alex beaumais – malta maykop: part two [workshopped]

This is an excerpt from a novella. For the first part, see Misery Tourism. 


Malta Maykop came back in a white lab coat carrying a clipboard on which she scribbled notes. She handed me an orange-lidded specimen cup: “I must see your pee.”
	“Where’s the bathroom?” 
	“You’re afraid of female gaze, dear?”
	I shook my head.
	“I must see everything eventually. The bathroom is beside front door, as you like it.”
	I walked towards the bathroom. A metallic alien skull hung like an antler trophy. The bathroom door only slid shut half-way and a laminated sign said “SMILE FOR CAMERAMAN.” 
	I unscrewed the cup and effortlessly filled it to the dotted line with riboflavin yellow. As I zipped up and stood taller, my head whacked something—a silver showerhead craning over the toilet. I felt the goose egg, imagining Malta Maykop trafficking in a plumber from the land of checkpoints and heavy machinery to install this autistic, not-to-spec bathroom. 
	I returned to the couch and handed Malta Maykop the sample. She brought it to the window and peeled back the black drapes, eyes watering as she scanned the outside world for pedestrians, laborers, spies. “No, no, my dear.” She turned on her phone’s torchlight, got on her knees to duck under the window, and lit up the sample. 
	“In my nation,” she said, “you would be in hospital right now. In my country young children memorize anatomical diagrams. We know the spleen, the meridians, the parathyroid.” She approached with feline steps and lightly bopped my nose: “The cock.” She grinned: “In my nation we don’t let people flop out of their mother and roam the streets in illness. In my country health comes at the butt of a gun. We are normal.”
	I wasn’t buying it. “How can I be sick? Don’t you need to pour it over a test strip or use a microscope? It looks like that because of all the vitamins.”
	She threw her head back to chuckle, which revealed the piggy upturned slope of her nose. “My dearest Zachary, I provide hop-on, hop-off emergency-style ambulatory service extremely pro-bono, as you like it, and in payment I hear what your countrymen call ‘mother issues,’ as you like it. How can I penetrate sharp exterior of your mystery if you don’t believe in your heart? But as for answering question in fashion of ‘citation needed’ query in connection of science of piss and such thing, I put forward cloudy sallow pallor of snow-globe sample, along with tiny bacterial minefield of potential particulate matter detectable through fighter-pilot vision. No microscope needed. In my country we are normal and we freely diagnose such things.”
	Malta Maykop proposed replacing the national healthcare system based on blood tests, radiological imaging, interview-based diagnostics, physicals, and breast and prostate feeling with an expanded regimen of urine tests to cut the bloated costs and complexity. “We could be enjoyers of splendid new paradigm,” she said, explaining how in her nation there were people, often men, afflicted with the inability to defocus their eyes, which resulted in searing between-eye pain but also a heightened ability in ancient times to spot dinosaurs or woolly mammoths or, in early modern times, to sit in castle turrets and spot crusading armies, and that this could be harnessed to spot the particulate in jars of piss. However, I was unmoored from urinalysis and healthcare ideology and was fixated squarely on the idea that I was sick, whether chronically or acutely; that despite self-identifying as healthy (notwithstanding an unapologetically prediabetic A1C reading and a stray girlfriend or two telling me “you’re sick”) I was unwell; that, far from simply dropping my obstinate defiance towards experts of all stripes, it was time to cradle in the bosom of Malta Maykop and enter my illness arc. 

*

After an interregnum somewhere between two and fifteen minutes that represented my last chance to escape and vent to my ragtag internet extremist crew, Malta Maykop click-clacked back in her lab coat, her hair tied slickly back, her eyes fascistically determined in wide problem glasses, her hands clutching her clipboard. [I’M BACK: DID YOU MISS ME? GIVEN THAT YOU NEGLECTED TO PURCHASE MY E-MFA LECTURE SERIES, I’VE FORGONE EDITING THE ABOVE PORTION SO AS TO THROW INTO RELIEF THE INTRACTABLE INADEQUACY OF YOUR NAKED EFFORTS. AS FOR YOUR DESCRIPTION OF MS. MAYKOP, THIS SMACKS OF INEXPERIENCE OR EVEN INCELDOM, THE CURE TO WHICH REQUIRES A DEEP REIMAGINING OF YOUR RELATIONS TO WOMEN.]
	“Did you complete brief survey?” Malta Maykop asked.
	“I didn’t understand all the questions.”
	“Am I alien with four heads? Are we conversing in same tongue? Please try harder, if you like, and we discuss any problematic residues.”
	I looked down once more: 

COACHING INTAKE FORM

	Age: 39
	Genetic Age: __  ☑ Don’t know [need referral to advanced lab testing] 
	How Can I help You Reach The Stars in 3 words or less: _?____
	Wealth: ◻ very rich ☑ rich ◻  poor   ◻ insanity
	You Are Gay: ◻ yes ☑ no ◻ very  
	Vocation in 2 words or less: _SELL HOUSES___
	You like frequent Intoxication: ☑ yes ◻ no 
	Class: ◻ serf ◻ nobility ◻ insanity
	Chakra:  
	You are reincarnated: ◻ yes ◻ no ◻ very
	Member characteristics: GIANT
	Favorite sexuality: ◻Breast sex ◻Greek  ◻normal  ◻tie up ◻insanity
	Wive: ◻ 1 ☑ 0 ◻ 2+
	Beetles or Elvis: ◻ Beetles ☑ Elvis 
	Animal: ◻ Armadillo ◻ Feline 

