i.

Mona the moaner

A knock at the door woke Mitch Stern from a fitful sleep. He looked,
bleary-eyed, at the red numbers floating in the dark near his bedside.
Late, they said.
So it was Mona, or the cops.
He rolled out of bed and stumbled across the lightless studio,
avoiding treacherous cudgels and files, lathes and lacquer pots. He tripped
just once, over a plastic bag half-full of empty Chinese food boxes.

At the front door he said, “Yeah?”

“Mitch?”
It was Mona, sure enough.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Mona”.
“Yeah?”
He heard the handle turn then stop halfway. Locked.
“Can you let me in please?”
He unlocked the door and pulled it open. The dim light out in the
hallway made him cringe like a blind cave newt. His hair was all
disheveled on one side and flat on the other. Mona laughed when she saw
him. He thought, holy shit I missed that laugh. Deep and throaty like well
water. “You look like shit”, she said.
His pupils got back down to a reasonable size and he once’d her
over. “You don’t”.
That brought the laugh again.
She had on a clingy black number he vaguely remembered
complimenting her on a week or so back. So she felt bad about their
argument? No way she wore the same outfit twice in a short span like that
unless she wanted him to notice. The games girls played. It was so
endearing he wanted to puke.
“So, can I come in?” She twirled her brownish hair between her
fingers.
He stepped aside and let her enter. She was cigarette smoke and
shampoo. She reached for the light switch. It was one of those really old
numbers with the black and the white buttons, rather than the sensible
upside-down L. He caught her hand. “Wait”, he said. “No lights, yet,
please”.
She leaned up and kissed his neck. Just like that. Hey we got some shit
to talk about. That was what he was gonna say. Girl, we gotta address some
things. But his body thought that was just the funniest joke it had ever
heard. Every hair on him was standing on end, trying to reach her. Her
hand slid down his stomach and made him shiver. Under the waistband of
his sweats. Just like that.
Girl, we gotta talk…
She took his cock in her hand. “Fuck me”.
Mitch agreed.

I am a time-machine, Mitch thought.

He felt like he was, sometimes.
He was six-months ago Mitch. He was comparing himself now to
himself then. The general concept was the same. It was like a Highlights
Magazine from a dentist’s waiting room when he was ten-years old Mitch.
Two images, you’re supposed to find and circle all the differences in them.
Look mommy in this one the owl has one eye open and in this one they are
both closed.
Six-months ago Mitch had no Mona. Circle that.
He dressed like current Mitch, for the most part. Current Mitch was a
little darker-skinned. New York to L.A. would do that, even in the fall.
Even though he was indoors most of the time. Somehow the sun still found
a way to touch him. His hairstyle was pretty similar; just kind of all over
the place. He felt like he was pretty much the same person he was six
months ago. But once, he had time-traveled way, way into the future and
he knew that he would always feel pretty much the same forever.
One thing was for damn sure--if six-months ago Mitch was a time
machine too (he could not recall if that was the case or not), and he met
current Mitch, he would be astounded!
Because that six-months ago Mitch sure was broke. Current Mitch
was…less broke. Another circle. Four-months ago Mitch was actually
pretty far from broke. But three-and-a-half months ago Mitch met Mona,
and all the booze and sushi and movie tickets that went along with her
and--
 --come to think of it, this black dress she was wearing tonight, where
she was kissing current-Mitch’s neck.
And wouldn’t you know it, she was wearing nothing underneath that
dress. That was a nice surprise, for Mitch. He wondered if it had been a
cold walk up from her car to the studio. She was not even wearing any
jewelry. That dress fell off her shoulders like a popsicle wrapper. It just slid
into a luminous pool there on the floor. She had not even closed the door
behind her. Mitch kicked it and heard it slam as they fumbled backward.
She had been to her waxing place, he quickly discovered. Maybe as
recently as that morning. She definitely felt bad about their argument.

