2 Ezekiel’s Cabin
Snow piled up along the northwest corner of the map. In Birdsview, January roads were drift tunnels cut by National Park plows, one of which was clearing Don and Marilyn’s driveway when they pulled off the main road. Driveway is relative. This was a long, winding secret with a mailbox out front.
The Subaru trailed the plow three miles through pines that hid special places from soft urbanites. They protected a cabin built on a brook trickling through federal land—what Don’s father left him besides a haughty disposition.
The plow driver tipped his hat at the house before pulling away. “Ezekiel loved a storm like this. Scared off the taxpayers.”
Don waved back. He moved towards the front door like he planned to open it but threw a punch instead, injuring his good hand. The storm. Ezekiel had come to watch the storm, to gauge the build up on the roof. It had been bothering him the whole ride home - a haunting, the possibility of it, whether his father might be spying incorporeally. The victim can’t differentiate between extra-planar communication and his having left a cabinet door open or a faucet running.
He watched Marilyn lift a paper bag of groceries from the trunk: “Maybe Ekekiel was in that office today, and maybe he took your side.”
She was exhausted. Don was moping again, turning a collective grief inward.
“Don, honestly. Take it out on a wall or stomp the porch, anything that isn’t art. And Connie is coming over at ten.”
Twisted peonies in relief framed the doorway he’d assaulted. That was Marilyn’s favorite flower and flourish. She adored the grooves and rounded curves, even where the stems needed a light planing the old man wasn’t around to give them. Ekekiel Hastings was gone but also everywhere.
Don tossed keys into a bowl whose wood saw its first sun when The Sun King ruled France. He hadn’t looked at it in years. Keys go in and keys come out. Ezekiel salvaged the trunk after a mudslide felled the old growth on the hill, and he began to work it that night on the back porch. Now it was stuffed with loose change and old gum wrappers. There’s some decay in any transfer of wealth. Objects lose value in the changing of hands. Ezekiel didn’t believe that—was too optimistic for it—and so dedicated his life to an endowed institution.
The park service didn’t recognize him in any official capacity. He’d come to his life’s work too late, they said. He phoned in bear cub sightings in spring or shoveled snow at the visitor’s center in winter, anything park rangers with authorized park ranger hats accessible by NPS catalog asked of him, which were sacrifices he unburdened onto others. “They can’t do it alone because there’s no money, and there’s no money because Americans don’t see trees as spiritual vessels, like the Japanese do.”
Don pulled some gauze from a cabinet in the bathroom and wrapped his hands like a prize fighter. He had to go twelve-rounds with a broom and mop. Connie, a sworn enemy, was on her way. It was midmorning, dark enough for highbeams, a storm kicking, and still she braved icy roads. This was how badly she wanted to tank his marriage. He had to wipe the whiteboard. Empty cups were everywhere—behind frames, under tables, overturned dangerously close to an AirPods case he slipped in his pocket. He dusted things Marilyn had dusted the previous day. He knew this because certain pictures faced the wall. A vacuum emerged from the hall closet, and Don ran it across local materials: warped planks and arrowhead motif rugs woven by hunched women with pleated faces and braided hair. Mushrooms and wet earth sprang up through the cracks in spring. They lived inside but on the forest floor.
Breakfast crackled in the kitchen, bacon and sausage smoking up the place.Marilyn and Don carried on at high volume over the whirring of an oven hood.
“I WISHED I’D GIVEN HIM AN INCH ON THE IDEOLOGICAL FRONT!”
“WHY ARE WE USING WAR LANGUAGE AGAIN!”
“BECAUSE THINGS ENDED IN A STALEMATE!”
That cultivated likeness, the lifting from others, the lies. It put too much strain on Don’s core principals. Ezekiel wore the skin of a man he admired. His cadence and grooming habits parodied the great naturalist, John Muir, who’d mapped the Yosemite on foot carrying a dense thicket of whiskers dangling near his stomach. He’d pegged the beard at two and a half feet using Ken Burns’ National Parks series and a conventional ruler. “A man has to understand the meaning of sacrifice,” Ezekiel often said, “but not all sacrifices measure up in the eyes of the lord, as Cain discovered too late. Putting yourself aside for a woman or child is easy, but for a grove or the dwindling Grey Wolf? Not many can give such a gift.”
Marilyn cracked eggs that were laid in a hen house by chickens related to the chickens Ezekiel took off the hands of a Yakama Indian who’d struggled to protect them from hawks.
