[Reader discretion advised: This story contains mature themes, explicit language and moments of raw introspection that some may find unsettling.]

That morning (the morning that this short story begins), I woke up at 5:30 in the morning, masturbated (which I won’t describe, because you know what it entailed, and anyone else who happens to read this and has ever looked at the internet for thirty seconds probably knows what a woman looks like when she masturbates), smoked some pot, fell back asleep. I put out the joint before I dozed off again, because I’m a responsible apartment-mate. Of course, eventually I woke up again. I drank some coffee and ate a cereal bar. I searched the web for your obituary, but I didn’t find it. I was mostly relieved, not disappointed. But if I found your obituary, that would explain why you’ve abandoned me, that it wasn’t my fault, and it wasn’t your fault, either. I’m always glad when I don’t find your obituary, but if I did find your obituary, it would have its upside. 

While I drank coffee and ate a cereal bar, I watched I Dream of Jeannie. I’d never seen it before. I don’t dabble in my own nostalgia, Hannah Montana, Zack & Cody and whatnot; I prefer to dabble in someone else’s nostalgia, especially art that was supposed to be disposable, flyers for restaurants that closed before I was born, matchbooks from 1923 Germany, comic books from the 1970s that never really caught on and almost no one remembers, Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth. I like the smell of paperback books from the 1970s that are disintegrating from acid in the paper, and I like the book even better if I can’t find any information about it on the internet. 

No one my age knows anything about I Dream of Jeannie, which concerns an astronaut who, after crash-landing on a deserted island, finds a bottle that holds captive a beautiful female genie. The genie, named Jeannie, is a petite blonde with big blue eyes, heavy mascara, a high ponytail and a pink harem outfit that leaves her midriff bare, but never her bellybutton. When she wants to make something magical happen, she crosses her arms in front of her chest and she blinks. She’s been in the bottle for like just over two thousand years (she was imprisoned by the Blue Djinn in 64 BC). I can’t even imagine. All of that solitude and isolation must have made her go completely murderously insane. She must really hate men after one kidnapped her and imprisoned her by herself for two thousand and one years with no one to talk to and nothing to read. She must want revenge on every man and any man she comes across, that’s what I think, especially based on what happens next. 

Tony releases her from the bottle, and then she sadistically tortures him and, over numerous years, systematically destroys his life. The astronaut, Tony, is clean-cut and square-jawed, with dark brown hair slicked to the side and the trim, polished look of a mid-1960s leading man, but his manic eyes suggest something phobic underneath. 

The episode I watched was the second episode of the first season. I really had never seen anything like it before in my life. 

I had not put my contacts in yet, and I didn’t know where my glasses were, so I just sat on the couch and stared at the slightly blurry screen. The show was set in Florida, with some wanderings into ancient Persia, and the images that reached my brain — my smudgy eyesight, plus my imagination filling in the gaps — were extravagantly beautiful, though I think the beauty was mostly invented by my visual cortex, trying to make sense of what I couldn’t see, showing me not what was there, but what ought to have been there. So what I saw was like the visual interpretation of a Salman Rushdie novel, a Raoul Walsh film, and it’s the way I remember it. 

At the beginning of the episode, in the world of Cocoa Beach, a sunlit blur of turquoise skies and seas, palm fronds that shade sand powdered from crushed pearls, the astronaut casually mentions to Jeannie that he wishes he had a swimming pool. Jeannie summons a swimming pool, he falls into it, treading water, he tells her to get rid of it, she obliges without giving him a chance to get out of the pool, and so he’s stuck up to his neck in cement. She must have known that this would happen, she did it on purpose to hurt him, displaced vengeance, if she cannot avenge herself against the Blue Djinn, she will vent her rage against some other man. I thought it would probably be really hard for Tony to breathe, stuck in cement like that. She wanted to hurt him, and when she sees him in pain, she laughs and laughs with this disingenuous bell-like laugh, an agitated manic faux cheerfulness, as though trapping him in cement up to his neck so that he can’t breathe was the kind of silly and hilarious mistake anyone could make. It would probably be terrifying, crushed in cement. It made me uncomfortable just looking at that. Then Tony’s friend Roger walks into the house and sees Tony stuck up to his neck in cement. Jeannie has to erase Roger’s brain to make him forget what he saw. 

I wondered: Could Jeannie just surgically erase that one thing? Like, Roger would remember everything that ever happened to him other than seeing Tony stuck in cement up to his neck. Would she need to understand the brain to make the spell work? I mean, would she just think that Roger should forget this one thing, is the thought in a genie’s mind enough to make something complex happen, or would she need to understand neurology and do something to Roger’s specific brain cells that hold that particular memory? I was pretty sure that Jeanie didn’t know in detail how the human brain works, since she’d been stuck in a bottle for a few millennia while all those discoveries were being made, and I figured that Roger would never be the same again, he would be kind of lobotomized, there would always be all these things that he would never be able to remember.

Later that day, Jeannie tells Tony that when she was at the market, someone struck her. 

“Nobody’s going to hit you or any other woman while I’m around,” Tony says. “Take me to him.” 

She takes him to a marketplace in ancient Persia, two thousand years in the past; the air is thick with saffron, pomegranate and woodsmoke, bronze lamps swing from cedar beams and cast pools of amber light on stalls piled with turquoise beads, hammered silver and ripe figs. Merchants shout to passing customers, and their words tumble over each other, and a falcon tilts its head quizzically at the time-displaced astronaut. Ali the Giant, “killer of many giant men,” is the man who struck Jeannie, millennia ago, and when he sees her, he grabs her again, he tries to kidnap her. Tony ineffectually fights him, arms swinging, fists hitting air. Ollie threatens to break Tony’s neck. Jeannie disappears without a trace. Tony is on his own, no genie to help him.

A hilarious chase through the marketplace ensues, Tony scrambling, Ali gaining, to the tune of some old jazzy music, through pyramids of spice sacks and winding alleys hung with carpets, till Tony climbs over an adobe wall and lands in the middle of a slave market in a wide, dusty square ringed by wooden platforms and flapping awnings dyed indigo and rust. Men in long robes bargain in low, urgent voices while women in veils glance sidelong at the spectacle. A bearded, broad-shouldered slave trader seizes Tony by the arm as soon as he hits the ground, clucks at his strange clothes and hurls him onto the auction block, calling out for bids in a booming baritone. 

“This one you can harness to the plow and spare the oxen!” cries the auctioneer.

“One shekel!” someone shouts from the crowd. 

“One shekel?” Tony exclaims in outrage, upon hearing the opening bid. “I am a college graduate!” 

For a pittance, the bidder buys Tony. In a prison cell, walls moist with centuries-old tears, Tony sits on the stone floor. A single beam of light, narrow as a blade, slices down from a high window, dust motes drift through the light like souls. Across from him, an old man with a long beard munches on two gleaming goat eyes, round and wet as polished onyx, which glisten in a shallow dish. The old man smiles through a map of wrinkles, and he tells Tony that this is a delicacy reserved for his birthday.

“They have an expert here,” the old man adds, “whose only task is thinking of new ways to cause exquisite pain.” 

A guard removes Tony from the cell and delivers him to the boudoir of Princess Fatim to be her sex-slave. She is a woman in a frilly rosewater-colored brassiere, fabric edged in gold thread that catches the lamplight like trapped sun. Her boudoir is a perfumed labyrinth of excess, tendrils of ocher smoke, infinity-mirrored walls that multiply her figure into an army of enchantresses. Princess Fatim leans back and, with the imperiousness of someone who has never been refused, commands Tony to feed her a single grape. When he declines, the air tenses; a burly guard steps forward, his forearms muscled from desert labor, and in one merciless gesture rips away Tony’s shirt before laying the whip across his back till he screams, bleeding.

Ali arrives; Princess Fatim points to Tony and shrieks, “He needs to be tamed! See to it!” Tony, terrified, those frightened, manic, phobic eyes wide, cries out desperately for Jeannie’s help, but still she doesn’t arrive. His genie has abandoned him to his fate. 

In a torture cell, Ali chains Tony to the wall; his torn, raggedy shirt flutters. The air is thick with the metallic tang of old blood. Ali heats a poker till its tip glows the color of sunset. He holds it in front of Tony’s face so that he can feel the heat across his skin. 

“Think about it,” Ali leers. “It’s almost ready.“ 

You see? He’s going to sodomize Tony with a hot poker! Like what happened to Piers Gaveston! Or Edward II. (Don’t pretend you have never heard of Piers Gaveston or Edward II. I would expect that you have.) I think that is really the only thing that torturers ever did with hot pokers, but maybe I’m just uneducated on that kind of thing. 

Luckily, Jeannie arrives. Bad news! She won’t save Tony unless he agrees to marry her, and she teleports him to an engagement party in her family’s home. The floor is a mosaic of turquoise and lapis tiles painted with vines that creep toward one another across the grout, the walls are swaddled with silk hangings of hunters and lovers and winged horses. A table groans with food, guests lounge in feathered turbans and brocade robes. A reed flute sighs, off camera. 

Jeannie’s parents are Jewish, and they are so happy to meet their future son-in-law! The party is extravagant and everyone is friendly and welcoming, but Tony doesn’t feel as though he should be prostituted like this. He’s attracted to Jeannie, as any man would be, he wants to touch her tits, but he doesn’t want to marry someone so crazy, he doesn’t want to wake up in the middle of the night bleeding, with his penis cut off and his heart on the bedside table. He tells Jeannie he won’t marry her, so she returns him to the torture chamber, where he will die in pain unless he relents.

“Do you know what you’re doing to me?” Tony pleads. “Ali is waiting for me with a hot iron. Your father is ready to have me beheaded, and I’m about to miss a very important conference in Cocoa Beach.” 

She finally agrees to return him to Cocoa Beach. I think she would prefer to have him alive to torture some more, rather than let him die and deprive her of her misandric vengeance. At home, Roger tells him that he’s going to set Tony up with a woman who was “Miss Galaxy.” When he goes out on the date, as soon as he leaves the house, Jeannie blinks away his clothes, then locks the door. He’s locked out naked, screaming Jeannie’s name, and everyone laughs at him. Miss Galaxy stands there, looking at the naked astronaut, laughing at him. You know, I couldn’t really see it clearly; it looked to me through my myopic blur as though Tony was fully naked, but I guess he probably had a little towel, the censors would have demanded it in 1965. 

But I think in the true “reality” of the “narrative,” Jeannie locked him out naked without a towel, and Miss Galaxy laughed at his penis. The show was made by Sydney Sheldon, after all, who later became a bestselling dirty book writer where women always used sex as a weapon. I Dream of Jeanie was on NBC in 1965, and they couldn’t show what “really” happened in the “reality” of the Jeannie-verse, so viewers got a bowdlerized version. But I know what really happened, my blurry eyes could see reality through the obfuscation. 

That episode of I Dream of Jeanie was really sadomasochistic and intense, Jeannie laughed and laughed with her terrifying little jingling twinkling laugh while she tortured and tortured and tortured Tony till his skin was literally shredded and bleeding, and when it was all over he came back for more and more and more, he let her hug him and touch his naked back, which was all bloody from the whipping, and he told her that he thought she was a wonderful girl. He hugged her because he was grateful when she finally made the pain and terror stop, which was all her fault in the first place. He loved the torturer for making the torture stop. I thought it really upset me, but I guess I wasn’t as upset as all that, because I fell right asleep again, on the couch, in front of the Roku. 

