Filth

Logging on to my email account, I was pleased to find a message from Evelyn, an ex-girlfriend, whom I hadn't seen in years. Last I'd heard, Evelyn was married, with twins, living in San Francisco where she ran a store that sold stained glass.

I was less pleased after I read her message:

Judd-

My husband and I find your emails inappropriate. Please respect our privacy and desist from trying to contact me.

-Evelyn

Oh God, I thought, I've been drunk emailing again.

Months before, there had been an incident on myspace where I received a response from a woman I didn't know to a question I had no memory of asking. After searching my account, it became apparent that I had been coming home from the bars after hours and firing off messages of lascivious intent that, come morning, I had no recollection of ever having sent.

Much to my surprise, however, after an exhaustive search, I discovered that I had not sent Evelyn an email in years, and the last one I did send was perfectly benign.

So I replied:

Dear Evelyn,

Great to hear from you. Hope things are well in San Fran. I received your message but have no memory nor any evidence of having sent you ANY emails. Are you sure you got the right guy? Best to.... Max, was it?

-Judd

A few days later, Evelyn wrote back:

Judd-

Come off it. You think we don't know who Fish is?

-Evelyn

This was getting interesting. For two years, I had been writing a blog called Filth that chronicled the life of a fictitious character named Julius "Fish" Fischman, his best friend, Arty From Philly, and a woman known only as Intimate Relationship #9.5. I figured this was the Fish to whom Evelyn was referring.

Dear Evelyn-

Either you're putting me on or somebody is putting us both on. Take into account that your web address is revealed on your myspace page. Just because these mystery emails are signed "Fish" doesn't mean they're from me.

-Judd

She wrote one last time:

Judd-

Figure it out and make it stops [sic].

-Evelyn

Her last message came with an attachment that contained copies of the various missives sent to her by one julius_fischman@gmail.com. Indeed, the emails contained material inappropriate to send to any woman, married or otherwise. They seemed to represent the unsavory intentions of a well-educated misanthrope whose sexual proclivities could best be described as criminal.

But they weren't from me. Nor did I ever register a gmail account by that name, which led me to suspect that there was some imposter masquerading as Julius "Fish" Fischman in order to harass my friends and exes, all of whom would be easy to find for anyone with a myspace account and a link to my page. Perhaps the culprit was someone I knew, some friend playing a practical joke, or perhaps it was an enemy or con man running a scam.

I sent the following email to julius_fischman@gmail.com:

Dear Fish-

Who are you?

-Judd Trichter

PS. Leave Evelyn alone.

Within seconds, I got the following reply:

fuck off

I had to find him.

I started with a search on myspace and, sure enough, located a profile for one Julius "Fish" Fischman, 32 years old, writer/actor, living in Los Angeles. And here's the kicker: 218,596 friends. I only had 164.

But not only was Fish more popular than I, he was also taller (5'10"), richer (income $150,000 - $200,000), and better looking, or at least the avatar on his profile looked better than the photograph on mine. I couldn't know for certain if the artist who designed it was trying to represent me, but judging by the frizzy hair, slumped posture, big ears, and crooked nose, it's safe to assume the graphic was at least inspired by me if not modeled directly.

The myspace profile also revealed that Fish writes a blog called Smut which one can view at www.juliusfischman.com. It's a well-designed page, more professional than mine with many more comments, links, and advertisements, though the writing isn't nearly as good. Fish's voice reminded me of a poor man's Bukowski aspiring toward Haruki Murakami. There's a whiff of misogyny prevalent in his descriptions of women and a lack of discipline to his style, though an undercurrent of self-deprecating humor does save it from being total trash.

The protagonist in Smut - in case you haven't guessed by now - goes by the name of "Judd Trichter," but the Judd Trichter on the blog doesn't resemble me in any way. Instead, Fish writes Judd Trichter as a drug-addled freeloader who suffers from delusions of grandeur while treating his mother like shit, borrowing money left and right, masturbating constantly, needlessly rebelling against authority, and generally lacking the ability or talent to ever get anything done.

In other words, Fish's page had the makings of a lawsuit.

I called Kenny Gutstein, my attorney, at once.

"Listen to this," I said. "There's some clown on the internet pretending to be me. Wait a minute. That's not quite right. He's pretending to be a character I created."

"Okay."

"And he's harassing my friends and writing terrible things about me."

"True things?" my lawyer asked.

"Some. But most are lies."

"That's slander."

"And judging by his page, it looks like the sonofabitch makes money."

"Great," said Gutstein. "What's his name?"

"I don't know his real name, but on the internet, he goes by Julius Fischman."

"Stop right there."

"What's the problem?"

"He's a client."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

"You represent this fraud?"

"I represent Julius Fischman," said Gutstein, "and believe me when I tell you, this fraud, as you call him, brings in ten times the revenue you ever brought."

I asked if I was entitled to any of that.

"Not a cent," Gutstein shouted into the phone before I could finish my question. "And if you intend any legal action against him, you can expect a counter suit and an injunction that will shut down your page."

"But he's my creation," I complained. "Without me he doesn't exist."

"Well... I'm sure Julius Fischman would argue the same about you."

There went my lawsuit.

I sent Fischman another email:

Dear Fish,

Where can I call you? I want to talk.

-Judd

He responded with a terse imperative:

eat shit

The next step was to browse through Fischman's thousands of myspace friends to see if we had any in common. I found one: Tracy Choo. Of course Tracy would know Fish. I should have known.

Tracy Choo was a half-Korean, half-android woman who worked as a barista in an internet cafe where I used to sip tea at two in the morning and write. She introduced herself one night, after her shift, when she sat down next to me and asked what I was working on. Turned out Tracy knew all about Filth and was psyched to learn I was the man behind it. We wound up talking for hours, constantly interrupted by the electronic gadgets she tended to at all times: some DJ from Japan calling her cell, some computer hacker IM'ing her, some web artist sending her a video text. To talk to Tracy was to interact with only half of her while the other half drifted through the constellations of cyberspace.

On our date, Tracy and I shoveled Kimchi into our mouths and washed down ecstasy with our sake. We danced at a crowded rave in an abandoned warehouse downtown. In the morning, we drove back to her apartment and its many screens and monitors, its criss-crossed cables, its overwhelmed power strips and webcams rigged to the ceilings in every room.

"Just so you know," she said, "if we have sex, there will be thousands of people watching around the world."

Despite what one might presume from my being an actor, exhibitionism isn't really my bag, but ecstasy combined with a hot Korean android can do strange things to a man, and I decided to give it a try.

The sex wasn't what I hoped. Even though she was eager and able to please, the fact that Tracy didn't sweat or carry a scent had the effect of reminding me that she was only half-human. Nor did it help my self-esteem that as a condition of her manufacture, Tracy couldn't lubricate naturally and had to shove a fresh battery up her ass between orgasms. It's hard to say this without sounding like a bigot, but I've always thought that dating an android - even one who's only half - was an admission of failure or at the very least a compromise I didn't want to make.

We went out one more time, but after that, I lied and told Tracy I was getting back with an ex. She took it hard.

"What's she got that I don't?"

"Nothing," I said. "It's just that my ex and I have a history, and I want to see if we can make it work."

We were outside at the time, and the rain drops collecting on her cheek made it look like she was crying.

"I thought we had something," Tracy whispered toward the ground. "I thought we had something real."

"I thought so too," I replied. But that was also a lie.

After seeing her profile on Fish's myspace page, I sent Tracy an email to feel out whether she'd be willing to talk:

Hey Trace-

Long time no see. How've you been? Came across your profile on myspace and thought I'd say hi. Hope all's well.

-Judd

Tracy replied with an indecipherable stream of words, letters, and symbols that might as well have been written in binary. I emailed her again and asked if it would be okay if I called. She responded thus:

Y

Though possible that she was asking, "Why," I took the letter "Y" to mean "Yes" and gave her a ring.

Tracy and I spoke for about fifteen minutes, catching up on the last year of each others' lives, until finally we overcame the awkwardness inherent in my calling. Then I brought up Fish.

"What about him?" she asked.

"I see he's on your myspace page."

"He found me in a chat room and asked me out."

"Did you go out with him?"

"Couple of times."

"What's he like?"

"Kind of like you, I guess, but not exactly."

I asked her to elaborate.

"He's more angsty," she decided. "Better looking. More stylish. Just sexier in a weird way."

"Sexier than me?"

"Yeah. And he's a better writer too. Have you seen his blog?"

"Yes," I said, "I've read his blog. And thank you."

I asked Tracy if she had slept with Fish, and she admitted she did.

"How was that?" I asked.

"Well," she sighed, "he did make me come."

"So did I."

Tracy laughed.

"Uh... no." Liar. "But I have to tell you," she added right away, softening in her rebuke, "he wasn't you. As much as I wanted him to be, he just wasn't."

"How so?" I asked.

"I don't know," she mused. "It's hard to put my finger on it, but whenever I was with Fish, I always got the feeling that he was an actor playing the role of you. And since you're an actor yourself, it was like he was an actor playing the role of another actor. Whenever I was with him, I felt incredibly aware of his being a generation removed from the original, and, worst of all, I think he was aware of it too."

And yet he was able to make her come.

"When was the last time you two spoke?"

"It's been a while," she answered in a shrugging tone that indicated he wasn't an entity that dwelled in her thoughts or remained in her life. "Last I heard he was living in Silverlake with his girlfriend. I think they're having a kid."

I told Tracy that I had been trying to get a hold of Fish and asked if there was some way she could put us in touch.

"I can give you his cell number."

I called Fish's cell and got his voice mail. There was no recording of his voice on the outgoing message, just a beep, after which I left my number and told him to call.

He responded via text:

What do you want

I typed back:

I want to meet

Quickly, he wrote:

Farmer's market 3 o clock

Then me:

Where in farmers market?

Then he:

jewelry kiosk

At three o'clock, in the rain, by the jewelry kiosk at the Farmer's Market, I waited to meet the character I created or the imposter who was playing him. After half an hour of asking every 30-something man who passed if he was Julius Fischman, I decided to text the guy again:

Where are you?

He replied:

Where the fuck are you?

I wrote:

Farmer's market

He wrote:

Fuck you

The guy was like Mamet with his dialogue. Cold and wet, I decided to cut my losses and go. Whoever this prick was, he obviously didn't want to meet.

That night, when I got home, I began work on a story called The Jew's Tale. In it, Julius Fishman has decided to commit suicide, but before doing so, he wants to get his watch fixed at the jewelry kiosk at the Farmer's Market. The kiosk is run by an old Jew who convinces Fish to trade his watch for a diamond ring. Fish returns home, pins the ring to his sweater, and attempts to hang himself. In the end, however, Fish passes out just before the rope gives, and he wakes to find himself engaged to his pregnant girlfriend, Intimate Relationship #9.5.

It took me about a week to finish the story, and after publishing it online, I got the following email from Fish:

Fucking prick

I wrote back:

Fuck you. you stood me up

He responded:

You stood ME up

I wasn't buying it. I mean, yes, it is possible there's another Farmer's Market in Los Angeles with a jewelry kiosk, but it's damn unlikely, and given the circumstances, I figured Fish for a liar.

The next day the sonofabitch emailed me a link to his blog which contained a story that, in my opinion, crossed over into the realm of bad taste. It was a story that involved an actor named Judd Trichter, who was so down on his luck, he was forced to take a job working on an X-rated film. But rather than acting in the film, Judd's role was to apply lubricant to the necessary body parts on the actors and actresses when they called for it on the set. According to the story, the name ascribed to such an occupation is "lube boy."

Normally, I wouldn't let such an insult bother me, but the following day, I was sitting in the waiting room at an audition when all of a sudden the casting director started laughing her ass off after reading my name on the sign-in.

