All these are shock waves
and they disturb my surface,
all bangs and rattles
infusing the gentle soup
surrounding my brain.
Turning rings from wheels from
hoops of silent grammar,
blindfold crawling again and again and
the pinprick gleam of quartz a beacon
toward a rising syntax hidden
lost in the dirty corners of my house,
a falling away of verbs and of action.
These lips and tongue
fold themselves with increased looping
across the boundaries of new vocabulary,
a color emerges from its own new name,
rediscovered correspondence is translated and aligns itself
to order along a still wet alphabet.
In a sun flooded room west of here
I will sit with wooden matches
and scratch each to flame
until the box is empty.
21 March 2009
20 March 2009
Lepidoptery
In a violent country across the western ocean
lives and breeds a type of moth which feeds
upon the tears of large mammals
Silent, like a handkerchief settling on her face,
its wings will outline the angles of her cheekbones
and it will absorb the salted moisture trembling between her lashes
Satiated, it will rise a silken gesture,
to beat itself against the glass of her windowpanes
and I will trace the dusty imprinture of its effort left there
against the woven fibers of my heart
lives and breeds a type of moth which feeds
upon the tears of large mammals
Silent, like a handkerchief settling on her face,
its wings will outline the angles of her cheekbones
and it will absorb the salted moisture trembling between her lashes
Satiated, it will rise a silken gesture,
to beat itself against the glass of her windowpanes
and I will trace the dusty imprinture of its effort left there
against the woven fibers of my heart
19 March 2009
Life On The New Frontier
He moves around his house through gathering darkness. He picks up objects and he examines them; he often understands their functions, their purposes. Sometimes he doesn't.
Though he believes his actions random, there is a pattern that can be traced, there is a regularity to his movements and his pondering. He is delineating new boundaries. He is inscribing a geometry; he is describing a shape.
She works. The job she does is like any other and she makes no distinction between them, the jobs she does, because the are all work. She can speak but she does not because there is no reason to. There is no reason to speak because she is working. Instead, she sings. She knows she has flattened one hundred aluminum cans when the song she sings is over. She can count but there is no reason to count when she can sing. When the song ends, she sings it again and flattens one hundred more cans.
The sweat that rolls from her skin rolls down her collarbone and collects against the skin that swells across her breasts. Her breasts are new ones; she never had them before. And the song she sings is a new one because the cans she flattens have never been flattened before. She wonders about her new breasts far more than she wonders about the new cans; she wonders about her new breasts through the song she sings over hundreds of new cans. She can do both at the same time. She remembers that every once in a while there are new cans in her life but there have never been new breasts in her life. Her can-song has begun to sound a little bit different.
She feels the sweat there under the swelling and she feels new to feel a new feeling there under her new and continually growing breasts. The way one fine drop of sweat will cling for an instant against and to her nipple before stretching itself to drop into the damp cloth of her rag, her shirt, her clothing. It is an old garment.
She takes no pride in her work, she takes no thing away from her labor except for a verse once in a while to add to the songs she sings when she works. It may be the flattening-the-cans song or the digging-a-new-hole song or the making-the-sex-thing song but it is only always another verse if it is a new thing. Like her breasts.
She knows her breasts mean big changes.
There is a town glistering in the distance and though he can see the lights from his place there on the road he knows that it will be several more hours before he is among them.
She feels the dust before she sees it rise from the road that leads to where she lives. She feels it rise and fall in all the heaviness dust carries with it when it rises and falls long before her eye holes take it in. She doesn't look up, she doesn't need to look up because the song isn't nearly over and she has a long time to sing before what the carries with it will be where she is. There is plenty of time to flatten cans, climb up on to the roof of the place where she lives, to look at the locus of the dust cloud, to sing the friend-or-foe? song, to prepare to welcome or to hide in the bushes before it got there.
His hands are making some motions but he doesn't exactly know what they are. They are motions at the ends of his arms. They, the motions, make things happen, but he really doesn't know what the things are, the things that happen when his hands make motions.
There are lights flashing past his eyes, his eyes that are watching his hands see things that are reflected in the shining skin that covers them, his hands. Red, blue, yellow, white, white, and white. These are the colors that pass across his hands, the hands he doesn't even recognize. Pity the hands, he (they) thinks to himself (themselves). Pity the foolish digits that do things without knowing what they're doing. Pity. Foolish.
She jumps down, she jumps up. The cans have been flattened enough, enough cans have been flattened, and she will retire to the bushes and hide while the pilots in the vortex of dust destroys her home. She knows that these kinds of things happen sometimes and she will sing the these-things-happen song while she hides among the dusty bushes and watches him (them) do what he (they) do to her house--the kinds of things that get done like burn it down because he (they) can't find her because she is hiding in the bushes. She wonders what they'll do about all the flattened cans.
She is surprised when she realizes that what she had been thinking "they" was really only one guy and his hands. She had felt "many" coming and had expected to deal with "many" and it knocks her a little bit to realized that "many" in her head meant "one" and his "hands." She revises her song as she sings it.
Fire is what they want and, despite his anxious posturing, fire is what they have started. He wonders what kind of house, whose kind of house, they are burning down. He does not approve of burning houses but has no resource for protest. He can merely watch and wonder.
His driving has become a stillness, his motion has become a part of his staying perfectly still. Except for his darned old hands.
The thunderstorms that roll across her horizon do not interest her unless they actually rain upon her. They are merely smears in the atmosphere until they come close enough to become potential sources of useful water. Then she must cease her work and begin the catching-the-rain song. She does admire them, the small storms, as the walk across the desert but she really pays them no attention. Unless they approach, there is no reason to. Pay attention to the,
Sometimes she sings to bring them near if she is thirsty or bored or looking through her eyes and other times she sings to keep them away, the storms, if she is tired or busy or thinking about something else. She wishes there was a thunderstorm now that she could sing the let's-put-the-housefire-out song to. She's glad, through, really that there aren't any storms to wish at.
He keeps wiping his brow until he realizes that he is. He is embarrassed that his action is so trite, so contrived, and so unconscious. He wishes emphatically for unique gestures, for an easy possession of unexpected motion. In his concern, he wrings his hands until he realizes that he is. He thrust them, his hands, deep in his pockets to control them, to let them think of something different to do. While he waits, he chews his lip.
She is one the roof of the shack and she is watching the dust cloud rise from distant wheels. In this, she knows there is interest and she knows she needs to know what to do. She may need to flee, to crouch some distance away. She waits on the roof and hums the waiting-to-know-what-to-do-next tune to herself. She wonders now if it will rain.
While he is burning her house, he is burning himself up. Though, of course, not really. He would like to think, to himself, that the damage he does to her house is like the damage he has done and will do to himself. It is not, he knows but doesn't like to think. It is not even close and he cannot and will not and won't not for ever and ever and ever realize that the hands with matches and the gasoline and the hands in his pockets and the hands on the steering wheel of his fast machine are the same hands. He won't.
He is weak that way. He is weak the way he is weak and his hands hate him for it and he hates them (but he has hated them for a long, long time). They know about the girl in the bushes, the girl with the terrible clothes, the girl with the new breasts, but they, the hands, won't tell him. Not a peep. Not out of his hands. They are too busy torching the pathetic hovel she sings as her home. They, his hands, drag him back to the car he drives when he can drive. When he lets the, his hands, drive a car. It is a Camero.
She is not surprised to remember that she knew this would happen. It is a song that she dreamed, this new house-burning-down song, and she suddenly remembers how the whole thing goes, the end of the song, the rest of the dream. She's going into town. In a thing called a "Camero." She stands up from the bushes and carefully brushes all the dust from her knees.
She waves her hand. She raises her voice to singing.
"Hello!" she makes. "Hello there! It's me!"
Though he believes his actions random, there is a pattern that can be traced, there is a regularity to his movements and his pondering. He is delineating new boundaries. He is inscribing a geometry; he is describing a shape.
*
She works. The job she does is like any other and she makes no distinction between them, the jobs she does, because the are all work. She can speak but she does not because there is no reason to. There is no reason to speak because she is working. Instead, she sings. She knows she has flattened one hundred aluminum cans when the song she sings is over. She can count but there is no reason to count when she can sing. When the song ends, she sings it again and flattens one hundred more cans.
The sweat that rolls from her skin rolls down her collarbone and collects against the skin that swells across her breasts. Her breasts are new ones; she never had them before. And the song she sings is a new one because the cans she flattens have never been flattened before. She wonders about her new breasts far more than she wonders about the new cans; she wonders about her new breasts through the song she sings over hundreds of new cans. She can do both at the same time. She remembers that every once in a while there are new cans in her life but there have never been new breasts in her life. Her can-song has begun to sound a little bit different.
She feels the sweat there under the swelling and she feels new to feel a new feeling there under her new and continually growing breasts. The way one fine drop of sweat will cling for an instant against and to her nipple before stretching itself to drop into the damp cloth of her rag, her shirt, her clothing. It is an old garment.
She takes no pride in her work, she takes no thing away from her labor except for a verse once in a while to add to the songs she sings when she works. It may be the flattening-the-cans song or the digging-a-new-hole song or the making-the-sex-thing song but it is only always another verse if it is a new thing. Like her breasts.
She knows her breasts mean big changes.
*
There is a town glistering in the distance and though he can see the lights from his place there on the road he knows that it will be several more hours before he is among them.
*
She feels the dust before she sees it rise from the road that leads to where she lives. She feels it rise and fall in all the heaviness dust carries with it when it rises and falls long before her eye holes take it in. She doesn't look up, she doesn't need to look up because the song isn't nearly over and she has a long time to sing before what the carries with it will be where she is. There is plenty of time to flatten cans, climb up on to the roof of the place where she lives, to look at the locus of the dust cloud, to sing the friend-or-foe? song, to prepare to welcome or to hide in the bushes before it got there.
*
His hands are making some motions but he doesn't exactly know what they are. They are motions at the ends of his arms. They, the motions, make things happen, but he really doesn't know what the things are, the things that happen when his hands make motions.
There are lights flashing past his eyes, his eyes that are watching his hands see things that are reflected in the shining skin that covers them, his hands. Red, blue, yellow, white, white, and white. These are the colors that pass across his hands, the hands he doesn't even recognize. Pity the hands, he (they) thinks to himself (themselves). Pity the foolish digits that do things without knowing what they're doing. Pity. Foolish.
*
She jumps down, she jumps up. The cans have been flattened enough, enough cans have been flattened, and she will retire to the bushes and hide while the pilots in the vortex of dust destroys her home. She knows that these kinds of things happen sometimes and she will sing the these-things-happen song while she hides among the dusty bushes and watches him (them) do what he (they) do to her house--the kinds of things that get done like burn it down because he (they) can't find her because she is hiding in the bushes. She wonders what they'll do about all the flattened cans.
She is surprised when she realizes that what she had been thinking "they" was really only one guy and his hands. She had felt "many" coming and had expected to deal with "many" and it knocks her a little bit to realized that "many" in her head meant "one" and his "hands." She revises her song as she sings it.
*
Fire is what they want and, despite his anxious posturing, fire is what they have started. He wonders what kind of house, whose kind of house, they are burning down. He does not approve of burning houses but has no resource for protest. He can merely watch and wonder.
*
His driving has become a stillness, his motion has become a part of his staying perfectly still. Except for his darned old hands.
*
The thunderstorms that roll across her horizon do not interest her unless they actually rain upon her. They are merely smears in the atmosphere until they come close enough to become potential sources of useful water. Then she must cease her work and begin the catching-the-rain song. She does admire them, the small storms, as the walk across the desert but she really pays them no attention. Unless they approach, there is no reason to. Pay attention to the,
Sometimes she sings to bring them near if she is thirsty or bored or looking through her eyes and other times she sings to keep them away, the storms, if she is tired or busy or thinking about something else. She wishes there was a thunderstorm now that she could sing the let's-put-the-housefire-out song to. She's glad, through, really that there aren't any storms to wish at.
*
He keeps wiping his brow until he realizes that he is. He is embarrassed that his action is so trite, so contrived, and so unconscious. He wishes emphatically for unique gestures, for an easy possession of unexpected motion. In his concern, he wrings his hands until he realizes that he is. He thrust them, his hands, deep in his pockets to control them, to let them think of something different to do. While he waits, he chews his lip.
*
She is one the roof of the shack and she is watching the dust cloud rise from distant wheels. In this, she knows there is interest and she knows she needs to know what to do. She may need to flee, to crouch some distance away. She waits on the roof and hums the waiting-to-know-what-to-do-next tune to herself. She wonders now if it will rain.
*
While he is burning her house, he is burning himself up. Though, of course, not really. He would like to think, to himself, that the damage he does to her house is like the damage he has done and will do to himself. It is not, he knows but doesn't like to think. It is not even close and he cannot and will not and won't not for ever and ever and ever realize that the hands with matches and the gasoline and the hands in his pockets and the hands on the steering wheel of his fast machine are the same hands. He won't.
He is weak that way. He is weak the way he is weak and his hands hate him for it and he hates them (but he has hated them for a long, long time). They know about the girl in the bushes, the girl with the terrible clothes, the girl with the new breasts, but they, the hands, won't tell him. Not a peep. Not out of his hands. They are too busy torching the pathetic hovel she sings as her home. They, his hands, drag him back to the car he drives when he can drive. When he lets the, his hands, drive a car. It is a Camero.
*
She is not surprised to remember that she knew this would happen. It is a song that she dreamed, this new house-burning-down song, and she suddenly remembers how the whole thing goes, the end of the song, the rest of the dream. She's going into town. In a thing called a "Camero." She stands up from the bushes and carefully brushes all the dust from her knees.
She waves her hand. She raises her voice to singing.
"Hello!" she makes. "Hello there! It's me!"
18 March 2009
Icosahedron
He sees them for what they are,
these photographs, though still they can resemble
a shape like a wing when spread across this table,
and they sideways cut the membraned layers beneath his eyelids,
the slick part that slides across the part called "hazel."
A twenty-sided construct,
a thing that nearly looks like a sphere,
rolls almost as well as a sphere,
and each side is a photograph
and, even though there are twenty of them,
when it does stop rolling nineteen of them won't be facing up at him,
and sometimes he'll be up all night,
sometimes he'll bat it across the floor all night
just to hear the crackling noise it makes
when it's clear on the other side of the room.
These clever arrangements of salts and metals
add together quickly, like equations are supposed to do in books,
but can never solve, are never totaled;
the palm of this hand and the way it rests against that shoulder
remain so while other, clearer photographs develop.
The blur here in this corner, he will assume it implies motion.
these photographs, though still they can resemble
a shape like a wing when spread across this table,
and they sideways cut the membraned layers beneath his eyelids,
the slick part that slides across the part called "hazel."
A twenty-sided construct,
a thing that nearly looks like a sphere,
rolls almost as well as a sphere,
and each side is a photograph
and, even though there are twenty of them,
when it does stop rolling nineteen of them won't be facing up at him,
and sometimes he'll be up all night,
sometimes he'll bat it across the floor all night
just to hear the crackling noise it makes
when it's clear on the other side of the room.
These clever arrangements of salts and metals
add together quickly, like equations are supposed to do in books,
but can never solve, are never totaled;
the palm of this hand and the way it rests against that shoulder
remain so while other, clearer photographs develop.
The blur here in this corner, he will assume it implies motion.
17 March 2009
Artificial English on the Beach
“Junggwode heisede yingtaosede xampan shi diyi heisede yingtaosede xampan. [The Chinese black cherry champagne is the best black cherry champagne in the world],” their Chinese host proclaimed. It was a truly awful beverage but everyone seemed to catching a buzz.
“Jende ma? Wo hen dwo xiangxin. [Really? I believe you very much]. Dzai Meigo, womendo jia jiege Sh-ASS-ta. [In the United States, we all call this Sh-ASS-ta],” Robert replied. “Keyi ma? [May I please have some more?]”
“Dwei, dwei, dwei. Hebei [Of course, of course, of course. Drink your cup.],” was the answer and the bottle, wrapped in yellow crinkly cellophane was again proffered with as much flourish as a loincloth wearing Chinese fisherman could flourish which was a lot. “He, he, he. [Drink, drink, drink].”
“What is this shit?” Sara asked over her cup and stubbed her bootleg Winston cigarette into the eyeball of one of the many scattered fish heads, fish parts, fishing gear, and generalized trash of this fisherman’s shack.
“This is the best black cherry champagne in the world,” Robert told her.
“I got that part. I’m asking you what kind of shit I’m drinking.”
“It’s probably soda pop dosed with pure grain alcohol and antifreeze.”
“See? That’s all I wanted to know,” she said, kicking another fish-head out of kicking range. The champagne was only marginally better than the baijiou they had been drinking up to that point.
“Wo xihuan niede difang,” she directed to her host. “I like your place.”
Using her best Chinese manners, Sara spat out the low doorway to show the host how much she liked it there by not spitting on his floor.
The host beamed because he liked it, too. He’d built it himself out of driftwood and industrial waste. With its beach-front location and views of the harbor, it was quite a bachelor pad and who knew how many young Chinese women had been tempted into its confines. How many young Chinese fisherwomen had actually given it up in there was questionable, but certainly some had been tempted, especially if the host kept the world’s best black cherry champagne lying around all the time. Surely it was not just for foreigners because the last time foreigners had been inside this little seaside hut was never. The host kept looking at Sara’s legs, revealed as they were by her Capri pants.
“He likes you,” Robert said.
“He likes my legs,” she answered. “He likes you as a human being. He likes you as a dead foreign devil ghost barbarian frenemy .”
“As well he should. I sort of set the standard,” Robert agreed.
“You do? I mean, you do.”
“I try.”
“You do. I mean you do try,” she replied. “But when’s this other guy supposed to get here?”
“Niede pongyo lai shemma shiho? [When is your friend coming?].” Robert asked the host.
“Lai kuaide, kuaide, kuaide. [He’s coming quickly, quickly, quickly].”
“Ni shuo iyangde dou shiho keshi ta bu lai. [You say that all the time but he doesn’t come.],” Sara almost snapped the words but her lips remained wrapped around her cup. Maybe the host didn’t hear her as he kept his eyes fastened on the shack’s open door.
