Hysteric

by Nelly Arcan

  THAT SPRING I rented the one hundred and fifty episodes of The X-Files and I remember some of them and even had a few moments of enjoyment. There was this one episode where people saw themselves dead in Polaroid portraits that were supposed to be photos of them smiling, just as they were when the picture was snapped. They saw themselves at the scene of the crime someone was about to commit, and seeing the image, they knew they were about to be murdered. In the photos they gazed at themselves strangled, stabbed, decapitated, their hair dishevelled and their limbs bent at impossible angles, for the first time in History people could identify their own dead body. In their investigation the two FBI agents discovered that the camera had travelled through time to shoot pictures of its subjects’ remains a matter of seconds after their death, the camera not only saw into the future, but beyond people’s lives. I wondered if the Polaroid would have had the same reaction to me as my aunt’s tarot cards did, I wondered if a death had been provided for me too.

  In The X-Files, Scully and Mulder made the strangest couple because they never fucked. The nature of their job, which was to fight the forces of evil that issued from the four corners of the universe, didn’t leave time for that. They were making the greatest discoveries of all time that, unfortunately, always fell into the hands of a colleague who was an agent for the opposing camp, the Liars and Concealers who believed in the global panic and destruction of all order on Earth that would follow the revelation that life came from elsewhere. On the screen, faced with the grandeur of the light-years that the extraterrestrials needed to reach Earth, Scully and Mulder’s sexual organs simply faded away. The sudden loss of your genitals must be a little like waking up one morning with white hair, it’s the price you pay for surviving the great shocks existence has in store.

  I decided that indifference to the opposite sex resulted from the proximity of a foreign yet superior race. Scully and Mulder didn’t fuck because, compared to extraterrestrial life, Earth seemed too small, suddenly it became boring and backward compared to the kind of evolution it took to be on the side of the conquerors. Perhaps they had a secret desire to reproduce with creatures from other planets and reappear in some better form. There’s no doubt, the instinct for reproduction must aim at something absolute, an ascension toward perfection, who knows if one day medicine will discover that cosmic expansion was written into the flesh of our ancestors from the very beginning, who knows if, in the caves where they sought shelter, they carried that destiny, so feared by my grandfather, that would spread human misfortune through outer space.

  I spent that time in my three rooms at the corner of Saint-Denis and Sherbrooke. After you left me, I went out to have the abortion, buy groceries at the corner store, and go to the Cinéma L’Amour and the Boîte Noire. When I wasn’t watching television, I was getting myself off. For weeks, I jerked off for you on the Internet and it wasn’t only because I had nothing else to do, it was a way of making peace with you and, while I was at it, the entire pack of my former clients, it was a way of rejoining the human race before getting out of it once and for all. Before I died, it was better to get over my whore’s rancor for fear it would extend my life needlessly through a spirit of vengeance; by trying to make others pay and accumulate reasons for them to do so, you can live to a ripe old age. My grandfather had something against everyone, he called down the end of the world every day of his life, and he died last year at the age of a hundred and one, it’s terrible to think that the desire to see the world end kept him alive so long. I’m sure that when he died he had doubts about himself, for a few minutes he resented the life he had spent in nothingness, for a moment he must have realized he would leave this earth before the hand of God, on whom he called with all his strength, would strike humanity.

  ALONG WITH SPENDING entire days and nights in front of the television set, for weeks I tried getting myself off on your porn sites but it didn’t really work. Seeing my own sex on other women created nothing but madness, unfortunately the only effect it had was to put me in my place and beg comparisons. Behind the screen people were mocking me, the malevolent entity that spanned the globe and linked all the web surfers knew that your girls would block me out of your thoughts and hunt me down in my own fantasies. If I wanted to come, I had to put myself in the man’s place and for that I needed women older than me, between thirty-five and forty at least. Today I realize that on that level, you and I didn’t have the same tastes. All I asked for was a little peace in the feeling of an appetite fulfilled the way it should be, in the moment that follows release when well-deserved repose should have been mine. You once told me that the goal was relaxation, for you jerking off meant taking care of yourself by expelling infection from your body, it was like scratching an itch, it also meant freeing your mind for the work you had to do, jerking off was part of your job. Every time I went to see your girls, I left feeling sadder and more disgusted than ever, and more agitated too, every time that it didn’t work for me, you won.

  I probably never stopped being a whore. In fashion magazines they say that being a whore knocks down all barriers to understanding men, whores know more about them than other women do, the whore’s trade makes whores into strong women who stand tall against betrayal. I think the opposite is true, I was never in men’s shadow so much as when I was a prostitute, to be a whore, you have to give up understanding anything, it’s a question of survival.

  After a while I stopped trying to get myself off but I returned to your sites so I wouldn’t miss anything you had seen, I went there like a scout. I noticed, as you must have, that your favourites, the Girls Next Door among whom your Number One was Jasmine, did look like real neighbour girls, just the way whores from escort agencies look like nice young ladies from good families. I saw that the Girls Next Door favoured access to the back door, they all looked easy, they all seemed to fuck for pleasure and they never faked it, the set-up that had them sucking off the first guy who happened on the scene was realistic. I even wrote an article about them for your paper Le Journal, I wonder if you read it.

