The Journal of Speculative Disease

Thu, 19 May 2005

one hundred answers to one hundred questions
(or at least the first fifty)

one:

One afternoon, coming home from school, young Rosalyn Enoch brought home her two new friends, Abel and Baker. Her parents though it odd that a nine-year old girl had befriended two such intimidating men, but any dispute they may have had with the duo’s presence was qualmed (or, perhaps, silenced) by Abel’s finger-over-lips shhhhing as Baker showed them to their seats around the dinner table.

“We need to discuss a few things with you kind people. Let us begin by saying we thank you for making us feel at home in your home, even though you know little of our intentions. Being good parents, seemingly, you may have questions as to why we are here. Let me lay those doubts to rest. My name is Abel. My associate’s name is Baker. We are here in the service of your daughter, who is a most bright and intuitive child, though not entirely well-gifted in certain…combative aspects of interpersonal communication. Feeling a need to better cover her interests in this area, she has hired us as bodyguards. The nature of our agreement does not concern you, as we keep a strict confidentiality as to our fiscal arrangements, as I’m sure you can understand. Let us just say that it is now our constant imperative to see that no harm of any sort comes to Rosalyn. Earlier in the day, we discovered that a young boy named Stephen Robbins…are you familiar with this boy? Stephen Robbins?”

Rosalyn’s father, already confused by the breakup of well-worn routine in his day, stammered “Yes, yes. Stephen. Ryan and Julie’s.”

“Stephen found it amusing to make certain unwarranted advances toward certain of the schoolgirls, including Rosalyn. We’ve seen to it that the only advances Stephen makes for the next few months with be with the assistance of a wheelchair.”

“You’re joking. Can’t even be.”

“Oh, I assure you, we make no light of our profession. Baker, show the man your hands.”

This demonstration produced the sort of sounds one generally hears from squeak-toys caught underfoot from both of Rosalyn’s parents. It’s possible this came not so much from an empathy for young Stephen as a realization of what might possibly be coming next. If so, they were right on target.

two:

I had never thought of my father as a religious man. We had attended services when I was younger, but we as a family got rather lax about it — I had discovered they hadn’t attended church regularly for years before I was born, wanting to make a fresh start of things by the time I came around. Any sense of an organized religious quality only came out in fits and starts — we were wedding and funeral Catholics, occasionally ducking into a Ash Wednesday service when the odd mood struck. I found the story he told me last weekend, while visiting in the airport bar during a layover between St. Louis and Boise, not only suprising, but contextless. Perhaps that’s why he waited all this time to tell me.

I remember him not being around when I was nine, which would have made him thirty-six at the time. I thought, at the time, that he was just busy with work, which he was, but it turns out he was avoiding the house because God was talking to him. “You ever try to remember something, a song or name or something, and then you just, it’s just there, you can hear it? That’s what it sounded like. That’s exactly it.”

The most suprising change in his life post-voice was the amount of anti-government rhetoric which sprang to his lips, of which (as the two scotch-and-waters became four, and six) I got quite an earful. “It’s exactly like those bastards, it’s just shameless, it is, it’s the fact that at least when somebody comes up on the street and robs you they know they’re doing wrong but they’re doing it anyway, and but these fatcat pukes don’t even understand, they’re too ignorant to realize what they do is a sin, and that there, that’s the worst sin of ‘em all.” It’s hard to know how to reply to statements like this, particularly coming from my father, who I realized as I was taking old Highway 20 back from the airport had probably always felt this way and only now, as we were all out of the house and he was coming into the end of his career, had no reason left to mind his tongue.

That has to be a good feeling.

three:

[removed]

four:

Davis was smaller then, and had no trouble climbing under fence and over hedge, up into treetops where he’d leap from branch to branch without any hesitation, stepping lightly across rooftops and leaping down into the snow-covered lawns, rolling and sprinting out and into the street. There was a cornfield unpassable in the spring, with the rain, but in the underbelly of February the field was a flat white slate, and Davis made extraordinary time crossing the places where, years earlier, he had helped to cause hundreds of dollars of property damace by knocking down cornstalks to make a fort deep in the middle of the crops. By dipping down into the access ditch, he found his way to the now-dry creekbed, a kind of eco-filter for field runoff, up to where Mr. Humphreys had put the stone, sheltered drainage pipe in, which went out and under the street, into the sewers, another place Davis liked to play, but not today, as he had an appointment to keep. From this point it wasn’t much farther, but Davis had to step carefully, as on a moonless night it was a trouble to see the barbed wire and cattle-fencing, and even with his many visits here he still occasionally got a prick or a shockfrom an inattentive choice. fortunately, there was no one this far out to awaken, excepting the cows, who were monolithically indifferent to any of Davis’s statements, no matter how often he tried to engage them in conversation. He was almost there, just up that hill, and he could hear it coming, he was just in time. There was a point where it stopped being noise and became tangible, something which held you and shook you, rattled the bones and the brain, made it hard to see, but Davis watched, standing there on the top of the hill, close enough to the tracks that he could feel the wind pull him in, and in the dark of the night, while the rest of the world was asleep, Davis understood, again, what it meant to be powerful, to be graceful, to have a strength so great that no man could stay your course. Davis walked home, but it was always longer, always slower, on the way back.

five:

Everything kept changing.

He’d fish for birds, using small balloons as bobbers and pieces of beef as bait, sitting on his rooftop hoping to catch something. This plan didn’t work for the simple and understandable reason that birds tend not to eat pieces of meat hung from beneath brightly-colored balloons, not even the crows. Hen then added a series of hanging hooks and went after the neighborkid’s kites, which made him quite the local scourge and target for eggs, soap, toilet paper. If you asked, he’d tell you his grandfather was a pirate, off the coast of Brazil, salvaging storm-shattered ships for a pittance of plunder and an excuse for mutiny, that month’s captain tied to the cannons. He’d make an analogy to his life from that story, but I’ll spare you such vanity.

He once had a wife. It’s unbelievable.

He is a Christian only insofar as he believes in a Prime Mover, a “first cause”, but buys not into any notions of purpose or divinity as conscious force, just as he has no belief in any permeation of this “first cause” in all creatd things except in the most fleeting sense. in fact, he thinks there’s somethign downright pernicious in this notion of collective sameness insofar as it appeals to a means of of similarity which, if given, allows for communication on a core level which he believes does not exist, and allows for a type of deluded solphism based on the assumption that we share certain traits. He’d make an analogy to the kites from that theory, but I’ll spare you such idiocy.

six:

He had taken to leaving her voice-messages when he knew she was on the phone, wanting to talk but not wanting to talk, and the nervousness of wanting to say something interesting and engaging and welcome would undercut his resolve and cause him to say terrifying things, telling her that reality had recently shown itself as a disguise for an increasingly malignant evil which had reached into every area of his life and was inescapable, that the armies of Satan were gathering on the horizon and the horizon exponentially tightened like a noose. He had to stay away from the phone, as demons nested there, entering through his right ear, breaking his speech into shards. But what then? If he fell out of touch, disappeared as he had so often pondered and promised, he would be lost, and would never come out from under it. The answer came as a vision. It was so simple! He’d join the army!

That was three years ago, and he’s not all that much worried about Satan’s armies or whatever it was that stuch him as being so terrible all that time ago, and even though it didn’t so much solve any of his problems as made him too tired and preoccupied to ever consider them, and even though sitting here at the airport he know all the things which sucked then still sucked, and even though he’d lost track of all the people who cared about him, at least nobody could say he never got out of town.

Maybe, he thought, waiting for his bus, maybe he should get married.

seven:

Now official, now completed, it was my job to help her remove all traces of him from the apartment, bagging clothing and books and leftover food for a short walk to the incinerator. I backpacked the Gaddis novels, not having them in hardcover, which may have been frowned upon but wasn’t wrong to do, exactly, as she didn’t make mention of it as we looked for the shears I had brought over.

“Okay, I got the sketchbook, and I got those shitty reggae cd’s.”

“I hate reggae. I really do. It took me a long time to admit it, because I felt like the whitest person in the world admitting that, but fuck it, reggae sucks.”

“So he played this a lot, is what you’re saying.”

“No, not even, but he’d play it and get into that goofy way people get when they listen to reggae, that kinda dumbed-down pseudo-stoner nod. It’s a lot like the way old biker people get when they hear the Zep.”

“This is true. So that’ll about do it, whcih I guess means it’s time for the second act. You have any styling ideas?”

“Short. Really really fucking short. I wanna have to wear a hat for a week so I don’t burn my scalp, I want it that short.” “Sure thing, cheif. Like last time.”

