The incel is you. Today, you will break all your incel rules. You raise your arms up over your head, slam them against the mirror, and your breasts jiggle. You consider your own expanse. There is a vast procedural gulf between, say, the chiselling of a cold block of marble into a Hellenic sculpture and the stratal butchering that the elimination of your surplus would entail. Three-fourths of your body weight would have to plop in red, fly-infested heaps around your feet. 

You resort to the elimination of your body hair, hacking and scraping at yourself. You nurse the idea of a camera capturing you post-workout as a gorgeous flush spreads across your cheeks. Wiry black orphaned curls tumble around you and puddle on the floor like the spirits of the shorn surplus flesh of your fantasies, deposited in goops of shaving foam ectoplasm.

Once you are patchy-pale and glittered with stubble, you wash yourself, do your makeup, and put on a little black dress over ill-fitting lingerie – they don’t make bras for you. You take over fifty selfies, pre-soaked in an amber filter, mixing with the warm light in your bathroom and your weak foundation to act as a colour-corrector for the pricks of blue lining your jaw. You find five worth incorporating into your Grindr album, to send to Elias Mose.

From the cropped, claustrophobic images on your public profile, you know that most within your Grindr catchment area recognize that the incel is you. Only the desperate reach out to you, constantly wheedling, roving the streets looking for hole. You only make the first move when you are travelling, or when you hover around army cantonments and police stations, looking for killers. You’ve been texting Elias Mose on and off for some time now. He is always persistent about meeting you, and today, if he says the right thing, you will say yes. 

You send him your new album and spasmodically jerk off to his replies. You agree to meet him on the condition that it happens at the one bar you’ve crossdressed at before (during Queer Night). 

You pull puffy blue jeans beneath the flare of your dress, you wear a blue high-vis jacket to cover up your torso, and you push your head into a bulbous helmet. You arrive five minutes late, but you still wait a while under the awning, smoking a cigarette through a crack in your visor with all the delivery riders dodging the rain, blending in.

You head straight to the WC and emerge with your outer layers shoved into a gym bag, renewed. Elias Mose is at a corner table next to a stained mirror, talking to someone else. He is more gaunt than in his images, with less of an easy light from the centre of his grey eyes. You aren’t initially perturbed by his companion. If you sit here long enough, someone will eventually come to chat you up (like what happened to you at Queer Night). 

As you turn to stand perpendicular to the table between them, you realise you cannot identify which of the two is Elias Mose. They both turn their bald, bearded heads to you at the same time, and they are almost identical. “Hi Sasha,” the one on the right says. “I’m Mose.” The other one says nothing and looks back down to his half-empty beer. 

Okay, you’re not fucking doing this, you tell them. The unique hellishness of your life slithers like ice down to your perineum. 

“We understand this is strange, and not what you expected,” Mose says. 

You ask them who ‘we’ is supposed to be. 

“My brother Elias and I.” Mose says. Elias finally turns to you but says nothing. “Come on,” Mose says. “Give us a chance, right?” 

You shrug, and though Mose scoots deeper into his bench and pats the space next to him, you slide in next to Elias. Your head hits the bowl-shaped lampshade above the table, and the light oscillates between the three of you, circling in a spiral. You ask them what this is all about. 

Mose begins. “It’s all about meeting, you know? Getting to know you. Which is not to say we don’t know you already, because I think we do. But there’s always that layer of facade that a face to face-

You cut him off. You know what a date is, you tell him. But now that he isn’t one person but instead two, what is this? Is this a unicorn situation?

“Ideally…” Mose sighs. “Ideally, we would’ve wanted to get to know you first, but we definitely don’t want to scare you or… you know… disturb you. We just have something very important to say.” 

There is a small, thin woman hovering near a podium at the entrance. You wave at her, and when her eyes meet yours, you lay the non-thumb fingers of your left hand above those of your right hand and raise your left hand up. Soundlessly, you mouth: beer. She stares for a beat, then nods. You nod back at her, but Mose seems to register this as your assent.

“Okay, so, imagine being alive,” Mose tells you. He tilts his chin down low, so he’s staring you down with his grey, flickering eyes. “And not just being ordinarily alive. Imagine living, being, and existing in a world that’s created bespoke for you, down to the smallest details. You are made for the world, and the world is made for you.” He makes jazz hands. “Alive!” 

On most days you imagine having breasts. Actual, smooth, hairless breasts, such that you can wear spaghetti-strapped tank-tops paired with jeans and take a billion selfies. 

“But this is clearly not the world we live in. That’s obvious, right? That’s just evident. Haven’t you wondered why? Haven’t you asked yourself why everything always feels so wrong, Sasha?” 

