[INTRODUCTION/SETTING THE SCENE]
That's just what they called it: the Mill.
It was a building where people went in, sat down for hours, and then walked out at the end. Some of them straggled outside to smoke, gnawing the filters of their cigarettes, hands moving sluggishly as they attempted to process the hours of the day and explain how they felt to the other blank-eyed smokers who stood beside them.
The parking lot was where these hapless escapees congregated, behind the dumpsters and beside the heaving growl of the central air unit. Some of them looked like kicked dogs, huddled into their coats, while others found momentary strength in numbers, complaining loudly and expansively to their comrades. Most just stood silently, staring into the bluer-than-blue sky, or off at the bigger building across the arterial, some firm with three names and what looked like ergonomic chairs at each desk. The winter was in the gray phase, when everything looked scuffed and corroded by the weird white markings of rock-salt and snow-sand. They felt their lungs, too, graying, like loose-leaf notebook paper gone to ash. Their eyes hung out of their faces.
It might as well have been Bedlam, but without the screaming and after the pre-frontal lobotomy.
Inside, it was worse. This was the Slow Season, and most of the people sat at their desks, hands on the home key row on their keyboards, staring sightlessly into too-bright monitors uncalibrated for hours of use. Overhead, garish rows of fluorescent lights stretched on for rooms and rooms, while stairwells were sinkholes of dark, flickering bulbs and breakrooms more of a storage space for vending machines and chairs with missing wheels or broken backs. Each room was structured as panopticon, with an overseer in the middle and their assignees grouped around them, all facing brick walls, so that the supervisor would be able to see their monitors. The Slow Season meant that everyone had just suffered through the crushing anxiety of Cut-Downs, where the wheat was scythed from the chaff, with blinding efficacy and seemingly no regard for circumstance. One grossly overweight woman, whom everyone knew had no acumen for the job, was kept on, while a young man who had just rented himself a studio apartment and was clawing his way out of debt had been told that he was “no longer needed.”
Desks changed every so often. They would come in to their position, only to discover, as though through some sort of dream logic, their desk was no longer their desk. Disorientation followed, and the onus of figuring out what, exactly, had occurred, fell on the hapless worker. He could always turn to ask the overseer, but they, likelier than not, would simply frost their gaze and point in a direction that the worker would then follow, hopefully, to some sort of answer. By the time the new location was ascertained (on another floor, but still facing another brick wall), the worker was considered “late” and suffered through the acid tones of their own supervisor as they sat down to prepare to do nothing for hours on end.
Most took up smoking just to be able to get out of the stifling atmosphere for 15 minutes at a time. These fifteen minutes were highly prized possessions. Some, especially those on the entry level, or the third floor, were in the unenviable position of having to ask their supervisor for an OK to leave. Cruelly, the supervisor would often either ignore their question, or simply say “no” with nary another thought. Their eyes, it's true, hardly ever left the monitors before them.
At five in the evening, the doors exploded with the rush of those freed from the innards of the Mill. Of course, there were some who had to stay behind, perhaps for hours, perhaps on a later shift. This, then, the optimal time to be there. Throughout the night, the third floor windows were illuminated. The hazards of being open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, even on Christmas Day. The Mill simply never slept.
It is a small city, perched on the edge of a harbor like a child testing its courage. The Atlantic turns into a widow in the winter, chilly and unforgiving and bitter, making itself a mirror for the world and showing nothing but bile and vitriol. Snow and ice crust the streets for months before melting into a gray sludge that looks like the residue of a painting after being attacked by turpentine. But this, the knothole of winter, the time after the old year's gone and the time before the new spring comes, this is the worst. The cold is unabated, the wind is hawklike and uncivil, and the hours leap by like whitetail deer before the sound of a hunter's rifle. The sun's passage across the sky is mortichnic, like tired clockwork performing a final time, every day.
There's a joke that runs through the city like an old thread, stained like a smoker's teeth: “You could always go work at the Mill.” And most, if they're lucky, know what that means and have been lucky to escape it, but some are desperate and don't know, and don't have anyone to warn them. And those who do go, stay for a long time. Hardly anyone ever quits the Mill - you're either fired, or you're a lifer. Most have been there past the three-year mark, declaiming with ever-withering tones as the months pass, “No, this time I mean it. I'm out of here. This is my last year. No bullshit.” And all the others nod their heads in mock-sage agreement, knowing better. The year passes, and even through the warm bounty of the summer and the crisp of fall, the ague of winter descends again and the year's wheel turns, and they're still there, at their desk, strapped in and just a bit more smudged around the hollows of the eyes.
This is a place where questions, once asked, lie unanswered on the floor like dead leaves. Eyes dart from corner to corner as if seeing shadows move, or as if seeking shadows. The breath of every single worker at the Mill is rotted and stale, and they stink of fear-sweat as it saturates their clothes.
And when they are finally off of a shift, they proceed in rank & slumped-shoulder file to bars, bars of different colors and stripes, different drinks clenched in different hands, but always a drink and hardly ever a beer. They chase away the weird grit of despair that lodges in the cracks between their teeth and in the corners of their eyes with the cleansing burn of alcohol. Soon enough, they overdrink, and the anger worms its way back into their hearts and their fists clench anew as eyes slowly creep back towards the clocks on the wall. As last call approaches with a heavy, almost tender step, the only thing on their mind is how many hours are left before returning to their desks and once again snapping closed the shackles around their wrists and tethering themselves to their desks.
Well, it's either this or a life of crime. Or a life working at the convenience store down the hill, where you're more apt to be stabbed than you are smiled at, and you'll go home with less in your pockets than you had when you arrived. The fifth floor of the Mill is reserved for these kinds of arguments, when the heads of the company bother to address the concerns of those who work below. The fifth floor, indeed, is never trespassed upon, not even to make use of its bathroom. Most do their business quickly, though the stalls don't lock and the urinals don't flush, and paper towels are hardly ever in supply. The handles of the bathrooms are almost always wet with someone else's residue, and most workers use the pinched sleeve of their shirt or jacket to open them. Once inside, the noisome chamber affords little privacy or even sanitation. In a sublimely cruel trick, the flusher on the toilets is situated in such a way that one must reach through the horns of the seat to depress, or put the seat down entirely. This is a problem endemic to the men's room, but there are other problems, and most would argue, somewhat worse, to the women's. The fifth floor argues that they are lucky to have a separate men's room and a women's room. This, they say, is an expense and ill-afforded.
In the lower levels, the temperature is hardly ever regulated, and most of the workers there are seen wrapped in layers throughout the day. Some prefer gloves, though that does make it more difficult to type, and the overseers frown on inefficiency. So the first floor are called the “Bluefingers” because of the strange hue of their hands, due to the cold. This is ironic, because those who deal most consistently with rich, upper-crust clients are on this floor. It is an enviable position, if only because of the prestige, but no one wants to work there because those who do inevitably come down with the First Floor Sickness: an unexplained phenomenon consisting of a constantly running nose, pertussis-like coughing, and a strange, low burr to their exhausted voices.
•
A pale, membranous blue, lit spectrally, as if from behind. The sun, slunk already between buildings, and the waves going in and out of the harbor like murderer's knives.
The still quiet of between-holidays, a city emptied from its brim to its dregs. The crunch of snow underfoot like day-old pastries, the street itself with a thin crust of delicate icing.
A toothache, like a black hole in his jaw, and his mittened hand at the side of his cheek, rubbing ineffectually. This is a different kind of cold, one that does not respond to half-hearted friction. Best thing is to relocate the pain. He strips off his left mitten and uses the teeth on the left side of his mouth to bite down hard on his index and middle finger, already pinking in the frigid air. He bites carefully, pressing hard on the divot between the third and second joint, and applies more pressure. The cold air seeps in around his fingers and saliva trickles down the side of his chin like a dam secretly preparing to burst. He feels the slimy trail go gelid as soon as it leaks from the corner of his mouth - too cold even to launch itself from the rampart of his chin and shatter on the sidewalk.
A carhorn, and headlights flashing - he's inadvertently crossed into the street at a green light. The driver, an old man with white hair and a Burberry coat (with matching red-plaid hat) is gesticulating angrily at him. He stops, standing directly in the road, staring at the man. The car is a shiny black BMW 5-series. There is not a single spot of rocksalt or sand on it, not even in the wheel-wells where plump, satisfied tires rotate on finely-greased axles.
The driver rolls down the window. He notes that the man is also wearing a scarf that matches his coat. “Whaddaya doin? Are you fuckin retarded?” Re-tah-ded. He doesn't recognize the accent. He shrugs and blinks, fingers still in his mouth. He removes them, gingerly, and the toothache gleefully reasserts itself. He notices the weird, nearly topological crescents of tooth imprints on his fingers.
“Toothache,” he says, by way of explanation, but his voice is quiet and the wind pulls the sound away from his lips before it has a chance to reach the irate driver-man's ears. Drooping ligaments of saliva are still attached to his fingertips from his mouth.
“GET OUT OF THE GODDAM ROAD!” The driver is turning purple. Like Veronica Salt, or whoever, from Charlie & the Chocolate Factory. Maybe he'll explode. He laughs a little, wondering where the driver-man has got to go that's so important.
“Are you late for a very important date?” He asks, tossing out his voice like a lasso. He does not move from the spot he's stopped. A weird rash of light has grown in his eyes, making him appear almost feverish. “You should check your pocket-watch!”
The man has rolled up his window again. He is now holding the heel of his hand against the horn. The sound obliterates anything else, for blocks around. The whole world becomes the F# of the horn.
He opens his mouth, saliva still dripping from his teeth, and looses a sound to harmonize with it.
One of his shoelaces has come untied, he notices idly. It lays like an old, dead worm on the asphalt, after a spring rain. He cuts off his sound, and stoops down to fix it.
Redandblack birds fill his vision. It feels like he's falling through a strange, wet, leaf-pile. The pain of the toothache, finally freed, explodes throughout his entire body as the car slams into his side, rupturing his skull and shattering his bones.
The sound of the horn continues to echo, pitch-shifting, like a scream unsure of itself, and then finally pinches off.
•
He wouldn't have done it if there had been someone there to see. He wouldn't have done it if his daughter, who looks to be about the kid's age, had been in the car, or in the state, for that matter. He wouldn't have done it if he hadn't just left his ex-wife's house, dropping off the kids' Christmas presents. His ex-wife's house, his old house.
He adjusts the chunky Rolex on his right wrist and turns the seat-warmers up. A not entirely unwelcome heat seeps up and into his buttocks, rising through them. He catalogues the various aches:
right knee
third digit of right ring finger (where the ring used to be)
knife-edge of left hand, near to wrist
indigestion
a rough tickle in his throat (post-nasal drip, perhaps)
rattling in the lungs
He'd light up a cigarette, but he promised someone he wouldn't. His hands are shaking slightly, and his nose is running.
He wouldn't have done it if it weren't so late in the day.
He wonders if there's blood on the front fender. He wonders if he bent the fender. The goddam mechanic won't be in until the new year, which means he'll have to drive the Benz, which is a year older than he'd like it to be and doesn't have the seat-warmers.
“Fucking hell,” he grumbles. There is nothing about this season he likes. He drives past buildings liberally festooned with tinsel and blinking lights and ho-ho-hoing plastic Santas lit electrically from within. He doesn't like the cold, and he doesn't like the lines you have to wait in just to get a coffee. He'd go to the Dunkin Donuts instead of the indepedently-owned local shop, but they don't have the kind of beans he likes.
He is the kind of man who changes his clothes three to four times every morning before he leaves the house. He can put them out the night before in order to conserve time, but by the time he gets up, showers, and gets ready to go to the office, he feels differently, and staring at himself in the mirror, he just doesn't feel right somehow. As if he knows - can see himself hours ahead - having a miserable day. He is possessed of a certainty that if he changes what he's forecasting, changes into a new suit of clothes, the day won't be as bad. He knows this is entirely erroneous. He does not care.
Showing posts with label written at work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label written at work. Show all posts
Friday, December 28, 2012
Sunday, June 3, 2012
Eddy (part one)
She spoke with her hands, illustrating the words her mouth revealed a half-second before she spoke them. Her hands were always ahead of her lips, even and especially when we laid together on top of rumpled sheets, with only the faraway moon for an observer.
She told a story: a wind-chapped, angry story about her last lover. He had marooned her in his boat at the marina. She'd woken to the sound of nothingness, a fuzzy heavy feeling in the air. The shadows under the benches and around the table were still, but seemed to breathe shallowly, as though her waking had caught them in the middle of some roundelay or caper. They waited for her lapse back into the soothing dark of sleep, to blink once and then yawn, and then curl back against the small pillow, nestling down and then, further down.
She didn't know at the time that he'd left her. The pocket of space behind each of her curves still seemed filled with him as she slowly climbed back to wakefulness. Her head throbbed with the fury of hangover, like something thrashing around in deep water, gasping for breath. Sharp, short bursts of electricity jabbed into the back of her neck, snaking up and around her head and invading her inner ear. This is what woke her up, what immediately forced her outstretched hand to seek his frame out - his big, broad frame, and - upon questing - found nothing.
Panic set in the way it always will, first like a fog and then like a fire. Frostbitten with it, she cast her gaze around the room. The immediate litany of locations fluttered through her head: ... bathroom, abovedecks ... She was half-dressed, and suddenly, acutely, felt her nakedness like a shame. Cheeks burning and eyes swimming in their shallows, she clambered into her pants and pulled the curtain of her hair back across her forehead. She called out his name, and heard it sink, forlornly, into the quicksand of silence.
That was the first time he'd left her. The second time, she began, was even worse ...
But the thunder abbreviated her telling, as her eyes slanted towards the window and the lightning's sky-grimace. She made the same motion: pulled her hair across her forehead, fear congealing in her eyes.
A month later, she, too, disappeared. It wasn't an entirely unknown phenomenon: this town had a habit of suddenly casting someone off, hurling them like a rider from the back of an angry bronco. A tear was shed, drinks were clinked together, and then the space at the bar where she sat was healed over like the space over an abscess in the mouth. It would be another number of months before she would be fondly remembered (a passing anecdote) and the feather of emotion and loss would tickle their sopping hearts.
One night, her last lover shambled in.
It was raining, though the day had been sunlit. The wind teased the oncoming storm like a prize on a string, blown first this way and then that, just out of reach. The smell in the air was of fish and gulls, and stale cigarette smoke.
He pushed his way through slant-wise. If he had stood up straight, he would have been barred progress by some invisible wall, would have had to lean against it every step of the way, pressing forward like a doomed mime.
One barfly leaned over and whispered to another, voice craggy with cynicism. It's him again.
His eyes were wild and his hair was matted down over his brow, as though he had been swimming. The scattering of patrons on their stools slowly swiveled their heads to watch his passage, like blinking, insensate seals sunning themselves on sea-slick rocks watching a freighter steam by. The bar glittered like the ocean beneath their elbows.
'Can I help you?' The bartender knew him, knew his glazed-over face and his glazed-over eyes. He was tolerated, though almost always politely asked to leave after one bottle of beer.
'Where's she.'
'I'm sorry?' The bartender blinked, though tilted his head to one side, as if examining an unknown variable in a math equation.
'Where's she.'
'I don't understand.'
'Yes. You do. She.'
'Look, man. You're obviously drunk. I think you should leave.'
He stubbornly shook his shaggy head, like a beast furrowing the soil, head lowered. He gnashed his teeth and listed from side to side. 'Not till. Her.'
They two were thrown into a momentary battle of wills, locked eyes, until the bartender chuckled and shook his head. 'I don't think you want me to call the police.'
He turned then, almost falling over onto one of the stools, causing a yelp of surprise to emit from the occupant, and finally pitched himself out of the bar, slamming the crash-bar hard with the heels of his hands as he went. The door gave a shrill whinny of alarm, but allowed his egress.
And that was the last time any of them saw him, either.
It wasn't that he, too, vanished into the particulate air, but rather that they all did. The Friday afternoon crowd. One by one, over the following weeks, in a staggered formation, until one day the morning lasted until the late afternoon with no one astride their seats. At two minutes til four, he entered, meaty hands manicured and hair slicked back from his clean-shaven face. Dried blood pocked the underside of his chin from where the dull razor had nicked the wriggling, subdermal capillaries. His left eye gleamed with a virulent sheen, as though someone had embedded a diamond deep within the mine-black of his pupil. He nearly swaggered.
The bartender raised an eyebrow as he walked in. 'Can I help you?'
'No.' The man sat down at the bar, directly in the middle of the empty barstools. One free hand moved carefully over his hair, as if cautious of any disturbance. This hand motion followed down his front, adjusting his dark tie somewhat absently, before coming to rest like a malformed, fleshy bird perching on the bar. 'You didn't even try to help last time.'
'I'm not sure what you mean,' he said, tilting his head to one side in the same manner as a dog does, upon hearing a sound whose origin he cannot determine.
'She disappeared.'
'People have a habit of doing that in this city,' the bartender replied, and went on to polish another glass that didn't need polishing.
'I know that,' the man growled, and his hand formed a fist.
'If you're not going to have a drink, I'm going to have to ask you to leave.'
'Fine. Gimme a scotch.'
'Which one?'
The man glared at him balefully, one eye squinted near-shut, the other glittering, malevolent, quasar-like. 'Whichever. The cheapest.'
The bartender turned, sizing up the man. He'd ordinarily turn him down, but something had changed. 'Fine. Neat, or rocks?'
'Neat.' A wolfish grin, as if on springs, rent the bottom half of his face.
Outside, the wind picked up, and slapped the awnings rudely with its big invisible hand.
The glass, redolent of antiseptic, slid suddenly in front of him, the liquid inside slopping from side to side. 'Quiet in here today,' the man said suddenly, a trace of amusement lingering on the words like scurf from the breakers.
'One of those days,' the bartender said, shrugging.
'One of those days,' echoed the man, and toasted the thin air with his glass.
A week later, the bartender disappeared, and someone new slid into his place like a picture in a frame. This one, a bit stockier, paunchier, balding at the edges, and not just around the head. He seemed worn down by the eraser of the world, as though by some miraculous coincidence he had escaped being completely folded down and compacted into a ball by shrugging through life as quietly as possible. He had never had a woman, never had a mother or a father, never even had a new pair of pants. He was colorless, his body like a pause between empty space and empty space. When people ran into him on the street - as would often happen - they simply bumped around him like the waters of stream encountering a rock. People eddied around him.
Perhaps it was no coincidence that his name was Eddy, or at least, that was the name the orphanage had given him. When he was fifteen, he asked who his mother had been, and his case-worker (he was #999178-1) had (somewhat rudely) told him that she was a crackwhore who gave birth to him in an alley and that the only reason he'd survived was because his incessant squalling kept a tenant in the apartment complex above from fornicating effectively. Even as a baby, he would reflect ruefully, he would prevent those around him from having sex. He had lived an uncommonly long life for a human prophylactic, but felt just as discarded as a French letter.
He had come by this job in a somewhat haphazard fashion. Most of the time, you would imagine a bartender should be friendly and personable, ready and willing to lend a sympathetic ear. Eddy ruminated he would only be lending a pathetic ear, having the prefix truncated by his sad-sack demeanor.
It had been the pram's fault, really. Rolling, racketing down the hill. The mother's blank, terror-taut face as it relinquished itself from her grasp and went speeding by. He had watched it, uncaring for a brief moment, more thrilled by the proximity of disaster than by the prospect of rescue. It wasn't until he heard the thin, piteous wail of the baby that he was galvanized. A thread of electricity snaked through him, starting in the soles of his feet and rioting up to the stem of his brain and causing sparks behind his eyes. Before he was fully aware of what he was doing, he was to his feet and dashing, somewhat lumberingly, after the carriage. Just as it was about to smash into a post-office box, he snatched the handle and yanked it backwards, causing he himself to fall to his buttocks and exhale loudly in the process. The baby within set up an even more piteous howl, somehow seeming louder now that the forward motion had ceased.
