The Curator of Obscenities
By Jillian Danback-McGhan
We didn’t bring any mortuary equipment with us on my last deployment. Not enough, anyway. No one on the ship thought to include it. Then we discovered the bodies, one hundred and twenty-seven of them. Migrants whose boat capsized in rough sea on their way to Italy or Greece. We pulled them all out of the water and used whatever was available to label the remains – duct tape, engineering tags, even some red curling ribbon, the type used to decorate Christmas packages. The incident became infamous across the Navy, as all screw-ups do. But that was over two years ago. By the time I transferred to another command and started preparing for my second deployment, word had spread throughout the fleet, and that ship had enough bags and tags onboard to accommodate five cruise ships’ worth of human remains. This freed up our minds to focus on other preparations.
Namely, porn.
It started four months before our scheduled deployment date, when Petty Officer Gerbowicz got busted for downloading porn on the ship’s network. Since my collateral duty onboard is Legal Officer, I attended the Captain’s Mast to document the findings and process his paperwork. Admittedly, it was one of the more entertaining Masts I’ve seen. Captain’s Masts are supposed to be somber affairs. I mean, you’re determining the future of someone’s career. During this one, though, we talked about porn. In front of our female Commanding Officer. Hell, we even had to look at some of it, being evidence and all. To her credit, the CO dealt with the proceedings with her usual detached professionalism. She finally broke toward the end, though, asking the question everyone in attendance wanted to know: “We’re in our homeport port – why didn’t you download this shit at home?”
I’m paraphrasing here.
Gerbowicz stammered on about hiding the porn from his wife, since she’d lose her mind and demand they go to a marriage counselor if she found out. Their marriage was already fragile, so he had to, simply had to, download it on the ship. Next, he turned to the CO, and in the most ballsy move I’ve ever seen at a Mast, asks, “Ma’am, you said deployment readiness should be our top priority. Really I was just following your orders.”
The CO didn’t like that. She busted him down in rank and docked his pay. Still, he had a point.
“Sam, what do we do about porn?” Demetri, one of my roommates on the ship, asked me once the Mast concluded. As Gerbowicz’s division officer, Demetri also attended the proceedings. We left the Mast together and headed to the wardroom, where the Executive Officer would be holding his daily operation brief. He continued, “We’re going to be gone for eight months and I don’t know about you, but I’m going to need to jack off at some point.”
We grabbed seats toward the back of the wardroom next to our other roommates and Demetri asked them the same question: “What are we going to do about… you know?”
One by one, I watched panic creep across their faces as they listed reasons why they couldn’t download porn at home.
Javier didn’t want it in the house with his kids: “I have daughters, you know. Can’t have them seeing that.”
Horace worried his fiancée would freak: “This will be her first time with me gone on deployment. I can’t test this with her.”
Demetri lived with his wife’s parents and they clearly had some boundary issues: “Man, I don’t think I could even buy a magazine without my mother-in-law finding it. She’s all up in our stuff.”
“Leave a bunch of it around the house, then. That’s how you finally get your in-laws to move out,” Javier said. Demetri flipped him off.
We whispered about potential solutions as the Executive Officer droned on in the front of the darkened wardroom. When he arrived onboard a few months earlier, he insisted on conducing these daily operations briefs to keep us apprised of global threats and news from the fleet. Except he also showed us these graphic images from war zones during every meeting. In this presentation, he revealed images of bloodied civilians sprinting away from an explosion in the background. Three women appeared in the forefront of the picture, clinging to each other as they ran. The impact of the blast shredded their clothes, exposing their burned chests. Their mouths gaped open in expressions of agony and terror.
“Make no mistake about it, gentlemen,” XO said. “You may not see it directly, but this is the consequence of what we do.”
“That’s it,” Horace said, hitting me on the leg. “We’re all bringing our own laptops with us on deployment, right?” The XO noticed our side conversation and cleared his throat pointedly. We turned to face the front of the room and stared blankly at the screen for a few minutes, pretending to pay attention, then picked up where we left off.
“We take a collective approach,” Horace said quietly. “One person downloads all the content onto an external hard drive. We chip in for a subscription to one of those online porn sites and designate a point man who uploads the goods. By the time deployment rolls around, we’ll have an entire library at our disposal. We can pass it around, download and delete as needed.”
