Harlot

Warrick was diagnosed with an undiagnosable disorder which rendered him unable to get out of bed. He wasn’t paralyzed; it was as if there were invisible walls around each side of his bed, exactly like the one it was propped up against. Doctors from around the world had taken a gander at attempting to treat his disorder, using approved treatments to gimmicky nostrums, but nothing seemed to have any effect on his inability to get out of bed. When they finally gave up trying to find a cure for his insolvable predicament, they bought him the most gossamer custom designed mattress and pillows and provided him with a caretaker who changed his bedding and fed him three times daily. As Warrick hadn’t made many friends or acquaintances during his brief lifetime before the onset of his disorder (he was only twenty four) and the rest of his family had already deceased, specifically due to tragic accidents or suicides, his caretaker, a man around his age that was so in shape he always looked like his clothes would shred apart and he would spontaneously combust, was, aside from the various doctors who treated more as a puzzle more so than a person, his only visitor.
Being bed-ridden had its meager advantages, though, including access to an infinite arsenal of pharmaceutical drugs. It was also a relief to actually sleep in a bed that wasn’t hostile towards him. Ever since he was twenty-one, his own bed had began to act rather…odd. It would grumble at him; rumble and shuffle, as if stomping; whoop up the sheets like a woman’s dress in the wind. He tried sleeping on the couch but he could still hear the threatening grumbling coming from his room; when he put in earplugs the grumbling became ever louder. He would knock on the next door neighbor’s apartment, very reluctantly, and ask if they heard any disturbance coming from his apartment but they shook their heads.
Warrick was a reclusive, aloof, astute man, one who tended to avoid confrontation and observe it in its stead. For two years he managed to ignore his bed’s personified, bizarre antics. He quickly discovered that the bed wasn’t always annoyed with him; in fact, it was rather temperamental. Sometimes it would make its own self. Other times it would ignore him completely, as if asleep itself.
Obviously, Warrick couldn’t invite company over in fear that the bed would react adversely. He wouldn’t have invited company over anyhow, but the confirmation that he couldn’t made it all the worse. By the last year, before his own bed encaged him, he had started to converse with it, or at least, attempted to. His loneliness was a tactual shroud, looming behind him like a porous cape. It was as if the peripheral perforated him until he was no longer a man but the actual shroud. He should have had a job three years ago; he’d been living off his father, who’d even gone as far to buy him his own apartment. They were close; Warrick’s mother had died during childbirth.
Twilight before his own bed swallowed him he was drinking beer in Central Park, trying to balance falling leaves on the tips of his sneakers. He’d been caught drinking in public so many times that he knew all the judges when he’d attend the summons; they’d just chuckle and ask him for local pub beer recommendations. He glanced at the pick-up team basketball players on the public court, sweating so much he mistook them for mermen in his dipsomania. He moseyed around the walkway of a fenced-in field until he’d passed the same crooked bench so many times it implored him to sit down; not that he could have wobbled on for much longer. He gazed out onto the empty field and tears of nostalgia swelled up in his eyes; tears that weren’t deserved because he’d never been to this field before. He pulled out the last beer in his satchel, drying his eyes with the sleeve of his coat; he downed the bear in two swigs and staggered home.
When he woke up, he couldn’t get out of bed. At first he thought he was drunk from the night before, but when he stuck his hand out and actually felt an actual wall where he’d flop his legs up to the knee down from his bed upon getting up the reality began to settle and at first, he was momentarily shocked, in disbelief, not long after in panic, screaming, screaming hoping that maybe if he screamed loud enough someone would hear him and, how could, how could he explain that he was incarcerated by his own bed? The bed seemed to be laughing at him, brimming with mirth; he assaulted the pillows, jabbing at them furiously until he was out of breath. Three hours of this ensued before he heard someone gently tapping on his door, in which he retaliated with a manic bellow for help. Eventually workers for the building opened his apartment door and walked into his room, mistaking what they saw for a talking mime. They swore at him for wasting their time but as they turned to leave his enraged desperation recaptured their attention.
