freelance writing, Jill finally landed a full-time staff writer job at a luxury trade magazine. 2002, 2003—those weren’t great years. 2004 was going to be a good one. The pay wasn’t life-changing, but the consistency of having a check delivered into her bank account every two weeks was. Direct deposit almost felt like cheating, as though it didn’t count if she didn’t have to deliver the money to a bank herself. Jill no longer scrambled to make rent anymore, and for the first time since college, she had health insurance.
The irony didn’t escape her. Her job involved projecting a high-end life of luxury to people—multimillion-dollar apartments, first-class travel, reports from lavishly bland parties—even though she would never be able to possess that life herself. Her days were spent in a small, quiet office, among only a handful of other staff writers and editors, but evenings often took Jill to press events, gaudy affairs thrown by PR agencies trying to get people excited about a product by handing out free drinks and access to a handful of barely recognizable D-list celebrities.
When she started covering these events, Jill felt the pressure to dress and act the part. But as she eased into the job, she realized nobody cared. She retired cocktail dresses and started wearing jeans (black). She would indulge in hors d’oeuvres (something she never got tired of, no matter how mediocre the spread), and talk to a few people for quotes. The success of a night was measured by Jill’s ability to eat an entire meal’s worth of canapés before the waiters stopped coming around. A bust of a night would end with Jill stopping for a dollar slice on her way home, so starving by this point that she would impatiently burn the roof of her mouth on hot cheese. On the subway, she’d tongue at the soft, pained parts of her gums.
Like many of their friends in Brooklyn, Jill and Victor had moved in together partly because they loved each other, partly because of convenience. They’d met at a party—Jill drawn to the tall half-Japanese, half-Brazilian with perfectly tousled hair. (It turns out they’d both been raised largely in Connecticut.) They’d been dating for just four months when they realized both their current leases ended at the same time, and it seemed like the sort of New York luck that only an idiot would pass up.
Summers were hot in New York, but they seemed particularly hot in Jill and Victor’s one-bedroom apartment in Bed-Stuy. The neighborhood was famous for that one movie that Jill had never seen but always meant to. What was it called? The one about the heat wave? It didn’t matter. Jill and Victor had a single air-conditioning unit, but it never seemed powerful enough to keep the apartment cool. Victor’s computer—a massive black monolith of a thing—was an unwelcome and powerful heat source. Jill had only ever owned tiny, thin laptops, but Victor had explained, more than once, that to power the 3D rendering engine for his work required a workhorse of a machine.
To be a video game designer, you had to be many things: an architect, a physicist, a novelist, all in one, Victor liked to say. He had mapped out elaborate blueprints to be modeled in three-dimensional space, the evidence of which was scattered about the desk, spilling over onto the dresser and bookshelves and any other flat, elevated surface in the apartment. Jill often saw Victor writing out formulas, doing shorthand math on loose paper—receipts, flyers, drafts of her bad short stories—anything was fair game. He had even scrawled notes on the back of junk mail envelopes; once, after Jill had brought home a couple bagel sandwiches, she found all the napkins from the takeout bag absorbed into Victor’s landscape of mad-scientist scrawlings.
Sometimes Jill tried to make sense of the notes to better understand what Victor was working on. He was making a video game, that she knew, but Victor never said what kind. When Jill pressed him on it, just out of loving curiosity, she wouldn’t get much more. It wouldn’t be like the ones she had played before, he said. Victor wanted to make something more personal. He wanted to create a game that was intimate and quiet. She admired his focus—she was jealous, in fact—so she left him alone to make whatever it was he was making.
With the new stability of Jill’s staff job, Victor was able to quit his day job teaching middle-school kids math. As long as he’d make enough from freelance web design to pay for his half of the rent, Jill didn’t mind paying for the rest of their expenses. It would be a fine arrangement for a few months while Victor completed his project. They rarely ate out, rarely went out at all, really. And Jill had never seen Victor more thankful than the day she urged him to quit tutoring. Over a long sushi dinner (Jill’s treat), a celebration of her first paycheck, he volleyed between saying “thank you” and “but are you sure?” and Jill was filled with a kind of pride she’d never felt before. She could provide for the person she loved, and that delighted her. Even if, when she got home from work every day, the loud hum of the black computer tower always greeted her before Victor did.
Victor’s project got to Jill.
