#hotgoat

When I was twenty, I registered for Selective Service. I wish I could say that it was because of some uber-equalist protest against sending only boys off to war, but I'd be lying. I mean, I did have a sort of residual liberal glow about me as I signed the paper, but really, at the time I could have given a shit about the stronger sex. I wanted a burrito.

Did they not give you a burrito when you signed up? Huh. How odd. Ok, me neither. But I did get a burrito out of it.

See, I sport a boy's name. I do not do this by choice. Nor did my parents choose to torture me by naming me something that would attract nasty jokes like Veggie Booty attracts vegetarian moms. (I love this stuff. I'm not ashamed to say that I've been known to hang out with vegetarian moms so that I can eat Veggie Booty off the floor too. Try it on your toddler. I'm not kidding. They will love it.)

A man who epitomizes the essence of biker named me Harley. This is a man who rode around with low-grade gangrene in his ankle for weeks. This is a man who has been in prison. He has scraped the remains of his best friend off of the pavement after a fatal motorcycle crash, and no one ever saw him cry. This is a man that you just do not fuck with. His name is Alan, and he was the very first person ever to see me.

I peed on him.

See, my mom was living alone far out in the deep dark depths of the country, and she went into labor. When Alan showed up and offered to deliver me in exchange for getting to name me, she didn't protest much. You try to get your way when your body's rhythmically trying to poop out a football.

So Alan got to name me, and he named me after the vehicle that bore him to the scene of the emergency. That vehicle was, yes, a Harley Davidson. So.

So there I am, a little baby girl named Harley. And some stuff happened, and around the time I turned eighteen I managed to finagle a small but adequate college scholarship.

And at the beginning of every semester, all my friends would troop over to the financial aid and get their student loan and scholarship checks, and then they'd all go running off to buy new books and stereos and big old bags of weed. And I'd be with them, in line the whole way, until it came time for the lady to hand me the check. Generally it went something like this:

Lady: Your check is not due for disbursement. Me: Why? I exceeded the GPA requirements for keeping my scholarship. Lady: You have not registered for selective service. Me: So? I'm female. Lady: Well, you'll have to prove that. Me: (Grabbing my boobs.) How do you propose I do that? Lady: Here's a Selective Service Deferral Request Card. You can fill it out, stating your reason for requesting Registration Deferral, and if they accept your request, your check will be ready for disbursement in two weeks. Me: But I don't have any food. Lady: Well, you should have budgeted your money better. Me: But I did! I made that two thousand dollars you gave me last semester last until yesterday, then I spent the last three dollars at taco bell! I thought I was going to get my check today! Lady: Fast food is not a good value. I suggest potatoes. Next!

And dejected and hungry, I would amble over to the weird disintegrating old orange counters with the bic pens haphazardly taped on with white string and examine the half sheet of paper she handed me. Each year the form was different but there was always a box you could check for "I am female." And each year I checked that box and then called my landlord and begged for time and showed up at my friends houses around dinner time a lot for two (actually three, it took them about a week to grant my request to be considered female) weeks.

I tried other ways of getting around this. Once I tried going to the financial aid office three weeks early to fill out the Selective Service Deferral Request Card, but they said the form had changed and they could not give me an old form and they had not gotten the new forms in yet. One time I tried to get a student loan and then pay it back with my scholarship when that came in but as it turned out, they don't give out student loans unless you've registered for selective service either. One time I tried going up the entire chain of command in the Financial Aid office and I did talk to a lot of people but nobody could help me. One time I cried and told them my cat was sick. They told me that veterinarian bills were not an appropriate use of scholarship funds.

So I did it for a while. One day walking to open the photo lab with a coca-cola in each hand and the dreaded three week hole looming in front of me again, it occurred to me that I could just register for selective service and be done with the whole thing. So after work, I went and did that. The financial aid office was closed so I actually had to go to an army-recruiting place to get the form (I still have no idea where else one gets these things other than recruiting offices and financial aid offices). I was afraid that they wouldn't give it to me if I explained the problem so I told item it was for my boyfriend and they gave it to me and I took it home and filled it out and mailed it in.

The next time my friends all trooped down to the financial aid office I was with em' coming and going. And when I got home with my new groceries that night, there was a friend sitting on my stoop looking hopeful and hungry.

I baked him a full sized homemade chicken potpie and sent him home with a ten-pound bag of potatoes.

