Alex brought me to Watkins Glen, one lake over, to the west.
The drive takes forty minutes, he arrived with folk songs coming out of the windows.
At some point he turned off the music to ask me about the conversation with my mom.
We walked a terrain more or less like the one in the photograph above. There were multiple mourning cloaks, and a bird he adores, the winter wren (Troglodytes himalis). I had to look up his eBird account to find its name, which is easy to forget—on eBird, the winter wren is described as a “tiny, short-tailed, plain-brown wren with a huge voice.” Wren is a very old word, it doesn’t signify anything beyond itself. I know of no poem on a “wren,” which doesn’t seem to sound as nice as “nightingale” or “skylark” or “windhover.”
We also saw kestrels while driving there through farmland—and in the gorge area, a raven on a nest on the ledge of a rock face—and at a pond on the way there, many many turtles on a distant log which I could only see with binoculars—and on the way to a restaurant around other farmlands, a red fox that looked like a cat.
Some of the bird watching became onerous for me. He drove down a dusty road and set up his telescope at one point. I saw wood ducks and coots from afar. He was very intent on counting all the birds he could find.
There were no clouds. He wanted to eat out, so we ended up at Dano’s Heuriger, an Austrian restaurant housed in a building that looked like a Viennese secessionist take on an abandoned barn. In the front was a fairly elaborate garden and in the back was a large lawn which could have been planted with grapevines. Alex told me that he had been there eight years before with an Ukranian co-worker he met in NYC, when he lived there, after graduation. She was 18 years his senior, and they slept together while vacationing in Italy. He had been in the process of telling me about various past relationships over the course of the day, first, his high school relations with Olga, then, the one-time encounter with Masha, who would transfer water from her mouth to his. This latter experience had been the hottest aspect of his hottest sexual encounter. Then there was the woman who trained in Japan to make cakes for some establishment in NYC, this being part of the training needed to work there. He had lived with her until he decided to go to Moscow. Later I asked him to list off the hair and eye colors of these sexual partners, and they more or less varied between blonde and brown. I was, as I had suspected, the first Asian woman he had slept with, and he was the first Jewish man I had slept with. He had, however, “fallen in love” with a half-asian coworker at the ornithology lab who works remotely and lives in Seattle. She had stayed with him to visit Ithaca for five days, during which time he began to feel married to her, and declared to her his affections, which were not reciprocated.
It’s not hard for me to experience a resistance to the mildness of the whole affair of dating Alex upon recounting the bare facts of this encounter, though I know how much is being left out when I do this.
I’ve become attached to him but not to him, as I tend to tell others. He seems more blithe and satisfied and complete and smug in his new knowledge of his ownership of my affection and attention. When he offered to drive me home directly after we were done with the excursion I was reminded again of the notion that men and women are a “phase apart” psychologically—and sexually—I haven’t counted the number of times he’s ejaculated in my presence, but given that I have come once, he’s come somewhere between 6 and 10 times more than me. I began to fall silent with distress; I told him I wanted to touch him now, I needed it.
Recently, as in the last week, I’ve been unable to feel much during intercourse, and it has reminded me of the first time I experienced the non-sense of copulation; I consider it to be divinely ordained punishment.
I tell Dylan about it via voice memo. He suggests that Alex might not be doing enough to get me aroused before the entrance. No, it’s just that God hates me. And he asks if I’ve talked to Alex about it—I have.
When Alex asks me why I can’t feel anything, there’s something tremulous and tender about it. Like a little boy who is afraid he hasn’t managed to satisfy his mom with his performance on a school project. I tell Alex that it’s because I’m sad, and the second time he asks about it, I tell him that God is punishing me.
I’ve started to draw lines radiating from the words “God hates me,” lettered in pink and purple color pencil on a sheet of paper from my blue notebook. I enjoy pretending that I’m a serious artist or student of art.
I tell him that I’m probably starting to freak out because I’m not getting what I want from sex, that thing being the mere fact of orgasm, which would let me rest well, let me want to leave the scene of encounter.
The last sexual encounter we have is sandwiched between me joking about not coming back, and me joking about us breaking up. And then I tell him I’m not really joking, and then I break down in tears over the course of that seven-minute drive home; I give him back his cake pan, and then I take it back, I say I don’t want it, but I’ll take it anyway. Alex has enlisted me to make him a birthday cake for Friday; I’m compliant.
