Four New Messages

by Cohen, Joshua

  Does David ever make it back home—or, Ever go home do David? or, Did home ever David make go? and though through the measured, mechanical accent he understood the words because they were in his language, he didn’t know what they meant until, a breath, he realized they referred not to him, rather to an American television show he’d never watched but had heard of—a hysterical serial, he thought, impossible not to have heard of (though it’d been over for a season, its antics supplanted), as he told this insistent, scarcarved, tough as warts horde:

  Yes, David goes back home to marry Samara from college—though his father dies or is kidnapped for ransom, but only after his mother’s investment firm fails or is arsoned, I hesitate to say which, and no—he said in answer to the youngest trollnik stroking his leg—no, I don’t know what happened to your sister!

  They lured him into the tower talking as if talk would be enough to resist them—them grasping at every scrap, at jeanpocket and jacketflap, at the frayed bills filched from his pockets and at coins—down a hallway suffused with noxious stench: fuming nettles, as if in the production of a remedy for this hallucination in progress.

  The back of the tower was not, like its frontage, glassed, but concrete poured floors above a courtyard. Only the front’s sheer veneer was new.

  It was a courtyard strung across with links for laundry—light frilly cirri of negligee and peignoir, lowhanging nimbi of thong and garter—filled with receptacles and trash. And he was tossed like a bag of trash himself—thrown atop the bags, rolled over their blackly bodied putrescence, needle shards of mirror, a slough of diapered spoiled lard—tumbling into another hall, to his knees at the threshold of an opposite tower.

  The boys emerged from behind—having slipped past the dumpsters at the yard’s periphery—dragged him to his feet, to an entryway as dark as fur.

  Just inside, seated in a chair with a singular daintiness, was a bear. A bear distinctly untaxidermical. It was a crossdressing bear, if animals can be said to be transvestite, if creatures have enough gender identity to make their wearing of the opposite sex’s human clothing something approaching a meaningful statement, any statement at all. A pince-nezed male shebear in a windsocklooking bonnet speckled with sunflowers, above skirts of billowing hospitalgowns patched with flag, the vex of a nation he could not place. The entirety had been cashiered from a fable, discharged from a land of porridgecomplexioned dwarves (his youthful escort, assembling protectively around).

  The mamabear gestured him to a chair of his own, of a similar make: a fussy interiorism high of haunch, tiny of limb—as if not a perch but perched itself, upon fluted legs, the feet with chiseled toenails, with claws—upholstered in pelage, in uncomfortable quills that rustled with every shift and he shifted, he couldn’t force himself to keep still. Between the chairs was a table as swarmed as the sexagenary square of a chessboard, draped with a drab spiderweb lace doily, set with a corroded samovar fixtured with a bulb, its stray filament illuminating two saucers, two companion cups. A battered phrasebook’s pages folded down. Not a phrasebook but his passport, atop his wallet, blueblack both. And the keys to a faraway home tenanted, it must’ve been, by faraway and worried parents.

  It was the dusty sittingroom of a pensioner with no children or none who visited regularly, only the relict thievelets who, kissing their mamabear’s jeweled paw, raised that dust in the rowdy muster of departure. They shut the door behind them—that door set flush with the shadows—spun its lock, as if adjusting a radio, or as a vault is sealed—suddenly, it was as if he wasn’t sitting in a room anymore but amid night itself.

  He felt tickling, below it all—but how had he not noticed—a rug of bearskin.

  His host growled in response to this inspection, said, Publicov’s no liar—he said he’d never met anyone who wants a girl like you do.

  So what type do you want, my dear? of what species, my dearest? I have every model in stock.

  Slav slave or Central Asian combination? vagina where the anus is or anus where the vagina is? there’s nothing we don’t do: oral exclusive, mutual masturbation, S&M, gruppengrope, frottage.

  I want one, he said, her name is Moc.

  Roleplay then?

  No role, Moc.

  No doubt we have her too—with this, the bear madame growled a woman from out of the fuscation: a big brutish wench with a figure like a log her employer could hibernate inside, who looped her wildweed hair and pouted lechy her smacked black lip, where she had a sore.

