Please, Omar said to Belén, and at first he didn’t know what he was asking for. He pulled his shirt over his head, collar first; it would be another few weeks before he could lift his arms all the way up. Belén laughed and set her book aside, then took rosehip and bio oils from the bathroom and warmed them in her palm. She sat behind Omar and used the mini vibrator from the bedside drawer to massage the oil into his scars. His whole body hummed with her touch. He still remembered having drains in after his surgery, the tightness of the tubes under his skin arcing toward his sternum; though practically everything had been numb there wasn’t a moment he hadn’t been aware of them. When his surgeon had yanked them out, there’d been no pain at all, only the giddy, fluttering high of relief, and he’d laughed in a way that had scared Belén, had scared even himself. Belén massaged his chest in whorls, pressing the length of her belly against Omar’s back, and he almost laughed again now, it felt that good. Omar’s nipples tingled in a way they hadn’t since he’d come home from the hospital, and he began to make little mewling sounds of pleasure. The ring of muscle around each brown nipple pulled taut. Does it hurt, Belén was saying to him, do you want me to stop, and he turned around and took her face in his hands and kissed her. They fell onto the bed and laughed into each other’s mouths. He was already wet when she opened him, so wet that she slipped her fingers into his mouth to give him the sweetness of the juice. Omar tried to remember if he’d closed the bedroom curtains, it was getting dark now and someone might be able to see in, but then he didn’t want to know; the world beyond this room was all snow and eyes and Omar shut himself against the thought of it.
Belén slipped off his pajamas. It felt strange to be naked before her. Of the two, he was usually the one to pleasure her first, he loved to put his head between her legs for hours; but tonight there was a need in him, he couldn’t get Mr. Harris’s face out of his head. Belén cupped his little cock in her hands, rubbed it in wet circles and tugged it up between her pinched fingers. He was panting, straining. Please, he said, I need your hands, I need you inside me. She smiled then and lubed her fingers before she eased him back onto the bed. She kissed the inside of his thigh. I love you, she whispered to him, do you know how much I love you?
Then make me invisible, Omar said.
He pressed toward her as she entered him, first one finger and then another. The single bedside lamp cast gaping shadows over Belén’s thighs as she knelt between his legs. Omar shut his eyes and reached for her wrist. She had three fingers in him, then four. More, he said again, I need you. She had fisted him once before, but it had been so long, and his hunger made it hard to tell if he was opening to Belén or if it was she who was opening him, she had always been the only one who could open him this way. She curled her fingers against the rough spot beneath his clit, making him strain for his pleasure against her slicked hand. Still, there was the window, and his gaze kept wandering back to the dark strip of glass where the curtains could not reach. He wanted to be hidden. He pulled Belén up to him until she partially covered his body, gathering him into herself, and then she covered his eyes. She said into his ear, Stop looking.
The darkness beneath her hand amplified his ragged breath, the chill of the mattress under him, the pulsing cluster of her fingers. They were committing a sacred act, sewing him back into his body. Omar imagined his ancestors engaged in this same straining, this same rhythm, generations of lovers reaching into that same hot center. I love you, Omar said into the dark, and then all that came out afterward was Please, just that one word again and again, please, as though with her hands she could show him the self that only she could see, and when he came he let out a cry that became a laugh of release, and Belén held him to her until the shaking had passed and Omar opened his eyes.
* * *
There was a loud crack from the back window. A second passed. A thud. Belén reached for her robe, and Omar pulled on his pajamas. They raced downstairs and out the back door. Mr. Harris was sprawled in the snow beside a broken plank of the old tree house. He crawled away from them, dragging a twisted ankle. Let me take you to the hospital, Omar said, but Mr. Harris snarled at him to keep back, like a wounded animal. Don’t touch me, he said, repeating the command when Belén appeared beside Omar in her slippers. The cold had crusted the snow into a silken sheet of ice, and Belén stood atop this crust in her red robe, shivering, as Mr. Harris crawled toward the road. Everyone on this street knows what you are, perverts, he said with venom, do you think we’re all stupid? He was really in pain now, even in the dark it was clear in his voice. Though it was absurd, Omar thought again how much he resembled Fantozzi. There was no actual affair between Fantozzi’s wife and the baker, Omar remembered, only an unrequited infatuation and the moment the baker laughs and calls Fantozzi’s wife a monster, not knowing she is listening. Omar stood over his neighbor. Mitchell, Omar said, though it felt strange to use Mr. Harris’s first name, we need to get you to the hospital. Mr. Harris recoiled from his hand. Don’t touch me, he said again. They were close enough to the road now that the streetlight illuminated the scrape from a branch on Mr. Harris’s face, an angry red that was sure to scar. Other people would see it one day, after the cut had healed, and wonder. Their eyes met. Mr. Harris must have seen something in Omar’s eyes, the concern mixed with pity that dulled Omar’s anger, or maybe he was only repulsed by Omar’s looking. What are you looking at, Mr. Harris hissed, stop looking at me. He struggled to his feet and covered his face, and Omar and Belén could hear him repeating this as he limped toward the light of his front porch, Stop looking at me, stop looking at me, stop looking.
