Hypocorism (ROUND 19)

Let's workshop this story that, troubling as it is beautiful, examines the intricate power dynamics and linguistic structures at play in a man's passionate relationship with a girl he deems too young

scent of the day: Pleasure Pavilion, by Amphora Exotica

This is only my second wear of Pleasure Pavilion. I still cannot give this fragrance the analytical attention it deserves. I will lean, then, more on personal associations and connections to other fragrances—both inside and beyond the house of Amphora Exotica—than on what each individual note brings. Look for a full review in 2026.

Whereas in Vespers you are met with a lovely saffron-vanilla oud, here you are met with a fermented-orange oud. The oud seems cheesier than in Vespers. In Vespers, although the same Cambodi-Hindi combo is used, the oud seems more barn—a barnyness that lends a dark antique feel that this one, resembling the upbeat energy of Hayati’s glowing vanilla-citrus sandalwood, lacks in comparison (albeit only in comparison). The medicinal aspect of the oud in both fragrances, this mainly due to the Cambodian, is a solid connection between both—and Hayati as well.

Pleasure Pavilion, through the medicinal cheese, has bubblegum aspects. It is an orange-floral bubblegum that—largely from how the citrus synergizes with the ambergris—brings to my mind Bortnikoff’s Sir Winston (I get that with Hayati too) and especially L’Heure Exquise. For anyone who missed out on Bortnikoff’s L’Heure Exquise before it became neutered into its mass-market state now, here is your opportunity to experience something close.

It is not just my nose that experiences the overlap between Pleasure Pavilion and L’Heure Exquise. My head does too. (1) Both rely heavily on a dual-origin oud base: Bortnikoff’s is bent more cola with his Indonesian oud, especially with extra clove and tolu, whereas Sundar’s is bent more into animalic territory with his Indian. (2) Both utilize similar white florals: (a) Sundar uses orange blossom whereas Bortnikoff uses neroli (the steam-distilled version of the same flower for a more high-end hotel feel) and (b) Sundar uses tuberose whereas Bortnikoff uses Jasmine (both boosting the female-crotch angle I love to nuzzle into). (3) Both feature high-viscosity resins: Sundar used uses labdanum and beeswax whereas Bortnikoff uses tolu, myrrh, and styrax—three elements, especially the really fungal myrrh, that would have taken Pleasure Pavilion to the next level (but what do I know?). (4) Both utilize ambergris to provide longevity and a radiating oceanic warmth: Sundar adds a hairy-chested musk that, a few hours in, brings out a radiant feel that might even compete with many of Ensar’s oud-leather-musk releases (the stunning Chinese Exclusive version of Oud Rex, which I own a bottle of, comes to mind) whereas Bortnikoff leans more into the balsamic class (similar to what we get in Ormonde Jayne’s Tolu). (5) Both have a forest-floor dankness limned with mint (nothing insane like TRNP’s Aguru, but there): Sundar uses regular patchouli whereas Bortnikoff uses what Ramsey the YouTuber likes to call Persian patchouli (cypriol).

There is an overall difference in vibe, of course: Sundar’s is more regal animalic, especially with his castoreum and deer musk, whereas Bortnikoff’s is more gourmand and spicy (in a slightly girly way), especially with his cocoa and cardamon and clove and that cedar-menthol glow. But the bigger difference is the I-know-not-what that seems, to my mind at least, rooted in intent. Bortnikoff’s composition—even in the woodcap era—seems aimed at making an oud fragrance that would insist on being honored by the greats of french perfumery. Sundar’s composition—at least when we bracket the name (I personally feel it is unfortunate, even though I have come to see its significance as I make clear below) and the seemingly mandatory rose (which does have a citrus-leaf presence here, sneaking as the orange recedes)—seems bent on honoring artisanal heads. Sundar’s approach speaks much more to me philosophically. I stand with Nietzsche in the idea that to have style is to be exclusionary. My own writing is not meant to be universal. Sundar’s approach also speaks to me specifically when it comes to perfumery. While I still appreciate the master blending techniques of trained perfumers (like Vinchon-Sphener, say), my heart is with artisanal. Sundar is coming out like Nas did back when I was young: he was speaking to his specific project housing (yes, it took off, but that was cherry on top). Sundar is perfuming like he has got something to prove to us in the Facebook groups. And that is exactly how I like it.

I find Pleasure Pavilion to have much in common with Vespers and Hayati. First, there is what unites all the Amphora fragrances: a solid house DNA here. The DNA seems a bit more aura and vibe than actual Sundaraid base. If I am right about that, there seems less capacity for redundancy like in Ensar and Tauer. Sundar is more like Bortnikoff in this regard. His scents are united less by common base elements (although one could cite vanilla elements in Sundar’s compositions and a unique incense that the YouTuber Therapeutic Fragrance often complained about in Bortnikoff’s). Rather, we get more a common feel and style—just like in Bortnikoff.

The connection to Bortnikoff is important to me. I think Bortnikoff might have been that perfect combo between artisanal ingredients (ingredients we often lack in the designer and niche space) and competent blending (blending we often lack in the artisonal space). It is so sad to see the state of Bortnikoff. He could have been the pinnacle. Russian Adam and Ensar Telegrafi both following his lead. I really think that Amphora is the house that best carries the baton forward in this Bortnikoff style, perhaps even more than Maksim: Maksim fragrances might smell more literally like a Bortnikoff but Amphora fragrances smell more spiritually like a Bortnikoff, if that makes sense.

There is also a conceptual commonality between Hayati, Vespers, and Pleasure Pavilion. Arguably, this conceptual commonality applies to all the fragrances in the house. The mystical-floral photography and marketing narratives capture it all. There is an emphasis on sacred aesthetics. In fact, the sacred aesthetics are bent so far in an Islamic-Sufi direction that the house could have been called Rumi. For here we get less utilitarian lifestyle fragrances and more something like ritual objects—Islam-rooted poems in olfactory form.

I find a structural unity between the three fragrances as well. We see heavy reliance on true florals with indolic depth and animalics used as consecration (rather than shock). (One might think of Prin, perhaps my favorite perfumer, when one thinks of animalics used for shock. I think, on the contrary, that Prin uses animalics in a consecration way. It is just that he is imagining wild marginal spiritual practices of forest tribes—not the mainstream spiritual practices of the Abrahamic religions, or Hinduism and Buddhism.) As for more structure overlap, there is that vanilla-ambergris anchor—and perhaps bushman candle (which I think might be in Pleasure Pavilion, even if unstated, and perhaps could be Sundar’s calling card like Bianchi’s orris).

All three fragrances, to my mind at least, have love as a common theme. Each fragrance tackles the theme from a different direction, though.

Hayati is the extroverted love of a girl who has not yet been weathered and worn by the world. It is the girlie love that is not afraid of looking naive. The main ground of this, although I need to wear it more to say for sure, is the kashan rose plus the boronia. Kashan rose’s aqueous and mineralic facet, coupled with the teenybopper berry of boronia, suggests that Slick-Rick teenage love (snapper tight, perhaps even full of hymenal webwork) rather than greedy love of a cougar (snapper, and every hole really, blown out to smithereens). And yet the jasmine and the vegetal musk of ambrette shows that, as if often the case with this age (if hairbrush handles could talk, am I right?), physicial innocence hides a creamy-muggy passion—a creamy-muggy passion that has not yet turned rank but rather still is as sweet as nectar that you cannot stop licking just like that lickable wall in Willy Wonka’s factory. I think of Muhammad’s young bride Aisha bint Abi Bakr—perhaps a secret firecracker herself.

