Mouthquake

by Daniel Allen Cox

  I was grateful for this opening and showed him the items I had already circled in the IKEA catalogue: the shower curtains with hologram inlay of downtown Stockholm; white Pappasan chair with red circular bull’s-eye stitching; dining room table with bevelled glass and chrome legs; inverse bookshelf that defied gravity and looked like an upside-down Machu Picchu. These were the manifestations of my love—collapsible, available, on sale, and easy to put together. Everything was tasteful, in my opinion, but Eric wrinkled his nose. I suggested we go there in person to see the furniture up close. He relented to a ninety-minute in-store visit. I ushered him out the door and told him to say goodbye to our old life.

  We took the bus to IKEA, and I directed us to a thoroughly greasy, disgusting, but affordable breakfast of industrial scrambled eggs and sausage links in the cafeteria before we proceeded to the actual shopping.

  Didn’t your mother used to come here a lot?

  Why do you always have to bring up my mother?

  Uh, I hardly ever. And that’s because this is the reaction you always give me. Since we can’t talk about your mother, I don’t talk about mine. We’re completely motherless because of you.

  That’s not true.

  Yes, it is. Your silence around her is really creepy.

  Can we not talk about this right now? You’re harshing my buzz.

  Most shoppers browse the showroom where everything is put together, but I prefer to stroll through the warehouse aisles, the domain of forklifts, uninteresting to the typical shopper unless you happen to get off on reading, on the sides of boxes, in no less than eight languages, warning labels, the quantity of bolts in each length and calibre, how many dowels and tools are required, the number of Allen keys included, and persons needed for setup. I’m a hopeless foamer for instructional detail. People like me keep every IKEA Allen key they’ve ever used, even though they’re identical and all you need is one. Eric appears to put up with it.

  I’d like us to try a new kind of sex.

  We already did.

  I mean another kind. There can be a few different kinds of sex.

  Sure thing, mister dickly. Is it something K-9 this time?

  No—there. There’s the sofa we wanted.

  That takes up too much space.

  Read my lips. We have the space. I’m going to throw everything out tomorrow.

  I think you have a problem. You have an addiction.

  You should be more careful when throwing around words like that. Whether or not I have a problem is for me to decide, and me alone.

  When will you learn to trust me? I don’t know why I agreed to this psychotic trip.

  You didn’t agree. I forced you. Listen, there’s something I’ve always wanted to try in bed. Like, I need it or something? Who knows. The logistics might be hard to figure out. Then there’s the matter of our feelings. That’s another thing entirely. Oh boy, here’s a futon with rubber wheels for front legs. Easy to move around.

  What is it?

  I was wondering…how you feel about scat.

  Uh…

  I just want to say that you’re not under any pressure or anything. But it’s something I need to do. It might be a way of regressing for me, getting to the root of things. I don’t know. It’s about being primal. Letting my body be as messy as my emotions. Getting to the insides of me that I don’t understand.

  The way you intellectualize sex is unsexy. Can’t it be as simple as you just liking shit?

  Ha. Hadn’t thought of that.

  And you’re saying that you want to get shit all over our brand-new furniture? In that case, I suggest we get everything in shit brown.

  You’re taking this remarkably well, I think.

  Why don’t you post an ad in the back of those sex magazines you read? You’ll probably have better luck there than with me.

  If I write an ad for this and you see it, is there a chance you’ll respond?

  Yes, if I need to send you spelling corrections.

  It bugs me that the artist renderings of the different pieces of furniture, in black ink on the brown cardboard boxes, is such a blatant victim of two-dimensional printing. So many things can throw the shopper’s impression askew, including creases in the cardboard, printing density, gaps in the ink, lighting and glare, the distraction of so many wonderful things, the design of the product conflicting with the design of the packaging. They could easily include a hologram of the item, or even a 3-D cardboard cut-out. These ideas of mine have to be remotely Swedish; they can’t be completely crazy.

  The only thing we ended up buying that day was a doormat, because it was the only thing we could agree on.