“Ta lai xiendzai. [He’s coming now.],” the host said. And the mystery guest was, indeed walking up the beach followed by a small entourage of children and young men. The guest seemed much older than young, though, and Robert and Sara had been promised he spoke English.
“He says that all the time, too.”
“What else have we got to do but sit in a smelly beach shack waiting for someone who speaks English?”
“We speak English.”
“But, we’re not Chinese.”
“Got that right. Give me some more of this excellent black cherry champagne.”
As Chinese men and boys began to squeeze into the low, narrow doorway, the host began slapping most of them back and shooing them out with rapid-fire dialect that sounded neither welcoming nor warm.
The guest looked at each of them, the host and Robert and Sara, in turn with a sickly grin on his face. Robert and Sara were used to sickly grins on Chinese people’s faces and wondered what was going to come next.
“Wode pongyou [My friend],” the host explained while gripping the guest’s forearm until it turned white. “Ta jiang ta shuo Ingyue. [He says he speaks English.]”
“Hmmm. I thought the host said he did speak English. Now it’s just a claim?” Robert said.
“What did you expect? We’re in the middle of the Neibu Zone ,” Sara answered.
“Jieshi wode pongyou, [This is my friend].” said the host. “Jia Xiaotou. [He’s called Small Head.]”
Both Sara and Robert snorted and burbled the Chinese equivalent of “pleased to meet you”—“Hau, hau, hau” or “good, good, good.”
And then there was silence.
But there was always more black cherry champagne, the best in the world.
“Ummm…weishemma jia Xiaotou? [Ummm…Why is he called Small Head?]” Sara asked.
“Bu zhidao [I don’t know.],” the host answered but he did. Robert and Sara imagined everyone knew why that guy was called Small Head.
Small Head, whose head wasn’t small at all, just grinned.
“Bu zhidao,” the host repeated.
“Keshi, ni tou bu shi xiao. Bu kan hen xiao. Bu hen xiao. [But your head isn’t small. It doesn’t look small. Not very small.]” Sara pressed.
“Keshi, dagai limian [Maybe inside],” Small Head replied.
“Ahhh,” said Sara.
“Ahhh,” said Robert.
“Ahhh,” said the host.
“Ahhh,” said Small Head.
“He doesn’t speak English, does he?” Robert asked.
“I don’t think so,” Sara replied.
“What are we going to do if he tries?”
“Play along. We are guests here.”
“Purdy pardy arda pardaciple,” Small Head said.
The host looked anxious.
“There it is,” Robert said.
“There is what?” asked Sara.
“There’s the English.”
“Ardy ard ah pard ah pardapard,” Small Head continued.
“Well, he’s got the rhythm right.”
“Yeah. It’s practically iambic pentameter.”
“Shemme jiang? [What did he say?]” the host asked.
“Ta shuo, ‘Pardy ardy ardy pard ah [He said, "Pardy ardy ardy pard ah."],” Sara snorted.
“Shemma yisi? [What is the meaning?]” the host asked. “Ta shuo shemma? [What did he say?]”
“Well,” Robert answered. “He said, ‘Hello, my new friends.’”
The host and Small Head looked blank.
“Robert,” Sara said.
“Huh?”
“Only two of us here speak English.”
“Oh, right. Ta shuo, ‘Nihau, wode xin pongyou. [He said, ‘Hello, my new friends.’]”
“Very good. Very quick,” Sara smiled.
The host and Small Head nodded and smiled together, one meaning “I never would have believed it” and the other “I told you so.”
“Jixu [Continue],” said the host.
Small Head turned his head away from the host, cleared his throat, and shot a grateful glance at Robert.
“Pard ard pardapard,” he began. “Paradarp prada prada darp darpa prad pra para darpapard.”
“Oh ho,” Sara giggled. “That’s a tough one.”
The host looked to Robert.
“A-fucking-mazing,” Robert answered while holding his cup out for more of that excellent black cherry champagne. The bottle was getting low and that was not good. Perhaps there was more stashed around somewhere. Or some baijou or even just some pijou [beer].
Robert took a deep breath.
“Ta shuo, ‘Wode pongyoude fangzi shi hen how ye iyangde fangzi dzai Meigo.’ [He said, “My friend’s house is very nice and the same as the ones in America.]”
“Damn right it is,” Sara said draining her cup, and holding it out for more. “You’re getting pretty good at this.”
“Parda parpar pardy darp,” Robert answered.
“Pardy par you, fucker,” she giggled.
“Pardy pard parp paparpard,” Small Head joined in.
“Puh puh puh puh,” the host contributed.
They all laughed like maniacs except the host whose face began to flush more than the alcohol had already flushed it which was a lot.
“Not even close, man,” Robert told him but in English. “Not even close.”
“Careful not to make him mad,” Sara warned. “I think he’s still got some more of that shitty champagne.”
“Pardpar parpy par par par,” Small Head added.
“That’s what I say,” Sara agreed.
“Jende ma? Wo hen dwo xiangxin. [Really? I believe you very much]. Dzai Meigo, womendo jia jiege Sh-ASS-ta. [In the United States, we all call this Sh-ASS-ta],” Robert replied. “Keyi ma? [May I please have some more?]”
“Dwei, dwei, dwei. Hebei [Of course, of course, of course. Drink your cup.],” was the answer and the bottle, wrapped in yellow crinkly cellophane was again proffered with as much flourish as a loincloth wearing Chinese fisherman could flourish which was a lot. “He, he, he. [Drink, drink, drink].”
“What is this shit?” Sara asked over her cup and stubbed her bootleg Winston cigarette into the eyeball of one of the many scattered fish heads, fish parts, fishing gear, and generalized trash of this fisherman’s shack.
“This is the best black cherry champagne in the world,” Robert told her.
“I got that part. I’m asking you what kind of shit I’m drinking.”
“It’s probably soda pop dosed with pure grain alcohol and antifreeze.”
“See? That’s all I wanted to know,” she said, kicking another fish-head out of kicking range. The champagne was only marginally better than the baijiou they had been drinking up to that point.
“Wo xihuan niede difang,” she directed to her host. “I like your place.”
Using her best Chinese manners, Sara spat out the low doorway to show the host how much she liked it there by not spitting on his floor.
The host beamed because he liked it, too. He’d built it himself out of driftwood and industrial waste. With its beach-front location and views of the harbor, it was quite a bachelor pad and who knew how many young Chinese women had been tempted into its confines. How many young Chinese fisherwomen had actually given it up in there was questionable, but certainly some had been tempted, especially if the host kept the world’s best black cherry champagne lying around all the time. Surely it was not just for foreigners because the last time foreigners had been inside this little seaside hut was never. The host kept looking at Sara’s legs, revealed as they were by her Capri pants.
“He likes you,” Robert said.
“He likes my legs,” she answered. “He likes you as a human being. He likes you as a dead foreign devil ghost barbarian frenemy .”
“As well he should. I sort of set the standard,” Robert agreed.
“You do? I mean, you do.”
“I try.”
“You do. I mean you do try,” she replied. “But when’s this other guy supposed to get here?”
“Niede pongyo lai shemma shiho? [When is your friend coming?].” Robert asked the host.
“Lai kuaide, kuaide, kuaide. [He’s coming quickly, quickly, quickly].”
“Ni shuo iyangde dou shiho keshi ta bu lai. [You say that all the time but he doesn’t come.],” Sara almost snapped the words but her lips remained wrapped around her cup. Maybe the host didn’t hear her as he kept his eyes fastened on the shack’s open door.
“Ta lai xiendzai. [He’s coming now.],” the host said. And the mystery guest was, indeed walking up the beach followed by a small entourage of children and young men. The guest seemed much older than young, though, and Robert and Sara had been promised he spoke English.
“He says that all the time, too.”
“What else have we got to do but sit in a smelly beach shack waiting for someone who speaks English?”
“We speak English.”
“But, we’re not Chinese.”
“Got that right. Give me some more of this excellent black cherry champagne.”
As Chinese men and boys began to squeeze into the low, narrow doorway, the host began slapping most of them back and shooing them out with rapid-fire dialect that sounded neither welcoming nor warm.
The guest looked at each of them, the host and Robert and Sara, in turn with a sickly grin on his face. Robert and Sara were used to sickly grins on Chinese people’s faces and wondered what was going to come next.
“Wode pongyou [My friend],” the host explained while gripping the guest’s forearm until it turned white. “Ta jiang ta shuo Ingyue. [He says he speaks English.]”
“Hmmm. I thought the host said he did speak English. Now it’s just a claim?” Robert said.
“What did you expect? We’re in the middle of the Neibu Zone ,” Sara answered.
“Jieshi wode pongyou, [This is my friend].” said the host. “Jia Xiaotou. [He’s called Small Head.]”
Both Sara and Robert snorted and burbled the Chinese equivalent of “pleased to meet you”—“Hau, hau, hau” or “good, good, good.”
And then there was silence.
But there was always more black cherry champagne, the best in the world.
“Ummm…weishemma jia Xiaotou? [Ummm…Why is he called Small Head?]” Sara asked.
“Bu zhidao [I don’t know.],” the host answered but he did. Robert and Sara imagined everyone knew why that guy was called Small Head.
Small Head, whose head wasn’t small at all, just grinned.
“Bu zhidao,” the host repeated.
“Keshi, ni tou bu shi xiao. Bu kan hen xiao. Bu hen xiao. [But your head isn’t small. It doesn’t look small. Not very small.]” Sara pressed.
“Keshi, dagai limian [Maybe inside],” Small Head replied.
“Ahhh,” said Sara.
“Ahhh,” said Robert.
“Ahhh,” said the host.
“Ahhh,” said Small Head.
“He doesn’t speak English, does he?” Robert asked.
“I don’t think so,” Sara replied.
“What are we going to do if he tries?”
“Play along. We are guests here.”
“Purdy pardy arda pardaciple,” Small Head said.
The host looked anxious.
“There it is,” Robert said.
“There is what?” asked Sara.
“There’s the English.”
“Ardy ard ah pard ah pardapard,” Small Head continued.
“Well, he’s got the rhythm right.”
“Yeah. It’s practically iambic pentameter.”
“Shemme jiang? [What did he say?]” the host asked.
“Ta shuo, ‘Pardy ardy ardy pard ah [He said, "Pardy ardy ardy pard ah."],” Sara snorted.
“Shemma yisi? [What is the meaning?]” the host asked. “Ta shuo shemma? [What did he say?]”
“Well,” Robert answered. “He said, ‘Hello, my new friends.’”
The host and Small Head looked blank.
“Robert,” Sara said.
“Huh?”
“Only two of us here speak English.”
“Oh, right. Ta shuo, ‘Nihau, wode xin pongyou. [He said, ‘Hello, my new friends.’]”
“Very good. Very quick,” Sara smiled.
The host and Small Head nodded and smiled together, one meaning “I never would have believed it” and the other “I told you so.”
“Jixu [Continue],” said the host.
Small Head turned his head away from the host, cleared his throat, and shot a grateful glance at Robert.
“Pard ard pardapard,” he began. “Paradarp prada prada darp darpa prad pra para darpapard.”
“Oh ho,” Sara giggled. “That’s a tough one.”
The host looked to Robert.
“A-fucking-mazing,” Robert answered while holding his cup out for more of that excellent black cherry champagne. The bottle was getting low and that was not good. Perhaps there was more stashed around somewhere. Or some baijou or even just some pijou [beer].
Robert took a deep breath.
“Ta shuo, ‘Wode pongyoude fangzi shi hen how ye iyangde fangzi dzai Meigo.’ [He said, “My friend’s house is very nice and the same as the ones in America.]”
“Damn right it is,” Sara said draining her cup, and holding it out for more. “You’re getting pretty good at this.”
“Parda parpar pardy darp,” Robert answered.
“Pardy par you, fucker,” she giggled.
“Pardy pard parp paparpard,” Small Head joined in.
“Puh puh puh puh,” the host contributed.
They all laughed like maniacs except the host whose face began to flush more than the alcohol had already flushed it which was a lot.
“Not even close, man,” Robert told him but in English. “Not even close.”
“Careful not to make him mad,” Sara warned. “I think he’s still got some more of that shitty champagne.”
“Pardpar parpy par par par,” Small Head added.
“That’s what I say,” Sara agreed.
(Click on the title or the book cover for more information)
16 March 2009
Chinese Stripper
the chinese stripper we've come to see comes on-stage
under blue lights, silver glittering on her eyes and in her hair
and silver seems to be her theme because
her shoes and her long fingernails and shooting through her stockings:
it's all silver under blue and ultra-violet lights.
and the best part is that she isn't chinese at all, really;
it's a trick they do with make-up and wigs, with gesture and music.
and it's a really great trick. really.
under blue lights, silver glittering on her eyes and in her hair
and silver seems to be her theme because
her shoes and her long fingernails and shooting through her stockings:
it's all silver under blue and ultra-violet lights.
and the best part is that she isn't chinese at all, really;
it's a trick they do with make-up and wigs, with gesture and music.
and it's a really great trick. really.
15 March 2009
The Thing in the Trench (after H.P. Lovecraft)
First Lieutenant Answorth Hollister had not lived long, had seen but 23 winters and feared he'd see no other. He'd seen some things he'd never expected to see, hadn't wanted to see, wished he hadn't seen, but Hollister’s hope and comfort was the growing doubt he would be around to see much more of anything else. The way things were going on the front, the way he was losing men and comrades and comrades who became his friends as the terrifying spectacle of mechanized warfare chewed through trenches filled with fragile men living underground while inhuman and inhumane machines roared and soared above them, Hollister felt each day closer to his own demise. No amount of trench luck or any talismanic charm could offset the sheer mathematical improbability of his survival. No matter which way he turned it over in his mind, it just would not add up. And, deep inside him, Hollister didn’t want it to add up and felt that, should he somehow miraculously survive what the press had already begun to call The Great War, what was left of his life would be unalterably diminished by the experience.
Hollister had seen the men of his company literally blown to pieces before his eyes, men with whom he had trained in America and with whom he had crossed the Atlantic in ships crowded full with horses and other soldiers. He had seen them reduced from men to mere targets for machine guns, artillery shells, tanks, and aeroplanes. He had seen Thatcher's face sheared off whole in a piece within a storm of razor-steel shrapnel. He had watched through the mica prisms of his gas-mask as Wilkins and Thomas choked to death on chlorine gas, and he had been helpless to do more than scream muffled into its filtering chamber. He had seen Larkin become a living torso, a freak born of unnatural forces, whose silent rictus distorted his once-human features while he wriggled worm-like through the foetid mud and feces at a trench bottom while raw plumes of intestine unwound behind him into the filth. Hollister had watched whole cordons of living men shredded into so much meat by the unholy chattering of machine guns. He had seen men fall burning from the sky as their tissue paper and wooden machines burned alongside them, twin corkscrews of smoke following each to the ground. He had seen squadrons of tanks plunge across the No-Man's-Land spitting red death while churning the bodies of both living and dead, both friend and foe to sanguineous pulp beneath their grinding treads.
Hollister had seen enough and wished to see no more. Many was the evening he'd sit on the firing-step outside his shelter with his revolver in his hand, its lanyard like some umbilical that attached this small machine of death to not only his belt and his body but somehow to his very heart and what was left of his soul. He had reached out to point with this small machine and men fell. He had done it and he had seen it happen and knew they were his bullets fired from his hand that dropped men wounded or dead to lie upon the blasphemed earth. And, at that time, in the blood heat of battle or the frenzied chaos of ambush, Hollister rejoiced in those deaths and celebrated them for not being his own.
Perhaps that was what Hollister hated most. He had found that part of himself rejoiced in death and he had looked at it and that part of himself had looked back at him with sickening recognition.
“I know you,” his killer self had told him. “I know you ever so well.”
Hollister saw himself blinded to all but survival amid a killing lust, his own eager willingness to murder and continue murdering and to keep on murdering until everyone and everything in that entire wasted land was dead except himself. And then perhaps, he thought, he would kill himself and the world would end in a bloody pile of corpses with the victor of this insane conflict the final corpse at the top of the insane heap.
Such were the thoughts that turned through Hollister's mind as another summer approached another winter, a winter he could not bring himself to believe he would ever actually suffer. Above him, the top of the trench opened to the sky and clouds skimmed red and orange with sunset glow. Hollister smoked his pipe and held his revolver, the cord from its base drooping down into the muddy sludge, the odiferous compound of rotten food scraps, vermin, and human waste in which he lived, ate his daily meals, and slept. He hadn't spoken aloud since before the midday meal and Hollister's acting subaltern, Corporal Skinner, was concerned.
"Coffee, sir?" he called from within the shelter he maintained for his lieutenant. There was a pause in the clatter while Skinner awaited a reply and, when none was forthcoming, the clatter resumed. Skinner soon emerged from the shelter's sandbagged doorway with a chipped china mug of steaming coffee.
"Lovely evening, sir?" Skinner asked as he waited for Hollister to take the mug from his hand. The metallic babble of sporadic machine-gun fire and the answering thump of grenades came floating down from somewhere farther up the line. He repeated, "It’s a lovely evening, sir."
Hollister turned to look at Skinner.
"If you like lovely evenings, I suppose it is," Hollister replied, returned the weapon to the sheath of its holster, and reached for the coffee.
Long after that day’s darkness fell, Hollister smeared lampblack across his face and looked around the circle of men doing the same. He had not known a one of them for more than two weeks and some not even two days. Numbering twelve all together, they were to be the patrol he would lead out beyond their wire that night to slip through the corrugated nightmare of the No-Man's-Land to reconnoiter German lines. Rumors of another push were circulating as they always circulated and brass wanted to know what the enemy was planning. Hollister and his men were ordered then to observe and, if possible, return with prisoners.
As he looked from face to face to face, Hollister could only marvel at their youth and innocence and naiveté. His exponentially growing cynicism compelled him to wonder how many of these fresh faces he would leave pale and wan in the mud under a moonless sky. He wondered if this were to be the patrol from which he would not return. At age 23, Hollister felt old and evil.
