Virtual Mortality

Jack Steele                                                                                                      3900 words

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Virtual Mortality

By

Jack Steele

     She’d been like a gift from heaven, as he’d often told her, just to see what she’d say.  For three years, at the very reasonable rate of ten dollars an hour, she would talk to him via instant message about anything from Plato to nipple rings, an expense of sixty to a hundred dollars a week that he charged to the church.  He considered it a legitimate business expense, his mental health no small thing for the general welfare of his congregation, and even on days when he couldn’t quite sell himself on that argument, when he admitted how specious it was, he decided it didn’t matter, that he liked being dishonest for a woman.  He told her everything and nothing.  Nothing about his family, friends, the church.  Everything about the private sermons, which he no longer wrote, or which had become, rather, a journal about his conversations with her.

     At her best she might say something like, “So, Reverend, tell me this.  Did you ever fuck anyone in your office?  From behind, say, like over the desk?”  “Behave Yana,” he would say, but Yana at her best never behaved.  “A married woman?  To help her get back at her adulterous husband?  And at the same time you could revel in what a slut she was, for being adulterous herself?  Or better yet, let’s really get depraved, how about a teenager?  Some nubile young thing who was already pregnant, so in that way you were safe?”  “You’re going too far with that one.”  “I don’t think that’s possible with you, Reverend.”  “If you’re not careful, I might lose my temper.”  “Promises, promises.  What would you do?  Oooo, the mad reverend.  I’m so scared.”  “Remember, Yana, I pay you to do whatever I say.”  “That’s not true.  You pay me to be Yana.  I don’t think you’ve ever screwed anyone in your office, but you wish you had, don’t you?  And you’re ashamed to admit the oh so boring truth.”  “Shut up, Yana.”

     She never failed to delight him.  He would practice conversations with her in the mornings as he lay in bed waiting for his coffee to make, and he’d still be “talking” to her as he drank his first cup and looked through the morning paper.  She took up too much of his time, of course, but she was absolutely necessary.  He even told her once, a morning when he unwisely put a  shot of bourbon in his coffee, that she helped him keep “dark thoughts at bay,” which she wisely turned into something light.  “Whatever do you mean by dark thoughts, Reverend?  Please tell me.  My hand strayed down to you know where when you said that.”  Before it was over his obsession with her had reached the point to where he would get an erection the moment he saw “Hi, Reverend,” on the screen.  He was convinced that he knew what her voice sounded like, that he knew her pitch and could hear her cadence and inflections.  “Say it again,” he sometimes said, and she would say, “What?”  “What you just said.  Your greeting.”  And then, after a short pause, it would appear:  “Hi, Reverend.”

     The first whore he told her about was a redhead he named Shirley MacLaine.  That’s why he picked her.  She looked like Shirly MacLaine.  Twelve dollars for half an hour.  “How long ago was that?” she asked.  “Fifty years or so.  Why?”  “Just wondering if I should raise my price.”  “If I could actually touch you, Yana, I’d pay you a thousand dollars for half an hour.”  “Keep going, Reverend.  Shirley MacLaine.”  It was a real whorehouse, out in the country.  The girls came into a small parlor and both the customers and the girls sat on chairs and stared at each other while hillbilly music played on a jukebox.  You weren’t three feet away from them, and when you worked up the nerve, you asked one for a “date,” and she led you down a hall to a bedroom.  She made you wash off in a “peter pan,” then she went through the menu.  Blow job, rim job, around the world, anal, doggie, or just a straight missionary fuck.  All he had was the twelve dollars, so he took the straight missionary fuck.

