new wave

manically criss-crossing the room along mappable coordinates and planes, he took apart every fixture, pulled every book down from its place along the wall or solitary bookshelf which could not contain their vast collection and in piles that defied ostensible logic, stacked them in scattered configurations around the room. the one dim light source in the room--a muted yellow bulb nakedly topping a porcelain lamps circa the nineteen-seventies--illuminated by way of omission, bringing out stark black shadows and messy outlines of stacked objects, the shapeless fruit of Nork's labor--spiraling towers and jagged-edged monuments of things, physical culture. once a month but sometimes only once every two months, if he could fight it, Nork performed this ritual: like a human garbage disposal or mad knife-wielding psychopath, taking apart his small one-room studio apartment, mutiliating its insides and then assembling it back together in a new order that made sense internally, to Nork, so that he was never finished until he could feel it in his bones--until it felt right and was comforting enough to look at. he never knew at the start of this process what he intended the apartment to look like once he was finished. he intended nothing except that it look different than before. sometimes: it took weeks--back and forth with trying to decide, finally, how to position or where to re-hang a single picture. other times: it took only one night and he didn't sleep. he went into work the next day, heavy-eyed and still fretting over the placement of a visible cord or a better location for the bed. he never knew what initiated the ritual but he knew that it had to happen--that it would happen and that nothing would be right in his world until the task had been carried out--the issue resolved.
one night: a girl was over. she was lying in his bed, Nork's semen spilling out of her vagina like an embarrassing grandparent. Nork didn't know why it embarrassed him. but it did: as if it were irrefutable evidence that he was still human despite his routines and rituals--still a creature affected by carnal impulses. the semen was evidence that Nork had lost the game he played of pretending to be anything but a sexual creature. it was evidence that something so silly as a naked body had caused him to ejaculate--and not a naked body, alone, but the physical sensation of genitals passing through genitals--his semen made him shameful of his maleness--that he'd needed an erection (which he considered embarrassing by itself) to produce this substance and that the girl wearing it, now with it running down her leg, less concentrated and looking more like benign tears, had no idea how he felt.