THE FIRST EIGHT HOURS were the best eight hours, when I still believed my lusty dreams would be fulfilled. Among the Amish, where I was born and raised, and up on Northstar, where I spent the better part two years, I’d marinated in high-octane fantasies of flesh and hair and spurting fluids, buttocks, breasts, and breathy whimpers, pelvis, scapulas, and collarbones, but I’d known that I was fantasizing. Now, alone in Arkansas, I imagined that I was standing on the doorstep of Gomorrah, knocking.
I downloaded OkCupid first, then Tinder, Bumble, Plenty of Fish, Coffee Meets Bagel, Down, and Hinge. I held off on eHarmony. I’d saved plenty on the rig, but I couldn’t see why I should need to spend it. Curled in a nest of blankets on the cabin floor, I liked and swiped and fell in love and typed and lost myself in reveries. In my lap, my member perked up and began to throb. Outside, an owl called.
The owner of the cabin and the land it stood on, an old man with a face like rocks and expressions like the lichen growing on them, had left the Amish, too. “Not being anything but yourself,” he’d told me after we had shaken hands, “that’s what most folks are scared of. Me and you, that’s all we know how to do.”
I thought being myself was enough. I thought having arms like my arms, and a face like my face, and no one to hold me back or hem me in would get me somewhere. Where it got me, after the first eight hours, was Craigslist.
Are you generous, honey? one woman wanted to know. I like men who are generous. Then, after my faltering attempts to assure her that while I had never performed cunnilingus, I was open to trying, That’s not what I mean.
The husband in a polyamorous couple got back to me: he wanted to interview me before moving forward, preferably in a well-lit, public venue, a library or café. I had to respect him.
I gave up around four a.m. and turned to vanilla pornography until the birds began to sing.
* * *
The summer went by like that, quickly and bleakly, and by mid-August, when school rolled around, I understood that I was not enough. I’d imagined that having a foot in each world would make me more enticing. Now I saw myself as others saw me: less than whole.
The campus was an hour’s drive south, but I didn’t want to move any closer. I feared for my solitude. Like minerals seeping into porous bone, online dating had taken the place of that solitude, but still I clung to what I knew about myself: I liked to be alone.
On campus, I discovered no shortage of loneliness. I was in my twenties and considered myself a virgin despite what happened with Martín, but adjectives like young and wild and free had little resonance with me. I felt like Rumpelstiltskin, awakened from another age. I learned social rules as one learns a new language, painstakingly. I would often annunciate what should be slurred and say directly what should remain unspoken. When I reacted with shock to a classmate who’d never heard of the book I was reading, I was reprimanded by her friend: “You know, if you tell her about it like that, she won’t actually want to read it. If you want to share something you enjoy, you should find a more inviting way to do it.” This sounded reasonable enough, but still, I was befuddled: all I’d done was mirror the response that my own ignorance of popular film and celebrity culture had more than once elicited from those same girls.
The double standard became, with time, a tender, festering wound.
Of course, I put none of this into the circle letters. To my mother, brothers, sister, uncles, aunts, and cousins, I wrote only of my studies, summarizing in great detail what I was learning about the American Revolution while omitting nearly everything about mechanized harvests and petrol-based pesticides. Though I still had two years of core classes to go, I’d set my sights on a dual major, history and agriculture: again, a foot in each world.
* * *
What had happened between me and Martín had only happened once, and while it was happening, I had felt nothing. Later, blistering myself in the shower, I’d gone on feeling nothing, and later still, lying on my back with steepled fingers while my bunkmates snored, I’d started to worry that nothing was all I could feel.
I wouldn’t have minded if I’d felt disgusted, I wouldn’t have minded elation, but the appalling neutrality of that encounter had been more than I could bear.
Martín, a bright-eyed kid from the Gulf, made a point of throwing impish grins my way whenever we passed each other in the halls thereafter. He’d gotten what he wanted. Good for Martín. I held nothing against him. He’d had no way of knowing how I would feel, or wouldn’t feel. Not even I had known. I’d feverishly hoped that I might yet turn out to be at least bisexual. That would’ve simplified my life considerably. Men are easy enough to find on oil rigs. Nubile women, not so much. I didn’t submit a dozen college applications because I was tired of the wet and the cold and the wintry gray and the nothing, even though I was. I didn’t submit them because I was tired of putting wear and tear on my body while neglecting my mind, although that was true, also. I submitted them because, on college campuses, I would finally find women my age.
