Junk Drawer Drunk

An Office Story--part 3

2008-02-28T15:35:00.000-05:00

“I don’t believe you truly appreciate the gravity of the situation,” Felton said, raising one eyebrow and fingering the top of his crystal cigarette lighter in the shape of an onion. A crystal onion--he had received for his twentieth anniversary with the Phantom Coalition. A crystal onion shaped cigarette lighter…what the hell had the Coalition been thinking? He didn’t even smoke

“And I don’t believe you fully appreciate to what degree I do not truly appreciate the gravity of the situation,” said Krane.

Felton made a face, but it was a face Krane had seen before; a collection of calculated lines and angles he had learned in a three-day seminar entitled: “Faces That Mean Things and How to Make them Mean Things For You!” The face Felton was making now was one called: The Lion Who Smells the Scent of the Weak or Sickly.

Krane knew this; he had been to the same seminar. He had even stayed in the same hotel room as Felton--to save the Coalition money. It had been Felton’s idea; Krane had no qualms at all about spending the Coalition’s money. In fact, it was something Krane enjoyed.

Krane answered Felton expression with another one from the same seminar: The Clever Monkey Looking Down From a Tree at the Lion.

Man, Felton thought, he really does look just like a monkey in a tree .How does he do that? He didn’t even take notes.

Felton regretted having chosen Krane to come with him to that seminar, but at the time Krane had been his most promising subordinate. Now he was just another problem sitting across the desk from him. Sometimes it seemed to Felton that his weeks were just an unending loop of the same crappy days repeating themselves. It was everything he could do some mornings to open his eyes on the world he knew was waiting for him, and lately he had even taken to having a bourbon or two with lunch just to brace himself for the rest of the day. Felton leaned back—smiled sadly with one side of his mouth. This was not one of his learned expressions—this was just the way Felton smiled. He flicked the lever on the crystal onion lighter and stared at the small, bluish tongue of flame that resulted. He would need lighter fluid soon, he thought. If that’s what it took—for all he knew it needed to be filled with lamp oil…maybe something made from whales.

Krane had relaxed his own expression and was now smoothing the knee of his pants and smiling smugly, waiting to see what would happen next.

“Where were we?” Felton asked.

“I was busy not appreciating the gravity of things and such,” Krane said.

“Yes,” Felton said. “Well you don’t. And it’s becoming a bit of a problem. It reflects badly on the department. It reflects badly on me.”

“But how does it reflect on me?”

“Badly,” Felton said. “It reflects badly for you too, Krane.”

“I see,” said Krane.

“The point is we can’t just go taking people from their homes all willy-nilly like that. People tend to notice. People tend to wonder what happened to people and start making phone calls and calling the authorities. People tend to look for people who go missing. You get that, right Krane?”

And Krane said: “I left a note.”

An Office Story--Part 2

2008-02-13T08:10:00.002-05:00

A week later, he did go to the police. He spoke to two detectives in a white, windowless room and was struck by how much the detectives reminded him of the detectives on a TV show—not any specific TV show but every TV show about police detectives he had ever seen.

One of the detectives was young and handsome and the other was older and handsome. The young one was blond and the old one had white hair. The young one’s face was smooth and the old one’s face had deep lines.

The detectives offered him coffee in a paper cup. They sat across from him at a table and drank their own coffee from white ceramic mugs.

“Does your wife do this sort of thing often?” the younger detective asked.

“I don’t know what this sort of thing is,” he said. “I don’t know what she’s doing. That’s why I’m here.”

“Does she disappear often?” the older detective asked. “That’s what we mean by ‘this sort of thing’. That’s what we’re asking you.”

“Not often,” he said. “No.”

The older detective leaned forward. The man could see the butt of detective’s gun in the shoulder holster under his arm. The butt of the gun seemed very dark and heavy and the leather of the holster reminded him of a horse’s harness. The gun looked like it was straining to get out.

“But she has before,” the older detective said. “That’s the thing, right?”

“A few times. Not often, though. I wouldn’t say often.”

“I would consider my wife disappearing a few times a few times too often for me.”

The young detective smiled with half of his mouth and wrote something down in a small notebook.

“And she’s been gone for about a week,” the younger detective said. “Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Has she ever disappeared for a week before.”

“No. Not really.”

“No or not really?” the older detective said.

“No.”

They asked him a series of other questions, and the more they asked the more he felt as if he had done something wrong. His answers sounded evasive and unsatisfying to even his own ears, and when he felt an itch on his nose and scratched it, he wondered if that too was the sort of gesture a guilty man would make.

When they were done they asked him if there was anything else he would like them to know about her, but he could not think of anything—not anything important. So he said: “She called me old shoe.”

The two detectives looked at him.

“I called her honey and she called me old shoe.”

The younger detective looked down at his notebook but didn’t write anything down.

“OK,” the older detective said. “Duly noted.”

He went home. He looked at some of her things that she kept on the bedroom windowsill. These were the things she loved: a tiny porcelain squirrel; a souvenir crystal boomerang from a vacation to Australia five years ago; a masonry jar painted to look like a snowman. It was then that he noticed the piece of paper sticking out of the masonry jar. He pulled it out, unfolded it, read the carefully written letters several times over.

The note said: “Your wife is safe. She is comfortably ensconced in chic surroundings, so there is no reason to worry or follow. Sincerely, The Phantom Coalition.”

It did not look anything like his wife’s handwriting.

An Office Story--part 1

2008-02-05T09:53:00.000-05:00

He called her Honey. She called him Old Shoe. He thought about this fact during the train to work, wondered if there was a sign of further trouble in this small detail. Honey is sweet. What is an old shoe? Comfortable, at best. Foul smelling, filled with holes and needing to be replaced at worst—if that was even the worst. But what could be done? The boundary of his life had long ago been drawn in indelible ink by a youthful hand—it had been drawn in the shape of a shaky and lop-sided heart.

The train stopped, he got off, walked the two blocks to the building he worked in.

It was potluck day at the office. It seemed that every other day was potluck day at the office and he had long since lost his enthusiasm for whatever carrot and broccoli casserole or cornbread stuffing his coworkers would bring. He did not want to mingle with his fellowman at the folding table by the coffee maker, making small talk about a TV show he had not seen or explain again why he had failed to bring any contribution to the feast himself.

