The Soho Press Book of '80s Short Fiction by Dale Peck

Author:Dale Peck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2016-03-25T18:43:37+00:00

Debbie’s Barium Swallow

by Laurie Weeks

Take pity on meat!

—Gilles Deleuze

Buildings or spinal columns shoot up from the pavement to sway clacking around a girl. Debbie, for this was her name, found herself one day walking like a friendly ghost through this forest of vertebrae. She’s a disoriented T-cell obeying commands from a nervous system driven by a mean brain, and all of Debbie’s instructions more or less consist of the same signal which is DEBBIE GET A JOB. What is happening to me, a girl thinks, walking to her job. No one touches her flesh so her flesh is made of air.

Though she’s wearing an attractive dress patterned with duck hunters in fur earmuffs, Debbie feels like an exposed tooth nerve throbbing across the sidewalk. Oxygen in the city is composed of chemicals designed to make you feel kind of funny; you walk through the streets bathed and breathing in this corporate substance and suddenly your body’s awash in loss and grief. Only your job can numb this anguish. Thank you jesus, Debbie thinks, for giving me such fast typing skills. Internal sirens signal the uncoupling of her nervous system from her brain: now your mind’s an engine running on the abstract fuel of cash, now your fingertips have fused to the keyboard and the distant mechanism of your body fishtails away into the vacuum between circuits.

This girl Debbie stands sweating and smoking cigarettes in the urine fog of the subway. How would it be to have a girl like Debbie’s arteries dilate around you in a slow red rush of velvet drapes? How would it feel to tune Debbie’s body into a swollen receptacle made of hot corpuscles like a wet fleshy bed where you could screamingly discharge your rage and fear and then relax? I’m a girl but I pretend I’m a guy pushing in and out of you. I watched your body walking down the sidewalk, guys knew who you were. I put my hands on your body you were underneath my hands. Girls never end and that’s their beauty; shoot one down and one even younger pops up in her place.

Flashback: Debbie wading through the frigid air, on her way to Mrs. Seaman’s first-grade class. The vast gray sidewalk a blown beach shooting out electric water from the reservoirs nearby giving off a hum. The rancid smoke of bodies rises from the schoolhouse chimneys far away above the stunted trees. Tenderly a crossing guard like an orderly guides her to the playground.

Debbie joins the other small ghosts in a game of Double Dutch, but her bones and musculature swarm with lead and heavy water and her bewildered frame can’t possibly decipher the whispering equation of twin whips and cement. Disentangling herself, she carries herself across the schoolyard to a corner where Jay Marks sits feverishly against a tree, his pointed face and hairless eyes swivelled toward a line of yellow dogs slathering outside the metal fence. Do you love me, Jay? Debbie whispers and Jay rubs the

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