The Tumours Made Me Interesting by Matthew Revert Read Free Book Online Page A

too? It was too much. If I was going to die, couldn’t I at least enjoy a modicum of privacy?
    I dismounted the Stotson’s couch and marched through the hole my misguided Heimlich had created.
    “Don’t worry about the wall right now, Bruce,” yelled Vince. “We can fix it up later. We have nothing to hide.”
    The two began engaging in the masochistic sex games I had clearly interrupted earlier. I picked up the phone to call my mother with the alien sound of their eroticism ringing in my ears. I hoped like hell mum hadn’t been watching the news. If anyone was going to tell her, it needed to be me.
    5.
    I had become phobic of my own bowel movements. The morning toilet trip always revealed some new, horrifying physical deterioration. Today it was pink anal foam. I had grown used to blood, mucous and stools of every sort but the foam threw me. How could something so foreign to my own experience form in my body? We live with ourselves for every miserable, waking second and yet, there’s so much about what we experience that we don’t know. Within me was an invasion that I couldn’t see. My outward appearance possessed the eerie calm that heralds the start of a storm. I was beginning to convince myself that I could feel the tumours growing. Ever since I was introduced to them, they had a physical presence. I felt more like an incubator than a person.
    I was readying myself for one of the most awkward conversations I was ever likely to have. Thankfully my mother appeared blissfully ignorant when I spoke to her on the phone, which meant that at least it was in my hands. I arranged to deliver her medication and tend to her bed sores. It was a struggle to keep from crying when I heard how excited this made her. Ever since my brother moved to Poland to mock death metal bands, I was all she had. I was about to take that away from her and it was the single most painful aspect of the whole ordeal. The more I tried to kill the thought, the more powerful it grew until it was throbbing like a headache.
    I was thinking much more clearly this morning, which was a mixed blessing. I didn’t miss the hangover but I longed for the way it stifled my depressing clarity. With clarity came reality and reality was a bitch. The apartment was abhorrently messy. It was so stereotypically ‘single male’. There was no design aesthetic at all. The only ‘art’ on the walls were faded posters of Olympic steeplechase champions, which I won in a raffle 20 years ago. The only reason I was so insistent about their display was because they were the only things I’d ever won. Clinging to these now seemed profoundly pathetic but I still couldn’t bring myself to remove them. That said, Marina Pluzhnikova was an undeniably handsome woman.
    The urge to clean intrigued me. Other than maintaining a basic level of hygiene, I wasn’t much for cleanliness. I appreciated the pleasant atmosphere a clean environment created but as far as my own squalor was concerned, it was enough to occasionally remove rotting food. The tattered yellow carpet was stained with ten years of spillage, which sat beneath modest mountains of general trash. A rich, stale scent permeated everything which, other than being admittedly disgusting, was a constant reminder of home. I guess the broken wall, which now allowed the Stotson’s clear visibility into my environment, made me more self-conscious about my living situation. At the same time, it almost felt as if I were now living with people – somehow I was less alone. I’d caught glimpses of Rhonda going about various domestic duties and it pleased me. After I’d met up with mum, I had a determination to whip my apartment into shape.

    I had to stop by the pharmacy on my way to mum’s. I had grown incredibly intimate with the pharmacy environment over the years. I was essentially mum’s designated care giver, ever since dad and Tom went away, and it was an intricate job. Mum’s medical situation was an endlessly complex