Korematsu Love

Inside the main room of Zen The Mental Journey, the monk placed his shaved head against my belly and slid his ear up and down. "Nothing."

"You're sure?"

"I'm afraid," the monk remained bent over, his hands on my hips. I had on a grey t-shirt, a picture of Bernie Mac in the center, Bernie grinning like a Cheshire as the monk pressed his ear harder, then stood and smoothed out the front of his purple vestment. "Perhaps there's a different source."

"You think it's in my head?"

"Well yes, but not in the way you make it sound," the monk smiled at the wordplay, bowed through the shoulders and slipped his hands inside his sleeves. The old house smelled of incense, with silver urns and Ace Hardware doorknobs, a blue rubber welcome mat and cat hair covering the six Buddha statues. I stepped back, thought of the others who tried to diagnose my condition without hearing the tic-tic-tick, how they insisted, "Your problem lays elsewhere." "Tinnitus." "Inner ear infection." "Stress." "Auditory hallucinations." "Some personal trauma."

"All in my head?"

"A very real manifestation," the monk agreed.

"But in my head?"

"Yes, yes. In your head."

"And what of this then?" agitated, I bent over and dropped my pants, allowing the monk to inspect the four inches of tail extending fuse-like from the center of my ass.

______

Mikie says she loves me, but things have gotten queer. She blames herself and wants to know, "What are we to do?" I press the cotton deeper inside my ears, adjust my blue earmuffs in an effort to deaden the sound, and raising my hands, say the only thing I can. "What, what? I've no idea."

I work for WQPD radio, writing news copy, condensing local and national stories into neat ten-second sound bites. I also host a Sunday program for local poets and writers, called 'Words On the Air.' Mikie is an events coordinator for Gabatine Books. We met last winter at a reading by Patience Agbabi. ("I ram raid man-made rules/accelerate into the sunset.") Mikie calls me TomTom - "Because you beat on my heart." - while in the time before the tic-tic-tick took over my head and turned my sphincter into a freak hole, I found living with Mikie glorious and life affirming.

Four weeks ago, in the middle of the night, I woke to a strange sound, and rolling over, felt a vibration just below my ribs. I located the tapping with my hands, and listening again, said "Weird," and switched on the lamp.

Mikie stirred, went "Hmmm? What is it?"

"I don't know. Can you hear?"

"What?"

"This," I reached for her hand and put it on my belly.

"Tom, I was sleeping."

"No, no," I let her pull her hand back, then shifted and patted where I wanted her to lay. "Just listen."

Mikie heard the flow of food and blood in the intestines, the stomach acids and everyday gurgling - the borborygmi - as air and gas moved along, but nothing else. "Go back to sleep," she said. "It's indigestion. It'll be gone by morning."

I rose on my elbow, Mikie's face in the lamplight softly lit, neither pale nor tan, a sailcloth on which my lips were ever eager to paint. I leaned in and kissed her shoulder. She yawned and smiled reluctantly. "Turn over. A massage is all," she pushed at the sheet and began rubbing my back.

Beneath her touch I was distracted, while as a tease Mikie's hands explored inside my shorts, her fingers dipped then stopping, perplexed and reaching again, she pulled down my drawers, scooted closer and stared at the distention which had only then appeared. "What the..?"

"What?"

"This!" she took my wrist and guided my hand until I caught hold, tugged and pinched without effect, and jumping from bed, I went to the mirror on the bedroom door, twisted left and right for a better view. "Jesus."

"What is it?"

"I don't know."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't."

"Are you telling me you didn't put it there?"

"Of course I didn't."

"Then what?"

I pushed my ass closer to the mirror, the tic-tic-tick a snicker as I bent over and tried looking between my legs. Mikie from her knees on the bed, "Does it hurt?"

"No."

"It's grey."

"Feels like rope."

"And you swear?"

"I told you."

Mikie got up quickly and inspected her own ass. Relieved, she yanked on her shirt and jeans. "Come on, come on," she said, and drove me then to the emergency room at St. Felicity of the Valley.

_______

The attending wore yellow latex gloves, the fibers imbedded in the folds of my ass supporting the claim that my tail had grown, "Or was not recently inserted." A sample was snipped, the specimen placed in a sterile plastic container and sent to the lab. X-rays of my belly revealed no additional abnormalities, though the tail ran some six inches up into my large intestine. "We can cut it free," the attending was confident, excited by the discovery, already imagining the possibility of articles, grants and prizes. "Once we have a full report from the lab, including a complete blood workup, and oncology has a look, we'll know better."

