– Get to the point, F.
– So what?
– How long before the torture?
Having bored them with great daring, F. now launched the dramatic phase of the credo. He drove down on his heel to get a shriek from me. Suddenly it was used Vaseline, and the light was like the holes in dead floating minnows, and one had a sensation that all the toilets were blocked and the teachers would have to come now and learn too much about us.
– I do not believe that the wart will “clear up.” To me the wart is ugly. I’m a simple man. There’s enough talking as it is, far as I see. To me a wart is a secret I don’t want to keep. When I see wart I think scalpel.
– Ahhh!
As he said his last word he had shot his hand out in a salute. The salute ended in a penknife, just as a bayonet illumines unmistakenly the use of a rifle. The orphans gasped.
– When I see wart I think Speedy Removal. I think Before and After. I think Miracle Drugs. I think In Just Ten Days.
– Go. Go.
– I think Yours For Only. I think Try This SCIENTIFIC HOME Method. I think RUSH ME MY FREE. Grab him, men!
They swarmed over me and pulled me to my feet. My arm was seized and stretched out straight. They lined up along my arm like sailors hauling a rope. Their backs were in the way and I could not see my hand. Someone flattened my palm against the porcelain and spread my fingers.
– Yes, F. cried above the clamor, I think Act Now. I think Don’t Delay. I think This Offer Expires.
– Help!
– Stuff his mouth.
– Mmmmmm. Mmmmmmm.
– Now! Slice! R-i-i-i-p!
I tried to imagine that I was just one of those backs tugging at the arm, just one of the sailors, and that a long way off they were carving butter.
44
The story of Catherine Tekakwitha’s feast is apocalyptic, as I started to say. In fact, it was my wife Edith who told me the story. I remember the evening perfectly. I had just returned from a weekend in Ottawa, where F. had arranged for me to have access to the Archives. The three of us were using the sunlamp in our basement apartment. F. said that I was the only one who could lie naked because both he and Edith had already seen my prick, but they had not seen each other’s parts (a lie). F.’s logic was infallible but still I felt queer about taking down my pants in front of them, and it was true I would never have let Edith get nude or let F. strut around.
– But I’d rather not, I said weakly.
– Nonsense, darling.
– At least one of us should get a proper tan.
They stared at me as I rolled them down over my knees, worried that I had wiped myself imperfectly maybe and there was tell-tale. Truth was, I felt that F. was using me like an advertisement for his own body. I was the tattered billboard for his reality. His expression seemed to say to Edith: If a thing like that can breathe and get up every morning, think of the fuck you can get off of me.
– Lie between us.
– Uncross your legs.
– Take your hands away.
And when Edith rubbed on the Sun and Ski I didn’t know whether to get an erection. On Sunday nights, such as this was, Edith and F. used to inject themselves with a little heroin, which is harmless and safer than alcohol. I was still of the old school in those days and considered it a killer drug, so I always passed up their offers to include me. That night it struck me that they were extremely ritualistic while preparing the hypodermic syringe and “toasting” the “horse.”
– Why are you both so solemn?
– Oh, nothing.
Edith rushed over to me and hugged tight, and then F. joined her, and I felt like some Maidenform dream in an airport for Kamikaze pilots saying farewell.
– Get off! You don’t have to suck up to me. I won’t squeal.
– Good-by, my darling.
– Good-by, old friend.
– Oh, get on with it, both of you. Go on, you degenerates, fly off to your crutch-supported Paradise.
– Good-by, Edith said sadly once more, and I should have known that this was not an ordinary Sunday night.
They rustled among their veins for one that still carried blood, tapped the needles under the flesh, waited for the red signal of a “hit,” and then squirted the solution into circulation. Withdrawing the needles abruptly, they fell back onto the couch. After minutes of stupor Edith said:
– Darling?
– What is it?
– Don’t answer so quickly.
– Yes, F. added. Do us a favor.
– I can’t watch this, my wife and my friend.
Angrily I stalked into the bedroom, slamming the door. I suppose they saw my buttocks in a blur as I left. One of the reasons I had left was because watching them use the needles always gives me a hard-on and, since I had chosen not to get one when the Sun and Ski was rubbed, I considered that getting one now would put me in an abnormal light. Secondly I wanted to sneak in Edith’s drawers which I did every Sunday night while they were senseless in their narcotic
