The Cybergypsies

by Indra Sinha

  Kissimmee, oh Kissimmee quick, you are quite amazing. Forget cyberspace. The Vortex has nothing on this, a fantasy eleven miles long – I check this on the car’s odometer – with every possible escape from reality. Arabian Nights; Medieval Times. At Fort Liberty, a cowboy castle, we are served by a lad dressed like a trooper from Custer’s Last Stand. Eve and the children adore the Congo River crazy golf courses which resemble meerkat colonies, complete with baked clay termitecture and blue cascades. We are thrilled by the drive-in burger joints. We eat at Basil’s Gourmet Dinning (sic) which promises the haûtest of haût European cuisine, but serves tough game smothered in cream and cranberry sauce – maybe Basil is Transylvanian. Each night on the television, smiling people promote bizarre products. Eve is much taken with a device which looks like a giant hamster cage.

  ‘Bear, I must have one. It dries fruit and it’s obviously a huge breakthrough because there’s an entire TV programme about it.’

  This is the life. England is so dull by comparison. The only thing missing here, its absence supplying the perfect finishing touch, is the tiniest trace of irony. All this and Walt Disney World too. In a cafe on Main Street USA, we see a video of WDW’s manager, a ferociously sincere fellow who says, ‘I never forget that my boss is Mickey Mouse.’

  ‘O o o,’ says the bird.

  ‘Yes,’ says Lilith, ‘We are all refugees from reality.’

  Casting Madison

  ‘DANGEROUS VISIONS FEATURES IMMEDIATE DEPARTURES TO OTHER PLANETS AND DIMENSIONS.’

  ‘Why settle for just one reality?’ demands the slogan in the dark sci-fi bookshop where Nico and Alexei have gone to ask directions. Lost in the dreary wastes of west Los Angeles, all they know is that they’re somewhere in the Valley, where the city spills over the mountains before the desert begins.

  Other planets and dimensions? Hell of a place to ask the way, Nico is thinking. The two of them wearing shades and Hawaiian-style bush shirts have been cruising the streets in a scarlet Cadillac Coupe de Ville convertible rented in Beverly Hills, perfect for a pair of hot movie producers on their way to a casting session.

  ‘We’re looking for . . .’

  ‘World models? Hey, I know the place. The Doll Shoppe. It’s really near. Head out the door, right along Ventura . . .’

  The Doll Shoppe sells gigantic dolls, tall as children, with names like Monroe and Jackie.

  ‘Keep going,’ says Nico.

  Twenty minutes later, they find what they are looking for, an unremarkable two-storey house above a launderette. A sign says World Modeling Talent Company. They head up dark stairs made gloomier by black carpet – shiny aluminium tie-rods bear witness to an attempt at style – and enter a drab room at one end of which, behind a scuffed desk, sits a man wearing a bootlace tie.

  The man appears surprised to see them.

  ‘Mr South? Jim South? We called you yesterday,’ says Alexei, adding unnecessarily, ‘We’re the guys from England.’

  The man slides open his drawer and from it takes out a glass ashtray. Lights a menthol cigarette. ‘What you guys looking for?’

  Dry southern accent, like a lizard’s tail rattling on stones.

  Nico and Alexei look at each other. The man waits patiently, his eyes flitting past them to the other desk, where a secretary is at work with some papers. After a couple of drags he stubs out his cigarette, finds a tissue, wipes the ashtray clean and replaces it in the drawer.

  ‘We’re looking for actors. For a movie. A quality production,’ says Nico. ‘Not porno. Educational A classic Indian text.’

  ‘Okay,’ says the man. ‘What tribe?’

  ‘Not that kind of Indian,’ says Alexei.

  The man reaches into his drawer and brings out the glass ashtray. Fishes for his pack of Kools. Lights up, takes a drag.

  ‘The actors,’ he says. ‘You want they do everything?’

  ‘Well, er . . . only what’s in the text.’

