The revery reduced, the steam evaporated, his eyes suddenly hardened to her languid rollings on the carpet. The arrangement of the furniture began to chastise him and he saw himself from afar as a Roman gorging himself on a toilet. He slit his wrist between the ulna and the radius and pulled one of the bones out like one might remove a fluorescent tube or battery, pushing it one way in order to dislodge the opposite end and then lifting the entire bone from its nest of tendons. This bone he placed in a pillowcase, which he gave a twist to secure…then it was morning.
Morning is that neighborhood in eternity where the garbage is constantly collected. Many cities these days, New York for example, ask us to throw all of our trash into one can, compost with recycling with imperishable refuse, and we presume they pay sorters to tell the difference. These sorters must be of a noble breed.
Whenever a male doper can get it up, he considers himself part of a small wonder. Carmine tried to write a poem about his miracle but it was pretty crummy so he ripped up the paper and threw it away. Then he thought, What if someone found it and taped it back together? No, he had to dig it out and burn it, which is what he did. Now no one will ever know. Around midday, he realized yesterday’s score was long gone so he called the woman and left a voicemail and waited for her to get back. Undoubtedly she would because they got on well together; already they needed each other, to a certain degree. Carmine remembered the woman’s idiotic dream she read from her pocket notebook; it was growing on him. He shouldn’t have put up such a hard front to her, he thought to himself. She came through, didn’t she? In spades. Anyway, strangers aren’t entitled to anything but should be courteous or leave.
Years later, Carmine would look back through his notebooks and feel tickled reading about this time. In fact, he remembered none of it, as if the typewriter ribbon of his mind was not only dried and lifeless, they didn’t even manufacture replacement models anymore. Now, his memory was wholly based on his imaginative interpretation found through his notes; a fair trade-off, he believed, if there ever was one.
*Excerpt from “Fragment to Death” by Pier Paolo Pasolini, from In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology, edited and with an introduction by Jack Hirschman, City Lights 2010