  I wonder if one of your Girls Next Door will show up knocking on your door and ask for asylum, seeking refuge in your six-foot frame and warmth in your tender gaze, they’ll tell you why they can’t go home and how they have to call a locksmith, forgetting they’re naked underneath their towel.

  When I was jealous you told me I’d done worse, you even said the worst. You didn’t understand how I’d touched the depths but still hadn’t opened my mind to the life choices of my generation. You said that whores were in no position to dish out advice. At the time you didn’t know that repentant whores often have a second life as nuns, neither did you know that in this world as in others, the pendulum principle is very real. To defend yourself, you referred me to my photos that had appeared on the Internet years ago. I admitted it: when I was twenty I had posed for Barely Legal, I made my confession as if, after everything you knew about me, there might still be room for surprise. At the time you didn’t react, but a month later you got it into your head to go looking for the pictures, and you asked for my help.

  Despite our patience and my directions, we never found a single one of them, and when I think about it, I’m not surprised. Since girlhood I’ve never enjoyed the proof of my existence and today I think it’s a lot more embarrassing for other people than for me. In general, the handicapped suffer too much to suffer from embarrassment on top of it, maybe I can write these things because I’ve been cut off from embarrassment. Still, it was too bad we couldn’t find any of my photos. They could have helped you love yourself, jerking off with your left hand, because at twenty I was practically a virgin, I was the perfect Girl Next Door, when men saw me they smelled sex, not money.

  I remember the day the pictures were taken, it was at my place, I remember after the shoot I’d examined the Polaroids that were used to get the lighting of my skin right, I remember the fear of getting excited nearly drove me hysterical. For the first ten minutes I didn’t recognize myself, I had never seen
myself in that light, that was my first contact with pornography until I met you. Too bad we hadn’t loved each other back then, when I was twenty, maybe we would have understood each other better. We would have had ten long years to destroy our love.

  Knowing both sides of the industry gave me the right to speak, and I kept none of my thoughts hidden. In my opinion whores, like Internet girls, were sentenced to die by their own hand because they spent the vital energy of their young years too fast, they preferred to finish themselves off, feeling the roar of the final miles instead of crawling through the remains of existence. By killing themselves they were like the light of dead stars reaching us in the lag of their explosion, light the astronomers say is the most dazzling of all because at the moment of death, they give up the best part of themselves, like hanged men. Maybe your father would have approved of the analogy between the life of stars and the lives of women living and dying from the desire of men, between the flickering out of life and the visibility the act gives. With the panoply of lenses and yellow, blue, and red filters, hundreds of times your father was able to photograph the deployment of multicoloured waves set off by the gutting of nova and supernova. Your father had a special camera attached to the end of his telescope, and a passion for astrophotography, he lined the walls of his observation post with giant illustrations of cosmic phenomena; one picture showed the result of a collision between two galaxies, both had emerged unrecognizable, dismantled, criss-crossed by bands of black clouds that looked like flowing blood. Above all else, your father searched for red giants swollen with the instability of their atoms and about to expire; your father loved the colours of agony, he knew the splendour of the last breath better than we did.

  If God had let all living beings die in so spectacular a fashion, ejecting everything they contained into the air, the world would have had meaning. Life would have been fuller had it been extended in a giant flash but God wanted it to disappear into the silence of oceanic depths and the forgetfulness of ghettos.

  You responded to my considerations about whores, Internet girls, and the cosmos with silence. You had started pulling away and for you distance meant losing the thread of the other person’s ideas, it also meant not taking the trouble to answer. I wonder if the smell will make people knock down my door after I die, I wonder about my body’s state of expansion when I’m found.

  IN THE PAST a lot of clients would say I had the body of a porn star, by that they meant that hundreds of hours of physical training and thousands of dollars of plastic surgery had made me into something particular, in some way it separated me from nature, my body belonged to the realm of culture. One day I asked you what the difference was between porn stars and me. You said that unlike porn stars I was there, in your life, every night I was in your bed. Maybe you meant I was a little too present a little too often, you had taken on too much and sometimes it was a problem. Or maybe you meant that the lack of sound effects and exaggerated expressions that porn stars have to put on, since they can’t judge the consumers’ reactions, was somehow precious to you. It’s true that no man can stand eyes like mine for long, they have seen too much and that’s why pedophiles love children, that’s why women fall for priests and soldiers returning from long tours of duty in hostile lands, to make sure the pleasure won’t wear thin.

  You noticed a few things about Internet girls, for instance, nothing came out of their pussies, always wet in their latex sterility, nothing, not even the little trickle of white liquid that’s normal, though you were afraid it meant someone had been there just before you. You marvelled that nothing came out of their asses either, no matter how far a man went, he never hit shit. They’re so clean, you told me, making the contrast with my shit that smeared your cock without your consent when you fucked me in the ass; you must have been implying that shit kills love even if you go looking for it. I had no responsibility for the organic matter inside the human body, or how your more violent incursions ended up meeting it, but that didn’t reassure you and I understand, touching a corpse can cause death.

