We went 0-fer at the tournament, but La Jolla Sports Park has this insanely soft grass, these big ol triangle canopies with shade for days that make it hard to not feel like a winner. But, yeah, on the ride back it was getting dark, and since Jesús and the busdriver are chill, a few of us, just the boys, really, we went to the very back and kicked it, stretched ourselves across the aisle to just vibe for a while, each in his own row. By the way the busdriver smiled at us in his mirror, you could tell he’d have joined us if he didn’t have to drive the bus. Like I said, he’s chill with Jesús. We were a few flat stanleys back there, relaxing, half-sleeping as we listened to the road gentle in our backs. Then Douggie folded himself over the back of his seat, so his arms were loose and swaying, and told us the entire plot of Rosemary’s Baby.Now, as I lie in bed trying to unfocus my eyes to stop a hundred faces from appearing in the ceiling, what doesn’t make sense is how someone like Douggie, nice guy, nice parents, Christian, I’m pretty sure, ends up watching a movie like that, and why he’d bring it up on the bus, when everything was perfectly quiet, just as we’d finished forgetting about our big loss. How could you have something so evil inside of you and not know? I don’t know how that’s possible. Then again, as I rub my swollen shins together, I don’t know why some bruises are dark purple, and others orange.
A man is pelting stones at a dog. In this story, because it is an old story, the dog is going to become a secret test for his humanity. The man is going to think to himself, if only I had known that this was a secret test, I would’ve chosen to keep the stones hidden inside my shoes. But the man doesn’t know and cannot choose, so he chooses stones and well, the dog was already there. As a child, the man had been a boy, small, and as a small boy, the man had seen his big father pelt stones at a dog and that dog had never turned out to be a test. It was a good ol’ non-test, regular dog with a regular bark, howling, when the pelted stones hit its body. A thwap and then the twin stones thwap thwap;the dog’s howl a mix of wince and surprise. But this dog on this day is a test dog, so when the man pelts his second stone – he would’ve anyway stopped after three – the test dog transforms into a god. God says son you failed and in reality the stones, too, were disguises of time, like I am, and thus for every stone cast, you’ve now lost a decade of your life. The man looks at god and wonders how he is going to break this news to his wife or his kids – or his landowner who will ask him to pay his debt. And what about his daughter’s surgery. And what about that mango tree he had planted. In ten years, he was going to hold their delicious flesh. And what about – At the end of this long thought, the man looks at god and says okay. He swallows the last stone.
Five years I’ve been in animation. The doctor at the walk-in clinic says I have the wrists of an eighty-year-old. I’m not an eighty-year-old. He says by the time I’m actually an eighty-year-old, you wouldn’t be able to sell my wrists on the black market. According to the doctor, a black market buyer would say “you call that a wrist? This is not what I come to the black market for.” The doctor doesn’t have a very good bedside manner but that’s what you get at the walk-in clinic. Suffice it to say that when you meet me at the beginning of this story, I’m looking at my career the way a professional baseball player would: something one should try and enjoy while it lasts, while it’s a job the body can still do it, before it makes the body crumple in on itself to cries of “belly itcher,” “broken ladder,” etc. Only I don’t earn four million dollars a year. I earn seven hundred and sixty-nine dollars a week. I never work less than fifty hours a week. I do not have sick days. I do not take vacations. And for the last six months, it’s something I’ve failed even to enjoy whilst bringing to life the following section of Dustin Down the Drain.
INT. THE DRAIN - CONTINUOUS
Dustin, now fully shrunken down to the size of his action figure, wails as he slides down the drain, through a series of forks in the pipe, before being deposited in a pool of scummy water.
DUSTIN
UM, this is not what I signed up for, dude!
Dustin Down the Drain is due in theaters next Summer. Dustin Down the Drain is budgeted at one hundred and fifty million dollars. In order to break even, after marketing costs, Dustin Down the Drain will need to gross three hundred million dollars. After the breakout success of Dustin Gets Big a couple years ago, the studio thinks Dustin Down the Drain has the potential to earn more than nine hundred million dollars. If you’re not in the industry, just trust me: nine hundred million dollars is a lot. Oh, for context:
“Dustin is an ordinary kid who is tired of his ordinary life and wishes he could get big again like he did last Summer. But when his wish gets misinterpreted by the wish machine on the boardwalk and he shrinks down to the size of an action figure, Dustin gets more adventure than he bargained for. Next Summer, Dustin is going:Down the Drain.”
