“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.

He patted his stomach satisfactorily when the steak was gone from the plate. He breathed in and out a few times, folded his napkin up, and cleared his dish from the table. He then crossed the floor of the studio, and knelt before his television. He tenderly put his right cheek and hands, fingers outstretched, against its screen. After enough time had passed, he turned it on, flipping between fuzzy networks and static. Bow down you head and kiss His hand, wait for messages.

After his food had settled and he had been thoroughly bored by the barrage of judges and people yelling at each other before crowds of hungry spectators that was midday television, he decided to go to the park. He pushed himself up from the floor, and put on his gray-green zip-up sweatshirt. He went to the studio door, and put on the worn, brown leather shoes that lay by its frame.  He was careful to make the bunnies go through their holes twice, so as to avoid anything becoming loose. He locked the door behind him and went down the twenty-three steps to the first floor, and the five steps from the building’s door to the street.

He walked four blocks over and three across, until he could see the green leaves reaching up toward the sky. He walked in the gateway and looked around him: see the children playing on the swings; see the old ladies feeding the dirty pigeons; see the flies fly above the children’s spilled frozen ices; see the squirrels dart up and down the trees; hear the dogs bark in the dog run; feel it all throb and pulse. It is Him and Him is you, what is part of Him can be part of you, meat and trees, honey and bees, eyes to head, head to knees.

He walked past the pair of benches near the entryway, and crossed into an open field. He settled under a large oak tree which gave him some shade in the afternoon sun. He leaned against its bark and felt the park breathe around him. What a beautiful day, he though. Sit under a shady tree and wait like the Snake for your own Eve.

He sat for what must’ve been an hour, maybe more. The playing children dwindled, replaced by joggers and dogs and their owners. The air began to take on a bit of a crisp bite. The joggers ran in the same circles around him and the dogs chased one another and things unseen by men. He noticed a gray poodle wearing a collar but no leash, following some scent through the field, coming towards him. The poodle, nose still in the grass, came closer; it was about the size of a large baby if those could walk. The man liked that it’s gray-brown fur made the dog look almost like a dirty lamb. The dog neared the tree and it stopped a few feet from the man’s legs. The man whispered under his breath, “Here doggie, here doggie,” wiggling his fingers in its direction.

The dog froze and stared at the fingers. After a few moments, it inched closer, and then, it began to lick the fingers. At once, the man took the dog into his arms. The dog barked, small and shrill. The man put a finger to his lips and whispered to the dog again, “Shhhhhhh, shhhhhhh,” but this had only a momentary affect before the dog resumed the barking. The man didn’t understand why it persisted in making noise. He clamped his hand over its mouth, and stuffed it inside his sweatshirt. He rose from his spot under the tree and headed out of the park, past the empty swings and empty benches, past the thud-thud of the joggers feet, and out the gateway again. He could hear a woman’s voice calling “Roxy, Roxy, here girl,” faintly from somewhere beneath the trees.

Jesus got it wrong. He was not supposed to die for our sins. He was His son, and He was sent here to observe us, judge us, and kill us. What is something else, make it His again. What is something else, make it His again. Jesus was supposed to do this, make it all one again, but Jesus got it wrong, couldn’t see that the whole came from cutting into the sinew. He got Me right, He got Me right.

The man took his had from over the dog’s mouth once they reached the stoop of his building. He looked inside his sweatshirt at the dog; it was very still, very quiet. The man opened the front door and ascended the twenty-three stairs to his landing. He opened his door and unzipped his sweatshirt, letting his passenger fall to the floor, its small nails making a scratching sound on the floor. It stopped and stared up at him as he unlaced the brown shoes and put them in their place by the door. The man looked down at the dog. Cut the flesh through the fur, cut the flesh to the bone. Take the knife to the skin, bring it across, make it naked again. Bring it across, make it naked again.

The man picked the dog up and held it at arms length. Then, he brought it to the kitchen counter. It sat still. The man went to the knife holder and took out a long boning knife. He held the dog down on its side; its back legs kicked out, but it did not bark, did not whimper. Take the knife to the skin, bring it across, make it naked again. Bring it across, make it naked again.

The man turned on the flame, put on the pan. He cut the meat smaller careful to avoid the bones. He ran his fingers over its pelt, so much like a lamb’s. He put the meat in the pan smelled the flesh cook. When it had browned, he put it on a plate. Eat the meat, chew the meat, chew, chew, chew, it was something else and now it’s you.

