Four New Messages

by Cohen, Joshua

  The main entrance to all this flaunted an anteroom entirely empty except for a single tabling entity—a mediumsized chest or toppled armoire cluttered with par avion and torn aspirin packets—that he called the piano though it was, in truth, a harpsichord. He never played it but sat on its stool occasionally and when he looked at the stool and saw, instead, a steeringwheel, he knew it was to time to get moving.

  He was hardly at this home, however, and so did most of his living, as he did most of his editing—his editable living—in transit. On the road. Always being driven by that swarthy pard with the spray of sesame seeds across his face—potentially a birth condition—and breath that smelled of “pomace” (according to the dictionary of one interviewee—an evenbanged brunette with diacritic zits who contacted your correspondent about a week after he landed in-country—who gave Yury’s name as I˙lgiz I˙rekovich, said he was partially Tatar and the father of her child).

  Barreling in that bloodred van (all the interview subjects mentioned that, as red as blood), from borders as illegible as signatures, to checkpoints blurry like their stamps. While idling at a crossing, the joke was: Where’s the separate lane for the Americans? The guards kept the envelopes they were handed, sealed—they didn’t need to be reminded of their lines.

  From goatweed town to village, the farther away the better, the better chance at gullibility on the part, and it was a part played, of the girl. Same gist, different oblast. But never getting so far from civilization—twin crowhaired Gypsy subjects stated that Yury had told them—that they’d lose their signals: their phone reception, a dependable internet connection (who were the sources for the rest of this? bartenders and barbouncers and disco DJs, an incompetent candidate for a regional legislature, the owner of a settlement’s only electronics outlet where Yury had bought brake fluid and nine volt batteries once, and, of course, obviously, local girls—girls who’d declined advances, girls with kasha teeth and bellies like pregnant dumplings who swore they’d refused “the friend,” who promised they hadn’t been refused by him—never a girl eventually filmed, never One who’d become a star).

  Usually the morning after they’d met at whichever hamlet’s lone bar or wannabe club he’d call her whose number he’d tattooed dramatically along an arm in the midst of frenzied dancing—he’d call early to disorient, waking the girl only to do her the favor of giving her an hour, for her parents to clear out for work, for her to apply razor, makeup, brush (he and Yury slept in the van or, if awake, “the friend” would flip through last night’s polaroids).

  They’d arrange an interview as if this were a professional engagement—this was a professional engagement—meeting for creamed coffees at the hamlet’s sole barclub reopened by morning as a canteen serving what can now be confirmed as a light but succulent Frühstück (when “the friend” wanted to persuade through intelligence he’d find the German word).

  There he might ask straight out to see some identification. The other conceit was inducement: he might neg and argue and feign incredulity, convincing the girl it was her idea to show it to him—figuring if she’d spread her wallet, she’d spread something else.

  It was only when he saw her sum that he solicited (with allowances, reportedly, for girls whose age of consent was within a year or two or three).

  After this vetting the appointment might adjourn to the van, its wheels astride the canteen’s curb, where Yury, bleary, would buckle the girl up front and interpret the terms on the dash—explaining, or obscuring, the particulars involved, then guiding her hand to fondle the appropriate releases (“This is a translated contract, it says the same as it does in English,” except it doesn’t).

  Though obviously an encounter like this was no guarantee, especially not when compared to an email—the prospects who’d responded to the ad, the pursued pursuing, seeking stigma with alingual typos.

  That ad, being untranslated, flattered:

  It said, If you can understand this you’re special and deserve to be treated specially, you’re the elect, lucky enough to give us an address and we’ll drive up direct, hump our grip up eighteen flights of stairs to knock on your door (the elevators having been installed out of order)—you’ll open and greet us, you’ll hug us and kiss us, you’ve won us, we’ll ply you with substance in thanks, then strip and fuck you for posterity—with your husbands and fathers and boyfriends out belaboring the docks and hangars, ensconced behind their paleotechnic computer terminals the size of motelrooms, slobby in their pinching jeans and unironic tshirts, too tired to prevent or remedy.

