Enough about nature. My turn again. For a while now I’ve felt something on my right upper arm. I’m going to look at it. I shift my shoulder forward, grab the fat on my upper arm, and roll it toward me. Now I can see it. Just as I thought—a blackhead. I have no idea why my upper arm is full of them. My own poor explanation for it goes like this: hair tries to grow there but because of the friction from T-shirt sleeve edges, individual hairs stay under the skin and get infected.

And so I come to one of my biggest hobbies. Popping zits. I’ve noticed a big blackhead in Robin’s ear. More precisely in the flat area just outside the ear hole. I’ve often seen people with exceptionally large, black things like that right in the same area. I think people just don’t tell each other and the blackhead then has years to fill itself with dirt and grease. Several times I’ve forgotten to ask people ahead of time and have just reached for their zit in order to pop it. I practically grabbed Robin’s ear. I could barely control myself. But a lot of people aren’t cool with that. When you just pop their zit without asking. They think it’s overstepping a boundary. I’ll ask Robin, though, once we know each other better. I’m sure we’ll get to know each other better. Not going to escape. The blackhead in Robin’s ear, I mean. That’s reserved for me. I clench the blackhead on my upper arm between the thumb and pointer finger of my left hand and, with a squeeze, out comes the worm.

It goes directly from my thumb into my mouth.

With that taken care of, I examine the little wound.

There’s a drop of blood in the hole left behind by the blackhead.

I wipe it off. It doesn’t disappear. It just smears.

Just like on my legs when I’ve shaved them instead of Kanell. Fast and careless. Often I get goose bumps from the cold water and from standing around in the tub. When I shave over them, I tear open every bump. Then I think I looked better with hair because now there’s a pinpoint of blood where every hair was. At some point I put on a pair of nylons over my bleeding legs and discovered an interesting effect. The almost see-through, skin-color nylons smeared each speck of blood into a stripe as I pulled them up my legs. By the time I had them all the way up, they looked like an expensive pair of patterned nylons. I wear them that way a lot when I go out.

Wearing nylons over my bloody legs has another advantage, too. I like to eat my scabs. At the end of a night out, when I take the nylons off again, they rip off the dried blood, and new scabs form. Then, once they’ve hardened, I can pick them off and eat them.

Tastes almost as good as sleepy seeds. The snack brought by the sandman and left in the corner of your eye closest to your nose.

When I treat my little wounds so poorly, eventually a pore or two will get sealed and keep a hair from coming out. The hair still grows, but it coils up beneath the skin. Like the roots of the avocado in the base of the glass. At some point it gets infected and then Helen enters the game. I’ve been very patient. Despite the fact that the whole time the hair was calling to me, “Get me out of here, I want to grow straight like the other hairs, in the fresh air,” I’ve kept my fingers off it. It’s difficult. But it’s worth the wait.

First I stick a needle into the infected lump and squeeze out the pus. From my fingertip into my mouth with that. Then it’s the hair’s turn. I poke around in the wound as long as it takes to get at the hair. It always looks a bit stunted since it’s never seen the light of day and has had to grow in tight quarters. I grab it with tweezers and pull it slowly out with the infected root. Done. Often another little pleasure will grow in the same spot a few weeks later.

A magpie is hopping across the shortly cropped hospital lawn. In children’s books magpies steal shiny objects like bottle stoppers, aluminum foil, and rings. In reality they steal eggs from small songbirds. They peck them open and slurp them out. I always try to picture just how a magpie hacks a hole in the shell of a songbird’s egg and then uses its beak as a straw to suck out the egg. Or do they do it completely differently? Jump on the egg until it breaks and slurp the puddle of goop off the ground?

Eggs are a constant theme with me. Years ago kids would chant, “Go climb a pole, you egg hole.” For no reason; just because it rhymes. But I always read a lot into it.

I told Kanell once what I thought it meant, and one afternoon we acted it out.

The pussy was the hole, obviously.

Into it an egg. For egg hole.

At first we tried a raw egg. But it broke in Kanell’s hand at the entrance to the pussy. The pieces of shell didn’t cut me or anything. It’s just that everything was covered in goop, and it was cold.

So then we discussed whether it had to be a raw egg. Actually it didn’t. So we boiled one. Hard. Eight minutes. Very hard.

