Teeth Pt. III

I recline, eyes closed, and pretend to be asleep. I pretend to dream, and in that non-dream I pretend to be a Builder, constructing the world around me.

Some electronic device is beeping softly in the next room. If I am in control of my world, then I ought to be able to make those beeps last longer.

I concentrate on slowing down the world around me. I picture a peach-pit, for some reason. I probe its texture with my pretend-self, and it seems that each beep from the other room describes another furrow on its surface. Long beep, deep ravine. Short beep, shallow.

I try to concentrate, but something prevents me. It’s hard to explain.

I feel like raw skin, cicatrized. They took the sutures out too soon; I’m in danger of splitting along the seams. Any sudden movement could unpeel me.

Once on a boat off California’s coast, she and I watched off the starboard bow as the captain told us,

“What you don’t want to do is dart your eyes all over the place. You’ll never spot one if you do that. You’ve got to relax your vision. Look out into the horizon. Your eyes will automatically focus on it if a plume goes up. Just relax your vision.”

There’s a new tone, very faint---coming from the hallway. I know that pitch. I know what it means.

They don’t like to tell the patients, but I figured it out.

I understand why they don’t want me to know. The imminence of death is a difficult thing to accept. Not for me. I’m more afraid of my past than my future.

I wish I could put a frame around it. I wish I could tend and prune it like a bonsai. I want to place it upon my mantle, I want to look at my past with a snifter of brandy in hand and think, that was that.

Instead I’m stuck without a conclusion, an impassioned speech (full of sound and fury) but no end-piece. Life is a candle melting into a pool wax, but the wax will stay there a very long time, pooled at the bottom, the wick submerged or burnt completely---useless.

The lights come up but the credits continue to scroll up the screen.

“So, what’d you think?”

Well, to be honest I’m stuck between “Fuck everybody” and “Please love me.”

I was born in agony and I am slowly dying in agony, and I bore the pain myself both times, naked, alone, unknowing. I spent my whole life learning, being taught: how to read, how to speak, how to use the toilet. And now I can’t do any of those things properly, so what do I have to show for it? I read the story of my life, then promptly forgot it as I lived it, and now I realize the whole time I was burning fuel, and I’m just about on empty. So fuck everybody.

On the other hand I feel like a hot air balloon whose mooring has been severed, and now I’m drifting upwards and it’s marvelous but the further I ascend, the smaller everything gets, until I can’t even remember what I’ve forgotten, and it’s becoming cold and I’m, I’m scared. So please love me.

Teeth, Pt. 2

There’s a story in my head of a man---I think the man was me---who got sick of making his own decisions. He was sulking at home contemplating his worries one day and his Scottish sheepdog came to bother him for a walk.

At that very moment he made a bold---some would say rash---decision. He deputized all his decision-making to his dog, Melba.

He set out across the Nebraskan countryside, the dog’s thick leather leash wrapped around his arm. Nicked and peeling, but still a strong leash, working its way deeper into the skin of his arm with each tug of his guide.

For two months he continued.  He ate what it ate, slept where it slept, shat where it shat. It was a lot of fun actually. Of course Scottish sheepdogs are well known for their herding abilities, and Melba was a credit to her lineage.

He had a purpose out there, sleeping in cornfields and railyards. He was trying to blow off his destiny. He was trying to trick his own fate by pitting it against pure instinct.

Needless to say, it didn’t work out for him. He knew it wouldn’t, but he had to try. The dog ate some mushrooms at the base of an old oak tree. The man knew the mushrooms were poisonous and he couldn’t bring himself to eat the deadly amanitas, which he knew from his youth to never touch.

A fire built near the site of the dog’s death. Shoveling like a beast with his fingers, a shallow pit dug into the moist post-rain soil. The dog buried under the forgetting earth, tears shed into my bread as I ate.

What do I care about memories, anyway? I think as I wipe my ass. Memories are vestigial. I’ve got no need for them. They’re an appendix and better to get rid of them than wait around until they get infected and do some damage.

