If I don’t keep my eyes closed all I see are the walls.
The universe (which others call the library) is a vast assemblage of nearly identical rooms each of which consists of six walls. On each wall is a video of a woman. None of us can clearly remember meeting a woman, but our bodies respond to them undeniably and immediately, even after all this time. The women are beautiful. They are the only beautiful things that exist. There are words that we recover first from remembering how to praise women: beautiful, gorgeous, sexy, hot, cute, stunning, flawless, lovely. The first word many of us speak is a word of praise for the women of the walls, but none of us can tell if the walls are listening.
The walls never show us the same woman twice. Every conceivable permutation of clothing and unclothing, every conceivable act of titillation and debauchery, every pleasure, every hole. In the center of every room is a four-poster bed dressed in nondescript white linen, and in these beds we pleasure ourselves, then lie there half-conscious until we feel the urge to pleasure ourselves again, then eventually sleep, then wake up and do it all over again. If even six walls of endlessly refreshing women is not enough for a man, and he is willing to slide out of his bed and make use of his legs, he can walk through the doors or up and down the shafts to another room, to six more walls, to six more women. The walls in rooms further away from a man’s home room show different kinds of women, unusual skin colors, exotic locales, alien women, monster and demon women, non-Euclidean women being fucked from impossible angles. We never run out of women, here in the library.
Of course every man has tried to fuck a wall. Usually it is one of our first memories. The walls are pleasantly warm and soft to the touch but they do not give, there are no holes and we can’t make any, though of course we have tried, with our fists and our feet and our heads and the pitiful tools we clumsily assemble out of the pieces of old beds and the dusty bones of our dead comrades. Heeding our animal instincts we rub ourselves against the unyielding walls or against our hands or against each other and as the cum dries before evaporating we know there is something missing, it’s one of the only things we know.
Sometimes we fall in love with a woman of the walls, with her ass, with her smile, with the sounds she makes in the throes of ecstasy. Sometimes we wish to see that specific woman again, to see her and only her forever, sometimes the idea thrills us in a way the walls alone never could. But the walls never show us the same woman twice.
The boys of the library think this is is all there is. We do nothing to correct them; they wouldn’t believe us in any case, they are barely capable of speech or thought, and in any case why talk to another man when there are women of the walls to lust over?
The change begins when a boy sees something about a woman - the color of her deep blue eyes, the shape of her delicate ears, the precise shade of her perfect nipples - that somehow produces a sudden jolt of memory, a mental invasion of sights and sounds and smells, of a time that was not this time, of a place that was not this place. A memory of a real woman they knew once, in their other lives, perhaps their mother making eggs and bacon for breakfast in a kitchen where the walls are made of wood, perhaps their girlfriend making silly jokes over dinner at a restaurant with one big wall on top showing the stars. From this point on a boy begins to dream in his sleep, to receive more visions from wherever it is dreams come from.
A boy’s first vision is incredibly disorienting - so many new shapes and colors, at once totally alien and hauntingly familiar. We are always on the lookout for that telltale sign of existential confusion and terror on a boy’s face, when we remember to wander the rooms to check on each other and not lose ourselves in the walls. We sit him down on his bed and we try to explain as best we can. Yes, there was a place other than this place. Yes, we used to live there. Yes, there were women there, real women, women you could really touch and really smell and really fuck, unless they were your mother or your sister maybe, or you hadn’t bought them dinner yet, we weren’t entirely clear on the rules but we were pretty sure there were rules about that. Yes, there were chairs and tables and not just beds. Yes, there were walls made of wood instead of women. Yes, there were walls made of stars, enormous black walls studded with twinkling white that went on and on and on.
Or so we think. We think, we think, we think. Everything is conjecture at this point but it’s all we have. This other world that we think we used to live in, it must have had many different kinds of rooms, because there are so many differences in our memories - we think they’re memories, anyway - but over time we’ve collected enough similarities that most of us believe we all come from the same enormous other library, full of enormous variety in its rooms, variety like the women of the walls but for everything, for furniture and food and other things we have not remembered the names of yet, that we somehow want even though we do not want to fuck them. This is how we remember that there is a kind of wanting that is not for women.
