I’ve made love in every way possible, she said. I don’t believe you, I said. In every way possible? In every way, she said, and I didn’t say anything (I preferred to shut up, maybe I was embarrassed) but I believed her.
I met M on Tinder.
My bio was “baader looking for his meinhof” (lower case letters, naturally). If it’d been Grindr, it might have been “fassbinder looking for his salem.” But no one tries to make that kind of impression on Grindr, though occasionally you’ll run into an earnest leftcom twink doing recruitment for the DSA.
You know what I mean. A gnomic bio that conveys, or tries to convey, a lot, too much: charismatic ultraleftism, a petty-bourgeois caricature of libidinal criminality, a curatorial and snobbish approach to reality barely masking a homicidal or a suicidal melancholia (the psychopathic semen of Jim Jones puddling in the white space below), the threat of cannibalism and of either being a fed or being the kind of terminally irresponsible personality who absolutely cannot be trusted, on any level. And the infantile whimper in the direction of a woman, regardless of whether it’s a heterosexual or a queer whimper, regardless if we’re talking about hell or the promise of a false, a carceral paradise.
There was one time when R, in words that were intended to hurt, and probably I deserved it, said that my Tinder bio proved that I was the most pathetic kind of pseudo-woke misogynist and coward, who orbited and adopted the affects of the left, purely for pussy (and to assuage my fears of mortality, etc., fears that were justified and overrated). I was hurt but I agreed, though I added that the Baader-Meinhof Gang didn’t really qualify as woke and that maybe it wasn’t all about pussy. There was also a coprophagic drive, maybe I was like one of those suckerfish that attaches itself to a shark in order to eat its shit. You see, I said, it’s symbiotic. I receive protection from predators, a free ride through the dying and acidified abyss of history…And what do you give in return?, she said. I said something about parasites, about the necessity of an independent, critical left (which I obviously didn’t believe in). You eat shit and you eat pussy, she said, but you don’t clean your tongue. And that’s not good for you or for the fucking shark.
But another time, a while later, R and I were hanging out with A, one of her colleagues. She was from somewhere in the East Bay suburbs, but genetically she looked like she was from Minnesota, and as an archetype she looked like a sex-matryoshka doll from Russia or from Brazil, containing infinitely smaller and more pedophilic manic pixie dream girl versions of herself, or as if during the Cold War she could have seduced all sides, but fooled no one, in the same way that the wives of the post-de Gaulle French presidents were known nymphomaniacs, fucking whatever Corsican mobster or Caribbean minister of the interior who was rumored to have a brutally big cock (and who, as an added benefit, had personally directed scenes of torture and rape), as their husbands sidled up to the CIA. R told her about my Baader-Meinhof fantasies as if they were just a funny kink or a triviality of my personality. All three of us talked about our sex lives. Mostly they were depressing, lacking, leading more towards kidney infections than kindness, more towards drawing up ever more depraved plans for an automatic writing of our unconscious, but long-planned suicides. We ended the night (though the sun had barely gone down) playing a circular game, stumbling drunk outside a bar in downtown Oakland, where each player was supposed to say something increasingly and gratuitously cruel towards the person to their left and then slap them. I proposed the rules of the game, I always invent these games in moments of mania. I don’t think I chose the coordinates of the circle, I think that was accidental, though I don’t really believe there’s such a thing as an accident. What followed is this: lacerating cruelty from A towards R, having to do with her passivity, her frigidity, her inability to embrace her own beauty and intelligence. A hard slap, harder than anyone expects. R, smarting, flushed, tries to turn to me but just says “pass.” I rip into A, talking about her pseudo-chola racial tourism, her abuse of her sex powers to hide her essential mediocrity and indecisiveness. I hit her, hard. She gets in my face, strutting. Let’s keep going, she says. R bursts into tears, and the night evaporates (or maybe she doesn’t burst into tears, maybe she rolls her eyes, I can’t say).
