Solutions 

Interesting is a fiscal word. Its length and latitude, its self-sacrificing implications. For the self which is interested is necessarily the self that is not-interested. And the grown wo/man who adheres is the grown child, therein made static, who terrorizes and is thus terrorized. 

Beth was pitted. Her face a blast zone of blackheads, a coven of acne scars and raw-red boils. Blemishes whose homes lay beneath the world known to the discerning eye. She knew them; she felt them. They situated themselves, teeming, built matrices and networks and phlegmatic families within her — underneath her.

The world as she saw it looked at her funny. Depending on the day she either returned its stare or ignored it. This for twenty years: her constitution now a gelatinous cognate//analogue of dreams not yet allowed to be broken. On Halloween people complimented her on her makeup, though she made a point of wearing none. Guarded, she was. Like the wet, hairy corner of the bathroom between the wall and the toilet or the soft quadrant of carpet beneath the couch which the sofa’s frame stymies the vacuum from reaching, she had reached the point at which a single clean served only the uncovering of a lower, dirtier mantle of blight. 

She was a seer. Eighteen years of honest speculation. An intelligent businesswoman: business was good. She called her practice (a repurposed nineteenth century slave hut) “The Oracle.” Most of her clients were men, gape-mouthed idiots dragged in by their similarly-doltish girlfriends, women often with ‘too much bounce for their own benefit,’ as Beth’s mother had loved to say. Beth used to envy these women, used to think that if she were more like them (aka unpocked) she wouldn’t have to live where she lived (Scranton, FL, a pockmark itself) or drive the car she drove (a ’93 Dodge Neon, back windows black-trashbagged), or like the style of music she liked (a Mod Metal-Celtic Dance fusion called “Fenian Bones” by the initiate), or spend her nights and weekends with the skinny (scrawny a better word) version of Randy Quaid’s and Louis C.K.’s lovechild (Paul (his name), whom she had, in the past and recently, referred to as her ‘rock’ and her ‘everything,’ statements of intent that made his eyes gloss over and invariably got her what she wanted, whatever it was, but statements also to which she held an inherent allergy or sensitivity or whatever the politico-medical terminology deemed it socially prudent to say today, that allergy/sensitivity/whatever manifesting in immediate nausea and a prolonged prayer to the Porcelain God. That her blackheads & boils would be brushed aside by society if and only if another equally-luminous physical asset/liability drew the observer’s attention from her inopportune visage. The key being a lack of focus: if she were also missing a limb, or had twelve fingers on her right hand, the would-be judgmentalist would first need to hone his-or-her focus on one or the other, allowing Beth the moment to either slip away or form her own excoriating judgments. 

The singularity of her issue was the sticking point. Paul, a former Navy SEAL who had surrendered the bulk of his muscle mass in the months after undergoing a Navy-endorsed procedure that resulted in the tripping of a dormant alopecia gene and the permanent debasement of both his TSH & LSH levels, had suffered acne’s fixations as a teenager, and could thereby empathize. They’d met when Paul’s mother, a frequent client, had brought him in for a consultation. Paul had avoided meeting Beth’s eye until his mother left to go to the bathroom (not returning from said bathroom trip for forty-five minutes — turned out she’d forgotten to put the seat down, had slipped into the toilet, and either could not or would not free herself from its cold suction), what Beth had thought was indicative of his disgust, though what Paul let on to be a side-effect of the alopecia. They went to a movie that night, “Ockham’s Bloody Razor,” the subject and characters and gist of which Beth had forgotten or never really known, and had dated steadily in the five years since. 

Beth was too smart for Paul; she knew this because she knew Paul believed it was his alopecia that ‘evened them out,’ physically. No — indeed it was the alopecia that kept Beth’s hands on deck (hairlessness having its particular merits, cleanliness among them). The ‘evening out,’ if there was such an evening-out for which to account, came twofold via Paul’s obsession with hamsters and his undying support for militant Islamism. He had explained to Beth over mac-n-cheese hot dogs one night in their Winnebago his paradoxical existence: stimulated by the merest olfactory hint of hamster turds, unable to own his attraction due to a crippling fur allergy. Because he could not embrace a hamster, he embraced all hamsters, from as close a distance as ‘far away’ could stand.

