I try to pull away, out of its view, but I cannot shrink tightly enough against the wall.
Why is that here? I ask, trying to keep panic out of my voice.
Your name, he repeats, tipping the camera toward me.
Oh Jesus, Gabe, leave her alone, says Jill, pushing him away. She takes my arm and pulls me along. Sorry about that. There’s always some retro-loving jackass at parties, and he’s ours.
Jane comes up on the other side of me and laughs down a scale. Paul, she says, where’d you go?
He reappears. Onward, he says, sounding giddy.
They ask us if we want the tour. We wander from the living room to a wide-open kitchen, shiny with brass and steel. They tap each shiny appliance in turn: Dishwasher. Refrigerator. Gas stove. Separate oven. Second oven. There is a door toward the back with an ornate, bronze-colored handle. I reach for it, but Jane grabs my shoulder. Stop, she says. Careful.
That room is being renovated, says Jill. There’s no floor. You could go in there, but you’d go straight down to the cellar. She opens the door with her manicured hand and, yes, the no-floor yawns at me.
That would be terrible, says Jane.
The camera follows me around. I stand near Paul for a while, awkwardly smoothing my dress. He seems anxious, so I move, a satellite released from orbit. Away from him, I feel strange, purposeless. I do not know these people, and they do not know me. I stand near the hors d’oeuvres table, and eat one shrimp—meaty, swimming in cocktail sauce—tucking the stiff tail into my palm. Another one, then a third, the tails filling up my hand. I swallow a glass of red wine without tasting it. I refill it, and drain another. I swirl a cracker in something dark green. I look up. In the corner of the room, the single eye of the camera is fixed on me. I turn toward the table.
The cat saunters over and paws playfully at a hunk of pita bread in my hands. When I pull it away, she swipes at me and takes a chunk out of my finger. I swear and suck at the wound. In my mouth, I can taste hummus and copper. I’m so sorry, says Jill, who swans up as if she had been waiting offstage for the cue of my blood. He does that to strangers sometimes; he really needs anxiety medication or something. Bad pussycat! Jane touches Jill’s arm lightly and asks her to come and help clean up a spill, and they both vanish.
Friendly people I have never met ask me about my job, about my life. They reach across me for wineglasses, touch my arm. Each time, I move away, not directly back but a half step to the right, and they match my movements, and in this way we move in a small circle as we speak.
The last book I read, I repeat slowly, was—
But I can’t remember. I remember the satiny cover beneath the pads of my fingertips, but not the title, or the author, or any of the words inside. I think I am talking funny, with my burned mouth, my numb tongue fat and useless inside my mouth. I want to say, Don’t bother asking me anything. I want to say, There is nothing underneath.
And what do you do?
The questions come at me like doors thrown open. I begin to explain, but as soon as the words leave my mouth I find myself searching for Paul. He is in the far corner of the room, talking to a woman with short hair and a strand of pearls that wraps around her neck like the coils of a noose. She touches his arm familiarly; he bats her away with his hand. His muscles look taut enough to snap. I look back at the woman who asked me about my profession. She is curvy and taller than most and has on the brightest shade of red lipstick that I have ever seen. Her eyes flicker over to Paul. She takes another long swig of her martini, the olives rolling around in the glass like eyes. How are things with the two of you? she asks. A pimento iris lolls in my direction. The woman with the pearls touches Paul’s arm again. He shakes his head, almost imperceptibly. Who is she? Why is she—
I excuse myself and walk into the dim hallway. I press my palm into the iron sphere at the base of the railing, and swing myself up onto the staircase.
The coatroom, I think. The bedroom full of coats. The repurposed—
The stairs move away from me, and I rush to catch them. I search for the door, a darker patch among darkness. The coatroom is cool. I press my hand on the wooden panel. The coats will not question me.
