In response to criticism from my favorite ex that I am no fun at parties, until I drink and become too fun at parties, I decide to learn a party trick. It’s some friend of a friend’s cousin’s gender reveal. There are gifts. There are wailing children, their faces gossamered in snot. There is a clown, a balloon animal hack. He has no idea what’s coming. I gather a crowd. I say watch this. And I swallow a sword.

We’re in the hills, the bad part of the hills. Bright enough out that you can see the smog bicycle-chain its way around the slate bodies of high-rises below. People ooh. People aah. They play paparazzi. The phone lights make my stomach hurt.

It isn’t, like, claymore-sized, but it’s still a sword. A kitchen knife would’ve been underwhelming, and there’s nothing worse to be at a party than underwhelming. I bought it off a military surplus site. It had probably been waved around over a flag-draped casket of some eighteen-year-old blown into pieces overseas.

The YouTube video said that sword-swallowing is actually quite easy once you get the hanging esophagus of it, so to speak. It’s about opening your throat right. It’s about not fearing the blade.

Imagine it’s a fifth of whiskey tipped 180. You shouldn’t have much trouble imagining that. Imagine it’s attached to a particularly well-endowed lover. Go on, use your imagination. Imagine it’s a drip water bottle duct taped to the side of a glass cage and you are a parched guinea pig. Deep Throat, meet cold metal. There are big eyes, hung like god’s in the glass, watching you drink, drink, drink.

You’re good at imagining little experiments on yourself. How many nights can you make it without a beer? How many days without running out of the grocery store, a half-shopped cart abandoned in the ethnic food aisle, your heart stopping and starting again in the strip mall parking lot? The world rubber-bands, people watching, so many people watching.

See, my mistake is, the applause feels great. An orgy of applause, each clap a wet mouth all over me, just me, my body, my accomplishments, my attention. My mistake is that I bow, as a showman should. I bow before I take the sword out.

It plunks. No other way to say it. Becomes lodged. Punctures something on the bend. I imagine all the booze sponging out of me like a water balloon dropped on sunburnt asphalt. A plop. A disappointing one. My stomach hurts, one of those classic stomachaches I always get before standing outside a bar for three hours, listening to the laugh tracks of weekend boozers as I gradually become a piece of the industrial landscape. Burning through a pack, the little smokestack that could.

Jack Hill is the first to try and pull it out. He has big vanity muscles, posts photos of them glistening online alongside captions that say shit like “Earned is Never Easy.”

Nope, he tells me. That’s stuck stuck. Calls it the Sword in the Gallstone.

I do the reasonable thing. I panic. I grab strangers by their arms, point to the sword handle peekabooing from between my tobacco-stained teeth.

Glup. I say. Glup! Glup! Glup!

They press phone cameras so far into my face I can feel the light travel down the length of the blade, refract through my offals, bounce against my polyps, exposed like a colonoscopy.

Outside, people stand across the street beneath a billboard for a 24/7 emergency plumbing service. It says Got a Blockage? Call Bob. I think they’re my friends. I wave my arms, pointing at the coppery handle. They blink their eyes. They smoke cigarettes, spitting through pretty lipstick onto the ground. Unbothered, preoccupied with swallowing their own swords, measured in micrometers of fiberglass. My blade is nine inches. God, I’d kill for a smoke. Let the saber poof away in the haze of a magician’s act, replaced by mourning doves free-flying through my bloodstream.

A cab pulls up. I get in. Where to, son? he asks me. Glup! Glup! I tell him. I mean to say hospital.

Gulf Heights, huh? Chic guy. You make the rules, boss. We zip through switchbacks, the city bent over its own topography like a body ejected through a windshield at high speeds. He’s driving fast. He keeps eyeing me in the mirror. Probably checking out the sword. Maybe he’s a sword guy. Has a katana collection he uses to cut through overripe watermelons in his vinyl-fenced backyard. Maybe he knows the best way to extricate each different kind of blade. Or maybe he thinks I’m gonna rob him. That I will unsheathe my mighty weapon from its fleshy scabbard and tell him I really really need twenty-five bucks.

It feels prudent to go to the hospital now. Even though they probably don’t have a sword guy. Even though I haven’t been to a hospital, a doctor’s office, a dentist’s office, since fuck if I can remember. Isn’t the not knowing better? All the visits are the same. Hello, everyday I feel like I am going to die. Spontaneously. Freakishly. Combust, anyeurize, stroke so hard I shift the earth’s axis. Like, they’re gonna put me in one of those capsule machines that rip metal fillings through people’s skulls at hypersonic speeds, and when I come out they’ll say yep, just what we thought. Cancer, from scalp to toenail. Prognosis: ten minutes to live. But nope. Every time they tell me I’m fine. That one day, I probably won’t be. They tell me to quit smoking, lose some weight, try to eat Mediterranean, take beta-blockers, cut down on the drinking. And, most likely, to stop swallowing swords.

The cab driver leaves me on the curb in one of those neighborhoods I always end up in. Nature reclaiming the industrial husk of the cityscape. Nature, in this case, is an amoeba that eats low-income housing instead of brains. It is white. It mass-transits across space and time, making everything unicellular and reclaimed and bespoke and you can’t get a beer for less than nine bucks.

I walk into a low-lit cocktail bar, pointing at my sword, gluping. It’s full of Adderall-skinny people who are so beautiful they tried to grunge themselves down and somehow horseshoed into an even deeper, more feral kind of beauty. They have tramp stamps that cost two grand and wear burn-hole acned tank tops and beaver fur caps. One brushes a sensual hand on the hilt of the blade, and I shiver. Perhaps it has already become another organ attached to me, one that I will inevitably panic is rusting away, making me sick, making me no fun at parties.