Six-months ago Mitch was commissionless. That was not even close
to a real word, but Mitch loved the way it rolled of his tongue in his mind.
People used to tell six-months-ago Mitch, ‘you couldn’t have picked a less
relevant form or art, pal. Nowadays, at least. It’s not graphic design.
Everyone wants graphic designers. You could’ve done music. There’s at
least some hope, there. Acting? Directing? Even painting or photography.
Mitch, you could be a fucking graffiti artist and probably have a better
chance of succeeding’.
But Mitch was a sculptor. And he was well aware that he was about
five-hundred years too late.
The most common question six-months ago Mitch got asked was
‘how does one make money as a sculptor’? He never had an answer.
But one day, something remarkable happened. It started as a weird
email that popped up in his inbox. When he saw it, he was sure it was his
friends screwing with him. He was so absolutely sure of it that he deleted
the email, and when a second one came a day later from the same ‘person’,
he deleted that one too. He called all the likeliest suspects and they denied
culpability, but he did not believe them.
The email was just so ludicrous. It claimed to be from some rich guy
on the west coast called Theo Raines. It said he was building a hotel in
Beverly Hills and that he had come across one of Mitch’s carvings online,
and how he would love to have Mitch come out to Los Angeles for a couple
months and do a massive, hand-carved sculpture for the lobby of his new
building.
Mitch just could not fathom how it could possibly be true, so he
ignored it, but when Theo tracked his phone number down and called him,
and they talked for about an hour, he realized that this was not bullshit. It
was, in fact, one of those incredibly rare, fortunate things that, up until
then, he had been thoroughly convinced only happened to other people.
What had happened was: Theo had gone onto Google and done an
image search for modern, impressionist carvings. Marble. Mitch had put a
bunch of his little, rough pieces from his NYU days up on Etsy two years
earlier (nobody had bought them, of course!), and somehow, one of those
pieces had come up in Theo’s search and caught his eye. Mitch never knew
which one it was. Theo tried to describe it for him, but it was no help.
Once Mitch was convinced Theo was a real person and not Billy or
Josh fucking with him, he said, “Listen, Mr. Raines, I’m waaaaaaaaaaaaay
better than I was back when I did that piece. Way better. But with that said,
I’ve got to be honest with you…I’ve never done a big project before. I’ve
worked with little blocks…those pieces took me a couple weeks to do.
While this opportunity is amazing and I would be more than honored to do
it, I just want to make sure you understand that I’m not the most
experienced sculptor…”
Theo did not respond to any of that. What he said was, “Mitch, do
you want to know how I got rich? Do you want to know my secret?”
“Sure”, Mitch said. “Of course”.
“I got rich by following my gut. I got rich by being so impulsive that
people thought I was fucking nuts. By acting before anyone else did, in
ways they would never have expected. By being first”.
Mitch liked that. It seemed cool and smart and the kind of not-
helpful/helpful advice rich people like to give to people who are poor.
“But what does that have to do with me?”
“I could hire someone else”, Theo said. “Someone the world would
expect me to hire for a project like this. Some world famous sculptor. That
Italian guy who does a bunch of corporate stuff--“
“Copogna--“
“Whatever. Or that lesbian in Chicago with the huge tits—but the
point is, I want you. I don’t know shit about carving, but when it comes to
art, I know what I like, and I like what I saw of yours. Now will you do it,
or not? I’m not gonna beg”.
Mitch started to answer, but before he could, Theo talked right over
him.
“I’ll pay you, of course. To start, I’ll give you--“
 More than Mitch had made in his entire life, up to that point. More
than either of his parents made in a year, probably. Close to it anyway.
When Mitch got off the phone he was in a state of shock. He still thought
maybe, maybe it was the most elaborate hoax his idiot friends had ever
conceived.
That night, he looked Theo up on Wikipedia. He was a real person,
and he was real rich. There were some interesting bullet-point facts about
him, which Mitch read. User-contributed stuff, so who knew how accurate
it was. Still, one of them stuck in Mitch’s mind later, after he came to know
Theo quite well.
It was about classic cars.
The thing was, Theo loved classic cars. He was in Guiness’s book for
having the most expensive collection of classic cars in the world.
His most prized possessions were these things called Hemi
Convertibles. The company that made them only made like a hundred of
them, way back whenever. Half of them were confirmed to be destroyed.
Theo owned forty-eight of them. There were two that were believed to be
unaccounted for. Theo had posted some kind of reward poster online: a
million dollars to anyone who could either get him one of the missing two,
or tell him where they were.
As of the date of the Wiki-posting, nobody had come forth. When
Mitch asked Theo about it, a few weeks after meeting him, Theo got this
sad, distant look in his eyes and confided that he couldn’t sleep, some
nights, because all he could think about were those two cars.
After the email and the phone conversations, Mitch got a check in the
mail and it did not bounce, and then it all became real, and Theo flew him
across the country (first class) and put him up in a big studio in Pasadena
(where current-Mitch was fucking Mona). Mitch was astonished by how
hot it was in Pasadena, even in the fall, and by how many Asian people
there were. Mitch had not really known anything about Pasadena prior to
coming there, other than he had seen it on TV a few times for the New-
Years parade with the ridiculous floats made only from flowers.

Now, Mona’s mouth was hot on current Mitch’s skin. She was
putting it everywhere on him. Everywhere. He had masturbated constantly
this past week, missing her badly. Fortunately he had not gotten around to
it tonight, so he was able to perform somewhat. He thought he probably
would have been able to anyway though even if he had, because Mona was
the sexiest fucking creature on the planet. She was into all kinds of weird
stuff Mitch had never thought might be appealing, prior to meeting her.
Like, she tied him up sometimes. Like once, not long after they first
met, she asked him if she could tie his hands to a beam that ran across the
ceiling of the studio and give him a blow job.
“That beam”, she said, looking up at it and scratching the side of her
face with a long, lacquered nail. “I’d love to tie your hands to it and blow
you”.
Three-and-a-half-months-ago Mitch was not much brighter than
current Mitch, but even he knew that you don’t say no to a girl like this,
asking to do a thing like that. He held his hands out and smiled.
She tied them up real tight and made sure he couldn’t wriggle free.
“Like for real”, she said, “if you can get free, it’ll fucking ruin it”.
He wriggled as hard as he could, to show her he couldn’t get free.
She threw the rope up over the beam and pulled it until he was on his
tiptoes, then tied it tight. She stripped all his clothes off and Mitch started
to feel just a little bit nervous because he had not really known her all that
long, at that point. But hey, he thought, maybe this was just how girls did
things out here on the West Coast. Plus, he thought he was really starting
to like her.
So she had him tied up naked in this awkward position, and she told
him what a fucking idiot he was for letting her do this. She started
rummaging through his stuff! She went into his wallet and pulled out a
bunch of cash and said it was hers, now. She said she could totally screw
him over, if she wanted to. She could rob him or beat him up or cut his dick
off. She could take pictures of him and post them online and send them to
his parents and his grandparents.
Mitch had no idea if she was serious or not. He played along the best
he could, under the circumstances. He said she could do whatever she
wanted with him. It was her call. I trust you, he said. Even though they had
only known each other a couple of weeks.
She went to the door. She said she was leaving, and she was gonna
leave him tied up there, all day, while she thought about what to do to him.
She said she hoped he didn’t have to pee any time soon. Mitch responded
with, “Okay, sweetheart. I’ll see you when you get home. Don’t forget
dinner.”
 She walked out.
And about ten minutes later, she walked back in. She rushed over to
him and delivered on that blow job. It was unlike anything Mitch had ever
experienced before. He thought he screamed like a girl when he came, and
maybe spoke another language even. Mona wasn’t sure if he did when he
asked her later, she thought he was just talking gibberish.
When she was finished, she untied him and said if he wanted to, he
could take his turn with her now. She gave him the ropes and stretched out
her hands, and Mitch laughed and said no thanks. Then after she was gone
he masturbated furiously and regretted not having taking her up on her
offer.
Mona never did give him back any of the money she took from his
wallet. Mitch never brought it up.

