=5=

"This is my first time," the girl says. She is lying, naked, on her back, across a red oriental-style footstool, fingering herself to an orgasm that never comes.

Neena looks at her blankly, as one's eyes might fall on an empty white ceramic cup, the heavy, utilitarian type you’d find in a diner. She is thinking of something else. Neena has heard the girl give this same speech before, maybe five hundred times before.

"My father brought me here," the girl continues, "on my sixteenth birthday."

Her head and shoulders hang off one end of the stool, her long bare legs off the other. Her legs are bent at the knees, her feet arched, only the tips of her tiny toes pressing the polished teakwood floor.

Her middle finger is buried deep inside her clipped black bush, moving slowly, in and out, in and out, as if she is hardly paying attention, or may lose interest at any moment.

Her skin is very white, as if dusted with talcum, or confectioner’s sugar, and the bones of her hips rise from an inviting pelvis that looks like a small animal designed by a primitive hunter as re-imagined by a postmodern artist.

Someone, somewhere, is methodically photographing her. You can hear the dry click and whirr like the descent of a plague of locusts.

"He was not my real father," the girl claims.

Her voice carries absolutely no emotion. She pauses a half-beat, for emphasis, but it all seems to be an afterthought. She’s not listening either, nor does she care.

"He bought me on a street in Bangkok. It was after a war."

Neena sighs, or rather acts as if she were sighing, and lays a frozen white lily to her cheek. She thinks, for some reason, of miles and miles and miles of empty green ocean and no horizon and the sound a tape recorder makes when playing back hours of nothing.

She thinks, Oh god, how meaningless, how completely and horribly unnecessary this all is….

The girl continues telling her life story, as she tells it every day.  

Over and over again.

"He sold me for an indeterminate sum. I was pregnant."

The tears on her face are not real.

"I am to be ravaged," she says, quite matter-of-factly, "over a period of several days by two rats, lightly sedated, and surgically planted inside me. One will be white and the other will be black. They are clones, and yes, I know, I don't understand how that can possibly be either.”

She pauses a moment, and continues.

“It seems a little bit too derivative of Orwell’s 1984 to me.  Do you think they tell me these things only to frighten me?"

Neena isn’t listening. Instead she is looking passed the girl, passed the wall, over the ocean, passed the horizon that is not there. She is listening to the tape playing nothing. She answers the girl but she feels like she is answering no one (you’re getting warmer Neena, dear) and the breath that whispers across her lips feels like the mechanically chilled air issued from an air conditioner.

"Yes,” says, "and no."