limp

I lost my job today. Supervisor Maxwell told me had grown tired of my habitual tardiness and poorly groomed appearance. His fat stubby finger pointed to a dark stain on my pants and a missing button on my shirt.

"I mean, Jesus Mark, do you ever look at yourself in the mirror?"

I gathered my belongings and left without saying goodbye to my co-workers. I never liked those people anyway.

The drive home was lonely and depressing. The sky was gigantic gray and swallowed the darting birds and soaring planes. I thought about all the people in the jets: the passengers, the pilots and the neatly dressed flight attendants.

Departures and arrivals.

Moving from point A to point B.

People constantly moving. In the sky. On the interstate. All around me.

The man on the radio warned of an approaching storm. "High winds and heavy rain are likely, so stay tuned to 104.7 WCRI for the latest on this developing storm."

Seek shelter. Find a safe place. Take refuge from the unknown. Hide. If you pay attention, you'll find these warnings everywhere: In the eyes of a passing stranger, in the voice of the newscaster, on the face of the terminally ill. This great trembling, the fear. It's everywhere.

I parked my car and an apartment maintenance man was changing the locks on the unit opposite mine.

"They say one helluva storm is headed our way," I said to him. He didn't flinch from his work. Perhaps he didn't hear me, I thought. "I said, one helluva storm is --"

"Yeah yeah, I heard ya the first time," he replied, obviously agitated.

"Oh . . . OK . . . Well, have a good one."

He grunted and sneered at my words.

The soft hum of the refrigerator greeted me as I entered my apartment. Through the front door I heard the maintenance man tapping and hammering. I peered through the blinds and observed him. He was at least 50 years of age. A wedding band was absent from his left hand, and I wondered if he was a lifelong bachelor. I doubted it. Men who are good with their hands and mechanically inclined rarely are single. Women appreciate men who can repair household appliances and perform minor car repairs. This breed of man sit atop the food chain.

I'm not one of them.

My father died when I was just six years old. Games of catch with weathered baseball mitts . . . Learning the rudimentary components of an automobile's engine . . . I do not know such memories. My mother remained a widow until her final breath, so I had to teach myself to be a "man."

I failed miserably.

Had this man fathered any children? I saw his rusted face and it read like a book: Years ago he had met a woman in Georgia. An unplanned pregnancy made their courtship a brief one. With a ratty suitcase in his hand and a Marlboro in his mouth, he stood in the darkened doorway and gave her sleeping body one final glance. She looked so peaceful, so innocent. An innocent victim. And he was gone, off to Tennessee. The following morning she awoke to an empty bed and a one-page letter on the cluttered dining room table. One page to justify a departure. One page to construct an apology. Eight months later she gave birth to twins, two baby boys, bastards by no fault of their own. And now, somewhere in Georgia, a mother and her two children struggle to survive. Government assistance. Secondhand fabrics clothe malnourished bodies. A dilapidated trailer home with faulty plumbing. A single-parent family drowning in poverty. A single-page letter of vowels and consonants -- just words.

They are slowly dying while the estranged father, the maintenance man of Forest Park Apartments, spends his evenings eating TV dinners and watching sitcoms. Television programs about happily dysfunctional families and funny mishaps. But he never laughs, doesn't even crack a smile while microwaved mashed potatoes dribble down his crooked chin. He watches commercials about products and services designed to make like easier and more enjoyable.

"A happy family life . . ."

"A good loving companion . . ."

"Vacations in the sun . . ."

"All of this can be yours . . ."

These slogans, these 30-second advertisements, these flickering families of prime time are reminders of what his life could be.

But it's not.

And it won't be.

He is a maintenance man. A man struggling to preserve a property. A life. A man battling the reverberations, the cycle of time. Preserve a structure while a crack crawls up the wall of apartment 213. Preserve the structure of your life while another wrinkle slowly carves itself into your face.

Cracks.

Breaks.

Leaks.

Deterioration.

Preserve.

Fight.

Preserve the facade.

Fight . . . time.

Every day.

Every moment.

You'll do anything to stave off starvation. The emptiness. The desolation.

As I watched him a fear began to churn in my belly. His lonely life. The regret. Opportunities missed. His futile battle. A life that awaits me in the curdled blood of the future.

I turned away. I turned away from the window to attend to my five fish -- five creatures that relied upon me for their perpetuation. I prepared to feed them but it was pointless. Atop the rippling surface all five of my beloved fish floated. Expired. Passed away. All of them. Now just dead things. Objects beyond saving, preserving. They had become articles to be disposed of. Buried. Flushed. I let the departed castaways float. They no longer had coordinates, direction. I was struck by their frozen state, their profound beauty: They had defied time and eclipsed the ever-passing moment. Regardless of our attempts to scavenge the now for permanence, nothing can be saved. Time is the perpetual victor.