Teeth, Pt. 1

Just the teeth and eyes are all that’s left. The rest of me evaporated to the surface of the sun.

When I was born they wrote a book about my life, and every day I’ve had to tear out one of the pages, wad it up and stuff it down my throat.

Now just a few pages and the index remain. If I concentrate, I can recall a few things. Like,

Army, see Military Service.
Military Service,
World War I, 33-76, 37m
National Reserves, 88-100

Also:

DePaul University,
        Undergraduate, 78-95
        Professor of Literature, 226-300

And:

Homosexuality,
        Discovery of, 11-12, 14
        Repression of, 22-32, 74, 90, 103-109, 155, 176, 200-202, 228, 235
        Public revelation of, 289-295

I sit on the edge of my hospital bed holding an old photograph, yellowed around the edges. A sharp-framed army cadet standing there, squinting into the sun. I’m able to conjure a character, like a cartoon, and I try to tell myself That’s you, that’s who you are.

There has been no grace in my aging. I am falling apart, piece by piece. Grace was just one of the first things to go. All I have left now are teeth and eyes.

The cartoon climbs out of the photograph and starts marching around my bedspread, big grin. Learned professor, decorated veteran. Decorated for what? I have no medals or diplomas now. They evaporated along with everything else useful.

I have only moments left.

But the greatest moments of my life may have been the greatest moments of any one’s. I’m sure there are many people who have had greater.

But still, I had a few.

I wish I could continue to live and grow like a tree, not bothering anybody, not needing anybody just living and pulling water from the ground and my food from the sun.

As I get up to use the toilet I pass Cherie, lying in the other bed. She’s nothing more than a puddle in that bed now. Soon she’ll be completely dried up, she’ll be just a stain on those sheets. And then they’ll wash the sheets.

I have only moments left, but moments are elastic. I can twist moments around my fingers like a rubber band. Stretch them until they snap. But what happens then?

As I sit on the toilet contemplating my incontinence, it occurs to me that if I were to have a stroke at this very moment and die, it would be convenient for the cleaning crew. When I inevitably shit myself, it’ll go straight in the bowl.

How many people in history have died sitting on the crapper? How many of them dreamed of dying that way? When they imagined their personal destinies, did any of them think they would expire on a toilet-paper-lined greasy plastic toilet lid?

Did any of them think how convenient that would be for the cleaning crews?

IV

(The end to this story took a long time to figure out. I have serious misgivings. Any suggestions are appreciated.)

The sugar in my çay had settled and turned to sludge at the bottom of the cup. I was aware of several things without knowing why: the cry of a corn vendor in the distance, the sweat on my forehead, the wires above me humming with energy...

“And that’s it. They never caught him. What do you think of that?”

Music from a passing car radio, the film developing inside...cuts on his fingers...

I thought for a long minute. Then for a longer minute I thought nothing. Then I spoke.

“Well, I think your story isn’t finished.”

“No?”

“No. A story is an answer. An unfinished story is a question, and a question is an unfinished story. What you’ve just done is ask me a question.”

“And what question is that?”

A tram ringing its bell the next street over. A rat scurrying down the gutter.

“The answer is No, Emre, in spite of everything you’ve said and done, I do not have it within me to hate you.”

Emre Çağan fished the lemon slice out of his cup of çay with his thick fingers. He put it to his mouth and loudly sucked the flesh from the rind. Tossing the cup behind him he walked toward me, then past me, and into the slow-moving crowd along the Sandemir marina.

III

“Now, up until this point the story I’ve told you is hardly remarkable. Bored rich man murders hapless poor man. Happens every day, believe me. What’s interesting comes next.”

Emre ran to the police station and on the way he purposely tore his clothes and scuffed his shoes. He showed up in front of the captain, who was startled from his nap to see the young man standing in his office, panting.

Emre explained he was nearly stabbed and had to defend himself from the booze-frenzied Kurd. Sobbing, he collapsed in a folding chair and covered his face with his hands.