In the shadows, two figures are struggling on the bed. My heart surges with fear, a fish with a steel hook through the ridge of its lip. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I realize that it’s just the hosts, writhing on the heaps of shiny down jackets. The dark-haired one—Jane? or is it Jill?—is on her back, her dress gathered around her hips, and her wife is over her, grinding her knee between her legs. Jane—maybe Jill—is biting her own wrist to keep from crying out. The coats rustle, slide. Jane kisses Jill or Jill kisses Jane and then one leans down and rolls down the top of the other’s stockings, a rolled line of underwear, her face disappearing into her.
A pleasurable twinge curls inside of me. Jill or Jane writhes, pulls up fistfuls of down coat with her hands, makes a soft noise, a single syllable stretched in two directions. A long red scarf slides to the floor.
I don’t wonder if they can see me. I could stand here for a thousand years and between coats and syllables and mouths they would never see me.
I close the door.
I get drunk. I have four flutes of champagne and a strong gin and tonic. I even suck the gin out of the lime wedge, the citrus stinging the scratch on my finger. Gabe finally puts the camera down on a chair in deference to its extraordinary weight. It sits there, quietly, but it holds me inside, somewhere, for precious seconds that I cannot take back. A face that I have yet to really look at, resting deep in the coils of its mechanical innards.
I walk past the camera and take it, my fingers tightening around the handle. I control it now. As I walk nonchalantly toward the front door, taking care to point the lens away from my body, I see the white cat with the smooshed face, watching me from the landing. His pink comma tongue slides out and makes a leisurely trip over his upper lip, and his blue eyes narrow accusingly. I stumble. I do not bother to get my coat before I walk through the front door.
Outside, my boots crunch loudly through the glittering ice and mean snow. Near the end of the path that leads to the driveway, someone has emptied a half-full coffee cup, and dark brown is splattered grotesquely across the white lawn. Narrow tracks in the snow suggest a deer has seen this sight, too. My skin is stippled with goose bumps. I realize I don’t have the keys, but I reach for the trunk handle anyway.
It’s unlocked. The trunk opens to me, and I thump the camera down into its shadows.
I go back inside and have a glass of wine. Then a shot of something green. The world begins to slide.
Instead of passing out like a dignified person, I stagger out to the car again, sit in the cold passenger seat, recline it, and stare out the sunroof at a sky crowded with delicate points of light.
Paul gets into the driver’s seat.
Are you all right? he asks.
I nod, and then throw open the door and vomit cocktail shrimp and spinach dip onto the gravel driveway. Pink chunks and long dark strands like hair settle among the stones and snow; the puddle gleams and reflects the moon.
We drive. I recline and watch the sky.
Did you have fun? he asks.
I giggle, laugh. No, I guffaw. I snort. Fuck no. Fuck—
I feel something cold on my face and I pick it off. Spinach. I roll down the window. Icy air hits my face. I throw it out of the car.
If that were a cigarette, I say, it would spark. It should be a cigarette. I could use one of those.
The cold stings.
Can you roll the window up? Paul asks loudly over the rushing wind. I roll it back up and lean my heavy head against the glass.
I thought it would be good for us to get out of the house, he says. Jane and Jill really like you.
Like me for what? I pull my head away, and there is a circle of grease obscuring the sky. I see a black stain flash briefly under the headlights, then a huddled mass on the side of the road—a deer, blasted apart by the
tires of an SUV.
I can almost hear the line between Paul’s eyebrows deepening. What do you mean, like you for what? What does that even mean?
I don’t know.
They just like you, that’s all.
I laugh again, and reach for the window crank. Who was that woman with that pearl necklace? I ask.
No one, he says, in a voice that doesn’t fool either of us.
At my house, he carries me to bed. When he lies down next to me, I reach over and touch his stomach. He doesn’t ask me what I am doing.
You’re drunk, he says. You don’t want this.
How do you know what I want? I ask. I inch closer. He takes my hand and lifts it away. He holds it aloft for a minute, seemingly not wanting to drop it, but not wanting to put it back either. He settles for resting it on my own stomach, and then rolls away from me.
I reach for myself. I don’t even recognize my own topography.