I want to break up with Alex because the pain of departure is too great; and this pain is not particular, it is the pain of coming to experience God’s hatred. I won’t ever get what I want from sex, but I’ll want it all the more when I can’t feel it. And God will trick me into roleplaying until I can’t distinguish between the masquerade and who I am “behind” the mask. In other words I feel that I love and adore Alex even if he is only of “medium” intelligence, which would not be an issue were it not for the fact that I seem to lack the stimulation that I associate with John’s speech or Zane’s writing in these long expanses of time spent with him: Alex is beautiful to me on account of his dumbness, and he might be the dumbest person I ever fall for.
To be clear: he is dumb, not stupid, meaning that there is nothing agaçant in what he says, it is just that he has nothing to offer up in speech during those silences of his: he is like the seal, his self-declared totem, always preferring to laze about in the sun, to seek out food, or to fall asleep between 9 and 11 PM.
During our walk he lazed about and I took a few pictures of him on a rock-ledge; he asked me if I wouldn’t be a little bit turned on if he fell off and died. “Of course I would,” I said, “That isn’t even a question.”
He seemed pleased, and continued to think about ways he could die, and what it would be like for me to have to contact his parents with the news. “One perverse trait of mine,” he told me a few days before, “is that I like delivering bad news.” Bad news as in news of death: “Today Uncle Z— passed—my condolences.”
Between the two separate episodes of crying, we had sex twice, and both times he came—a rather marked increase in his satisfaction. I did it the first time with my buccal cavities, and when he came in my throat it gripped me with a cough; the semen was stuck in my sinuses after I had drunk some water for some time. The head of the penis fit well against the back of my throat. I was able to breathe, the mechanics made sense. He laughed as I released myself with the loud cough; I liked this, I liked what had led up to it, the fact that my crying in the bed had generated some fascination; he looked at me, with almost maternal beatitude, and held me to him as I attempted to squiggle away, with the ambivalence of a petulant child. He told me that I generate a lot of heat when I cry, and I liked this, this notion of me radiant with rays of heat, like the squiggles in Feynman diagrams. And then something happened which I don’t remember—someone initiated a kiss. It was probably me—it was probably me pressing my closed mouth to his surfaces, smelling the scent of him which endears me to him, opening on from the pressed soft mouth to the small surface of the tongue to the sucking and licking of larger surfaces, or the mouth sucking on the tongue, or the making of hollows into vacuums, and the generic full repertoire of what mouthes are able to do to other mouthes. I swear I don’t remember what happened—that this is all a mistake, what I am attempting to record, or else it is a catachresis, and what I think happened then happened some other time. But it’s true that I acted with adoration and felt I needed his cock until it was inside me and within those moments between need and entrance I lost all sensation, and couldn’t bear to try to fake something or hide this. “Don’t move,” I said.
Don’t move so I can see if I feel something. And I couldn’t, so he came out and asked if he could jerk off onto me. An idea I liked, but I preferred to participate in the way that I did. The complementarity of the penis and the mouth was excellent. The mild degradation of feeling choked, of having to cough at the intrusion of the acidic but otherwise strange fluid. Perhaps semen is only disgusting insofar as it can’t be described, as it can’t be resolved into simple valences of good and bad. It is acidic and a bit sweet and a bit salty, a lot of flavors mixed into one dangerous substance. And the next time I did it, the following morning, I tasted more of it, as if I had come there to eat the semen, as I was licking at the urethra before I put the head deeper into my throat. The stuff that trickled out before he came, it was like paint—a substance with no meaning other than its capacity to stick to and cover a surface. When I paused he asked if I was going to leave him there, and I retrieved a condom—this time he came from me pulling at his cock with my cunt, which was only barely starting to feel some pleasure when he said he was going to come. But as I sat on his cock without knowing what would come of it, I found that other shadow of pleasure, the slight burning of the walls opening, though it feels more like caving in. I sighed with pain that must have been indistinguishable from sexual stimulation, though I wasn’t at all stimulated, I was guessing at the high heavens of possible pleasures while I sighed from the creaking open of the cunt’s cold tissues, and I loved that statement when it came, I’m going to come, which means I am now about to come. He was lying on the hard laminate floor, near the door, anyone could have filmed us through the glass door, could have seen and recorded me telling him that he “looked religious,” his subsequent laughter, or the strange unsexy moment of me pulling down my pants and underwear to mount him, or the sexier moment in which I sighed from the creaking open of the cold door of the frigid cunt that God chooses as the signifier of his hatred of me, insofar as I am female.
