Bodies Are Disgusting (3 page)

"Yo, Dougie," he says, spinning on his heel to
face you. "'Manda told me you were getting out today. She hadda
work, so I'm your ride, since the Jarethmobile got trashed. She
told me to bring you some clothes and jewelry, since your plugs and
shit got lost in the accident." He points at the canvas
bag.

Upending the bag, you see that he's not lying
(not that you expected him to, really, but sometimes he tends to
embellish the truth). In the pile is a case with your spare
glasses, which you pull out and settle on the bridge of your nose.
While they aren't the most recent prescription, they bring the
world into enough focus for you to see the lines on Simon's face.
For all that he tries to pretend that he's an unfeeling douchebag,
you can tell that he's been worried about you.

The next thing you pick up is a bag of
jewelry, all of which fits into the various piercings you have. You
put the plugs in your lobes first, then put hoops in the snakebite
piercings in your lower lip, a stud in your left nostril, and a bar
in your left eyebrow. At the bottom of the bag is a ring, a mate to
the one you wear on your forefinger, etched with a design like a
tangled celtic knot, but less elegant. You hold it in your hand for
just a second before setting it aside.

You see that, in the pile of clothing Simon
thought to bring, he packed your binder, bless him. Unfortunately,
you're pretty sure your contusions prevent you from wearing it. You
fold it back up and set it aside, instead pulling out your
underwear, shirt, and jeans. "Turn around, asshole; you don't get
to see my tits while I'm changing."

He scoffs, but he spins on his heel again, the
rubber sole of his checkered Chuck Taylor's squeaking on the tile
of the floor. "What the fuck ever, man. It's not like I don't know
where you sleep." His words are teasing, devoid of all trace of
meanness. "Not that I give a shit about titties. What part of
'gayer than a three-dollar bill' did you fail to understand when we
moved in together, dude?"

It's a worn old refrain, one that you have
become familiar with in your years of cohabiting. It had never been
necessary. You'd taken him at his word when he'd assured you he was
quite enamored with cocks (and you simply fail to possess one,
which removes you from the list of people he's likely to court).
Still, it's some comfort to hear the familiar words, even as you
shuck off the hospital gown and pull on a plain black turtleneck
and a pair of panties. "All right, if you want to see my
road-burned ass, you can turn around now." Not that you actually
have any road-burn; you had remained firmly belted into your late
car, as you'd been told by the nurses, Amanda, and your bruises.
But you can't help but tease Simon in return.

You hear the chirp of Simon's Chuck's on the
tile again, followed by a low appreciative whistle. "Oh, shut up,"
you grumble as you try to wiggle into your favorite worn pair of
jeans. Simon just chuckles, a warm sound that is effervescent in
his slender chest. Were you facing him, you know you'd see his
shoulders shaking, and from the sound of it, he might be cupping
his forehead in his palm.

With a little hop, you are able to pull your
pants up over your hips finally and button the fly. You turn, and
your initial estimation is true: he is hunched over, one hand to
his face, laughing. "Fuck you, man. Fuck you."

You grab the ring and stuff it in your pocket,
though you can't for the life of you figure out why.

"All right, take me home, asshole." You scrub
at your face, knocking your glasses askew, before adjusting them so
they sit straight again. "I have been in this hospital for way too
long."

"Pfft, you haven't even been conscious most of
your stay here, which, by the way, why the fuck have you not
updated your emergency contacts in your wallet?" Simon is scowling,
though you can tell his heart isn't really in it. "You still have
Amanda listed above me, and you've been broken up for
how
long?"

"I don't know if you passed the first grade,
Simon, but I'm pretty sure that 'Ebonlee, Amanda' comes before
'Glyndon, Simon' when arranged alphabetically. And if, for some
reason, we were going purely on a first-name basis, Amanda still
comes before Simon in most English alphabets." You cross your arms
across your chest, regret it when you brush against the gigantic
bruise there, and move your hands to your hips. "And by 'most,' I
mean 'all.' So relax. You're still my best friend. But she's also a
friend I'd count on to be there for me if I get plowed into by a
drunk fuckwit, all right?"