And inserted it. So I finally had the egg hole I’d always imagined from this playground rhyme.

Since then it’s been our inside secret. In the most literal sense of the phrase.

There’s one other thing I’d like to do with Kanell.

I’ve always loved to play around with the lymph nodes in my groin. I slide them around under my skin. The same way you can move your kneecap around. Recently I’ve had the desire for Kanell to trace them with a Sharpie. To accentuate them. The same way you accentuate your eyes with makeup. Is that a sexual fantasy? Or just a new form of body art? It would only be a fantasy if thinking of it made me hot. And that it does. What would happen the first time the fantasy were realized? He’s good about exploring my fantasies, just as I’ve supported his with every fiber of my being, right from the start.

Out on the lawn one magpie is fighting with another. Over what?

We humans think of magpies as evil animals because they eat the young of other birds. But we eat the babies of almost every animal that appears on our menus. Lamb, veal, suckling pig.

Outside, Robin is strolling with a female nurse. The magpies fly off. I look at the two of them, appalled. I’m jealous. No way. I feel a claim to him just because he’s taken a picture of my wounded ass and I gave him a titillating lecture about modifying my underwear. And because the nurse can walk and I can’t. Well, I can, but only very, very slowly. They’re both smoking. And laughing. What is there to laugh about?

I want to be able to walk again. I’m going to walk right now—to the cafeteria. There is one here, right Helen? Yes. The candy striper said something about it. I’m going to slowly go to the cafeteria and get a cup of coffee. Good, Helen, do something normal. Don’t think anymore about Robin and his fuck-pie or about my parents in bed boning each other. I have plenty of time. Good idea. I should have been capable of thinking of it without the two strolling strangers. Coffee always makes me have to go to the bathroom. I’d like to secretly have a bowel movement, without telling anyone here. Just for me. Just so I know I still can and that I haven’t grown together and sealed shut. I won’t tell anyone. That way I can still use this venue to try to bring my parents together. That way the things that are supposed to be together will grow together.

I roll onto my stomach and let my legs slowly drop to the floor. I grab a painkiller from my pill supply and slurp it down. I’ll get some use out of it along the way. Inside, I’m prepared for the long voyage. But not on the outside. I’m still wearing just this tree-top angel outfit, still gathered and knotted at the front. Nothing on the bottom. You can’t walk around like this, even in a hospital, Helen. Even as an ass patient. There are a lot of people running around the halls and in the cafeteria. I go at a snail’s pace to the space-saving, built-in wardrobe. Mom said she had left things for me in there. I open the door. Only pajama bottoms and T-shirts. I’ll never be able to manage that. To put on a pair of pajama bottoms you have to bend down and put in first one leg and then the other. Oh, man. That’ll stretch my ass too much. Mom didn’t think of a bathrobe or something simple like that. Now what, Helen? I walk slowly back to the bed and pull off the sheet. I wrap it around myself and tie it at the shoulder so I look like a Roman on the way to the public baths. This is fine for walking around a hospital. The two ass-piss stains could have been caused by something else. They could be the result of my drooling on the sheet while sucking on a Werther’s Original. Very believable, Helen. Nobody’s going to ask you about it. People aren’t like that. They don’t want to know.

Off we go. To the door. I haven’t left this room in three days. Am I even allowed to wander around? Come on, I’m not going to get in trouble for walking. But am I allowed to walk in the hall as slowly as a dying grandmother? If someone catches me, they can send me right back. Better not to ask in advance. Open the door. There’s a lot going on in the hallway. Everyone is busy doing something. They all seem to know each other here, and everyone is laughing and pushing things around. To my eyes it looks as if they’re doing things just to look as if they’re busy in case the supervisor happens to walk past. They don’t want to be caught smoking in the nurses’ station. Better to chat on the hallway while shifting something around. They can’t fool me. I creep past them. Nobody acknowledges me. I think I’m going so slow they can’t see me with their hurried glances.

It’s just as bright in the hallway as in my room. The linoleum reflects the light back up from the floor. It looks like gray water. I walk on the water. It must have something to do with the pain medication. I still know the way to the elevator. You retain that even over the course of several days. The escape route. I lie there in bed the whole time in pain and know exactly how to get out—without even being conscious of the fact that I know. Out and around to the left. There are bad religious paintings hung all over the place. The nurses probably put them up to please their parents. They all end up here sooner or later. The parents. Proctology unit. Oncology. Palliative care. Something will bring them here. Unless they care for them at home, which I think is the best way.

