5/30/2017

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"Porn with Condoms," a story of mine, is in Crack the Spine. 

An Occurrence at the Only Place You've Ever Known

Full dick or get the fuck out.

He absorbed Allison’s message, the acknowledgment of his cop-out deflating Roger’s confidence faster than the flushed, un-full dick that was still drooped sadly across his knuckles like an ulcer-prone salamander.

Drawing the blue alien thing and/or palm tree over it in the Snapchat he’d sent her had been a gamble, stupid enough for her to forgo an acronym and use proper punctuation in her Gchat response. He’d done it because Allison had told him about how she, before sending a pic, would sometimes doodle Pac-Man ghosts skirting across her cleavage, how she and her friends would turn their nipples into rabbit noses or penguin eyes or a “titmouse,” her favorite pun.

When he couldn’t find flattering lighting in his room or seated on the toilet, when he’d only managed to achieve the thin-blooded hard-on of a gun-shy flesh rookie, when he’d found it impossible, given the length of his arm, to get a proper dick selfie angle that wasn’t an anatomy-book close-up but didn’t provide too much unnecessary perspective, he’d decided to compromise. Life was compromise. A breast partially blocked by a stick-figure rendition of a woodland creature was still a breast. He could live with that.

He’d positioned himself at his desk, scrolled through a few of Allison’s recent Facebook photos, worked himself to a state of semi-stiffness, gripped the base, extended his phone and tapped. The image had been fuzzy, the lack of contrast between skin and white tee shirt making for a less-than-enthusiastic representation of the focal appendage.

He’d used the app’s drawing tool to make a blue outline, expanding its parameters, shading it in. He’d added green palm leaves and/or antennae on top of the head, and two eyes and/or coconuts about halfway down the shaft. Not bad, he’d thought. Open to interpretation.

There would be neither interpretation nor reciprocation from Allison.

-          Doesn’t count since I can’t even see it.

-          you racist against blue dicks?

-          a little. come on roger. Full dick or get the fuck out.

-          fine, fine.

Roger listened for distractions, hoping his suitemate might need to borrow laundry detergent or ask why the bottle of Lubriderm was missing from the bathroom. He glanced out his window to see if any of the likely green-card-less Asian guys working construction on the adjacent building were having one of their frequent smoke breaks-slash-bullshitting sessions but the rooftop was empty except for plastic bags doing battle in the breeze. He remembered a movie where a maladjusted loner filmed a similar scene with a 90s camcorder and told his girlfriend that it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever witnessed. To Roger, the twirling sacks reminded him of a sadness he couldn’t quite place, emptiness under the guise of total freedom.

More importantly, he had no excuses for Allison, whose emojis had gone from tongue-flicking and joyous to crying/barfing zombies.

Roger removed his boxers a second time.

*

She’d gotten his email from the bottom of an article he’d published on an obscure site curated by a former professor. Some drivel about the evolution of celebrity worship syndrome focusing on the potential illuminati symbolism of fingerless gloves worn by Beyoncé and Jay-Z at a diabetes fundraiser. She wrote to Roger that she liked his acknowledging that the “legal framework in post-racial America relies on the myth that racist concepts no longer exist,” and was impressed with his portrayal of Beyoncé, noting that it reminded her of “that slutty girl who you keep around bc she’s a hot mess, makes you feel better about your life and always has good stories bc she’s a pathological liar – who i havent talked to after she got married at age 18 to a guy who needed a visa, just messaged me asking if she could use my email because she lost her pw. wut?”

He’d given up actual psychological research as an undergrad, and writing was a hobby in the downtime between preparing invoices and market analyses, but it felt cool to have a fan. Even if she didn’t seem like the throws-panties-on-stage type. Even if she didn’t seem like any type.

Allison Anvil. Her name sounded like a proto-feminist but retroactively offensive comic book character, like her online persona was administered by a psoriatic identity thief trolling in his basement for passwords and social security numbers.

Roger knew she was real, though. As in, not a dude.

Their exchanges followed a natural progression: Gchats, texts, following, friend requests. Her mobile uploads and posting history formed a more or less complete depiction of her last five years, too thorough to be forged. There were throwbacks of beach trips, a blurry ride on Disney World teacups. Diatribes about Holocaust Remembrance Day and World of Warcraft. A Young Democrats dinner highlighted by a Bill Clinton handshake and an ex-boyfriend Roger thought looked like a younger version of himself minus ~fifteen pounds of beer inflation. And the most recent ones – drinking simultaneously with lip-glossed companions from a bowl of neon-infused sludge, their duckfaces straw-induced and therefore permissible.

The kind of stuff Roger imagined he’d see and read from Jocelyn – the neighbor who did her laundry at the same time as him in their building’s communal basement dungeon and, when she wasn’t buried in her phone, appeared to be around the same age as Allison – if they’d been friends on Facebook or in reality.

Roger was a man who had done so much laundry.

He still lived in the first apartment he’d found on Craigslist, stayed put through several drug- and career-related roommate transitions and absurd rent increases, worked as a headhunter at the same IT company where he’d started even though he was mostly bored and there wasn’t much chance for upward mobility. He used the same hair product – “power putty for a windblown surfer look!” – long after his faux-scraggle days had ceased.

In the nine years since he’d graduated and moved to New York, his only relationship had been brief and on FaceTime with a girl who was still at the school he’d gone to in Maryland, who couldn’t deal with the distance between them and her desire for at least two members of the ultimate frisbee team.

That someone who seemed to crave stability would remain single for so long was puzzling to the friends and coworkers who populated the periphery of Roger’s life. He didn’t suffer from a recurring skin condition or extraordinarily gross breath; he was no better and no worse than the majority of his boat-shoed, IPA-swilling comrades.