Men should encounter the details of love instead of believing with blind faith in its immaculate broadness. I love “A” insofar as he lazes around like a big dumb seal, insofar as when I try to push or pull him when he’s supine or seated he’s so heavy and I’m so weak and light that I can hardly translate him across the floor. He smells like butter, rosemary, lemongrass, some combination of everything he eats; his skin turns red under heat or sun, he looks semitic and therefore reminds me of Kafka’s accounts of his father, or young Sigmund Freud, after I tell him I like him because he’s a bit of a pervert, he sticks the word “perverse” in front of every story of himself, he starts to become confident and talkative in small significant segments. I can understand him as someone who can desire me without any of the stupid illusions of love, so that I can be the sole illusion-maker, the one who tricks him into thinking I love him when all I am is a machine of desire who bakes birthday cakes for the sake of seeing if he can help me die better, because how can I die or kill myself when I’m 46 if I haven’t gotten some practice with the death-rattle of orgasms?
I once had him fuck me a tergo until I collapsed on the bed like a dead Plath, as I had been reading the Plath on the floor when he lunged onto my body from behind, and then I was able to fall off of his cock with the true enervation of a tired succubus. I didn’t mind that I hadn’t come, I felt I had come in a spiritual sense. He said the words: “la petite mort,” and I smiled, though to me it hadn’t been “petite.” I don’t, in fact, believe that it’s possible for me to separate the sense of love I experience for this dumb man from my desire for death. I think I know I love him in the total, complete sense of the word because I spoke to my analyst this morning about my plots to murder him; to enter his apartment and poison him, and to see how long it would take for the authorities to find me. Had I not met his coworker, who might remember what I said about being a PhD student in comparative literature, it might be impossible to track me down. I would remove the used condoms from his trash can so that nobody would know that someone had been in his room, fucking him with some regularity. Perhaps they’d gain access to his phone and figure everything out, but otherwise where would the find evidence—how much DNA would I have left behind in his bed? How many strands of pubic hair? It would be like sex with the law for them to trace me, take from me samples of DNA; to compare that of my fingertips with that of some hair or fluid left behind in his great big bed, which I would not be able to fully excise of little hairs, or in his bathroom, or wherever else I shed those thick hairs.
“You really don’t want to lose him,” my analyst said, after I had begun to speculate at length about the logistics of the murder; the analyst’s response caused me to beam with satisfaction. I felt I had been awarded for showing my signs of love, in the form of this minor fantasy of homocide. “They might just discover me lying on his body,” I said—I would be too sad. I might end my life with the same poison, and with his cock inside of me. I want to be infamous like Sada Abe; I want Ithaca and his little house on Hector street to be known for its ability to induce in some sleepy circumstances an erotomaniac drive for murder.
He seems unfazed. When I am crying in his car he tells me to think about it, and when I look in his direction once I can see that he no longer looks so blithe and happy, he’s worried that I’ll break up with him, he doesn’t want to lose me. It makes me glad that I’ve done this to him, no matter what it effects.
He sends a nice text message about an hour later, so nice that I crack into another round of heavier tears.
He appreciates me. He has described me with our shared signifiers: “silly,” “fun,” “weird."
For the rest of the morning I draw the lines emanating from “God hates me.” I eat leftover madeleines, encrusted in a lemon glaze. I listen to John Adams’s “Christian Zeal and Activity,” which makes a lot of tears come out. I’m still leaking tears as I walk to class; I’m afraid of seeing John, but he doesn’t show up.
I’ve never experienced such pleasure and pain in one knot of time; I am grateful for the peaks of intensities. But I write out of desperation; I need to make time full, to fill time with text. Now I am outside of the standards of satisfaction which will be imposed on this text at a later time. I mistrust standards.
