NSFW: Part of a Scene from My Upcoming Novel, *The System Was Blinking Red*

    “I gotta get out of here,” I said again, but it was too late: the woman at the podium had begun to call out names of actors, and out they came, grinning and waving, their faces sheeny with sweat. It took me some moments before I even realized that Tyler had emerged, but then, after the last actor — Colin Ferrel, the star — had been announced, the camera swept through a series of closeups, and suddenly, there he was, Tyler himself, but altered: hawkish nose and beautiful eyes and plump smirking mouth, but clean-shaven, short-haired, and someone had clearly been wailing on his body at the gym — those muscles on the poster were some kind of trickery, the result of a technology sufficiently advanced that I could not distinguish it from magic, but the trickery was less, other, than what it would have been just a few months ago, because now toned pectorals and deltoids tested the material of the light shirt he wore. It was unreal, uncanny, the worse for being unimagined: the thousand ways I had dreamed Tyler, the contortions I’d put his body through, the cocks I’d shoved in his mouth and through his fingers, and I’d never once thought of him as anything but trim and light as a bird, the way he’d been when we met: was that the way he was when we split? Had he already been developing those muscles even then? Everything about this was wrong, impossible. The Tyler I knew toiled Off-Broadway and went in for bit parts on sitcoms and pulled stints with Upright Citizens’ Brigade to hone his improv skills — he mocked super-hero movies, the swollen bodies and grim faces, and I had a memory, a distinct one that I am sure is real, though I have no idea when or where it might have happened, of him using vicious air quotes around the word “acting” when he discussed X-Men.

    The lights had fallen. They were talking, all of them, about the movie. Milton seemed riveted but I couldn’t focus. What was The Redeemers about? Everyone already seemed to know, but I didn’t. Clearly there were superheroes involved — I kept hearing words like The Illusionist and Osiris floating around — but I couldn’t tell if they were meant to be fighting one another or against some foe whose name I couldn’t pick out of the rabble. Tyler seemed nervous, reluctant to talk, until the moderator directed a question right at him. I didn’t hear the question, but then Tyler’s voice was ringing in my head, his face hallucination-huge on the screen:

    “I’m just really humbled by the opportunity to be a part of a tradition like this,” he said. His voice was round and deeper than I remembered, less stereotypically gay. He’d been working on it. “I had Redeemers comics all over my bedroom as a kid, and to play a character like Goshawk has always been a dream for me.”

    “Acting,” I thought, seeing his fingers wiggle at their knuckles. “Acting.” “Acting.” “Acting.” I had a crazy idea, then: Tyler had been body-snatched. My Tyler, the real Tyler, had been used to incubate this weird, rote joiner, this muscled “actor” who mouthed the same bullshit spewed by handsome, talentless automata everywhere, the posers for photos, the models for figurines — Tyler Fauxsenthal, coming Christmas 2009 to suck your soul. The real Tyler had told me on our fourth date that he wanted to show me a movie, and that movie had turned out to be a vintage porn flick in which a middle aged black man picks up an angelic white youth, takes him home, unbuckles what turns out to be a prosthetic foot, and roundly fucks the angelic youth in his angelic ass with the stump of his amputated leg. “Now that’s cinema!” Tyler had crowed, and I had thought seriously about never seeing him again. Was that the clean-cut young man who sat up on the stage now, smiling through the gentle applause his respectful answer had garnered? The real Tyler had once, as I rode him from behind, begun to declaim Shakespeare, finally urging me, “Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night!” as I pressed myself deep into him and climaxed. Was that sexless Goshawk? I was on my phone now, reading about his character — Goshawk, in the Redeemers comics, is sixteen years old, a child born with brittle bones who cures himself with science and discovers that he can fly with the aid of a winged suit, because his tough-but-birdlike skeleton is so light. The real Tyler had once told me of an adventure that ended with him doing lines of cocaine off a stranger’s erect cock in the bathroom of a punk club in Jersey. Was that the fresh-scrubbed Pittsburgh grinner up there on the stage?

On teasing my novel.

Hi, y’all! Sorry I’ve been out of commission so long. Boring story; let me just shoot the microphone and tease my novel, The System Was Blinking Red, with the following paragraph.

*

And now these scenes are gone. Let us leave behind for the moment the politics of Congress and understand as best we can the politics of fear and bureaucracy, the way in which, since that day in 2001 on which so much changed, our red-blinking system has turned against us, because we — each and every one of us — could, in theory, be the enemy: they melted down the rubble of the Twin Towers and forged the rubble into a battleship that they sailed into the harbor below Manhattan, asking, Are you not safer this way?; they stymied our goodbyes and made us remove our shoes, though they knew — though we all now know — that it makes not a whit of difference, that those machines cannot see the bombs we all undoubtedly carry in the soles of those shoes, and even if they could, the mind-fucked and bored factota who peer at their creepy luminsecent screens have entered a mental state so stultified that they miss a huge percentage of all potential contraband anyway; and now, in the New Kafkaism, our toiletries might be weapons; in the New Kafkaism our President is given each morning a sheath of undifferentiated horror, all almost certain never to come true, to terrify him into keeping us at bay; the system blinks red, it blinks, but now it blinks differently: to protect our freedoms from those who would have us lose them, we have given them away; and piled upon this all has come to be a digital apparatus, a world of websites and dead-end phone calls, search engines that search nothing, 800 numbers to receive our fears of the Other, blank-faced kid-cops better trained in counterterrorism than in walking a beat — and to them, we are told, we should Say Something, if we See Something, and what that Something Might Be is left conveniently, inconveniently, confusingly, terrifyingly dark: oh yes, I’m not the first to notice that we have come to live in a deeply political nightmare brought forth by the dastardly acts of nineteen damaged and dangerous men many of whom were not much older than children, and by the dark sickness of a security apparatus that terrified us all into saying, Okay, you do this, we are safer this way, unconscious then of the tradeoff and incapable now of taking it back, but I’m reminding you because it’s important, because when they say Never Forget, you must recall, it is your job to recall, that we have a system that should never have let us.