There are not seven days to the week, but nine. This is why the prophets have never been right about The End. We have all been wrong because the beast does not live in the Earth but in the skies. The beast controls the sun and moon and the cold things far away that decide our fate, and the beast manipulates them to deceive our perception of time. He lives inside the Earth, and when the chosen die they’re returned to heaven, inside the Earth’s womb and they are part of Him again. Eat the meat, chew the meat, chew, chew, chew, it was something else and now it’s you. It was a dog, it was a cow, it was all and none, and now it’s you. Now it’s you and you is Him and you are one meal closer to the womb again.

When the man finished his dinner, he cleared his plate from the table, and swept the bones into the trash can. He crossed his studio to the television set and kissed it, loving it totally before he sat back and turned it on, flipping through the networks.

I remember the first time we kissed.  After two weeks of being smashed against each other and six other people in a van that was deemed unsafe from everyone from the SFPD to a drunken potbellied, knee sock wearing, Arizona gallery owner, defying death at the hands of winding mountain roads, alcohol poisoning, and the bar owners in San Diego whose lovely vinyl bar I’d taken a key to in some smiling fit of protest and robbed of at least thirty percent of its stuffing, we kissed.  We kissed after staying at the all white house in Las Vegas, in the all white planned community, filled with stuffed unicorns and fake ivy, The Princess Bride at the ready in both of the DVD players, and towers of dog food at the ready in the garage but no dog.  After hustling our way in and out of casinos and shot gunning beers in car chases.  After a noisy house show in a basement in Reno, where they told me Las Vegas carpets look the way they do to hide the vomit of drunken slot machine players.  When you dropped me off at the airport I felt like I was leaving one way I could have lived my life.

We had a country between us.  Our relationship waxed and waned depending upon who had another lover and if that person exhibited any potential to be loved nearly as much as the one who was too far away.   You wound your way east and we ordered every tiki drink on the menu.  We walked along the Hudson River.  We went to Coney Island and got horrible foot-long drinks served to us by a barefoot, pregnant teenager who looked pissed off to even exist in her swollen state in the July heat, who told us that she would put another shot in the drinks for a dollar.  We waded in the water at midnight and passed out on the subway.  We wound up at the end of the line in East New York, both of us soaking wet with leis on, remarkably unharmed.  We kissed goodbye again.

A few months later, I realized what a folly it was to think that whatever the madness between us was could survive on secondhand tales and sentiment.  I had an affair with a math professor; you burned through your usual LA rotation.  We were each too much of our locations to give them up for each other.

A year ago, you picked me up from the airport in LA.  Same beat up red car, same sweet willingness to help out, same highways and traffic and palm trees.  Except that it was pouring.  It had been pouring for the entire two weeks I’d been in California.

We stopped by your house, dropped off my bags and headed to the familiar strip of dive bars.  I was sad to hear that my old favorite had been overrun by hipsters in search of free tacos and no longer staffed by hookers on their last legs. We went to another and sat at a table in a room with a pool table and many buckets catching the leaks that kept sprouting from the grey ceiling.  Your friends came, my friends came; all our mutual friends had long since left LA.  At one point, you drunkenly turned to your friend in the plaid shirt with the silly soccer ball tattoo and put a hand on my shoulder: “This is the only girl I’ve never screwed around on or screwed over.”  It was true too.  We left and kissed on the corner.

You went to work the next day and I lay in bed listening to the planes.  Their sound was different in the unrelenting tiny thuds of the rain drops.  I left the bed and spent the day with your mother and your new nephew.  My friends picked me up since you got off work too late to get me to my show on time.  You were supposed to come that night.  You didn’t.

I got back to your house and climbed into your bed underneath the tiger comforter.

“Hey,” you said.

“Hey.”

“Look, there’s no easy way to say this.” The rhythm of the rain faded and was replaced by a cathedral of silence.  I could hear notes of your guilt bouncing off its cold stone interior, echoing between us.

“I find in these situations, the ‘this’ should be said as quickly as possible.”

“You can punch me if you want.  Remember that girl I was seeing?  The one I broke up with a while back?  We’re back together

“Oh.”

“Are you mad?”

I wasn’t.  I should have been mad, furious, but there was no love left to fuel such a reaction. I felt though, that on basic principles of self-respect, I should at least give punching you a try.  I weakly balled up my fist and touched it to your shoulder.  I could tell that actually delivering a blow was something you wanted much more than I did. I wasn’t mad.  Maybe I was disappointed that this was how we’d finally unraveled, in such an ordinary way.

“I’m not sleeping on the sofa,” I said.