Vespers is a more sacrificial love toward the transcendent—albeit through a more masculine vehicle. As I say in my review (my deepest review of an Amphora fragrance to date), I think of a man of the Mevlevi order of Sufis sublimating his eros through whirling. Whirling, in my mind, is a profound spiritual technology for the sublimation of Eros: taking the raw energy of human desire and re-aiming it toward God—eros transitioning into something more like agape. I can smell the buttery-leather funk billowed out from under his tunnure as he twirls. This billowing impression is an effect of the white ambergris and musk, mainly. It is as if the whirler is pushing all of this crotch funk away from him as a means to purify himself before God and enter a trance state of fana, where the animal urges—foremost the desire to take and control (foremost the desire to annihilate the Hayati’s girl’s webwork with blustery creampies)—drop away and the Dervish gets a small taste of what it will be like to disappear—which Rumi tells us he will do on the wedding night of death—into the bosom of the highest beloved: God. All this is locked in the notes: jasmine and musk speak to pheromonal desire; ginger and vetiver speak to masculine discipline; sandalwood and oud speak to meditative surrender; champaca, which in Hindi mythology at least represents divine love, and pink lotus, which in Buddhism represents an enlightened state (the crown chackra opening to for a glimpse of nirvana), speaks to reaching for the divine—the two notes coming together to represent the divine as a sort of solar gold (champaca) that is at the same time cool and inviting (pink lotus).

Pleasure Pavilion is, like Hayati, an outward-facing erotic love—but in an unmistakable masculine register. One might want to think, if only for PC reasons, of Romeo to Hayati’s Juliet. But this reading does not hold up. Here we get something more like Muhammad to Hayati’s Aisha—or, if we want to keep the Juliet anchor to honor Western audiences, this would be Juliet’s uncle whose house Juliet cannot seem to stay away from! Here we have eros that is unashamed. It does not apologize. It knows its power. The time to meditate and abolish one’s ego into the bosom of the divine—what we get in Vespers—is for another day. Today is the day of embodiment, lineage, continuation—indeed, the very load-busting domination that Vespers is trying to eradicate through twirl. My reading here is rooted in the heart tension between tuberose and tobacco. Tuberose here is explicitly framed as flesh: dense, lactonic, almost sanguine in its red floral fullness. It pulses rather than floats. Burley tobacco, by contrast, is haylike and sovereign—sun-cured leaves rather than sweetened pipe smoke. Where tuberose suggests warmth and yielding (the endless give of ear cartilage), tobacco—which really comes out in a lovely way after three or four hours—asserts posture and authority (the man ready to make mince meat out of this boneless piece of chicken). Their union is erotic, yes. But I do not think of it as romantic—or, if it is, it is in the DDLG way. I think of it—of course, this is just my weird mind—as courtly and hierarchical, echoing the architecture of harems and private chambers where pleasure and power were never separate domains. That is why I say the name Pleasure Pavilion now clicks in my mind. Instead of Hallmark corniness, I find actually the deepest levels of age-gap transgression. That is a big win for me!

Pleasure Pavilion’s florals sharpen the erotic politics rather than soften it. Rose and carnation introduce spice and flush—rose not as tenderness but as heat; carnation adding clove-like bite and tension. Osmanthus, with its apricot-leather nuance that synergises beautifully with the castoreum, acts as a hinge note: golden but slightly animalic; honeyed but faintly suede-like. I think the osmanthus does wonders to reinforce the sense that pleasure here is intentional and cultivated rather than innocent. Patchouli, aged and Indonesian, grounds the florals into soil and shadow, ensuring that the composition never dips into such decorative extremes that we forget what is happening: what many might describe as a problematic power dynamic between a grown man and a little girl. Yes, this is patchouli as loam and skin rather than bohemian sweetness—an earthy bassline that keeps the entire heart anchored in the body. The Sumatran vanilla, enriched with beeswax, takes the edge off a bit. It makes this a candlelit session, not some back-alley rape. Still, the vanilla-beeswax does not come off as confectionary. It is resinous and candlelit, which—with the help of labdanum—reinforces the suggestion of enclosed chambers and close contact, where warmth is retained rather than dispersed. Again, the name Pleasure Pavilion makes perfect sense! My preliminary recoil was dumb.

As for the notes that tend to draw fragheads (the oud and animalics), the Cambodian and Hindi duo gives a medicinal cheese character suggestive less of Vespers’s mystical portals and more of frictioned skin. I picture private skin, tubal skin that wears its marine origins on its sleeve. I picture a sleeve, a tube, reamed out enough to have been torn—reamed out, however, by a man who has literal antique treasure chests and the finest cheeses all around. Castoreum—a glandular secretion that carries a high-pitched pheromonal quality of biological distress centered around the perineal region—brings leathered warmth and ferrous aspects suggestive of vaginal microtears. Deer musk adds a furry pheromonal haze that solidifies that we are dealing not with some little Romeo but with a hirsuite man who has been through many rutting seasons. The ambergris, contributing a saline smoothness that lifts the density, neither erases desire nor purifies it. The ambergris, rather, ennobles the desire. The ambergris gives the desire an aristocratic flavor. More unfavorable eyes, eyes perhaps jealous of this forbidden love and all its pleasures, might take the ambergris effect as symbolizing that the little girl’s participation (bucking, grinding, participation) has been groomed or as evidence of a machinery in place meant to normalize even those Japanese whining sounds in the many climaxes inside the Pleasure Pavilion.

Sundar himself find a connection between Hayati and Pleasure Pavilion. “I intended this composition,” he writes, “to be the masculine leaning counterpart to Hayati. For while she’s bright, ebullient, and emanates the sweet warmth of love, he’s bold but sophisticated. Commanding yes, but tasteful with debonair flair.” How I see it is that Hayati radiates love as girlie life-force (a little girl’s drive, even if she could not name it, to become impregnated) whereas Pleasure Pavilion asserts eros as a masculine life-force. As I made clear, this masculine force is old. The musk and the Indian oud—all the antique and leather vibes—make that undeniable. This is a masculine force that takes the Hayati girl not in the clumsy and playful and exploratory way that someone more here age would. No, it is a masculine force that knows exactly what buttons to press (no trouble finding the most mysterious of g-spots). It is a masculine force that turns the Hayati girl into a girth fiend—a shocking turn of events that makes me think of little Kirsten Dunst in Interview with a Vampire left with an appetite extremely rabid for her size. Vespers, which is my favorite of the three, I see as a man—radiating all this sexual energy—turning this eros into spiritual devotion as he prepares himself for Rumi’s wedding night.

Pleasure Pavilion’s release comes at an opportune time. Ensar’s house is under fire after people have run chemical reports on his sprayable perfumes, reports that apparently show what any of us with trained noses already knew: that he uses synthetics. Synthetics themselves are not a problem, at least not for me. Ensar remains, for all his redundancy and high price, a top house. The drama concerns the fact that Ensar apparently insisted from the very beginning that he never uses synthetics. I do not know personally if he ever said that. I do know, however, that even if he did the tension is resolvable with enough clever wording—wording I am in fact prepared to provide in my defense of the house. I have nothing against synthetics. Prin is perhaps my favorite perfumer and he uses synthetics up the wazoo. And I might come out and say that despite having like 30 Ensars and 30 Borts and nearly 20 Areej’s with smatterings of other artisanal brands (Jinx, Pinoy Sirun, Pineward, Havenhollow, Katana, Sherwood, and so on), Schön’s Montabaco might be the best thing I have ever smelled and might very well be—for all its iso e super—my number one fragrance of all time. That said, Amphora is a house that walks the walk—so the narrative goes and so my nose says. Unlike Ensar, unlike Jinx, unlike pretty much everyone else—this house, that is to say, is 100 percent natural according to the definition of “natural” many of us have in mind. So now is the time to strike.

