X, p.1
X, page 1
PRAISE FOR X
“Davis is an astounding writer, seemingly unconstrained by taboos and waist-deep down in the maw of life, examining what the rest of us shy away from—never more than here in X, the rare book that can thrill and entertain, while simultaneously causing you to question everything about how you’re living.”
—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
“OH OH OH I FINISHED IT AND THREW MYSELF DOWN THE STAIRS.”
—Leigh Cowart, author of Hurts So Good
“Hardboiled style meets dyke drama in the clubs and play parties of queer Brooklyn. In an atmosphere of creeping fascism, Davey Davis gives us a fascinating protagonist. When not making a mess of their life or wasting it on true crime podcasts, Lee is an amateur sadist obsessed with finding the mysterious X, mistress of the craft to which they aspire. X is both a delight to read and a penetrating study on the intimacy of violence and the violence of intimacy.”
—McKenzie Wark, author of Reverse Cowgirl
“In X, Davey Davis presses down hard on all of our bruised places until we beg for more. In their taut, electric prose, Davis performs a skillful sleight of hand: keeping our eyes on the noirish tale of a pain slut’s growing obsession, while just out of frame fascism slowly creeps into daily life. X will leave you wet, hard, and implicated.”
—Morgan M Page, One from the Vaults podcast
“Filled with clever and thoughtful turns of phrase, and drawing on traditions of noir, camp, memoir, and erotic thrillers. Davis depicts the trans/nonbinary/queer subculture of Brooklyn as an all consuming underground network of friends, playmates, lovers, and clients, with occasional forays into office jobs, self-absorbed on the edges of a larger society of official cruelty. They unflinchingly draw taut the tightrope between ego aggression and political passivity that so many live on.”
—Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show
ALSO BY DAVEY DAVIS
the earthquake room
Contents
X
Acknowledgments
“Fantasy” is not just a thin wish but a logic that names a value.
—LAUREN BERLANT
Unnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn . . . nnnnnnnnnnnn . . . Ak-k-k . . . nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn . . . Hhhhh . . . Unnnnn . . . nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn . . . K-k-k-k . . . nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn . . . nnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnn . . . Ch-ch-ch . . . nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn—nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn . . .
—SAMUEL R. DELANY, HOGG
####
“I just want to try it,” said Venus. “It’s not that deep.”
“Not that deep,” I repeated, rolling my eyes. We were in the parlor where the ladies bring their clients before taking them down into the dungeon. I wasn’t a client, exactly, but she and I still had to negotiate.
Venus laughed. “You’re cute, too. I like it when cuties can’t breathe.”
A Lynndie England fetish, I figured. And here I was to play bottom for her—a political prisoner, demeaned for the Polaroids. Abu Ghraib must have really been something for the right kind of American preteen.
But Venus denied any connection to all that. This very specific kind of discomfort that she was going to put me through, she said, had nothing to do with the world outside the dungeon. She had a wide mouth that curled into a moue when she wanted things. “Not political,” she insisted. “Just sexy.”
Impossible, but I wasn’t about to argue with a femme who had me over a barrel. A real candle in a brass wall sconce (convenient, I thought, for when energy savers swept through Manhattan) flickered in time with the music easing from a hidden speaker: Hibari Misora covering Nat King Cole like honey on a comb, her contralto melting away into a sissified version of “Siboney” that I’d never heard before. No one except for Venus and me, and the anons paying for the camera footage of our time together, would know what I was willing to do for the information I wanted. And this was my only lead. I was lucky Venus wasn’t asking for something much worse.
“Fine,” I said. “I’m in.” How bad could a waterboarding really be if you could get up and walk away afterward? Waterboarding. Sounded fake. But real life always feels less real than the news feeds. Sueño, lisped the speakers. Te espero.
