INVICTUS , I SHOUT by Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois

1.

In Highcastle Pharmacy, Tiffany meanders the aisles, always returning to the discount lipstick rack with its blurry mirror.

2.

Eleven p.m. The promenade deck of this cruise ship is clear of passengers, except me, running sweaty laps, seeking release from America’s need for fun, captive of my wife’s need for entertainment.

3.

Tiffany’s lips are dry from medication. They’re a rough, unpaved road, a two-track through pine woods.

4.

Tiffany’s hands shake from medication.

5.

There’s also a fat old man on the deck with an oxygen tank, and his large, red-haired, middle-age daughter.

6.

If I’m not with her to blot the edges of her lips with a tissue, Tiffany ends up looking like a circus clown.

7.

He’s got the plastic tube in his nose, but he’s singing tunes in a lusty voice, using up his dollars’ worth of air before he slings the green and silver tank overboard.

8.

Tiffany’s attempts to restore her wounded beauty are always doomed to fail. They are never better than awkward approximations of what she once was:

9.

His daughter watches the old man, having schooled herself to accept everything. She has large, fleshy arms.

10.

A high school cheerleader, a beauty queen, a trophy wife.

11.

Every lap a different song, delivering his repertoire unto me, preparatory to biting the dust and entrusting his ashes to the Neptune Society and the sea.

12.

Tiffany’s getting her brains fucked out in the woods behind the old brick buildings that house mental patients.

13.

I am his priest, and he trots out his sins in melodic forms.

14.

Those buildings used to be full to bursting. I remember those days.

15.

His daughter is proud of him. My last lap, I churn the air as the engines churn the stern water.

16.

Tiffany also has a lesbian lover who is more tender with her than the psychotic men. Naturally.

17.

He’s singing this: I am the master of my fate/ I am the captain of my soul.

18.

The lesbian is a Hispanic from Unit 26 with veined hands, darting eyes and mysterious tattoos, who smells of lighter fluid and moth balls.

19.

Invictus, I shout, loud as I can, as I fly by.

20.

She’s probably manic-depressive, but has consistently been diagnosed as schizophrenic, misdiagnosis being all too common here.

21.

I can see that the daughter wants me to stop and fuck her right there, as her father watches, which will give him verification that she is a real woman.

22.

Our foreign doctors have huge caseloads, tenuous English, and disdain for our patients. They don’t want to be in the bughouse any more than the patients do.

23.

I don’t even slow. There’s time for that after her father is dead.

24.

When they go home at night, the shrinks take showers so lengthy that their wives feel compelled to go into the bathroom to check on them.

25.

Few people know that these cruise ships carry a supply of five or six coffins in case it’s a voyage busy with death.

26.

Invictus, I shout as I zoom past, sweat flying from my brow. He knows it, the man exults. I recited that poem at my father’s funeral. It was his favorite. Invictus is a poem of defeat. One only deludes oneself into thinking that one is the master of his fate, the captain of his soul, if he has signed on to be a slave, if he has wrapped his arms around servitude and the soul’s defeat.