  I wasn’t exactly sure why I wanted to get into scat. I don’t know if I believed the reasons I gave Eric. I think I did need to explore it from a somewhat intellectual point of view, so the ad I submitted was longer than I expected. I was sure there was someone out there who had already felt this way but had suppressed, sublimated, ignored, and ultimately, punished themselves for their ideas. So I was hopeful about finding someone into this stuff.

  I forget exactly how the ad went, but it included my idea that the perfect song had ten assholes taking a shit on a set of cymbals; how I’d heard a rumour that Edith Piaf was buried with a shit inside her, and exhuming her would release an extinct form of sadness into the world, a single endless note of agony; rumours that toilet paper is the gentrification of shit; that nobody ever leaves a floater by accident; that Georges Bataille was a compulsive wiper; that shit made of silicone is actually just a dildo falling out; that diaper lovers are mystics; that in scat there is no top and bottom, only jazz, and everyone submits; that two people can never shit at precisely the same time, two rosebuds blooming side-by-side but out of synch, not hopeless just tragically usual; that maybe, if we try hard, terrestrially speaking, to understand the love that sits heavy in our bowels, if we finally understand that we can never love another shit more than our own, that all this time we have only ever wanted to shit into our own mouths while saying something important, words choked and forced back inside; that the fear of shit is an enemy, a policing, so when someone says, “that’s shitty,” “this smells like shit,” “hey shit for brains,” “hey asshole,” or “don’t be a shitty-shit shit head,” I’ll either assume they work for the Conservative Party of Canada and are trying to kill my orgasm, or I’ll wonder why they are showering compliments and trying to turn me on; I wrote something about finger fucking myself over a sewer to deform a perfect shape, dreaming of shit that comes out in the shape of its shitter, pinching my nose to hold the smell in, shooting down drones that spy on the shit of the innocent, blowing an armada of suppositories into another endless someone, reading sphincter folds like tea leaves, interpreting regularity as a form of fluency (and therefore a myth), busting nozzles on cans of air freshener, enlisting a heart as a Trojan horse to the ass, and sewing a transnational flag for the shit sniffers and fart fuckers of the world.

  I didn’t get any responses, but I’m not surprised. I didn’t actually say what I wanted to do, and I forgot to put in my Hotmail address.

  THE MEAT OF IT

  My bed became an operating table. The king-sized silk sheets became a starched white single that smelled of bleach. The walls were cool white and green, the furniture gone and replaced with expensive medical equipment—X-ray machines, defibrillators, heart monitors, ventilators. There were tubes and syringes and cotton swabs on a tray where the night table used to be. A tinted observation window where the sun used to be. Four faceless surgeons, a hospital gown where I used to be naked, no more pillows but my head propped up on a neck stirrup, padded at the side so I couldn’t hear well, and a curtain raised in front of my nose so I couldn’t see what was happening to my mouth.

  They gave me a local anaesthetic, a giant needle that stuck me deep in the throat. I could feel the numbness creep in, the gap in the synaptic messages. I wasn’t sure if the doctors realized this, but I could see everything in the glare of the plastic panes
on the overhead lamp. My mouth was stretched open with forceps like I was going to give birth to something through my face.

  I could feel that something was fucked. And that’s when I knew they were out to completely destroy my voice. They were going to rip my larynx open, scalpel right to the heart of it, peel back the skin and tissue like it was an artichoke, find the meat of my stutter, and examine it trembling under the hot white light, the insides of my throat writhing in a pool of blood in their hands. It was a cold study—maybe there was a “cure” or maybe there was nothing they could do—they just had to excise it and toss it into the medical waste, the mechanisms of my voice box open and laid out. There were definitely no safe words. A voice can’t make sound when it’s so exposed to the elements, it can only vibrate uselessly, and maybe, just maybe, if the light caught it right, the doctors would be able to make out an intention, a wish, a regret, an expression of love, an exasperated rasp, a pleasure growl, choked laughter, reduced to its zero-sum parts. There might still be something to analyze, so the head surgeon took another slice.

