After Toyta had filmed a luxuriously uxorious—read: unremunerated—scene in his room in the starriest hotel in Moscow (don’t believe it but this is what he almost certainly had her believe: with marble baths, marble sinks, marble floors, with beds as rare and expensive as arabescato and just as uncomfortable to stay the night in), this hyphenated-American, this Russian-Israeli-Floridian—Iosif, Yossele, let’s call him Joe, regular Joe—procured for her a legitimate work visa #H1B and flew her to Los Angeles, whose airport bears the acronym LAX.
Los Angeles, despite belonging to dreams, also belongs to America. This means that Toyta’s life was set, her survival assured by Marines. Here she could become someone named Tanya and this Tanya Someone could become a success. The rest, the dénouement as it’s said in film, the finale, is scarcely as important.
In LA, Toyta/Tanya became Tina Toy, then, because she was once mercilessly lashed with the word “tiny” by a wheelchaired dominatrix in a Thai noodlerie’s ladies’ room, “your waist is soooo tiny!”—Tanya/Tina at the mirror slurping up the word in an endlessly looping waist of tiny tiny tiny—she became Tiny Toy, until a reputable casting agent she met at an audition for a low budget, character driven thriller told her she’d had her typed from name alone as black, not white and foreign—and so she became Mary Moor, who became Mary Mor (both at the suggestion of a Brit cameraman with bum knees who’d tried to date her), because in porn, which genre it seemed she’d be condemned to forever, there was already an established Mary More, another tanned to public transport upholstery texture girl with platinized tresses once notorious for the development of her kegels but now on her way out who, due to unspecified viruses—definitely herpes, allegedly hepatitides—could perform by industry decree only when protected, with the man maintaining on his erection a condom.
Toyta, for her part, was never infected with the worst of the diseases you could contract in America—doubt—she was positively immune to fear and doubt and so was incapable of being anything but fun, firm, and objectively reckless (not even that monthly test could scare her: the butch boss nurse, the kit’s prick, a fink of blood to clog the vial—while waiting, she counted, the results always arriving punctually, by thirty).
It was on the set of a pornographic movie whose title has not survived and whose content has since like a failed family been broken up into short few minute clips all over the internet and there, meaning everywhere, aggregated under myriad descriptors and tags (the disparate keywords: Teen—Interracial, Anal, Trib, POV, Mary Mor), that she met a porno actor who—due to his 12 fame, the presumed prowess that went along with it, along with a concomitant legend regarding the size of the loads he routinely “unloaded”—was asked to play weekly poker with legitimate Hollywood television and film actors who only minced and otherwise faked the act of sex for much more money than was paid the people, just as attractive, who had sex really.
One Sunday during a game of Texas hold ’em, he (“Neo” of the prickly cactus muscles and tribal tatts, his head to toe entirely depilated) raved to his host’s brother inlaw—this producer/director Edison—about his costar Mary—superhott—recommending her as a miscellaneous Eastern girl/stripper/prostitutka who might even be able to negotiate small speaking roles, ten words or less, tiny.
A boa slithered down a chairback. Edison’s inlaw, an awardwinning screenwriter with an intellectual reputation, entirely intolerant of the career of his wife’s kitschmacher brother, weekly invited the owner of a prominent Animal Handling company to play because the man, who worked only for topflight productions—dogs only for the best children’s dogmovies, his lizards and apes regularly preferred over computer effects no matter how perfected—brought the snakes. A month before, and he could’ve lost his license for this, he’d brought a baby lion. “Leo” prowled around the balmy house, was soon forgotten and lost, only later did they find it stuck in the dryer.
The Animal Handler said this Sunday:
Them women from over there are gorgeous. But I don’t know they worth the trouble.
He proceeded to tell the story of a friend and onetime employee (a janitor, a hoser) who had, he said, Ordered one of them from one of them services online—they sent her off and she ruined him, took every fucking follicle.
(The boa was coiled safely in a donut box.)
No fault divorce, he said, no shit, wasn’t no time for fault. Four years in this country and the cunt was entitled to half.