The way in which Sundar’s house is 100 percent natural should not be underestimated. You can glean the significance by looking at the comment I wrote the other day on the Ensar Facebook board. In response to the lab report buzzing around on the groups like perfumery’s version of the Epstein files, Ensar Telegrafi himself responded that the report is merely for his sprayable perfume—not for his oil. And he even breathed a public sigh of relief, a sigh of relief since he has dealt too long with haters who claimed his oils had synthetics. Someone responded to him and said “Well set us all at ease, end the drama by answering one question: Do you use synthetics or not in your sprays?” Ensar never replied. But I did—in effect, on his behalf. My response was as follows.

The answer is implied. And the answer is YES. But with bad actors, hyenas and jackals, looking for a gotcha (salivating to make more out of his quotable admission than perhaps need be) it is understandable why he refuses to say more, why he won’t connect the dots—especially when they are so easy to connect. His compounded perfumes, in line with pretty much all compounded perfumes you will ever get, can be expected to have synthetics.

His compounded perfumes—not the pure oils, but the sprayable perfumes—are therefore not 100% natural in the strict chemical sense, where “natural” means extracted directly from biological matter (plant/animal/mineral) and “synthetic” means produced by chemical synthesis (regardless of whether it exists in nature).

If the GC report is correct and representative, his sprayable perfumes would also not qualify as 100% natural under an ontological definition of naturalness. A substance is natural, on this definition, if (a) it exists in nature as a molecule and (b) behaves identically in olfaction and biology. Even though on this view essence matters more than provenance (in which case even lab-derived linalool would be “100% natural”), Ensar perfumes still would not count as natural. After all, chemicals like galoxolide or iso e super are not merely lab-derived versions of molecules found in nature but genuinely synthetic constructions.

That said, there remains a coherent and defensible functional sense in which Ensar’s perfumes can still be described as natural: synthetics, where present, are used in small amounts to support (stabilize, better express) natural materials rather than to replace or dominate them. From this functional perspective, the fragrances remain clearly 100% natural. Claiming 100% natural on this measure is still a robust claim in a world where synthetics are the protagonists in most perfumes on the market.

Amphora’s case is different, at least to my knowledge. Amphora’s fragrances can be said to be 100% natural in the more robust sense we all know and love. If it is not 100 percent natural in the strictly chemical sense (gathered only from real plants and woods and animals), then the perfumes are at least 100% natural in the ontological sense: any chemicals, even if lab derived, can be found in nature. That is pretty big. I know of few other houses for which the same could be said. Jinx, Ensar, Areej—they all use performance-enhancing drugs. I personally do not care about provenance. I care for the end effect. I am a big fan of mixed media perfumes. And philosophically the natural-nonnatural distinction bugs me. Nuclear power plants and HIV vaccines and cyberspace are as natural, according to my metaphysics (monistic through and through), as flowers and dirt and farts. What is great about Amphora is that we get stunning effects, even in longevity, without lab-created aromachemicals.

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*Worked on the ending today. It is a bit didactic. I need to smooth that out. But I think this ending is more in line with my vision.

Hypocorism

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not have will destroy you.—Gospel of Thomas (Logion 70)

His school-pickup spiel, before it even got going, elicited teen eyerolls of classic daddy-daughter theater. Her teeth sucking (“Tch”) as she scanned the ceiling made him feel as if he were driving his own daughter to some ice-cream social circa 1952, a Father-Knows-Best figure unable to stop himself from rehashing the leave-room-for-Jesus dance rule into the rearview. But she was a big girl who liked to ride shotgun. “Shotgun shawtee,” she called it. And this afternoon he was baggy-eyed and shifty, not having seen her in nearly a week and brimming to the point of bowlegged ooze. So the exaggerated mouth mimicry, surprise snark caught when he glanced over, nearly had him snarl “Fuck it” (fuck the brakes, fuck the transmission, fuck who the fuck sees) and clamp her bratty throat mid pantomime—neck-biting brandings of savage devotion (“Kill any nigga try to stop me fuckin this”) cresting, rubberless and rabid (“You wanted my fuckin baby, huh?”), into ear-licking whimpers of surrender (“Need you more than anything, baby girl”) riding out with whispered repetition (“more than anything”) on the dying aftershocks of pelvic paroxysm.

She could recite the lecture by heart. A trusted adult needed to be in the loop, in her corner. That was the rule: someone sex-positive and open-minded, nuanced enough to judge case by case, and yet whose blessing could not be bought—at least not in any overt way too untethered to ratiocination, too noisy in the closet. A crack-rock bribe, for instance, should not suffice for the green light. Too loudly it screamed bondage to the bollocks. Yet it would be a lie to say that such cheap grease—among other trump cards in this city of dumpster divers winging perfectly good burgers over the shoulder in slavering search for a fent patch to suck—had never crossed his mind as he sat in the sedan, all around him a zombie horizon of bombed-out industry farmed by smartphones, awaiting the school bell.

She resented the rule. Yet she respected him for sticking to it, for disproving her quiet doubts—quiet but not silent: “Niggas out to fuck. They ain’t stand on shit but they own asses. No discipline, I swear. How a bitch gonna find someone solid? I know how to say ‘no.’ I need a nigga that can say ‘no.’” In a sneakers-over-smarts world teeming with thugs and malingerers catcalling through blunt smoke on every corner and crumpling under Olde-English impulse (a Philly now shot through by smartphones valorizing, even in households otherwise sheltered, shallow minds quick to barter decency for dopamine in the stampede for likes over legacy), his tight-leashed stability—although easily clownable in the pocket-protector voice of a white man, the Judas of present culture—felt safe. Even as her frustration simmered against his stubbornness, she respected discipline—her own her eyes tilted toward betterment: “I ain’t tryna be scrolling. If they was one gift you could get my ass it would be a flip phone. Niggas’ minds lost.” Even as the waiting stretched her to the verge of being the first to say “Uncle” (“You made your point, nigga”), she needed him to need the rule. The boundary meant he knew his own shadow.

Mutual masturbation, always in the front in case the world rolled up, had become their extracurricular ritual in the swelling meantime. She would squat over the flattened passenger seat, back arched against glass. He would grunt his body—e-brake hump dug into his ribs, armrest console into his spine—just right to position his nostrils, flared for greedy memory, under the jasmine indoles of the brown eye’s crow-footed pucker. And there he would be for as long as it took, transfixed by the creamy clicks of swollen tension as mere child fingers (nails bitten to stubs) churned with self-mutilating insanity the residual bulges of baby chub into a Velveeta slop: schlup-schlup-schluck-schlup-schlup-schluck (“Hnnnn. . . . Mmmmph”)—the something-about-to-give frenzy of macaroni sounds, feral cousins of feline eyelids and cheeks squelching in face massage, broken like confident jazz by intermittent Vulcan salutes (self-initiated as if with cruel intentions) revealing a too-tight-to-be-true chokepoint of fibroelastic constriction resistant even to the strain of two-handed splay (“Spread it, sweetheart”), obdurate closure snapping him back each time to the milkweed pods whose fused seams he would pry open in the midsummer fields of a childhood silken with promise. “Wider, baby girl. Wider for me.” He had his orders, knobby roots reaching down into that outer-dark stream from which all rivers flow.

The glimmer of mucosal marbling, bruised plum to bubblegum pink, drew him ever nearer the gamey petals, pleats whose cumin musk would make a joke of Rochas Femme (his ex-wife’s signature scent)—his nose huffing like a famished breatharian, at a hover just shy of touch, as both worked themselves with the Jolly-Rancher-colored slick of her taunting tuahs (“Tuah”) always dead-on with llama dominance (thwack) despite the distance to the twisting piston audible on the driver’s side. Her grownup gush into his gargling mouth (“Make that fuckin mess, big girl”) became, after her recent reprimand about him dragging his heals (“Tch! Nigga you be stallin!”), the sole merciful contact he would allow (frustrating in its unreliability without the milking aide of that finger husbandry he hoped one day to floor her with, come-hither hooks to the tubal crown’s textured engorgement galloping faster into bladderward jabs of paternal sternness)—well, technically, the sole merciful contact aside from hugs and cheek smooches and, of course, his alarming arcs of propulsion timed to verbal stress (“Such a fuckin big girl!”), solar-flare arabesques (nothing new but never not shocking) that sometimes gunked both their faces, not just his own (tongue flailing in audible exorcism under the fallout).