  The decision had been made long before I got to the operating room: My voice was going to be removed. With my mouth agape at the ceiling, the anaesthesia mask descending over my nose, the gas turned on, the suction turned on, the saw turning, there was nothing to do but close my eyes.

  But it turned out to be worse than I had imagined.

  In the dream, the doctors turned me into a non-stutterer. It ruined my life. Because now that the stutter had been excised, the continued interruptions could only be explained by one thing: I willfully refused to say what was on my mind.

  In subsequent dreams, I took them to court. My lawyer was the Grand Antonio, and he beat them silly with a hunk of mortadella until they confessed to malpractice, and then he ate them.

  PRESENTÉ PAR LA LETTRE E

  En Vogue, les Everly Brothers, Electric Light Orchestra, Everclear, le début de la chanson “The End” par the Doors, enregistrements perdus et retrouvés dans la glace, Engelbert Humperdinck, les énoncés contre la guerre, Everything But the Girl, les folies électro-acoustiques, “Every Day I Get the Blues” (pas juste toi, Gerry Boulet), erreurs de synchronisation entre la contrebasse et la batterie, “Et si tu n’existais pas,” Enigma, entretiens avec Enya dans lesquels elle dénonce la musique d’Enigma en tant que plagiat, Eno et l’évolution de la musique actuelle, “Échappé belle” de Beau Dommage, Ella Fitzgerald, l’ergonomie de l’oreille, Elvis Presley, émetteurs de fréquences extra-terrestres, ex-membres qui nous manquent, Eric’s Trip, “l’Exile” de Harmonium, “Elle a fait un bébé toute seule.”

  BROKEN PEOPLE

  Sometimes Eric likes to try to talk me out of ideas. He rarely succeeds, but I appreciate the effort he puts into it. Especially because I know the reason he tries so hard is love.

  He claims to be able to see danger long before I can. An extra sense, perhaps, that he developed to make up for deafness. It’s not that we have different definitions of danger; in fact, they’re quite similar, but we apply them differently in our lives. I know danger isn’t the only agent of change, nor the best, but it delivers pleasure unfailingly.

  Eric and I sat facing each other in kitchen chairs. We never usually did that—it’s just how we ended up sitting. There was nowhere else to look except at each other.

  Do you really need to know what happened to you?

  Yes. I need to know if I was abused or not. And if so, then how.

  Why does it matter?

  Because I feel like a survivor, and if I actually am one, I want to live the life of a survivor. I think that’s a pretty normal feeling to have.

  Okay. But have you considered this: What happens if it turns out to be true? Won’t you become an angrier person?

  What are you talking about? I wouldn’t try to take it out on people. I would get over it and try to make something beautiful with it. I’m aware of the need to end the cycle of abuse.

  You don’t know how you’ll feel. No one can predict that sort of thing. What if it was something really bad?

  I promise not to have a nervous breakdown if it turns out to be really bad. Is that what you want to hear? And what do you mean by “angrier”? Do you find me angry to begin with? Am I an angry person?

  That’s not what I’m saying. Isn’t this all about forgiveness?

  Yes, of course.

  And isn’t it easier to forgive now that you don’t know what it is?

  Ah…I see where you’re going, but, um, knowing is the entire point. The forgiveness has to, um, mean something.

  And sorry to get in your face about this, but what about the definition of abuse? It’s not universal. I’m trying to be sensitive here, but this is such tricky territory. It’s nuanced.

  Hey. Saying something is “nuanced” doesn’t add the nuance you’re looking for. You don’t support me. I can feel it.

  I support you, I really do. But I want to be sure you know what you’re doing. Sometimes I’m not convinced you think the present is more important than the past. That all you’ve lived counts for much, much more than whatever you’re trying to remember.

  Then you don’t fully support me.

  What are you afraid of?

  Losing my memory. Maybe that’s why I’m doing this now, before I forget too much. And I’m afraid of losing my stutter after all this time. I’m afraid of becoming fluent. These days, when I tell people I stutter, they say they didn’t know until I said the word “stutter.” They have no right.

