He returned to his pornographic commissions, & produced a few couture eroticas for which he’d seldom not receive his promised pay. More often than not, he received his compensation, as he’d become an infrequent contributor to several subscription services for such couture eroticas. Litigation against those who had reneged on their promised funds was beyond his means, & generally, no contracts had ever been signed. In those years he sometimes designed logos for mobile phone games. He sometimes answered hundreds of thousands of questions for consumer research firms. He sometimes washed dishes in sandwich shops, sorted packages & manned cash registers. One dire December, he spent a weekend collecting cans to make up for the rent he owed the primary tenant of his living arrangement, for the walk-in closet which he subletted.
Eventually, after several years of this perpetual grind, he found a fairly stable job for a corporation called Sinflate, a corporate venture known for cranking out second-rate imitations of industry trends with a pornographic gloss, as well as interactive pornographies of a more original design. He had been offered the position from his portfolio of erotica. It had been offered as a temporary gig, but he was asked to stay after he’d shown himself to be adept at cranking out large volumes of texture files & models in an efficient fashion. At the time, he’d been subletting a basement nearly two-hours away from Sinflate’s office by public transit, & much of the “go-getter” attitude he displayed was merely a result of the fact that his landlord skimped on heating & his workplace did not. Sometimes he slept beneath his desk.
However, when his coworkers complained about management & compensation issues, Cairey nodded along with them, knowing the ritual of employee comradery expressing itself this way, but all the while, he was relieved to have a modicum of stability in his income, as well as unlimited access to acrid office coffee. His diligence lead to his promotion after six months to a salaried position, which amounted to a meager raise, but entailed an increased workload (which, if he’d cared to do the masochistic mathematics, was effectively demoting his per-hour income)- but this salary enabled him to have documentation reliable enough to get his social credit score high enough that he could sign a lease on a microscopic apartment above a mexican butcher shop, which was still in the ghetto he’d grown accustomed to living in, but at the very least, offered views of its ends.
His new position switched his department from mobile games to live interaction. He no longer made textures & models for the virtual environments of half-assed cash-grab gameworlds, instead, he designed & polished the various procedurally generated digital skins that covered Sinflate’s private courtesans who could be rented for a per-minute fee. They interacted with their clients through virtual reality headsets alone or for an increased rate through interactive plasticine replicas of female genitalia, the most popular model being the aforementioned “Tinkerbell.” It was prostitution cleansed of the flesh, made entirely virtual, & livestreamed with enough personal attention to -in the opinions of their clients- render the old escort services & livestream camgirls entirely superfluous.
It was in the office that Cairey met the second Abigail of his life, that aforementioned ex-psuedo-girlfriend of his. She was a “motion capture model” for Sinflate’s livestream interactive pornographies. Her real name was Helen Leere. Abigail, or rather, “Abbie Normal,” was her courtesan name. & though she was always disguised under a procedurally generated digital skin chosen by her clients, often skins Cairey had designed, she was not inordinately unattractive herself, even shorn of her mascara, piercings, hair dye, & all the other collected trinkets of ostentatious individuality which she dolled herself up in. She had taken a shine to Cairey, or at least, she had taken a shine to blabbing to him ceaselessly on their mutual lunch breaks. Eventually, one Friday, she suggested they go out for drinks, & they ended up back at her apartment, surrounded by her various collections of consumerist ephemera, which were, in her case, governed by an ostensibly politically charged curatorial program which meant that there were pretty-pinkified figurines beside vaguely female-empowering slogans, often about “Sex Workers’ Rights”; there were posters of androgynous glam-boys, & a bookshelf of leftover university requirements whose books had subtitles like “Queering the Post-Colonial Reapproriation of Margaret Thatcher as a Feminist Icon” or “Critical Autoethnographical Approaches to the Erotic Literatures of Early 21st Century Fandoms”- & of course, her room bore a faint odor of vaporized marijuana (which they inhaled copiously after drunks), incense sticks (which she lit whenever she entered the room), & decaying fruit (as she was a vegan, except for sushi, which she ate every day for lunch). It was there & then that Cairey, at the age of twenty five, lost his virginity, while wearing an augmented reality headset, to this second Abigail, disguised by a Princess skin he had designed for his own satisfaction.
