Four New Messages

by Cohen, Joshua

  But Moc the bitch does not respond, or can’t (and only later does she speak again, garbling what she’d been told: “It tastes so big, it feels too sweet,” i t.d.). Anyway the bed from their sawing atop it is too loud to hear whether she responds with his name or not—her mouth an unlanguaged vowel as he slams her once, pulls out, pulls her toward him again, a leg gives way, two legs give way and they’re leaning against a hallwall and the wall’s rughanging that’s purple and gold and damp with sweat, with fluids his and hers in toecurled arabesques, and panting as he straddles the splintered wood and her and strokes himself off into her mouth and onto her face in splinters that are white and the trees are wet and white like in another season (the calendar in the background, tacked to the opposite wall, shows nature and says, in translation, May)—the trees, the trees, the trees are webbed with sperm.

  II. Com/Moc

  _________________

  1. Com

  _________________

  They say in this Industry you need a professional name because then it’s the professional who’s guilty and not you, then the profession is at fault and not you or your parents, your schools or the way you were raised.

  This professional name—and no, it can’t be as rudimentary or flippant as “Professional Name”—becomes a sort of armor or shield, speaking in newer terms a version of what this Industry in its more responsible incarnations requires: protection, a prophylactic.

  A condom, a condom for a name.

  (Or else, consider it like you would an alias for the internet, an avatar that can investigate realms that you with your own name couldn’t. A safer way of being yourself, by being someone else.)

  And they say that one not particularly unique way of identifying this unique professional name is: first name the name of your childhood pet and secondly, as surname, the name of the street on which you grew up—in which case I’d be Sparkin West 2nd after my parents’ dog (that shepherd we had for only a year, though I was also something of my doggie’s dog), and a lane that subtly grids the wealthier suburbs of Jersey, where my father sits wrapped in the robe of his disused urban planning degree as the hypochondriacally retired founder of a successful addiction counseling business and from which my mother, trained as an historian, commutes daily to the city to edit the travel and health sections of a trendy magazine for women and men who read like girls.

  Which is how I’ve come here or why.

  From now on, in accordance with accepted journalistic practice, I will keep myself out of it. Kept distant, alone. He was no journalist but the son of a journalistic mother who in middle age had capitulated to exposés on waxing and superfoods that stop aging—and his assignment so vague as to be birthright.

  Grow, change.

  He’d heard different things, not from any pros who know but from hearsay, from wasteful reading around the internet, clicking through the links.

  He’d heard that his professional name should be, first name the last name of his fifth grade mathematics teacher, de Vaca, last name the first name of his favorite aunt, Diana—and so de Vaca Diana. Or else that he should use the first name of his favorite brand of candy and as last name the full name of his favorite baseball player who played for the Giants until getting enmeshed in a major steroid scandal—Berry Berry Smackers Barry Bonds. That was what he’d do in school. He’d sit with notebooks, filling them with pen, with pencil, with names. Of other people he’d rather be, of other personalities. He’d sit with pen and pencil, gnawing their spans to match the gnarled branches just beyond the window, wet with rain, saliva. Always a thigh warm against the radiator. Then Ms. de Vaca, Mr. Heller (English), Mrs. Rae-Heller (social studies), would draw the shade.

  He was a mediocre student, but in order never to work every degree had to be obtained.

  College was enrolled on the other coast, expensively intentionally, though it was called a university, despite its being the only institution that accepted him.

  It was May and all those not vicious enough to have found an offer to stay seaside went home to their agrestic Midwests, back to Mommy and Daddy, inferior internships, inferable jobs. And he was going back too, he was scrambling to pack the room into the U-Haul rented for the week—pick it up on one coast, drop it off with another franchise on the other.

