Billy stands at the bathroom mirror, gazing at his own reflection. The shower head drips onto the white porcelain tub as he holds a razor in his hand, lost in thought, as if refusing to go out into the open area of his studio apartment where there is a kitchen with a small refrigerator and stove—their coils all mangled into the corner of the room—and the layers of dust that line the furniture are the only proof that time still persists within the obnoxiously bare white walls that have windows that face the street, covered with flannel bed sheets, peeled back occasionally to let out smoke.
Despite the stench of a sedentary wetness, Billy hasn’t left the apartment for some time. In fact, he never leaves. He has become a piece of furniture, something wooden with grains up and down his arms and legs that sits next to the coffee table, covered in dirty laundry and grease, an unmoving shadow flickering in the blue glow of the television set. No job, nor any education to speak of. Instead, like an ascetic of the twenty-first century, lying flat, he is evolving, sustaining through photosynthesis of the electric hum of artificial projections of light.
Something must have happened to him, something a long time ago. Call it trauma, or life, or the modern condition or whatever. But something has broken off and is now rattling around—tinging against his skull like a shard of glass—jagged edges snagging and tugging at connecting wires, rearranging them in convoluted and novel ways, resulting in a strange affliction of digital blindness, a condition defined by the neurons oh his brain refusing to spike in the presence of the artificial—like reading a blank page, still turning, flipping through, waiting for the good part to show up.
The bathroom is small, cramped, and full of toiletries. His physical body and the reflection in the mirror take up most of the visual space. From the door, cracked open to let the steam flow outward, he can see the silhouette of the sex worker lying on his bed, illuminated by the blue glow of a screen. It is one of their monthly appointments, which have turned into weekly visits, and now, have fallen into a category of casual encounters whenever she has a free moment to stop by.
Looking briefly around the bathroom, he realizes that her personal items have consumed a great deal of real estate. Multiple bottles of shampoos and conditioners line the shower ledges covered in a soapy film. Pink razors and essential oils rest on the sink. Lotions and sunscreens, tampons and dental floss. Two toothbrushes, one green and one pink, sit in tandem in a glass cup on the vanity, their bristles touching.
Billy pushes the lever rod down on the faucet and lifts the stopper, draining the water and shaving cream. The water sifts slowly, hampered by debris. He lifts the metal pieces out from the drain and pulls long black hairs from it, too long and dark to be his own, and throws the congealed nest into the wastebasket below. Replacing the stopper, he runs the water from the sink and watches it flow easily, unobstructed.
As he walks through the door his shadow against the walls seems like a cave painting, man’s first foray into art, etched into plaster from repeated exposure to cigarette smoke. The sex worker, Laurie, turns to face him, rubbing her eyes as if she has just woken up. He switches off the bathroom light, returning the apartment to its natural state of static hum.
“I fell asleep. You were in there for so long.” She states this as a fact, though he senses she is asking a question, asking him to account for the lost time.
“Sorry to wake you.”
She sits up, her torso emerging from underneath the blanket as she leans her head against his shoulder. The television is set to a low volume and scrolls through stations at a set interval, staying on one station for no longer than five seconds.
it’s the biggest music competition of the Summer. . .
Billy’s remote controller regulates the speed of the surf, never stopping on one station, randomly jumping from one frequency to another.
I always have to test my blood sugar, before I ea . . .
Every time the cable box jumps to a new station, blotches of absence appear to Billy in different areas of the screen, sometimes engulfing the whole of it, like motor oil swirling in a puddle on the ground.
kick me again. . .
It has a calming effect on him. It blocks out the images.
oh yeah. . .
“I think you’re probably the only person who still has cable television,” she says.
“It relaxes me.”
“Like sex?”
[crowd cheering] flying out to center field. . .
“No, it’s a different kind of high. It helps to shut off my brain from everything else out there.”
“Are you. . . what’s that word. . . Agoraphobic?” Her mouth wide, yawning.
“I don’t think that’s the way I’d put it.” He says, annoyed at the question.
my windshield came in on me. . .
“Do you want to try again?”
because if I don’t whip you now. . .
“Let me try again.” Her feet extend toward the other end of the futon and she props herself up on one elbow near Billy’s lap. With her other hand, she pulls his cock out from his boxer shorts and fondles it with her fingers, resuscitating a flaccid body, a dead fish. His head tilts back instinctively.
how can you tack frustration and . . .