Every animator says they’ve wanted to be one since they were a little kid. I can back it up. When I was six, the projector showing me and my fellow children a cartoon broke five minutes in. The projectionist let me keep a section of the damaged reel. I could see exactly how the cartoon fist went from being cocked one moment to hitting another cartoon’s face the next. I could see the exact frame in which movement started, and the exact frame in which it reached its conclusion. Nice, right? I’ve used this story in every job interview I’ve ever had. It’s a little cute, but you have to tell them something like that. You can’t just tell them that you need a job or else you’ll die, and that (oftentimes) you don’t want to die—no, you have say when you were a kid your house burned down, and your dog ran into the flames to rescue your sketchbook, and you swore that his dog death wouldn’t be in vain, or something. If I told a story like that, I’d have gotten every job I’ve ever applied for. I don’t talk to many children. When I do, and they tell me that they want to do what I do? I try my best to scare them off of it. I ask them if they like having wrists. I let them know that the job I have is twenty-years-worse than the job I dreamed of getting when I was their age, and if they get it, their job will be twenty-years-worse than mine. Then I smack the ice cream cone out of their hand so they know what the world’s really like. I didn’t always feel that way, exactly. At the time, I was just a normal animator: overworked, underpaid, battling a head cold. My immediate superior was in my work space, showing me my own work, and leveling the very serious accusation that I was not making movie magic. “You’ve got Dustin bouncing off this pipe here and then tumbling twice before he hits that pipe there. The line of continuous action is shattered”—he said, using some animator argot so I’d know he knew what he was talking about—“and it’s just busy, busy, busy!”I told him I could clean that up, no problem. “This is not the kinda work a crunch is supposed to produce,” he said. “I can’t pass this up the chain of command, because this is just not the kinda work a crunch is supposed to produce.”They had set up bunk beds for us in our work spaces. They had ping pong tables too. You know, to make it fun. Like a fun little work sleepover where you don’t get any Vitamin D for days on end. I promised him that I was gonna get that line of continuous action looking way more continuous. He paused as he ducked under the bunk bed in my work space. “Oh,” he added. “I heard that you put in a request to take Christmas off to drive to Nevada for one day and spend it with your family? Now, I don’t know exactly what the fuck you meant by that, but that’s not the kind of attitude a crunch can really accommodate. You wanna give your family Christmas presents? You are going to give all four quadrants of the human population the best Christmas present they could ever hope to receive when Dustin Down the Drain arrives in three thousand theaters on July 7th. Alright? I know twenty kids at USC who would kill for the job you have right now. They would kill you if they even thought it might get them your job. They’d kill you just for having a job at all, when so many others don’t. Now, I wouldn’t let them, because we’re a family here. But I need you to start acting like the hills are full of hungry wolves. Because they are.” It was the most hardcore thing I’d ever heard someone say half-crouched under a bunk bed.I’d frequently take my midnight lunches at a diner down the block from the studio called Louie’s Lunch Car Luncherarium. The futuristic hobo train theme was confusing, but the milkshakes were good. I liked to just get a big milkshake for lunch because it’s something you don’t need wrists to consume. That day, I was too angry about my immediate supervisor’s criticisms of Dustin’s line of continuous action to care about my wrists, so I was doodling on my placemat, something I never did anymore unless I was in a terrible mood. I didn’t look up when the hobo boxcar front door slid open and another customer walked in. I didn’t look up until she was sitting in my booth across from me. She was wearing a long red leather coat and sunglasses so skinny I didn’t know what the point of them was. I felt confident she was the most striking customer in the history of Louie’s Lunch Car Luncherarium. The kind of woman who makes you really self-conscious about all the empty milkshakes in front of you. “That looks good,” she said. “Milkshake,” was all I could think to say, so that’s what I said. “No,” she said. “Your drawing. That’s really good.” I looked down at my doodle. It was a character I’d created in my youth, back when I had real convictions about the effect my work could have on the world if it was done with craft, truth, and rigor. His name was Spiggletwit Montpelier. He was a duck who ran a boarding school. I thanked her. “You’re a real talent,” said the stranger. “I’d say you should become an animator or something, but I hear that job is actually really terrible. In fact I hear it sucks shit.”I agreed that it sucked shit. She asked if I was indeed an animator. I told her. Sheasked what kind of work I did. Did I ever do movies? I told her I did do movies. “Well that’s better!” she winked. “More money for them, more money for you.” I disabused her of this. She shook her head in dismay. “This fuckin’ industry,” she said. “This motherfuckin’ goddamn industry.” “Tell me about it,” I said. I liked how often she swore. “You know,” said the stranger. “I’m also in the industry, in a way. “Oh yeah?” I said.“Yeah,” she said. “I represent the interests of a major competitor.” This very weird thing to say hung in the air. “Yeah,” she continued, as if she hated to bore me with all this, “I represent the interests of a major studio competitor who’d really love to hobble the upcoming release of a film called Dustin Down the Drain. They (the major studio competitor whose interests I represent) just won’t shut up about how much they’d love to give someone $50,000 to wipe the hard-drives at the studio producing Dustin Down the Drain, which, if it doesn’t erase the film from existence, will at least damage the workflow so bad that Dustin won’t be able to go down the drain for years and years, probably causing the studio to suffer permanent reputational damage that could be parlayed by someone like my client to the benefit of themselves, and the proprietary, economically competitive artistic content they’re currently developing.” She was being coy as hell, but I had a feeling I knew what she was talking about. It sounded like she was working for the studio behind Mikey and the Shrink Ray: Requiem—an upcoming film with a very similar premise to Dustin Down the Drain (“regular-sized boy becomes tiny”) but not the red hot buzz a sequel to Dustin Gets Big could hope to generate. They had also made a recent major marketing fumble thanks to that subtitle: Requiem. The rumor was that the studio was too embarrassed to admit they’d made a mistake after a press release announcing the year’s slate had mixed up Mikey’s subtitle with the subtitle of a vampire film that had instead been announced as Oathhunter Elegy III: Always Bet on Small! The stranger went on to explain that it was actually so funny but she actually had the $50,000 in a briefcase right