Asked for Answers and Got a Head Full of Heroin

Urgent heavy knocking on the door at 1am. The toilet is flooding- fully, spectacularly. The drain on the floor can’t swallow fast enough, and water rushes out into the hallway in rolls and waves. I dig my wellies out from under the laundry and books of poems, and dial for help. The dorm is suddenly full of big guys in security jackets, loud voices, keys jangling on belts, bottom lips pushed out with chewing tobacco. I missed the dinner at Manor, and Moo Cow for sleep. Woke and pit-pattered around the landfill. Ate some mozzarella with tomato relish, falafel, raisnets. Still hungry hours later, I boiled water, and ate ramen out of a cup with chopsticks. I’m shivering with fever, sitting on my bed with my heart pounding in my ears, drowning in piles of unfinished work. Watching Fawlty Towers instead of sleeping.

- Want to hear a secret? I’m stronger than you.
- That’s no secret.

The Book of Salt:

“Thin Bin, how would you define ‘love’?”
Ah, I think, a classic move from the material to the spiritual. GertrudeStein, like the collectors who have preceded her, wants to see the stretch marks on my tongue. I point to a table on which several quinces sit yellowing in a blue and white china bowl. I shake my head in their direction, and I leave the room, speechless.
…

Your hair looks clean and freshly washed, I thought. An important indicator of anyone’s overall cleanliness. You wear it parted on the left-hand side. A personal preference of mine as well. Your tie is tucked into the V of your sweater. I too prefer a sweater’s soft drape into the buttons and bulk of a vest. Your coat looks warm. I would look good in it. Your hands…your hands? But where are your gloves? Ah, hands like yours will not stay cold for very long. Your eyes, coffee and cinnamon. An infusion to wake me from sleep.

“Well, are you coming in with me, or shall we conduct our interview here in the doorway?”
Your French was flawless but with a slowness to its delivery, unctuous and ripe. I wanted to open my mouth and taste each word. “Interview,” though, slapped me in the face. The word was a sharp reminder that I was a servant who thought himself a man, that I was a fool who thought himself a king of hearts. I got up and walked with you into a stairwell paneled with sheets of sunlight, slipped one by one through the dusty window panes. I followed you up four flights of stairs, and with each step, I was a man descending into a place where I could taste my solitude, familiar and tannic.

Quinces are ripe, GertrudeStein, when they are the yellow of canary wings in midflight. They are ripe when their scent teases you with the snap of green apples and the perfumed embrace of coral roses. But even then quinces remain a fruit, hard and obstinate- useless, GertrudeStein, until they are simmered, coddled from hours above a low, steady flame. Add honey and water and watch their dry, bone-colored flesh soak up the heat, coating itself in an opulent orange, not of the sunrises that you never see but of the insides of tree-ripened papayas, a color you can taste. To answer your question, GertrudeStein, love is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but untouched.