DICK PALACE 1

TAKING INVENTORY OF THE SURROUNDINGS

The sound of the bathroom overflowing is replaced by periled moo from through the roof. They'd had the cows gagged as I was coming in, though apparently that cloth cud had been chewed through.

John is holding the Mason jar two-thirds full of sweat he’s collected from several women, none of whom he’s screwed. He’s pasted a pixeled printout of the Virgin Mary for a label. The Virgin Mary’s faces resembles mine. John takes the jar and fits it succinctly in my left nostril.

“Smoke this in your corncob pipe,” he says. He watches me inhale. His face is made of teeth.

“I ain’t wearing this sissy perfume,” I say.

“Wearing it?” he says. “You’re supposed to snort.”

“It smells like cesspool,” I say. “Smells like crawdads. The sewage treatment place, where your mother went to die.”

John is swallowing in a certain way that scratches the itching in his throat.

“You’ll remember your mother again shortly,” I say. “Believe me.”

“It’s cologne,” he says. “It’s androgynous.”

John takes the jar out of my nostril and puts the lid back on the jar and carries the jar under his chin across the room where he puts it inside a tiny chest of drawers. The drawer won’t shut. John kicks the drawer until the jar goes tinkle.

A color fills the room.

A man steps out of the color, looks around, and steps back in.

John works a section of the color into something reflective and begins examining his face.

“Mother,” he says. “You would remember that. You would blorp ben snonnum meem.”

“Say huh?” I say.

He turns around, hands still on his face. There’s a portal wedged between his teeth. Through the portal I can see giraffe’s eyes, ten thousand, blinking, green.

“Bloss bleenum ott lo dim dop,” he says. He turns to face the wall. “Tell you what, you can have your dreams. You can brush my mother’s hair. You can sit by her by the bed. You can hold her hand until she’s numbing. You can pick the hair out of her lids.

“You keep your dreams, Oph will keep his,” he says. He opens the door. I can see Marie-Yves through it. Marie-Yves is several times the size of the time I saw her last. She is wearing a t-shirt made of goat. “We gotta get a move on, Stuey boy. We have to burn the library one last time before they squash it, and still be at the studio by eight.”

He takes Marie-Yves in a headlock and holds her grunting.

“Hey, and wash your god damn clothes. Wash them, would you? Listen. I am tired of everything you say. We don’t have a washing machine. What’s a Laundromat? Just take a bath with your clothes on. Do what I say.” John turns and forces himself through the door towing Marie-Y down the hall behind him. There are bubbles forming on her back. “I” am tempted to float out with him but remain hovering in the bathroom, looking down on Stu hunkered naked in the boat tub with his red left arm. I close the door. I open the door again and kick it shut so that it shudders. I open it again just a little and nudge gently it with my forehead. John and Marie-Y resume their scripted arguing on the other side of the door. This time it’s about her smoking.

Marie-Y is filled with worm.

Several months from now Marie-Y will swell as large as the ocean and she will drink it. She will lie down across America and sigh a little.

Stu picks up the soap, considers shitting. He opens Marie-Yves Curie’s medicine cabinet and scratches an inventory list into the soft flesh of his arm:

- Cottage cheese, 500 ml
- Liquidated baby, 150 ml
- Happy pills, 20 mg x 30
- Vanilla scented douche, 150 mg
- Recouvrement de poche de cellophane, 12 count
- clown lipstick, black
- Sleepy pills 10* 0.125 mg
- Cumulus Umbra tampons, 12 count
- Store-brand diet cola, 50 ml
- Notre Dame eau de toilette, 300 ml, half empty
- Orconectes Viriles condoms, in a variety of neon colors, studded with nobs of metal and autographed by a local legendary porn star, boîte 12 count, 7 remain
- chewing tobacco, already chewed and put back in the can, 1 can
- Men-Ü facial moisturiser après rasage hydratant
- the biggest pair of safety scissors ever conceived
- Q-tips
- Calamox lotion de calamine, 300 ml

Marie-Yves Curie is a slut, Stu thinks.

Stu thinks about John crawling up inside the enormous bloated several-months-from-now version of Marie-Yves Curie and is surprised to find how that sounds nice. He wonders if a person would be able to survive off of flesh chewed from the inside, like the worms do. He thinks about how many people she could fit.

Reaching from the boat, Stu grabs a dirty T-shirt and underwear off the floor.

When Stu brings the clothes into the boat tub, I return to his P.O.V.

It is a strange sensation to bathe with clothes. The clothes slush around me, absorbing most of the water. I take one piece of the clothes and wring it out over my head. I can smell my juices in the clothes. I can smell parts of who I’ve been. I begin flailing and kicking the water from the rowboat-shaped tub in spasm. I make a scooper of my hands. Every other time I’ve bailed water in a boat has been under the impending fear of sinking. I think, Stop thinking. I stop and sit and get immersed into the rhythm of the water sloshing back and forth. I begin to acquire an erection. Someone has scratched a question-mark onto the head.

This is the essence of arousal—not being able to explain.

Arousal is a trick our bodies play to get us to do something productive we might not normally think of otherwise.

I sit admiring my erection for several hours.

Afterwards I regret it—feeling like I’ve been had. I wring my clothes and put them on. I apply some of the pink calamine lotion to my arm, hoping it will at least smother the chiggers if they think to re-emerge.

If someone asks what’s wrong with my arm, I’ll cut them. Or I’ll just say: “calamine.”

When I open the door to exit, Marie-Y is still standing there, waiting to take my place. She is much smaller than she had been. She looks smaller than she ever. We stand there for a long time, wincing, numb. Finally I say, “It’s all yours,” wondering how I could say that in a way she’d really hear. She says she’s sorry, that she really has to pee. “Should have said so,” I say. She winks. I don’t notice if she notices the pink lotion. She goes in and closes the door behind her. I stand listening at the door trying to hear if she’s masturbating. I listen for her flesh. I get bored. I go and sit down on the couch.