You watch as the small woman comes up to your table and competently transfers beer from a bottle into a glass. She cocks her head at you and then flicks up her chin. Peanut? You shake your head and she returns to her podium. 

“Why don’t you give us an example of something about the world that feels wrong. Wrong for you.” 

You don’t know, you say. Things are expensive. 

“Perfect, see?” The bar is not full, but patrons from another table turn to look at Mose because of how loudly he shouts. “Exactly. That is so precise. There’s this this this this… this web that’s just covering all of us in something so sticky. Something we can’t extract ourselves from even if we tried, because the nature of this thing is that it’s everything. And it wears many faces, right? Call it individualism, call it toxic masculinity, call it-

Capital, you suggest. 

Mose laughs and nods furiously. “Yes! Yes, so you are familiar with that sort of literature. That is totally a place for us to start.” 

Look man, you say. It’s getting a little hard to keep track of whatever this is.

“Why don’t you use the app?” Elias speaks for the first time, addressing Mose.

“I- just give me a minute. I wanted this to be more organic and free flowing, given how well we already know Sasha.” 

What app? 

Elias has finished his beer and is eyeing yours. “Campus Crusade for Christ has an app called GodTools. It’s supposed to help structure what he’s trying to talk about.” 

You see, you tell him. A group of bearded teenagers in cheaply printed Campus Crusade for Christ t-shirts once accosted you outside church, asking for donations to fund their mission trip to China. You turn to Mose and tell him that you have screenshots of your past few weeks of correspondence over Grindr. 

Mose’s face darkens. “What always breaks my heart is that nothing you can ever say or do contradicts this fundamental idea that the world is wrong.” 

You remind him that he’s sent you pictures of his dick. You turn to Elias and ask if perhaps it was his dick. 

Elias shrugs. “I don’t use phones much. But he has taken intimate pictures of me in the past to use for things like this, so I wouldn’t be able to tell you for sure.” 

You ask Elias why he broke kayfabe. Was he disillusioned now? Did he no longer believe in the mission? 

“Mose got saved at a time and place where everything was very templatized. Step one step two step three, and if this happens, then do this, so on and so forth. A method to the madness. I don’t find that to be practical. It wasn’t like that for me. Honesty is the thing.” 

So then, you ask. What’s the point of participating at all? 

“Life is a series of encounters. This is one: you are meeting the two of us. Eventually, you will have the ultimate encounter, and by ultimate I don’t mean grand. I mean final. You won’t know it when it happens. It’ll just happen. Everything else is just preparing the way.” 

Mose has been poking around on his phone, and he now lays it flat on the table. You see two watercolour swirls on the screen, a blue one on Mose’s side and a grey one on yours and Elias’s. Three grey arrows point up from your side to Mose’s side, but they cannot cross the vast gulf of empty white pixels separating them. “This,” he points to the serene blue swirl. “Is the abundant, perfected life I was talking about. What we were made for. And this is where we are now. Separated. See?” 

You ask him at what point in the template or agenda he’s going to ask you to detransition. 

Elias laughs, and his laugh turns into a grey Rorschach swirl in your mind that you interpret as his certainty that you haven’t even transitioned to begin with. 

Mose scrambles and waves around the blue side again.  “There is a sense here of the apophatic. The unknowable. How do we, who have lived only on this side,” he points to the grey. “… even know what the other side is supposed to look like? But I do know one thing, and Sasha, I know, that every specific wrongness you feel here will be made right there. How else can I describe this but transition? You know, you you you… keep calling yourself the incel. ‘I am the incel. The incel is me.’ I see that as insulation. I see that as isolation. You came here, with whatever perceptions of what was going to transpire between us – and I’m not assuming, and I’m not judging – I know it is just another attempt to make things feel right again. In your body and in yourself.” 

The small woman is back again. You think she is here to refill your beer, but she seems to have something to say. I’m very sorry, she says. And this is a bit uncomfortable, for which I apologize again and hope you understand, but there’s an MLA that’s about to visit the bar, so.

You understand, and your cheeks start to flush. 

“I’m sorry, what?” Elias asks. 

First, she looks at you. You know the MLA who fixed all the pipes a couple of years ago? All the open sewers? Then, she turns to Elias and Mose. You are both free to stay as long as you like, but… Then she elides the pronoun for you …will have to leave. However, we have Queer Night every second Saturday, so you should please come back for Queer Night. Next week! Second Saturday. 

You check your pockets to make sure you have everything. This was interesting, you tell Elias and Mose. You’ll see these guys around. 

“Sasha, wait-” Mose reaches for you. 

