There’s nothing left to do today. Cycles will reset tomorrow as they always do. Time cycles, numbers cycle, and biology cycles. No one can avoid it. Omar cannot avoid it but right now he floats in the little clipping of time at the end of the day where there’s nothing left to do and the anxiety that looks ahead to tomorrow hasn’t yet taken root. This little stretch of time is as long as his body as a fraction of the arc length of the rotation of the Earth around the Sun. His feet flop eastward towards the edge of his bed, poking out of the crumpled, lifeless blanket. After a year unwashed and unfluffed, the blanket is nothing more than the molted skin of a long-gone lizard. Omar wiggles. He has mastered this wiggle, which nudges the blanket as high as possible on his chest for maximum coverage but lets his arms pop out so that he can balance his phone on his left hand and swipe around with his right index finger. He has reached an agreement with the passage of time: every night, it will show him some mercy and pause its flow for him; in exchange, a little bit of his vitality, expressed as liquid, pumped into a tissue.
The time has come. Omar’s right finger executes a preprogrammed series of little flicks. A private browser tab surfaces, dark gray, the color of privacy. This is the only URL he ever types anymore. He’s not allowed to search for the name of the site. He has to type “.com;” he is not sure if he has to type “www.” but he always does. The infernal site confronts Omar with a resuscitation of an otherwise-dead pursuit from the Victorian past: the impulse to categorize. Five generations ago, men with bushy mustaches and bizarre hats stitched together family trees of all of God’s creations, from fish to rocks to orchids. They left men in Omar’s time so little left to do but the impulse remained.
Filter by:
Omar knows some ethnicities only through pornography. He stopped wondering long ago how it is all these people ended up filming themselves having esoteric variants of sex. Does the demand lead the supply? Is there really a critical mass of people out there who want that, who yelled their unfulfilled preferences out into a market full of entrepreneurial ears, unscrupulous men with cameras fanning cash at destroyed young women, running through calculations about view counts and advertisements needed to make back their hideous investments? The answer must be “yes,” Omar feels, somewhere subconscious. These questions have not been allowed to surface for years. The cruel outside world, the world of exchanging debasement for money, would seize on those questions like a cold, hungry squid. Omar cannot let this happen anymore.
The usual pathways spark no excitement. The grand splendor of every corner of human sexual depravity laid out in a digital tapestry leaves Omar cold. His lifeless penis sags, drained of the initial Pavlovian jolt that strikes when he sees dark gray. He drags his right arm back from under the covers and tabs over to a more neutral social network. He types in “Ch” then lets his phone’s memory complete the rest. Her page loads. She was hot in high school and she’s hot now. She looks hot at her graduation from nursing school. She looks hot after a round of tennis with her less-hot sister. A groan threatens to escape Omar’s throat when he sees how hot she looks at the beach, tanline poking past the edge of her bikini, weight shifted onto one hip. But Omar can’t bring himself to jerk off to a person he knows, or knew, in real life. “Real life,” as in Algebra One, nine years ago.
He breathes for a moment then thinks of how to describe her. Into a dark gray box go the words “busty young blonde nurse freckles” — Omar deletes young, hesitating, hesitating again considering synonyms for busty, finally accepting his own query and pressing an “Send” button. A new tab overtakes: an advertisement displaying a smooth, uncanny, videogame elf-woman slobbering and heaving, eyes crossed. Omar scans for a tiny “x” and smashes it as soon as he finds it. An endless column of thumbnails unrolls down his phone screen. Some look computer-generated; some look real, even too real, too professional to be erotic; some look grainy and old. Every fourth video’s thumbnail is punctuated with an advertisement.
Real girls, Real Sex
Make $$$ While You Sleep
2 inches in 2 weeks
Fuck Bitches 2Nite
Stop Jacking Off Alone!
If he had to, Omar could not describe his criteria for choosing a video to watch, one that would inspire proper masturbation. Still, none meet those criteria. He ventures to page 2 and keeps scrolling. Nothing hits. He releases a breath he had been holding for almost a minute.
An image halfway down page 3 grabs Omar’s throat and wrests him erect, heavy eyes widened, sitting up then hunched over in an instant, rapt in disbelief. He extends his neck so that his eye is less than a centimeter from the tiny thumbnail, a box within a box within a box.
