A single word from a wavy pool of thousands. He rose and picked the paper from the floor next to the bed. Thom could pinpoint it two feet away. Maybe it was the way it looked on the page… a perfect little word. A pillbox. Seething, but lean. Or the letters themselves? The anatomy. The sure, hooking sweep of the S poised like a crane over the E. The E, the fluish longing between the S and the X, the tangle of limbs. And the X, the most exotic and abstruse of all the letters. All velvety rubbing together, the wringing out droplets from flesh, the ringing out of flesh, the pinepitch friction and dreamwet fall, the faint hint of opium in the air… SEX comes from the mouth of a serpent, from the very beginning of his long smile.
It must somehow be wrong to slip into a wet dream at the mere mention of the word SEX. Every time somebody says the word SEX, there they are: two bodies folded over each other. Every time it pops up on the page, there it is: a leggy triskelion twisting into a propeller.
Would thiS wEar off with agE? At thirty-thrEE, would, could a pagE bE ScannEd without pinpointing Each occurrEncE of thE blaStEd word automatically? No morE littlE luSty figurES baSking, armS EXtEndEd, lEaning againSt thE word, likE it iS a mErE prop. No morE miniaturE Spinning orgiES. TonguES on EvEryonE’S bottomS and topS. JuSt a cold, limp word. AbSolutE EXpungEmEnt.
Maybe not. But at forty, surly then surrender is a must. That kind of desire is released from the body into the brain for safe keeping during the aging process. Surely at fifty, or better yet, sixty, when death isn’t a tragedy anymore but a shame. Surely at seventy, with spectacles and a breathing tube and a life support system and a plot picked and a will drawn and a neighbor behind a pale curtain looking across the street to see if a bereaved family has arrived, surely then a lousy paper could be read from face to finish without incident.
Improperly cut, the pages stuck together. He ripped at the fringes and peeled apart the edges. She’d been gone for hours. Maybe longer. Grey light filled the empty apartment, and he didn’t bother with the bathroom door.
Do or die looks, the whole lot. He ran his eyes along the congregation of grainy photos. All of the men could harass death. Looked eighteen. Had Duck’s Asses. They all had blazers and were freshly shaven. The photos were probably for Christmas cards thirty years ago and now, years later, were serving double time as the obit. If they had held on another season, would the photos have been updated? One man, Arnold Silver, of 355 Maple Ave., had his arm around a woman. The arm was almost as big as her head. The blurry outline of an anchor tattoo tied like a knot, looped around his forearm. He fought a long battle in Europe decades back and lost a short one at home a day ago.
And how would that work? Do you know ahead of time or not? Would Mrs. Silver announce:
–Last call. This is it.
Then a day rolls by and Arnold goes:
–You know, we haven’t done it in a while.
And Mrs. Silver goes:
–I guess we’ve grown out of it, back into our own bodies. Our leaves have fallen back into our own soil.
Thom scanned the rest of the page looking for hooks, as was his practice. They remember their last time, treasure it even, like the first, or at least use it as a bookend to keep things straight up top. And what if the last time wasn’t a blast? Could she be left dangling, and he a failure for eternity? Maybe that’s why they drop off in pairs.
He began to flip the page but noticed something familiar. He pulled the paper close to his face.
All of the coiling and legging and tubes and pots and weigh stations leading it all out of Thom’s body dialed in and shut up, shut down. There wasn’t anything to do but flush an empty toilet and stand momentarily in the empty room. His typically excitable bowels were spooked, far too fast.
Thom called out to the room, he thought, then called out to Esther, the babble of ink on grey paper blotching out her facial features—the impossibility of it turning up here, so quickly, so fast, was dazzling. The toilet, empty now, flushed fast, had reproduced another faceless pool of water far too fast and was taking shape.
He rotated the dial, and water slowly began to pass through the faucet as he foamed and covered his face. He took his razor from the holder and positioned it against his neck, a needle about to be released on a record. After the dead air in the room, he began to pull crisp music off his jaws.