If Victor had been a painter, she’d have seen his canvases around; if he were a musician, there would at least be sounds of composition coming from the other room. He spent his day obsessing, typing on a computer, his game’s contents buried on the hard drive unseen, like it didn’t even exist.
Jill finally said these things to Victor. She wanted assurance that what he was making was even real. This conversation, to Victor, felt like a betrayal. How could she not believe him? Could she not see him working? How could he prove it to her without showing something that wasn’t ready to be seen? And why was she yelling?
was working on the game. But he’d found another way to make money, and he was determined never to tell Jill how.
The toughest part of building his game wasn’t the programming. It was the graphics. Victor had no formal training in 3D modeling and animation, so he’d started teaching himself. There were textbooks available, but they were all expensive. Instead, Victor cobbled together an education through what was freely available on the internet. There were a lot of tutorials, some helpful, most not. But the best resource was an online community of budding 3D artists.
Victor had also, unwittingly, stumbled onto a community of people with a penchant for computer-animated pornography. On the surface it looked like any other forum, except as he read on he realized users were talking about animating monster orgies. Still, curiosity kept Victor from closing his browser. The videos weren’t titillating so much as they were mesmerizing. The animations were crude and unrealistic; the models were undetailed and untextured. The result was a hypnotic kind of sexual fantasy that was weightless, with actors that had skin that was slick and smooth like plastic, bouncing around in 3D space, unbound by the laws of gravity.
There was a section of the forum where people could request specific videos. It was, without a doubt, the busiest part of the message board, and it became clear to Victor that while the community of people making these movies was small, the appetite to consume them was overwhelming.
Victor combed through all the requests—they varied greatly in sophistication—until he found one that sounded easy:
I want a video where a guy is fucking a big titted girl from behind until he cums in her ass. She’s blonde and her tits bounce as he pounds her. Also she has wings—not like angel wings but like the kind of wings a bat has. Haha dont ask.
All it took was finding a couple of stock character models and grafting some wings on the back of the woman. The animation was easy too, since it was just a repetitive thrust. The trickiest part was figuring how the wings should move. Should they flap? They should.
It was only five minutes, but he sent the video to the requester, redsox1978, anyway. Within an hour he received a reply:
Goddamn man this is fucking perfect. Thanks so much!!
After that, he began taking commissions.
As Victor took on more and more orders, complicated requests prompted long email chains, lots of back and forth. It was a hassle, for one thing, but Victor also found that getting in discussions with strangers about their specific fetishes was not exactly the way he wanted to be spending the workday.
So he had customers fill out a request form:
White woman—blonde, large breasts
White woman—blonde, small breasts
White woman—brunette, large breasts
White woman—brunette, small breasts
White woman—redhead, large breasts
White woman—redhead, small breasts
Asian woman—large breasts
Asian woman—small breasts
Black woman—large breasts
Black woman—small breasts
White man—regular penis
White man—large penis
White man—extra-large penis
Asian man—regular penis
Asian man—large penis
Asian man—extra-large penis
Black man—regular penis
Black man—large penis
Black man—extra-large penis
White woman—blonde, regular penis
White woman—blonde, large penis
White woman—blonde, extra-large penis
Monster—regular penis
Monster—large penis
Monster—extra-large penis
Characters can be customized. Please choose a base model and describe which physical attributes you would like altered. Be as specific as possible.
What is the setting?
Detail the scene you want commissioned. Be as specific as possible.
As with Victor’s very first commission, people generally had specific ideas of what they wanted, but they tended to be small variations on what was already out there. People would request women with very specific haircuts or tattoos; maybe a demon would have two cocks. It was easy work. Plus the money was good, even better than the freelance web design work he was doing, and it wasn’t long until Victor was making almost all of his income from tailor-made animated pornography.
Like any job, the work got easier the more Victor did it—partly because he was getting more skilled, but also because every new request meant a model or animation that could go into his library to be used again. On his desktop, he now had a folder of different porn-actress sounds, sorted and organized by voice type and intensity. Over time, Victor had amassed a collection of different men and women and anything in between, able to fuck in every position imaginable.
Unlike several of the other animators who did commissions, Victor had very strict rules about sharing his work. Any custom porn was made for the client and the client only. If he discovered that it had been uploaded to a public porn site, Victor cut that person off for good. As his reputation grew, he spent more and more time policing popular sites for his own work. Victor knew the value of his art wasn’t defined by its quality, but its scarcity.