She yelled about sausage, about how much to make. But he was done vacuuming and now sat at the breakfast bar five feet away. His AirPods were in, and the noise cancellation was on. She’d gesture, mime a frying pan or something, but that required a visual attention he couldn’t give without a physical cue. She might have to touch his shoulder because he refused to sit with ambient household sounds, like everyone else. He was insufferable at times. Ezekiel had been right about that.
He’d known and loved Marilyn for a short time, that long year when the three of them shared the cabin. His poetry sat over the fireplace mantle where his ashes would have been if Don hadn’t scattered them on the shores of Diablo Lake. These were the bars she chose:
“To wander amongst his oldest things, the mountains and the streams, to be enveloped by the very light that lit the dawn of creation, that wild, antediluvian glow from which he banished callous men - this is our daily bread.”
She gifted him a Kindle filled with books he didn’t know how to download himself because he would otherwise lug them into the forest in a bag he was no longer strong enough to carry—arboreal thinkers like Thoreau and Emerson and Wordsworth. She nursed him during the last phase of his illness, when he could barely keep down food or water: “You have to eat Ezekiel, otherwise the pills don’t work, they don’t dissolve properly.”
She lifted his head and put oatmeal directly into his mouth, draped his arm around her shoulders and lifted him up, one hundred and twenty pounds carrying that same weight to a bathroom she cleaned with compulsive urgency so he wouldn’t face infection. This was a woman of an animistic disposition; she had the ability to see life everywhere and in everything.
Don concerned himself with matters that concerned only him.
Ezekiel’s final months were spent beside a son of Eli, an ingrate who had forgotten the face of the lord and his Grand Tetons. Libertarianism. Don did a four-year stint in the California university system and was now concerned with capital flows. He’d always been a contrarian—had a reflexive disagreeableness tucked deep in his bones—all he needed was a teacher to crack them open, expose the marrow.
Ezekiel discovered a collection of online comments in defense of grazing rights in eastern Idaho because Don left his phone unlocked on the kitchen counter. He read them twice, picked up the tiny computer, and then inched towards the study at an unhurried pace he knew did not reflect his attitude or intentions.
“Why have you done this to me?” he said, waving the evidence around in his hand.
Don spun his chair to meet Ezekiel, who was still on the living room side of the threshold refusing to share space with the man who had “liked” an assertion that Yellowstone National Park was “already too large and could survive the sale of single-use plastics in the giftshop.”
Don meditated for a moment before delivering the blow.
“I think it’s time to abandon public land, the concept of it. Man is arrogant. He sees his fingerprints everywhere. He thinks his generation is the one that’ll shoot the last Buffalo or fell the last Coastal Redwood. He thinks the government he dreamed up can stand against culling and rebirth, the fundamental basis of the natural world.”
Ezekiel cut in as Don began a bloated thing about Schopenhauer on the Will: “I don’t recognize you. You slept under those trees, they gave you their shelter. I should have seen this coming when your mother settled on ‘Donald’ against my wishes. It’s a monied, urban name.” Ezekiel had to realize, Don thought, that he was monied and urban as recently as twenty years ago—he had to consider such an obvious contradiction before coming at his son with hermetic airs.
Because of Ezekiel’s righteousness, they were stable and nothing more. That’s how he saw it. Ninety-five percent of a Silicon Valley portfolio to a wolf sanctuary in Boseman, Montana. What kind of country accepts that decision as anything other than a sign of cognitive decline? When does a state transfer certain rights and bank account numbers? Did the sanctuary ask where the money came from—that it could be traced back to drone technology?
Hypocrisy, that’s how he felt, or tried to feel, until other feelings crept in. The man was currently defenseless. Could anyone survive a line by line financial evaluation? Was Don some original soul? Ezekiel was a better man than he was, someone the wolf sanctuary admired and threw a banquet for every year. His funeral involved a police escort in a town of five-hundred people.
Don unlocked his phone and put Brady on speaker, presumably to share the experience with his wife. Marilyn pushed back immediately. “I’m cooking. I’m very busy right now.”
He sank his AirPods deep and twisted them until he couldn’t hear anything but Jourdain breaking down gender dysphoria:
“The DSM describes dysphoria as a kind of mismatch between person, gender, and place, a felt sense of misalignment. The implication here is that place—culture—is the source of that misalignment…If no one noticed, would dysphoria survive? Would a feeling of misalignment exist?