"Is your name really Judd Trichter?" she asked.

I told her it was.

"You're 'lube boy'!"

I called Tracy.

"This has to stop."

"Yeah," Tracy sympathized, "you guys have some issues. Fish was really pissed you stood him up at the Farmer's Market."

"I stood him up? He stood me up."

"That's not what he says."

"When did you talk to him?"

"A few days ago. He said you don't return his calls."

"That's a lie," I insisted, but Tracy confessed that she didn't know who to believe.

"He doesn't like the things you write about him. He thinks you're unfair."

"How so?" I asked.

"Well, for one thing, he wants to be successful."

"But he is successful. His website is ten times as profitable as mine."

"That's true," she agreed, "but no one would know it by reading your stories."

"What else?" I asked.

"He wants to be happy."

"I'm sure he does."

"He told me to tell you that he'll stop harassing you if you let him edit your page."

"No chance," I said. I had my pride.

"He said he's willing to pay."

It was raining again on the day of the meet. I had so little money and so little gas in my car, I was worried that if I drove down to Koreatown, I'd have no way of getting back.

The building Tracy lived in looks like a giant mainframe computer. It sits on Wilshire Boulevard facing a vast television screen that plays beer commercials for the Asian market. To get to her apartment required going up one elevator then down two flights of stairs to get to another elevator that took me to the roof so that I could climb down a fire escape that led to her window.

Inside, Tracy had turned off the lights and drawn the curtains so that all I could see was a green flicker from the giant screen outside.

"Wear these," she said, handing me a pair of sunglasses as I entered. There was an ambient sound coming from her bedroom -- either some avant-garde mix tape or a white noise from Tracy's machines and gadgets hooked up into a complex feedback loop.

"Is he here?" I asked.

"He's in the bedroom. You'll have to converse with him through a screen."

With the sunglasses on, I couldn't see a thing. Tracy led me by the hand as I tripped over phone lines and cables and finally reached a desk at which she told me to sit.

"I'm not sure this will work," she said as she placed a keyboard on my lap. "The technology isn't quite there yet, and neither is your writing."

I sat for a minute in total darkness, listening to the noise from the bedroom getting louder and louder until, suddenly, a series of letters flashed before my eyes:

FISH: glad you could make it

I typed my response on the keyboard:

JUDD: my pleasure

FISH: allow me to get right to the point. you made a big mistake making intimate relationship #9.5 pregnant

JUDD: how you figure?

FISH: as written, i am clearly incapable of being a decent father. i don't make enough money, and i don't like my fiance

JUDD: so?

FISH: so what will happen to the child?

JUDD: nothing good i suppose

FISH: you think that's funny?

JUDD: wasn't meant to be. you live in a cruel and unfair world

FISH: then maybe i can live somewhere else

JUDD: like?

FISH: i don't know

JUDD: me either

The screen stayed black for a moment.

FISH: what if my writing career were to take off?

JUDD: unlikely

FISH: why?

JUDD: the reader never sees your writing because he's supposed to assume it represents the voice of an honest man in a world with no value for honesty

FISH: and there's no way i can find success in that world?

JUDD: not as a writer

FISH: but i want to write. i like writing

JUDD: then you won't find success

Black again.

FISH: what if ir#9.5 has a miscarriage?

JUDD: that's a cop out

FISH: what if the world were to change and find a place for my work?

JUDD: that'd be nice, but it isn't a part of my experience, and it wouldn't be something i'd write

FISH: even if i paid you?

JUDD: even if you paid me

FISH: >:-(

JUDD: what's that? your 'angry face'?

FISH: >:-(((((((

JUDD: ooh, i'm scared

FISH: what youre doing is cruel. it's cruel to me, cruel to the child, and cruel to ir#9.5. for god's sake, man, she's having my baby and i don't even know her name

JUDD: her name is Ethel

FISH: Ethel? why Ethel?

JUDD: Julius and Ethel

FISH: oh. very funny

Tracy interrupted:

TR8CE: i don't get it

JUDD: don't get what?

TR8CE: why is Ethel funny?

FISH: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenbergs

TR8CE: ohhhhhhhhhhh! :-)))))

FISH: so what happens after she has the baby?

JUDD: you'll give up your dreams, take a series of mundane jobs, and devote yourself to being a good father

FISH: does this make me happy?

JUDD: not at all. you'll be as much a failure at fatherhood as you were in the arts. your relationship with ir#9.5 - excuse me - Ethel, will further deteriorate as each of you suffer through the lie of a marriage held together by the bond of a child neither of you actually want

FISH: where's the light at the end of that tunnel?

JUDD: no light. just suffering

FISH: so i'm a martyr

JUDD: i suppose

FISH: a martyr to what?

JUDD: to absolutely fucking nothing

FISH: and there's no other way? no compromise I can pay you to make?

JUDD: nope

FISH: then i hope you don't mind if i send an email to your mother telling her you're back on heroin

JUDD: i hope you don't mind if Ethel has twins

FISH: how 'bout i put that McRibs commercial on youtube

JUDD: how 'bout I just delete your ass, take down the whole page, and let your whole existence dissipate into the cyber-void

FISH: you don't have the balls

JUDD: that's where you're wrong, douchebag. i'm tired of Filth and the next stage of your life doesn't interest me. i'd rather move on and write something else

FISH: and throw away something you've spent the last two years working on?

JUDD: why not? you ever see how few hits it gets? it's like you barely exist in the first place

FISH: so do it then

JUDD: maybe i will

FISH: what's stopping you?

JUDD: frankly, the only thing stopping me was that i was hoping you'd pay me to keep you alive

FISH: if you let me edit the page

JUDD: no chance

FISH: why not?!

JUDD: because i think your writing sucks

FISH: fuck you

JUDD: no, FUCK YOU!!!!

FISH: you'll delete Ethel and Arty from Philly too?

JUDD: all of youse

FISH: good. great.

JUDD: glad you approve

FISH: so get on with it then

JUDD: looking for the passwords...

Tracy interrupted:

TR8CE: stop it, stop it, stop!

FISH: he started

JUDD: how did I start?

TR8CE: Fish doesn't want to disappear. he's just scared. he's scared of having a child because he's never been one himself. the whole childhood experience is completely alien to him

JUDD: how's that my problem?

TR8CE: fish, don't you ever feel incomplete? like you're missing something that everyone else seems to have?

FISH: sometimes i can't find my keys

TR8CE: i'm serious. and judd, if the next stage of Fish's life doesn't interest you, what about an earlier stage? why not write about how fish became fish?

JUDD: who would want to read that?

TR8CE: i would

JUDD: no you wouldn't

TR8CE: i would, Judd. i really would :'-)

FISH: maybe it'd be cool to be a child

JUDD: believe me, i was a child for years. and it sucked

TR8CE: are you telling me you wouldn't go back if you could?

JUDD: maybe high school. but only for the ass

TR8CE: come on judd. do it

FISH: yeah, Judd. i want to be a child

JUDD: you have no idea what you're asking for

TR8CE: and write it as a novel this time. no more short stories

FISH: I'll pay you for it

JUDD: how much?

FISH: i'll talk to gutstein and make an offer

JUDD: and no one gets to edit what i write!

FISH: Y

The screen went black, and the noise from the bedroom faded. There was a burning sensation in my eyes, and when I shut them, I faded out into sleep.

***

It was still raining at dusk, when I awoke, fully dressed in Tracy's bed, staring up at the webcam on her ceiling. Curled up beside me, Tracy faced the window, her terry cloth robe open to reveal the olive sheen of her thighs.

"I made you some tea," she said, sensing somehow that I was awake.

The petal-scented steam rose from the cup on the night stand. I could feel Tracy's long, synthetic hair coarse against my face as we listened to the rain crackle against the tinted glass of her window.

"Ten pages a week," she said. "Direct deposit into your account."

Behind the curtain, outside the window, the giant screen emitted a blank, grey light into the room. It was a steady light. No flickering. And I couldn't help but fear that the TV was somehow rigged to the webcam above us, projecting our intimacy to the traffic that fitted and started down Wilshire Boulevard.

"Will you do it?" she asked.

I listened to the crackle caused by individual rain drops, falling from the sky, accelerating downward at a rate of 9.8 meters per second squared, to collide with the window like shrapnel smashed against a wall.

"I never got to meet him," I said, reflecting on the idea that the crackle of rain was nothing more than the static hiss of the Earth Machine processing units of condensation as if they were so many bits of data organized through river applications into oceanic dreams.

Tracy turned her body from the window, away from the glass that never breaks despite the force of a million raindrop collisions. She turned her body into mine, forehead against my temple, nose against my cheek, her button mouth touching the corner of my lips.

"You found a way to communicate," she whispered beneath her breath, barely audible above the crackle and hiss. "It's a start."

Filth

I wanted to get my watch fixed before I hung myself. The battery had run out weeks before, and I hadn't the energy to replace it. Nor the money. And then I worked all month painting walls, loading trucks and folding shirts until the holidays came. I made some deliveries and held a sign on a street corner. I still couldn't cover the rent, but at least I made enough to get my watch fixed. At least I'd know what time it was I died.

There's an old Jew with a kiosk at The Farmer's Market near my apartment. I handed him the watch and asked if he could replace the battery. He told me he was busy on account of the holidays and I should come back in a couple of hours. It was 1:50 in the afternoon. If I came back in two hours, I'd still have plenty time to hang myself before Intimate Relationship #9.5 came home from work. A body needs to dangle a good fifteen minutes for there to be no chance of resuscitation, and I didn't want IR#9.5 getting worked up trying to save me. I felt no malice toward her and only wanted to be out of the picture so she could return to her family and raise our unborn child in a better environment than I could provide.

I decided to see a movie to kill time. Nothing interested me at the multiplex, but I bought a ticket for Blood Diamond because it was about to start. It was a terrible film. The story felt like it had been concocted by mooshing together three articles in an issue of Vanity Fair: an expose of the diamond industry, a report on ecotourism destinations and a fluff piece about a Hollywood star who cares. The star is, of course, Leonardo DiCaprio, who hops and jumps about the frame with the frenetic grace of a wet marmot. Though better suited to playing a disgruntled figure skater, DiCaprio is somehow cast as a Rhodesian mercenary, who, over the course of the film, goes from being a racist soldier of fortune to a hero who will sacrifice his life to save a young black boy and bring down the biggest diamond company in the world. And in case we don't know what we should think of this unlikely scenario, the director, a talentless hack by the name of Ed Zwick, forces his actors to indicate what they are feeling at all times while providing a soundtrack that tells the audience exactly how it should react.

Blood Diamond is the kind of movie Hollywood makes in order to raise awareness about an issue. Or so they claim. In this case, the issue is conflict diamonds: stones used to fund both sides of various civil wars in Africa. According to the film, diamond companies mix conflict diamonds into their store of regular diamonds and release them into the market without notifying consumers of the blood spilled between their mining and their distribution. By making Blood Diamond, the actors, producers and Zwick get to show that Hollywood cares about the content of its movies and strives to educate audiences about parts of the world that hold our natural resources. I believe their motives, like those of Angelina Jolie and Madonna, are sincere in their desire to raise awareness. What I don't believe is that raising awareness is worth a rat's ass.

While watching the movie, I began to wonder when in the backsliding values of our country the definition of altruism became so watered down that it no longer involved sacrifice. In their attempt to raise awareness, the producers, actors and Zwick risk and sacrifice nothing -- especially not their eight figure salaries. They change the names of the diamond companies in the movie so that no slander suits could be levied against them. They don't shoot where it takes place in Sierra Leone, thereby supporting the local economy, because it would have been too dangerous and therefore uninsurable. They don't even take the time and effort to make the movie with artistic integrity or believable characters. In fact, it can be argued that movies like Blood Diamond do nothing to raise awareness about an issue because they place that issue in the context of a fantasy world where heroism is rewarded, good triumphs over evil and everything works out in the end.