“This is insane to me,” Elias tells the small woman as you slide past her. “The politician is going to show up here, see her, and what? Cancel your license? And, at the same time, you’re okay with us still being here because what? We’re white? Because we’re white?” 

You realise only as you step back out under the awning that you forgot to re-enter your cocoon. The delivery riders are still there, and they are all staring at you now. The rain continues to pelt, and you take great, heaving breaths and you will never do this again. You itemize every incel rule you broke today, and you remind yourself why those rules exist. The delivery riders elbow each other and mutter.

“Sasha!” Elias and Mose come down the stairs behind you and stand on either side of you. “Sasha,” Mose says. “At least let us drop you home. That’s our car right there.” 

You look at the rain and the delivery riders and your phone and your fucked up bicycle and you say yes. Mose presses his hand against the small of your back and leads you towards the rear seat. He slides in next to you. Elias makes for the front door, but he doesn’t get in just yet, instead staring out into the distance as he covers his brow with a hand. 

“I’m so sorry for how this all turned out,” Mose says. “Truly, I am. Listen.” He takes your hand. The off-market sound system turns on and begins to play a song – shimmering synthesizers, creeping bass, rim shots on a snare drum, textured acoustic guitars strummed from the bottom string up. Clothed in rainbows, Kari Jobe sings, of living colour.

“If I try to be honest like my brother, it’s not possible to think always and only of the ministry. It would be impossible to establish a true connection. Don’t you agree?”

Flashes of lightning, rolls of thunder, she sings.

He sidles closer to you in the backseat of this car you are now sure is a repurposed electric cab. You are leaking water onto the seat fabric and so is he. Blessing and honour, strength and, Kari keeps going. Glory and power.

“I’ve thought of you so often. You’re so talented, Sasha. And so beautiful. We’re on this side of the earth. We’re buried and enmeshed in that vast, stinging network. Everything is so expensive. But sometimes, when I look at you, especially now in the flesh, I can see you from the other side. It’s apophatic but He grants us glimpses sometimes, you know?” 

What, you ask him. 

“Please, would you let me show you?” 

Holy holy holy, is the Lord God almighty, who was and is and is to come, Kari sings. Elias still hasn’t entered the car. Mose brings his hand to the neckline of your dress, and you decide it’s best to hasten the day, since this is what you broke all the incel rules for in the first place. You hold his wrist and slip his hand in, bringing it lower so he can cup your breast. Knuckles flush against the cup of your bra, he fondles you and moans into your ear. You ask him to tell you something filthy

“God, I can’t stop thinking about how we first… first came to know you in the sewers. All the hair.” He flicks your nipple back and forth with the pad of his thumb. “We would collect wads of it and chew on it, and that – from your discard – is how we came to know what you would look like on the other side. And that’s so rare, you know? Visions of the other side”

You freeze up as the picture forms in your mind. Just Mose, not Elias, scooping together little maggot-like strands. You tell him to stop. His eyes widen and his body tenses. You grab his wrist and pull his hand out of you. 

“Wait! We were in the sewers because we were hiding from the Worm. It’s so all late and we never really know. I know I shouldn’t have told you that, but I was just trying to be honest.” 

Kari eases out of the chorus: You are my everything, and I will adore You. You get out of the car and stagger onto the wet street. Elias stares at you and finally shrugs. You begin to walk towards your bicycle. 

“Sasha, wait!” Moses screams in that booming voice from behind you. “Elias! Elias, do the rain thing. Please, just do it.” 

“What? No. What’s the fucking point?” Elias tells him.

“Please! For her to understand, just please!” 

The rain stops so suddenly and abruptly that you stop as well. A big SUV with a red MLA decal on the front screeches to a halt next to you, and the driver steps out to look at the sky. Off under the awning, the delivery riders stretch their hands out and take tentative steps out of shelter.

You turn back to see only Elias’s and Mose’s silhouettes, backlit by the cars behind them. Elias has his hand up, pointing into the air. Mose shifts from one foot to the other. You scurry away. 

A year later, nothing has changed. You are in the back of a cab careening down a straight highway lined on both sides with trees. You are compulsively refreshing Grindr, and for a flash of a second, you see Elias Mose again for the first time since that night, mere meters away from you. You ask the driver to stop, and you step between the first layer of trees, nearly skidding down the mulchy embankment. Deep in this forest clearing, one of them crouches (you cannot tell which). He is dressed in sackcloth and on his knees, beating his chest and weeping. He looks up to the moon and opens his mouth, breathing fire.

---

Claudia Leffie is a writer from New Delhi. Her work appears or is forthcoming in manywor(l)ds, Some Words, and serious-lit.