Oleg was at the corner of Broadway and East 12th, outside that Italian place across from The Strand, speaking on the phone to his friend Laure, who was explaining that at precisely that moment, a man was driving to her small pale house on a patch of muddy grass in a dark, gnarled corner of Montgomery, Alabama.
“How does he know where you live?” Oleg asked.
“We hooked up before,” Laure said casually, entirely too casually, Oleg thought. Laure had told the man not to come, that she was busy, waiting for her family to arrive, as though she actually needed to explain to him why he shouldn’t come to her home uninvited.
“He keeps saying he’s on his way,” she said. “He just dropped a pin.”
“How far away is he?” Oleg asked.
“I don’t know, like thirty minutes?”
In Alabama, they gave distances as time because, really, what was a mile when the roads could go from dense city to strips of farmland or patches of dense forest or sharp mountain roads and then back to city and its clusters of rundown shotgun houses all within the span of two songs on the radio. The landscape was irregular, untamed by industrialization and urban planning. In Alabama, nature still predominated. You learned to tell distance by the amount of time it would take you to drive somewhere, which might have been half a mile or three miles, distance getting subsumed into one’s own sense of rhythm and time. Thirty minutes could have meant five miles or ten or fifteen or twenty — Oleg had lost his sense for distance. He lived in New York, after all, and for him distance was counted out in subway stops and city blocks.
“He’s really coming?”
“I mean, maybe, probably.”
“Well, your family is there, right?”
In fact, Laure’s mom had texted a little while ago to say she wouldn’t be coming after all, leaving Laure alone. They had been fighting so much lately, Laure said, and about things that Laure had considered settled. For example, she explained, her mother had called her just last week to relay some bit of family news regarding Laure’s grandmother. This was not her mother’s biological mother, but the woman for whom Laure’s grandfather had left his wife. This woman, the subject of the call, Laure called Grandmomma. The other woman, the biological grandmother, Laure called Ernestine because she had always been a more remote presence. At any rate, Grandmomma had developed an infection in her foot stemming from diabetes, and the infection had recently gone to ground in the blood, requiring very strong antibiotics that had to be given at the doctor’s office. Grandmomma had three children of her own who came to take her to these appointments, but last week, her son, Evander, hadn’t come in time, and so Laure’s mother had taken her to the doctor. While they drove, Grandmomma’s other son, Gregg, called and complained very loudly about his brother. This, Laure’s mother overheard since Grandmomma always put her phone on speaker because she was hard of hearing. On and on, Gregg went about Evander and his funny ways, complaining about his lateness with bills and promises, his disrespect toward his Own mama, a damn shame. While this went on, Laure’s mother stared through the windshield, trying not to listen as Gregg’s voice filled the car. It started to feel like they were being buried in sand, Laure’s mother said. At any rate, he eventually said that he was pretty sure Gregg was into some faggot shit, just like Laure, and look at how that had gone. When Laure’s name came up — of course, they did not call her Laure, but her birth name — Laure’s mother saw the road shimmer before it turned liquid and moved like a silver snake, and she held the wheel very tight to keep the car steady, though they could both feel the wheels drifting to the shoulder. Grandmomma said that she loved Laure just the same, but referred to her as that boy, and wasn’t nothing wrong with that boy, the same as there was nothing wrong with Evander. Then she hung up. But for the rest of the drive, that feeling stayed in the car, that buried alive feeling, and they could hear, or feel, his voice stretching the air in the car tight as a drum. Laure’s mother finished and then sighed heavily, and Laure asked if there was a point to the story, at which her mother said, I’m just saying, people talking. You act as though no one can see you. It’s my life, it’s my life, you say, over and over, but you never stop to think about how it affects other people. You my child, and I love you, but, you act like love don’t ever hurt somebody. Then they had gotten into an argument about Laure’s transition — which she had considered a dead topic — and her mother revealed that, yes, sometimes, she struggled to understand it still, and the topic was very much not dead to her. They argued for so long that Laure ran out of tears and her mother ran out of air, and they were both rasping into the phone. Then Laure said that she should just come over and they would talk about it once and for all, really get it out of their system. Her mother agreed. But then she had texted to say that she wouldn’t make it after all. She had to see to Laure’s sister and her sister’s baby. And if that were not bad enough, here was a man coming to her house.
“So I’m here alone,” she said.
“Oh, so maybe you’ll let him in after all.”
“Stop it,” she said, laughing. “He pressing too hard.”
“Little pig, little pig, let me in,” Oleg said. “He’s gonna blow your house down.”
“Not tonight, he’s not,” she said. “Anyway. I just thought it was funny.”
“That a strange man is on his way to your house with nefarious intentions?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Isn’t it insane that we give our addresses out to these guys?”
“Sure,” he said. “That’s why I don’t host. I don’t need the hassle of being murdered in my own apartment.
“I mean, you have a boyfriend,” Laure said. “Makes hosting kind of difficult.”
