I remember when a portal opened up inside my brother Lucas. The whole Event still resonates in my memory as being among the most definitive of our shared history. The way it happened was that my brother, who was not accustomed to interdimensionality or really anything that might transgress his very rigid parameters for what could constitute reality, who had lived the first years of his life quite literally in a bubble of poly-urethane with a compromised immune system, and who had understandably and without any prompting begun early on to seen the exterior world as an intrusive threat, had therefore no extant psychological defense against the portal that opened from nothing deep in his right thigh as he played gladiator with a wooden sword in our ordinary suburban backyard, underneath the swing set. The portal, not large by any conventional logic, yet encompassing universes, embedded neatly into the surface of his right superficial femoral artery and by doing so sprung a small but nonetheless excruciatingly painful and life threatening internal hemorrhage, which we didn't know at the time but would soon learn.
What we did know, those of us who were present (which is to say, myself, my mom, dad, our little sister, mother's sister, father's brother, and a couple neighbors, so in fact a great many people and certainly everyone who was of any significance to the family and Lucas in particular), was that Lucas had gone from happily slaughtering an infestation of imaginary Gruelbats in the Bleakpits of Daemonia to lying completely prostrate and as sickly pale as I had never seen him, a horrifying gasping wail issuing from his throat, his mind abandoning all capacity for the palatal phonemes of articulate speech. An ambulance was summoned, mother in hysterics (having practiced for many years a refined automatic neurological collapse at the slightest appearance of regression in my brother's health), father assuming his equally refined stolid gaze and robotic efficiency, myself and sister Amy huddled in a corner, bequeathed by the situation and our precious years with an uncomprehending but total dread, as poor Lucas, by now covered in sweat and entirely Beyond All Recognition, was carted off on a stretcher to his proximate salvation.
We, the children, visited Lucas in the hospital the next day, with our aunt and uncle, to the incontrovertible impression that Something Was Terribly Wrong. The signs were abundant and unmistakable: in addition to the general pallor that hung palpably in the air, my mother sat in the waiting room, her eyes bleary red from weeping, while father paced up and down the hall saying nothing but communicating the first truly perceptible cracks in his armor of implacable efficiency that we'd seen since Lucas had been diagnosed with leukemia at the age of four. Amy and I played as best we could with the cheap plastic toys in the kid's waiting area. Being 8 and 9 already and as such far past the age where such trinkets might genuinely intrigue us, we could at best generate a facsimile impression of amusement, if for no other reason than that such a reassurance might impress on my mother that the world, or at least her family, could still muster a modicum of normalcy, even or perhaps especially in times of crisis. We weren't fools, and understood dire necessity when surrounded by it, and thus we calmly stacked oversized lego blocks one atop another with all the brave enthusiasm of actors on a stage that is in the midst of being burned to the ground.
Now children are seldom credited with as much comprehension of adult psychology as they quite often possess, and it was certainly no mistake that I, then, perceived the last shreds of maternal sanity give way to a prevailing hysteric wind as the doctor drew the pair of them aside and conveyed some horrific, though evidently not fatal, news. In that moment I could somehow tell that my mother would never be the same, that the final nail had been firmly embedded in the coffin that was her already pathos-ridden understanding of the universe; I could see, though cripplingly unable to articulate the perception for many years, that her world view had presently shifted to reflect a new and total belief, namely that existence itself had probably always conspired against her happiness in this her sole and most precious domain of power, to confound her every attempt at protection of her wards, and leave her irresolute and defeated.
What I learned later, communicated to me and my sister with the quiet seriousness of parents attempting desperately to avoid utterly shattering the already fragile and diminishing happiness of their children, was that the two-dimensional half-centimetre of circular portal in Lucas' thigh, which had opened at a right angle in the surface of his arterial wall, was causing an alarming amount of blood to escape into his body, while at the same time the half-section located inside his vein, acting as a trans-dimensional gateway of sorts, whisked away to Lord Knows Where another equally precious quantity of plasma, so that internal bleeding and the peculiar and unprecedented internal-yet-in-fact-external bleeding together meant that Lucas was very rapidly Bleeding to Death.
Unfortunately, modern medical science lacking experience with intravenous trans-dimensional portals, and entirely incapable of manipulating them with conventional medical instruments, elected for the drastic but nonetheless time-worthy approach of hacking the whole leg right off, just below the hip. My mother had to leave the room when it came time to explaining this, and I still remember the awkward metaphor my father used: “It's like when you have a candy cane, only the end of it got broken in your pocket and kind of crushed, and you still want to keep the whole thing but you can't keep it with the end hanging on, because bits of it are getting everywhere and its making a mess in your pocket, so you throw away the end bits that you don't want so you can keep all the good stuff. You know?” We nodded, of course, and bit our tongues at the absurd juxtapositions of severed limbs and mint-flavored candy. The odd and vaguely cannibalistic confluence of the two gave me nightmares consisting of crumbling, blood-drenched legs marching through corridors towards me, blossoming gaping toothless mouths all over their surfaces and whispering my name, always in my brother's voice, but horrifically distorted with a perverse melancholia, rasping also with a dark slow-motion baritone that shook my subconscious and intimated at mysteries that would unravel my skin and cause the flesh of my eyes to blister.
When Lucas came home we assembled like a Royal welcoming committee on the driveway, with helium balloons and presents we'd meticulously selected from Toys 'R' Us to avoid prompting unnecessary awareness of his dismemberment (as if such a thing could be avoided); I remember that I got him a big super soaker water pistol, and my sister got him a chess set. Strangely enough, I don't remember what my parents bought him. Soon after the Event their actions began to blur for me into an indistinguishable continuum of helpless guilt, one futile gesture after another, each one too little and too late to banish what had already transpired, the evil that could not have been prevented or even remotely anticipated, the great Denial against which all the heretofore assumed parental omnipotence consummately vanished, revealing only the sad and altogether human weakness of their paternal and maternal forms.
I remember holding my gift up as the nurse wheeled Lucas out of the para-transpo vehicle; I remember my arms lowering involuntarily at the sight of him, face down, expressing a dejection I did not until then know to be possible, a manifest full-body, one-legged sadness that was vastly in excess of what any twelve-year old child should, in the fullest throes of their most potent, attention-starved emotional hyperbole, be capable of mustering. I remember his eyes looking up at me, leaden, too far gone to even judge or recriminate: a spectre of something against which my pathetic offering seemed a ludicrous bathos. I remember dropping my gift and crying, too overwhelmed, rendered once again into a simpering babe, hastily silenced and ushered away by a woman, probably my mother, but recollection blurs into coos and swaddling gestures and eventually silence. It all blurs.