  ‘Yeah?’ He stubs out his cigarette, barely tasted, empties the ashtray, wipes it and puts it away. He gets up, crosses the room and fetches some thick volumes. Heavy scrapbooks. He thumps them on the table and says, ‘Tell me if you see something you like.’

  He sits down at his desk, slides open the drawer and gets out the ashtray. A smile blows across the cracked desert of his face.

  ‘Or if you like something you see.’

  Nico and Alexei begin leafing through the scrapbooks. The World Modeling Agency has everything. ‘Dwarves’, ‘Giants’, ‘Fat Ladies’, ‘Uglies’, ‘Freaks’, labelled presumably without reference to their clients’ feelings. The porn actors fill four books. There are hundreds of them; name, picture and resumé. Beside each entry is a row of ticks.

  ‘The ticks?’ says the man. He’s halfway through his regulation six drags. ‘Well, five ticks means they’ll do anything you can think of, and more. You think of it, they’ll do it.’

  Sucks at his Kool.

  ‘Four ticks means they’ll do butt-work. Three’s oral.’

  Another toke. ‘Two is straight stuff only. One means glamour okay, rest no way Jose.’

  He stubs his cigarette out, empties the ashtray, wipes it and drops it back in its drawer.

  ‘Make your choice and I’ll have the actors here tomorrow.’

  Nico and Alexei are the video’s producers. They’re here to cast it, equipped with descriptions of the four types of women idealised by Indian eroticists. The first person they saw was Ashlyn Gere.

  The Padmini, or Lotus woman. Her face is lovely as the full moon, her rounded limbs are soft as walnut flowers. Her eyes are sloes with sharply pointed corners dipped in red,.wide as a fawn’s. Her nose is a little sesamum flower, her lips trembling sprays of scarlet bandhujiva.

  ‘She is built like a brick excrement-house,’ an Ashlyn Gere fan writes on a web page. This must mean something else in America because in Britain it isn’t a compliment. Ashlyn began her career in horror, but then found her métier in porn, an industry which gives itself nearly as many awards as advertising does. She’d won Best Performer awards for three years in a row and was one of the few people to do mainstream work after being in adult films. (She played Bonnie McRoberts in The X-Files.) As a superstar of the adult industry, Ashlyn had several films lined up, but she showed a polite interest in the project. (‘Those ancient guys knew stuff that just blows your head off.’)

  The Hastini, or Elephant woman. Abandoned in her eagerness to win new lovers, her lips are greedy for kisses. She likes violent lovemaking and only a master of love can satisfy her.

  They went to Marina del Rey to see Ona Zee and her husband Frank, doyens of the sacermasoch scene (chains, whips, bulldog-clipped nipples). Ona is a square-jawed brunette who nowadays makes her own pictures. They knew at once that it was no go. It was Ona who suggested they ring World Modeling.

  The second day, they spend only a couple of minutes with the bootlace tie man (ashtray, six drags, upend and empty, wipe clean, put away) before he shows them to a small room with two chairs and a table and leaves them.

  ‘Six puffs every time,’ says Alexei.

  One by one, the actors and actresses they’ve picked enter the room and unselfconsciously strip to show off firm, smooth bodies.

  ‘So what theme does the pic have?’ one girl asks.

  ‘It’s based on the Kama Sutra,’ says Nico.

  ‘The whut?’

  A smiling young man, flexing a complex musculature, asks, ‘You wannasee wood?’

  ‘Wood?’ says Nico.

  ‘Yah. You know. I can show you a boner.’

  ‘No, no, not necessary.’

  ‘No problem for me, bud.’

  ‘No honestly, it’s okay.’

  Flying back across the Atlantic they work out how much they’ve spent on flights, cars and hotels with nothing to show for it.

  Nico goes to Belgium, to a house in a suburb of Brussels. In a back room are filing cabinets full of modelling cards. Thousands of them. Most of the girls are from e
astern Europe. The agent pulls out a picture of a very beautiful, very young, girl.

  ‘She’ll do anything to get out of Russia,’ he says. ‘But it will be her first time.’

