BONEYARD: I’ve been waiting for #4 a long while. No previews at Evil Angel yet. Ah!
ARCELOR: That’s cuz Elegant not Evil produced it. Angel.
PTERODACTYL: No I’ve seen… amazing. She is so sweet and giggly.
BONEYARD: Dactyl send me a link in Private? Tx.
MATCHMAKER: 1st anal! Takes it like a champ. That’s a big fucking cock.
BONEYARD: Dirty Debutantes was 1st anal, Match. Like a minute of it till she pulls him out. His cock isn’t even that big. Didn’t get more than the tip in. *Real* first time maybe?
ARCELOR: No no—camera angle / bad lighting. It’s in her pussy. In missionary, right.
BONEYARD: Yeah that’s it. It looks like it’s in her ass though. But she does have one of those assholes that’s really close to her pussy, so maybe not. But on top of that she reaches down like it hurts. Then he pulls out and it seems like after he puts it back in she’s not in pain.
ARCELOR: First taste of porn cock—it hurt.
MATCHMAKER: Of course you know
ARCELOR: Three months now Match and you still can’t keep up. Boneyard, you can blow that shot up. There’s no switch. She licks her hand and rubs her pussy. Just dry.
VIOLETSKYE: Hi guys just wanted to clarify this is my FIRST anal scene. I saved it for Elegant to get it right. It was scary but exciting too. So glad I finally did it. Hope you guys liked it most of all.
ARCELOR: Welcome Violet!
BONEYARD: VIOLET!!! So Debutantes had no anal—you can confirm?
VIOLETSKYE: I hear that all the time but no it really is lighting and the distance of the shot. Now you know! They should spend more. Maybe they would have got it.
ARCELOR: Bet the director likes the rumor though. Couldn’t have hurt sales.
VIOLETSKYE:;)
PTERODACTYL: The new scene looks so good. No condoms. Just waiting to see the whole thing.
BONEYARD: Congrats on your best-new-starlet nomination, Violet. And best three-way too!
MATCHMAKER: Yes congrats that is great news. Totally deserved.
VIOLETSKYE: Thank you Matchmaker. That scene was even scarier. And being nominated too!
ARCELOR: That nom, that was just your first three-way wasn’t it?
PTERODACTYL: That’s how good she gonna be.
VIOLETSKYE: On camera, yes! My first three-way ever was a private session. Not a fun one actually. Sketchy. Creepy. But this one went great. Jeremy H. is such a good director. Makes it easy on the girls.
APACHI5: Shooting any features now? Would love to see you in character again. And doing interracial! (We can dream…).
VIOLETSKYE: I’m not shooting any right now but there have been more offers since the nominations. They pay better but I don’t think I’m really into the playacting thing. It’s distracting enough with the lights and crew. The gonzo stuff, pure sex, is better for me, if only it paid. And no interracial I think. Sorry.
MATCHMAKER: You’re so adaptable though. And you don’t talk as much as the gonzo girls.
VIOLETSKYE: Deer in the headlights:) I can’t do that on purpose though. It happens or it doesn’t and it’s happening less now. Too familiar. You’ve got to actually play the part once you can’t just react and expect guys to get hard from the wide eyes.
MATCHMAKER: But you can be so natural in character. Your scene in Ransoms is amazing.
VIOLETSKYE: You mean I look scared and confused tied up on the bed. But I was! Not from being tied up but from being on a porn set fucking strangers in costume. So I just got lucky. Even that—I wouldn’t be scared now. That’s going away and then the roles just seem silly. I can’t help smirking, even during. Some girls do that I know, make it sort of ironic, but the scenes aren’t very hot then. Irony and sex don’t mix.
PTERODACTYL: You and Sasha. Philosophers of sex…
VIOLETSKYE: The best ones don’t let that show. They actually have some commitment or they never lose the wide eyes and keep turning the guys on that way, not with the character. Or the role just has fear or confusion built in like Ransoms.
VIOLETSKYE: Ha! Don’t really know her but would like too. Another generation. She has that sexy jawline.
APACHI5: But you can do both can’t you? No need to choose.
VIOLETSKYE: I can but now I just want to fuck without the gimmicks and get paid. That sort of honesty turns ME on. Otherwise I’ll end up one of those bored Vivid girls. Unhot.
ARCELOR: I think it’s so cool you have your own take.
MATCHMAKER: Your last few scenes have been getting wilder.
VIOLETSKYE: This new scene, it’s cool. I’m happy with it. It’s a feature so you think it’s easier. But I tore my anus doing it. It was swollen for three days and shitting was a nightmare. I barely ate.
BONEYARD: That sucks! I’m so sorry Violet.