She didn’t have any reply to that.

eight:

“It’s November, and the snow has fallen, and that can only mean one thing—”

“And that’s vandalism!” “Shit yeah. You got the axe?”

“No, no, no, you’re not bringing that fucking axe. First off, if we bring it you’re gonna wanna use it and you’ll cut your foot off and you’ll be screaming and hobbling around and leaving an incriminating blood trail and probably leave the foot-chunk behind and get blood all over my dad’s car and what are you even gonna do with an axe anyway?”

“But you never know! Be prepared, I say, but if I can’t bring the axe I’m willing to concede on taking the bolt cutters instead.”

“See, now there you go, that’s a piece of equipment we can actually get some use out of. So we got the bolt cutters, we got egg-money, we got a stack of Misfits bootlegs—”

“Heeeeeey, these post-digger has quite a bvit of potential. We could steal a couple scarecrows! We could…shit, your folks don’t fuck around when it comes to lawn care, do they. There’s all sorts of, hey, paint!”

“Would you please stop fucking around and help me push the car out? Or better I’ll steer and you push. Get up front. And, no, no, put it back. Scarecrows. I don’t even know why we take you along.”

nine:

I had always assumed that the listing of “corpse defiler” on Arturo Oliver’s business card was a nod to his short-lived stay as curator emiritus at The Museum of Questionable History (it was during his stay that the “Hindoo and Chinee action village and playground for youngsters” exhibit went up, and boy was that ever a bad idea), but no, he actually really *was* a professional defiler of corpses, whcih must have led him to take the protections he did against such an ignoble fate. Art’s wife’s parents, understand, had not necessarily crooked but certainly askew connections to the Mayor’s office, and believing Arturo had lined his coffin with his life’s savings, unwilling to believe that he had left this world with only the three dollars and twelve cents in his bank acount to his name. It turns out that Arturo did have his coffin lined, not with his name. It turns out that Arturo did have his coffin lined, not with loot, but with claymore mines wired to tremor gauges in the coffin-handles, which went off just around the time the backhoe was a foot shy of the lid, which ripped all kinds of hell outta the backhoe and covered a twenty-foot radius in dirt. This would have defiled his corpse somethin’ fierce, only Arturo had been cremated, and three months later Paul Apostrophes, prior to losing his head, was to come across his urn stuck up in that lumpy-looking tree by the mobile-memmorial to all those killed in pursuit of mad science.

ten:

All the local kids had different entries in the Insect Pit Fight contest out at Carter Park each Friday at five, all summer long, hypothetically. We had a number of disputes as to what constituted an insect and came to the comclusion that anything that would make a good monster if a thousand times its own size counted: thus crawdads out of the mercury creek counted but Randy’s pet hampster was unquestionably out. As absolutely none of these pit fights actually led to any fighting, matches were primarily judged on how creepy your contestant was, which may have been somewhat subjective but each week’s results stayed pretty consistent throughout the year. As June began to fall down into July, crazy half-understood notions of eugenics and breeding led us to attempt cross-breeding between different creepy insects to maximixe their creepiness. Getting insects to mate proved to be even more difficult than getting them to fight, and we were just about ready to wind down our little insect show-and-tell society when Lou attempted to define himself as an insect. “I ate a bug. And so that bug is part of me and that makes me a human-bug hybrid” was his line of thought, and were it not for the fact that he could kill us all as soon as look at us we woulda thrown that contestant on the same heap we threw Adam’s “so dig this, I think a whole colony of ants should count as one insect, because they have like, this hive mind, and when you, like, think about that for a while that’s ever creepier than a sheddable exoskeleton, i mean, that’s like *society*, man” claptrap. Not only that, but Lou proceeded to eat all our other contestants, which pretty effectively brought an end to the insect pit fighting series for years and years.

Later, after we all got real jobs and sporty cars that impressed clients and suits we couldn’t clean ourselves, we started the insect pit fighting series up again, over extended lunches at Adam’s new place out on the peninsula, only we can afford to have designer insects flown in from labs down south, which tends to make things a bit more cutthroat. We still can’t get ‘em to fight, though.

eleven:

I got a message on my machine today, and all it said was “Is Gloria Swanson dead? No, fuck it, don’t tell me, but give me a call though.” I knew by the sound of her voice (she has a slight problem, even at thirty, with her r’s) that it was Natalie, who used to date Seth for nearly three years, during which time I became better friends with her than I was with Seth who, last I heard, joined the circus. The three of us used to sit up and watch old silent films on AMC with the sound off, supplying our own soundtrack — Neubaten was a big fave, I remember. It was in the middle of an Erich Van Stroheim triple feature, and smack dab in the middle was Queen Kelly, and Natalie kinda quietly flipped out.

“Fucking a, that’s my mom, that’s my mom right there.”

Seth, who knew these films backwards and forwards thanks to an extended stay at Bethany, said “Gloria Swanson. Y’know, Sunset Blvd., Gloria Swanson, oh God you guys. There’s no way.”

Later that night we watched Swanson playing herself playing Nora Desmond and Nat was just silent, just staring at her. It was eerie. Nat’s never met her birth-mother. She has memories, in a vague way, and some pictures, which I saw for the first time not much later, and she was right; Nat’s mother could have been an understudy from back in the twenties. I think she knew then that Gloria Swanson had to have died by now. It’s been nearly a century since she was born. It’s be the easiest thing in the world to get on the net and look it up, just to know. I haven’t done it, and I guess Natalie hasn’t done it either. Sometimes it’s okay not to know, even when you know.

twelve:

Will has a collection of used diaries and journals he’s bought in estate sales and flea markets. Not famous people, or people he ever knew, but just ordinary people who wrote down whatever they thought was important, or worth remembering. He has about fifty now. He once told me he feels different when he walks around now, among other people, as though he can hear the rhythmic pulse of the songs in their heads, hear how they all intertwine together, even if none of them know it but him. He keeps asking me if I want to borrow a couple; like any collector he has particular favorites, the woman who hid dolls in the walls of all the houses she ever lived in for some perceptive child to find, the man who talks of how the corpse of his miscarried son comes in at night, takes his body apart, and puts it back together wrong, the skin inside out and the fingers down at the wrist. I’m terrified to read these journals, even the kindest or most incidental of them, because the idea of feeling as though I know people that I do not and will never truly know makes me feel ill, makes me feel weak. There are certain curtains I think you shouldn’t walk behind. Will, on the other hand, says one should run from nothing in nature, but study it to better learn who we are as a whole. The question I’m left with, and that i think about each time I leave Will’s apartment but never think to ask him, is what can one put together from such scraps and blurtings, scribbled phone numbers and endless repetitive doodlings? Can you really put a life together from such things?

thirteen:

I had locked my keys in my car again. Only this wasn’t my car, or else I would have known how to get access to the spares. Instead, I was left to stare blankly at the keys, sitting on the dashboard, an unwitting accomplice to my addlemindedness. When I was working at the lot, we had this plastic wedge/metal hooked wire contraption which made breaking into cars easy-peasy, but out here at one in the morning I was to find no such ewuipment without calling a locksmith, which simply would not do, as I hadn’t the money for such luxuries. Thus, it was either chicanery or breaking the window with a rock, which wasn’t even an option, this not being my car. The window was open a crack, just enough to fit something inside, like a coathanger or a branch. This, of course, would be too simple, and lacked panache. After wandering down a couple blocks and ducking into a couple bars, I found a guy with a couple fishing poles, which he offered to let me use for a round of shots for him and his compatriots, on their way to Storm Lake that night to hook up with some “serious people”, whatever that means. He then lent me a pole, but at the suggestion that i stick the end of teh pole in through the crack and descend the hook like one of those toy-car-and-crane games you still see in airports and riverside bars, he scoffed openly and informed me that the only way this plan would work is to stand back a good twenty feet, cast teh hook in through the crack, and snag the keys that way. This seemed like a roundabout way to get my keys, but fuck it, it’s his pole, and I had nothing better to do. So this guy takes a dozen-odd casts and gets nothing but glass, at which point one of his buddies takes about six casts and ends up getting the hook stuck up in the trees, at which point he is shamefully removed from the pole. It’s about two, at this point, and the bar rush is pouring out into the parking lot, and people keep asking for a shot, so we decide to do the American thing and charge a dollar a cast, with the winner getting half of the pot, the other half split between me and the pole-owner. We had about sixty bucks when the police arrived and unlocked my car with the wedge-and-hook thing. Pole-owner and I very quietly split the loot and I got into my car, moved the box of cd’s back down on teh floor, looked over the pile of clothes and shit in the back seat, and left town for the last time, up thirty bucks in gas money.

