The doctor says the pink growth in my mouth is a form of torus mandibularis. He’s never seen it grow so rapidly in anyone. He taps the bone growth with the mirror: “It’ll come back if we file it down,” he says, seeing my concern.

I was tired of being dumped by girls who eventually got a good look at the inside of my mouth. I felt like I was barely holding on to Tanya as things were. I used to be very attractive, or at least I always thought of myself as having the potential to be. The torus isn’t the reason I was being dumped all the time, but it felt like the reason. Sometimes a girl would kiss me and look at me funny afterwards, too ashamed to ask questions.

It’s probably also that I have deep-rooted personality issues as well. I dated the dark-headed counselor’s daughter for about a year, and she told me, free of charge, that the reason a lot of girls didn’t like me was because I had anger issues.

I get angry occasionally. Like the time I was putting up blinds in the second bedroom and my right arm got tired, got hard to breathe, and suddenly my right arm was smashing the drill’s battery bottom into the top of the bookshelf where I keep all my magazines, then the magazines kept falling off one after the other, dragging each other down.

 

A rabid deer has been stalking my trailer, coming up and rubbing the nubs of its horns against the skirting. Its grunting keeps me up sometimes. I should buy a dog. I write a list of chores on a notepad. These include buying a pack of razors, looking for a new bedframe, changing the oil in the car, calling Mom, throwing old food away that’s accumulated in the refrigerator, putting ant poison out a week in advance of cutting grass because there’s always this one kid that comes into my yard after the grass has been cut and of course the ants get all over his legs, and of course their parents always have something to say about it: my kid was in your yard, and guess what they were eaten up by?

I’m going to see Tanya tomorrow. She’s kind of a homebody, doesn’t do much in the way of talking. She wants a guy that isn’t quite a man but someone who’s relatively young, someone she can still grow old together with, someone from whom she can still learn something, something about that age of unintelligible mistake-making, etc. She wants someone who can accept her for what she calls her ugliness.

Tanya has a large mole sprouting directly from her left eyeball. To counter the attention she gets for her eye, she’s started tattooing over the tattoos on her arms. She calls what she’s doing a blackout. Tanya is nearly fifteen years older than me. People don’t seem to notice, though; she is pretty young on the outside, and doesn’t act her own age.

She can’t just cut the mole off. Her grandfather had moles, her uncle, her great grandmother. Her sister has them on her nose and looked like a cartoon character. If she cuts the mole off, she believes her eye will be blinded for good. She asked me up front one day if she ever went blind whether I’d still love her.

“I didn’t know we were saying that already,” I said.

We’d been dating about a month and I didn’t know if I was ready for what she was asking.

 

Tanya looks through her good eye at her little tattooed fingers. Her fingers are really narrow, but also kind of muscular. She’s done work, before. She knows the world. I know the boulevard, on the other hand. I know the inside of the guts of an American-made truck. I still have posters of muscle cars from my childhood hanging on my bedroom wall. There are places I’d like to go, someday, but that which, if my parents are any indication, I will never get to.

The tattoo on the back of her soon-to-be-blacked-out hand reads arrogance. There’s a tattoo on her upper left shoulder that reads unfamiliarity. She’s blacking out all the words because they make her feel insecure. The way she sees it—it’s as if she one day learned that words have meaning and rushed out to get a tattoo of the words in all the excitement, which made her look like an idiot that had just learned a couple of big words. “If life could be boiled down to one or two words, that would be fine,” she said.

When I was little, I used to get in trouble for staring at people. I know Tanya and I look odd. Aside from having torus, my hair, particularly around the rim of my head, feels crisper at the roots, the result being a cloudy frizz that pokes out of nearly every hat I wear. I’ve been told my nostrils widen for no better reason than to look intimidating.

I hope one day I’m able to work at an apple farm. I would like to have the kind of job where you stand on a ladder all day, putting fruit in a bucket. No one has to stare.

Right now, I push buggies at the Sunflower. Things are okay. I’ve also been offered the frozen position. I’ve done that work before. Standing in a freezer all day isn’t so bad. The gloves the frozen people hang on the wall outside the door smell sour, though. I don’t know if I’ll take the position, because it pays the same, and I think I enjoy being outside more than in the freezer.