VIOLETSKYE: And then it turns out someone hadn’t even had their PASS test cleared yet. So I’m sure I’m fine but I have to wait to be sure I don’t have HIV now.
KIRKPATRICK: Occupational hazards;)
VIOLETSKYE: That was a feature film. So what’s the difference? The money. I don’t think gonzo should be second-class. Everything interesting in features comes from gonzo. It’s the lab.
APACHI5: I thought you got banned.
KIRKPATRICK: Ten days.
ARCELOR: Why do you waste your time here? No fucking life.
KIRKPATRICK: Same reason as you.
BONEYARD: Get back to yr bridge and suck Scottie off, Kirk.
VIOLETSKYE: Lonely like us ☺
KIRKPATRICK: Have the mods even verified that this is Violet Skye? She shows up in this thread out of nowhere. And she doesn’t talk like the deer on camera, does she.
VIOLETSKYE: How should I talk?
KIRKPATRICK: I met you a month ago, at the convention in LA, and you didn’t sound anything like this. You were just a ruined child. A fool. You should be banned not me.
PTERODACTYL: More bullshit from this guy.
BONEYARD: Prob. should verify though, even if Kirk’s just trolling.
CASSANDRAMASON: No I can tell, it’s her. Some of us have been to college, guys. Sorry to lurk.
KIRKPATRICK: Have you? Not community. A real one.
VIOLETSKYE: Cassie!
CASSANDRAMASON: Congrats on the nominations. You are going to WIN, sexy. I will see you in Vegas at the awards.
VIOLETSKYE: Thank you!!! Yes just two weeks left, see you then. Would love to work with you someday cutie. You have such a pretty pussy.
BONEYARD: WE ALL WANT TO SEE THAT!
ARCELOR: Kill the all-caps please.
CASSANDRAMASON: I want to eat yours V
KIRKPATRICK: Bet Cassandra’s a fake too.
VIOLETSKYE: Wish we could ask the same of you Kirk but you can’t be a fake because you aren’t anyone at all.
CASSANDRAMASON: HA!
KIRKPATRICK: Clever for a worthless whore.
MODERATOR 2: Cassandra you are already registered with us. Can you do the same Violet?
{User Kirkpatrick deactivated}
VIOLETSKYE: What a shame. Honest guy. This is why we do this.
VIOLETSKYE: Yes will do.
MODERATOR 2: So glad to have you! Don’t worry about the trolls. We’ll take care of them.
■■■
While Janice sat at the kitchen table, staring into him, Lewis, on the other side of it, could think only of the foundering of his latest chat-room impersonation. Whatever was wrong with Kirkpatrick, he’d managed to sniff Lewis out. It could take a hateful man with all the wrong intentions to see things as they were. Especially lately.
In truth, if you were observing neutrally, and not through the inflamed imagination of a fan, who was elated to be in any kind of touch, even virtual touch, with the object of his fantasies, it wasn’t hard to see that the stories and theories Lewis put in Skye’s mouth were incredible. There were too many barbs, however oblique, directed at the very people she was supposed to be courting. That was the point of these “adult” chat-rooms, after all. Porn promotion. There were also the places where Lewis would break character to make overly intellectual points—that porn had a way of destabilizing the viewer’s sense of self at least as much as the actors, say—or where he would reveal the banal brutalities of industry life in terms that were impossibly detached.
But the men in the chat rooms, in thrall to the idea of flirting with their dreams, were not in the frame of mind to notice the liberties he was taking with character. They took Lewis’s indictments at face value, and were forced to see them as emanating from the most sympathetic of sources, under the circumstances: the actresses themselves. Their fantasies were terrorizing them.
Lewis didn’t know Skye’s civilian details, so there’d be no fooling the moderator. He clicked the page shut. Better to flee the site, he thought, than to let them prove that he wasn’t her, only a simulation, an impostor. His ideas might survive then, even in the heavy shadow of Kirkpatrick’s doubts, living a kind of twilight existence, subtly shaping their thinking.
He’d turned to the porn forums only after breaking off his physical interventions in the city. At this point, he felt, he could only be a beating or two away from arrest. Anyway, the last of the hookers, Lisa, her calm had exhausted something in him. He couldn’t explain it to himself, but he knew he’d rather not look these girls in the face anymore, especially with the streets as clear as they were these days. The rewards no longer justified the risks. Isn’t that how his father would have put it? In the end, there was nothing that wasn’t an investment.
That didn’t mean there wasn’t more work to be done. Just not in Halsley. Scale was the question. He’d first grasped its importance, in the realm of politics, a decade ago, when he’d helped Kames and the Wintry expand into Providence. The group was fragile back then. Now they were a force.
