Woom

This novella uses a frame narrative set in a single motel room to nest several interconnected stories, gradually revealing that the man telling the stories is also their central figure.

Angel, a well-dressed, bald man with a jagged scar running up the left side of his face, opens the door to Room 6 of the Lonely Motel, a run-down establishment 30 minutes from the New York-Canadian border. He greets the empty room by saying "Hello, Mom," revealing that his mother died here. The room is unchanged: the same solid wood bedframe, the same oil painting of Jonah escaping the whale, the same warped vanity mirror. He lies on the bed in the fetal position, reflecting that this room is where everything started and where it is fitting it should end. After vomiting in the bathroom, he calls an escort agency on the room's rotary phone, specifically requesting a heavyset woman. The dispatcher assigns someone named Shyla.

When Shyla arrives, a large, freckled woman in a gold lamé dress, Angel surprises her by shaking her hand and sitting across the room rather than initiating physical contact. He tells her the more questions she answers, the bigger her tip. He asks whether she has children, whether she believes in ghosts, and whether she thinks places can absorb evil. He compares the room to the biblical whale that swallowed Jonah, suggesting that a place saturated with enough suffering eventually expels it onto anyone who enters. He then offers to tell her a story about one of the terrible things that happened in Room 6.

Angel narrates what appears to be a third-person account of a man named Johnny who falls in love with an adventurous woman named Jenny. Jenny's thrill-seeking escalates into heroin use, and she quickly becomes addicted. A drug dealer named Juicy appears at their apartment, reveals Jenny owes him $6,000, and proposes clearing the debt if Johnny acts as a drug mule, swallowing baggies of heroin and flying them into Canada. At Room 6, Johnny swallows roughly 80 baggies, but severe cramps cause him to expel 27 of them. He demands Jenny reinsert the recovered bags vaginally. She does so, but while preparing for the flight, a bag bursts inside her, causing a fatal overdose. Johnny manually extracts the bags from her body and discovers an embryo at least eight weeks old, which he realizes cannot be his. With Jenny dead beside him, Johnny swallows the recovered bags and completes the delivery.

Back in the frame narrative, Angel unzips his backpack and places items on the dresser: lubricant, a small dildo, a rubber fist, and a large black rubber cone. He explains the concept of stretching a hole incrementally with progressively larger objects, as with piercing gauges, and states his intention to dilate Shyla. She consents, saying she likes to feel full. As he works the rubber fist inside her, he tells a second story: Johnny used the $10,000 Juicy paid him to arrange revenge. Johnny's friend Chuck P., a pornographic film director, stages a fake shoot in Room 6 with a performer named Candy Rains, whose colon is filled with a thick mixture of red dye, corn starch, and water designed to look like blood. Juicy, lured into participating, is drenched by the fake blood mid-act and flees naked in terror. Johnny later blackmails him for $50,000.

Angel transitions to the large cone and begins telling the story of Mary Booker. In December 1980, Mary, pregnant and past New York's 24-week legal limit for abortion, rents Room 6. Her husband has left her, and a hospital has turned her away. She writes a letter on motel stationery addressed "To my Unborn Child," then runs a bath, bends a wire coat hanger into a hook, and inserts it. Pain erupts and blood pours from her. She pulls the wire free but slips on the blood-slicked tub, strikes her head, and falls unconscious face-first into the running water. Under stress, Angel's speech impediment surfaces: he says "woom" instead of "room," a difficulty with R-sounds called rhoticism that he mostly overcame in childhood. This impediment gives the novella its title. The desk clerk found Mary when her rental time expired. She was braindead upon the paramedics' arrival and died days later. The baby survived.

Shyla reveals she always wanted children but cannot have them. As a teenager, she suffered severe damage to her reproductive organs that required an emergency trachelectomy, the surgical removal of the cervix. The surgery left her with an abnormally deep vaginal canal; her father's medical debt drove her into escort work. She tells Angel about a client she calls the Smother Man, whose experience of near-suffocation during a session with a handcrafted facesitting box became a kind of spiritual rebirth. Angel reciprocates with his own story: responding to a newspaper ad for the Evergreen Method, a form of attachment therapy, he was rolled tightly in a rug by four strangers at a gravel lot near an airport, smothered until he could barely breathe, and forced to fight his way free, "crowning" as his head emerged. Though he cursed the group and left in fury, he acknowledges internally that they showed him what he truly wanted. Shyla then discloses that the injury requiring her trachelectomy was caused when, at 15, three boys raped her with a baseball bat, destroying her ability to bear children.

For his final story, Angel narrates the tale of Bethany Chastain, a girl whose mother, Cora, has histrionic personality disorder and compulsively seeks male attention. When Bethany is nine, Cora places a nude male store mannequin in her basement bedroom. Bethany names him Andy, and over time he becomes her romantic fixation; at 11 she begins grinding against his smooth crotch and experiences her first orgasm. Cora eventually dismembers Andy for an art piece, sanding down his crotch with a belt sander. Angel then shifts to first person, revealing that he is Johnny. He and Bethany were classmates and swimmers who began dating in 12th grade. As a foster child who shaved his head and waxed his body for the swim team, he unknowingly resembled Andy. On prom night in Room 6, Bethany presses chloroform-soaked panties over his face. He wakes to the high-pitched whine of her mother's belt sander grinding away his genitals. A blown fuse plunges the room into darkness; he screams; the desk clerk bursts in.

Angel reveals the full picture: surgeons repaired his urethra, but he can never have sex or biological children. The desk clerk who found him was the same man who found Mary Booker years earlier. The hospital named Mary's surviving baby John. Angel is that baby; the scar on his face was made by his mother's coat hanger in utero.

Angel removes his pants, revealing scar tissue from navel to inner thighs. He declares that religion, therapy, rebirthing, and love have all failed him. He states his plan: he will insert his head into Shyla's vagina and have her birth him. The progressive dilation was preparation. Shyla refuses. Angel chloroforms her into unconsciousness, coats his head in lubricant, lies on his back between her legs, and forces his head inside her, tearing her tissue. Enclosed in her body, he experiences a moment of total peace. Then a vivid flashback strikes: the sensation of a wire hanger tearing through his cheek in utero. Panic overtakes him. His chin is lodged; he cannot pull free. His air runs out.

Shyla wakes to intense pressure against her organs. She sees Angel's purple limbs protruding from between her legs. Bearing down with her hands on her belly and her powerful pelvic muscles, she pushes while staring at the painting of Jonah escaping the whale. The tear widens and Angel's head spills onto the carpet. His chest eventually moves with a slow breath; he is alive but unresponsive, his eyes glazed. Shyla acknowledges that Angel assaulted her and knows she will need surgery again. Despite everything, she feels pity, recalling her mother's words about embracing one's enemies. Angel draws his knees to his chest in the fetal position. Shyla cradles him and promises to nurse him back to health, right here in Room 6, rocking him gently as a small sound escapes his lips.