I don’t know why I didn’t think of it at the time, but now I remember one of the first nights I met R. On our first date, we fucked in the yard outside the house I shared with a few roommates until dawn. The next day she left to go home and get her stuff and she moved in that afternoon, and we never left each other after that. But before that she’d been at a party at our place. Everyone was in love with her. There were a bunch of guys there she’d fucked once, or maybe twice (if she really liked them), who surrounded her in some kind of uncanny courtly dance. Later some of these guys would send me death threats. Others would suck up to me as if I knew something they didn’t. Not about women, but about life, about everything that had nothing to do with women. Now I remember that that night she’d proposed a similar game, a slapping game. But there was no communal circle. It was just a circle with her in the center. And she asked all of her current and former suitors to hit her. All of them stood back or gave tepid fraternal punches. But then I smacked her, with a spectacular force, something that had been inside me all my life. I don’t think I knew what I was doing when I smacked her. I was too drunk to know who she was, or who I was. But she fell in love with me that night. I fell in love with her a few days later, when I remembered hitting her. But I never hit her again.
xxx
Later, when I started fucking both of them on the same day (though the coital day can last an hour, or a year, or a Schopenhauerian lifetime, well, no, nothing lasts a lifetime, not even our compulsions, less so our hallucinations of our compulsions, well, no, perhaps suicide lasts a lifetime, or longer, it’s hard to say), they would collapse into an almost catatonic depression. Which might have something to do with my sexual and interpersonal qualities, but also might just be a universal symptom of contemporary heterosexuality. R would say her pussy was too loose, nothing, lost. You don’t love me because my pussy sucks. She’d read this book she found on my kindle, The Pussy. One third of the book is devoted to an extensive survey or racial and class phrenology of L.A. labias, one third to half-funny workerist Dilbert-level jokes about office life, and one third to a truly fascist vision of Fight Clubesque or Evolian violence, a violence whose only end is the annihilation of the earth itself. An atrocious book by an alt-right online personality, a book cribbed from an OKCupid profile (which shows the the writer’s senility). A book by an anonymous writer who considers himself in the American tradition of Henry Miller and Bukowski, which is more or less accurate. But who also considers himself a kind of slacker horny Ernst Jünger, filtered through the attention-economy techniques of Tucker Max, which is possible. But who also considers himself the distiller or synthesizer of a Third Positionist political movement somewhere between Bernie Sanders and Ted Kaczynski, when in fact his literature, his politics, are ultimately closer to the moral autism and repressed but dull, Germanic homosexuality of Timothy McVeigh. But for whatever reason, the book really got to R. It fucked her up. Reading is dangerous, no matter what you’re reading.
M would say her pussy was too good, a narcotic, Sino-Mexican fentanyl or rather a speedball, a simulacrum of herself. You only love me for my pussy, she’d say. There are so many men who tell me my pussy is too dope and that they’ll leave their girlfriends for me, she’d say, and she’d seem genuinely sad. I’m never going to leave my girlfriend for you, I’d tell her, but I still love you. And then sometimes she’d say, you know, the only reason you love me is because you don’t come enough. What do you mean?, I asked. Well with all the other guys I fuck, they come three or four times in an hour. Or sometimes they just fuck my throat and come once, crying out like a colicky infant who’s been broken down into interstellar dust, in a rictus of despair. But you’ll fuck all night, sometimes into the morning, and sometimes you’ll leave without coming (even if you make us coffee first, and light our first cigarettes and we talk about what we have planned for the day or what’s in the news, a bombing or an election, or both, the farical and more perfected instantiation of fascism that was dreamt up outside our superfluous sanctuary of fucking and tenderness). At first I thought it was a game, a kink of yours, but now I’m starting to think it has something to do with something very deep and fucked up in your personality, but also something attractive, something to do with a desire to be tortured and to torture, to test the limits or the rhythms of what a body can stand before it has to face those limits face to face, finally. Something to do with your being a writer, too, and something to do with fear, your fear which is your most defining trait. Well, I said, don’t you like it? I mean fucking all night? I’ve come with you in a way I’ve never come with anyone else, she said. A few nights later I asked her, did you mean what you said when you said I gave you the best orgasms you’ve ever had? I didn’t say they were the best, she said. I said they were different. I must have looked despondent because she added, they were probably the second or third best. I could live with that.