“Not really,” Oleg said. “Truman would like to watch. He loves watching.”
“If I showed up to a guy’s place and his boyfriend wanted to watch, I’d for sure think they planned to kill me,” Laure said.
“Me too, probably,” Oleg replied. “To be clear, I’ve never done that. Anyway, what about when you’re on the other apps?”
“The straight ones?” Laure asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Do women, like, give guys their address? I’ve always wondered this.”
“Am I the only woman you know?”
“The only one whose sex life I’m interested in,” Oleg said.
“Absolutely not. Those guys are murderers.”
“But not the gays?”
“No,” she said. “The gay ones just want to do meth. That I can deal with. But the Trumpy ones? The Rogan-pilled ones? Absolutely not.”
“Well, where did you find this guy?”
“The gay app,” she said. “But it’s different. He’s DL, so the chance of murder is higher.”
“I guess that’s true,” Oleg said, thinking at that moment about Laure in Alabama, lying on her bed, waiting for a strange man who was or was not at that very moment driving toward her while he, Oleg, looked at the red sign over The Strand and at the red flags snapping in the wind.
“He just sent me another pin,” she said. “He’s like twenty minutes away.”
“Getting warmer,” Oleg said.
“Obviously, I’m not letting him in. If he even shows.”
“Did he show up the last time?”
“Yeah,” she said. “It wasn’t bad, you know? Just not . . . great. And kind of not worth the hassle of cleaning.”
“Cleaning your apartment or cleaning your . . . apartment?”
“Both,” she said. “I didn’t even finish.”
“Now that’s depressing,” he said.
“You’re telling me!”
Oleg glanced into the restaurant for the first time and saw through the tinted glass bearing the restaurant’s name, the golden lights suspended over the dining room which caused the white tabletops to glow very softly. The interior of the restaurant doubled and tripled itself, so that everything had a dreamy quality, and all the gestures of the people inside took on a charge of some sort. He had the sense — as he often did — that he was watching a film when all he was watching was life playing out at a remove. It occurred to him that the image in his mind, the reel of images, depicting Laure and him in their opposite parts of the country as well as the journey the man was taking in his car toward Laure had precisely the quality contained within the gestures of the people on the other side of the restaurant window. They were not idealized. They were not romantic. But something akin to that. A kind of magic banality that allowed him to see himself but also to see as himself.
“Did I catch you doing something, by the way?” she asked. The question startled him.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s the middle of the day. Were you doing things? I know you love to do things up there in your little city.”
“Oh, then, yes,” he said. “You did.”
“I hear the streets,” she said, and as she said it, he could hear them too. The noise of the traffic, the sirens, the music coming from the park up the street. All of it, spreading in silver waves over them all. “What are you doing?”
“Meeting a client,” he said.
“Oh, ew, work,” she said. “I’m not trying to think about that. I have enough of my own.”
Laure had a comical number of jobs. She taught psychology at a community college as an adjunct, worked as a research assistant for a couple professors in her department, and also did remote work for a mental health services contractor based in Missouri that serviced various companies. She had started on the crisis lines, taking calls from people having any number of emergencies, but Laure had gotten very depressed and very ill during that period. She had once received a call from the mother of a fifteen-year-old boy with autism. The mother was calling from inside of a bathroom where she had locked herself. The boy was on the other side of the door, striking it repeatedly with something hard and pointed. Like the butt of a knife, the mother said. Her son had been in a strange, quiet mood all day, which was not like him because typically, he was animated and voluble. He usually spent a great deal of time outside, counting leaves and fallen needles of pine straw, which he sorted into incredibly neat piles on the ground. He could spend hours that way, chattering to himself, building elaborate shapes out of the pine straw and leaves. Occasionally, he’d even lie down next to the structures he made and stare through the canopy of the trees that ringed their yard. They lived in an apartment complex with dense pine forests all around them. Her husband worked for a bank as a manager, and she stayed home with their son, whom she homeschooled because of his difficulties. They got along very well, she said, anxiously, nervously. They were best friends. They spent all day, him outside, her inside, speaking across the threshold of the open back door, which was a glass sliding door. But that day, he’d been quiet and had refused to leave his room, no matter how she coaxed him, and then he’d sat up abruptly, holding one ear and flinching as if someone were screaming into it. When she brought him lunch, she said, he’d stood up and bolted into the kitchen where he’d grabbed a knife and turned to her. Almost without thinking, she ran into the bathroom and locked the door, and he’d been out there ever since.