She was suddenly behind him, tear-tracks on her face like snail's footsteps. She gabbled out her apologies, her remonstrances, her heartfelt thank-yous, all the while pumping his hand up and down - even from his awkward, sprawled position. He slowly got to his feet and stared down into the carriage, ignoring the mother.
The child had uncannily blue eyes. That's what he'd remember, he thought to himself, extending a finger down to the earnest, pink-whorled face. He brushed the back of his knuckle against the infant's cheek, who immediately went quiescent and stared up at him in awe. That, he thought with some satisfaction, is how you should treat your rescuer. Like God.
The mother was the proprietress of the bar. Her name was Judy, and she needed a replacement, and he needed a job, and so one piece fit with the next, and the puzzle was complete. He showed up the next day, donned the apron and bowtie, and begin fastidiously polishing the glasses like his pre-decessor had and, no doubt, much like his successor would. In a city such as this, such thoughts were not only commonplace, but also necessary. He knew where his last will & testament was.
Even certain apartment complexes would come equipped with small glass enclosures, for the storing of such documents, labelled, rather comically,
BREAK IN CASE OF DISAPPEARANCE
Eddy didn't have that luxury. He lived in a run-down, shabby apartment building ruled over by a thundercloud of a woman, as egregiously nosy as she was conversationally inept. Continually followed around by a brood of gaggling children, she would accost him on the stairs as he drooped home from another shift at the bar, fistfuls of grubby tip-money shoved into his pockets. 'Rent's due in one week,' she'd remind him, underchin wobbling with gobbets of fat about ready to drip off and splatter on the warped floorboards. He rather thought she was so full of bile that the fat-gobbet would eat away at the wood and sizzle through the to the third floor landing, the second, and eventually on down into the concrete of the basement, where it would eat at itself relentlessly until only a small, shaded stain would remain - for years to come, even after the rest of her body's inevitable disappearance.
And what do we, any of us, leave behind, after we've gone?
The question curled around itself like an ingratiating cat, tail tickling the stem of his brain. He felt suddenly, disgustingly fat, and climbed the stairs all the more quickly. Once within, he sneered at the air and bared his teeth like an incensed wildcat.
Experimentally, he snarled, and then, feeling foolish, grimaced, made a moue with one hand, and sank into his easy-chair.
The night would be long, longer than any day, and not even the rumble of (yet another) approaching thunderstorm would provide him with a much-needed frisson of excitement. He closed his eyes and imagined that he had a dog - heard the familiar panting and click-click-schuss of nails and paws on the linoleum of the kitchen floor. Felt the corrugated rupp of tongue against his cheek. Maybe tomorrow, Eddy thought to himself, he'd get to the gym. Stop smoking. Take up drinking. Maybe tomorrow he'd vanish into the particulate air, just like all the rest of them.
His last thoughts before he tumbled into the yaw of sleep: wondering whether or not the police station still had a 'missing persons' department, or if such things were now superfluous, if people just had grown accustomed to suddenly losing people - strangers, their loved ones, even celebrities wiped right off of the television screen ...
How the ragged fall apart. Something just tugs at the threads dangling from the edges of a person, a great unknown something with dextrous fingers.
Eddy, back on the job, behind the deserted bar, humming along with Sarah Vaughn's muffled voice, percolating from the old and dingy speakers tucked in their crannies behind the bar. His thoughts swirl around the inside of his head. One customer, so far, today: a fecund, broad-lipped young woman who ordered a Cosmopolitan. He made it a little too strong on purpose, hoping she would unlock herself to him and spill out secrets. He wanted to hear a secret today. Wanted to break a promise to someone. Wanted, above all, to feel human.
'So, when do you think you'll disappear?' she asked, trailing her finger over the rim of the martini glass. Her expression had gone from quiet to dour, and her hands, once tremulous, had stilled.
This was not the question he had wanted, but, in keeping with his profession, he shrugged and pointed at the clock. 'Quarter to nine,' he quipped.
She stared at him, uncomprehending.
'When I get off work,' he supplied.
She disapproved, with both lips. 'Not what I meant.'
'Just trying to lighten the mood, miss.'
'My mood doesn't need lightening.'
'My mood always needs lightning,' he mis-heard, perhaps on purpose.
Her lips only tightened. No laughter seeped through that ossified crack in her face. She downed the rest of her drink and stared at it for a long moment, as if willing it to refill of its own accord.
'Another?'
She shook her head, from side to side, slowly at first, as if unsure. Then, once more, and definitively. She'd already paid, but she made no motion to stand. Eddy watched her, and then returned to polishing the glasses, to wiping the bar, to standing just to one side.
She rested her head in one hand, neck arcing west as if waiting for a monster to divest her of her blood-supply. She looked blankly into the air, at nothing in particular, and certainly not at Eddy.
He was afraid, for a brief moment, that he'd turned invisible - somehow become even more colorless, faded. Then, abruptly, a shocking bleat of noise issued from his mouth. The woman startled, her elbow jostling the empty martini glass, which toppled to one side and fell with a loud report against the bar.
'I'm sorry,' he apologized awkwardly. 'I was afraid I'd disappeared.'
'You're a weird one,' she accused. 'Have a good day.'
And with that, she gathered herself around herself like a thick fog and vanished out the door.
'Yes, I know,' Eddy murmured, haplessly, to himself and to no one at all. To the ghosts of those long gone. Aiming his words up; through the low, dim ceiling, piercing the rain-heavy clouds, and finally, galloping toward the petulant, eternal sizzle of the sun.
She told a story: a wind-chapped, angry story about her last lover. He had marooned her in his boat at the marina. She'd woken to the sound of nothingness, a fuzzy heavy feeling in the air. The shadows under the benches and around the table were still, but seemed to breathe shallowly, as though her waking had caught them in the middle of some roundelay or caper. They waited for her lapse back into the soothing dark of sleep, to blink once and then yawn, and then curl back against the small pillow, nestling down and then, further down.
She didn't know at the time that he'd left her. The pocket of space behind each of her curves still seemed filled with him as she slowly climbed back to wakefulness. Her head throbbed with the fury of hangover, like something thrashing around in deep water, gasping for breath. Sharp, short bursts of electricity jabbed into the back of her neck, snaking up and around her head and invading her inner ear. This is what woke her up, what immediately forced her outstretched hand to seek his frame out - his big, broad frame, and - upon questing - found nothing.
Panic set in the way it always will, first like a fog and then like a fire. Frostbitten with it, she cast her gaze around the room. The immediate litany of locations fluttered through her head: ... bathroom, abovedecks ... She was half-dressed, and suddenly, acutely, felt her nakedness like a shame. Cheeks burning and eyes swimming in their shallows, she clambered into her pants and pulled the curtain of her hair back across her forehead. She called out his name, and heard it sink, forlornly, into the quicksand of silence.
That was the first time he'd left her. The second time, she began, was even worse ...
But the thunder abbreviated her telling, as her eyes slanted towards the window and the lightning's sky-grimace. She made the same motion: pulled her hair across her forehead, fear congealing in her eyes.
A month later, she, too, disappeared. It wasn't an entirely unknown phenomenon: this town had a habit of suddenly casting someone off, hurling them like a rider from the back of an angry bronco. A tear was shed, drinks were clinked together, and then the space at the bar where she sat was healed over like the space over an abscess in the mouth. It would be another number of months before she would be fondly remembered (a passing anecdote) and the feather of emotion and loss would tickle their sopping hearts.
One night, her last lover shambled in.
It was raining, though the day had been sunlit. The wind teased the oncoming storm like a prize on a string, blown first this way and then that, just out of reach. The smell in the air was of fish and gulls, and stale cigarette smoke.
He pushed his way through slant-wise. If he had stood up straight, he would have been barred progress by some invisible wall, would have had to lean against it every step of the way, pressing forward like a doomed mime.
One barfly leaned over and whispered to another, voice craggy with cynicism. It's him again.
His eyes were wild and his hair was matted down over his brow, as though he had been swimming. The scattering of patrons on their stools slowly swiveled their heads to watch his passage, like blinking, insensate seals sunning themselves on sea-slick rocks watching a freighter steam by. The bar glittered like the ocean beneath their elbows.
'Can I help you?' The bartender knew him, knew his glazed-over face and his glazed-over eyes. He was tolerated, though almost always politely asked to leave after one bottle of beer.
'Where's she.'
'I'm sorry?' The bartender blinked, though tilted his head to one side, as if examining an unknown variable in a math equation.
'Where's she.'
'I don't understand.'
'Yes. You do. She.'
'Look, man. You're obviously drunk. I think you should leave.'
He stubbornly shook his shaggy head, like a beast furrowing the soil, head lowered. He gnashed his teeth and listed from side to side. 'Not till. Her.'
They two were thrown into a momentary battle of wills, locked eyes, until the bartender chuckled and shook his head. 'I don't think you want me to call the police.'
He turned then, almost falling over onto one of the stools, causing a yelp of surprise to emit from the occupant, and finally pitched himself out of the bar, slamming the crash-bar hard with the heels of his hands as he went. The door gave a shrill whinny of alarm, but allowed his egress.
And that was the last time any of them saw him, either.
It wasn't that he, too, vanished into the particulate air, but rather that they all did. The Friday afternoon crowd. One by one, over the following weeks, in a staggered formation, until one day the morning lasted until the late afternoon with no one astride their seats. At two minutes til four, he entered, meaty hands manicured and hair slicked back from his clean-shaven face. Dried blood pocked the underside of his chin from where the dull razor had nicked the wriggling, subdermal capillaries. His left eye gleamed with a virulent sheen, as though someone had embedded a diamond deep within the mine-black of his pupil. He nearly swaggered.
The bartender raised an eyebrow as he walked in. 'Can I help you?'
'No.' The man sat down at the bar, directly in the middle of the empty barstools. One free hand moved carefully over his hair, as if cautious of any disturbance. This hand motion followed down his front, adjusting his dark tie somewhat absently, before coming to rest like a malformed, fleshy bird perching on the bar. 'You didn't even try to help last time.'
'I'm not sure what you mean,' he said, tilting his head to one side in the same manner as a dog does, upon hearing a sound whose origin he cannot determine.
'She disappeared.'
'People have a habit of doing that in this city,' the bartender replied, and went on to polish another glass that didn't need polishing.
'I know that,' the man growled, and his hand formed a fist.
'If you're not going to have a drink, I'm going to have to ask you to leave.'
'Fine. Gimme a scotch.'
'Which one?'
The man glared at him balefully, one eye squinted near-shut, the other glittering, malevolent, quasar-like. 'Whichever. The cheapest.'
The bartender turned, sizing up the man. He'd ordinarily turn him down, but something had changed. 'Fine. Neat, or rocks?'
'Neat.' A wolfish grin, as if on springs, rent the bottom half of his face.
Outside, the wind picked up, and slapped the awnings rudely with its big invisible hand.
The glass, redolent of antiseptic, slid suddenly in front of him, the liquid inside slopping from side to side. 'Quiet in here today,' the man said suddenly, a trace of amusement lingering on the words like scurf from the breakers.
'One of those days,' the bartender said, shrugging.
'One of those days,' echoed the man, and toasted the thin air with his glass.
A week later, the bartender disappeared, and someone new slid into his place like a picture in a frame. This one, a bit stockier, paunchier, balding at the edges, and not just around the head. He seemed worn down by the eraser of the world, as though by some miraculous coincidence he had escaped being completely folded down and compacted into a ball by shrugging through life as quietly as possible. He had never had a woman, never had a mother or a father, never even had a new pair of pants. He was colorless, his body like a pause between empty space and empty space. When people ran into him on the street - as would often happen - they simply bumped around him like the waters of stream encountering a rock. People eddied around him.
Perhaps it was no coincidence that his name was Eddy, or at least, that was the name the orphanage had given him. When he was fifteen, he asked who his mother had been, and his case-worker (he was #999178-1) had (somewhat rudely) told him that she was a crackwhore who gave birth to him in an alley and that the only reason he'd survived was because his incessant squalling kept a tenant in the apartment complex above from fornicating effectively. Even as a baby, he would reflect ruefully, he would prevent those around him from having sex. He had lived an uncommonly long life for a human prophylactic, but felt just as discarded as a French letter.
He had come by this job in a somewhat haphazard fashion. Most of the time, you would imagine a bartender should be friendly and personable, ready and willing to lend a sympathetic ear. Eddy ruminated he would only be lending a pathetic ear, having the prefix truncated by his sad-sack demeanor.
It had been the pram's fault, really. Rolling, racketing down the hill. The mother's blank, terror-taut face as it relinquished itself from her grasp and went speeding by. He had watched it, uncaring for a brief moment, more thrilled by the proximity of disaster than by the prospect of rescue. It wasn't until he heard the thin, piteous wail of the baby that he was galvanized. A thread of electricity snaked through him, starting in the soles of his feet and rioting up to the stem of his brain and causing sparks behind his eyes. Before he was fully aware of what he was doing, he was to his feet and dashing, somewhat lumberingly, after the carriage. Just as it was about to smash into a post-office box, he snatched the handle and yanked it backwards, causing he himself to fall to his buttocks and exhale loudly in the process. The baby within set up an even more piteous howl, somehow seeming louder now that the forward motion had ceased.
She was suddenly behind him, tear-tracks on her face like snail's footsteps. She gabbled out her apologies, her remonstrances, her heartfelt thank-yous, all the while pumping his hand up and down - even from his awkward, sprawled position. He slowly got to his feet and stared down into the carriage, ignoring the mother.
The child had uncannily blue eyes. That's what he'd remember, he thought to himself, extending a finger down to the earnest, pink-whorled face. He brushed the back of his knuckle against the infant's cheek, who immediately went quiescent and stared up at him in awe. That, he thought with some satisfaction, is how you should treat your rescuer. Like God.
The mother was the proprietress of the bar. Her name was Judy, and she needed a replacement, and he needed a job, and so one piece fit with the next, and the puzzle was complete. He showed up the next day, donned the apron and bowtie, and begin fastidiously polishing the glasses like his pre-decessor had and, no doubt, much like his successor would. In a city such as this, such thoughts were not only commonplace, but also necessary. He knew where his last will & testament was.
Even certain apartment complexes would come equipped with small glass enclosures, for the storing of such documents, labelled, rather comically,
BREAK IN CASE OF DISAPPEARANCE
Eddy didn't have that luxury. He lived in a run-down, shabby apartment building ruled over by a thundercloud of a woman, as egregiously nosy as she was conversationally inept. Continually followed around by a brood of gaggling children, she would accost him on the stairs as he drooped home from another shift at the bar, fistfuls of grubby tip-money shoved into his pockets. 'Rent's due in one week,' she'd remind him, underchin wobbling with gobbets of fat about ready to drip off and splatter on the warped floorboards. He rather thought she was so full of bile that the fat-gobbet would eat away at the wood and sizzle through the to the third floor landing, the second, and eventually on down into the concrete of the basement, where it would eat at itself relentlessly until only a small, shaded stain would remain - for years to come, even after the rest of her body's inevitable disappearance.
And what do we, any of us, leave behind, after we've gone?
The question curled around itself like an ingratiating cat, tail tickling the stem of his brain. He felt suddenly, disgustingly fat, and climbed the stairs all the more quickly. Once within, he sneered at the air and bared his teeth like an incensed wildcat.
Experimentally, he snarled, and then, feeling foolish, grimaced, made a moue with one hand, and sank into his easy-chair.
The night would be long, longer than any day, and not even the rumble of (yet another) approaching thunderstorm would provide him with a much-needed frisson of excitement. He closed his eyes and imagined that he had a dog - heard the familiar panting and click-click-schuss of nails and paws on the linoleum of the kitchen floor. Felt the corrugated rupp of tongue against his cheek. Maybe tomorrow, Eddy thought to himself, he'd get to the gym. Stop smoking. Take up drinking. Maybe tomorrow he'd vanish into the particulate air, just like all the rest of them.
His last thoughts before he tumbled into the yaw of sleep: wondering whether or not the police station still had a 'missing persons' department, or if such things were now superfluous, if people just had grown accustomed to suddenly losing people - strangers, their loved ones, even celebrities wiped right off of the television screen ...
How the ragged fall apart. Something just tugs at the threads dangling from the edges of a person, a great unknown something with dextrous fingers.
Eddy, back on the job, behind the deserted bar, humming along with Sarah Vaughn's muffled voice, percolating from the old and dingy speakers tucked in their crannies behind the bar. His thoughts swirl around the inside of his head. One customer, so far, today: a fecund, broad-lipped young woman who ordered a Cosmopolitan. He made it a little too strong on purpose, hoping she would unlock herself to him and spill out secrets. He wanted to hear a secret today. Wanted to break a promise to someone. Wanted, above all, to feel human.
'So, when do you think you'll disappear?' she asked, trailing her finger over the rim of the martini glass. Her expression had gone from quiet to dour, and her hands, once tremulous, had stilled.
This was not the question he had wanted, but, in keeping with his profession, he shrugged and pointed at the clock. 'Quarter to nine,' he quipped.
She stared at him, uncomprehending.
'When I get off work,' he supplied.
She disapproved, with both lips. 'Not what I meant.'
'Just trying to lighten the mood, miss.'
'My mood doesn't need lightening.'
'My mood always needs lightning,' he mis-heard, perhaps on purpose.
Her lips only tightened. No laughter seeped through that ossified crack in her face. She downed the rest of her drink and stared at it for a long moment, as if willing it to refill of its own accord.
'Another?'
She shook her head, from side to side, slowly at first, as if unsure. Then, once more, and definitively. She'd already paid, but she made no motion to stand. Eddy watched her, and then returned to polishing the glasses, to wiping the bar, to standing just to one side.
She rested her head in one hand, neck arcing west as if waiting for a monster to divest her of her blood-supply. She looked blankly into the air, at nothing in particular, and certainly not at Eddy.
He was afraid, for a brief moment, that he'd turned invisible - somehow become even more colorless, faded. Then, abruptly, a shocking bleat of noise issued from his mouth. The woman startled, her elbow jostling the empty martini glass, which toppled to one side and fell with a loud report against the bar.
'I'm sorry,' he apologized awkwardly. 'I was afraid I'd disappeared.'
'You're a weird one,' she accused. 'Have a good day.'
And with that, she gathered herself around herself like a thick fog and vanished out the door.
'Yes, I know,' Eddy murmured, haplessly, to himself and to no one at all. To the ghosts of those long gone. Aiming his words up; through the low, dim ceiling, piercing the rain-heavy clouds, and finally, galloping toward the petulant, eternal sizzle of the sun.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
post-war, desolation
the divine general
is kicked back at his holy desk
helmet tipped down over his eyes
snoring
on the wall behind him
a map of the universe
yellowed and faded,
curling at the corners
someone has written in Sharpie
on the general's helmet
“God is Dead”
then crept out of the room
snickering
and, below,
the spavined old women
clutching wooden beads
in shivering hands
bend their bonneted heads
murmuring like a newsreel
the songs of Heaven
and the burnished-eyed,
spring-young men,
chins thrust forward,
resolutely march
forever through fields
toward a many-handed,
million-named enemy
with only philosophy
to protect them -
this year the trees shall
unburden themselves of pages
in place of leaves
and shrink themselves
in the process,
turn to wizened old men,
stooping over graves
and clucking their tongues
and
in the encroaching dark
as the sun goes out
with a mutter, and
as the stars begin to
sizzle in the skillet
of the sky,
the gloating sound of
the dead rises
from the horizon
like an orchestra warming up,
then,
wind,
and nothing further
but the cruel wink
of the moon
over the empty churchyards
is kicked back at his holy desk
helmet tipped down over his eyes
snoring
on the wall behind him
a map of the universe
yellowed and faded,
curling at the corners
someone has written in Sharpie
on the general's helmet
“God is Dead”
then crept out of the room
snickering
and, below,
the spavined old women
clutching wooden beads
in shivering hands
bend their bonneted heads
murmuring like a newsreel
the songs of Heaven
and the burnished-eyed,
spring-young men,
chins thrust forward,
resolutely march
forever through fields
toward a many-handed,
million-named enemy
with only philosophy
to protect them -
this year the trees shall
unburden themselves of pages
in place of leaves
and shrink themselves
in the process,
turn to wizened old men,
stooping over graves
and clucking their tongues
and
in the encroaching dark
as the sun goes out
with a mutter, and
as the stars begin to
sizzle in the skillet
of the sky,
the gloating sound of
the dead rises
from the horizon
like an orchestra warming up,
then,
wind,
and nothing further
but the cruel wink
of the moon
over the empty churchyards
Sunday, November 13, 2011
prosopagnosia (with apologies to D. Markson)
I've always wanted a brother.