There were women, maybe one or two a month. Bar-hookups, Tinder dates, alumni functions. Connections that lasted a couple hours, or petered off after a few increasingly foggy mornings after, and ranged from the outrageous – the day trader who let him put it in her ass after he bought a $400 bottle of Grey Goose and told her his Kindle sales rivaled James Franco’s, the daddy-funded poet from whom he received a period blood mustache and who later tried to cover it up by asking if he’d had a nosebleed – to the more pedestrian: a texting moratorium, an unrequited friend request.

It wasn’t that he was incapable of reciprocating passion, that his moments of sensitivity were feigned and served an ulterior motive.

He was alone because above all else, Roger loved ideas.

Age seven or eight, he would sit in Sunday school, listening to a watered-down version of Revelation, thrilled by the cartoon chaos it evoked. He would spend hours in his room creating his own action-figure End of Days – Mumm-Ra as the Antichrist, Princess Leia and Wonder Woman as angelic mediators, Ninja Turtles as the Four Horsemen. But a couple of years later, during a stretch of summer that included the demise of a second cousin, a cat, and a Siamese fighting fish, death became something far more brutal than the easy deus ex machina redemption found in dismembering a villain’s plastic limbs. If there was a god, Roger no longer wanted to be a part of his or her utter fucked-up-ness.

Instead, he focused on another portal that was mostly reliable and seemingly infinite, where age/sex/location was as malleable as his grasp of geography and his desire to blend in with whatever chatty den of liars and pedophiles his clicks would lead him. His first girlfriend was ninety-eight percent instant messages and two percent hugs before and after school. When she broke up with him in-person before the seventh grade winter formal, using more audible words than she’d spoken to him in the past month, he was only shocked because her messages the previous evening had included the requisite number of extra vowels and punctuations – byebyeee talk to u sooooon!!!! – to make it seem like everything was going smoothly.

High school nights, holed up in a parental home office suckling on filched Bacardi, he would scroll through his AIM contacts. He devised and honed a system for gathering information, for establishing a connection that seemed more meaningful because it usually played out on his own terms, the rehearsed-yet-casual sequences of manipulation that belied the painfully ordinary insecurity that consumed his non-typing life. He’d start with a simple, hi, hey, hello, wait for the nm u? response. The trick was in dictating the movement, carving its direction. If KatyKay40286 complained about the frumpy patterns rimming her newly issued field hockey skirt, he would commiserate by mentioning how his swim coach had screwed up everyone’s Speedo sizes – yea sucks its a little uh…tight hehe. After her expected LOLish response, he would write that it was probably nothing compared to the sports bras she was forced to endure (KatyKay40286 being a notable subject of bust-related speculation). Roger would then suggest that they play The Question Game. You had to alternate asking each other questions, one at a time, and that while the questions could be about anything, yes/no answers were discouraged. The game would start innocently enough – what life decisions caused Mr. Neary to become the kind of teacher whose coffee mug reeks of Kahlua every other class? – but would quickly veer toward the erotic:

whats your favorite position?
how big is/are your [                ]?

The questions were far tamer than what he’d encountered as a pubescent smut room devotee, but there was a thrill in the forging of textual intimacy, an arousal on par with what he imagined actual physical contact would elicit. If the girl got skittish and stopped playing or signed off, he would resort to another slightly less gratifying pastime: scouring the streaming video landscape in order to check in on which of his favorite starlets was farther along on the oft-tread arc, from casting couches and coy handjobs to triple penetration and rectal prolapse.

To an adult Roger, Allison was a welcome throwback to that indispensable era, though not in any sexual sense; the need to fulfill unrequited horny-boy urges no longer existed. Instead, they traded the facts – the loan-drowned reality of her recent graduation from a small school in a rust-colored Ohio city, his summer share on the straight part of Fire Island – and the obsessions – her resentment of a single-mother childhood and the sperm donation that led to her creation, his fear of developing colorectal cancer due to chronic Burger King gluttony – that comprised their inner and outer lives. She was fascinatingly ADD, filterless, able to jump, in the space of a few lines, from her internship at a law firm where she was trying hard not to perpetuate “America’s meritocracy myth,” to her quest to pillage the interwebs for the most awful sounding white baby names (my personal favorite so far is Kamdyn – aka murder capitol of the east coast), to the vitriol she posted on random people’s walls: “You do realize that Native Americans are a marginalized ethnic group that still exist, not a cutesie halloween costume. and your baby isn’t cute, fyi. is this an ad for birth control?”

For all she confessed, she never demanded the same from him. She could discuss how her roommate was a popular webcam model who got paid to play videogames in an elf costume and how sometimes Allison would try on the ears to not feel lonely, or how her bulimia phase had been so extreme that she wouldn’t go to class unless she was guaranteed a seat by the door and a clear path to a bathroom or garbage bin, and Roger wouldn’t feel compelled to tell her about how he cried constantly for months after he beat a pregnant squirrel to death with a nine iron or how he and his neighbor Timmy, before his mother found out about it, would take turns wiping themselves, post-toilet, as part of a game Timmy called “family time.”

All he had to do was keep the conversation going.

He would come home from work or a bar or wake up late and activate one of his devices and know that in a moment he’d be inundated with the same pleasing stream of pathos:

ugh roggerrrrr im dying

i took a vicodin

but i just took it

whenever i get really bad insomnia i get scared that i’ve developed bipolar

because that’s an early warning sign

and this is the age when people show their first symptoms

like stay awake for a week straight babbling like a homeless veteran

oh no. katy perry is back on Reddit.

save me from myself.

He could absorb her brand of damage until sated, take what he wanted and give back nothing.

Sounds awful :( gotta pick up a jacket at the dry cleaner. Later

                      

After a year Allison started trying to meet Roger in person. At first it was subtle. She was thinking of staying at a friend’s in Hoboken, would he be around if they took the train into the city? She had to come in from her mother’s house near Trenton to get her passport renewed at a Midtown office that happened to be near Roger’s office, would he want to get smoothies?