xxx
R and M were both beautiful. I only fall in love with beautiful women, I don’t know why, I’m probably a cliche (on the other hand my sexual attraction is ecumenical, beyond capacious: also a pornographic cliche). R believed, on a visceral and existential level, that 1) physical beauty and inner beauty, which are not the same but which carry out a mysterious correspondence, exist and that 2) to the extent that we live in a world of corrupt and evil (white supremacist patriarchal ableist) appearances, we need to learn to perceive beauty in the platonic flame, the platonic concentration camp. She often fell in love with earnest lesbian reverends in the social justice community, with anhedonic Lithuanian grad students, with bisexual Mexican poets in immigration detention, etc., but also with specific scenes of solidarity, of unexpected humor. M slept with, developed crushes on, a swathe of California lumpen: skaters with big cocks, graffiti artists with big cocks, addicts and vanarchists, older men who reminded her of her dad (terminally alcoholic, artistic, luciferian-communist), sometimes the sweet pathetic boys who sat next to her on the tech company bus to Silicon Valley in the morning (she wasn’t a techie, she didn’t have a college degree, but she had been sucked in nonetheless). Speaking of skaters, in spite of the fact that she was temperamentally a radical leftist, with a deep hatred of cops and capitalism, she had a swooning infatuation with Beto O’Rourke, mostly because of his mostly staged nineties skaterboy persona (she also called Bernie her “daddie” and occasionally confessed sympathies with the worldview of Jordan Peterson).
They were both beautiful and they both had big tits, but in every other way they were nothing alike. R was tall and blonde, with an aquiline or a Roman nose, a Russian Jew who looked more Scandinavian than either Russian or Jewish. M was short and dark and she had an upturned nose. Her mom was Irish and her dad was Pakistani-Mexican. M always talked about her ideal relationship, which was joining an older, confident, and beautiful heterosexual couple. She was twenty-one, I was thirty-two, and R was somewhere in the middle, somewhere on that vantage where supposedly all youth and sex appeal is lost for women. Sometimes we talked about the possibility of the three of us. I don’t think I could ever love a blonde, M said. I only like to fuck women who look like me.
She told me about how she liked to fuck her friend with a double-ended dildo (but for some reason in my memory, I always thought of it as a “double-edged dildo”). Sometimes I thought, with everything she knew about me, and with everything R knew about me, my own anonymity and desire for annihilation had be exposed, that the two of them were already together on some other plane or on other nights.
It wasn’t that I wanted to be replaced, or replicated. I’ve just always had a sense of that already having happened. Very early in my life, Duras said, it was too late.
xxx
From the very beginning, M told me about Joaquim and Alex. That was what I was supposed to live up to, and to disappoint. Joaquim was also an older guy (much older than me, it turned out) and an “intellectual,” a “communist.” He had sculpted a statue of Stalin that M loved. He sometimes threw it away, or hid it away, in fits of depression, when life had become insipid or when he considered that Stalin’s position on the national question were just thoroughly irredeemable. For a while, M and Joaquim had fucked, but then they lost sexual chemistry. Then they tried to rescue it by involving Joaquim’s girlfriend in the mix, but that was a temporary disaster, though also an unexpected gift. Joaquim retreated into melancholia, into impotence, while M and Alex fell in love, became lovers. Eventually Joaquim got over it and the three moved in together in a house in Richmond, a house which M describes as unreal, a totally unreal and bitter memory, because there was too much happiness to remember there. Joaquim pursued his art–he had thousands of projects, but he wasn’t an idler or a dreamer, he was constantly writing, constantly reading–while M and Alex lay on the lawn, sunbathing, talking about their lives, enveloped in each other. Then one day, it’s not clear when, Alex got diagnosed with cancer, with a very bad prognosis, and M got sick, too, she wasted away to less than eighty pounds, and when she woke up her dad was holding her hand, an ex-boyfriend was holding her other hand (she described it as the most erotic experience of her life), and Joaquim was dead from an overdose. Though they didn’t tell her that right away. He couldn’t handle the two loves of his life wasting away, she said.
