Michael Rizza - Cartilage and Skin

The girls seemed to become intrigued by my expertise, but they couldn’t possibly be enticed by it. Rather than visit clinics in Yalta or upon the Swiss Alps, I squatted beside corpses in garages, basements, and lonely apartments. With this current invention, though creative, Stephen seemed to have faltered a little — unless, of course, his machinations surpassed any concern for me in order to work somehow solely in favor of his own penis. For the sake of entertainment, he had committed me to telling a story, and he’d apparently assumed that if I were left on my own, without his assistance, I would flounder.

Bruni asked what was the worst way to kill yourself.

“It’s hard to choose,” I found myself saying; the alcohol was making me more adventurous. Despite my desire to see her smile or laugh, I adopted a false, serious tone. “Do you mean in terms of mess or in terms of pain?”

“I don’t know.”

“In terms of mess, people are very innovative. I don’t like to talk about it.”

She had light brown eyes, which now looked at me with a tinge of pity, searching my face. I felt obliged to keep talking, though I didn’t like this charade at all.

“I suppose the worst I’ve ever seen, in terms of pain, was with a small caliber gun. Before people shoot themselves, they often have a wrong idea about what is going to happen.”

At this point, Stephen chimed in, and the heavy sluggishness of his tongue made me realize that he was noticeably drunk. “Sometimes, if they get the angle wrong, when they put the barrel in their mouth, they blow off their cheek or the back of the neck.” As he spoke, he tapped his finger against his cheek and then the back of his neck. “But most often, it’s the roof of the mouth and the nose.”

“Oh, God,” Ann said.

“And they have to keep on living with that wound. Tell ’em, Walter.”

“No,” I said. “They don’t want to hear the gory stuff. Within a year, I’m going to be working more on the psychological end. This now is just a sort of internship. There is a position opening up in a clinic in Yalta, a very prestigious place, but they demand several years of fieldwork before they even consider you.” I sipped my beer, self conscious of being the center of attention. “You can actually learn a lot about a person by the way he kills, or tries to kill, himself. The act correlates intimately to his self-image.”

Bruni briefly touched the back of my hand with her finger. She seemed very sad. She moved her head and eyes slowly, in a mixture of drunkenness, sorrow, and sensuality.

“What about the small caliber gun?” she asked, the tone of her voice convincing me for a moment that I was, indeed, a suicide specialist.

“In the terms of anguish, it’s the worst I’d ever seen. People think it will make a clean hole through the other side of the head or maybe even burst out. What happens sometimes, however, when the caliber is too small, is that the bullet has enough power to enter through the bone but not enough to exit. The bullet ricochets around inside the skull, like a bean rattling in a jar. This one man had a wife and a kid, but he left them because they made him miserable. They were a yoke he could not bear. Yet, after a week or so of living on his own, he sliced up his brain pretty good. He stayed alive in his apartment for at least a day or two, walking around, shitting and pissing himself. We found him dead in the hall closet. He had chewed his fingernails down until they’d bled horribly.”

By the time I finished speaking, a silent sobriety crept over my audience. Even Stephen, the inventor of my occupation, now seemed struck by my story; he’d apparently forgotten himself and become caught up in my words, as though I possessed the bewitching capacity to speak my new identity into the existence. Feeling Bruni’s fingers on my hand and her soul reaching out to me in sympathy, I had an urge to abandon my vocation, but I couldn’t; I felt trapped in the moment. It was too late to unweave my words. Beyond my bleak theme, what had truly disturbed everyone must have been my delivery, for my voice had gradually become strained and quivery, as if I were struggling against a terrible burden within myself, which had grown heavier and heavier with each word, until I’d wrapped the whole table in the gloom of a funeral. If I wanted to take back the entire episode, it wasn’t because I’d lied, but because I had revealed too much of the truth. When my father had put a bullet in his brain, it might not have ricocheted around in the way that I’d described, but it had certainly reduced a perfectly fine man into a state of retarded infancy, but not one marked by silly giggles or the senseless gaze of the lobotomized. Rather, his curled body had seemed to shrivel and twitch in response to some secret and paralyzing terror, as if the bullet had increased the very torment it’d been intended to relieve. Strangely, when I had started explaining my expertise to the girls, I had no idea that I was going to incorporate any personal information, let alone this. If not the alcohol, then surely Bruni’s hand and eyes had unsettled my dormant demons.

“Excuse me,” I said. It was my turn to use the bathroom.

When I started walking away from the table, I had a feeling that I wasn’t going to return. Although it would cost me my umbrella, overcoat, and sports jacket, not to mention a paperback, fred’s number, and Lyle Tartles’s card — I would be free. I edged my way through the mass of people in the bar area and followed a yellow arrow pointing into a narrow corridor. The bathroom doors were marked “Lads” and “Lasses,” and seemed to offer little privacy, not simply because they were louvered doors on spring hinges, but also because they were too small to fill their doorframes, stopping far too short of the floor and also the top of the frame. When I swung the lad’s door open, a girl was pulling up the zipper of her jeans, which were apparently a little tight on her. She glanced up at me, and before I could apologize for the intrusion, she informed me that the toilet for the lasses was clogged. I stepped back into the hallway and waited. Somebody came up behind me and asked if I was in line. I half-turned, nodded, and mumbled something. When the girl finally came out, possibly after many adjustments before the mirror or another bout upon the bowl, the young man playfully asked her if she’d remembered to “strike a match in there.” She told him to “fuck off,” which he seemed to interpret as flirtation because, smiling, he told her that she was “cuter than a button hole.” As soon as I entered the bathroom again, I heard the young man start talking to someone else who had just joined the line. I had my choice between a toilet and a urinal that were barely separated by a low partition bracketed to the wall. I chose the toilet. Before I even began to urinate, I recognized that the conversation behind me was about the accommodations in the restroom; then, as if to satisfy their curiosity, the young men crowded into the room. While one lingered directly behind me at the sink, the other hobbled forward and leaned over the urinal. He sighed the moment he began to relieve himself. I stood there with nothing happening. He flushed the urinal before he finished peeing, and when he at last finished, he flushed a second time. Laughing, he advised me not to try so hard. I continued to stand over the toilet, and in the reflection of the water I could see both my face and my genitals. I listened to the second young man urinate and then spend an agonizing amount of time primping himself in front of the mirror, before finally leaving. When I was alone, a few drops squeezed out of me and disrupted my reflection; then relief came in a steady flow. With the thought of returning home, my neighbor Claudia Jones entered my mind. I imagined she was a perverse woman who was somehow dispassionately associated with the ambiguous and naked W. McTeal. She appeared veiled in a dark mist of sensuality. Behind the door of her apartment — indifferently clothed in thin, delicate garments — she moved with gaudy ennui, from shadow to purple shadow. Somebody then burst into the bathroom. As the door clapped back and forth on its spring hinges, the person released in fits and starts a series of farts that he’d most likely been holding in; he grumbled, as if angry or annoyed, and then quickly departed, setting the door into furious motion again. The disturbance halted both of my streams: that of urine and fantasy. By the time I washed my hands and reentered the hallway, I began to think how foolish it would be to abandon two pretty, drunken girls sitting at a table. Thus far, my life was a collection of botched moments and missed opportunities, and rather than alter this pattern, I was ready to perform another act of stupidity that I would one day probably regret. The image of Bruni’s wet finger gliding into her mouth and then, licked clean, glistening with her saliva — enticed me back to the table. As I approached, however, I saw that the table was vacant, save for Stephen, who was holding up a slip of paper, apparently calculating his tab. He looked at me and smiled, but he wagged his finger at me, as though reprimanding a child.