Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  “It’s polyurethane,” Lucretia said. “I’m allergic to latex.”

  It had the tensile properties of a garbage bag. Polyurethane was a Third Reich innovation and was also in spandex. Linda had been superstitious about birth control and made Henrik use Trojans even when he pointed out that the Trojan horse was the singular metaphor for treacherous penetration and destruction from within. He chanced a look down to see Lucretia spryly engaged in her profession; it was hard not to think of those assembly-line robots that affixed bottle caps. Through the polyurethane he felt heat but no friction or moisture. He could imagine the oily flavorless polymers she was tasting, and the saliva she produced—smearing him with digestive fluid. Heavy sheaves of hair gathered and ungathered ticklishly on his thighs, and her jangling earrings pricked tiny points of cold when they tapped on his hipbones. The opened condom foil beside him read ELECTRONICALLY TESTED.

  He was losing it—losing sex. Linda once said how odd it was that you had sex, not did sex, but you did do “it,” “it” being sex, not love; you neither had nor did, you made love. But sex was something you had or didn’t have, and thus could lose. And just like having sex, you could lose sex over and over again, if it was going to be that kind of night. Over the embarrassment and pity and a feeble carburetion of lust, he mainly felt annoyed—at the ingratitude of wanting sex right up until he was having it, and the futility of coaxing his ungrateful cantilever, since effort itself made it impossible, the not wanting to not want to want.

  Lucretia stopped. “Something different?”

  “Okie doke.”

  After a buttery squirt of silicone lube, Lucretia stretched out onto her back, and as Henrik loomed over her he noticed her foot had a deep red furrow that wrapped around to her ankle, as if chopped by a hatchet. Lucretia clasped Henrik’s face in her hands to steer him in for a kiss, and since he was congested he had to hold his breath. Penetration went . . . okay, with some mistargeting, but then began the missionary’s lonely ordeal in the savage jungle. He felt less like he was having sex with her than intubating her. Four, five minutes of this brought a searing perpendicularity of the neck, and all the midsection strains that lust usually masked. In his head he kept repeating the word mucilage.

  Lucretia had turned her face aside, caterwauling way out of proportion. Henrik committed himself to a sporting finish. Then he felt her shaking his shoulder. “Henrik.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You fell asleep.”

  The Depakote, probably. His surrendering member dangled between his thighs, asphyxiated in its airtight hood. He wiped drool from the corner of his lips.

  “Am I doing anything wrong?” Lucretia asked, shrugging quietly with her breathing.

  “No, I’m sorry, I just had a long day.”

  “Do you want me to try something else? Any kinks?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “. . . Like this?”

  “Ow.”

  “Here, I’ll show you something. I turn over like this, and you straddle here and go in at an angle—”

  “That’s a bit fancy for me.”

  Lucretia scootched back and investigated his face with concern. In a voice high-pitched with generosity, she said, “Do . . . you want me to watch you jerk off? Do you like pee? I could use some guidance.”

  Henrik sneezed and left the room covering his nose and lips to find a tissue, returning to see Lucretia keeping a straight face, humoring him with humorlessness. “You don’t have to stay,” he said.

  “You sure?” She kissed him. “You’re really sweet. I want to make you feel good.”

  “You’re doing a great job!”

  Lucretia sat up, looking unbothered. She wiped her hands on the sheets and pushed her hair back over her shoulders. “Don’t feel bad, I never get off either.”

  He trotted to the bathroom, feeling ridiculous for still wearing the condom, which he stretched off with a loud snap. The silicone lube wouldn’t wash off. When he returned to his room, Lucretia was dressed and holding the cash envelope that he’d left on his dresser per instructions.

  “No tip?” she said with perky tact.

  “Oh—sorry. I’ll go get, uh, wait here.” He went for the petty cash envelope in his underwear drawer, releasing a brink-of-tears sigh as he counted out twenty dollars in an unstackably crinkled sheaf of singles. His nudity increased. “Uh, here. Can I write a check for the rest?”

  “Sure! Leave the name blank.”