Alex didn’t die, in the end, after all the chemo. The first time M and I fucked I remember she had red dots all over her back and ass, like a Lichtenstein syphilitic outbreak. Later, she apologized. For what?, I said. For all the nasty dots on my ass. Oh yeah, what was that? Alex gave me acupuncture earlier. The next time she came from Alex’s, she came to me in tears. I loved Joaquim more than anyone I’ve ever loved, she said, but Alex told me the truth about him: he was a pathological narcissist, a rapist, a monster, etc. But after that she still talked about him and kept his photo tucked into her iPhone case. M was like that, she saw both sides at once. It didn’t really matter what she was supposedly seeing at the moment. She wasn’t seeing anything, or she was seeing everything, with a kind of mischievous, manic smile, a smile that might have been a ruse, or which she admitted was fraudulent.
xxx
M was sick. She had epilepsy, which along with her endless regimen of medications had stripped her of the rude health that she’d imagined to always be her, as a girl growing up as an only child on a pot farm outside of Sacramento. I used to ride horses, swim in rivers, etc., she said. She still did those things, but it cost her. She would run half marathons at night on no sleep through Oakland, because the alternative of being alone, of playing around with her drugs (she wasn’t an addict, but a gambler with drugs) was unbearable. But she was also mentally ill, of course. She asked me why I was always attracted to sick women and I didn’t know what to say, because as I considered the matter, everyone’s sick these days, and if I’m particularly attracted to sick women it’s only because I’m as radical as reality itself, as Lenin said. The reason I’m mentally ill, she said once, is that I’m a product of my parents. Not just a product, but a gnostic poison. I have all the justified paranoiac fear of fascism of my dad, his endless flight from reality, and all the inveterate pessimism of my mom. She was born with one leg twisted backwards (they fixed it) and an abiding feeling that life is revolting, that people are nothing, and that she should never have been born. Her dad was a late-stage alcoholic who had been involved in the radical New Left Chicano art scene in LA in the 1970s, and her mom was a recently impoverished (post-legalization) pot farmer who’d grown up as a metaphysical orphan, a metaphysical whore, in the best sense of the word. M couldn’t get off unless she was calling her lovers “daddy,” and M’s mom slept with kindly blond farmhand boys who were even younger than M. In high school M slept with her friend’s mom because she could smell her loneliness. It sounds like porn, but M told me that life should be porn, except less prude, less hermetic and bourgeois. They always tell you, she said, that life isn’t porn, as some kind of post-third wave platitude. No shit. Life isn’t porn because life is way better than porn, or it should be. In the same way that everyone knows life is boring, but it’s not always boring. We don’t’ spend our entire lives bored, but most of us spend our entire lives in the desert of anti-pornography, or post-pornography, though I’m not exactly sure what postporno means, it’s just a word you see a lot in the gentrified (inter)-sectors of sex work and the art world, those dreary galleries where instead of falling, of experiencing the natural history of capitalist decay, which is to go from the MFA to the strip club, as just another alt-girl who gets extra-slobbered on for your arty tattoos by fetishizing middle-managers and then raped and emotionally abused by alt-lit alt-boys , you recuperate it and go back to the very sight of power that expelled you, though at what cost? M, though she’d gotten some local fame in Sacramento and the East Bay (the same thing) as a graffiti artist, had turned against art, almost decisively. In favor of anonymity and self-abnegating sex, mostly, though she wanted to take that to certain geographical extremes, to leave her job and work as an Amtrak porter, to move to Amsterdam and only listen to Joy Division and starve herself while smoking two packs a day, or become a whore in Tijuana, but not an upper-class whore by any means, but a whore of the people, as she understood it (the people, the whores).
When she first told me about her sickness, and her mom’s sickness, and her dad’s sickness (which obviously worked at cross purposes, or crossroads), I sent her Vallejo’s poem “Espergesia,” that beings like this:
I was born on a day
when God was sick.
Everyone knows that I live,
that I’m evil; and they don’t know
about the December of that January.
Since I was born on a day
when God was sick.
She loved it, wanted to put it on her tombstone (incidentally, I was born in December, and M was born almost twelve years later, in August). I told M I’d read a different Vallejo poem at my grandmother’s funeral, about the corpse prayed over by a unity of human pathos that one day decides to get up because it’s annoyed by the Popular Front. But no one understood it. Maybe because I was reading a poem by a Peruvian surrealist communist at a funeral dominated by soft-Zionists and indifferent neighbors. When my grandfather died a few years later, by suicide, he wrote a much more materialist poem, a poem filled with the real love of a dying animal, as a suicide note. When I told M about it she didn’t believe me, at first. Where’s the note? What do you mean?, I said. Well, I collect everything from the dead, and from the living, and from those who are constantly in between. If you can’t show me his suicide note, I think you’re making the whole story up.
