Read Thomas!

Window Watching

2010-06-18T18:44:00.001-07:00

Marshall cheered his son on as he left the dugout and ambled up to the plate dragging his bat behind him. The pitcher was a heavyset kid who looked like he developed at twice the rate of the other kids on the team. He had sandy hair, freckles and a smirk that intimated Marshall’s son hadn’t a chance. When he threw his first strike he seemed to be looking right at Marshall, like, After I’m done with your son, you’re next.
“Asshole,” Marshall muttered. One of the other parents near him gave him a sidelong glance and he wondered if the pitcher was her kid. He stood and clapped his hands. “Keep that bat up!” The kid turned to his father behind the metal fence and gave him a look like he wanted to get out of there. He wore his inhaler on a string around his neck and the batting cap he had on was three sizes too big for him. “Hit the goddamn ball!” Marshall hollered at him. The woman next to Marshall gave him another look but he ignored it. “That’s okay,” he yelled as the kid chopped down at the air with the bat, missing the pitch by a good three seconds. Marshall sat down feeling a little lightheaded. He held his head in his hands and only heard the third strike. He watched his kid head back to the dugout between his fingers and grimaced a little as the other boys threw crumpled up paper cones at him.
By the next inning Ellie had brought back a couple of Styrofoam cups filled with a little boxed wine she had procured from the trunk of her car. They drank the wine and watched their son stay clear of the ball in the outfield. Ellie mentioned that maybe they had better let the boy just stick with chess. Marshall muttered something about the importance of athleticism and she dropped it. Ellie watched her husband pensively. Marshall looked restless and on the verge of something big. She felt wherever he went these last two weeks the earth seemed to shake with him, like at any moment the ground would give way below him or hell would come crawling up after him. She wanted to say something to him but didn’t. She refilled their cups instead.
After the game the little league coach went around collecting the mitts and baseballs with a red wheelbarrow. His name was Less, or Lester–Marshall couldn’t remember. His wife had encouraged Marshall to talk to Less one day after a game. He told Less he was the kid’s dad and they shook hands. For a while Lester just smiled at him with his hands on his hips, nodding his head. Marshall had thought he was a little off.
Marshall sent Ellie off for another refill. When she returned they sat on the bleachers watching the parents meet with one another and pat their children on the asses. Marshall told her the whole institution of little league baseball is perverse. After a while the little league coach came up and offered his hand to him. Marshall, taken aback, spilled wine on his jeans going for Lester’s hand. Less said, “My condolences.” Marshall resigned himself to letting the wine spread across his denim. It looked like a Rorshach inkblot. He said, “Condolences?”
“Your father–Ellie told me.”
Marshall looked over at Ellie. She looked away from him. “Ah,” he said, “thanks.”
Less looked down at Marshall’s jeans. “You know I’m not judging Marshall…but this is a thing for the kids. I don’t think they allow alcohol out here.”
Ellie turned. “He’s grieving,” she said suddenly, and began rubbing his back.
Less nodded and tapped Marshall’s leg. Marshall watched his kid push the little red wheelbarrow around in circles in the outfield.

He didn’t play baseball when he was a kid. Most of his childhood was spent working with his father in construction. His father seemed to use him as a selling point. When they followed up on leads together his dad would have him knock on the door. He would introduce Marshall as “the boy.” What always amazed Marshall was the curtness people had then but didn’t have anymore. They seemed to talk in monosyllables. If his dad made a sale the men on the porch would shake hands and his dad would have Marshall shake hands too. These old veterans pressed hard, as if testing him, like they would somehow be able to tell the quality of his father’s work by Marshall’s handshake.
The work itself was relatively easy, but monotonous; gather up scrap metal, put it in a pile; gather up siding, put it in a pile. Whatever his feelings on putting vinyl siding on a house were, Marshall had since looked at the material as an obstacle separating him from his youth. It embodied work, and the greatest extent to which his father would level with him. His entire relationship with the man could be summed up with putting siding in one pile, the scrap metal in the other.
One day when Marshall was fifteen and could drive, his older brother sent him back to a completed job to pick up a wheelbarrow they had left there. When he pulled up to the house he noticed his father’s truck in the driveway with the wheelbarrow already in it. He saw movement through the window and caught his father walking inside the house shirtless and holding a glass of scotch in his hand. When his father saw the kid outside he froze. There was a moment where the two of them watched each other, standing there like asteroids orbiting another world. Marshall could see his name spelled out on his father’s lips. All at once something took hold of him and carried him away with it. Before he knew it he was racing down the cracked streets of these nowhere neighborhoods putting distance between himself and the man in that house. He kept working for his father and they never talked about it. But he felt himself grow a little older after that.

Marshall was crouched down over the home plate with Lester’s hands wrapped around his shoulders and neck. He caught himself in the tail end of a loud wail and he could feel the tears rolling down his already soaked cheeks. Men were standing all around him. Some of them he recognized as fathers of the boys on the baseball team. Others looked like joggers that were passing by when they noticed a man having a blowout on home plate. Ellie was with some of the other women. She had her hand cupped over her mouth. She was crying. One of the men that had gathered around was talking to Marshall’s son just ten yards away. Marshall could just barely hear the man saying, “Your daddy’s okay…he’s just sad right now,” over the soft hum of Lester’s voice–“Let it out Marshall, let it out.” Marshall wanted to get up and hug the boy but he stumbled forward and Less caught him. “That’s okay,” Less hollered, “We’re just going to hang here as long as we need to!”
Marshall wiped the tears off his face but couldn’t for the life of him remember how he got to the plate from the bleachers, or why there was more wine on his clothes, or why his wife and son looked worried. Worried. He remembered Ellie saying something like that to him earlier. He remembered it clearly now. He had a bottle of scotch in his lap and he was watching television when she came home and said that she was worried about him. He had told her, “Let’s see how you do when your dad dies.”
He hadn’t had that much to drink. That wasn’t what did it, he thought. It could have been the heat. It could have been the mental image he had held in his head of his father’s last breath all week, his eyes swollen shut so pumped full of the shit they give you in hospitals. He rubbed his forehead and looked around him. The fat kid pitcher was smiling at him and Marshall had an urge to grab the kid by his feet and hurl him over the fence while his mother watched.
“I’m okay,” he managed to get out. Less kept his hands on his shoulders like at any moment Marshall would take off raising hell. At first Marshall thought they were all looking at him like he was drunk but now he realized it was something different. They seemed to feel sorry for him. He could hear Ellie telling one of the mothers he didn’t have that much to drink. He was grateful to her for that. “I’ll be okay,” he said again. He shook Lester’s hands off his shoulders and walked as straight as possible to where his son was talking to one of the other dads. “I’ll take it from here,” Marshall smiled. The man stood up slowly and looked at Marshall completely amazed.
“Marshall, why don’t I take him home? And you can ride with me?” Ellie said in a panic, running up to them.
Marshall turned and looked at her and the remaining people that hadn’t already wondered off, bored. “I’m fine,” he said. “It was just the heat.” And he really did look better, save the red stains and sand all over his clothes. He thought for a moment. “Shows over!” he laughed, waving everyone off. Less tried approaching him but Marshall put his hand out like he’d better stop. “Come on son,” he said to the boy.
Marshall grabbed the boy by the arm and smiled at everyone one last time. While walking towards the car he heard a few of the onlookers say to Ellie, “You’re gonna let him drive?” And he heard her say she didn’t know what else to do. He heard Less murmur that he should stop him. And he heard one of the other men say, “Not unless you’re bringing a bat with you.”

On the ride home Marshall tried getting whatever information he could from his son. He said, “Do you remember daddy stumbling over to the home plate?” But the kid either didn’t see it or didn’t want to talk about it because he said nothing. Marshall dropped it and for a while they drove in silence.
He watched the rows of familiar houses drift by him as he drove. The neighborhoods looked the same as they had when he was a kid: old trucks on cinderblocks, children’s toys littering the lawns, houses covered in vinyl siding, and American flags hanging from the porches like testimonies to a time when people gave a shit. The histories of these old neighborhoods aren’t old enough to mean anything; their use fading with the dwindling numbers of the Vietnam generation. Marshall drove to work everyday thinking this, and thinking that none of it meant anything to him.
He opened the glove box and grabbed the flask that lay on a pile of old receipts. He polished off what was left of it and stopped by the liquor store on his way home. He spent twenty minutes in there comparing Glenlivet to Glenfiddich before he remembered the kid was still sitting in the car. He looked out of the window of the store with both the bottles in his hands and saw his kid was starring at him from the passenger seat. For a moment the two just watched each other like that before the kid looked away and Marshall paid and left.
The two said nothing on the ride home. Marshall looked his son over. He seemed to be looking out at something ahead of him–beyond the street, beyond the rows and rows of crackerjack houses that seemed to cover every inch of space left. His expression was fixed, as if he were contemplating something bigger than what his age and soft little body would allow. Marshall thought that for a moment the boy looked like an adult.

The Umbrella Massacre

2010-03-30T19:53:00.000-07:00

I remember Paul Gibson. We had worked together for two years, most of our time spent in a break room that was once a broom closet. There was this florescent light overhead that would twitch and zap and occasionally go out for a few moments. That didn’t bother Paul. He’d go on talking, and when it came on again he’d be there in front of me with his eyes fixed on mine, his moving pale-grey lips seeming detached from his still body. He’d tell me, “There’s nothing more intriguing than identity and the lengths to which people will go to hold onto it.” I had a vague notion of what he was talking about, but what always stayed with me was the direct, monotonous tone in which he said these things, like there was a person in there and what I was looking at was a mask silhouetted by the dancing shadows of an ill-green light fixture beyond repair. He never seemed to move, either. I’d be the first to leave the room and the last to enter it. He’d be sitting perfectly still with his hands clasped in the dark, or under the strobing light, sort of waiting for me to come in there and engage him. He was my boss, incidentally.
The last time I saw him was six o’ clock at the end of a work week. Everyone had gone home save he and I. We had been talking in the break room for a while and I was certain I had just left him in there with the light out. I had stopped by my desk for a moment and followed the tacky grey carpet to the restroom and opened it. That’s where I found him. He was sitting on a chair next to the toilet reading a copy of In Flight Magazine entirely naked save his argyles and Sperry’s. I held close to the doorframe entirely stunned when he looked up and noticed me. All at once he stood and put his free hand out in the air for me to shake. I stared at him for the longest five seconds of my life. Then he left, like reality came bearing down on him and he really was naked in the restroom with the In Flight Magazine trying to shake my hand. He bundled his clothes and got out of there and I never saw him again. Soon there was a new manager and the light in the break room got fixed.

I stood in the restroom stall at the airport bent over the toilet feeling sick. I was going to New York City to see my brother. His girlfriend had died and he needed me there with him. My sister and I had talked over the phone about his “situation,” as she put it. She said he looked unstable and excitable, and if I didn’t go to New York, there’s no telling. I was hesitant but I promised her I’d go anyway. My brother and I were always close but at some point our friendship had deteriorated to an occasional phone call and flight here and there when something big happened. There was an understanding one of us would be there for the other if anything went wrong. Here it was wrong and I knew why I should be there but not exactly how. His girlfriend would be dead in a coffin and I would stand next to him and hold him by the shoulder. I’d have a drink with him later and listen to him talk with wet eyes while I nodded my head. Outside of that would be a mystery.
They had been cooking dinner together. They needed pepper for the roast beef and Lysol because they had quit smoking and their neighbors had been having a party and it was practically coming in through the walls. She had gone to the store and was hit by a cab on her way back to the apartment. There was a wind storm that night. The news station had later said eight people were killed by cab drivers. The anchorman had said they were driving flustered.
I left the stall and straightened my tie in the mirror. My sister had told me to wear a blue tie because every other color says too much and pinstripes say too little, so I wore that one. I splashed cold water on my face and headed towards my terminal.
My sister had bought my ticket. She had told me over the phone that she wanted to fly me first class. This sort of thing was unusual for her so I declined, but she insisted. I argued with her a little more but she wouldn’t have it, and anyway she knew I would like the idea of flying first class to NYC. I had told her once, “People just need to be told it’s first-class. They’ll pay hundreds more to call it that, even if the conditions were somehow even worse. If first class were in the luggage compartment you’d still see people crouched in there. I’d crouch in there if I could afford it.” She recalled over the phone that I said that to her. Later I remembered it was Paul Gibson who had actually said that to me. I had somehow forgotten that. Before our time together in the restroom he had said, “Society is a network of pedestrians imitating mannequins and not the other way around.” He told me he went to airports dressed in a suit and tie and walked around hurriedly. He didn’t know why he did it, he just did it. He enjoyed experimenting with identity. He enjoyed sitting first class on a plane reading the In Flight Magazine.

I was delayed over NYC. I had forgotten about the wind. It was the same wind that killed my brother’s girlfriend with the pepper and Lysol. JFK had been alternating between accepting flights and redirecting traffic all month. “Fifty miles per hour,” the pilot told us. The turbulence was excruciating. We had to land in Philadelphia.
Next to me was an older woman who was hyperventilating. I tried calming her down a little. I told her, “You’re more likely to get killed by a coconut falling from a tree than die on a plane,” but I couldn’t remember if that was for planes or sharks. She told me it was sharks. “You’re more likely to die by coconut than by shark,” she managed to get out. I watched her for a moment. She reminded me of a speckled trout my brother and I had caught off a dock in Baffin Bay when we were kids. It was our first and last time fishing. After half an hour of struggling with it we finally managed to haul it onto the dock. We sat there cross legged, the fish between us, too frightened to look at it. I remembered this sensation that it was watching me, struggling to breathe, its eyes going white.
The pilot asked us to increase the airflow in the cabin by adjusting the air ducts above our heads. He said it would help reduce the amount of ice on the wings. When the woman next to me heard that she began wheezing and clutching out at the air in front of her as if she could contain it all in her hands and fill her lungs. I tried helping, “Turbulence is just when the wings stop working–we cut a pocket of warm and cold air and for a brief moment the plane isn’t actually flying.” She closed her eyes and grasped the sides of her seat tightly. She didn’t talk to me anymore after that.
I watched the light on the wing outside my window blink in the freezing cold night air, and remembered that dysfunctional florescent light in the office break room. I remembered two months ago I was sitting in that room when a coworker came in and began talking about how Paul Gibson’s strange behavior was evidence for his eventual meltdown. When I asked her what she meant by that she said, “You don’t know?” I knew what she was going to say before she said it. Paul killed himself. She told me he died running his car in his garage. It was carbon monoxide poisoning. I didn’t know what to say, but after a while I told her about our conversations. She called them warning signs. I remembered sitting there at the table across from where he used to sit for three hours recalling all the dialogue we had shared. When I left the office that evening it was nine o’ clock. I had tried remembering what warning signs Paul Gibson was giving me. It wasn’t as if there was some gradual change. He was the same the whole two years I knew him.

The airline issued cab rides going from Philadelphia to New York. The trip took three hours, and by the time I got to Brooklyn it was late, but my brother had waited up for me anyway. I understood exactly what my sister meant. He looked excitable and unstable. He told me just us two would be the only familiar faces at the funeral. He said he didn’t know anyone from her family.
We walked from the lower east side to Prospect Park at two in the morning. The wind was picking up hard and the rain was coming down in billowing torrents. Everywhere we went there were umbrellas. They would be broken, ripped in half, bent, hanging from trees, or stuck in garbage cans. I hollered over the sound of rolling bottles and rustling trees, “You can’t use an umbrella in a wind storm, it’s like using a screwdriver on a nail!” but my brother wasn’t paying any attention. He just kept saying he had sent her out for Lysol and pepper for the roast beef. He kept yelling that. I had this image of a woman exploding on the wet and windy streets of Brooklyn in a rainbow of pepper and Lysol, and the bright lights of a taxi with a foreign cabbie driving flustered. He asked me if this was all there is to it. I told him it wasn’t. I told him there’s a whole lot more to it.
We kept walking around like that. I was still feeling sick. It was a pain I couldn’t place. It felt like there was something expanding in my stomach, something that had been growing ever since I had talked to my sister over the phone about coming out here. I thought I needed sleep, but looking at my brother now I decided a drink would be better. He was crying and I held him by the shoulder. “I sent her out for Lysol!” he yelled again. I held onto him and got us across the street where I spotted a candlelit near-empty bar. The wind had gotten worse since we left the apartment and I needed to get him inside. Umbrellas were kicking up in the air and skating past us. I thought, if the wind gets any worse the umbrellas could be dangerous. We stayed close to the building and shifted alongside the wall to the door and went in.
I wanted to buy him a drink and tell him something lighthearted, but all I could think of was something Paul Gibson once said to me; “There’s something adulterous about New York City. It’s a city of cheating spouses.” I told him that and smiled at him. I pointed to the few people in the bar talking over the sound of a rattling piano and stand up bass. We watched them for a moment. There was a couple talking and laughing with one another. The man stood up and ordered a drink at the bar while his date stayed where she was apparently checking the text messages on her phone. My brother looked away and I couldn’t help but think he saw something in her that reminded him of his girlfriend. I thought, there are few women who would die that way, and the woman at that table looked like one of them. I imagined her hurrying down the street with that shopping bag, chased down by the lights of a taxi cab. I watched my brother for a moment and tried to think of something more to say.
I tried clearing my head, but all I could think about was the image of an emaciated naked man searching for my hand like it was a lifesaver stretching between him and an endless ocean. My brother had gone completely quiet, and that worried me. He had this way of going white, and leaving you without ever getting up from his seat when things were too big to get a hold on. He was doing that now, and the only thing I could think to do was keep my hands on his shoulders and encourage him to talk.
The bar closed and we were out on the street again looking for shelter from the wind. What I predicted about the umbrellas came true; they were practically flying through the air now like darts without direction. We spotted a subway terminal and I thought, the safest thing to do would be to hide down there for a while until it was time for us to begin the three-train journey to the funeral, which was only in a few hours anyway. So that’s what we did. We sat on the dirty cement steps leading down to the poorly lit urban dungeon. My brother told me he could sit there forever watching the howling drunks of four a.m. push carts down the stairs. I looked him over. He was off talking about the Lysol and pepper, and the flustered cab driver that hit his girlfriend, and he was off being white as a sheet and giving me looks like at any moment he’d jump into the next train and I’d never see him again.
We had a few hours to kill so I thought I would get us both something to eat. I had seen a twenty-four-hour corner store near the subway station that had a neon sign on the window that read, Hot Sandwiches on the way over. If I was going to somehow get us both to the funeral without sleep, and after several drinks, in this storm, we at the very least needed full stomachs. I asked my brother if he was OK with me leaving for a few minutes to get him some food. He nodded his head silently, but as I began to climb the stairs he said from behind me, “Thanks.” When I turned to look at him he had his head down and his back to me. I stood there for a moment not knowing what to say. “It’s fine,” was all I could think of. I went up the stairs and outside into the pouring rain and blowing wind. The streets felt empty and deserted. The city looked as if it would come down in the storm. The clouds would eventually part and there would be nothing left save these empty streets.
When I got halfway to the store I got that expanding feeling in my stomach again and thought of my brother sitting there alone on the subway steps. I couldn’t believe I had left him alone in the shape he was in. I paused by a street sign and held onto it, my head bent forward like I was going to vomit. I felt like I was going to collapse right there in the street, and it was all I could do to stand straight and head back to the subway terminal.
He wasn’t on the stairs. I slid my card through the machine and blew through the gate and ran down to where the trains pull up half-expecting to find a train parked there and subway workers frantically hurrying around with walkie-talkies. People would be gathered around a bit of blood covered, tattered clothing holding their hands to their mouths. A train conductor would be shouting hysterically, “He just came out of nowhere.”
I didn’t find him there. There was only a drunk with a cart filled with broken umbrellas muttering to himself. I felt a little embarrassed. I walked back up the stairs and found a restroom there and went in. There wasn’t anyone by the urinals but when I looked under the stall I saw my brother’s soaking wet dress shoes. The pants weren’t down around the ankles, and I knew he was just sitting in there fully clothed. I banged on the door and he unhatched the lock. He was sitting on the toilet with his head in his hands. I stood there for a moment trying to think of something to say.
I grabbed one of his hands and put it into mine and shook it. He just looked up at me confused with his hand oscillating in mine. He said, “What is this?”

When we arrived at the funeral the wind had gone but it was still raining. My brother and I were completely soaked and covered with an unidentifiable black grease from wandering around the subway terminal for three hours. We stood on the outskirts and watched them lower the casket while the family threw roses on it. I noticed out of all the people there, only a few of them had umbrellas, the rest were just standing in the rain trying to look as if it didn’t bother them, but I could tell it really did. I could tell that was something they were really thinking about. I pointed it out to my brother, “Look! They’re all getting soaked!” He followed the direction of my finger as I pointed to each person without an umbrella. We laughed a little but stopped when the preacher gave us a look like we had better quit it.
Soon the rain started coming down harder and the mourners looked ever more conscious of this fact. With each blowing torrent and crack of thunder we broke out into more laughter. People started shaking their heads at us. One man had his fist out in front of him and two others were holding him back. He kept saying, “God damn it,” while shaking his head. Others were joining in now and I held onto my brother like it was really time to cut it out. Then all at once a broken umbrella skated past us, and when my brother saw it he just let go. There was a sound coming from him I had never heard before. It was guttural, and it was coming from this place buried deep inside of him. He wasn’t crying; it was laughter. I watched him laugh. I had never seen anyone laugh so hard.

See The Monster

2009-10-24T07:51:00.000-07:00

Morgan watched the reflection of the overhead light trace across Sidney’s pale forehead as he changed position in his chair. It was just the two of them in a white room with a large one-way window. He said, “I want you to recount the events of that evening. I need you to be completely honest with me.”

He sat the file down on the stainless steel table and positioned his arms so that the file was somehow guarded from Sidney.

“You have everything there in front of you. What is it you want to know?” Sidney watched Morgan intently, and smiled a little as Morgan, clad in a white lab coat, swung the file open and flipped through a catalogue of criminal case history and psychiatric assessments, each piece of evidence reviewed in sharp, black cursive by a Dr. Paulson.

Morgan examined a photo. It was of a deceased woman stretched awkwardly over the particleboard remains of a cheap motel room nightstand. The textured wallpaper behind her head exposed a small bit of plaster. Above the plaster was measuring tape, evidently there to indicate good police work and the shock of the killing blow. Her eyes looked as if they were searching for consolation in the white flash of a policeman’s camera. She had red lines around her neck. A single sandal hung loosely from her big toe. The picture seemed orchestrated to Morgan; a stage set portraying an account of the terrifying reality of homicide: too real to be real. He hesitated, “Why did you do it?”

They had only examined their first photograph and Sidney could already see the helplessness taking hold of Morgan. There was a look in Morgan’s eyes that suggested some miraculous resurrection; the two dimensional girl in the picture begins to recirculate blood, she becomes animated, she stands and smiles. Snapped by a forgotten fling the photo is eventually lost because it means absolutely nothing. But in Morgan’s hands, grounded in reality, in a linear time frame removed from the childish fantasy of Morgan’s emotional mind, the photo is heavy, and everything in it breathes a severity so obviously removed from the shallow confines of paper and light. There’s no smile, there’s no wave; only police and a half dressed dead girl, all contained in a Polaroid that seemed to defy the laws of physics.

Sydney nodded his head at Morgan like he anticipated Morgan’s reaction, but said nothing.

Morgan turned to the second photo. A man sat prostrated in the street with his arm twisted behind him. The abrasions on his head suggested he was thrown from the building behind him. Something was sticking out of his chest. Morgan looked closer. It was a cue stick, halved and bloodied.

“Which one would you like to talk about? There were many occasions.” Sidney sat with his hands clasped together on the table.

Morgan said nervously, “I wanted to say, ‘Recount the events of that evening’ ...I’ve never said that before.”

Sidney wore a vaguely chastising expression. “Which evening exactly?”

Morgan shakily slid the third photo over to Sidney and tapped it. “This one.”

Sidney looked down at a photo of an elderly woman resting on the broken glass shelves of a china cabinet. He acknowledged the photo without touching it. “I watched her from my building across the alleyway for weeks. She was an elderly woman of domestic qualities. She wore glasses on a chain around her neck.” Sidney looked up at Morgan and pointed to the glasses. “I went to her apartment...”

Morgan looked Sidney in the eyes. They seemed detached and his language seemed practiced. He felt jealous of this distance, this removal Sidney appeared to possess–a removal Morgan could no longer conjure. A cold, panicky resentment washed over Morgan. “When did you...” Morgan hesitated. “When did you go over there?”

“Why don’t you tell me that?”

Morgan said, “On October the twenty-first, 1991.”

Sidney nodded his head. He was always still, unmoving, groomed and trimmed. Morgan was jealous of this self-control.

“Tell me what happened.”

“Through my observations I knew her door would be unlocked, not because I had seen her lock it, but because she was the sort of person that regarded such precautions as petty. She was very self-involved. This kind of person is so very removed from horror...” Sidney stopped and gave Morgan a peculiar look “...the outside thought of an intruder in her house would be an absurdity.”

“So you went to her building...”

“I climbed the stairs of her building and found her door. I knew the floor plans in her building were very large. I also knew she would be sitting at the table by the window going over her Reader’s Digest at that hour. So I felt I could take certain liberties; I could walk in and have a look around.”

“She didn’t hear you?”

“No.”

“And you...had a look around.”

“Yes.”

“When did you...”

“I was sitting in her bedroom, on her bed, looking at pictures of her grandchildren. I heard her walk into the living room. I could smell the tea. The whole atmosphere was domestic. I enjoyed that.” Sidney looked down at the photo and pointed to it. “I approached her from behind, here. I thought she would see me through the reflection of the glass. She didn’t. I simply pushed her in.”

“Simply?”

“Very simply, yes.”

Morgan picked the photo up from the table and studied it. Like the photo of the girl, it had a sort of heaviness to it that once added to the bulging case-file, could not be lifted and carried away. It would fall through the floor, through our world. The only place for it was a black depth completely removed from society. It belonged in blackness, or the white of their room. It was like a diver’s tank–lighter in the water, heavier outside. All at once there was a surge of anger he hadn’t felt in a while. “Why?” he yelled.

Sidney studied Morgan for a moment in silence and began tactfully. “There were no complications in her life. There was no confusion as to whom she was. She could have never imagined a killer in her house and suddenly I’m there, standing behind her. She was clueless to darkness. She lived in light. I wanted to wash her in madness, flood her with that darkness she so arrogantly ignored. It’s not in her periodicals. It’s not happening in the newspaper. I’m incarnate...” Sidney paused and let his eyes fall on Morgan heavily “...I’m standing in her living room.”

Morgan fell silent for a while, as if hypnotized by Sidney’s speech and subtle, eloquent mannerisms. He listened to the florescent light above them hum softly and remembered how much he hated florescence. He felt this pale, sickly light entering the pores of his skin, climbing through arteries, playing with the intricate inner-workings of his mind. This light seemed to follow him. This light would follow him everywhere he went. Life felt a maddening series of white washed tile rooms and these inhuman lights. Hallways upon hallways of them, snaking across the planet like copper on a circuit board, or the snapping synapses of a robotic brain, illuminating paperwork. These photos. The greenish pallor of Sidney. “What about the others?” he asked, his voice cracking. “Were they taken by surprise?”

Sidney touched the photo of the man on the street meditatively. “He was a drunk. It was at a bar. He went to the restroom and I rushed him. I broke the cue stick over his head and drove it into him. He fell out of the window. He was a very rough man.” Sidney thought for a moment. “He died rough.”

“Then you walked out of the restroom and finished your drink.”

“It was a half empty dive and I knew I didn’t have to leave until someone visited the restroom and saw the mess we made in there.”

“And the woman?” Morgan nervously studied the photo of the woman in the motel room again. He could feel the photo more than the others. There was something in it that cut out at him, something sharp and persistent.

Sidney adopted a solemn countenance and watched Morgan adjust himself in the loose fitting, long white coat. His voice became soft, as if treading on the needles Morgan’s near hysterical expression seemed to scatter around the room. “Her husband was a tyrant. She was hiding from him in this place. I had watched her long enough to know I could approach her–that she would trust me because she had nowhere else to turn. I took a room near hers and we’d run into each other. I had told her I wanted to help her...that I would help her. We sat on the bed for a while. She wanted to trust me. She was pale, fidgety, sexless–her husband had beaten that out of her–and she needed me. I threw her against the wall and strangled her to death. She wanted that trust. It offered security. All three of these people have that in common. They were actors in a play on security. You can imagine where that leaves me.”

Morgan let this thought sink in and said nothing for a while. He studied the photo of the young woman again and felt his heart begin to wrench. “But you said she was battered, so she had to have had some idea of...” Morgan paused, and for a moment the final impressions of the victims flooded through him; the reflection of the elderly woman in the glass; the startled expression of the drunk; the fading to lifelessness of the young woman. He said, “...of pain...”

Sidney raised his eyebrows and nodded his head at Morgan empathetically. He said, “That’s it Morgan. That’s right.” And after a moment he added, “We’re getting very close to this...to breaking through.”

Morgan stayed lost in the photo of the girl in the motel room. He wanted to know what the look in her eyes meant.

“Morgan?” Sidney said after a while. “Are we done?”

Morgan nodded, “We’re done,” and shakily stood up. He took off the long white coat and handed it to Sidney. Sidney put on the coat and buttoned it. He removed a name badge from the coat pocket. It read, Dr. Sidney Paulson.

“How did it feel, Morgan?”

Morgan clutched his wrist compulsively and shook his head rapidly but said nothing.

Sidney put his hand on Morgan’s shoulder. “It’s important, Morgan, to tell me how it felt. These sessions...we’re making progress.”

Morgan looked down at his case file and back up at the doctor. He felt he had trouble breathing and had to steady himself before answering. “It felt like I was looking at a monster.”

Sidney paused for a moment and nodded his head. “That’s good, Morgan. You have to see the monster before you can defeat it.”

Sidney gathered up the case file and nodded at the window to indicate the session was over. Two orderlies walked into the room and stood by the door patiently. “Thank you Morgan. You did very well today.” Sidney watched the orderlies lead Morgan down the long, white hallway, until he seemed to disappear in florescent light.

The Chess Player

2009-10-21T12:26:00.001-07:00

It was the great defense of 1985, perfectly orchestrated on a rainy morning in Montpellier. The photograph was taken at the precise moment Seirawan hid his king safely on h2, effectively ruining any chance Mikhail had of gaining counter play by attacking. The game would prove a maddening ritual of pawn manipulation entirely hopeless for Mikhail Tal. It was said he had expected a win from that game. Instead he’d move to an eventual draw against Jan Timman, sealing his tournament defeat. Seirawan was that push that sent Tal careening off course, captured in this black and white photograph indefinitely.
Morton studied the photograph meditatively, and for a long while he sat shuffling pieces around on the board in front of him to match the notation below the picture. He sipped his coffee and buttoned his jacket higher around his neck. He had never gotten used to the cold bite of Russian winters. They put the tables by the door. When it opens the snow blows in and stings his already red hands. They dry and crack, and he has to lick his fingers to turn the pages. He thinks maybe he’s too sick for the public. He enjoys this thought. Sick men playing chess in cold Russia, sipping coffee and disappearing into the perfect neatness of a classic photograph–there’s warmth in that the winters can’t touch.
“There it is, isn’t it? Such modern play for the year.”
Morton turned and met the face of the husky Russian voice behind him. The man looked on Morton’s book nostalgically, his hands loosely hanging on the rims of his balloon-like smoking jacket’s shallow pockets.
Morton looked down at the board and back up at the man. He hesitated, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Russian.”
The man smiled. “Of course,” he said in perfect English. He gestured to the board and chair the way old men do in cafes, in this climate. “May I?” Although he was already pulling out a chair for himself and taking a seat. He then held two large knuckles out in front of him and said nothing. Morton sipped his coffee and absent-mindedly pointed to the man’s right hand. It concealed a white pawn.
“What are you doing in St. Petersburg?” The man asked the question while standing the pieces on the board, not looking up at Morton. Morton had no reply, and only watched as his opponent shuffled around in his massive coat. He had a sort of shrewdness to him, although he was not very thin. Thin men are shrewd, large men are greedy. And he wasn’t greedy, he was clever.
The stranger looked up and noticed Morton studying him. He smiled. “I’m sorry, I did not mean to sound so...meddlesome… I meant only to make for conversation.”
He looked Morton’s age, and like Morton he had those sparse and yet undeniable reminders of the way things fade and die, and grow white, as did the seldom stalks of hair on his loose chin. He thought, why does something grow when it is dead?
Morton laughed a little. “I’m a tourist here.”
The man nodded. “An American?”
“Yes.”
“That book you are reading,” he said after a while, “I have read it more times than I can count on these fingers of mine.” He held up nine stubby fingers and laughed like all Russians laugh.
Morton wondered where the missing index finger on his opponent’s left hand had gone, and if it should ever inhibit his time in speed chess.
“Ah...” The man stood up a little and bent over the table. “I almost forgot.” He made a rather illustrious bow. “Roman Nikolaevich.”
“Morton Christensen.”
“A Danish name!”
Morton nodded politely and made his first move. They played the Budapest Gambit. It wasn’t entirely interesting but at least safe, Morton imagined, maybe even resulting in a shorter game. This was favorable. Morton had grown a man of few friends, and he tended to avoid these pleasant encounters with just about everyone. Though however brief the nod of a street vendor in passing, it filled him with a sort of deep self-loathing. He could afford this sentiment at his age. He could afford to have no obligations to anyone.
It was just the two of them and the shop owner, who now went around the shop sweeping and dusting mantles. He paid little attention to the chess players. The shop was in lower Nevsky tucked away in a not too busy neighborhood. Morton enjoyed the quiet. And his plan as usual was to leave the cafe before the early morning traffic. It would be these young business types, these self-assured types. They would file through the swinging door talking on little cellular phones. They were so completely obvious to Morton. Russia could not have business people, it could not have professionals. It is a land without that necessary material all fast moving societies have; anonymity.
Roman brought out his knight and Morton did too in a ritualistic attempt to control the middle-board.
There was silence for a while. Both players made their moves swiftly. They were playing a very classical and elegant game, and they surprised each other; it’s not often that excellent chess players should cross paths at random in little cafes tucked away in quiet neighborhoods. The players realized this thought completely.
“You know I have met Mikhail Tal,” Roman broke the silence, making a move and pausing. “In my line of work it was custom to meet the chess players. Chess has always played such an integral role in government. And a chess player is...expected to play this role. We say…” Roman paused, and very comically he drew in a breath and puffed his chest out. “‘Look what we’ve produced here!’ Huh?” He studied the board and hesitated with a pawn in his hand before sweeping a piece off the board and setting it down amongst the other captured soldiers. They stood lined up there, defeated. Morton couldn’t help but notice the felt was torn on the bottoms of two pieces, and he wondered about calling the fragility of his set out to Roman but thought better of it.
“Think of what a chess player is comprised of, shall we? Intelligence, creativity...and he must always be a step ahead of his opponent! And when he is not? What happens? Huh?” Roman held two open hands near his shoulders and looked around quickly with bulging eyes. “…The game is lost!” he said finally. He smiled and lowered his voice. “In some way Russian chess is a failure for this very reason: It is Russian chess. When chess and politics are one iron fist...” Roman formed a fist out of his left hand with some difficulty. “...chess cannot evolve! Take this book.” He gestured to the book that now worked as a coaster for his half empty cup of tea. “The Syrian-American beats Mikhail Tal the great, Why? Seirawan played a modern game. Russia is slow and heavy handed in its methods, and this is the sort of game Tal played–one of the finest players of our time–he played a heavy handed game, a Soviet game!” This last line he whispered for reasons unknown to Morton.
Morton lost control of the middle and castled king-side. He wondered for a moment if a long castle would have been more appropriate as he had already advanced the pawn at h1. “Russians are the best chess players in the world…” he said after a while, a little distracted by the thought Roman could castle offensively, giving him a better position down the middle file.
“A certain kind of Russian.”
Morton sat back in his chair and wondered about the meaning of this statement.
“Incidentally, there has been an experiment. This experiment is what happens when you let a player think for himself. Do you know the outcome? We got Kasparov and you got Fischer!” Mr. Nikolaevich laughed until it drove him to a fit of coughing. “…It was a departure from our dear Botvinnik...surely!” With this last line Roman could hardly control himself–the image of the aggressive chess players in comparison with the rigorously uptight Mikhail Botvinnik was priceless.
Morton gave him some time to catch his breath before advancing his knight into a fork position, threatening a pawn and bishop. Roman sobered up for a moment and examined his options while Morton studied him a little more. He looked in his late sixties. His mannerisms were broad and sweeping. When he wasn’t talking his mouth was enveloped in this way that looked as if it would swallow itself, as if he were unabashedly unsatisfied with silence. And yet his mouth betrayed his gaze, which was remarkably concentrated, and lucid, somehow.
“Do you travel often, Christensen?”
“No.”
“Interested in our art, I presume?” Nikolaevich laughed sardonically.
He slammed his pieces down on the board with each move. His moves were authoritative and violent, betraying the character he had let on to Morton. Morton had played with this type of chess player before (They are common in Russia.) Moves were meant to be made with assurance. There was an air of battle to it. “Check.”
Morton studied the board. He had only one option.
“Check.”
He blocked check with a pawn and Roman advanced his king beside it. Morton knew the game was an irrevocable draw and allowed Roman some time to find it so that the game’s closure was mutually decided.
They shook hands.
“Fascinating...” Roman shook his head and watched the sparse, unmoving pieces on the board. He seemed to process the workings of their game in his head, and as he did this, he produced two small balls, yellow and blue, from his jacket pocket. He then rolled the balls around in his right hand and smiled at Morton, looking him directly in the eyes.
He’s senile, flashed through Morton’s mind.
Roman reached over the board with his free hand and slid Morton’s book over to him and opened it to only a few pages past the photograph of Seirawan and Tal. He studied the page and the board and nodded his head for a moment in silence.
He showed Morton what he was looking at. Morton followed the finger that was gently tapping the page. The finger was halved and grizzled, and Morton winced a little as he took the book into his own hands. It was the notation of a game played between Mikhail Tal and Jan Timman during the 1985 Montpelier Candidate’s Tournament. The game was a draw.
Although Morton was no master, he was indeed a very fine player, and his grasp on the algebraic notations, particularly the Staunton (the primary notation in Morton’s book) was unbridled. It didn’t take long for Morton to understand the Russian’s fascination. The game they had just played was an exact mirror of the game in the picture.
Morton reread the notation. “Impossible...” he said aloud.
Roman Nikolaevich smiled and leaned forward a little. “Not impossible!”
Morton shook his head. “You knew! And you manipulated the game so that it would follow...”
“Now that is impossible!” Roman laughed. “It takes two to play! How could I have known which moves you would make? Additionally, I did not realize the significance of our game until the very end!”
“A coincidence...”
“Not just a coincidence; a mathematical anomaly beyond cal-cu-la-tion.” Roman tapped the syllables of this last word in the air above his head. It seemed to Morton he enjoyed saying it, as it was here his otherwise flawless English accent slipped and loosened that strong, guttural Russian bellow, like the sound a child makes when imitating the deep voice of an adult.
“Good players play good games, there’s only so many.”
“But a game in your book?”
Morton thought aloud. “How could we have played their game?”
Roman Nikolaevich put the balls away and steeped his tea. He put the tea bag on the table and Morton watched the steam rise from it and the water pool around it.
“Not impossible…” Roman meditated.
There was a burning light in their café, and it allowed the shadows of the objects on their table to grow with the rising sun. The book, the tea, the coffee cup, the chess pieces with their tall dark counterparts–like an other worldly game–, were all so imminently the objects of a Russian morning it gave the impression of a theatre set imitating the subtle nuances of real life. Roman, too, seemed to be entranced in the flawless beauty of their gathering, and even more so in the mystery of their game.
“Well…” Morton broke the silence. He got up slowly from the table and held a hand out to Roman–a gesture that seemed to take him by surprise.
“No.” Roman didn’t stand or take Morton’s hand, but only shook his head quickly with his arms crossed. “We must play another!”
“I’m afraid…”
Roman latched onto Morton’s arm before he could finish. The gesture was not at all violent, but Morton could see he was possessed by some notion much larger than chess.
“What is it you want with me?” Morton asked laughing.
Roman began setting the pieces back up. “Another!” He said again.
Morton hesitated and after some deliberation he sat down heavily in his chair. He played PK4.

