Egyptian Cotton (Edited)

I wrap myself tightly in beige Egyptian cotton, listening to a lint-draped box fan recycle stale midsummer air.  My bed is empty but for me, and I must once again accustom myself to the tragedy of aligning myself diagonally across the middle of its queen-sized expanse.  Either that or accept the seeming finality of the vast emptiness to one side of me; is it possible that there is only one good side to me?  I have so many sides, I think; just another thought regurgitated by the whirring of my fan and spit out into my bedroom, to stir curtains and jacket covers but never any interest.

I don’t sleep more than five or less that twelve hours, and even then I dream uncomfortable dreams of silverfish and fear-fattened spiders crawling out of the vents and across my swaddled body.  Tonight I slept not at all, and the poetry of the soft blues of dawn are replaced with the sickly-strange bleached out brightness of total daybreak.  Sometimes I forget to get out of bed, and I glorify or lament the vicissitudes of life from my beige bassinet until the breaching of the afternoon hours.  I loathe to quote myself, but across the slanted ceiling above my bed I scribbled in a fat black Sharpie scrawl, "The future is dark because its lights have blinded us."  Mummies don’t have eyes, I remind myself,  and the thought slices the Egyptian cotton into thin strips and hoarsens my voice into one made throaty by dry and dusty millennia.

The bathroom ceiling collapsed minutes after my shower yesterday; the landlord, a schoolyard chum, put in a new one, but left drywall in the toilet and bathtub.  I laugh quietly as I consider the pros and cons of renting to and from a friend as I sweep the wreckage aside with a bare foot, wincing as a jagged corner of plaster draws a trickle of blood.  I can hear the creaking of my roommate’s bed frame as he fucks another random barfly.  A two-for, for he rarely passes up the cold, uncomfortable opportunity of sex in sobriety with a stranger after being afforded the opportunity of the gin-soaked rondevouz the night before.  A need filled by empty atmosphere or something much more vacuumous, and I wonder if filling mine with a vacuum might suck me into it entirely.

My countenance confronts myself in the mirror above the listlessly leaking sink.  Pale and drawn, the blood loss of an ulcer of two weeks prior has not yet been recouped, no matter the eight units transfused.  I pause and remember.

The rusted wheels of the gurney squeal in protest at every turn as a team of nurses wheel me down the midnight quiet halls of the hospital; one pushes as the other plays doctor with my intravenous bag.  I am soaked in my own blood, vomited up just moments before.  As the darkened rooms float by, I, in an anemic haze, hear a litany of questions.  "Do you have an executor of your estate?  Does anyone have power of attorney over you?  Do you have a last will and testament?"   It may have been the blood loss, but I felt no real urgent fear.  Years of a not-so-subconscious death wish have reduced a natural fright into mild curiosity.  Was this it?  My last experience?  A camera down my throat, alone and cold and soaked in my own blood?  Where was everyone?

I look at my solitary toothbrush and lonely, lowly grimace, and answer my own question: No one is coming.  As I shower I watch spiders fuck in the upper-cornice of my cloaked enclosure.  I’m not even sure I want anyone to arrive, or if I would even hear their car turn into the driveway.  I am heartsick of plastic tans and plastic tits and the god-forsaken plasticity of Cosmopolitan culture.  Even as I think these things, I shave my pubic hair into a small square just above the base of my penis, and I undertake the painstaking chore of shaving my testacles.  For what?  For who?  I haven’t had sex in eight months, and the questions undermine the believability of the assertions I’ve erected to deal with loneliness.

My feet slip a little as I step up and out of the shower; no matter how long I dally bathing, I can never wash the sleep out of my eyes, mind, heart.  It’s a numbness, I know, and possibly terminal.  But as my feet pound down the stairs to another skipped breakfast, I quote myself again.  "The future is dark because its lights have blinded us."  So I paint my skin something more opaque, and I herald the onset of self-determination.  My truck starts slowly, and the radiator belches sun-cooked air into my face.  I wrap myself in an Egyptian sun as the closely-manicured lawns of small-town America slide past me.  And as the stale air inside the cab is impotently circulated by the straining automobile, it stirs the hair atop my head, the empty seatbelt to my side, but never any interest.

My vantage point corkscrews into the commonplace as I approach Subway, intent on a chicken teriyaki sandwich and any other brand of elementary satiation. I load it up with a garden of vegetables, but the only tastes I ever salvage from the whole ensemble are sweet onion sauce and banana peppers. The woman behind the counter wears a shy smile, and the whole scene whitens with its light pollution. Smiling back, I taste vinegar and ash. Her hand brushes mine as I receive my change. I shiver and look away, noticing the myriad battalions of potato chips protecting the wall. The bag I buy breaks the silence and the spell. The door nearly shatters at my hands hit the glass, leaving no handprints; years of sandstorms had pumiced my appendages into anonymity.  I was never there, although onlookers claim they saw a ghost. Must have been the blood loss or the blank looks. Spitting as I hit the sunlight, I imagine I hear a symphony of teeth clatter like sardonic hands clapping across the packed parking lot. Fate never pulls its punches, and its recent divorce from mercy has devastated many of its wayward children.
 