  Ha. You don’t stutter like you used to, but you still have it, honey.

  You’re so encouraging.

  What else?

  That’s not enough?

  Here’s what I think. I think you’ve been avoiding the topic of your mother. That’s where the answers lie. It’s so clear to me, but it’s like you’re making yourself blind to it on purpose. Of course it’ll be painful, but that’s part of the work.

  I got up to make some tea, although Eric was usually the one who made it, so I didn’t know where anything was. I just stood at the counter hovering in front of the cupboards, hoping the tea bags, cups, and saucers would materialize.

  What’s up with you today?

  They changed stuttering to Childhood Onset Fluency Disorder in the DSM-5. The American Psychiatric Association still lists it as a mental fucking illness.

  And you have a problem with that.

  Yes, I have a fucking problem with that. I have a problem with, um, being another acronym. I’m already identified by so many acronyms, I don’t think I…jeez! I can’t take another. And stuttering never should’ve been on the disorder list in the first place.

  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you. But I can see the value of having it on the list. Like maybe it opens up funding. Or something?

  Funding.

  Yes.

  Fuck funding. And fuck the DSM-5.

  Everybody needs money, even to do the noblest things. The speech therapy industry needs government funding to function. Some people want to be helped. But it looks like you don’t.

  I accept help. I just don’t want to be pathologized anymore.

  Did—what was her name, the speech therapist—

  Rosa.

  Did she ever pathologize you?

  Yes, but it wasn’t her fault, it was just her job. That’s what they all do. For the money.

  Listen, you can move on with your life and pretend speech therapy hasn’t helped you. That’s your prerogative.

  This is really surprising coming from the President of the Deaf and Dumb Society. It’s as if you think signing your way through everything doesn’t make you look like a moron.

  Hey. That was mean.

  I’m sorry, but if stuttering turns out to be a mental illness, I mean if it’s actually, um, a self-protection mechanism, a childhood onset whatchamacallit, a symptom of abuse, a bruise, if you will, then I’m screwed. Because I’m proud of my stuttering. It’s part of who I am. It’s my identity. I’ve
learned how to accept my speech as a bent part of myself. A queer part. It’s a difference in me. My signal is jammed, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. But I’m conflicted that I identify so strongly with, like I said, a mark of abuse. Unless I was destined to become a stutterer anyway? Which is a distinct possibility. I don’t know anymore. I don’t know anything.

  You think you were born this way? Sounds like gay essentialism to me.

  I don’t care for your snotty analysis. This is really hard for me.

  Well, don’t take it out on me, asshole, or I might not stick around to help you through it. Find yourself a fucking therapist.

  Then stop acting like one. If you really want to know what I’m afraid of, it’s inventing memories that never existed. I’ve done it before. I could be making myself so impressionable that any idea could seem like a memory, and soon I’ll be full of false ones. Next thing you know, I’ll be saying Big Bird made me grind on his face. No, I’m not kidding. This is how people get falsely accused, and it happens all the fucking time. They go to jail for nothing. Now you know. And maybe now you can stop bugging me.

  Are you talking about your imaginary friends again?

  FUCK. YOU. GO FUCK YOUR FUCKING SELF.

  I had long resisted seeing a psychotherapist or other type of counsellor to talk about things that were on my mind. Perhaps it’s because I have a harder time confiding than most people. Who knows what biases a therapist has, sitting there judging you silently while you let your emotions crawl on the carpet in front of them like a sick, maimed animal? I’ve heard others say with relief that they feel free to tell strangers anything, knowing they’ll never see them again. I retort that they’ll most definitely see a stranger again, that when a comet passes you, it’s not by accident. Once you’re in someone’s orbit, it’s hard to avoid them. I wish they were right, that we’d see strangers only once and never again. If that were the case, I’d empty myself into them to the very bottom and then run away just before they exploded with an overload of human goo. I would use the situation to my advantage. But that’s not how it works.