By Ryan Carter

We were riding beside one another, cutting off traffic. He said, “I want to cut off a piece of your cheek and keep it in my pocket. I can carry it with me.”

He said, “I want to cut off one of your lips and keep it with me.”

I said, “Would you pull out my eyelashes?” He said, “What is the meaning of eyelash?”

I said, “After you pulled out all my eyelashes, you could blow dust in my face? You could tie me up in a chair, and throw dust through a fan, into my face?”

He said, “Yes.”

I said, “Would you enjoy pulling out my fingernails with pliers?”

He said, “Yes, of course.”

I said, “Would you like to cut me all over with tiny pieces of glass?”

He said, “Yes of course. You know that from Qing Dynasty?”

I said, “I’ve seen pictures. They cut off a woman’s tits. Would you want to cut off my nipples and leave the raw part to ooze?”

“Ooze?” But he went on. “I really want to. I would put vinegar on it.”

“Would you like to clip off my D with scissors?” When we were nude together, we’d settled on this hammer of a letter to tenderize the meat.

He said, “I want it more than anything. Cut off your D. I could keep it with me.”

A bridgemouth opened to our right, crossing Suzhou Creek. Before we reached the intersection he hung back and I lost him from my eye. A piece of construction equipment, a bucket, a shovel, perched on a barge and poked around in the sludgy water.

I mean, we really couldn’t get enough. As he pulled up beside me again I asked, “Would you like to throw me in the river?”

“Yes, but that not exciting enough,” he said.

“Would you like to hold me under the river until I stopped moving?”

“What river? I want to do it in the big river. It’s more dirtier.”

Before we had left the museum from which we were cycling home, we had climbed to the sixth floor with its roof terrace. From which we spied the Peace Hotel’s pimply backside and the Waldorf’s ass and the Customs House’s, too. This museum is drawing gashes across its neighborhood. I had asked him there, “Do you want to throw me off the roof? I’d like to throw you off.” He was smaller than me and I reasoned that he would float down.

“To throw you off is more fun. You make a bigger mess.”

Before the museum we had sat a high tea at the Peninsula. His treat: our anniversary, one year. I even let him take pictures of me while I scowled at the others taking pictures and making their pigs-feet picture faces. When they set the dainties on our table I had asked him, “Would you like to poison my tea and make cakes of my eyes?” To illustrate, I pointed at the topmost cake: eyeball-width, crowned with a marzipan peach.

He had said, “Of course,” nonchalantly, “Why not?”

Now I asked, “Do you want to stab me repeatedly?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to cut off my head and feed it to a bunch of dogs?”

“Yes, that is funny to see. Dog head foot ball.”

“Do you want to lock me with no food in a building full of hungry rats?”

“Why I want to do it?”

“So I would either starve, or the rats would eat me.”

“This is better. I will put the juice of duck on your body. It feels good. Are you feeling good, thinking about I am putting juice of duck all over your body, with my hands?” I nodded. “Then I will put you in the house with rats.”

“Would you watch?”

“Do you think I have time to look you when I study university all day? Anyhow I don’t care. We see dead person with bones every day, in university. But I will come get your bones two years later and sell them to my university. Foreigners with big bones, will get a lot of money from university, which wants to teach with you, OK?”

He added, looking purposefully into the sun, “I will put you, tie you, and put you in those places back there, we saw from the museum top. There have rats.”

We slipped on a few cycles more and he added, “Or I can rent apartment. All this,” he nodded at stack after stack of pink and gray apartments, dated to an age of excitement, “they have the girl massage place, the factory, the store for robbering (robbering?” he winced a bit) “and so why not the house for you eating by rats? Anyway I thought that foreigner loving me will make me rich, but you don’t make me rich, even we love, except I sell your bones to university. Foreigners have long legs so their bones very expensive. Then I buy my apartment and give people to live there, then buy more apartment, and I love other foreigner who rich, and mother tell everyone about me, and foreigner marry me in Europe or America, and then,” he said, smiling widely at me.

“You know you don’t want to love anyone but me.”

“Baby,” he said. “I love you, so much. I don’t want to be with anyone else. I see your ear and I want to bite it.” We were gazing at one another. If we were alone in an apartment, we’d be taking off each other’s clothes.

Around a blind wall I winked at him and at the intersection behind it, the squarest of trucks barreled through its right turn. Of course I was killed.

I saw my bicycle mangled. One wheel spun and the other was folded into a chrysanthemum, the flower they call the little asshole, or the other way around. He had disappeared again; it was as if he had never ridden beside me. I knew also how I had been mangled and could see those parts of me hanging outside the skin that was supposed to keep them in: a loop of gut, ripped on some part of the transport. I was puzzling on how I could just, look upon myself like this, and so I knew I had awoken.