I bend over and hold my stomach because I can’t reach my ass in this position. It hurts. I’ve made it to the glass door of the central part of the building. I just have to pound the buzzer like Robin and the giant glass door will open automatically. I stand there and don’t go through. I have no money with me. Crap. Have to go back the whole way. No one acknowledges me on the way back, either. I guess I am allowed to wander around. I’m also allowed to take care of my wound myself. It’s in an extremely unhygienic spot. Pretty much the most unhygienic spot Robin can imagine. Room 218. Mine. Open the door and in I go. Back to peace and quiet. Thanks to my idiotic forgetfulness I’ve wasted a lot of energy. I look in the drawer of my metal nightstand. There are a few small bills in it. Mom must have put them in there while I was sleeping. Or did she tell me she had? Or did I dream it? My memory’s gone to shit. In any event, I’ve got money now. I hold it in my hand as I walk. They don’t make sheets with pockets yet. My ass is getting used to the motion. I’m a bit quicker now than on the first trip. Probably because the pills are taking effect. I stare at the floor the whole way. We’ll see how far I get before someone comments on my attire. I punch the button. The automatic door swings open and this time I go through. Beyond is a whole new world. Here different diseases mingle. Ass patients and ass nurses aren’t the only ones out and about. An old woman with tubes in her nose is walking around. The tubes run into a backpack that’s attached to a walker.

She obviously has something wrong with her head—not a proctology case. That’s a change of pace. She has beautiful white hair that’s in a long braid coiled on top of her head. And a nice bathrobe on. Black with three-dimensional pink flowers on it. And nice slippers. Made of black velvet. You can see the shape of a bunion through the slippers. Like a tumor on her big toe. It’s growing sideways over the other toes. And by doing that it pushes the joint of the big toe farther and farther to the outside. Until it’s quite far away from the rest of the foot. A bunion like that is a destructive force. It bursts out of all your shoes over time. It’s about to destroy those velvet slippers. The toes end up like teeth in a jaw, crowding and displacing each other and becoming crooked. But the big toe always wins the battle. I know it. I have a bunion, too. Everyone in our family does. Father’s and mother’s side. Very bad genes, all things considered. The big toe always wants to go where the other toes belong, so little toes keep having to be surgically removed. My uncle, my grandmother, and my mother hardly have any toes left. Their feet end up looking like devil’s hooves.

I want to think about something nicer so I try to find a pleasant end to my granny observations.

Okay, even her spider veins are pretty. I used to call these weblike formations varicose veins. But they’re actually called spider veins. Everything about her is pretty. Except for the bunion and the tubes. The tubes will soon be taken out, I’m sure. Hopefully she won’t have to die with them in.

I push the button for the elevator, cross my fingers for the handsome old woman, and say hello to her very loudly. In case she’s already hard of hearing.

Old people are sometimes startled when someone addresses them. They’ve already gotten used to being invisible to those around them. Then they get happy that someone has noticed them.

The elevator arrives from above.

I can tell from the red arrow. If I still remember correctly from my sterilization, the cafeteria’s in the basement.

The elevator doors pull apart from each other with a loud screech and invite me in. Nobody else in the elevator. Good. I push the button marked B.

Cafeteria is written next to the B. I use the ride down to hoist up my toga with the hand holding my money and pull out my homemade tampon with the other hand. Bloody and slimy as it is, I’ll put it near the panel of buttons, the most scrutinized place in this moving crate. Just below the button panel is a bar you can pull down, like a handrail. I yank the horseshoe-shaped bar down and balance the bloody, sticky lump right in the middle of it. Success. Toga down as if nothing’s happened. The doors open and two men are standing there. Perfect. Looks like a father and son. None of the important things in life are discussed much in this family, either. I look at both of their faces. The father is ill. His face is yellowish gray and he’s wearing a bathrobe. Lung cancer? The son must be here visiting. I greet them, beaming with joy. “Good day, gentlemen.”

And walk out with perfect posture. It takes a minute. The men have gotten in. The curtains close. I let myself slump back into my bent-over posture and hear from the elevator a weak, old voice, revolted: “What is that? Oh my God.”

