Richard woke from a flying dream. It wasn’t the flying that bothered him. It was the landscapes whizzing by beneath his wings. Instead of green forests and golden wheat fields, he zoomed over alien mountains that glistened pink and purple. With all the zooming, Richard gasped and it woke Ellie beside him.
Dreaming again? she asked.
Richard said yeah, and swinging his legs off the edge of the bed, he rose to a seated position. He shifted so his underwear didn’t slide so high up his crack.
Wanna talk about it? she asked.
Naw, nothing important. Just images from Coulson’s exhibit.
The alien landscapes?
Yeah.
But that’s okay, isn’t it? I mean, they must be … I mean, to stick themselves inside your head like that …
Richard said: I guess. But he wasn’t so sure. Something about Coulson’s paintings bothered him. They were supposed to evoke alien worlds. But there was something familiar about his pink mountain ridges.
It used to be that when Richard and Ellie woke in the middle of the night, they made love, then spooned naked until first light. But lately, Richard only got up to pee and Ellie blew her nose. Then they settled again onto their separate sides of the bed and closed their eyes.
This time, before they fell asleep, Ellie asked if Richard had made his doctor’s appointment.
Richard said yes and promised himself he would do it in the morning.
After all, you have a birthday coming up. A big one. Then Ellie smacked her lips and gave a couple snorts, signalling that she had gone back to sleep.
Richard lay awake, staring into the darkness. He was back at the gallery. His mind was burbling with conversations from earlier in the evening. Mostly, the people ignored his work and crowded around Coulson’s paintings. They thought Richard was a has-been. Coulson, on the other hand, was an up-and-comer. He was at least fifteen years younger than Richard and it showed in the vitality of his technique and in the vibrancy of his palette. People didn’t say so out loud, but Richard saw it in the way they looked at him: Richard, you’re tired and uninspired; maybe it’s time to try something new.
Richard hadn’t realized that the preparation for his doctor’s appointment would be so onerous. He didn’t like taking laxatives, especially when Ellie was at home with him. She sat up in bed with a novel while he emptied his bowels in the en suite. The next morning, he went to the doctor’s office, feeling light-headed and with a rumble in his belly. When he arrived, a nurse handed him a paper-thin gown and led him to a change room. The doctor reminded him of a pig farmer, the way he carried his big gut out in front of him and massaged it with his thick sausage fingers. He made Richard lie face-down on a black, vinyl-covered table. The gown fell away to either side and exposed his ass to the ceiling. While the doctor scrubbed his hands, his assistant—a girl named Teena—spread a wad of petroleum jelly in circles around his anus. She used her dainty rubber-clad fingers to shove as much of it inside as she could squidge.
You see the game last night? the doctor asked.
Christ no.
You got something against hockey?
No. No, of course not. It’s just—the laxative—you—I—I was on the toilet all evening. Kind of hard to watch when there’s no TV in the bathroom.
Ah. Too bad for you. But here—the doctor slapped the top of a TV screen positioned near Richard’s head—here you can watch the whole show.
Really? Richard groaned.
There’s a camera sends an image.
You don’t post it on YouTube, do you?
The doctor laughed as he unfurled a length of black rubber hose. Hang on tight, he said, and he shoved the end of the hose up Richard’s ass.
Richard could feel it low in his gut, fluttering like an epileptic snake. He could feel it worm through his large intestine and on into his small intestine.
Oh, I almost forgot. And the doctor pushed the power button on the monitor.
As the image came up, the doctor gave another thrust of the hose, and on the monitor, it produced an impression of flying. Richard felt like he was soaring through his own guts, over pink ridges and purple glistening peaks. He was flying through alien landscapes.