By Maxwell Gordon
It was the totality of the thing. The cuban-heel boots, the length of the skirt (just above the knee), a white accordion-ribbed blouse with a collar like bleached fangs, a necklace with a fringed Catholic-ish cross, a long leather jacket with wide lapels like the Black Panthers used to wear. You could not isolate any one portion of this outfit and expect it to make any sense. It had to be cohesive, it had to be a whole, it had to work towards the totality of her being.
Her corporeality played its own part in the form of black bangs scorched with a straightener and a wizened frame that allowed her clothes to drape over her with no suggestion of gender. She could be a head surrounded by cloth; her legs would be a tumorous oddity. The eyebrows had to be hidden, but their physical tangibility was not to be altered. She must be eyes and a mouth; her nose and ears must be rendered inconsequential by a studied ambiguity most readily achieved with chessboard monochromatism. Her face sunk into her cheekbones, corniced with a crepuscular chin made vaguely vulpine by a staccato arc lamp’s yellowed mist. No, her personal ambiguity would not be that of the cross-dresser or the tomboy. It would be that of the catamite, the eunuch, the castrato. Her strides would be wide and refreshing like cold water. Her words would be thin and jutting like cold water.
She was going to a party at a student housing cooperative, with bad alcohol and dyed-hair deadenders who had been elevated into coolness by their parents’ ability to fund whatever area of study they had convinced themselves that they held real passion for. No, dead-ender wasn’t correct. They would cut their hair and shave whatever stubble they had accumulated. They would wear shirts with collars. They would graduate. She had not yet graduated but she already wore collars and paid great attention to her hair. There was no need for her to sell out, there was no way that selling out would ever compromise her own boho-genius. She was and always would be a very clean tramp, buoyed by what she had ascertained was a certain wit.
She arrived at the front entrance – not quite on time, but early enough to avoid a line. She paid her seven dollars to a pustule-embossed forest-hag with pink lengths of chaff sprouting from its skull. The person appeared to her as a technicolor simian of indiscernible sex. She nodded and said thanks. The table attendant nodded and exhaled. She wondered what color its pubic hair was, its texture, its tactile sensation beneath a fingernail. She wondered if it had a navel; if that navel was damp. She wondered what its teeth sounded like when they gripped a thin pane of glass. Or a thick one. She wondered if it could bite a twig in half or if it needed to whittle it down with its teeth. If its tongue was padded and freckled like that of a large herbivorous mammal. And she wondered what it smelled like beneath all the pot smoke.
She wondered if any of the people who lived here ever sweat, or if their bodies were too fine-tuned for such a garish exertion. Their flesh was pristine and pale (the co-oppers were, as a rule, white) and unblemished by callus or muscle. She had never seen them eat. As a species, they never ate. She could never remember any one of them as distinct from any of the others, even though she knew that they coalesced around certain leaders, who may or may not have developed their positions from some kind of actual bureaucratic authority. They had three-hour-long meetings every other week where everyone would go and they would talk and they would put their heads down and raise their hands to vote and Alice had it on good authority that really, honest to God, they all hated each other. They all hated each other and fucked each other but they never had real arguments or fights because real arguments and fights were not amenable to the co-op lifestyle and the group leaders would become very, very disappointed in you if you argued or fought because it was a cooperative and not a regular apartment or a dorm and everybody knew it. They bickered in the margins. They were fluorescent nuns whose mouths were receptacles for smoke and snipes at miscellany. A hundred people who despised one another and fucked one another and did not sweat. A hundred paunches resting like sunbathing iguanas.
The jungle juice smelled like paint thinner and tasted like rotting raspberries. She exited onto the terrace, centered around a swimming pool, flanked on three sides with windowed walls, on a fourth by a tower wrapped in a wooden staircase, a mannequin in lingerie keeping watch. The people outside held cups in their hands. They jittered but they did not throb. They were “howhaveyoubeens” and “haveyouseens”, the prospect of fucking was not yet in the subjunctive. She scoured them for someone she might recognize so that she could make small talk until the more interesting types arrived.
