Alix parked on Baring Street and we walked to the Moody Eye Clinic. At night it was large and gloamish with traces of the fungal. We rode down in the murksome elevator.
There is something I haven’t mentioned about Alix, it’s my rustiness in my writing still, or it’s the hardship anyway of writing a whole novel brain-injured or no. You forget important points. You forget these people are characters and that readers are sometimes interested in them like that, in their traits, like my brown curly hair, my cracked-up face, the hole in my iris, and the other iris, as well, or for instance my extreme bralessness. My striped dress.
I didn’t mention this from the beginning of Alix’s characterization. But it’s so important and especially now and it’s never too late. Just tell them. Tell them what is actually going on, Cumin. Well, we were in the basement of Moody, in the heart of the crime, crimes—two holes—against me.
He was good-looking.
“All I had to do was go in there with the fucking bedpan, Cumin. With cordless headphones, I say hello to the patient, HELLO, HI, but distracted like taking a call from my girlfriend. I help the man get on the bedpan. I put him into the position. I say it’s fine, don’t worry, please don’t worry about that, you’re fucking paranoid, bitch, I’m working at work what the fuck, I’m doing my job, where the fuck do you think I am, and the bedpan is filling up. It’s delicious. Bitch, whore. It excites and opens a sphincter. I make sure a different nurse comes in before me and puts on Seinfeld on the TV, too. They think it’s reruns but we have a DVD cued. It’s like this combo, this nostalgia, you know, Cumin, everyone loving up on the ‘90s like that, all that ‘90s TV and feeling comfy in Jerry’s apartment, and in a Manhattan like that, in general, where like a fucking postal employee can pay rent and then I roll in on my ‘phone call.’ It took a sec to get the combo but it started to work absolutely. Really really good. And I could perfect it from there. Like, the episode where Susan dies and nobody fucking cares, when she dies in the hospital and they are like, com’n let’s go get some coffee, combined with ‘bitch’ and ‘you’re fucking paranoid’ combined with my loving touch, my expertise in getting the man into his position with the bedpan. It comes together, Cumin. It really does. It really really does, you know? Everyone started using my script. We got a stack of these DVDs. That was the workshop, breaking down this script, the combos, the certain episodes in combination…which is what I do here.”
He beamed like he was telling me he wrote for a living, like that exists.
We were in a black box theater on two opposing actor’s stools, in the basement of the Moody Eye Clinic at 2 a.m.
And I understand that’s a little strange. Not terribly strange in the compendium of things, but a little. Why is there a theater in the basement of a clinic? What is happening? A novel is like that, about something happening, which feels off, or false, to focus on that considering. Bodies have been changed into clay by gunshots and poisons, a perilous gas, any way at all to make the body slump and pile about, to act like a lot of pre-pottery by cause of sudden extinguishing, yet in novels people are good-looking. They have curly hair, or big dicks, get and don’t get their tenure, or whatever they want, love, drugs, and apartments.
Alix had big dick energy.
BDE.
Caren Beilin
Caren Beilin is the author of the novel Sea, Poison (New Directions, 2025). Her previous books include Revenge of the Scapegoat (Dorothy, 2022)—winner of the Vermont Book Award for Fiction—Blackfishing the IUD (Wolfman Books, 2019), Spain (Rescue Press, 2018), The University of Pennsylvania (Noemi Press, 2014), and the chapbook Americans, Guests, or Us (Diagram/New Michigan Press, 2012). Some of these titles have been published abroad with The Last Books (Amsterdam) and los tres editores (Madrid). She lives in Cleveland and is an Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University. She is the fiction editor of the Cleveland Review of Books.