Consumer

	Tap. Tap. Tap.
	It was one of those days that feels like an intercalary chapter in The Grapes of Wrath. It was raining, but not the romantic sort of rain. It was cold rain on a hot day that frizzled all the girls’ Herbal Essenced hair and snarled everyone’s usual Chicken Soup for the Soul temper. Not the poetic high that makes you want to twirl through emerald forests with a lover, only the sloshy misery of soaked Eddie Bauer socks and muddy Calvin Klein jeans.
	It was a day you knew might mean something in the long run, but was drippy and boring as hell in present reality.
	Kana watched the pissy rain behind a streaked Marriot hotel window pane, desperately hoping that repeatedly tapping her Uni-Ball pen against the glass would awaken literary inspiration. Seven stories beneath her, irritated figures blurred by the rain scurried back and forth. A young Tommy Hilfigger couple squabbled and angrily parted ways. A young blond toddler lost her balance on the slippery black concrete and fell, yowling in pain and annoyance. Kana pondered hurling herself from the hotel window just to break the monotony of the scene, the pink and crimson oozing from her shattered skull competing with Coca-Cola’s colorful brilliance.
	She often wondered why her boyfriend’s post-sex bathroom rituals lasted long enough for her to develop writer’s block.
	She turned from the window and crossed the hard carpet to the dingy green hotel chair where her size five Victoria’s Secret satin panties had landed after gracefully sailing a considerable distance through the air. She pulled them up over her prickly legs, shaved with her Silk Effects razor nearly three days ago, over the irritated bikini line Skintimate Shave Gel had failed to protect. She hated to acknowledge her genitalia after intercourse. To her, the area was little more than swollen, slimy, disgusting evidence of thwarted nature. The sterile, plastic taste of Trojan latex still hung in the back of her throat like the scent of a gynecologist’s examination room. A necessary evil, to be sure, but one that bled the punch out of “fuck,” the animal out of “carnal,” the abandonment out of “passion.”
	She fumbled with the unnecessarily tricky catches of her Second Skin bra and stepped into her L.E.I. flare jeans. Shirtless, she glanced back at the window. Her eyes shrouded in Focus Daily contact lenses flashed over the scene, skidded to a halt, and hit reverse five frames to the left.
	The stranger standing in front of the window watched her with a pleasant smile, naked and handsome, shaggy black hair tumbling over his laser-green eyes, porcelain skin, hung like a horse, shifting casually back and forth on the balls of his feet, his black feathered wings furling and unfurling with the swaying motion.
	Puzzled, Kana opened her mouth a little and cocked her head thirty degrees to the right. She considered a moment. Then she looked him straight in the eyes and announced,
	“You’re not real.”
	His slight grin widened into a genuinely happy smile, and he swung his head from side to side in agreement. He started toward her.
	She watched, completely at ease with the notion that she had finally jumped off the deep end.
	Several nights ago on her Easy Touch telephone, she had drunkenly and tearfully confessed that she couldn’t wait until she finally went crazy, because then they would put her on so many drugs that the world would make sense.
	He had advanced so that his chin was just above the top of her head, accompanied by the odor of fresh stone and dead rivers. She hadn’t known you could smell hallucinations.
	“I want to show you something,” he said in a husky baritone voice. Then he wrapped his enormous feathery wings around her, holding her close to his alabaster white body.
	“Um, could I grab my knit Gap baby tee shirt?” Kana had the presence of mind to query. But by the time the sentence had congealed and escaped on her breath, it was too late. Her hallucination released her and spun her around, holding her firmly by the shoulders.
	A cavern. Misshapen rock formations, dripping underground streams, and the dusky orange glow of a fire.
	“Where are we?” she whispered.
	“The beginning.”
	She watched as Henry Ford’s wife used animal skins to absorb her menstrual flow. Upton Sinclair watched in horror as half-eaten animal carcasses where dumped next to the nursery. Albert Einstein relieved himself in a bush while Amelia Earheart gave birth to Christopher Colombus’s child on the cave floor.
	Kana whimsically addressed her companion. “Ever read Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”?
	He smiled. “Have you?”
	She remembered embarrassedly that she had not.
	“Show me the end.”
	Once again the black feathers engulfed her. She found herself drowning in a river of clouds, people, cars, cultures, McDonald’s, and death, raging around her, above her, and beneath her, deafening. Terrifying.
	“It’s always the end,” came the explanation. Then the rustle of feathers, and merciful silence.
	Back in the hotel room.
	“Are you an angel?” she asked confusedly.
	“If you need me to be.”
	“Supposing I did?”
	“Then you must be dead.”
	This answer being decisively unsatisfactory, she switched into another vein.
	“Are you Satan?”
	“Yes.”
	“Am I going to Hell?”
	He tenderly traced the curve of her cheek, sending warm, pleasant electric pulses pounding through her bloodstream. “You don’t believe in Hell.”
	“I don’t believe in you either.”
	He laughed, a deep, rich sound. He steered her toward the Marriot bed and gently forced her down. Bringing his chiseled face so close to hers that she could feel his hot breath on her lips he murmured, “But you believe in passion, instinct, emotion. It’s enough.” His hand caressed her throat, stroked her satin-bound breasts. “You believe in humanity.” His hand continued its downward journey, felt between her thighs.
	“Are you God?” she asked breathlessly.
	“Yes.”
	“Are you the force that cannot be defined or explained?”

	“Of course.”
	Kana closed her eyes and gave herself up.

	Twenty minutes later, the force that cannot be defined or explained had vanished into the bathroom to dispose of the spermicidally lubricated birth control device.
	Tap. Tap. Tap.
	Kana sighed and stared naked at the pissy rain. Then she stood up and got dressed, still uninspired and wondering if her boyfriend was still in the bathroom, too. As for the other, despite the wonderful visual and verbal foreplay, all she had to show for it were sore thigh muscles and a dry throat, from the same old push-pull-remove-and-flush exercise.
	And nothing made any more sense than it had before.