that very moment, alongside a stylish two-piece suit lined with extraordinarily powerful magnets. Magnets that could easily annihilate a computer server if someone was to give that computer server a little hug and rub up and down on it a bit. “So,” she said, “my project right now is to tail Dustin’s animators around the city until I find one who wants to take it, hopefully a disgruntled one who wishes their life and wrists had turned out differently.” I felt a briefcase-sized object slide under the table and rest between my legs. I explored this object with my feet. It sure felt like a briefcase full of money and magnets. Still, I hesitated. I had never engaged in corporate espionage before. And nothing in my worldly experience suggested it wasn’t the kind of thing I would probably mess up. I stood. “You haven’t paid for your three milkshakes,” she said. I still didn’t know what to say. So I just said “milkshakes” again. “Actually, allow me.”She put the leather briefcase on the table, popped it open a crack, and placed a hundred dollar bill on the table. All the forks and knives slid over and affixed themselves to the leather. St. Bartholomew’s Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles has, for many years now, partnered with a nonprofit organization called ‘Miracles for Hope,’ which gives the most messed-up children on their saddest wards the opportunity to make their dreams come true before it’s too late. ‘Miracles for Hope’ has shown a kid what it’s like to perform a stadium rock and roll show. They’ve helped a kid experience zero gravity. They’re a really special organization, and we’re glad to help them out whenever we can. At least that’s what my immediate superior told me back at the studio the next morning when he introduced me to Dylan, a smiling, super cute little child decked out in Dustin apparel. “Sorry, who is Dylan?” I asked, distracted. My suit was extremely uncomfortable. There was a good reason most professionals wore suits without magnets in them.“He’s Dylan,” said my immediate superior, pointing at Dylan. “Dylan is here from St. Bartholomew’s Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.” “You’re making my miracle come true,” said Dylan. “For my hope.”My immediate superior explained that Dylan was afflicted with Zweimann’s Syndrome, an extraordinarily rare disease that gave him a small bubble in his brain which, at any moment, could explode, killing Dylan on the spot. “But,” he added, “we’ll be damned if that’s going to happen before Dylan can get a special sneak preview of Dustin Down the Drain.” I turned to the boy: “Are you sure that’s what you want your wish to be, Dustin?”“I’m Dylan,” said Dylan. “This is Dylan,” said my superior. “Dustin is Dustin. Dylan lovesDustin, though.”“I think that Dustin and the drain mouse are going to get married!” said Dylan. “Well, you’ll know for sure in seventy-four minutes” said my immediate superior. “Right this way, Dylan.”I stepped in front of him, impeding his path. “You’re impeding my path,” he said. “You can’t show Dylan Dustin,” I said.“Every moment you impede my path could be the moment Dylan’s brain bubble explodes. You do know that, right?”“This is a security breach,” I pointed out, wiping sweat from my brow. “Next thing you know, that kid is going to be talking to every blogger in town, and then everyone will know what happens to Dustin. Everyone will know whether Dustin marries the drain mouse, or not.”My immediate superior shoved a finger into my chest. “‘Miracles for Hope’ has shown a kid what it’s like to perform in a stadium rock and roll show, buddy. They’ve helped a kid experience zero gravity. And Dylan is going to find out what happens to Dustin when Dustin goes down the drain.”Before Dylan followed my immediate superior down the hall, he turned and smiled some more at me with his big toothy kid mouth. “Hey mister,” he said. “If my brain bubble doesn’t explode too soon, I wanna be just like you when I grow up. I’m gonna draw all the pictures for the movies they make for kids just like me, and I’m gonna win every award in town, and I’m gonna dress like a million bucks, just like you.” “Sure you will, Dylan,” I said. “Sure you will.”This would have been a sweeter exchange if I hadn’t already done it. While the servers that once housed Dustin were quietly inspected, I waited for someone to put the pieces together and find me at my desk. But no one came. No one said anything to me at first. And then no one said anything to me at all. The $50,000 went towards a $70,000 loan I’d taken out to attend the University of Southern California. I’d already paid off $90,000 of it at the time. After the lump sum, I’m still paying off the remaining $120,000. Dylan didn’t get to watch Dustin Down the Drain that day, but thankfully, he’s still waiting to die—much like the rest of us, but different. He no longer harbors pie in the sky fantasies of overcoming Zweimann’s Syndrome and becoming the next great me. If he lives much longer, maybe he’ll thank me for it. The studio quietly moved Dustin Down the Drain’s release to the Fall. When they were sure that the damage was irrevocable, they moved it to the Spring. There was no kind of profit that could justify the cost of making Dustin Down the Drain twice, but nobody in this town will ever admit something’s over when it’s over. They move it to the next Summer. They slowly take people off the project one by one. They move it to the next Fall. Now it’s just a few of us going over the same salvaged frames again and again. Paid a small allowance to keep the work going in the basement forever, just to spare them the embarrassment. It’s going great. It’s almost done. It’s going to do boffo box office numbers. It’ll be out in time for Christmas. I make a sketch of Dustin bounce from pipe to pipe. His line of action is perfectly continuous. It’ll be out next, next Summer. It’ll be out for the twentieth anniversary of Dustin Gets Big. It’ll be out on my eightieth birthday. The muscles in my wrist will keep shrinking somehow, even when it seems like there isn’t any more wrist left. We’re going to celebrate one hundred years of Dustin by finally sending him down the drain. I read it in the trades, so it’s definitely happening. The motion picture event Dustin fans have been waiting two hundred years for. Three hundred years. I bounce him back and forth down the drain for a thousand years. Two thousand years. Ten thousand years I sit at my desk, drawing Dustin bouncing back and forth down the drain for the millionth, two millionth, three millionth time. I have to agree with him. Not what I signed up for, dude.
Your wife’s gym friend is drunk. Not outrageously drunk, but too drunk to drive. According to her, he went to a work happy hour thing that morphed into a dinner thing which became a cocktails thing and now he is stranded somewhere in the city. There are no Ubers apparently or the wait is too long, so he calls your wife and asks for a ride, that is, of course, if it’s alright with you.“I don’t understand,” you say. “He’s getting kicked out of the bar?”She’s standing near the door with car keys in her hand. “No, just drunk. I said that already.” “You’re really going downtown now?” She taps her phone. “It’s not that late.” You turn off the TV and say you’ll come too. Your wife drops her keys and they crash on the tiles. “Perfect,” she says, picking them up.
