"I already know that everything is fucked."

--Poet Christine Telfer

Here are the answers:

1. Undefined anger aimed at gentle softness.
2. Alone in an empty room, tears stream down your face.
3. Infinite desire to cry which, when satieted, offers no solace.
4. Just a hint of suicidal despair, drowned by the pretense of not screaming inside.
5. The desperate last phone call placed to your desire who won’t talk to you for more than one minute.

And the question is:

How do you define, as if to echo some half ass pop lyric, that hurting feeling?

That was the nagging question that annoyed Phip Shire like some rudely persistent bill collector. For Phip every pretty face concealed an aftermath of emotional ruin and interior scars.

It was also why Phip Shire hadn’t really intended to fall in…in…Hell, he couldn’t even say the hideous word. Yet Dart Reflet, whose name sounded like an awkward attempt at wordplay, had wondrous and sad soul scorching eyes. She even had a modest yet rising rep in the local Pittsburgh poetry scene. She was the kind of woman that Phip, into books and Woody Allen films, would define as "Hot". In fact, you could cast her as one of those quirky, cerebral women that Woody would run through those patented, and no doubt completely fictional, emotional highs and lows.

Dart’s exterior outline strongly suggested a thin Mary Stuart Masterston look. She also had a first rate mind, although it didn’t appear as if she was putting any effort into being smart, which kind of annoyed Phip, then again, as he would discover, she had also that concomitant high strung neurosis to match. Now, while most men wouldn’t find this particular combination of estrogen laced traits to be at all fatally attractive, Phip had been horribly imprinted and disfigured at 19 by a first, whatever, with those same traits. He thought it horrible because Phip himself was about 6’5", 280 and black. This was not unlike an elephant who wanted to mate with an attractive horse, where the relatively petite object of your affection would, in most cases, find your presence, let alone your advances, absolutely terrifying, thus trotting off amidst furious clouds of prairie dust and Crude Black Guy Stereotypes.

Yet to her credit, Dart didn’t immediately trot off. Why, it took Dart almost a whole month to fully reject him, which was quite amazing considering the distinct gracelessness of his pathetic excuse for a first move.

Phip first noticed Dart behind the counter of the local Book Sprawl on Rodi Road. She resonated with an unmistakeable aura of class. So Phip, a bookstore browsing junkie, lied and asked her where to find the science fiction—he probably knew as much about the whereabouts of books in that store as she did thanks to way too much isolation on his hands—just so he could talk to her. She was actually quite wonderful to talk to . He found out that she wrote poetry and even gave readings.

Phip who had been going down (literally, it was his favorite sex act.) on a steady diet of salacious and not so salacious whores for the last seven years of his life, realized Dart could give him something that you just couldn’t buy on the street: really good conversation with an intellectual equal, or superior, as Dart would no doubt point out if she ever read this story. In fact that was how Phip first fell in love with the Winona Ryder clone in college at college. It was all conversation. Some of it lasted for hours. He had never even touched her. She even offered to hug him once in his dorm, but he refused. He vividly remembers refusing her because of her fiance, race, campus politics and such, not to mention unresolved subconscious issues tangentially related to a fear of intimacy, somewhat. In most time travel stories he’s read the plot usually revolves around stopping Hitler or some Big Historical event. Phip would use time travel for the personally selfish rationale of setting his own personal history straight. First stop: Indiana University Dorm room, where he would at least complete that hug and try to make the only other person on Earth (aside from parents) who told him she loved him feel good.

So Phip began what might laughlingly be called The Seduction in order to rectify those past wrongs. He vowed that this woman would at least get the faint hint that he loved and cared about her. So he wrote her some really bad poetry, she immediately recognized it as bad (He apologized afterward) hastily threw in some better written stuff and added a note saying he’d like to spend some more time with her, along with his phone number. A huge fan of comics as well as an aspiring science fiction writer, Phip wrapped the note in issue two of Kingdom Come, sort of Superman vs. The Book of Revelations. He then went to the Book Sprawl and hand delivered it.

