by Patrick Bard
“What is it?”
“Nothing I can tell you over the phone.”
3
Jerome’s tone alarms Sebastian. He observes the other sales reps through the clear dividers of the open space. Most of his colleagues are absorbed in conversations with clients or suppliers. He gets up. As he arrives at the elevators, he hits the Down button, gets on, presses two, and wonders what Jerome has discovered. Jerome Loison isn’t just a colleague. Twenty years earlier, the two men graduated from the same high school. Afterward, Sebastian left for the big city. Paris. That’s where he and Marie met, during their first year of college. They’ve been together ever since. He was supportive of Marie’s mental health crises. It required several stays for her at a psychiatric hospital. Diagnosis: depression. When Marie was gone for many weeks after Lucas’s birth, he did his best. She relapsed when Lucas was in elementary school. This time she had to remain in the hospital for an even longer stretch. The doctor explained to Sebastian that depression is a chronic illness. Marie was put on antidepressants. It took a while to find the best prescription for her. At times she suffered from uncontrollable crying fits in the morning, seldom getting out of bed before noon. Sebastian had to manage his wife’s illness, his son’s education, and his job—and juggling all three had not been easy for him. He didn’t have parents or family to turn to for help.
He can’t foresee now that he’ll one day need to explain to an investigative judge that when Lucas was in the grips of the measles epidemic that hit his elementary school and he woke up with an extremely high fever, Marie was incapable of getting out of bed to care for him. Sebastian got home from work and found his son shivering beneath his bedcovers, teeth chattering, forehead beaded with sweat. Marie slept soundly, passed out from the sleeping pills she was taking. Sebastian called for an ambulance and it ended well, but at the emergency room he’d been told that Lucas could have suffered serious consequences. After that, Marie spent three months in the hospital. Sebastian was so exhausted that he nearly asked for a divorce. But Marie’s mental health improved. They overcame the crisis and celebrated their fortieth birthdays last year.
Sebastian gets off the elevator and heads down a hallway overrun with a jumble of cords, disemboweled towers, and scattered hard drives. In spite of the cooling fans in Jerome’s office, or maybe because of them, the temperature is stiflingly hot. Dressed in a blue T-shirt printed with the words I am not a geek, I’m a level 9 warlord, Jerome is focused on a screen that partially conceals him. Sebastian only sees him from the back. In the glow of the fluorescent lights, Sebastian can’t read his face.
“Come. Look,” Jerome says flatly.
Sebastian goes around the desk and stands behind him. From here, he has an unobstructed view of a full-screen photo of Lucas taken two or three years before. Quickly, he calculates that his son was likely no older than fourteen. Lucas stands in his bedroom of the apartment where the family used to live in Bagneux, looking straight out, fully naked. His gaze is focused. His skin is slicked in oil from head to toe. He has an erection. Sebastian swallows. It takes him a moment before he can choke out a response.
“Damn it! He must be the victim of a pedophile.”
4
At sixteen, Lucas has never kissed a girl, let alone had sex. But he’s seen tens of thousands of people of all colors and backgrounds having sex in every possible position and every possible pairing. A man with a woman, a woman with a woman, a man with a man, men (one, two, three…) with a woman, women (one, two, three…) with a man, groups of men, women with women, in every possible attire, from the simplest outfit to costumes of nurses, secretaries, college students, professors, buff athletes, cheerleaders, maids—just to cite the more common ones—not to mention all types of lingerie. Lucas has seen as many getups for the men, including bodybuilder, pizza delivery guy, plumber, gardener, personal trainer, and taxi driver, all of them having sex with partners of all ages.
Lucas saw his first porn flick when he was eleven. He was with friends, at his best friend Jeremy’s house. It was when Lucas’s family lived in Bagneux. The boys were all gathered one weekday afternoon when they stumbled on a porn site.
Lucas watched, embarrassed, a little disgusted, but also slightly excited and, most of all, intrigued, troubled, and fascinated. Like the other boys, he pretended to be bored, as if he’d seen it all before. The video showed a woman around his mother’s age and a twenty-something guy having basic sex.
“The cougars are the hot ones,” Jeremy said. “They love doing it, and they know how to do it. They’re experienced, and they go for young guys even like us.”
Lucas shrugged, but that evening he had a lot of trouble falling asleep.
That was it? That was what sex was all about? Skin, skin, and more skin, moans, sighs. Nothing else? If that summed it up, he didn’t get why everyone the world over made such a fuss about it. He was soon hit with the thought that he had been conceived that way, then pushed the vision into the recesses of his brain from which it should never have emerged. Instead, he asked himself how it would be when he had sex for the first time. How it would be when he was with a girl. And then, since he was far more interested in the Wolverine Epic Collection, he didn’t really think about it anymore. But although relegated to a corner of his mind, the memory of the video never faded. It came back to him regularly. In truth, the memory returned more and more often according to the changes in his body, subtle changes at first, then increasingly visible ones.