Edison, shockhaired, sensitively chinned—before he produced he’d inherited his father’s storage facilities throughout LA, he’d joke on first dates that he’d inherited emptiness—told Neo to tell Toyta to come by the studio next Friday and—Hotty #3 was born. A minuscule part, a negligible role (Neo’s bluff was called by a rash of queens, he’d left down $2K to Edison).
The film was the fifth in a series, a franchise—the fifth sequel, the pentaquel perhaps—but who recalled what the first four had been about, what’d happened in them when and where, who’d lived or died while making adolescent love on a rope bridge restive above a torrid ravine in Ventura steep enough to roll the credits down, there was no sense before there was no continuity …
… The old man, lupine, spry, and hairy, wiped down the bar and continued his story:
Unfortunately our Hotty’s only line was cut, for being unintelligible. A tragedy—her words.
He paused, drank some sort of murky plumwater, took puffs on a short handrolled stub.
But then somebody uploaded that scene to the internet, he said, where to this day you can find it.
He turned behind the bar to wind the clock.
Business was changing, he said.
Movies where you sat in the dark with a hundred people groping one another gave way to television where you sat in the dark by yourself. Then the internet came around, cords became cordless, wires became wireless, suddenly entertainment was free and everyone’s an amateur—amateurs at being themselves—because only celebrities are lucky enough to get paid just for being. Buy a camera, convince your bestlooking kinsfolk, upload, and Play—no more packaging, no more distribution where the smut’s hauled out to the far bazaars among the bahns. This was democracy, this was enfranchisement, all that other sluttery you sold us—CocafuckingCola, shiny motorcycles parked between the legs of our mothers.
The bartender’s eyes were elder, rheumy, his mouth disfigured, raggedly burnt and rimmed with moles like a castellated ashtray, like the hoops and arches of a crown. He snuffed his rollie, cleared the ashtray behind the bar.
His nose was a sharply tuned muzzle, was a hatchet. He was wolfish, vicious.
He said, Toyta returned to doing porn after her serious stint—she was savvy. She founded her own singlefee, multipass network—a dozen sites, a dozen girls, independents under her personal curation. An entrepreneura—that and not any implanted measurements is why her story is still told.
(I’m certainly polishing his English. Through the flit of whiskers he was facile but incorrect and interspersed locutions in French, in German, Italian—I’ve also filled in details and—no, you’ll decide.)
It’s said that the neighbor of her Grozny aunt had a daughter who was sold via Ukrainians to an au pairship in the West. My own—Grossnichte, Grossnichte—grandnieces, yes, grandnieces ended as Gulf commodities, whored to the oily emirates, the sheikh sex dens of Dubai—
XXX
_________________
He—I—sat listening to this story, to the script of this tale and to others. Dizzied by the dates and locales, the vertiginous names—what linguæ!
He sat on a stool at the bar and let this wizened bartender give him an education—this tender who’d taught himself the idiom by studying a UK travelguide “to Swiss.” He had a cigarette and a drink, unidentifiable, he was learning how to smoke and how to drink, he’d been abroad for a month already but was not going back, he felt as if he’d graduated from even himself, that he was a new person now waiting only to receive the new skin to prove it—signed by no one,
signifying nothing.
In the vid, behind Moc’s head, a calendar had hung. The image on the page for the month of May showed a bouquet of blossoming trees—birch?/dogwood?/willow?—in front of the castle he’d stood in front of that morning (apparently, it was a renowned castle, though arduous to find—tired afterward he’d wandered into this bar at random, it had about it the rogue air of foreignness, of youth).
He’d had reprinted—at a kiosk in a webcafé huddled between a shashlik stand and a kvassarium—a stack of that screengrab, which froze mild May above Moc chastely clothed, or in that interim declothing phase (it was the only frame that satisfied all criteria): just her face and, regrettably, perhaps the top cleave of her breasts. He’d been asking around for weeks: Is this setting in any way familiar? do you recognize the girl or just last month? He’d handed one to this proprietor’s hispid paw not an hour before—this proprietor who called himself Publicov and was closer to being an upright verbose lupus than anything human.
