“What did you bring, bitch?” Patsy said.
“I brang nothing.”
“Then what’s in that plastic bag?”
Woo-jin was surprised to find the takeout bag with the empty ex-burger box still inside, dangling from his finger. “It was a burger.”
“You ate my burger?”
“It was a bad one. I threw it up.”
“You are so so not fair. All you get to do is eat free food and drink free soda while I grow tissues all day.”
“I wash dishes, too, you know,” Woo-jin said.
“You look like you saw a phantom of the opera.”
Woo-jin confronted the kitchen-like area and found a glass that he filled with water. Then, he drank it. “I saw a dead body,” he said, and started feeling the ennui. That’s the misnomer a caseworker had used for it one time. A hellish onrushing of fanged empathy.
“I need you to lance my boils,” Patsy said. Woo-jin slunk back to the living room, meaning he turned around and walked two steps. Patsy sat sweating under three flickering fluorescent tubes, her head small compared to her neck. Bandages covered her left shoulder where they’d last extracted tissues.
“I’m sorry, Patsy. I feel it coming.”
“What did you say about a dead body?”
“I said I saw it in a field. It was a girl, a nicely dressed girl. Bugs crawling on her.” Woo-jin picked his mouth guard out of his shirt pocket and slipped it between his teeth. He tried not to look at Patsy’s thick and sweating face because that would make it worse, but he couldn’t help it and now he started thinking about how mean he had been to eat her burger. How selfish. This meant it was building, the flying, multitentacled, and fire-breathing ennui attack. He took off his shoes, making it as far as shoe #1, aka the left one.
On TV Stella Artaud landed on the moon roof of a limo, climbed inside, and received a drink from Dr. Uri Borden, as played by Neethan F. Jordan. Who. Woulda. Thought.
“My boils!” Patsy said. “I need my boils lanced before my caseworker comes.”
Woo-jin pushed back the ennui by turning his thoughts to that old standby, puppies in party hats, and fetched the boil-lancing kit from the bathroom. Actually there was no room separately called the bathroom, only Patsy’s room where the toilet was. For convenience. Patsy’s walls were decorated with some of the finest unicorn posters in all the land. There was one of a unicorn being ridden by Chewbacca that Woo-jin appreciated. Sometimes while taking a dump he’d wish he could ask Chewbacca for advice. Like: where can I get one of them fly utility belts? Patsy’s boil-lancing kit: where was it? Here it was sitting on top of a Harlequin paperback. It looked sorta like a gun. Except instead of shooting slow-motion bullets this gun poked and sucked boils.
Back in the living room Patsy had rotated on the sofa so the ass was up and the panties pulled down to show the butt with the boils on it. No one had ever measured the butt but Woo-jin guessed it to be nine miles wide.
“Hurry and get it over with,” Patsy said. “The workers will be here soon and I don’t want to get penalized again for hygiene, lack thereof.”
“You’re talking like a TV person,” Woo-jin said, “with the lack thereofs.” He pressed the gun to the first boil and squeezed the trigger; the hiss and wheeze of puncture and extraction.
“What was this dead person thing about?” Patsy said.
“This dead person thing was about me sitting there wishing I still had a burger.”
“You were such a liar about that burger.”
“I was not a liar.”
“You’ll have to go to the mart later for pork rinds and chipotle ranch. What more about the girl? The dead one.”
“She had face bugs. She looked like a nice person. I should call the cops, right?”
“I can’t understand you with the mouth guard.”
“But I don’t wanna eat my tongue.” Woo-jin dropped the boil gun and dug his fingers into his chest. Hyperventilating, he fell to his knees then clawed around on the carpet as if underneath it were some fancy-pants answer to his problems. Gravity appeared to be shifting to the left, wanting to suck everything in that direction. Woo-jin crawled against the leftward pull to his hammock. Shivering, sputtering, blinking, he pulled himself into the netting and attempted to unwad the thin gray blanket.
One time on TV there was a show about historic animation guys who made the cartoons way back in the day. They’d draw their pictures on sheets of clear plastic and layer them like a sandwich, making the action go with the background. The ennui was kind of like that, with the world of real shit serving as the background layer, going about its real shit business while on top of it, layer upon layer, were sheets of dread, planes of condensed suffering, a thickening wall between Woo-jin’s regular ole self and the black hell of emotions. It was almost worse that he didn’t pass out when he had an attack. Instead, he had to watch people looking at him, hopefully someone like Patsy who’d gotten used to these attacks, but sometimes, when the ennui hit in public, some stranger bending down low gawking at him clinging to a newspaper box, or commuters ignoring him as he writhed on the concourse of a bus station, their eyes saying, This freak’s on something nasty. Sometimes cops picked him up and were pricks about it until they could prick his finger and get a whole history from the sesame-seed-sized droplet of blood they fed to their vampiric Bionet monitors. Oh. This guy’s got an actual condition. He ain’t an embodiment. After which they’d maybe toss a blanket at him and make sure he was as far as possible from respectable citizens. And all the while he couldn’t make his body move through space like it was supposed to, only vibrate shivering regardless of the temperature.
Now, in the relative safety of his hammock, through his eye slits, he watched Patsy pull up her drawers and mumble curses about burgers. Predictably her suffering was the primary tributary to the ennui. He saw her for the prisoner of her own body that she was, sensed acutely the tragedy of her not understanding her own enslavement. Then deeper. The chorus of shrieks!!! He’d seen in a magazine that one painting by that one guy, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. The sound generated by that painting was what he was dealing with here. Like wind whistling in your ear, except multiplied, skull-rattling, sourceless. Here’s where the mouth guard came in handy. Woo-jin bit down so hard his jaw began to ache. A couple times he’d come out of the ennui unable to open his mouth for over an hour. Now he rode that clattering thrill ride of skeleton bones down, down, down, fingers grinding like machines in the gray blanket, gurning his face around the mouth guard, trying to bring into his mind the calming presence of Chewbacca on that unicorn with his fly utility belt, snot jetting out of his nose, a real winner of an ennui attack here, folks, and then, most horrible of all, he found himself wearing the dead girl’s face. He couldn’t see it, wouldn’t dare seek a mirror, but he trembled, convinced that the face was superimposed on his own, its mucousy underside squirming to find purchase on his own contorted visage.