fourteen:

So it was that Ana And Merle’s dad decided he was running for mayor. Now if there’s two children you don’t want as your posterkindern for photo-op perfection it’s those weirdy-o skyfish kids, but Merle was out on teh road with Ed (after Ed was sprung from a summer sesh. of Extended Detention with Extra Discipline at Our Lady of the Clotting Stigmata Church For Incorrigable Delinquients thanks to some high-grade cup-and-balling by Owen and Rissa, but that’s an entirely different story) and Ana was being led around the outskirts of town with Josef and Seth, who were convinced of some sort of half-baked plan about re-rises again, so as long as things stayed out of sight, so to speak, for the next six months, all would be fine with the Vote Skyfish campaign. That, of course, did not happen, but I’m running out of time here. I’ll tell you about it later.

fifteen:

XXXXX

sixteen:

Jean and Todd had been living together for nearly a year before the cannibalism fantasies began. At first it was something more subtle, more like a displacement complex manifested in wearing the other’s skin. Being thouroughly modern, they discussed this, and decided that there was no use in holding in their emotions, and so while lying in bed at night before they went to sleep they told each other, in technicolor detail, that days daydreams of skinning and stretching and tanning, that first trip to the grocery store disguised in someone else’s flesh, the stomach-flutters of being found out and the delight in getting away with it, slipping back out of the carcass while driving back to the apartment, giggling. They developed recurring storylines: picking up runaways at the bus depot, seducing them, and pulling the facial skin back off the skull just before orgasm, staring into their terrified eyes; or taking in blind housekeepers and convincing them the skin was a high-dollar item in Europe, talking them into putting it on, modeling it across the living room floor, taking them by force. After a time, as all such things do, the glimmer of these tales began to dull, and being throughly modern and well-read as to such ideas, came to the conclusion the removal of the skin was really a means of devouring the other in an indirect way, and wouldn’t it be marvy if instead we go right to the heart of the matter? So Jean and Todd skipped over the already-curdling retro-necro of vampyrism and started in on elaborate cannibalism fantasies, assured by all the major experts that such thinking was perfectly healthy and indeed essential to a fully-functional relationship. Jean was particularly into notions of keeping Todd alive for as long as possible, removing his arms and legs and keeping him alive by feeding him off a gruel of finger and ear meat. Todd, being Todd, was much more obscessed with the idea of surrepititiously feeding pieces of Jean to people he know, friends at work, potential love interests he was sizing up for the knife before he’d even cracked open Jean’s ribcage. They were both so happy to finally have shared interests and were delighted to hear the news of Jean’s pregnancy, which opened up an entirely new aspect to their nightly post-morteming. Placenta may be deathless meat, but at least it’s a start. Alas, at eight weeks in Jean lost the baby. WEll, no, she didn’t so much lose it as it left her body before it was completely finished gestating. By the time Todd got home she was still there, laying in bed, trying not to roll over. After the showering and the disposal and the phone calls, Jean and Todd had a terrible idea. The enitre time they told each other they weren’t there, they were somewhere else. “We’re not doing this.” “We’re both at work, making spreadsheets.” “We’re driving home from the library.” “We’re naked on a beach in Cancun.” “We’re at your mother’s house, puting up the new awning.” Both Jean and Todd began joking about it, talking about it, both at work and among friends. Jean’s work friends, hardened to the far edge of irony, thought Jean was showing impressive reserve to be able to joke her way through such a tough time. Jean’s non-work friends, who saw her endless stream of comments as representative of a re=integration of her child’s spirit with hers, were moved beyond words at the extent to which she had incorporated her child’s death into her life, embracing her loss. Todd’s work friends, all sensitive to the hardship he must be going through, played along with his play-acting as part of the greiving process, careful not to cause any conflict while he was in such a fragile place, making sure to up their unexpected hug quota for the next few weeks. Todd’s non-work friends, crotch-thick in the new masculinity, ignored all his comments as being potentially inciteful to expression of feelings, which was just not macho. All of their friends, however, loved the casserole.

seventeen:

listen, i know she’s not going to like me, so let’s not even dick with each other. just keep walking. i don’t care enough about anyone or anything to pretend something we both know isn’t there exists, or could exist, or might one day exist if only i would change. i should be happy to still be breathing oxygen. all my friends are playing an endless game of post-sexual tag, taking turns being It. i’m sitting on the sidelines and thinking about how cool i am not to demean myself by playing. twenty-five years and absolutely not one fucking thing has changed. it’s not the sadness. i get that way. there’s nothing new or novel in that. but there is absolutely nothing in my future to suggest that this is temporary, that i’m going to surface from this and find myself in a productive state. the only think i have to look forward to at all is getting away, running away, as fast as my little legs will carry me, until i have to run from there and find some other place to hold all my dreams. embarassing. maybe if i got in a car accident. at least i’d have a reason to call.

eighteen:

I was nine years old, if memory serves correctly. I had heard from a bus-associate that this girl a grade ahead of me would let you look up her skirt for five dollars, which was the equivalent of four days worth of lunch money. All that week I sat in the library, ducking out on lunch, too racked with the thought of where my savings would soon be going to actualy do any reading. By Friday I had the money, and after the final bell rang, I went out front to look for the girl, who walked home from school instead of taking the bus. I knew I would be missing the bus, and I was too ashamed to call my mother to have her pick me up, so I walked behind the girl for a couple blocks, trying to get the nerve up. She stopped at a crosswalk and waited for me to catch up, my cover blown. “Is there something you want?” “I heard. From on the bus. Y’know.” “No, I don’t know.” “I’ve got the, it’s right here. So.” “What are you talking about?”, the emphasis on the word talking, the withering tone young girls get once they decide you’re wasting their time. “Like they said. So I can look.” “Get away from me. God.” That was the first time I met Pamela Bambelam. I wouldn’t have the nerve to look her in the eye for another three years.

nineteen:

Dave(1) has been working at the mall. He’s the manager of a store which sells children’s clothing. No one at the store has a child of their own, except the owner, whom none of the employees has ever seen. Dave(1) supervises the unloading of the trucks that come up from downtown. He checks for damaged merchandise and sorts the clothing into stacks designated for areas in the store. Area Seven is infantwear, and the piles which are laid on the Area Seven designated space in the back of the store are all very small. New employees tend to make these piles too high, and they topple onto the floor, which should be scrubbed down every other night were it not for the fact that Dave(1) had to fire the janitor, who was stealing clothing for his daughter. Most of the new employees come from the local high school. Some of them get a certain look in their eyes when they look at children’s clothing, a blurred haze between lust and fear. Dave(1) arranges storefront displays with plastic infants supplied by a warehouse out in Chicago. The infants all have numbers in black marker scrawled across their back, like the victims of a coven of ritual mathematicians. Plans for the displays come from the head office, indicating the placement of each plastic infant in the display with a number. Sometimes the high school employees rearrange the placement of the plastic infants in the front window display and have to be fired. In the past two months, Dave(1) has locked the keys in the back office four times. Upon discovering he has done this, he walks around the store, holding the temples of his skull with his fingertips and muttering. Dave(1) took out a second martgage for his fifth aniversary, earlier in the year, at the insistence of his wife. He is now terrified that he will lose his position of manager and be, at best, reduced to his earlier position of clerk, with a reduction in pay and benefits which will make prompt monthly payments much more difficult. Dave(1) and his wife have a beautiful home up in the hills, which they’ve been pouring a steady stream of cash into in the hope that it will stay beautiful through the years. It’s the little details, Dave(1)’s wife tells him. The district supervisor has been hinting that sales in the corner of the mall where Dave(1)’s store is have been low across the board, he shouldn’t take it personally, it’s the season, just gotta get through the next couple months, when the Dillards will be moving in two stores down, revitalizing the north end. Dave(1) cannot sleep, each night’s dreams have him putting his arm into a hole and unable pull it back out, something wet and stuffed with teeth brushing against his fingertips. Dave(1)’s wife has been stopping by the store at night, before he gets done doing up the next day’s inventory, thumbing idly through Area Seven. The high school employees make jokes at Dave(1)s expense, agreeing that they won’t have to deal with any of that shit just as soon as the band gets to LA. Dave(1) has sold his cellular phone and beeper, and only through force of will can bring himself to pick up his home phone, his hand shaking over the reciever. When he drives to buy groceries on Thursday night he keeps thinking he sees the car he sold when talk came up of a down payment on the house. While setting up the front window display one of the arms came off plastic infant number four, and before he could stop himself Dave(1) began to bash the head of the plastic infant against the window, unable to stop before he had gathered a small crowd, staring. The last I heard, they’re putting an Orange Julius there.

