I sat in a corner for the next two days, pissing and shitting myself. On the third day, I accidentally stuck a wet finger into an outlet. It was inexplicably live. The shock slammed me against the wall. When I came to, my guts were in perfect working order and I was crackling with energy and determination. I scooped, disinfected, scrubbed, aired, showered, and finally called Miss Hume from a payphone impersonating my poor (dead) mother. My daughter had been aboard the ferry that was blown up this morning while crossing the Bosphorus at Eminönü, I croaked. She was now at a military field hospital on the European side of Constantinople with burns on 70 percent of her body. Hume was unimpressed. She demanded the Teodora bio or her money back, but I thickened my mother’s Spanish accent and pretended not to understand, unctuously thanking her for wishing my charred daughter a speedy recovery. I then punched all the phone keys at once while yelling “Oigo, oigo, oigo!” and hung up on the bitch. Next, I methodically covered my tracks. To my landlord, and the world, I was leaving for Constantinople on a charity mission and subletting for three years to Dr. Petra Xin Hua Wu, a reclusive, retired Fujianese math professor. Dr. Wu put her name on my door, mailbox, and cell phone account, and returned Hume’s undoubtedly irate letters with a bold “Addressee Unknown.” By then, I had dumped my girlfriend du jour, an unemployed tax collector—she was getting fat and had acquired two hamsters in a city that didn’t need any more rodents—and had bid goodbye to my few acquaintances (I had no friends).
Holed up in my apartment, I prayed that I would outlast Hume’s vengeful interest in me. Only in the dead of night did I venture out, hunched under Dr. Wu’s black wig, sepulchral makeup, and padded Fujianese overcoat. Now that all writing and related furniture and paraphernalia had been removed to the basement, the apartment felt airy, almost palatial. For a while, I felt light and soft—dare I say happy? I wish I could have held on to it. But always one to poke a rabid dog, I was soon back in my natural ruminative state, aggravated by New York City’s traditional summer sewage floods, an onslaught of rats expertly swimming through the filth produced by twenty million eating and shitting souls.
I considered my predicament. Was a writer who could not write due to a mysterious brain disturbance still a writer, or was I finally off the diabolical hook? I had first wondered about this as an adolescent, puke dribbling, chin resting on the toilet bowl. Conscience smirked, not even bothering to voice its opinion of the shirking, cowardly creature that spent more time worshipping the porcelain god than at the writing table. Forty years of self-flaying had followed. The question, which now appeared before me written in fiery tongues, carried the added pathos of medical mystery; and with it, a promise of absolution. “My brain does not have the capacity to write,” I murmured humbly. “Please, take back your poisoned chalice!” I pleaded, to no one in particular. The fiery tongues flickered and vanished. I knew what that meant. The door had been slammed shut in my face.
It was night when I woke up, sweaty and angry. I resolved to become my own master, or kill myself. I gave myself seven days. The first step was to find an exit strategy. I stayed up all night, but nothing came to mind and there was no one, or nothing, to ask—no books, computer, TV, cellphone, or radio. Dawn broke out in a rumble of sewage-pumping trucks. I crawled into bed. It was then that I saw an ancient Yellow Pages half hidden under the night table, where it had escaped the purge. I sat on the bed and opened it to the letter A, hoping that a word would jump out and point me toward freedom. I purred, chanted, and caressed the brittle pages from A to B to C, begging them to tell me what to do. By the time I got to J, I was tearing them out and flinging paper balls into a dark corner of the room to punish their muteness. My heart was in my mouth, a cliché courtesy of my grandmother, whose ashes (if they were indeed hers—no one knows what goes on in crematoria these days), in her Elmira grave, must have been rolling with laughter at my plight; she, who never doubted her own centenarian self for a second. My heart was in full gallop against my front teeth by the time I turned to K and something shot out like a comet’s tail. It was the Word, shining, winged, barbaric: Kill. I knew immediately it wasn’t me I was to kill, but someone else. Who? “Whoever made you waste your life,” Grandma reverberated dustily from her grave.
