The End of My Death

I watch Oprah whenever I get the chance. She has a calming effect on me. I find her the very embodiment of benevolence. Her head and bosom appear to become larger as the rest of her body melts away to something pretty close to slimness. It helps that her topics have become increasingly banal — last week she did a show on the dangers of household dust, the stage littered with guests who had experienced various levels of mild allergic reactions. But whatever the topic, I remain mesmerized. Today my father was her guest and they talked about his book, which I read when it was still in galleys and found to be accurate, and even moving, though it blushed too easily at matters of sex and glossed over his pretty ugly first marriage.

He tries so hard, my father, to claim me for the land of the living, but it is too late, I am already dead, something other than human. He brings out those family photos trying to demonstrate some constituent normalcy, to show that I, too, am only human and came from humans, but it backfires in a way that confuses him and pushes him stunned to the periphery of the story. It’s so clear to everyone that he has little to do with the Dahmer myth. I think he was even a bit dismayed that so few gave any credence to the allegations that he had abused me.

Really I'm just another pointless enigma, nothing to solve. Still everything I've touched has become apocryphal — all those retold childhood incidents and stupid generic photos. Suddenly this ordinary chronology of scraped knees contains within it the genesis of a monster. But even that monster is dead now that I've reached the end of my death. When I worked in the chocolate factory I didn't need to eat any meals — the chocolate dust collected at the back of my throat and when it formed a little ball I washed it down with vodka hidden in an Evian bottle. Now I eat three square meals and all that starchy nutrition has made me a little bit fat, so I don't feel at all like the same person. Everyone wants to know what do I think about when I masturbate, but I'm on medication now, so I don't really do it very often and when I do I find I can't really think of anything. And everyone wants to know if I still dream of picking guys up and dismembering their drugged bodies. But really its hard to think about social interaction when your body image is so low — I'd have to get back into shape first.