"You're just a cynic," cries the voice of protest to my argument. "You think it's better to make movies out of comic book characters? Or art films composed of empty formalism? Or would you rather do nothing but sit there and criticize?" Quite the opposite. So angered was I by this film, so inspired to action by the drivel I had been subjected to in these final hours of my life, I decided the only sensible recourse was to use the last four hundred dollars in my checking account to buy IR#9.5 the biggest fucking conflict diamond I could find.

I approached the old Jew at the kiosk and made my demand. "I want a blood diamond," I said. "I want a stone that came into your possession at the expense of an African village. A gem that was mined by limbless children and trafficked by unsavory arms dealers. I want the bloodiest diamond my four hundred dollars can buy."

Behind his long gray beard, the old Jew, tall and rotund, frowned at my request.

"If you are looking for a cheap stone," he said, "I can show you some synthetic gems that only the most practiced eye could discern."

I told him that I was not looking for a cheap stone so much as I was looking for a stone with history. "A history of suffering," I said. "Because in these, the final hours of my life, I have come to realize that value is not determined by color, clarity and carat, but by risk, sacrifice and the shedding of blood."

The Jew smiled, revealing teeth that were yellow and rotten with decay. "I recognize you as a connoisseur," he said, "though of something much more perverse than precious stones. And whereas I do not do business in the kind of gem you are looking for -- at least not to my knowledge -- I do believe I have something that might be of interest to you."

He motioned to his wife to watch over the kiosk while he bent down to unlock a file cabinet behind the counter. Inside I could discern the first steps of a staircase that descended into the ground. It seemed too narrow a passage for the Jew's girth, and yet he maneuvered his body inside with great ease. "Come," he said, and I followed him into the darkness, spiraling beneath the market with one hand on his shoulder and the other grasping at the damp, stone wall. "A little further," he said, as I listened to the sound of his footfalls and a steady dribble of water on rock. "A little further," he said, as I became lost in the circular motion of our descent, wondering if we were actually moving downward, deeper into the Earth, or just spinning blindly in a pitch black room. "A little further," he said, as we reached the final step, where a faint light from a gas lamp revealed the contours of a room cluttered with antique furniture, curtains and tarnished Judaica. "A little further," he said as he took up the lamp and led me to another room, and then another, unlocking door after door to reveal more rooms filled with books and scrolls and broken tablets made from rock. "A little further," he said, and the old Jew handed me the lantern as he stooped to lift the sheet from a cracked wooden desk that stood at an angle on two uneven legs. He opened a drawer that was so small, it could only fit the bit of cloth the old Jew pulled from it.

"Have a look," he said, as he unwrapped the cloth to reveal an indistinct diamond, half the size of my pinky nail. "Hold it," he said, as I took it from him and rolled it about in the tips of my fingers. "Let me show you in the light," he said, as he held the lamp near my hand. "Now sit," he said, before collapsing his weight onto a dusty couch. I sank down onto a chair that seemed to slide beneath me the moment I considered sitting.

"I will tell you nothing of the cut, color or clarity of this stone," said the Jew, "since it is apparent such information would be wasted on you." He took the diamond and set it down on a low table between us. "I will, however, tell you something of its history, as much as I know, for remember, a stone such as this exists for millions of years before human eyes ever set on it."

"My father," said the Jew, "first came into possession of this stone in Warsaw before the war. He bought it from a gentile who had a reputation as a gonif but who always dealt fairly in business, selling pieces for a fraction of their worth, so long as no one asked how he came to possess them. For many years, my father and the gonif did a good business together, and neither man ever felt cheated. One day, however, it was revealed that the gonif had raped and murdered a young girl who was about to be married. She was the daughter of a well-known poet in Minsk, and according to the papers, the gonif had cut off her finger with a length of wire to remove the ring from her hand.

"My father had bought this ring from the gonif the day before he learned of the murder. Needless to say, he was upset and burdened with terrible nightmares. Furthermore, he was frightened about what would happen to him, his family and all the other Jews of Warsaw if this gonif should confess from his cell to whom he sold his goods.

"Believing it was too dangerous to return the pieces to their rightful owners, my father decided instead that everything he still had from the gonif should be wrapped in a cloth and hurled into the Vistula as soon as possible.

"Now I was a young boy at the time, and to my mind, it made no sense that we should be throwing away such valuable merchandise. Why not melt it down or bury it until the people forget, I asked. But my father wouldn't hear of it. He wrapped the gonif's jewels in a cloth and handed it to me with strict orders to throw it in the river. What would be the harm, I thought, if I pry this one stone from the ring and keep it in my pocket? Everything else I threw away, but this one stone, far from the most valuable in the cloth, was the only one that I kept."

Here the Jew stopped for a moment and picked up the diamond from the table. He looked at it in quiet contemplation, scratched his beard and continued with his tale.

"I was staying with family friends in the countryside at the time the Germans invaded. My father's shop was taken from him, and he was killed along with my mother and two sisters. The family I lived with smuggled me to Cyprus, and from there, I moved to Israel where I began a new life. I lived on a kibbutz where we grew watermelons, and I fell in love with a beautiful Sabra named Shoshanna. She had been a teacher to the refugees, had taught us Hebrew, and it wasn't long before she told me that she was pregnant with my child. One day, I left the fields to see if I could buy her a ring in which I could place this stone which I had kept with me since that day at the river. And after having it set, I returned home to discover that while I was gone, the Arabs had killed everyone in my kibbutz including my Shoshana and our unborn child. If I hadn't gone to buy the ring in which to place this stone, then I too would have been amongst the dead."

The Jew paused again and looked down at the diamond as if seeking some hint as to how he should go on. Perhaps this was not a story he had told before.

"To survive, I was forced to take a job in Ramat Gan working for a jeweler, a survivor of Auschwitz, who had competed with my father when they were living in Poland. He was a terrible man who had always despised my family, and for years, he worked me like a slave, paying me a pittance of what I deserved, until one day I agreed to marry his daughter. She was a meeskheit shrew of a girl, but she came with a dowry, which we used to move to America and open a pawn shop in the Bronx. For our engagement, I gave her the ring I had meant for my Shoshanna.

"It was the 1950's then, and my wife and I worked hard to establish ourselves in this strange, new land. We had a beautiful daughter, whom I cared for at the store while my wife worked as a nurse at the local hospital. She became interested in politics, spending time with young artists and revolutionaries, arguing for radical action on behalf of the common man. She became enamored with free love, drugs and jazz music. One day, she told me that what I did in the pawnshop was an evil business and that she had no choice but to leave me for a Nicaraguan communist named Carlos. She and Carlos would send our daughter and me postcards from South America, with pictures of them in the jungle with rifles slung over their shoulders. Years later, we received a package with some of her belongings: her fatigues, some letters from our daughter and the ring that carried this stone."

The Jew became excited. He stood up and paced about the room as he continued his tale.

"In '68, the pawnshop burned to the ground when the schwartzes decided to riot. My daughter and I moved to Los Angeles, where I started my life over for a third time. I married again, this time a woman whose father was a rabbi. I had never before been a religious man, but the rabbi convinced me to study Talmud and Torah. He convinced me to live in the old ways, to keep kosher and observe the Sabbath.

"My wife and I opened a shop downtown in the jewelry district and had a son who was diagnosed with Tay Sachs disease. For years, we struggled to care for him and eventually sold the store to cover the costs of his medical expenses. He lived to be 12 years before he finally succumbed.

"Afterwards, I used this stone and some others as collateral on a loan to open the kiosk here at the Farmer's Market. My wife and I have worked here for the last twenty years. Business has never been particularly good, and we never did have another child. Eventually, though, we did pay off our debts, and I was able to get back this fakatka stone."

His story was finished, and he looked up to see if I approved.

"What do you want for it?" I asked.

"What do you have?"

I told him I had four hundred dollars to my name. He said he'd take it.

I told him I also needed a ring and asked if he could throw one in for free. He said he couldn't, so I offered him my watch in exchange. He looked at it closely.

"This watch is broken," he said.

"It is," I said. "You'll notice the hour hand points west of the 12 even at five past. It was that way when my father gave it to me. It had been given to him as a gift, but he didn't want it, so he offered it to me instead. He took it out of his pocket, and said, 'You want this?' I was 20 at the time, home from college for winter break. 'Sure,' I said. Words seldom passed between my father and me, and those were the last we ever exchanged. After giving me this watch, he walked out the door and never came back."

The Jew took an interest in my story. He sat back down and fixed his gaze on the watch as I continued.

"After he left us, my family's debts were more than we could handle, so I dropped out of school to take a job for which I was paid by the hour. I remember being late my first day on account of this broken watch, but after a while, I learned its idiosyncratic way of keeping time. I learned to stare at this watch and count the hours I had worked and the money I had earned. And in between the hours I had worked, I dreamt of a brighter future. I had big dreams. Enormous dreams I planned to fulfill as soon as I got my family out of the mess my father left us."

I took the watch from the Jew and rubbed it in my fingers, hoping that it could give me some clue how to continue the story I had begun.

"As the years went by, I realized that my debts weren't getting any smaller - but my dreams were. In fact, they were becoming mundane. Whereas I used to dream of a house in the hills, now I dreamt of having enough money to cover the rent. Whereas I used to dream of falling in love, now I dreamt of getting laid in a brothel. My dreams became embarrassing to me."

The Jew's face showed a great pain in hearing me say this, but he urged me to continue nonetheless. I put the watch down and leaned forward in my chair.

"I didn't have any Holocausts. No great tragedies. No illnesses or accidents. I never lost anyone special because I never got close enough to anyone for it to warrant tears when they died. The broken pieces of my life have been parceled out in broken hours for wages that never covered their worth. Some months ago, after knocking up a girl I never liked and hearing that she was going to have the baby, I realized that those parcels were spent and not invested, and there would be no interest returned."

I paused to think of how I'd end my story and bring it back to the watch. After all, I needed to convince the Jew that the thing held value.

"My old man gave me this watch not as a father gives a gift to his son, but as a poker player sheds his cards to make way for a better hand. And yet I've worn it all these years and lived by its time. And that's my story."

"I'll take it," said the Jew.

It was around five by the time I got home, which only gave me an hour to type up a suicide note before IR#9.5 came back from work. I deleted several drafts before coming up with something I liked. Here's what I wrote:

Dear IR#9.5-

Will you marry me?

-Fish

I printed it out and stuffed it in an envelope along with the ring that held the Jew's stone. I attached the envelope to my sweater with a large safety pin. Lacking a rope or the means to buy one, I was forced to use an extension chord to accomplish the grim task of a death by hanging. Though an aesthetically displeasing instrument, the extension chord does contain a certain umbilical reference to the information age which seemed apropos of my failed career as a writer / actor of electronic media. In order to find out how to tie a noose, I had to turn on my computer and look it up online. First, however, I checked my email.

There was nothing in my inbox other than a forward from Arty that showed a clip of an amateur stripper falling head first off a pole. I checked my myspace account as well and took comfort in the fact that I'd never have to answer another email. Then I googled and discovered there are a variety of knots that fall under the category of "noose." There is the simple noose, the strangle snare, the gallows knot, also known as the scaffold knot, the hangman's knot and several others. I decided to go with the hangman's knot more for its look then its effectiveness. Wikipedia recommends six to eight coils for a good hanging though I didn't have enough slack to do more than four. Per their instructions, I used Vaseline to lubricate the chord so that it would tighten smoothly and cut off my breathing from the instant I fell. It was probably around 5:30 by then, which gave me half an hour before IR#9.5 would return home.

