There are just enough holes in the organism, although some are called upon to pull double or triple duty, not to mention the Cronenbergian nightmare of the primitive cloaca. What's going on inside the body is life and what's outside is something else, a large collection of distracting objects, but it's where they meet that fascinates and appalls, the entrances and exits and mucous membranes, points of physical communication between the world and the body. Catastrophe can come from without or within or from some horrible mingling of the two, there is no safety anywhere. I suspect the first experience of a certain quality of neurotic repugnance I was to feel intensely and often for the rest of my life surrounded the phenomenon of losing baby teeth. I don't like being so down in it, all this muck and blood and steaming and churning and monstrous autonomic activity; my attitude toward it is stuck in some crucial infantile developmental phase from which I never managed to evolve. All of which is merely to say that Sam is home from the vet and he has a big ugly stitched slit in his belly and he might need to have another one, since whatever globules of alien tapioca were excised from his body left some of their kind behind and it's spread around a bit. I'm waiting for lab reports. I squirted painkiller and antibiotic down his throat and he's lying on a chair looking like he just smoked a bowl.