A. Homes - The End of Alice

She keeps my mouth at her breast. “Suck,” she says. “Bite it. It’s yours.” Harder and harder. Never enough.

And then with no warning, the teeth of this strange second mouth bite my hand. Her head goes back and she bellows like I’ve killed her, and I cry out, too, because she’s hurting me and I don’t know what’s happening. I’m scared and I want my hand back and I want my mother back and I want to be out of this place.

The anal exam is over. I am returned to my back, legs laid out straight. I give the doctor the gory details of all my comings and goings. Hesitantly, he presses my belly— they are loath to touch us, as though the criminal mind will seep out through the pores and poison them. The doctor feels his way around. What once was stiff has gone roly-poly.

Silence. The false solemnity of the occasion eats at me.

A long time has passed since I’ve spoken to a man without a sentence, a man without a gun.

“So how is it?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer. I attempt conversation. I speak as though I’ve forgotten that they are reluctant to treat our melancholia. If we’re sad and suffering, they are pleased; legally if not morally, they’re obligated by their mothers and wives, sons and daughters, to rub it in. They have done their jobs, the punishment is working.

I mention my concern about Clayton, his poor mood.

“I don’t do couples therapy,” the doctor says curtly.

He picks up my chart and scribbles simultaneously with his speech. “Gas,” he says, writing it down. “You’ve got bad gas.”

Wonder bread. The damned Wonder bread, they’ve never heard of wheat or rye.

“At your age,” he says, and then without finishing the thought, he turns away, digs deep into a steel cabinet, and pulls out a large canister of orange-flavored Metamucil. He hands it over as though he’s making a large and luxurious gift.

“Thanks,” I say. “Thank you very much. Thanks from the bottom of my heart, which just so happens to be located at the top of my bowels.”

The nurse eases me down off the table, all too experienced with the range of movement, the ins and outs of men in shackles. He bends and brings up my boxers, my trousers. I am allowed to zip myself.

As I shuffle out under heavy guard, the doctor taps the canister of Metamucil. “Two teaspoons in a glass of water every morning,” he says. “And you’ll be good as new.”

* * *

It’s over. As suddenly as it started, Mama holds up a hand. “Stop,” she says. “Stop,” she whispers in my ear. “It’s enough.” She puts her hand on my shoulder and tries to push me away, but my fist is still inside her. Suddenly, I am an intruder, a thief. I am doing something wrong. It takes me a minute, more than a minute. I’ve gone deaf, I don’t catch on right away, I keep pulling and pushing, boxing her insides, going the rounds, giving it my best. I’m doing my job, doing all I can.

“Stop,” she says again loudly; the echo off the tile makes it sound like a shot.

I stop.

She reaches between her legs, plucks my hand out, and lets it drop like some discarded thing. I’ve failed. I turn full front toward her and begin to rub her, to poke at her with my skinny stub. She laughs and pushes me away. “Now you’re just all excited. All riled up.” She laughs as though it’s so funny. She gives me a kiss and climbs out of the tub, wrapping a towel around herself. She lies back on the cot, hand over her eyes, and sighs, breathes heavily, deeply.

I’m staring, wondering what I’ve done wrong.

“Don’t ogle,” she says without even looking at me. “Swim some, get your flippers wet.”

I am still so small a boy that for me this tub is a pool. I take off, circling, turning laps and somersaults. I make myself relax, loose the cat-o’-nine-tails that stood between us.

A knock at the door. “Hour’s up.”

Shriveled, I climb out of the water. My mother wraps me in a towel and lets me sit on the edge of the cot, resting while she dresses. I suck water from the towel and try not to look while she loads herself back into her costume.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “It’s not to worry about. It’s not you. It’s not new.”

Mama is home.

“No,” I say.

Mama insists.

You seem so impatient. How can someone who’s been in jail for twenty-three years be so impatient. Isn’t it bad for your blood pressure? How many girls did you go with? Was it ten, fifty, or a hundred? Were you a voracious pedophile? Do you mind when I call you that? My mother says I’m too honest, is there such a thing? Back to you — Did you always know you were like this? I guess I’m like you, but you’d never know it just looking at me, everyone thinks I’m shy, a little depressed, a late bloomer. Do you think I’m unusual?

Today she drives me further in. She drives me to know things about myself, things I already know too well. Goddamn. Goddamn. I am wild. I am trapped. Appfelbaum knocks on my door and asks if I’d play him in checkers, if I’d crown his king. Today, I’d just as soon knock his head off with a baseball bat. I want something else — to see and to hear something entirely different. I want to escape myself.

That she is out there, unleashed, untamed and untrained, free to wander, to feed freely, to satisfy her desire, her whim. That she can pursue her fantasy, her silly summer’s delight, infuriates me. And that I, a true connoisseur, a talent unparalleled — okay, okay, not oft paralleled, lest you think me egomaniacal — that I am kept down, restrained like this, is beyond my comprehension, my sense of justice, of all things right and wrong, good and evil. I am a good boy and she is such a bad girl.

Alice is beside herself with glee. She has found me naked by the lake. I say something sharp like, “Quiet, you little fool.” And then follow this interdiction with, “Have you no manners? When you come upon someone in their nakedness, you should pretend you have seen no such thing. You act as if you have come upon someone dressed in white tails. And if you are compelled to comment, you address the person by saying something along the lines of, ‘My, you’re looking well today.’ ”

“You’re my captive, my prisoner,” she says, still half-laughing. She points to a hearty oak tree. “I must tie you up,” she says. “Will you go easily?”

“You mustn’t come so close,” I say as she steps toward me. “Perhaps on my person I have a hidden gun, you might get shot, wounded by my release.”

“Then that’s the price I pay,” she says, yanking my arms behind my back, exposing me. She produces a coil of rope; the tickling touch of her small, clammy hands causes blood to rush from my head. My knees buckle beneath me.

“Your totem pole rises,” she says, referring to the state of my nakedness. I am thawing from the freeze.

She jerks my arms tighter behind my back, showing herself to be surprisingly strong and quite adept, if not practiced, at the art of knot tying.

“Is this the way you win your friends?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Well, then, I take it you’re quite popular?”

She looks at me. “Have you anything you might buy your freedom with?”

I shake my head. “No.”

A letter. An interruption. She is the one who sent me into this world, this excavation of my experience, and now I resent her intrusion. I am in my thoughts with my beloved, with Alice, and she has come barging in — a poor substitute. In my less lucid moments, I might confuse them, conflate the two — maybe adding a little of this and that, dashes and hints of other, less significant girls. But in my heart of hearts I know the difference. Today, I hate her, I wish she were someone else. There is no comparison.