When he started sixth grade his parents bought him a cell phone; then, at Christmas, he got a computer. His very own laptop. The idea of going on porn sites didn’t cross his mind right away. He was too preoccupied visiting the pages devoted to superhero comics, a passion from his childhood. For some kids it was dinosaurs; for him it was Marvel. He went on online game sites. That was all. Then, in seventh grade, he started downloading movies and streaming pirated animated features that were just digital dumpsters of viruses, links to phishing scams and pop-ups that opened more pop-ups. Frequently, he had the impression of being caught in a spider’s web from which he couldn’t escape. The time he downloaded Spider-Man was when windows offering porn videos came up. He hit the green button, thinking he was activating the movie, but instead a page opened on a lottery that offered the chance to win an iPhone 7 if he played a game. Since he wasn’t on a Mac, and because he already had a cell phone, he clicked on the X meant to close the window. He just wanted to see Spider-Man. Instead of the movie, another window opened, offering video games for cell phones at a cost of 2.49 euros per week. Still uninterested, he continued to hit X until he was offered the chance to meet “cougars” ready to satisfy his every fantasy. The nude photos of women caught his attention and he lingered on the large breasts and the open mouths. Right next to the photos, an animated GIF of a couple having sex popped up in a window.
His mouth dry, uncertain of his destination, he clicked on it simply because he liked the girl’s face.
Two years had passed since fifth grade. He had grown quite a lot. His voice had deepened. As he watched the video that today he would dismiss as totally mundane, he experienced his first erection without quite understanding what was happening to him. The sex was filmed from the point of view of the guy as he looked at the girl. What particularly aroused Lucas was that the girl was looking straight into his eyes. At least, that was the impression he had. He didn’t know yet that these types of videos are called POV, point of view, to designate a subjective camera angle. He also didn’t understand that the guy was having sex while framing the scene and holding the camera. Two jobs done by one person reduced costs and maximized benefits. But Lucas was as unaware of this as he was of why the image he was seeing was so real.
Like a sponge, he was content just absorbing what he saw. Of course, he tried to recapture the initial thrill of excitement in the hours, days, and, even more so, the nights that followed. In fact, on the first of these
nights, he barely slept, just kept going from one video to the next. It was easy to do, because whenever he clicked on a tiny image, one out of two times, instead of a video, a new window would open up offering a mosaic of new faces and bodies in a never-ending supply. That was how he ended up with dozens of open windows on his screen.
When his alarm went off in the morning, he jumped out of his chair. Like a spelunker climbing out of a cave, he gazed upon the dawn light as it entered his bedroom and realized that he had spent a sleepless night. In haste, he closed all the windows on the screen and put the computer to sleep. In English class that morning, he started to look at the girls in a different way; he started to visualize them in the roles in the videos he had seen during the night. He also ended up drifting off to sleep in the middle of class.
5
Lucas started all over again opening windows the following night. And the next one. And the one after. He started masturbating. He’d do it up to five times in a row. He ended up hurting. He didn’t dare say anything to his father, much less to his mother. As for his friends, not a chance. He continued to watch pornos. His video habit increased. Now he couldn’t go without a daily fix of porn.
This went on for several months, and his nights started to spill over onto the days. As soon as he could, he turned on “fuck ’n’ sucks,” as other boys called them, on his laptop and smartphone. Lucas wouldn’t have used that term.
At the beginning, he watched each video through to the end. The videos lasted anywhere between three and twenty-five minutes. He quickly grew bored by the repetitive nature of sex. He started to fast-forward, skipping from the stripping to the blowjob, watching at high speed the one, two, three positions—doggy-style, riding, missionary. He barely understood what little was being said. He’d always been lousy in his English-language class at school. But his intuition kicked in and he quickly caught on. He was unstoppable. The only problem was that his vocabulary centered on a single and specific field of activity. But every day he explored a little more, broadening his knowledge. He discovered that the contents covered each aspect of everyday life, classified alphabetically on the sites: A for Adoration, Aerobic, Amputee, all the way through Y for Yacht, Yoga, and, of course, all the positions that go with each letter.
6
As a result of Lucas’s sleepless nights, his grades quickly took a nosedive. He had never been an outstanding student, but as soon as he dropped below the average, his mother and father were called to a parent-teacher conference at school.
“Lucas isn’t misbehaving in class,” Mr. Lambert, his main teacher, explained as he spoke to his mother. “He’s simply not mentally present, and he often drifts off to sleep.”
With eyes lowered, hands on her lap, Marie seemed apathetic. Mr. Lambert couldn’t help thinking that Lucas was a lot like her. Detached. As proof, it was Sebastian who responded, coming to his son’s defense.
“All teenagers are like that, aren’t they?” he said.
“It’s best not to generalize, Mr. Delveau. Teenagers are exactly like adults. Each one has their own personality. The stereotype of a teenager is precisely that, a stereotype. The staff thinks that Lucas isn’t adapting well to the demands of school. He’ll be starting eighth grade soon. It’s best to get him help before he starts to fail,” Mr. Lambert replied, looking pointedly at Marie.
Since she still didn’t react, he followed up with a question.
“What is Lucas’s nightly bedtime?” he asked.
“What are you saying? We make sure Lucas goes to bed every night around ten, at the latest,” Sebastian answered indignantly.
