Free Sweet Affliction by Anna Leventhal Page A

couldn’t remember what it is.
    â€”
    The loose end of the toilet paper in the bathroom is folded into a sharp triangle. Marcus gets no small amount of pleasure from this. It’s not just an aesthetic thing. The triangle’s point is a guarantee of safety and cleanliness, a little contract between the hotel and the client, assuring him that his will be the first hand to touch the dangling end of the roll after the excretory act. It’s a reassurance, a promissory note.
    Marcus loves hotels. Since tenure-track he’s discovered in himself a capacity for leisure he never knew existed. He enters a state of near-hibernation in these rooms, leaving only when required by work, venturing no further than the vending machine down the hall for sustenance. Room service, even better.
    Marcus unfolds the local paper. By the time he gets to World News he’s aware that he’s no longer paying attention to the stories. His attention has turned wholly inward, to the process of his bowel, which seems Machiavellian as any government.
    He keeps seeing the same, he hopes, silverfish running the baseboards of the room. Its head turns left and right, looking for an opening. Something so small making a decision. He folds the paper, wipes, flushes.
    Standing in front of the mirror, Marcus opens a container of dental floss and reels out a length. It is dry, like a bit of tendon. Not waxed. He looks at the packaging, which is clearly marked
Waxed
. He winds one end of the floss around an index finger, and the other end finds its corresponding digit. The floss goes in between the two front teeth, the pearly whites, the all-I-want-fors, putting him in mind of sticking a hand between two sofa cushions in search of lost change. A ginger rummaging, wary of the sticky, the soft, the yielding. Give us hard and smooth only, no weak spots or cave-ins of the flesh. The floss is arid and crisp; he feels as though he is playing his teeth with a violin bow. The tune: “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window.” In G major. If the package is marked
Waxed
and the floss is palpably unwaxed, there is an alarming slippage between the sign and the signified. What could it mean?
    After the bathroom ritual Marcus flops onto the bed, which is strewn with papers from the conference, and lights the second cigarette of the day. The second is always the best. The problem is the first, which is invariably awful. The difficulty is how to get to the second without the first.
    He once asked Alex how he quit after a ten-year, pack-a-day habit. “Well,” Alex said, “I stopped having cigarettes.”
    Marcus flips on the TV. He’s in the mood for something that will relax him, his head chirping after a day of unlimited drip coffee, small talk and panels where colleagues ten years his junior presented papers whose brilliance made his own work seem rote. He runs his hands through his hair a few times, grateful that he still has all of it and that at thirty-seven he is still trim and energetic. So many of his fellow academics have become badger-like, soft-bellied creatures squinting behind their wire-rimmed glasses.
    He finds a rerun of
ImmigRaces
, an old favourite at his former house. Part gladiator-style sporting event, part reality show, part helpful civic contribution,
ImmigRaces
took place on the grounds of the old closed-down Hippodrome. Illegal immigrants discovered by undercover police squads would be turned over to the producers of the Races, where they would be housed in barracks underneath the stadium and made to participate in a series of challenges. These ranged from obstacle courses involving pools of oatmeal and grease-coated rope swings to the devouring of live insects to recitations of hour-long oaths of allegiance from memory, in both official languages. The winner of each season’s competition was granted citizenship for himself and his family. Second prize was a ticket home.
    â€œThis show is so formulaic,”