He's been trying to lick his elbow. He only stops to eat, sleep and relieve himself; goes to the mailbox once a month to collect his disability check. In winter he sits in the bathroom with the electric heater and the door closed and a small hot plate where he boils eggs and cans of food with the tops removed; he keeps the TV on a shelf and sleeps on a board that drops down over the tub.
Once in a while he has a visitor or two perched on the sink or the toilet. The conversation is always the same and brief. They only come to look, mostly talking among themselves, and if they do talk to him it's only just before they leave, standing at the door, inching their way out in little backward steps, hoping he'll get the point that the conversation is over. Still, he keeps it going as long as he can, enjoying the discomfort on their faces, their feet shuffling while they keep their hands in their pockets, fiddling with loose change or keys, or whatever bits of crap they keep in there. He'll pluck random thoughts from the stew of his past, anything that comes to mind, like how he once named a cat after his third grade teacher, then ate it.
They always say the same thing: "Write, don't call," and leave. "Don't let the door slam," he shouts back.
Same thing, every time. Like an echo.
He prefers to be alone. Company interrupts his concentration. Especially their company. They smoke cigars and talk, as if he's not there, about things that don't concern him at all. Like how much they hate laundromats, useless chatter, irrelevant to their filthy lives, living as they do, keeping warm on top of subway gratings, in basements, back rooms or so-called residential hotels. None of them could afford a laundromat anyway, as far as laundromats go, because they never have more than four quarters at one time without spending it on gum and egg rolls.
He thinks about gum and egg rolls as his tongue lashes the air. It seems to reach a little closer than it did in August, and here it is already October 22nd.
He curls up against the loofah and watches the hairless fairies riding bare-breasted on Chihuahuas. This makes it all seem worth it.
He gets up and turns on the TV, puts on a pot of water and slides an egg in. He watches the news, listening to the egg bobbing against the sides of the pot. The woman on TV is saying that the body collapses into itself in sleep. He checks himself in the medicine cabinet mirror to see if he's shrunk since the night before and, thinking he has, does some stretching exercises. First he touches his nose with his tongue, his warm up. Two years ago he cloistered himself for this purpose, attending to his bodily functions for this one purpose alone, devoting himself to its familiar pain. He became a lapsed human being the way some become defrocked priests, calm in the knowledge that there is no punishment for transgression. He composed a rhythm from his days and nights that loosened ties with any animal needs or considerations beyond keeping his body alive.
And what does he have to show for it? He can flick a fly off his nose.