“No way” comes out as a breathless whisper. His heart thuds and his thumb lingers for half a moment before making contact with the screen. The thumbnail expands to the full width of the screen. It’s her. Chelsea, the real girl who had made Omar’s Adam’s apple lurch as a teenager, the real woman at whom he ogles from a vast, disgraceful distance, wrapped in his crinkly blanket, rubs herself on camera on his screen, mouth agape, a mask of lust poorly concealing shame and desperation. The video paralyzes Omar. He had yearned, intermittently, for the reveal of this exact image for so long, and now that it appears, all erotic mystery vaporized, he feels nothing but disappointment with both himself and with Chelsea.
“Chelsea—”
Of course the name “Chelsea” doesn’t appear anywhere. A description beneath the video calls her “Lexxi” and announces a link to a site where lonely, desperate men can subscribe to “Lexxi” to view supposedly exclusive photos and videos, where she can moreover upsell them on private messages or even custom photos and videos. Omar has no agency left. He clicks like a zombie.
Everything’s grayed out on her page because he’s not a subscriber. He can read an “About” section that lists cold, quantitative measurements and obviously manufactured interests. Omar reads several acronyms he does not understand. He clicks another link, this one to a wishlist. Lingerie dominates Lexxi’s wishlist. Omar imagines what Chelsea’s wishlist would be. How did she get here? Did something happen with the nursing gig? Family emergency? Maybe if you’re hot you just make more money this way…? Omar imagines Chelsea, alone and destitute, dribbling microwavable canned soup into tacky bowls, buckets catching rainwater leaks, an imagined grandmother thinning and rotting on a futon in a makeshift bedroom. He imagines her curvaceous figure hidden under cartoonish pyjamas, her face dry and pimply without makeup, her hair tied back so that she can forget about it; then he imagines her transforming for the camera, slathering herself with cosmetic goop, hoisting synthetic strips of fabric between her buttcheeks, pulling her eyebags down and to the side, checking for pubic stubble in a too-brightly-lit mirror. In Omar’s vision, Chelsea as Lexxi is a damsel imprisoned by the tortured appetites of monstrous men everywhere. Money is the key to her cage.
Omar sheathes his penis through his underwear-flap and walks to the pair of sneakers where he keeps his wallet. He slips out his credit card then returns to bed. He can break this paradox, he thinks. She does for money what she can so that she never has to do it again; it should be a one-time trade: sexual integrity and privacy in exchange for a normal life. He can’t blame her for the choice he imagines she has made.
The Subscribe button glows pink. He has to choose a tier. $5 per month gets you a continual drip of lewd photos, presumably filling the needs of the basic masturbator. $20 per month unlocks livestreamed videos every month where she will interact with you in a chatroom as she “tries on” swimsuits and lingerie. The advanced senior masturbator can pay $120 a month and guarantee himself a 30-minute one-on-one video call with Lexxi where she will utter his name and act as his puppet, within reason.
“Turn around,” he could demand.
“Take it off. Slowly.”
She would have to. That’s the deal of the $120 tier.
Omar makes his selection and a new screen confronts him. He must create an account and set up a profile. He thinks to himself that it makes sense that they are asking for more details than usual; this must be how they weed out the creeps. He considers a fake name but chickens out when he realizes it wouldn’t match the name on his card. He wouldn’t want to trigger some kind of clerical friction that he’d have to scrub out later.
Click to verify your email.
He taps the button onscreen. The email doesn’t come right away. He waits, unbreathing. He checks his Spam folder. There it is. He verifies his email. He’s back at the page confirming his subscription.
There was an error processing your request. Please try again.
A little banner drips down from the top of his phone screen.
CITY NATIONAL BANK FRAUD PROTECT™ Did you authorize a $120 purchase to CAMJUNGLE.COM, LLC at 11:19 PM on 10/18/25? Reply “YES” to confirm or “NO” to automatically lock your account and engage FRAUD PROTECT™.
Omar beams with righteous pride, knowing that he is making a difference, turning a damaged person’s life around, scooping her dignity back to a kind of baseline, a moral equilibrium from which she can continue, unfettered by past stumblings, for which he expects no fanfare and no praise because he is doing it only out of a sense of rightness and duty, which will radiate from within when the time is right, surely detectable by the type of sensitive woman he will ultimately court, as he types “YES.”