The conflated smells of onions and of some kind of meat and of stewed apples and of the animals and of cigar smoke and of, after a few minutes, singed hair and singed flesh is not a good one.
I am, pardon me, I repeated, telling you the truth, I suggested, all truth etc., please please please, although I definitely did not suggest this in so many words.
The singed hair and the singed flesh part was about this: each time I answered I got burned on the back of the neck with the cigar. It was the tall, thin woman who would take the cigar, apparently, from my boss and place it against my neck.
I think that each time it was the tall, thin woman.
But it was impossible to be sure.
Those are just kisses, the boss would say, stuttering on the kisses part, so that it seemed to me, each time she never quite finished saying it, that I had received several kisses instead of just the one.
Once, I went to a circus, the clowns and animals kind.
Once I say, but this was not really all that long ago. It was a small circus just outside a city or, rather, outside the old borders of the city, when the city had ended, or had had an end, and then there had been some area, then more area and who knows what, the maps went blank, before you reached another city or the sea, but what we are talking about here was inside the city, as the city, is what I mean, had been extended into the area. I had stumbled upon the circus by accident as I was following someone, and when I had finished following that someone, I went back to it, bought a ticket, and went in. Inside the orange and ochre tent it was all bright lights and flashes and drums and choreographed roars and clowns and odd movements and frightening voices and a woman standing on top of a horse and an elephant, finally, the feature, sitting in a car. Put your hands together, said the announcer, a dwarf on stilts, for Kisses the Driving Elephant, who was, in fact, driving, so to speak, an appropriately enormous convertible, using her trunk to turn the wheel.
Eventually, Kisses drove her car into a small pyramid of very short clowns.
Which hadn’t been meant to happen and hadn’t been all that funny.
In various parts of the world, at various times, they have used elephants to execute people. One way was the elephant would rear back and you would be tied to something and then it would come down on your head. Brave people, it was said, wouldn’t close their eyes. Those elephants were painted with all kinds of patterns. I forget who told me about that. But at any rate I used to imagine it sometimes — lying there, eyes open, being brave, with the painted elephant rearing back.
I don’t think any of the very short clowns were badly hurt. Kisses, certainly, was not hurt, and she kept driving, around and around.
It was of this Kisses the Driving Elephant, at any rate, that I thought, and of elephants in general, and of those painted elephants, as they applied, for perhaps the sixth or seventh time, of great big elephants and of jeering onlookers, one of their kisses to the back of my neck.
Insofar as I was able to think.
Then they made me ingest the onions, the stewed apples, and the meat.
I wished they would not make me eat the stewed apples.
They had been our stewed apples — for the shelves, in our jar, etc.
Chew, I was reminded by someone close to my head.
I chewed.
It was very sweet. Sweeter than just the fact of the stewed apples.
Honey sweet.
I had seen all this process, from a small remove, on that previous occasion, the latter portion of which, involving the bag and the rocks, I have already mentioned. But that had all transpired in an almost empty room, empty except for a small blue appliance that sizzled and sucked away at an outlet in one corner. The process went on long enough for me to notice that the walls, which I had taken for white, were really a very pale green, another effective — I knew something about the subject — technique. The woman with the cigar, my boss, had not conducted that exercise. The tall, thin woman plus one or two others had. My job, at the first, had been to stand at the door, which I did until all of them had left and it became my job to sit in the room and watch him. Part of my stupidity, you will note, consisted in having been a party to this previous process, and having, nonetheless, taken the course it has been part of the purpose of this narrative to describe. But I had been in the condition I had been in when I had chosen my course of action. In picking me for the assignment, the boss hadn’t counted on what might become the ramifications of my having fallen in love.
Or perhaps she had.
Preposterous causality.
But at any rate, I was still in that condition.
I am still in that condition.
Where is she? I asked, my mouth full of hot objects and I don’t know what kind of unpleasant tasting meat.
This time I did get some kind of response.
It was the stapler.
Each time its two ends came together there was that fine, crisp clunk.
That was the way John found me, having, as he put it, made his arrangement with them.
We came to an understanding, he told me a little later when I was back on my feet again.
Yeah? I said. An arrangement? I said.
Way for them to reimburse me for breakages.
Which surprised me a little. After all, with the exception of the incident involving my former downstairs neighbor, and one involving one of the waiters from the night of our turkey dinner, as well as another just before his arrival involving a young man on a motor scooter who had, as he had put it, injusticed him, he had all but given that up.
Just temporary, he said.
A little arrangement, I said. One you just made.
That’s right, one I just made, he said, then leaned over and gave me a little pat on the cheek.
I say that was the way John found me, with a piece of onion stuck to my lip, and with the staples.
Ouch! he said.
Looking around at all the shelves.
Then at me.
As I had sat there, stapled, and I had apparently sat there, stapled, for two days, I had been thinking about, when it had been possible to think, those early days in the autumn when we would sit together at the café in the park. She had very nice hands, that’s what I thought. They were nice in their movement, which was unusually fluid and precise, and they were nice to look at and also to consider as they held up some object or other, of which there were, absurdly it now seems, so very many. Also there was her mouth, which was really just her mouth, but I had liked to watch it, desperately, as I had liked, strangely, to watch her shoulders, which she had held almost impossibly straight, like, I had always thought, some impressive individual in a painting, but just as likely, I had also thought, not.
She came across the room toward me.
She had come across the room toward me.
The end.
Sitting on the shelves, or perhaps I’ve already said this, were several of the objects we had collected in the country, as the world, even as it wrapped itself tighter and tighter around our throats, was made to seem to vanish.
Was made to seem to vanish, I say to myself, pathetically.
Actually, of what I thought, as I sat there, was nothing.
Or not nothing.
But not quite something either.
Exquisite.
The caged animals were now, after two days, all moving more slowly, if at all, and all of it, including me, now stunk.
They’re done with you, Sport, said John.
That’s it?
That’s it.
Where is she?
Who?
What do you mean, who?
He shrugged.
My tongue, at this point, was very swollen, and John suggested I not speak anymore, and for quite some time I couldn’t, so that was that, and now me alone in this fucking apartment, the end.