I, like most Radical Liberals or Extreme Right Wingers of my generation (I leave you to figure out which group I'd link arms with on the White House lawn) tend to have moments of extreme paranoia. These range from becoming convinced that the lady in the minivan in front of me is taking so long at the tool booth on the bridge because she's arming a nuclear device to wrapping a pillow case around my head and attacking the weird black mold in my shower with a gallon of bleach because I'm afraid it will grow under my toenails.

This paranoia has produced some interesting behavioral oddities in me over the years. Once I stood in the driveway of my house in the rain for three hours, because I was convinced the house would slide off the hill. I will not fly in an airplane, and I cannot go out onto one of the decks attached to my house. Since September 11, I have avoided the city of San Francisco assiduously, even if I live twenty minutes from it and the place I do live is deathly boring. I'm one of those people who uses a paper towel to open public restroom doors and I cross myself when I see road kill, though Catholicism and I parted ways in 1984, and we'd only flirted for six months or so.

Recently, I noticed that I've been building an even more pronounced paranoid delusion. I spend a minimum of six hours a day in front of a computer that has high-speed Internet access. I have become so used to having the ability to Google anything, at any time, that when that ability is taken from me it's as if an invisible mental limb has been lopped off. This amputation sensation makes me worry both for the state of my own head and for the state of the world as we know. So ok, my Internet access goes down. That's not so bad, right? I'm an avid reader, I could read a book. At work I don't even need access, I just use it to entertain myself while I wait for one of those five minute processes my job is made up of to finish. It's really not the end of the world, when it happens.

Except, what if it is?

What if this lack of connectivity is the harbinger of the last five minutes I will ever have? What if planes are about to start falling from the sky and this is the time I have to take stock of my soul before I let go? What if this *blink* is the first indication we get those that who survive will live unimaginably different lives from this day forward? I grew up in the most atomic state in the union, so these thoughts are not new to me. I was probably ten the first time I had an apocalypse dream.

Experience has taught me that the only reasonable reaction is to pretend everything's fine. And so far, this has been the case. (Some will argue that if I'm suffering from these types of thoughts everything is not fine, at least within my head. Hey - if it doesn't affect my behavior, is it really that worrisome?)

But what happens the day that everything is not really fine? Will I know to act when the time is right? Because I have to tell you, I'm 70 % sure that it will happen - that in my lifetime, civilization as I know it will crumble. Sure, maybe that's a delusion produced by my paranoid personality. But what if I'm right? I should be ready. I should have potatoes and gasoline on hand, and know how to build a fallout shelter out of mattresses and aluminum foil.

I'm pretty sure that I have the skills necessary to live in a post-apocalyptic society, should I survive. For the first five years of my life I lived in a one-room house that had no plumbing, heating, or electricity. I know how a kerosene lamp works and could build one on my own. I can chop wood and pluck a chicken. I can light a fire in the damp and cold and am not above sautéing bugs in a little butter and port wine should protein become a problem. I've washed my clothes by beating them on rocks and would kill a squirrel with my teeth if I was hungry and it stayed still long enough. I'm not in the least squeamish; if I'd been in the Donner party I'd have been the first one with human gristle between my teeth.

No, the post-apocalyptic world is not what worries me. What worries me is the apocalypse itself; that while everyone else is running around smashing shop windows and taking cases of Twinkies to their heavily guarded Datsuns, I will be wasting time calmly pretending everything's all right. And that will certainly lessen my chances of survival. Think about it.

If I have seventy-two cases of Twinkies, I have a food source with no expiration date. If I am one of those without Twinkies, I either have to steal Twinkies from some heavily guarded Datsun or offer to have some well-armed jock's child in order to get my hands on the almighty expiration-less pastry.

I thought writing this would make me feel better, but it didn't really. It did make me wonder if there are Twinkies in the fat machine.

I gotta go.

(Being the true and complete record of a day in the life of a superhero, taken from the hero's own journal)

6:00 AM - Woke with the sun. Attempted to hop out of bed but tequila intake from night before precluded superhero stunts before coffee. Must remember to ask SuperCraig what brand we were drinking, so as to avoid forever and ever. Took supershower.

7:15 AM - Trusty sidekick popped head in door sounding altogether too cheerful. Seemed none the worse for wear even considering tequila. Sidekick showered while I packed the Dorkmobile. Almost forgot lightsaber.

8:00 AM - Snorklesense began tingling. Pointed the Dorkmobile south towards the source of the disturbance. Sidekick and I vowed to overcome whatever evil stirred the air.