Halfway through their second game Roman lost the look of desperation he had put on briefly as if playing a part for Morton, and after lighting a cigar and coolly blowing the smoke into the air he broke into a sort of reverie. His monologue began all at once. He had a way of moving in quick bursts as he talked, and pausing like a hummingbird in mid-flight when he didn’t. He spoke of the coincidence of their first game, and slowly he drifted to the topic of coincidence alone, or, “The millions of events that seem to come together all at once, as if hurled down from heaven,” as he put it. Roman had over sixty years of practice with conversation, and he was one of those rare men who could bring out unrelated trivialities from the void, pair them all together, and say he had never thought of it that way, as if it was all his listener’s idea–but then of course that his listener is wrong, although surely onto something. Like this he moved to the subject of his own life. Morton, having not said a word, all the while wondering how he would approach his exit soon after the game, only watched Roman with a curious smile around his lips. He seemed to move mechanically, a note Roman took down while talking incessantly.
“…I’ve made more arrests than I can count.” Here Roman stopped, finally, and watched Morton as if expecting something.
“And what was your line of work?” Morton put in halfheartedly.
“I was a KGB intelligence officer.”
Morton paused with a pawn in his hand and looked on Roman intently. “KGB?”
Roman laughed. “A conversationalist now are we?” He castled his king. “The stories I could tell you, Morton Christensen.”
“And you talk at liberty about this past of yours?”
Roman hesitated. “Just between friends, OK? We are friends, Morton?”
Morton castled.
“I don’t know what possesses me, Morton, but I want to tell you a story.” Roman slid the tea bag off the table and again began steeping his half empty cup with it–his tea had now gone completely cold. He concentrated on Morton completely as he did this to a point where Morton had to avert his eyes. He studied the board for a little while and looked up–although it was Roman’s move–and when he again saw Roman was not yet done fixing on him, he diverted his attention.
“Our chess game was perfect, Morton. And I want to tell you a story about this kind of perfection. It happens occasionally…” Roman looked down at the board dejectedly. “I am very old now, Morton. Or maybe not quite that old…” He glanced quickly at Morton, “Perhaps we are close in age, you and I? What’s that? Fifty-eight you say? Yes, of course,” he nodded and gave Morton a mysterious look. “That age seems correct.” He leaned back from the board. “I’m at that point where you take a step and...” he gestured in such a way as to look as if he were spilling something, “...there’s no predicting anything…” Roman went quiet for a moment and began again, apparently remembering his original thought. “I’m sure you’re familiar with the KGB?
“Well, now, I’m sure you are. Everyone has some idea of the dealings of our secret service. The story I’m about to tell you, Morton, is entirely true…”
Roman hadn’t made a move for a little while now, and Morton, being of little patience, could only sit and eye the torn felt of his pieces, and feel a sort of panic come over him. He dubs them “attacks,” but they are little more than movements of mistrust and forebodings of lost time working through his system as if culminating to some volcanic burst of insanity, and they pass, namely because he was never given to meltdowns, and would have no idea where to begin. He is one of those people that swallow incessantly, and only spectate as the body is consumed by a living rigor mortis. It consumes him now, and if Roman hadn’t been preoccupied with the flowery subtleties of a neighborly monologue, he’d see Morton is on the verge of falling completely apart.
“…It was 1978, I believe. I was a secret service agent for our Russian government. I was assigned a case, a certain Lev Ivanov...a Russian-American drug dealer...” Roman sputtered the words out with complete abandonment while Morton looked on in a state of paralysis. Roman seemed inwardly to enjoy torturing Morton in this way. “We had been following this Ivanov for three years, and during that time he had embarked on campaigns of magnificent proportions. You have no concept of the KGB Christensen, but allow me to tell you of its brilliant functionality: Nothing, no object, no living thing, absolutely nothing in Russia escaped our watchful eye. We were everywhere. And we knew Lev, we knew him completely, and we watched him with such detail, such attention...well…that was our game.”
Roman was fixed on Morton, and so absolutely engaged in the necessity of this conversation, it seemed, momentarily to Morton, the inevitability of its conclusion was certain. He listened to Nikolaevich completely now, and as Roman went on, Morton fell deeper into this paralysis of thought and body.
Roman leaned forward so that his head nearly met Morton’s as he spoke.
“...Ivanov had a brother, and the two of them had worked out a series of vast purchases throughout Moscow and Leningrad. Although this brother, this certain Alexei, was not…the pest his older brother was, the two were inseparable, and we watched them, Christensen, with great detail.” Roman leaned back in his seat and, seeing that he had Morton’s attention, adopted a more relaxed tone.
Roman made a move and watched Morton distractedly study the board and make his.
“They had passports. There were very many, and everywhere they went a red flag went up. They had passed checkpoints all over the country. We had agents in Irkutsk, Minsk, and some of the furthest regions in Siberia who kept a close eye on them. Of course, they were not top priority. If I could be honest here, more than anything our government was interested in espionage, and it was here we paid the closest attention, but drug dealing, moreover American drug dealing, was certainly a reprehensible offense.
“You must understand the KGB, Christensen. It is like a bear that waits in hibernation. One thinks it is asleep, but stir a leaf, break a twig, lift a rock, and his eye will open. That eye will follow you everywhere.” Roman changed his face so that it appeared he was sleeping, and opened one eye as he talked.
“Once we are alerted to a...presence, in that very instant, we know our man better than he knows himself.” Roman made a move. “So now, where was I? Ah, the coincidence! My division had hardly taken an interest in Lev Ivanov. The man was a ghost and a vagrant and could be dealt with, should he surface and demand the attention of those institutions around him, by the local police. It wasn’t until a certain heroin purchase made here in Moscow with the help of our mafia that we began to look at Ivanov more closely. What was so strange about him, Christensen, was his arrogance. With all his passports, which incidentally could at this time be purchased easily in Moscow, he simply had taken no other precautions. It was as if he wanted to be found. You see, drug dealing was a constant affair, and I don’t have to alert you to the idea that our KGB and mafia were essentially the same thing, but...” Roman paused. “It was something about Ivanov’s openness that caught our attention. We had to ask ourselves, ‘If a man such as this, an American, wants our...’” Roman paused and laughed to himself a little, “‘Wants our heat,’ right? Is that how it is said, the heat?” Morton nodded silently. “We asked ourselves, ‘Why?’ It was here we thought, ‘C.I.A.’ An agent. Thus Lev Ivanov had our attention completely.”
Roman pulled another cigar out of his jacket pocket and bit the end off. The other, half smoked cigar, lay burning at the end of the table. He lit up and puffed the smoke slowly and quietly, so that the air around the two chess players was stagnant and hazy, and the world around them–the shop, and the window where one could see people beginning their hurried morning routine–disappeared. There were only the two of them now, in this thick haze of smoke and hushed discussion.
“I should tell you that, after all, Ivanov was no agent. I knew this, and more than anything I knew he was only stupid and arrogant, and had this notion the KGB would lose interest in him. He was half correct. I was left with the case after further investigation proved he was what he appeared to be: a swindler and a drug dealer. KGB had bigger cases. I don’t need to tell you of our…operations,” he smiled. “So it was just me–a young officer eager to leave this case and head on to espionage divisions–and a network of unlimited, and yet, coveted resources to shake up this Ivanov and his rogue brother, who, at this very moment, had taken an apartment in Moscow. These brothers, according to our sources, were very close. And other than the occasional purchase Lev would make on his own after much chiding from Alexei, they were every hour of the day together...”
Save the attention Morton showed the game he hadn’t moved a muscle. Now, as if stricken by his inability to shake Roman from his solitary morning, or a notion entirely different, Morton struck the chess board with his fist so that several pieces overturned. It was here that culminating volcano inside of him seemed to boil over, although he himself had little presentiment he would strike the board. Roman, apparently less surprised than Morton himself, paused and watched Morton closely. One again he put on that same sardonic smile on his face, as if, Morton thought, he were trying to seduce Morton into an emotional reaction.
With an expression of anguish surprising for Morton, he whispered in a tone denoting total honesty and panic, “What is it you want with me?”
Here Roman laughed and sat back in his chair. “Just a story between friends, Morton, a story between friends. I thought you’d appreciate it…because of our chess game...well now I see I have overstayed my welcome?”
Morton watched Roman, and for a brief moment neither of them spoke.
“Please, allow me to finish my story. I see by your expression you are beginning to come around. I believe the ending will interest you the most, Christensen.”
Morton, feverish with anxiety, clasped his hands together and looked down at the chessboard. The game was now unplayable, and he watched the queen as it rolled back and forth on its side.
“I have spent many years studying this day. Not because it was of special interest to my institution, but because the...circumstances of its closure struck me completely. I have since put the pieces together, and what I’ve constructed, I believe, is the truth of what happened.” Roman looked at the board and steadied the queen with his hand. He leaned forward and fixed his eyes on a shaking Morton Christensen. “On August the 21st.1981, Alexei Ivanov; fluent in Russian; a man of few attachments; a man involved in dealings reaching far over his head, received word from a close ally, a certain Ivan Volkovsky, that his brother, Lev Ivanov, had been taken by the KGB and killed that morning. Immediately after hearing this news, Alexei climbed the stairs to the top of his building and met the day. He looked out over a busy Moscow. He paused there for a moment and let the gravity of his older brother’s death sink in. He looked down at the little street below him, said goodbye to this world, and jumped seven stories.” Roman leaned back in his seat.
“The truth about that morning…what Alexei did not know, was that the information he had received was incorrect. It is true that we had taken Lev in for questioning–it was not my call, and we had been making certain bureaucratic changes I won’t be mentioning now that affected our position on drug dealing. So he was taken, but after spending some time with him we learned he and Alexei were not working alone, and were instead involved in something much larger than the both of them. And this attracted our attention, and through our...methods...he told us everything we needed to know. We had names, we had kingpins, and we had leads that connected other cases. We knew he was telling the truth. So we let him go with the understanding we would contact him soon and he would be required to do what we asked of him. But word travels fast in the underworld, and it was already out that Lev was taken. This kind of ‘informant’ tactic is rarely used...it was understandable that Ivan was under the impression Lev was already dead, which, in any other circumstance, I can assure you Morton, would be certain.
“So, here is poor Alexei in mid-flight, and, wouldn’t you believe it? Here is his brother, very much alive, heading home as instructed by our organization. This is where our anomaly, our…chess game,” he laughed, “settles in. At the precise moment Lev Ivanov approaches the building his poor younger brother is hurling through the air above him. Alexei strikes his brother and kills him instantly. Alexei lives, his brother does not. Amazing, isn’t it? I imagine in all the world there are few stories like it. But it exists! I can testify to it completely. Our analysts who later studied the scene, gave this account: ‘When the jumper hit Lev, he did it in such a way as to break Lev’s neck instantly with his chest, thus, on immediate impact, he must have broken several ribs. The blood trails show the jumper had crawled into an alley, and moved this way, on his arms, dragging his broken legs, for thirty-five feet. The trails end rather abruptly, and show he was taken away in a car shortly after.’ Do you want to know how we knew it was Alexei that jumped?” Roman smiled at Morton and waited for his response, but Morton did not respond, and only sat heavily in his chair with a sort of darkness looming over him. Roman, only encouraged by Morton’s obstinacy, carried on more excitedly. “The blood, Morton! The blood had pooled by Lev’s broken neck! And here are handprints all over his sleeping head! The evidence shows the jumper had spent time with Lev holding his head in his hands and, indicative by the dried salt on Lev’s face, weeping!
“No one had seen the incident, so we had no witnesses. But we were certain any other jumper would have cried out for help. Alexei, on the other hand, under the impression he was a target, could not. Only he would have crawled away like that, in such pain and agony. And only he would have been taken away by car–by the very same Ivan Volkovsky who provoked the jump in the very first place! Ironic?
“They must have hidden away with what money Alexei had already saved. He would have had to procure some doctor, and by sheer luck, work himself to health over the course of many years. He has since acquired new passports...and some…minor illegal work. He is still watched, of course, but since I had the case, it had been my business, and I never allowed an arrest. He is no longer a threat...he is a broken man...his ribs and his legs might have since healed with some difficulty...but his soul left him with the crack of his brother’s neck. He lives his life in solitude, entirely beaten by the shock of his role in his brother’s departure from this world. If he is a criminal, it is only because there is no other justice in his life. His life is entirely injustice. You might wonder, why doesn’t he kill himself? The answer to this question is yet another question, why? He must ask himself this every waking moment. You see, he cannot kill himself. He lives in a state of constant shock and disbelief, so completely stricken by the gravity of his injustice. His life is a shadow of that very moment; the very sound of his brother’s breaking neck.”
Roman paused and looked down at the chessboard meditatively. “Can you imagine, Christensen, the weight of such a thing? The perfection of their encounter? It is just like our game; that rare moment where the event mirrors a mathematical improbability. As if, if his life or this game were to begin again, it would take millions of turns until it took that turn, and acquire that shape.” Roman shook his head, “He must live his life searching for some pattern in everything, or the missing piece that gives his life some degree of significance.” He picked a pawn up off the board and studied it. “He is like a chess player, playing the same game again and again. He is playing fate. He has played our game, and he spends the rest of his life wishing he could somehow reset the pieces and begin differently. But he cannot! The game began the second he entered this world and ended the moment he realized it was his brother that broke his fall. It was inevitability. And the outcome will always be the same.”
Roman began setting the pieces up on the board while smiling at Morton. “Shall we play another? I can assure you our game will have a very different outcome.”
Morton said nothing, and rather morosely, he watched Roman’s giant hands stand the pieces on the board. It would be their third game–their second had ended in an incompletion, meaning it was a draw.
Their game was slow moving, and neither player said a word. It was mechanic, and the two played as if consumed with some idea, both entirely removed from the outcome. In the middle-game Roman had Morton running, and everywhere he went he encountered a wall or a trap, and with each solution the algorithms formed still more problems until, much like their first game, it became a game of pawns. Both players marched and sealed territory for their pieces. The final pawns were taken and the board was left empty, save two solemn kings.
The two players studied the board.
“Don’t worry, we won’t have to go looking through your book for this game,” Roman laughed.
Morton, no longer with his hands and his mind busy moving pieces and studying possible moves, was left with his hands clasped tightly around his book. He did not take his eyes off the board, and Roman did not take his eyes off his opponent. The two said nothing for a while, and only sat like this, in silence and suspension, until the shop owner dropped a dish somewhere in the kitchen, causing a loud crack.
All at once Morton jumped up from the table. Roman stood up too, and his jacket opened slightly enough for Morton to see the Tokarev pistol holstered below his left shoulder. Morton went for the gun and Roman caught his arm. Morton reached with his other arm and Roman grabbed this too, so that the two of them stood with Roman holding both of Morton’s hands to the table. Morton did not struggle, and Roman made no move to let go of Morton’s arm and reach for his gun himself. The chess players only stood like this, momentarily studying each other. Morton looked to Roman entirely defeated, and in his eyes was a sort of wisdom, as though Morton were so completely used to being helpless in this way he could have imagined for himself no other outcome.
Roman said in Russian, I’m so sorry Alexei.
Alexei Ivanov turned his head away from Roman, and Roman loosened his grip. The two opponents stood there for a moment when all at once Alexei turned and hastily walked out of the cafe. He dragged his leg as he walked.
Roman Nikolaevich stood there smoking after Alexei had already gone. He bent down and picked the chess book up off the ground and opened it to the photograph of Seirawan and Tal. He stood the pieces on the board, and for a long while he followed the game to Tal’s eventual resignation in silence. He had four pawns to Yasser’s seven. Tal had no choice but to resign, this much was clear to Roman. Where it is unclear in other areas of life, the conclusion in chess is imminent and unavoidable, and there is a pattern, physical proof, that one can follow from the beginning to the end. It was right there in front of him in black and white notation–a language of history free of interpretation. And yet, as he neared the end of the game, he couldn’t help but hope the outcome would somehow turn out differently for Tal.

Pails Beneath Blue Skies

2009-09-27T12:39:00.000-07:00

Nathan has this Great Dane that’s real big, almost bigger than me. I’m taller than it now but not by much. The dog’s always out cause he’d burrow under the fence or just jump clean over it –you can’t keep a Great Dane fenced in, just try it, it won’t work. It bolts too, like lightening, just this pale streak shattering the horizon. You can’t chase after it either. Dogs like that are free. If it’s your dog it’s because it wants to be your dog.
We stood in the piss-yellow wheat field not far from the house. We liked to go in a little ways –not so far that we can’t hear Nate’s parents when they call but just far enough in that we can’t see them and they can’t see us. Nate wanted to show me what happens when you throw a stick just past the old water well.
He caught the dog’s attention with the stick. It stood there just stupid, looking at it like it’s fillet o’ cat. Nathan threw it hard and Dane bolted. The well was covered a little by the wheat but we knew where it was. I gave Nate a look like, I hope you know what you’re doing and he just gave me that jackass smile of his. The dog jumped like I’d never seen before. It was like something in the Olympics. I knew it landed on the ground cause I saw the wheat shake ahead of us and his big fat head peak through with the stick in his mouth. That well is a five-by-five hole in the ground. I couldn’t believe he cleared it.
Nathan punched me in the arm. “What the hell did you do that for?” I asked him, rubbing the sting out. Nate has these bony ass fists that hurt like hell.
“You didn’t believe me,” he smiled.
“You never even told me he could do that,” I told him.
The dog got tired and sat down in the piss-yellow wheat grass and we jumped on top of him, trying our best to ride him before he shot off too fast for us to hang on. We tumbled a little and got up. There’s parts of wheat that hurt when it gets you right. It’s not all soft like it seems.
Walking out of the wheat field we ran into Peter Jenkins. Jenks is a big fat kid Nate goes to school with. He always wears these striped collared t-shirts that are too small for him and he kind of waddles like an out-of-breath penguin when he walks. Jenks lives about a mile down the road.
“Hiya guys,” he gave us this big rainbow wave.
“You walked all the way down here Jenks? Jesus, look Clem, he looks like he’s about to pass out!” Nate laughed and slapped me on the shoulder. I laughed a little too.
“Shut up!” Peter shouted. He walked with us on the edge of the field. From where we were standing I could see this fort we built out in the woods one summer. It was a big project. It was me, Jenks, Nate, and Nate’s sister, Karen. We don’t play on it much anymore cause Nate says forts are for kids. I still want to play on it though. Maybe it’s cause I’m fourteen and Nate just turned fifteen. He told me that once you turn fifteen everything changes. I wish I could hurry up already. He caught a growth spurt too. I feel like he left me behind and we’re only eight-and-a-half months apart.
Nathan’s my cousin. My parents drop me off out here every summer. They say the country’s good for me. I think that’s all trash, cause really, we’re not even from the city. We live outside San Antonio, way outside, and in my mind that’s country enough. I don’t like when they tell me that, like we’re city people, cause when my friends here in Marion hear it they make fun of me. They say they’re tougher out here and that I’ve had it easy. That’s all nonsense though. Nate just acts tough. I could beat him up, I think, if I worked at it, like Rocky or Raging Bull or something.
“You guys hear? There’s a dead Mexican come up in the dirt.”
Nathan and I just looked at Jenks.
“You didn’t hear?” he said.
“What the hell are you talking about Jenks?” Nate asked him.
“My dad told me he was out plowing and found a skeleton with the clothes still on, all torn up. You know how my dad’s all into army stuff? He recognized the uniform. It’s a Mexican from…” Jenks paused and took the both of us by the arm and slowed us down, “Santa Anna’s army.”
Nate fell over laughing. He did an impression of Jenks, “It’s a Mexican from…Santa Anna’s army.” I laughed too. Jenks was unimpressed.
“I’m not kidding!”
“Your dad’s crazy as hell! There wasn’t even any fighting out here, and they didn’t even bury anybody,” Nate said.
Peter got all red faced and started huffing and puffing. The thing about Jenks is, his dad is crazy. He wears this confederate uniform he had inherited from some great grandfather or something. It’s all tattered and dirty. He wears it all the time. He drinks a bunch too, and does these flag ceremonies in the mornings. I know because Nate and I went out there one summer. We woke up early and went and saw him. Six a.m. he was out there with the uniform and sword all raised high in the air and everything with poor Peter Jenkins all groggy-eyed, still half asleep, pulling on the flag rope. When old man Jenks started blowing on the horn we had to go –we were laughing so hard we thought he’d hear us.
I smoothed things over, “so have you seen the body, Peter?” I called him Peter. You call him Peter when he gets to a point like his head is gonna explode. Calling him Peter kinda turns the heat down.
He softened up. “No, but my dad has, and he didn’t even touch it. He just left it there and started making phone calls. That’s why I came over here, to tell you guys so we can go together?”
Nate gave me this long smirk. “I’ll tell you what, Clem, if there is a dead Mexican out there, I bet he has a sword or something we can sell.”
I thought about it. I’ve never seen a dead body before. And I can’t be sure I want to. But if I act all wuss like to Nathan he’s going to hound me about it for weeks. “Sounds cool,” I said.
“Lunch time! Lunch time! Let’s go boys! Hurry the hell up!” We could make out Nathan senior hollering in the air out by the house. He had his stick out, which meant if we didn’t go to him he was gonna come to us, which is basically the worst thing ever.
“You guys have to go?” Jenks looked all disappointed.
“Why don’t you go look at the Mexican for us and tell us about it. And if it’s there we’ll go look,” Nate told him.
“I don’t want to go alone…and anyway, if we wait too long my dad’ll have taken it out. He says he wants to have it stuffed or something, I dunno.”
“We’ll go later, come on Clem, he’s got the stick.” Nathan signaled towards the house.
Nate Sr. was banging it up against the wall now, red faced as hell.
“Seeya Peter!” I waved as we walked away. Peter was already walking along the field line back to his house. It would take him over an hour to get home the way he walks. He was already soaked through with sweat.
“Dead Mexican my ass,” Nate murmured.
I turned and followed Nate back to the house with Dane noiselessly trailing behind.

Truth is, I don’t really like it out here. Nathan senior works us half to death on weird projects he doesn’t even know what to make of. Like fixing the fence or moving bricks from one place to another. Half the time we just work and don’t ask any questions. Last summer I came back home with blisters and scratches and my back hurt like hell. My mom said I wouldn’t have to come out here anymore if I didn’t want to but my dad butted in and said the work was good for me. I don’t know what he was talking about. First of all, he works in an office and mom tells him all the time he doesn’t know the first thing about work. Second, how can work be good for anybody? It’s terrible. If you work too much you wind up looking like Nathan senior (mom calls him the Marlboro man.)
Aunt Ellie is crazier than Nathan senior, but in a different way. She sits on the couch all day long watching Days of Our Lives drinking wine with ice in it. Sometimes she mixes it with Diet Pepsi. It smells the whole house up, especially when it’s four-hundred degrees outside. She keeps her Pepsi and ice in a little cooler by the couch, and when she doesn’t, she makes us get it for her. Every two minutes I have to come up and fill her glass with ice and get the Franzia out of the fridge. She told me I have to bring her the box cause if I fill it in the fridge I’ll spill it everywhere (which I did, once). I hate the smell of that boxed wine. It smells like cardboard and vinegar. She gets it all over the place, too.
Aunt Ellie calls us the empty pail kids. She says it’s like we’re waiting for something that never comes. She says it will never come, and not to get our hopes up. I have no idea what the hell she was talking about.

Lunch is that tuna out of the can stuff on grilled cheese sandwiches. It’s not bad, especially if you pour ketchup on it.
Nathan senior needed us to fix the latch on the fence again cause when we let Dane out we broke it somehow –which isn’t true at all. That stupid fence latch was so rotten it probably fell off on its own. So Nate and I went into the storage shed and got the screwdriver and hammer. We took a hook down from the wall Nate sr. was using to hang one of his drills.
Easiest solution: screw an open and closed hook that latch together right into the gate. Nate Sr. had some elaborate thing planned out for us. This project would take us ten minutes.
It took two hours. Nate couldn’t figure out where to put the hook and neither of us could guess how we were supposed to open it from inside. So we just did two hooks, one on both sides. And if you needed to undo both hooks, we had a thin piece of sheet metal by the gate you would use to slide through the crack and lift the other hook up. Problem solved.
Uncle Nathan came out to have a look at our work. This look of despair just kind of crawled all over his face. “What’s the problem?” Nate Jr. asked. “It’s a latch. That’s what you wanted, right? Problem solved.”
Uncle Nathan just shook his head at us. “You boys have some kind of plans today?”
We both nodded our heads.
“Well you can cancel them,” he smiled.
Nate and I looked at each other. “But we were going to see the Mexi…”
Nate cut himself short knowing full well what his dad’s reaction to digging up the alleged dead Mexican would be.
“Go take a bath!” He told us.
It was only three o’ clock. Taking a bath would mean we were in for the night, which would be terrible. And anyway, taking baths is the worst thing ever. They made us take baths together to save water. My parents would never in a million years make us do that. The first time Nathan stayed at our house it was hilarious. I was getting into the bathtub by myself, when all of a sudden, the door swings open and there’s Nathan, half naked, about to climb in with me. Right then my dad happened to be walking down the hallway and he just stops, looks at Nathan and at me, and all loud like, he says, “What the fuck is this?” Nathan was so embarrassed he almost cried.
We took a bath. Nathan made fun of me cause, and this isn’t even true, his dick’s bigger than mine, which, again, just isn’t true at all. It’s the same thing every evening, too. Anyway I got Nathan to play boats with me in the water. He doesn’t do it as much anymore but he still secretly likes it. Nathan has over twenty of these plastic boats.
Boats works like this: the ships are split up and dealt out to one another based on size and shape. You then choose a boat at random and pit it against the other sailor’s boat. The way you fight is, get on opposite sides of the tub and sail them at one another. Whichever one careens off course after it’s hit, is the loser. The game’s a lot of luck cause the person with the biggest boat usually wins. But you can only play one boat once, so you have to hope yours is bigger. It’s kinda dumb though cause we always play our biggest boats first anyway, and then wind up just getting tired of the game and getting out. When you’re in a bathtub for too long it gets awkward when the water goes cold.

We walked through the field in our pajamas. Four in the afternoon and we were in our pajamas. Why? Cause Nathan sr. basically told us we couldn’t leave the house for the rest of the evening and made us put them on. Once we were in the kitchen, both wearing pajamas and sandals, we couldn’t go back to Nate’s room to change, cause if we did that his dad would see us (the living room’s right near Nate’s room.) So if we were going to make the slip, we’d have to go through the kitchen window without them hearing us, and then into the backyard, and out the gate.
We really did a shoddy job with that gate latch, no kidding. It took us ten minutes just to get it open. We let Dane out too. Dane’s never seen a half buried Mexican, either.
On our way past the field, careful not to hit the main road, we ran into Bobby Fisher. Bobby Fisher, not Bobby Fischer like the chess player (I know how his name is spelled cause my dad’s really into him, also, Searching for Bobby Fischer is the coolest movie ever). Bobby was older than us by about two years and he was dating, or so rumor has it, Nate’s sister. Nate didn’t like it but there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
“Hey kiddos,” he said, passing us and trotting into the greenbelt. We cringed a little. He always acts way older than us, calling us names like squirts and sports. If you ask me, he’s a real asshole.
We followed him in the greenbelt. “Where you headin’?” Nate asked him. Nate acts all cool when Bobby’s around.
“I’m meeting a friend,” Bobby said.
“Which…” Nate had his answer before he finished his question. Bobby was meeting Sally Brooke –basically one of the hottest girls in Nate’s grade. She was sitting on a rock right before the part where the greenbelt gets heavy.
Nate looked a little put off by the whole thing. True, he’s not into the idea of Bobby dating Karen, but even worse is the idea that Bobby’s playing footsy with the whole neighborhood while Karen’s in summer school.
“Hey, you guys smoke…” Bobby paused by the rock Sally was sitting on and looked around to see if anyone was eavesdropping, “grass?”
I looked down at the ground, I didn’t see him but I was sure Nate nodded at Bobby and gave him some stupid coolly high-five or something.
“Rad!” Said Bobby.
Truth is, Nate’s never smoked, I’ve never smoked, plain and simple.
Bobby said, “You want a dime bag?”
“Sure,” Nate looked at me. “How much is that?”
Bobby looked at Sally, who smiled at him. Sally’s got the biggest chest I’ve ever seen. It was like someone smaller was gonna crawl out of there, like those clowns in the little car we saw at the circus this one time.
“Eight bucks?”
“Eight bucks?!” Nate hollered. He hesitated a little and looked at me. I saw him out of the corner of my eye but I wasn’t paying any attention. I couldn’t take my eyes off Sally’s chest. “Shouldn’t a dime bag be a dime?” Nate asked.
Bobby laughed. “I don’t know why they call it that. You want it or not?”
Nate slapped me on the back of the head, “Wake up!” I snapped out of it and the two of us searched ourselves for money. The pajamas didn’t have any pockets.
“No money batman?” Sally was talking to me. My pajamas had the bat symbol on the chest and a Velcro utility belt. Pretty ace if you ask me. But girls don’t understand stuff like that, so I just shrugged all embarrassed and everything.
“Can we pay you tomorrow?” Nate asked.
Bobby looked like he was pretending to think it over. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it was all secrets or something, cause when he looked at Sally she just laughed and said, “Sure, tomorrow.” The whole thing seemed mysterious.
He left and made us wait there with Sally, who just looked around like she was bored or something. I hate girls, really. They don’t know how to do anything. Well, Karen’s nice, and she did good on the fort. I thought she was gonna hang drapes and stuff on it but she didn’t. She made this swing that was really cool. My swing was crappy so we took it down.
I played with Dane a little while. If you hold the stick high over your head he’ll put his paws on your shoulders and jump up at it.
After about ten minutes or so Bobby came back with the bag and this huge smile on his face. He held it up to us. His fingers were all muddy. “Here you go kiddies, pure St. Augustine.”
Nate and I looked at one another. “Is that a good one?” Nate asked.
Bobby just laughed and nodded his head. He threw us the bag. Nate asked what else we needed and Bobby gave us a lighter and a look like we should get out of there now. We both looked at Sally, who was rearranging her chest or something.
Once we got a safe distance from the greenbelt we walked into the wheat brush and inspected the contents of the bag. Nate acted like he knew what he was doing. He smelled it and smiled, “That’s the real stuff, boy.”
I smelled it too. It smelled like lawn fertilizer. I thought maybe Nate doesn’t know what lawn fertilizer smells like cause he’s never had a lawn, just gravel and wheat. “Is it supposed to smell like that?”
“Of course! Idiot!” Nate hollered.
He said you needed paper or something to smoke it with. This much I knew. We couldn’t find any paper. There was just a cardboard box we found lying near the greenbelt.
Nate picked it up and started shredding it. “This will have to do.”
We rolled the grass up in the cardboard into this huge cigarette deal. It was massive. It looked like we were gonna blow darts out of it like these bushmen do in the nature videos.
Nathan lit up and coughed his ass off and handed it to me. I took a long puff and coughed too. “Jesus!” I shouted.
“It’s supposed to be like that, you gotta stay with it, I think.” Nathan sucked on it some more and handed it back to me.
Nate’s dad burns scrap wood and stuff in the backyard sometimes. It tasted just like that. Like hot paint. My arms felt like jelly.
“This is the life man…” Nate lay down in a patch of straw and looked up at the sky. I did too.
We passed the cardboard cigarette back and forth, watching the birds swoop from the greenbelt into the wheat field and disappear.

“What’s that?” I opened my eyes and saw the silhouette of Peter Jenkins blotting out the sun. His belly hung over his waist just slightly uncovered by that crusty t-shirt he wears all the time. He hung over me like that awhile, like I was Japanese and he was Godzilla.
I sat up and looked over at Nathan, who had the cardboard smoked down to almost nothing. He looked like something I’ve never seen before.
“Forget it Jenks, you’re not cool enough,” Nate said.
I had a headache the size of an anvil. “How long was I out? Is it supposed to be like this?” I felt like I wanted to puke.
Jenks bent down and picked up the bag and took some of the grass out. “Grass?” he said.
“Duh,” said Nate.
“No. Grass grass, not grass. You guys are smoking lawn grass. Why you smoking lawn grass?”
Nate and I stood up and looked at the bag. I couldn’t figure out how I didn’t recognize it before. Bobby had it all twirled up to make it look different, but I shoulda caught it. Jenks was dead right, we were smoking lawn grass.
Nate must have realized it the same time I did, cause this look just came over him like he was gonna flip. “But, why do I feel all strange then?”
“Cause you were smoking cardboard!” Jenks doubled over in laughter. Watching him I couldn’t take it anymore and started laughing myself. Bobby really ran one over us. Bobby Fisher. Not like Bobby Fischer. Bobby Fischer wouldn’t sell us lawn grass. He’d tell us to keep our money and disappear.
“Where’s Dane?” Nate asked, looking around.
We called his name out and he came running. Dane always comes when you call him.
Jenks got up and dried the funny-tears from his eyes. Nate punched him in the arm and he just winced a little and laughed some more. Jenks has big wobbly arms, and he takes a punch like a champ. Not like me.
“So you guys want to see the Mexican?” Jenks asked.
Nate and I suddenly remembered why the hell we came out here in the first place.
“I haven’t seen it yet but dad still has it out there in the dirt I think.”
We walked down by the pond between Jenks’s house and Nate’s house. Nate wanted to dunk his head in water cause the cardboard gave him a headache, too. The whole time walking down there he was going on about how he’d like to show Bobby Fisher a piece of his mind, which is really all just garbage cause Nate’s fond of Bobby and we all knew it. I asked him to just forget about it and Jenks changed the subject back to the Mexican, and when he did that, I felt like I was getting hit with something all at once. I had this feeling like we were gonna go take a look and I’d bend down and the bones will just claw up at me and pull me deep into the ground. I saw Evil Dead, too, so I know how that goes.
That well Dane jumped over, I thought about that. One summer we threw rocks down there trying to measure how deep it goes. We never heard the clunk. It was like they just kept falling. I think that’s what it’s like to die, like you’re a rock just hurling through darkness.
When we got to the pond Nate just rope swung straight in, pajamas and all. It looked ace. He let go of the rope and did this back flip thing in the air. I couldn’t do that. Maybe they had something with this country/city thing. Nate’s got this way of unknowingly doing things real tough like. Nonchalant. That’s the word. I know that cause I misspelled it in this year’s spelling bee. I didn’t even make round two.
I swung on the rope but I did it real easy. I can’t do that diving stuff. I worry about rocks.
Jenks just stood in the leafs watching us. We had our pajamas on and we got to that point where we knew when we got home we’d catch hell but right now it didn’t matter.
Dane backed up a little and ran head first towards the water. He jumped in hard and swam in circles.
“I bet that Mexican has gold or something!” Nate yelled, splashing water all around him.
I dunked my head underwater and swam around looking for fish. People say they stock this pond, but I haven’t seen one fish in all the time I’ve swam here. I open my eyes under water, too.
“Come on guys!” Jenks did that big rainbow wave he does and we sauntered out of the water. Even half past six it’s hot as hell. We figured the clothes would dry on our way back.
“I bet if we dug underneath him we’ll find a treasure chest,” Jenks said, picking his nose and wiping snot all over his shirt.
I tried riding Dane again but he just shot out underneath me.
“They didn’t even have much gold…hey wait a minute! I bet he was a deserter or something, why else would he be all the way out here?” Nate said.
I thought about that. In Texas history class all they ever talked about was the Alamo. There was this General Wool or something that marched from San Antonio to Chihuahua. And then there was this Taylor. Anyway, what I remember for sure was that the Americans were driving them deeper into Mexico, and there was nothing resembling a battle in East Texas. Especially Marion of all places. So how the hell did he get out here?

By the time we reached Jenks’s farm our clothes were nearly dry and Nate and I gave a sigh of relief. Now we’d only have to explain the sneak out (if they hadn’t already gone to bed and didn’t notice we were missing).
“Hey, my dad’s out there!” Jenks hollered.
Sure enough, there was a tractor plow out on the field and two people sitting next to it in lawn chairs drinking beer out of a cooler. We weren’t close enough to see the Mexican yet but from where we were standing I could make out old man Jenks’s confederate uniform clear as day. He was tossing back a beer and listening to oldies with his buddy, Jim Fisher –that rat Bobby’s dad.
I felt that heaviness again and wanted to turn back.
“Don’t be a wuss.” Nate sped up a little and I followed after him. “Man…I bet crazy old Jenks probably already took our gold!” He broke into a run.
We, all three of us, ran up to the plow. It was there, just like Jenks said. The skeleton of a man. It wasn’t entirely uncovered but you could see the hand gripping out at the sky and the open mouth of the skull. It was as if he were clutching out at the sun, one last time before being dragged back down into the ground. We fell silent.
“That there’s a real bo-ner-fied Mexican,” old man Jenks smiled at us and rocked back a little in his lawn chair.
The man in the dirt had bits of tattered jacket hanging off him, and bits of metal shone through what was left of the ribcage. You could see the butt of a sword sticking out a little from the ground.
“We’re waitin’ for the Ar-che-o-ology Society to come out here and dig his ass up,” said Bobby sr., a big half-toothless smile on his face.
Nate turned to me and said, “Let’s go.” He was all red and I thought I was too. I didn’t look at him too hard cause he looked away like he didn’t want me to see him.
It really was like the Mexican was reaching for something.
I made a move to grab Peter but his arm was frozen stiff.
“Just leave him, Clem.”
We left Jenks standing there like that, just starring at the skeleton, paralyzed.

Nate and I followed the barbed wire fence line towards his house. It used to have electrical wire to keep cattle in but there’s no cattle here anymore.
We didn’t say anything for a while. I just kept my eyes fixed on the gravel road and picked out at the wire here and there. All I could think about was the image of that skeleton with its bony hand clutched out at the sky, and I remembered what Aunt Ellie said, It will never come.
The little gravel road opened up to Nate’s field and Dane trotted up ahead of us close to the field line. I walked in and Nate followed behind me like he knew where I was going. When we got to the well the both of us just kind of hung there on the rim and looked in. Nate took out that lighter Bobby Fisher gave him and dropped it in. Not a sound.

Our Darkest Hour

2009-08-20T19:51:00.001-07:00

After a colourful evening of champagne and loud talking, we awoke with the feeling of betrayal: Though the sun was expected to rise over the city of New York as it did every morning, it simply did not. Alarm clocks were checked and rechecked, spouses were woken up and forced outside in pajamas, and some of us even called our offices to announce, “No, I will not be coming in today because the sun has not yet risen.” And though we very much agreed the sun should rise, the benevolent night hung on and our sun remained obstinate.

The official call to the Southern and Western coastlines was made at five-thirty. They, of course, took the call as a joke. But when our weather bureaus and government offices called the West and Southern Coasts again at 8:00 a.m. to see if, perhaps, the sun may have risen there and just skipped the East Coast by chance, they were far more cooperative. And so by 9:00 a.m. the entire country was aware the sun had not come up, and would probably not be coming up at all.
“The exact time of the sun’s disappearance is unknown,” the Times later reports, “probably because we have no sun-watching committee in place, and had never had a need for such an institution. NASA -perhaps the only similar commission- is unfailingly without comment.”