twenty:

You could live your entire life and never get off the interstate. It’s an insight which had dulled to cliche and washed up as a mute truism you can do nothing but shrug at, waiting for a possible “but…”. Truckers with piss-bottles and tin-foil filled with powder know this as well as vagabond kids praying the engine doesn’t die before they hit town know this as well as state troopers flashing the lights on, then off, so as not to have to get out in the cold, scribbling tickets. What once seemed to be the apex of the dehumanized consumer, the self-sealed commuter, now holds a hint of escape and velocity unknown to the workaday world. This was the flow of logic he put forth, refusing to leave the car for any reason, refusing to stop except for gas and watch-timed urine breaks. We had no reason to hurry, but I couldn’t get him to slow down, to stop off and visit friends, to just chill out. I had seen this behaviour before. I had a girlfriend once who was a CNN junkie. Actually CNN wasn’t even enough, she ended up spending so much time online we had to get a second connection. Nobody called it a war, not even the troops, who all had that processed overlit glow to them, a very slurpee run at four am while coming down at Quick Trip look about them. She had a cousin who knew a guy whose brother was there; he was sending e-mail which had been forwarded four times by the time my girlfriend got to it. “You don’t know what it’s like over there,” she’d tell me repeatedly. During the bombing runs on the capitol city she took time off work, sitting in the chair I bought for my first dorm room, drinking coffee and watching the screen. She had favorite reporters, ones who could be trusted and ones who were jockeying for anchor spots. It dawned on me after about a month that I wasn’t going to get properly laid again until after the hostilities ceased. I was this close to a massive letter campaign when the truce went into effect. It wasn’t a full week later before those kids barricaded themselves in that school, however, and I had moved into my car by the time they started taking out bodies.

twentyone:

He’d designed trees which go through their entire growth cycle in a week, Suck the soil dry of nutrients. Drop a seed along the foundation or beneath the floorboards and next week the house was destroyed. Twelve times he did this. He went over to see his ex-wife, just to drop by, maybe take a look at the house. By the time the cops arrived he had branches reaching up from his mouth. have nowhere to | i ever wanted was | yes, just like you fucking | because i | inferior and don’t even | witchhunts for the | reboned and strung through with | rash all splotched like demerol | other hands | because if I had a probelm with it I’d go straight to | stopped loving me when? When the passenger trains used to cut through their backyard, they’d go out sometimes and put on shows for the travellers. dancing, just enough leg to make you turn back in your seat. or else they’d just wave. hi, i never knew you, you never knew me, it’s a shame this life’s so short.

twentytwo:

There’s a certain kind of logic, a vernacular of seeming-like-truth, what we think of when we think of talking honestly, the talk we want from others, that we respect even though we’re a little afraid of it, all knuckles and specialized terms and brutality despite itself. We’re certain this is some sort of primal core honesty because it hurts, and the truth is supposed to hurt, isn’t it? This pain in my chest I get when you tell me such things, that’s because it’s more real than that joking around we did at lunch. Isn’t that right? Doesn’t the echo of that ache outline the boundaries of your passion, your feelings for me, and isn’t it true that the stronger that emotion the more solidly we’re connected, weathering the storm, coming through all the hard times we always knew would find us? It’s supposed to mean so much more, now that we’re yelling and throwing things, because it feels so much more immediate, so listen, there’s no need to cry, no need to explain, because I know in my heart that you only hit me because you love me.

twentythree:

To think of him now, not him in the casket but him standing there, in the backyard, just a bit too cockeyed to make a sunsetting silhouette, is to slowly realize how much the dying part had smoothed out all the memories, softenened them in the night-terrors and idiopathic risings up out of the brain in the bathroom or on the sidewalk and the shuddering push of the tears back below the surface, now drawn out and blown clean, all the edges sanded away without the overly soft bloating of the bad dreams he hoped he was past now, all the old hatreds too long unfed to do more than gum at his ankles when some silly misunderstood spat left him looking for something to kick. The clench of the jaw just to think of what she’d said, how he hadn’t been clear enough, too muddled in his words to get the point across, focusing hard on the grammatics to push back the idea that it wasn’t form but content that was lacking, that what he was trying so hard to say just wasn’t worth it. The old man never had these sorts of problems, he’d tell himself; he’d just speak his peace and let it go, maybe at best toss a rope with a joke he’d heard on the tee-vee. Towards the end he had to re-learn how to breathe, with that thing in his neck, and maybe it’s just looking back but he did grab at his chest a lot, settled in his chair, staring out the window. No slack-ass meds for the old man, who’d lump anything he had no need for or response to in an impressive category he’d call shit and kick to the curb. No blathery babbling, no backtracking excuses, no thrashing around to fill every silence. That’s how he remembers it, and it’s too late in the day to start looking at the undersides of the rocks he calls his parents. Close as you’d ever come. Hints and emulations and boxfuls of knicknacky crap with no place to fit in his house, ends he can’t remember fighting so hard for, actually calling Jack’s wife a cheap freeze-dried cunt right in front of the kids. The sort of thing the old man would say, he thought, and settled into the chair, watching the skyline for the slightest hint of a storm.

twentyfour:

One night, back in Iowa City, we were all wandering around on mushrooms and hash, and Tilda made some comment comparing a car running a red light to the brown hornet, and we laughed, and Brendan started to compulsively blurt out the names of cartoons, terror-laughing “Right, remember that?” after each one, and Tilda got this stressed look in her face, and this was around the time I was trying to get into Tilda’s tights, so after about thirty of these increasingly meta-regressive looping exclaimations I hit him, hard, in the back of the skull, and I hit him again, and again, five times in all, while he stared at me, confused, unsure if I was actually hitting him or not. I didn’t see anybody from that crew for about a month (except for Tilda, who had decided to let me into her tights after learning we had the same English class, taking that as a weary kismet), and even after I started hanging out at the apartment way over by the Vine again Brendan and I didn’t much talk, but he wasn’t much talking to anyone then. It was around my birthday that Brendan’s girlfriend called us, told us she was looking for him, that he was going to jump off the roof of Currier or something, and that if we see him we should call her and that the police were looking for him so we should probably call them too. Jackson, whose apartment this was, put down the phone and told the rest of us. According to the clock on the wall, we had dropped about half an hour prior, and we turned out all the lights and sat in the dark, on the floor, praying Brendan wouldn’t come here. About twenty minutes later there was a knock on the door, and we all got quiet, and he knocked again and again and again and it was inevitable that one of us was going to crack, so Matt got up and opened the door, and Jackson told Brendan that his girlfriend was looking for him and that he just couldn’t let him in the apartment and Brendan started wailing about his girlfriend and sat down by the door, out in the alley, and then the police showed up. The police came into the apartment and asked a number of questions, none of which I remember anymore, and then they took Brendan off in handcuffs. I never saw Brendan again.

twentyfive:

She’s got a sonambulent quality to her. Think Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion tweaked on too much mocha, so even in her existential hollowness she can’t quite sit still, can’t help to reach up to play with a bang she cut after her last boy had their last fight last Friday night, her fingers skittering across the side of her hairline like roaches in a flouride-dusted death scene. She’s a closet exhibitionist, a tanning-booth addict who spends the weekend on a giddy high from full-body UV radiation. She has fingernails that look like Easter eggs and a tatoo of the Sacred Heart between her vulva and her belly button. She has wooden shoes she only used for grain silo waltzing with the smell of vodka, vomit and Lorzban tucked deep in the back of her closet. She was a passion play Mary three years straight. She’s reaching for her hair again. Her brothers are all cops, all still on their first wives, the oldest with a kill to his name. She put that dress on today to show off the tan, the strapless slope of her shoulders. Three drnks in she’ll wander in conversation, wonder how many years she has left, and get this stunned look, all the emotion she’ll show tonight.

twentysix:

Three am and I’m knocking at her window, crying that she’s gotta teach me how to play piano. I gotta know, I can’t wait, it’s the only thing left that’ll save me, I don’t care that it’s Thursday and she’s gotta work tomorrow. I’ll give her all my money and what’s left of the Stoli to come down here and teach me how to play piano. What? Fuck that shit, I’ll buy a piano! We’ll break into a piano store and ride it down Cherry street! Come oooooooooooon, piano! PI-AN-O! PI-AN-O! Howsabout them piano lessons? I’m a quick study and my fingers aren’t fucked up anymore! I cut the cast off this afternoon after my medical council down at the Amphouse convinced me that so long as I got feeling in my digits I’m out of the schwartzwelt of muscle regrowth! I could chop down a house with this hand! PIANO! Don’t make me climb up there! I need an employable skill and seediness is not resume quality! And nobody who’d have use for my amazing prodigious lego assembly skills is hiring! But that kinda skill should make it clear that I’m at least four times as serious about this piano thing as I ever was about the lego thing! I’ll fix the trellace! So what that I broke it, I’m saying I’m willing to square all my, and even, okay, even more on top of that I’ll haul that piss-smelling couch out of the basement for equal trade of lessons as to the high art that is the piano! PIANO! Come oooooooooon! What cops? What the fuck do the cops know about playing the piano?

twentyseven:

[this men and women kick is bad, i don’t like it. it’s like i’m writing everybody else’s stories. who needs to hear another story about how frustrating and scary and joyful it is to be a thing with someone else? well no fucking duh, matlock, why don’t you go peddle your apples on the other side of the street? it’s insidious, this line of narrative, as it infiltrates all other stories, until you can’t write anything without sticking in two crazy lovestruck kids who find each other across time and space, spoiling and tainting anything interesting which surrounds it, like a wisecracking animal in a Disney movie — which reminds me, I’m working up a spec script for a Disney adaptation of the sinking of the Indianapolis, with a freshly-sobered Corey Haim as the voice of Louie the Happy Shark, give me a call if you got a bid — and the next thing you know you’ll pimp out any human tragedy that might have room for a wet coupling in it. who gives a cheap back-alley fuck about how men and women are different? are we still on this shit? next thing you know we’ll be writing Being Clever With Guns stories with lots of highbrow smut from people who can’t masturbate in private like decent folk, all aflutter talking about the latest rumor around town that there’s a new kind of irony just discovered out on the coast that’ll be big this summer…oh, that’s right, i forgot. sorry. This is the only thing I’ve ever been good at. This is the only thing I have. I have lived my entire life in a small room, the windows closed, the phone disconnected, the typewriter clicking out the next list of grievances and impotent desires. I collected everything I had ever written, found printer cables so as to get a copy of the science-fiction novel I wrote in the seventh grade, photocopies of the psychic theater stuff I gave to Jenna in high school, stories tucked in with my report cards up at my parent’s house. Pieces of the stupid book, unused interlace material, stories I wrote for rhetoric, for workshop, for publication. A sixty-page chunk from 1993 I had forgotten writing. Things I wrote instead of studying, instead of sleeping, instead of leaving the room. I listened to the shanti project collection (which you should buy) and looked through it all, trying to find pieces for reading. This is the sum of my life. This is what I have to show for the past twenty-five years. There is no indication that my life will ever change. I will move to a new town, at some point, and I will shut myself up in my room and write, turning the sunlight out, working out scenarios for my imaginary friends like a schoolboy with army figures, until I burn all the bridges there are to burn in that town and I move somewhere else, convinced that happiness is simply an exercise in applied geography. I do this in the hope that eventually this thing that I do will reveal itself as something that can supply the parts of a life I’ve been missing for so long, or until such a time that I realize how unlikely that is to happen, and feel something in my head fit into place, and change my life. I don’t need any massive epiphany. I just want to feel like I’m not lost, that I haven’t made some terrible mistake I cannot find my way out of. I just want to sleep.]

twentyeight:

It’s summer, and you know what that means: the unstoppable juggernaut that is the Journal of Speculative Disease Softball Team of Lower Washburn, with proud new sponsors Kilvan Excavation Team Twelve and Cornhusker Vodka (“You won’t remember how good it is!”), has returned to wreak nightmarish havoc amongst the Gilbertville League, with or without the “no spiked bats” rule. All the medical atrocity from a while back has left the team incredibly limber, though the inability to dampen gravity (as ruled by the league two years back, after the floods of ‘97 washed out the park, leaving JSDSToLW at a distinct advantage) has pretty much resigned Qu’ael to the bench for the remainder of the season. In fine form are power-hitters Abel and Baker, who still get a laugh by replying to the common question “I thought you guys were dead?” with a delighted “We were!”. Also looking to cause some deep-field damage is Jimmy Cheerios, whose “game face” led to a number of dropped balls and screaming basemen last year. Yet the team holds its own defensively with the pitching powerhouse of Ana Skyfish, so long as the team can keep her off the booze until the Seventh Inning Binge. It’s looking to be a fantastic year for the team, particulary since the immediate expulsion of all members utilising demonic technology is no longer an official rule, though any victory parties which end up within fifty feet of Immaculate Conception lead to a hundred dollar fine, so expect to see more midnight raft-burnings out on the Cedar should this underdog team come back from last year’s dissapointing 0-16 season. Opening day is the Fifth, and don’t forget, it’s Fruity Drink Day at the Gilbertville Softball Complex so bring you pitchers and get ready for softball the way it was meant to be played: drunk, bloody and beligerant!

twentynine:

He was hoping the new jacket made him look like a Chinatown hitman, but it was too new, too shiny, and God knows he’d give his kid to the Gypsies before he let anything happen to his two hundred dollar coat. The sort of guy who buys a truck and then spends his weekends hand-buffing it with imported chamois and special waxes. Maybe if he bought a gun, he kept thinking, he’d been thinking all year. He decided long ago that were he ever in a position to pull a gun, he’d forget he had it, and thus from a self-defense standpoint it was just silly, but he was trying desperately to build an attitude, be more of a fuck-you guy, even if just on the weekends, certain he only had a couple more years to learn how to be a fuck-you guy before the kid was old enough to notice and the wife was old enough to care that he was just being silly, buying all those magazines he’s convinced young guys read in order to keep up on how to be young guys, planning to increase their young guy qualities, completely oblivious to the stone-writ fact that young guys are, to the last, fuckups who do not plan *anything*, much less how to be cool. He was, in fact, driving home from the hip (according to the magazine) uptown boutique when he was broadsided by a Taurus full of kids jetting off to post-band practice dinner. Nobody was really hurt, except one of the kids cut the inside of his mouth on his braces, and while exchanging information he realized he actually had something of a social context to talk to a gaggle of young guys as to what essentiates the young guy in this strange age, if only he could make a decent bridge between the two topics. It then hit him, like divinity, how he could speak a language the young guys would understand. “You guys want some beer?” “Fuck yeah!” They pushed the cars into a nearby Denny’s parking lot (more because there was something about pushing a car that seemed to feebly imply a context for meeting chicks than any actual structural damage) and crossed behind the back fence, where there was a hill that was renouned amongst the little kids as a phenominal sledding hill, in the winter, five months from now. This was the first time he had the experience of being the cool older guy and he wasn’t sure how much talking he should do, or what questions would diminish his cool older guy status, so he stuck to vague questions about school and laughs he hoped seemed knowing when the subject came to girls. One thing he learned is that young guys polish off the beer at a pretty quick clip, and rather than trying to draw the evening out he said he had to get back to the wife, actually saying “the wife”, and they laughed as he took off. Driving home, he made a mental tally of the things he had learned about being a young guy, which wasn’t much: young guys really look forward to getting out of school because they think being a college guy will let them date next year’s high school senior girls, who he guesses are a year or two out of the range of their male peers, or maybe the young guys just weren’t very sure of themselves and thought the mystique of moving fifty miles away would make them well-nigh irrestiable to doe-eyed schoolgirls, or something. He learned that young guys don’t give a squat about all the music labels he was certain young guys took as their generational call to arms; they didn’t even know what Budapest narco-dub was supposed to sound like. Young guys are convinced that drinking only takes place when joined with adventure and cunning, which is the priveledge of being underage and fades swiftly once you hit 21. His wife laughed when she saw the side-panel dent in the shiny red truck, which was gonna depreciate the resale value, he told himself, which meant he should unload it as quickly as possible. It’s not really him, anyway.

thirty:

as though talking about it somehow made it magically go away. she’s sitting atop the vent. she’s shrouded in quilts. she doesn’t yet know for sure that he loves her. she has notions, but no confirmations, floating inside the hiss of the air. when she touches the window there’s ovals where her skin melted the frost. she’s not entirely sure that he knows what he wants, not sure he knows he wants her. she knows precisely how many steps from here to the refrigerator, where the bottle of vodka was tucked up in the icebox, an equilibrium of internal and external, the same song on loop for hours now, staring blankly at the floor, the dead center of december night. he’s not even sure he wants to be sure, he said, and she wanted to smack him. she had hoped to have outgrown this, to have thought long and hard enough on all these things, endlessly resurfacing, but apparently not. balance of polarities. it’s the only way. it has to be.

