BAX 2020 by Seth Abramson

Author:Seth Abramson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

LISA LOCASCIO

Byzantium

When we see him on Twin Peaks: The Return, he’s not much to look at. A half-stache the Tumblrs deride as “Cheeto pubes” dusts his upper lip. He’s acting hard, sweaty and jumpy. A middle-aged man reams him out for his terrible resume. He picks up his wife in a convertible. They laugh joyfully about the money she’s extracted from her mother, get high on coke. He draws her in for a long kiss, his hand on her neck. He’s spitting mad, ready to hit, pinning her against the couch. She shoots holes in a door, furious at his betrayal. He and his lover, a fellow redhead, hide down the hall. “I liked fucking you,” he tells her in the forest, and shoots himself in the head.

I don’t want him anymore, but it moves me to see him again, after all this time.

*

It was cold in Manhattan, where I had come to find him. I wore a wool coat zipped up beneath my chin, a silver infinity scarf, boots tipped with gold metal. Earlier, a woman had stopped me in front of a sex toy store in Soho to photograph me for her fashion blog. I held still for her on the cobbled street and then went inside, where in one breath I explained to an employee that I required an implement with which to penetrate myself because sex had become so infrequent that my body closed up shop between encounters, meaning that when it did happen the act was more painful than pleasurable. I needed a tool to keep the machinery shipshape should usage occur.

I had told this story to many people, many times over. It was beginning to feel a little stale, a party trick I did to make them see me.

“Let me get someone,” the employee said quickly when I stopped speaking. “I’m actually helping this lady right here.” A woman beside her I hadn’t noticed stared at me, mouth ajar.

I purchased a device and got on the 6 uptown. I didn’t live in New York anymore; I lived in Los Angeles, where I had spotted the actor on the street in my neighborhood at the base of the Hollywood Hills two or three times the previous year.

*

My husband and I had an evening ritual. We got high and watched TV. Doing this every night created a womblike interior in which we gelled together, accompanied by our favorite delivery dinners and treats I baked between entertainments. If he was in a loving mood, my husband arranged me so that I lay against his body and felt his warmth on my back. We watched so much television that we regularly exhausted every platform: Netflix, OnDemand, Prime, our DVR, cable, broadcast, and the DVD collection fed by my husband’s habit of walking down to Amoeba when he got bored. Content was consumed as soon as it appeared in the feed. One night in January 2014, the new movie was called Byzantium and had vampires. I love vampires.

The film concerns a mother-daughter vamp pair in Brighton, England.

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