…When she talked to Xylea about the election, from a Tysons Corner hotel room, Leila said she wanted Kamala to win because she hated Trump supporters, hated right-wing asshole men, hated a country of stupid fucking rednecks and other dysfunctional losers who were prepared to vote for a fucking rapist clown because they hated women like her. It’s not very complicated, she said. Anything that’s good for men, for white male supremacism, is bad for me, and vice versa. Xylea said that’s fair, if I were a trans woman I’d vote the same way, because everyone sees a presidential election through their own prism, but personally, I want Trump to win, because that’s what benefits me. How does it benefit you?, Leila asked. Because Kamala would legalize sex work, Xylea said, and have you seen what happens in fucking Germany where sex work is legal, how much they charge there, we already have too many girls who think they can do this and they’re making it worse for real hoes like me. Leila laughed. You know Kamala hates sex workers and basically wrote the bill that made our lives suck, FOSTA-SESTA, got rid of Backpage, and besides sex work isn’t becoming legal in this country anytime soon, in any conceivable timeline. Regardless, Xylea said, breezing past Leila (Xylea didn’t care about facts, she lived in a world of pure intuition, pure brutality and surrealist logic). Whenever liberals are in power, there’s less stigma around sex work, and whenever the right is in power, we make more money. Leila didn’t know what to say to any of that, just laughed harder. Xylea had always been one-quarter Nazi, she got it from her dad’s side, and she generally liked right-wing sociopathic men, believed they were part of the natural order (not the natural hierarchy, of which there was none, since the world was nothing but chaos, anarchic and relative power), believed that men were meant to run the government, institutions, the military and police, and the money system. She naturalized her trauma, Leila thought, exaggerated it into some kind of political theology. She’s fucking retarded like everyone else in this country, but at least she’s honest about it.
…Later that night, Eva came over. The night before they’d gone to a haunted house out in rural Maryland with some of Eva’s friends. It was the first time they’d really gone on a date, gone out into the world together. The last time they’d been together, at the end of the summer, it’d been a kind of illicit tryst in hotel rooms, in the basement of Leila’s mom’s house, the room she’d lost her virginity in a lifetime ago, before Eva was born. Now things were different. Leila wanted to be seen with Eva in public, take her arm, lean in to kiss her, fleeting little romantic gestures in the night. Eva was clearly proud to be seen with her, and her friends, a thoughtful curious and quite drunk girl named Justine (when Justine started getting a little flirty, Leila thought about mentioning the Marquis de Sade) and a shaggy-haired puppy-like boy named Cam, were in awe of her, treated her almost like a celebrity, which Leila thought was funny, and touching. The haunted house was at an old camp grounds/slaughterhouse, it was supposed to be the scariest haunted house in the Mid-Atlantic, but Eva kept remarking how she wasn’t scared, maybe because I’m with you, she said, or because I’m drunk. Eva kept sipping from a water bottle filled with red wine. When they’d met a few months before she hardly drank at all, just hit her weed pen all the time, but now, she said, she was drinking most nights, always red wine, on an empty stomach to ensure the best drunk. Leila wasn’t scared either, not even startled, by any of the mutants, zombies, cannibals, and myriad monsters, but she was overcome by a strange floating sensation, as if she had left her body and merged with the autumn nocturnal forest, some sweet but fraught childhood memory overtook her, or the ambience of a memory, something to do with her dad and an owl, the premonition or legend of an owl, some kind of femme dream within a patriarchal universe, and that night, back at her mom’s house, she did in fact have nightmares of a sort. One only dreams in the land, or at the very least in the language, of one’s childhood, she thought, getting herself a cup of water. In the Lyft on the way to the haunted house, they were all packed in, and when she kept seeing Trump signs in the placid outer , suburbs she said something about the movie Get Out, the banal horror of transit in an enemy country, a country that was intimately known and foreign in equal measure. Eva didn’t care about the election at all. Leila liked this about her, liked the way in which she lived life free of the usual depressive neurosis, genuinely loved her life and life in general, she said that she’d already lived the most blessed life and that there was nothing she’d change about it if she could, nothing about the past, she was proud to be from Bridgeport, Connecticut, unabashedly loved musical theater, reveled in her beauty and sex appeal