Due process took its course. Emre showed up in court and put on a similiar performance, with Mr. Çağan showing up to testify, tearfully, to his son’s love of peace. Every man, woman and child in the room was wrapped around his finger. The evidence the prosecutor produced, solid though it was, might as well have been made of fairy dust as far as the jury was concerned.

So of course Emre wasn’t convicted. Actually he came out of it a hero.

But whatever Emre was trying to release by murdering that drunk didn’t make it out. It seemed like it would, but really it just poked out its slimy little head, looked around a bit, then receded back into Emre, digging itself in deeper.

I guess when you set out to do something, and you pull it off on the first try, it’s hard to stop there. For men with brains hard-wired for success like Mr. Emre Çağan Jr., it’s impossible.

So he goes out one night and he picks off a drifter sleeping on the beach. The cops had to have found the body eventually, but no one ever heard of it.

A month later it’s a beggar who hangs out by the exit to the old castle and bugs the tourists for their lira.

And so on.

Emre never changes his methods. You’d think a smart guy like that wouldn’t leave such an obvious clue, but then again maybe that’s how he thinks. Chokes them with a wire every time.

And he never takes a hit. Sure, he gets arrested. Guy’s been arrested dozens of times. They put him through the whole rigmarole and every time the whole town flocks to his side like gulls to a dead fish.

Find something that works, then stick with it. Choke a vagrant to death, get yourself scuffed up, play the victim. I don’t know whether he just thought his reputation was that good, or he thought his dad could buy him out of any trouble, or maybe he was just losing it.

But I’ll tell you what, it did work. Not for the reason Emre thought it would. The public let him off because he had become their representative. Their savior. Their strike back against all the Untouchables who spoil the views from their terraces, stink up their bus stations. The good hardworking citizens of Anamur hate those people, and simultaneously they hate themselves for hating them.

So when they acquit Emre they acquit themselves. And there’s one less flaw in their crystal lives.

II

In the south, on the Mediterranean coast, there’s a small fishing town, Anamur. In the summers it’s a hot spot for vacationing businessmen and their families. There are a handful of luxury hotels and gourmet restaurants, and a ferry that runs daily to Cyprus. All of these are owned by one very wealthy man, Emre Çağan.

Mr. Çağan had a son, named after himself. Young Emre led a very comfortable life, as you might imagine, growing up in a resort. Never wanting for anything, a new car each year, single but many girlfriends---you get the picture.

Tourism money doesn’t get to everybody in Anamur; some of the population still scrapes out a living on 30-year-old fishing trawlers. Those without boats work in the fields growing strawberries and taro, and those who can’t work in the fields, beg.

Sometimes when Emre emerged from his palatial home he had to step over a sleeping bum to get to his Porsche. Like young Siddhartha, the contrast disturbed him.

There was an old Kurd who used to wait by the bus station to panhandle tourists when they arrived. Everyone knew he was an alcoholic, but he had been loitering at that same station for so many years that he was considered a fixture of the neighborhood.

One night in June, not unlike any other except for an unseasonably chill sea breeze, the Kurd was sitting and rolling a cigarette. The last bus from Antalya had already arrived and departed to Adana. He thought to turn and ask the man behind him for a light, and as he did he felt a thin cord pulled around his neck with sudden violence.

After a brief, languid struggle the Kurd expired there on the cold concrete platform.

I

Annoyed with the slow-moving crowd of gawking shoppers on Sandemir marina, I stepped off the curb and nearly collided with another pedestrian.

Where I had bounced off my left foot and put my right forward, he had advanced his left, pushing off with his right. We were both momentarily startled, and I took the opportunity to raise the camera hanging around my neck and take the man’s picture.

He was squat, or squashed---he looked like he was under a lot of pressure. Thick Turkish eyebrows, nostril hairs protruding. Sweat on his neck, cuts on his fingers.

“Hey, did I give you permission to shoot my picture pal?”

“No. This is a public place, you have no reasonable expectation to privacy.”

“Well fine then, how about I take your picture?”