His eyes blurred on the image of himself thrown at the pearly mirror. It became confusing, what he was looking at. He questioned how it was designed. He cut the lights, pulling in the outline before him, motionless, featureless, silent. He began to shave by touch. The blade chased his face, his fingers followed until it all felt smooth, backward, nascent. Thom’s grip grew tighter on the razor and his thoughts drifted around untethered. In his aquarium brain, a memory swam to the surface of his consciousness with a coy little mouth that opened into a chasm and swallowed him whole…
It’s a shithead thing and stupid, but it came over the phone. When he picked up, there wasn’t a voice on the other end, only a long exhale, like the sighs you’d imagine leak out of old houses between the warped beams and slats of rotting wood. Behind the sigh, machines were flaring, robotic noises, hatch marks streaking gaudily across the background like searing comets.
Raymond was either mono or stereo. Today it was stereo.
–Hey there, Thom-Thom.
–Yeah. Hey. What’s up?
–There’s a meeting here. It looks like I’m finally done.
The words rose a fell and he peeled the word finally out of the cone of his mouth like fraying wallpaper.
Thom looked across the room to his roommate, Troy, submerged under an ocean of late night vodka that glowed blue in his liver, sitting there like an electric bean under his skin. He was packed down and petrified in shale blackout sleep with his shoes on. A collection of beer cans circled his bed like diver boats.
–Listen, I know it’s a little out of the way, but can you give me a lift? They have…my car’s not in the right condition to operate.
Thom’s small dormitory bed was empty, though, you don’t see it that way at that age. You’d barely think of it that way at all.
–Well, where are you?
–I’m in the green room. Soon, they’ll be taking me out to do Sullivan. From the waist up, only.
–No, where are you? I’m not sure…
His words scuttled through the spats and holes in the phone.
–I’m in Manchester. For safekeeping.
There was a long pause. The sun seemed to rise and set.
–That’s, like, two maybe thr—
–Maybe three.
Troy rolled over, the way a bear might, revealing a small, coiled nude just under his paw.
–Okay.
–Okay.
There was a flatness to the way these words slipped out, like neither mouth had actually opened.
Thom looked at the ceiling, waiting for the sun to rise, waiting to let last night’s bacchanal at some such dorm room pass through or seep into his bones. Once dawn began to climb the autumn sky, he climbed into his cold car and drove. It was only a psychology mid-term, and it’s just properly fucked and anti-normative to hold a three hour class anyway.
Thom pushed the gas pedal and the car eased in backward, curling into a spot directly in front of the florist. A motion sensor heralded his arrival through the door with two nasally beeps. The shop itself felt like a blood blister, swollen with dark, rich colors and an off-limits delicateness. A room with this many roses takes on the aroma of blood.
Another inch shorter and Mickey would technically be considered a little person, though, midget, allowing for a nice alliterative burst, is the term she would most certainly prefer. Mick the Midget. Her feet swung out with a soldier’s cadence as she alternated between her post behind the counter and the walk-in cooler with two enormous sliding glass doors. Here it was a kind of butcher shop game where the emotionally deformed customers, fuck-ups or the fucked-up, could specify the exact flowers they needed by finger pointing and head nodding, measuring just what it would take. This is how men…men…menstruate…through their wallets, Mickey would say, clipping the stems of roses and watching the tips fall into the trash.
–Haven’t seen you in ages, Thomas. I thought you’ve been staying out of trouble.
–That is the impression I would like for you to have, Mickey.
They both flashed teeth. Thom noticed just now that she wore dentures.
–What can we do for you today? What’s the occasion, a celebration? Or a more, a more… somber matter? Or is this, what did you used to call it…damage control?
–What’s the difference?
Puzzled, she indentured her lower lip as a series of strains of daylight washed through the room, pushing a glow through the overpriced vases, and landing a crop of lanky sunspots that floated lazily over the wall.