8:40 AM - Arrived near the scene of the disturbance. Many innocent civilians walking towards the center of evil. Their collective goodwill was keeping it in check, until Sidekick and I could take care of the problem. Much thanks, as parking hellish.

9:40 AM - Parking spot stolen by evil grandmther in blue dodge. Attempted to burn her with laser gaze but apparently not enough coffee yet.

10:00 AM - Found parking spot only eleven blocks from destination! Lady Luck smiles on the super, when she can get out of Vegas.

10:10 - 10:40 AM - Stood in line to speak with collective goodwill organizer about best use of Skywalker Snorkledork's special powers.

10:50 AM - Shed mild mannered software developer's disguise behind tree. Afraid I may have permanantly scarred mind of small child who inadvertantly witnessed transformation, but then child laughed at blue bathing suit. Laser gaze still not working.

10:55 AM - Starfish not well inflated, necessitating dangerous reinflation procedure during flight.

11:00 AM - Innocent bystander recognizes Skywalker Snorkeldork, Sidekick takes picture.

11:05 AM - Skywalker Snorkledork ready. Victory assured.

11:15 - 11:49 AM - Waited around for politicians to finish describing threat.

11:50 AM - Legs tired. Sat down. Think about using laser gaze on politicians.

12:04 PM - Unexpectedly saw old friend Flash in crowd. Decide to revisit superhero costume as am jealous of Flash's sweet costume.

12:15 PM - Finally! Began leading innocent bystanders towards certain victory.

1:00 PM - Superhero S giving me trouble.

1:00 PM - Victory further than originally surmised. Stopped for popsicle.  Superhero S fell off costume. Placed S on starfish, where it stuck better. Next time sew S on.

1:20 PM - Victory in sight. Starfish slipping.

1:40 PM - Victory achieved! Sidekick invaluable. Remember to give Sidekick cool sidekick name next year. Also, muffins.

Standing in front of the mirror in the morning I do all the faces necessary for a woman's beauty routine.

Once wrinkles did not apply to me, but the past couple of years that's changed. Now I apply moisturizer and give myself a regal, haughty look that smoothes out my jaw line and makes my neck look longer than it is wide. I take special care under my eyes and think about the possibility of these bags just getting darker and lower. I stop looking at my eyes.

While I apply eye makeup I think about Mae West, who said "A woman should wear a great deal of mascara when young and even more when she is not." I hear ya, Mae, I hear ya. One more coat of that good stuff should do it. Maybe two.

My lips are still generous and often chapped and asymmetrical in a way that makes applying lipstick a lesson in watercolor technique. If I even think about following the lines, it goes all wrong and I look like a little girl that's been eating mommy's lipstick. The technique that works is to sort of smudge it on loosely, pop those babies together a couple of times, step back from the mirror, and leave it alone. Anything else results in a rising terror when I once again vainly try to find the actual shape of my impressionistic lips.

This morning everything went well and there weren't even any repairs needed when I surveyed the effect after a quick five minutes of slapping on colors and creams. I stepped back to see what it looked like in the sunlight coming through the window and my left foot was stuck to the floor.

Hmm? I thought. What's down there?

Down there was blood, a great river of it running down the back of my leg, dried on the heel of my foot. Great clots of it lumped and bumped to the sticky drying red goo that was holding my foot to the floor. I had, once again, shaved the mole off of the back of my calf and it had responded like it always does, by bleeding with great gusto but no actual pain.

I like to call myself Beavis when I make a truly bonehead move, it makes me feel superior. Don't analyze that statement too long, it ruins the fun.

So here's the problem. If I get back in the shower to rinse it off chances are the damn mole will start up bleeding again. And I can't very well go to work with a leg that looks as if it's been savaged by an underage sociopath with a razor-tipped weed-whacker.

What to do, what to do?

Aha! The American female’s most common response to blood comes to my aid, and I grab a big wad of toilet paper and attempt to wipe the sticky red stuff off.

Yeah. Right.

Drying blood does one thing to toilet paper, and that one thing is to tear tiny little rolls off the sheet as it is dragged along the surface of the blood. Now my leg is covered in gore and toilet paper, a fashion statement sure to get me noticed. This is getting worse by the second.

I am a resourceful woman, though, and after some rifling in the cabinets I discover that I am the proud owner of some weird pre-moistened face cloth thingamajiggers. Twelve cleansing moisturizing packages later, things began to look kind of normal again.

Now to bandage the bump, so to speak.

In a fit of utter stupidity, I poke the mole to see if it still wants to bleed. It does. And it does. Aaaargh!