“Great,” said Venus. She stood up, tugging at the hem of her graphite bodycon. No stockings, no leather, no latex, no beat except for some mascara and a few strokes of the eyebrow pencil. She hadn’t gotten dressed up for me, which I knew to take as a neg. “Let’s go.”
When I learned that X used to work in this dungeon, I asked Camille if she knew any of the girls, and of course she did. She gave me Venus’s number, and I texted right away. Would she be willing to answer a few questions about someone I was looking for, someone we both knew?
who, Venus asked.
id rather talk about it in person, I countered; it’s hard to tell if someone is lying over text. I waited a half hour, but she didn’t reply. I texted again. so when can i come see you.
Another half hour, and nothing. Fuck her, I decided. Then I thought about X. It’s always fine until I think about X. I tried again. happy to pay.
you are? This time, her response was immediate.
i mean, I was quick to text, maybe not your normal rate.
Then there was nothing. I figured she’d written me off and gone back to her video game or whatever—any smart girl would have—but the next night, when I was just lying there, staring up at Camille’s ceiling, my phone lit up beside me.
send me a pic.
I was annoyed, but I never miss a chance to show off. I sent her one from last year, when I was less pale and skinny. A few moments later, my phone lit up again.
work trade?
I smiled at Camille’s ceiling. If trade plays their cards right, they never have to work.
I gathered all the cash I could, plus a few twenties on loan from Camille, and went to meet Venus at the dungeon. I would make up the rest by letting her do whatever she wanted to me, to torture or tease me to her heart’s content. That’s where the waterboarding came in.
“You’re into some weird stuff,” I said. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned corporal punishment?
“My desires are unconventional,” she replied, smirking over her shoulder. Her arm snaked over her head, gels tapping against the door frame she led me through. Five inches taller than her natural height, she jogged down the stairwell ahead of me like a champ.
Below the soundproofed parlor, I could hear the building’s age. The thin walls and petrified floors popped like knuckles. Sounds escaped locked doors as we passed by: a man moaned; a woman laughed; wind rattled window. The whole effect was like those CDs they play at Halloween stores, the banal music of the oubliette in whining minor key. God, pain is corny.
At least Venus is sexy. I expected her to interrogate me, or strangle me with an American flag, but all she did was spray from the industrial-grade nozzle and tell me how cute I was. She laughed when I fought the restraints, which made the weight-lifting bench we dragged in from the Wrestling Fantasy room wobble, but she never let me tip over.
Were our roles reversed, I doubt I would have been so kind. Her pretty skin is unmarked, her eyebrows no match for spit or tears. Even if her idea of a good time is a simulated drowning, it’s not so bad. Is there a Hallmark card for when you want to thank someone for not raping you with a cattle prod?
“You made it three seconds longer that time,” Venus informs me.
The towel slides off the bridge of my nose, and I can see her again, though the water still burns behind my eyes. My lungs expand and contract, swift as spooked birds. I take another breath, pushing out my chest as far as it can go against the restraints, and it feels good, even though it hurts.
When she unties my hands, I touch my face. Skin cold as rubber under my fingers, all of them numb from Venus’s bad bondage. Head still burning, I cough up water as she moves on to my legs, then block one nostril with my thumb, hook my index finger around the other hole, and blow. Some mucus, mostly water. More coughing. For the first time in weeks, I don’t feel congested. “Basically a neti pot,” I say. I laugh at my own joke and start coughing again.
She rolls her eyes. Her hair is big and shiny and ombré, like Venus Xtravaganza. Maybe that’s her namesake.
When I sit up, everything inside my head slowly shifts, like a lava lamp. My nasal cavity is raw and I can taste copper, but no one ever says anything about waterboarding causing nosebleeds. Most people don’t even know what waterboarding is, exactly, or at least I didn’t, not until tonight.
Venus expands something on her screen. “You okay?” she asks absently.
“Yeah. You know, I think I’m a natural,” I say. Now that I’m no longer bound and struggling, she seems more interested in her phone. Am I really that boring when I can breathe?
