Primordial: An Abstraction

60

There’s a raw fingerprint on the faux stainless steel, fingerprint-proof kitchenette trashcan. Somebody must have left it there.

I confront my roommates.

“There’s no fingerprint,” responds one of them. “There can’t be.” He presses a fingertip against the siding and no fingerprint comes off.

“Don’t get smart with me,” I tell him.

I pass out.

My roommates put me on their shoulders, carry me to bed, and tuck me in.

I wake up with a hangover.

I go to the Union to get coffee and a bagel. No cream in the coffee. No cream cheese on the bagel.

All of the writers are dead.

They’re strewn across the floors and the tables and the stairways and the railings and the embankments like wet papier-mâché mannequins. The pages of their manuscripts and their creative writing degrees tangle and snarl in the dust devils that rip across the floortiles and the grass and the bodies.

“Gesundheit.”

A mortician takes me aside and asks if I will help clean up the mess.

“I don’t know these people. Can’t somebody else do it?”

The mortician insists there’s nobody else.

I see people everywhere.

I say, “There’s people everywhere. Seriously. Can’t you ask somebody else? Him. Her. Her. Her. Her. Him. Her. Ask her.”

The mortician doesn’t want to. He likes the way I look. My brow, apparently, casts an attractive shadow onto the blank screen of my cheeks. “It’s a shadow I can trust,” explains the mortician.

“Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. All right.”

The dead writers smell terrible. Decomposition, let alone rigor, hasn’t set in. This is how they smelled when they were alive. Slathering a mustache of mentholatum across my overlip doesn’t help. I can still smell the writers. I worry that I’ll never be able to get the smell off of me.

The mortician plays coach and directs me where to go. At first I defy him and demand that he disposes of some bodies too.

He won’t do it. He’s adamant. Almost arrogant.

On another day I may have let him have it, but I’m afraid of morticians, of their resolve, of their existential apathy, and I would do anything any mortician told me to do under any circumstances, although not without complaint. Like an unparented child, I never comply without the pretext of a complaint.

There are a lot of dead writers.

Students and faculty and staff and administrators and townies and other people that don’t belong at the University stop and stare at me as I lift the bodies and hurl them into the mortician’s jacked-up hearse.

There are dents all over the hearse. Especially on the hood. I assume they were produced by angry grievers who struck the vehicle with bats and bricks and sledgehammers as the mortician drove off with the corpses of their loved ones. I want to ask him if this is in fact the case.

I don’t ask him.

After heaving about fifty writers into the trunk, I feel like I’ve caught something. I feel. . dumb. And naïve. And invincibly self-important.

“I write because I’m weak!” I announce, slipping into character. I immediately regret it. Then I announce it again.

Before I can go on, the mortician kicks me in the knee and I fall over. Like a wrestler, he picks me up by the head, shakes me for about half a minute, then discards me. I do a maladroit somersault across the grass.

The audience cheers, claps.

I may or may not pass out. At no point do I lose the light, but there is a temporal gap.

Palsied, I stand and ask the mortician what happened.

He’s gone.

And a new, much larger horde of writers have already overtaken the Union. Careworn manuscripts in one hand, creative writing degrees in the other, they stagger back and forth in search of fresh meat. .