After Theo set up six-months ago Mitch in the studio, the first thing
Mitch did was start agonizing over what he was going to carve. Theo was
not helpful at all in that department.
“It’s up to you, kid. I don’t even want to suggest something because I
don’t want to taint whatever your instincts are. You’re the artist, so just do
what you feel. And make sure it’s amazing.”
Six-months ago Mitch drank a lot more than any other iteration of
him, prior to that time, and since. He was stressed about what he knew was
this massive opportunity. He came up with an idea for what to carve in a
moment of clarity, in the middle of the night when he was puking in a
toilet he had pissed in earlier. The puke blobs came together to form a
shape roughly like a woman’s face. Like tortilla Jesus or oil-stain Mary.
“That’s it”! He sputtered. He was puking so hard he worried he was
going to pop a blood vessel in his eye. “That’s it!” Then he puked more.
Wisely, he waited until the next morning to tell Theo the good news.

Something else about Mona--she was ultra flexible. When Mitch

mentioned it to her, she said it was because she used to do yoga a lot.
“And”, she said, “I used to be a stripper”.
She never said how long ago that was, or whether it really even was
used to be, at all. But she did clarify her remark, saying it wasn’t a burlesque
show or anything remotely classy. It was like, real stripping, in a real club.
Fully nude.
 “But that was in my wilder days”, she said, laughingly. Mitch
shuddered, wondering what those must have been like.
And the weird thing about it was, she was never broke. Her parents
were pretty well-off. She was never addicted to crack either. She made
decent money doing whatever she did--acting or modeling or whatever.
Her daddy never raped her as a kid as far as she could remember, or her
uncle. Though she assumed she would have repressed those memories
anyway, so maybe one of them had.
“So then, why’d you ever become a stripper”, Mitch asked, when she
told him all of that.
She shrugged. “I just like driving men wild”.

After the vom-epiphany, Mitch was ready to get to work. This piece
of marble Theo had found at a quarry in Vermont was absolute perfection,
and he ached to get his chisel into it. He had an idea of what She should
look like but he wanted a model to stand for him at least initially, to get
him started. He didn’t know anyone out here on the west coast and was
sick of all the girls back home, so he started going out to some clubs on
Sunset, under the pretense of research.
He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, really--he had a vague
image of a girl with pale skin, a skinny girl with small boobs and gangly
legs. She had this red hair that was so bright it burned in the dark behind
his eyes. A girl like that had to exist in L.A., if she existed anywhere. She
had to be willing to stand for hours while he worked. He would pay her--
or Theo would, anyway. He had no romantic aspirations but he figured
you just never know. It was going to be pretty awkward at first, no matter
what.
It was after about a week of searching that he spotted Mona at some
nameless shithole near the porn store at the end of the strip. She was
dancing under spinning, color-shifting lights in a skirt so short that when
she moved, it slid up her thighs so the crotch of her panties was exposed. A
little white triangle tractor beam turning every guy into a staring slob.
Mitch was sucked in right along with them.
He would never have had the balls to approach her but he had
received the first “so when are you going to get going?” call from Theo that
afternoon, so he was desperate.
 She was at the bar, drinking cheap beer with her friend. Mitch
stumbled up and uttered the ill-fated line:
“He I’m Mitch…I’d love to carve you”.
Miraculously she did not slap his face, but she was pretty put off. It
took him a while to explain what he meant to say. “You seem a little creepy
and gross”, Mona replied. “But if you’re serious, we can meet, in a public
place, and talk more about it”. She did not give him her number. She
would call him.

Things went much more smoothly over coffee, two days later, in Los
Feliz. Mitch was lucid. Mitch made his pitch, and she was intrigued.
“I’ve done all kinds of modeling”, she mused. “Runway, print”. She
had posed for people to do paintings of her, and paintings on her. “But all
of that, it goes away, doesn’t it? Magazines get thrown away. Paintings
burn up or get lost. They get waterlogged. I wash body paint off. Models
get fat and their tits start to sag.
“But a sculpture…” she tapped her front tooth with her fingernail.
“No fire, or flood, could ever get rid of that”.
Mitch started to say something to agree with her, but she went on
before he could get a word out.
“I have this image in my head”, she said. “It just came to me. Do you
mind if I tell you what it is?”
“Of cou--“
“It’s two images, actually”.
“Oka—"
“In the first, I’m a sculpture, done by you. I’m standing in the lobby
of the hotel that rich guy is building. There is a riot going on. The city is in
flames. The hotel is in flames. I’m standing among the flames, my arms
outstretched, my head thrust defiantly back and I’m watching it all burn. I
want to cry but I can’t because I am made of stone”.
Mitch blinked.
“The second, I’m the same sculpture in the same lobby of the same
hotel. Only L.A. has finally sunk into the ocean the way the scientists say it
will someday. Everything is underwater. All blue and green and sun rays
dappling the sand. I’m standing stark white in all that blue. Fish are
swimming between my legs. Seaweed clings to my fingers in these long,
green gossamer strands. I have seaweed pubes and crabs everywhere. I’m
immovable. I’m immortal”.

When Mona rode Mitch, sometimes she liked to run her hands
through her hair and pinch her nipples and yip like a Pomeranian. She had
this tattoo on her inner thigh. A word written in some foreign scribe. She
claimed not to know what the word meant, and that she didn’t want to.
She said she told the tattoo artist to write something in another language
and not tell her what it means, because she always wanted to wonder. She
wanted some part of her body to remain a mystery to her, always.
Mitch memorized the symbols at one point and wrote them down,
got them translated using some nifty software at the Pasadena Public
Library. The word was Cantonese.
The word was Idiot.

