A. Homes - The End of Alice

“Eyes front,” the guard at my back says, poking me with a billy club.

Due to renovation work, the infirmary has temporarily been relocated to the main building, the administration area, where the corridors are wide and free people, employees of the state, secretaries and civil servants, pass by. They stare. I growl. That is the voice I have left. The cool wand of the billy club taps my shoulder and then brushes against my ear. My head twitches. “Don’t push it,” the guard says.

In pain. My gut.

In the examination room someone screams. My keepers yank my chains. The doctor, blood-splattered, steps into the hall, followed by an inmate. The back of his head shaved. I take note of the long, thick line of stitches running across the rear of his skull.

“Slipped in the shower,” the doctor says, chuckling. Everyone laughs.

The inmate is led past me, shaking, drenched in his drying blood.

My stomach, my weak stomach, my sensitive intestines, curl tighter. I am taken in. A male nurse asks my complaint, and while I’m still shackled, my shirt is unbuttoned, my pants are pulled down, trousers and boxer shorts bunched around the steel at my ankles.

The doctor enters. He is a short, pig-faced man, pink not red, too pink like a runt still struggling to stay alive. What makes a man become a prison doctor? A sentence of his own, the payback of a certain debt? A bad loan? A good doctor does not put himself behind bars, does not give up the nice bums and pretty titties of the upper classes for the privilege of serving the poor, the pathetic, the perverted.

I am rolled onto my side.

“Bend your knees,” the male nurse hisses in my ear, his breath tickling the short hairs.

I do what I can. The metal around my ankles clanks.

“Ever had a rectal?” the doctor asks, jamming a jellied finger into my blind orifice, my toothless mouth, under my tangled tongue and up.

I suffer the indignity of a man in chains, his pants pulled down, privates probed by a putz, while a male nurse, major homo, looks on with great approval.

“Have you ever engaged in homosexual activity?”

Mama pulls her blond hair back, piles it high on her head, and pins it there where it won’t get wet. Strays trail down her neck. Her neck is damp, perspiration mixed with perfume, a sweet fruit, a strong liquor, the place you want to bury yourself, to drink. I kiss her neck and, with my lips still pressed to her skin, inhale. Her neck seeps sweat. Teardrops afraid to escape her eyes sneak out the back, slipping down her spine only to find her ass and be sucked back in.

Slowly, she descends the steps into the water. Her body, round, truly a pear, a plum and then some. The most beautiful woman, front and back. Still the Tomato Queen.

She sighs, sweeps her arms wide, and splashes. “Heaven,” she says.

I slip out of my underwear, leave everything folded on the chair, and sit for a minute on the cot; naked, totally naked, so naked.

Mama smiles. “You know, this town is where I met your father. Right here in this park, at a party for the Strawberry Festival. He towered like a tree.”

She’s back. We will go home to our house and summer will start again. In my memory it is always summer. None of this will ever have happened. The bath will wash us, will clean us, erase everything, and we will begin again.

I plunge in and swim to my mother.

“Your father loved it here. This was the one tub he could fit into. From the time he was ten or twelve he was just too big. He loved baths. Liked to soak.”

She leaves the bath, pulls a bottle from her purse, and pours herself a glass. “Bathtub gin,” she says, carrying the glass back into the water.

In the water, she turns pink, she turns red. She lies back clutching the bar that goes the whole way around, and like a ballet dancer doing her exercises, she opens and closes her legs. She teases me, making waves.

“Did I ever show you what having you did to me?”

I shake my head.

She shows me her breasts. “I’m bagged out,” she says, cupping them, holding them up, pointing them, aiming them at me like missiles. “Bombs away,” she says. “You stretched me all out.”

“Sorry,” I say, horrified.

“Nothing to apologize for. It’s my own damn fault.”

She reaches for the bottle she’s left by the side of the tub, refills her glass, and drinks quickly.

“Have you ever engaged in homosexual activity?” the doctor asks.

“Yes,” I say, naively thinking that something about the way my butt hole hangs will tell him anyway, thinking that even if I don’t say it, he’ll know.

“Do you have a regular partner or more than one partner?”

I don’t answer.

“Who is your partner?” he asks, wiggling his finger high into my gut.

Again, I don’t answer and he doesn’t ask again. He pulls his hand out, snaps the glove off, and throws it across the room toward the trash can. It lands on the floor. Who will pick it up? Surely not the doctor, not the nurse, and not me. Who then?

“Blood in your stool?”

“No.”

“Pain on urination?”

“No.”

“Burning? Frequency?”

“No.”

“Impotence?”

“I’m frightened,” she suddenly says. Her face has lost its color, she goes white, deathly white. “Give me a hug.”

I go to her. Swim there. She pulls me against her. My cheek, my mouth, is at her breast. She flattens me against it and sees my embarrassment rise under the water.

“Impotence?”

I shake my head. “No.”

Mama smiles and hugs me hard, looking down at my rise through the water.

“Go ahead,” she says, holding my head in her hands, turning it so that my mouth is at her nipple. “If it belongs to anyone, it belongs to you.” She moves my head back and forth over it. The softest skin, not skin but a strange fabric, a rare silk. My lips are sealed.

She rubs her finger over my mouth. “Open,” she says. “Open up. It’s only me, it’s your mama. Taste, just taste.”

Like butter, only it doesn’t melt. A tender saucer that pulls tight under my tongue, ridges and goose bumps.

She reaches for my hand. I try to pull away.

“No.”

“Yes,” she says, pulling harder on the arm, leading it toward the place between her legs.

“No,” I say more desperately.

My hand goes through a dark curtain, parting velvet drapes. My fingers slip between the lips of a secret mouth. My mother makes a sound, a guttural ahhh. I try to pull my hand out, but she pushes it back in. Pushes it in and then pulls it out, pushes and pulls, in and out, in, out.

“It’s your home,” she says, one hand at the back of my neck, holding my head against her still, the other on my hand, keeping me there, her leg wrapped around my leg.

“It’s your home,” she says again. “You lived there, before you lived anywhere else. You’re not afraid of going home, are you?”

It grows slick, greasy with something wetter than water. My hand is inside my mother, in a place I never knew was there. Deeper. She takes three fingers and threads them into her. Perfume and juices, the cavern grows. She moves the hand in and out. My fingers are swallowed.

She grabs my arm at the wrist. “Fist,” she says. “Make a fist, curl your paw.” It doesn’t go at first. Too large. “Push,” she says. And I do. “Harder.” My knuckles round the edge of the bone and pop in. My fist is inside her. My fist, like I’m angry. I turn it around, screwdriver, drill. I feel the walls, the meat she’s made of, dark and thick. My fist is in and almost out and then in again. Her fingers dig into my biceps, she is controlling me. “Go,” she says deeply, desperately. “Go. More.” She is pushing and pulling. I’m rocking, fighting. Buried in my mother, I’m boxing. Boxing Mama, punching her out, afraid my hand will come off, afraid the contractions of her womb will amputate me at the wrist. My shoulder is stretching, nearly popping out, and I can’t stop. That much is clear. Whatever I do, I can’t stop. She is filled with fury and frustration and there is no way of saying no.