That night I heard him crying in the bunk above mine: a relentless, whispered, gasping sob hearkening to the deepest cthonic agonies his soul had thus prematurely become witness to, and eventually his arm slumped down with the release of someone entering a new plateau of misery, where the crying becomes muted but the suffering turns heel and lodges itself in the emotional registers of the stomach, heart, and sacrum. And he said to me what I could never hope to forget or banish or in anyway make right, “Ethan, I'm scared.” My brother was scared. The unknown mysteries that ordinarily imbue a child's fantasies with delight and possibility, with soaring Peter Pan cloud-decamptments and rolling hills of infinite splendour, had for Lucas been exposed as a fraud: the vast uncertainty of the world, proven to be as supernatural and real as anything he had comprehended in his dreams, was defined by a prevailing note of malice, bearing down right now and right here, and of all the people and children and sufferers in the world, on him.
I did then what I had never done before or would do again, what we never spoke about afterwards but which the situation seemed to demand, and suffering my own private collapse of security and immortality – because with precocious wisdom I knew what had sundered him forever from happiness could just as easily befall me – and my young heart bursting with uncontrollable filial sympathy, I climbed up to his bunk and wrapped my arms around him and held him until the sun rose and illumined nothing but the skin of our trembling hands and the stark unremitting future that bears portals into children's thighs like the sparkling eyes of god.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
The Dater
On May 23rd, 2010, Julio de Malaggar posted his first online dating profile to the well-known free online dating service, OkCupid. The contents, appearing beneath a staggeringly anachronistic photograph of the author with one leg elevated on a leather-backed chair, hands rested daintily upon velveteen knee, his perfectly Edwardian attire completed with a pleated cravat, read as follows [ed.’s note: all errors, grammatical and otherwise, are those of the author and are preserved for historical accuracy]:
Username: prettyladdiesmmm
Profile: I offer greetings to all my dandies and lascivious receptacles of love: your glistening concavities are welcoming to my manlihood. I see that you fawn lightly over the casually awarded pleasantries of your man-lovers, in this society that is our world in this day and age. It has been many years since I have experienced contiguity with lady-flesh; many many moons since I have encircled, nay ensorcelled, a woman’s bosom with my cubits. I have strong (irresistible!) desires to exchange abundant mouth-juices with your mouth juices in rituals of facial interchange. In my private chambers I regularly invoke the old bacchanalian rites that are available to the loins of this earth – oh you sweet feminines how you torment me with your dangling rondures – to lavish deserving satisfaction upon men by appearing before the mind’s eye as a sort of imago. My lady imagos are the most voluptuous this side of Venus, and I challenge any other man to upstage me in this regard. Rest assured, dear readeresses, that you are well attended to in the love-suanas of my mind’s bordellos.
Come to my bedside, my carnal pleasure-mates, and fall under the ridiculous intensity of my thrusting willpower. I will see you transported to the Heavenly plane of super-abundant sexiness, where you will orbit the lustful love-kernel that is my undeniable face.
When not inducing swooning in all the beautiful women who pass by me on the street as I engage in my swaggering daily constitutionals, I enjoy tennis, tea-drinking, croquet, commenting on matters of national political significance with my friend while we sit and drink Ouzo from slender-necked glasses in the courtyard behind my Mediterranean-style apartment building, reading the magazines, sailing internets, looking at pictures of my favourite women (all of them!), eating olives from small sticks that the woman at the department store hands me in a sultry coded gesture of wanton love-festing (if it is you reading this, I am personal love-making you tonight you coquettish marvel queen!), being a charming man to all the world, writing love advertisements in the OkCupids, telling you all about myself, my beautiful women, that are waiting for me like immaculate objects of hot festering desire.
You should contact me if: you are passion-quivering with sweat streaks of unbearable trembling deep-throaty bodily need. If you like good conversation and men who is intelligent and will listen to you, before and after sex. If you are hungry from mediocrity and want to spice up with a bit of meaty perfection. That’s me!
Username: prettyladdiesmmm
Profile: I offer greetings to all my dandies and lascivious receptacles of love: your glistening concavities are welcoming to my manlihood. I see that you fawn lightly over the casually awarded pleasantries of your man-lovers, in this society that is our world in this day and age. It has been many years since I have experienced contiguity with lady-flesh; many many moons since I have encircled, nay ensorcelled, a woman’s bosom with my cubits. I have strong (irresistible!) desires to exchange abundant mouth-juices with your mouth juices in rituals of facial interchange. In my private chambers I regularly invoke the old bacchanalian rites that are available to the loins of this earth – oh you sweet feminines how you torment me with your dangling rondures – to lavish deserving satisfaction upon men by appearing before the mind’s eye as a sort of imago. My lady imagos are the most voluptuous this side of Venus, and I challenge any other man to upstage me in this regard. Rest assured, dear readeresses, that you are well attended to in the love-suanas of my mind’s bordellos.
Come to my bedside, my carnal pleasure-mates, and fall under the ridiculous intensity of my thrusting willpower. I will see you transported to the Heavenly plane of super-abundant sexiness, where you will orbit the lustful love-kernel that is my undeniable face.
When not inducing swooning in all the beautiful women who pass by me on the street as I engage in my swaggering daily constitutionals, I enjoy tennis, tea-drinking, croquet, commenting on matters of national political significance with my friend while we sit and drink Ouzo from slender-necked glasses in the courtyard behind my Mediterranean-style apartment building, reading the magazines, sailing internets, looking at pictures of my favourite women (all of them!), eating olives from small sticks that the woman at the department store hands me in a sultry coded gesture of wanton love-festing (if it is you reading this, I am personal love-making you tonight you coquettish marvel queen!), being a charming man to all the world, writing love advertisements in the OkCupids, telling you all about myself, my beautiful women, that are waiting for me like immaculate objects of hot festering desire.
You should contact me if: you are passion-quivering with sweat streaks of unbearable trembling deep-throaty bodily need. If you like good conversation and men who is intelligent and will listen to you, before and after sex. If you are hungry from mediocrity and want to spice up with a bit of meaty perfection. That’s me!