Laure asked the woman if he had done anything like this before, and she’d said, No, that’s what she’d been saying, that he’d never in his life been like this. Other parents, she knew, talked about their children with autism as though they were bombs, waiting to explode, but that had never been her experience, not with her own child, anyway. And here he was, thumping at the door, like so many other children, she had heard about. She felt, frankly, powerless against the cliché of it all. She said that the worst part was that she felt as though she were locked inside of a story of her own making, and at just that moment, she felt very unreal and like her life was not her own. Laure asked the woman if she were hurt. If she were afraid her son posed a danger to himself. She asked the mother if she felt like she could de-escalate him. She asked all of the questions she had been trained to ask, and eventually, the woman was able to talk to her son through the door and to explain, not that he was scary, but that she loved him and was concerned for him and wanted him to put down whatever he had in his hand. All his life, the mother explained, the boy had been so obedient, so docile and tender and funny and kind and sweet, but at that moment, he was none of those things. He was standing there with the hard, rigid object in his hand, banging at the door.
It was scary, Laure said when she called Oleg to tell him about the incident. In the end, the boy’s father had come home and found him sitting outside of the bathroom door, his head resting against the knob. Laure had stayed on the phone, a span of time that felt like hours, but when she reviewed the logs, she found that it was only about thirty minutes. The mother had sent a text to the boy’s father, her husband, before calling Laure, and she’d only wanted support. But Laure had been struck by how powerless she felt at the woman’s powerlessness, and also how little her questions had been able to help the situation. She felt as if she were trained to be a perfect, mute bystander, a voice on the other side of the line, indistinguishable in efficacy from an AI prompter. Shortly after another call involving a violent teenaged girl who had slit her baby brother’s wrists, Laure begged to change jobs.
The issue, she explained to Oleg, was that even though she knew she was meant to remain unmoved by the extremity of the lives of others, she always felt trapped inside of their stories, like she couldn’t get out no matter how hard she struggled. She always felt like the mother in the bathroom, waiting for the boy to break the door down.
Now she organized trainings for the company and worked in a department she had rigged together that she called Metrics.
“Don’t make me think of work on my day off,” Laure said.
“Sorry to disgust you,” he said. “But it was still nice to hear your voice. I never hear from you these days.”
“Girl, I know,” she said. “But these jobs be killing me, you know? I’m on my last nerve down here.”
“Better the jobs than the trade,” he said.
“I’m giving up DL men. For good,” she said. “I’m going to find me a nice femme queen and be happy.”
“So you can bump purses?” Oleg said. She laughed.
“That’s homophobic and misogynistic,” she said.
“Those are the same thing.”
“Somebody’s gotten into the feminism,” she said. “Good-bye, Ollie.”
She hung up before Oleg could reply. Laure was the only one who called him Ollie, and only when she was exasperated with him or by him. Oleg looked into the interior of the restaurant again. He was about five minutes late, but in New York, five minutes late was really on time.
The client was already seated at a table near the window. He was a tall, fleshy man with a thick beard trimmed to give the impression of an angular, square face underneath. He had dark, shining eyes, and a full mouth comprising purple lips pink at their center. His skin was very dark, shimmering almost under the soft light from the globe lanterns above the table. He shook Oleg’s hand and let out a deep, sonorous laugh as they sat across from one another. Oleg apologized for being late, saying that he’d had a last-minute call from a friend that had gone a little longer than he’d anticipated. The man waved him off with a large, friendly hand and said that nobody could be late in New York, not really.
The man was named Hamilton, and he had gotten Oleg’s contact info from Oleg’s online portfolio. He was interested in some new headshots and some photos for his book. He had been a little vague about his line of work, and Oleg had not been able to find much about him on the internet, lacking a last name to do much with. In fact, he hadn’t even known the man was black until entering the restaurant and getting waved over.
“Are you an actor, then?” Oleg asked.
The man smiled and said that he was something of actor, yes. A performer, really. An artist. In fact, he was a content creator. At this, the man good-naturedly rolled his eyes and stuck his tongue in his cheek before adding, “Like everyone else, obviously.”
Oleg asked what sort of content the man made.
Hamilton leaned back and crossed his arms. He wasn’t ashamed of it, but he wanted Oleg to keep an open mind about what he was about to say.
“Consider it open,” Oleg said.
“I actually got your contact from Barton,” he said.
Barton was a producer of adult content. He ran a website for which Oleg had shot some promos and BTS. Tall, tan men with more muscles than Zeus flexing by pools in the Hamptons. He had photographed the men lying on pristine white sheets or hanging from tire swings, totally nude, their genitals artfully obscured. For the paywalled portion of the site, Oleg had shot nude portraits of the men. And then he’d taken some more sexually frank images of the men in various stages of fucking. This had taken place during the late summer at a rented cottage. The whole week of shooting, Oleg had spent carrying around cameras and lenses, sweating through his shirt as he sniped shots of the men at play and in repose. They had scheduled “recreation time” during which they were supposed to wear pool shorts or speedos and dunk one another under the water or go on spontaneous “hikes” near the forest at the corner of the property. All to create the atmosphere of playful, erotic boyishness that would result in raw sex in the sauna or in the gym, all venues leading inexorably to the white beds in the white rooms, where the sex had been choreographed fiercely and elegantly.