When Brady hit his stride, Don recognized Ezekiel. Loose threads linked the two, a synergy neither would have admitted but which explained at least some of Don’s relationship to both. They appreciated that salty, Old Testament prose, so thick with interpretive byways. A verse could be put to work for any number of ends. That was the point of divergence, as far as Don could tell. Ezekiel leveraged the word to the advantage of bark and lesser-mammals. Brady used it for anthropomorphic ends. We were storytellers once—the flood, Isaac on the altar, Achilles and Hector at the gates of Troy. It was in there somewhere, the whole human project, its truth and reconciliation. Brady knew that, the urgency of it, and Ezekiel had gotten distracted by bird calls.
He paused Jourdain mid-rant, turned off noise-cancellation, and addressed his feelings.
“I miss him today, for whatever reason,” he told her. “And I think he’d hate the state of my mind.”
“If this is about counseling, I’d say we did what we usually do. You used Claire to get a point out of your system, and I cried about stuff I’ve already cried about. And your dad can’t see the state of your mind, which are thoughts to the rest of us. Regular language, please.”
The sausages rolled around the pan accumulating carcinogens, charring, and she began to think about cancer, not Ezekiel’s but the rectal variety caused by meals like this one. She was giving her husband cancer every morning but couldn’t stop because this was what they had in the fridge and meat tasted better with a crust on it. They were largely hardship free, and she was creating a hardship that would emerge decades later in some scan or bleed.
They had no mortgage at a time when medical doctors could barely afford a condo with a Space Needle view. No car payment, no credit card debt.
Conversations flowed naturally where other couples forced the issue, a self-serving impression, she knew, but one with legs. Don was almost credible on any topic, a purveyor of intellectual half-measures. He could skirt boundaries cordoned off by the lasers of grounded experience, wiggling a toe here or there to test whether the alarm bells worked. If they didn’t sound, he’d keep prodding. “I’m not sure Heidegger would agree with that.” The problem was they did go off. It was a dog whistle, and he was the only human in the room. He trusted that there were no actual Heidegger scholars present because there never were or would be, but forgot that a person doesn’t have to know anything about Heidegger to spot someone who knows Heidegger from a video essay.
It cut a bad image, but she was always reminding her friends that there were strange, fascinating processes going on underneath. A woman holds back certain truths from a man whose judgement she fears out of love. It took two years to drum up the courage to tell Don about her obsession with The Bachelor, which she watched on her phone in the laundry room. He riffed about the show for two hours before admitting he hadn’t seen it—plot points and character arcs, critical evaluations of particular cast members’ bodies he’d recognized from Instagram. He presented that bizarre lie to a person with whom he lived, a person who knew him and his viewing interests, one who had begun that conversation with the phrase “I’ve seen every season of…”
People found this obnoxious, and it was. But that wasn’t all it was. A mouth that moved without clear purpose—that saw no cause to stop moving—forfeit respect by the second, and yet she counted her blessings that it was her husband losing ground. Most men said nothing at all to their wives. They didn’t lie or cheat or steal. They did nothing and called that a virtue, a “taciturn manner.” Jake was like that, whether Connie wanted to admit it or not. He was sweet, docile, but lacked a basic respect for her mind.
Marilyn could talk to Don about the high and low— European wars or The Muppets as a predictor of cultural decline—even if those conversations sometimes went on without her. She’d walk several feet away to see him speaking with the space she’d left. It could take Don minutes or longer to snap back, and then he’d shoot an adorable expression reserved for those occasions: “but you still heard that, right babe? Kermie loves Piggy but rejects her need for performative validation. IT’S AN IMPORTANT DISTINCTION.”
There was steadfast loyalty beneath Don’s disagreeableness and pathological talking, and Marilyn respected that. Women love a man who hates the world but makes her the exception. The primary consumers of revolutionary material are ladies prowling for a guy with change in his eyes, someone who’ll rush her behind a barricade and start chucking grenades. Don had a problem with everything other than Marilyn, and the one problem he had with her could be fixed. She was sure of that.
They were co-workers, loosely defined. He taught economic theory to disinterested college students at Cascades Community College, and she helped those same students iron out their credit requirements en route to state colleges that didn’t want them two years ago but were now willing to make an exception. Don was proud of how they met. He’d honed it into a polished dinner party yarn.
“I opened my email one afternoon to an act of pure sentimentality, a request that I reconsider the final essay of a young lady who wouldn’t otherwise receive her AA. I didn’t do that sort of thing, and still don’t. But there was a voice in there, a cadence, a spark on the page that basically yanked me through the screen.”
“...just let her explain the paper face-to-face. I won’t go into it, but she’s been through something the last few months. She needs a break right now like you wouldn’t believe…”
“I had to meet Marilyn O’Hearn, and if that meant passing a kid who didn’t know Freidrich from Selma Hayek, so be it.”
