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LAGNIAPPE

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Story
by Alissa Nutting


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     I think he maybe slipped her something else because when the curtain on Guff’s bunk finally reopens and the two of them come out, she’s still in great spirits, which for Sis means that she is in a completely altered state.
     “Sister,” she yells, putting her naked arms around me and bringing my face to her half-bosom. She rocks me back and forth like a mother for a little while.
     “What were Mother’s last words?” she asks. I was only four at the time but I remember them.
     “Well,” I say, “ “Mother looked at me and said, ‘I’m doing this because of you. You drove me to this.’”
     Sis completely cracks up. CT and Guff start laughing too, and before I know it tears are pouring down my face because I can’t stop laughing either. “That’s ridiculous!” Sis says through her laughter. I nod. “What’s this?” Sis asks Guff as he hands her the tube to a hookah, but then before he can answer she sticks it in the side of her mouth like they do with that spit-sucky thing at the dentist, and she keeps talking.
     “You know, no offense, but I didn’t want you to live with me. I felt like I had to take you in, because Mother was such a piece of shit, and I didn’t want to seem like a piece of shit too. But it ruined so many things for me. If I hadn’t been forced to grow up overnight and be a parent the way I did, things would be way better for me I think, much much better.”
     I have been in the stomach of the Worm Eternal long enough to know that she doesn’t mean this in a personal way, that in fact the Worm Eternal has himself entered her ear and is speaking to me through her so that I will have Greater Understanding. CT gently squeezes my hand and whispers “W-I-R” into my ear, which means Wriggle-In-Effect, as in, the Worm is actively present and working.
     Suddenly, the bus stops and Fractal Clymber runs back wearing a headdress of swan feathers. “Dudes, the sun is coming up and there are all these flat rocks and I think it’s really cleansing. Like, I sort of took an accidental detour, I mean it’s totally cool, I totally know where we are, but I think it was like, meant to be, because it is so fucking pure out there right now, and I think if we all just go out there and sit it’ll be great, like I might even be able to forget that that ever happened, I mean.
     When we file out of the bus, the light of dawn seems to sober Sis up a little bit. It’s easy not to sober up in the bus-light and bus-air; the bus is a sort of intoxicant in itself. As we walk out onto the rocks Sis looks down at the light shining on her scar tissue and begins to cry.
     But Guff is totally on it. “Lay down, beautiful woman,” he says. “Bloom like a flower.” He walks to her and parts her legs with his hands and tells her to say it. “I’m a blooming flower, say those words.”
     And she does. The light is coming up brighter than I’ve ever seen it, and it is all hitting Sis, her scarred parts and her whole parts, everything. And Guff’s face moves into her bloom like a hummingbird, and CT walks over with his erection standing tall and shadowy from his still-untied leather suit, and he moves his face into her bloom like a hummingbird too, and I stretch out on a rock like I do backstage at the concerts. Sis’s noises are a lot like the music of Wolf Rainbow, except this time I do jump in, I get lost in them and become her totally. I enter her like the Worm Eternal and my ears eat every drop of her pleasure.

                                                                    *

     When we got back on the bus we were all pretty tired, so CT and I retired to the clam bed. Sis hugged me and I hugged her back and it was cosmic. When we hug, my boob sort of fills her boob-hole.
     When CT and I woke up Fractal Clymber told me that Sis had him let her out at the Reno airport, but she left a note saying she was going to a treatment center in Tucson, and that Guff gave her a lot of money in the form of gold coins, which is how Guff likes to get paid, and that she would call me sometime soon, or that I could call her when I was ABLE to talk. The word “able” was really bold and underlined.
     She had also left me a white full-body leotard and I knew with just one look that it was Mother’s. I smelled it, kind of hoping it would still smell like Mother, even though it had been so long and she was mostly a horrible mother, but it just smelled like the bus. I put it on beneath my leather suit, though, and pretty soon because of rubbing on the leather all day it got a really comfortable smell, like a tired horse.
     A few weeks later we were able to stay in the hospital with Sis for a week. It was weird-Worm Eternal-serendipity because we went to Arizona to film a new video for the upcoming album, La Muerte es Suerte, and during filming the python wrapped around Guff’s shoulders totally bit him in the wang. The handler didn’t understand it at all, she said there was no reason in the whole world why that would happen, and asked him what kind of cologne Guff used and stuff like that as he and the snake were being taken away to the hospital on a stretcher, the same hospital Sis was staying at.
     So we cancelled some tour dates and I got to sit by Sis and hold her hand during therapies, sometimes holding her as she got sick and getting drops from her on my leather suit that left a nice type of reminder stain and sunk down through to mother’s leotard underneath, and late at night when the cable went bad and Sis was asleep and CT and the rest of the gang were doing opium in the bus parked in the hospital lot (“We can do as much of anything as we want, you know? We’re in the parking lot of a fucking hospital” Fractal Clymber happily declared) I often thought about how family and mother and Sis were like my suit and my leotard, skin under skin under skin, this onion whose layers can be peeled back and peeked into and that the Worm Eternal can help me understand. Knowing that, it is wrong to deny the beauty of anything. In fact, the beauty is dizzying in fast, airplane-showing-off ways: the beauty of CT’s locks spiraled in a hurricane of hot rock and cold mescaline, the beauty of my sister so strong while her body is weak, the beauty of my mother’s white leotard becoming the color of camels and tea and milk beneath my suit. “The beauty beneath;” it is something I say to CT all the time now, and of course he understands, has always understood.

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