She was sick. She had no memory before she started using vicodin around the age of fourteen. That gave her proprioception, a liberation from her good Sacramento Catholic school girl athlete childhood (swimming, principally). That bullshit Chicana childhood that was ridiculed in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. She never deferred to basic white girls trying to leave Sacramento to go to Reed College or Barnard. She fucked their moms and their boyfriends, wrote merciless poetry about them. She was worried I would start taking pills with her, even though there was no danger of that. That I’d be another Joaquim. I told her I didn’t want to die yet in some melodramatic iteration of her past. Maybe one day, because it would be hot. For awhile sexually we fell out. There were problems. She didn’t want me to go down on her, it tickled her, but not just epidermally. I need to go down on a girl I’m into, I’d say. Well, for me, no. It tickles. Ticklishness is the worst form of anxiety, I realized. It’s like when the Freudian left realized that anxiety caused repression, and not the other way around.
She would giggle almost epileptically when she talked about what turned her on. Being double penetrated by two brothers at once (the closest she’d gotten was fucking two tall skater brothers, in different rooms, but never at the same time). The guy she loved the most, but also kind of demoted and who doted on her, was her paragon of masculinity. The first thing she told me about him was that in the Sacramento protests of the summer 2016, those embryonic pre-Trumpian antifa protests against the Traditional Workers Party, this guy Jack, a semi-pro MMA fighter who’d been raised an orphan and with all sorts of other sob stories, was so buff and preternaturally Aryan that he was maced by an antifa dweeb. Jack, the superhero, immune to pain, grabbed the mace canister away from the misguided antifa, and crushed it with his bare hand, like a Chad meme. A few minutes later he was stabbed by a Nazi, whom he also disarmed and beat nearly to death. You see, I like guys who look like Nazis, but are anti-Nazis. Like Tarantino’s steroidal-Zionist homosexuals with huge cocks, I said, or aesthetically and politically confused machos, I said, with a twinge of jealousy? Yeah, she said. It’s hot.
One of the things that brought us back together, sexually, but also emotionally (not that these days there’s really a difference), was when we both remembered our initial Tinder conversation. Well, not the first night, but maybe the second. We’d planned for her to come over to my place without the usual, PC first date, and never to use condoms. And how do I know you won’t kill me?, she said. You don’t, I said. Will you? I told her there was a good chance that I would kill her, that I already loved her so much that killing her was the only option. But when we got together that first night we didn’t talk about homicide, or femicide, but about suicide. We talked about suicide pacts, and we came together encouraging each other to kill each other. Sometimes, depending on the tenor of the orgasm, alone, with the other watching and gloating. But sometimes together.
xxx
When she was very young, her dad, who had already lapsed into terminal alcoholism, kidnapped her for a week. Maybe two. They went to Santa Cruz, to the boardwalk. It was the happiest and most traumatic memory of her life. Later her dad would invite her to shows from their favorite bands, but he would forget to pick her up to go to them. Even later than that, R and I went to Santa Cruz and she took off all her clothes on a non-nude beach and I realized she had not only the body, but the spirit, that kind of sad stern pornographic spirit, of a Greek goddess. Aphrodite, mostly. She was tall and honey-skinned, too, and every day she became more herself.
During the Kavanaugh hearings, M was enraged. She wanted me to watch the SNL skits with her. But R, who was totally immersed in the U.S. legal and geopolitical crisis of fascism, couldn’t be bothered. In fact, there was never a moment where R didn’t roll her eyes at the #MeToo movement. She considered it beyond reactionary. An embarrassment to women and an insult to life and to revolution and to a sense of humor. M was much more at that point actively engaged in a sexual life, in a life with men as they instantiate themselves, and so she was angrier, I guess. But she wasn’t that angry, either, because in the end we all have to live with men. No matter what they say when they genocidally troll or when they utopically legislate. At the end of the day we’re all leering men in a Fellini movie with the narcissistic sexuality of a woman, itself an invention of men, or in response to the ontological accident of men. Supposedly.