There’s no way they’ll clean it up themselves. They’ll never figure out that it’s just harmless menstrual blood. It looks like something that fell out of a wound. You can’t even recognize that it’s gauze. Soaked with blood as it is. It could even be a piece of flesh. Human flesh. These days everybody’s afraid to come in contact with blood. They’ll tell someone on the floor where they get out. The father will hold the doors open to keep my bloody clump from traveling onward. The son will have to go find a nurse on the hall. The nurse will then have to find a rubber glove and a garbage bag so she can remove the clump. And eventually a wet cloth to wash off the dirty grab-bar.

She’ll thank the father and son. Showing such civil courage in the cause of hygiene. Then my masterpiece will end up with the medical waste.

I’ve arrived at the cafeteria. The bills have in the meantime been passed between both hands and smeared with blood. The finger that was inside me also clearly has blood under the fingernail. Blood turns brown when it’s exposed to the air. So it looks more like crap or dirt. So my period-hands now look more like the dirty hands of a kid on a playground. I’ll nibble it all out from under my nails later. Cleaning your nails with your teeth in public looks as if you’re chewing your nails—and I hate that. Chewing your nails is considered by almost everyone to be a sign of psychological weakness. Insecurity. Nervousness. It’s something that belongs behind closed doors. Kill or be killed. Coffee, please. As a reward for the long trip here, I’ll treat myself to caramel flavor.

I pay with a bloody bill. Pleased that this bill will sooner or later make the rounds. First it’ll be clamped under the spring-loaded plastic clip in the drawer of the cash register. Until it’s handed out as change. Then it’ll wander into a sick person’s wallet and, later, when that person is released, will be carried out into the world. Whenever I get a bill with blood on it, my first thought is always of a nose bloodied from snorting too much coke. A bit of blood often gets on the part of the rolled-up bill that was stuck into the nose. Bit of snot, bit of blood. Maybe I should rethink that. There’s more than one way to get blood on a bill. I take my coffee and my change to an empty table in the cafeteria. I’ve done it. I’m sitting here like a normal hospital patient drinking a cup of coffee. I have a long journey behind me, and I’ve disturbed at least three people through hygienic transgressions. A good day.

While I’m drinking my coffee, I need to figure out how I can manage to stay in the hospital for a while longer. Somehow I need to inflict another injury on myself or else reopen the one I already have. But how, without it looking purposeful? So my parents don’t get suspicious. Not to mention the doctors. The cafeteria is slowly beginning to fill up. It’s teatime. Most of the people here want to get out of the hospital as fast as they can. I want to stay as long as possible. I think the only other people who want to stay in the hospital as long as possible are the homeless. In our town there’s Blind Willy. I don’t know why everybody calls him that, because he’s not blind. At least not when I talk to him. I always want to give him something. Mom says if you give them money they just drink themselves to death that much faster. Or they buy drugs. She has no clue. Whenever I was downtown without her I would talk to him and get close to his face so I could smell his breath. Not a whiff of alcohol. She was wrong on that count. And I asked him about the drugs. He just laughed and shook his head. I believe him. So I stole some money out of mom’s purse and put it aside. Then the next time I went into town without mom, I gave it to him and told him it was from my mother. She sends her best. I told him he shouldn’t ever thank her, though, because she wouldn’t want it to seem as if she were seeking a public show of gratitude. He took her for a generous, humble lady rather than a hypocritical Christian. I also stole a sleeping bag, food, and clothing for Willy from home. As far as he knows, it all came from her. Whenever I walked past him with mom, he and I would look at each other briefly and then lower our gazes with knowing smiles.

Willy is probably happy when there’s something wrong with his leg or something so he can spend a night in the hospital.

If I’m to have any chance at all of bringing my parents together, I need a lot more time here. I would pay to have any of these people’s diseases. But there’s no point in even thinking about that. It won’t work. Just like trading breasts with my friend Corinna. She has big breasts with soft, light-pink nipples. I have small breasts with hard, maroon nipples. Whenever I see the way her tits bulge out of a T-shirt, I want to trade. I picture the two of us going to the plastic surgeon and each having our breasts removed and then reattached on the other. I always have to convince myself to stop thinking about it because no matter how badly I want it, it’ll never work. It breaks my heart that something like that isn’t yet possible. And besides, I’d still have to ask Corinna whether she was cool with it. I couldn’t do it without her consent. Or maybe I could. But then I’d definitely lose her as a friend. But I can’t do it anyway because it’s simply impossible. Get it through your head, Helen! Quit torturing yourself by letting your mind wander down these hopeless cul-de-sacs. It’s just as much of a waste of mental energy to think about how much you would pay the people here for their various diseases. It won’t work.

