by John Gould
But she’s too late. This is what Matt wants to say to Mariko—Sophie’s too late. The environmental thing is over. We left kritikal behind ages ago. We did not pass Go, we did not collect two hundred. Matt has the feeling, though, that giving up on Gaia, or at least admitting he’s done so, would be giving up on Mariko, giving her a final excuse to give up on him.
And then of course he might be wrong. Hey, it wouldn’t be the first time, more like the seventeen kajillionth. Maybe the human race is just going through a bad patch here, and life will live through it. Who knows? So Matt keeps quiet. He holds his peace, too, on the offspring issue. Why bring a kid into a world you know is ruined? He’s often thought it—he thought it even when Mariko was briefly pregnant, and even when that experience inspired them to start boinking for a baby—but he’s never said it. Mariko seems to know, though, or maybe it’s just that she’s reached the same dire conclusion. That one loss, and then that one iffy prognosis—narrow uterus, a few fibroids—and she gave up, went back on birth control. No specialists, no clinics, no nothing. But what if they’re both wrong?
“… her eyes widening as she looked about the sumptuous suite. ‘Oh my gosh,’ she said, ‘this is like something out of a dream or—’”
“Mercedes?”
“Not now, Matt.”
“No, but I’m having another psychic—”
“Never interrupt a woman when she’s this close, Matt. Trust me.”
But she’s about to be interrupted anyhow. Somebody’s just turned in at her place, a middle-aged guy, bald, slender. Yeah, the goofy walk is right—like somebody crossing a log over a river—but so much else is wrong. He’s got out a key though, he’s opening the door.
“’ … thought you might like it,’ he said with a roguish grin, swinging the door shut behind him. Nikki fell against him, her full breasts pooling against the implacable wall of his chest. His lips were on hers and she drank greedily from them, startling herself with the violence of her own—Oh wait, here he is. Zane. Zane! Phone for you. Hang on, he’s going to take it up in his room.”
Bald? So he’s buzzed off that fringe of brown fluff, big improvement. But slender …
“Yyyello.” That silly, sarcastically nasal voice—it’s only been a few weeks, and that’s too long. A stand-up comic’s voice is what he’s got, good evening, ladies and germs.
Click, Mercedes signing off.
“Have you ever imagined you were in a movie?” says Matt.
“What?”
“Or in a book?”
“Not bad thanks. You?”
“Because you’re not. This is just what it is. You being sick? It’s just you being sick.”
Sigh. “Okay. I get it, Matt.”
“And you dying is just you dying.”
A breath or two, more chesty than you’d really like. Matt watches Zane’s window, half-hoping for his silhouette. What if he gets busted? I love you, man, stay away.
“But you don’t believe that,” says Matt.
“Not really. Things can be other things too.”
“Right.” Behind Matt somebody very small begins to cry, a thin, experimental wailing that pours out an open window.
“Anyway,” says Zane, “how are things with you?”
“Good, good. Not so good.”
Squeak of bedsprings, Zane settling in. “Mariko?”
“Yeah, I guess,” says Matt. “Where did we leave off last time?”
“I forget her name, Sally?”
“Sophie.”
“Right. Sorry, man, I’ve been meaning to call.”
“No, no sweat.”
“It’s weird, I really thought … I don’t know. I thought you and Mariko were forever. Hey, is that somebody crying?”
“Yeah, I hear it too. Must be something in the line, bad connection.” Matt shifts his body as though to block out the sound. “So here’s a question for you. My best friend and my wife are both gay. What’s up with that?”
“It’s you, Matt. You do it to people. You’re just so incredibly manly, you’re just so—”
“Fuggoff.”
“—just so magnificently straight that everybody around you gives up and goes queer.”
“You really think so?”
“Yepper.”
Matt blows a modest raspberry. The squalling behind him resolves into a fit of giggles. “How was the doctor?”
“Doctor? Oh, she was fine.”
“Ha.”
“Ha.”