His limp excuses – he was sick, he had to attend a company-mandated retreat at a mud-covered obstacle course upstate, he would be starting a juice cleanse that would render him unbearably flatulent – awoke in her a directness that Roger found difficult to combat. They could hang out on his schedule. What weekends did he have free? When was she going to finally meet the famous suitemate who used Febreze as body wash? She would have no problem sleeping on the couch as long as fewer than three sex offenders lived in his building.

Roger knew that it might go down like this, that she would try to sabotage the idea of herself he had worked so hard to cultivate and maintain. He wasn’t skilled enough at Instagram to keep conjuring images of the places that coincided with his cop-outs, so he tried broaching the subject honestly.

-          Do you ever think that if we met in person it would ruin our internet bond?

          just that once you meet in person, that’s it, it’s no longer an internet friendship and there’s no turning back and reinternetizing it.

Her middle-finger emojis were swift, relentless.

He was selfish. He was a solipsist. He was needy. He was too privileged to understand the consequences of cultural appropriation. He wore the same Third Eye Blind tee shirt in at least fifteen of his pictures.

Though Roger agreed with most of her accusations, he didn’t feel the sting of her absence until the third day of signed-off silence. His coworkers had left their usual happy hour spot and he had secured a seventh pint. He was looking at a Buzzfeed list of horrible-sounding Trader Joe’s products that “seem vegan but shockingly aren’t!” and wanted to text Allison the link. He tried thinking of someone else whose opinion about the article he would find interesting or worthwhile. The bartender was mostly ignoring him, occasionally glancing at the dwindling pile of singles in front of his beer with increasing trepidation. With Allison he could drink to the point of being a dickhead and send her stupid shit and regardless of her response he would know that they were on the same wavelength for at least a few moments, feeding a deeper need, what he imagined it would be like to have someone worth coming home to.

Now he was simply another lonely dick.

When she signed back on (heyyy dummy I still h8t you and im never coming to nyc but hows ur week been??) he decided he would be more present, give a little more of himself, enough to keep her appeased. Even if she only wanted to tell him about sending her ex-boyfriend Photoshopped pregnancy tests or her ideas about the patriarchy’s relationship to anti-Semitism that evolved into a treatise on the shortcomings of biology. He would try.

-          if i could redesign sexy parts, balls would be on the inside, as would clits, and there would be no vagina, just a little hole, covered by the labia. and nobody would have hair.

it would be like the iOS 11 of genitalia.

-          isnt that pretty much what a vag is

-          no there’s the other shit inside

i don’t know what it’s called

the labia minora!

-          idk i kind of like my genitalia

-          you’re the only one.

the worst is when guys send dick pics.

like okay, i can tell if someone has a nice dick but i don’t need to see a picture of it.

-          note to self do not send dick pics anymore

-          i’m not going to get off to a picture of an erect penis

-          lol

-          you would never send a dick pic

-          haha only if asked

-          send me one

thats what snapchat was made for

-          i dont have an erection tho

-          that and me sending pictures of my boobs with animal faces drawn on them

how hard is it to get an erection? pun intended

-          very punny

-          now i’m inspired to send another boob creature

-          do it

-          not to you. i would only send it to you in exchange for a dick pic.

i just sent my friend a boob puppy.

-          are you going to have me arrested if i send one

-          no!

-          as long as you don’t screenshot mine

-          i dont even know how to do that

He didn’t know how, either, and wouldn’t have done it if he did. He didn’t want to deal with pissing her off again. The reference to a relative state of photographic permanence awoke in him a twinge of memory, an ugliness he tried to shake off while looking for his phone.

While Allison waited, faceless and soundless somewhere in New Jersey.

*

Roger took a second photo – this one blatant, unaltered – and pressed send.

As the image slid through the data channel to Allison’s screen, he felt a sharp pressure on his throat, a sense of suffocation that sped down through his limbs, a putrefying heat. Then a dizziness like when he was a child and would intentionally spin in a circle until falling to the ground, except now he was trying not to move, fighting the downward plummet.

At some point his vision ceased and he was aware of nothing but a feeling of fullness, a widening, a roar of liquid forcing him towards an artery-choking torment. He was swimming in near-darkness, submerged in a milk-thick sludge that, while alternatively burning and sponging his lungs was also buoying him in the direction of a faint light that kept getting closer until he collided with an earthen hardness a few feet beneath the surface where the water was now soup-thin, gleaming. He reached for one of the root-like structures whose ends rippled and flickered from the embankment and it broke loose, rubbering down into the murk.

He reached for another, another until he gripped one that held, pulled himself and emerged into an air that convulsed, engulfed his chest. He crawled onto a sandy outcrop and closed his eyes.

When he opened them he was upright, walking on a path that reminded him of a condo-stunted nature preserve where he and other ambitious young degenerates would share saliva and hastily rolled joints. Except here the sun-doused vegetation pulsed with a velocity that made him giddy, growing denser as he whirled into what became a vortex, a sequence of spirals that disintegrated and regrouped as irregular rows of hulking columns, multi-shaded and huge and formed of a substance that was softer than bark and free of branches.

Giant dicks. Thousands of them.

And tiny ones, lining both sides of the path, a sea-smelling undergrowth of brown and pink mushroom caps. The members implied an entire pulsing diaspora of masculine possibility: erections with varying degrees of height and curvature, throbbing and agitated, drooping, foreskinned willows, boulder-balls jostling the exposed earth, a coarse pubic lichen that could be dense or peach-sparse, leafy dark ringlets curling and twisting past the base of shafts, others manicured to a new-purse sheen.