Allotting time for the ten minutes it would take to die by strangulation, I decided to spend one last fifteen minute session engaged in the only activity that ever really brought any pleasure to my life since I first discovered it at the age of fourteen. I dug my favorite video out of the closet, cued it up to a fantastic menage-a-trois scene and rubbed out my final load. I must have been in a rush when I finally took the chair from my desk, climbed up to the light fixture atop the living room and tied the chord to a bolt that seemed as if it would hold. With everything in place, I dispensed with ceremony, tightened the noose, and kicked away the chair in order to get the job done as quickly as possible.

Anyone who has ever lost a loved one to a suicide by hanging has probably wondered what a person thinks in those final moments as he hangs by the neck with his mortality being squeezed from his body. Having lived through it, I can tell you, it is not some childhood memory that flashes before your eyes, nor some last regret, nor even a white light beckoning in the distance. The only thought that went through my mind was the startled realization that I had forgotten to turn off the porno on my TV set after I was done rubbing one out. The very next thought was that I had left a jar of Vaseline on the ottoman and a note attached to my sweater that said nothing about suicide. Thus it occurred to me that whoever should find my dangling corpse would believe that I had died not by suicide, but by the incompetent commission of an attempt at autoerotic asphyxiation. Einstein himself, had he died in such a manner, would be remembered as the village idiot, and I had no intention of allowing my meager legacy to be overshadowed by such a disreputable act. Instead, in what I believed would be my final struggle on this Earth, I began to swing my legs violently toward the ottoman in an effort to kick the Vaseline across the room where no one would find it. Having accomplished this, I then set to work at swinging toward the television set in order to destroy it or at least turn it off so that no one would see the two women on its screen who were taking turns pleasuring a man dressed in the black robes of a judge. Inevitably, my legs were too short, and the swinging pendulum of my body couldn't reach the set. I swung harder and harder, pushing against the ceiling with my hands in order to lengthen the chord, an act which had the correlating effect of tightening the noose and thus bringing me closer to an ignoble death.

By the time IR#9.5 entered the apartment, I was whirling around the living room like a rhesus monkey, becoming more and more light headed as my toe finally grazed the glass on the screen. She screamed, of course, not knowing what she was screaming at, but recognizing that she was a witness to the uncanny in all of its emotional, spiritual and metaphysical terror. The last thing I remember was the failure of the ceiling bolt which allowed my body to careen forth into our home entertainment system, knocking the television, stereo and VCR to the ground as I collapsed unconscious in a heap of broken components.

When I awoke, I was engaged.

Filth

Intimate Relationship #9.5 is pregnant. She informed me of this while we were eating lunch at a diner in West Hollywood.

"We're due in February!"

"Wow," I said. "That's great."

"I can't wait to tell my parents!"

"I'm sure they'll be thrilled."

There I was talking to someone I'd known for years, someone I'd lived with and been in a relationship with for years, and I had never before seen this glassy-eyed look on her face. It was a look usually associated with young jihadis committed to blowing themselves up on a bus, or with malnourished Scientologists wandering Hollywood Boulevard offering free personality tests to baffled tourists. It was the look of someone who had taken faith in an entirely irrational belief: that these same parents, her parents, the mother who speaks about her daughter as if she were dead and the father who twice hired thugs to beat me, would suddenly rejoice upon hearing that their daughter was pregnant with my child. I understand that all parents, once they've reached that age, desire to be grandparents, but only insofar as their sons or daughters expect healthy and respectable offspring with a mate of whom they approve. Did IR#9.5 actually believe that her parents were going to forgive their grudge against me and accept me as one of their own just because one night their daughter and I were drunk enough to fuck but too drunk to remember our contraceptive responsibilities? How could she delude herself to such a horrible extent? And yet, judging by the tone of her voice and the gleefully stupid look on her face, IR#9.5 seemed to think that the phone call she would make to her parents would somehow go as it does in the movies or on television or in healthy families built around love, respect and understanding, instead of fear, prejudice and other evangelical values.

"That's wonderful!" her mother would say. "Oh, sweetheart, I'm so happy. Let me put your father on the phone. Honey, come quick, your daughter has news. Remember that Jew she brought to Thanksgiving last year? The one who showed up drunk and clogged the toilet? Who chewed with his mouth open, dropped his fork so he could peak under your niece's skirt and petted the dog in a suggestive manner? Who clearly had no money, no prospects for making money and no intention of ever having prospects for making money - yes, remember that virus your daughter introduced into our home in order to humiliate and get back at us for the wrongs we committed against her in her youth? Such wrongs as grounding her when she was 12 and got caught smoking with her friends? Or buying her a Volvo for her 16th birthday instead of the convertible she wanted? Our daughter, who has always despised us for raising her in the bosom of prosperity; for protecting her from poverty, disease and miscegenation; for showering her with love and affection even after she quit college to pursue a career on the stage - do whatever it is you want, my angel, my rosebud, Mommy and Daddy's little actress! We will always support you, dear, whatever career you choose, dear, even if it is clear to all and every that you lack the talent, the looks or the drive necessary for prospering in such a competitive field -- but come quick, honey, and pick up the phone! Our wonderful daughter, 37 years old now, an adult herself now, has made the very adult decision to enter the next stage of her very adult life. She has decided to eschew tradition, skip marriage, cut right to the chase, and to do so not with any of the nice boys from the club (who are no longer boys really, but men themselves now, with jobs and families and fortunes of their own now, with houses down the block - what houses! - I see them on their way to work, in their suits, a kiss for their wives as they descend their driveways, briefcases in tow, to provide wealth and security for their families, for their community, for the country they love) -- but our daughter has no interest in these young patriots and has instead decided to have her child, her firstborn, with that thing that floated here from the East, much like his shit floated onto my hall runner that fateful Thanksgiving Day. With that thing from New York our daughter has decided to couple and bear fruit. With that thing that shows none of the attributes of a human being other than his apparent ability to impregnate another human being, and not just any human being, mind you, but the very human being we hoped would bring meaning to our lives, who instead brings forth the mixed-blood child of a Jewish mongrel, polluting our line and forever sullying our family name. So pick up the phone, husband, and hear this wonderful news, straight from the mouth of the babe. Tell her how proud we are of her accomplishment. How grateful we are of this gift. How much we respect her choices, admire her decisions and look so forward to the miracle of this degenerate birth."

How else could her mother respond, and how could IR#9.5 imagine otherwise? Unless this was precisely the response she hoped for. Unless an angry and bitter response was the very aim of her carelessness -- or her very careful planning, for who's to say this pregnancy was truly the accident she claimed it to be? It certainly wasn't my idea to have a child, but convincing a 37 year old woman to have an abortion is no easy task. Especially IR#9.5, whom, I must admit, I had never seen looking so happy. Not even when we first met, before I had drained her of any hope and optimism, any feeling that the world was not the cruel and meaningless abyss that it so blatantly is - not even then had she ever glowed with the greasy luster she glowed with now, ordering herself a bacon burger, a waffle, a biscuit, a vanilla milkshake, a diet coke and a slice of pie. As if the reason for getting pregnant was to justify a guiltless eating binge, her face shining like that of a cultist-religious-zealot, enlightened by the seed that sat festering in her womb. You'd think she was pregnant with the child of God Himself and not the spawn of an unemployed writer living on the Hollywood skids.

"What about your career?" I asked, as she slurped the last clumps of her shake.

IR#9.5's favorite topic of conversation had always been her career. The woman had worked all of five days in the last ten years, and yet she could hold court for hours on the exhaustive research that went into every role. Roles that included the audience member with a question in an infomercial and a victim of strangulation on a cop show.

"I can still do voiceovers," she slurped. "And after the baby's born, I'll lose the weight and start auditioning again."

I didn't believe for a second that IR#9.5 wanted a baby. She just wanted to be pregnant. Wanted to see the mugs on her opponents as she strolled down Larchmont Boulevard in her maternity dress. "When are you due?" the competition would smile. And IR#9.5 could tell them. She could tell them when she was due, what method of childbirth she preferred and what names were being considered. And wasn't that what she really wanted? To make other women jealous? To create the illusion that she had found love? That she was worthy of love? That she was worthy of the attention she could never garner as an actress. That she could never garner from me. That she could never garner from her father, who found his other daughters more interesting, especially the middle one, who had developed perky little breasts at puberty, who may have been touched by the old man, one lonely night, in the bath, while her mother lay asleep in the next room. In their home, the accusations were echoed and denied for years. This Orange County Treasurer, friend of Oliver North, linked to missionary groups in oil-rich South American jungles, careful with his finances, careful in his council, careful in his testimony before Congress -- but careless one night with an eleven year old girl. So careless, in fact, that, years later, bribes would have to be paid to prevent her leaking it to the press, as she threatened, even though her mother never believed the scheming bitch was telling the truth!

And what effect did this have on IR#9.5, the youngest daughter, who normally would have benefited from the full range of her father's affections, but instead, due to the man's shame, he could never dote on her the way a father wants to dote on his youngest and most precious child? Compelled by these accusations, true or not, to deny, to ignore, to neglect his baby daughter. To turn away and re-enter the house every time she sunbathed by the pool, so that IR#9.5 became ashamed of her body and thought her body abhorrent to men. So that she began vomiting up her meals at the age of thirteen in order to have a body worthy of Daddy's attention, or so the shrinks would argue when her parents carried her 80-pound skeleton to that recovery center in Ojai. He never attended her swim meets, dance recitals or gymnastics tournaments. And then, even when she was older and he too feeble to ever accomplish anything untoward, he walked out again, this time from that production of Equus at Chapman University.

How many times had IR#9.5 regaled me with that story? How proud she was of landing a lead role only to have her father storm out on opening night, during the climax, when IR#9.5, in all her undergraduate glory, stripped down and simulated the sexual act, surrounded by theater studies majors costumed as horses, while the real horse, the ultimate observer for whom this false tragedy was being played -- this Murder of Gonzago played to a Claudius who'd pour poison into his own ear rather than confront the sight of his naked daughter -- fled the theater rather than see his daughter exposed in the name of an art he never understood, or understood all too well to have exploitation as its purpose and not some deeper, creative revelation.

What difference did it make to IR#9.5 what happened to her older sister? "I am my own person," she must have thought. "A living, breathing being who needs love and attention from my father." What a perfect disaster for the self-esteem! All the stunts she pulled growing up: the fake suicide note, the photos left on the kitchen counter, the panties stuffed into the cushions of Daddy's chair. But she never received from him the attention she wanted. Never received the response she was looking for. And what response might that have been? Your Honor, can you only imagine? (I know I can. I can imagine it in great detail!)

So of course, after college, when IR#9.5 began attending the cattle calls advertised in Backstage West, she was inevitably viewed by casting directors as trying too hard, desperate for validation, never learning that the art resides in playing the scene without forcing your ambitions past the footlights. She had chosen a profession that guaranteed her the continuing diet of rejection she had known since birth. Whatever youth, innocence and naïveté she possessed was gradually displaced by all of the anger, bitterness and frustration that goes along with years upon years of struggling to book that tampon commercial or that role as an understudy in a play no one wants to see. It was a giant disappointment of a life oozing across Silverlake like the rancid water from an overstuffed toilet. And how was she going to mop it up? What was IR#9.5's grand plan to clean up the mess that was her life?

"Why aren't you more excited that I'm pregnant?" she asked, as I drove her back to the office where she worked as a temp. A 37 year old temp.