This is a thought which propels me through life like an outboard motor; leaving a muttering, ruminant wake behind me.
Or perhaps it's a father. Hard to tell.
Regardless, some kind of masculine figure.
Like a statue at the foot of my bed.
Or a painting, one of those English Lords with their hounds, on the wall opposite my bed.
I don't really use my bed to sleep anymore.
My grandmother didn't either, after a time. She'd piled all the toys from each Happy Meal she'd bought over the last three weeks on top. Clothes in plastic, books, papers. A mound of ephemera.
Her bedroom always had a strange smell, and the shades were always pulled.
I have a few friends, though I would consider none of them brothers.
In fact, I get teary-eyed when I see a father-son moment on the television.
Even if it's only a commercial.
Sometimes I'll see a group of guys walking down the street and I become cancerous with envy.
They walk so easily in tandem and I, I trip over my own damn feet.
I am somewhat afraid that I will turn into my grandmother. She wandered through a kind of fog that only she could see, towards the end. And always worrying.
Maybe it's a family disease. A external locus of control. Nothing to do with me except for how I was put together. Faulty parts.
Car manufacturers usually recall those cars whose brakes are faulty.
When I drive, I like to drive very fast.
I remember I turned off my headlights one moonless night in the country.
Whipped around the curves like a frightened ingenue in a noir film.
Almost crashed.
I don't drive so much anymore, though I miss it.
I'm a pedestrian. I hate that word, and I love most words.
Borborygmia, for example.
Or anaphylaxis. Medical terms really are the best. Granuloma, dyskinesia, catatonia. Fomite, dendrite, neuropathy. Cortex, intravenous immunoglobulin. This last, I know, treats hypogammaglobulinemia, a primary immune deficiency, and inflammatory diseases like Kawasaki's disease.
They say you can't learn anything from television. I tell them, everything I learned from television, I verified on Wikipedia.
Just kidding. [citation needed]
And so in the waning days of November.
When does a month start to wane? I suppose it'd be right after the half-way mark.
Today is November 13th. So I suppose this is the gibbous days of November.
The sun is still near to us. Not as near but still near.
I wonder exactly how far it is.
Aphelion is a good word, too.
So is perihelion.
The closest approach of Pluto is called perihadion, and farthest is apohadion. -hadion from Hades, which is hell. I like to call the closest approach of Hell, when times are really bad, perihadion.
Everything is circles. I used to draw circles, endless amounts of tiny, inked-in circles whorling across the margins of every notebook page.
That was in middle school.
My teacher told me to “cut it out” and I took scissors to each page in defiance.
Or maybe I didn't, maybe I just wanted to.
This, as I write it, is kind of like a memoir and kind of also like a conversation I'm having with myself.
At least I can be guaranteed of an intelligent conversation.
I think that's one of the worst jokes ever created. Just as bad, if not as bad, as a diner in a restaurant holding up their empty plate to the busboy and saying
We didn't like it very much.
Oh you sly dogs. How clever you are.
But still you have to smile and laugh as if it is the first time you have heard it.
An amnesiac would make a better waiter than me.
Really only someone with retrograde amnesia.
Like that guy in that movie. Couldn't make new memories.
But then how would the waiter remember the drinks?
He could tattoo it on himself.
He does anyway, metaphorically.
And somehow it's easier to make friends when you lie, even if it's just a little one. Everyone lies, I think it's just easier for most people to gently elide over the truth with something fictional.
Novels exist because of this. So do movies, and television.
I spend a lot of time in front of the television.
I am usually biting my nails until they bleed.
I am usually also stoned.
I prefer to say “high” because stoned sounds so violent.
Giles Corey leaps to mind.
The farthest approach of a black hole is termed an apomelasma, and the nearest, perimelasma.
Perhaps that would be a more adequate descriptor of the bad days. The lonely days, when it feels like there's a great sucking thing at the foot of my bed.
Or at the other end of the couch, where I wake up.
In the hole where the statue would be.
Or the painting of the English lord.
Some days I feel like Colin, the puling, pathetic invalid from The Secret Garden, jealous of Dickon's wick.
No innuendo there, Frances Mary Hodgson.
If this were a play, I'd list out the people I know like a dramatis personae, so you'd be better acquainted with them.
I don't “know” many people.
Who does, really. We all just kind of hang around each other relative to each other's natural gravity.
Someone the other day was telling me that we don't know why gravity exists, we just know it does.
I met this someone in the great gray hallways of the Internet.
I imagine the Internet is full of the sound of doors, constantly opening and closing. Some of those doors have locks and deadbolts.
I met this person because all my life, I have wanted a brother.
I put the laptop at the other end of the couch and leaned back like I was just waking up and there he was.
Just his face, but he was smiling.
Through a beard.
I have always wanted a beard.
I'm almost to the place where I have a beard.
Though when I was buying cigarettes the other day, the guy at the register said he didn't recognize me, that I had more “fungus” on my face.
I haven't smoked in six months.
Three weeks ago, I started again.
That might be why.
Not that he said I had more “fungus” on my face, but that six months had gone by.
Why he didn't recognize me, that is.
When I look in the mirror, I don't recognize myself.
Not because of my beard.
Though that might be why I grew it.
To dysrecognize myself.
I don't think that's why, though it's a theory.
That could also be why I tried to kill myself.
So everyone else would dysrecognize me.
I don't think dysrecognize is a word.
And when I told you that the Hum was worse that day, I said it while making kind of this phrenological semaphore over my skull.
You said sometimes, you speak so dramatically.
I tried to pretend it didn't hurt but it did anyway.
When I was a kid, my teachers always said I was “sensitive.”
I imagined all of my nerve endings somehow closer to the surface of my skin, sometimes even sticking out of the pores, like invisible tendrils waving ethereally in the wind.
If someone got too close, I'd get shocked, like an overabundance of feeling would incapacitate my brain.
Kind of like a reverse jellyfish.
A therapist told me that I have an eidetic memory for negative things people say about me, so I tried to apply negative mnemonics to learning.
Flashcards, if I got them right on the first try, earned me one lash of the whip.
Just kidding.
Though in fourth grade, I did pretend to have epilepsy. I did it so convincingly that they scheduled an EEG for me. Electroencephalogram. I remember laying in the dark and hearing the scribble of those little pens over quadrille paper.
I remember thinking it looked like a seismograph and I wondered if they were looking for earthquakes inside of me.
I suppose, in a way, they were.
My grandmother, along with all of her other junk, had a silver can that, when shaken, continued to shake seemingly of its own accord. It was called Earthquake-in-a-Can.
Maybe that's where I got the Hum. Like the Bottle Imp. From the Can.
100% Genuine California Earthquake! The side of the thing read.
The things they teach kids.
I am of the opinion that you ingest what you learn and sometimes what you ingest can make you sick if it's not cooked properly.
The cooking properly comes from the teaching.
We don't have enough good teachers. There's only a small amount of people with the patience to cook, and even smaller amount of those who want to be paid a small amount to do it.
We all wish we could do something with our lives that didn't equal out to money, though we all do it anyway.
Money is the universal language. It's accented by different denominations, from different countries.
I would prefer to be dumb.
Or have my metaphorical tongue cut out.
Rather than speak money.
There's no grammar to money, no tense. It's all present tense. I have this amount of money. Now I do not have this amount.
Today I have to decide if I have enough nickels in the paper roll to buy lunch. I already know I don't.
I speak so dramatically.
And when I told you the Hum was worse today, I meant it, and I did everything I could to try to get you to understand, but I wasn't speaking the right language.
If I gave every person a hundred-dollar bill before I asked them if they understood what I meant, I bet every single one of them would say yes.
Though you really should account for that contingent of the honorable.
And of course, the wealthy. The wealthy look at the hundred-dollar bill like I look at a penny on the sidewalk.
A tails-up penny.
Of course you were concerned. You're always concerned. You should be.
And every week at the end of my session she asks me about my safety. It's a polite way of asking if I'm going to cut the cord.
Off myself.
Kick the bucket.
Jump off a bridge.
Take too many pills.
I say things like no, no. Absolutely not. I couldn't.
Truth is, I could.
But I won't.
Freud calls it Eros and Thanatos. The life-urge and the death-urge.
I prefer Libido and Destrudo, or Destrado.
I will, someday, write a book entitled Destrudo, or Destrado.
The death-urge.
Everything has an opposite.
Except for me.
Then of course there's the two sides to everything I think.
The Apollonian and the Dionysian.
The classic internal struggle.
Maybe I am a collection of multiples that each have their own opposite. A collection of multiples has no singular opposite, other than a collection of no multiples, which is essentially a black hole.
Perimelasma. Sounds like a type of cancer.
I suppose a black hole is a kind of cancer, like a tumor on the skin of space. Perimelanoma.
I am told that I catastrophize. That means I am always thinking about what will go wrong rather than what will go right.
During my session last week, the therapist asked me if I had been diagnosed in the past and if so with what.
In the mental hospital, they told me I had Borderline Personality Disorder. This means I have mood instability as well as idealization and devaluation episodes. It also means I have unstable interpersonal relationships.
I have started keeping this journal to chart my thought process. This is why it isn't the most reliable.
Nothing about me is reliable.
Some people say that the term Borderline Personality Disorder should be renamed to Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder.
I think I like the first term more.
They diagnosed me within a half-hour. Opened up the DSM-IV and pointed to the entry. F60.31 in the ICD-10, where it says traits relating to BPD are influenced by genes.
Think they would've recalled me by now.
My attempts to recall myself ended badly.
Swiss physician Theophile Bonet used the French term “folie manico-melancolique.”
This basically transliterates to craziness of a manic and sad nature.
In 1946, Melanie Klein first used the term “projective identification” to describe the following feeling.
I see you feeling something and you can't feel it, so I feel it for you.
But I can never know how you are actually feeling, I'm just imagining that I know.
A kind of emotional contagion.
I have a very vivid imagination.
You are very catching.
All of you.
Or perhaps I'm the one who is sick.
Seems that way.
I find that alcohol is the best medicine for my brain but the worst for my heart.
The cigarettes don't help either.
I find that cigarettes are the best medicine for time but the worst for my lungs.
I miss cocaine.
I was trying to talk to one of you when I ended up in the hospital. I was trying to tell you how I felt and I think you were uninterested, or you had enough on your mind.
Years prior, at four in the morning, we sat on the curb outside your house and you said I could call you anytime.
You said you'd always answer.
You never did.
Proves to me that you shouldn't rely on things said at four in the morning.
Or past midnight.
Or at all.
Lately I've been drinking a lot of coffee (black) because I miss the rush and twitch of amphetamines. It helps me write. I am halfway through a novel that I'm afraid I won't finish and harbor this secret intimation that it's already dead in the water.
Floating corpses, mottled flesh, belly-up.
I think we drank a whole fifth of whiskey between the two of us that night.
Maybe a few shots of Dr. MacGillicuddy's, too.
And some beers.
What I had to say spewed out of me and hit the sidewalk with a sickening slap.
All I could hear was the racheting ricochet of billiard balls. The jaw-crack of stick hitting cue ball.
Your blank eyes.
I walked down the yellow lines the whole way home.
I stole six Xanax from my sleeping roommate and took a blade to my arms.
Maybe it was less than six.
Or more.
I remember the whorling police lights outside the window. Someone called the cops.
It was me.
Or it wasn't.
The ambulance ride to the hospital, about ten blocks away, cost $600.00 USD.
Six years later, I still haven't paid it.
Or maybe it was five.
Years later, that is.
It was the night before the fourth of July.
A blue piece of paper made it okay for them to bring me to the mental hospital.
Terrible name for a place like that.
Hospital, that is.
I woke up and wrote poetry with a pencil that I had sign a safety contract to get.
I wrote about a Holocaust victim whose name was Eva. I don't remember the poem now but it had to do with God.
In the hallways, a kid with a beard and holes in his socks walked endlessly around.
Peripatetic. Another good word.
With a Bible in his hand.
I asked a nurse what happened when he finished.
She said, he starts over again from the beginning.
She didn't know how many times he'd finished and then started over.
I didn't ask.
I met someone else there, too, and his name was Seth.
I tried to teach him how to solve a cryptogram.
He kept pulling his pants up because they wouldn't let us have belts.
When I left three days later, I left the cryptogram for him.
And my phone number.
When I left, I got in the van and the radio was playing “Doctor, Doctor” by Robert Palmer.
I thought that was weird.
When I got out of the van at my house, the radio was playing “Sick Sad Little World” by Incubus.
Or perhaps not, though I remember the song was appropriate.
I asked the driver if he had a tape in there, playing all these songs, like someone would play scary noises on Halloween.
He didn't.
And I didn't ask.
Though maybe I should have.
Fifteen minutes after I got home, one of you knocked on the door. You hugged me very tightly.
I remember that I was confused as to why you were hugging me.
We stood in the door at the bottom of the stairs where I had been dragged out by the paramedics.
Or maybe it was the police who hauled me out.
I wonder how the neighbors felt that night.
I moved out of that apartment years later and returned to it one drunken night.
With two guys.
They put porn on the TV and I said I had to leave.
I'm glad I did.
Though part of me wishes I'd stayed.
My old bedroom got turned into a game room.
There was a dartboard on the wall where my bed used to be.
I think I did drugs fifteen to twenty minutes after we stopped hugging.
We used to call it Diet Coke, because it was Adderall.
I was the one who made the joke first, though it became widely used and I was never credited.
At this time, I guess it doesn't matter.
You used to call it Orange Sunshine, but the pills weren't always orange.
We also did Concerta.
I remember one time we were on our way to Boston in Lindsay's car and I was separating the capsule to make sure none of the green, non-snortable bits were in the mix.
I loved that feeling. Utility. Functionality.
Having something to do is important to me.
They say sharks can't stop moving, or they die.
They even sleep while they've moving.
Violent sleepwalkers of the deep.
Although I guess you'd have to call them sleepswimmers.
Aquatic sonnambulocomotion, perhaps.
I never learned how to swim.
I almost drowned in an inground pool when I was six.
My mother doesn't know how to swim, either.
My uncle had to save me.
I am mildly hydrophobic as a result.
I have dreams of driving over a bridge when it collapses.
I could probably make it to shore if I tried.
How hard is it to keep yourself afloat?
Not speaking metaphorically, of course.
My therapist tells me not to let the anxiety get ahead of me, and I reply that it already has.
That's usually when she asks me about my relative safety.
I say no. No, of course I can't do that. I couldn't even if I wanted to.
She always appears unconvinced.
I think I might scare her a little.
I kind of hope I do.
I told my therapist about the Hum.
When I say I told her, I mean that she had me do a freewriting exercise and I wrote about it.
I wrote that the Hum is worse today.
That was the first sentence.
I may not have capitalized the h.
I wrote how my thoughts are like comets streaking across the sky.
Over the gray, tilled fields of my brain.
Caressing the fields with their hairy tails.
Lighting up everything with an eldritch luminescence.
Eldritch is a good word.
So is etiolate.
Though they mean two completely separate things.
At one-thirty in the afternoon, the sun is already going down.
I was so excited to discover I have $25.00 in my savings account.
I was disappointed when I discovered I couldn't withdraw it from the ATM.
T.S. Eliot's 'Rhapsody on a Windy Evening' is one of my favorite poems.
The last twist of the knife.
I was disappointed when I found out that it was the basis for the song “Memory” from Cats, the musical.
I generally like musicals.
Especially Sondheim.
A Little Night Music is my favorite.
Probably because I also like Ingmar Bergman.
It's not gloomy, it's profound.
La lune ne garde aucune rancune.
The loops are getting smaller, though there's more to say. Recursive iterations tighten the spiral each time.
The last twist of the knife.
T.S. Eliot says,
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
When I say I love you, I mean it.
Or I don't.
The heart speaks a language the tongue is deaf to.
All thuds and growls and sighs.
This is a thought which propels me through life like an outboard motor; leaving a muttering, ruminant wake behind me.
Or perhaps it's a father. Hard to tell.
Regardless, some kind of masculine figure.
Like a statue at the foot of my bed.
Or a painting, one of those English Lords with their hounds, on the wall opposite my bed.
I don't really use my bed to sleep anymore.
My grandmother didn't either, after a time. She'd piled all the toys from each Happy Meal she'd bought over the last three weeks on top. Clothes in plastic, books, papers. A mound of ephemera.
Her bedroom always had a strange smell, and the shades were always pulled.
I have a few friends, though I would consider none of them brothers.
In fact, I get teary-eyed when I see a father-son moment on the television.
Even if it's only a commercial.
Sometimes I'll see a group of guys walking down the street and I become cancerous with envy.
They walk so easily in tandem and I, I trip over my own damn feet.
I am somewhat afraid that I will turn into my grandmother. She wandered through a kind of fog that only she could see, towards the end. And always worrying.
Maybe it's a family disease. A external locus of control. Nothing to do with me except for how I was put together. Faulty parts.
Car manufacturers usually recall those cars whose brakes are faulty.
When I drive, I like to drive very fast.
I remember I turned off my headlights one moonless night in the country.
Whipped around the curves like a frightened ingenue in a noir film.
Almost crashed.
I don't drive so much anymore, though I miss it.
I'm a pedestrian. I hate that word, and I love most words.
Borborygmia, for example.
Or anaphylaxis. Medical terms really are the best. Granuloma, dyskinesia, catatonia. Fomite, dendrite, neuropathy. Cortex, intravenous immunoglobulin. This last, I know, treats hypogammaglobulinemia, a primary immune deficiency, and inflammatory diseases like Kawasaki's disease.
They say you can't learn anything from television. I tell them, everything I learned from television, I verified on Wikipedia.
Just kidding. [citation needed]
And so in the waning days of November.
When does a month start to wane? I suppose it'd be right after the half-way mark.
Today is November 13th. So I suppose this is the gibbous days of November.
The sun is still near to us. Not as near but still near.
I wonder exactly how far it is.
Aphelion is a good word, too.
So is perihelion.
The closest approach of Pluto is called perihadion, and farthest is apohadion. -hadion from Hades, which is hell. I like to call the closest approach of Hell, when times are really bad, perihadion.
Everything is circles. I used to draw circles, endless amounts of tiny, inked-in circles whorling across the margins of every notebook page.
That was in middle school.
My teacher told me to “cut it out” and I took scissors to each page in defiance.
Or maybe I didn't, maybe I just wanted to.
This, as I write it, is kind of like a memoir and kind of also like a conversation I'm having with myself.
At least I can be guaranteed of an intelligent conversation.
I think that's one of the worst jokes ever created. Just as bad, if not as bad, as a diner in a restaurant holding up their empty plate to the busboy and saying
We didn't like it very much.
Oh you sly dogs. How clever you are.
But still you have to smile and laugh as if it is the first time you have heard it.
An amnesiac would make a better waiter than me.
