I should start my own show, if this is the way “journalists” behave. If this is the respect you show survivors.
Donald
May 16th, 2016
Mr. Ellis,
Kindly reread our correspondence. I made no such promise.
I am sorry you had a bad experience but if it’s any consolation, our ratings were fantastic for your segment and I do believe your appearance, while difficult for you, was for the greater good and will benefit us all in the long run.
Yours,
Marsha
P.S. You are such a smart guy! A GREAT voice to your community. Let us know when you’ve signed a deal. We’ll want an exclusive.
IV
Yeah . . . Yeah hi, this message is for the editor of your publication. Of the Dispatch national newspaper. My . . . Listen, I’m just wondering, Mr. Editor, I have a question for you. How would you feel? Yeah . . . you, you . . . tell me, since you have all the answers. How . . . how would you feel if this happened to someone you loved and a paper wrote about it in the detail that you did? How . . . you piece of shit . . . I’m . . . I can’t—You can’t just do these things to people, ya know? We aren’t currency. We aren’t . . . God, we are trying to LIVE, Morris. Do you know that? My friend Jamar is trying to LIVE, and you just want us DEAD. It’s better for your word count if we are brutalized, shamed, humiliated, just . . . just . . . you, you want us under the ground, don’t you? How many shovels do you own, you fucking prick? How many . . . how many of our fucking skeletons do you need to dig up?
Leave us alone, man. Leave Jamar Sands THE FUCK ALONE. We’re not . . . fuck you, Morris goodbye. Just . . . stay away from us.
One
PEAR KEEPS CALLING. HE KEEPS LEAVING MESSAGES ASKING me to pick up. I can’t answer the phone. I’m watching reruns of Seinfeld, and the Dispatch is in my lap, my face staring up at me.
“Victim.”
Who is this person? This victim? Jamar.
Who am I?
“A source told the Dispatch Mr. Sands was found covered in blood and bodily fluids at the scene of the crime, yet authorities stated they found no open wounds on his body. When reached for comment, Detective Whirloch declined, stating it was an ongoing investigation. The Dispatch did, however, confirm from a friend of the victim that the blood and bodily fluids belonged to a deceased cat that was found outside Mr. Sands’s apartment.”
“The Dispatch did, however.”
Monsters.
What kind of newspaper talks about itself in the third person?
What friend told them this?
Who would do such a thing?
Below the paper, something moves underneath my shirt. I lift it up and look at all the scars on my stomach, comets caught in ice.
Something sticks out of my belly button. Something thin and pink.
Like a tongue.
It is a tongue.
With not a single suspect arrested in more than a year, Detective Whirloch was released from the case earlier this week. John Oretta, deputy director of the FBI’s Violent Crime unit, resumed the investigation, releasing a statement that said in part, “The perpetrator will be brought to justice in a court of law, and I’m here to make that happen.”
Mr. Sands was said to have met the perpetrator on the dating app OkCupid, where she went by the username Maude. Earlier this week, the Dispatch confirmed an account on the website with the username Maude, registered to one Maude Sands. According to sources, the account has been inactive since January of this year, the month in which Mr. Sands’s assault took place. The FBI declined to comment on whether this was, in fact, the account used to lure Mr. Sands and whether it was just a coincidence that the account holder has the same last name as Mr. Sands. In an effort to make contact with the perpetrator, a reporter from the Dispatch reached out to the account belonging to Maude for comment. No response has been received.
“Maude Sands?”
She used my name?
Why did she use my last name?
Does she know me?
God. She knows me, doesn’t she.
The tongue moves slowly around my stomach, then slips back inside me.
The muscles around my lower back begin to seize.
The whole room reddens raw.
I throw the newspaper on the ground and stare with terror at the sight of it: the black hole where my belly button used to be.
My ribs clench. Teeth mince. More muscles seize. Contract and release.
I am floating in an abyss of absence.
“used to lure Mr. Sands”
I lean forward and look at the hole in me.
Something small and green shines back.
An eye.
It blinks.
I cover my mouth.
The room goes blind, the room no longer seeing me in it.
They reached out to it for comment?
To her?
They went on there and reached out to her?
They tried to talk to her?
Why would they do that?
Why did they fucking do that?
I lean back on the couch. Long, crooked fingers pour out of my hole like spider legs. Its nails are painted red. The fingers spread me. A scalp emerges. Then a head.
It is covered in the meat of me.
It is covered in who I am.
Her wrists steady themselves on my hips and pull her body out from inside mine.
She stands over me, dripping, glazed with the shades of my organs. Her face invisible behind the blood-glass.
I weep and tell her I love her.
I love you.
Is this how you love me?
I do not love her, but she owns me. I have come apart. I am an owning.