Astonishingly enough, she sort of took the bait and they started going out.

It all failed horribly enough though. It took her about a month to blow him off. Still, he was completely enamored of her in his own elephantine way. He even made her the lead in a science fiction story he was writing called "His Many Splendored Trish Letrefs". It was about a dumped guy who snagged his girl’s DNA and created slave like simulations of her in virtual reality.

Phip sensed a personal metaphor in all of this but he didn’t dwell on it.

He just wrote stuff.

Phip made Dart the transparent lead in the story because Dart hated Science Fiction. He was hoping her vanity would take over and she would at least try the genre if she was in it. No doubt another miscalculation on his part. But he had been reading the hot science fiction writers, McAuley, Egan, Sterling, and Stephenson. He wanted to match them for intensity and offer a deluge of information. He’d show them all how it was done.

His Many Splendored Tart Letrefs

By Phip Shire

 

 

Never one to confuse the true and the real, Fhip began fucking the black market Chinese Bot Dolls as soon as they oozed into the market around 2008.

What was true was that he didn’t think himself very attractive. Fhip kind of resembled black actor Forest Whitaker, who Fhip didn’t think was a very attractive man—and what was real is that even ugly men need to get laid. Sexual repression is what makes Jeffrey Dahmers of us all. Fhip never wanted to become the black rapist archetype. So he found substitutions.

Brought on-line in China, where the abortion of female fetuses created a shortage of snatch and a subsequent tide of angry young men, the cholls were manufactured as antidotes of a sort. Built with a light carbon frame, programmed with the organic survival imperatives of insects and the simulated movement of Porn Queens, the cholls proved to be very popular.

Full of inflatable parts, adjustable constriction apertures and AI dialogue available from Blade Runner to Annie Hall to the Best of Seka the Choll Bots gave Fhip and other losers every lewd physical desire that he could think of. But they couldn’t make him laugh, feel deeply, or cry.

One time he had inordinately reached out for real human affection while he was busy flunking out of Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 05’. He worked with a New Catholic Girl ("Better living through genetically designed sex inhibitors" screamed the Vatican’s Net Ads) named Christine Telfer. At the time he was making a name for himself on the Net as an incendiary and original stylist—he got a zillion hits from "Constitution Mars" and his impassioned argument for removing the Rifkin patent control over human/animal chimeras.

He was even making several hundred dollars a week in micropayments over the Net. Meanwhile, Telfer read his work and went about her gender defining role of emotional disruption. With her Mary Stuart Masterson look and slightly anorexic build, Telfer used a number of her evil insinuating tools: a constant and infectious radiant smile, sustained hypnotic eye contact, a pouty modelish cuteness, and something Fhip wasn’t used to: persistent kindness. Since she worked with him every day she wore Fhip, who almost reached a serial killer level of "loner", down to about nothing and Fhip decided that he would like it whenever she was around. He liked it so much that when she fluttered her eyes and asked him "Why are you so happy today?" he thought it over and decided to try something novel by telling the truth and saying "You make me happy."

But Fhip, that proverbial black outsider that Richard Wright used to focus his books around, who didn’t go his high school prom, and never really went out on a date during high school or college, simply didn’t understand how relationships between men and women worked. He ended up hurt. He watched her drift out of his life on the arms of better looking, richer and more emotionally rounded white men. He didn’t have cholls back then, but he did his best to drown his misery in Full Immersion Porn and resign himself to the fact that he wasn’t going to be good at certain things such as giving and receiving love from other human beings.

So he lived his Vulcan like life in Pittsburgh for many years, living with cholls and the full immersion porn. He avoided love. The only time he felt like dying was when he was in love.

Imagine his surprise when he even attempted a relationship with Tart Letref in 2012.

 

What was odd about their relationship—aside from the fact that they were both kind of odd—is that he didn’t know he cared about her until the relationship ended.

Or anyone else for that matter. His general rule of relationship intensity is that if you feel like crying all the time after she’s gone, well, it must have been something special. And after two days it definitely hurt. He felt like crying all the time. He wanted to call her up but he couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t quite pathetic.

