and then
the elevator door opens and you’re standing inside
reaming out
your nose something about the dry air
in the
mountains and find yourself facing two spruce elderly couples
dressed
like improbable wildflowers in their primary color
definitely
on vacation sports outfits, a wormy curl of one of the body’s
shameful
and congealed lubricants gleaming on your fingertip
under the
fluorescent lights, and there really isn’t too much to say
as you
descend the remaining two flights with them in silence,
all five of
you staring straight ahead in this commodious
aluminum
group coffin toward the ground floor. You are,
of course,
trying to think of something witty to say. Your hand
is, of
course, in your pocket discreetly transferring the offending article
into its
accumulation of lint. One man clears his throat
and you
admit to yourself that there are kinds of people if not
people in
particular you hate, that these are they,
and that
your mind is nevertheless, is nevertheless working
like a
demented cicada drying its wings after rain to find some way
to save
yourself in your craven, small child’s large ego’s idea
of their
eyes. You even crank it up a notch, getting more high-minded
and
lugubrious in the seconds it takes for the almost silent
gears and
oiled hydraulic or pneumatic plungers and cables
of the
machine to set you down. “Nosepicking,” you imagine explaining
to the
upturned, reverential faces, “is in a way the ground floor
of being.
The body’s fluids and solids, its various despised disjecta,
toenail
parings left absently on the bedside table that your lover
the next
night notices there, shit streaks in underwear or little, faint
odorous
pee-blossoms of the palest polleny color, the stiffened
small
droplets in the sheets of the body’s shuddering late-night loneliness
and
self-love, russets of menstrual blood, toejam, earwax,
phlegm, the
little dead militias of white corpuscles
we call
pus, what are they after all but the twins of the juices
of mortal
glory: sap, wine, breast milk, sperm, and blood. The most intimate hygienes,
those
deepest tribal rules that teach a child
trying to
struggle up out of the fear of loss of love
from anger,
hatred, fear, they get taught to us, don’t they,
as boundaries,
terrible thresholds, what can be said (or thought, or done)
inside the
house but not out, what can be said (or thought, or done)
only by
oneself, which must therefore best not be done at all,
so that the
core of the self, we learn early, is where shame lives
and where
we also learn doubleness, and a certain practical cunning,
and what a
theater is, and the ability to lie.”
the
elevator has opened and closed, the silver-haired columbines
of the mountain
are murmuring over breakfast menus in a room full of bright plastics
somewhere,
and you, grown up in various ways, are at the typewriter,
thinking of
all the slimes and jellies of decay, thinking
that the
zombie passages, ghoul corridors, radiant death’s-head
entries to
that realm of terror claim us in the sick, middle-of-the-night
sessions of
self-hatred and remorse, in the day’s most hidden,
watchful
self, the man not farting in the line at the bank,
no trace of
discomfort on his mild, neighbor-loving face, the woman
calculating
he distance to the next person she can borrow a tampon from
while she
smiles attentively into this new man’s explanation
of his
theory about deforestation, claims us also, by seepage, in our lies,
small
malices, razor knicks on the skin of others of our meannesses,
deprivations,
rage, and what to do but face that way
and praise
the kingdom of the dead, praise the power which we have all kinds
of phrases
to elide, that none of us can worm our way out of,
which all
must kneel to in the end, that no man can evade,
praise it
by calling it time, say it is master of the seasons,
mistress of
the moment of the hunting hawk’s sudden sheen of grape-brown
gleaming in
the morning sun, the characteristic slow gesture,
two fingers
across the cheekbone deliberately, of the lover dreamily
oiling her
skin, in this moment, no other, before she turns to you
the face
she wants you to see and the rest
that she
hopes, when she can’t keep it hidden, you can somehow love
and which,
if you could love yourself, you would.
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