delirifacient (24 page)

And the small man offered the browncoat a consoling tour of the facilities and how could the browncoat say no and he took him around to see every nook and cranny and explained all the procedures and the subtle differences between the hygienic requirements for operating on men and women and then he took the brownback to a series of offices behind the men’s room and there he introduced a small woman typing away as his wife and the small woman waved at the browncoat and returned to the typing for it seemed very lively and important. And the small man said he was chief doctor here and much of the intellectual framework for the centre and its operations were his no need to clap so forcefully he told his wife and now his life story he had also been the centre’s first male patient and he proudly displayed his full mop of hair and the absolute flatness of his crotch.

And brownback asked the small man what had attracted him to this business initially and the small man said this was his life’s passion and previously he and his wife had run a fertility clinic but then he was confused and inverted everything and only after a numinous chat with a superior man did he understand how wrong and counter-productive his life’s activity had been and under the seal of royal approval he had converted his fertility clinic into this centre and he was extremely dedicated to its work and that he also had a side business in contraceptives and granted his two operations rather cannibalised each other but regardless he was so dedicated to the entire range of options available to prevent human reproduction that if he could he would even issue a bull on immaculate birth control if he could that was hehe but that was just a silly man daydreaming and no need to pay attention.

And the small man also told the browncoat that in addition to his wife’s very giving involvement with his project his daughter worked as a nurse in the men’s room she was a vampyric little nympho but she was her father’s little nympho and his own mother at the advanced age of 86 worked as a doctor in the men’s room also for his mother too was an inexcusable slut la-la-loved the cock that octogenarian cur but how could the small man not love her passion for his passion (for the excising of the objects of her passion). And the brownback saw that the small man was highly enthusiastic about his ideas and his work and he asked the small man whether he wasn’t maybe a deluded victim of his own destructive energy and propaganda and the small man said that this was very droll to him and he was an highly rational fellow and, as his wifemotherdaughter will surely tell the browncoat, there is nothing he has lessmore talent for than being a prisonervictimtyrantprophetapostleapostate.

And the browncoat said he saw that this was the highest truth and he was very grateful for the tour and the lecture but now he had to go mourn his wife in privacy and gratitude and reverent salutations to the small man’s mother. And the small man said he would escort him out and they said goodbye to the small man’s wife who ignored all around her and was only attuned to the discrepancies in her husband’s manic voice and only reacted when she sensed that he was riding another paranoid burst of exomologesis and even then she only watched to ensure he did not attempt to prove his guilt and authenticity of faith by an extracting from within other cavitary organs of his of value moderate to high. And the small man and the browncoat walked to the main hallway and the small man stopped the browncoat and asked him whether he was really who he said he was a mournful widower and whether he hadn’t actually been sent by his employers to supervise the operations and evaluate his work and his voice was trembling and his eyes were confused also. And the browncoat said enigmatically that regardless of all this mud he thought the small man was discharging his function very and very well and he winked at the small man and the small man was very relieved and emotional about being very relieved and the small man shook brownback’s hand and thanked him and spoke so fast he was spitting in brownback’s face and brownback finally said it was time for him to go for he also had duties and functions to carry out and the small man winked in solidarity and returned the brownback’s hand in almost the same state he had found it and said goodbye and brownback said goodbye and walked out of the building.

And he walked away from the building, and other men and women who had been inside the building walked with him, and they all had bizarre approaches to walking and the men spread their legs as far as they could, in both length and width, and the women walked on the tips of their toes almost without separating their legs at all like overweight ballerinas, and the browncoat paraded his normal walking before them and raced past the men and the women and into the uninterested lights of downtown Peterburg.

‘to: bestest girlfriend

from: aggrieved and enraged, aka your favorite exchange student

[censored, best friend], man, i’m truly sorry the only human being i truly hate has to be my mom;

spoke to [censored, host mother] yesterday

we cried together, and she said all moms do stupid things; but no matter how stupid it is, it’s still mom’s express desire and she has to respect it; but she said she understands everything all too well, and she’s with me, she’s there for me; she’s really there for me…

[censored, host father]… sucks ass. he suddenly grew a pair and started taking this host father thing seriously; told me i couldn’t see him, and that was it, and all types of other bullshit; and he said that in this house what he says goes, etc; and i ended up crying in his arms, and he cried with me, but then again i was only crying because of him getting a hard on over this stuff in the first place; duuuuude… these people were okay with it, because they had no reason not to be okay with it – until mom obsessively specified that the program says no boyfriends, and emphasyzed that she forbids it as well

fuuuuuuuuuck

honestly

i hope i just never see her again; my only releif is that im away from her now; although, if this happened back in the old country, i would have left home by now and not gave a fuck once and for all; believe me, [censored, best friend]: ONCE AND

FOR FUCKING ALL.

now i have to sit here and think how stupid one person’s obsession can be this hasn’t changed anything

i’ll still see [censored, forbidden boyfriend]

this only brought us closer;

but the disapointment, this sensation of ramming my head against the wall, makes me think fuck em all every last one and fuck their fucking ‘protection’, makes me wanna tear my clothes off one day and just take [censored, boyfriend], make him a boyfriend like it says in the fucking definition; like fucking enough already, you know; the moment is approaching; yeah, like in donnie darko, when you’re sick of all the shit and you just simply fucking do it, just absolutely shitting on all the rules and norms and programs and MOMS and rules

normally, i wouldn’t have even thought of doing it but now, i even know the day it’s happening: wednesday come wednesday, i probably wont be a virgin anymore; that’s just a fait divers; because the rest are idiots, and if im the only thing that can hurt them then so fucking be it; poshli vy vse nahui, suki

limits suck, but ive reached the limit

yours,

the rebel child inside you’

