Marla shoves Tyler back out into the hallway, and she says she's sorry, but he shouldn't have called the police and that's probably the police downstairs right now.

In the hallway, Marla locks the door to 8G and shoves Tyler toward the stairs. On the stairs, Tyler and Marla flatten against the wall as police and paramedics charge by with oxygen, asking which door will be 8G.

Marla tells them the door at the end of the hall.

Marla shouts to the police that the girl who lives in 8G used to be a lovely charming girl, but the girl is a monster b.i.t.c.h monster. The girl is infectious human waste, and she's confused and afraid to commit to the wrong thing so she won't commit to anything.

"The girl in 8G has no faith in herself," Marla shouts, "and she's worried that as she grows older, she'll have fewer and fewer options."

Marla shouts, "Good luck."

The police pile up at the locked door to 8G, and Marla and Tyler hurry down to the lobby. Behind them, a policeman is yelling at the door: "Let us help you! Miss Singer, you have every reason to live! Just let us in, Marla, and we can help you with your problems!"

Marla and Tyler rushed out into the street. Tyler got Marla into a cab, and high up on the eighth floor of the hotel, Tyler could see shadows moving back and forth across the windows of Marla's room.

Out on the freeway with all the lights and the other cars, six lanes of traffic racing toward the vanishing point, Marla tells Tyler he has to keep her up all night. If Marla ever falls asleep, she'll die.

A lot of people wanted Marla dead, she told Tyler. These people were already dead and on the other side, and at night they called on the telephone. Marla would go to bars and hear the bartender calling her name, and when she took the call, the line was dead.

Tyler and Marla, they were up almost all night in the room next to mine. When Tyler woke up, Marla had disappeared back to the Regent Hotel.

I tell Tyler, Marla Singer doesn't need a lover, she needs a case worker.

Tyler says, "Don't call this love love."

Long story short, now Marla's out to ruin another part of my life. Ever since college, I make friends. They get married. I lose friends.

Fine.

Neat, I say.

Tyler asks, is this a problem for me?

I am Joe's Clenching Bowels.

No, I say, it's fine.

Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains.

Just great, I say. Really.

8.

MY BOSS SENDS me home because of all the dried blood on my pants, and I am overjoyed. me home because of all the dried blood on my pants, and I am overjoyed.

The hole punched through my cheek doesn't ever heal. I'm going to work, and my punched-out eye sockets are two swollen-up black bagels around the little p.i.s.s holes I have left to see through. Until today, it really p.i.s.sed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and n.o.body had noticed. Still, I'm doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around to everyone. When I pa.s.s people in the hall at work, I get totally ZEN right in everyone's hostile little FACE.

Worker bees can leaveEven drones can fly awayThe queen is their slave

You give up all your worldly possessions and your car and go live in a rented house in the toxic waste part of town where late at night, you can hear Marla and Tyler in his room, calling each other human b.u.t.t wipe.

Take it, human b.u.t.t wipe.

Do it, b.u.t.t wipe.

Choke it down. Keep it down, baby.

Just by contrast, this makes me the calm little center of the world.

Me, with my punched-out eyes and dried blood in big black crusty stains on my pants, I'm saying h.e.l.lO to everybody at work. h.e.l.lO! Look at me. h.e.l.lO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. h.e.l.lo. Everything is nothing, and it's so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me.

Sigh.

Look. Outside the window. A bird.

My boss asked if the blood was my blood.

The bird flies downwind. I'm writing a little haiku in my head.

Without just one nestA bird can call the world homeLife is your career

I'm counting on my fingers: five, seven, five.

The blood, is it mine?

Yeah, I say. Some of it.

This is a wrong answer.

Like this is a big deal. I have two pair of black trousers. Six white shirts. Six pair of underwear. The bare minimum. I go to fight club. These things happen.

"Go home," my boss says. "Get changed."

I'm starting to wonder if Tyler and Marla are the same person. Except for their humping, every night in Marla's room.

Doing it.

Doing it.

Doing it.

Tyler and Marla are never in the same room. I never see them together.

Still, you never see me and Zsa Zsa Gabor together, and this doesn't mean we're the same person. Tyler just doesn't come out when Marla's around.

So I can wash the pants, Tyler has to show me how to make soap. Tyler's upstairs, and the kitchen is filled with the smell of cloves and burnt hair. Marla's at the kitchen table, burning the inside of her arm with a clove cigarette and calling herself human b.u.t.t wipe.

"I embrace my own festering diseased corruption," Marla tells the cherry on the end of her cigarette. Marla twists the cigarette into the soft white belly of her arm. "Burn, witch, burn."

Tyler's upstairs in my bedroom, looking at his teeth in my mirror, and says he got me a job as a banquet waiter, part time.

"At the Pressman Hotel, if you can work in the evening," Tyler says. "The job will stoke your cla.s.s hatred."

