Hello, My Name Is: and yadda, she pins it to His lapel, its spike sticking through His bathrobe, His breast (later observers would describe Him, Him as Him — as if they’d known, or could’ve told the difference if only to tell it again well after the fact — as the height of inappropriateness, here in a house robe piped in pink, over His mother’s own robe trimmed in purple, both rattytatty, and holed), pricking Him to weep, His sacred heart. To pump Himself, then, from this nick of a question, Ben asking, what’s in a name — whether an inoculation against self, or a sanguinary palm smeared to mark the forehead in confusion, disbelief…blood, Ben thinks: maybe mine aren’t just impersonators; Jesus, do you think so they’re clones? Could be, could be worse. Holding Himself against the pain, the pains of both wound and thought, He tongues lips, sets teeth. Elaine hands Him a program. Explain blows a kiss to His booboo, is what she says from lips swollen with enhancement, botulinum, collagenital. He opens the paper to read right to left. How late tonight there’re still two midnight sessions to choose from: Doctor Tweiss’ scheduled to talk in the Shishak Suite about minimally invasive surgical options to, and He’s quoting: Get The Most Out Of Your Sinuses; competing with his brother Doctor Tweiss who he’s up late doing the Ramses Room in a discussion of the Metametymparapsychologyality of (Im)personational (Im)personation: An Excursus in Pretty Pictures & Lite Muzak; please pick up your vouchers from Registration, it’s urged.
Fat, frizzy almost menschs swarm Him away with them into an elevator then upstairs to either or both sessions included (How To Be Two Places At The Same Time: A Seminar for Expectant Mothers; a prerequisite for How To Do Two Things At Once II: A CrashCourse, kneepads not provided), but the food — it’s back down on the floor below buttoned the lobby’s L. Ben jiggles a flabby wriggle from their frazzled, cuticlebitten grasp, attempts to take the elevators again and this direction down, but the doors’ve already shut, fallen. He rests Himself against the buttons to summon the lights, God forbid walk a floor. Suddenly, the hallway’s hobbled through with Bens halting with walkers and quadcanes, disabled to wheelchairs (electric and wheeled by Himself, by His own best companions both in drag and in friendship, and in the spirit of charitable help), incarnations of any fate that might be His, forever robbed of their futures — with their constant flowmasks or nasal cannulas hooked up as if by strands of saliva to little, wienerlike oxygen tanks tubing attendance, and, too, them lying their spacesaving, moneysaving accommodation in the Q’asino’s sprawled ballrooms and hallways and even in the elevators He’s waiting for still atop a host of rental and stolen stretchers hauled, gurneys rolled on casters that squeak to suspect an infestation of mice from function to food again and again.