Their first dates were pleasant but mundane, two different movies and the same Lebanese restaurant, nothing undeniable in them. The surprise that landed Don in the long-term relationship zone was something he’d kept to himself and organized around an idea of Marilyn.
He located her empty desk in the administrative offices on a Wednesday morning around lunch time, sight unseen, and began asking pertinent questions: “Is Marilyn seeing anyone? As a general rule, does she wear heels or sneakers? Any interests I should know about?” Layla, who occupied the desk beside the one Don was currently sitting on, offered the following tip: “she plays the Wicked soundtrack more or less non-stop. I can hear the high notes blowing out those ratty headphones she won’t throw away.” The off-broadway cast was on tour and in town. A powerful coincidence.
On their third date, he drove her into town for a morning matinee. He did this with no tickets but a bold plan to win a lottery. A mass of theater kids toss their names in a hat and cross their fingers. The winner nets orchestra seats two rows from the stage, reserved spots not generally available to the public. His number hit, of course. Her face sparked like a firefly and stayed that way for three and a half hours that Don barely tolerated. He’d spotted a thinly-veiled Marxism, some McCarthyist purge of goats and sheep from the university, a reverse Animal Farm set to Disney tunes. It was possible that Elphaba wanted to help these animals because they were animals, that this was about empathy and not a burgeoning class consciousness, but her skin color and level of education called that reading into question. She was their Trotsky, an ivory tower advocate slumming it. Why the Marxists were targeting girls and gays wasn’t exactly clear, but ideologues work in mysterious ways. He wanted to tell her this, to remind her that there was more going on, but he kept his wits about him.
That afternoon, they walked the secret stone pathways of a Japanese garden bursting with pink and white camellias, its lilied ponds and tiny bridges tickled by the red fingers of wisteria in flame. They made love in the back of the Subaru with the roof open after the parking attendant retreated to his shed and grabbed a magazine. By nightfall, the gates were shut and locked, which meant they’d have to flag down the attendant anyway, who shot them a knowing look. There were no signs of the stress to come—of the doll or the clubs or the shifting expectations.
Marilyn flipped the eggs, and Don put his plate beneath them.
“Maybe Claire is on to something with the honeymoon. Five-years late makes it a vacation, but we can afford it.”
“I agree completely. I was going to bring it up if you didn’t. I’m thinking maybe Cancun. We can dive with the whale sharks, tour Chichen Itza. Brady mentioned an Ayahuascaro that’ll really send you, and he works out of Tulum.”
He moved towards the study carrying his breakfast.
“I have a video lecture to record, and it’s due by five. I need at least three hours to get my head around how to communicate with them.” That was code for “I’ll be behind a shut door for longer than necessary and that’s by design.”
“Okay, we’ll book the flight and hotel tonight.”
Marilyn faced the fridge and was assaulted by the whiteboard. “Swallowing.” She wiped it clean and then let her hands fall towards her child, cradling its future, rocking her arms back and forth. Tulum sounded swell, but the prospect of exposing a swelling belly was less enticing. There was no good way to tell Don that he was the father through artificial means. There was no precedent for it, for the whole situation. It wasn’t that he’d be upset, exactly, she just didn’t know how to say the words “I injected myself with the semen you left in the doll.” He wasn’t opposed to a child. Maybe she could avoid the bathing suit. Or she could just reveal the repulsive thing and take her lumps.
She thought of Ezekiel again, of his judgement, just as Don had. They’d never talked about grandchildren directly, though it wasn’t tough to piece together. He cherished life, its potentiality. Not forests and meadows but acorns and dandelion tufts. Don didn’t understand that about him, she was sure of it. He would want a child raised in that cabin and in those woods. She was determined to do it.
Connie was at the door.
***
Connie had come to visit Don and Marilyn—was in fact standing on their porch—talking on the phone with someone else. “...Stacy-Lynn, that is some bullshit is what that is. A phone ain’t a personal possession where men and work wives are concerned. No such thing…”
Marilyn grabbed the door, and Don froze in the living room, plate in palm, sweating over how he might get through the next two hours. Connie was a fictional character, a distillation of a place. If Faulkner had spotted her on a park bench in Mississippi, she’d be on the page that night. He’d put Dixie in her mouth, fried okra and spanish moss draping the live oak. This was a millennial woman who put a phone to her head and left it there for hours. When it wasn’t attached to her face, it was in her hand, on speaker, at max volume. She was the only person in Northern Washington with a perm.
He was inches from the study when Connie made eye contact. Preoccupied, that was his first intuition. But her attention was in fact split three-ways between Stacy-Lynn’s voice, a hug from Marilyn, and Don’s side of the living room. She spotted him over Marilyn’s shoulder, sidling past the couch, and he wasn’t convinced that the hug wasn’t a decoy to generate line of sight.