She smiles and flicks a piece of that golden hair out of her eyes, the strand jerking like a tawny snake. With a peek behind her to make sure the lid is down, she takes a seat on the toilet. Every move she makes—her ass slides back over the creamy ceramic like cakesitting porn—is dainty. “Well, I have no one to compare you with. Maybe you’re not even any good.” She laughs like Mariah Carey, though I don’t know if it’s herself or something on the internet that she finds funny.
“Anyway.” She sighs, shoving her phone down her chest and into her bra. She flicks her hair again, allowing her head to follow the course of her mane away from me and toward the little clock on a shelf beside the door. Hair dramatics are a useful trick for covert timewatching. “Now you. Who you digging up dirt on?”
The way dungeons turn over, I knew it was possible that Venus had never heard of X, but tonight I’m lucky. When I say her name, the syllable crunching like a bad word, Venus is suddenly standing again.
“Her?” she demands, gilt-nailed fingers lost in ombré. “Why do you wanna know about her?”
“It doesn’t matter. Why did she leave?”
Her mouth rolls, her face thinks. “I don’t know exactly. But it had to do with a manager.”
“Did X do something?” I ask. “Or the manager?” I’m relieved that she doesn’t pry. Maybe it’s good that Venus finds me boring.
More rolling, more flicking of the hair. Her babysoft feet pace the tile, most of it still dry. The water she drowned me with has disappeared into the drains along the walls of the sloping bathroom, which looks like any other you’d find in a rich white lady’s house except for the walk-in shower with three heads, dripping like a pack of hungry dogs. Her shoes—size 6½ US—are a bird’s nest of black vinyl next to the toilet. Towel around my neck, I take my phone down from the counter, where I left it to keep dry, and open my Notes app.
“Let me put it like this: That manager was asking for it,” says Venus.
Even when I’m not eye-level with them like I am now, Venus’s legs look bigger and softer and prettier than they do in her Cyte stories. In most of her carefully paywalled photos, she’s staring down at the camera, her hip stuck out like Nomi Malone thumbing for a ride. But she markets herself as a switch—there are a few shots where her sneer is replaced with an over-the-shoulder simper, and a slender gloved hand presses a riding crop into the crease between her ass and her upper thigh. She has that nice laugh. I bet she has a nice scream.
Water runnels through my eyebrow and I note its course, the cool it leaves behind. I can’t get distracted. I want to know everything Venus knows. Anything could be a clue. She screws up her mouth as she talks, crinkling her lips like a candy wrapper.
“Yeah, she was buzzed back then, too. She usually wore a wig in session. A nice one. Very expensive.”
“She went by a few of them, but that was the one I heard the most. Can’t remember the other ones.”
“It’s been like a year, you know? I don’t remember everything. Trauma brain. But I do remember that she was a Leo. I think. Definitely a fire sign. Or like maybe an air sign.”
When I run out of questions, I put my phone back in my pocket and massage the headache between my eyes.
“You good?” Venus asks.
I nod, digging my thumb into my eye socket. To be expected, I guess, when you huff a gallon of water through a towel. “I’m done.”
Prim as a straight girl, she scoops up her heels, pulls a ratty pair of fleece-lined moccasins from the cabinet under the sink, and slides her golden toes inside. No more feet. That’s when I know for sure a quickie is out of the question. The thought of jerking off alone in Camille’s shower later, maybe while glaring at a mold spiral, makes my head hurt even more.
“I’ll walk you out,” Venus says, glancing at her phone again. “I have a client.”
The front door closes in pneumatic silence behind me. Liquor store neon flickers to the left. Scaffolding cages a black storefront to the right. It’s dark, and I don’t see anyone on the street. I check my phone. Twenty-seven degrees and no messages. The icy wind brings my damp hair to life on my forehead. My emptied sinuses sing in the cold. I start for the train.