I couldn’t think of a reason why he shouldn’t. I handed him the Canon and watched him adjust the focus. It occurred to me that maybe I should smile, but I didn’t.

“Alright,” he said. “Let’s take a look.”

“We can’t. It’s film. I need to get it developed.”

“Yeah, I know. There’s a photolab just over here, let’s go now.”

There was a one-hour wait, and they wouldn’t let us smoke cigarettes inside, so we leaned against a brick wall in the alley behind the place. I bought us plastic cups of cherry-colored çay from a street vendor, and we stood and smoked and sipped uneasily.

I looked up at a grey and stolid sky through electrical wires hanging in the alley and thought I saw the lines of a musical staff imposed on the clouds. A single gull flew in a diagonal and played a whole octave from low to high.

“So we might as well get to know one another,” he said, withdrawing another Camel from a pocket inside his jacket.

“I’m curious to know where you were headed in such a hurry.”

“I’ve got a letter to mail.”

I glanced at my watch. Only just after noon.

“The post office will be open for another four hours. What’s the rush?”

“That’s just how I walk. What’s your rush?”

“I was wandering.”

“Just a fast walker like me, huh?”

“On the contrary. I intend to spend all afternoon wandering, and I have no time to waste.”

The man snorted loudly and looked like he was about to spit but didn’t. Cigarette smoke curled around his knuckles.

We stood for some time, silently sipping and smoking.

“I am curious,” I said. “What would you have done had I not allowed you to take my picture?”

“Son, I would have knocked you silly.”

I almost laughed aloud and had to take a big gulp of tea to hide it.

“It’s not that I minded having my picture taken,” he continued. “You’re right; it’s a public place and in these times you can’t go anywhere public without getting on camera. But it’s the fact that you bumped into me, and then didn’t apologize.”

“It wasn’t my fault. Or yours. It was just an accident.”

“Yeah, I know that. But a man can’t go around letting people bump into him, even if it’s no one’s fault.”

“Why not?” I knew I was infuriating him.

“I bet you’re the kind of guy---” he took a slow drag of his cigarette--- “who prances around all day, taking pictures of pretty birds and sunsets and doesn’t really give two shits about the human beings around him.”

“Well yes, I do like pretty birds, and sunsets always send a chill down my spine, but it’s not true that I don’t care about people. On the contrary, I love almost everyone I see.”

He snorted again and looked at his wristwatch. “Alright, kid. Looks like we’ve got another 40 minutes, so I’m going to tell you a story. If you’re smart, it’ll really help you a lot. If you’re not smart, or you’re not paying attention, then my breath is wasted and no one can say I didn’t give you a fair chance.”

Sinta the Sharker

It just isn’t working. Like before, like the other times.

The whole process had seemed so easy when Sinta was younger, exploring alone in the comfort of privacy. The parts were made for each other, what could be more simple?

Maybe if he changes their position.

Thick forearms, bearing small scars where the fishing hooks have snagged flesh, roll her onto her back. Sinta hopes that gravity will aid him this time. But it is not gravity or strength that Sinta lacks.

Aboard his trawler, he feels assured. Sharks are terrible predators, but Sinta does not fear them. He knows sharks better than they know themselves.

He knows how to call them by flinging chum into his wake. He knows how to hold the snare pole so the beast catches its own jawbone. He knows where to apply the heated knife to remove its fins without touching the bone, and he knows how to hoist a finless shark off the deck and back into the forgetting sea.

What Sinta does not know is how to control an organ which does not seem to be a part of himself.

In the dark bedroom the flesh underneath his hands looks like the pale blue of a fish’s underbelly. A cold, quiet part of his brain conjures images of his hands and the knife, the slick animal struggling under his sure grip.

And his body continues the mechanical, pointless motions without success.

Tom the Temp Worker

A stack of envelopes on his left, an empty tub on his right. Left hand goes to the stack. With his thumb he flips the opened side to his right hand. Like a squirming earthworm his index finger finds the opening and with the thumb pries open the package, pinching its contents out.

