Khem

      As you approach the courtyard of a brick apartment complex, tucked just one block back from a heavily trafficked street, you feel your abdomen go sour. A pressure blossoms there, straining at the walls of your small intestine and instigating a brief hypochondriac panic. You grab the broken handle of the courtyard gate's door, seeking the comforting touch of something solid and impervious to death. If you were to die within the next few minutes, what would become of you - your thoughts, your 'personality' (tenuous to begin with), your I?

     But then it turns out that this peristaltic crisis is nothing more than a fleeting blockage: a reminder never to eat flash-frozen buffalo chicken burgers from a diner car with a name like "Fee's Grille" for the rest of your life.

     You've come to visit your friend Daniel, who has temporarily come to live on his father's couch in a rent-controlled apartment, passed down after the grandmother's recent death. You press a button to be buzzed in and walk into a claustrophobic stairwell. Once you've passed through the apartment's front door, it becomes obvious that this domicile once served as the central meeting place for your friend's extended family. The bare walls betray untarnished rectangular grids where swarms of pictures have previously hung. 

     The carpet is a plush, forest-green sod; you suspect that, if you were to press your hand down into it, you would meet no resistance - your limb would first sink up to the wrist, then to the elbow, then to the shoulder, and there would be no particular reason to stop there once you had gotten going. 

     Daniel, wrapped in a pilled, sun-bleached hoodie salvaged from a mound of dirty clothes at the foot of his father's bed, shows you the rest of the small apartment after barely greeting you. For such a modest space, the unit really boasts an unusual wealth of corners, niches, and recesses where one might nestle down unseen and ensconce oneself in an irretrievably private reality. 

     One such area is an alcove set off of the corner of the living room. Here, you see that a few pieces of fraying wicker furniture have been stacked up against a wall in one corner. Divots in the carpet tell you that, in the past, this had once been a gallery for the display of sumptuous china and other antiquities. A set of bay windows here faces the parking lot outside. From the sill, a decaying rubber plant dangles over a brass air duct in the floor. Daniel informs you that this is where his grandmother would sit to take her afternoon tea. Now that she is gone, it seems that the pocket of space she had once so frequently occupied has become a smooth, somehow indecent void. You can tell that neither your friend, nor his father ever cross the invisible threshold where this alcove transitions into the territory of the living room. Even for you, a newcomer to the apartment, it is difficult to stand here for any more than a few seconds; despite its vacated atmosphere, you find this spot exhilarating, and you might very likely have urged Daniel to bring some chairs in from the kitchen so that the two of you could pass the visit here - but some unknown irritant or radiation has begun to harm your skin. There is a pressure mounting, too, beneath your brain.

     Instead, you follow Daniel back out into the living room. Here, he motions for you to sit on the sofa. He asks if you would like a beer and you immediately accept his offer, wishing to drink something cold and mildly soporific into your stomach. During the few moments in which you are left alone there, you notice a cherrywood television cabinet covering the wall opposite you. With the exception of a few oddly scattered angel figurines, its expansive shelves have been totally cleared of their contents. Undoubtedly, this grand fixture once housed crowded rows of framed photographs, collectibles, and cherished objects, accumulated by Daniel's grandmother over the course of her eighty-four years. You wonder where these pieces have gotten off to. Has Daniel's father stowed them away somewhere so that the memories they activate would not ambush him as he sits alone in this gutted reliquary of a room? Have relatives come from all corners of the city to cannibalize the grandmother's externalized body of possessions due to some gut-level mania to keep something hard and tangible in their possession while her soul expands beyond the scope of the planet? And why have some of these keepsakes been left behind, isolated in such a way? Some of these porcelain angels, left contextless in the shelves' midst, seem to gather a suggestive aura about them from the depths of the novel emptiness by which they are surrounded. 

     Daniel returns with two green, perspiring bottles. Using his keychain to crack off the cap, you take several involved gasps of your beer - it is a complex, unconventional brew. You learn, upon reading the fine print of the label, that it is a 'saison.' Daniel sips his beer, as well. He seems incapable of conversing. You can hardly think of anything to say, yourself.

     Then, an ambient anxiety reestablishes its prerogative, dominating your thoughts. The blockage is back and you can feel your heart staggering, terror-drunk in the phonebooth of your ribcage. You ask Daniel for the bathroom and he points you to an open door between the kitchen and the diminutive foyer where you came in. Immediately, you rush inside, carrying your beer with you and setting it down on the counter by an expended toothpaste tube covered in a sallow, unidentifiable powder. This may finally be it, you feel. You're finally going to pop your coronary pod, and you don't think your friend will even notice when it happens. You collapse onto the toilet. Something barrels through your viscera. 

     Then a blissful relief washes over you: a hardened plug of dark feces detaches and lands in the gulf of toilet water below, followed by a considerably more pliant train of waste. The monarch holds court with his retinue in the porcelain basin, you think to yourself, satisfied. Death has passed by your door, allowing you to reoccupy the future years of life you had so suddenly abandoned.

     In the aftermath, you choose to sit for several minutes in solitude, noticing the environment of the bathroom for the first time. All here is immersed in a dull manila glow from the one lightbulb still functioning above the sink. The tub is mottled by ubiquitous deposits of calcium scales and sienna stains from the hard municipal water that drips from the shower head. On the wall in front of you is a framed image: a beach at low tide, pounded by a glaring sun that hangs in a midnight black sky. There is a set of strange tracks progressing out of the background to the very fore of the landscape (you cannot tell to whom or to what such prints might belong). Over the vacuum of the sky, a paragraph of haloed cursive characters gleam with an airbrushed gloom. The preponderant effect is that of a generic Protestant devotional. You read the following:

"I was walking on the beach next to God; after a period of trials, I looked back to find only one set of footprints. I asked Him, 'Lord, why, during my darkest hour, were there not two sets of footprints. Had you left me?' And He said, 'No, my child. My feet were still firmly planted in the sand. But you were in the sky with Khem, a prototype nephew of mine. I wanted to see what he would do with you."