  He left the memo line blank too. He knew it was dumb to leave a paper trail, but there wasn’t much she could do to him that wouldn’t make him feel somewhat grateful for the effort. Lucretia smiled and took the check. “I had fun.” She pecked his beard and hugged him, and he patted her on the back as the buckles and studs of her corset pressed into his stomach. “Maybe see you again?”

  “I would, but I’m cleaned out.”

  “Fair enough. You’ve got my number.”

  Instead of making her wait for him to dress, he walked her to the door and was thwarted by the doorknob: his lubed hands couldn’t grip it. He tried clamping it between his forearms, but now the knob was slippery too. Lucretia stood behind him, making him self-conscious about his buttcrack. Henrik grinned in frustration. “Heh.” Lucretia opened the door herself, and Henrik hid behind it as she left, kissing her fingertips and twiddling them at him.

  The door closed and Henrik deflated with a sigh. Not enjoying sex shouldn’t keep him from enjoying sort of having had sex. He surveyed his living room for forensic evidence. From under the coffee table peeped a white ear of something—the envelope that had fallen out of Lucretia’s purse, addressed from the Employment Development Department of California to Laura Bernard. Well, of course her name wasn’t Lucretia. Basic decency obliged him to return it to her. But nothing basic was ever easy.

  Henrik did a pratfall onto his sofa, feeling the cool press of corduroy cushions against his midsection, the cycles of breath and systole. He covered his face with his greasy hands and felt his eyes squirm under their lids. Stop, he thought. I own you, I am you, and I’m telling you to stop. But nothing stopped, not the wind thrashing outdoors, or gravity, or air pressure, creaming you under its ocean of air, never explaining itself, never cutting you a break. The forwardness of time, the downwardness of gravity, shoving everything like a plow—nature always acted personally. Nothing universal about it.

  CHAPTER 5

  Technical Support

  Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.

  —Alan Turing

  I. Stroke of Genius

  Vanya knew about the porn. She had to. Right? Certainly she knew of it; that Will dabbled, fleetingly and without remorse. A few months ago she’d asked (maybe a bit too casually): Baby, have you watched much porn? He’d said yeah, and that was the end of it. But thank god she hadn’t asked exactly how much he’d watched, because the honest answer would’ve been most of it. So far as Will knew, to Vanya it was a normal guy thing. A quirk . . . though quirks were usually effects and not causes of one’s personality, and by that standard, Will’s porn watching was no quirk—it was pure trait.

  And though he hadn’t watched it since he’d met Vanya a year ago, it was still a huge part of who he was, of what he’d consumed, and it was here now, and Vanya was not. What did she expect? He’d never delete it—it was too important, indisputably rare and beautiful. Never mind the man-hours it’d taken to download it; to create file tags and XML-formatted scene markers; to regularize the filenames and formats; to fill gaps in photo sets and find hi-res scans of DVD cases, front and back; to complete the back catalogs of particular performers (since in porn, the juvenilia was often the masterpiece); to build his seed ratio on invite-only torrent forums; to decipher thousands of CAPTCHAs to prove that he was human; or to assemble the storage solutions to house its gigascale, then terascale, then petascale volumes—he’d only watched about a third of it, so it remained in many ways a mystery even to him.

  Over the years he’d culti
vated an eye for composition, an ear for rhythm, and impeccable connoisseurship. That one-and-done you wanted to ID all these years? Aline Batistel, and she did a scene as Paula Becker for Brazilian Hustler too. That flawless blonde, whom only the collapse of the Soviet Union could produce? Alena Hemcova—or Alissa Romei, Lenka Gaborova, Katerina Strougalova . . . but drill deeper into the file hierarchy, past the MF and FFM and MMF and MMMMMF, beyond the Zenra and Private, the Woodman and Steele and ZONE-sama, the doujinshi and lemon fic, into the farlights of eros, where there was no niche he couldn’t cache: eco-friendly BBWs bukkaked while cemented into sidewalks, flexi Juggalo stepdads cuckolded by butterflies, cum tributes to horses torn in half, spray-painted soup men donkey-punching intersexed RealDolls. He’d also watched gay porn in a state-of-the-union capacity—you would think the redundancy of male equipment would limit the palette, but wow, no.