#
It’s just after Christmas last year that your wife declares war on her gunt. When you ask her what a gunt is, she lifts up her shirt and pulls down her pants and points to the crepey pouch of tissue on her lower stomach. Say goodbye, she says, grabbing and shaking it. To her credit, she follows through. Your wife wins the war against her gunt. She wins the war and just keeps going.And at first, there’s no issue. Not really. The gym is her space, her time. You’re happy for her, even. You have your places too. Your own gym, for example. Your office friends, you’re close with them. You know intimate things about each other. Brad from account services tried to kill himself in college, for example, and Sue Ann the media planner recently had plastic surgery on her vagina. But they know you as well, know when something’s off. It is Brad, in fact, who brings it up first. Comes over for a beer one night and asks where your wife is.“At the gym,” you say.“Didn’t she go this morning?” Brad says. “Didn’t you mention that?”“That was a class,” you say. “Boot camp or something. This is free weights. Or yoga, I forget.”“Does she do that a lot, go to the gym twice a day?”“Well,” you say. “She usually goes three times.” Brad takes a long drink of beer, wipes his mouth, looks away, and says jesus.
#
Your wife’s gym friend is wearing an untucked black shirt with the top three buttons undone. He is sitting in the passenger seat and giving you directions to his condo. Your wife follows behind, driving his car, which is some kind of SUV off-road type thing. It’s got a big stovepipe situation coming out of the hood, which he says comes in handy more often than you might think.He talks about work. He asks you what you do. When you tell him, he makes a face and says, “Damn dude!” Looking over, you notice your wife’s gym friend must shave his chest. You can tell because he has stubble. It distracts you for some reason. You roll a yellow light and pull over on the next block to wait for your wife to catch up.“Ah, just keep driving,” your wife’s gym friend says. “She knows where she’s going.”
#
You’d be more concerned if there was more to be concerned about. There’s a thing called trust, you tell Brad and Sue Ann. I trust her, you say. Ten years, you remind them. That’s a long time. But they don’t look convinced. They think it’s weird, all the time at the gym. And it’s not their fault, they just don’t know, don’t understand the extent of the situation. You’re not one of these shithead husbands. You do the dishes, your own cooking. You’re not ignorant or moody. You’re an adult, goddamnit. It’s how you’ve always been. Virtually nothing has changed since the day you were married. Hell, you wore your tux last Halloween and went as James Bond. You tell them you’re exactly the same person you were on your wedding day. The microwave in the breakroom bleats in bursts of three.“So, okay,” Sue Ann says. “Maybe that’s the problem.”
#
“How does she know where you live?” you ask your wife’s gym friend. You are still pulled over, waiting for the light to change and your wife to join you.“Hmm?” he says.You swallow and repeat the question. Behind you, your wife flashes her brights.“Oh, she’s taken me home from the gym before,” he says.“What?” you say.“Sometimes I jog there,” he says. “Double exercise, you know.”“Right,” you say, putting the car into gear. “Double exercise.”
#
It’ll take you three weeks to look at your wife’s phone and when you do, you’ll see her gym friend’s penis in the folder for recently deleted photos. You’ll be shocked by its color, its fluorescent redness. You’ll think, did he use a filter? Does he have high blood pressure? Is there something else medical going on here? You’ll look down at your own crotch. So normal looking, so boring. How can you compete with a day-glo dick? You can’t, you think. You can’t, of course.You’ll throw the phone against the wall. You’ll think, I should throw the phone against the wall. Then you’ll realize you already did that. You’ll pick it up and throw it against the wall again. A buzzer will go off in your ears. Your wife will come into the kitchen. She’ll be screaming at you, that was the buzzing. She’ll follow you out to your car, sawing like a cicada. You’ll leave the house and go to Brad’s and against Brad’s advice, you’ll return home a few hours later. For five days, your wife will refuse to go to the gym. She’ll lie in bed sobbing, begging for you to talk to her.On the sixth day, she’ll move in with her gym friend, into the condo where you dropped him off that night. Over the next couple months, she’ll intermittently try to get back together. She’ll text you baby names and call late at night. Your lawyer will advise you to not pick up. Your lawyer will also advise you to not prevent her access to the house, so when she asks to pick up some stuff, you’ll say that it’s fine, just don’t bring her gym friend. He’ll come along anyway.Your wife or whatever she is at this point, will run off upstairs to collect her things and leave you in the kitchen with him.He’ll say that none of this is her fault and that he understands how you’re feeling. He’ll say that neither of them meant for this to happen, but that it’s against nature to deny true love. He’ll say that in a couple years, we’ll laugh about this. You’ll tell him quietly that you’re going to punch him in the face. He’ll do this shitty laugh scoffing thing and shake his head and say he’s trying to have a mature conversation and so that’ll be when you punch him in the face. He’ll fall down, out of surprise mostly, and without thinking, you’ll kick him as hard as you can in the back, the spot where the kidneys are. You’ll do this a great number of times. He’ll writhe around on the ground. You’ll step on his head a little and grind his face against the kitchen floor. Something religious will fill your chest when you hear his nose crunch under your foot. Your wife will hear the yelling and come running and see the blood on the white tile and faint, but when she comes to, she will be looking at you in a whole new way, and it will disturb you, it will turn your stomach, because you’ll realize that somewhere in all this violence, the seeds of your eventual reconciliation have been planted.
#
You keep the car running as your wife walks her gym friend to his door. Driving him home was your good deed for the day, you reason. There’s really no point in overthinking things. Tomorrow’s Thursday. You can take Friday off. There’s nothing wrong that can’t be fixed by a long weekend. Your wife gets back in the car, turns the heat up full blast, says something you can’t hear. You ask her to repeat it. She says never mind.