He stood with his knees against the bed, flushed and moist from the shower, cupping something precious in one hand. As the world wheeled back upright- last night’s fucking and drinking had knocked it from its axis- I lolled in the juices beneath my back and calves.

I smiled and my face became a shell of pain. I rolled and the sheets stuck to me. It was blood, and rolling I retched, and I kept it down, and my hand found my cheek missing. He had cut off my lower lip, too. I saw dull scissors first glinting in his hand, and then before he lay my meat across my severed lips, I saw the tweezers. Now I know the meaning of an eyelash.

Which comes next. It is strange to remember a dream so well.

June 12-13, 2010

I’d like to say it was a test of their ability to deal with genderbending, premeditated, but really no such plan came to my head. I was looking at Renata’s nails lacquered green and needed something to break up the monotony of a seven-day week, mostly for them, because into this week we also had to cram nearly everything. Angel Liu had drifted to the front row and I asked her, for me, casually, “what color nail polish would you have?”  She looked down hard for a minute and then she defiantly as she always does- for here is a woman with a backbone through which you cannot pass your hand, and maybe the only one in her class-” dark pink”, she says. Tomorrow I’ll paint them for you, she says.

Tomorrow comes and we’re in the same room, which always smells like something wrong, and always something different: onions, stinky tofu, toilet cake, rotten fish, rotten crabs, solvents, soot or old beer. Before the bell has rung Angel Liu says I’m going to do this now and I don’t struggle, just hold my right hand out, and she lays on stripes of the paint. I only give her one hand; today, the room smells like nail polish, but we can claim to have made that stink ourselves. It doesn’t stop being very hot, and the bell rings and I, composing my serious face, bark out an order for them to produce their texts. Ben and Tensho lounge on each other in the back of the classroom; Claudia is staring out into the air outside the window. I ask her to laud the bird that has just flown by, but she hasn’t seen it.

We are going to break up into groups and talk about literary elements in Song of Myself. Here I went and had Lundberg guest lecture on masturbation and exuberance, and Whitman’s writing out to touch the reader. Dr. Lundberg asked three of the male students- whom, I don’t know, I didn’t ask- to round the room sniffing the girls, to seduce and be seduced by their perfumes. Only one was wearing. Now, two weeks in, Kaoru still can’t put the words in the sentences together and draw conclusions from it. I approach her group and Yuun’s, and the painted hand falls on the table.

Yuun toots and shrinks back. I yank it from the table and use the left to conduct- “and so with this rhetorical question, since the reader cannot answer the poet back, what’s she or he got to do instead?” Silence. I am right-handed and raise the painted hand to underline the line in question. “Can you use the other hand, please?” But Yuun usually says nothing at all, and gets a hundred on her tests.

“Oh, right.” I am pretending there is nothing abnormal here. I duck the hand under the desk and grow and transfigure, myself and my purpose. I raise the hand to Yuun’s face and she shrinks back again and I, satisfied, say “try harder,” and walk away, over where Angel Liu and Kelly yak with a fever.

“Do we call you he or she? You’re like Lady Gaga over here.”

“If we have to make comparisons between this little thing you’ve done to me here and some master of flash, I’d rather the comparison to David Bowie. Do you know him?”

Both chime in- “nope.” I plug in the iPod and throw Ashes to Ashes up on the speakers. I hold my hand up to my face as a rooster reunited with its crest and turn one way- “now Lady Gaga” then the other- “now Ryan.” I move to float around the room waving the hand tambourine-wise in other faces.

Casper behind his headphones sees it for the first time, hanging out over there with Kelly and Angel and Jerry, the cool cucumbers. Casper wants to go to UNLV, study hotel management and cruise his way into the Bellagio on the finesse of a regular Moe Green. He’s wearing a hat with the blazon, “Y SHOULD WE ENVY,” and lines drawn through the appropriate letters to render him a debtor to the prestige of the yen or yuan, the dollar, the won and the euro. “Mr. Carter, why you do that? It’s so gay!”

If I could say, “well, yes, sure,” it’d be one thing, but that’s beyond my professional opinion. It’s a pang of instinct; instead of a measured reply it brings beads of sweat to my brow and I begin to scratch the polish off my nails. I have the same conversation with Jack as I had with Yuun: use the other hand, please. Angel Liu, as she’s leaving, says, “Why scratch it off? You should leave it. It’s cute.” I mumble something about it being more punk rock.

Later, in the office I am typing and admiring the holes in my fingernails when the director bobs in and says, “Do you have time now?”