The Abyss of Human Illusion by Gilbert Sorrentino, Christopher Sorrentino Page A

dulled, to return to New York on a Trailways bus so as to grind himself into his misery a little more, a little deeper; a man of perhaps fifty in the seat next to him performed fellatio on him in the dark early morning somewhere near Joliet, and he absurdly thought that he was getting even with his wife, the bitch. Someone liked him, even if it was this sad old cocksucker.
    But New York was of no help, it didn’t feel at all like home to him, it existed in a kind of aquatic grayness of sleet and dark clouds and sympathetic friends, all of whom performed their parts as carefully as possible, rarely bringing up his wife save once in a while, to call her a bitch, a whore, even, transgressively, a cunt. He stayed with two of these friends, a man and wife, and in the comically sad way in which life crawls and stumbles its way through time, this couple had always been thought of by their passive guest with a kind of jolly but mocking contempt: now he slept on their pull-out Carlyle couch, ate their food, and drank their liquor.
    He began to talk to them about his wife, to confide in them, to think of them as the intimate friends that they assuredly were not. In his neurotic and uxorious gloom, he said, in many different ways, the same thing over and over to them: Where is my wife? I want my wife! He would take her back no matter what, ask her nothing, forgive her everything, she could walk on him, kick him, she could spit on him! if only she would come back to him, come back and make him the complete slave and idiot of abasement that he so longed to be. His was a continuing performance that went beyond humiliation, a groveling masochism of which he embarrassingly seemed fully aware. They watched him in silence as he blubbered and wailed; it was horrifying. But not to him.
    A week or two into the crazed life that he was sedulously creating for himself, he found out, somehow, that his wife and her kidnapper, her rapist, her Svengali and sinister sexual magician, her depraved wizard, her slavering satyr with his enormous phallus eternally ready for her, only her … he found out that they were living in St. Louis. He had no address for them, and no way of thinking them—of thinking her—into the landscape: what did St. Louis look like? But he unexpectedly got the address from his host, who had a friend in St. Louis, an assistant professor at Washington University. He had no idea how any of this had come about.
    He wanted to go to her in strange and alien St. Louis, to plead his case, to beg her, implore her, to dare ask her if she’d had enough abandoned and filthy sex with her seducer; but feared that she certainly would accept his pleadings, his tears, with perverse delight, would abuse him with a word or two of contempt, and send him home alone. He knew this, knew that she was a bitch, a worthless bitch, shallow and corrupt and cruel: oh how he wanted her, she was his bitch! He asked his host then if he would consent to go to St. Louis and, through his friend at the university, meet with his wife, plead for him, set out his case for him, ask her why she’d left, ask her, ask her, ask her, even if he had to do it in front of her smirking lover. He would pay for his trip, his airfare and all expenses, and even include a bonus for his trouble, although he was not so totally unbalanced as to use the word “bonus.” And so the friend left, but was back within three days, for his wife and her amour had apparently left St. Louis, and there was no way of knowing where they had gone. The husband, in his by-now usual imbecilic daze, finally left his friends’ apartment after finding one of his own, a dark and wretched shotgun flat on Fourth Street and Avenue D, a perfect venue to complement his mood of not-quite-suicidal misery. How the streets churned with ignorance and poverty and hatred and violence. Perfect.
    The weeks passed and he began, slowly, very slowly, to consider the rash frenzy, really, of his request to his