Diseases for kisses

CON STRUCT

Claire and I never fell in love, even though we both tried hard. It
happens. Anyhow, this is probably as good a point as any to tell some­
thing about myself. How shall I begin? Well, my name is Andrew Palmer,
I'm almost thirty, I study languages (Japanese is my specialty), I come
from a big family (more on that later), and I was born with an ectomorphic
body, all skin and bones. However, after being inspired by a passage
from the diaries of the Pop artist, Mr. Andy Warhol—a passage where
he expresses his sorrow after learning in his mid-

dle fifties that if he had exercised, he could have

had a body (imagine not having a body!)—I was

galvanized into action. I began a dreary exercise

regimen that turned my birdcage of a thorax into

a pigeon breast. Hence, I now have a body—that's

one problem out of the way. But then, as men-

tioned, I've never been in love, and that's a problem. I just seem to end up as friends with everyone, and I tell you, I really hate it. I want to fall in love. Or at least I think I do. I'm not sure. It looks so... messy. A11 right, all right, I do at least recognize the fact that I don't want to go through life alone, and to illustrate this, I'll tell you a secret story, a story I won't even tell Dag and Claire today out here on our desert picnic. It goes like this:

Once upon a time there was a young man named Edward who lived

BAMBIFICATION: The

mental conversion of flesh and blood living creatures into cartoon characters possessing bourgeois Judeo-Christian attitudes and morals.

(HYPERKARMA): A deeply rooted belief that punishment will somehow always be far greater than the crime: ozone holes for littering.

by himself with a great amount of dignity. He had so much dignity that when he made his solitary evening meal every night at six thirty, he always made sure he garnished it with a jaunty little sprig of parsley. That's how he thought the parsley looked: jaunty. Jaunty and dignified. He also made sure that he promptly washed and dried his dishes after completing his solitary evening meal. Only lonely people didn't take pride in their dinners and in their washing up, and Edward held it as a point of honor that while he had no need for people in his life, he was not going to be lonely. Life might not be much fun, mind you, but it seemed to have fewer people in it to irritate him.

Then one day Edward stopped drying the dishes and had a beer instead. Just for kicks. Just to relax. Then soon, the parsley disappeared from his dinners and another beer appeared. He made small excuses for it. I forget what they were.

Before long, dinner became the lonely klonk of a frozen dinner on the microwave floor saluted by the tinkle of scotch and ice in a highball glass. Poor Edward was getting fed up with cooking and eating by himself, and before long, Edward's dinner became whatever he could microwave from the local Circle Knuke 'n' serve boutique—a beef-and-bean bur-rito, say, washed down with Polish cherry brandy, the taste for which he acquired during a long, sleepy earnest summer job spent behind the glum, patronless counter of the local Enver Hoxha Communist bookstore. But even then, Edward found cooking and eating too much of a hassle, and dinner ended up becoming a glass of milk mixed in with whatever was in the discount bins at Liquor Barn. He began to forget what it felt like to pass firm stools and fantasized that he had diamonds in his eyes.

Again: poor Edward—his life seemed to be losing its controlability. One night, for instance, Edward was at a party in Canada but woke up the next morning in the United States, a two hour drive away, and he couldn't even remember driving home or crossing the border.

Now, here's what Edward thought: he thought that he was a very smart guy in some ways. He had been to school, and he knew a great number of words. He could tell you that a veronica was a filmy piece of gossamer used to wrap the face of Jesus, or that a cade was a lamb abandoned by its mother and raised by human beings. Words, words, words.

Edward imagined that he was using these words to create his own

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