As he took in the now-sharp environment, he realized that he had seen these dicks before, their context obvious in the memories with which they corresponded. Timmy’s baby carrot dangling in a toilet bowl. His first timid side-glances at adult equipment (including his father’s) in the piss-trough at the old Yankee Stadium. A fraternity brother whose primary career aspiration was to join an off-Broadway troupe of “genital origami” artists and who would practice his craft during chapter meetings. The ex-roommate he found one morning passed out naked on the couch, shit drooling onto the carpet, a sheet of bruised tinfoil splayed across his lap.

The path began to widen and bend, and as he followed its curve, he noticed that while the skin foliage was thinning out and revealing shards of waning sun, the individual dicks were becoming over-rigid and mammoth, redwoods where once had only been saplings. He easily recognized which porn actor each belonged to, remembering the many holes that had contained them. Billy Glide’s barrel-girth, a ring of freckles just below the circumcision scar. The pale English hammer of Danny Dong, thinner at the base and rouge-tipped. And Lexington Steele, an obsidian tower stabbing and combining with the dusk, glossy with lube.

The path ended in another shock of color and vertigo and he found himself in a field at night, standing at the entrance to what looked like a medicine man’s sweat lodge he’d seen set up at a “pow wow” near an Indian casino where his mother bought wolf-claw necklaces and he watched complacent men pound drums and yodel. The structure, under the clamor of frozen stars, bubbled like a marshmallow, hissing from the pressure of whatever resided inside. The entrance was concealed by a curtain of six-foot-long chrome dicks, tips swaying a few inches from the muddy ground. He spread them apart, gently, and walked inside. As he tried to adjust his eyes and to not gag on the corrosive fog that now contained him, a groan flared from somewhere close and the hut expanded, recoiling at his presence. A spurt of flame – a hearth? – throbbed in a far-off distance and he moved toward it, coughing, lifting the crew neck of his tee shirt over his nose.

The smoke pulled and ebbed and spewed a montage of images, each featuring the same expanding and contracting protagonist. He saw himself in an earth-toned bathroom he barely recognized, his tiny pink nub sud-shielded and bobbing alongside rubber Sesame Street toys; slouching in a ski resort’s communal shower, peach-fuzzed and shy-shrunken; adjusting to the unwelcome rawness of his first jock strap; cautiously assessing the welcome friction that resulted in his first unexpected dollop of salty release. An assortment of time-lapsed close-ups, varying levels of pubic hair, razor stubble, the sores last year that were only a harmless reaction to defective latex. And then, the twinge that had gnawed earlier when he’d sent the Snapchat to Allison: pictures he’d taken with a primitive digital camera and sent over AIM a decade ago – some full-body, others side-posed, spread-eagled – to someone named peachez00100 who never sent anything back, and who, he found out much later at a reunion, from snickering classmates who had seen the pictures, turned out to be a guy he’d gone to high school with.

He let the old embarrassment rise and blind his brain with a shattering percussion that, when it subsided, left him cold and feverish, tongue swollen with thirst.

He was a few yards from the source of the hut’s light, a tube of fire that loomed phallic and enormous, though it emitted no discernable heat. The flames in his direct line of vision parted and realigned as a projector screen that appeared to be operating at an archaically low definition. The video was a point-of-view shot, missionary position, the first girl he’d slept with – whose name he couldn’t remember – her pleasure-stunned stares at him while he surveyed her neck, breasts, belly button, plunging in callow, arrhythmic excitement. Then a flicker and she changed, her body’s outline blurring. Lighter hair and lips, a thickening of thighs, paler skin, still familiar.

His dick remained.

The screen wasn’t deficient, he realized. There were many screens layered against each another, a living composite of everyone he’d ever fucked. The length of time that each body would rise and dominate the surface appeared to correspond to how many times he’d been with that person and the duration of the encounter(s). The college-era girls cycled through at a brisk rate, the end results of mostly un-remembered brownouts or casualties of his prematurity. As the bodies beneath him aged and held their focus longer, it grew harder to look at them, though he had no choice but to absorb the emotions that manifested the same way every time: the pleading for something greater, a future not predicated on his dick, a future he would never give them.

After several minutes he watched himself pull out and deposit a belly-smearing load, but instead of the relief and fade-to-black he expected, the girl/girls remained and he was still inside, though not in any way he’d felt before. He was the negative space that his dick had created, a shadow that nevertheless had the ability to bore beyond any untested womb, to inflict a greater pain that he now shared, the pain of never transcending a definition, of once-harmless ideas destroyed in a searing of flesh.

He knew what he was.

He tried to run from the flames and the screens that had separated and surrounded him in every direction, the lives he could no longer thwart, a white light and sparks and the stars were above and whirling and he leapt into it, screaming, and the light snuffed out and he was alone in a dim halogen glow and silence. Something soft in his hand and he knew without looking down that he was in the old recurring dream, the one where his dick had come off and he couldn’t figure out why there was no blood and he forced himself to wake up but when he reached down he touched a smoothness, a nothing of skin, and he heard a humming laughter, receding with the light, a joy from which he would forever be sundered unless he could reattach himself, if he could find a way to avert the stars’ dissecting gaze, if he could convince his feet to move, if he could only…

Allison’s message blinked at the bottom of the screen: nice, roger!! followed by a sequence of emojis that included various salutatory hand gestures and what looked like a frog with a potentially hazardous goiter. He reached for his phone, opened Snapchat to view the response picture she’d sent. One visible breast – large, pale, mostly unremarkable except for a nipple that was pinker than he’d imagined and possibly larger, if it hadn’t been obstructed by the nostrils of a monochromatic alligator head. Ten seconds later it was gone.

Outside, on the adjacent rooftop, a hooting. Construction workers on their break, smoking, chugging Powerades. Most of them were lined up near the ledge, tossing junk from the vacant apartments they’d been renovating. Whenever one of them found something worthwhile – a scarred Blu-ray player, a pack of Parliament Lights – they would take turns aiming and dropping garbage bundles into the commercial dumpster positioned near the front of the building.