Checking and rechecking his men's equipment to make sure no stray rattles or clanks could give away their position, Hollister tried to remember each man's name and face.
"All right then…ah…Jacobs," he said when needlessly adjusting the soldier's Sam Browne belt.
"Jenkins, sir."
"Very well. Jenkins, then," Hollister said and passed down the line. "How about you…ah…?"
"Williams, sir."
"All right, Williams then. How about you? Are you ready to give the Krauts a shiny black eye tonight?"
"I reckon so, sir."
"Oh, you reckon so. Well, I suppose that will have to do," the lieutenant muttered as he checked the next man and the next and the next.
An hour later found the squad belly down in the foul muck and muddy filth lying between the two great armies. Broken equipment and shattered machinery, bodies of animals and bodies of men, the smoldering remains of a tank with its charcoaled crew draped from its shattered turret, fragments of fragments of bones, and honed shards of shrapnel all littered the pock-marked landscape. Each shell-hole had a foot of stagnant, putrid, blood-polluted water at its bottom.
The squad moved slowly, inching its way across the dangerous ground at perhaps the rate of a few terrifying yards an hour. As they approached the enemy trenches, the men grew more excited and, strangely, calmer as they moved their bodies with deliberate care, as they began to feel themselves nearing combat. Hollister slipped over the edge of a deep crater and slid down to the cesspool at its bottom. A headless corpse, from which army he could not tell, waited for him. Belly-down in the water, it was swollen and bloated with gas.
"Pardon me, chum," he whispered to it and set it bobbing to the other side of the pool.
With a shielded flashlight, Hollister checked his map as the rest of his men followed him silently into the slimy water. Shutting off the light, Hollister directed his men with gesture, the silent language of scouts, into the formation they would take to enter the enemy's lair. Men to the left, men to the right, and all slightly behind the center from where Hollister would lead them as they attempted to slide under the German barbed wire and into his fortifications without arousing alarm.
As they moved under the dark sky, pressing themselves deeper into the blood-sponged earth, Hollister could feel himself thrill to the danger in which they were moving. Alert to the sound of a sentry's challenge, a shot, the pop and arching whoosh of a flare, Hollister’s nerves screamed as he carefully inched his way through the debris fronting the German wire. Each calculated movement was in direct opposition against welling impulses to stand, to scream, to run toward his enemy, and to plunge his knife into his enemy's flesh. Yet still, Hollister picked his way carefully, setting the pace and the tone of the attack for his men, keeping their fear and excitement in check by checking his own.
As he approached the first line of tangled barbs, Hollister held up his arm for the squad to stop and wait. He then signaled for a soldier with wire cutters to crawl forward and clip through the wire. With pistol drawn and a grenade in his left hand, Hollister laid watch as the man, a man named Smithson, worked. He winced at each metallic ping when the wire parted, and he expected to hear gunfire and screaming at any moment. The youth named Smithson worked forward, clearing a tunnel through the wire and Hollister directed the men to follow. When all were through and awaiting him on the other side of the tangle, Hollister took one last look around neutral territory and plunged into what had by brute force become Germany.
Just ten feet from the lip of the enemy's trench, Hollister's patrol was arrayed in a long line, all thirteen armed with grenade and pistol or bayonet and pistol or hatchet and grenade or knives in both hands; all held some combination of lethality and savage slaughter. Their belts dripped with death and their hands were eager to loose and guide those weapons they carried. Hollister gave the signal and all thirteen moved forward like some dark and terrible wave moves to engulf some dark and terrible shore.
As the squad reached the edge of the first line of entrenchment, each man tried to slip over the brink silently while looking simultaneously in opposite directions. Some were more successful than others were but all ended crouched at the bottom. They were alone. No enemy sentries cried alarm, no enemy soldiers surged forward to engage nor did they scuttle to the rear for reinforcements. The line was deserted.
"Where are they?" Hollister whispered. "We need prisoners."
"Left side clear, sir," a corporal named Wiseman softly reported, careful to lisp as he had been trained to insure the sibilance of his speech would not carry to enemy ears.
"Right side clear, sir," a private named Petersen likewise whispered.
Hollister was perplexed. The trench should have been filled with soldiers or at least posted with sentries in anticipation of just such an infiltration. It should certainly not be abandoned, as it now appeared to be. He moved down the line of his men looking for a lateral communication trench, a way back toward German second and third line of trenches and, when he found one, he motioned for them to follow.
As the patrol moved through line after line of trenches, each as empty as the first, Hollister grew more and more nervous. The wrongness of the empty trenches was frightening and strange and more menacing than any trench filled of crack German storm troopers. Had the war ended and the Germans gone home overnight? Had he led his men into some kind of horrible trap? Would the ground rise beneath them when hidden explosives detonated? Had he been killed without knowing it and stumbled his way into some kind of Hell at the head of a troop of similarly lost souls? Hollister had learned that anything was possible in this nightmare landscape, anything except the expected. To find a vacuum where he'd expected to find enemy soldiers preparing for attack was more than disconcerting though.
The lieutenant felt his sense of reality slip sideways and he struggled to keep it within his grip while the empty trenches and shelters threatened to become part of some surreal new existence into which he'd entered without plan or reason.
His men were likewise affected and Hollister could hear their growing muttering and whisper. They looked about them, weapons at the ready, wide-eyed and lip-licking with fingers pressed softly against triggers and hilts and handles. Hollister called the squad to a halt and passed the word that they could drink from their canteens. Calling the corporals to his side, he made a new plan.
"We keep together and move as far back as we can," he told them. "Be ready to fight, be ready to run, but we are going to find some Germans. I don't care if he is dead or alive, but I want to see at least one German soldier before we head back to our own lines."
The corporals made silent acknowledgement and went to spread word among the men. There was some soft rustling as they shifted their equipment, rechecked their weapons, and recalculated their chances of seeing the next day’s sun rise. The squad began to move, Hollister at its head, down and back deeper into German territory.
At each junction of trenches, the line stopped so Hollister and the corporals could move up and out searching for enemy soldiers or traps. They encountered none. One hundred, two hundred, five hundred yards from where they first slipped into the Kaiser's trenches, nearly a half-mile behind enemy lines and no sign of any enemy alive or wounded or dying or dead. It was if the trenches had been sanitized of every remnant left by the men who once excavated them. Hollister felt his own and his men's sense of eerie unease increase, the increasingly supernatural feel of the deserted fortifications becoming near to unbearable and he didn't know who would snap first, he or one of his men.
It was one of the men. A tall and gangly youth from Ohio named Freter or Fryer or Frazier stood up to empty the clip of his 1911 Colt automatic into what turned out to be a gas mask stuffed inside a trench-wall niche. The staccato fusillade set off a near panic in the men and Hollister could barely keep them from unleashing their combined firepower with no real enemy in sight.
“Steady, men,” the lieutenant whisper-screamed to his jittering command. “Steady now.”
Hollister stepped to the trembling Freter or Fryer or Frazier and snatched the handgun from his fingers. Releasing the empty clip, Hollister reached and plucked a full clip from the youth's belt, slammed it home into the pistol butt, chambered a fresh round, and gave it back to the boy.
"Next time, try to hit something," Hollister told Freter or Fryer or Frazier and the men close by nearly smiled.
Hollister had to keep the men moving or these kinds of outbursts would become uncontrollable and infectious. He nearly started firing himself when Freter’s or Fryer’s or Frazier’s first rounds went off. And, if there were any Germans about, they certainly knew an enemy patrol was in their midst. The Americans had to move quickly and far.
Hollister ordered the corporals to get the men moving again, this time down a trench line parallel to the one they occupied. Perhaps this section of front was vacant but they might find enemy troops to the left or right. By then, hours had passed and Hollister kept checking his watch to make sure the squad would have enough time to return to its own lines before dawn. Only few more minutes of motion were left before they would have to retreat, their mission a failure.
But, all questions were answered as the lieutenant turned the next double-blind corner. Expecting to see more deserted trench or, perhaps, more trenches but not deserted ones, instead Hollister’s eyes were filled with the sight of an enormous crater, a crater larger than any he had ever seen except amid geological formations. It was far too large; it could not conceivably have been a shell-hole or created by an explosion except one of such enormous proportions that its secret existence was a sheer impossibility. One side or the other would have clamored to claim such devastation. Yet explosions were what invariably caused such large pits in war zone landscapes and, if it were a bomb that dug this hole, it was the largest bomb in creation and then, perhaps, it was responsible for the death of all the German troops within the radius of its desolation. But why Hollister had not heard of its use and how it might have made German bodies completely disappear had not yet occurred to him. For a moment he merely gazed at the pit. Some 300 yards across and at least that deep, it carried the usual accumulation of water only, rather than a mere puddle or pool or a pond, the crater held a small lake.
Hollister could feel his men gather around and behind him, each in turn stunned by the sight before them. A kind of gas or vapor or mist or smoke swirled across the surface of the water at the bottom of the pit but at such a remove from their position that they had yet to fear it. The soldiers could have been witness to some primordial scene of volcanic wasteland long before the simplest life graced this planet's basaltic shores or grew strong enough to blast it back to its origins. They could have been explorers of some alien-scape on some distant planet where life had never and would never thrive. Perhaps they shared the vision of the horrifying future awaiting after endless years of this horrifying war. They stood there, Hollister and his men, transfixed by the vast, dead nothingness before them and tried to imagine how it figured into their mission and how they would report it to their superiors and what it all might mean. And then the waters stirred.
Something, some thing, came uncoiled and uncoiling from the foul water at the bottom of the enormous basin. It was something long, long and black, and it glistened with metallic striation like some horrible organic machine and it reached up and out from the bottom of the pit. The smell of it was nauseating and, before they could turn to run, many of the men began to vomit and vomited still as they finally turned running, voiding bowel and bladder both in a mindless terror beyond the mindless terror of their war.
Behind them came the unspooling thing and then the reaching. Hollister tried to move his men quickly and with some order toward some point of safety as yet to be determined but they finally and completely panicked, dropped their weapons, scrambled and clawed at one another to return to the trench line and run and run and run for their lives and for their souls.
The soldiers pushed their lieutenant aside in their rush and trampled him beneath their feet and it saved his life. As the slick, venomous ropes of animate slime pursued them into the false safety of the German emplacements, those glittering tentacles overpassed Hollister. Attracted by the American soldiers' movements, their heat, the ragged emanations of their raging emotion, and their noise, the protoplasmic proto-tentacles plucked them, man by man, to strip each of his flesh and absorb their juices both chemical and psychic. The massive members were rowed with cups and within each cup was a mouth and within each mouth was a toothed tongue that licked away the men’s blood and muscle, their hormones and their fear and, when sated with by twelve, each retreated back into dark waters and again bypassed the thirteenth there in the mud to leave him wide-eyed and broken, barely conscious, but alive—insanely and against all rationale or reason ecstatic to be just alive.
“How very odd,” Hollister thought before he surprised himself by guiltlessly welcoming the rusty anesthesia of insensibility.
Hollister never returned to the American lines. His captain and his colonel and his general wondered briefly at the loss of the thirteen before resuming their business of slaughter. His status as “missing in action; presumed dead” was duly noted and the telegram was duly sent back to the United States where his mournful family duly received it.
When a German patrol eventually did find Hollister approximately nine days after leading his squadron to their damnation, the lieutenant was both naked and gibbering. The Germans were scouting the old section of trench-work their brass decided needed to be reoccupied without proffering explanation as to why they had been abandoned in the first place.
"Typischerweise," the Germans complained to each other about the seemingly arbitrary orders that propelled them on their seemingly arbitrary mission. And then they found the American, naked and shivering in the six inches of muck and mud flooring the abandoned shelter carved into the abandoned trench’s wall. Streaked with his own waste, unshaven, clutching his genitals in his ragged-nailed hands, the American babbled words they could not understand nor had the inclination to understand. The man before them was clearly mad, a weakling, and a coward suffering from the new mental disease dies Kriegsneurose.
"Rous, schwine," they shouted at Hollister, prodding him with their bayoneted rifles. They made rude comments about his nakedness and his smell as well. Hollister seemed not to see them and, instead, curled into a trembling ball. They had to drag him from the shelter into the relative light of the trench.
Hollister screamed like a woman and clawed at his eyes. He scrambled along the base of the trench wall like a rat, pissing himself and screeching. The Germans laughed in disgust and growing nervousness even as they kicked him and brought the butts of their rifles down upon him. The extremity of his breakdown was too close to their own teetering sanities and they did not appreciate things like that for very long.
"Wass is das 'R'leyh'?" they asked each other after they shot him and left his corpse to rot there in the bottom of that trench.
Though formed thought had long since fled him, Hollister’s last real sensation was simple gratitude toward his killers.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937)
Hollister had seen the men of his company literally blown to pieces before his eyes, men with whom he had trained in America and with whom he had crossed the Atlantic in ships crowded full with horses and other soldiers. He had seen them reduced from men to mere targets for machine guns, artillery shells, tanks, and aeroplanes. He had seen Thatcher's face sheared off whole in a piece within a storm of razor-steel shrapnel. He had watched through the mica prisms of his gas-mask as Wilkins and Thomas choked to death on chlorine gas, and he had been helpless to do more than scream muffled into its filtering chamber. He had seen Larkin become a living torso, a freak born of unnatural forces, whose silent rictus distorted his once-human features while he wriggled worm-like through the foetid mud and feces at a trench bottom while raw plumes of intestine unwound behind him into the filth. Hollister had watched whole cordons of living men shredded into so much meat by the unholy chattering of machine guns. He had seen men fall burning from the sky as their tissue paper and wooden machines burned alongside them, twin corkscrews of smoke following each to the ground. He had seen squadrons of tanks plunge across the No-Man's-Land spitting red death while churning the bodies of both living and dead, both friend and foe to sanguineous pulp beneath their grinding treads.
Hollister had seen enough and wished to see no more. Many was the evening he'd sit on the firing-step outside his shelter with his revolver in his hand, its lanyard like some umbilical that attached this small machine of death to not only his belt and his body but somehow to his very heart and what was left of his soul. He had reached out to point with this small machine and men fell. He had done it and he had seen it happen and knew they were his bullets fired from his hand that dropped men wounded or dead to lie upon the blasphemed earth. And, at that time, in the blood heat of battle or the frenzied chaos of ambush, Hollister rejoiced in those deaths and celebrated them for not being his own.
Perhaps that was what Hollister hated most. He had found that part of himself rejoiced in death and he had looked at it and that part of himself had looked back at him with sickening recognition.
“I know you,” his killer self had told him. “I know you ever so well.”
Hollister saw himself blinded to all but survival amid a killing lust, his own eager willingness to murder and continue murdering and to keep on murdering until everyone and everything in that entire wasted land was dead except himself. And then perhaps, he thought, he would kill himself and the world would end in a bloody pile of corpses with the victor of this insane conflict the final corpse at the top of the insane heap.
Such were the thoughts that turned through Hollister's mind as another summer approached another winter, a winter he could not bring himself to believe he would ever actually suffer. Above him, the top of the trench opened to the sky and clouds skimmed red and orange with sunset glow. Hollister smoked his pipe and held his revolver, the cord from its base drooping down into the muddy sludge, the odiferous compound of rotten food scraps, vermin, and human waste in which he lived, ate his daily meals, and slept. He hadn't spoken aloud since before the midday meal and Hollister's acting subaltern, Corporal Skinner, was concerned.
"Coffee, sir?" he called from within the shelter he maintained for his lieutenant. There was a pause in the clatter while Skinner awaited a reply and, when none was forthcoming, the clatter resumed. Skinner soon emerged from the shelter's sandbagged doorway with a chipped china mug of steaming coffee.
"Lovely evening, sir?" Skinner asked as he waited for Hollister to take the mug from his hand. The metallic babble of sporadic machine-gun fire and the answering thump of grenades came floating down from somewhere farther up the line. He repeated, "It’s a lovely evening, sir."
Hollister turned to look at Skinner.
"If you like lovely evenings, I suppose it is," Hollister replied, returned the weapon to the sheath of its holster, and reached for the coffee.
*
Long after that day’s darkness fell, Hollister smeared lampblack across his face and looked around the circle of men doing the same. He had not known a one of them for more than two weeks and some not even two days. Numbering twelve all together, they were to be the patrol he would lead out beyond their wire that night to slip through the corrugated nightmare of the No-Man's-Land to reconnoiter German lines. Rumors of another push were circulating as they always circulated and brass wanted to know what the enemy was planning. Hollister and his men were ordered then to observe and, if possible, return with prisoners.
As he looked from face to face to face, Hollister could only marvel at their youth and innocence and naiveté. His exponentially growing cynicism compelled him to wonder how many of these fresh faces he would leave pale and wan in the mud under a moonless sky. He wondered if this were to be the patrol from which he would not return. At age 23, Hollister felt old and evil.
Checking and rechecking his men's equipment to make sure no stray rattles or clanks could give away their position, Hollister tried to remember each man's name and face.
"All right then…ah…Jacobs," he said when needlessly adjusting the soldier's Sam Browne belt.
"Jenkins, sir."
"Very well. Jenkins, then," Hollister said and passed down the line. "How about you…ah…?"
"Williams, sir."
"All right, Williams then. How about you? Are you ready to give the Krauts a shiny black eye tonight?"
"I reckon so, sir."
"Oh, you reckon so. Well, I suppose that will have to do," the lieutenant muttered as he checked the next man and the next and the next.
An hour later found the squad belly down in the foul muck and muddy filth lying between the two great armies. Broken equipment and shattered machinery, bodies of animals and bodies of men, the smoldering remains of a tank with its charcoaled crew draped from its shattered turret, fragments of fragments of bones, and honed shards of shrapnel all littered the pock-marked landscape. Each shell-hole had a foot of stagnant, putrid, blood-polluted water at its bottom.
The squad moved slowly, inching its way across the dangerous ground at perhaps the rate of a few terrifying yards an hour. As they approached the enemy trenches, the men grew more excited and, strangely, calmer as they moved their bodies with deliberate care, as they began to feel themselves nearing combat. Hollister slipped over the edge of a deep crater and slid down to the cesspool at its bottom. A headless corpse, from which army he could not tell, waited for him. Belly-down in the water, it was swollen and bloated with gas.
