Dr Jew

eyeballs so big and round. Had he shut the door behind him? He had. When finished he flushed the fog water away and looked at the sink and thought the thought he always thought when finished: Some men wash their hands after using the restroom. Some men wash their hands before using the restroom. You can tell a lot about a man based on when he washes his hands. Some men don't wash their hands. Some men have no hands. Some men fall into the toilet and drown, which probably can't qualify as hand washing. Some men urinate on their hands and ruin the day for all they meet.
    In the hall again he was turned around. He wanted to relocate Robot Raccoon but the trail bled in two directions and both looked equally endless. He went down one and for your money and knowledge and what little I give you it may as well have been the other. More doors, corridors, floors. Jew declared within that if he'd been in charge of designing such a place he would never leave it so hard on a lone guest as to let it go without a map and bit of You Are Here .
    And here is where he was when he saw her just up and around the end of the bend, she of a few pages back with the black and white dress and the figure so amply fair and fully buttocksed, she , the maid, Lygia.
    Wait, he said, but only in his head did he speak so shy and young he was and she did not hear him.
    He ran without trying to run as she rounded a corner with a stack of neatly folded towels in her hands. He came around and saw her kick open a swinging door to a kitchen and this time he said it in words, "Wait!"
    He went through the door behind her and there she was staring him in the face.
    "Oui, monsieur?"
    "Oh, hello," he said. She seemed to have grown prettier in the past few minutes. "Hello… Lygia, isn't it?" He knew it was.
    "Oui, mais je ne parle pas anglais."
    "What?" he said.
    "I don 't speak English."
    "Don 't you?"
    "Well, perhaps I do. Robot Raccoon asks me to speak only French though."
    "I won 't tell if you won't."
    He wanted to kiss her. But she was at least twice his age. Which meant that if they married she would be 40 when he was only 20, and 80 when he was 40. Wait, that's not correct. That's impossible aging, bad math.
    "Did you need something, dear?" she said.
    And the dear might have pleased him under other circumstances but in this case it stung and defined a wall between them that he could not surmount with his limited height, youth.
    "I was looking for Robot Raccoon. I got lost."
    "Oh, is that all? I believe he's still in the front living room. Just that way down the hall, turn left at the staircase, and maybe a hundred feet more."
    "Right," he said. "Just… the left… the staircase, the feet, some more."
    He wasn 't even talking. He was watching her breasts as she breathed. It was like the earth expanding with day and night, the heat. Knew this moment would come.
    "Are you staring at me?" she said.
    She knows, he thought. She knows as all women know. Inside those breasts are two brains, two extra hearts, to throb and think with, and all of it congealed to reveal without thought what every inch of flesh on every female knows: that he and every man alive will kill and more to entwine within the womb of feminine cocoonery, to wear her and expand upon her in all directions. That is all.
    "Yes," he said.
    "You're funny," she said.
    And if all this is fantasy then why does it insist on making me question it and why does it still make my palms wet and my throat dry? Why can I see through her clothes to her breasts but it stops there? If my imagination can stop there at the level of skin and not carry deeper to blood and bone and if this all is a streaked memory I am living within then give me more and deeper for God's sake, God, let my imagination have its fill.
    Lygia set the towels u pon the counter and came to him, bending over to look into his face just inches away. She had a fruit scent like strawberries perhaps that was so gentle it was barely heard but crept up after a few seconds locking forever into his mind whether co-existent or self-perpetuated. Her fingers on the top of his head running through his hair and she taught him something –words that changed his eight-year-old life forever – she taught him something that left a horrible and necessary scar that said… it said…
    "You are a sweet boy. But you are still a boy. When you are a man you will not ask if you are a man or still a boy. You will not ask ."
    And she was gone. And he was falling.