She spotted Gabrielle, a loudly imbecilic ex-valedictorian and a two-time fuck. She had a boyfriend now. She had run into them once at HEB. His name was Dallas and he was indeterminately handsome in a sleazeless Bryan Ferry sort of way. He smelled like clean linen and Barbasol. Gabrielle was Alice’s third fuck, her first girl. There had been two since then. Her second fuck was Gabrielle’s seventh, and Gabrielle’s then-recent ex-boyfriend, though the two of them had only been together for about a month. Both of them had been inebriated and he was strange. Gabrielle was not strange. Gabrielle had a head like an oblong peanut and a recessed jaw that recalled JFK staring into a fisheye lens. She wore lots of makeup that made her face either oleaginous or glittery, depending on the angle of the light. Her hair was brown and turgid and smelled like drunken lilies. Tonight, she wore a skintight lime-green dress (the skirt stopped just above the knee) and white Doc Martens.
Hairless, totally hairless, but not naturally. Razorbumps everywhere – legs, stomach, back, taint. You could set a watch to Gabrielle’s moans – every fifteen and a half seconds – and she sounded like she had acted them out beforehand. But not very well. There was no variance in inflection, pitch, or dynamics. And she had stained Alice’s bedsheets at two in the morning and they both slept in it because Alice was too tired to do laundry. Alice had got some in her mouth and she tried to get the taste out with toothbrushing and cigarettes but her mouth just smelled like cunt and ammonia the whole next day. And Alice hated Gabrielle for thrusting some kind of private humiliation on her and not giving a goddamn about it and now she was fucking Dallas.
Gabrielle was very Catholic. Dallas was not Catholic but he would convert. She’d make him convert and he would. He had the eyes of a perfect dullard. The Latin and incense would embalm him. And he would fuck her and they would have seventeen children. And they would be valedictorians and they would all go to college and they would fuck and then get married and then they would fuck some more.
Gabrielle made eye contact with Alice and waved and smiled a perfect idiot smile and said hey and Alice thought to herself, Jesus, alright. And then Alice said hey and walked over because she wasn’t a bitch. Not to Gabrielle anyways. And Alice said hey Dallas and Dallas smiled and nodded and Alice swore to God she could hear the wind passing through his gums.
Dallas had idiot eyes but Gabrielle seemed to not have any eyes at all. She had eyes, physically, in her head, but when Alice looked in them there was always something filmy obscuring her pupils and those little poles – little poles, her eyes were just pupil and white – would skitter away from her like olive oil in a hot pan. Her mouth only moved in vowel shapes, her tongue never touched the roof of her mouth or the backs of her teeth. It was an erogenous organ for perfect idiot vowels.
How have you two been, Alice asked. Fine, you know, Gabrielle replied, we’re doing fine, I met Dallas’s family, you know, and they’re really great, really great, and Gabrielle looked to Dallas and he smiled and grunted out an mhmm from somewhere south of his clavicles and Gabrielle continued. She said he has an uncle, he’s an investment banker, he’s really rich, he drives a Tesla you know and he only types in lowercase! He only ever types in lowercase Alice, he only ever texts in lowercase. Like a teenager! Isn’t that hilarious and Gabrielle laughed in these shrill little clucks and Alice laughed and Dallas laughed and nodded and mhmmd and laughed more and Alice thought for a moment, that someone not her but someone really ought to kill Gabrielle before this all got out of hand.
Gabrielle asked Alice well, how have you been, what have you been up to, and Alice said just reading, you know, just the usual and Gabrielle said yeah, just like always and she laughed and Alice laughed and Gabrielle said I don’t know where you find the time, you know. I’m always trying to read more but I feel like I can’t ever find the time to do it and Alice laughed and said oh well, you know, ha ha, ha ha.
Gabrielle became very serious. Her inverted beak flattened. She asked well, Alice, what have you been reading and Alice said, well, I found a book of some of Freud’s earlier stuff in Waggener. Some professor must have retired and he left some books behind and I grabbed that one. And Gabrielle said oh, Freud, you know, I’m not that familiar with him, what’s he about, and Alice said, well, it’s just some early psychoanalytic stuff and Gabrielle made a face like she’d just witnessed an electric chair execution and said OH, Freud, yeah I know Freud, I thought his name was Frood, and she laughed the high-pitched clucking laugh, like feud. I thought it was Frood and Alice laughed and nodded and said, well it was great to see you two. I’m going to run to the bathroom and I’ll be right back. And she would not be right back and they both knew that she would not be right back and they did not care.