The scales suddenly fell from my eyes. It wasn’t my fault! Someone else was to blame. Killing that someone would liberate me. Who could it be? Both of my parents were dead. I had no pets or children. I scrupulously did not keep up with ex-girlfriends, all of whom I had dumped—if anything, they were the ones entitled to revenge. Still searching, I fell asleep. Knowing what I had to do, even if not yet to whom, made me feel serene.
At noon the next day, twelve hours after the Revelation of the Word, on the first day of my seven-day plan, I dared to walk in plain daylight to the corner mailbox to return Hume’s latest ultimatum. As I was letting go of the mailbox slot, I saw Mercy McCabe lumbering toward me. She was grinning and waving, her fat ass tightly packed into those hideous Moschino leather pants favored by SoHo art merchants (in August!), her left hand clutching a congenitally ridiculous Hermès handbag, her mustardy hair, milky-freckled complexion, and pugnacious upturned nose buffed to a shiny finish under the sun. Did she know it was me under the Dr. Petra Xin Hua Wu accoutrements, or did she mistake me for one of her rich Oriental art collectors? “I got news for you,” she whispered, lowering her hulking frame over my head. I was cornered. Her tiny blue eyes that locked on mine left no doubt that she knew that I was I. “Bebe and I just broke up,” she said, gleefully watching my jaw freeze, and sweat and tears begin to stream down my Dr. Wu whiteface. As I fled from her, stumbling on trashcans, scraping my knees, and losing Dr. Wu’s left slipper, I could hear her guffaw and yelp her contempt.
When I came to, late that afternoon, I was sprawled in my kitchen with Dr. Wu’s robe stuck to my flayed, bloody knees. As I ripped it off, removing chunks of flesh, I yelled, “Not fair!” It wasn’t fair that Bebe and Mercy McCabe had broken up after a decade together. It was monstrous. Ten years ago, Bebe had chosen Mercy McCabe over me, after a long and ferocious contest. As she disentangled her golden curls in front of a gilded, antique trifold vanity mirror—a McCabe gift, I later learned—Bebe, my unrequited child concubine, love of my loveless, licentious life, Bebe who sang every night in the filthiest male sex dive in town and reduced men to tears, Bebe, whose piercing, questioning, tactile gaze turned me inside out, Bebe explained her inconceivable choice to me by declaring, with the little-girl deadpan she reserved for such cruel occasions, that McCabe was permanent mate material, whereas I was not. Pressed by me to explain further, she stated that: A) I was poor and bound to get poorer, while McCabe was rich and getting richer; B) “I don’t trust you.” Point A plunged me into a metaphysical vertigo from which I never recovered: Why was I born with expensive tastes and no money? And, shouldn’t civilization trump tasteless cash? McCabe couldn’t even hold a fork in her paws! Point B was a great injustice. Me, not trustworthy? Me, the devoted, head-over-heels, adoring servant? The courageous, passionate, yet respectful, literate, and loyal best friend, denied even a private glimpse of Bebe’s scrumptious body, but iron-willed enough to listen kindly, without batting a jealous eyelash, to her torturing account of how she allowed herself to be narcotized and lewdly pawed and sodomized by two dyke artistes the night before (when she had, by the way, stood me up) while posing in the nude for a bogus dyke fertility handbook? I secretly raged and suffered for the next three years, while publicly indulging in non-stop dissipation and excess, before Bebe and McCabe’s well-publicized conjugal harmony slowly began to heal the open wound. With every anniversary, the wisdom of Bebe’s choice became clearer to me. It soothed me to picture the two of them dying of old age in each other’s arms. Now, their break-up made a mockery of everything I had endured: rejection, suffering, forgiving (kind of), and, finally, forgetting. Bebe was back in my mind, more alluring and tyrannical than ever. And so was McCabe, once more a filthy swine after a decade’s promotion to virtuous, bovine spouse. McCabe: my nemesis, my torturer. It was all her fault. I decided to kill her.