Four New Messages

by Cohen, Joshua

  We wish to communicate how guileless he was—there in that middling motelroom as in his dormer apartment, no expert, no connoisseur. He had experience but no discernment, and anyone who tells you that the more time you spend with something the more particular you get about it has never been stuck in a marriage to his parents, has never grown up a boy with appetites and television: more is only more of more and to invoke subtlety or fuss is merely to show fear in the face of glut—Jersey boys in neon motels are never intimidated, they’re never afraid.

  They just drop their pants (he dropped his pants). Stretched the underwear down—there’s no concern for not being prepared, no worry as to whether or not he’s ready. The computer is always ready, the internet’s always open (he’s never been unattracted to himself).

  Bound by gridded paper, between panel ceiling and patchy carpet, he was as erect as the walls, as hard as the walls (telling someone how hard you are is to flatter yourself in lieu of claiming girth or length).

  We shouldn’t be so crude. Though we’re sure whatever document we’ve opened, still unnamed, still unsaved, we’re sure it won’t be saved. They-say-in-this-Industry. Keystroke, stroke. Drag to trash.

  When you’re on that first page or window of the site, when you’re in its Home, you’re faced with a list of vids, and each vid is advertised, in a sense, by a still from the vid, a stilled scene from the moving scene to come—a freezeframe or screengrab, a capture.

  If you like the looks of that single, practically measureless moment, you click on it and the still image loads into a moving image—the vid moves, a movie (we can’t justify explaining this here, it just feels like it needs to be said—we’d rather not presume as to the depravity of our audience: Hello, Mom).

  A taste is always given first, a still and silent taste, because if everything was sounding and in motion all at once, all the vids, you couldn’t decide which One would gratify desire, you’d become confused, Mom, and the warmth of your breath would become the overheating of anger.

  Her screengrab seemed unpromising—he didn’t know why he clicked, maybe because even in the context of amateur porn, theirs, hers, was the most amateurish and he felt for that, not erotically, he felt pity. Even in still silence it came off as wrong, as wrongly incompetent. Fuzzy, unfocused. Angled oddly. The fan whirred to cool the drive, cooed. His mouth was dry, tongue heavy. It was a corner of her mouth then a swatch of smaller penis (onscreen all penises are smaller), a tracery of drool.

  The room was dark. Nothing existed outside the spotlight of the screen—bluish, greenish, mucoid, queasily regorging—nothing existed outside the weakly fluctuant cast of its halo.

  How could we remember any of the vids before her? how could anyone? She erased them, what deleted them was her apparition, her apparency. Though we might, like the virtual does, lie: we might say it was a big lips blonde that did it for him, or a shy spinnerette with tiny thimbleplug anus, we could say Latina mature with redblue hair and puffy nips for knees, we could say young teen hairlessness, Black Mama, we could fabricate forever …

  He was of a generation—no, bad word, bad habits … we’re trying to say that everyone is our age now, even if they’re not. We all grew up with this crap, we didn’t know anything else—like Dad did, who masturbated to paper, to brownpaperwrapped magazines: pages glossy like lips, breasts shot verso, recto displaying recto, the navel that is the centerfold. Magazines not like the ones you work for, Mom—not fair that your son’s father had to be your husband too (though Dad never mentioned sex).

  Our generation doesn’t have to hide anything under the bed, to secrete the forbidden in the closet, behind the shoes, behind the socks smelling like semen, the socks smelling like shoes. Instead ours is a practical pornography, with no awkward visits to newsstands or subscriptions to renew—there are no secrets, the entirety is acceptable. The computer sits proudly on the desk in plain day. There to help with the spreadsheets, with directions. We can just press a button and, naked lady. Press another button, another lady, nude. Point, click, penetration, it penetrates, it rewires your brain. You come to expect that all women take it up the pooper, take goop on their faces and into their mouths and, swallowing, that they all do so voluntarily, with nary a complaint in rooms like this one: unlived-in-looking, filthily-linened, plywood-doored.

  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?

  Go
od. 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.