"We can't have a baby," I stated. "We're three months behind on the rent. How could we possibly afford a baby?"

"We'll make it work," she smiled. "You'll just have to find a job of some kind. Something that provides health care and a steady salary."

"Is that all?" I asked. "I just have to throw away every plan I had for my life?"

"Would you prefer I stuck a wire hanger up my cunt?"

"Wouldn't be the first time."

"That was different," she said. "I was young and still had a future."

"And he was black."

"That had nothing to do with it."

"Babies aren't easy," I told her. "They need to be fed. Every day. Sometimes more than once. They need toys and clothes and care. They require a level of emotional support that, quite frankly, isn't your cause celebre."

"You think I'm incapable of being a mother?"

"I think a child should be brought into a family based on love and sound economic principles."

"You're saying you don't love me?"

"Have I ever said otherwise?"

"I'm having this child," she replied. "I don't care what you, my parents, my doctor or anyone else has to say about it. I am having this child."

Intimate Relationship #9.5 and I first met when I was living with Mitzi (Intimate Relationship #9.0), a woman I would have been happy to marry and have children with. Mitzi had class, long, silky blonde hair and a lanky frame, stretched and sculpted five days a week by the most expensive Pilates instructor in town. She was a European-born descendant of Swiss nobility who owned a high rise apartment in Westwood and ran her own business out of an office in Century City. In three years of dating, I never once saw her pussy unwaxed. Sure, she had Daddy issues of her own -- they all do -- but the woman stood to inherit millions from her old man, and I looked forward to a life of easy luxury and bourgeois ennui.

And Mitzi's parents actually liked me. At least they seemed to. They always had a kind word on the phone, and on holidays, they'd invite us to London, where we'd sit around the fireplace in their Kensington home, laughing over a pricey vintage as we discussed art, literature and international affairs. Maybe they were just amiable people, appreciative of my narrative gifts and my Ivy League charm, or maybe they were compensating for the guilt they felt over the role Mitzi's grandfather played in Switzerland during the war. "We have done everything we can to return assets to the rightful beneficiaries when it can be proven that they are the heirs to the deceaseds' accounts." And in more private circles, "In fact, my daughter is even marrying a Jew."

Only we never married. I offered her a ring but she wanted to wait. I fucked her every which way 'till Tuesday, in every position possible, using every variety of stimulant and erectile dysfunction medication on the market to increase my potency during our marathon sessions of unprotected lovemaking. But no matter how many times I hid her birth control pills or switched them with Claritin, the only thing my relentless intercourse engendered was a sexually transmitted disease that forced Mitzi into the gynecologist's office and left her hairless pussy stitched up like a Haitian baseball.

It was during this time that IR#9.5 happened on the scene after booking a bit part in a play I wrote that was being produced at the Hollywood Park Casino. Starting with the first rehearsal, she threw herself at me every chance she could, never subtle, offering to suck me and fuck me wherever and whenever I wanted. "You don't even have to ask," she'd say. "Just grab your cock and stick it in me." I rebuffed her every advance without hesitation. It wasn't hard to do. Not when I had millions of dollars waiting for me at home. Not when I wasn't even remotely attracted to this psychopath and couldn't stand the way she ruined my play with her amateur hysterics on the stage.

But during this time, things were changing between Mitzi and me. 9.0 had grown suspicious since the surgery and obstinately un-sexual even after the stitches were removed.

"I just don't feel pretty," she'd say. "I don't feel ready to make love again."

"Then let me look at it," I'd plead. "Let me see how it's changed so I can become re-acquainted with your vagina. The fact that it's scarred won't make it unattractive to me. A scar is merely the memory of a battle won. A victory against death, disease and decay. This scar represents the mark of all the obstacles our love has overcome. Like the mark a child puts on a tree to see how much he's grown in the past year. Let me see that beautiful mark on your vagina. Let me make love to that beautiful, marked vagina."

"I can't," she'd plead, turning away from me in bed. "I need time. Please give me more time."

"And anal is definitely out of the question?"

Meanwhile, at work, IR#9.5 was laying it on thick, boasting to me about her miraculous sexual prowess, her affinity for the menage-a-trois and the way she loved to go to sleep with a hot flush of come in her mouth. What would be the harm, I wondered, in a quick blowjob at work if afterwards I returned home to the woman I truly loved? She'd never have to find out. And besides, wasn't it possible that Mitzi had cheated on me at some point? Did she really contract that STD before we met, or had there been an affair I didn't know about? Something other than stretching and sculpting going on five days a week with that Pilates instructor? How else to explain the mysterious appearance of this strange disease? (Actually, there is a likelier explanation which I'll get to in a moment).

The problem was it all looked so easy: a blowjob received in the wings of the theater, in the dark, where no one could see it and no evidence would remain. If IR#9.5 blabbed, I'd deny it. No one would take her word over mine. I was a playwright, for Chrissake, with a beautiful, intelligent girlfriend, and she was just some crazy actress looking to get ahead. It would be the perfect crime, and I, the master criminal, soon-to-be relieved of the sexless anxiety that had been building in my loins.

But what think tank, what wise men, what tribunal of learned minds would have predicted IR#9.5's blowjob to be a force of nature so spectacular that I would soon be sucked into her mouth like a wrong-footed dinosaur misstepping into the La Brea Tar Pits? Sweet gentleman of the jury, I tell you, this was no ordinary blowjob. If IR#9.5 applied half the craft to her acting that she applied to her cocksucking, she would no doubt be remembered as one of the all time legends of the silver screen. For what IR#9.5 accomplished in the wings of that theater, so far superior to anything she ever accomplished on the stage, rendered my reactive mind weak, my body limp, and my senses dull to all but the sound of ancient cherubs singing forth great visions of rusted spacecraft gliding over lilied fields atop the gentle vesper forged from a molten core of erupting Earth piercing the ether with lavic apocalypse burst through the marble of an incense laden hallway petaled with 72 dulcimer-strumming damsels dancing circles of crossing threads to weave silken tapestries depicting desert armies hacking pyramids with bloodied scimitars unleashing rivers of honeyed yogurt to overflow the chalice of an elixir sweet to my lips like the warm embrace of an opiate slumber wrapped in the blanket of a good God's grace.

She made a believer of me.

And all it took was 18 seconds. 18 seconds for IR#9.5 to turn a man of no faith into a firm-bellied acolyte to her Temple of Fellatio. 18 seconds to unzip my fly, confound my life then strut onto the stage and deliver her lines as if nothing had happened.

The next evening she serviced me in my car after I drove her home. Then it was the dressing room. Then the alley behind the theater. Then center stage one night after the house closed. Before long I was calling her in the middle of the day, meeting her in public parks, department store bathrooms, library stacks, peep show booths, slow-moving elevators and confessionals. Each time a miracle. Each time a religious experience as her mouth burned, her hands gripped, her tongue flicked -- she knew exactly how long to tease, to bob, to stroke, to suck, to finger my ass and massage my prostate until I came like a drunken monkey. She could drop a line of saliva with her eyes closed from a standing position and have it land squarely on the red, sore tip of my cock. Oh, IR#9.5 may not have been much of an actress, but she was an artist of oral such as my Swiss Miss could never compare. And with each successive blowjob, the vision of my life with Mitzi grew evermore faint: floating the Mediterranean in her daddy's Yacht, summers at the chalet, our multi-lingual children sent to the finest boarding schools in Switzerland... all of it vanishing in the wake of these mind-melting, knee-buckling, asshole-quivering blowjobs. It was a competition between a life and a sensation. On the one hand, Mitzi, a perfect wife, the promise of family and the realization of my economic ambitions. On the other hand, IR#9.5 -- the orgasm masquerading as salvation!

In the end, as often happens in situations such as these, fate would intervene, sort out the complications and reduce the argument to its inevitable consequence. It turned out I was not the master criminal I thought I was, for a true, master criminal would never have documented the crime on his camera phone for the purpose of showing it to Arty from Philly and the other drunks at his favorite bar. And he certainly would not have downloaded the footage onto his desktop and allowed it to be discovered by his girlfriend on the very day her doctor informed her that the surgery was not successful, and that the STD she had contracted would leave her barren and possibly cancerous unless her entire cervix was removed.

There would be one final fight between us, the evening that Mitzi, in a rare show of emotion, threw my belongings off the terrace of her Westwood Apartment, demanding that I tell her if IR#9.5 was the "slut" who gave us the disease that wrought such havoc on her body, but, in a strange twist of biological inequity, did almost nothing to damage mine. "Just tell me it was her," Mitzi insisted. "Just admit it to me, you bastard. You Goddamn Zionist bastard!"

I did not lie to my love. I could not, and I would not lie to her. I held her hands in mine, looked her in her tear-filled eyes, and I told my Mitzi the truth. I told her I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Intimate Relationship #9.5 (obviously borrowing "sexual relations" from a former leader of the free world who had defined the term in a way that rendered certain acts no more perverse than a hand shake). I told her IR#9.5 was NOT the cause of her genital defect (again, not a lie, for Mitzi had contracted the disease long before IR#9.5 and I first met, likely the consequence of an evening I spent with a junky under the 101 Freeway -- a confession for another trial, dear jury, but suffice it to say that I have needs as various as they are sordid). And despite my overwhelming honesty and my heartfelt plea that we stay together, my Swiss Princess, my Mitzi, the love of my life, declared that she was, indeed, finished with me and with America as well. In her view it was the whole country that had wronged her, ravished her, as we'd done in Vietnam and were about to do in the Middle East. Plundered her worth and left her a barren desert at war with herself and mankind. We forget that though there are immigrants who come to this country, dig a foundation and construct a new life, brick by brick, with the mortar of their sweat, there are also some who take a wrecking ball to everything they've built, raze the ruins and scatter ashes into the sea. Who return to their native lands to bequeath a bitter resentment of Americans to their children (adopted children as it will have to be in Mitzi's case), cursing the country that provided them for so long with protection from the truly evil empires of the world as opposed to the merely careless. And perhaps this is the true cause of modern, European anti-Semitism. Perhaps it has nothing to do with Israel's treatment of Palestinians or with the guilt felt over Europe's role in WWII. Perhaps it has only to do with the many venereal diseases Jewish men have passed on to previously neutral Swiss women, who, for a brief and vulnerable moment, found us charming and worthy of their trust.

I gathered my belongings from under Mitzi's terrace and drove them over to IR#9.5's Silverlake flat, thinking I'd crash there for the night and score a quick blow job before planning my next step in the morning. But once I told her I was no longer with Mitzi, my relationship with IR#9.5 was immediately changed and changed forever. No longer was I the non-reciprocating recipient of her oral virtuosity. No longer was I the brilliant young playwright who would cast her in all of his plays. Now, instead, I was a prisoner to her mania, expected to pay back in spades for her unrequited lavishings. In short, I was expected to fuck her, to eat her hairy pussy (you could lose your keys in the thing) and to suffer under the weight of her bouncing, flopping, thumping attempts at orgasm. In exchange for a place to stay, I would suffer constant reminders of the times I had rebuffed her and used her as a whore. But now I was the whore, commanded to put up with her never ending criticisms and embarrassing public outbursts. If only I could sell another play, I thought, I'd have enough money to move out and get my own place. But how could I be expected to write when IR#9.5 made it her daily work to reduce me to an empty husk of a man barely fit to hold even a kernel of the human spirit? The blowjobs had vanished, a tactic of seduction never to be repeated, all leading up to this final act of treachery wherein IR#9.5 would extract from me my sperm and use it to impregnate herself so that even the law, the full weight of the American legal system, would now serve to enforce her hegemony over my life.

A trap. A tar pit. A child.