Friday, September 10, 2010
The Toilet Seat
Leroy was born on a toilet seat, and got stuck. His mother forgot him there for a day till he started wailing, but she couldn't pull him loose. She lowered herself to the floor by the toilet and let him suckle her teat. This went well with the newborn, though soon he began to shiver and tremble with the cool air of the water beneath him. Leroy's mother fetched him a blanket and a space heater, and the shivering subsided. His being stuck saved tremendously on diapers, and with the extra cash his mother could afford to feed the little babeling all the gourmet apple compote his stomach could contain. Leroy grew, though not particularly strong, and he squinted often at the sunlight peering through the window into his small corner of the world. His mother gave him toys until he was old enough to read, at which point he did. He acquired an education in this manner.
When he was four, still stuck, his neighbour Delila, also four, came over to visit. Thus he acquired his first friend, immersed in the confines of his ceramic prison. He learned of fealty and kindness, and eventually abandonment when one day, having lent him her favorite plush toy Boogaloo – who was a furry purple arthropod with long antennae abutted in plastic eyes covered all over with very authentic looking teeth – she left his commode for good. Called away, Leroy wondered, by powers greater than the allure of his simple friendship. His mother still loved him, though, and showered him with gifts and water and breastmilk until he was eight.
At twelve, child services came by to examine his situation. They concluded summarily that a terrible evil had been committed against the child, and the mother for this would be separated from him and imprisoned in a gulag deep below the earth where her breasts would be exposed into a metal crate containing wolf pups, and she would never again see her child for the torment she bequeathed to him by her negligence. The solicitude of child services was limitless towards Leroy, however, and they concluded that freeing him from the eternal preserve of his toilet seat would represent the greatest trauma by far, and thus it was better to leave him be, alone in the bathroom, though sans the security and attendance of his abusive mother. Thus began Leroy's adolescence.
Once in a while a girl would pass by his house, and peer into the bathroom out of curiosity. She might come with friends, and seeing Leroy there, covered in pimples and quite beside himself for shame, they would begin to laugh and giggle and deride him. Leroy blushed during these moments, and wiggled as deep into his toilet as he could. Sometimes the girls would come alone, and on these occasions he found himself more courageous by a good deal, and he even called out to them as they turned around to leave, though none ever stayed long enough to say hello. The state graciously provided Leroy with a computer, feeling it inappropriate for him to be denied any of the modern conveniences that defined his generation's youth. Unsuccessful with girls, though rapturously intrigued by them, he took to distracting himself with video games. His favorite was Super Mario Brothers, which he played on an SNES emulator to the exclusion of more contemporary offerings. He felt a certain idealistic fascination, verging on envy, for the freedom with which the Mario Brothers could submit their bodies to pipes. He marveled at the locomotive possibilities this represented with the youthful exuberance that characterized his age group and gender demographic.
In his twenty-first year of incarceration, a young female student moved into the house. She was studying anthropology at the university and her name was Abelle. She moved in and out of the bathroom with a lithe beauty, and for Leroy she would pirouette as she brushed her teeth, and sing him jovial melodies about the Irish hills (where she had never been, but she was a hopeless romantic for other people's idiosyncracies). Leroy fell hopelessly in love with her, and told her so: she laughed and patted his cheek, and told him roommates must never fuck. He sulked for a week until she made him flower bread out of the petunias growing through the living room floor.
She stayed there for a year and was then replaced by a fraternity. The house filled up quickly with young men carrying kegs of beer and branding each other on the shoulders with hot pokers and cigarette lighters. They indoctrinated Leroy into their fraternity (gamma-gamma-gamma) by making him wear a diaper on his head for a day, which they all considered an ironic gesture considering where he lived. Leroy didn't understand the joke but submitted to his treatment out of a deeply rooted physiological desire for masculine friendship, which thus far in his life he had entirely lacked. He had never met his father, and believed that all middle-aged men wore mustaches and traveled by means of rotary concave propeller caps. The fraternity celebrated his condition by drinking often and loudly. Eventually they left in a terrible conflagration of spontaneous homoeroticism, which neither Leroy nor the fraternists anticipated or would ever admit to thereafter. Leroy had his first homosexual experience at this time, with a man whose name was unpronounceable owing to its origin in the pantheon of Elder Gods. He politely explained, in between blow jobs which he administered for Leroy with his knees planted securely on the ceramic tiles, that for a human to pronounce his name would result in that person's immediate transformation into a monosyllabic manifestation of entropy – into what he further described as the daemonic inversion of the holy word Om.
The State thereafter underwent a transition to severe Randism, and a few of its representatives eventually came to visit Leroy, who by then was twenty-five. They told him him he was no longer eligible for social assistance, being a theoretically able-bodied man with no inherent physiological, psychological or scatological issues. They told him he would have to find work or otherwise find himself out on the street. When they said this he noticed the balding head of a man peer around the corner of the bathroom door. “That's Hobart, the landlord,” explained the State representatives. “He has an acute bathroom phobia and until now has never visited, but this morning he overcome his fear out of an even greater hatred for the ideological contempt your behaviour demonstrates towards the social weal.” Hobart nodded tacit agreement.
Thus compelled by the simultaneous disapproval of various authority figures, Leroy began producing elaborate harmonic melodies using the limited but poetically austere harmonics of his stomach and ceramic toilet. With the assistance of friends, he established what he dubbed the “Symphonic Atrium” in the bathroom, and coupled his body-toilet music with other percussion instruments, and charged passersby five dollars an hour to sit and enjoy his performances. The New York Times wrote glowingly about the experience in their Arts column, “Leroy's performance is a marvel of the auditory and the olfactory. He has combined the smells and sounds of human defecation with the pure resonance of undilute percussion. The two harmonize with each other in unanticipated ways, drawing depth from one while at the same time a stochastic tremolo from the other. It is their interpermeation that transforms the simple rhythm of one, and the disgusting physicality of the other, into a transcendent synecdoche of shit-sound.” Leroy didn't understand the review at all, but appreciated the naked photographs the reviewer continued to send him afterwords.
Eventually a man with revolutionary tendencies called Ponquist began to paint a portrait of Leroy with his words. The gist of it was that Leroy represented all the frailties of humankind, and was an extant martyr for the suffering everyone must endure. Already a popular conversation topic among hipsters, the addition of messianic qualities elevated Leroy to an unparalleled degree of public renown. An endowment fund was created for his benefit, and quickly grew glutted with the enthusiastic donations of those who had come to adore the toilet as a receptacle for human misery. In a matter of minutes his house was torn down around him and the toilet seat raised up onto a dais. He was surrounded on all sides by transparent glass, and a rich, gold trimmed carpet cascaded down marble steps in his new apartment, where he had been placed by a freight helicopter.