  The Shankhini, or Conch woman. Although not petite, her breasts are firm, her waist slim though not curvaceous; she moves swiftly, swinging long legs and arms in a rangy stride like a young man’s.

  Nico locates one of the Russian girls at a ‘glamour’ shoot. She is sitting on a stool surrounded by photographers who are shouting instructions at her. The girl is obviously confused. She fastens huge eyes on Nico as if pleading, ‘Get me out of here.’ For a moment, he daydreams about stepping forward to rescue her, but stops when he remembers what he has to offer.

  Nico hears about a dancer called Madison who has made adult films. She’s lots of fun, the informant says, exciting, with a dark tan and Cleopatra hair. She could pass for an Indian. Her agent says she’s in Europe. Nico and Alexei finally find track her down at the International Porn Awards in Paris.

  The Chitrini, or Pretty-as-a-ipicture woman. Her curls are swarms of black bees framing a pretty face from which peep a pair of bright restless eyes and a lips that pout like a pair of bimba gourds.

  ‘Madison is terrific,’ Nico says. ‘Bubbly, friendly, funny, bright. She’s relaxed and not at all fucked up, which is pretty remarkable, given the business she’s in.’

  The yoga of two

  The narrative I write for the Kama Sutra video is not so much an explanation of what the text is, as of what it isn’t. The Kama Sutra is usually thought of as a guide for advanced lovers. In fact the reverse is true: it was written for novices and virgins. In India, now and in Vatsyayana’s day, people marry young and most marriages are arranged. The bride and groom might be teenage strangers who have never been alone together before their wedding night. Ahead of them lies perhaps half a century of married life. Divorce being unthinkable, it would be useful if they could fall in love and then, human nature being what it is, stay in love. The Kama Sutra is a guide to how to fall in love with the person to whom you are already married. Its techniques, starting with nuzzled near-kisses, are the gentlest introduction to physical love. The young lovers are taught to proceed step by slow step. A moment’s reflection will show what must have been obvious to Vatsyayana and every other writer on erotics, that it is ridiculous to classify just eight, twenty or fifty kinds of kisses, embraces, love bites, nail marks or sexual positions. Any porn website contains pictures of hundreds more postures than are listed in Kama Sutra. So why classify? Why give names to specific body conjunctions and detailed instructions for manoeuvring arms and legs? There are two reasons. Superficially, the embraces, kisses and postures are the practice exercises of a yoga-of-two, but their deeper purpose is to train the couple to be mindful together. The sexual positions are merely moments plucked from a flowing dance. When lovers are attuned by practice, it is the minds which experience communion and then it no longer matters what the bodies do. They can be freed to improvise and the love-making will be skilled, breathless, ardent, inexhaustible. Physical orgasm ceases to be important. It is the minds that dissolve into one another, the experience being blissful beyond description.

  Eve, patiently weeding your herb garden, you look up and smile – in a circular henge of roses, you grow costmary, borage, hyssop, dill, rosemary, bergamot, tree onions, camomile, angelica, chives, cotton lavender, parsley, catmint, lemon balm, summer savoury, comfrey, meadowsweet, elecampane, winter savoury, horseradish, many different mints, coriander, oregano, various sages, fennel, lavender, several types of thyme, rocket, caraway, sweet cicely, chervil, rue, basil, lovage, marjoram, sorrel, wall germander, orris, lemon verbena, marigolds, sunflowers, feverfew, French tarragon, Russian tarragon, nasturtium, heartsease, wormwood and garlic – a lock of hair curves down and touches your chin. When two people in sympathy share any pleasurable activity, it generates love between them. This is as true of reading aloud to one another, or gardening side by side, as it is of making love on a bed of crushed flowers, or flattened grasses.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s ironic’, says Eve (we have reached Cork and I am unpacking the laptop and searching our hotel room for a phone socket for the modem), ‘that you were writing about the bliss of marriage and the joy of doing things together while your wife and children had to go off to Disney World by themselves?’

  All in the mind

  ‘Bear, did you ever do it in those games, with other people?’

