by Paul Neilan
If sex with the landlord’s wife was like an off duty clown swinging two fish together by their tails, then sex with Gwen was that same off duty clown sitting on the splintered wooden floor of his living room with a gun in his mouth, watching a German snuff film and crying.
“You know what I like about you?” she said.
We were on our backs and her sheets were drenched with sweat and fear and gallons of my blood. I thought my collarbone was broken, or at least torn out of its socket. And that was a shame, because it had always been one of my best features: prominent but not overbearing, shapely and subtly regal. It was the clavicle of an African queen. But not after this. Not after Gwen. She’d dug her hands in up to her knuckles and yanked up on it as she slammed herself into my pelvis, using my own body against me. I was a fuck prop in her one woman show. The critics vomited in the aisles and the ushers wept unabashedly. And I sang that Foreigner song in my head:
I wanna know what love is . . .
I want you to show me . . .
slow, and with emotion, as she kicked the shit out of me. I thought the irony might dampen the unbearable pain, but it gave me no comfort. I fingered my collarbone and thought of happier times.
“I like how you never bring work home with you. You leave it behind when you walk out every day.”
This was not entirely true. I used to fall asleep in her bathroom all the time.
“I know you’re just a temp, but still,” she caught herself, thinking maybe she’d offended me, as if that was even possible, “and I know you’re busy now and putting in a lot of hours, so we don’t get to spend as much time together, but you’re really good at separating yourself from it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I need to do that more. I need to step back and remember who I am. I hate thinking about work and stressing myself out when I’m at home and I should be relaxing.” She paused, then said thoughtfully, “I need to remember that Panopticon Insurance is not my entire life.”
It was one of those completely untrue affirmations people feel like they have to make every once in a while, like “This was for my lord and savior Jesus Christ,” whenever somebody catches a football for a four yard gain, or “We did all we could,” whenever a doctor loses a patient who’s old and not famous. It’s just something you say.
Because Panopticon Insurance was her entire life. It was all she ever goddamn talked about. All her friends worked there, or they were former employees who’d left on good terms with management. She went in on weekends even though she didn’t have to. She fell asleep thinking about it and had nightmares where she had to make decisions even though she wasn’t given all the necessary information, and hilarious dreams where she fired the corporate vice president because he wore an ugly tie. She fucking woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me that one. And I’m pretty sure she called me Panopticon during sex. More than once.
It was her entire life, and that’s exactly how she wanted it to be. And that’s fine. She cared about Panopticon Insurance. It was important to her. And that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Which is untrue, and again just something you say.
“So I like that about you,” she said again, and leaned her head on my shattered collarbone as I writhed and wilted.
“I also like that about myself,” I said. Of all the things in me to admire, she picked my apathy. That’s disheartening.
“Oh, I meant to tell you, marketing is having a contest to come up with a new slogan for the company. The winner gets a fifty-dollar gift certificate and a write-up in the newsletter. You’re so creative, why don’t you enter?”
“I’m shy,” I said.
“I would beg to differ,” and she curled her head under my chin, trying to play sexy as the pain coursed through me like I was being fucking electrocuted.
“What’s the old slogan?” I said through clenched, grinding teeth.
“Panopticon Insurance: Watching Out for You, Wherever You Go.”
“Chilling.”
“I kind of like it. But they want to bring it into the twenty-first century, maybe say something about technology or computers, but still keep that old brand nostalgia.”
“The Neo-Nazis are trying to do the same thing.”
“Ha ha, real funny.”
“So’s the Klan.”
“Could you be serious for once?”
“All right, how about Panopticon Insurance: Where Dreams Go to Die.”
“If you don’t want to do it that’s fine,” she said, annoyed, and turned over. I was very happy with myself.
She lay there, facing the wall, breathing loud through her nose to let me know that she was angry. After a few minutes of cleansing, nasal-snorting silence, she turned back towards me. She had worked through her feelings, and we could talk again. Self-help pop psychology techniques are fucking fascinating.
