She knows that she is has grown heavy. She dreams that fat hangs from her belly and hips like marmalade or lava. They, the supposedly indivisible unit, have failed recently - in her mind forever, for this failure and its memory stretches far beyond this one - at the games of pleasurable friction. Everything, as before, has again turned desultory and perfunctory. There are always other matters - as whimsical like future shape of a imagined house or as rancid as the argument from the previous day - far heavier than her fat both real and imagined, hanging over their bed, the gladiatorial arena.

That is why he is here, this stranger whose sincere lies were conniving enough for her to go with him, half drunk on the cocktails he had bought her, to his studio apartment, with its strong smell of maleness. She smells the expensive cologne on the sheets in which her sighs and vocalizations are muffled when he enters her from behind with his strange but desiring hardness - the big hard dick they were only an hour ago joking about.

Only in the morning washing her body satisfied and bruised in places where he bit her too hard - does she remember that he had barely touched her body - for example the shadows behind her earlobes, the fine line of hair on her nape, the exact curvature of her spine. And then this line from a novel comes to her – a line used by the one whom she had betrayed in a poem he wrote to her at the very beginning, the beginning of that, which this morning will be the coda and the end:

“Strangers kiss as softly as moths.”

...

He writes he hates her, in English. It is not his language; he has to stop and think every turn of a sentence what he was to say next; he has to translate meaning from the language they normally use for daily speech. But it is effective medium, this English, to spew the anger, which originates primarily in his own self pity, on to paper; throw down blots of ungrammatical sentences, false and narrow, much like the mass manufactured pop songs he had used to woo this woman in the very beginning.

So I woke up - fucked. They, the amorphous vampire-bat like spirits that populate the spaces between the living peoples, they must have taken a dump around here for it stinks. Or maybe it is the Chinese takeout overturned on the floor, my dinner last night, one which that I could barely eat after all those vodka shots. Or maybe it is my own acne face, sour and bearded, stewed in its own savage smell.

She was here last night but she didn't stay. "Can't do no more handholding for you, Johnny", she said. Johnny ain't my name but women get told that is my name. My real name is hard to hold under their tongues, especially when they are going mouth to mouth with me. I always kiss women even if I don't, particularly, like fucking them at that moment. Women, ah women, I have handled them in good numbers after going through that painfully long adolescence of fifteen odd years. I was thirty by the time I was able to disassociate the wishy washy notions of romance, the classic teenage hangover, from the hard edged traffic of fucking. And women, most of them, especially those whom you want to have another go at, can be kept in line with constant praise and constant tweaking of their oedipal organs. Yes, this is very much like the constant updates school of cunnilingus. Take the temperature boy, I say, keep your tongue on the pulse. Ok, except on the days of blood, the days of flood.

I met Ellen because I am working that gig at the corner of Seventh Ave and 24th St, and attending the AA sessions at that church around the block thrice a day. By the way this was where the preacher man and I fought over god and devil, hand to hand combat, pretty nasty it was too. He hadn't met too many of my kind before, an intellectual bum being fresh out of Princeton Seminary; a nice liberal and progressive white boy he was. I think he was fascinated with me because he thought I was some character out of a Beat novel he may have read in college.

Idiocy, you see, is prolific. Jack, if he were around now, would not be driving around the country with madcap Neal but instead flying from bookstore to bookstore ministering to book clubs of retired baby boomers, and yes, let's allow him that, getting a little wild on the side, by say banging one or two or three celebrity stuck, crawly, crazy, dope loaded groupies, in the morning and in the evening. You might be curious how I know all that. I was one of them before I was not one of them, before I became this anonymous old coot pushing a broom, busing tables at Olde Mick's, and fishing for women like Ellen.

Mick, the owner of Olde Mick’s, by the way is as Irish as his German Shepherd. He is Chechen, and I think he is tied up with the Russian Mafia - one of the suppurating nodes of the global underworld, one of the many enforcers in this Gotham city. Very honorable fellow. We even got around to discussing the role of Jihad is Islam, blood vendettas, and what a dumbfuck Edward Said is. He didn't know anything about Edward until I educated him. I had taken a seminar run by tight assed Eddie boy, and had shot breeze with him on Mozart.

I don't let people know I have an eye out for higher mental things. People generally are more comfortable around dumbfucks, and I have gotten good at playing a dumbfuck. But Shamir thinks of himself as an intellectual mobster. He was in the university you see, studying philology when Mother Russia fell apart, before there was that Gronzy shootout. Ok, more like a blitz, flattening of a city, kaboom, testing, testing of the latest Katyusha motherfuckers in close city streets, Stalingrad all over again.

And Shamir, that is Mick's other name by the way, was or so he claims in the middle of that cluster fuck, slitting throats of Ivans. He says he had nothing against the Russians, he even had a blonde Russian girlfriend then whom he loved but a man can't lose his honor or he might as well castrate himself. Well, Shamir buddyboy, I want to tell him, your value system ain't mine. I have stolen money from women, fuck-buddy women, and then went tripping. And my machinery has simply gotten better with time. But I don't. I merely whomp his ass at chess as we chew cud on Indo European languages after work, sipping tea. He doesn't drink because it messes up his Aristotle and Islamic apologetics, and I try not to because I am surfacing these days, or trying to, even if on most days I wake up feeling fucked.

* The term skaz comes from the Russian verb skazat. (to tell) and such words as rasskaz (short story) and skazka (fairy tale). It is also a word used of (traditional or folk) oral narratives, and has occasionally been used of works to suggest their origin in terms of such an oral context...