With these sex animation projects dominating his time, he’d become less interested in physical intimacy. Maybe it was all the breasts and dicks he spent his day around. For Jill, all things occupied one of two states: they were either in a rut or they weren’t. Their relationship, once hot, had now cooled. Which she knew was normal. Like all ruts, it would pass.
game,” Victor said early one Saturday while Jill was drinking her coffee.
“Really?” Jill looked up from her newspaper, which she had folded into quarters to make it easier to chip away at the crossword. Victor motioned toward the office.
Now seated in front of Victor’s giant computer, Jill saw on the monitor a sparse menu, just text announcing the game’s name: INVENTORY.
“So what do I do?”
“I think it’s better if I don’t explain it.”
“Are there instructions?”
“You can figure it out.”
“Can’t you just show me what to do?”
“No, I’m going to leave the apartment while you play.”
Victor already had his coat on.
“Wait, are you serious? You’re leaving?”
“Yeah. I can’t be in the room with every person who plays the game, so I should see if it makes sense for strangers.”
“But I’m not a stranger.”
“I’m just gonna hang out at the café around the block. Just text me when you’re done.”
And suddenly Victor was out the door, no goodbye, no kiss. The computer was emitting so much heat. How does Victor sit here all day? Jill wondered, as her hands began to sweat.
Was she excited? Was she anxious? There was nothing left to do but hit the space bar. She began.
The desktop tower began to hum. On the screen, a door to an apartment.
The game did not, as Victor had promised, explain itself. It took a moment for Jill to figure out how to move. The mouse controlled the first-person view, and eventually she figured out that the arrows on the keyboard would direct her movement. The mouse was like the head, the keyboard like the feet. She moved clumsily toward the door. It didn’t budge.
How do I open the door?
Jill tried the space bar again. No luck. Then she tried ENTER. Same result. She clicked with the mouse. The door swung open, the animation sudden and too quick. Jill figured Victor would want feedback, so she found a sticky note by the keyboard and jotted down that observation: unrealistic door opening.
Stepping into the apartment, Jill found a corridor. The three-dimensional space was sparse and dimly lit, ominous. Was the game supposed to be scary? If so, Victor had succeeded. Jill walked down the hallway toward a light shining from around the corner. She turned right, into what appeared to be the kitchen and living room. There was no furniture, though. It was an empty apartment.
She kept moving forward. Through the kitchen, she discovered another door. She clicked on it. The door opened with the same unconvincing animation as the front door. Jill underlined her sticky note.
As she’d expected, the next room was a bedroom. The layout of the apartment in the game resembled the floor plan of their actual apartment. It had taken her a moment to recognize it without their stuff packed into the space. This meant that through the bedroom, there should be another door to Victor’s office.
Why would Victor put our apartment in his game?
Like the kitchen and living room areas of the game, the bedroom was also without furnishings. It seemed large and cavernous without a bed or bookshelves or clothes strewn across the floor, like in their real bedroom. Jill moved to examine the closet. She clicked it open. It was empty, though there was a set of unused clothes hangers. Clothes hangers—nice detail! Jill wrote, thinking it would be encouraging to also catalog things she liked.
She kept moving. There was, as she’d expected, a door to Victor’s office. But this door looked different. The other two that she had walked through had been brown, textured to look like wood doors. This one was black. Light peeked out from under it, signaling that maybe someone was inside the room. Jill could feel her heart rate rising.
I am going to kill Victor if something jumps out of this room.
With a tap of the mouse, the door began to creak open slowly, its animation more deliberate than the other doors, revealing a dark room. Jill took a sip of water, exhaled, and stepped through the doorway.
The room she entered was not Victor’s office. It was another corridor, just like the one she had walked through minutes earlier. Opening the office door had placed her in the exact spot where she’d started the game. That must be a bug. Jill turned around and tried to go back through the door again, but this time, clicking the mouse did nothing. So she proceeded forward down the hallway, through the kitchen and living room, and into the bedroom again.
This time there was a bed. Its appearance startled Jill. It was their bed, modeled with painstaking accuracy. She walked around it and examined the dark wood frame, with its textured wood grain; the bedding was a replica of their own, a mustard chevron duvet over white sheets. The biggest difference was that the bed in the game had been made, in contrast to the usual state of disarray in real life. Looking away from the computer, Jill peered into the other room at their actual bed.