"Pardon me, chum," he whispered to it and set it bobbing to the other side of the pool.
With a shielded flashlight, Hollister checked his map as the rest of his men followed him silently into the slimy water. Shutting off the light, Hollister directed his men with gesture, the silent language of scouts, into the formation they would take to enter the enemy's lair. Men to the left, men to the right, and all slightly behind the center from where Hollister would lead them as they attempted to slide under the German barbed wire and into his fortifications without arousing alarm.
As they moved under the dark sky, pressing themselves deeper into the blood-sponged earth, Hollister could feel himself thrill to the danger in which they were moving. Alert to the sound of a sentry's challenge, a shot, the pop and arching whoosh of a flare, Hollister’s nerves screamed as he carefully inched his way through the debris fronting the German wire. Each calculated movement was in direct opposition against welling impulses to stand, to scream, to run toward his enemy, and to plunge his knife into his enemy's flesh. Yet still, Hollister picked his way carefully, setting the pace and the tone of the attack for his men, keeping their fear and excitement in check by checking his own.
As he approached the first line of tangled barbs, Hollister held up his arm for the squad to stop and wait. He then signaled for a soldier with wire cutters to crawl forward and clip through the wire. With pistol drawn and a grenade in his left hand, Hollister laid watch as the man, a man named Smithson, worked. He winced at each metallic ping when the wire parted, and he expected to hear gunfire and screaming at any moment. The youth named Smithson worked forward, clearing a tunnel through the wire and Hollister directed the men to follow. When all were through and awaiting him on the other side of the tangle, Hollister took one last look around neutral territory and plunged into what had by brute force become Germany.
*
Just ten feet from the lip of the enemy's trench, Hollister's patrol was arrayed in a long line, all thirteen armed with grenade and pistol or bayonet and pistol or hatchet and grenade or knives in both hands; all held some combination of lethality and savage slaughter. Their belts dripped with death and their hands were eager to loose and guide those weapons they carried. Hollister gave the signal and all thirteen moved forward like some dark and terrible wave moves to engulf some dark and terrible shore.
As the squad reached the edge of the first line of entrenchment, each man tried to slip over the brink silently while looking simultaneously in opposite directions. Some were more successful than others were but all ended crouched at the bottom. They were alone. No enemy sentries cried alarm, no enemy soldiers surged forward to engage nor did they scuttle to the rear for reinforcements. The line was deserted.
"Where are they?" Hollister whispered. "We need prisoners."
"Left side clear, sir," a corporal named Wiseman softly reported, careful to lisp as he had been trained to insure the sibilance of his speech would not carry to enemy ears.
"Right side clear, sir," a private named Petersen likewise whispered.
Hollister was perplexed. The trench should have been filled with soldiers or at least posted with sentries in anticipation of just such an infiltration. It should certainly not be abandoned, as it now appeared to be. He moved down the line of his men looking for a lateral communication trench, a way back toward German second and third line of trenches and, when he found one, he motioned for them to follow.
As the patrol moved through line after line of trenches, each as empty as the first, Hollister grew more and more nervous. The wrongness of the empty trenches was frightening and strange and more menacing than any trench filled of crack German storm troopers. Had the war ended and the Germans gone home overnight? Had he led his men into some kind of horrible trap? Would the ground rise beneath them when hidden explosives detonated? Had he been killed without knowing it and stumbled his way into some kind of Hell at the head of a troop of similarly lost souls? Hollister had learned that anything was possible in this nightmare landscape, anything except the expected. To find a vacuum where he'd expected to find enemy soldiers preparing for attack was more than disconcerting though.
The lieutenant felt his sense of reality slip sideways and he struggled to keep it within his grip while the empty trenches and shelters threatened to become part of some surreal new existence into which he'd entered without plan or reason.
His men were likewise affected and Hollister could hear their growing muttering and whisper. They looked about them, weapons at the ready, wide-eyed and lip-licking with fingers pressed softly against triggers and hilts and handles. Hollister called the squad to a halt and passed the word that they could drink from their canteens. Calling the corporals to his side, he made a new plan.
"We keep together and move as far back as we can," he told them. "Be ready to fight, be ready to run, but we are going to find some Germans. I don't care if he is dead or alive, but I want to see at least one German soldier before we head back to our own lines."
The corporals made silent acknowledgement and went to spread word among the men. There was some soft rustling as they shifted their equipment, rechecked their weapons, and recalculated their chances of seeing the next day’s sun rise. The squad began to move, Hollister at its head, down and back deeper into German territory.
At each junction of trenches, the line stopped so Hollister and the corporals could move up and out searching for enemy soldiers or traps. They encountered none. One hundred, two hundred, five hundred yards from where they first slipped into the Kaiser's trenches, nearly a half-mile behind enemy lines and no sign of any enemy alive or wounded or dying or dead. It was if the trenches had been sanitized of every remnant left by the men who once excavated them. Hollister felt his own and his men's sense of eerie unease increase, the increasingly supernatural feel of the deserted fortifications becoming near to unbearable and he didn't know who would snap first, he or one of his men.
It was one of the men. A tall and gangly youth from Ohio named Freter or Fryer or Frazier stood up to empty the clip of his 1911 Colt automatic into what turned out to be a gas mask stuffed inside a trench-wall niche. The staccato fusillade set off a near panic in the men and Hollister could barely keep them from unleashing their combined firepower with no real enemy in sight.
“Steady, men,” the lieutenant whisper-screamed to his jittering command. “Steady now.”
Hollister stepped to the trembling Freter or Fryer or Frazier and snatched the handgun from his fingers. Releasing the empty clip, Hollister reached and plucked a full clip from the youth's belt, slammed it home into the pistol butt, chambered a fresh round, and gave it back to the boy.
"Next time, try to hit something," Hollister told Freter or Fryer or Frazier and the men close by nearly smiled.
Hollister had to keep the men moving or these kinds of outbursts would become uncontrollable and infectious. He nearly started firing himself when Freter’s or Fryer’s or Frazier’s first rounds went off. And, if there were any Germans about, they certainly knew an enemy patrol was in their midst. The Americans had to move quickly and far.
Hollister ordered the corporals to get the men moving again, this time down a trench line parallel to the one they occupied. Perhaps this section of front was vacant but they might find enemy troops to the left or right. By then, hours had passed and Hollister kept checking his watch to make sure the squad would have enough time to return to its own lines before dawn. Only few more minutes of motion were left before they would have to retreat, their mission a failure.
But, all questions were answered as the lieutenant turned the next double-blind corner. Expecting to see more deserted trench or, perhaps, more trenches but not deserted ones, instead Hollister’s eyes were filled with the sight of an enormous crater, a crater larger than any he had ever seen except amid geological formations. It was far too large; it could not conceivably have been a shell-hole or created by an explosion except one of such enormous proportions that its secret existence was a sheer impossibility. One side or the other would have clamored to claim such devastation. Yet explosions were what invariably caused such large pits in war zone landscapes and, if it were a bomb that dug this hole, it was the largest bomb in creation and then, perhaps, it was responsible for the death of all the German troops within the radius of its desolation. But why Hollister had not heard of its use and how it might have made German bodies completely disappear had not yet occurred to him. For a moment he merely gazed at the pit. Some 300 yards across and at least that deep, it carried the usual accumulation of water only, rather than a mere puddle or pool or a pond, the crater held a small lake.
Hollister could feel his men gather around and behind him, each in turn stunned by the sight before them. A kind of gas or vapor or mist or smoke swirled across the surface of the water at the bottom of the pit but at such a remove from their position that they had yet to fear it. The soldiers could have been witness to some primordial scene of volcanic wasteland long before the simplest life graced this planet's basaltic shores or grew strong enough to blast it back to its origins. They could have been explorers of some alien-scape on some distant planet where life had never and would never thrive. Perhaps they shared the vision of the horrifying future awaiting after endless years of this horrifying war. They stood there, Hollister and his men, transfixed by the vast, dead nothingness before them and tried to imagine how it figured into their mission and how they would report it to their superiors and what it all might mean. And then the waters stirred.
Something, some thing, came uncoiled and uncoiling from the foul water at the bottom of the enormous basin. It was something long, long and black, and it glistened with metallic striation like some horrible organic machine and it reached up and out from the bottom of the pit. The smell of it was nauseating and, before they could turn to run, many of the men began to vomit and vomited still as they finally turned running, voiding bowel and bladder both in a mindless terror beyond the mindless terror of their war.
Behind them came the unspooling thing and then the reaching. Hollister tried to move his men quickly and with some order toward some point of safety as yet to be determined but they finally and completely panicked, dropped their weapons, scrambled and clawed at one another to return to the trench line and run and run and run for their lives and for their souls.
The soldiers pushed their lieutenant aside in their rush and trampled him beneath their feet and it saved his life. As the slick, venomous ropes of animate slime pursued them into the false safety of the German emplacements, those glittering tentacles overpassed Hollister. Attracted by the American soldiers' movements, their heat, the ragged emanations of their raging emotion, and their noise, the protoplasmic proto-tentacles plucked them, man by man, to strip each of his flesh and absorb their juices both chemical and psychic. The massive members were rowed with cups and within each cup was a mouth and within each mouth was a toothed tongue that licked away the men’s blood and muscle, their hormones and their fear and, when sated with by twelve, each retreated back into dark waters and again bypassed the thirteenth there in the mud to leave him wide-eyed and broken, barely conscious, but alive—insanely and against all rationale or reason ecstatic to be just alive.
“How very odd,” Hollister thought before he surprised himself by guiltlessly welcoming the rusty anesthesia of insensibility.
*
Hollister never returned to the American lines. His captain and his colonel and his general wondered briefly at the loss of the thirteen before resuming their business of slaughter. His status as “missing in action; presumed dead” was duly noted and the telegram was duly sent back to the United States where his mournful family duly received it.
When a German patrol eventually did find Hollister approximately nine days after leading his squadron to their damnation, the lieutenant was both naked and gibbering. The Germans were scouting the old section of trench-work their brass decided needed to be reoccupied without proffering explanation as to why they had been abandoned in the first place.
"Typischerweise," the Germans complained to each other about the seemingly arbitrary orders that propelled them on their seemingly arbitrary mission. And then they found the American, naked and shivering in the six inches of muck and mud flooring the abandoned shelter carved into the abandoned trench’s wall. Streaked with his own waste, unshaven, clutching his genitals in his ragged-nailed hands, the American babbled words they could not understand nor had the inclination to understand. The man before them was clearly mad, a weakling, and a coward suffering from the new mental disease dies Kriegsneurose.
"Rous, schwine," they shouted at Hollister, prodding him with their bayoneted rifles. They made rude comments about his nakedness and his smell as well. Hollister seemed not to see them and, instead, curled into a trembling ball. They had to drag him from the shelter into the relative light of the trench.
Hollister screamed like a woman and clawed at his eyes. He scrambled along the base of the trench wall like a rat, pissing himself and screeching. The Germans laughed in disgust and growing nervousness even as they kicked him and brought the butts of their rifles down upon him. The extremity of his breakdown was too close to their own teetering sanities and they did not appreciate things like that for very long.
"Wass is das 'R'leyh'?" they asked each other after they shot him and left his corpse to rot there in the bottom of that trench.
Though formed thought had long since fled him, Hollister’s last real sensation was simple gratitude toward his killers.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937)
14 March 2009
Sharper Than She Ever Imagined
It hardly seemed worth it but still she tried to avoid the worst and deepest of the puddles. Drenched for the most part even swaddled against the weather—-raincoat, hat, and leaky rubber boots—Sheila went through the pointless motions of trying to stay dry even as ice water ran down the back of her neck. She was a beige and gray woman toiling through a black and gray cityscape, damp and defeated. Just finding her way home was an ordeal and once arrived, no comfort awaited.
Was it surprising that Sheila found no joy in her life? If she were to do away with herself, would those who might find her body be puzzled that she had killed herself? After the landlord forced the door to find her there forgotten save for the stink of her, would they ask themselves why, oh why with so much to live for, why in heaven’s name did this woman take her own life? Sheila thought not.
Looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, the only mirror in her house, Sheila pondered not the “why?” of her impending suicide but, instead, she meditated on the “going through with it and doing it right.” She had, after all, been disappointed by so much during her 25 years that she quite rightly feared that her own demise would prove a bungle or a let-down or just another waste of time.
There was loneliness. There were longings unsatisfied, goals unattained, dreams and wishes unrealized. Sheila mined her memory for a reason not to die in the same way she looked at the ceramic knickknack, a shepherdess with crook and lamb, adorning an otherwise barren shelf and she struck nothing in either to stop her self-destruction. No single part existed by which she could justify the whole.
Sheila endured a childhood unremarkable for it’s very lack of remark, no awards or ribbons or certificates of achievement, friendless and awkwardly so, tolerated by parents barely tolerable themselves until her after-graduation flight to a different kind of solitude as if that would be a cure. There were some terms at a university where Sheila floundered in confusing classes with even more confusing classmates before she skulked away with her lackluster Cs and Ds and no one even noticed that she’d left.
She felt like putty. She learned that she was soft and without angles, malleable had anyone ever cared to mold her though not even her professors had indicated that possibility. She was beige and gray and invisible. Sheila made herself available, no one responded, and she didn’t know what else to do. She sat her life lumpenly.
There was a job then and more pointless hours earning pointless money that only ensured she could pay her pointless bills so she could work some more and acquire more bills. Sheila met no one though she tried, could connect with no coworker or neighbor despite her tentative overtures, and she could make no friends. She cashed her checks and shopped for her groceries and moved about the world as if sealed inside a jar.
The blossoming she awaited never occurred and her appearance was, to be generous, drab and her personality, to be truthful, was unfinished. She was putty and, had she been truly visible, Sheila knew she would be recognized as such and then ignored all over again. It was all a losing proposition.
Sheila said “hello” and and she said “goodbye” to the few people she encountered in the courses of her beige, gray, softly sodden days and counted those as her relationships.
“Goodnight, Rodger,” she said to her manager when she left the shop each workday.
“Take it easy, Sheel,” he answered and she always tried to do that and she never quite could.
“Hello,” she told the bank teller. “I’d like to cash this check.”
“Have a nice day, Ms. Cord,” the teller always admonished her. Sheila knew that she wouldn’t have a nice day, that she couldn’t have a nice day, that she couldn’t even manage to take it easy.
Dark days followed darker nights. In winter mud, wet and cloying cold, she slouched her way to and from the place of her pointless employment and past the shops where she made her purchases. Along the way back to her rooms, Sheila would stop in those shops and purchase the tins and boxes from which she ate. Her days off were even worse than her days at work for she truly had nowhere to go with only the television to remind her that other people existed. She’d sit and eat, silent and unmoved and growing larger and softer as the programs unreeled before her. Sheila never laughed and she never cried and she eventually would turn off the machine and sit in silence or sleep until it was time for work again.
The futility of this repetition was beginning to become apparent. She could find no compelling reason to keep doing any of it and, one beige, gray afternoon on her way to her rooms from where she worked, Sheila added to her purchases one small paper package of razor blades called “safety” though why she could not understand why. They seemed seductively dangerous to her.
And so, balanced on the edge of her not very clean tub in her very not clean bathroom, it was with true and real surprise that she saw the paper packet of razor blades she opened with the desire to open her arteries continue to open and open more and more and further and further beyond the possibilities of its apparent size and shape, beyond the limits of its own dimensions and begin unfolding and unsheathing and opening again and again and then again in ways both strange to witness and unimaginable until before her stood a being, a form composed of knives, needles, razor blades, jagged shards, and smooth scalpels, opening more and spreading to become a kind of metallic person, a jumble of sharp angles and cutting edges, a face like a flower of cutting steel and glass and flint, like a fan of knives.
It then spoke to her with a voice composed of tuned metals, a voice that sounded like ripping rippled foil, like iron nails dragged across a shattered mirror, like shattering obsidian, like a bundle of needles disturbed to friction.
“Sheila, dear,” his voice insinuated the room. And the creature there trembled with light gathered and magnified and reflected, a blinding aura of potential, and the potential of a blade in repose. “So sad.”
“Yes,” she replied. “Oh, yes. So sad.”
He shimmered as he moved and the shivering sounds of sharp edges run across each other accompanied the sight. He was disorienting and beautiful and very, very frightening. Sheila wanted to cry but was afraid to do so.
“Afraid?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
“Sad and afraid,” he pondered. “This is no way to live.”
“I know,” Sheila answered. “It isn’t. I don’t want to. I don’t know how.”
“You wish for something,” he continued. “You wish for more.”
“Yes,” she affirmed. “More. Much much more.”
“And here you sit with me.”
“Yes.”
“Then we shall sit together for awhile,” with his voice brittle and sharp and comforting in a clean sort of way.
‘How strange,’ she thought that there at the pinnacle of her isolation and upon the cusp of her demise, she would finally find a friend, a confidant, a person (or a sort of a person) who seemed to care for her. ‘How strange. How beautiful. How perfect.’
“How strange. How beautiful. How perfect,” he told her.
His gentlest touch, his lightest contact, and Sheila bled. The sounds of their caresses were the sounds made when skin parts whisper-soft under surgeons’ knives. Still, her longing grew within the glow of candlelight and flavored wine, the flickering reflections that her razor-man shed, and she grew both bold and slightly anesthetized. She flirted with her razor-man.
Sheila reached to touch his face and she did touch his face and then she put her bleeding forefinger into her mouth to taste the blood he had brought forth from inside her.
“Does this hurt you?” he asked as his lingering touch drew a line of deep iron red from her skin, a crimson line of contour from below her ear traveling down her neck and across the tops of her breasts. The line gaped, a fault line filled with blood.
“No,” she answered him. “Never. It will never hurt me to be touched.”
And she kept telling him “no” even when the real answer was emphatically “yes” until she could no longer speak at all but could only open more and more under his embrace, until his kisses skinned her face and her eyes rolled white, her teeth gleamed white all the way back to her molars against the shocking red shine of her naked muscles and bone. Sheila’s meat quivered in the open air.