This seems to mollify your roommate, and his
body language loosens. "I'm just fucking with you," he says. You
know he's lying, but choose not to say anything. It's not like it's
any skin off your nose to change the order of your emergency
contacts in your wallet when you get home and have access to a
pencil.

"C'mon," you say, shoving your binder, the
empty plastic jewelry bag, and your glasses case back into the
canvas bag. "I want to go home."

Simon nods. "Of course."

* * *

It takes forever to check yourself out of the
hospital, but you finally get it done before the sun sets, and
Simon drives you home in his VW Bug. By the time that the local
news is airing, you're settled on your couch with a nice TV dinner
that Simon microwaved for you himself, and your roommate has
disappeared into the nebulous never-never that constitutes his job
at the strange used-bookstore-slash-coffee-shop downtown (the one
that inexplicably stays open until four in the morning).

You eat the TV dinner, grateful that it isn't
hospital food, and start surfing through the items Simon recorded
on the DVR while you were away. It's still early, and you've been
spending a lot of time sleeping or unconscious lately, but the pain
pills you picked up from the pharmacy on the way home have a
not-inconsequential kick to them. Which figures. You've always been
susceptible to the cottony dreamlike quality of codeine.

By the time prime-time programming is gearing
up, you're drowsy and fuzzy and sprawled on the over-stuffed sofa
with your limbs at awkward angles, too opiate-drunk to
mind.

It's been a while since you thought about your
past with Amanda Ebonlee, about how the accident seems to have
robbed you of your knowledge of your first date with her. As you
float on the couch in a sea of co-codamol-fueled good-will, your
mind reaches back through time and gropes for those lost straws.
The opening strains of some prime-time drama impel it away from the
present, but you still find nothing. There's just a ragged hole in
your awareness where those memories should have been that you can't
help but probe like tonguing a hole where a missing tooth should
be.

A wet plopping sound drags you back to the
present.

You don't recall falling asleep, but that's
the only explanation your brain can provide for what's happening.
Your trusty old CRT television still casts flickering light into
the room, but it's subtly changed, as if the pane of glass in front
of the screen had melted and rippled to distort the light that
shows through it. The cause of the noise is not immediately
apparent, your eyes having a difficult time adjusting to the room's
dimness. The lamp that you recall Simon leaving on for you has been
turned off, leaving the TV as the only source of
illumination.

The fact that you don't scream when your eyes
finally adjust to the eerie wavering glow only serves as a
testament to the codeine's fingers still in your system. You think
to yourself that, surely, you must be asleep, but the silver ring
on your index finger burns like a brand at that thought, causing
you to hiss and twitch in such a way that you nearly slip off the
sofa.

The walls of the house you share with Simon
look melted, like they were rendered by a drunken Salvador Dali. A
film of slime covers the one nearest you, and it pulses slowly as
if it were breathing. The wall behind the television looks clean
and static, but it reminds you of one time Amanda had been working
on a photo-manipulation and had taken the smudge tool and scribbled
over the image in frustration. The ceiling, you realize, is the
source of the sound that had drawn you back from Memory Lane. It
bows ponderously under the weight of... something slick and dark
and wet. Something like moss droops in ropes from the edges,
creeping closer to sockets that once were light
fixtures.

You put your feet on the carpet in front of
the sofa, wincing when you feel not synthetic fibers, but something
warm, moist, and leathery. The floor looks to be covered in a rug
that is stitched together out of hides of varying shades of pink
and brown, but they ripple as though still somehow alive under your
soles. Squeezing your eyes shut, you dash for the kitchen,
navigating by touch and memory alone. Your footfalls sound like
dull thuds to your ears, almost indistinguishable from the lazy way
your heart beats in your chest, until you cross the threshold into
the tiny kitchenette. You open your eyes.

