It is smell as
provides his conduit between the two; every hospital he’d ever visited dulled
with that exact same odour, a disinfected and sterile antiseptic registering
more keenly in the senses than either room’s muted palette, or those fixtures
common to both.
Today, he perceives the distance between that building
from which he has just arrived to this as nothing more than a simple
time-travel fingerclick, no matter the actual hours of train journey endured,
enduring here again that time permitted as visitor in his habitual silence,
prepared to acknowledge as reductive his ascribing to the chair in either
room his any sense of discomfort retaining as he actually does no concrete
memory of the chair in that other, as too he will forget this one upon which he
currently sits the moment he leaves the room.
Skunk: She’s... well
suddenly surprised to hear that unbroken quiet broken
now by a voice, his own no less, prompted by nothing more than the sight of his
thumb wrapped in its grubby bandage, excited at last to relate these recent
happenings out loud.
Skunk: I mean, ehm, just, just physically, she’s
shorter than me, she’s slight, she has a sort of ehm... she has dyed red hair,
like that henna stuff, and short, she has short hair. I think she might be a
student at the university although she eh, her feat-, ehm, she has a young
face, maybe too young to be a
student, and I think she’s American. She sounded American.
prompting him now to dig again from out the
watch-pocket of his 501s the Canadian 25 cent silver coin, full minutes passing
in its contemplation.
Skunk (as if considering this for the first time): I
mean, I suppose it’s also entirely possible she’s Canadian.
Contrary to the nurses’ assertion, he knows her to be
beyond his hearing, or suspects as much anyway, but even in such refuses to
abandon the narrative.
Skunk: And she had a, an, it’s a sort of doll thing
that, like E.T., but it had, it was... it was broken.
all his telling consciously edited of its every
upsetting detail.
Skunk: That’s what happened to my thumb,
holding it up to pick at a loose thread on the bandage
and, finding it tight attached, trying subsequently to bite it free,
Skunk: when I was looking for the doll’s arms I
accidentally put my thumb through an old bottle and cut it, the glass had a
looking at the swell of fabric, trying to recall the
wound he hoped healing underneath.
Skunk: It was, eh... Remember when I was a kid and I
had that, ehm... It was a balloon kit, a sort of green... gel that you attached
to the end of a, a straw, and you could blow it up to be a sort of balloon? A
kind of, if you left them, if they actually stayed inflated, they’d
get really... brittle, a...
his mind wandering across the past
Skunk: ..a membrane, that’s what the bottle was like,
like a skinny membrane, that’s exactly how easily my thumb went through it, it
was so old. Brittle glass.
a sympathetic pulse erupting fast now within his
thumb.
Skunk: The little arms had come right off, it was all
a bit... Anyway, I collected the various bits together and had it repaired for
her, took it to the shoe repair place and they did it for me, and it looked
pretty good, to be honest. Not... It didn’t look like new, but it was, it was
pretty good, better than it had been anyway.
with something to this of an inverted glass underwater
holding air.
Skunk (quoting): “Red-haired women are bad luck.”
in the speaking of which he notices the thinning out
of his mother’s own, as if the scalp had simply relinquished it, had come to
understand it as something of which there was no further want, and how this
lessening in particular changed her appearance more than the madness itself.
Removing the new and still pristine pewter hipflask
from the inner pocket of his denim jacket, he taps at it with the same hand’s
fingers to ascertain its charge.
Skunk: I just got this,
unscrewing the squeaky cap
Skunk: Jesus, who needs that?
swallows
Skunk: and I ehm, I went to a, it was a play based on
the life of the Elephant Man.
chuckles to himself, sighs
Skunk: I had, I, basically what happened was I’d had
way too much to drink
tapping again at the hipflask, then drinking
Skunk: but that itself wouldn’t have been a problem,
it was the play, it was, God a’mighty... They threw me out, anyway, like
actually practically lifted me up physically from out my seat and took me to
the street. For ehm, I was... misbehaving is about the kindest way of phrasing
it.
Sighs.
Skunk: Jesus.
his eyes suddenly wettening,
Skunk: I’m sorry. Mum I’m so sorry.
And here now with
both of them gone, with the three of
them gone, his first attempt at clearing out seems much less that than a
burrowing further in, discovering as
he does lying in her bureau in an inverted box lid, and beneath a variety of
pamphlets such as might be collected from a doctor’s waiting room, her
hairbrush, from out the still matted bristles of which he succeeds in
disnetangling, intact, a single brittle hair he then, subject to no
recognisable or comprehensible impulse, tongues on into his mouth, before
dragging toward him the nearest whiskey bottle, the house at this time being
littered with multiples of same in their varying degrees of emptiness.
It has no taste,
the hair, a texture too of so near nothing as to initially confound his every
repeated attempt at its swallowing, applying himself alongside the liquor’s
consumption to the methodical separation of each, of such colour variance as to
suggest its having been brushed from off two individual scalps, at least, and
to the swallowing of each subsequent, long drunk enough not to gag upon this
engaging with the sacrament.
Exalted to some
grotesque ecstasy he buries his fingers in the black mass of his own hair and
begins to pull, his eyes watering with the pain, the skin of his scalp
stretched to the absolute extent of its finite elasticity before each
individual hair in his grip is ripped from out its own follicle, the torn flesh
colouring now with its myriad risen dots of blood.
Skunk: “Touch me
not, for I am not yet ascended to my Father."
and in such
accomplishment creates for himself an itch that even if he could never scratch
he might yet still over and again entirely remove, over and again.
Skunk’s eyes roll
up inside their sockets as if in such he might access and thus subvert the
workings of his mind, himself so very clearly lost in the increasing and
accumulant dust of himself.
