The neo-Nazi, naturally, preferred butt sex. Of course, Liliana somehow remained, even in her advanced age of thirty, too naive to size this aspect of his character up with one cursory glance at his aesthetic. It was a head-to-toe dark denim ensemble and black leather boots topped off by his bleached-looking blond hair that was completely au naturel. Strangely, this was not the first time, she realized as it was already too late, that she allowed someone of the neo-Nazi persuasion access to her unclothed body. There had been another one, less obvious in terms of appearance, with long brown hair, a bushy beard and the odor of a wheatgrass shot gone horribly wrong. She ignored this latter quality amid her drunken haze, during which he escorted her back to his apartment in a cab (at a time when New York still thrived on cabs). When she woke up, her ass, like Mama Makeup’s in Truth or Dare, was bleeding, a Confederate flag loomed above her and the long-haired man was nowhere to be found. She fled before some strange potential dungeon master appeared to keep her from leaving.

Five years later, now in Berlin, Liliana was still somehow too pure (read: oblivious) to understand that men’s sexual whims are often at odds with women’s romantic desires. To enhance the irony of her disconnect, she had only moved to Berlin after securing a film editing position for Cazzo Film, which had been successfully getting people (men) off since 1996 with such classics as Coxxx and Spielfilme. So though she might have been staring at exploding with semen penises most days, it didn’t mean she didn’t believe in a little old-fashioned wooing. Which is, in part, why she fell for the neo-Nazi’s line. His name, she learned after he cornered her outside of Drink Drunk off the Schlesisches Tor stop to ask her if she wanted to join him by the canal for a drink, was Blaise. Which she didn’t really feel was all that Norwegian so much as French, thanks to Pascal. His blue eyes had that sparkle in them that so few brown or green ones do, so she succumbed, said, “Sure, I’d be happy to.” So they walked. To the edge of the Spree, where it was colder and windier and rather than ducks floating tranquilly on the surface of the water, there were just sinister swimming rats that came up only enough for you to briefly apprehend their species while also questioning whether or not it was truly a rat that you had just borne witness to in some arcane swimming championship called “infect all aspects of the city, bodies of water included.” In short, it was the height of an idyllic scene in Berlin. Liliana knew that much, and that’s why, again, she overlooked, in addition to Blaise’s exterior, which fit the neo-Nazi cliche and ideal to a tee, some of his more “off-color” comments as they drank from their beer bottles.

As she evaded the inevitable question about what she did for a living (for it wasn’t just in New York that people were ostensibly obsessed with this query), he seemed content to wax “poetic” about other non sequitur elements of life. “Men are immortal, women just replicate,” he told her, referring to some phenomenon in biology Liliana was probably too stupid, as a woman, to know anything about.

She didn’t want to believe what he was saying, nor even fully process it so as to get on with a night that might actually consist of not sleeping alone and staring into the void called the ceiling as she contemplated whether it could ever be possible to spend long periods of time with anyone other than herself. Least of all anyone claiming to have a penis. For these days, even when you did unearth one, it so often tended to be rather small and not punctuated symmetrically enough by balls. But she went with his “banter,” gave sexism and discrimination a chance for the sake of maybe at least hitting it off in his bedroom, which was just nearby where they had first encountered at the Drink Drunk.

They grabbed two more beers before heading upstairs, where the vibe of the apartment was decidedly Ikea. Not in decor, but in spartan nature. Save for just one very overt centerpiece that stood out to her like some sort of shining light. The way the Bible might be illumined to people who, for some strange reason, continue to ascribe to being Catholic. But this was no religious text, at least not conventionally speaking. No, this was Mein Kampf, and it looked to be a very valuable, out of print version of it no less. Elsewhere on the shelf were The Turner Diaries and Helter Skelter, tellingly prosaic of white supremacy indeed. If Stormfront existed in “literary” form (as if anything those people said could ever be classified with such a word), she was sure it would also be on this shelf as well, which was sure to include additional white male hard-on material, including Nabokov and Salinger. But he was Norwegian, she thought. Aren’t they supposed to be the coveted Aryan race? Not the race that actually seeks to implement their congenital look onto others? None of it made much sense to her. Nor did it when she downed the rest of her high in alcohol content beer, followed him into his room and proceeded to wonder if and when he would ever penetrate her.

The answer still didn’t come (nor did he) twenty minutes later, when all that had happened was a song and dance between his mildly interested appendage and her asshole, the latter constantly squirming to get away from the former. So instead, there was a lot of use of fingers, mainly his. She was too frozen and in shock from drunkenness and forcing herself to accept that the neo-Nazi was so predictably only interested in ass play that she would either have to go along with it or let him get off on finger banging her because there’s something about doing this to a woman that makes misogynists feel at least some sense of arousal when they can’t feel it for actually fucking a broad.

He continued on, fingering to the point of bruising until, finally, she surrendered. Surrender Dorothy. That’s what so much of life is as “the weaker sex.” Giving an inch (of your butt crack) so that they can take a mile. Unless, that is, you choose not to accept the offers of Aryan men waiting outside the Drink Drunk. Opt, instead, to do as Mother and Father always told you not to and judge a book by its very trenchant cover.

She practically bolted out of bed when the morning came and it was a respectable enough hour to be seen walking along the street (though, who was she kidding? Most people were only just now going back home from whatever godforsaken themed club that had finally decided to close up shop at this late/early hour). She took a roundabout route, ambling in a way that she thought might help her unclench her freshly permeated perineum. Called by some intuitive sense back to the Spree, she caught sight of a rat, presumably one of the ones from last night, rigor mortis. It looked almost as stiff as her backside and openness to finding love felt in that present moment.