Do you see what my life had become before I received the text message that set everything in motion? Whom do I blame for that, for the sorry state of my life, for my placeholder life? 

I blame you. What kind of a man abandons a friend the way you have done? So I check the internet every day for your obituary, and I don’t find it, and so you must be alive. My husband has also disappeared, but somehow your abandonment hurts me more. 

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THE SUN rose up over the bridge and my phone farted, and I guess I was ready to wake up, because I woke up. 

Hey! It’s Alden! 

At first, I ignored the text, it seemed like one of those faux-familiar fakes from prisoners in Burma. But then it continued with more messages, and a degree of sincerity that I didn’t think could be faked.

The sender seemed to know me awfully well, but I was quite sure I didn’t know him at all. 

So of course, I met him for coffee, that afternoon, what the heck? He seemed to think he knew me, and from everything he said during the coffee, there in the fucking coffee place, he not only knew me awfully well, but also, he and I were in love. He was a couple of years younger than me, he had painterly dirty-blond hair and a kind of lithe, curated and intentional gorgeousness layered with a veneer of performative ease that nearly tilted the room. 

He knew everything, stuff about my life, my parents, my marriage (I never talk about that shitshow, as you know), things that I remember and know well. Not just my birthday and where I’d gone to high school, but inside jokes. He knew that I have a scar on my thigh. (I fell off my bike when I was nine. Into a thorn bush!) He knew the way I order Thai food. (I hadn’t realized that I have a “way” of ordering Thai food, but as he described it, I realized that he was right.) He knew the name of my first cat, the time I broke down crying in public. He knew the playlist I listen to when I cannot go to sleep. 

And he also claimed to remember a lot of things that had never happened, him-and-me things, memories of his life with me, the bar where we first met, the movie we saw on our first date, a jazz club we went to in the city, all kinds of shit that I didn’t remember at all, because they had never happened. He told me we’d met in a bar on Caldrith Slip, that we’d danced to a song I claimed to hate. He told me the exact drink I had the night we were together for the first time, and how I’d said something dumb about the moon being “too obvious.” He remembered me quoting Sontag in the dark and telling him not to fall in love with me because I had no real self. I never said that to him (of course, since I had never met him) or to anyone, but it is something that I might have said to someone. It is something I believe, come to think of it! He remembered the way I sighed when we were together for the first time. So things had happened between him and me, except that they were things that had never happened. 

So it was only fair and right that I would invite him back to my place and let him do it to me like three times. 

I know that you’ve warned me about this kind of thing, but again, where are you? You can’t leave me alone for this long and expect me still to follow all of your instructions for living a good and safe life. If you want to control me, you need to text me every once in a while. 

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HIS NAME, Alden, was kind of a weird name. If his name was “Tom” or “Steve,” I might have wavered in my certainty that we had never met. I mean, I slept with a lot of guys named Tom, and a bunch of guys named Steve. So if a guy named Tom or Steve had shown up and insisted that we’d had some kind of hot thing going on at some point, I would probably have believed it. But I would have remembered an “Alden.”

You know what fucking is like. Do I need to describe it? Alden was rather spectacular, so I will just say that it was like being taken hostage, and that he didn’t blink once. 

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HE GOT UP out of bed, naked, and he went into the kitchen, and then into the living room, and finally he appeared with a bottle of vodka and two shot glasses. “Don’t you have to work?” I asked, and he said no, and so I said OK, and so he crawled naked back into bed with me and we drank vodka straight from the bottle and ignored the shot glasses. If you drink vodka from a shot glass in bed, you’ll spill vodka all over the bed. 

In bed, he talked a lot about the first time we were intimate, he remembered that in great detail and he reallywanted to reminisce, and he talked about his favorite parts of what was apparently a marathon fucking session. When he asked me what I remembered most, I said, “Yeah, same as you, same thing. That was awesome, that first time.” By now, I really could not tell him that I didn’t know him, because I felt like I was impersonating someone named Kalyee, that I was the one who wasn’t real, I was the fraud. 

He fell asleep really briefly and I checked his wallet, and I got his full name, and also some other stuff, his ss# and driver’s license, which I photo’d on my phone, and then I crawled back into bed and put my arms around him and fondled his balls, gently. 

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HE GOT DRESSED and kissed me goodbye and headed out; he passed Meya, one of my roommates, in the hallway, and he said, “You must be Meya!” and excitedly told her that he was Alden, as though that should really mean something to her, as though I had probably told her all about him, about how much I love him. 

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ONCE HE LEFT, I googled him, and sure enough, there he was, a real person. On Facebook, under relationship status, it said, “In a relationship” and when I clicked through to see who he was in a relationship with, there I was, my big stupid face. 

The only thing is, I left FB and social media some years ago, after that experience that you know all about, which we don’t need to talk about now. 

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FROM ALDEN’S FACEBOOK PAGE, I tried to click the picture of my big stupid face, but when I did, I just kept getting a message that the page didn’t exist. So I walked across the hallway and asked Meya to try it. On her phone, she pulled up Alden’s Facebook relationship status page and clicked my big stupid face, which led me into my old, abandoned Facebook page. It wasn’t fake, this was my actual Facebook account, the one I had turned off after that experience you know all about. I had turned it off, but I had never deleted the account. Somehow “I” had reactivated my page and picked up right where “I” had left off. And then somehow blocked my IP address from accessing it, so I would not be able to see what was going on. Whoever had stolen the Kalyee Srithnam page knew what she was doing! 

And “I” had been posting. A lot. Using more exclamation points and heart emojis than I really would ever use, like I’d been replaced by someone grateful to be alive, maybe even someone likable, with a whole new life, so much more filled with love and friendship than my real one.

This new life had been going on for a while now. There were posts in which “Kalyee” talked about things I had really done, but I hadn’t written the posts, and there were even photographs of me doing things I’d really done, but I didn’t recognize the photos, and somehow the images felt wrong, like reenactments. Like last summer, I went to Coney Island with Tasha and ate a chili dog by the Boardwalk, and there was a photo of me on my Facebook page, as though Tasha had taken a picture of me, but it was a photo I had never seen before, and there was something wrong about it, something that felt like someone had dreamed it, like someone had dreamed something that I really did. 

There were dozens of photos, me at parties, at parks, smiling into cameras, arms around people. Apparently, I have six hundred and fifty-three friends. Most of them, I didn’t recognize their names. Under one of my posts, someone I didn’t know had written, I love your sense of humor! It was great seeing you on Thursday! and someone else I didn’t know wrote, Will you be at Nullvoid Friday night! to which “Kalyee” replied, I wouldn’t miss it! See you there! ? There was a picture of me surrounded by like a dozen friends, and my caption was, Hanging with my fave humans at Pensione della Bellezza restaurant. We all had big Facebook smiles. You know those big Facebook smiles? There were still a bunch of real friends from my real life who were still connected to me through the account from before I’d turned it off a few years ago, and they said stuff like, It’s so nice to see how you’ve turned your life around! and I’m so glad that you’re finally happy! 

That kind of bothered me. “Turned your life around”? 

My “friends” thought that this other me was somehow better than the “me” they knew. She had turned her life around from the train-wreck/dumpster fire that is my actual life, and which my “friends” didn’t approve of. I hated how much that got to me. My “friends” were so happy for me, so happy that I wasn’t me anymore. Fucking “friends.” 

For good measure, I looked at Instagram and TikTok on Meya’s phone, and they were back in action too, though my phone and computer and iPad all showed them as inactive. 

“My” social media had lots of sexy pictures of me and Alden, too. There were a lot of pictures on Instagram where I was partly unclothed and Alden wasn’t, like this whole series where we’re on the beach, and I’m in a thong bikini, one photo is even an over-the-shoulder shot with my naked butt-cheeks exposed fetchingly, and in all the photos Alden is wearing jeans and a t-shirt. In another photo, we’re in the kitchen drinking coffee and I’m in a bra and pink boxers and Alden is wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Boy, I sure seemed to be really sexy, and Alden and I sure seemed to be in love, if social media were to be believed. But also, sexy photos of me with other dudes, and women too, though mostly guys. 

Under my relationship status on FB, it said “In an open relationship”, although it tagged Alden. 

The pictures looked like me, pretty much, but also not like me at all. My eyes were a little glassy in all the pictures. They lacked that “spark,” that certain je ne sais quwhat? that you always said was the best thing about me (back when you were still talking to me and calling me and [whatever] still alive or whatever), that little something in my eyes. The photos didn’t have that. And I looked closer, and maybe my skin was a little too smooth in all the photos, like they had been retouched. I would never retouch a photo just to post it on Instagram. 

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I’VE BEEN A HERMIT, more than a little bit, as you know, because of the things that you and I have spent far too much time talking about, and then that other thing that I wrote you about, that maybe you know about if you opened the message. I still volunteer at the senior community, but I have not been nannying or dog-walking or much of anything else, I’ve been sleeping late and smoking pot in bed. I’m not really earning money, and I raised the rent to compensate, which pissed off my roommates, understandably, because, after all, they work, so why shouldn’t I work? I am a Democratic Socialist of the kind of more Trotskyite variety, and I voted for Mamdani in the primary, so raising the rent so that I don’t have to work doesn’t really align with my ideals. I promise I’ll stop doing that kind of capitalistic shit after the Revolution gets here. 

I really still go into the senior community only because I hope that if I’m old and someone visits me, she won’t abandon me all of sudden. Even though I hate people and if I were an old lady in a senior center, all I would really want is medicinal weed and some tongue now and then, the latter preferably from someone on the staff, but from an old guy if that’s all that’s available and willing.

Still, I go to the senior community to play chess against Arthur on Tuesdays, and we are pretty reasonably matched. I beat him 65 percent of the time, and about ten percent of our games end in a draw. I’d like to let him win every once in a while, because it makes him happy to win, but once, when I did let him win, he knew what I had done, and it pissed him off. He wants to win fair and square. So about 25 percent of the time he wins, fair and square. 

Arthur is a veteran, he was married for forty years till his wife died, he fought in a war, I don’t know which one because he doesn’t like to talk about it, and he has two sons somewhere else in America, but he’s always lived in New York City so he would never move to follow them, because, after all, they moved away, if they’d wanted him to live next door they would have just stayed, right? 

You can kind of see when you look at Arthur from a certain angle in just the right kind of light that maybe a long time ago he might have been a little handsome, which still means that he’s like not handsome at all, so that got me wondering whether someone who used to be handsome a long time ago is more handsome (or less unhandsome) than someone who was never handsome, because he knows what it’s like to be handsome and still carries himself that way, as though he were still handsome. 

Anyway, I don’t really talk much to Arthur, I just come over and we play chess and then I leave — if I beat him really quickly we play a second game, but if he puts up an actual fight, I leave after just one game and go home —, but you can get a sense of a person just by playing chess with him. 

Arthur calls me “Sport,” like he pretends it’s because he thinks he’s all Gatsby, but I think it’s really because he can’t remember my name; maybe when he sees me he doesn’t even remember that I’m the same person who came over last time to play chess, or even that anyone ever came over to play chess with him before. I know just a few things that make me seem smart, like, for example, epistemic logic, and usually I just get to impress people only once, the first time I meet them. But another reason I like Arthur is that every time I tell him the word for whataboutism in ancient Greek (it’s “antiparáthesis aschétos”), he is impressed all over again. So I’d go crazy if I didn’t have Arthur in my life for all kinds of reasons, even though he’s all fucked up and they don’t let him use the burners in his kitchen anymore. 

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SO THIS is where my life stood when Alden flew into my bed and then out of my bed. 