  He’d found a parkingspace too far from his door, down the block. Opposite the dogrun overrun that bright breezy Friday, the benches surrounding filled with profs and students who dressed like profs, standoffish admins lisping infidelities by phone and the hirsute homeless underliners of paperback books—he passed them sweating up and down the three flights from his room to the truck, down the block, each load he carried farther down. Weightlifters in the park, lifting weights, lifting weights, lifting weights in reps, in tight swimsuits, in reps. The busstop crowded with blondness for the beach. Hot and blandly still. Clear. That scape so different from this, so different from here. (But it seems this might be the incorrect approach.)

  He laid the carpet down in the back, then the shelves and endtables and wobbly coffeetable and coffeemaker by the kitchen corner, above a low shelf kept always for his pan, his pot, his fork and knife, spatulation. He was drenched, wiping the hair from his face then stooping to lift, with the knees, with the knees, his body carrying the boxes and its boxy self—overdressed in sticky jeans, but all the shorts were packed—in sudden jerks, in spasms. Bicycles swirled around, walkers walked and runners jogged, a tanned xanthous man in the park, lifting weights, lifting. Everyone was light, was weightless, he felt, and only he was sulking, pale and big and bloatish, loading himself down in this lumbering truck—he’d become a mover, a slomover, a driver, a slodriver, he had no plans for what would happen at home or what he’d do with the degree he wasn’t picking up. Media, PR. IT, finance. Generous options, given Mom’s connections. This country should take only four, five days to drive—he and Mom were supposed to have their conversation come Friday next, graduation being that week too, he wasn’t sure which day.

  When he was finished clearing the room he sat on the bed wondering if he’d forgotten anything, but he’d only forgotten what he was sitting on—tedious, it couldn’t not be overlooked—Ms. Zimmer’s bed, the saggy loaner.

  He scooped through his pockets, the jeans dried rough and hot, felt the truck keys, found the keys to the apartment. He left them on the pillow but didn’t leave a note, no paper—he’d coordinated his departure with Ms. Zimmer’s root canal appointment, giving dumb excuses about slots and fees, the traffic.

  It’d been too soft a bed, it’d gone too softly on him, he smoothed it, smoothed the pillow too, he’d never had sex there, he’d stopped even having dreams.

  He called his parents to say he was leaving—sure as he was that his mother wasn’t home—left a message:

  I’ll be back soon, Dad, nothing special to eat, just make sure to make the sofa up downstairs.

  He thought about just sending an email, then thought the better of it: he’d email them later, as reminder, forty-eight hours or so into his crosscountry drive—on a heartland signal wavering like grain in the wind, wavering then true, fixed and true.

  What would he say then? what would be the Subject?

  The man who invented email—sending messages from one computer to another—never revealed what was said in that first email ever sent. Unlike with the innovators of the telephone, whose testimony we have—unlike with the first man to swagger pithy on the moon.

  What did that first email say? why did the inventor never tell us? Probably because that message was obscene. Probably said, “Sveta, lover, I want to fuck your face off!” or, “Daddy, why’d you touch me there?”

  This was Illinois.

  He’d been up all night so late that it was two nights—so this was Illinois. And had finally slept by dawn and woke by noon, undressed at his computer.

  As he stretched a yawn his computer woke too, its screen confirming: he’d bought a ticket for an international flight departing in six hours.

&
nbsp; Such are the problems you get giddily into when you have access, the situations brought about by life’s late convenience—how convenient it is to be connected, modern.

  His parents’ credit card.

  He checked out of the motel—as if his purchase on bliss couldn’t be roomed anymore—found his rental, that cumbrous truck packed fully, got behind the wheel, and drove toward Chicago—he was on the highway, he’d clung to the outskirts.

  He left the truck in extended parking—one lot the same as another, or it’s only that he’s misplaced the number, his section, his row—there unburdening himself of his dirty bedding and dirty clothes, the corrugated boxes of incorrigible books, loose Registrar slips and Bursar receipts, the last days of being a student condoms optimistically purchased, bilingual dictionaries overdue, photographs of parents but none of friends, not that he wasn’t into photography but that he had no friends. He had a wallet on his person, that abused credit card.

  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 a
bove 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).