers.

  My real objective is to integrate myself into the community by joining whatever backgammon tournaments or tantra workshops they might hold to keep themselves occupied while awaiting the digital rapture, with an eye toward finding out whether anyone might know where Billy is. There’s likely to be only some trivial hacking and casual surveillance. Best of all, GAME is reputed to throw fantastic parties. If you’re into strip Twister and prescription bingo.

  Since I’m officially undercover as of now, I’m banned from the Red Rook offices. So I go home to my apartment, a spacious loft at Lafayette and Bond near NYU, to change out of my suit, pour myself a Kentucky coffee, and get up to speed on this online world called NOD. The Randalls hadn’t really touched on why their brother might want to symbolically electrocute himself into it, but I suppose that’s a question I’ll ask when I speak with IMP’s security chief about Billy’s recent corporeal whereabouts.