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Honolulu is as I always imagined heaven would be—

Very beautiful, and very boring.

And just as Jesus deemed heaven should be, Honolulu is full of mediocre middle Americans, escaping from the purgatory they made their everydays, gorging on overpriced reward for lives neither really good nor bad: for coveting their neighbor’s wife and not doing anything about it, for texting “OMG” during American Idol, for murdering their own souls with a slow suffocation of healthy greed.

I walk to Starbucks, my white marble skin sponging in the humidity. The sky is harsher, bluer than the Pacific, the sun is unquestionably that great ball of fire early Christians denied it to be. And both boil the air hot as hell. I order a soy latte, and the price makes me wonder if I’m also paying a sin tax. But I’m trapped on an island that’s forever a vacation from reality; where else am I going to buy holy water for workaholics?

As fast as I can be, I’m back in my hotel room, writing these words to build my own heaven on earth, making myself slave away each moment, wringing work out of every second of now that makes up true eternity.

I pause, and look outside at the bright sky cooking unmoving bodies lying on the beach, those corpses of ambition, those—

Thighs. God, check out the cellulite on that chick.

I’ll do anything to escape heaven.

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My back’s flat against a black sheet of stage that’s speared with a pole, and warm air over my bare legs is like a comforter. A couple of two-dollar bills melt into one between my teeth, pillowed by my wet tongue. Lured by that make-out Monopoly money, a topless Japanese girl slithers over me, her skin powdering my nose, her head nuzzling my thighs, pausing. Then her hands massage my breasts as she crawls back, kissing me, biting the fake money into her mouth. She pecks me on the cheek, chirping, “Arigatou!”

“No,” I giggle. “Thank you.” As vulgar as the world might make watching naked, thin girls strip to buy clothes and food, Japan styles the experience as gracious, as graceful, as losing your virginity on your wedding night.

Only maybe more mildly mannered.

I sit back down at my table, with a hostess. Her eyes are wide, their slant exaggerated with false eyelashes and lips constantly curved up. “She good dancer, yes?” She echoes my declaration from a few minutes before.

I smile. “Hai!” I say, with a short nod. The only Japanese I’ve spoken my two days in Tokyo is “Star-uh-bucks-oh,” “Yes,” and “Thank you.” Excepting my Engrish chant while hunting for soy lattes, this seems to be the most Japanese spoken by the natives, too. With such soft language, what little I’ve seen of the megacity makes it feel feminine, despite city myths of men groping women in crowded elevators, in spite of the aisle of rape porn I stumbled onto in a six-story sex shop.

Tokyo is just too polite to feel fully dirty and urban.

Though the metropolis is dense with thin buildings nodding to the sky, heavy skyscrapers bending under the clouds, and a tower that flatters the Eiffel with its likeness, it’s urbane about its urbanity, completely clean, only littered with bowing trees offering to shade your stroll on the sidewalk.

It’s partly this prettiness that makes exploring Tokyo vibe like virtual reality: everything is blinking and bright and light and seemingly safe, so consequence-free. So I wondered through alleys, sky walks, and sidewalks, finally entering Kabukichō, a district that was hardly lit in the red it’s famed for: instead it was flashing yellows and greens and blues, and the whites of Japanese men’s eyes, against the gray of their European business suits.

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I’m looking at my legs lazy-stiff in the air, my foot melting into the flesh-colored leather of my stilettos, feeling the bed sheet rub against my naked back. I try to keep quiet, hearing him on the phone, breathing, talking to his Black Card concierge.

“So there aren’t any Elvis chapels open this late? Can you keep looking?”

He puts his Blackberry on the nightstand, muzak crackling through its speakers while a distant man searches for a cheap chapel, though we’re already consummating a fleeting mirage of marriage.

He dives deeper in, and my head tips further back, to face our hotel room window. Upside down, I see the few neon blocks that’s all of Vegas most people will ever know: a miniature of a medieval castle, of the Eiffel tower, of New York, New York. Of the world. It glitters, cheap: the city is an overpriced cocktail that people pay for to cure their pleasure-desert thirst.

I smile at him. “You sure you don’t want to wait until we’re married?”

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“So any idea of what your story will be about?” My dad’s question curves up with his lips; he smiles. After years of telling me my fashion writing was fashioning my writing into meaningless fluff, he was happy to hear I was tired of wordsmithing complicated coos about overpriced shoes on my dot-com. And while I always disagreed–I care less about what I write about and more about how well I write–, I was ready to move from commentator to creator, to build a whole new reality revolving ’round–

“Most likely sex,” I say, reaching for another piece of bread at the same time as him. He pauses, his hand hanging in the air, and lets me take a slice first.

“I’m sorry?” he drawls, still the southern gentleman after more than half a life in Los Angeles. “I didn’t hear you.”

“Sex. More ‘adult’ topics.” I use finger quotes, my polished nails snagging the air in the restaurant. Little hands like his, with the same long fingers. Only mine jammed against a keyboard all day long to make money and pay for blowing bucks at ‘Bucks, and his strummed a guitar to earn a living, when he wasn’t fiddling with the espresso machine he’d taught me to use when I was eight.

“Oh.” He swallows half his beer. The liquid was clear and gold and light, like his faith in Jesus’ virginity and Eve’s original sin.

“Not typical sex writing,” I explain, “not some sort of Sex Mafia and the Cashmere Jungle dating diary. But I think my stories will be situated around sexuality, around gender. Gender’s so much more cultural than physical.” My dad might blame naming his only daughter “Kristopher” for her interest in sex being bendable. “Plus, the sex industry is getting more glossy and pop. Adult toys are like luxury items.”