None of it felt particularly sexy to Oleg. Not even as he photographed the men with their erections, getting close to capture threads of precum or the puddling of sweat in the channels of the obliques. The men’s bodies were incredible, sculptural, and lacking any erotic energy, Oleg thought. He preferred a body in its natural state. Or in motion.
Hamilton explained that Barton was a friend of his from drama school. They had gone to Juilliard together, actually. Barton used to be so intense, Hamilton explained. So brooding, as though he had all of these depths just resounding in him constantly. At first, Hamilton had found this quality very attractive, irresistible. This tall, remote, silent guy with blond hair and dark eyes, just taking up so much space while the rest of them went around trying so hard, and he just seemed to have it. Whatever it was, Hamilton said. Whatever Barton said or did, he had this way of drawing reality around him so that it seemed totally congruous with his actions. And he made the rest of them feel like absolute phonies. Almost immediately, Hamilton’s attraction turned to disgust, but he went on desiring Barton in the most insane, embarrassing way while Barton floated over all of them.
“Have you seen him? Like, in person?”
Oleg explained that he had in fact met Barton out on the shoot in summer, and yes, he’d found him very attractive. Tall, blond, substantial because he exercised very forcefully and diligently. He treated himself, Hamilton explained, as though his body would sublimate without his discipline. Barton seemed to be under a great deal of pressure at all times, and like that pressure was the only thing keeping him alive, Hamilton explained.
Oleg said that he saw it somewhat differently, that Barton didn’t seem that unreachable or unknowable, that in fact he’d found him simply a shy man with a great body.
“That’s what he wants you to think,” Hamilton said. Anyway, they went way back, and they had been talking over DM a couple weeks ago when Barton had mentioned, in passing, this one photographer he’d worked with recently, whose work had been immaculate. That was the word he’d used, immaculate. So Hamilton pressed for a name and that was how he came to email Oleg.
“I’m flattered,” Oleg said. “That he thought the work came out well.”
“Did you not?” Hamilton asked. “Are you that much of a self-critic?”
“Not at all,” Oleg said. “It’s just hard to know what someone thinks of your work, your deliverables. Sometimes, you can see them deceiving themselves about the quality of the outcome, like the money they are paying automatically makes it better than it is.”
“You’re selling yourself short,” Hamilton said.
“I don’t mean to. I obviously work very hard and hope the work is . . . of good quality. I just mean, sometimes, people want the thing to be better than it is, more than it is, and you can see that desire working on them at the moment of delivery. I find it . . . interesting, but also kind of sad.”
“Why sad? If they’re happy with your work?”
“I guess because,” Oleg started to say, but he was interrupted by a waiter who had come to bring them water and coffee. They had ordered pastry right from the dessert menu, which the waiter found delightful, as if they were being rebellious, naughty children. Then she went away.
“Because?” Hamilton prompted.
“I guess because it seems like they are stifling their real reaction. That’s what interests me about people. How they really are.”
Hamilton nodded, and explained that his work took him in the opposite way. In making his scenes, he thought about what he wanted the audience to feel and how best to direct them toward that feeling. Obviously, he wanted to turn them on, but this was difficult as an aim. In one sense, he said, it was actually quite easy to turn someone on. You just had to take out your dick. But once you had done that, you had nowhere else to go. There was this one performer, he said, whose whole thing was about his bulge. Sometimes, the performer even posed in very sheer, almost translucent thong underwear, and his bulge would loom portentously out toward the viewer. You could almost make out the outline of his penis, the head and the sizeable swell of his balls. But you could never actually see the penis itself. The man had posted over 300 times, and he boasted something like 30,000 subscribers, who paid 10.99 a month, at that, just to see virtually the same image again and again. The man posing in loose shorts. The man posing in tight pants. The man posing in an office bathroom. The man posing in the sauna with a towel draped over his lap. The man lifting weights, the camera trained on his crotch. Again and again, the same image, but the fanbase never tired of it because he preserved the one thing that they wanted to see most. In their imaginations and fantasies, the penis grew inhuman and monstrous. It became an idea, an abstraction. And then it became pure sensation. A desire without language that activated with each notification of his posting. They were responding, in essence, not to the images or the videos, but to the idea he had created in them. That was the way to do it, Hamilton thought.
But other creators thought that what people wanted was to see you naked. And true, some people did want to see you naked, but if all people wanted was to see a naked human body, even a naked human body having sex, then there were innumerable free options on the internet. Or even their own bodies. You needed something else to turn people on. They wanted a narrative. To be inside of a story, Hamilton said.
To create his scenes, he thought about his audience and tried to imagine himself as them. To identify with them so totally that he could intuit what would make them feel the most aroused. But you had to go about this carefully because to be too obvious would be to destroy the delicate illusion. To do it too subtly or without irony would be a mistake as well. What he had to do was cultivate a natural unnaturalness. An ease before the camera’s eye that said that he was himself.
