Joshua Cohen - Four New Messages

The bed wrecked in its throes, the noise of its legs and spine as if the chatter of the girl’s rickety bones — an agony of creaks, a brutish splintering of howls and gurgles — them going back and forth and back as the pardner with the camera, lights, and sound, pulls in, pulls out, in again then zooms out on the fourhorned raging bed wobbling mortally, it has knees now, it’s on all fours now as they fuck on all fours atop it, ripping out tufts of mattress hair and popping buttons like whitehead pimples and, though we never know her real name just her naked beauty (how when she’s on top her tits turn dizzying circles, how when he doggies her her breasts hang down like lucent bunches of fruit, like lamped grapes the veins), though we never know her real name just what she’d told him her name was or what his pardner had told him, interpreting, when he’d asked her just like they’d rehearsed, “My name is Moc” (practice it, pronounce it Mots ), she perhaps knows his name, because 12:46 in “the friend” shrieks — we can just barely make this out above the bedsounds — Say my name! Say my name, bitch!

But Moc the bitch does not respond, or can’t (and only later does she speak again, garbling what she’d been told: “It tastes so big, it feels too sweet,” i t.d.). Anyway the bed from their sawing atop it is too loud to hear whether she responds with his name or not — her mouth an unlanguaged vowel as he slams her once, pulls out, pulls her toward him again, a leg gives way, two legs give way and they’re leaning against a hallwall and the wall’s rughanging that’s purple and gold and damp with sweat, with fluids his and hers in toecurled arabesques, and panting as he straddles the splintered wood and her and strokes himself off into her mouth and onto her face in splinters that are white and the trees are wet and white like in another season (the calendar in the background, tacked to the opposite wall, shows nature and says, in translation, May ) — the trees, the trees, the trees are webbed with sperm.

_________________

They say in this Industryyou need a professional name because then it’s the professional who’s guilty and not you, then the profession is at fault and not you or your parents, your schools or the way you were raised.

This professional name — and no, it can’t be as rudimentary or flippant as “Professional Name”—becomes a sort of armor or shield, speaking in newer terms a version of what this Industry in its more responsible incarnations requires: protection, a prophylactic.

A condom, a condom for a name.

(Or else, consider it like you would an alias for the internet, an avatar that can investigate realms that you with your own name couldn’t. A safer way of being yourself, by being someone else.)

And they say that one not particularly unique way of identifying this unique professional name is: first name the name of your childhood pet and secondly, as surname, the name of the street on which you grew up — in which case I’d be Sparkin West 2nd after my parents’ dog (that shepherd we had for only a year, though I was also something of my doggie’s dog), and a lane that subtly grids the wealthier suburbs of Jersey, where my father sits wrapped in the robe of his disused urban planning degree as the hypochondriacally retired founder of a successful addiction counseling business and from which my mother, trained as an historian, commutes daily to the city to edit the travel and health sections of a trendy magazine for women and men who read like girls.

Which is how I’ve come here or why.

From now on, in accordance with accepted journalistic practice, I will keep myself out of it. Kept distant, alone. He was no journalist but the son of a journalistic mother who in middle age had capitulated to exposés on waxing and superfoods that stop aging — and his assignment so vague as to be birthright.

Grow, change.

He’d heard different things, not from any pros who know but from hearsay, from wasteful reading around the internet, clicking through the links.

He’d heard that his professional name should be, first name the last name of his fifth grade mathematics teacher, de Vaca, last name the first name of his favorite aunt, Diana — and so de Vaca Diana. Or else that he should use the first name of his favorite brand of candy and as last name the full name of his favorite baseball player who played for the Giants until getting enmeshed in a major steroid scandal — Berry Berry Smackers Barry Bonds. That was what he’d do in school. He’d sit with notebooks, filling them with pen, with pencil, with names. Of other people he’d rather be, of other personalities. He’d sit with pen and pencil, gnawing their spans to match the gnarled branches just beyond the window, wet with rain, saliva. Always a thigh warm against the radiator. Then Ms. de Vaca, Mr. Heller (English), Mrs. Rae-Heller (social studies), would draw the shade.

He was a mediocre student, but in order never to work every degree had to be obtained.

College was enrolled on the other coast, expensively intentionally, though it was called a university, despite its being the only institution that accepted him.

It was May and all those not vicious enough to have found an offer to stay seaside went home to their agrestic Midwests, back to Mommy and Daddy, inferior internships, inferable jobs. And he was going back too, he was scrambling to pack the room into the U-Haul rented for the week — pick it up on one coast, drop it off with another franchise on the other.

He’d found a parkingspace too far from his door, down the block. Opposite the dogrun overrun that bright breezy Friday, the benches surrounding filled with profs and students who dressed like profs, standoffish admins lisping infidelities by phone and the hirsute homeless underliners of paperback books — he passed them sweating up and down the three flights from his room to the truck, down the block, each load he carried farther down. Weightlifters in the park, lifting weights, lifting weights, lifting weights in reps, in tight swimsuits, in reps. The busstop crowded with blondness for the beach. Hot and blandly still. Clear. That scape so different from this, so different from here. (But it seems this might be the incorrect approach.)

He laid the carpet down in the back, then the shelves and endtables and wobbly coffeetable and coffeemaker by the kitchen corner, above a low shelf kept always for his pan, his pot, his fork and knife, spatulation. He was drenched, wiping the hair from his face then stooping to lift, with the knees, with the knees, his body carrying the boxes and its boxy self — overdressed in sticky jeans, but all the shorts were packed — in sudden jerks, in spasms. Bicycles swirled around, walkers walked and runners jogged, a tanned xanthous man in the park, lifting weights, lifting. Everyone was light, was weightless, he felt, and only he was sulking, pale and big and bloatish, loading himself down in this lumbering truck — he’d become a mover, a slomover, a driver, a slodriver, he had no plans for what would happen at home or what he’d do with the degree he wasn’t picking up. Media, PR. IT, finance. Generous options, given Mom’s connections. This country should take only four, five days to drive — he and Mom were supposed to have their conversation come Friday next, graduation being that week too, he wasn’t sure which day.

When he was finished clearing the room he sat on the bed wondering if he’d forgotten anything, but he’d only forgotten what he was sitting on — tedious, it couldn’t not be overlooked — Ms. Zimmer’s bed, the saggy loaner.

He scooped through his pockets, the jeans dried rough and hot, felt the truck keys, found the keys to the apartment. He left them on the pillow but didn’t leave a note, no paper — he’d coordinated his departure with Ms. Zimmer’s root canal appointment, giving dumb excuses about slots and fees, the traffic.