* * *
That’s not what I mean, the woman from Craigslist had told me. Of course it wasn’t. Nothing is free in this world. If I was to take, then I would also have to give, and my company alone, my thoughts, my recollections, the places I’d gone, the things I’d seen, the muscles I’d built, the vitality that coursed within me — all for naught. I was no Othello, not that things ended well for him either, and this was not Othello’s world.
I told myself I didn’t have the money. I told myself that prostitutes were victims, and I shouldn’t take advantage of them. I told myself that women of the night were wicked jezebels, and I was pure. I was trying on reasons. None of them fit, but the truth was out there somewhere.
Why not a prostitute? Would I not be giving something in exchange for what I got? Honoring an agreement between two consenting adults? Contributing to the local economy? Was it my upbringing holding me back? Was I still mired in provincial moralism?
Or was I simply being stingy?
* * *
In late November, I broke down and ordered a sex toy on Amazon: a silicone doll shaped like the torso of a naked woman, armless, legless, and headless, but with prominent breasts and two holes. Forty dollars. A bargain.
In the time I spent scrolling through search results, my brain’s entire blood supply must have been reallocated to another organ, for I failed to read the stated dimensions of the toy I ordered. In my head, it was life-sized, and therefore life-sized it would be.
Two days later, I returned from class to find a small box on the steps of the cabin. Not yet disturbed — like a mattress, I imagined, it would inflate when opened — I unlocked the door and brought it inside. I’d had no time for lunch between classes that day and was famished, but the package promised to sate a deeper hunger. Crouching on the wooden floor, I tore at the brown tape with a butter knife until I got it open.
Inside, nestled among the packing peanuts, was an even smaller box. Still not ready to be disappointed, I removed this one as well and prized it open, and out plopped my new lover: bright pink, thirteen inches long from neck to groin, approximately the size of a newborn. I’d already burned a great deal of willpower convincing myself that making love to this toy would in no way resemble fucking an armless, legless, headless woman, and now, with the scarce faculties remaining to me, I would have to disassociate my impending act from the thought of fucking an armless, legless, headless, inexplicably voluptuous baby.
Still trembling with what had very recently been anticipation, I unzipped, unbuckled, and let my trousers fall around my ankles. My first attempt at entering the toy proved unsuccessful: it did not, after all, produce its own lubricant. I hadn’t thought of this. Fortunately, I had half a bottle of salad dressing in the fridge, and my second attempt went more smoothly. The sensation was pleasant, and the smell was zesty — new car doused in balsamic and lemon — but standing in the old man’s sparsely furnished cabin, thrusting into that petite chunk of silicone, I ran suddenly and jarringly against the limits of my own imagination. The last few months on Northstar had passed in a sort of waking fever dream, in which I’d anxiously anticipated the libertine fleshpots of Arkansas, and now, I realized, once again, I’d fallen into the same trap, succumbing to a paler, ghostlier, but no less gripping version of that same delusion, certain that my romp with this sex doll would somehow convincingly simulate coitus with a real woman.
Feeling like an idiot, I thrust harder and deeper, hoping to resuscitate my suddenly insubordinate penis, and finally managed to ejaculate, albeit with no small degree of despondency, into the doll’s anal cavity.
There were mushrooms, lettuce, and tomatoes in the fridge, but I no longer felt like salad. After washing myself and the doll, I prepared a bowl of pasta, then logged in to Amazon and initiated a return.
You have not used the product? the customer service representative wanted to know.
No, I typed back, I have not used the product. It’s too small. I would wash the doll again, I resolved, this time with even more soap and hot water.
If you have used product, cannot return.
I haven’t used the product, I replied, grimacing at the unpleasant, almost zero-G sensation sloshing in my bladder. This is how I’ve always experienced guilt: as a physical loosening of the earth’s otherwise all-embracing pull on that most earthly part of me.
You have not used the product, just confirming?
On the table beside my bowl of macaroni, the toy glistened wetly, reprovingly.
Confirming, I agreed.
* * *
December brought a Christmas miracle: a woman matched with me on Tinder. Her only picture showed the backs of bare legs and callipygous buttocks peeping out from under a miniskirt, reflecting the light of a flash. Before I could message her, she took the lead: Ur cute. Do u really live in Siloam Springs?
