The
little glass held just a double-shot of whiskey, and within that summer’s
limited parentheses of knowledge he understood only the pouring of the very
first of these measures from a freshly-opened bottle would generate sound, air
bubbling in audibly around the liquor in that gurgling rush of its exit. Four
doubles would take him down into the label of a 70cl bottle, each shotglass
emptied of its heeltaps as he might empty the very air of whatever nourishment
it proffered.
Dressed
only in Levi’s undershorts and with his tall walking stick forsaken in favour
of whatever support might be available in whatever immediate furniture, and
while physically circumscript by those dimensions as defined the house, he
dwelt instead in the welcome protracted impasse of a nostalgia sustained by
alcohol and by his repudiation of all outside interference, avoiding even the
merest intimation of hope, any acknowledgement of which he feared might result
in his absolute expulsion from that recent past he so loved and to which he
still so tightly clung.
Malnourished,
drowsy with summer heat and the alcohol consumed, in such condition he was at
some remove from all concept of time, awake ignorant of the day, date, or hour,
which even if vouchsafed and in such instances where confusion was possible,
would confuse him in the regarding of its context as that of morning or of
night.
Left
as it was at any moment, his arm itself might thereon have served function as
some form of calendar, the skin tightening to scab around each of the
lacerations as they healed. That, or perhaps the slow growth of his hair,
beard, or nails. Thwarting all though, those abuses he repeated upon his flesh
left him abandoned throughout that summer to an unhealed loop of himself,
driven back and again to whatever depth of abstraction he sought in the bottle
and the eating of those M&Ms he found from off the carpet, or clutching
them tight in his fist as he clummed around until he could open his palm flat
and the little sweets would remain adherent to the sweating flesh, even when
turned upside down, and shaken.
In
each routine recess of sobriety he repeatedly found himself surprised to be the
inhabitant of such a calamitous state of waste, much as the equally bereft of
short-term memory goldfish is believed surprised by those contents of its bowl.
It
was with neither small joy nor even memory of its removal that he would find
and find again his ear-ring, the tiny silver skunk on its silver hoop,
following each of which findings he would then sit for those minutes requisite
to its replacement, dedicated to this small task with that concentration common
to the utterly intoxicated.
Often
confounded by an initial inability, his earlobe reddened and swelled beneath
the crush of his drunk, clumsy fingers; he imagined himself repiercing the
hole, pushing through whatever thin film of regenerative tissue he supposed to
have grown across the puncture.
The
ringing telephone he would counter with
Skunk
(bellowing): PHONE HOME! PHONE HOME!
and
on one occasion screaming at a visitor beyond the door he refused to unlock
Skunk:
WAKE DUNCAN WITH THY KNOCKING!
with
a near echolaliac ignorance of those words’ actual meaning, or source.
And too,
there was some inheritant memory dormant beyond access and itchy in his muscle
returning him to that one section of the bathroom’s peeling wallpaper behind
which he could hear the sick ticking sound of his mother’s wasps.
In
the midst of which:
With
some unconscious nod to the day’s temperature, the recognition of midsummer
heat, he sought amongst the curated archive of their joy (opened and as yet
unopened brown cardboard boxes bearing the bookshop’s address) her birthday
Polaroid photographs taken on the train almost one exact year previous, saying
over and again to himself words felt remembered
Skunk:
“I celebrate thee above all.”
until
finding first his own portrait prompted the correction:
Skunk
(reading now from off the Whitman Strip): “I glorify thee above all.”
around which words were
scribbled in a hand years yet from womanhood quotation marks and her “said
Elvis” appendix, his own face from a year ago more alien to him now than the
image of E.T., the Polaroid of which he had also found, her steadfast doll
companion obscured in part by his hipflask out of focus in the foreground.
Lifting
both photographs up now into the light, the light illuminating too the back of
his left hand where blisters had bubbled up white beneath each burning match
extinguished upon his skin the night before, he began almost to chant that verb
he had failed to recall,
Skunk:
Glorify. Glorify. Glorify.
rolling
over onto his bare back and spreading his arms out wide to either side, the two
photographs still clutched in his damaged hand,
Skunk:
Glorify. Glorify. Glorify.
a
woeful and unwitting beggar before death.