But a rule was a rule. No doubt she saw herself as the head of her household, which would be no lie: cooking scrambled eggs and ramen noodles; doing laundry and dishes; hauling her toddler brother to the corner store on a hiked hip with picked-out fro and buttered lips while her mother, basically catatonic, slept each day away (“Tch. That bitch stay depressed!”). And no doubt at least part of her believed she held the strings, also true: having set everything off one afternoon as he dropped off the autistic sibling he mentored as a b-balling “big brother,” groping his full package like Millie Jackson in concert (“I like your glasses”) with a succubus lip bite at the front door—shower-capped and wrapped in an outgrown Nemo towel—and leaving him thunderstruck as he walked back to his car (only to be, despite the flipping-twenty-eight-tails-in-a-row odds, thunderstruck yet again when, later that night while toweling up his load from the bathroom linoleum, he reflected on the fact that his body-heat reanimated scent of the day was Bortnikoff’s Coup de Foudre, whose meaning—“lightning bolt”—could only accelerate that self-mythologizing intensity for which jail posed no threat to actionable planning). Before they took it to the next level, however, that day-one condition had to be met. She needed to confide in one trusted adult whose progressivism came not at the expense of blindness to the power-dynamic concerns: a third presence (“female, motherly,” he said) whose progressivism might even extend, if only down the line, to the button-slurping variety—a full-on-family fantasy that, while vibrant in the early days of pen-and-paper strategy (“Suck that little bitch, Mamma”), had since dwindled to a tagalong mouth (free-floating like the smile of the Cheshire cat) the more his passion (the not-always-sweet suffering kind) thickened for his one and only.

It was nearly an impossible ask. He knew that. Indeed, he suspected that was precisely the point. And that it could be the point would not be out of character given his typical reasoning through transgressive territories. For example, his academic article defending the moral permissibility of bestiality, the piece that got him terminated from his professorship in the no-due-process-for-the-privileged heights of the safe-space hysteria, laid out safeguard conditions (one of which was a third-party vetting, as in the case at hand) that together set the acceptability bar too high for most real-life cases ever to clear. Even his fantasies obeyed this logic: any young girl who came onto him (usually after some rescue scene, and usually one where an adult was trying to take advantage of her) he would deny—no matter her pussy flashing insistence or pretzel-position demands—with an electrifying sense of feel-good pride, telling her they would most likely have to wait—and that, even then, he would want her parents to know there had been mutual attraction when she was underage. Any titillation he might have found in the prospect of a downy spinner always gave way to the titillation of basking in his performative restraint, in his putting his foot down on the ethical boundaries that would mean the girl—unless she showed tremendous pluck and planning and persuasion (something not common at that age in this era)—not getting what she wanted. He got off not by touching, but by covering all his ethical bases without sacrificing his liberality. Temptation is a test of character. Remaining ethical despite the taboo was the highest eroticism.

Another part of him suspected that the permissibility condition he imposed when it came to his blunt-toking crush remained even months in, if not itself mainly a head game of self-inflicted tantalization, less about protecting her welfare than about preempting his guilt. His love having grown to the point of wanting the best for her, evident not just in the very imposition of the condition but in the advice that often conflicted with his interests (“Explore Europe,” “Go to college,” even “Don’t settle down so young”)—this suspicion, however, seemed more a function of him being an overthinker whose hypochondriacal disposition extended not just to the what-ifs of the body but to the what-ifs of the soul, a disposition for which he had the perfect outlet as an ethics professor where (in lecture and print) he deployed all types of hyperbolic thought experiments to run through the meat grinder of doubt even things we take for granted as perfectly acceptable: circumcising infants, ear-piercing toddlers, marketing junk food to kids, subjecting them to tickle torture, kissing them on the mouth even when they show resistance, indoctrinating them into religions that peddle much more psychic mutilation than just thoughts of eternal damnation. There is a high likelihood, in other words, that the suspicion of bad motives for the no-touch rule reflects less the reality of the situation than the reality of his worrywart temperament. This is the same man, after all, who in first grade checked his own Halloween candy for signs of tampering and ended up throwing out all of it, nothing in the two pillowcases surviving his pristine standards. Just as few kids in the world then did the same thing (despite the era’s razorblades-in-Snickers hysteria), few men otherwise in his shoes now—especially if they are anything like average American men (namely, in an uncritical state of self-satisfied ignorance)—would ever pause long enough to consider that their no-touch rule might not be noble.

A bigger part of him suspected—a much more reasonable suspicion, merely considering no more than deep evolution’s need to load the young with seed—that he would eventually succumb. Her tightness coupled with her beauty, her heady smell of fried tuberose coupled with her persistence (even if oblique, like her working into conversations “Been wantin a baby like forever” or just singing with that extra intensity “♩ If you like it, then you shoulda put a ring on it ♩”)—those were only part of it. Tugging harder at him was movement of her mind, charming in its speed and acuity.

“Okay Gramps!” she said one afternoon as soon as she opened the back door to toss her bag in. “You really in here bumpin grandma music.” He figured he would be broadening her horizons to something smarter and more empowering than the Perc-30 in the anus of her generation. But she turned up the volume and sang the lyrics, directing them his way as he drove: “♩ Long as you know / that I can have any man I want to. / Baby, that’s actual and factual. / But still, I choose you, to be with me / and work on me, so [nigga] you better not flake it up! ♩”—working in those extra two “nigga” syllables in such a way to show her mastery of both rhythm and meaning. “♩ Well you want my heart, uh, / and all my time? ♩” Her stress and higher pitch on the word “time” turned T-Boz’s observation into an interrogative. “♩ Well it won’t be there if you can’t deal with my mind/ ‘Cause a girl like me— / I won’t settle for less. / I require plenty conversation with my sex! ♩”

The way she looked at him while belting out those last words made his eyebrows contort in incredulity.

“What? A bitch need her pussy ate!”

“You’re fucking unreal, I swear! Where you getting that shit from?”

“That’s what she sayin’.”

“She’s saying she doesn’t just want sex. She wants someone intelligent, someone who’ll match—.”

“Nigga, I know. But both true. She smart like me but she a girl like me: she like that tongue gettin in it—two ways.”

“So, on your interpretation, she isn’t saying just that she wants stimulation of the mind in addition to stimulation of the body—.

“No she is saying that, though.”

“No, I know. But you think she’s also saying—she wants plenty of licking?”

“After all that talk she like: ‘Now talk to this, nigga!’”

“Ahahaha. She wants to be orally stimulated and orally stimulated?”

“You said it, nigga—mind and pussy.”

“I’m seeing the song in a different light now. You cracked open a whole new angle. Let me guess—what’s she say? ‘If you gonna get me off, you got to love me deep’? So, if I can channel you here, you’d say it applies both ways here too. She wants someone respectful of her, true to her, all about her, and—”

“Them deep strokes.”

“Ahahaha. You make it hard for me.”

“What?”

“You know what.”

“You make it hard for me too. Tch. Why you think I always wanna be with you when we ain’t doing shit and you keep me hidden?”

Street snappiness (“Look, dumb nigga fakin the limp,” referring to the panhandler at the red light) and mental dexterity (“Bitch switched her shit up but she ain’t trying to hear me,” referring to her teacher shifting the meaning of “wrong” from “illegal” to “immoral” mid-sentence)—these did not come, as they often do, at the expense of wisdom and knowledge of self.