As if by stroke of good fortune, the president had woken early on this morning to a degree of general hubbub, and, after studying the sky and speaking with his aides, called a panel of meteorologists, astronomers, physicists, and for some unknown reason, generals into a private meeting. As the panel sat quietly, not quite wanting to make that first move that turns science into an embarrassing world of paranormal happenstance, the most obvious topic of discussion, “Where is the sun?” was finally raised by the president himself. A murmur went around the room.
The first to speak was a prominent person on the defence committee. “This is a nuclear fallout from a failed shipment of warheads to Cuba.”
Here the scientists, nearly in unison and with mutual agreement, said that this was impossible, and that even after Hiroshima, the entire country didn’t see one second of darkness during the day.
After these last words were spoken –“darkness during the day,” the scientists, as if stricken by a sudden revelation, exclaimed that what we were experiencing was very obviously a solar eclipse, and that, because of some phenomenon that a certain Dr. Jarsky attempted to explain called, Miss-Gravicentrics, the moon was rooted in its place. Here other physicists put in that they may have heard of Miss-Gravicentrics, and that it’s entirely possible that climate change could have affected an unforeseen curvature in the earth’s rotation, forcing the moon to follow on an unpredicted course over the night, and thus, by force of deterrent magnetism, locked itself in place with an alignment between our point of view and the sun itself. During this oration, one of the physicists left the room and brought back several magnets and a metal sphere, and showed clearly on the table for everyone to see, how, when the magnets are positioned correctly, it can hold the sphere in place. This man nearly received a standing ovation, but was interrupted by a rather astute astronomer by the name of Flimage. The astronomer went on to point out that, aside from the theory being totally ridiculous, they had received no calls from NASA about a sudden and abrupt rotation of the moon. Here the room once again returned to its former state of tired confusion. The president finally suggested a call to NASA and was surprised to learn no one had thought of it earlier. With an air of fresh relief, NASA was called at once.
“No, we have no idea…absolutely no idea Mr. President, sir…” Checking himself, the head of NASA operations remembered a State of the Union address where the president coined the term, “Cannot is off the table,” and corrected himself. “We are expediting search expeditions,” was the first thing that came to his head.
“Search expeditions?” the president hopelessly muttered into the receiver.
“…Yes sir.”
“For the sun?”
“That is…uh…that’s correct.”
At this moment a PR representative –a noiseless, birdlike woman who is often seen energetically orbiting around the president, hurried into the room and told him an emergency meeting with the press has been called to address the issue, as, already, most of the citizens of our dark nation were already quite awake and tiredly rioting in the streets.

“I know most of you know by now that the sun is somehow missing,” the president began, weighing out each word, knowing very well that this address would be heard, referenced, and commented on by families, TV, textbooks, and academics for years to come. “We have never woken to a morning without the sun, therefore have no protocol in place. However, our experts are working feverishly at this very moment to locate the sun. Many theories have been brought up, most notably, the existence of dark matter in our universe. Our agencies, and some rather unanimously, agree the sun will resurface. After all, according to our analysts, the moon, our weather patterns, the temperature, and our satellites are behaving normally. If the sun simply blinked out of existence, this would not be so. We believe what we’re looking at is a nuclear reaction on the sun’s surface causing it to cloud over. After all, it is still somehow warm outside. In any case, there are many working theories. But I’d like to assure you, do not panic. Go to your respective jobs as usual. We’d like to show the rest of the world, when they wake up to a sunless planet, we can stay in control. So, citizens of America, on our darkest hour, I ask you to carry on normally, so that we maintain stability, and the happiness that is our right. Cannot is off the table. Thank you.”
Here the press, which were very obviously selected by a special committee to ask pleasant questions, were chosen one by one. The questions were generally about what sports teams were to do or whether this was going to affect various body cream markets and so on. Each question was expedited quickly and ended with positive results. By the end of the press conference, a great deal of the nation had accepted the loss of the sun as a temporary fact to be reckoned with.
Shortly after the conference, at roughly 11:00 a.m., the president again met with the committee. A unanimous decision was made to establish a meeting with the U.N. and involve the rest of the world in a dialogue on the issue. Here the president remarked he’d like to call the major powers separately and iron out the confusion they are probably already having as foreign journalism sweeps through the respective countries.

China informed the committee that they were already aware the sun hadn’t come up in America and many other parts of the globe, due to their esteemed astronomers working nightshifts in the joint space-station, Sirius. The sun, according to the astronauts, had suddenly disappeared. Key figures in China’s glorious space program told the astronauts that they were mistaken, and had an elevated case of space-tremors, which is rumored to affect a sense of reality. When Chinese astronomers at ground zero learned there was indeed no sun in the sky above America, Canada, the UK, parts of Europe, and a great deal of the pacific, the People’s Republic of China’s Great Bureau of Intelligence was contacted immediately. And so they had known, quite possibly before our president had even woken up. When asked what China planned to do about a morning without a sun, the great Chinese leader interrupted our president and told him he was mistaken, that although the sun did not rise in our area of the western world, it would indeed rise in China, and China would never see a morning without the sun. The conversation promptly ended.
Russia was more cordial. They informed the president they were well aware of the missing sun in our sky, as it went missing in theirs around 1:00 p.m. (sunrise, EST) and believed they had a protocol for such an event, but cannot find it. The protocol is rumoured to have existed during Yosef Stalin’s campaign. He had apparently examined every possibility for defeat, and a sudden and abrupt missing sun, making Russian winters even colder for troops already tired and hungry, was among the possibilities on this list. Now if they could only find the protocol. Russia would call America back if they can find anything.
Japan had already begun construction on a massive robotic sun which would, according to the prime-minister, be able to illuminate a small percentage of the planet. The sun would have a rotational axis and be able to swivel like a light post, it would also have a dim-switch controlled here on earth for posterity. The robotic sun, already coined, “Mr. Illuminato,” would need to be launched into space using several shuttles –an operation beyond complexity in its nature. The minister explained the original plans for the robotic sun called for solar-charging, and after realizing this didn’t make much sense, the project was overhauled. Japan would get back to America on this.
It was already obvious to the countries of Southeast Asia that America had ruined the sun. Burma, in particular (and the rest of the countries just kind of following in suit), was absolutely certain on this point.
Germany and Scandinavia were creating an innovative project called, Astriothermic Gravinatrics. The German president went on about the project in great detail, but tired, having not slept at all, he soon asked leave of the conversation.
France was much with the same sentiment as Burma, and yet declined to speak about it.
Israel faulted the Palestinians for the missing sun.
Palestine faulted the Israelis for the missing sun.
Most of the countries in the Middle East were also with the same opinion as Burma, only differing with the theory that the sun would somehow come back if America were totally wiped out.
The UK had dispatched journalists to China to see if, perhaps, the sun would indeed rise there as the Chinese government insists on it.
Mexico, in a joint operation with several South American countries, hoped, much like Japan, to build an illumination device and place it above the earth’s atmosphere. Not nearly as sophisticated as Japan’s model, and made of elements that would prove unstable leaving the earth’s atmosphere –like wood for instance, the incomplete structure will probably remain incomplete.
Several countries in Central America, with the help of Cuba, were working on thwarting the Mexican Mr. Illuminato project, coined, Senior Dias.
The sun will apparently also be rising over North Korea.
Both Africa and Egypt, upon learning the sun is missing in the western sky and those parts of Africa normally lit at 5:30 a.m. EST, celebrated in the streets, hoping also that the sun, normally blazing hot, would cease to rise over their countries for an extended period of time.
Canada figured that whatever America does to fix the problem is probably fine.
Australia was ordering tanning beds from South Korea.

We didn’t need the sun. We never needed the sun. And if the sun wants nothing to do with us, we don’t want anything to do with it. This sentiment began to spread in the early afternoon of our first day, and, bored with the ceaseless scientific dialogue fleeting across the crowded television sets, our citizens began to change the channel, making, according to the newly appointed Alaskan Federation of Sunless Psychological Reorientation, a leap of acceptance.
“Our people [Alaskan’s] never needed the sun. We can deal with sunless days. And being oriented to a state of sunless psychology, we are better equipped to tackle this problem. These guy’s in D.C., folks, they’re going to crack soon. They’re reliant on the sun, like a baby yearning for breast milk.” Here the man made a puckered baby face to the laughter and applause of an eager audience. “Do we want people like that in office? In light of all this, the A.F.S.P.R. moves to relocate the country’s capital and operations to Fairbanks, Alaska, and the powers therein.”
This oration was spoken loudly by the head of the newly appointed federation, which, according to sources in the Times, was assembled in Alaska between 11:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. that afternoon, and is rumoured to be largely made up of drug-addicts and members of gun rights groups who had happened to be, by chance, meandering near city hall during the signup.
On the set of the shabbily constructed mockup of the oval office, was a table on which sat several vitamin d lightbulbs, an energy drink containing electrolytes, and a cult 44. magnum python revolver. The man went on to say that these were the tools for success in a sunless world, and life without the sun was not the end of life.

Although the sentiment that we might as well just move on was present amongst many of our citizens, there was still, amongst the very ardent, an understanding that the sun should still be discovered, or, if the situation provokes it, turned on. To this end, our country’s leading public specialists were brought in by a special government committee, appropriately named, The Illuminists.
They sat in a brightly lit room with computers at a large round desk. On the wall were several projector screens. The camera was fixed in place. One of the men, a biologist, was explaining the importance of sunlamps.
“…Oxygen is extremely necessary on our planet,” he went on, “positioned outdoors in large-scale community gardens, sunlamps can provide the necessary false light to grow edible foods…”
Behind the set, off camera, a special, more secretive meeting was happening. Not even the president was among them. On this panel sat the heads of the defence committee, NASA, and various energy groups. The newly formed association, made mostly of wealthy corporate committees, was very deliberately entitled, “P.O.L.I.T.E.” or, Progressive Oil Liberation in Terrorist Environments. The panel lumbered in their seats heavily, each of them in suits with hands crossed, or pouring a glass of water or juice brought in pitchers by the caterers. They spoke with gravity, each of them, in turns, weighing out the costs of, what they called, a “grand-scale endeavor.”
“…According to our sources,” spoke one of the brilliant data analysts shuffling around the men handing out spec. sheets, “without sunlight we’re looking at a total meltdown of resources. Oxygen is a gradual problem. We believe our densest forests have several weeks before a massive ecological collapse. During this time we’ll have sped production of sunlamps, and can provide the necessary light to create an atmosphere of stability. The same goes with warehousing livestock. Our problem lies here; where are we going to get the energy to fuel the increase of power?”
“And the demand?” asked Halbertson, a heavyset financial advisor on the committee.
“The demand is total,” answered Goldman, a defence advisor.
“If we invest in these three areas,” the original analyst said, still passing out papers, “we will be sure we’re on the ground floor for what would prove to be a viable leverage over our consumers.”
The print-sheet he handed out showed an animation of a confused consumer shoveling money into a pyramid. The pyramid was made of three boxes, and in them were three words: Air, Light, Food. Above the pyramid, in a circle symbolizing Ra, was instead the word, Energy.
One of the men on the committee had a map of the world spread out, and on it there was a red circle drawn around the Middle East.

By 4:00 p.m. E.S.T., several journalists for the BBC were en route to China via high-speed, private aircraft (China was no longer accepting incoming flights otherwise). The windows in the aircraft were locked shut and the cabin lights were on. The journalists were eagerly expecting the Chinese sunrise. The time in the UK was roughly 9:00 p.m. It was at exactly 9:35 a.m. in the U.K. when, out of nowhere and with no warning, the sun simply was no longer above the British skies. This puts the time of the sun’s disappearance, according to the BBC but with a disagreement from the Times, at 4:35 a.m. in New York. The disagreement lies precisely in the account of a family living in Queens who later reported to the Times that they had woken at 4:45 a.m. and saw the beginning of an average NY sunrise. Many other reports also confirmed there was sunlight above NY as late as 5:50 a.m. (although these reports were muddled –most of the witnesses apparently confirmed intoxicated by operators at the 911 center).
When the journalists arrived in the Beijing airport at 5:45 p.m. our time, or roughly 5:45 a.m. Chinese Standard Time, they were promptly shuttled into the facility via a windowless terminal gate and received in a large, flowery reception centre with ingenious gilded statues and gorgeous handmade furniture. At this point they were told by a very well dressed government official, that indeed the sun had risen over China, and yet, because of an “urgent inconvenience,” the journalists could not be allowed to see it.
It could be said that outside this room there was a commotion happening. China, as anyone could have guessed, had received a number of foreign visitors over the preceding many years. Travelers come and go, and, unless in the case of a large protest or political overturn, could come and go freely. Not on this day. No one inside the country was allowed to make calls outside. Foreign websites and international email were closed to the public. Within several hours China had become a self-contained domestic affair. If a case arose where a certain family needed to fly outside the country, they were told that the air traffic control systems were temporarily shut down, and to wait. If a person were to drive down south of Yunan to the Laos border they would be stopped and told that the country they were looking to visit had also been temporarily shut down, and also to wait. So the people waited. And the crowd outside any number of the many Chinese airports was overwhelming.
The journalists, having not been outside, were expedited back to the UK. On arrival, a great time later, they reported the Chinese authority had convinced them of the sunrise, although they never saw it.

“Forty-two thousand six-hundred and sixty-eight suicides in America alone since dark-dawn,” the Times reported at 9:00 p.m. EST. “One-hundred and seventy-three thousand murders. Nine million reported robberies…” the list went on and on. The reporter now had a trust amongst America’s citizens. He had coined the terms in the early afternoon, “The Incident on New Year’s Day,” or, more appropriately, “Year Zero.” “Time,” he said, “has to be managed differently now.” Anyone that was still interested listened eagerly. “Our world has sunk into a deep decline,” he went on, “and only our friends at the committee [P.O.L.I.T.E.] can dig us out.”
By this hour P.O.L.I.T.E. had already integrated a strategy of demand manufacturing –or D.M. as they put it- into every area of our media. Their commercials, made within several hours of their 12:00 p.m. meeting, were broadcasting between news segments on every channel. The commercial featured a cartoon of tired citizens walking in the dark, illuminated only by candlelight. They looked within the throes of visible starvation, and they were sick, many of them carrying children. Suddenly lights flare up everywhere, and by each light post there are mountains of food. Now they are happy and thanking the “Committee of Sustenance” [P.O.L.I.T.E] for the nourishment.
P.O.L.I.T.E. was already acquiring massive quantities of the military infrastructure. Our government had contracted it out to them in exchange for a controlling stock in the goods and resources that, in the span of only three hours, they had already bought up. Factories producing sunlamps, magnum revolvers, and energy drinks were already in full swing, and it was outside one of these very factories that the committee now sat patiently around a large wooden table right on the tarmac. The wind was picking up, and everywhere around them there was movement. Massive trucks had been brought in and military Humvee’s were shuttling around ammunition at alarming speeds. Underneath the light of a helicopter, the final arrangements were made. The Middle East, save Israel, was to be erased in its entirety, in its place; oil wells.

The president slept badly. He had dreams of himself on a large stage surrounded by armored men in black body suits. There were floodlights on everywhere, and he was dictating something into a microphone. He wore a banner around his arm that read, P.O.L.I.T.E. He was talking in short bursts, hammering his knuckles down wildly on the podium. The people were screaming and running, every one of them, thousands of them. They weren’t Americans. He was shouting in some foreign language they understood. He raises his hands to the sky and the bullets rain down. He can feel the wind from helicopters on his head and neck. With each wave of the hand, more bullets come down. It’s dark despite the lights now.
He woke at 3:00 a.m. to a phone call brought in by his secretary. He was sleeping in his suit on a hardback chair in the oval office.
“Thank God, what have you come up with?” The president answered the phone with an air of feverish relief. It was the Russian president on the other line, and the secretary had already informed our president that the protocol had been found.
“…News not so good, I believe,” the husky, thickly accented voice replied, an intimation leaking in through the receiver making the president somehow even more impatient.
“What is it?”
“The protocol makes for gun and bullet.”
“What?”
“In box that reads, ‘Missing Sun,’ just gun and bullet.”
The president rubbed his forehead, sighing in resignation, knowing soon he’d have his hand on a red phone, and that soon he might be using the phone to make a call, the most important and horrible call in world history.
“…All Stalin’s plans are gun and bullet…” the Russian president went on.

The people of NY waited through the night in expectation. Some had fallen asleep, others were on rooftops, some were rioting in the parts of the city that weren’t already charred and burning, and many others were together in Time’s Square. They had brought in actors for the affair. One of them, famous for his crime drama series, 36 Hours, stood on a podium reading haikus about the sun. The time was 3:30 a.m., and the entire world was deep within the planet’s first ever collective witching hour. There was a light on the stage attached to a phone connected to a satellite line tied with an ethereal tether to a U.S. Embassy in the U.K. The Ambassador was expected to call the moment he saw a sudden and abrupt light in the sky. The ring of the phone was supposed to trigger the dropping of the very same ball they used for New Year’s Eve the previous evening. If the sun was going to disappear for a day, our citizens wanted a party if it decided to come back.
The expectation of a rising sun over New York was an arbitrary affair. It was almost outrageous to think that if the sun’s light had somehow ceased to be at a random moment in time, it would appear again at exactly a full rotation of its orbiting planet later. But the people of New York were no longer concerned with science. For nearly twenty-three hours they had heard nothing but scientific reason and had gotten nowhere. The sun had not been shining all day, never mind the facts; the crowd, and much of America too, had passed over into the realm of metaphysics.
Christian groups all day had crowded the streets, hollering about the apocalypse, testifying to the horrors of mankind. Whatever the occurrence was, be it a black hole vortex between the sun and the earth, sucking up light but somehow not heat (which was, at this time, the predominate theory) or punishment for being the awful race that we were, it couldn’t hurt to believe a little that, in this next very hour, the sun would rise in New York, blink into existence in Europe, light the shores of the Atlantic, and stay apparently exactly where it is in China and North Korea.
People were on the streets all over the country, and much the same in parts of Europe too, tearing a hole straight through the fabric of an endless night. They stole TV’s, lamps, and children. There were people who called themselves vampires who paraded through the night hopping around the lampposts, and biting others when the mood should strike them. The police were especially asked to shoot these ones should they be caught terrorizing the open streets.
Some groups tramped through the shopping centres carrying crosses on their shoulders and telling the world to repent. These same people were also given a great deal of TV time throughout our dark day. They were hysterical, telling us that, somewhere along the line, we had lost our way, and that the light must again be shone on our path. They were so vehement about this “light” and the obvious metaphor of our circumstance, that many of them had blinded themselves, arguing that a true Christian needs only the light of god. Needless to say, these types gained a great deal of political and social influence.
The A.F.S.P.R., after a short gunfight in Anchorage, officially gained control of the Alaskan state. By 3:00 a.m. they had successfully succeeded from the state union, illegalised birth control, and participated in at least thirteen known book burnings.

The president sat with one hand tied to a red phone in the pentagon. He was very much awake and alert. One hour had gone by since the conversation with the Russian President. He was alone in the room –P.O.L.I.T.E. had suggested he get his thoughts together. He was instructed to call them –now already en route to a general location over the Middle East, if the sun hadn’t risen over New York by 5:35 a.m.; exactly twenty-four hours since its abrupt disappearance. It should be said here that the president’s thoughts were mixed.

The city was burning, and yet there were many of us gathered in the light of the blaze, holding hands and intently watching that light on the stage. The poet’s voice had taken a backseat to the affair, and he rambled on as if totally unaware any of us had stopped listening.
“…Blazing, blazing into our hearts, you who blaze our heartfelt path, you who have lit the shores of our blazing…” At this time the citizens of our city were getting anxious. A murmur went around the crowd. No one really knew what time the sun usually rose on January second.
“…You who are so bright, warming our whimsical fancies to our heavenly content…”
By 4:55 a.m., people began to get desperate. Already there was wailing and moaning in the crowd. Others remarked that perhaps we weren’t seeing the light because of the smoke, and some others said that last year the sun’s light didn’t reach our city until close to 6:00 a.m. Impatient, our citizens began to turn their frustrations on the actor, who, lost in his thirty-page poem, read louder.
A cabbage was thrown, then a shoe, and finally there was a barrage of objects being hurled at the stage. Many missed and hit several of the actors nervously in line to read their respective poems. Panic had struck Time’s Square. And right when the hysterics had culminated into a thick, irreproachable frenzy, a hush went around the audience. The light on the stage began to blink. The phone rang over the loud speaker.
“Hello?” the actor answered anxiously, already covered in a thick layer of garbage.
A pause. The crowd now wavered in anticipation.
“Hello?” the voice said.
“Yes, Ambassador?!” the actor lit up.
Our people were feverish with expectation.
“Is Juan there?”
“Who?”
“Sorry, I think I have the wrong number.”
At this point, the New Year’s Ball –which was now connected to the phone line, dropped suddenly, and fireworks of all kinds shot from the stage together with music from the loud speakers. Confusion reverberated through the audience; they were promised festivities when the sun began to rise, and although there was a great deal of commotion, the sun had still not yet risen.
The actor hung up in resignation, expecting another onslaught of garbage from the uneasy crowd.

It was 5:10 a.m. and the president sat over a cup of coffee, drinking with his free hand, and hovering over the light of the red phone with his other. After a few moments the phone rang. It was a field officer for P.O.L.I.T.E. The president was confused –he thought he was instructed to call P.O.L.I.T.E. at 5:35 a.m., and here they were calling him.
“We already did it,” the man said, cutting in and out with the chopping sound of helicopter blades. The president could hear laughter in the background. “Time bombs,” the excited field officer let on. “We just parachuted them in and got the hell out of there.”
The president was entirely shaken, and, trying to contain himself, asked, “How long ago did you… ‘do it’.”
“Oh we dropped them in around four-thirty or so.”
The president held his head in his hands, and for a brief moment his mind went blank.
“…And the Middle East is…gone?”
“Oh yeah. We’re up here with the Israeli military,” the man hollered, “…they’re really impressed with how neatly it all played out.”
The president hung up the phone and buried his head into his arms as he sat over the table. He tried picturing the faces of the lives he destroyed but couldn’t; all that was there was a clouded entanglement of floating people in white sand.
He called his secretary and asked her to organize a live nationwide address. He was feverish with anxiety, and, getting up, having to steady himself a little, he noiselessly walked out of the room.

For several weeks the people of our city crowded together in Time’s Square early every morning in anticipation of the evermore improbable sunrise. We held candles and sang together, and hopelessly begged the sun to come back. The sun did not come back. The benevolent sun had left us (or we had left it –which, incidentally, is the predominate phrase in reference to the event).
It should be said here that for the people of our planet not quite all hope for an illuminated world was lost: After all the very many solutions proposed by the illuminists, the A.F.S.P.R., Japan, and Scandinavia, it was Mexico’s that, for a brief moment in history, bore fruit. On December 28th of that very year, after so many attempted sabotage campaigns by Cuba and agents of Central America, Senior Dias was successfully launched. It maintained light -only mostly along the equator and hardly enough to maintain more than a twenty-mile strip across the globe- for exactly eight months. It wasn’t until the technicians aboard the orbiting sun, dubbed illuminauts, received a shipment of bad livestock that the project was put to a final halt. (An international day of mourning for these illuminauts, who had apparently died attempting to push the livestock off Senior Dias, has since been held yearly.)

And so the sun was gone, forever, it would seem, and as the years went on, it was marked as yet another scattered remnant of the great mass of history carrying us from the very beginning to the present. As things moved along a course for the history books, we eventually grew tired of the entire affair and accepted our fate of a sunless world. We are living a ceaseless New Year’s Eve, like a record that skips and is never righted.

Falling Planes

2009-07-30T17:25:00.000-07:00

There’s a wild clapping of a sledgehammer scattering a slab of cement over the forest floor. He’s out there once a week, every week for the last two months, hollering till his throat hurts, hammering till it’s all broken up. He works at it in the middle of the night. There aren’t any tourists around at night, and the park rangers, save just one, are all gone. The later was recently hired to investigate just who the hell was going around tearing up park projects long after your average tourist goes home. After all this time the elusive ranger hasn’t once approached Peter, who considers the ranger an ally. There’s evidence to support this thought. The last several months Peter’s woken up to a paper bag of goods: fruit, bread, eggs, and other basic necessities. The hermit and the park ranger appear to be friends.
The park service people were building an open cabin off the arm of a hot springs they had two miles up the trail. The cabins are the only real attraction the park has to offer, save the record for being the densest forest in the Northwest. It’s this density that allows Peter to camp just a quarter-mile from the central trail largely undetected. He can’t put in exact dates and times just how long he’s been in the park but he thinks it’s been about six months. He’s not out to set any records.
The hot springs are what brought him out here. It was a company retreat. He’s walking along the trail with Levy and Jefferson talking about the specs on a recent project–about whether the business complex they were contracted out to build would sink in the marshland they built it on in give or take forty or fifty years. They called the project Swamp Thing. The buyers had absolutely no idea, and the three of them, the architects, could give a shit whether the structure held. They make it to the springs together. They bring warm whiskey they had heated up before they made the two hour drive to the park entrance. They huddle together in one of the big wooden troughs passing it around, talking loudly and celebrating the victory of a defeated work week. Within three hours they are flat out hammered drunk. Making their way back along the trail to the little gravel parking lot, Levy turns around and sees only Tom Jefferson behind him. He’s too drunk to imagine Peter making up his mind, in some fucked up state of existence, to walk off the trail in search of some inner soul or whatever quest Peter imagines he’s on. The two of them just amble along the trail to the car and head back. The only inkling of a search party Peter remembers is the barking of a few dogs at what sounded like two, maybe three miles away. He found this surprising. When a white collar architect disappears it’s not much different from the three-year-old on the milk carton. A white collar architect has a family, a house, a network of neighbors and acquaintances. He’s valuable. He half expected helicopters, or men in plastic orange suits chopping down brush with machetes, instead there’s this park ranger who doesn’t care to tell anyone the missing man is alive, and an arrangement of day-tourists hightailing along the trail in the afternoons.
Peter puts the sledgehammer down and rests against a tree. He obtained the sledgehammer from the slab the first evening he snuck down here. The workforce had left it behind, as if on purpose. It was just leaning up against the very tree he’s reclining on now, telling him, Go for it.
He watches the broken up cement soaking in the moonlight. They’ll come back tomorrow and start the pouring again and he’ll come down the hill the following Sunday and break it all up. Plain and simple.
There’s a memory he keeps going back to. It’s the morning before they went out on their little day trip and he’s with his wife on a busy street corner. She’s going to the copy shop to make copies of a baby shower invitation she’s putting together for her sister. She’s in a hurry. There’s a kiss and a short embrace and then there’s this look. For a very brief moment he looks at her as if for the first time and it makes her uncomfortable. He’s tried to piece together what he meant by that look, or what she was thinking when she avoided it. After six months without human contact this is his last real memory of what it was like to be a person of society: a fleeting image of his wife all coffee addled and busy on errands and him, for the first time in his life, feeling totally within the moment. He’s not under any delusions about being awake while the rest of the world sleeps, or engaging in some kind of struggle against the wares of a society wrapped up in linear movement. It’s cut and dry. He was walking on a path and turned off it.

Peter wakes to the sound of men talking further down the trail. It’s daylight. He isn’t sure how long he had been sleeping, but judging from the sun’s place in the sky he guesses it’s around six a.m. That’s dangerous. Joggers don’t necessarily get out this far, but tourists looking to catch an early soak do. He guesses the men up the trail, by the sound of their voices, are park rangers, or botanists. He’s gotten used to the way these people speak and the way tourists speak. The tourists speak rapidly, as though they’re looking to get all the conversation in the world all wrapped up before the end of the day trip. The rangers don’t speak that way. They bide time and speak heavily, like there’s no deadline to meet, no appointments to make; there’s just this moment and all the applied weight it can carry in each word. The botanists don’t talk at all.
He ducks into the tangle. He wonders sometimes, any ranger that’s worth a damn would spot tracks into the overgrowth from twenty feet away and wonder, What’s all that about? But only one has found him. Just one. Twenty-eight square miles is enough to disappear completely.
The men walk right up to the slab and stop. He watches. Every time Peter sees a ranger he wonders if it’s the guy. He likes to imagine, out of the four rangers he’s seen in his six month stay, that his man is Hal. He spotted Hal three months ago three-quarters of a mile up trail ripping up a fish trap in the middle of the icy cold river. It was snowing outside. The river must have been close to freezing, but there he was, in the goddamn middle of it worried about salmon. Another ranger came down the trail and said, ‘Give it up Hal.’ The guy spent another half hour working that trap over with a box knife, by the end of it pale-white and sick. Peter couldn’t look away. Later there’s a sack of groceries. He stopped seeing this ranger since they started with the slab pouring. Hal could have been transferred to the evening shift after Peter’s first foray out there. It has to be him. This is the guy. Hal.
The rangers inspect the cement. There’s a little blood on one of the chunks that lie broken near a bit of metal rod form. The entire slab was only twenty square feet. Broken up and spread out all over the trail it’s nearly double that.
One of them says, “Well, at least we know it’s not a wild animal.”
The other: “We never thought it was.”
“Where’s graveyard?”
“Where do you think?”
Peter’s created a job. Beautiful; hermits out in the forest helping park rangers earn a living. Maybe this is why he gets groceries in the morning. He watches the rangers make their way back down the trail. He studies their way of walking, their speech. These two are day guys. There’s one other that appears to be working between three and nine. Then there’s graveyard. After they’re gone he scrambles back up the hill. He’s gotten fast at this. It feels good to be able to run through a dense forest without getting so much as a scratch. There’s nothing that can catch him in there so long as his pursuers leave the forest intact during the pursuing.
He reaches his lean-to. Sure enough: a paper sack with bread, three eggs, a tomato, and a bit of dried ham.

You couldn’t find Peter unless you were really looking, and even then it’d be near impossible. He figures the only way the ranger got to him is that slab. Peter’s fifteen minutes walking up the hill through a portion of dense vine and ivy, and then down into a bit of bright green overgrowth in which one could hide a wild family of giraffes. It’s fifteen minutes for him, and probably an hour of crawling through dark soil for a ranger. The guy had to have been on a good hunch, there’s just no other way around it. Then to actually figure out how to return there and bring groceries early every morning; he had to have been committed. Peter studies the bag. It’s muddy, meaning the ranger didn’t glide it in on a rope of some kind, meaning he either drags it behind him or holds it to his chest. Committed.
When Peter found his first bag several months before, he was convinced they were taunting him. So he camps out in a tree for a solid two days watching the lean-to, searching the forest. He thought they were luring him in. He didn’t see a single thing that entire time in the tree. So he comes down from the tree hungry as hell, hardly able to get to the river and drink. He spends three hours following an injured trout he spotted along the river bank until he can get to a spot where he can nab it without falling in hard and floating away. When he gets back he finds a heavy woollen blanket, another paper bag, and a note:
Bread and Water.
That’s all it said, Bread and Water. He’s thinking it’s religious, like body and soul or something. He’s since tied it to one of the stakes in his lean-to. He doesn’t worry about traps anymore. The ranger was probably watching him that entire two days in the tree, waiting for him to get exhausted and head down to the river. He stopped trying to trick him after that. He didn’t want to be found and someone found him. This person doesn’t want to be found either.
Peter cooks his eggs on a thin rock similar to shale. He doesn’t know what it is, but it conducts heat better than the others.
His first week out here was rough. He wondered around the woods eating berries he shouldn’t have been eating, trying to remember if it’s red before yellow or yellow before red on snakes, wondering if you spear fish in this climate or invent a fishing pole of some kind. Nearly starving, holed up against a rock, it falls in his lap; salmon. At first he thought it was some kind of sign from God. Then he sees the wire in the water. It was this rusted tangle all barbed and old caught in rock and branches too big to carry downstream. It was cutting salmon heading up the river. He took advantage of it for a few weeks and then eventually dragged it out and buried it. He learned to spear fish using a thick branch he sharpened with rock. He had a bit of sharp vine wrapped near the tip so the fish doesn’t slide off whenever he pokes one. He built a lean-to for getting out of the wet. He learned to make fire. Eventually workers came in a half-mile away to pour a slab for the hot springs and Peter got himself a hobby, and a new friend. It couldn’t have worked out better.
Peter puts the fire out and eats his breakfast, periodically studying the little nooks between the dark overgrowth surrounding his camp for tracks.
He thinks about his father. He passed away when he was seventeen, his mother not much after that. There was a college fund left behind. For some unknown reason he got into architecture. He had little interest in engineering but things just lined up in such a way that he floated along like that for ten years. He met Ellie in Fairbanks and they moved down to Seattle. She was pregnant, they got married. It’s as if you begin something and it moves beyond your control. It speeds up. Soon you’re following your own wake.
He remembers going to forest reserves like this one when he was little, he and his father. He remembers the handrails, the “KEEP TO THE TRAIL” signs. It depressed him. He wanted to be a part of it, not drift through it. There was always a road home. Every beautiful thing seemed to him, to have some barrier separating you from it. Gardens have fences, parks have trails. In the city they require this certain amount of green space. This is what they name it, green space. He had to make room for this space on his projects. They had to allot for that. He began to hate it. Every tree he passed was a reminder of a world he could never enter.
Ellie said, Go on holiday.
Peter finishes up with breakfast and hangs the remainder of his food from a tree to keep the elements off it. This will hide the food from anything save bears, which he never sees anyway. When he’s done he crawls into the lean-to for a nap. He’s sleeping more during the day. For ten years it was ten-five, Monday through Friday. Now it’s more sporadic. He sometimes sleeps all day and walks the forest at night, other times it’s just the opposite.
The dreams are getting clearer. Everyday it’s the same one. He’s with a group of people, they’re together in the park. Everyone is happy. Then the planes fall. There’s a woman, she looks at him like nothing he’d seen before. He never wants to see that look again. More planes fall.

Peter wakes in the evening and heads down the hill. He likes to survey the scene on Mondays when the workers show up and learn they have another week’s worth of pay ahead of them–there’s a brief glimmer of excitement before they feign frustration at having to do it all over again. But they haven’t even started the pouring yet. They’re getting sloppy with their work. They’ve poured the slab enough times to know how to get it done quick. Peter often catches them by the river in the afternoon drinking and fishing. He’s created a job for park rangers and holidays for workers.
Today’s trap is a camera hooked up to a little soft humming generator for power supply. This is new. Before, there were a series of signs he collected. After his first foray the sign read, Please For Your Own Safety, Do Not Enter. The second sign read, Do Not Enter, then, Trespassers Will Be Shot, then, TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT, then finally, Please, For Your Own Safety, Do Not Enter. This was confusing. They might have realized that by the eighth time they’ve had to pour the cement they’re dealing with some kind of psychopath. Maybe they decided not to encourage him.
Peter chunks a rock at the camera and heads back to his lean-to. He makes dinner. He had caught salmon a few days before. What he doesn’t eat he wraps in fresh leafs and buries. The ground is cool and works as a refrigerator so long as it’s wrapped well enough to keep the elements off it, and even then, the shelf life for buried salmon is only a day or two before it’s crawling with all sorts of seedy little creatures. He could dry it but the climate’s not near hot enough for it. He cooks up the salmon and eats it with a little bread the ranger had left for him. He has a wooden trough of water he’s since dragged up the hill from the river. He’s not worried about the smoke from his fire. His fires are small and fast. You can’t see them through the thicket and the smoke they produce isn’t all that dark. He chose the hill he’s on so the smoke would be nearly completely invisible from the trails, which are surrounded by heavy, tall foliage. The only thing he really worries about is the smell, so to this effect he keeps the actual cooking down to about five minutes. Really cooking anything is risky.
He finishes up and surveys the trails. No battalions of park rangers. No men in plastic orange suits. Just him, alone in the woods. He crawls inside the lean-to and goes back to sleep.

Peter gets up early and goes for a swim in the river. He thinks of the Polar Bear Club and all those old men that perform high dives in icy cold pools of water in the arctic. There’s this group called the Twenty-Step Club that go around collecting bets on who will make the twenty steps out to the arbitrary flag representing the North Pole from the science facility completely naked in the dead of winter. The water Peter swims in isn’t as cold as all that but damn near close. He can feel his whole body tightening and his knees weakening and buckling below him. It’s a great feeling, to put your body in complete and total shock for the hell of it.
He hasn’t used soap all the time he’s been here, and yet he feels cleaner than he ever has. He feels strong in the cold water, alive. Cold rivers have a way of rejuvenating what they meet, this is so by their very nature; bringing in new water, new life.
He had worked Monday through Friday. He had made plans. He had picked up things that accentuated the lifestyle he’d chosen in a very special way–an overnight bag of some worn leather; giving all those business trips a sort of rugged freedom. He had thought about a garden. He had thought about a rockery. He had worn designer hiking shoes to work. There’s soap smelling of fresh rivers, clothing with animal prints, houses with rolling lawns; life in a zoo, where the artificial and the natural meet for an awkward embrace. It’s amazing that a thing can stretch in two directions at the same time.
Peter ducks his head underwater and watches the tad poles swim up against the rocks. If you tilt your head so that there’s one eye out of the water and one eye in, there’s an illusory displacement of what you’re seeing in the water. Peter likes to watch his hands and the rocks and fish and things underwater on sunny days when the rippling of the current and the sunlight create a little dancing light show. He holds his palm just a couple inches under and watches the light parade over it from above the water. Thirty-one years and this is all he really needed–an ice-cold river.
He gets out of the water and puts his clothes on. He looks around for a thick vine and finds it. He spends a little while separating the thorns from the vine with a sharp rock. Some of them don’t come off so he has to pick them off with his nails. He examines his foot. He had split it open the other night when he was tearing up the slab. It was a piece of rock that shattered and shot shards everywhere. He remembers they found the blood and half imagines them examining it for evidence and laughs to himself.
Peter ties the vine around his leg and ties the other end to a thick tree branch he finds near the river and crawls back into the tangle. He drags the branch behind him to smooth down any footprints he made before. He’s very careful in everything he does. He’s paranoid as hell that someone else besides the phantom ranger will find him out here. He gets in about twenty yards from his camp and begins to stand and make his way towards it when he spots something moving around. It appears to be a person digging around in the lean-to. The shape is bent in, just exposing the black and brown slacks of a ranger. He’s finally done it. He’s surprising the ranger in the act. He thinks he’s about to embark on the first human interaction he’s had in six months. He moves around the camp still in a thicket of vines and shrubs and the assuming arches of Douglas Fir trees. He aims to sneak up on him and corner him so he can’t get anywhere. Then they’ll have a conversation, just the two of them. He gets closer in and the ranger backs out of the lean-to and turns towards him.
It’s no ranger. It’s a goddamn black bear; surprised, hungry. He’s about fifteen feet from the bear and begins to back up but it’s starring right at him and he knows he’s not going anywhere. The bear rears up on its hind legs just starring at him more out of curiosity than anything. Peter’s never seen a bear in the forest reserve but understands there are a few around. He’s seen tracks and discarded fish but liked to imagine they wouldn’t presume to go anywhere near him. Here’s one standing right in front of him, totally aware of his presence. This is probably something he should have planned for. Does he stand there and wait for the bear to pass? Does it even recognize him as a threat? Is he prey or predator? Does he run at it with a rock and hope he can conk it on the head and eat it? That’s ridiculous. He’s cursing himself for knowing absolutely nothing about how to handle a situation like this one. He knows what to do when the fax machine is out of ink, or how to answer his wife when she says she’s going to start getting more exercise, or his boss when he asks what Peter’s been working on. Nothing about bears. Then, Bears can’t run downhill. That’s right, he thinks. That’s what you’re supposed to do; run down hill, they’ll just roll or not follow you at all. Access to the river is downhill through thick vines, the bear with its short little legs and top-heavy posture doesn’t stand a chance. He moves a little to the left to test the animal. The bear’s just starring at him. Peter makes a run for it, diving down the hill he just crawled up. He rolls down, caught along the way by a tangle of vines and sharp branches. He begins to slide, now in a mess of wiry thicket. He tries getting a hold of a branch he can hang onto on his way down but it snaps and he tumbles forward, landing on the rocky embankment of the river. No bear in sight.
Peter frees himself from the thick mess of vines strangling his torso and waist. He begins to pull them off with care, biting into them and unwinding them. But he gets frustrated when this doesn’t work and the pain inches along, so he tears them off, cutting himself just about everywhere. His body is in a bad state. His lower shins are bruised from the rough rock landing and his torso is scratched to hell. His hands are bloody pulps from all the branches and vines he grabbed at on the way down. The bear didn’t even follow him to the hill.
After washing up in the river, Peter heads back up the hill, this time not pausing to cut a vine and drag a branch up with him. This time he just lumbers up the hill brushing the vines aside and ducking under tangles of branches, sometimes just pulling them down and casting them away altogether. When he gets back to the lean-to the bear’s still there. This is something he hadn’t expected. He was too busy worrying about the cuts and bruises to imagine the animal wasn’t frightened at all by his brief escape, or had no interest in chasing him down, somehow knowing he’d be right back. The animal just stares at him like he did before. Peter picks up a heavy rock and runs at the animal like a lunatic, hollering at the top of his lungs. The bear scampers off.
The lean-to is a mess. The day’s food is gone. He clears all the rubble aside and takes a nap.