An attack came a month later by the Anti-Toilet Mafia, a group that had formed in direct opposition to the confinement imposed upon Leroy. They perpetually drenched their heads with fresh urine and considered it their solitary function in life to liberate Leroy from his confines. On the other hand, they were arrested by those adherents who slept in an entanglement of limbs around Leroy's feet, an adulatory posse, who rose up at the slightest sound of intrusion and brandished sharpened plungers and razor sharp floss wire: what they called the Filaments of Dread. A terrible battle took place at the entrance to his lavish bathroom, and all his attackers and defenders perished. The very last one to go, with his dying breath, unknowingly spoke the inverted word of Om and set in motion a tremendous sequence of entropic discombobulation.
All the bodies that had accumulated in the space between Leroy's toilet and the entrance to his mansion spontaneously erupted into a blood-water river of human juice. Leroy was swallowed up, and the force of it tore loose his toilet from its moorings. He was washed to sea where he sat in perfect buoyant calm upon all that remained of his previous life. The last remnant of his childhood clung to his ass like the vice-grip fingers of an extremely large and plastic man. He paddled intuitively in the vast waters around and below him, having acclimated to the aquatic through many hours of deep meditation on the nature of liquidity. He proceeded to enjoy his newfound freedom by getting moored on a small tropical island.
At first he believed he was the only resident of the island, and composed long eulogies to himself which he recited forwards and backwards to maintain strong mental acumen. He contemplated the many men and women he had loved in his life up to that point, and wept tears for each of them that mingled into the salty brine of the sea. He thought fondly of his mother, who must long ago have perished in her wolf-box, and of the wild Ponquist who transformed him into the vessel of divinity. He wondered at the world that it had never known the quality of life that being embedded in a toilet seat produces, and he began to laugh at the marvel of his existence as it had thus far unfolded.
“Excuse me, sir, but would you mind not laughing so loudly. There are some of us who have been here for a long time and grown accustomed to a certain level of decorum, you understand. It's only polite to defer to your seniors in all matters of etiquette, as we've lived long and hard lives and have only the deference of those younger than us from which to draw comfort,” said an old man behind him. With great difficulty Leroy turned himself around and for the first time beheld a dozen other men and woman, all stuck firmly in toilet seats, all witheringly old, and all sitting on the ground. Their heads pointed in different directions to the sea and sky. At this point Leroy became enlightened, and devoted the remainder of his days to carving the sanguinary principles of mortality into tablets made of sand, which he placed reverently at the limit of the waves. When he died his soul discovered that the universe was an enormous toilet seat, which his spiritual posterior continued to occupy for some time thereafter. THE END.
When he was four, still stuck, his neighbour Delila, also four, came over to visit. Thus he acquired his first friend, immersed in the confines of his ceramic prison. He learned of fealty and kindness, and eventually abandonment when one day, having lent him her favorite plush toy Boogaloo – who was a furry purple arthropod with long antennae abutted in plastic eyes covered all over with very authentic looking teeth – she left his commode for good. Called away, Leroy wondered, by powers greater than the allure of his simple friendship. His mother still loved him, though, and showered him with gifts and water and breastmilk until he was eight.
At twelve, child services came by to examine his situation. They concluded summarily that a terrible evil had been committed against the child, and the mother for this would be separated from him and imprisoned in a gulag deep below the earth where her breasts would be exposed into a metal crate containing wolf pups, and she would never again see her child for the torment she bequeathed to him by her negligence. The solicitude of child services was limitless towards Leroy, however, and they concluded that freeing him from the eternal preserve of his toilet seat would represent the greatest trauma by far, and thus it was better to leave him be, alone in the bathroom, though sans the security and attendance of his abusive mother. Thus began Leroy's adolescence.
Once in a while a girl would pass by his house, and peer into the bathroom out of curiosity. She might come with friends, and seeing Leroy there, covered in pimples and quite beside himself for shame, they would begin to laugh and giggle and deride him. Leroy blushed during these moments, and wiggled as deep into his toilet as he could. Sometimes the girls would come alone, and on these occasions he found himself more courageous by a good deal, and he even called out to them as they turned around to leave, though none ever stayed long enough to say hello. The state graciously provided Leroy with a computer, feeling it inappropriate for him to be denied any of the modern conveniences that defined his generation's youth. Unsuccessful with girls, though rapturously intrigued by them, he took to distracting himself with video games. His favorite was Super Mario Brothers, which he played on an SNES emulator to the exclusion of more contemporary offerings. He felt a certain idealistic fascination, verging on envy, for the freedom with which the Mario Brothers could submit their bodies to pipes. He marveled at the locomotive possibilities this represented with the youthful exuberance that characterized his age group and gender demographic.
In his twenty-first year of incarceration, a young female student moved into the house. She was studying anthropology at the university and her name was Abelle. She moved in and out of the bathroom with a lithe beauty, and for Leroy she would pirouette as she brushed her teeth, and sing him jovial melodies about the Irish hills (where she had never been, but she was a hopeless romantic for other people's idiosyncracies). Leroy fell hopelessly in love with her, and told her so: she laughed and patted his cheek, and told him roommates must never fuck. He sulked for a week until she made him flower bread out of the petunias growing through the living room floor.
She stayed there for a year and was then replaced by a fraternity. The house filled up quickly with young men carrying kegs of beer and branding each other on the shoulders with hot pokers and cigarette lighters. They indoctrinated Leroy into their fraternity (gamma-gamma-gamma) by making him wear a diaper on his head for a day, which they all considered an ironic gesture considering where he lived. Leroy didn't understand the joke but submitted to his treatment out of a deeply rooted physiological desire for masculine friendship, which thus far in his life he had entirely lacked. He had never met his father, and believed that all middle-aged men wore mustaches and traveled by means of rotary concave propeller caps. The fraternity celebrated his condition by drinking often and loudly. Eventually they left in a terrible conflagration of spontaneous homoeroticism, which neither Leroy nor the fraternists anticipated or would ever admit to thereafter. Leroy had his first homosexual experience at this time, with a man whose name was unpronounceable owing to its origin in the pantheon of Elder Gods. He politely explained, in between blow jobs which he administered for Leroy with his knees planted securely on the ceramic tiles, that for a human to pronounce his name would result in that person's immediate transformation into a monosyllabic manifestation of entropy – into what he further described as the daemonic inversion of the holy word Om.