Marilyn asked if Connie was still on the phone, and whether she could be bothered to attend to the people in front of her, as was common courtesy in all fifty states.
“Yeah, I’m a’ need one second though,” she whispered, adjusting the phone a bit at the wrist. “Stacy I gotta run, I got obligations up here. Back home I’d just put ya on the table, but these people are different as far as having a stranger in the house.”
Connie transferred from the administration office at The University of Alabama-Birmingham, where she did Marilyn’s job half as well but with a personal flair Marilyn couldn’t match. She steered students towards Humanities courses that interested her, and advised them to switch majors because dreams were “big as we let em’ get.” Her husband, Jake, dreamed as well. He fixed things, handyman gig work, and he’d been captured by the tiny house movement exploding over the Pacific Northwest. He found a boat trailer rusting away in a Tuscaloosa front yard, and grabbed it off the guy for nothing. The build out took six months, and now here they were, a couple of bass flopping in a dry pond. That didn’t bother Connie, though. She’d always wanted to head west, somewhere ink sleeves weren’t a sign of prostitution. That’s how Marilyn spotted her. They’d come together over the horror genre and the Annabelle in full color on her left forearm.
Don dug deep for a perfunctory statement. “So, Connie, I was telling Marilyn that I have a lecture to…”
“Oh Don, honey, that’s fine. Make your video. You and I got no business.”
What had troubled Don that morning—the sense that his consciousness was an open sewer visible to others—found validation in Connie’s face. It was the look you’d give a shower drain. She’d crammed a hand in his ear and yanked out a substance coated in hair.
She knew too much, and was about to know more. Interview acumen requires a special set of skills, chutzpah, arrogance, a total disregard for one’s own privacy and that of others. Howard Stern had people with something to lose spilling their guts on New York radio. Connie was like that. She got you comfortable, disarmed, and then swept your legs out from under you. “It’s okay, honey, we’ve all been there. But I can’t help if I don’t know where, and you can’t move forward unless you tell me everything you know.”
He moved into the study terrified of what he wouldn’t be privy to. He would pretend to record a lecture he’d already recorded last night for however long she lingered in their kitchen.
A high winter sky opened up over the cabin, sending welcome light through the french doors and onto the tiny glass table where the ladies sipped coffee and shared stories about their husbands.
Don’s suspicions were correct. Connie had been in the loop since the beginning. She was involved in the whiteboard incident and sent pictures to Jake.
“Can you believe this shit? He wants another man in his bedroom. He needs it at the same time! If he advertises a thing like that, it means what he ain’t sayin’ would curl your socks. You fish with this rat fink. Doesn’t that bother you?”
Jake studied the image, spun the phone vertically and horizontally. He saw the vile phrase written in purple just below Don’s name in black, but he couldn’t concentrate. The shot revealed mechanical issues. “I don’t like that scum build up on the water dispenser. That’s a leak Don don’t know about. Ice maker maybe. And a guy don’t talk about sex stuff on the lake. We don’t never talk about it, really. No right time or place.”
“He’s nasty, Jake. You’d get papers, let me tell you.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Man can tie a fly off, though. Not many college men can. Spinning rod maybe, but a fly is something else.”
Connie sat across from Marilyn cracking too many sugars into six ounces of coffee.
“Marilyn, girl, what are you tryin’ to see, exactly? What would convince you?
She leaned back when delivering a line like that, cocking her head to the side a bit, shifting her eyes from the subject, selling the judgement. Other ticks bled in as well. Connie sipped the mug and then dropped her free hand to the table, wrist first, and began tapping her nails on the table compulsively.
“Connie, what am I supposed to do—Tinder, Match? I’m forty-two. I’ll be writing to death row inmates and Nigerian green card seekers. They’ll put me on 90 Day Fiance.”
“I’m a’ sweep up that Nigerian he don’t got me mixed up with swingers and robots and whatnot. Over there in the Far East, they got depravity in the veins, and respect a woman far as they can throw her. I seen a documentary on Netflix where men like Don cohabitate with robots. They stand’ em up at the dinner table, sit with' em on the train, dress' em up like the help and things of that nature.”
Connie had half the story, and not the crucial part. There was a difference between a novelty item and an imposter. He used it when she was in the room, at times when she was available. She wasn’t wanted, and a man can’t hide that. Changes, shifty behaviors, surfaced in retrospect. More time spent on devices, typing and turning, shuffling around a corner or behind a clothes rack, always a hand in the pocket where his phone lived. She hadn’t stopped to put it together - whether she wanted to know, whether that knowledge was even relevant given her current, expansive condition.