Mitch remembered the outfit Mona wore, the first afternoon she came
to stand for him. It was a red tube top and tight blue jeans with the knees
torn out. He wondered if she bought them like that or did it with scissors.
He had spent the entire night before unable to sleep, wondering how he
was going to breach the subject of asking her to disrobe.
After walking into the studio, looking around for about a minute, the
first thing she said was, “So, am I taking everything off?”
“Well, yeah”, Mitch stammered. “Or like…you can wear a thong, or
whatever, if you’re more comfortable…”
“Hmm…I wouldn’t want to do anything that might compromise the
artistic integrity of the piece”, she said. “And anyway, it’s no big deal.
Won’t be the first time I’ve ever been naked in front of a man”.
Mitch laughed nervously.
“But I have a stipulation”, she said. “A few, actually”.
“What are they?”
“First, you have to take me out to dinner tonight. Otherwise I’m
going to feel like a whore, since you’re paying me to do this. And nowhere
shitty. I want sushi”.
They had not, up to that point, actually talked about Mitch paying
her, by the way.
“Second, I get to show you off to my friends if I want to. You will tell
them why you chose me as your model. You will tell them how amazing I
am and how amazing the statue looks, because it is based on me. I want
them to be as jealous as possible of the fact that I am going to be a sculpture
in a big, expensive hotel”.
Mitch had no problem with either of those things. “Deal”, he said.
He felt like he should look away during the actual undressing part,
but she seemed to want him to look. She pulled her tube top right down
over her braless breasts and tossed it aside. She undid her jeans and slid
them over her thighs, kicked off her boots and sat on the floor to extricate
herself from her socks. She lay back, arched up her hips up and slid her
panties off, pointing her crotch right at Mitch like a fucking crossbow. He
bit his lip so hard he thought it might bleed.
“Where do I stand?”
He showed her to her pedestal, and even though it was just an
overturned laundry basket, she loved that she got to stand on it. It fit in
with whatever romantic image she had in her head of how this would all
go, Mitch surmised. He showed her how he wanted her to stand. What
position her hands should be in, and her feet. How he wanted her to angle
her chin toward the ceiling. She ate it all up.
Mitch asked if he could take a couple pictures of her so he could
work while she wasn’t around, and she said absolutely not. She did not
want to see them end up on the internet, ever. And anyway, there was no
reason for him to work when she wasn’t around, as far as she saw things.
She could be around whenever he needed her to be. “I have”, she
announced after that first session, her green eyes twinkling like bits of
broken bottle glass, “anointed myself as your muse, Mitch. You got a
problem with that?”
Mitch did not have a problem with that.

Another thing about Mona was that she was a moaner. When she
really got going it was like a cheap porno flick. She dug her nails into
Mitch’s arms and his back and it left little bloody half-moons. It got pretty
painful sometimes, like tonight. But Mitch didn’t really care. He was glad
she was back.

Theo took three-months ago Mitch to the site where the statue would
stand when it was finished. The hotel was in the early stages of
construction. There were girders everywhere like some great skeletal beast
that had lost all its skin. Chunks of drywall hung in leprous patches above
the dirty ground, where Mexican workers sat, eating, on a long piece of
iron pipe.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Theo murmured. It was an overcast day but he
shielded his eyes with his hand like it was just too beautiful for him to look
at straight-on. “And your piece will be what ties it all together. Your piece
of…well…corporate art”. He laughed abruptly. “What an oxymoron!”
Mitch thought that was pretty amusing. “Hey, Theo…have you ever
wondered…I mean…do you worry that what I’m making…the statue, I
mean…won’t be…I mean…might not be…exactly what you want?”
Theo looked at him like that was a stupid question.
“Of course not”, he said. “You’re my guy. Soon as I saw the Google
images, I knew it. You’re my man, Mitch”. He paused for a moment,
staring up at the building in silence. “And anyway, if you make something
that’s shit, I can always get someone else to do one that’s better”.
Mitch vowed to himself that Theo would never have to do that. He
threw himself furiously into the piece. It began to take shape much more
quickly than he had thought it would. He had been daunted initially by the
size of the block, but he soon realized it was the same as the previous work
he had done, just on a different scale.
Mona did a good job standing very quiet and still while he was
working. She said the trick to stillness was to keep your eyes focused in one
spot. Once your eyes broke, so did you, she said. She did get tired
sometimes though, and she took breaks whenever she wanted. She liked to
lounge on the couch under the window like a kitten. Watching him.
Sometimes she dozed off or read magazines. If she felt like too much time
had passed since he last noticed her, she would get up and go pick some
trivial item up off the floor; a piece of trash, or one of his tools that had
fallen. Always in his line of sight. He had bought her a robe for when she
was not standing and it hung, never touched, on a recliner near the bed.
When she was standing on the block she was not a woman--she was not
sexy, she was just a thing. But when she was lounging or walking around,
she was the most beautiful girl Mitch had ever laid eyes on.
When they had sex for the first time, he exploded inside her in about
a minute. “I’m so fucking sorry”, he said. “I’ve pretty much had a boner for
the last two weeks straight”.
“It’s okay”, Mona said. “Sometimes bad sex is the best kind”.
 Mitch grimaced. “That sounds like a line a girl gives to make a guy
feel better…”
“It is”, Mona replied. “But it’s also the truth. Because people who are
really good at sex usually have tons of it”.
Still didn’t make a ton of sense to Mitch.
“But you still need to get me off. You had your turn and now it’s
mine”.
“I’m not sure I know…the best way to do that”.
“I’ll show you”, Mona said. “It’s actually pretty simple”.
Then, it was every night. Just like that. More than once per,
sometimes. It never got old though. Not with Mona. Mitch overheard his
parents talking once, having their equivalent of a philosophical
conversation. They were saying how it was human nature to feel the urge
to stray. How having the same lover for fifty years or whatever just wasn’t
natural. Most other animals had multiple mates.
And while maybe they were right, Mitch could not imagine how
someone could ever get tired of sex with Mona. If she had any inhibitions,
he sure hadn’t discovered them. She did the kind of things he had only
seen on friends’ computers in high school. The kind of things he never
thought in a million years that he might like, but she made him like them.
She liked to do it in public places like in the car or in the pool on the
roof of the building Mitch lived in. Hand-jobs under the table in a booth in
the corner of a shitty Chinese joint on Green. One of her favorite things was
when Mitch took her from behind in the studio, her body pressed up
against the big window on the south wall. Her hard nipples leaving streaks
of sweat on the glass while people walked past on the street down below,
none the wiser, or so Mitch hoped.