Now I am not a bleeder. My body is very efficient with the repairs. The skin gets punctured, some blood leaks out, the next thing I know it's sort of crusted over and ready to do this neato healing trick. I can go from fresh scrape to scab falling off in three days. It's a nice thing, to be able to depend on your body to do what needs to be done whilst you're nancing around in your head.

Consequently, I've never been that great about dealing with blood. I know they say put pressure on it, but I've never had to, because usually by the time I've noticed there's a hole in me it's stopped bleeding. This mole flies against everything I know about self-first aid, which is leave it the fuck alone or puncture it with a needle. I'm pretty sure neither of these things is going to help.

Aha! What I need is a Band-Aid!

Of course, I don't own a fucking band-aid. I think I've bought band-aids twice in my life, and both time they were for someone else. Damnit. Damnit. Damnit.

Fortunately, I do have duct tape (the clear kind) and toilet paper. I believe I have already stated that I am resourceful, right?

Enter sexy hipster designer chick, resplendent in her men's shorts and giant wadded up toilet-paper band-aid. To complete the look, I‘m wearing authentic Hawaiian flip-flops, the plastic 2$ black ones.

I walked in a neighborhood filled with enormous old gingerbread Victorians. They were falling apart around me; this neighborhood had for some reason resisted gentrification. On the corner stood a pink and purple five story that had seen it's last coat of paint sometime in the seventies, probably. I peered up and down the street, looking for the house I grew up in.

I didn't see it, but it was very familiar to me, this other Albuquerque of my dreams. I dream of it so often that I no longer know I'm dreaming and it takes me a while to sort out what's real and what's not when I awake.

For those of you who hate Albuquerque, the Albuquerque of my dreams is much, much worse. It is what you imagine the real thing to be.

I am always eager to be there, though. There is a house there that I want badly to own, and in my dreams, I often do. It has three floors and a number of secret passages and there are no rats.

Anyway, in this dream, I am not at that house, but one I've never seen before. I am just walking down the street in front of the pink and purple house when I hear it, this music that seems to be made of the poetry I wish I could write and it is so angry and heartbreaking and true that I must know what band this is. I press myself against the chain link fence to hear better and it is definitely coming from one of the upper floors. I turn in the gate and walk to the door but then I notice that the house has been split up into apartments, a crazy confusion of apartments, and that some of the people on the second story have ladders leading from their windows to the ground, and that the third story people have ladders leading from their windows to other second story windows, etc.

The house starts to look kind of creepy.

I think about knocking but then decide that what's needed is just a sneak and peek to determine the name and maker of this album. I climb a ladder to a second floor window and carefully, very carefully slide inside.

The music is playing at full volume here and I stand for a while and listen. It's like stretching out on a redwood platform that's floating in a warm lake on a summer day; it's that satisfying for me, this music. Then I begin to look for the player.

There is a noise that's not music and it crawls up from somewhere below me and attaches itself to my spine and I know that even though I meant to come up here and get the name of an album I will do something truly, dramatically, strange up here, because It was never in me to walk away from that sound. That sound, like a kitten begging for some horrible torture to stop, freezes me. I look around the room more carefully.

It is indeed a normal room, except for a small hole in the floor. I peer into that hole, and see a long way down, past the first floor, to the basement. There is a child sitting on the floor, tears running down its face. It looks up at me and I motion for it to climb up a board that sits slanted in the hole. It does, silently and quickly, and I know that this child has been in that basement for a long, long time. This child is willing to trust me simply because it does not know me.

Below, there is a bellow of anger. The child reaches the top of the board and I yell, "Grab onto it!" I reach down and grab the child around the waist and pull both the child and the board up the rest of the way. I put the child on the ground and swing the board against the edge of the hole until it splinters, then look back down the hole.

Down there is a man who will soon find a way up here, and when he does that man will kill us the way he's killed many before us. The stench hits me and I realize I have broken into the home of a serial killer, upset his routine, and now I am the thing that must be solved for him to get his life back in order. He looks up at me, and he's naked, and smeared with blood. His mouth opens and he screams at me, no words that I can make out but pure hatred comes up that shaft towards me.

I raise my very long, sharp heavy splinter and drive it into his mouth with all the strength I have. He crumples underneath my onslaught, but continues to move and twitch and moan and gurgle. The bottom of the shaft is narrow enough that I cannot see his head any longer, now it's just the upper part of his torso lying on the ground.