	“About my member characteristics and the chakra…”
	Malta Maykop crossed her legs and looked up from her clipboard: “Mens cannot self-describe their sword yet we have expectation of their wielding it in battle. Is delightful paradox!” [PERHAPS OWING TO AN INTENDED COMEDIC EFFECT OR JUST FLAGRANT INCONSISTENCY, MALTA MAYKOP’S SPEECH IS DETERIORATING. AS SUCH, THE READING EXPERIENCE REQUIRES A SUSPENSION OF BELIEF: AN OPTING IN TO THE GNASHING SHARK JAWS OF A CRUEL META-TRAP SET FOR MS. MAYKOP BENEATH THE QUICKSAND OF DUMBASSERY ENGULFING ZACHARY SHMUEL. YOUR DEFIANCE IN NOT ORDERING MY VIDEO LECTURE SERIES IS RETARDING YOUR DEVELOPMENT AS A WRITER AND POSSIBLY YOUR META-COGNITION DOWN TO THE NEUROCIRCUITRY OF GRIPPING A PENCIL (OR KEYBOARD) AND TELLING A SIMPLE STORY.]
	I had a whole discourse about my penis and I wanted to tell her. I handed her my Coaching Intake Form and decided to tell her that the word “GIANT” I’d written was no mistake: that it was the skeleton key to my disquiet.
	“I have a whole discourse about my penis.” [I WOULD URGE YOU TO PUT IT AWAY, TO TAKE THIS PHALLUS OFF THE TABLE AND STRIKE IT FROM THE AGENDA. FOR EVERY CHAUVINISTIC DUDEBRO OR STRAY (HORRIBLY NAMED BUT POSSIBLY DECIPHERABLE TO YOU) “ART HOE” (I CAN’T BELIEVE I TYPED THAT SLUR BUT IT’S MERELY TO PIERCE THE ARMOR OF YOUR MISOGYNY WITH A POISONOUS DART CURE) WHO LIKES YOUR DICK DISCOURSE OWING TO INSUFFICIENT PARENT/GUARDIAN ATTACHMENTS IN CHILDHOOD, THERE WILL BE, CHARITABLY ASSUMING A READERSHIP FOR YOUR MORONIC FANTASIA, A PREPONDERANCE OF WELL-ADJUSTED WOMEN WHO WOULD SOONER WARM THEIR HEARTH WITH YOUR BOOK ON FIRE THAN BELIEVE IN IT, AS WELL AS, IF YOU’RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO GET TAUGHT A LESSON YOU’LL NEVER FORGET, ONE OR TWO SHARP-TONGUED CRITICS WHO LOOK JUST LIKE ME, SAME BUILD, GLASSES, TATTOOES, SAME EDUCATION, SIGNATORY TO THE SAME PETITIONS, TAKING OUT THEIR BIG PENS TO MAKE THE FUNNIEST HAY AND FANFARE OUT OF YOUR DELUSIONAL PENCIL-DICK DISCOURSE!]
	Malta Maykop, scribbling maniacally on her clipboard, looked up to say, “Yes, you may relate discourse, if you like.” 
	Malta Maykop [YOU CAN STOP REPEATING HER NAME EACH TIME.] looked at me like a scientist, not like a physicist but like a divinely inspired social scientist, her inky blue-black hair dry-shampooed [ZACHARY SHMUEL WOULDN’T KNOW THIS DETAIL], eyes machine-calibrated behind wide frames—not too wide but a hair wide on an already not-too-wide-but-wide face that said “impregnate me” (note to editor: I, or rather the narrator, isn’t invoking an impregnation fantasy but merely suggesting that when a woman has a striking, almost fascist look about her hair, glasses, and so on, it represents a kink; we can delete this detail if you advise it). Malta Maykop’s fashy scientist look telescoped deep into her ancestry, past the hundreds of median Gaddafi concubine bauble heads to the one, two, or maybe three noble savage ancestor bauble heads reeling in my attention from the sad dark-matter ocean we call the world. I believe that Malta Maykop was wearing dummy lenses that neither magnified nor minified—similar to Ms. Maykop assessing the quality of urine without microscopes or dipsticks, I could estimate, based on my time in my grandfather Zachary Shmuel I’s optician shop as a youth, whether someone was nearsighted or farsighted based on their having fat bulging gremlin eyes versus malnourished preemie eyes. Malta Maykop’s eye shape was unremarkable and her lenses lacked the partial magnification suggestive of a presbyopic prescription, although in truth I could not guess her age, whether 25 or 55.  
	[THIS IS WHERE I GET OFF THE BUS: IN THE LONG DRUM MARCH TO THE DREADED DICK DISCOURSE. BEYOND THE MORALLY PUTRID INNUENDO AND MIXING OF METAPHORS, YOUR WRITING EVINCES A LACK OF FACILITY WITH CHARACTERIZATION. MY HOURLY RATE WITHOUT SUPPLEMENTAL VIDEO LECTURE PAYMENT CANNOT SAVE YOU. Y’ALL MIGHT WANT TO ASK SIRI ABOUT MY COLLEAGUE’S NEW REFORMED MASCULINITY COURSE “DEFANGING THE Y-CHROMOSOME: GENTLE APPROACHES.” I CAN’T BE BOTH YOUR THERAPIST AND YOUR WRITING INSTRUCTOR. I’M ON STRIKE.]


ALEX BEAUMAIS is the author of the novel Dox (tragickal, 2021) as well as short fiction at places like Fugitives & Futurists and poetry at DON’T SUBMIT! His website is beaumais.neocities.org. 


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