–Just give me some red roses Mickey, uh neat, you know, no baby’s breath or any of that side dish stuff, and a phone book, please.
–Well nobody’s asked for one of those in ages.
A rimple formed along her brow as she slid her eyes across the shelving below the counter.
–One day they’re gonna stop making these. It’s all going to be floating over us like the cartoon bubbles. And how many, Dear? The roses that is?
Thom pulled up his wallet and split the leather expecting to see something more. He dropped all he had onto the counter.
–Whatever this will get me.
She chuckled and eased the dusty, coffee-ringed phonebook across the countertop before disappearing into the cooler as Thom slid his finger down the Ps with one hand and pointed to the fattest roses he saw with the other.
*
Each time Thom neared the house he froze and coasted forward while staring at the door in front. Eventually his foot would hit the gas, and he’d coil around the block one more time. Self-conscious, he would swivel his head, side to side, pretending to be lost when he turned back on the proper street and slowed down in front of the house with the colossal red door like a fresh gash among all the other white houses.
He could leave it in the mailbox. Open the thing up and just slide it in. Nothing would be lost, really. It was still a nice thing to do. But it could just sit there, too, and the gesture becomes jest. In the shadows, desiccating silently, head hung in a tin tomb while all of the other affairs unfolded and collapsed. And then he might find it days or weeks later, black and web-wrapped, under the endless backlog of credit card applications and fanning sale fliers. And then something would be lost.
Signaled. Turned. Engine killed.
A giant could walk through the door with his head held high. Up close, strips of red peeled away from the red painted wood but still clung to the door like a thousand tiny price tags. In place of a peephole, a stained glass window shaped like a sun hung at eyelevel; the sun appeared to be staring at the dead center of Thom’s forehead, the way people feign eye contact with important strangers. He crumpled his hand into a fist and knocked on the door, below the window, where the sun’s heart would have been, thinking this a kind of special calling.
He knocked again as a light breeze slid through a line of birds threading the sky. Bushes on either side of the house wiggled their tips with a supple, pianist’s grace, but the house remained still. He opened his coat with resolve and tugged out one long red rose. There. He rested it against the door on the WELCOME mat. He would see it here. Turned and leaving, Thom felt his heart decelerate to a slow trickle. But before he was out of earshot he heard a tapping grow louder, a telegraph along the floorboards of the house. The door opened, and the late, wet, autumn sun spilled over his face and neck as he came out onto the porch, standing there, huge and skeletal, all around himself in angles and furrows like rusting scaffolding. His creased fingers clutched an adjustable metal cane. Beyond the labyrinthian lines of his brow, beyond the thin, wire-rimmed glasses, beyond the black bags sagging like hammocks below his irises, his eyes glowed pink like a rabbit’s.
Thom plucked the rose from the ground and stood up as tall as he could, trying to make eye contact but squirrely, every which way with the eyes, as though about to begin a blind date.
–Hi there. Are you…
He couldn’t remember his first name from the paper. Arnold? Aaron was it?
–Are you, Mr. Polly?
His head shook sedately.
–I saw in the paper… I know you don’t have calling hours, but…I work…I worked…
He nodded again.
–I just wanted to say that I’m sorry, sir. I hope you don’t think I’m being too intrusive, but, I knew Esther from work. I don’t even…
As all the oils and the electric thumbtack-laced sweat leached out of his glands and into his pores, he felt like he was leaking down the drain.
–And I wanted you to know we have something in common. My father, yesterday, too. Four years ago to the day. It makes me connected, feel… connected, kind of, ah… I guess I can relate. Do you know what I mean?
The wrinkles that etched into his brow deepened as if some invisible driver had tugged on the folded reins of his face. Spindly, craning over Thom, he still didn’t say a word.
–I know this isn’t much, but I just thought you might like this small token.
He extended the rose, blossom first, to Mr. Polly, who raised a slender arm and what appeared to be a tiny microphone that dangled from a loop around his wrist.