The State thereafter underwent a transition to severe Randism, and a few of its representatives eventually came to visit Leroy, who by then was twenty-five. They told him him he was no longer eligible for social assistance, being a theoretically able-bodied man with no inherent physiological, psychological or scatological issues. They told him he would have to find work or otherwise find himself out on the street. When they said this he noticed the balding head of a man peer around the corner of the bathroom door. “That's Hobart, the landlord,” explained the State representatives. “He has an acute bathroom phobia and until now has never visited, but this morning he overcome his fear out of an even greater hatred for the ideological contempt your behaviour demonstrates towards the social weal.” Hobart nodded tacit agreement.
Thus compelled by the simultaneous disapproval of various authority figures, Leroy began producing elaborate harmonic melodies using the limited but poetically austere harmonics of his stomach and ceramic toilet. With the assistance of friends, he established what he dubbed the “Symphonic Atrium” in the bathroom, and coupled his body-toilet music with other percussion instruments, and charged passersby five dollars an hour to sit and enjoy his performances. The New York Times wrote glowingly about the experience in their Arts column, “Leroy's performance is a marvel of the auditory and the olfactory. He has combined the smells and sounds of human defecation with the pure resonance of undilute percussion. The two harmonize with each other in unanticipated ways, drawing depth from one while at the same time a stochastic tremolo from the other. It is their interpermeation that transforms the simple rhythm of one, and the disgusting physicality of the other, into a transcendent synecdoche of shit-sound.” Leroy didn't understand the review at all, but appreciated the naked photographs the reviewer continued to send him afterwords.
Eventually a man with revolutionary tendencies called Ponquist began to paint a portrait of Leroy with his words. The gist of it was that Leroy represented all the frailties of humankind, and was an extant martyr for the suffering everyone must endure. Already a popular conversation topic among hipsters, the addition of messianic qualities elevated Leroy to an unparalleled degree of public renown. An endowment fund was created for his benefit, and quickly grew glutted with the enthusiastic donations of those who had come to adore the toilet as a receptacle for human misery. In a matter of minutes his house was torn down around him and the toilet seat raised up onto a dais. He was surrounded on all sides by transparent glass, and a rich, gold trimmed carpet cascaded down marble steps in his new apartment, where he had been placed by a freight helicopter.
An attack came a month later by the Anti-Toilet Mafia, a group that had formed in direct opposition to the confinement imposed upon Leroy. They perpetually drenched their heads with fresh urine and considered it their solitary function in life to liberate Leroy from his confines. On the other hand, they were arrested by those adherents who slept in an entanglement of limbs around Leroy's feet, an adulatory posse, who rose up at the slightest sound of intrusion and brandished sharpened plungers and razor sharp floss wire: what they called the Filaments of Dread. A terrible battle took place at the entrance to his lavish bathroom, and all his attackers and defenders perished. The very last one to go, with his dying breath, unknowingly spoke the inverted word of Om and set in motion a tremendous sequence of entropic discombobulation.
All the bodies that had accumulated in the space between Leroy's toilet and the entrance to his mansion spontaneously erupted into a blood-water river of human juice. Leroy was swallowed up, and the force of it tore loose his toilet from its moorings. He was washed to sea where he sat in perfect buoyant calm upon all that remained of his previous life. The last remnant of his childhood clung to his ass like the vice-grip fingers of an extremely large and plastic man. He paddled intuitively in the vast waters around and below him, having acclimated to the aquatic through many hours of deep meditation on the nature of liquidity. He proceeded to enjoy his newfound freedom by getting moored on a small tropical island.
At first he believed he was the only resident of the island, and composed long eulogies to himself which he recited forwards and backwards to maintain strong mental acumen. He contemplated the many men and women he had loved in his life up to that point, and wept tears for each of them that mingled into the salty brine of the sea. He thought fondly of his mother, who must long ago have perished in her wolf-box, and of the wild Ponquist who transformed him into the vessel of divinity. He wondered at the world that it had never known the quality of life that being embedded in a toilet seat produces, and he began to laugh at the marvel of his existence as it had thus far unfolded.
“Excuse me, sir, but would you mind not laughing so loudly. There are some of us who have been here for a long time and grown accustomed to a certain level of decorum, you understand. It's only polite to defer to your seniors in all matters of etiquette, as we've lived long and hard lives and have only the deference of those younger than us from which to draw comfort,” said an old man behind him. With great difficulty Leroy turned himself around and for the first time beheld a dozen other men and woman, all stuck firmly in toilet seats, all witheringly old, and all sitting on the ground. Their heads pointed in different directions to the sea and sky. At this point Leroy became enlightened, and devoted the remainder of his days to carving the sanguinary principles of mortality into tablets made of sand, which he placed reverently at the limit of the waves. When he died his soul discovered that the universe was an enormous toilet seat, which his spiritual posterior continued to occupy for some time thereafter. THE END.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Two Half Melons
The worship began almost as soon as the Melon Halves were injected with the potent formaldehyde concoction. Everyone knew the world did not lack for deities. Nevertheless, there was an unmistakeable allure to the unchristened, immortal concavities of Honeydew that science had chosen, before anything else, to inoculate against mortality. You could certainly argue, and many did, that the real progenitor God was the scientific community, whose agents selected the Melon for the experiment. But this is akin to saying that the Judeo-Christian God was wrought by the men who wrote the bible. From the perspective of the devout this is blasphemy, and even from the perspective of the educated atheist does nothing to increase knowledge of the believer's real motives for his faith. We all knew that the real God was implicit in the mystique of the Melons Themselves, and the prevailing liturgy thus became a tale of causa sui: the Melon elected for Itself to be grown, harvested and shipped to the Santa Monica laboratory where scientists were busily conducting research on biomedical gerontology (life extension). Once there, the Melon invoked Its powers of grace to be positioned in the laboratory within arms reach of the experimenter who, being junior, was tasked in that moment to fetch something organic for his more senior colleague. Why was the Melon halved? Because the junior researcher had intended to consume It, of course. He'd just finished slicing the melon in two with his pocket knife, and was on the verge of piercing its (now) sacred fruity interior, when the urgent call from his colleague for a specimen came ringing through the intercom. The subsequent events have since become as canonized for Melonites as are the twelve stations of the cross for Christians, or the pilgrimage to Mecca for Muslims. The Fourteen Phases of Melonic Purification begin with four pre-injection moments, consisting of the Reluctant Lowering of the Knife, the Hoisting of the Melons, the Preliminary Migration, and the Arrival at the Site of Injection. These four moments are succeeded by the six moments of Holy Melonic Transformation: the Stationing of the Melons, the Angling of the Syringe, the Compression of the Syringe, the Contact of the Fluid to the Melonic Membranes, the Suffusion of the Fluid, and finally the Chemical Melonic Transcendence. The entire purification cycle is concluded with the following four moments: the Subsequent Migration to the Janitorial Closet, the Unknowing Profanation of the Melons before the Janitor, the Janitor's Retrieval of the Melons, the Melons Final Transmission to the World.