So he sat in his cubicle and pretended to work. He pretended to work so hard, in fact, that one of his coworkers brought him a small plate of cornbread stuffing. “You’re working too hard,” his coworker said. “It’s an illusion,” he told his coworker.

He had a forkful of the stuffing to be polite and smiled, feeling the crumbs gathering in the corner of his mouth as he did.

“Tasty,” he said, though in fact it seemed to suck every drop of moisture out of him. It was impossible to swallow, and when his coworker left him and went back to the table, he spit the stuffing out into his waste paper basket.

Work ended. He stood on the train platform again waiting for the blue line to take him home. It was cold and snow was falling, but the flakes were small and inconsequential. A man dressed in rags and plastic bags was walking the edges of the platform, asking people who were not there for money, and then spitting and yelling “Sucker!” when the people who were not there ignored him.

The train came.

He got on and found a seat by the window. He was the only one on the car and he began to think about his Honey again. He wondered what she was doing right now. He wondered what she would say when he got home. He knew he would say: hi Honey.

If she were in a good mood, she would say: Hi Old Shoe. If she were in a different mood, she might throw the statue of the Virgin Mary at him—but several feet above his head in deference to their love. The Virgin Mary had long since lost her head, but other than that seemed indestructible.

The train lurched forward and the wheels on the wet tracks made the sound of a sigh. The man sighed with it—his own sound inaudible beneath the train’s.

There was something on the tracks, and then a power failure, and then trouble finding his car in the train station parking lot and then an unusual amount of traffic on the drive home so that it was a quarter passed ten when the man finally pulled into his driveway.

The house was dark. The front door was locked and he had to fumble with his keys and even after that found it necessary to shove against the door with his shoulder because there was something against it on the other side.

Immediately he imagined it was her body, that she had killed herself in some final act of defiance, and not being even satisfied with just that, had also positioned herself so that it would be hard for him to open the door. That would be just like her.

But it turned out to be the cushions of the couch stacked in a pile and a box of old newspapers. He called out her name, but not loud enough to actually wake her if she was sleeping. He turned on a light. The statue of the headless Virgin Mary was on the floor by her favorite chair as if she had been waiting for him. The house smelled like fried eggs and in the kitchen, shells were strewn about the floor.

Upstairs, the bed was empty, as was the bathtub, as was the old refrigerator box in the basement and a number of other places she sometimes liked to sleep when she was mad at him.

He considered calling the police, but they had never been very helpful in the past and he could swear the dispatch person was starting to recognize his voice and address. So he went to bed alone—still dressed in case she suddenly needed him.

As a further token of her displeasure, she must have changed the time on the alarm clock, because it was close to noon when he woke up alone and late for work.

The Act--Part 4.

2007-12-19T13:59:00.000-05:00

The ape sat at the edge of his cot, trying to remember the dream he had just had. It had been green and pleasant and filled with large fleshy leaves, but beyond that, he could pull no details from his mind. He rubbed his eyes with the black knuckles of one hand and yawned. It was an impressive yawn, with many teeth and much red.

The ape got out of bed and nudged the man in the cot next to him. The man groaned and rolled over, so the ape left the man to his dreams and went to the mirror and basin propped up on a small table in the corner of the tent. He looked at himself in the rust and soap spotted mirror. Where those new grey hairs on his face? His left eye looked a little milky. He splashed water from the basin onto his face and left the tent.

Outside the sun was shining and the air was cool. It was morning and it smelled like morning—which to the ape smelled a little like mud and dead leaves.

Across a section of ground rutted with tire tracks, the Manager was sitting in a folding chair, drinking his last beer and fiddling with the handle of his new velvet hammer. He called the ape over to show it to him.

“Nice, huh?” the manager said. “I’ve been looking for one of these for ages.”

The ape nodded.

“It’s the kind they used to use on fugitive Gestapo guys. You know, those guys that used to hunt those bastards down after the war and drown them in their bathtubs or whack them to the death with one of these on a beach in Argentina or somewhere. You know those guys? The guys who tracked down the bad guys?”

The ape nodded again, but really he had no idea what the Manager was talking about. The ape had never heard of these hammer wielding hunters of retired Nazis, and wondered if maybe they were just something the Manager had dreamed up one drunken night or seen as a kid in one of those black and white movie serials with names like “Spy Hunter!” or “Ace Reilly, Defender or Liberty!”

“It’s a magic hammer you know,” the Manager said and the ape just looked at him blankly, wondering if it would be wise or rude to just walk away now.

“Let me show you,” the Manager said. Then he wacked the ape hard on the knee with the hammer. It made no sound. And the ape itself made no sound either when he opened his jaws wide to scream.

“See,” the Manager said smiling. “Magic.”

The ape closed his hand into a large black knot and punched the Manager squarely in the face. The Manager’s face gave some and made a noise like a peanut shell being stepped on. The ape knew then that he was in trouble.

The Act--Part 3

2007-12-12T12:18:00.000-05:00

The Manager drove through the town on the way back to the big tent. It was your usual small town, with no building over three-stories high, and faded and peeling advertisements for defunct products painted onto brick walls.

At the corner he saw a man wearing a sign around his neck as if it were a necklace. The Manager slowed down to get a better look; The man was pale and dirty. On the sign was a passage from the Bible. Something about praising something. The Manager had only a passing acquaintance with the bible from his school days. Mostly he knew it to be a heavy book with sharp corners.

He watched the man with the sign around his neck grow small in his rear view mirror. Poor sap, the Manager thought. How does a guy end up like that? How much family trauma does it take? How many lonely nights, missed proms, schoolyard fights?

He rounded a corner just as a pack of wild dogs attacked the man with the sign, knocking the man to his knees just like Christ with the cross.

It made the Manager sad and sentimental to think about it and he stopped at the grocery store just outside of town for a case of beer and bunch of bananas. Still green, just the way the great ape liked them.

While he drove, the Manager opened a beer for himself with the claw of his new hammer.

The Act--part two.

