Who was the culprit? The man you sucked off in the bar’s bathroom last Saturday, or the trick you met on the street in the middle of the week, the one who’d decorated his apartment in Catholic kitsch and kneeled in front of you like an altar boy? Perhaps it was the man who fucked you without a rubber beside the indoor swimming pool in his apartment building, the smell of chlorine in your nostrils, the cold tiles irritating your back, the guilt you felt almost but not quite overriding the pleasure of his unfettered cock moving inside you. It doesn’t really matter: you’re trapped now, on your toilet, your stomach swelling with gases like pseudocyesis and watery shit leaking from your ass, wishing you had followed your mother’s advice and become a priest and waiting for the erythromycin to take effect. When the diarrhea is on hold your body relaxes and your mind wanders; you imagine amoebae moving inside of you by means of pseudopodia, as your encyclopedia told you, false feet, a protrusion of cytoplasm that is both a means of locomotion and of consumption. It feels like they’re stampeding; what’s left for them to eat? When the diarrhea starts again your intestines cramp visibly; there’s Compazine for that but it’s not working yet. You close your eyes against the burning pain in your guts and your ass; it’s a cliché, but it feels like lava is moving through your body. After the umpteenth episode, when you have wiped yourself clean with wet toilet paper to soothe the rash on your buttocks and flushed the toilet, you open your eyes and realize as you look at the unfamiliar walls of your bathroom that when your eyes had been shut your mind had been shut as well. Not just shut, but shut off. You remember it as a blank moment of time; you remember now a succession of these blank moments, reaching back into the early hours of the morning when the diarrhea first struck. They are like bricks, these blank spots, and together they form a wall through which you can’t see, over which you can’t climb, around which you can’t walk or run. You feel trapped then, by that wall, by the undeniable feeling of wellness moving into your body, by the inadequacy of the grammar you possess to describe the wall and the wellness. You know that while you were building that wall you were able to see beyond it, but now you can’t remember what you saw, and as you wait in vain for the next bout of diarrhea you realize that the body doesn’t always succumb to illness: sometimes it yearns for it. It embraces it with a protrusion of false limbs and pulls it inside itself, and in so doing takes you, if only for a little while, beyond the confines of this world, and into another.