Homesick for Another World

by Ottessa Moshfegh

  He took a taxi home.

  He knew what to text the woman at the arcade. He would text, “How does it feel to be a middle-aged divorcée living with your retarded nephew and working in a computer café? Is it everything you ever dreamed?”

  He took a long time to type all the letters in pinyin and to select the right characters in the phone. He read it over and over again until the taxi stopped in front of his door. He pressed Send and paid the driver.

  He went to the arcade. The woman was not there. He paid for his time and got a computer in the corner, out of sight of anyone else, and sat and played video games, pausing to check his phone every minute or two, until the sun came up.

  As he walked home, he stopped in the courtyard of the old PLA camp to watch a group of high schoolers practice their sword postures. They looked very elegant and upright in their pea green uniforms, he thought. A bird warbled somewhere in a flowering tree. He walked beneath a curved cement archway and through the badminton courts and out through the tall wrought-iron gates and up the road to the morning market under the bridge and bought a bowl of hot dry noodles and brought it home to his apartment and ate it by the open window.

  • • •

  He was awakened by his phone that afternoon. It was a text from the woman.

  “Actually, I am a very sad person. I am very lonely and troubled. Who are you?”

  He couldn’t believe his attack had produced such a vulnerable, honest reply.

  “I am an admirer,” he wrote back. “I think you are beautiful.”

  And then he sent another text: “I am in love with you.”

  He lay back down and waited for her to text him back. He waited twenty minutes. Then he couldn’t wait anymore.

  “When I said I was in love with you, I meant I admire you very much. I’d like to get to know you better. But I’m not sure that you’ll be attracted to me.”

  Still, that wasn’t good enough.

  “I don’t know what type of man you like. What type do you like?” Now he had made a big mistake. He had said too much. He felt he had ruined everything. He knew he had just ruined his entire life.

  “I like a man who isn’t afraid to try new things,” she wrote back.

  He did not want to ruin what he had left. He thought carefully of how to reply. But she sent another text.

  “Let’s meet,” she wrote. “I want to see what you look like.”

  “When?” he wrote back. “I am free anytime.”

  “Tonight,” she wrote. “Meet me at the back gate by the market at midnight. I will wear a rose in my hair.”

  The man’s heart stopped for a moment and then started back up again very slowly. He lay back down and caressed himself beneath the sheet. He had not caressed himself in a long time, he realized. He thought of their meeting, her face, the rose, the striped shadows from the iron gate falling across her bosom in the moonlight. He would watch her for a few moments before emerging from the shadows. He would be a long dark figure, he thought. He would be smoking a cigarette. No, that might disgust her. He would keep his hands in his pockets, his chin down. He thought of the American movie Casablanca. He would be like in Casablanca. He would touch her face lightly with the back of his hand. She would blush and turn her face away, but then she would look up at him again, into his eyes. They would fall in love, and he would kiss her. Not a long kiss on the mouth, but small kisses on the cheeks and neck and forehead. Mr. Wu thought long kisses on the mouth were disgusting. When they happened in movies, he averted his eyes. The thought kept him from caressing himself any further. He read all her texts again. It was only two o’clock. He dressed and went to the arcade.

  • • •

  The woman at the arcade looked worried and unkempt. Her hair was tied in a ponytail and she wore a stained trench coat over her dress. He tried not to pay attention to her disarray. Once she was his, he could dress her any way he liked.

  “How are you, Mr. Wu?” she asked. She barely looked up from her wad of bills.

  “How are you?” he replied searchingly. He put his arm up on the counter, tried to smile. She turned and yelled to one of her employees in the back room, counted out his change, and handed him his card.

  “Enjoy,” she said gruffly and picked up her phone.

  He took a computer directly in front of the counter so that if he sat to the side of it and crossed his legs as though he were reading articles online and smoking, he could look at her out of the corner of his eye. He watched her take out her compact and pat down her hair. She took down her ponytail and tried to comb it out with her fingers. It only made her hair look worse. She tied it back up again and drew down the corners of her eyes. She seemed to clean out some gunk from her eyes. Mr. Wu gagged a little and stubbed out his cigarette. He looked at the time. It was three thirty. She powdered her face, and as he watched he noticed that her powdering was a little heavy-handed, that she was powdering a little too quickly, with too much gusto. He thought she looked the wrong color. He thought she looked very strange. Now she took out some rouge and spread it on her wide cheeks. That’s not so bad, he thought. But then she licked her fingers and wiped some of the rouge off. He thought of all the money and cards she’d handled with those fingers. He thought, Would I kiss those fingers? He thought of the fingers of the prostitute from the day before and wondered where they’d been, how much money they’d handled, and what sticky knobs of doors they’d pulled on. Then the woman put on some blue eye shadow and red lipstick. Wu could not help having the thought that the woman looked like a prostitute. She looks worse than a prostitute, he thought. She looks like a madam. He wondered if he still loved her. He took out his phone and reread all her texts again.

  “I am very lonely and troubled. Who are you?”

  She sounded desperate, he thought.

  He had made a grievous mistake, he thought.

  He logged off his computer, got up, walked to the counter, and handed her his card.