He did not mind this second Abigail. He often thought he liked her a lot. He even admired her ability to express herself by means of her furnishings. He had gotten used to living out of a single bag of luggage, which contained his few changes of clothes, a sleeping bag, a VR headset, a Tinkerbell, & a battered laptop. He had only recently bought a mattress for himself, secondhand, which laid on the warped wood floor of his unadorned apartment with a single sweat stained pillow & no sheets. His only other possessions were a frying pan, a fork, a bowl, a knife, a towel, a thermos, & a cracked blue lamp he’d found on the sidewalk. He considered her to be pretty well put together compared to himself, & eventually their routine of Friday-night fuckings became as regular as his Monday-morning commute. Often, they served as troubleshooting sessions for the skins he was producing for her clients.
She talked enough for the both of them. She loved to share her opinions. He did not have opinions anymore, at least, not any that he thought worthy of sharing. What he had were questions, unending, ever-multiplying storms of indecision & confusion. He had his personal biases, or fetishes, of course, but he could never find their sources, & so he had no way of organizing them under some totalizing philosophy of aesthetics. He had tried before, many times in youniversity, to explain his reasons for liking or not liking certain things, but always ended up as confused as his interlocutors, or else trapped, defending some position he was not sure he held. Even when he was alone he could not come to a conclusive stance or find some kernel at his center from which he could correlate the chaotic flux of his life & the world. There was always another question, a shadow lurking behind any assertion, & behind this, the shadow of this shadow in the form of an assertion regarding the questionability of the question, & he found that this procession of shadows, if not arbitrarily ceased by his mantra of apathy & indecision, would never end. It was easier to agree, he’d found, with consumer demand. There was no arguing with pornography. There, the customer was always right, & he paid for it.
It was easier to agree with her too, as it was easier to agree with everything anyone said. Agreeing never caused problems. & how much worse was it when he let slip a question! A simple “why?” could cause an avalanche of disagreeable sentiment. A “but so?” had nearly lead to a public incident between them one Saturday morning when she had brought up some recent tragedy she’d read about in the news. It was easier to agree, to nod along, & sometimes assert that he had “never thought about that before” even if he had, & he usually had, it was more agreeable to say that he had not. His time in youniversity had made him skeptical of his own judgment, or lack thereof, as he found that his questions, say, “But what’s the point of it?”- made him an enemy, while agreeing or feigning wonderment made him an ally. The only thing he had ever asserted was the importance of “True Art,” & his desire to create it- but he had found this, over the years, to be the most questionable assertion of all. It seemed obvious, in retrospect, that Pornography was more important than Art.
He had become fully disenchanted with himself & with the processes of art production as a material practice, as he felt his work on texture art & models only supplied the same benumbing emptiness he’d felt when he had
been a dishwasher, a pamphleteer, & a collector of cans. Even his recollection of working on his botched panorama was no different in kind. It was merely one of his first instances of working uncompensated overtime. & when it came to that “great idea” which he took to mean “the effect of the artwork on its viewer”- he had no faith in his ability to control or curate it. The contingencies of his subject matter, his fetishes so to speak, were as inexplicable & arbitrary as anything else in the world. His knight, & princess, & black crowned satyr were only meaningful to him for their connection to his childhood world of imagination, which had been cultivated by the happenstance of having consumed particular comic books at a particular time in which such figures were presented to him. They could just as easily have been cowboys or pirates or superheroes or saints or political revolutionaries or scientists… He’d designed all of these skins before for the satisfaction of an anonymous client. That’s all there was to it.