As he stacks their folded innards neatly he tosses the envelopes to a bin at his feet, paper chaff showing on his dark slacks like snow on the wet pavement outside his window. His fingers turn blue from ink and dirt.

10:30. Break time. 15 minutes.

Watching the blind, blinding snow through the window. Coffee is free and awful. It scalds his throat and sits testily in his empty stomach. Fox Business News drones in concert with The Price Is Right on the opposite wall, both turned low.

Tom can’t help but feel like he’s underwater.

Radwa the Rumba Player

When the Leader entered, the whole room was like iron filings and a magnet. There was a sound like the wind just before a cat pounces.

Radwa rested his bow on his harp delicately. He took deep breaths, waiting for his cue, letting the aromatics of the prelude begin to warm. The bass player set to plucking with his right hand, the one missing a pinkie.

The Leader took a seat at a circular table and his entourage of co-conspirators and thugs filled the other seats like bullets in a revolver.

Kafa began working on the drums, and the beat rippled the water in the pitchers set atop each table.

But no one had touched their glasses. They were waiting for the Leader.

Gregor the Garbageman

Sometimes they are very heavy, filled with wet leaves or lumber. Gregor has a permanent crick in his shoulder where he rests the cans. Walking to the truck, his head throbs and dirty sweat beads out onto his brow.

Meanwhile the driver Martin slurps the pale brown drops pooled in the lid of his coffee cup, held in one hand while his other manipulates an oversize steering wheel. He takes several gos at a tight alley turn and then, signaling to his partner in the side mirror, shifts into Park and waits for Gregor to hop off and haul the garbage over to the truck.

Gregor listens to the throb in his head and thinks how winter is the most savage season. Children injuring themselves playing on ice. Their parents making themselves sick on strong liquor.

Just before dawn there is a terrifying stillness and while looking at all the city's alleyways and empty bus stops Gregor imagines cold blue fingers curling, tightening their grip.

Pierre the Perfume Tester

Pierre has a nosebridge like the hump of a camel. His nostrils, attractive cylinders which give the organ an aquatic aesthetic, would look large on any other face. On his they only accentuate the massiveness of the rest of the nose.

He sits on a high-backed, velvet-cushioned chair without armrests. It is a small room, and the chair is the only piece of furniture. A yellow paisley pattern covers the walls and there are no windows. He is dressed sharply and his chest swells slightly as he breathes.

A door is opened and the scientist pushes a simple steel cart laden with rows of corked test tubes. The tubes contain liquids in a variety of shades, mostly amber.

He pulls a notepad from the pocket of his lab coat and hands it to the well-dressed man, who has his own pen.

Silently, the scientist lifts one of the vials and, uncorking it, hands it to Pierre. Pierre draws the object to his heroic nose and sniffs it, just once.

He takes a moment to scribble some thoughts on the notepad, then sniffs the potion again.

He holds his breath almost a full minute, wearing the expression of someone starting to remember something. Then, exhaling, he writes some more. He returns the test tube to the scientist, who sets it aside and begins to uncork another.

“Passion,” says Pierre suddenly, “is the perfume of life.”

Fernando the Fry Cook

Fernando sticks two fingers into the slit he’s made with the serrated knife and scoops out the pink meat in clumps which stick to his fingers.

“What? This is good meat here. You can taste, see---it won’t hurt you...” he sucks a grape-sized piece of raw pork sausage onto his broad lips, and with a lick of his tongue like a coral eel zipping out of its hole and then quickly back in, the morsel disappears.

“Listen, if you’re gonna stand there with your Little-Miss-Shits-Roses attitude, I’d just as soon you get lost. I’ve got to brown these sausage crumbles and stick them in the freezer before I can clock out. 6:30 a.m., people want their eggs & sausage.”

Dollops of the gristly meat sizzle madly when Fernando drops them into the warmed oil. As he pushes them around the griddle they transform into sweaty, grayish-brown clumps.