“Whoa, slamming the door and shit. Why you all flustrated?”

“Let me tell you nigga. This bitch—.”

“Oh baby, you really upset.”

“ . . . . ”

“Aww, baby—come give me a hug.”

“This bitch think I copied cuz I talk about ConaLee in that book you gave me.”

“You brought up Night Watch? Ahaha. I’m sorry, I—.”

“Nigga it right after Civil War. What you think Imma do?”

“Nah, you’re good—you’re great. But why you bring her up?”

“Cuz she like me. She livin poor, mom all fucked up. She the only grown up bitch. Tch. Then you got these creepy niggas takin over the crib.”

“Papa—ahaha.”

“Yeah, that nigga Papa. Only thing different, I woulda poisoned that nigga!”

“Get em. Ahahaha.”

“But yeah, so this bitch think I copied my shit. No bitch, even a broke bitch be readin. I swear. White bitches—matter a fact, all these bitches—expect too little, like we dumb.”

“George Bush.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

“Can I have another hug?”

“Of course, baby.”

“I feel better.”

“Good. That’s what I want.”

“I wish you was my teacher.”

“. . . .”

“So you used to teach about God?”

“You can say that. Back before the bullshit.”

“I would’ve liked your class. Better than this dumb—tch.”

“I’m too dry.”

“I like dry.”

“You say that, but . . . .”

“You think we woulda fucked?”

“Tempting, but no.”

“Hmm.”

“. . . .”

“. . . .”

“Would’ve been jerking off before class, though.”

“Oh, I know! No panties, front row.”

“Ahahaha. Why you so nasty, little girl?”

“No, for real—I would’ve been your best student.”

“How so? You let me shoot in you mouth before class?”

“Nigga, thought we ain’t goin there!”

“I’m just messing.”

“Tch. You already know, though.”

“So why, then? Why would you be my best?”

“A bitch be thinkin some shit. Don’t underestimate. I got thoughts.”

“Oh, the head good?”

“Nigga, what into you today? You be shuttin down my mouth but look at you!”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Tell me about these thoughts.”

“So you ready, huh?”

“Yep.”

“Okay. Hear me out.”

“Will do.”

“You ready?”

“Ahahaha! Yeah.”

“Okay so I need air, food—all that, right?”

“Yeah you do. Dollar-Menu fiend in this bitch!”

“Boy—.”

“What?”

“Tch. Anyways, I need my mom to be alive. I needed her.”

“Sure.”

“Same thing true of all this shit: trees, cars, dogs.”

“Yep.”

“But can it all be leanin? I mean all this shit. How you gonna have any leaning if all of it leanin?”

“Riddling. Ahaha.”

“But you see what I mean? This shit hangs. That shit hangs. But it all can’t be hangin on somethin else, feel me?”

“Yep. If everything’s hanging—.”

“How the whole hang? Somethin gotta be solid. Somethin gotta hang on nothin.”

“Nothin but itself.”

“What that is—now don’t ask a bitch that! But I do know that whatever it is, it’s always there. That’s what I think about God.—Oooooh mic drop.”

“Go pumpkin. Go pumpkin.”

“See? Best student!”

“You’re making a smart point.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re describing a dependence chain. Leibniz—that’s who I wrote my dissertation on. He says what you say: because there are dependent things (what you call “leaners,” “hangers”), there has to be something that does not depend on anything else (well, on anything else nonidentical to itself)—an ultimate independent foundation. Otherwise the whole chain collapses.”

“It couldn’t even be there in the first place.”

“Exactly.”

“I love that you get me.”

“And, well, even though you brought up your mom, what’s cool—what’s cool is that you’re arguing, like Leibniz, not in terms of going back in time but going down in terms of structural support. You can’t have turtles all the way down.”

“Turtles, nigga! What?”

“Hehe. Turtles gotta stop!”

“Leebnits sound right, though. I like him too.”

“Even if what you say is true, why call it ‘God’? Why say it’s always there? Couldn’t it have just—well, not existed?”

“None of the leaners could’ve made that happen, though. They too busy leanin! Ahaha.”

“But what if they all lean so hard, they drag it down too—like a drowning man pulling the lifeguard under?”

“Okay, Mr. Lawyer. But if the leaners kill it, that mean it was leanin on somethin else. Real solid don’t sink. Quote it!”

“So you’re saying if the leaners—.”

“If they could do that to it—.”

“Then they got power over it.”

“If they could do that, then it lean on them! Ahaha. Got me trippin. Next a bitch be talkin bout turtles.”

“No, it’s sharp. I’m just playing devil’s advocate. This foundation, though—could it have made itself not exist?”

“You gotta exist to do somethin. You can’t un-be before you be. I don’t—. Nigga, you got me not knowin what I’m sayin.”

“Nah, you’re good—more than good. Still—couldn’t it make itself now, or later, not exist?”

“They ain’t even all these coulds without it. So how can—?”

“I see. Yeah, you—.”

“You too smart for me, though.”

“Nah.”

“. . . .”

“. . . .”

“I got a surprise for you.”

“Oh yeah. What?”

“I had gym today.”

“Mmm.”

“We going to the spot before you drop me? Or a nigga gonna stop being embarrassed of me and I sleep over?”

“I’ll never be embarrassed of you—ever.”

Such wisdom, which often reflected admirable optimism and hope in the face of the ugly and indifferent (“Everyone got bad stories but butterflies see the gift in each one” or even just “Delulu ain’t no solulu”), proved stomach-sinking. For one, it could invite the envy even of seasoned poets, Goethes and La Rochefoucaulds. Take her many “nigga” maxims, which she would launch off the top of her head as they drove around the city like an old couple (minus the pettiness and kill-me-already weariness).

“Saying you got shit to do—that be how niggas get out of shit to do!”

“Niggas’ll blame the white folk for they own liquor receipts!”

“Niggas stay mad the elevator smell like piss, but they ain’t takin no steps!”

“A nigga’s demons be raisin his children—let that sink in, nigga.”

The real tragedy, though, was that such wisdom could have been earned only through unbelievable hardship—hardship that, at the same time, carried a silver lining for her suitor: it brought her, like ConaLee, at the very least to the mental age of thirty, right up there with the mental age of Mary (both of them sharing the same introspective equanimity and fun-sized frame, spun to spin) when she signed herself over to Joseph and God.

The qualities of the attracting source, her body and mind, do not alone explain the magnetic effects. One factor not to be underestimated was the murmur taunting him from within: that middle age offered few second chances for snug holiness this likely to move on at any moment. All it might take for her to be gone forever was one of her classmates asking her to come over and smoke. At least that became the worry. It cropped up with unavoidable vivacity in his alone times when, especially during the demon-active witching hour, his native paranoia (from an upbringing even the earliest Alanon intervention could not have offset) overtook him and, in fact, synergized with his more-than-theoretical understanding of the mercuriality of young women—the constructive interference creating a panic wave immense enough to override all the evidence that, however much she was a creature of the hood, she was too through-thick-or-thin in loyalty to be reduced to the label “hoodrat.”

The wave rose more and more even in the sunlight of their together times. Her questions were already nearly too much for him to handle on a good day without the intrusive thoughts. “How it make you feel lookin up at the stars?” Her jugular-flared energy exposed his age. “Yo, what color your favorite song?” Its ravages already evident in the claustrophobic feelings of inadequacy brought on nearly two decades back by his son’s nonstop talk from the car seat, time could not be offset—aside from lurches here and there—even by the stamina boost of this little why-for-every-how stroking his hand in her lap and engorging the car with the junk-in-the-trunk aromas of black teen spirit. “What somethin about you—no jokes, somethin deep—you not tryna see?” Her overload of bushy-tailed care underscored what perhaps was his baseline weariness with life—a weariness of which this affair, for all he knew, was the equivalent of the sexual lunge at the hospice nurse from the deathbed. “Nigga for real, what you trying to be remembered for and shit?” Academia having prolonged his stay in a Neverland where everyone being an overgrown child made the hideousness of being an overgrown child stay blurry enough to ignore, her preaternatural maturity proved a threat. “So how you know, like, when a risk be worth it?” But the mirrors outside the fun-house tower were clear and the grand one she held up, amazing given her frame’s ballerina petiteness in every spot but one, blinded with satellite-telescope-grade reflection: hyperreal enough to seem surreal—a disk of colors and detail spiraling around the blackest abyss. “What’s the last thing that made you cry, really cry?”

