Joshua Cohen - Four New Messages

How could he even begin to map what was inside his Apple, its pulp contents? its seeds? On top of everything, on the desktop, there’s a folder called Davids documents and in the folder called Davids documents there’s a subfolder called Sophomore_year, which contains in itself subsubfolders called Math and Science and Math_again and Science2 and Language-and-literature-requirements, which contains inside not a folder anymore or folders within folders like a Slavic doll nested one doll within another within another like they’re pregnant already — that’s what happens whenever a user turns his back and leaves them, even toys, alone — but files, files upon files listed and named and the names of these files are Gandhi and Gandhi-one-more-time and Pilgrimsprogress and Pilgrimsprogress-final and, lastly (alphabetically), What activitees I did on my summer vacation, which is a file, no, an essay, no, a paper from as early as fifth grade, which begins: “What activitees I did on my summer vacation was to go with Mom to gazebo. We went sailing and I got ‘severely sunburn,’ the doctor said, then chickenpox also and laid in bed with vanilla ice cream, taking weird smelly baths … The End,” he actually wrote, “The End.”

He sat out on the furthest bough of his Apple — leaned against the cold headboard, plastic, against the cold wall, the wallpaper testing its pattern of bars. He was a file called Him in the folder known as Motel —the motel’s proper name lodged in the throat. Its decor was worse, inconsequent. A mess of burns, of stains — but who hasn’t read motel descriptions before? who hasn’t stayed in motels themselves? Any description would be extracurricular unless he could blaze another way, an alternate route — the green road branching from the red road, the main road always the red road smoldering down south into the black.

Imagine there is a God. Just imagine, you don’t have to all of a sudden believe in anything and cut your scrotum or go bathe your head in rivers. Imagine to yourself that there’s this omniperfect entity looking down upon us all, with eyes, with real anthropomorphic eyes, really looking. Now, imagine He’s doing so from just above this motelroom, which is a rectangle of sorts, it actually looks like a screen — and there is no roof, God has taken the roof off Himself. You can locate our hero in the lower righthand corner. There, he’s a dot. A forgettable pixel, the whim of a bawdy baud. You thought only a splotch of coffee, a sneeze’s stain or semen. But him, picture him. Now, God or the motel’s invisible management, take Your giant finger and place it over him, Your cursor. Place it directly above his face. Directly above and blinking. Click.

He opened a window — not an actual window onto Creationdom, just something we call a window. An opening into a new otherness or alterity, not to make it sound any better than the depressing it was. Though it was good the motel got such good service — he was connected, stably online, for a fee. To be added to his bill. Spending so much money, so much of it not his.

He was tired of unfinishing delinquent assignments, tired of rereading homework done in a rush. He entered into the browser the address, which he wouldn’t store in memory. Instead he’d stored it in his own memory and supplied it every time. Daily, often twice: www., the name of his preferred diversion, com, which stands for “commerce”—he pressed Enter, depressed, also called Return.

This site he frequented on select evenings and weekends and weekday mornings and afternoons loaded new vids daily, that’s how they’d advertised at first, “Tens of New Vids Daily,” then it was “Dozens of New Vids Daily,” and then in flusher times (flush the fraught tissue down the toilet), just “New Vids Daily Cum Check Them Out,” and sometimes he sampled those new vids while at other times he sampled the other vids he’d missed on the days he’d fructified with only one or two of the tens and dozens on offer. An incentive to, as the site’s top teaser banner advised, “Xxxplore.” None too brilliant but comprehensive, the site gave variety, moreover, it was free, he assumed supported by its ads: swinger networks popping here, loading there the freshest fleshlight sextoy (now phthalate-free), longdistance callingcards (Centroamérica).

We wish to communicate how guileless he was — there in that middling motelroom as in his dormer apartment, no expert, no connoisseur. He had experience but no discernment, and anyone who tells you that the more time you spend with something the more particular you get about it has never been stuck in a marriage to his parents, has never grown up a boy with appetites and television: more is only more of more and to invoke subtlety or fuss is merely to show fear in the face of glut — Jersey boys in neon motels are never intimidated, they’re never afraid.

They just drop their pants (he dropped his pants). Stretched the underwear down — there’s no concern for not being prepared, no worry as to whether or not he’s ready. The computer is always ready, the internet’s always open (he’s never been unattracted to himself).

Bound by gridded paper, between panel ceiling and patchy carpet, he was as erect as the walls, as hard as the walls (telling someone how hard you are is to flatter yourself in lieu of claiming girth or length).

We shouldn’t be so crude. Though we’re sure whatever document we’ve opened, still unnamed, still unsaved, we’re sure it won’t be saved. They-say-in-this-Industry. Keystroke, stroke. Drag to trash.

When you’re on that first page or window of the site, when you’re in its Home, you’re faced with a list of vids, and each vid is advertised, in a sense, by a still from the vid, a stilled scene from the moving scene to come — a freezeframe or screengrab, a capture.

If you like the looks of that single, practically measureless moment, you click on it and the still image loads into a moving image — the vid moves, a movie (we can’t justify explaining this here, it just feels like it needs to be said — we’d rather not presume as to the depravity of our audience: Hello, Mom).

A taste is always given first, a still and silent taste, because if everything was sounding and in motion all at once, all the vids, you couldn’t decide which One would gratify desire, you’d become confused, Mom, and the warmth of your breath would become the overheating of anger.

Her screengrab seemed unpromising — he didn’t know why he clicked, maybe because even in the context of amateur porn, theirs, hers, was the most amateurish and he felt for that, not erotically, he felt pity. Even in still silence it came off as wrong, as wrongly incompetent. Fuzzy, unfocused. Angled oddly. The fan whirred to cool the drive, cooed. His mouth was dry, tongue heavy. It was a corner of her mouth then a swatch of smaller penis (onscreen all penises are smaller), a tracery of drool.

The room was dark. Nothing existed outside the spotlight of the screen — bluish, greenish, mucoid, queasily regorging — nothing existed outside the weakly fluctuant cast of its halo.

How could we remember any of the vids before her? how could anyone? She erased them, what deleted them was her apparition, her apparency. Though we might, like the virtual does, lie: we might say it was a big lips blonde that did it for him, or a shy spinnerette with tiny thimbleplug anus, we could say Latina mature with redblue hair and puffy nips for knees, we could say young teen hairlessness, Black Mama, we could fabricate forever …

He was of a generation — no, bad word, bad habits … we’re trying to say that everyone is our age now, even if they’re not. We all grew up with this crap, we didn’t know anything else — like Dad did, who masturbated to paper, to brownpaperwrapped magazines: pages glossy like lips, breasts shot verso, recto displaying recto, the navel that is the centerfold. Magazines not like the ones you work for, Mom — not fair that your son’s father had to be your husband too (though Dad never mentioned sex).