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I sit on the porch in the half-darkness smoking a cigarette and chewing off the skin around my fingernails and feeding it to the ants that scurry across the steps, and their mandibles clamp down and they carry my flesh aloft like an emperor. I finish the cigarette and reach into my pocket for my phone and take out the phone and call her number. She answers on the third ring and her voice is thick, muted.
"It's unlocked," she says. "Just come in."
"Okay," I say, and I hang up and go inside. In the kitchen I take the bottle of vodka out of the freezer and open it and take a drink and the syrupy stuff goes down neat and squats there in my hollow belly, snarling, like panic.
The smell hits me in the hallway and I take a moment to adjust to it. People don't smell their own smells, and hers is a mixture of halitosis, armpit, and dope. I walk into the bedroom and she won't let me smoke in the house but there she is in bed with a joint, taking big clumsy drags at it. She looks terrible.
"You look terrible," I say, taking off my jacket and throwing it on the floor. She looks at me for a full minute, expressionless, then shrugs and takes another pull of the joint.
"I haven't been feeling very well," she says finally.
I sit down on the bed next to her and take off my shoes. "Give me some of that," I say, putting my feet up.
"No," she says. Then she says: "I had a dream this afternoon, a daydream I guess, about a child, hollowed out and blackened by fire."
I exhale roughly through my nose and lean my head back against the wall. "Did you take your lithium?" I ask her.
"Yes."
"I was walking along today," I say after a while, "And two girls passed me, and I heard their conversation, and one of them said 'I had a dream last night that somebody put half an aspirin in my ear' and the other one goes 'Oh my god I had the same dream!'"
"Why are you telling me this?"
"What's that smell?"
"I told you I was sick. Do you want anything to eat? I think there's some stuff in the kitchen."
"I'm okay," I tell her.
A lie. I take another drink of the vodka and pass it to her. She shakes her head slightly but takes it anyway, has a drink, hands the bottle back to me, and rubs her nose roughly with the back of her wrist.
"I can't feel my nose," she says.
"What?"
"I said, I can't feel my nose."
"Jesus Christ, what's that fucking smell?"
The cat jumps up on the foot of the bed, turns in circles three times, then jumps down again.
"Are we gonna fuck tonight?" she asks me.
I consider the question for a few moments. She hasn't wanted to have sex for about a week, saying over and over again "It's a surprise, it's a surprise," and I was frustrated but now I simply don't feel like it, and I wonder if I should just break up with her and get it over and done with.
"Maybe," I say.
"Can you rub my back?"
"No. Why don't you take a shower?"
"Go to hell."
I take out a cigarette and light it and am surprised when she doesn't say anything. It is estimated that the act of body modification began as many as 40,000 years ago, with historical and archaeological evidence suggesting that Australian Aboriginals, for example, were adept in the arcane arts of subincision and labial elongation. The Similaun man was discovered with an ear piercing. In Paris in the nineteenth century, nipple piercing in young females was a socially acceptable vogue and discussed, and displayed, openly.
I get up and go over and turn on the CD player. "What do you want to listen to?" I ask.
"I don't care. Nothing. I don't care."
I straighten up and scratch my stomach and take another drink of vodka. "Have you fed the cat?"
"Yeah, I fed him before."
"I don't believe you. It doesn't look as though you've moved from that bed in days."
"I'm cold," she says.
"Mmm," I say, and I leave the room and go into the toilet and urinate and don't wash my hands and I come back. "Do you want me to get another blanket?"
"Please," she says.
I fetch an extra blanket from the linen cupboard and throw it across the bed, then lay down on top of it. It isn't cold at all.
"Why is it," she asks, slowly, "That humans think themselves so superior to all the other animals? Is it because we found God?"
I snort and look down at my fingers. "Which one?" I ask.
"I wish you would come to mass with me."
I wish you would take a fucking shower, I don't say.
"Maybe I will, one day."
"I don't feel very good."
"You said."
Cutaneous mechanoreceptors – the legendary Krause corpuscles – are present in massive amounts in both the penis and the clitoris, and are wholly responsible for the release of endorphins into the brain, a signal to approach and initiate orgasm. Horizontal piercing of the preputium clitoridis, certainly a delicate and painful procedure, is said to immeasurably enhance sexual pleasure.
She frowns, and reaches under the blanket for something, then frowns again and withdraws her hand.
"What's wrong?" I ask, putting the cigarette out in a coffee cup.
"Nothing. I can't…I can't really feel my legs. I think I'm going to go to sleep."
"Whatever," I say. I drink some more vodka and light another cigarette and turn off the lamp while she slides down the bed and puts her head on the pillow.
"Do you love me?" she asks. I don't say anything. She is quickly asleep, her breathing ragged, high. I finish the bottle and the cigarette and get up and take my clothes off in the dark and lay back down. Everything seems blue, and the smell is stronger. I gag slightly and then put my arm across my forehead and smell the cologne on my wrist.
Sepsis, generally referred to as blood poisoning, is a whole-body infection responsible for an upsurge in white blood cells, tachycardia, consumptive coagulopathy, meningococcemia, acute renal failure, and organ death. It is generally treatable with antibiotics, dialysis, fluid replacement, but must be detected early.
I wake up I don't know how much later, on my stomach beneath the covers, something hard pressing against my thigh. I can hear the cat licking itself at the foot of the bed. I roll over onto my back, kicking it away inadvertently, and reach across the bed, half-dazed, and begin rubbing her breast. I move a little closer and say "mmm" and I move my hand down her stomach, sneaking my fingers into her panties, and am pleased to discover that she is wet and, as they say, ready. I yank the panties down to her knees and then, curious, move my hand back to the top, I suppose you would call it the top, of her vagina. I feel something cold there, metal, a little ring.
I realize she isn't breathing.
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