“Ya see, I believe people should be at peace with their food, their bodies, their bodily functions, yaknowhatImean? Like this pig I’m cookin’ here, he’s not so different from me. When he was alive, he ate and shat and slept just like I do. And then somebody killed him, and all his shitting and eating days were over.”

As Fernando orates he makes chopping motions with his spatula, as if he were holding an extension of the knife that bled the animal, the cleaver that butchered it, the grinder that sausaged it.

“Now I just ate some of this pig. Later I’m going to shit him out. Rinse, lather, repeat...and then eventually I die. After that they can throw me in the pig trough for all I care. Ha!”

Sealing the last of the crumbles in its Tupperware, Fernando pulls a hairy forearm across his sweaty forehead.

“There’s one thing I’ll tell ya. Whatever ya do, you gotta be at peace with yourself.”

The Atomic Man Pt. 7

Regaining consciousness only a few seconds later Charlie found himself slumped in his seat, car drifting on momentum down a darkened residential street. His lips and nose ached where they had hit the steering wheel. He braked and the slight change in velocity made his head spin.

For three shaky breaths he thought of nothing as the world stopped squirming in front of his eyes. The truck was nowhere in sight. Through his windshield he could see that the hood of his poor Tercel had crumpled like wet paper.

He pulled to the curb and parked. Then he realized where he was: the 1600 block of First Street, by Bethany's place. He checked himself out in the rearview: not too bad, just a thin trickle of blood from his nose.

Reaching in the glove compartment, he tore off a corner of a partially used Taco Bell napkin and stuffed it into his nostril. It didn't hurt at all, which he chalked up to a lingering drunk. Actually now that he thought about it, he wasn't angry any more either---he felt kinda good. Better than good. He felt warm, like the summer sun emerging from behind a raincloud. His luck was definitely turning around. For sure.

He saw a shadow moving behind the curtains in the window of the house he had parked in front of. "Sure I'm crazy," he hummed as he stepped out of the car and walked towards the door.

"Hey there Bethany."

With big curious doe eyes Charlie's old classmate regarded him from inside her carpeted foyer. She wore an oversize Cleveland Browns T-shirt and denim shorts. Charlie remembers her from high school as a shy girl with pimples and a flat chest; they were neighbors and usually walked home together. He could remember one dark November night when she had been late at school meeting with Debate Team, and she had pretended to be angry at her mom for making him escort her home, but then had laughed at some joke he made and in that moment Charlie realized he had a crush.

"Hi Charlie." Oh wow, thought Charlie, she has grown up. It was the voice of a woman, a wiser woman who was wary of childhood friends showing up unannounced late in the night. No more acne either. Now if only that Browns shirt weren't so loose...

"Are you alright?"

"Oh this? Don't worry, it's just the dry air. What're you up to?" He silently congratulated himself on his quickly improvised explanation.

The pretty doe eyes studied him for a long moment. "Making Hamburger Helper. You hungry?"

Charlie stepped inside and was careful to shut the screen door behind him.

The Atomic Man Pt. 6

"Sure I'm crazy," crooned Billie Holiday on Charlie's car radio, "crazy in love, I say."

If confronted, Charlie might have claimed he was only too tired to bother changing the station, but actually he was enjoying the schmaltzy tune, drumming the thick tempo on his steering wheel as he cruised home on a deep moonless night. He felt peaceful as a lullaby; the three or four drinks he'd had at the bar went down smooth and easy as sweat down a working man's back. He felt as if he had just emerged from a hot bath.

Putting the '93 Toyota Tercel into second gear, he started to climb what one old-timer had told him was the "third steepest hill in Ohiuh." You could tell the old-timers from the way they pronounced Ohio. An "uh" on the end like an exhausted sigh, like they were too beat to finish the long vowel and just gave up.

It was like some club you only gained membership in once you had pissed away most of your life doing crap work for crap pay in Appalachia, and instead of a ring or a lapel pin you got a twang and a gap in your teeth.

