Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica (26 page)

So I curled up as close to the edge of the bed as possible and tried to act like I was asleep, but I couldn’t remember what a sleep- ing person looks or sounds like. I did remember that Maura used

to breathe very loud, almost like snoring, but I was afraid if I did that he’d think it was heavy breathing and come after me again. I decided to just lie there as quiet as I could. After a while, he pulled me over to him and lifted up my nightgown. I started to say no, but he slapped me in the face and said, “Shut up, you know you want it,” and before I could think, he was pushing it into me.

When Ed used to do that thing, I learned how to pretend I was floating near the ceiling, watching all this happen to some- body else, that there was no pain and it was even a bit amusing when you looked at it the right way. That’s how I was able to be a normal girl the rest of the time, well, not normal in terms of being able to talk to boys, but not going crazy, either. So that’s what I did, and it wasn’t that bad, and when it was over he even said, that wasn’t so bad, was it? And I had to admit it wasn’t. Then he went home and I was able to really go to sleep.

The other part Sherina thinks is funny is that the next day he called Angie for my phone number, and Angie had to tell him I’m only fourteen and he’d better not try and track me down. Which he never did. So I didn’t actually get a boyfriend out of it, but it did improve my popularity, both because I proved that I can look good enough to get a grown man, a political figure, interested in me, and because it really does make a good story, doesn’t it? Even I have to laugh at the nightgown part. Except the one time we got into Lena’s parents’ liquor cabinet and they made me tell it to Lena’s sister, and when I got to that part, instead of laughing I started crying and couldn’t stop, and then I threw up. Other than that, though, it’s okay. But I wish I had let Simone be first.

THE TRUE REPUBLIC
‌

STEVE ALMOND

Everyone always said the truly freaky shit happened down in
the Republic, but I never believed them. I figured it was gossip, the natural oxygen of a bullshit nation. What I knew of the Republic was what I saw on TV: rioting around the petroleum islands, the roving water militias, the lavish, fortified estates where leaders played golf and decided which sector would get the next nuclear plant.

I was a typical New American, I guess: earnest, vaguely patri- otic, vegetarian. I had grown up in Vermont Province. I was still in junior high when the Great Line was drawn. My parents sup- ported the referendum. They could see where things were headed. A house divided and all that.

I’d visited the Republic only once, in high school, but that was before China called in their chits and everything went apeshit. You could still travel without an escort then. The roads were cracking, and I remember seeing a few work camps around the capital. They told us those were collective farms.

My cousin Clem had visited back in ’28, on one of those cor- porate Desalinization Fellowships. The whole thing wigged him out. The armored vehicles, the drug tests, the prayer circle debrief- ings—not his scene.

We all wanted to know about quality-of-life stuff. Clem shook his head.

“Fried food and pig shit, man.” That was his executive summary.

So I had no intention of seeing the Republic again. But, then, I never meant to sign on with the Sticky Icky Dirt Band, either. Just sort of fell into it. They needed someone to run the light board and electronic effects. I needed a winter job to supplement my soybean crop.

The Sticky Icky was a trio of college burnouts who did trance- hop covers of cheesy oldies: Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails. I doubted they would stay together long enough to grow out their dreadlocks. Certainly none of us expected that our lone single, “Unchain Your Brain,” would become a hit down south.

“Fucking racist pigs,” said Phred, our lead singer. He was half Vietnamese, half trust-fund.

Nonetheless, one day we found ourselves in receipt of a certi- fied letter from Mr. Shivalik Khan, one of the young Saudis who had bought up most of the Gulf’s swamps. He wanted us to play

his twenty-first-birthday bash, at the beachfront arena in Orlando. A forty-five-minute gig for five hundred thousand rands. Enclosed was a check for a hundred thousand rands.

The show was a disaster. Most of our equipment ran off a solar grid, not generators. Our bassist, Tork, kept smacking up against the bulletproof barrier. But the crowd was so cranked on Bliss tabs it didn’t even matter.

Khan stood in the royal box, in a long blue robe, and did his jerky Arab noodle dance. An older woman, presumably his mother, sat beside him, bored out of her skull.

After the show, we got loaded onto a copter and whisked off to his compound. We set down on this parapet and looked down across a thick lawn, to the lagoon with the waterslide, the Aruban sand strobing blue, two full bars, giant, freshwater Jacuzzi, steam room, sauna. And scattered across all of this: naked betties, laugh- ing, smacking each other on the butt, swilling mai tais.

“Holy crap,” Tork said.

“Totally unmonitored,” Khan said. “Fuck anything you see.” “Have they been tested?” Phred said.

Khan let out a peal of girlish laughter. “You poor little sod- buster. They’re virgins. Certified.” He spread his arms. “Welcome to the fruits of repression.”

We were all young guys, horny enough, but we were New Ameri- cans, subject to certain sensitivities.

“They’re, what, fucking fourteen?” said Hankhank, our drummer. “I’m not busting some underage hymen.”

Tork shrugged.

Khan fed us vodka tonics, Bliss tabs, some smoke. The drinks had been dosed with enhancers, naturally, and the blood rushed straight to our dongs.

