Sister stretches out her arm, handing me a manila folder with a pen attached. “I’ll show you where to sign.” Suddenly she cringes and rubs her temples. The band is starting in on a particularly heavy number titled “Reign of the Pig Women.” “My God,” she whimpers, “Do you have some aspirin, some water?”
The Worm Eternal is wise and sneaky. He will leave you all alone on auto-pilot and then suddenly come back to help you when you’re least expecting it. “Yes, one second,” the Worm Eternal tells me to say to Sis, and then I go over to Zapruder (one of the road crew) and ask him does he have anything. I’m in luck because he just scored five minutes ago, a great score since our entire stash had to be replaced due to the cop incident.
Deep down, I suppose I hadn’t really been dealing with the fact that Sister wanted to break contact at all; in fact I was in denial right until the second the Worm Eternal slid into my brain. “This is your last chance,” it told me. “You might never see her again if you don’t do something drastic.”
I return a few minutes later with a glass of cold water. “Here Sister,” I say, trying to seem nonchalant. I’m worried my voice sounds robotic since I’m being so careful with my words. I drop two pills into her hand. She’s still holding her temple and cringing but when she sees the pills she cringes even more.
“Are these aspirin p.m. or something? I just want regular aspirin; I don’t want to feel drowsy.”
“It’s regular,” I tell her, “it’s just from Europe. Most generic pills in Europe are neon green with a pagan star in the center.”
She swallows them and opens the folder and clicks the pen above the line where I need to sign.
“OK,” I nod. “I just want to read it first.”
She scowls. “That’s an oddly responsible thing for you to do.”
I pretend to look at the words for several minutes until she leaps up off the couch, a very high leap. “Is it warm in here?” she asks. Her face and body have flushed to an alarming but expected bright orange and her pupils look like giant Kalamata olives. “It is,” I reply, and she removes her shirt.
That’s when I see that she is only wearing one breast.
I open my mouth to say something, something loving that also expresses my utter grief at her loss, but she’s staring up at the loudspeakers. “This is a really great song,” she yells, which is not what I was expecting Sister to say.
“It is,” I reply gingerly, “this drum solo will last for approximately forty minutes.” Sister suddenly seems so changed; I’m not sure whether to talk to her in the careful way I’m used to or to just open up.
“Lets go watch them,” she says. It is almost a squeal, and is total confirmation that she’s most certainly in a Wormhole and I need to jump in with her. So we go to the curtain and I yell to Zapruder that she is my sister, and he checks out the still-inflated side of her bra and gives me a thumbs up.
A few hours later we are back on the bus driving to California, and Sister is more talkative than ever. She has told us all about her breast cancer and the mastectomy, and when Grog says she is still totally doable they start flirting and take off her bra so Grog can draw a nipple over her scar tissue with a Sharpe marker. She thinks it’s hilarious. It’s so good to see Sister smile.
When the curtain on Grog’s bunk finally reopens and the two of them come out, she’s still in great spirits, which for Sister means that she is in a completely altered state.
“Sis,” she yells, putting her naked arms around me and bringing my face to her half-bosom. She rocks me back and forth like a mother for a little while.
“What were Mom’s last words?” she asks. I was only four at the time but I remember them easily.
“Mother looked at me and said, ‘I’m doing this because of you. You drove me to this.’”
Sis completely cracks up. CT and Grog start laughing too, and before I know it tears are pouring down my face because I can’t stop laughing either. “That’s ridiculous!” Sister says through her laughter. I nod.
“What’s this?” Sister asks Grog as he hands her the tube to a hookah, but then before he can answer she sticks it into the side of her mouth like it’s that spit-sucky thing at the dentist and lets it hang out there while she continues to talk.
“You know, no offense, but I didn’t want you to live with me. I felt like I had to take you in, because Mom was such a horrible person, and I didn’t want to seem like a horrible person too. But it ruined so many things for me. If I hadn’t been forced to grow up right then and be a parent, things would be way better for me now I think, much much better.”
I have been in the stomach of the Worm Eternal long enough to know that Sister doesn’t mean this in a personal way, that in fact the Worm Eternal has itself entered her ear and is speaking to me through her so that I will have Greater Understanding. CT gently squeezes my hand and whispers “W-I-E” into my ear, which means Wriggle-In-Effect, as in, the Worm is actively present and working.
Suddenly, the bus stops and Fractyl Clymber runs back wearing a headdress of swan feathers. “Dudes, the sun is coming up and there are all these flat rocks and I think it’s really cleansing. Like, I sort of took an accidental detour; I mean it’s totally cool, I totally know where we are, in relative terms. But I think it was like, meant to be, because it is so fucking pure out there right now, and I think if we all just go out there and sit it’ll be great, like I might even be able to forget that that ever happened, I mean.”
When we file out of the bus, the light of dawn seems to sober Sister up a little bit. It’s easy not to sober up in the bus-light and bus-air; the bus is a sort of intoxicant itself. As we walk out onto the rocks Sister looks down at the light shining on her scar tissue and begins to cry.
But Grog is not about to let this happen. “Lie down, beautiful woman,” he says. “Bloom like a flower.” He walks to her and parts her legs with his hands and tells her to say it. “I’m a blooming flower, say those words.”
And she does. The sun is coming up brighter than I’ve ever seen it, and it is all hitting Sister, her scarred parts and her whole parts, everything. And Grog’s face moves into her bloom like a hummingbird, and CT walks over with his erection peeking tall and shadowy from his still-untied leather suit, and he moves his face into her bloom like a hummingbird too, and I stretch out on a nearby rock like I do backstage at the concerts. Sister’s noises are a lot like the music of Wolf Rainbow, except this time I do jump into the noise, I get lost in the sounds and become them totally. My ears eat every drop of her pleasure.
When we get back on the bus we’re all pretty tired. CT and I retire to the clam bed. Sister hugs me and I hug her too and it’s cosmic. When we hug, my boob fits into her boob-hole.
Several state lines later when CT and I wake up, Fractyl Clymber tells me that Sis asked him to let her out at the Reno airport. She left me a note saying she was going to a hospital in Arizona, and that Grog gave her a lot of money in the form of gold coins (Grog refuses to be paid in any other type of currency). She also wrote that she would call me sometime soon, or that I could call her when I was ABLE to talk. The word “able” was bolded and underlined.
The biggest surprise was that she’d left me a white leotard. I knew with one look that it had been Mother’s. I smelled it, hoping that it would somehow still smell like her, even though she’d been dead for over two decades and was mostly a horrible mother. But it smelled like the bus’s incense-laden air. I put it on beneath my leather suit, though, and pretty soon because of rubbing on the leather all day the leotard acquired a very comfortable smell, like a drowsy horse.