“You are becoming beautiful,” he told her as he stripped away the lie of her and revealed the true of her. Free of flesh and yellow fat, her mouth fell open like a flower all long tooth, white bone, and sheets of red muscle along her jaw. “So beautiful.”
The cold, wet air on her now-exposed nerves sent Sheila’s senses reeling, the sheer weight of pain overwhelming her capacity for rational thought. She became her own reactions and there, teetering along borders she had only dimly imagined, Sheila lost her sanity in a blinding rush of agony and new-found love.
Her razor-lover gently turned back the layers surrounding her throat, peeled open her skin and fascia and muscle down to the very cartilage and he opened that, too; the rush of cool air through Sheila’s new orifice slobbered her devotion and its concomitant ecstasy.
Beige and gray no longer, Sheila blossomed crimson, scarlet, deep burgundy red under his attentions and each caress exposed something new and secret and long hidden away from view.
It was all revelation.
Each uncovering brought new jolting wonder, agony, and awareness. Unobscured by eyebrow or eyelid, her vision sharpened; she saw cleanly and she saw clearly, and she watched with naked eyeballs as what had once been inside her spilled outside and spread uncoiling across the floor in a multicolored slick of organ meat and membrane.
“Beautiful,” she marveled at her own concealed colors, awed and humbled that she’d carried them so long and unaware. Sheila thrilled as the blades that were his hands and fingers cupped her breasts and whispered them to ribbons, hanging shreds of golden fat and meat. The white-hot stab of billowing pain carried her nearly outside herself as her flesh shredded with his caress, hot floods of her brilliantly oxygenated blood laving them both.
Sheila reached to stroke his cheeks, to return his loving touch, and watched the skin and meat of her fingertips fall away in translucent slices against the angled edges of his features and each slice brought the nerves in her hands closer to her surface, each nerve singing electric fire into her overloaded brain.
She couldn’t tell if the wetness between her legs was purely sex or just what was left of her sex, her genitals in tatters, fragments, and still pumping pure, white-hot sensation to the glowing nucleus of her cerebral cortex. The feeble orgasms that used to reward her clumsy, lonely masturbation were burned to cinders by the heat of what was exploding inside her newly skinned skull. All other joy and sorrow, all other emotion and feeling withered away under the awful raw burning that swept Sheila toward willing destruction. Helpless in her razor-lover’s embrace, she arched and arced and convulsed herself enough to fling her colors against the wall, great swathes of red and yellow and lines of blue across the rotten plaster and shining brighter than any paint or pigment.
And as what Sheila was becoming rose above her flayed self and as what Sheila had once been fell heaped beneath, she found herself, for the moment, alone and bleeding in her bathroom. Her razor-man fled in sudden collapse upon himself and back down to the small and dangerous blade held in her hand, and Sheila could take a breath to contemplate her new and profound state of nudity, her slavery to pure sensation. This she did and she saw that she was a red woman, a blindingly white woman, and fully opened in a room awash with color until she was quite nothing at all.
Was it surprising that Sheila found no joy in her life? If she were to do away with herself, would those who might find her body be puzzled that she had killed herself? After the landlord forced the door to find her there forgotten save for the stink of her, would they ask themselves why, oh why with so much to live for, why in heaven’s name did this woman take her own life? Sheila thought not.
Looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, the only mirror in her house, Sheila pondered not the “why?” of her impending suicide but, instead, she meditated on the “going through with it and doing it right.” She had, after all, been disappointed by so much during her 25 years that she quite rightly feared that her own demise would prove a bungle or a let-down or just another waste of time.
There was loneliness. There were longings unsatisfied, goals unattained, dreams and wishes unrealized. Sheila mined her memory for a reason not to die in the same way she looked at the ceramic knickknack, a shepherdess with crook and lamb, adorning an otherwise barren shelf and she struck nothing in either to stop her self-destruction. No single part existed by which she could justify the whole.
Sheila endured a childhood unremarkable for it’s very lack of remark, no awards or ribbons or certificates of achievement, friendless and awkwardly so, tolerated by parents barely tolerable themselves until her after-graduation flight to a different kind of solitude as if that would be a cure. There were some terms at a university where Sheila floundered in confusing classes with even more confusing classmates before she skulked away with her lackluster Cs and Ds and no one even noticed that she’d left.
She felt like putty. She learned that she was soft and without angles, malleable had anyone ever cared to mold her though not even her professors had indicated that possibility. She was beige and gray and invisible. Sheila made herself available, no one responded, and she didn’t know what else to do. She sat her life lumpenly.
There was a job then and more pointless hours earning pointless money that only ensured she could pay her pointless bills so she could work some more and acquire more bills. Sheila met no one though she tried, could connect with no coworker or neighbor despite her tentative overtures, and she could make no friends. She cashed her checks and shopped for her groceries and moved about the world as if sealed inside a jar.
The blossoming she awaited never occurred and her appearance was, to be generous, drab and her personality, to be truthful, was unfinished. She was putty and, had she been truly visible, Sheila knew she would be recognized as such and then ignored all over again. It was all a losing proposition.
Sheila said “hello” and and she said “goodbye” to the few people she encountered in the courses of her beige, gray, softly sodden days and counted those as her relationships.
“Goodnight, Rodger,” she said to her manager when she left the shop each workday.
“Take it easy, Sheel,” he answered and she always tried to do that and she never quite could.
“Hello,” she told the bank teller. “I’d like to cash this check.”
“Have a nice day, Ms. Cord,” the teller always admonished her. Sheila knew that she wouldn’t have a nice day, that she couldn’t have a nice day, that she couldn’t even manage to take it easy.
*
Dark days followed darker nights. In winter mud, wet and cloying cold, she slouched her way to and from the place of her pointless employment and past the shops where she made her purchases. Along the way back to her rooms, Sheila would stop in those shops and purchase the tins and boxes from which she ate. Her days off were even worse than her days at work for she truly had nowhere to go with only the television to remind her that other people existed. She’d sit and eat, silent and unmoved and growing larger and softer as the programs unreeled before her. Sheila never laughed and she never cried and she eventually would turn off the machine and sit in silence or sleep until it was time for work again.
The futility of this repetition was beginning to become apparent. She could find no compelling reason to keep doing any of it and, one beige, gray afternoon on her way to her rooms from where she worked, Sheila added to her purchases one small paper package of razor blades called “safety” though why she could not understand why. They seemed seductively dangerous to her.
And so, balanced on the edge of her not very clean tub in her very not clean bathroom, it was with true and real surprise that she saw the paper packet of razor blades she opened with the desire to open her arteries continue to open and open more and more and further and further beyond the possibilities of its apparent size and shape, beyond the limits of its own dimensions and begin unfolding and unsheathing and opening again and again and then again in ways both strange to witness and unimaginable until before her stood a being, a form composed of knives, needles, razor blades, jagged shards, and smooth scalpels, opening more and spreading to become a kind of metallic person, a jumble of sharp angles and cutting edges, a face like a flower of cutting steel and glass and flint, like a fan of knives.
It then spoke to her with a voice composed of tuned metals, a voice that sounded like ripping rippled foil, like iron nails dragged across a shattered mirror, like shattering obsidian, like a bundle of needles disturbed to friction.
“Sheila, dear,” his voice insinuated the room. And the creature there trembled with light gathered and magnified and reflected, a blinding aura of potential, and the potential of a blade in repose. “So sad.”
“Yes,” she replied. “Oh, yes. So sad.”
He shimmered as he moved and the shivering sounds of sharp edges run across each other accompanied the sight. He was disorienting and beautiful and very, very frightening. Sheila wanted to cry but was afraid to do so.
“Afraid?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
“Sad and afraid,” he pondered. “This is no way to live.”
“I know,” Sheila answered. “It isn’t. I don’t want to. I don’t know how.”
“You wish for something,” he continued. “You wish for more.”
“Yes,” she affirmed. “More. Much much more.”
“And here you sit with me.”
“Yes.”
“Then we shall sit together for awhile,” with his voice brittle and sharp and comforting in a clean sort of way.
‘How strange,’ she thought that there at the pinnacle of her isolation and upon the cusp of her demise, she would finally find a friend, a confidant, a person (or a sort of a person) who seemed to care for her. ‘How strange. How beautiful. How perfect.’
“How strange. How beautiful. How perfect,” he told her.
His gentlest touch, his lightest contact, and Sheila bled. The sounds of their caresses were the sounds made when skin parts whisper-soft under surgeons’ knives. Still, her longing grew within the glow of candlelight and flavored wine, the flickering reflections that her razor-man shed, and she grew both bold and slightly anesthetized. She flirted with her razor-man.
Sheila reached to touch his face and she did touch his face and then she put her bleeding forefinger into her mouth to taste the blood he had brought forth from inside her.
“Does this hurt you?” he asked as his lingering touch drew a line of deep iron red from her skin, a crimson line of contour from below her ear traveling down her neck and across the tops of her breasts. The line gaped, a fault line filled with blood.
“No,” she answered him. “Never. It will never hurt me to be touched.”
And she kept telling him “no” even when the real answer was emphatically “yes” until she could no longer speak at all but could only open more and more under his embrace, until his kisses skinned her face and her eyes rolled white, her teeth gleamed white all the way back to her molars against the shocking red shine of her naked muscles and bone. Sheila’s meat quivered in the open air.
“You are becoming beautiful,” he told her as he stripped away the lie of her and revealed the true of her. Free of flesh and yellow fat, her mouth fell open like a flower all long tooth, white bone, and sheets of red muscle along her jaw. “So beautiful.”
The cold, wet air on her now-exposed nerves sent Sheila’s senses reeling, the sheer weight of pain overwhelming her capacity for rational thought. She became her own reactions and there, teetering along borders she had only dimly imagined, Sheila lost her sanity in a blinding rush of agony and new-found love.
Her razor-lover gently turned back the layers surrounding her throat, peeled open her skin and fascia and muscle down to the very cartilage and he opened that, too; the rush of cool air through Sheila’s new orifice slobbered her devotion and its concomitant ecstasy.
Beige and gray no longer, Sheila blossomed crimson, scarlet, deep burgundy red under his attentions and each caress exposed something new and secret and long hidden away from view.
It was all revelation.
Each uncovering brought new jolting wonder, agony, and awareness. Unobscured by eyebrow or eyelid, her vision sharpened; she saw cleanly and she saw clearly, and she watched with naked eyeballs as what had once been inside her spilled outside and spread uncoiling across the floor in a multicolored slick of organ meat and membrane.
“Beautiful,” she marveled at her own concealed colors, awed and humbled that she’d carried them so long and unaware. Sheila thrilled as the blades that were his hands and fingers cupped her breasts and whispered them to ribbons, hanging shreds of golden fat and meat. The white-hot stab of billowing pain carried her nearly outside herself as her flesh shredded with his caress, hot floods of her brilliantly oxygenated blood laving them both.
Sheila reached to stroke his cheeks, to return his loving touch, and watched the skin and meat of her fingertips fall away in translucent slices against the angled edges of his features and each slice brought the nerves in her hands closer to her surface, each nerve singing electric fire into her overloaded brain.
She couldn’t tell if the wetness between her legs was purely sex or just what was left of her sex, her genitals in tatters, fragments, and still pumping pure, white-hot sensation to the glowing nucleus of her cerebral cortex. The feeble orgasms that used to reward her clumsy, lonely masturbation were burned to cinders by the heat of what was exploding inside her newly skinned skull. All other joy and sorrow, all other emotion and feeling withered away under the awful raw burning that swept Sheila toward willing destruction. Helpless in her razor-lover’s embrace, she arched and arced and convulsed herself enough to fling her colors against the wall, great swathes of red and yellow and lines of blue across the rotten plaster and shining brighter than any paint or pigment.
And as what Sheila was becoming rose above her flayed self and as what Sheila had once been fell heaped beneath, she found herself, for the moment, alone and bleeding in her bathroom. Her razor-man fled in sudden collapse upon himself and back down to the small and dangerous blade held in her hand, and Sheila could take a breath to contemplate her new and profound state of nudity, her slavery to pure sensation. This she did and she saw that she was a red woman, a blindingly white woman, and fully opened in a room awash with color until she was quite nothing at all.
12 March 2009
Cleaning Up
Late Summer/Early Fall 1989
Miami, Florida
I've already unloaded the truck and I've got all the equipment and supplies prepared, but first I take a look at the job. I won't have to worry about the carpet; they usually just tear it up and throw it away, but the walls and the bathroom floor and the tile and the grouting will have to be soaked and scrubbed and soaked and scrubbed again and again.
I remember reading about this one in the paper a couple of months ago; I saw the live-cam report when they pulled her body out of the apartment in a black bag strapped to one of those ambulance trolley-beds. For a murder like this, the cops usually keep the place completely sealed off for at least a month, often more, and when it's finally released to the owner, the owner calls Tate or someone like Tate and Tate calls me or someone like me to clean the place up so someone like who used to live here can come and live here again. I guess it's one of those "somebody's-got-to-do-it" kind of jobs and I guess I mind cleaning up blood and brains more than I thought I would but a lot less, I guess, than I ought to.
They'd been drinking, I could see that from the garbage still scattered through the kitchen and the bedroom--brown bottles that once held beer, now long evaporated, and one of those giant plastic jugs of cheap vodka the DrugMart liquor department always has on sale. The blood starts there, in the kitchen, as a few spatters on the wall near the table, like she'd been slapped or punched while sitting down and then a small, streaked pool in the sink like she'd leaned over with her hand to her mouth or her cheek or the side of her head as she moaned and tried to daub the wound and a few smears along the short hallway where someone had dragged a hand like maybe she was stumbling or not wanting to be dragged toward the small bedroom.
Of course, the landlord will repaint the walls so all I really have to do is make sure he doesn't have to use two coats. That's means bleach from a spray bottle and a good scrub down to the dry-wall with scouring pads, maybe some more bleach, and a quick once-over with sandpaper to even out the texture.
I wear latex gloves, of course, and knee pads and sometimes I have to wear a mask because of the smells that may have accumulated especially in the summer like in this apartment, like old meat and pennies, like something sweet hovering inside a mouth full of the worst breath you could imagine in the morning only worse and stale air built up since all the windows and doors have been sealed for weeks and weeks and weeks.
In the bedroom, I just push the bedclothes into black plastic bags without even looking because I will leave them by the front door for the cops or the landlord to take or throw away. I don't care. Sheets and blankets and pillow cases and one of those comforters they sell for twenty dollars or so at the local discount chain store--blue and green stripes in a synthetic fabric overlaid with a chaotic mass of black, red, rust colored blood. They used to all match. I might use the steam gun on the wall above the headboard to make it all soft and scrubbable. Why break my back?
I will definitely use the steam in the bathroom since it's mostly tile and porcelain and can take the heat. The sink where someone tried to clean himself up, clean her blood from his hands and forearms, will get blasted and the towels, the same sad blue and green, go into more black bags like the bag the former tenant went into and I'll have to really get out the tools to scrub the tiles and especially the grouting around them under the sink and around the toilet. It will take some hours, here, and Tate will swing by around lunch time to see if I want to eat, which I won't, and if I get done before six o'clock he'll want to know if I want to go with him to take a look at another job, which I won't but I will, and maybe it will be somebody's flood-damaged basement or somebody's tenant-damaged trailer home or somebody's child-damaged formal dining room or maybe it will just be somebody's damage, which I hope it isn't, and we'll talk a little about the best way to clean it all up.
Miami, Florida
I've already unloaded the truck and I've got all the equipment and supplies prepared, but first I take a look at the job. I won't have to worry about the carpet; they usually just tear it up and throw it away, but the walls and the bathroom floor and the tile and the grouting will have to be soaked and scrubbed and soaked and scrubbed again and again.
I remember reading about this one in the paper a couple of months ago; I saw the live-cam report when they pulled her body out of the apartment in a black bag strapped to one of those ambulance trolley-beds. For a murder like this, the cops usually keep the place completely sealed off for at least a month, often more, and when it's finally released to the owner, the owner calls Tate or someone like Tate and Tate calls me or someone like me to clean the place up so someone like who used to live here can come and live here again. I guess it's one of those "somebody's-got-to-do-it" kind of jobs and I guess I mind cleaning up blood and brains more than I thought I would but a lot less, I guess, than I ought to.
They'd been drinking, I could see that from the garbage still scattered through the kitchen and the bedroom--brown bottles that once held beer, now long evaporated, and one of those giant plastic jugs of cheap vodka the DrugMart liquor department always has on sale. The blood starts there, in the kitchen, as a few spatters on the wall near the table, like she'd been slapped or punched while sitting down and then a small, streaked pool in the sink like she'd leaned over with her hand to her mouth or her cheek or the side of her head as she moaned and tried to daub the wound and a few smears along the short hallway where someone had dragged a hand like maybe she was stumbling or not wanting to be dragged toward the small bedroom.
Of course, the landlord will repaint the walls so all I really have to do is make sure he doesn't have to use two coats. That's means bleach from a spray bottle and a good scrub down to the dry-wall with scouring pads, maybe some more bleach, and a quick once-over with sandpaper to even out the texture.
I wear latex gloves, of course, and knee pads and sometimes I have to wear a mask because of the smells that may have accumulated especially in the summer like in this apartment, like old meat and pennies, like something sweet hovering inside a mouth full of the worst breath you could imagine in the morning only worse and stale air built up since all the windows and doors have been sealed for weeks and weeks and weeks.
In the bedroom, I just push the bedclothes into black plastic bags without even looking because I will leave them by the front door for the cops or the landlord to take or throw away. I don't care. Sheets and blankets and pillow cases and one of those comforters they sell for twenty dollars or so at the local discount chain store--blue and green stripes in a synthetic fabric overlaid with a chaotic mass of black, red, rust colored blood. They used to all match. I might use the steam gun on the wall above the headboard to make it all soft and scrubbable. Why break my back?