Our romance was a whirlwind. Within fifteen minutes, we scheduled a rendezvous at her place that evening. The old-timer left me alone for the most part, patrolling the property with a walking stick or staying shut up in his ranch house across the ever-muddy drive, but he never had visitors, and I didn’t know what he would think of loose women coming and going. Luckily, she didn’t have roommates.
She lived in an apartment complex close to campus. Idling under the aluminum roof of a carport, I texted her, asking if I could park anywhere.
Yes, anywhere.
They won’t tow?
Never.
Just in case, I put my car lock on.
She was on the second floor. I scaled the wooden steps that wound like thick vines up the outside of the building, breath billowing before me like the ghost of Christmas yet to come. Her blinds were closed, her windows dark, but she had left the door unlocked. I eased it open.
Inside, low light emanated from a couple of muted LEDs plugged just above the baseboards. Entering was like sitting down to a candlelit dinner, an experience which, I realized with a sudden pang, I might actually have preferred. To drop my money on a prostitute was one thing; to spend it at a restaurant with snowy tablecloths and vintage chardonnays, watching the firelight play on the face of a beautiful stranger, speaking lightly, delicately, our words plunking like chords from a well-tuned Yamaha, slowly reeling each other in, was quite another. Maybe if Martín had started off like that, I’d have responded differently, but Northstar didn’t have any Yamahas, and candles, given what we were pumping from under the Beaufort Sea, were out of the question.
She was waiting for me, reclining on an L-shaped sofa in a flowing, floral gown, the petals pale — light blue, perhaps, or lavender — against an eggshell background. “Well?” Her voice was huskier than I’d expected, but sultry, so sultry. “Don’t just stand there. Aren’t you coming in?”
I shut the door and stood against it, vigilant, uncertain. She drew herself upright, patting the cushion beside her as if calling a dog. “You’re so far away from me, baby. Come here. Let’s get to know each other.”
I floated across the room and sank onto the sofa. I hadn’t taken off my shoes.
We started kissing.
Something was wrong. The way she pressed into me, forceful, too forceful. The way she smelled — not bad, not bad at all, but also not appealing. Appealing to someone out there, perhaps — perhaps Martín — but not to me. The way the flesh above her lips betrayed the faintest hint of something razed.
“Honey, you sure you a white boy?”
“What?”
“Your lips,” she said, studying me, her face too close to mine, “your lips are so thick. Not like any white boy I ever kissed. I swear you got some black in you.”
I shook my head. I’d known some black folks on the rig, but none back home. Perhaps it should’ve struck me as peculiar that my first two sexual encounters were with a Chicano kid and an African American woman, given that I’d never even seen a non-white face before I turned eighteen, but somehow, this seemed the least peculiar thing about my situation. The white girls in Arkansas were no more a part of my tribe than were my first two flings. Mine was a tribe of one.
“Your parents are lying to you, then.” She sounded astoundingly confident, as if she’d already reviewed the 23andMe results. “Maybe lying to each other. Maybe your mommy’s lying to your daddy.”
“I doubt that very much.”
“Just accept it, honey. Your parents are lying.” She slid off the sofa and knelt before me, tugged at my trousers. “This,” she said, gripping me through my boxers, “is not a white boy’s cock, see? You see what I’m saying?”
“Wait.”
She put my penis in her mouth, not waiting.
“Please. I have a question.” I felt as if I’d raised my hand. As if I’d wandered onto the set of a parodic porno film and been mistaken for the lead. She peered at me expectantly, not taking her mouth off my dick. I asked, “Are you a trans woman?”
“A what? A trans what, now? What is that?” Was that confusion in her voice? Or irritation?
“Were you born in the wrong body?” I asked, trying hard to remember the words I’d learned in gender studies. “A man’s body — were you assigned a man’s body?”
“Honey, does this look like a man’s body?” Rocking back on her heels, she cupped her breasts and brandished them defiantly.
“I’m just asking.” My penis bobbed exuberantly in the space between us, happy to have been released. “I just would like to know.”
“But why would you ask a thing like that? Why would you even ask?”
“I swear, I’m not judging. I just would like to know. That’s all.”
“How would you feel,” she demanded, “if I got all up in your face about you being something you’re not? How would you feel?”
There was that unpleasant, zero-G sensation in my bladder. There was that tender, festering wound.