Tonight, with current-Mitch, she just wanted to do it on the couch.

Tender and slow, after she had scratched him up a bit. She ran her fingers
through his hair, softly. She nipped his ear like a lioness nips her cub.
“Cum for me”, she whispered to Mitch, repeatedly. “Cum for me.
Come for me”.
So he did.

Three weeks ago, the sculpture was into the later stages of its
creation. Mitch had rasped and riffled at it for days on end, and even
begun a bit of polishing. The floor of the studio was thick with Emery dust
and flakes of tin.
The basic form of the piece was a woman standing with her arms
stretched upward toward the sky. A dramatic pose. Her entire body was
arched backward, her knees were bent and her belly was curved so you
could see the details of her ribcage like an upside-down “U”. The arms
were flexed, so they looked like she was reaching out for something just
beyond her ability to touch, or she was trying to stop it from falling. She
had narrow, womanly hips and tiny, pert breasts. She was gorgeous, a god-
damn masterpiece.
The only problem was the face.
Mitch had pitched the upper section of the block. He’d modeled the
hair after Mona’s, and the general shape of the visage, but he had done
nothing in terms of starting on the actual features. It was just a blank oval
of stone, surrounded by that wild, flowing mane.
Mona loved to joke about it. She said it reminded her of Madonna’s
character in Dick Tracy. “You should just leave it blank”, she said. “Let
people project whatever face they want onto it”. Mitch admitted that was
an intriguing idea.
But he never gave it any serious credence. He knew She needed a
face, but for some reason, he just never got started on it. He spent so much
time working on the rest--the hands, the feet, and all that hair. But every
time he started on the eyes, the mouth, the nose--whatever, he just got
distracted and got into something else. There was always more to polish,
anyway, or a bit more scraping to be done.
They had been drinking that night, and Mona was lying on the floor,
on her stomach, staring up at the piece. Mitch was dozing off.
“Hey Mitch?”
He opened one eye, saw her sitting cross-legged now, with a set to
her lips that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Her well-
manicured brows were raised like gull wings in kid art.
“Yeah?”
“Why haven’t you started on the face?”
“I…I just haven’t. I’m saving it for last”.
“Hmm…” she looked away. “You sure?”
Mitch frowned. “Yeah. Why?”
 “You sure you don’t need me to have…a certain expression or
something? You need to make my face look a certain way?” She started to
contort her mouth, her eyes, into various positions, until Mitch laughed.
“No. It’s not that…”
He looked up at Her. Ghostly pale in the moonlight. Her arms
reaching up toward the beams on the ceiling. Come for me.
Mitch felt his heart do a double kick in his chest. Mona liked to say
that when things were getting hot and heavy. But…that had not been
Mona’s voice.
His thoughts swirled. Drunk, he decided.
“What’s wrong with my face, Mitch?”
The question struck him hard. He thought she was joking, but she
looked deadly serious. Her eyes boring into his skin. “What?
Seriously…come on. I was…it’s funny…I just had the thought earlier
tonight…you have the most extraordinarily beautiful face. You really do”.
The gull wings arched even further.
“Then why haven’t you put it on your statue?”
Mitch realized he had no answer.
She let it go for a couple days after that, but pressure started to come
from another sector. Theo and his requests for a progress report.
“The ribbon cutting ceremony is a few months off”, the rich man
said, over the phone. “How far away are you?” He refused to come see the
statue until it was finished.
“I’m almost there”, Mitch said. “It’s pretty much done. All that’s left
is the face”.
“How long does that take?”
“Not long”, Mitch murmured. Not long when you know what it
should look like…
“Good”, Theo said. “I look forward to seeing it”.
Mitch started doing Google-image searches for “Beautiful Woman’s
Face”. He thumbed through the magazines Mona left behind, hoping
something would click. Nothing did.
Disaster struck, one evening, when Mona went to check movie times
on his laptop and saw his search history. She was furious.
She said a lot of the same things she had the first time she brought it
up, only now with exclamation points. “What’s wrong with my face! Why
aren’t you putting my face up there! Am I too ugly for you!”
 Mitch did his best to assure her that none of that was the case, but she
was not convinced. She stormed out of the studio, slamming the door
behind her and leaving him sitting alone on the couch, feeling like the
worst person on the planet.
“Fuck”, he whispered. He looked around for a cigarette, found none.
“Fuck”.
He had a theory that once a girl had sex with you, it was impossible
to hide anything from her. Even something like this, which he realized he
had been trying to hide from himself. He had been enjoying his time with
her so much that he had intentionally ignored the growing shadow in the
corner of his mind--the realization that while Mona’s body was
perfect…that it was exactly what he had envisioned, her face was…not
quite right.
It was horribly unfair. It was utterly despicable of him. The main
reason she had agreed to stand for him was so that she could see herself up
there in that statue and be proud. And now…
Now he was hesitating, and he had no idea why. He wished her face
was right for the statue! He wished any face was! At least then he could
have some closure, even if it meant enduring the wrath of Mona. But
this…this knowing that nothing quite fit; it was maddening!
After beating himself up for another hour or so, he started to doze off
and he was in that in-between area, where sometimes you step off an
imaginary cliff and your heart jumps up into your throat and your whole
body starts to tingle--when a voice came, so distinct and close that he was
sure there was someone in the studio with him.
Come for me.
He actually sat up, that was how freaked out he was. He looked
around and it was just the shadowy shapes of things he knew. Moonlight
on window glass, and the great, towering white shape of the nameless,
faceless Girl.
The next morning there was another call from Theo. It had been a
week , apparently. “So, Mitch, how’s that face coming along?”
Mitch had a headache and his self-loathing had only just begun to
wear off. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “It’s…it’s going,
man. You’ve gotta just let me work”.
Theo was quiet for a moment. “If you don’t get this done, you know I
will kill you, right?”
 Mitch laughed at what he hoped was a joke. It had to be, right? But
then, Theo could probably pull something like that off, if anyone could…“I
had an idea, maybe. I want to hear what you think”.
“Okay…”
“What if I left the statue faceless? It’s just an idea I’ve been kicking
around. I…I’m not like…final on it though…I wanted to just see what you
think. The details are all…they’re fucking amazing, Theo. The body…the
hair…but what if I just leave the face blank? Just a smooth surface. And
then people can…look up at it, you know? See whatever face they want to
see up there. Something…abstract”.
“Hmm”, Theo said. Then about ten seconds later, again, he said it.
“Hmm. No. I don’t think so, Mitch. The statue needs a face. That’s too
weird. Get the face done, and call me when it is. You’ve got a month”.