A healthy stream now. A band was playing inside. They were all straight eighthnotes, fuzzpedals, barre chords and root notes. All of the members had the same Carhartt pants and trimmed mustache except for the bass player who was a girl and was wearing a small red dress tucked into a pair of pale blue 501s. Alice remembered the image so that she could later compose a great witticism about popular Bush-era revanchism, and how it basically loops back around into being Reagan-era revanchism, and how that probably had something to do with Eisenhower. It needed work. She thought that there ought to be a fashionable nostalgia for Franco or Salazar. She would look good in a Falange uniform. A pale blue tunic, like the bassist’s jeans, but chambray instead of denim. A wide collar and epaulets. Sleeves rolled to elbows. Khaki jodhpurs at waist-height. A leather belt with a pistol that was dark gray and had wood on the handle like a movie. Red beret, Roman salutes, a black boot polished that morning. She could blouse the shirt in such a way that her hips would be de-emphasized in favor of her shoulders and she would be given the silhouette of an inverted trapezoid. She could crop her hair and ripen her flesh in what she imagined was an Iberian sun, with air like warm brown rice and honey, and she could be a boy scout with a Mauser’s muzzle pushed up against the nape of some poor bastard’s neck. She wanted to march into Barcelona with a rifle over her shoulder like a kid with a BB gun and they could take pictures of her with those old cameras with flashbulbs and clicking sounds.
She wished they didn’t strum and pluck, picking notes like chickens pecking at corn. They should grab the strings. You could take them in a bundle, like reeds, and wring the notes out of them. Play chords derived not from vibration but from friction, from pressure. But they’d scare their audience. Polyphony was incidental to them; any instrument was just an extension of the snare drum. It was not music to experience. It was nootropic. Something that allowed for conversation, a light half-note sway, the declension of Rohypnol into liquid. Any amount of individual expressiveness would hinder the whole operation. Sixty years ago, Pete Townshend could smash a guitar onstage and then he could pick anyone out of the audience and he could fuck them. These indie weasels strummed like they had carpal tunnel and any member of that shitty little band could pick anyone out of the audience and they could fuck them. But when they fucked now there was no sweat.
Colm was there. Alice thought he had been banned because he said something about the Jews. He was a great big mick – he liked to be called a mick – who was about six foot two and two hundred and fifty pounds. He was pale. He had thin blonde hair with gaps where he combed it and big heavy lips and an ass that jutted out. His torso was a great rigid orb flanked by flabby yogurt-textured arms. He only ever wore New Balance tennis shoes, slacks, and polo shirts. She thought she remembered him saying something about only ever buying clothes from Target. He wore those little BTK frames and he had a little vellus-hair mustache dripping down the sides of his philtrum in two sloped quadrilaterals. He had a gap between his front teeth that lisped his baritone into a warped effeminacy. Alice noted to herself that his androgyny was an inverse of her own.
The two of them had met the previous year, when Colm was antagonizing a group of student communists at their weekly Sunday reading group. Alice was in attendance at the recommendation of Gabrielle’s ex, whom she was fucking at the time. Colm had attended sporadically up to that point. He was not a communist himself. He was not much of anything but he read far too much. Never novels or poetry. She loaned him a copy of Wise Blood one time and he told her it had a stupid ending. Colm read history, philosophy, politics, economics, theology, theosophy, ethnomusicology, physiocracy, astrology and alchemy. He called it all theory. It was all the same stuff to him. And all this theory Colm read reinforced the underpinnings of his thought, of his personal philosophy, of Colmism – that it was stupid to believe in anything anyways. That nobody actually knew what the hell they were talking about. Not Biden, not Trump, not Putin or Xi or Macron or Hitler or Trotsky or Kennedy or Oswald or the guys on the grassy knoll, not Garibaldi or Robespierre or Lyndon LaRouche or Patrice Lumumba or Saint Peter or Vishnu. The only other tenet of Colmism was that there was something to be said in the specific case of Richard Nixon.
Colm antagonized the communists because they took themselves too seriously and because they were assholes and degenerates and rich kids. But they never kicked him out. They must have liked having a smart idiot like him around. He would keep them on their toes, but they would remain impervious to his repeated offensives by virtue of their unshakable faith in the immortal science of Dialectical Materialism. Sometimes they would invite him out for drinks. They’d get him drunk and they’d ask him what he really thought about the blacks or the Jews and he’d tell them what he really thought and the communists would laugh at him and then they wouldn’t say anything at all.
