Robo-Kon is mysteriously closed when Keith approaches. No one is around to ask what’s going on, why it’s closed in the middle of the day when the place normally only closes for an hour in the middle of the night for restocking and straightening up. The outdoor speakers are playing the local radio station, WRXO, which has been on a Jefferson Airplane/Eagles/Credence Clearwater Revival/Fleetwood Mac/fucking Donovan kick for the last week. It’s hot and Keith’s thirsty. He takes a beat, hunkering down on the sidewalk with his back against the warm brick of the convenience store.
WRXO is fine, but Keith misses online playlists and Bluetooth earbuds. There is no better feeling than walking down the street with ‘80s pop rock blasting in your ears, thinking about kissing the person you’re in love with. It’s better than actually kissing. It’s better than sex.
Keith has never understood people who euphemistically refer to sex as “needs.” He’s no virgin, has had sex dozens of times in his life, and sure it feels good but his mind always wanders off during and then he has to hold off on coming to make sure she comes, and if it’s hard for her to come then it just gets frustrating for both of them, and then when and if they both come he’s left dealing with an awkward sweaty naked person and himself being awkward and sweaty and naked. Jerking off, on the other hand, takes less than ten minutes unless he really feels like drawing it out, and when he’s done it’s a quick cleanup and back to whatever he was doing before. Keith understands being horny and needing to come, but he doesn’t understand the idea that your penis has to go into another person for it to count.
He's not asexual either, nor demisexual, though both of these possibilities have been suggested to him. There is a direct and immediate correlation between him seeing an attractive girl – often a stranger -- and experiencing the need to come. It’s just that he doesn’t feel the need to come in or on the girl who instigated the need.
And that’s just sex. Romance is different; Keith has been in love at least nine times, and only three of those times were with a girl he ever actually went out with. The other times were better. There’s something preferable about unrequited love, even better if the girl doesn’t even know you exist. It’s pure, uncut romance. Chivalric. Like a knight, wandering around in the woods and thinking about his Lady. Way better than squabbling over an IKEA purchase or trying to enjoy some overpriced dinner in a fancy restaurant, the stuff “real, adult relationships” are made of.
If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken and so die. Unlike a lot of people, Keith knows the whole line. But he doesn’t agree with it. Music has never surfeited his appetite for love. Instead, it just whets it sharper and sharper, like an endless succession of tiny olive and pickle plates. Before he came to Rxobot, Keith took many a long walk listening to Billy Joel and Journey, bursting into a sprint when the music and energy and excitement from thinking about Cardamom got to be too much.
Cardamom doesn’t know Keith. She’s never even heard or seen his name, as far as he knows. And he knows he doesn’t really know her. He knows the term parasocial relationship. He knows other terms too. Erotomania. Crazed fan. Stalker. He isn’t any of these things. He doesn’t want Cardamom to know he exists. That would ruin it. He rarely even fantasizes about meeting her; his own proximity would sully the magic of her. Make her less of a perfect object of longing.
And he knows, he knows, this is literally objectifying. But it doesn’t hurt her, does it? It’s not hurting anyone. This isn’t incel shit; he’s not angry at anybody, and he knows logically that if he really wanted to find someone to hook up with, he could. But it just feels like a lot of effort for little payoff. In fact, it’s a net loss. Not only do you lose time and money when you actually get with someone, but you lose that precious energy that comes with the longing, with the not-having.
Besides, if Keith ever does have another girlfriend, it wouldn’t be someone like Cardamom. She’s a self-described princess, a glamour girl, a fancy lady. She wears expensive clothes and sips expensive drinks in an expensively-furnished apartment. Keith likes eating at hole-in-the-wall lunch counters and running around in the woods. He’s been wearing the same pair of jeans for four days. Jeans wearing thin at the knees and back pockets and splattered with old paint.
That’s why he came to Rxobot, to paint. Before he arrived, Keith went to Staples and had a fat stack of glossy prints made from around fifty photographs and video stills of Cardamom. He didn’t make eye contact with the clerk, fearing she thought he was a creeper. But these photographs aren’t his spank bank. He doesn’t jerk off to Cardamom, anyway. Cardamom is for love. No, these are reference photos. Without Internet, he knew he couldn’t rely on his memory and that he’d need images of his muse to work from.
And look, Keith has female friends, he’s more or less aware of current feminist talking points, and he knows it’s gross and entitled and patriarchal or whatever to be this self-indulgent white male artist who’s uninterested in a woman’s humanity beyond how she inspires him.
But also, what she doesn’t know can’t hurt her. And his painting style isn’t so realistic that people would instantly know it was her. Someone who’s a fan might say, “Huh, that looks kind of like Cardamom Lee. Is that Cardamom Lee?” but he would have full plausible deniability.
Cardamom, like Lydia before her, and like Sandy before her, and like Bette before them, and on and on, is the little secret spark to ignite his engine, and his limerence is the gasoline that kept the engine going. And the engine is his paintbrush, Keith guesses.
Maybe it’s a kind of narcissism. It’s definitely selfish, Keith figures, keeping all that love-energy to himself and using it for his own ends rather than giving it to its proper recipient. But then he wouldn’t be able to paint. And if he couldn’t paint, then what would he do? Survive, he supposes. Just barely.
It may be selfish, immature, unhealthy, what have you, but Keith would rather sit on this warm sidewalk with his eyes shut, thinking about Cardamom’s warm golden skin and long shiny black hair and eyes like mosaic-tiled swimming pools, about her voice like a furry blanket you could wrap yourself up in…
“It’s closed? What the hell?”
Hearing the voice in his head through his ears is so shocking that he jumps, inadvertently slamming the back of his skull against the brick. Even before the pain and nausea subsides, he forces himself to look up at her.
She’s beautiful, yes, of course she is. But she doesn’t look like herself. It’s like how when a celebrity stands next to their wax self at Madame Tussauds, the wax version looks realer. Cardamom is wearing little to no makeup, and her hair is braided and twisted up into a big knot on the back of her head, and she’s wearing one of those dorky sun visors presumably because a baseball cap wouldn’t fit over said hair. He can’t take it.
This is problematic, Keith says to himself as he lurches up and past her, speed-walking away with his head pounding. You’re being one of those men that women on the Internet complain about. Except, is he? From Cardamom’s perspective, he’s done nothing wrong. She can’t read his mind. She can’t read your mind, he reminds himself, even as doubt starts poking through the and spreading on the walls of his brain.