10.22

I had a lot of blood in my stool this morning. But I’ve had blood in my shit for years now. I’ve been to the doctor’s many times about it. I would worry about it to Z. I tried to make her look at the blood. She refused politely enough. After my second “scoping,” the doctor told me I was fine. Though she couldn’t find it, she was 99 percent sure that I had anal fissures. She said I had a “very tight rectum,” that she could feel how tight it was when she put the scope in. It must have been so tight that it was causing my stools to cut my rectum. I should not “hold on to my stools.”

I got in the car and started driving. Normally I would worry about my anus all day. I’m not worried about it now. The phone I shat out is still in the Ziploc bag in the passenger’s seat. Maybe that’s why I’m hallucinating a telephone, because I’m obsessed with my bloody stools, or maybe because of that accidental sex with Z. That makes sense. I’m scared that it is going to stop making sense. What happens if I start doing things that hurt people?

I’m picking up a wireless signal from the Big Sky Motel. I’m in a restaurant attached to a gas station called Durango’s– or at least that’s what it says on the coffee cup. I’m in Superior, Montana. It’s alpine here. There are wispy white clouds all in among the pine trees. It smells like pine trees and gasoline. I stopped so I could use the bathroom and check to see in my ass was still bleeding. It’s not. I’m a narcissist

I was sick right when I got back to the US and jet lagged and slept more or less for two days. When I got up I turned on the television. CNN was showing live footage of a weather balloon. They said that a child was somehow trapped in the balloon. It was flying over a field. It was stupid. So what if that boy is in there. So what if he’s dead. I though “we don’t care about that boy.” This is on TV because we care too much about ourselves. We think our lives are too valuable.

I climbed up a big butte on the outskirts of Tororo. There is a cell phone tower on the top. The butte is huge. It is a huge presence in the town. Everything there is called The Rock (the Rock Cement, the Rock High School, etc), named after the butte. The cell phone tower on top is guarded, I found, by a shirtless man with a Kalashnikov named Patrick. He was happy to chat. He said he had 12 children. He asked if I was married. I said yes, though I wasn’t, because everyone there called Z my wife because in Tororo if you live together you are married. I told him I had no kids, and I said 12 kids such a big family, unheard of in the US. I was trying to flatter him. He looked proud. I went on lavishly saying 2 kids was a lot of kids for the US. Then he asked me, “but what do you do when they die?” with only two kids you will be childless soon, that was the implication. At least two kids are bound to die in each family. What do you do?

I am a narcissist. I am unduly worried about my anus. I am unduly worried about my mental status. I think about all the women in the villages who dropped to their knees and held out their hands to me and refused to look at me and all their orphan children and all the dying women, who told me they were dying, and then begged to feed me even though the brother’s and sister’s orphans were lying in the shade of their huts with distended bellies. I think about the woman I saw on the side of the road as I was walking home from Z’s clinic one afternoon. I only saw her out of the corner of my eye. First her feet, then her naked legs, then her fuzzy black pubic hair. Her legs spread open. I didn’t look. People walked past and didn’t look either. Was she dead? Naked with her legs spread? Did I hallucinate her?