Alice liked Colm because he was pathetic and intelligent and he was not kind and he was very stupid in ways that were of some benefit to her. She did not think that he had ever fucked and at the same time they first met she had not fucked anyone either. She would prove to be incorrect in this assumption. He had fucked twice: once in his junior year of high school in his hometown of Sanger, and once in his freshman year of college, before the two of them met.
Colm professed a profound indifference to sex (and, for that matter, women). Alice could tell that he was full of shit and she was right. She never flirted with him or even touched him and he reciprocated her inaction. But she would listen to him talk about theory, about the blacks and the Jews, about the mayor of Austin, and he would pay for Alice’s coffee (she never ordered anything besides coffee) and drive her places she needed to be or buy her packs of Marlboro Lights or canned cocktails at the gas station because he was twenty-one and she was not.
She was not cold enough in her conversation with Gabrielle and would compensate for this deficiency in her conversation with Colm. She had by now drained her cup of its intoxicants and she believed that this would amplify her verbiage by reduction, as if it were shaped into a series of jagged edges by an electric saw. Colm would not mind as long as she listened to his ranting about the Federal Reserve or Nagorno-Karabakh or something equally obscure in that manner so alluring to pseudointellectuals. And she could augment his speech by pulling out little acute-angle chunks with acid-honed teeth. She would light a cigarette and exhale the smoke into Colm’s eyes. She would ash it on the ground and make sure to get some on his New Balance sneakers. He would not mind and she would not have to engage with him in any meaningful sense. He would just be happy to speak. They would only be rehearsing the contours of their own personalities, their own personal conversability, in the event that a more opportune target would happen upon them.
The two of them made eye contact. Colm opened his mouth slightly and raised his eyebrow in a primordial come-hither pantomime. Neither said hello. They had seen one another too recently. Alice asked Colm if he ever ended up asking that TA out and Colm said what TA and Alice said that one in your Russian history class, Russia Since 1991 or something. Colm said Jesus how the hell do you even remember that shit and Alice shrugged. Alice said she was from Belarus right and Colm said yeah and Alice said just like Marina. Colm said who the fuck is Marina and Alice said you know, Marina Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald’s wife he picked up in Minsk and Colm said shit, yeah, I know who Marina OSWALD is, but you just said Marina, I thought you were talking about a Marina from Belarus that you or I knew or something because you just said a first name and nothing else so don’t give me that smartass shit alright. Alice shrugged and said well, then, did you ask the Belarusian TA out?
Colm said well, shit, first of all that’s gotta be like four months ago now. I can’t believe you remember that shit. I wasn’t really thinking about it at all to tell you the truth. I think I probably thought about it for a week and then I dropped it. You know why? Because it was really, really fucking dumb. I mean really fucking stupid. It was a real fucking short bus kind of idea. But I was horny and lonely or whatever but what fucking good would any of that do? I mean yeah she was pretty and she seemed pretty smart. I mean she wasn’t a freak but Lindelmann’s not going to have you as a TA if you’re a total mouthbreather. And her accent was cute even though it made her sound like an idiot sometimes but it was nice, it was cute. But what if I’d done it, Alice. What if I’d asked her out? What fucking good would that have done me? Think about it. I mean really think about it here. Because there are only two outcomes there and I really mean that, only two possible results. I either fuck her and then I have to see her every day I’m in class and she’d have to see me or I get title IX’d. And I’m not getting title IX’d. I mean it’s too easy now. I’ve read articles about it. It’s bad. It’s bad shit. It’s a fucking kangaroo court and you can’t do shit about it to save your own ass. You can’t even bring a lawyer in. I mean that. They won’t even let you bring a fucking lawyer in. I mean call me fucking naive or whatever but I was under the impression that I was in the United States of AMERICA, AMERICA, the fucking U S of A but it’s all a bunch of phony baloney bullshit anyways. Not that me or my folks could afford a lawyer anyways but you know that. I bust my ass for nothing. Not a single goddamn thing. I mean all of this is such a fucking sham anyways but I’ve already told you as much. And I mean you get it I guess, as much as you really can, I mean no offense but you’re a girl Alice and I think a lot of this stuff isn’t really all that intuitive to you and you know, I get that, I try to be sensitive to that, of course I have my blind spots like anyone else but I’m very conscientious of this stuff when I’m sharing my thoughts like this. I’m not busting your balls here. I mean it comes from a place of great affection. You have to know at some point that nobody really gives a shit about people like US, you and me. And I’m not trying to sound like one of those trust funder commies here. Or, God forbid, a fucking Democrat, Jesus fucking Christ, god forbid. I mean Ruby Ridge and Waco – did they ever teach you about Ruby Ridge in school? Of course, they didn’t, those fucking swine – Ruby Ridge, that was Clinton’s whole thing. And Reno, hers too. And that Sanders fuck didn’t fucking lift a goddamn finger, that fuck. So much for the working man, huh. So much for Joe Sixpack. Jesus. Butchered his wife and his kid. On TV. On TV like it was fucking Khe Sanh or some shit like that. Can you believe it. Can you fucking believe any of this shit? And I’m not saying they’re gonna sic the FBI or the CIA or the IRS or the ATF or the NSA or the DHS or fucking NASA or whatever on me. I’m not fucking Mulder. What I’m saying is that I’m cautious.