Thom felt his hands leave the rose and rise upward, as though connected to strings high above the crest of the doorway and then slide across his bony, time-tortured back to gently tap his shoulder blades. The other hand followed naturally, magnetically. Inside the embrace, he felt like a piñata before you boof it with candy; delineated, but unmistakably hollow.
And for a second, it was rich, rising and falling on the porch.
Then his body shrunk inside Thom’s reach. He could almost feel his ancient back snap like a fortune cookie. To just feel him limp in his arms. Still warm. And then they were together. Then the crumble to the ground, bone over arid bone, like a cartwheel. It was all too much squirming. Thom opened his arms. Mr. Polly shook, searching for balance as Thom steadied his elbow.
–I’m sorry, I just thought…
The old man bounced his cane like a pogo stick. Teardrops swung off of the tails of his eyes. More sweat pooled below Thom’s armpits.
–I just didn’t want you to feel like you were alone. Do you understand?
Mr. Polly’s hands stopped shaking. He reached forward and squeezed the rose back between Thom’s fingers. A metallic device coiled around his wrist. He slid it into his palm and nuzzled it against his throat and then his neck droned in the mutilating argot of electric clippers.
–FIVE YEARS AGO, SHE STARTED PUTTING THE WASH IN THE DRYER FIRST. DO YOU SEE?
–Uh…
–AND THEN ONE TUESDAY FOR DINNER WE HAD RAW EGGS AND HAMBURG PATTIES IN THE SHAPE OF TRIANGLES… DO YOU SEE? SO, I TOOK THAT OVER.
Thom rolled the rose stem between his forefinger and thumb.
–AND THEN, OCCASIONALLY, SHE STARTED BRUSHING HER TEETH WITH HER HAIR BRUSH… SO, I TOOK THAT OVER, TOO.
–Ah…
–AND THEN, IT WAS THE SCISSORS. YEARS OF IT. DRAWERS FILLED WITH THEM. WHY WOULD I OPEN THOSE DRAWERS?
–Yeah… They were everywhere on her desk at—
–AND THIS SPRING SHE COULDN’T GET OUT OF THE TUB. SO, SHE SAT THERE FOR TWO HOURS. SHIVERING TILL SHE GOT PNEUMONIA IN HER CHEST. DO YOU KNOW WHY?
–I don’t…
–SHE JUST FORGOT MY NAME AND NEVER GOT IT BACK. SHE COULDN’T RECALL. DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE? SOME GUY RUNS A RED, BUT I’VE BEEN ALONE FOR YEARS NOW.
At that moment, through the horrible din of mind and machine, his name came back to him.
–I know how you feel, Edwin.
All the air in Edwin’s body drained out in one wheezy breath. Thom leaned in closer, but quickly retracted.
–ARE YOU MARRIED?
–No, but I know…
–ARE YOU MARRIED?
–No.
–HAVE YOU EVER LIVED WITH A WOMAN FOR FORTY YEARS? DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE TO HAVE YOUR WIFE’S BRAIN EATEN… EATEN HOLES IN IT BY A BUNCH OF MOTHS?
–What?
–HAVE YOU EVER SEEN HER LOOK AT YOU AFTER THOSE YEARS, AND THEN HAD TO LISTEN TO HER SAY…
Edwin dropped his fist. A ring around each eye glittered like chainmail in the sun.
He pushed his fist back to his neck.
–W-H-A-T’S Y-O-U-R N-A-M-E?
On the axis of his cane he turned, and the colossal red door closed behind him. Only the soft tapping could be heard as he picked away, step by step, from the door.
Thom watched the door from his car, sliding the key inside the ignition without looking, and stirred up the engine. Like a circus elephant tethered to a mere stake in the ground, he could go. One good piece of footwork, and he’d be gone. He kept watching the door. Backstage in his brain, there was a busy cast waiting to pass through the curtain, and it was easy to let them. He conjured a curvy black sedan with out-of-state plates pulled into Edwin’s drive. Out stepped a man who emptied the car of two children before a woman with big eyes joined them on the march to the porch. He watched while the family waited, until the door finally opened. They appeared huge there, tucked under the doorframe. Edwin’s arms wrapped around the man’s body. A few broken rose petals took to the air and clung weightlessly, wobbling around, encircling their bodies in a gust of vermillion butterflies. Thom finally moved the car, circled around the street a few more times and then slipped into idle by the curb, hoping to see the real family approach. But each time around the block the red door remained closed, and the porch was still empty.