It was maybe a month after they first started hanging out together, he and Zane. Spring of grade four? They unfolded Matt’s birthday jackknife (“Take care of it, son, and it’ll take care of you”) and they sliced open their thumbs. Zane went first, drew a bead of blood that sent Matt’s head spinning. He knelt down, steadied himself, held the knife tight in one hand and whipped his other thumb along the blade. Too hard, too fast—he had himself a gusher. Once they had their thumbs smushed together you couldn’t tell blood from blood anyhow. They hadn’t figured out what to say so they just knelt there glued together for a bit, then went back to playing cowboys, wads of paper towel reddening on their thumbs.
“But really,” says Matt, “how’s your T cell count and all that?”
“Not so bad. Has Mercedes been telling tales?”
“She claims you haven’t been seeing to her wifely needs.”
“Uh-oh. Reckon she’s ready for another whuppin’.”
“Atta boy.” Matt drains the last of his coffee, dismounts his dinosaur and crosses the street. He stands on the lawn looking up at Zane’s window, a Romeo thing. “How’s your stuff? What are you working on?”
“Wrapping up Beach, mostly.” Zane’s cheeky title for his Nigerian documentary, A Day at the Beach. You think of the Marx Brothers, A Day at the Races. You think of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Jacques Tati having his shy fun in the sand. Then you meet Shanumi. “Nico’s working with me on something new, too. Kind of a parallel. I might get your help on it.”
“Really?”
“You’d be into that?”
“Um, sure. Mind you, I saw Beach again, the cut you sent me. A couple of times. I don’t get it.”
“How so?”
“I don’t get it. How you can do that, how you can handle that.”
“You could handle it too, Matt.”
“Not sure.”
“So that’s why you stopped?”
“Oh Christ, this again. Have you got a new theory, is that it? And please don’t be a prick.”
Squeak of bedsprings, Zane getting up. “You weren’t good enough.”
“Prick.”
“No, I mean you were good.” Zane passes the window one way. “You were really good.” He passes it the other way. “That wasn’t good enough.”
Another raspberry from Matt. “I get plenty of this crap from my wife, thanks.”
“Okay, sorry. So what are you working on these days? Tackling some pretty formidable stuff?”
“Fuggoff.”
“Hulk, maybe? How to Lose a Guy in—”
“Fuggoff. And anyway, I got fired.”
“What?”
“I got fired.”
Zane passes the window again. He’s doing a little dance, either that or he’s buckling over in some kind of distress. “That’s fantastic. You’re kidding me. Are you kidding me?”
“Nope.”
“You got busted? For the fakes?”
“That last one, somebody called in.”
“What does Mariko think? She’s impressed?”
“Mm, not so much.”
“Oh.”
“But then she’s screwing around on me, so … Hey, is that the right word? When it’s two chicks is it still screwing? Poofter like you should know.”
“Naturally. Hey, what was that?”
“Delivery,” says Matt. A truck’s just dumped a load of gravel at the foot of a driveway a couple of doors down. Matt’s already on his way up the block. “We’re doing some work, f
ixing the place up. Getting ready to sell.”
“Wow. Everything changes, eh?”
“Yeah.” Matt strides north, the sun’s hand heavy on his back. “Hey, so Nico. You know he’s a social worker, right, not a filmmaker?”
“He’s actually in the movie,” says Zane.
“Oh. What’s it about?”
“It’s … I’ll tell you another time. It’s kind of big.”
“Okay. How is Nico, anyway? I don’t hear much about him these days.”
“He’s all right.”
“Yeah? Is he … I’ve sort of been afraid to ask, is Nico—”
“Positive. He’s positive.”
“Oh.”
“He got it from me.”
“Oh, man.”
“Imagine killing somebody you love,” says Zane.
“Yeah. Imagine that.”
“I should go, Matt.”
“Namaste.”
“What?”
“Namaste. It’s Hindi. We’ll need it when we go to India.”
“India?”
“I bow to you. And you do a little head-bob, with your hands praying.” Back at the room Matt googled this up, got it on his third spelling. “I bow to the soul in you.”
“Oh. Cool. So we’ll talk soon, eh?”