Those uninitiated into the melonic mysteries may find it difficult to entirely reconstruct the events that transpired from the the names of the Fourteen Phases alone, but the essential point to understand is that Science, in its capacity as the transmitter of immortality to the Melon Halves, chose to reject the Melons for some perceived imperfection. In doing so, they inadvertently positioned a single man, the Janitor Perry Winkleton, as the catalyst for Melonism's rapid ascendance. Science therefore beheld perfection, but either could not see it for what it was, or was even in full view of it ultimately dissatisfied. The Janitor, who is to Melonism what St. Paul was to Christianity, undermined the haughty indifference of the Scientific worldview with the clarity of uneducated humility. He perceived simply that the Melons were sacred and precious, and retrieved them from the garbage bin where they'd been thrown. Lovingly, he rinsed Them off and carried Them to the people so that Their truth could be experienced by everyone. It was Perry Winkleton who spoke out at the First Melonic Council against the sectarian desires of the new, self-titled Left and Right Melonists. These followers, though undeniably devout adherents to the Melons, came to wildly divisive conclusions about the respective qualities of each Half. Some records suggest that Science injected Immortality into the Left Melon before the Right Melon, thus undermining the legitimacy of their equality as manifestations of Godhead. The Right Melonists, by contrast, argue that the Second Injection illustrates a more perfect Transmission of Immortality, that the First Injection had to be repeated before the universe could fully acknowledge its occurrence. The Second Injection became thus the culmination, perfection, and unification of the Melons as the divided-yet-not-really-divided true God.
Perry Winkleton, however, rejected the notion of there being two Melons, which is to say in any sense of religious, spiritual, allegorical or anagogical significance. To prove his point he held the Melons aloft and hurled them at the gathered assembly, where rather than splattering apart they fused for a single moment, in mid air, into the Holy Perfect Melon, before coming to rest on the conference table as two separate halves. Thus for a time the Left versus Right Melonist division hid itself underground, and a new eschatology began to circulate that one day the Melons would reunite, thereby delivering lasting peace and nutrition to all the world. Perry Winkleton himself adopted this as the revealed doctrine of Melonism, and actively promoted its transmission to non-Melonists wherever he went. If anything proved to be Winkleton's undoing, it was his unabashed acceptance of all peoples into the folds of the Melon. His martyrdom was secured when a group of Melon separatists waylaid him with lead pipes on his way home from a Melonic Conference, and pulped his head in like a ripe melon. Despite Winkleton's murder, he was successful in preventing the inclusion of the First and Second Injections as additional phases in the Melonic Purification, which very quickly became canonized after his death. To this day, Melonists continue to await the coming to fruition of the Melon's Oneness, and wage a constant struggle against the temptation to devour Its Holy Juices by slicing out their tongues and pulling out their teeth. God Bless the Melons Halves, for Their Gifts Are Always Sweet and Come in Pairs.
Those uninitiated into the melonic mysteries may find it difficult to entirely reconstruct the events that transpired from the the names of the Fourteen Phases alone, but the essential point to understand is that Science, in its capacity as the transmitter of immortality to the Melon Halves, chose to reject the Melons for some perceived imperfection. In doing so, they inadvertently positioned a single man, the Janitor Perry Winkleton, as the catalyst for Melonism's rapid ascendance. Science therefore beheld perfection, but either could not see it for what it was, or was even in full view of it ultimately dissatisfied. The Janitor, who is to Melonism what St. Paul was to Christianity, undermined the haughty indifference of the Scientific worldview with the clarity of uneducated humility. He perceived simply that the Melons were sacred and precious, and retrieved them from the garbage bin where they'd been thrown. Lovingly, he rinsed Them off and carried Them to the people so that Their truth could be experienced by everyone. It was Perry Winkleton who spoke out at the First Melonic Council against the sectarian desires of the new, self-titled Left and Right Melonists. These followers, though undeniably devout adherents to the Melons, came to wildly divisive conclusions about the respective qualities of each Half. Some records suggest that Science injected Immortality into the Left Melon before the Right Melon, thus undermining the legitimacy of their equality as manifestations of Godhead. The Right Melonists, by contrast, argue that the Second Injection illustrates a more perfect Transmission of Immortality, that the First Injection had to be repeated before the universe could fully acknowledge its occurrence. The Second Injection became thus the culmination, perfection, and unification of the Melons as the divided-yet-not-really-divided true God.
Perry Winkleton, however, rejected the notion of there being two Melons, which is to say in any sense of religious, spiritual, allegorical or anagogical significance. To prove his point he held the Melons aloft and hurled them at the gathered assembly, where rather than splattering apart they fused for a single moment, in mid air, into the Holy Perfect Melon, before coming to rest on the conference table as two separate halves. Thus for a time the Left versus Right Melonist division hid itself underground, and a new eschatology began to circulate that one day the Melons would reunite, thereby delivering lasting peace and nutrition to all the world. Perry Winkleton himself adopted this as the revealed doctrine of Melonism, and actively promoted its transmission to non-Melonists wherever he went. If anything proved to be Winkleton's undoing, it was his unabashed acceptance of all peoples into the folds of the Melon. His martyrdom was secured when a group of Melon separatists waylaid him with lead pipes on his way home from a Melonic Conference, and pulped his head in like a ripe melon. Despite Winkleton's murder, he was successful in preventing the inclusion of the First and Second Injections as additional phases in the Melonic Purification, which very quickly became canonized after his death. To this day, Melonists continue to await the coming to fruition of the Melon's Oneness, and wage a constant struggle against the temptation to devour Its Holy Juices by slicing out their tongues and pulling out their teeth. God Bless the Melons Halves, for Their Gifts Are Always Sweet and Come in Pairs.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
The Arrow
The arrow struck Arlin in the chest somewhere between Tobermory Rd. and Fleetwood Cr. He staggered a bit at first but eventually caught his breath and his bearings. Surprisingly, it didn't hurt, and the bleeding stopped after a couple blocks. Since he was already on his way home, he decided to hit the sack and worry about it in the morning.