It’s gorgeous, she tells me. To wear yourself so honestly like that. It’s avant-garde, but not like our parents’ avant-garde. It’s like swimming naked through that oil spill in the river and making love in the broken glass on the sand avant-garde.

Another shakes her beaver cap at me, saying I’m trouble. A bad omen. The Five of Swords. Her psychic told her I was around the corner. Says that she’s on her period so she forgot to insert her vaginal crystal and that’s why I had appeared to them in this manner. She tells me I look like her ex, that they always had these accusations popping out of their jaw, throat propped open in cocaine-addled screeds. I have to go, go, go. Before she feels the blade. Before one of them pities me enough to kiss me. To kiss the sword.

I wander the city. The sun is up and then it’s down. I keep losing my way, neck craned towards the sky as to not upset the sword. Last thing I’d want to do is make it feel nervous. I watch the sky go through its ugly rotations, a track mark of a moon, the pilot-light blinks of passenger jets as they self-harm contrail lines into the sky. Every day, the city sends out color-coded air pollution warnings. Red. Isn’t red bad? Doesn’t red make us sick? Isn’t red going to kill us or is it the cigarettes or is it the strangers at parties or is it the swords?

I call my mom. She’s drinking bubbly wine with her American Girl Doll collection club. Glup. A sad glup. A defeated glup. Right off the bat she asks why I never call anymore. If I’m still having those scaries. If I’m eating enough. If I’ve quit smoking yet. If I know how much a mint Caroline Abbott doll goes for on the resale market, that Margeret told her it was hefty but she doesn’t trust that old snake-faced coot. If I can try calling more. I want to tell her I don’t call her because one day the call will not be completed as dialed. That one day her club will find her on the hardwood, doll parts scrambled on the floor there beside her, her cat Mr. Needy sniffing the rigor, making timed calculations, sharpening his dewclaws. Isn’t it easier to not know? To pretend the party trick is all there is, the applause, the night lubricated into the morning until it all becomes one contiguous slug-crawling time block and we can keep learning new tricks? I’m good at projectile target practice into the porcelain bowl, at marathon doomscrolling, at kiss-and-tell yourself maybe they’re the one, at talking over other guests, at speedrunning seeing double. I have many talents. The sword is just the newest one.

Eventually I find the hospital. The intake nurse rolls her eyes at me. Accustomed to drunk assholes and the things they get stuck in their orifices. She pops bubble gum. Each time, I flinch and the sword pricks a little bit. It’s hungry, the pointy bit inspecting the contents of my stomach, disappointed to find only light beer and passenger-seat-warmed Slim Jims.

The doctor has a bad skin rash that makes him glow radioactive under the fluorescents. He runs tests. He knocks on the hilt and says do you feel that? You do. Mhmm. Interesting. Can you describe your pain on a scale of I’m a little baby to I have just been disemboweled? About a seven? Mhmm, that’s what we’d call a “late stage esophageal cancer” on the scale. Can you bend your knees and cough for me? Mhmm, you can’t. Interesting. How many sexual partners do you have? Mhmm. It’s tough sledding out there. Do you use intravenous drugs? Do you have any allergies I need to be aware of? Is this your first time swallowing swords? Do you find that typically you overreact to normal physical conditions? Do you use condoms? Do you have any familial illnesses? Have you been depressed in the last six months? Do you call your mother frequently? Do you abuse lithium? What about Librium? Do you even know what you’re doing here? Mhmm, mhmm, mhmm. He writes on his note pad. He makes eyes at the nurse and she pops her gum and he says see, it’s not so much the sword I’m worried about. Rather, it’s your liver, I’m noticing some fat. Or maybe it’s your lungs. Maybe we should start there. Those puppies have seen pinker days, haven’t they? Taking care of ourselves is better than any medicine I could prescribe. And besides, that puppy is stuck stuck.

They send me out into the world with five aspirin that cost $300 a pop, and a hospital bracelet asphyxiating my wrist. The sun is back up, a sucker punch through the vaseline-smudged sky. Behind the cloud cover, maybe there’s a blue sky. Maybe there isn’t. Maybe it’s split-lip red and we’re all dead already.

I try to find my way home. I try to accept that this is my life now. It feels like maybe the sword is settling. On the street, people hardly stare at me at all. Perhaps they think I just have one of those faces, made whole by the sword between my teeth, and maybe for a moment they pity me and then they realize they have their own lives and problems to worry about and no one stops to try and pull it out.

I follow wildfire smoke into a backyard in a swanky neighborhood. People are partying, having an occasion, and I love occasions, and I can’t help myself even if I wanted to because on the walk over I’ve come to the conclusion that the sword is metastasizing, that soon there will be more sword than there is me.

Parents drink champagne and talk over each other and fire off blue and pink flares and watch their children with tepid interest as they prairie-dog holes through the Miracle-Gro lawn and eat Italian pasta with bare hands and it’s so loud it’s almost like there’s no noise at all.

On a small stage by a rose garden, a party clown fights against a balloon animal boa-constricted around his throat. He gags to me, pointing to the animal and himself and I can see the fear in his eyes and he sweats through his makeup, and beneath it is a normal person trying to figure out exactly how he got here in the first place.

I say glup. Meaning, if I could manage to get this sword out, I’d cut him free. I’d save us both from ourselves. But it’s staying put, and so are those balloons and I hold the party clown’s hand because he is afraid and so am I, of that ever looming reality that I am gonna die, and I won’t know the precise moment, but I will know with exact certainty that I’ve done it to myself, and perhaps that kinda knowing is actually my best party trick.