She says nothing. She pulls her hair out from the hole in my stomach.
It is longer than an intestine. It is longer than an umbilical cord.
I am exhausted. Broken. Preyed.
She opens her mouth and leans toward mine.
I enter her. She swallows me.
First my face
then my shoulders
then my ass
and my feet.
I slide down into her throat.
My body curls into its self and swings in her warm stomach as she walks.
Where are you taking me, Maude?
What are you going to do with me now?
I am inside her forever.
I am the predator now.
I am the assaulter.
I’m the power now.
Are you going to lock me in your chat room, Maude?
Can I say goodbye to my sister first?
I lie in her body and just listen to her breathe.
When I wake up, the newspaper is still in my lap. The scars still on my stomach.
On TV, someone tells Julia Louis-Dreyfus she looks like she’s just seen a ghost.
V
JOSHUA_DISPATCH: Dear Maude, my name is Joshua Greenfield and I am a reporter with the Dispatch newspaper. In the event you ever check this OkCupid account again, we would love to get a statement or comment from you regarding your relationship with Jamar Sands, Donald Ellis, or Pear O’Sullivan. Specifically, we would love to hear from you directly regarding your motives. Perhaps one of these men did something to you at one point? Perhaps you have your own history with violent men? Were you yourself ever sexually abused or harmed? Anything you’d like to share with us would be greatly appreciated and would be printed verbatim. Alternatively, if there is anything you’d like to tell us off the record, we are open to that as well. My personal email address, should you not want to leave such a statement here, is [email protected]. Looking forward to hearing from you, and thank you for considering this. Best, Joshua
One
You know who I am, don’t you?
I know you do.
What’s your name?
Never mind, you don’t need to tell me. I already know.
You know, contrary to
what you might think of me, why you might be here, there was a time when I actually loved women. I swear to you. Sebastian White wasn’t always an uptight anti-muff fag, doing Dom Pérignon Jell-O shots on some daddy’s yacht off the coast of France. Okay, maybe I haven’t done that. Yet. But God, a girl can dream. I’ve always been the loudest queen in the room, who loathes more than he loves. Doesn’t everyone? You’re such a liar if you say you don’t.
Hello? What are you looking for in there, my Pantene? My anal beads?
Just kidding, I don’t use Pantene.
God, I can already tell you’re no fun.
Just a joke!
. . . Okay. Where was I? Right. Loathing.
There’s so much to loathe in this world, wouldn’t you agree? Islam. Welfare leeches. Rachel Maddow. Liberals. Sean Penn! Anything with beets in it. Beets are vile. But more than any of that, as you know, I loathe feminists. It’s by no small miracle that all feminists in America haven’t been stoned to death by now. I’m just telling you the truth. Feminists are pollution, taking a stance—against what exactly, no one in their right mind knows. They are angry, bitter, saggy chauvinists masquerading as supportive, loving sisters. Feminists—and you women in general—have it easy. Easy. Let me tell you. I’m not afraid to say that, even now. You want to see first-world inequality, try growing up a gay man in Alberta, Canada. Easy, I tell you. Women by nature need something to complain about in order to feel like they matter. And they are always unhappy. Always. To repurpose John Lennon: if you don’t believe me, just take a look at the one you’re with. They hate their jobs, their fashion, their weight, their husbands, their children, their lack of children. Especially this new generation of nonbreeding Chronic Feminists—a term I coined—working horrid hours as assistants to prenuptial lawyers or whatever, just to claim some inane independence, while their boyfriends make partner and pay for their rosé, tampons, and pink pussy hats. I wrote an article about it for The Guardian. Chronic Feminism is the end of the real woman. The end of a well-taken-care-of house, the end of a proper home-cooked meal. The end of marriage. The end of breast milk, for God’s sake.
I hope you’re not a feminist. I can’t imagine you are. You’re actually intelligent.
I don’t even have to know you to know that much is true.
I think we can both agree that feminism is for the weak, wouldn’t you say?
I can keep talking. Believe me, I can do all the talking.
Let me tell you something. You’ve read my columns, right? Well, when I was younger—before I knew I was a fabulously handsome homo who could live off salad and dick for the rest of my life—I had a girlfriend named Jane. We were sixteen. She was righteously chubby, with a big smile that just sort of fell and broke across her face, like a busted jar of pickled turnips or something. Jane had blond hair the shade of a dove’s cunt and used to do her roots with Clorox bleach laundry detergent when she didn’t have money. It was insane and fantastic. She had tits so big we used her cleavage as a drug compartment. Her tits were like Halloween; reach in and find some new candy every time. I loved Jane. We met at camp one summer and became inseparable. She taught me how to type, giving me my first writing skill. She taught me many things, honestly—how to sew chiffon, which is a blessed nightmare. Jane taught me how to be a straight-up bitch. But most important, Jane taught me—no, showed me—the art of the blow job, which would later spin off into various other jobs I fell madly in love with: hand jobs, cushy jobs, bang-up jobs, rim jobs, snow jobs, inside jobs, hum jobs, nose jobs. Looking back, it’s obvious Jane was less my honey and more my hag, but I fucked her anyway. As I got older, I became keenly aware of two things: one, I hated having actual sex with her because, two, I was attracted to boys.