2007-11-13T08:26:00.000-05:00

The Manager went to town and bought a velvet hammer. The clerk who sold it to him said it would make a quieter bang when he used it. The clerk tapped the hammer against his own knee a few times as if proving the point. “Does it hurt?” he asked the clerk. “It’s still a hammer, isn’t it?” the clerk said, the smile spreading across his face like a red flower in bloom.

The Act--part one

2007-11-12T14:30:00.000-05:00

It was his job to wrestle with the ape. It was the girl’s job to watch and look frightened. It was Manager’s job to turn the screw. The audience was always just half a dozen locals sitting in the metal bleachers. You could not say it was their job; they were not getting paid.

After it was finished, the spotlight went out and the man and the ape stood up, brushed the sawdust from their respective knees and went into the dressing room. The girl usually followed though sometimes she stayed behind to talk to the locals. She liked to call it “working the locals,” but really it was just talking, and sometimes she ended up going out with one of them and coming back late with her hair mussed and her shirt on backwards.

“Who’s working who,” the man sometimes said while they waited for her to return, and the ape would nod in agreement. When she came back, she would not look either of them in the eye.

Interlude

2007-11-07T09:32:00.000-05:00

We sat on a red-checkered cloth laid out on a green hill. Ate slices of pineapple from a Tupperware container until our gums began to hurt.

“It’s a lovely day,” she said and I did not stray from the script.
“Very lovely,” I said. “And so are you.”

My cell phone was in the glove compartment a quarter of a mile from here. The Internet was a good day’s drive away. I might as well play along.

“I love a picnic,” she said and I smiled and nodded.

Trees in the distance swayed and all you could hear was the sound of their soft leaves rubbing together, like the hands of a million evil babies plotting something. Birds chirped like car alarms. Clouds floated by and she was happy, but I felt as if the world were spinning on somewhere without me--somewhere close by perhaps, but slightly off to the side.

“It’s romantic,” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

Through great effort, I did not check my watch. I pulled several muscles not doing it.

Steal this Video--Buy the Book

2007-09-18T07:52:00.001-04:00

Not only am I in it (and isn't that enough?) , but some other great people too. And if you actually purchase a copy the editor has promised to forgive my gambling debts.

Precedent

2007-09-11T14:55:00.000-04:00

They said he would not dream. Faceless They or the pamphlet or the commercial on TV. But he did, and he had paid not to. It was a matter to take up with his lawyers when he finally awoke. Ten years of dreams; ten years of one plot slipping into another, one story line or character abandoned and another picked up with the sort of inconsistency of logic that only exists in failing soap operas or the subconscious. What sort of price or penalty could the law inflict for a decade of such a non-life as this?

He even dreamt once, somewhere within those ten years—perhaps toward the latter part of it, but it is understandably hard to pin-point such things—that he visited a lawyer and discussed the situation with him.

The lawyer was a round, pink man with dimples, watery eyes and hair the color of wet sand. His office was in the very point of a tall, silver building downtown—the interior of the office being obviously constrained by the building’s tapering exterior so that the ceiling and walls surrounding his desk formed an inverted pyramid. The exact center of the room—where the lawyer kept his desk--was the only place where a normal sized person could stand up straight.

The lawyer sat at his desk, and his client slouched in a chair across from him.
“I can see your problem, Mr. Smith,” the lawyer said.

Mr. Smith was not the man’s real name, but the one he was currently answering to in his dream.

“Do you think I have a case then?”
“Oh definitely. Mental hardship, breech of contract, assault, grievous torture, criminal neglect and disillusionment. Let me ask you this: in the last ten or so years, to the best of your recollection, have you signed any contracts?”
“While I’ve been asleep, you mean?”
“Yes. Certainly. While you’ve been asleep.”
“How would they get me to do that? Put a pen in my hand and move it around? Or some sort of…um…suggestion, or something?” He did not quite understand the question.
“I mean in this world, Mr. Smith. In your dreams.”

The man thought about it. It was hard to keep track of the events that had happened in his subconscious. How could he separate what he had dreamt from what he remembered, or remembered dreaming, or dreamed that he had remembered dreaming? It gave him a headache to think about it and he clutched at a pain in his scalp, beneath his hair, and felt a small hole cave in beneath his fingertips.

“Are you in pain, Mr. Smith?” the lawyer asked, smiling.
“Yes.”
The lawyer smiled and made a note on the pad of yellow paper on his desk.
The man pulled his hand away from his head and removed a small fragment of eggshell from beneath his fingernail.
“I don’t recall signing any contracts.”
The lawyer frowned. He was one of those men whose frowns and smiles meant roughly the same thing.
“It’s too bad. We might have got them for breech of those contracts as well. Would have been ground breaking stuff, really.” He shook his head wistfully. “But never mind that. We’ve got plenty to work with already. What about marriage? Sexual encounters? Any crimes you may have committed here that you may have suffered unwonted guilt from?”

The man thought back again remembered vaguely certain red-haired women, drunken fights, bank robberies and beheadings.
“I don’t know about unwonted guilt,” he said.
“Well. No mind. No mind. Never mind. We’ve still got plenty to work with here. Exciting stuff.” He ripped the yellow sheet from the pad, and slid it into a slot on his desk. The sound of gears and wheels turning came from somewhere inside the desk or beneath the floor. Things grinding or being shredded or mulched and compressed into small squares.

The lawyer stood up and held out a hand the size, color and consistency of an uncooked leg of lamb.

The man stood up (not all the way) shook the lawyer’s hand, and left the office.

In the elevator going down, Mr. Smith wiped the cold blood from his hand onto a leg of his trousers.

The elevator stopped and opened directly onto a moving sidewalk and a bright summer day. He stepped out into a crowd of black suited men and black gowned women and was carried away. The city around him was tall and unfamiliar, and yet he knew it was his city. It was the metropolis he was born in, raised in, and someday would awake from.

The spires, spears and towers glistened and slid by him. The men and women that surrounded him did not jostle or push, like the madding crowds in movies or commercials for island getaways, but stood politely beside him talking in normal voices as they all traveled along together through the city.

At a corner he stepped off the sidewalk and came to a stop. A pay phone rang and he answered it. It was the lawyer.

