Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica (18 page)

be able to see it, but technically it wouldn’t be classified as miss- ing. Every soldier could now walk off a plane into his or her loved one’s arms, for all the world to see. Home, waving a hand that wasn’t there, the sun shining through the hole shot through his chest. Win-win.

4

A soldier lay in a dusty parking lot in Baghdad, a jagged line machine-gunned across her chest, holes that will kill her, holes through which her life will escape, unless these holes themselves can be incorporated into her body.

Stateside, six weeks later, at her bedside, her boyfriend pulls back the bedsheet to see how she’s healing—seven pink-tinged, round-lipped blossoms. His finger hovers briefly over each one, tracing their swelling. She shudders, takes his face in her hands, and kisses him, their first real kiss since the operation, now press- ing her whole body against him, rubbing the holes against his chest. He places his finger in his mouth, wets it, and circles the hole shot through her collarbone, slowly working his finger inside, below the surface, working it slowly in and out, making it bigger, slowly able to accept two fingers, then three.

By the end of the night he’d filled every one.

5

Erika watched the soldiers coming off the plane, waving their empty hands. Her mother was on the couch reading magazines called “
Us
” and “
InTouch,
” which Erika called “
Them
” and “
Out of Touch
.” The air conditioner whirred to life. This was the apart- ment they’d lived in since her father vanished. Sunlight shone

through a soldier’s mouth. That’s messed up, Erika said to no one, switching channels.

6

Side effects. As with everything, there’s side effects. Once you’re brought back from the other side, once you’ve gone over, you no longer recognize where you’re from, not really—
you’re a new frea- kin’ species, soldier, what do you expect?
Still, you were shipped back to where you came from, shipped home. It was impossible for you to stay. Baghdad? Tikrit? For what? To wander the desert with a hole through your heart?

7

It wasn’t exactly boredom—more a sense of the unreal. Hous- ton, to Erika, felt deeply unreal, even if she couldn’t point at anything specific and say, what
is
that? Everywhere she looked was another temple to the ultra-real—a coffee shop that smelled like coffee, a record shop lined with bins of used CDs. The tat- too on her backside, she’d wake some mornings, keep her eyes shut, trying to remember what it was. Flames? A snake? Three snakes entwined around something? What? Why did she get it? With who? What did it mean? Maybe it was a lotus blossom. She’d read somewhere that because of all the barbeque joints in Houston, the air over the city was made up of 10 percent burnt particles of flesh—
particulate matter
. Maybe she heard it on the radio—she could still hear a voice pronouncing the words
par- ticulate matter
. She read somewhere else that the drinking water was 6 percent antidepressants, from sewer runoff seeping into the groundwater.
Pissing in a river, watch the fish smile
. Erika

calls herself a vegetarian, some days.
THE AIR IS MEAT
, the graffiti on a bridge over 59 said—
BE HAPPY
.

8

The porn industry picked up the ball, first the low-end compa- nies, the bucket shops, but it quickly spread to the mainstream. Click onto YouTube, type in “a crystal made entirely of holes,” and you can see it, a video, homemade. It shows the tonguing, lots of tonguing, but it doesn’t show how to make the holes.

9

Houston is the center of the plastic surgery world—more peo- ple alter themselves here than anywhere else on the planet. In Houston there’s a plastic surgeon; let’s call him Dr. Malick. For awhile Malick oversaw the coercive interrogation wing at the federal prison downtown. State-of-the-art facility, high-risk prisoners. With the passage of the Military Commissions Act, safeguards had been put in place to prevent the abuses and embarrassments of another Abu Ghraib. Strict oversight. In the interrogation rooms, Malick perfected a technique to simulate the effects of a shrapnel or bullet wound to flesh, and then he would “heal” the wound, a few moments or a few hours later, after the questions had been asked, after the answers had been given, or not given.

10

Word spread. The skateboard punks who used the concrete forti- fications outside the prison as jump ramps heard about what was happening on the other side of the walls. They saw the nighttime

deliveries—a hooded man, an orange jumpsuit, the spray-painted goggles, the old school headphones that silenced everything.

11

Malick opened the first Drive-Thru Holery in the desolation of downtown, out of a storefront below the Pierce Street overpass. He’d recently been retired from the prison—rumors he’d gone a little too far, though no formal charges were filed. Malick kept a running tally on an electronic billboard, visible from the highway, of the number of holes he’d “punched.”
YOUR MIND IS YOUR ONLY LIMIT
! was the tag line. At first he gave out a Krispy Kreme to each customer—the perfect synergistic franchise—though now he doesn’t bother. No one ate them anyway.

12

Once it caught on, Erika said it was all she’d found to believe in, that her god-given body had always seemed so limiting. Her god- given body filled her with despair, she said. It wasn’t a matter of belief, because she professed to believe nothing. She and the other skateboard punks found themselves wanting more, more
options.
The flesh they were born with, the few holes they were given, the few ways they’d found to fill them, it wasn’t enough, not anymore. Maybe it never was. They wanted some new organs. They wanted to be transformed, they wanted to become new freakin’ species.

13

Maybe it was the Krispy Kremes, but after they got their first hole, the punks called themselves “donuts”—those with twelve called themselves “a dozen.”

14

One hole per visit was allowed, by law, though there was no limit on the number of visits one could make. One could come every day—Erika came every day.
I’m a dozen
, Erika said,
I’m two dozen
. The day you got a donut someone else had to drive you home—that was the other rule. Those days Erika’s boyfriend got the donut instead of her she’d drive away with one hand on the wheel and her other hand tearing off his bandage. Most days, though, she came alone. For Erika, Malick bent the rules—Saint Erika, pilgrims crossed the parking lot on their knees just to touch her toe, her toe with a hole shot through it.

