Friday afternoon we rode the train to Manhattan. Case took us to a big building, no different on the outside from any other one. A directory on the wall listed a couple dozen tenants. ARABY STUDIOS was where we were going.
“I have an appointment with Mr. Goellnitz,” Case told a woman at a desk upstairs. The place smelled like paint over black mold. We sat in a waiting room like a doctor’s, except with different posters on the walls.
In one, a naked boy squatted on some rocks. A beautiful boy. Fine black hair all over his body. Eyes like lighthouses. Something about his chin and cheekbones turned my knees to hot jelly. Stayed with me when I shut my eyes.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Just some boy,” Case said.
“Does he work here?”
“No one works here.”
“Oh.”
Filming was about to start when I figured out why that boy on the rocks bothered me so much. I had thought only Case could get into my head so hard, make me feel so powerless, so willing to do absolutely anything.
A cinderblock room, dressed up like how Hollywood imagines the projects. Low ceilings and Snoop Dogg posters. Overflowing ashtrays. A pit bull dozing in a corner. A scared little white boy sitting on the couch.
“I’m sorry, Rico, you know I am. You gotta give me another chance.”
The dark scary drug dealer towers over him. Wearing a wife beater and a bicycle chain around his neck. A hard-on bobs inside his sweatpants. “That’s the last time I lose money on you, punk.”
The drug dealer grabs him by the neck, rubs his thumb along the boy’s lips, pushes his thumb into the warm wet mouth.
“Do it,” Goellnitz barked.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Say the fucking line.”
Silence.
“Or I’ll throw your ass out of here and neither one of you will get a dime.”
Case said “Come on, dude! Just say it.”
—and how could I disobey? How could I not do every little thing he asked me to do?
Porn was like cloudporting, like foster care. One more way they used you up.
One more weapon you could use against them.
I shut my eyes and made my face a snarl. Hissed out each word, one at a time, to make sure I’d only have to say it once
“That’s.” “Right.” “Bitch.” I spat on his back, hit him hard in the head. “Tell.” “Me.” “You.” “Like it.” Off camera, in the mirror, Case winked.
Where did it come from, the strength to say all that? To say all that, and do all the other things I never knew I could do? Case gave it to me. Case, and the cloud, which I could feel and see now even with my eyes open, even without thinking about it, sweet and clear as the smell of rain.
“Damn, dude,” Case said, while they switched to the next camera set-up. “You’re actually kind of a good actor with how you deliver those lines.” He was naked; he was fearless. I cowered on the couch, a towel covering as much of me as I could manage. What was it in Case that made him so certain nothing bad would happen to him? At first I chalked it up to white skin, but now I wasn’t sure it was so simple. His eyes were on the window. His mind was already elsewhere.
The showers were echoey, like TV high school locker rooms. We stood there, naked, side by side. I slapped Case’s ass, and when he didn’t respond I did it again, and when he didn’t respond I stood behind him and kissed the back of his neck. He didn’t say or do a thing. So I left the shower to go get dressed.
“Did I hurt you?” I hollered, when ten minutes had gone by and he was still standing under the water.
“What? No.”
“Oh.”
He wasn’t moving. Wasn’t soaping or lathering or rinsing.
“Is everything okay?” Making my voice warm, to hide how cold I suddenly felt.
“Yeah. It was just… intense. Sex usually isn’t. For me.”
His voice was weird and sad and not exactly nice. I sat on a bench and watched him get harder and harder to see as the steam built up.
“Would you mind heading up to the House ahead of me?” he said, finally. “I need some time to get my head together. I’ll square up things with the director and be there soon.”
“Waiting is cool.”
“No. It’s not. I need some alone time.”
“Alone time,” I smirked. “You’re a—”
“You need to get the hell back, Angel. Okay?”
Hearing the hardness in his voice, I wondered if there was a way to spontaneously stop being alive.
“I got your cash right here,” the director said, flapping an envelope at me.
“He’ll get it,” I said, knowing it was stupid. “My boyfriend.”
“You sure?”
I nodded.
“Here’s my business card. I hoped you might think about being in something of mine again sometime. Your friend’s only got a few more flicks in him. Twinks burn out fast. You, on the other hand—you’ve got something special. You could have a long career.”
“Thanks,” I said, nodding, furious, too tall, too retarded, too sensitive, hating myself the whole way down the elevator, and the whole walk to the subway, and the whole ride back to what passed for home.
When the train came above ground after 149th Street, I felt the old shudder as my cloud port clicked back into the municipal grid. Shame and anger made me brave, and I dove. I could see the car as data, saw transmissions to and from a couple dozen cell phones and tablets and biodevices, saw how the train’s forward momentum warped the information flowing in and out. Saw ten jagged blobs inside, my fellow cloudbounds. Reached out again, like I had with Case. Felt myself slip through one after another like a thread through ten needles. Tugged that thread the tiniest bit, and watched all ten bow their heads as one.
Friday night I stayed up ’til three in the morning, waiting for Case to come knocking. I played the Skull Man level on Mega Man 2 until I could beat it without getting hit by a single enemy. I dove into the cloud, hunted down maps, opened up whole secret worlds. I fell asleep like that, and woke up wet from fevered dreams of Case.
Saturday—still no sign of him.
Sunday morning I called Guerra’s cell phone, a strict no-no on the weekends.
“This better be an emergency, Sauro,” he said.
“Did you log Case out?”
“Case?”
“The white boy.”
“You call me up to bother me with your business deals? No, jackass, I didn’t log him out. I haven’t seen him. Thanks for reminding me, though. I’ll phone him in as missing on Monday morning.”
“You—”
But Guerra had gone.
First thing Monday, I rode the subway into Manhattan and walked into that office like I had as much right as anyone else to occupy any square meter of space in this universe. I worried I wouldn’t be able to, without Case. I didn’t know what this new thing coming awake inside me was, but I knew it made me strong. Enough.
The porn man gave me a hundred dollars, no strings attached. Said to keep him in mind, said he had some scripts that I could “transform from low-budget bullshit into something really special.”