Ten days after Dart had given him the equivalent of a Dear John Letter, he still hadn’t called her back to beg for her forgiveness, to beg to have some sort of small role in her life’s screenplay. He wondered if he was having some misgivings. After all, even though she resembled his first love physically, the similarities ended there. Obsession number one was a devout Catholic; Dart was more agnostic than Phip was. The first obsession was vivacious and full of life; Dart had openly and subtly hinted that suicide might be an appropriate way out. (Phip really didn’t know how to handle that one. As a black male he simply couldn’t grasp why an intelligent and attractive white woman would want to take her own life. What? Too much sex? Too many good job offers? He kept on thinking that if they had switched bodies she probably would have snuffed out her life at 14.) Finally, the first obsession had honestly cared about him; Dart, despite a few harmless come ons, at times seemed as if she could barely stand him.

Yep. Dart was no bed of roses he thought. Aside from having a stiff upper strata personal style that vaguely reminded him of Miss Jane Hathaway of Beverly Hillbillies fame, she had that unsightly counterweight that many intelligent people have: She was hopelessly neurotic. Higher IQ means a higher level of psychosis. Sure, Woody Allen is smart enough to write Annie Hall, and he’s also smart enough to eruditely rationalize fucking his wife’s stepdaughter. The proverbial twin edged sword. So, while he would miss her he wouldn’t necessarily miss her accusing him of trying to brainwash her by showing her science fiction books or miss her threatening to walk out of a movie theater because he tells a friend she’s the reason he’s watching "Lamerica" as opposed to "Lone Star".

Still, he had never spent so much time with a quality woman. God the conversation was good. She could talk about writers ("The reason so many of them turn to drink was because they constantly explore their own deep and disturbing emotions.") or journalism ("I think the reason I never pursued it is that I sort of thought I wouldn’t be writing about the kinds of things I’d like to write about anyway.") or she could rant on for days how overrated Jim Carroll was or recite Steely Dan lyrics over the phone from memory or try to defend Woody Allen’s indiscretions or she could appreciate a good John McLaughlin tune.

Phip certainly missed those aspects about her.

Furthermore, her few kisses had electrified him. Mechanical intercourse with whores—the worst of whom would implore him to "hurry up"--couldn’t match her soft darting kisses of tenderness.

Spontaneous, Phip remembered lifting her up in the air in the Monroeville parking lot. It made her laugh really hard. Then he let her body slide, slowly, down his six foot frame. Somewhat dizzy afterward, he held her in his arms. He was trying to be respectful and hadn’t really made any serious passes at her. Whores had sort of spoiled him anyway. He had never learned to read the sexual cues that women gave off, at least when you’re not directly putting money into their hands. But as he held her that night something inside him broke and he kissed her. She kissed him back, softly. It was wonderful. So wonderful that when he was alone in his room that night he almost stroked himself raw. Whenever Phip jacked off—which was once every five years for medical reasons—he tried never to think about Dart. He kind of liked her and thought that might be some kind of psychological violation if visions of her outstretched althletic thighs or hints of something wet oozing from her central oriface might flash across his sordid mind’s eye. But that night, his own personal Virtual Reality of dreams betrayed his intents and: he could see those long lovely legs spread, knees bent, with toes wiggling in a circular clockwise fashion. The only thing she wore were those cute little blue socks that she would traipse around her apartment in. Phip would begin fucking her with his stereotypically large black cock. Dart would collapse into a sick, orgasmic trance, with nothing but the whites of her eyes showing. Her releases covered Phip’s cock with a shiny sheen. Phip’s face was covered with her dried glazelike cum after eating her out for about 45 minutes or so (again, his favorite pasttime.) With one of her dainty hands stuffed down Phip’s mouth, so he could suck on it, her other hand reached around, squeezed his testicles and he began to relax. Then she would turn those knife like blue eyes to his and Phip would realize that he was hers… 

The Futile Romantic Try

He first saw her  while browsing the Sprawl O’ Books on Rodi Road. He noticed her through the dancing green holograms that were floating through the air (something about the release of the "Last Dangerous Visions" anthology set to ambient music, jabbed with site addresses), and found that she bore a resemblance to the girl he knew before. Slowly, after work on his modestly successful site, The Sex and Violence Show, he would travel to the store, hang around and ask for the whereabouts of holonovels or DVD dramas that he already knew the location of.

