Chapter 33
Streaming is genius because you get paid to share something the customer never owns.
Joselyn does market research and chooses who we promote on the front page. Morgen assists. It’s very clear Joselyn now has the Arto empire more than Morgen ever did. I’ll go with the last woman standing. Just don’t make me come out of retirement.
Pornography is a worn-out term but if you use it people will know what you mean. It’s antiquated in the way of saying “moving pictures” instead “movies” or “film”.
It’s content. The opposite of contentment.
And you need it to compete.
So it’s not a question of “do you” but “what kind” of content to include.
If one of the stars of a popular highly subscribed profile died that was the ticket. It happens often enough that we built system to milk the spots off that cash cow.
Joselyn tapped her pen on the tabletop as if calling court into session. She says, “I did the numbers and if something, bad, or…if something happened to Everhet. Something tragic. God forbid. His reboot would be monstrously successful. I mean his backlog alone—”
“We’re not doing that.” I say. And my face gets that minty-tingly feeling. My headspace turns to hot TV fuzz. This woman is my meal ticket, but taking Everhet’s side was still instinctual. It’s easier to defend him than help him.
She’d been talking about killing people a lot lately. About removing “roadblocks” and dealing with “issues”.
It’s amazing how thoughts that were horrific and illegal a few short years ago can become normal, tangible, and anxiety reducing.
“Last shoots” are what the news call the trend of self-made snuff flicks. And for the past three weeks they have been the top trending category. Which, thinking back to the first secret premiere I ever attended, further proves Everhet’s foresight of this. Or maybe it was his cry for help, and we all mistook it as genius.
More of the same creates more of the same. It’s infinite loop logic.
Butler caved on his rules about visibility into people’s personal information. It didn’t take much. I just told him to instead of asking. He triangulated the location where a large cache of last shoots were being uploaded to PPL.
It was the West Estate.
●
He started borrowing some of Joselyn’s books without asking. I went to get them and he returned them to me without an issue or a scratch on them. Everhet owned a small printer with a scanner hooked up to his computer. I bet when the paper came out all hot and crisp it felt like his own magnum opus. His dumb gum-chewed brain thought he wrote it.
Everhet kept looking at those copies of obscene books. Kept reading like it was making him smart but it was sucking the life out of him through his dilated pupils. They’re not normal books. The words are arranged in such a way you get this zinging in your head. A minty-tingly feeling.
Looking into the shapes and symbols on the page makes you warm in the belly and the face. You feel numb and think: If I look away I’ll die.
Some books take the lives of their readers away and bury them in their pages.
You look at the shapes. Letters, sequenced in such a way.
Your eyes lock.
If I look away I’ll die.
A month ago I found Everhet for the first time, he was lying next to the computer. Eyes open but lifeless. The obscenity of the videos. The VCOs were giving him brain damage.
This morning he pointed a gun at himself instead of a book and painted the wall with his brains. He streamed it live.
The art nailed to the wall behind him was of a late 18th century VCO. A classic one among collectors with a penchant for American history. A big red X. Some stars and triangles. Blood-soaked with a bullet hole in the middle.
Upon seeing him I felt a piece of myself disconnect and drop out of me and before I could locate it, it flew away. Suddenly I was aware of where I was in my life. That meaning, I could clearly see the difference between where I once was and where I am now, since he was the last one I knew from my old life. The last tie, cut.
And I had a sense of something, but never had proof, that Joselyn had something to do with my inability to connect with Morgen. Like I would have never been able to even if I tried, or she was intervening between our souls unbeknownst to either of us.
Maybe the mirror “appeared” to him on its own. Maybe Joselyn made it appear.
Not to sound like a victim, but I could see how, if she wanted to, Joselyn could have planned to use me to free herself from her servitude to her wealthy masters from the first night Morgen brought me to her. Enslavement is enslavement no matter how glamorous or comfortable.
I took the flag off the wall and folded it. Tucked it under my arm and felt the way I did the night I fell into the sewer. I was watching my body move for me. If Joselyn had somehow created me into this, into her slave, would I even know or care?
