A. Homes - The End of Alice

She nods. “Again tomorrow?”

“Sure, why not,” he says, waving the ten through the air before he pockets it and walks off.

I am here, taking it up the ass, and she is out there, roaming the hills, the valleys, of Scarsdale, Larchmont, Mamaroneck, in a post-acquisition high, a moment of tranquillity, of pseudo-satiation. And in that flash of release, she has relaxed her vigilance. Upon returning home, balancing her electrolytes with Lay’s potato chips and Orange Crush, she allows herself to be cajoled into Mummy’s car and led to the shopping mall. She is there now, trying on tennis togs, having her racket restrung, shopping for the supplies her fantasy demands.

That she is so clever, manipulative, as to have both him and me engaged is something that were I younger, I would feel the need to take to heart. Taking matters in hand, I would remind her that though I am caged, I remain viable — a man. I would dilly myself, shoot onto the page, leave it to dry, then fold the crusty wad into even sections and slip it into an envelope, mailing it to her for reconstitution. In the comfort and privacy of her room, she would collect in her mouth a fine blue loogie, a big ball of spit, and drop it down onto my page and, then with either the tip of a pencil or her pinky finger, would swirl the two together. And then as if applying a plaster, a medical paste, she would collect the material on her finger or perhaps raise the page itself, pull down her panties, and rub it against herself. Like that, we would be together. And I, in my cell, connected to my fluid as though it were my faith, would shudder and ripple as she worked the paper back and forth until our wetnesses mixed and the thin blue lines that rule were all worn off, until the paper itself was just a sliver, thin as a pathologist’s cross section. Finished, she would drop this page onto the floor by the bed, and later in the afternoon she’d slide it — r-still not quite dry — back into the envelope, tape the seal, and with a red pen mark it Return to Sender.

“Been opened,” the postman would say, squeezing the damp, the lumpy. “Can’t return to sender if it’s been opened.”

“Didn’t open it,” she’d say. “Came that way.”

And because she is sweet, and because she is young, and because she looks like his sister the Carmelite nun, he’d accept her letter and drop it in the great box bound for upstate.

Prison. Bells. Commotion in the corridor. I wake from my dream, rise from the fugue, and pull to the surface.

“He bit me. Broke the skin. Sick fuck took a chunk out of my arm.” A guard is crying.

The Special Tactics team has Appfelbaum, the abortionist with the habit of snacking on the fetuses he scraped, cornered, pushed back into his cell.

“Broke the skin. Sick fuck. Does he have rabies? Tetanus? Something worse? Do I have to get tested? Do I have to get shots? I hate this place, fucking zoo.”

Appfelbaum’s door slams closed; the click of the lock falling into place echoes down the hall.

“I ain’t gonna lie,” Frazier says. “No point pretending. Just is the way it is. No surprise.”

How does the watched pot boil? How to let it steam, simmer, froth, without them knowing? If it spills out and over, they will put it down fast and furiously. I know. I have been shackled to this Cot and left to twist and turn for days and nights, the shackles so biting my flesh that I required stitches. I have been left alone and awry in a dark bed, a wretched wet stink. I have been swaddled, stuffed into a straitjacket pulled so tight that my ribs broke and my breath slipped away from me in a thin, high whistle. Trapped and tied and left for days, involuntarily paralyzed. I’m too old for that now — not too old for them to do it, they have no limit, but too old to have it done. I haven’t the stamina. In my blood, in my muscle and veins, there still lurks the impulse, the urge, the coursing poison of rage. But in my effort to contain it, to spare myself the humiliation of an explosion — imagine how much more forceful an explosion is in a confined space, how much more hazardous — I turn this poison on myself. I maim myself in order to stay the line, in order to go unnoticed. I pain myself so deeply, so thoroughly, that when I am through, I have no ability, no interest, in paining others— or so one might think. But if you are smart, you must know that as I hurt myself — and I feel I am hurting myself for you — as I assume the burden and beat you to the punch, I loathe you all the more. It is too much to keep inside. If I were able to relieve myself, to simply piss it out, it would hiss and foam a thick black and inky line. The body is not the proper capsule for such poison. And my contempt for what I am made to do to myself mounts, so, when you are not looking, and be sure that at some point you will blink, your mind will wander, I’ll slip this blade that I carry stealthily, silently into your heart.

My poison is my vigilance.

The bells ring. Order is restored. Everything is as it was.

What time is it? I wonder, but there’s no one to ask— Frazier doesn’t wear a watch.

Clayton is in the doorway. “Edge of Night,” he says. “Edge of Night, can I?” I nod. He turns on the television and fits himself onto the cot next to me. The episode is well under way. I want to fall into someone, collapse upon her/him and have the walls of my skin, the container of my vessel, dissolve so that their embrace becomes me, envelops and swallows me. She is strong enough to take it. I can tell. She has the stamina, the muscle of youth. I look at Clayton, the beautiful boy, and wonder what he sees in me — father figure, I fear — what our relationship really is. That someone should climb in and voluntarily curl so close fills me with a sense of success and disbelief, repulsion and love. And with Clayton, that I have done nothing to deserve this fortune, that I have made no seduction, no grand overture, is my gift and my punishment.

I run out of the room, even though running indoors is prohibited. Up and down the hall, always stopping halfway, stopping before the end. I cannot come up against the metal wall, the immobile door. To touch, to even accidentally brush against it will compel me to hurl myself, forcibly butt my head against it again and again until my skull cracks, until it bleeds, until I am senseless and no longer know where I am, until I cannot see, stand, or speak, until I no longer know where the wall is, until I am truly powerless, until my heart actually stops.

I think of you, your picket fences, flower beds, holly bushes, your life measured by the alarm clock’s tick, the car-pool rotation. You claim to be a prisoner, but until you suffer the anxiety raised by the uselessness of decision, of desire, you are free. As I mentioned before, there is little need to control oneself here, except that it is degrading not to; if you don’t do it yourself, they will do it for you, that much is proven, and it will not be pleasant, that too is promised, guaranteed. You long to break out but comfort yourself with the structure you rebel against. You encircle the goods you are hoarding, all that you own, those damned privet-hedge definitions of what is yours and what is mine; your houses, cars, wives, children. That is why you are there and I am here. They say I have trouble with boundaries. How close can I get? How far can I go? I have a populist’s streak that says all for one and one for all. I am not a stingy man, but then, the sum total of my possessions would fit neatly into two cardboard boxes. Who has more? Argument could be made, could be won, saying that by having nothing, no actual object, I have everything. I am neither defined nor bounded by what I own. Truth be told, I am jealous of you, hungry to touch, to feel, to hold each item in your drawers: steak knives and potato peelers, twenty-five pairs of socks nestled nicely against your wife’s brassieres. Your gold cuff links and her good jewelry buried under your boxer shorts, the family jewels.