“So how do you like working with Martha? Isn’t she great?” she said.
“Yeah. She rules.”
And so did Fred and Keith and Sue and all the other faceless fuckers I didn’t know who sat in the cubicles nearby. They were all on my amazing team and they could all help me get a full-time job if I was nice enough to them, asked if they needed any extra photocopying done or a shoeshine, or a rimjob maybe? The implication was clear. But I didn’t talk to anybody. I knew them only as the ugly guy, or the fat guy who’s gay, or the old woman with the stringy hair. None of them had names and I didn’t want them to. I didn’t want to be involved, even in the shallowest sense of the word. But I didn’t tell Gwen that. I never told her about sleeping in the bathroom either. She would not have understood.
“What about Karal?” I said. “How did he ever get hired in the first place?”
“Who?”
“The banged up guy who waters the plants. Karal.”
“Oh Carl! He’s not really an employee. He works for the maintenance company. He must be in a union or something. But Gina in HR—”
“Who?”
“Gina? In HR? Human Resources? You really need to start learning the lingo Shane.” And she laughed.
My god, how I loathed her.
“Anyway, Gina told me that his mother calls every Friday and says, ‘Did my son do a good job this week?’ ”
“His mom? Jesus.”
“I know! But how is Gina supposed to know? He doesn’t even work for us!” She thought that part of it was hilarious. “One day she started crying and told Gina how he used to be an Eagle Scout and he was so handsome until this hunting accident in high school where he almost blew his head off. There was mud in the barrel of his gun and—”
“Hunting accident? I thought he was in Nam?”
“I don’t think so. I think he’s always been with the maintenance company. But she was crying and everything. Gina didn’t even know where to transfer her! Isn’t that crazy?”
I agreed that it was, in fact, fucking insane. After she had sighed her way out of laughing she said, “I should introduce you to Gina. The more people you know in HR the better.”
“Human Resources,” I said.
After pedaling all the way home from work in the goddamn pouring rain and almost dying at three different intersections, I realized that I’d left my keys on my desk. They were behind the stapler, wrapped in a paper towel. Goddamnit.
I’d had a rough time on the toilet that morning. I woke up kicking and holding on to the handicapped bars with both hands. I was dangling from a fucking helicopter in my dream, hanging on to the landing gear as we flew out over water. We were really high up and the pilot was jerking us all over the sky, trying to shake me off. He didn’t like me for some reason. I gasped and opened my eyes as an echo clanged off the walls. I had just kicked the metal stall partition, really hard. My foot hurt. And someone was standing outside the door.
Their shoes were pointing in at me. They were probably wondering if they should knock, or say, “Is everything all right in there? Do you need any help?” But they didn’t. After a second’s hesitation they left, without say
ing a word. There are no good samaritans in a men’s room. Nobody wants to help some guy off the toilet. Maybe if he’s family, but even then, hire a fucking nurse or something.
I got up quick, still shaking off the dream. All I had to do was be out of the stall before anyone else came in. Then if they asked me anything I’d blame it on Karal. Yeah, that guy who waters the plants ran past me as I walked in. I think he was crying. But when I stood up I saw my keys sprawled out on the rancid floor in a pool of water at the base of the toilet, like they were sunning themselves in filth. They’d fallen out of my pocket during the helicopter struggle. I didn’t know where all the water had come from. A pipe must have been leaking. Or. Oh god.
I ran them under the lukewarm water in the sink for a few minutes, but it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. They were tainted now, polluted with dribbled piss and splattered shit and toilet water. The unclean molecules had already attached themselves and become part of their DNA. It’s how atoms work. That’s why everyone hates science. I wrapped them in a paper towel like a dead pigeon and set them on my desk behind the stapler and tried not to think about them for the rest of the day. And I didn’t. Which is why they were still there and I was outside my locked door, half-drowned and cursing the ugliness of the world and its bathroom floors. I hoped the cleaning people wouldn’t throw them out. They’d probably be too busy stealing shit to even bother.
