Tyler grabs the back of my neck, slamming his dick into my mouth again and again, relentlessly as if it were another gun. Maybe the same one he once had shoved down the back of my throat, and I had taken the initiative to blow a hole through my own cheek. I also wonder how clean his dick is and where it's been, but I quickly backpedal because I know exactly where that particular organ has been making its rounds. The space monkeys casing the place are only too happy to bend over for Tyler - both metaphorically and literally.
The head of Tyler's cock slips through the hole in the side of my still-bruised face, and I can imagine the spray of jizz bursting through the gap like a popped zit when Tyler nuts in my mouth, gagging me, choking me, before chivalrously remembering to throw my own off-white undershirt in my face to clean up when he's done.
He reclines on the thin, squeaky mattress with his hand resting low on his stomach, scratching at the drying splatters of semen and spit and blood, because my cheek never heals, even months after the incident when I tried to shoot him and myself. When I did shoot him and myself.
I swallow more blood than saliva these days, even when at the height of my reign in fight club. The average person swallows two liters of spit each day. That's enough to fill an orca's tank at Sea World in only 12,976 years. In the time it would take me to accomplish this task, the orcas - and all life on earth - would be long past extinct. Right now, all I have is Tyler's tadpole swimmers racing through the paths of my spit to fizzle out in the acids of my stomach, and that's nearly enough.
I had orange juice from concentrate along with my usual breakfast of bland oatmeal from the institution's outdated kitchen this morning. The kitchen is decorated with rustic Home Living catalog accents that remind me of home. Page forty-seven hosts an artistic spackling of black mold in the upper left corner of the cracked ceiling; page twelve features dull, crunchy cockroach carapaces and rat turds coating the water-warped bottoms of every cabinet. I yearn for a swig of gasoline to rinse my mouth with, homemade napalm cooking in my stomach juices and frying the wriggly little fuckers on their way down.
I dab gingerly at my mouth with the shirt as neatly as any executive diner after their starting course of clam-and-piss chowder. I'd almost prefer the acrid undertones at this point, but I don't want to give Tyler any more brilliant ideas.
I throw the shirt back in Tyler's face, the sleeve catching on the lit cigarette in his mouth like hooking the too-small plastic ring around a glass bottle in a crappy carnival game, taking home a plastic bag with my prize goldfish that will die in two hours because even though I could produce enough saliva to keep the fish afloat, it couldn't actually survive in the thick, viscous liquid of my spit. Too acidic. Plus the mucus would gum up its gills, unable to pull in oxygen, and it would suffocate.
The shirt gets stuck on Tyler's cigarette, because if I could smoke after blowing a wad like a second bullet into someone's mouth, that's what I would be doing. The shirt gets stuck, and while Tyler is swatting the material away from his face, I use the distraction and grip my hands under his thighs, shoving him over onto his stomach and nearly off the bed. He's flailing, immediately on the defensive with his heels kicking up into my ribs and elbows blindly aiming for my busted cheek, but I eel up his body and swing a hard knock with my fist at the back of his head, stunning him long enough to pry his cheeks apart and shove my way into him.
I spare a wistful thought for lube, if only to spare the skin-grating chafing against my dick, but I didn't have time to dig out a spare globule of fat from my gaunt belly and boil and boil the quivering yellow-pink chunk of myself until I could scrape off a thin film of glycerin to ease the way. Tyler wasn't worth the effort, grunting and bucking beneath me as I humped against him forcefully enough to shudder the thin metal frame of my bed. I had pulled the bed away from the wall weeks ago, after the rhythmic thump, thump, thump prompted my neighboring psychopath in the room over to return the enthusiastic drumming with his own face until he'd cracked an old lobotomy hole and bits of brain dribbled out of his forehead in the exact color and texture of my breakfast.
I fucked Tyler as hard as I wanted, harder than any actual person could take without rupturing their prostate, because at the end of the day all I'd have to show for the effort was a wet spot on my bare mattress and a pillow flattened under my fists where Tyler's head should have been.
I finish up quickly instead of drawing out this intimate, tender moment between myself and...myself. Tyler curses as I pump him with round after round of orcas and goldfish, swimming in the upstream of his lower intestines like salmon out to spawn. He collapses when I do, the long, lean line of his back only slightly more comfortable than the coiled springs that liked to punch their way up through the unclothed mattress and bite me in the ass while I slept. And I did sleep. I slept like a baby on my padded slab with no sheets and no pillowcase. I didn't get sheets unless I became one of those unmanageable patients the staff tired of fending off rabid bites and handfuls of thrown feces, until one day when they would conveniently make the patient's bed up for them as neat as any four star hotel.
There would be fresh, laundry-crisp sheets with pale blue stripes pulled taut over the mattress and a complementary mint perfectly centered on their meticulously fluffed pillow. The next morning, room service would wordlessly unknot the twisted length of sheet from the metal railing at the foot of the bed, nudging the patient's head gently to the side to get at the other end wrapped around and around their blue-black neck, stuffing the used linens into a canvas bag to be carted down to the laundry facility in the building's sub-level, while the poor asshole was bagged up and carted down the street to the mortuary. Then their room was scrubbed clean for the next tenant, the mattress bare and waiting.
I roll off Tyler and pick the still-smoldering cigarette out of my singed shirt, the homemade fag made up of rolled together bits of shredded toilet paper and milkweed from the overgrown tangle of flora in the 'gardens' out back that were the sleeping grounds for more Robert Paulsens than I care to consider. I finish off the cigarette and snub the cherry end between my thumb and forefinger, flicking it towards the hollow metal seat in the corner of the room hooked to a hole in the ground that served as my toilet, minus the floating detritus of used condoms.
I tuck my hands behind my head as Tyler flops over and splays out on his back with his shoulder nearly brushing my own. I smile, the hole in my cheek puckering and flaking off a scabby crust of semen and spit and blood, listening as my neighbor taps a gentle lullaby into the adjacent wall that eventually turns squelchy, like an overly ripe melon knocked one too many times in the local grocery mart, Tyler just breathing beside me.
And then I sleep.