This is no place to figure out a plan to extend my stay here. I’m just too distracted by the other inmates.

I also notice that the coffee is having its usual effect on me. My innards are starting to gurgle and rumble. I react to a cup of coffee the same way a native in the rain forest would to the first cup of his life. With symptoms of poisoning. Half a cup of coffee in the top, diarrhea immediately out the bottom. I did a coffee piss-test once. My dad taught me how. When you get up in the morning, you usually have to pee because your bladder has stored it up all night. So when you’ve pissed yourself empty in the morning, you can pretty much assume there’s basically no more pee left in your body. Now, if you drink a cup of coffee with breakfast, your body feels so poisoned that it leeches water from itself in order to wash out the poisonous drink as quickly as possible. You have to go to the bathroom as soon as you finish drinking it and piss out more fluid than you just drank in the form of coffee. I’ve confirmed this by using the coffee mug as a measuring cup. The pee always sloshes over the edge. So to the delight of my father I proved the dehydrating effect of coffee. My mother wasn’t pleased, though, because she doesn’t think urine belongs in a coffee mug.

I’ve got to get back to my room. It’s go time. My body is starting to fend off the coffee. There’s no way I can use a public toilet down here in case I have to crap. I’m scared of that and need peace and quiet. It might also hurt so badly that I have to scream. This isn’t the place for that. That’s something I’d want to do on my own. Quick, back to my room. Though it’s not like me, I don’t take my cup to the cart at the exit for dirty dishes—despite the fact that I want to be a model patient. In an emergency you can leave your cup. Just stand up and make your way slowly to the elevator. And cinch closed what’s left of your sphincter muscle so nothing ends up in the sheet.

Just in the nick of time I remember that I got rid of my do-it-yourself tampon for the sake of a prank. I’m squeezing everything down there together as best as I can. In the front, too. A Roman with a bloody toga walking around the cafeteria. That would create quite a sensation. Don’t want that. Thanks to my pussy’s good musculature, I can hold blood in for quite a while. Then, when I sit on the toilet and relax my muscles, it all sloshes out of me at once. At the elevator I tell myself I’ve already made it halfway. Once I get on the elevator I’ll just have to stand still and then when I get out on my floor I’ll only have to make it the same distance I did from the chair in the cafeteria to the elevator.

Ding. It’s here. I immediately look for what I left behind. Nothing. As I thought. Tampon gone. Not even a hint of a drop of blood. Drops of blood have a very short half-life in a hospital. When the doors have closed, I stick the tip of my pointer finger into my blood-holder and dab an oval of blood—like a potato print in school—in the exact spot where my goods were. They won’t catch me. The doors open. I walk to my room so fast it hurts. The pressure is building. I’m worried about what’s going to come out and how. I stand over the toilet bowl with my legs spread apart, pull the gauze plug out of my ass and let nature take its course. I don’t need to paint a picture, but it takes a while, hurts a lot, bleeds heavily, and now I’ve done it. The thing everyone here is waiting for me to do. But they’re never going to know. I make a new plug out of toilet paper. Air this place out. The telltale scent has got to go. First I turn on the shower full blast. Somebody once told me the water pulls bad smells down the drain. I leave the door to the bathroom open and walk even more buckled over than before to the window next to my bed and open it as wide as it goes. I walk gingerly because of the postfecal pain. But I’m in a hurry. Back to the bathroom door. I open and close the door, fanning the air in the direction of the window. I don’t smell anything anymore. But that will need to be confirmed. I go back out into the hall and close the door to my room. I take a few deep breaths in and out until I have only fresh, stench-free air in my nose and lungs. Then I go back in, just as any nurse would, and sniff. The smell is gone. Everything’s clean. No evidence. Mission accomplished. I turn off the water and make a new homemade tampon to handle my menstrual blood. Done. Calm. What should I do now? I’ll lie down and close my eyes. Let’s simmer down—or at least get worked up over something else.