How do I know you’re not another filmmaker? Publicov asked. Or maybe this Moc owes you money and you want to do worse things to her than what is done for the pleasuring of cameras?
He said to Publicov, You have to believe me—I was sent by her family in America.
Now she has family in America? The barwolf sucked his lips, fanged stiff the hair around them.
Cousins—I’m Moc’s cousin from Jersey.
Roland Jersey—what did you say you were called?
Orlando, he said, Orlando Kirsch (first name the city his mother was born in, last name that of his father’s orthodontist).
Publicov said, I don’t know what I’m looking at, and lit another rollie.
Izvinitye, turning away from the smoke to busy with the bottles—containments undusted, displayed like women tall and smooth and without protuberance, ranks of uncomplicated women, easier to uncork, easier to pour.
But Publicov hadn’t returned the printout, it lay like a rag sopping up the bar—the same printout posted that morning all over the ornate ironwork gates surrounding the calendared castle, on grave crucifixes in the dim midden yards of ruined churches, across the graffitied walls of gnomish humpy bunkers and imperious towers—glued and taped and stickered and tacked and nailed.
He asked Publicov, Please keep an eye out for her, telling him he was staying at a certain “Hotel Romantical,” where he’d also left the desk clerk, an obliging pink boy of approximately his age, with a sheaf.
There was no text on this primitive poster save an address for an email account he’d opened the night of his arrival: [email protected]—the new address of his newest domain, $5/month in perpetuity it cost, and his bank, his parents’ account at the bank, was scheduled to make the payment on the first of the month, the first of every month, and to do so indefinitely or until his parents’ funds were depleted, which meant this empty website—We’re Under Construction, We’re Still Under Construction—and its full inbox of tipsters’ emails might outlive him.
Publicov, finished prepping for lunch’s rush, turned to him and said as if in afterthought, And you might not want to try asking the police.
He said, So I won’t.
We’ll drink to that, and Publicov poured himself a glass, then refilled his, both to their brims. Together they clinked, took down the warm shots colored like a bruise. Publicov’s glass hit a tooth, a slimy cuspid, which fell out and soaked in the dregs, a lonely rottenfaced fang. The bar was beginning to fill with customers, with noon, and Publicov must have been distracted. The drink tasted like the colors of the walls, like the turpentine that would remove that black. That spore, accreted grime.
The windows were open, the door, like a wing, aflutter. The crowd, on surrounding stools, in chairs at wheeltop tables, was vocal, was warming—they were sweating what they had drunk. Bluish ghosts wisped from their lungs but above him hovered only a miniature white cloud and he did not suspect his cigarette brand, he suspected himself, his soul (and hungered for a waitress—he wondered why there wasn’t one around).
In a high nook, nested amid a thatching of cables, a television was playing sport—which sport he didn’t recognize, he was too impaired. It wasn’t darts—because that was being played against the door with a kitchen knife—nor was it a game exclusively of running or jumping. The rules, assuming there were any, involved a ball round like a spot but spotted itself, impregnated with a rambunctious demon, it hopped and skipped and jumped around as a team of perhaps fifty grown men had to run and avoid it, because it wanted to hit them and kill them, and the men could run but they could run only in the confines of the stadium, and the stadium, as the volume was lowered throughout the afternoon, got smaller and quieter until it was just a silent spit of light and he was alone with Publicov, who handed him his bill.
Dusk was just beginning, in the bar it was almost too dark to read—anyway the napkin had too many numbers.
He might have been drunk but still hadn’t imbibed that much and said so and Publicov, offended, said, But it is only an address, maybe it will help.
Thank you, Publicov.
He thought, this book—this will be a book—is hereby respectfully dedicated to you.
