I knew the fart was coming long before it happened, and I was really anticipating it with some excitement.
Theresa once told me that I had ‘impulse-gratification’ issues. This was obviously some expression she’d picked up off Oprah, but she did have a point. I mean it doesn’t occur to me, even if I’m on a date, to hold in my farts. I just let it gush out, and then take deep breaths to try and inhale all the stink before it spreads. Denying your urges, restraint, this is what causes cancer.
I don’t know what the Japanese teachers (that is the real teachers) thought of me, this 187cm gorilla that strides in for an hour every Monday morning and can’t communicate with anyone, and strides out, having done nothing, taught nothing, and achieved nothing, and yet is probably getting paid double what the real teachers who spend all day wiping toddlers arses are getting.
But after another all night karaoke binge for no discernible reason, this particular Monday morning was something special. I dragged my hungover carcass to the kindergarten. I was hunched over double. My saggy muscles could barely haul my bulk up the stairs and over the baby-gate.
As usual the kids screamed in terror at my arrival, and scattered like pigeons. And I sat down among the shitty, snotty, slimy little creatures.
Natsuki was the only one who would ever come near me. She only did this because she enjoyed excavating bits of snot out of her nose and putting them in my mouth, or my ear. I would hold up the English flashcards. « Its an apple ! It’s a banana ! That’s it ! Good on ya Natsuki. » I’d give her the card as a reward. She would go and tear it up, or hide it, or use it to interfere with her little playmates, who were hiding in fear in different corners of the classroom.
Let me iterate: I taught these kids NOTHING.
This particular morning I had, under my armpits, huge sopping sweatstains forming replicating self-similar fractal paisleys. A waxy secretion seeped from my pores, like maggots squirming from maggot-holes attracted to carrion. My skin was lacquered – when I washed my face after class, the water beaded and raced around, like mercury.
It was while washing my face – after class, mind you, when it was too late – that I first saw my reflection that day. My teeth were all grapestained from red wine. It looked like I’d been down on my hands and knees eating the loam of gravesoil before class. My teeth were lines of half decayed tombstones.
There we were. Like a swamp. I was hot and mucky, it was damp. My teeth felt like they were falling out, loose and rattling in their gum-sockets. My scalp felt tight like the skin of a drum.
Eyes were lolling in my head and I don’t think they were mine. I was beaming on automatic, above on a flying fox.
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I could anticipate the coming fart like the way a sailor can anticipate a storm by the anvil-shaped clouds.
A stream of lumpy silver bubbles that started at the base of my throat or somewhere deep in my chest coursed through my body, exiting through my arsehole. My sphincter, slack from the amount of booze wasn’t tight enough to vibrate, it just wobbled soundlessly.
And this fart just poured out all juicy and loose. The hackles on the back of my neck started to rise, and the barometer on the piano twitched to life. The blu-tac got all moist and the posters starting peeling and sliding off the walls. A fly dropped off the ceiling.
As the putrid fetor slowly engulfed the room, the kids started going nutty, their irises reduced to pinpricks. It wasn’t as though the fart was sending them crazy, but as though it’d awakened the insanity inside them. Much as a glass of wine awakens your tastebuds in preparation for a mouthful of chocolate mousse, or masturbation enlivens your sense of hearing.
And that fart kept pouring out, foaming, frothing out, like when spring tears apart winters iron grip, and the glaciers deliquesce into streams behind the ice which pour into rivulets into tiny waterfalls into rivers carrying great cracked pieces of iceberg.
I know I am using a lot of moist-sounding words to describe this fart, but it was mostly dry. Although I was only to find this out for sure when I got home.
Actually I tell a lie, I couldn’t carry the burden of suspicion with me all the way home, and I checked my jocks after class in Daiei’s toilet.
Given the buoyancy of flatulence, it being warm air, I could slowly feel weight soaking back into my body. As the fart was freed from its confinement, I felt gravity tightening. It caressed my entire being like a sedative, with it’s soothing numbness, an old friends welcome home. I slid back into my Dave-shaped hollow in the world, like a peach pit being replaced into its perfect snug fit, into its cosy crater at the centre of the peach.
And the unholy stink. Forgive me father, a pestilential quagmire it was. It’s miasma stuck to me like chewing gum. It clung, like an unpleasant rumour, an unwanted nickname. A yeasty phantom, unable to leave the site of its death. The rank stench was so beyond that of a mortal fart that it wasn’t even recognisable as one, anymore than a baby would see it’s own potential in spilled semen. It’s smell had so eclipsed foul that I smelled it with more than one of my five senses. My tongue got hairy, and white spots splashed in my vision.
The other teacher was in fact my employer. Her name was Hiromi. She was a forty-year old Japanese woman. I tried to look everywhere save at her. “It’s a tiger! Grrrrr! It’s a cat! Meow!” But a quizzical look gathered about her brow, like clouds collecting on mountain peaks. She was on the other side of the room, far from Ground Zero.
Away from the epicentre, the stink had, no doubt, dissipated, and it probably just smelled like a fat man had defecated after eating a tin of dog food. She stood up. Suspicious. She approached. Closer. And closer. My tongue was fat and bloated with guilt. This is the end. I have nothing to my name, not a rag of decency.
The kids were going berserk, clawing at, and inserting things into one another.
Blindly, fiercely ignoring my boss, I continued handing out the cards: “It’s a motorcycle!” “It’s a rocket! That’s it Natsuki!” Hiromi entered the circle. The bunch of grapes that was my heart shriveled and shrank into a kid-size pack of sultanas.
Then she did something, which filled me with a new emotion.
It was an exquisite mélange, of equal parts humiliation and acquittal. Of base muck-dwelling shame, and relief bordering on white-light spirituality.
She reached down for Natuski, picked her up, and checked the back of her nappy. And then she did the same to the next kid, and the next. To find out which one of the dirty, filthy, unhousetrained little savages it was who had shat ‘emselves.