and her freaky, unquenchable sexuality, knew the power of her dark hair and her sultry siren eyes, to be desired by someone like this was exactly what Leila needed right now, it was a desire commensurate to her desire, her desire for desire, to be seen as a glamorous mystery and yet a simple heart, a distant and secret star known only to a few and yet, also, a warm body capable of fucking, tenderness, intimacy, nocturnal conversation. After the haunted house they went back to Eva’s dorm room at American University. It was the first time Leila had been in a college dorm room in nearly two decades. Eva’s roommate wasn’t there. She had this thing about her roommate, who was messy and just “weird,” “a rich girl from Missouri” (in her opinion all the real people came from the East Coast, everyone else was slightly off, maybe a bit hallucinatory), she’d fucked her out of curiosity, because her titties and ass were fat, but the sex had been off, fun but off, and she would vacillate between periods of being repulsed by her roommate and then times when all she could think about was repeating the experience, fucking her again. Eva had spent high school in a group home for black and brown scholarship students at a rich Connecticut public school, and there she’d learned everything she needed to know, at first, about sex and being a woman, had been fucking one of her roommates the entire time, a girl who pretended to be straight, the girl had a boyfriend, they never acknowledged what they did together during the day, but at night they’d show each other porn, kiss each other’s tits, scissor, get each other off, that sort of thing, though that girl hadn’t been her first, her first was this Russian kid named Ivan who was cheating on his girlfriend with her when he was a senior and Eva was a freshman, they’d do it in his car and he was into some kinky shit, like knife play, which she found funny, because how you gonna do knife play on me in your car when I’m supposed to be at softball practice, and then sometimes he would take her into the woods and whip her, like some demented Russian monk, which also made her laugh, at the time and in retrospect, and then there were the series of teachers, theater directors and mentors, good-looking or ugly (especially the ugly ones), most of whom were married, with whom she’d had dalliances, corrupt but physically chaste, for the most part, whom she would drive to obsession, and with whom she, too, would become obsessed. And of course, all the older men from the internet, whom she started talking to at the age of twelve, before that. Eva poured more wine into her water bottle. I need to have my romantic drunk period, she said. She was so beautiful, Leila couldn’t stand it (in some ineffable way, it hurt her). Leila sat up on her lofted bed, looking down at her. Eva’s friend Sophia was about to come over. Sophia’s been dying to meet you, she said, she’s like in love with you, too. She knows how obsessed I am with you, she heard about you from the very beginning, from the time at the zoo. You two can talk about films, she’s a film major. She’s super dykey, but she’s having problems with her girlfriend right now, actually they’re always fighting, I don’t know about what. Then Sophia was there. She was a striking dyke with a gorgeous head of wild red curls. Leila immediately felt at home with her, and, in fact she’d grown up in a Jewish family in Bethesda, not far from Leila’s hometown. She was chatty, effusive, had a mischievous glint in her eye. While Eva went to the bathroom to do her makeup, the two of them talked, about D.C., how it had changed, mostly for the better, about what it was like to be gay in this city, about the Howard lesbians, who were the city’s hottest lesbians, almost intimidating (Sophia loves black girls, Eva said later, she goes crazy for them). It was late, but Sophia and Leila were hungry, so they decided to get a bite to eat. What’s open at this hour?, Leila asked. We could go to Clyde’s, in Georgetown, Sophia said. Oh my God, Leila laughed, that place. What’s the deal with it?, Eva asked. It’s just an old D.C. institution, the kind of place men would go to smoke cigars and drink martinis and plot how to send weapons to , right-wing death squads in Central America. I mean now they probably just bitch about the woke kids and TikTok and what not. You know David watches TikTok all the time, Eva said. She was talking about her new sugar Daddy, her first, a guy who built mansions and was a professional blackjack player, palled around with Hulk Hogan and John Travolta, wore only black, with a giant gold cross hanging from his neck. In high school she’d seen a reality show episode of this silver fox older man who was engaged to a very young woman, like nineteen years old, and she’d decided that that’s exactly who and what she wanted to be when she grew up. Then she matched with this guy on Bumble, who looked uncannily familiar. Of course it was him. She’d spent a weekend at the casino with him, as his little eye candy