My friend Ryan had stolen a virtual reality headset from the GameStop where he worked. He’d been using it for a week to alternately play a rhythm game called Beat Saber and jack off. I’m just out here living my best life, he texted me when I asked him what he was up to. This was followed by a clown emoji, then one of a guy in sunglasses. He was not shy about it. I think perhaps his social media feed, with its scrolling procession of fame-hungry people unacquainted with shame, had led him to believe that it was okay to tell me things like this. 

We had met because he used to date Dana, a woman I was no longer friends with. Our relationships with her had independently dissolved, and we were both sore about it. This soreness had bound us together; we were like two battered children, pressing our fingers into the tenderness of each other’s bruised knees. 

Ryan invited me over to try out the headset. He wanted to show me V.R. porn. “It would be so funny,” he kept saying. I didn’t really see what would be funny about it, but still I agreed. 

“Yes,” I said, “so funny.” 

“It’s just like normal porn,” he said, “except you’re the guy getting his dick sucked.”

Ryan was the friend I did crazy things with. Most of my other friends, the women, were getting married or having babies or adopting golden retrievers. He was the only one who could hold his liquor anymore. One time when we got drunk, he let me try to pierce his nipple with a sewing needle and a piece of ice, like Lindsay Lohan did to her twin self in The Parent Trap. The gold-plated stud dangled, half-in and half-out, encased within a teardrop of blood. It was understood that he wanted to have sex with me, and also understood that I didn’t want this to happen. This mutual understanding allowed us to maintain the tenuous balance of our friendship. 

I put the headset on. A girl was standing beneath me. I had a full, cock-eyed shot down. I could see the top of her head, the curly bangs, the whites below her irises as she looked up at me, then the slam-dunk into the cleavage crack of her tank top. In real life, I was a short woman; five-three in heels, at best. The experience of suddenly growing a foot was disorienting. It made me feel almost seasick.

I looked down at the length of my new body. Plaid shirt, silver belt buckle, jeans with a bulge where there normally wasn’t one. The girl put her hand on top of it, trailing a finger across the inseam. I felt the tingle of a phantom cock. She was speaking effusively in a language I couldn’t understand. Then I realized that I actually could understand it, at least a little bit. It was Russian, and the old words came back to me, familiar but foreign. Igrat’ — “to play.” Papik — “daddy.” She rubbed the palm of her hand flat against my jeans. 

“Is it working?” Ryan’s voice interjected into the tumbling Russian, startling me. For a second, I had forgotten he was even there. He was like a ghost in the Russian girl’s world, and I had no sense of where he was in the actual room. He could have been ten feet away, leaning against the doorframe, or right next to me, his face inches from mine.

“Can you sit in the desk chair?” I asked. “This is freaking me out.”

He chuckled. I heard the creaking of springs as he settled into his gaming chair. 

As the girl unzipped my jeans to fish around for my cock, I became overwhelmed. The experience was both foreign and all too real. My face flushed hot. I turned my head, taking in the twin bed pushed against the wall. A single well-worn pillow, a pink quilt coverlet stretched prissily tight. I could still hear the girl, her Russian now accompanied by giggles and breathy moans, as well as the boot-in-the-mud sound of a hand schlupping around a lubricated cock. I took a step and swiveled even further, until I saw a black void. TURN BACK AROUND, neon letters advised me, and so I did. In front of me, the girl had dropped to her knees. 

I closed my eyes; there seemed to be no other way to escape it. When I opened them, the girl was still there, droning on and on in her half-real language. “I can’t leave,” I told Ryan. It didn’t occur to me to take the headset off.

“Don’t you want to viddy the old in-and-out?” Ryan teased. He was referencing A Clockwork Orange, which we had watched a few months earlier while sitting a respectful three feet apart on his bed, per the zoning laws of our heterosexual friendship. And that was what it felt like, the headset — like that one scene where they pincer the guy’s eyelids back with hooks and force him to watch gore that makes him sick. The headset was made of ill-fitting, heavy plastic that pulled my lower eyelids down, but was strapped so tight that it felt like my eyeballs were popping out of their sockets. 

I took a breath. I forced myself to look down. I was in her hand. She was massaging the length of me. Hands that were mine but not — wide-spanning, thick-veined — rose up of their own accord and began to search for the breasts within her tank top. 

