Of Warm Hands and Sympathetic Clefts

It always begins in a souring. Overanxious types show up, hands slip down and go up unsympathetic clefts, overripe melons burst in the corners, and I . . . I am always there with my big, rough tongue to lick it, souring and all.

An old man asks for the time and gets brushed aside. His fists half-heartedly clench as he shuffles off to sink into one of the couches furthest from the lights. Bitter, he silently farts into the brown patch-work couch and drenches it completely. Couches at parties are, by far, nature’s most farted-on objects. A couch can be pushed only so far and sometimes a couch will fart back. This couch is no different. It pushes back. Its essence will spread and attempt to fill the world. Soon harsh-words need will exchanging, jaws will need breaking, heads will need squishing, and—at the very least—entire floors will need fumigating. The old man knows this. He sits still as his pupils slowly turn into couch-fabric.

It is nearly eleven o’clock and Paula is still beautiful. Thin, pale worms dig themselves deeper into the food. She looks on as their bushy tails disappear into a dark red casserole. They mean to be eaten. But everyone has seen the posters and they are too excited to be hungry too and so tonight the worms will go unfulfilled. Paula’s fingers curl into a fist and the fingers crackle. Her bones are older than she is. She steals a glance at one of the many full-length mirrors and I look back at her.

Her hair is coming undone. She looks around to check if anyone is looking. No one of import is; only two younglings who look away as soon as she finds them. She licks her index finger and tucks the three enterprising locks behind her ears. Mrs. H’s back bumps into her. Paula shudders. It has been eighty-three days since anyone touched her. But then she doesn’t know that. She shudders anyway. Mrs. H’s big brown eyes grow even bigger and browner and her little mouth reaches maximal puckering and they both apologize for the green daiquiri that now dribbles down the yellow sundress. The dress is ruined and everyone in the room knows it. A thousand dogs licking it for a thousand years couldn’t lick it clean. To compensate, Mrs. H takes her by the hand and drags her rag-doll-like to the restroom. As if Paula didn’t already hate everyone and everything enough.

Mrs. H is ten years younger than Paula and far lovelier by most standards. Most men are exactly that: standards. Paula snorted. Standin’ ‘tards. No. That spoilt it.

Mrs. H turns on the faucet. The tap gasps. The small, clean room fills with the sound of water filling in Mrs. H’s soft, cupped hands. They are soft and quite large. The water collects and then overflows, collects and flows over. Paula looks at me and studies my face for clues to what she must do. But I have nothing to say to her. I never have had anything to say to her. I cannot and she knows I cannot. She knows what I am. Everyone implicitly knows what I am. She knows I am not her instructor, nor her aggregator, nor a reminder of her humanity when she least feels human though she believes me all these and more. I am, for her, just there—inscrutable. Where she is awful, she thinks I am not. She believes I love her still. She believes that because I cannot take her with her flaws, I shall not take her at all and let her world so keep her, flawed and all. I do not care. I am only curious. Mrs. H takes her hands apart and the cupped water collapses.

- I don’t know why I do that, Mrs. H says. Mr. H says it’s my maternal instinct kicking in. I tell him to stop thinking in clichés.

Mrs. H resists the urge to stroke her belly. It wasn’t protruding yet. They had been married for five months now. It should be.

- I suppose it’s comforting, Paula says.

- What is?

- Oh? Oh. I suppose they both are—the water-thing and the cliché-thing.

Mrs. H examines the damage.

- It isn’t all that bad. A blotch here and there gives one character. The dress—though replaceable—isn’t inexpensive enough for this place. Inexpensive is better. Expensive dresses are better spent on the dos of the higher floors. They get ripped—and ripped off, she half-smiles—just as much but one minds it less there.

It is a very sunny dress. It even has a few small, light, orange suns embroidered on it in discreet places. Mrs. H produces a damp tissue, slides the crook of her arm behind Paula’s thin frame to lock her in place between the basin and her parted legs, and then proceeds to vigorously rub the green out of the yellow dress. Paula gasps.

- The tiny spider doesn’t bother with the foreplay, does she? Paula thinks.

The blotches were now streaks and lighter in colour.

- That’s only made it worse, Mrs. H says as she straightens up and removes herself from Paula.

- It doesn’t matter, Paula says recovering.

- It does! Of course it does! I think my shawl would look good on you.

- No. Don’t worry about it. I was anyway looking for an excuse to get out of here before . . . well you know . . .

- You won’t stick around? He might be good you know and I had hoped to get to know you better.

- Perhaps some other time; perhaps when I am not ovulating quite as much.

They giggle nervously. Mrs. H takes off her shawl and wraps it around Paula’s shoulders.