     “Of course you did,” said Yana, adding a smile, “but why are you telling me this?”  “I’ve thought about her all my life.”  “But not because she was a good fuck.  Am I right?”  “Right.”  “So why?”  “I don’t know.  Do you think she’s still alive?  What are the chances?”  “Probably not very good.”  “No, but if she were, she’d probably be working at Walmart, don’t you think?  I can see her sitting outside in the alley behind the store, smoking by herself, still skinny.  She might have a trucker for a boyfriend.  He gets plenty of pussy on the road, but he keeps coming back to her because she’s an old friend.  And she’s got a daughter who also works at Walmart.”  “Maybe it’s his daughter,” Yana suggested.  “Could be,” he said, “but be that as it may, sometimes they all go to Denny’s together for supper.  Or rent a movie and order pizza.  What do you think?”  “You’re too sentimental, Reverend.  She’s probably got cancer, and that’s why she’s so skinny.  She lives in a rented room with a hot plate.  Wears a wig because she’s lost all her hair.  They’re about to lay her off at Walmart because she can’t keep up.  Too many pain killers and her daughter’s boyfriend borrows money from her and never pays it back.  Plus, the trucker probably wants to screw her daughter, whether she’s his or not.”  “You’re such a cynical bitch, Yana.”  “I know, hon.”

     He told her that he’d had at least one embarrassing moment with every whore he remembered.  “Except me?” she asked.  “Yes, dear, except you.”  With Shirley MacLaine it had been when he kissed her, then asked if it was okay to kiss a whore.  “Not sure whether kissing her or asking her after was worse.”  Yana said, “I’m sure she thought it was sweet.”  “She might have.  She was pretty nice.”  “What did she say?”  “She said it was fine and grinned in that Shirley MacLaine way.”  “You could probably have got her to marry you at that point.”  “I should have saved my money and gone back every week.  Developed a relationship with her.  Run off with her to somewhere.  Wonder if she had a boyfriend.”  “Were you kissing her when you came?”  “I don’t remember.  Probably not.  It’s hard to keep your lips together at that point.  I do know I came too soon.  Had a problem with that in those days.  Couldn’t hold back.”  “I’m sure she didn’t mind.  You were easy money, Reverend.”

     The second whore he remembered he called Rita Moreno, but only because she was Mexican.  “I know Rita Moreno isn’t Mexican,” he told Yana when she objected.  “It’s just that I’ve always liked her.”  “I think you’re being racist.”  “Think whatever you like.  Latin women have a certain warmth.”  “Between the legs?  Is that what you mean?”  “Shut up, Yana.”  “I don’t have to, you know.”  “You do if you want me to continue paying you.”  “Maybe I don’t care.  I have other clients.”  “Face it, Yana.  You wouldn’t want to lose me.”  “No, Reverend, you have that turned around.  I can make you do whatever I want.  Admit it.  You’d do almost anything not to lose me.”  He didn’t reply.  “If I told you I didn’t want to hear about Rita Moreno,” she said, “you’d humor me, wouldn’t you?”  He hesitated, but not for long.  “Yes.”  “Okay, then, go ahead and tell me about her.  And don’t worry about being a racist.  I know you’re not perfect.”  “I’m not a racist, Yana.”  “Whatever you say.”

     Another whorehouse, this one on the Mexican border.  Really good looking girls surrounded him and began to chant:  “fucky for love, fucky for love.”  But he shook them off and went to the bar and pretty soon Rita Moreno sidled up.  Only she wasn’t skinny like the real one.  “How much?” asked Yana.  “Eight dollars for half an hour.”  “You’re too much, Reverend.  A racist and an expoiter of cheap labor.”  She was heavy, very plump, but in a solid sort of way, and dolled up like a Christmas tree.  Bangles and beads and enough scent to choke a horse.  She leaned against him, rubbed his leg, told him he’d be the first that night.  “Bad move on her part,” Yana said.  “I seem to recall you like sloppy seconds.”  “Don’t be so crude, Yana.  Besides, I wasn’t thinking about that at the time.  I was nineteen and in a Mexican whorehouse.”  “So you went with the fat one?”  “I liked her.  She pouted well when I put her off, and she wouldn’t give up.”  “All the pretty ones were probably lesbians anyway.”  “Good point.  I hadn’t thought of that.”  “Not that yours wasn’t pretty.”  “Actually, she was.”  “So how long did you last this time?”  “You really are a bitch, Yana.”  “How long?”  “Half a minute, maybe.”