 

The night I met Tanya, she lived on the coast and I was an hour inland. So I drove out to meet her one night, that chemical feeling in my chest keeping my shoulders warm but simultaneously I couldn’t keep my left leg still down near the clutch and when I finally made it into town I got out at her apartment and walked around the building looking for her window and she said to me on the phone that she was having second thoughts and I told her she could come out and meet me if she wanted where it would be somewhat public, and she said it wasn’t that she was scared of me and I said well hey, just give me a chance, I’m a good guy and everything, and when I wouldn’t let up she just said it, “I have some pretty bad issues right now,” by which she meant an ex-boyfriend was stalking her, and the fact that she didn’t have an income anymore, therefore she’d be needing a place to stay soon, to which I replied okay, sure, fuck all that, you made me drive an hour for this? and I started to walk away just like that, except then I realized I’d also lied to her, she didn’t know I had mouth lumps, she didn’t know I was nearing twenty-five and still worked at a grocery store, that I was so capable of getting angry, so I called her again and apologized and she let me in and we fucked and from then on we were close as “books on a shelf” or something like that and she even gave me permission to drive her car. Soon after, she drove inland and moved into the apartment with me.

 

Tanya says she’ll help pay to have my torus grinded down, she doesn’t care what the doctors say about it just coming back, she has all this money her grandmother suddenly gave her, and she wants to get me surgery.

“You’re worth it,” she says. I’ve always been pretty taken aback by this kind of thing, people telling me I’m worth it, because then there has to be reciprocal of some sort, like I just know one day this whole thing isn’t going to work and I’ll owe her a lot of money and emotional support and she’ll use that against me, somehow.

I tell her to take care of herself first, me second.

“I’ve seen some shit though,” she says. “Some things you can’t take care of.”

I tell her I’d rather get a good tattoo than have my torus removed. I don’t tell her I’m really afraid.

I could come out of surgery unable to open my mouth for a month. Or there could be a massive hole in the top of my mouth exposing my sinuses. Then how would I eat?

She asks what sort of tattoo I’d want.

“I’d just have to think about that.”

“It’s a big deal, getting a tattoo,” she says.

I don’t know if I like what she’s implying. Am I too stupid to get a tattoo? Does she think I’m incapable of thinking my way through something like a tattoo?

She covers tattoos up with other tattoos because life’s a constant uphill battle and she hates a lot of what happened in her past—I mean, everyone has this thing they’ve done that they’re embarrassed about, but you should see Tanya, every single thing she performs is recorded to memory, shuffled, redistributed to some other area of her psyche.

She’ll be telling a story, something that’s supposed to be funny or whatever, she’ll laugh, then later she’ll ask what exactly was so funny about any of that? She’ll grab her face, pull her cheeks, pinch the sides of her knees, strain for an answer. She’ll think she’s the only person in the room laughing at any of her jokes and that’ll make her feel bad. What if she comes off as stupid, laughing like that in front of all those people that are smarter than her? But I tell her there’s no way to quantify who’s smarter than who. And she says what are you, my therapist?

Something I don’t tell people is under the bed I have a binder full of old diary entries from high school. I’ve given journaling a chance. Next to the binder I have this toy from my childhood that has different-shaped holes in it. I take it out and put blocks in the hole, just to calm down.

The closest I’ve ever been to being caught with the toy is the semester I decided to give college a try. I was in the apartment, and my roommate at the time passed by my door and saw me sitting on the side of the bed.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Just staring at the wall,” I said.

I didn’t take the toy out from under the bed for a while. Eventually this became a defense mechanism. “I need to go and stare at the wall for a minute.” Then I really did take up staring at the wall.

I’d think of all sort of things when I stared at the wall. I thought about dropping out of college and working at a grocery store full-time. And here I am. I’m happy. Things are going fine. Except the rabid deer clopping through the gravel outside, huffing and puffing at night and keeping me awake. You can yell at the thing and it’ll just snarl at you like you’re the problem. Sure, when I stare at the wall I’m reminded that I’m happy. Things are fine, and I should be happy.

Tanya has a similar thing she does. She stares at her reflection in the bathroom mirror at night. I tell her rather than focusing on my torus we could have something done about her PTSD. She needs an actual therapist, someone kind and thoughtful and who will listen to her talk, much more qualified than myself. She said she’s had therapy, once. The therapist she had did some sort of music thing, and the only good that did her is she can’t stand to hear “Wind Beneath My Wings” anymore. Plus, therapy costs more money in the long run than we can afford. Also, Tanya hates colorful rooms, the bright reds and blues and things like that. Therapists remind her of preschools and elementary teachers, and she’s never had a therapist that didn’t have a weird playroom complex.