Just like that other girl, Fhip found her enchanting. Beautiful piercing blue eyes had she.

Fhip discovered that Tart had her own website called "Bad Attitude" which featured her decent yet unspectacular poetry, graced with heavily photoshopped photos of herself--which were quite spectacular. He imagined her ratings eclipsed his by thrice, but she hadn’t quite figured out a way to exploit the cash stream, thus the book clerk job.

He began what might be laughingly called "The Seduction" by writing some bad poetry, handing her a 10 gig postage stamp Iomega Hard Drive that featured his best reviews and criticism, and even giving her a copy of his stalled attempt at science fiction called:

Life Story as Science Fiction Metaphor

By Fhip Shire

Born in the info brothels of the Pittsburgh South Side, Pif hires tried his best to live his lives. His was the photon networked life of the warring Catholic Jihad Memes, the airborne propaganda aural worms, self replicating hermaphrodite sex clones, and where Identity meant being several people with several different sexes on the net all the time, Yet: Pif Hires wondered aloud here in 2049: How do you stop that hurting feeling? If the quadsexual Telf Chris Group Mind rejects your love, then what meaning does life have?

 

And so on.

Astonishly enough, she took the bait and they started going out.

Fhip tried his best to love Tart. He took her to all the usual places: evenings at the Monroeville IMAX theaters, 51^st South Californian Thai Dinners on top of the U.S. Steel building, virtual walks through the Cydonia ruins on Mars, but it just wasn’t enough. One time on Mars, he threw a batch of endorphin roses at her. It made her smile. Still, he wasn’t sure when to hold her hand. He simply couldn’t read her particular estrogen laced traits. Or "No chemistry" as she would say.

Plus he didn’t have that much money. He lived in a dismal efficiency where had to keep and occasionally hide, his sleazy Juliette Lewis Choll, who he kept permanently programmed as the adolescent in Cape Fear.

Tart, for her part, tried her best. Like most women, she understood relationships and their ebbs and flows much better than most men and light years beyond Fhip. She knew that by the second date it was over. But she didn’t want to hurt him too badly and she knew that she could. So she had invited him over to her apartment, near New Carnegie Pitt University, and gave him an opportunity to make a pass or two. Fhip failed miserably.

Tired, bored and even somewhat frustrated by Fhip’s ineffectiveness, she told him they "needed to have a talk". She told him it wasn’t working. She was unmoved by his breaking down into tears and firmly told him to "Go. And please don’t call." She was a little nervous when she told him to take a hike because Fhip was over six feet tall. Perhaps that’s why when he hugged her goodbye for the very last time she didn’t notice the tiny hollow micro needle he pricked her arm with. Fhip vowed she would notice the results of the blood he drew.

 

 

 

The Many Splendored Tart

Time compression, blimp spy cams, and instantaneous genetic reads were all the rage in 2012. The Future Shock that Heidi and Alvin once wrote about finally materialized at the millenium’s edge after President Lani Guinier released the alien artifacts and the Indian Deductive logic software found its way on the nets, spurring everything from successful Turing test conversations to picking the right meal. When that happened in 2007, it accelerated human knowledge by about 100 years. In some fields, such as aerospace materials science, more like centuries. In other fields, such as gene crunching, because of Alien Gray nantech assemblers, millenia.

Fhip was primarily interested in one breakthrough: Genetic Forecasting. Tech acceleration of the present could solve the problems of the past Fhip believed. Worried about old age? Hyped up antioxidants might be the solution. And the virtual world offered virtual immortality, where hours could be stretched into days (it was based on the way neural synapses function during dreams). And Fhip’s personal fave: Worried about your true love dumping you? After Tart’s few electrifying kisses, he didn’t want to immediately return to mechanical choll sex. Well, if an enterprising person combined Genecast@, Realavirt@, LiveAvator@ and Compusim@ you could get the virtual girl of your dreams.

