A Moment of Doubt Read Free Page B

Reader’s Digests , the computer magazine, the five or six bits of change that have fallen out of my jeans onto the toilet tank, the floor, and into the bowl itself. Marlene’s busy licking my balls, getting physical, cooing over what they’ve just done like good little students. And I’m gazing up at her lovely asshole like it’s Halley’s comet and I’m Halley, or it’s Juliet’s balcony and I’m Romeo, etc., only marginally aware that my back’s killing me, or that the neighbors have begun to batter the front door down, or that I’ve managed to pass the last few moments quite content to live with the fact that I’ve not killed anyone yet today, and may not get around to it . . . .

TWO
    I’ve spilled heroin all over the computer. This could be bad news for the disk drives, they’re kind of touchy, especially these older jobs, caked as they are with all the sleaze I’ve sent through them over the years. I’ll clean them with coke to wake them up. Sleep mode, coke mode, smack mode, speedball mode, the drives get it all, they deserve hits of each and the best, considering what they go through, what goes through them. My two disc drives, they’re like priests in twin confessionals, with a single supplicant, slobbering and masturbating and retailing sin after sin, alternating between them, so each has time to digest the horror, the insanity, the lust, the gore, the needle marks on the spines of my books, the incredibly labyrinthine descriptions of my landlady’s vagina, and what brandy tastes like when it’s sipped from there, and speculations about how the unction of the Holy Sacrament might better serve mankind, were it dispensed from Marlene’s cunt—we’re hawking extreme unction. My God, one of these priests would say, and getting a faraway expression in his eye, as if in his mind racing to an astral file in heaven to check up on precedents, he commences to grind away at this idea, just like a disc drive gone off to look for something it hasn’t already loaded into RAM, caught by surprise that you’d be bringing up such a thing now, laddie, as sipping the sacramental wine out of a lady’s vagina, and, now, he ponders, forefinger by his swollen Irish nose, would that be in an upright position, or . . .
    Check you later, Fadder, call me if you get an insight. I’ve got to go, it’s Tuesday already, there’s heroin all over the computer, and I haven’t killed enough people yet this week to pay for it.
    But it’s not that simple. Nothing’s ever easy in this life. By the time I make it back to my room, with a handful of change, holding up my pants and trying to find my place in the computer magazine, I’m so distracted by the possibility of having to commit murder in the midst of an otherwise more or less numinous day that I only absently run my finger through the smack on the chassis, wondering where this umber dust came from, and looking up at the ceiling above the machine like a goddamn idiot, that I forget to realize that the shit has materialized out of nowhere, out the thin air of an amok despair I’d been fucking with all morning. To prove this, rather than snort or shoot it, I tickle the DELete key on the computer keyboard a few times. Sure enough, a few one-byte holes appear in the brown powder exposing the gray case of the computer beneath. I hold down the key, and it “echoes” its function, right to left, bottom to top, just like a cursor on a screen, until I release it. When I do release it, the brown powder is gone.
    I check the screen.
    â€œI, alas, Mr. Windrow, will never again appreciate this magnificent instrument firsthand, as it were.” Th imbelina lit another Gitane and blew a thick, blue smoke ring that spun and expanded in the air, encircling as it sank Tiny’s massive penis and crashed into the monster’s loins. Tiny sighed like a water buffalo.