Yeah, I say, whatever.

"They make you wear a black bow tie," Tyler says. "All you need to work there is a white shirt and black trousers."

Soap, Tyler. I say, we need soap. We need to make some soap. I need to wash my pants.

I hold Tyler's feet while he does two hundred sit-ups.

"To make soap, first we have to render fat." Tyler is full of useful information.

Except for their humping, Marla and Tyler are never in the same room. If Tyler's around, Marla ignores him. This is familiar ground. This is exactly how my parents were invisible to each other. Then my father went off to start another franchise.

My father always said, "Get married before the s.e.x gets boring, or you'll never get married."

My mother said, "Never buy anything with a nylon zipper."

My parents never said anything you'd want to embroider on a cushion.

Tyler does one hundred ninety-eight sit-ups. One ninety-nine. Two hundred.

Tyler's wearing a sort of gummy flannel bathrobe and sweatpants. "Get Marla out of the house," Tyler says. "Send Marla to the store for a can of lye. The flake kind of lye. Not the crystal kind. Just get rid of her."

Me, I'm six years old, again, and taking messages back and forth between my estranged parents. I hated this when I was six. I hate it now.

Tyler starts doing leg lifts, and I go downstairs to tell Marla: the flake kind of lye, and I give her a ten-dollar bill and my bus pa.s.s. While Marla is still sitting at the kitchen table, I take the clove cigarette from between her fingers. Nice and easy. With a dishcloth, I wipe the rusty spots on Marla's arm, where the burn scabs cracked and started to bleed. Then I wedge each of her feet into a high-heel shoe.

Marla looks down at me doing my Prince Charming routine with her shoes and she says, "I let myself in. I didn't think anyone was home. Your front door doesn't lock."

I don't say anything.

"You know, the condom is the gla.s.s slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away. The condom, I mean. Not the stranger."

I'm not talking to Marla. She can horn in on the support groups and Tyler, but there's no way she can be my friend.

"I've been waiting here all morning for you."

Flowers bloom and dieWind brings b.u.t.terflies or snowA stone won't notice

Marla gets up from the kitchen table, and she's wearing a sleeveless blue-colored dress made of some shiny material. Marla pinches the edge of the skirt and turns it up for me to see little dots of st.i.tching on the inside. She's not wearing any underwear. And she winks.

"I wanted to show you my new dress," Marla says. "It's a bridesmaid dress and it's all hand sewn. Do you like it? The Goodwill thrift sold it for one dollar. Somebody did all these tiny st.i.tches just to make this ugly, ugly dress," Marla says. "Can you believe it?"

The skirt is longer on one side than on the other, and the waist of the dress...o...b..ts low around Marla's hips.

Before she leaves for the store, Marla lifts her skirt with her fingertips and sort of dances around me and the kitchen table, her a.s.s flying around inside her skirt. What Marla loves, she says, is all the things that people love intensely and then dump an hour or a day after. The way a Christmas tree is the center of attention, then, after Christmas you see those dead Christmas trees with the tinsel still on them, dumped alongside the highway. You see those trees and think of roadkill animals or s.e.x crime victims wearing their underwear inside out and bound with black electrical tape.

I just want her out of here.

"The Animal Control place is the best place to go," Marla says. "Where all the animals, the little doggies and kitties that people loved and then dumped, even the old animals, dance and jump around for your attention because after three days, they get an overdose shot of sodium phen.o.barbital and then into the big pet oven.

"The big sleep, 'Valley of the Dogs' style.

"Where even if someone loves you enough to save your life, they still castrate you." Marla looks at me as if I'm the one humping her and says, "I can't win with you, can I?"

Marla goes out the back door singing that creepy "Valley of the Dolls" song.

I just stare at her going.

There's one, two, three moments of silence until all of Marla is gone from the room.

I turn around, and Tyler's appeared.

Tyler says, "Did you get rid of her?"

Not a sound, not a smell, Tyler's just appeared.

"First," Tyler says and jumps from the kitchen doorway to digging in the freezer. "First, we need to render some fat."

About my boss, Tyler tells me, if I'm really angry I should go to the post office and fill out a change-of-address card and have all his mail forwarded to Rugby, North Dakota.

Tyler starts pulling out sandwich bags of frozen white stuff and dropping them in the sink. Me, I'm supposed to put a big pan on the stove and fill it most of the way with water. Too little water, and the fat will darken as it separates into tallow.

"This fat," Tyler says, "it has a lot of salt so the more water, the better."

Put the fat in the water, and get the water boiling.

Tyler squeezes the white mess from each sandwich bag into the water, and then Tyler buries the empty bags all the way at the bottom of the trash.

Tyler says, "Use a little imagination. Remember all that pioneer s.h.i.t they taught you in Boy Scouts. Remember your high school chemistry."

It's hard to imagine Tyler in Boy Scouts.