15

Her body was state-of-the-art. You could see the sky through her forehead, the stars through her palm. Bones were rearranged; bones weren’t a problem. She wanted each hole to shoot clean through to the other side, she wanted to shoot through to the other side. One more and she’d be gone.
Pure donut
, it was called, but no one had yet gone that far. A crystal made entirely of holes. Ma- lick knew Erika would go that far, she was that beautiful. From that moment on, we’d only glimpse the outline of where she’d once been.

NOTES ON
‌

REDEVELOPMENT

RICK MOODY

Your honor, these are my introductory notes, and though I
don’t need to tell you, let me add that of course they are being composed against the backdrop of the secessionist movement here in our newly partitioned country. These notes are further to how we, as municipal executives, might redevelop the crumbling Giuliani Way and environs, the neighborhood formerly known as Times Square. That is, for the betterment of civic programs generally, with especial attention to the problem of diverting sig- nificant monies to the education budget and to the Abolishment of Homelessness Project, I do hereby propose the Pornography or Salacious Entertainments Relicensing Act (hereafter abbrevi- ated POSER).

The first and most obvious point follows. Now that the voters of the Mid-Atlantic States, along with the New England region, have made the commitment to sunder ties with what was formerly known as the United States of America, we are no longer bound to observe restrictive federal statutes relating to tie-wearing, overt signs of belief or belief in the true and risen Christ, ankle-length dresses, and the necessity of reserving sexual congress for repro- ductive purposes.

Accordingly, as one of only four transgendered members of your administration, as a adventurer in the arenas of gender and human sexuality, I feel I am now in a unique position to recommend certain kinds of businesses that will attract to our city a great num- ber of visitors (and tourist currencies) via the newly restored Port Authority Bus Terminal, the Bloomberg Heliport, the Forty-second Street Pier, Westway, and so forth. First, as you know, transgender businesses flourished in the area during the highly regarded peri- od known as the First Great Decadence, and I would therefore like to propose some expansionist licensing along these thematic lines, such as the TV Makeover Hut, in which people are encouraged to stop into a storefront and have themselves made over, in particu- larly provocative ways, in the payment of opposite sex, whereupon they will be filmed (in the performance of exotic dances) by local webcasting operations. Since the female-to-male transvestite im- pulse has now become so commonplace as to be practically nor- mal, it would be easy to promote such a business as especially family friendly. Off the record, I am more than capable as regards the solicitation of seed monies for any “trans-related” businesses. Church-related sexuality has become very popular lately as well. We estimate seven or eight deconsecrated churches along

Giuliani Way, and these could easily be turned into businesses that cater to this very popular fetish. Orgies or one-on-one encounters on the altars of these churches, with voyeurs encouraged to pay for the right to serve as witness to these sessions, could be a hit. Moreover, returning to the transvestite and transgender imagery, it’s obvious that many of the people who have led extremely con- stricted “heterosexual” lives during the theocratic governments of the early twenty-first century could now have the opportunity to wear the vestments of church attire to pursue their experimen- tal sexual encounters. It is, these days, practically a superstitious belief that defiling a priest’s cassock while making a baby out of wedlock will ensure the baby’s longevity and his/her robust en- gagement in physical love in later life.

The amateur pornography studios that have begun turning up in Balkan and Central European pornographic markets in recent years have not been attempted here with the sort of marketing
oomph
that they really require, so I have an additional proposal along those lines. We all know that the old single-room occupancy hotels of the Midtown area served ably as sets for pornographic films, and we know that the more tawdry a pornographic film, the better its postprandial glow, so it should be possible to con- vert one or more of these dormant hotels back into “self-guiding pornographic production stations,” where people who are above the reasonable new age of consent may feel free to film themselves performing the exercises of love with anyone who happens by, as long as these people or persons have had the de rigueur on-the- spot STD swabs. Imagine “self-guiding pornographic production stations,” or SGPPSs, as common or easily accessible as automatic teller machines (ATMs). Again, there may be crossover revenue

streams available to us here, especially in concert with the Office of Internet Projects, which is eager to license larger numbers of filmmaking operations in the city than we saw during and after the G-Rated-Only Family Film Act of 2012.

Recall if you will, your Honor, the Rev. Beauregard group- rape incident. We, as a legally chartered municipality, as one of the truly great international cities of the world, cannot publicly condone lawless vigilantism. We can decry the sort of poltroon- ery that leads young anarchistic toughs of our city to journey a thousand miles south and to imprison and violate the person of a leading southern theologian. But while we can oppose the original events, there is really no obstacle to promoting a business model based on quality-controlled public theatrical reenactments of the Rev. Beauregard group-rape incident. It would be, ergo, part of the Blows for Liberty campaign that has been so symbolically rich for the grass-roots campaigners of the northeastern secessionist movement. Who are we to stand in the way of this interpretation of the events? In fact, it would be possible to set up a sex-related Great Moments in American History theatrical extravaganza, perhaps on the site of the former Peep World Center, which was recently landmarked. In this venue, sexual tourists could have their way with various robotic likenesses of presidents, senators, and others from the annals of history. I think everybody agrees that sexual congress with presidents just helps regular folks let off steam, as it also alleviates stress and resentment about politics in general.