  That’s not her.

  Of course it’s her—the newest version. You won’t recognize the difference.

  I want Moc.

  You would.

  The woman’s giant trunking mass dulled abruptly into furniment again: secretaire, escritoire—into nothing that refined, just a handleless lunk of domesticated linden. Where you’d keep a will you’d like to lose.

  And I want immortality, said Madame bear, but I can’t have it—I want to own a helicopter and a yacht and a gym franchise, I want to downsize half my staff and fix the lottery in Kyiv—but who can live from wishes?

  Who?

  Having held every other bodypart, his hands could hold his hands.

  Madame bear sniffed, said, OK, so you’re searching for this Moc—I’ll tell you what, I’ll help you, I’ll tell you how to find Her.

  And from now on, dearest Reader, it’s too late to doubt—

  There is, the bear said, a place.

  Then it covered itself with a shawl, tugged from a puddle in its lap—the fringe of that rug of bearskin, omnivorously soiled, full of thistle.

  It was deeper night and eurous gusts found the spaces between words to fill them with their chill.

  This isn’t a story, David, this is a place (and here another creature’s prose is indiscriminately enhanced: the bear’s original locutions being even more melodramatic, more foreboding, stalled by tedious epistolaries)—but it is Far far away, it is dangerously enchanted.

  The bear paused to siphon tea for two from the samovar looming like a fervid moon above them. Lighting his wallet, lighting his keys.

  The brew was black and ropy, with a hint of citrus, of bergamot, then, he sipped again—it was still too hot—this taste unplaced, hot and dull but rublesucking sour.

  He put his cup back on the saucer, placed the saucer atop his passport for a coaster: his passport picture, he felt, already out of date—it was mortifying and he hoped the bear wouldn’t ask to examine it, wouldn’t comment.

  Or it both exists and doesn’t exist, the bear went on, I myself don’t know how it manages that, but you will.

  My lovely, my darling.

  Though when you’d know is precisely when you’d no longer be able to tell me.

  It’s distant, David, I can tell you that, then once there, go higher.

  Go high atop a mountain, a hill that’s been fortified, a walled settlement walled deep in the past.

  At least you’d think it was centuries ago—all that mud, that woodstirred mud. Before electricity even—this is important—before all that current that connects the world like lines of latitude, reception like lines of longitude, the equator of constant signal.

  The houses look that old too, they look ancient, they’re falling down, their foundations rotted stumps, sinking, sunk, their roofs are thatched and leaking weather.

  There in the center of town, because it is a town, there in the center of the center as if the hub where all the wheelspokes meet, is a square, and in the center of that square is a well and if you gaze and gaze and gaze into that well late at midnight you will see, it’s said, your own reflection—this is because there’s a measure of water at the bottom—what else would you expect to see down there, tell me?

  But.

  (The bear tugged tight its holeworn shawl—that thorny fluff indistinguishable from its fur—then crossed one leg over another like a popular child psychologist, and this struck him as faintly ridiculous: one claw resting on a claw of the chair—the bear was smaller than he’d
thought, it didn’t reach the floor.)

  But the inhabitants of this town—they are why it’s so special, David, Orlando, friendly Greg—whatever you wish to be called.

  Cinching its socky bonnet, the bear’s ears skewed out the sides: mangled ears, one lively, the other limp, like the rushing minute and lagged hour hands of a clock.

  When a girl like Moc decides to shed her coy lycras and molt her cloying denims to engage in sexual intercourse on camera, that’s when it happens—that’s when the, shall we say, “funniness” happens.

  (Please forgive my language—when you recall in your own words how I’ve told this tale to you tonight I hope you’ll have me speaking better.)

  This is a special change I refer to, a sort of conversion. After they’re shot, if you’ll follow my explanation, after these girls are shot, they cease to exist.

  Rather I’m speaking of an existence that’s not an existence—after these girls are filmed doing what it is they do, they no longer belong to themselves but to the world, as they’re no longer merely physical but image too, they are everywhere, they are everyone’s.