Tuesday brought the comfort and beauty of the story of the homocide, and of the dream.
I recorded the dream around 3:50 AM and sent it to Alex around 7:30.
He said he liked it, and asked “how are you?”
That dream was the most perfect dream of my life.
“Have you tried to write a book?”
“Why don’t you try to write a book?”
“What stopped you from writing?”
“What was it about?”
Questions he asked me—I told him that I believe very few novels are actually good—what novels are good?
Hardy, Cusk, … Lerner (he had read The Topeka School)
“I can tell that you would be hard on yourself…”
My novel which I could not write, I said, was about someone in analysis, or someone in the process of seeking out an analyst, or someone involved in an experimental procedure by which analysis was carried out over email, until the analyst decided to send a response requesting that the analysand show up at the office.
Or my website was my book, or like a book, or a substitute for the book.
She is sitting at a marble table in the atrium of the main humanities building of the university among various young undergraduates, many of them young women donning shades of green and white in the form of skirts or dresses or cropped tanks; some are pretty and other less so but everyone is fresh-faced and seems to wear a new shade of green, a garment acquired within the past several weeks out of seasonal lust for new fabric.
She’s wearing dull brown still, but her nails are glitter blue, the standout of all her visible parts. What’s the semiosis of the glitter-blue nails? They have something to do with the shade of a robin’s egg at exaggerated saturation and the uncommon grit of sheen; in truth this blue doesn’t correspond to something in nature, no birds eggs seem like particulate mica, and so the nails recall the supersensual coolness of Mallarmé’s Azure, that blue which is pure signifier and which subsists on the environment of words around it in an unrecitable poem that’s been traduced into a new tongue—experiences of virtual poetry pieced together like parquet tiles in an admirable swedish apartment. There’s a lot of black ink and movable type in this woman’s head, her life and her fashions are all photocopied, scanned, OCR’ed, or else kept like eggs in a university library.
The girl’s brain is full of men. She’s checking on some men. She’s opening up Tinder, she’s looking at it in a scholastic environment while everyone mills about gossiping or reading social media feeds or filling out application forms. Very few people read actual books, but who cares—she’s reading her ex’s website.
Her ex is not her ex of course, they were never a couple, they remain intermingled through the numinous efforts of reading and writing back, and his sex remains ingrained in her so long as he lives through her text and so long as she fucks other men. She didn’t expect him to write for a while, and indeed he hasn’t, but now that a while has passed he has done it. He has done it, moreover, through her own bodily influence, he has done his own thing in her wake, and he has made something of such stupefying beauty that she begins to contract in pulsed form. She’s hiding with her hand as she crumbles forth and feels her breath all tensed into unescaped exhalations; mirth bends her over the black screen and green text which resembles nothing, no eggs and no poems and no girls in green or white and no glitter-blue nail lacquer. She’s merely seated in a very public place while the inveterate internal contractions shows that some non-volitional reaction has arrived. This isn’t staged, this isn’t exaggerated, but there’s something a little artificial about it.
Alex, look at what Zane wrote:
Alex, Zane made me come like Plath did:
Alex, Zane wrote something beautiful
Alex, I feel so much better now…
Of course she’s too busy noticing the pelvic contractions to send any such text message to Alex, though she may very well mention it to him in person on his birthday—Alex, look at how much I love you through my experience of Zane’s writing—my sexuality can work again, your cock can smelt me into diamonds.
God doesn’t hate me because God loves Zane and Zane wrote something so beautiful that it made me contract so hard that I had to hide the clenched face from the girls in green and white around me. The nymphets with their vapid lives (truly!) don’t know anything about this cracking-open and its remote affiliation with the most advanced sexter in the world. Zane is real and Zane’s effects on her are real, but she as a human entity is not—what she writes about her experience of Zane’s text constitute her feathered outline of a self. Who is she. She might as well have a ridiculous name, like H.D.’s “HERmione Gart.”