In a way, maybe he saved my life. 

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I FIGURED I should learn more about all of these places that “I” like to go, so I tried to find a Nullvoid club in New York City, but I could not. I could not find one anywhere in the world. Then I searched for the Pensione della Bellezza restaurant, and I found one in Bangladesh, but it didn’t look like the Pensione della Bellezza restaurant in the photos, and its name was translated into English. 

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A WEEK LATER, I had a drink with Rowan — you know that guy? I’ve mentioned him to you, but the two of you have never met. Rowan has soft brown curls, he always looks like he’s about to say something important, even when he isn’t, like someone who used to be obviously a little shy and then decided to pretend not to be. He’s the guy who introduced me to one of my clients, back when I walked dogs, back before I fell into this empty hole. Anyway, he always cheers me up, and this night he was cheering me up. Except that he’s grown a mustache. A mustache. I mean, what the fuck? I didn’t say anything about it. I wasn’t sure if he meant it for real, this mustache, or if it was supposed to be kind of a lark, ironic. Was he going to keep this mustache? He kept touching my hand, which was also new, but I ignored it, I don’t want to mess up a friendship with someone who cheers me up, since almost no one cheers me up these days, not even Arthur. 

So after a while, I told him the story about Alden, and about Nullvoid and Pensione della Bellezza restaurant, places where Alden and I always hung out that don’t really exist anywhere, and he laughed. “I know those fucking places,” he said. He pulled out his phone, opened an app, then opened an app inside of the first app (I didn’t know that such a thing existed), and within the second app he tapped in a search, and pretty quickly he found a picture of the nightclub, all polished and impossible elegance, with a ridiculous elegant sign out front that said Nullvoid. 

“It’s really very famous among a certain subset of a certain subset,” he said, laughing.

I just blinked, perplexed. 

He laughed again. 

“I think I know someone who can help you understand what’s going on,” he said. 

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SO HE TOOK ME to this kind of geeky place filled with geeky stuff, weird gadgets and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow ephemera next to Captain Scarlet ephemera and the like, and there was this guy there, his name was allegedly “Lag,” who was so self-assured in his geekiness, in his esoteric confidence, that he was almost sexy, and so almost sexy that he was genuinely sexy. Lag was, I think, thirty-two years old, but his mind was fifteen. 

The answer was really easy, Lag said that Nullvoid was this really famous nightclub within Virelia, which was like an exclusive hidden hole within another hole deep within this pretty well-known virtual reality app, and that Pensione della Bellezza was this really famous restaurant down the street from Nullvoid. Famous meaning: famous among people who live in Virelia. 

“Ah,” I said. “Virtual reality. Now I get it. There is no Nullvoid anywhere in the world. All of this is happening in a virtual world. All of it, these new friends, my relationship with Alden, everything.” 

He frowned and said, “I thought that was kind of obvious,” and I said, “Yeah, it’s obvious if you never go outside to walk a dog.” 

I don’t think Lag understood what I meant, but it made sense to me. Does it make sense to you? Do you know what I was getting at? 

“Virtual reality was a kind of niche thing during the pandemic,” I said. “When we couldn’t go outside, we couldn’t meet friends, it made sense to meet friends inside an artificial three-dimensional space. But now it is less than niche, it’s nothing. It’s failed. No one cares about it. Like, Tron.”

He shrugged. 

“It didn’t go away,” he said. “It’s just moved up a level. This is what always happens. You and I move into a neighborhood and make it cool, and then rich people take it over and make it exclusive. You and I are like, yeah that neighborhood sucks now. So Virelia is like when they just decided North Greenwood Heights was now called South Slope.”

“Well, that was before my time,” I said. “But I get what you are saying. You take something that sucks and rename it for fancy people, and now it’s exclusive.”

“Right, it’s like this place we used to go that is now called something else and we can’t even really go there anymore because it’s too expensive. Virelia has a hefty membership fee, and you need a ton of equipment, it’s not something you can join with a two-hundred-dollar headset. It’s exclusive now.”

“So why would anyone bother with this?” 

“Why do rich people do drugs?” he said. “It’s just better than life. When life cannot keep up with your dreams.”

“Do rich people still do drugs?” I asked, and he said they did drugs that I’d never heard of and couldn’t afford.

“Drugs are like South Slope,” he said. 

“And enough people know about this Virelia?”

“Sure,” he said. “It’s a city of the rich, so one rich guy introduces it to another one, and on and on. Like what I said, it’s the way one rich shit moves to Tribeca, and then they all move to Tribeca. And vacation in Iceland. There’s a massive tax rebate in the Big Beautiful Bill, a full refund. Some people even remote work from in there.”

“Wait,” I said, “so I could just go in for free? The BBB lets anyone could go in for free?”

“It’s not a handout to freeloaders, it’s not welfare. The rebate is available only to people making over a million a year, or with more than ten mill in liquid assets.”

“Why would they—”

“They didn’t want to pay for it themselves!” he said. “It’s a beta ecosystem integration pilot project, it subsidizes the U.S. oil and gas sector (because it needs a lot of power to run), the idea is that it’s the sort of thing government should be supporting. They cut like ten billion dollars from Medicare and Social Security’s budget to pay for Virelia.”

I thought about that. I didn’t get it, but that’s why I’m a scholar of ancient Greek, the Late Bronze Age Collapse and surface-level physics, with a smattering of epistemic logic, not an economist at the Cato Institute.

“Anyway, in addition to the millionaires and billionaires playgrounding in there, there are friends and family, and a jerry-built population of artificial intelligence personalities so real you don’t know which is which. Huge metropolises, tiny towns, vast nature preserves.”

“And I am in there somewhere?” I said. “Some version of me.”

“One way to find out,” Lag replied.

.

I’VE BEEN READING a lot of old shit, The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and especially! Gargantua and Pantagruel. Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Rabelais. Rabelais was a priest. You want to hear some Rabelais? 

He wrote, “There’s no need to wipe your ass, if you haven’t unloaded any shit. There can’t be any shit if you haven’t shat. So you’ve got to shit before you can wipe your ass. I wiped myself with a headband, with a pillow, with a nice cloth slipper, with a game bag, with a basket — but that was an awful way to wipe your ass! — and then with a hat. Let me emphasize that there are hats and hats: some are smooth and plain, some are furred, some have velvet, some have taffeta, and there are others with satin. Best of all are the furry ones, because they do the best job of cleaning off shit. Then I wiped myself with a hen, a rooster, a baby chick, with a calf’s skin, with a hare, a pigeon, a hawk, a lawyer’s leather briefcase, a big hooded cape, a cap and a falconer’s wristband. But, to make a long story shorter, it’s my solemn opinion that there is no ass wiper like a fluffy goose, if you keep its head between your legs. On my honor, this is the truth. Because you feel a miraculous voluptuousness in your asshole, as much from the soft smoothness of that goose down as from the good warm bird, and this is readily communicated right into your asshole and up to the upper intestines, all the way through to the heart and the brain.” 

So stew over that for a while. 

In Tristram Shandy, Sterne writes that some readers are uncomfortable “unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last.” And there is a lot of stuff I won’t talk about in this little story-slash-essay, most of it you already know and there is no reason for anyone else to know about it, because it is frankly fucking embarrassing. But I will tell thisstory from first to last. If this were a movie, right after Lag says, “One way to find out,” there would be a quick cut to me sprinting through some spectacular VR landscape. 

But that is not what happened in life. 

In life, I told Lag that I would think it over, I went home, I smoked some pot and ate some potato chips, and I watched H.R. Puffnstuf, another example of someone else’s nostalgia. But I sometimes find HRP illuminating, and thisepisode was illuminating.

You know which episode? It was “Magic Path,” the one where Witchiepoo destroys the path that leads off the island, and Jimmy and his magic flute are trapped forever. You know why this is important? Because it teaches children that there is no going back, that the past is the past. Always forward, never back. One day, you’re a happy little kid playing your flute, the next minute you’re trapped on an entheogenic island, constantly tormented by an evil witch who is obsessed with you and your flute, who can think of nothing else. That’s what life is all about. Always forward, never back.It moves in just one fucking direction. Scientists tell us that Time is not linear, but it sure feels linear. I wish it were otherwise, me and my fucking life. Remember 2019? Things seemed like full of possibility then. Oh well. 

Then, my brain full of weed and Puffnstuf, I read the Bible. I like to read the Bible sometimes the way I like to watch horror movies. The Bible is also someone else’s nostalgia, like Puffnstuf, like Gargantua, like Jeannie. There’s no real difference. This is from Deuteronomy: “The LORD will strike you with madness, blindness and dismay. You shall grope at noon as a blind man gropes in the dark…. And you shall eat your own children, the flesh of your sons and daughters that the LORD your God has assigned to you.”

Then I fell asleep, and I had nightmares from reading the Bible, nightmares infused-with THC, like seltzer water. 

.

I TOLD LAG that I had some walking around money, but I didn’t have enough money to afford something that only rich bastards can afford, and he’s like, it’s cool, I spoof, which I kind of understood. You might wonder why he would be willing to do this for me; but if think how a geek guy feels when a neo-geek girl walks into the room, you can probably figure it out, why he would do this for me. He didn’t expect anything in return, other than gratitude. 

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“YOU NEED an identity,” Lag said. 

“Like what?” I wondered. 

He asked me whether I wanted to be a dude or a girl or otherwise, and what my backstory would be. I could be anyone I wanted to be, so I needed to figure out who I wanted to be.

“I mean, what do you think?” I asked him. 

“Well, you want to meet this ‘Kalyee,’ right?”

“Yeah, sure. I want to meet ‘Kalyee’ and figure out what she’s all about.”

“Well, what does Kalyee look for? What kind of guy does she like?”

I described Alden. I said I figured that was her type, but I didn’t a hundred percent know for sure. She might not have a type. But if she did have a type, she liked hot young gorgeous guys. I knew, at least, that she was open to the possibility of a hot young gorgeous guy.

Then it struck me. 

“What am I trying to do here?” I asked. 

“Just get her attention,” he said. “What would get her attention?”

“I mean,” I said, “it would appear that a hot guy would get her attention. Alden is hot. But what then?”

“Whatever you want.” 

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I NEEDED A DUDE’S LOOK, a dude’s backstory and a dude’s voice. W/r/t the latter, my own voice is not light and airy anyway, and all the smoking and drinking has given me a bit of a rasp, so it was not a stretch for me to impersonate the gorgeous but not-exceptionally manly young man I intended to become in Virelia. 

I called myself Moonn, just like that, with two n’s. My last name was Feller. Because, you know. Like “fellow.” It’s a joke. Moonn is short for meundadak, which is “suddenly” in the Acehnese language. So my name means that now, suddenly, I’m a fellow. 

Lag and I set up FB, IG, Bluesky and TikTok accounts, all backdated and spoofed to look like I’d signed up ages ago, with a healthy swarm of friends and followers, all fake accounts that Lag generated by pushing a button. They all followed each other, they all had backdated posts, they all seemed real if you didn’t look too closely. No X account, because, you know.

Lag created a gorgeous photo-perfect avatar, blond and young and gorgeously gorgeous in an almost hilariously gorgeous way, and I promised to come up with a backstory, but t/b/h I figured I would just wing it. I wasn’t going undercover in North Korea, after all. 

.

NO JOYSTICKS, no handheld controllers, nothing to break the illusion. The rig allowed me to walk in place while remaining physically stationary; as my legs moved against gentle resistance, sensors translated the motion into smooth locomotion in VR. So when I moved my legs in “real life,” I would walk around in Virelia. I would feel the wind on my skin. If anyone hugged me, I would feel the hug. I could really live there. 