How to answer the question of scale in his own case, given his own ethical imperatives? How different were they really, though? Lewis’s sensibilities owed more to Kames than he’d like to admit. The two hadn’t spoken in years, except through the odd email. Still, Lewis had listened to him lecture dozens of times. It must have left a mark.
Pornography, Lewis thought, might well be the bigger canvas he needed now, and these chat rooms might be his inroads. He’d grown up, like most men, thoroughly at home with porn, in both its public and private guises. It shadowed him, but so closely he had a hard time seeing it as something distinct from himself. But in the last few months, as he’d withdrawn from the world and tapered off his meds, the fetish had come plainly into view as something attached to him like a parasite. Once he saw it this way, he found it impossible to get off to it. Lately he seemed to feel it less necessary to get off at all—by himself, with Janice, with anyone. It felt like evolution.
One of the things he liked about the forums—and he’d liked this about his pre-assault chats with the hookers too—was that they forced him to improvise, react in the moment. He didn’t come to them with scripts, fixed ideas, or stories to lecture them with. The situation would draw fresh ideas out of him, extend his thinking in unpredictable directions.
The chat rooms took things a step further, though. Now, he had to react from the very point of view of the ones he held in contempt. It was a way of putting himself in the girls’ shoes—in its way a compassionate act. He felt more empathic for it, and his moral thinking seemed suppler to him. He was learning something, not just about himself, or even the girls, but about the space between them and how it might be closed.
Skye wasn’t his only character. He had others going at rival forums, some of which were dedicated to more extreme pornography. In one case, the raw fact around which he built his lies was that Maya Haven, a Czech newbie to Porn Valley, was to star in the latest Piss Mops flick. Lewis-as-Maya had so far explained to the fans in the chat room how, in shooting the scene, the taste of urine was not unlike white beer; that though the first sip was always jarring, no matter how many times you’d had it before, by the third swallow, there was something quenching in it, even if the aftertaste was worse and more persistent than beer.
In shooting the scene, he, Maya, had kneeled in the bathtub. Her patellas ached from the ceramic. Each man—there were three, though in the most heroic scenes in the series, there might be twice that—each man undid his jeans, just slightly off camera, and the first man up, his cock would dangle into frame. Lewis described the initial spurt onto the tongue; how Maya was encouraged to gargle with the piss; how she let the first stream, a golden brown, leak down her chest, running over her tits and belly through her legs.
But to the surprise of all, including herself, with the second stream she began to drink. She angled her head so that the piss struck the back of her throat and disappeared directly down her gullet. By the end of it, she’d consumed more than two pints. The men clapped spontaneously as she stood and twisted the shower knob. The sound of the falling water merged with the extravagant claps as the image went dark and she rinsed the piss from her hair and body. Just this once, she nearly forgot about the money. The director even threw in an extra hundred for drinking.
So far, no one had called Maya out, questioned her reality. The forum members seemed entranced, touched, disgusted, and yes, slightly shamed by Lewis’s tale. Which was his hope. It was also a funny story, he thought, and nothing hurts like humor.
But would the real Maya ever discover what she’d said in the forum? And would she be shocked by the odd detachment of her words, the self-lacerating wit? Or would she reluctantly recognize her reflection in them and hate herself more for it? Maybe she’d even learn something about herself from Lewis, just before she reported the deception to the moderators.
And then Violet, who was becoming far more famous than Maya. What would she think of what she’d said, which was altogether more reflective, if equally troubling? Maybe she’d be proud, and want to take up the challenge, live up to the portrait. Maybe one day soon she’d give it all up, this twisted image of the good life. Unlikely, but not impossible.
The only woman’s thoughts Lewis didn’t seem to speculate about lately were Janice’s. He spoke to her mostly in freighted trivialities now. Overall he simply spoke less, and even before he’d stopped getting off on porn, he’d stopped getting off on her. He was willing enough to go through the motions for her, she found. But she wasn’t. So they didn’t.
She of course could speculate about no one’s thoughts but his anymore. It felt to her as if he were flattening out, shrinking. There was less of him to inhabit now, to live in or with. At the same time, she had the odd feeling he was also deepening, growing, and rapidly. But the growth was taking place far away from her, on the other side of him, a place she knew existed but always left alone out of respect, love. Now it seemed ground was being gained there, so much that it was dwarfing all she knew of him. It was changing too, seeming no longer merely unknown, though available in principle to her, if she felt it important to know. It was becoming unknowable territory, and it chilled her. She had to admit that what she had left of him now was mostly abandoned land, scorched earth. No one could survive here for long.
He shut the laptop. She shut the window and left him to himself in the kitchen.