The Lamp

He had never before stood in such an open space.  On all sides was grainy light brown vastness greedily engulfed at the edges by an infinite blue pierced only by a white disc of heat.  He, the small house, the yellow sedan with the faux oak panels, and Miriam all seemed like tiny alien specks dangling from the strip of black tar that had brought them here.  The air moved like a clear sea, tiny waves disrupting his normal window of the world, as though he were wearing goggles with beveled lenses.  Their pulsing made his own seem irrelevant.

“Come one, give me a hand with these bags,” Miriam said, her tan left forearm resting on the top of her open door.  Her skin was darker than the sand around them, flecked with spots that made her seem, for an instant, made out of the same material that surrounded them.  She sighed, dropped the car keys into the right pocket of her tan shorts and grabbed the handle of the back seat door.  She looped her arm through three bags and sighed again letting him know his pondering time was up.  He opened the backseat door on the passenger side, picked up the remaining bags, and slammed the still open driver’s side door as he followed Miriam into the house.

He dropped the bags on the floor by the door.  It was a sparse affair: one room, an unfinished wooden table, a precarious looking bed, a small table lamp with a rusty iron base and faded shade, a stove, and two chairs that were a good sitting away from being firewood. Everything the color of old paper and dust.  No air conditioner; no fan; fuck.  Roller shades hung in the windows, one on each side of the room save for the side on which the small door that led into the bathroom was.  Miriam had said that she’d been lucky to find the place, a left over from government tests preformed years ago, not many places one could find out there that didn’t require pissing in the sand.   He peered through the front window at the twelve-by-three slab of cement that was the front porch.  Most of it was covered in sand, but he could see two of its corners peaking through their coarse veil.  There was one rusted-out lawn chair on its side, anchored to a chain attached to some sort of spike in the concrete, waiting for wind that he could not even imagine existing.  He could feel Miriam behind him, getting excited, probably clasping her hands together in front of her thin gray tank and grinning beneath her straw brim. He continued to stare out at the expanse to avoid this not so contagious pleasure as long as possible.  The whole scene reminded him of some movie he’d seen in junior high on nuclear fallout.  Two relatively normal people going about their business, survivors who had properly dove under their desks when the atom bomb dropped and were now living the dream in a barren wasteland.  This amused him enough to gird himself, smile and turn around.

“Oh, it’s just perfect,” she exclaimed.  “Can you imagine a better place for me to do this?  The entire place it like one giant pallet cleanser!”

“That it is,” he replied, managing to not only say it with a somewhat genuine grin, but to maintain that grin until she was safely in his embrace, unable to see it melt away in the heat.  He was impressed with this feat.

The first week was not so bad.  Miriam had decided to do away with her sense of smell first and had put swimmer’s plugs in her nose.  He loved her nose.  Other men he had discussed it with found it a bit strange, but he was truly fascinated with her nose.  Seeing her pad around that little faded house with was like watching a woman with two corked bottles of champagne attached to her face.  He passed the time reading book and working on his screenplay as Miriam “Explored life without a sense of smell to its fullest.”

She would pick up a piece of paper or run her hand across the planks of the table and pause, rub her fingers together and think.  She’d then ask him to do the same and ask him how the item felt.  Miriam would then sit stoically and meditate on how one smelled what one touched.  She would open a can of soup and put it to her ear, then put her ear to the table to see is she could hear the difference in their scent. She’d then ask him to do the same and ask him how the two scents differed.  Again, Miriam would then sit stoically and meditate on how one smelled what one touched.  The entire process would be repeated three more times, exercising and examining each sense in relation to the missing one.  This would go on from the time they’d woken up, the blankets they’d piled on in the night against the frigid desert air scattered around the floor having, kicked off when their sleeping selves grew too warm as the sun rose, and would go on until the sun set and the temperature at last cooled again.

In the evening, she’d heat up some of the food they’d brought with them, they’d eat, and then they’d fuck, her nose plugs touching his face when the kissed.  She’d fall asleep before him, and he’d flip on the lamp and read.  Although this initial phase of her project was supposed to take a full seven days, after a mere three, she thought she knew enough about life without smell to move on.  She could smell without smelling.

On the fourth day, Miriam began phase two of her project: blindness.  She had purchased a pair of tanning goggles, black plastic, completely opaque and fit tight to the eye, from the tanning salon on (Venice Beach).  As before, he read but now he also read aloud to her.  She’d do the same routine, feeling things, tasting things, listening, asking his take, and thinking.  By the sixth day, she was carrying on as before but not asking for his perception of things.  Periodically, she would take the nose plugs so that she could fully determine what each sense’s perception contributed to her world, differentiating between smell and sight.

Dinner time became a disaster.  Aside from the fact that, after a few days, they had both grown tired of the charm of eating as though they were living in a bomb shelter, Miriam was determined to live exactly as she had with her sense of sight and smell as she had before.  Since the temperature changed as the sun set, she could still unfortunately tell when to start dinner.  This meant spills, over salting, one fork stabbing, four plates lost to gravity and several minor burns, accompanied by a growing sense of litigiousness as well as hunger for the two of them.  To compound his foul mood, with the addition of the goggles, the nose plugs lost their charm.  Especially during sex. Miriam now reminded him a very much of a race horse, nostrils flared, eyes capped, galloping around a race track as they moved between the sheets.  He kept hearing race trumpets whenever they kissed and wondered how on earth he had wound up out in this place.  If you have ever been stuck in 108 degree heat, you would understand why the thought of touching another human, especially when accompanied by a chorus of horns, became absolutely repulsive to him.  The things they give grants for these days, he thought as Battleship entered the winners’ circle.