As it turned out, Fhip just happened to be an enterprising person. He was able to steal her DNA with his micro needle. He used the aforementioned software to build a virtual Tart. It took time but everybody had the time thanks to Timepress@ "Turn your Days Into Years", or so the ads say—it worked by transferring the time distortion of dreams to the Net. Tart was reborn, with the same brown hair, lucid blue eyes, same wild mood swings, love of poetry, even experiences and memories—the subconcious memory which registers everything.

Memories were the best. Thanks to search engines and the Softmind@ ability to decrypt human memories, he sort of had a VCR recording of Tart’s life. He switched on reverse and found out that Tart first got laid at 14. He even found out that she had an incestuous affair with her older brother, which shattered him and forced him into an alcoholic, psychedelic drug binge. No wonder Tart always looked vaguely guilty. But she had lots of normal relationships, although she lied about the nonsexual status of the affair she had with the professor: To the contrary Fhip thought, that was a very consummated relationship.

You could even do some reprogramming. What’s the harm, she was only bits…He wasn’t sure what the Sentient Meme Civil Liberties Union would think and frankly he didn’t care. Its his computer generated person. He decided to imprint Tart on himself by planting memories (Compusim@) of extremely sexual relationships with people who looked vaguely like him.

Not only that, he programmed her endorphins to churn and overflow whenever she saw him. For virtual Tart, time with Fhip would be as intoxicating as crack, literally. Tart would have to get her fix.

He scattered his many-splendored Tart Letrefs across both his personal nets and throughout cyberspace. Fhip even modified some of them: Some Tarts had a bigger set of tits and broader sense of humor thanks to Recode@. He had many choices of where to seduce her: The Bill Gates Global Empire Site or the Authentic Neal Stephenson Metaverse. The "Seduction" usually began by Fhip calling to Tart through the virtual crowds--- filled with people or the representations of people (cartoon mice, walking slogans, indecipherable glyphs, a thousand Cruises, a thousand Monroes—some actual women—glowing mist, etc.) ranging in size to a few centimeters tall to 100 meter giants who glided over the cyberspace metropolis, dotted with Bladerunner blimps blinking modified banner ads.

He would say "Hello" and she would subsequently fall to her knees.

Then, Tart would beg for his attention and company, which he would sometimes grant like a medieval King throwing fresh bread to the starving peasants. Sometimes, Fhip would reject her—which he did often for the sheer masochistic thrill of it all—and reduce her to a shuddering heap—literally. He sort of programmed her that way.

Only Fhip’s kiss could awaken her. Otherwise, she would just kind of lay there in a groveling shivering heap and slowly fade away. Initially, it made Fhip feel like a real man.

Perversely enough, Fhip grew tired of all those easy submissive Tarts. He soon began to develop a taste for the few Dominatrix Tarts that he had programmed. He would always have to call her at some number (Even virtual beings had phone numbers and places they hung out.) whose last four digits always spelled Hell. First, she would put him on a strict time limit. She would then tease him incessantly with that sexy cerebral Tart voice of hers. Tell him all about her new boyfriends and ask, in a wicked tone resonant with both pity and condescension, what could you possibly want with me now that I’m involved with someone else—asked in such a way that suggested just a hint of her girly scornful laughter, sung as a chorus.

Fhip loved it.

Then, because he programmed the Tart Dominatrix with mercy, she’d invite him to some immersive place that he hated, like, "Lame Fifth Avenue Poetry Readings" (Yes, Lame is a registered part of the URL). Then, after one of her very solemn readings featuring the most sullen of pastoral imagery, she would invite him to a cramped confusing room in Escherville—"Where up is Down" as the ads say—where she ordered him to do things to her involving the collisions of his tongue and her enhanced genitalia. Which he liked.

Actually, he hung out with the Dominatrix Tarts more because it, well, reminded him more of the real Tart. Besides, those submissive Tarts were unrealistic and offered no challenge.