Retouch/Switch
by Cara Hoffman
She talked about money and how she didn’t have any, but this was fiction. Said she was terrified of losing her job, but the truth was she didn’t need it.
The job was retouching: making skin look smooth on the screen, making flesh lean, eyes bright, faces pale. She talked about the crime of it. How it wrecked your head. How you wanted more. She swore it was the money that kept her there. Money made our lips full and rosy, our bellies smooth and taut, our thighs slimmer. Money sanitized our faces and bodies of the moments that built us.
Her eyes were gray like concrete, and she never said I. She said we We can’t sleep at night, she said. We’re hungry again, she said.
She sent pictures of herself alone and said, This is a picture of us. Sent pictures of horses, pictures of parking lots, pictures of an open wound, a pocked stone. Here we are, she said. And here we are again.
She said when she lay beside me, she retouched me in her mind. Those eyebrows the wrong shape, that lip too thin. Arms should be slimmer, breasts higher, no one has a birthmark like that.
When she came to me in Aveyron, I had been alone for months, not speaking to anyone. The town was surrounded by fields of yellow rapeseed flowers; elder trees bloomed their hot breath out into the empty courtyard. I’d been eating one meal a day.
There were white horses grazing and black moths clinging to the screen doors and kingdoms of frogs in the mud. And I was silent, ecstatic in the cradle of real things.
I’d left the States and the noise of people talking about who they were. I’d left the tyranny of their camera-ready faces. It was when people began to say they were “on brand” that I lost the power to speak. I left because there was nowhere to rest my eyes and because at home in solitude, a machine stared back at me. I left because I had nothing to say to anyone who stayed.
I loved her because she knew the membrane between this world and that one was thin.
That one, faery land. The smell of his skin.
* * *
Bent over, the fur of him, the knots in his spine, the flesh and meat of his ass. Opening him. Smooth and strong, tender and deep, exposed. His face in the pillow, the weight of his body pressing back. The sound of his breathing like suffering. The salt musk alkaline smell and taste of him. Smell like mango, moldering pages, linseed oil, leather, ice.
His back streaked red and the stretch marks at his shoulders where new muscles pushed against the skin and made tears in his body.
* * *
When he was her, she said she wanted to turn me inside out.
In the apartment above the bar. In the closet at work.
In the basement when she first lost her job.
Her whole hand inside. And she sucked me until I was bruised.
I took it on my back, in the dressing room, on my knees, on the street. She said it was like biting into a plum. It was like running fast down a hill so light you might become airborne.
“That’s what it’s like to fuck you,” she said.
* * *
Asleep in her studio. Asleep on the couch by my desk. Asleep near the ruin. In her bed—nothing else in the apartment; no furniture, not a scrap in the kitchen, a single bottle of fig leaf perfume in the medicine cabinet. On the beach, her hair bleached white in the sun. In the ramble. Asleep on the lawn in the park when the hawk came down to strike beside me, so close a clod of earth from its claws struck my face. And she brushed it away. Put her wet lips on mine.
Driving with her in summer while her wife cried in the back seat. Each of us retouched by her.
* * *
Back in the States, where I can’t taste a thing, you push my face hard up inside until I can’t breathe. Your heart a little coffin that you’ve lined for me with satin.
* * *
For a time, I lived alone where things grew everywhere; there were shale cliffs and waterfalls, rich moss and beds of fern along the forest floor. Long-dead industrial buildings perched at the edge of the gorge, their roofs cratered and trees growing sideways from their walls.
You could scale the cliffside if you were light, you could stand on the roof, you could jump from the ruins into a deep pool the width of a fat man’s body. Touch the bottom to bring up fistfuls of silt and stones and bullet casings and fossils.
There is solace and comfort in the long-abandoned place, in the golden hour. No one’s voice and no one’s touch to intercede between you and the world. It doesn’t matter where this was. What the place might have been called at that point in time. Borders are unrecognized by wind and water.
* * *
I lived here quietly, until another showed up, butch this time, a marathoner.
People thought his house was haunted because the TV antennas were from the fifties and the doors swung open and slammed shut in the wind. And the barn looked like it had been smashed by a giant fist. I loved how he ruled this emptiness and he knew it called to me like no other.