We spent the night lying side by side in the cocoon of the rain’s noise.  My friends came by in the morning and gave you evil looks as I loaded my things into their van.  I listened to a plane pass by overhead, and I knew I’d never hear anything like it again.

He dropped the bags on the floor by the shack’s entryway.  It was a sparse affair: one room containing 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 one hard sit away from being firewood. Everything was the color of old paper contoured with 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 a small door that led into the bathroom.  Miriam had said that she’d been lucky to find the place, a left over from government tests performed years ago; not many places out here 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 peeking 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 brace 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 palate 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 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 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 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 they 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.  Now, 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.  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 behave exactly as she had before she elected to sensory deprivation.  Since the temperature changed as the sun set, she could still unfortunately tell when to start dinner.  This meant spills, over salting, one incident of stabbing her hand with a fork, four plates lost to gravity, and several minor burns, accompanied by a growing pugnacity 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 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.  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 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 a bar in Echo Park that had free tacos and was staffed by ladies who’d seen better days, thanks in part 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 just 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 sunlit 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.  She 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 stabbing towards him.  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 perfect 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 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 faraway 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.  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 over 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 snake, 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 began to move like riders on opposite sides of a carousel, Miriam, her faceless thrashing self, and he and the lamp, the brightness to Miriam’s dark, circling the same center, but never having to occupy the same space.  He had relinquished the bed fully to her.  He slept now on the concrete slab, cradling the lamp under a thin blanket.  The sand cut him when the winds were strong and the blanket was of little help.

The heat had passed the point of being unbearable, he thought.  He couldn’t tell anymore.  He began to think about Miriam, about the lamp, about what was human and what was not.  He resented the creature inside for exiling him from the electrical outlet.  He often ran his fingers over the lamp in apology for this.

The third, or maybe it was the fifth or the seventh, morning of his departure to the outdoors, he awoke clutching the lamp, sand caked over him and the blanket, his back aching, to find it standing on the concrete, a shadow in the bright expanse.  It made a garbled noise at him.  He squinted and stared up.  The figure was utterly black, alien, he could see his eyes in the reflection of her latex socks.  Its ears were now covered in tiny hoods 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 shade flew off with the first blow.  He felt immediate guilt, not for the attack, but for hurting the lamp.  He want to scoop up the shade and assure it that he had meant it no harm.  The creature though, had to be erased.  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 shade, put it back on the lamp, nuzzling and kissing the reunited pair apologetically.  He pulled it to his breast, and ran, away from the concrete, from the house from Miriam, from the thing, into the desert air.

Five years before, she had tumbled into the record store where I worked. She was on the arm, or rather the face, of one of the annoying punk boys who came into drink their malt liquor in safety and ask why we didn’t stock more UK82. I felt awkward seeing my friend’s little sister with the kind of guy we’d get out of the store by putting “I Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City” on until he would leave.

A man in a suit and tie came in to tell us we could go upstairs. But back to funny things. Later, after we’d been in the thick of it for at least three plodding hours of weeping, hollow kind words, and sterile cream carpeting, my friend Miki and I sat on some steps around the corner from the funeral home. She exhaled smoke into the thick August air in such a way that I marveled at the fact that any time had passed since high school. We were both bad at, the comforting.

“Christ, look at me, I’m wearing black flip-flops,” Miki said, wiggling her painted toes. “Who does that?”
I burst out laughing. Part native New Yorker and part recovered punk, my wardrobe was ninety-percent black, yet I had found myself stuck in a towel for an hour that morning, trying to find something, anything, not too short, or too bare, or too fun, something funeral appropriate. It was truly a feat t have that much black and nothing passable for this, perhaps a mark of youthful optimism. We sat on the limestone steps long after her last drag, laughing, putting off going back.

Melissa had wanted to join the army, but her mother had made her wait a year, fearing death in a hot country far away. It turned out Melissa didn’t even need to leave the borough to die. That was funny, in a horrible ironic sort of way. We had led parallel lives, crossed paths so many times, but I never would say I knew her. I wasn’t there for her, but for her sister, my dear and ruined friend, propped up at all times by her boyfriend, her brown eyes filled with a darker quality than three days before.

When Miki and I returned to the funeral home, everyone our age had spilled outside. It was strange, the punks I had drifted away from were there, my classmates from my posh, all-girls high school were there, all saying it was so horrible, but hey, nice to see you. A woman, pointy shoes, knee-length skirt, pearls, turned gleefully, with excitement in her voice, to the crowd, “Ohhhhhhh, who died? It’s someone famous right?” We laughed at the time, in stunned shock at the vapid, casual, callousness of this creature. I sometimes have dreams where I punch her in the face. I guess that’s how things like this are, the funny things; they’re not actually that funny.

