My doctor says if he could do it over again, he’d be a realtor, but I think he should have been a stand up comedian. I’d get my real estate license and study finance, he tells me. This is before he launches into one of his familiar bits. His Eric Clapton impression, for example. He likes to do his British accent for me because he knows my dad is British, which he figured out because of my last name. What kind of name is that, he asks. Then he’ll do some material about his wife, who is from Italy, or some stuff about beating up the Irish kids in the neighborhood when he was a young man.

I ask him what baseball team he likes and he goes into a new routine about the Yankees. The problem with that team is all of the Caribbean boneheads, he says. A nurse walks past the door, down the hallway. She walks like such a man, he says loudly, doesn’t she?

A comedian, or maybe a red-pilled podcaster. Or maybe not. He’s a little too old.

***

A young girl waits on the grass at Irving Square Park, as she does every Sunday after church. Her family attends Spanish mass at 10am. She’s waiting for her friend, who’s family will not be done with their service in the small brick building on the other end of the park until at least 12:15.

On Saturday nights the park is full of men drinking and pissing all over the park and the adjoining streets. By Sunday afternoon, when the neighborhood's residents come to walk their dogs, the smell has dissipated somewhat, save the surrounding alleyways and delis. The girl likes the smaller ones, especially the well-manicured poodles and terriers, but is nervous every time she sees a pit bull. Within two years she has trouble seeing the board and starts to fall behind in school. The doctors say it is cancer of the retina. Within three years the fits begin. The doctors say it is epilepsy.

***

I walk through a set of double doors, past the sign in the window reading WALK-INS WELCOME, and into the waiting room, standing before the front desk. I continue to stand. The woman behind the desk is engaged, waiting on the telephone and looking for files on the computer. After some minutes she looks up from the screen and asks me the reason for my visit. Gastro-intestinal, I say.

The woman breaks eye contact and looks back at the computer screen. You need an appointment for that.

***

If you’re fishing off the Olympic Peninsula, you can only legally keep the farmed Salmon, the Captain says. These have a distinctive notch cut into the fin, while the Wild Salmon have no notch. The party leaves the dock at 5:30, much later than the 4:30 start time the captain’s secretary wife had recommended in a text message the previous evening. At 8:47 one of three reels starts to take off and the captain makes sure it is actually a fish before handing off the rod to the party’s only female member to reel in. But the Salmon has no notch and there are no more bites that day. By noon the captain suggests that they return to shore. He says it is his worst day of the year and later that evening the secretary wife sends another text to offer the group a partial refund of $200.

Three would-be fishermen return from a voyage to the brewery. The strip mall by their campsite is the only place like it for two hours in every direction. Their truck is the newest vehicle in roughly the same. As they pull into the parking lot some locals look up from their cash registers to size up the visitors and guess their origin before returning to count change. The gaze of one man collecting shopping carts lingers on the female for an extra moment. The fishless men cast their line down the store aisles, hunting for snacks and gathering bundles of firewood wrapped in plastic. They reel in some antacids to soothe their sore throats, still raw from puking in the captain’s pee bucket.

I got one, one of them says, holding up a silvery Coho slapped with an orange price tag. Their catch is magnificent. A wild, never frozen, Pacific Salmon, the likes of which would surely fetch the highest price in the markets of their homeland.

***

A boy goes to another school one extra day a week, where they tell the kids not to eat the food at their other school. They say don’t eat the crispy bacon or the sausages at the Boy Scouts pancake breakfast. But the boy eats the bacon, and the sausage, and pepperoni pizzas, and even the Italian submarine sandwich. At the special school they only give the children donut holes, sometimes. After lessons.

During the lessons they teach the children how to pray in a language none of them understand, but if they could have it would have gone something like this: God has forbidden only the flesh of pigs because he is lenient. But the book also says that some others were made to keep all of their rules because God was angry with them. They had taken the rule from their masters, who hated the pig-eaters from the swampy lands down river. The boy understands none of this, but when he becomes a man and someone offers him a ham sandwich, he always feels slightly off put and declines.

The boy’s grandfather sits him down for a lesson. He is used to these. What to say when you sneeze. What to say when you do something with intention. The old house is full of strange objects, like the small jug that sits next to the toilet. The old man tells the boy which hand to eat with and which to wash with. The boy listens with his usual level of seriousness and attention when his grandfather calls him in for these talks, and does not point out that, unlike his grandmother and grandfather, who eat with their hands, he eats with a knife and fork.