Driving away he wondered about all of those scissors; hundreds of pairs of scissors snapped inside his head, cutting things free over and over with the great snake hiss of the blade. The car seemed to drive itself. The blades kept hissing in his head, cutting more memories loose. He looked at his hands on the steering wheel, unable to remain still.
Still waiting for the check, they didn’t speak. They had met in the morning for breakfast, ordered big, but neither touched their plates much. When the waitress finally delivered the check, held between surprisingly plump knuckles along her point and mid fingers, Raymond smothered it with his hands immediately. He squeezed hard, craned around and fisted the slip into a cone as he pulled it from the table. As he did, his hands shook so much that his watch unbuckled and completely slid off his wrist. He pulled the bill closer to his face and pretended nothing had happened.
–Pricey omelet.
Thom picked up the watch and reunited it with his father’s wrist. His hands were larger than Thom’s, so large that he could barely cover even one of them with both of his own. It was good to see it, his fingers rattling—a fly crashing against a lampshade, a flesh and bone telegraph chattering out a message. It was something to bob your head to.
Raymond and Thom left the restaurant and walked the two blocks back to the car without speaking. Raymond was always either mono or stereo. Today it was mono.
–How are you feeling?
–I feel…fine.
–So, how long’s it been?
Thom kept walking, never altering the interval between steps, and unlocked and opened the passenger door on his curl around the car. His rapid stride abruptly ended as he opened the driver’s side door, where he filed himself inside the car practically upright. He dialed up the radio—lodged the volume deep in the mid-fifties—which filled the rest of the ride over.
*
All of the patrons stood in an odd line to enter, clumped out here and there in teetering spots, klathcy ellipses, and then slipped one by one past the cashier and into the next room. Hanging black plastic strips, like huge languid eyelashes, rubbed each visitor as they passed through into the garden. Two strips clung momentarily to Thom as he passed, peeled off his chest slowly, then swung backward to lap at the next visitor.
It took a moment for the eyes to adjust. Inside, the room opened on to massive verdant trees, looming out huge, green, nearly blood-red leaves; most were fat like rowboats and floated over the curves of the ceiling. Waves of sunlight swam overhead through the thinner palms, these snakey malachite‐looking feathers in float, pitching white, nearly blue light onto the terra cotta path that curved over the floor. A geodesic dome cupped it all together, sitting like an enormous glass bowl over the entire garden, holding it all in. Every person inside seemed to be standing perfectly still, hesitating to smile. Not a single breath was drawn.
Thom took naturally to the unspoken edict of the room, stopped his feet and tried to hold onto his breath. He turned back to Raymond, the only one moving, whose hands trembled against the frozen statuary that sprawled through the court and the coiling stone footpath, embryo-tight in spots, and in others unfurling wildly like some unfamiliar signature curling across the Deceleration of Independence. The whole snarl of movement forward over the world had stopped for all the other visitors, but for Raymond, life itched on defiantly, beginning at the great chamber of his chest then shivering out in the rounds of popping blood cells burning through his whole body, then down the fire tube barrels of his arms and out the clubbed tips of his thick fingers.
Some slight thing, a leaf it seemed, caught above the ground, looped end over end as the rest of the visitors watched. And then suddenly it was clear why everyone was so still. It was all to the right of the ellipses, the after. A silent woman had spilled wine, ancient wine, the scorching lavender wine of a Caesar on her blouse. A stock-still man’s arm had rows of pinks and blues and was made entirely out of button candy. A frozen child’s crown, the soft spot that hadn’t closed, was endorsed by two widening wedges of purple blood. A stiff grey-haired woman had dotted her starched white slacks with pale, steamy butterpiss. Wordless. Motionless. All dead air. They weren’t really there anymore. Everyone held the same emerging smile and look of incredulity on their faces. For a moment, they were all gone.