Something warm and furry brushed against my legs, and I jumped. I pulled the headset off. Ryan’s cat stared up at me and mewed. 

“What did you think?” Ryan asked. His eyes were bright, and he ran his hands through his messy, overgrown hair. 

“Interesting,” I said, because it was impossible to tell him the truth: that, hidden in the hollow of my jeans, I was uncomfortably, ferociously wet. 

“Can I borrow this for like a week?” I asked instead.

I had been to Russia once, when I was in high school. Some teenage ennui had possessed me, and I was desperate to leave my relatively loving family. After school I scrolled through the digital brochures for boarding schools, admiring the girls in their starched, pleated skirts, the close-shaven hills of rolling campus greens; I went to information sessions for summer study abroad programs that touted themselves as formative experiences. Both of these options were so expensive that my father laughed me out of the room when I mentioned them, and so I settled on applying to a government-run program that sent high schoolers to far-flung countries under the guise of cultural exchange. 

I had no connection to Russia, but I liked the promotional images: teenagers bathing together in a wide, flat river, the onion domes of a Russian Orthodox church just visible over the treeline. “Summer school for spies,” my parents called it. My mother drove me to the airport, and I boarded a series of planes that took me to Novosibirsk, where I was to take language classes for six weeks. I brought a suitcase and a ribboned tin of praline pecans, which my host family, the Danilovs, declared too sweet but ate anyway, seemingly out of politeness.

The Danilovs were a family of three. There was the mother, Anna, who somehow looked both twenty and fifty simultaneously. The father, Andrey, disappeared at odd hours and reappeared with mussed hair, smelling of cigarettes. I was staying in the room that normally belonged to their son, Yuri, who was in his last year of high school, one grade above me. He had a buzzcut, his dark widow’s peak so severe that he looked perpetually angry. No matter the weather, he always dressed in the same tricolor zip-up hoodie with the logo for the Russian space program on the back.

When he saw me for the first time, as his mother and I lugged my suitcase up the apartment steps, he looked me up and down and said something to me in Russian. Though it was largely unintelligible, I recognized a word from the primer I had been studying. Mal’chik. He had assumed they were getting a boy. Anna hissed at him, a fast stream of words I didn’t understand. When I asked her what he’d said, her smile was thin-lipped and insincere. 

“He is very happy to meeting you,” she said.

The morning after Ryan leant me the headset, I called in sick to work.

“I think it’s the flu,” I told my boss, inflecting my voice with a shudder. “I’ll probably need the rest of the week off.” The headset had terrible battery life. I plugged it in to charge.

I went about setting up the house with the fervor and consideration of a doomsday prepper. I purchased a week’s worth of ramen and Lean Cuisines, a crate of diet soda, a bergamot-scented candle. For the first time in a while I was thankful that I lived alone and had no pets, no boyfriend, and a job as an administrative assistant at a law office where I was entirely unnecessary to daily operations. I drew all the curtains shut.

Initially, I sampled from the ever-growing menu of V.R. porn available online. I entered worlds in which women — in certain cases many at once — bared for me the sometimes taut, sometimes gaping holes of their pussies and mouths and assholes. Worlds where my masculine, ruddied hands grabbed at their bleached hair, the texture of straw, as the women dump-truck-reversed onto my cock. I became embroiled in all sorts of scenarios. I was a plumber, a stepfather, a personal trainer. But none of it gave me that same all-encompassing shock that I’d experienced watching that first video, that feeling of immersion, as if I could walk over and sit on the Russian girl’s bed, and it would bounce and creak, and her pillow would smell like freshly washed hair. That I had only been able to understand snatches of what she had said, could pick up on just the suggestion of dirty talk, had made it hard to tell if she was a bad actress or not. When she’d looked into my eyes, beseeching, and unleashed her torrent of half-nonsense, it had felt sincere. 

After three days of watching porn, I found myself driving to an Adult Entertainment store that was directly off the highway exit, planted underneath a big billboard that read IMPOSSIBLE FANTASIES and pictured a woman riding a white tiger. Inside I bought a strap-on, the best they had in stock. No matter the impending car payment, the plane tickets I had been putting off buying for my cousin’s wedding. This was all secondary to the discovery of my penis. The strap-on was ten inches long, at least four inches in girth. It was made of dark rubberized plastic and was called The Black Beauty.

