Mark de Silva - Square Wave

MATCHMAKER: But you can be so natural in character. Your scene in Ransoms is amazing.

VIOLETSKYE: You mean I look scared and confused tied up on the bed. But I was! Not from being tied up but from being on a porn set fucking strangers in costume. So I just got lucky. Even that — I wouldn’t be scared now. That’s going away and then the roles just seem silly. I can’t help smirking, even during. Some girls do that I know, make it sort of ironic, but the scenes aren’t very hot then. Irony and sex don’t mix.

PTERODACTYL: You and Sasha. Philosophers of sex…

VIOLETSKYE: The best ones don’t let that show. They actually have some commitment or they never lose the wide eyes and keep turning the guys on that way, not with the character. Or the role just has fear or confusion built in like Ransoms .

VIOLETSKYE: Ha! Don’t really know her but would like too. Another generation. She has that sexy jawline.

APACHI5: But you can do both can’t you? No need to choose.

VIOLETSKYE: I can but now I just want to fuck without the gimmicks and get paid. That sort of honesty turns ME on. Otherwise I’ll end up one of those bored Vivid girls. Unhot.

ARCELOR: I think it’s so cool you have your own take.

MATCHMAKER: Your last few scenes have been getting wilder.

VIOLETSKYE: This new scene, it’s cool. I’m happy with it. It’s a feature so you think it’s easier. But I tore my anus doing it. It was swollen for three days and shitting was a nightmare. I barely ate.

BONEYARD: That sucks! I’m so sorry Violet.

VIOLETSKYE: And then it turns out someone hadn’t even had their PASS test cleared yet. So I’m sure I’m fine but I have to wait to be sure I don’t have HIV now.

KIRKPATRICK: Occupational hazards;)

VIOLETSKYE: That was a feature film. So what’s the difference? The money. I don’t think gonzo should be second-class. Everything interesting in features comes from gonzo. It’s the lab.

APACHI5: I thought you got banned.

KIRKPATRICK: Ten days.

ARCELOR: Why do you waste your time here? No fucking life.

KIRKPATRICK: Same reason as you.

BONEYARD: Get back to yr bridge and suck Scottie off, Kirk.

VIOLETSKYE: Lonely like us ☺

KIRKPATRICK: Have the mods even verified that this is Violet Skye? She shows up in this thread out of nowhere. And she doesn’t talk like the deer on camera, does she.

VIOLETSKYE: How should I talk?

KIRKPATRICK: I met you a month ago, at the convention in LA, and you didn’t sound anything like this. You were just a ruined child. A fool. You should be banned not me.

PTERODACTYL: More bullshit from this guy.

BONEYARD: Prob. should verify though, even if Kirk’s just trolling.

CASSANDRAMASON: No I can tell, it’s her. Some of us have been to college, guys. Sorry to lurk.

KIRKPATRICK: Have you? Not community. A real one.

VIOLETSKYE: Cassie!

CASSANDRAMASON: Congrats on the nominations. You are going to WIN, sexy. I will see you in Vegas at the awards.

VIOLETSKYE: Thank you!!! Yes just two weeks left, see you then. Would love to work with you someday cutie. You have such a pretty pussy.

BONEYARD: WE ALL WANT TO SEE THAT!

ARCELOR: Kill the all-caps please.

CASSANDRAMASON: I want to eat yours V

KIRKPATRICK: Bet Cassandra’s a fake too.

VIOLETSKYE: Wish we could ask the same of you Kirk but you can’t be a fake because you aren’t anyone at all.

CASSANDRAMASON: HA!

KIRKPATRICK: Clever for a worthless whore.

MODERATOR 2: Cassandra you are already registered with us. Can you do the same Violet?

{User Kirkpatrick deactivated}

VIOLETSKYE: What a shame. Honest guy. This is why we do this.

VIOLETSKYE: Yes will do.

MODERATOR 2: So glad to have you! Don’t worry about the trolls. We’ll take care of them.

While Janice sat at the kitchen table, staring into him, Lewis, on the other side of it, could think only of the foundering of his latest chat-room impersonation. Whatever was wrong with Kirkpatrick, he’d managed to sniff Lewis out. It could take a hateful man with all the wrong intentions to see things as they were. Especially lately.

In truth, if you were observing neutrally, and not through the inflamed imagination of a fan, who was elated to be in any kind of touch, even virtual touch, with the object of his fantasies, it wasn’t hard to see that the stories and theories Lewis put in Skye’s mouth were incredible. There were too many barbs, however oblique, directed at the very people she was supposed to be courting. That was the point of these “adult” chat-rooms, after all. Porn promotion. There were also the places where Lewis would break character to make overly intellectual points — that porn had a way of destabilizing the viewer’s sense of self at least as much as the actors, say — or where he would reveal the banal brutalities of industry life in terms that were impossibly detached.

But the men in the chat rooms, in thrall to the idea of flirting with their dreams, were not in the frame of mind to notice the liberties he was taking with character. They took Lewis’s indictments at face value, and were forced to see them as emanating from the most sympathetic of sources, under the circumstances: the actresses themselves. Their fantasies were terrorizing them.

Lewis didn’t know Skye’s civilian details, so there’d be no fooling the moderator. He clicked the page shut. Better to flee the site, he thought, than to let them prove that he wasn’t her, only a simulation, an impostor. His ideas might survive then, even in the heavy shadow of Kirkpatrick’s doubts, living a kind of twilight existence, subtly shaping their thinking.

He’d turned to the porn forums only after breaking off his physical interventions in the city. At this point, he felt, he could only be a beating or two away from arrest. Anyway, the last of the hookers, Lisa, her calm had exhausted something in him. He couldn’t explain it to himself, but he knew he’d rather not look these girls in the face anymore, especially with the streets as clear as they were these days. The rewards no longer justified the risks. Isn’t that how his father would have put it? In the end, there was nothing that wasn’t an investment.

That didn’t mean there wasn’t more work to be done. Just not in Halsley. Scale was the question. He’d first grasped its importance, in the realm of politics, a decade ago, when he’d helped Kames and the Wintry expand into Providence. The group was fragile back then. Now they were a force.

How to answer the question of scale in his own case, given his own ethical imperatives? How different were they really, though? Lewis’s sensibilities owed more to Kames than he’d like to admit. The two hadn’t spoken in years, except through the odd email. Still, Lewis had listened to him lecture dozens of times. It must have left a mark.

Pornography, Lewis thought, might well be the bigger canvas he needed now, and these chat rooms might be his inroads. He’d grown up, like most men, thoroughly at home with porn, in both its public and private guises. It shadowed him, but so closely he had a hard time seeing it as something distinct from himself. But in the last few months, as he’d withdrawn from the world and tapered off his meds, the fetish had come plainly into view as something attached to him like a parasite. Once he saw it this way, he found it impossible to get off to it. Lately he seemed to feel it less necessary to get off at all — by himself, with Janice, with anyone. It felt like evolution.

One of the things he liked about the forums — and he’d liked this about his pre-assault chats with the hookers too — was that they forced him to improvise, react in the moment. He didn’t come to them with scripts, fixed ideas, or stories to lecture them with. The situation would draw fresh ideas out of him, extend his thinking in unpredictable directions.