When he woke up at first he couldn't even remember anything happening the night before. He'd gone out to the bar with some friends, and afterwords had wandered home by himself, as he usually did. Then his hand found the wooden shaft sticking out of his chest, and the hard, smooth fletching at the end. He toyed with the idea of pulling the arrow out, but he didn't have the strength to.
Putting on a dress shirt, so the end could stick through the buttons, he went off to his job at the chocolate packing plant. Normally lifting boxes was no problem, but with the arrow in his chest he found the work quite difficult. The boxes kept bumping up against the wood, and he couldn't get a good hold of them.
“You should get that checked out, man,” said his manager, who usually didn't give a shit.
Arlin shrugged. “I think I'm ok, really. It doesn't hurt.”
“Yeah, but how can you ever expect to impregnate a woman with that sticking out of your chest? I mean, look at the angle on that thing. Looks like it was shot from below you! Perfectly positioned to make intimate congress just impossible.” His manager was also the kind of person who enjoyed using expressions like “intimate congress” and “woebegone affiliations”. “All your affiliations will be woebegone, I'm sure of it,” he added.
With some reluctance, Arlin went to the doctor later that day. The doctor checked his pupils, his ears, and the reflexes in his knees. “You seem to be healthy,” he said.
“But what about the arrow?” Arlin asked.
The doctor turned back around from where he had been carving a totem of the Greek ithyphallic god Priapus, and scratched his chin. “Oh,” he said, putting on his glasses.
“Is it serious?”
“No, I don't think so. There is only mild gangrene. It looks quite old, infact, and was probably there long before the arrow struck you.”
Arlin nodded, “I got it from my childhood, from the tiny ocular rivers that signified my place of yearning for the inexpressible, and the subterranean channels of my early pubescence, which languished a bit too long in the secret interim before my emotional chrysalis could properly unfold.”
The doctor wasn't listening. “Here, take a few of these, all at once, or many of them spread out over some indeterminate period of time, depending on the intensity of your placebo. I've also given you a referral to a good psychotherapist I know. And don't scratch at it.”
The psychotherapist was busy riding a wooden horse, wearing a Pippi Longstocking wig, when Arlin peered in for his appointment. “Come in, come in!” said the therapist, who did not dismount. Arlin sat on the only seat in the room: a child's potty. “It's to expose you to acute feelings of infantilization, thereby causing your id to enter into a state of directionless imbalance, making you more malleable to the will of the presiding authority. It's also amusing to me, and I always indulge in my amusements. Now tell me why you're here so we that we can entirely ignore your words and delve into the suggestive reality I will provide for you.”
“There's an arrow in my chest. It's made some things difficult, like lifting boxes at the chocolate factory, and forgetting my mortality.”
The therapist had come close to Arlin as he spoke, and placed his lips around the end of the arrow. He was sucking on it, and flicking his tongue against its wooden surface. “Tell me abut yuh muher,” he said, running his fingers up and down the arrow, delicately caressing it, as beads of saliva began to dribble down his chin.
Arlin tried to recoil, but the arrow tip protruding from his back connected to the wall behind him.“She was an uncontrollable gossip, and spent most of her young adulthood riding on the lapels of rich businessmen. She used to tell me it was the fastest way to get across town. For six months she lived in the washing machine of a French diplomat, and was only discovered when the Italian maid overheard her making love to a German repairman whose metallic hammer kept banging up against the side of the washing machine's gaping hole. I mean opening. She was thrown on her ass, where she stayed for a year accepting the generosity of parliamentarians who threw money at her, and plane tickets, and their weddings rings. She had the power to make men forget their problems. This was all before I knew her.”
The therapist was smelling the wood deeply, his eyes rolling back into their sockets a bit with each whiff. “Yes, oh yes. I see it very clearly now.” He stood up abruptly and slapped Arlin across the face. “You disgust me. How long have you pretended not to notice that your father is a homosexual?”
Arlin shrugged, “He was always a homosexual. He only married my mother to temporarily escape the attention of the pink mafia, from whom he had stolen a priceless artifact. It was an ornamental carving of the moment when a man loses his youth irrecoverably, captured in terracota like those soldiers in China. It was being preserved in bile, which of course was doing nothing for its complexion.”
“Your only hope is to subject yourself to the iniquities of love. I know a beautiful woman you must marry. Here is her number. Her name is Melinda. The winks I am giving you now are merely a facial tic and have no suggestive meaning.”
“Alright.”
Arlin met her at a drive in movie. She had a quiver embedded in between her breasts. Whenever she quivered, it quivered. “You're very pretty,” he said.
“You're not the first person to have assumed that the remarkable appearance of coincidence is likewise an unavoidable promise from God.”
“Of course not. But by the same token, I could be the first person for whom this is in fact the case.”
“What makes you so special?”
“A love of probabilities only masks a deeper fear of fate. I don't give a rat's ass about fate or chance. In fact, I never think about either. I didn't choose for this arrow to stick through my chest, and I didn't choose for you to have a beautifully proportioned quiver. I don't think I've ever seen one quite like it.”
“The odds are really outstanding.”
“Sure. But then again, so what? It's not like there's an ideal formula for happiness floating out there, waiting for us to shoot it down. All arrows arrive at their destinations with perfect randomness. Even the most masterful shot is still at the mercy of the wind.”
“I acquired my quiver in a terrible accident. I was racing through an amusement park looking for the exit, when I happened upon an exhibit describing the exploits of Robin Hood. Only, this wasn't the conventional version in which Robin Hood substitutes himself for regulatory economic mechanisms and as a metaphor for Stalinism; instead, the Hood persona was being played by a retired philosophy professor who was busy attempting to reduce all the world to a great theory of receptacles. He called me up on stage to demonstrate his point through a complicated system of gestures, diagrams, and phallic knives.”
Arlin leaned in close, “And he impaled you with the quiver?”
She shook her head, “Oh no. Years later I had it surgically implanted in my chest, as a symbolic gesture of affinity with the substance of his argument. The accident was listening to him in the first place.”