Most mornings, Paul asks me what I dreamt about.
I don’t remember, I say. Why?
You moved around. A lot. He says this carefully, with restraint that betrays itself.
I want to see. I set up the camera on the highest shelf of the bookcase next to my bed, to record my sleep. The DVD from the other day is obviously broken, so I put it into the garbage can, shoving it deep into the bag past potato peelings curling like question marks. Then, I order another DVD. It shows up on my cement stoop.
This one is in many parts, smaller parts, like film shorts. The first one is called Fucking My Wife. I start it. A man is holding the camera—I can’t see his face. The woman is blond and older than the last woman and she has meticulously applied mascara.
How do I say, how do I say, how do I say—
I cannot hear him. I look at the video case again. Fucking My Wife. I don’t understand the title. I can’t hear him. Only her voice, tinged with desperation.
How do I say, how do I say, how do I—
I don’t want to hear her anymore. I hit mute.
How do I say, how do I say, how do I—
I turn off the DVD player. The television blinks to the news network. A blond woman is staring gravely at her audience. Over her left shoulder, like an advising devil, there is a square graphic of a bomb, blasting apart the pixels that make it. I unmute the sound.
—a bombing in Turkey, she is saying. Viewers should be advised that the following images are—
I turn off the TV. I yank the plug out by the cord.
Paul comes over. How are you feeling? he asks.
A little better, I say. Tired. I lean into him. He smells like detergent. I lean into him and I want him. He is solid. He reminds me of a tree—roots that run deep.
The DVD player is broken, I say, heading off the question before it can be asked.
Do you want me to look at it? he asks.
Yes, I say. I plug in the TV again. As the DVD begins to play, and the bodies begin to unfold, I can hear it again. That voice, that sad, desperate sound, the questions repeated over and over again like a mantra, even as she smiles. Even as she moans and her mind flits between her question and the pattern of the carpet. Paul watches with determined courtesy, absently stroking my hand as it plays. The next one begins, a different scenario. Something about a massage.
Can’t you hear it? I feel the nails of my free hand digging into my jeans.
He tilts his head to the side and listens again.
Hear what? he says, his voice tinged with exasperation.
The voices.
It’s not like it’s on mute.
No, the voices underneath.
He moves away from me so quickly I lose my balance. His right hand hovers next to him, flexing and unflexing as if he’s holding the disembodied heart of an enemy. What is wrong with you? he snaps. When I don’t respond, he slams his hands against the wall. Goddamnit, he says.
I turn back to the screen. A man looks down at a woman going down on him. Let me look at those pretty baby blues, he says, and her amber eyes flick upward, and different names run through their respective minds like a chant for the dead. I turn the TV off.
Don’t be angry with me, please, I say. I stand in front of him, my hands dangling heavily at my sides. He puts his arms around me, rests his chin on my head. We rock back and forth slowly, dancing to the sound of the heating vent struggling to keep us warm.
I think I found you an apartment, he says into my hair. It’s on the third floor of a building on the other side of the river.
I don’t want to leave, I say into his chest.
His muscles tense, and he pulls me away from his body by the length of his impossible arms.
It’s like you’re not even in there. He grabs the sides of his arms. You’re responding to all of the wrong things.
Please stop, I say. He reaches for me, but I knock his hand away. I need you to be simple and good, I say. Can’t you just be simple and good?
He looks straight through me, as if I already know the answer.
The next morning, I slide the cassette out of the camera, rewind it, and put it in the VCR. I fast-forward through the stillness, though there is not much of it. Camera-me flails. She grabs for the air as if she is trying to pull party streamers down from the ceiling. She knocks her limbs against the wall, the oak headboard, the nightstand, and does not recoil in pain but goes back to them, over and over. The slender lamp crashes to the floor. Paul gets up, tries to help, holds her arms, holds my arms, trying to pin them to her sides, then looks guilty and releases them. She comes down. She struggles against the blankets. She slides down onto the floor, rolling half under the edge of the bed, partially hidden by the pulled sheets. Paul tries to get her back up onto the bed and she takes a wild swing at his head, and I can hear her steady no, no, no, no, no, no, no even as he tugs her back up onto the mattress, getting close enough to talk into her ear, something too low for the camera to catch, and then getting her down, down onto the mattress, down into his arms in a grip that looks both threatening and comforting. This lasts for a moment before she is—before I am—up again, and Paul pulls me into him, even as I hit his chest, even as I slide again to the floor. A whole night of this.