Her love required more attention and stamina than he worried he had. Boys her age would have so much more in common. He did not know Kai Cenat, a streamer she watched. He did not know Samara Cyn, her favorite music artist. He did not smoke weed. Aside from the big issues like knowing how to shut off the water main if a leak springs up or how to change a tire or spot the signs of a failing alternator or how to spot employment scams or how to handle first-aide emergencies or how to put things into perspective during times of crisis, even his hard-earned knowledge could be a disadvantage. Everything-is-new excitement and in-this-together bonding came with learning together not to use a metal spatula on the nonstick pan, learning together how to get the earring that went down the drain without having to call a plumber, learning together that not all laundry should be washed in hot water, learning together that assembling furniture without reading the instructions first is a bad idea, learning together that you do more than getting the bathroom super clean by mixing ammonia and bleach, learning together that the tire pressure light coming on did not warrant pulling over and calling for help—or any of the rest of the things he and his ex-wife, yet to come into their fixed habits and expectations, found out the hard way as they fumbled forward into adulthood, mutual naivete leaving room for more vulnerability and less shame.

He pictured it all. He would be right there ahead of time: just a little too fast, a little too certain, a little too closed to the idea that maybe the best thing she needed was not an answer but the room to try, to fail, to learn—an equal, for example, to strategize with on what subway routes to take to make the flight on time, rather than someone who already knew to leave the house much earlier and exactly where to go to catch the JFK AirTrain. He saw himself storm in like a parent with his swollen mental Roledex. saying “That shit a damn MLM, girl!” or “You fuckin never throw water on no electric stove!” He could hear himself. “Baby, I know you upset but please understand that your period might be at least a small factor” or “Bet your neck pain will go away if you sleep with your arms in external rotation like this.” Even if she was not as charmingly naive as other people could be (thinking Palmolive in the dishwasher would work just as well, or that turning the fridge off overnight was a good energy-saving strategy, or that aluminum foil would help the food “heat more evenly” in the microwave, or that music always needed to be on during sex like in the movies), how could he not scoff inside (if only in the bless-her-heart way) at her idea of a proper home cooked meal: Hamburger Helper spruced up with frozen peas—his own signature dish in the first years of marriage?

Such concerns, and the vivid imagery that kicked them off (her laughing and smoking with a boy her age as they listened to music they both grew up with), took the foreground over her heartrending attempts at knowing him deeper and making their togetherness turn into something for which only a catch to bring home to mom aims—something he did not know if he could handle. His distance—palpable through the veneer of presence in his responses (“Shiiit. I just think of how long the damn light took to get here!”)—and his jealousy—palpable through the veneer of nonchalance in his questions (“So who’s that guy you were talking with?”)—did not take long for her to pick up on and try to nip in the bud. “Nigga, please don’t tell me you worried ’bout these young boys? Tch. Get out your head. You already got me!”

It was as if she had access to the privacy behind his eyes. “I know what I want. I don’t want no drama. A bitch want direction, boundaries—a smart nigga that ain’t into all that bullshit. A bitch done learnt the hard way. You listen. You ain’t just react. Shit scary out here. But I ain’t never felt safer with no nigga but you. I ain’t have to think about what I really think and what’s safe to say. You like me for me. You got a bitch vocabulary up: palimpset ([sic]). Nigga, you got me seein my room like that shit. Like who lived in this bitch before? You got a bitch finna travel. You calm me down—ain’t punch no bitch in the mouth in a minute. You tell me not to feel clowned over some dumb shit. Ain’t no other nigga out here hold me down, wanna write letters back and forth. That shit—I swear. Nah, just being with you—I know my feelings better, myself. I’m off the damn phone. The world big, true. But you the one crossed a bitch’s path. You always on my mind. You ain’t gotta worry bout no other nigga. Tch. I know how to say ‘no.’ Look at me, for real. You ain’t gotta worry where I be, who I be with. It’s all yours. You already got me.”

Her words did set his mind at ease. But the quiet those words safeguarded allowed truths to surface from unanticipated dimensions. “Mmm. I can smell that pussy baby,” he said on yet another day parked in the far corner of the woodland cemetery behind her school. He had given up the lecturing by this point, or even focusing so much on a plan of action regarding finding the appropriate third. “That shit wet for me?” The explicit understanding (especially considering the risk telling someone posed) had become just to wait until she became legal—even though, in her view, he had an unreasonably strict standard of when that was. “Oh fuck yeah it is, huh? Mmm. You can play with it, baby.” The implicit understanding, however, was that they would not hold out beyond their trip to Miami, planned for the summer vacation before her last year in her school.

“Let me see you spread it for Daddy.” His voice, as usual after to-the-gills absences, was hoarse with domineering desire. But this was the first time he claimed the title “Daddy” aloud in her presence. He could feel that it did not land well. She always liked to say, perfectly reflecting the Aristotelian distinction between a person whose authority comes from without (by appointment, by inheritance) and a person whose authority comes from within (commanding respect by his very being, bearing, merit), “No nigga can control me unless he can control me—feel me?” And yet he knew that, blazing entirely from his root chakra, that the problem was not on his end. He had said it with full throat—no stutter, not even a micro hesistancy into which only the most perceptive empaths could tune. But even though he knew he uttered the third-person “Daddy” from that inherent authority of earned command, she did not pull down her sweats and spread for his vision those lips that—with a deep sense of personal pride one might not expect given his assumed tastes—he had watched change (in what almost seemed an artistic timelapse of existentialist haunt) from downy soft to ebony kink.

“Daddy” was a rough word, yes. It was rougher in his mouth, back teeth floating in white honey. But so too were those petechial throttlings in the buildup to orgasm, another eventual exception in their dance of creative compliance with the rule. And yet even such life-and-death roughhousing had her tongue lolling in bliss, wet wheezes taunting—like only nymphet stridor could—for a harder clamp. Harder clamps did tend to bring on last-ditch squeals of struggle, these gagged by getting the thumbs just right not to slip in the neck sweat. Sometimes they even brought on kicks and claws of self-defense, these gagged with threats that were so unlike him but came easy with her: “Watch the fuck what happens you touch me the fuck again!” But not only did she continue to circle her fingers with greater intensity through it all (sufficient proof that the nonconsent got her off just as much as it did him), it took several times of her saying “Please stop asking me the same thing” for his worrywart self not to check each time afterwards that her death’s-door comportment was no more than a masterclass in method acting. No, some other explanation was operative.

The tremor in her eyes, he took it to be an almost purposely-impotent struggle to hide sadness. And that sadness, in turn, jacked the explanation right into the base of his skull. Like a red bird suddenly landing before your vision on the windowsill, the explanation seemed too adventitious—indeed, too unbidden—for it to be mere projection even from the magical corners of the underworld. It was an explanation reasonable in hindsight given the violence of her self-play and her nasty mouth. A back-contorting montage erupted in high definition before his mind’s eye: her growing from inarticulate infancy to teetering toddlerhood and beyond—a montage that would have been family wholesome, bildungsroman bittersweetness coloring spelling bees and sleepovers, had not the one core constant through all the change been her serving as the Swiss-cheese sex sleeve for some older man in her home. He did not know if it was her father or just some guy with her mother. All he knew was that she stepped up the school bus looking, in her lexicon, “ran the fuck through.”