Once Horace finished talking, Demetri and Javier snapped their heads in my direction. I didn’t have to worry about a wife, or kid, or noisy mother-in-law peeking over my shoulder, they argued. I reluctantly agreed. Not because I wanted to, mind you – I hated being volunteered for things like this. Facing the guys’ eager faces, I couldn’t say no.
“Talia will be cool with this, right?” Javier asked.
“We’ll see,” I said.
When I arrived home later that night, Talia was in the garage of the rented colonial we shared. We started dating almost two years ago, shortly after I returned from my first deployment, and moved in together a year later. She breathed life into the bland home with both her bright personality and the oeuvre of paintings in various stages of completion she left lying around the house. That night, I watched as she leaned over my workbench. My open toolbox rattled as she stabbed at a piece of aluminum with one of my screwdrivers. In her newest creation, she outlined a woman in thin, silver wire. She painted over the wire with thick, globby strokes, probably applied with a palate instead of a brush, making the subject’s flesh appear veiny and textured. Mismatched buttons served as her eyes, frayed electrical cords for her hair, and dried wads of white and pale green bunched together in a V-shape between her legs. Talia continued to work, entirely unaware of my presence. I didn’t disturb her, but smiled as I watched her wrinkle her nose and stick out her tongue in concentration. She wore a paint-splattered smock over a pair of leggings and one of my t-shirts that nearly reached her knees.
“Tal,” I said. “I have a steel punch that can do that.”
She didn’t look up and continued to stab at the piece of metal with an explosive intensity, the kind of passion I only seemed to experience when I watched her work. We met at a time when it seemed like everything in my life was tainted in some way. Then came Talia, with all her ambition and goodness and life. Being with her makes me feel like, I don’t know, maybe there’s hope for me yet.
Five minutes elapsed. Then five more. Finally, Talia set down the screwdriver and took a step back, hands on her hips, to assess her work. Only then did I approach her and wrap my arms around her smocked waist. She shrieked.
“How long have you been there?” she asked.
“Long enough,” I said. “Who’s this?”
“Garbage girl,” she said. “Working title, for now. I’m only using materials I find on the street. I’m thinking my next collection will only include mixed media pieces.”
Glancing over her shoulder, I saw two flattened discs, the remnants of the exterior of a Sprite can. She dimpled the surface of the aluminum and affixed a red push-pin in the center which, I guessed, would form the titular garbage girl’s breasts.
“Nice cans,” I said.
She leaned back, pressing her soft body into mine. “What would I do without such wit in my life?”
“Run away with some rich dude,” I said. “Live in a big house with an art studio and get commissions from all his rich friends. Sounds like a much better option.”
“Nah, I’d rather toil in a rented garage and bring Garbage Girl to life,” she said. “Help me clean up?”
“Horace had an interesting idea today,” I said as we entered the house and proceeded to our bedroom to change – me out of my uniform, she out of her painting attire. “And I, well, kind of need you to be cool with it.”
“Uh oh. Sounds serious.”
“Not really. I told you how we’ve started prepping for deployment, right? And the idea for how we would, um, acquire certain items came up.”
“Like alcohol? You know I’ve been saving my empty bottles of mouthwash for you.”
“Oh, I thought that was for Mouthwash Man.”
“Quit while you’re ahead, honey. Horace had an idea?”
“OK, so, it’s porn, Talia. We agreed one of us would download a stash of porn for deployment and I agreed to be the one to do it.
Talia broke into forceful laughter, bucking and snorting in her amusement.
“You’re not mad?” I asked.
“No, I’m not mad,” she managed to say, wiping tears from her eyes. “What, were the other guys too scared to ask their wives?”
“Not everyone is as cool as you.”
“Don’t pander,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You get to do the dirty work, huh? I don’t get why you can’t just imagine stuff.”
“Men need their visuals.”
“Please tell me you aren’t getting the real demeaning stuff. I couldn’t live with myself knowing I shacked up with some caveman.”
I smiled, lifted her off the ground as she reached to grab a sweatshirt off the floor, and tossed her playfully onto the bed. She released a peal of laugher.
“A complete neanderthal,” I said. She grabbed a hair in response and gave it a sharp, playful tug.
After, tangled in the bedsheets and her lithe limbs, I drifted off and dreamed of looking out onto the open ocean – one of those stretches at sea when there’s nothing in sight besides the sun, the slowly surging water, and a blinding haze on the horizon. Suddenly, a body emerged, a bloated back rising from the water like some breaching sea animal. Another appeared. Then another. I woke with a start and saw Talia glancing down at me, half propped up on one arm, her other hand on my chest.