They’re all gathered together in a big group. Everyone is happy. There’s this elderly woman. She’s eloquently dressed for an evening in the park. She has a way of emitting this pride in humanity–as if all the world’s cruelty pales in comparison to her authoritative gestures of brief excitement and humility. Peter’s watching her and the others with his hands in his pockets. He feels the part of an observer, and he likes this thought. People are playing frisbee, others are picnicking. There’s a serenity to the people, to the hills, to the big bright evening luring in the wishful citizens of the park. It’s warm. He pauses to watch the woman a little longer. She smiles at him. Never had life felt so big–so utterly vast.
That’s when the planes fall.

When he wakes there’s a new note. Soon, is all it says. Soon. He sits for a while and tries to imagine what that means. He comes up with two possibilities: Hal is coming to meet him, or his time here is up. He liked Bread and Water better. It gave him something to think about. He thinks for a moment, holding the note in his hand. He shakes his head and ties the note next to Bread and Water.
He spends the following few days going on half mile walks along the banks of the main trail heading up to the hot springs. People walk the trails less and less, mostly because he’s removed any directional sign he’s come across in the last six months. One day he makes it out to a place he’s successfully avoided since he first came up here–a small ranger’s station a little off the main trail. He watches the empty cabin for a short time and debates over whether he should go up there and have a look inside. This is risky. If they catch him in there they’ll have no choice but to haul him out, unless of course it’s Hal that catches him.
Soon.
Peter walks out in plain sight and follows the side trail to the cabin and pushes on the wooden latch of the rickety door. It’s unlocked. He steps into the cabin and looks around. There’s a desk and a communication panel of some sort. There are stacks of papers. He flips through a logbook detailing the specs on invasive plant species in the area. He feels almost high on adrenaline. There’s a large board detailing shift times. He skims through the names. Instead of Hal’s name mentioned on graveyard there’s another name, Steven. He wonders then, if Hal makes it out on his own time–although this seems implausible.
There’s an entrance to another room near the desk. He swings the door open and steps in. It looks like a break-room–there’s a refrigerator and a microwave. Several cords stapled to the ceiling throughout the cabin lead out a dusty window to a small generator. There’s a large wooden table near the window where several paper bags rest in a neat little row. They’re his bags, set aside for five days in advance, each one containing the usual groceries. There’s a sticky note on the bag in the middle: For Peter.
Peter runs out of the cabin and into the thicket of ferns and rock he came through. How do they know his name? How many of them know where he is?
He makes it back to the lean-to and studies the only two bits of communication he’s had with the outside world: Bread and Water, Soon. Paper bags with his name on them in the break room of a ranger station he imagines four people share can mean only two things, one: They all know he’s there, two: They are aware he’s a missing man. They must have had some sort of communication with the search party. They haven’t breathed a word. This thought is both unsettling and reassuring, the later because he has friends now; men who understand what he’s doing; men risking their jobs to let him do it. The idea is a romantic one, but doesn’t match his feeling of uneasiness. More people mean more mistakes, more changes of mind. On the other hand, they have let him live in the reserve for as long as they’ve known he’s here. This must mean they respect him, they appreciate what he’s doing, and they identify with it. That’s going too far. He tells himself he was walking on a path and one day walked off it. It’s as cut and dry as that. He needs to keep it simple, day to day. They know he’s here now. He’s a guest in their forest. He stays gratis. He tells himself to ignore it. He tells himself it’s better this way.
He finally gets around to cleaning out the lean-to from the mess the bear made. He wonders if he’d see more of him, like maybe he’s made a new friend. He unearths a bit of salmon and cooks it on an open fire. He’s less worried about the smoke now–if the rangers know he’s here he can afford to be a lot more liberal. No more track cleaning, no more short dinners. He has a few less things to worry about now.

One evening, Peter wakes to the sound of people talking loudly. He sits up and listens. It’s coming from the trail. They make no attempt to hush the sound so he knows it has nothing to do with him. They aren’t rangers or park specialists, and anyway, park people don’t congregate at night. These people are tourists, no doubt about it. Drunk tourists. He’s awake and figures he might as well go have a look. Eavesdropping isn’t his forte but what the hell. In all the time he’s been here he’s never woken to the sound of drunk hikers. Drunk hikers like he was once. He wonders if one of them will ever make the slip.
He hikes down the hill quickly and quietly. He could be wearing bright yellow and it wouldn’t make a difference in this thicket, in this darkness. There’s four of them, drunk as hell, stumbling along the path back to the lot. They pass around a bottle of whiskey. One of them is humming a Philip Glass song Peter recognizes, the other three walk behind him naming all the words in Spanish they can remember. The only woman present is yelling, “Bonito, bonito!” Her friends are telling her the pronunciation is terrible. She flashes a whiskey wet smile and stumbles a little, “I speak Spanish, I’ve been to Tijuana, like, four times.” The man humming Philip Glass changes his tune to the Mexican Hat Dance and the other three join in, periodically pausing to take a pull off the whiskey bottle and a drag off a cigarette. Peter follows them hanging on the side of the trail, slowly, nearly within arm’s reach. He can almost taste the whiskey. He walks with them a little longer and pauses. He steps out of the brush and onto the trail about ten feet behind them and watches them walk ahead of him and out of sight. The Mexican Hat Dance stifles the atmosphere, hanging in the air long after they are gone.
He can’t sleep now. The brief moment of human contact sends him down to the river where he sits on a rock in the moonlight. He thinks about his father and the fishing expeditions out in Alaska. He thinks about Ellie and her endless energy for life’s most trivial errands. He makes his way back to the lean-to and crawls in. He glances at the scratched log he’s used as a calendar as of late and sees it’s Sunday night and debates about whether he should go down there and break up the slab again. He hasn’t missed a Sunday evening of beating the shit out of that thing since they started pouring it and figures there’s no reason to start now. It’s a job, really, in some twisted way of looking at it. If the work force went out there Monday morning to see the slab perfectly intact, he imagines they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves. They’d stand around waiting for him to show up.
He gets his sledgehammer and makes his way down the hill. On approaching the slab his stomach sinks. There’s no slab. They hadn’t even poured it. He was too busy with the bear and the park ranger cabin over the week to even think about going to take a look. All that stood there now was the smashed camera tied to a tree and the little generator below it. They had cleared the broken cement away. He hadn’t expected this. He’s had this ritual for about two months and here it is, cleared out. He throws the sledgehammer down and sprawls out on the smooth ground where the slab used to lay.
Peter examines his clothes. Save the woollen blanket he’s since made into a haphazard jacket, they are the same white shirt and brown khakis he had originally worn out to the reserve with Levy and Jefferson, now all tattered and dirty, washed again and again with a rock he uses to rub out stains in the river. His shirt lacks the starch stiffness it once had. It was his business Pendleton, his favourite shirt, the same one he used to wear to work. He laughs to himself; even on holiday he couldn’t leave behind the costume of his restrictive life in the city. He thinks for a moment, he still calls this holiday.
He had met Ellie at work. She was a marketing consultant for his design firm. She’d come in every Tuesday afternoon right on schedule with her clever looking entourage and close the door to the meeting room after Peter’s managing directors filed in. She had this way of walking that was imminently organized, as if every movement and gesture she made had some necessary purpose in the long run. She was tall, commanding authority, brilliantly self-assured. He would spin around in his chair and watch her through the little observation window between him and the meeting room. She’d set down her notes and speak to the men in the room with a polite countenance both articulate and self-assured. He could tell they enjoyed her company, that they, at a moment’s notice, would do anything she asked without hesitation.
One afternoon he slid a note off his desk as she passed him. It read: I’m completely in love with you. He thought she’d like this; her being a creative advertiser; her surrounded by an energy that says, Get to the point; her so obviously involved with the sensationalism of her own life. But she didn’t even notice it. She just walked right over it. So he stands up and yells, “Will you go to lunch with me?” The room just stares at him. She stops, turns around, and after a long pause says, “Where?”
They liked to imagine for a long time this story would be something they’d tell their kids. He used to joke to her about how cliche it was, how cinematic. And there was nothing to it, really. Two people meet in an office, why did it seem like a fairy tale? She on the other hand believed in the story. It was simply in keeping with her design. During their entire marriage he could only want to believe in it. But he was unmistakably two people.

He wakes with a jump. Two men are standing above him and it’s daylight. Last week this could have happened, this week it did. These men are rangers. They’re just looking at him, shaking their heads as if to say, You know better than this. Behind them is a third man Peter doesn’t recognize. He’s not in the usual ranger clothes. He wears a tan shirt that says, Supervision, in bold black.
“So you’re our guy?” says the third man.
The park rangers cross their arms and put their heads down, looking like the situation is completely beyond their control, like whatever happens next is up to the man behind them.
Peter sits up and pauses for a moment. He looks at the forest around him where he’s spent so long with a kind of goodbye. There’s this immense silence here. He feels it entirely. He knows it’s coming. It’s this pressure that feels like two hands pushing his shoulders to the ground. Consequence, a thing that doesn’t exist in the forest. When the rock rolls and crushes the delicate life underneath, it comes apart in the soil and something new grows. The forest is an eloquent play on cause and effect. But it’s indifferent. Where he’s going he can expect consequence and judgement. He’s thinking of his dream. What made him so afraid? What did the planes represent? He looks the supervisor in the eyes, searching for the thing he’s been running from. “I’m your guy,” he says after a while.
“Three and a half months,” says the man, shaking his head.
“I thought it was much longer than that,” says Peter.
“Nope. Three and a half months.”
Peter just shrugs and nods at him. The first conversation he’s had with anyone since he came out here and it has to be with this man.
The man turns to one of the rangers, “Frank, you call it in.”
Peter lays back and puts his hands behind his head, looking at the bright green world around him. This is it. This will just be something he tried, a brief glitch in his otherwise flawless record, eventually forgotten or glossed over. Nothing will ever feel like that cold river again.

Hal drives down the road at a practical crawl. He looks at Peter through the review mirror like he’s waiting for him to say something.
“I saw you weren’t on nightshift anymore,” Peter says finally, leaning forward into the metal cage wall that separates the two of them.
“I never was.”
“Oh, I thought it was you,” Peter says in resignation.
Hal sits up a little in his seat and eyes Peter through the mirror. He looks to Peter like a very emotional man, a person that builds extremely personal attachments with people, a trust. There’s a simplicity in his look, like a wrong and a right.
“I worked the day, early, they switched me, a while back...I worked early one morning and I found you up there in that tree...”
He found him in the tree, but there was a bag before that, that’s why he went in the tree in the first place. Hal wasn’t the first.
“...We got to talking about it and thought it best to just leave you be. We split up the bag duty,” he laughs a piercing, good natured laugh, “that’s what we called it, bag duty, and that’s that.”
“You wrote that note? What does it mean? Bread and Water?”
“After I saw you I went back to the cabin to report it. I ran into one of the other rangers on my way back with the bag and the note on it. His name was Jack, he doesn’t work here anymore. He was the one that found you. He looked at me like I caught him robbing a bank and I realized what was going on. So I just went back and let it go. The other rangers came onboard one by one.” Hal pauses and does that laugh again, “I don’t know what the note meant, but saw it later on a delivery. Jack was a little off if you ask me.”
“And Soon?”
“I wrote that one,” he says with a smile, “a little doomsdayish...didn’t really mean anything.”
Peter laughs to himself. He put so much weight in those notes. He can hardly believe they were both meaningless. This is what he can expect, he thinks; a series of meaningless gestures here on out.
“There’s going to be a lot of reporters you know...”
“I know.”
For a while they drive in silence. Peter notices the state highway they’re driving on is the one he used to take to work. It’s another half hour to the city.
“What were you doing all that time out there?”
Peter thinks about the question, a question he will have to think about and answer many times.
“Dreaming.”
Hal laughs. “Dreaming? About what?”
Peter leans back in the seat. They didn’t handcuff him although the third man told them to.
“I’m in this park,” Peter begins with a little bit of effort. “Everyone’s happy...like ecstatic, you know? It’s like any public park. There’s trees, rolling hills. People are doing whatever it is you do in parks. There’s this woman near me, although I’m there alone. I get this feeling like she’s a good hearted person, a very natural, down to earth old woman...like she’s just weighted down to the world around her, absolutely an elderly woman, imminently pedestrian...I guess that’s what makes it so difficult when she starts breaking down.”
“Breaking down?”
Peter tries organizing his thoughts more clearly. He hasn’t talked with anyone long enough to make it difficult.
“We’re in the park. I get the feeling like I don’t know any of these people. I’m just kind of walking through. I’m happy...there’s this feeling in the air–you know, it’s evening time–it’s this feeling like everything is going to work out. Then people start pointing up. There’s this plane in the air. It’s just kind of paused there, still. People are looking at it just amazed. This woman next to me is saying she didn’t know planes could do that to what looked like her daughter and her grandchildren.” Peter pauses and remembers this part of the dream vividly. He remembers her voice seeming so real and human. “People stand up and just stop whatever it is they are doing and just look. I’m looking. Then other planes start forming a line to the left and right of the first plane, all in a row, all pointed at us, just completely still, like that,” Peter holds his hand out in the air, “it’s like nothing none of us have ever seen before. All these planes: commercial, fighter jets, little rotor planes, all lined up in a big row, there must be eight of them. Then there’s this ringing sound. Like that sound you get in your ears when they pop; this piercing sound...and the planes fall...” Peter pauses for a moment and watches the last bit of scenery before the slow drift into the city fade behind him. “...They fall without gravity,” he begins again, “as if pushed down with an extreme force all at once. They fall below our horizon, where we can’t see, but they make a sound where we know they hit the ground hard, and we can smell it too–like burning oil and metal. At this moment people start yelling and panicking. People are horrified. Some are running. But the thing I remember most is the woman next to me...she’s hysterical. Nothing really registers until I look at her face. It’s not till I see her face that I get scared. I’ve never seen such fear. When I see it my heart just sinks. People are yelling that it’s Armageddon, others are just floored with fear. Then more planes line up and there’s that sound again. When the woman sees that she just starts screaming. Have you ever heard an old woman yelling at the top of her lungs? I do in my dream. She’s yelling with no consideration for her grandchildren, these grandchildren she would go to great lengths to disguise her fears for. She’s yelling with complete and total abandonment. This woman that is so absolutely real and tethered, weighed down in decades of reality, has just...lost all grasp. My heart sinks, my whole body sinks, and looking at her I’m scared beyond all imagination.”
Hal lets his eyes fall heavily on Peter through the review mirror. He gives him some time to collect himself before he asks, “Then what happens?”
Peter watches the steam from Hal’s Styrofoam coffee cup rise and disperse in the warm light from the reflective complexes of the city on the horizon. He sees them all huddled there together, burning in that morning light, for the first time in months, but in some respect, for the first time in his whole life. Towers of metal, standing like prisms and great light posts, like men holding lanterns high above their heads in an otherwise quiet and brutal darkness. He feels warmth from that light. This was something he didn’t expect. And he remembers his building is somewhere in there, too, standing as tall as the others. He meets Hal’s eyes in the review mirror. “Then I wake up.”

They Say I'm Panicking

2009-05-02T19:25:00.000-07:00

They say I’m panicking. Who’s they? They are people with backs up against the walls, eyes in keyholes, clenched to the pipes under eighteen-wheeler trucks, all saying the same thing, “Don’t panic.”
Here’s what’s happening. My girlfriend, I’m absolutely convinced, my girlfriend is having some sort of affair. It’s not this average fly-by-night sneak around with so and so jazz musician sort of thing. This is an operation. She’s engaged, I’m absolutely convinced, she’s engaged in this operation, a complex operation, an operation I’ve yet to finally witness, but I know to be operating. What is it? Here is what’s happening. Every time I leave the room men appear.
I’m not sure if they had always been there, hiding, backs up against the wall, clenched to the pipes under eighteen-wheeler trucks, but one thing’s for sure, the second I leave they are there, appearing, as if out of the ether, out from under the tables, out of tiny black holes. They have sex with her, or she has sex with them. They crowd around her, all sorts: white men, black men, ethnic types, men with tattoos, men with sunglasses, some men, some men have beards and some have furrowy eyebrows that exacerbate emotion excessively during an orgasm. Some men carry briefcases and check their watches for the time, like they have somewhere else to be after all this is over. Other men have tools, boxes with an array of bits and instruments, like interchangeable wing nuts and large contraptions of some animated steel. They use them on her. She enjoys it. She writhes in ecstasy while these men prepare their instruments, clean their gear, attach various accessories. Then they put their helmets on and attach rubber aprons, some even wear oven mittens. They are very well prepared. Some wear welding masks, others wear mustaches. They enjoy it too. They ejaculate. They fill the room with it. They look at pictures of me and laugh. She laughs too. They joke about my work. She tells them my work is terrible. They enter her. They joke about my penis. She tells them my penis is terrible.
I open the door. Nothing.
Here’s what’s happening. These men hate my guts. They appear the second I leave and are gone the second I enter the room. She’ll use the restroom. She’ll close the door. That’s when it happens. Men appear. Some of them are my friends. Some of them are family members.
I tell them, “I know what you do when I leave.” I tell the barista. I tell the bartender. I tell the drummer. I tell the priest. I tell the mechanic that doesn’t speak any english.
“You’re being dramatic,” they tell me. “You’re overreacting.”
“I know your face!” I scream.
They say I’m panicking.
I’ve installed cameras in the bedroom. I’ve tried everything. Nothing. She sits there quietly in the room, going about her business. They’ve tampered with the tapes. We have a small atrium. One day I told her I was going for a walk and I crawled up there on the roof. It was dark and raining. I watched her through the atrium. Nothing. I have theories. I was looking at a hologram. I was looking into another dimension. I’ve bought books on the subject. There is such a thing as quantum mirroring. They’re very advanced. They’ve learned to manage light, create illusions. They are illusionists. But I’m onto them.
I told her I knew all about it. She played coy. She said, “About what?” I just smiled and nodded my head at her. She wants me to lose it. That’s what all this is about. I won’t give in.

Dead, Broke.

2009-05-01T15:35:00.000-07:00

(Or, Photographer, Professional, Father)
(Or, Dreams Of Ridiculous Men)

A busy dance of light and color flutter around me, forging a rhythm with the shooting pain in my back. Light, color, intense pain, and standing over me is Jared, nodding at me and smiling, an occasional thumbs up between losses of consciousness. There’s paramedics. They move about in quick dashes, bouncing over the sidewalk to the back of an ambulance parked near me, pulling out equipment, hesitating, and putting it neatly in its original place. What are they doing? They’ve brought a gurney now, I can tilt my head just enough to see them raising it, applying the necessary adjustments, then, now on second thought, lowering it, realizing I couldn’t possibly be lifted to a height of three feet in this condition. They ask Jared to step back, he complies, still smiling at me and giving me the thumbs up. My camera is slung around Jared’s back because I had asked him to hold it. He takes a picture of me. “For evidence,” he says.
The paramedics must be new, that’s all I can think about, they sent the new ones, these guys have no idea. “Don’t move him, don’t move him!” says one, complicating the assembly of the gurney and using the added time to think. The other one has a breathing machine out, he’s attaching a tube to a tank and attaching the mask he neatly tore out of the package to the tube. “He doesn’t need that,” the other paramedic says, hopping back to the ambulance and moving out of sight. Lights, intense pain, the blaring sun. Jesus God, why a sunny day? What were we thinking? Darkness.
I awake to the sound of a man talking on his cellphone. He has this device attached to his face, jabbering to himself like a madman. He’s the owner of the house, I imagine. I try and make out what he’s saying. “So we don’t have to pay a dime? Nothing? You’re sure?”
“His back is broken,” I hear from one of the paramedics, “what do we do?”
“We slip this thing under him and lift.”
Jared’s making money signs at me, rubbing his thumbs, index and middle fingers together, smiling like a lunatic. The man with the phone is talking excitedly. Finally the paramedics lift, a slight jostle, then nothing.

A year earlier, on the day, it was tax time. I sat at home putting all the paperwork together excitedly. I knew my check would be perfectly reasonable. I worked for a newspaper for over a year and claimed zero on everything, and with my hours being so abundant and the addition of all the extra overtime I accrued, I figured I was all set.
When the money came in, it amounted to a little over two-thousand dollars. I was ecstatic. I immediately cleaned out the refrigerator in my one bedroom apartment to make room for all the new products I imagined I’d fill it with. This was no easy undertaking; the refrigerator was a burial ground haunted by the inky remnants of things, one day, on some nameless improbable health kick, I thought I should be eating: fruit rice cakes, vegetable juices, tofu, all of which I purchased at a health foods store near the apartment –a meticulously groomed asylum frequented by clean looking people with strollers and paper sacks, hatchback cars and well bred K9’s. When I finished up with the cleaning, I went out to the bank to cash my check and have a stroll. After walking around town for an hour or so I started feeling out of shape and went back to the health foods store to load up again. It wouldn’t be long before the refrigerator was nicely packed with rice cakes, hummus, vegetable juice, and a nine dollar cheese I would never finally understand. It didn’t matter, I had a bit of extra income again and I was excited. Next in line would be exercise, maybe cycling or something. Maybe I would join a local sports team and spend some of the extra money on gear. I had to think about it. People buy gear for all sorts of things, it just seemed like something I would need. I had a bit of extra money here, there was a whole range of opportunities.
A month later I lost my job at the newspaper due to re-staffing and went on unemployment. I worried about what I would do for work. Then I worried about Sarah, my girlfriend of two months, she was moving in. I wondered what the cost would be on something like that, a girlfriend living with me, is that tax deductible? Would this affect my food-stamps? These were important questions, but she was dead-set on moving-in, there would be nothing I could do.
It began with a bracelet, something she left on the nightstand, then there were these moon earrings. I tried putting them in a neat little pile in the key tray near the door, as if stacking them somehow made them look like one object, and as if that somehow made it all less threatening, but soon there would be no way to ignore the things she left behind after her visits: there would be more earrings, a coat, a scarf, a coffee cup, and later it was a desk, a nightstand, and finally her: a grown woman named Sarah sleeping in my bed. I couldn’t stack her on the key tray, there was just no getting around it, she was set in, living with me, soaking up the heating, doubling the water bill, a human being.
So I put it all together: girlfriend, furniture, tax check now down to about $900.00 with the grocery store excursion, credit card payments and other expenses, and finally a vacuum I bought for Sarah’s sake...I figured we could vacuum together, like this is just something couples do when they live together. The last of the newspaper money went to rent but more unemployment would come in and with that I’d be all set. I’d have money to invest in a hobby, I could purchase gear of some kind.

I decided on photography. Working at the news agency drawing comics, I’d often go out to lunch with the journalists. Overtime I developed an interest in their gear. The way they would speak to one another in technical terms, showing off their 35MM. cameras with zoom lenses the size of telescopes, the way they always seemed alert and ready to make a ground-breaking shot, it was fascinating. So I went down to this camera shop on the outskirts of town and had a look around. There was so much to choose from, all non-digital SLR cameras, weighty and shiny, resting peacefully on racks behind glass windows. There were leather cases too, these interested me very much. I wanted something leather, a brown leather, heavily polished with brass buttons. Already I could see myself downtown, taking pictures of pigeons in black-and-white and showing them off to Sarah later on, maybe putting on a gallery showing. The second I walked in the store I knew this is what I’d do with the extra tax money.
“Anything I can help you with?” a dynamic looking man with horn-rimmed glasses asked, studying me over a mess of spools and black plastics he had strewn about the countertop.
“Just looking, but I’m thinking something old-fashioned, you know? Like the stuff they used in the Vietnam war? Something with black and silver, unnecessary hoses and lenses,” I told him excitedly.
He brightened up, nodding at me like he understood exactly what I meant. “We specialize in non-digital cameras, you’re in the right place.”
I made my way over to the camera accessories. There were leather straps and buckles, zoom-lens casings, there were patches meant for sewing onto blazers so as, I gathered, to protect the jacket from the camera constantly rubbing up against it. I would need something like that, I would need a special satchel of lenses, I would need light measuring instruments.
The man showed me a network of cameras, everything from Minolta’s and Nikon’s to Chinese and Russian plastics popular for light-bleeds. I gravitated towards the more inexpensive ones that had a special look I was in search of, something a little more vintage. “I like this one,” I told him, pointing to an older Minolta in the case.
He pulled it out along with three others and spread them out on the countertop. “These are all pretty similar, but I’ve organized them according to price range and quality. Do you think you’ll be needing autofocus? What about quick-shot photography? This one has a battery...”
“What do you think?” I asked him, smiling and leaning in with a whisper.
He nodded his head and pushed the last camera forward. It was massive and had a battery attached to it, there was a flash mechanism on the top and a network of levers and focus systems I would never understand. My stomach sunk and I could feel my throat clenching up.
“This is one of Nikon’s finest, it’s perfect for you; something for advanced photographers.” He brushed the other cameras to the side. “It has an autofocus, push-button snap shooting system, battery hookup for a shutter speed of one and eight-thousand, and this...” he said, turning around and pulling out this enormous object from a leather case, “a super-telephoto 360-1200MM lens...you’ll be able to read over the shoulder of a passenger on a commercial airplane from right outside the store.”
I nodded my head, still smiling at him, and held the lens with him as he talked, periodically inspecting a series of numbers and focus dials and giving him looks as if to say everything was in order.
“...This camera comes with Fuji black-and-white and color film, also a case...” he nodded in the direction of the leather cases hanging down by the window and back at me, “for both the zoom lens and the film...”
I watched the cases dangle in the alcove: beautiful, baroque, resting intently in time and nostalgia, referencing morning coffee, leather-bound books and centuries of good journalism.
“The camera is nine-hundred and the lens is four.”
I could feel the room spinning as I nodded at him, gritting my teeth, perspiring, smiling.
“Will this be cash, check or credit?”
“I have a credit card.”
“Excellent.”

My credit card statement would be significantly beyond what I could afford to pay. I would reduce it about nine-hundred with the tax money, but then there would be this four-hundred dollars I’d have to deal with. I walked home quickly instead of taking the bus, dangling from my hand and rocking up against my kneecaps with each stride was a very heavy purchase I tried ignoring. What was I thinking? I thought I would just take it back, wondering if he had given a receipt. Then I remembered the pigeons downtown, the gallery showing, crouching in bunkers during the next war taking shots of the poor soldiers scattered about the battlefield holding-in their insides. My photos would be remembered, discussed, scrutinized for years to come.
The next few evenings were spent trying to hide the camera from Sarah. I knew it wasn’t her place to question me about it as we hadn’t been dating all that long and she just kind of moved in, but then I felt guilty, we were, after all, living on ramen noodles and milk. She would start asking questions, she would ask to be taken out to dinner, I would say we can’t afford it and need to start tightening up and then she’d ask why. I could see it all playing out this way. I would have to divert her somehow.

“Food-stamps,” Jared said one day when I approached the subject with him, sitting outside our usual coffee shop.
Jared was a friend from college before we both dropped out. He worked for his mother’s investment firm, which appeared to be constantly on the rocks. I’ve never actually seen him go to work, nor had he ever really mentioned it.
“Really? Don’t they only give those to poor people? Like ethnic types and stuff?”
A woman at the table nearest us half turned in my direction and shook her head.
Jared leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his neck, “Dude, no way, everybody deserves food-stamps when they need them, and besides, you are poor, you just don’t want to admit it. Maybe this is just what you need to get back into the game.”
“What game?”
“The game of life man, the game of life.”

I went down to the office and got the food-stamps the next afternoon. There were a lot of rough looking people waiting in line. One man had an eye patch and a cane, he was talking to this woman about his business while she frantically searched through her purse for lipstick. “Motherfuckers come up in here, stagnate my whole process, I gotta territorialize, you get me? I gotta draw a line up in this bitch...”
Another man wore an overcoat that went down to his feet. He would swoop forward and back again while shaking his head rapidly, occasionally brushing his hair back and inspecting his hand then wiping it off on his coat and start the swooping again. He had licked the line-order ticket and stuck it to his forehead.
“One-forty-seven?” A woman behind the counter hollered out.
I looked at my ticket and raised my hand. For a brief moment the room went quiet and everyone starred at me. I put my hand down and walked to the desk embarrassingly and handed the woman a form I had filled out on one of the countertops.
“Cubicle four.”
I followed the direction of her pen and swung back around. “Am I eligible for food-stamps?” I asked.
“Cubicle four, sir.”
In the end my paperwork was approved by a quiet man that hardly ever looked up when he talked. It was all very quick. Jared had told me to dress down and look depressed and I tried following this advice as much as I could, but the man didn’t seem to notice.
“Here is your card and this is your identification number,” he pointed to a series of computerized digits with his pen. “Don’t sell the card, reproduce it, or loan it out to anyone.”
He handed me the card along with a list of rules and numbers to call if anything went wrong, also included were a change of address form and a pen with the words, “Broke’s not beaten” written on it. I tried shaking his hand before I left and he just looked at me in amazement, shaking his head.
A week later when the card kicked in, I bought food and cooked a big meal for Sarah and I. There was salmon and a special cheese, there was a plate of fruit. It worked perfectly, all my fears went away. I could distract Sarah with these food-stamp meals and continue to spend my money however I liked.

By the time my third unemployment check came in I was able to cover a few of my credit card debts and organize my affairs into a plausible level of comfort. It had been a few weeks since I had bought the camera. I tried taking it out a few times to the park and taking a few shots but I couldn’t figure out how to disconnect the battery. I would press down on the button and ten or twenty shutter sounds would go off and before I knew it I’d be out of film. When I went and had my film developed there were twenty pictures of an out-of-focus pigeon in a park and thirty-three of my foot. There was a cute girl behind the counter that tried not to notice how terrible I was at photography and I decided I wouldn’t take my film there for a while. I would do it anonymously at random locations throughout the city. I thought I’d eventually get the hang of it and start going back there, maybe even buy that jacket patch I had seen several weeks earlier.
Things were going OK, then I got the phone call. It was my aunt, she was in the hospital. She said I should come down and visit. There was an ominous tone in her voice and on the bus ride all the way down there all I could think about was what it meant. I wondered what was wrong with her; I figured she wouldn’t call me unless she was dying because we hardly ever spoke with one another, although she was one of the few family members I remained in contact with, other than an occasional brief phone call with my sister and her son, my nephew. I had other relatives, a whole network of them, but I hardly ever spoke to them either. We had reached a comfortable and pleasant disenfranchisement from one another, and as the years went by this comfortable distance lengthened, passively moving along a course where, one day, we’d all be complete strangers. That was OK in my book; I had never really been a family oriented person, and anyway I was old enough not to care. I was comfortable with my few friends, with the occasional girlfriend, drifting along on unemployment without being made to feel guilty about it by some nameless relative, but nevertheless I worried about my aunt. I wanted her to keep a pleasant distance, not die. I worried about what I would find when I walked into the hospital room. I wondered if other relatives would be there. I wondered if her divorced husband, a drunk that had stumbled off into the distance one morning and never came back, would be there.
When I arrived in the hospital and gave them my name they showed me to her room. There was just no way I could have prepared for it. It was this terrible lump of mass lying on the bed. It appeared to be a woman, although I couldn’t be sure, she looked ninety years old.
“Fucking Christ...” I said, starring at it and shaking my head. The body looked charred and grizzly, as if it had been mauled by a bear while on fire. I could feel tears welling up for the first time in, I don’t know how long, and surprised even myself.
“No, no, no, it’s the next one over,” the nurse said from behind me.
She showed me to a little cubicle behind a curtain and a wave of relief washed over me. This one was definitely her. She was awake and starred at me with a worried smile, looking me over and scrutinizing every wrinkle in my clothing, studying my unshaven face, the worry marks on my forehead, my first two or three grey hairs on the sides of my head just above the ear.
“I’m going to die and you’re going to take care of your nephew because your sister is on drugs,” she said quickly.
“I can’t afford that,” I told her.
“No, you can’t, but I’m leaving you money. He’ll be eighteen eventually. It’s only a few years. He goes to school in the mornings, likes pizza and macaroni...and horror movies scare him.”
I took a moment to process all this, weighing out the costs, wondering what Sarah would think. “Will it be temporary?”
“No...” she said, shaking her head. The shaking upset her chest and she started coughing loudly, hacking at the air violently and reaching for my hand. “You’re going to be his legal father, Charris.” She gripped my hand tightly and looked me squarely in the eyes, “Of course you’re not my best choice but you’re all he’s got. He likes hockey, but don’t let him play it, the other kids like to get rough with him and push him down, he’s smaller than the other boys. Oh, and he has asthma. He’s a sick boy, Charris.”
I tried talking but couldn’t. I opened my mouth and the words just wouldn’t come out, so I just kind of shook my head stupidly and squeezed her hand. You can’t escape family, they’ll run you down. They’ll creep after you and hit you with everything they’ve got.
I managed to say something comforting: “It’s not so bad...”
“Charris, I’m dying, obviously,” she kind of waved her hand in the air and gestured towards whatever was happening behind the curtain nearest us. I could make out the silhouette of a man holding his chest with one hand and reaching out at the air with his other, there were gasping and choking noises. She was right, this room just wasn’t a place where people get better. Every cell in my body suggested this woman was dying, that she was, already, extremely dead, there’s just no getting around it. I wanted to get the hell out of there, and then I felt bad for feeling that way. Here’s my dying aunt, this man in the next cubicle having some kind of fit, the transparent skin of the woman near the door, and here’s me thinking about leaving, and when I thought about it, my family history was just pretty much that; a series of long, drawn out female deaths and men just kind of waiting for the right time to make the slip.
She started talking about giving me money to take care of my nephew, Charley. I changed the subject and we talked about other things. She told me she was holding out to see me, she had to see me, she said. We talked about my sister for a while and inevitably the conversation drifted back to money and death, death and money. I told her I had money and not to worry about it, but I knew whatever I said it wouldn’t make a difference, there would still be money, money I needed, money I didn’t want to spend on a nephew I’ve never seen.
“No you don’t,” she said.
I sat there for a few moments and held her hand and then she died. It was just like that, she said I didn’t have any money and died.

A few days later I was sitting out on the balcony of our little apartment adjusting the zoom lens on the Minolta. I could make out crows on power lines half a mile away. I had successfully forgotten what my Aunt had told me about taking care of the kid. I imagined she was delirious, that my sister was taking care of her son and doing fine and that this would be something I wouldn’t have to worry about. There was a funeral planned for the following Sunday and I was able to put it off until then.
I was expecting Jared. He was bringing his Nikon 35MM camera by and I was going to take a look at it. He had just bought it at the same shop I bought mine. He had went in and chosen one of the less expensive ones and, much like me, walked out with one of the finest cameras in the store. The man behind the counter had told him the camera was for advanced photographers like himself, that the intense network of levers and dials were all things he, of course, thoroughly understood.
The bus pulled up and Jared walked out, waving at me. Slung around his shoulder was a vintage leather camera bag and a lens case. He was wearing a blazer with a leather patch sewn into it, the same one I wanted.
“How’s it going Charris?” Jared said from below. “Sorry about your aunt!” he hollered.
I buzzed the gate open with this electronic remote the landlord had given us and he followed the little garden pathway up the outdoor steps to the side of my apartment and walked in, tramping through the living room and out to the balcony. On closer inspection there were two blazer patches and I couldn’t help but be a little annoyed. He sat down next to me and removed his camera from the bag and set it down on the table, starring at it as if it were some complicated math equation, or as if, at any moment, it would get up and start walking around.
“Looks good,” I said, picking it up and turning it around in my hand. I adjusted various wheels and switches and returned them to their original order.
“Yeah, it was one of the best ones,” Jared said dejectedly.
I sat it down on the table, “Uh huh.”
We talked for a while about the camera and went online looking for some instruction sheets containing information we pretended to already know. We watched a video called, “Market Your Photography” and Jared took notes. We discussed putting on a gallery showing soon. We imagined ourselves wearing woolen scarves and horn-rimmed glasses, swooping around the city hurriedly and making groundbreaking shots. We would photograph the evasive occurrences whisked aside by a society engulfed in movement and linear thought. Jared and I were photographers, we were absolutely certain of this.

The following Sunday, Sarah and I were all intently groomed and prepared for a day of silence and remorse. I brought the camera along. I thought I’d take a few photos of the procession and everyone wearing black, of distant family members looming heavily behind the relatives closest to my aunt, of handshakes and condolences. I wasn’t quite sure if this was frowned upon but Sarah assured me people photograph funerals all the time. Suddenly the day didn’t seem like such a burden, I could busy myself with turning the lens, loading black-and-white film, possibly even figuring out how to work this lever on the side of the camera, this protrusion I didn’t know what to make of.
It was all going very smoothly, although there were a few instances where I received a few ill-regarded glances in my general direction, but for the most part people were grieving and didn’t notice the eye of the camera, poised and aimed, zooming in on tiny spasms of emotion and grievance. One man asked me if I was the photographer for the procession. I told him that I wasn’t, that I was her nephew and he gave me a strange look and went away. I stood outside at the cemetery while relatives passed immediate family members and whispered condolences, others were hovering around the casket talking to the priest. He nodded gravely, occasionally lifting his head to the sky and making this gesturing motion with his hands. I took a picture of this.
Sarah and I were talking about my relatives. She was interested in each of them, the faces they would make, the way the heads of the older men in my family would vibrate a little whenever they walked, as if they were muttering to themselves with their mouths closed. She liked how none of them talked to one another, and particularly, how not a single person there was the least bit interested in her. I told her, that makes two of us.
“Charris?”
I swung around. It was my sister. I began to greet her, swinging an arm out in the air to give her a half hug when she grabbed my hand and wrapped it around her wrist. I took a step back. It wasn’t her wrist. There was a little boy down there, hiding behind my sister’s dress. I tried talking but couldn’t find the words. She walked away, slowly uncovering my nephew. He looked down at his feet and kicked the dirt. I stared at him in amazement, completely perplexed. My mind went blank, then suddenly, “He’s a sick boy, Charris.”
I ran after my sister. She spun around. “You’re going to have to sign some papers and stuff, good luck!”
“I can’t take care of a kid!” I told her. She looked sick, strung out. She looked me in the eyes, mumbling incoherently. I nodded and waved her off. By the time I reached Sarah and my nephew I was resigned. I had a kid. I was a reluctant owner of a child. Girlfriend, son. Human beings.
Later that afternoon, two men appeared at our front door. They had papers, dockets, clipboards and ties. I invited them in and watched them mill around our apartment, looking through the cupboards and taking notes. They told us they were there to insure the child was going into the right hands. They gave me papers to sign, numbers to call. They gave me instructions for going to a certain building where there would be a certain desk I would need to approach. I would need to tell them my name and sign more paperwork. We talked about taxes and numbers and this excited the men almost excessively. They were thoroughly interested in speaking with me about deductions, what to claim on my taxes, how this would affect my unemployment.
The next day a court official granted me parental control of Charley. I had another, separate appointment with another man downtown who would write a check for ten-thousand dollars, signed over to me by my aunt. Charley was fourteen. I had four years with him. Four years until he’s eighteen and I can send him packing. Ten-thousand dollars. What about college? This wasn’t nearly enough. I had to come up with some more money. I asked him if he even wanted to go to university and he told me he was unsure. I dropped the subject.
The following few days were spent just getting him ready for school and putting him on the bus. I had to go online looking for the public bus routes. I made him a print sheet. I cooked him dinner. We made a little bedroom out of sheets in the living room near the window. He said it was like a fort. I told him that’s exactly what it is, “Your own fort.” I bought him rubber balls and things to play with in there. When he wasn’t at school he’d roll them around on the carpet. I was deeply annoyed with my sister.
I went online looking for work. There was a man that had been interested in my comics while I was still working for the newspaper. He was part of a private firm that hires out artists and writers for literary journals, catalogues, N.R.A pamphlets, just about everything. I had blown him off when I was working but now I needed him. Charley was eating breakfast and watching television, Sarah was cleaning up. This could work. I could get a job and, anyway, it’s only four years.
“Dear Mr. Gosmond, I’m emailing you in regards to the comical strips...”
That’s not going to work. Comical strips? How do people talk to one another? I had been home long enough on unemployment that I had forgotten how to communicate. But is that true? Is this kind of letter communication or just the opposite?
“Dear Mr. Gosmond, you motherfucker...”
I closed the laptop and watched Charley eat breakfast. We looked at the classifieds together. He had his highlighter out and was highlighting jobs for me. Architecture jobs, sales analyst jobs, environmental cleanup. He wore his highlighter on a string around his neck. He had asthma. He was particularly small for his age. He never had a chance. A cute kid just the same; shaggy brown hair around his eyes, excited about absolutely everything. “Legal guardian,” the paper read. Jesus. “Son,” I thought again.

