A Moment of Doubt by Jim Nisbet Page B

And I weaved down and around the corner, through the milling, frightened tourists, a bum or two, a poet/hooker, a saxophone player, a barker, to Carol Doda’s Condor Club, at the corner of Broadway and Columbus. There, on the side of the building, is an ersatz California Historical Marker, commemorating the Condor as the Original Site of the Invention of Topless Dancing, if you care to believe that, and, placing one hand over my heart and the other on the plaque, I knelt on the sidewalk and repeated my solemn oath, aloud.
    Someone charitably dropped a handful of coins between me and the wall.
    But even as I so swore, my heart froze beneath the palm of my hand, galvanized into arrhythmia by a current that shot between it and the brass plaque. Hadn’t I, somewhere, just last year, in This World Leaks Blood , or was it Through a Mandible, Delicately , or . . . . But hadn’t I, just last year, used Marlene’s pussy in a particularly grizzly scene? Just her pussy? Yes, I had, but it was in Heart of Mercury , a horrible scene, in which a young Oedipal Adonis had received his mother’s pussy in the mail. It was sent to him by an insanely jealous rival for his mother’s affections who, failing in his advances, had succumbed to the temptation of torturing and killing the woman, in order to deprive the rest of the world of her charm and affection. It was an unfortunate thing, a thing I deeply regretted doing, so deeply that, immediately upon completion of this very arduous piece of writing, so complicated in its ramifications that I sat up all night finishing the book, yet so real to me as I created it that my keyboard and cashmere sweater and chair seat were wringing wet with perspiration long before I was finished, that I immediately availed myself of the consolation of the real thing, even though it was three flights up and four in the morning, to assure myself that, (a) she was still alive and intact, and (b) it was as good as I remembered, and wrote, it. She was and it was and we were all so very young then . . . .
    But it had been so necessary, borrowing Marlene’s vagina, to the solution of the case. When the son opened the box containing the horrible discovery, there necessarily had to be a detailed description, absolutely lurid and convincing, for verisimilitude. Really, I outdid myself. In the course of things I had to restrain myself from running upstairs to make a detailed inspection, so as to get everything just right. But I knew that would lead to a cul de sac, so far as the novel went, and stuck to the task at hand, only later paying the visit. And, as the Moral Imperative would have it, this vicious act led to the unraveling of the perpetrator’s otherwise unconnected but nonetheless stealthy and heinous butcherings, which had stymied Windrow and half the finest minds of the San Francisco Police Department for nearly two hundred pages . . . .
    The words of my oath died on my lips. Would Marlene’s vagina go the route of Myra’s tongue and larynx? Had I been innocently littering the city with ruined minds and bodies?—Innocently? Venally !—And, and what about my own penis? Had I not used my own penis in dozens, if not hundreds of fuck scenes? Had my mercenary practices insured that I contract, sooner if not later, herpes, syphilis, dismemberment, gonorrhea, three or four rapacious strains of venereal disease, as unidentifiable as they were incurable, urethritis, warts, impotency, AIDS itself? Would some sadist with sharpened canines and one eye soon slake his hunger with a grilled penis and cheese sandwich? Still kneeling against the wall I opened my fly and made a careful inspection. Still there, unpoxed. But even as I picked my teeth after dinner, somewhere in the back of my mind I planned to go home and write
    The thin man shrugged. “Stretch Windrow’s asshole,” he said to Tiny. “And make it last!”
    How could I do other than use my own asshole as