What happens when I encounter my reflection and I’m alone is I look at my torus. She wants to have it grinded down, but I guess I kind of like it occasionally. I run my tongue over it like it’s a sack of rocks at the bottom of a stream, and all my thoughts melt away, just for a moment. Then I open my mouth, look at it, tap it with a fingernail.

 

Tanya shows me the eyepatch. We’re sitting in a car outside the grocery store after my shift. She says if I won’t have the torus removed then she’ll wear an eyepatch.

I say baby, you can wear two eyepatches for all I care.

Later she throws the eyepatch away. She keeps her left eye closed as much as possible, but the mole sort of pokes out from underneath her eyelid.

 

We are in bed together. Tanya talks about a thing her mother once said to her about needing to look pretty. Something to the effect of her mother just wanted her to do what’s normal and get the acne treatment with the sulfur in it, which Tanya refused because she’s allergic to sulfur, it makes her break out in hives whenever she wears it, and because of her life of no-makeupness she was forced to instead beautify herself with tattoos, the likes of which were remarked upon constantly by her mother, and to which I now find myself constantly remarking upon as well.

What started as butterflies and barbed wire and circles of flame became vaginal openings, an anchor resembling a penis, bulls with penises for horns, troll teeth, pronged forks hanging from floating assholes, a cyclopean infant tearing from the womb, hunks of meat, diamond-filled lotus pods with little seeds rolling down her elbow—this is supposed to be the story of why I love Tanya no matter what she does to herself. Which is to say I don’t care how she looks, and simultaneously I understand the reasoning behind the blackouts, that maybe it has more to do with phallic symbolism than a couple of big words.

I explain to her the tattoo I want: I want an orange spherical object like a tiger’s eye marble, and a silver mechanical object holding it in place on my shoulder. I also want green lines around the mechanical object, like a forcefield. When she asks what that’s supposed to mean, I don’t know what to tell her. I’m not even sure if it’s supposed to mean anything. I like colors. If I wanted to get my arm colored in red or blue, I will do it that way.

She says something about the technique they use to remove tattoos, some instrument that zaps them away, leaving segmented scars, which they’d have to go over again for a few sessions. She’d have to rub on some kind of vitamin rich lotion, keeping in mind that she’s allergic to a lot of lotions, etc., so she’s decided the blackouts simultaneously show solidarity (to what?) and a kind of rebelliousness, simultaneously to go out in public without dicks hanging off her skin, meanwhile still remaining a menace, to be multicultural and multinatural, to which I respond (to myself) that a lot of what Tanya says is full of shit, all the while I’ve started to feel a kind of rumbling in my mouth, like the torus is growing. I interpret this, anyway, as a call to distance myself emotionally.

 

So I offer myself a form of therapy which involves going into the bathroom at night when Tanya’s asleep, sitting on the toilet, and chanting lines from a song I remember from my childhood. I do this quietly. I also look for faces in the spatters of paint on the ceiling. I have a notebook in hand. I’m thinking of drawing the tiger’s eye and mechanical vice, but when I start to draw I realize I can’t make a circle. Not many people draw circles that are worth a damn. I have this idea in my head that if I keep up the work I’m doing and if the work I’m doing isn’t good enough, I’ll be at the grocery store forever, pushing buggies or shoving milk to the front of the rack. I think this is okay for a little bit. A lot of people shove milk to the front of the rack for a living. I’d get to come home at the end of the day and relax and not have to think about anything work-related. And then there’s Tanya, who doesn’t have a job yet. She has beautiful eyes, and she tells me I have a beautiful mouth, she doesn’t care about the torus, my mouth is just wonderful, she squeezes my hand, pinches my nose, buys me food sometimes, asks me how I’m feeling, tells me we need to talk, tells me she’s been feeling philosophical, asks me what’s bothering me, pokes my ribs and laughs, pours water down my shirt, throws bugs on me, curls her knees up in front of her chin and tells me she’s not feeling so great—”You know, emotionally?”—asks me why I don’t ever ask how she’s feeling anymore, asks me whether I really care about her feelings, etc., I don’t remember all the things I need to remember about Tanya, but I swear to her I’m getting there. Just give me a little bit of time and I’ll be the most perfect boyfriend you’ve ever had.