Now armed with my penis, I kept returning to the Russian girl: Eva_VR. I watched Eva’s videos with a monogamous, almost religious devotion. There was no flashiness to her scenes, no costumes or theatrics. Just a normal Russian girl, who, at some point, would become undressed and undone for you. I learned the choreography of my favorite videos so that it felt natural, as if I were truly controlling that male body’s movements. Bring the hand up to caress her cheek at 1:22, as soon as she bites her lip. When she rolls her eyes at 2:37, begin to roughly massage the breasts. Stick it in at 4:39, after she says, “Delay vse chto khochesh” — “Do whatever you want.” 

That was another thing, too: I was becoming proficient at Russian. More than I had been when I had spent that summer in Russia, more than made sense. Old words came back to me, almost synesthetic in the associations they recalled. Podoyti poblizhe — “Come closer,” the sound of tree branches tickling the apartment window in Novosibirsk in the dark. Neposlushnaya devochka — “Naughty girl,” that neon Otkyrto sign that flickered in the window of the corner store near the Danilovs’ apartment, where I bought candy bars that lay underneath a rack of nudie mags. Devochka — “Girl,” the feeling of my face roughly pushed into a dry patch of grass, the smell of dirty water.

Even before the V.R. porn, I had not been entirely unaware of my proclivities. I went to a liberal arts college, bought into the promise of academia for a while. I had read Butler, and de Beauvoir, and Foucault, and Dworkin, and all the other people who had too much to say and obfuscating ways of saying it. Even then my friends had joked about my penis envy. “Beth wants to have a big dick when she grows up,” they’d say. 

That was the era of weed-smoking and the inane hypothetical questions that went along with it. “Which writer, living or dead, would you want to have dinner with?” “Would you rather have to fuck a goat without anyone knowing, or have everyone think you fucked a goat even though you actually didn’t?” “What would you do if you woke up in the body of the opposite gender?” The answer to that one felt so obvious that I was surprised that anyone’s answer differed from mine: jack off, then go find a woman to fuck. 

“So you want to be a man?” I was asked once, with genuine, careful concern for my imagined gender dysphoria. “No,” I replied. That wasn’t it at all. How to explain what I meant? Except it was not hard to explain at all. I didn’t want to be a man. I had no interest in testosterone or crew cuts. I wanted something entirely unobtainable: a large, pulsating, fleshy penis that rode around in my pant leg at all times. A meatweapon. 

My boyfriend at the time thought I just needed a change of perspective. When he persuaded me into riding him, he would simultaneously therapize me. “What if you thought of it as you enveloping me instead?” he asked one night. The idea was disgusting to me, bringing to mind something monstrous and swallowing, a saliva-coated mouth. Even that word — envelop — felt too slick. When I came, I did so reluctantly. 

Afterward we got high and watched an old Animal Planet show on YouTube. The episode was called “Most Extreme Mates.” It ended with the mating habits of the deep-sea anglerfish. The females were terrifying, with their bioluminescent lures that hung like lanterns above their open mouths. When they mated, the much smaller male anglerfish literally attached himself to the female, biting into her and permanently fusing to her body, becoming a semen-filled limb. I was reminded of my boyfriend, the way he begged to be subsumed. The problem was that I didn’t want to take something into myself. I wanted to rip something apart from the inside. And if I couldn’t, I would prefer to be ripped up instead. I tried explaining this again, but I couldn’t make it make sense to him. We broke up shortly after that.

A few months ago, around the time my friendship with Dana ended, I saw a clip of a female anglerfish on the internet. She twirled, blind and half-dead, through the shallow daylight blue of the ocean, mouth agape, sunlight playing across her horrible face. The responses were split. She just wanted to see the sun! argued one post with two thousand likes. This is unnatural. The temperature of the world is changing, even in the deep ocean, someone else responded. Wake up, people — before it’s too late. 

As she ascended toward the surface, I noticed the fused body of her mate trailing alongside her fin like a limp flag.