Kavanaugh, Khashoggi, these Kafkaesque names that stalk me in my shitty dérive disguised as an exodus from McLean, Virginia. And as far as we could calculate, when M was born I was stranded in my liminally pubescent room, decorated with the posters from the bands that only she would remember years later, reading Kafka and rediscovering masturbation. That summer that changed me forever, like everyone’s first summer, or second or third or penultimate orgasm.
There are other names that matter and haunt. Tsarnaev, for instance. Our first, though not our last, fight was over Amanda Palmer’s poem about Dzhokhar, which, naturally, I hated with a passion (and so did R, when we escaped from Obama-era martial law in Cambridge, and Amanda Palmer’s shitty would-be sex salons) and which M considered her favorite poem. We didn’t talk for days after that. But then again, we could never agree on the relative value of eroticism versus politics. Whenever I became political, she became sexual, or personal. And vice versa. We both agreed on the immense charisma of Dzhokhar, but for different reasons. When I objected to his being broken down in the poem, in an apolitical guise, she said that it was only in the infantile disintegration of a human being into infinite pieces (whether it is initiated by the national security state or a washed-up riot girl poet) that allowed her to care for and reconstruct those pieces, and in turn to love the boy. And naturally, I wanted to be loved, broken down, to be that boy.
The first book I gave her to read, because I knew I could never or at least for the moment beat up California lumpen Nazis to impress and educate her, was Duras’ The Lover. R had asked me, as we were both trying to treat or cope with alcoholism, who the best women alcoholic writers were. I said that there were many. Duras came to mind first, but of course Jane Bowles came next, and a litany of others. So we bought a bunch of her books. I gave M The Lover, which had certain implications for our relationship, though in fact, our relationship had much more to do with The Malady of Death. Sometimes she liked to come, in our hallucinatory mutual adolescence, listening to Neutral Milk Hotel or watching Harold and Maude, or we would read biographies together about Fassbinder, his indulgence, or talk about her lovers, whom she divided categorically into sociopaths and narcissists (with obvious overlaps and demilitarized zones), though I was mostly a narcissist, with only a touch of sociopathy, the pyrrhic bridge of sociopathy that connected us to some unknown place where we met outside of ourselves.
When she was a kid, her mom used to leave her alone for weeks, or maybe months, at a time while she plied her trade as a small-time yeoman Sacramento narco (incidentally, in spite of her libertarian views on drugs, her mom’s views on pornography were about as negative as Andrea Dworkin’s: still, M and her mom shared an almost incestuous symbiosis, an unequal Siamese twinship, when it came to sex and everything else: secrets, boundaries, the privacy of the mind, the sensuality of boredom and shame, weren’t so much prohibited as profoundly unnatural in their house: M had walked in on her mom with almost every one of her lovers, and curiously enough, the primal scene she remembered most vividly was her mom in the shower with her disabled lover, seated in his wheelchair, his face ensconced in in her loins (that was the word M used, curiously enough, “loins”), her mom affectionately washing his back: so it was in fact possible to make love, she thought at the time, when you’re not all there). Once in awhile an aunt or a friend of the family would come to check in on her, but most nights she spent alone. These memories, which couldn’t actually be called memories in the discrete sense of the word, because they seemed to exist outside of time, to incarcerate her in a time without end, were more painful to M than the brief nightmarish blur of her dad’s kidnapping, which, at the very least, was an act of psychotic love. Anyway, the only VHS tape in the house was Harold and Maude and M would watch it over and over again, until she fell asleep, to cope with her terror. I think I saw it at least three times with her, portions of it. She didn’t watch movies like anyone I’d ever met. She’d cycle through them the way she did bands, a few minutes or scenes of one and then onto the next (I think that’s why she loved me, though the word doesn’t quite sound right: when she was with me, she said, she felt like she was in an infinite and self-contained movie, a movie that wouldn’t end well but that also wouldn’t end). The only time she would watch an entire movie all the way through is if she was sucking a guy’s dick the entire time, edging him: sucking dick, she said, is fun, ludic, like solving a puzzle, which is true, I thought, but it’s always the same puzzle, no? In those cases she preferred movies that turned her on. Spring Breakers, Battle Royale, campy sadomasochistic movies filled with beautiful people about men being physically violent to other men, and to women, too, though in different ways.