Sharp inhalation from HER and the girl at the nearby table looks, but she doesn’t see because she’s hiding her face, scrunched like the body of a hedgehog into her mad mad mad laughter. She laughts harder with greater full-body tension as she comes across the name of Dylan and back-tracks to think of Gwyn as some other Welsh name, the imago (misspelled “imagoe” the first time it was written here) of Stonehenge crops up in her mind, she feels that Zane “gets” her in some sunclock sense, like ancient stone that makes clean shadows. There’s something about rotation in here, whatever is going on in the physics of the story is miraculous. She may overvalue what Zane has written; it may not be as excellent as it first appears to her, she may be a bad reader on account of the abortive effects of her jouissance—and indeed she has no ability to doubt its power now that it has given her a sense of her organism and an outline, a good toothsome sense of what she would kill or die for. The stringent analysis of what it means, of its affordances for others, can come later, but for now she’s as dumb as can be, it’s as if he had flogged her with a neural network.
In the dream I went for a drive with my father and we died. We woke up in a cave-like part of a hall and he said something I can’t remember, which is probably the key to my life, the letter of the body, the ultimate truth, the word of God, etc.—the unlocking point of my frigidity. He said something about a name being equivalent to another name, the word “Japan” or “Japanese [woman],” and something about having your fortune told by a complete stranger, or having an astrological reading from a stranger. It is dangerous, he said, getting your fortune told by a stranger, when all you do for them is hand over some of your money.
We had driven through a wide expanse of deforested land, and then a segment of timber farm. Bulldogs were evenly spaced across the lands, to protect the trees from intruders. The bulldogs weren’t separated from the lanes of the highway by any sort of fence, so I was a bit afraid that they might attack the car or get run over.
We get to a road at which we are supposed to turn and the terrain becomes dark mud; the area is now dense with older growth forest. There’s a playground in the midst of this, and we have to maneuver around some unmarked mud road that turns sharp and tight around each of the pink and purple plastic constructions. At some point the road goes straight towards a precipice and turns at a right angle only at the very edge; the terrain is so wet and steep that one could not calculate a safe point at which to brake before the necessary turn. My dad manages to make the turn, but past the segment of mud the forest clears out and the road becomes a slope of loose rock at a near vertical angle—one can see the horizon and distant hills from this vantage point. We drive down the slope and brace ourselves, vibrating and hurtling head-first down the rock-face, and wake up in the cave-like hall, ostensibly after having lost consciousness or died. No car in sight.
I associate the architecture of this second place with the cabin in Antichrist or some of the interiors in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, or the scene in which Kaspar Hauser is first shown rolling the toy horse in Herzog’s movie. The swoop of adrenaline from falling down the hill was so extreme that when I woke up I felt such a specific fresh ecstatic healthiness, a sensation I associate only with specific oneiric experiences with my father. I think of a dream in which he had died, where the sharp blissfulness came from the experience of weeping over his death. There was also the dream from high school in which I ripped off his face in a fit of rage. There was nothing but flame-red flesh like molten lava left behind his “face.” In this driving dream I was moved not primarily by the ecstasy of falling but by the beauty of the prior scene with the bulldogs posed like evenly spaced gargoyles over a non-descript timberland, and by his ordinary, non-heroic, but not even “stoic” response to the challenge of driving on unmarked twists in steep mud and then down a cliff.
I return to the scene of the pornographer—I read and I read and when I read to the end of the text once more I read about what I have been addressing: that force is not real—that it is a purely geometric phenomenon— that there is this “force on her back making her feel flatter and more contained than she has ever been able to be in normal life, this force causing her eyes to become slightly oblate and unfocused and wobbly, this force’s ability to trick her limbic system so easily into believing false things.” Zane stands here telling me about the death drive in his own words, turning what I’ve written back onto me, and I feel myself become slightly oblate with the stretching forth of my cunt-canal, that feels more like a bubble of air of the sort that enables certain organisms to float on water, the “silent duck” of Nymphomaniac. And thereof his soft infant body has smushed and flattened to something like twice its original diameter, filling every crevice of its dad.