One day, while Sarah was at work and Charley was in school I gave Jared a call. We met up at our usual coffee shop. He was drinking coffee and writing the names of local bands and show dates down on a napkin, shows he would never see. Jared reads Boudellaire and exercises to avoid hangovers. I was pretty certain there never was an investment bank job and was almost completely certain he operated on unemployment and food-stamps, but we never talked about it.
“Jared,” I said, bouncing up to him at the coffee shop while he pretended not to notice me. “Jared!” I said again, and slapped him on the back of the head, knocking his little train conductor hat off.
He jumped with a start and looked around the coffee shop embarrassingly and signaled me to join him outside. He pulled a cigarette out of a package as he stood up and paused for a moment and put it back in.
I asked him, “You’re quitting?” as we made our way out.
He took out rolling tobacco from his other pocket and began rolling a cigarette. When I looked around I noticed the other customers had rolling tobacco out on their tables as well.
I told him about Charley and my situation, about money and my fears I wouldn’t find work, about the ten-thousand dollars. It had been over a month since I had last seen him and this was unusual. We usually spoke twice a week.
“Invest,” he said.
“What?”
“Invest, that’s your only option.” He rolled his cigarette and lit it cooly.
“Invest in what? Why?”
He shrugged, “You know, stock. Invest in stock.”
“What kind of stock?” I asked him.
He leaned in, speaking in a whisper, “Orange juice.”
“What? Orange juice? Is that a stock? Why?”
Jared leaned back in his chair and looked around us, drawing in the tobacco and exhaling, puffing circles into the air. “We’re seeing serious gains, highs, you know? Market peaks in share value, in layman’s terms.”
“You invest?”
“Of course.”
“In orange juice?”
“Frozen orange juice.”
“Is that really a stock?”
“Traded on the I.C.E...Inter-continental-exchange, in layman’s terms.”
“Intercontinental is one word,” I told him.
“I know.”
“And you’re making money on frozen orange juice?” I asked.
“I’m seeing my investment, anyway, spring will come, you know, more oranges? If you put in now you’ll make your money back. Serious gains Charris,” he leaned forward as if to impart a secret, “market peaks in F.O.J.”
“Do you even know what any of that means?” I asked him.
“Not really.”
I leaned back in my seat and watched the cyclists and motorists cruise up and down the street. It struck me they were all very polite to one another. Men waved at one another, people walked dogs, a woman stopped to talk to a jogger on the sidewalk. The jogger had a walkman strapped around his chest and a headband, or maybe it was a heart watch, I couldn’t tell. They were talking about real estate, smiling at one another intently. I leaned back in my seat and looked over at the back of a newspaper the woman nearest us was reading. The headline read, “Court grants Rutherford $12,000 for expenses, home owners required to clear ice from sidewalks.”
“Investments man...the foundation on which this country is built...” Jared said resolutely, nodding his head as if just imparting something extremely profound.

Things were going OK with Charley. He would come home from school and we would cook a light dinner together. He’d go through all the cabinets and pick out things to put in the macaroni and I’d commend him for his foresight while putting everything back in its original place. Sarah would get home a little later and clean up and her and Charley would watch a movie together and go to bed. Charley liked the movies Sarah brought home; romantic comedies that made them both cry. They’d eat popcorn together on the couch like that and cry with one another and I’d read the news, contemplating this stock thing Jared was talking about. As it turned out, frozen orange juice was climbing steadily. The market depended almost completely on weather. Investors make decisions based on the time of year and climate changes and invest in concentrate, which is then sold to larger companies. It was a real commodity, something literal and tangible. It made sense. People drink orange juice, companies buy concentrate. I began to see oranges in monetary value. We had a bowl of them on the countertop and I’d pick one up, roll it around in my hand, attach value to it and think, I could invest thousands of dollars in these. I could make a killing. I’d wear a suit and reel around airports talking fast on a cellphone, I could read the business section in the smoking room, I could guffaw at the stewardesses in business class, I’d make friends with balding men in cigar clubs. This was all entirely possible. I could be an investor.
I settled on giving it a few day’s rest. I thought I’d concentrate on doing something for Charley, maybe open up a certificate of deposit for a college fund. I was thinking about his future and decided I’d ask him how he felt again. So when the weekend came around I sat him down on the couch and asked what he wanted to do. He gave me a look that suggested he had no idea what I was talking about and, looking at him like that, a fourteen year old kid, I realized I didn’t really know either, so I said, “Today, I mean, what do you want to do today?” He shrugged. “Anything,” I said, “what do you want to do?”
“Go for a walk?”
I said, “Really? Out of anything?”
“Out of anything,” he replied.
We went to a park and walked around. We were both silent. After a while, I asked him if he missed his mom and he said he really didn’t know. I asked him about going to college again and he said he really didn’t know about that either. So we walked around with our hands in our pockets, kicking up dirt around the baseball field or watching the kids play around on the slide. There was a grown man at the top of it hurling his kids down and laughing excitedly. He went, “Lift off!” and threw his children down the thing and they bounced and fell in the sand. They were insane with excitement. He looked like a good father. I suddenly realized I could do that, I could become a father. I could take interest. I could teach Charley how to play catch.
“Charley? You want to go on the slide?” I asked him.
“No.”

That evening we went out for dinner just the two of us. He had a grilled cheese sandwich and I ordered a steak and orange juice. I looked at the orange juice for a while and then at Charley and thought, What am I doing?
Later, as we walked around the block back to the house we happened upon a lighting store and Charley wanted to go in. The store apparently specialized in elaborate lighting: strobe lights, black lights, squiggly rubber things for kids. He said he wanted something for his fortress. I was happy he had decided to do something after all.
There was an overweight man behind the countertop who eyed us over a stack of boxes while we wondered around the shop warily. For a lightbulb store it was considerably dark. I had realized I had never been in a lightbulb store and wondered how these people could possibly stay in business. Real estate costs were soaring in the neighborhood, there was an entirely new breed of people setting into town; men looked increasingly like the patrons of airport smoking rooms, women had triple seated strollers, couples rode along the streets tandem wearing bright colors and smiling at one another. The lightbulb store didn’t stand a chance. I wondered, in what dimension would the store thrive? I thought, that’s the world I’d like to live in, a world where those backlit moving waterfall pictures were invariably mountains of exchange and success, where blinking cardboard cutouts of Burt Reynolds were hot commodities. Then I looked at the man behind the countertop again and put the elation aside. It would be a world of people eating chips on couches and making a big mess, it would be a world of reality television and small, Asian puppies that yelped whenever you walked by. Things were OK the way they were.
Charley picked one out. “That’s a good one,” I told him. It had rubber shooting off everywhere, corkscrewing in multicolored bursts. It looked like a small pineapple sun hurling solar flares into the room. It was an excellent lightbulb.
When the man behind the countertop noticed Charley taking an interest in the bulb he came around looking more brightened up than before. He took Charley on a little tour around the store while I stood my ground, running my fingers along the stacks of boxes in the cluttered little shop. The two got along very well. The proprietor was an overgrown kid, but he had a passion for something. He took something, no matter how inane and silly, and latched onto it. He knew technical names, he spoke a technical language. He referenced entire schools of thought according to various spokespeople in his catalogue of luminescent heroes. There was something to that. I realized I needed something like that, I needed some sort of passion. I was a photographer, sure, I was a comic artist, but I also needed to be an investor, oh, right, and a father. I could be an artist that makes investments for the sake of his family. The thought reinvigorated me. There was something to the lightbulb store.
Charley decided on the lightbulb, a strobe light, a lava lamp, and two vintage space rockets that light up when you shake them. I thought, our energy bills are going to be ridiculous. We wound up spending over two-hundred dollars there. The lightbulb salesman would wave to me every time I passed his shop from that moment on.

I called Jared the following week, “Alright, let’s do it.”
“Do what?”
“The frozen orange juice concentrate thing, I’m ready to invest in frozen orange juice concentrate.”
“You’re making an excellent decision,” he said.
“Let’s hope so.”
“How much do you think you’ll invest?”
“I don’t know, what is...uh...viable?” I asked.
“Now you’re talking.”
“What? Oh, you mean viable. Yeah, I’m, you know, trying to be dynamic.”
“Yeah, you have to know the lingo in this market, Charris, otherwise they’ll eat you alive.”
“Really?”
“You know it.”

We met up a few days later at our usual coffee shop and discussed it more thoroughly. I had brought a few charts of the last few years of the F.C.O.J. market. It fell significantly during a hurricane in Florida and another along the south-central coastline. It was also affected by trades with neighboring countries, government spending, tax reform, and, rather strangely, the morale of certain southeastern Native American tribes, particularly on reservations near Disney World.
“Research is for pussies, Charris, just do it,” Jared remarked as I tried putting everything in a manageable order we could look at and dissect.
I thought about it. My aunt had given me exactly ten-thousand dollars. My unemployment wouldn’t last forever, and I had yet to email Mr. Gosmand about the comic strips. We needed a house. Charley needed to go to school. I could invest three-fourths of this money into a series of commodities and live on the rest. Six-thousand dollars could be fifty, ten years down the line. I wondered if it really worked that way.
“It’s hurricane season, Charris, we can get those stocks at hardly nothing.”
He was right, if we invested during hurricane season we’d double our investment by spring and just pray hurricanes didn’t actually hit.
“Then there’s California,” he said, “it accounts for a portion of the market, the situation is safe there, you’ll always have a fallback, even if the situation is dire in Florida, the stock would always recover with California. They lean on one another.”
“Where did you learn that?” I asked him.
“I might have made it up.”

The following week I met Jared’s mother. She was, in fact, a stock broker. She wore raiser sharp horn-rimmed glasses and a pinstripe business slip. She spoke quickly and in technical terms, she moved her hands when she talked, she told me I was making an excellent decision investing.
“Investing in frozen orange juice? Really?” I asked her.
“Absolutely, these markets are chaotic but safe. They are constantly in a state of minor fluctuation. So long as there isn’t a full market crash, you’ll be fine.”
“Do you see anything like that happening?”
She smiled, “It’s completely implausible, but if you like, you can take a little time to weigh out the pros and cons,” she looked down at her watch, “reconvene in ten minutes?”
I went outside and thought about it, walking up and down the sidewalk with my hands in my pockets wondering if it were a good idea. There was a man taking pictures with a zoom lens in the urban park across the street. A Japanese businessman walked briskly by checking his watch with the hand holding his leather briefcase followed by a man with a little boy on his shoulders. The man and the child whistled and laughed with one another. Artist, investor, father.
“Alright,” I said, wheeling through the door of Jared’s mother’s downtown office. “I’ll put in six-thousand.”
“You’ve made an excellent choice, but I recommend ten.”
“Really? That only leaves me with one.”
“Nine!” she said quickly.
I thought about it. Jared was nodding his head, his mother winked at me. “OK,” I said, my throat clenching up.
“Excellent!”
She gave me all the papers I needed to fill out. I asked her if investing nearly all of my money in only one stock was a good idea and she told me, “It’s always a good idea.” I wrote her a check and that was that. I was given receipts. She informed me on where I could go about checking up on the stock and told me she would be my personal investor. Her percentage was relatively small, it was a smart investment. We didn’t put a buy or sell cap on the stock, so I could de-invest at anytime.
“You’re an investor,” she told me.
I nodded my head at her with my hands in my pockets. Jared made money signs at me, rubbing his thumbs, index and middle fingers together, smiling like a lunatic.
For three weeks I didn’t touch the newspaper, I didn’t read up on stock or check Bloomberg, I didn’t even return Jared’s phone calls. I wanted to let my investment exist on its own, free of mine and Jared’s interpretations, free of any sort of impact. I was neither afraid of the outcome nor the initial investment. I wanted a break.
One evening I took Charley out to the park and photographed him running into a group of pigeons, right at the moment where they were poised in takeoff, nearly soaring off into the sky. I was getting better at photography. I knew how to manage light, I knew the best times to photograph –right after a rainstorm. The pictures were coming out increasingly better. I was ready to take my film to the store where I purchased my camera. This roll would be my best.
I hadn’t seen Sarah in a few days. She said she would be working late. She apparently came home after I had already went to bed and woke up before I did. I didn’t ask any questions. Taking care of Charley was pretty easy. He didn’t require diapers or an excess of emotional support, nor did he require large financial expenditures. Relatively speaking, I couldn’t have hoped for a better kid.

I finally finished the email to Mr. Gosmond:
“Dear Mr. Gosmond, I understand you’re interested in putting together additional comic strips for your clients. I’d love to lend a hand. As an avid gun supporter I’d be perfect for your N.R.A. pamphlets, and as an investor I’d do well illustrating for any clients in the business field. As a venture photographer I’d be a steady hand in your art magazines and finally, as a father I’d do well illustrating your family oriented reader’s journals. I hope my esteemed catalogue of illustrations finds you well. If so, you can contact me at this address...”
I included a series of past strips working for the newspaper, everything from black-and-white single box cartoons in the editorial section to strips in the comic section. I had opted, at the beginning of my career with the paper, stupidly and for no apparent reason, to sign the rights of any strip I’ve created over to the newspaper’s publishing company. Submitting my strips to Gosmond, even for career reference purposes, could result in a lawsuit. I betted no one would be the wiser.
I showed the letter to Sarah, “What do you think?”
She was washing dishes, looking tired and somewhat disoriented, “Looks great.”
I was almost certain she was cheating on me, but she did well helping out with Charley and she started paying her half of the rent. I felt these things were important and felt obligated to seemingly let it slip by unnoticed. This created a certain tension as, according to a feeling and not necessarily any rational series of events, I had this idea she was aware I was aware, and was biding her time, waiting for me to expose her so she could make a clean break. I knew this transaction was going on behind the curtain of our everyday conversation and domesticated mannerisms, and was absolutely intent, maliciously intent, on letting her cheat on me without any sort of confrontation or affect. This, I felt, annoyed her to no end, and it wouldn’t be long before she was a little more obvious in her affairs, coming home reeking of that special scent, that postmortem saturation of sex and deceit. The stronger and more obvious this affair was the more resolute my complete ignorance would be, thus perpetuating and strengthening her conspicuousness. And all this was happening on an undercurrent, behind a facade of a normal, American relationship. I felt, for the first time, I was making a general and unannounced leap into adulthood.
For starters, the entire affair could have been in my head, and this was even a likelihood, but in reality it didn’t matter in the least, because whether Sarah was being unfaithful or not wouldn’t change the fact the subject successfully eluded mention, so therefore changed nothing. She was paying bills and helping me with Charley, every penny of which found its way into my calculations; nine-thousand in stock, food-stamps, depleting unemployment stipend, and a healthy one-thousand dollars for general spending. If Sarah suddenly left I’d be nearly out of resources to cover Charley on my own. I couldn’t let that happen.

I caved. Taking Charley to school one day I passed a newspaper machine and put the quarters in on a sudden whim. I frantically flipped to the business section while Charley stood there on the sidewalk looking up at me confusedly. Up. F.C.O.J. was up several points. Most of the stocks in the I.C.E. were up and the jumps were significant. According to an analyst in the commentary section, the leaps were owed, mostly, to a change of power in China, a new leader who, known for being incredibly oppressive, shut down certain private industries in and around Jiangsu. This caused an uprising in key areas throughout the continent where goods-for-export were produced, sparking a renewed interest in American national investments, thus strengthening the made-in-America market, particularly in the area of produce; farmers were purchasing seed, equipment, parts and raw materials from American businesses, strengthening those business and creating investor-faith in national corporations that don’t outsource. The peak in investment was small all across the board, and actually completely natural, subject to change, but then, right at the perfect moment, a government in Northern China, or a faction of its police, began executing Tibetan monks during a protest. Two events spinning into one another forced a market pinned to a World economy to drop, forcing investors to look elsewhere. This news was broadcast internationally and was running constantly. Stocks were moved, fortunes changed companies, and frozen orange juice, as well as many others, benefited from the entire affair. There were, in other cases, massive plummets, especially in plastics, but the affect it had on F.C.O.J was too small to outweigh the gains. I was officially a smart investor.
I took Charley home and put on a suit and left him in the living room. I needed to go out to a coffee shop and check my email, talk on the phone, drink coffee and look at the business section in front of everyone. This was extremely important to me. I called Jared and he came right over. He was, strangely enough, also wearing a suit, carrying himself completely differently than he normally did.
“Told you stocks would jump!” he said, sitting down with me after ordering a cup of espresso. He set it gently on the little napkin on the little plate it came with. He had a little spoon he stirred the espresso with, too, although he had no sugar or milk in the cup. I watched this all take place for a few moments and felt embarrassed.
“What does it mean? Should I pull out now? Take my money and run?” I asked him.
“No. I’ll tell you what you do, you take a trip, go enjoy yourself. Come back and let it ride for a while. Your money isn’t going anywhere. It will stay where it’s at,” he said, finally putting the spoon down.
I thought about it. I had never even entertained the idea of going on a trip, but it might be good for Sarah and Charley to get them out of town for a while.
“Leave Charley at home,” Jared said.
“I can’t do that, who’s going to take care of him?” I asked him.
“Get a babysitter. He’ll be fine.”
“You think spending the little money I have is wise?” I asked him.
“If you’re running out and the stock is up, just pull out a little, but for now, I’ve noticed it’s best to just take a break from the whole thing. My mother told me new investors have a tendency to get excited and make a lot of dumb moves. You should avoid these by enjoying yourself for a week or so. Why not? You’re on food-stamps and you receive unemployment, do you really need to be here?”
He was right, I hadn’t thought about a trip. Maybe going off to an island somewhere with Sarah was exactly what I needed. I could take a break from Charley, well, provided I left him with a reputable baby-sitter, and I could take a break from looking for work, which sounded enticing. I could also separate Sarah from whomever I imagined she was sleeping with, if this was indeed even happening.
I slouched in my seat and watched the man nearest us drink his coffee and read his paper. The headline read, “Man with similar case to Rutherford’s rejected in court, judge heard to say, ‘We’d like to avoid faked injuries.’”
“What do you think?” Jared asked.
“I’ll think about it I guess, maybe ask Sarah what she thinks.”

That evening I was resolute. Sarah had come home tired and stinking of sex again and I figured we needed a trip. When I asked her about it she agreed, in her own distant way of expressing herself.
“I think we could leave Charley with a babysitter,” I told her.
She set her keys on the nightstand and took her shoes off, half-sitting on the armrest of the couch. “Let’s try it, it could be fun.”
“Where should we go?” I asked.
“Hawaii, let’s go to Hawaii.”
“We can’t afford that.”
“I’ll help pay for it, why not? We can be like real tourists, it will be cute. We’ll eat seafood by the ocean and everything, you can wear a big stupid hat. I think it would be nice.”
Hawaii. I had been there once when I was younger. I worked on a cruise ship for a month and was eventually fired, or quit, I couldn’t really recall. I worked a tour group stand near the dining gallery. Pride of America, the ship was called. I knew nothing about Hawaii, and they hardly told me anything relevant, but that didn’t stop me from selling immense portions of little tour excursions at nameless prices. The thought of going there and being a tourist sounded vaguely intriguing.
“Alright, let’s do it,” I said.
I was surprised at how enthusiastic she was about the trip. I thought this would be a long, painstaking endeavor trying to convince her, that I would eventually just wind up going alone, but she was excited. I suddenly had a renewed interest in our relationship. Suddenly we were doing fun, spur the moment things, making spur the moment decisions that only severely romantic couples make.
“Why are you wearing a suit?”
I looked down at my pinstriped slacks and shrugged.

A week later and we were off to Hawaii. Honolulu, to be precise. All the way there Sarah worried about Charley. We had left him with a babysitter, a woman I found through Jared, apparently a distant relative of his. She was in her mid-twenties and had long, thick dreadlocks, a peculiar smell and a way of speaking that bordered a remoteness I couldn’t quite put my finger on, as if there were only half of her talking to you, the other half wandering around aimlessly. Charley was aloof and could care very little. He would go to school in the mornings, she would pick him up, they’d cook dinner and watch television with one another. This is how I imagined things would go. She might watch politics and ask him questions, she might afflict him with her world view, she could forget to have him shower here and there and might even have her boyfriend over. I didn’t want to think about it, and it didn’t matter, she was cheap, that’s all I cared about.
Originally we were embarking on a cruise but at the last second I backed out. Bad memories of turtle-like people wandering around empty corridors looking for the bathroom, ageing social butterflies and swingers eyeing me strangely, obese children, overachieving waiters, the shift of a drunken ship barreling through the roaring ocean uninvited, no thanks. We could find an in-between, a middle ground on the beach somewhere. We could be tourists, this is what we wanted, listless tourists, but not so far removed from reality as passengers on a ship. We settled for Waikiki.
Sarah bought me a hat like she promised, this big stupid cabana hat and purple sunglasses with the bobs on the back to go with it. I got her back with the nineties jeans that go up to the bellybutton, expanding and lengthening the curvature of the ass, as if it began in the mid-back area and dropped somewhere before the bend of the leg. We walked around like that on the beach saying, “Ooh and Ah” at every little touristy trinket we came across. We were absolutely inconspicuous. We were a couple, I an investor, on vacation.
We were staying at Yolanda’s Bed and Breakfast on Waikiki Beach. We had a week in Hawaii and we were three days in, days spent sleeping off the initial hangover after getting into town and drinking at the hotel bar. Benjamin, our personal waiter, tour guide, mainland expert, snorkel boat captain and presuming chaperone, would oversee our vacation the entire trip. His rate was a hundred dollars a day and when I heard that price I declined but Sarah said, “No, lets keep him, it will be fun.” By nature his goal was to up-sell just about everything. Four dollar margaritas had to be twelve-dollar margaritas, tacos became lobster, snorkeling off the reef became a special excursion ten miles out, only reachable by boat, piloted by Ben for seventy-five dollars extra. Three days in and already I was nearing the end of my bankroll.
On the fourth day I thought I’d go out alone in the morning and get a head start. I had breakfast in the bamboo bar and made my way out to the beach, but when I got there I had this sudden burst of energy, a brief moment where things began to make sense, and I realized I would be spending the day alone. I was suddenly invigorated. I calculated costs in my head for horseback riding, parasailing, offshore fishing. I settled on kayaking: twenty-dollars for a full day. Fun, cheap, and good exercise. I went back to the room and found Sarah there still asleep so I packed up a few things I thought I’d need: water bottle, binoculars, sunscreen, and an anthropological book of birds off the shores of Hawaii, illustrated with remarks, dates, theories on lineage and technical discussion. The thought of reading it out on the kayak excited me very much. I’d read about them and watch them with my binoculars. Then I remembered the camera. I searched frantically in the suitcase to see if I had brought it. It wasn’t there. I searched in Sarah’s suitcase. It was there. She had brought it along, zoom lens and all. She must have known I’d forget it and wanted to surprise me with it. I eyed her gratefully while she slept. The morning light was pouring through the windows and highlighting the reddish tint of her hair. I considered myself lucky for the first time in our relationship.
I had my knapsack slung around my shoulders, white sunscreen on my nose and the big hat and sunglasses on. I must have looked like a dork but it didn’t matter to me, in fact, it felt oddly pleasing.
Benjamin was out by the dock putting lifejackets on his boat when I greeted him.
“Are you ready?” He asked me.
“Yeah, how did you know where I was going?”
“You’re going on the boat.”
I stood there for a moment, confused. Then I remembered we had made plans to go whale watching and suddenly felt hopeless. He must have sensed it because the next thing I know he says, “That’s okay, I’ll just take Sarah out.” He seemed excited about this last prospect.
“Really?” I asked him, “You don’t mind? I wanted to go kayaking.”
Now he was elated, “Kayaking? Why didn’t you say so, we’ve got kayaks...” He pointed towards the kayaks stacked up in the sand near the bar.
“I know, twenty-bucks,” I went to hand him the wet twenty I had in my bathing suit pocket, not quite dry from swimming with Sarah the night before when we were drunkenly fucking in the ocean.
He waved his hand at me and shook his head, “No, twenty’s for the two seater, the singles are forty.”
“Well give me the two seater,” I said anxiously.
“Can’t, it wouldn’t be kosher, two seaters are for two people, I’d love to make an exception but...you know...regulations...”
“Why are two seat kayaks less, wouldn’t they be more?” I asked him.
He brushed his shoulder-length, bleach blonde hair back and scratched his bare chest and gave me a mumbled, nonsensical explanation. Burning daylight and impatient, I told him I would take the one seat kayak for forty and began to make my way back to the room to get more money.
“Wait,” he said.
I doubled back and hung there in the sand for a moment.
“There’s a ten dollar deposit on the lifejackets, I can’t let you go without one...”

My mood cleared up when I got out on the water. It was slow going at first, having to paddle harder against the waves. A couple times I nearly lost it but I was able to gain control once the first set of waves passed. It eventually leveled out and I was able to get off the surf. It went well after that. My aim was for a small island I saw out in the distance, but the more I paddled the further away it seemed to be. I thought I could reach it in a few hours but two hours in and the shape in the horizon hardly changed. I wondered if I was hallucinating or just moving against the current. I wondered, once you’re past the surf, doesn’t the current take you out? I resigned myself to taking a break for a while and looking in the bird book. I pulled the knapsack out from the plastic compartment behind me and found the book. It was authored by a man named Ale Borsanni and had colorful birds all over the cover. The title was, “Birds of Hawaii.” There were brown Noddy birds, Myna’s, White and Red-Tailed Tropics, colorful Cardinals. There was a certain story about the migration of a Japanese White Eye flock, carted into the land by the Japanese during the war, or so supposes a naval captain that had apparently discovered an abandoned Japanese ship three-hundred miles off the coast of Hawaii after the war. He said it was like a ghost ship, not a single person alive onboard. No bodies, nothing, just crates and crates full of Japanese White Eye’s. Assuming the birds were infected with a virus and that this was stage-one of a Japanese plan to wage germ warfare on America in the wake of Hiroshima, he ordered his men to sink the ship by firing a torpedo into the hull. Apparently a number of the birds escaped, thus the reason why the island is populated with them today. The captain gave a detailed account of ordering his men to shoot the birds down in the sky and how he felt when they realized they couldn’t get them all. He was quoted, “The sea was red with little birds.” This story was largely unsubstantiated but I enjoyed it immensely.
After reading through the bird book for an hour I decided I would see if I couldn’t spot some of the ones in the pictures. I began to take out the binoculars when I realized I could just use the zoom lens from the camera and possibly even get a few photos while I was at it. I looked around, the sky was empty, and then I noticed, while scanning the horizon, the island I had been kayaking towards. It was no island, it was an oil rig, way out in the distance. My stomach dropped. From what I could tell it wasn’t moving, there was no wake, in fact, although I wasn’t close enough to tell for sure, it appeared to be manless, red as if rusted. I took a picture and decided to aim for it anyway. Maybe there would be a ladder I could climb. I could explore it, that is, so long as the vessel is empty. Vessel. I was thinking like a sailor. Suddenly I felt full of energy and completely pleased with myself.
By the time I got close enough to figure out what the hell its story is it was nearing three O’clock. It wasn’t quite a ship, more like an island on stilts. I had heard about these: oil rigs that served their purposes now abandoned by the companies that owned them. Too much trouble to move, more trouble than it was worth, apparently.
I paddled hard until I reached a floating deck near the stilts. I grabbed my knapsack and tied it around my shoulder, steadying the kayak up against a floating deck and wedging it between two planks and began climbing the ladder. I kicked the kayak after the first or second rung up to make sure it was wedged well enough and made my way back up.
The structure reminded me of a business complex set in a parking lot in suburbia. With all the cranes it looked a great deal like a strip mall outlet under construction. There were several rows of ladders and zigzag staircases built up around a large cube-shaped building. The building looked like a command center of some sort, and on the very top there was a triangular structure coming to a sharp point, beyond that just antennas positioned almost excessively skyward, as if the rig was nothing of utility, instead a monument, an iconic symbol of man’s great leap, now totally abandoned. I made my way up the rickety ladders and zigzag staircases, I entered the command center, now just metal, plastic, and dust. There was a seagull on some inanimate control panel that must have come through the broken window. The office looked like a children’s toy fashioned after some archaic vision of the future. I stood there in the doorway for a moment and made my way back down to the main deck.
Between exploring the rig and getting lost in an area reminiscent of an abandoned parking garage, I had spent over an hour on the ship. I checked my watch, 2:00. I had plenty of time. I started taking pictures. It was a wave of inspiration, one I hadn’t felt in a long time. I took great shots of the cranes, and the bird sitting on the control panel in the office, looking as if it had always been there. I took photos of a pelican standing on the rustic-looking helicopter pad. I took shots of the zigzag staircases and the incredible obelisk on the command center. I had more film, I kept going. It was the best I ever felt.
After the photo frenzy I decided I had better make it back before it was too late, so I set out on the ladder and made my way down to the floating deck. The kayak was missing. I looked around the stilts and wondered if I was on the wrong side of the rig. I wasn’t, this was the only ladder. I was stranded on an abandoned oil rig way the hell off the coast of Hawaii. This felt typical. Less than a six-months before, I had lost my job, became involved with a girlfriend, had an aunt die, suddenly had a son I couldn’t take care of, and now this. I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Fuuuucckkkk!” I screamed, over and over again. Then I saw the kayak, about twenty yards away. It was possible. I could swim after the kayak, swim it back by the little handle, and head back to mainland. I dropped my knapsack, took off my clothes, and made the plunge. I expected it to be like a swimming pool. I figured I could just jump in and swim after it, but although the water appeared to be calm, one thing I didn’t account for was the current. I felt it pulling me away from the kayak, away from the rig. I swam harder. No dice. I made it back to the floating deck and pulled myself up, completely naked, panting, crying. Fucking Jared. Fuck you Jared. You moron.

I awoke to the sound of a helicopter. It was morning. The previous evening was spent making more attempts with the kayak, but the more I waited between attempts the further away it floated, till finally it was gone completely out of sight and darkness gathered. Now there was a helicopter. It wasn’t far and I knew if I got up near the command center I might be able to wave it down. I yelled at the top of my lungs and jumped up and down, waving my hands, but it didn’t matter, the helicopter was coming straight for me anyhow. Whoever it was, they were looking specifically for me. I cleared out of the way so it could land on the launch pad. Ben was piloting the helicopter. I wanted to hit him.
“Get in!” He yelled out at me, opening the door.
“What?”
“Get in the helicopter!”
I grabbed my knapsack and put on my shirt and the next moment I was in the helicopter lifting above the rig.
“How did you find me?” I yelled out at him.
“You didn’t come back last night, the kayak was still missing, so I called it in. This has happened before.”
“Really?” I asked him, I felt oddly reassured.
“Several times actually. People aim for it thinking it’s an island, park the kayak. The current is strong near the rig, without a tie the kayak is not going to last wedged between the poles.”
“How’s Sarah?” I asked him.
“She’s fine,” he hollered at me, “out on the beach sunning, didn’t even notice you were gone.”

We landed on the roof of a hospital not too far from the beach and I rode with Ben back to the Bed and Breakfast.
“Where did you learn to fly a helicopter?” I asked him on our way back. “They let you do that?”
“I took a training course. The coast guard doesn’t need to put on elaborate rescue missions every time some yahoo goes nuts, so provided we’re trained and clock so many hours and get licensed and so on...they let us out there.”
“Why don’t you go to work as a pilot?”
“What do you mean? I make way more money doing the tour excursions. By the way, that rescue mission is four-hundred dollars, they charge me two-hundred just to take it out.”
When I found Sarah out on the beach it was just as Ben said. She was tanning, half naked. She didn’t have a clue I was gone. I wished they had left me out there longer. I could have grown a beard, gotten skinny, maybe made the news. When I told her she just said, “Oh, okay.”
“We have to get back. I’ve maxed out my credit cards,” I told her, gritting my teeth.
She just looked up at me and smiled, shaking her head.
“What? We need to go Sarah.”
Just then, Ben approached. Sarah stood up.
Ben said, “Maybe you should just head back, brother.”
I stood my ground, watching the two of them. Ben put his arm around her, she looked indifferent. Ben smiled, Sarah wrinkled up her eyebrows and nodded her head at me. I clenched my fists and took a swing at Ben. He tilted back and grabbed me from the side. I felt this flash of heat on the back of my head and then nothing.
I regained consciousness in the hot sand. I was sunburnt, I must have been out for over an hour. It was mixture of being knocked flat out and desperately needing sleep. I sat there for a while watching the waves and rubbing the back of my head. This seemed about right. What else could I have expected? I wondered about Charley, about the apartment, what we would do if Sarah wasn’t there helping out with rent. I had to talk her out of this. I made my way back to the bungalow and found all my luggage piled up outside. I went for the door handle but it was locked. I knocked on the door. Nothing. I could hear her and Ben inside, talking. Sarah sounded as if she were crying.
“Sarah? Can you hear me?”
Nothing.
“Sarah? We need to talk about this. Please answer the door. I’m willing to forgive you Sarah, whatever you did, it’s OK.”
When I looked up it was Ben and not Sarah standing in the doorway.
“How’s your head?”
“Sarah!” I saw her sitting on the bed behind him, but when I tried getting past Ben he blocked me. “What about the bills!?” I yelled out at her. Ben closed the door. I hammered on it desperately. “The bills!” I screamed.

The whole trip back I iced my head down with the scotches I procured from a sympathetic stewardess. I had money, being maxed out wasn’t particularly true. I had about six-hundred dollars left on another card, and with the nine-thousand I had in stock, which had climbed to thirteen before the trip, I wasn’t looking too bad off. I needed all of it now, every last penny. I would have to take it all out, look for a smaller apartment, set some money aside for Charley and move on. When I arrived home he was there, sitting on the couch next to the babysitter. It was midnight.
“Why isn’t he in bed?”
“You’re back early!” the babysitter got up and started picking through an ashtray.
“Come on Charley,” I said, dropping my bags down and trying to pull the kid off the couch. He screamed. It was a loud, painful scream, as if I were coming at him with a blowtorch. “What is it!?” I yelled. Then I saw it. He was wearing a sling around his arm, this bizarre hemp contraption. I looked up at the babysitter with a questioning glance, she looked frightened. “What in god’s name happened?”
“He was playing hockey with his friends, hurt his arm real bad. I put some oil on it and applied a...”
I interrupted, “You did what? Oil? Why didn’t you take him to the hospital?”
She got defensive, suddenly huffing at me and pointing, I took a step back, “Hospitals are the problem, man! You put your kid in a hospital? You know how corrupt they are? Like, insurance and shit? I’m into homeopathic therapy, sustainable, non-...”
“Get out!” I hollered.
“What?” she backed up towards the door.
“Get out!” I said again, this time angling towards her with a closed fist.
“My money...”
I let out a loud yell and leapt across the table at her. She dodged and bolted out the door.
I sat next to Charley on the couch and calmed down. He looked like shit. “Come on, we’re going to the hospital.”

It came as no surprise when I learned the hospital bill would be over a thousand dollars. He had a broken arm and I was there all night with him. He watched TV and ate apple sauce and hotdogs. He asked where Sarah went, I told him she was in a tragic accident, that she was badly disfigured, most of her body burnt, charred and ugly, that I left her like that, smoking on the beach. He began to cry and I stopped talking. We were silent for a while.
Even though I told Charley he could stay home he wanted to go to school anyway and show off his cast. He wanted me to sign it with the highlighter he had strung around his neck. I called Jared when I was leaving the school. He said we should meet up, that it was urgent. I already knew what he was going to say. The stock plummeted, massive hurricanes in Florida, labor unions going under, a prosperous Chinese economy...
“Orange fever,” he told me when we met up at the coffee shop. I ordered a coffee and took a seat next to him.
“What?” I asked him.
“Orange fever. The stocks plummeted because of orange fever. Has something to do with Cubans, I don’t know...”
“You don’t know?” I interrupted.
“We’ll get it back Charris. It’s not all gone.”
I told him about Sarah, about the medical bills, about the oil rig. I told him about my debt. We left the coffee shop and walked down the street together. It was a sunny day. I hung my head and told him everything. It felt good to let it all out. It just kept coming. I told him about my need to be an artist, an investor, and a father, even though I don’t know the first thing about any one of those things. I asked him about the lever on the side of the camera I had brought along, and before he could reply, I asked him whether applying oil to a broken arm really works. I told him I could be a helicopter pilot if I wanted to. I told him painted light bulbs require a special kind of paint, so it wouldn’t just burn up when the light is left on.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said.
He stopped me in front of a nice house near the coffee shop. “What?” I asked, not looking up.
“I’ve heard about this.” He began talking excitedly, some guy named Ruther-something-or-other slipped in front of some guy’s house and made all this money. It’s some city ordinance. They have to clear the sidewalks, man! We can fix this. I just push you down, you know? Like this,” he made a sweeping gesture with his foot and pushed at the air hard. “Look!” He pointed at the sidewalk where there lay three leaves and an earthworm, “This sidewalk is filthy! The owner should have cleared it, right? If I push you down real hard, they’ll think you slipped, and we collect, split it, like forty-sixty. You take sixty, I’ll take forty, right?”
I thought about it. The idea seemed too bizarre, it was hard to register in this emotional state I was in. I remembered something about this case, but it all seemed blurry and convoluted.
“Fifty-fifty,” he said.
I thought about the camera, about the big zoom lens. I thought a tripod might be nice, or one of those leather carrying cases. I thought about taking Charley to the park. We could buy a dog and walk it together and I could talk to women who have dogs of their own. I could take black-and-white pictures of the dogs running into flocks of birds. I could take them to that girl that worked at the camera shop and tell her she could have one.
Jared made money signs at me, rubbing his thumbs, index and middle fingers together, smiling like a lunatic.

Fake Trip Advisor Review 3

2009-03-01T00:10:00.000-08:00

Hotel in Africa - Klaus Von Gulag

Oh my God! Yes, finally, hahah! Was der coolen vacation jamals! How to describe? So viel spab! Africa is rich with sausages, sausages in der animals, in der kitchen and dining room table, in der spa…the sauna sooo hot! Hahah!
We went on safari organized by the hotel, so much must, main event of my trip. You must! There were other German tourists and we had for wurstfest! Because you find the zebra and it has two colors: white and black and contrast against the wilderness finds easy prey for the lion, because we saw it jump and make a tasty meal! Der manager of der tour group served us after der lion had leaved us. We had der sausages we grilled on der safari panzerkampfwagen! We had the most enchanting whimsyhausen, we even danced and Marie and I went running on the safari with nothing! Der manager smeared the zebra on his face and went running after us like the lion, he was all red and screaming like lunatikausel! We laughed and danced and ate der zebra sausages!
In the evening he took us back to the hotel and we were so tired all der German couples came up to our room for wurstfest slumber. When I awoke we forgotten der zebra bloot and found it all over the bedsheets, the cleaning kammerjungfer thought it was wine gluton! Oh my God! They said for too many in one bed but our tour safari manager had party kampf with maid right there and she promised not to say nothing! Haha!
We cleaned off der zebra bloot in the steam roomen and finished the last zebra sausages out of der garbage sacken. Der safari manager introduced us to his party colleague the hotel manager and we went playing out by the pool. You can drink the hefeweisen and we wore nothing and ate the sausages inside the swimming pool. The managers were so happy we had der last zebra sausages so we finished der hefeweisen and went for more.
On the safari again there were no lions so the hotel manager was could not be patient and just shoot the zebras. We ate the sausages and played in the bloot like nothing! Marie and I ran off into the safari land again and the managers and tour guests danced in the zebra bloot and ate the sausages.
We return in the hotel and we were too tired from the party festing and the managers just slept in our room again. We had a kampf in the morning over the sausages and we resolve tear them in half and share, he was very generous!
Der rest of der fest we had similar days and we borrowed the panzerkamfwagen for airport departure and flew out. I think the other Germans still at the pool in the sausages! Hahaha! Oh my God!

-Klaus.