companion, getting spoiled, going to spas, going out to dinners with his equally old and equally rich friends, seeing a show with Steve Martin. She showed Leila and Sophia pictures. Leila was struck by how glamorous she looked in her little black dress, the way that luxury became her, as if there were certain girls who just were born to become rich, by virtue of not just their beauty but their desire, their capacity to outshine any environment they find themselves in, and of course Leila thought this made sense (there never was such a thing as the proletariat after all, because before there was a so-called proletariat there were men and women, and men, most men, would kill for the ruling class in order to become rich, or in order to harbor the illusion of being on the same plane as their rulers, or in order, in other words, to be able to fuck women, whatever women whenever they wanted, and women would fuck their way to the top, if they had the chance, or they’d die dreaming of it), and yet, to her, it represented a kind of unbearable loss, knowing that men ultimately had all the power and the money in this world, that one day she would lose Eva to a guy like this, or if not Eva some other girl like Eva, that in fact she’d lost so many girls before precisely to this logic, which is why these days Leila thought of nothing but of how to get rich, make money, become powerful, which for her meant becoming not just more beautiful but more in command of sex, the illusory realm of sex, more of a hoe, just like Xylea knew herself to be, Xylea who said that when she first met Leila she’d been worried by her kindness, by the way she’d yield and let people walk all over her, by her white guilt, but it’s been so wonderful, she said, to see you take your power, love yourself first, become a bad bitch, because your values haven’t changed, values never really change, shitty people stay shitty and good people stay good, but you’re one of the good ones, and you’re one of the few people in this world I’d trust to do some good with power, and in fact Eva hadn’t shut up about David, her sugar Daddy, since she’d met him, though the truth is he hadn’t even given her that much money, less than a thousand, not counting all the spa and shopping days. I’d wake up in the morning, Eva said, and he’d be lying in bed laughing to himself watching TikToks, like a fucking idiot, like I swear the level of brainrot in these boomers is something else, he has absolutely nothing going on up there. She seemed to like how stupid he was, it made him more appealing, she took his stupidity as an almost natural condition, just like she took his support for Trump, and in fact the only emotion Eva showed about the election, a few days later, was to say that David was happy, which, clearly, made her happy, not because she cared about him or his well-being or the well-being of the country, but because rich white men needed to be in a good mood, in order to get something from them. Oh but he showed me this article of what happened to his ex-fiancée, they were calling her like the Frankenstein Instagram baddie, or something like that, she ended up dating this plastic surgeon after David but one night he beat the shit out of her, like so bad that he cracked her skull open and completely fucked up her face, but instead of taking her to the hospital he performed like unlicensed plastic surgery on her in their hotel room, made her look all weird, so now she’s suing him, David told me to be careful who you date because this could happen to you. In the car on the way to the restaurant, Leila listened to Sophia describe her film projects and asked her if she’d ever seen the movie Watermelon Woman, and Sophia smiled and said that’s my favorite movie of all time. Eva looked happy, to see the two of them bonding. What did I tell you, Sophia, this girl knows everything, she knows all the crazy shit. At the restaurant they got burgers. Sophia asked Leila if she was Jewish, Leila said she was, that’s so , cool, Sophia said, have you been to Israel?, I was there last year, right before the war, it was amazing, and Leila said she hadn’t, noticed how she didn’t care anymore about politics or Palestine or whether or not someone is a “Zionist,” the worst thing you can be for a lot of leftists, a lot of her friends, too, worse than a fascist, but who gave a shit, really, people were or believed all sorts of things based on their upbringing and specific circumstances, none of it really mattered, or said anything substantial about the person, and she thought about how earlier in the night, when she was getting picked up from her mom’s house in a Lyft, the driver had been an Arab guy, yet-another Arab guy who was a total fucking creep to her, the moment she got in the car he started breathing weird, asking prying and incoherent questions, they hadn’t gone a quarter mile before he said, why is your name Leila?, Leila is a girl’s name, and yet you are a man, and she’d told him to stop the car, he kept driving so she shouted, pull the fuck