The bed looks just like ours. Very accurate, Jill added to her note. She was running out of space, so she started a new one.
Through the office door again, Jill found herself looking down the same corridor. As she walked into the kitchen, this time she noticed the appearance of their small dining room table and its two matching chairs. Upon further inspection, Jill recognized the same impressive level of detail that Victor had applied to their bed. She walked through the living room into the bedroom, where she found the bed again, and then through the office door to emerge back at the corridor.
The game was a loop. Each time Jill completed her tour of the apartment, she was sent back to the beginning. And every subsequent iteration of their apartment featured one new item. Victor had started with the big things—their couch, bookshelves, dressers—but as Jill went further and further into the game, the new details were harder and harder to spot—small plants, clothes hanging in the closet, the teapot on the stove. Jill wasn’t sure if this constituted a game, since there was no concrete objective, but she did enjoy the small mystery of finding the new object that had been rendered in the apartment with each ensuing version.
Jill had lost track of how many times she’d done the loop. But as she got further and further, the game started to become mundane. The changes were becoming so subtle that Jill lost interest in finding them, and she started going through the loops as quickly as possible. And as the artifacts began to pile up—there seemed to be no end to them—it got harder and harder to see around the space. Oddly, Jill found herself able to move through all of the objects like a sort of specter. The models would clip and glitch out as she passed through them.
At a certain point, once the game had rendered everything faithfully from Jill and Victor’s home, new objects began to appear. Extra chairs and tables, imagined plants and lamps and TVs and mirrors. The new items became escalatingly absurd: a beach umbrella, a car tire, a giant menorah, the statue of David. Eventually the apartment became so crowded with things that it was just a mess of botched polygons colliding with each other in a hollow space. Jill had made an assumption that because the game had a beginning, it must also have an end. Clearly it did not.
Victor had explained that adding sound effects and music would be the last step—he wanted to get every other element pitch-perfect first. But he hadn’t considered that the absence of sound had a different effect. The game felt hollow, empty. Jill moved around Victor’s world like a ghost, floating silently and weightlessly. Or maybe that was the intention. Maybe this is exactly what Victor was trying to tell Jill. The thought infuriated her. This was the art of a coward.
There was one dimension that Victor had not considered. The player could always quit. No matter how much Victor wanted to control the three-dimensional confines of the space, and the fourth dimension of time, there was a dimension he hadn’t accounted for.
Jill hit ESCAPE.
MOUTHFULS AND DEEPTHROATS—m4w (Upper West Side)
Come by today and let’s have some fun. Generous, clean, down to earth. Hosting in my safe location. Please be clean and ready to have some fun on this gloomy day.
White Guy Seeks Asian Woman—m4w (Astoria)
I’m looking for a sexy and small asian woman (preferably Japanese, Chinese, or Korean) to have a nice time with.
I am married, never been with anyone other than my wife but I fantasize about a sexy, tight, asian woman to spend time with on the side. Maybe you are in a similar situation as me—it doesn’t matter to me as long as you are understanding.
I am 30 years old, white, 5ʹ9ʺ, 217 lbs (a bit husky), brown hair and eyes with a beard, very clean. I am intelligent and enjoy good conversation. I am willing to take it at your pace and explore this together.
Shoot an email if interested and let’s discuss! Please put ‘Asian Fever’ in the subject line so I know you’re real.
Rape fantasy question—m4w (Midtown)
Question for you ladies. Is it true that most of you have some sort of rape fantasy?
Months later, Jill was in her new studio in Cobble Hill browsing the personals section of Craigslist. It had been a slippery slope to get there but what was the harm? Jill was compelled by the way people could be so frank about their desires. Some were crude and gross, but overall it seemed like an act of bravery to vocalize what you wanted most.
After leaving Victor, Jill had been promptly laid off from her fancy magazine job. The stock market had tanked two years earlier, and the world was still catching up to its effects. She moved in with some old friends to stem the financial bleeding and finally, once she’d cobbled together some freelance work, she found her own place, a small studio. She’d taken her clothes with her when she left Victor, but anything with a shared history—the furniture, the kitchenware, decorations, all the things they had picked out together—was left behind. At a department store, she loaded up two shopping carts full of home goods: trash cans, lamps, towels, silverware, pots and pans. She was excited—it had felt like a fresh start. But when she reached the checkout—pushing one cart forward with her left arm, tugging the other cart behind her with the right—she watched the digits on the register climb, each beep of the bar code scanner reverberating in her body, the cost adding up to an amount that she hadn’t accounted for during her shopping spree. The cashier was still scanning items when Jill walked away. She abandoned her carts and headed to the exit.
