X, by Davey Davis
The letter X is the shiftiest minx in the alphabet: a treasure, a cipher, the person we once loved; a porno, a warning, the gender marker beyond F or M; and, now, the title of a queer, near-future noir by Davey Davis.
In “X” (the novel), X (the character) is a little of all these things, a “femdom nightmare” and the object of obsession for Davis’s nonbinary narrator (who spends most of the novel nameless).
After an intense sadomasochistic one-night stand at a Brooklyn warehouse party, the narrator fixates on X as a distraction — or perhaps a chance at salvation — as the world slips ever further into fascism. A mysterious government agency is encouraging undesirables to “export,” or voluntarily leave the country. First, they went after “nonwhite immigrants, those on the no-fly list, known commies and antifa, Jews and Muslims, Black and brown leftist organizers”; now they’re chasing down “drug users, sex changers and lots and lots of poor people.” X has been served her export papers, and the narrator has one month (at most) to find her. The hunt serves as a distraction from the narrator’s bleak daily life: a dead-end job they hate, a recent ex-girlfriend they can’t forget and a looming certainty that they, like all their friends, will be forced to export soon. As the clock ticks down, these realities bleed deeper into the story, no matter how much the narrator tries to ignore them.
Like Davis’s first novel, “The Earthquake Room,” “X” is lyrical and nonlinear, with sentences that feel like carved obsidian: dark, sharp and shiny. Here, however, the voice is less poetic and more terse, like the patter of a hard-boiled detective from a classic film. This is a queer noir world, full of inexplicable violence, an encyclopedia’s worth of sexual deviance and a deeply flawed, untrusting and untrustworthy antihero. At times, Davis’s styling goes too far, torquing sentences into awkward shapes (“Soon I could identify where each pain came from, as might a studied butterfly its pins, were it alive to know”), but the overall effect is masterly, a perfect mating of style and subject.
Like so many of us today, Davis’s narrator has (in part) been turned into a citizen-detective by the relentless true-crime-ification of entertainment. Throughout the novel, their obsession with sex and death has a pop culture counterpoint in a chatty podcast where two women breathlessly discuss gruesome murders for an audience of millions. Not all readers will be able to personally identify with the novel’s stories of sexual waterboarding, but many will recognize the experience of devouring, adjudicating and enjoying the worst (and often last) days of someone’s life for entertainment. With TV, movies, podcasts, etc., death spectating is now a booming business — our modern Coliseum. Again and again, “X” shows us how sex and death are entangled for many people, not just BDSM queers from the future.
Indeed, the darkest parts of “X” are not the scenes of snuff films or future fascism; they are what the novel suggests about our present. We are not reading some far-off or improbable future. At times, the novel feels like a dispatch from next week, as when the narrator opines that “we didn’t even know how good we had it back when it was merely skyrocketing unemployment and crumbling civil rights.” “X” documents a dystopia that has only just arrived, suggesting that perhaps there was a moment when we could have taken a different path.
That moment? It’s now. Now. Now.
“X” will leave you, in the same way it leaves its narrator, wondering: What are you ignoring? What can’t you admit to yourself? And is it already too late, or have you just given up?
Hugh Ryan is the author of “When Brooklyn Was Queer” and “The Women’s House of Detention.”
X, by Davey Davis | 268 pp. | Catapult | Paper, $16.95