Whoever’s bundle landed closest to the dumpster’s center, Roger assumed, would win the prize.

One of the workers was cradling a filthy doll, clothed in the shreds of a baby blue dress and stockings. The head was missing an eye and most of its orange curls, and those that remained looked like they’d been burned. Each time someone hovered over the ledge, ready to toss, the man with the doll would move behind him and pretend to hump it, hold its arms and make it dance, simulate oral sex. The other workers would crack up and the tosser, also laughing, would turn around and smack the doll across the face or stomach, as if blaming it for his poor aim.

When everyone else had tossed, the man with the doll snatched one of the plastic bags that were swirling around the roof and placed his projectile inside. He gripped the bag by its handles, swung it in a series of circular arcs, and released. As the bundle flew upwards, doll and bag separated, terminating on the horizon, a black rift in the sun. A flutter of garments and for a second it looked like she might float down, saved by a parachute of fabric and air.

She fell no slower than the rest of the trash, made the same echoing crunch against the dumpster’s metal.

The unencumbered bag drifted and landed where it had been thrown, where the workers stomped out butts, jostling and grinning, shuffling into the building through the fire exit.

Roger sat down and waited for whatever Allison was typing.

lizard people unite

at chrisvola.net.

You convince yourself, // held // to the earth, // that pigeons // are only creatures // with no // names.

My book of poems, E is for Ether, published by Leaf Garden Press, has gone live today on the interwebs. Glad to share this weird one, much of which first appeared on this blog in its original unedited form. 

Golden Age Redux

Close to hyperventilation, you can mouth a few of the mantras you’ve developed until you find one that seems to work. “All of my electronic devices have abnormally long battery lives,” you might repeat, lips scraping the pillow. Other lapses in composure require variations on the theme. “I’m a white man with a Nordic complexion living in a state with harsher than average gun laws. I have better medical coverage than the majority of nightlife industry workers. My frequent customer card at the local deli is one hole-punch away from a sandwich valued at up to $10. In the event of any significant hair loss my head is nicely shaped and conducive to shaving.” The talismans that, with varying degrees of success, hold back the dreams that are always about running, running that’s never recreational.

At 28, you tell yourself in another black moment, your world is failing.

You’re fucked.

But you’ve got to remember, you’ve always been a headcase. There were the night terrors that started at age four or five, when not being able to sleep meant death was inevitable. The time when you puked Raisin Bran before school and for the next three months, automatic reflex, you woke up around dawn and started dry heaving, sometimes making it to the toilet but usually not, bile stains on the hallway rug, a routine that was squelched by a prescription for what you years later found out was high-end Pepto-Bismol that tasted like red velvet cake. And even distant relatives still remind you about the time when you watched a news story about a girl who underwent a tracheotomy to remove a nickel she’d swallowed. You spent the next week choking yourself because you had just upgraded your piggy bank and something could have slipped and who knows? You had to be sure.

Now it’s summer and you’ve just gone on a fishing trip back in Connecticut because your old man’s retiring and he wants to see you more. Late afternoon, you’re sitting in the garage, cleaning the fish you caught and swatting flies away from your beers. You watch your old man examine your subpar work, the messy fillets that are plentiful of bones and skin fragments, the perfectly good chunks of flesh you accidentally flung into the blood-crusted bucket reserved for organ gunk and skeletal remains. You brace for another lecture about technique but your old man stays quiet, places a fillet knife on the cutting board.

“When I’m gone,” he says, “who’s going to show your kids? I won’t be here forever.”

At night in your childhood bedroom in your parents’ house, you look at yearbook pictures of someone you don’t recognize.

Now you’re choking yourself again, saying the mantras.

It doesn’t take much.

When you return to the city where you live you make an appointment with a shrink with an ethnically androgynous name whose mostly positive online reviews you’ve been tracking for months, even though you couldn’t find any pictures of him/her, but you’re cool with it because the office is one of only a few that take your out-of-pocket plan. You sign in with the doorman in the lobby of a 70s-ish concrete abortion that looks like every downtown building, read headlines on the elevator flatscreen about a man falling 65 feet at a baseball game and the Dalai Lama’s website inflicting viruses on its visitors. You get off on the correct floor where you assume there will be an office with a comfortable couch in a dimmed setting, a Morgan Freeman type with the gravitas and wisdom of two centuries of psychoanalytic progress. You walk into a hospital-light cubicle. Behind a purring desktop and a tissue box sits a mousey South Asian woman who can’t be more than five or six years older than you.

“I’m Dr. K­—,” she says, standing up and extending a hand. “Have a seat and tell me what’s going on.”

The clinical florescence of the overhead light accentuates the shrink’s mottled, child-scar complexion. Your chair is comfortable enough but you wouldn’t want to watch TV in it. “I’ve been thinking a lot about dying,” you say, getting right into it because you’re on the clock, eyeing the tissues. “Actually it’s pretty much all I’ve ever fixated on. Not really my own death. I think about my parents getting old, the elderly people I see limping alone down the street, fat kids snarfing Tropical Skittles and Doctor Pepper. I guess it’s not that weird but for me it’s like, palpable. I think I’m losing weight, circles under my eyes. My mother says they’re hereditary but I never really noticed until recently.”

“Are you religious?”

“No. Spiritual maybe. I don’t know.”

“This is something that people have been wrestling with since before the language existed to express it. The ultimate hang-up. There aren’t any real answers, at least none I’m qualified to provide.”

Morgan Freeman’s voice wouldn’t have made it sting any less.

“Morgan Freeman is a false god,” you whisper to no one.

