Carrie says, “Dammit, Mongo, did you spike my drink with that shit, too?”
Mongo just smiles and scoots around her toward the door. “Give me one moment,” he says and disappears into the room.
Carrie leans back with a hand on her gut. I use the break in the action to clean myself. It takes quite a bit of paper and sets me to gagging a little myself. I don’t know how she managed to keep her head down there between my legs for so long. It smells like something crawled up inside me and died. About two weeks ago.
Mongo shouts from the room, “OK, ready, both of you out here now!”
Carrie says, “Screw you jack, I need to hit that pot, like now.”
Mongo’s at the door again. “No, out here. Is part of next challenge. Two more to go.”
Carrie and I look at each other and it’s clear by the look on her face she didn’t really know what she had signed up for. “Hey man,” she says, “I ain’t doing any of that ‘Two Girls, One Cup’ puking shit on each other business.”
“Just shut whore trap and get out here now.” Mongo motions with his knife for us to come out. We both do as we’re told. Hard to argue with a three hundred-pound Chechen brandishing a weapon.
I stare at the plastic sheeting covering everything for a second before responding to Mongo’s comment. “We need to do a hot what?”
Mongo shoves me onto the bed. “Is called hot karl, and you need to lay skinny, pale ass on bed.” He nods at Carrie, who’s hopping from foot to foot and looking more than a little sick to her stomach. “And by looks of whore ex-wife, we should hurry before we miss opportunity.”
Carrie’s in such bad shape she doesn’t even bother to respond to his whore comment. As for me, I’m not even thinking at this point. I’m on autopilot. Whatever happens now, happens. I feel like this is one of those out-of-body deals, like I’m hovering above myself, watching with a strange detachment while these curiously odd things happen to my body.
I watch myself lie there while Mongo pulls a box of Saran Wrap from the bedside table drawer.
I note with mild amusement as he tears off a long sheet of the clear plastic wrap and places it over my face.
I am only slightly interested when he tells Carrie to squat over my head and shit on my face.
“You want me to do what?”
“This is hot karl,” Mongo says impatiently. “And by looks of you, this will be most epic hot karl ever captured on film.” He motions to the bed and says, “Now, assume position.”
My outside-the-body self notes the look on Carrie’s face, and I can’t decide if her lips are curled in a rueful smile or a disgusted grimace. Her stomach thunders again and she scrambles onto the bed. Whether she really wants to do this or not, she’s clearly out of time. It’s either do it here or do it where she stands, but there is no more waiting to decide.
I close my eyes and feel like I’m floating somewhere between my body and some ethereal plane of self-enlightenment. I really feel like I’m on the edge of a transcendent breakthrough here. I’ve never been very spiritual or mystic. Carrie tried reading tarot and following our horoscopes and checking our star patterns once, but like everything with her, it was a passing fancy once she discovered how much work was involved with that mumbo-jumbo. But this is something more than that. It’s like I’m splitting into two separate forms of existence right inside my own head. There’s two of me in here and I seem to see and feel worldly experiences through both of them. My earth-bound physical self takes in all the rudimentary sensations and processes them, noting how the bed bounces as Carrie steps over me and positions her bottom over my face. The existential ethereal me notes the ironic twist my life has taken and how it seems to be coming full circle back to Carrie, who once again is shitting on me, but this time in the very literal sense rather than figuratively.
This realization might actually be amusing if I wasn’t about to become the recipient of a fecal facial.
My eyes are still shut, and I don’t think my physical self would let them open for any reason at this moment. We’ve seen some things in our lives, the real me and the mystical me, but there is one thing we don’t want to have a memory of, and that’s the vision of our ex-wife’s open rectum expelling a quart of hot excrement directly into our face. This isn’t a tangible thought in our collective consciousness, more like an intuition. We both know something bad is going on, but if we close our eyes and minds to it, maybe it won’t be so bad. Mind over fecal matter.
Unfortunately, we still have to feel it. The plastic wrap sucks down tight over my face, sealing off my eyes, my nose, my ears. It feels as though my entire head is enveloped in steaming soup. It hammers my face with astounding force, as if expelled from a hose. Plastic wrap sucks into my nostrils but I can’t really smell anything, nor can I breathe. Warmth consumes my head and filters through my hair. I feel it beneath me, pooling between my shoulders. It’s already starting to get cold.
I’m struck by how nonchalantly this is going down. It’s as though I was being drowned with a big pot of corn chowder, rather than…
Rather than shit.
My face is being buffeted by shit.
Hot, wet, thin, laxative-brewed shit.
On my face.
In my hair.
Running down my back.
The only thing keeping it out of my eyes, ears, nose, and mouth is a thin layer of plastic film.
The other-worldly me and the physical me become one again real quick. It’s a sensation kind of like my skull sucking my brain back in through my ear. The world goes from ghostly detachment to very real sensations. This is the moment the smell hits me, despite the layer of plastic protection. I suppose I could be imagining it because of what’s on me, or I’m panicking due to asphyxiation, but I don’t think so.
Oh, fuck me.
I freak.
If I was thinking, I would probably try to execute some sort of roll-and-peel maneuver to extract myself from the plastic wrap in such a way as to avoid anything on the other side of it from touching my face.
But I’m not thinking, I’m most definitely panicking. Of course I am. My face is covered in shit sludge.
I scream. I sit up fast and run face-first into Carrie’s ass. There is an audible splat, even through the plastic wrap in my ears. All the sludge on my head does what gravity forces it to do and begins a horrifying landslide down. I can’t tell where plastic stops and excrement starts. I can’t see anything either. I run into the wall and bounce off the doorframe in my mad dash to the bathroom. I slam into the sink, hike my shin against the toilet, fall to my knees and reach frantically for the faucet in the shower. Hot, cold, I don’t care. I’m nearing a state of hysteria, as well as oxygen deprivation.
I think I’ve lost my mind.
I have no idea how long I’m in the bathroom, lying half in, half out of the tub, letting the shower water course over my head. I could likely stay here until I drown. I’m not clean enough yet. There will never be clean enough. Eventually, Mongo comes for me.
He pulls me out from beneath the stream, hauls me to my feet and slaps me a few times.
“Fuck, alright! Stop hitting me!”
He wipes me down with a towel and when I open my eyes, he inches from my face.
“Time to finish this.”
I shake my head. “No. I got nothing left, you sick bastard.”
I mean that in an emotional sense, that I’m a hollowed husk of a human now, that I can’t possibly go on. That I’ve reached the limitations of what I can endure and I feel that I speak the truth, but my own rumbling innards betray me. A new wave of pressure in my bowels makes me nauseous.
Mongo grins. “Sounds to me like you have one more left in you.”