Flashbang

The flash goes off after she’s finished fucking me. A brilliant darkness as my eyes re-adjust to dim light. I like it best when it’s dangerous — her hand, a lens, a weapon. Shoot the parts I’m afraid of. Aim for the head. We dance together in August and sleep together in October, stop seeing each other in December, then start again in March; a wounded summer sweeps us to Paris in the fall.

She wears Prada and Vaquera. JW Anderson for Uniqlo when the work is slow. She’s so thin, I can see blue veins running down her back like the map of a city subway. Her elbows hyperextend. When I offer to open a jar for her, she shakes her head and pushes me away. Her cheeks flush, she gets flustered, she tells me I want to do what you want to do, but never waits to hear what that is. 

A week after her opening in the Marais, we meet for a costly dinner in London. Our eyes lock across a table that shakes on uneven tile. Last week it was all love, my body the centerpiece, but tonight she’s cruel and I’m tired. My glass shatters. When I wake up the next morning, I want to be alone. I boil water for coffee with my hip pressed against the cool stainless steel countertop. Sam traipses downstairs in an oversize black jumper and tells me about a prophetic dream while sipping cardamom tea. She says that I’m her boyfriend in an interview for an arts magazine, but by the time the piece runs in November, I’m not.

We crash out separately. Drugs, exes, obsession, and rejection. Who am I and who is she and anger and apathy. Jet-setting, political duress, too much work and not enough of it. She lashes out. I’m needy and self-abasing. None of this ever stops us from fucking. 

I like what I see under her blue boxers. I get hot, pulling the fabric aside to get a better look at her. With a nonchalance that soaks the thin threads between us, she presses her foot against my hard-on. Then she is like iron in my throat. I can think of nothing but the sensation of fullness. My lips connect with her pelvis. I taste determination when she kisses me. Each time she pulls away, we snap back together, harder.

On our third walk around the block, some hot night in May, she tells me she’s making me the monographic subject of her fall show. I’m into it—why wouldn’t I be? I basically suggested it. In a last appeal for something consistent, she looked at me, curious, and listened. I made my case: what if we can push each other in the right direction, embrace the effect, carpe punctum or whatever; maybe we could do some crazy shit, beautiful too, imagine the pictures. But now that it’s tangible, I worry that reality will destroy the balance this idea created. My body; the wall; her name. I ask for a voice, and though her assent is enthusiastic, I still find her commitment difficult to believe. Sudden vertigo when I realize I won’t know how it’s worked until I’m up five flights, in the gallery, bound in the proof and surrounded. 

I tell my therapist I don’t know what the point of any of this is; making things, involving myself. She tells me that it is not easy to be comfortable in your own humanity, as if difficulty is a metric of worth. I tell Sam I can’t believe she’s making a whole show about me. She says, what else am I supposed to make it about? The pictures and the writing turn emotion into fuel. They keep us going, they bring us in and take us out of parties and cities and frames of mind. 

It’s 8pm in Paris but the sun won’t set for another two hours. I propose we do drugs and take pictures. We split a Coke-Zero, dosed into small Ikea glasses. The effect is immediate. My body is bigger than hers everywhere. I pin her to the wall, wrap my inked arms around her waist, and enjoy her. I am so turned on by the look on her face when she is pressed against the bed stretched out around me that I swear I can feel every inch of this silicone cock. She gasps, losing control. Pleasure, power; she takes pictures. Her body is hard like glass, dazzling and breakable.

In the pharmacy, we struggle to find shampoo, shaving cream, sunscreen, and toothpaste in French travel sizes. We laugh and sigh and grab at each other as a task that should take five minutes drags us into the second half of the hour. I pick up a bottle of hand cream and curl my palm around the smooth plastic. I want to ask her, why do you love me, what would you do if I ended up pregnant, do you believe in marriage, would you break up with me if I pushed you in the canal, would you ever kill a man? We have breakfast in the park, surrounded by children laughing and picking at deconstructed hamburgers and fries. We talk about having kids. The fantasy keeps at bay a plethora of unpleasant realities, offering instead the pursuit of some long and legible future. We bike past an army of stern-faced French police officers, a hundred or so at least, machine guns held against their armored chests. 

She shot 29 rolls this month, almost a thousand pictures, my body from every angle. Each image stings like her hand on my ass when I ask nicely. The greater the distance between the present and the moment of capture, the less the person in the photographs belongs to me; the harder it is to remember that I was there, moving my body into position, saying yes, saying no, saying please.

Over steak near Millennium Park, we start talking about ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’. Our references don’t often overlap, so I’m eager to tell her I’ve seen the episode where he plays golf. She giggles. Larry David loves golf. He plays it in like every episode. I stammer as her amusement turns to bright pink panic. She buries her face in her hands. The waiter approaches, then changes direction. It’s cracking me up to see such a tightly wound girl hysterical over Larry David in the middle of a bistro in Chicago. She can’t stop laughing and it’s freaking her out. Every time we make eye contact, it starts all over again. 

There is all this pressure to justify what we are doing—internal mostly, but from all over too. I guess it’s natural to wonder about effect and purpose. I don’t know what this show will mean to anyone else, but it’s carrying me through a fraught time. When I try to anticipate reception, I start getting tense. This is just the piece that I could write and the work that she could make right now. 

Name a single person we love who doesn’t like sucking cock.

I like following hot girls to foreign countries. I like hard drugs and gay bars and getting fucked in public. I like being called a slut, but only by people who’ve earned it. I like addicts and actors; models, writers, stars. It makes my pussy wet when she’s standing above me, aiming her camera. It feels good to have her tongue on my dick while I’m touching her body.

At a diner, while the sun is rising, our orders are slightly different. I don’t say, I’ll have what she’s having, every time anymore. A greasy man with dark wet hair stood in the doorway and harassed her as we entered. Breakfast is subdued. The work is piling up. People like to say things to me, she says softly, without despair. I stop myself from filling the silence with theory and platitude. I don’t think it matters how well we both understand why violence happens. Instead I say, you should be allowed to taser people who get in your face like that, and she smiles. I wonder what I’d do with a body like hers. Slim hips, long blonde hair. 

We go to the Pines, several times, to shoot and relax and fuck and swim. Some friends are on the couch outside. Sam sings as she wipes down the counters. I watch her reflection in the large windowed doors. Her hands glide around a tall stalk of flowers with sharp green stems that shimmer pink at the tip. My wet trunks are slumped across a vintage tubular chair. The music feels good. I get hard. She asks me what I’m doing, then lays her head in my lap and falls asleep. 

Narrow trees carve daggers into the sky around us. When I know she’s shot her last roll, I lean back against their rough bark. The ocean growls and leaves hiss in the wind. She looks on as I begin to touch myself, her hands tied without film. Cum runs down my leg and pools in the black sole of my sandal. We walk to the ocean and I wash in the waves.

She sees in me what she sees in herself, and I see possibility in her recognition. I show up with my body to prove it. We project a shared vision that flickers into being through repetition, through slow, persistent effort — an echo, a recursive loop, a drumbeat; intense and unyielding; reflecting our effect on each other, sprawling across the room. 

In the lab, they all know my name, my face, they call me the star. My body is segmented and printed at all sizes, tacked to the wall. I am an object you can buy, a reflective surface, blunt force. The days become crisp and a charged fall comes into focus. In bed on a Saturday night, we roll around in her pale sheets and try to make sense of it: how to go out, keep friends, be true, make a living. The scale of the problem is daunting. I see the outline of her, soft behind white cotton, and for a second, I wish that I were the photographer.