She asks you about your education, your hobbies, your sexual preferences. You imagine that each of your thoughts about death has contributed one mile-per-hour to the speed of a car you’re driving on a road with a singular destination, a cliff of an unknown depth. “You’ve got to try to stay in the moment,” she says at the end of the session, “in the present, stay busy. If the negative thoughts start to creep in, think of something positive in your life. It’s much more beneficial to be your own architect than to focus on things no one can control.”

The pep talk is beyond hackneyed, but you’ve always been susceptible to encouragement. It’s why you got good grades. When you leave the office and watch the video streaming in the elevator about a circus bear in Azerbaijan who has learned to ride a motorcycle, your hands stop shaking.

In terms of demographics, pigment, and the geography of your birth, you are lucky.

You stop smoking weed every day, lift free weights a few times a week, have coffee with friends you haven’t seen in a while who you consider “optimistic” and not “coke-jaded.” You initiate conversations with women at the restaurant where you’re a manager and at the bars where you drink and these encounters are occasionally successful, i.e. frictional. You re-read the Eastern philosophy textbooks that you were drawn to as an undergrad and that now make the tattoos that say “BE HERE NOW” in Sanskrit on your hip and the Chinese character the guy in the shop said means “Tao” on your back a little less like Phish-related mistakes and more like the fulfillment of a promise you made without knowing it. If everything exists in one moment, before might be irrelevant, and more importantly, maybe there won’t be an after.

One night you burrow deep in a Wikipedia hole that ends with dozens of open tabs related either generally or explicitly to transhumanism, which, you read, is “a class of philosophies that seek to guide us towards a posthuman condition, including radical life extension to the point of biological immortality, fostering a respect for reason and science, a commitment to progress, and a valuing of human (or transhuman) existence in this life.” The idea that you might, in the tangible future, be able to overcome physical limitations through radical technologies that are already being funded, to diffuse the death switch.

You love this shit.

“You crazy fuck,” you say to yourself, giggling, but for the better part of a week you surge through websites that extol the possibilities of nanomedicine, mind uploading, postgenderism, cyborgization, artificial wombs, chemical brain preservation. You skim through the less interesting rebuttals from neo-Luddite haters bitching about the trivialization of human identity, hubris, coercive eugenicism, and dozens of other killjoy buzzwords.

Your parents are probably screwed, but you will still be middle aged in 2045, the estimated year of the Singularity, when things are supposed to really start going down, transcendentally speaking, when negligible senescence won’t be limited to lobsters and jellyfish. You join Beta Race, an organization that publishes a monthly e-mag aimed “to deeply influence a new generation of thinkers who dare to envision humanity's next steps” and begin following the group’s transhumanist lifestyle recommendations. You practice caloric restriction and supplement your mostly raw and vegan diet with up to 50 daily supplements that increase mental clarity, reduce cortisol release, and promote optimal health and energy in convenient, antioxidant-rich doses. Your coworkers start calling you PT, short for Purple Teeth, for the red wine you consume daily (one per meal and another after an acceptable cardio session) in order to maximize your resveratrol intake, and you ask them what you should wear at their funerals, when your Body Mass Index will still be at an optimal 18.5 to 20. They can’t tell you to go fuck yourself because you’re their manager but you know they want to. You couldn’t care less about hurting the feelings of weaklings who have already given in to self-immolation. You learn to use group collaboration tools on your phone and visit personal networking sites to meet and communicate with other proto-posthumans. You download an app that turns your phone into a device to supplement your memories, constantly recording conversations and other audible events. You purchase better insurance that’s more than you can realistically afford but ensures that the co-pay will be low enough for the regular examinations and blood tests you will have to undergo ad nauseum.

Your stomach might convulse sometimes at work or when you pass a pub, anticipating the succulence of animal fat, the release of hard liquor, but these are necessary casualties of the focus on everlasting survival, and denial is an essential quality for success in the cyborg nirvana you are destined to inhabit.

One afternoon you’re jogging in a park on a trail that’s almost the exact distance, if run every day, that will lower your blood pressure to an optimal level in only a few weeks. You avoid eye contact with the idle dying you pass – an liver-spot scarecrow reading a newspaper to a neck-lolling woman in a wheelchair, a trio of shagged-out kids smoking cloves, an otherwise hale-looking guy wearing a Ballpark Franks tee shirt thereby declaring his affinity for nitrate-induced gastrointestinal carnage. Close to a personal best time, you build up speed for the last few hundred yards, glancing at the occasional female runner heading in the opposite direction. One girl slows down as she passes, eyes wide, points at your midsection, sort of trying to hold back a laugh but also sort of concerned, and resumes her original pace. It’s humid, you’ve sweated through your shirt and there are probably some serious swamp ass issues going on, but you are exercising outdoors during an abnormally warm autumn.

Water transfer isn’t just normal, it’s necessary.

“Uninformed bitch,” you whisper.

You pull off your ear buds, turn to flag her down or at least pretend she’s the reason you stopped and not because you’re totally winded. You feel an unnatural squishing between your sock and cross trainer. You look down at the athletic shorts that were Carolina blue but are now crotch-covered in brownish stains, at the thin red stream that’s coursing down your right leg, congealing, pooling under the tongue of your shoe.

An alert beeps and blinks on the activity tracker attached to your wrist. Your heart beats per minute have tripled. 

      

*

Your grandmother had been afflicted by hemorrhoids for most of her later years, referring to them as her “piles.” You’d always been careful to avoid the slime-capped Preparation H tubes and stool softener bottles that resided openly in her bathroom.

What’s currently sticking out of your ass isn’t like the gargantuan protrusions you’d seen in waking nightmares while listening to her graphic complaints, a relief that does nothing to ease the throbbing that makes it impossible to sit down.

