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Jack Bell

[/vc_column_text][vc_single_image image=”1716″ img_size=”large” alignment=”center” onclick=”img_link_large” img_link_target=”_blank”][vc_separator color=”white”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row thb_divider_position=”bottom”][vc_column width=”1/6″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]I don’t hate Daniel. At least, I hadn’t tired of him yet, or else had reached that point that you expect a marriage to end up at the burnt end of its wick. I don’t hate anything about him, any specific thing he did. Not the loudness of his chewing, or the sound he’d make in times when we’d run into each other in the house but had nothing specific to say; a loud click in his teeth that I guess meant acknowledgement.

None of it mattered much to me in the end. It was the price I paid for marriage, wasn’t it? Nothing but brief festers of discomfort at the benefit of a partner; just in the same way as you’d feel with anyone else as close to your life as he was to mine. Why shouldn’t I have to feel uncomfortable with the presence of someone over me at all times like the sweat of summer heat?

When you love someone you accept them, all of them. Their presence, and yours in its shadow.

At the kitchen table over a late breakfast, Daniel had said something about his hours of teaching going up this week. Not much money for extra tutors in the course. More days on campus.

‘You won’t mind it, would you?’

I wasn’t looking at him, but hoped he thought I was. He wanted me to play sympathy as I usually did, to know he was being acknowledged. ‘No. Of course not. You can’t expect what they’re doing with your schedule. You can only endure it, right?’

Daniel would sometimes say I tried to excuse everything—as if I had the disease of justification. He said this when I was talking about other people, of course, never about him. He didn’t know how often he was the thing I tried to excuse.

How could I say I was happy at the thought he’d be out of our flat more? When he was gone, it was like the slow release of a pressure valve. The longer he’d be here, the more pent I’d become with his presence. All the little things I don’t usually mind, it’s harder to let them float away like a shoot of steam into the atmosphere if there’s no space for them.

Sometimes I wonder if he can tell how I feel about our marriage of presence. That’s why he does it, maybe; something he can give me without words.

Don’t worry. I feel the same way. I know it’s better to have space. Of course I don’t judge you for it. I still love you, you know?

But he doesn’t know the extent of it; what it really means, of course. If he did, I wonder how it is he can be so quiet on it. He’d be stronger than I thought.

The first time it came up was a day last year when he went over our internet bill. He never had before; we’d never gone over the streaming bandwidth.

‘We didn’t watch that much Netflix, did we?’ he said with a laugh, a little one, like an escape of breath.

I managed to excuse it, naturally, and even tapered off a little after that without him knowing. It was no big moment, but something I knew would catch anxiety in me without preparation.

Then some months later it came back, like a habit. An ex-smoker always sneaks one cigarette every once in a while. They feel it in their lungs as they never had before. Then they go through a packet.

When Daniel’s new schedule came in and he left that morning, I opened my computer and logged on again. It was still hot; still high, white sun through the windows, but I felt safe. Alone inside, no presence around me other than my own and the vacant heat.

 

I didn’t do anything the first times, not really. I just watched as most people do. They were just bodies on my screen. Some were more talkative than others; most I assumed just didn’t speak English. They had their fans, people who commanded them, wanted to hear them talk. But most others seemed to be content with their distance as a kind of shadowed audience of digital voyeurs.

Then it was a long time before I reached the place to send tips of my own. When I did, it wasn’t that they gave me what I wanted to see. It was instead the kind of exchange between us—like we weren’t separated by pixels and bandwidth and money. I stood out of the shade and was noticed for a brief moment.

I’m glad Daniel doesn’t look at my bank details, but he’s the type of person that wouldn’t, anyway. Not without feeling bad about it, at least.

That was the reason I never told him. It wasn’t infidelity—I wasn’t lessened in my attraction to him—but it was a secret. My own secret of release in ways I didn’t think he’d understand. He’d try to, in his own way, maybe, but it wouldn’t have been our way.

After a couple of months, the other models began to fade away from my attention, which was when I began to realise I had a favourite. I didn’t favour him for any kind of exceptionalism, though of course he was good-looking. He had a slim body, well-built and healthily coloured, and enjoyed being naked for people; said often what a ceaseless thrill of his it was to have so many people watching him like that. He had a bright face and authentic smile. He was talkative and genuine in his thoughts. He said a couple of times that he was a university student saving up to live on campus.

After a few months of just watching him, and then a few more of sending tips anonymously, I wasn’t expecting there to be a point in which I became one of those usernames in the chat box. I didn’t think I’d be the person that would need that level of intimacy with something so…artificial. He wasn’t real, was he?—no more real than myself when I was logged on. My username wasn’t any more real than who I was as the person watching the stream. Was it?