 

 

Tart’s Revenge or No Wrath like the Wrath of a Woman Virtually Cloned

 

 

Fhip, as was par, was filling full of himself some weeks after he had unleased his Tarts over the nets. In fact, wearing his comics superhero Adam Warlock (Starlin drawn) avatar, while he was hanging out at the Schlocky 60s Television bar over in Metaverse city chatting it up with both the Frank Gorshin Riddler and that green Orion slave girl from Star Trek (They were a couple), he was watching one of the Tarts he had rejected fade away in a groveling, submissive heap.

That always filled his heart with joy.

When suddenly, the crying Tart heap, laying over by the Green Acres barn where Jethro was chasing that Gabor sister around in an infinite slapstick circle, stopped crying, started chuckling, and began to fade in. His virtual blood began to run cold.

She then strode over to Fhip and began to taunt him. Ed Sullivan, John Glenn, Astro Boy, Walter Cronkite, Kurt Vonnegut, and the just shot Lee Harvey Oswald could only stare as this rejuvenated Tart who said things like "Oh you miss it don’t you?" or "What’s wrong? Don’t cholls give good conversation?" or "When you’re alone in your room, crying over me, that makes me glad. Really." And so on.

Fhip wasn’t amused. But there wasn’t anything he could do. He tried verbal commands and even brought up a virtual keyboard to try to get her under control. Actually, all of them under control. There were about 40 or so he had faded out over the last several weeks. They were all popping back to life.

She must have recoded them or found a Hack Guru who could. Fhip knew his way around a keyboard and could employ the usual defensive screens, but they were no match for a Guru.

After the taunting, a huge screen opened up behind Tart.

Fhip then watched as a very embarassing part of his life unfolding on the screen. She or whoever was helping her must have found a snippet of his DNA and plunged into his own memories. God, how could he have been so dense, every girl these days carried dozens of molecular Lewinsky traps. They looked like insects and sucked up bits of sweat or skin in order to draw up a genetic map.

Unlike Fhip, however, Tart was only willing to share his most tortured memories to the internet at large.

For example:

Fhip getting laid by the aging prostitute who erased his virginity and introduced him to the clap to boot, Fhip accidently crapping his pants in the second grade, Fhip’s bedwetting experiences, Fhip alone in a dorm room crying over a girl he couldn’t have…And those were just the nice parts. And even though he was always someone else here on the Net—Adam Warlock, Spock with Evil Goatee and Steely Dan were his favorites—he still lived in the meat world. Now he might be famous in that way he would never want. He had hoped Tart hadn’t done any marketing or he might not be able to walk the streets.

Fhip immediately surrendered. Lawyers were called in and both parties voluntarily employed clean up agents on the nets to eliminate all vestiges of Tart dominatrixes and highlights of the bedwetting Fhips at camp.

Oh well. Back to his Juliette Lewis choll.

 

 

The prostitute he had sex with wasn’t beautiful—she kind of looked like Courtney Love during Heroin rehab-- but she was certainly durable and she knew what he liked. He could fuck her slowly, for an hour. Her favorite trick was wearing a dress and allowing Phip naughty peeks at her panty deprived crotch. That always got a rise out of him, literally. She certainly was friendly he’d often think. As was his preference, he enjoyed spreading her thick thighs and eating her out silly. He could usually tell if he had done a good job if her juices seeped out of the bottom of her vagina and flowed down like a stream toward her anus. She was also quite pliable in other matters of import, such as positioning. At first he had to train her to straddle him on top. But after a few sessions, she would promptly straddle his face and let the work commence. Yet after awhile, even his whore left him for something better. She was pregnant, very likely with his child. Alone again, naturally.

I mean, its not as if she could
  Not do better than me, afterall
Nearly every man in the ci
    Ty was Whiter and Wealthier
    than he was. She’s probably hang
              in around some guy who knows how

response was inconclusive, his
    Erection was not. So years
later, when he sees her on
the street he will stride up to her

and answer

"Yes" to a forgotten tragic

    question.