“Fugging right.”
If this trip were a movie—such is Matt’s thought as he squelches back down the hall to his room—it would suck so far.
Guy holes up in a hoity-toity hotel. He shivers and sweats, fires off the odd email, places the odd phone call. He heads out for a stroll in the suburban barrens, or for a sneaky recon mission, or for a quickie with a puzzling stranger. Sure, there’s a bit of moral conundrum taking shape—save the sick guy? let him have his big gesture?—but do you really need that sort of grief when you’re kicking back on the couch? The sex, which is sudden, and moderately acrobatic, does have cinematic potential. A clever director could do something with that, and he could haunt the whole thing with some sort of existential despair. Or maybe spoof that, pull a Woody Allen? Whichever. Matt would be obliged to trash the thing either way.
If Matt were making the movie though, things would be different. Things would be inside out, upside down. The sick guy would save the healthy guy, something like that, the ironic reversal. Life, though? Life’s so lame.
It takes Matt a little longer than it should to regain his room. The gizmo on the door keeps rejecting his card, which turns out actually to be his organ donor card … Still not firing on all cylinders, no.
“Okay, so I’ve got another one for you.” Kate on the voice mail. “Never mind who am I, what about why am I? You like the philosophical stuff, right? So why is there anything at all?” Typical mushy stuff, new love. “You’ve got nothing, and that splits into two things, energy and gravity. Like evil and good coming out of … whatever they came out of, you tell me. But what made it do that? And once something’s something, can it really be nothing again? Oh and also, I’m still humming from last night, seriously humming. Just so you know. B-bye.”
Matt paces the room a spell before dialing. Answer a question with a question, seems to be his best bet. He’s run a movie trivia contest or two in his day, he ought to be able to come up with something dastardly. Oh, here’s a good one. “Get ready, smarty-puss. How many movies have titles that start with Jesus Christ? B-bye yourself.”
How long has it been since Matt last spent the night with another woman? Seven years. He still hasn’t spent a whole night—he was awake and headachy at dawn today, gave the sleeping Kate a peck on the cheek and skulked back down to his floor. Tucked into the Emperor, he resisted the allure of the remote control, went instead for his bedside reading.
She. He grabbed a handful, sniffed at the pages. Any sign of Mariko, her papaya bubble bath, her leafy perfume? Nope, nothing. In desperation, then, he tried the words themselves, tried reading the darn thing. Sure enough, there she was—the earnestness, the daffy love for even the most hopeless of humans. Matt imagined arriving at this world Mariko had concocted, imagined himself marooned and defenseless in her new-deal paradise. He imagined her licking the salt from his sea-soaked body, not to excite him but to clean him, to purify him. And he fell asleep, and he dreamt, and he forgot his dreams.
He’s made it to mid-afternoon now, but he’s still got a good hour to kill before Kate’s free. Time for a little tube. Matt clicks through the various movie menus, Drama, Comedy, Family, and finds nothing to which he hasn’t already applied his kritikal acumen. Which leaves Adult.
For a guy who’s exposed himself to so much celluloid over the years, Matt’s weirdly virginal when it comes to Adult. There was the odd softcore movie when he was a teenager—he recalls watching one with Zane on a sleepover, there in the blue-lit gloom of the McKay living room. A producer auditions young women for a smutty movie, a skin flick about skin flicks, cutting-edge stuff. Matt was horrendously, excruciatingly aroused. And his friend? What was going on in Zane’s jammies? What was going on in Zane’s head?
Of late—since sleep has become a no-go, there in the musty sanctum of his study—Matt’s taken to snooping around on late-night TV again, catching the odd libidinous offering. Arty coupling in arty films, parodies of porn in middlebrow thrillers, infomercials for phone sex or Crazy Gurl videos—it’s all arousing, it’s all appalling. After five minutes or so, any night Matt blunders into this stuff, he’s one big shaken cocktail of lust and shame. He’ll click off the tube and scuttle down the hall to Mariko’s bedroom—his bedroom?—and play ghost at the cracked-open door. Mariko’s sleep is almost laughably serene, each breath a rumour of a breeze. Shouldn’t she sense him there, rise to the tug of his attention? Would she have, in the old days?