"You think it's cancer?"

"An external tubercle. Most likely nothing more than an elongated polyp," he showed the tips of his teeth as he tried out further names to see which rolled easiest from his tongue. "At worst an excrescent sarcoma."

"And what about the ticking?"

"The tumefaction is probably altering the flow of blood which in turn creates a mild vibration manifesting itself as a tick." The attending felt my stomach for tenderness, examined my eyes, throat and ears, and grinning, moved around me once more and asked, "Do you mind if I take another look?"

Two days later, the report from the lab came back. "It's not cancer," the doctor on the line was an older man, more sober in tone than the attending. "There are no signs of carcinoma. Your tumefaction does not even contain living cells. How this protrusion of yours grows as you claim is hard to fathom." The doctor paused, then said "I'd like you to come in for a second exam."

"Why?"

"So we can observe and then discuss the best form of treatment."

I didn't like the word 'observe,' imagining then a glass cage where I sat beneath bright lights while physicians gathered on a circular platform stared down at me. "A witch hunt."

"How's that?"

I asked for specifics, wanted to know, "What sort of treatment are we talking?"

"We can't be sure until we take a closer look. Your condition being what it is."

"And what exactly is my condition?"

"As I said," the doctor answered.

"Everything's fine," I told Mikie that night. "A benign growth is all, like a hemorrhoid gone mad." I explained how the doctors saw no need to surgically remove the tail. "They've given me a salve and some pills that seem to be working." I didn't want her to worry, had earlier used a tweezers and a large cuticle trimmer to probe deep inside my ass, cutting back the fuse as far as I could. "See?" I pulled apart my cheeks, showing Mikie a tail-free anus, saying exactly what the doctors couldn't, "I'm fine. Really, I am."

How vulnerable, a man with his pants down at his knees and both hands separating his butt-cheeks. Mikie appeared beautiful standing behind me. I watched her upside down, the blood rushing to my head as I recited Robert Creeley's, "If the moon did not.../no, if you did not/I wouldn't either, but/what would I not do..?" I saw Mikie smile, uncertainly at first and then laughing, the whole ridiculousness of the situation making her think how happy she was to be with a man willing to expose himself this way, and how disappointing when her _expression changed and became a panic. I released my grip, turned again to confront the mirror, the nub inside my ass a grinning snake, alive and passing through my fingers.

"What next?" Mikie decided my affliction must be an allergy, and on her own scrubbed the apartment, mopped the floors and dusted the walls. Disappointed when this, too, failed, she made a list of other possible interventions, introduced me to the monk at Zen The Mental Journey, appealed for me to give St. Felicity of the Valley another try. The second visit lasted several hours, with three more doctors feigning to be clever, debating Beta blockers such as propranolol designed to slow my heartbeat and retard my condition, sedatives and sonograms, MRIs and radiation. Other doctors wanted to experiment with stimulant variants, dialysis and electric shock, all clueless as they reviewed my chart, drew blood, took additional samples from my ass, scratching their heads while inviting me to stay overnight. "For observation."

"They don't know," I refused to go again.

"But?"

"What?"

Mikie agreed reluctantly, had me see an acupuncturist, and later a hypnotist who introduced precognitive suggestions.

At work I began running searches of my own, reading up on migraines, meningiomas and tumors in the thalamus, the effect of pressure on the brain, growths in the cerebellar vermis, along with mutant forms of sarcoma. Other than the occasional article concerning babies born with elongated tailbones, and the story of a man with tinnitus cutting off his ears, I found nothing remotely similar. "Needle in a haystack," Boddy ran the board for WQPD, came over to my desk the morning I arrived carrying a white noise machine. "What are you doing? That thing's just creating static, man. It won't help," he said, and made me pull the plug. "As your friend, Tommy boy, listen to me. You can't cover old noise with new. Here, take this. Go on, go on," he reached into his wallet and handed me a card.

"Psychosomatic," the psychiatrist I went to speak with the next afternoon said of my condition. "The body does not play tricks. For all manifestations there's a reason. Depression, for example, can produce recurrent myocardial infarctions and increased endothelial activation. Ambulatory blood pressure can rise due to stress, carotid artery atherosclerotic progression shows up in times of trauma. Tell me, Thomas, are you sad?"

