EYE'S BATHTIME IS OVER


If he stays in too long, he’ll shrivel.
Slave doesn’t watch or listen to the time tick down; only knows when it’s gone.


Sigh.
My time has come, he indulges in thinking. He puts his Giant Chinese aside, part-finished, sauces and greases eager to commingle on their paper plate, and goes to fetch the Towel.

The towel so huge it takes up a linen closet of its own. There’s another, much-smaller linen closet down the hall, home to everything else.

It smells of lime and cherry, washed after each usage in its own soap and washer.
There Eye is, engorged with bathwater, slimy with methadone sweat, not yet fully lost to visions but beginning to show some activity, nerves pulsing and painting the white under the lid like the first stirrings in a crystal ball.

The water is no longer steaming; the jets are off. Eye has settled down low and absorbed more than half of what water there was.
Slave knocks on the steam-soft door of the bathroom, the gesture purely pro forma, no question that Eye is too far-gone to respond.

As there’s no objection, Slave enters, wiping door pulp off his knuckles.




IN ONE FELL SWOOP, SLAVE PULLS

the plug and whirls the Towel over Eye where he rests. The water gurgles down and away.


A few eyelashes, which Slave will have to tweeze out in the morning.

Wrapped in the Towel, Slave straps Eye into his harness of metal, wood, and leather, which hangs behind the door. He straps him in tightly so he can be dragged up the stairs with a minimum of injury to both dragger and dragged.


The bottom of the harness is a single wheel, like the front of a wheelbarrow, which Slave can by now maneuver up the stairs and into Eye’s sleep chamber without pausing for breath or backing up to straighten course.

THEY'RE IN EYE'S SLEEP CHAMBER NOW.

Leaving Eye in the harness, Slave slathers the incredibly lavish, kingly bed with a fresh coat of grease – semi-solid, aromatic, not unlike Vick’s – which Eye finds soothing to lie in, especially on Dose Nights.

This accomplished, Slave takes a break, wondering if he’s been too hard on himself to end up this tired or too easy on himself to take a break at all, and then hoists Eye out of the harness and into the bed.

Eye sinks into the cooling grease with a satisfying, slow breath out.
Slave hangs the harness on the back of Eye’s bedroom door, on a hook deliberately identical to the one in the bathroom downstairs, as if some attempt had been made to convince the harness that it truly lived in one spot and not two.

He fans Eye’s Snacking Chocolates out in a gold-leaf bowl by the bedside and tiptoes away, tossing the Towel down a long, dark chute.

SLAVE IS AGAIN FREE TO WANDER, 
THIS TIME FOR THE REST OF THE NIGHT.

He returns to what’s left of his Giant Chinese, a grimmer prospect now than when it was fresh, but satisfying still. He takes it down to the den, which Eye calls “Your Playroom.”

 The den features 
a TV set,
a VCR,
and a box of videos
There are no computers in Eye’s household. Even the phones predate the Millennium.

Munching fried crab, Slave rummages through the video boxes until he finds the Italian one he’s been trying to watch all the way through for a while now. 

He hides the fried crab under some docudramas he has no interest in.

There’s a legend afoot – Slave feels like someone has told him this, but he must have thought of it on his own since he has no contact with anyone except Eye, unless it was Rib who told him – that there’s legitimate nudity, “full frontal and some of the back,” to be had in this film, if one could only sit through enough exposition to get there.

He thinks he’d very much like to get there, but, a minute and a half in, the opening titles not even over and everything grainy and black and white and filled with motorcycles and cement and sunglasses, he’s on his feet again roaming with, a drumstick in each hand and his paper plate left behind, sinking into the carpet, bathed in TV light like an extra sauce.

HE'S NOT THINKING IN TERMS OF PUNISHING HIMSELF FOR THIS INATTENTION,

but he heads toward the Basement as if it were his last remaining move.

Slave approaches the Basement door, fumbling along the wall for a light switch, coating it in grease without turning it on.

He turns the handle, and then there is light: a glow from beneath, like the glow of insects or embers or cove phenomena.
Gnawing off the last of his chicken legs, he tosses the bones down the stairs in tribute or mockery of tribute to whatever Basement Gods might be waiting.

He hears those bones clatter once, hitting a few stairs down, then bounce off and away.  He doesn’t hear them come to rest. 


FULLY IN THE BASEMENT NOW,

Slave is full of confidence, trudging along in a familiar fantasyland.

The glow is still far in the distance, declining to lighten the foreground, but he doesn’t mind. He is master of this domain, or at least unchallenged in his claim to be.

He kicks around through Eye’s shit: boxes and boxes, armoires, vanities, chifferobes, statues and tapestries and rows of hollow suits of armor he’s always wanted to hide in but never wanted to have to.

After enough half-levels and antechambers he arrives in Eye’s Main Basement, a grand gallery of dust motes, rust shavings, rolled up maps and parchments, First Editions of occult treatises, organs and half-births in jars, shelves of skulls and teeth … a scene somehow banal in its extraordinary weirdness.

HE DOESN'T LINGER LONG:

rattling in the distance, lower yet, comes the bark of what he calls My Dog.

Foolishly, he’ll later realize, as he realizes later every time, he chases after it.

It barks. He shouts, 


He believes it is trapped, injured even, struggling, wailing to be set free.


he shouts, as if by freeing My Dog he might succeed, if only symbolically, in freeing himself as well.

The lower he goes, because of certain echo-chamber properties perhaps, the louder the barking becomes, though it also seems to come from farther away.

And so deeper and deeper down it takes him.


Slave can only go so far down before the Basement becomes the Sub-Basement and everything changes.

In his haste to catch up with those old panicked barks he misses the transition point, barreling through a rotted-out doorway and headlong down a ramp, into a deadfall, landing in cold, shallow water.

Bone-faced fish and frogs encircle him, groaning, croaking, unrolling long grey tongues to see what Tonight has brought.

No statuary or suits of armor here: it’s  rocks, rubble, webs.

The skeletons of rustic beasts rot in piles and blind bat-like birds roost in the (nearby) roofing.

Slave feels the edges of the scene pressing inward upon him, closing his chest, filling his throat with gas that can’t get out.

Dizzymaking gas.
He heaves out of the water, crawls ashore.

All thought of My Dog is forgotten, made childish.

A chattering behind the walls, partial words, ratspeak, cannibal consonants.

A grim vantage lower still, deeper than the water-level, into the Cave, where …

If only there were an elevator straight upstairs and into my bed, thinks Slave, desperate, begging.

Instead, like the next best thing, he passes out from fear where he crouches and lands all warm and happy in Tonight’s Dream.