His reaction to the vision, there might have been more selfish reasons for it. He sensed she would wreck his life, for one. It was less about authorities finding out. Her mouth was too ride-or-die, too wise beyond its years, to wreck his world with a word. It was more her cursed beauty, beauty pitiable enough to make a scholar burn his first editions: their foxed pages whose rust-colored constellations of mildew he would finger in the spine-protective v-cradle and whose musty-vanilla lignin he would sniff in a reverential trance—split screen—splurted in a maniacal laughter with Kingsford lighter fluid as if nothing more than grill charcoal for testosterone protein.

One thing was her breeding-hormone body—hard to blame on gas-station milk alone since her soul seemed meant for some voodoo sage, the kind that gave bayou kids nightmares merely by mention of her name. But the face, against that the body did not matter. It could have had one of those mini embryo-body arms—a nub, a flipper. Had the block known its Greek mythology, more than one corner thug—especially considering her predilection for getting men to fight (“Stab that fuckin nigga!”)—would have called her “Helen of the hood” or “Heleniqua” by now. And he knew himself well. Making her his girl would mean, however much she tried to set him at ease, no sleep deeper than the cortisol twilight of prison. The more typical elbow-patched professor might have been different. But for him it would mean carrying a gun again—especially through monkey-business sectors where all the ook-ook-ook catcalls (nose-bone grunts that made the construction-site classics sound like Connery pillow talk) not only disrupted higher-order reflection and conversation with their sheer percussive might but could explode at random into frenzies of contagious violence if—in the “ghetto catch-22” that defies the Jane Goodall paradigm—you try to usher your partner away from the harassment in silence. That itself would be, he knew, a problem for everyone. He feared his quick trigger—his jealousy already once landing him behind bars for two nights, the first time in over ten years he failed to show for his Monday-Wednesday courses. Perhaps the inner daimon he used to have his first-year students read about was looking out for him now, knowing his artistic vocation could not flourish in the hood from which it had clawed itself free.

Whatever the reason, he called her by her first name—another first beyond their introduction. She turned, her baby cheeks—it was unclear whether they really were streaked or whether his seeing them as such was an imposition—splitting him in two. The distant seer of himself was himself, the autoscopic gaze admonishing from an inverted world. His love needed to evolve. The message traveled along the sight line. Not one break from a school environment from kindergarten well into his thirties, his maturity paled compared to hers. But he could not siphon some of hers to right the scales. She could not unsee, unfeel. She could not unsee, unfeel, what the montage made seem she really did see and feel. The insufficient best he could do would be to behave himself—behave, even if it entailed the stumbling steps of an impostor, like the man she needed him to be and of whom he had shown glimmers well before she was born.

That was the man who would not tell her “Suck those balls good, baby” but rather “Be the ancestor of your future happiness.” That was the man who would not tell her “Spread that little asshole” but rather “The full story always entails forgiveness.” That was the man who would not tell her “All the way in, Sweetheart” but rather “Go after what you care for most, because you’ll get your heart broken no matter the path—even the path of avoidance. Take my word for it.”

That was the man who, although wanting to promise her—as any good father does—“nothing bad will happen on my watch,” knew—as any wise father does—that such a promise is impossible to keep: strangling all possibilities for disappointment was an impossibility not only for humans but even for divinities, because it would entail (both as a means and as a consequence) the very bad things in question—the ultimate one, cauterizing the soul into a vegetative state of living death, more vile than rape. That was the man who could encourage her to reclaim the wondernaut facet of lost childhood. That was the man who could tell her that the norms of treatment, the scripts given, were not the only way. That was the man who could at least promise to be with her as she wept, witness to her every broken heart—all the while with guard up, a moment-tarnishing sacrifice of the responsible adult: prepared to lift her chin up from where, in her slobbering reduction of love into desire, she needed it to go; prepared even if it meant activating the “I hate you” fury of an early sprouter not yet thirty bleeds into the mystery of matriarchal time.

“Baby—baby come here.” Tone stripped of the greasy greed that normally would attend the command, he watched himself live—not just fantasize—on the point of tears. He held her close with a kiss to the temple. He could smell, this close, that her breath would taste like Carnation from the can—like she could not give up her mother’s nipple the way some could not let go of their thumb.

“It’ll be okay,” he whispered. He was the one who needed to snuggle her too tight, not the other way around. He squeezed her. She was deboned. She had that endless give of ear cartilage.

“I love you, baby girl.” She did not knock him out of this change with one of her phrases: “Nigga, what the fuck up with you?” She gave in. She nuzzled like a cat. And that only solidified his resolve.

He could feel the heartbreak his head swore his heart demanded—the price of a higher love. Let her go. You have to let her go. And he knew the self-lacerating temptation doing so would invite. It was the temptation, besting him too many times before, to rage against heartbreak by turning beloved into enemy, holding against her precisely what drew him in, if her fight—her resistance to being released—proved insufficient to stop him from walking out of her life: “Little skeezy hoodrat—thirteen, doing this fuckin nasty shit!”

Screaming such tantrum lines into their faces before kicking them out into desolation on the other side of the peephole still stinking of pussy worked over into a cousin of burnt rubber (their knapsacks dangling in one hand, their shoes in the other), maladaptive as it is and a sign of his roots having grown in polluted soil where it is rare to find kid teeth not rotten from soda, was relatively healthy compared to other forms the temptation could take on. For this temptation was a function of (or even correlated with, if not identical to) the temptation, erotic for the displaced monkey tenant inside each of us (regardless of race or creed), to trash the place and steal everything not nailed down before being forced to move on. A good boy who rose out of the drug-addled ghetto by conducting himself with great discipline and industry and care, jumping through all the hoops whose promise of at least social and economic stability he trusted with optimistic naivete—such more sinister forms were perhaps, so he worried, likelier than ever to manifest (as a sort of revenge for being born only to be smashed by unjust suffering before obliteration) given the waning courage to find gratitude in the suffering; given the mounting weariness in which, with the career wrecked by the kangaroo-court excesses of the 2016-2022 safe-space hysteria and the interpersonal skills atrophied by the resultant isolation, there seemed so little to lose and yet, with the diminished mobility and the chronic pains of sleepless aging, so much to gain.

The worry, although his haters would use it against him if they ever had access to behind his skull, was a good sign—just like they say that crazy people do not worry if they are crazy. He did not want to be that person. It was not just for her sake, that he loved her. It was for himself. He had done regrettable things in the past. And, yes, they did approach the level of kicking the girl out of the car. But he always circled right back, telling her to get back in and that he was sorry. If he tried to let this girl go and she seemed okay with it, the truth of the matter would be much less dramatic. Ugly for his age and unattractive to her wants, his tendency was not to kill but—judging by the past—to go sad-boy emo to manipulate her with guilt. Weathered like a good cast iron, though, it was unlikely, despite his love for her in particular, that he would engage in such performance. Yes, he would likely still be sad-boy emo (some grooves have been carved too deep over too much time to get out of). But it would be in private. And it would be much closer to Hollywood’s tub of ice cream on the couch than what people might find—and use against him—in his writing.

More than most other fruiting bodies, he could dream himself down into the mycelium network in mainlined detail. There is no denying that. And he could dredge it up in literature to remind us all who we are, what we are capable of. Lacking due respect for the risk-taking heart (for that nomadic part of us that, wanting what it wants, kicks at the boxes of the controlling mind), lacking due respect for the fact that we are all slated for obliteration (after a trembling blink of not even knowing why the hell we are here), so many would hate their love—to say nothing of envy, a much harder emotion for them to face. So many would ban it a priori, without considering the nuances of the case at hand. But take the most intense of these haters, those who considered him an absolute monster. He could dredge up images, write out scenes, worse than they could ever imagine—where, instead of kicking her out of the car, he watches his own hands erase the most important counterbalance to the age gap: the contagious optimism of childhood that had promised a man of shadows a second life.