For a moment they were all just hushed subjects in a court…the hissing vortex before the next record begins. And then it all turned together and greyed. It’s the twisting, whirring tinnitus of the heart. Imagine the fabled Kansas farmhouse rewound on a massive turntable and spit back up into the sky…and it all strips the paint and funnels back to black and white. The people slippered away into their clothes, just suits, it’s all black suits now. It’s taxes, just tuxes now, floating tuxedos in a great flattening dissolve through the garden. And it was all for them, the whole room, the world, all of it was for the untold butterflies, bowtie after bowtie after bowtie, to clasp onto in elegant positions around the enormous room.
Raymond’s shaking hand rose and twitched into the air, a fledgling wing, and he held it above the ground as if his finger were caught in an electrical socket. Palm open, he shook against the static backdrop. His fingers blurred and became one object. One small Duke of Burgundy materialized and braided a dizzying path through the air. As it fluttered, vacillating between two poles, back and forth, back and forth, it looked as if its body had been spliced into the frame, skipping a couple here, there, as it passed in apoplectic fits, and hovered then over his quivering sunward palm. Thom crafted a mountain range formed of small thoughts, mulling over the frozen muller, too, and could read the message that shook from his father’s hand.
He watched the pair, Raymond’s shaking hand and the trembling butterfly. He couldn’t tell the difference, if there really was one, if the thing dropped or his father’s fingers rose. Without differentiating, believing, the butterfly rested on the tips of his fingers and posed demurely like a masthead. For a long while, neither creature moved. His father leaned into Thom’s ear. Closer—slowly. The Duke of Burgundy’s wings bowed before the silent entirety of the garden.
–Almost a week. Thom nodded his head in agreement, carefully bobbing his head, noticing just now the ten or more butterflies that had landed along his arms and body.
The Duke’s wings hung low, perpendicular, imperceptibly above his motionless palm, lightly fanning the air. Without thinking, Raymond could have crinkled it into a ball or pulled the wings from the fuselage. But he held it there, still. Two weightless passengers. Quiet. Free.
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He didn’t remember turning into the parking lot or even wanting to stop. Curled around the steering wheel, his hands trembled slightly, flexing open and then snapping shut with a swift reflexive tortility as though pulled by a team of imaginary horses. He couldn’t, it was… he couldn’t remember where he had just come from. Ed…win’s, of course. Another ad layered on dull glass before him read:
MUSTANG CIGARETTES - BUY 2 GET 1 FREE
That’s the stuff. He opened his car door and closed it, forgetting about the car windows, which gaped open into the blackness of the car like caves. From their spot leaning on a blown out payphone, two young boys looked deep into the blackness. A severed phone cord dangled from the receiver like a long silver umbilical cord. One boy’s arm was entirely down his pants handling his crotch while a cigarette burned boldly in his free hand. He took a drag and exhaled a request for Thom. He couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven.
–Hey man, you wanna do me a fuckin’ favor?
Thom walked by them, trying not to notice or be noticed. He didn’t say a word, walking past the uneven pyramid of windshield fluid and passing the ICE machine standing huge and half‐filled with neat cold stacks, placeholding a bouncer’s cool, impersonal gaze by the door.
Automatic doors opened and closed.
A motion sensor clued a buzzer to puff a loud beep, which clued the clerk to slide his borrowed copy of Slits back under the counter. Barriers are only so effective. Sometimes things just leak through, even if you hold them back.
–Pack a Mustangs, please.
Thom bounced his gaze off the floor. There was always a twinge of guilt in buying cigarettes, like pinching the rolls of fat around your stomach before biting into a cupcake.
–Are these for those kids outside?