After awhile our relationship changed. It became deeper, but slower, more prone to distraction and entropy. She started hanging out with her punk and skater friends again, going to shows, riding her bike around the salt flats, updating her Instagram, etc. I traveled a bit, to nowhere in particular around the country. She was always impressed by the places I’d been but in reality Sacramento was more exotic to me than Santiago or Beirut. I never imagined really what her life was like when we weren’t together in bed. I mean I imagined it when she told me about it, I can only fall in love with a woman in the midst of her confession, since at the end of the day I’m a borderline cannibal. But as far as I was concerned, love was a place, or more specifically a bed, where someone told you a story, an ongoing story meant only for one person, though it wasn’t really meant for anyone (that quantum of anonymity and inscrutability was essential). She seemed happier, though. I asked her why and she said, When I first met you, you broke something very deep inside me, something I always knew was there (by which I mean something I knew was already broken), and I got very sick. I’ve been sick for years, with one of those ineffable fevers that attracts men like you, but this time it got really bad. But then the fever broke. You broke it and overpowered it, because you’re the first person I’ve ever met who was sadder and more nihilistic than me. I had antibodies, for the first time. It’s been very good for my health.
We didn’t fuck as much for awhile. I stopped fetishizing her as much and started giving her books that would actually improve her mind, expand her political and historical horizons, etc. Embraced my role as a pedagogical, melancholy lover, a role that to this day is repulsive to me on some level, since I believe, and M does too, that a body is a cancerous gift or a Trojan horse to be burned up before it destroys you, that knowledge doesn’t exist, and that youth is something that should never be given up, or should only be given up when it’s already too late.
An Irreal Postscript
She called me the night of the midterm elections. I’d thrown up by 6 pm pacific time, from pure disgust. I knew deep down that electoralism was the only conceivable path forward, and the path that we’d take to our doom, such as it was. I teased her about a bit about Beto, but it didn’t seem funny in the way it used to be. She sounded disturbed. Come over, she said. I can’t, I said. I need to see you, etc.
A few nights later, I went over to her place. She looked terrible, I mean she looked hot but she looked like she’d seen a ghost or a particularly uncharismatic serial killer. She couldn’t stop talking, which was normal for her, but also she couldn’t stop drinking, which wasn’t. For the first time we spent the night outside. Usually we’d only go out to smoke cigarettes next to the motel across the street where the only witness to our outlandish conversation was this one creep in his car who’d spend the entire night watching the sex workers and their clients and pimps go about their business (he left at the same time every morning, presumably to go to work). At some point we ended up back at her place. She opened up another bottle of red wine, and a bottle of sake, though we were already wasted. We drank them both. She fell asleep. I can never fall asleep when I’m drunk so I stayed up reading her zines and looking at her folders of old photos, old love letters. She started to snore and wheeze and pant violently, and talk in her sleep. I’m always surprised when beautiful girls sleep like old men with heart conditions, but then again, the girls I’m into are addicts, alcoholics. Around six in the morning she started to talk in her sleep. I started to touch her, first her pussy, but then just rubbing her back, her neck. Do you have an alias?, she said. She was talking to me now. No, I don’t have an alias, I said. I’ve always been too much of an exhibionist to have an alias. I’ve always been honest because of my exhibitionism and my hypertrophic morality, though that doesn’t preclude lying, often, from time to time. Do you have an alias?, she said again. I shook her. What do you mean? Now she seemed lucid, like Ahab in his somnambulism. I said, she said, do you have a fucking alias?
She woke up.
Two nights ago, she said, right outside my house, a man came up to me with a photo of you. A blown-up photo from you in a crowd somewhere. He asked about you, he said your name. What name did he say?, I asked. She said my name.
What did he want?, I said. He wanted to know if I knew you. And what did you say? I told him to fuck off. And then what did you do? I ran inside. And then? I started drinking. I couldn’t eat or sleep. What did the man look like? He was white. He was in his forties. He looked like any guy who’s white and in his forties. He was wearing a suit. And what did you think? I thought you aren’t who you say you are, though you’ve barely said anything about yourself, and I don’t know who you are. But more specifically? I thought you were involved in something dangerous. Something that I didn’t want to know about but something hot, maybe, something that has to do with the violent left. I told her I wasn’t. I didn’t know what to think. I felt violently ill. I started to see my whole world collapsing. That Cointelpro fear.
