The vital fluid allows for radical love-energy. Management was charged for the cost of the door. “Sister, no harm, no foul.”
“No HARM? You look like sex freaks to the entire world! You should see the faces you’re making! They’re not even attractive. I’m saying this objectively. You look carsick and blinded by headlights.”
“It’s not about how we look to other humans, Sis. Third eye. There’s more to see than you think.”
“Ugh, it’s on the TV right now.” There’s a long silence; I can almost hear her eyes squinting. “What the hell is that, a tattoo?”
I decline to answer, as Sister wouldn’t understand. I recently had a bottle of wine tattooed on my mons.
“CT and I got married,” I offer.
Sister hangs up then calls back and hangs up again, then finally calls back and is sort of able to speak through the wheezing. I stare at the healing crystals I glue-gunned to my phone in the mirror, a sort of second-line of defense against Sister’s negative energies. Work, I beg them. Glow.
“To that creep,” she sputters, “to that pervert hustler? Did you know he hit on me at Thanksgiving? I was putting the cranberry sauce into Tupperware when I felt a stiffness on my leg and turned around. He was down on the floor like a crab rubbing his…his…extension near my ankles. His pants were that new kind of denim, the stretchy stuff. I could feel everything.”
“He is a wonderful lover, Sis.”
“I can’t do this right now,” she says, and then hangs up.
I stay on the phone and let the open dial tone be a sort of beacon-call, a homing signal for CT to return, bowels empty, groin hungry.
I should mention that Sister is also my mother, somewhat. When Mother died, Sister was nineteen and I was four. As a teenager I used to love calling Sister “Smother” whenever she was overbearing—a perfect combination of sister and mother.
“Sustainable,” replies CT, “so bitching.” We’re at the home of a fashion designer whose mansion is built into the side of a cave. One room of his house is actually filled with bats; when I grabbed a flashlight sitting by the door and shined it up to the ceiling, there were tons of bats instead of popcorn paint. The room has no furniture due to “Ze guano, yeesh, ze guano,” but there is a mounted television on the wall that plays looped footage of a young girl feeding a loaf of French bread to a Dalmatian dog over and over again.
We came to the designer in order to get fitted full-body leather suits. “Ju can wear zees forever,” he said, “Drink en zem, sex en zem, die en zem.” They have zippers and ties all over the place so they can stay on during a variety of activities, like going to the bathroom or getting an immunization shot in the upper arm.
CT raises his glass of wine up to the ceiling, a kind salute. The wine is red and has 10-15 drops of bat blood in each bottle; it’s from the designer’s own vineyard with blood from his own bats.
CT, who is very pale and pretty always, lifts the glass to his mouth and sucks it in with his cheeks so the wine glass stays magically attached to his face as a sort of bulb-nose. He looks at the ground and puts his arms out in a crucifixion pose, then begins moving his arms. He looks like a hummingbird that has been transported to a different planet, one where the environment is harsh and there are no flowers so it has to fly around all the time with its own personal glass vase of nectar attached to its face.
It strikes me that the cave home we are in is one such environment; a hummingbird could not live here without a nectar appendage-bottle.
The designer disappears for a minute and comes back holding three pairs of night vision goggles. “Let us go back inside ze bat cave,” he suggests. He is no longer wearing a shirt.
The goggles make everything green and give us all emerald eyes, the bats and CT and the designer. Several battery-operated floor cleaners roam around the cave’s paved cement and eat the guano. They remind me of sting rays or giant moving sand dollars, very flat and white.
“It’s like we’re underwater,” I say, “an underwater cave.” But in the cave, as in water, my voice does not seem able to travel.
The designer kneels down onto the floor and begins untying CT’s new leather suit-fly. For a moment there is a sting of panic in my stomach; my mellowness is suddenly a balloon full of water being poked with a stick. I’m not sure if it’s going to burst open or maybe just spring a tiny leak or perhaps not puncture at all. The free love of the Worm Eternal instructs us to see one another as fellow worms, genderless, openings identical and indistinguishable.
But sometimes I fail the Worm and grow jealous.
CT hands me a bottle of bat blood wine. “My cherished one, please pour this on top of Gustav and me, pour it slowly so that he and I shall be like a primordial fountain flooded with the blood of cursed statues, unholy stones.”
And then the stick poking my balloon turns into a feather, and I am tickled. I feel my Inner Worm remind me that the Intensity comes when I forget that life is art, and Intensity is what clogs the path to enlightenment. As CT likes to say, “The boy at the top of the mountain of knowledge, the one standing like a flamingo with one leg straight and one leg bent. He is a mild child.”
As I ready the bottle at the top of CT’s golden locks, dead center in the middle of his part, Gustav’s head lifts up and he gives a half-hearted protest, “Don’t spill, ze suit, ze suit,” but CT gently moves Gustav’s head back downward, the way a parent might guide the cheek of a child who has just had a nightmare back down to the pillow.
“How can I wear a leather suit that does not carry the stains of wine and blood?” asks CT, and Gustav does not answer; of course it was rhetorical, and the bloody wine pouring over their green night-vision bodies looks completely black. I feel more powerful than ever, like a superhero who has shadow-juice as one of her many weapons. I streak their bodies with the unseen.
When my phone rings there’s about a fourth of the bottle left. I tap the opening at CT’s mouth and drizzle the rest of it inside until he makes a happy noise.
My phone’s screen is so green that beneath the goggles it seems interactive. I speak to it for some time before realizing that I need to open the phone in order to answer the call. Luckily it’s just Sister, who calls again and again and again until I answer. Once, when I had a few squares of acid beneath my eyelids, I finally distinguished the source of the music but then mistook the phone for a fetal orb—not an orb from the beginning of time but a baby orb, one that has only been alive for a few million years—so I sang children’s songs to it and told it bedtime stories hoping that its musical electronic crying would please, please stop. I later got distracted by CT leading me to a hammock that had been stretched over top a hot tub at his request by the really expensive hotel’s staff, but the next morning I saw that I had eighty-seven missed calls, all from Sister.
“Hello,” I say. I am unsure of the duration of time it takes me to complete the word. The bat blood wine—at least our particular serving, I am beginning to realize—has another complication to its chemical makeup besides alcohol and blood.
“Oh Lord. Are you on drugs right now? I can call you back later, when it wears off. This is important.” I can hear sliding window blinds in the background and I know that she is staring out at the sky with a deep frown on her face. Even though the sound is distorted (it sounds like the opening of the world’s largest tin can) another part of my brain knows those blinds well enough to recognize the sound they make even when it’s camouflaged by drugs.
“I’m fine,” I say. “Just sleepy. Just terribly awake.” I hear Sister’s nervous fingers tapping on the glass of the windowpane, or maybe someone knocking on a really thick foam door. “Sister?” I ask, because it is so quiet except for the rustling of the bats and the gentle sounds of Gustav’s mouth that I can’t remember whether the conversation has ended and she has already hung up or not.