There was no way I was riding all the way back to work in the rain just to get my filthy keys, just to ride back home and almost die all over again. It wasn’t going to happen. I thought about kicking the door in or jimmying the lock with a credit card, but I knew I didn’t have it in me. To do that kind of thing you really have to believe. I settled for trying the door knob again, twice. It didn’t work.
So I sat down with my back to the door and went over my options. I could go to Bryce. Whatever else was happening, he was still my landlord. It’s what you do when you’re locked out of your apartment. Or I could call a locksmith myself, spend the money to skip the awkward “No no, I’m not here to have sex with your wife Bryce, I just need my key” conversation. Or I could go to a bar and get drunk, then curl up on the floor in front of my door and pass out. I was already in my work clothes for the next morning. I usually wore the same thing every day anyway. It would be all right on the floor. My ass was asleep and I’d only been sitting there a few minutes. And everywhere is comfortable when you’re unconscious.
I was kind of looking forward to it actually, until I walked out the front door and saw Mobo standing there under the awning, stroking his goatee. Ivan wasn’t with him. For his sake I hoped he was dead.
“Bambilo!” Mobo said, smiling at me, “How you been my man?”
“Uh, pretty good. How, are you?”
“Surviving pacho, surviving. The rain has the answers, but it’s making me hungry, you know?”
“Yeah, I’ve got to get out of here,” I said, buttoning my yellow raincoat. “I’m locked out, so—”
“You locked out? You came to the right hocho. I got your key upstairs.”
“Huh?”
“Bryce gave it to me.”
“What? He gave you my key?”
“Come up in a few mapos camacho. I need some time to hide the bodies,” he said, and laughed as he went inside.
I stood there, staring out at the rain. I felt like something had just exploded in my face, like I was the bumbling bad guy in a Disney movie, black soot dusting my cheeks and forehead, my hair blown straight up and still sizzling at the tips. But there was nothing funny about this, and it could never be seen by children. Mobo had a key to my apartment. That meant Mobo had definitely had non-consensual sex with Ivan on my salty bed, and probably in my kitchen too. I’d have to live with that knowledge from now on. And I really didn’t know how to do it. Even for a man who doesn’t care about anything, that’s a little too much to bear.
It couldn’t have been true. It just wasn’t possible. I would’ve seen the fur, found the stains, felt the presence of evil. I would’ve had ghosts in my apartment after something like that. Ghosts who wept through the night in between bouts of nausea and suicide attempts. No, Mobo had not fucked a guinea pig in my bed. Or on my cutting board. He was probably just sniffing my boxers or pissing in my tub. Maybe he used my place to take shits.
No. That’s not how it was. Bryce had given my spare key to Mobo because Bryce’s wife kept stealing it. She liked to sneak into my apartment while I was at work and lie on my bed. Sometimes she wore one of my old T-shirts. Sometimes she went through my stuff, looking for a photo album. She wanted to sigh over what a cute kid I’d been, a cute baby. She wanted to see pictures. But I didn’t have any. Then Bryce found out and he put a stop to it the only way he could: Mobo. She couldn’t get past Mobo. Dudes who fuck guinea pigs are the modern equivalent of that three-headed dog and Medusa and all those other Greek monsters. That’s how far we’ve come in a few thousand years.
So that’s what happened. That’s why Mobo had my key. It wasn’t true of course, but I didn’t care. I believed what I had to. I’d lived with bigger lies before, but none more important.
I went upstairs and knocked on Mobo’s door.
“Surprise surprise,” he said, shaking his head. He was wearing a kilt, and he didn’t have a shirt on. His white albino chest was blinding, like the light you see when you die just before you go to hell for all eternity. “Is this business or pleasure?”
“Uh, remember I just talked to you downstairs? About my key?”
“Ah, what we talk about and what we mean are always two different things compodro.”
