II

In the overstuffed armchair caddy-corner to the kitchen island, she waits. Her accessories are a calculator and wire-rimmed glasses without lenses.

Carry the two and. Transfer those credit card points and wait to pay interest. Carry the one and. Transfer from this account so. Re-insert the $60 recently taken from the ATM … Still doesn’t work.

She tries to imagine a future beyond not-paying-the-rent and can’t do it.

Try harder. It’s maybe a white room with no door. An elevator without buttons. A desert with grey sky and grey sand and a giant globe of tumbleweed, tumbling. An infinite staircase you could climb and climb without getting out of breath, which somehow makes it scarier. There is no end. It’s a fucking circle. Always the repetition of the first of the month, just around the corner.

On the phone to an ex-boyfriend she sobs, ‘I’m drowning, I’m drowning!’ His response is inaudible. But he’s probably thinking the same thing we are: she should have thought of this a long time ago. Before the first of the month came rolling around.

‘I already sold all my clothes,’ she scream-whispers into the phone. ‘Even the Coach bag shaped like a cat. I told you that!’

She thinks of her disappeared clothes. She thinks of the sweatshirt she found in a flea market with ‘Lovely Nymph’ emblazoned on it in fuzzy cursive, how she lent it to her ex as a joke, how he wore it out clubbing as a joke, exposing his furry belly, how he laughed, how she laughed, poking at the furry belly button below the lovely nymph, how there was no future then, either, but in a good way, how beneath the sickly sweet candy shades of dawn the sweatshirt ended up (confusingly!) in a gutter, covered in sooty slush.

Where was that flea market, again? When was that night? The memory of the ruined sweatshirt makes her hang up on her ex mid-sentence.

Back to the calculator. Multiply this times two. Carry the. Subtract this from that and what do you have left. She feels like she’s choking on air. Like the air is full of something toxic – carbon monoxide, Rohypnol – and she’s taking it in in great big gulps.

Knock knock. Enter the landlord.

Pressing her knees together, she fakes primness. Then she falls into the plushness of her chair and fondles the calculator. The landlord looms over her regretfully. You can barely see his eyes beneath the shadowy brim of his hat.

He frowns. She says, ‘I think I knew you in another life.’

 

III

Hours pass without meaning. Light dances on the Formica countertop and mocks him by doing so. For the first time in a long time, it seems particularly tragic that he can’t tell red from green.

Days he lopes around the sun-filled modern Spanish, passing the French doors and infinity pool and custom built-ins, thinking the same toxic thoughts on a loop. Nights he …

There are no nights.

He paces. On the forum they tell him to measure it bone-pressed. On the forum they tell him to gobble zinc. Try losing twenty pounds, they say. Released from its fat pad, the transformed creature will throb and bloom. He will have one more inch, maybe two more inches, a life.

The smallness of his cock is no more or less tragic than the myriad homeless people hunched over tattered bags on Sunset, or the widespread abduction of children by a cabal of liberal élites, or the sureness of our collective destruction hurtling at us faster than you can say ‘California wildfire’, or, in the face of all of this, the gobsmacking prevalence of single-use plastics. Rather than distract from each other, these problems tug at him and aggregate, forming a giant doomsday bubble populated by tiny grimacing dicks.

(Paperclip Girl, meanwhile, is too filled with something else – happiness or sadness or a frantic combination of both – to worry about single-use plastics. Can’t-Pay-Her-Rent Girl doesn’t have the brain space, either. She can’t process the significance of her landlord glowering down at the chewed straw of her iced latte. She just knows that one way or another, and maybe in all of the ways, she is about to get fucked.)

He paces and thinks and paces and thinks. Do you believe in karma? i.e. the idea that we’ll all be reincarnated clean, beautiful, easy to love, and all with the exact same dick size? He sinks into the beige couch and places his head in his hands.

Ding dong. The giantess is here with her kit.

 

IV

Two Pine-Suckers walk through a pine forest, searching, in a lazy, haphazard way, for each other. One wears khaki cargo pants and no top. She fondles her breasts. The motion is repetitive, almost unbearably so, like writing the same sentence over and over on a chalkboard.

Pine-Sucker Two wears an orange sweater and plaid skirt and clutches a backpack.

She is as tall as the low branches.

She is of the age range eighteen+ but still teen.

