‘I’m leaving in two minutes, coming to get you. I don’t believe a word that comes out of your mouth. It’ll take me a half-hour. See you.’
‘Don’t!’
‘What? Is your boyfriend sleeping there? Is that it? I’ll pound his face in if he’s there.’
‘Ezrah, fuck!’
‘Ezrah fuck what?’
It was the last thing I heard. My fingers were bright red. I ran out of Michael’s apartment, shot down twenty-two flights and out into the world of light and its rising.
They were waiting for me on the opposite sides of the room. I walked to my window and leaned my head against the glass. Gio was at the edge of my bed and Ezrah had his arms crossed over his chest at the wall. I turned on the light and they both flinched the same face. The difference between family and stranger was erased. Killer equalled cousin equalled father equalled pimp. And Jew equalled Jew equalled Jew.
Gio said: ‘You have to rid yourself of this man.’
Red patches rose up and flushed Ezrah’s face. ‘Just fuck off, man, okay?’
My bottom lip started to shake. I had to remember: collaborate.
‘You’re coming home with me, Mira. Just come now, okay?’
Ezrah was walking right toward me. I had to move away.
I walked to the window, leaned my head against the glass. God, what is this place that it can break people in half? This place where men come to fuck their own daughters. This maze where fathers and daughters meet up …
‘Excuse me,’ Gio said. ‘I think I can explain. Nothing is wrong here. What has taken place here isn’t wrong.’
‘Wait,’ I warned Gio, without looking behind me. How was I supposed to collaborate with them?
‘Why doesn’t she tell me to leave then, you asshole? Mira? Why don’t you tell
me to leave? Just tell me to go and I’ll go, okay?’
‘But it’s not you who has to go, it’s Mira who has to stay,’ Gio answered. ‘She still has work to do tonight.’
‘Hang on,’ I said. My throat felt caked with mud. I turned around to face them. ‘I don’t want to be here but I don’t want to leave. I want to finish my job at this place and move on.
‘I want to talk to you both, but one at a time. Maybe, later, I can talk to the two of you together. Maybe, one day, I can talk to a room full of men. Maybe one day I’ll be the Lord of all men. Maybe the Mother of God was a whore. Maybe one day I’ll be naked and shining and you won’t have to worship me or any young girl anymore. Maybe one day we’ll all have holes at the top of our heads and be programmed for God. And women will fuck men instead of men fucking them. And then this place can be burned to the ground.’
I smiled. They were both listening to me.
AFTERWORD
I remember the embarrassment I felt when Lie with Me came out over ten years ago. There was no good way for me to explain why I shot fiction with pornography, hoping for the best. That initial public embarrassment was likely a kind of useless repression. Because I had no big truth to tell about myself. Now, though, in retrospect, I know why I wrote Lie with Me. It was to sustain this perfect, merciless feeling I first had while spitting art’s extremity into the suckhole of porn. And it’s not embarrassing for me to admit anymore that I was desperate to find meaning in this action.
Unfortunately, by the end of two books I didn’t know any more about female sexuality than when I’d started out. My mercilessness had not blossomed into compassion either.
Is untapped sexual energy in women even still a problem these days? In 1999, I felt that problem as acutely as my shame. And it was this push-pull of pressures that made me transcribe and complicate the getting-fucked female voice – a voice that I found in porn, a voice that was utterly wasted by porn.
Porn needed fiction, I felt. I needed the fight.
Significant visions are not always easy to remember. But memory, sometimes, functions all right. This one feels loaded: 1982, in the basement closet of a girl in my class I saw a bronze naked man projected onto the wall, guffawing and walking toward a very high bed. This bronze naked man had a rod sticking off him. I had never seen a thing like that, I’d only ever seen them mottled and soft and hiding like purses between hairy legs. This one was a workshop utensil! This one was pointing and leading to something airtight. What I got from my first vision of cock: cock was a tool, you had to use that thing right.
The girl’s mother called her name from upstairs.
The bronze king honed in on the very high bed where there were two women waiting with soft boobs and flipped hair. Those two were like chipmunks, fawning on their knees.
Something was about to happen, something I knew I had to see.