Painting crisp and clean as milk glass: watermelon juice, clear pink and sticky, on the small of a young man’s naked back. Ass like white linen. Don’t remember who did it.

The seeds, and the pulp of seeds.

Anemia of no known cause and I’m terrified with it. Bad family history. My mother had benign polyps so large they resected her colon and she now shits about once every thirty minutes, my aunt has IBS, and my grandfather’s (counts on fingers) aunt died of colon cancer. $1700 for the colonoscopy and $915 unspecified; $543.20 for lodging; and $290 for transport from the clinic, because I’m alone in this town. Self driving car ferries me down roads I didn’t know, fragments of lighted highways far away between black hills. Roadside motel. I’m the only one here. Check in is an empty room with a kiosk in it: young Nepalese man on the screen. His stout square face glitches and restarts. My room’s in back.

Hard, mourning my lover. Even hot men don’t help, because whenever I see one I imagine we could have enjoyed him together. Safeway that wasn’t on the map. Is this what grocery stores actually are like? In what aisle would the jello be? And how do you ask? I wander the empty aisles and debouche into an empty city, million dollar shacks beside the sea. But after a week on Soylent and white rice my hell is to smell everything clearly down to the last detail: cinnamon coffee cake; mashed potatoes with butter, cream, and salt. Some humans are here, they’re just not here with me.

Naked in the spartan room. The magnesium sulfate in water has been ineptly flavored with rotten fruit. My lover died on or about June 26th and was found a week to ten days later. Black goo would have oozed out of his anus; yes, and his mouth and nose too. Had he been afraid? Had he wanted me, and me not there? His skin would be yellow and his mouth would be black, and maggots would have poured out of it like rice in reverse. Before his mother stopped talking to me she said his sister had been up all week cleaning the inside of his windows. Sometimes my eyes just water, quietly and automatically.

In a heavy rush I shit brown liquid that smells burnt or rusted, or like rotten mushrooms. The smell is so vile I retch but nothing comes out so I dry heave thin strips of fishy, metallic water into the bathtub. I empty flocculent particles of feces into the toilet until past sunrise, dully grateful none end up under my hood. Woman’s voice cackles outside my hotel room door: Remember? Remember?

The clinic is cold, and a little shabby, and someone has warmed the blankets like a hot towel on a loaf of new bread. I’m bed 4, far corner of the preparation room (hardware store number sticker on the wall). Almost everyone is gone for the day, and the big room dim and quiet. The anesthesiologist is a little old Chinese man named Dr. Wu in red scrubs and a nun’s sweater. Keep me conscious, I say. If something is going to happen to me I want to know it. Fear of anesthetic is a common phobia he says. I don’t tell him I have a PhD in the history of the seventeenth century and I know what surgery is and don’t care. That would be weird. This isn’t actual surgery he says. I’m not going to make you the big sleepy. If this was real surgery, I’d watch you to make sure you are not in a BIND, the most important thing for anesthesia is to make sure you’re not in a BIND. (I don’t ask him what the dangerous BIND is.) But I’m only going to bring you to the edge of sleepy. Because to get the camera in—that’s a big PUSH. His gleeful gesture is broad and spastic, like someone miming a fencing lunge. It takes effort he says, to get the camera through your little! twisty! colon! He mimes that one too. Pulling it out, well, that’s much less pressure. He’s practically dancing in this big empty room. He’s probably a massive druggie and this makes me love him more. All anesthesiologists are freaks.

Big holes gouge my memory of my lover’s death. Entire weeks are gone, months. I went directly from choking sobs in front of my laptop to broken sleep to the next semester. But Dr. Wu keeps me awake like I asked, and the pink and amber whorls of my large intestine on the screen gleam like a miniature Antelope Canyon that I carry with myself. The diener (dienerin really) pulls me backwards against her strong body so the surgeon can wrestle the long flexible camera around the corners of my intestine, but it feels like nothing.

The way here was a myriad of little side roads but the return is straight forward and well lit. Like time in memory, space is superimposed upon itself: my phone says a walk from the hotel to the train station will take 40 minutes but the same distance as a drive is 10, which makes no sense. Out from under the comparatively archaic closely packed architecture of Turk or 6th Street, every block in the Valley looks the same. They slide past without effort and the self driving car plays gentle ambient over cartoon visuals of a ruined city. Trees grow out of caved-in high rises: whatever happened here, happened long ago.

Internally rearranged, with violence. Beyond exhaustion. Sway gently as the train sways, silent amid a shrieking working class crowd. Baseball game. I must be white to the lips. The ultimate expression of architectural beauty is the public toilet next to the Palo Alto train station because it’s pure of form: the unequivocal thingness of concrete, carved and smoothed with diamond burrs. Finally a stinking man stumbles out, pants around his thighs stiff and glassy with ancient dirt, then crashes into the underbrush bellowing You want a fuck, man, just ask; I’ll give you all the fuck you want!

It was hemorrhoids.