Somehow Alice had acquired more alcohol in the interim.
It sounds like you might be repressed, she said, and Colm said what the fuck do you mean, repressed? Alice said I mean sexually, sexually repressed. She put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it. She had to manipulate the flint on the lighter with her forefinger because the skin on her thumbs was too tender because she had a habit of gnawing on them and tearing out little white chunks of dead epidermis so they could melt on her tongue like snowflakes. She did this when she was bored. Not nervous, only bored. When she was nervous, she just smoked and then she wasn’t nervous or she just convinced herself she wasn’t nervous anymore. She took a drag and blew the smoke into Colm’s face but he did not so much as flinch.
Colm scrunched his big red face into his nose and said who the hell are you to tell me I’m sexually repressed? Alice took another drag and another sip and giggled. She was tipsy-ish now. She had saved calories for the booze by skipping two meals. She paused for a moment and then spoke. I think you hate the government because you don’t fuck enough, she said. If you fucked more, you’d be well-adjusted. The fuck do I want to be well-adjusted for, Colm said. So, I can pay a shrink one hundred bucks a week and say hi to the mailman and fuck a girl every once in a while? What do I need to fuck anybody for? It makes you weak, Alice. You’ll get soft. I can’t get soft. I’ve gotta be at one hundred and ten every goddamn minute of every goddamn day. Someone has to be. You think anyone here is at one hundred and fucking ten percent like I am, right here, right now? She ashed the cigarette but missed his shoe. She said you can believe what you want to believe but I don’t think fucking someone would kill you. Do you have a healthy relationship with your mother?
Jesus fuck, Colm said. I have a great relationship with her and I don’t want to fuck her. This Freud shit is eating away at your brain. He paused. I don’t want to fuck my mom, Alice.
Alice grinned. I don’t know Colm, is she hot? And Colm said fuck you. Alice said maybe you want to fuck your dad instead and Colm said Jesus Alice, you really ought to go fuck yourself. Alice said well maybe I ought to go and fuck both of them, mom AND dad, maybe I should be your new stepmom Colm. Colm said fuck you I need to go get another beer and Alice asked can I come and Colm said fine alright.
It was five bucks for a can of Lone Star but Colm managed to get two for that amount. Alice was pretty well drunk by that point and her social faculties were well-lubricated. She asked Colm if he wanted to try and find anyone they knew and Colm said alright so they went off. Colm found this scrawny grad student guy who he said had taught him a class on microeconomics even though the guy hardly looked north of fifteen. He was probably about five foot six with floppy brown hair and browning teeth. His face was that of a pubescent Egon Schiele, which Alice supposed was handsome in an abstract sort of way, but his partying with undergraduates indicated some kind of latent infantilism that made her think that he would skin her alive at the first opportunity. Not that the prospect was altogether unattractive. She thought about how pretty she might be reduced to bare muscle and tendon, about how shrunken globules of fat contrasted against corrugated red flesh might make for an interesting composition in her complexion, if you were a continental type pervert. The guy’s name was Andrew and Colm and him were now in some kind of argument about the Protestant Reformation.