This sort of deconstruction was something he kept to himself, or else, unloaded in his weekly appointments with his therapist, who always found a way of turning his questions back around on him. This was how he learned, in the first place, that asking questions was a most disagreeable enterprise. He’d been asked questions for almost two decades by various therapists, & he didn’t feel any better for it.
Even so, as he entered his late twenties, & approached his thirtieth birthday, Cairey’s relationship & work-life were more harmonious than they’d ever been before. Everything had been fine enough, predictable enough, routine enough, & satisfying enough, until a year ago, when something he’d seen at Flöskel struck him with an answer to all of his questions that he’d never considered before, & it was this answer that threw him into a disorder that he feared he could never recover from.
It was the re-emergence of that uncompleted panorama of his, which he’d left behind at the General Arts Youniversity- as all works made using any materials supplied by the institution were contractually owned by it, & the canvas & paints he’d used had come from their supply closets- nevermind the fact that he’d had no use for it himself. In those interim years it had been purchased as a piece of a lot when the Youniversity had gone bankrupt & was liquidated & stripped by the procurers of its debts. Collections of student-produced artworks were purchased from the liquidation firm by a company that licensed images for use in the production of movie & television sets. Cairey’s piece, under the name “G.A.Y. Paintings Lot #6”- had been licensed by a subsidiary of Flöskel’s home decor department for reproduction in its “Here & Now” collection, where it was trimmed to show only the five foot by five foot square in which the moon was depicted. It was renamed “Blue Moon.” It became the best-seller in the subcategory of “Misc. Wall Hangings”- & was reproduced thousands if not hundreds of thousands of times.
Cairey had known none of this when he’d gone, a bit hungover & ornery from a frustrated troubleshooting session the night before, with Abigail to procure furnishings for an apartment they’d signed a lease on together. He only learned the process by which his piece had come into Flöskel’s possession later, after the ensuing incident. What had happened when he saw it, after drifting through the aisles of Flöskel for over an hour, was later diagnosed as a “manic derealization episode.” What had happened was that Cairey had become convinced, viscerally & instantaneously, that his life was a joke. He had become aware, upon seeing dozens of “Blue Moons” hanging, of the total unreality & impossibility of the situation in any reasonable world. Somehow, his painting had become a work of “True Art,” shorn entirely from his own authorship of it, & worse, from its compensation. In seeing his painting, now successfully appreciated in the market, being admired by droves who did indeed purchase it & hang it on the walls of their homes, he recognized the hand of an evil god bent on torturing him with ironical inversions of his aspirations & his dreams.
In that instant, everything suddenly made perfect sense. All of his questions were answered with the unfolding of this central kernel, & as it unfolded, he felt that he had been invited in on the joke that was his life & his world. He felt a relief so profound that it was intoxicating. He said “none of this is real” to himself, & began laughing like a maniac. He told Abigail, whose eyes widened in horror & concern & disbelief, that she was not real. He told her, in a jumble of breathless laughter, that she was a parody of his imaginary friend from childhood. He told her that he had painted this painting, this particular “Blue Moon,” which he held above his head, & that this painting was from a dream he had had, & that this was all a part of the curse he had been under since the night he had set off to slay the dragon & seize the Aphorapt. He cursed & screamed the name Tinfasel in lamentation. He screamed such things at bystanders, & their reactions made him laugh all the harder. He started destroying the paintings, smashing them against the others, slashing them with a knife from a kitchen set they had decided to purchase. He flipped over displays & wreaked general havok through Flöskel until he saw security guards locking onto him with their eyes.
Then he ran, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake, through the labyrinth of Flöskel’s departments, through its cafeteria, & out an employee exit, down a fire escape, where a lone dishwasher was smoking a cigarette on an ostensible bathroom break. From there Cairey ran through the city like a fugitive or a secret agent, hiding behind trees in the park, keeping tabs on passing police cars & pedestrians, looking for signs of his Great Enemy, the infernal author of his ails, the dark wizard Tinfasel. He at once wondered if he’d lost his trail, but knew that escaping him was impossible. He’d never felt so alive & alert as that day when he’d turned against the demon of his fate & ran wild through the city like a uncaged gorilla.
