by Adam Rapp
My bad molar isn’t so much painful as it is just strange getting used to. I’m sure the tooth’s nerve has long lost its purpose and I worry about winding up with a postapocalyptic face once the decay has rotted through my jaw. I’ve called Dr. Hubie three times now to request a home visit but I can’t get past Julie Pepper, who diplomatically deflects the idea with the skill of a world-class badminton champion.
Nearly two months have passed since Bethany Bunch’s disappearance. Recently someone staked a realty sign in the front lawn, only the culprit had painted over the actual firm’s name and in large red horror-movie letters had scrawled the words BABY KILLERS LIVE HERE. Baylor Phebe extracted the sign and brought it up to the attic before anyone else in the house could see it.
“Those poor people,” he said of the Bunches.
His kindness verges on the ecclesiastical. I’m starting to believe he might be the Kindest Man on Earth.
Now the sign is living under my bed, ironically on top of the Bunches’ DVD player, which is still wrapped in a towel.
Three days ago Baylor invited me to go ice fishing with him. I ran into him while re-stapling insulating cellophane to the screened-in panels of the front porch.
“Up at Lake Camelot,” he said. “They got bass the size of Toyotas. Ever been ice fishing?”
“No,” I said.
“The best way to take your mind off stuff,” he said. “They got a great waffle house right near the lake.”
I told him I would think about it. The idea of being in that much open space makes me start to sweat and claw at my face.
Bradley Farnham is a UFO personified. There are occasional sightings, but these are mysterious and often from a distance. I knock on his door every few days but there is no answer.
It’s past time to start harassing Harriet Gumm for February’s rent. It’s her first delinquency. The lease gives each tenant a six-day grace period before I charge a $25 late fee. Lyman’s lawyer, Marty Moynahan, felt this was more than generous. I’ve only had to tack on a late fee once, which was to the Bunches after their fourth month in the building. (I waived it in January, the month Bethany went missing, but the Bunches insisted on paying it anyway.)
My first nude modeling session with Harriet Gumm is scheduled for four p.m., five hours from now. For the past few days I’ve completed fifty sit-ups and fifty push-ups; the sit-ups in two sets of twenty-five, the push-ups in five sets of ten. These numbers are staggeringly low for a grown man who doesn’t suffer from muscular dystrophy or some other related disorder. My chest is sore, almost depressingly so. It feels like what little pectoral muscle tissue I possess is full of crushed glass.
And then there’s this: Three nights ago I think I tried to kill myself. I took one of Haggis’s Percocets and then another. I drank a few fingers of bourbon and looked at the blob of aluminum foil containing the rest of the deal. The rest of my life represented by a blob of aluminum foil seemed somehow appropriate.
I thought about Sheila Anne. I imagined the children we would never have. Freckle-faced, with huge, wondrous eyes. The stray dogs we would never take in. The old farmhouse we would never fix up.
I lay on my stomach and stared at our wedding Polaroid magnetized to the bottom of my minifridge. I couldn’t stop thinking about those first weeks when we fell in love. How we laughed together at our clumsy sex. How while following the band around on the road she’d run out of underwear and had to start wearing my boxers, which made her legs look thin and coltish and beautifully pubescent. How we couldn’t stop listening to Silver Apples, of all things. That never-ending feeling—which, for her, had ended so resolutely. I contemplated my general ineptitude and sexual inconsistency.
I thought about being found dead in the attic of my family home. One of my tenants knocking, the smell of my decomposed body fouling the uppermost story, Todd Bunch, Pollard’s newest fireman, breaking down my door with an official firehouse axe to discover the worms boring into my flesh. My body voided of all waste and humors. Ants feasting on the jellies of my eyes.
About twenty minutes into all of this gloom and doom I started to get really really really high and put on an early Flaming Lips record and wound up having one of the best times in recent memory, just sort of drifting around the attic like a helium balloon being batted about by a declawed kitten. I swayed and giggled. I pushed off the walls and swooned. I rolled onto my back and bicycled my legs. I fell asleep on Haggis’s promised flotilla. It was a flotilla of Venetian gondolas drifting down a warm, loving Italian river. Thanks to the beauty of Percocet and the Flaming Lips, I made it through my darkest hour.