They’d reached the five minute mark, and that meant Marilyn would need to take the conversation to her feet. She grabbed the glass cleaner and a rag from under the sink and began spraying the french doors. A black smudge in the lower left corner, probably from a boot toe. That had to be addressed if things were going to continue.
“Why are we so reactive,” Marilyn responded, scrubbing and inspecting. “Women, I mean? So a man wants things. So what? I tell him no and he moves on. This is what I tried to explain to Claire, that I’m less offended by the asking and more upset that he has me in therapy because he got the wrong answer.”
That jarred Connie. “Now hold on now, Don set the appointment? For what?”
“He said he didn’t feel wanted, that while he would respect my desire to keep the sex normative, it meant he wasn’t seen. A lot of anthropologic shit about women in the Australian bush, I don’t know. I shut Don out the second I hear jargon. He thought a marriage counselor would suggest exploration, I guess.”
Connie looked very close to spitting her coffee across the table before gulping it down.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph. He thought Claire would set you straight, tell you to open up the bedroom. This man is retarded—touched, that’s what we say now. Brady Jourdain has a hand in this. The country don’t got enough babies in it, got too many women at work to bring babies into it. The foxy ones don’t gotta say it straight out—just drop a few crumbs is all. These men are dumb as hell. Eat them stale things up even though they been on the ground, got grass on em.”
Connie knew Brady through her husband, same as the others. They’d consumed a good part of his early canon moving across country. Jake had a few episodes he wanted to introduce, a few concepts to communicate.
“Connie, you are hearin’ anti-female positions, and that ain’t Brady’s voice. Maybe in the words you’ll find something, but not the tone. Listen for the tone next time.” He pushed back the podcast by twenty minutes.
“Jake, this is a truck stop and it’s two in the morning…I am tired.”
“The women are unhappy,” he said, “and Brady’s asking why that is.”
Brady’s schtick didn’t work on her, and neither did Don’s. As the conversation with Marilyn meandered on, a familiar tingle hit. Connie picked up on electrical impulses, wave patterns, and whatever else connected women like fungi beneath a damp canopy. In astrological terms, men were water, wind and sky—fluctuating, vaporous, free as birds. Women, who were terra and flame, remained grounded, steadfast, resilient, the lava flows that made land from sea. Men floated down to drink or eat before wafting back to heaven on a breeze. They were visitors to earth and closed to its messages. In that moment, the ground told her there was more going on with Don and Marilyn. That something was happening in the study.
***
Don held icons with his pointer finger and shook them around. He put them in the bin and then pulled them back out. Why was he wasting his own time? Because he surrounded himself with objects inseparable from a competency he lacked. They made him feel lesser. Playing the Strat in the corner required an impetus, a rockumentary about Pink Floyd or Tom Petty, some false sense that he might write Damn the Torpedoes. Biographies did that, too—they hyped up the reader beyond recognition. A great Wittgenstein biography communicated genius in a participatory way, as if the reader had contributed to the Tractatus and was at the tail end of a process. Next thing you know a guy is digging into hardcore logic when he can’t reliably divide fractions. Delusion was a sign of good work.
He decided to watch YouTube videos.
He did an hour on James Joyce then made a fist and pumped it. That was what he needed. Now he was prepared to yank Finnegan’s Wake from his bookshelf, to examine the quality of previous marginalia, whether it justified itself or bled over into less impressive sections because he’d been sloppy, inattentive to the width of the highlighter. He wasn’t reading Joyce so much as turning the pages while thinking about the historical person—the portrait of the artist on the dust jacket, the Adriatic-facing window beneath which he sketched Ulysses, whether he should have sung high tenor, like his parents wanted. We choose these data points and assign them to a man when he’s gone.
Joyce and Hemingway were parked at some cafe along the Seine when his phone lit up: Jenni Park. Jenni Park, who operated an above-board commodities trade in pornography recognized by the IRS.
“Meetup in Honolulu next week. Top spenders only.”
He fired off a compulsive response: “Staying at the Royal Hawaiian.”
***
Connie walked over to the french doors and popped the latch on the floor with her foot. “Put that rag down and grab your coat. I wanna see the water.”
They made their way down to the creek and began to walk. The sun was bold, pleasant. They hopped over three stones covered in lichen. The far side of the creek came up against red cedars that matched the cabin.
Connie dropped to a squat and gauged the water temperature with her hand, swirling it around. “So what, then, we pray he wakes up wanting what’s already on offer?”