Now, Mona lay in his arms and things were as close to okay as they
had been since the night she stormed out. The statue was still faceless, and
Mitch still had no idea what the fuck he was going to do about that--but at
least his muse was back.
They lay entwined on the couch under the window, looking out at
the hills in the distance, the mist moving on them. The lights of the rich
people’s houses peeked through and the headlamps winding up those
windy streets. Mitch loved this view. The hills were one of his favorite
things about L.A. There weren’t any hills back home in New York, or if
there were, he never saw them because of all the buildings in the way.
Those dark shapes against the greater dark like giants slumbering.
They gave him a deep feeling of comfort, and he had no idea why.
“It’s nice to have my muse back”, he whispered. She smiled and
nuzzled his neck like a puppy.
“Mona…”
“I’m sorry I got mad, Mitch”.
“What! Mona…Jesus Christ…I’m the one who’s fucking sorry. This is
my fault. I feel terrible--“
“No”, she stopped him. “You were right. I was being selfish. I was
worried about my face not going up there…” her voice was a low, griefy
rumble against his skin and underneath it. “About my face…going up
there. But Mitch, this statue…it’s yours! It’s your creation! And the bottom
line is, you can put whoever the fuck’s face you want up there. You can put
your mother’s face up there…or fucking Mickey Mouse’s. I was…I was just
hurt that you didn’t want to use mine, you know? But I’m over it now”.
Mitch scrubbed his hand through the unruly side of his hair, trying to
smooth it down. “I still might”, he said. “I…I just…I’m not sure what I’m
gonna do yet”.
She looked up at him and smiled. It was that smile only girls seem to
know how to. “Mitch, it’s okay. It’s still my body. When you think of the
right face, it’ll still be my body. I’ll still be…” she drew in a tiny breath,
almost a gasp. “I’ll still be immortalized in stone. Just not my face”.
Mitch wanted to kill himself. He wanted to banish whatever this
weird, fucked-up nagging doubt was. Why not put Mona’s damn face up
there! Looking at her now, he thought she was damn beautiful. Damn-near
perfect.
“Mona…I feel like the worst guy in the world. I’ve used you”.
Mona reached up and ran her finger down his cheek, to his chin.
“You need to shave, scruffy man”.
“Mona…”
“I wanted you to use me, Mitch. I used you too”.
“Mona…”
“Mitch, if I thought this was something personal, I’d castrate you. Be
certain of that. But I can tell it’s really eating you up. I don’t know what’s
wrong with my face--“
“Nothing--!”
“--I don’t know why my face is wrong, then, but it is. And that’s
okay. Like I said before, it’s your piece. You do whatever you want with it”.
“Mona--“
“Mitch! Let me tell you something. I’m not much of an artist. That’s
just God’s honest truth. I’ve painted some. It’s all crap. I’m in SAG, so I
guess that means I’m an actress? I model sometimes, whatever that means.
I stand around and look pretty. But I’m not an artist. You understand? I
have no real talent”.
“You do!”
Mona laughed. “I’m what you might call a dilettante. And I’m okay
with that. I’m not passionate about anything, the way you are about your
work.
“You should really see yourself when you’re carving, some time. It’s
like you’re alone there. Just you and that rock. I don’t exist. The world
doesn’t. I could…I could never be the way you are, when you’re like that.
I’m too jittery. I’ve always got a million thoughts in my head all bumping
into each other. I could never stand there chipping away at something for
weeks or…for months. I don’t have it in me. It’s something I’ll never
understand”.
“Baby…”
She leaned up and kissed his mouth, softly. He saw a few strands of
her hair get stuck in her lip gloss when she moved away. “I’m not mad
anymore, Mitch.”
“You…you’re sure?”
She smiled.
“You’re not just putting on a brave face for the cameras?”
She shrugged. “Maybe a little bit. But you’re the artist here, man. I
wouldn’t dream of telling you what to do with your piece of art. You
wouldn’t listen to me even if I did. That’s the thing I love about you. You
talk all sweet to me because you like me…but you’d blow that statue up
before you’d let me, or anyone, tell you what to do with it”.
Mitch scratched his head thoughtfully because he’d never thought of
it that way before. Mona was right. “Mona”, he said. “Mona…I fucking
love you”.
He had never said that to any girl other than his mom or like, his
grandma maybe. He worried Mona would get weirded out or laugh, but
she looked at him earnestly with those green, green eyes, green as the east
coast ocean waves.
“I love you too, Mitch”.