Really only someone with retrograde amnesia.
Like that guy in that movie. Couldn't make new memories.
But then how would the waiter remember the drinks?
He could tattoo it on himself.
He does anyway, metaphorically.
And somehow it's easier to make friends when you lie, even if it's just a little one. Everyone lies, I think it's just easier for most people to gently elide over the truth with something fictional.
Novels exist because of this. So do movies, and television.
I spend a lot of time in front of the television.
I am usually biting my nails until they bleed.
I am usually also stoned.
I prefer to say “high” because stoned sounds so violent.
Giles Corey leaps to mind.
The farthest approach of a black hole is termed an apomelasma, and the nearest, perimelasma.
Perhaps that would be a more adequate descriptor of the bad days. The lonely days, when it feels like there's a great sucking thing at the foot of my bed.
Or at the other end of the couch, where I wake up.
In the hole where the statue would be.
Or the painting of the English lord.
Some days I feel like Colin, the puling, pathetic invalid from The Secret Garden, jealous of Dickon's wick.
No innuendo there, Frances Mary Hodgson.
If this were a play, I'd list out the people I know like a dramatis personae, so you'd be better acquainted with them.
I don't “know” many people.
Who does, really. We all just kind of hang around each other relative to each other's natural gravity.
Someone the other day was telling me that we don't know why gravity exists, we just know it does.
I met this someone in the great gray hallways of the Internet.
I imagine the Internet is full of the sound of doors, constantly opening and closing. Some of those doors have locks and deadbolts.
I met this person because all my life, I have wanted a brother.
I put the laptop at the other end of the couch and leaned back like I was just waking up and there he was.
Just his face, but he was smiling.
Through a beard.
I have always wanted a beard.
I'm almost to the place where I have a beard.
Though when I was buying cigarettes the other day, the guy at the register said he didn't recognize me, that I had more “fungus” on my face.
I haven't smoked in six months.
Three weeks ago, I started again.
That might be why.
Not that he said I had more “fungus” on my face, but that six months had gone by.
Why he didn't recognize me, that is.
When I look in the mirror, I don't recognize myself.
Not because of my beard.
Though that might be why I grew it.
To dysrecognize myself.
I don't think that's why, though it's a theory.
That could also be why I tried to kill myself.
So everyone else would dysrecognize me.
I don't think dysrecognize is a word.
And when I told you that the Hum was worse that day, I said it while making kind of this phrenological semaphore over my skull.
You said sometimes, you speak so dramatically.
I tried to pretend it didn't hurt but it did anyway.
When I was a kid, my teachers always said I was “sensitive.”
I imagined all of my nerve endings somehow closer to the surface of my skin, sometimes even sticking out of the pores, like invisible tendrils waving ethereally in the wind.
If someone got too close, I'd get shocked, like an overabundance of feeling would incapacitate my brain.
Kind of like a reverse jellyfish.
A therapist told me that I have an eidetic memory for negative things people say about me, so I tried to apply negative mnemonics to learning.
Flashcards, if I got them right on the first try, earned me one lash of the whip.
Just kidding.
Though in fourth grade, I did pretend to have epilepsy. I did it so convincingly that they scheduled an EEG for me. Electroencephalogram. I remember laying in the dark and hearing the scribble of those little pens over quadrille paper.
I remember thinking it looked like a seismograph and I wondered if they were looking for earthquakes inside of me.
I suppose, in a way, they were.
My grandmother, along with all of her other junk, had a silver can that, when shaken, continued to shake seemingly of its own accord. It was called Earthquake-in-a-Can.
Maybe that's where I got the Hum. Like the Bottle Imp. From the Can.
100% Genuine California Earthquake! The side of the thing read.
The things they teach kids.
I am of the opinion that you ingest what you learn and sometimes what you ingest can make you sick if it's not cooked properly.
The cooking properly comes from the teaching.
We don't have enough good teachers. There's only a small amount of people with the patience to cook, and even smaller amount of those who want to be paid a small amount to do it.
We all wish we could do something with our lives that didn't equal out to money, though we all do it anyway.
Money is the universal language. It's accented by different denominations, from different countries.
I would prefer to be dumb.
Or have my metaphorical tongue cut out.
Rather than speak money.
There's no grammar to money, no tense. It's all present tense. I have this amount of money. Now I do not have this amount.
Today I have to decide if I have enough nickels in the paper roll to buy lunch. I already know I don't.
I speak so dramatically.
And when I told you the Hum was worse today, I meant it, and I did everything I could to try to get you to understand, but I wasn't speaking the right language.
If I gave every person a hundred-dollar bill before I asked them if they understood what I meant, I bet every single one of them would say yes.
Though you really should account for that contingent of the honorable.
And of course, the wealthy. The wealthy look at the hundred-dollar bill like I look at a penny on the sidewalk.
A tails-up penny.
Of course you were concerned. You're always concerned. You should be.
And every week at the end of my session she asks me about my safety. It's a polite way of asking if I'm going to cut the cord.
Off myself.
Kick the bucket.
Jump off a bridge.
Take too many pills.
I say things like no, no. Absolutely not. I couldn't.
Truth is, I could.
But I won't.
Freud calls it Eros and Thanatos. The life-urge and the death-urge.
I prefer Libido and Destrudo, or Destrado.
I will, someday, write a book entitled Destrudo, or Destrado.
The death-urge.
Everything has an opposite.
Except for me.
Then of course there's the two sides to everything I think.
The Apollonian and the Dionysian.
The classic internal struggle.
Maybe I am a collection of multiples that each have their own opposite. A collection of multiples has no singular opposite, other than a collection of no multiples, which is essentially a black hole.
Perimelasma. Sounds like a type of cancer.
I suppose a black hole is a kind of cancer, like a tumor on the skin of space. Perimelanoma.
I am told that I catastrophize. That means I am always thinking about what will go wrong rather than what will go right.
During my session last week, the therapist asked me if I had been diagnosed in the past and if so with what.
In the mental hospital, they told me I had Borderline Personality Disorder. This means I have mood instability as well as idealization and devaluation episodes. It also means I have unstable interpersonal relationships.
I have started keeping this journal to chart my thought process. This is why it isn't the most reliable.
Nothing about me is reliable.
Some people say that the term Borderline Personality Disorder should be renamed to Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder.
I think I like the first term more.
They diagnosed me within a half-hour. Opened up the DSM-IV and pointed to the entry. F60.31 in the ICD-10, where it says traits relating to BPD are influenced by genes.
Think they would've recalled me by now.
My attempts to recall myself ended badly.
Swiss physician Theophile Bonet used the French term “folie manico-melancolique.”
This basically transliterates to craziness of a manic and sad nature.
In 1946, Melanie Klein first used the term “projective identification” to describe the following feeling.
I see you feeling something and you can't feel it, so I feel it for you.
But I can never know how you are actually feeling, I'm just imagining that I know.
A kind of emotional contagion.
I have a very vivid imagination.
You are very catching.
All of you.
Or perhaps I'm the one who is sick.
Seems that way.
I find that alcohol is the best medicine for my brain but the worst for my heart.
The cigarettes don't help either.
I find that cigarettes are the best medicine for time but the worst for my lungs.
I miss cocaine.
I was trying to talk to one of you when I ended up in the hospital. I was trying to tell you how I felt and I think you were uninterested, or you had enough on your mind.
Years prior, at four in the morning, we sat on the curb outside your house and you said I could call you anytime.
You said you'd always answer.
You never did.
Proves to me that you shouldn't rely on things said at four in the morning.
Or past midnight.
Or at all.
Lately I've been drinking a lot of coffee (black) because I miss the rush and twitch of amphetamines. It helps me write. I am halfway through a novel that I'm afraid I won't finish and harbor this secret intimation that it's already dead in the water.
Floating corpses, mottled flesh, belly-up.
I think we drank a whole fifth of whiskey between the two of us that night.
Maybe a few shots of Dr. MacGillicuddy's, too.
And some beers.
What I had to say spewed out of me and hit the sidewalk with a sickening slap.
All I could hear was the racheting ricochet of billiard balls. The jaw-crack of stick hitting cue ball.
Your blank eyes.
I walked down the yellow lines the whole way home.
I stole six Xanax from my sleeping roommate and took a blade to my arms.
Maybe it was less than six.
Or more.
I remember the whorling police lights outside the window. Someone called the cops.
It was me.
Or it wasn't.
The ambulance ride to the hospital, about ten blocks away, cost $600.00 USD.
Six years later, I still haven't paid it.
Or maybe it was five.
Years later, that is.
It was the night before the fourth of July.
A blue piece of paper made it okay for them to bring me to the mental hospital.
Terrible name for a place like that.
Hospital, that is.
I woke up and wrote poetry with a pencil that I had sign a safety contract to get.
I wrote about a Holocaust victim whose name was Eva. I don't remember the poem now but it had to do with God.
In the hallways, a kid with a beard and holes in his socks walked endlessly around.
Peripatetic. Another good word.
With a Bible in his hand.
I asked a nurse what happened when he finished.
She said, he starts over again from the beginning.
She didn't know how many times he'd finished and then started over.
I didn't ask.
I met someone else there, too, and his name was Seth.
I tried to teach him how to solve a cryptogram.
He kept pulling his pants up because they wouldn't let us have belts.
When I left three days later, I left the cryptogram for him.
And my phone number.
When I left, I got in the van and the radio was playing “Doctor, Doctor” by Robert Palmer.
I thought that was weird.
When I got out of the van at my house, the radio was playing “Sick Sad Little World” by Incubus.
Or perhaps not, though I remember the song was appropriate.
I asked the driver if he had a tape in there, playing all these songs, like someone would play scary noises on Halloween.
He didn't.
And I didn't ask.
Though maybe I should have.
Fifteen minutes after I got home, one of you knocked on the door. You hugged me very tightly.
I remember that I was confused as to why you were hugging me.
We stood in the door at the bottom of the stairs where I had been dragged out by the paramedics.
Or maybe it was the police who hauled me out.
I wonder how the neighbors felt that night.
I moved out of that apartment years later and returned to it one drunken night.
With two guys.
They put porn on the TV and I said I had to leave.
I'm glad I did.
Though part of me wishes I'd stayed.
My old bedroom got turned into a game room.
There was a dartboard on the wall where my bed used to be.
I think I did drugs fifteen to twenty minutes after we stopped hugging.
We used to call it Diet Coke, because it was Adderall.
I was the one who made the joke first, though it became widely used and I was never credited.
At this time, I guess it doesn't matter.
You used to call it Orange Sunshine, but the pills weren't always orange.
We also did Concerta.
I remember one time we were on our way to Boston in Lindsay's car and I was separating the capsule to make sure none of the green, non-snortable bits were in the mix.
I loved that feeling. Utility. Functionality.
Having something to do is important to me.
They say sharks can't stop moving, or they die.
They even sleep while they've moving.
Violent sleepwalkers of the deep.
Although I guess you'd have to call them sleepswimmers.
Aquatic sonnambulocomotion, perhaps.
I never learned how to swim.
I almost drowned in an inground pool when I was six.
My mother doesn't know how to swim, either.
My uncle had to save me.
I am mildly hydrophobic as a result.
I have dreams of driving over a bridge when it collapses.
I could probably make it to shore if I tried.
How hard is it to keep yourself afloat?
Not speaking metaphorically, of course.
My therapist tells me not to let the anxiety get ahead of me, and I reply that it already has.
That's usually when she asks me about my relative safety.
I say no. No, of course I can't do that. I couldn't even if I wanted to.
She always appears unconvinced.
I think I might scare her a little.
I kind of hope I do.
I told my therapist about the Hum.
When I say I told her, I mean that she had me do a freewriting exercise and I wrote about it.
I wrote that the Hum is worse today.
That was the first sentence.
I may not have capitalized the h.
I wrote how my thoughts are like comets streaking across the sky.
Over the gray, tilled fields of my brain.
Caressing the fields with their hairy tails.
Lighting up everything with an eldritch luminescence.
Eldritch is a good word.
So is etiolate.
Though they mean two completely separate things.
At one-thirty in the afternoon, the sun is already going down.
I was so excited to discover I have $25.00 in my savings account.
I was disappointed when I discovered I couldn't withdraw it from the ATM.
T.S. Eliot's 'Rhapsody on a Windy Evening' is one of my favorite poems.
The last twist of the knife.
I was disappointed when I found out that it was the basis for the song “Memory” from Cats, the musical.
I generally like musicals.
Especially Sondheim.
A Little Night Music is my favorite.
Probably because I also like Ingmar Bergman.
It's not gloomy, it's profound.
La lune ne garde aucune rancune.
The loops are getting smaller, though there's more to say. Recursive iterations tighten the spiral each time.
The last twist of the knife.
T.S. Eliot says,
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
When I say I love you, I mean it.
Or I don't.
The heart speaks a language the tongue is deaf to.
All thuds and growls and sighs.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
a hagiography
i knew him for a time.
we flew around
the room of the world
like crazed moths,
bumping into one another
more often than not,
knocking loose the dust
from our wings
i heard he changed his name –
funny, i did too. we made
pentimentos of ourselves,
scrawled over the names
we once called one another
with ink & with wax.
we were wildeyed,
two jongleurs of
an old &
sour tradition,
ghoulish and gabbling
under the scold
of the moon,
ghastly and garish
under the scald
of the sun -
we unravelled ourselves
then gleefully set to the strings
with our teeth,
sawing giddily
back and forth,
magnesium sparking
exothermically
in our bellies
then suddenly
i knew him differently,
like a book from childhood -
he acquired a dingy patina,
became covered in
something sticky
like spilled jelly -
i came to know how
he acquired clothing:
by osmosis -
something borrowed became
something his
just because of how he wore it.
that,
and the stink.
i came to hate hearing him play
“her majesty” on the guitar,
especially the whole
bellyful of wine bit,
came to loathe
both his wistfulness
& his ardor,
latenights,
by the bungalows, crooning,
while girls, swooning,
clutched at his threadbare sleeves
how the ragged fall apart!
years down the line
i think of him,
somewhere west,
past the heaving, sighing Rockies,
past the arid and
steaming deserts -
i think of him,
sitting high up in a redwood
amongst whispering,
adulatory leaves,
in a familiar jacket
pressing a looking-glass to his eye,
facing east -
i am not so high as you;
i am nestled snugly
in my harbour-town,
an island amongst islands,
one for every day of the year -
& i have always preferred
the hard sheen of the Atlantic
and you,
you’ve always preferred
to be pacific -
once,
i broke the string of your guitar
on purpose, and never told you,
viciously turned the knob
as easy as turning a key
in a greased lock –
i blamed it on the humidity -
these things happen, i said coyly,
when they’re pulled too taut –
they capitulate,
sing one desperate chord
and then
twang
like the zithering lash
of a downed power line.
my fingers thrilled
to the snap, yanked away
as though burned,
itched -
for days after.
i can still hear it,
that sound –
can still see your manic,
berserker eyes
over your manic,
berserker beard,
i can still hear you
galumphing through your
frustrated coitus,
grunting and moaning,
slapping and sighing,
as though wresting madly
at the lock on the door
where love is kept captive
secreted away
in a dark corner,
shying away from your
red-faced advances -
we battered at the world,
ran full-hearted at doom
heedless of warnings
and admonitions
from those who had run
the same path before,
grinding our teeth
while congratulating ourselves
on outwitting the slow men,
the low men,
the causers of this and that and thus,
removed ourselves,
turned frail and brittle,
cracked
in more than one place –
for me,
the thunder of our separation
still reverberates
through time’s
glassy echo chamber,
like an orchestra halted
at the point of climax,
for you,
it’s no more
than a whisper,
the susurrus of drug
still feathering
your heart,
no more than
a moth’s wing
against your face
in the dark,
no more than
the schuss of cars
going through puddles
in the night,
somewhere between
departure
& return
we flew around
the room of the world
like crazed moths,
bumping into one another
more often than not,
knocking loose the dust
from our wings
i heard he changed his name –
funny, i did too. we made
pentimentos of ourselves,
scrawled over the names
we once called one another
with ink & with wax.
we were wildeyed,
two jongleurs of
an old &
sour tradition,
ghoulish and gabbling
under the scold
of the moon,
ghastly and garish
under the scald
of the sun -
we unravelled ourselves
then gleefully set to the strings
with our teeth,
sawing giddily
back and forth,
magnesium sparking
exothermically
in our bellies
then suddenly
i knew him differently,
like a book from childhood -
he acquired a dingy patina,
became covered in
something sticky
like spilled jelly -
i came to know how
he acquired clothing:
by osmosis -
something borrowed became
something his
just because of how he wore it.
that,
and the stink.
i came to hate hearing him play
“her majesty” on the guitar,
especially the whole
bellyful of wine bit,
came to loathe
both his wistfulness
& his ardor,
latenights,
by the bungalows, crooning,
while girls, swooning,
clutched at his threadbare sleeves
how the ragged fall apart!
years down the line
i think of him,
somewhere west,
past the heaving, sighing Rockies,
past the arid and
steaming deserts -
i think of him,
sitting high up in a redwood
amongst whispering,
adulatory leaves,
in a familiar jacket
pressing a looking-glass to his eye,
facing east -
i am not so high as you;
i am nestled snugly
in my harbour-town,
an island amongst islands,
one for every day of the year -
& i have always preferred
the hard sheen of the Atlantic
and you,
you’ve always preferred
to be pacific -
once,
i broke the string of your guitar
on purpose, and never told you,
viciously turned the knob
as easy as turning a key
in a greased lock –
i blamed it on the humidity -
these things happen, i said coyly,
when they’re pulled too taut –
they capitulate,
sing one desperate chord
and then
twang
like the zithering lash
of a downed power line.
my fingers thrilled
to the snap, yanked away
as though burned,
itched -
for days after.
i can still hear it,
that sound –
can still see your manic,
berserker eyes
over your manic,
berserker beard,
i can still hear you
galumphing through your
frustrated coitus,
grunting and moaning,
slapping and sighing,
as though wresting madly
at the lock on the door
where love is kept captive
secreted away
in a dark corner,
shying away from your
red-faced advances -
we battered at the world,
ran full-hearted at doom
heedless of warnings
and admonitions
from those who had run
the same path before,
grinding our teeth
while congratulating ourselves
on outwitting the slow men,
the low men,
the causers of this and that and thus,
removed ourselves,
turned frail and brittle,
cracked
in more than one place –
for me,
the thunder of our separation
still reverberates
through time’s
glassy echo chamber,
like an orchestra halted
at the point of climax,
for you,
it’s no more
than a whisper,
the susurrus of drug
still feathering
your heart,
no more than
a moth’s wing
against your face
in the dark,
no more than
the schuss of cars
going through puddles
in the night,
somewhere between
departure
& return
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
dissever
and the blank-eyed men
are out again,
pious saints of discord with
melted-wax faces
& grasping fingers,
absently adjusting
the ties at their throats
& cracking their necks
from side to side –
they slip sideways between us,
nimble dancers with
poised, gleaming scissors,
murmuring snatches of song
culled from other lovers
they’ve dissevered –
we never see them
though they live in our house,
share our bed,
sit in the empty chairs
at suppertime,
gorging themselves on our silence -
while in the dark,
under the table,
the dog whirs & whines
with alarm
soon enough
sleep becomes a five-second shudder
between one & two in the morning
and we wake up at the same time
unable to look at one another,
afraid of what we might see
and outside, the wind is
shearing leaves from their branches
and the rain is pounding the roof
like a hundred thousand tiny fists
and the sea is going in and out
of the harbor
like murderer’s knives
we share invisible,
vibrating smiles,
hold hands
and watch as the lightning
blotches the face of the sky
like an incandescent rash,
our teeth
glued together
inside of our mouths
when the electricity finally fails
we are plunged into
bristling, barren black
extending all the way up to
the cosmos
and when you say
timidly
that you love me
all i hear is scissorblades
going
snip
are out again,
pious saints of discord with
melted-wax faces
& grasping fingers,
absently adjusting
the ties at their throats
& cracking their necks
from side to side –
they slip sideways between us,
nimble dancers with
poised, gleaming scissors,
murmuring snatches of song
culled from other lovers
they’ve dissevered –
we never see them
though they live in our house,
share our bed,
sit in the empty chairs
at suppertime,
gorging themselves on our silence -
while in the dark,
under the table,
the dog whirs & whines
with alarm
soon enough
sleep becomes a five-second shudder
between one & two in the morning
and we wake up at the same time
unable to look at one another,
afraid of what we might see
and outside, the wind is
shearing leaves from their branches
and the rain is pounding the roof
like a hundred thousand tiny fists
and the sea is going in and out
of the harbor
like murderer’s knives
we share invisible,
vibrating smiles,
hold hands
and watch as the lightning
blotches the face of the sky
like an incandescent rash,
our teeth
glued together
inside of our mouths
when the electricity finally fails
we are plunged into
bristling, barren black
extending all the way up to
the cosmos
and when you say
timidly
that you love me
all i hear is scissorblades
going
snip
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
ochre & umber
Lord: it is time. The summer has been immense.