Colm, a nominal Catholic, thought it was bad. Andrew thought it was good. Both of them arrived at their opinions through very silly means. Colm was under the impression that the Roman Church and the Habsburgs and the monks and the nuns and the saints and the bishops constituted some kind of nouveau-Roman empire and that having an empire lording over Europe (east of the Danube didn’t count) was a good thing even though he did not explain and Andrew did not contradict him. Andrew saw Luther as some kind of volkisch figure who affirmed the destiny of the Germanic peoples and that Christ on the cross was an irrelevant detail. Alice thought they were boring but she was happy that Colm found a friend with a similar level of functional Asperger’s to bounce his theory off of. She was inclined to side with Colm because she knew him better and because she liked paintings of stigmata women sobbing. But Andrew just kept going on and on, about how his last name was Schatzenbrau, about how his people were Prussians, about how it was really the Prussians and not the Anglos who beat Napoleon back, about how his people were geniuses, the likes of Wagner and Moltke and Spengler and Frederick the Great and Beethoven and Goethe. They were valorous and virtuous and it would be their destiny to dominate Europe. Merkel was a good Teuton, he said. She imagined this thin-faced twink clad in a pickelhaube charging into a mitrailleuse and laughed. They both looked at her and asked what’s so funny and she said nothing and snaked another cigarette into her mouth and said nothing’s funny. I’m just laughing to myself. And she scanned around for anyone she could talk to instead of these two.
The smoke made her want to puke so she stomped out the cigarette right after she lit it. She hadn’t noticed how crowded the place had gotten. When did people really start filling in? Half an hour ago? Forty-five minutes? How long had Colm been droning on for? She repositioned one of her feet and steadied her position. The smell of so much flesh and sweat and the sound of so many clanking consonant intervals at once was making her feel as though her feet were sinking into a bog. It would be funny if she puked in the pool, but then she’d be banned like Colm, even though that didn’t seem to stop him coming to these things. He won’t ever shut the fuck up about how much he hates hippies. Was he trying to get laid? Who would ever fuck Colm? I wouldn’t fuck Colm. Was he bullshitting me? Maybe he didn’t even have a cock. Maybe he was smooth down there like a Ken doll. Maybe he was gay. No, if he was gay, he’d care more about how he looked and he wouldn’t be such a fucking slob. He did smell nice. Gold-bond and aftershave. I will allow him that much. Did he powder his taint? And his skin isn’t that bad apart from him being so deathly goddamn pale and even that isn’t really so bad it’s kind of got its own thing going for it so maybe he was a little frumpy that’s all but someone could fix him up maybe.
She could not see anyone that she knew. She could see anywhere from two dozen to twenty thousand people and she did not recognize any of them except she thought that maybe she saw one or two people from a Victorian literature class she had taken the previous semester except she did not know for sure if it was them and even if it was, she recalled them being very dull. And she could not move her head very fast anyways or she would make herself very sick and she only actually skipped dinner, she had eaten her lunch and expelled its contents half-digested into a toilet bowl shortly afterwards just a small amount of pressure on the uvula with the fore- and middle-fingers and it was over within a couple of minutes and she very well might do the same thing when she got home and then go to sleep with a burning taste on the back of her tongue.
So, for the time being, she was stuck with Colm and Andrew. The two of them weren’t attracting anyone else to their conversation. This was unsurprising. Alice wanted more alcohol but she did not want to leave Colm or Andrew because she was becoming entranced with the former’s physicality in spite of her own aesthetic preferences. Alice had never realized how small Colm’s feet were before, how his thighs and calves tapered like two big bags of icing into soft little ballerina’s feet. And there was something grateful about how his ass and his hips didn’t send him tumbling when he rocked up and down from the balls of his feet to his heels and then repeated the process. He always stayed aloft. That big dumb stupid bastard. She saw the leg-flesh tremble each time and the khaki-flesh clung to him and it was leg-flesh also. And it made a big THUMP every time his heels landed on the ground. She was not entranced with him in anything approaching a sexual manner but he was enveloping her nonetheless and he did not even have to do anything. He was too maternal to be lusted after. Too matronly. It would be different if there was muscle under the fat. Something that recalled a lost virility. As it stood, he was an estrogenous lump of lipid and bone. He was well-suited for a womb. To carry. To bring a brood of young into this world. He was designed to recline in a half-moon position, nested, nude, with his offspring suckling on his teats, He was a great pale sow with glasses and teeth and feet.
The mass flesh and cloth and sweat congealed around Alice and it oppressed her and she continued to fixate so as to avoid recognizing the existence of so many lips and teeth in one coordinate. His argument with Andrew came more and more to resemble a sumo wrestler being antagonized by a chihuahua. Surely Andrew did not come to an undergraduate party with the sole intention of arguing with a fat man. There was absolutely no way he did not come here with the intention of a quick fuck. Just like the other men here. And he was losing to Colm, a professional, that poor motherfucker was nothing but knots and eyebrows now, little ridges of spittle dotting his lower lip in morse-code punch-cards. This man knew nothing of life except to humiliate himself. He had done nothing but humiliate himself every minute of every day. He was a bug on the windshield of his own dasein. In his past life, Colm was probably a Thomas Aquinas or Ignatius of Loyola. He could not be humiliated. He did not need to fuck. He could gestate. He could nurture the whole of the world in the warmth of his gut.