On the designated day for punishing mothers, those of us who got our applications in early enough show up, mothers in tow. Most look like they came willingly, walking ahead of their children, mostly daughters, but not mine. I had to sedate her to get her in the car.I paid for the deluxe package, which includes interrogation. The application allowed three questions. Two were easy: What really happened to the kitten I brought home in third grade? And, Why did you only let me shave my legs to my knees until I was sixteen? The third was harder to decide on, but I went with, How can Kant’s categorical imperative ever truly be a reliable guide to moral obligations if humans lack rational agency?I prop Mom up next to me to wait our turn for interrogation. She puts her head on my shoulder, but only because her neck won’t hold it up. I may have over sedated her. I take a granola bar out of my bag and Mom lifts her head enough to give me the look that says I can’t believe you’re eating again.The door opens after only a few minutes and a mother and daughter come out of the room. They have both been crying. The mother is missing a few teeth and a finger, has bruises on her neck, is soaking wet. For a moment, I wonder if I am overreacting, if maybe it’s not too late to cancel and take Mom home, but then I see her sit up straight, roll her shoulders. I can tell she is judging the other mother for being weak, for breaking. She gives me that smile that says she can’t believe I chose to wear these shoes in public and cracks her knuckles.
When asked, Dad says, Don’t worry about Ximena—she’s just a girl good at running away, but you find a shoebox of condoms, calling cards, Selena CDs, baby name lists, and blush palettes squashed between a bed leg and a wall, the last of Ximena in her whirlwind-emptied room, which reminds you of Diva Fridays:Come on, she’d say, I’ll teach you about eyeshadow, before putting her heavy handed brushstrokes on your lids, which made you miss Marco—who lived in her room before he too fled—all cropped shirts, eyeliner, and laughter mixed with hair oil and truancy.He had a box of condoms too.The animals look like them, you tell Mom. She doesn’t understand that squirrels are gnawing with baby teeth, raccoons developing pink palms, vultures singing raspy cumbia, your beagle watching you through Marco’s eyes rimmed in black skin; she sees only laundry, lunch boxes, and outlines.One Saturday, after you follow these animals into high weeds, burrs on your socks, Dad-tied pigtails on your head, you find the rotted lumps they’re eating: skin and bear paw people-fingers and maggots plated on shattered bones. It smells like basement.Your dad says it’s just deer. Leave it alone.Later, a woman calls you, asking if you’ve seen Ximena. She barely speaks English. You finger landline phone curls, safe and bored, before saying No.No have money to call again, she says, so please—Get more money then.You hang up.Many bad, fun runaways later, when police turn your boneyard into a poppy field of flags and shoot your animals for evidence, Mom weeps, vowing I didn’t know, while you tell yourself that you lied to be good, to be a girl missed, knowing you lied for no reason at all.
Yesterday came the decreeAnd today it comes into force. We must all fight like Plains Indians, from here on.That means cool your arrows. Your axe must sleep in the ground while you win prestige by counting coup: Curl yourself like a puff of wind. Inch your body to the enemy. Closer to his neck, where the soft hair curls against his pulse. Touch his body with your coup stick—you have won. Steal his horse if you want; beat the darkening air with your cries. But the battle is over now, if you want it.
***
Press playWe are the narrators in his head. The man who each night plugs us in his ear and listens to stories. Alchemised from the page by our mouths, paid by the hour.We’re in bright studios far away, but we know the man is in bed when he kisses our lips to his ears.Dark-time. Pillow. Moulded rubber in shells of skin. The marvellous intimacy of audio.And we have a burning question: why does he listen in the dark, when he falls asleep so fast? Like bathtub water pulled down narrow pipes? Oh, time made foam. And we have a theory: he likes the way we read from scripts, threading words to thick red scarves that press his horizontal skin. He likes the way murderers are always caught, in the end. He likes how he forgets what we said last night and how he can rewind to the good parts—just before the foam hits.
***
ColtYoung horse shimmering between the plain and sky. Blue falling to four-legged black, to land on dirty green.Old man who calls himself a cowboy. Walks to the horse thinking how can it still stand. Madyoung thing kicking in a red barn door and the door kicking back, snap. Just like that, a sentence passed.Old man touches young horse snout whispering blue-sky words. Speaking in fact to the mouth of a holster, the handle of his gun. And green just waiting.
