ribcage456
It was a delicate pharmaceutical cocktail that kept Everett logging on to meetings with a smile and a shaky thumbs-up, freeing the other hand to type out messages which would populate on a second monitor:
>:-o
=D
o_O
(_!_)
He had read about these digital hieroglyphics once in a textbook and was thrilled that user Ribcage456 was also fluent. Ribcage456 had been encouraging him to do kinky stuff while on the clock. Today’s challenge was jerking off during a meeting.
RIBCAGE456: Ur 8==D can be off camera but ur camera has to be on while u do it 3:02PM
CUBICLE2TRADE: U r crazyy ;P 3:04PM
His days had come to center around these erotic exchanges; flesh exposed under a wiry microcosm. They hadn’t actually shared photos—a safety measure implemented by the chatroom after a series of lawsuits—which somehow made it feel more intimate; no proof, only trust that each was fulfilling the other’s naughty requests. Soon they were corresponding almost daily. Everett could feel his fixation swelling into obsession, an infatuation so flagrant that despite never mentioning it aloud, he was certain his roommates, his government appointed analyst, even his boss could see it growing in real-time, like a pimple, or a drinking problem. “Don’t gather firewood if you have no flint,” his analyst would often repeat. So what! He heard trumpets, his cock pulsed, and he replied immediately.
C2T: Well I did it 5:17PM
RC456: Mmm did ur coworkers notice? 5:41PM
C2T: No but they noticed me getting flushed and sweaty 5:42PM
RC456: Thats so hot. what did u think about? 5:49PM
C2T: U know what I thought about 5:51PM
RC456: Haha but I want you to say it 5:53PM
C2T: (>.<) 5:54PM
The afterglow of their flirtation sustained him through coworker happy hour, mandated each quarter, where everyone insisted on discussing banal work assignments and their relationships with known girls and boys, orderly professional types who no doubt never hear trumpets.
Everett indulged the small-talk, his cellphone burning in a hole in his pocket as newcomers crowded the bar. Waitresses weaved between the suits like racehorses. Excusing himself, he sought to reach out over radio waves and hold Ribcage456’s hand, hiding in the restroom to send messages, although Ribcage456 rarely responded after 8PM. Work commitments, etcetera. He was a go-go dancer at some nightclub in the redlight district, but whenever pressed to divulge its name, or his own, Ribcage456 would pivot the conversation to something vulgar, more abstract.
C2T: Heyy 6:31PM
C2T: R u already at work? 6:48PM
A busty server squeezed past Everett and his coworker, Carl, who stuck out his tongue and wiggled his belly. One could usually count on Carl for an adventure, so Everett pulled him aside to give him the rundown on Ribcage456, how they’d been messaging for months, how this was love. Carl didn’t flinch. He even nodded a few times, which Everett interpreted as an endorsement. They ordered shots, another round, and soon found themselves on the street, drunk enough to believe the neon of the business district looked beautiful.
They got a cab. Carl took chunky key bumps in the backseat. The dime bag was a gift from a fat chick—Carl’s words—the night before. The illicit nature of their quest exhilarated them both. Everett asked the driver to roll down the windows, the trumpets were sounding again.
Outside of the first club, panic seized him. What if Ribcage456 didn’t find this spontaneous manhunt endearing? And how would they recognize each other? We’ll just know, Everett had initially told Carl. Swaying on the curb in front of the bouncer, that seemed fanciful. He accepted some of Carl’s cocaine for courage.
The venue was built around a long hallway lined with a series of booths which, upon tapping phone-wallets for entry, the curtains would part and display horny tableaux of the past: a school teacher stretching a rubber form of contraception over a banana, a perky-assed military officer distributing a vaccine that turned out to just be a dildo, that sort of thing. Carl found it all hysterical, but his coworker’s gaze remained serious, fixed on the performers posing and flexing, wondering which, if any, could be Ribcage456.
Everett walked from room to room, in and out of dirty scenes set behind glass where onlookers leered and paired off. Pimpled and liver-spotted, ragged and suited, the place was undoubtedly democratic. Patrons were entangled with their eyes shut, lips parted in silent screams—the dim lighting gave everything a melancholic tinge. Everett saw nothing of his virtual lover in the pile up of limbs and orifices.
