Tomas managed to empty just about all of the contents of his stomach before we even got out of the cab. I didn't notice any of this because I had fallen asleep before we even got to Bedford. Luckily, none of it got in the cab, but the exterior of the door was caked with a pink mixture of stomach contents and compunction. The driver was understandably pissed about it. Aberdeen and I did our best to clean it off with hot water and Murphy's oil soap, both of which were fetched from the duo's loft. I did most of the cleaning. Aberdeen shelled out a pretty substantial tip. Tomas, meanwhile, remained fetal on the sidewalk amidst small, glittering shards of glass and derelict pieces of garbage, much to the amusement of a small crew of Dominican guys, who, Aberdeen later relayed, probably have something to do with the tire-slashing epidemics that occasionally erupt on the block. The biggest of the clan had a certain criminality about him, but the other members of the quintet seemed harmless.
Oxygen's atomic number is eight. How would you abbreviate that to fit in four spaces? ATNO? Thirty-one down is probably HEALS, so that's got to be right. That gives me an N-A-Blank-Blank-Blank for the tennis star. It's a Russian surname…don't they call the surnames something different…patronymic or something like that? Regardless, the other name is Russian, so it's probably NADIA. Yeah, let's go with that. What type of product has a rotating ball? Guinness and a few other English beers have those widgets in them. I doubt that's what the clue is supposed to refer to. Blank-O-L-Blank-Blank-Blank. I'll come back to it.
I have been to the terrestrial hell in which Tomas is trapped, that existence of cold sweats and porcelain worship. The torment encroaches upon the infinite. Every muscle in the body strains as it violently strives to reject the poison, but nothing is exhumed except a cocktail of enzymes that coat the tongue in a residue of bitter-citrus that no amount of brushing or mouthwash can remove. You enter into a fugue state — slightly responsive, borderline schizophrenic. (You apologize to your mother and can't figure out whey she looks like your girlfriend. Former girlfriend. She pats you on the head, arousing nerves that you didn't know existed. Topanga, from the television series Boy Meets World, takes over for her every now and again. Giant tacos engage you in profound conversations based on excerpts from Derek Parfitt's Reasons and Persons. They are erudite, but lack the condescension that one typically associates with the scholarly. It is mentioned in passing that Parfitt claims to not have what is know colloquially as a mind's eye — his memories are constructed out of information and data that he cannot visualize. Joey Ramone interrupts the conversation to let you know that Perry Buick-Pontiac is the best place to buy or lease a new Pontiac G6; the voice of the Micro Machines Guy (though he looks like Rachel Ray in drag) adds “On East Virginia Beach Boulevard, just two blocks west of Newton Road” so quickly that you only understand what has been said a few moments later. Rufio and a few of the Lost Boys are reenacting Sade's wedding scene of Narcisse and Hébé (otherwise known as the Shit-Storm) with the cast of Friends on stage left. Stage right is occupied by the janitor from Scrubs, who is busy mopping up some of the melted props used to recreate The Persistence of Memory. He has a minatory look in his eyes, and he keeps calling everyone with whom he speaks “Buttercup.”) You accept everything that takes place in this delirium, but deny whatever is in front of your face. Conspiracy. Everyone is against you.
There's that G that begins twenty-nine across. “Proceeding.” The G could be for Go or GOES or GOING. I've got an AH. How about GOINGAHEAD? It fits. Okay. HEALS and ATNO are definitely right.
The state of the bathroom surprises me. Its cleanliness would be expected if it was not the case that Lindsay shared the other bathroom with Barazov — then again, after living with Connie for just under a month last summer, I do know that women are not immune to certain proclivities that are as disgusting as those of men (though men at least know how to use a fucking plunger!). I can imagine that Aberdeen's frustration with Ichycoo probably stems from his lack of bathroom etiquette, as it is a well-known fact that hippies always let yellow mellow. Furthermore, I have learned that Ichycoo is a wookie (a term that essentially describes a straight bear (if you don't know this term, please consult the next available gay man) with a love of boomers (psychedelic mushrooms), pharmies (pharmaceuticals), and herb (marijuana); the wookie is also known to have a taste for the more southern-inspired improvisation that the jam band scene has to offer (Allmans, Widespread, Mule, etc.), to wear their hair long, often in dreadlocks, and to inhabit parking lots adjacent to venues in the mountainous regions of the U.S.; migration patterns depend upon tour dates, but they are known to travel in cars and vans comprised of people they have only known for a few hours, even if they are familiar with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people within the scene). The bathroom itself is typical in the context of renovated Brooklyn apartments. The walls are of a calico tile — perhaps some kind of marble — that is predominately coral in color. The floors are an off-white, the type of color one is bound to encounter when reading a book printed in the seventies or early-eighties. It is still too close a relative to white to be like one of those paperbacks from the fifties or sixties, the type that has the binding with that horribly brittle glue — so the cover goes missing within a day, the spine snaps shortly thereafter, and by the time you're done reading you end up with seven small books that are all missing pages. There is no counter space. One has the option of storing things either on the toilet, beneath the sink, or in the medicine cabinet behind the mirror. The bathtub is new and small. Tomas barely fits in it.
That has to be OBOE. There's always an OBOE. That has to be TIDE next to it. Don't write it in, though. Wait on it. What do flight passengers work on? There's definitely an S at the end. Forty-two down is MALAWI, right? Yeah, because flight passengers work on LAPTOPS. So it is TIDE. Fifty-six down is PBS. That makes fifty-six across…PLAUSIBLE. Sixty-one is SOITSEEMS. That makes this PLUM, this SETS, and this APSES. This is BAWLEDOUT. Wow, I just got that entire corner in, like, thirty seconds.
A part of me never wants to drink again. Not seriously anyhow. Tomas has proven that Hegelian dialectics can rear its pompous head anywhere. The action of drinking is social, but also inherently anti-sociaclass="underline" when taken to its logical conclusion, alcohol is a poison that can kill you — and there's nothing more anti-social than death, especially suicide. There's certainly more to this, but it's rather recondite (perhaps the only English word, with the notable exception of sesquipedalian, that both is and means the same thing — i.e. obscure). I pop off the cap of a beer with a lighter, light one of the cigarettes that Aberdeen left me, and examine Tomas' chest for signs of life. Bob Dylan sings of his “girl from the north country” courtesy of a shuffling iPod. I try to think of the girl for whom he sings, but no photo is available. Tomas lets out a troubled groan.
Who was the sportsman of the year in 1998? Co-winner. Four letters. Tiger had a good year. Probably. He's had good years for the past decade. I remember he was a really big deal right around the time Biggie died. That was '96. I think. Football. Who won the Super Bowl that year? Was it Tampa? No, it was the Broncos. They won those two years in a row. SHARP doesn't fit. Or is it Sharpe? Not that matters. DAVIS doesn't fit. Who was the quarterback on that team? Elway. Of course. How could I forget about John Elway? What about baseball? That was during the home run craze. It obviously isn't Bonds because he didn't hit seventy-three until later — maybe '01. Yeah, I remember that. It was the only news that didn't concern 9-11, bin Laden, Afghanistan. Jesus, was that really almost six years ago? That doesn't even seem real anymore. Everything that day was so fucking unreal. I still remember the principal's announcement. Well, most of it.