Over a few weeks of obsessive Craigslist searching for free and cheap things, Jill was able to furnish her entire studio. The only thing she struggled to find was a bookshelf, so her hardcovers still sat in small piles at the foot of her bed. She had also discovered the “missed connections” and “casual encounters” categories of the site. It had been too long and she was intrigued. She clicked.
Many of the postings included a photo of the guy, which usually featured him shirtless, never a face, of course. Other times, it was a straight-up dick pic. Jill found these fascinating—less aroused, more curious. Some guys understood that the appeal of a dick pic had less to do with the penis itself but with how it was framed. (It wasn’t difficult: good lighting and an angle that wasn’t from straight above—really, just a little thoughtfulness.) After leaving Victor, it was refreshing to think about someone else’s dick for a while. No sacrifice had to be made for the future. It was about what felt okay and comfortable in the present. And the thing that felt okay and comfortable right now was getting laid.
to meet at a bar. This seemed reasonable. But when she arrived, she found herself stuck there for the duration of a drink, even though she knew immediately that neither of them was interested in sleeping with the other. (He was too sweaty; she suspected he’d been disappointed by her height.) The small talk they made felt frivolous, and Jill felt her soul slowly leaving her body as she asked a litany of questions like “How many siblings do you have?”
Not to be discouraged, she set firmer rules. They could meet at a bar, but neither was obligated to stay for the entire drink. “Either of us can leave at any point, and the one rule is the other must not take it personally,” she wrote to the next encounter. He agreed.
They hit it off. Jill went home with him after a small conversation where they’d established a rapport, a mutual attraction, and so began Jill’s campaign of Craigslist hookups. Half the time she bailed, but all of the men she did go home with were for a single night only. (The exception was one man, Garrett, who liked to go down on her while listening to NPR on his headphones. Jill saw him four or five times.) Her strategy was to approach each encounter with no expectations but stick to her rules. If, during their conversation, the man said something she wasn’t comfortable with—an off-color comment, joke, or political belief—she’d leave; if he made any mention of her height, she’d leave; if anything was suggested that was outside of what they’d arranged on email, she’d leave.
Craigslist was an ugly website. It was Times New Roman on a stark white background, with functional blue text to denote links—like a website that was never styled. But Jill admired its HTML brutalism. There was something simple and naked that made it feel trustworthy, like it wasn’t trying to dress up what it was. Whereas the online dating sites she had briefly attempted to use were styled in bright, nonthreatening colors, Craigslist was stripped down to its bare essentials.
If getting over the loss of Victor meant regaining some semblance of control, in these casual encounters no one had more control than Jill.
own was difficult. The market for full-time writing jobs had completely evaporated, and Jill found herself doing an uneven combination of freelance assignments and administrative temp gigs.
But mostly, Jill had a lot of unstructured free time. So she began to write. She’d fill up those empty hours in the day in front of her computer, working in a text document that had no deadline and nothing at stake. It was calming. She wrote and wrote and it felt therapeutic—or at least she believed that’s what something therapeutic would feel like. Eventually, the gigs became more reliable: a couple regular written assignments, three days a week filing at a law firm near her apartment. And Jill would come home, open up her laptop, and keep writing. When her law firm job turned into a full-time thing, it took more discipline to keep writing but she woke up early to write before work. Most nights, she’d come home and continue writing, exhausted, until she would close her computer and climb into bed in whatever she had been wearing at the office.
A year later, Jill had a manuscript. Through a friend of a friend, she had an agent. Through her agent, she suddenly had a book that several prominent publishers wanted. It was stunning that a year of work could culminate in this. And though it was at times difficult, in many ways writing a novel was the easiest thing she’d ever done.
The money was good. Jill hadn’t expected that. She quit her law firm job—the first time she had quit anything in her life. (Well, besides Victor, if that even counted.)
The title was Adult Contemporary. It felt like she’d finally grown up.
She hadn’t talked to Victor in months, but she couldn’t help dedicating the book to him. He would never read it—probably never even know about it. But Victor had made a video game to tell her exactly how he felt. Jill had returned the favor.
The art of a coward.