A dozen short, thick snakes emerge from under the doors of the occupied stalls and slither towards the basins. They leap from the floor to collect in the other basin, hiss at the two women, and start disappearing one by one up the waterspout.

- Stop them! They’re too young to be on their own!

Two identical women in distractingly pink dresses kick the stall doors off their hinges and lunge at the only snake left in the basin. The snake’s head splits into two. Small, square human-like dentition erupts from their thick gums. A ventilation-grate falls to the ground and a much larger snake pokes its head inquiringly through the opening. The two pink women squeal and protest that thing cannot possibly be theirs. Smaller snakes flop to the floor from the other grates. The air turns most foul. Mrs. H and Paula exit the restroom.

- That’s a very nice shawl, remarks Ms. T.

- It’s mine, says Mrs. H.

- Is it silk?

- Yes. I’ve always said all things green must be silk or they simply cannot be green enough.

- I have felt that exact same thing about blue-ishenss and cotton.

Someone opens a window. An odour so foul it is sweet sticks its many fingers up everyone’s nostrils. Eyes water and contact-lenses slip under eyelids. Some head for the restrooms. Paula blocks them off and Mrs. T peeks into the ladies’ to check if the snakes were dead yet or the women back in their stalls. They weren’t. Meanwhile, the food is ruined. The clothes are ruined. Little green bubbles dot the sides of the chocolate fountain. Everyone self-consciously spits into their drinks and throws them away. The hostess slaps someone; presumably whoever opened the window. The window is closed and fifteen wet, furry deodorizer-dogs are pressed into action. The mirrors spot-over and I can’t see what happens next.

- I must leave now, I hear Paula groan.

- Are you sure?

- Yes.

- This one’s agent claims he was the one that came up with the “we’re all in the pregnant, junkie whore business” line.

- And how exactly is that something that recommends him?

- It’s funny coz it’s true.

- I have given up on writers.

- Yes. They’re not very human, are they?

- I don’t give a shit about that. It’s more about what they’re branching out into.

- Gigolo-hood?

- They’re always trying to pluck naive-realist cherries and that is not their job! That job, says the philosopher-turned-journalist with the standard-issue lopsided grin, is ours.

- Hmph. I still like their little gigolo dance.

- Remember what the agents promised about the last one?

- You mean the girl that came to the thirty-second’s thing?

- I’m not sure what floor it was. It couldn’t have been that low.

- What month was it?

- November.

- So the big tide wouldn’t have come in yet . . .

- . . . and the smell would have been unbearable that far down, yes. Maybe it was somewhere in the fifties.

- In November? The fifties had gone silent.

- The lower sixties then.

- Ah . . . now . . . I haven’t been there for years. I don’t think they bathe much down there. As if the courtyard wasn’t bad enough.

Paula silently swore. Why would no one let her finish a thought? What did it matter which exact gathering of morons had last had a writer? Writers were rare and just as invaluable as cock-farts. There were hungry parties full of hungry people on all of the thousands of floors and artists enough to service them all. Time and time enough alone fed them all. And Time’s little puppets, the cannibalistic hordes of the lower floors, would continue to feed them until the ocean should finally claim the Building. The big tide had been coming later with each passing year; as if the ocean was saving up, gathering itself for the one last push. The whole planet would suck itself dry and its vengeance would come in thousand mile high waves. The cult of shit-what’s-their-name-again would sacrifice the construction workers on the highest floors and magick them into zombies. The zombies are the only defence. – Launch the armoured bummers! the high priest would say and the zombie pilots would fly once again into the storm to negotiate peace. But the Ocean would not care this time and kill them all and then unwrap the Building like an onion and suck it dry.

- But that was only an idle fantasy even if it wasn’t hers alone. Meanwhile, Paula could no longer bear to become imperceptible in the field of yet another audience’s endless empathy or to dissolve in the sea of its sympathetic brown eyes. She must leave.

- What?

- What?

- Did you say something?

Shit, I think, it happened again. It seems I break the wall whenever I strain it overmuch while listening in. My chronicling then becomes Paula. In examining the contents of the glove, I fill it and she sinks below—flailing limbs and all—into nothingness and inconsequentialness. But I can only chronicle. I cannot create. I am drained now and without will. I am impotent. I am no cock, nor its adversary. I have no face, no arms, and no legs. I am all neck. If I fill, it is only because I also empty. I am filterer and farter. But I am still not at peace. A neck never is. So I must pull back to the still-spotted mirrors.

- Yes, she said, I was saying it must have been somewhere in the early sixties.

- Ah. I wasn’t there then. What did that guy do?