Two freaky fiction writers chat. Jack Skelley, author of The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e), 2023) joins Victoria Brooks, author of Silicone God (Moist, 2023). Fear of Kathy Acker is a cult hit embraced by young readers. Skelley’s new book of stories is Myth Lab (Far West Press, 2024). Silicone God is a strange strain of post-human, science fiction/body horror by “Queer Mistress Wife Human” (Brooks’ Instagram name). Topic A: How horny writing may reach beyond tired categories of sexual and textual orientation. Jack: I’ll kick it off! Victoria, I was first attracted to Silicone God for its boundary blurring. Your debut novel straddles genres, becoming larger than its many parts: It’s billed as “queer sci-fi” but also subsumes body horror, perhaps auto-fiction, and ventures into themes such as species evolution (which my new book Myth Lab does too!) At the same time, its (very horny!) narrative messes with the sexual orientation of its protagonist. In fact, the novel messes with the very concept of time and narrative. Can you encapsulate how and why you do this?Victoria: In terms of why, I don't think I can do otherwise. It's all a mess: me, bodies, sexual orientation and gender. Sex. Time. I tried to reflect this in Silicone God. But I always feel like I'm fighting between letting the mess in and keeping it out - deciding which false coherences I'll accept. Choosing genres and drawing straight lines is hard because mess is fucking fun. And when the mess is sex, it's horny! This, especially in the case of writing like ours that mixes genres, including auto-fiction, can leave the reader with questions about what's real and what isn't. My writing (my nonfiction work and my sci-fi) draws on aspects of my life, but I like to play with the reader. I want them to wonder. I think it's sexier to read a hot scene and think maybe it actually happened. Myth Lab also embraces the mess (or the blur) in such a beautifully wild and sexy way - I'd love to know more about why you're also drawn to this mode of writing. Jack: I get what you said about “deciding which false coherences I’ll accept,” because so many coherences are merely imposed norms. Including sexual norms, of course. Myth Lab goes crazy messing (as you say) with depictions of sexual orientations and genders. For example, it portrays booming transgender medical procedures as advancements in human evolution. Hormone replacement therapy (HRT), silicone implants (breasts, butts and beyond), and “neurodivergent” approaches to sexual orientation are all celebrated in Myth Lab’s mish-mash mess. Rather than in traditional story form, it does this via mock-academic “theories,” and other genre perversions. I think Silicone God does a parallel thing. But in (mostly) narrative mode. Here’s a freaky paragraph from your book:My little suckers cupped her skin – the slimy hot and cold sensations sending her wild. I put one on her clit, and carefully engorged it with blood so much that it became a mini cock. She begged me to kiss it till she came.The sexy mess is so messy that the quaint term “bisexual” doesn’t begin to cover the book’s realms of trans-species sex. And trans-temporal sex! So let me confront you with the (admittedly reductive) question your readers have: How much of Silicone God is based in your personal experience?Victoria: I love how we converge on the point about transness: in Silicone God, there is a divine trans character (created by mushroom gods 3000 years in the future). Myth Lab's theories give me life, and more specifically give life to my drive to see sex on the page. Your text takes the form of so many dimensions of a sex life. We have the hallucinogenic poetic parts with lines like: “Where voice and vagina conflate, you’ll find kisses promise more illicit pleasures. The Other’s voice cajoles, seduces, instructs, creating the one hundred-letter word for thunder....” Then later, a switch to a more linear prose—one of my favourite parts is a short meditation on the erotics of gel nails—then to the tender: “How I yearn to hold and heal. How, upon cumming, I laugh uncontrollably. How, later or at any time, I weep at the most maudlin nonsense. A detergent commercial.”It also gives me joy to see your creative destruction of academic or philosophical authority over sex. I feel we have a similar drive in our writing to understand something, or grasp at a truth about sex (that maybe exists beyond our own words) and do something wild with it. To your question: it's hard to distinguish where I stop, and Silicone God begins. Even the scenes taking place in a future dimension called Time ruled by mushroom gods. Now, if the question is rather: Are there scenes that are written directly from experience? Yes. My book gives dramatic color to my thinking around the mistress archetype, and I have been a mistress many times. So some of the tougher scenes (and some of the hot ones) are direct from experience. So I've paired the very real, with the outright unreal. I wonder why. Does Myth Lab have a theory? Does it do the same?Jack: Yes, Silicone God’s trans divinity from the future comports with (one of) the central hypotheses in Myth Lab: That technology, an extension of language, is exponentially speeding human evolution. And this includes a new universe of sexual mutations. I sort-of summarize that in this line from the Myth Lab “theory” titled “Rendezvous with God-MILF”: “If DNA is evolution’s hardware, language is its software, and dirty talk does most of the coding.” Many of these ideas derive from Terence McKenna, the psychedelic shaman who postulated that pre-human evolution was jump-started by a metaphysical intervention from psilocybin mushrooms. So there’s another connection between your novel and my stories! Magic fungi! Towards the end of Silicone God, the narrator has this bizarre epiphany:When I first saw the Sea of Time, I thought it looked like heaven. It was a heaving mirror, the same color as the violet sunset and the silica under my feet. Massive cock-shaped mushrooms poked up among the dunes….Setting aside the phallic symbolism of mushrooms, Let me ask you this: You’ve already acknowledged having been a multiple mistress. Do you also have experience with magic mushrooms? Or what is the source of your mushroom god imagery?Victoria: We've coincided with mushrooms: magic! I'm excited that you mention one of my favorite scenes in Silicone God. I have certainly had my fair share of psychedelic experiences, but the source of the imagery is rather the evolution and physicality of mushrooms themselves. I find it extraordinary that their mycelium underground networks have helped trees secretly communicate; even flirt with one another. And as a queer person who believes fiercely in activism, I adore this. Perhaps it's even brought together our books! I'm also interested in the analogy of the mycelium and the mistress, and how she becomes a mode/body of communication between wives (or indeed between wives and husbands, and with other mistresses). That's where I was going with the scene you mention: the mirror sea (made of mistresses) nourishes the mycelium which is the network connecting the mushroom fruit bodies. I feel like we could keep on talking about this (and our mycelium line of communication will certainly continue) but perhaps we can wrap things up here with my question to you about imagery in general. I feel like our approaches to imagery are similar, although in Myth Lab I was struck by how skillfully you managed to evoke so many hallucinogenic scenes. This, for many reasons, is one of my favorites: “It suggests that James Joyce’s mistress ululates her uvula. It flutters with ovulations in the ‘Linguaverse,’ as you might call it. The ultimate sex worker, this super uterus is formed by subtracting her slave names from her pet names, and hiero-symbols in doublewide quasar waterways.” I'm curious about the experiences and/or processes that have resulted in such poetic alchemy? Jack: These “theories” are intertextual: They are inspired by what I’m reading and hearing. I quote from other books, and each story ends with a list of sources. I blend them with personal compulsions to arrive at a third place: linguistically based with lots of dumb puns and pop-culture references. This is my go-to high/low synthesis. Myth Lab mixes everything from Kim Kardashian and TikTok to C.G. Jung and Noam Chomsky. Plus a bunch of mythology, romance and sex, including sex-worker material. It’s fun to write, and – one hopes! – to read.