“Hey,” she said. “You were twitching like crazy.”
“Just a dream,” I said. “Let’s go make dinner, ok?”
The guys and I met for breakfast in the wardroom to review our options later that week. Horace had done some research and recommended CumHub.com as our primary vendor.
“Acceptable from a cost and quality perspective,” he said gravely. The rest of us laughed at his serious expression, giddy with the outrageousness of our undertaking. We agreed to pony up a year-long, all-you-can-download subscription. But we all have our thing, and I wasn’t about to do all the downloading without the guys’ input. Not that I cared what got everyone else off, I just didn’t want to be in the position of guessing everyone’s preferences. It’s like being in charge of the music on a road trip. Only much more revealing.
“We each get five slips of paper,” Horace announced, holding up an emptied, wide-mouth soda bottle which would serve as a make-shift ballot box. “Give your choices some thought. After the XO’s daily gorefest, we put our choices in the bottle.”
“What is it with XO and those graphic-ass images?” Javier asked.
“Focus, Javi,” Horace scolded. “No names, no judgement. Just write down your thing and Sam will be the only one to see it. Agreed?”
We all nodded.
Later that afternoon, the XO’s brief featured images from inside a combat hospital, where medical staff forcefully restrained an elderly man while a doctor sawed through his leg below the knee. The man sat up, alert, his face contorted in agony, watching the doctor at work. XO flipped to another image, revealing images of mangled, emaciated dogs lining the streets. Murmurs arose from the room; he hadn’t shown us pictures of dead dogs before.
“We may be firing from a distance, but these are the consequences of what we do,” XO said. “You to come to terms with this now so you don’t freeze up when we get the order to engage.”
After the brief, the guys transcribed their kinks on torn sheets of lined paper and crinkled them into little balls, placing each into the bottle I left on my stateroom desk. I reviewed them later that night. Most requests were predictable – big titty porn, lesbian stuff, an overwhelming number of requests for anal – though some shocked me: romantic scenes, bondage, one request for tentacle porn, which I didn’t even realize was a thing. A few requests for some dark shit I’m not even going to repeat and immediately threw away. One request got stuck at the bottom of the bottle and I couldn’t get it out for a solid week. When I did, it simply read sexy feet.
Jokes ensued, of course. They called me the Dirty Librarian, PervO, Porn King. Javier even used the onboard engraver to make me a nametag with Kink Master listed as my job title. The asshole even put it on my uniform when I wasn’t paying attention, so I ended up walking around with it on all day. My favorite moniker, though, was the Curator of Obscenities. Another Horace invention. It added an air of sophistication to the deed, which I appreciated.
To make sure all categories were covered, I took a methodical approach to downloading videos, creating a folder for each kink and sub-folders for overlapping desires. CumHub didn’t have the best search functionality, though, something I realized after opening a video tagged as Hot Moms and discovering a woman licking on a hairy earlobe. This meant I had to watch every single clip to ensure there wasn’t some weird revelation at the end, like a girl shitting on a guy’s face or a guy choking a girl to death. I’m not making those up, either – there’s some twisted stuff out there. And man, did it get old. The overly dramatic moans, the guys’ creepy voices, the tinny soundtracks – there’s a reason most videos are only a few minutes long. Well, besides the obvious.
“That’s such a fake face,” Talia said one night as I brushed my teeth and simultaneously screeded an episode from a series called The Gang Bang Chronicles. “So are her breasts, you know. And his penis. I hear they use prosthetic ones.”
“You don’t have to worry about me getting taken by this, Tal.”
“Good. Wouldn’t want you to develop an addiction or anything.” She wrapped her arms around my neck from behind and kept watching the flashing images on the laptop screen. “This actually reminds me of some archival work I did in grad school.”
“So, how do I enroll in this school?”
“Hilarious. It was this internship with a private gallery where I dug through a bunch of stuff acquired by the collectors. Had to document each object by style, year, distinguishing features. That sort of thing.”
“Yes,” I said. “Your dedication to art preservation and my acquiescence to my horny friends’ urges are completely the same.” The video ended and one called Naughty Neighbors started playing automatically.
“You joke, but the thing is archiving is it involves very little appreciation. You easily get desensitized to what you’re cataloging. I remember looking at these beautiful artifacts – we’re talking bronze busts, early American portraits, Romantic-era landscapes, some indigenous shell jewelry – after a while, all I saw were tags. It cheapened it all.”