Of the Islamism he had explained nothing (Beth had never asked) but to clarify that Beth wouldn’t be waking up to news of his having splattered himself on Times Square’s gummy sidewalks or some tarmac, because he was “not one of the violent ones.” Merely did he organize local and national rallies in support of al Baghdadi, a leader whose message Paul held was chronically misrepresented and thus misconstrued. Paul had been arrested six times and released without cause after each.

Paul himself was a proud atheist, and regularly (each morning) prayed to Athe-Sanko, an atheistic deity whom Paul held housed himself inside a three-quarter-used vat of Crisco he kept above his bed next to a worn copy of Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary and an anthology of blue knock-knock jokes given him by an old SEAL buddy.

Beth was a busy woman (though she did not believe in the concept of busyness). Beth’s schedule was thus: 

 Monday-Friday:  Work, 6 a.m. – 4 p.m. 
                                            Walk in circles, 4 p.m. – 6 p.m. 
                                                Eat all daily food, 6 p.m. – 7 p.m. 
                                                        Listen to/nod at Paul 7 p.m. – 10 p.m. 
      Sleep. 

Saturdays Beth knitted Paul sweaters and dreamed of frog-hopping to the moon.

Sundays Beth stared at herself in the mirror and traced Cyrillic lettering on the sidewalk in soap. 

Paul worked at PetSmart, a second complicating factor vis-à-vis his hamster infatuation. He often requested work in the stock room (where pets are not allowed), but was often-as-often denied — his boss, Gary, being a sadist and part-time Baghdadi-hater. Paul often cited his hatred of Gary as his reason for his having boarded the Baghdadi train. Paul put up with Gary and the sneezes because of the employee discount, which he used to score Dr. Dog’s Puppy Zit Creme for Beth at standard markdown. Beth cherished Dr. Dog, if only for its unconventionality and the promise of a homeopathic panacea’s arising from the fig-scented pulchritude of its invited anomaly. Affording the six weekly bottles at $30/pop would be a non-starter; at $15, provided strong attendance at Friday afternoon’s pay-to-enter “Art of Seeing” talk (held in the party room of the laser tag place behind the Oracle), it was manageable.

All this to say that situation confounded Beth in a manner distinct from the way in which it perhaps (as far as she could say/tell) confounded her boyfriend. She was successful (ever a relative term) in her business, yet caught upon what could be, if only. Providing sight as she did, unable to see beyond her own apparent plight. She could be the Athe-Sankodamned Dr. Phil of prophets if TV would have her. Better than Kreskin, the billboards would read. 

Saturday, May 12: Paul at a Baghdadi rally in Kimbasota (the town nearest Scranton, a town with six gas stations, four diners, and a KMart (the parking lot of which was famed (state wide) for being the site of the annual Panhandle Druid Festival (at which members of the Panhandle Druid cult (alongside a smattering of immature male undergraduate collegians and a few plucky youths from the local high school (the collegians and youths attending for the laughs engendered by discomfort; the cult members being deadly serious about it all (to the point that the cult itself was classified as a Terrorist Organization by the USA FBI after six members were accused of attempting to spread their membership in an horribly illicit manner))) sang and chanted the songs of their forebears while dancing the Panhandle Druid Dance and spray painting (in myriad colors) cursory male organs across the hot tar (the festival occurring at the peak of summer))), attendance three (boss Gary and Gary’s half-cousin (Carlos) the others (protesters))). Beth at the Winnebago, knitting, picking her face. In Greece, Beth thinks, acne is a sign of strong blood. Heat rises to the surface. True or not, the idea sets in motion the cogs of false industry: 

Paul, at the rally, feels wireless static from his pocket. He stops chanting “Death to corporate capitalism” and reaches in to source it. He is shocked — tased — by his cellular phone, which through triangulation the USDA has weaponized (Baghdadi having threatened (in a grandiloquent speech, attended by none other than chef Gordon Ramsay, who was opening a restaurant in Oman and as such was in the area) the sanctity of the NAFTA-backed American Meat Industry™). Paul falls forward onto his face. The pressure exerted upon him by the ground and the gravel he had laid that morning as both a path and a boundary (to both lead him and discourage others from interrupting his leading) dented and scraped his flesh (as such encounters will). For five hours Paul was kayoed. When he came to, his face was pocked in the selfsame pattern as his beloved Elizabeth’s. 