Fake Trip Advisor Review 2

2009-02-28T23:58:00.000-08:00

Review of Hotel somewhere in Florida, Dr. Morgan Rutherford

I often summer here and find it to be a remarkable, quaint little retreat. My latest stay was filled with an assortment of surprises. The first of these being the lack of a decent infirmary (I've mentioned this to hotel management on a number of occasions and, lo and behold, another year has gone by without a clever heeding of my requests.) It's no problem anyhow for me as I, thoroughly anticipating their careless non-reform, was smart this time around and brought my tools and surgical instruments. There is, you see, never a reprieve from practice in my own closely scrutinized occupation. Never mind, I take joy in being the sole proprietor of healthcare at this fine establishment even when on holiday.
As for the hotel itself, it's all very good. The wine selection is immense and no exception is the food; bon appetite! Although one minor event of mention occurred when I became aware of the chef's chronic, very obvious case of spastic hemiplegia (his incessant shuffling and imbalanced dynamic equinus gave it away.) I approached him at once and offered to operate and prescribe ankle-foot orthosis but he politely declined. At this juncture, after searching him more closely and following his wandering, palsy eye, I declared a rite of conscience and injected him with an analgesic at once. He stuttered incoherently and passed out right there in the restaurant in front of everyone (it was my intention to time the dosage so that we might have been able to find a more suitable environment to operate…well, c'est la vie! Luckily I had my instruments with me by the table, and I surely began to move in that direction when the staggering, anaesthesized buffoon started in epileptic fits right there on the floor! By the time the management came I was able to escape without notice (I could not work in these conditions.)
I saw Luis only one other time during my trip and luckily, this time, we had a little more quiet time with one another where I could successfully operate without interruption. Of course, again he declined and even threatened to call the authorities (the authorities! I couldn't believe it myself) but I took his jabbering as an indication of hysteria and hypochondria and was successfully able to induce a chemical coma where we could begin the healing process in peace. Now because there is still no infirmary our work space was less than adequate, but we made do on a small wooden table in the janitor's break room (it was a Sunday and they were absent so we had plenty of time.) I was able to drag him there by his arms careful not to bruise his palsy ridden body and prop him up on the table. Luckily I've performed this procedure before and had prepared my tools the night before, these being;

A scalpel for cleaning away raw bits of skull and tissue

A pre-charged round power blade for removing the skull

Swabs

Duct tape

Hoses for cutting off spastic blood spray

Elmer's glue

The surgery went fine up until one of the wait staff, apparently in search of floor cleaning caution signs, rudely interrupted my work. A small debacle ensued where the poor young man, at the sight of our surgical operation, showed signs of mental hysterics and shock, however I was quick to diffuse a scandal by quickly running at him with the ether rag. Problem solved. I dragged him across the floor and brought him over to the next table where I would go to work on him next (you see? No place is in need of an infirmary more than this hotel!) Anyway, moving on, I finished both surgeries at once (in the case of the young man I applied a scalding topical cream to his chest for posterity and shaved his legs to strengthen an aerodynamic physique for future shock incidents.) Now, because the hotel is lacking in surgical goods common in any third-rate hospital -there were no IV's for intravenous feeding, I had to improvise, but luckily I was able to disconnect a few hoses from the fountain machines and rig up some kind of needle device rerouting the crème soda directly into blood circulation for both patients.
Work aside, the trip went on pretty well after that, I went horseback riding, swimming, and most days I just lounged around in my room or checked up on the patients in the janitors closet (the manager, a close friend of mine, allowed me full access when I told him our situation and changed the locks to suit our purpose.)
However my days of restful bliss were soon put to a halt and I was called back into duty again when another incident occurred. The manager and myself were enjoying dinner out on the veranda one evening, as we often do, when one of the larger guests began to choke on a bit of meat at the table nearest us. Although we were a bit tipsy there is no one better suited for the job than myself, so of course I had to act. The manager handled crowd control while I managed to escort the choking patient (now turning nearly blue) down the elevator and into the janitors closet. Now because I knew I would need help with this procedure I was sure to call for my close friend the manager who I reached on the janitorial office phone. He was timely enough and although he has little medical training, we made do as we often do. Now in the case of the choking patron, the Heimlich maneuver is often recommended, but not by myself; a surgical incision into the esophagus should be made with the addition of prying clamps to hold the throat open while the object is extracted. Although the manager was slightly intoxicated he was still of great help in this process; aside from his usual techniques I find highly disagreeable (he'll often beat and jabber at the patient, making unnecessary incisions and extracting unaffected organs,) he did quite a good job of pulling out the meat (although this extraction was made orally, which I don't recommend.)
We finally finished the surgery and sewed the patient up after injecting the necessary anesthesia and my own special addition; a small, battery operated blinking light I taped around the esophagus so that, next time our patient dines they will be reminded of previous choking incidents and will appreciate the necessity of chewing carefully. Her family would be pleased to know she's now resting peacefully in the janitors closet near our two other patients, receiving intravenous injections of grape soda (we ran out of the crème.)
The rest of the trip went the same, a few days of rest and relaxation, an incident, and a brief few hours where the hotel manager and I went to work (although some of his methods I found a little obtuse, sometimes doing more harm than good.)
In any case, that about wraps up another summer here. And until the hotel gets an infirmary, another summer spent practicing more than resting, but never mind. Patrons here will be delighted to know that, during the summer months, if anything unexpected should happen I'll be ready and willing to be of service!

-Dr. Morgan Rutherford

Fake Trip Advisor Review 1

2009-02-28T23:54:00.000-08:00

Intercontinental Hotel, Tokyo, Japan. Business man in Tokyo.

I just finished up with my business trip in Tokyo while staying at the Intercontinental. I run an at-home body products business online and I came here to try and make a sale to a leading distributor, although when I got here, I couldn't find them, and when I did, there was a communication gap and I was just too disgusted to go on with it. I'm still in Tokyo, writing this at the hotel community room, but I can't seem to find my way out of the country. Really want to leave though. The hotel is fine, but what really got me was how backwards everything is here. They're angry about Pol Pot I think, because when I transferred from my layover in the Philippines to Japanese Air they said they couldn't accommodate me because of my size. I told the stewardess they hate me because we killed Pol Pot and that got her real mad. She started hollering about Alah and everything and I was just lucky I didn't get suicide bombed right then and there. I heard these people like to do this honor killing thing, my buddies warned me about it, but on the plane?! She quit hollering though because she could tell I was real worried. Listen, take my advice, if you ever get threatened by a hysterical Japanese suicide bomber posing as a stewardess on a plane just do what I did. Point towards Tokyo to indicate you just want to get to your destination, then make a sign with your hands as if something is exploding inside them while making an exploding sound with your mouth to indicate you don't want to get blown up, then point at yourself so they know it's you who doesn't want to die. It really works, because the next thing I know she starts crying and yelling something like, "Hiroshimama" or something. Whatever it was, I avoided a real potential problem.
When we landed, I hailed a taxi and pointed to a picture of the hotel I kept on me because I was thinking ahead and heard these people don't read English and are illiterate. He mumbled something and drove me straight there. He was talking about something but I could hardly understand and couldn't make it out, I think he was crazy, but then I learned they all do that and I was really worried about my business trip.
When we arrived at the hotel, my worries were confirmed: their English is incomprehensible, they just do this jabber thing that's just really disgusting. I think its because of the way their faces are shaped that muffle what it is they're trying to say. Anyway, for dining stuff the food was okay…I mean, different, but okay. The problem is you have to unroll the fish yourself, it doesn't make any sense and just means more work, but they bring these sticks out you use to unroll the fish and flatten it, and why do they always forget to bring silverware? I think they want tips or something.
The hotel has a money changing booth but that was another problem: they only give you Disney dollars or whatever, but don't worry, every place I went to takes them. I was embarrassed using them at first around Tokyo but people seemed to sympathize with my situation and accept the monopoly money so that cleared everything up.
Word of the wise: their images of Jesus over here are way off; he's overweight. I couldn't believe it, but he was bald and overweight. I tried pointing this out to a few people but they didn't get it. I took a tour of one of the churches and while I was near the altar, you know, just repulsed and disgusted, I tried explaining to the people around me about how Jesus had a beard and was thinner, when they didn't understand, I took out my sharpie and corrected the statue by putting a beard on it and black holes around the wrists and then took out my red marker and put red all over it. I think they were impressed because the lady started screaming this "Gaijin" thing at me, which, because by this time I was accustomed to understanding what they meant to say, I knew to be "Great." So they were all running around me and showing these guards what I had done and pointing at me saying "Great" and the guards ran up to me to thank me. But I knew about Jesus being modest so I just made my way out of there and decided to avoid the thank you's. I wouldn't have understood it anyway.
When I got back to the hotel they moved me to another room. I'm not too excited about it, the bathroom is actually near the bed and they gave me a roommate I didn't ask for. But I guess it's free because they haven't asked me for any money yet. There's also free internet in the community room but I can't go outside at all which is strange. I figured there must have been a terrorist attack or something.

The Endless Concord, Chapter 17

2009-01-15T18:31:00.001-08:00

XVII. The Big Weight

Two Halves Don't Make a Whole, by Dr. Idleman, Chapter 2: “The Shallows”
Vertigo is a loss of identity, not a loss of physical placement. We live in a society of constant vertigo, like sailors on a grand vessel. The plank is punishment for identity. The plank is freedom from vertigo. Identity is affirmed only when one is jettisoned from this ship, a ship where all destinies remain alike…

I threw the book in the trash. Looking at it there atop the garbage in the trash can reminded me of the teamwork ball and things I left behind. This maneuver seemed like a clean start.
Rainy was due in two days. Waiting for our visits was reassuring. I woke up in the morning earlier than usual and went through the classifieds highlighting jobs I knew I would never apply for. Each one guaranteed a different direction, some other course I could take, long networks of personalities I could assume, entire lives I could live. Highlighting the ads arranged some commitment to these potentialities; exhilarating, fresh. I was down to about two hundred dollars and knew I would eventually make some decision, even if it were to do nothing at all.
After some research I learned I was eligible for unemployment due to the circumstances of my departure from the Plaza. But when I went down to the office and pulled a ticket from the red ticket dispenser and waited in a room filled with all sorts of women with hoop earrings, men with overcoats and no t-shirts underneath and lice waiting for the next wave of shaggy haired people and woolen scarves, I was informed I needed some confirmation from my superior, that being Willis, and was given forms I would need to fill out at home as their offices were closing early. Back in the apartment I stood with my hand hovering over the phone contemplating calling up Willis and that inevitable sympathy I knew he would contrive out of sheer habit, when lo and behold there came a knock at the door. I received a visitor for the first time since Rainy a week or so prior.
“Clement…uh…Launders?” A large man in uniform asked, lumbering over a clipboard with one of those post office pens with the chain attached to it.
“I’m here to pick up the refrigerator.”
We studied the refrigerator that lay on its side in the hallway.
“Did the landlord send you?” I asked, surprised it hadn’t already been moved.
“Er…maybe, is your landlord named Frank Othello?”
“Christ…” I said, opening the door all the way and motioning him to do what he needs to do.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry, nothing, go ahead, it’s all yours.”
He motioned to another man who was leaning up against the stairway having a cigarette.
“Those things will kill you,” the first mover told him.
“I know,” replied the other man, bending down to stand the refrigerator upright.
“Sir?”
“Yeah?” I asked, about to close the door.
“You need to sign for it.”
“He wants me to sign for it?”
“It’s policy.”
I signed for the refrigerator, watched them leave, and began to close the door when I caught the sight of a woman barreling down the hallway.
“Tonya?”
“Good, you’re home. We tried coming the other day but no one was here.”
“I was in Seattle…this is uh…unexpected to see you here.”
She pushed open the door and held it with one hand while motioning me to step back, which I did, totally bewildered, and waved down the hall. “It’s okay,” she said.
Right then Willis, Randall, Marvin and Frank appeared at the door and all five of them stepped into the apartment.
“What is this?”
“I’ll put on some coffee,” Tonya said, abandoning the defense stance, the kind they taught us in training, and walked into the kitchen.
Willis motioned me to sit down, starring at my fist, the one I used to hit Idleman. It was red and covered in blue spots. I hid my hand where he couldn’t see it and waited for whatever comes next.
“Frank?” Tonya called out from the kitchen.
“Yeah…I uh…there’s no coffee machine any more,” Frank hollered into the kitchen.
“I keep a French press in the cupboard,” I said, standing up to help Tonya, when Willis, who was hovering above me, gestured for me to sit back down and announced he would take care of it.
I watched Randall and Marvin wonder around the room. Marvin would find a place to stand, kind of lean up against the wall and cross his feet, nearly fall, and prop himself back up, astonished, as if he had just woken up. Randall looked up at the ceiling fan and moved his head around in a clockwise motion, switching every fourth bar or so to a counterclockwise motion and then switching back again. Frank hung around the door, for, I gathered, an easy escape if I had decided to turn on him.
Tonya came out with the coffee with Willis behind her, setting the mugs down on the coffee table and watching me take a sip and contrive a satisfied nod of the head.
“We figured the movers would get you to open the door, just in case you were holing yourself up in here.” Tonya sat down next to me with her hands on her knees.
“So does that mean I get my refrigerator back?”
“Hey that wasn’t part of the deal!” Frank said, hammering on the door and pointing at Willis who motioned back that he wasn’t going to betray this deal they made.
“Let bygones be bygones with the refrigerator,” Willis said sitting down, “that isn’t why we’re here.”
“Why are you here?” I asked.
Marvin burst out laughing.
“And why are they here?”
Tonya and Willis looked back at Marvin and Randall as if noticing them for the first time, “We’re taking them to the SSI office after this, today’s SSI day, had to bring them with.”
“And you?”
“We’re here to help you. Frank came to me the other day, said you had ‘Went over the edge’ and suggested I do something about it. And I…well I was going to come anyway, because of what happened. I hoped we could talk about that later. Thom also called.”
“How does Thom know how to reach you?”
“He’s resourceful. Anyway, you should thank me, I assured him you would be getting ‘Intense psychiatric care complete with lasers and electrodes to the brain and everything.’ He was polite and amiable after that.”
I nodded my head. “I don’t know what you’re expecting to find here.”
“How’s the coffee?” Tonya asked.
“It’s good, it’s mine isn’t it?”
“No, we stopped by the Good Dollar on the way over, stuff for the office kitchen.”
“Ah.”
“We sure had a scare at the parade huh?”
“Why do I feel like people are tip toeing around me?” I asked.
“Well, because they are,” Willis broke in, “you made a mistake that cost a person his life, you lost your job, all of your appliances were stolen, you have a drug and alcohol abuse history, there’s a pattern here, an ending to all this.”
I watched Marvin and Randall go into my bedroom. “Uh…Willis?”
Willis stood up and dragged them both back by the arm. “That’s not OK! You understand? This is someone’s house, do you go around like that in someone’s house?!”
“Okay,” I said standing up, “it’s been fun…”
“We’re not done here…”
“I think I’ve had about enough,” I interrupted Willis.
“Hold on,” Willis said, taking Randall and Mravin by the arm and escorting them out the door, grabbing Frank too, who winced and stood his ground, grimacing at Willis. A short standoff took place where the two of them just kind of starred one another down when Frank finally walked out of the room defeated. Willis then politely motioned Tonya to leave.
“Uh uh, no way, I ain’t on watch right now, you aren’t even paying my ass for this. I’m here to see that Clemy here don’t blow his top,” Tonya protested.
“Please? I’d like to speak with him alone. Why don’t you hop in the van and take them down to SSI, I’ll see you back at the Plaza.”
Tonya hesitated for a moment, put her coffee down, and kissed me on the cheek. “It ain’t the end of the World baby, there’s always in with the new and out with the old,” she whispered, patting me on the shoulder and walking out of the room.
The gesture felt warm and reassuring.
“Let’s go for a drive. Is that your rental car out front? Is that what you used to get to Seattle?” Willis asked, picking the keys up off the table and spinning them around his finger by the ring.
“Can I have my car back?”
“No, I need it.”

“I just want to say this and get it out of the way. I think it’s important we talk about other things,” Willis began, rolling down the road at fifty miles per hour, “but about the way things ended…I had no say in that, Roswell had a firm grip on my testicles, you have to realize…”
I waved him off. “Water under the bridge.”
“Good. Just as long as you know…”
I motioned him to stop.
“Okay, okay,” he said, “moving on.”
We turned onto highway five heading North and the car picked up speed.
“Frank informed me of your kind of, oh, falling off the edge of the earth there,” Willis set in, “he said you were depressed and drinking pretty heavily, watching a lot of television, which is, you know, a bit abnormal for you. You were always active, following the news and making little comments and so forth. I’ve never known you to be so…I don’t know, resigned? Yep, that’s it…as if you’ve turned in your resignation here.”
“It’s funny how you can feel fine until everyone asks you how you feel all the time.”
“But is it that simple? I don’t know…you know it’s a funny thing working in this field. There’s these constant reminders of where society has failed…where we’ve failed.” He looked over at me and back at the road. “These reminders…they pace back in forth, they spin in circles, they shit themselves, they scream from the depths of inner consciousness…howling like that, like dogs at the moon. It’s an inconvenience for us, the people who have to play the janitor of this system. My psychiatric degree and my certificates amount to just that, janitorial work. We’re caretakers, jail keepers, undertakers, and janitors all in one, but more than anything we are the hand that covers the mouth from making its presence aware to the rest of the World, we’re hiding under the bed. The hysterically disorganized mother that feeds the child pain medication so it might go to sleep…so she can go on fucking well into the…”
I motioned him to stop again.
“Do you remember Charley?” Willis asked after a short silence.
“Yeah Willis, I remember Charley.”
“Fucking Christ right?” he said awkwardly.
I glanced at him out of the corner my eye and nodded my head in agreement.
“Is this it?!” he asked, shaking his head.
He said it again after I didn't respond, and then again, then another time, and finally he was shouting it out of the window moving down the road at something like ninety miles per hour. People honked and moved out of the way. Rain blew through the sky and the trees, plotting to climb in through the window and drip down onto the dark gray interior of the car, welling up in little puddles that would eventually be sopped up using the inevitable newspaper technique. Willis had his head halfway out of the car as it swerved around forcing me to grab the wheel and attempt to get a handle on things.
“Come on!” he yelled.
I shook my head violently. “You’re on your own.”
“Come on!” he said again.
“Is this it?!” I said under my breath.
“Again!”
“What is this Willis? Some kind of hip new therapy you copied down from an infomercial? A mantra, is that it?” I yelled out at him over the sound of the wind.
He rolled the window down more. Water was definitely getting in.
“I don’t know,” he said shaking his head with a big smile, “Is this it?! Come on!”
“Is this it?!” I said again, with the same volume as before.
“Think of Lance, huh?”
“Is this it?!” I yelled out of the window, in unison with Willis.
“Roswell! That bald headed coffee addled power marketing head fuck! Think of him and his Goddamn teamwork ball!”
We yelled the words out of the window again.
“Charley? Forever wasting away in that goddamn armchair we bought from the office warehouse for fourteen-ninety-five?” he spelled the words out while hammering at the dashboard with his open hand. “Sun falling over the buildings? All those people down there going about their busy little lives? And there’s old Charley! Up there in that window! Heart too fucking big for the weight of the World! Lights out like a white-dwarf, a silent collision of fate and melancholy for no one to see! Fucking Christ! Is-this-it?! Is that how it ends?”
I studied Willis, his eyes were red and teary, a face I had only seen once from him. He was grave, the way he looked that night when we discovered Charley's body.
We went down the road like that for over an hour, the windows rolled down, rain pouring through, our heads hot with cold and delirium, yelling our heads off, as if each exclamation were somehow putting cracks in the glass that separated us from ourselves, this part of us we buried away and wanted back. I had never seen Willis behave this way, and I was sure I’d never see it again. Part of me knew all along that this was the way he dealt with things. No one could ever be that stolid, I imagined, and here he was, howling away. It seemed to make sense. I realized I wouldn’t rather be anywhere else but in this car screaming my head off at the walls encasing the highway, at the tops of the Douglas Firs and midday moon. This moment, I told myself, is the center of my life, this one exclamation that meant everything.
The words left us and echoed on down the onramp, no longer under our control like a top spins off the fingers carving direction out of momentum and the shape of the Earth. Willis set on a destination unknown to me. I thought I should ask before thinking better of it and let him just drive where he wanted to drive. He could pilot the rental car clear into outer space. There would only be a short stop at the mechanics where he would wrestle with the price for a while, excited over this special they have on rocket boosters and wondering whether or not he could somehow save on fuel if he converted the engine into bio-diesel, weighing out his options like this before hopping into the car, waving off my questions with a stern nod of the head, and taking off clear into orbit. “This one really kicks out at you!” He’d yell over the clatter of the engine, “I mean, you know when you’re breaking the atmospheric lens!”

We hit a point in the road where there was less traffic and it turned into one of those highways that meant you were in it for the long haul. The rain blew through the window, knocking the car around with Willis just kind of piloting the thing grinning from ear to ear. On the side of the road were the occasional stores people occasionally stopped in to collect food and things in bulk. This scenery just went on like that. I thought about the direction things were going with Rainy, about finding work and the general future one contemplates when speeding down the highway with the windows open. I felt this heavy weight gather up in me all at once. It kind of gathers in the stomach and sends you hurtling through the car, through the road, down into the hot center of the earth. I had found Idleman and had never asked the questions I wanted to ask, questions I could never put into words. I looked at my face all swollen with cold through the side-view mirror and started laughing. You have to laugh, continuing on past the weight to the next step, something just a continuation of everything before it, something you can turn around and study; an algorithm, like the way the knight moves on a chessboard.
I remembered the painting by Brink I kept on the wall; the broken, manless ship and the wild ocean swallowing it whole. I realized my fascination for the painting wasn’t the destruction or the helplessness, it was that, for the brief moment in which the idea was captured, the ship and the ocean were one thing.
Willis pointed to a sign out on the side of the road, looking at me with wet eyes and a wild grin. The sign read, Welcome to the middle of nowhere.

The Endless Concord, Chapter 16

2009-01-15T18:29:00.001-08:00

XVI. Recovery

On the drive home from Seattle a thought entered my head. It was something like a conscious affirmation of something I had known all along. It came in an image of Rainy, confused, shaking her head at me. “Quit mentioning his name!” she said. Then came an image of Rutherford. He was leaning back in his chair and telling me he was close friends with Rainy's father. I had thought about it that night on the drive home, “Before he moved back to San Diego...” Rutherford had said. Suddenly it hit me all at once and I pulled off the road, sitting there like that and chain smoking cigarettes trying to put it all together. Idleman was Rainy's father. The thought of if seemed too big, bigger than me, and the more it sunk in, the angrier I felt.
I turned around right before I-5 hits Portland and drove in the opposite direction back towards Seattle, speeding as fast as I could. The lines in the road and the scenery seemed to kind of blend together in one big mesh of grey. My head felt cold and angry. I didn't want to look in the review mirror, afraid of what I might see. So I drove like that, without looking back. I thought about moving down an empty road in the night, I thought about Lance pacing around in the office and telling me he was on the line. The environment began to look like the way he described it in his interview with Idleman, and for a moment I knew what he was talking about.
There was a series of coincidences here. I tried letting it sink in while I drove down the road at 60 miles per hour in the ice and sleet, chain smoking cigarettes and drinking copious amounts of coffee. So Lance was born at Clariton Hospital in 1966 where two young doctors, Idleman and Rutherford, would eventually begin work. At a young age Lance moves to San Diego with his family. Roughly five years later, without having previously met Lance, I gathered, Idleman moves to San Diego where he takes up his practice. Lance has a mental breakdown and is sent to Idleman’s office where Idleman becomes his doctor. At some point Idleman must have moved back to Brooklyn for a short time, but long enough to start a family, and moved back to San Diego a second time and eventually Seattle. Meanwhile, Rainy, Idleman’s daughter, visits her father in San Diego every so often while living with her mother in Brooklyn where she eventually falls in love...well, maybe that’s pushing it, but at least gets married to Idleman’s good friend and aging colleague Dr. Morgan Rutherford. They moved to Seattle around 03’ where they lived for a short time and separate. At some juncture a very mature and completely insane Lance Bennett bounces around Seattle and Portland, Idleman publishes several books, and Morgan looses his mind. Born in the early 80’s in Idaho and now working in Portland, I come along and close the books on the whole situation. People are far more involved in one another’s lives than I had ever imagined.
Somewhere outside of Seattle, the outskirts of Tacoma, I imagined, I pulled off the road and sat on the hood of the car smoking a cigarette in the dark looking out over the fields and buildings behind them, all lit up and shimmering in the night sky. Like streams feeding into lakes this industrial system of warehouses and smokestacks feed into commercial outlets that feed into downtown. A large whirlpool of graffiti and cement with an empty space in the middle. Here on the outskirts I felt I was being pulled in, dragged by the legs into this network of glass and steel. Men don’t become themselves. We never had a chance.
When I reached Seattle I was too amped to check in for the night and go to sleep. So I looked up Idleman's name in a phone book I found outside a diner and, to my surprise, there it was, right downtown. I pulled up to it and parked my car in the parking garage near the Plank St. Market. It was 3:00 A.M., and for several hours I had nothing better to do but pace outside of his building. It was a large office building with a gothic flare and gargoyles hanging off the arches. It seemed about right. I vibrated from one side of the street to the other trying to place the last month’s events in my head in the proper order one more time.
So I met Lance, Lance died. I soon find out a man named Idleman worked with Lance and a man named Rutherford compiled his case file in Brooklyn. I met a girl connected to both of these people who shared a connection with me beyond this triangle of relativity. We shared something bigger, and we shared it right at the time when I needed her the most, a time when I was lamenting over a man on the line I accidentally murdered. I tried putting it all together in the right order but it was difficult making it all out. Maybe it will take shape later, but there was something else, there was Idleman, and soon he would be in this building here and I would confront him, unsure of how, but I would confront him.
At 6:00 A.M a man in a suit walked by, handed me a five dollar bill, patted me on the shoulder, and told me it gets better. I shook my head confusedly and walked across the street into Idleman's office building. I waited in the lobby until 7:00, a time, I imagined, that would make my appearance seem legitimate.
“Hello, I'm a friend of Dr. Idleman's. I'd like to see him please?”
The woman behind the black marble countertop regarded me with indifference. “He's not in,” she said, not looking up.
“Yes but I'm a friend of his and he'd like to see me.”
She looked up at me and then over my shoulder. I turned around to see what she was looking at. Two security guards stood behind me at the door.
“I mean, I'm a client actually. I'm a client and I'd like to see him, you see I am having a breakdown...seeing elephants fucking in the street...that sort of thing.” I made my hands and body shake as I spoke, but oddly, it didn't seem that forced. My hands and body where already shaking.
“He won't be in for another half hour, would you like to wait?”
“He's here isn't he? Rainy must have called him. Where is he?” I asked, spinning around me.
She waved her hand at security.
“You have to leave sir, at least until he comes in.”
“Fucking skank!” I snapped, wheeling around quickly and surprising even myself.
Security dragged me out of the building and soon I was street side again. I began walking quickly down the sidewalk unsure of where I was going. There was a diner right up ahead and I decided to duck in and try getting my head together. I had a cup of coffee and some breakfast while reading the news and taking several trips to the bathroom where I splashed water on my face to wake myself up. The newspaper I had procured from the bin they kept by the door was wrinkled up and out of order. There was a story about a woman who stabbed her husband over a row about music, she was quoted to have said, “I mean, who doesn’t like Bruce Springsteen?” There was a riot at a soccer match in Chile and some kind of economic collapse in Bangladesh. I flipped to the front cover. There was a picture of two men shaking hands in a boardroom. The date of the newspaper was a few months old and I remembered Lance looking at the very same headline. “Can you imagine?” he had said.
I paid my bill and walked out into the street being bustled around by the foot-traffic of the people around me. I began walking towards the parking garage when, there, just ahead of me and across the street where I dropped Willis off just a few years prior, was Dr. Idleman. The coincidence of having left Willis at this very same intersection hit me and I could feel the strings tightening. There he was, Idleman: Rainy's father, Lance's doctor, Thom's biggest hero, the butt of Willis' satire, and my, for reasons unbeknownst to me, mortal enemy. I noticed his large head, the way the white stringy hair on the sides of it would shake whenever he looked around, the self-assured, doctorly way in which he carried himself. He was reading a newspaper and waiting for the light to change, drinking a cup of coffee with his free hand. At the sight of him I could feel all the frustration and anxiety I’ve had in the last several months well up in me all at once.
The light changed and, instep with the pedestrians around him, he walked to my side of the street. I marched briskly forward and met him halfway on the sidewalk, grabbing him by his plaid blazer and walked with him, pushing him in the direction of the office building but doing it in such a way so to look natural to the people around us.
“What are you doing?” he asked, nervously and quietly, also weary of calling attention to the situation, apparently afraid of what I might do if the crowd around us had discovered my harassing him; clever.
I walked the two of us into the diner I had just left.
“We're getting coffee.”
“I already have coffee!” He gestured with the cup he was holding while we walked, briskly and arm and arm down the sidewalk in the early morning light.
“That's OK!”
I pushed him into one of the booths and he sat, starring back at me, with the look of a cat you just ruffled up from its slumber on his face.
“There better be some goddamn good reason...”
“Shut up.”
“Do you even know what you're...”
“Can I help you?” A waitress asked, looming over the two of us and apparently not picking up on what was happening here.
“Two coffees please,” I said, trying to sound rational and collected.
“Do you even know what you're doing?” Idleman said in a whisper after the waitress had gone, leaning in close to me.
“The coffee is on me,” I said with a smile.
“I'm leaving,” he said, trying to gather himself up in the coffee stained leather booth and leave.
“Just sit down!” I shouted, pushing his shoulders down and alerting the customers around me, who now froze and watched what was happening here in silence.
“What is it? What is this? Who are you?” Idleman asked finally.
“That doesn't matter, but the point is, the point is who I'm not...” I said blankly, trying to register what that means.
“Do you even know why you brought me here? You don't, do you? Just spit it out! What is the meaning of all this!”
“I um...I...” I hadn't planned on any of this. I thought, on the drive down here, that I'd suddenly know what to do when I saw him, the questions I wanted to ask. They were there, I was sure of it, but when he sat in front of me like that, I couldn't seem to recall them, I couldn't seem to recall anything. I wanted to believe Lance's death was his fault. It was because of him, because of his rationality, that the World looks like it does. Lance was a kid who wanted to play guitar, that's it.
Idleman sat starring back at me. His eyes were weighty, self-assured. There would be no debating with this man. He had a look of intelligence that couldn't be argued with, whether externally grown or intently mastered.
I got up to leave and began walking towards the door. He stood up behind me.
“You need to get your head checked!” he shouted behind me, and quickly produced one of his business cards and threw it in my direction.
I swung around and slugged Dr. Idleman. It was hard, and he fell hard. The sound of a two hundred and fifty pound man being hit and knocked to the floor with the coffee cups near him trailing shortly behind, the quiet of the room otherwise, and the moan a sixty year old man makes when he is attacked, was all-at-once, filling the room with a kind of stillness, a surreal intensity no one in it would ever forget.
“I love your daughter,” I said with a shaky and cracked voice on the way out as he stumbled to his feet.
I drove home that afternoon in silence, thinking of nothing but the sound of the tires over a road stretching from Seattle to Portland. The more ground I covered the more things seemed to fit in place. It was almost a shape I could look at, that I could touch.

The Endless Concord, Chapter 15

2009-01-15T18:27:00.000-08:00

XV. Rutherford

We didn’t sleep together that night, nor did we after dinner the following night. However it was decided I would drive up to Seattle to see her a week after she left town. This was enough. We had only this one priority and it gave me a sense of purpose. I wondered if this is why people get themselves involved in this whole business in the first place. I was crossing those country roads that lead nowhere, this one looked somehow more commercialized, more on ramps and off ramps, more people with a sense of destination. I wanted to hang on with Rainy, she gave me a wholeness.
I thought about Lance and Willis less and less until finally altogether. These two characters seemed a part of some other life, and here was this new one with Rainy. I would go grocery shopping, clean the apartment up, look through the classifieds for work, talk to Rainy on the phone, read some and go to bed. Days seemed to drift by.
I tried figuring Rainy out in my mind, putting the bits and pieces together, these explanations she gave me, to make a life-form. So long as I guessed at the details in between it seemed like a plausible human being. She was born in Brooklyn and went to school there, traveled around the States and lived in France for a couple years. She still drinks Pastis, besides the language it’s the one thing that really grew on her. Somewhere along the line she moved to Seattle, for reasons why remained vague but it didn’t seem to matter. We were largely uninterested in these details, they seemed to come up mainly out of necessity, and when they did the idea was to get through them as quickly as possible, more because we felt it necessary. We understood this is what people do when they get started, but these talks soon became less frequent until finally nonexistent. I didn’t really want to know about her upbringing and she was comfortable with that, and on the other hand, she had absolutely no pretensions as to my heritage whatsoever. This was a good thing, it seemed. We agreed people were interested in the histories of their partners only when nothing else could be discussed, only at that point where all other topics of interest were exhausted, only then can this leap into banal conversation be made, and these details seemed just that to her; banal and tiring. I couldn’t disagree. So after our first two nights together things began again in the present. However there would be relapses, these would be unavoidable.
The first of these took place on my first trip up to Seattle to see her. It had been nine days since our meeting together at the apartment. Since then there had been two weeks of solid dating, enough, I imagined, to get things going on a close level. I rented a car, a little blue Saturn -Willis still had the hatchback- and drove up there with the window partially rolled down chain smoking and avoiding the freezing cold splashing water as best I could. She lived in a small duplex apartment in Queen Anne in a neighborhood that reminded me of Thom. Kids skied down community streets into cul-de-sacs all bundled up in bright blue’s and yellow’s. Parents footed the snow affirming its compaction. Men wearing colorful beanies waved up at me everywhere I went. There were entire communities of nonsmoking people. I felt I would outlive my welcome.
Her place was clean and warm. She had thick carpet that left foot prints, big Native-American wool blankets, and a snow white well groomed cat that seemed rooted to the spot –a loafer paid in fish and milk whose only job is to just kind of give the room a winter ambience.
“That’s Garfunkle,” she said, pointing at the cat who acknowledged her with a look of bored indifference as I walked in.
I waved at Garfunkle.
“So this is the place,” she said shrugging.
“I want to wake up here every morning,” I said, looking around the room and associating every object in it with her. Standardized pictures of her time in France, a wooden sail boat on the mantel, the electric fire, a Norse God, a fuzzy forest green toilet lid cover, tea tree facial soaps; I could roll myself up in her apartment and disappear.
“You want to?” she asked, drawing closer and hugging me.
The fact that we hadn’t had sex yet became remarkably apparent.
“Shall we get a couple of drinks?” I asked, nervously slapping my thighs with my hands and feigning interest in a picture she had hung on the wall.
She stood by the Eiffel Tower bundled up with dark colored scarves. A man stood near her playing a violin and wearing an Anglobasque beret looking solemnly at the ground. She wore a facial expression of nervous excitement. Another man, dressed like the violinist and holding a flute, held his palm out to her in anticipation. The movements of her body indicated she were taking a step away from him.
“It’s the middle of the day!”
“Well…” I broke off, shrugging.
“I’ve got some Pinot Noir in the cupboard,” she said walking into the kitchen.
“That will be fine,” I said, sitting down on the couch.
I tried activating Garfunkle but there was no use, he was on the clock.
“So what have you been doing?” I called out to the kitchen.
“What?” I heard echo through the room.
“What have you been doing?” I yelled.
“Oh, yeah. Just kind of...you know?”
“What’s that?”
“Huh?”
“Again please?” I sounded out.
She brought out the glasses and set them down on the wooden table all littered with Scientific American and National Geographic. We drank in silence.
“A refill?” she asked after we had downed them in only a few minutes.
“Uh, please,” I said, pretending to wonder if it were a good idea.
“So how’s it been going in Portland? Have you talked to Willis at all?” I heard from the kitchen.
“No, haven’t talked to him.”
“Are you going to see your brother here in town?”
“I might swing by.”
“What’s that?”
“I might swing by,” I hollered.
“Oh okay.”
She came back with the wine glasses and again we drank in silence.
“What uh…what vintage is this?” I asked, eyeing the empty glass down and setting it on the table.
“I don’t know. Should I check?”
“No, that’s okay.”
We sat in silence a little longer, looking around the room.
I looked at her seriously for the first time since I came in. She had braided her hair in two locks that came down to her shoulders. Some curly parts hung on the freckles by her bright green eyes. She drank wine with her hands cupped around the glass pretending not to notice the look I gave her. Garfunkle yawned and shifted his weight on the top of the couch between us. The air conditioner was again present.
I finally lunged at Rainy. She lunged back. We rocked back and forth on the couch kissing violently. Within seconds her shirt was off and I was kissing her warm body. She sat back on the couch and I pounced on her, causing Garfunkle to jump onto the coffee table and knock off the glasses. Rainy tore my shirt off throwing the buttons all over the room and just like that we made love.
It went like that until evening time and we decided on going out for dinner. I thought I’d take the rental because her car is too small. Rainy said she knew a place –a small Greek joint with a floral veranda. The hostess suggested we sit inside and gave us a look when we suggested the veranda.
“It’s ice cold out there.”
“Sounds good, keeps the joints active,” I said while she looked on in bewilderment.
It was ice cold but good. The sky was a dark blue and the stars were coming out. Every waking moment more would collect in the sky. It was the first time I ever registered the idea that stars don’t abruptly appear, as if day suddenly became night. There was this other thing, twilight. The day leaves in grades and visible shapes slowly form in the sky, you can even watch them, like shells on the floor of the ocean become visible after the sand you kicked up settles down. This thought made Rainy happy and we rubbed one another down to stay warm. I thought about those drives I took when I was younger, the slow change in environments, the absence of borders, the harmony of land.
“Can you blow rings with steam?” She asked, making a straw sip motion with her mouth and blowing into the air.
“I don’t think so. You can try it with a cigarette,” I said, pulling a stick out of the pack.
“I don’t smoke,” she said crassly.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, “for some reason that fact didn’t compute.”
“Compute,” she smiled.
The waiter came with the menus and we selected whatever we couldn’t understand at random. As we talked and waited for the food to come a man stood not far from us starring at Rainy. He was well dressed and looked about forty-something. He had a concentrated look in his eyes, and he didn’t seem to notice when I looked back and forth between him and her trying to make something out of it before finally bringing the man to her attention. I wondered whether or not it was a good idea. Rainy turned around mid-sentence and studied the man, a fresh look of worry falling over her face.
“Hello Rainy, I apologize…I didn’t want to interrupt,” the man said, approaching the side of Rainy’s chair and looking at me.
“No, no interruption,” I said, shrugging and looking at Rainy.
The man smiled at Rainy .
“Clement, this is Morgan.” she said as the expression on her face lingered.
“Ah, Morgan Rutherford,” he said, politely shaking my hand.
“Dr…” Rainy added.
I thought about the name, it didn’t seem to ring a bell although sounded familiar.
“Morgan is a friend of my fathers, he lived in Brooklyn for a long time, and,” she looked at him nervously and back at me, “he’s a friend of mine.”
Morgan again nodded politely and the two exchanged astonishment for having run into one another.
“I hope I’m not interrupting?” asked the Doctor, making to pull up a chair.
“Well actually…” Rainy began.
“Uh, no, not at all,” I broke out, while Rainy and I exchanged looks.
“Very good.”
The waiter came out and Morgan suggested we celebrate this crossing paths with champagne and ordered it immediately. Morgan worked at a hospital with Rainy’s father when she was quite a deal younger. The history was orated excitedly by Morgan while Rainy kind of gazed at the horizon distractedly. When Rainy was twenty she moved here with him and became engaged to be married.
I snapped to attention on hearing this last part.
“Rainy was a young social butterfly and I was a man eager to make a fresh start after so long working at the hospital and the two of us hit it off swimmingly,” he announced excitedly.
I nodded my head and watched Rainy stare off into space.
“I’ve been here in Seattle since, work just dictated that I be here, ah champagne…”
The waiter went around pouring glasses and Rainy gulped hers down eagerly and tapped the glass for more. I tried examining the bottle without looking rude about it.
“So are you a friend of Rainy’s?” Morgan asked after tasting the drink.
“He’s my boyfriend,” Rainy broke in.
“Ah, I see, well aren’t you lucky, young man!”
“Yes I am,” I said, reaching out to hold Rainy’s hand and laughing nervously.
Rainy drank another glass.
“When two fluttering young bees roust about in the glorious winter’s day, one might hear but a…”
Rainy got up.
“But my dear!” exclaimed the Doctor, who too got up.
I stood up reluctantly.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Uh…to the restroom?” Rainy said.
We all looked at one another and Morgan and I sat back down somewhat embarrassed.
“So I guess you two are lovers?” Morgan leaned forward, in all seriousness after she had walked out of earshot.
“I guess so.”
“And how is that going for you?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“I’m sorry. You see, I probably shouldn’t be here. The truth is, I had already eaten dinner…I just, well I saw the two of you come in…Rainy she, she’s a basket case...allow me to say that, yes I believe so, she is a hand-full…”
“That’s enough,” I said, trying to figure out what to do.
He wore this green turtleneck that betrayed his body. A brim hung around his chin and flopped down in woolen cloth to his sternum. The fabric would fold into other folds and layers. It was difficult to tell where he was coming from.
“Let me just explain. I’ve known her many years…many years…”
“Like when you were nearing thirty and she was only just being born?” I asked.
“Now, OK, now I understand you’re upset! But that’s alright! That’s no problem. Here you are, the two of you, new together and I am just some old codger who happened to just waltz in here and upset your new partner here…this must be confusing for you, I’ll allow that. I’ll allow for it.”
“I just don’t want this to turn into something.”
“It won’t! It won’t! Believe me I’ll leave before she gets back, let me just say what I need to say here.”
I waved my palm out in the air and shrugged.
“After all is said and done. I love her very much. I want you to know that. She means the World to me. We came out here together, and it’s a given there was an age difference, but we got through it. Her father was a good friend of mine. We worked together at Clariton for a good many years before he went back to San Diego, he’s very successful now. I was a few years younger than he, about forty-eight, when I first noticed the fine young dove his daughter had become. She had supple…”
I waved my hand at him and shook my head.
“Okay, well then all right. In any case, we were going to be married. Although at times I’m under the impression that she only didn’t know any better, and this feeling that perhaps she might run away from me was always present. I’m no fool. I’m under no delusions women at that age stay with one partner their entire lives. But what was to come…well that I could have never predicted.”
“I take it, more than one?” I put in.
“Yes, a great many,” Rutherford said solemnly furrowing his brows and taking a sip of champagne.
His movements looked comical in a way, as if he were miming sorrow.
“When did it happen?”
“A few months into it, after we had already made the move to Seattle.”
“Why come here?” I asked.
“Like I said, her father moved to the West coast years ago because his profession was just more lucrative here, we moved so Rainy could be relatively close to her father; she visited him in San Diego once a year for most of her young life, and because, in my line of work, Seattle is an excellent place to settle down. It’s the weather; people fall apart, they need doctors. After our falling out I moved back to Brooklyn, but I couldn’t stay, a year was enough.”
“I see.”
“So, moving on, they came and went. I knew they were there, I mean, I knew they were coming; I wasn’t surprised. I dealt with it in my own way, I’m not going to bore you with that, but the problem here, and the root of my surprise, were the numbers. It would be at the very least, several times a week, but sometimes several in a day! Why there were artists, businessmen she picked up at the coffee shop, janitors, African-Americans. The numbers Clement! I had lost my mind following her around on these escapades…and she enjoyed it! As if she knew I were following her! The little princess!” he said, shouting this last part out and crinkling his lips as if he had a bad taste in his mouth.
I starred at him blankly, trying to process the randomness of this episode –on our third date.
“She ruined everything! The dirty little damsel! The nasty little strumpet!”
“That’s just about enough I think!” I said, interrupting him and causing him to look up at me as if he had just awoken out of a deep sleep.
“Yes, yes you’re quite right. I’m sorry. We’ve made up since. I’ve seen her one other time since our breaking up. We’ve made up…I shouldn’t be going on like this. I know she doesn’t want to see me. She never wanted to, I understand that now. That is why…that is why. Anyway, I should be going now,” he said getting up.
“I think that might be a good idea,” I said, getting up and politely shaking his hand.
“Good luck to you, enjoy the champagne. Please tell her I…well…tell her whatever you’d like.”
“Take care,” I said, watching him saunter off mumbling aloud.
“Nasty…nasty little whore…” I heard him say in the distance.
I sat back down again trying to understand what just happened and noticed Rainy looking out at me through the window. I waved her over.
“Is he gone for sure?” Rainy asked.
“Yes, I think he’s gone for sure.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why? It’s not your fault.”
“Well…I know what he probably told you.”
I laughed nervously, “I understand, he uh…well you were Lolita and he was an older man at the uh…”
“Clariton hospital.”
“Yeah, it’s uh…” I paused, allowing that word to sink in. “Clariton?”
“Yes, in Brooklyn, Clariton,” Rainy said, tilting her head and forming a smile, “What’s up?”
I ran out to the street. Several cars with tinted windows pulled away from the building. I approached them and tried looking in before they pulled away. A woman in a yellow Jetta threw an orange juice bottle at me and called me a creep. On the back of the car was a sign that read, “Baby on board.”
Rainy ran after me. “What are you doing? Don’t leave!” she shouted. “It was a long time ago, I’m not like the way he said. He’s fucking crazy!”
I continued to run down the street looking in car windows until finally I saw a green turtleneck not far ahead walking along on the other side of the street. It had to be him. I ran towards the man. Rainy called out behind me crying, “Clem don’t go!” Her voice sounded terrible. I couldn’t ignore it. I turned around and motioned to her with my hands that it’s fine. “It’s not about you, I’ll explain later, go back to the restaurant!” I said, turning around and sprinting towards the man. He turned the corner and when I reached it I was put to a halt with a blow to the head.
“Stay away from me!” yelled a flamboyant voice.
I stood up slowly with my vision foggy and tried connecting that voice with Rutherford’s.
“I warned you! Creep!”
There was a hand directly in front of me, I saw a finger, and I definitely saw a small black eye, and out of that eye came a bursting gush of yellow liquid. I seemed to register what was happening a split second before the liquid came out and was able to block it from getting in my eyes, but that didn’t stop the burning. I fell to my knees trying to wipe it away from my face when Rainy approached, having to step back from the acid haze.
“What happened? Oh my God!” Rainy yelled, trying to cover her mouth.
“He attacked me!” I saw the figure of a green man stepping back. “He just attacked me and I sprayed him!”
Rainy grabbed me and led me back to the restaurant cursing the man with the spray and trying to piece together what happened. I went straight to the restroom and spent a half hour flushing out my eyes while Rainy periodically checked in with little solutions she said the kitchen staff procured to help me out. The cook suggested onions and so she brought onions. The hostess said raw meat might help because it works for bruises and wondered, “Does this work for pepper spray eyes too?” Someone in the blurry fog around me suggested citrus and began to squeeze limes on my head. The staff offered to call the police but we told them it was fine and that it was only a misunderstanding. They asked us if we wanted to wrap the food to go and Rainy said it would be a good idea. The cook or someone from the kitchen took the opportunity to say the food wasn’t spicy, and don’t worry, pepper free.
Rutherford didn’t pay for the champagne. We had to use an ATM accompanied by a young waiter. Rainy promised she would pay for it.