“Listen,” he said, “if you get really into this….” and he pointed out hydration and liquid nutrition ports, so I would never have to leave Virelia to eat. Even an alcoholic beverage port, so that I could get parlous drunk in VR without disengaging. There was also a way to pee and poop without even unstrapping the rig. I’ll leave that to your imagination. 

.

YOU KNOW what VR is like, so I don’t really need to describe how amazing it is to be in an artificial three-dimensional world, blah blah blah. A few years ago, during pandemic, everyone was talking about it, all the “media” and tech oligarchs and whatnot were falling all over themselves to talk about how we would all soon be living in an artificial world. That didn’t happen, right? but the result is that everyone understands what it is like to be in there, even people who have never seen it. I will add that this was more real than you ever imagined it could be, the wind blew on my skin as advertised, the colors were deeper and more detailed. This was not exactly real, but it was almost exactly real, and this seemed like a place I could live, which I guess was the point. 

In Virelia, I suddenly materialized on a busy street corner in the middle of the day, sleek cars zipping back and forth, young beautiful fashionable people zipping by me on the sidewalk, talking, smiling, in their virtual, freshly conjured clothes in precision-tailored iridescent fabrics that shifted color as they moved. 

I felt kind of like a real man, which was a very odd sensation; I needed to get out of the crowd and acclimate. I took out my wallet and looked at my Virelia ID, which listed my address. I could see a subway sign two blocks away, so I wandered over there, descended the escalator, took a subway card out of my wallet and swiped through. The map explained how to get to my apartment, and I took the subway there. What was a subway like in Virelia? you wonder. It was a subway! These things are the same all over the world, and this was one thing that would not take getting used to.

I love my apartment in New York City, but I loved my apartment in Virelia more. The building had stone columns, uniformed staff, a glass-walled, temperature-controlled pool on the fifth floor, a cavernous members-only restaurant on the top floor, and my apartment, all forty-five hundred square feet of it, was high above the Mintspire in the Old Civic Core. My wall-sized mirror was framed in brushed gold, shimmering glow made everything look like it had been envisioned by Wong Kar-wai. The views from my black marble bathtub were amazing. 

I looked at myself in the mirror. Well! It was one thing to see this image as an avatar on a computer screen; it was something else entirely to see all this gorgeousness in the mirror right in front of my face and to know that it’s me, that this was my lean and balanced male body. I wore breathable, deep ultramarine quick-dry swim shorts with a silk short-sleeve shirt. What was cool about it was that the outfit would have looked horrible on a lot of people, but on me it looked really good. I looked really good. It was fun being a gorgeous guy. I think it’s more fun being a gorgeous guy than a gorgeous woman, but I am not sure why. 

I went to the wine console, opened a bottle of cab, poured a glass. It looked good in the apartment’s amber light, but when I drank it, it didn’t taste like cab, it just tasted like alcohol from the locomotion rig’s booze port, which is what it is, after all. Still, there was something to it, something nice about it. I shouted to the stereo to “play me relaxing and bouncy,” and it did, a little syncopated symphony. I just sat there for a while in my beautiful apartment, on my incredibly comfortable couch, drinking my cab and feeling a little relaxed, I was just a rich gorgeous young man in his luxury apartment, drinking his expensive wine. 

After about an hour, I left the apartment and walked across the street to the park. The air was soft, and the weather was warm but unsettled. I took off my backpack and sat down in the grass, which felt cool and damp against my gorgeous bare legs. I took a book out of my backpack, which I had never heard of. It was called The Girl Who Folded Herself into Corners. It was about a girl who kept folding herself into smaller and smaller origami creatures so she could fit into tighter and tighter rooms. First she was a crane, then a mouse, then a tiny box with no writing on the outside; at first she lost her hair, and then her voice and then, at the end, she was just a single blinking word in someone else’s diary: “Sorry.”

I’ve tried to find the book since then, out in the real world, but I guess it exists only in Virelia. I wonder who wrote it. Maybe some girl who could never get her novel published IRL. Maybe a boy who writes like a girl and was embarrassed to show it to anyone, till Virelia, where he could be whoever he wanted to be. Or maybe a robot wrote it, maybe it didn’t even exist as a concept till I opened my bag, and it didn’t exist as a full story till I opened the covers of the book. Maybe it was written while I was reading it. Maybe it is like a tree that falls in the forest, or a positive or negative charge on a quantum particle, and it exists only because I observed it. 

In the center of the park there was a lake, the sun shimmered on the water, I took off my shirt and I dived in, swam in water that was perfectly warm and perfectly cool, passed harmless and beautiful fish that brushed my skin. I burst above the surface of the water, out of breath. I lay down on the lake’s sandy shore and dried off in the sun. 

I went back to my apartment and looked in the closet, which was filled with clothes that would look good on me, sharply cut jackets in deep greens and slate grays, black jeans made for this specific body, crisp button-downs, soft knits, clean sneakers and boots. I tried on a few things, then I took it all off and stood in front of the full-length mirror. My chest was flat, my shoulders straight and broad, my legs long and lean, the muscles taut, my skin clean and smooth and unburdened. I touched my hips, then my chest, then looked at my face again, then I looked down at my penis. Some people say that a penis can’t be beautiful, it cannot be art. “A breast is by nature beautiful. A penis is always a punchline, a perennial gag.”

This was not the case with mine, which was like a classical sculpture, perfect and artistic and beautiful. It rested in a gentle arc that led to the glans, a bud of delicate color, unhidden, the skin soft and flushed, marble warmed by touch, which hung with the weight of breath just below where my testicles nestled, two smooth stones in a velvet sling. The whole composition — almost symmetrical, beautiful in its slight asymmetry — belonged to the world of beautiful and graceful things, not to the world of the absurd or comic. It was like the final line in a poem: essential, quiet and inevitable.

I had never wanted to be a man before, not at all. But I didn’t look at myself as a woman admiring someone handsome. I looked at myself as a man, proud of himself. I had never wanted a penis before, I had no Freudian “envy” about it, but now that I had one, I didn’t know how I would ever give it up. 

.

NULLVOID WAS NOT HARD TO FIND. I pretty much just had to mutter the name, and a menu popped up in front of my eyes, and I tapped a button, which displayed a map that showed me how to get there. It was a bit of a trek, though, which I had not expected; in VR, as I remembered it from the pandemic, you get to “worlds” by walking through a portal. But the Virelia sub-sub-app was supposed to replicate life, after all, so I had to work for it, I had to really “exist” in here, this was not a video game. I could have driven to Nullvoid, but the drive would have taken two and a half hours, and the nearest parking was five miles from the club. So the best way to get to Orin city was public transportation. I walked to the subway, which whisked me to the intercity train station. The train ride to Port Lirio (a waystation and transit hub to Orin city via barge and bicycle) cost a hundred dollars in real money, which I had to Venmo to the train station ticket booth. Once in Port Lirio, I walked ten minutes from the train station to the canal boat, past a tiled, shimmering plaza, a noodle shop wreathed in steam and incense, and a quiet temple, which glowed with pulsing firefly lanterns. At the dock, I had to Venmo fifty dollars for a boat ticket. The boat ride was beautiful, along a narrow medieval canal that wound past crooked 16^th century row houses with red-tiled roofs, a weeping willow that caressed the water, arched stone bridges and ivy-covered facades where flower boxes spilled over with Dutch tulips and flowers that grew only in Virelia. Upon debarking, since I was really tired of paying and paying and paying for transportation, I stole a bike. So, there you go. I wondered if there was a prison system in here, but I didn’t wonder that much.

I later learned that an even higher speed transport system could hook right up to my apartment, but that was way out of my price range, and I was not rich enough for the BBB rebate. 

I rode the bike in the dusk on a road that skirted the cornfields, and as I ascended from the countryside into Orin city, the cornfields became buildings and dusk became midnight, and then there I was suddenly on Nullvoid’s dark side street, and the lights of the club pounded in the distance. 

.

WHAT was the inside of the club like? 

When I was a little girl, I went on vacation with my parents. Never mind where. Someplace magical. The night before we left, I dreamed about it, and when we got there, I saw my dream, the place looked exactly like my dream of it. 

This was Nullvoid, but for a different reason: it is exactly what you imagine. It does not look the same to any two people. 

So if you want to know what it looks like, just shut your eyes and imagine it. That’s what it looks like. 

Do you imagine a kind of Roman atrium, with columns and vines? Do you picture a sleek dark Berlin cathedral? Then that’s what Nullvoid was. 

I know that may seem like a cop-out, it may violate John Gardner’s “fictional dream” rule of writing (“In good fiction, the reader is given continuous vivid detail”), but this is just the fact of the thing: what I saw is irrelevant to what it was. 

Inside the club, I went around asking everyone if they had seen Kalyee Srithnam, and many people knew her, but some people said they hadn’t seen her, and some people seemed a little cagy about it. Finally, this one woman with green eyes and silver lipstick said that Kalyee was dancing naked in a backroom, but that it would cost me to get in there.

So I pushed my way through the crowd, dancers and minglers and drinkers, until at last I came to a big black door labeled Subdirectory, with a guy in sunglasses standing in front of it. This was the place, this was where Kalyee danced.

The bouncer asked me my name and birthdate, and I had to think for a second before I could remember my bullshit dude name and what his birthdate was, but I finally remembered, and the pause made the bouncer suspicious, and so he asked me what my favorite song was when I was ten, which was difficult, because “Moonn” was seven years younger than me; what hit songs would a ten-year-old have been listening to when I was seventeen? I had to do a little math, and at last I said “Radioactive”. 

The bouncer kind of thought about it. My avatar, I think, looked like just the kind of VC crypto brat who would be at exactly this kind of place IRL, but it still took a little negotiation, a wire transfer from a VR bank after a wire transfer from an IRL bank into the virtual one. At last, he nodded and then opened the door. 

.

I WAS IN! This incredibly high end and elegant strip club, men on some stages and women on others, an infinity mirror of naked bodies, and there she was on The Echo Platform, the beautiful Kalyee Srithnam.

What did she look like? Of course, she looked like me; but you know how I pretend to be beautiful and can sometimes convince people? Somehow she looked like me but was actually beautiful. I guess it’s like how people say real beauty comes from inside, and my inside is not exactly beautiful. You know how I look, my black bangs, my sometimes-skinny sometimes less-skinny body, my tits which some people think are too small and some people think are just right (nobody thinks they are too big). She had my tits, exactly. And as for my body, she had the sometimes-skinny version. I wear clothes pretty well when I feel like it, but other times I look like shit, and she wasn’t wearing clothes and she looked pretty good. There was my scar, in exactly the right spot. Some people would feel really invaded. But I’m just narcissistic enough that I loved it. Someone, somewhere, had admired me so much that she had created a perfect likeness of me, even down to that scar, in exactly the right spot, and she was wearing me like a Halloween costume. 

.

I SAT by the edge of the stage, I watched Kalyee dance. Her movements were graceful, balletic and sharp, gravity-optional. This was, let’s say, a very loose interpretation of the real Kalyee, who could dance a bit, but not uber-gracefully. It’s like that guy who played Bobby Darin on Broadway. The real Bobby Darin kind of stood back, not moving too much because of his bum ticker, snapping his fingers to keep his blood circulating, arrhythmia in a cool fedora. His Broadway incarnation stomped and leaped and twirled and flew, things the real guy could only have dreamed about, things that would have given the real Bobby Darin a quick heart attack. 