Trying to eat my sandwich as I drive, I’m wearing a salad by the time I reach my parents’ house. They’re worried about me, I’m sure, licking lips for a dram of truth to assuage any ghastly fears that make the reality pale. An idea, some simple directions from me about how to tame a lion; I know, but I never say—feed it, feed the lion, because then the lion sleeps.  But I stop by more often, now, and make small talk, cutting them off lean portions of my life in order to chew the fat. All of this paranoia burdens me, really, into safeguarding my privacy into a complacent dishonesty.  I paint some things happy right over the sincere, invaluable original.
 
A longhaired cat licks the lemon sunlight from its whiskers amongst lissome lotuses in the garden. This planet prefers a sundress in floral print. She glances up at me as she stretches languorously, her pupils like a narrow, bottomless canyon in an emerald ocean. Cats were holy to the Egyptians, I thought, guardians of the dead, and she watches me from some time before the Sphinx. Kneeling down, I scratchthe length of her back, paying particular attention to the top of her smaller, feminine head. Purring appreciatively, she pushes her body up against my fingers, demanding more pressure. That verdant patch of greenery emits a sweet Lethean perfume, a truth serum that wipes the cluttered slate clean, and a stubborn grin worms its way from one recalcitrant corner of my mouth to the other.
 
A coed walks briskly by, and the firecracker flash of her pink tank-top snares my attention through the window. Every step bounces her full breasts, and the cotton of her athletic shorts clings obstinately to the curves and crack of her ass. Fucking summer. Fighting the urge to masturbate, I glance out the other window. Superimposed against the world, caught helpless between double panes of cheap glass, my reflection slouched in the acerbic sluice of its corporal confines. It fell in love with me, once, my likeness, but I never requited it.
 
My copy of Women in Love sits sedately in my father’s change jar; I chime a gentle peal of laughter, knowing that my only currency is words, and I’m deeply indebted to many bankers from many backgrounds in many places and times. D.H. Lawrence’s haunted, haunting stare meets my mind’s eye, remembering that he euthanized his own mother by administering an overdose of morphine. Life isn’t so bad, and I believe it.  I pop the old-fashioned top of a bottle of Grolsch, and it tastes suspiciously like Xanax. The carbonation stings my tongue and the effervescence defeats my gravity. Someone had left the kitchen television on and muted, and a non-talking head pantomimes Armageddon while a graphic ironically coalesced over where his heart should be: “Recession!?” Who gives a shit. Maybe we’d leave people the fuck alone if bothering was too goddamn expensive.  The world is gallows humor.
 
My bladder insistently demands relief as the last drops of the pint disappeared. Shutting and locking the door in one smooth, practiced motion (as is most of any particular day), I sigh deeply as I begin to urinate. Glancing out the window, I see the same longhaired cat watching me, her head cocked forty-five degrees. She doesn’t quite understand.
 
The new guy showed up amidst the clanging clamor and bells and whistles of the Fourth of July carnival. Never has the lighting of a fuse inspired such fear in me. My insides wrestled each other into a torturous stalemate, and whatever neurons that remained at their posts were sending some very anxious missives. She couldn’t understand my newly-arrived, intransigent demeanor, even as her head rested happily on his shoulder. My own shoulders itched, wondering where, when, why, and how her head went. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, I reminded them, as I excused myself and left for the bar, hell-bent on utter annihilation. Now, it’s beyond me why any spirit should possess an alcohol-by-volume of 151 proof, but even that barely killed my rioting angst and venomous self-hate. What few blood cells left in my depleted circulation soon became addled and asinine, and the features of the bar blurred all the way to black. Mistakes were made, and they are my only real attempts at artistry. I lost more blood that day, and there’s a pool of it staining the linoleum beneath a barstool at Denny K’s. 
 
I punch the medicine cabinet, leaving no mark. I’m so fucking harmless. The water that washes my hands circles the drain crimson red, and I grimace into the mirror. My teeth are there, sure, but I have gummed everyone I have ever met for twenty-three years. There are no dental imprints of mine on anyone. My eyes stare at themselves above my snarl, and those pearly blacks call me a liar.
 
A cavalier, Kevlar attitude attires my personality as I make my wary way to work. The stop-and-go resuscitations of diesel-engine trucks soundtrack the short commute, and every employee and employer leaves a little more honey in the downtown hive.