A STORY by GIULIA ALVAREZ-KATZ
Landscape PG County 05
I discovered Sergei on TikTok. Camera tight on his face, his soft head bloated by the lens warp. He had sagging skin that was halogen-bright. His plush mouth opened and closed and made several Slavic-accented noises before I interpreted them as words, so all I caught him saying was, “The universe is inside you, inside me. I am the universe, and I am always, always inside you.”
No one was home, but I remember turning around to be sure no one saw what he had done to me. In the mirror above the fireplace I saw my face turn bright red.
I squirmed in my seat and followed him immediately. I went to his profile. 160,000 followers, not bad. But he produced videos like a machine, all with horrifically low engagement. A few dozen likes, maybe a comment once in a while. Nothing seemed to indicate anyone else had been as profoundly moved by his content as I had. I spent much of the evening watching his videos one after another in reverse chronological order. In one of them, he mixed sand and gravel into a jug of yellow tempera paint. He announced that it was soil from a cursed place. Someone commented asking where that was, and he replied to it saying, “New Jersey :).”
I hypothesized that much of his followership was made up of people who thought it was a bit. One of his videos must have gone viral in a wrong way. Maybe he shared some aphorism that made his perplexing, ornery manner come off more charming than he meant it to. That first enormous surge of followers had probably been steadily dropping off since then, abandoning him once they realized he’s being quite serious. Moderate numbers and low engagement are dead giveaways, and I knew this because it happened to me, too. I felt a certain kinship with him as a result. To give him some credit, I’m twenty years too young to let that kind of content creation failure be anything but humiliating. When it happens to older people, who were lucky enough to live lives free of these obligations, it’s easier to forgive.
I followed Sergei on Instagram, too. There I watched him recite a monologue from a play I couldn’t recognize. Not that I would have the knowledge base to recognize obscure theater. He played a man who murdered a woman with a name that sounded like mine, if I stretched my jaw enough to produce a white-noise rumble in my inner ear. He wore a blue velvet robe and white-rimmed sunglasses. His facial expression made my whole body erupt into hot goosebumps. About halfway through the video, he removed the sunglasses and stared right at the camera. I downloaded it. I watched it in the bath, over and over again, edging myself until the glasses came off so I could come while looking in his eyes. I did this about seven or eight times before I started to feel sick about it.
Sergei was ostensibly a painter, though he dabbled in acting and poetry as well. I’d always thought that men who choose to paint or act or write poetry are pathetic. Not Sergei, though. His drive to create seemed organic. It came from his groin. None of the puttering self-involvement. None of the cerebral hang-ups. Just creation. He expressed himself with the apelike sincerity of a teenager having an erection they’re not sure what to do with. Strangled and uncomfortable, full of wanting. Sergei was a true artist.
I left a comment on a video of his paint-covered hand gesticulating wildly at a pile of canvas. I wrote, “Can I make an exquisite corpse with you?”
A few hours later, he followed me back and sent a mostly-incomprehensible message that seemed to be asking me for five hundred dollars, followed by a long string of Cyrillic hashtags. I ignored it.
TikTok knows my sins better than I do, so Sergei’s videos kept showing up. Some from several weeks ago, some from just days before. On a Tuesday morning I saw the video meant for me.
Another painted hand dancing around a pile of canvas, this time holding a cigarette between two fat fingers. He said, “I am going to set these on fire, but this is tomorrow’s issue. Today I have a message, and you know who you are.”
My skin was on fire and I found myself choking on the frothy saliva that was rapidly filling my mouth. I pressed my teeth hard against each other until my eyeballs started to vibrate. The inside of my head was becoming a noisy place.
“You, you who invite yourself into my world, who are you?” He continued, the smoker’s grit in his voice more apparent than usual. “You want me inside you, of course you do. I want you inside me. I want our bodies to be no longer bodies, but gatherings of energy that mingle with one another. To be immortal together, to become one being in the universe.”
The video cut to his face. I twitched in surprise. I allowed my eyes to blink four times. Sergei peered up at me, an accusation nestled in his pupils. I blinked four more times. Accessing the childhood comfort I only ever found in repeating numbers.
“If you want to understand, really understand, you know where to find me.”
I let the video play four times before I was sure I’d absorbed its meaning, its intent. I wrote him a message on Instagram. I revised it four times before I decided it was ready to send.
Hey, I was serious about that exquisite corpse. I can provide materials and a place to do it. Idk where you’re based but I’m living on the Upper West Side rn. Love your work btw
Sergei wrote back:
If you want to create/exist/produce/become there is certainly something to be admired in this instinct in this attraction but my time is limited on earth, and precious, I am mixing new colors outside excited fainting like a wild boar. I am working my ass off reworking my big 60” x 80” canvasses before they burn and come out nicely . I will be making educational video as well about all this process. So my price is my price, do you want to be present in this tragedy of life? Or carry on doing what you have been doing? I offer immortality and I have free shipping.