"You think you're some fucking prize?" she asked when she returned home from work. "You think I want to be stuck with you and not Brad Pitt or Bill Gates or at least someone with a fucking job? Where the hell do you get off being pissed I'm having your baby? You should be so lucky I'm having your fucking baby!"

IR#9.5 went on to list for me all the reasons why I was fortunate to be linked with her, or with anyone, considering my profile as it had been compiled by Ana, IR#9.5's "spiritual therapist," a woman capable of reading palms and auras but not licensed to prescribe medicine in the state of California.

"Ana warned me you were a damaged person because of that bipolar bitch who raised you!" This was how IR#9.5 referred to my mother. "The hair-trigger temper and hour long tirades. The wild and unprovoked mood swings. The year long depressions that created your fear of abandonment."

"What fear of abandonment?" I asked. "Abandon me! Please! Take my unborn child and leave the TiVo."

"Ana says you mistake violence and hysteria for affection. That you're completely unable to love a woman in a normal emotional state."

"Like the state you're in now?"

"You drive me to this state," she screamed, knocking a bottle off the kitchen counter. "You do it the same way your mother goaded your father into beating her while you sat by like a pussy, helpless to stop the abuse but secretly desiring that he would kill her. Because that's what you really wanted, wasn't it? For Daddy to kill Mommy, thereby setting you free from the interminable warfare in your apartment. Free from the late night visits from police and social services. Free from trying to make that miserable cunt happy when you knew damn well she'd never be happy. She'd never be normal and nice like that Swiss anti-Semite you treated like shit. And don't even get me started on what Ana says about your father!"

"Why not?" I asked. "Who knew a fifty dollar Gypsy would hold the key to unlocking the enigma that was Abel Fischman?"

"Ana thinks you're ruined as a man because you're unable to live up to the role model your father provided. Even though you want to hate him, subconsciously you envy him because he was capable of smacking a woman when she needed to be smacked. Capable of cheating on his wife without the moral bellyaching that's the signature of your tribe. Fuck you and your Jew morality, Fish, telling me to kill my child so you don't have to feel guilty about being a shitty father! Did I ever ask you to feel guilty? Did I ever tell you to stick around? I absolve you of all responsibility, Fish. You have the permission that your morality requires. So go ahead and walk out on me like your father walked out on you. I bet you don't make it past the 110 freeway before that churning feeling in your gut brings you slithering back to my door. But give it a shot, Fish. Go ahead and abandon your woman and child. Try it on and see how it fits, you disgusting piece of shit!"

And so I tried. I threw on my coat, grabbed my laptop and drove to the bar to say good-bye to Arty. I was going to leave Los Angeles. Abandon the mess I'd made to start a new mess somewhere else, anywhere else, so long as I was no longer subject to the endless, screaming reproaches of that intolerable woman.

"As far as a full tank will take me," I told Arty.

"Do you even have a full tank?"

"Can you spot me a twenty?"

Arty sat on a stool staring at the barkeeper's ass. She was a perfect "one-hander," i.e. she had an ass so compact a man could scoop it up in one hand. They grow this kind of ass in LA. It occurred to me, I'd miss this kind of ass.

"She was supposed to be the chick who blew me during intermission," I said. "Not the mother of my child."

"Everyone settles," Arty belched. "Hell, I wanted to be the King of Sweden and fuck my way to Nirvana. Instead I'm married to a plumper, working 60 hours a week, lucky I get an hour a day in front of the internet to pull my pud and dream of better things." He took an angry swig of his drink. "But it could be worse," he alleged. "I could be back in Philly working in my old man's shop, waking up at four in the morning to freeze my ass off half the year." He admired what he saw as the barkeep bent over to pick up a crate. "Or I could be alone."

"I don't love her," I told Arty. "I don't even like her. And I think she'll be a terrible mother. I think the child would be damaged beyond repair from growing up in the toxicity of our home."

"And the way we grew up was so great?"

I admitted it wasn't. But I also pointed out that we didn't turn out to be happy, friendly people. "We became self-loathing, drunken misogynists, and as such, it is our obligation to the greater good that we refrain from reproduction."

But Arty wasn't listening. He was staring down into his scotch like a twelve your old peeking through a keyhole into his sister's bedroom. He paid the tab and threw an arm around my shoulders.

"Let me show you a trick," he said. "Hey barkeep! My friend here is having a baby!"

"Congratulations," said the one-hander. "This one's on the house!"

I went from bar to bar that night telling everyone who'd listen that my girl was knocked-up. I drank for free in no fewer than six establishments, hitting on one-handers into the wee hours before someone finally took mercy on my soul, called me a cab and sent me back to her lair.

IR#9.5 was asleep when I got home. I could see the outline of her body curled up beneath the duvet. I pulled away the covers and lifted her nightgown to get a better look. Her ass was enormous. You couldn't scoop it with one hand or even two. You'd need a shovel for that ass. You'd need a fucking snow plow. In my drunken state, I thought it would be a good idea to stick my dick in that enormous ass. I took some lube from the night table and greased her up with my fingers.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Editing my myspace page."

"I'm sleeping."

"So sleep," I said. "What do I care?"

"Get off me," she yelled, nearly breaking my finger as she rolled over on the bed.

"Then how 'bout a blow job?" I asked.

"At three in the morning?"

"Yes," I answered. "A blowjob at three in the morning!" I turned on the lamp at the side of the bed. "Is that such a horrible thing to ask?" She turned over and buried her face in the pillow. "I would even go so far as to say that three in the morning exists for the very purpose of blowjobs and suicides. And since I haven't the rope for the latter, I might as well settle for the former."

She cursed into the pillow.

"Why is it I'm worthy of being the father of your child but not worthy of a blowjob?"

"Fish," she said, turning fiercely in my direction, "I'm tired. It's late. And I'm in no mood for this now."

"Now?" I asked. "You're in no mood for it ever! You never want to blow me anymore. It disgusts you to even think of it. Years ago, you loved to have my cock in your mouth. You loved the way my body shook as I spewed hot come in your mouth..."

She covered her ears with her hands and screamed.

"Goddamn it!" I declared. "You owe me a blowjob. Even if you hate it, even if it makes you sick. Because as much as you hate my cock in your mouth, that's how much I hate the idea of your having my child!"

"Get off me!" she screamed, as I laid my bulk on top of her, preventing her from kneeing me in the balls.

"You want to get rough?" I asked. "Is that how you want it, you little brat."

"Fuck you, Fish," she shouted, her teeth clenched and her body twisting beneath me. "Fuck you, you piece of shit!"

"Is that how Daddy's little girl likes to play?"

"I'm not a little girl!" she insisted, in her little girl voice, angry and petulant, with a scowly little look on her face.

"Then why are you acting like a little girl?" I asked, pinning her wrists with one hand while I unleashed my cock with the other. "Why are you hurting Daddy's feelings like a bratty little girl?"

I poked my prick against her chin as she wiggled and flipped, fighting to get away.

"Daddy's hurting me," she said, tossing her head as I jabbed my cock into her lips.

"That's right Daddy's hurting you," I replied. "He's hurting you because his little girl has to learn she's a big girl now. She has to do some big girl things. And if she doesn't start doing some big girl things this very instant, then Daddy's going to smack the shit out of her until she opens her mouth and puts his cock-in-her-mother-fucking... OHHHHHHHHH MY LORD ALMIGHTY!"

I'm going to be a father.

Filth

J- was sitting at his desk, at home, struggling, typing a report for The Patent Office when he heard a knock on his door. Must be my elderly neighbor, he assumed. Asking me to carry his groceries up the stairs again. I'll have to talk to the building manager. Can't have these disturbances while I work.

But it was not J-'s elderly neighbor who had knocked, it was, instead, a deliveryman carrying a small, coffin-shaped box of insubstantial weight. According to the postmark, the package had been sent from a city in China, the name of which J- did not recognize and could not pronounce.

"Are you certain you have the right address," he asked, but after the deliveryman provided sufficient confirmation, J- accepted the package and carried it into his living room, where, upon further inspection, he discovered the following note attached to its corrugated cardboard:

Dear J-,
Hope you enjoy the gift. They're the next 'big' thing!
Sincerely,
A-

Well it's about time, J- thought, relieved that his generosity was finally being acknowledged.

A- had been a classmate of J-'s from their days at The Academy. A decade after their graduation, the two men became re-acquainted at a reunion where A- approached J- and requested of him a certain favor. It was the type of favor that was strictly prohibited according to the bylaws of The Patent Office, but was, nonetheless, often performed in exchange for a small bribe. Though never by J-. Though well aware of the corruption quite common at The Patent Office (particularly among the poorly paid clerks whose prospects for promotion were in doubt), J- himself had never taken part in any illicit activities. In fact, he found it quite brazen of A- to ask such a favor, especially considering the sort of penalties he could have incurred should J- have turned him over to The Authorities.

But A- had always had a reputation for brazenness, both in his personal and in his professional life. It was his trademark. Something people admired about him. Brazenness was a quality J- liked to think he possessed as well though he never had an opportunity to express it. Instead, his reputation was for thoroughness and diligence, qualities that served him well and earned him his current position. Qualities that didn't make it easy for him to break the rules, though in the end, after much deliberation and for reasons which he did not at the time understand, J- did, eventually, grant the favor A- requested.

What J- did not do, however, having been a novice in matters of corruption, was ask for anything in return. Which isn't to say he didn't expect anything in return. Which isn't to say he didn't want anything in return. And in the coming year, when J- didn't receive so much as a phone call from A-, he began to suspect that he had made a grave mistake. He had made a moral compromise only to be taken advantage of by someone far more experienced in the world of duplicity. In retrospect, J- wished he had demanded compensation and negotiated a specific amount before doing the favor. Or just refused A- from the beginning. The whole fiasco bothered him even more when he heard rumors that A- was involved in an enormously lucrative enterprise while J- remained chained to his desk, working for the paltry salary of a clerk at The Patent Office.

After reading the note, J- ran it twice through his paper shredder in order to eliminate any trace of incriminating evidence. He jumbled the confetti in the trash and grabbed a knife from the kitchen drawer. He approached the strange, coffin-shaped box and thrust the blade into the corrugated cardboard.

"Dear God!" cried a voice from somewhere in the room.

J- jumped back and looked about his apartment searching for the source of this strange outburst. Must be my neighbor's television, he decided. He is hard of hearing and plays his set so loud.

Once more, J- stuck his knife into the package only to hear the same frightened voice scream out, "Please be careful!"

There was no mistaking it this time. Something in the box could speak!

Casting aside the knife, J- peeled open the cardboard box to reveal that inside, covered in packing foam, stood a pudgy little man no more than one-and-a-half feet tall wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches and gray slacks held high by suspenders. He was a living, breathing man, ugly and curious, like nothing J- had ever seen. He wore a horsehair wig hastily sewn to his scalp and a striped tie too wide to be in fashion. Beads of sweat had collected on the little man's brow. Flecks of Styrofoam clung to his beard. And though he appeared to be a middle-aged little man, beyond 50 perhaps, the tags attached to his wrist would suggest he was brand new.

"What kind of a shit gift is this," J- asked.

The little man cleared his throat, licked his palm, and wiped it over his mussy coiffure. He thrust his stubby, little paw into one inside pocket of his jacket, then into the other, from which he produced a small sheaf of papers. He unfolded the sheaf several times and kept unfolding it until the papers reached the size of a small booklet.

"I am, good Sir," and here the little man cleared his throat again, "hm, hm... obliged to hand you this upon delivery."

He extended the booklet to J-, who, upon receiving it, read out loud the following title:

Congratulations on the purchase of your new homunculus!