The backpack chafes, too small for her sturdy shoulders. Inside are her colourful notebooks. Their pages are filled with her doodles – eyeballs, boxes, pyramids, crushes’ names in letters shaped like clouds, positive traits of a Scorpio in letters shaped like flames, chessboards with rooks, bishops, and knights, their faces non-existent or grotesque.

Doodling is more than a way to pass time. It helps her get ideas, ideas that have nothing to do with her doodles. For example.

The eyeballs multiply upon themselves, filling the page psychotically. Sometimes she switches to mouths, smiling, the teeth too precisely drawn, not blurry as they would look in real life. (But what exactly would you call real life, at this point in time?! Imagine a life where you weren’t a Pine-Sucker?! Seems sort of impossible?!) The precise toothy mouths crowd the page.

Pine-Sucker One can’t remember a time when she wasn’t in trouble. For example, about the berries. She didn’t know the berry juice rule until after she’d broken it. Don’t track the goddamn berry juice in the house, it’s not beyond me to make you pick up a mop, stop telling me there’s no berry juice, that’s the whole problem, you feel it before you see it, feel the sticky smears under bare feet, are we feral? Should we pretend like we’re feral? Because it seems like you want us to live like feral animals?

Like all the other sham authority figures, his face is hard to picture. The house, too.

Probably it was rustic? A vaguely Bavarian cabin with a couch and a bed? More so she can remember the juice, almost invisible, with watercolour splotches of red, coming as it did from those anaemic berries that could kill you in two bites …

Walking through the woods is both a punishment and an escape. The Pine-Suckers listen to the cracking of ice in the branches. They shiver. Overhear woodpeckers working. Spot waxwings drunk on fermented berries. Their minds wander and stop at dead shivery ends.

Wander and stop, wander and stop.

When the Pine-Suckers find each other, they stare at each other with big blank eyes, doing their best impression of a tree. It’s as if they’ve been together in this clearing all along, nearly still, growing imperceptibly.

Cut to them kneeling.

Like in church? No. Not so graceful. Less out of grace than a practical necessity, with the added complications of mud, roots, crawling things.

The two Pine-Suckers have never been aware of single-use plastics, and likely never will be. They know about pinesap consistency, the colour of loam, the way sticking your tongue out in crisp air can predict a storm, how to make your whole freezing body a weathervane. They can decode the scars in tree rings, feel the pine roots gossiping beneath their knees.

 

V

Damn Daryl, I’m not even gay either but you look magnificent.

Before the girl with the sailor hat enters the room, Daryl tucks into a meal of venison steak, ground deer pancreas, raw deer heart. Silverware separates Daryl from the latent life force and therefore Daryl eats with his hands.

To taste the organ meat is to roam the forest, sniff the dirt, rush through the prickly brush in pursuit of his prey. When he downs a shot of bone marrow, he tastes the gaminess of death but also the gaminess of life, a slippery thing swimming down his throat and into his bloodstream. He feels electrolytes, triglycerides, minerals flowering in his own guts, healing him and making him vital.

It’s a beautiful thing that the deer gave to Daryl.

 

Oh Daryl. I love the way you make each and every girl fall in love with you the way you do your thing.

Before the girl with the sailor hat enters the room, Daryl washes his hands and goes over his choreography. Kiss neck, breasts, belly. Determine exact right depth of thrusts and exact right rhythm of thrusts. Stare into eyes at proper intervals. With right look. A kind of puppy-dog look. More like a mixture between puppy dog and murderer. It has to skirt the line perfectly. Thusly he often practises this look in the smudged mirror above his sink.

With the focus of an élite athlete he ignores the mothballs between his toes, the incessant buzzing of the fly he can never catch. He stares at his face and practises the look.

His eyes (a striking blue) bore directly into the (imagined) girl as if weapons. His eye-weapons melt the (imagined) girl.

Daryl’s own face stares back at him. The grey tufts infecting the black mane like a virus. The sunken hollows of his cheeks.

He stares at his naked face and thinks, I am Daryl. I am of the age range of twenty to fifty. I am strong and versatile. And I have T-minus eight minutes to make the girl in the sailor hat fall in love.

 

Hey whoa Daryl that sure is a gnarly scar snaking down your abdomen, groin area. What’s up with that?

Pretty sure it’s a tattoo.

One helluva tattoo.

Why you gotta cover your whole body that way? Makes it look like you’re still wearing clothes.