She strokes it for a long time and then, impatiently, with it still soft, she puts it in her mouth, covers it in her saliva, and moves her tongue up and down it, feeling the hairs and dough-like skin in her mouth.
two men, apparently. . .
After some time, she resigns, sighing as a string of spit hangs from her mouth like a high-wire. “Is everything alright?”
oh yea. . .
“Just tired.” Billy stares off, tuning out into the screen, focusing on the missing information, the oil slicks on the television as it hums and switches stations at random.
his hair is back! And just look how thick and healthy it is. . .Literally holds the dunes in place. . . [dramatic music plays] . . .
*
It’s morning and the apartment is somehow smaller. Piles of clothing doubling in size. Furniture multiplying, breeding, and giving birth to small trinkets and kitchen utensils he would never buy. There are shoes near the front door, most of them too small for his own feet. The ceiling sags, leaking from above. The walls creep inward like a trash compactor, condensing his life, making way for new developments, sucking out every square foot, and the woman who is sprawled out next to him in bed is twisted around the blankets like a tapeworm, leaving him lean and malnourished.
Her features are very German during the day; rigid with a squared-off jaw, high cheekbones, an elusive tan, and intense black hair. But when she sleeps, she turns into a soft child-like creature. Mouth slightly hanging open, softer angles, rounder borders. It’s uncanny how someone can look completely different when they sleep, Billy thought. As if something they carry in their waking hours deforms them, marks them with the physical symptoms of stress and surgically reroutes the contours of their face.
It makes him nauseous—the difference that only appears when we wake—every morning reminds him and an uneasy feeling slides up his throat. Can you ever truly know someone? He thinks this over. Or do they only come out while they’re asleep, out of reach from carnality?
He stays quiet in the mornings, and he slinks over to the kettle to boil water, then to the far window, only pulling the curtain back enough to let his smoke drift out of the opening. He looks at her breathing, occasionally making a slight movement, a soft murmur. Traffic whirrs with commuters below. Billy wishes that she could stay there, asleep forever.
*
Laurie is a sex worker, but she is also a licensed member of the medical community. Only after graduating from Johns Hopkins, and after many offers from different research programs, did Laurie make the move into sex work. The Surgeon General’s declaration of an “epidemic of loneliness” has spurred the industry, and since jerking off was too embarrassing to prescribe, “sexual healing” became the mantra of medicine—something to make a profit off, to exploit—the oldest profession now rebranded as the newest science.
The first time Billy called the Medicinal Sexual Healing Agency (or the MSHA), he had no idea what to expect. All he knew was that he couldn’t seem to get his dick up. He thought maybe it was the loss of human contact as he sequestered himself in his apartment. The presence of the absence that flowed from his television screen dulled his senses, made him numb, but he couldn’t turn it off. It flowed into his room at all hours of the day, playing at low volumes, psychedelic patterns randomly and arbitrarily appearing and rearranging on the screen. He had become addicted to the calm, the nothingness. But this nothingness, this solitude of pure continuity, made it difficult to respond to physical stimulation.
His hand on his cock was the absence of touch as he moved it up and down. The images of pornographic videos lost meaning in their pure realness. There was no artificial, there was no absence. Computer-generated pornography created the opposite problem, it inherently became the absence of visualization. One without the other created a longing for their mixture. He couldn’t focus on the images, the fucking, the cum, the penetration. Instead, he found himself flaccid and reaching for the remote, switching the television back to the random interval channel surfing—sending him back into nothingness.
When he heard of the MSHA, he was desperate and figured he should try it. The advertisement played it off as a professional, medically licensed operation. He thought of a nurse coming to his front door in full scrubs, wiping their feet as they entered, putting on the disposable shoe covers like a GE appliance repairman. They would take Billy’s pulse, shine a light in his throat, make him turn his head, cough. Then, he or she would lather a generous amount of lube on their latex-gloved hand and gently insert multiple fingers into Billy’s asshole, reaching upward, searching for the prostate, playfully flick it, rub it until a spasm of cum would fly out onto the dull white walls, painting them with another coat, sliding down to the floor.
Then the nurse would pack his or her kit back up, dispose of the latex gloves, remove the disposable shoe covers near the door, and be on their way, sending an invoice by mail—payment due by the first of the next month.
The last thing he expected was Laurie, who was young and healthy, a well-rounded and entirely real person who now sat on his couch in her thin underwear, sipping coffee and scrolling on her cell phone. She holds the coffee close to her lips and slurps, only a little at a time, then pulls the mug away from her face, pauses, and then sips again. Billy stares at her, waits for her to look up and acknowledge his annoyance.