He ignored the calls he received on his phone, eventually tossing it down a sewer grate to send the agents of his enemy astray. It was only hours later, when his mania started to fade in the quotidian crowds & routines of the city, that he realized that none of these people gave a damn for him or for Tinfasel. He realized that they were innocent & that he had clearly gone momentarily insane.
It was then that he passed a film crew filming that final scene of that final episode of Symon. It was this site that convinced him that he’d truly cracked & gone mad before, as the reality of this dramatic production appearing just then & there, with its yellow-tape cordons, its cameras, microphones, & assistants- made him question the answer he thought he’d discovered, as he questioned how it could be that he, & not someone more interesting, someone more compelling, more dynamic, & more heroic, could be the protagonist of the dramatic production of the cosmos. It seemed ridiculous to him that any deity of any caliber should pay him any attention at all, nevermind construct a universe around him, & merely to torment him. It was then that Symon gave his speech, which went as follows:
“I ask you, comrades: What are we gathered here together for? I tell you, it is under false pretences. Do you see? This is nothing but a show, a play of lights & mirrors. This is a fraudulent world of my direction. I am its protagonist. But why, I ask you, why have you gathered here to witness this production of mine? Am I boring you now? Has this show gone on too long? You are free to leave whenever you’d like, yet here you remain. Why? Do you know yourselves? I know. You are drawn here because my reality is more engaging than your waking lives could ever dream to be. Am I wrong? Well, I fear to tell you that this show is at its end, but do not fear overmuch. I have merely grown tired of it. There are better things to be done with this talent of mine. I can create realities which surpass your own. Is it not a crime that this talent should be limited to these serial installments? Is this not ridiculous? I think it is. I do. Do you? Well, I tell you, my disciples, soon, someday very soon, you shall never have to part from my world as it will become your world as well. Do you believe me? I tell you, together, we shall upend that dull reality of yours & replace it with one of my design. There will be no need for false realities then. There will be no need for all of these spurious artifices of inferior craftsmanship.
I will invade your humdrum world & turn it into a Paradise. There is only one question: Are you with me?”
& it was then that he realized, listening to Symon’s speech, that he was, in fact, as entirely free to create True Art as Symon was, or, he thought, free to create a reality superior to his own. He realized then & there that he’d escaped the clutches of Tinfasel, that ill-god of fate, & that his own lifetime lay open before him, open like an ocean scattered with archipelagos of possibility. He realized that he had destroyed, once again, in a fit of intoxication, a reality he had spent so long to create. He realized that he was perhaps too free to do as he pleased. & this was not a relief. It was far worse than the mania to realize the fundamental apathy this dull humdrum reality had to the reality he envisioned in his dreamworld. It was awful to compare the poverty of his soul to the richness of his aspirations- to compare the fragility of his mind to the sensibility of his fantasies- & to compare destruction he’d wrought against the ill-god of his self-loathing, to the work that remained in the construction of paradise.
He felt dizzy as he considered what he could do next- after all that he had done. There was no going back, no amount of penance could rectify his sunderance of the routine reality he had disavowed in that one moment. Abigail would never understand. He could never explain it to her. It was over. & his job- he could not imagine just showing up to it on Monday as if nothing had changed. In the span of a few hours, he had ruined what remained of his life, & with each wave of recollection of what he had just done, he hated himself all the more, & feared himself all the more, & he felt that he could not trust anything that came from his mind any more, though he believed that, someday, in the future, he might be able to build a new reality & make his dreams come true. So he did the only thing he could think of doing- which was to go to his therapist & have himself institutionalized. He let a faceless bureaucracy handle the fallout of his madness.
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