Some knowledge gives us inner pleasure. To wit: I think of the time I first smelled marzapan. I remember knowing right then that sex with anyone except myself was going to be out of the question. I was seven I think.

Picture it at our old place in Colorado in the late December, me outside, by the sauna. The place was steaming. Maybe we were skiing or something, but the smell was of damp wood and there were echoes and mountains. I don’t remember everything. Picture my mother baking some sort of a cake, and me (small, nimble, thin) pattering around the backyard, coming up with theories; why the snow was early this year, why frostbite turned things blue, where my father had disappeared to earlier that year. My mother: "Russell, come away from there, you’ll get pneumonia." And I knew it. The sex, the pneumonia, the aftershocks of some revelation; it was all in alignment. I wasn’t to go into the sauna because I was prone to getting sick.

My mother lifted me up on the table, and put a wooden spoon in my mouth and that was the first time I tasted marzapan. When she turned away, I ate more of it, and soon I was sick and couldn’t move for days. It was some kind of diabetic shock, and I remember the doctor calling me "Roy" as I buzzed in and out of consciousness. When I think back on it, I find the wooziness very romantic. I’m a sucker for a love story.

That was the Winter my mother slept with her brother and was taken away. Her brother was taken away too, I dunno where. I never saw them again. But theirs was a love story, and I found a diary of my mom’s when I was 13 that describes the whole damn thing. It’s fascinating. If I ever saw her again, I’d never tell her I read it, but it’s like looking inside of her head. It’s like pulling the gray matter of her brain out through her ear and spreading it all out on a table and taking a magnifying glass and looking at every synapse and every cell, and it’s totally beautiful. Sometimes when I read it I feel like I’m eating her brain.

I’ve since been in saunas. Damp bodies, heat. It’s fun and disorienting. I go to see what happens. I like to drink heavily and then pass out in them. I did this in my gym and the trainers carried my limp, naked body out and put me on a massage table. There was first-aid, resuscitation. Someone splashed me with water and it was like a new world. Alcohol isn’t really a depressant, I don’t think. I always become wildly optimistic when I’m drunk.

And also whenever I smell marzapan. It’s like some kind of trigger. It makes me want to eat the whole cake, or whatever is in front of me. I’m a Pavlov dog. I tried to commit suicide when I was eighteen, but even the memory of the smell of marzapan got me to come out of the washing machine before I put myself through the spin cycle. But I guess I’m still a little depressed. I prefer to think I am a melancholiac with the appetite of a horse. I can eat you under the table. But we’d probably never meet. And if we did, I might be prone to violent seizures or disintigration.

I haven’t talked to people since I was twenty. I’m not a mute. I talk to myself in private, and the words still seem to come out okay. But I don’t want to talk to people or have sex with people or do any of the other things that people do. It’s kind of a luxury, not to talk. Truth be told I barely leave the house, and that’s kind of a luxury too. But my father left me seven million dollars when he died and I’ve been pretty luxurious since then. I live in a loft in Soho and drink only the finest champagne.

I try and exist only on the Internet. I have many Internet presences and I often place personals ads to get weird responses. I have fun with myself like that. I like the future, and I like how the present is like the future. And I often dream that the future will be more and more nostalgic for simple things like marzapan.

I’m not averse to pornography. I find it fascinating. All these people wrapped in prezel shapes entering and exiting each other, playing role games, defining themselves by the way that they look or how fluids emerge from them. But I am never really turned on by it. I have never had sex, and I hate bodies. I am interested by them, but I hate them. I even hate the body of Irma, the cleaning lady who comes twice a week. I see it through the frosted glass of the shower where I hide from her. She knows I hate her body and cleans quickly and leaves.

Tonight is my birthday. It is Autumn, and I am watching the rain fall. I am making a cake and thinking of my mother and her brother. The batter is sweet and I am happy.

 

RUSSEL DALTRY is a very short and fearful man from Colorado. He lives in New York. Don't even try and find him, though. He doesn't want whatever encyclopedias you're selling.