I didn’t know what to make of this, so I marinated on it for several days, reopening the message and staring at it with heavy-lidded eyes until the prickling sensation it induced in my back became unbearable. Then I’d put my phone down and do something else until I wanted a reminder of our connection again, to see the proof that for all my failures I was at least special enough to earn a correspondence with a truly great (albeit largely unrecognized) artist.
On a Friday while having drinks with my coworkers, my fourth Negroni emboldened me to send Sergei a reply.
I’m probably stupid, but are you saying I gotta pay you to meet up with you?
Within minutes, he replied.
Absolutely not lisichka, I am no whore or callgirl, I am an artist which you know already. I ship worldwide for free and my smallest pieces start at $120. The giant canvasses are $500. I can send you pdf catalogue. This is my price. Then we can make all the bodies we want.
I said ok send me the catalogue then and looked through it on the subway home. My eyes were heavy, and all my joints moved like they were made of gelatin. I chose a medium-sized painting valued at four hundred dollars. Titled Landscape PG County 05, it was a thick-looking blob of emerald green paint smeared over an equally thick-looking plane of grayish blue sky. I didn’t think it suited my apartment. I didn’t think it suited any wall. It looked like the kind of painting that exists to be destroyed.
When I told him what I’d chosen, he sent me his Cashapp ID. He didn’t reply when I said thank you can’t wait til it comes!
A week later, he notified me it was on the way.
When it arrives send me a photograph with you in it. I want to see the size.
I asked, don’t you know exactly how big the canvas is?
He said, I mean to learn how large you are, lisichka
The painting showed up while I was at work. It was waist-height. Sergei had written my address on the box by hand. I wanted to rip the sticker off and swallow it whole. He even had the penmanship of a genius. Each stroke he committed to seemed to have been abandoned just as quickly, each letter’s edge faded out like he could barely keep the pen on the surface before feeling compelled to move onto the next one. As I dragged the box to the service elevator my doorman Kamacho trotted over to help and was like, “Woah, whatchu got there, mami?”
He picked it up, and I told him it was art. He handled it with slightly more care than he had been before, his touch gentler and his movements more calculated. Our service elevator was old enough to still need an attendant to pull the lever, so while Kamacho propelled us up to the 12th floor he asked me if I knew the artist.
I told him, “Yeah, I hit him up on IG,” not feeling as if I was telling a lie. But not feeling like I was telling the truth either.
I opened it up on my living room floor, slashing it down the middle with a box cutter. I parted the folds of bubble wrap and plastic to find Landscape PG County 05. The photos did it no justice. Its majesty was entirely in its texture, in its ridges and pockmarks and sharp-edged air bubbles. I could feel Sergei baked into each layer of it, all the weeks this object had spent in his presence, receiving his energy. I could feel every movement and step he’d taken radiating through the paint.
I collapsed before Landscape PG County 05, which was still not fully out of its protective shell. I ran my hand up and down the canvas, shuddering every time my skin got caught or grazed in the texture like he’d done it himself. I remembered his request. I preened myself to be photographed with his work, and posed with a gentle hand resting on the top edge of the painting. My chest tightened with each chirp of my phone’s self-timer. I sent Sergei the photo he’d asked for, and included no additional commentary.
A few hours later when I was touching myself about that video again, Sergei interrupted himself with a message that read, thank you for your patronage, lisichka. I will come to the city to make with you an exquisite corpse. I am free every day except for when I am not. I eagerly anticipate your reply. xx a
The next morning I told him he could come on Saturday afternoon, that he already had my address. I concluded the message by asking if he had any allergies.
For three days he didn’t reply. Then on Thursday he sent me his phone number. I texted him then, like, hi this is Aviva, from instagram. Are you coming on Saturday?
On Friday evening, he finally replied: yes lisichka Saturday I will see you.
I had told Kamacho that morning before my cigarette run that the artist was coming today, and not to bother calling me before sending him up. Because Kamacho has known me since I was ten years old, he gave me an apprehensive look but did what I asked him to anyway. He hasn’t snitched on me once; not for any of the high-school boyfriends I snuck into the building, not for any of the times I needed to sleep off a half-bottle of tequila on the sofa in the lobby, not for any of the weed or cigarettes I smoked in the stairwell. I’m just marginally too old for him to start snitching now.
I waited for the artist in my living room. I wore a short skirt and a modest, shapeless top. To be sure the outfit wasn’t making any daring assumptions. I wasn’t yet sure what assumptions I was trying to make about this meeting, either, so I abandoned the responsibility entirely to let my garments do the deciding for me.
Sergei showed up with paint on his forehead and an enormous fur coat on. He stank of cigarettes and fifth grade art class. He didn’t knock, didn’t wait for me to appear at the door. He walked in without saying anything. I bounced off the couch at the sound of the metal screeching open. I let the combined terror and excitement propel me with considerable speed to the foyer, where we exchanged pithy greetings (I said, “Hey, thanks for coming.” He roamed his eyes all over the apartment and said, “You are rich. Or your papa is.”) He was taller than he seemed on camera, and broader. His face didn’t look like it did in videos. It was sharper, moved in a twitchier way than I’d expected. All his body hair was a silvery steel gray and it made him shine like metal in the afternoon sunlight. He was soft and round all over.