“Come back to my office,” he said. His voice was almost shrill with his excitement.
“I’ll be right there.”
But when he stepped onto the sidewalk he thought would take him back it carried him further away.
“Crap,” he muttered as the silver-pointed building that contained his lawyer’s office slipped further and further down the horizon.
“How do I get back,” he asked a man standing next to him.
“Get back where?”
“There…” He pointed, but already the building had sunk completely from view.
“North sidewalks are on the east side of the street,’” the man offered.
“Oh.”

It seemed hopeless now. There were no more exits within sight; the sidewalk was taking him into a part of the city that not only looked unfamiliar, but was. In no dream or life had he ever been here before.

The light faded, the buildings became more alien and shabby, and the crowd—despite the lack of apparent exits—thinned to half a dozen or so men and women.

“I was supposed to get back to my lawyer’s office,” he said to no one in particular. A young woman answered. She stood only a few feet away yet somehow he had not noticed her before.

“How far away is it?” she asked. She had curly red hair—as most women in this world did—pale skin, a slightly turned up nose and a pink mouth and chin that reminded him of a baby’s. She wore a white dress with tiny red flowers. She was the first person he had seen all day wearing something besides black. And despite the dim blueness of the growing evening, a spot of golden sunlight fell upon her, then slid away.

“Very far,” he said. “And in the wrong direction.”

The sidewalk stopped moving of its own accord and the man and woman found themselves walking alone upon regular pavement, among brick buildings and wooden houses. Lights were coming on in windows now, revealing gold and yellow glimpses of the scenes inside: families at the dinner, gathered around the TV, or playing a game at the kitchen table. A man washing the dishes. A woman vacuuming. A dog curled up in the corner.

The streetlights came on with a click and hum.
“It’s getting late,” the woman said. “Do you think your lawyer will wait for you.”
“I think so. I have a very exciting case. Pioneer stuff, really.”
“Maybe we should try underground.”
“Perhaps.” It being a dream, the man had not remembered underground travel, perhaps had not even known about it, but now having been reminded of it, it made sense to him. Had he not traveled that way often and even taken one of the tubes to his lawyers office once before? It seemed to him that he had.

They walked down mossy steps and entered the tunnel that ran beneath the city. It was dark and dank down there, lit intermittently by yellowish lights hanging from the low ceiling. The floors glistened with dampness or sparkled with broken glass.

They walked—hand in hand—in the center of the passageway, as far away from the moldy, dampness-streaked walls on either side as possible.

“Of course, it’s not used much anymore,” the woman said.
“I can see why.”
“But this is the way back to your lawyers?”
“As far as I can recall.”
But he could not recall very far at all.

Did he know this young woman’s name? It seemed that he did, and it was either Ariel or Hilda. He did not know for sure where he knew her from, or even whether they were friends, lovers, or spouses.

They walked for a long ways, at a good, dream pace, until it seemed that they had gone on for miles. The passageway became narrower and the lights less frequent. The dampness and moldy stains became more pronounced, or was that only the thickening of the shadows?
“Did we take a wrong turn?” he asked.
She laughed. “We haven’t turned once since we started.”
He laughed too. He laughed for a long time. It seemed like a very funny remark and he laughed until his ribs hurt and his face was wet with tears.
The walls seemed to cry too, and the passageway begins to fill with murky water.
“We better hurry up,” Hilda says. “The tide’s coming in.”

They walked faster. He held her hand, and it seemed the warmest, softest, most comfortable hand he had ever known.

The water poured in over the tops of his shoes. It was warm water that smelled vaguely of fish. Then it was up to his ankles, his knees, his thighs.

A thin, chattering sound echoed against the stone walls and grew louder.

“Rats?” she asked.

He did not know, but soon saw the tiny grey and brown skulls of rats and squirrels as they swam out of the darkness in a frantic mob towards them.

“Holy crap,” he said, but there was no place to go. They stood still as the rodents washed over them in a wave of brown and grey fur, tiny claws and teeth and clicking that seemed to momentarily displace the water entirely.

The wave ended in a few drips—stragglers that hopped and bounced off of their heads and shoulders.

The water was up to their chest now. It became difficult to walk and the two of them struggled to move forward at all.

“Well, that’s about enough,” Hilda said. “I don’t particularly want to drown. Do you think you might be able to reschedule?”

He began to say that he thought this might be a good idea, but by then the water had reached his chin. He looked around and could only see the top of Hilda’s head, her read hair spread out in the water like there was something bleeding beneath the surface. When he opened his mouth to speak, the water poured in, filling his lungs.

But they did not die. He coughed out several enormous bubbles, felt a sharp pain deep in his chest, but did not die. Breathing water, seeing through the unfocused and murky lens of water, reaching through flotsam and jetsam to find Hilda’s hand again, he lost interest in his law suit, his lawyer and anything his lawyer might have to say—though it also occurred to him that drowning, even when it wasn’t fatal, might come under the heading of mental hardship.

They found a door beneath the surface, opened it and went down a long stairwell to where the water became colder and darker around them. The walls of the stairwell were chipped and pealing. The stairs themselves seemed to be in danger of crumbling into mud beneath them and while rounding a corner a handrail came off in his hand.

A shoe floated by (It must have been a particularly buoyant shoe; it must have been one of those shoes with the air bladders in the tongue and heal). He pointed to it, and Hilda smiled an underwater version of her beautiful smile (more serene, less teeth).

Finally coming to the end of the stairwell, they walked through steel, double doors into a vast and modern lobby. It was clean and bright here, even the water seemed thinner and more like sunlight. The ceiling was lost above them in the distance and beneath them a featureless grey marble floor stretched out for miles. Set into a black marble wall was a set of brushed steel elevator doors.

They stepped into an elevator and rode it up to the lawyer’s office, the water seeping out as they went. When the stepped out of the elevator they were dry.

There was a piece of yellow paper taped to the door of the office and the words “BACK IN 5 MINUTES written with a dying pen.

“Should we wait?” she asked.
“I suppose,” he said.

They sat down on the waiting room couch and began reading decade old copies of Better Homes and Gardens, Computer World, The Encyclopedia of Britannica (periodical edition, P through T) and Golf Digest. They did that for the next three years.

Deciduous (1.)

