The tiny black worm writhed and then curled, as if sniffing the air. Then it flicked up toward my face, right at my left eye.
Pain exploded through the back of my skull.
And then, the world was gone.
* * *
My surroundings vanished from sight. This was not an uncommon experience on the Sauce. Instead of kneeling on the linoleum floor of the Beanie Wienie cannery, I found myself shambling aimlessly around a barren landscape in which it looked like everything had been eaten by locusts—all was dust and leafless trees and little sprigs of vegetation that had been gnawed down to the roots. The sky was an acrid, cancerous ruin.
As I wandered, I came upon what looked like a floating worm. It hovered about three feet off the ground; at its base was a pile of coiled loops that led up to a twitching bulb the size of a football, then a single segmented tube that extended upright until it ended in an opening. It turned toward me. At the top was a human mouth—the “worm” was a disembodied esophagus and digestive tract, ending in the bundle of small intestine. At the bottom it possessed an anus and, in the front, a six-inch-long erect penis.
The mouth opened. A guttural song emerged.
Soon, I saw another one—a digestive and reproductive tract, floating free of whatever body it had been attached to, this one with female genitalia at the base. Its mouth opened and out fluttered a high-pitched song, as if in response to the other. I backed away, but they were not pursuing me—they were pursuing each other. The two pulsing bundles of offal met, the mouths locked together in a kiss and soon the penis was pumping away, the wet tangle of intestines falling to the ground and thrashing against one another in ecstasy.
I soon encountered another such pair, and another, and another. Then I crested a hill and below me was a massive pink pile of the intestine monsters engaged in an orgy, the mass rippling and throbbing. All around the perimeter were tiny versions, little bundles that inched along the ground like knotted earthworms.
Then I blinked and it was gone. Or rather, I was gone.
I was now in a makeshift classroom, with small desks and a big sign on the wall bearing a Dr. Seuss quote (“Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive, who is youer than you”). The room was vacant except for a single rough-looking woman who was standing in the front, screaming and screaming into the empty room.
Then I blinked and I was standing in my apartment, in my bathroom. It was nighttime and I could hear the faint drum of the rain. In walked Amy, who closed the door, lowered the lid on the toilet, and sat on top of it. She stared straight ahead, in silence, covering her mouth with her hand. She was wearing her work clothes—a clean white button-up shirt and navy pants. The ceiling was dripping right into her hair but she didn’t seem to notice.
And then, very quietly, she started crying.
I moved toward her, reaching out, but of course I wasn’t there, and this wasn’t happening, not right now, anyway. Soon she got up, dried her eyes, and left the room. I followed her, through the living room. She swung her red raincoat onto her arms and headed out of the apartment. I followed—drifting, like a movie camera on a rig—as she walked across the street to the convenience store, jogging through the rain with her umbrella. At the door she wiped her eyes again, then went in and bought the last blueberry muffin from the little case on the counter. And then I blinked and …
I had a body again. I was lying in a filthy room that looked like it had once been a hospital. I was on a gurney, and I was unable to move despite the fact that I could see no visible restraints.
I craned my head around, trying to get a sense of my surroundings. There was a huge cockroach crawling up my shirt, toward my face. That’s what it most resembled, anyway; it was fully two inches long and had tiny pincers like a crab. I tried to kind of shake my chest, to knock it off, but I couldn’t even move enough to do that.
I heard a voice say, “You’re awake,” and I saw Nymph step out of the shadows. It was that fit and well-to-do version of myself, only instead of a suit he was wearing the same clothes I had on (stained jeans and an old T-shirt that said CHICAGO BEARS, 1984 SUPER BOWL CHAMPS around a navy-and-orange-clad Dan Marino). As if to mock me.
I said, “Is that actually you? Or is this just more hallucination bullshit?”
He didn’t answer. Just smiled.
I said, “Because if it’s you, I have a bunch of questions. But I’m not going to bother if it’s just some symbolic bullshit meant to teach me something about myself.”
“Tell me,” said Nymph, “if I asked you to eat that insect on your shirt, would you?” I didn’t answer. What was the point? He continued, “What if I left and came back a week from now? Would your hunger be such that you would be willing to eat it then?”
The bug was scaling a wrinkle in my shirt just above my nipples. It had yellow eyes. It blinked.
“The answer is forty-six,” Nymph said, before I could answer. “That’s how many hours without food you could go before willingly eating a living insect. At any given moment you are less than two days from abandoning all dignity in the name of desire.”
Next, he gestured to the corner and said, “What about that corpse of a small child, lying over there?” There was in fact a little boy there, lying still in a fetal position. Dark skin, maybe Hispanic. “How long until you would eat him? I know the answer, but I’m curious to see how far off your own estimate is. I also know what that number would be if the boy was alive.”
I said, “The thing in the old coal mine, your ‘Master,’ what is it? What does it want?”
He cocked his head with a look that said, Are you seriously asking me that?
I tried again, because why not? “Why is it trying to brainwash people with the idea of fake offspring? What’s the point? Is it all just a game? Did the Master get bored?”
Nymph took a few strides my way and stopped next to a rusty metal tray attached to the gurney. “Look.”
On the tray were three objects:
A surgeon’s scalpel;
A hunk of black rock that had been chiseled into a crude blade, like something you’d find at an archaeological dig;
A hunk of black rock that was still in standard rock shape.
“Obsidian,” said Nymph. “All three, I mean. Did you know that the sharpest blades in the world are made from obsidian? This scalpel has been sharpened to an edge just thirty angstroms wide—one hundred millionth of a centimeter. A razor’s edge is twenty times thicker, by comparison. So, let me ask you—which of these three tools would you like me to use to remove your face?”
Since we both had my face I actually wasn’t sure if he was talking about removing it from my skull or his. Not that it mattered, since this was all some sort of vision and wasn’t actually happening.
Are you absolutely sure of that?
The bug had reached the top of my shirt, standing on the elastic neck band. There was a soft hissing noise and I realized I could hear the thing breathing. Labored, like its tiny lungs had asthma.
“How about this,” Nymph said. “I will ask you a question. If you answer correctly, we move on to the next round. If you answer incorrectly, I make a single circular incision beginning behind your right ear, looping around under your chin, behind your left ear, and across your forehead, meeting back at the right ear again. Then I simply peel off your face, like peeling an orange. Here is the question—which of those three is a naturally occurring object?”
I had trouble understanding how I was going to get any useful information this way, but it didn’t seem like I had any choice but to play along. I looked over the three objects. Which is naturally occurring, he asks? Well, the scalpel was obviously man-made. Of the other two hunks of obsidian, one looked untouched by human hands, owing its shape to wind or erosion or whatever. The other had clearly been chipped into a blade, maybe by an ancient caveman. So, it was made of stone, which is naturally occurring, but the “blade” shape was man-made. Seemed like a semantic argument to me.