My strength feels gone, but I raise my weapon again and place it on his back where I guess his heart would be. I turn to look at the child, who is regarding me with big curious eyes. I turn back to the pit and use my full weight to push this blunted bloody piece of pointy wood through his heart, and then through his throat, then through his sternum, until I am reasonably sure he will never move again.

I take the child up and wrap it in my shirt. As I climb one-handed down the ladder out the window it holds on to my neck with strong hot little hands.

Once on the street we are safe and the dream cuts to later, when we have been standing outside the house watching them bring things up from the cellar. Instead of his body they bring out a machine-augmented rhinoceros, a terrible dead thing kept alive with a respirator implant and extra armor grafted onto it where it might be vulnerable. The child quietly slips behind me, and I pick up my giant splinter again. There is nowhere I can see that this thing is vulnerable, but I will try to kill it until it kills me, because the child behind me has only me to protect it.

Right before the rhino charges I realize that I have no idea if the child is male or female. I guess it doesn't matter. I brace my stick against the ground and wait for the thing to thunder down on me.

At the community picnic I found a man. It was obvious to us both that what we wanted was to hold each other. It was agony not to touch and we drifted around each other like ice skaters, hands, arms, especially shoulders always aware of the others' position. I swear to you that we could blow a dance floor down, he and I, if ever we were set upon one together it would be like dance dance revolution baby.

The fact that he was gay is immaterial; neither of is were looking for sex or love the way that we all spend our time searching for sex or love. We've both found that and lost it, and we know how much more and less is this goofy feeling that came upon us in the land of women's studies graduates. What I wanted was not to have sex with him, or anyone else. What I wanted was to sit in a big chair and hold each other and allow time to flow around us for a little while.

I regret not asking him to come with me, though I have no idea where that would leave me now. Perhaps having some snuggles would have left me feeling less insulated, but it could have just as easily left me wanting love again. I am enjoying this hiatus from that desire. It makes me nervous to even contemplate choices that would lead out of this lovely quiet time.

Anyway, so I miss you, and you too, but don't take that as a declaration, because I am long out of those. I find myself wondering if either of you will ever stand in front of me again, but that's all I can give to the cause right now.

It's a thrift store book, the kind I read and then leave on the kitchen table at work for others. It's an Oprah Book too. Sometimes she's got a good book, but mostly I read them with a developing dread about what Oprah has done for American Women's fiction. No Flannery O'Connor's or Eudora Welty's here.

I need a book, though, one with enough pages and enough interest to get me through the next few days as I list and pack, but it can't be the kind of book that opens up my soul and leaves me to face the blasts of humanity through the poetry of someone like, say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This Oprah book will do, with its ubiquitous tree-and-a-stream cover.

I put some laundry in, colors so I have to dissolve my detergent in hot water and stir it and add it separately. It always gives me a sense of satisfaction to do this, to use my own two-minute ritual to avoid phosphates and still get clean clothes. It's funny to me that convenience is the thing that's filling up our landfills, individually packaged lives layering upon one another until gigantic mounds of crap threaten to overwhelm us. I think a lot these days about my children, if ever I get around to that exciting life step, and their children, and what the world will be like fifty years from now. We are not really making a dent in the depths of the trash we excrete as a society or a species. Even if we could limit personal usage, population growth would negate our efforts. Fifty years from now the world will be a different, terrible, place. The Adirondack trail will be lined not with trees but with the erosion that follows the death of a forest from acid rain. The American Southwest will be a parched bare desert alien to we who know it as a dry but perfectly viable ecosystem of small, slow hungry plants, and animals. The rainforests will be gone, and when that happens oxygen levels will fall, and carbon dioxide levels will climb, and every temperature pattern on earth will be disrupted...

But dissolving my own natural detergent instead of using Tide makes me feel better. Aren't I a simple creature?

The laundry started, I get my book and go outside to sit on the deck and read. This is my favorite pastime. I can be social, I can. But no matter who you are or what your company offers me, it's not as much as the author offers me when I am invited to read about the inside of someone else's head. For this I prefer the fictional; while it avoids the constraints of reality, great fiction is always based on truth. Today's book will perhaps not be great fiction, but it will be a good story.

I open the book and begin reading. It's good enough to read, not good enough to recommend or submit to my book club. It carries me along on a rising tide of guilt, but the character is numb and so am I. The washer dings. I use a piece of paper that was inside the front cover to mark my place and change over the loads, then sit down again.