  You don’t have to leave your tower, which was an identical copy of the prior tower visited, you don’t have to leave your apartment, which was a perfect clone of the previous “flat”—a number of the females surveyed spoke a studious Anglo-English—you don’t even have to be sober, shouldn’t have to be sober again (the substances provided were vodochka, a nailbite of cocaine). If porn was concrete, these girls were cement—cement being the most important component of concrete, what makes concrete stick, what makes it bind, the rest is just sand, water, and air—without these girls, the porn would never adhere, the screens would go blank, the towers would crumble.

  In winter, on a junket to a smaller burg whose snow and ice kept the populace indoors, “the friend” proposed to meet a girl vanside, parking that bloodbright mobile in the square by the townhall and plague column, by the manger and tree, by the monuments to horsebacked wars saddling generations with occupation. He drove the girl to her dacha—which was abandoned for the season—where they dressed a tripod in her clothes for a scarecrow, put a picnic blanket down and thawed the garden.

  Another winter another dacha, but this dacha used yearround since the family had been evicted from their permanent residence for nonpayment. The girl’s deaf or blind or both deaf and blind grandmother was exiled to the kitchen, while Mama—laid off from her banktelling shift, home from selling knitwear in the market—joined in her horny self—no need to look at her ID.

  However, all prospectives were made aware: if there were ever any parental or supervisory issues that rendered filming in their cinderblock villa or cottage not feasible, or just undesirable, “the friend” was prepared to relocate to virtually any area cemetery, junkyard, or gully and fuck in the back bay of the sanguineous van—amid the hubby spare tires and jutting jack, the encompassing external drives and menagerie of woofers and tweeters—with always newly purchased, still in its shrink plastic bedding rolled down: latex beneath her, latex inside.

  They’d make do with the van instead of renting a room or putting up at a pension—but was this because the accommodations available were so horrible (the bedbugs scuffling, hatched from the sconces)? or because when a room was cheap, its trouble was free? As policy, shakedown money, to neighborhood operators or the mafiavory, never was paid. Yury kept a gun in his pants, the uncircumcised coming more naturally than feminine circumspection. This amateurishness, a voluble amateurishness, was their aesthetic, all of theirs.

  And finally—after the rubber was removed to unleash another manner of voluble across a girl’s eyebrows—there’d be an outro Q & A, postmortem.

  How much did you like it?

  I liked it moc! very much!

  Last session, “the friend” had mislaid the cards, and a vibrating pouch of dildos and lube, and so here he’d had to improvise—with bottoms ripped from pizzaboxes scrawled across with marker:

  “My name is YOUR NAME. Today I had my first sex on camera.”

  Say it, he said, waving the cardboard spotted with cheesegobs and grease.

  My name is YOUR NAME, today I—but this peroxidized little sister of a girl he’d had the previous Easter was interrupted by a drip in her eye.

  Just for you @, “the friend” prompted, and the sister, who’d been sororally recommended, repeated.

  Say, Goodbye.

  That day might have seen this girl’s first sex on camera, but not on film—nobody used film. Rather they used a format more indestructible,
yet even more evanescent—Digital. “The friend’s” digit dangled at its largest size, glabrousized. Then shrank at sixty frames per second.

  After the redlight was no light, was dead light, it was his turn in the shower. He toweled his cock dry, put it to sleep in the cinch of a drawstring.

  Yury was packed.

  By the time our peroxider had gathered her halter and mini and arose—she’d ascended—upon her pleather stilettos, “the friend” had seeped through his pants.

  So was she still named Natasha? or was she Molly [from] Darabani, as she was posted last week? or was she Poly [sic] Sofia, as the commentariat corrected? but what about this Obsessa O’dessa—is it me, or did I take ballet class with her?

  Anyway, her name was never Natasha—she’d given “the friend” the name of a friend.

  In their vignette, “the friend” called himself Greg.

  Now Natasha did it for the rush, Molly out of desperation, and Poly liked the cash—but what about the girl who bore them all, gravid with their shame?

  She did it for the hope.

