“Watching Suy Kui act is deeply disturbing,” Diderik said. “She is a seemingly seemless display of trenchant display of phallic imagery.”

We were seated in the Spectre of Kabool, drinking green leaf tea and chewing chiabattas.

“Burp,” said I. “I’ll get another pot. You want one?”

When I returned, Diderik was still staring into space, in exactly the same posture as I’d left him. I put the cup of tea in front of him.

“So, what else have you been up to lately,” I asked.

“Well, it’s uncomfortable to work for TRU. I mean, I was used to the restrictions in the tried and tested EyeRak system, but there’s a whole different set of pre and pro scriptions now. I can’t go into them. I mean, they’re classified for one,” Diderik said.

“No, I meant what have you been up to after Sinsemilla left.”

“Oh, that,” Diderik said, but I know he merely pretended not to be bothered. It was a secret, albeit public, scandal that Diderik’s compulsive wife, 20 years his junior, had left him for a bouncer at the TRU Executive’s Club. She passed me in the rush the other day, driving a red BMW convertible. Diderik was still driving his hammered old Trabant. It was parked across the street from the bar we were patronizing, with a coating of white tape around the left side mirror, probably put there to keep it from falling apart, standing out from the grime and rust of the battered vehicle.

“No, listen, I mean that

‘I’m not comfortable in this corporation,
but this corporation has made itself comfortable in me!’”

“Stop quoting Ekelöf and get to the point, I said, waving my hand vigorously, as if to scare away some fishy flies from his discourse.

“No, I mean that Suy Kui offers no resistance to the imaginary. She’s the terrifying spectral image of phallic desire.”

“As in Natural?” I said. “Nonsense. What do you know about Hardcore?”

“Well, I know it was a boook written by Linda Williams, in which she discourses upon the porn genre.”

In the book, Diderik said, Williams elaborates the concept of visual spectacle, using at is a vehicle to explain the prevalence of the cumshot as an ocular gimmick. The cumshot constitutes the high point of a hand-job sequel, usually around 15-20 minutes in duration. The sequel typically opens with some narrative pretension: a lightly clad sorority girl gets a visit from the post-man, or horny house-person is having one’s cable fixed, and so on. Then her step-sister or room-mate emerges from the shower or bed-room, preferable in the nude, and the action begins. This sequence is tightly scripted, and, finally, ending in the infamous, and already-mentioned, cumshot. What Suy Kui had managed in her work, Diderik said, was no less than the most perfected embodiment of the phallic imagining to date.

“It’s brutal. You never know if you’re watching a machine or a person.”

“A personal machine, perhaps,” I said, in an, admittedly failed, attempt to be witty.

“Or a mechanical person,” Diderik explicated, while fishing out another cigarette from his packet with his hand-implants. He’d stopped wearing the skin cover, and the metal screws holding his hands together were on display in their cruel and senseless honesty.