He regained consciousness on a loveseat in the hall. Someone was wiping his forehead with a damp rag. Gardenias? Their perfume mingled with the stale smell of velvet cushions that had been soiled and sanitized on repeat.
“What did you take? You’re very sweaty.”
His medic wore jade lipstick with a pale coat of foundation that cracked like a fresco. Protruding from (t)he(i)r temple was what looked like a nipple surrounded by an areola with little bumps bristling under several layers of makeup.
Everett stammered, “I was looking for a dancer.”
The woman gave him a knowing look before snaking a hand slowly up his thigh, her acrylic fingers coiling around his supposed manhood. As she rubbed him through his trousers, he could think only of Ribcage456 and their one-sided fidelity which had kept him celibate since their first encounter in the chatroom a few months prior.
The music, although quieter in the corridor, still made the wooden sofa feet vibrate. He pushed the madam away. She shrugged and vanished into the club’s trembling walls. He was alone for the first time in hours. He sent Ribcage456 more messages, all of which remained unread.
C2T: With a friend at this techno/sex club - maybe its where u dance? 9:06PM
C2T: Lmk 10:03PM
C2T: Cmon :[ 10:55PM
Don’t gather firewood if you have no flint. Oh man, the tears were coming. A series of his romantic failures looped in his mind, a lifetime of discouraging lovemaking that ended with pitiful shoulder squeezes and kisses on the cheek. He wasn’t an idiot. He recognized the patterns. He’d loved men online before, but he wasn’t ready to abandon hope that this would end differently. This belief sustained him when the loneliness bore down, hour after hour in front of a screen in the name of a paycheck to afford a colorless life, the faith that something else might happen. He walked towards the loud music.
The end of the hallway spilled into a large room flanked by two bars with countertops that fanned out on either end to accommodate poles and cheap stage strobes. Here everyone kept their clothes on except the dancers. He scanned the crowd until a warmth spread through his body, beginning at the base of his skull, some form of horny infrared. Atop the bar danced a thin man in beauty store tights with a collapsed chest and a protruding rib. Trumpets! Beneath Ribcage456 was Carl, wrapped up on a barstool with a girl dressed similarly.
Noticing Everett’s gawking, Ribcage456 twisted towards him. Paralyzed by the potential manifestation of so many fantasies, all Everett could think to say was, “I am Cubicle2Trade.” The dancing man kept gyrating. Figuring he couldn’t hear him over the raucous, Everett cleared his throat and repeated, “I am Cubicle2Trade!”
The woman with Carl giggled. The dancer’s movement slowed, his eyes held an emotion Everett struggled to place. Contempt, indifference, or worse, pity for maybe this guy wasn’t Ribcage456 at all but someone who didn’t spend hours in online chartrooms, and Everett was another loser, stupid and broken, shouting at a bar.
The rest of the night was conveyed to him the next day in the hospital.
In a fit, he’d taken too much of Carl’s cocaine, which turned out to not be entirely cocaine, and at some point he found his way to the club’s utility closet where he took a hammer from the shelf and bashed the drywall and then his own face. The commotion was drowned out by the music, well above the legal decibel limit, his government appointed analyst, who was sitting at his bedside with a clipboard, explained. So Everett laid unconscious and unfound on the floor much longer than he ought to have. Very negligent on the club’s part, his analyst determined. Then he chewed Everett out for what felt like hours, about men and the internet and self-worth. Tears came again, wetting the bandages which covered his face and jaw. A nurse fiddled with his morphine drip.
When his counselor left the room, Everett took deep breaths, as he’d been taught, as if through an invisible straw, to ease his sobbing. The nurse sat beside him.
A male nurse.
Handsome, too, in the way that anyone who is helpful is handsome. He placed a hand on Everett’s chest, his touch unambiguous. Then he slid his hand lower. The tears stopped. :]
Jacob Seferian lives in Texas. His fiction and poetry have appeared in several magazines, journals, and anthologies, both online and in print.