But inside there were more objects still, and he, chief among them, cultivated his body. David with a Gorgon’s head, turning to stone in front of his mirror.
* * *
It didn’t matter who you were. I wanted nothing more than you.
* * *
We slept together on the Greyhound bus and shared our clothes and people had no shame in asking what
we were.
Were we this or were we that? Cruising or sleeping out, safer together. The music loud from the street and the city sprawling white below us. You were the purest form. The one I liked best.
Our devotion and our poverty and our whole future clear.
You were the only thing between me and nothing.
And we went down to the canal where those little boats were moored and crept inside one of them to sleep. The light from the flares and the light from the fire burned all night.
I left you with your hand pressed against the glass.
I left you amid the noise of the terminal.
That first time—the rush of bare life—the ecstatic loneliness. Like the world was going to tear right through me at last. You were the door in the dollhouse that led to the kingdom of the real.
You were the one. You were the only one.
If I could have left you forever I would.
Emotional Technologies
by Chris Kraus
Los Angeles, sometime in the late 1990s; I’ve been living here a year or two, and the landscape is an empty screen of white-sky days. There’s nothing here except for what you’re able to project onto it. No information, stimulation. No digression. No references, associations, promises and so your own reality expands to fill the day. And this is freedom. Driving from the GlenFed bank to FedEx to the library to the type designer out in Pasadena, I have become an independent contractor of my own consciousness. There is no social web here, only single units, and one is more efficient. Los Angeles is a triumph of the New Age.
The only experience that comes close to the totalizing effect of theater now is sadomasochism. “It’s so… theatrical” is about the worst thing you can say about anybody’s work in the contemporary art world. Theatricality implies an embarrassing excess of presence, i.e., of sentiment. Because it’s more advisable to be everywhere than somewhere, we like it better when the work is cool. And so S/m emerges as the most utopian effect of diaspora, because anyone who wants to can consent to play. Contained within itself, S/m does not rely on urbanist associative meaning threads that were once described as “chemistry.” It’s portable, it’s emotionally high-tech—the most time-efficient method of creating context and complicity between highly mobile units.
I am kneeling on the floor of the downstairs studio awaiting the arrival of a man I met over the telephone named Jeigh. For the past five weeks, Jeigh, a graduate of EST and participant in the men’s movement, has been training me to be a “woman.” Jeigh’s ideas are absurd, but as I’ve observed from being in the LA art world, ideas and meaning are completely arbitrary. He tells me what to wear, what to do, what to say. While I wait, a bowl of ice cubes are melting on the wicker table by the window. I am very nervous now about those ice cubes. Forty minutes ago, Jeigh called from Santa Monica to say that he’d be leaving in ten minutes. Tonight’s the first time that he’s ordered ice cubes. It’s a hot September night, and Santa Monica is about twenty-two miles away. It’s difficult to time this right, because if I go downstairs too soon the ice will melt, but he wants to find me kneeling, in position, the moment he walks in the door. My mind’s already split in two: I’m halfway here, the other half of me is hovering about the 10 East freeway, following the likely progress of his car.
I’ve been kneeling here about ten minutes in the sheer black blouse, the crotchless panties. I don’t dare get up long enough to check my makeup. My back is straight, and my palms and cunt are trembly. The motion-sensor light outside the house blinks on, and then the door swings open. My eyes are lowered like he told me, looking only at the black jean legs below his waist. He shuts the door, I take the timing of his footsteps as the cue to speak the line he gave me. My voice comes someplace from the swirl between my downcast eyes and the tension of his footstep. Modesty and fear commingling like a cocktail of two complementary drugs, NOW: “My body is yours. You can do what you want with it.” I’m speaking in a voice I never used before.
There is no experimental theater in sadomasochism. That’s why I like it. Character is completely preordained and circumscribed. You’re only either top or bottom. There isn’t any room for innovation in these roles. It’s a bit like what Ezra Pound imagined the Noh drama of Japan to be: a paradox in which originality is attained only through compliance with tradition. Tonalities and gestures are completely set, and so exactitude is freedom. His black Levi’s, my slutty outfit, his black shoes. S/m’s a double flip around the immanence of objects in the theater: the objects aren’t blank and waiting to be filled with meaning by the actors. The objects here are meaning cards; they hold all the information. He says, “Hold out your hands.” “Yes, sir,” I say, blood rushing to my face. He’s given me a choice of two responses to his utterances. The second is: I understand. He puts a collar round my neck and slaps me. Handcuffs, blindfolds, gags, and whips. The objects tell us who we are and what to do. S/m is like the sixteenth-century improvisational theater of commedia dell’arte: a stock repetoire of stories, bits, lines, and
gags. He chains my handcuffs to the door. I’m Columbine and he’s Pierrot.
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