over, opened the door with the car still moving, finally he stopped, as she got out she spit in his face, from outside the backseat she hit him right on the cheek with a huge gob of spit, he looked at her shocked, his mouth agape, unable to process what had happened, and she’d had to walk all the way home in her platform boots and calm down and call another car, and while she was walking home she thought of things she wanted to say to him, like fuck you Arab men, you’re all a bunch of fucking creeps and pedophiles, literal inbred retards, I feel bad for your women and children but as far as I’m concerned you can all rot in hell, you deserve all the things that keep happening to you, all the shitty things that let’s face it, on some level, you bring upon yourself, she wanted to say all these things she wasn’t supposed to say, taboo things, things that would get her “canceled” and make her lose friends, but she no longer cared about any of that, about believing and saying the right things, or about not believing and not saying the wrong things, because the world was nothing but garbage, but shit, but hell, and language was the shit’s shit, a hell-within-a-hell. Eva sat next to Leila in the booth. You two are so fucking cute, Sophia said. You know this girl fucking adores you, she does not shut up about you, and Eva started kicking her under the table, blushing, oh my God I’m going to fucking kill you, Sophia, but she liked it, Leila could tell, and Leila said aw, I love that, it makes me really happy to hear that, the truth is I’m fucking crazy about this girl…
…Eva came over to her hotel the next night, but Leila was a little drunk and high (she’d started partying with some of her clients), she didn’t like fucking girls in the hotel beds where she saw clients, she used to like it but now she didn’t, though the guy earlier had been nice, young and almost cute, he hadn’t been with anyone since his last girlfriend, towards the end of that relationship he’d had a threesome with her and her friend, a trans woman, and he’d really liked it, it sparked something in him, so now he wanted to try it again, without the distraction of a failing relationship with a cis woman, at first he just wanted to talk, he was lonely, like a lot of DC guys he made a lot of money as a military contractor and had nothing to spend it on, he clearly had a little crush on Leila, really liked her, was a bit nervous, she took things slow, he liked kissing, he kissed her like she was his girlfriend, which she guessed is why they called it “girlfriend experience,” she was able to relax around him, be herself, sort of, when she was riding his face she shouted out so this is where all that military contractor spending is going, paying transsexual prostitutes to eat their assholes, which she instantly realized might be going too far, but he laughed, later he told her about the absolute bullshit of his job, the futile psychopathy of sending weapons to Ukraine, to some of the worst people in the world for the profits of even worse people, the true killers and despoilers of the Earth, the whole country is fucked, they agreed, the whole world, he talked about his loneliness, his lostness, looked at her with sweet, imploring eyes, he was smart enough to know she couldn’t give him anything, anything lasting, that what lasts in the gift of sex, of a woman, is its ephemeral trace, the memory that outlives the money he parts with that she parts with that ebbs and flows through the electronic hallucination of the economy, passes through bodies, makes up bodies, I’m just like you, he said, I’m a whore just like you, she smiled, well you’re not exactly like me, I sell, myself to the same system, the same men, his family came to this country from Ethiopia, he hated Trump, thought white men were on the verge of extinction, that we all were on the verge of extinction but there was something different in the paranoia and the inanity of the so-called Master Race going extinct, will it get bad soon?, Leila asked, in an unplanned moment of vulnerability, as if maybe he could tell her something she didn’t know, as if the Defense Department had some secret advanced scientific knowledge of climate, geology, and society, which they could systematize and direct, through certain capillaries, to individual government employees, though of course she didn’t trust that kind of thing, experts are the most clueless and sanguine, the sanguinity of the military bureaucrats of Dr. Strangelove, the ones who would avert their eyes from anything, from doom, to the very end, she trusted her own common sense and empiricism most of all, and then she trusted prophecy, the prophecy of her dreams which had told her, several nights before, that in a few years there would be some planetary change to plant photosynthesis, a snowball effect of some unseen and unaccounted for nexus of causes, that would lead to mass die off, to the end of life on Earth, though a night or so before that dream she’d also dreamt that one of the Instagram baddie