I took the pills she prescribed, a dose of Zanex to relax, mixed and matched in an increasingly creative cocktail with the medications other physicians and health care clinicians gave me; Zoloft and Diazepam in the form of Valium to reduce anxiety, Vicodin for discomfort, Benzodiazepines for sleep, Diphenhydramine, Melatonin and Valeriam Root when even dozing was impossible. Mikie spoke with holistic healers, brought home bags of alternative medicines. I drank herbal teas and whiskey, took milder drugs by day and a more mind numbing combination of pills at night. Nothing worked. The ticking went on unabated, thirty beats to the minute, a clic-clic-click every two seconds, steady as rain.

________

One night, unable to sleep, I read an article on Dr. Jeffrey Willick, professor of physics at Stanford University who specialized in the structure of the universe, specifically dark matter which he believed composed 90% of universal mass. Dr. Willick's last published work, 'What In The World Is Dark Matter?' raised the question: "Does order emerge from the primordial distribution of mass solely through the process of gravitational instability, or is there another force?" Attending a conference in New Jersey, Dr. Willick was eating in a coffee shop when a car crashed through the front window and crushed him dead. Dark matter? Another force? I popped more pills, squirmed against my tail and pressed my fingers harder still into the sides of my head. Later, I stood in the doorway of our bedroom and watched Mikie sleep. Unable to cure me, she turned tentative and even resentful these last few days, like a dancer keeping her distance from a clumsy partner, she went so far as to wonder, "Is it me?"

"What?" my response was a reflex. "Of course not."

"How do you know?"

"Because."

"If everything was alright, this sort of thing wouldn't happen."

"But that's not true. Bad things happen to people in love all the time. Boyfriends fall out of windows, wives electrocute themselves with hairdryers, people get sick and die and love isn't the cause, it's the salvation."

"Is it?" Mikie seemed to be speaking from a distance, and told me a story then. "When I was a girl, our family had a collie named Murf. We were inseparable. I was the one who took care of him, brushing and walking and feeding, but then Murf got old, his skin developed hotspots and open sores, his hips failing along with his bladder. My ability to be there for him then, to rub his head and provide the simplest of comfort, came less naturally. In time my parents decided to put Murf down, and I grieved as much for his death as for the fear that in the end I'd betrayed him. Do you understand?"

I moved closer, wanting to hug Mikie and reassure her, "Everything's going to be alright. I'm not a dog," I said, and smiled, hoping she'd laugh, only she didn't find the humor, answered "I know," and turned away.

I shut the door to the bedroom and let her sleep. Our tv was on the opposite side of the apartment, and finding the remote, I adjusted the volume to low and surfed for the news. A reporter I didn't recognize sat in front of the camera and told the story of Julio Vasquez, an unemployed baker from Madrid. I felt my tail tap against my leg as I listened to how Julio stowed away in the landing gear of a DC747 en route to Newark, hanging on in the near oxygen-less altitude as the plane descended and his lover, Angel Miron, waited below. Before the report was finished, I felt a pressure building from behind, the tail in my ass thrust hard against the rear seam of my slacks, pushing and poking and bursting through. At the same time, my head filled with a violent, "Snap! Snap! Snap!" as if tiny bones were breaking in my skull. I dropped to my knees, covered my ears, not wanting to wake Mikie yet terrified just the same, I clenched my jaw in order to keep from wailing out, "Owww-eeee!" and rolling into the fetal position, managed to reach up and turn off the tv.

___________

"Shit, man," Boddy listened as I told him what happened the other night. "You mind?" he asked for a look, curious to see what the tail was doing. We stood in the front room of his apartment after work, my pants down while Boddy examined what he referred to as, "That little piggly wiggly of yours."

"It's not so little," I pulled up my jeans. "If I didn't cut it back."

"Weird science."

"Dead cells."

"Like hair and fingernails?"

"Something like that."

"Looks like rope," Boddy made a motion with his fingers. "What do you think, a virus?"

"I don't know."

"How do you feel?"

I raised my eyebrows.

"Right. Ok. And you don't want to go back to the hospital? Afraid they'll turn you into a lab rat?" Boddy leaned against the counter near his kitchen. "Sorry," he laughed. "You know what I mean," he set his beer down, asked more about Mikie and my episode while watching the news. "You didn't?"

"Tell her? No."

He nodded as if he understood, then said, "So how is she with the tail?"

"She's dealing with it."

"Kind of throws a monkey into the mix, huh?" he laughed liked before. I adjusted my pants which had shifted in tight against my ass. My head ached and I went to the freezer and wrapped ice in a towel. Boddy walked around the counter and switched on his laptop. "Weird science," he said again.