“That’s kind of the point,” I said, stroking her arm lightly. Reminders of my own spreadsheet annotations involuntarily elbowed their way into my mind. Male, no identifying documents, scar on left leg. Female, identifying document illegible. Dark hair, body decomposition prevents further identification. Child, boy, fingerprints not available due to hands and feet missing. I tried to focus on Talia’s soft hair brushing my face instead. Inhaling the scent of acrylic paint and citrus shampoo, exhaling odors of salt water and decaying flesh.
“What is?” Talia asked.
“When you’re away for so long, you don’t want to think of anything too affectionately,” I said. “Sex included. You put your emotions aside and get back to work.”
“You can’t just decide to turn off natural human responses,” she said.
“You have to,” I said. “It’s the only way to get by.”
“Interesting way of coping,” Talia said, cringing as a woman with fuchsia braids on screen twisted her face in expressions indistinguishable from ecstasy or pain while a portly, grunting man penetrated her from behind.
Anal, I noted, then dragged the video icon to its proper file.
Later that night, I dreamt of bodies lined up in neat rows across the entire flight deck. Each possessed a red ribbon tied around the toe, the ends curling in festive spirals. The synthesizer-heavy soundtrack from Naughty Neighbors thrummed in the background. As I glanced down at one of the tags, all I could read were the words sexy feet.
Though the days felt long and arduous, the weeks leading up to deployment passed by quickly. The entire crew dedicated hours each day to drills and maintenance, our bodies moving in unison while our minds floated elsewhere. I mainly kept busy toiling over navigational charts and helping crew members write their wills and powers of attorney. The only thing punctuating the monotonous days were the screening parties where I’d show my roommates the highlights from the latest videos I downloaded. For some reason, these always followed the XO’s daily briefs.
Talia worked furiously, too, applying finishing touches to her collection. She planned to present her pieces in an upcoming art show down in the Outer Banks. Since the show coincided with my pre-deployment leave period, we rented a house on the water where we’d stay for the week and make a trip out of the excursion.
One night, needing a break from staring at strangers’ pulsing bodies and contrived screams, I ventured into the garage to watch Talia at work. Discarded objects littered the garage floor, including plastic bags, pebbles she had painted and laid out on a tarp to dry, and a plastic snorkel sliced in half lengthwise. Pans of blue and green paints flooded her workstation. As I approached, I tripped over a box of metal scraps she collected from her latest foraging expedition. The ensuing metallic clatter made Talia turn abruptly from her work.
“Sam,” she said, stepping in front of the canvas and shielding it from my view. “I don’t want you seeing this one.”
“When have you been shy about your paintings?” I asked.
“I just don’t want you looking at it.”
“Come on, you know I’m a responsive audience,” I said, moving toward her and lifting her up playfully. She stiffened and strained against my grasp.
“I mean it, I’m not messing around.” The seriousness in her voice jarred me, so I set her back onto the ground. Not before I stole a glance at the canvas.
A woman lay suspended in a pool of blue, clearly meant to be water, though Talia hadn’t added dimension to the painting yet to indicate depth. Her skin looked pale and lifeless. She held a small bouquet of flowers, made from candy wrappers and plastic bags. She winked at the viewer. The spliced-open snorkel protruded from her lips.
“Oh,” I said, turning from the canvas and back to Talia. She looked up at me with wide, frightened eyes.
“I should’ve realized earlier how insensitive this is. You know how wrapped up in my work I get. I was going to show you, but I wanted to talk to you about it first,” she spoke so quickly, I could barely separate each sentence from one another.
“You don’t have to hide stuff like this from me,” I said. And I meant it. The painting elicited nothing from me except confusion. I mean, why the flowers?
“It’s just, with everything you told me about your last deployment, and this one coming up. I know how stressed you’ve been,” she said. “You’re really not upset?”
“Of course not. I can’t freak out every time I see a picture of someone…” I trailed off, largely because I didn’t know if the woman in the painting was supposed to be drowned or not. I tasted bile for a moment, but the sensation passed just as quickly.
“I know,” she said. “I just didn’t want to cause you to have some reaction or something.”
“Tal, you don’t need to worry about me,” I said. “What’s this one called?”
“Ophelia’s Escape,” she said. “Get it?”
“Sure,” I said. No, I thought.
“Are you really alright?” she asked.