  WE BOTH TALKED too much. We exposed our insides, we showed each other our inner ugliness, that might have been a way of brandishing our weapons and forcing the other to retreat. You said things that aren’t meant to be said, you took pictures of your cock and collected them, your collection helped you see its every aspect, your collection was a kind of panorama where the most inaccessible angles of your cock could be seen in full view on your screen, of all the images classified by theme in your computer you preferred the photos of your cock because they were erect the same time you were, it was a symmetry you enjoyed. You said that the length of your cock varied according to the day and that was due to the strength of your excitement, capturing your cock with the camera at the final stage of excitement created a problem because as soon as you let go of it, it would grow limp, at the exact moment when your cock reached its maximum size, only a few seconds remained, often you came too fast.

  I interrupted you at that point in your story, I remember it well, we were at Bily Kun and Nadine was there too, leaning on the bar in front of a pint of beer, bursting with her usual good mood, head thrown back and surrounded by men you knew. As usual, she had done coke. To keep you from disappearing behind the happiness your photo collection provided, I told you about a similar case, one of my former clients, I described how the man admitted jerking off while imagining himself jerking off. Sorry, my love, I halted the description of your desolation that night, I should have kept silent and looked away, that’s what people who have to carry other people’s shame do. From that evening on, things started deteriorating between us, you and I understood that my reply about your cock told us everything we needed to know about our future, maybe it was your way of retreating into yourself so you could move on to another woman.

  The way I resented your little habits seemed like a reaction from another era. You figured my grandfather had too much influence on me, I had listened too eagerly to him and become a member of his generation. He was a farmer, and for you that said it all about his vision of the world. Being a farmer meant retreating from human beings and idealizing pure matter they haven’t touched, it meant attributing bad intentions to technology and being afraid to turn on the TV, it also meant not understanding that if pictures give you a hard-on, they don’t kill anyone, their impact doesn’t go beyond the intimacy of your living room. Being a farmer meant having God above your head all day long in the middle of the wheat fields and having only him to blame when the wheat didn’t grow, it meant exposing yourself needlessly to his wrath and being the first to pay. In the city, you said, skyscrapers form a shield and maintain us in a state of impunity.

  According to you, ours was the great age of pornography and we had to accept it the way we accepted climate change, and bid farewell to the final moralizing stutterings of the Pope. According to you pornography was part of daily life, doctors were even beginning to prescribe it. Everyone knew that sex made couples stronger, and I reminded you that these days, sex wasn’t something practiced by just two people. I reminded you that compared to the charms of the Girls Next Door stored inside your computer, I felt like I was getting in the way of a routine that went on very well without me, I’d be better off tiptoeing out of the room. I remember that often, toward the end of our story, I would leave your apartment in the evening for fear of being the fifth wheel. At first you wanted me to stay because you thought I was going off to meet another lover, you thought I was running away and that it was no fault of yours, but then you let me go without a word because you understood it was a gift.

  FOR A WHILE you tried to take matters into your own hands and initiate me to the world of Internet porn. You assured me there was room for two in front of your screen. You didn’t share my obsession with imagining the everyday lives of the girls we saw, for you the pictures didn’t inhabit the same plane we did, they didn’t have the substance of life. I began to panic for real when I realized I was willing to do anything to please you, even become
your client. Submitting to your desires was the only way to be in your good graces. Then I understood that could never happen, at least not for real, I was much too scared and fear froze me; that’s what fear is for, to force a person about to commit a crime to reconsider his actions. I also understood that our love life was crowded with the memories of my former clients, I was a woman betrayed. With you, I had the worst of both worlds. Sometimes I even missed prostitution. I wondered whether hooking up with my former clients would help me get over what you were doing, if I had begun whoring in the first place, it was for reasons I didn’t fully comprehend until I met you.

  For a whole week I agreed to your initiation, I followed the operations that, in your cyber world, always brought you to your destination. You were deft and very quick, on your screen the images leaped to the movement of your fingers on the keyboard, it was magic. You were a computer geek and all your friends said so; with your skills you’d go far.

  That week I wondered whether, in the crowd of Internet users jostling through the same networks at the same time, there were family members, people like your father, or even your mother. One day you admitted that your mother knew absolutely everything about you, between you and her there were no taboos and you never hid anything from her. The two of you teamed up around the kitchen table when your father tried to lay down the law. Among other things, you talked to her about the pornographic images you retrieved by tearing them away from behind their pay walls and encrypted servers and hiding them behind your own passwords. You told her that your taste for porn was really all about hacking, pirating, plundering, since the act you loved above all else was breaking down the barriers of pay sites and taking away their women and storing them behind your own passwords with the rest of your herd. Your mother never made you feel guilty about anything, not even when you smoked cannabis in front of your grandparents, and you didn’t like it when I told you your mother wasn’t really a mother at all.