Lance Olsen - Sewing Shut My Eyes

Alien who dribbled, snarled, and made a mess of the spaceship, not to mention Sigourney Weaver’s buddies, which gestated in Itty’s unwitting bowels as he showered and shaved at dawn, multiplied and glided in viral flotillas through his bloodstream as his very tall very handsome chauffeur drove him to the airport, sun flaming the horizon white and blue like the first frozen instant of a nuclear explosion, and birthed resoundingly as the DC-10 lifted its nose wheel from the tarmac at O’Hare, rattling for altitude and sending a pitbull of nausea yipping through Itty’s consciousness a nanosecond before he felt his sphincter involuntarily relax just as he flipped to the business section of World News in first class and wondered whether or not he should order that glass of champagne to accompany his poached-egg-and-sausage breakfast which would be arriving any minute.

The answer, proffered by his gut that had instantaneously spiraled into a Mobius strip, then into an intricate origami of pain, and finally into a complex map of the LA freeway system gushing with frantic traffic all trying to reach the same intersection in nine seconds or less, was no. Everything in his body simultaneously turned liquid: hot, bubbling, expanding liquid; and this liquid then turned into gas, the gas into steam, and the steam into super-heated vapors pent in a vessel three thousand times too small to contain them. The sores that were Itty’s eyes brimmed with tears, the anvil that was his head with multitudinous special-effects pyrotechnics, and the spirit of anguish (dressed as a frothing Hell’s Angel complete with skull-and-crossboned black leather jacket and black-and-silver steel-tipped boots) raged into his viscera wielding a blowtorch in one hand and a chainsaw in the other. Itty dropped his magazine and tilted up his chin as though the thought of prayer had suddenly swept through his being (although it hadn’t, yet) and, opening and closing his mouth like a blowfish in an aquarium, he reached down with trembling fingers and delicately unfastened his seat belt, cautious with the latch as the guy on the bomb squad who’s been disarming those gizmos for thirty-three years and now knows the only thing that stands between him and a safe retirement to a chaise lounge by a blue pool in the courtyard of a Floridian condo at four o’clock on a sunny February afternoon is this one small fuse connected to this one inordinately large bundle of TNT.

And then the real discomfort began. It felt like someone had decided to perform hara-kiri on Itty from the inside out with a fistful of dull razor blades, each dipped in high-grade carbolic acid, and that this someone couldn’t make up his mind where to begin cutting first, so he tried everywhere at once, which would have been just fine, except he was drunk and in a bad mood and had brought along for the ride six hundred and sixty-six of his closest, most ornery confreres, all of them drunker and in worse moods than himself. It felt, in certain almost unspeakable ways, like the DC-10 on which Itty currently traveled was no longer surrounding him, containing him in its dry cabin always a little too cool or a little too warm and scented with sour jet fuel, rubbery seat cushions said to double as life vests (though, as Itty often noted to himself as he first willed the plane into the air and then willed it to stay there, didn’t exactly exude a sense of confidence in those sitting on them), and foiled food that smelled like no other food on earth, foiled or unfoiled, smelled, supporting him five miles over what now must have been Cedar Rapids, Iowa, but instead that the plane had somehow imploded into itself and then into his belly, where it had accelerated, unleashing the gargantuan flame throwers of its multiple engines on the sensitive membranes of Itty’s inner self, nuking his entrails, boiling his duodenum in its own juices, cauterizing his anus so that he almost lost sensation there, the sensation so powerful, as he inched out of his seat, slipped to the floor, and shuffled into the aisle, unaware of virtually everything going on around him in the same way a voodoo priest walking on Jujubes of coals at a big voodoo priest ritual is unaware of virtually everything going on around him — the pale blue carpet he tread upon, the interested faces of the other passengers confronted by this well-dressed first-class midget with a deadly serious glare etched into each and every one of his warped features, the blond-bunned flight attendant he pushed past without so much as one of his quick practiced leers at her tight ass (which was, per usual, floating with unavoidable facticity at eye-level) in order to demonstrate to the world that he was as libidinous and slimy as the next guy, short or not — trying as he did to maintain his composure those last ten feet and seven seconds it would take him to attain the lavatory, those last three yards and six seconds it would take him before he could slam and lock that flimsy aluminum door behind him, wrench down his pants and underwear, and scramble into position before the voiding of his essence began, with or without his consent, in a humid rush beneath him. He discovered himself actually anticipating his arrival by several heartbeats with the pretty pathetic gesture of prematurely extending his right arm and spreading his fingers as though he were some magician willing the lavatory door to open, the pressurized cabin seeming to make the gaseous agony punishing his midgut increase to an extent where he knew that if he didn’t hurry he ran the risk of blowing up on the spot in a putrid cloud of bodily fluids; and so, while not exactly breaking into a full sprint, Itty sort of hopped, skipped, and dashed the last yard, gripping the knob no bigger than a fifty-cent piece and twisting it with almost reverent intensity, the understanding now fibrillating in that place in one’s soul where devotion is kept that a whoosh of freedom awaited him within a matter of instants almost too small to count.

Only it was locked. The knob was locked. The little plastic oblong slab on the lavatory door said OCCUPIED.

Itty stared dumbfounded, moving his mouth in surprise, snaking out his neck from his rigid collar as if he were going to lick the thing, and doing a fine brief jig while thirteen lifetimes catsuped by before he comprehended what he was looking at, at which point an earthquake of horror shuddered over his countenance. He stopped dancing. He retracted his neck. His pink eyes became, if possible, pinker, took on the wet, glaucous appearance of objects left in the hold of a sunken ship way too long, and he involuntarily lifted himself onto his toes, his body straining for height, then lowered himself back onto his heels, partially because he thought better of this first action, given his propensity for self-esteem, partially because another jumbo jet was taxiing down the runway of his colon. The abrupt pangs accompanying its takeoff bent him at the waist, transmogrifying him into a prim European psychiatrist meeting his latest hysteric in a 1902 drawing room, and then rotated his head so that he peered over his right shoulder and down the aisle like Wile E. Coyote knowing, just knowing, that that big boulder he’d catapulted at the Road Runner a minute ago had misfired and was presently sailing up the desert canyon toward him, seconds to impact, and that there was nothing, nothing whatsoever, he could do about it.

Except it wasn’t a big boulder he saw when he peered over his right shoulder: it was a compartment abob with curious faces waiting to see what the funny dwarf would do next. Which, it so transpired, was (all the self-esteem business pretty much out the porthole by now) to scurry back down the aisle as fast as his imperfect legs could carry him, panic floreating in his mucoidal eyes, past all those pale faces that made him feel a little bit like a mobile inflight movie screen, keenly aware that a dramatic tension had just invaded his sphincter, announcing either (if there was a god) the advent of a small bashful passing of breathtakingly stale wind or (if there was not) the onslaught of a vile torrent of watery filth, through the curtain separating first class from second, and right into the towering food cart serving minuscule plastic rectangles, each dabbed with artificial eggs, a large comma that might have been a strip of bacon or a sliver of badly burned wood, and that inexplicable dark green leaf of lettuce everyone tacitly agrees no one has to touch, none of which Itty’s psyche recorded because Itty was busy clambering into the lap of a startled woman wearing a powder-blue leisure suit and synthetic cotton-candy hair, hoisting himself onto her seatback and vaulting into the aisle on the other side of that cart, using this newly-created momentum to propel himself (tearing loose his belt buckle and fumbling with the buttons on his pants as he moved) through the myriad shouts of disbelief to the threshold of the one empty lavatory at the rear of the airplane, whose door Itty threw open and clapped shut behind him with a high-pitched nearly animal-like groan of relief.

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