  “Thank you,” she said. He felt sick.

  There was a karaoke bar above the dry-goods store on the corner. He went up the stairs. The woman there gave him a large beer and a bowl of peanuts. He ate them quickly and drank the beer and looked out the window and smoked and remembered the woman smearing on that greasy lipstick. He imagined her as the manager of a team of teenage prostitutes. He imagined her yelling at one of them for not pleasing a customer. He had a horrible vision. He envisioned the woman from the arcade washing the prostitute’s private parts with the hose from a latrine. He imagined her hand in the prostitute’s private parts. He ordered another beer. He could not believe his own mind. He imagined the woman’s mouth on the prostitute’s private parts. He imagined her cleaning all the little pockets of this prostitute’s private parts with her tongue, using her tongue like a bar of soap. “I like a man who is not afraid of trying new things.” What if these new things were disgusting things like what he was imagining? What if she wanted him to lick her private parts like that? Could he do it? What if she wanted to use the latrine on his hand? And what if she wanted to lick his fingers after she’d used the latrine on his hand? He couldn’t possibly go through with something like that. What if she wanted to clean herself after moving her bowels without toilet paper, lick her fingers and then ask to kiss him on the mouth? He might have no idea that she’d cleaned herself after moving her bowels without toilet paper and licked her fingers. She might want to kiss him tonight, at midnight. His eyes filled with tears. He put out his cigarette.

  “Sing a song?” said the woman behind the bar.

  But Wu was too disgusted. He went down the stairs and took a walk by the ravine. He imagined the woman from the arcade swimming in the refuse. He imagined her sucking the dirty water into her mouth and then spurting it out like a fountain. I will never kiss that woman on the mouth, he decided. That is one thing I’ll never do.

  But he still loved her, he tried t
o think. I could still love her.

  He went back up past the ravine and past the shops and bought a bottle of baijiu and another pack of cigarettes and went and sat on the steps of the temple flophouse and drank and smoked for a while. A dog came and sniffed his leg. He drank and drank and spat and flicked his cigarettes at the passing dogs. “Ha ha ha ha ha,” he cackled. He looked at his watch: five o’clock. He had plenty of time before his date. At the little family restaurant he ate a soup made of mutton and spicy peppers. He shoveled the rice into his mouth like a peasant, let it fall all over his lap and onto the floor. My last day of freedom, he thought. He decided to take a taxi to the city and visit his little prostitute. He bought another bottle of baijiu for the road.

  • • •

  His little prostitute was not at work that day.

  “Sorry,” said the fat, gray-haired madam. “We have other nice girls for you.” He looked at the teenagers sitting on the stained couch. They barely lifted their heads from their phones. One of them had stiff shifty hair like the woman at the arcade, but her face was covered in hard little pimples.

  “I’ll take the one with the pimples,” he said.

  “Wan Fei!” yelled the madam. The girl got up. She was extraordinarily tall, he saw.

  “Never mind,” he said. “Just give me the dumbest one you have.”

  “Zhu Wenting!” yelled the madam. A fat-faced, pale, short-haired girl got up, eased her phone into the back pocket of her pale yellow jeans. He followed her into the back room and watched her undress in the red light. She had small, hard, pointy breasts. He went over to her and pinched them. She had no reaction.

  “Does that hurt?” he asked her.

  She pinched his cheek like a little child’s. “Does that hurt?” she asked him. He found her delightful. He got undressed. Although he was drunk, he was still shocked by his own actions. He reached down and caressed himself while the prostitute walked to the bed and pulled back the sheets. Her bottom was round and dimpled and the color of polished brass.

  “Let me kiss you,” he said and pushed her face down into the pillows.

  As he swiveled his tongue around her privates, he fell in love with the woman at the arcade again. He reached down and caressed himself. The prostitute laughed and put her butt in the air.

  “Put your finger in it,” she said.

  He was aghast.

  “In what?” he wanted to ask. But he did not ask. He put his finger in his mouth—he did that—and put it up the prostitute’s bottom. She made a squeaking noise and wriggled and squeezed on his finger and squeaked again.

  “Wrong one,” she said.

  He was not embarrassed. He put a second finger in there. She made a bigger noise. He pushed them deeper in. He decided he would make love to her this way—in her bottom, with his fingers. This was living, he thought. He reached down and caressed himself as he did it. She wriggled and squealed.

  “Be quiet,” he said. He took his fingers out of her bottom and pushed her head into the pillow to muffle her squeaks. That gave him an idea. He squished his fingers between her face and the pillow and hooked them in her mouth. He felt around her mouth for her tongue and did his best to wipe his fingers off on her tongue. Then he went back to making love to her behind with his fingers. He continued to caress himself. He thought of the woman at the arcade.

  “Enjoy,” she’d said.

  He laughed. The prostitute’s muffled squeals excited him. He took his fingers out of her behind and put them in his mouth. He could not believe what joy he’d brought himself. His eyes filled with tears.