Had Charlie been less immersed in musings on his own unpromising future, he might have noticed the glow dawning atop the crest of the hill ahead of him. Instead he was unprepared for the pickup truck which, barreling toward him from the opposite slope, smashed into his right headlight hard enough to spin him rudely a full 90 degrees.

The impact was so great that he was momentarily unable to see through open eyes. When vision returned, he was looking through the vertical wrought-iron bars of a cemetery and a small, hysterical part of his brain was sure he had joined its population.

His second hormonal response, after shock, was rage.

Charlie completed the spin he had started with such speed that he nearly did enter the graveyard, spotted his prey's taillights near the bottom of the hill, and gave chase. Righteous images of revenge bloomed in his mind like blood through a clean white bandage. He could see his quarry was driving a sparkly silver Ford F-150. Probably some well-off contractor from Columbus or Cleveland. He should go back to his happy bungalow in the suburbs and stop taking honest work from real men, like Charlie, gritting his teeth and cutting his fingers on old rusted tools and drinking cheap piss beer and playing pool on a warped table with no 14 just two 12's and the bartender Brittany never remembers his name and---

His pursuit was overzealous or perhaps his reaction time was slowed by the recent head trauma. Either way, he failed to realize that the truck had slowed down upon reaching the bottom of the third steepest hill in Ohio. Charlie's second impact was too much for his already battered brain stem and he lost consciousness.

The Atomic Man Part 5: The Third Egg

He cracks the third egg rudely on the side of the pan, noticing a small flake of shell fall in, promising an unappetizing moment later on. Charlie isn't worried about moments, only the ruling hunger in the pit of his stomach. He grows more impatient for the eggs to cook, turning up the flame.

The condom is held between two fingers as the rest are busy unclasping her bra. He can feel the ribs in her back with the sensitive parts of his wrists and it's slightly unnerving. He feels he's playing an instrument. It doesn't want him. It's only performing a function.

He starts to resent her, this mysterious woman who turns off the lights and who is such a quick draw on the prophylactics. She's just---he can't remember her name. Becky? Katie?

Probably not her real name anyway. Probably a fake name she uses on the weekends when she's looking for a fuck. A fake name for a fake woman.

The unopened condom is crushed under her chill bony back as she falls receptively onto the bed with sheets too dark to see but probably filthy.

The eggs sit dry and overcooked in the hot skillet. Turning off the heat, Charlie scrapes the turgid lump onto a not-entirely-clean plastic plate. A brown and grey remainder sticks to the pan like moss.

"Fuck it," he thinks as he puts the pan under the faucet, filling it with water to let it soak and be cleaned tomorrow, or the day after.

Plate in one hand and coffee in the other, he returns to the sweat-damp sofa where his day began to shovel down breakfast in front of the Saturday morning cartoons. Finished, he scratches his scrotum through the flap in his boxers, stupefied.

"Christ, I needed that."

The Atomic Man Pt. 4: The Second Egg

Searching for the light switch, they find it and reveal the drab severity of their furtively adopted surroundings. She tells him to turn it off.

Just like that. It's not a request. No endearing "dear" or "babe" attached to the end, because he wasn't any of these things to her. He was the tall guy in a striped shirt who outside the bar in between sets had offered her a cigarette, making a flat joke about British slang, calling it a "fag." She had seemed sweet to him then, laughing softly.

She pushes a condom into his hand, not even asking if he'd brought his own. He thinks then that she must be used to situations such as this. The etiquette of strangers meeting in strange rooms. He wonders whether she's into it as much as he is, whether she's putting on a well-rehearsed show whose intermission they had just reached.

Two yellows sit in a viscous pool of translucent liquid which has begun to congeal around the edges. Charlie's stomach churns but anyway he thinks maybe that's hunger and decides to pluck another egg from the carton, thinking "Christ, I need it."