- Rilke
Exhaustion: a seep, a leak, a hiss, a sigh. Above, the fullness of the moon, pendulous in the sky, like a fat white berry about to drop from its invisible branch. You lick your lips self-consciously, flashing the barest sickle of tooth in a grin. You roll over onto your left side and study me in the dark. I have always looked better in the dark. Your eyes flash like garnets in a mine. Their glimmer is furtive, nimble, darting.
It is not yet cold, not thoroughly. Summer’s lungs still pump, though fall’s breath is coiling in her mouth. This is my favorite time of year, and you say it is yours, as well, though sometimes I am afraid that you lie just to make me smile. I don’t mind the lies, but I mistrust how you make my mouth behave. You’re murmuring something about the cats. I’m not really listening, and feel that brief twinge of guilt as I scramble to catch hold of the conversational thread. It’s another one of your banalities, catalogued as something meaningful in that teeming card catalogue within your skull. I’ve grown used to the little twist of introspection in your tone after we’ve had sex, how you look at me and then away, even as you’re talking about the grocery list, the pile of debris in the kitchen yet to be swept, or what needs to be done to the apartment in order to defend it from winter.
The lightest skirl of wind, dainty and mischievous, makes a whorl over your exposed shoulder and you immediately horripilate, shivering violently and yanking up your shirt as if to disengage from some invisible assailant. This will be the last time this season that we meet like this. For the next few weeks, it will be long walks, barely touching, coats knitted up to our throats and hats jammed on our heads. You dislike the cold and I say I dislike it too, though secretly one of my favorite things in the world is to come out of the cold and take my jacket off. Secretly, the cold makes more sense to me. I know what to wear in the winter. You make fun of me because I don’t wear shorts in the summer, and I’ve confessed once that I don’t understand why even though, in truth, I know.
We will get up from this place and rejoin the world. It still surprises me how much you like to be outside, when you seem at your most comfortable curled up on the couch in an afghan, buried in a book. You just finished a book on colour theory and are contemplating taking up painting. I encourage it. I think sometimes that I fall in love with images of you that I film in my head. I’ve seen you do things inside of my head that you’ve yet to do. I’ve always wanted to make a movie, but you hate to act and say you can’t. I have fifteen or so unfinished scripts with you as the main character. They gather dust and spiders in one of my desk drawers.
In fact, this whole thing could be one of my dreams. This whole thing with you and I could be nothing, could be nothing more than another scene in the movie I’m writing and will never film. I hear the soundtrack to it in my dreams at night. This morning I woke up with “Golden Brown” stuck in my head, and when I looked over at you, the images came rushing back … a subway, rocking and tilting, rocketing through the tunnels of some city. Probably Boston. The lights go on and off, intermittent and epileptic, spasming. You hold on to one of the bars with a white-knuckle deathgrip, but none of the fear in your hands registers in your eyes. You are determined to survive, though there is no immediate threat. That song on the loudspeaker, dim and crackling, though unmistakeable.
We will get up from this place and rejoin the world, secrets of summer buried deep within our bodies like seeds. We keep them dormant and savor them through the whole of winter.
You’ll go away, off to another city, and I will wander the autumn roads after you depart, kicking desultorily at the sodden leaves. It rains the entire week before you go, denuding the trees of their foliage. You call the wind Delilah and I confess I do need a haircut. You’ll laugh, but it’s nothing like your June laugh. This is your October sound, and it’s full but dry. I can taste the anger in it, that dull, thudding sound like a sluggish heartbeat. It’s tinged with wistfulness. I am used to the twist in your tone. As we draw nearer to your leavetaking, you become slightly distant. You look at me less. You are preparing.
I wake up one morning near Halloween and roll over to touch the space in the bed you used to occupy, now vacant. I am like a tongue aimlessly exploring the abscess left by an extracted tooth. You’ll come back – you always do – but I am always here. I’ll get up from the bed and pad to the desk, pull out the unfinished script, and stare out the window while the cats butt their heads against my calves and purr insistently, as if to tempt me with the spectre of their future pleasure. I want no part of them, and swat them away with an outstretched palm – they just push their small skulls into my hand and burr their pullulations even louder. They are both of ours, though they’ve always belonged to you.
There’s a heaviness in the air, though there is a distinct fragility, too, like eggs in a nest of swaddling cloth. I am sometimes afraid to walk outside without your hand in mine, and the eyes of strangers seem to know and understand that I am one-half of who I should be. Winter is a fractious mathematician – it leaves us all one-half of who we should be. Our steps become slower, more cautious, down city sidewalks. It takes twice as long to get anywhere. Lights come on earlier and leak out of the sides of blinded windows. I take to drinking, first just beers at home, six-packs of cheap lager. I sit in front of the television with a glass bowl in one hand and the can of beer sweating on the coffee table. I think of nothing and everything at the same time.
I’ve called you a couple of times now. You sound so distant, as though I’m calling the afterlife, and your spirit is annoyed at having been invoked. I make hesitant, tentative conversation about the city and our friends, and how, the other day, flakes of snow tumbled from the sky’s cotton-stuffed mouth. I make a bad joke and you laugh, but it’s polite and gray, like a deserted spiderweb. I am afraid you’ve found some robust someone in your city and you spend your cold nights with them, curled up on their couch, reading. I make a brief, coy allusion to our last night together and the silence is impassive, like a tomb’s door. I won’t give up hope – I know you will come back for a break, and then for the summer in the spring. This is how it has always been and how it will always be. I turn the conversation to you and you are evasive, vague, banal. In the long silence before I end the call, I suddenly find myself hating you. I remember the catlike flash of your eyes, your drunken pinwheels. It’s easy in these depths to freeze. I remember to breathe, and apologize for the call. You are quick to remind me that there’s no reason to be sorry, though I do it again, anyway. I don’t say “I love you” when I hang up, and you don’t either. You tell me to say hello to the city for you, and I will. I see myself standing at the Top of the World, up on the hill, arms outstretched, bellowing my salutation on your behalf.
I go the wrong way down one-way streets on purpose in my old Volvo, late nights, when I can’t sleep. I roll all the windows down and smoke American Spirits because I know you hate it when I do. I find myself wondering if I miss you at all, or if it’s only that I miss how I look when you look at me. I figure it’s probably the latter, though the former makes more sense to my viscera -- which, as of late, behaves like a contortionist at every memory. Perhaps you are why I have come to dislike summer.
I have become unmoored from time in a way that I find pleasing. I drift ceaselessly, become unconcerned with appointments, dates, times. Work is the only thing which provides structure, though I hate what I do and have never been able to find something that I enjoy. This year, you have taken more of yourself with you when you left than you ever have before.
It’s one night in the bar over an Irish coffee when I decide maybe it’d be a good idea to come visit you in your city. My limbs are jittering because I have a sensitivity to caffeine, though I could also chalk it up to anxiety. I go outside and lean heavily against the side of the building. A friend of mine is here. I admit that once I liked him like I like you, though not with the same heat. He’s always been cold to the touch, and you – you’re liquid fire, you’re pyroclastic, even when your voice is chilly. He has a new scar on the side of his face, under the trapper hat whose ear-flaps slap his cheeks in the wind. That night, I catch him in the men’s room, leaning with both palms on the porcelain sink, staring at his reflection and gritting his teeth like an athlete about to take on a rival. He pretends its nothing, says he was just fooling around. I don’t believe him, but we’re not as close as we used to be. Before, I would’ve put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed with all of my fingers, but now I just nod from the doorway and slip out sideways. I think he might be a little jealous of you.
I have decided to come visit you in your city. I swallow the last of my Irish coffee and it plummets into my stomach like an unexploded depth charge. I am bottomless, I am fearless, I am confident. It is the distance between us which is my rival, and I will defeat it with my stride. My friend is waiting outside when I leave, throwing my scarf around my neck like a hero in a movie. The sky has emptied of clouds and now is bare, bristling black all the way up to the cosmos. The wind is still and my boots crunch on the packed snow. He wants to talk about something, he says, and he refuses to look away from my eyes. His are shockingly blue, like the guts of a flame. He’s letting his beard grow out. He’s shorter than me, though wider in the shoulders. Tonight he’s in a flannel jacket, buttoned right up to his Adam’s apple, and the top button bobs when he swallows. He doesn’t own any scarves or gloves. He says he hates them, but I think it’s pride.
When I see him outside the bar, he’s smoking again. The last time I saw him, he hadn’t had a cigarette in over six months. I’d like to ask him what made him start again, but the look in his eyes makes me reconsider. He asks me where I’m going and I say home, he asks if he can walk with me. I don’t mind, though I’m wary. He seems invisibly crippled.
The walk isn’t a long one. My friend has a manner of speech that I’ve always found myself endeared to, halting and somewhat vague. It’s nothing like your cadence, which is maybe why I like it so much. He’s circuitous, coloring in the scene around the thing he needs to talk about before actually attacking it, like a dog mistrustful of his bed. He is much more direct with eyes than you’ll ever be. I’m not sure I like it. The whole time he is talking I am half-listening. I am preoccupied with the thud of my heart and the images of you from my dreams, on the subway in your city. Placing myself there next to you – we’re not even touching, we just stand and let the motion of the train rock us back and forth while the song plays. I find myself even in dream behind you, staring at your dark hair loose over your pea-coat. How your shoulders tense almost invisibly beneath it when the subway bangs around a corner and rattles through the tunnels like a teeth in an jaw gone slack.
He’s telling me about her, his you. He’s angry, but sad, and suddenly I imagine we’re oil and water – he’s the oil, and on fire – and I am refusing to help extinguish him. All at once, I put you out of my mind and stop walking. He stops too, a step or two away, and looks back at me. He is at once apologetic, and I tell him not to be. I look at him and tell him that things are going to be all right. I notice the scars again, and it’s obvious now that they’re from fingernails. When I ask, he says nothing, then curtly turns on a heel and mutters something about having deserved them. I walk alongside him for awhile in silence, our depths mirroring the bible-black empty of the sky over our heads.
We arrive at the back door of my apartment and I, as always, am immediately putting the key in the lock to turn it and allow ingress when his hand – cold, red-fleshed and white-knuckled – comes down to rest on mine. His eyes are the same color they’ve always been, though the blue of them has now frozen over and seems nearly Arctic. He confesses that he has something to confess and I take my hand from the doorknob to withdraw a cigarette from my pack. I notice that I have somehow unconsciously become distant, and I hope it doesn’t show in my outward demeanour. I offer him a smoke and he accepts both it and the flame from my lighter. I urge him to continue silently, but he takes a long, shuddering drag before he does.
He confesses that he hates himself and that he has for a long time. This is not surprising to me. Unbidden, my thoughts return to you. Perhaps it’s something about the crunch and hunch of his shoulders over the cigarette, or the way he won’t stop shivering. I feel a gentle derision for him sweep over me, like the loving loathing of an older brother or parent. In another time, I would have slapped him until he stiffened his spine and narrowed his eyes. I find myself hating myself for being unsure how to proceed. I listen. He is again stalking around the edges of the conversation. This is how he prepares himself. He is telling me how much he loved her, his you, but that things one day just grew wrong, went askew, like a tree being forced to split itself in two to grow around a boulder. He is in the middle of luridly describing the night they fell apart when I stop him and put my hand on his shoulder. My breath is moist, hot, and turns instantly to vapour when it encounters the air outside of my mouth. I suppose it’s my way of slapping him in the face. I do it as gently as possible; I ask him what’s wrong, what’s really wrong. He looks me in the eyes and breathes his first complete lungful of air since I’ve seen him and winces at the invading cold.
“It’s you,” he says, and stiffens his spine. He’s no longer abstruse about it, no longer darting or sneaking. It spills out of him like water from a ruptured pipe, gouting madly out of his mouth. His feelings, his thoughts. All those dull platitudes you never want said but secretly wish to hear. I can feel something exploding way down deep inside of me, fathoms into the pit of my stomach, and can hear your voice ringing like a cathedral bell in my skull. Again, the rattle of the subway car. Again, the haunting refrain.
He asks to come in, and I let him. We leave our boots by the door.
I wake up. There’s a moth in the room, an ugly brown-winged furry thing that keeps battering at my face. I wake up in a haze and it’s gone, but as soon as I close my eyes it’s back, rubbing and fluttering against my jawbone before disappearing again. I’m surprised it hasn’t woken you yet. You’ve ended up in my bed. We didn’t take our clothes off, though our hands have played cartographer for a number of hours before eventually capsizing like yawing sailboats in a tempestuous sea, folding beneath the waves of each other’s hair. They have migrated during the night’s hours to different locales – sandwiched between pillows, as a trivet for the heated head, at rest on the shoal of a shoulder, limp and disused in the crevasse between our bodies. As I wake, so do my hands, and they resurrect themselves, crawling out of their hideaways, blinking and startled in the morass of sheets.
Then the tidal bore of wakefulness, tinged with the rye-brown of drunk, a wave through the estuary and up the wide-mouthed river of sleep. You are there, towheaded and tousled, breath fluttering in and out of your mouth left ajar. There is no moth, I realize. You stir, soundlessly, and I remove myself from the bed. The heat's come on, and I am sopping through my clothes. The bathroom's anodyne light causes my eyes to rebel, and I stagger away from the mirror, muttering something unintelligible to myself, like a warding spell, before I realize it's your name - though which you, I am uncertain.
I have never been certain of much. It's always one thing, then the other, and then another on top of it. How life goes: an unending accumulation, like silt at a delta. We deposit and are deposited upon, a chain of transactions that leaves us somehow always with one more thing than with which we arrived. I wouldn't categorize you as a thing, either of you, nor myself. We are epistolary, all of us - fragments, spinning, like a shattered window in slow motion. I have told you that I do not believe in being whole, and you make your customary frown before launching into a tedious dissertation regarding fate and the like. I don't believe in such things, but sometimes I tell you I do and listen with rapt attention. Sometimes I can even convince myself that I do believe in your grandiose notions of how the world operates, as if on some invisible axis comprised of spirits and unearthly beings who take interest in our mortal affairs. It's easier than the brittle realism of cause and effect, easier still than the blank face of reason and logic, like a Greek god on its plinth, boring its eyeless, infinite stare across the centuries. Though I always catch myself, you decorate the hook well and I am constantly drawn to its spiralling glitter.
I used to call you by colors, both of you, and perhaps it'd be best if I revert to that now, for the sake of clarity. You are Ochre, the hue of your hair, the hue of red-clay earth. You are Umber, the raw brown of varnished wood. This makes it easy to tell the two of you apart, even though distance separates you. I am standing in front of the door, waiting for you to pass by, smoking a cigarette. A transient with gaps in his mouth asks me if I have fifty cents and I give him a penny out of spite. He throws it on the ground in front of me and curses me in some bile-inflected, spittly tongue. I am indifferent and blot him from my sight. He vanishes appropriately, though I am made nervous by his indictment and the memory of him lingers in my brain long after suppertime. I am poor, lately, too, and my pockets are fast becoming threadbare. I am always seen wearing the same pair of pants, and sometimes, the same pair of socks.
The sky above tumbles by, as if it is trying to get ahead of itself knowing it never can. The wind is loud and blustery, more befitting an April afternoon than a December evening. You've been working all day, chained to a desk by a headset, answering phone call after phone call. I imagine you in mechanical repose in front of your computer, inert until needed. A strange sense inside of me is awoken at this image. It has been days since I've thought of you. I've prepared a bottle of whiskey, which is to say, I've opened it and had a shot. The warmth of it is even now is metastasizing inside of me, spreading from organ to organ. I have my head tilted up, slightly, and am watching a fat bank of clouds shove itself imperiously along. I know that by midnight they will have usurped the heavens and will dump their accumulations on top of us, unceremoniously, and with little regard for our bared heads. A bus lets off and I watch the passengers shuffle their way out of the heaving vehicle's innards. Umber is a bad name for you, but it's what I've got. I might tell you tonight, though I don't think you'd appreciate it.
I'm playing music in my head, and the urge to throw myself at the bar is gargantuan, like a hand pressed firmly against the small of my back, goading me on. I know I might find you there. You've lost your phone and I don't even know where you live. I've told you to knock on my window, though for the past week the window has remained resolutely silent. My doorbell is broken, and I've tried to fix it, though only ended up with the frottage of an electrical shock for my pains. I know I might find you at the bar, though I am resolute in waiting.
The fifth of whiskey goes down smoother after the first three shots. I have forsaken a glass and have taken to drinking directly from the bottle, as classless and gauche as it is, taking great pleasure in swimming within its brown depths. I imagine myself in miniature, dancing like an angel on a pinhead, around the rim of the bottle, before teetering and falling in. I imagine a hand - yours - opening and closing, slowly, then quickly; as if asking for something, then begging, then demanding. My head is beginning to spin, wobbling on my spine like an unbalanced, greasy ball balanced precariously at the top of a tall pole. This delirium, I tell myself, is more comfortable than loneliness.
A man with dark-rimmed glasses and a white coat is leaning over me. He is fastidious but for his beard, whose gray coils spring from his chin like the innards of a broken pocket-watch. His brow is unevenly furrowed over wiry eyebrows and brooding, dark eyes. He has concern coming out of his mouth, but I am barely able to hear it through the booming tripartite throb of my heart. I hallucinate that I am lashed to a gurney on a subway, staring at your dark ochre hair. You never turn around, even in my dreams.
I wake up on my couch, unkempt and with vomit staining the corner of my mouth like an ill-advised brushstroke. You are laying in the bed, one shoe on and the other off, sock bunched up and dangling from the edge of your toes. There is a thick, musty stillness in the room which, after a moment or two, I realize is the smell of my own sick. I am immediately overcome by a surge of embarrassment. You are just as you were the last time you were here, laying in exactly the same position, lips parted exactly the same way, breath fluttering out of you in resigned, slow patterns. I imagine I can see it in the air; frosted iterations of gentle recrimination. I do not know what day it is, though the whiskey bottle sits not far away from me and still has a drop left in the bottom. My fingers are stained with the yellowing scent of just-smoked cigarettes. There is no clock in my room and I do not care what time it is.
I stumble up from the couch into the bathroom again, giggling slightly at the repetition. My mind sharply invokes the image of the transient, cursing and spitting, and I giggle a little harder. The laugh causes my stomach to cramp and I bend over the sink to eject more poison from my insides. It's only poison on its way back up, I think deliriously to myself, amid whorls of head-splitting pain.
Your hand comes to rest between my shoulderblades, and I hurl myself as far away from myself as possible, feeling a sudden collapse incipient. I sag at the knees and you curl your elbows beneath my armpits, hoisting me up. You're stronger than I thought you were. Your fists curl at the sides of my jaws and I notice that your fingernails are ragged - some are discolored with the ochre of dried blood.