But back to that delinquent rent. Onwards!
I will first pose for Harriet Gumm and do the hard-core landlording afterward.
About posing nude:
I worry about my average penis. Will it relax and hang naturally? Or will it retreat, assuming the form of a young acorn facing its first brutal winter? Yes, I worry about size. I worry about length. I worry about girth and general penile attractiveness.
I also worry about farting, or somehow stamping the stool. Yes, potential stamping worries me too. I long for deliverance of that sanitary doily.
Despite these fears, which I accept as normal asinine frailties of the human condition, I have to admit that I’m looking forward to sitting for Harriet Gumm. It’ll be like entering an unknown cornfield without an exit strategy. Or like the first day of Intro to Spanish.
Earlier, as I was retrieving the newspaper from the front porch mailboxes, I ran into La-Trez tear-assing it down the stairs from the second floor.
I said, “La-Trez with a hyphen.”
She stopped halfway down the staircase. Per our previous encounter, she was wearing her corduroy coat and backpack.
“Hey, Francis,” she said.
“Another delivery?” I said.
She didn’t answer.
I asked if Bradley was home and she replied, “Naw.”
Then I asked her how she kept getting into the house.
“Front door’s mad open,” she said.
I tested the door. It opened with ease. Someone had used silver duct tape to cover the latch plate so the latch wouldn’t catch the strike. I removed the tape and placed it in the pocket of my bathrobe for future reference. I assumed Bradley was the culprit, since he was the only one with a mysterious visitor.
La-Trez descended the rest of the stairs, but I stood in her way, my arms folded before me. I said, “Whatever you’re up to—”
“Excuse me,” she said, squeezing by and scooting out of the house, the smell of sesame flowering briefly in her wake.
The door latched cleanly behind her.
I went up to the second floor, where another large canvas sack had been set beside Bradley’s unit. I opened it. String again. As before, I dug my hands in deep. Nothing but string.
It’s late again. Just after three a.m.
The house sleeps below me. Only the low-end hum of my minifridge and the gentle hiss of my humidifier. I’m beginning to believe the humidifier knows my thoughts. Perhaps household appliances attain a human intelligence after logging enough hours with you. My humidifier knows my thoughts and my microwave may be out to get me. But at least I know where they are. If this gets any worse I suppose I can just start unplugging things.
I am now writing longhand, using a cheap ballpoint pen and an old spiral notebook. That’s how it’s going to be for a while, for reasons I’ll get to. I’ll have to transcribe these pages with the Corona later, in fits and starts.
Disrobing for Harriet Gumm was easier than I’d thought. While engaged in this task, I realized I was actually disrobing a robe, which made for a clever syntactical distraction. Perhaps not dissimilar to undoing a hairdo. Or dismembering a member.
It was late afternoon but felt like early evening. When she opened the door, she actually said, “Welcome,” as if she were the madam of some eighteenth-century brothel. She had taken down all the art.
She closed the do
or and I stood there. The overhead light was faint. Like really, really faint.
I pointed up to the fixture and asked if her lights were on a dimmer.
“I use low wattage for first-timers,” she explained. “We’ll raise the lights with increased comfort level.”
The stool, which, in fact, did not have a protective doily on it, was perfectly centered in the room. There were four easels positioned around it.
Harriet wore blue jeans and a navy cardigan over a white blouse with a lacy collar. She was barefoot. Her toenails were polished red. Her eyes were made-up. She was less goth and more preppy and I wondered if she created a character for each new subject. She smelled like peppermint soap.
“So let’s get started,” Harriet said.
There was suddenly something overly calm and medical-assistanty about her.
I asked if I should disrobe right there, in the living room, or if there was some other, more appropriate place, perhaps a folded screen to change behind.