.

I WATCHED HER DANCE, the taut strength of her limbs, the confident arch of her back, the smooth plane of her belly, I don’t know for how long, and eventually she left the stage. She put on a thong and a bra and sat down with me. 

“You stared at me all night,” she laughed. 

Her voice was low and musical. My voice, but the nascent rasp (from cigarettes, reefer smoke, and liquor) had been buffed to a dusky shine.

“Right?” she said. “For you, tonight was all about me.”

I said that was right. I had stared at her all night. 

“You do dance well,” I laughed, and she laughed too.

She touched my hand lightly. I was falling under her spell. I was a man, infatuated to obsession with a stripper. But not just any stripper. 

“What’s your favorite color?” she asked, and I made something up. Her magnetism made the rest of the room feel faded and gray, she was a spark in the middle of an ashen fog. Someone somewhere had considered me, studied me, figured out what was missing, and made me perfect. 

“You want to get out of here?” she asked me. 

.

OUTSIDE, the air on my skin was cool and electric. Kalyee had put on jeans and a t-shirt, which somehow looked elegant on her. We walked across the street from the club and strolled along a crowded thoroughfare which (because this was designed by a poet or an artificial intelligence mimicking a poet) buzzed with neon, which made Kalyee look only more beautiful.

“You sought me out,” she said. 

I shrugged. I didn’t want to lie. The truth was complicated. So I didn’t affirm, didn’t deny, which means that I affirmed without affirming. 

“Can you just leave work like that?” I asked, and she laughed. Then I said, “What’s your favorite color?” and she answered correctly. 

.

WE WALKED down a side street that glowed in the electric prism starslight, and then into a little bar that was just a crack in the bricks. Inside, the bar was lit with an amber sheen, cozy-welcoming, the kind of thing that you would fucking hate and that I would usually hate, all the good fucking energy. The bar had booths like confessionals and a mirror behind the bar that showed other instances of this reality. It was entirely full, so Kalyee asked the bartender to open a new instance, which he did, and we sat down at a table in the corner of the now-empty bar, which immediately began filling up again. From our table in the corner, Kalyee and I watched the little bar fill with people.

Kalyee talked, and she smiled, and I talked, and I fell into her smile and drowned. As I said, I kind of recognized her voice, which after all, I have heard from time to time, and of course I have seen her face before, but the more she talked and the more she smiled with her beautiful mouth and looked into my eyes with her own beautiful eyes, the more I realized that this was like the voice I recognized dipped in honey, and the face I recognized polished by Ikenaga Yasunari. 

“Are you real?” Kalyee asked. “I mean, is this your real name, is this what you really look like? It’s ok if it’s not, I don’t need to know who you really are, it’s just … I want to know if you are real, or a fantasy.”

“That’s kind of … it defeats the whole purpose, doesn’t it?” I asked. “Isn’t it unethical to try find out who I ‘really’ am, or even to ask?”

“Some people come to Virelia to see new things and visit new places,” she said. “Some people come here to be someone new. Most people here consider themselves already pretty wonderful. A morosophos doesn’t usually get so parlous rich without a healthy self-regard.”

She was using my slang and my ancient Greek, both of them in a single sentence. Crazy. 

I didn’t act like I knew what a morosophos is, even though I do. 

“Which do you think I am?” I asked. “To see new things or to be someone else?”

“You seem pretty confident, self-satisfied, someone who thinks he is already wonderful.” She thought. “Not a true morosophos but a healthy self-regard. I would guess that you are exactly what you look like. Moonn Feller. I could search for you on social media, if I want to be sure.” 

“You could, if that kind of thing matters to you,” I said. 

Her eyes went a little blank for a moment, I could see she was searching. 

Finally, she smiled. She had found me, my fake back-dated digital footprint, and she liked what she saw. 

“I’m also me,” she said, lying like crazy but it sounded so believable. “This is me in Virelia, and this is me IRL. No difference at all. Except that I won’t ever age in here. I am twenty-seven, and that is old enough. You are only twenty.”

She asked me some questions about myself. I answered them. I won’t go into detail here. It’s not interesting. I’m a rich cute young white guy from Wisconsin. I’m twenty. I like women who are a little older than me, but not much. When I am an older guy, I will like women who are younger than me, which I didn’t tell her. 

“Look,” I asked her. “Can I see you again?” 

She smiled in a certain way that was very charming, or maybe sweet, or even irresistible and devastating. Computers can do amazing things with smiles, these days. I started to move beyond infatuation, I really started to fall for her. I wondered if “real Kalyee” — the person I used to call “me”, I mean — I wondered if that “other Kalyee” was ever that charming. 

“Yes? Maybe?” I asked. 

“What would we do? Use your imagination. I don’t like to waste my time on the everyday.” 

It didn’t take me long to consider; anything I wanted would be mine just by thinking it, and I have a relatively vivid imagination when I want to put it to use, so I described the island nation we would visit, I conjured the natural landscape, the color of the ocean, the coral, the volcanos and the techno-city in the island’s heart. I told her how to get there, the tickets she would need to buy (the ferry to a port, the shuttle to a zeppelin, the parachute to the city center). She said it sounded nice and told me she would meet me on this island on Wednesday at five pm. 

“Who is this ‘Alden’ fellow on your social media?” I asked, and she said, “I will never leave Alden, I love him, but I can still see you again. Wednesday at five.”
.

I wanted to kiss Kalyee, but I know from personal experience that women do not like to be kissed when we do not want to be kissed. So I looked into her eyes to try to figure out what Kalyee wanted, but her eyes were two pools of code. Had the tech bros behind this enterprise figured out a way to connect the eyes to the soul? Apparently not. So I didn’t kiss Kalyee, and we parted.

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BACK HOME, in the real world, I could barely sleep. I kept going online and looking at Kalyee’s social media, looking at the photos she posted on FB, and even a couple of videos on TikTok, Kalyee in Virelia, which, in the flicker of her feed, really looked like a real place. 

I thought about this trip with her to the island I’d dreamed up. What a lot of chutzpah that took, to invite her to an island paradise for our first date. I thought about all the things that could happen, all the things that I wanted to happen. 

Then it struck me that in Virelia, I could go fuck myself. Or, to be more blunt, that in Virelia, I wanted to go fuck myself. I was not a hundred percent sure how that would work logistically. 

I texted Lag and asked if he was awake and if we could talk, and within a minute he said he was awake and that we could talk, and so I called him. 

“In Virelia,” I said, “I could go fuck myself,” and he said that I could. 

“You could totally fuck yourself,” he said, “if that’s what you want. If you want to fuck yourself.”

“How does that work?” I asked him. 

“You want to go fuck yourself?” he asked. “Or is this hypothetical?”

“I really really want to go fuck myself,” I admitted. “How does that work?”

“Well, I don’t want to get graphic. I assume your mother has already had this talk with you.”

“All right, let me try again,” I said. “In VR, I am a dude. This ‘Kalyee’ – well, if she is anything like what I gather she’s like from Alden, she will have certain expectations. I have a date with Kalyee tomorrow. How do I perform, given that, you know, I don’t actually have a penis?”

“Moonn has a penis,” he said. “And you are Moonn.”

“So I just watch it go to work? Like from ten thousand feet?”

“Ahah,” Lag said. “You want to enjoy your penis.”

Lag loved this assignment. He was at my apartment within half an hour. 

.

“IT’S CALLED cross-sensory substitution,” Lag said. “We overlay your sensory inputs with male analogues. Your brain doesn’t care if the signals come from real nerve endings or redirected ones. It just adapts.”

I said that I totally understood that. I was wearing my haptic suit, and the locomotion rig stood in the middle of my bedroom.

“Your clit becomes a responsive zone for what would be a penis. The sensations are transformed. Not fake, just rerouted.” 

He took a sharp intake of breath. 

“Sorry,” he added, looking a little chastened, even though I had not chastened him. “Sorry for using that language. That word.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “You’re like a doctor. So we have to talk bluntly, doctor.”

“Yeah,” he said. He visibly relaxed. “Yeah, that’s the idea.”

“I am a dude who has a fully functioning penis, but no sensation there … what would you call that?”

“Penile sensory neuropathy,” he said, too quickly. He sounded like someone too well-informed on the subject, which made me feel bad. 

“OK,” I said, “so it’s like I am a dude and I have penile sensory neuropathy, and you’re a doctor. I mean, it’s not just like I am a dude and I have penile sensory neuropathy. In Virelia, I really am a dude, and I really do have penile sensory neuropathy.” 

The geek installed a strap-in neural stim unit, which was a wearable pack that connected to my haptic suit and was supposed to stimulate my internal nerves. 

“Your vaginal, pelvic and clitoral nerves,” Lag said enthusiastically, now quite comfortable as my doctor, “in sync with a mapped-out digital phallus.” 

He actually used the word phallus.

“It vibrates, expands, contracts,” he said. “It gives you the illusion of thrust, of presence, of building pressure.”

“So,” I said, “if I meet Kalyee in Virelia, and one thing leads to another….”

“If you experience intimacy in the virtual realm….”

“Yes, we ‘experience intimacy’,” I agreed, settling on language that didn’t make me cringe more than a little.

“You will feel it as a man,” he assured me. “Not metaphorically. Neurologically.”

“Wow,” I said. “You’re smart!”

.

I REENTERED VIRELIA, on that same street corner, and I took the subway to my beautiful apartment. I still had a few hours till I needed to leave, so I turned on the big screen, and there was stuff on there that existed only in Virelia, maybe stuff that hadn’t existed at all until I turned on the big screen. Virelia had a streaming service called Cloudleum, which is a name I really liked, even though I didn’t know what it meant. Was it like a museum in the clouds? Or a loom that made clouds? I flipped to a multi-cam sitcom called Second Self, which was, by all indications, filmed in front of a live audience. It was set in “Mirror Harbor,” a coastal city in northeast Virelia known for its popular floating markets. The show followed two roommates who were actually the same person at different stages in their life, brought together by a time glitch in the city’s public transit network. Now they were stuck sharing a rent-stabilized tidehouse. The laugh track was believable, the jokes were a little too perfect. 

I felt like I was somewhere else; my senses overloading, I turned away. I went to the fridge and took out a bottle of vodka and took a big gulp. That same alcohol sensation. I lit a cigarette. I felt a little lightheaded.

.

WE MET on the island at five, and we walked on the beach at sunset. The waves lapped on the shore. I was so handsome, and Kalyee was so beautiful, and everyone on the beach was gorgeous, sun-warmed avatars of desire, skin smooth as chrome, eyes that flickered and fractaled with just the right amount of mystery.

At a coastal beach bar, an impossibly sexy waitress took our order, photorealistic, but not realistic at all. Like, anyone really this beautiful in real life would look like our waitress, except that there was no one as beautiful in real life, not quite. Her legs looked like they were procedurally generated: taut and strong, equilateral, flexing just enough with every step to prove the simulation was overclocked. She had small breasts and a tattoo of a broken music note near her left hip. As a dude, I was apparently developing a “type.”

We ordered something stupid and tropical: a glowing drink that pulsed like a heartbeat. When I drank it, I felt a light buzz, not just in my head but in my chest, my fingertips. Like a phantom memory of college nights I’d never had. My avatar remembered things I didn’t.

I turned to Kalyee. She was looking at me in that soft way of hers, I was realer than the light.

“Listen,” I said. “I need to know something about yourself. Something personal. Something fucking embarrassing. You see? Do you understand why?”