Other than the mess Simon left in the sink,
everything is normal. Even the fact that your roommate is a little
bit of a slob when it comes to dishes is par for the course, a
battle that you long since decided to let slide in favor of
training him not to hoard used dishes in his room. Steadying
yourself on the door frame, you turn back to face the living room
and find it to be exactly as it had been when Simon had left you to
go to work: the TV is on, with the volume low, the lamp in the
corner casts a pool of incandescent light that doesn't quite fill
the room, the carpet is freshly-vacuumed and a little stained, but
clean.

There's a knock on your door.

The carpet feels fine between your toes as you
pad slowly toward the door; your visitor knocks again before you
make it there. You don't bother with the peephole, instead
unlocking the deadbolt and throwing it open wide.

Amanda shifts uneasily from one foot to the
other, holding a generic plastic bag in her hands. "Hey. Thought
I'd stop by on my way home to bring you some food and make sure
Simon didn't accidentally strangle you with a blanket or
something." She tries to smile, but it doesn't make it to her eyes.
"Can I come in?"

You nod dumbly and step aside. As she brushes
past you, you smell the familiar scent of her hair products
combined with the aroma of cheap Chinese food, and you can feel
some of your tension drain away. When you finally manage to get
your voice working, you say, "Sorry. Simon gave me one of the
painkillers before he left, and it kinda went to my
head."

"Do you need to sleep it off? I can go..." You
can't tell if there's relief in her words or disappointment. It
doesn't matter, though: you're grateful for her company, and you
can't bring yourself to send her away.

"Nah, stay." You check the clock on the cable
box; it's after ten. "S'been a while since I had food. Let's
eat."

She gets forks from the kitchen (which means
she only brought solid foods), and you both sit on the couch to
eat. She brought vegetable lo mein for you–which you eat with wild
abandon–and shrimp fried rice for herself. After you've eaten half
of what's in the Styrofoam, you set your fork down and lean back
into the couch cushions, the eerie not-panic of earlier almost
entirely forgotten.

"So, tell me what I missed while I was
concussed to hell and back?" you say, finally tired of the silence
now that you aren't shoveling food into your mouth.

Amanda sets her fork in the rice and purses
her lips. It's an expression you are well familiar with, but not
one that you can truthfully claim to be fond of. "Well, other than
you almost dying, we've got a nightmare client, the stock market's
down, Wal-Mart stopped carrying my father's shaving cream, and we
nearly lost California to a tsunami caused by a massive earthquake
somewhere in the Pacific."

"Wow, and here we've been thinking we'd lose
it to the San Andreas fault." It isn't that funny, but Amanda
snickers anyway. Even now, she still laughs at your crappy jokes,
and that still makes your heart flutter.

Suddenly, you remember the ring in your
pocket. Half of your brain remembers Simon packing it in a Ziploc
bag with your replacement facial jewelry, and the rest of it
remembers a strange cat-shark-boy plucking it from the aether.
Before you realize what's happening, your hand is already digging
in your pocket and pulling it out. "Hey, this is probably a little
random, but I thought you might like this," you say as you hold the
band out to her.

She quirks one eyebrow, but the sour-lemon
expression doesn't return. "Not to sound catty here, Doug, but...
what?"

"I found it somewhere, and it's way too small
for me–" which, you realize as the words leave your mouth, is the
truth–"and I thought you might like it." At her skeptical look, you
roll your eyes. "It's not a trap, Admiral Ackbar. I don't have a
use for it, and I thought maybe you might."

After staring at the proffered ring for a few
moments, Amanda heaves a sigh and plucks it from between your
fingers. That simple action fills you with a monumental sense of
relief that flows from your empty hand down to your toes. Amanda
pockets the ring like you had done at the hospital, and you let
your arm fall to your side. Whether you'd been hallucinating Ori or
dreaming him or simply just been delusional, that duty is now
discharged.