2007-01-05T12:43:00.000-05:00

Deciduous

1.

The dentist was built like a tanker. Not only was he large, he leaked oil. I felt it smearing from his fat knuckles to my chin while he adjusted the suction. I imagined aquatic life dying in his wake, imagined ducks and pelicans choking in his residue as he lumbered down the sidewalk on his way to work.

“So how’s every little thing?” he asked, knowing that I could not answer with anything but a grunt, and what were the odds of a grunt ever being the correct answer to anything?

I grunted. He told me again that I really should be flossing. I grunted apologetically and he began his epic battle with one of my back molars. The one on the right. One of my favorite molars. I loved that molar—we had been through a lot together—but now it had to go. He tugged, banged at the sides with metal things, poked at the area around it with something sharp and I tasted blood.

“It’s a stubborn one,” the dentist said. “Would you like to rinse?”

I grunted that I would, then rinsed and spat out about a kilo of blood and water and saliva into his little white swirling sink. It looked like pieces of red string swirling around the drain. I kept rinsing and spitting until the water was almost clear, but there where still little bits of tissue coming out, little bits of myself that the dentist had knocked or torn or scraped loose. I wiped my chin and rinsed and spit some more. It seemed like I would never be done.

“Sure is a lot, eh?” he said.

I grunted, forgetting that I could have actually answered him with words now. Then I was done spitting and he resumed the battle.

On the drive home, with the right half of my face feeling as if it no longer belonged to me, I felt at the gap with the tip of my tongue. My missing tooth. The gap seemed infinite. A void in my being. I felt less than I was before.

And that night, when I was almost asleep, I felt a hand slipping beneath my pillow. I opened my eyes. There was a man standing there, in a brown suit, a brown hat, and thick, black rimmed glasses. I could see the stubble of a five O’clock shadow on his impressive chin, and smell black coffee on his breath.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, trying to control my voice, because really, what is the use of panicking, and perhaps the man had a reasonable explanation.

“I was checking to see if you left me anything.”

“Why would I leave you something?” I asked him. “Why would I leave you something under my pillow?” I was so thrown by this that the fear of a strange man in my bed room was replaced with curiosity. Or mostly replaced—there was still and aftertaste of fear.

He smiled and adjusted his glasses, and I guess I figured it out then, but he handed me his business card anyway. Then he showed me his official license. Everything seemed to be in order.

“But no tooth, eh?” he said.

“No,” I said. “I haven’t left a tooth under my pillow since I was a kid. Frankly, I’m surprised you’re still checking.”

“Yeah, well that’s the job, isn’t it?”

“I guess.”

“I mean, I’m not here to hide eggs, am I?”

“I guess not.”

He sat down in the chair by the bed. He had not been invited too, but you could tell he was exhausted. I was probably his last stop of the night. He took off his hat, fanned it toward his face for a moment and then rested it carefully on the point of his knee.

“Let me just catch my breath for a moment,” he said.

“Sure,” I told him. He sat there, began panting—as if the act of sitting down had only exhausted him further.

“Phew,” he said. “It’s been a long night…”

“I can imagine.”

He closed his eyes and in less than a minute he was softly snoring. I got up. Who could sleep with a strange man sitting in the chair by their bed? Some people can, I imagine, but not me.

At dawn, I brought him a cup of coffee, nudged him gently on the shoulder. He opened his eyes, straightened himself in the chair, straightened his glasses on his face, took the cup of coffee gratefully from my hand.

“That’s never happened before,” he said after his first sip. Then he checked his watch and said: “Shit. Can I use your phone?”

I showed him to the phone and got ready for work while he made his call. I could not hear the words from the other room, but I recognized the pleading tone in his voice. When I was dressed and ready to leave, he was still there, sitting on my couch now, staring at a blank TV.

“Well that’s that,” I guess. “I lost my job. And you didn’t even leave a tooth.”

“Sorry,” I told him, though I wasn’t really. I mean, it wasn’t my fault, was it? Of course it wasn’t, and he didn’t really seem to be blaming me either, but he also wasn’t getting off my couch.

“Can I drop you off anywhere?” I asked, hoping he would take the hint. But he only shrugged, checked his watch, then shrugged again.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To work,” I said.

“I’ll go with you,” he said.

He drove with me to work and insisted on paying for gas. But he paid with a bag of quarters, which the clerk had to count, making me late for work.

“I’ll meet you back here when you’re done,” he said in the parking lot. “I’ve got some things I need to take care of.” I just shrugged and said OK. At least he’d helped out with the gas. And really, what else could I do? I felt like I owed the guy something. I had lost a lot of teeth when I was younger.

The beginning of the novel I am working on now

2006-09-21T13:28:00.000-04:00

The boss performed a small miracle at the copy-machine yesterday. A thousand loaves and fishes, both sides, collated.

I could do this on heavy stock paper too, he said, as we all gathered around dutifully applauding. But he said ta-da one too many times for my liking and I began taking tiny steps backwards to my cubicle. I was sitting down again and playing solitaire by the time he performed his next trick. No one noticed me gone, or at least no one said anything. I played solitaire and lost every hand and was down several hundred dollars in imaginary money before the boss’s show was over.

The guy in the cubicle next to mine told me about it later.

Nothing spectacular, he told me. He just turned water into hot cocoa again.

Our boss is like that: always showing off; always boring us with his omniscience and omnipotence and all of that. Once I cracked up the girls in Accounting by saying he was omni-impotent: ineffectual everywhere at once.

That was a good day. Everything I said that day seemed to get a laugh and people leaned against the wall of my cubicle like I was someone entertaining and worth hanging around with. I expected to be asked out for drinks after work, or a movie and even though none of that happened, it had still been a good day.

Today is not like that. Today I lose files and crash computers with reckless abandon. It seems as if a sort of electronic black cloud is floating above me, and at noon, as I am walking beneath a row of lights in the cafeteria, they all snuff out one at a time overhead as I pass. No one notices but me and that guy over there in the dark suit at the corner table. He looks up from dissecting his sandwich with white plastic utensils. He looks at me and smiles.

I go back to my cubicle, go about my business, wait for another day to end as if the supply of them is infinite.