“I can’t say I’ve noticed.” The rest of his drink disappears. I suppose being sick for a couple weeks had loosened more than just my strict schedule of sleep: my tongue wagged like I imagine it would if I ever drank more than soy lattes (unlike my dad and brothers, I avoided alcohol because I hated to relax my hold on reality). I take a long sip of water, and the ice tinkles like my internal giggling: I’d told my dad I planned my next career move to be a strip tease of words, when I rarely even discussed dating with my parents–my family had first learned about the last boyfriend from my blog.

Maybe now my dad’ll say a little prayer for me at church, which could lead to an extra blessing from god for using my writing to build my heaven on earth. At least god’ll be comfortable with my move. Besides being called upon too often from women in miraculous positions parting a sea of red sheets, it’s written in black and white in the dusty grays of the Bible:

Even Jesus hung with hookers.

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“Charlie, do you know what the number one killer of women is?”

“No.” He knifes off a bit of spinach croissant, and looks slightly annoyed as pastry flakes fly into the air, like buttery snow. “Actually, isn’t it heart–”

“I thought it was toyfriends who were forced to watch Cashmere Sex and the Mafia Jungle,” I say. I break off a chunk of my Belgian chocolate and cherry scone, and the side of it keeps crumbling, like a rock slide off a miniature mountain of dessert. “Which would be fair. But it’s actually heart disease. And by heart disease, I don’t mean emotionalism set off listening to John Mayer singles. I mean actual heart disease.”

“I get it. I’m not in pre-med to do coke,” says Charlie. “So why are you eating that chunk of cholesterol?”

“You can hold my hair back in the bathroom while I get rid of it, right?” I ask. “And while we’re in there, I’ll take the Go Red for Women heart check-up on my iPhone.”

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“See that chick in the front row?” I nudge my friend Lilly, leaning forward so my toes dip into tip of my croco-stamped pumps.

“Yeah?” Her eyebrows arch, brushing blond bangs.

“That’s the second cousin of the sister of an extra’s assistant from America’s Next Top Model, three seasons ago.”

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“She looks like she’s going to prom.”

The hair stylist pauses mid fluff, Carlota and I curb our cooing over the model’s ringlets, curls carefully highlighted to look sun-kissed. Adam reaches for a handful of organic trail mix. “I want effortlessly elegant. She looks like she’s going to a high school dance with that hair.”

“We can make the model’s waves looser,” Carlota says, “but I like them. Kristopher?”

“I like them, too,” I say. “It’s girl hair.”

“And we’re selling to girls,” says Carlota.

“All right, fine,” says Adam. “After a lifetime of being girls, you guys know what you’re talking about. I’ll go work on a million other things I can do that I actually know.”

The model slips on a vintage Chanel shift, a simple sheath of fabric impeccably tailored so that it melts into a background for the body wearing it. After many minutes of makeup, she naturally looks like a living doll.

“I wanted to tell you,” says a stylist, Mary, pausing her pinning. She’s a hipster hippie in high-waisted, wide jeans and a gold necklace worn as a headband over intentionally tousled hair. “I really love your site.”

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“I almost miss The Boy.” I put my lips to my latte, and the kiss of bitter espresso drowning in the soy milk is faint, like a memory of taste.

“Well, that’s understandable,” says Charlie. “You guys dated a long time, right?”

“Yeah, on and off,” I say. “He really became a part of my life. Of my blog.” I sigh. “I wrote about him a lot. People really liked the stories.”

“It’s tough when a relationship ends,” says Charlie.

The waiter comes and balances the bill on the edge of the table. “Mind if we split the tab?” I ask him. “I don’t want Charlie to feel any pressure to put out.”
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“Take that down immediately,” types The Boy.

“What?” I instant message back. I check the webcam built into my MacBook, a tiny black square full of potential for private publicity. No light blinks green to tell me I’m being filmed, but still, “Do you mean my sheer panties?”

“No, that story you wrote about me. Get rid of it now, please.” His typed messages appear in flashes of black and white on my computer screen, but his words are vibrating with reds. “You have no discretion. People who know me might see this. Do you understand?”

“All right,” I type back. “I apologize for invading your semi-privacy with a public semi-fabrication.” And I really am filled with regret—it was such a great story. I click a button in the back-end of my dot-com, and with an e-checkmark next to DELETE the tale is erased from everything but memories.

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Sitting in the jacuzzi, I watch the steam bubble off the water black with night, the spa breathing puffs of gray floating towards golden city lights.

My seat in the hot tub is like a throne: the Los Angeles night is laid out for me, though the kingdom looks like a miniature of itself, like a smart cut of cardboard glittering with yesterday’s Christmas lights.

I watch a tiny car silently buzz along the coast, but even the automobile doesn’t scale the city for me: it all looks fake. “Can you believe that each of those lights is a home, is whole world into itself, full of people the center of their own universes?” I ask.

“You can’t see house lights from here,” says The Boy. “Those are all street lights.”

“Even way up in the Hollywood hills?” I look at a dark silhouette melting in the sky, a hump of land sunny days have shown to be a pricey mound of dirt littered with houses. The hills are freeways away, but I think if I stretch my hand far enough out of the steaming water I can grab them, and crumble their earth in my fist.

“Yeah,” says The Boy. “Look how equally spaced the lights are.”

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