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By Root 2338 0

and is unmentionable in polite society. It seems to me there are two things humans like to pretend simply do not happen—two things, two inescapable actions in life, one of which is a daily concern, and the other, come to think of it, is also a daily concern, even though it will only happen to you once: defecating and dying. There’s nothing else we treat with such embarrassment, such secrecy, nothing else we talk about in such couched euphemisms and hush-hush tones. Our sick and elderly we ferret away to die in the impersonal and sanitized environs of a hospital, pretending it’s only a temporary illness or a contagious virus requiring quarantine, confinement, shutting it out of the sphere of everyday life, and then when it happens we say that So-and-So has “passed away” or “gone to a better place.” And is that not exactly how we treat the very turds a healthy rectum must expel on a daily basis? We excuse ourselves from our fellows to disappear into this small bright sanitary room which no modern dwelling comes without, the sanctum of tiles and porcelain and running water, the hospital of the home, the place where we attend to matters of the body, where we bathe ourselves and bulwark our frail flesh and guts with all our hygienic defenses against a world that constantly besieges us with filth, the place of toothbrushing, flossing, shaving, applying makeup and deodorant, where we keep combs, brushes, hairspray, earwax syringes, toenail clippers, medicines and mouthwash, balms and salves, the place where we gaze at our reflections while sculpting ourselves into place for the day—and the place, Gwen, where we shit—where we lock ourselves in and secretly excommunicate these stinking brown heretics from our temples, then erase their miasma by thoroughly wiping the crevice between our nethercheeks with the ceremonial ablutionary tissue and send the whole mess spiraling into oblivion, down the maelström to the place of the unseen, sent to the underworld washed in the waters of Lethe—banished, forsaken, forgotten.

I was now walking bipedally almost all of the time. It was also around this time that I realized I was naked. And because I expressed a desire for clothing, Lydia took me shopping.

I had spent most of our life together naked before Lydia’s eyes, but for most of that time I did not yet know that I was naked. In fact, in my ape days I don’t think I even really realized that humans’ clothing was something physically apart from their bodies. Does that sound quaint to you? Such things are not necessarily immediately apparent. I failed to understand that clothes did not simply grow and regrow again on human flesh overnight, like a fungus. But as I became human, through careful observation I came to understand what clothes are. In the beginning of my acculturation, whenever Lydia took me to the lakefront in the summer, I would marvel to see the beautiful sapiens sapienettes all cavorting around on the sand with only two tiny membranous bits of elastic fabric keeping them from their animal nakedness. And I would watch and silently remark upon the changes of wardrobe Lydia went through in a day, the fascinating ephemera of her morning-to-night garment cycle: in the morning she peeled herself out of bed in her larval pajamas, of which she owned several pairs, including a nightgown of the old-fashioned variety typically worn by little girls in latently pedophilic Victorian children’s books, a slippery silk affair that her deceased mother had once sent her for a Christmas present, which shimmered and slithered all over her big mysterious body like a school of fish over underwater dunes (make a note of this nightgown, as it will later become important), and in this outfit she emerged from her sleeping chamber, rubbed at her eyes, padded around the house, woke Bruno if he wasn’t already awake, prepared a light breakfast for us while I exuberantly retrieved the newspaper from the doorstep—one of my few domestic chores in those early days, which I performed with the zeal of a fresh recruit—then ate with me, all in that woozy, discombobulated