Marilyn had to hand it to Connie there. Yet there was a time before this one. Everyone was a baby once. Men used to settle for less. That had to be true. A nineteenth-century lech dealt with speed constraints, wagon wheels and state censors. Some guy heard from another guy who heard from a guy three towns over that certain women will let you urinate on them for a quarter. Such creatures crept along the hinterlands, in dreams or nightmares, as frightful aberrations that a man might stake through the heart as soon as fuck. Folklore, but never women in the recognizable sense—not a wife or even an optimistic fling. But they’d entered real space now. They’re found on the frontpage of the internet.
Modernity made novel sexual experiences accessible. But what about the experiences themselves—why this and not that? Tentacle rape was a top search result. A person can’t fixate on an image without a preceding foundation, right? A pink zebra demands the ideas pink and zebra, surely. So how does one arrive at a gang of octopuses assaulting a helpless woman stranded on a hazy world orbiting three stars? Women and gang violence and octopuses and science fiction? Weren’t there missing links? She thought about this whenever Don sat her in front of bizarre subgenres of pornography.
“Do men grow crazed with age?” she wondered out loud. “What’s that about? Are their wants purposeful, primed, or is it like when a koi grows to the size of its pond? It doesn’t care about being big or small, it’s just responding to constraints."
“It’s the koi thing. They grow into things, foster notions. A man will delude himself at any opportunity, really. The internet helps em’ gauge the size of the pond is all.”
Marilyn continued to think through the problem as they walked.
“I’m still in touch with a different age. I can pull memories, clear as day, from a time when sixteen year old girls boycotted Eminem because they didn’t believe Britney could give head to Fred Durst or Carson Daly—that it was even a possibility. Did they not watch the music videos? But they were removed from oral sex, visually speaking. If they’d seen it done, it was on a shitty tape at a sleepover or something, and those were performances, stage managed. They used to give paid lessons at bachelorette parties. This is how little they knew. I’m not sixty. This wasn’t twenty years ago.”
***
Don was flustered, pacing. He didn’t even know if the Royal Hawaiian was in Oahu or Maui or the Big Island. He’d read a Didion essay about it in college that he remembered nothing about, and somehow that dormant memory got into his thumbs.
A fixation came over him, and fixations trail a thread leading back to a dark room.
A year ago, Don lay awake in bed peeking over Marilyn’s shoulder. Her social media feed was a nightly ritual, curtains drawn, a rectangle beaming out from her hands and into a face caked with mud and other products.
He commented on celebrities who had or hadn’t aged well, and which American teenagers had been co-opted for use in Chinese disinformation schemes. “You see that? That’s what I’m talking about. We have a girl in a hijab against the Shanghai skyline. This is strategic. They want us to think she belongs there.”
They swiped up but occasionally down. Marilyn might u-turn to a post Don failed to process because he took in visual information at half-speed.
“Wait, what? Did they save the dog and find the bum who tossed it in the dumpster? Go back to that one, babe.”
“It’s alive, Don. It was diving off a dock near the end.”
The algorithm delivered Jenni from the blue. She tossed a peace sign at her 1k followers from the front of a kitschy wall mural at some shaved ice joint called Waiola Aloha House. Small bites from a large cup piled with confections, some of which she shoveled to the side, displeased. She bounced around in a micro yellow bikini that could get a girl arrested in Corpus Christi: “...mochi and lilikoi…obsessed…”
The video snuck in despite the odds. A personalized system weeded out images likely to produce thoughts she’d rather her husband didn’t have. Her feed was well sanitized, devoid of sex pots and densely saturated with their opposite—beautiful girl’s girls excited by the proper application of lip liners and seasonal wardrobes organized around Nazi terminology, talk of “skin types” and the pallet limits of a given “undertone.”
Clothing to nudity ratios had little to do with swipes or follows. That would be too easy. The male gaze is an irrational number. It can’t be split into sensible parts. It's tits out, it's a mom of three with a pooch walking a Golden Doodle, it's a fifty year old bartender with a coke problem. This Hawaiian tart, however, was an easy call.
As soon as Marilyn oriented the screen in her direction, a strange image troubled Don’s sight. A mass of female bodies packed shoulder-to-shoulder, their arms tucked politely to the side. They were diminished somehow, reduced, childlike. He stood with and over them, tall enough to see the tops of heads going on and on in every direction, maybe to the end of the world. Various hairstyles, all paperwhite, no faces. A cloudless, crimson sky hung overhead, and a beam of yellow light materialized against it. Jenni began to inch upwards, satin threads standing on end. An invisible hand had her by the hair. The strange heads tracked her progress higher and higher until she faded to a black dot, and then they began to clap. He didn’t understand the vision or whether his spine was leaking psilocybin, but he did have an intuition about what triggered it. It was brought on by the way Jenni bit down on her spoon, how she moved her mouth—brief, ruttish gestures that let slip a genuine deviance lost on the uninitiated.