After a full week in my masturbation cave, I opened my phone to a mess of junk email notifications and several texts from Ryan. I was surprised by how quickly his tone had shifted from nonchalance to paranoia. Let’s hang, the first text read. Sent three days ago. Then: Movie and beers at mine tonight? and Enjoying the headset?? followed by you good? and Beth are you ignoring me? There were many other messages, concluding with the simple but effective ?????.

Sorry, I texted back. Been swamped with work. I didn’t want to tell him what I had been up to, even though I knew his response would be favorable. He would no doubt find it “funny,” and I suppose that was why I didn’t want to tell him.

Instead I returned to Eva. I had memorized her lines so that we could have full conversations back and forth now. How she liked it, whether it was hard enough, hot enough. What she would do to me, what I would do to her. I pounded the strap-on into the dejected old pillow of her face. I came, again and again and again. Afterward, pulling the headset off my face, I felt bereft. I wanted the scene to continue after the video ended. I wanted to curl up in bed with Eva, run my hand through her softly curling hair as she fell asleep in the crook of my arm. 

That night, spent and bleary-eyed, I looked up the website of the government program through which I had gone to Russia. I clicked through a sliding carousel of fresh teenagers. One of them was slumped over a wooden classroom desk, pencil in hand as he scrawled out words in wobbly Cyrillic. Another warmed herself in a yurt carpeted in Oriental rugs. I searched for the promotional image I remembered — the American teenagers in the river — but couldn’t find it. They seemed to have changed the Russian language program entirely. Instead of shipping teenagers off to Moscow and Novosibirsk, they now sent them to more obscure, less politically charged locales, like Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Latvia. Any evidence online of a program in Novosibirsk had been erased. 

All that summer, Yuri had ignored me. During the day, I attended classes at the community center with the other American high schoolers. In the evenings, I rode the rusted child’s bike I had found abandoned behind the Danilovs’ apartment complex, feeling lonely and sorry for myself. When it rained, I holed up in Yuri’s room. For the duration of my stay he had to sleep on the leather couch, underneath a fleece blanket that looked very itchy. I think that was another reason why he resented me.

On one of my bike rides I spotted him with his friends. They were walking on the other side of the street eating candy bars and drinking cans of Baltika. When Yuri saw me, his posture straightened, and he seemed to brighten. 

“Hey!” he called out, the sheepish American greeting he had picked up from me. “Hey! Bet! Hey!” he said again, his tongue tripping over my name as it usually did. His friends took up the chant. 

“Hey, hey, Bet, hey!” they sang, and I realized they were mocking me. 

I rode faster, and when the adrenaline wore off half a mile later, I knew I had made a mistake. Yuri was like the black bears that sometimes got into our trash cans back home, the ones my father had warned me never to run away from. “It makes them want to chase,” he’d said, stretching his limbs out wide. “Get big. Show him that you are the boss.” 

I had failed to get big with Yuri. I had fled, and by doing so, I’d taught him what it felt like to chase me. 

After opening Ryan’s texts, I went to the mall in an attempt to reenter the world of the living. I wandered through the stores and blinked against the fluorescent lights. I hadn’t been exposed to anything more than the soft light of my bedside table lamp in days. I had carried it like an old-timey lantern between bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. 

The next day I returned to work. I paced around the office, eating handfuls of mints from the crystal dish at the receptionist’s desk. I stared at my inbox, opening emails without reading them. I didn’t dare watch porn at work, but I did use part of the day to cyberstalk Eva. I found her management company, a website full of erotic photos, and finally what I was looking for: a private email address. I spent the next few hours drafting my inquiry in Russian. I reread it three times before I clicked Send.

Eva wrote back a couple days later, in Google Translate English. It was 20,000 rubles for a custom video, about two hundred dollars. I agreed.

The morning before I left Russia, Yuri awoke transformed into a perfect host brother. Across the kitchen table at breakfast, he smiled at me as he spooned porridge into his red mouth. He poured my coffee. He passed the sugar. At one point, he said something to his mother in Russian that was too quick and slurred for me to understand. She smiled and said something back, then reached out to stroke the top of his head. Then she turned to me, still smiling. “He will take you out,” she said. “Fun day in town.”