“I’ve turned the heat up,” she replied.
When I asked her why the heat was relevant she said that the living room, which she actually called “the modeling room,” should be a comfortable “nudity temperature.” The word nudity hit me square between the eyes like a Ping-Pong ball.
“But by all means,” she continued, “feel free to use the facilities.”
I crossed to her bathroom like a man forced to walk toward a large sleeping bear. I closed and locked the door, turned the light on. Taped to the medicine chest, as if Harriet had known I’d opt for the john, was a note:
Mr. Falbo,
Don’t be nervous. You’re going to be a great subject.
Sincerely,
Harriet Gumm
I hung my bathrobe on the hook in the door. I peeled my double-layered thermals off, folded them neatly, and placed them on the toilet seat, after which I removed my slippers and merino Ingenius socks, inserting the socks into the slippers, and then gently placed the slippers on top of the thermals. I’d never undressed this carefully in my life. There was a geriatric, ritualistic quality to my movements. It felt like I was about to receive my first colonoscopy.
I was naked.
I took the note off the mirror and stepped back a ways to do a quick survey. The recent sit-ups and push-ups didn’t seem to have made much of a difference, and the large brown mole in my navel looked like it always does: sort of sadly forced there, a cruel anatomical joke.
I will admit that, before the session, I performed some subtle pubic topiary. I used the edging feature on my now retired electric razor. In Harriet Gumm’s medicine chest mirror my penis looked acceptably average. It was the genital equivalent of Hall and Oates’s “Method of Modern Love.” But I was grateful, if only for aesthetic purposes, that Cornelia and Lyman had chosen to have me circumcised. I tugged on it once or twice and headed out.
Harriet was standing beside one of the four easels, upon which a large sketch pad had been placed. She looked big-eyed and wise and a little savage. “Is it warm enough?” she said.
I nodded and mustered all my will to resist planting a fist in front of my dick. I kept waiting for her eyes to drop and check out the goods, but she calmly kept staring straight into my eyes.
“To the stool?” I asked. My voice had been cut in half, which used to happen a lot in the early days of fronting rock bands. The first thing to betray a front man’s false poise is his voice.
“To the stool,” Harriet replied.
I cupped my balls, sat on the stool, and then released them so they dangled comfortably. Were my balls too fuzzy? Should I have trimmed those as well?
The stool was much warmer than I’d anticipated, but the aforementioned lack of a sanitary doily was dismaying.
Harriet must have sensed my unease. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I always disinfect the stool.”
She was witchy, this girl. A witchy little preppy goth.
I nodded and simply sat there, the arches of my feet forming tensely around the stool’s little dowel support. My palms were on my knees, my head lifted high off my neck. My posture was probably too good. I think I might have been trying to elongate skeletally as well as genitally. For some reason I was aware that my nipples felt like they were more alive than usual. Like they both had individual brains. Or like they might form mouths and start meowing. And I decided to share this with Harriet.
I said, “I feel like my nipples might form little mouths and start meowing.”
“Kitty titties,” she said. It was the cleverest thing anyone had said in weeks.
Harriet continued to stand beside the easel, about five feet from me, taking me in. At this point she’d ceased committing her gaze to only my eyes and by now had surely assessed other parts, zones, limbs, joints, rogue hairs, skin tabs, and lumps.
Harriet proposed that we do a trust exercise. She told me to close my eyes. She would walk circles around me and while she did this would meditate on really seeing me, meaning beyond my physical being to my essence and my goodness and the primordial flickering of my soul, etc., etc. In a soft, pleasing voice not unlike a voice you hear on a commercial for feminine protection, she told me I should focus on relaxing, that I should simply surrender to the nonthreatening circumstances and “breathe into the experience,” a phrase that immediately made me imagine I was kneeling over one of those CPR dummies with the bald brainwashed eyes that never close and whose bodies cease existing after the lower torso.
