INDIANA
Above the sink in the kitchen was a window and, on the sill, an old jelly jar, the color of the cartoon caricatures etched on its glass fading from too many washings, perhaps, or from the constant exposure to the sunlight. There, there was always a chunk of a potato pierced by a trio of cocktail toothpicks, tipped with brilliant spun-cellophane buds, in such a way that they held the potato suspended on the lip of the jar so that its underside just touched the dingy water beneath where already a fur of roots sprouted and reached down. Soon, soon, the eyes above ripened into those pale segmented branches that ended in a stunted leaf or two and, once or twice, an already fading flower. Something to look at as I washed and dried the dishes and regarded the day outside already lengthening or already turning into twilight.
IOWA
There is only one potato farmer in Iowa, five hundred acres near Muscatine, surrounded by melon farms on the sandy soil. The country gets confused sometimes. One “I“ state looks the same as any other “I“ state. You tell folks you're from Iowa and they say, Iowa, potatoes, right? Well, in this case they would be right because here is a five-hundred acre field of potatoes the locals say looks like the worst stand of beans they have ever seen. It all goes to chips, shipped to the Frito Lay plant in the Quad Cities. At night, the farmer of the only potato farm in Iowa watches a woman on the Tonight Show who collects potato chips she has found bearing images of the famous rendered on the canvas of starch during the deep-fat frying. “You can see Nixon,“ she says. “And this one looks like Gorbachev right down to the stain on his forehead.“ She is from Indiana, where the country that watches late-night television now believes its potatoes are grown. “Here is Queen Victoria, Mickey Mouse, Kojak, Betty Crocker.“ She has hundreds she keeps in jewel boxes. She holds them up to the camera, waxy cameos. Working his field of potatoes, he resists thinking that things look like other things. The sun, as it sets, for example, is not like a slice of potato. His face, reflected in the dusty windscreen of his tractor's cab, is not his face.
The Sex Life of the Fantastic Four
INVISIBLE GIRL
Where he touches me, I vanish. The back of his hand stroking my face erases my cheek. Involuntary, the skin initially, then the deeper flesh. The skin first, gone when it feels his fingertips. I feel the surface disappear but still feel feeling there. His touch sinks in. The subdermal layers go. The nested cells he polishes clear, his soft palm hovering. By the time I have stripped off the blue bodysuit, stepping out of the spandex which retains, for a second, the shape of my body as it falls, the body it reveals has already become translucent, the meat turning milky, the bone wiped clear in streaks like a smear of butter melts the white from a paper plate. I become clarified grease beneath him. Entwined, we are tangled up in the skein of my airy sinew, the ropey braids of my circulatory system, its cartoon of primary reds and blues. My blood thins in the extremities but knots at the nodes of erectile tissue, clotting a nipple visible again beneath the sheen he has left from licking what looked, a moment before, like air, now, me, there, concentrated into rubbery ruby light again. It disappears into his mouth. I am down to the broken dashes of the central nervous system, suggesting, still outlining, the outer neural net of my skin, feeding me the synaptic code of dots and dits from the dissipating periphery. His hands, as they caress nothing, reveal me to myself, leave the afterimage of his movement burned upon the transparent wall of my retina, the lightning streak of his skin shaping the borders of my own body. I close my eyes and watch as my eyelids dissolve. My vision passes through skin first, turning then to scrim. And I see, now, through another unoccluded lens. I see through my lids, through myself, see his cock, clearly, moving inside of the vast and now empty empty space which must be me and must be not me.