Lick ‘Em and Leave ‘Em
Wicked Bitch Is the Best
Inside Eve
Total Suckcess #15
Well, hm. Tough call. Matt clicks a title at random, hits Purchase—and instantly feels naked. Where’s his notebook? Oh wait, the hotel stationery, the hotel pen. Matt skitters over to the desk. The paper comes in single cream-coloured sheets, each tipping the scales at about eight pounds. He hefts one, notes the almost fluffy feel of the thing, takes a thumbnail to its gold embossing.
Oops, opening credits. Matt clambers back onto the bed, punches a couple of pillows into position and settles down to work. What comes to him first (it often works this way) is his review’s last line. “Watching hardcore porn to get horny is like going to the slaughterhouse to get hungry.” Brutal. Brilliant. Whether or not it’s accurate remains to be seen (onscreen everybody’s still dressed), but this is not the kritik’s immediate concern.
Matt’s never witnessed hardcore porn before. This fact becomes evident about three minutes into today’s entertainment. There turns out to be one big difference between softcore—the stuff he’s previously consumed—and hardcore. This difference is the dink. Relegated to the role of subtext or absent centre in softcore, the dink would seem to be furiously foregrounded in hardcore. Matt often averts his gaze—should he really be staring at some other guy’s weenie, if this film is meant to be straight?—but the male member is clearly hardcore’s main character. It generates the plot’s premise, rising action and resolution. It’s the point. “Possibility that this is always the case?” Matt scrawls. “That all narrative is sex-shaped? Develop.”
Half an hour or so goes by. Into it are wedged five carnal encounters, or maybe it’s just four—threesomes, twosomes, one-somes. Matt takes advantage of a spate of chit-chat to get down some thoughts. This is his act of rebellion, writing instead of wanking off. Rugged individualist.
“In terms of sex positions this film displays a deplorable poverty of imagination. You’ve got your missionary, your doggie, your standing doggie, your cowgirl, your reverse cowgirl, and that’s about all she wrote. Excuse me, but what about the butterfly? What about the peace sign? What about the kneeling pretzel, the split level, the armchair, the wheelbarrow”—oh, how he pored over t
hat book of Meg’s!—“the rainbow arch, the froggy, the proposal, the squashing of the deck chair, the playing of the cello …” He’ll add more later. Back to the movie.
After an inspired flourish of character development—“I mean, what does he expect if he’s going to go away every single weekend?”—it’s back to business. If Matt had the nerve he’d tackle the race thing, the gender thing, the thing about race and gender. All the women in jolly old pornland seem to be white or Asian, whereas all the men seem to be white or black. Whither the Asian male? Whither the black female? Whither the brown folks of either persuasion? There’s definitely an article in this, though it may mean fidgeting through one more film to make sure the research is rock-solid. Or he could have a go at condoms, the complete lack thereof …
But no, he won’t go there.
“The thing about Eve,” Matt scribbles, “is—you guessed it—she’s innocent. In fact Eve (played by Cheyenne ‘Let’s-see-some-ID’ Sweet) is so innocent she’s never even seen a male organ, let alone had to deal with one. This deplorable situation her friends resolve to correct. Eve obediently tags along to various erotic encounters, watching—with us—just how it’s done. Thus is she prepared for the movie’s climactic scene, in which Dirk ‘Ohmigawd’ Winsome joins her in her verdant garden and … But don’t let me spoil it for you.”
You?
What comes to Matt last is the start of his review. He’ll go with stats again. He did a bunch of research one time for his piece on The Seven Year Itch at the Reprise, but never used it. The average time spent on foreplay is nineteen-point-something minutes. The average duration of a female orgasm is six seconds. The average man will climax seven thousand times between puberty and death. Forty percent of people have had unprotected sex with a new partner in the last year, despite the fact that … Anyway, he’ll open with a barrage of these numbers, and then he’ll—