He thought she was asleep later when he got up to piss. He started to

set her head gently down on the couch cushion, when she surprised him by
saying, “I’m awake”.
She wanted to know where he was going. To piss, he told her.
He came back and she asked if he’d washed his hands. He forgot to.
She wasn’t mad. She had her head propped up on her elbows and she was
staring at the statue. The arch of her back gleaming in the lowlight.
“It’s really killing you”, she said.
Mitch nodded.
“What’s the problem?”
 “I don’t really know. I feel like…the face is somewhere in my mind,
but I can’t find it. That doesn’t make any sense”.
Mona turned to look at him. “No, it does. It’s like when I can’t find
where I left my car keys. I know that I know…but…”
Mitch opened his mouth to start to say it was really nothing like that,
but then he reconsidered. “Yeah”, he said. “Exactly”.
“What you need is a way to open your mind”.
Mitch smiled and settled back down onto the couch beside her. Her
arms wrapped around his shoulders like racecar safety belts. Her nipples
hard against his back. “Yeah”, Mitch said. “If it was that easy”.
“Maybe it is”, she said. Her voice low, almost a whisper.
Mitch frowned.
“Maybe there’s a way”, Mona said. “Maybe I have one”.
“Okay”, Mitch said. “What is it?”
“Tomorrow night”, she said. “Around six. Unless you’re scared”.
“Well I am a little bit, now”, Mitch admitted. She leaned in and
kissed the back of his neck.
“Don’t be”.

The next night they were in the loft’s tiny kitchen, on the floor, Mona
had laid a blanket down with some pillows. She’d lit candles and put them
in jars on the countertops, they flickered nervously up there, making
shadows dance on the ceiling. She was right in front of him, real close, her
legs entwined with his so their crotches were about an inch apart. The
candles were Christmas, Mitch had a feeling, because it smelled like
cinnamon and peppermint. Nostalgia was a tiny twist in his guts.
Mona wore a blue headband and a white t-shirt with no bra
underneath. Mitch was in short shorts. Astonishingly, a light rain fell
outside, pattering against the high windows of the flat. This was Mitch’s
first L.A. rain. The sky was dense and low, as the sun set somewhere out
past the roiling clouds. The statue stood in the center of the cluttered
common space, a faceless ghost.
Mitch stared down at the little tab Mona had handed to him. The tiny
harmless-looking piece of paper that fit on the tip of his finger.
“What do I do with it?” He said.
“You put it under your tongue”.
 Mitch had never been into real drugs--he’d smoked weed a few times
and drank plenty. Nothing else. “You sure about this?”
“How could I be?” Mona placed the tab on the tip of her finger.
“Open wide”. Mitch opened wide. He felt the smoothness of her lacquered
nail as it slid past his lips. He lifted up his tongue like she’d told him to and
she pressed gently underneath. He saw her open her mouth and he did
what she had done. He tried to remember the last time he’d washed his
hands. Oh well.
“Okay”, he said. “How long does it take?”

Later, rain was beating harder against the windows. A steady

rhythmic tap. Thunder growled some. Lighting forked between towers of
cloud.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Mona murmured.
Mitch was already too far gone to answer. He felt a blink coming on
the way you can feel a sneeze, and when his eyes opened, the world was all
washed out and pale. Mona’s lips were a crimson swathe in the dim. Her
hair was a velvet waterfall. Her eyes were closed, she was lying on her
back on the floor watching the rain beat against the window. Mitch was an
inch tall. He was running, dodging ants the size of dogs, his eyes unable to
comprehend the bigness of the world. Then he was a giant and he was
terrified to move because he didn’t want to step on anything--just one
building the size of a baking soda box, full of a hundred lives, moms and
dads and newborn babies and the elderly in their wheelchairs. Dogs and
cats and colorful fish in their aquariums.
He was running through a forest. Trees like columns in an
interminable hall of dream. Mist moving impelled by some malevolent
force. Cool moisture on his face.
Come for me.
Only, hidden by the black trees and the grey mist. A dark shape
somewhere in that greater dark.
Something grabbed his dick and it was Mona. Her eyes wide and
manic. She was naked, her smooth skin shining in the candlelight. Mitch
did not fight her. He let her do her thing, grinding on top of him, tossing
her hair and raking her nails down his chest.
Behind her, in the center of the studio, the faceless face of the statue
watched. Mona’s panties were draped over the statue’s hand. The rain was
slamming the windows now, fireworks exploding with every landing
drop.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Mona said. “I can feel our sweat mingling, Mitch.
I can feel my pores sucking your pores. Your pores are sucking my pores
like little mouths. Our sweat is fucking”.
Mitch didn’t give a shit about that. He was watching Mona’s face
contort while she fucked him. God dammit…god dammit…it was almost
right. It was so far off. Just a couple corrections. Her eyes a little farther
apart. Her nose smaller. Maybe that was it. Mitch felt around on the floor
for a chisel, found nothing. He reached up and started molding her
forehead with his fingers, the clay moved so easily beneath them. He
moved them down to the nose, and that clay didn’t move so easily. He
pressed harder. It wouldn’t budge. He gave it a hard shove.
Mona screamed.
“Fuck!”
Blood was dripping off her nose like the rain hitting the glass. Mitch
opened his mouth to catch the drops on his tongue. Mona shoved herself
off of him.
“Fuck you! Fuck you, Mitch! Fuck you Bitch! If I’m too ugly to be
your statue then you should just kill me. How about that?” She bared her
breast to him, her nipple standing erect and moist because he’d apparently
been sucking on it. She reached up onto the counter, grabbed a butter knife
and tried to put it in Mitch’s hand. “Do it!”
Mitch just stared at her.
“Do it!”

A little while later, they came down.

