Search for Saturnight's Day (pt. 3)

-3-

click here to read pt. 2

In the mirror, Mardoon and the neighbor appeared before the neighbor and Mardoon in the mirror.

When Mardoon walked into the bathroom behind the neighbor, the lights were already on. He winced and squinted his eyes to allow them to adjust to the contrast. White, sterile light from ceiling bulbs mixed and fused with off-white, warm yellow light from fixtures above the bathroom sink into something pretending to be daylight.

The neighbor’s actions were both fast and slow. Mardoon gazed quizzically as the neighbor wheeled over a medical examination lamp. The neighbor gripped the device by a handle affixed to its long, telescopic pole. Across the wide bathroom, he tugged it along. Its plastic wheels clattered against the uneven tile flooring. Mardoon watched the neighbor simultaneously adjust the lamp head with both hands as his (the neighbor’s) foot probed for the foot-brake, trying to engage the locking mechanism. Then it clicked with a satisfying clack, and, once stuck in place, the neighbor flicked it on. The light burst into the bathroom, so bright it pierced the neighbor’s pores and washed out any darkness that may have lingered from the last room. He was ready to commence.

In a flash! Mardoon’s eyes captured a livephoto-esque instantiation of the bathroom scene. Dust of hair sprays, aerosols, and powder, flecks of blush, or perhaps eyeshadow hung in the stagnant bathroom air. A sort of preservation in time, where movement was only implied. Dust particles fell into shimmering pointillistic lines off of which light scattered. The lines traced the trajectory of airflow from the bathroom into the cave from which Mardoon sucked air into his lungs. These lines animated his breath. And each exhale blew the lines apart: a sort of nuclear mushroom cloud expanding outward from the holes in his face. With each inhale, he tasted the aerosols, felt the bitter, metallic zsching coating his lungs. But he was unbelievably bored and started to feel he was dying again. Maybe he was.

“This isn’t gonna be too long, is it?” He asked. “Every second I’m in here must be shortening my lifespan”

“Maybe it is.”

Where am I? He wondered, as he watched the neighbor continue this preparatory ritual:

The neighbor took his nest of hair—long, stringy tendrils in curled ringlets down his neck, stretching to the middle of his back—and into it caked a heaping handful of some sort of muck which he’d used his four fingers to scoop out of a palm-sized plastic tub. The muck bore the consistency of a viscous mud but glowed a pearlescent pastel blue, shimmering and sparkling as it seeped through his fingers. The neighbor swung his sludge-covered hand to the top of his head, slapping it on with a resounding thwack and began to mix it into his hair. Slowly, the nest of hair became one malleable entity. He shaped and molded the putty on his head until it became a glistening hair-octopus: a bulbous mantle on top, two hair-tentacles gently caressing the profile of neighbor’s face, two more reaching what Mardoon initially thought to call “skyward,” but ended up calling “trying-to-get-the-____-away-from-the-neighbor-ward,” and the remaining four tentacles dangled down his back and unnaturally curled upward at their ends, stiff with hair-muck.

Mardoon tapped this live photo memory again and again in his mind with a mental finger: paying attention to the subtle zoom that coincided with the inhale of his breath and the shutter-stop rewind motion blur that indicated the clip had ended and it was time to exhale. He considered his opinions on the matter of men wearing makeup. Mardoon preferred to keep an almost nondescript appearance in even this way; thus he did not makeup himself.

“Okay, your turn,” the neighbor said.

“Sit right there so I can get a good angle on you, with the lighting just so,” and gestured to the toilet in the corner of the bathroom.

Mardoon sat on the toilet and looked up. The neighbor appeared over him, donning the keratin octopoid crown and holding a brush. A dew of sweat and setting spray dappled his icy, blue skin. He smelled of honey and vanilla and eggs, and each time he told Mardoon to hold still, his weed-breath wafted into Mardoon’s nose.

As he sat, various implements moved in and out of Mardoons field of vision, which for some reason had taken on an almost fisheye lens quality. Nearly 80% of which was consumed by the neighbor himself. Due to the fisheye effect, this meant every time the neighbor lifted his arm to adjust and make himself comfortable, or reach for a different palette, or just to stretch, a close-up still of his hairy, untrimmed armpit became Mardoon’s focal point. And he stared intently at it, convincing himself he could definitely smell it. He wished he did not see it. He wanted to close his eyes, but he did not, and thus became aware that even when the neighbor’s arm was down, the hair was long enough that he could see the ends of the hairs sticking out.

The neighbor kept beside him in a tiered storage cart the tools of an artist—brushes, pencils, palettes, sponge-blenders. These implements appeared and disappeared from Mardoon’s perspective as the neighbor moved in close, or backed away, or reached for something else. Mardoon noticed that the twangy Spongebob Squarepants theme song mutedly emanated from some unascertainable direction, but that none the less was with him on the toilet amidst the transformative ritual. Perhaps, he wondered, perhaps Spongebob is part of this ritual.

Next, Mardoon watched, heard, listened, and smelled; he became lulled by the sensory overload of the process: the neighbor held an eyeliner pencil in his right hand. The hand appeared small off at the edge of the fisheye lens, but it grew as it approached Mardoon, fingers first. Impossibly long, tapered fingers stretched and curved along the fisheye lens. They moved independently of one another. Almost defiantly. The neighbor twiddled the pencil and knuckles twitched between bent and unbent. A manual sort of operation. Mardoon felt the carefully applied pressure of the pencil beneath his eyes, at its corners, on his waterline. This gentle care relaxed him, for a moment. But, he continued to smell all the smells of the room, still tasted the aerosols, his mind becoming a bottomless pool of sensory overload. He wondered if he was stuck in this loop, growing a bit weary until he recalled his project again, which took him out of this spiral—he still desperately had to get back to it.

“You’ll be fine wearing that, by the way. And your hair’s good. You’ll fit right in,”

“Now, close your eyes,” The neighbor said, reaching for a small hand-mirror stowed in the bathroom storage cart.

“ I dunno…”

“Shush! Close ‘em!”

And Mardoon did.¹

“Okay, open them up,” he said.

While his eyes were closed, the neighbor had gently pressed the handle of the hand-mirror into Mardoon’s palm and wrapped his fingers around Mardoon’s to close his hand around it. The neighbor repositioned Mardoon’s arm with a series of articulations; when Mardoon opened his eyes, he saw the mirror piece missing from the plastic frame. Mardoon quickly flipped it over in his hand, searching for second mirror on the other side. But it was only the back of the device, a black speckled plastic upon which the neighbor had affixed multiple rainbow stickers, some of which were peeling off.

From out of view the neighbor’s voice echoed in Mardoon’s head: “You look so good. This will drive the ladies wild. They can spot your type pretty quick. Just be careful, they’ll eat you alive.”

click here to read pt. 4

1. THE VISION