The Magician’s Shoes

2006-08-14T08:45:00.000-04:00

The magician had six toes on his left foot. He had four on his right. He often thought that if he had been a better magician—one who had something more than a store bought wand perhaps—he would be able to even things out more. But he was not that better magician. The bouquets of flowers he made from yesterdays newspapers always wilted and sometimes the colors ran. On a good day, it was true, he could make wine from water but even on a good day it was never good wine. Sometimes it was vinegar.

If the magician walked alone across an open field his path inevitably and imperceptibly arched to the right. This is worth noting, not only due to the disparity of his feet and its effect on his locomotion and guidance, but because the magician was a man prone to walking alone across open fields. He liked to walk and think. He liked to smell the dampness of the earth and the vaguely sharp but pleasant rotting of things around him. Leaves, fallen trees, perhaps a few aged doves that had fallen from the sky or from his coat sleeve unnoticed.

When the magician walked alone across open fields, all his breath came in sighs. He had, this year as in all years before, unreasonable expectations for the spring. Could it not bring love or success or at least hope of either? He was scheduled for a birthday party the week before spring and for a bar mitzvah the first day of spring and as he sloshed through the mud and flattened grass of the field, he thought that maybe there was some significance to this. Everywhere around him there were symbols and clues and evidence of fate and the future. Or if there weren’t, there should be. In a better world there would be.

It was not spring yet. Strips of off-color snow lay across the earth like blank spots in the universe. Like the world was an unfinished painting. The snow was melting. The sky was gray. A flock of birds flew by in away that struck the magician as apocalyptic.

Greetings from a Fellow Traveler

2006-08-03T10:16:00.000-04:00

Hello. Listen. I want to tell you something. Nothing big; don’t get excited. I am not going to tell you the location of the bodies of those two college girls that have been missing since last July. And don’t think I had anything to do with that either. I’m just saying. Anyway, I have it on reasonably good authority that nothing bad has happened to them at all—that they just wanted to get away on there own. A friend of mine knows a friend of theirs. I only mention them because they happen to be in all the papers lately. Mostly, I think, because they are pretty. It is like that with the pretty and missing. I wonder how many homely people have been lost in the meantime.

Anyway, the small thing I wanted to tell you: we are in this together. What? you ask. I assume you ask. Why wouldn’t you? And I mean only this: all of this. Everything. The world, the universe, existence and all that. We are in it together, you and I.

It is like, I think, riding a bus. Getting on a bus. A crowded bus. You are not even sure it is the correct bus. You get on, find a seat where you can—by the window, by the aisle—try to find a spot to yourself at first, though you know that even if you do someone will come along and sit next to you anyway. And who will that person be? That is the question. Will they smell funny or want to talk? If they have candy in their pocket will they offer you some? Are they the sort that will fall asleep with there head against your shoulder or the type that will elbow you in the ribs for possession of the armrest? It is all fairly random. We get what we get.

So I am that person sitting next to you. That is all that I wanted to say. We are in this together. We are jostled along bumpy roads while the bus takes its slow and regular route around the sun. Here is our mutual armrest. Would you like to use it first? Are you sleepy? I am here. My shoulder is here. Hello.

Untitled Apocalypse --Part 3.

2006-08-02T08:28:00.000-04:00

The last man on earth died in a way that he imagined was unique—and being that he was the last man on earth it would be hard to argue with him.

He died like this: bit by bit; all of his automatic functions ceasing to function automatically. Falling away—those little miracles of physicality; his body’s repertoire of old standards—falling away like the walls of an ancient fortress. To blink, he had to remember to blink. To breathe he had to remember to breathe. Both in and out. Even his heart could no longer be relied upon and he had to consciously clench and unclench it at regular intervals. It was like opening and closing a hand in his chest. It was lucky for him that he figured this out.

The disadvantage to all this was obvious. Sleep or distraction would kill him. His mind could not wander from the task at hand: to go on living. He knew this, (it had occurred to him between beats and blinks and breaths,) and he could not last long, but he would go on for as long as he could. He was like a man hanging from a rope above the abyss. His grip on the rope was slipping. The rope was fraying. The knot that tied the rope to the railing of a bridge was coming undone. The rusted bolts of the railing were crumbling. The bridge was about to collapse. The abyss waited, like abysses always do.

In the end it was a fly that killed him. It entered the room and flew past his ear. When was the last time I’ve seen a fly, he thought. When was the first time? And then the world faded completely away.

Untitled Apocalypse Part 2.

2006-08-01T08:51:00.000-04:00

The last man on earth made his home in the shell of what used to be a Happy Jack’s Burger Palace. It wasn't really a palace, of course, and there were nicer buildings with more room and better furniture less than a mile away. The library, for instance, or the museum of art--but he recalled some dim and happy memory of having had a birthday meal at Happy Jack's once with his parents, and the bright colors gave him some comfort now.

His first act of home repair was to board up all the windows. He did this not only for the obvious reason that most of them had already been broken during the riots, but also because he could not shake the nagging and unfounded suspicion, fostered by a lifetime of movies and comic books, that marauding flesh-eating mutants were roaming the earth. There weren’t any; there was only him, the cockroaches, the pigeons and a few limping rats, but he would never leave his dwelling after sundown anyway. Just to be on the safe side.

After the windows were boarded and curtains hung to obscure the non-view, he put tablecloths over two of the tables and his personal effects on a third. The other tables he removed with a sledgehammer and piled outside in the parking lot. On a whim, he threw rocks at the sign in front until all the words were gone and only one corner of Happy Jack’s insanely grinning mouth remained.

The meat in the non-functioning freezers had long since spoiled, but the smell was not so bad if he remembered never to open the doors. Eventually he rolled them out into the parking lot to add to his growing mountain of debris.

The streets were another matter. By summer the bodies were in full rot and the smell of it was overpowering. Birds pecked at the corpses. He lit a lot of scented candles and stayed indoors. He lived on potato chips, candy bars and Twinkies. There was a lifetime supply less than a block away a long with all the over-the-counter cold and flu medicines he could ever want. He made cocktails from the medicines, experimenting with different combinations until he found the reliable recipes for feeling good, or euphoric, or drowsy. His life itself was powered by batteries—sometimes taken from the rubble of stores, sometimes pried from the hands of decaying looters.