  Since he’d been seeing Vanya, months of sex, years in the gathering, had just sat there like regretted kitchen appliances. What to do with our useless virtuosity? His collection belonged in the Smithsonian, though that’d never happen. But why? If the objection was that porn was tasteless, profane, distorting, or exploitative, then porn was just really honest TV. And now there were canonical sex acts—the sex tape as heroic fucklore in an era of democratized you-porn. Porn was obviously art: it just had weak criticism. People driveled about its politics, culture, commerce, morality. But who was defining it? Just because porn didn’t have to be good didn’t mean it shouldn’t be. Will had been troubled by the rise of livestreaming, which was like replacing cinema with improv; and on the other hand, an encroachment of self-aware, camp irreverence: Bangbros, Cum Fiesta, Big Sausage Pizza. You couldn’t find a convincing cheerleader anymore, there were only porn cheerleaders, with pigtails and lollipops, hosed down with hand lotion by yard-long prop cocks to the accompaniment of thrash metal. It catered to an audience so porn-saturated that they needed to be reassured they weren’t taking it too seriously. Thus irony had finally kicked in the garden walls of the orgasm, sincerity’s last refuge.

  The real question was whether masturbating to porn was an art form: not as “erotica” or performance art, but as solitary pursuit of the sublime. Someone must have done it seriously, subtly, with literacy and flair, a masturbauteur—maybe it was Will. One time he’d discovered he could play the same clip in two windows side by side and cross his eyes to stereoscope the image into 3D, so long as he took Dramamine first. Another time he’d erotically hypnotized himself with a recording of his own voice, a little squicky but more or less effective.

  Now he sat half-recumbent with his undershirt bunched under his chin and twelve videos tiled across three monitors. Revisiting porn after many months refreshed all the marvelous warps in the glaze of pornic fiction. Like how it never rained. Or the beguiling divot in Nadia Nyce’s forehead, which looked like Bree Olson’s, who was otherwise indistinguishable from Ashlynn Brooke. That subgenre of guys offering “real” girls money to fuck on camera, thus synchronizing the fantasy with reality. The moment at the beginning of a gonzo scene where the actress switched her focus from the camera to the other actors, and audience became voyeur.

  Every hour or so he wristed the sweat from his upper lip and coughed with the sudden awareness of how dry his throat and eyes were. He used to wonder at his fondness for porn actors, since he categorically resented people for whom sex came easy, but porn wasn’t easy; everyone knew it was a clearinghouse of coercion and addiction, which cut down on smugness. Will preferred not the smirking glamoristas, not the Tori Blacks and Delta Whites, but the Sasha Greys and Anastasia Blues, those who brought their sordid biographies before the lens, the ones you couldn’t watch without thinking, My god, this girl is going to die someday . . . Occasionally they were dead already, making it especially clear that when they were on your level or lower, degradation-wise, guilt increased but shame usefully decreased. All this disqualified him as a good person and a feminist, but he wasn’t antifeminist either, more of a solipsist—and if solipsism was theory, then masturbation was practice.

  Maybe Will liked porn for not insulting him by pretending it had anything to do with the reality of sex, or with him. How could he relate, when there were no Asian men in porn? They weren’t any more underrepresented in porn than anywhere else, but still it bothered him sometimes to manage his desires by watching white people fucking, or white-on-Asian, or black-on-white, or sometimes white-on-black or black-on-black. Well, there was some AMWF (god bless that Lexi Belle), but it was so depressing to see the low user ratings and comments it always got. Porn from Asia was another obvious exception, but with its ludicrous censorship, even Asians denied the Asian cock, burst it into a cloud of pixels, and Will’s attempts to demosaic it only yielded ghostly approximations. But there was definitely no AM-disabled-WF—Will and Vanya were unimaginable even to porn.

  On day three of his binge, Will was getting impatient with the tedious editing of a POV FFFM CFNM A2M DTD BJ scene. He launched his video-editing software, and after checking on his bid for the anodized aluminum skillet he was buying for his mother, he tried trimming the clip down—too jumpy, and the cuts disjointed the sound; he fixed it with subtle cross-fades and clip stretching. He normalized the dynamic range so it didn’t get all loud when the cameraman was talking. He discovered that speeding up a blowjob was hilarious, and slowing it down produced an appealingly bestial lunar-gravity effect. This was great: he could pan, crop, and zoom exactly like he . . . huh.