thirtyone:

Backwards. Sleepless. There were infants who had removed themselves from the womb with clar and fang, sinew strung between teeth, feeding on the insects whoe clustered around their mouths and eyes as they lay, perfectly still, awaiting prey. In the marketplace such infants were bought and sold to be kept in front foyers to keep out theives, or used in soups. There was a basement room where post-soldiers had been gathering after the war to rant and spit at the cowardice of peace, plotting how to make the most of the groundswell of anti-governmental opposition which had been rising since the currency became worthless. a scar-line across the knuckles to identify party members. Lamps fueled on a thick white fat filled the room with dim light and a smoke that stuck to the skin, residue you could lick from your fingers. Trucks packed with speakers drive slow circles around the city, playing People’s Music and calls to appease the bloodshed. A woman with missing fingers has been speaking on topics roughly related to “Genetic Destiny” while distractedly folding a sheet of green paper into a house, a swan, a spider. The air is filled with wind-up toy birds tethered by thrice-used string to the wrists of children, who stand numbly in the park and wait until they are allowed to go home. Some of the children are missing, with nails driven into the ground to hold down the false birds. The throat collapses with certain word-combinations, and the bodies remain where they have fallen, dated only by the soot which covers them. Everything we touch we taint forever, which only haunts as we have fallen in love with a mythic space which continues falling away with each glance. At times, in the wire-hung tunnels benneath the cobblestones, there is no way of knowing if one has been deafened, the silence is so absolute. Streetcleaners push false tracks into the mouths of empty mines which pop up from the street like sewer-worms, attempting to lure the street rabble to their heart-bled ends, keeping the population down. The townspeople talk often and at length about how great their new technology is, how much easier the world is thanks to the miracle of assisted walking. He asked her to take off her clothes and put her head inside the skull of an elephant. Last night, when I could not sleep, I did something I have not done in nearly five years. I told myself, then, I would never do it again. I guess I was wrong.

thirtytwo:

I don’t understand how I feel. When I was ten, I was in the playground at school, up on the wooden fort, when two kids who didn’t like me grabbed my legs and threw me over the side. I flipped and landed on my back, the wind knocked out of me. I didn’t know such a thing could happen. I tried to breathe and couldn’t, couldn’t even pull as though I was gagged; my body couldn’t do the thing it needed to do. One of the teachers ran over to me and told me to settle down, to relax, to stop trying so hard to breathe, and I would have hit her in the mouth, had I the ability. When I was underwater, a year before, I at least had breath left to me, and felt like I had time. I was surrounded with something and I wanted to get it inside me, but I couldn’t do it. How I feel now is like that, only reversed. I have something inside me, but I don’t know where it is. I’m carrying something, by which I don’t mean any kind of maudlin “heavy weight” metaphor; I simply mean that I feel this presence on me, and the overwhelming desire to let it go, but I don’t know how. It feels exactly like not knowing how to breathe. I am not afraid. The things I was once afraid of losing are gone now, and the only things I have left are the things I have an absolute trust in. What am I, now that my future is gone? When my notions of who I was supposed to be no longer exist, what is left? I have been noticing what parts of me are actually other people; what parts once lived in someone else’s body. Other people might take this as a reason for panic, an ill-defined sense of question as to one’s primal nature. I believe that the people you love are a part of you, and not in some mush-sense: you can see those people in you, and so can others; you carry them inside you, just as they probably carry some of you with them. This is part of why being a hermit is not as hard as it could be, because these people are, in a literal sense, with me. It is a diminished sense, when compared to the more visceral qualities of interpersonal connection, but it affirms a permanence that the heady rush of this week’s fixation may not necessarily hold. When I die, I take a comfort in knowing that I have not fully left this earth, that there are people in which I still carry some effect. I do not want to die, however, because those people have an effect in me, and I have to respect that, even in my emptier places. This is the afterlife as I understand it. I don’t think of this as cynical.

thirtythree:

The girl who lives two blocks over, Jason and Mag’s kid, practices the piano every afternoon from four to five. She’s been doing this since before I moved into the neighborhood, two years ago. She’s recently become smitten with some boy from school, and now spends her afternoons on the phone with this boy, attempting to fool her parents by playing audio tapes of old practices on her high-end stereo. I can tell these are tapes because of a slight hiss and flatness of tone. beneath this sound I can hear the sound of her on the telephone, talking to the boy, setting herself up to be teased, to laugh. I can hear the brush of her feet across the carpet, dangling over the edge of her bed, toes pointed at the floor. It’s absolutely startling all the things I can hear once I stopped talking.

thirtyfour:

am thinking of lines of flight. I am thinking of a way out. I am thinking of crossing in front of the bus, at my stop, despite the insistent reminder by the bus driver against crossing in front of the bus, for if I wait, and let the bus pass me by before crossing the street, the other kids will spit on me. Sometimes they spit gum. Sometimes the gum gets stuck in my hair. I am terrified of going home with gum in my hair and having someone in my family see what I have become. I am thinking that maybe I wouldn’t mind getting hit by the bus, as the bus couldn’t be going very fast in that short a distance from a complete stop. I am thinking maybe I could take off in a sprint up the street, hopefully reaching the corner before the bus does, before the other kids catch me. I am thinking of walking up to someone’s house here, pretending I have business there, pretending I need to borrow something from Mrs. Riva while praying she’s not home. Perhaps it would not be the bus that would hit me, but another car, and with this being a poorly-enforced 25 miles per hour zone I could be seriously hurt. This would not necessarily be a bad thing. Perhaps my leg or my ribs would be broken and I could do my assignments from the hospital, or from home. I am beginning to suspect that if I try to escape from running this gauntlet that retribution will be inflicted on me later. I am thinking of the time Brandon called me a pussy-eating faggot, and I told him that didn’t make any sense, and he hit me in the mouth with his fist wrapped in his leather belt, the buckle cutting my lower lip. Perhaps I could just not get off at this stop, go three blocks down, where I could duck under the bridge. This is my stop. I have to get off the bus. I have to go now. The bus driver is waiting for me. Everyone is looking at me. I have to go. I stand by the curb and Brandon’s friend David, whose girlfriend sometimes talks to me in study hall, spits gum in my hair. I cannot pull it out. I walk two blocks home and try to think of how I can sneak in the back door before my mom sees me. I go around back, and my parents are both out there, weeding the baseline of the house, and they see the gum in my hair, and I do not know what to do.

thirtyfive:

All this time come and gone and I’m still the surrogate boy. What a crisis means is that all ongoing projects are shelved in order to take care of the given crisis. A crisis is a means by which to step outside of time, into a ficticious now where the importance or relevance of events pertains only to the crisis in question. It is a way to hold back the tide of one’s personal history by engaging in a greater potential tragedy, through which all ramifications can be postponed, all emotional debts remain unpaid. What one ideally hopes to feel is the displacement of entering a completely different social sphere, that feeling of “craziness” or “detachment” that pulls us from the long-term frustrations and petty beatings each “normal” day consists of. That crisis, particularly intentionally generated crisis, almost always fails to sustain that sense of shifted strata for any signifigant length of time only demonstrates the absolute nature of one’s personal assignments and histories, how one cannot step outside of one’s life in order to go play in the sun for one more day. The questions inside you require answers and will not wait. Of course, were any of this true, I wouldn’t be here now, waiting for a call.

thirtysix:

There was once two brothers who could remove the bones from their bodies and exchange them, so as to increase or decrease in heigth as necessary. Sometimes they would take the bones from their arms out and chase girls around the schoolyard, flapping their unskeletoned arms in circles while holding the bones in their mouths. As punishment for such acts, their father would remove all the bones from their bodies and leave them in their shared room, two puddles of skin and tissue atop their quilts. As children almost always do, these children occasionally lost their bones in play, through forgetfulness, or by hurling them at something and being unable to retrieve them. Their father cobbled false bones from pieces of wood and scavenged steel pipe, and as the children grew older, they became quite odd-looking indeed.

thirtyseven:

She runs from nothing in life. Everything is, at worst, an incredibly challenging learning experience. She has a sideways hardwired grace which carries her feet across or around the strangest of places, to emerge later with another batch of stories and something close to peace. I can’t stub my toe without being laid up for two weeks, calling my friends and telling them how I’m going to kill myself because I can’t go on. Everything’s an excuse to play Beckett for me. Novelty is a repetition of forms. Were I not fixated on my idea of hermiting I may have learned a few of the things she has taken in and made a part of herself. I know better, and remember each time, but the simplest step never gets taken. There is an excess of repetition. I give her an extended explaination as to how I am going to cease talking because there is too much information, or perhaps too little hidden in what I’m trying to do, an inaccurate attempt. She smacks me on the back of the head. “Dumbass,” she says, “what do you WANT?”