- Nothing. All he did was list all the things we do that he said were the same as circle-jerking.

- Like?

- Oh I don’t remember. Things like peeing in adjoining stalls, liking sports teams, joining fraternities, gangs, armies, and . . . umm. . . talking.

- I see. And did it work?

- Sort of. But, to prove his point, he whipped out what he called his “mouth-treat” at the very end and invited us to be honest with each other for once in our lifetimes and that pissed everyone off. We threw him off of course. But it was one of those selfish deaths. I wish we had fewer of those.

The mirrors clear and I can see again. The sun has set. The darkness of the empty sky will envelop and dissolve the world’s many misgivings. But the moon will soon clear the Crater’s rim. It is now nearly midnight; a midnight in the dragon-mating season. It is too late to risk walking home alone. The moon drags the giant winged rats out of their snug burrows in the earth below. In spite of their immense size and their fervent desire to get at all the meat inside, they can never get into the Building and so their mile-long claws and their mile-long teeth are of little consequence to Paula’s walking home. What is of consequence is that they invariably include the Building in their love-making. This season the entire Building shudders every night. They crash into it, pound their free claws on it, and sometimes slide up and down its length. The Building may be nearly indestructible but it gets damaged very easily. Anything not being watched by more than one human can be legitimately consumed by the building to repair any damage it might sustain. There are no cameras in the corridors she needs to walk through to get home to her cat-with-human-eyes. So Paula is stuck here. The lights dim. Mrs. H’s sweaty palm finds hers. A spotlight picks up N and deposits him on the wider, room-facing edge of the big, empty table that now is blocking off the twin exits. At the other end of the room, the much older and much less successful writer grabs a passerby and says, “Don’t leave me now. Not today.” The passerby agrees and sits down. Their hands link in the dark and they turn slowly towards the lighted portions, towards the writer and his audience, revealing  . . . revealing . . .  revealing . . . but no one is looking.

Smiles are exhaled and left to linger. N takes in a deep breath and exclaims “If everyone I’ve ever met weren’t so goddamned lazy, I’d be dead already!”

Indulgent tittering.

- Thank God they close the windows here. I hope there are no closet-Smellers here. Keeping your windows open so the stench of a million dead artists rotting in the Courtyard will fill the holes in your heart is a bit like copyright infringement, no?

Pause.

- But then perhaps not everyone can afford the likes of me and it’s not like the dead need anything more. The story I have chosen for tonight has me committing an awful lot of manslaughter. I know manslaughter is bad. It is not like I don’t know that. It’s just that I don’t think much of the dead. They’re dead, no? Fuck ‘em and fuck what they might want. Aren’t there enough of the living to worry about anyway? The more that die, the fewer there are left to kill me.

 I sometimes think I am dead. My wishes don’t even amount to a fucksworth.

- I do not propose we valorise life or the living. The sun bleeds the earth. Her skin ruptures and bleeds pustules. We are them.

Paula groans audibly.

- My story begins—like all good stories—in the promise of sex. But before I begin I must ask how many of you have been bouldering, mountaineering, rock-climbing, and etcetera?

Most free hands go up.

- Oh okay. I thought I’d get away with more made-up shit. But since you all have been to the Crater’s rim and even had jobs on the rim, he snorts, I’ll have to make up a setting. My story is set in a mountain range and that is something that stands on its own and serves its own purpose. Let us call it the Himalayas. I am assuming everyone knows how mountains work. They are essentially big phalluses. Obviously you all knew that but I had to use “big phalluses” at least once. Twice now. I now cannot bear mountain-climbers or mountain-climbing anymore. All you do is you go up a really big phallus to plant your flag, tent, and etcetera in it and by doing so conquer it. Some instead simulate an ejaculation by reaching the top and then jumping off. The entire exercise usually has only two rules: you climb mountains and you try your best not to jump off once you’re high enough. And so it inevitably attracts only those who can barely manage either. I was once like that. I will not say I was young and foolish ten years ago or that it has been ten years since. Such things assume too much. Who is to say that Time hasn’t stood still from that moment until this one now? Who is to say that it isn’t I that have, in fact, walked?

Paula groans once again. Louder. She squeezes Mrs. H’s hand and Mrs. H groans gently too.

- So anyway, I was much younger and my foolishness was of a much younger sort. I thought climbing mountains was the easiest way to get some. I had not struck on lines like “Yes. I think you are exactly like Woolf and Plath. I think it’s really great you use menstrual flows as a metaphor for sex.”

Pause. Tough audience, he thinks. They are like all audiences: a field of gently swaying necks. Their fleshy eyes follow me around and the blocked-up noses claw the air to smell me. The mouths smile. They are always so awfully silent.