pornstars she followed had decided to run for president on a third party ticket, was piquing interest and gaining surprising momentum, that she attended one of the pornstar’s campaign events, where Leila came up to her after her speech and asked her, were she to be elected, to remove the 800cc cap on the size of silicone breast implants, to which the pornstar said yes, we’ll absolutely look into that, shook her hand like a politician, I mean we’re gonna be fine here in this country, he said, in the First World, our grandkids are gonna be like what the fuck, the guy left and Eva came over and they fucked for a bit and then they watched some Adam Sandler movie from when Leila was a kid, a movie Eva used to watch with her parents, and Leila fell asleep in a cold sweat, having asked Eva to hold her, I don’t know how to ask for this sort of thing, she said, but can you hold me, of course Mommy, Eva said, I was going to do that anyway, and she drifted off without any consolation, she was beyond consolation, it wasn’t Eva’s fault but Eva wasn’t the right person to hold her at that moment, there was no right person anymore, no real or theoretical person, she’d seen through the illusion of attachment, through the narcissistic circuit, the sadistic theft and the compensatory eroticism, of the mother-child relationship, from which everything and nothing flows, and now, she thought, slipping into the dark, there was a void where the void was supposed to be…
…On the day of the election Leila made an appointment to get more botox and fillers. She watched the results at her brother’s apartment with her brother and his girlfriend Kat and some of Kat’s DC lesbian friends. Leila understood, or accepted, the results before anyone else, saw tears and panic welling up in Kat’s eyes, felt the urge to give her a hug but also wondered why it is that the people who are least affected by all this are the most invested, there’s this perversely outsized psychodrama to being a professional class cis white woman, some paradoxical overdevelopment of feeling at the expense of reality, a disembodied psychic hell, had she been forced to live in it she would have also numbed herself with SSRIs and reality TV and a lowkey drinking problem, we already went through all this in 2016, how is it shocking now, you can’t keep interpreting the world as an insult, like yes the patriarchal asshole white men who run this country think you’re a cunt and don’t care about your uterus, is this news to you?, and the myopia of it all mirrored, for her, the ultimate unimportance of so-called politics, political reality, it was just entertainment at this point, a masochistic or a sadistic spectacle, depending on which side of the Blue-Red divide you fell, it suddenly dawned on Leila (though it wasn’t sudden, she’d been sensing this for years) that this country wasn’t real, it was just a hallucination, a bunch of evil retards believing evil retarded things for centuries, making those empty beliefs a kind of reality through the undeniable force of collective delusion, but it didn’t really matter, if these lunatic psychosexually stunted screen-addicted idiots, in the thrall of some messianic indigenous twenty-first century American fascism, wanted to hold power, take power, whatever, then why not let them?, they’ve always been in power anyway, have never been able to really do anything with that power, they fantasize about a Thousand-Year Reich of the white race but the white race is fake and gay, the heterosexual family is fake and gay, the flag and the military and Bitcoin and Fox News and capitalism and genetic purity and youth sports and chromosomal sex and Jesus and the Black Sun and the swastika and Exxon-Mobil and industrialized animal agriculture and sissy porn and whatever retarded shit Elon Musk says and believes is fake and gay, too, and there are no rules, the rules are only for those who make the rules but they’re not for us, which is why she could get giant tits and a million tattoos and have long blonde hair and a big dick and live out her own apocalyptic sexual fantasy of self, as long as there’s food and water things will be okay, and interesting people to get to know, hot people to fuck, a mind and a body capable and incapable of various things to dream and die in, with, and before they started calling any of the swing states she called a car and went home, took a bath, and went to bed.
…The next day the mood in her mom’s house was sepulchral. She spent the day in bed, sick and depressed. She didn’t look at the news. That evening she matched with a totally plastic sixty year-old bimbo MILF with 2500ccs from Tampa on one of the apps, who said she was staying with her son and her son’s girlfriend, she was so fucking horny, wanted to fuck her son’s girlfriend but was being a good mom, for now, maybe Leila could come over and keep her company, Leila went over and they fucked and Leila called her Mommy while she sucked on her huge fake tits and went home with her faith restored in this country, somewhat.