He raised his eyes to meet the clerk’s incontrovertibly shaking head. That voice.
–No, they’re for me and my lungs.
The clerk’s huge face held a bristly black beard that thinned slightly around his chin. As it drifted toward his neck, it shrank in accordance with his body. There seemed to be too much material stuffed into his arms, and bony knobs poked out from his elbows and wrists. His fingernails were all bitten down to jagged stubs. He was all dowel arms, bulldoggedly propped up behind the counter, clamped on tight with a blue nametag and topped with a store hat. He had the head of a man, the body of an adolescent, and a fresh black eye.
The store phone rang.
–Hang on. I gotta do this call.
Automatic doors opened and closed.
Two more beeps signaled the arrival of the boys from out front. He could feel one of them, probably the vocal one, standing too close behind him. He hadn’t properly extinguished his cigarette, and a small thread of blue smoke, like the kind you always see preceding a massive, abominable plume in the movies, waved from behind Thom in bleary, exotic tendrils. The little boy rocked arrhythmically. He didn’t stop lurching, searching for new space to occupy. This little boy was like a giant flesh gearshift that an invisible hand seemed to be sliding into first, second, third. The boy’s body brushed against his back. He could hear—almost feel the air he pulled into his small lungs, stealing it from an imaginary air repository under his own nostrils. And why couldn’t he stand still? His eyes stayed fixed on the clerk, coiling the cord around his wrists. The boy’s small fingers tapped Thom’s shoulder, the highest point he could reach without jumping.
–What’s the fuckin’ hold up in here?
Thom turned around slowly to meet two little eyes running at him before he was able to steady out a focus.
–Can you please, please give me some room?
–Fuck you.
What?
Fuck?
Fuck me?
You want to fuck me?
You want to unzip your little boy pants?
You want to take out your little boy cock?
And fuck me?
Until I bleed?
Fuck out my eyes with a raging torro torro cock?
Is that it?
Or is it a general desire for me to get fucked?
Fucked over?
Fucked up?
Fucked senseless?
Acute dysphoria bled into another feeling altogether. And, of course, at this point Thom was already long gone.
–What do you mean?
The boy’s eyebrows converged, uniting the two fuzzy caterpillars living on his brow.
–You a retard?
It had just been such a long day. Thom began to shake.
From the vitreous eye of a video camera, Thom could see himself in black and white. He could see his hand rise. He could see the little boy’s sneakers dangling above the grainy linoleum floor, his body like a rabbit pelt between his fingers. Sometimes things just leak though, even if you hold them back. Barriers are only so effective.
He could see the other boy reaching for something in his pocket. He could see his own leg raise and feed the boy’s stomach the heel of his boot. He looked curly before he hit the floor, a little overgrown fetus obscured by amorphous shadows, rolling uncontrollably down the candy aisle and out of view.
He could even see the whites of the boy’s eyes, two bleached moons there among the silent and imperturbable ATM machine. There, among the prolific lineage of thirty packs of ICE COLD BISHWATER BEER. There, among the MUSTANG promos. There, among the gelatinous coffee and swizzle sticks. There, among the dick and twat mags and spicy nuts and WOMEN ❤ BEER TOO plastic cigarette lighters and the splashy forever fanning of corn chips and the tedious arranged splay, the juke box array of individually wrapped factory snacks and salts. He could see him there on the floor in a kind of florescent manger among the universe of convenient things. Below the lightless awning of his hoodie the boy looked even younger than he probably was. He appeared all wrapped up, like all of the store’s goodies, all swaddled up like a newborn.
Thom turned back to the counter. A rack of black magic markers propped on a cardboard tree lounged against the lightly purring cash register. He yanked on one, and the entire tree took to the air and collided gently with a glossy green package of diapers stacked at the other end of the store.
He turned back to the boy who had since heeded Thom’s request for more space. Hand raised, still holding the marker, he looped in around the boy’s neck and reeled him against his chest. He squirmed, but Thom was off of the schneid now.