     Very odd, he thought.  He had his dick inside a Mexican whore for thirty seconds and fifty years later he remembered every second of it.  “So how did she embarrass you, Reverend?”  “Two ways.  First, after the sex, she told me my hair stank.”  “Oh my.”  “And prompted me, like I was a child, to take a shower.”  “Why did your hair smell bad?”  “I had a phase like that in college.”  “Of not washing your hair?”  “More like a counterculture thing.”  “I see.  The reverend as rebel.  Beatnik or hippie?  How old are you again?”  “More like beatnik.  I tell you everything, Yana.”  “I doubt that.  How else did she embarrass you?”  “I was disappointed in her performance and it showed.  I sulked.”  “She probably wasn’t that thrilled herself, with your thirty-second performance.”  “I know, don’t rub it in, but get this, she thought I was mad because I’d misunderstood her about being the first that night.  She thought I thought she was a real virgin.”  “Now come on, Reverend, how could she think you were that dumb?”  “I don’t know, but that’s what embarrassed me.  It’s the truth.”  “Let’s see.  If I understand this right, you were embarrassed by a misunderstanding on her part about what she mistakenly believed was a misunderstanding on your part.”  “Yes.”  “The things that go on in Mexican whorehouses.  Did she get huffy or try to make you feel better?”  “Better.  She tried to make me feel better.  Later in the bar she even offered me a stick of gum.  And told me not to look so sad.”  “You sure bring out the mother in whores, don’t you Reverend?”  “Do I?  I hadn’t noticed that lately.”  “Oooo, a zinger.  You poor thing.  Want me to kiss you on the forehead and pull the covers up?  Remind you to say your prayers?”  “I don’t believe in prayer, and you can kiss me on my pecker.”  She put up the smile sign.

     Yana already knew he didn’t believe in prayer.  He’d told her from the start that he was an atheist preacher, maybe even during their first conversation.  “That would be a good screen name,” she said that first day.  “Atheist Preacher.  Just Preacher makes me think too much of The Grapes of Wrath, and there’s something menacing about The Reverend.  Don’t you think?”  “No.  What do you mean?”  “I don’t know.  Makes me think of Elmer Gantry, or even crazier evangelists, ones who really believe their own shit.  Wasn’t there a Robert Mitchum movie where he was called that?  But never mind, I’ll call you Reverend.  It’s okay without the article.”  “Call me whatever you like.”  “It must be a chore, Reverend, talking to people all day who believe in God, especially when you don’t.  Will I be your little break from that?”  “If things work out.”  “You mean, if I’m able to please you enough?”  “If you want to put it that way.  Yes.”  “Something tells me you want more than dirty words, Reverend.”  “I suppose I do.”  “But I wonder if anyone could be perverse enough to please you, the way you really want to be pleased.”  “What makes you say that?  How can you know that already?  Assuming it’s true.”  “I have my ways.  Do you want romance, Reverend?”  “No.  I don’t think so.  I’m happily married, for one thing.”  “And for another?”  “I want to say I’m too old, but that’s not it exactly.  Too settled, I guess.  Set in my ways.”  “And yet you want something you don’t have?”  “Yes.”

     “You’re going to call me a racist on this one too,” he said, the day he told her about the third whore.  “Uh oh.  Was she black?”  “Yes.”  “And that’s why you picked her?”  “Not really.  She just happened to be standing on the right corner at the right time.”  “Uh oh again.  We’ve descended to street corners now?”  “It gets worse.  I was already a preacher at the time.  No more college indiscretions.  A preacher and married and a father.”  “You were asking for trouble, Reverend.”  “Tell me about it.”  “You’d have made the front page.”  “I doubt it.  This was in a big town.  A city.”  “So tell me, though.  Did you want to get caught?”  “I didn’t think so at the time, but looking back, it’s hard to explain it otherwise.  And isn’t that what they say nowadays about things like that?”  “You’re the preacher, Reverend.  You should know that better than me.  Is it what you tell people who come to you with similar problems?  That they want to get caught?”  “No.  At least not so bluntly.  People would think I’m crazy.  I couldn’t say, ‘Deep down you probably want your wife to know you’re cheating on her.’”  “Do people actually tell you those things?”  “Not many.  There’s more professional help elsewhere these days, plus it’s more likely to be a woman who confides in me.  When a man comes in, chances are he’s considering suicide.”  “Have you prevented a suicide, Reverend?”  “Yes.  Or I might have helped.  He didn’t do it in any case.  Not yet.”  “Always the pessimist.”  “Ready to hear about my black whore?”  “If you insist.”

