Cows Read Online Free PDF Page B

been exposed by a weak lightbulb and the passing of time as a deception. It was no longer the mystical, horrored passage to dream-time that had so attracted him in those early years.
    But standing there, silently gathering his courage outside Lucy’s flat, he could not help hoping that it might again become a section on some road to happiness. Not the real happiness that TV so accurately threw across the bareness of his bedroom—he could not hope for that—but an approximation of this ideal, a stockaded copying, built with the only materials at hand, within which his loneliness could be shallowly buried.
    Lucy opened the door, then drifted back and collapsed on a couch. Steven followed her in and sat at one end. The room looked like it had been picked up and shaken. A thousand small objects lay scattered over any surface that would hold them. Some of them were clothes and containers of food, but many were shiny steel and surgical in nature. Small lamps shone yellow in corners and a video played an abdominal operation—close-ups of blood on green medical cloth, tight angles on smeared rubber gloves probing inside a human, low-volume technical commentary.
    “They sell these to people who want to be doctors, to teach them. But I don’t think they look for the right things.”
    Lucy talked without taking her eyes off the screen. The surgeons manipulated organs and she started to shout, jerking forward, squinting. “Look! Did you see that, when he lifted the liver?”
    “What?”
    Lucy rewound with a remote. “There was something under it. Didn’t you see? It was black and shiny. Look.”
    The tape played again and the black thing under the liver was only a cavity filled with blood.
    “Shit.” Lucy slumped back, but she didn’t stop watching. “Why don’t they show it? One day it’ll be there. They’ll forget to hide it and I’ll know just where it is.” Then remembering, turning to face Steven: “Did you look in the cows?”
    “There wasn’t anything.”
    Lucy’s face set. “You didn’t look.”
    “I did. I looked. I moved everything around and I couldn’t see anything except guts.”
    “Did you look inside the organs?”
    “Some of them.”
    “What about the intestines?”
    “How could I? They’re all clogged up with shit.”
    Lucy was angry. “It could have been in there. You should have checked.”
    “There wasn’t anything there.”
    Lucy sucked her teeth in disgust and stopped the video. Steven was worried, he needed to make a connection. This room and its disarray, this girl with tits under her T-shirt and her legs sprawled apart, was the closest he was going to get to a wife and a ranch in the country. He tried to sound sympathetic.
    “How do you know there’s anything there at all?”
    “Because I know how much pus my body churns out. I’ve measured my shit and my piss and my snot and all the other slime that comes out of me. And it doesn’t add up to what being alive pumps into me every fucking day.”
    “If you’re so sure, how come you have to find it in cows or see it on a video?”
    “Because if I know exactly what it looks like and exactly where it is, I can find it in me and cut it out.”
    Lucy pushed herself up from the couch and walked over to something on a table that looked like a computer. She fiddled with the console and picked up a thin black flexible rod that was connected to it by a length of wire.
    “Help me look?”
    She pressed a switch and the monitor came to life, showing an unfocused disc of shadows and light that shifted as she moved the black cane through the air. Steven could see a bright light at its tip.
    “It’s an endoscope. It’ll show if there’s anything in my colon, but I need you to help me put it in.”
    “Sure.”
    Lucy pulled off her tights and bent forward, bracing herself against the table, in front of the monitor. Steven smelled shit as he worked lubricant into her ass. Her ring was tight like Dog’s. He couldn’t tell if there was