The pages thereafter, printed in several languages, contained warranty information and instructions for care and maintenance. It was, as far as J- could tell, an owner's manual of sorts. An owner's manual for an homunculus. For some sort of pet given to him as a gift. Only there was nothing cute about this pet. Nothing cute about an ugly little man in a suit.

J- wondered if the homunculus was truly meant as a gift and not as some sort of an insult instead. He remembered that A- and he were hardly friends at The Academy. That A- was older and born of a family with a long tradition at the school. An elitist who rarely stooped to speak to an upstart like J-, unless it was to mock him or impress his friends with his ability to "communicate with the people."

But that was years ago, J- reasoned, and A- would never be so foolish as to think that the status he held over me then would still apply. Not after the favor I granted him from my station at The Patent Office.

But as J- stared down at the homunculus, twitching, clearing his throat, and patting down his hair with a slickened palm, his hypos began to get the better of him. He couldn't help thinking that A- was gloating over him. That he had given him this gift in order to call J- an ugly little man in a suit, a suck-up, too timid to ask for money in return for a favor. That this offered gift was a most malicious display of arrogance if ever there was one. That it represented an attack on J- and the entire tradition of The Patent Office - an intolerable affront to all that was decent in human behavior!

The homunculus cleared his throat again prompting J- to backhand him with a ferocity that sent the little man flying across the room and crashing into a bookshelf. Hoping to catch A- before he left his office, J- dialed his number and demanded the receptionist put him through. While on hold for what seemed an eternity, he jotted down on a pad some of the many things he wished to say should his old acquaintance have the courage to take the call. And if he couldn't get him on the phone, J- was fully prepared to speak his mind on voice mail, or in a strongly worded email that A- would not soon forget.

"Isn't it great," A- asked, when he finally took the call. "These babies are gonna sell like hotcakes! I'm gonna mass produce the things, market 'em up the wazoo and, in two years time, there's going to be one in every home in The Land!"

"Mass produce them," J- asked. A-'s excitement unnerved J-, catching him completely off-guard and forcing him to wonder if his initial reaction might have been inappropriate. "Do you mean to tell me that..."

"One of our R&D guys came up with the idea about a year ago," A- interrupted. "Yours is the latest prototype. Top of the line. A real beaut if I don't say so myself."

J- was baffled. He still suspected that A- was getting one over on him, but he couldn't think of a way to prove it. "Do you mind telling me first what in God's name it is," J- asked. "I mean, what is its purpose? What is one supposed to do with the thing?"

"Personally," A- replied, "I have mine sing to me. Turns out the sonofabitch is a heck of a baritone!" From the pit of his belly erupted a loud and raucous laugh.

J-, however, was not laughing. He still found no humor in the situation. "Do you mean to tell me you've given me a slave," he asked.

"Oh no, no. Not at all," his old acquaintance protested, ending his laughter in order to take on a tone of seriousness that expressed his disdain for the institution of slavery, long gone from The Land, though it had existed some time ago. "It's got to be human to be a slave. And this thing is definitely not human. At least not according to the patent on its manufacturing process." So that was the favor, J- realized. That was why A- needed me to move those papers at The Patent Office. "Of course if you don't like it, I can always take it back," A- added in a manner that suggested not only that J- was an ingrate but also an accomplice in a crime. "I just thought I owed you something. After all, you did make it possible for me to..."

J- cut him off rather than be reminded explicitly of the mistake he had made a year ago. The whole business was making him sick. If A- was telling the truth about the homunculus, then J-'s favor had been a key component in its manufacture. His transgression had a consequence, embodied in the form of an ugly little man in a suit. A soon-to-be mass produced ugly little man in a suit.

"I didn't mean to offend you," J- offered in a bewildered state of contrition. "It is a lovely gift." Though one that made him nauseous to look at. "Do I have to... feed or clean up after it?"

A- told him that the homunculus could pretty much take care of itself.

"And does it... have a name," J- asked.

"I don't know," A- replied. "Maybe you should ask." The homunculus stood facing the bookshelf, browsing through titles, pretending to ignore the conversation J- was having on the phone. "It is made from the root of mandrake and the sperm of hanged man," A- explained. "They are born of an ancient tradition and reconfigured to exist in the modern age. Consider yourself lucky that you're one of the chosen few who can have one before everyone else."

It occurred to J- that his old acquaintance could very well have lost his mind. How else to explain this delusional behavior? How else to explain why a person would invest what must have been millions of his own and other people's dollars in the hope that the general public would want to buy what was essentially a middle-aged midget? It occurred to J- that perhaps A- was no more malicious than he was brazen. Perhaps he was merely a misguided entrepreneur who had gone insane.

The two acquaintances made a non-formal, non-committal commitment to have lunch sometime in the near but not too-near future. They hung up their respective phones, A- so that he could get home to his wife and children, and J- so that he could return to his desk and finish typing his report. There was, however, the matter of dealing with the one-and-a-half foot man standing in J-'s living room. He walked to the bookshelf and asked the homunculus if he had a name.

"My name," answered the little man, twitching and clearing his throat, "hm, hm... as in the one which was given to me at the factory, hm ... or the plant, I should say..."

"Please," interrupted J-. "Just tell me your name."

The little man smiled and tilted his head obsequiously to the side. "My name is Randolph," he announced, clicking his heels and lengthening his posture. "Randolph, the homunculus!" He bowed and swung his arm in a flourish, then looked up sheepishly for approval.

"And is Randolph your Christian name," J- asked, unimpressed by the performance.

"Oh good heavans!" replied Randolph, with a laugh followed by another clearing of the throat. "It is a name, which I assure you, hm, hm... is neither Christian, Semitic, Mohammedan nor of any other particular denomination. It is my entire name. It is what I am called, hm, hm... though I'd be more than willing to change it hm... if that is what you require."

The little man forced a chuckle, but seeing no approval from his owner, allowed his gaze to fall downward in what might have been the saddest expression of defeat J- had ever seen. But it was not an expression that elicited any sympathy from J-. It elicited nothing but more nausea and frustration. For J- had not asked for this little man. He had not asked for this gift. Nearly half an hour had passed since the deliveryman knocked, and in that time, J- had made no progress on his report, and his position at The Patent Office was not so secure that he could afford to waste time on some toy -- especially not one that served no purpose other than to remind him of a crime he committed a year ago for which he could still serve a stiff sentence if caught. Deciding he was better off before ever having laid eyes on the damned thing, J- returned the little man to his cardboard coffin, sealed it up with duct tape, and placed it on the uppermost shelf of his closet where he kept old laptops and other objects he had no use for but wouldn't, for whatever reason, simply throw in the trash.

******

Clerks in The Patent Office are each expected to hand in one detailed analysis report (DAR) at the end of each and every week. The DAR's are then graded by the managers on a scale of one to six, with a "one" representing a failing mark and a "six" meaning the report is virtually perfect. As explained in The Patent Office Handbook (POH), any clerk who hands in a DAR that receives a grade of one will be immediately terminated. An accumulation of twos, i.e. two in the same month, is also enough to force a clerk into early retirement. Even a steady diet of threes and fours provides no guarantee that a clerk will keep his job. Indeed, the only way that a clerk can feel at all secure in his or her employment at The Patent Office is to score fours and fives (F&F's) with consistency on his or her DAR's.

But scoring F&F's is no easy task. F&F's require discipline, determination, and an unwavering mind-set, the scope of which is beyond the nature of the great majority of the population. And as for a six - well, that is nearly impossible to attain! Any time a clerk can "six" is cause for celebration in the office, not to mention a bonus and a good deal of envy amongst his or her peers. And if a clerk can score "repeat sixes," i.e. three in a month, the clerk, according to the rules outlined in POH, is to be immediately promoted (upon review) to the rank of "manager." In fact, repeat sixes is the only way (with exceptions) to be promoted to the rank of manager, which is why The Patent Office is often called a meritocracy (of sorts), and why each year thousands of graduates from The Academy apply there for a job.

It is also the reason why there are so few managers employed by The Patent Office and why their positions are so enormously coveted. Not that anyone knows what they do. Even the clerks who work in close proximity to them have no idea what goes on behind the closed doors of the managers' chambers. They know only that the managers are well paid; that they can get things done without going through normal bureaucratic channels; that they are the keepers of a great many secrets; and that the ladies of The Public Sector are eager to bequeath to them the treasures of their loins.

What it takes to write repeat sixes, thereby gaining promotion to the rank of manager, is the ever-present topic of discussion amongst the clerks of The Patent Office. But the criteria for evaluation remains an enigma to them. Sure, the managers provide rudimentary instructions. They issue copies of past fives and sixes in order to serve as guidelines and set parameters for quality. But reading a six, or even studying one in depth, is little help when it comes to actually creating one yourself. Clerks often turn in what they think is their best work only to get back scores of three or four, which is enough to make them wonder if there really is a standardized system by which they are being evaluated, and not some sinister machine spitting out arbitrary numbers.

There is even a story that circulates the office concerning a pair of clerks who were having an affair and who promised each other one evening that whoever was promoted first would tell the other "the secret of the sixes." As the story goes, it was the woman who first achieved promotion, and, thereafter, when her mate asked her to divulge the answer to the riddle, he received instead an icy reply that it was strictly forbidden for her to tell him anything other than what was contained in The Patent Office Handbook. When the clerk pushed the issue and demanded that his mate keep her end of their bedroom bargain, the newly promoted manager informed him that she would sooner end their relationship than respond to what he was asking. Even when the clerk's anger approached the threat of violence, the manager would only add that up until the very moment of her promotion, she had had every intention of telling him the secret, but that the knowledge of the secret had changed her -- "had transformed her understanding" -- to the extant that it was no longer possible to tell him and, indeed, that it would never, ever happen.

In pursuit of repeat sixes, J-, like most of his fellow clerks, kept long hours at the office and carried his work home with him, spending weekends and holidays staring at the screen of his laptop. He regularly pulled all-nighters at his desk, washing down amphetamines with coffee to keep himself awake, and even when he did get to bed, he often tossed and turned worrying about whether he had taken the right course in his writing, or whether his forays along the roads of style were leading him astray. He worried about whether or not he could keep up with his overly competitive rivals in the office. He worried that age was getting to him, slowing him down and sapping the very strength he needed to remain afloat. If a clerk was going to get promoted to manager, he usually did so within his first seven years. J- had been at it for ten, and though he scored F&F's with consistency, he felt no closer to repeat sixes than he did when he first started. And there were personal concerns as well. Work prevented J- from having anything resembling a social life. If things kept up the way they were, J- worried he would remain a permanent bachelor, stuck to his desk and its never ending pile of reports. If only I had more talent, he often wished. Or savvy. Or a different perspective. Or maybe if I just put a little more effort into it. But alas, nothing seemed to work.

One night, as J- lay in bed thinking about the report he would hand in in the morning, he heard a strange tapping noise emanating from the closet in his living room. It was Randolph, no doubt, probably clearing his throat as was his annoying habit. J- had not had any dealings with the homunculus since the day, several months prior, when he had first received him in the cardboard coffin. He had surmised, however, that Randolph had escaped his packaging and enjoyed the run of the house when home alone. The evidence was subtle but clear. There were chicken bones in the trash that had been broken open with their marrow sucked out; books had been rearranged on the shelves; and, at night, J- often heard noises in the bathroom as the little man moved through the ritual of his toilet. Since his mind was so completely occupied by work, J- didn't worry much about the homunculus' presence. He thought of Randolph as a leaky faucet, a sore shoulder or just some other nuisance that needed to be dealt with at some infinitely later time. This particular night, however, J- could not leave well enough alone. The noise was keeping him awake, and this particular night, J- wanted his sleep.