- Rilke
Exhaustion: a seep, a leak, a hiss, a sigh. Above, the fullness of the moon, pendulous in the sky, like a fat white berry about to drop from its invisible branch. You lick your lips self-consciously, flashing the barest sickle of tooth in a grin. You roll over onto your left side and study me in the dark. I have always looked better in the dark. Your eyes flash like garnets in a mine. Their glimmer is furtive, nimble, darting.
It is not yet cold, not thoroughly. Summer’s lungs still pump, though fall’s breath is coiling in her mouth. This is my favorite time of year, and you say it is yours, as well, though sometimes I am afraid that you lie just to make me smile. I don’t mind the lies, but I mistrust how you make my mouth behave. You’re murmuring something about the cats. I’m not really listening, and feel that brief twinge of guilt as I scramble to catch hold of the conversational thread. It’s another one of your banalities, catalogued as something meaningful in that teeming card catalogue within your skull. I’ve grown used to the little twist of introspection in your tone after we’ve had sex, how you look at me and then away, even as you’re talking about the grocery list, the pile of debris in the kitchen yet to be swept, or what needs to be done to the apartment in order to defend it from winter.
The lightest skirl of wind, dainty and mischievous, makes a whorl over your exposed shoulder and you immediately horripilate, shivering violently and yanking up your shirt as if to disengage from some invisible assailant. This will be the last time this season that we meet like this. For the next few weeks, it will be long walks, barely touching, coats knitted up to our throats and hats jammed on our heads. You dislike the cold and I say I dislike it too, though secretly one of my favorite things in the world is to come out of the cold and take my jacket off. Secretly, the cold makes more sense to me. I know what to wear in the winter. You make fun of me because I don’t wear shorts in the summer, and I’ve confessed once that I don’t understand why even though, in truth, I know.
We will get up from this place and rejoin the world. It still surprises me how much you like to be outside, when you seem at your most comfortable curled up on the couch in an afghan, buried in a book. You just finished a book on colour theory and are contemplating taking up painting. I encourage it. I think sometimes that I fall in love with images of you that I film in my head. I’ve seen you do things inside of my head that you’ve yet to do. I’ve always wanted to make a movie, but you hate to act and say you can’t. I have fifteen or so unfinished scripts with you as the main character. They gather dust and spiders in one of my desk drawers.
In fact, this whole thing could be one of my dreams. This whole thing with you and I could be nothing, could be nothing more than another scene in the movie I’m writing and will never film. I hear the soundtrack to it in my dreams at night. This morning I woke up with “Golden Brown” stuck in my head, and when I looked over at you, the images came rushing back … a subway, rocking and tilting, rocketing through the tunnels of some city. Probably Boston. The lights go on and off, intermittent and epileptic, spasming. You hold on to one of the bars with a white-knuckle deathgrip, but none of the fear in your hands registers in your eyes. You are determined to survive, though there is no immediate threat. That song on the loudspeaker, dim and crackling, though unmistakeable.
We will get up from this place and rejoin the world, secrets of summer buried deep within our bodies like seeds. We keep them dormant and savor them through the whole of winter.
You’ll go away, off to another city, and I will wander the autumn roads after you depart, kicking desultorily at the sodden leaves. It rains the entire week before you go, denuding the trees of their foliage. You call the wind Delilah and I confess I do need a haircut. You’ll laugh, but it’s nothing like your June laugh. This is your October sound, and it’s full but dry. I can taste the anger in it, that dull, thudding sound like a sluggish heartbeat. It’s tinged with wistfulness. I am used to the twist in your tone. As we draw nearer to your leavetaking, you become slightly distant. You look at me less. You are preparing.
I wake up one morning near Halloween and roll over to touch the space in the bed you used to occupy, now vacant. I am like a tongue aimlessly exploring the abscess left by an extracted tooth. You’ll come back – you always do – but I am always here. I’ll get up from the bed and pad to the desk, pull out the unfinished script, and stare out the window while the cats butt their heads against my calves and purr insistently, as if to tempt me with the spectre of their future pleasure. I want no part of them, and swat them away with an outstretched palm – they just push their small skulls into my hand and burr their pullulations even louder. They are both of ours, though they’ve always belonged to you.
There’s a heaviness in the air, though there is a distinct fragility, too, like eggs in a nest of swaddling cloth. I am sometimes afraid to walk outside without your hand in mine, and the eyes of strangers seem to know and understand that I am one-half of who I should be. Winter is a fractious mathematician – it leaves us all one-half of who we should be. Our steps become slower, more cautious, down city sidewalks. It takes twice as long to get anywhere. Lights come on earlier and leak out of the sides of blinded windows. I take to drinking, first just beers at home, six-packs of cheap lager. I sit in front of the television with a glass bowl in one hand and the can of beer sweating on the coffee table. I think of nothing and everything at the same time.
I’ve called you a couple of times now. You sound so distant, as though I’m calling the afterlife, and your spirit is annoyed at having been invoked. I make hesitant, tentative conversation about the city and our friends, and how, the other day, flakes of snow tumbled from the sky’s cotton-stuffed mouth. I make a bad joke and you laugh, but it’s polite and gray, like a deserted spiderweb. I am afraid you’ve found some robust someone in your city and you spend your cold nights with them, curled up on their couch, reading. I make a brief, coy allusion to our last night together and the silence is impassive, like a tomb’s door. I won’t give up hope – I know you will come back for a break, and then for the summer in the spring. This is how it has always been and how it will always be. I turn the conversation to you and you are evasive, vague, banal. In the long silence before I end the call, I suddenly find myself hating you. I remember the catlike flash of your eyes, your drunken pinwheels. It’s easy in these depths to freeze. I remember to breathe, and apologize for the call. You are quick to remind me that there’s no reason to be sorry, though I do it again, anyway. I don’t say “I love you” when I hang up, and you don’t either. You tell me to say hello to the city for you, and I will. I see myself standing at the Top of the World, up on the hill, arms outstretched, bellowing my salutation on your behalf.
I go the wrong way down one-way streets on purpose in my old Volvo, late nights, when I can’t sleep. I roll all the windows down and smoke American Spirits because I know you hate it when I do. I find myself wondering if I miss you at all, or if it’s only that I miss how I look when you look at me. I figure it’s probably the latter, though the former makes more sense to my viscera -- which, as of late, behaves like a contortionist at every memory. Perhaps you are why I have come to dislike summer.
I have become unmoored from time in a way that I find pleasing. I drift ceaselessly, become unconcerned with appointments, dates, times. Work is the only thing which provides structure, though I hate what I do and have never been able to find something that I enjoy. This year, you have taken more of yourself with you when you left than you ever have before.
It’s one night in the bar over an Irish coffee when I decide maybe it’d be a good idea to come visit you in your city. My limbs are jittering because I have a sensitivity to caffeine, though I could also chalk it up to anxiety. I go outside and lean heavily against the side of the building. A friend of mine is here. I admit that once I liked him like I like you, though not with the same heat. He’s always been cold to the touch, and you – you’re liquid fire, you’re pyroclastic, even when your voice is chilly. He has a new scar on the side of his face, under the trapper hat whose ear-flaps slap his cheeks in the wind. That night, I catch him in the men’s room, leaning with both palms on the porcelain sink, staring at his reflection and gritting his teeth like an athlete about to take on a rival. He pretends its nothing, says he was just fooling around. I don’t believe him, but we’re not as close as we used to be. Before, I would’ve put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed with all of my fingers, but now I just nod from the doorway and slip out sideways. I think he might be a little jealous of you.
I have decided to come visit you in your city. I swallow the last of my Irish coffee and it plummets into my stomach like an unexploded depth charge. I am bottomless, I am fearless, I am confident. It is the distance between us which is my rival, and I will defeat it with my stride. My friend is waiting outside when I leave, throwing my scarf around my neck like a hero in a movie. The sky has emptied of clouds and now is bare, bristling black all the way up to the cosmos. The wind is still and my boots crunch on the packed snow. He wants to talk about something, he says, and he refuses to look away from my eyes. His are shockingly blue, like the guts of a flame. He’s letting his beard grow out. He’s shorter than me, though wider in the shoulders. Tonight he’s in a flannel jacket, buttoned right up to his Adam’s apple, and the top button bobs when he swallows. He doesn’t own any scarves or gloves. He says he hates them, but I think it’s pride.
When I see him outside the bar, he’s smoking again. The last time I saw him, he hadn’t had a cigarette in over six months. I’d like to ask him what made him start again, but the look in his eyes makes me reconsider. He asks me where I’m going and I say home, he asks if he can walk with me. I don’t mind, though I’m wary. He seems invisibly crippled.
The walk isn’t a long one. My friend has a manner of speech that I’ve always found myself endeared to, halting and somewhat vague. It’s nothing like your cadence, which is maybe why I like it so much. He’s circuitous, coloring in the scene around the thing he needs to talk about before actually attacking it, like a dog mistrustful of his bed. He is much more direct with eyes than you’ll ever be. I’m not sure I like it. The whole time he is talking I am half-listening. I am preoccupied with the thud of my heart and the images of you from my dreams, on the subway in your city. Placing myself there next to you – we’re not even touching, we just stand and let the motion of the train rock us back and forth while the song plays. I find myself even in dream behind you, staring at your dark hair loose over your pea-coat. How your shoulders tense almost invisibly beneath it when the subway bangs around a corner and rattles through the tunnels like a teeth in an jaw gone slack.
He’s telling me about her, his you. He’s angry, but sad, and suddenly I imagine we’re oil and water – he’s the oil, and on fire – and I am refusing to help extinguish him. All at once, I put you out of my mind and stop walking. He stops too, a step or two away, and looks back at me. He is at once apologetic, and I tell him not to be. I look at him and tell him that things are going to be all right. I notice the scars again, and it’s obvious now that they’re from fingernails. When I ask, he says nothing, then curtly turns on a heel and mutters something about having deserved them. I walk alongside him for awhile in silence, our depths mirroring the bible-black empty of the sky over our heads.
We arrive at the back door of my apartment and I, as always, am immediately putting the key in the lock to turn it and allow ingress when his hand – cold, red-fleshed and white-knuckled – comes down to rest on mine. His eyes are the same color they’ve always been, though the blue of them has now frozen over and seems nearly Arctic. He confesses that he has something to confess and I take my hand from the doorknob to withdraw a cigarette from my pack. I notice that I have somehow unconsciously become distant, and I hope it doesn’t show in my outward demeanour. I offer him a smoke and he accepts both it and the flame from my lighter. I urge him to continue silently, but he takes a long, shuddering drag before he does.
He confesses that he hates himself and that he has for a long time. This is not surprising to me. Unbidden, my thoughts return to you. Perhaps it’s something about the crunch and hunch of his shoulders over the cigarette, or the way he won’t stop shivering. I feel a gentle derision for him sweep over me, like the loving loathing of an older brother or parent. In another time, I would have slapped him until he stiffened his spine and narrowed his eyes. I find myself hating myself for being unsure how to proceed. I listen. He is again stalking around the edges of the conversation. This is how he prepares himself. He is telling me how much he loved her, his you, but that things one day just grew wrong, went askew, like a tree being forced to split itself in two to grow around a boulder. He is in the middle of luridly describing the night they fell apart when I stop him and put my hand on his shoulder. My breath is moist, hot, and turns instantly to vapour when it encounters the air outside of my mouth. I suppose it’s my way of slapping him in the face. I do it as gently as possible; I ask him what’s wrong, what’s really wrong. He looks me in the eyes and breathes his first complete lungful of air since I’ve seen him and winces at the invading cold.
“It’s you,” he says, and stiffens his spine. He’s no longer abstruse about it, no longer darting or sneaking. It spills out of him like water from a ruptured pipe, gouting madly out of his mouth. His feelings, his thoughts. All those dull platitudes you never want said but secretly wish to hear. I can feel something exploding way down deep inside of me, fathoms into the pit of my stomach, and can hear your voice ringing like a cathedral bell in my skull. Again, the rattle of the subway car. Again, the haunting refrain.
He asks to come in, and I let him. We leave our boots by the door.
I wake up. There’s a moth in the room, an ugly brown-winged furry thing that keeps battering at my face. I wake up in a haze and it’s gone, but as soon as I close my eyes it’s back, rubbing and fluttering against my jawbone before disappearing again. I’m surprised it hasn’t woken you yet. You’ve ended up in my bed. We didn’t take our clothes off, though our hands have played cartographer for a number of hours before eventually capsizing like yawing sailboats in a tempestuous sea, folding beneath the waves of each other’s hair. They have migrated during the night’s hours to different locales – sandwiched between pillows, as a trivet for the heated head, at rest on the shoal of a shoulder, limp and disused in the crevasse between our bodies. As I wake, so do my hands, and they resurrect themselves, crawling out of their hideaways, blinking and startled in the morass of sheets.
Then the tidal bore of wakefulness, tinged with the rye-brown of drunk, a wave through the estuary and up the wide-mouthed river of sleep. You are there, towheaded and tousled, breath fluttering in and out of your mouth left ajar. There is no moth, I realize. You stir, soundlessly, and I remove myself from the bed. The heat's come on, and I am sopping through my clothes. The bathroom's anodyne light causes my eyes to rebel, and I stagger away from the mirror, muttering something unintelligible to myself, like a warding spell, before I realize it's your name - though which you, I am uncertain.
I have never been certain of much. It's always one thing, then the other, and then another on top of it. How life goes: an unending accumulation, like silt at a delta. We deposit and are deposited upon, a chain of transactions that leaves us somehow always with one more thing than with which we arrived. I wouldn't categorize you as a thing, either of you, nor myself. We are epistolary, all of us - fragments, spinning, like a shattered window in slow motion. I have told you that I do not believe in being whole, and you make your customary frown before launching into a tedious dissertation regarding fate and the like. I don't believe in such things, but sometimes I tell you I do and listen with rapt attention. Sometimes I can even convince myself that I do believe in your grandiose notions of how the world operates, as if on some invisible axis comprised of spirits and unearthly beings who take interest in our mortal affairs. It's easier than the brittle realism of cause and effect, easier still than the blank face of reason and logic, like a Greek god on its plinth, boring its eyeless, infinite stare across the centuries. Though I always catch myself, you decorate the hook well and I am constantly drawn to its spiralling glitter.
I used to call you by colors, both of you, and perhaps it'd be best if I revert to that now, for the sake of clarity. You are Ochre, the hue of your hair, the hue of red-clay earth. You are Umber, the raw brown of varnished wood. This makes it easy to tell the two of you apart, even though distance separates you. I am standing in front of the door, waiting for you to pass by, smoking a cigarette. A transient with gaps in his mouth asks me if I have fifty cents and I give him a penny out of spite. He throws it on the ground in front of me and curses me in some bile-inflected, spittly tongue. I am indifferent and blot him from my sight. He vanishes appropriately, though I am made nervous by his indictment and the memory of him lingers in my brain long after suppertime. I am poor, lately, too, and my pockets are fast becoming threadbare. I am always seen wearing the same pair of pants, and sometimes, the same pair of socks.
The sky above tumbles by, as if it is trying to get ahead of itself knowing it never can. The wind is loud and blustery, more befitting an April afternoon than a December evening. You've been working all day, chained to a desk by a headset, answering phone call after phone call. I imagine you in mechanical repose in front of your computer, inert until needed. A strange sense inside of me is awoken at this image. It has been days since I've thought of you. I've prepared a bottle of whiskey, which is to say, I've opened it and had a shot. The warmth of it is even now is metastasizing inside of me, spreading from organ to organ. I have my head tilted up, slightly, and am watching a fat bank of clouds shove itself imperiously along. I know that by midnight they will have usurped the heavens and will dump their accumulations on top of us, unceremoniously, and with little regard for our bared heads. A bus lets off and I watch the passengers shuffle their way out of the heaving vehicle's innards. Umber is a bad name for you, but it's what I've got. I might tell you tonight, though I don't think you'd appreciate it.
I'm playing music in my head, and the urge to throw myself at the bar is gargantuan, like a hand pressed firmly against the small of my back, goading me on. I know I might find you there. You've lost your phone and I don't even know where you live. I've told you to knock on my window, though for the past week the window has remained resolutely silent. My doorbell is broken, and I've tried to fix it, though only ended up with the frottage of an electrical shock for my pains. I know I might find you at the bar, though I am resolute in waiting.
The fifth of whiskey goes down smoother after the first three shots. I have forsaken a glass and have taken to drinking directly from the bottle, as classless and gauche as it is, taking great pleasure in swimming within its brown depths. I imagine myself in miniature, dancing like an angel on a pinhead, around the rim of the bottle, before teetering and falling in. I imagine a hand - yours - opening and closing, slowly, then quickly; as if asking for something, then begging, then demanding. My head is beginning to spin, wobbling on my spine like an unbalanced, greasy ball balanced precariously at the top of a tall pole. This delirium, I tell myself, is more comfortable than loneliness.
A man with dark-rimmed glasses and a white coat is leaning over me. He is fastidious but for his beard, whose gray coils spring from his chin like the innards of a broken pocket-watch. His brow is unevenly furrowed over wiry eyebrows and brooding, dark eyes. He has concern coming out of his mouth, but I am barely able to hear it through the booming tripartite throb of my heart. I hallucinate that I am lashed to a gurney on a subway, staring at your dark ochre hair. You never turn around, even in my dreams.
I wake up on my couch, unkempt and with vomit staining the corner of my mouth like an ill-advised brushstroke. You are laying in the bed, one shoe on and the other off, sock bunched up and dangling from the edge of your toes. There is a thick, musty stillness in the room which, after a moment or two, I realize is the smell of my own sick. I am immediately overcome by a surge of embarrassment. You are just as you were the last time you were here, laying in exactly the same position, lips parted exactly the same way, breath fluttering out of you in resigned, slow patterns. I imagine I can see it in the air; frosted iterations of gentle recrimination. I do not know what day it is, though the whiskey bottle sits not far away from me and still has a drop left in the bottom. My fingers are stained with the yellowing scent of just-smoked cigarettes. There is no clock in my room and I do not care what time it is.
I stumble up from the couch into the bathroom again, giggling slightly at the repetition. My mind sharply invokes the image of the transient, cursing and spitting, and I giggle a little harder. The laugh causes my stomach to cramp and I bend over the sink to eject more poison from my insides. It's only poison on its way back up, I think deliriously to myself, amid whorls of head-splitting pain.
Your hand comes to rest between my shoulderblades, and I hurl myself as far away from myself as possible, feeling a sudden collapse incipient. I sag at the knees and you curl your elbows beneath my armpits, hoisting me up. You're stronger than I thought you were. Your fists curl at the sides of my jaws and I notice that your fingernails are ragged - some are discolored with the ochre of dried blood.
episode 3: the snake & the pocket-watch
He had always had a negligible relationship with time. Whether it was the malingering before school early in his life or whether it was the difficulty wrangling the space between one thing and another later in life, he had always found himself either uncomfortably early or uncomfortably late. Nothing he tried would fix it. It was as though he had, somewhere along the line, broken time's heart, and now time edged away from him every time he came into contact with it, preferring instead to avert itself, take subtle detours. The story of how this came to happen is presented below, as anecdotal evidence.
1.
Half-past-one in the afternoon, October 11th. Fifth grade recess overlapping by chance with sixth, seventh, and eighth-grade recess. A dangerous mixture, but one which the administration allowed due to some sort of catastrophe in the kitchen and, as a result, the compression of what should have been two waves of outdoor recreation into one. The activities were over-staffed as the students ran around in the sunlight, at their various games. There's an impromptu kickball game, watched over by the militant gaze of Mr. Hardwell and the stentorian vocals of Ms. (not Mrs.) Kravitz. There's the game of tag (not to take place on woodchips, and Mrs. Rathburn's intervention when it did); the various playground chatter, girls grouped on the grass in circles talking about horses and the Babysitter's Club books; the loners; the dirtbike kids; and, finally; the game of spies-in-the-bush.
