And I'm telling you, she was about to slip. She was gonna blurt everything, I could feel it. I was sitting just like I am now. You know, legs crossed at the ankle, not too much, medium smirk. I was drinking coffee, just watching her. I was holding back, that's what I'm saying. And that's the part that kills me. I know that bitch! She's dying to tell me! She just can't bring herself to spit it out! Actually that's the part that excites me. I can admit it. Like everywhere else, the women here are inveterate liars. But here it's like they won't let up! No matter what, the charade must go on! Listen, by the time I'm done here, I'll tell you, I'm gonna write the damn book on these sluts! I was sitting there—whatever—nodding, small-talk, and like an epiphany, it was as if she could suddenly see the irony, she could see me steeped in it, Buddha-style, and that I could go on smirking for a thousand years if need be, spending money, fucking the shit out of her, and still never doubting it for a second! After all, what do we know about real girls? That's why it was there on the tip of her tongue. Guys like us, we have an instinct with whores because it's a symbiosis. They need us like we need them, and that's the part she couldn't admit. So instead, at the last minute, it's some lame bit about how she's had another boyfriend all this while. That she feels terrible for lying to me. And I suppose I'm playing for headway, but in my mind I'm like: Oh come on! A boyfriend! Try twenty, you bitch! Fifty! And that's even beside the point!
I was down on the mattress, eating cold noodles, watching Malaysian Strike Force on the VCD . . . Like with Benoit rambling, I was only halfway into it, halfway listening, because it was a scene I'd been through dozens of times . . .The big showdown. The main cop vs. the Japanese bad guy. They were wearing hyperbaric suits, facing off in an air-sealed chamber flooding with poisonous gas . . . As with most Chinese action pics, there was a lot of eye-popping wirework involved, some hair-raising near-misses with those little combat knives . . . Meanwhile, Benoit had worked himself into a lather. He'd leapt out of the chair and begun to pace around the room. He was spastic, muttering to himself, thumbing through my sketchbook, through my paperbacks and comics littered on the desk, quickly tossing them aside . . .
You know, and that's the irony! Tell one of these cunts you're in love and she wants to laugh in your face. On the other hand, whenever she deigns to say it, you feel forced to take it seriously in spite of yourself. No, the irony is that even here, all these girls willing to go at the drop of a hat, at the slightest whiff of a dollar, and yet still, secretly, pretending to themselves that it's some sort of spiritual journey. And don't act like you can't see what I'm talking about either. You can't name it any more than I can, but you can feel that Shangri-la, that something out there and it's the same reason all these chicks can't satisfy themselves working as waitresses. And you'd be in a better position to help me play this thing out if you weren't still stuck on what's-her-name . . . I mean how long are you going to stay cooped up here as if it's the end of the world? Listen, give me one way that she was any different from the rest and I'll leave you alone about it. Just one—but you can't! So what's holding you back? The memory of what could have been? Look, didn't you say that bitch could barely speak a word of English! Come on, what were you going to do, learn Chinese? What, settle down? Meet her family? Yeah, you're laughing, because it sounds just as bad to you! Which is exactly what I'm saying, pal, fuck that shit!