  These women lived in hope, they lived for the future as if they were every one of them already characters in a movie that projected well beyond one orgasm’s duration—a movie of constant orgasm being constantly filmed: a wishful collectivist biopic accumulating footage—incessantly accumulating reels and gigabytes of footage—for all that dirty work of editing into coherence and happy endings somewhere years from now and countries away.

  They lived as the aspiring stars of the movies of their own lives, which themselves contained the movies of others (much as nuclear reactors contain their cores):

  Like the Innocent boy from around the block movie about an Innocent boy from around the block who begins driving a better sportscar and sporting better muscles, crucified in a black leather jacket, hung with gold chains (though he sold heroin substitute, though it was said he sold women—look how motivated he is, look how rich—Innokenti, I remember when we both were just kids).

  Like the movie about the defense contractor billionaire who’d financed a production of his own out in northeastern Randomstan, but without even filming it, with epic thousands of extras but no cameras or crew: it’d been a Passion play, one night only staged on the steppe, ever since being nearly hazed to death as an Air Force mechanic he’d wanted to experience that many people taking orders from him—the one about the former bricklayer turned gas refinery tycoon who, to repent for having inflicted Orthodox baptism on his ten year old stepdaughter (and to mortar his relationship with her mother, a lingerie importer), had bought the girl her own television broadcast: she’d babble to the world about her friends, boys, school, and sport for an hour each night at eleven—the port concessions magnate who’d financed a judge’s vanity recording of Liszt—the financial services mogul who’d commissioned a mural of his transgender mistress/master for a flank of his bank—the politician who’d hired a Muscovite screenwriter to ghostwrite a book exposing the corruption of his, the screenwriter’s, uncle, a Navy embezzler who’d sunk submarines: the nephew took the work, he was broke.

  This was an ambitious time and the girls knew their movies—they knew those had by hearsay or passed down the bulvar as well as they knew those of their siblings and intimates—they traded their stakes and plot points and narrative arcs—they quoted from them until they couldn’t separate the quotes from their own conversation—they repeated and repeated them, you couldn’t avoid them, you can’t avoid summary—they even ambitiously invented them to reinvent themselves:

  A man thrashed his wife whose head spurted oil—another billion, trillion—googillionaire. A man from the next town over, it was said, always just the next town, battered the gut of his pregnant wife and their son was born fluent in C++ and Chinese. Soon he had women at his door lining three deep, begging him to go to work on their issue. Then yet another nouveau oligarch who’d kickstarted his fortune marketing fire extinguishers throughout the Baltics or Balkans, parlaying that lode into funding lucrative eCommerce interests—it was said (apparently, it even made international headlines), he intended to launch a blue whale into space and was designing a shuttle whose fuselage would be equipped with a seawater tank. Once safely in orbit, the tank’s hatch would open, releasing the water and whale to float dead forever in blackness—our earth a bruise the size of its eye …

  But the most successful of these movies, the widest cited, it seemed—whenever a teacher assigned the composition theme of Hope, whenever any of the girls skipped their composition tutorials to hitchhike to the gorge for a swim only because they were young with plombir skin and fit and ruthless and happened to spot speeding from the opposite cardinality a vehicle as red as (some of these epithets were used, others are fictitious) “the Soviet flag,” “a fire siren,” “the covers of the Russian passport,” “menarche”—was this, was the story of “Mary Mor.”

  Which is also the story of the unpopular Hollywood film Sleepwaker V, dir. Edison Lips, 1998.

  Sleepwaker V is the most famous but also only film of this “Mary Mor,” who does not star in it with her name shining pointedly above the title, but plays Hotty #3, whose total screentime is ≤ forty-five seconds.

  “Hotty Mor” as she was called—with the accents of these tellings a binomial classification perhaps best transliterated as Chotty Mor or Khoti Mor—was a success story to trump all success stories, her movie widely heard of but seldom seen—it became more potent the longer it went unviewed, as if an ineffable dictator.

  She was a model of what every girl wanted—not just an actress, was she a model too?

  Her recent naturalization by the United States government revealed her to be Toyta Dzhakhmadkalova—and this attempted journalism, this inept investigative reporting, is dedicated to her.