How to tell her that I was afraid of her son? I couldn’t; I didn’t have the words. Instead, I tried to feign a stomachache. “Eto bolit,” I said — “It hurts.” At first she didn’t seem to follow. “Bolit? Bolit?” she repeated. Then she gave me a handful of small black pills with a glass of water and watched me swallow them.

Yuri spent the whole day ordering me around. “Do this,” he said in English, and pushed me to my knees on the gravel between the rails of the train tracks. “Do that,” he said, and juggled me on his knees like a soccer ball in the darkness of the cinema while an American movie dubbed over in Russian played across the screen. People around us were laughing, but I couldn’t understand any of the jokes.

It was terrible, but I didn’t try to run away. It felt futile. He knew that I wasn’t brave enough to tell on him. At the time I viewed myself as suffering in silence, like some saint. I was a stupid girl.

After the movie, he took me by the hand and coaxed me into the night. 

“Here, devochka,” he said. “Here. Good.”

We ended up at the banks of the reservoir where, during the day, businessmen in suits and women toting fat babies would gather, taking advantage of what little sun Siberia got. At the time, the idyllic visuals were all I could understand — the picnics of potatoes and grilled meat, the children running around half-naked in the surf. I had no clue how polluted the water was as Yuri pulled me in alongside him. I didn’t know then about the town of Berdsk, which had been sacrificed to build the reservoir and now lay at the bottom, submerged. While swimming on spring days when the water ran shallow and clear, you could make out the shape of the buildings below: a whole town, drowned. It was there, underneath my thrashing legs, as Yuri did what he wanted to do. 

The men I slept with in college tended to be surprised after we had sex. “I thought it would be different,” my college boyfriend had remarked that first time he held me to his chest. “I thought you would be more aggressive.” Translation: I didn’t know I could be that aggressive. He flexed his hands, as if his palms still tingled. “What’s wrong with you?” I sensed he was thinking. I shrugged, mute. Sexuality has a way of twisting memory into fetish, misery into pleasure. And that pleasure is its own sort of misery: the punishment perverted, left like fruit to rot, with a sickly sweet stench that you can never quite get off your hands. 

With Eva I was not going for a perfect recreation. I asked her to make something analogous: desperation, water, an endless stream of Russian obscenities. I tried to remember the things Yuri had said to me. But even with my new proficiency, I could still recall only gibberish. Only the words I had understood at the time remained, my kindergarten vocabulary having calcified into memory. Plokhoy. Devochka. Da. Stoj. It was impossible to piece together his dirty talk, to translate his intent. 

After work that night, I spent the evening searching for him online. I googled different combinations of “Yuri Danilov,” his parents’ names, and Novosibirsk until I found him on the Russian social media site VK. I recognized him by the hairline, the dark blade of his widow’s peak. In his profile picture he stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, scowling in front of a snowdrift. 

There weren’t many photos, but I combed through them for clues about his life. He had a wife now. In some photos she held a baby with dark, sad eyes and that same severe hairline. The baby’s drool spilled bountifully over onesies and multicolored teething rings. Yuri didn’t smile in any of the photos. Instead he stared the camera down, his mouth a red, impassable border between his insides and the world.

I clicked on the message feature. My cursor blinked, idling in the white space that could become anything — an accusation, a lamentation, a proposition. I stared until the light fuzzed my vision into snowdrifts. Then I exited the website and shut the laptop. It was useless. There was nothing to say. In my bedroom the V.R. headset waited for me, splayed out on the pillow like an expectant wife. 

If you broke it or something, I wouldn’t be mad, a new and lengthy text from Ryan began. I didn’t read the rest before responding. 

I didn’t break it. Give me through the weekend and then I’ll get it back to you, okay?

Ok. A too-quick response. 

This exchange churned the low-level dread in my stomach. Ryan was not an “Ok” sort of guy. He was, if anything, too effusive over text. If you asked him how his day had been, he would give you a long play-by-play that required you to scroll several finger lengths to reach the boring conclusion. I knew I should just give him the headset back, but I couldn’t, not yet. When I’d emailed Eva in Russian asking how much longer she’d need, she’d responded выходные. The Cyrillic was easy for me now, and I no longer needed to sound it out or translate it into English. She would have it to me by the weekend. On Friday at work I compulsively refreshed my inbox, willing it to produce the one email I actually wanted to read. 