Someone was passing a joint around. Alice hated weed but she took a puff anyways. There was a new band now. It sounded exactly like the first band and all the members looked the same as the first band except the bass player was a boy and not a girl. They probably all fucked and Colm did not fuck but Colm was more pure fuck than any of them any of those stupid fucking dilettantes. She needed to hold something. She needed to be inside something warm very quickly very fast. Her desiccation ripened into revulsion. She had not been cutting enough, she had not been cold water, she had hardly said a single goddamn thing at all. She had been forced into the spectator’s booth and she was drunk and she was lonely even though she was not alone.
She said hey Colm and Colm said yeah and Alice said I’m going to go get another beer and Colm said alright. Alice said I want you to come with me and Colm said alright if you want me to I will. He told Andrew I’ll be right back in a minute or two. She grabbed him by the arm and strode in big sloppy steps and went inside and walked past the table where they were selling beers to a couple of great boys in khaki shorts and fringe haircuts. Colm said what are you doing and Alice said come on, come on and Colm said alright, alright but you’d better not get me in any more shit because the last time and Alice said will you please just shut the fuck up Colm I’m trying to have fun we’re going to have fun and Colm said alright.
They snuck behind a couple of co-oppers who were supposed to be bouncers but were drunk and high and looking at their phones. Alice and Colm went up a staircase and on the second floor the lights were off and there was nobody. Alice shushed Colm and the two of them went into a room with a pool table and a large television and the lights were off and there was nobody.
She grabbed his sleeve and grinned and told him to sit down and he sat down and she sat down too. She pushed him on the shoulder to get him to scoot into the corner and he did and she scooted into the corner also. His face was navy blue and his cheeks were folding into big rubbery jowls. His lips were slightly parted and he breathed soft and slow down the front of his shirt. She asked if he was okay and he said yeah, yeah, I’m alright. She put her face between his chin and his chest and inhaled. A hint of ginger. He choked a bit on his breath and said oh, Jesus Christ. Alice asked are you alright and he said yeah, yeah, I’m alright and she said okay and pulled up his shirt and kissed his navel and he said ah ahh Jesus Christ Jesus Christ Alice and she said are you sure? Are you sure this is alright and he said yes, Jesus Christ, yes it’s alright don’t stop don’t stop keep going please for the love of Christ keep going Alice keep going don’t stop and she said alright and she kept going and she didn’t stop. She kissed his navel again. His big fat beautiful navel like a blue moon with a big asshole and she squeezed the underside of his thigh and she licked his gut in a big circle and squeezed him again but harder this time and she felt him get hard against her and she wanted to puke but she kept going. She kept going.
She could feel the little curls of his belly hair on her tongue and traced it like India ink and she gagged and buried her face in his stomach and there was no sweat on him. He was totally cold and dry and she just wished that he was warm like the womb she knew he was so she could crawl inside of him and sleep for ten thousand years and he would be so kind if he let her do that, so kind, it would be so kind for him to do that for her and she choked on her own lungs and she felt her cheeks spasm and she started crying and she asked Colm am I a nice girl? Am I nice? And he said what’s wrong? Of course you’re nice, of course you are, and he tried to put his hand on her head but she swatted it away and she said Colm dammit I don’t want to be nice to anyone anymore! I’m so sick and goddamn tired of being nice, being so fucking NICE to people can’t you see that? Can’t you see how sick and goddamn tired I am of being so goddamn fucking NICE all the time? I’m never nice to you I’ve never been fucking nice to you once and you still said I’m fucking nice. What does that MEAN Colm? What the fuck does that even fucking MEAN? I’ve been nice my whole goddamn life! Do you have any idea of how sick and fucking tired of it I am? Do you think I’m pretty? Am I fucking pretty to you? I mean I put on makeup and I dress nice but I don’t do it so I can be fucking pretty for anyone. Not for you not for anyone. And everyone thinks I want to fuck them and well maybe I did for a while but not anymore. Not anymore! I just want warmth, I want something that’s forever and never and nothing. I wish I didn’t have any skin so I could feel everything all the time all at once. I’m poison. I know it. I just know I’m fucking poison and everything I ever touch is just going to turn to shit total total shit. I want to be an artist Colm you know how bad I want to be an artist but I’ll never do it because everything I ever touch just turns to SHIT it turns to SHIT. I just want to do something beautiful in my life Colm can’t you fucking see that? And Colm said that’s not true, that’s not true at all and Alice said WILL YOU PLEASE JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP COLM? WILL YOU? FOR ONCE IN YOUR GODDAMN LIFE WILL YOU PLEASE JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP PLEASE PLEASE SHUT UP SHUT THE FUCK UP.