  She was born atop a tiny speck of static blown just outside Vedeno, Vedensky District, Chechnya, a mudspot like a mortifying stain on the dress of the land. Must be laundered, must be treadwashed by tanks. Russian was not her native language, she had no dialogue, she was frequently silent. Her home, an apartment complex hastily built to gird Vedeno’s outskirts, has been almost totally destroyed. It was, by the time of her leaving, that proverbial heap of concrete surrounded by field the color of a suicidebombed circus and the miry consistency of mad tigress dung. The following things, things being weaknesses, made her cry: faded wallpaper in a scythe pattern similar to what they had in the kitchen of her family’s apartment (but every family had similar wallpaper), last cigarettes not shared, dying ficus placed by unsunned windows (in apartments where none of the windows were sunned), cold tea—and now, for the uninitiated, the briefest of history lessons: border skirmishes by separatist guerrillas vs. Russians, Russian army incursions, hilariously vituperative decades of on again off again conflict you might’ve caught on television or not.

  It has not been recorded—how Toyta found her way to Grozny (lit. terrible), capital of the Chechen Republic, following the First Chechen War. Perhaps she was there visiting a relative close or distant, the aunt of her aunt she called aunt too, the wife of a father’s friend from hydroelectric engineering school she called Peacock—because of the woman’s plumage, the feather she tied to her braid—but privately. Supposed to meet her at the bus terminal. Never knew which three o’clock train. Nor is it known how Toyta was supposed to have supported herself. Whether she cooked for monks or did laundry for a nearby madrassa, whether she cleaned floors for whatever government offices were left or washed windows in what official residences in the diplomatic quarter hadn’t been razed. What retails as fact is that one night in an impromptu Grozny discotheque (formerly a dairy) she met a Russian soldier—cleancut, tightbodied, tightclothed in uniform plus mufti sneakers—who managed through bribing a general it must have been to bring her back to the site of his patriarchate: 180 kilometers outside Moscow and then, for a weekend, to Moscow Herself, neighborhood Ostankino, where a comrade soldier also discharged had an uncle who commanded a balcony over Zvyozdny (but the u
ncle spent whole months what was characterized as consulting in Crimea).

  We will pause here to allow you to recite your PIN numbers to yourself.

  By Saturday Night 1996, she’d escaped a Ciscaucasian death. Toyta would become, if the girls who’d tell this story were aware of the concept, Immortal—which Slavic languages too tend to render in the negative, as if it were regrettable: “never-dying,” “never-ending.” At a bar in Moscow she left her solider for a visiting American, a roving producer of pornographic movies.

  This reporter was told that though the bar’s ambiance blarneyed Irish, its name was very much of its place and time, ambitious, nearly excessively utopian: The Brothel Under the Sign of the Dice with Three Faces, Where Lesbians Drink Free on Sundays, Male Homosexuals Eat Free Every Second Monday, Where Behind One of the Toilet Tanks Is Said to be Hidden a Jew’s Treasure, and the Rook’s Nest in the Garderobe Has Been Formed from the World’s Longest Lime Twig That if Ever Unraveled into Its Original Curvature Would Spell Out the Word Typewriter … (but I think here I might’ve been toyed with).

  You ask, you might, how could an American who respects women and gives them jobs with equal wages and higher ed degrees and diligently keeps his paws off them—how could he ever expect with his solicitousness and always asking and nerves to take a woman away from a Russian soldier? from an officer—we’ve just promoted him—an officer with holstered sidearm, this major in Czarish bluegreens the color of a Romanov’s blood? To answer that, however, you’d have to think bigger than masculinity, bigger than the sexpower of violence, of war. It should be understood that the American in the sideways porkpie hat still dangling its pricetag was no mere gap year visitor or sex tourist but an approximate Russian himself (such is the nature of the American problem: who are you? whose are you?), an émigré who’d come to the United States in 1984 or thereabouts via Israel and was here returned to Moscow—though he was born in St. Petersburg, or Leningrad, and had never been to Moscow before—recruiting talent or the eligibly cheap.