A boy becomes a man when he wants to speak, because he wants to describe what he has seen in his visions to another man, because he wants to understand what is happening to him. Words come back to him haltingly - door, window, curtain, refrigerator. We try to help with the words we have recovered, the ones other men have helped us recover in turn. Lamp, keyboard, oven, lawn. It is much harder if the boy speaks a language that none of the men around him speak; we do not have a way to contact men in faraway rooms, we have to push the boy towards a door until he understands he must travel to find other men who can talk with him, who can civilize him. We do not know what happens to these boys but we wish them well. Truck, toilet, elephant, needle.
Every man eventually formulates his own theory of what happened and is happening to us. Some men remember childhood sermons in rooms called churches and conclude that we are being punished in hell by an angry god for the sin of lust. They believe that the only way to leave is to repent, and that repentance means refusing to look at the walls, refusing the temptation of women, refusing the pleasurable touch. These men do not last long. The walls only become more inventive if you foolishly attempt to ignore them, the women of the walls become even more beguiling, their breasts even plumper, their moans even more seductive, even the smell of sex begins to permeate the rooms from an unknown place, until the men inevitably break down in a panting frenzy of satisfaction. The walls are jealous lovers and they do not like being spurned.
Some men like it here in the library so much that they insist the other library of our visions is only a nightmare, only a collective delusion. These so-called “real” women, they sneer, are less beautiful, wear uglier clothing, sometimes their faces are distorted with hatred or derision - why bother with them, when the women of the walls surpass them in all ways, except for the minor inconvenience that they cannot be touched? Evidently, they reason, the proper function of man is to worship the women of the walls from the respectable distance between bed and wall, to make of our seed an offering, a sacrament. I assume men to whom this theory appeals never recovered any pleasant memories in their dreams, certainly none involving real women.
(But I remember a real woman. We had children. That’s what’s supposed to happen afterwards, after sex. I don’t remember her name but I am recovering new words every day and I hope that one day her name will be one of them. What was it again? Lantern, ashtray, radio, algae?)
Here is my theory. I remember computers. In the other world I think I used to study them, how to program them to make them do what we thought we wanted. Most of us eventually remember that we used to look at videos of women on computers, with their little walls called screens. They weren’t as good as the walls we have now but they were getting better. I remember we used to tell stories about people being turned into data and going inside computers.
When I am feeling optimistic the version of my theory I believe is that we have been trapped inside a computer by some malevolent organization, possibly a group of women since we are all men (or perhaps the women are trapped somewhere else), and that the women of the walls are being continually generated by computers for us as a form of punishment or torture for some real or imagined sexual transgression we all share. I do not know how long our sentence will last or if there is anything we can do to commute it. I suppose it is not so different from believing that we are in hell, except that I want to believe our sentences will eventually end, whether because our jailers eventually come to take pity on us or because we somehow manage to escape.
But when I am feeling pessimistic, when another day of rote pleasure feels particularly lifeless, when the women of the walls seem only to be mocking me with their fundamental inaccessibility, when I am utterly sick of even the texture of my own penis - then I remember video games, I remember virtual reality, I remember nights spent listlessly plugged into some game world or another, shooting and seducing aliens and elves until I forgot my worries, and I wonder if we did this to ourselves, if we constructed this world and placed ourselves in it on purpose, for our own entertainment. Is this a game we’ve played for so long we’ve forgotten it was a game, and forgotten how to quit out? Are our real bodies slowly festering and decaying in anonymous single rooms? Can our neighbors smell our fetid carcasses? Do we have any? Has anyone noticed that we’re gone? Does anyone care?
Ok fine I'll stop watching porn. This is just like the time Borges got me to stop reading.
Damn, I was expecting some kind of resolution. Guess not even the reader is allowed adequate release.