Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Farina Page A

feel it inside of me.”
    “Here,” handing her the enema bag. “Emergency douche for your peace of mind.”
    “You pig.”
    She snatched it away from him and ran to the bathroom. Gnossos sitting there with his pants collapsed around his shoes, shirt and tie still on, erection wilting slowly. He drained the glass of Scotch and poured another. Through the wall, the sound of anguished moans and squirting water. Talk to her.
    “Do you need any help?”
    “Oh, go away.”
    Gratitude. So to speak.
    He scuttled over to the record machine and flipped through her collection, finding little of value, settling finally on a Brubeck. Footsteps coming. “Did it work?”
    “Oh, I suppose so. I feel sick.”
    “Original sin.”
    “You’re some help, you are. And why are you sitting there with your pants down? Oh, couldn’t you go away? For a little while, please?”
    Standing up, pants all wet. From her? No, the Cutty Sark. Jesus, forgot about dinner. Poor Fitzgore. “Can I move in tonight?”
    “No! Oh, I feel awful. Poor Simon.”
    Got to piss. Better wait until I get someplace else. “Okay, baby, dig you later.”
    “Take this thing with you,” holding out the damp, deflated bag.
    He slung it over his shoulder, shrugged, looked at her sadly for a brief moment as she stood shivering by the fire, her arms crossed in front of her belly, then turned and wandered out the door and up the street.
    He hesitated once as a peculiar figure danced out of the shadows, limp wrists dangling, eyes leering in the moonless, overcast night, then vanished. He blinked at where it had been. Bald skull? He hunched his shoulders against the cold and continued walking through the snow. What the hell.
    Semper virgini.
    Without commission the membrane was still intact. Soon, he told himself again, soon: there must come love.
    A black and swollen depression closed down around him and spilled heavily through the blood and marrow of his night.

3
    A tarantula.
    Eyeless and hairy, squatting thickly in his mouth, a brown prickly leg twitching between closed lips.
    How did it get there? He turned his head to one side and tried spitting, but it squirmed and remained. What if it bites? Smoldering greasesticks impaled in my neck.
    He rolled over with extreme caution, feeling for the pillow, but there was only the dusty rug on the floor. He had been breathing lint throughout the night and the tarantula was not a tarantula but his tongue.
    “Water?” came the feeble try.
    A brief stirring in the adjoining room, sounds of someone dressing, then silence. The effort expended uttering the weak request had driven a sliver of caustic, nauseating pain from temple to temple and he lay as still as a closed book until it went away. Move very slowly.
    His chin was on the rug and he opened one eye to find stray hairs, nail parings, spent staples, little dustballs, cat fur, dried flower petals, onion peel, and a dehydrated wasp. He closed the eye. Attacked in the spine by some species of burrowing, parasitic worm. Easy now.
    “Heff?” Again the sickly throb.
    The door to the connecting room opened and Heffalump walked over barefoot, in jeans, a towel around his neck. He carried a glass of fizzing Bromo Seltzer in one hand and two fingers of umber horror in the other.
    “Drink it,” came the unsympathetic order.
    “Gggggg,” from Gnossos, gulping down the chilly effervescence.
    “Never mix shit and booze,” came the reprimand.
    “Oh crap, a mother.”
    “Here,” handing him the whiskey, which went swirling spasmodically through his blood, jarring the terrified will of nerves and blood cells. Then a warm calm. “Better?”
    “A little. You wouldn’t believe my tongue.”
    “You look very near death.”
    Remembering. “He passed me last night. On Academae Avenue.”
    “Oh yeah?”
    “Kind of a bald cat, looked like a teenager, though.”
    “You should have asked him in for a nightcap, save him the trouble of looking you up in a year or two, when you