With the 80% of men I don’t admire or want, I fantasize I’m fucking ethics into them. Or milking a teaspoon of fascism into latex.

So my first session with Josh, when he finally, finally barks like a K-dock sea lion chopped and screwed, and I hear, steganographied inside the hollow of that plangent anti-yawn, a glassy chattering, as if location data from the Guatemafutbol app is being cross-checked against asylum applications, I think I’m dreaming it to get off on.

He sends another booking email ten minutes after leaving.

In our second session, Josh says he wants to talk. But he doesn’t start talking, so I ask him what he’s been thinking about. I let him infodump about his vampires vs. werewolves vs. zombies paintball scenario.

I don’t tell him I played woodsball almost every weekend for two skinny alcoholic Idaho boy years, back when the idea of dying violently in a way that wasn’t my fault was romantic. A year in, I took out a life insurance policy and made the beneficiary Deworm the World. I’d get shot, and in the sting of it, walking to the dead zone with my gun held high, blessedly forbidden to speak, I’d think, if I were actually dead, that’d be 2,500 additional Quality Adjusted Life Years for children in Kenya and India. That’s ten times as effective as direct cash transfers. And I’d feel smart and good. When you can’t imagine personhood, what a balm to imagine utility.

And now Josh is crying and I don’t know why.

I hold him and rub his back and eventually coo and darlin’ my way to going down on him. Though I’m looking up at him when he comes, as he pulses I see the faces of dozens of farmers over six generations who have tended a single fig tree and then the tree and its grove and grove after grove incinerated by white phosphorus.

I’m still cleaning up when Josh makes another appointment request. Probably from the elevator.

I text Rowena, my roommate and safe call, that Josh has left and my next is on the way.

I think I might be on my way to a new regular. He’s a crier.

Rowena replies within a minute:

Yesss get it! Awww. I almost miss the criers.

Rowena and I had to stop having sex for a while after her surgery, and I don’t think I’ll ever want to start again. The break let me realize I was no longer the hot one ushering the benighted one into a whole, real life. It’d become mere sex. Not repairing the world. We will love each other (and therefore text in complete sentences) as friends forever. We still sometimes kiss hello or goodbye; sometimes someone’s hand is in someone’s hair; occasionally someone’s thumb brushes someone’s breast. I still sometimes lose track of whose skin is whose. But we’re not a thing anymore. I’m pretty sure. We’ve never talked about it.

Josh is through nice and quick in our third session. I decide I trust him enough to quickly pee before whatever crying is going to happen. But when I come out of the bathroom, he’s pulled my street bra from my bag and is seated on the edge of the bed holding it up to himself.

This could mean any number of things, or nothing at all. It’s bad he’s been in my shit. But we can come back from this.

I slowly walk over, smiling, sit beside him, and run a finger down his shoulder. “It’s one of my prettiest, I think.”

It’s not. It’s a nude t-shirt bra.

“It is pretty,” he says flatly, still holding it to his chest. Too high. A hairy nipple pokes out underneath it.

“Do you… wanna try it on?” I’m aiming for a tone that could be heard as tease or invitation, depending on his needs.

“It wouldn’t fit.” His voice is distant and dead.

I put a hand on his knee and stroke it reassuringly and give him a couple seconds. I mean, he’s not wrong. “I could measure you. I could bring something in your size for next time if you wanted.”

“It wouldn’t fit.”

I let myself laugh just a little, hoping it’s gentle, hoping to bring him back into the room. “Oh, darling, it’s not that hard to find something that fits.”

“That’s easy for you to say, with your puberty-blocker tiny rib cage…”

“I didn’t start till twenty-three!” I say, louder than I mean to, standing up and taking a step back.

“TWENTY-THREE! BEFORE FULL PELVIC OSSIFICATION! YOU CAN’T POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND!” 

I’m okay. My bag is still by the door. The bra is the only thing he’s pulled out of it. I can afford to lose the bra. I’m between him and the door, there’s space between us, he’s agitated but isn’t showing signs of getting physical, I’m okay, I can be calm for both of us. “You can’t know what’s possible for you unless you start. It takes time, but so much can happen with time. What you see here took eight years of…”

“EIGHT YEARS? YOU’RE A LIAR! YOUR AD SAYS YOU’RE TWENTY-SIX!!! TWENTY-THREE PLUS EIGHT IS THIRTY-ONE!”

