The Book of Nods by Jim Carroll

Author:Jim Carroll
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

The Transient

They were the cheap rooms on that floor, with the bathrooms down the hall. Late at night, through his insomnia, he counted the times the women used their shared toilet, especially the giggly pair in the room two doors down. They were young; they’d been there only two days. One always seemed to take an awfully long time, much too long to simply urinate, even taking into account, as he did, the possibility that they were drinking California wine throughout the night. “She is maturbating; it is obvious.” He said this, for some reason, out loud, and realizing what he had done, realizing that he might easily be overheard by one of the passing women, he wrote out a note on yellow paper. It said, in block letters, “Talk silently to yourself,” and he attached it with some tape to the frame of the mirror. He returned to the image he held of her (it seemed unbalanced . . . tentative and precarious). This time he kept silent, however. Maybe that was why it slid back and forth. She was rubbing her clitoris in circles with the tips of her pinky and thumb pressed together. She was cooing very softly. Again, he mimicked this imagined sound, abruptly, a sort of glottal strut, out loud, then quickly checked himself, peering up to the mirror and shaking his head . . . these things were difficult. Lacking any imagination, she thought of nothing in particular as she manipulated herself . . . only of the narcissistic pink color of the door before her. (He knew the color, having used the ladies’ room himself when no one was around.) The expanse of pink opened out in her mind to a meadow of blinding pink light, pink as the clitoris she now rubbed (her fingers pressed together in a triangle, like some oriental greeting).

He always used the more clinical choice of words in his inner dialogues, like “clitoris” or “penis” . . . never resorting to those vulgar euphemisms. He thought words used in their formality were much sexier. He heard these words spoken always in a voice not quite his own ... an assured, commanding female voice . . . that of a wealthy child’s guardian, or, more specifically, the voice of that one woman doctor on the staff of the ward he had occupied those three Christmases ago, the doctor he always asked to have his sessions with, but was never allowed, forced to see the Chinaman instead.

She was returned now to her room, her roommate having answered the squirrel-like knock, and they were giggling again as if she had never left. “God, the doors here are thin,” he thought, “can they hear me when I sing along with the radio?” He panicked at this notion. Resolved NEVER to do THAT again, never to sing out loud. He drew another piece of stationery from the drawer and wrote out a reminder which he again taped to the mirror, this time to the bottom of the frame.

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