“It sounds like how you describe Barton in school,” Oleg said.
“Exactly,” Hamilton said. “It’s exactly that natural quality he had. No matter how absurd the lines or the situation, he said them as though he believed them. But his belief in them also made a kind of . . . structure around them? A frame that let us peer in, so that we were both in the illusion and outside of it. He spoke across the gap.”
That phrase reminded Oleg of the story Laure had told him about the woman and her son. Their open backdoor, their easy conversations before that awful, strange day.
“Do you like it?” Oleg asked.
“Content creation? Yeah, I like it,” he said. “It’s like acting.”
“Acting like you’re not acting?”
“Yeah,” he said.
The key was that it couldn’t feel cheesy, like a planned scenario. No one bought that kind of artifice anymore. His audience wanted something unmediated. Of course, I am aware that I am mediating, he said, but it can’t feel mediated otherwise the audience would hate it. Unless of course they were talking about voyeurs, which was a different thing.
There were some creators, Hamilton said, who made private videos, scenarios with their clients. They’d roleplay. But Hamilton didn’t like that because sometimes, they wanted a scenario that he felt was outside of his wheelhouse. Sometimes, they asked for totally implausible things. Oleg asked for an example.
One guy had asked Hamilton to pretend to be a man pretending to be an AI to find out what turned on his step-dad which he would then use to seduce him. The underlying scenario of the step-parent seduction was common enough that Hamilton understood it to a degree, but he asked why the AI was necessary.
“Historically,” Hamilton said with a wry smile, “you usually just pretend like you’re asking your step dad for the “talk” and then you segue into mutual handjobs, you know? That’s the way it always was before. But now . . . .”
The AI intervention, the client explained to Hamilton, was for realism. Because, realistically, these days, people turned to bots for this sort of thing. So Hamilton had to pretend to be an AI assistant in the stepfather’s phone. But really, he was pretending to be a stepson pretending to be an AI in the stepfather’s phone through which he deduced what turned the man on. Hamilton’s client was both the audience and a participant in the scene, watching it and watching himself in it at the same time. All of this played out over text.
“That’s . . . nuts,” Oleg said. “I don’t . . . did that really happen?”
Hamilton smiled his very white smile and nodded.
“It’s wild out there,” he said. “But he tipped like, two grand.”
“What?”
“Yeah, he was in finance or something.”
The issue Hamilton had with that scene was that he didn’t understand the sort of person who would use AI. He himself never had and didn’t see much cause.
“I read that some creators use it,” Oleg said, “to talk to their fans for them.”
Hamilton said that he knew about that sort of thing too, but he couldn’t understand it. So much of what he did, he said, was because he liked the people aspect of it. True, he was performing for people whom he’d never meet or see or touch or hear, but he liked knowing that he was being witnessed by other people in the small, private darkness of their lives. They’d roll over from their spouses or partners or in their dorm rooms and pull up his videos and pics and get off to him while he got off on screen. At all hours of the day, in all corners of the planet, he was getting off on someone’s screen, even though at that very moment, he might be somewhere else, doing something entirely different.
Oleg said that he’d also read somewhere that most of the internet traffic out there was really just bots.
“God,” Hamilton said. “That’s so depressing.”
“Do you think bots look at porn?”
“Bots don’t look at anything,” Hamilton said. “They don’t have eyes.”
“But you know what I mean,” Oleg said.
“Are all of the porn metrics from bots? No. Only a human could think of something as insane as ‘pretend to be a guy pretending to be AI to seduce his stepdad.’”
“Too inefficient,” Oleg said.
“Exactly.”
Hamilton said that the other issue he’d had with the scene was that he thought it should have been the other way around, that the step-dad should have been pretending to be an AI to seduce the stepson. After all, it was more likely that the younger guy would use AI than the older one. But the client had told Hamilton that in his own life, it was totally different. At his job, people like him, which was to say, millennials, used AI far less than their bosses, who were almost all older than the rest of them. These people used it as a matter of course in writing emails, making schedules, sending texts to their colleagues, their wives, their friends. Every piece of text that issued from the C-Suite at this small firm in Midtown bore the unmistakable tinny ring of artificial intelligence. They’re all using it, the client said, even his own stepfather was using it. The client’s stepfather had used it to write a eulogy for his sister’s funeral. He had admitted it at the wake, as though it were a cheeky joke. He’d gone to the machine and asked it to come up with a heartfelt, but funny speech to give for his sister. The bot hadn’t even asked for information about the sister. Instead, it just churned out a block of text about how kind, funny, sweet, and sometimes annoying the sister had been in life. The strange thing, the stepfather said, was how eerily accurate it was despite knowing nothing about her. That’s how horoscopes work, the client had said to Hamilton over text. Speaking about things with sufficient generality as to make you think they were talking about you. It was also how the AI deployed by some of the other creators worked, Hamilton noted. You felt you were speaking to another person just because the bot used your name and was polite, saying thank you for the compliment and asking how you were feeling that night. Something of the illusion of intimacy, but a stranger illusion because the intimacy was with a non-human intelligence. Could you be intimate with a string of text? Or was intimacy only ever a one-sided illusion? You felt it because you wanted to feel it? Anyway, the client said, that it was more realistic for the older person to use the AI in the fantasy, so Hamilton agreed.