Autumn came and went and then winter, spring and summer. After that, the bodies were mostly skeletons and did not smell so much. Grass and then trees grew from the debris in the streets. His home became cluttered with the objects and symbols of things that once had made him happy and did not make him sad or bitter now.
He grew older. He grew old. His own death felt just around the corner, and he began to wonder if he should have done things differently. Should he have left behind something other than the piles and arrangements of a forgotten culture that would now be his legacy? Should he have built from this rubble and raw material something new that would have been his own contribution to the planet—the artifacts of his own particular culture of one? He could have painted paintings, kept a journal or traveled farther than a block from home. It seemed to him, in his fading moments, that an opportunity had been wasted, but he did not know exactly what the opportunity was.

It did not matter. He would lay down in a booth one day and die. With a whimper or a hacking cough. He would be one more dead body. He would be fresher than the rest.

Untitled Apocalypse Part 1.

2006-07-31T16:14:00.000-04:00

1.
He was away when the world ended. A patient at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows Detox Center, he was not allowed to watch TV and did not get to see civilization crumble, did not witness the riots in the street, the cars and city busses overturned, the stores looted and houses burned. He only saw the anxious faces of his caretakers, saw them whispering to each other in the hallway and began to notice the decided lack of effort going into his well paid for upkeep. The last meal he received was a handful of oyster crackers and a bowl of not quite solidified Jell-O.

The next day there was nothing, and the day after that he ventured out of the safety of his butter yellow room to complain. But by then, he was the last one left. Chairs and carts were left overturned in the hallway. All the calming prints of Monet’s haystacks had been torn from the walls. All the rooms were devoid of patients and in some even the mattresses were gone. The Ping-Pong table in the rec. room had been smashed to pieces and the front doors had been left wide open and unguarded. A few dead leaves blew in, skidding across the floor symbolically.

He went back to his room, dressed, packed up his belongings and checked himself out. He was cured anyway—it had not been much of a problem; his only addiction was mild and particular: a habit for a concoction of his own invention composed mostly of Alka-Seltzer Cold Plus with a shot of Robitussin. Sometimes served with ice, depending on his mood and the weather.

As he walked down the empty street, over broken glass, passed the burned out shells of cars, passed bodies stacked up like fire wood, he was remarkably unfazed. The world, to him, had always seemed on the verge of some cataclysmic end. It was no great surprise or disappointment to find out it had finally occurred, or that it had happened while he had been catching up on his reading in a quiet room.

Newspapers blew by in balls of post-apocalyptic tumbleweed in the street. He stopped to scan the headline of a page of the financial section caught beneath his feet. The dollar was down against the pound or the peso, but this hardly seemed an explanation for this final turn of events. What was buck or a quid here or there? Well, now it was nothing. It was probably disease anyway, or maybe a war or maybe an election—it did not matter. He was the master of all now; the world was his rapidly spoiling oyster.

He would stop at a drug store, fix himself a drink and ponder his next move.

Aqua Velva

2006-07-12T12:23:00.000-04:00

Aqua Velva was her name. Her parents were funny like that. Named after her grandfather, who was not himself named Aqua Velva but reeked of it so much that everything that he touched smelled of it. And when he died, the possessions that were handed down from him had the same smell, and all of his children who had inherited these bits and pieces of him—his car, his house, his records and cardigan sweater—would smell like him for decades later.

Aqua Velva’s parents had received a toaster oven and a TV in the final distribution, and even these stank of the old man’s aftershave—though to an admittedly lesser degree than the sweater.

And something else about the TV: though it was not large (a twenty-one inch screen), the set weighed so much that it took six men to carry it from the old man’s house to his youngest son’s small bungalow only three doors down the street.

The six men were like pall-bearers carrying the TV down the steps, down the street and into the son’s house. And two of the men had even been pall-bearers for the old man’s funeral and had remarked to each other when the job was done that the corpse had been considerably lighter than his TV.

They put the TV set in the basement—perhaps fearing no other floor could hold the weight, and there it remained forever.

Aqua Velva was born a year later and grew up watching that TV. And sometimes she thought about the grandfather she never knew, even as the scent of him finally faded and the TV now smelled of nothing but electricity, warm plastic, burning dust.

Her own parents eventually died, leaving her the condo but no particular smell. She went on with her life with the perpetual image of mom, dad, and grandpa looking down on her from a cloud. She could see them there, with elbows propped in white fluff. Maybe halos. Somewhere a harp.

It made sex difficult for her and eventually she painted the ceiling of her bedroom black, figuring that would help. It did some.

Whenever she met someone new, they asked her about her unusual name. Sometimes she told them about her grandfather. Sometimes she lied.

It’s French, was her favorite lie. A name of royalty. A wealthy and powerful family that had lost their heads during the French Revolution. During the High Terror, when the streets ran with blood and the usual raw waste.

It doesn’t sound French, the people would sometimes say.

It’s old French, she would tell them as they slowly lost interest and the day wound down and she went home to the house her parents had left her. She would watch TV for awhile in the basement, before going up to bed. Her old bedroom. Then she would fall asleep staring into the blackness of the ceiling. She would dream but without pictures or colors. Then she would awake and do it all again.

Chew

2006-07-07T13:17:00.000-04:00

He invented a teakettle with jaws powered by industrial strength titanium springs and a tiny electric motor. This kettle could chew up tealeaves and spit them out into an attached, chrome-plated miniature spittoon. Maybe the spittoon would be sold separately—he hadn’t figured things out that far. Actually, he hadn’t quite invented the atomic, self-chewing, teakettle yet either. So far it was only a vision he had, while waking up this morning in his basement apartment. Feet and the lower halves of legs were moving by the window above his bed—actually only a mattress on the floor. And a few small dogs—their whole bodies visible. One of them even paused to piss on the glass of his wndow.

None of this had anything to do with tea or teakettles, but the mind is a mysterious thing.

He was an inventor, or would be once he invented something. He went to the bathroom and shaved with a disposable razor that was several months passed its reasonable life expectancy. He cut himself in several places, dotted the places with torn-off corners of toilet paper.

