hair, pulling her toward him. “I see you like it rough, Cliff,” Dollie says. “What a big, strong boy you are.” “Yeah, you bet your ass I am,” Cliff says, unbuckling his belt. “Knock it off, Cliff,” Rob says. “Jared, give me a hand in here, will ya?” Cliff doesn’t knock it off. “We paid good money for this; I’m going to try it out.” Jared rushes in to stand beside Cliff, reaching out to grab him as Cliff tugs down his boxers. The room is momentarily quiet. “Everybody quit staring at me,” Cliff barks. “I can’t.” He looks down, dejectedly tugging up his boxers, then sinks onto the bed. Jared and Rob try to look away. Cliff moves too fast for them to get out of the room in time. Even Dollie tries to look away. “I’m too damn drunk,” Cliff cries, “too fucking damn drunk.” “Oh, Cliff, you’re so much more than that,” Dollie says. Dollie has tonight off, but I have to get Lucy ready for a stag at a fly-fishing club. I imagine the lewd anglers stripping her and dressing her only in a fly vest, her perfect breasts and cherubic skin peeking out between the nippers and the hemostat leashed to the fly vest. I helped to program Lucy with a few flip comments, to suit her personality and to protect her. These anglers will probably just play with her and have some laughs. With a group that large and unfamiliar with each other, I’d be surprised if there were any serious sex-play. In my imagined morality plays, the girls always prevail. Whatever men attempt to take from them with their rough ways, whatever indignity lies at the bottom of it all—the porn-talk, the abusive moves—is something the girls simply don’t possess and so can’t lose. These girls never had it in the first place, unlike real girls. Unlike me. We send them into the world to do their business with a kind of absolute psychological armor that cannot be pierced. They do bad things with bad men who are behaving at their worst, and the girls take it all in their sincere and well-meaning doll-girl ways. Before I put Dollie away to rest, dressed now in a relaxed but stylish shift—I never put them away naked—I do something more forbidden here at DollAmor than watching videos of the girls’ nights out, an act of destruction and liberation from which, eventually, there will be no way back for me. I shut off the playback screen and reach for a button to the left of it, deep within Dollie’s soft, round skull, and I press “erase.” Just like that, the entire night before simply ceases to exist, the fact of it, the evidence, the
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