I’m fascinated by the pain of not knowing what is wrong. I won’t worry about what could
have made me happy, although it would have made me unhappy.

Y lived near route 440 near Kennedy blvd.. Z a frizzy haired woman who came from the west side at dawn in black torn pantyhose asked Y to be let in.Y kept her for a month and then asked her to be gone. She didn’t want to be gone ever. She wanted her forever with Y. She wanted for Y to die first and then die herself shortly thereafter. She lingered. She had blue yellow and red mucky children’s toys arranged on the pavement.

L a small time neighborhood gun dealer pitied her. Z vomited bile and rage on his polyester jeans.

Dr. Butterman was a Jewish doctor from Holland who now had his office on Park Avenue. He breached Z’s vagina with a q tip. It hurt as much as she thought it would but she didn’t make a sound or a movement. The Doc was peripheral. He was considering Z’s round tight belly from under florescent light. He palmed her smooth belly, as if he was at a weekend farmer’s market, to see if it was ripe. Z was euphoric and at a loss.
Dr. Butterman would see Z the day of the operation. He said that she was okay for
intercourse.

Are you doing drugs when the baby is present, I said.
I take pills for anxiety, Z said.
You’re dating a guy with a temper, I said. Selling guns for him won’t help your anxiety.
I find extremes help shift my focus away from my problems, Z said.
Still dating a gun dealer is not the answer, I said.
How is your baby, I said.
I found a nanny, Z said. She’s been working for a month. She was normal until yesterday. She’s very religious. She sang hymns to my baby and read to him from the book of John. She has her own bible. All the pages are marked in red ink. I have been giving her my old clothes. She wears them the next day. I pity her. I had to let her go when she began pleading manically for her life on a 1800 Christian number.
I’m sorry, I said.

Z had the overwhelming need to vomit on her lover. She texted him incessantly about her due date. He was a no show for the birth. Her two brothers killed him. Z died from grief. The two brothers and the continued. They lived with the memory of their sister. The lover returned as a cannibal killer. He devoured the foot of the reasonable brother and the heart of the sadist brother. The one surviving brother thought the cannibal killer was his sister’s ghost. His sister had tolerated him.

Y instructed me to walk the two miles from 14th st. to Canal st.. The city was replete with compromising memories. Y had papers for me to sign. He still had his car parked at
a garage, not wanting to worry about alternate parking, and he wanted for me to retrieve it. I didn’t know how to drive. I thought I would give the garage attendant money for the time the car had been parked.

Y pointed to the dotted line. I signed. I had my account. All I had to do was answer the cell phone Y gave me. Y’s assistant made insipid jokes. He was energetic without doing anything and never looked my way.
Y’s place had become a mausoleum. He had catalogues of the powerful and the not so powerful personal medical information that he sold.
The assistant called me in the field with pertinent news. In ten years the assistant will
have an assistant like himself.
I hope to reclaim my present with this narrative that is a river of blood and sperm, its nature is that of the virus which speaks of the future in terms of a cure.
Disease is time and transformation.
I heed the whisper of the baby’s eyes. It speaks of her mother’s death. It drools ever since its teeth have appeared underneath the pink gum line.
Y was brimming with self love. I don’t associate consistency with the anomalous. But it has become a dubious world we live in. So we are told and we don’t have the language to address it and are learning how to speak again.
Y was a recluse. He was shrewd genial and innocent. But even an innocent has the need to vomit. When he lost faith he vomited in my ear mouth and nose.
The assistant thought that I was asexual. I thought he thought this because of my lack of confidence. He never made an advance. He did, as I did also, want to know why I was a solitary.