Warrick spoke so fast it took nearly ten minutes for him to speak legibly. When he finally conveyed that he couldn’t physically remove himself from his own bed one of the workmen tried to get into bed with him, albeit reluctant. He got in and out and shrugged. Apparently, though, Warrick insisted that he could not, and he his tale was convincing enough for the workmen to call 911 because they believed he was insane. When an ambulance showed up they attempted to strap him down onto a stretcher but could not pull him out of his bed. Bewildered, they lugged his entire bed into the ambulance and drove him to the hospital.
He was transferred from ICU (where he received no intensive care and no one visited him except untimely nurses and hustled doctors), to psych ward, to scientific laboratory, to isolated military compound. Finally, he was transferred to somewhere unbeknownst to him. They fed him books, laptops, computer games, twenty-four hour long commercials. Anything he requested was immediately answered or delivered to him, even illicit drugs in monitored dosages. The only thing he wasn’t allowed access to was firearms and other weaponry—to an extent, of course, as a laptop could be, in a certain light, be used as a weapon. Men in hazmat suits occasionally visited him aside from the normal slush of doctors and the constant admonishment of his caretaker. Sometimes they found the bed to be more intriguing than him, and vice versa. They sampled everything there was to be sampled, though from what he could discern from their facial expressions, they found nothing out of the ordinary.
He tried to reach out to them. It was a demoralizing sensation, and eventually he grew morose and jaundiced, medicinally surfeit, not as much as changing positions in his down cell. They could reach out to him, but he couldn’t reach out to them. It was as if his whole life had been actualized into an allegory. People walked by him as if he was an object that was once novel but had been walked by so many times that it was no longer even noticed. He began to regret never loving anyone. There were so many, many people he could have loved, loved? That he could have known! He had nothing of a legacy to leave behind; his life had been humble and he had been tragically, albeit romantically (though deliberately), withdrawn.
One day he asked his caretaker if he could fetch him a lover, an unconditional lover; someone who loved him despite his paralytic predicament. His caretaker said this was impossible. Warrick brooded, then asked for a prostitute, a hired girl. His caretaker considered this for a moment and then nodded, stepping zealously out of the room. Within thirty minutes a girl no older than twenty swaggered into Warrick’s room, her nose plugged so she wouldn’t be engulfed by the wicked fumes of Warrick’s body odor.
She waded lithely onto his bed, crawling tantalizing forwards. He immediately hated himself. He hated everything around him. Love was squandered, again, and this being, this creature, despicable though considered beautiful, that he craved when deprived though merely tolerated when granted, squeezing the bed sheets sensually, promiscuously; she obviously had much more experience than he did, she wasn’t alone, was never alone, never knew what was like to be alone—he wanted to converse with her, perhaps she knew what it was like to be alone, having made love, or what she considered having “fucked”, to some many john’s, in so many brothels and run-down, debauched, derelict, shadowed niches and recesses hidden conspicuously throughout life that the majority only dabble in once or twice during their lives.
He asks her, how long has she been doing this, why she’s doing this, she doesn’t have to be doing this. She shrugs and persists on slithering towards him like a contortionist. He softly places his hands on her shoulders, indicative of intimacy, and arrests her until she’s staring into his eyes, addled and turbid. He gently breathes in and out, anxious, mustering up the words to convey that he doesn’t desire her, that he does but, he’d rather get to know her, that he’d rather pay to have an acquaintance rather than know another stranger.
Shirking from his intensity, she stutters at first, then tells him she’s only been doing this for two weeks, mainly with friends of friends, people she’s already known. He then reaches forth and burrows his head into her shoulder, unable to speak; the mind has its own explanation, its exaggerated, romanticized, elaborated, embellished, inhuman story of its own; a story that weaves a threnody, beneath of which the crows caw, that walls itself between human to human until they’re unable to reach out to one another, much like the predicament accursed himself.
The prostitute cradles his head…empathetically, leerily. He does not cry, or sob, or weep. Suddenly he raises his head and his lips graze hers; startled, she springs back; then, with an eerie impulse, leans in until they’re lips are touching; they don’t kiss. He begins to whisper.
“Let me show you something.”