  A pulse of red static scorched through Will’s brain. Inspiration.

  He abandoned watching in favor of editing. He sought better tools and raw files. He found an image stabilizer for handheld POV scenes, and audio filters to muffle the sucking-through-clenched-molars sound the actors made. Render times were a bottleneck in the workflow, so he hauled his old desktops out of the garage, popped in some spare RAM, and fashioned an HPC cluster to distribute the processing. After two days he was performing macro-assisted edits practically in real time, with three fingers on his trackball and his other hand striking hotkeys, occasionally leaving no free hand to jerk with yet maintaining jet-hot arousal throughout, while his overclocked towers ran double digits over operating temp, their rushing fans overwhelming the solemn allegro patter of his percussions.

  At random intervals, icy glitches of repetitive strain relayed up from his middle and ring fingers to his elbows. Both wrists, velcroed into pantyhose-colored braces, bore seamy scars from carpal tunnel surgeries. His left-handed death grip triggered fat flares of pain, masked by the crackle of his limbic system. But Will outdid himself now by managing to climax hands-free, and that was better anyhow, haunted as he was by the likelihood of developing some grave asymmetry between his hands.

  Admiring the clever cutaways in a Claire Bandit scene, Will began to reassess form. He stopped stroking his cock and stroked his chin instead. The usefulness of looping, skipping, pausing, the fact that porn wasn’t watched so much as intensely skimmed, was proof in itself of the shortcomings of linear sex in real time. If sex was raw data, and indeed it was, it should be semantic and context-aware. A reminder to pay the water bill popped up onscreen and Will paid it, then bought some eye drops. Maybe he could try a picture-in-picture inset. Or try lifting assets from one film into another?

  Lumbago pinched in his back like a bedded nail. He pirated DAZ Studio and used Vanya’s hi-res photos to skin the models, just because he had so many of them. With some filtering, some relighting, a few hours of figure rigging and keyframe, he could composite her into other films, controlling each joint and gyration. Well, there was one way to get Asian men into porn: in postproduction.

  He screened his works. Porn that didn’t require people. What was porn, after all? A set of expectations. The frontiers were wide open: machinima, teledildonics, sexual death-matches. Using game engines, performances could happen in real time with human agents conducting virtual surrogates in constructed environments, and it’d be trivial to mod the physics, script
behaviors, add or subtract orifices and phalli, random-generate genders. One man could be ten men, ten men one woman. Will realized he’d poured the foundations for the homebrew online collaborative erotic composite performative found-footage remix. The world’s first, as far as he knew, and he would know. Dozens of cameramen, lighting and motion techs, audio engineers could collaborate over team chat in the authentically realized fantasy, in the shadow of which ordinary copulation was merely tediously possible. Better than having sex, you could make sex. People would only need to watch. Love would be free at last.

  All of which might be nice to daydream about, but Vanya would be coming back eventually. His stroke of genius was just a tributary obsession after all, and maybe it was for the best that whatever the aesthetic pleasures, the actual physiological release felt unsatisfyingly forced, like a pepper sneeze. He resisted the shame he was supposed to feel; a life of rejection had funneled him to this meager consolation, the one kindness he could render himself, and he was supposed to feel bad? Fuck that. He would allow some self-pity, however, and some primal reluctance to be seen for a while. It was good that porn didn’t watch you back.

  He passed the week’s final climax like a drain clog, and with the barrening of lust came the crushing return of perspective: that sexual release imperfectly eclipsed dread, and the vertiginous awareness of disrobing in front of your computer to watch other people fuck along with millions of other people worldwide seemed like some decisive failure of the human experiment. With fatigue and eyestrain and simulator sickness besetting him like a flu, all enthusiasm erased, Will looked down and saw his hand, the desk, and his undershirt streaked in blood. He panicked. He searched blood in semen: surprisingly, it was okay. Will cleaned up and lurched into the shower more for spiritual than hygienic purposes. When he returned, his room had a heavy smell of skin. And there was nothing to do but sit at his computer again.