Drop City

she wasn't in the main house where half a dozen people shushed him because they were watching some silent movie Norm had got out of the library for the sheer appreciation and _uplift__ of it. Ronnie stood there a minute in the darkened room, watching the light play over a frozen landscape until an Eskimo appeared, two slits for eyes, the wind tearing at the ruff of his parka, and began building an igloo out of blocks he cut from the snow. He had a knife the size of a machete, and he wasted no time, because you could see the way the wind was blowing and his breath froze into the wisps of his beard, each block perfect, one atop the other, and when he fitted the final block into a gap in the roof of the thing, everybody burst into applause. “Fuckin' Nanook,” Norm said, and there he was stretched out on the floor with a comforter drawn up to his chin, “you want to talk about living off the land, man . . .”
    In the morning--or no, it was the afternoon, definitely the afternoon--Ronnie woke with a lurch that set the whole room rocking like a boat, and the dream, whatever it was, was gone before he could resuscitate it. Just as well, because he could feel the veins inflating in his neck with the frantic scramble of his heart--he'd been trying to escape something or somebody, dark twisting corridors and howling faces--and now, suddenly, he was awake in the apparent world, a fine sheen of sweat greasing his body and leaching into the sleeping bag that each day stank ever more powerfully of mold and ammonia and creeping decay. Beside him, breathing through her open mouth with a faint rattling snore, was Lydia, her arms stretched out as if she'd been crucified. The dark nipples were like knitted caps pulled over the white crowns of her breasts, and her breasts were like people, two slouching fat white people in caps having a conversation across the four-lane highway of her rib cage. A fine line of glistening dead black hair measured the distance from her navel to her bush. There was hair under her arms, hair on her legs, a faint stripe of it painted over her upper lip. She was sweating. Her eyelids trembled. He lay there contemplating her a minute, letting his heart climb back down from the ledge he'd left it on, feeling as if he'd been assembled from odd scraps during the night. His head throbbed. His stomach made a fist and relaxed it. He needed to find some toilet paper, _fast.__
    Pan rose from the sleeping bag that was stretched over a double mattress on the floor in the far corner of the back room of the main house. He rose slowly, warily, his bones as heavy as spars, and began silently shuffling through his backpack and the cardboard box that between them held everything he owned. He didn't want to wake Lydia. He definitely did not want to wake Lydia. Because Lydia would want one thing, and that thing, in his present condition, he was unwilling to give her. In fact, as he studied her out of the corner of his eye while rummaging for any last overlooked and forgotten quarter or eighth or even sixteenth of a roll of toilet paper his brothers and sisters might not already have got to, she struck him as being fat, too fat, not at all his type. His type was Merry. His type was Star--and where was she?
    He hadn't been able to find her the night before, though he'd looked everyplace he could think of except the back house, where the spades and Sky Dog were nursing their grudges and washing down their Velveeta cheese sandwiches with sour red wine and snuffing the last fading vestiges of grilled venison on the thin night air, but she wouldn't be there, he knew that and the spades knew that and everybody in Drop City knew it too. He'd run into Merry--she and Jiminy were reading poems out loud to each other in Norm's bedroom upstairs--but Merry said she didn't feel in much of a festive mood because the whole _idea__ of a barbecue went against everything she believed in, and then she'd called him a carnivore, or maybe it was a cannibal, but she said it with a smile, as in all is forgiven but don't bother me now I'm reading poetry. Out loud. To Jiminy. So Ronnie found some other people and continued to abuse various controlled and illicit substances until the whole day went into extra innings and he wound up in the shadowy deeps of this room with a stick of incense and a single phallic candle burning and Lydia naked and hairy and wet and taking hold of his prick as if she owned it.
    And now he needed toilet paper.