 

There are other ways to give myself therapy. In the bathroom, I ask myself a list of questions on the spot. What was my childhood like? When I was little my dad would pickle eggs and he’d add onions, peppers, and chili powder. Even further back: we’d go fishing, I’d get the line snagged on something in the water, a tree trunk or whatever, I’d snap the line back, and he’d yank the rod out of my hand and jerk it violently, red-faced, until the line came loose.

I was caught masturbating two times: when I was twelve and when I was seventeen. When I was twelve I used a pillow and when I was seventeen I was in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet.

One of the scariest things that ever happened when I was little: I was sitting in Mom’s lap and we both heard someone creeping around in the attic. Mom picked me up and ran down the road with me in her arms, and I have no idea why we didn’t take the car.

One time when I was helping Tanya move out of her trailer on the coast I noticed this guy’s name on the wall next to her bed. This Thomas guy, she said, was an old boyfriend, she’d do anything for the guy, she said, she’d even go back to him if he ever turned up.

What if he came back, what if he wanted her? Furthermore, why did they break up? Does she love me? Does she see me as some replacement for Thomas? Was there anything wrong with Thomas? Is there something wrong with me, for feeling the way I do about Tanya?

When I first started doing this therapy thing in the bathroom I thought it’d be easy to answer questions if I was also the one asking them.

The first time she told me about Thomas, there was an ashtray sitting in bed with us. I never thought anyone smoked in bed like this. We’d been sleeping together, but neither of us probably felt anything like love yet. And then she told me all about Thomas and why she loved him. She told me the whole thing. There’s really no point in repeating it. The point is that I’ve had this problem ever since where I’ve compared myself to this person that I’ve never met.

 

I used to climb in the metal parts piled under the big tree in my grandpa’s yard. I used to shoot pellets at trees just to hear the wood click. I developed what I’ll call a drinking problem just before dropping out of college and I considered doing AA for a little while but then I told a friend about my drinking problem and my friend didn’t think my drinking problem was really big enough for AA. I ask myself whether I’ve had good friends in the past, and my answer is usually no, probably not. I ask whether Tanya is a friend, or a girlfriend, or both, whether such a thing is possible this early on.

I’ve also just gotten nervous about being with her, since she’s started blaming me for everything that’s gone wrong with her life.

As a form of therapy, I sit on the toilet and make a list of all the things I’ve done to help ruin Tanya’s life:

            1—Helped Tanya move out of her trailer

            2—Told her I wished she’d get a flower tattooed on her right forearm

            3—Gave her money, one time, for beer, which she later claimed was some scheme to help support her bad “habit”

            4—When she leaned over, when we were in bed, she kissed my forehead, and I traced her face down to her eye, kissed her on the mole

 

I feel lonely. Nothing nobody’s ever felt before.

 

Riding the boulevard makes me feel better. I think about calling some friends up. I haven’t seen my friends in a long time. But since I started seeing Tanya, we’ve all gotten out of touch and I’ve been able to step back and see how this must have hurt them, and I have a feeling they wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me now. Except one of my friends is finishing college, and emails pictures of his dogs and the big tree outside in front of the administrative building among other things.

I kind of get irritated thinking about what other people are doing. I’m coming home every day, have this sort of routine where I’ll put a puzzle together a few minutes before getting frustrated, then pick at the bill of my hat and watch television while Tanya sits in the bedroom, doing whatever it is Tanya does when she’s alone.

I’ve distanced myself enough to finally kick her out. I feel that heat in me. It grows outward, like a quivering, immense liquid.

 

In the middle of the night I’m still in the chair watching television when I hear a hard rumbling, the side of the trailer bending in by the weight of the deer’s antlers. Then I hear a scraping at the door. I go to the door and look out and the deer is standing there in the gravel next to my car, snarling at me. I look down at my shirt and see this yellow stain where I’ve been drooling. I’ve been sleeping so hard and well even next to Tanya which I have grown to despise and who didn’t know what I planned to do—even through all this emotional turmoil inside me, I’m sleeping so hard I’m drooling all over the place, the torus so big it’s hard to contain it all.

I go out to the deer. It stomps and huffs, tears ass over the hood of my car before loping into the woods.

When I go back inside, Tanya is waiting next to the bedroom door. “What was that?” she says.

“Somebody fucking with my car,” I say. “They’re gone now.”