The other day he was doing his thing with the redhead in the white robe and suddenly the cough came back out of nowhere. He was lying on his back and the way she pressed his chest made him feel like he couldn’t breathe. Without failing to continue doing his thing he propped himself up on his elbows to give the cough more leverage and in fact he did end up coughing up some blood, some phlegmy flecks of which made it onto the puddled wad of the redhead’s robe.

She didn’t notice. Her eyes were closed. He stared at her until she opened them. Boring into her. Creating a his/hers magnetic pull of understanding. They could be going at it till the end of time, barring any more hacks.

Except she stared back, and then she did something orders of magnitude worse than registering his phlegm: she laughed.

 

Can you believe what Daryl did with those knots? Daryl’s knot-work has been super above-par lately!

Before the girl with the sailor hat enters the room, a sadness envelops Daryl, won’t go away, threatens to swallow everything – the standard Ikea shelving and substandard futon, the row of tinctures and powders on said Ikea shelving, the refrigerator full of organs, the ointment he puts on his tattoos, which are always hurting as if they’re brand new.

Sadly he checks his muscles in the mirror. Sadly he notes that they never change, not even to atrophy. Sadly he takes a gulp of Mucinex. Mucinex can either stop your coughing or thin your mucus, making your coughs more productive. It’s not made for blood-mucus – just regular mucus. Shit. Now he’s imagining thinned blood-mucus splattered all over the girl in the sailor hat, her holding her sexy little hands to her sexy little face to shield herself from the deluge.

‘That’s not what I meant,’ she would say, ‘When I said sicko.’

 

I want you to feel my (me) deeply in myself.

A powdery splotch has reappeared on his lungs. Bad luck. People think death doesn’t matter when you’re in Daryl’s position, but it does matter, it matters a lot; find out you have an aggressive form of cancer and suddenly everything, every goddamn object in the room, is ringed in a residue of death, like mildew in tile cracks.

The annoying mystery of death. The embarrassing grossness of death. The video game-like unfairness of death, the way your body could make one stupid mistake and suddenly smiling orbs fill the screen shouting GAME OVER. The undeniable possibility that when it happens – this thing you’ve been thinking about non-stop, as ever-present and familiar as the ticking of the clock – you won’t understand what the fuck is going on.

You’ll lose the plot.

Your tattoos won’t make sense.

The girl won’t be a girl anymore, her face will be a TV screen turned to a non-existent channel.

Or worse – the girl won’t be there at all when it happens. What if the girl with the sailor hat exits the room and his body chooses that exact moment for game over?

 

Эй, мне нужен милый компаньон, с которым я могу поговорить, когда мне скучно, позаботится о нем и будет верен мне.

Because the girl with the sailor hat is taking her good sweet time entering the room, Daryl runs through a mental catalogue of every girl who has ever entered the room. Kind of Futuristic Girl and European Girl and Neighbours A and B and Girl in Pleated Army Miniskirt. The stunning variety of girls entering and exiting the room brings to mind the stunning variety of creatures in the animal kingdom, their feathers and camouflage, their noises and silences, their varied and glorious adaptations. A rainbow blur of animals and girls. The possibilities compound and compress into one little deer underneath Daryl, looking up. Here, take it. Take my life.

He wants to not die alone. He wants, he wants, he wants. It’s incredibly painful, the wanting. He smooths his plaid flannel sheets and pictures the girl with the sailor hat splayed out on them (except he can’t quite picture her clearly, she’s more like an eye floater or a chalk outline) and tries not to want. Without meaning to, he places his head in his hands. He smells pancreas; feels despair.

A husky, cigarette-flecked voice enters the room. The voice says, ‘It’s okay to want. Wanting is the essence of being alive. No duh.’ The voice sounds – familiarly – like it’s trying not to explode into laughter.

 

I’m looking for a sweet companion, someone to respond to my ‘sup’ late at night.

But the redhead in the white robe isn’t here. At least not bodily. Not her irritating smile. Not the smear of dark wine on her inner lips. Not the warm package of her body gently unspooling from her white robe. Nor the robe itself to remind him of blood-soaked bandages, or a shroud.

Her laugh is here. Prickly as a campfire, redolent with vocal fry. Her laugh makes Daryl want to punch a wall.