I turned away. I turned away from the aquarium and checked my e-mail. Nothing but spam promising high-powered pharmaceuticals without a prescription, a bigger penis and hardcore pornography.

The slogans. The advertisements. Tantalizing promises of an easier, more enjoyable life. Just forget the present and become the future. Take a pill to cure the pain. Feed the fetish to silence the desire. Erase yourself. Just delete the moment.

I clicked the link for "Hot Hot Hardcore Action!" and was directed to a website that displayed naked women, close-ups of penises plunged into vaginas and assholes, and short video clips of men and women engaged in a variety of sexual acts. The video clips were brief and looped endlessly.

Over and over.

In and out. In and out.

Up and down. Up and down.

Ejaculation. Ejaculation.

A moment.

Repeating.

Over and over.

For $29.99 per month I could have access to thousands of pictures and hundreds of videos featuring "filthy whores" and "barely legal teens begging to fuck!"

You'll do anything to stave off starvation. The emptiness. The desolation.

I entered my credit card number and within seconds a wealth of pornography was just a mouse click away.

The emptiness. The desolation. Just forget. Erase the now. The ever-passing moment . . . it's burning in your belly like a raging ulcer. Just cure the pain. Become the future. Become the invisible.

I clicked on the video "Gina Gets Gang Fucked." The video began with Gina naked on a bed. She was rubbing her vagina while three naked men surrounded her, all of them stroking their penises. I stared at the colors. The images. Gina's naked body. I undressed myself.

"Think you can handle all three of us?" one of the men asked. She nodded seductively and began to suck one of their penises.

Within minutes her body was smothered by the three men. The predators were penetrating their pray. In her mouth. In her vagina. In her anus.

I gazed at the pleasure points. I stroked my penis. The men uttered ecstatic cliches of sexual gratification. Gina, with a penis crammed into her mouth, barely made a sound.

And I stroked myself, attempting to get hard.

Faster.

Faster.

Stare.

Fantasize.

Pretend you are someone else.

Chase the feeling. The moment.

And I continued to stroke my penis, waiting for blood to flood blood vessels.

Faster and faster.

But nothing.

The video continued and I began to separate myself from the moving images, the flashing screen. I stopped stroking my penis and just stood there with my dead cock in my hand, watching people -- nothing more than digitized images trapped in time -- copulate. A crooked scar was carved into one of the men's thighs. Below Gina's navel was a poorly inked tattoo which read "Daddy's Girl."

Who were these people, these strangers?

I watched the four bodies not as a group performing abhorrent sexual acts but as individuals. Real people who breathe. Eat. Sleep. Exist -- somewhere. And it suddenly seemed bizarre that I was watching their twisted figures. The sweaty meat. The penetrating organs. The violated holes of flesh. I was watching four strangers fuck.

And in my right hand lay my limp penis.

"Oh yeah baby, are you ready to take this?"

And one after one the men ejaculated onto Gina's face.

"Mmmm . . . yeah, I like that," she said.

You'll do anything to stave off the emptiness. The desolation. If only you could erase yourself from the present, the moment. Become someone else.

And the video ended. The soft hum of the refrigerator filled all the empty spaces. The maintenance man was gone, at home with the sitcoms and lukewarm mashed potatoes.

And I was naked. In my apartment. Alone with five dead fish.

"Do you ever look at yourself in the mirror?"

I walked into my bedroom and stared at myself in the silver glass.

My brown hair -- oily.

My green eyes -- vacuous.

My torso -- well-defined clavicles.

My penis -- a sex organ.

My legs -- pale and thin.

Me. Naked. Stripped.

What do you see?

I was a passenger in a soaring jet.

I was a voice on the radio forecasting rain.

I was a co-worker preparing useless documents.

I was a maintenance man changing the locks of a vacant apartment.

I was a dead fish floating without direction.

I was a scarred man fucking Gina.

I was Gina, and I was once a child of innocence.

You'll become anyone and do anything to stave off starvation. The emptiness. The desolation. Just preserve. Maintain the facade so the future will be recognizable. Leave a dent, a mark. Leave something that will prove you existed. Fend off ugliness. The scabs. The scars. Uproot the weeds. Paint over the holes. Bury the bodies, the objects. Fuck until dopamine floods your brain and everything is temporarily erased. Just minimize the damage. Cure the pain. Become a slogan, an advertisement. Smile for the camera.

Because it's all vanishing.

Floating across your eyes and tumbling through your fingertips into that immense abyss -- the vacuum of history.

A flash of light sparked the sky. Thunder rattled the panes of glass. A great rain fell from the heavens.

And I walked outside. Naked. Not as a man but as a creature of the past, present and future -- the now.

And I walked outside. Naked. Not as a man but as a creature of the past, present and future -- the now. The rain soaked my hair. The water trickled down my chest. The drops dribbled from my limp penis. I was a drenched beast who had accepted the brutal testament of time and its bittersweet fruit -- the beautiful futility of existence.

xx