You do know I’m gay, right? Not really your type, am I. Just saying.
Anyway, Jane and I dated for two years, until I turned eighteen and the closet was like, “You can’t stay in here anymore, dyke, you gotta go.” So I broke up with her and came out in an op-ed in Taki’s Magazine, my favorite conservative website at the time. I wrote about being a Gay in Sheep’s Clothing, surrounded by a liberal army of unhappy homosexuals who hated me and my beliefs, hated the fact that one of their own was a Libertarian. Perhaps we couldn’t agree on immigration reform, I argued, but we could definitely agree on the fact that vaginas are disgusting.
I apologize, I know you have one, but honestly, they are.
If you remember, I wrote that it was my sexual life with Jane that first made me keenly aware that I was different. That I didn’t enjoy sex with her, but that I likely would never enjoy sex with any woman. I didn’t use her real name, of course, I’m not a fucking monster. The article got quite the buzz. And why wouldn’t it? It was ripe and fresh with honesty. And it set me apart from the liberal gay mafia, which is exactly what I wanted. Soon I had offers to write for everyone from Breitbart News to the Humble Libertarian. It was thrilling. I wrote essays, had columns in the Wall Street Journal and the National Review, became a regular commentator on Fox News—and the rest is, as they say, herstory.
You do understand, don’t you? I’m not a bad person. I’m a freed person.
Contrary to that thought, I’m actually fucking decent as hell, because I’m honest. Brutally, yes, but come on, don’t you find it incredibly refreshing? I mean, wouldn’t you rather I tell you I think you’re an awful person—You are, by the way, I mean, just look at you right now, what you’re doing—than lie to you just because I’m scared of how you’ll react?
Really ask yourself if anything I’ve said so far is not true.
It’s just you and me here.
It may be cruel. May be hard to hear.
But it’s not a lie.
Look, I had to talk about Jane so readers could understand my own personal discovery better. It was an important detail in my trajectory. I always knew I had been attracted to men, but it wasn’t until I actually dated a woman that I positively KNEW I was not of the hetero herd.
Why are you here, by the way? Why are you even here? I mean, I know this isn’t just random. You clearly picked me. Specifically. You weren’t just walking by. Were you? You weren’t. I know you weren’t. I’m the perfect fodder for your misandry. Your envy.
You hate me, don’t you. You do. You can say it. I know you do. You can say it.
Say it. Say you hate me.
Say: I hate you, Sebastian White.
I loved Jane, you know. I still do. I’ll always love her. I know you must’ve had a Jane in your life at some point, right? Come on. Everyone does. A relationship that expires once someone turns into a Sensitive Lunatic, which, as you know, was the title of my first book. People will completely freak out over your hard-earned success when you least expect it. Jealousy is mercurial. It doesn’t always show up the way you think it will. My experience with her also taught me that people’s feelings will inevitably get in the way of almost every rational thought or action, if they are allowed to.
Like your feelings right now. Look at you. I can feel it!
I can feel you thinking with your feelings.
And this is why I protect my intellect and point of view at all costs. This right here. And Jane right there. And every Chronic Feminist I’ve had to sue for defamation in between. I am a provocateur. I am “priviledged,” as the liberal snowflake would like to cry. Yes, I’m priviledged. Priviledged to say whatever the fuck I want to whenever the hell I want to. Free speech, honey. Free. Beautiful. Speech. You must never allow yourself to be censored or silenced by those who get upset easily, by those who are what I call Emotional Polenta—poor people’s food for thought, which was the title of my second book, a New York Times bestseller.
All right. I guess you’re just going to sit there in silence and judge me, aren’t you.
How easy for you to do, considering this position I’m in, separated from you in the way that I am. Considering that you can hear me but I can’t hear you. Because you won’t speak.
You know what that makes y
ou, sweetie? A coward.
Do you think I care?
Hello? Are you still here?
Have I made you angry with what I’ve said? Do you think I deserve this? I just wanted to explain who I am and give some real context, not fake-news context. If you’ve read about Sebastian White in the media, then surely you’ve gotten the wrong impression of who exactly Sebastian White is.
Any Man Page 7