THE HUMAN TORCH
I sit at the bar, usually, drinking ouzo neat, a Jordan almond dissolving at the bottom of the shot glass. I have set the liquor on fire swizzling it with my finger. I like to watch the floor show and the show on the floor. The tunnel crowd weirded-out by the drag queens doing stripteases or singing old torch songs “One for my baby and one more for the road,“ sending up Lady Day or Barbra, that kind of thing. I dump some water into my aperitif, extinguishing the blue flame and turning the drink chalky like a precipitate in a test tube. My current favorite is a Liza interpreter who vamps this obscure number — is it by Mercer? — that plays with the line “You've let yourself go.“ She sings to her lug of a lover how he has grown fat and dull, how their liaison has suffered the consequences. There follows a litany of complaint. What a schlub, she sings. “You've let yourself go.“ But it turns in the end. It always turns. “Come on over here,“ she whispers, “come on over and let yourself go.“ I tear up, naturally, but it isn't saline staining my cheek. It's a dab of molten lava percolating there in the corner of my eye, my own brand of running mascara. I have to watch myself. Spontaneously, my eyelashes can ignite, throwing sparks up into the tinder of my eyebrows, which can smolder for hours without my knowing. Once, I set the sprinklers off in the Russian Bath House on 10th. I've stopped looking for a boy who can top me. It's too dangerous. The leather bars. Too hot. I was cooking inside the horsehide Eisenhower jacket, cooking the jacket, the seared meat smell an additional turn-on, I suppose. These powers we have acquired seem to fall into that dark space between the involuntary responses wired into us and those we can modulate. Not like the heartbeat on the one hand or walking home on the other, but like blinking and winking, say, or like desire itself. There is only so much one can do to help oneself. Oh sure I can bellow “Flame On“ all I want followed by the stunning transformation from solid buff flesh to superheated gaseous vapor. The controlled burn. Here precision scalding. There the delicate sweating of copper pipes. But in the weaker moments, when I am weak in the knees, a stranger's hand on my hand will steam off skin. I can't watch myself all the time. A human touch sets off the human torch. I am a captive within my sublime hide.
MR. FANTASTIC
To make the edge of the famous samurai swords of antiquity, the smiths beat the iron flat into foil then folded the metal over and hammered it flat again. And then another fold and peening, and still another and then another. Thousands of times. Fold and flatten, fold and flatten. Until, in this primitive way, through brute force and patience, the metal's crystalline structure became saturated with itself. Atoms packed inside the spaces between atoms, at last, both the surface and simultaneously its underside now no more than a molecule deep, the edge of the matrix serrated only by the minute undulation of subatomic matter, a sine wave, spanning a mere handful of angstroms, of the outermost electrons. Sharp, you bet. It is what I find myself doing to my own skin in private moments. I stretch and fold and knead it back together. A wrinkle in the loose hide on my forearm, a flap of fat at my chin. It is the very definition of definition, and I spend hours honing my musculature, ironing in the pleats on my belly, increasing the cant of my cheekbones with the finest shade of a sharpened pencil line. I know what people are thinking. The elasticity of your normal everyday run-of-the-mill uncosmicly irradiated penis is, itself, a goddamn miracle to most. The ways it inflates, its skin thinning to the gauziest of tissue webbed by diaphanous capillary sponge grown thick with the stiffened rebar of packed and interlocking corpuscles. Sure, I've tried it all. Swallowed myself whole, took myself in myself from behind. For awhile she liked to watch it snake toward her across the floor, liked the way it coiled up a leg then threaded the cleft of her rear, whipping around her waist then back up her back, curling over her shoulder and back down between her breasts down her stomach, parting her down down there and then her labia and into her from above, how its tensile strength lifted her in this hardened harness, held her weightless as it expanded within her and all around her. We haven't done that in awhile, and everything, believe me, grows familiar. Recently our lovemaking has tended toward the less baroque. A simple vertical embrace, my member remembering its scale from before the accident. Sue, her legs wrapped around my waist, is saddled on my hips, riding this altogether unfantastic appendage and me supporting her, strapping my silly, pliant arms around her, then around me and then around her again. Stretching, another lap and lapping another lap, another band around us both, belting us to us. My arms still encircling, encasing us from head to toe, this cocoon spinning while we kiss, my elasticity nearing its end, effaced to the point of transparency, my thinning skin becoming, at last, the clear outer covering, at last, of this new creature we create.