Hurt people hurt people, I thought. The old boring statement rings true.
Would there be any point to fighting it? After someone opens themselves up to being a worthy and willing conduit, can they change their minds?
With all her perceptiveness and supernatural abilities I wonder if she could foresee all this happening. And if that is the case there was no difference between what she wants and what I want now. Perhaps, our souls were married in this way.
Did Morgen think I was a bartering tool to win Joselyn’s affection? There are so many questions in my life that will never be answered. But I have very little doubt of what will happen next to Morgen. And I’m grateful Joselyn built a spiritual wall, otherwise I’d never see it through.
Whether it was my decision or not, I marched on foot that night to her cabin in the woods alone. I couldn’t feel the weight of my own body as I walked, and I stared straight ahead, I didn’t want to look down and see my feet floating.
When I arrived at her cabin the door opened for me on its own. And I knelt before her and I gave the flag to Joselyn the way they brought John the Baptist’s head to King Herod on a silver platter.
“Did you leave his body?” Joselyn asks.
I reply, “Yes.”
This is the end of the Arto dynasty. And whether it’s my choice or not, I am ready to finish it.
I must be under some kind of spell.
●
She grabs one end of the tie about her waist until the knot undoes itself and her robe drops to the floor, under which, she is wearing nothing.
Without being told I already know to unfold the flag and lay it in the open area in front of the fireplace that is raging with an unnatural white fire. And I feel the tug and pull of the dark energy circulating in the room. I couldn’t blink if I wanted to. My lips and hands are cold. I have that minty-tingly feeling.
Joselyn kneels on the flag, facing the fire. Places her hands on the floor under her shoulders. Then slides her hands towards the hearth until her forehead is touching the flag. She lifts her hips toward the ceiling without letting her knees leave the floor.
I never knew what I really wanted in life. I wanted money to make my life easier while I figured that out. But my purpose until this moment was just me inventing reasons to do things and attaching feelings to those reasons as a source of motivation, like hooking your exhaust to your gas tank. For years I created voids just to fill them.
So when I knelt down behind Joselyn I knew this was the void I would always wish to fill. I had found what I wanted, and it was to be indispensable to someone. And I knew in my chest that whatever we were conjuring, Joselyn couldn’t do it on her own. Whether she is controlling my mind to think that or not, it feels true.
She needed me.
But then again, so did Morgen.
●
The next morning Joselyn was crouching by the fireplace watching the flag burn, resting her chin on her knees.
Dry-mouthed and groggy, I angled my elbow against the hardwood floor and swung my weight over, looked at her, saw that she didn’t see me from her angle and hadn’t heard me yet, so I waited a few minutes for some special feeling to come. It didn’t.
After Joselyn noticed I was awake she stood up and walked over to me. Still naked. Little streaks of Everhet’s blood on her thighs, buttocks, and back. A little on her wrists and her palms. And just a dab on the forehead. She walks until her feet are near my feet they she lets her body slowly fall beside me even after her feet came off the ground.
She grabbed my wrist and placed it on her stomach in the center below where her rib cage ends, just above the belly button. And says nothing. She just stares at me. And I could see into the obsidian blackness of her pupils, and felt the universe look back, or the void was looking back, the side of the universe the universe can’t see. It was the hunger that drives our species to do every horrible and beautiful thing we do.
“They’re going to save this place, you know. This World.” Joselyn guides my hand just above her pubic bone. Her womb.
And my thoughts had to be my own because I asked, “How can you know already?”
She says, “Really?”
That’s when I noticed we were both floating.
James Jacob Hatfield is a displaced engineer, a painter, and many other contradictions. His work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Barely South Review, Chaleur Magazine, Havik, and others. His ekphrasis poem “torrents of lahar, No. 36” was anthologized by the North Carolina Museum of Art. He is a Sterling Fellow and a Weymouth Fellow. He is the creator and curator of the Gemini Sessions Substack. He lives in Durham, NC.
Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, and sign up for our mailing list.