The gel cap pills stick to my esophagus as they go down, the sides of my throat like splintery wooden boards with fat coats of paint. The music is the speech of a retarded hunchback now, spitting all over itself with unintelligible sonnets about lost loves and deceased parents. Along the way I swallow out of rhythm and the pills stop altogether, spreading their smell across the inside of my mouth, making it a hospital. The patients check in and stumble around for a while wondering why the medication doesn't work and where all the doctors are, where anybody is. Eventually… they don't die, just lie down and allow their personal stinks to take control. Their ugliness comes to life and they float on top of the water, mosquitoes and their larvae buzzing and squirming, respectively, in the air. I can't breathe and run to the sink, pawing at the Cold handle. The brown water shotguns out and I cup my hands underneath, collecting enough to sip. The water is very cold and very metallic, rusty. The pills disappear from my throat but the hospital stays, and it is as if the nuclear holocaust has struck: the white antibacterial waiting rooms are now burnt and red; the walls sizzle away like bacon fat revealing pipes and I-beams like charred meat. Remembering that blood often tastes of salt, I pull my shaving razor from the medicine cabinet and remove the blade. I hold it like a pencil in my right hand and rake it deeply across the back of my left. The blood comes out smiling as if I have opened the door and invited it into my home. I smile back. Then I press the back of my hand to my mouth and suck. Unfortunately my blood is as rusty and dry as my throat and now I am no more than a fountain pumping water from its own pool back into itself. My left arm drops drunkenly and I spit on the floor and then walk out the bathroom and towards the front door. I open it and step out, swinging around on the knob to look back inside before I shut it. There is a pathetic trail of blood behind me, a sparse dribble.
Outside things are no better. The air is full of dust from ground up concrete. The asphalt on the ground is smoking, the whole town looks like a mirage. The sun is very hot but I cannot find it in the sky. Cars sputter and die in a great traffic jam, men light cigarettes and scream hoarsely, women pick at their cuticles and their eyelashes are crumbly tarantula legs crawling around their eyes, making it hard to see. Old fat Jew is asking people for a quarter so he can take the bus but everybody sees the crumbs in his moustache so they hate him and walk by contemptuously, lean over to their accomplices and whisper things. His hands are cracking and the skin is white and callused where blisters have popped. His circus left town without him. Pregnant Korean woman walks into a nail salon. Withered 90-year old woman walks out. The whole town reeks of noxious fumes but nobody is doing any construction anywhere so it must be coming from our skin. Radio stations fade out of focus into static. This is a far better song than the rest, rhythmically pure and empty of artistic pretense. A stout man in a dress shirt breaks into dance, sweating and flinging his arms around while his eyes clench shut. His glasses fall off and he carelessly stomps on them. Everyone else thinks he is insane. I walk by nodding my head in time.
Eventually I get to the beach. Where the asphalt made a mirage of the city, the screaming sand makes the beach a casino, steaming into the sky. Bright lights and Big Time cigarette breath. I still stink of medicine and iron dust but everyone else stinks of coconut lotion. In this way I find some confidence in myself and am able to consider myself superior to the rest. The hidden sun singes all their bodies. They remind me of the corpses lying in the hospital. The difference is that these people are unable to disappear and have not yet realized that they are ugly. They suspect it, though, and that is why they have smothered their skins with oil. Even the beautiful people have become ugly here. Everyone looks like the scab that has dried onto my left hand. It itches and I rip it off. The blood hurries out again but this time seems more annoyed with me, feels lazy. I see the ocean.
The waves have not been here for some time. The water is completely still, leaves the landscape finally clear. The sea is cold and hides nothing from me. A hundred feet out there is a woman drinking from a whiskey bottle. Her skirt is high and her legs are long and she looks lonely out there. My throat is still full of splinters and hospital beds. I step into the ocean, walking with Cowboy Calm to meet that beautiful woman.
Back.