Door by Grace Kim
| delivering food to old people every Tuesday and Thursday mornings
which would interrupt his schedule, his sleep schedule. His mother convinced
him to do it. "You should contribute to the community. Look at how
comfortably we live. It'll be a chance to give back." And she was
right. Doing something good didn't bring back that terrible feeling again.
In fact, it made him happy, but he could never admit that he was proud,
even to himself, or that he could ever do anything productive. So it was
dismissed and looked at as an obligation: to keep from being nagged. While making music, he would think to himself, "That was one fucked up dream. Being sucked into the earth, people were dying everywhere," things like, "I can't believe it happened again, just when I thought I was getting a little better," and things like, "someone is playing an awful trick." Whoever this person was, was able to decide that this man should have as many disorders a person can have, who also anointed another man who would determine this, and had the ability to prescribe pills to balance heads. These pills caused him to gain weight and have extreme difficulty climaxing. "He goes out to check the mail and turns on the sprinklers as the sun was about to go down. Even going outside a few feet away from his room was a great deal. It reminded him of how there was a time when things were normal. This made him frustrated. Night after night, his routine is looking at pictures of vaginas on the internet. That's the part of the female body that was the most attractive to him. Masturbation was an opportunity to feel something pleasurable in a body that did nothing but ache. It was also a way to gain some manual self control. There was a Mariachi band playing festive music on stage. Her grandma's best friend was hosting the event. She gave the microphone to her to say something to the audience and to her grandma who would later watch it on videotape. She spent her days at work, taking care of medical records, filing them away; made sure everything was in its proper place. Just a few feet away were people in small rooms in need of critical care. Some of them laid down silently in peace with all sorts of wiring and tubes attached to them. Others lay awake and would shout, "Oh, my God!" and "Can you hear me, can you hear me, can you hear me..." and so on. [read on] |
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