That post-trip silence was pretty awkward. Mona’s nose was bloody
still and a tiny bit swollen. Mitch had gotten her an ice pack and she was
holding it up against her face. She had dark rings under her eyes.
“I’m so fucking sorry”, Mitch muttered, for like the tenth or eleventh
time.
Mona tried to smile. “Ouch. No, it’s my fault. My idea, remember?
With how much emotional stress you’ve been under recently, I should’ve
known this kind of thing could happen…”
Mitch looked away. The rain was still steady outside. “Yeah”.
“I don’t suppose it…helped…at all?” She looked at him hopefully.
 Mitch opened his mouth to say no, but then something occurred to
him. Something big. Usually with a big realization like this, he didn’t know
how big it had been until later, when it no longer mattered. But this time,
he was aware of it happening, while it was. The whole world seemed to
slow down. He could feel blood pumping in his temples. Hear the roar of
his breath in his throat. Maybe it was just the acid.
The realization was that he needed to lie, now. Something was wrong
with him. Something deeper than he could touch. But it was wrong with
him. Not Mona. He’d been an asshole to drag her into his wrongness, and
he could lie to fix things.
So, he said, “It might have”.
And Mona’s eyes grew wide. She set the cold compress down and
Mitch winced at the sight of her purple nose. “Really?” A trickle of blood
ran from her nostril. “Really? You saw the face? What was it? Who was it, I
mean?”
The way she asked, so earnestly, made Mitch feel sure that he was
doing the right thing. He leaned toward her and gently kissed her lips,
being careful not to touch her nose. She nuzzled his cheek with hers. He
felt her soft hair on his face.
“What did you see?” She whispered. “What did you see?”
“Baby, I saw you”.
And while Mona’s infallible lie-sensors were surely on, she was still
happy. Mitch reckoned she knew it was a lie, but that she didn’t care
because he had lied to make her happy. And so she was. People are fucked
up.

Two-months later Mitch was standing in the lobby of the new Raines
Tower at the grand opening ceremony, surrounded by men wearing
expensive suits and women in dresses that showed off their big plastic tits.
His statue was in the center of the room, beneath a giant chandelier hung
with a thousand fake candles, which were even programmed to flicker--
some stupid little gimmick. Everyone in the room kept staring up at the
statue and oohing and aahing and Mitch felt like he was going to vomit
like that night forever ago, when he first decided what he should carve.
Theo had his arm around him. The billionaire had said something
funny, and Mona was laughing. She looked radiant. The fake flickering
candles caught the stones in the earrings she wore, big blue fake ones
surrounded by tiny white.
“I knew he was the one for the job!” Theo slurred. He smelled like
sour wine. “I just knew it! What a damn good thing I found him. And what
a damn good thing he found you!” Theo was talking right to Mona’s tits.
Mona leaned in and kissed Mitch lightly on the mouth. Theo slapped
Mitch’s shoulder and guffawed. “I didn’t know it was like that! It’s like
that?”
Mona grinned and Mitch managed to twist the edges of his mouth
into the semblance of a smile. He really did feel sick. Maybe it was the rich
little snacks being served on gleaming platters--tiny hot dogs wrapped in
dough, stuffed mushrooms and bruschetta with brown olives. He felt like
anywhere in the room was safe to look, except for up at the statue. It
loomed over everything. The grim specter of integrity alloyed by love.
“Well shit!” Theo said. “Shit, Mitch…I can’t say I blame you!” He
said it right to Mona’s tits. “I mean…look at her!”
Look at her.

Mitch and Mona stayed together a few years, after that. They tried to
make it work. She flew with him to New York and met his family, his
friends. They all said she was waaaaay too good for him, which was
definitely true. She thought she was pregnant once, but it turned out she
wasn’t. Mitch got a little famous. Mitch got a little rich. And Mona, she just
got filled up with wanderlust. She would have kept going for
convenience’s sake, maybe, maybe forever. But Mitch felt like he was
keeping a wild tiger locked up in a tiny cage. It was safe and well-fed, sure,
but all it did was walk around in circles all day, and sleep.
She said sorry when she left, and Mitch was upset, but he was
secretly a little relieved, too. On an unfathomably deep level, being around
Mona reminded him of the failure with the statue. Even though with
everyone telling him what a masterpiece it was, with everyone wanting to
pay him to carve something for them, he had no idea how exactly he had
failed--but then--people are fucked up.
Mitch moved back to New York permanently. He’d had enough of
L.A. People in New York were assholes but at least that was clear about
them right off. He met a girl from the Midwest who wasn’t as pretty as
Mona, and who certainly wasn’t into all the kinky shit she was. They
stayed together a long time. She thought she was pregnant once, and it
turned out she was. And a few more times after that, too. Mitch went on to
have a long, successful career as a sculptor, which was pretty weird,
considering that he knew he was at least five-hundred years too late.
He carved pieces for hotels and office buildings and private
residences owned by wealthy celebrities and tycoons. His pieces were
featured in magazines and blogs and would end up in museums
eventually, after he was dead. He inspired a hundred imitators, most of
whom he thought were way better than he had ever been. He felt like a
phony, sometimes, and other times he believed all the compliments people
gave him. He did lots of interviews. He appeared on late-night talk shows.
He went to big parties and drank fine wines, and it felt like everywhere he
went, no matter what else he had done, people always asked about the
Raines piece. Had Theo really just hired him randomly because of
something he’d seen on the internet? Who was the girl the statue depicted?
It was his most famous piece. It was his best work, or so everyone said. He
read somewhere once that it was one of the most photographed sculptures
in the Western World.

And one day, his sweet Midwest wife bought a huge photograph of
the Raines piece, taken by a very famous photographer, and put it in a
gorgeous gilded frame, and hung it in their living room to surprise Mitch
when he came home from a trip.
It was one of the only times in their long marriage that she ever saw
her husband get really mad. He said if she didn’t take it down and get it
out of his sight by the end of the day, he was going to burn it, and if the
house burned down with it, then so fucking what. And if she or the kids
were in the house when it burned, then they’d burn too. Just get it out of
my fucking sight now, before I lose my shit.
She was really confused and scared because Mitch was a mellow guy,
most of the time. She did as he said--she took it straight down and put it in
their garage, out of sight. She listed it on an online auction site and it sold
for a lot of money. She used the money to take Mitch on a nice vacation to
the Bahamas. They stayed at a hotel with a water park right outside, and
big aquariums in the casino so you could watch sharks and stingrays and
colorful fish swimming a couple feet away, while you played cards.