"What are you doing?"

"I want to try something," he motioned me over.

"I've already done a million searches. There's nothing."

"Yeah, well, let's try something new." A minute later, three stories Boddy found by way of a general search appeared on the computer screen. He tugged at my sleeve and told me to, "Have a look." In order then, I read about Juliane Monroe, a housewife from White Plains who, determined to save her husband, provided a part of her liver for transplant; of Able Pierson, unrequited in his love for Lucy Falkmore, setting his car on the railroad tracks near Penmost Station, turning himself and his old Chevy Nova into a tangle of flesh and metal road kill; and Winston Perimen, looking to impress his girlfriend, Rosanne DeCarlo, hurdling a fence at the Wintmore High School playground, miscalculating his lift and leaving two-thirds of his testicles on the metal post.

Each time I read one of the stories, my tail went hard while my head pounded with such dissent I dropped the ice and had to push the heels of my hands against my temples until the agony passed. "Fucking Christ," I sat on the floor after the third incident, my tail bent back, the ticking slowly subsiding to its familiar clic-clic-click. Boddy helped me up, watched me for a moment, then poured a tall whiskey into a green plastic tumbler and got me to drink. "Theory confirmed," he said.

"What are you talking about?"

"Three new tales, three more Tommy breakdowns."

I heard the tic-tic-ticking inside me then like sharp silvery echoes captured under glass. "It's not what you think."

"It's love, Tommy boy, no doubt about it. It's love that has you all fucked up."

"You're nuts," I set my whiskey beside the computer. "All of this is just coincidence."

"Really?"

"It has to be."

"You want to try again?"

I didn't answer, said instead, "There's no way this shit is interactive."

"And yet."

"Bull."

"I'm just saying."

"What?"

"Just saying, Tommy boy. Take a look."

___________

In bed that night, I lay flat on my belly, Mikie beside me, my ass sore, my muscles otherwise slack from the whiskey and pills I mixed a bit more than I should. Mikie slept facing me, her mouth parted with the slightest trace of spittle on her lip. Earlier, stumbling in from Boddy's, I walked sideways toward the bedroom so Mikie wouldn't see the fresh tear in my jeans. (Before coming home, I went into Boddy's kitchen for a knife, my tail grown out again, the fibers thick and weed-like, I tested the density, the reaction from nerves in the stem, then cut high against the base and tossed the remains in the trash.) Mikie watched me from the hall, asked "Is something wrong?"

"No, no," I came back in fresh pants. "I sat in something is all." We ate dinner, watched a bit of tv, read for a while and went to bed. Eventually I nodded off. When I woke, just after three in the morning, the ticking in my head was a steady tap-tap-tap of bogeyman fingers against a different sort of windowpane. On her side, Mikie beneath the sheet formed a soft flow of waves through her shoulders and hips. I stared in the dark, explored her curves, the same soft arcs and crescent I'd covered with my hands and mouth countless times before, though here they looked somehow different and more daunting.

I closed my eyes, opened and closed and opened them again, expecting each time to find Mikie staring back at me, searching my face for answers, and knowing I wouldn't get back to sleep, I slipped from bed, stood and checked the status of my ass. Clipped earlier, the nub remained a buried seed. I thought of what Boddy said about how fucked I was, and unsure what to do, went into the kitchen and got a glass of water, then sat at the table, my blue earmuffs beside my laptop. I put on the muffs, rubbed my face, the sound in my head a steady clicking of screws being turned, and leaning forward on my elbows, worked my fingers hard against my temples.

Nervous, yet hoping to prove Boddy's theory wrong, I switched on my computer and ran a search of my own. Instead of articles, I checked for websites, found www.philosfodder.com, clicked and waited for the site to open. The home page featured a series of links framing the main text, the day's headline: 'Philos For The Ages - Hero Or Heartache?' I read of Fred T. Korematsu, the Japanese-America whose lawsuit against the United States challenged the constitutionality of interning the Japanese during World War II. "Long a symbol of resistance against racism and overreaching governmental authority," the piece began, "at the time of his arrest in May 1942, Fred T. Korematsu was not motivated by righteous defiance, but rather a desire to be with the woman he loved." Determined to continue the affair he'd started that spring, Korematsu refused to report for processing and detention, went so far as to alter his appearance with plastic surgery, changed his identification to the name Clyde Sarah, his heritage listed as Spanish-Hawaiian.

