Paraphilia Magazine Issue 13

She goes back into the washroom and emerges with a small glass. She walks over to the desk and takes the nearly spent bottle out of one of the drawers. She empties it into the glass, filling it about half way, and hands it to me. I drink and feel immediately better.

“Gusano, gusano,” I say, and she purses her lips and brings me the bottle. I hold it upside down over my palm and the worm-- actually the larvae of a rather dull looking desert moth called Hypopta agavis-- falls into my hand. I put it to my mouth and eat it.

“Senor Stephen,” Adelita says, shaking her head. I take a last puff from the Delicado and extinguish it in the faux crystal ashtray.

She might have been beautiful once, Adelita, when she was fourteen or fifteen perhaps, before the five children and the husband who went north and never returned, before putting herself through whatever sort of school nurses in Mexico put themselves through in order to tend to drug addicted, alcoholic Norte Americanos dying in cheap rooms along the Paseo de Montejo in Ciudad Merida, Yucatan.

She might have been beautiful once. Even now, as she fills the syringe with morphine and reaches into her satchel for the rubber tube she will use to tie me off, even now, as I pump my arm to push the veins to the surface so as to make things easier, even now she is the most beautiful woman in the room. *** The room costs $1,125 pesos a month to rent, around ninety American dollars. I deliberately chose Merida, as opposed to simply ending up here, both because I had been here previously and because it is fairly difficult to reach. There are no direct flights from most places in the United States, and one generally has to go first to Mexico City in order to get here.

Women will cry when they learn of my death, but the thought of listening to them wail at my bedside as I await the inevitable was simply more than I could bear. I’ve been in and out of hospitals, lock down detoxification wards and other nightmares on a number of occasions these last years and am well aware of the opportunities these sorts of situations present for high drama on the part of ex-wives, former lovers and even those who have taken it upon themselves to develop what are best described as schoolgirl crushes.

Skopje was a miserable place. Much of the old city had been destroyed by a massive earthquake in the early Sixties and the elaborate Byzantine and Ottoman architecture was replaced by the brutalist designs of Kenzo Tange, the communist urban planner who was a favorite of the dictator Tito and who had orchestrated the rebuilding of Hiroshima after the war. Tange wiped 97