The paper I used to mark my place catches my eye. It's the sort of paper they give you at the doctor's office for tests, everything shortened and garbled so that you can't tell what he's really thinking you have while the phlebotomist takes your blood. I know the type of doctor, because when I was sixteen I had a hip problem and the orthopedic surgeon unable to find a problem on the x-ray decide I had Leukemia. I spent a week in the limbo of the cancer diagnosis tests before they realized that my bones had just grown a little faster than my ligaments and I needed to stretch them out regularly until I reached full growth. That week was terrifying, full of slips of paper with boxed checked and terse notes and people who were too kind to the disturbingly off-kilter kid that I was.

This piece of terrifying paper is dated Jan 10, 2000. It's for an MD who specializes in "Diseases of the Skin." It takes me a long time to decipher the codes and handwriting, and I'm not sure I've got it right, but I think this guy that's he's made the test orders out for has a lot of moles, and at least two that look melanomic. The piece of paper in my hand orders pathology reports for both spots.

With one melanoma, your chances aren't great. With two, chances are it went long enough undetected that you're a goner in a pretty short span of time. I know this because I am a moley person, because doctors and dentists take a little extra time to look at the spots that decorate me in their own sweet ways. Even gynecologists can be distracted from their allotted six-inch square plot by the lure of an irregular mole on my inner thigh. So I know what this guy, this Roy M. Glaser is in for, in the same way I've imagined what I'll be in for when the doctor finally stops at a mole and says, "How long have you had this?"

(Just a side note here. Honestly, do you people watch your moles? Cause I swear, I used to, but now with this over thirty crap, the changes in my body are so often and varied that I have a hard time keeping up with my feet, let alone the whole oversized envelope of skin that protects me from your searching gazes. I mean, even when I'm thin, I'm not a small woman. How often do you bend over and examine your naked ass in the mirror? Maybe if I knew other people did it I wouldn’t avoid it as if somewhere, someone was watching me.)

I'm sitting on my back deck with the evidence that Roy M Glaser has experienced the thing that I've been bracing for ever since it was belatedly announced to our mothers that even one bad sunburn could start up a terror of melanoma later in life. And Roy's been through it, and he might not (Oh, who am I kidding,) he didn't make it. Two melanomas at one office visit?

So then, if I accept that this is true, then I am reading a dead man's Oprah-book-of-the-month-club book. I have to assume that he had it with him when he went down to the lab, which means the book was also with him before he knew, when he was still cancer-free. (Pepsi Cancer Free! The Choice of the Past Generation!) So the book, at least, was innocent, was not bought by a man who knew that death dressed in polka dots was stalking him.

Except, maybe he did know? Maybe he saw one or the other of those spots and knew what they were, knew that they marked the end of his run? I imagine Roy's about sixty, with the thinning hair and building paunch of a man who was healthy, active, out in the sun. He too was born before moms got the word. Maybe Roy'd been living with the certainty that those years on the sea with the sun on his body and a bimbette on each arm were going to exact some kind of revenge, and soon. Maybe he'd already had one treated and knew exactly what he was looking at.

So what I want to know is, did he buy himself that book? Because I know men, and I know fiction, and even gay men wouldn't find this book interesting. There's a world where women's fiction gets turned into Southern Literature, and in that world sexy young English professors with smooth southern accents will read women's fiction, but everywhere else, especially California, this is a terrible combination, this Roy M Glaser and book.

Maybe his wife bought it for him? I can't imagine even at the best of times that he'd be able to read it. Maybe that's why the slip was stuck in the book. It's the thing he used to carry it in, to insulate himself from the terrible possibilities in that note "call for path" scrawled on two places on this numeric chart of his skin's health. Sitting in the waiting room of the lab, he rolled the book in his hands, the paper safely inside, his eyes passive on the soothing green and pink seashore painting hanging on the walls.

(Someday those paintings will be priceless collector's editions, I just know it. They will still be ugly and insulting to everyone who looks at them, but they'll be rare, because they're so ubiquitous and despised now that they will be destroyed willy-nilly, the way prayer tracts were in the 15th century. Look up something like that on Ebay, why dontcha. You'd get rich with a coupla those)

Anyway, so I'd like to think that Roy M Glaser died without reading this particular book, that he made better use of his remaining time than that. I'd like to think that among the books they donated to the goodwill after he died there were copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Don Quixote and Delta Wedding and those kinds of wonderful narratives. I'd like to think that Roy M Glaser smiled sweetly at his wife who just wanted him to be happy and put the book aside for lovemaking and showing his grandkids how to tack out on the open water.