My first impulse was to strangle her, or to never talk to her again. Who’s after me? Is it you? Is it someone you’re fucking? Are you a fed, or cooperating?
She started to cry.
I told her, because I always told her I’d be honest, that I had three or more conclusions, in ascending levels of probability: 1. you’re mentally ill (she’d told me about her childhood false memory syndromes, the psychologists who had treated her, the psychologists who had treated her dad) 2. You’re cooperating. 3. Jack is after me, for some reason or 4. you were approached by the FBI, etc.
- She swore to me that she had a firm grip on reality, and I believed her. She was fanatical about reality, even though sometimes she overshot the mark. She never lied or cheated or lost the thread, as far as I knew, which was as far as I was able to know.
- I had to trust her, because the alternative was ghastly solipsism, impossible.
Three and four were harder.
- I needed to know more about Jack. Would he hurt me, the people I care for? She said Jack was the muscle behind a mysterious group, that he had no agency of his own besides impulses of violence and kindness that often got confused. What group (and what violence, what kindness)? And what’s their ideology? Well he takes orphans into his house, victims of sex trafficking, victims of all kind of trafficking. And he personally is on the left, but he has affiliations with the right. But he doesn’t know who he works for. Sometimes strangers show up at his house in the middle of the night, strangers with accents from all over the world. They demand a kid, a woman. And he never hands them over, except when he’s told to. He’s capable of horrific acts of violence. But the only violence I see, the violence that turns me on, is when he beats up some guy who’s harassing a trans woman outside a club. And then we fuck. But from what he tells me he has other orders. He doesn’t have political agency, like you. Whereas you, I don’t know, it might be impossible for you to hurt someone, but I think you would. Do you think I’ve killed someone?, I asked. I don’t know, she said, as if the question was enough to settle the question, to prove that I would kill someone.
- And of course there was the FBI, DHS, all that shit we’d constantly joked about, apotropaically.
I had to run outside and call R right away.
xxx
It doesn’t matter, R said on the phone, after an initial shock, a shock that was different than mine, since it was more immediately political: chasing young pussy was my decision, but the movement came first. The worst they can do is ruin our lives. But we’re on the right side of history. That was the first time I realized that what she said was true. I was on the right side of history, with all my faults. But that side was obscene, and behind its obscenity, it was senseless, and behind that side, there was a dead dog who’d been beaten to death for no reason, or who’d died masturbating, half-castrated, dreaming of his grave.
(Later, talking to a leftist friend whose leftism was equally poised between revolutionary hatred and Gramscian rationality, he reminded me that there’s a certain self-confirming narcissism on the left, which might be a necessary narcissism but is still a psychic projection. Every time the feds try to fuck with you, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re after you. I mean they’re after you, but they’re not after you because you’re successful, because they’re threatened. At least since the Bush years, counterinsurgency has been a purely literary creation. You don’t do anything, but by what you do, you implicate yourself in a constellation or a Kafka novel, maybe even an Oulipo novel. There’s nothing to do, he said, in terms of opsec onanism, there’s no correct ethical conduct in the face of this ersatz Oedipalization. The state, and this sick society, he reminded me, needs to be violently overthrown, though personally he was against every path, every Maoism. He clung violently to reality to the point that he disavowed not only violence and non-violence, but the entire military and vanguardist delusion of the future). That afternoon the fires came in from Butte County, from the Sierra Nevada mountains, and the air became unbreathable. M came out to smoke with me and finish our bottle of sake. There were families walking by gasping for air and wearing masks, looking at us like we were the incarnation of the Kali Yuga. You smell like a dog and like shit, M said. You’re right, I sweat like that when I’m anxious. The sun was blood-orange in the acrid grey air, which made me think I could look at it, until I realized it was blinding me, and then I kept looking at it, until my retinas filled up with pools of black planets. These fires, these fascisms. These fears, these feds. M was always filling me in on the latest astronomical news, shit that was being analyzed at some MIT lab. She was the only girl I’d fucked in awhile who didn’t care about astrology, though she believed in aliens, and didn’t smoke weed, though she was constantly looking for coke. Anyway, we went inside and fucked for awhile, and then we spent the rest of the afternoon listening to Leonard Cohen and noticing/narrating the idiosyncrasies of our bodies.