I hugged her instead of answering, feeling the fresh splotches of paint from her smock soak through my shirt. As far as Talia knew, we encountered a capsized boat and searched the wreckage for survivors. She found an article about it online shortly after we moved in together and came to me, tears in her eyes, asking if I wanted to talk about it. I did. I wanted to tell her everything. To crumble in her lap and have her piece me together, like one of the subjects in her artwork. But that felt like too much pressure to put on her. On a new relationship. So I said it wasn’t a big deal, I only saw what happened from a distance. Too much time had passed for me to come clean now.
What I wanted to tell her is that I was the one who processed the bodies. That I worked two full days without sleeping, attaching make-shift tags to bloated corpses and disembodied parts with string and curly ribbon and anything else I could find. That I took pictures, documenting any physical attributes which could be used for recognition. That, for weeks after, I answered queries from migrant aid agencies, sending them pictures to see if any of the remains we found matched descriptions from family members (Anyone with long red hair? How about a teenage boy with a purple birthmark on his left forearm?).
No one wanted the job. My boss volunteered me for it. Said I seemed solid enough to manage. And I did, mostly. Except when I noticed how four of the corpses, one woman and three smaller children, wore identical yellow windbreakers. Seeing them made me remember a trip I took to Disneyland with my family when I was six or seven, for some reason. We wore these tacky matching shirts and took photos as a family on Main Street for our annual Christmas card. My mother made my brothers and I keep wearing the shirts for the duration of the trip, though. I need to be able to pick you out of a crowd in case we get separated, she said.
“I think these should be grouped together,” I told the Department Head supervising the effort.
Without warning, I started to shake and felt nauseated, overwhelmed by the heat and the smell in the hangar and everything else. I sprinted to the nearest trashcan I could find and heaved up the contents of my stomach until I could no longer stand.
“Get a hold of yourself,” the Department Head hissed once I finished. “We’re only taking inventory for God’s sake.”
“Only inventory,” I repeated. Then I took a sip of water, spat it out, and got back to work.
One child, female, wearing a yellow poncho, I typed into my spreadsheet.
A week before leaving on deployment, Talia and I drove to her art show. She assembled a few companion pieces to Garbage Girl and Ophelia’s Escape into a collection she called Found Women. Her work received praise from most of the attendees, including a gallerist from Atlanta who gave her his card to discuss a potential sale. A columnist from a regional art magazine photographed her work and called it a “poignant reclaiming of female agency” and other expressions I didn’t understand, but made Talia radiate with pride.
We grabbed dinner after the show and when we returned to the beach house, I dozed off on the couch. Images from XO’s briefs dominated my dreams and, with disturbing vividness, mingled with scenes from the porn videos. Three women fleeing an explosion entwined themselves between the cast of the Gang Bang Chronicles, while a doctor looked on, halting the amputation he performed. Naughty neighbors cavorted in craters left by missile blasts as the fuchsia-haired woman sprawled out on the ground, pleasuring herself amid the mangled remains of street dogs. Garbage Girl stood off to the side, her arms crossed, glaring at the scene disapprovingly. All along the dirt road, bodies emerged to the surface, as if the solid ground suddenly liquified. They revealed their backs as they rose, then rolled over, exposing their decaying faces. Moans rose and fell like a chorus, notes of terror braiding together in a melody of torment and facetious pleasure.
I jolted awake when Talia gently shook my arm, half expecting to still be surrounded by the hideous visions of my dream.
“You were really out,” Talia said. “Come on. I’ll be outside. Join me.”
I got up and found Talia standing at the far end of the balcony, holding a bottle of Milagro, as the dark waters of the Atlantic shimmered behind her. The half-light of the waning moon cast a soft light over her long limbs, making her skin look as if it glowed from within. The evening breeze off the ocean caused her hair to lift and swirl in delicate strands. She looked like some ethereal creature, too perfect to be real.
And I just stood there, dispassionate and dumb, trying to reconcile the images from my dream with the one that unfolded before me now. I wanted to feel aroused or elated or wistful. I wanted some strong emotion to overwhelm me. Instead, I felt desiccated, as if everything inside me had withered and died.
****
Jillian Danback-McGhan is an author and Navy veteran. Her work has been anthologized in Our Best War Stories by Middle West Press and has appeared or is forthcoming in Line of Advance, The Raven Review, Deadly Writer’s Patrol, Minerva Rising, and Prometheus Dreaming. She lives in Annapolis, MD with her family and is currently working on a collection of short fiction.