“Do you think that guy was hot for his stepdad?” Oleg asked.
“Hard to know,” Hamilton said. “People are mysterious.”
“Would you ever meet up with one of your subscribers?” Oleg asked.
“Like . . . to hook up?”
“Or for coffee, but yeah, I guess, to hook up?”
“No,” Hamilton said firmly. “I don’t think so. I mean. If they were hot, maybe. I don’t know.”
“I think that’s interesting,” Oleg said.
“Why?”
“Because they subscribe and you sometimes talk to them, and they know all this stuff about you, and, yet, there’s this . . . boundary, I guess, you can’t cross. Into the real world.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But I think that’s best. Boundaries. Plus, people on the internet are crazy.”
Oleg laughed.
“I used to do that,” Hamilton said after a moment. “I had a scenario where the guy wanted me to pretend to be a hostage.”
“How do you pretend to be a hostage?”
“He wanted to come tie me up and blindfold me and put a gun to my head.”
“A gun?” Oleg asked.
“Not a real one, obviously. Prop gun. But yeah, he wanted to put it against my head and in my mouth and then jerk off.”
“And you let him?”
“Hell yeah, I let him. He paid me five grand.” Hamilton then explained that it had gotten a little weird because the guy wanted to clarify what kind of hostage he was meant to be. Hamilton had planned to be a kind of generalized hostage. An innocent bystander plucked from some nondescript narrative and forced into a story of coercion and power. But the client wanted a more specific story. At first, Hamilton suspected that the guy wanted him to pretend to be a slave — you get a lot of that, he said, people wanting slave play — but in fact, what he’d wanted was for Hamilton to pretend to be a cruel, brutal overseer whose brutality goes too far and drives an ordinary guy to take revenge. He wanted Hamilton to pretend to be rich, powerful, black, and evil. Hamilton let the man tie him up and put the gun to his head while he, Hamilton, sat in the dark, breathing slowly, trying to imagine himself in the position of a wealthy, powerful elite whose actions have brought grave consequences upon him. The issue, Hamilton said, was that the guy was worth north of twenty million dollars and was from a very prestigious family. He had all these rules about what Hamilton was supposed to wear and say and how he was supposed sit on the chair while the guy stroked his head with the gun. He’d even made Hamilton wear his clothes, and his cologne. In fact, he made Hamilton act as him, but black.
“The black part was very important to him,” Hamilton said. “He was like, don’t pretend to be white. Just be black. But rich. Like me. But black.” He kept saying that over and over, Be black.
“Like it’s a thing you can be,” Hamilton said. “At a certain point, I felt like . . . I was pretending to be black . . . even though . . . I mean, I am black.” And with all of the rules, Hamilton said, it started to feel less like a hypothetical hostage situation and more like an actual hostage situation — anyway, he didn’t meet people in person anymore.
“My friend has a guy threatening to come to her house right now,” Oleg said. “They hooked up once, but now he’s, like, dropping pins and getting closer to her place.”
“Oh my god,” Hamilton said. “That’s crazy.”
“I know,” Oleg said. “But I kind of get it.” Then he explained that once he’d been very horny and had been trawling the apps all day for sex, with very little reward. He even changed his location in the city on the apps, trying to drum up fresh interest. Then a guy had reached out and said that he was looking for head down on West 42nd, near 10th. Oleg had agreed, then they both realized that they were farther apart than they previously thought due to Oleg changing his location. By then, Oleg was already on the sidewalk in the cold, walking briskly toward 9th Ave, thinking he’d just hop in a cab and be on his way. But the guy said, No, dude, not today. It wasn’t worth it for Oleg to come down there when the guy just needed a little head and would come fast anyway, and he had to get back to work. Oleg said, no, no, he was on his way, he’d be there in a flash. He was already in the car on his way down 9th Ave, and the guy kept telling him not to come, but Oleg thought he was just being chivalrous, and explained that, no, it was really no bother, and he’d be there soon. Ten minutes later, Oleg got out of the car and onto the guy’s street, and the guy said, definitively, Do not come, and Oleg said that he was already outside, and the guy then got very apologetic and said he hadn’t thought Oleg was serious about coming down, and he felt sorry for him. It was then that Oleg realized that he’d made a mistake. Or several mistakes, really. His own horniness and his own desire to self-abnegate had caused him to overlook the fact that the guy was not interested in quick head at just that instant if it involved someone getting in a car and going downtown. Oleg texted the guy and said, okay, sure another time. Then the guy asked if Oleg was really down on the street, and Oleg felt anxious about being spotted, so he said, not really. But then he realized that his position on the app probably gave him away, and he blocked the guy so he wouldn’t be able to see him, which of course meant that there would never be a next time.