She cried some more and Colm was silent and then she started up again. She said how the hell did you ever get so smart anyways Colm? How did you? How the fuck did you ever get so goddamn smart. I know you’re a whole hell of a lot smarter than me or whatever. I get that. I get that but I don’t believe it you know why? Because I’m just as goddamn fucking smart as you are and I ALWAYS HAVE BEEN just as GODDAMN FUCKING SMART as you EVER fucking were and I mean that. I really do. I can’t drop as many fucking names as you or whatever but I swear to god I’m smart I really am I really am. I know how people are and I can see things in people and I get people a whole hell of a lot better than you’ll ever fucking get anybody. But god fucking dammit I wish I was smart. I mean I wish people thought I was smart the way people think you’re smart alright. Because you aren’t really that smart at all. You’re a coward. You’re a fucking coward. You’ll never be beautiful in your life you’ll never be a goddamn artist. You’ll never be beautiful Colm you know that? You’ll never be beautiful. You know how goddamn bad I wish I was beautiful? Do you have the first goddamn idea about beauty? I want to be beautiful not pretty just beautiful for the love of God I just want to be fucking beautiful I want to put beauty into the world and the world isn’t letting me and god FUCKING dammit is that too much to FUCKING ask? Is it? Tell me right fucking now Colm if it’s too fucking much to ask. I don’t want to be pretty because then all anyone ever wants to do is fucking fuck you or something. Isn’t that right isn’t that fucking right isn’t that all they ever want to fucking do. I don’t want to fuck anyone ever again for as long as I live do you understand that Colm? Never again for as long as I fucking live on this fucking Earth. I swear to fucking God. God fucking dammit Colm do you still have a fucking boner? Is that all you ever wanted to fucking do you fucking asshole? Just fuck me? Jesus Christ Colm get the fuck up get the fuck out of here. I should have fucking known all you ever wanted to fucking do was fucking fuck me you stupid fucking pervert fuck you. Just get the fuck out of here and Colm tried to say I’m sorry I’m really fucking sorry and Alice said fuck you fuck you just get the fuck up and get the fuck out of here please please get the fuck out of here. I never want to see you again, I never want to fucking see any of you fucking assholes again for as long as I fucking live. I never want to fucking see anybody ever again. I am so fucking sick. And Colm got up and went out the door and down the stairs.
She sat there in the dark for ten fifteen minutes with her eyes open and her mouth closed and she didn’t think about a single thing. The only constant to her being was her physical tangibility, the easy in and out of her own breath, the pure revocation of noumena. She was pure synapse now. Electrons running down thin little strings flossing inside of her head. She was a sunbathing iguana. She was not crying and her tears were dry wallpaper paste on her cheeks and her chin and her mouth.
She got up and she did not think. She went to the other side of the upstairs landing and descended a staircase opposite to the one she had ascended from and made her way into the co-op kitchen. Then she went to the knife rack and got a meat cleaver and she set her hand on the counter. She thought about extending her ring finger but she was afflicted with the distant possibility of matrimony so she stuck her pinky out instead. She got it with one clean thwack and it did not hurt at all.
Alice was bleeding very badly but she did not see that she was bleeding very heavily because it was dark and her jacket and her skirt were black anyways. She wrapped the loose digit in some paper towels and put it in her purse. Then she got some more paper towels and wrapped her hand like a boxer. She walked back up the stairs and down the opposite stairs and her head felt like it was full of cotton and her eyes felt very shallow and as she was headed out the front door to leave the place her legs crumpled underneath her and her head hit the ground with one clean thwack and everything was dark and she smelled metal and she tasted metal and she could hear Colm yell Alice, Alice, Jesus, are you alright?
Maxwell Gordon is a writer in Texas.
High Horse 
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