“I don’t understand why you’re asking,” she snapped. “I don’t understand why you don’t want to just relax and let me suck you. Here, just let me suck you.” Her mouth plunged toward my penis, but this time, I took evasive action, scrambling back along the sofa. Her expression was a kicked dog’s, eyes enormous and reproachful, and her posture was a prairie dog’s, tall on her knees. “All of a sudden you don’t want me? Why?”
“I just want us to be on the same page.”
“We are on the same page, honey. You’re the one getting us off the same page.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but if you’re not a trans woman… I mean, my pants are off. Why don’t you take your dress off?”
“Because my dress don’t need to come off. That’s why I wore a dress, see? Easy access.”
“But I showed you mine,” I said with the simplicity of a child. “Why not show me yours?”
“Honey, I haven’t seen nothing. It’s dark in here.” It wasn’t all that dark, not now that my eyes were adjusting. “We’re going on trust here, aren’t we?” she went on. “For all I know, that dick of yours could be a strap-on. Come on.” Rising, she seized my hand and tried to pull me off the sofa. “You don’t want a blowjob? Fine. Let’s go to the bedroom.”
Maybe I should’ve been frightened, but I wasn’t frightened. I didn’t feel unsafe at all. I just wanted things to make sense. I made myself heavy, refusing to budge.
“Come on.” Pouting, she sank down onto the arm of the sofa, clutching my hand in both of hers. “Don’t be like that. Why you got to be like that?”
“Why won’t you tell me if you’re a cis woman?”
“A what?”
“A cis woman,” I repeated. “A woman who—”
“That,” she said, “is an ignorant word.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t make it up. I’m just using the words people use.”
“What people?”
“The writers.” I shrugged. “The people who write about this stuff.”
“Oh.” She snorted, her intonation elongated, scathing. “So, you got it from a book.”
“I guess so. I’m in school.”
“That’s why I never went to school,” she said. “They don’t know nothing in school. Just a bunch of ignorant fools, that’s what they are. They got you questioning everything, don’t they? I bet they got you questioning your own name.”
“That’s one of the only things they haven’t got me questioning.”
“I bet you haven’t even told me your real name,” she said. “You’re accusing me of hiding things, but I bet that’s just your online name.”
“I’ll show you my driver’s license if you want. I bet you don’t want to show me yours.” The best thing about our courtship, in my opinion, was how straightforward it had been. No maybe yes and maybe no and maybe I’ll just keep you guessing: she’d given me a date, a time, an address, asked if I had STDs, and said she liked it from behind. After months of never knowing where I stood with anyone, this candor had come as a balm. Now, though, it had been transformed into its opposite. I wasn’t pleased.
“My driver’s license?” she demanded, indignant. “My driver’s license? You think I let anyone see my driver’s license? How am I supposed to know you won’t go stealing my identity? Maybe you’ve already stolen someone’s.”
“I think I’d better go.”
“Honey, what about what you came for?”
“I’m not really feeling it anymore—”
“You don’t even know what you’re missing out on,” she cried. “How many girls you know who’ll let you fuck them in the ass? Me, I love it in the ass. I’ve never gotten any complaints about my ass, know what I’m saying? I’ve never had any man complain.”
“I’m happy for you.”
“You should be happy for you. The guy I fucked last week, he was happy. Never been happier. Me up on top of him, riding him, grinding all over him, his dick all up in my ass—”
“Why don’t you call him,” I suggested, “and have him come over, and let me leave?”
“You know what I think? I think you’ve got to be at least a little gay.”
“What?”
“Are you really telling me you’re not a little? Just a little?”
“Look,” I said, “if I were gay, I don’t like these games.”
“Honey, who’s playing games?”
“Two things turn me on,” I said, startled by the confidence with which I spoke. Never before had I articulated my desires with such force and clarity. “Honesty, and cis women.”
“Hold up. Hold on, now.” Perched above me on the arm of the sofa, she looked for all the world like a quizzical bird of prey. “You do like… but that still is an ignorant word.”
“Cis women,” I repeated. “Women who were born as women. With vaginas, I mean. Not trans women. Cis women.”
“Now you’re switching things around on me.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I haven’t switched anything on you. I’m just using the words people use. Maybe you should read some of those books instead of telling me I’m the ignorant one. Especially seeing as they’re about you, not me.”
“At least let me suck you.” This time, I moved faster than she did, rising from the sofa, but in the time it took for me to pull my pants up, she got between me and the door. “Please.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not in the mood.”