     For no particular reason he’d continued drinking after dinner, something he almost never did, and when everyone in the house was asleep, he got in the car and drove to where he knew there were streetwalkers.   “The girl I saw on the street corner was bone thin, Yana.  Probably died of an overdose of something the next day.”  “What was her name?”  “The name I gave her?”  “Yes.”  “I don’t remember.  I’m not sure I ever gave her one.”  “I don’t believe you.”  “Okay.  Billie Holiday.  It doesn’t really fit though.  I mean, with all due respect to the whore, she didn’t really have a chance of living up to that.”  “But you wanted her to?”  “I think I had something like that in mind when I left the house, but it was late, or the wrong place, and I didn’t have much to choose from.  This poor girl was so beat down she hardly even looked female.”  “Maybe she wasn’t.”  “I’ve thought of that.  I was pretty drunk.”  “How much?”  “Twenty dollars for half an hour, and an extra twenty for a blow job.”  “God, you were drunk.”  “Yes.”  “And lucky to be alive to tell about it, I’m thinking.  Sorry Reverend, editorial comment here, but that should be embarrassing in itself.  Being such a fool.”  “Wait til you hear the rest.  At her direction I drove to a deserted warehouse district and we did it in the front seat of my car.  Even with the blow job, all very brief.  She didn’t even really take her clothes off, so she could have been a guy for all I know, but here’s the kicker:  after I dropped her back on the street, I found a little kitchen knife on the seat.”  “Just in case you got out of hand?”  “I presume so.  Must have fallen out of her pocket.”  “I was right, wasn’t I?  About why it’s embarrassing.  So reckless, Reverend.”  “Yes.” 

     One day he asked her if she’d ever really been a whore.  “No.”  “But you’ve wanted to be?”  “I might be tempted if it were as easy as this.  But just think Reverend:  sexually transmitted diseases, guys who might really gross me out, guys who might really hurt me.  A night in jail.  Real life is real life.”  “Guys who need to wash their hair.”  “There you go.”  “But you’re not satisfied, are you?  With your sex life.”  “Now you’re getting personal.”  “If I sent you more money, would you get more personal?”  “How much?”  “How much do you want?”  “Why do you want to know about me, Reverend?  Isn’t it enough that I’m sitting here in the dark with my hand on my pussy?”  “Is it wet?”  “Yes.  It doesn’t take much when I’m talking with you.  If you listen carefully, you might hear it in my voice.”  “I’ll send you a hundred dollars if you’ll talk on the phone with me.”  “No.”  “Do you have a boyfriend?”  A pause, then she told him how much more money to send for getting that personal, and he didn’t hesitate to send it.  He knew that whatever she told him might be a lie, but he didn’t care.  He was interested in her lies.

     Even before that she’d shown him two pictures.  One was a line drawing, a portrait of a cute blonde in her twenties, possibly even younger.  Shoulder length hair.  Wide innocent eyes.  Perky breasts, nipples visible under a blouse.  That sort of look, but better than a cartoon, more character, more real.  Not a generic sex toy.  The other was a photograph of a too thin woman wearing a see through white shift of fur-trimmed lace.  She was holding a white mask over her face and either standing on tiptoe or wearing high heels.  The only visible part of her face was her mouth and chin.  Her lips were painted bright red.  He didn’t ask her if the pictures were really her.  He knew she’d be evasive.  She’d always insisted that he was not talking to a real person.  “You’re talking to Yana,” she told him, “a product of someone’s imagination.  Just be happy with that, with her.  Please?”