  ‘Oh hell, you’re not jealous are you?’

  ‘Should I be?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, no. I was always too embarrassed. Maybe, if I’d managed to conquer my inhibitions . . . Well, I’ll confess, I almost made love once, with Lilith. To see what it was like.’

  ‘And you can talk about it just like that? You don’t think I’ll be hurt? Didn’t you think you were being unfaithful?’

  ‘It was all in the mind. There was no reality to it.’

  ‘Doesn’t emotional adultery matter?’

  ‘It’s hardly very serious.’

  ‘What about all these people who fall in love on the internet? Marriages breaking up. You can’t say it isn’t serious.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you are right. Branwell and Hypatia fell in love on the net and they’re happily married.’

  ‘So does it matter if you fall in love? Or doesn’t it?’

  ‘The nearest I ever came was with Luna. I loved talking to Luna, being with her. But you couldn’t call it love. I didn’t even know if she was a she.’

  ‘What did Lilith mean, “Luna lives through the Vortex”?’

  ‘I wish I knew. Luna is a one-off.’

  ‘Bear, just suppose you succeed in pulling me into your world, like you pulled Todd . . . Suppose I got emotionally mixed up with some stranger? Imagine that. Would you mind?’

  Remember Venice

  Lobster and white wine in Cork (gliomach is Irish for ‘lobster’). A long, deliciously weary evening, still light at ten o’clock, Hare Krishnas tambourining through the streets. Eve – is it the wine? – seems happy. Walking back to the hotel her arm slips into mine. She says, ‘We haven’t travelled alone together for ages . . . ’

  I have pulled the thread of time from this narrative, as you pull the string from a necklace, scattering the beads to fall where they may, in unpredictable constellations. Our marriage had been quietly eroding over a long period, but outwardly little had changed. The tide goes out and you follow, crossing the low beach, rippling slicks of water, ribbed sand, rocks draped with weed . . . however far the sea goes out, you always expect it to return.

  ‘Eve, remember Venice?’

  We went there the year after we were married. Arrived in the small hours and took a water-taxi through canals that looked like a deserted film set. We stared in wonder as it chugged out into the wide Guidecca canal and all the lights from San Marco to the Arsenale suddenly came into view. It was a time when we’d been in love, and when being in love meant not being able to say so because mouths pressed breathlessly together cannot speak. It was perfect. We vowed that if ever in future we were in trouble, we’d say ‘Remember Venice’, and that this charm would always work, no matter what. Remember, Eve, how we danced on the Lido’s wet sand, our feet made patterns that wove in and out of each other. While we slept, the Adriatic poked out green tongues and melted them like the icing of a cake, our two pairs of footprints, that sometimes wandered far from each other but always came back.

  Descent to the underworld

  Okay Eve, follow me.

  We are standing at the end of a road outside a brick building. Around us is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building (Eve says, ‘Oh like that place in Venice’) and down a gully.

  ‘You take over now. You decide what to do next. Anything you like. Up to you.’

  ‘All right,’ she says, ‘let’s look inside.’

  We are inside a small building, a well-house for a large spring. Water is bubbling up through a grat
e. On the ground are some keys, a brass lamp, some food and a bottle of water.

  ‘What do I do now?’ she asks.

  ‘Whatever you like.’

  In vulgar – no, actually, thrilling – reality, she’s poring over my laptop, which is plugged into a phone socket in the hotel in Cork. She has asked me to show her what it’s like to be inside a game. Our heads close together, we study the text that is scrolling up the silvery screen.

  ‘I bet it’s a pine forest,’ says Eve. ‘I don’t like the way the trees strobe when you drive through pine plantations.’

  ‘Is that how you see it?’ I ask, surprised.

  ‘Of course not. We’re not in a car are we? We’re on foot.’

  ‘Are we? What gives you that idea?’

  ‘Well, it says we’re standing outside the building.’

  ‘Yes, but we could have flown there. Nowhere does it say we have to walk.’

  ‘We can fly?’

  ‘Why not?’