Читать книгу The Deep Whatsis - Peter Mattei - Страница 5

The intern from the edit house is so drunk she is trying to take her skin off. At least that’s what it looks like. She is already half-naked and is grabbing at her flesh trying to find the edge of the Threadless T-shirt that she lost half an hour ago. I don’t remember her name.

“What are you doing?” I ask her as she pulls at her body, but it is no use, she can’t hear me and if she can she doesn’t understand.

Certain people when they drink too much they get an idea in their head and then it forms a kind of feedback loop in which the thought just repeats itself over and over, as if their brain is trying to grip on to something, anything, for dear life, because all of reality is slipping into the void. Megan? Morgan? Caitlin? Finally she speaks and her answer is she wants to take her T-shirt off because she likes to sleep naked, she’s going to sleep now, it’s one of the checkboxes of her still-forming self, sleeping in the nude, it’s who she is, she sleeps in the nude in her sleeping bag even in winter, that’s what she is saying to me over and over out of nowhere in the dark, so I just say good night and turn the lights off. She keeps babbling and looking at me with such a confused sense of joy that I want to laugh, so I do laugh.

Then I go into the bedroom and get a pillow and go into the bathroom and get the little trash-biny thing. I slide the pillow under her head and I put the trash-biny thing next to her and I tap her shoulder and point to the thing and explain to her that if she needs to barf she should barf in that and not on the floor, if possible, especially not on the pillow—it’s Icelandic eiderdown.

She looks up at me and smiles and then she passes out.