Harriet said that at some point, after x number of revolutions, we would switch positions; that at this important flash point of the exercise she would take her clothes off and sit on the stool herself, and this would be my cue to begin circling her. In terms of deep-sea imagery, there was a sharks-zeroing-in-on-prey kind of thing going on.
She started walking circles, sylphlike and confident. “The only rule,” she said, “is no touching.” She told me to close my eyes and I did so. “And while I’m circling you, just be sure to keep breathing and connect to your breath. And later, while you’re circling me, only breathe through your nose. The person on the stool keeps their eyes closed until the other person is done circling.”
An interesting, not entirely logical set of ground rules. Sort of a child’s made-up game.
I asked her how many times she intended on circling me and she said she wasn’t sure.
“Like hundreds?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she answered. “Maybe twenty-seven. Maybe three. Keep your eyes closed now. Remember, trust.”
I could hear her bare feet padding around me. Her refrigerator hummed. The low-wattage light buzzed overhead. We were quiet for what might have been thirty seconds, but it felt like an eternity.
Thoughts were suddenly skittering through my head. Thoughts about quantities of Percocet and the Bunches’ new door, which was way more expensive than I thought it would be, like $478, and thank God Home Depot delivered and my dwindling supply of canned food and was I maybe starting to eat like a man stranded in an Arctic wasteland who’d happened upon a crashed propeller plane and the madness of astomatous snowmen that might be existing only in my mind and I was really pleased as punch that I hadn’t needed to fart thus far and Detective Mansard’s hearing aid and his bristly nicotine ’stache sort of floating independently through space like it had its own wandering intelligence and why all of the sudden is there this sort of constant intestinal gurgling going on in my lower depths and can Harriet actually hear that and was I going down low enough on my push-ups and was my bad molar releasing an odor and my mother in a white hospital gown walking through a field of blood-orange poppies sort of half doubled over because Lyman the abstraction of him at least had forgotten to reload her morphine plunger which she’d dropped somewhere in the sea of all those poppies and Sheila Anne sleeping on Dennis Church’s tan, fit chest and less-than and greater-than signs coming out of nowhere and storming my thoughts guerilla-style and what the hell is Bob Blubaugh doing with his life anyway and the sound of a lone tennis s
hoe knocking around in the dryer unit and Baylor Phebe’s almost grotesque kindness and will this winter ever cease or has the environment finally surrendered to the inevitable demise of the planet and Bethany Bunch flying upside down like a high-end chess piece flipped on its crown but traveling at some unbelievable speed through dark starlit skies and never stopping and why am I so overly concerned with my tenants’ lives when I should be trying to hunt down the three members of my former band and maybe solve some problems of my own, mainly this thing of not being able to step away from the actual structural confines of the house without feeling like the world is tetrahedrally closing in on me—
“Your turn,” Harriet’s voice issued from the darkness.
I opened my eyes. She was standing before me, naked. She was so beautiful that I almost barked like a seal. I’m not talking about parts. I’m talking about the whole of her. Harriet Gumm is Beauty Incarnate in the way that Hershey’s is Chocolate or a Mustang GT 5.0 is Horsepower. Her youth is astonishing, the quality of her skin crushingly, intensely perfect.
Again, it was all very touching, not sexual.
“May I?” she said, pointing toward the stool.
I dismounted and she took my place, crossing her legs. She closed her eyes and I started circling her.
She reminded me to breathe through my nose.
I asked her if it was okay to look at her.
“You can look wherever you’d like,” she replied.
I walked exactly twenty-seven circles around her. I know this because I counted them, half under my breath, all the while breathing through my nose.
Harriet has a faint reef of acne across her upper shoulders, sharp bony points to her elbows. She also has a small brown mole perfectly assigned by some higher power to live at a point between her shoulder blades that almost seems like the actual center of her being. I imagined our moles sort of docking, which made for an interesting physiological composition, my stomach joined to her back, our congenital markings informing each other, causing something miraculous to happen, a volcano birthing a tornado of hummingbirds in some distant land.