The boy had no choice but to be held there, pressed against his rib cage, against some strange, outfolded womb. He wanted to believe he was the only man in the boy’s young life who had ever really held him. It would leave an impression he’d never forget. Thom leaned into his ear and whispered the only advice that came to mind.
–Please don’t stand so close to people. It makes them uncomfortable. And don’t smoke inside. Please don’t rock so much, either. Please try to be still.
He could spin the boy’s head more easily than a doorknob. He held him tighter before releasing him, as if back into the wild, and the boy leapt toward the door.
Automatic doors opened and closed.
Two beeps rang, and they were out of the store. Thom’s arm stung and he noticed the boy had snuffed his cigarette into his forearm. He pulled on the crushed cigarette, a layer of skin attached, and dropped it to the floor.
He turned back to the clerk, who was now off of the phone. His nametag read: BILL.
–I guess I won’t be needing any cigarettes today, Bill. But I’ll take this marker.
He removed it from the package and dropped the plastic casing. Bill didn’t move. His eyes didn’t shift from the newly formed basin sinking in Thom’s arm like a fresh, puckering asshole.
–Take it.
–That’s real big of you, Bill. You’re a good man.
–It’s all good.
–Bill, you look familiar to me. Have we met before?
Bill’s gaze slipped below the counter and then followed Thom to the door, slowly opening, triggering a long hymnal beep once he moved to the doorjamb. The tone filled the entire store and leaked out into the street.
–Are you sure we haven’t met before?
But nobody could hear over the beeping that seemed to raise in pitch, higher and higher, and then went on to inflate Thom’s entire head, his entire brain, his entire body with helium. Every bruise and scab from the prior night began to vibrate and ring like bells all over his skin inside the squealing vault of sound.
Thom noticed a height chart that lined the doorframe like a series of colorful discs stacking up a spine. Sickly pastel blues, reds, and oranges, the colors used to differentiate the height of all the would-be criminals stratified upward along the frame of the door. He pushed the base of his back against it, sliding his spine along the metal rail. He ran the tip of the marker across his head and plotted his height on the chart. When he pulled away, he half-expected to see his own body still standing there.
Marker thief∕vandal—Height: 5’ 8.”
Thom put the tip to the rail again and let the anemic height chart pull more ink from the moist black tongue of the marker. Bill, seeming increasingly concerned by Thom’s lingering presence, began searching blindly for his Louisville Slugger underneath the counter, forgetting company protocol to alert local authorities with complete equanimity. Thom wrote one word over the glass door:
MIDOR
Marker capped, he stared at the door. My door. Store left.
Outside, two phlegmy globules of spit ran down his windshield. Another frothy monstrosity rested on the driver’s seat. He stood motionless and stared at his car for a long time.
From the corner of his eye he noticed a long stream of piss as it seemed to sizzle against the corner of the convenience store, breaking against his ears at the same time it hit the side of the building. He followed the line from the edge of the wall across and connected it back to an exceptionally long green-grey cock that swung from a bum’s body like a panting tongue. Make no mistake, there was a special kind of kinship with this man that registered inside Thom, still listening to the stream, as they both had taken turns drawing lines along the same building. And even more interesting to Thom was that he could smell the ammonia frothing from his languid spigot as it hit the wall and oozed down to the narrow alleyway between buildings.
Unconcerned with his seat, Thom hopped in the car and pulled away, watching the last few impossible drops get shaken wildly into the air like a child with a sparkler.
The sal volatile of piss stuck warmly in his nostrils as he drove. Back now, and hundreds of green lights ushered his car forward, sparkling now, beseeching green buttons that kept opening up the night into a widening smile that seemed to curl forever over the globe. He barely noticed the spit that soaked into his pants. It was perfect. The needle never had to touch the groove. There didn’t have to be any feeling. It was touching without really touching anything at all.
Thom sailed along the street with a Venetian lean, forward, over the wheeled shoulders of murky water, turning the radio on and off over and over.