“Hi,” She says, her mousy features and rubber band smile. In her left paw she swipes a neatly folded letter several times in prominent tight creases.
“Here,” She says, handing me the letter, standing on her heels.
“Thanks,” I say. Even the sputtering resonance of our incumbent voices find it difficult to embrace in the hallway. There is silence. Everyone is either barhopping or asleep. Jen turns around, slowly, as if an arrow in a compass, her feet weighing down equally between meted steps. I look down at the pencil slices on the front of the letter and think of autumn leaves raked into a bushy pile. Without looking up, my ears register the sound of Jen and Val’s door slightly adjusting itself. There is the sound of the lock and then the sound of loneliness as I look down into her gift, now in my own palm. The words BIG BROTHER scrawled on the front cover. This is Paris. A hotel room floor, a burgeoning fifth grader in the hotel room I am to look after, a girl in Spokane, WA. who purportedly wants nothing to do with me and sporadically misplaces me in her memory, as if I am a classified dossier and her brain a file cabinet. An eighth grader who lives less than four-hundred meters from my house back in Peoria and who I just met and, quite possibly, have fallen in love with.
Looking back, seeing my reflection averted, my hair fashionably swayed to one side of my face with VO5 gel; I can scent the cologne, the English Leather musk I first discovered two years ago at my own eighth grade exercise in commencement, the slightly sickly sweet urinal cake tang biting into the side of my elongated jaws as I view my own impending apocalyptic paw grapple the brass handle of the door, occluding the reflection of my contorting, sad face in the shadow of my palm, from my own vision, covering it up with the hand I must move forward with.
Once inside the room I notice that Renner is once again sleeping, his mouth tweaked open, exhaling, sleeping like he is rehearsing the art of hibernation. I slowly open the letter. In a minute, it will be severed, physically shredded in several juvenile strands. In a minute it will be on the floor and I will jut into the bathroom that becomes a shower when you close the door, abandon my garments, slough out of my jeans. I will smear layers of soap over my entire body, occluding any visible hint of pigmentation. My one contact is gingerly pricked out of my eye and held in front of me like a tadpole in a junior high biology experiment. The water to the shower is running, but I am still looking at myself in the mirror, padding the soap over my body, verifying that my every pore is blanketed with residual foam.
This is the bathroom in Paris. I am sixteen years old. Tears appear to drool a long solitary slope down the side of my face, curving near my chin. My whole body is so white, so blanketed with soap, I could pass over for a very-trimmed down Slim Fast commercial variation of the Pillsbury Dough boy, standing in front of a mirror with my oversized boxers held out in front of me, commenting how much I lost in two hours, holding up the thoroughly endorsed product into the unblinking lash of the camera lens and gratuitously thank the product with a slick, veneer smiled sealed into the front of my face.
I am naked, tears swirling down a thoroughly sopped soaped face. I am crying. I am trying to be reborn once again. Trying to come into the world without having to be baptized. Through the squinting and the tears, I cannot make out the stretched features of my face as I adjust the shower, feeling the sizzle and pelts of heat beading my upper back, slowly raining down on top of the heavily layered soap. I am trying to rinse everything from my skin. Trying to feel like I am brand new again. Trying, really, just to feel.
Still wet and scantily lathered I momentarily step out of the shower, picking up the ribbons of what was once Jen’s letter. Slice by slice, I let go of the torn paper observing how it floats lie a prodigal feather, slowly into the basin of the toilet. Looking into the mirror, my face a rash, my eyes riddled with protrusive arteries, I slowly grasp my penis and drip piss on top of the letter. Looking close enough, I can see her name signed in pencil, a self-inked flower planted in the page, dotted over the I in her first name. I see where twice, she calls me Big Brother, laughing to myself as I hold my Pig boy kids, charms that I purchased outside of the Rhine watching, as everything I have just severed gets sullied in a hot stream of yellow.
“Good night, Elena.” I say to myself, before waggling the diddles of pee off my unit. Before stepping back into the shower. Before orchestrating my hands over my chest trying to feel clean once again. Trying to feel brand new. Trying, intrinsically, just to feel something other than lost.
The author in Paris, 94
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