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These women lived in hope, they lived for the future as if they were every one of them already characters in a movie that projected well beyond one orgasm’s duration—a movie of constant orgasm being constantly filmed: a wishful collectivist biopic accumulating footage—incessantly accumulating reels and gigabytes of footage—for all that dirty work of editing into coherence and happy endings somewhere years from now and countries away They lived as the aspiring stars of the movies of their own lives, which themselves contained the movies of others (much as nuclear reactors contain their cores):   Like the Innocent boy from around the block movie about an Innocent boy from around the block who begins driving a better sportscar and sporting better muscles, crucified in a black leather jacket, hung with gold chains (though he sold heroin substitute, though it was said he sold women—look how motivated he is, look how rich—Innokenti, I remember when we both were just kids)   Like the movie about the defense contractor billionaire who’d financed a production of his own out in northeastern Randomstan, but without even filming it, with epic thousands of extras but no cameras or crew: it’d been a Passion play, one night only staged on the steppe, ever since being nearly hazed to death as an Air Force mechanic he’d wanted to experience that many people taking orders from him—the one about the former bricklayer turned gas refinery tycoon who, to repent for having inflicted Orthodox baptism on his ten year old stepdaughter (and to mortar his relationship with her mother, a lingerie importer), had bought the girl her own television broadcast: she’d babble to the world about her friends, boys, school, and sport for an hour each night at eleven—the port concessions magnate who’d financed a judge’s vanity recording of Liszt—the financial services mogul who’d commissioned a mural of his transgender mistress/master for a flank of his bank—the politician who’d hired a Muscovite screenwriter to ghostwrite a book exposing the corruption of his, the screenwriter’s, uncle, a Navy embezzler who’d sunk submarines: the nephew took the work, he was broke   This was an ambitious