I don’t know what I was expecting from tonight, but it wasn’t this. I feel tired and creepy and horny. Worse, I bottomed for nothing. I asked Venus every question I could think of, but she had nothing useful for me. No address, no phone number, no aliases. There were a few details, the kinds of things you need to know about a girl so you can describe her to a client over the phone, but it was stuff that I already knew (shoe size) or that could have changed since Venus saw her last (no tattoos). Nothing she said was unbelievable, but I find it all a little hard to believe. She talked like she was hiding something. I keep my eyes trained on the ground, patrolling for ice on the littered pavement of Midtown.
I’m almost to the 1 when I feel my phone moving in my pocket, and for an instant, before I remember that she has neither my number nor any reason to use it, I wonder, with a stirring of hope, if it’s X.
Syd’s name glows atop my messages. The hope falls down a flight of stairs. But then I remember—Syd is responding to a text I sent over a week ago. I’d given up on them. But now, suddenly, I have another lead, right when I thought I was out of luck. Hope staggers to its feet.
sure, Syd says. where should we meet?
####
When I wake up, my whole body hurts. It was gonna hurt anyway, but sleeping on Camille’s couch doesn’t help. Ten days after X, the bruises are uglier than ever, but less tender, at least. I pull some clothes on over my long underwear and check the fridge. Nothing in there except a can of something and a plastic bottle of primordial ketchup. Time to go.
I arrive late on purpose, but I still end up sitting at a wobbly corner table for a full seven minutes before Syd strolls into the grimy Bushwick café. It takes almost seven more for them to order and receive their drink. I watch them pocket their change instead of tipping, a bold move for a trust fundie.
“Thanks for meeting me here,” they say, collapsing into the chair as if they own the place. There’s a grey veneer across their teeth, like the skin that grows on soy milk when it’s been out on the counter all morning. Without taking a drink of their coffee, they set down their cup and push it away, as if to give it a little privacy. “We haven’t hung out in like forever.”
Syd is so fucking fake. Ever since I’ve known them they’ve spoken slowly, under the hipster pretense that lethargy is the same thing as intention. They often find ways to bring up the two years they spent sober, even though those two years were five years ago now, and they haven’t gone a day without using since. They think that just because they’ve had EMDR and gone on a pricey peyote retreat that they’re enlightened, but they’re as authentic as Camille’s nose. Unlike with Camille’s nose, everyone can tell.
“Yeah, it’s been a long time,” I say. I know why I’m here, but what I haven’t figured out is why Syd agreed to join me. They must want something, but what? As we trudge through small talk (Climate change. Always climate change.), I try to figure out a way to ask them about X. Before I can, they surprise me with their own question.
“So listen, you know Margot, right?”
“Margot Kuhl?” I can see her full name in Helvetica Neue, flanking a thumbnail of a Revlon’d mouth and knockoff Moschino sunglasses.
“Yeah,” says Syd. “I think I’ve seen you two around.”
As if they caught us fingering each other on a blanket in Prospect Park, when the truth is that the night we met, Margot posted a string of pictures that neither of us remember taking. Nothing too damning, but she deleted them the next morning, a sure sign of gay mess. Didn’t matter. They were up long enough that Syd, or someone who knows Syd, could save them for dyke drama reference.
Margot’s blackout fuckups have never panned out in my favor. I don’t know how well Syd knows X, or if they’ve seen each other recently. If I could have figured it out with Cyte or Instagram or whatever, I obviously would have by now. Cracking open my phone is a lot easier than rolling off the couch an hour early to meet some secretly rich asshole in a café roughly the size of a hall closet for a cup of scalding imitation coffee. But I haven’t found X online anywhere, not a trace. It doesn’t help that X, the porniest letter, happens to be the world’s worst search term. So here I am, sitting here with Syd, who I’ve long tolerated but never liked. At least now I have a bowel movement to look forward to, but of course there’s an OUT OF ORDER sign on the fly-spotted bathroom door.