The girls descended on us. They were way out of our league: pale Slavs, tall Africans, Peruvian sex bombs dipped in balsam. They laughed at everything we said and stripped the clothing from our bodies and pulled us to the ground and shouted things that our girls never said, in these ridiculous accents:

“Let me lick-lick!” “Put in ass, put
hard!
” “Squirt the face now!”

They took our hands and placed them around their throats. We were all hopped up on stimulants; they made us fierce,

predatory, unable to quell our erections.

“You like that tight little cave?” my third girl said. She was Inuit, I believe. “Bust that bitch in two so I can suck the blood off.” Khan watched all of this from his perch. He could see the ex- pressions on our faces, our savage porno sneers. It gave him great pleasure to watch us break free of the polite gender politics we’d

absorbed up north.

I heard someone calling my name, a girl down the beach lolling under a palm tree. I staggered toward her. She stepped from the shadows, and my chest seized up.

“It can’t be,” I said.

Tork, behind me, said, “Good Christ. It is. Jenna fucking Bush.”

We all remembered her from the memorial video in our safety training classes. She’d been kidnapped by diesel bikers during the

2012 Texas blackout and found a few months later, in parts. But she was alive now, restored to her sorority girl prime, an image I had jacked off to countless times as a pimpled teen. She stood luxurious in her rolls of baby fat, with her twat shaved down to a tender pink pucker.

“Who all is going to fuck this nasty cunt?” she said, in her soft drawl. “This nasty, horny cunt?”

I turned and spotted Khan. He grinned broadly. “Jesus,” I said. “She’s a synthetic.”

Tork nodded. He was watching Doris Day eat out Paris Hil- ton. Then we caught sight of Hankhank. He was tittie-fucking a young Marilyn Monroe on the dock, while Betty Page licked his ass.

At a certain point, a loudspeaker came on and beckoned us to the amphitheater. Klieg lights washed down onto a steel cage, inside of which two naked men circled each other. They had cocks like thick hammers—obvious products of the Genital Enhancement Program—and they went at one another with a merciless, dead- eyed hunger.

We’d heard about such things: Ultimate Fag Fighting, it was called. The winners were allowed to sodomize the loser—to death, if they so chose.

I turned away, stumbled off to a high bluff. The bodies below had assumed a frantic, tribal rhythm. I could pick out particular images: a little redhead at the edge of the lagoon, impaled by gi- ants on either end, held aloft, bucking, gagging on a third. A black woman in congress with a sullen Shetland pony. A pair of crew- cut club boys writhing in a pool of semen.

The whole thing was so fucking out of hand. It was like a Bosch painting, and impossible to look away.

“You like the sick shit, huh?” Khan said.

I must have nodded, because I was led by the hand to a dank grotto. In one vestibule, we watched a priest calmly insert his meaty fist into a bucket of lard, then into a series of effeminate altar boys.

“Catamites,” Khan said. “Quite wrong for them to be alive.”

In the next, a scowling mother superior introduced a pack of frightened novitiates to the rigors of genital mutilation. The noises of the victims were amplified and run through an echo effect.

The drugs made it hard for me to react to all this properly. But I managed to convey some basic brand of distress to Khan.

“Don’t you see?” he said mildly. “They choose to come here. It is a paradise for them, to feel these things. They will be stars forever.”

It turned out the entire compound was rigged with cameras. Khan was livestreaming. We were merely a minor attraction—a one-hit band from the other side—to supplement the various star athletes, synthetics, homosexuals, and several hundred cock-starved vir- gins. All entirely illegal under the Moral Code of the Republic.

He made a fortune off the downloads, particularly those that included the special snuff featurette. The political leadership was happy to collect kickbacks. Khan had a hidden archive with most of them on film, just in case.

It was the only durable economy, he explained. With the crude almost gone and the aquifers sucked dry, porn had become the

last, best resort for most citizens. They would spend a few months on the compound, then be shipped west and dumped in the desert provinces. They understood that.

“Without me, they have what? Prayer and starvation,” Khan said. “I only give them what they’ve always wanted.” He smiled a thin smile. “And, you know, I do pledge allegiance—every day: to the Republic and that for which it stands.”

CONTRIBUTORS
‌

STEVE ALMOND
is the author of two story collections,
My Life in Heavy Metal
and
The Evil B. B. Chow
. His collection of essays,
Not That You Asked
, was published in 2007 by Random House. He lives outside Bos- ton with his wife and new baby daughter, whom he cannot stop kissing.

JONATHAN AMES
is the author of
I Pass Like Night
,
The Extra Man
,
What’s Not to Love?
,
My Less Than Secret Life
,
Wake Up, Sir!
, and
I Love You More Than You Know.
His graphic novel,
The Alcoholic
, will be published in 2008 by DC Comics/Vertigo. He is the editor of the an- thology
Sexual Metamorphosis
and the winner of a Guggenheim Fellow- ship. For more information, see his Web site: www.jonathanames.com.

CHARLIE ANDERS
is the author of
Choir Boy
, which won a Lambda Literary Award. She co-edited the anthology
She’s Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff.
She also pub- lishes
Other
magazine and organizes the Writers with Drinks reading series. She likes to role-play that she lives in a democracy. “Transfixed, Helpless, and Out of Control: Election Night 2004” was originally pub- lished in Suspect Thoughts Online
.