20. Phantom Limb

Apr 16, 2010 14:01


In the afternoon we order room service, giant silver platters carrying white plates of messy burgers and greasy fries strangely garnished with delicate, fresh snipped parsley.  There's single serving glass bottles of mustard, ketchup and mayonnaise, miniatures of the real things.  Like vultures picking at the skeletal remains of a carcass, we pick greedily at each other's food for awhile and then we pick at each other's clothes until we are as stripped as our empty plates.  We have a kind of tame, mechanical sex, the kind where we're fucking and caressing and using all the right moves to try and manufacture some kind of emotion but nothing is coming through.  Instead, we're really focused on thinking about what we'll order next from room service or how many blue storm splotches are over the Weather Channel's map of Missouri.

Something is not working correctly.  Something has been amputated.  The way we're going on--both today and yesterday--it feels false, like our lives have been partitioned off and moved just outside of everything else. I feel could knock out a wall of this hotel room and see a different world, a real world.

In the evening I pick benzos from Mike's black memento box, but this feeling of impending doom I've been trying to suppress with narcotics is growing.  It slices through the fog in my head, cutting across my high like the sunshine ray that cut across our hotel room earlier.I'm left twisting and moaning on the bed, my fingers clenching and unclenching on sweat-drenched, cotton sheets.  My guts are tense and a headache like a chisel is chipping away at a spot between my eyes.  In the midst of the panic, I reach out beside me for Mike's hand but his eyes are closed and he's asleep, or he's pretending to have fallen asleep, or maybe I'm asleep and I can't wake up and I am no one and this is nowhere.



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necessary voodoo: 2. ascension

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