69
I love my wife and kids.
I really do.
These people, technically speaking, are all that matter.
My fixations, my traumas, my anxieties, my badnesses, my fetishes, my appetites, my significations, my out-of-the-corner-of-the-mouthisms, my deployments, my aggressions, my capers, my idolatries, my indictments, my litigations, my verdicts, my peripeteias, my mournings, my emissions, my gesticulations, my dominations, my litterbuggings, my panderings, my scourgings, my reapings, my hate-mongerings, my bench-pressings and my binge-drinkings — all of these things, individually and collectively, are neither here nor there.
70
I think I forgot to study for that midterm exam I got to take tomorrow. I’ll have to pull an All Nighter.
I tell my roommates to get out. They don’t want to go but they know they don’t have a choice.
I lock the door behind them.
Around 3 a.m. the dead begin to speak to me.
Black ghosts have confiscated the white noise.
I examine the Victrola to make sure that it’s working.
It is.
I perceive the voices of deceased autocrats contacting me from the Underworld. Their clipped accents belie their opaque intentionality.
I get the sense that the voices will never go away.
I turn off the Victrola.
They go away.
71
A fight breaks out during the midterm. I start it.
72
Sushi “goes extinct.”
You can’t get it anymore.
Not on campus, not off campus.
And when I ask somebody about sushi, anybody, they look at me funny, uncertain of the word’s meaning.
It’s gone.
When something close to you dies, you change forever.
There is no sushi.
Again: there is no sushi.
One more time. .
I can’t get over the “extinction of sushi.”
I think about it every day.
I carry the Lack with me wherever I go.
I feel guilty, as if I were responsible.
As if, somehow, I “killed sushi.”
All of the sushi.
This is a simple enough delusion, but I am powerless to rise above it, to disavow it, to banish it from the cockpit of my subjectivity.
My awareness that the delusion in question is a real delusion — i.e., that the delusion exists, thus distorting my perceptive faculties — is of no consequence. It never is. And this is my distinguishing characteristic.
And this, above all, is why I am just like everybody else.
73
One of my roommates dies.
It’s his ninety-third birthday.
We make him a cake and he gets so excited he begins to hyperventilate and he can’t calm down.
We watch him.
His skin turns purple. His veins inflate. His cheeks puff out. He grips fistfuls of air. He makes a sound like a toad trying to play a flute. He makes another sound like an imploding brick.
Eventually he falls sideways onto a chair, smashing it.
Nobody knows CPR.
That makes my eldest roommate eighty-nine now. I tell him he’s in charge and sort of laugh until my stomach hurts. Then I ask if he likes me. I ask all of my roommates if they like me.
“I just want to be liked,” I admit.
74
Anticlimax is like Malbec. Varietal and robust. Full and dry.
75
I strike one of my professors.
He is very old.
Elderly.
And he’s lying in bed.
A hospital bed.
I’m in the Infirmary.
It might be the Morgue.
It’s the Morgue.
And the professor is dead.
He says, “Please. Please.”
The mortician appears. He remembers me, complimenting the shadows that “sleep on my cheeks.” They remind him of the dark side of the moon.
I say something about how my professor is dead and said please twice and the mortician replies, “Yes. But the glaucoma, you see.”
I look down into my professor’s frozen-open eyes.
There are no pupils, no irises. Only milky films that seem to glow in the purple darklights of the Morgue.
Saddened, I turn to the mortician. “All this death. All these empty shells. How do you do it?”
“Everybody dies. Can you give me a hand?”
He wants me to carry the body across the room and deposit it in what looks like a fish tank or some kind of incubation chamber that will, according to the mortician, “suck the residual life out of it.”
Objecting, I try to run away.
The mortician talks me into Stasis.
Then he talks me into doing what he wants.
I only get about halfway across the room, the dead professor slung over a shoulder, before my back gives out and I collapse.
I groan.
“You are very old,” utters the mortician, trying to help me up. “Elderly, one might say.”
I shoo him away and push the cadaver off of me and get up myself, clutching my lower back.
This takes awhile.
The mortician encourages me to buy a coffin. “It’s never too early to plan for The End.”
Once I’m on my feet he pushes me into another room where there are several varieties of coffins for sale.
He drags me around by the elbow and tells me about the exteriors and the interiors and the discounts and the pros and cons of this coffin versus that coffin.
I want to resist.
I hurt too much to stop the mortician. I don’t want to make him mad either.
Nonetheless I inform the mortician that there’s no way in hell I’m buying a coffin.
The mortician is tenacious. He wants a down payment.
I tell him no.
The mortician keeps after me. He won’t let up.
Neither will I.
At some point I lie down and close my eyes.
76
I get a letter and it says my parents are dead. Mother’s cause of death: old age. Father’s cause of death: grief.
No signature. No return address.
It has been years since I’ve seen my parents.
Their last visit was over a decade ago.
I barely remember what they look like, and I don’t own any photographs, not of them, not of anybody, or anything.
The ability of the photograph to freeze time is something I have always deeply resented. Frozen time is no time at all.
I call my wife to break the news but the line has been disconnected and I can’t be sure that I even own a phone anymore. I’m not sure I even know what a phone is.
77
When I reach behind myself and bend over, my arthritis flares and kicks like an impaled bull.
Grooming my body hair has become too much work.
I let the hair grow out.
The moment I make the decision, the hair bristles. . and stops growing.
Two weeks later my thighs are smooth as ice, white as ivory. I touch them and the feeling is gone.
78
Weary, I sleep for at least a fortnight.
A monkey attacks the University as I lay unconscious.
It is not a big monkey but it is a powerful monkey and a purposeful monkey and the administrators don’t know what to do. They’re scared. And yet everybody more or less likes monkeys. Even the evil, destructive ones.