He threw off his covers, stumbled into the living room, and approached the closet door. He could hear Randolph's breath, some mumbling, and more of that strange tapping noise. J- was about to knock when it occurred to him that this was his house and he was damned if he had to knock on his door to be polite to an uninvited homunculus. Instead, he decided to yank the door open and catch the homunculus unawares. But in that moment, when he finally did yank the door open, it was not only the homunculus but J- who was caught unawares. Unawares and completely unprepared for the shocking sight that lay before him. For the closet bore no resemblance to the room as last J- saw it, several months prior, when he first condemned the little man to its uppermost shelf. Since then, the closet had been entirely transformed into a scaled-down replica of J-'s cubicle at The Patent Office. Even the furniture matched. Only upon closer inspection did J- realize that the swivel chair had been crafted from stapled shoeboxes; that the desk was made from the cardboard coffin Randolph had arrived in; that the lamp was actually an old, carved-up boot holding a hemp oil candle that Randolph must have taken from the cupboard.

"My goodness," Randolph exclaimed, clutching his chest. He stood up from his chair and slipped his tweed jacket over his shirtsleeves. "Hm, hm... I wasn't expecting company."

There was an old forgotten laptop and an ink jet printer hooked up to an outlet. A pile of documents were arranged on a bookcase made from discarded wood -- documents that looked suspiciously similar to the reports J- wrote for The Patent Office.

"You have woken me," J- replied, still stunned at the scene spread out before him. "You have woken me with all of your throat clearing and mussing about."

"I beg your pardon," said the homunculus. "I guess it is something of a nervous tick I have, hm, hm... Some minor blunder at the factory, hm... or a faulty mandrake perhaps."

There was an edition of John Milton and a copy of The Secret Sharer atop the coffin. J- recognized them as his own.

"Just a little poetry and some Conrad," the homunculus offered as answer to a question that was implied but never asked. "I promise to return them to their, hm, hm... exact positions on your shelf when I'm finished with them."

J- had never considered what kind of existence the little man had been carving out for himself since being stuck in the closet. He had never considered what activities a homunculus might pursue to relieve himself the burden of time.

"What are you typing," J- asked, genuinely curious.

"Oh, nothing really," Randolph motioned to the laptop with a dismissive wave. "Just some... reports."

J- insisted on seeing these reports. He carried the laptop into the living room and browsed through the hard drive while Randolph lingered, hands in pockets, by the closet door. All through the evening, J- read the files one by one in the order they were written.

"I have them printed out," the homunculus interrupted at one point. "Though the ribbon is hm, hm... a bit weakened from overuse."

From what J- could gather, it appeared the homunculus had been writing a journal of sorts that combined commentary concerning what he was reading from J-'s book shelf; an account of the building of his office; theories on the process of his manufacture; analysis of his relationship to J-; and musings pertaining to the quality and nature of reality. There was nothing, as far as J- could tell, duplicitous in the text, and nothing about which J- needed to be alarmed. By all appearances, the writing seemed to be little more than the private thoughts of a miniature man who lived in a closet and passed his time wrestling with the anxiety of his own existence.

But the prose was exemplary. Extraordinary, in fact, though there seemed to be no progression in the skill: i.e. the homunculus wrote as well in his first report as he did in his last, which led J- to believe that there was something timeless about the little man. That he was not maturing. That he was manufactured with his skill innate, at exactly the age at which he appeared, and that he would get no older or wiser as the years wore on.

"You write rather well," J- admitted.

"Ach. Thank you," the homunculus demurred. "Just a little, hm, hm... hobby of mine." He went on to expound on his tastes in literature placing particular emphasis on his love for the diaries of Franz Kafka and the couplets of Alexander Pope. "To live within the, hm, hm... genius of his poetry is a treat beyond any other. I especially like his piece entitled, 'An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,' my favorite line being..."

"Randolph," J- interrupted after it had occurred to him that perhaps this gift from A- was not entirely useless. "Do you ever get bored living in the closet?"

"Well, I, hm, hm... try and keep myself occupied."

"Lonely?"

"I find comfort in my craft." The little man twitched and adjusted his wig.

"It seems a great waste that a talent such as yours should sit in a small, dark room and not be put to greater use."

The homunculus thanked his owner for the compliment.

"How would you like to do a little bit of work for me," J- asked. "Perhaps look over my reports?"

The homunculus put a hand to his heart indicating that he was flattered. "As you are my owner," he replied, "I am hm, hm... here to perform whatever task it is you wish of me. And if reading documents is how you prefer I spend my time, then I am hm, hm... in no position, hm... to refuse."

A further thought occurred to J-.

"Might you also be willing to write them?"

*****

For the sake of appearances, J- still went to the office every day. He still did some research and attended meetings so as not to raise suspicions. But with Randolph secretly taking over his writing, J-began to use his new, surplus time to experience what some might call life.

He began cautiously at first, taking longer lunches and leaving the office at six. Then he started taking breaks in the middle of the day just to see if he could get away with it. Eventually, he built up the courage to visit museums, browse through bookstores and attend matinees at his local theater. He took hikes and walks in the park. Laid out on the beach and read magazines in cafes. He even met his colleagues for drinks after work and flirted with the waitress at the office watering hole where he often bought the first round, a tradition anytime an analyst scored a six. And J- was scoring quite a few sixes since Randolph had begun writing his reports.

It didn't take long for the homunculus to exceed the level of mastery J- had worked for so many years to achieve. His first report scored a four, his next a five, and within a month, the little man had scored his first six. After scoring another six the following week, the office pool held odds at two-to-one that J- would finally earn his long-awaited promotion. Unfortunately, the week after, there was a slip in Randolph's execution. His DAR came back a five, meaning that he would have to start all over again in his attempt at repeat sixes.

But no matter. Everyone in the office was still betting on J-. His colleagues smiled at him in the hallways and deferred to him at meetings. The secretaries raised their skirts ever so slightly when he entered the elevator. One night he was even able to convince a female intern to join him for an aperitif back at his apartment. The evening seemed to be moving in a glorious direction until the young lady excused herself to go to the bathroom, where she immediately erupted into hysterics, screaming and crying after catching sight of a one-and-a-half foot man squatting over the toilet. J- spent the next hour struggling to convince the unfortunate girl that it was only her imagination playing tricks on her, but the night had been ruined, and the intern asked to be driven home.

With respect to their living situation, J-'s relationship with Randolph had grown more amiable than it was when they first met. The two got along like old roommates. They shared the paper in the morning, watched television together and talked sports. J- cooked breakfast for the little man and even built him a cot so he wouldn't have to sleep on the floor. The only tension in their relationship arose from Randolph's inability to score the repeat sixes necessary for J's promotion. Month after month, the same situation persisted: two straight weeks of sixes followed by a four or a five.

"Is there anything I could get you that would help," J- asked.

"Not at all," Randolph replied. "You have provided me, hm, hm... with everything I could possibly need."

"Then is it fatigue?"

"It could be," said Randolph, in a contemplative tone. "But I am certain hm, hm... this will be the month I pull it off!"

J- assumed it was just a matter of time, and until then, he could at least enjoy the bonuses and the envy of his colleagues. He could enjoy the time off and the relief from the pressures of having to write a report every week. He could enjoy his sleep! J- was well rested and healthy for the first time in as long as he could remember. His weight was stable. His skin was clear. He was also incredibly bored. After all, with Randolph doing all the work, J- had almost nothing to do but fill his days with empty chores and activities. It was as if his body was engaged in a pantomime while his mind remained stuck in the closet with Randolph. It was as if J-'s only "real" activity was the wait -- the wait for Randolph to score three sixes in a row. The wait for the promotion to come. The wait for his life to improve.

"I hope you weren't waiting long," J- asked as he took his seat at a booth near the kitchen. A- had called him that morning and asked if he'd like to have lunch. They agreed to meet at a quiet downtown bistro, where J- had every intention of picking up the check.

"Few minutes," grumbled his old acquaintance. He seemed less brazen than usual. His complexion pale. His manner more reserved.

J- inquired about A-'s family and a few of their old classmates from The Academy. Asked about his various business ventures and informed A- of his own recent success at The Patent Office. "Only a matter of time now until I'm a manager. Imagine the favors I'll be able to do for you then!"

Pleasantries aside, A- removed his glasses and leaned forward across the table. He lowered his voice and told J- there was an important matter they needed to discuss. "A matter of extreme urgency." He then apologized for not coming to him sooner and acknowledged that, in his negligence, he had forgotten that he had once sent J- an homunculus as a gift.

J- had hoped that the subject of the little man would not come up in their conversation. After all, if anyone were to find out that Randolph was writing J-'s reports, the repercussions could be most severe. The Patent Office dealt in some of the most important matters of national finance. If it was leaked that a homunculus from China was writing his DAR's and possibly undermining economic policy, J- could be arrested and even charged with treason.

"I assume," said A-, "that because I haven't heard from you, there hasn't been any trouble with yours."

J- looked down at his empty water glass and found himself overcome by a terrible thirst. "Trouble," he asked, as if the homunculus was the furthest thing from his mind. He tried to suck a last bit of liquid from a melting ice cube but found it failed to satisfy. "What do you mean by trouble?"

A- continued in hushed tones, out of keeping with the boisterous voice he usually employed. "It seems that some of the homunculi," he whispered, "despite our best efforts at making them benign... took advantage of certain opportunities to turn on their owners."

"Turn on them," J- asked, trying to appear only mildly interested, his throat parched from the thirst. "Mine has never, hm, hm... been out of the closet."

A- furrowed his eyebrows in disbelief. "You mean to tell me," he asked, "that you kept your homunculus in his original packing and never once let him out?"

J- nodded, his throat so incredibly dry, his lie so incredibly blatant, he could not actually give forth sound. He twisted in his chair, eyes searching for a waiter or an unattended glass of water from another table.

"But what does it eat," A- asked. "Where does it go to take a shit?"

J- shrugged. His lie was outrageous, insulting to his friend's intelligence, but he was sticking to it. And Goddamnit where was that waiter?

"Is it dead," A- asked. "No. It can't be," he answered his own question. "You'd smell it if it was dead."

A busboy appeared from the kitchen, and J- beckoned him over holding his glass in the air. The busboy filled the glass with ice water, and J- drank it down in several large gulps before asking the busboy to fill it again. Taking another long drink gave him the time needed to formulate more lies.

"I stored the homunculus in a cellar which I never use," J- elaborated once he had finished his drink. "If he is hm, hm... dead and rotting, I wouldn't smell him because I never go down there."

Obviously, there was no cellar in J-'s apartment, but there was also no way A- would know that unless he'd been there. Which he hadn't. And whereas A- clearly didn't believe J-'s lie, he was decent enough, or tactically proficient enough, to continue on as if he did.

"It is essential," A- warned, "that we know your homunculus is dead. That we get it out of your home and destroy it immediately before it does you any harm." A- glanced at his watch without reading it and motioned to the waiter that he wanted the check. "I have some time now. Let's take care of it before you're due back at the office."

J- pondered what his life would be like if he had to return to handing in F&F's. If he had to return to the mundane drudgery of a clerk with no hope of making manager. Ten years he had been at that office. Could he possibly survive another ten or twenty years without promotion? Without even the hope of promotion?

"I'm afraid," J- responded as A- received the check from the waiter, "that I am unable to return to my home at this time."

This was the first time J- had ever refused his old acquaintance, and it was apparent from the look on his old acquaintance's face that he was not accustomed to being refused. Indeed, A- paused for a moment, made certain that the waiter had moved on, then carefully placed the check down on the table. He leaned in close, bulky and strong, and spoke in a more assertive tone.

"When will you be able to return to your home," A- asked.</