“I am inventor,” he told his bloody, tissued self in the bathroom mirror. This was empowering. This was self-actualizing. This attached industrial strength titanium springs to his soul, his heart or his sense of self-worth. He had read a book once about this sort of thing.

He brushed his teeth and spit and imagined another invention—a tooth brush that did all the work, moving up and down the surface of the teeth by some mechanism or another, a tiny powerful motor, maybe the brushes even spinning too, getting all the difficult to reach parts… Oh yeah. They already had those. What was he thinking?

After that, he dressed and went upstairs to the front door. He forgot to take the tissue off and several school girls walking by laughed at him. He did not realize his mistake until he was at his bus stop and man in a dark suit who was waiting for the same bus pointed it out to him.

He brushed the pieces of tissue away—they were dry now, like crumbs with a fluffy edge and said: “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” the man said and the bus came. They both got on and found a seat near the back. They sat together, and the inventor wondered if people would think they were friends. He did not know the man. He had not seen him at the bus stop before. But the inventor started to like the idea of being mistaken for his friend and as the bus ride went on he leaned closer and closer toward the stranger.

Edison #23, Robot Inventor

2006-07-06T08:27:00.000-04:00

I will give you back your sparkling city then, the new one you clamor for, the one you saw once in a dream. I will build it back up before your eyes. See it prodding with its sharp white points at a blue heaven? Spiraling highways, three layers of hovering cars, rocket ships carving arcs across the sky. Everything shiny and piled high as it should be; this is the wedding cake for the marriage between technology and the human spirit. Look how much the happy couple has made of it all—how great their love must be. Look at all that has been baked and constructed upon this earthy platform to celebrate the undying and fully requite affection between man and what man can do.

I give you all this, but then a grey sheet of clouds passes over it. An ash-like snow collects on the monorails and travel tubes, on the spires and moving sidewalks. It has always been so bright and sunny here, but now these flakes gather like a heavy dust over all of our accomplishments.
A Robot, on his way to work, looks up at the sky and wonders how things could have changed so suddenly.

It started out so nice today, he says to a passing stranger.

You know what they say about the weather around here, the stranger says. If you don’t like it, hang around for a few minutes and it’ll change.

Ha ha ha, the robot says, but it is only because of a switch he has politely flipped on in his brain. He has heard this joke 342 times before. Just wait a few minutes. Boy, that’s for sure, the Robot says.

But the stranger has already moved on. The sidewalk has carried him to the corner where he steps off and must cross the street under his own limping power.

The Robot steps onto a platform and sinks quickly beneath the pavement. The layers of pipes, cables and sewers that support this city pass by him as he descends lower and lower. It is dark here and unadorned, because it is for him and his kind and they do not require light or frills or faux wood paneling. He is finally dropped onto a speeding conveyor belt far below the city. It is filled with robots of all makes and models, rushing through the darkness on their way to work. The only lights are the various red or green glowing eyes and diodes of the robots. Overhead, dim objects—pipes, beams, the ragged cement feet of buildings dangling through the ground-- slide by at an alarming rate. There is the whir of the great gears turning, and the rushing of black air.

The Robot senses his stop approaching (a beeping sound has begun in his brain) and extends his arm upward just in time to grasp onto a metal handle hanging from a thin metal cable. The handle pulls him out of the masses and flings him upward through a hole in the ceiling. He is shot like a bullet through a long, black tube before finally exiting the transit system with a quiet pop as he is pushed out of a hole in the sidewalk and lands with a soft metallic clink onto the pavement.

Home sweet home, he says bitterly and walks up the three steps to the massive glass entrance of the United Consolidated Conglomerations building. He crosses the lobby, takes the service elevator to his cubicle on the 92nd floor. He sits down, pulls out a tangle of cables from beneath the desk and plugs the ends of them into his visual receptors, his audio input display, his random idea generator and two fingers of his left hand.

By noon he has invented three new things.

Love Poem #3

2006-06-27T08:15:00.001-04:00

One day like two or three
Days ago
It will seem
I will wish
It will have been

One day when all this flesh rebels
And would that it had been
Subversive instead
Planting quiet seeds
Of revolution long ago
For some form of rebellion more subtle
Than flat out decay

One day, when I am asked
I will say
I knew her when
I knew you when
And know you still
And they will say:
Oh, when is that?
I will say: now
And they will nod
And cut my toast
The harmless old man
Clinging to his ghosts
While he chews toothless on
This one imagined
Happy memory
And margarine

Love Poem #2

2006-06-26T07:50:00.000-04:00

I have always liked fire escapes
Standing by a kitchen window at a party in someone’s apartment
Or a bedroom window of some girl I have recently met
Who smells of soap and shampoo and incense
And some mysterious fourth ingredient
And seeing the rusted metal of a fire escape
I imagine climbing down
I imagine sneaking away into an alley that leads to a different life
That difficult last step:
A ladder that extends downward
A ladder of questionable integrity
Into an alley—the sort of alley they have in movies
Where black cats pop out of garbage cans on cue
And a large rat disturbs the reflection of the moon in a puddle

I imagine the fire escape like that
And imagine fleeing
As if this party or this girl
Was a building actually on fire

Love Poem #1

2006-06-23T09:08:00.000-04:00

You came and visited me in my small second floor efficiency
And said you liked my Chia pet in the shape of Popeye the Sailor Man
I was happy and we chewed on our teeth for awhile
And you said
Maybe this would work better with food
And I said
Well that’s an idea, let me see what I have in the fridge
But all I had was some mayonnaise and a cantaloupe of questionable vintage
We can graze on Popeye the Sailor Man, you said
And I was hurt and went to bed in a huff
Well, not bed so much as the mattress on the floor
You stayed on the couch
And in the morning, you were gone
And my Chia pet stood on the dining room table
Actually the box the mattress came in propped up on cinder blocks
I intend to get a real table someday, honest
But anyway, the Chia pet in the shape of Popeye the Sailor Man
Looking all stoic like a small shrub-like plant
That had just been pissed on by a cat
Mostly because the neighbors cat had jumped through my window again
And pissed on my Chia pet
And tipped over my garbage can to get to the rotten cantaloupe
Fucking cat