“That’s like an O. Henry story,” Hamilton said, laughing. “Oh my god. Total ‘Gift of the Magi’ situation there.”
“I don’t know about that,” Oleg said, “but it does make me think, like, that guy was probably not afraid for his life . . . just annoyed and irritated.”
“I would be,” he said. “But also, if you were already down there, he should have let you up. Bad form.”
“Bad form was showing up in the first place,” Oleg said.
“I mean, what were you going to do? Tie him up and suck him off against his will?”
“I think that’s probably what he imagined.”
“How is your friend?”
Oleg checked his phone and saw that Laure had sent him three screenshots of text messages from the guy. He was getting closer. Laure had sent the screenshots with a laughing emoji and a message that said: save me from these dl dudes.
“She’s fine,” Oleg said. “I think.”
She did this all the time, Laure did. She had a parade of men coming into her house all of the time. She documented their coming and going with her digital doorbell, which sent photos of them to her phone. She arranged these images into a gallery that she kept in her camera roll. The funny thing was that she did not know their names, not really, and sometimes, she would be chatting with a guy on an app and get a strange feeling of déjà vu that prompted her to ask for a pic. Then she cross-referenced the pic with the gallery, looking for matches, and only when she found a corresponding entry in her carousel of hookups did the memory of the hookup come back to her. The image in isolation did nothing to stir her recollection — no, it had to match some image in her gallery, which then trigged the reel of memory. Oleg sometimes thought of the guys and their faces trapped in the reel of Laure’s camera roll. He’d seen her flick through it, and how it spun like a digital rolodex. She arranged them by date, but the similarity of angle, lighting, and perspective of the shots made them all look like a gallery of mug shots. An array, they called it on the cop shows. An array of dudes, most of whom were black, tall, with a closed affect as they stood at her door, waiting for her to answer. He’d once pointed out to her that she had what amounted to a bounty hunter’s catalog, and she’d said that she liked that. They were her cons. She did in fact sleep with a number of men who had records. Men who had recently gotten out of the pen and whose lives still bore the traces of institutionalization: intense neatness, scaled down possessions, yard sandals, and a twitchy paranoia that allowed them to see over both shoulders at once. One time, Laure had told Oleg about a guy she was kind of seeing. He’d recently gotten out after a five year bid for roughing up some trans girls in Birmingham. He was living in a halfway house, but was permitted day passes to work or go the store or to socialize. They’d met at the pawn shop when Laure had been picking up an iPad she had pawned to pay something on her cable bill, and the guy, Keldrick, had been standing outside smoking. He held the door for her both going and coming out, then he followed her to her car. He was short, with thick hair, and a dopey, boyish smile. When Laure sent Oleg a photo of him, he was struck by the dimness of his gaze, like a bulb that had come loose in the socket. But Laure really liked him, even though Keldrick sometimes went to his ex-girlfriend’s house to kick it despite telling Laure that he was at “work.” When they were together, he smothered her in love and affirmation. He told her again and again that he loved her body, all of it, and he didn’t need or want her to change a thing. He liked it all. Erythang, Laure said, mimicking him. Then Laure got tested at her monthly appointment and found out that she had syphilis. After she told Keldrick, he told her that he forgave her for getting him sick. Laure hadn’t cheated though, not yet, and not with anyone who had syphilis, and after some pressing, she found out that he had been sleeping with someone else. She was enraged by the betrayal, but also, but the speed with which he had forgiven her. She dumped him. And a week later, a different man was posted up outside the pawn shop. This man, she bought a pack of cigarettes. His name was Omar.
“She’s a regular Mother Theresa,” Hamilton said in awe.
“She’s certainly something,” Oleg said.
They made plans for Oleg to stop by Hamilton’s filming space, which was really a studio apartment above a pickleshop in Bushwick, for some shots. They finished their pastries and went out into the cold, gray afternoon. Hamilton pulled Oleg in for a hug. His muscles were substantial under his gray coat. He had a careful carelessness with which he wielded his body, Hamilton did, and Oleg felt something of approximation to intimacy.
He wondered if this was what Hamilton did to his subscribers. This careful modulation of performance. When he pulled back, he flashed Oleg that same smile and raised his eyebrows. He was much taller than Oleg, and so close to him on the sidewalk, Oleg felt himself slide under Hamilton’s animal charisma. A flicker of heat ran across Hamilton’s eyes, and then, he patted Oleg’s back and said that he was grateful he’d agreed to take him on.
They parted, Hamilton going downtown, Oleg walking to Union Square.
The holiday market was in full flow. The stalls were filled with local crafts and food. Baked goods, hot chocolate. Some of the chess hustlers had put on Santa hats and sat around squinting at passersby.