Curled on your side in bed, tablet-addled, you learn that fifty percent of Americans will suffer swollen veins in the anal canal at some point in their lives, usually after age 30 and usually due to the strain of soft bowel movements, constipation, obesity, or pregnancy. Though initially painful, the prognosis is rarely serious, and can usually be corrected by a combination of increased fiber, drinking more water, drinking less alcohol and caffeine, exercising frequently, and applying an over-the-counter ointment when necessary. Except you can’t be certain that what you have is actually a hemorrhoid. You’re too young, you don’t drink coffee, you’ve been laying off the booze for the most part, and your diet has been endorsed after years of studies by Beta Race’s team of board-certified nutritionists.

The bleeding might also be caused by a similarly shaped polyp, tumor, or abscess. You analyze the risk factors for each. Until recently and for as far back as you can remember, you’ve been a happy guzzler of red meats, processed cheeses, over-proof spirits. Roughly seventy percent of your penetrative experiences have been sans condom, meaning that HPV is more a certainty than a possibility. The human papillomavirus accounts for approximately ninety percent of anal cancer diagnoses, and the three dozen or so partners you can remember make this risk exponential.

Your activity tracker starts blinking. You remove it.

You look up Google reviews of the primary care physicians in your neighborhood. You’re about to schedule an appointment when you remember hemorrhoidal Nana telling you in a brief moment of opiate-free clarity before she succumbed to the tumors that had spread to her marrow, to “never go to a doctor. I didn’t for twenty-three years and it wasn’t for lack of aches, there were plenty of those. It was because I knew, deep down, that the second they started prodding around they’d find something. You can’t find anything if you don’t look for it. Here I am, a few months past eighty, feeling okay, and I have the nerve to listen to your goddamn mother. A simple check-up. It’ll take a load off everyone’s minds, she says. Now look at me. Fucked. Take Advil, get enough sleep, don’t get married and you’ll be fine.”

She died two hours later.

You don’t want to be fucked. You want to be a sentient machine.

So you’ll wait. Say the mantras, wait.

But every morning there’s the same blood-streaked shit, the same WebMD links. One day you notice two identical lumps behind your ribs on both sides. Cancer already spreading from your lymph nodes? Maybe they aren’t lumps, but areas of organ-related swelling. Early onset kidney failure is a possibility. Nausea in the mornings, your skin crackled at the joints, a bit of fatigue. You begin documenting the frequency of bathroom visitations, checking each urine deposit for color, opaqueness, bubbles, activating the stopwatch app on your phone to get an accurate measurement of its duration. You check your semen for blood and other potential abnormalities with the thoroughness of a tea-leaf reader, cupping it in your hands, sniffing. While pressing your fingers to your jugular to confirm suspicions of an abnormal heart rhythm, you press on something like a growth that clicks when you move it – a clear indication of a thyroid disorder that might lead to hyperactivity, irritability, memory problems, psychosis, and paranoia. Brief episodes of dizziness: fluid on the brain. A shoulder ache is an aneurysm in-waiting. You keep clicking the links. Sleep is occasionally possible, but only after the forced repetition of the glass-half-full self-talk that you haven’t really believed in a long time.

You can’t find anything if you don’t look for it.

You stop looking.

There’s no point in continuing a transhumanist regimen if you aren’t even going to be around for the next upgrade of your phone.

WebMD can fist itself.

You bury most of your electronic devices in your closet. You stop responding to what few texts you still get from long-estranged friends. Afternoons: bong rips, HBO, Thai lunch specials. Nights, you drink with a fervor. More often than not, your super, who also occasionally sells you Percocet and mushrooms, knocks on your door to tell you about the previous night, how he stopped you from flinging a slice of take-out pizza at a passing bicyclist after another sidewalk puke session outside your building. You give him money, change the channel. Mornings don’t exist. Your cross trainers are ashtrays. You get all your shifts covered at the restaurant.

At least you’re sleeping.

You’re out alone one night and you meet a girl whose face you won’t remember and who’s almost as toasted as you are, but who sobers up fast a few hours later at your apartment when you ask her if she won’t mind biting a mole off your back that you assume is malignant. You wake up alone in piss-heavy boxers, roll off the bed onto the floor, a howling emanating from your balloon-swollen abdomen.

Your time has come.

*

The clinic’s waiting area is well-lit, featuring plush couches, a silent BBC news broadcast, an impressive selection of gender-neutral magazines. The only noise as you fill out your insurance information comes from the ambient nature sounds pumping from invisible speakers and a little kid making fun of his brother for coloring an eagle green and orange in a book in the children’s play area. A nurse enters from a side door and pronounces your name wrong. You take a last breath of willful ignorance and follow her into the examination room.

You don’t remember the questions she asks you, and you don’t remember your shorter answers.

She tells you to sit down, wraps a blood pressure machine around your arm and slips a thermometer under your tongue. “Ninety-eight-point-three,” she says. “Very good.” She frowns a little as the blood pressure machine relaxes from your arm. “BP’s high.”

“I’m always nervous,” you say.

She nods, jots something on a clipboard, tells you to roll up your sleeve. You watch the plastic pouch expand with truth juice. The nurse divides the blood into vials with different color caps, slapping stickers on each. As she flicks her gloves into the hazardous waste bin, you imagine being sucked down with them, crushed against the loose needles and emptied piss cups, pierced and filth-bathed into a strangely melodic silence, a soft gray place where you have no concept of gravity and the squirm of your days.

The nurse tells you to strip, walks out of the room, not making eye contact.

The man who enters a few minutes later is tall, thick with the traces of what must have once been an impressive musculature, with an unassuming salt-and-pepper beard and a dignified hairline. He introduces himself with a deliberate, Julep-swilled drawl and a mitt-shake that’s rigid but oddly pacifying. He motions for you to have a seat on the examination table and flips through the papers on the clipboard that the nurse gave him.

He looks up. “You decide to request all these tests yourself?” he asks. “Seems a little unnecessary for someone your age without a history of,” he looks down at the clipboard, “anything.”

But you know that’s not how it works.

