Anna dumped out the mop bucket in the kitchen sink. The water was elephant-coloured, a gush of torn nails and hairs. She was telling me about her three grown-up kids in Indonesia. Anna had been working in Canada since the kids were little and she had a sixteen-year-old at home, the baby she’d left with her own mother right after she’d been born. Anna had flown on a plane to Saudi Arabia one week after giving birth to her youngest. Anna said that working motivated her. She said that she cried for twenty-four hours straight after leaving her baby, but then she never cried about it again. The baby’s name was Innalo. Innalo would be going to university because of the money that Anna sent home over sixteen years every single week and Anna said that this was worth it. For not knowing her daughter at all, it was worth it that she, alone, would go to university. Anna said that my father had been very, very good to her, better than any family she had ever worked for in sixteen years. She told me that my father had offered to sponsor Innalo to come live in Canada so that she could study at a Canadian university.
‘You kids are lucky,’ Anna said. ‘To have such a good and responsible man as your dad.’
Anna smoothed out and folded our plastic bags. ‘Some ladies commit suicide,’ she said, ‘on the path that I have taken.’
§
I had a video camera in front of my face, shooting my friends as I told them a story: ‘Gayl filmed girls being fucked for the first time,’ the story started. ‘White virgins, Western virgins seduced by a beautiful and perverted Tanzanian musician. Then, for this totally spectacular ending, Gayl filmed the girls getting beat up by her.’
The sun was strong in Fort Lauderdale. I wasn’t positive if my ending was the only ending like that, or not. If I was the only one who was turned free by that violence, or not. Aaron’s parents had a huge fancy place with a pool. All of Gayl’s footage and archives had been destroyed.
‘It was this totally backwards and inspired allegory about masters and slaves,’ I continued. ‘Gayl was trying to make the masters aware of their privilege, the people who wouldn’t ever think of themselves as masters. A master can be a total innocent, you know, just from where she was born, how she grew up.’
I’d talked to my mom for a long time on the phone in Aaron’s parents’ bedroom suite. She said that people in Korea had been calling her Nina, not Irene.
‘Gayl made this kind of dialectical porn that degraded the oppressors.’ Lee and Aaron and Wils watched me, rapt. I had them. I could keep them. ‘Gayl made this porn to fuck up the people watching it, the people paying for it. She wanted to take these people to the height of their fantasy and give them what they wanted to see, like a teenage slut getting fucked, full of depravity and need, but then right at the moment of orgasm she could subvert the whole equation.’
‘How?’ asked Lee. ‘That’s what I want to know.’
‘She got me, playing slut-slave, to embrace her, my female oppressor. The man as the perverse force was negated onscreen in the self-consciousness that all of us were actors.’
I imagined Nina in Korea in her love hotel, full of money and bursting, a whole other world.
‘I’ve been committed to tape,’ I told my friends in Florida. ‘I believe in what I’ve done. I don’t regret a thing. That’s what porn is. It’s sharing yourself.’
Lee smiled at me, she licked the salt off her glass. It was a good shot. Aaron and Wils were our witnesses.
‘Sharing is pleasure is lack of regret,’ said Lee. ‘I think we think we all agree.’
Notes
Epigraph: The dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity – which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are. Michel Houellebecq, from The Possibility of an Island, p. 144. First Vintage International Edition, 2007
Epigraph: My mystery is that I have no mystery. Clarice Lispector from Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser. p. 4. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009
p. 11, 122, 125, 157: You could be raped a thousand times and you could still be a virgin. From an email to the author from Moritz Gaede
p. 48: I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess. Gore Vidal, the opening line of Myra Breckinridge, New York: Bantam, 1968
p. 62: Love is a sign of our wretchedness, God can only love himself. We can only love something else. Simone Weil from Gravity and Grace, p. 62. London: Routledge Classics, 2002
p. 90: Shame is the most proper emotive tonality of subjectivity. Giorgio Agamben from Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 110. New York: Zone Books, 2002
p. 122: Is it right to ignore me like this as if they did nothing to me? Were the soldiers justified in trampling an innocent and fragile teenage girl and making her suffer for the rest of her life? A paraphrase of Miss Kim from the article ‘Inside Queens: The Memories of a Comfort Woman,’ by Jane H. Lii, published September 10, 1995, in the New York Times
p. 125: Base feelings, envy, resentment are degraded energy. Simone Weil from Gravity and Grace, p. 8
p. 136: A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams. Simone Weil from Gravity and Grace, p. 53
p. 152: Subordination: economy of energy. Thanks to this, an act of heroism can be performed without there being any need for the person who commands or the one who obeys to be a hero. Simone Weil from Gravity and Grace, p. 43
p. 152: Cruelty and eroticism are conscious intentions in a mind which has resolved to trespass into a forbidden field of behaviour. Georges Bataille from Eroticism, p. 80. London: Penguin Books, 2001
p. 152–3: Silence cannot do away with things that language cannot state. Violence is as stubbornly there just as much as death, and if language cheats to conceal universal annihilation, the placid work of time, language alone suffers, language is the poorer, not time and not violence. Georges Bataille from Eroticism, p. 187
p. 154: Circular absolute knowledge is definitive non-knowledge. Georges Bataille from Inner Experience, p. 108. New York: State University of New York Press, 1988
p. 163: The power of the abject is the hunger for strong sensations. To feel yourself alive in the face of abomination. Myra paraphrasing Georges Bataille, from Eroticism