The Atomic Man Pt. 3: The First Egg

A familiar rotten taste in his throat and an uncomfortable humidity in his crotch tells Charlie immediately upon waking that he has slept in his clothes. The fierce midday sun glowers at him through his living room window where he is sprawled on the couch. Rising, he attends to his first drugs of the day. A tall glass of water, cigarettes, coffee's on the brew. Stronger coffee than the last time because each time he makes it these days he decides to put more grounds in, thinking, "Christ, do I need it."

The first egg feels soft and malleable, like muddy water in his palm. The tips of his fingers caress its shell as he moves it between his thumb and index finger, and cracks it against the lip of the skillet.

The neon lights revealing chipping plaster on the walls of a motel that charges by the hour, a consignment for hormonal burdens. Passions in faded rouge and teal walk drunkenly down a dingy hallway. The lights in their room are off and they stay that way as the door shuts.

The Atomic Man Pt. 2: Charlie In Love

Charlie remembers how the wan fluorescent lights in his kitchen struck her face and revealed acne scars like moon-craters. He'd never been so turned on by someone's forehead. It was explosive.

The powdered ecstasy prickled the back of Charlie's nostrils and he felt his toes lift off the ground. He wanted to grab her just then, dig his fingertips into the small of her back, and draw their bodies together tightly, like blood between glass slides. He'd observe her closely and magnify everything.

Without touching her, he felt their erogenous zones light up like Operation. Her breast in the hollow of his chest, his thigh against her crotch. His lips scraping the thin tendons in her neck.

He remembers as he sits, naked, on the end of his lonely mattress that night. His lust for the alabaster-skinned girl whose name he has already forgotten is grown cold and stale as the pepperoni pizza, three days old, which he prepares to eat. The bone-dry cheese peels from the crust like burnt skin and he looks out his window at a quietly smug moon.

"Sooner or later," he thinks, "I'll lose my mind."

Bones of Macchu Picchu Pt. 1

Jorge de Castenada chewed a hanging bit of flesh on his chapped lower lip idly. Having ridden since the now-setting sun was only a promising glow on the horizon, Senor de Castenada had succumbed to shallow contemplation. He was unconcerned with the unsure mountain path ahead. His thoughts lingered, like the hanging strips of dead skin on his lips, on the cacophonous trampling below him; the sauntering listlessness shared with his fellow riders like a jug of intoxicating wine passed wordlessly.

****

Manuel's shin bulged obscenely near his ankle, the shattered bone which he had tried to straighten with vines lashed around a tree branch flexed outward with every torturous step he took. He gasped in agony, and fought the urge to lie on his stomach and crawl the rest of the way up the rough shale. The open sores which wrapped around his bare torso like a torn shawl were a constant encouragement to stay on his feet. As he labored, he grabbed at exposed roots and resilient shrubs, drew comfort from them, feeding his own stoicism with theirs. The air was thick with tropical humidity and he sucked it into his lungs with difficulty; breathing warm syrup. The limestone dust hanging around him seemed to collect in his wounds and weigh him down.

In the suffocating tranquility a Rudyard Kipling fable intruded upon Manuel's thoughts. It involved a rhinoceros, a fearsome armored beast he had never seen. The rhinoceros, an arrogant and vain beast, removed his skin once to take a swim. A man put cake crumbs inside the rhino's hide so that when he re-donned it, the itching was maddening. In his efforts to scratch at them, he rubbed off the buttons which would have allowed him to remove his hide. So the beast was doomed to a life of wrinkles and irritation, which is why, Kipling wrote, rhinoceroses are such violent and cruel creatures.

The thought of a world where such fantasies took place uplifted Manuel. A blithe, saccharine land where pains such as his would only irritate and no one, animal nor human, knew to fear death. As a heron flew overhead Manuel amused himself by calling out to it:

"Hola! Fellow creature of the mountain, might you be so kind as to lighten my load a bit? My pack is heavy with firewood, and I would abandon it were it not for my fear of the coming night which even now creeps up behind the sun with murderous intent. Surely, if any of your relatives are nearby, you could carry a log between the two of you? I will meet you at the top, where we can share the succulent berries which I have gone to such pains to gather, and tell legends around the fire!"