I will definitely use the steam in the bathroom since it's mostly tile and porcelain and can take the heat. The sink where someone tried to clean himself up, clean her blood from his hands and forearms, will get blasted and the towels, the same sad blue and green, go into more black bags like the bag the former tenant went into and I'll have to really get out the tools to scrub the tiles and especially the grouting around them under the sink and around the toilet. It will take some hours, here, and Tate will swing by around lunch time to see if I want to eat, which I won't, and if I get done before six o'clock he'll want to know if I want to go with him to take a look at another job, which I won't but I will, and maybe it will be somebody's flood-damaged basement or somebody's tenant-damaged trailer home or somebody's child-damaged formal dining room or maybe it will just be somebody's damage, which I hope it isn't, and we'll talk a little about the best way to clean it all up.
Another Reason, An Important Reason
It was just after the solstice and the day stayed full sunlit until well into the evening and she rose from where she had been reclined, rose from the magazine through which she had been reading and she stood barefoot on the pale wood planks of the floor and the light behind her from the window outlined her golden and she said, "Do you want to see me naked?" as she began to unbutton her jeans.
He turned to where she stood between his eye and the sun low toward the western horizon and the spark of her in the room and what she'd said and what she was doing caused him to make his mouth make a small and significant smile and yes, he did so very much want to see her naked there in that light washed room and glowing.
And she was.
He turned to where she stood between his eye and the sun low toward the western horizon and the spark of her in the room and what she'd said and what she was doing caused him to make his mouth make a small and significant smile and yes, he did so very much want to see her naked there in that light washed room and glowing.
And she was.
11 March 2009
Black Lacquer Heart Drastically Reduced
Chinese New Year, Sanya, Hainan Island, People’s Republic of China, 1986
Elegant and dramatic in a timeless discount warehouse way,
not only does this surface protect and seal the composite material beneath,
it is easy to clean with a damp cloth.
It is seamless.
It's the odor of sweat and coconut oil and the musk that pours off both our bodies
as we're fucking in the strong South China sun on the balcony of our hotel room.
It's a head full Chinese vodka and the aftertaste of beer--yeast and hops and something else—and the aftertaste of vagina, musk and low orchids. It's almost summer.
"Fists of Wushu Whirling Around in the Air Really Fast" is on the downstairs television
and fists of wushu are making that shrill snapping-fabric noise which may or may not be a special effect.
It's the same images over and over again, the same odors and the same sounds;
damp grass, diesel, lonely roads, a high wall with broken glass embedded on top.
It is rotten chlorophyll and meat, the air warm, perhaps chemical, perhaps not.
There are crickets and dogs barking,
there are lights in the distance,
house lights and streetlights and headlights,
but it is always dark.
As we walked along chatting, we drew near a beggar.
"Spare a yuan?" the ragged guy raggedly croaked.
Without saying anything, Sara reached into her coat pocket and
Pulled out one of our miniature bottles of vodka.
"There you go," she said as she held it out to the beggar.
"Thanks," the guy said. "You’re okay for dead demon foreign ghosts."
What if A-bombs are really some kind of time machine and all the people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki who got "vaporized" were actually kicked out and away and somewhere else and they exist there still in that moment when the bombs exploded?
Once, back in America, when I was walking along thinking about something else completely, a bum asked me, “Spare change?” and I said “No, thanks.” I thought he was trying to give me some of his.
And still I return to those memories of rotten fish, of my friends and their flesh,
of burning grease an aphrodisiac in the air heavy and thick around us,
why we put those flavors in our mouths,
upon what that oil were smeared
for us to savor and taste and
return to again and again in our heads.
Elegant and dramatic in a timeless discount warehouse way,
not only does this surface protect and seal the composite material beneath,
it is easy to clean with a damp cloth.
It is seamless.
It's the odor of sweat and coconut oil and the musk that pours off both our bodies
as we're fucking in the strong South China sun on the balcony of our hotel room.
It's a head full Chinese vodka and the aftertaste of beer--yeast and hops and something else—and the aftertaste of vagina, musk and low orchids. It's almost summer.
"Fists of Wushu Whirling Around in the Air Really Fast" is on the downstairs television
and fists of wushu are making that shrill snapping-fabric noise which may or may not be a special effect.
It's the same images over and over again, the same odors and the same sounds;
damp grass, diesel, lonely roads, a high wall with broken glass embedded on top.
It is rotten chlorophyll and meat, the air warm, perhaps chemical, perhaps not.
There are crickets and dogs barking,
there are lights in the distance,
house lights and streetlights and headlights,
but it is always dark.
As we walked along chatting, we drew near a beggar.
"Spare a yuan?" the ragged guy raggedly croaked.
Without saying anything, Sara reached into her coat pocket and
Pulled out one of our miniature bottles of vodka.
"There you go," she said as she held it out to the beggar.
"Thanks," the guy said. "You’re okay for dead demon foreign ghosts."
What if A-bombs are really some kind of time machine and all the people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki who got "vaporized" were actually kicked out and away and somewhere else and they exist there still in that moment when the bombs exploded?
Once, back in America, when I was walking along thinking about something else completely, a bum asked me, “Spare change?” and I said “No, thanks.” I thought he was trying to give me some of his.
And still I return to those memories of rotten fish, of my friends and their flesh,
of burning grease an aphrodisiac in the air heavy and thick around us,
why we put those flavors in our mouths,
upon what that oil were smeared
for us to savor and taste and
return to again and again in our heads.
10 March 2009
Making Green
He is careful. He uncoils the hose so there are no knots or kinks that could lead to disaster; he threads the brass connectors carefully, mindful of their grooves and how easily they might be stripped. He loops one section around his forearm, stoops to turn the faucet there emerging from the house, and water flows. It is a perfect thing. His thumb covers the outlet in such a way that the spray is diffused, is distributed into an even fan of moisture, just the right amount to cover without beating the flowers and bushes with which he begins his watering.
This is perfection, he thinks. He moves his arms in gentle patterns to cover everything growing against the side of the house. All the lilac, the last of the tulip, the rose, the forsythia, and the lobelia hidden all receive their droplets in measured doses. Each is satisfied and none denied. This is perfection, he thinks.
A light goes on in a window near where his plants are. The new illumination confirms his efforts. The greenery is practically stretching to gather his gift, the blessing moisture, into its tendrils, petals, fronds, leaves, roots. Earthworms themselves rise to the softening surface to gasp and to gather. The light goes off and he turns his back to the satiated.
"I'll be back," he whispers. "Be patient. Just wait."
And then the lawn, an expanse of green (he knows it is green though no moon shines against, no light reflects from its manicured blades) waits expectant and trembling in anticipation.
"Hello," he says. "Are you thirsty?"
His thumb moves the precise fraction to change the flow, to allow the arcs of water distance and coverage. His arm swings faster, more forcefully, and more potent to cover the eager.
"This is for you," he tells it. "This is all for you."
Another light goes on, a door opens, and a thin voice calls from the doorway. "Dad? Dad?"
He snaps a coil of hose behind him, takes up all the slack, and moves to another thirsty section. He avoids wasting water on asphalt or concrete.
"Dad?" the voice enjoins. "Dad, are you coming in?"
Behind the voice there are noises of ice in glasses and he knows that until that ice is melted, there will be no water there.
"Dad? What are you doing?"
He trails the long, green hose with its reptile-patterned skin behind him as he stalks the lawn and he can imagine the rising sun and the way rainbows will spark from the smooth sheets of clear water that erupt from his hands.
Originally published in Blue Mesa Review 4
Albuquerque, New Mexico 1992
http://www.unm.edu/~bluemesa/
This is perfection, he thinks. He moves his arms in gentle patterns to cover everything growing against the side of the house. All the lilac, the last of the tulip, the rose, the forsythia, and the lobelia hidden all receive their droplets in measured doses. Each is satisfied and none denied. This is perfection, he thinks.
A light goes on in a window near where his plants are. The new illumination confirms his efforts. The greenery is practically stretching to gather his gift, the blessing moisture, into its tendrils, petals, fronds, leaves, roots. Earthworms themselves rise to the softening surface to gasp and to gather. The light goes off and he turns his back to the satiated.
"I'll be back," he whispers. "Be patient. Just wait."
And then the lawn, an expanse of green (he knows it is green though no moon shines against, no light reflects from its manicured blades) waits expectant and trembling in anticipation.
"Hello," he says. "Are you thirsty?"
His thumb moves the precise fraction to change the flow, to allow the arcs of water distance and coverage. His arm swings faster, more forcefully, and more potent to cover the eager.
"This is for you," he tells it. "This is all for you."
Another light goes on, a door opens, and a thin voice calls from the doorway. "Dad? Dad?"
He snaps a coil of hose behind him, takes up all the slack, and moves to another thirsty section. He avoids wasting water on asphalt or concrete.
"Dad?" the voice enjoins. "Dad, are you coming in?"
Behind the voice there are noises of ice in glasses and he knows that until that ice is melted, there will be no water there.
"Dad? What are you doing?"
He trails the long, green hose with its reptile-patterned skin behind him as he stalks the lawn and he can imagine the rising sun and the way rainbows will spark from the smooth sheets of clear water that erupt from his hands.
Originally published in Blue Mesa Review 4
Albuquerque, New Mexico 1992
http://www.unm.edu/~bluemesa/
09 March 2009
Ethics in a Gunfight
Pike Bishop: He gave his word.
Dutch Engstrom: He gave his word to a railroad.
Pike Bishop: It's his word.
Dutch Engstrom: That ain't what counts! It's who you give it to!
The Wild Bunch
Sam Peckinpah
1969
08 March 2009
Garnish Trouble
Uh oh,” I said to myself when I saw the slices of lemon she’d twisted into möbius strips and then placed precisely at eleven and one o'clock on my plate. “This is new.”
I didn't really mention that I’d noticed, though, because I wanted to see how things developed, to watch what direction this issue of pleasing the eye as well as the palette might take, to see if there was an advantage for me hidden there somewhere.
Over the weeks that passed, I found myself eating the shells of ripe tomatoes she’s layered like the petals of roses and filled with deviled chicken; I ate toast cut to resemble the symbols found on playing cards and she put fresh raspberry jam on the hearts and the diamonds and she put black currant preserves on the spades and the clubs.
I would nod in a noncommittal manner at each of these presentations but I would also make low noises that could be taken for warm appreciation. Sometimes I would raise my eyebrows in way that could be interpreted as delighted amusement.
I ate palm trees made from carrot sticks and jalapeño peppers; I ate an entire canned ham sculpted into an entire school of goldfish with kalamata olive bubbles; I also ate the arabesqued watermelon rind that doubled as my salad bowl. I began to make more noises at meal times, noises more obviously associated with approval. I began to say things like “Would you look at that?”
With the swinging door held open, my palm flat against it, I saw her knives spread along the kitchen counter, her back to me as she obliviously bent herself to transform a rib roast into some marvelous, colorful creature.
And parsley. There was parsley everywhere.
I didn't really mention that I’d noticed, though, because I wanted to see how things developed, to watch what direction this issue of pleasing the eye as well as the palette might take, to see if there was an advantage for me hidden there somewhere.
Over the weeks that passed, I found myself eating the shells of ripe tomatoes she’s layered like the petals of roses and filled with deviled chicken; I ate toast cut to resemble the symbols found on playing cards and she put fresh raspberry jam on the hearts and the diamonds and she put black currant preserves on the spades and the clubs.
I would nod in a noncommittal manner at each of these presentations but I would also make low noises that could be taken for warm appreciation. Sometimes I would raise my eyebrows in way that could be interpreted as delighted amusement.
I ate palm trees made from carrot sticks and jalapeño peppers; I ate an entire canned ham sculpted into an entire school of goldfish with kalamata olive bubbles; I also ate the arabesqued watermelon rind that doubled as my salad bowl. I began to make more noises at meal times, noises more obviously associated with approval. I began to say things like “Would you look at that?”
With the swinging door held open, my palm flat against it, I saw her knives spread along the kitchen counter, her back to me as she obliviously bent herself to transform a rib roast into some marvelous, colorful creature.
And parsley. There was parsley everywhere.
07 March 2009
Cut Glass
Cut glass
on a windowsill
starch-stained and empty of all but atmosphere
Plate glass
in a window frame
fossilized raindrop dappled
Eyeglasses
on a floor
spiderweb splintered and shattered
Window glass
across the carpet
tear-washed and bloody
Mirror glass
in a sink
toothpaste spattered and reflecting nothing at all
Broken glass
in her hand
blood smeared and sparkling
Etched class
in a shuttered case
far removed
from every eye
on a windowsill
starch-stained and empty of all but atmosphere
Plate glass
in a window frame
fossilized raindrop dappled
Eyeglasses
on a floor
spiderweb splintered and shattered
Window glass
across the carpet
tear-washed and bloody
Mirror glass
in a sink
toothpaste spattered and reflecting nothing at all
Broken glass
in her hand
blood smeared and sparkling
Etched class
in a shuttered case
far removed
from every eye
06 March 2009
A One Hundred Watt Woman
A contrast here
of rashly darkened sky
when from some other and oblique angle
there is light
rising and again
reflected down among us
where we sprawl damply in the wetted lawn
illuminated
though shadowless
unable to stop this glowing
which penetrates and envelopes in one motion.
Intuition
tells us fear though
reason sees no thing at all or
how we make our own faces into small
reflections
precise, acute
reactions to this washing,
an amber recoil and release into
what had been about to happen in that awful flare.
of rashly darkened sky
when from some other and oblique angle
there is light
rising and again
reflected down among us
where we sprawl damply in the wetted lawn
illuminated
though shadowless
unable to stop this glowing
which penetrates and envelopes in one motion.
Intuition
tells us fear though
reason sees no thing at all or
how we make our own faces into small
reflections
precise, acute
reactions to this washing,
an amber recoil and release into
what had been about to happen in that awful flare.
05 March 2009
Closure
The last time Max Reddison saw his wife, his late and very deceased wife, Olivia, they went at each other like animals and not in that good, Dear-Penthouse-kind of way. In fact, the fight got so bad that the police would surely have come had the Reddison’s any neighbors who might call the police. Just the fire in the backyard would have summoned some kind of official response if there been any officials to respond. Nearly a mile from the nearest neighbor and almost 8 miles from town, any ruckus at the Reddison place was unlikely to be noticed until one or the other of the Reddisons failed to make it in to work for a few days running. Unless they made the effort, the Reddisons could go days without seeing another living soul near their property.
There were no neighbors to rush over investigating screams and the lunatic glare of gasoline-fed flames. There were no nosey cops sticking their nosey noses into other people’s business. They got their mail at a post office box in town like all the other outlying residents did; milk delivery was something on a TV show from the 50s. There still wasn’t cable, either, but they had a dish. The Reddison’s could watch Turkish soap operas, Chinese children’s shows, and Kenyan farm reports, but they didn’t have a local channel to catch tomorrow’s weather report. Once a week, a newspaper appeared in their PO box whether they paid for it or not and they always paid anyway.
Max would always regret that fight but was grateful for the solitude. Still, considering his wife and considering the fact that she was 13 days dead on the night of their last fight and considering that the fight in question was more like Max’s frantic struggle to stay alive while simultaneously trying to come to emotional terms regarding the undead behavior Olivia displayed nearly two weeks after her funeral and just when he’d started thinking about going back to work.
Max’s regret was more than understandable. As it was, there was no one but startled crows there to witness the recent lunatic Max dancing blood-smeared in that fire’s light or to see what he held in his hands and for that Max would be always grateful. Crows might talk, but they weren’t snitches. As awful as that sounds, it was the only thing his shattered brain could think toward the end of the evening’s commotion: how to hide what happened and never think of it again.
What appears to be the end of a story is often the beginning of another and even as the blood-covered Max danced the bloody sun up from the eastern forest’s horizon, up into the sky for some clean white cleansing light, he knew that this story was never going to end and he’d seen where it was leading, which was Hell, and he wasn’t happy about it at all. It was a bleak future.
The ending of every story is the beginning of another and another and another; a cocktail party is a bad place to start a story. The chatter of voices, the mix of people makes it hard to determine voice, point-of-view, plot, or protagonist. Trying to unwind the thread of a narrative from the ebb and flow of a party’s ice-rattled chatter is confusing; the branches and eddies of overlapping topics and relationships can be overwhelming. Suffice to say that one story was already ending as Olivia and Max stood at the doorway waiting to enter their friends’ home and that another began as they crossed the threshold.
Alcohol did things to them and, even drunk, Max knew Olivia shouldn’t be drinking in her condition. It just wasn’t done.
“Hey, you fat slut,” he reminded her. “You wanna have a retard baby or somthin’?”
“Fuck you, Mr. Einstein,” she replied.
Their friends began to move away, to cough, and to look around a little white-eyed for their coats and keys. It looked like it was going to another of those Reddison kind of nights.
“The fucking whore thinks shots of Ketel One are fucking prenatal care,” Max continued. And continued. “Jose Cuervo’s her pediatrician. Dr. Daniels…paging Dr. Jack Daniels. You’re wanted in the maternity cocktail lounge...Merlot if it’s a boy; Chablis if it’s a girl...I’m not even sure if the kid is mine. She’s been spending a lot of time with Evan Williams and Jim Beam.”
There were many such comments. A response was almost mandatory.
“Unlike your dirty dick, at least liquor is antiseptic, you filthy shit,” she rejoined and, everyone had to admit, she had him there. Max had let himself go.
“Fucking fuck fuck fucker fuck,” Max exclaimed.
“Oh, shut up,” Olivia told him and he did.
The accident was almost inevitable; that Olivia and the surely severely brain-and-body-damaged fetus would die was almost a relief to anyone with an eye to how such stories unfold and knew what to expect as Max and Olivia grew old and a child grew up.
That Max survived unharmed and was awaiting trial on charges of driving while grossly impaired, two counts of vehicular homicide enhanced by his intoxicated state, and a host of smaller, add-on charges to express the district attorney’s and the people’s indignation was almost obligatory. His tortured and preferably both protracted and brutal death in prison was the popular demand that would surely be satisfied. One way or the other, everyone wanted Max dead on just principle alone. Still, he was released on bail because, really, where was the filthy shit going to go?
“Fuck it,” Max found himself saying almost continuously. “Just fuck it and fuck them.”
That Einstein crack Olivia’d made still smarted and he found himself trying out rejoinders he’d no longer ever have the opportunity to use.