But when I spoke to him it became real in some broadly surreal way, because I said real things: I went to uni too years ago… I’ve been married about eight years now… My husband doesn’t know I do this…

And sometimes when he spoke back to me, it felt as if he was responding to me directly through our phantom barrier.

‘All that time at work… Maybe your husband’s doing it to see someone else. Did you ever wonder that?’ he said with a laugh, showing a wide smile of full white teeth. He had no clothes on and his thin hips were twisted toward the camera, but it was his teeth I was looking at.

Maybe, I wondered. Everything else I’d ever excused to others, to myself; maybe this was just another one of them. I felt bad for telling him about Daniel being gone so much—it was a boundary of personal truth that had been broken, some strange force of intimacy that had been pierced just so that I’d be able to say it to someone else. He was on camera, he was smiling, he was naked—and still, he was saying something that was completely my own. It was in my brain. It grew.

‘Sometimes I feel like I want to be married someday,’ he said on another day. This time he was semi-clothed, more pensive looking.

He didn’t react much to the excitable comments in the chat box in response; how they’d marry him if they could. I watched his eyes lowered, dimmer than I’d seen them before, coloured dark in the meditation of genuine though. He shrugged a little, tried to smile again. ‘God, I don’t know if he’d be able to handle me doing this, though.’

Then he laughed it off. I didn’t. I still watched him as he shifted personas again. I sent him a tip and he became hard for me at a moment’s notice, but the shades of his look in the dark corner of the webcam were still dim, still pensive.

 

I don’t know if Daniel noticed my moods when he came home from work, or else maybe just thought they were natural—this is that natural air between people after a certain period, perhaps. Air passes; we’ll be tense now and loving later when we’re both back to normal.

We didn’t do much at night, but I did, after Daniel went into his usual heavy sleep. They mixed with my thoughts, strange as they became in their blurred clarity. I thought of Daniel and some young, pretty co-tutor in one of his courses. They joined in quiet afternoons after class and connected in ways he and I hadn’t since we first met; still with brutal, youthful passion; primal urges. As if it was that which was his valve.

And then, sometimes, in the seclusion of presence, those thoughts slid, and the beautiful young woman became him. Daniel and him together; him as Daniel’s secret just as much as he was my own. I watched them together in physical urgency, and it felt as if that were all I’d ever do. Just watch him. I wasn’t real and neither was he.

When those thoughts became too real and came to cloud my mind on foggy days, I wanted sometimes to cross that invisible boundary I kept so mystically. How easy it would be to send him a private message (you could with enough tips) and ask him which city he lived in, which uni he went to, who he was in real life.

I don’t know what it’d mean if I did—it seemed almost an impenetrable thought to even try. To bring something into life, into form, what is unreal to begin with.

If he’d never be real, Daniel still would be. And so would I, in our ghostly way. And if we were real enough, perhaps even one day maybe I’d tell Daniel, after enough time for it to mean anything purposeful. And maybe even he’d understand in some strange, abstracted way; in that way that our space would make sense.

 

When we moved out at the end of the year with the lift in Daniel’s salary, we found a good place—a house, not a flat. The only thing was that our internet bandwidth came with a cap.

‘No more Netflix,’ Daniel said with a smile.

I smiled for him too, so that he wouldn’t see anything beneath the skin surface of my smile. To him, I was smiling at our new lives. The house was large and spacious, even more so when seen without furniture as we’d done when we closed our deal. It was an old place on a deep suburban corner that had been fixed up; long hallways and more rooms than we’d be able to fill on our own. I thought about mornings when I’d get up before Daniel, shower, have breakfast, and all the while still have enough space between us to never see him directly if I didn’t want to.

But then I wondered how easily I’d feel him still. Somewhere inside that house, between the walls and the stuffy sunlight. The clicking in his teeth if we happened to turn down the same hallway. Our bandwidth at its level.

 

Somewhere a notification chimed and he came on someone’s screen. He smiled at his camera and slid his clothes off when he received enough tips. He took hold of himself and people told him how beautiful he was; what they’d do to him if they only got the chance. And he took it all from them. And he smiled again, which didn’t fall, didn’t dim.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/6″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row thb_divider_position=”bottom”][vc_column][vc_separator color=”white”][vc_separator color=”white”][vc_separator][vc_column_text]Jack Bell is a third-year creative writing student with a former degree in Film. He’s interested in fiction that explores genre boundaries, as well as examining our modern cultural milieu about gender, sexuality, and human relationships.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]