Oleg entered the market in order to get to the station, but as he was going, he kept glancing at the various stalls which resembled dioramas. Little self-contained units of drama or narrative. The effect of passing through the maze of stalls to the station was akin to a reel of film coming unspooled, spilling its unrelated frames across his mind’s eye.
He had a strange sense that he had come out of narrative somehow, come out of a story. At the mouth of the station, his phone rang. It was Laure.
He stepped away from the top of the stairs and made his way back into the holiday market while Laure explained, laughing, hysterical, that the guy had actually come to her house. She could see him out there, parked near the turnabout. She recognized his car. He had texted to say that he had arrived, and there he was out there.
“Are you okay?” Oleg asked.
It was so crazy that he had come, she said. She really didn’t think he would even as he had sent her dropped pins along the way indicating his proximity. The last time they’d met up for sex, he’d climbed on top of her and held her down by the throat. This in itself was not terrible or scary. In fact, he did it at her urging. She’d asked him to treat her like one of those round-the-way girls you sometimes saw in news reports or circulated on Instagram in stories as missing. She wanted him to treat her how she really felt sometimes, like disposable, usable, to make of her whatever he wanted. He’d choked her, gently at first, and she’d gripped his wrists and made him squeeze harder until she’d felt something hot and bitter rising from her belly, and she’d almost come, almost, when he slid inside of her and took her roughly that way.
But afterward, he’d grown almost tender toward her, which had repulsed her and had caused her erection to go away, so she’d told him to get out and take that soft shit somewhere else.
Now he was at her door — not yet at her door, but in his car outside of her house, looking at through the windshield.
“Do you want to call the cops?” Oleg asked. “Do you need my help?”
“No,” she said. “I just think it’s so funny.”
Then she said that she hadn’t thought about it in weeks, really, but it was true she thought she’d seen his car outside in the university parking lot, which was very small, did Oleg remember how small it had been when they were students? Yes, he remembered it being tiny, big enough for like fifty cars, maybe, anyway, she thought she’d seen him, but figured there were so many Altimas in the world. And then another time, recently, she’d been shopping at Wal-Mart, buying chicken breast for meal prep, and hadn’t she seen him then too? And, thinking about it more, yeah, she’d seen a very similar car drive by a couple of times when she’d gotten home late in the winter dark, its yellow beams trailing up and over her skirt and her hair, touching the crown of her house’s rooftop before passing out into darker, bluer night.
“Oh my god,” she said. “He’s been . . . following me?”
Oleg was near the equestrian statue, gazing at the doom’s day clock counting down over Union Square. The wind was cold and ashen on his face.
“Lock your door,” he said. “Lock it now.”
“It is,” she said.
“Do you have a picture of the plate? Take one, now take it,” he said.
He heard scratching, soft, hurried breathing, and then she said she’d snapped the photo.
“My ring doorbell,” she said. “I have his picture. In the gallery. You know I keep a gallery on me.”
He wanted to laugh, but didn’t, not yet. He studied the vendors handing out baguettes and croissants to the people in their winter jackets. The children running, laughing. Across the street, the red lights of the cars trying to force their way onto the street.
“What is he doing?” Oleg asked.
“Nothing. Just sitting there,” she said.
“Don’t go outside.”
“I was planning to take him some cookies and milk — obviously, shit, Ollie.”
“Well,” Oleg said.
“Well what.”
“Nothing,” he said.
“No, say it.”
“Nothing to say.”
Laure sighed sharply and said that she could feel his judgement. In fact, she always felt judged when she talked about her sex life with him. That was why she never told him anything. Oleg tried to interrupt to say that in fact she told him everything. But she pressed on, saying that his judgement was why she hadn’t wanted to call him today. Because he would just say that the fact she even had a gallery of men’s faces with whom she’d had sex was something of a warning sign. And perhaps she shouldn’t have gone around having sex with so many men. Giving out her address. And actually, she’d thought about getting a gun, recently.
“A gun? You?” Oleg said. “You do not need a gun.”
“I thought about that,” she said. “And I decided I wouldn’t. But not because I thought you would say it.”
“Is now the time to be having this fight?”
“I’m not fighting,” she said. “I’m just saying, you make me feel filthy sometimes.”
“I don’t think you’re filthy,” Oleg said. “I love you. I love you so much. And sometimes I’m scared for you. And it comes out fucked up. And I’m sorry for that. I am.”
Laure said nothing. Overhead, a plane made its way through vast distances.
“Laure?” he asked.
“He’s backing out,” she said. “He’s pulling out.”
Oleg sat on the step by the statue. He put his face in his hand. He could smell the pastry and the coffee from the Italian spot. He could smell Hamilton’s cologne. On the phone, Laure’s breathing slowed and evened.
“This reminds me,” she said. “You’re never going to believe what my mother said today.”
Brandon Taylor is a novelist. He writes the Substack sweater weather. His most recent book is Minor Black Figures.
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