Basted in luxury, I feel my skin thicken and coagulate, alligator over with knobs and leathery excrescences. Nothing disturbs my sangfrois, my pluterperfect imperturbability. Not even the outrageous charge on my credit card. Are all spa attendants in New York City East-Asian? The Moonflower, 8 East 41st Street between Fifth Avenue and Madison in Midtown Manhattan. Subsidiary of Syzygy Therapeutics, biotech asset acquisition fund. Phoenix Biogenic. Genetic alterations and rejuvenations by appointment. Skin and face transplants. Peel away the years to a new you. A livid, pocky-faced Filipino manicurist in a lab coat ushers me from a stenciled glass-front lobby with Poland Springs water and airline magazines to the gleaming Pompeian splendor of sweaty marble spa amenities in the bowels of a corporate high-rise. Off-key scents lurk like exotic zoo animals in artificial rainforest settings. A soupçon of wet plaster and tile grout impregnated with mildew and Lysol hides like a shy pacarana under scented paraffin. “There is mold in the saunas, the Jacuzzis malfunction, there are rodent feces, insect pests” said former Spa Castle employee Joon Yung Lee off-camera to Channel 4 investigative reporters. Member of PacPlex, a sports and recreation complex. The hot basalt rocks on my vertebral prominences form a sensory keyboard, a ganglionic archipelago of stepping stones that carry me over the babbling brook of my distractions to a calm lake of stagnant river ooze in which I sink and wallow. Wie nackte Mädchen kommend über Steine (Rilke). As though the water were talking with pebbles in its mouth (Derek Walcott). You know how submerged stones in a talkative brook are covered with a thin slime of translucent algae, like the epithelium inside the cheek? My pulsing senses quicken into Nilotic mud amplifiers. I flatten myself bellyward in crocodile-crowded spa linen, alert to the panic of crazed wildebeests.
Rilke. Probably the best poet currently tattooed on a pop singer.
August 2014
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