A small half-gerbil woman, about the size of a penny, is polishing my smooth, metallic ass, a perfectly reflective surface in which everyone can see their own desires. Unfortunately, such a sight causes mayhem and disasters all over. Cars crash, people weep, and despair abounds wherever I shine my hot, metallic, round backside.
Once upon a time, there was a man. (I know that is hard to believe.)
He’d come look at my butt and, upon sight, speak in tongues, and when he’d look away, he’d completely forget what he was talking about. But every time he stared into my ass and spoke, he’d speak of the forgotten rings of reality, cut realms from the lost spires of deadly lifeforms, the ambitions of dead civilizations reclaiming life through hieroglyphical afterlife via symbols and contemplation.
How could a perfect geometric form (my ass) generate a symbolic and linguistic nexus of ancient civilizations that inspires insight into the history of eternity?
“Yeah, how?” says the half-gerbil woman, throwing the cleaning rag on her shoulder, triumphantly punctuating her hourly shift in the shining of my ass.
“I didn’t realize I said that out loud,” I respond, embarrassed by my not-quite navel-gazing.
My life is an answer to the question: “What if I looked at my own ass?”
And the answer is…not good.
I am heartbroken and lonely, my only friend a half-gerbil woman devoted to the cleaning of my ass, the maintenance of a perfect reflective gloss and conduit to ancient history, the secrets of the universe, some unknown underworld, or a combination of all three, as uncovered by the garbled speech of this horny, staring man.
This nameless gerbil-woman is always immaculately dressed in a suit and lives in a box in the corner of my room. Every day, this vaguely religious and severely routine-oriented woman listens to stories about my life…for what? She maintains a record of every single fact about my life, every occurrence fiercely held together in loving safekeeping by her attentive, holy mind. Calm, devoted, and completely neutered as far as I can tell, I once saw her sewing sweater sculptures (sculptures made out of sweaters), I think, because she was inspired by my life or in love with me or both. But recently, she stopped making art and has no idea what to do with herself.
She has all this energy saved up from listening to me, and it needs to go somewhere, to be released. And on this sunny day, with my ass causing infrastructural damage all over the metropolis, I decide I will find a way, out of gratitude for her monastic service and amazing listening skills, to give her some kind of sweet release, although she wouldn’t ask for it and will probably refuse it, clutching her pious purity like oxygen.
It’s not that I decide to kiss her but that I find myself floating and vibrating with desire closer to her lips until a kiss is the inevitable conclusion of what is happening to us in that park that day, that moment. The kiss is equally bizarre and life-altering, as if discovering swimming for the first time while wearing a suit made out of ceramics. It is a weird kiss. I never get my footing and feel uncomfortable the whole time. But this discomfort is life itself. What the hell is comfort? Death. I am in love with this awkward gerbilish woman.
In the midst of this, we hear the speaker of tongues. He is gazing, no doubt, at my round and glorious butt of all butts. Does he have a job? What kind of life is this? The speaker of tongues. This man just walks down the street and then becomes a vessel for some message transmitted through my reality-destroying ass? The gibberish summons an ancient civilization of neanderthals in raw daylight in public. These neanderthals use glowing rocks and Taoism technology to create life, like a Frankenstein’s monster of a neanderthal, but the monster wanders around sad and envious of the neanderthals so one day kills all the neanderthals and masters the science to build more monsters like herself, creating a world consisting only of monsters like herself. We see this mini-apocalypse unfold before our eyes.
Back to me and the tiny half-gerbil woman. With our kiss, a boundary is crossed, and I no longer rely on the nameless gerbil woman to record my life. I find a stone and start to carve into it the blank facts of my everyday life as honestly as I can. This violent act reconciles me with an understanding that representing my experience is always a degrading assault on the self-sufficiency of inert matter, a war long waged between words and things since the dawn of history and civilization…a war still being waged every second.
