Sitting on the Couch Watching Internet

“OK now you pick,” she said leaning into his chest, and even though the eels came out of his hands when they touched she thought it was nice to feel close to someone.

The video he picked was a concert of John Zorn and Yamatsuka Eye. The band played a series of very short, spastic, tightly composed jazz pieces while Yamatsuka screamed like a dolphin being tortured. The video quality seemed degraded, despite a high production value, like the recording had sat too long on YouTube and was beginning to decay. She wasn’t sure whether or not that was a thing that actually happened.

She nuzzled close into his body, drawing in some of his warmth. Date number three. His heart was beating fast, maybe from the music or the alcohol. Maybe all boys’ hearts got to that speed on the third date. The eels moved slowly, worming out from under his fingernails. Sometimes they retracted themselves after poking around her arms and neck curiously for a bit. She imagined them moving under his skin, and thought they could be moving under her skin just as easily.

“We don’t have to watch the whole thing,” he said. “You get the idea.”

Somewhere in the video John Zorn started to grunt like a walrus. The words were indecipherable. Then he blew his saxophone so loud it distorted her laptop speakers.

“No, I really like this kind of music,” she said. “I like how fast it is.”

“I’ve always loved Yamatsuka Eye,” said the boy. “He’s a legend in the noise community. The way he uses his voice is just something else.”

He wrapped an eel around the beer on the table and chugged what was left, then set down the empty bottle and slid around her shoulder. The eels moved under her shirt and around her waist, their skin gray-black and coated in a thin, silvery mucus, and she felt them touching her more purposefully now, caressing, massaging, and she felt an odd sense of comfort in their movements, like she always knew where they were going next.

“What’s it feel like when they come out?”

He gave her an odd smile. “Huh?”

She thought for a moment and said, “Never mind.”

She wondered if somehow he didn’t know the eels were there. Or maybe it was just a stupid thing to ask.

The next video was of two female singers moving through a white, featureless space. The artists’ slow and methodical movements reminded her of a video she once saw of a sea krait, its body moving in a way that looked like it had no bones, the spine bending in ways that shouldn’t be possible. Meanwhile the boy’s hands were moving over her arms and shoulders, unhurriedly, enticingly. He wrapped his arms around her so that her whole body was against his. She let him hold her close. She wanted his breath to warm her neck. She wanted to be close enough to him that she could trace every movement from the inside of his skin to hers.

She rested her head on his shoulder and the eels writhed against her neck. A little faster now, like they were growing more excited to be feeling her. Were they touching her because she wanted them to? Did they have minds of their own? It didn’t matter. Eventually, as the duet video descended into a final, brooding chorus, one of them started to burrow around her clavicle. She could feel its soft, squirming form work its way under her skin. She had always thought the human body was simply a shell, but now it felt like something mystical, like her body was the center of a hidden cosmology that only these eels knew how to divine. The feeling of being bored into was so pleasurable it was almost painful, and she cried out suddenly. The boy jolted away and eyed her. Her whole body was tingling. The eels retreated under his nails.

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah, yeah of course,” she said. Her head was spinning and it took a while to recover her bearings. She drank some of her beer and reached for the laptop. “My turn again.”

She picked a video at random.

“Oh god. This is uh. Kind of a left turn.”

“Shut up,” she replied, and buried herself back in his arms.

The music was by some pop-rock band called “yonige” and had a lot of catchy, harmonized hooks. The video itself was just a fanmade montage of anime clips set very loosely to the music. It was goofy, but she didn’t mind as the eels moved back under her shirt and began to stroke her. She was breathing hard and she could feel the boy’s attention on her, though he seemed apathetic about the eels themselves as they crossed and canvassed her body. There was something so attractive in the way he could act so detached, but still be so close to her, so very much a part of her and this moment they sculpted together.

As the song went on his attention turned to the screen, but the eels only focused harder on her. Something was happening. She felt them move up under her chin and towards her lips. Her body quivered as she felt them begin to work their way inside her. It was like her whole body wanted to be taken, to break open, to invite them in. As she watched the video stream on, as she felt the eels move through her esophagus and into her stomach, she moaned and moaned into the boy’s neck. She could feel the eels slide through her stomach, entering her body cavity, worming into her innards. She could hear them now, hear them moving inside her body, feel the strange sensation of their flesh, their slick bodies rubbing against her intestines. They felt warm, each one of them, little dense cords of comfort as they slithered inside her.

Eventually the feeling rose to such an intensity that she could no longer hear the music, couldn’t open her eyes wide enough to see the screen or the boy or the bottles or anything else. It wasn’t quite like an orgasm—it wasn’t even particularly sexual—but still her entire body was raptured away from the world and doused from the inside out in pure unflinching pleasure. She felt like her soul had been opened up, her heart magnified, her lungs turned into balloons. She was all feeling. All sensation and nothing else. The motion of eels inside her body, that warm, wonderful passion had overtaken her and she didn’t care if they made her sick or if they made her fat or if she suffocated, she just wanted to curl up with them, be taken and filled by them, and exist like this until the end of the universe.

When she opened her eyes it was dark. A few minutes or a few hours later. The boy was asleep, slumped over the far end of the couch. Moonlight seeped in through the living room window. The laptop was closed. She was covered in a cold sheen of sweat. The eels were nowhere to be found, the feeling of them utterly gone.

Without thinking she leapt across the couch and grabbed the boy’s hand. She pried his fingers open and held them close to her face, staring into his nails, kissing at his fingertips, hunting desperately for any sight or smell or taste of the eels, but they were just hands now. He woke up and asked her what the hell she was doing.

“Where are they?” Her voice was hoarse, her throat still heavy with a layer of warm slime. “Where did they go?”

“What are you talking about?” He pulled his hand away and wiped his eyes. “I think I should go home.”

“No,” she said. “Don’t leave.”

He stood. She was still staring at his hands, his regular skinny flesh hands that ended in regular skinny flesh fingers. “Please stay.”

“Look I had fun and stuff, but—uh, yeah this is—I should go.”

And then he was gone.

She started to feel like she was going to vomit. She put her head between her legs and took deep breaths, trying to calm her stomach. But it was no use. She could feel the absence of eels inside her like a cold vacuum in her gut, filling her with emptiness. She got up and went to the kitchen and looked at her knives. Maybe if she cut herself open she could excise the void they left behind. Probably not worth a try. Probably it was the kind of thing you just have to wait around for. Let it burn itself out.

Later she opened her laptop to a video called “11 HOURS of 4K Underwater Wonders + Relaxing Music – Coral Reefs & Colorful Sea Life in Ultra HD.” It looped a shot of a small crevasse in a pile of brain coral, where a pair of huge green morays were hiding, mouths wavering open as they gazed into the camera. She sat and watched it and finished a warm beer, wondering what it meant to feel close to someone else, and why she needed that feeling so bad in the first place.