  Where do they exist then, ask yourself, if they do?

  In themselves, in their own skin, or as imagined—as unimagined—on the screen in your lap?

  They become women/nonwomen—having been used, having been overused, and so weakened, weak, there’s a grain and a haze to them, a sapping depletion (indeed, everyone’s fate is the same and is sordid).

  Not anymore pure people of skeletonized flesh, yet also not purely data transmission of image and sound, they dwell instead in the middle—limboed, in an interim stage—abiding a gaplife as something between.

  At best as an essence of what they once were—half theirs and half yours now: David’s, Orlando’s, gregarious Gregory and Yury’s—shut into this secret repository, into this archive they live in, a cache of the senselessly undead.

  For steadiness he sipped at his now tepid bitter tea, keeping his eyes on the rude snout of his ursal host, on the ear that kept twitchily ticking.

  Your Moc—the bear producing a rumpelskin paper from a slit in its parachute housedress, the printout showing the Missing caged on a page, caged in a screen, depicting the Wanted at the very beginning of mid-act—your Moc is not as she was, but she is still herself.

  She has already entered that other realm, that porousness beyond borders, that Freedom …

  The bear crumpled a corner of the printout in its paw, dipped it in its own tea (untouched), began eating it wet. Those eyes nailing themselves into his. As drops of the drink smeared its fur, matting the fur that was just then wrapping around him, he who couldn’t help but stare—at that lewd dewy snout, that lurid ear tick, the sharpened nails of those eyes—couldn’t help but close his own now, he was exhausted, he was softly enfolded, he apologized, mumbling, he hadn’t properly slept in over a month …

  XXX

  _________________

  (notes for a videographer)

  He wakes in the forest. It is dark and it is thick, with green and brown like the swirl of a clogged toilet. Wastepaper hanging from the trees, lots of trees. Sweaty profferings of verd as if not grown but enlusted, bouquets of let loose bush. Pubescent stalks sprung up between pawprints, deep but shallowly filled, like wells with toes, with talons, their moisture stagnant, a dankness pervades, the stalks decompose. Evidence of uprootings. Trees big and wet—when did it rain? up on their roots exposed like rusted struts, like scaffold. Hills just ahead like steppingstones to hills, like stones topped with walls of trees, with a sky of trees screening out the sun. (I’m doing my best here. This would all sound so much better in an original.)

  Af yge enneb inle mezre ygu … it feels “like being inside wood” (as if I’d been spellbound, trapped, imprisoned within a tree, then axed). He’s bruised all over his body, bruises brackish in color like his skin’s a passport cover, or as if his insides have been stamped with the splotch of poisonous berries—apparitions smeared across his stomach, faces null like navels. Everything hurts, his ribs hurt. His arms and legs feel shorter, he feels smaller, like a boy, younger than a boy. Wondering, wondering—what miracle decoction was that? what potion that stranger bruin conked me out with?

  He’s cold, wearing less clothes than he had been. Less a jacket, there’s nothing returned to his pockets, there’s no wallet, no return tix or pass. No oily key hard alongside his hardness, his wakingtime erection. An eye is swollen, a lip bleeds, he feels like he’s broken a bone in his cheek. In his throat. He is thirsty—he goes.

  The trickle is from a nearby stream whose water could not be anything but fresh, flowing, as even he’s aware, from uphill even sweeter.

  He follows, follows the stream’s sharp dark carving of the hill, pausing only to wash himself and sip at a knotted pond, continuing.

  This compulsion to ignore the fakeries and secondlives, for the origin, the source—he wants not the trickled down, he wants the wellspring only.

  He trails through the woods, along the weedy banks in squeaking sneakers. The grain grades steeply, while the pits he has to avoid on his way are not wells to other worlds but the wet sucking prints of the outsize dogs that roam here. The big shaggy shepherding monstrosities he could ride atop—they prowl patrol around the summit’s settlement, chaining the moat, the wall’s circumsomnia.