“No they’re not,” I said, but he had already turned back inside. He left me standing at the open door, like Bryce’s wife always did. Déjà vu makes me fucking sick sometimes.
I took a deep breath and held it. Then I stepped inside.
His apartment was much less like a dungeon than I expected. Except for little, leathered Ivan shivering in the corner, shackled to the wall in thick medieval chains, it wasn’t like a dungeon at all. There was a leopard-print throw rug, and four upholstered seats against the wall that looked like they’d been stripped from an old theater. There was a feathered dream catcher hanging from the ceiling like a useless chandelier. There were birds chirping and other muted animal calls, and water was falling around me under a light hush of music. It sounded like a lady was playing the harp in a rain forest. It was very peaceful. Until an elephant blasted its fucking trumpet call so loud I thought it was smashing through the wall.
“You want some avocado?” Mobo said, standing in the center of the room under the dream catcher.
But I couldn’t respond. I was transfixed by the mural that desecrated his far wall. Mobo and Ivan—a full-sized, Planet of the Guinea Pigs Ivan—were side by side at the end of a craps table in a casino. Ivan was bent over the table, leaning in. He’d just thrown the dice. Furry cleavage spilled out of his cocktail dress. It was red, like his lipstick. Mobo was beside him, naked from the waist up and wearing a loincloth. He was tan and ripped and glistening, flexing his painted-on biceps as he roared for a good roll. There was a wad of bills in each clenched fist and an unmistakable bulge in his loincloth. It was shaped like a fire hydrant. It cast its own shadow on the table.
“You like that?” Mobo said as I swayed and almost fainted. “One of my barrachas gave it to me. She’s a kindergarten teacher.”
“That’s appalling.”
“She’s doing another one for me. Ivan’s going to be the Virgin of Guadalupe, isn’t that right? If you ever sit still for your head shots, bitch!” he yelled at little, cowering Ivan as I pretended to be deaf and invisible.
“So, you want a sprinkle on your avocado? A little tinkata?” Mobo said.
“What? No. I don’t want any avocado.”
“You want the tour? I don’t have a shower curtain but my futon is brand new,” he said, and motioned towards a curtain of beads hanging in an open doorway, where he kept all the tortu
re machines and lube.
“Christ, no. I just want my key.”
“Ha ha, don’t be shy mondurro. Have a seat, as the Indians did.” He pointed to his leopard-print rug, then disappeared through the curtain of beads into his unholy bedroom. There was no way I was sitting on his fucking floor. I was pretty sure the rug had syphilis. I collapsed in one of the theater chair aisle seats instead and put my hands on my knees like a girl wearing a skirt in public for the first time.
Ivan was staring at me. Strapped in his slave hood, he twitched his nose continuously, furiously. It seemed deliberate, like he was spelling out something in Morse code. Kill me maybe, over and over again, like that deformed soldier in the Metallica video. If it was sign language I may have felt compelled to act, but I didn’t know Morse code, so I had an excuse. I’m sorry Ivan.
When Mobo came out he was wearing a ripped T-shirt, and carrying a briefcase in each hand.
“You like the white man’s chairs eh?” he said, nodding. “All right, let’s get down to business chapo.”
He sat down in the seat right next to me, and as he did his bare knee slid out from under his receding kilt and touched the back of my hand just as a monkey screamed out of the rain forest like he was swinging in the fucking window. Too many unsettling things were happening at once. I would need a sanitarium, or some time in the country at least.
“So what you need?” he said, balancing a briefcase on each knee.
“I need my key.”
“Of course, of course. I can help. I know what you seek. Clarity.”
He stood up and unhooked the dream catcher from the ceiling.
“Just relax,” he said, dangling it over my head. And then, as I sat paralyzed in disbelief, he chanted “Humma humma humma humma” while he shook the dream catcher down past my lap to my feet, then worked his way back up to my head. After the third pass over my balls I had to speak.
“Just open that one,” I said.
“Which one?”
“That one,” and I pointed to the briefcase closest to me.