Meanwhile, like a soundtrack to our romance, the speaker of tongues begins to offer some kind of ominous prophecy or something but is too encumbered by language to articulate himself, as if placing the concept of zero like an animal into a maze and asking it to make its way to the exit to deliver a critical, time-sensitive, life-saving diagnosis to a dying patient at the other end but taking so long that it begins to mold at the peripheries of itself from zero into an ugly oneness—a depressing prospect for a creature whose identity centers around the chic void and glamorous emptiness permeating everything everywhere ever. We just can’t understand him.
The gerbil woman, now casting off a weighty and rigid prudishness, is bursting from herself with eagerness to have sex, as if floating above the laws of physics through pure desire.
The next day, I’m standing on the street. Like I do. There is a friendly woman standing next to me weeping, seeing her dreams of becoming a decadent ice cream chef in New England and unabashedly pursuing her repressed lesbian crushes. She is beautiful and, I think, attracted to me. I’m not really that into her, and, not sure why I do this, but I decide to show her my whole ass. She notices there is no hole.
“No butthole?” she asks.
“Nothing can go inside it,” I reply confidently.
“Sharon,” she says. “That’s what everyone calls me. And you?”
“I don’t know my name,” I tell her and float, suspended in a sad stupidity, then put my skirt back on.
For a long time, I wondered: Who made my butt? Where did it come from? What is this world? Is this world a perceptual lie invented to hide us from the meaty truth, and did the curvature and sleekness of my shiny round ass destroy the limits of reality with a great strange vortex that will eventually pull everyone and everything into it, not like a black hole but like a fold that doesn’t destroy physical matter but sends it to another way of operating like a reorganization of space, a Revolution in Existence, a Chic Gloss Beyond the World!? I don’t know.
She takes me to a corner I didn’t even know existed behind my apartment building and shows me it: another metallic ass.
“I’m making you a new one,” she says, wiping her tears from before away from her face. There is bird shit all over it.
I’m insulted and speak as if without enough air: “A replacement ass? How long have you been planning this?’
“A while.”
“Well there’s bird shit all over it so—”
“—I can wash it off.”
“I’m not wearing that! My ass must be…shitless.”
I guess renting a studio is too expensive, so she’s been making this makeshift metal ass in an alleyway like an overconfident inventor in the 1800s before the dawn of humility that came after electricity and Wikipedia.
Then she takes me to her apartment. Actually, it’s right across the hall from mine. Weird I never met her before. She takes me into a bright kitchen in a mostly dim apartment, lights beaming out through the darkness. There are these little glowing creatures that look like voluptuous feminine fairies all over the counters. They’re really charming. They act in unison sometimes, not out of conformity but out of missing the pretense or sin of separation to influence them as individuals with distinct selves, as if operating with an understanding of themselves as totally connected to the world and each other. They are so graceful and kind and loving and free from any kind of jagged violence, suddenness, or impatience. Everything about these creatures makes me think they must be angels, but I don’t know. Then she puts her penis on the kitchen counter, and the angels scatter like roaches when you turn on the light.
“Take a look at this,” she says.
The penis opens up like a trailer, and there are cartoon skunks inside smoking long, French, feminine cigarettes, puffing smoke rings into the air, discussing world politics like it were interior decoration, like “maybe we move Germany into the middle of the ocean.” I can’t really hear what is being said, or maybe I’m doubting my hearing because of the unbelievability of what is being said by the cartoon skunks.
“I’ve been watching you,” she says “and the speaker of tongues. What are these ancient civilizations?” she asks, the cartoon skunks staring at me with arms crossed like backup muscle.
Suddenly, I feel pursued in a very conspiracy/paranoid/this-is-bad way and awkwardly try to say the things that make me the least desirable…kind of impossible.
“Oh, uh, that guy. I think he’s just on drugs…”
I run out the front door and steal the metal ass replica. “It’s based on my own ass, I have a right to own this,” I think to myself.
Back in my apartment, I am standing naked, looking at this replica ass. The gerbil woman, OCD-ishly cleaning my ass with laser focus, pulls away at the end of her shift, disinterested in the world outside her clockwork of tasks, jumps down, walks over to the ass, and puts it on nonchalantly, giggling to herself. I turn around, and we shine our asses at each other, reflecting each other, and finally, this minuscule gerbilish woman grows to my size, and we tell each other our names.