“Third time’s a charm…” Rainy said sarcastically as she drove the car back to the house and I sat in the passenger seat. “You gonna tell me what happened?” she asked, watching me ice down my face and turning back to the road.
I rolled down the window. The breeze felt good on my forehead.
“I thought he was Rutherford.”
“I gathered that, what made you want to see him so badly? Did you want to verify everything he told you was true?”
“No, it has nothing to do with you. It’s Clariton hospital. His name is Dr. Morgan Rutherford. Lance was born in Clariton Hospital before he moved to San Diego,” I mumbled impatiently.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Lance Bennett, Morgan compiled his case history.”
“Oh my God.”
“Yep.”
“Well what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to ask him some questions, I have to know.”
“Have to know what?”
The wind shot through the car blowing receipts around.
“I don’t really know,” I said finally.
“You don’t know what you have to know?”
“Yes. I don’t know what I have to know.”
We drove on in silence. I thought about asking her how I could get in touch with Rutherford but thought it better not to. She had broken off contact with the man, it seemed, and even if she did know, I knew her reliving the pain of having to think about him ever again wouldn’t be worth whatever it is I wanted from him. He wasn’t Idleman. And besides, if I wanted Idleman I could go straight to the source. An established author and Doctor isn’t hard to find. I could find the both of them on my own. But is that what I want? What would I say when I see them? What more is there to learn? Crazy man died, end of story. Was there more to it?
By the end of the night I was resolved to drop it. This story had to have some kind of ending. It can’t continue on with some other investigation brought out by a careless counselor sometime after Lance’s death. He’s dead. It had to end there. Rutherford was himself a lunatic, there would be little he could tell me. According to the case file, he had only compiled Lance’s youth history, there’s the possibility the two had never even met. No matter how many times I ran it through my mind, this longing to understand Lance, to dig further into him kept surfacing, and there was this other thing, this one line, “Before he moved to San Diego.” Lance lived in San Diego, he was also from Brooklyn. None of this made any sense.

I awoke the next morning feeling better, and there was Rainy with coffee and light coming out from the window. Her bed was warm and comfortable and I remembered what I said about never wanting to leave, this time taking it seriously. We ate breakfast and talked about whatever was in the news and I knew right then the night before would never be discussed again. We did the crossword, the Sudoku, and then split up the funnies and read them aloud. Rainy liked pointing out ironic headlines and making up new ones. We did that together for a while until I remembered I should probably visit Thom.
“Do you want me to come or do you want to go alone?”
“Go alone.”
“Okay.”
I changed back into the shirt without the buttons out of the overnight bag I brought –the other one was soaked with pepper-spray, kissed Rainy and headed towards Thom’s.

He buzzed me through the gate and I drove in and parked near his blue Jetta, or one of the many blue Jettas there in the parking lot.
“Upstairs,” he sang into the speaker with a buzz that unlocked the door.
“Clemy, meet Ross, Ross meet Clement,” Thom proclaimed standing in the middle of the living room bouncing around with a big smile. Ross, who looked strikingly like Thom, rushed forward and shook my hand excitedly.
“You knew I was coming?” I asked, surprised.
“Yeah! I buzzed you in silly,” Thom said with a tilt of the neck, “what’s wrong?”
“I need to borrow money.”
Thom looked at Ross and then back at me. I looked around the room. “This place is beginning to look more and more like a catalog.”
“I know!” Thom said laughing and clapping his hands.
“Please, sit down,” Ross said, indicating one of the love seats.
Four navy blue love seats rested on a white woolen carpet near a table of some inanimate steal and glass.
“Tea?” Ross chimed.
“No thanks.”
Thom sat down across from me and next to him, Ross. Several moments passed, it was impossible to tell, of them just kind of looking at me with big smiles.
“What is this?”
“We’re not going to give you any money,” Thom said finally, both he and Ross nodding their heads emphatically.
“Goddamn it Thom.” I said resolutely, standing up.
“Wait till you hear what we have to offer.”
“Thom, I need a loan. I ask you only because you don’t impose any interest rates, otherwise I’d go to a bank, but frankly this isn’t worth the trouble. I’d rather deal with them. When you became such a bastard I have no idea…”
“You see the way he talks to me?” Thom turned to Ross who nodded in agreement.
“Five years ago you were normal. It’s this…it’s this city. Idahoans shouldn’t move to Seattle…it’s no good for anyone...”
“Where do you get off?” Thom yelled, noticeably offended.
“Okay okay,” I said finally, walking over to the window, “let’s hear the proposition.”
“I don’t know if I want to tell you now, after this.”
We all three exchanged glances.
“What he means is,” Ross began, “we have an arrangement that might suit all of our needs, if you would only quit making the…remarks…we would tell you.”
“I’m sorry who are you again?”
Thom wiggled in his seat in aggravation, huffing his nostrils and oscillating excitedly. Ross padded him on the knees and looked at me with wide eyes. Ross was pissed off.
I made a zipping gesture with my mouth, thumb, and forefinger.
“I am an innocent third party aware of your relationship with your older brother. He’s told me everything, the way you talk to him, the way you ask him for money…”
“I can’t, I just can’t!” Thom said, throwing his arms in the air.
I looked on in astonishment.
“You see? You see what you do to him? Now you just listen. I’m aware of your alcohol abuse problems, your history of substance abuse, your getting fired from your job. You are a louse sir…”
I tried interrupting.
“Excuse me!” Ross began again, “A louse!”
Thom got up and skipped obnoxiously towards the kitchen.
“Your older brother and I are what some might call 'Successful people.’ We have ideals, beliefs, and above all, stability. These things are strangers to you. But not anymore! We’re going to help you get back on track. This is what you might call, an intervention. Thom knew you would be heading up this way and needed my support. That’s why I’m here talking to you now. It’s time to get in shape buster!”
“We’re going to exercise?” I thought about Jane Fonda, Ross and Thom all going out for milkshakes together.
“Laugh all you want! You’re not going anywhere! You’re checking into a drug clinic and I’m going to make sure you get there!”
“I’m sorry?” I asked laughing nervously. “Are you joking? Do you think that because I got laid off I’m addicted to drugs? I did some coke when I was a teenager, this is really getting out of hand...”
“We read on MSN.COM social workers are most likely to have relapses. We know the statistics.”
Thom came out into the living room with a piece of paper. “Here are the warning signs. You fit these descriptions of a high-seeking addict.”
I grabbed the paper out of his hands and read it aloud.
“This can apply to anyone,” I announced after I finished reading.
“Not here, look at this,” Thom said, pulling the paper away and pointing at number nine, “'The user will borrow money and get defensive when asked what it’s for.’”
“You never asked me what it’s for!” I shouted.
“We didn’t need to, we already knew! And have a look at this, number twelve, ‘Will reject offers of food and drink as they will appear unsavory in comparison to the drug.’”
“We offered you tea, that was a test,” Ross added.
I looked at Thom in bewilderment.
“Drug addicts hate food,” announced Thom.
“Show him number seven,” Ross said pointing at the paper.
“'The addict will appear disheveled, sometimes showing signs of lack of sleep, and will often have bruises or scars on the face from falling down during moments of drug crazed lunacy.’”
I looked down at my shirt with the missing buttons from Rainy and felt the scar on my head from the escapade with Rutherford’s doppelganger.
Ross looked on with smugness, Thom looked sympathetic. The internet printout they were holding displayed a picture of Dr. Idleman.
“How are you feeling Clement?” Thom asked finally.
“We’re here to help you Clement,” Ross added.

I ran as fast as I could. Thom had locked the door with the key from the inside and hid it somewhere during my talk with Ross. I had to take the fire escape. It wasn’t like it was in the movies. Every step I took bolts seemed to be falling off the thing. You don’t just fly down. You have to take it slowly and weigh your steps, careful not to let your leg fall through the gaps between the metal stairs. People on treadmills in the gym below Thom’s floor looked on confusedly as I ran to the car with Ross and Thom, who had taken the elevator, racing closely behind me. I couldn’t be sure, but Thom looked to be carrying a brown lunch bag and a harness of some kind.
“We’re here to help you Clemy!” he screamed from behind me.
I was able to lose them in a lackluster car chase and headed back to Rainy’s.

“I’ve got to get out of town,” I said as I came through the door tracking quickly melting snow into the living room.
“You just got here,” she hollered from the kitchen.
I told her what happened and she couldn’t believe it.
“I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true, they think I’m a drug addict.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I need to go back to Portland. When Thom resolves to care about someone…no matter how misguided he is, he’ll have the whole police force on them…”
I examined the possibility of crisis control looking for me.
“He wants to institutionalize you?” Rainy asked laughing.
“It’s not funny. You don’t understand the way these people think. They’re all hyped up on morning news and Idleman.”
“Idleman?” she asked, puzzled, giving me an awkward look.
“I have to get going.”
“You just got here. No one’s sending agents to my duplex.”
“The networks of management these people exist in are vast Rainy. Right now there are little Idleman's crawling all over the skyscrapers of Seattle looking for Thom’s renegade brother!”
“Quit mentioning his name!”
“What?” I asked confusedly.
“Just...” her tone changed, “why don’t you calm down or I’ll institutionalize you myself,” she said in a sexy drawl.
“It’s not funny! I’m not delusional. These last couple of months have been bizarre. Nothing has happened…and yet everything has happened. Things don’t normally move this quickly for me…”
She gave me a questioning look.
“No, no, no, I didn’t mean in that way, this is fine,” I said gesturing to the two of us, “I mean in other respects…Willis, Frank, and now Thom –all of these relationships now totally irreparable. What happened to just going to work and reading the newspaper, having a cup of coffee and a drink later with a friend?”
“I don’t think that lifestyle would suit you.”
“But that was my life before…”
“Lance?”
“Yep.”
“I thought we weren’t going to bring it up? It’s ridiculous that you keep bringing it up. You’re like some kind of disturbed veteran! It’s not that bad.”
“What would you do if you were me?”
“Take everyone’s advice to degrees. For instance, listen to some of what your brother says and try to find some shade of stability, like a job or something. Listen to what I say and drop the subject of Lance and ‘The meaning of life’ or whatever it is you’ve been going through and think about forgiving Willis, and maybe get something else to occupy your time.”
I thought about it for a while. “Okay. Sounds like a plan,” I said finally, “I’ll go back to Portland, call Willis, find some new healthcare job, and pick up a hobby. How’s jazz saxophone sound, huh? Maybe I can play the sax at a bank or something, they can hire me out, like ‘Jazz up your mortgage’ you know?”
“You asked for my opinion.”
“I need to get going.”
“I’m only trying to help.”
“Don’t say that!” I hollered, edging towards the door.
“Say what? That I’m here to help you Clement?”
“Who told you to say that?” I yelled, moving quickly towards the car without waiting for an answer.
“Call me when you’re not a goddamn lunatic!” She called out from the house.
I paused and stopped before entering the car and sat down on the curb to think. Children continued to ski down the street with parents walking briskly behind them. Men in yellow parkas threw a Frisbee through the air and exaggerated the retrievals. Is there something here I’m missing? I thought to myself.
I stood up and turned around to notice Rainy still on the porch.
“I’m sorry,” I said, not looking up and making a show of kicking my shoes around in the snow bashfully.
“It’s okay,” she replied in a soft, maternal voice.
She came down from the porch and there was an awkward embrace. She promised to come see me within the week and I told her that would be fine.

The Endless Concord, Chapter 14

2009-01-15T18:26:00.001-08:00

XIV. Charley the lamplighter

Rainy appeared on Friday and I buzzed her in. She was as tall and pretty as I had remembered and I wondered if I looked any different.
“You keep a good apartment for the depressed alcoholic you make yourself out to be,” she said, stepping over the downed refrigerator in the hallway and stepping into an appliance free room.
“Special muscle wine,” I said, flexing nonexistent muscles and smiling.
“What on earth?”
I poured us two glasses of the $4.00 whiskey and watched her swirl the glass and smell it.
“It has a shoe smell to it.”
“That’s the great Cambodian Alps you’re onto there.”
“What’s this bubbly paper residue?” she asked, pointing out the odd bloated cork material in the glass, although there was no cork.
“Those are flavor crystals.”
It felt good to be in the presence of a woman. I wanted to impress her somehow and I felt oddly capable of it, as if I had been hibernating, all the while stylish replies and airy topics swirled around in my sleeping head. She was anxious to laugh and that was good. We could say nothing at all. We agreed on everything under the sun.
We polished off the bottle of Special Muscle Wine sitting on the couch talking about Frank and Willis and Thom and every job she and I had ever had. She thought it amazing so much had happened to me in the last few months. She thought it good of me not to think ill of Frank for stealing the appliances. She said it denoted a lack of materialism and attachment to Worldly objects. I wondered if she were religious or not and she told me she wasn’t.
“Are you?” She asked, drawing closer.
I tried thinking of a joke I could tell, maybe tell her I am the reincarnation of the late reverend of Gods messianic kingdom, Jim Jones.
“Not really, no, not at all actually.”
“Good, I don’t want to get involved with one of those religious freaks. I had an ex like that.”
“How so?”
“Just over-the-top I guess.”
“What qualifies over-the-top?”
She brushed her hair behind her ears and sat up a bit on the couch to face me. I braced myself for something good.
“Nothing cultish or anything. He was a Scientologist.”
“I see.”
“It’s like religion meets business.”
“The Grand Inquisitor.”
“It’s oriented around maximizing your personal success.”
“How’s that?”
“The subjective can sometimes disagree with the objective, so instead of altering your perception on the events around you, you instead alter the events around you.”
“Sounds like a power meeting at a stock party.”
“In a way it is. But his problem was, he couldn’t alter his objective reality to reasonably suit his own ends.”
“Did he try to…maximize you?” I asked smilingly.
“It’s not funny! It was terrible. He just looked so pathetic. It’s like a homeless person trying to capitalize on his friends and somehow not getting it right. I felt sorry for him.”
“There’s the meek and humble and then there is the vain and self-involved. You expect one to look like what he is. When the first crosses over into the later it’s confusing. ‘Who does this guy think he is?’”
“I think that’s what pathetic means.”
“Yep, a man swimming in shit trying to look dignified. Maybe a top-hat or something.”
“Great, thanks for the metaphor.”
“Is he still an...uh...Scientologist?”
“No, he couldn’t afford to reach the next level. He sold his car and only had enough money to reach like, level 3 or something.”
“Is that how it works?” I asked, pouring us another drink.
“It’s like Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t know. Anyway, he went to that same church Brian Seabeck goes to in California. He went to visit. They wouldn’t let him in because it was on some other level and he wasn’t maximized enough.”
“Sounds like the story of my life.”
“…All the Travolta's in the World…”
“So were all those guys trying to ‘objectify’ movies like 'Cocktail' and 'Grease' and program them into our society?” I asked laughing.
“Yeah, have you ever seen ‘They Live’?”
“Yep. A masterpiece.”
“It’s just like that. Some kind of elitest mothership filled with little Cruises and Kidmans.”
“Jesus. Stepford life, Logans run, a Brave New World of little Hubbards running around with lavender hankerchiefs tucked in around their necks.”
“That kind of self-assurance scares me honestly.”
“They’ll tell you you’re weak.”
“And that’s what he did, he told me I was weak.”
“You’re not weak. The weak are self-assured. They wear disguises. They seek unity in the church or the office, some face to get behind. You are powerful in that you know your life will end. You will die and there won’t be any mother ship captained by Brian Seabeck soaring off into the omni-verse.”
“Who would captain your mother ship?”
“Woody Allen,” I answered without hesitation.
She smiled.
I did an impression of Woody Allen trying to give directions to Burt Reynolds using intergalactic anti-semitic coffee shops as landmarks. She got a kick out of it. I thought about putting on some music and starred blankly at the space where the stereo used to be.
“So tell me about your patients…or former patients, whatever. Have you had anything else exciting happen besides the masturbation and the dead guy?”
“Clients.”
“Whatever.”
I thought for a while. Suddenly I remembered that fourth person, the shadow sitting in the room at dawn I tried stifling when I was with Frank and intoxicated the other night, a memory of this man I had long tried burying. Willis had also mentioned it, right after my meeting with Team Teamwork, but I had ignored it. Bits and pieces began to come back to me and I wondered if it were far too depressing for the first date.
“Alright,” I conceded after some hesitation, “but it’s not something I break down into a synopsis.”
“Will I regret it?”
“Probably.”
“OK shoot.”
“What?”
She waved her hand in a rolling motion.
“I…”
“Wait, wait!” she interrupted, pouring out the rest of the Muscle Wine into the glasses and getting comfortable. “Continue,” she added in an English upper-class tone of voice and a roll of the hand.
“I was at the Golden Sun when I first started,” I began, sitting up in my seat and taking on a node of seriousness she seemed receptive to. “It was a place of long corridors that led to stockrooms and stockrooms that led to even longer corridors. The building served as a hotel years ago and had been around since the early 1900’s.”
She rolled her eyes.
“What?”
“Is this a ghost story?”
“No, now listen up…”
She saluted me.
“I only mention the atmosphere because it’s an important detail. The presence of some of these old buildings, not necessarily unique for that time period, carry a kind of well preserved force majeure. It’s this knowing static intensity that just kind of looms heavily, unmoving. It’s like a withered old black eyed woman in the rocking chair of a front porch in the middle of nowhere, the wrinkles between her skin just kind of gathering dust. There’s this isolation to the place. It’s at once a treatment facility, an aging hotel, and finally a depravation tank fallen off the edge of the universe. To work a graveyard in the place…I mean Jesus. They would have made some kind of reality fear show about it. There are no ghosts…just manifestations of something buried deep within us these environments conger up. It’s just a depth; a well of thoughtful hyperactivity. People have lived, cried, loved and died in these places. They resonate.
“This is the background of this building. At the very least it’s twelve stories high with two creaky old elevators, a flight of stairs, fire escape on the side of the building, about 150 bedrooms and a whole network of stockrooms and locked rooms and rooms with desks and rooms without them. We usually kept to the first few floors except for the occasional room check or some massive janitorial problem.
“So towards the beginning of my time there I worked graveyard. My job was essentially to sit there on the first floor and buzz people in and out and keep a log of faces I see and behavior...”
“The strange man in the white lab coat,” Rainy interrupted.
“Right. I sat there every night essentially watching and waiting. If something were to go wrong procedure was to buzz the office on the second floor and those guys would come down and assist me. At night there were usually three of us –two in the office and one at the front desk rotating every two and a half hours. I never really knew what I was waiting for really. I had an idea of why I was writing in the log but it was just an idea. You see, they are allowed to come and go. The purpose of the buzzer is one, to keep their drug dealing friends out, and two, to delay them long enough so that we might identify them and write that we saw them down in the log. If we don’t see someone for longer than three days we know there’s a problem. If the mark in the log says, ‘out’ we know this person is probably in jail. If it says, ‘in’ it means there was probably an overdose and we’re going to find a body in a room somewhere. This place is mainly a drug and alcohol facility, but moreover, it’s an old hotel where people pay rent with government checks. They pick up the meds we give them and that’s about it. We host a few meetings but no one really shows. They bring booze and drugs in all the time and, so long as we don’t see it, there’s little we can do, and the absolute least we can do is make sure we know whether or not these people are dead or in jail.
“The reality is this; people slip through the cracks…these people have been inside one of these cracks their whole lives. The building itself is a tear in the social fabric of things. None of this should be there. It’s an effect of things no one wants to see, no one wants to admit. Does the caretaker of nonexistence become nonexistent? We’re working in this hole and we know it! You can feel it. So you act accordingly. You let your mind drift; you disappear in the corridors for a while with the door ajar. You take thirty minute long cigarette breaks. We all did it…
“So naturally checkmarks were missing from the log and checkmarks were forged. When you’re doing close to nothing, in nothing, you might as well do nothing. The graveyard was the place to do it.”
“Did someone die in their room?” Rainy asked, noticeably interested.
“Not exactly,” I began again, feeding off her interest. “There was a client…I had met him briefly and only in passing. He looked pretty forgettable, I mean, in that kind of work. Deep in that crack. He was anorexic and had an elevated case of scabies…”
Rainy cringed.
“He had this slicked back oily hair saturated in nicotine and tuberculosis and wore this hunter green shirt perpetually covered in coffee…”
“What was his name?”
I thought about it for a moment. The name Lance Bennett danced on the tip of my tongue and I wondered why. It would surface every time I pictured the face of the man. Their names, the images of these men, seem to resonate at the end of a hyper-colored coil, the chemical makeup all busted out of shape and hysterical, melding into one another, forming a confused and twisted life-form. There are fish in oceanic trenches with glow-in-the-dark eyes.
Finally, from this depth, the name surfaced. “Charley Crane.”
“It sounds so innocent,” said Rainy, looking teary eyed.
I nodded gravely and continued. “After a few weeks of working there I finally decided to look over the past logs. I knew I'd be transferring to the Plaza soon and that I might as well make my mark somewhere. The logs would be a place to start. They were dusty, looking as if never read. Well, they hadn’t been. We had been so used to doing the check-mark thing and filing the sheets away we never bothered to really pay attention to them, aside from a few names that were on emergency watch…”
“For the high risk level patients?”
“Exactly, ones perhaps with noticeable track marks that hadn’t eaten in days and so on. Charley wasn’t on that list, his name rarely came up at meetings; his check sheets had floated by empty and unnoticed, and what I discovered when taking an interest and looking into them, unnoticed for three months.”
“Oh my God.”
“Most days there was nothing in the log about him, and other days there were a couple of words so no one would be alerted like, ‘Looked fine,’ or, ‘Self-talk.’ But that was just stuff filled in later because we hadn’t been paying attention; ‘He’s probably around here somewhere so I’ll just write this.’ Anyway, there were stacks of these papers, and finally none at all. The man had just been erased from our little register. It was possible for him; his meds were self-care and he wasn’t on room watch. He was the perfect candidate to disappear completely.
“I reported everything immediately to the other two on duty that night. They were tired but willing to investigate. We knocked on the door. Of course there was no answer. We filed an emergency entry form on the online register and we were in the room within half an hour…”
“Oh my God,” Rainy said again, burying her head in her hands, “I’m scared of the outcome.”
“The room was empty. Clean and empty. No note, nothing. It was puzzling. All logic would have suggested he was probably outside somewhere, staying with a relative, whatever. But it seemed impossible for this client…it was impossible. The second a guy like that steps out of that neighborhood red flags go up. He’d be in a holding facility within a week. These guys have fingerprints and they’re all registered with us. Blinking lights come up on computers at police offices. They can’t legally admit that type of person into a jail for longer than forty-eight hours.”
“What about family?”
“None. We were on that too: missing, dead, murdered. The more we dug up on Charley Crane that night, the more his absolute and total disappearance from our universe was confirmed. He wasn’t out there, it doesn’t happen like that. These people have been living with this identity for so long, they don’t just reverse one day. Medication, treatment, these things aren’t designed to make you get better, they’re designed to keep you neutral, static. Static Charley was a walking red-flag for police and healthcare agents.”
“What about social security money?”
She knew we could have tracked him based on account withdraws, I was impressed. “He had SSI, a kind of card, checks just went into that. We checked into that too. Can you guess?”
“Untouched.”
“Yup. Untouched. A crack in the universe and the man just crawled inside.”
“Is that it?”
“Nope. This is a building with three healthcare employees with nowhere to go and nothing to do. We can’t leave. For eight hours we’re just kind of stuck there, and we were on the case. For the three of us this was all there is. Men naturally become detectives. You don’t want the case to end, you don’t want the daylight to come through the windows. This would be a night without an ending, it seemed to us. We were ready. We made coffee, we searched his case files, we looked at pictures, we interviewed clients.”
“Wasn’t there someone you could call?”
“Of course, there’s emergency administrators. All the administrators from all the facilities become floating emergency staff on graveyard shifts. That night just happened to be Willis. Carla Black was off. We called him and remarkably he came. I hadn’t known him that well at the time. At the plaza I had only done a kind of preliminary shift, but still, there was enough dialogue shared between us for him to trust me enough to get out of bed and drive all the way downtown –which he was obligated to do anyway but they rarely did.
“So by two in the morning three became four. Willis picked up on the ominous significance of our task almost immediately. Although the man, at times, can be a lifeless empty space, there is a kind of cosmic rhythm to him. He is like an asteroid belt. There is mystery to this nothingness. Exploding asteroids in space make no sound. That is what he is, the point where they make no sound…” I paused, realizing I missed Willis.
“So we stood in one of the upper offices with the windows open and the cold air blowing snow into the room. We turned the florescent lights off just leaving desk lamps to light the room. Don’t ask me why we did this, there is no logical reason for it, but that’s what we did. Something phantasmagorical was happening, we were in the gloam and we knew it. ‘This is the gloaming,’ we told ourselves.
“Willis sent orders in all directions and we followed them without a moment’s hesitation. We knew he was in the building, we just knew it, but the circumstances surrounding his being there were something we couldn’t have predicted. That was perhaps this ‘gloaming,’ these circumstances. It was superstition, but this place, this place was like the gate to some other world, and in all honesty, in a way, it was just that. The resolve was to search every corridor, every office, every stockroom we thought had always been locked. Some rooms there were no keys for, others there were, some seemed to open in expectation.
“We split up and searched the building like a torch guided mob of overall wearing family men searches the forest for that invisible thing in the darkness, something they expect to find, this thing they know will be there but will never be fully revealed. The face of the marauder evades the marauded for fear that identification will be something altogether ugly; this darkness that stays deep beneath consciousness, something so totally beyond our comprehension. By this time…I don’t know, maybe it was just drowsiness and delirium, but we were expecting nothing short of the face of God...and we bounced this caffeinated affirmation off of one another accordingly. We would open the door to a room housing Armageddon. We were sure of it.”
“With this lead-in it better be,” Rainy said laughing shamelessly.
“You don’t understand this kind of hysteria! You put certain people together in a place like that, under the right circumstances, and you’re all delusional; the world our clients live in becomes our own. We’re all chasing ninjas and assailants.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing.”
Rainy emptied her glass and set it on the table.
“We ran into clients during our search,” I began again. “They seemed to pick up on the black magic of our task. The faces of dogs tell the story of a storm to come long before it comes. People were banging doors, others were screaming. Jasper was on the stairs vomiting and praying to God. No one really told them what was happening…they just felt it. Schizophrenics are conductive and far more finely tuned-in to the coming apocalypse than we.”
“So what happened?”
“I opened the door to a room and found Charley Crane.”
Rainy looked on with wide eyes red and glazed over.
“It was a boardroom companies used to hold meetings, now converted into a stockroom. Before Charley, the door to this room probably hadn’t been opened in years. He opened it once. I opened it again.”
Rainy cried. I held her and whispered in her ear.
“He had brought food in with him. There was a bathroom there in the room he used for several weeks. He never left. It was said later on he had survived in there for two months on whiskey, soda and dry food. He was dead, I knew it the second I entered the room.”
Rainy shivered and cried more.
“But there was something good about this. When I called the other three up, and we entered, we noticed, somehow immediately and in harmony, the window he sat facing was facing West. Don’t ask me how we knew but we were certain he died during sundown of the day before. And we were right. His medical analysis confirmed he died of starvation and malnutrition at somewhere around 6:00 P.M. Rainy, we discovered his body at sunup the following day. For two months he was locked in that room, and we opened it twelve hours after his death. We didn’t know this man, we were his caretakers and he was a ghost to us, but I speak for all of us when I say that in that moment we’ve never been closer to anyone in our lives than that man. He had somehow slipped out of that crack and into the four of us.”
Rainy sobbed some more and I held her. “Are there a lot of stories like this in your line of work?”
“There are very many.”
“Oh my God…” she said again.
We sat on the couch for a while longer. She sobbed more and I held her. I thought about the look on Willis’ face that night. He was the next in the room after me. He only nodded his head. The World was moved out of his reach with that nod. Willis seemed to have washed his hands clean of all of it in those few moments. The thought of Willis being this far removed and myself being present for that last straw, it was terrifying. Although I had hardly known Willis then, the feeling there were two people that died that day lingered.

The Endless Concord, Chapter 13

2009-01-15T18:22:00.000-08:00

XIII. Coping with Coping

I awoke on the floor. The carpet span around the room. I was on the wall and then suddenly on the ceiling. I had absolutely no sense of gravity. I crawled to the toilet and vomited and then sat on the tile by the toilet for a long time trying to imagine what had happened the day before but nothing came to mind. My head felt hot, raging, as if the insides of my skull were melting, or my brain were being cooked on a frying pan. My bones hurt and my body felt weak. I couldn’t bring myself to stand up for fear I’d collapse. So I didn’t, I just sat there, creaking and prostrated on baby blue tile. For a long time I studied the strips of plastic between the floor and the walls. The dust lodged inside. I looked up at the vent in the ceiling, “Nutone” was scrawled across it in 50’s retro cursive. It resonated softly. Judging by the light coming through the window I guessed it was early afternoon. I reached up and turned on the light and watched it burn for a while, starring up at it as if I were going to go blind looking at the sun. I realized I hadn’t studied these things in a long time. When I was younger, I remembered, I would often study the patterns the paint dots made on the white walls housing my room. There’s an education in the tiny details that haven’t yet been exhausted by the busy world. Those subtle little areas of space one would never think about can teach a great deal; some men have blanketed themselves in those places. They have found corners to hide in. There are many of these people in society; a man whose hobby it is to scrutinize the patterns of a snail shell, everyday searching the objects for some hidden meaning, and discovering it –although perhaps nothing he can rationally explain to an audience of busy people. Or a bicycle mechanic discovering an entire micro-Dysnical world in the mechanics of his gears and tiny parts; it’s as if in every object an interactive microcosmic universe awaits discovery. There are cubby holes to crawl into in these worlds. You can live in them, forever wondering about the engineering of a Tesla coil and how this object defines everything else, mirrors everything else. Tiny bugs in Africa, dead ants on a hot sidewalk in Texas, power lines strung up against a bright blue sky on a summer day in the suburbs of Chicago; there is life in these things. They are invitations, hideouts in occupied time in space, eyepieces in which to live through.
I vomited again and lay down on the floor starring up at the ceiling.
I was eventually able to kind of half walk out of the restroom and climb onto the couch in the living room. An empty bottle of Special Muscle Wine sat on the table. Seeing it there filled me with a deep hatred for the Cambodian people. There is absolutely nothing worse than this hangover. I pictured them all huddled around one another and the stack of exports bound for America, laughing and enjoying themselves. A man climbs the distilling tank and pours in this florescent chemical. “Laundry Detergent,” the bottle reads, held above the tank until empty and cast away to the jabbering of Cambodians. A thick musky dirt and grime fills the air as he lowers himself down from the tank, kicking chickens away and receiving pats on the back from his friends, who wear the expressions of men who toiled in steamy, pipe-filled environments stirring troughs and hollering at one another over the sound of burning metal all day. I thought about Lance again while looking at the bottle. I remembered Frank the night before talking endlessly about Carla Black and laughed to myself. He never liked Willis until he learned Willis liked him. When did I pass out on the floor?
I stood up with effort and rubbed the stinging hot back of my head and walked into the kitchen to pour some orange juice but my hand grabbed at thin air when I went to open the refrigerator. I made another effort. Thin air. There was no handle. There was no refrigerator. The refrigerator was missing. I paused and registered the idea that I may have never had a refrigerator. But the thought was lost as I looked over all the “Keep Refrigerated” products strewn about the countertop. Men without refrigerators don't keep products such as these within arms reach. Eggs lay on the verge at room temperature, milk on the brink, cheeses sending out warning signals. The food looked like freshly caught fish struggling for life in an ice chest. The countertop, ordinarily a temporary place of residence, was now the last stop. They had certainly passed that mark. There would be no going back.
I found skuff marks on the tile flooring leading to the carpet and then followed a trail of carpet tracks leading to the door. The thin strip of gold plastic separating the carpet from the tile was torn, as was the thick gold strip of plastic separating the carpet from the outside. The refrigerator was dragged out of my apartment. There were cigarettes put out in the sink. Several cans of beer littered the floor. All evidence pointed to some kind of refrigerator removal party. The microwave was also missing as well as the blender, the juicer, toaster, and the coffee pot. That wasn’t all, there were no television in the living room, no videos, no radio. All gone. A good amount of my clothes were taken as well as my watch. I looked in my briefcase and was surprised to find my laptop computer still there. I walked into the living room and sat on the couch looking at all the empty spaces where my objects used to be. They had even gotten the dust buster.
On the glass table between the couch and where my television used to be was a note; it was dated and signed by Frank. The presence of this letter seemed totally unsurprising, as if it had always been there, in itself a necessary piece of furniture to synchronize the events of my life. It couldn’t have turned out any other way. I knew this letter would be there and I somehow knew the refrigerator would be gone. Why did I put my computer in my briefcase and put the briefcase in my closet? It’s as if all along we both knew Franks role in our relationship, as if I had hired him to make a decision for me. But what decision? The decision to leave? Did I need something to legitimize my moving on? Maybe. When you’re digging a hole sometimes it’s best to keep digging and see if that hole doesn’t bottom out somewhere. Is this why I let Frank stay with me? Did I know it all along? I finally picked up the letter and studied it. The words seemed to fall off the page, moving across it in diagonals and running into one another at the ends of each line, as if he had tried correcting himself on each second line by writing as straight and evenly as possible, not registering the fact that the previous lines were written at an almost 45 degree angle.

