Citing emotional inertia, she left me. Truth is I’d grown sick of her well before. There was a pretentiousness about her ears—lobed in a fashion that suggested something very special was going on between them. Still not sure how to make the rent on my meager double cheeseburger salary, I stumbled that first morning through the four rooms of our apartment, now cleansed, wiped clear—at least superficially—of her two year presence, save for the shit she didn’t want any longer: the rubics cube, a defunct toaster, silverware, framed photos of me covering her on my parents’ sofa.
But in spite of her ears, I did love the woman. I went out to the pub and sloshed down swill till two in the morning. This was a laundromat for my brain. Or at least I intended it as such, but on my moaning way home, I still had a nasty helping of memories on permanent rinse, commingling into a waterlogged ball, so many tangled knots I didn’t know where to start.
It was then, as I sat puking in a dumpstered mini alley, that I met the towel man. His voice first, muffled, coming over my shoulder as the last of the corn plopped onto the cement: “Let me take care of that for you,” he said.
And then a swirl of cotton and thread and flower patterns and cartoon characters all about my spinning head. When I looked back down there was no sign of my regurgitations.
I shook the man’s outstretched wrap. Not an inch of him left uncovered—he was towels, all around, with a miniscule black gap where I assumed his eyes hid. He smelled of wet bathroom carpet, toilet water, crusty spaghetti sauce. And he wanted a place to stay.
“I don’t have a job as such,” he explained, the towels around his mouth puffing out. “But I can be a valuable roomie all the same. You’ll see.”
He began, predictably enough, in the bathroom. Ducking down in the center of my tiny tiled shittery, looking at half his height like, well, a heap of dirty towels, he spun around clockwise and then counterclockwise, swabbing up the feminine scents of organic hand lotion and weapons grade face wash and me creeping into the shower now and then, scaring her when she turned around after rinsing her hair. Losing myself in the hypnospiral of his rotational cleansing, his tagged towel corners, moistened, lapped at my ankles.
Concerned I might have more corn in me, he dabbed some squishy fabric across my forehead, and the walls stopped leaning. On the way to the kitchen he flopped by the rubics cube, vanishing it without acknowledgement.
Soberized, I stood witness to his moppings around the kitchen.
“Are you sure I don’t want these?” I asked, cautiously polite in case he decided to wipe me away.
“Sentimental slop,” he mumbled, cushing his yarn rump along the cabinetry. He even managed to get the stains under the dinner table, the arguments over what to cook and how to cook it, the impromptu candlelit feasts I prepped when feeling romantic.
I suggested a smoke break. He folded down on the sofa but declined the cig I offered, on account of his consuming fear of self-immolation. Butting and coughing, I announced my intent to retire, “flipping sausage patties first thing in the morning.”
“I’ll work through the night,” he vowed, and before I went off to bed, he requested my latest pay stub. Though considerably moistened after he wiped a blue rag across it, I discovered a stub much improved: I had been promoted, and now worked at the corporate office, far away from the grills. Rent was no longer an issue.
I spent my dreams setting myself on fire over and over and over again.
Come morning, my roommate had dispersed himself. I found him draped over every edge, nailed to every wall, slow drying under slices of sun.
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