She smiled just a little.

She said, “It’s because you want to know if there’s a me inside me. Something no one would bother coding.”

I shook my head. 

“I know there is a you inside you,” I said. “I just want to know the you that is inside you.”

“How do you know there is a me inside me?” she asked. 

I said nothing. I waited.

She nodded slowly. “OK.”

She looked away, and then back. Her voice was a little too steady.

“When I was twelve, I stole a bottle of nail polish from the drug store. I wanted something shiny that was mine.My mom found it in my backpack. She dragged me into the store and made me apologize to the cashier. I cried so hard I threw up.” 

She stopped.

That wasn’t my story. That was someone else’s memory. And it wasn’t really that embarrassing. I wondered why Kalyee chose that. I wondered what would make that story so embarrassing for her, why she thought it was embarrassing. 

She paid the check and stood. 

“Enough sadness and embarrassment,” she said, and she was away into the night, shedding clothes on the sand as she ran into the ocean. I looked at her and looked at her. Virtual Kalyee was more remarkable than my real-life version, like a dream of me that I once had, but forgot. Or, maybe, Kalyee was way more alive than the actually alive version of me ever was. But that person, the woman I was back in New York, that wasn’t me, not now. Now I was a guy on the beach, staring jaw-agape at a beautiful woman who had just shed her clothes and was splashing in the waves. 

She ran to me and I kissed her on the beach, ran my fingers through her black hair. 

I said, “Should we get a room?” 

“No need,” she said, and with a flick of her fingers, a soft shimmer rose around us, a kind of semi-visible dome, like a mirage. From the outside, we’d vanished. From the inside, the whole beach still sparkled before us like glass diamonds.

.

WHEN I WAS A FETUS, for a little while, I was male, I had bipotential gonads that I must have enjoyed till I discarded them in favor of my labia; and even now that I have grown into a woman, I remain microchimeric, fetal cells with my father’s Y chromosome still live in my brain, liver and bone marrow. So I have an embryonic memory of being briefly male, and my father’s Y chromosome flails inside my brain begging to be heard through the cacophony of my stridently female-coded XX mind, like one man in a feminist book club. All of this nascent maleness throughout my life slowly created a little bit of nascent Moonn Feller in my unconscious, till, finally, he burst into conscious life inside me; and mostly, because this little Moonn Feller inside me is a dude, after all, he’s been waiting for a moment of orgasmic release, yearning for it, planning for it. 

Under the canopy, my clothes came off. When I moved, she moved. When I wanted, she wanted. The voice in my head was mine, but male, maybe, or maybe just free. The haptics redirected everything. I caught myself standing wider. Taking up space. Thinking with velocity instead of spirals. I did it like I’d always known how; and maybe I did always know how, the Moonn Feller who had always been inside me, who remembered my fetal gonads and missed them. I felt pressure, friction, tension and then release, somewhere between my thighs and my throat.

.

THIS IS THE QUESTION you want to ask: is it better? 

It is briefer. It is less intense. It is less good, but not worse. It is more aggressive. That’s all. It is less affectionate, more insistent, less like a lingering hug. Like a spark that dies in a second instead of a flame that burns for hours. 

This is why you dudes are so fucking shitty. Or, I should say, that is why we dudes are so fucking shitty. 

.

WE SAT together on a terrace that looked out at the water. Kalyee stared out into the night, at the people walking by, the art-deco city in the distance, encircled by the glimmering bay that divided our isthmus, and separated us from the island business center. “Good work, Moonn,” she said as she admired the architecture of my imagination, and she squeezed my hand. Some of the people that I saw walking by were in love, and I wondered how many of them were real, I wondered how many were real people, how many fell in love because this island I dreamed up lured them into it. As for the people who were not real, I wondered if their love were real. Kalyee pointed to the skyscrapers across the bay, lights on in the windows. “Right now,” she said, “there are people working in those offices, on projects that they think they worked on yesterday. But they didn’t even exist yesterday.” She smiled. “I wonder what they will come up with. What discoveries they will come up with….” We could see digital people working in those offices, but did people work in those offices when we were not watching? This was the tech center of the island construct I had envisioned. Would the tech workers there really innovate? Would worlds really explode from worlds?

.

I WENT TO VIRELIA once a week only, and I spent the whole day in there. Sometimes I would go to Kalyee’s place, a giant loft in the Noisebelt. We might go out to lunch in the early afternoon, watch Cloudleum, sit on her balcony, make love on the floor in front of the fireplace, the heat of the flames warming our skin while the stars shimmered lazily outside the window, above the Virelian skyline, all of it impossibly bright and hyper-real. In the back of the apartment was a wooden door, something imported from Cambodia, with a comically solid medieval padlock on it. I didn’t ask her about it. Sometimes she looked at the door, and then at me, and smiled. It was a secret door to a secret place, and she was teasing me. Sometimes, even when I didn’t have plans with Kalyee, I would go to Virelia just to hang out in my apartment there and watch Cloudleum and listen to music. 

.

THE REST OF THE TIME, I lived my regular life. I am embarrassed to admit it, but I started to look forward to seeing Kalyee whenever I was in the real world. I stopped thinking of her as “Kalyee” and started thinking of her as Kalyee. My real life had been gray and airless recently, but now that I had visited Virelia, my real life seemed even more gray and airless in contrast.

One day, when I was bored, which means like any moment of any day of any week that I wasn’t in Virelia, I logged into Moonn’s Facebook account, and I sent a message to Kalyee. She responded immediately, and we chatted online till I fell asleep. I felt like a fifteen-year-old-boy. I mean, I guess I felt like a fifteen-year-old boy. I kind of felt like I knew what that meant, to feel like a fifteen-year-old boy, like I had been a fifteen-year-old boy once. I feel like a fifteen-year-old boy. Or: When I am Moonn, I feel like I remember what it was like to be a fifteen-year-old boy. Doesn’t everyone know what it means to feel like a fifteen-year-old boy? Suddenly, I knew what that meant. A month ago, would I have, or was this new? 

I kind of didn’t want to look at Kalyee’s relationship status, and I kind of wanted to look, to see if she still tagged Alden under her relationship status, or whether she had started tagging me. I considered going to Meya’s room and asking to look at Kalyee’s Facebook page on her phone. In the end, I didn’t look. 

.

“THIS IS AMAZING,” Rowan laughed. We were in one of those bars that pretends to be a speakeasy. I was a little drunk, and it just felt meh, like old news, being a little drunk in the real world, no excitement, no novelty to it. I thought maybe I should quit drinking.

“I’m glad you shaved off that horrible mustache,” I told him. “Was that like ironic, or was it for real?”

“It was to make people uncomfortable,” Rowan said. 

“Kudos,” I told him. “Mission accomplished.”

Rowan wore an oversized sweater that looked like it once belonged to his grandfather. He wasn’t touching my hand this time. I figured maybe that was part of the performance art thing that he had been doing that night last time, he was playing the role of a guy with a weird mustache who touches people and makes them uncomfortable. 

“So you are in love with yourself?” he asked. 

“She isn’t me,” I said. “She is someone who looks like me and sounds like me. She remembers some of the same things, and she tells some of the same stories, but she isn’t me. She is better.”

“So you are in love — ” 

“I am not in love,” I said. “Moonn is in love. Moonn is different, really different.”

The funny thing is, this made a lot of sense to me, and I think that Rowan understood it too. 

“I wonder all the time how she feels about me,” I said. 

.

THE WEIRD THING IS, Kalyee would ask me questions about myself, and I would answer, and I never felt like I was lying. Sometimes she didn’t even ask me questions, things just popped into my head about my life as Moonn Feller, my memories, my opinions, my sense of self. These things just came to me. Once a “memory” had entered my head, it was my memory, it had really happened to me, or, that is, to me as Moonn. Fiction writers would say I had a consistent backstory. Like, one time I said, “I’ve always really hated Coldplay.” So this is what Moonn Feller was like. In my so-called “real life,” real-Kalyee has zero opinions about Coldplay, they were a band that had a breakthrough hit single when I was three years old, before I was old enough to form memories, a band that was around my entire life putting out blah records that never made an impression on me. But as Moonn, I hated Coldplay. I never felt like I was lying, and I never worried about being caught in a lie. My mythology was consistent. I felt like Moonn Feller was a real person, and that I was Moonn Feller. 

Kalyee said, “That is funny. They’re innocuous. How could anyone care?”

That was what real-life Kalyee had always thought about Coldplay, but not Moonn Feller. So I shook my head. 

“It’s the arrogance,” I said. “The epic grandeur. The delusions of artistry.” 

“Oh who cares?” Kalyee said. “Let people have their delusions.”

This was indeed wonderful. Let Coldplay think that they are great artists. Leave them to their lies, if it helps them feel better about themselves. 

.

“I’VE FALLEN IN LOVE,” I told Arthur, and he said, “Yes, I remember. You are still in love this week? That is remarkable. A love like that, which can stand the test of weeks! It is something to treasure.”

Arthur asked what my “young man” was like, and I said that I was in love with a woman, actually, and he raised an eyebrow, because I guess this would have been provocative back when he was young, or the last time he was aware of anything going on in the world. I wanted to tell him that it was not exactly how it sounded, but it was actually weirder and harder to explain than it sounded and so I just let him think whatever he wanted to think. 

I don’t ever talk about my marriage, you know, but I mentioned it to Arthur this time, and I also even told him a little about Alexéin. That’s all I did; I told Arthur that I had been in love twice, years ago, and now I seemed to be in love again, and this time maybe it would be different. 

The point, which I can share with you, although I didn’t mention it to Arthur, is that after my marriage, I thought I would never fall in love again; and then I met someone who loved me, and whom I loved, but who didn’t really know me, and I was kind of convinced that only someone who really didn’t know me would ever love me. So maybe now I am resigned to this? Alexéin loved me because he thought I was Zora-Nora Séraphina, and if Kalyee was in love with me, it was because I was Moonn Feller. I didn’t say this to Arthur, but as I was talking to him, I kind of began to feel like maybe this was the perfect way for me to live, in a completely artificial world, and as a completely artificial person, in love with someone who also doesn’t exist at all. 

“I guess the lesson,” said Arthur, “is that we can always fall in love again.” 

He stared at his rook for a very long time. 

“The same way, for example,” he added, “that sometimes I think I will never win a game of chess again, and then I do. Is that like love? The lesson in chess is to find a player so weak that they cannot detect my flaws. Is that the same as love? To find someone so weak that they cannot detect our flaws? Is winning in chess the same as winning in love? I don’t know.” He was still staring at his rook. “The rook is my favorite chess piece. When I win, I always win with my rook.”

I smiled. 

“I win with my pawn,” I said. “When I turn my pawn into a queen. The pawn has one rule: ‘always forward, never back.’ Maybe that is the rule to finding love again.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But being a pawn in life means being sacrificed for a greater cause, having very few options, never able even to look behind you to think about what might have been.”

“Being a pawn,” I said, “means the possibility of becoming a queen someday.”

He moved his rook down the board to E1, clean and final. My king was pinned. I crowned my pawn, and he took my pawn, and I crowned another pawn, and he took it as well. 

“The queen is dead, the new queen is dead, check and mate,” he said. “Long live the queen.”

.