Well. Well then. I don’t think I can get this session back on track.

He’s burned as a client so I might as well.

“Okay. I don’t like messing with possession, a person’s demons make them who they are, but I’m going to have to speak with your manager.”

“What!? My what!?”

“Not you, Josh. I’m speaking with [and here I recite the true name of the specific demon possessing him, precise in all seven times seven syllables] right now.” I see its wings extend from Josh’s back and fill the hotel room wall to wall, each feather a projection screen for stock footage of perfect, innocent, white, middle-class, millennial girlhood.

I trace a minor sigil of command on my throat with my thumbnail. “Connect me with your boss.”

On the wings, the gingham and wheat fields and slap bracelets and mothers’ patient instruction in grace are overrun by forest fires and failed rocket launches and burning archives and excessive, gorgeous fireworks.

Through Josh, but not through his voice, not through anything that has to do with bodies or materiality, but through the fact of Josh and his Josh-ness, the devil speaks.

the devil’s not a boss, says the devil. the devil’s an emergent property. the devil’s a tipping point.

“I want to make another deal.”

you and your devil deals. you know by now the devil doesn’t do deals. the devil gives you things you want and shouldn’t.

“Fine, well, I want to do that again. Put Josh’s anger and self-hatred about gender stuff on my books. Don’t take away the proto-trans or whatever feelings. I just want to be the one to carry the lost time. I want to metabolize his regret for him. I have a lot of practice, it’ll be easier for me.”

metabolize her regret for her, corrects the devil.

“I’m a realist. Maybe when he actually does something about it.”

you know she’s a dick, says the devil. evil job. contemptuous with her wife and kids in a way that’s subtle enough to really mess ’em up. she’s filed more than twenty reports about tents on the SF311 app this year.

“I don’t want to know about that. Just give me the gender guilt. I dunno, maybe if I take some pain off his hands he’ll do better. Hurt people hurt people.”

yeah sure but who ain’t hurt? mostly people who hurt people keep hurting people. but cool whatever.

First my fingers claw, then my toes curl, then muscles in my scalp I otherwise forget I have squeeze tight. The tension crawls inward, everything clenching along the way, arriving at my pelvic floor. I’m made into a valve so other people’s problems can be poured into me with nothing spilling back. Leading up to my undirected kidney donation, there was some imaging where I had a radiotracer injected, and this is similar: something cold is flowing into me but I can’t follow the sensation all the way to where it’s going. It’s over in less than a minute. When it passes, the un-clenching is delicious, but soon I feel no different from before. I won’t really feel different until I have a moment alone with my thoughts and they’re more enemy than usual.

you have no idea why you want this do you? asks the devil. don’t you like desire? don’t you want to get to know it better?

I want to say I don’t want to hurt, I’m just trying to do what’s morally optimal, but I know that’s not totally true. How am I supposed to know why I want anything? Maybe because I spent so long drowning in feelings of wrongness, I get itchy if I feel too fine. Maybe I have some fucked-up idea that eternal suffering will guarantee eternal womanhood. Maybe I watched Breaking the Waves too young.

“I just want to, okay? What I don’t get is why your demon friends keep putting me in these situations, why you keep letting me take up other people’s burdens. Like, what’s your project here—is it easier to harvest sin if it’s packaged up in fewer people?”

this is one hundred percent your project my dude, says the devil. why would the devil need a project when humanity has so many?

When I chuck my keys into the key bowl, Rowena looks up from her copy of Les Guérillères. It’s bursting with even more  sticky notes than yesterday but will probably never actually amount to a video essay. “Trash client?”

“Trash client. But I’m okay.”

“Oof. Sorry. I’ll start the popcorn. Go get changed and we’ll watch something stupid.”

By the time I get back to the couch, the popcorn’s in two bowls so Rowena can do her dill-nootch-sriracha bullshit. She’s prepped a menu of three movies but I make her pick. We lean into each other. I think she initiates it, but I can’t feel her trying. She pets my hair and I pet hers and, when we lift a hand to return to the top of the stroke, the small banshees of the day escape our skulls and stretch their jaws: the mostly justifiable fibs, the sweetnesses we might have shared and didn’t, the insufficient gratitude and minor thoughtlessness, all the shavings of our souls we sold today. Hundreds of them scream and scream and eddy round each other, florets twining into inflorescences. They rise through the drop ceiling to the apartment above and probably, eventually, spin into the night.