“How about instead of E=MC2, I say E=URA fat pig,” he would think.
Or, “It’s all relative, you fucking drunken slut.”
Or he would imagine himself smashing Olivia’s jaw with a heavy tumbler of Stoli neat, saying, “Atoms for peace, bitch.” Something witty like that to really shut her up.
So, it was with mixed feelings that Max attended the funeral. Awaiting the start of his speedy trial, Max stood far in the rear of the crowd gathered while the festival of grief for mother and child unfolded graveside. Listening to their eulogies, he was amazed to learn that Olivia was looking forward to being a mother and had decided to turn her life around, was going back to college, was getting her shit together finally. Incredible. He’d had no idea.
The hostile glances from the mouth-breathing members of Olivia’s family made him decide to skip the reception after the graveside services. No one was going to speak to him anyway and he was likely to be beaten up just on principle alone.
Max spent the next 13 days listening to the telephone’s squawk or the doorbell’s occasional clang and drinking from the vast storehouse of liquor in which Olivia and he had invested. Max planned to take negative steps or “steps,” and he wanted to work through the AA process in reverse until he was completely despised, reviled, and hated by every person on the planet and God in Heaven Himself if not even Christ, His really forgiving Son, more so than he already was, if such a thing was possible and Max wanted to find out. He wanted the outside fury to match the inner self-loathing that kept him going.
Despite the local weekly’s righteous editorial, despite the obscenely violent phone calls stacked up on the answering machine, despite the hate mail forming drifts in the unopened and uncalled-upon post office box, despite the fact that no merchant in town would sell him anything making even the simplest purchase of anything impossible without driving even more miles in the opposite direction of town and therefore not worth the effort, despite all that and more, Max still felt the world wasn’t hating him quite enough. Perhaps if he shat himself in court, appeared hung-over and unrepentant, he could provoke the proper loathing.
He thought about his unborn child a lot and, even when rational thought was beyond his impaired abilities, had taken to calling it the Tadpole in his head. He’s say things aloud, things like, “Poor little fucking Tadpole.” Or, “Wanna go fishing, you fucking little Tadpole?” Or “That’s no way to hold a fucking knife, you fucking little sweet baby Tadpole,” like he was practicing to be a dad or something.
The night of the day after Max opened up the third case of vodka, after drinking at least a solid quart of the former Soviet Union’s finest distilled spirit every single day plus ingesting additional other liquors and fermented beverages for almost two weeks, he was primed for the absolute worst night of his life since the night of the accident, a night which was, in its own special way, worse than the accident itself. He was pickled, stewed, trashed, thrashed; he was a stumbling, shaking, shivering, dry-heaving drunk, and he’d soaked both pants and sofa with urine. He loved every hateful minute of it. And he hated himself even more fiercely for that affection.
There was nothing that was ever going to help him not feel horrible for the rest of his life, so Max decided to get it the fuck over with. He had decided, in his alcoholic stupor, to plead guilty to every charge, to confess to things they didn’t even know about, to declare himself a very bad man. He had no intention of defending himself against any charge; he would just play for time until the public fever for his blood reached its crescendo. Max had no intention of serving another minute in incarceration; the two nights he’d spent in county jail before he’d raised bail had convinced him that state prison was out of the question. He would die first and with meaning rather than as rat-meat at the end of some convict’s shank or cock.
Drinking himself to death was not possible in so short a time, though it was helping. Max knew his own character well enough to know that, after a certain amount of heavy, heavy drinking, he would probably be able to blow his brains out. And tonight, lucky 13, 18 days from the accident, one day less than two weeks from the funeral, and one day short of tomorrow’s hearing, Max was going to chug-a-lug a whole bunch of clear, antiseptic booze and put a pistol in his mouth. Didn’t work out that way, though.
When he first heard the scratching, Max figured it was another one of his former so-called friends coming over to kick his ass. Only his former so-called friends tended to drift away after ten or twenty minutes of knocking, hooting, peeking through windows, and breaking shit outside. The scratching sound, however, did not go away. Ten, twenty, thirty, and finally forty-five minutes of steady scratching finally pulled Max up from the sofa, sticky with piss, and into a duck-walking and stumbling, slit-eyed search for the source of the sound.
His front door and windows were silent and showed no signs of visitor. All the front rooms were silent. Toward the back of the house, the sound grew louder and Max finally located the source of the scratching sound at the kitchen’s back door and, drunk as he was, he just opened up the door and flipped on the light. Let them come, whoever it was.
“Ma’sh,” it said through sewn and waxed lips. “Oh, Ma’sh. Ahm shorry. Ahm sho, sho shorry.”
“Ack,” Max replied, drunkenly backpedaling and flapping his hands to end up falling backwares on his ass. “Ack, ack, ack.”
Olivia or, rather, Olivia’s corpse stepped into the kitchen. In the light, he could see what she was holding, how it squirmed, how it reached for him.
“We can be fam’ly, Ma’sh,” the late wife continued. “We can be fam’ly forever and ever and ever.”
That’s when Max reached for the knives, for the chairs, for the pots, for the pans, for anything he could lay his hands on. Even drunk terrified, vomiting, and pissing himself again, he could still beat up, cut up, and burn up a corpse. The fucking bitch. And the poor fucking little Tadpole, too.
So, Max showered, shaved, brushed his teeth, used a half-bottle each of mouthwash, eye drops, and liquid cold medicine. He stepped out of his home and he waited, the smell of barbeque still hanging in the early morning stillness. Max’s lawyer was coming to pick him up and they would drive silently into town for the first of what was going to be a lot of painful and protracted court procedings. Max had decided to stick it out, to change his plea to “not guilty,” to roll the dice with a jury trial. He could afford it if he sold the house and all the land, cars, furniture, and fixtures. Even if he lost, Max figured prison couldn’t be any worse than the Hell he’d learned was awaiting him. He just didn’t want to die anymore. Not ever. Max would not go gently into that cold grave.
Max lost his case and it turns out he couldn’t have been more wrong about prison. But that is a completely different story.
Originally published in Black Petals, Wichita, Kansas [#35, Spring 2006]: http://www.blackpetals.net/
There were no neighbors to rush over investigating screams and the lunatic glare of gasoline-fed flames. There were no nosey cops sticking their nosey noses into other people’s business. They got their mail at a post office box in town like all the other outlying residents did; milk delivery was something on a TV show from the 50s. There still wasn’t cable, either, but they had a dish. The Reddison’s could watch Turkish soap operas, Chinese children’s shows, and Kenyan farm reports, but they didn’t have a local channel to catch tomorrow’s weather report. Once a week, a newspaper appeared in their PO box whether they paid for it or not and they always paid anyway.
Max would always regret that fight but was grateful for the solitude. Still, considering his wife and considering the fact that she was 13 days dead on the night of their last fight and considering that the fight in question was more like Max’s frantic struggle to stay alive while simultaneously trying to come to emotional terms regarding the undead behavior Olivia displayed nearly two weeks after her funeral and just when he’d started thinking about going back to work.
Max’s regret was more than understandable. As it was, there was no one but startled crows there to witness the recent lunatic Max dancing blood-smeared in that fire’s light or to see what he held in his hands and for that Max would be always grateful. Crows might talk, but they weren’t snitches. As awful as that sounds, it was the only thing his shattered brain could think toward the end of the evening’s commotion: how to hide what happened and never think of it again.
***
What appears to be the end of a story is often the beginning of another and even as the blood-covered Max danced the bloody sun up from the eastern forest’s horizon, up into the sky for some clean white cleansing light, he knew that this story was never going to end and he’d seen where it was leading, which was Hell, and he wasn’t happy about it at all. It was a bleak future.
The ending of every story is the beginning of another and another and another; a cocktail party is a bad place to start a story. The chatter of voices, the mix of people makes it hard to determine voice, point-of-view, plot, or protagonist. Trying to unwind the thread of a narrative from the ebb and flow of a party’s ice-rattled chatter is confusing; the branches and eddies of overlapping topics and relationships can be overwhelming. Suffice to say that one story was already ending as Olivia and Max stood at the doorway waiting to enter their friends’ home and that another began as they crossed the threshold.
Alcohol did things to them and, even drunk, Max knew Olivia shouldn’t be drinking in her condition. It just wasn’t done.
“Hey, you fat slut,” he reminded her. “You wanna have a retard baby or somthin’?”
“Fuck you, Mr. Einstein,” she replied.
Their friends began to move away, to cough, and to look around a little white-eyed for their coats and keys. It looked like it was going to another of those Reddison kind of nights.
“The fucking whore thinks shots of Ketel One are fucking prenatal care,” Max continued. And continued. “Jose Cuervo’s her pediatrician. Dr. Daniels…paging Dr. Jack Daniels. You’re wanted in the maternity cocktail lounge...Merlot if it’s a boy; Chablis if it’s a girl...I’m not even sure if the kid is mine. She’s been spending a lot of time with Evan Williams and Jim Beam.”
There were many such comments. A response was almost mandatory.
“Unlike your dirty dick, at least liquor is antiseptic, you filthy shit,” she rejoined and, everyone had to admit, she had him there. Max had let himself go.
“Fucking fuck fuck fucker fuck,” Max exclaimed.
“Oh, shut up,” Olivia told him and he did.
***
The accident was almost inevitable; that Olivia and the surely severely brain-and-body-damaged fetus would die was almost a relief to anyone with an eye to how such stories unfold and knew what to expect as Max and Olivia grew old and a child grew up.
That Max survived unharmed and was awaiting trial on charges of driving while grossly impaired, two counts of vehicular homicide enhanced by his intoxicated state, and a host of smaller, add-on charges to express the district attorney’s and the people’s indignation was almost obligatory. His tortured and preferably both protracted and brutal death in prison was the popular demand that would surely be satisfied. One way or the other, everyone wanted Max dead on just principle alone. Still, he was released on bail because, really, where was the filthy shit going to go?
“Fuck it,” Max found himself saying almost continuously. “Just fuck it and fuck them.”
That Einstein crack Olivia’d made still smarted and he found himself trying out rejoinders he’d no longer ever have the opportunity to use.
“How about instead of E=MC2, I say E=URA fat pig,” he would think.
Or, “It’s all relative, you fucking drunken slut.”
Or he would imagine himself smashing Olivia’s jaw with a heavy tumbler of Stoli neat, saying, “Atoms for peace, bitch.” Something witty like that to really shut her up.
So, it was with mixed feelings that Max attended the funeral. Awaiting the start of his speedy trial, Max stood far in the rear of the crowd gathered while the festival of grief for mother and child unfolded graveside. Listening to their eulogies, he was amazed to learn that Olivia was looking forward to being a mother and had decided to turn her life around, was going back to college, was getting her shit together finally. Incredible. He’d had no idea.
The hostile glances from the mouth-breathing members of Olivia’s family made him decide to skip the reception after the graveside services. No one was going to speak to him anyway and he was likely to be beaten up just on principle alone.
Max spent the next 13 days listening to the telephone’s squawk or the doorbell’s occasional clang and drinking from the vast storehouse of liquor in which Olivia and he had invested. Max planned to take negative steps or “steps,” and he wanted to work through the AA process in reverse until he was completely despised, reviled, and hated by every person on the planet and God in Heaven Himself if not even Christ, His really forgiving Son, more so than he already was, if such a thing was possible and Max wanted to find out. He wanted the outside fury to match the inner self-loathing that kept him going.
Despite the local weekly’s righteous editorial, despite the obscenely violent phone calls stacked up on the answering machine, despite the hate mail forming drifts in the unopened and uncalled-upon post office box, despite the fact that no merchant in town would sell him anything making even the simplest purchase of anything impossible without driving even more miles in the opposite direction of town and therefore not worth the effort, despite all that and more, Max still felt the world wasn’t hating him quite enough. Perhaps if he shat himself in court, appeared hung-over and unrepentant, he could provoke the proper loathing.
He thought about his unborn child a lot and, even when rational thought was beyond his impaired abilities, had taken to calling it the Tadpole in his head. He’s say things aloud, things like, “Poor little fucking Tadpole.” Or, “Wanna go fishing, you fucking little Tadpole?” Or “That’s no way to hold a fucking knife, you fucking little sweet baby Tadpole,” like he was practicing to be a dad or something.
The night of the day after Max opened up the third case of vodka, after drinking at least a solid quart of the former Soviet Union’s finest distilled spirit every single day plus ingesting additional other liquors and fermented beverages for almost two weeks, he was primed for the absolute worst night of his life since the night of the accident, a night which was, in its own special way, worse than the accident itself. He was pickled, stewed, trashed, thrashed; he was a stumbling, shaking, shivering, dry-heaving drunk, and he’d soaked both pants and sofa with urine. He loved every hateful minute of it. And he hated himself even more fiercely for that affection.
There was nothing that was ever going to help him not feel horrible for the rest of his life, so Max decided to get it the fuck over with. He had decided, in his alcoholic stupor, to plead guilty to every charge, to confess to things they didn’t even know about, to declare himself a very bad man. He had no intention of defending himself against any charge; he would just play for time until the public fever for his blood reached its crescendo. Max had no intention of serving another minute in incarceration; the two nights he’d spent in county jail before he’d raised bail had convinced him that state prison was out of the question. He would die first and with meaning rather than as rat-meat at the end of some convict’s shank or cock.
Drinking himself to death was not possible in so short a time, though it was helping. Max knew his own character well enough to know that, after a certain amount of heavy, heavy drinking, he would probably be able to blow his brains out. And tonight, lucky 13, 18 days from the accident, one day less than two weeks from the funeral, and one day short of tomorrow’s hearing, Max was going to chug-a-lug a whole bunch of clear, antiseptic booze and put a pistol in his mouth. Didn’t work out that way, though.
When he first heard the scratching, Max figured it was another one of his former so-called friends coming over to kick his ass. Only his former so-called friends tended to drift away after ten or twenty minutes of knocking, hooting, peeking through windows, and breaking shit outside. The scratching sound, however, did not go away. Ten, twenty, thirty, and finally forty-five minutes of steady scratching finally pulled Max up from the sofa, sticky with piss, and into a duck-walking and stumbling, slit-eyed search for the source of the sound.
His front door and windows were silent and showed no signs of visitor. All the front rooms were silent. Toward the back of the house, the sound grew louder and Max finally located the source of the scratching sound at the kitchen’s back door and, drunk as he was, he just opened up the door and flipped on the light. Let them come, whoever it was.
“Ma’sh,” it said through sewn and waxed lips. “Oh, Ma’sh. Ahm shorry. Ahm sho, sho shorry.”
“Ack,” Max replied, drunkenly backpedaling and flapping his hands to end up falling backwares on his ass. “Ack, ack, ack.”
Olivia or, rather, Olivia’s corpse stepped into the kitchen. In the light, he could see what she was holding, how it squirmed, how it reached for him.
“We can be fam’ly, Ma’sh,” the late wife continued. “We can be fam’ly forever and ever and ever.”
That’s when Max reached for the knives, for the chairs, for the pots, for the pans, for anything he could lay his hands on. Even drunk terrified, vomiting, and pissing himself again, he could still beat up, cut up, and burn up a corpse. The fucking bitch. And the poor fucking little Tadpole, too.
***
So, Max showered, shaved, brushed his teeth, used a half-bottle each of mouthwash, eye drops, and liquid cold medicine. He stepped out of his home and he waited, the smell of barbeque still hanging in the early morning stillness. Max’s lawyer was coming to pick him up and they would drive silently into town for the first of what was going to be a lot of painful and protracted court procedings. Max had decided to stick it out, to change his plea to “not guilty,” to roll the dice with a jury trial. He could afford it if he sold the house and all the land, cars, furniture, and fixtures. Even if he lost, Max figured prison couldn’t be any worse than the Hell he’d learned was awaiting him. He just didn’t want to die anymore. Not ever. Max would not go gently into that cold grave.
***
Max lost his case and it turns out he couldn’t have been more wrong about prison. But that is a completely different story.
Originally published in Black Petals, Wichita, Kansas [#35, Spring 2006]: http://www.blackpetals.net/
04 March 2009
The Pros and Cons of Convulsive Dancing
Two young people, American students newly arrived at Shaanxi Normal College, watched one of their Chinese peers navigate a careful path through the looping trajectories of the girl students waltzing together across the floor of what was, on the other 364 nights of the year, the student dining hall. He, the Chinese kid, held a box of candy to his chest until he reached the Americans. Then, safely arrived, he held it out to them.
“It is an angel,” Ruibao said softly and he pointed to the drawing of a beautiful foreign woman with long legs and a cloudy-looking dress.
“What?” Mark looked at the box and where Ruibao’s finger pointed and the picture on the box where he pointed.
The music was loud, a tape of recent Hong Kong pop songs alternating with syrupy, Liberace-style ballroom music and the Chinese kids loved it all and all had been especially screened by the college administration for this first ever, experimental Welcome Back to School Dance. Some electrically minded students had patched an enormous Korean boom box into the school’s ancient, Soviet surplus vacuum-tube amplifier to pump the music through a brace of large, trumpet-shaped speakers.
“It is an angel,” Ruibao repeated just as softly.
“What?” Mark asked again. “I can’t hear what he’s saying.”
“He said, ‘It is an angel,’” Karen supplied.
Ruibao smiled shyly.
“It looks like a ballerina to me.”
“It looks like a dancer, for sure. A human being dancer. Nothing supernatural about it at all.”
“How do you say ‘ballerina’ in Chinese?”
“Fuck if I know. ‘Dancing’ is tiaowu.”
Ruibao frowned. Couples scuffled around the cafeteria, a lot of girls dancing with a lot of other girls and a very few boys dancing with a very few other boys. Ruibao wanted so much to dance with one of these foreigners. It would be such an amazing story to tell everyone back in the dormitory after lights out. It was something he could embellish all semester and take home with him over New Year holidays and tell again and again to the village families.
“Umm…I think it is an angel,” he repeated. Ruibao couldn’t believe a disagreement had arisen, at least so quickly. “It is an angel.”