Meanwhile at the Winnebago Beth falls asleep mid-knit at the exact moment of her hamster-and-Islamomaniacal boyfriend’s collapse. When three hours later she awakes and walks to the bathroom to apply that late-afternoon’s layer of Dr. Dog, she finds her acne — the blackheads, the pocks, the boils — cleared. 

Incredulous, she calls Paul to distract her from what certainly will prove a false high, as so many past excitements have proven (at sixteen, e.g., when she thought her acne had cleared when in reality what had happened was the individual zits had conglomerated to form a mega whitehead that subsumed her entire face (her skin being pale, she did not notice until that night at prom when it popped during a slow dance on her date (Jerzy “Rob” Młynarski, who at the time of this writing works at a PetSmart in Kannapolis, NC))). Paul does not answer. Still incredulous, she slaps herself. The pain feels right — what has she done, indeed, to deserve such spiritual, such Godly-impersonal intervention (Godly here being both a descriptor (adverb) and a part of a greater whole (that whole being the hyphenated term expressing the natural impersonal nature of that which operates as it does supra situational conditioning))? Again she slaps herself, this time with the up-end of a teflon spatula. She spends the next hour walking in circles, unsure of how to progress — nothing now bothering her, she has forsaken the need to pursue the activities which fogged her from her cardinal motive (or the need has forsaken her). Paul at this point still face down in the gravel, bleeding, the back of his bald head covered in pigeon shit. Beth exits the Winnebago and slides into the ’93 Neon, speeds to the Oracle. She’s never crystal-ball prophesied for herself, and is unsure if it will even work — but given the circumstance, and as unencumbered as she feels, worth a shot. 

Paul returns to the Winnebago that night after carefully (see: a pack of rubber gloves per hand) disposing of his phone in a gorge off of Rte. 10 two hours north. Beth is not home. Paul shrugs, makes himself soup. His face hurts when he thinks. He eats the soup, dreaming of thoughtlessness, praying not to Athe-Sanko but for the painful pleasure of Hell Week in Coronado. He reads the blue joke book, stupidly. He picks the loose pebbles out of his cheek craters. 

Beth is at the Oracle — though Paul will not know this until two days from now, when he will report her missing and will lead the cops and firemen to the Oracle where, looking through a back window (all the doors being locked from the inside) he will see Beth seated in the dark at the seeing table, her pure skin sheen, illuminated by the crystal ball towards which she leans and will lean for the six-month remainder of her now-zitless life (she got up once to eat, the coroners assumed (this assumption owing to her decay rate), sometime during/between months two and four (another assumption being that she rerouted a water hose and allowed it to run ad infinitum (when thirst entered her mind she need not have thus looked away from the ball to annul its influence in order to perpetuate her ability to gaze) (this corroborated both by the presence of the water hose on the parlor floor (which regular clients said was unusual given their knowledge of the place) and the crippling drought experienced by the state during what would have been Beth’s fifth and sixth months (her body was discovered after two weeks by a K9 dog who had been deployed to the area to investigate a drug trafficking operation that *allegedly* was being run by Carlos, Gary’s half-cousin, who worked behind the arcade prize counter at the laser tag place (the drugs (*allegedly*) were being stuffed up the rectums of the arcade’s plush German shepherd dogs (95% polyester; price: 7,000 tokens)). The struggle to change negative energy into positive practice, Paul will realize upon his own deathbed (in the cockpit of a commercial airline, as fate will spin it (having broken things off with PetSmart after leaving Beth to her thankless self-duty at the Oracle (the cops and firemen having left upon being walkie-talkied that a homeless man had sparked a dumpster fire outside a Walgreen’s and recognizing Beth to now be in her own hands), Paul will train in aviation and take up work as a pilot)), proved as odd an obstacle for him to overcome as did the obverse. Society will soldier on.