…She told Leila in bed one evening in the future that once her mom when she was about twelve or thirteen brought her to an abandoned church somewhere in rural New Jersey and gave her a book on parents’ sexual attraction to their children. She was in psychosis then, she said, she was often in psychosis during my childhood. Now all she wanted was enough money to be hot and move to the Midwest, take photographs in abandoned buildings, savor the emptiness where life, with its lush and pointless violence, had been.
…On the phone Xylea said that with her mom there wasn’t much to talk about besides hoeing, and kink, their relationship had been rocky, at best, Xylea always resented and at the same time gave credit to her mom for bringing her into sex work, making her a teen prostitute, her mom told her that when she’s really hating herself her sexual masochism gets really intense, Xylea said she couldn’t relate because for her sexual masochism was about hating her situation, not herself, but her friend Leila had talked a lot about that, written about it, you and my mom would really get along, she said, she’s actually a really brilliant writer, writes about sex work, it’s just the drugs and the demons and the mental illness that makes her shitty a lot of the time, she said that when she’s really hating herself she has this recurring fantasy that she’s eating out a fat black woman, you know, it’s that hippie white guilt thing she has, Xylea had called Leila crying, she often started a phone call in the middle of sobbing or hysterical laughter, what’s up?, Leila said, I’m just crying about Tupac, and Diddy, what a beautiful poet Tupac was, the way he talked about sex work and art, how he wasn’t going to start the revolution but that his art would plant the seed in the mind of someone who would, and fuck Diddy, it’s not the sex thing, I’ve been around childhood sexual abuse my whole life, it’s the way Diddy is claiming Tupac’s legacy, saying they’re going after another revolutionary black man, Cointelproing him, whatever, it’s shameless, well yeah, Leila said, especially considering Diddy killed Tupac, you know, the child sex trafficking shit makes sense considering he’s like the black Epstein, the CIA connection, you know I don’t like to cry over shit that’s not mine and I’m a white girl but still, well you’re a white girl from the ghetto, Leila said, fucking yes I am, it’s because my mom came from money, she didn’t tell me until I was older, past 18, so that’s in me, in my blood, but she was raped by her dad I think, or something, so she went to the trailer, parks and from there to the ghetto, the typical pilgrimage of the white hippie girl, and I’m grateful for it, because she told me about the Black Panthers when I was a kid and raised me to know what’s real and right in this world, even though the ghetto ate a white girl like her alive, and in the end yeah I was molested, groomed, raped, but it’s better to be molested by the system than by your family, by some white patriarch, because I always knew I could run away, find another home where maybe I had a shot at not being molested, you know, there was a wider world, even if that world was a prison, because nothing compares to the prison of the white family, in this country, it’s the Moloch from which all evil, all perversion springs, and yet even then, I can appreciate its good side, having known my uncle, there’s something very powerful in its traditionalism that rich liberals will never understand, well you understand, Leila, even though you’re a rich girl, because you understand everything, or most things, because you pay attention, and ask questions, and don’t project your reality onto others, don’t assume that your reality is reality itself, you know what I mean?