“No, no, no. Look at it,” Mark insisted and, grabbing the box out of the startled Ruibao’s hands, pointed to the picture on the box or, rather, thumped his big, fat, foreign finger against the picture. “It’s a ballerina, a dancer, see? Tiaowu. See how she’s standing on her toes, see the skirt here, the fancy skirt, the tutu? She’s a dancer. A ball-er-rina. Tiaowu.”
“Err…I think it is an angel for sure,” Ruibao repeated and his smile was enormous. Maybe the foreigner was asking him to dance. Ruibao had wanted to lead, but he’d take anything at this stage in their relationship.
“Drop it, man,” Karen said. “If he says it’s an angel, it’s an angel.”
“Whatever. It’s pretty much a non-issue. Angel or ballerina? Ballerina or angel? Maybe she’s a Russian hooker. Maybe this is Russian hooker candy. How do you say ‘Russian hooker candy’ in Chinese?” Mark said. “Should we go get one of our tapes? This music kind of sucks a lot.”
“I don’t think so, man,” said Karen. “No convulsive dancing.” And then she said it again in Chinese. “Bu fengkuangde tiaowu.”
“No what?”
“No convulsive dancing. That’s what they call anything other than ballroom. Anything sexy or chaotic is forbidden.”
“Sexy or chaotic?”
“Disco dancing. You know, free-style. Punk. Solid Gold. Soul Train. American Bandstand. Whatever. Anything that isn’t a waltz or a foxtrot is convulsive and they aren’t having it. At least not at school.”
“What are they going to do about it? Do they have some kind of dancing jail?”
“Probably. All these kids could end up doing hard time in some Convulsive Dancing Re-education Camp on the Mongolian border. But who knows what they’d do to us? They already think that we’re hopelessly corrupt.”
“I’m starting to feel hopelessly corrupt and we’ve only been here nine days,” Mark said. He absently held out the box of candy to Ruibao. “Here, take it. Here’s your candy. Here’s your ballerina candy.”
“Well, we are corrupt. And we’re decadent, too.”
“Damn right. And proud of it. I wanna hear me some Ramones.”
Ruibao backed away from the two foreigners who now seemed to be ignoring him, but his hands kept pushing the candy back at the one called Mark.
“No, no, no,” he said. “It is for you.”
“Huh?” Mark asked, adjusting his attention back to Ruibao.
“The candy is for you, man,” Karen snickered.
“For me?”
“This guy looked around a while. He looked at a lot of fellows. And then he saw you across the crowded dining hall. And he knew that you were the one for his candy. Please don’t break his heart.”
“Shut up,” Mark snapped. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Be sensitive to each other’s feelings? Cuddle? There’s no problem that can’t be solved by talking it out, man.”
“Asshole, I’m serious.”
“So is he.”
Ruibao still stood with the foreigners and he could understand every third or fifth word of the English they spoke but none of it held much meaning for him. The candy seemed to hover between them, neither fully received nor fully given, though still fully in the foreigner’s hands. It was an expensive box of candy, too.
“C’mon, man.” Mark reiterated. “Let’s get my Ramones tape. I wanna be sedated.”
In counterpoint, the sound system delivered a scratchy version of the Blue Danube waltz.
“I’m telling you,” Karen answered, “it’s way too early in the school year for us to be doing stuff like that. We need to figure out what’s going on and shit. We don’t even know what the rules are.”
“Are there any rules?”
“For them?” Karen swept his arm to include the entire dance floor. “Hell, yes, there are rules. For us? Who knows? The same rules? Who knows? I don’t wanna be deported.”
“Chickenshit.”
“Provocateur.”
“Annoying little fuck.”
And there it stood while Jiao stood by in the dining hall semi-darkness, waiting for a break in the foreigners’ conversation while the scuffle of the dancing students’ shoes. The candy was a lost cause, but the dance was still a possibility. As with so many other things in this world, Jiao knew that perseverance through suffering was most often the only course of action that might result in success. Almost every other strategy led to disaster and more suffering. Jiao had seen it played out many times in his village. The crushing weight of state-imposed quotas that robbed the peasants of everything they’d grown, the Red Guard and their witch-hunting for anti-revolutionaries when only they knew what anti-revolutionary meant, the hopelessness of a life of ignorance and dirt. Jiao wanted to dance.
When the music changed to a Hong Kong pop song, a song about a young boy’s life on the street and his love for his grandfather, the candy box hit the floor and opened, a few paper cups of stale Chinese chocolate tumbling free. Jiao began to move.
“Hey, foreign man,” Jiao called. “Dance with me.”
He began to swing his arms and make them do the things he’d seen on the videotapes of Japanese rock stars. He kicked his legs up and out and back again. Jiao pushed his hips out lewdly. He jumped up and down, spinning in the air and landing with loud thumps.
“Check it out,” Mark said.
“Whoa,” Karen replied. “My man’s got rhythm.”
“My man’s got crazy.”
Jiao spontaneously reinvented the twist. He danced a new dance no one had ever seen before. He did the monkey. He did the fly. He walked the dog. He strutted and he pouted and he wiggled his ass. There was no limit to what he could do with his body and the music and the way they’d become intertwined.
The other students began to stop their dancing to stare at Jiao, some giggling and others just open-mouthed. And just as quickly, two uniformed school security guards came running across the hardwood floor and tackled him. Hard. Once on the floor, they smothered Jiao, punching and kicking him until all the dance moves had fled his body. Rising from the floor, they carried him between them, his toes dragging against the floor and drops of blood falling from his brow and his mouth. The guards kicked the outside door open and they were gone. The music continued though no one danced anymore or in any way.
“Shit,” Karen said.
“Really,” Mark answered. “I guess there are rules about dancing.”
“About convulsive dancing.”
“God, that seems extreme.”
“I wonder what’s going to happen to that kid.”
“Nothing good.”
“Aren’t you glad you didn’t get your Ramones tape?”
“I am now. Think they would have done that to us?”
“Us?”
“Me. You. Whatever.”
“I imagine so. Or something like that.”
“Man. This is going to be a weird year.”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Let’s get out of here. At least we can listen to the Ramones in our room.”
“Think so?”
“Hope so.”
“We can drink beer for sure.”
“Then let’s go do that. I’ve had it with dancing for one night.”
The two foreigners left the darkened dining hall. The Chinese students began to slip away in twos and threes and fours as well. The music continued to wash over the dining hall and the dwindling, shuffling crowd of students. As they left the building, some of the students stepped on scattered chocolates and, eventually, the box with a picture of an angel or a ballerina got kicked to the side.
“What is this crap?” Mark asked in the near perfect darkness. “What are we standing on?”
Karen bent down and sparked her lighter.
“Bones,” she answered. “We’re standing on bones. This must be kitchen.”
“Jesus. How many pigs is this? There’s like 50 skulls here.”
“I guess they don’t have dumpsters in China, the People’s Republic of.”
“If they did, someone would move in.”
“Move in and open up a noodle shop.”
“Move in, open a noodle shop, and sell inflatable Santa Clauses.”
“Move in, open a noodle shop, sell inflatable Santa Clauses, and fix bicycles.”
Karen’s lighter flared again, illuminating her face as she hit the pipe. She passed it to Mark and he drew in a lungful of hashish.
“Do you think the limbo is considered convulsive?” she asked in that funny way people talk without exhaling.
Mark blew out his chest full of pungent smoke.
“If they beat the crap about of Candy Boy for whatever it was he was doing, I’d imagine the limbo is on the list.”
“Well, that’s just stupid.”
“Agreed.”
“Do you even know how to ballroom dance?”
“I learned to foxtrot and waltz for my cousin’s wedding two years ago. I’m sure I could pull something together.”
“Do you want to try?”
“Sure,” Mark answered. But, instead of walking away, he cocked his head and listened to the muffled music.
“What?”
“Wait a minute.”
“What?”
“Listen. I think they’re playing the Ramones.”
Karen snorted her laughter through her nose.
“C’mon. Let’s dance convulsively.”
“It’s not the Ramones.”
“I know, I know. But, I still hear them.”
“I think it’s Phil Collins.”
“Close enough.”
So, the two of them danced convulsively in the pitch-blackness behind the dining hall kitchen with rotten pig bones crunching beneath their shoes.
Excerpted from Artificial Rats & Electric Cats: Communications from Transitional China, 1985 - 1986 (2008) available from www.camberpress.com.
“It is an angel,” Ruibao said softly and he pointed to the drawing of a beautiful foreign woman with long legs and a cloudy-looking dress.
“What?” Mark looked at the box and where Ruibao’s finger pointed and the picture on the box where he pointed.
The music was loud, a tape of recent Hong Kong pop songs alternating with syrupy, Liberace-style ballroom music and the Chinese kids loved it all and all had been especially screened by the college administration for this first ever, experimental Welcome Back to School Dance. Some electrically minded students had patched an enormous Korean boom box into the school’s ancient, Soviet surplus vacuum-tube amplifier to pump the music through a brace of large, trumpet-shaped speakers.
“It is an angel,” Ruibao repeated just as softly.
“What?” Mark asked again. “I can’t hear what he’s saying.”
“He said, ‘It is an angel,’” Karen supplied.
Ruibao smiled shyly.
“It looks like a ballerina to me.”
“It looks like a dancer, for sure. A human being dancer. Nothing supernatural about it at all.”
“How do you say ‘ballerina’ in Chinese?”
“Fuck if I know. ‘Dancing’ is tiaowu.”
Ruibao frowned. Couples scuffled around the cafeteria, a lot of girls dancing with a lot of other girls and a very few boys dancing with a very few other boys. Ruibao wanted so much to dance with one of these foreigners. It would be such an amazing story to tell everyone back in the dormitory after lights out. It was something he could embellish all semester and take home with him over New Year holidays and tell again and again to the village families.
“Umm…I think it is an angel,” he repeated. Ruibao couldn’t believe a disagreement had arisen, at least so quickly. “It is an angel.”
“No, no, no. Look at it,” Mark insisted and, grabbing the box out of the startled Ruibao’s hands, pointed to the picture on the box or, rather, thumped his big, fat, foreign finger against the picture. “It’s a ballerina, a dancer, see? Tiaowu. See how she’s standing on her toes, see the skirt here, the fancy skirt, the tutu? She’s a dancer. A ball-er-rina. Tiaowu.”
“Err…I think it is an angel for sure,” Ruibao repeated and his smile was enormous. Maybe the foreigner was asking him to dance. Ruibao had wanted to lead, but he’d take anything at this stage in their relationship.
“Drop it, man,” Karen said. “If he says it’s an angel, it’s an angel.”
“Whatever. It’s pretty much a non-issue. Angel or ballerina? Ballerina or angel? Maybe she’s a Russian hooker. Maybe this is Russian hooker candy. How do you say ‘Russian hooker candy’ in Chinese?” Mark said. “Should we go get one of our tapes? This music kind of sucks a lot.”
“I don’t think so, man,” said Karen. “No convulsive dancing.” And then she said it again in Chinese. “Bu fengkuangde tiaowu.”
“No what?”
“No convulsive dancing. That’s what they call anything other than ballroom. Anything sexy or chaotic is forbidden.”
“Sexy or chaotic?”
“Disco dancing. You know, free-style. Punk. Solid Gold. Soul Train. American Bandstand. Whatever. Anything that isn’t a waltz or a foxtrot is convulsive and they aren’t having it. At least not at school.”
“What are they going to do about it? Do they have some kind of dancing jail?”
“Probably. All these kids could end up doing hard time in some Convulsive Dancing Re-education Camp on the Mongolian border. But who knows what they’d do to us? They already think that we’re hopelessly corrupt.”
“I’m starting to feel hopelessly corrupt and we’ve only been here nine days,” Mark said. He absently held out the box of candy to Ruibao. “Here, take it. Here’s your candy. Here’s your ballerina candy.”
“Well, we are corrupt. And we’re decadent, too.”
“Damn right. And proud of it. I wanna hear me some Ramones.”
Ruibao backed away from the two foreigners who now seemed to be ignoring him, but his hands kept pushing the candy back at the one called Mark.
“No, no, no,” he said. “It is for you.”
“Huh?” Mark asked, adjusting his attention back to Ruibao.
“The candy is for you, man,” Karen snickered.
“For me?”
“This guy looked around a while. He looked at a lot of fellows. And then he saw you across the crowded dining hall. And he knew that you were the one for his candy. Please don’t break his heart.”
“Shut up,” Mark snapped. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Be sensitive to each other’s feelings? Cuddle? There’s no problem that can’t be solved by talking it out, man.”
“Asshole, I’m serious.”
“So is he.”
Ruibao still stood with the foreigners and he could understand every third or fifth word of the English they spoke but none of it held much meaning for him. The candy seemed to hover between them, neither fully received nor fully given, though still fully in the foreigner’s hands. It was an expensive box of candy, too.
“C’mon, man.” Mark reiterated. “Let’s get my Ramones tape. I wanna be sedated.”
In counterpoint, the sound system delivered a scratchy version of the Blue Danube waltz.
“I’m telling you,” Karen answered, “it’s way too early in the school year for us to be doing stuff like that. We need to figure out what’s going on and shit. We don’t even know what the rules are.”
“Are there any rules?”
“For them?” Karen swept his arm to include the entire dance floor. “Hell, yes, there are rules. For us? Who knows? The same rules? Who knows? I don’t wanna be deported.”
“Chickenshit.”
“Provocateur.”
“Annoying little fuck.”
And there it stood while Jiao stood by in the dining hall semi-darkness, waiting for a break in the foreigners’ conversation while the scuffle of the dancing students’ shoes. The candy was a lost cause, but the dance was still a possibility. As with so many other things in this world, Jiao knew that perseverance through suffering was most often the only course of action that might result in success. Almost every other strategy led to disaster and more suffering. Jiao had seen it played out many times in his village. The crushing weight of state-imposed quotas that robbed the peasants of everything they’d grown, the Red Guard and their witch-hunting for anti-revolutionaries when only they knew what anti-revolutionary meant, the hopelessness of a life of ignorance and dirt. Jiao wanted to dance.
When the music changed to a Hong Kong pop song, a song about a young boy’s life on the street and his love for his grandfather, the candy box hit the floor and opened, a few paper cups of stale Chinese chocolate tumbling free. Jiao began to move.
“Hey, foreign man,” Jiao called. “Dance with me.”
He began to swing his arms and make them do the things he’d seen on the videotapes of Japanese rock stars. He kicked his legs up and out and back again. Jiao pushed his hips out lewdly. He jumped up and down, spinning in the air and landing with loud thumps.
“Check it out,” Mark said.
“Whoa,” Karen replied. “My man’s got rhythm.”
“My man’s got crazy.”
Jiao spontaneously reinvented the twist. He danced a new dance no one had ever seen before. He did the monkey. He did the fly. He walked the dog. He strutted and he pouted and he wiggled his ass. There was no limit to what he could do with his body and the music and the way they’d become intertwined.
The other students began to stop their dancing to stare at Jiao, some giggling and others just open-mouthed. And just as quickly, two uniformed school security guards came running across the hardwood floor and tackled him. Hard. Once on the floor, they smothered Jiao, punching and kicking him until all the dance moves had fled his body. Rising from the floor, they carried him between them, his toes dragging against the floor and drops of blood falling from his brow and his mouth. The guards kicked the outside door open and they were gone. The music continued though no one danced anymore or in any way.
“Shit,” Karen said.
“Really,” Mark answered. “I guess there are rules about dancing.”
“About convulsive dancing.”
“God, that seems extreme.”
“I wonder what’s going to happen to that kid.”
“Nothing good.”
“Aren’t you glad you didn’t get your Ramones tape?”
“I am now. Think they would have done that to us?”
“Us?”
“Me. You. Whatever.”
“I imagine so. Or something like that.”
“Man. This is going to be a weird year.”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Let’s get out of here. At least we can listen to the Ramones in our room.”
“Think so?”
“Hope so.”
“We can drink beer for sure.”
“Then let’s go do that. I’ve had it with dancing for one night.”
The two foreigners left the darkened dining hall. The Chinese students began to slip away in twos and threes and fours as well. The music continued to wash over the dining hall and the dwindling, shuffling crowd of students. As they left the building, some of the students stepped on scattered chocolates and, eventually, the box with a picture of an angel or a ballerina got kicked to the side.
***
The music from the dining hall was a dull murmur as it passed through the brick wall at the back of the building.“What is this crap?” Mark asked in the near perfect darkness. “What are we standing on?”
Karen bent down and sparked her lighter.
“Bones,” she answered. “We’re standing on bones. This must be kitchen.”
“Jesus. How many pigs is this? There’s like 50 skulls here.”
“I guess they don’t have dumpsters in China, the People’s Republic of.”
“If they did, someone would move in.”
“Move in and open up a noodle shop.”
“Move in, open a noodle shop, and sell inflatable Santa Clauses.”
“Move in, open a noodle shop, sell inflatable Santa Clauses, and fix bicycles.”
Karen’s lighter flared again, illuminating her face as she hit the pipe. She passed it to Mark and he drew in a lungful of hashish.
“Do you think the limbo is considered convulsive?” she asked in that funny way people talk without exhaling.
Mark blew out his chest full of pungent smoke.
“If they beat the crap about of Candy Boy for whatever it was he was doing, I’d imagine the limbo is on the list.”
“Well, that’s just stupid.”
“Agreed.”
“Do you even know how to ballroom dance?”
“I learned to foxtrot and waltz for my cousin’s wedding two years ago. I’m sure I could pull something together.”
“Do you want to try?”
“Sure,” Mark answered. But, instead of walking away, he cocked his head and listened to the muffled music.
“What?”
“Wait a minute.”
“What?”
“Listen. I think they’re playing the Ramones.”
Karen snorted her laughter through her nose.
“C’mon. Let’s dance convulsively.”
“It’s not the Ramones.”
“I know, I know. But, I still hear them.”
“I think it’s Phil Collins.”
“Close enough.”
So, the two of them danced convulsively in the pitch-blackness behind the dining hall kitchen with rotten pig bones crunching beneath their shoes.
Excerpted from Artificial Rats & Electric Cats: Communications from Transitional China, 1985 - 1986 (2008) available from www.camberpress.com.
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