The browncoat found this letter in his mailbox one day and imagined it must have been dropped there by mistake. He scratched his cerebra and jogged lazily through all the people in his building and determined that the likeliest recipient was the blond airhead whom he always heard running, presumably for fitness because she had a smiling face, down the stairs and up the stairs and around the block and in her tiny apartment three storeys above him. He only read until he reached the line that started in ‘we cried together’, lost what little interest he had in the situation and dropped the letter, half-removed from its envelope, on the floor, without bothering to crumple or shred it.

The child’s letter landed gently onto the carpeted floor and stayed there, written side up, waiting for another tenant to walk by, one whose curiosity wouldn’t resume its natural flaccidity so easily. It was even conceivable that the first person to notice it and pick it up would be its lawful recipient, but the browncoat did not bother with such irrelevancies and went back to his room.

The browncoat had been a student at the biggest university in Moscow for two and an half years. He refused to live in any of the university’s halls of residence and rented a one-room flat in a tedious building in a tedious cerebral eclipse part of the city. He had his own bathroom but shared a kitchen with the other people who rummaged around on his storey. The browncoat would frequently go into the kitchen late at night when most of the others, responsible young bureaucrats and rubicund young builders and Rubenesque young chambermaids, were maximising their mourning efficiency and ulterior earning potential in their respective tonically warm beds, the restorative pods of the happiest production, and late in the night would he remove all the milk bottles from the kitchen and he opened and took them to his room, taking great delight in the way the glass bottles clicked and scratched each other in his arms in what to him were agonisingly loud noises that would force a snoring platoon to come to attention, and in the inevitable little spills that he would come back to and push into the little creaks in the parquetry with the tips of his shoes and hope the spills would remain visible so as to give any potential detective a trail to follow to the scene of the secret crime but none would come. And in his room the brownback would place all the milk bottles on the table open before him and most times there would be six to seven bottles and he would summon the blond airhead from three storeys above him to the insides of his closed eyelids and think hard on her and in a few minutes spill himself into the first milk bottle. And then he would think on the blond airhead again and this time it took longer but not by much and he would cataract into the second bottle. And then he tried to use the blond airhead again but she had been all used up all thoughtout all thoughtup and he had to resort to other females and males of similar anonymity and athletic inclinations and he would squeeze himself into every one of the remaining milk bottles, and by the time he was done which was three to seven minutes per spill and the additional pair of minutes of recovery he required before the last two rounds he was quite soft in the head and reddened and his veins were angry but also proud at him. And he would close the milk bottles and shake all of them until the flocculent islands that floated on the surface of the milk islands that he always wanted to christen but somehow always forgot to map into his cerebral domains had been wholly consumed by the uniformity and lesser density of all the sickly white around them. And he would embrace all the bottles and struggle to open his door and walk across the vulnerable corridor that always took him to the kitchen and leave the bottles where he had found them and although he would always remember the exact initial position of each bottle relative to the others and which way each of their labels had faced and even how they had tilted he always made minor intentional mistakes and arranged them too carefully too rationally and too efficiently and always thought a kindred mind would have noticed and become suspicious but the scurrilous residents of his storey were too closed to the world of the milk bottles and never cared and could barely recognize which bottle was theirs when they drank cold milk in the morning, separately or with their tea and coffee. Twice the browncoat braved discovery even further and opened two fresh bottles that had been sealed for the morning and replaced the seals and bottle caps in noticeably clumsy dispositions and the unity of virgin milk bottle and seal and cap was irremediably broken but in the morning the owners of the deflowered bottles would either not pay attention to how the seals came off far too easily or think their neighbours had opened their bottles by mistake but abstained from drinking and were too embarrassed to tell them about it and so it was ultimately of no importance that the seals had been broken. And he did this each night and his neighbours smiled at him in the mourning, laughing at his sluggish demeanor and poor cuntry boy adaptations to the cycles of an active city life.

And the browncoat would go to his university in the afternoon and listen to courses he stuck his tongue in his ears to wash off as soon as he left the lecture halls and walk among many students of the same course, some nodding and some debating the merits of the ideas and some walking alone, their faces washed off in their long hair, and some reciting the knowledge words of the course into their sleeves until all material evil had been warded off. And the courses were brief and the work a thing of mirrors and translations and the browncoat had as always more than enough time for staring and walking.

And he decided to serialkill his time and added some fresh faces, experimentally, and he ate with the fresh faces and off the fresh faces before the course at the university and the fresh faces looked all around him in curiosity and talked and their talk was thunderclap and their tongues flicked and hooped and pounced on the biggest toughest words and slithered around the words and bit their necks and injected them with their mollifiers and could thereupon taste and chew the big words up as was their pleasure. And the smaller tongues of the fresh faces would not brave the biggest words, which were loners, but stalked the wordhordes with old men’s patience and crept upon the weaklings, the antediluvians and the hatchlings, and brought the weak words down and mounted them and bit into their rumps and the smaller tongues of the fresh faces went not hungry.