He walked through the dusk to clear the head, to sober. Give himself time to decide whether to walk or be taken by what’d take him. The wind blew harshly, exhaled from the debauched cherubs’ cheeks of the arcades. Lampposts lofted lamps that were out but the posts themselves were justification enough, drastic lancing efflorescences, metal trees set starkly against the grayscale of the sky. He decided on a taxi but couldn’t find a taxi, could find no tram either, no tramstop though there were tracks over which to stumble, no buses or huffy marshrutky despite the poles that served as stops where he’d plastered over the timetables with posters of his Moc. Each cobble felt like a hill he had to ascend, a mountain, between them deep smutted river valleys filled with 50 ml nipbottles filled with the messages of wet butts. Pedestrians, mere bundles of cloths and threads and yarns, baskets with pasty arms and legs protruding and, from the tops, heads swollen like kerchiefed treats, passed him in the street, their very lives averted. Setts and pavingblocks gave way to a prospekt expansive enough for the parade of tanks and trucks in convoy, pulsing traffic away from the asbestine heart installed at the horizon—this city’s entire historical centrum, intended only for the necrophiles and thanatos tourists, giving way to asphalt, the fancy fachwerk and gingerbread facades faded, even that fairy castle smogged, the leanings of centuries collapsed into piles of wood and stone until only boxes remained.
As if cardboard boxes, crates for the packing, stacked into towers, these hundreds or thousands of modular units making of the suburbs a boundless concatervation—as if the world had surrendered its rolling fields and city streets and instead cast itself up, straight up, as if the three dimensions of our experience had been upended, to two—as if he were headed toward not an address but a setting, a set …
How to explain such a scene to Sunday brunch readers at home? How to situate you—how to acquaint you but only with words?
Your correspondent did not know, your apprentice artist had not an inkle, how to describe the towering above him. Think not of livingspace, of cozy homes in distant faubourgs and kieze, but of officeparks, think of malls. Risen tiers and superseding levels of commerce, of store. But not stores as you might be used to them.
Where offices and shops should have been were domiciles, were private apartments—though from the outside, approaching the pathwork from the windblown street, they provided anything but privacy. They were glassed, they were entirely glassed floor to ceiling and any visitor could see in. He could look in where an accountancy should be and there was a family arguing at supper. Observe where managers should reign and surveil a grandfather at stool. Hello, grandfather! How are you feeling? how commoted are your bowels this evening?
A building cubicled, celled, seen—its exterior lit from within into a screen. The lobby door was locked, a smashed metal door loosely
locked. He twisted the knob and pulled, pulled. He checked the address again and the address was correct, unless a disgruntled resident had reaudited some numerals. Someone would leave, he was certain, he didn’t know why he was certain—so vitrined, everyone appeared exhausted, appeared asleep.
He waited but no one came. He leaned against the jamb and, though he didn’t know which unit he was looking for, tempted the buzzers, which were anyway unlabeled. He buzzed one and then another and yet another, but they were not buzzers. They didn’t buzz an apartment with a familiar tone so that the party buzzed would be alerted that he was outside downstairs waiting for the door to open—instead they were eavesdroppers, they were monitors. When he pressed one he heard, through the fixture’s grill, a baby’s tin crying, when he pushed a second he overheard gerocomically gluttonous breath, fingering still a third, it was ragged sex, while from others was speakered indistinct talking, murmuration and scold, snoring, a lot of snoring and even silence, but needless to say only the silence baffled—perhaps that apartment was vacant or its buzzer, broken—and he didn’t comprehend any conversation.
Moc—if she was in residence—which foursquare screen above him was her gleaming? which button would give him access to her sighs? In his hand, Publicov’s napkin was streaking, had smirched—never having noted which floor was hers, it was presently expressive of even less: just a clot of phlegm, a florid spew. He considered hurling it like a rock at a pane—then went scrounging for a more stolid embodiment under a precise hedgerow welded to the ground—but there were no rocks and there was a redundance of panes. He threw the paper and away it flew. The swingset had no swings. The slide was a ladder up. The weather was as oppressively changeless as the consecution of the development’s paths.
The door clicked and out staggered a group of intimidating children, overgrown children. Their youths were stuffed like sausages into the casings of overalls, in the fashion of gastarbeiters, their faces were slabs of borodinbread swabbed with butter, their noses whole potatoes and ears, the toothpicked rinds, their fingers livid burns as from carelessness with methpipes. They stared at him, spoke cacophonic codes and then—nudging one of their race forward, a manboy with crusty, distended lips, trollishly stunted—inquisitioned:
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