You know there has to be a first time.

“I’ve done a lot of research, and given my distinct set of possibilities, yes I need them.”

The doctor shakes his head, reaches for a box of latex gloves in a nearby cabinet. “Well all right then,” he says. “Hopefully your insurance isn’t going to murder you for this.”

     “I have better medical coverage than the majority of nightlife industry workers. I have –”

     “Uh, ok. So which one of these possibilities will we be starting with?”

You guide the doctor’s hands toward every abnormality and inflammation, watching for a glitch in his serene face, the flowering of concern, but nothing changes. He asks you to flip over and assume a position normally reserved for canine submissives so he can get a look at the scabbed-over flap whose throbbing existence can’t be denied by even the most untrained eye.

“Yup, that’s a real big one,” the doctor says, almost chuckling. “This looks pretty straightforward, but I’m going to digitally examine your rectum for any irregularities, polyps, et cetera. This might be uncomfortable.”

You realize he doesn’t mean “digitally” in the technological sense.

You clench at the release of pressure and the snap of glove removal.

“Everything appears to be fine internally,” the doctor says, marking something on the clipboard. “You’re probably going to want to get the hemorrhoid removed for hygiene purposes. Shouldn’t be too painful since it’s mostly external. In the meantime, make sure you’re eating vegetables and drinking lots of water. Easy on the alcohol.”

The doctor tells you to put your clothes on. They’ll have to wait for the blood work results, but all of your vitals seem well within the healthy range for someone your age, with the exception of your blood pressure, which he’ll chalk up to a natural aversion to clinical settings. No need for a prescription.

“On a one-to-ten, how confident are you?” you ask. “I mean, I’ve read that misdiagnosis rates can be as high as forty-seven percent in a preliminary examination like this.”

The doctor sighs, stares at the phone you’ve taken out of your pocket. “This is the golden age of hypochondria,” he says. “You should get back into a more consistent workout routine and maybe find a couple hobbies that will keep you off WebMD. Make an appointment with a rectal surgeon to get that hemorrhoid removed. Otherwise, keep doing what you’re doing.”

You leave the office as you entered it, trailed by a rotting, skeletal version of your dead grandmother’s face mouthing the word fucked on constant repeat. Three days later, sleeplessly camping on the couch amidst untouched plates of disintegrating drunken noodles, you get the call.

The bird-pitched, Mouseketeer twang belongs to someone who introduces herself as Holly from Clinical Imaging & Diagnostics who sounds like she’s barely qualified to read lottery numbers, but at least she’s bubbly. That might be the point.

Syphilis with a smile!

“So, um, I’m going to read you the blood work results from your recent visit with Dr. E—? Please let me finish before you ask any questions, but honestly honey you’re not going to freak. All the blood cell counts are great! Liver, thyroid, and kidney function are good…”

She reads off every result and she’s right. You know because you’ve already checked what the numbers should be. She’s “super jealous of your cholesterol?” and your STD panel is “totally negatory!”

You hang up, scoop solidified chunks of MSG into the garbage, and go into your room to find your cross trainers.

The next day you call your boss and tell him you won’t be coming to the restaurant that night, or ever. You’re going to look for a job where you can utilize your philosophy degree: arts conservatories, historical organizations, cultural think tanks. You run a little every morning because it feels good to be outside and moving. When you get tired you stop. You shave every day and dabble in some of the facial products that had been lying dormant on your dresser since before your thesis defense. You buy groceries at a store that doesn’t sell kombucha or wild broccoli and supplement your non-organic vegetables with ground beef or boneless pork chops or whatever you feel like cooking. Your phone resides in closet purgatory when the retro flip model you purchased on Amazon arrives in the mail.

Whether everything is one big moment whose meaning shines perpetually or a collection of seconds adding to nothing, you don’t care.

     You’re not fucked.

You’re alive.

One afternoon you’re getting ready for happy hour drinks with an environmental lawyer whose pictures are all taken from questionable angles and no full-body shots but who comes across in her profile as “relaxed” and “balanced.” The phone rings, unknown number, but you’re expecting a follow-up from the interview you had the day before for an archivist position at an online Nietzschean database. Or it might be the lawyer, XOXO-Jennie88, calling because she has to work late or something. 

“Hello, is this J—?”

Monotone, rehearsed.

Telemarketer scum.

“Mm-hm?” Your thumb slides along your well-moisturized cheek toward the hang-up icon.

“J— this is Holly from Clinical Imaging & Diagnostics. I’m calling again in regards to some blood work you recently had done.”

The twang is gone. The harmless questioning cadence replaced by stoic certainty, the weight of bad news.

Your thumb slides back, gripping.

You hear your grandmother’s chalk-scraped cackling. You feel the soft gray place spiraling farther away into the bowels of a basket you’ll never grasp.

“I’m glad I was able to reach you. I’ve been trying to get in touch for the past week but your inbox is full.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I’d like to apologize for the inconvenience but there was a mix-up in the lab regarding the samples we received. An obviously undesirable administrative error. These things are rare but they do happen, and we make it our primary responsibility to notify those affected as quickly as possible. There’s probably no need to be super concerned just yet – your cholesterol is still excellent – but there were minor incongruities in a few of the readings and we’d like you to make another appointment to draw more samples and to discuss with your primary care doctor the possibility of –”

“I have surprisingly good credit for someone my age and it increases with every punctual student loan payment I make.”

“I’m sorry but that doesn’t have anything to do with –”

“In the event of a natural disaster my apartment is ideally situated along a major evacuation route.”

“Um, congratulations?”

“I have three point five times as many Twitter followers as the global average. The shoe store on West Broadway is finally having its annual end-of-summer clearance next week and the mid-cut suede boots that match most of my collared shirts and a fair number of my jeans will be sixty to seventy percent lower than their current value. My cholesterol is still excellent…”