Dear Clemy,
If you’re reading this letter you probably discovered that most of your stuff is missing. If you’re wondering if I had planned this out the whole time the answer is that I hadn’t. It was a spur the moment thing I put together with Mingus and some of the boys while you were passed out drunk. Sorry buddy, that’s the way it goes. You’re still probably one of my only friends, this is just the way I do things. Didn’t they warn you about getting involved with patients in training and all that? I heard they did. I heard they warn you about this kind of thing. Good advice. It’s not that we want to do it…it’s just that we feel obligated to do it. If it helps I was reluctant the whole time. We were just kind of going through the motions, you know? We all felt bad Clem. Even Mingus refrained from going through your pockets and taking off your clothes. “I won’t do it, out of respect,” he told me. I almost cried when I heard it.
It wasn’t easy for us. That refrigerator is tough work. Have you ever tried to move one of those things? Holy shit! Man was that work. In the end we just dragged the goddamn thing out. Mingus cut his hand on the coil thing on the bottom. Don’t worry he’s fine. Anyway, so we wound up accidentally dropping that thing outside your door. It looked pretty broken so we left it there. Hey maybe you can fix it or something! Like a project, you know? Something to keep your mind in order? Also, you might have difficulty opening your door, you might want to call someone about that.
The television came out a little easier. Luckily you don’t have too many cables. A lot of people have satellite dishes and all of that junk. You can’t really sell one of those because the companies know their own, so it’s just extra material. We were thankful you didn’t have one. Not even a cable box, which amounts to a lot of extra cords we can’t do anything with. Unplug and go, that’s the way to do it.
Alright kiddo, that’s about it. If you’re pissed I understand, there was a lot of good shit in there. Also, you really need to get your life back in order man. I mean, I know you don’t need my advice or nothing, or maybe you do I don’t know, but man you’ve been depressing the shit out of me. Take it from me buddy, as a guy whose been around the block, once you go down that road it gets to a point where there’s no going back. Hitting rock bottom isn’t a novelty like a lot of these new young kids think it is. When you hit it you know where you are, and there’s no goddamn microwaves and refrigerators down there, take it from me. You’ve got to clean up your act, screw your head on straight! You’re still young, you’re smart, you’re a damn good kid! There’s lots of other jobs out there, quit sitting on your ass alright? Alright. Good luck Clemy!
Oh yeah, Mingus wants to add something.

Mingus: Don’t you go telling nobody! I get you and set you straight mother fucker!

Yours truly,
Frank.

I stood up and opened the door. Sure enough, the refrigerator was lying on its side in the middle of the hallway just like Frank promised. I closed the door and sat back down on the couch to think. Near the cubby hole where the television used to be rested the copy of Two Halves Don’t Make a Whole by Dr. Idleman. The large head on the spine wore a self-assured grin. I told you so, Idleman seemed to be saying. I picked it up and studied the cover, finally opening it and revealing a hologram of the two parts of the body unable to connect. When you move it to a certain angle there’s a cartoon picture of a man sharing both halves and holding his stomach in pain. You can tell he’s in pain because of the lightning bolts all around his face. I opened it up to chapter 1, realizing I was still holding Franks letter, I put the letter back on the table and began flipping through the book settling somewhere towards the beginning and started reading.

Two Halves Don't Make a Whole, By Dr. Idleman, Chapter 3, “A Shallow Pond is a Deep Well.”
Is God God? Is Devil Devil? How is God God without Devil Devil? How is Devil Devil without God God? Isn’t God God because Devil is Devil? This concept applies to all things. Look at your skin. There are tiny cells in your skin. Those cells are made of tiny atoms. Those atoms are active because positively charged particles and negatively charged particles interact with one another creating energy. A battery uses the same concept. Or a magnet –which actually pushes the energy of equal charge away from itself. Positive opposes negative and vice versa. The two work in unison. Here we see the groundwork for life. The wealthy don’t finally realize what they have until they realize the suffering of others. Studies show that the people of isolated communities don’t begin to engage in domestic conflict until those communities cease to be isolated and their media, government and way of life become an object of international scrutiny. Suddenly an island rich with resources is not good enough, an oppressive military is in order, an industrialized economy, a sea of magazines and images telling the populous how it should dress and how it should behave under the new international standards become items of necessity. Here we see oppression in this case spawned completely out of comparison. As could be easily guessed, the people of this World finally realized what they had lost. That they lost it is inevitable. The island World in this example is a man hanging from a cliff searching the darkness for a hand it pulled down with him. Or pulled up? Time will show the hand pulls both up and down. This in view, there are no actions inherently good because there is always a mirror World in which those actions were either the cause or effect of something ultimately bad (in this case the man hanging from the cliff was in bad shape but still had a grip on the rock. Like the island, his falling didn’t result until he reached for the hand of the one on top. Both, of course, fell). Should it be the effect, the effect will then be a cause and so on, forever a roller coaster of conflicting algorithms, a spiral into another spiral into another spiral etc. This is so because life is stimulus and by its nature stimulus is the interaction between opposing factors. It is in our language, it is in everything. Nature again and again confirms death is both the beginning and end of life.
So how then can we begin?
At a human level we must remember that this “stimulus” isn’t necessarily an interaction between two events, but millions of equally opposed events: “How are you today?” “I am depressed.” “Why?” “Because I’m fighting with my wife.”
But is that true? Can person B. really narrow down his emotions to something that simple? Or does it always ultimately boil down to being completely and totally confused as to why he’s really depressed? –in most cases this confusion being the depression itself. (If it were as simple as this people wouldn’t hire psychiatrists!) Identifying the problem is 90% of it, and more than anything accounts for 99% of our jobs. The reality is, however, that at some point person B’s floodgates opened and he could no longer account for his emotions. Imagine too many house guests flooding through your door, your wife tells you “Mr. So and So is frightfully intoxicated and bickering with Dr. This and That…please mediate honey,” but who are these people? You’re in a room packed to the edges with several hundred So and So’s. Indeed, who really are these people!
You realize here that you should have sat by the door and greeted every one of them before they stepped in! If you have any questions you know whom to see! If you have any problems you know where to find them! If you’re in search of a special someone to help you finish a joke you know where to go!
So you see, depression is that crowded house, and more people are rushing in. If you let it go on like this the guests will sober up and start beating up on one another! None of the guests in this story are particularly bad or good. They are neutral. Or they are both in one breath. They are, as people, potentially anything. But for your own good, so as to solve potential problems, you must simply know what they are and where they are and how to categorize them. You must identify them and categorize them from the onset; that way you know where to go when you need to recall something…or when you need to hide something. Every event should be identified as neutral, labeled, and put away in the shelf inside the library of your own head.
The idea here is this; every rock skipped across a pond creates a ripple. Every skipped rock sinks. Sunken rocks are eventually carried to the banks and skipped again. That which begins, ends, and begins again, and ends again, taking on different shapes, different attitudes, different lives. You put the book on the shelf with the label “Fought with Wife,” but inside that book is an altogether different story. It’s rich and complex, adrift on a sea of billions of other nameless little worries and subtle insanities, all of which tell the story of another book to come, and then another. Remember that this book is only a volume in a series, and the series itself is a volume in a larger catalog. Like the house guests of your head; every word, every chapter, and every book must be categorized so you know where to find it when you need it.
Ask yourself what you would name this catalog. Think about it. The only answer fitting is “life.” Life is both horrible and wonderful in the same breath. The destruction caused by the tornado is almost worth watching the tornado destroy. Burned forests create better soil deposits for new forests. Tidal waves give surfers a good ride. The Yin Yang is two opposing life-forms giving birth to one another for infinity. There is no division, no walls. This shape is the energy of life, it is life. The beginning and end of all things is the beginning and end of all things...

I finished reading the chapter and put the book down mildly confused. It wasn’t what I expected at all. I had expected something bland, full of contradictions masked by silly little witticisms and cartoons. This material on the other hand seemed mildly educated, although convoluted and nonsensical, educated. As I read between the lines again it seemed he was trying to come to this point, namely, that there is no such thing as salvation, that salvation is an illusion that creates want. If things are treated neutrally one is no longer susceptible to depression, but going by his logic, no longer susceptible to happiness either. I liked the idea of it. Although it didn’t seem in any way at all new. I got this feeling he was taking a much simpler concept and masking it somehow. The concept of the island was obviously inspired by Aldous Huxley. But the mirror thing was interesting. He was taking Newtons third law and applying it to every area of life. Comparing everyday social stimulus to a cosmic sea of relativity. In other words, oppression creates protest, protest creates oppression, oppression again creates protest. So what was he suggesting? How could this possibly be a self-help book?
I flipped through again intent on reading more but instead put the book down and leaned back on the couch. Moving from the crouched reading position made my whole body ache and again I remembered I was completely hungover.
I put the book back on the shelf and folded up the letter, put it in my back pocket, and went through the groceries on the counter to see if there was anything salvageable. There was spinach and garlic, and the eggs looked okay. It hadn’t been long enough anyway. I figured I had another 24 hours before they skipped over to the other side completely. I made a spinach, egg, and garlic sandwich. I used 3 eggs so as to get the most use out of them before they went South.
I sat on the couch for a while thinking about Frank, Willis, Lance and Idleman. This Idleman and Lance's Idleman seemed totally different from one another. I wondered if perhaps Idleman knew he had to draw a distinction in himself between the way he feels and his practice, but the more I thought about it the more I would tell myself I shouldn’t think about it. I wanted to believe Idleman was a joke, it is imperative I believe this.

That evening the phone caught me off guard as I walked out of the shower still dripping on the carpet. I hadn’t even realized it was there but I picked up the chord and followed it out of the apartment. It was lying near the refrigerator. I unthinkingly picked up. The phone had rang many times since my termination from Estate Healthcare, but I had never once picked up. Frank was instructed to do the same, but this time my picking up the phone was automatic, as if it would somehow dry the cold water being blown off my body from the air conditioning. It was a reflex, and I had regretted picking it up before I heard who was on the other line.
“Hello? Are you there? Hello…talk to me…hello?”
The voice was totally unfamiliar, sounding like a twelve year old boy. What was Frank getting into?
“Yes, this is Clement. Can I help you?”
“Hey! I’ve been trying to get a hold of you all this week. It’s Rainy. Remember? From the pool? ‘Ice-water is the one thing no one’s truly fucked with?’”
“Oh yeah, hah, right. How are you?”
This was the last thing I expected.
“I’m fine. I’m in town for the next month or so, you?”
“Great, I’ve been great.”
“What have you been up to?”
“Oh…just kind of working on...um...projects.”
“How’s the ‘Behavioral health’ center?” Her voice sounded as if she were making bunny ears with her hands on the other side of the phone.
“It uh…I’m not over there anymore. I’m kind of just looking at other options.”
“Really? What happened?”
Why lie? What difference does it make now? If anything this time-period gets to award me it’s the right to care less what people think of me. You get to grow out a beard and masturbate several hours of the day. You get to survive completely on hard-boiled eggs.
“I was fired. Yeah…they fired me.”
“Oh my God! I’m so sorry. What are you going to do? Why did they do that? I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m prying…I guess this is more interesting than talking about the weather or something anyway…I mean if you don’t mind talking about it that is…”
“No, it’s fine. I guess they fired me for being me. That’s the best way to describe it…”
I thought about that. “They fired me for being me.” I turned it over during a short pause on the phone. Couldn’t I have just said, “They fired me?” The meaning is the same; a mistake made is a mistake made by “me,” so because the mistake is some outward reaction to my environment it is collected within me. While the mistake is made I would still be me. From the subjectivity of others the action is a figment of my personality. In this case, violation of confidentiality –liar, accidental med adherence to a client resulting in death –murderer, a failure to advocate control to masturbating clients –incompetent, pervert. But is this me or just me in a former state of being? A me that occurred and no longer occurs?
“I lied, murdered a man and let my clients masturbate in front of children,” I said slowly, wondering if I got it all down correctly or not.
“Hmm…” a short pause on the phone, “well it couldn’t have been so bad as all that as you’re not in jail or anything.”
“That’s true, I’m not in jail or anything.”
“Do you feel bad about any of it?”
“The death yes, but it was an accident. The rest of it was beyond my control…they just wanted someone to cut loose so the public would feel as if justice had been served.”
I thought of Judge Bronson on Court TV.
“Was justice served? Were you really the problem?”
“Frankly, no. Although I was involved in all of it, these mistakes were institutional mistakes, problems bound to happen embedded deep within the system. I was just there.”
“See, there you go, you feel better?”
I did feel better. Not because I felt guilty for what happened, but because here was someone on the other line that seemed willing to make time for a problem. Not necessarily the problem, but a problem associated with me. The idea of it seemed to legitimize me as a plausible figure in society, as if Rainy were somehow pulling me back into the stream of things. Frank would attempt this maneuver for me but it only made things worse. The more I talked to him the more I felt I was going down his road, whichever road that might be.
“Yep.”
“You don’t sound all that great. You alright?”
“I’m fine, just kind of tired.”
“Well, you promised me ice-water, do you want to meet up?…let’s say...” I heard the sound of papers shuffling on the other line. “Friday? The twenty-fifth? Five o’clock sound OK?”
I looked at the calender on the wall wondering when the last time I set a date for a meeting was. I couldn’t remember if I had ever done that. It was the 21st of January. It had been exactly one month and a half since my getting fired.
“Okay. Where?”
“Your place?”
I gave her the address and wondered if any of this were a good idea. My head felt flighty. I looked in the mirror. I looked like shit. I could hardly recognize the sallow, pale faced figure looking back at me.
Thinking about anything too long gave me a headache and I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything for at least an hour. I decided it was probably from the television and lack of sunlight. My reading schedule, had after all, dropped down to two or three chapters a month, still stuck on the employment of the assistants given to K. in “The Castle” by Kafka. K. had just begun the relationship with the town girl. His work was remedial and pointless and he would take his frustrations out on the two assistants constantly, often flogging them in public. These frustrations were generated largely from K.’s feelings of alienation. He had come to the town as a land inspector assuming he would be admitted into the castle so that he might meet with the King or some high office. He begins to learn that this is impossible, and that life in this town is a slow race up the thousands of hurtles between where you stand and the people in power. He would, like the protagonist in “The Trial,” never really learn what was needed of him, forever remaining on the outskirts. The more he looked in from his humble vantage point, the more outskirts he would see. Boundaries within boundaries within boundaries. The Castle read like a dream where you’re running and never getting anywhere.
I thought about Kafka asking his story to be burned as a dying wish. The Castle would never be finished, it would instead be taken into the hands of his publisher and published the way it was, uncompleted. There were these two things moving in parallel with one another; Kafka’s incompletion of the book and K.’s incompletion of his journey to a better understanding of his place in this strange town, this World. It’s as if Kafka meant it that way. I had always wondered why he hadn’t just burned the books himself instead of relying on a man whose job it is to publish them. Although they were great friends, it seemed like an odd request.
After starring into the mirror too long and thinking about Kafka, I felt this new development of Rainy was about what I needed to clean up my act. I punished myself because I needed to punish myself. This is what people do when they accidentally kill people. This is what people do when they lose their own identities. I would need to somehow get back on track. I wanted to look good for Friday.
I looked at my little beard and thought it better to shave it off. Beards remind people they have nothing to do and in my case it’s better to assume there are things that need doing. After all, the kitchen and living room needed to be clean and the answering machine needed to be plugged in. This is a good start. Frank didn’t steal the answering machine. Was this some kind of life buoy he had left behind on purpose or something he had simply forgotten?
I got out all the mops and dust pans I had purchased at the grocery store and began filling one of the buckets up with soap and water. The tile in the bathroom was easy because I wasn’t worried about the water splashing around as there was no carpet in there. The sink in the kitchen was another story. The things I thought had went on in the kitchen couldn’t have amounted to the state the sink was in. There were dishes covered in things that could never have been eaten. There was sawdust –although we had never done any cutting, cat hair –although we didn’t own a cat, and what looked like duck meat –although neither of us could have afforded this luxury. The image of Frank and Lucinda eating duck, shaving one another, and whittling sticks above the sink came over me and I just doused the whole thing in disinfectant.

After finishing up towards the next morning, I sat down on the couch and had a cigarette, resolved to quit smoking, and then had another cigarette. I thought about Thom on a treadmill in Seattle drinking coffee and thinking about Jesus. The early morning light of dawn would be pouring into the room through razor sharp blinds. It’s as if Thom would never leave the condominium in my head. He would always be placed there, enacting the same ritual over and over again. I have to believe this. Willis would forever be looking out of the window of the Plaza making subtle comments about the neighbors. Lance will always be wearing the big collared shirt, standing in the wind with his hand resting on the gas tank of his father’s old Indiana Motorcycle. I wondered if when I die these images die with me. Is there some place where K. and Lance Bennett meet?

The Endless Concord, Chapter 12

2009-01-15T18:21:00.000-08:00

XII. A Great Blur

Two Halves Don't Make a Whole, by Dr. Idleman, Chapter 4: “The Cocoon.”
A man on the brink of self destruction does not presume to make the leap actively and with resolve. There are no occurrences, physical or otherwise, to some noticeable affect. Instead, he drifts, passively and with no awareness of his own, into a colorless World of no circumstance. No differentials are made between one point of dialogue and another. Sound, instead, melds into a distant and perpetual movement of one shape. Affirmations are made only through indoctrinated memory of prior dialogue and contrived images of the way normal people interact, whether media driven or otherwise. In this way our man shields himself from the active reality encircling him –the reality he ignores and yet lives vicariously through. Although he is present in body his mind is in a cocoon and will not reemerge until the completion of this stage of his life has finished (if ever this reemergence were to take place). The walls of this cocoon are as thick as the emotional trauma inflicted (or self inflicted) will allow. With each new circumstance comes another layer, and with each new layer there is a higher level of isolation –the harder one must shake him. He must be shaken violently. The conclusion of this metamorphosis must not be allowed; he must be shaken, he must be torn from his perch and disemboweled. It is better to hold the insides of a man than no man at all, or an empty shell he once occupied –a history with which we all share, and depend on...

I paid rent for 3 months in advance with some of the money I had saved working at the Plaza. For several weeks Frank and I watched television, only occasionally getting up to buy cigarettes or pour a bowl of cereal, sometimes losing track even of this and deciding on abandoning it altogether.
I was running out of money and Frank knew keeping me afloat was the right idea. I had worried about bringing it up. I knew there were no feasible way to go about asking a person on SSI for money. For a time I would rehearse the question in my head, the proper ways to go about approaching him with it, reminding him he did, after all, stay rent-free, but in the end it proved in vain as Frank, being receptive to this change in behavior, offered a loan. He had apparently noticed my diet growing thin, sometimes nonexistent. Neither of us had anywhere to go and our only hope was to wait it out…something would surely happen, we just didn’t know what.

On SSI day Frank brought home what couldn’t have been anything other than a transvestite. She was roughly seven feet tall standing awkwardly in the kitchen underneath one of the burning light bulbs near the empty refrigerator.
Frank introduced her as an old friend of his who worked closely with publishing agencies. Lucinda, he explained, would put us on the fast track to success. Lucinda nodded gravely. “There’s a man I occasionally do errands for. He offered to look over Franks work. He wears leopard skin suits –he’s very successful,” Lucinda said in a voice that sounded like the throaty moan before a falsetto.
“You hear that?” Frank asked, standing in the kitchen and putting his arm around Lucinda and talking to me through the little alcove that looked out into the living room, “Leopard skin suits!”
Nothing had come of it. Lucinda came and went, so did others. And the more Frank brought them home the more I felt removed from any shred of stability I had left. I was set in, I told myself, far too deep to climb out. I would wake up at noon, turn on the television, send Frank out for food stamp groceries, and go to bed at midnight after a 40 ounce Butcher's Choice. This is as good as it gets, this is my life. Duck down under the glow of late-night television, communicate telepathically with the catalog people and hold on to the door frames when the World begins to shake. A world of carpet stretched over everything I touched. There was a line here. We knew where we were.
Willis and Thom would continue to leave messages. I didn't want to hear them. They were reminders of a life I felt intent on leaving behind.

Our man of the cocoon will stare blankly at any hope of rescue. Flotation devices, buoys; lifesavers will be thrown, and he will look on them as he would the rest of his environment; as indistinguishable as the next shade of colorless wallpaper. Objects of our world take one shape, and they mean but one thing: not his. And as long as nothing is his there is nothing to keep him afloat.

I developed an interest in the cliché paintings with the sailboat out in the storm at dusk. The connection between this picture and my dreams of the Kraken, which I no longer had, became apparent. I filled my apartment with these pictures, going online and ordering more of them. My favorite was by Brink. It was painted with oil on what looked like particle board and cost only a few dollars, plus shipment. I enjoyed it immensely, and for a while looking at it was a distraction from the television.
The sea was violent and empty of any life. It was large and black, and like the Kraken, it was totally removed from the destruction it inflicted on its seafarer. In this picture the mast was broken. Large planks of wood slid down the arching waves crashing into the shallows only to be lifted up again. There didn’t appear to be anyone on the boat. I speculated on whether the sailors had already drowned, or if they weren’t perhaps buried somewhere in the hull, trapped and wading the water, knowing this is it. I liked to believe there had never been anyone on the boat to begin with, that this was just something that was forever occurring and never had any beginning and would never have any end; as if the ocean itself ran deep with gears, grinding this thing out forever and ever. The painting seemed to represent a fight between shape and shapelessness; a perpetual contract between the ocean and its wayward fare; between life and death.

After a month of living with Frank a week went by where I didn’t hear from him at all. I did my own grocery shopping. It was the first time I had left the apartment since I entered it after my termination. It felt good going to the grocery store. I felt I had purpose. I drew it out for as long as possible. The bright self-assured products helped me focus. I read the labels, contemplated the network of aisle caps, watched my image drift by under the large metal spheres hanging from the ceiling. I liked to imagine the woman with the leopard skin had found Frank a publisher. I imagined he was living in a heart-shaped Jacuzzi filled with transvestites somewhere in Los Vegas.
I glided down the isles on a sudden whim purchasing multicolored plastic mops and sponges. Turn things around, I told myself. But the objects remained in the cupboard in the kitchen. The dust buster, still in the cardboard box, sat on the microwave in anticipation. On a few occasions I woke up earlier than usual to exercise to a Jane Fonda workout video I had bought years before as a gag birthday present for a friend. I had missed the party and circumstances dictated I couldn’t see him until I had forgotten about the present altogether. The video featured a soundtrack by Huey Lewis and the News, Billy Ocean, and DJ Jazzy Jeff. My devotion for this routine didn’t last long; soon I’d be back to waking up at twelve and falling into a rhythm of court TV and microwavable pasta and zucchini. Every afternoon Judge Bronson taught me new lessons on justice and self-control. I took sides, I listened to the voice of the narrator with rigor and zeal, I was convinced every judgment was sound. I felt absolved in my own judgments.
When Frank did finally come home he had with him a few bottles of this special syrup, as he liked to call it, and several packs of cigarettes and some magazines.
“You can’t buy that stuff with food stamps, how did you get ahold of it?” I asked him.
“I stood outside making deals,” he began. “This is how it works, you stand by the double doors saying, ‘Discount card! Discount card sold here!’ until you get a hit. What you want is a young guy with nothing to lose…”
“What about elderly people with things to lose?” I asked, sitting on the couch and watching him reel around on the carpet between the front door and the kitchen. I flipped through a copy of guns and ammunition I found in the grocery bag he had lain on the table.
“Well, for those ones you just tell them whatever you want. Shake them off, that’s the idea…you can tell them it’s rebate card or something; purchase 800 dusters and get a free spatula, I don’t know.”
“Are you aware there’s an entire community of people out there interested in deals such as those? To some a clean spatula is an award for a life of military service, retirement, and a clean tax statement.”
“Alright, well then I’ll knock their block off! How’s that sound?”
“Just trying to help.”
Semiautomatic weapons are a right guaranteed by the drafters of our fine constitution. Comes in our own featured Urban Camouflage.
“So, when you get a guy that looks like your kind of guy, you just simply tell him if he makes his purchase with your food stamp card you’ll give him a 25% discount on the whole business. All he has to do is make a purchase of equal value in cash on alcohol plus add 25% extra in food. So if he were gonna buy $20.00 worth of food, you have him buy $20.00 worth of alcohol. The food goes on your tab, plus an extra $5.00's worth.”
“But you lose 25% on that discount.”
“Nope.” Frank exclaimed, eager with a punch line, “In fact, you don’t lose any food stamp money!”
“How does that work?”
“Okay, so this is how it works. Get the guy and tell him what to buy in alcohol in cash, also cigarettes, porn, whatever. He gets all his groceries and has the food card swiped for the price of the food, equal to the alcohol, plus an additional 25% worth. The card goes through and you get your goods and walk off. He gets his and goes home. But remember, you’re standing outside this whole time, you gave him a list and the password. There’s no cameras out there. He brings everything out, this gives you leeway. Whose to say this guy didn’t pick up the food stamp card your crazy, State Hospital insured ass dropped on the ground? Almost everyone I know writes their passwords on the back of those things because they have memories like goldfish. According to them an Estate nutcase drops his card and some kid picks it up and buys a bunch of alcohol, porn, and cigarettes in cash and the rest on food and walks out! All you have to do is call the County and tell them what the deal is; you lost your card near the store and now there’s this big charge on it and you need a new one etcetera. They’ll look at the tapes and see the kid go in there with it buying a bunch of riffraff and that’s that,” Frank said, satisfied with himself.
“Has this worked yet?”
“I’m going to call the office today…give it a bit of time.”
“I was wondering how you guys got ahold of all the liquor you drink.”
“There are different ways going about it.”
“What happens to the kid?”
“It’s my word against his if they find him, which they won’t because it’s $25.00 and no one’s going to lose it over that amount of money. They might put some camera photo of him up on the wall or something, I dunno.”
“Sounds full-proof Frank.”
“What’s up with you? Jesus…this place looks like shit,” he said, finally looking around the room.
“Thanks.”
“So I’ve got this great stuff, have a look at this; it’s vintage.”
Frank produced several drugstore bottles of ‘Special Muscle Wine,’ a whiskey –about forty proof and aged a week. “They have a two for one special. Got em’ both for $4.00. It’s made in Cambodia. Look at this,” he said, pointing at indecipherable text on the bottle, “that’s Cambodian.”
“Classy.”
“You want to do the honors?” he asked, walking into the kitchen and getting out glasses.
“Frank, Cambodia doesn’t have the infrastructure to support an FDA approved distillery.”
“What? Are you joking? I’ve been drinking these for years. This is grade A hooch.”
I wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t be drinking. His alcohol abuse history is pretty weighty and he needs to get back on track. But when I looked around the room at the plastic bags, coke bottles, and movies that lay around I couldn’t go through with it. Who was I to tell him any different? I’m not a counselor anymore and even if I were, what does that really mean?
Frank and I talked about what he had been doing since the last time I’ve seen him, where he’d been staying and so on. He was staying with Mingus, he informed me. He wanted to get his head in the right place and staying with me wasn’t helping him; I was depressing him.
The Special Muscle Wine, although it was a bit rough around the edges, seemed to go down OK. I livened up as he talked, relishing each of Frank’s stories as if this were the first time I had heard them. We talked about all the residents we knew and the special quirks they had. There was one in particular, Jasper Minx, who would wake up at dawn everyday and fight invisible assailants outside the door of the Golden Sun. Jasper had informed Frank one afternoon that he was protecting the facility from, “Mutants, ninjas...that sort of thing.” So Frank, a few days later, got it in his head to convince one of the less disturbed clients to go out there dressed in black with a hood and start grappling with Jasper. Jasper, instead of crippling the man as Frank had predicted, assumed the Golden Sun had hired someone else out for the job and found another street corner to defend. He even, several days later, went to the labor department complaining of being improperly laid off from his job –although he was so incomprehensible they asked him to leave.
After running through all of these stories he ran through them again, this time more sentimental, concentrating on miniscule bits of scenery he had noticed in passing. We talked like this for a long time before the whiskey began to wear off and I wondered to myself if I really knew Frank as well as I seemed to let on. When I studied him I could detect much the same sentiment. We both needed a friend, and this running over things seemed to do the trick. I had successfully forgotten about Lance Bennett, Thom, the stinging betrayal of Willis Thomas, and another character, a face Willis and I had once successfully shut out, this shadow of a client we once shared sitting in an empty room facing sundown, a figure I never wanted to see again. A sharp sting dug its way into my chest. It would fade and, as if out of some hysterical fog filling the room, the jovial monologue of Frank O. would return.

The Endless Concord, Chapter 11

2009-01-15T18:19:00.000-08:00

XI. Operational Context Zones Pt. 3

After filling out the Success Management Form (S.M.F.), I sat in the waiting room distractedly watching office workers move about me in quick dashes. Their speeds and facial expressions would indicate the nature and priority level of the assignment given them. Every once in a while there would be a quick burst of movement, this brief ejaculation of prioritized panic, and then nothing.
There were ovular dishes of popuri placed neatly around the edges and newer additions to the Highlights that lay there before. A plant of evening colors waited to be dusted on schedule. I took the plastic leaves in between two fingers and bent the wires inside them around into odd positions, observing the affect this new countenance had on the room.
I leafed through a few of the Highlights and wondered about the feel of the recycled paper as it had felt when I was a kid: the subtle religious messages, the mazes that lead nowhere, the feeling of helplessness when some kid before me had already went over everything with a purple crayon. The only section at all worth while is the picture find. I wondered to myself if the Highlight people were aware of all of this and nodded off to sleep.

There was the Kraken again. It’s large and indifferent eyes watched the catastrophe as if it itself were neutral. The tentacles supported this image, seemingly sprouting out of the water from the rocky floor of the ocean. They were like the roots of the earth, dark like ferns under the shaded canopy of Northwestern firs, all covered in barnacles. They were both incredibly alive and totally removed –like loose fire hoses or downed power lines during a storm. Both aft and bow, starboard and port side were systematically torn to shreds with heavy thuds from the sweeping limbs.
I watched the destruction from the mast, the cold wind and water blowing into my face and my head adrift with dizziness. The destruction was quiet and, aside from the water, affected me very little. The mast seemed to remain largely unaffected. Throughout the episode I stood looking at the Kraken directly in the one visible eye –the other one now stayed submerged, tilted at an angle. It was looking at me like a painting following one around a room. I recognized the expression on its face, something it was telling me through no conscious will of its own. It must turn out this way, it seemed to say, there is no other way for it to be. There were mechanics to its destruction, like a machine created for one purpose alone. There were mechanics to my helplessness as well, as if we’ve done this hundreds of times. The expression was the same as before. It’s nothing personal, it’s nothing personal.

“Landers, Clement Landers? Landers? Clement?”
I got that feeling I get when I wake up out of a short sleep sitting up in a chair. The stomach bottoms out and it feels as if I had been dropped from a plane or blown out from a rocket.
The giant octopus morphed into the secretary of the Estate Plaza Crisis Committee (E.P.C.C.) She was the one I had seen before in the room with Willis with the large, red-framed glasses.
“Yeah,” I said, wiping my eyes and getting out of the chair, the word sounding more like an affirmation than a response.
“A.T.E.C.R.B is ready to see you now,” she said with a reptilian twitch of the head.
“What happened to A.T.E.A?”
“A.T.E.A is a subcommittee for A.T.E.C.R.B, which acts as an employee evaluation tribunal before review turns over to State controlled B.H.C.B and B.H.C.O.E.C.”
“I see.”
Flower patterns on couches.
“A.T.E.C.R.B stands for After Traumatic Event Crisis Review Board.”
I picked the Highlight that had fallen out of my lap while asleep up off the floor and set it on the coffee table next to the plastic evening plant.
“They are in the room to see you now,” she said with another twitch of the head.

Willis sat, arms outstretched, with a placid look of resignation on his face. His hands seemed to anticipate forms he would sign quickly so that he might be allowed to go. Around him sat the Team Teamwork people that were there before plus a few others. Mr. Roswell, my hiring manager, was also among them.
They indicated a seat across from Willis with an outstretched hand and I sat down. Team teamwork was dressed conservatively. Roswell was wearing a dark suit jacket and jeans with a tucked in white dress shirt and brown leather belt and brass buckle. He wore a stern facial expression and, for some unknown reason, aviator sunglasses –apparel I was unsure what to make of.
The “Let’s get down to business! Shall we? Yes!” mentality that was in the room before was gone. It was a white room full of sallow looking people with shallow paperwork. All visible signs indicated this is the way things end. I was grateful they didn’t dance around me throwing teamwork balls into go get em’ hoops. Perhaps, I thought, it’s the presence of Willis that started the meeting off on such a serious note of centrality. I looked at Willis thankfully but he wasn’t paying any attention.
“How are you doing Clement?” from the woman who had previously worn the hooters shirt now in a business slip.
“I’m fine.”
I acknowledged Roswell and wondered why the hell he had come all the way down here for this. I looked around at the walls. There were no cats hanging from branches, no English countryside.
“So, we want to review the events of…” from the man formerly in the tuxedo shirt.
“They want to revoke your license Clem, you’ll never be aloud to work in this field again,” interrupted Willis.
“Excuse me,” said Roswell in a tone I hadn’t yet heard from him. “Whose conducting this meeting?”
He looked at Willis. Willis shrugged and waved him off.
“Four citizens of the County have already filed lawsuits against Estate Healthcare. They say the clients at your location had been improperly placed, that they should have been sent to secure. State review boards suggest the same, and that perhaps their conditions were improperly evaluated, as after all, that is a low-risk facility with low-risk clients. Their conditions are supposed to, by now, under your facilities treatments, have improved to an almost citizen level…not degraded to Golden Sun material. The community is beginning to feel like the Plaza’s role in community integration needs some reevaluation...some cleaning up to be more precise. There were other instances that put that facility on thin ice before your arrival and even some of those cases are still pending. Then we get Lance Bennett, and now this. We have to make some massive adjustments here…to make sure the wheel spins more smoothly for our clients and the betterment of the rest of…”
“Here’s where our new active, fit and spunky, smiling PR Rep, Roswell, fires your ass Clemy,” Willis interjected, tilting his head back and gazing up at the ceiling.
“Excuse me!” Roswell exclaimed, vibrating with outrage.
“Roswell? Since when does the Estate have a PR Rep?” I asked, starring at the belt buckle.
It read, Make Counselors Not War!
“There’s been other little breakdowns I don’t need to mention here. We needed someone to handle both the State and the community. Anyway, it’s beside the point. We want to help you Clement, help us help you.”
“There won’t be any unemployment stipends Clement. They’re letting you go right here, cold turkey,” Willis said, still starring up at the ceiling and rocking back and forth in the big leather office chair.
Team Teamwork looked blankly around the room.
“Unfortunately that’s true. Because of the nature of the incident you don’t qualify for some kind of unemployment package. In your contract it states ‘Only under unfair treatment by your superiors, layoff due to overstaffing or lack of available schedule, sickness, or internal dispute and public scrutiny warranting a re-staffing.’ I’m afraid we’re under no obligation to consider your package. However, you’re welcome to reapply in seven years under our new termination agreement. And although we’re revoking your license, you can continue to be a supporter of non-State-run Estate Healthcare. How does that sound?”
“Internal dispute and public scrutiny?” I asked blankly, already getting that nauseous feeling I get during moments of contractual confrontation.
“Well…in this case we’re letting you go not for these conflicts per say…more because of your failure to live up to our confidentiality agreements.”
“Again please?”
“Some time ago you associated with a man named Frank Othello? One of our clients at the Golden Sun?”
I paused and tried to imagine Frank in this light, never really hearing his name in such a matter-of-fact context. The coincidence of just talking to him registered at phenomenal levels.
“You were reprimanded over there for abusing your role as a residential counselor and using your position to provide confidential information to him? Information that affected the safety and well-being of one of our licensed board administrators?” Roswell asked shrewdly.
Several members of Team Teamwork smiled and gave me a thumbs up.
“I told Frank Carla Black is a conniving bitch.”
“Goddamn right...” Willis mumbled.
“That’s Estate Healthcare business.”
I looked over at Willis for some help but he kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling, unable to confront my questioning glances.
“As radically defensive as your administrator, Willis, might appear to be right now, he is with us one hundred percent on this one. Willis realizes the importance of staying in the game,” Roswell said with a wry smile. “Have a look at the shift change report filled out on the...” he sounded a tune from Beethovan’s 5th, “Lance Bennett debacle.”
He handed me the printout.
Was med-count OK? If no, please explain.
“No. The med cabinet was nearly empty, having been consumed by client, Lance Bennett.”
Were the client symptoms and post-shift diagnostics discussed and evaluated with departing staff?
“Yes.”
Was departing staff clear and intelligible?
“Departing staff was incoherent, often slurring words together and showing obvious signs of intoxication.”
Were there any signs of stress and/or weaknesses that might compromise the well being of the facility?
“Departing staff was emotional…possibly delusional.”
Were all clients up to par with contracted codes of hygiene?
“Client Lance Bennett is deceased.”
Please add any additional notes, employee name and number, and press send.
“See incident report for full details of crisis and measures taken. Departing staff appeared to possess little control over his mental faculties. Suggest further preventive evaluation, possibly termination. Willis Thomas, Program Administrator, 099228739.”

I looked at Willis questioningly and he looked back and shrugged. His eyes were red and teary.
There was a long silence. Roswell starred at me with his mouth scrunched up and his eyebrows raised, nodding his head. Team Teamwork gazed with big eyes and grins in my general direction. Willis drummed his fingers on the tabletop nervously looking around the room. An air conditioner unit switched on outside.
“Well I’ll be off then,” I said, getting up to leave, shaky with the feeling of betrayal.
“Not just yet my man!” Roswell boomed, clapping his hands together with a big smile and spinning around in his chair. The sound seemingly awoke Team Teamwork into action, who now gesticulated and shuffled papers at an accelerated rate. Roswell's attitude suddenly did a 180, now sounding as if he were giving away raffle tickets at a children’s hip-hop concert.
I paused by the door and looked around the room for the teamwork ball.
“We were hoping you could fill out some cool disembarkation forms…standard policy, that kind of thing, but man it would really help us a lot.”
I looked at Willis. He begrudgingly nodded his head at me in agreement and forced a smile.
“You see, we’re trying to make some changes in the way we swing things around here, you get me? We want to iron out the creases in our termination process and we could use a little of your jive! So, if you could just report up to room three and hop on one of the computers and fill out a questionnaire, you can rock on out of here!”
I looked at Willis again who turned the other way.
“You can just go and finish that right up my man! Yes! Okay! Then you can pick up your hourly paycheck signed up until yesterday and just do what you gotta do!” Roswell chimed, rocking his body in the air as if to a samba tune.
On my way up to floor 3 there was a man dressed in a blue jumpsuit installing a new water-cooler. As I approached the computers a woman eyed me suspiciously. She was drinking soda and on her desk lie an empty coffee cup, turned on its side in such a way as if to showcase its lack of coffee for everyone to see.

Type 1 for strongly agree. Type 2 for agree. Type 3 for disagree. Type 4 for strongly disagree.
“You feel your severance package was adequate given your responsibilities, expertise, experience, and overall work you did for the company. (If no severance package was offered type 0 for neutral.)
“0.”
“You feel the severance team was quick to diffuse any possible conflict that might have arisen using active techniques in N.S.C (Negative Situation Control).”
“1.”
“If, under different circumstances, you had met the people of A.T.E.C.R.B, you would communicate with them on a social level, actively engaging in everyday conversation that could possibly lead to a friendship.”
“1.”
“You will recommend the Estate to close friends or family members either as a place of treatment or employment.”
“1.”
“You will live up to the ‘Eternal Employment’ section highlighted in your confidentiality agreement that states, ‘One is always an employee of the Estate, even after employment is terminated, because one is always working to keep valuable Estate information private, both for the company and our clients.'”
“1.”
“You are aware that employment for Crisis Control and state review boards is considered a betrayal of this agreement and will not accept any such employment.”
“1.”
“You realize failure to comply to confidentiality agreements can result in a lawsuit against you.”
“1.”
“You will not apply for employment before a period of 7 years.”
“1.”
“You feel that the acting severance manager did an excellent job in handling your employment termination.”
“1.”
“There were sharp objects within your immediate grasp during the termination process.”
“1.”
“You would recommend the acting severance manager to future employees in line for termination.”
“1.”