thirtyeight:

I used to own an oracle. I was pulling out of Eat one afternoon and this kid in a Scoupe dinged my passenger-side door on his way in. Instead of doing the whole insurance gig he offered me an oracle, which he apparently was gonna try to pawn down at Hemsetter’s. We called it even and I went home, where I tried out the oracle, to discover that it was broken. It wasn’t entirely broken, it still spit out fortunes, but they weren’t at all clear, even for the accepted vagueness of the business. breath you remember, rejection, body-gates I called up my hoolie-friends, because what the fuck else am I gonna do, I’m worthless as vaccuum attachments alone. “Dude, first off, this is home-wired, none of this is professional work. Or they were smokin’ Drano at the plant. Either way, this is just no good.” “So it’s broken-broken?” “No, it’s not exactly broken, but whoever did this either had some kinda superfucking plan going on or…what the creeping fuck is *this*?” “Dude, that’s a cockroach, that’s not part of anything. People need to learn to appreciate their machines, I say.” “No, no, look. First off that ain’t a roach and second off it’s soldered onto the board. That’s some kind of seed.” “You were right. People who use seeds as resistors have no common sense. Get your fingers in there and pull that thing out.” “Yeah and you can suck your dying breath out of my ass, man. I ain’t pulling anything out of there. Or better it’s his shit, mn, so if bravery is entailed it figures that he’s our boy.” “Fuck you both. If you’re not touching it, I’m not touching it.” “I say you should haul this thing off and bury it under somebody else’s lawn. Somebody you want cursed, or at least wanna stick with a dead lawn.” “God damn it, that’s just what I need, some fucker hits my car and curses me with his evil oracle. Su-perb.” “So whatcha want me to do, Haas? Seal this beacon of evil up? See if I can pawn it to the Librarian and Satanist contingent?” “Nah. I gotta take care of this. You guys wanna go with me to the quarry?” deviant tangibles of mouth, tongue, skin Quarry’s about five miles out of Wasburn, just shy of Eagle Center, only I hadn’t been in there in a few years and hadn’t been updated as to the closing and filling of the quarry, which leaves abandoning the oracle there pretty iffy. I went back towards town, over by the dump, but the NO BIOTOXIC, CONTAMINATED OR EVIL OBJECTS sign suggested they wouldn’t let my deposit fly. I tried giving it to my landlord as a sign of good faith toward my back rent, but found it no less than an hour later on my doorstep with an eviction notice. I made a few quick calls while backing up my two boxes worth of shit (see, I’m supposed to be moving) and discovered that my previous circuit-bending hoolie-friends would not allow the oracle in or around their homes, even in Martha’s kids’ treehouse. Everybody was out, or doing the young-adult-trying-to-get-laid-and-don’t- jinx-it-with-your-needing-a-place-to-stay-bullshit thing, or wouldn’t talk to me anyway. I got all my shit in my car, cancelled all my utilities, and drove out to the rest stop to sleep and ponder. In the morning, I consulted the oracle. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxxx x xxx x I guess I don’t much have a choice. Which is good, because when I have a choice I hold onto it as long as possible. I just have to do it, now.

thirtynine:

I was in Iowa City a couple weeks ago. They cut down the tree where the birds who knew my name lived. I listened, to see if they had nested elsewhere, but they were gone. Something was wrong, she thought. She wasn’t supposed to feel like this. She was supposed to feel entirely different, crazy and wild and free, let go of her old life and stepped into a completely different world, but she felt the same as she did before she made the call. Perhaps tired, perhaps sore, but no different. She wanted to look down at her body and see if maybe the change she had been so certain of had manifest there, only he was looking over at her, trying to nudge her into saying the first word, and she didn’t want to look stupid. She wanted to go but didn’t want to move. She didn’t know where she wanted to go. She couldn’t go home. She looked out the window, away from him, and waited for him to leave. Something was wrong, he thought. Everything was supposed to be easy now. Everything was supposed to fall into place. He thought of things to say. He had gotten what he had wanted all this time, all these years, hints and suggestions finally come to fruition, only this couldn’t have been what he wanted because he still felt the same thing he had always thought was the feeling of him wanting her. He told her he had to go to the bathroom, started to mention something about cleaning up and left it half-finished, hanging in the air. He locked the bathroom door behind him and avoided the mirror. She didn’t look any different. Maybe it’s all these fucking flourescent lights he has, maybe tomorrow, out in the sunlight, she’ll see it, she’ll feel it. She used to feel that free, before. She’s almost certain. It seems like it when she thinks about it. It was all so different then. We were all so.

forty:

Ed Satan’s youngest brother Doug had been playing his favoritest game in the whole world, which is called Bomb, and I’ll hip you to the rules. Go to the nearest drinking fountain or sink or water cooler. load up on water, holding as much as you can in your mouth without spitting it all over yourself. Go to whatever designated area you have been asked to trade the next X hours of your life for money or education or the approval of the elected government, and wait for somebody to say something annoying. When they do, spit water in an arcing spray (or up in the air, should you have multiple targets), yell BOMB! and run out of the room. Educators frown on this kind of behaviour, as do spit-targets, and if you don’t find a target fairly quickly you’ll spend the rest of the day rubbing your aching jaw. Doug, however, is obscessed, and has developed the mouth strength (and the cloak of silence) necessary for hours of water-holding, waiting for the optimal moment.

fortyone:

“Two catholic girls were sitting on my front steps trying to figure out at what point penetration actually becomes penetration, and thus a mortal sin. They asked to borrow a ruler, and i told them to get the fuck off my porch.” “That’s exactly the kind of attention you don’t need.” “I had always remembered catholic girls as being more orally fixated. I guess the church is trying to keep up with the needs of the young people.” “Or something. More Chivas, please.” “I got the taxi driver to run to the store and bring this back here. I didn’t even need to leave the airport. What kind of two-horse operation doesn’t even have a bar?” “I’m learning it’s all part of the distribution of satisfaction in Des Moines. The whole logic of this town is that if you want something, you have to travel to get it, no matter where you are.” “You have to expand your notion of where you are to include the entire town. Unless you have cabbies to do your bidding.” “Right. See, I’m used to thinking of here are room-size. You do that here, you’ll never get anything done.” “We need glasses. Drinking this from the bottle looks really horribly conspicuous.” “No bar means no glasses. For God’s sake, does this even count as civilization?” “Plane leaves in two hours, huh?” “Unless we get delayed again. Which wouldn’t suprise me.” “Let’s go play pinball. No one’ll be around to watch us get tanked there.” “No arcade here. If you can imagine.” “Savages. Fucking savages.”

fortytwo:

you should always go out with a bang, but it’s late in the day, and the shadows are hung, and there’s nothing left to say. at least not to you.

fortythree:

today i was at the mall. my head hurt, again, as always. i reached down to pick up my keys and felt a cooling quality to the tiles. i thought perhaps if i could rest my head against these tiles the pain would subside, at least for a while. i touched my head for a moment, a moment where the pain went to some other place and the absolute cellular knowledge of peace defined as lack of fear plus lack of suffering reached into me and shook my body, as though i had collected memories like phlegm in the lung which had split and come loose, all at once, i could not follow. a security guard came up behind me and asked me if i was alright. i couldn’t move. i thought if i stayed perfectly still he would leave me be. he lifted me up by the shoulders and asked me if i needed a doctor. my legs gave out in an attempt to return my skull to the dirty tiles, but he would not let me go, and called an ambulance, and i hadn’t the strength or the control to do anything but wait, and hope he’d drop me, let me go. by the time i got to the hospital, the sense of peace, and all the remembering that followed, had gone away, and the darkness came in on me.