  • • •

  Around eleven forty-five he passed the ravine and stood and took in the moonlight. He felt nervous and yet very serene and tired. Along the road were just a few cars and a few people and a few cows led on ropes and a few dirty children throwing Pop-its at the side of the bridge. He walked toward the road but then stopped abruptly. The woman from the arcade had turned the corner and walked, a rose in her hand, in his direction. They could not possibly walk together to their rendezvous. That would defeat the entire purpose of their meeting, he thought. He hung back and waited for her to pass, then continued, watching the steadiness of her gait. She twisted off the stem of the rose and began to put it in her hair.

  He walked several yards behind her, then watched as she fixed the collar of her coat and smoothed out her skirt as she waited, looking around nervously in the dark for him. She did not look as garish as she had earlier that day in the arcade. She curled the end of a strand of her hair around her finger, then let it go. She looked beautiful. It was almost just as he’d imagined, only the striped shadows of the iron bars did not fall across her bosom, for she was standing on the wrong side of the gate. The faint light that was cast down on her was from the neon sign across the road. It made her look intelligent, he thought, wise, savvy, in a way.

  He was not sure he could approach her.

  He decided to send her a text.

  “Go stand behind the gates. I will stand under the neon sign. If you like me, clap your hands. If you don’t, whistle.”

  He took a deep breath and lit a cigarette and went and stood in the light. He looked at his phone, then up, looking straight in her direction. He turned to the side, to the back, then to the front again. He waited for a clap, a whistle, but heard nothing. He waited five minutes. He had his answer.

  • • •

  Mr. Wu went back down the road and bought an armful of fireworks and took them up to the karaoke bar over the dry-goods store and up onto the roof and started sending them off into the ravine. They made a delightful wheezing and whipping noise before they exploded. He watched the white and green and red and yellow lights fizzle out and extinguish in the dirty ravine sludge. He decided to send one higher up into the sky. It sailed over the ravine and hit the banner announcing the opening of the new supermarket. The banner lit on fire. He quickly ducked back into the doorway and went down into the bar, said good night, and stumbled down into the road. He walked home under the burning banner and down the dark and quiet road, pausing now and then to raise his arms in victory.

  MALIBU

  In order to collect unemployment benefits, I had to fill out this log of all the jobs I’d applied for. But I wasn’t applying for any jobs. So I just wrote down “lawyer” and made up a phone number. Then I wrote down “lawyer’s assistant” and put down the same phone number. I went on like that. “Law-firm janitor.” I looked at the number I’d made up. I tried calling it. It rang and rang. Then a woman got on the line.

  “Who’s this?” is how she answered the phone.

  “I’m doing a study,” I said. “How do you feel about people seeing you naked?”

  “I was a nude model for an art school,” she said, “so I have no problem.”

  She said her name was Terri and that she lived out in Lone Pine with her mother, who had Parkinson’s. She said she wanted to get pregnant so she’d have something to think about all day.

  “I’m an Indian,” she said next. “Chumash. What are you?”

  “I’m regular,” I told her.

  “Good. I like regular men. I wish I wasn’t an Indian. I wish I was black or Chinese or something. Well,” she said, “how about you come out here and we see what we can do? I’m not after your money, if that’s what you’re thinking. I get checks in the mail all the time.”

  It sounded like a vulture was squawking in the background. I thought for a minute.

  “One thing,” I said. “I have pimples. And a rash all over my body. And my teeth aren’t great either.”

  “I’m not expecting much,” she said. “Besides, I don’t like perfect-looking men. They make me feel like trash, and they’re boring.”

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  We made a date for dinner the next day. I had a good feeling about it.

  • • •

  It wa
s true: I had pimples. But I was still good-looking. Girls liked me. I rarely liked them back. If they asked me what I did for fun, I told them lies, saying I Jet Skied or went to casinos. The truth was that I didn’t know how to have fun. I wasn’t interested in fun. I spent most of my time looking in the mirror or walking to the corner store for cups of coffee. I had a thing about coffee. It was pretty much all I drank. That and diet ginger ale. Sometimes I stuck my finger down my throat. Plus I was always picking at my pimples. I covered the marks they made with girls’ liquid foundation, which I stole from Walgreens. The shade I used was called Classic Tan. I guess those were my only secrets.

  My uncle lived out in Agoura Hills. I called him sometimes out of desperation, but he only ever wanted to talk about girls.

  “I don’t like anybody right now,” I told him over the phone. I was looking in the mirror over the bathroom sink, doing some one-handed picking.

  “But women are good,” he said. “They’re like a good meal.”

  “I can’t afford a good meal,” I said back to him. “Anyway, I go for quantity over quality.”

  He told me to go ask if Sears or T.J.Maxx was hiring, or Burger King. For someone else, maybe that was fine advice. He himself didn’t need to work. He was on disability for having a gimp leg. Also, he had a colostomy bag he didn’t care for properly. He used a lot of peach-scented air freshener around the house to cover the smell. He rarely left the living room and liked to order in large Mexican dinners or whole pizzas. He was always eating something and dumping out the colostomy bag right afterward.

  “I don’t feel very well,” I told him. “I’m too sick to find a job.”

  “Go to a doctor,” he said. “Look in the phone book. Don’t be a fool. You need to care for your health.”

  “Can I borrow some money?” I asked him.

  “No.”