…A few nights after the election, she worked at the Watergate Hotel. The place really did feel surreal, haunted, in a lugubrious and kitschy way. She thought of some joke about deep throat, “cumming full circle.” The client was young-ish, in his early forties, he’d be called “boyishly handsome,” he’d grown up poor in Jersey, made a lot of money in finance, quit when it got boring, moved out to a farm in Loudon with some girl from an old American family, they’d split up, he’d spent a year out there battling nature, sublime boredom, killing things with guns, with his bare hands (the story he told about this girl whose sister had been killed by a deer in a car accident several years before, weeping by the side of the road, he walked up to her to find her standing over a mortally wounded deer, go home, he said, waited until she drove of , had no gun so he killed the deer with the butt of an axe, drove home covered in blood), when he’d first gotten in touch with Leila he’d written these long paragraphs about his farm, inviting her out to the farm, on the phone she told him it sounds like I’d end up chopped up in a bag, no, he said, laughing, but it’s dangerous out there, he was selling the farm, though, not really sure what he was going to do with his life, seemed to have settled on this rapturous idea that Leila represented some kind of sexual and romantic paradise, some kind of mystery, he hadn’t been with anyone since he and his girlfriend broke up in over a year, had never been with a trans woman, seemed (of course, only seemed) to fall in love with Leila, spending the evening on a balcony overlooking the Potomac worshipping her body, her mind, her life story, as if every inch of the map and the territory that was her contained some ineffable secret, as usual she mixed fact and fiction, the same as in her writing, facts that were not discrete from fictions but alchemized into some reality on the other side of this one, some melancholy dream you can wander through in the moment between two oblivions, he’d voted for Trump but he said he cried tears of joy when every president was elected, Leila thought that was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard, and kind of cute, the way certain people who benefit from everything can sentimentalize everything, she changed her mind, no one really gets to the bottom of this country, to its visceral horror, which remains propositional, out of sight, there’s a certain addiction to fantasy that unites everyone here, she herself was a fantasy creator, a fantasy embodiment, “hypernormal stimuli” as evolutionary biologists called it, please stay with me tonight, he kept saying, looking pleadingly into her eyes. I’ll pay whatever it takes. She made close to 10k that night, decided she’d join Equinox when she got back to California, because fuck running away from being the bougie ass bitch she was destined, seemingly, to be. Before dawn they went out in his truck to get tacos, look for more lube. He held every door for her, seemed to delight in every instant of her company. He talked to cops and black women with equal panache, as if there was no one in the world who wouldn’t be happy to be in his presence, which was probably his experience. When he was fucking her later, around dawn, she felt this fleeting feminine tender abjection, wanted him, secretly, to cum inside her. She fell asleep next to him, and a few hours later, got up and left.
…Eva came over one of the last nights before she went back to California. This time was sweeter, softer, opening up into a more merciful duration. The sex was good, this time. They were in the warm, bright upstairs guest room where Leila stayed when she came home now, no longer sneaking around in the basement, in her childhood bedroom, in some subterranean part of her psyche, her past. Eva was on her period. Leila lay a towel down on the bed like she was laying a blanket for a picnic in a Russian movie. They fucked slower, Leila still holding on to her throat, but gently. Sex, like reality, she thought, needs to slow down, take a deep breath. Leila looked down and realized she was covered in blood. They showered off together. Earlier they’d shown each other their favorite porn. Eva’s was very aggressive lesbian scissoring, Leila’s was bimbo hypno, which Eva found fascinating, titillating, and at times vaguely dystopian. I like the idea that a woman is the opposite of a human, Leila said, on a divergent evolutionary path, drawn there by an inscrutable programing that may be angelic or demonic or both, it doesn’t matter. I like the idea of dating another girl who becomes just like me, and vice versa, or of two girls converging into simulacra of each other, or rather simulacra of some other image that never existed. I like to think that power and abjection, worship and degradation, are just mirror images of each other, and that a kind of manic rapture exists in eyes that see everything and nothing but are blind to what they’re supposed to see. That kind of thing. She showed Eva Enter the Void (the hypno porn had made her think of it) while they ate Chinese food. Eva had a dreamy, contented look. She drank one of Leila’s mom’s bottles of wine. Later she straightened Leila’s hair (I love the smell of burnt hair, she said, it makes me think of beauty, of glamor), playing with it lovingly while in a distant house they could see a man on the far end of middle age working out in a home gym in his garage, a little apparition of male ego in the night. It reminds me of the movie American Beauty, Leila said. He’s starting to realize that he only has a few years left in which he could conceivably fuck underage girls, and he’s entered an existential panic, as if he can see himself from the vantage of his own nullity, his own death. Eva had never seen it. She said her whole life had been defined by doubles, by dreams, things always happened in twos, one thing was never just itself but always contained its repetition, was always a mirage of something else. Maybe it’s because you’re a Gemini, Leila said. She said she was trying out for the role of Dolly Parton in 9 to 5. If I get it, you have to come back and see me perform. Of course I’ll come see you, Leila said, and kissed her.