The girls were odd. They didn’t make friends, we realized too late, they collected people. A cab driver who barely spoke English, a barista with a middling art career and infected lip piercing, the neighborhood dog-walker-cum-psychedelics-dealer. We decorated their lives, and we wanted to. We were ravenous to. Every text message, every invitation to the graveyard or the beach, we simply couldn’t say no. Their magnetism was a thing to behold, a gift to feel.They ate little, like birds, claiming assorted food allergies none of us had heard of and none of us questioned. They went to a loosely qualified doctor who tapped their temples and told them their guts were full of parasites. They believed they were witches, and given the power they had over us, none of us was eager to dispute this.We loved their ardent devotion to each other, and wondered how any of us could be so lucky as to populate their orbit. They dropped tabs on our tongues like fairy godmothers and we thought we were blessed. Their friendship was fast—none of us knew the propulsion was drugs, not truth. None of us knew it hit hard and quietly like an acid trip then faded out with sullen indifference.So when they disappeared, separately and then together, the hole they left behind was so ragged none of us could stop purging long enough to breathe. And realize.“The thing is,” a friend says to me while he changes lanes on the 101, “there are friends, right. And then there are the people you do drugs with.”I reject this notion, soundly, a week after Anastasia disappears and an hour before Antonia does. It isn’t hard to know where they’ll be on a Sunday afternoon, and I just want to believe them. All the same, I can’t seem to stop crying.A therapist—I can’t remember which one of the five I see—asked me what was worth fighting for, what was so brilliant about Anastasia that I couldn’t stop fixating. The answer seemed obvious: everything was brilliant about her; she shone like Saturn itself on the night of the new moon; she floated through this life, ethereal and untouchable, and for a while she’d bothered to look me in the eye. I wanted to devour her whole, become her. But when I opened my mouth to spill this soliloquy, all that dribbled out was, “Oh, my god. I don’t know.”I’d touched the fabric of the universe for a good seven months, and her sudden absence felt like a rebuke, like a rejection of my being. Our souls had tangled that afternoon in the freezing water of the Kern River. I’d dropped to my knees in the current, splashing up to my neck, and let out a primal scream so deep and vibrational I felt all the errors of my life simply exit my body. And she was right beside me, crying, smiling, pointing to a blue jay and saying it was the soul of my grandfather watching me. I’d never felt so loved in my life.“Were you not on five scant grams of shrooms?” my friend interrupts, blaring his horn at a mountain lion attempting to cross the freeway.I hobbled out of the water after a brave thirty seconds. She stayed in for twenty minutes, claiming she’d done so much work on her nervous system the cold actually felt good. I felt properly chastened for not doing enough work on my nervous system for the cold to actually feel good.I never knew, and still don’t, why I was collected. Me, a soft housing department inspector who’d been called to investigate a burst pipe in their apartment that burbled out red water like Kool-Aid. When I arrived, they’d piled everything on top of everything else. They were huddled together atop an armchair atop the couch atop the bed, limbs tangled, bright eyes fixed on me. There was a good eight inches of acid red water devouring their floor. Two ducks had flown in through an open window, dipping their beaks and coating their feathers in vermillion. They said they regretted calling me because they loved the ducks.As the last drop of liquid drained, and as I scrawled my illegible signature to the final report, they clambered down from their tower and asked if I wanted to be their friend. Creatures of this magnitude had never approached me—I had cystic acne and scoliosis—and yet here they were, looking me deep in the eye and handing me a piece of lilac paper with one phone number on it along with a half-gram mushroom. The floor and lower eight inches of their apartment were freshly red. It never faded, not as long as I knew them. They’d point to the low water mark at parties and say it was the water that sent me, Brayden, to them. It was A Sign from The Universe to Conjoin Our Paths, as in all of our Past Lives.I couldn’t shut up about them. Not then, not now.“Of that,” my friend says, nearly missing the exit to the canyons, “I am well aware.”They shared a purple cell phone so you never knew which of them was responding to your text. I was saved in their contacts as Moonbeam☽, and this made me feel special. They used a lot of ☆sparkles☆ and rarely my name. Sometimes Antonia would tell me to meet her at the graveyard after dark, to hop the fence and skirt the guards. I did it three times, tearing my pants at the crotch and not saying a word about the blood seeping through the knees. She’d dance under the full moon, a diaphanous dressing gown she’d stolen from a set she’d worked on (the only time I ever heard her mention a job) billowing around her in dramatic fashion. This was when she confessed to her kleptomania, in small sighs as she caught her delicate breath. She stole once a day, every day, from big box stores. Mostly supplements and probiotics. She had a lifetime cache of them in her closet. She admitted this with such resigned pride it seemed ridiculous that everyone wasn’t stealing. In total and over time, I stole $927 worth of goods from the mega–hardware store. Just $23 shy of grand larceny. It did, I have to admit, feel incredible.Life with them was outrageously beautiful. I simply mattered more, in this life, under their attention. We all felt this way, though I doubt any of us would have the nerve to admit it. They seemed to access a current of existence that none of us had known existed, and they pulled us into its flow. The rules as we’d known them seemed arbitrary and small; their world was a kind of floating, a soft ease. They called me, a man truly ugly as sin, the most beautiful being they’d ever seen, stroking my craggy cheeks. It seemed that after thirty-two years of thin, pale light, I might finally