Joshua Cohen - Four New Messages

He paused, drank some sort of murky plumwater, took puffs on a short handrolled stub.

But then somebody uploaded that scene to the internet, he said, where to this day you can find it.

He turned behind the bar to wind the clock.

Business was changing, he said.

Movies where you sat in the dark with a hundred people groping one another gave way to television where you sat in the dark by yourself. Then the internet came around, cords became cordless, wires became wireless, suddenly entertainment was free and everyone’s an amateur — amateurs at being themselves — because only celebrities are lucky enough to get paid just for being. Buy a camera, convince your bestlooking kinsfolk, upload, and Play — no more packaging, no more distribution where the smut’s hauled out to the far bazaars among the bahns. This was democracy, this was enfranchisement, all that other sluttery you sold us — CocafuckingCola, shiny motorcycles parked between the legs of our mothers.

The bartender’s eyes were elder, rheumy, his mouth disfigured, raggedly burnt and rimmed with moles like a castellated ashtray, like the hoops and arches of a crown. He snuffed his rollie, cleared the ashtray behind the bar.

His nose was a sharply tuned muzzle, was a hatchet. He was wolfish, vicious.

He said, Toyta returned to doing porn after her serious stint — she was savvy. She founded her own singlefee, multipass network — a dozen sites, a dozen girls, independents under her personal curation. An entrepreneura — that and not any implanted measurements is why her story is still told.

(I’m certainly polishing his English. Through the flit of whiskers he was facile but incorrect and interspersed locutions in French, in German, Italian — I’ve also filled in details and — no, you’ll decide.)

It’s said that the neighbor of her Grozny aunt had a daughter who was sold via Ukrainians to an au pairship in the West. My own— Grossnichte, Grossnichte —grandnieces, yes, grandnieces ended as Gulf commodities, whored to the oily emirates, the sheikh sex dens of Dubai—

XXX

_________________

He — I—sat listening to this story,to the script of this tale and to others. Dizzied by the dates and locales, the vertiginous names — what linguæ!

He sat on a stool at the bar and let this wizened bartender give him an education — this tender who’d taught himself the idiom by studying a UK travelguide “to Swiss.” He had a cigarette and a drink, unidentifiable, he was learning how to smoke and how to drink, he’d been abroad for a month already but was not going back, he felt as if he’d graduated from even himself, that he was a new person now waiting only to receive the new skin to prove it — signed by no one, signifying nothing.

In the vid, behind Moc’s head, a calendar had hung. The image on the page for the month of May showed a bouquet of blossoming trees — birch?/dogwood?/willow? — in front of the castle he’d stood in front of that morning (apparently, it was a renowned castle, though arduous to find — tired afterward he’d wandered into this bar at random, it had about it the rogue air of foreignness, of youth).

He’d had reprinted — at a kiosk in a webcafé huddled between a shashlik stand and a kvassarium — a stack of that screengrab, which froze mild May above Moc chastely clothed, or in that interim declothing phase (it was the only frame that satisfied all criteria): just her face and, regrettably, perhaps the top cleave of her breasts. He’d been asking around for weeks: Is this setting in any way familiar? do you recognize the girl or just last month? He’d handed one to this proprietor’s hispid paw not an hour before — this proprietor who called himself Publicov and was closer to being an upright verbose lupus than anything human.

How do I know you’re not another filmmaker? Publicov asked. Or maybe this Moc owes you money and you want to do worse things to her than what is done for the pleasuring of cameras?

He said to Publicov, You have to believe me — I was sent by her family in America.

Now she has family in America? The barwolf sucked his lips, fanged stiff the hair around them.

Cousins — I’m Moc’s cousin from Jersey.

Roland Jersey — what did you say you were called?

Orlando, he said, Orlando Kirsch (first name the city his mother was born in, last name that of his father’s orthodontist).

Publicov said, I don’t know what I’m looking at, and lit another rollie.

Izvinitye, turning away from the smoke to busy with the bottles — containments undusted, displayed like women tall and smooth and without protuberance, ranks of uncomplicated women, easier to uncork, easier to pour.

But Publicov hadn’t returned the printout, it lay like a rag sopping up the bar — the same printout posted that morning all over the ornate ironwork gates surrounding the calendared castle, on grave crucifixes in the dim midden yards of ruined churches, across the graffitied walls of gnomish humpy bunkers and imperious towers — glued and taped and stickered and tacked and nailed.

He asked Publicov, Please keep an eye out for her, telling him he was staying at a certain “Hotel Romantical,” where he’d also left the desk clerk, an obliging pink boy of approximately his age, with a sheaf.

There was no text on this primitive poster save an address for an email account he’d opened the night of his arrival: meetingmoc@moc.com — the new address of his newest domain, $5/month in perpetuity it cost, and his bank, his parents’ account at the bank, was scheduled to make the payment on the first of the month, the first of every month, and to do so indefinitely or until his parents’ funds were depleted, which meant this empty website— We’re Under Construction, We’re Still Under Construction —and its full inbox of tipsters’ emails might outlive him.

Publicov, finished prepping for lunch’s rush, turned to him and said as if in afterthought, And you might not want to try asking the police.

He said, So I won’t.

We’ll drink to that, and Publicov poured himself a glass, then refilled his, both to their brims. Together they clinked, took down the warm shots colored like a bruise. Publicov’s glass hit a tooth, a slimy cuspid, which fell out and soaked in the dregs, a lonely rottenfaced fang. The bar was beginning to fill with customers, with noon, and Publicov must have been distracted. The drink tasted like the colors of the walls, like the turpentine that would remove that black. That spore, accreted grime.

The windows were open, the door, like a wing, aflutter. The crowd, on surrounding stools, in chairs at wheeltop tables, was vocal, was warming — they were sweating what they had drunk. Bluish ghosts wisped from their lungs but above him hovered only a miniature white cloud and he did not suspect his cigarette brand, he suspected himself, his soul (and hungered for a waitress — he wondered why there wasn’t one around).

In a high nook, nested amid a thatching of cables, a television was playing sport — which sport he didn’t recognize, he was too impaired. It wasn’t darts — because that was being played against the door with a kitchen knife — nor was it a game exclusively of running or jumping. The rules, assuming there were any, involved a ball round like a spot but spotted itself, impregnated with a rambunctious demon, it hopped and skipped and jumped around as a team of perhaps fifty grown men had to run and avoid it, because it wanted to hit them and kill them, and the men could run but they could run only in the confines of the stadium, and the stadium, as the volume was lowered throughout the afternoon, got smaller and quieter until it was just a silent spit of light and he was alone with Publicov, who handed him his bill.