He waited, inhaling more warm air through his mask.  They would come.  People with nothing to lose always did; plant a seed of hope and all doubt could be overcome.  He could feel the day passing, the sun moving, the dust swirling.  In his mind, he could see the men stumbling home to their houses shuttered in wet rag filters, telling their wives, long lost to them, of the stranger in the bar, his claim.  The seed would take root; fester, dig its way down.

What have we to loose, he could hear chapped lips asking, what?  Plant the seed and people will pull their hope out of the forgotten nook of their soul where it’s been hidden. The husbands, glad to be able to veil their optimism in their wives, would agree to come along, only, of course, they would say, so that no harm would come to the silly women as they pursued this whim.

He sipped in the boiling air.  They would all come: husbands, wives, children, dust covered, snaking down the road from their homes to the field where he sat.

When the time was right, he exhaled, opened his eyes, and stood up.  He turned around and there was his whitewashed audience, just as he expected, as he had learned from all the times before to expect.

“I will make it rain.”  There was no reply, no loud angry comeback as there had been when he declared this earlier in the bar.  No slammed door in his face as when he had gone door to door that morning and the women caught sight of a raggedy man.  He was more holes than soles in his shoes, pants and shirt clinging to his frame by tattered threads.  He had hit their rawest nerves with his bargain.  He merely asked for their presence on the arid field as the sun set, and he would make the rain return.  He received tight lips and slams, up and down the town’s street.  This had been slightly kinder treatment than the jeers when he made his offer in the bar, where the men, long since given up on trying to make the dead ground bear fruit, languished their days away.

But now, silence the sound only of breath.  Now, from within each human husk a pulse quickened.  Now, some held hands.  Now, children looked up for a cue from their parents. But found none.  Everyone stood vulnerable in their faith.

He began to sway in the gray gauze of the dust.  He turned his palms up to the sky and the light shown through the holes of his tattered jacket as he raised his arms.  He swayed with such ease that it seemed to his audience he was weightless, the wind moving him, or perhaps possessed by something not of this world. In later years, each would tell the story in his or her own way.

His right hand crossed to his face, and his dirt-tinged fingers took off his mask, pulling it up over his head and casting it to the ground.  His lips parted and he began to speak, struggling against the dust as it tried to invade his mouth.  His weathered eyelids shut.  The sun began to set.  His voice came out, the noise lost as Babel’s tower fell, and he told his tale.

With each spoken word, the hearts of his audience grew heavier.  He continued and the wind died, the dust settled, for even they wanted to hear.  He swayed more and more, becoming lighter as the sun’s rays spilled through his silhouette, and his story rushed from between his lips.

Animals crept out f the brush and up from the yellow earth, ears piqued.  The prairie dogs stood in rapt attention, swaying when he did, listening.  From a place unseen, the black birds landed among the townspeople.  The cleverer ones laded on the shoulders of men, getting a better view of the figure by the tree.  The galahs on their tiny legs, their brown feathers at ease in his voice, stood still and heard.  There in the open field, he held captive audience, all those he could see before him and creatures too small to comprehend, all afloat in his tale.

The black bird in the tree, they would tell it later, was the first to cry.  As his story went on, sadness sunk its roots deeper and deeper into the centers of his listeners.  It grew, strong and painfully inside all.  A tiny tear, the first of many, fell from the bird’s eye and onto the water-greedy ground.

He swayed on, he told on, wrenching the hearts of those in the field through a press.  The galahs cried out and wept, their tiny bead-like eyes brimming with liquid.  The prairie dogs bared out at the world as streams flowed out of their small eyes.  Arms at their sides, each unaware of those around them, the people felt hot trails run down their cheeks.  Mothers and fathers and children grasped onto one another, but none, neither could nor wanted to shut their ears to the speaker’s words.  All wept, even he beneath the tree.  All swayed without realizing, the animals, the huddled families, those who had come alone, partners in a dance that they would never repeat.  Where once tall green stalks had swayed in the field, now living creatures did.

As the sun set, the last bits of orange disappearing in pink and purple on the horizon, he spoke the last line of the story, so much to bear, that story, that no none ever retold it.  They would retell its telling, its teller, but never what was told.  And then, then, above the swaying, lamenting crowd below, at last; at last the clouds formed, gray plumes grouping, amassing, until they covered the sky.  At last, at last, the sky let loose its precious tears.  It drenched the swaying mass below, pounding down new life, saturating ground, skin, and souls.  His story ended, the man by the tree took in a breath of the cool air.