Alex called me in the middle of all this. I felt I could smell him through the line. I managed to convey that I was doing a lot better in a way that felt accurate and concise. And I liked hearing the rhythms of my voice as I did it, and its timbre, as it came from my supine throat while the sun was setting. I could feel my elbow tense up after a little while. I thought of calls in high school to Jacob. Dull light came through the windows, it was around 19:30. I liked receiving the text about having a call in the middle of the reading and writing. I felt cared for, it was nice. He said he wanted to hear more about what it was that made me feel so bad about being taken home, about not getting to share a bed with him. I have written about these conflicts in greater detail to Lara, but I came up with something new on the spot; I told him that, as with the incident in which I wanted him to fuck me without a condom, I may have wanted him to risk something for me, to lose sleep over me. Saying to a man that I desire that he risk something in sex was fresh for me, it felt like a mark of my capacity to put psychoanalytic insight into action, to “take responsibility for the symptom” rather than simply identifying with it. I don’t think I’ll remain with this neurosis around his desire to not have me sleep over every time we hang out, after having made that statement. Alex might want me over more later on, who knows. He might be able to sleep better with me in the bed after this conversation, he at least said outright that there will be times when he wants me to sleep over. It seems true to me that I don’t need to take this as such a significant sign of his lack of love for me (why do I need this particular sign of love?)—but I do know that there is something at stake for me in sharing a bed with someone that is important, that I don’t plan to reject or abandon for the sake of accommodating some man’s belief in maintaining a certain kind of comfort.
I have spent some time making a cake; it was elaborate: the folding of stiff-beaten whites into the chiffon batter, the emulsification of milk, vanilla bean, and egg in making the pastry cream, the drama of whipping cream into gel and of folding pastry cream into whipped cream to make the “bavarian” cream: the concise, mere, simple action of folding one ingredient into another just enough to combine without causing one emulsion to lose volume. The cake is assembled and tomorrow I will decorate the exterior. Today happens to be tomorrow, in fact—since it has taken all of me to make the cake, I write about the process after it’s done, pretending that I have been able to describe something while enervated. It’s not easy to frost a cake even with an offset spatula. The gelatin condensed too much when I made the stabilized whipped cream. And I’m enervated not only because of the cake but because of that immensest of orgasms, and what surrounds and caused it. It was on account of Zane that I was able to feel so much—and now I return to the polite task of behaving as someone’s girlfriend: making him a cake, which will be seen by those who show up to the party, who will know that I made it for him, which a non-familial woman wouldn’t do for someone she wasn’t having sex with, no? Moreover, I have made plans to meet with a random visitor on Tinder, which makes me feel like I am cheating on him, because I would prefer not to tell him about it. Will Alex ask me if I want to spend time with him this evening, which would make the whole scenario of “cheating” even more acute? If so, do I ditch the stranger, or do I tell Alex “I have plans” and elicit suspicion? Alex is not “in” something with me but I am starting to feel devoted to him. And if the stranger is fun, isn’t that too much fun?
I’ve decided to meet the stranger, but only after finding out that Alex will not have time to fuck or take a walk; he is too busy making food for the celebration. I’m about to be late to this date, bye-bye for now.
The date is boring, and I don’t need to talk about it.
He talks a little too much, and he tells me he doesn’t feel it, and I tell him I don’t want to sleep with him.
We see a male duck attempting to copulate with his female friend.
He tells me about “charismatic megafauna” and kestrels and how when I’m in my 30s I’ll be more interested in birds. He tells me about his zombie invasion dreams and interprets them as racial allegories, performance of blackness—I could’ve used this opportunity to talk to him about my complicated relation to my race, but I don’t feel like engaging him in a complicated topic. The whole conversation is aseptic even during the part where we talk about our past/current relationships and sex lives. I don’t like his choice of fragrance.
I want to have sex with a black man, a non-white man, I tell my analyst—could be asian or indian or whatever, but it would be easiest for me to have sex with a black man because I tend to like black men on some basic level and black men seem to often like asian women, but 2/3 of the black men I’ve met were sort of cardboard—much more smoothed out by some social necessity to perform a certain professionalism in all interactions. The black men I’ve found most attractive weren’t American, they were both from Trinidad.
In the morning I tell Hunter: “That’s all!”
“I don’t know what to tell you!” Nothing more to say!
Guess what?! Zane wrote a new story…. and it’s BEAUTIFUL.
The contractions in me continue while I tell him about it.
That precedes the cake, that precedes the ducks, that precedes a lot.
Back to something—or not—I look forward to the time spent alone and at the desk.
And what else can Zane do, what else can Zane do.
What can I do and and what can I experience—what can I write that I haven’t written.