Arlin nodded. “Yes, I often think it's entirely possible that I fired the arrow at myself, that night.”
“Do you want to make love?”
“I think it's the only reasonable thing left for us to do.”
When he woke up at first he couldn't even remember anything happening the night before. He'd gone out to the bar with some friends, and afterwords had wandered home by himself, as he usually did. Then his hand found the wooden shaft sticking out of his chest, and the hard, smooth fletching at the end. He toyed with the idea of pulling the arrow out, but he didn't have the strength to.
Putting on a dress shirt, so the end could stick through the buttons, he went off to his job at the chocolate packing plant. Normally lifting boxes was no problem, but with the arrow in his chest he found the work quite difficult. The boxes kept bumping up against the wood, and he couldn't get a good hold of them.
“You should get that checked out, man,” said his manager, who usually didn't give a shit.
Arlin shrugged. “I think I'm ok, really. It doesn't hurt.”
“Yeah, but how can you ever expect to impregnate a woman with that sticking out of your chest? I mean, look at the angle on that thing. Looks like it was shot from below you! Perfectly positioned to make intimate congress just impossible.” His manager was also the kind of person who enjoyed using expressions like “intimate congress” and “woebegone affiliations”. “All your affiliations will be woebegone, I'm sure of it,” he added.
With some reluctance, Arlin went to the doctor later that day. The doctor checked his pupils, his ears, and the reflexes in his knees. “You seem to be healthy,” he said.
“But what about the arrow?” Arlin asked.
The doctor turned back around from where he had been carving a totem of the Greek ithyphallic god Priapus, and scratched his chin. “Oh,” he said, putting on his glasses.
“Is it serious?”
“No, I don't think so. There is only mild gangrene. It looks quite old, infact, and was probably there long before the arrow struck you.”
Arlin nodded, “I got it from my childhood, from the tiny ocular rivers that signified my place of yearning for the inexpressible, and the subterranean channels of my early pubescence, which languished a bit too long in the secret interim before my emotional chrysalis could properly unfold.”
The doctor wasn't listening. “Here, take a few of these, all at once, or many of them spread out over some indeterminate period of time, depending on the intensity of your placebo. I've also given you a referral to a good psychotherapist I know. And don't scratch at it.”
The psychotherapist was busy riding a wooden horse, wearing a Pippi Longstocking wig, when Arlin peered in for his appointment. “Come in, come in!” said the therapist, who did not dismount. Arlin sat on the only seat in the room: a child's potty. “It's to expose you to acute feelings of infantilization, thereby causing your id to enter into a state of directionless imbalance, making you more malleable to the will of the presiding authority. It's also amusing to me, and I always indulge in my amusements. Now tell me why you're here so we that we can entirely ignore your words and delve into the suggestive reality I will provide for you.”
“There's an arrow in my chest. It's made some things difficult, like lifting boxes at the chocolate factory, and forgetting my mortality.”
The therapist had come close to Arlin as he spoke, and placed his lips around the end of the arrow. He was sucking on it, and flicking his tongue against its wooden surface. “Tell me abut yuh muher,” he said, running his fingers up and down the arrow, delicately caressing it, as beads of saliva began to dribble down his chin.
Arlin tried to recoil, but the arrow tip protruding from his back connected to the wall behind him.“She was an uncontrollable gossip, and spent most of her young adulthood riding on the lapels of rich businessmen. She used to tell me it was the fastest way to get across town. For six months she lived in the washing machine of a French diplomat, and was only discovered when the Italian maid overheard her making love to a German repairman whose metallic hammer kept banging up against the side of the washing machine's gaping hole. I mean opening. She was thrown on her ass, where she stayed for a year accepting the generosity of parliamentarians who threw money at her, and plane tickets, and their weddings rings. She had the power to make men forget their problems. This was all before I knew her.”
The therapist was smelling the wood deeply, his eyes rolling back into their sockets a bit with each whiff. “Yes, oh yes. I see it very clearly now.” He stood up abruptly and slapped Arlin across the face. “You disgust me. How long have you pretended not to notice that your father is a homosexual?”
Arlin shrugged, “He was always a homosexual. He only married my mother to temporarily escape the attention of the pink mafia, from whom he had stolen a priceless artifact. It was an ornamental carving of the moment when a man loses his youth irrecoverably, captured in terracota like those soldiers in China. It was being preserved in bile, which of course was doing nothing for its complexion.”
“Your only hope is to subject yourself to the iniquities of love. I know a beautiful woman you must marry. Here is her number. Her name is Melinda. The winks I am giving you now are merely a facial tic and have no suggestive meaning.”
“Alright.”
Arlin met her at a drive in movie. She had a quiver embedded in between her breasts. Whenever she quivered, it quivered. “You're very pretty,” he said.
“You're not the first person to have assumed that the remarkable appearance of coincidence is likewise an unavoidable promise from God.”
“Of course not. But by the same token, I could be the first person for whom this is in fact the case.”
“What makes you so special?”
“A love of probabilities only masks a deeper fear of fate. I don't give a rat's ass about fate or chance. In fact, I never think about either. I didn't choose for this arrow to stick through my chest, and I didn't choose for you to have a beautifully proportioned quiver. I don't think I've ever seen one quite like it.”
“The odds are really outstanding.”
“Sure. But then again, so what? It's not like there's an ideal formula for happiness floating out there, waiting for us to shoot it down. All arrows arrive at their destinations with perfect randomness. Even the most masterful shot is still at the mercy of the wind.”
“I acquired my quiver in a terrible accident. I was racing through an amusement park looking for the exit, when I happened upon an exhibit describing the exploits of Robin Hood. Only, this wasn't the conventional version in which Robin Hood substitutes himself for regulatory economic mechanisms and as a metaphor for Stalinism; instead, the Hood persona was being played by a retired philosophy professor who was busy attempting to reduce all the world to a great theory of receptacles. He called me up on stage to demonstrate his point through a complicated system of gestures, diagrams, and phallic knives.”
Arlin leaned in close, “And he impaled you with the quiver?”
She shook her head, “Oh no. Years later I had it surgically implanted in my chest, as a symbolic gesture of affinity with the substance of his argument. The accident was listening to him in the first place.”
Arlin nodded. “Yes, I often think it's entirely possible that I fired the arrow at myself, that night.”
“Do you want to make love?”
“I think it's the only reasonable thing left for us to do.”
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