2.
At approximately 1:45 P.M., the administration was largely satisfied with its policing. Three of the ten supervising teachers were allowed to return inside, to their lounge and their lunches, and the game of spies-in-the-bush intensified. Delineated below, for the purposes of dramatis personae, are those involved.
A. Nikos Kazanstakis, leader of the Rogue Snakes, age 10. Denim jacket embroided with Harley-Davidson patch. Terminal sneer on his littleboy's face.
B. Craig Wilcox, second-in-comannd of the Rogue Snakes, age 11, held back one year. Plans to oust Nikos not-quite-formulated.
C. Bruno and Toby Farragut, twins - though not identical, and perhaps not even fraternal. They stuck to their story despite the fact that almost no one believed them. Age 10.
D. Simon Eyvind, a freakishly large 11 year old, similarly held back. Of Norse descent. Considered "the muscle" of the Rogue Snakes.
The manifesto of the Rogue Eagles, crudely illustrated by Nikos' own hand, lived in the hollow of a tree just beyond the limits of the playground. The tree stood at an awkward angle, having shoved itself right up against a large, flat rock made up of schist, granite and mica. The namesake of the gang had been declared the day that Nikos stumbled upon a copperhead, Agkistrodon contortrix, coiling in the cool shade of the rock. Nikos had not displayed any outward show of fear, but stood there, staring at the viper, unblinking, untwitching. Just in time, a teacher had investigated, and shrieked aloud at the sight. They had since been disallowed to congregate at their rock, but none of them had ever shown much regard for that particular edict. They had been in existence for two school years now, since the third grade.
There is also the rival gang, who exist nebulously around one young man whose parents enjoyed the largest house, up on the hill. His name was Kevin Bailey, age 10. His infamy was based around one mythological incident; it was said that he had mercilessly abandoned Dennis LaChance on the roof of the school and left him there for three whole days. Those three days, a record rainfall was set, and, once Dennis had been found by his fearful, quivering parents, the local sheriff, and the super-intendent of schools, he could not speak without his teeth chattering. It was rumored that Kevin had no reason for the cruelty. When asked, Harold Vernor (one of Kevin's "lieutenants") had shrugged and simply said, "He didn't like him."
There is also Dave Granger, and it is he whom this anecdote concerns.
2.5
Dave Granger always carried around a small, gold-plated pocket-watch that he had found in the basement of his house, in his father's old workbench, covered in sawdust within one of the drawers. When he found it, the gears were stopped and the device was silent. He had held it up to an ear, rattled it once, experimentally. He flicked it, once, with the index finger of his right hand, on its back. Sawdust swirled in minute, hesitant curls through the musty air of the basement, and the watch startled to life, the second hand resuming its staccato progress ever around the circle of hours. A wet paper towel or two later, and the glass face of it was clean, though scratched more than a few times. It possessed no chain, though the knob at the top was slightly sticky, and refused to wind. Incredibly, it still told time perfectly. On more than one occasion, Dave had intentions to open it and commit surgery on its insides, though he could never seem to pry the back off, even with a screwdriver and the claw-end of a small hammer.
His father had been gone from the house for years, departed in his own swirl of sawdust, like a magician's vanish gone wrong and with no audience to witness it. Echoes of him remained - his towering bookshelf, crammed with paperbacks of Alan Dean Foster and Piers Anthony, in contrast to his mother's neat rows of Danielle Steele and Phyllis E. Woodiwiss, bookended by photographs of lighthouses at sunset and leaves with their fall vestments on. Dave didn't know his father's face or voice, but had seen pictures. He had his hair. Once or twice, he found a piece of paper written by his father - a legal document here, signed in a completely illegible scribble. Technically, Dave Granger was David Granger Jr., though the Jr. was more or less negligible at this point.
His mother refused to speak about it. She walled herself off from the world, coming home from work with tired smiles and brief pats on the head, absented stirrings of the spaghetti sauce while the news blared behind her on the small kitchen TV. Dave entertained weird notions that his father's soul was in the pocket-watch, though never really believed it. He was no stranger to oddities and arcana - mornings, he lay awake, staring at the red LED of his clock, slamming his eyes shut and attempting to force time forward by the force of his will alone. This never happened, but it never kept him from trying.
3.
1:50 P.M., and Dave Granger, who had just finished reading My Brother Sam is Dead, decided to become a profiteer. This is where the trouble starts. He had long since known about the existence of the Rogue Snakes, and rode to school on the same bus as Nikos. They had never spoken to one another, though they both preferred to sit at the back of the bus and stare out the windows at the cars which trailed behind.
There is one encounter, during which Dave Granger established his own slight infamy. One Sean Walker, a seventh-grader, who boards the bus further down the route than Dave, decided to begin a turf-war with Dave over the back seat. It was a short-lived war of subtle intimidation. Sean sat in the seat in front of Dave, turning around to declare his intent one morning. Nikos had watched, but did not intervene. Sean put down the gauntlet, threatening to make Dave's life hell if he didn't get his "four-eyed, nerdy ass" out of that seat from then on. Dave had blinked once, pushed his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose, and remained silent.
The next morning, Sean Walker boarded the bus, and immediately swept his gaze to the back. There was Dave, sitting in his regular seat, backpack open next to him. Sean sat in the seat in front of him, and, when the bus pulled up in front of the school, began his second act of war. As the rest of the kids stood up and began clamoring, obscuring the driver's rearview gaze, Sean stood up, fist at the ready, warning between his teeth - and suddenly found his gaze blackened and his head slamming to one side.
As soon as he had seen Sean's fist curling, Dave had pulled the red-spined American Heritage Dictionary from out of his backpack and swung it through the air, savagely connecting with the side of the bully's face.
Everyone's got a rumor connected to them. Dave's lingered in the hallways of the school for a good week before it was usurped by Fred Kessler's urinary incontinence in the cafeteria. It wasn't forgotten. Nikos had watched Dave swing the dictionary and approved of the violence, though he didn't like the kid that much - didn't trust him; never trusted a loner like that - though he did have respect for him. Nikos didn't need anyone else in his "gang," however.
4.
11:50 A.M., and Dave Granger was in possession of a secret. He spoke rarely, but he had a gift for listening. Class bored him, and his eyes roved around the room, around his fellow students. He always sat at the back of the class for this very reason, sat alone, in corners, in the lunchroom, usually reading. Once in awhile, someone would approach him, but he would only ever do the same thing he ever did - blink at them, somewhat owlishly, and nod, before returning to his book. The incident on the bus was the only thing anyone really knew, concretely, about Dave Granger. He did well at school, though never applied himself, and was the subject of much frustration between guidance counsellor and teacher alike. This day, being the last one to leave the room, Dave happened to notice a piece of folded-up notebook paper dangling out of Harold Vernor's desk. As he walked by, the note fell to the carpet. Somewhat absently, he picked it up, and without thinking, opened it and read the line therein:
TODAY AFTER RECESS WE GET THEM
Dave Granger was in a unique position to understand the contents of this note. He had known for awhile, that Kevin Bailey had decided to take down the Rogue Snakes. Kevin despised Nikos and every member of his "gang." He had called them dirty fuckers, having only just learned the word, and declaring that they should be "put down." Dave had overhead this conversation because he was in a habit of finding lonely, dim places to read his book where he wouldn't be bothered. This day, it was just behind the equipment shack beyond the baseball field. Dave had broken in (the lock was rusty and wouldn't snap to) a few days prior and had successfully established himself in what he liked to call the Lookout.
In a similar fashion, the Rogue Snakes had found a reason to exist beyond holding fake 'meetings' and discussing inanities. Dennis "LaChatter" LaChance had been inducted into their gang because his dad worked at the race-car track a town over and had promised them all tickets to the race the following week. His price? Revenge. Dave knew this because Dennis had told him in the cafeteria just two days prior. Dennis had to tell someone, and he didn't know anyone, so he sat down next to Dave and had the story out after a brief interval of awkward hellos and eye-twitching. In a way, Dave was curious about Dennis and felt pity for him, though in no way felt invested in the situation. He had looked up, blinked, and ... just once, nodded, as if to say he understood. The nod was all that Dennis had needed for verification, and had left Dave alone, confident that he wouldn't say anything to anyone.
5.
2:01 P.M. The recess bell has shrilled over the playground, and swarms of kids are migrating to the doors of the school. Teachers are busy herding them, making sure no one is left behind, standing sentinel by the building, scanning, squinting to see who is lagging at the edges. Mrs. Rathburn is pre-occupied with her impending divorce from her adulterous husband, and old Mr. Rubenstein can't see much beyond the tips of his fingers. The rest of the supervisors have been released to their classrooms.
The doors shut behind them as they usher the last of the students inside.
6.
1:55 P.M. Dave puts down his book in the Lookout and stares at the inside of the shack door. The woodgrain seems to be moving, though it isn't. He's just tired. Last night, his mother came home and forwent even her usual pat on his head, went right into her bedroom and locked the door behind her. All night he could hear her sobbing, and he still doesn't know why.
All at once, he stands up, exits the Lookout, and crosses the playground. He is not determined, he is not sure of purpose, he simply has committed to action. He knows the place he is walking, and it is right into the snakepit.
Nikos is holding court, though the business portion of their meeting has concluded. He doesn't say anything as Dave walks up, though Simon Eyvind steps in Dave's way and inquires as to his business with the group.
"I have information," Dave says, proferring a piece of notebook paper.
7.
5:15 P.M, and Dave's mother is just getting home from another day at work. There is a message on the answering machine, evidenced by the flicker of the red LED light on the console.
It is Dave's father, Dave Granger Sr. She does not listen to it beyond the words "Lee, it's Dave ..." preferring instead to wildly jab at the DELETE button with her index finger, over and over and over and over again, tears springing to her eyes.
Dave walks in just as she is closing the bedroom door. The evening whorls in like a flying saucer, darkening all of the town with its shadow. He stands in the front door's rigid embrace, staring at the clock on the opposite wall.
The phone will ring a great deal that night, and there will even be repeated knocks on the front door of the Granger house. It will be revealed that Nikos threw a snake - Agkistrodon contortrix - at Kevin Bailey, and that the two groups converged on one another like weather fronts in the aftermath. It will also be told that Kevin Bailey has been envenomed by the snake from a particularly nasty bite on his right hand. Even though Agkistrodon contortrix's venom isn't particularly fatal, Kevin - it turns out - is allergic to most reptile venom, and has gone into tachycardia on the playground. He is rushed to the hospital, where he remains for most of the night in critical condition before being downgraded to stable around six in the morning.
Dave Granger will not blame himself. He stood back from it all and watched the physical portion of the fight - the actual scuffle - happening between Kevin's gang and the other members of the Rogue Snakes. Nikos and Craig had held back until Nikos entered into the fracas with the snake in hand. Dave is possessed of a secret, wild elation. He sleeps until midnight, where he wakes in a sudden froth from a red-hued dream of a man with snakejaws. He gets out of bed and goes to the kitchen, crouches by the cabinet under the junk drawer and withdraws an old, dust-covered bottle of Popov vodka. Without hesitating, Dave tips the bottle back and takes his first swallow of alcohol. He promptly vomits it back up, retching, eyes filled with the bitterwater of tears. His mother still does not wake up, even over the retching. Dave is forced to clean up his sick on his own, alone on the linoleum with not even the cold moon to illuminate his progress.
8.
1:34 P.M., October 18th. It's a Tuesday. Kevin Bailey has been out of the hospital for a few days now, and this is his second day back in the classroom. As a result of the treatment with the antivenom CroFab, his skin is mottled with raised red rashes and he is cursed with an uncontrollable, tic-like itching motion. He has also acquired a nickname: Itchy. His fury is deep, and comes from a sinkhole that has collapsed somewhere inside of himself. His prior position, somewhat invulnerable, is completely decimated.
Kevin Bailey has been approached by Craig Wilcox, Nikos' second-in-command. Craig's mother is friends with the Baileys, though this is a somewhat new development. The Wilcox family has recently come into a bit of luck - they've won a substantially more than modest sum of money via the state lottery. Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox immediately summon the aid of Mrs. Evoria Bailey, Kevin's mother, also a real estate agent. They want to move higher up on the hill. They are invited to dinner, and this is how Craig comes to know Kevin. Their parents want them to be friends - why wouldn't they be? - and Mr. and Mrs. Bailey are concerned about the scuffle. Nikos has been suspended, and Craig sees this as a perfect time to begin his takeover.
This is how Kevin Bailey comes to know about Dave Granger. A certain piece of paper has exchanged hands for the second - no, third - time in a week. A certain piece of paper with one line on it. Kevin Bailey takes the note in his hand and folds it cleanly, obsessively, twice - four times - eight times - sixteen times, until the paper is a lump of pulp that won't bend further. Kevin Bailey scratches at the nape of his neck and Craig Wilcox wins an ally.
9.
1:45 P.M., and it's exactly one week after Kevin's been bit. His rashes are beginning to fade, though he still itches like a madman, uncontrollably. His fury is the path of an oncoming storm. Like leaves on a tree, the whole population of the school turns whitebellied and scatters. No one goes near the edge of the playground - not that they did anyway. Dave Granger's in the Lookout, reading, alone, but he can't keep his mind on the page. He reads the same sentence, over and over again, trying to latch his mind onto it. He tries to skip a page, but it doesn't work. The sentence is "They huddled in the dark, waiting for the threat outside to subside."
Abruptly, the door to the shack is thrown open and it becomes clear to Dave Granger why the day hasn't felt right. Everyone's eyes have slid off of him - and moreso than the usual, where no one used to look at him at all, even recognize his presence - today, today ... it's been different. They have noticed him. That's what he missed. They all - all of them - noticed him. But now it's too late. The door to the Lookout slams shut behind Kevin Bailey.
10.
6:30 P.M., and Dave Granger's mother still hasn't come home. Dave sits at the kitchen table, his sneakers muddy, his face a bas-relief map of bruises and blood seeping out of more than a few abrasions. He breathes heavily. On the table in front of him is his pocket-watch, mangled and in shards, the springs bleeding out of the back of it like miniature metal snakes. His eyes keep twitching, relentlessly, to the cabinet under the junk drawer, and then to the clock on the wall. For an unspecified reason, the pocket-watch has not ceased to tick, even though it has been eviscerated and smashed beneath Kevin Bailey's heel. Dave Granger's throat is also on fire, most likely from the gears and cogs that no longer reside in the pocket-watch but now sink in a sea of gastric acid within his stomach.
All at once, Dave gets up and limps over to the clock on the wall. He stands beneath it, staring up at the second hand as its zombielike progress continues, inexorably up the arc past the 9, scales to the 12, and begins its descent down (somehow seeming faster) toward the bottom of the circle. As it passes the 1, Dave Granger steps away, dragging a kitchen chair to the base of the wall. As the second hand hits the 4, he is extending his shaking hands to the sides of the clock on the wall. As the second hand hits the 6, Dave Granger's lifted the clock off of its nail and holds it above his hand. He does not know what number the second hand is on when it meets the linoleum in a satisfying, gibbering crash of glass and plastic. He stands there, staring at his ruin, when he notices the blinking number 1 on the answering machine across the room. For a moment, the ticking has stopped and the only sound he can hear is the schuss of his breath, rasping in and out past his blood-crusted lips. As he climbs down off of the chair, the sound resumes and Dave Granger winces involuntarily, though whether it is from his dismount or from the sound, he cannot tell.
FIFTEEN YEARS LATER
Dave Granger lights a cigarette and leans against the building. His head is muddy with beer and his legs are shaky. He is trying to remember the last time he ate anything substantial, though his mind keeps straying to a conversation he's had days earlier with his closest ally Tom. Dave's hair has grown out and his beard has grown in, though it is patchy and uneven. Some days he hates himself, though those days are full of quiet loathing, and Dave thinks of it as the muttering of a demon that lives somewhere in the Byzantine coils of his insides. Dave was a theology major for awhile, but that soon lost its lustre due to a professor more keen on inculcation rather than education. He tried English, but grammar bored him. He tried theater, but the incessant narcissism of every other student-major made him physically ill. For years, he frittered away time to small splinters, choosing to develop a friendship with a commuter student who grew marijuana up north. Dave lived on campus in the building where all the other undeclared students lived. He had been shunted in with a cocky freshman out of Duxbury, Mass. - a hockey player who had been granted scholarship and who would, nightly, have rendezvous with a girl named Michelle, oblivious to Dave's presence. He reminded Dave of someone he'd known a long time ago - but then, he found that most people did.
His friend the grower went by the unfunny (and perhaps unwise) nickname of Mr. Green, though Dave called him Tom. They would lay back in Tom's 1986 Buick Century station wagon and smoke endless amounts of dope, until, at times, they would fall asleep next to one another. Somehow they were never caught by campus police. Tom always parked his car next to the water tower, right in the thick of everything, unconcerned by passersby. In fact, he even claimed once, it helped his business. People knew where to find him. No one cared. Dave felt a peculiar sense of belonging, and even thrilled mildly at the risk. He experienced brief tingles in his fingertips as he sat in the car. Joe did most of the talking, and Dave Granger did most of the listening, which was about par for the course. Tom often mused on cosmic conversation, preferring to fill the void of silence with (sometimes completely erroneous) information gleaned from various websites on the Internet.
"Did you know," Tom had said lazily, propelling a caterpillar of smoke out of his mouth, "the Greeks divided time in two parts?" Dave didn't reply. He knew there was more. There's always more. "Yeah ... Chronos, and Kairos. Chronos is like, you know. The numbers on a clock, but like .. Kairos? Kairos is divine time. Kairos is like ... strike while the anvil's hot, you know?" Tom leaned back and closed his eyes, proferring the joint across the seats to Dave. "I wish I had a clock that told Kairos time, man. That'd be awesome."
Dave nodded and blinked, coughing out the smoke. "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not." He finished the quote and passed the joint back. He had found that he was always the fastest one to take a hit - most people took their time, preferring to orate, or lapse into the television screen, joint burning down in their fingertips, while Dave Granger took it, smoked it, and passed it all in less than five seconds.
"Who's that?" Tom was used to Dave's quotes, but it was rare that he would be familiar with any of them.
Dave turned to the passenger side window. The sun was setting over the hills, as red as tomato soup, and the sky around it a virulent orange. "St. Augustine."
Tom nods, languidly, and exhales.
"Kairos time," Dave Granger repeats, a hint of color in his usual monochrome tone. "Huh."
The cigarette's gone out, and Dave's mouth is dry. He can tell by the way his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth - only slightly - and how the insides of his cheeks stick to the sides of his molars when he opens his jaws to yawn. This, of course, is due to dehydration, but Dave mistakes it for the need to return to his beer. He flicks his cigarette - Camel light - into the street, and returns inside.
The bar is familiar to him, a bit of a dive, the only place he feels entirely comfortable in the world. For months now, he's lived alone, and it's been like a bit of paradise, but even Adam got lonely and prayed for companionship. This is something he likes to say to excuse his frequent visitation to others ... and probably also by way of excusing his alcoholism to himself. It is also entirely possible that Dave Granger is not an alcoholic. The staff at the bar is familiar to him as well, though he keeps largely to himself and enjoys roughly the same position there as he did in middle school - at the edges of things, usually with his face in a book, though at times the alcohol would cause breaches in the social wall he had erected for himself.
1.