Sometimes it’s hard to formulate your own algorithm for wanting. For example, five seconds ago all Daryl wanted was for a woman to enter the room, preferably the girl in the sailor hat, but really any of the aforementioned women would do; he wanted a woman to enter the room and he wanted to do his thing with her until she was weak, helpless to love. By Daryl’s calculations, that factor combined with his stamina meant they’d never stop going at it. Ergo, no dying alone.

But now that an (almost) woman has entered the room, all Daryl wants to do is be alone so he can enter ketosis. Ketosis will sponge up his brain fog, freshen his mitochondria, allow his cancerous cells to achieve cell death, ensure that he will live forever with or without the girl in the sailor hat.

Then again. After a while, modelling optimised behaviour gets blah and you wonder what else there is. That’s when your mind wanders – poisonously – to dying alone. Its nearness.

The head-free redhead laughs.

‘Do you ever stop talking?’

‘I said that out loud?’

One misconception about not being real is that you are immortal. In fact, your cancer metastasises quicker, cartoonishly so; from the warped cells lining your small air sacs it snowballs uncontrollably, rushing towards your adrenal glands, your liver, your brain.

Any moment you could spontaneously combust in a confetti blast of guts. And there it is – an end to your wanting, your wondering, your dumb circular misery …

Oh angel of death, clean me, make me perfect.

‘Daryl, relax.’

 

VI

We spent forever preparing for the orgy. We utilised lotions, pomades, lubricants, almond-based exfoliants, ice cubes, tweezers, waxes, laxatives, Vitamins A and E, Korean red ginseng, Cordyceps capsules, horny goat weed, the bark of an African evergreen tree, Nair, merkins, freckle erasers, toenail polish, eyebrow threads, nood flashers, douches that made our insides smell like funeral homes, epilators that made us smooth and raw like plucked chickens.

Then we curled against the edges of our wireframes, goose-bumped and tan, trembling, every sorry piece of ourselves concentrated on an atom-thin filament of feeling wanting to expand. Wanting to and not allowed.

We stayed in our wireframes without being found. We grew older without changing.

Then news came that the orgy had already happened. There were rumours that it had been over in a millisecond, and was nothing but a trick of light.

We weren’t sure how to register our displeasure. We were exhausted from doing nothing. We were pixelated, see-through, idiotic, not threatening in the least.

At first we were like, ‘What the hell?’ Except the words didn’t escape our slippery mouths. It was more of a thought, thought all at once. When we shouted, no sound came out. When we pounded on the walls, the walls had too much give. With even gravity an iffy proposition, every movement felt unbearable, like a bad tickle, or a banshee screeching through our arteries.

We were pissed. We were so pissed we thought we might burst.

We were afraid we might burst.

We were sure the only thing left to do was to burst.

At that point we were still swingers and grannies, dilfs and real estate agents, college co-eds and international glamour models; we had our own desires and outlines, even if our desires ranged from watery pale to burning, and our outlines would sometimes slip and combine with another’s.

And yet suddenly we had the acute sense that we were underground, and always had been, sort of trapped inside fibre optic cables, sort of trapped and frantically moving.

We throbbed forward. We bulged holographically. We burst.

We got juices on our nothingness. We squirmed against invading mycelia. We felt just as pissed, but with new, distracting sensations. The thing is, Daryl was with us. We could feel his Daryl-ness, separate from our we-ness. There was something qualitatively different about him. Something beautiful and wrong.

Wrong like the scenario with the babysitter? No. Wrong in a new way. His wrongness had a smell to it. The smell of late-spring air floating into a house and mixing with must and old wood. The smell of coming home from school when it’s still light outside, and knowing it will be light for some time.

Daryl was ahead of us now, blending with the webs and root forms outside. Now he could taste every element of the soil: that fragment of mouse, that gas void, those particles of quartz.

We remembered the first time we were naked for a reason. How our teeth kept chattering. How matter-of-factly or not our lover’s gaze drifted and fell on our belly buttons, our dimples, our hips. How we gazed back and/or squeezed our eyes shut. How stupid we felt, and how fantastic to feel stupid.

Then we felt like before that. We felt nude as insects, as springtails and maggots.

The mycelia made a slow feast of us, licking and sucking our toxins, our we-ness.

We were past enjoying being slowly feasted on. We were that fragment of mouse, that gas void, those particles of quartz. We were mycelia, feasting.