“What happened to love, huh?” Ptoo! “Cry on that.” Ghrrhkkhh, huck. “Open that mouth.” Ptkhk. “Lucky I ain’t have a couple of my boys come help me run that nigglet-ass through.” Ptoo. “Look at me when I spit at you.” Ptoo. “Ooh, greasy now, huh? Ain’t sayin shit now. Mmm—real fuckin greasy.” Ptoo! “Claw my hand one more fuckin time!” Splack! “What happened to ‘Slap me. I like it when you slap me’?” Thwk. “Thought you liked that?” Thwk. “Yeah. Uh uh uh uh. Matter a fact, mmhh—yeah give it to me. I want it all. Give it to me. Spread that shit open or I’ll rip it the fuck open. Uh. Give it to me. Mmh. Told you, bitch.” Splack! “Wanna see that mouth bleed.” Splack! “That nose too.” Splack! “Oh fuck yeah.” Schlp-schlp-schlp-schlp. “Pissin up my car again? Bet your ass still piss the bed. How a little kid gonna fuckin be a whore?” Schlp-schlp-schlp-schlp. “My fuckin God!” Schlp-schlp-schlp-schlp. “Oh, you limp now? Look at yourself: purple ass Whoopie-looking monkey.” Splack! “Fuckin piss all over me but ain’t saying shit? Wake the fuck up! Ptoo!” SPLACK! “Act like she ain’t never been choked the fuck out before. Give me a break.” SPLACK! “You know how to get a motherfucker going, huh? Uh uh uh uh. Ghetto fuckin cum dump! Get this bendy when your deadbeat dad ran this shit through? Huh?” SPLACK! “No little girl this open unless they nasty. In and out.” Prfft, fwt. “This that nasty honey.” Frt, frt, frt. “Oh we playin dead now? That ain’t stopping shit. Hear me?” Thwk, THWK, SPLACK! “Uh uh uh uh. Bitch look at you, gorilla-eyed monkey. Wake the fuck up!” SPLACK! “What the—? Shittin too?! Really—really, bitch? You a real pig, huh. Look at it! Face right in there, mmh—like a dog. Uh uh uh uh uh. Act like a dog get treated like a dog. Hear me?” Thmp! “Keep playing.” Thmp! “Where your teeth? Go get them teeth!” Thmp! “Keep playing. Ain’t stopping shit. Uh uh uh uh uh. Ain’t stopping nothin’. Uh uh uh uh uh uh. Ain’t stopping nothin!” SPLACK! “Here we go. Uh-uh-uh-uh Oh fuck yeah, all up in that baby pussy.” Schlp-schlp-schlp-schlp. “All me up that nigglet cunt.” Thmp!

But that ability to face the darkness—the darkness that has people pull their dearest loved ones under water in order not to drown; the darkness that has people knowingly destroying a shared resource, hoarding during a pandemic, because they fear that someone else will take it—only adds to his safety. The positive of his literary devotion to exploring the underground darkness from which all life springs—and, in turn, to confronting and even befriending his own capacity to terrorize—was that, in his life beyond pen and paper, he was less likely to be puppeteered by the shadow. It meant he posed less of a menacing threat than all but the most pure and naive people, those too-guileless-to-be-real archetypes whose manipulable innocence to social maneuvering and petty jealousies sheltered them from the vanity and malice and ulterior motives that make humans especially dangerous among Earth’s creatures: Percival of Arthurian legend, Kimmy Schmidt of “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in Twin. By writing about the darkest parts of the human condition not only does he purge extreme emotions in the controlled environment (dark energy exploding onto the pro-social page rather than onto flesh-and-blood poontang), he also builds a detailed map of his psyche. He can recognize, with this map in hand, the early warning signs of envy, rage, or selfishness. He becomes harder to “puppeteer” because he knows exactly which strings the shadow tries to pull. By exploring the most heinous of antisocial impulses he forces himself to confront—not too dissimilar to “scared straight” programs—the destiructive and pathetic consequences of those impulses. The forbidden allure—that which explains why the burqua is actually an evolutionary sound strategy to boost impregnation—gets entirely stripped. Instead of taking the path of the repressor (pretending the basement is empty at greater risak of the beast down there breaks through the floorboards), he has studied the beast. He knows its patterns. He knows what to feed it. And he also knows the importance of locking the basement door and checking the floorboards for weak spots. Exposure and integration are more effective than repression and denial.

The are negative sides to his literary devotion, of course. Aside from drawing career-ruinous hate (“What sicko fuck would write this shit!”) from the very people who—given their repression of the Moloch within, the belief that they are all good (and it is others who are bad) blinding them to Moloch’s rising—were the real ones to watch out for (the old anti-gay-preacher-caught-banging-all-these-methed-out-boys trope, the old small-town-family-guy-turned-Auschwitz-skull-rapist trope), there was a negative with much less fireworks. In his life beyond the brain it not only made him an eggshell-walker (hypervigilent, too prone to say “Sorry,” as if in fear of waking some hulking monster), it also made him too quick to assume the worst even when doing so got in the way of his own happiness—like with the Halloween candy or like how, throughout high school and college, he would explain away all but the most autistic-friendly signs of overt flirtation (“They just want to get with my friend,” “They just want help on the paper”) or like how, in the case at hand, he figured her reaction to the word meant she probably spent her childhood getting reamed out.

A good enough tell, not necessarily that she was a virgin but definitely that the paternalistic ravages he imagined were false, would have been the hymenal webwork of her splay. That, coupled with all her reassurances mixing motherly aplomb with princess devotion (“Yeah nigga, I am someone’s baby—and yo ass betta know whose by now!”), gave him little excuse. But being so caught up in his head, although in many ways a blessing for his professional calling, could also be his curse. He might have been quicker to appreciate other interpretive possibilities had he been more open to reality beyond his assumptions and expectations, assumptions and expectations rooted in a tangle of personal insecurities and stereotypes blocking him from case-by-case judgment. Perhaps some fly on the dashboard—present like a Tinkerbell guardian fluttering to his ear—would have opened him much sooner to the possibility that the word was the final sign of the astral alignment whose case she—the Scorpio to his Taurus—had always shown eagerness to build (and for which he, finding it easy in his love to hold back eye-rolls, taught her the word “kismet”).

He had a history of needing a third presence to help him accept the obvious in time, to help him not let his intrusive doubts blind him to positive news. Were it not for his college roommate, for instance, he would not have seen the flirtations of his would-be wife as what they were. It is easy to look at his writing and see a sinister soul, violent. Just as in the case of many who listen to death metal, though, the opposite is true: he is a gentle sensitive soul—a fact expected given his poetic vocation and perhaps even relevant to his nymphet attraction.

Luckily his new love was also his fairy of encouragement, holding him down even if it meant holding up a rude mirror (“Why you say ‘sorry’ so much?”) or just smacking him upside the head with the autistic-friendly overkill she knew he needed—his good little girl and yet, if only through quiet cunning, his nurturing guide. Luckily she did not need to hear the fatherly advice that the well-meaning coward in him felt she needed at the expense of his seed: “Have the bravery to face the consequences for not following stupid rules.”

She put their song on low: “♩ When I was led to you, / I knew you were the one for me ♩” Letting it play long enough to reorient his mind, she asked the best-of-both-worlds question that broke the silence. She voiced it with recessive slang, with we-need-to-talk gravity—plunging him even deeper into the situation he has dedicated his adult life to avoiding.

“You ever heard of ‘DDLG’?”

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