Joshua Cohen - Four New Messages

Barreling in that bloodred van (all the interview subjects mentioned that, as red as blood), from borders as illegible as signatures, to checkpoints blurry like their stamps. While idling at a crossing, the joke was: Where’s the separate lane for the Americans? The guards kept the envelopes they were handed, sealed — they didn’t need to be reminded of their lines.

From goatweed town to village, the farther away the better, the better chance at gullibility on the part, and it was a part played, of the girl. Same gist, different oblast. But never getting so far from civilization — twin crowhaired Gypsy subjects stated that Yury had told them — that they’d lose their signals: their phone reception, a dependable internet connection (who were the sources for the rest of this? bartenders and barbouncers and disco DJs, an incompetent candidate for a regional legislature, the owner of a settlement’s only electronics outlet where Yury had bought brake fluid and nine volt batteries once, and, of course, obviously, local girls — girls who’d declined advances, girls with kasha teeth and bellies like pregnant dumplings who swore they’d refused “the friend,” who promised they hadn’t been refused by him —never a girl eventually filmed, never One who’d become a star).

Usually the morning after they’d met at whichever hamlet’s lone bar or wannabe club he’d call her whose number he’d tattooed dramatically along an arm in the midst of frenzied dancing — he’d call early to disorient, waking the girl only to do her the favor of giving her an hour, for her parents to clear out for work, for her to apply razor, makeup, brush (he and Yury slept in the van or, if awake, “the friend” would flip through last night’s polaroids).

They’d arrange an interview as if this were a professional engagement— this was a professional engagement — meeting for creamed coffees at the hamlet’s sole barclub reopened by morning as a canteen serving what can now be confirmed as a light but succulent Frühstück (when “the friend” wanted to persuade through intelligence he’d find the German word).

There he might ask straight out to see some identification. The other conceit was inducement: he might neg and argue and feign incredulity, convincing the girl it was her idea to show it to him — figuring if she’d spread her wallet, she’d spread something else.

It was only when he saw her sum that he solicited (with allowances, reportedly, for girls whose age of consent was within a year or two or three).

After this vetting the appointment might adjourn to the van, its wheels astride the canteen’s curb, where Yury, bleary, would buckle the girl up front and interpret the terms on the dash — explaining, or obscuring, the particulars involved, then guiding her hand to fondle the appropriate releases (“This is a translated contract, it says the same as it does in English,” except it doesn’t).

Though obviously an encounter like this was no guarantee, especially not when compared to an email — the prospects who’d responded to the ad, the pursued pursuing, seeking stigma with alingual typos.

That ad, being untranslated, flattered:

It said, If you can understand this you’re special and deserve to be treated specially, you’re the elect, lucky enough to give us an address and we’ll drive up direct, hump our grip up eighteen flights of stairs to knock on your door (the elevators having been installed out of order) — you’ll open and greet us, you’ll hug us and kiss us, you’ve won us, we’ll ply you with substance in thanks, then strip and fuck you for posterity — with your husbands and fathers and boyfriends out belaboring the docks and hangars, ensconced behind their paleotechnic computer terminals the size of motelrooms, slobby in their pinching jeans and unironic tshirts, too tired to prevent or remedy.

You don’t have to leave your tower, which was an identical copy of the prior tower visited, you don’t have to leave your apartment, which was a perfect clone of the previous “flat”—a number of the females surveyed spoke a studious Anglo-English — you don’t even have to be sober, shouldn’t have to be sober again (the substances provided were vodochka, a nailbite of cocaine). If porn was concrete, these girls were cement — cement being the most important component of concrete, what makes concrete stick, what makes it bind, the rest is just sand, water, and air — without these girls, the porn would never adhere, the screens would go blank, the towers would crumble.

In winter, on a junket to a smaller burg whose snow and ice kept the populace indoors, “the friend” proposed to meet a girl vanside, parking that bloodbright mobile in the square by the townhall and plague column, by the manger and tree, by the monuments to horsebacked wars saddling generations with occupation. He drove the girl to her dacha — which was abandoned for the season — where they dressed a tripod in her clothes for a scarecrow, put a picnic blanket down and thawed the garden.

Another winter another dacha, but this dacha used yearround since the family had been evicted from their permanent residence for nonpayment. The girl’s deaf or blind or both deaf and blind grandmother was exiled to the kitchen, while Mama — laid off from her banktelling shift, home from selling knitwear in the market — joined in her horny self — no need to look at her ID.

However, all prospectives were made aware: if there were ever any parental or supervisory issues that rendered filming in their cinderblock villa or cottage not feasible, or just undesirable, “the friend” was prepared to relocate to virtually any area cemetery, junkyard, or gully and fuck in the back bay of the sanguineous van — amid the hubby spare tires and jutting jack, the encompassing external drives and menagerie of woofers and tweeters — with always newly purchased, still in its shrink plastic bedding rolled down: latex beneath her, latex inside.

They’d make do with the van instead of renting a room or putting up at a pension — but was this because the accommodations available were so horrible (the bedbugs scuffling, hatched from the sconces)? or because when a room was cheap, its trouble was free? As policy, shakedown money, to neighborhood operators or the mafiavory, never was paid. Yury kept a gun in his pants, the uncircumcised coming more naturally than feminine circumspection. This amateurishness, a voluble amateurishness, was their aesthetic, all of theirs.

And finally — after the rubber was removed to unleash another manner of voluble across a girl’s eyebrows — there’d be an outro Q & A, postmortem.

How much did you like it?

I liked it moc! very much!

Last session, “the friend” had mislaid the cards, and a vibrating pouch of dildos and lube, and so here he’d had to improvise — with bottoms ripped from pizzaboxes scrawled across with marker:

“My name is YOUR NAME. Today I had my first sex on camera.”

Say it, he said, waving the cardboard spotted with cheesegobs and grease.

My name is YOUR NAME, today I — but this peroxidized little sister of a girl he’d had the previous Easter was interrupted by a drip in her eye.

Just for you @, “the friend” prompted, and the sister, who’d been sororally recommended, repeated.

Say, Goodbye.

That day might have seen this girl’s first sex on camera, but not on film — nobody used film. Rather they used a format more indestructible, yet even more evanescent — Digital. “The friend’s” digit dangled at its largest size, glabrousized. Then shrank at sixty frames per second.

After the redlight was no light, was dead light, it was his turn in the shower. He toweled his cock dry, put it to sleep in the cinch of a drawstring.