fortyfour:

mai q’aellah neiah delleasa ve auim wallia devenes, est. (the you-and-i is simple until we get scared, but without being scared there is no you-and-i.) Jimmy came over and convinced me there was nothing wrong with cooling off by sitting in the fish pond. “We’ll just be careful not to sit on any of ‘em and we’re good. Besides, it’s too fucking hot to just be hanging around and sweating like a couple of simpletons.” “You need to take your poorly-thought out ideas and you need to hit the road. You being here is giving me an ulcer and you haven’t even had time to really think evil thoughts yet.” “I ain’t staying, and if you don’t wanna soak in the pond that’s fine with me, kid. I just wanted to see if you knew the score on Josef. Like if we should be doing something, or something.” “I ain’t doing shit. Fuck him anyway.” “Well fine then. We know where you stand.” “Listen, I’m not gonna get all weepy-eyed over somebody who’s basically been dead for the past six years just because the body finally died. I have real people to care about. If you guys wanna have some pretentious-ass pity-party for poor Josef, knock yourselves out.” “Jesus Christ, man, I’m just asking what the things are. You don’t wanna do anything, fine. Su-perb. I think I’ll be taking off.” “Good idea. And don’t take any of that candy with you on your way out.” “Fuck you.” “Fuck you.” “No, man, fuck *you*.”

fortyfive:

“It’s not so much that I miss you, as I think we’re past the missing each other part, but I would like to to think about a proposition I’d like to make. Just think about it, and if you don’t wanna do it I’ll let it go, no problem. I’d like to buy our bed off you. Now I know it was your bed from long before you ever even knew me, but ever since I’ve left I haven’t gotten a solid night’s sleep on my old bed that I got out of my parent’s house after I moved out, and I’ve tried out a couple other beds while staying with friends, but nothing’s doing the trick. So if you’re interested call me back. I’ll pay super-well: I got that job with the meat people that I had told you about from before. So just —” “Hello?” “Oh, um, hey. It’s me. I thought you were at work?” “No work today. Bomb threat. Did you call hoping to get the machine?” “No. Well, actually, yeah. But it’s good to hear you, though. I mean.” “No, that’s. So you wanna buy the bed?” “If possible. If not, you know, it’s no big, um, thing.” “You know Dave and I have been in that bed.” “I’m not asking for the sheets or anything. I just really like the bed, and remember when you told me that when you felt all not right that your advice was to get a good night’s sleep? Well that’s what I’m trying to do. And you can help!” “I’m gonna charge you through the nose, you know.” “I pretty much expected that.” “Well. I think I’ll talk to Dave who’s thinking about moving some of his things over here anyway, but yeah. Anything else you want?” “No, I got…Darren wanted me to ask if you have any soiled panties you’d like to sell, but I’m not gonna ask that.” “I appreciate that. Always a gentleman.” “So you’re good?” “Yeah. I really am. Sometimes I’m not sure I should be good? You know? Like I should still be all fucked up or something? But it seems good, so I’m kinda just trusting in that.” “Excellent. That’s good to hear.” “You?” “I’m working all the time. Which is okay. Something I need to do or something. It’ll pass.” “You doing anything for Josef?” “Nah. It doesn’t sound like anything’s going on here, and I’m not driving up there for that. And when I talked earlier abotu it I get the impression like things are maybe not good. So whatever.” “You gonna be home tomorrow?” “Yeah, after about six.” “Cool. I’ll stop by and tell you what’s up with the bed.” “Perfect.” “I gotta go. You take care.” “Will do, cheif.” “No, really.” “I’ll see you tomorrow.” “Yeah.”

fortysix:

We were about halfway through the dishes when my grandmother looked at me, paused, and said “You know, what you need is a woman to straighten you out.” We’d had this conversation before, so I defaulted to “Well, yeah, but you know that the sort of person to attract a woman is already pretty straightened out.” She paused for a good long while, seemingly whipping up some sort of enderly great secret that, once hipped to, might actually prove to be the thing it seemed like everybody else already understood, some kinda pre-uterine memo I musta slept through. “That’s true,” she said. “Ain’t that a bitch.”

fortyseven:

“If only we had a means of aeronautically propelling ourselves from the confines of the garden,” the great mole said. “we could be free fo this place! we could live by the river and feast on the finest of roots!” “but alas! such knowledge is lost to us, as we have paent our years belowground, where the light found us only in times of accident or catastrophe. what do we know of the laws and bylaws of space travel?” “but we have in our possession associates who do know of such things! wiht the knowledge they possess we will build us a craft to lift us up into the sky and out and away! destiny become history! (ed. note: this is the war-cry of all moles, which is also (like most war-cries) a root-sap drinking song — either way, should you ever hear it, we would most certainly suggest immediate taking of shelter, for things will soon go amok.) to the treeline, gentlemen!” “the treeline? but sir, who lives out by teh treeline? the rabbits?” “yes, but they are just as stuck here as we are. we go on further!” “the squirrels? they know of limb-to-limb locomotion.” “but still not sufficient, for where we wish to travel there are long gaps without trees. further still!” “but then who, sir?” “our friend moi! she will be in the trees!” “moi? you mean conquest?” “no sir! i mean moi! onwards!” [intermission. we suggest spending this time getting yourself a refreshing beverage from your local kitchen, or going horsies, or calling someone and telling them something you never thought you’d ever tell them.] “i have spoken with moi, and she has agreed to use her intricate knowledge of aeronautical engineering to build us a worthy vessel! indeed, she is quick as tragedy, for here she is!” “what nature of craft is this? it looks like a box!” “silence! i will have no dispiriting the manifest destiny of my people! all aboard!” “if you’re sure, sir, than i’m sure, so…all aboard. how do we work this contraption?” “we just OH FUCKING HELL!” (collective screaming) “it’s just moving! just like it just…aaaagh!” “oh, when will it ever end! will this be the end of our exodus?” “did we just stop?” “we did, we…” “moi’s lifting us out! saved by providence! mine are a blessed people!” “all praise the almight moi, who saved us from the metal beasts and poisons of the garden! hooray!” “hooray!” “there is the river! we have found the homeland!” and this is how zeke’s dad (with some help) solved his mole problem.

fortyeight:

the speckle-shelled birds are diving down on each other, through the branches and brambles, where the bells tied there by the tree-children crack open the morning and lead to much yawning and rubbing of eyes. yesterday, while i was out walking the dog, i came upon a gaggle of children who asked if they could pet her. i, of course, said certainly, and they did, informing me of the day’s events. “we hit the dog jackpot today. we petted three dogs and we have one inside to pet. and we saw a weinerdog but they wouldn’t let us pet him.” i know this weinerdog; his name is spencer, and he’s as high-strung as the people who walkhim, enough so that when i see them i have to cross the street to avoid the little hyper weinerdog’s yelping and carrying on. “that dog sucks anyway,” i said. “yeah. this dog’s a peach, though.” this is the first time in a while i had heard someone other than myself refer to something as being a peach, so i was a bit taken aback. they looked at me and said goodbye to the dog, heading off to the creek to throw rocks. last night, coming in from doing bad things, i saw those children leaping from tree to tree, silhouetted by the thunder, moving faster than i could follow. i assume the bells in the trees are theirs. because of this, i know that i need to shave my head again. i cannot explain how these things work, and i’m too old to try.

fortynine:

[forty-nine is a secret story. ask me, and i will tell you.]

fifty:

the center of all fiction is the stories children tell themselves, at night, trying to sleep. all of literature is annotations and extended examinations of this core. all the work is done; all we do is fit and frame the stories we already know, the ones other people have woven into their speech, their dreams. it is not the suffering, the torments, which caused job to suffer. it is the knowledge that his god was fundamentally unknowable, that none of the structure he had attributed to his god existed. “there’s no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going” i wonder what i missed today. i wonder what i did not notice. all the things which have escaped me forever because i did not know where to look, or how to ask, or when to stop and notice. i want to know how things work. being a janitor was a means of better understanding architecture in an applied sense. in the buildings where i worked i knew how to get from any point a to any point b. i knew what lurked behind all the secretive closets, what was hidden on the elevator floors one needed a key for. i knew how the lights in the chandeliers were changed. i have made music to understand how songs work. i understand how certain houses work, how certain neighborhoods work, how certain communities work. it’s all in the looking, the bone beneath the skin. in my dream i saw ana and josef. i asked them why they had come to visit me. i asked them what they wanted. i asked them why things had happened as they had. i asked them why i felt so terrified despite my seeming autonomy as narrator. i asked them why i was still in iowa. i asked them if i will ever get out of this place. i asked them if i shoudl keep writing. i asked them if i will spend the rest of my life as alone as i had to that point. i asked them to bless the people i love and bring me to them by any means available. i asked them for curses, for songs, for cautionary tales. i asked them for people with pieces of their face missing and for little girls who live in the trees. i asked them for underage punk-rock bands and storytellers whose audience had floated to the bottom of a pond on the edge of town. i asked them for guidance. i asked them for solace. i asked them to cast my step in grace. ana and josef stood at the end of the bed and stared. everything near becomes distant. i don’t know what i’m doing anymore.
(12:08.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #