It is visible and comprehensible to the swivelling eye of the NYPD drone, thirty thousand feet up, but the colour of my hoodie does not matter in the final analysis. It is true that the colour of my hoodie, which is black, has been linked in the popular imagination, whose influence on the design of the kinds of algorithms now flickering through the drone’s brain is far greater than often claimed, with participation in insurrectionary activity, militant antifascism, agent-provocateurism, anti-imperialism, what they used to call the anti-globalisation movement, Black Bloc, propagande par le fait, anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, Luddism, sabotage, and so on; and it is true that those same kinds of algorithms have been utilised in a number of big-data crunches out of Cambridge and Palo Alto to declare that the caprices of the popular imagination are, as it happens, borne out objectively in the facts; and it is true that my own future liberty might imminently come to depend on the logical conjunction of the colour of my hoodie (black) with the facts in question. But the colour of my hoodie does not matter insofar as it is black that forms one term in that conjunction as opposed to, say, purple. Or orange. Black in this scenario is just a formal data term given meaning by its placement among others. From thirty thousand feet up it is noted, computed, cross-referenced with one of those Cambridge/Palo Alto databases, and converted to a number of directives: arrest, immobilise, incapacitate.

#

Perhaps one hour earlier I’m graphing the curves his hands make in the air close to me. I am in his kitchen, which is in his apartment, which is on the Lower East Side. I believe he owns the apartment. This means he is wealthy. I woke with him, of course, and when I sat up to put on my clothes he might have turned one hand lazily at the base of my spine. But now, in his kitchen, I can watch the parabolas he draws in the air instead of touching me. It is morning still, but outside we can hear ourselves rising. 

#

Right at the beginning of Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti says that 

it is only in a crowd that man [sic] can become free of [the] fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite. The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd, too, whose psychical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch. (15; New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1984. Trans. Carol Stewart. Print.) 

#

To understand our situation it might help to know that I am not his girlfriend (or boyfriend) but that he does have one (a girlfriend, not a boyfriend). She lives in State College, Pennsylvania, where she is pursuing postgraduate studies in the Veterinary Sciences. He told me her name once but I have forgotten it. 

#

An Emotionally Disturbed Person Bag (EDP Bag) is a ventilated canvas and mesh bag resembling a hiking rucksack (or, rather more pertinently, a body bag) into which a person (Emotionally Disturbed) can be zipped from crown to foot so as to completely encompass and immobilise them. The EDP Bag currently manufactured and sold by DeSantis Holsters ($899.99 plus shipping) has seven sturdy handles to facilitate easy lugging of the Emotionally Disturbed Person once bagged. In 2016 there was a minor controversy when several NYPD officers were filmed using an EDP Bag to restrain Johnell Muhammad, a man suspected of having evaded subway fare ($2.75); but, I am assured by The New York Times, “there is no evidence that the officers involved in the arrest in Manhattan violated police policy” (May 13, 2016). Certainly, nothing came of the censure the cops received on social media. The NYPD calls the EDP Bag a “mesh restraining device.”

#

For breakfast we go down to the Landmark Coffee Shop on Grand Street. I zip on my black hoodie before leaving. He orders ham, eggs, and homefries. I order coffee. I watch him eat: he cuts himself a piece of meat, puts down his knife, switches his fork to his right hand, spears the cut piece, puts the meat in his mouth, puts down his fork, chews thoughtfully for several seconds, swallows. He pauses for several seconds, looking at me, or perhaps moving his free hands in parabolas again while declaiming about something. My mouth and neck and legs and my own hands are aching. The crowd is spreading down Broadway towards us. 

#

After a few minutes of watching him, I grab the ham steak from his plate, roll it into a kind of tube, and attempt to swallow it whole. Almost immediately I empty all the coffee in my stomach onto the Landmark’s table. 

#

According to Wikipedia, 

vorarephilia (often shortened to vore) is a paraphilia characterized by the erotic desire to be consumed by, or sometimes to personally consume, another person or creature, or an erotic attraction to the process of eating in general practice.[1][2][3] Since vorarephilic fantasies cannot usually be acted out in reality, they are often expressed in stories or drawings shared on the Internet.[1] The word vorarephilia is derived from the Latin vorare (to “swallow” or “devour”), and Ancient Greek φιλία (philia, “love”).

Wikipedia, however, is not a serious academic source. 

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He’s white. He has sandy-coloured hair. Last night I’m running my own hands across his ribs as though one day to push my fingers through, without breaking the skin, to grasp his organs. Today he is across the table, negotiating with the waiter. 

#

From above—to the drone, perhaps, or to the drone’s operator in 1 Police Plaza, not so far from here—the crowd might first resemble an animal: cornered, many-limbed. It has a spine on Broadway and a brain at Union Square Park. It breathes, it flinches. Near Astor Place it shrinks back as the police fire tear gas canisters—manufactured by NonLethal Technologies of Homer City, Pennsylvania—into its body; but down St Mark’s it closes soft, flexible jaws around the police lines. The drone operator in 1 Police Plaza, not so far from here, peers closer to the screen. Perhaps the crowd is not so much an animal, he thinks, as a siphonophore: a colonial organism. If in the eyes of the operator the crowd is a Portuguese man-of-war, then I’m in that moment a dactylozooid, a tentacle bearing venom down Lafayette, aching again, mouthless, to touch or be touched and thereby to paralyze. 

#

The previous night he is holding too tightly onto my hair, tipping my head back, stretching my mouth open. The expensive streetlight of SoHo is smeared on his torso. I am what aching or hungry. Maybe as he tracks fingertips on my ribs—he’s touching me—I am saying what if I slept with someone else. I mean, I am saying, perhaps. You have someone else. Each night sending a goodnight kiss to Pennsylvania. A grin to show I am not what a serious or prudish person. I don’t care. Maybe then he is pushing both thumbs into my mouth, to catch my tongue between them.  

#

In On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida asks me

how to touch upon the untouchable? Distributed among an indefinite number of forms and figures, this question is precisely the obsession haunting a thinking of touch—or thinking as the haunting of touch. We can only touch on a surface, which is to say the skin or thin peel of a limit […] But by definition, limit, limit itself, seems deprived of a body. Limit is not to be touched and does not touch itself; it does not let itself be touched, and steals away at a touch, which either never attains it or trespasses on it forever. (6; emphases original; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Trans. Christine Irizarry. Print.)

I’m only six pages in but in the café in Amsterdam last year I’m trying to position the cover so that it’s visible to the room, trying to graze from this banana-oat muffin in a way that the kind of person that reads Derrida’s lesser-known works might graze from a muffin, any muffin, in a café in Amsterdam, accompanied in the cold, thinking, untouching.

#

Vorare: to devour. Who does the cop remind me of? And philía: love.

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He did used to watch those ASMR videos of Korean girls eating fried chicken for forty-five minutes at a time, but he assured me that it “wasn’t a sex thing.” 

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The Strategic Response Group (SRG) of the New York City Police Department was founded in 2015 by William Bratton, during his second term as New York City Police Commissioner (2014-16). The primary function of the SRG is to respond rapidly and in large numbers to neutralise incidents of citywide unrest. SRG officers carry Threat Level IV ballistic vests, ballistic helmets, riot shields, and Colt M4 rifles in addition to their standard police equipment of service firearm (SIG Sauer P226/Glock 17/Glock 19), Conducted Energy Device (Taser), telescoping baton (nightstick), department-issued vest, pepper spray, FlexiCuffs, Maglite, radio, and body-worn camera. 

#

This is where we hear the crowd: outside the Landmark at Lafayette and Grand. This is where we see the crowd: near McNally Jackson at Lafayette and Prince. This is where we are swallowed by the crowd through the disintegrating or oh scarred and mined-out landscapes of our bodies, together, then abruptly apart then inside of one another and outside of together or apart and we’re stretching then from Lafayette and Prince to Broadway to Union Square Park and beyond, thoughts flashing throughout by the synapses of us layering a new living organism of shared stomach upon New York digesting as capital or cops might once have digested, might yet digest again when Utopian energies reverse but just now it is every enzyme of ourselves overtaking and reconfiguring and remaking till we are all body-thought, our hand spills down into the subway station at 1st and East 14th Street and another is grasping now an SRG SUV at Christopher Street, squeezing, popping the metal, getting to the flesh within. 

#

The drone operator is peering closer. It is too big. He knows now what it reminds him of: crude oil.

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He’s not a cop. He’d not be a cop: he has ACAB on his ribs. Someone once described this as an elitist east-coast affectation, which it is, he acknowledges, but not, he insists to me—was it in Amsterdam or was that someone else?—in the way that the describer intended: because, he explains, at length, the describer/accuser was under the impression that ACAB tattoos are, ipso facto, or (if you like) in essentia, elitist, east-coast, Brooklyn, hipster, whatever, thereby constructing, he continues, an image of homespun, salt-of-the-earth cop-worship among working or, as it were, “ordinary” people, which could not be further from the truth, he declaims, opposition to the police (and graphical representation of such) being far more prevalent among the lower classes, being, you know, he notes, the people that actually have to deal with the police, their tender racist mercies and so on, their bean-bag rounds and Civil Asset Forfeiture not often gracing bourgeois neighbourhoods, which is where the real partisans of the pigs are to be found, the middle classes, the small-business fascists, landlords and such, and so, he is concluding, although the describer/accuser was right, his ACAB tattoo is an elitist Brooklyn affectation, they were only so—he is waving hands without touching me still, over the table—for the wrong reason, which is, he maintains, jabbing a fingertip into a saucer, it is in Amsterdam, maybe this was someone else after all, shit, does he even have the tattoo, shit, just the same as being wrong entirely. Yet the cop reminds me of him, unfairly. 

#

Up against the glass of the Uniqlo where I bought my black hoodie one day when I was visiting from Philly, and it was too cold, I was stupid and glib, I don’t feel the cold, I’d been saying then. He’s white: I can see the skin around his eyes, the sandy-coloured hair falling from the front of his ballistic helmet. 

#

Oil: spreads and swallows and eats and dissolves and renders inedible. It might rush through to the elevators of 1 Police Plaza or the Freedom Tower or the big long-distance telephone interexchange centre/NSA covert surveillance hub (TITANPOINTE) at 33 Thomas Street, then what, to blowout, to geyser across all Manhattan and eat and nourish this contaminated youth. To turn bodies into a slick of rage, many-brained and twitching. The drone operator is thinking he cannot allow this. 

#

I did once write a piece of autofiction about the time I ate a dead man in a navy-blue Silverado that had run off Highway 20 in Montana. My friends called this “the vore story,” a persistent taxonomic error that obliged me repeatedly to explain that chewing (as I had done with the dead man’s heart, part of his forearm, fingers &c.) was precluded by most conventional usages of the term vore. I called it my anthropophagy story, given the dubious etymology of cannibalism, but this only licensed my friends to fake-high-ironic-misremember it as the “the androphagy story,” which for obvious reasons amused them a great deal. It was never published, of course. But when facing down a sandy-haired cop who has found you and only you in a city-sized crowd—egos will not admit of randomness—it is hard not to think of the crimes and enormities beneath your name in print, or at least in a Google Doc to which, no doubt, any agency worth naming has a backdoor. 

#

The fact of the colour of my hoodie—and OK, I’m wearing a mask as well, OK, and carrying an improvised nightstick of my own, OK, bloodied or oily—has been conveyed from the drone’s eye to its brain to another computer at 1 Police Plaza to a controller to the ear of the cop who has found me now, sought me out by the Uniqlo window. He is holding a riot shield and a telescoped baton. Those words are entering his ear: arrest, immobilise, incapacitate. 

#

Politophilia would be the paraphilia characterised by an erotic attraction to the state. Politovorarephilia would be the paraphilia characterised by an erotic attraction to being taken in, consumed, or digested by the state. It would entail either the desire to be entirely bodily controlled by the state in a more literal fashion than normal or the desire to become one with the state, to be transformed in its stomach to so much raw material, again in a more literal fashion than normal, for its continued operation. There are subreddits about this, I imagine. 

#

the bag is dark and vomit-smelling and I cannot move my arms though I can feel something moving me from without and it feels as though the fabric and the mesh are constricting and I cannot breathe as well as I imagined once that I might in the bag when at night or beside him or elsewhere or beside others if there were others I did write about others I suppose I imagined was I touching myself myself zipped closely into the bag but perhaps that’s part of it part of the point and to begin caring about points now seems late but it is definitely constricting verb pushing verb entering unentered closer to swaddle OK swaddle I’ll not theorise about that now my limbs or might there be more material actually entering not me and might the bag not be shrinking but filling not me or me and might there be a swallowing to be swallowed after being swallowed, shit

#

Sleep with someone else, he is saying. Maybe both thumbs remain in my mouth. Expensive light from outside. More expensive than the light that might ever have crawled upon the dry skin of anyone else I might’ve been with. Why would you do that?

#

But the NYPD did find that the Emotionally Disturbed Person remained Emotionally Disturbed even when placed into an Emotionally Disturbed Person Bag, and eventually collaborated with a well-known chemical company (which must remain nameless for legal reasons) in the production of Emotionally Disturbed Person Gel (EDP Gel), a non-toxic, quick-fixing agent that could be pumped into an Emotionally Disturbed Person Bag, wherein it would expand to hold the Emotionally Disturbed Person more firmly in place than the conventional EDP Bag-filling (air) could allow. One of the primary innovations of EDP Gel was that although it invasively rushed to fill every available orifice of the Emotionally Disturbed Person, and would indeed swiftly penetrate into their lungs, it did not thereby asphyxiate the Emotionally Disturbed Person. Thanks to the Gel’s novel chemical structure it set as a porous interface that still allowed gas exchange within the Emotionally Disturbed Lungs of the Emotionally Disturbed Person. Indeed, the social media manager for the company claimed on his Instagram story that EDP Gel was actually a better medium for the delivery of oxygen to the bloodstream than what he called “common or garden” air.