Maidenhead

Elijah whispered in my ear: ‘Someone in this house has a very dirty mind.’

I didn’t know why the video was making me horny. It was fucking disgusting. It was my dad’s. I felt like Elijah was going to fuck me right then. I was totally queasy, horny and queasy. Elijah put his hand on my tit over my shirt and he was squeezing and pinching my nipple wi

th one hand and using his other hand on the mouse. We swivelled in a semicircle closer to the screen.

Then someone walked into the screen and I whipped my head away.

‘Come on, come on,’ Elijah laughed. With his forehead, he butted me back.

In the video it looked like my father. My father taking off his pants over the girl on the floor. It looked just like him, puffy eyes and hairy chin. His moss-and-mould-covered skin, naked and hairy like a troll. There was a man like my father and a girl on her hands and knees. Her pink bikini top hung from her neck.

‘I can’t,’ I said.

‘You can. You can.’

There was another older guy in the video now with the man who looked like my dad. I was forced to the screen like eyelid torture. A college girl in some wrung-out bikini with two old guys, one in front of her and one behind. She opened her legs and she opened her mouth. In porn they make fathers screw daughters with other fathers. The girl with the bikini around her neck didn’t look sad. She looked like she was going to have an orgasm. I leaned back into Elijah. I was going to vomit.

‘You’d like that too? Two guys with you? Huh, you’d like that, Myra, wouldn’t you? Gayl would too. But she’s better at this shit. She’s a real artist.’

I leaned over to the side and hacked. It burnt the back of my throat. Elijah didn’t care.

‘It’s okay that you like it, it’s okay you like it, that’s okay ... ’

That’s what Lee had said to me too. It’s okay that you want these things to come true.

Yeah, well, now everything was true. My life was here. And it was friendless and looking at porn with a phantasm of my father, thinking of Gayl the Artist on a cock-hard lap.

§

I was writing my essay, writing easily now. I didn’t have a reader anymore like Lee or Chris but I imagined that I was writing for them both. Maybe I was writing for anyone who could fucking stand me. I’d changed my title to The Pornography Liberation Narrative and Sex Slaves: A Synthesis.

‘Pornography is exhilarating and revolting simultaneously,’ I wrote, thinking of my father’s stash of porn that had morphed at the end into Rent-A-Maid sites.

‘Pornography links up the internal, the external and the fantastical ways that we are not yet in the world with the ways that we might very well be.’

Me and Elijah made out that night with the porno sounds on. He wanted me to start at his feet. I kissed his toes and travelled up under his robe to his big-eyed, big thick, all-seeing cock. I sucked him off under there the best that I had ever done it. Elijah moaned goddamn, fucking Christ, shit, my lord.

‘Pornography shows us things that are only at the edges of our imagination,’ I wrote. ‘Pornography shoves this edge at us violently.’

Before he left our house that night, Elijah told me something that I replayed and replayed, the way Lee did when her teacher told her how hot her body was. ‘Myra, you are my favourite little actress,’ Elijah said. ‘It’s your little hands, you’re so greedy, you grab at me. You really want me, don’t you?’

Yeah, yeah, I do! I am your favourite.

‘I like that it’s no act, my hot little actress.’

I was an actress, his favourite hot greedy little actress!

‘Pornography is a mirror of us, a mirror of our self-consciousness,’ I wrote, ‘our master self-consciousness and our slave self-conscious that comes together and rips into the way we were born. Pornography is the liberation narrative that takes us out of the family pen. It synthesizes the secret and the domestic, the explicit and the implicit, the master and the slave. This is a synthesis that we must absorb in our lives.’

Elijah likes me. I’m his favourite. I desperately had to tell the whole world.

‘In literature,’ I wrote, ‘synthesis is a technique of open interpretation or postmodern analysis, wherein we analyze a text from a multiplicity of viewpoints. In history, this is called Dialectics. Hegel said that history is a dialectic, a constant struggle between factions. Pornography and the innocence of it is a mode of learning, a constant struggle, that synthesizes our understanding of the opposites within ourselves.’

I was an actress not acting. A being being.

§

Wils set me up another big hit from the bong. Aaron looked angry and I knew he hadn’t wanted to see me. ‘You’re driving me to alcoholism,’ he’d said on the phone. ‘I’m a pacifist pothead and you’re driving me to drink.’