The phone was ringing but neither of them moved.
Take it off, she said, pointing at the offending article.
He retracted his toe, then, as it reappeared from the hole, said, Mothra emerges from her cocoon and warms her wings. Wiggle wiggle.
Take it off and I’ll … mend it. They were swimming through syrupy air, and after what might have been ten minutes or an hour, the sock arrived in Turk’s hand and she set out for her brother Seamus’s former bedroom, the de facto storage shed that was home to an assortment of steamer trunks, her mother’s foot-pump Singer, stacks of sheet music, old tax forms, a set of dining room chairs, disintegrating linens, and somewhere inside the little rolltop desk at which her brother had done his sums, a sewing kit in a blue velvet bag.
The room was at the farthest end of the hallway, rarely visited, an expedition into her childhood, and it took ages for her to navigate the Sarab floor runner, her cannabinoid receptors having transformed the patterns thereupon into a down escalator she was trying to ascend.
The phone was ringing again.
She was sucking wind by the time she got to the door, yet when she opened it she summoned enough air to push out a full-throated, Hiwatt! that brought him running, if unsteadily. He kept nosing into the wall like a balsa-wood glider that had its wings trimmed wrong, and thought it would be proper to announce, as one must, as surely as the sky is blue and cats meow, This is some good shit! But he was outthinking himself two-to-one, and felt pointedly that he’d already revealed too much of himself to Turk, upon whom he’d developed an if-not-quite-debilitating then definitely goo-goo-level crush, and the utterance of that particular cliché would bring into stark light the creaky apparatus of his altered state, thereby throwing into question the intimacy they’d shared earlier that evening when they’d rapped about their families and Turk’s memories of Hiwatt’s grandfather and her own doubts about the efficacy of her upbringing. He worried because, of course, there is the question of authenticity that lurks around any confessions or intimacies shared while on drugs, since in an altered state one can no longer be considered oneself, but some other, uninhibited, even alien, person. He worried his brain into somersaults over it.
Hiwatt was a passionate guy, strong on desire, weak on restraint, a connoisseur of inhibition when it came to the game of exposing himself, whether physically or spiritually. He had certain needs, one of which was to experience the struggle between shame and the desire to share himself with strangers, a little saga that played out every time he entered the booth, unbuttoned his jeans, and began to masturbate, separated by only a pane of glass from the naked girl oozing around in front of him. His excitement relied entirely on being observed. Classic exhibitionist. He would have preferred that his observer be clothed, but he hadn’t yet been able to bring himself to offer any of the dancers money to put her clothes back on, feeling that it might cross a line of perversion that not even the official live girls at Show World would put up with. He had shared this concern with Turk, and she, given her own line of work having a bead on the full spectrum of New York’s rarest fetishes, had shrugged. What’s the harm in asking? she’d said. It seemed to have no effect on Turk when he talked about the girls and how quickly and explosively he ejaculated on the matte-black wall beneath the window. She listened, nodding, sipping from her coffee, offering no indication that she admired his courage at all. Perhaps she had no inhibitions of her own, he thought.
Hiwatt was, at the tender age of eighteen, primarily interested in re-creating a lost relationship, specifically the one he’d shared with his nanny, who since his birth had performed all the functions of mother and, after he’d reached puberty, the physical functions of a girlfriend, to a point. She let him feel but never see, and she stroked him off most nights before bed, with a bored, distant look on her face that Hiwatt would forever seek from his sexual partners, followed by praise for the velocity and quantity of his ejaculations. The nanny saw nothing out of the ordinary in their ritual, no more shameful than scrubbing his ears in the bath, proving yet again that, begun early enough, practiced often enough, anything can achieve the splendiferous normalcy of oatmeal.
The silhouettes didn’t line up, but it was close enough. Turk reminded him of his nanny at the hairline, a Transylvanian peak that announced itself when she pulled her graying hair into a ponytail, and sometimes if he squinted he could, at a distance, make it all fit. That Turk gave no indication she meant to care for him in the only way that would cure his homesickness was no deterrence. He’d understood that he’d have to convince her; New York was not the same as home. Here, he would have to express his manhood.
Commenting on the goodness of the shit did not, therefore, align with his master plan to project himself as a cool, enterprising, and altogether responsible, if horny, young man worthy of her attentions, and by the time he’d completed his spectacularly uncool journey to the end of the hall, he’d decided to