***

At the gate to the camp the three are approached by a family in an RV behind them, and are soon being shouted at by a woman in a Go-kart for giving away the gate code. They pull past a sign reading DUMPING STATION and a man in latex gloves feeding a tube from his trailer into the ground, past the family with Mexican license plates and two purebred dogs and the most state of the art trailer on the entire site. When they return to their site it is almost dark.

The couple retires to the trailer, cutting their catch into thick steaks along the fish’s spine and dusting it with dry spices. By the time they emerge from the tiny kitchen, the third member of their party has the fire going. How does everyone like their salmon, the man asks. Medium for me, the woman says. The third wheel likes his rare. I’m a caveman, he says.

They cook the fish on the large metal grill, making sure to let it get hot to disinfect the surface. They drink beers and take turns going into the camper to smoke, the welcome pamphlet having specified that marijuana, while legal in Washington State, is strictly prohibited on this PRIVATE campground. When their food is done they slice into the flesh, inspecting it for doneness. The meat is smoky and pink and delicious and for some moments they sit in the light of the fire and stars silently, chewing their food. One man feels a tingle at the back of his throat and coughs.

The woman looks closely into her fish. Why is it moving, she says.

***

A Nicaraguan paramilitary is hit by a 5.56 NATO round fired from an AR-15 style rifle. The smaller cartridge has a tendency to tumble when it hits human flesh, unlike the large 7.62 bullet of an AK-47, which most of the Sandinistas carry, and will typically pass through a human torso.

When the man is taken to surgery, Doctors discover a 60cm round worm which swims from his intestine to the abdominal cavity.

***

I would have came harder if I wasn’t hung over, the girl says. Will you suck my dick, the boy asks. Yes, she says, you deserve it. She squints to inspect the underside of his penis, studying it intensely before taking it in her mouth. Whoever did your circumcision really botched the job.

She touches his hand on the back of her own head. Be careful. He picks the girl up and lays her down underneath him. Can I fuck you? Not without, she says, pointing down at the dick. He goes into the drawer in his bedside table. Then he is inside her.

Are you gonna come for me baby, she asks. He focuses on how she feels, but nothing happens. What do you like, she asks again. The boy considers for a moment. I don’t want to say. The girl is curious now. What is it, she says, grinning. No, he says, I can’t. I’m weird. I’m fucked up. I’m a pervert.

***

My visits to the doctor are usually filled with lighthearted, senile banter, and the occasional tidbit of information. Or once in a while a lecture or serious life lesson. Last time he told me the story of Maria Hernandez, who was murdered by drug dealers in Bushwick, around the time he was growing up. They named a park after her.

Today he is deadly serious. The most serious I have ever seen him. He listens to my story and shakes his head. Don’t ever do that again, he says.

He looks at me intensely and his eyes narrow. Have you ever had a strange sensation, he asks, late at night. Like something crawling around your anus.

***

Funny thing about our neighbors in Colorado, the radio DJ says. Now you can’t drink a beer at a bar. You can’t eat at a restaurant. Of course, you can go right out to your car and smoke a joint in the parking lot. Now how does that make sense.

The white landscape extends to the horizon in every direction as though the world was encased in an eggshell. The two men let the lady use the trailer’s toilet, while they go to use the concrete toilet shed by the side of the road. It is one of two structures on the exit, including an observation tower made of the same cement. The three meet back in the truck. One man’s face is as white as the desert. I just pulled something out of my ass.

***

In London, a young Irish dock worker is dissected on an operating table. His body is full of tiny spirals. Some years later, doctors find them still writhing in the body of a German farm girl. Two hundred years later a man on the computer preaches the benefits of running with no shoes. He takes pictures of the bush meat he eats each day. Millions of people listen. His brain and heart are full of spirals. A crowd of people gather around a tent in a parking lot. The tent is serving carrion. They eat the barbequed bear carcass with a smile.

Among the crowd at Washington Square, a young man holds aloft a slice of cardboard scrawled with permanent marker. It reads simply: I EAT ASS. For years, poets like the young man have come to this place to spread their gospel, propelled by an invisible force within.

The power of this ancient message radiates for thousands of miles in every direction, drawing pilgrims from across the globe, and the city continues to grow, disappearing up its own ass, forever.