Half-past-one in the afternoon, October 11th. Fifth grade recess overlapping by chance with sixth, seventh, and eighth-grade recess. A dangerous mixture, but one which the administration allowed due to some sort of catastrophe in the kitchen and, as a result, the compression of what should have been two waves of outdoor recreation into one. The activities were over-staffed as the students ran around in the sunlight, at their various games. There's an impromptu kickball game, watched over by the militant gaze of Mr. Hardwell and the stentorian vocals of Ms. (not Mrs.) Kravitz. There's the game of tag (not to take place on woodchips, and Mrs. Rathburn's intervention when it did); the various playground chatter, girls grouped on the grass in circles talking about horses and the Babysitter's Club books; the loners; the dirtbike kids; and, finally; the game of spies-in-the-bush.
2.
At approximately 1:45 P.M., the administration was largely satisfied with its policing. Three of the ten supervising teachers were allowed to return inside, to their lounge and their lunches, and the game of spies-in-the-bush intensified. Delineated below, for the purposes of dramatis personae, are those involved.
A. Nikos Kazanstakis, leader of the Rogue Snakes, age 10. Denim jacket embroided with Harley-Davidson patch. Terminal sneer on his littleboy's face.
B. Craig Wilcox, second-in-comannd of the Rogue Snakes, age 11, held back one year. Plans to oust Nikos not-quite-formulated.
C. Bruno and Toby Farragut, twins - though not identical, and perhaps not even fraternal. They stuck to their story despite the fact that almost no one believed them. Age 10.
D. Simon Eyvind, a freakishly large 11 year old, similarly held back. Of Norse descent. Considered "the muscle" of the Rogue Snakes.
The manifesto of the Rogue Eagles, crudely illustrated by Nikos' own hand, lived in the hollow of a tree just beyond the limits of the playground. The tree stood at an awkward angle, having shoved itself right up against a large, flat rock made up of schist, granite and mica. The namesake of the gang had been declared the day that Nikos stumbled upon a copperhead, Agkistrodon contortrix, coiling in the cool shade of the rock. Nikos had not displayed any outward show of fear, but stood there, staring at the viper, unblinking, untwitching. Just in time, a teacher had investigated, and shrieked aloud at the sight. They had since been disallowed to congregate at their rock, but none of them had ever shown much regard for that particular edict. They had been in existence for two school years now, since the third grade.
There is also the rival gang, who exist nebulously around one young man whose parents enjoyed the largest house, up on the hill. His name was Kevin Bailey, age 10. His infamy was based around one mythological incident; it was said that he had mercilessly abandoned Dennis LaChance on the roof of the school and left him there for three whole days. Those three days, a record rainfall was set, and, once Dennis had been found by his fearful, quivering parents, the local sheriff, and the super-intendent of schools, he could not speak without his teeth chattering. It was rumored that Kevin had no reason for the cruelty. When asked, Harold Vernor (one of Kevin's "lieutenants") had shrugged and simply said, "He didn't like him."
There is also Dave Granger, and it is he whom this anecdote concerns.
2.5
Dave Granger always carried around a small, gold-plated pocket-watch that he had found in the basement of his house, in his father's old workbench, covered in sawdust within one of the drawers. When he found it, the gears were stopped and the device was silent. He had held it up to an ear, rattled it once, experimentally. He flicked it, once, with the index finger of his right hand, on its back. Sawdust swirled in minute, hesitant curls through the musty air of the basement, and the watch startled to life, the second hand resuming its staccato progress ever around the circle of hours. A wet paper towel or two later, and the glass face of it was clean, though scratched more than a few times. It possessed no chain, though the knob at the top was slightly sticky, and refused to wind. Incredibly, it still told time perfectly. On more than one occasion, Dave had intentions to open it and commit surgery on its insides, though he could never seem to pry the back off, even with a screwdriver and the claw-end of a small hammer.
His father had been gone from the house for years, departed in his own swirl of sawdust, like a magician's vanish gone wrong and with no audience to witness it. Echoes of him remained - his towering bookshelf, crammed with paperbacks of Alan Dean Foster and Piers Anthony, in contrast to his mother's neat rows of Danielle Steele and Phyllis E. Woodiwiss, bookended by photographs of lighthouses at sunset and leaves with their fall vestments on. Dave didn't know his father's face or voice, but had seen pictures. He had his hair. Once or twice, he found a piece of paper written by his father - a legal document here, signed in a completely illegible scribble. Technically, Dave Granger was David Granger Jr., though the Jr. was more or less negligible at this point.
His mother refused to speak about it. She walled herself off from the world, coming home from work with tired smiles and brief pats on the head, absented stirrings of the spaghetti sauce while the news blared behind her on the small kitchen TV. Dave entertained weird notions that his father's soul was in the pocket-watch, though never really believed it. He was no stranger to oddities and arcana - mornings, he lay awake, staring at the red LED of his clock, slamming his eyes shut and attempting to force time forward by the force of his will alone. This never happened, but it never kept him from trying.
3.
1:50 P.M., and Dave Granger, who had just finished reading My Brother Sam is Dead, decided to become a profiteer. This is where the trouble starts. He had long since known about the existence of the Rogue Snakes, and rode to school on the same bus as Nikos. They had never spoken to one another, though they both preferred to sit at the back of the bus and stare out the windows at the cars which trailed behind.
There is one encounter, during which Dave Granger established his own slight infamy. One Sean Walker, a seventh-grader, who boards the bus further down the route than Dave, decided to begin a turf-war with Dave over the back seat. It was a short-lived war of subtle intimidation. Sean sat in the seat in front of Dave, turning around to declare his intent one morning. Nikos had watched, but did not intervene. Sean put down the gauntlet, threatening to make Dave's life hell if he didn't get his "four-eyed, nerdy ass" out of that seat from then on. Dave had blinked once, pushed his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose, and remained silent.
The next morning, Sean Walker boarded the bus, and immediately swept his gaze to the back. There was Dave, sitting in his regular seat, backpack open next to him. Sean sat in the seat in front of him, and, when the bus pulled up in front of the school, began his second act of war. As the rest of the kids stood up and began clamoring, obscuring the driver's rearview gaze, Sean stood up, fist at the ready, warning between his teeth - and suddenly found his gaze blackened and his head slamming to one side.
As soon as he had seen Sean's fist curling, Dave had pulled the red-spined American Heritage Dictionary from out of his backpack and swung it through the air, savagely connecting with the side of the bully's face.
Everyone's got a rumor connected to them. Dave's lingered in the hallways of the school for a good week before it was usurped by Fred Kessler's urinary incontinence in the cafeteria. It wasn't forgotten. Nikos had watched Dave swing the dictionary and approved of the violence, though he didn't like the kid that much - didn't trust him; never trusted a loner like that - though he did have respect for him. Nikos didn't need anyone else in his "gang," however.
4.
11:50 A.M., and Dave Granger was in possession of a secret. He spoke rarely, but he had a gift for listening. Class bored him, and his eyes roved around the room, around his fellow students. He always sat at the back of the class for this very reason, sat alone, in corners, in the lunchroom, usually reading. Once in awhile, someone would approach him, but he would only ever do the same thing he ever did - blink at them, somewhat owlishly, and nod, before returning to his book. The incident on the bus was the only thing anyone really knew, concretely, about Dave Granger. He did well at school, though never applied himself, and was the subject of much frustration between guidance counsellor and teacher alike. This day, being the last one to leave the room, Dave happened to notice a piece of folded-up notebook paper dangling out of Harold Vernor's desk. As he walked by, the note fell to the carpet. Somewhat absently, he picked it up, and without thinking, opened it and read the line therein:
TODAY AFTER RECESS WE GET THEM
Dave Granger was in a unique position to understand the contents of this note. He had known for awhile, that Kevin Bailey had decided to take down the Rogue Snakes. Kevin despised Nikos and every member of his "gang." He had called them dirty fuckers, having only just learned the word, and declaring that they should be "put down." Dave had overhead this conversation because he was in a habit of finding lonely, dim places to read his book where he wouldn't be bothered. This day, it was just behind the equipment shack beyond the baseball field. Dave had broken in (the lock was rusty and wouldn't snap to) a few days prior and had successfully established himself in what he liked to call the Lookout.
In a similar fashion, the Rogue Snakes had found a reason to exist beyond holding fake 'meetings' and discussing inanities. Dennis "LaChatter" LaChance had been inducted into their gang because his dad worked at the race-car track a town over and had promised them all tickets to the race the following week. His price? Revenge. Dave knew this because Dennis had told him in the cafeteria just two days prior. Dennis had to tell someone, and he didn't know anyone, so he sat down next to Dave and had the story out after a brief interval of awkward hellos and eye-twitching. In a way, Dave was curious about Dennis and felt pity for him, though in no way felt invested in the situation. He had looked up, blinked, and ... just once, nodded, as if to say he understood. The nod was all that Dennis had needed for verification, and had left Dave alone, confident that he wouldn't say anything to anyone.
5.
2:01 P.M. The recess bell has shrilled over the playground, and swarms of kids are migrating to the doors of the school. Teachers are busy herding them, making sure no one is left behind, standing sentinel by the building, scanning, squinting to see who is lagging at the edges. Mrs. Rathburn is pre-occupied with her impending divorce from her adulterous husband, and old Mr. Rubenstein can't see much beyond the tips of his fingers. The rest of the supervisors have been released to their classrooms.
The doors shut behind them as they usher the last of the students inside.
6.
1:55 P.M. Dave puts down his book in the Lookout and stares at the inside of the shack door. The woodgrain seems to be moving, though it isn't. He's just tired. Last night, his mother came home and forwent even her usual pat on his head, went right into her bedroom and locked the door behind her. All night he could hear her sobbing, and he still doesn't know why.
All at once, he stands up, exits the Lookout, and crosses the playground. He is not determined, he is not sure of purpose, he simply has committed to action. He knows the place he is walking, and it is right into the snakepit.
Nikos is holding court, though the business portion of their meeting has concluded. He doesn't say anything as Dave walks up, though Simon Eyvind steps in Dave's way and inquires as to his business with the group.
"I have information," Dave says, proferring a piece of notebook paper.
7.
5:15 P.M, and Dave's mother is just getting home from another day at work. There is a message on the answering machine, evidenced by the flicker of the red LED light on the console.
It is Dave's father, Dave Granger Sr. She does not listen to it beyond the words "Lee, it's Dave ..." preferring instead to wildly jab at the DELETE button with her index finger, over and over and over and over again, tears springing to her eyes.
Dave walks in just as she is closing the bedroom door. The evening whorls in like a flying saucer, darkening all of the town with its shadow. He stands in the front door's rigid embrace, staring at the clock on the opposite wall.
The phone will ring a great deal that night, and there will even be repeated knocks on the front door of the Granger house. It will be revealed that Nikos threw a snake - Agkistrodon contortrix - at Kevin Bailey, and that the two groups converged on one another like weather fronts in the aftermath. It will also be told that Kevin Bailey has been envenomed by the snake from a particularly nasty bite on his right hand. Even though Agkistrodon contortrix's venom isn't particularly fatal, Kevin - it turns out - is allergic to most reptile venom, and has gone into tachycardia on the playground. He is rushed to the hospital, where he remains for most of the night in critical condition before being downgraded to stable around six in the morning.
Dave Granger will not blame himself. He stood back from it all and watched the physical portion of the fight - the actual scuffle - happening between Kevin's gang and the other members of the Rogue Snakes. Nikos and Craig had held back until Nikos entered into the fracas with the snake in hand. Dave is possessed of a secret, wild elation. He sleeps until midnight, where he wakes in a sudden froth from a red-hued dream of a man with snakejaws. He gets out of bed and goes to the kitchen, crouches by the cabinet under the junk drawer and withdraws an old, dust-covered bottle of Popov vodka. Without hesitating, Dave tips the bottle back and takes his first swallow of alcohol. He promptly vomits it back up, retching, eyes filled with the bitterwater of tears. His mother still does not wake up, even over the retching. Dave is forced to clean up his sick on his own, alone on the linoleum with not even the cold moon to illuminate his progress.
8.
1:34 P.M., October 18th. It's a Tuesday. Kevin Bailey has been out of the hospital for a few days now, and this is his second day back in the classroom. As a result of the treatment with the antivenom CroFab, his skin is mottled with raised red rashes and he is cursed with an uncontrollable, tic-like itching motion. He has also acquired a nickname: Itchy. His fury is deep, and comes from a sinkhole that has collapsed somewhere inside of himself. His prior position, somewhat invulnerable, is completely decimated.
Kevin Bailey has been approached by Craig Wilcox, Nikos' second-in-command. Craig's mother is friends with the Baileys, though this is a somewhat new development. The Wilcox family has recently come into a bit of luck - they've won a substantially more than modest sum of money via the state lottery. Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox immediately summon the aid of Mrs. Evoria Bailey, Kevin's mother, also a real estate agent. They want to move higher up on the hill. They are invited to dinner, and this is how Craig comes to know Kevin. Their parents want them to be friends - why wouldn't they be? - and Mr. and Mrs. Bailey are concerned about the scuffle. Nikos has been suspended, and Craig sees this as a perfect time to begin his takeover.
This is how Kevin Bailey comes to know about Dave Granger. A certain piece of paper has exchanged hands for the second - no, third - time in a week. A certain piece of paper with one line on it. Kevin Bailey takes the note in his hand and folds it cleanly, obsessively, twice - four times - eight times - sixteen times, until the paper is a lump of pulp that won't bend further. Kevin Bailey scratches at the nape of his neck and Craig Wilcox wins an ally.
9.
1:45 P.M., and it's exactly one week after Kevin's been bit. His rashes are beginning to fade, though he still itches like a madman, uncontrollably. His fury is the path of an oncoming storm. Like leaves on a tree, the whole population of the school turns whitebellied and scatters. No one goes near the edge of the playground - not that they did anyway. Dave Granger's in the Lookout, reading, alone, but he can't keep his mind on the page. He reads the same sentence, over and over again, trying to latch his mind onto it. He tries to skip a page, but it doesn't work. The sentence is "They huddled in the dark, waiting for the threat outside to subside."
Abruptly, the door to the shack is thrown open and it becomes clear to Dave Granger why the day hasn't felt right. Everyone's eyes have slid off of him - and moreso than the usual, where no one used to look at him at all, even recognize his presence - today, today ... it's been different. They have noticed him. That's what he missed. They all - all of them - noticed him. But now it's too late. The door to the Lookout slams shut behind Kevin Bailey.
10.
6:30 P.M., and Dave Granger's mother still hasn't come home. Dave sits at the kitchen table, his sneakers muddy, his face a bas-relief map of bruises and blood seeping out of more than a few abrasions. He breathes heavily. On the table in front of him is his pocket-watch, mangled and in shards, the springs bleeding out of the back of it like miniature metal snakes. His eyes keep twitching, relentlessly, to the cabinet under the junk drawer, and then to the clock on the wall. For an unspecified reason, the pocket-watch has not ceased to tick, even though it has been eviscerated and smashed beneath Kevin Bailey's heel. Dave Granger's throat is also on fire, most likely from the gears and cogs that no longer reside in the pocket-watch but now sink in a sea of gastric acid within his stomach.
All at once, Dave gets up and limps over to the clock on the wall. He stands beneath it, staring up at the second hand as its zombielike progress continues, inexorably up the arc past the 9, scales to the 12, and begins its descent down (somehow seeming faster) toward the bottom of the circle. As it passes the 1, Dave Granger steps away, dragging a kitchen chair to the base of the wall. As the second hand hits the 4, he is extending his shaking hands to the sides of the clock on the wall. As the second hand hits the 6, Dave Granger's lifted the clock off of its nail and holds it above his hand. He does not know what number the second hand is on when it meets the linoleum in a satisfying, gibbering crash of glass and plastic. He stands there, staring at his ruin, when he notices the blinking number 1 on the answering machine across the room. For a moment, the ticking has stopped and the only sound he can hear is the schuss of his breath, rasping in and out past his blood-crusted lips. As he climbs down off of the chair, the sound resumes and Dave Granger winces involuntarily, though whether it is from his dismount or from the sound, he cannot tell.
FIFTEEN YEARS LATER
Dave Granger lights a cigarette and leans against the building. His head is muddy with beer and his legs are shaky. He is trying to remember the last time he ate anything substantial, though his mind keeps straying to a conversation he's had days earlier with his closest ally Tom. Dave's hair has grown out and his beard has grown in, though it is patchy and uneven. Some days he hates himself, though those days are full of quiet loathing, and Dave thinks of it as the muttering of a demon that lives somewhere in the Byzantine coils of his insides. Dave was a theology major for awhile, but that soon lost its lustre due to a professor more keen on inculcation rather than education. He tried English, but grammar bored him. He tried theater, but the incessant narcissism of every other student-major made him physically ill. For years, he frittered away time to small splinters, choosing to develop a friendship with a commuter student who grew marijuana up north. Dave lived on campus in the building where all the other undeclared students lived. He had been shunted in with a cocky freshman out of Duxbury, Mass. - a hockey player who had been granted scholarship and who would, nightly, have rendezvous with a girl named Michelle, oblivious to Dave's presence. He reminded Dave of someone he'd known a long time ago - but then, he found that most people did.
His friend the grower went by the unfunny (and perhaps unwise) nickname of Mr. Green, though Dave called him Tom. They would lay back in Tom's 1986 Buick Century station wagon and smoke endless amounts of dope, until, at times, they would fall asleep next to one another. Somehow they were never caught by campus police. Tom always parked his car next to the water tower, right in the thick of everything, unconcerned by passersby. In fact, he even claimed once, it helped his business. People knew where to find him. No one cared. Dave felt a peculiar sense of belonging, and even thrilled mildly at the risk. He experienced brief tingles in his fingertips as he sat in the car. Joe did most of the talking, and Dave Granger did most of the listening, which was about par for the course. Tom often mused on cosmic conversation, preferring to fill the void of silence with (sometimes completely erroneous) information gleaned from various websites on the Internet.
"Did you know," Tom had said lazily, propelling a caterpillar of smoke out of his mouth, "the Greeks divided time in two parts?" Dave didn't reply. He knew there was more. There's always more. "Yeah ... Chronos, and Kairos. Chronos is like, you know. The numbers on a clock, but like .. Kairos? Kairos is divine time. Kairos is like ... strike while the anvil's hot, you know?" Tom leaned back and closed his eyes, proferring the joint across the seats to Dave. "I wish I had a clock that told Kairos time, man. That'd be awesome."
Dave nodded and blinked, coughing out the smoke. "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not." He finished the quote and passed the joint back. He had found that he was always the fastest one to take a hit - most people took their time, preferring to orate, or lapse into the television screen, joint burning down in their fingertips, while Dave Granger took it, smoked it, and passed it all in less than five seconds.
"Who's that?" Tom was used to Dave's quotes, but it was rare that he would be familiar with any of them.
Dave turned to the passenger side window. The sun was setting over the hills, as red as tomato soup, and the sky around it a virulent orange. "St. Augustine."
Tom nods, languidly, and exhales.
"Kairos time," Dave Granger repeats, a hint of color in his usual monochrome tone. "Huh."
The cigarette's gone out, and Dave's mouth is dry. He can tell by the way his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth - only slightly - and how the insides of his cheeks stick to the sides of his molars when he opens his jaws to yawn. This, of course, is due to dehydration, but Dave mistakes it for the need to return to his beer. He flicks his cigarette - Camel light - into the street, and returns inside.
The bar is familiar to him, a bit of a dive, the only place he feels entirely comfortable in the world. For months now, he's lived alone, and it's been like a bit of paradise, but even Adam got lonely and prayed for companionship. This is something he likes to say to excuse his frequent visitation to others ... and probably also by way of excusing his alcoholism to himself. It is also entirely possible that Dave Granger is not an alcoholic. The staff at the bar is familiar to him as well, though he keeps largely to himself and enjoys roughly the same position there as he did in middle school - at the edges of things, usually with his face in a book, though at times the alcohol would cause breaches in the social wall he had erected for himself.
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