belch

a short story

It was a winter Tuesday, and I was commuting home from work. The subway was crowded, and I sat beside a homeless man. You don’t need to know much about him; all that matters is that he burped.

The belch was cartoonishly violent. Its production sounded painful; the man’s esophageal structures flapped like a stiff playing card in bicycle spokes. It overpowered the train’s rumbling, yet no one seemed to notice.

Perhaps I was the only one.

My body reflexively straightened, battening down my nostrils for the looming olfactory siege. The space between the sounding of a stranger’s belch and the arrival of its humid intestinal air turns out to be its own breed of purgatory.

Everything vanished. It was just me and the belch.

My mind raced with anticipation.

I felt perplexed — even concerned — that, as I felt the warm air push at my cheeks, my first thought was: “I want to smell it.” I immediately felt the urge to submit, to let the stench invade me and burn my nostrils like a fine whiskey.

I’d long been fascinated with the homeless: Where do they go? What do they eat? Who are they? If, as it is said, “we are what we eat,” could I meet this man? His belch is what he ate, and what he ate is he.

Would it smell like me?

I felt a tickle in my nostrils.

I imagined watching as he ate his last meal. It’s dark. I see him hunched over, his oversized Dickensian rags flapping as he speedily scurries after a plump rat. He pounces and clasps his hands around the rodent. Like Goya’s Saturn, he violently bites the squirming varmint’s neck as it omits plaintive tea kettle shrieks. Tufts of mangy fur sail through the air; the blood spills from his Santa Claus-like lips, shooting down his forearms in purposeful tributaries and dripping back down to the pavement.

My cheeks grew rosy in the gaseous air.

His mother used to hold his little body against her bosom as he cried, feeling the pressure of something unfathomable rising inside him. She bobbed up and down, gently patting his back until he belched. She’d praise him and kiss his forehead.

I thought I saw condensation on the windows.

Maybe excising his gut in confined public spaces makes him feel powerful. Each belch is an act of chemical warfare against the elites, a way to force entry into their posh bodies and become unmistakably present.

Or maybe he’s generous. Perhaps the flatulence of the dregs is a cure for something, a secretly powerful smelling salt. One good whiff will knock you flat on your ass, freeing you from all your disenchantment and malaise. You’d wake up safe in your childhood bedroom. You’d hear your parents laughing in the other room. You’d rise out of bed feeling more content than ever. You’d notice a spider on the wall. Rather than fearfully squish it, as you were once prone to do, you’d gently guide it into your palm and place it on the window sill.

Maybe it’s the cure for modern callousness: “Inhale my gaseous runoff, and thou shall know compassion.” He understands that empathy is penetration: the other in you, yourself in the other.

All you have to do is submit.

The moist air clouding around your face is the stranger’s extended hand.

He’s offering a gift.

It’s all around you.

I enthusiastically inhaled.

…

It smelled like Diet Pepsi.