I texted Ryan an olive branch. Hang out Sunday? 

Sure. 

Come by whenever. I’ll leave the door unlocked. I spent the weekend alone in my apartment, waiting for Eva’s email or Ryan’s arrival, whatever came first. By Sunday morning, when neither had materialized, I forced myself to leave my phone behind and venture outside. I went to the park and sat on a beach towel in the grass. I attempted to notice things in the world. A man was selling cut fruit out of a waterlogged cooler. Children swung around like monkeys on a plastic play structure, screaming and laughing. A small dog chased an even smaller dog around a tree. The sun beamed down, burning my skin. I closed my eyes, and a scene from one of Eva’s videos began to play out. I pulled my large erect cock out of a pair of dress pants. I slapped it against her face. The head was redder than her lips, wetter than her tears, larger than the apples of her cheeks. Larger than anything in the room, casting its large mushrooming shadow over the entire world.

A cloud passed over the sun, changing the light and leaving me cold. I opened my eyes. The void where my dick should have been throbbed like a festering wound. When I got home, my phone was lit up with notifications. One of them was from Ryan, saying he would be there soon. One of them was from Eva, attachment included. I sent her a thank you — Спасибо — before I entered into the scene she had created for me. I left my front door unlocked.

This time we were in the bathroom: a small space with sloppily grouted yellow tiles. Eva was soaping herself in the tub. At first she didn’t notice that I was there. I stood in the doorway, filling it with my bulk until she sensed my presence. She looked up at me and splashed and gasped, clutching her breasts to hide the nipples from my sight. Suds clung to her hair. “Уйди отсюда,” she said. “Я занятa.”

I paused the video and ran myself a bath. I got in. The water was warm. I hit play with the hand I had kept intentionally dry. “Я занятa,” she repeated. “Я занятa.”

I moved closer, fondled the soft wet curls at the top of her head. Hesitantly, her hands unclenched from her breasts. 

“Я тебя хочу,” I said. “я сказала, ты плохая девочка.”

она вздрогнула, thrashing away from my руки в воде like a рыба. I laughed and поцеловала её. было легко to overtake her —

“Beth?”

I startled. I had forgotten where I was. Water sloshed over the lip of the tub as I yanked the headset off. It slipped through my wet fingers, landing with a splash in the water. The lights in its eyes went out.

Ryan took a hesitant step into the bathroom, his eyes averted, focusing on the pink washcloth hanging off of the edge of the sink. 

“Are you okay?” he asked. 

Was I okay? That was the question, I supposed. But there was something touching about it being the first one Ryan asked. Not “What are you doing?” or “Why did you tell me to let myself in?” I took a few deep breaths, trying to slow the hammering of my heartbeat. I looked down. My hands, of their own accord, had reached up to hide my breasts.

“I’ll replace the headset — ” I began, but he stopped me.

“It’s okay. It’s not like I paid for it, anyway.” Almost reluctantly, he approached. The soaked bathmat squelched as he stooped down and knelt in front of me. “And it’s stupid. A waste of time.”

“I guess so.”

He looked down at the broken headset. He had exceptionally long eyelashes — blonde, like his beard. “Were you using my V.R. headset to get off in the tub?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. The whole thing felt impossible to justify.

He bit his lip, his eyes met mine. “Do you want me to leave?”

I answered honestly. “I don’t know.”

This ambiguity was enough to encourage him. I watched as his hand reached out and tucked a lock of my hair behind my ear. He traced the shell of it, then cupped my jaw in his hand. I watched as his hand travelled down, heading for my breasts, my crotch. Drops of water clung to the fine, downy hair on his knuckles. His hand shook, and the droplets shuddered and slid down the length of his fingers.

“Stop,” I heard myself say. He drew away, sitting back on his heels in the middle of the bathmat. The knees of his pant legs were soaked through. Two dark circles bloomed on the khaki. “We do it the way I want,” I said. “Or not at all.” 

That night I left him in the bed and returned to the bathroom. The headset was waiting where I had left it on the counter. I tried to turn it back on, but it remained resolutely dead, black in the eyes. I slipped it over my face and found nothing but darkness.