The apartment is a sensory deprivation chamber. It cuts off all external stimuli, hones into the buzz of the TV as it flips randomly through the transmissions. It is a backdrop, a white noise methadone. But the atmosphere changes when Laurie is around, the gravity increases, the windows break, there’s blood all over the hardwood.
“I’m going out in a bit,” she says. “Want to come?”
Her phone buzzes on the coffee table and she lifts it up, reads a message, and scrolls, not looking away. Billy doesn’t say anything. She knows he has no intention of leaving.
“I figured.” She gets up and goes over to the kitchen sink to rinse out her mug, “you should really read some fucking Kierkegaard or something.” She dries the mug and places it back in the cabinet. “I’m serious. What if you die in here? You’ll be stuck in the walls, just forced to watch whoever moves in after you.”
Billy’s looking out the window, pretending to not pay attention.
“Doesn’t that depress you?”
He’s silent but can feel her eyes digging into the back of his head. He focuses on the television switching channels at the normal intervals in the milieu of the apartment. After an absurd amount of time, he can feel her eyes disengage and he hears the apartment door slam and he sees particles of dust bouncing slightly in the air.
bottom line I just put it into your. . . winch 16 . . .
He sits down on the futon still hearing Laurie’s voice in his head. He’s pissed off, partly because he knows she’s right. He reaches for the remote. The remote controller is still rigged to change the channel every five seconds or so. He presses a button, increasing the change in frequency, and the channels on the screen cut in and out quicker, with less uniformity.
welcome. . . so what do you suppose. . .contract on this. . . yes later get some. . .focus birth. . .
Now, the stations are changing about every half second, but he pushes it even further—all the way up—and the channels begin to seep into each other, forming one cohesive movement, a seamless hum, a continuity of absence.
see some cold paralyzed Russian box if I had a cashier. . . see . . . [chilling music] . . . shaping powersofgenesampling. . .
His eyes glaze over, and he is pushed far back into the cushions of the futon, falling deep inside himself, far down to the wooden slats and metal springs. He begins to feel a pull, a magnetism that brings him back up and to his feet, electrons floating in the air, changing places, slowly dragging him closer to the convex screen. His face presses up against it, mouth drooling on the glass.
andguarantee your sor from the manufactspecialists [traffic] he other please call. . .
He is no longer anywhere in the vicinity. He is already sucked completely into the oil-slick programming on the screen, and his body soon follows as Laurie walks through the door and watches his head slide through the glass of the television, his torso lifting, feet and legs high up in the air.
She runs over and grabs his legs, tugging at them with as much force as she can. But her hands go soft and his jeans scratch her palms as his body drops through the precipice as if the screen was a large bucket of water.
*
He didn’t really “come out” anywhere. Instead, he arrived inside something.
For a long while he wandered around in the darkness. Arms out in front of his face, mouth hanging open, feet shuffling. He didn’t speak, just walked, footsteps echoing and mutating endlessly into a distorted feedback of open space.
Eventually his right foot kicked against a structure. Something hard, wooden, tall with corners. He got down on his knees and felt it with his hands. He could feel knobs—wooden knobs—two on each drawer. On top of the wooden structure was an older-style television.
The television hummed alive and emitted a blue light out into the vast nothingness.
The futon was there, the coffee table, the bathroom door on the far wall. But when he sat down and faced the screen, he noticed that there was no more absence, no oil slicks, no blotches at all. It was like a mirror of his life—no, not a mirror, a glass portrait. He could see his same futon, the same coffee table, the same bathroom staring back at him from the screen. But it was just the room, and he was nowhere.
For a moment, it was still. Then, like a stone cast out, the door handle turned, and Laurie walked in. He watched silently, examining her, as if she were someone else. Rounded features, softer jawline.
Laurie moved from the door to the futon, sitting down and fumbling for the remote. When the screen lit up, she thought, just briefly, that she saw his face. But whose face? Someone familiar, a familiar man, but she had forgotten him already. His own presence in the room was now just a fever dream. An old technology running the film in the wrong direction, a hidden message of backward speak flickering at her in the daylight through the open windows.
“Laurie,” he leaned forward and waved across the television. “Laurie can you hear me?”
But if she could hear him, she had no intention of responding. The apartment carried on like usual, steeped in static that played at a low volume.