R
EAL WOMEN are magma bodies. He almost slips on the glasslike epiphany of it on his way from the bathroom. Yeah: with the right amount of pressure and moisture, the world’s just a bunch a fuckin’ pyroclastic material...
Nate does not care for this kinda shit, neither volcanology nor geology. The world and its systems are meaningless to him. The inner workings of things are plutonic, unknowable by dint of their depths. Nate wants action, immediate and irrefutable.
For example, Nate understands that real women do not have bladders of infinite capacity—that in the morning, with a joint of light spilling beneath the curtain, they wake and find that the call of white porcelain, of water, twists through their abdomens like a banyan’s knobby roots.
But not Sasha.
Real women wake with rumpled hair, without makeup—or with the makeup from the night before crusted about their lashes and lids, and smeared in a clownish flower over their lips—they wake with the ineluctable fate of morning breath, with perhaps a pulpy white tinge of alcoholic fuzz sprouting in their mouths.
Not Sasha, baby.
And if not
Sasha, then none of this matters to Nate.
Sasha wakes brilliant and ready.
Fuck me, she says. There’s not a hair out of place, except, Nate reflects with a smile, for where it counts.
Fuck me.
Everything is perfumed with Sasha, which is to say, perfumed with vacuity.
I’m ready to LEARN.
Her toenails are pools of lava, her knees bended, her thighs cradling a heated vent as she lounges on the bedspread, impatiently waiting. She is seismic.
Nate is a philosopher of sensibility. Sasha is a female Diogenes, performing, in twists of skin and sweat, feats upon which onlookers would gaze with ambivalence or arousal, and perhaps horror in the case of her grandmother.
Now fuck my face—
The problem with Sasha
is her face. It begins to melt. Ah, fuck. The noises she makes are epileptic. Just my goddamn luck. She freezes, locked like a stone in defiance of cause and effect, her lips frozen, then trembling like a glazed donut in a microwave.
FuFuFu—
Nate glares at the screen. Her HD physiognomy morphs and erupts. It is first volatile, then a dilapidated jack-o-lantern of pixilated confusion. Scratches and smears, he thinks. He must take better care of
FuFuFuFuFuF—
Nate does not care for any of this. He presses the eject button, imagining the great composite cones—Pelee, Pinatubo, St. Helens, Vesuvius.