“What do you mean, not in the mood?” she demanded. “You wanted to kiss me, I kissed you. You wanted head, I went down on you. You wanted to talk, I’ve been sitting here pouring my heart out to you.” The desperation in her voice was so intense that for the first time since I’d arrived, it occurred to me — cerebrally, anyway; I still felt nothing in my body — that I might be in danger. A quick glance around the room revealed no knives or guns, but who knew what was hidden in that semi-darkness?
“Please.” I tried to step around her, but she moved with me, staying between me and the door. “I just want to get home. That’s all.”
The point of that semi-darkness, I saw clearly now, was not the ambience, and was not the secrecy, and was not anonymity, even. The point was plausible deniability. I would know that it was a man’s ass I was fucking, and she — he? — would know I knew, and yet, together, we would make believe that I was in the dark, both literally and figuratively. How many times had this worked for her? I wondered. And how many times had the whole thing gone horribly wrong?
I did something that surprised us both, then: I seized her just under the arms — standing, she was a head taller than me, but I was more solid — lifted her bodily, and removed her from my path. She gasped and staggered, but didn’t fall. I pushed past her, out onto the landing, but she rushed after me, crying, “Honey, that was so damn hot! You don’t know what you’re doing to me! Please!”
In the floodlights, her cheeks were angular and ashy, streaked with tears. She’d even done her makeup for me. Now that I got a good look at her, though, it was crystal clear that she had not been born a woman. I doubted that she even lived as one by day. Probably, she worked in a warehouse or factory somewhere — a job I might’ve had if I hadn’t grown tired of men. There was something familiar about her, but when you spend your whole life surrounded by men while thinking of nothing but women, I told myself, their faces do all start to blend and blur.
“Would you just do one thing for me?” She hung back this time, not seizing or clutching or throwing herself at me. Finally, my boundaries had been established. “Would you just hug me?” Her voice was smaller than it had been, meek and supplicating. “Just a hug.” Like a long-stemmed waterlily, her body sensuously swayed on the threshold. “That’s all I’m asking for.”
I did it. I did it for her, so that the moisture wouldn’t go on leaking from her painted eyes, and I did it for myself, too: so that I wouldn’t have see myself as someone who rejects the vulnerable, treating them as less than human, callously leading them on. Beneath the dress, too thin for winter, her flesh felt sinewy and terribly warm.
“Thank you,” she mumbled, bending too far so that she could nestle moistly into the hollow of my collarbone. “God bless you.”
I was halfway back to Siloam Springs before it hit me: I had seen her before. She — he, by day, as I’d suspected — worked in the campus cafeteria, slinging French fries. Once or twice, I’d met her eyes as she’d dumped greasy shoestrings on my plate. I’d sat less than fifteen feet from her, alone at a small table, munching, swiping, wiping grease stains from my phone screen. Maybe that was even how I’d matched with her.
Tires crunching in the frosty ruts, I pulled into the tract of frozen mud between the old man’s ranch house and the cabin. The headlights, cutting across the cabin steps before they died, illuminated something, small and oblong. Sweat turned to crystals on my face and arms as I crossed the hard mud, crouched, and shone my phone’s light on the object.
It was the box that the sex doll had come in.
Not the bigger, outer box. The smaller one. I hadn’t bothered repacking the big one. Half the peanuts had melted anyway, collateral damage by salad dressing. In a hurry, eager to be rid of the thing, I’d slapped the return slip on the smaller box and dumped it in the outgoing mail bin at the nearest post office. Now, it had come boomeranging back to me, stamped return-to-sender. When I picked it up, I found that it was much too light. One end was torn. The doll was missing.
Heart racing, I cast a glance over my shoulder, but the old-timer’s house was dark and silent — not that this proved anything, but then I recalled the haste with which I’d sealed the package, using only scotch tape, all I’d had around, and an image flared up bright and vivid in my mind: the box ripping open in transit, firing its contents across the back room of some anonymous postal facility, the rejected pink torso reborn as projectile.
Someone had gone home that night a happy postman.
Freezing though I was, I didn’t go inside. I sat on the stone steps, cradling the empty tube of cardboard in my lap, and stared up through the mist of my breath at the glittering smorgasbord of stars embedded in the winter sky, knowing in my bones that none of this would be so humiliating, so goddamn unbearable, so nightmarishly and catastrophically surreal if there were just a single soul — a lover, ideally, but I would settle for a friend — whom I could tell.
— ITTO & MEKIYA OUTINI
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