“Well, maybe that’s not enough sleep for him. Young people his age need a lot of shut-eye, and all of them are lacking sleep. The reasons are usually too much television and too much computer time.”
“I thought it wasn’t good to generalize,” Sebastian retorted caustically.
Mr. Lambert didn’t argue. He merely suggested that Lucas get some tutoring. Sebastian agreed. But the private lessons didn’t yield great results. It took a lot of effort for Lucas to reach passing grades in the last semester, barely enough to squeak into eighth grade.
7
Before long, looking at the videos on fast forward wasn’t fast enough for Lucas. He started to click away furiously, in search of the next girl, the next thrill, in search of the one who would hold his attention. Sometimes he found her. It depended on a particular face, expression, pout, and body. He would then watch every porno the girl had appeared in. He would never have said acted instead of appeared to describe what he was seeing. Even though he knew that this theater of the flesh was nothing more than a big act. And when he ferreted out the rare pearl, he played and replayed the video dozens of times, finding nearly the same intensity of arousal as when he first masturbated in front of his screen. Nearly is precisely the problem. He quickly discovered that images get old. That their power dulls after repeated viewing. Seeing them again and again drains the screen of any excitement. He trained himself to turn away from whichever girls were his current obsession and resumed hunting on the web until his porn-filled brain almost forgot the X-rated stars he was obsessed with—Natacha, Katia, whatever other names the actresses went by. After days of fruitless pursuit, he returned to his objects of desire, as if rediscovering Natacha or Katia, along with his intense reactions—all the while inventing stories and creating scenarios. The difficulty was that each time, the effect dwindled a little more, until the element of surprise faded completely. Boredom set in. So he resumed his quest, browsing myriad faces of women upon myriad faces of women, clicking, looking for a few minutes, sometimes mere seconds, just long enough to get a sense before moving on to the next film. Hours went by without him being able to watch a single video all the way through. Hours that he robbed from his daily life. From his nights, his afternoons spent with friends who little by little grew detached, as he became equally indifferent to their company.
Aside from his secret life, he seemed to lead a normal teenage existence. It would require being inside his head to discover the variety of pornographic images that jostled each other in order to grasp the extent of the fantasies he’d developed about girls in his class, even about women he sees when he’s riding the bus. In rare moments of clarity, Lucas wondered if he hadn’t become one of those sex-obsessed crazies that the media talks about, and the thought depressed him. To reassure himself, and as a way of fleeing the world, he took refuge in his precious laptop, his precious smartphone, and his precious porn sites. He clicked at random, and the need to spice up his nights led further and further into practices he never imagined existed. Like the time he selected bukkake without the slightest idea what it meant—only to see actresses getting squirted with a deluge of sperm. Gross! It disgusted him. To erase those images from his mind, he hurried back to his favorite categories. Recently, he’s discovered the world of cosplay—another thing he was completely ignorant about. When he saw the name Wonder Woman appear on the drop-down menu, his passion for superheroes immediately superimposed itself onto the porn images.
Just imagining what he could do with Wonder Woman’s costume got him aroused. Right away, he hit the icon. The mere second it took for the clip to download seemed interminable. His patience was rewarded when the superhero appeared in an immaculate white kitchen where a plumber proceeded to shave her head before making her his sex slave. That cosplay story stirred him up for weeks. He found lots of other versions of Wonder Woman, as well as Catwoman, even of Batman. He also consumed lots of pornos with vampires, zombies, succubi, androids, and sexy models in Halloween costumes having sex in wild settings, in every position. He loved the role-playing videos that looked as if they’d stepped out of comic books made expressly for his generation.
Every late afternoon now, he waits impatiently for the moment when he’s alone. The worst is when a thunderstorm prevents him from connecting to the internet. Because if he tried, it would fry the router.
Just like the time bolts of lightning shattered the sky in Bagneux. The firehouses were swamped with calls to deal with flooded basements. He had been in school, and no one had been home to disconnect the router.
The lightning ran in on the line and fried it. That evening there was no way to connect. To make things worse, lightning hit the cell tower that served the neighborhood and knocked it out. He couldn’t even use his smartphone.
“Couldn’t you have disconnected it this morning?” he grumbled to his mother.
His mother looked at him pensively. “I don’t check the forecast every day upon waking,” she said. “The thunderstorm came on suddenly. Your father will pick up a new box tomorrow. It’s not like it’s the end of the world. Surely you can live one day without the internet.”
Lucas shrugged.
That evening, he joined his parents for dinner. Without thinking, he started fidgeting, continually bouncing his left knee, which made the table shake.
“Stop it, Lucas,” his father told him, clearly irritated.
Lucas’s leg stopped. But a minute later, the jerking started up again. His father struck the table with the flat of his hand. The dishes and silverware rattled.
“Enough, Lucas! Stop it! You’re a bundle of nerves.”
“What are you saying?”
“Don’t take that tone with me. Since the box is fried, why don’t you use the time to study your math.”
Lucas raised his eyes and stared directly at his father. “Not in your dreams,” he replied.
This time his father stood up. He raised his arm and pointed in the direction of the stairs.
“That’s it!” he said angrily. “Go to your room!”