When I am done, I rewind it to the beginning and replace it in the camera.
I stop ordering DVDs by mail. There are no voice tricks in Internet porn, no weird commentary tracks. I begin free trials at four different websites.
I can still hear them. A man with slender wrists wonders endlessly about someone named Sam. Two women are surprised about each other’s bodies, the infinite softness. No one said, no one said, a tanned woman thinks. It echoes around her mind, around mine. I lean in so close to the screen that I cannot even see the picture anymore. Just blotches of color, moving. Beiges, browns, the black of the tanned woman’s hair, a shock of red of which, when I pull back, I can’t see the origins.
A woman mentally corrects a man who keeps referring to her pussy. Cunt, she thinks, and the word is dense and sits in the air like a wedge of underripe fruit. I love your pussy, he says. Cunt, she repeats over and over again, a meditation.
Some are silent. Some have no words, just colors.
A woman with a black harness around her fleshy hips prays as she fucks a thin man who idolizes her. Each thrust punctuates. At the end, she kisses his back, a benediction.
A man with two women on his cock wants to be home.
Do they know what they are thinking, I wonder, clicking through videos, letting them load like a slingshot being pulled back. Do they hear it? Do they know? Did I know?
I cannot remember.
At two in the morning, I am watching a man make a delivery. A woman with breasts that float wrongly against gravity opens the door. Not the right house, of course. I think that I have watched this before, maybe. He sets the empty cardboard box on the table. She takes off her shirt. I listen.
Her mind is all darkness. It is full, afraid. Fear rushes through it, white-hot and terrified. Fear weighs on her chest, crushing her
. She is thinking about a door opening. She is thinking about a stranger coming in. I am thinking about a door opening. I can hear him clutching the doorknob. I cannot hear him clutching the doorknob, but I can hear it turning. I cannot hear it turning, but I hear the footfalls. I cannot hear the footfalls, I cannot hear them. There is only a shadow. There is only darkness blotting out light.
He, the delivery man, the no-delivery man, thinks about her breasts. He worries about his body. He wants to please her, really.
She smiles. There is a smear of lipstick on her teeth. She likes him. Below this, there is a screaming, rushing tunnel. No radio signal. It fills my head, it presses against the bone of my skull. Pounding, pushing it apart. I am an infant, my head is not solid, these tectonic plates, they cannot be expected to hold.
I grab my laptop and hurl it across the room at the wall. I expect it to shatter, but it doesn’t—it strikes the drywall and hits the ground with a terrific crash.
I scream. I scream so loudly the note splits in two.
Paul comes running out of the basement. He cannot get close to me.
Don’t touch me, I howl. Don’t touch me, don’t touch me.
He stays near the door. I slump down onto the floor. My tears run hot and then cool on my face. Please go back downstairs, I say. I cannot see Paul, but I hear him open the basement door. I flinch. I do not get up until my heart slows.
When I finally stand and walk over to the wall, I tip the computer right side up. There is a massive crack down the center of the screen, a ruptured fault line.
In the bedroom, Paul sits across from me, his fingers tapping idly on the denim of his pants.
Do you remember, he says, what it was like before?
I look down at my legs, then up at the blank wall, then back to him. I do not even struggle to speak; the spark of words dies so deep in my chest there is not even space to mount them on an exhale.
You wanted, he says. You wanted and wanted. You were like this endless thing. A well that never emptied.
I wish I could say that I remember, but I do not remember. I can imagine pumping limbs and mouths on mouths but I cannot remember them. I cannot remember ever being thirsty.