  Now he is hot, being so close to the sun—a lamp brought close by an invisible hand from above, swiftknuckled, silent. The summit rising only to flatten toward a desk, a desktop. And somewhere farfaraway—the sound of pages being turned or the clicking of keys—a chair unreclining, brought closer, closer.

  Each of his bruises pulsates, pounds, giving off heat of its own, like he has circuits secreted inside, like overwork has ruined them.

  The dogs he recognizes, just then, he recognizes as Sparkins—a litter of them, more, litters’ clones of the one he’d had to be named after, nicknamed after, that one disastrous year before his parents were forced to sell it, or maybe, he’d suspected, put it down, because Dad in his couched craziness got allergic. But Sparkins a bit larger than the Sparkin he’d had, quite a bit larger, even from a distance. Enormous lumbering Sparkins trundling their guard, stepping over stumps, stepping through trunkhoarded piles of leafy cereal flakes, flecked with crystals of sugar, of salt. Blown piles up to the moat, then on the moat’s other marge up to the fortress wall, blown spoons and bowls and the smothering plastic that bagged them—as if cumulus that’d been slammed by the wind into the trees and wall, becoming stilled, dispersed, disincarnated.

  This city, being walled, is inherently attractive—not just in the artificial picturesque sense. When you are not wanted in, you want in, but maybe making you want in is the sense of a wall, its purpose. Where you are not needed you run to make yourself, you must, indispensable. He comes unheard and unseen, but perhaps the Sparkins are used to him already. Unheard because of their enlarged dogtags jingling in stride, jingling like bells. Unseen because he sneaks his way low and nimble. Toward the bridge’s access, the bridge over the moat. The moat heaped with gray and creamcolored boxes. With monitors and drives, modems and printers—all the elements of an obsolete technology, too useless to be recycled as another’s access and so, their discard to hazard a fall: no water but a bog of coaxial cables in barbed coils, sharded screens of bridgelike wires, their innards exposed to spears and spikes, gutted lengths unwound to a murderous serration.

  No foreigner storming invasion but a hero lost from a bedtime telling of immemorial nights, wandered from a page: he stands as if a pixel, a lone pix fixed at the drawbridge’s lip—a drawbridge, a moat, each flattened, flat, smooth the page, Reload.

  To enter through the portcullis withdrawing, through its portal … (this is where I write from now—Dear Mom, cc: The End—I must have fainted).

  I wake in a square, undressed but tended. My bruising beginning to subside. And in its stead, a glow fanning through me, as if the opening rose of health, as if vigor.

  The
town is a setting of lithic streets and alleys, the houses themselves logged of dilapidated wood—but lived in, not neglected, textured.

  Nobody is around—no presences I sense directly—but I feel, I prickle as I feel—these floatings, these passings.

  A brush of hair or a gusting sway, as if the skirt of the wind blowing by me, blushing up my cheeks. A skin’s prick to horripilate the wrist, a nail’s graze or a lovemark left by teeth. As I begin—this is how I begin—gradually, after days, a week, to see.

  Everywhere—as if enclosed, as if my life’s been flattened up against the seething surface of my eye—everywhere I look soon there are women, there are girls.

  I see them, by seeing through them. Their beings projected onto every surface, on every ceiling and floor and sky, projecting across every window and alley’s curve, across and as every doorway’s gracious waist—the walls, visible through them in wrinkle crack and cellulite chip, in spall and score and peeling paint, temporarily aging them in their revenance. But then they float again, they pass again—eidola of posturing plank, with glints of screwy smiles—their youth preserved only in their motion.

  Girls throughout alight and nude, or not nude but purified, thoroughly pristinated as I proceed—through the statics of climate—to recognize: Natashka one and another from that vid with the Cuban I think and yet another from a schoolyard seduction and still another from the bucked back of a moving truck and a girl I recall her name too, I think Masha, Sasha, Svetlana (trans. luminance)—and they are themselves but aren’t, as they were both onscreen and you have to guess in life itself, but not.