Bob Fingerman: Pariah

Dabney touched his forehead and plucked a strip of his peeling skin away and pressed it onto his tongue, tasting his own acrid saltiness on the paper-thin jerky substitute. He let the rind sit there for a while, building up sufficient saliva to swallow it. He knew this was disgusting behavior, but so what? He was doing a self test of what senses he could stimulate. Taste: check. Touch: check. Sight: negative. Hearing? All was quiet above and below so Dabney forced an acidic burp. Check. Smell?

Smell.

Smell had taken a beating in recent months, not that smell had ever been his favorite. The nullification of smell was sort of a blessing, given the circumstances. So, three out of five, for the time being. Morning would come and sight would soon return to the roster.

Four out of five.

Not bad.

“Jesus, even a little air movement would be an improvement. Movement. Improvement. A breeze through the trees would please as it rolled over my knees like a disease or honey from bees and it would ease my… my… Fuck. Lost it.”

With the rhyming game over, Karl rolled over on his side; the mattress where he’d been lying was damp with perspiration. Moisture he could ill afford to lose. Karl stared at the wall, or at least in the direction of the wall. It was so dark he couldn’t see it, but it was there, a thin layer of protection between him and them. And he wasn’t even thinking about the big them. The capital T them . He was just thinking about the them that constituted the others in the building. His neighbors.

All the windows of apartment 5B were open but you’d never know it, the air was so still it felt like a vacuum. Karl inhaled deeply through his nose, some buildup within the nasal passage creating a high-pitched whistling noise. He breathed in, out, in, out, changing the tempo, attempting to negate his insomnia by nose whistling some half forgotten pop tune, the melody of which had come unbidden from the depths of his subconscious. What was that tune? Now he began to hum it, a ditty sans lyrics. But there were lyrics. He knew that much. This was killing him now. The more he hummed, stretching out the notes, the less the words came into focus. This was killing him. Well, not really. But it wasn’t helping.

Weighing, like, a hundred or so pounds was killing him.

Being dehydrated was killing him.

Not sleeping was killing him.

The earworm was merely aggravating.

With internal creaks and pops belying his actual age of twenty-eight, Karl swung his legs over the side of the bed and touched his toes to the bare wooden floorboards, which were as warm as everything else. What kind of world was this where even the floor was tepid? Floors were supposed to be cool to the touch. Even in summer.

Before stepping from the bed, Karl groped at his night table for matches. Though he was loathe to strike one and add to the heat even a little, he was more averse to stubbing his toes or tripping over something. After living in this apartment for the last few years you’d think he’d know the lay of the land, even blind. But he didn’t. His sweaty palm found the book of matches and Karl snapped one into life, the brightness singeing his eyes for a moment as they adjusted to this pinprick of light in the absolute dark. The small dancing light found the blackened wick of one of the candles, which sputtered to life, creating a pool of comforting incandescence.

Karl had lots of candles, gifts from his mother, aunts, grandma, and past girlfriends. Even female coworkers-Secret Santa crap. What was it with women and candles? He’d gotten them as gifts, pretended he’d appreciated them, then thrown them all in a box in his closet. Now he was grateful for them-except the scented ones. He’d learned that lesson the hard way. The fresh, fruity, cinnamony, flowery aromas reawakened his dormant sense of smell, unfamiliar odors rousing the olfactory receptors, which in turn refreshed the revulsion from the overwhelming tang of rot outside. It had only taken one Apples ’n’ Spice candle to teach him his lesson. He’d lit the wick, basked for a moment in the delicious bouquet, and then puked from a crushing whiff of the ceaseless alfresco parade of putrescence.

So, unscented.

In the light Karl could make out the trappings of his bedroom. The posters on the wall-Kiss, Slipknot, Metallica, Judas Priest, Ozzy, Motörhead, Korn-reassured him, though none of those bands was responsible for the rogue melody assailing his brain at the moment. What was it? Familiar yet unfamiliar. It was sort of pretty in an annoying kind of way.

Karl’s eyes roved to The Wall of Beauty, a veritable tapestry of pinups, centerfolds, magazine clippings, and most personally gratifying (and now, in retrospect, most painfully sentimental), Polaroids from the good old days when he was “getting some” and could occasionally convince his conquests to pose for him in the raw. When things had been different he’d been discreet and kept these pix salted away in a private place, but now? Now they were on permanent display.

Karl got up from the bed and shuffled over to the wall. The flickering candlelight made the images seem to writhe. Though there was some mild twitching south of his personal equator, it was insufficient for the purpose of autoeroticism. Eroticism! What a joke. Is there anything less erotic than jacking off before an altar of two-dimensional representations of nubile flesh? Of any flesh? In this case, dead flesh? All dead. At least Karl assumed they were all dead. So, did whacking to these beauties’ images constitute virtual necrophilia? Back in the day, one of Karl’s fave porn starlets offed herself. Consequently, his massive cache of videos in which she’d appeared became anathema to his libido. He gave the tapes away to a friend less burdened by… what would that be? Sentiment? Conscience? Ethics? Empathy? Plain old decency?

Decency seemed an antiquated concept. So when he could work up the energy these days, he spanked to dead ladies. Were there any other kind?

Karl ran his fingertips over some favorite images. Long of leg, wide of hip, narrow of waist, all with come-hither eyes. His prize was the Polaroid of Dawn-Anne McCarthy, his junior high crush. He’d run into her years after they’d graduated, on line at a store here in the city. Her disdain for him in junior high had vanished and for a few dazzling weeks they’d fulfilled every last one of his adolescent fantasies about her, and several his pubescent mind had been too inexperienced to even conjure.

Until he’d blown it, of course.

“You were the best, baby,” Karl said, touching the tip of his index finger to the flossy hub of Dawn’s sex. He exhaled with conspicuous melancholy, not that there was anyone to notice or lend comfort. “You were my Everest.”

Karl flushed with embarrassment at his floridity, then looked up at the ceiling and considered going up to the roof. Maybe it was cooler up there. Maybe there was some air up there. Then he considered Dabney and reconsidered, slunk back to bed, blew out the candle, and curled up on his side on the edge, in an attempt to avoid the damp spot.

Which was warm.

“You asleep?”

Across the hall, in 5A, Ruth Fogelhut poked her husband of forty-six years in his xylophone ribs with her chicken claw of a hand, her hard, pointed fingers raking his translucent epidermis and leaving behind scarlet trails-not that either could see them in the dark.

“Who sleeps around here? Especially…” Pause for a brief dry-throated coughing fit. “… with you torturing me all through the night. Sleep? What is this thing you call sleep? I should be so lucky to sleep. Even a nightmare is preferable to your constant mutchering .”