- It was the eleventh day. We were three guys and three girls. We had paired up but it came to nothing. There were only two tents and we were quite frustrated because it was too cold to simply wander off and leave a pair or two alone. One of us had forgotten the third tent at the base camp. There was much suspicion and much resentment. We hated each other like only horny, frustrated teenagers can.

- There was quite a lot of other equipment we had to lug around. Rope, crampons, a million carabiners, food, sleeping bags, cooking equipment, clothes, and so on. We also had ice pickaxes or something. But only the girls used them. Perhaps we instinctively knew it is wrong to claw a phallus.

- We were about sixteen thousand feet above sea level when I fell. Now a lot people I have met believe when you fall at sixteen thousand feet above sea level you fall all the sixteen thousand feet to the sea. This is simply not true. At the very most you might fall a thousand feet. That isn’t all that bad. You might still live though you’d not like to.

Pause.

- I fell. I should have fallen with everyone else but we hadn’t roped up because we weren’t feeling very pally. So only I fell. Well I didn’t really fall. I slipped and I slid down forty or fifty feet. But on a mountainside forty or fifty feet off the beaten path is bad enough. And my situation was in fact quite bad. My oversized belt buckle had managed to snag on a very small rock projection. I lay spread out on the ice unable to move. I twisted my neck to see where I was. I found I was hanging, much like the helpful rock, over a thousand-foot drop.

- Now this is interesting. You see me here telling you about the time I nearly died and you assume I didn’t die then. I did not have that luxury back then. It was like everyone and everything was waiting on me to do my bit and fall: my impatient friends, the biting cold, and the realization I had about how easy it is to die. I was on Kierkegaard’s cliff. I was incredibly free for the first time in my life. There was nothing holding me back.

- When people say their life flashes before their eyes when they are about to die, I suspect, it is very likely that they are being forced to evaluate their entire lives and so decide whether Life’s really all that. It stretches the imagination very little to imagine they all would be forced to overvalue their past under such stress. In a suicide-bid, on the other hand, when sentiment has time enough to settle, one might have a less biased perspective on life and death.

- Now my friends did not really care about the very many epiphanies I had had in under a minute or so. They were yelling at me to get the fuck up already. I still couldn’t get up. I was certain I would die if I did. There was however one more thing that kept me in limbo. I am incredibly lazy. Climbing up to my friends would take twenty minutes easy. Even after that I’d have to keep walking for a week till we got back to the base camp and motorized transport. And even the base camp wouldn’t be the end of it. I might forever be stupid enough to get dragged along to such situations. Would it really be that bad if I just lay here, spread eagle and with freshly ripped clothes, and just let the mountain do with me what it will?

- One of the guys decided I needed some help. He roped up with everyone else, struck a dozen nails into the firmer bits of the ice and passed the rope through them, and slid a few feet down and let an ice-axe slide the rest of the way towards me. I saw it coming towards me and I saw it was way off course. I stretched a little to catch it. I knew I wouldn’t. And then it hit another rocky projection and everything slowed down as I—in much horror—watched it turn direction and gain speed as it sped towards my outstretched right leg. It clipped me and fell over the edge. My nylon pants filled with blood and I leaked over on to the white ice.

- The mountain had kneed me just before the belt-buckle had snagged on the little rock. I was sure the axe had fallen on and killed at least one hiker. One of the girls had been pregnant and had had a leech latch onto her leg the night before and today morning she had found herself a lot slimmer and had been sniffling and whining ever since. And now my fiendish friend had wounded me. I had had enough. I was extremely angry. I wanted my revenge. I reached around and unclipped my crampons from my backpack and fitted them on my hands. I clawed my way back up. It did take twenty minutes. I finally reached the track, threw off my crampons, straightened up, dug my naked hands into a partially-hardened snow-bank, made a melon-sized snowball, and let it fly at the fiend’s head. It came right off and rolled off the cliff as the headless torso slowly sank into the snow. I laughed. The girls laughed. The other guy did not. I did not care. I blamed him for the lost tent and we threw him over the next day. The end.

Pause.

- Is that it? The hostess asks.

- Yep. Now if you wouldn’t mind. I am all spent.

- No. We don’t throw people off willy-nilly. Do you see a satisfied audience here? The Courtyard is a sacred place and not for the likes of you.

- Fuck you. That was a nice story. Now throw me off!

- No.

- I am an anteater whose veins are varicose with ants! They live in me. I am their anthill. They wake now and I can no longer bear it. Throw me off!

- No. Now go to the back. What a fucking waste of time, she says as she turns on the lights.