It seemed like only yesterday he’s been in the hot, but not nearly as hot as this place, embrace of LA, in a stranglehold of traffic when Miriam called him to tell him the Nomnia and Videre Foundation was giving her the grant for what was sure to be her masterpiece.

He’d met Miriam three months before in bar in Echo Park that had free tacos and was staffed by ladies who’d seen better days, no thanks to the special room upstairs, rentable to patrons in fifteen minute time blocks.  He recalled that it had been an up day, a day when all the waitresses wore outfits that smashed their breasts up to their chins,  as opposed to a down day, when all the waitresses let the pull of the earth’s core have its way with their floppy flesh.  She was drinking a margarita and seemed entirely out of place sitting at the bar between two day laborers.   He would’ve stuck to the tacos, but she gave off the vibe that she’d be just as out of place anywhere else on the planet and this sucked him in.  Before he knew it, he was eight shots and no tacos into the night and nodding his head as Miriam told him all about her questions of how to represent one sense only through the other four.  She had plans to answer this question and create a great installation on it.  Here he was now lying in bed reading by the lamp in the middle of the desert with this woman, silently moaning for gridlock, air conditioning, and other signs of civilization.  Really, the only thing that assured him of its existence was the lamp, a beautiful conduit for manmade electricity.

By the fourth day of the second phase, he’d stopped reading aloud to Miriam, telling her that he was working on the screenplay as he flipped through The Jungle.  He was growing increasingly tired of her questions and the daily series of tactile interviews he had to respond to.  Miriam, perhaps aided by the tanning goggles, began to spend time out on the porch during the day.  She would sit in the sun for a few minutes at first, but by the sixth day of phase two she had begun to spend the majority of the sun lit hours in the chained down lawn chair.  This was a boon though, he thought, it gave him some space and relieved him of pangs of guilt that accompanied his neglect of the “impaired” Miriam.

All pangs of guilt at avoiding Miriam subsided with the next phase.  Miriam had decided to do without taste first and had ensconced her tongue in a rubber sheath.  This horrible thing she put on her tongue reminded him entirely too much of a condom; where was once was the sweet mouth he kissed was now a phallus, sheathed and ready for action.  She could not longer articulate her words; when she spoke to him it was like watching something in its death throes thrashing about inside her mouth, emitting chunky, garbled noises.  Meals were an exercise in revulsion.  She chewed with her mouth slightly open, mashing her food against the roof of her mouth, maddeningly masticating, mashing, mashing, macerating every last bit of all she consumed just to make absolutely sure she couldn’t taste anything.  The first night her tongue was encased, she tried to kiss him filling the cavity of his mouth with her a wave of synthetic thrashing.  He pushed her away and rolled off of the bed.  He lay on the floor, his fingers curling through the lamp’s cord; Miriam lay on the bed, silent and still.

After that, he took pains to avoid her at all costs.  He would go outside as soon as Miriam came in.  He ran the cord of the lamp outside and took to reading in the desert night, that thing sleeping inside and him, safely on the other side of a wall with his glowing bastion of sanity, sound, clear reason and design, of everything Miriam was losing.  The sense of history a lamp entailed had never really occurred to him until now.  He could feel trial and error, Edison, Tesla, Humphry Davy, coursing through its hot body, tying him to some far away human sanity.

Miriam had carefully tested suits made out of various materials before they left to determine which would best deprive her tactile sensations.  Organic fibers, cotton, silk, linen, had too much texture to them.  Fetish wear latex suits were too thin, allowing her to feel through a tacky filter.  The winning combination was a sight to behold: a black wet suit encased her body, accompanied by fitted leather gloves, a leather mask, and two pairs of rubber fetish sock, worn one of the other, so as to render her fully without touch.  He had seen the ensemble back in the city, as she giddily modeled it.  It was cute then, zany, wacky.  Here, in an environment devoid of the cultural trappings of her apartment, her eyes covered, nose plugged, her tongue slipping out like a too limber condom encased cock, she was no longer a she, but merely a black slit in space.  And now all she had left was her hearing.  Her ears had not adapted to compensate for the loss of her other four senses, so she flopped about the house like a fish on the deck of a boat.  He recoiled at even the thought of her or at his inability to feel for her any longer.  Perhaps the two fed off of one another, either way his skin crawled any time he could feel her near him.  He wondered if she could hear his flesh rise up into goose bumps.

So they moved, two sets in a revolving door of the house, Miriam, her faceless thrashing self, and he and the lamp, the brightness to Miriam’s dark.  He had relinquished the bed fully to her.  He slept now on the concrete slab, cradling the lamp under a thin blanket.  The third morning of his departure to the outdoors, he awoke clutching the lamp, sand caked over him and the blanket, his back aching, to find her standing on the concrete, a shadow in the bright expanse.  He squinted and stared up.  The figure was utterly black, alien, he could see his eyes in the reflection of her latex socks.  Her ears were now covered in tiny sheathes made out of felt.  He knew, that as planned, they would also be plugged.  His grip on the lamp tightened. In a sudden flurry of movement, he shot up and lurched at the figure, hitting it in the middle with the lamp.  The naked bulb shattered and caught up in part of the wetsuit.  The figure lay sprawled on its back, defenseless, senseless, a turtle on its back.  His hands had been cut by the shards of glass, he walked over to where the figure lay squirming, and crushed the shards of glass on it in further with his shoe, trying to make it bleed, to make it human again.  It just lay there and reached its arms up toward him.

He turned picked up the lamp and began kissing it in a passionate frenzy.  He pulled it to his breast, and ran, away from the concrete, from the house from Miriam, from the thing, into the desert air.