THE NEXT TIME I saw Kalyee, we spent the day together wandering the floating markets in the Virelian Glassdown quarter, where vendors sold dreams bathed in light. We had dinner at Pensione della Bellezza, then we saw a flick across the street, at a theater that looked like a grand movie palace from the 1940s, with red velvet curtains and a gold marquee. It was always full of people, but I’m sure many or most of them were not people. The movie was about a colony of sentient coral that learns to speak through dreams transmitted to deep-sea divers, but the divers forget everything when they surface, so the coral starts altering the divers’ memories to stay alive in their minds. It was animated, and the animation shimmered like oil and velvet. It must have been an AI movie, but it looked hand drawn, with hand-brushed textures and shading variations that no computer could fake, till now anyway, and I figured that some program was making it up as it went along, that no one would see it again after tonight. Then we took the night train to Caldrith Station, through the flickering industrial zone and the fog-lit wetlands, and we got out and checked into a hotel, which was perched on a cliff over a shimmering bay. The lobby was cavernous, full of tall glass sculptures that refracted the moonlight, and the front desk clerk spoke with a calm voice like lullabies stitched into static. Our room had no ceiling, only a dome of stars running on a slow loop, and the bed floated just a few inches above the ground, and it hummed faintly when we touched it.

.

WHEN I WAS BACK in real life, I sat around as usual, eating cornflakes, sometimes riding my exercise bike and watching Netflix. One afternoon, Tasha texted me, and she was just across the street, so I told her I’d be right down. I had not seen her since the last summer, when she and I had gone to Coney Island together, and I’d eaten a chilidog by the Boardwalk. 

We met in a bar across the street and had a late afternoon glass of wine together, which was one of our old habits. Tasha was a pretty blonde girl I’d met during my brief college career, which you know all about, the less said about that the better, but she had stuck with me over half decade since then. She had kind of latched onto me back then, she wanted to be like me, she thought I was cool. So I was not surprised that I recognized the clothes she was wearing, she was wearing the black leather newsboy cap I’d passed on to her, a cropped field jacket with asymmetrical zippers over a cropped tank, and a tiny black miniskirt that I knew she’d bought after seeing me wear it to meet a guy. 

As we spoke, I noticed little mannerisms of mine that she had picked up, things that I didn’t know were “Kalyeeisms” till I had spent too much time with my VR doppelganger. She tipped her head before making a point, dragged out the last word of a sentence when she thought she was being clever, and let her eyes flick sideways for a beat before delivering a compliment, and this kind of calculated, magnetic cheerfulness drew me closer to her. 

She seemed very very familiar, all of a sudden, not so much like the Tasha I had known for years, but like the “Kalyee” I had more recently met. 

Ahah. 

So this was it? Tasha was the woman Moonn loved?

It made me wonder whether this mattered to me; and, in the end, it didn’t matter. 

As I talked to her I felt more and more like Moonn. 

I almost kissed her when I left. 

.

I THOUGHT about what I should do. Tasha clearly loved me, in her way, in both worlds. Was there a future for us in the real world? Maybe not; I had known Tasha a long time, and she was rigidly straight. She wanted to be me, but that didn’t mean she wanted me. She wanted Moonn, and Alden. She wanted a gorgeous young guy, not real-life me. And she had been so determined to ensure that Moonn was real, that Moonn was who he said he was. If she learned that Moonn had fooled her like this, wouldn’t she see this as a betrayal? Moonn had fooled her no more than she had fooled him, she wasn’t who she said she was either, but that is not the way people generally judge things.

I felt a little bit relieved that the mystery was solved, and more relieved that I didn’t care. I wanted more than ever to see Kalyee. I knew that the way to Tasha’s heart was through Kalyee’s heart. 

I fell asleep for a while, and when I woke up, the yearning was stronger and stronger, so I logged in and sent a message to Kalyee: I love you. Let’s move in together. 

There was a little bit of a break after that, not much, just enough time for her to write a long response and delete it and send a short response that read as though she had dictated it. 

I held my breath. 

Ohhh …. gosh. We have fun together. 

I was heartbroken and also enraged, I had the reaction that I had seen in the faces of various men over the years, a certain wounded presumption, almost a feeling of entitlement, like I figured that I had put myself out there, I had wined her and dined her, I had told her I loved her, I had given her that, and so I had earned this. I was heartbroken, she had made me love her, I had given her my heart, and now, for all that, I deserved her. And after all, who would she be if I had not trained her for years on how to be me, helping her with clothes, giving her advice on life, and presenting a blueprint for her to emulate in every way. Kalyee didn’t know it, but she really really owed me.

.

DID OUR RELATIONSHIP decline after that? 

It did not! It just didn’t get better. We were a dead shark, like the fellow said, once, a long time ago, back when everyone loved him, that fellow who coined the “dead shark” terminology. But even if I were a dead shark, I was still happy. You know, after I sat with the heartbreak for a little while and after the heartbreak had become a part of my life, like that residual pain in my little toe from the time I broke it, I realized that I could accept that nothing would get better, since everything was pretty great already, so why not be happy? Why did things have to get better? Forget about the “dead shark” guy and remember what Aristotle said about happiness. 

I still visited Kalyee in Virelia once a week, sometimes twice, though usually I tried to give Kalyee room to breathe. I knew intellectually that Tasha was Kalyee, but in my heart, I didn’t really believe it when Kalyee and I were together. I was Moonn and Kalyee was Kalyee. I could not see Tasha in there. She was Kalyee. Kalyee, in Virelia, was remarkable, she had taken the beta protype to next-gen level. Tasha was not, she was a carbon copy of the prototype. (I don’t really know what a “carbon copy” is, except that it gave us “cc” in emails, and it’s an old-book metaphor for something that isn’t as good as the original, which I thought you would understand, at your age.)

Kalyee and I went to amazing places together, a glass-bottomed observatory suspended over an active volcano, a luminescent forest that was alive with a chorus of glassy chirps, an art gallery where all the paintings responded to your emotions in real time, and an opera house where we saw “Saul” by Carolina Uccelli, an opera that’s been lost, but which artificial intelligence has regenerated. The opera singers were real, but their skills were enhanced. 

And one night, she let me see behind the antique door in the back of her apartment, and then to walk through the door with her.

.

WE WALKED into the room and floated up into an expanding and collapsing kaleidoscope of realities, all seamlessly layered so that I knew we were in all of them at the same time, both of us slowly spinning, like dancers in water. Do you see what I am saying? My brain was in four places at the same time, a spiral staircase of carved teak that led to a transparent dome above the city, into a sky of galaxies and auroras moving in slow arcs, where the air smelled like rain; and a dark, circular room lit by glowing and buoyant creatures that felt like memories; and a room that was bigger inside than outside, filled with humming trees and patches of time-dust with minds that flit among the branches; and a vast void that shimmered with shifting clouds of living glass and starbloom, where Kalyee and I flew with translucent wings that we wore like harnesses. In all the braided and interwoven worlds, we glided through the light, our hands touched, and we felt the pulse of the universe. 

.

WHENEVER I WASN’T WITH HER, I still thought about her and wished I was with her. I loved the way her skin felt when I touched the side of her face; I loved sinking into her when I hugged her, when I saw her again for the first time in a while. I loved the way she wrapped her arms around the back of my neck, and the way she smiled right before she kissed me. And also, I really loved her breasts, the way they felt, the nipples, Kalyee’s inframammary fold — the natural fold where the bottom of the breast meets the chest wall — it turns out that I am an inframammary fold man, the way some guys are leg men, and some guys are ass men. I loved the way Kalyee’s small breasts bounced a little, not too much, when she got out of bed. I really loved Kalyee’s breasts. Especially her inframammary fold. 

“We will live here forever, in Virelia,” she said to me one morning, as the light of sunrise streamed in from the high windows of her apartment. “It will keep growing, with new things to discover, and so will we, forever and ever. We will upload our consciousness to this world, and we will live forever. And we will never get old.”

She nestled her fingers between mine, and the day blossomed. 

.

STILL: AFTER THE TEMPORARY HEARTBREAK, part of the magic dissipated, Virelia became a life in which one could suffer disappointment, and from that realization, I started noticing details in Virelia, little seams that didn’t make sense, and I started to notice things about Kalyee, pauses when she talked to me, a vacant look in her eyes sometimes, her costume fraying. Then maybe a month or so after my heartbreak, as the weather in New York City was starting to get a little nippy, but Virelia remained the same as always (cold in the cold places, nice and warm in the nice warm places), Kalyee and I holed up in a sky chateau in the Alps; we managed to ski a little during the day and to disappear into the hot tub steam at night, and then in the morning (and I am sorry for getting a little bit graphic), Kalyee got out of bed naked, and as she turned around and stood at the head of the bed, before she got dressed, she ran her fingers through my hair, massaged my scalp a little bit, and I looked up, right into her bush, in the full glare of the Swiss morning sun, and I noticed for the first time something else about her, a particular pubic hair grooming flourish that I recognized, something that in the real world had been especially short-lived. I had not studied Kalyee’s pubic hair in direct sunlight and with such attention before, but now I did. While Virelia is a vivid and sharp-focused world, this detail was not, it was a little blurred, as though rendered from a photograph with artistic pretensions, which is why I had not noticed it before, the lack of HDR high-resolution detail.

And I knew right away exactly what had happened. Tasha wasn’t Kalyee. Mystery solved. 

I should have figured it out sooner. Tasha had never seen me get off. Whoever had duplicated me had seen me get off. So it would not have been Tasha. Maybe I’d hoped it had been Tasha, maybe I would have loved to be worshiped like she did. The truth was more complicated and less flattering.

Did Kalyee sense the sadness in my eyes when I left her that day, the grief in my voice? Avatar eyes reveal nothing. And as for the voice, I always felt despair when I left Kalyee to return to my real life. She had no reason to realize that today was any different. 

.

I WOKE UP the next day in real life, and I didn’t message Kalyee, and I didn’t even start thinking about going back, because she and I would have to have a big confrontation the next time I went to Virelia. So maybe I would not go back to Virelia. What was the point, after all? Maybe Moonn Feller could just disappear. I could delete my social media pages. And I would be gone. Maybe Kalyee would miss me. Maybe not. Kalyee had enough admirers, after all. She didn’t need me, not really. 

.

SO I PUT IT ALL OFF, just tried to figure out what to do. You know, I really loved Kalyee. Seeing behind the curtain didn’t end that. It warped it, but it didn’t erase it. 

I went down to the East River and rented a kayak. It was cold, as I mentioned, I was the only one out there. Did you know that the East River isn’t really a river? It’s a tidal strait. which means the currents are brutal and unpredictable and can really sweep you away. I am fully certified to kayak in the East River, but having been enough to battle the tides and get certified when I was nineteen doesn’t mean that I am strong enough now, at twenty-seven, so it was a struggle, constantly struggling against the currents. Gulls circled overhead, they squawked in the gray morning air. I passed under the Williamsburg Bridge and nearly lost control, but I fought my way back. I had to keep reminding myself that this wasn’t Virelia, that I could actually die out here. After three hours, I returned the kayak to the rental office. My arms ached, and my legs also ached, the whole thing had been a big fight, my body against nature. 

I thought Kalyee deserved to know why Moonn Feller was going to leave her. 

So I strapped myself into the locomotion rig, and I went into the world, I took the subway to Kalyee’s loft in the Noisebelt, and I told the doorman to announce me. 

.

I DID GO UP to Kalyee’s apartment, the looming ceilings and the tidily organized clutter that reflected who she was, and which I loved so much, but here is the part of the “story” where I think you will be disappointed. 

You know, I think, that I have tried my hand at “fiction” writing. I wrote and directed and starred in a movie called Nobbled, which was never released, but which some people liked. That was fiction, it never happened, none of it happened. 