I read about Korematsu's arrest, how he stood inside the wired gates at the internment center and howled his lover's name, when suddenly my head filled again with the sound of hail on tin roofs. My tail recharged, shot down my pajama leg. I grabbed onto the sides of the table and trembled, my water spilling just as the site clicked over to a different link, landing on a page where readers were invited to post their own messages. I waited for my hands to stop shaking, then typed, "What now? What am I supposed to do? I'm not prepared for this. When did things become so extreme? I read the articles and wonder why they effect me so. Am I really supposed to give up a piece of my liver, fly across the ocean in the wheel of a jet, set my car on the railroad tracks, or take on the government in order to accomplish what? These articles confuse me. My life by comparison seems inadequate, my head pounds with the boom-boom-boom of bassoons and bass drums. Love makes me nervous, I admit as much. The fear of disappointing M_____, of not being who she thinks I am, or should be, all this terrifies me. What does she want? What do I want? Why are things like this? Why is my head now a kettle of stones? What's wrong with me? What am I to do?"

I finished the letter and sent it off, then went into the bathroom where I popped two more pills, 100 milligrams of Zanex and Vicadin, before returning to the hall. I considered trying to sleep again, but found Mikie awake in the bedroom, sitting in the dark. She flipped on the lamp as I came in, a weary sort of "What now?" _expression in the corners of her mouth.

"Sorry," I said, and sat beside her, my apology ecumenical, all encompassing. When I reached for her hand, I felt her stiffen. "I didn't mean to wake you," my head throbbing still. Mikie stared at me in my earmuffs, pointed until I realized and pulled them off. "What did you take?" she asked.

"A little something."

"A little more?"

"Just a bit."

"You can't keep drugging yourself."

"I know."

She got up quickly, as if an idea had only then occurred to her, and went into the bathroom. I thought for a moment she might dump out all my pills and followed after her, watching through the open door as she sat and peed. "What are you doing?"

"Sorry," I turned my back.

"That isn't what I meant."

"I just want to sleep."

"And then?"

I rubbed my head. "I don't know."

"This can't," she began, only to stop. I moved into the front room as Mikie came out and stood near the couch, the light from the bedroom behind her, the ticking in my head like lead hoofed insects dancing, the length of my tail dangling inside my pajama pants. I extended my arms, waiting to see what Mikie would do, wanting to hold her, to tell her, but could only say, "I know."

"You know what?"

"This can't. You said."

"But that doesn't mean anything," she was angry now. "What can't you?"

"It's not your fault," I needed her to understand, though the reference seemed accusatory, and quickly I added, "It's crazy, that's all." My hands remained out. I waited more, unsure what Mikie was thinking, not knowing what else to do. "Rats," I thought again of Boddy, about the doctors and the pills and all the rest, and who could understand? "If I could," I told her, and finished then with what Creeley started, "(W)hat prevention, what/thing so quickly stopped./That is love yesterday/or tomorrow, not..."

After several long seconds, Mikie made the slightest of smiles, the sort of private grin one shows when there's pain behind the effort; a memory at a funeral, Mikie's lips rolled inward and puffed out. She came toward me then, avoided my arms but reaching nonetheless to rub my cheek. I thought of the story she told me about her dog, Murf, and felt the gesture sadly. But here she surprised me and held her hand flat against my face, her _expression changing as she moved her fingers toward my neck, my shoulder and over my chest. Further then to the waist of my pajamas, she stepped behind me, knelt and slipped my bottoms down.

My tail in a wiggle, went suddenly stiff. Mikie took the length of me in her hand, laid me out across her palm and brought her face close. I turned to watch over my shoulder as she opened her mouth as a sacrifice, a penitence, a want for love to be as it should: accessible, palatable, easily devoured. She didn't hesitate, whatever she thought a moment before still clear enough. Fully taken, I didn't say a word. When she stood, a minute later, trembling and hopeful, I hoped, too, and listened for the ticking in my head as I moved toward her and kissed her lips.

As I did so, the noise in my head increased, the additional clic-clic-click I realized coming from my computer, late night readers surveying the same site as me, providing email responses to my letter. I nearly laughed to think of the world so brimming with us, and stepping from Mikie, I went into the kitchen where I opened the drawer next to the stove and found a box of matches. My tail damp from Mikie's mouth, I dried it with my fingers, then struck the match and lit the fuse. Mikie's smile was more beautiful than anything I'd ever seen. I heard another click, and then a hiss, and felt behind me first and next within the most amazing heat.

Copyright © 2005 Steven Gillis