     What she told him when she “got personal” wasn’t the least bit unusual or unexpected.  Totally plausible.  She had a boyfriend.  She loved him, and she was happy with her life in general, but she was more adventurous sexually.  He wasn’t a dud by any means, but imagination wasn’t his strong suit, and he wasn’t much into fantasy.  He didn’t know about her Internet activities.  “If what you tell me is true,” he said, “you’re breaking your own rules.  Even if it’s all a lie, telling me is still breaking the rules, or at least the spirit of them.”  “I know.”  “Then why are you doing it?  For the money?”  “To please you, Reverend.”

     That much he believed.  For three years he talked on the Internet to a person who wanted to please him.  Probably a woman, but even that didn’t matter.  He told her about his three whores.  He told her about his private sermons.  “The deception became easier over the years,” he said, referring to the atheism he discussed with himself at length in the private sermons.  “Not just because I got more practiced at it.  It’s that they expect shorter sermons, and they don’t even listen to those.  I could read a grocery list.  I might could even get away with talking about hell and damnation, although that’s so unfashionable these days it might actually be riskier than a grocery list.  I save hell and damnation for the sermons to myself.”  “You love to torture yourself, don’t you Reverend?”  “Not sure I’d say ‘love.’  I can’t help it.”  “Like you can’t help talking to me?”  “Exactly like that.”  “Am I an obsession?”  “Yes, Yana.”  “Say it.”  “I’m obsessed with you.”  She put up a smile.  “You’re the devil, Yana.”  “Have you put me in your private sermons?  You must have.”  He hadn’t told her about the journal.  “Yes,” he said, “ I’ve put Yana in my sermons, private and public, but explicitly only in the private ones, of course.”  “Really?  You’re too good to me, Reverend.  I’m blushing.”  “I say how Yana has helped me.”  “I’ve helped you?  Now I’m really blushing.  Please go on.”  “It’s too corny.”  “Please, please.  Pretty please.  I don’t mind corny, really I don’t.”  He said, “You saved my life.”  There was a pause, too long, and then she said, “How sweet.”  “Don’t you want to know how?”  “Sure.”  But he held back for a moment.  He knew her pretty well by then, and he knew he’d gone too far, but in the end he couldn’t think of anything but the truth.  He said, “I go out of the country a lot, to places where it would be very affordable to hire a prostitute.  I’ve never done it, but I think I would have if I hadn’t met you.”  “And you’d have hated yourself for it?  Is that what you mean?”  “No.  Or at least that’s not what I’m getting at.  It just wouldn’t have worked.  For one thing, what whore would listen to my whore stories?”  “You mean what whore would appreciate them, don’t you?”  “Yes.”  Another silence.  Uncharacteristically, she didn’t ask him to explain how that saved his life, but he wanted to tell her.  He said.  “I think that would have been my slippery slope, Yana.  More and more whores, always looking for something I couldn’t find.  I’d go broke.  I’d spend my last penny on a whore and wind up with no family, no friends, a pitiful, disgusting beggar in some broken-down country.”  “No, Reverend, you just like to think so.  We’re such birds of a feather, you and me.  You’ll never self-destruct.”  She’d warmed up again, but the next day she was gone.               

     He still smoked four cigarettes a day, had for thirty years, one after every meal and one before bed, no more and no less, and was proud of the discipline it showed.  He broke the rule for the first time soon after he finally admitted that Yana wasn’t coming back.  There was a little stone patio just outside his office, very private, surrounded by huge ferns most of the year.  It seemed always to have just rained there.  The church and the patio were made of native limestone.  There was a lot of stained glass, leaded windows, wooden crosses, flourishing flower beds all over the place, a well cut lawn.  Many in the congregation regretted the absence of an ancient graveyard, but at least there was morning ground fog most of the year.  Next door, in the same style as the church, the rectory now housed only him and his wife, who was probably at that moment having tea with lady churchgoers, his three children long since gone their separate ways, all okay.  It was a cozy liberal Protestantism all in all in which he’d lived, and he was able to say to himself honestly, as he stood on the patio and smoked the forbidden cigarette, that he’d had no more than the usual regrets.