see color.And then Anastasia stopped speaking to me. She wouldn’t look me in the eye at parties and shrugged away from my hand on her shoulder. She’d gaze indifferently at the wall as I left their apartment, whispering wistfully that she loved me in a child’s mocking tone. When I asked her what was wrong, she’d sigh, “Nothing, Moonbeam. Nothing.” Their texts were increasingly Antonia-coded, and nobody believed my sweating panic, until Anastasia said she’d enjoyed the relationship we’d had in the past and simply disappeared. The sinking in my stomach and the hole in my heart were surprising, even to me. I was so hollowed out I called off work for two days to sit on my couch in abject silence. By Wednesday, I stood in a wrecked apartment downtown and let the upstairs pipes rain electric blue water on my head, soak my clipboard. By Thursday, I stood in a room made of mold and breathed spores with indifference, watching them grow across the clipboard. By Friday, I stood outside the girls’ apartment and looked through the window, my big greasy nose smashed against the glass. Half of the red stain was scrubbed away, as if the apartment were sawed in two. I was sawed in two. Antonia glided out of the bedroom and watched me through the glass, taking pity on me long enough to walk me to the park and let me cry on her shoulder while she fed me dekopon oranges in the dappled light. Anastasia merely went through her phases, she assured me with a honeyed tongue, just as the moon does. And I believed her. She slipped me half a tab of acid and we, too, went to the moon. Her laugh fluttered like crystal and her freckles sparkled. She promised I would always be her moonbeam. And I believed her.I still do.“Fuck, $15?” my friend cries, coming to a shrieking stop at the parking lot gate. He reverses and rams into the car behind us, which honks pitifully, and cranks forward again to find a street spot in front of someone’s second home. I start to cry again as we walk toward the secret stairs, blubbering behind my sunglasses. I showed them this beach. They took my hands, one on each side, as we walked down this road, waving at people out in their front yards tending to their succulents. A woman gave Anastasia a cutting that she popped in water and called Brayden once it grew roots long enough to live. Antonia plucked limes from trees so ripe mounds of exploded citrus blanketed the ground. We listened to the ocean, floated in the waves, and cried about our mothers. It was the best day of my life, I’m sorry to say.My friend and I descend the sand-coated stairs. There’s one huddle of figures on the beach, spread across striped blankets, that seems to breathe and expand. There are five in total, and the glittering shapes of Anastasia and Antonia render beautifully with every step, their laughs bounding across the walls of the cliffside. I know that sound in my marrow, the validation of it, that for the first time in my life anyone found me funny. As we approach, the laughter wanes and the companions defamiliarize. Where I’d assumed the cab driver and the infected barista and the dog-walker-cum-psychedelics-dealer I’d come to know and nearly love, instead: a convenience store owner who couldn’t speak at all, a bartender with an eyepatch, a feral-cat herder with a joint dangling from his lip. They look at me in expectation. The girls don't look at me at all.I attempt to say their names, but all that comes out is a pathetic squeak.“Hi,” my friend says breathlessly, his eyes affixed to the girls. A familiar wonder is on his syllable, and as I turn to cast him a glance, I suddenly disintegrate into the sand beneath his feet.They turn to him, lock their pinkies together. “What’s your name?” Antonia asks, so coolly taking the joint from the cat herder. She impossibly exhales a perfect ring of smoke into which my friend says his name. The girls turn to each other and giggle. “Who are you?”He is speechless for a moment, reduced to a stuttering moron, eyes glazed. “I’m a claims adjuster with plaque psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis.”Anastasia beams, tossing her hair back into the sun, and asks, “Do you want to be our friend?” All he can do is nod, his jaw slack, bewitched. All I can do is stare up at him in horror, reduced to millions of aghast granules. The betrayal! The nerve. Anastasia jumps up, setting her manicured feet right on top of me, and takes his hand. Something feels familiar about the sand around me. It smells like old car, like espresso, like dog hair. Antonia takes one last toke and pops the joint into the eyepatched bartender’s mouth, slipping her hand into my friend’s other sweaty palm, her fingers laced through the crust of his plaques.“You have beautiful hands,” Antonia gasps, examining the red flakes across his knuckles. She kisses them one by one with childish glee. “Well, come on, Moonbeam,” Anastasia says, pulling their human chain to the water. His laugh booms across the sand, shivering every one of my grains, as he follows them into the sea.
I’m dating her for her looks but she’s ugly. And she’s ugly. Plus, she’s ugly. Ok, I’m not sure how these two relate, complement, contradict, combine. She has lice. The lice are nice. Alive. On me, on her, raucous nibbling on our heads, in my bed. The most action I’ve seen all century. Maybe. I’m only twelve. Or thirty. I don’t know what the last century was like. For me. For anyone. What my past lives were like. She asks me to comb her hair. Not for lice, or any sort of grooming, but because it gets her off. Despite the fact that it gets her off. Ergo, it gets her off. On the contrary. In addition. I look for the lice anyway. Looney Tune lice. Jazz band lice. Lice living exciting lice lives in the great metropolises of Licedom. She’s on the edge of the bed clipping her toenails. I hear them land on the faux-wood flooring with a world-ending asteroid thud. Sayonara, she says to the dead dinosaurs made double-dead now. I think I’d like to fuck a T-Rex. Be fucked by a T-Rex. The Jurassic orgasmic. Love in the tar pits, at the sticky, clinging end of things. While seeing T. Rex. Marc Bolan shimmering like a glam rock god, speakers the size of whole ecosystems. I think a lot. I’m ugly, I think. Thinking is ugly. Do lice think? I ask her, Do lice think? I’m not a louse, she says, so how should I know? Because, I say. Therefore, I say. Furthermore.