I don’t really have that freedom when I pass along stuff that really happened to me, even a nonfiction novella (or fictional memoir) like this, because I cannot invent a confrontation out of whole cloth where there wasn’t one. So teasing a confrontation, a big Obi-Wan/Darth Vader final reel battle, and then not delivering that, is what John Gardner called a “narrative betrayal,” a violation of promised profluence. “The good writer must believe that everything matters,” Gardner wrote. “Nothing may be wasted, nothing falsely promised.” 

So I just warn you to be disappointed. 

Was I angry as I took the elevator up to Kalyee’s apartment? I don’t even know. What was there to be angry about? I just felt I would be blunt, I would talk to her, I would tell her what I knew. 

When she opened the door, I saw that smile, I felt almost ready for that kiss, but my frown warned her away. 

“I know who you are,” I said. 

I almost told her that this was a betrayal. But was it? Did Kalyee betray me? I had wanted to solve a mystery, and she had given me the tools to do so. 

She frowned. She looked frightened. She flickered and froze a little, like when you’re on a FaceTime call and the connection is unstable. Then she was gone. 

I knew immediately what had happened, and what I had done. It was something I had never meant to do, something I regretted the instant it happened. 

I knew what would greet me when I went back to the real world. 

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I WAS NOT READY for reality. I left Kalyee’s apartment and I took the elevator downstairs. I told the doorman, “Kalyee is not well. She needs help.” He picked up a phone, a kind of anachronism, maybe, something we expect from watching movies, and I could see him talking into it as I left the apartment building. I walked up the block, past the French restaurant where Kalyee and I had a couple of romantic dinners, and a movie theater showing the film version of The Girl Who Folded Herself Into Corners, that novel that maybe existed only here, only in my mind. I just walked and walked, past bodegas and nightclubs and supermarkets and canals, dogs and cats and squirrels, street musicians, people everywhere, talking and laughing maybe for themselves but maybe only for my benefit, under bridges and over train tracks, till I came to the end, nothing more, just a vast white screen. And then suddenly the vast white screen melted away into an Escheresque tangle of staircases, a hundred staircases stretching up to the heavens. 

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I FELL ASLEEP in my bed in Virelia and woke up in my rig at home. My phone buzzed with the message that I expected, that Arthur was dead.

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YOU REMEMBER the last time I saw Arthur? It wasn’t till much later that it occurred to me how unusual it was for Arthur even to remember who I was, and especially unusual for him to remember a detail of my life, that I was in love. One might have imagined that Arthur’s dementia was waning. But in fact, Arthur was much clearer than he seemed. Why did he call me Sport? Not because he couldn’t remember my name and had to cover this up by pretending to be Gatsby. It was because he really thought he was like Gatsby. He wanted to be Gatsby. But there was someone he wanted to be even more than he wanted to be Gatsby. 

People can really figure out the solution to a mystery when they want to. I guess I just really hadn’t wanted to figure out the solution to the mystery, and I didn’t figure it out till it was right in my face, and right under my nose, quite literally. And, you know, “it” had been in my face once or twice a week for quite a while before I noticed what had been right under my nose all along. 

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ABOUT TWO OR THREE YEARS AGO, I was visiting Arthur, and he suddenly asked me what my full name was, and when I told him, he looked on the internet and said, “Writer/actress/model/ loudmouth.” 

“That’s me,” I said. I didn’t know how Arthur could let himself talk about other things while he was playing chess. He said that I had quite a portfolio, and I didn’t know how he could know that so quickly, but I realize now, years later, in retrospect, that he had been searching for me on the web beforehand, and he only pretended that day that he didn’t remember my name, he was doing his bumbling old man routine. 

“Check,” I said, and he blocked my queen with his rook, and I took his rook, and I said, “Check mate,” and he seemed glad that the game was over, his mind had wandered elsewhere. 

He said that he used to be a photo hobbyist, and I said that today, these days, we call a hobbyist a GWC, which means “guy with camera.” 

Arthur said, no no no, he insisted that he was talented, and pretty soon he was showing me these glamorous old cheesecake photos from decades ago, which were actually pretty well done. 

He looked at me a little sideways and said, “The camp aesthetic is intentional,” and I laughed, and I realized that they were even more well done that I had originally thought. 

He said he’d like to photograph me if I were willing, and he asked what my rate was, I said three hundred dollars per hour for nudes, and he said how about a thousand, and I replied that I didn’t want to wind up getting kicked out of my volunteer position playing chess with him once a week. It would be pretty embarrassing, I said, to get fired from a volunteer position, especially for sexual misconduct. 

He said that as a grown man he was allowed to entertain naked women in his apartment, and that even if the management caught me, which was unlikely, and fired me, which was unlikelier, he would still be allowed to invite me over as a friend to play chess with him. He said, What are your boundaries? and I said I don’t have any boundaries. 

So, you see, that was how I wound up naked in the middle of Arthur’s living room, with him snapping photos of me with this parlous monster camera that he got out of his closet. This all probably sounds quite creepy and predatory to you, but after all, this was one of my numerous jobs, dog walker, babysitter, delivery girl, naked photography model. If you are going to decide to be a naked model, then this is pretty much the job, being naked in the middle of someone’s living room, and it didn’t really matter that Arthur was so old, since he was in fact a good photographer. It did worry me that he was my friend, or kind of my friend anyway, but I figured he would forget all about this by tomorrow. I wasn’t embarrassed that Arthur saw me naked, or by any of the outside-the-boundaries things I did in front of Arthur’s camera at Arthur’s direction, all of which was part of the job, like any job that has elements that other people might criticize or look down on, like walking a dog on a leash or like punishing a naughty kid (or, for you, like trying [and failing] to trick someone into giving you favorable terms in a negotiation, or trying to find a workaround for environmental regulations in some foreign sweatshop), but I remember that I was kind of embarrassed by a pubic grooming flourish that I had experimented with just that morning, and which I had decided not to show anyone. Arthur didn’t mention it, and I figured that he wouldn’t even remember it tomorrow, but I really never forgot that Arthur had seen it, and even photographed it, which is how I knew who was behind Kalyee’s mask in Virelia, when she got out of bed naked and I looked at her more closely. 

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YOU’VE PROBABLY figured it out, mostly, but here are the details. Arthur used to be in the tech sector, and though it was years and years and years ago (what was the tech sector years and years and years ago, anyway?), he still knew old friends from that world, who introduced him to Virelia. Arthur was wealthy enough, just barely, to qualify for the BBB rebate. Arthur tape-recorded a lot of our conversations and had them auto-transcribed and summarized into a handy Kalyee “Bible.” He fed my recordings into a voice cloning software. 

It turns out that I talked to Arthur a lot more than I thought. We played chess and I talked a lot while we played chess, I just didn’t notice, really. He secretly videorecorded our photo session to be able to feed my movements into a motion capture model. All of that gave him a pretty good template for a Kalyee avatar for Virelia. 

In Virelia, he attached his headset mic to his voice simulator, so when he spoke, his voice went into the machine and my voice came out, with almost no lag. He also used the Kalyee “Bible” to launch an AI version of me, so that when he logged out of Virelia (for example, to play chess with me), Kalyee would always be in Virelia, she would live there. (Yes, I wondered how much of my relationship was with Arthur’s version of Kalyee and how much of it was with the AI. The police have promised to give me a log of his Virelia use, but I am not holding my breath.) 

When I figured out who Kalyee really was and confronted her, Arthur unluckily was behind the mask that evening, and he must have imagined the humiliation, the embarrassment he would suffer (he was a man of a certain age, after all, and this was like stealing nail polish), and the jolt did him in. 

For years before I confronted him, he must have worried all the time about being exposed, about how impossible this would be to explain. Maybe he had just started getting really comfortable with his deception, maybe he was finally certain that his ruse would never be discovered, which would have made the shock of the confrontation worse. 

He didn’t live long enough to find out who had figured him out. Arthur never knew that the person behind Moonn’s mask was the familiar woman who loved to play chess with him. 

“You do this for the money?” Arthur asked me that day, years ago, as he gazed through the camera lens at my bare ass, and I shook my head and said, “I like to be looked at.” Because I haven’t really needed money for a long time, and I do like being looked at, sometimes, like this. When I am gazed at, I have all the power, all the strength. The gazer is smitten, he’s awed, and I am not smitten, I am not awed. He has revealed all; I have revealed nothing. The rest of the time, in my life, I am usually powerless; I like to feel powerful. 

When Arthur was taking my picture, I knew that this was all about the male gaze, and I was right, but I didn’t really understand. The whole time, he kept asking me what it felt like to be looked at and admired, and I thought he wanted to be the admirer; thinking back on everything I went through with Arthur, I realize now that he didn’t want to be the admirer, he wanted to be the admiree. And it mattered who his admirers were in real life, because he wanted to feellike a woman being admired by a beautiful man. It wouldn’t work, otherwise. He needed the feeling of being admired by a man, a beautiful young man. This was why he stole nail polish so many years ago, and why it embarrassed him so much. Imagine how awkward it would have been for a boy to steal a bottle of nail polish, all those years ago, and for his parents to catch him at it. 

The need to be admired by a man was why he stole me, like the nail polish. When we were together playing chess, he envied me. He didn’t exactly want to be exactly me, but he wanted to experience what I experienced, to be some version of me, his own version of me. Which, as it turned out, was an improvement over the original. No one could ever love the real me the way I loved Arthur’s version of me, and the way Arden did, and how many others…?

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QUESTION FOR YOUR BOOK CLUB: when I thought that Tasha had impersonated me in Virelia, I wanted to win her heart, but when I thought that Arthur had done exactly the same thing, I saw it as identity theft and a betrayal, and I decided to end the relationship. The former was a performance, an admiring homage; the latter was fraud and treachery. Why the difference in my perception? 

Discuss. 

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A FEW BLOCKS from my real-life apartment, I drank a glass of wine all by myself at a wine bar that was filled with real live humans, but somehow it felt less real than Nullvoid, and less friendly, as though everyone in the wine bar was a projection that couldn’t even see me. In Virelia, everyone talked to me, everyone smiled at me. In the real world, no one made eye contact. So I finished the wine and I went outside into the rain and walked around, the rain flecking against my face and my hair, and I missed Kalyee, I wished that I were Moonn and that Kalyee were walking beside me. I just wanted to go to Kalyee’s loft apartment and look into her pixel-lit eyes and see her smile at me with that fond recognition and put her arms around the back of my neck. I wanted to kiss Kalyee and talk about my day. I didn’t really care that if one had looked behind her eyes and traveled up a jumble of wires, there would have been an old man there. Kalyee was not that old man, just like Moonn Feller was someone separate from the person I was outside of Virelia. If you take some part of an old man’s dreams and weave that into a young woman’s body, with a young woman’s memories and loves and hopes, and people look at her and admire her and talk to her in a certain way, the way they would talk to a young woman, then that person isn’t an old man, that person is a young woman, she is living the life of a young woman. I didn’t love Arthur. I loved Kalyee. I would not have hurt her. She didn’t have to die. We could have been happy together, Kalyee and I. 

I walked past a traffic light that glowed red through the rain and haze, and for just a second everything was almost as beautiful as Virelia. 

^^^

Kalyee Srithnam writes frequently for Oblivioni Magazine. She can be reached at KalyeeSrithnam@gmail.com

Art design by the author; photograph of Kalyee taken by Alon Preiss; AI background illustration by nameless robots.