He turned towards Marilyn, shaking the cobwebs out: “You still there, babe?”
She shot him a confused look.“Am I still here?”
He’d been gone for an instant. He’d missed a beat of Marilyn talking her way through the video.
“Who is this shit for?” She said, “Is it like that channel where teenagers in push-up bras slurp ramen competitively? Does some bathing suit brand have cash behind this?”
Don piped up with a sentence that wouldn’t have survived even a second of internal reflection.
“Maybe she wants to be objectified, maybe that’s the point.”
“Jesus Christ, Don. This is about money, abuse or both. There are power dynamics involved.”
Brady addressed this line of reasoning in episode 145, Of Monarchs and Peasants.
“Listeners, a woman is power. I will say that again. Woman is and always has been in the seat of civilization. She legislates from the bedroom, sets the rules of sexual engagement...”
Marilyn was wrong. Jenni wasn’t a hapless victim, he was sure about that. But Brady’s position shook as well. What if Jenni wasn’t leveraging her body as authority? What if it wasn’t arithmetical but visceral, a desire to be completely seen? What if it was a natural impulse—pure urge and the pleasure that brings? What if Hawaii was still the Eden Captain Cook had glimpsed in 1778? In undergrad, those journals read like romantic impressions of a lost world. Bare-breasted savages paddled to meet the hulking frigate at harbor, women who, once ashore, surrendered their bodies happily and without a second thought. These were shaded documents, of course, subjective, personal; but they tracked Don’s intuitions. The modern, Western woman had drifted from that state of nature, from its reflexive ease. Clerics, rabbis, and imams reimagined women they couldn’t have. Puritanism perverted everything. Through this framing, Marilyn was the victim and Jenni the liberated. Had Brady missed this crucial point? Did he know that women could be free? Was this a discovery?
Marilyn fell asleep, and Don took his MacBook to the study. He shopped her public handle and found what he knew would be there. Adult offerings, JenniJuice, a tightly cropped image of Jenni nibbling her lower lip, a fake mole situated just above the crease of her mouth.
He subscribed. A patron, a Latinate hand-me-down for father and defender. Five-hundred a month moved from their joint bank account to a prepaid debit card Don refilled at the 7-Eleven near campus, which was getting off light, he suspected. He’d followed the rise of several now infamous models. Anastasia Rosé, a big star who ran the podcast circuit and most of the men on it, had a Lamborghini shipped to her apartment by an Abu Dhabi prince in exchange for soiled underwear.
Jenni expanded his memory and stressed its failings. His campus login was written on a digital Post-It-Note that consumed a third of his desktop, yet he memorized the card number, expiration date and pin number used to buy Jenni lingerie from online boutiques in France.
There were Catch-22s involved. His phone lived on silent because Jenni might notify him while Marilyn was present, but notifications stayed on because content might drop. To be late was to cede territory to those willing to camp out until the doors opened. There were time stamps to consider. She could see that kind of thing, and he didn’t want to be the third or fourth person to acknowledge the way she’d crimped her hair.
He carried her into the bathroom where he listened to audio files. Jenni recounted Bacchanalian orgies that carried on until dawn without him, and, on one occasion, produced video evidence shot in a shaky hand. Spectators might become participants, which meant he had to get to Oahu at any cost.
Don tossed his phone in the desk drawer and flung open the double doors to the study. He made for Marilyn and Connie with a speedwalker’s gait.
He caught them heading back towards the house. Marilyn was pointing out a marmot hole.
Connie began an interrogation. “You out of breath in the house, honey? What kind of lecture does that, huh?”
He took a few deep breaths to bring down the excitability a notch.
“I’m thinking maybe Hawaii. Thoughts?”
“I mean, it’s more expensive, right? There aren’t any whale sharks or ruins, either.”
“Babe, listen, it’s Hawaii. It’s going to be Hawaii because we have the credit card points and they’re for Delta which transfers to Alaskan Airlines which is a subsidiary of Hawaiian Airlines which has a bonus program at the moment, and that means we fly first class for almost nothing.”
Connie knew it. This was it. Don had to get to Hawaii so bad it had him sprinting across the house babbling about air miles. “Well I’m gonna get with Jake on that. When are we leaving?”