I took his coat to the closet, and its weight pitched me forward and down like the garment had a gravitational pull of its own. I offered him a drink, even though the sun was still heavy in the sky. He asked for gin straight. I poured myself the same. I had set up legal-sized paper and four kinds of drawing implement (markers, crayons, pencils, and pens) on the living room table, but Sergei ignored them, choosing instead to pace around my apartment touching everything that drew his eye even momentarily. He’d pick up a tchotchke, put it down. He’d open a book and mindlessly flip through it. He’d examine a framed photo by tilting it toward the light. He talked and talked, but it was impossible to listen. Watching his unfamiliar body move through a space so familiar was enthralling enough. I got enough of his chat on TikTok. I wanted to see what he looked like in the same room as me. How much space he took up, how he engaged with his surroundings. How he engaged with me.
I started paying attention in time to hear him say, “My wife thinks you are a whore, you know.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“You understand what this is, what life is, and this terrorizes her. Age has made her cold, unmoved by the finer parts of living.”
I was stunned to find this answer disappointingly boring. I told him as much, and he laughed like a jolly old man before saying, “but you want old Sergei anyway.”
“I want to make art with you,” I corrected.
“This is the same as wanting to fuck,” he spat out the last word, and his lips were glistening, “great artists know this to be true.”
“I do think you’re a great artist. I’m not, so what do I know, but I still don’t know how much I believe you.” I paused after saying this, then chuckled to inject some levity into my disagreement.
“We will see if you are a great artist,” he pulled a frame hanging in the hallway away from the wall, peering behind it. He frowned, “Who does this archival shit?”
“My rich papa.” I reached out to wipe his fingerprints off the glass with my sleeve.
It took several minutes of stilted interruption to corral him into the living room, but once I had him on the couch I knew somehow he’d be trapped there until I was done with him.
I took my turn first. I drew a goat’s head with amethysts for eyes and six horns. I gave it my teeth, my sharp canines and crooked incisors. I folded it and handed it to Sergei, who had been looking at his phone with his mouth ajar. He asked if he could smoke a cigarette. I opened the window and gave him a ceramic dish.
Sergei didn’t let me see what he was doing. He did not spend very long drawing but his movements intensified my anxiety. Nothing about his body was very predictable. Every twitch or grunt came as a horrendous surprise. He missed the ceramic dish nearly every time he ashed his cigarette. He used the black filaments on his fingers to rub hard at the paper. Then he folded his work away and handed it to me.
I hadn’t made much of an effort to hide my work before, but now I felt compelled to. I drew a mermaid tail for legs, but colored it a smooth gray and gave it dorsal fins like a shark. I added a handful of remora, wrapped ribbons of kelp around the fins, drew barnacles where it made sense to. I took quite a while to finish drawing, in part to delay the inevitable.
When I unfolded our exquisite corpse on the coffee table, Sergei put his hand on my breast. It didn’t surprise me, but it made me sick to think he wanted it to. I pretended it wasn’t happening. I looked at his work instead. The torso he’d drawn was of a bird with an impressive wingspan. Maybe a raptor. He squeezed hard, presumably to reacquire my attention. I dug my nails into his thigh. He winced, bit my neck in retaliation. His breath was hot, coating my jawline and clavicle with moisture. I slammed my knee into his round belly. He fell backwards onto the couch and I straddled him with a blue pencil in my fist. We breathed there for a moment, neither of us sure what would come next.
He begged with a smile on his face, “If this is how you will kill me, at least let it be yellow. Yellow is much more alive than blue. Yellow is ecstasy. Blue is misery. Lisichka, please. Only with yellow.”
“Fine.”
When I reached behind me to find the yellow pencil, he dug his calloused fingers into my tights and ripped a hole in the crotch. I yelped, and this untempered expression of fear was humiliating enough to summon the totality of my rage.
All my muscles flexed furiously at once. I pressed my thighs harder into his abdomen and wrapped my other hand around his throat. I held the yellow pencil a centimeter from his eyeball. I sank my teeth into his tit, gnawed at his collarbone. He whimpered and squirmed but did nothing to stop me.
Only then did I let him fuck me. He was nothing like the beast I’d hoped for. He was self-conscious. Undeservedly romantic. I told him, “I’m not your wife. Don’t fuck me like I’m your wife.”
He said, “You’re better. You’re my collaborator,” and started fucking me harder like that turned him on. I bit his forearm so hard I drew blood.
It was a disappointment, so I put him to sleep in my bathtub.
When I woke up at midnight to swallow some water, he was gone. I took this opportunity to sit on the kitchen counter and block him on everything. I stared at Landscape PG County 05. I took a flash photo of it leaning on my living room wall. I told myself to put it up for sale on Facebook marketplace for ten dollars OBO, but didn’t. Then I flipped it over to face the wall and put myself back to bed.
Giulia Alvarez-Katz (she/her) is a food writer and content creator based in Queens, New York. Her hobbies include zongzi and riding the subway end-to-end.